[The first thing Palamedes is aware of is how many things he isn't aware of; it's a stupid contradiction and it makes him angry, impotently so, which makes him angrier, and so that is how Palamedes Sextus starts his, what, third go at life?: being pissed about it. There's no clear-cut moment that he's aware in the ways that matter: who he is, what's going on, where he is and has been, etc. No, of course not: only a vague sense of coming back to himself at the same time that he isn't himself, and looping around in that state of mind for a while.
The things he knows for certain: he is no longer a squid, being a squid again sucked very much, and the first two things lead to the third, or: he's still here. Or here again? Here. With that pin in place the rest of the memories settle into where they should be within minutes, because of course they do - Palamedes doesn't waste time and the universe has accepted that, cosmically.
He can't find his glasses. This makes him squint, which really solidifies the "pissy nerd" aspect he's got going on, here in his first moments of new-old life.
That he is not on the beach means that someone has moved him before he managed to come back, which is invasive in a fun new way that he doesn't yet have extant words for. He rubs at his entire face with his palms and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes for a moment, a whole-body Ugh, and then peers at his surroundings through his fingers.
Oh, he thinks, which is what anyone with sense (double meaning) would think when snapped back into awareness and bombarded with an uncomfortably large assortment of necromantic wards. It's the prickly back-of-the-neck feeling but tenfold, and Palamedes stares at the closest mysteriously warded dead thing like he can pick the ward apart just by glaring at it. (He'll work on it.)
What he notices next is the blanket, and the face he makes at it is legendary and tragically unseen by any sapient eyes. He half-heartedly wraps it around himself, capelike, and whole-heartedly attempts to stand up. There's only one person this study- it is a study, upon cursory couch-bound inspection- could belong to unless things have changed very drastically in his absence (which, well, maybe!), and he'll be damned if he fails his whole House by not taking a good look around.
Instead he fails his whole House by being a necromancer with bird bones who's spent several weeks semi-dead and entirely-squid, and so as soon as he attempts to stand and take a few steps, he wobbles all the way down to the floor. It is here he will remain until The Lord Emperor Actually, For Real returns: on the floor, daringly scooting closer to a notebook that doesn't ping dangerously warded. He looks up, and:]
Lord. [hello.] That figures.
[Which could mean anything from obviously, the Emperor would keep tabs on the local necromancers, to of course this is your study, to UGGGGHHHH, or all three concurrent and consecutive, but Palamedes declines to elaborate further. He shifts to sit cross-legged, squinting still.]
I'm working under the assumption that you found me on the beach, correct me if I'm wrong, and I dimly recall being a sea creature for a completely unnecessary reprise, so — it didn't work. You know, that's arguably more embarrassing than being — what, chewed to death? Is that what happened?
[It is at this point that he attempts to stand again using the arm of the couch as support, much like a toddler wobbling onto their feet, except much taller.]
There's nothing wrong with my work, so it must be that damnable ocean. Is that tea?
[ It was a genuine relief, to find this one on the beach. He had rankled at that as soon as he'd thought it, because of course anything given to him is given; after Augustine, he is exhausted with good fortune. He is buckling under the pointed grace of— impressively!— even pettier gods than he is. He is getting distinctly tired of curveballs.
Still: always nice to be the bearer of good news. So he brings the squid home, and he goes to make tea, and he doesn't even snap the boy awake until he has biscuits ready to offer in recompense. They never made it to tea and biscuits, him and the Sixth. He has a lot of catching up to do. The field has changed.
So God ambles back into his study, a tea tray in his hands, and is unsurprised to find a lanky bird-boned young man poking at his notebooks. This does not worry him: most aren't warded, and the warded ones aren't hard to break. He won't take it as personal affront to come back to a room of unpicked wards. If he hadn't given Harrow run of the place already, he would probably have to watch smoke come out her ears as she waffled between piety and the compulsive need for a challenge.
He sets the tea tray down: on the low coffee table, as a kindness. ]
And biscuits. [ He looks faintly amused as he drops into a chair across the still-damp sofa. ] I would've gone with 'devoured by a gargantuan sea monster.' It sounds suitably dramatic.
[ God pours the tea, stirs two sugars into his. It's all very pleasantly mundane. ]
Catch me up on what should have happened? I'll trade you what you've missed.
