God puts his gentle hand on Paul's shoulder. He opens his mouth, and he offers him mercy, and all Paul can think, as his stricken face vanishes behind a flood of impossible, pulsating light, is that the weight of a kindly God is indeed a fearful thing.

He wanted this. He wanted this on the ship, even with rotten citrus and despair as unswallowable as dry crackers on his tongue. He wanted this in the study, even as he toppled God from his pedestal in black depths of terrified fury. He wants this still, and always, in every shivering beat of his collapsing fusion-heart, when it's far too late to matter, when it never mattered at all.

"I tried," Paul says, from the lashing, furious throat of a hurricane, "I tried to pretend. I tried to keep them close. Behold, lord - the fruits of my fucking trying."

His hand clenches around the tooth. Silver wells between his fingers, as incandescent as his obscuring corona.

"Palamedes is gone," and he wants, and he wants, and he wants, "Because I tried. Because I wanted to be human more than I wanted him to live."

"Where do I keep that?" He asks God, in a thousand joyless laughing tremors. "How would I forget?"