Paul gets worse. John turns from the sea to that sick radiance, to the tangle and spill of a thousand voices in pain, and he aches with some new and hideous sympathy. He recalls the moment he wanted to kill the boy, there on his study floor. He feels it again now. It would be vastly simpler for the both of them— for a little while.

It's an absolute heartbreak, hearing Paul say fuck.

This boy is so small. He is so trapped, and he always will be, and there is nothing John could ever do to convince him otherwise. They are both too much of what they are; the point of no return was always too far back. For ten thousand years, John has fashioned that into his dogma: there was nothing else to be done.

"Palamedes was my responsibility, not yours," he says. It is maybe the only decent thing he has ever said to this boy. "But we are not infallible. We aren't in charge. We are hunted by bigger fish." He presses fingers to the crease between his eyes, then abandons pretense and runs a hand over his face wholesale. When he drops it to look at Paul, his eyes are the perfect inverse of Paul's light. "He went to that fight willingly. Every one of them did. You asked it of them, sure; you showed them the path; but they chose it. An unfair choice is still a choice... you have to leave them that."

He says, "Men feel like this. Gods don't. There will always be a body count— always— and it's up to men to feel it, and gods to watch it rise. It's a raw deal, being both. It hurts more to be both. But if you want it to be for anything, you have to... You can't stop caring. If you stop caring, they stop being yours."

He turns back, again, to the sea.

"Keep all of them, the lost ones especially. Honor them. Someone should."