[ He looks at Palamedes, then, and it's maybe the first time he's really looked. There is a difference in him now: the absent air has cooled and solidified to a realer attention. The set of his shoulders conveys more weight. He is, by measurable degrees, fucking around distinctly less. ]
I've never been dramatic, [Palamedes says, which is both funny and also, technically, comparatively — true enough. Everyone else in his life is leagues more dramatic, by his estimate, so this is not a lie. He busies himself shifting back over to the low table, folding his legs up to his chest to then unfold them under said table and lean back against the front of the couch, crammed in the space between. He watches God (For Real) put sugar into tea and he thinks, So this is it.
Not in a fatalistic way, nothing like that, but here are the facts he knows: Camilla is not here, or it would be her face that greeted him upon waking and not God's study; his work is pristine, and its failure implies not only a wealth of untapped knowledge existing in the seas and beyond of this place, but also a sort of — attachment, call it. Palamedes doesn't believe in fate, he doesn't for a second consider the possibility that this realm has some kind of larger destiny for him and that he ought to commit wholeheartedly to it, or anything. But.
He's alive in this one. Persistently, and through efforts that are not his own. It cements if nothing else the idea that Trench is more than a way station between his bubble in the River and whatever work he can finish with the help of Harrow's something-that-articulates. Persistence.
So: he takes a biscuit, and wilder, he even takes a bite. Mostly to collect his thoughts, and to stop giving God (Really) the half-focused stare he's been fixing him with this whole time. Hold on.]
I shouldn't have gone back to "sleep," more or less. I assume you're aware of who made it out of Canaan House, [and credit Palamedes this, but he only frowns for a split second saying this, instead of fully boiling over with picked-scab fury. Growth.] and that I wasn't one of them.
[Tea next, and he foregoes sugar just to sip it, to put liquid in his mouth and chase off the foul, sticky dryness of long sleep.]
I tethered myself to my own skull at Canaan House, just in case something went irrevocably wrong, and then I spent eight months waiting around in the River for somebody to notice. Do you not look into what goes on down there? Anyway, it was — a bubble. I only had the one room, but it held just fine.
[He gestures with the rest of his biscuit, like, Obviously, this is the thing that should have happened again. Here is the part that pisses him off, to wit:]
It's not a difficult insurance policy to set up, as I'm sure you can imagine. But I woke up damp on your couch when I should have been fully aware the whole time. That fucking ocean disobeys everything it's told to do.
[ The boy's expression draws hard around Canaan House, but only for a flicker. Only for a breath. Something shifts in God's eyes: the lines around them tighten, ever so. The black-hole light of the iris stays the same, as though it's some central gravity around which the rest of him moves.
He repeats, slowly: ]
You made a bubble.
[ God chews his lip. He considers this. He looks somewhere between impressed and lightly distraught, and he says, in the tone of a man working through an unusual math problem aloud: ]
Eight months. I do wish I'd seen it. But it's a big River... and a worse ocean. The two don't line up how you'd expect. There are, and I don't mind saying this, factors at play here I've never even seen... we're operating under a different ruleset. It isn't my domain.
[ God picks up a biscuit and fidgets with it, absentmindedly rolling the edge between his fingers. It gets crumbs in his tea. ]
I do think we can crack it, but there's a lot of work to be done. The sort of work we haven't done since the beginning. [ That we is, again, doing a lot of heavy lifting. ] And it's tougher when we have sea monsters trying to flatten town every month or so.
[Oh, and if he were not so tired, so scrubbed raw by the acts of dying and reforming on some couch, the way God (really) reacts to his admission of, frankly, fucking around in the River would give him at least some satisfaction. Some iota of pleasure, for being able to say that he did a thing that surprised even the Emperor Undying, so there, et cetera.
It doesn't. The significance of surprising a man who by all accounts shouldn't be surprised by anything does not fill him with a spiteful little joy; were he not so freshly living, the ghoulish wrongness of it might curl a slow dread around his heart and start to tighten. God's own admission that the rules are different almost does.
He sticks his biscuit in his tea, instead. Neat.]
I won't die for you, [he says mildly, and when he blinks he can see YOU LIED TO US screaming back at him, practically subliminal.
