Chapter Text
“I think you should get a tattoo.”
“Obviously not. Look, I'm only here right now to eat eggs for her, I don't want – “
Back still to him, Pyrrha shoved the frying pan off the hob.
“Let me be clear, Sextus: your current strategy is not working. I'm not going to sit here waiting for it to fail, which one day it will, and then I'm back on window watch.”
“This is not an indefinite solution! Once we crack the ninth fold –”
“FUCK the ninth fold ward Sextus, and fuck whatever miserable research you two hooligans get up to. You're alive! And that's true of almost no one that I know. Have the good manners to get a picture of topless mermaid on your bicep while you're still with us!”
“It's not my bicep!” Unbidden, his leg was swinging out. “It's. Not. My. Body.”
Their foldable kitchen chair crashed into the soft plaster wall. Dust hung in the air for a second, and neither non-believer thought to send up a prayer of thanks that Nona was still at school. Pyrrha stood, propping up the counter, eyes for once unreadable. The damage he'd inflicted on Cam's toes was already surrendering to the itch of healing.
“I'm sorry but it's true. It's not mine. And I know you feel comfortable and you have your astounding range of bad taste tattoos, but it's completely different. Gideon is dead, and he's never coming back. Do what you want with your place. But I'm still Camilla's.”
Resolute, he folded his arms.
“Actually, I got most of these while old Duty was still alive.
Oh don't drop your jaw like that, you thought you can get artistry like this on New fucking Rho? I mean, I love the guy but he did gobble up my soul to use as a battery. Has that made me more blasé about the sanctity of his mortal remains? Who's to say.
But the point is, Sextus, that these are the only bodies you or I are ever going to live in again. Camilla will never let you back into your nasty bone hand, although I personally miss the days when you couldn't talk. If you insist on chasing down lyctorhood, even though I've told you it's perverse, this will still be what you look down and see. One flesh, one end, and you blinked first.
Palamedes, whatever lanky Sixth body you had is dust in the grave; but you are not. Things didn't turn out how you thought they would. Get a tattoo, take up smoking, pursue a questionable string of affairs, I don't care, but if you're planning to keep living, you need a plan to keep living in the body you're in right now.”
It would have been easier if she had stabbed him in the leg. Instead, she served him up some of the grisly eggs.
“If you really do hate yourself, eat these up.”
“I owe Camilla that much suffering, at least.”
Sighing one of the biggest sighs in her enviable repertoire, she retrieved the fallen chair and flopped into it.
“Oh you simple little scholar. What do they teach you out on Sixth?”
“Not to smoke contraband cigarettes…”
The gentle sound of gunfire thirty floors below pattered like rain outside. Pyrrha leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.
“Feel better now you've got that off your chest?”
Even now, he couldn't resist prodding. Her eyelids didn't even flicker.
“Why do you think we stop Nona from eating pencils?” she asked dreamily.
“If you're asking me that, I'm really having second thoughts on the eggs.”
It was stunning that she'd managed to prepare something so slimy while getting such an even spread of bitter burned crunch throughout.
“I mean it. Are we just here pumping protein into a body for Harrow to come back to?”
“Ah.” So it wasn't all off her chest, yet.
Pyrrha's chair clattered back down to all four legs and she leaned forwards, watching him intently.
“Tell me, what does Nona owe Harrow? Because she had souls bobbing along behind her like a clutch of balloons, but that girl never let anyone in in her life. I'm damned sure she didn't open the door and say ‘Take what you want from the fridge’. But Nona seems to have made herself at home. Is that so wrong of her? Should she also be looking flirtatiously at kitchen knives?”
Palamedes focussed on shovelling horrible, horrible eggs into his mouth and not coming close to looking Pyrrha in the eyes.
“But you, my little vampire, had someone inviting – no – begging you to come in, and yet –”
“You talk too much,” he brandished his fork at her, “and you drank bleach in this very fucking kitchen. You and Gideon ascended to imperfect lyctorhood and now you're lecturing me on what to want and how to feel. So what? I'm not hurting Camilla, or Nona, or you. I'm barely hurting myself. You want me to find a way to cope, and I am.”
“Are you coping? Because from here it looks like you're falling apart.”
Palamedes could only blink at her.
“I – I don't think that about Nona. She's not...”
Camilla's folded arms on the table were too inviting - he let his head sink into them.
“I blew myself up then convinced Sixth to secede,” he moaned into his elbows. “I glimpse a face I should love in the mirror, and I feel despair. We can never go home again, you and I. On a planet of refugees who are never going home, there is no one who is never going home more than us.”
A soft hand in his hair and he couldn't even flinch.
“I'm a hypocrite who's spent uncountable lifetimes making mistakes; allow me to wish that you could skip past some of them.
You feel like shit: you might continue to feel like shit until we all die our messy deaths. It's possible. It may even be inevitable, but it's not for the best. Stop telling yourself that you deserve it, and after eleven thousand years you might stop believing it. You think that abstract suffering is something you owe the universe, or Camilla, or yourself. Well it's not. It's not useful – it's frankly ungrateful – and it forces me to be the adult, which pisses me off. I wish you would at least want to feel good.
We're never going back home, it’s true. But I would take you all to a quiet moon and build a house there in a heartbeat.”
She tapped his clockwork gently and collected his plate. Whistling, she bustled it over to the sink.
“Update please: why am I crying?” asked Camilla.
Pyrrha was bent industriously over the washing up.
“Extraordinarily bad eggs today, I'm afraid.”