But call this negotiating terms. Questions remain unanswered from all sides of this shitty ouroboros, and he would be a fool to simply say no to what sounds like an offer. Why not shoot his shot while he's definitely in the prime emotional state to do it, here goes.]
I made a bubble and it was easy. You can ask Harrow; she's been there. Besides your Lyctors, I'm the best possible choice.
[A shrug! Also the only other necromancer from their shared home kicking around, but like, that's not the real point of saying it.]
I don't need to know everything, [would be nice though!!!] but truth over solace. I don't think I can crack anything if I don't know the questions.
[ Great, so. Several points here. Chief among them is that Harrow has been fucking around in River bubbles and not telling him about it, which is exactly the kind of thing he'd been a bit on-edge about, before everything went to hell about twenty different ways. Most of them literal.
He'll take it up with her later. Palamedes dunks his biscuit and says I won't die for you like casual conversation, as though that wasn't the deal from the moment he got the letter. For another moment God just looks at him, and considers. Then he says, quite reasonably: ]
I'll try not to ask you to.
[ And here he looks a little chagrined, and he puts the biscuit down fussed-with but uneaten so he can scrub a hand back through his hair. He probably gets crumbs in it. ]
Truth over solace. [ He echoes it low and weary (or low and wry, like someone dwelling on a punchline). ] How's this: you're welcome to my notes. Anything in this room's fair game. [ He gestures, broad, to the rows and rows of bone and blood and notebook. ] Unpick any ward you like, shout for me if you run up against one you can't. We'll start there.
[ This is said like prelude, like getting the unimportant stuff out of the way. He drums his fingers beside the abandoned biscuit. He says, more seriously: ]
And I owe you an overdue apology. I really didn't intend... I didn't foresee things at Canaan House getting so terribly out of hand, and I would have, had I been paying better attention. [ There is that chagrined not-smile again, that tightening of the mouth. ] You paid for my mistakes. That has always been the lot of a Lyctor, but I didn't mean it to come due so soon.
[Certain points bear repeating, in Palamedes' mind; certain points bear being stated at all, and I won't die for you is at the top of his list.
He'll repeat himself later, if he has to. The negotiation is continuing, which is both a surprise - a continuation - and not - none of the questions. He can put together only so much with secondhand context and conjecture (but he is pretty good at that), and he knows when he's being promised just enough shiny things to tide him over. He's the Sixth one, after all, he's supposed to go googly-eyed over research notes and delight in picking at wards and collaborating.
That's all very patronizing, but he expected it, and so it settles over him as if a second blanket; again, he's too tired to make it a whole thing.
He says,] Mm.
[And then God apologizes. Palamedes listens the same way he's listened to the terms, the offer, and slowly but surely every one of his nerves catches fire. Suddenly sitting on the floor feels more supplicant than comfortable; he pushes his tea-with-biscuit-in further into the center of the table and braces his hands behind him on the sofa, to haul himself back up onto it with middling effort, and he says:]
I am not a Lyctor.
[And since meeting the three now that he has, if counting what Harrow did and the Third Princess' various atrocities is valid, he's never been more resolute in not wanting to be a Lyctor, either. They aren't even that good, he wants to say, YOU LIED TO US, did a single one of them figure out the work before it was too late—?
That feels, unfortunately, petty. Surely some of them were nice people, once.]
Don't apologize to me. I don't pay for anyone's mistakes but my own; those are mine to keep.
[This, here, is the point of pride: he sees the guise of the penitent savior, the effort to ply him with notes and curiosities — he chafes against it in an instant, white-hot.]
The Warden of the Sixth says I am not a Lyctor like he'd etch it into his bones, and God finds that he doesn't like that much. He finds that this is a bit of a sore spot. He has only just fished Augustine up from Hell and stood in this very study with him, just here, with the weight of Alfred's name unspoken in the air between them. His patience isn't what it might otherwise be. He is very tired.
So he decides they are not going to have this conversation just now, for everyone's sake.
God regards the boy before him. His drumming fingers go still, for just a moment. There is a beat of silence between them. Then he leans back, and picks up his tea, and the tension unspools. ]
Harrowhark and Gideon are just upstairs. [ He will let the Ninth pass on technicality; they're First, now, but that is a different conversation. Not one he thinks would be helped by hounding it here. ] And we've a few additions... a few others who came through that fight a bit worse for wear. They'll be glad to see you up and out of the water.
[God says nothing at all. Palamedes looks him in the face and throws the whole of his being behind the declaration, not a Lyctor, and God says nothing. Instead, God delicately picks over Harrowhark and Gideon as if they both aren't fully aware that Palamedes has called them the Ninth on purpose, too.
He isn't fool enough to consider that victory. He isn't fool enough to consider it anything but a pin placed into a thing that he will undoubtedly have to circle back to later, but for the first time since God entered this room with the tea, Palamedes feels like the Emperor Undying has managed to be honest with him. Without airs, without deigning to distract him with notes and baubles— honest, if nothing else in the lack of another nonsensical apology no one has asked for, to obligate him to accept God's ownership of Palamedes' necromancy and his cavalier, and his personhood, and his mistakes, and have him genuflect right back under that coffee table.
How God takes—and takes—and takes.
Palamedes will take what he can get. His capacity for spite is still there after all, he finds, twisting another white-hot stab into his gut that makes his recently-revived head spin, and then — it stops. He picks up his tea again in turn. He hums, placidly interested in who might be hanging around God's own house, although the list of people who would want to see him and people who aren't Ninth is very short.]
I'm going to make a request.
[A pause, to let that hang for just a heartbeat.]
It's nothing major. But you needn't bother sugar-coating death for me; I was there. With respect, I would ask you not to assume I can't handle the grown up topics. I'm a real stickler for detail, after all.
[It's not a request for honesty; he's not going to bother. But if he's to be kept at arms length from the totality of whatever lies behind all those wards, he'd rather not pretend it's for his protection.]
[ God's eyebrows rise, because they are well past the limits of good sense and still moving. It is a little astonishing and a little impressive to fish a dead child out of the sea and watch him swing Don't apologize to me and I'm going to make a request, tone neat and clipped as though his hair isn't still rumpled by death and saltwater. God's lips twitch at With respect.
He listens. He inclines his head in a nod. ]
Understood.
[ That hangs for a moment, too, as he sips his tea. When he lowers the cup it is to settle forward again, something unreadable in his black-hole eyes. Pleasantly, seriously, he says: ]
I'll be glad to have you on these projects, but we aren't on a tight timetable. There's no harm in taking a moment to readjust. You were under for five weeks, by my count, and the scars of that battle are still being felt. Start with the notebooks. We'll go from there.
[The immediate problem, of course, is that Palamedes does not believe God when he says "I'll be glad to have you," at least not in the way that a normal person would be glad to have a given person on a project. He sips at his soggy-biscuit tea (fascinating texture) rather than push the issue, or think about it too hard.
There's healthy skepticism and then there's obsessive paranoia, and he has other things to do with his time besides pick at every sentence with a fine-toothed comb.
Even so, he chafes again at the gentle implication that he can have his personal time to be traumatized first, or whatever this kindly overseer bit is. No; he's not a fan.]
When I have time.
[Could he, in earnest, just start right this second? Of course he good, but that's not in the spirit of the principle of the thing, so: some other time. What he would like to do most is go back to his bunker, assuming it remains untouched, and maybe kick over the cheap kitchen chairs (all two of them) and see if that makes him feel better. Later, he supposes.]
You said you were going to catch me up on what I missed.
o lord, heal this warden
The things he knows for certain: he is no longer a squid, being a squid again sucked very much, and the first two things lead to the third, or: he's still here. Or here again? Here. With that pin in place the rest of the memories settle into where they should be within minutes, because of course they do - Palamedes doesn't waste time and the universe has accepted that, cosmically.
He can't find his glasses. This makes him squint, which really solidifies the "pissy nerd" aspect he's got going on, here in his first moments of new-old life.
That he is not on the beach means that someone has moved him before he managed to come back, which is invasive in a fun new way that he doesn't yet have extant words for. He rubs at his entire face with his palms and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes for a moment, a whole-body Ugh, and then peers at his surroundings through his fingers.
Oh, he thinks, which is what anyone with sense (double meaning) would think when snapped back into awareness and bombarded with an uncomfortably large assortment of necromantic wards. It's the prickly back-of-the-neck feeling but tenfold, and Palamedes stares at the closest mysteriously warded dead thing like he can pick the ward apart just by glaring at it. (He'll work on it.)
What he notices next is the blanket, and the face he makes at it is legendary and tragically unseen by any sapient eyes. He half-heartedly wraps it around himself, capelike, and whole-heartedly attempts to stand up. There's only one person this study- it is a study, upon cursory couch-bound inspection- could belong to unless things have changed very drastically in his absence (which, well, maybe!), and he'll be damned if he fails his whole House by not taking a good look around.
Instead he fails his whole House by being a necromancer with bird bones who's spent several weeks semi-dead and entirely-squid, and so as soon as he attempts to stand and take a few steps, he wobbles all the way down to the floor. It is here he will remain until The Lord Emperor Actually, For Real returns: on the floor, daringly scooting closer to a notebook that doesn't ping dangerously warded. He looks up, and:]
Lord. [hello.] That figures.
[Which could mean anything from obviously, the Emperor would keep tabs on the local necromancers, to of course this is your study, to UGGGGHHHH, or all three concurrent and consecutive, but Palamedes declines to elaborate further. He shifts to sit cross-legged, squinting still.]
I'm working under the assumption that you found me on the beach, correct me if I'm wrong, and I dimly recall being a sea creature for a completely unnecessary reprise, so — it didn't work. You know, that's arguably more embarrassing than being — what, chewed to death? Is that what happened?
[It is at this point that he attempts to stand again using the arm of the couch as support, much like a toddler wobbling onto their feet, except much taller.]
There's nothing wrong with my work, so it must be that damnable ocean. Is that tea?
no subject
Still: always nice to be the bearer of good news. So he brings the squid home, and he goes to make tea, and he doesn't even snap the boy awake until he has biscuits ready to offer in recompense. They never made it to tea and biscuits, him and the Sixth. He has a lot of catching up to do. The field has changed.
So God ambles back into his study, a tea tray in his hands, and is unsurprised to find a lanky bird-boned young man poking at his notebooks. This does not worry him: most aren't warded, and the warded ones aren't hard to break. He won't take it as personal affront to come back to a room of unpicked wards. If he hadn't given Harrow run of the place already, he would probably have to watch smoke come out her ears as she waffled between piety and the compulsive need for a challenge.
He sets the tea tray down: on the low coffee table, as a kindness. ]
And biscuits. [ He looks faintly amused as he drops into a chair across the still-damp sofa. ] I would've gone with 'devoured by a gargantuan sea monster.' It sounds suitably dramatic.
[ God pours the tea, stirs two sugars into his. It's all very pleasantly mundane. ]
Catch me up on what should have happened? I'll trade you what you've missed.
[ He looks at Palamedes, then, and it's maybe the first time he's really looked. There is a difference in him now: the absent air has cooled and solidified to a realer attention. The set of his shoulders conveys more weight. He is, by measurable degrees, fucking around distinctly less. ]
Welcome back, Warden.
no subject
Not in a fatalistic way, nothing like that, but here are the facts he knows: Camilla is not here, or it would be her face that greeted him upon waking and not God's study; his work is pristine, and its failure implies not only a wealth of untapped knowledge existing in the seas and beyond of this place, but also a sort of — attachment, call it. Palamedes doesn't believe in fate, he doesn't for a second consider the possibility that this realm has some kind of larger destiny for him and that he ought to commit wholeheartedly to it, or anything. But.
He's alive in this one. Persistently, and through efforts that are not his own. It cements if nothing else the idea that Trench is more than a way station between his bubble in the River and whatever work he can finish with the help of Harrow's something-that-articulates. Persistence.
So: he takes a biscuit, and wilder, he even takes a bite. Mostly to collect his thoughts, and to stop giving God (Really) the half-focused stare he's been fixing him with this whole time. Hold on.]
I shouldn't have gone back to "sleep," more or less. I assume you're aware of who made it out of Canaan House, [and credit Palamedes this, but he only frowns for a split second saying this, instead of fully boiling over with picked-scab fury. Growth.] and that I wasn't one of them.
[Tea next, and he foregoes sugar just to sip it, to put liquid in his mouth and chase off the foul, sticky dryness of long sleep.]
I tethered myself to my own skull at Canaan House, just in case something went irrevocably wrong, and then I spent eight months waiting around in the River for somebody to notice. Do you not look into what goes on down there? Anyway, it was — a bubble. I only had the one room, but it held just fine.
[He gestures with the rest of his biscuit, like, Obviously, this is the thing that should have happened again. Here is the part that pisses him off, to wit:]
It's not a difficult insurance policy to set up, as I'm sure you can imagine. But I woke up damp on your couch when I should have been fully aware the whole time. That fucking ocean disobeys everything it's told to do.
[Or: UGGGGGHH.]
no subject
He repeats, slowly: ]
You made a bubble.
[ God chews his lip. He considers this. He looks somewhere between impressed and lightly distraught, and he says, in the tone of a man working through an unusual math problem aloud: ]
Eight months. I do wish I'd seen it. But it's a big River... and a worse ocean. The two don't line up how you'd expect. There are, and I don't mind saying this, factors at play here I've never even seen... we're operating under a different ruleset. It isn't my domain.
[ God picks up a biscuit and fidgets with it, absentmindedly rolling the edge between his fingers. It gets crumbs in his tea. ]
I do think we can crack it, but there's a lot of work to be done. The sort of work we haven't done since the beginning. [ That we is, again, doing a lot of heavy lifting. ] And it's tougher when we have sea monsters trying to flatten town every month or so.
no subject
It doesn't. The significance of surprising a man who by all accounts shouldn't be surprised by anything does not fill him with a spiteful little joy; were he not so freshly living, the ghoulish wrongness of it might curl a slow dread around his heart and start to tighten. God's own admission that the rules are different almost does.
He sticks his biscuit in his tea, instead. Neat.]
I won't die for you, [he says mildly, and when he blinks he can see YOU LIED TO US screaming back at him, practically subliminal.
But call this negotiating terms. Questions remain unanswered from all sides of this shitty ouroboros, and he would be a fool to simply say no to what sounds like an offer. Why not shoot his shot while he's definitely in the prime emotional state to do it, here goes.]
I made a bubble and it was easy. You can ask Harrow; she's been there. Besides your Lyctors, I'm the best possible choice.
[A shrug! Also the only other necromancer from their shared home kicking around, but like, that's not the real point of saying it.]
I don't need to know everything, [would be nice though!!!] but truth over solace. I don't think I can crack anything if I don't know the questions.
no subject
He'll take it up with her later. Palamedes dunks his biscuit and says I won't die for you like casual conversation, as though that wasn't the deal from the moment he got the letter. For another moment God just looks at him, and considers. Then he says, quite reasonably: ]
I'll try not to ask you to.
[ And here he looks a little chagrined, and he puts the biscuit down fussed-with but uneaten so he can scrub a hand back through his hair. He probably gets crumbs in it. ]
Truth over solace. [ He echoes it low and weary (or low and wry, like someone dwelling on a punchline). ] How's this: you're welcome to my notes. Anything in this room's fair game. [ He gestures, broad, to the rows and rows of bone and blood and notebook. ] Unpick any ward you like, shout for me if you run up against one you can't. We'll start there.
[ This is said like prelude, like getting the unimportant stuff out of the way. He drums his fingers beside the abandoned biscuit. He says, more seriously: ]
And I owe you an overdue apology. I really didn't intend... I didn't foresee things at Canaan House getting so terribly out of hand, and I would have, had I been paying better attention. [ There is that chagrined not-smile again, that tightening of the mouth. ] You paid for my mistakes. That has always been the lot of a Lyctor, but I didn't mean it to come due so soon.
no subject
He'll repeat himself later, if he has to. The negotiation is continuing, which is both a surprise - a continuation - and not - none of the questions. He can put together only so much with secondhand context and conjecture (but he is pretty good at that), and he knows when he's being promised just enough shiny things to tide him over. He's the Sixth one, after all, he's supposed to go googly-eyed over research notes and delight in picking at wards and collaborating.
That's all very patronizing, but he expected it, and so it settles over him as if a second blanket; again, he's too tired to make it a whole thing.
He says,] Mm.
[And then God apologizes. Palamedes listens the same way he's listened to the terms, the offer, and slowly but surely every one of his nerves catches fire. Suddenly sitting on the floor feels more supplicant than comfortable; he pushes his tea-with-biscuit-in further into the center of the table and braces his hands behind him on the sofa, to haul himself back up onto it with middling effort, and he says:]
I am not a Lyctor.
[And since meeting the three now that he has, if counting what Harrow did and the Third Princess' various atrocities is valid, he's never been more resolute in not wanting to be a Lyctor, either. They aren't even that good, he wants to say, YOU LIED TO US, did a single one of them figure out the work before it was too late—?
That feels, unfortunately, petty. Surely some of them were nice people, once.]
Don't apologize to me. I don't pay for anyone's mistakes but my own; those are mine to keep.
[This, here, is the point of pride: he sees the guise of the penitent savior, the effort to ply him with notes and curiosities — he chafes against it in an instant, white-hot.]
Do the Ninth still live here?
no subject
The Warden of the Sixth says I am not a Lyctor like he'd etch it into his bones, and God finds that he doesn't like that much. He finds that this is a bit of a sore spot. He has only just fished Augustine up from Hell and stood in this very study with him, just here, with the weight of Alfred's name unspoken in the air between them. His patience isn't what it might otherwise be. He is very tired.
So he decides they are not going to have this conversation just now, for everyone's sake.
God regards the boy before him. His drumming fingers go still, for just a moment. There is a beat of silence between them. Then he leans back, and picks up his tea, and the tension unspools. ]
Harrowhark and Gideon are just upstairs. [ He will let the Ninth pass on technicality; they're First, now, but that is a different conversation. Not one he thinks would be helped by hounding it here. ] And we've a few additions... a few others who came through that fight a bit worse for wear. They'll be glad to see you up and out of the water.
no subject
He isn't fool enough to consider that victory. He isn't fool enough to consider it anything but a pin placed into a thing that he will undoubtedly have to circle back to later, but for the first time since God entered this room with the tea, Palamedes feels like the Emperor Undying has managed to be honest with him. Without airs, without deigning to distract him with notes and baubles— honest, if nothing else in the lack of another nonsensical apology no one has asked for, to obligate him to accept God's ownership of Palamedes' necromancy and his cavalier, and his personhood, and his mistakes, and have him genuflect right back under that coffee table.
How God takes—and takes—and takes.
Palamedes will take what he can get. His capacity for spite is still there after all, he finds, twisting another white-hot stab into his gut that makes his recently-revived head spin, and then — it stops. He picks up his tea again in turn. He hums, placidly interested in who might be hanging around God's own house, although the list of people who would want to see him and people who aren't Ninth is very short.]
I'm going to make a request.
[A pause, to let that hang for just a heartbeat.]
It's nothing major. But you needn't bother sugar-coating death for me; I was there. With respect, I would ask you not to assume I can't handle the grown up topics. I'm a real stickler for detail, after all.
[It's not a request for honesty; he's not going to bother. But if he's to be kept at arms length from the totality of whatever lies behind all those wards, he'd rather not pretend it's for his protection.]
no subject
He listens. He inclines his head in a nod. ]
Understood.
[ That hangs for a moment, too, as he sips his tea. When he lowers the cup it is to settle forward again, something unreadable in his black-hole eyes. Pleasantly, seriously, he says: ]
I'll be glad to have you on these projects, but we aren't on a tight timetable. There's no harm in taking a moment to readjust. You were under for five weeks, by my count, and the scars of that battle are still being felt. Start with the notebooks. We'll go from there.
no subject
There's healthy skepticism and then there's obsessive paranoia, and he has other things to do with his time besides pick at every sentence with a fine-toothed comb.
Even so, he chafes again at the gentle implication that he can have his personal time to be traumatized first, or whatever this kindly overseer bit is. No; he's not a fan.]
When I have time.
[Could he, in earnest, just start right this second? Of course he good, but that's not in the spirit of the principle of the thing, so: some other time. What he would like to do most is go back to his bunker, assuming it remains untouched, and maybe kick over the cheap kitchen chairs (all two of them) and see if that makes him feel better. Later, he supposes.]
You said you were going to catch me up on what I missed.