Work Text:
It’s dull and sharp all at once, like a yellow, sickly old bruise she keeps pressing her fingers into, hard. Again and again and again he says her name, not Camilla’s, but hers. And she pockets another flimsy envelope, and she feels the warmth radiate from him a half-step away as they walk the halls of Canaan House, and she laughs at his jokes at thirteen and cries into her pillow at seventeen and doesn’t kiss him at twenty. And still - she keeps the letters. Each is a broken capillary. She does not read them, but she presses her fingers into them, hard.
She needs the reminder, because:
Sometimes it’s easy to forget he doesn’t belong to her in the way she belongs to him.
-
On the ship during her desperate search for the Reverend Daughter, he exists in her muscle memory. She grows tired at the helm and moves to rest her head on his shoulder - but it’s too tall, and not lean enough, and it was really Coronabeth’s all along. It’s not so embarrassing, though, considering Coronabeth does the same to her. Occasionally she’ll nearly topple over and crush Camilla under her weight, expecting a twin’s height and judging the distance incorrectly.
He exists in the corners of the ship where only dust lives. The eyes on the portrait of the red-haired woman they tote around onboard sometimes flicker to grey. They follow her, and she stares back until her vision blurs and she drifts into sleep. And there, too, he exists. Camilla never was one to remember her dreams, but she grabs hold of these when she wakes and stores them in her memory like fireflies in a jar.
In her dreams, he always speaks, though she cannot always hear him. Sometimes she can hear him, but the way his eyebrows quirk, or the way his smile lines deepen capture her attention instead. Often he’s walking away from her, wading into a rushing river while her feet are stuck in mud on the bank. The river dreams are her least favorite.
Once, she did not dream of him at all. Instead it was Cytherea, rapier brandished, standing in the center of Camilla’s childhood bedroom and proffering an envelope coated in bile and dried, black blood.
“I’m not taking that,” Camilla says.
Cytherea laughs - a sickly, wet sound. “And why not? Are you not holding on to them?”
“You’re not the real… one. You’re not her. You’re dead.”
“So are you, without him,” Cytherea says, and drives the point of her rapier through Camilla’s chest.
Coronabeth doesn’t ask about it when she jerks awake in a cold sweat. The canvas bag is wrapped securely in Camilla’s arms, but she frantically searches its contents anyway. Just to be sure. Just to be safe. Coronabeth doesn’t ask about that either.
-
She didn’t kiss him at twenty, or any of the nineteen years preceding. At twenty-one, it’s a bit of a lost cause. She supposes she could still try it, but his spirit is currently occupying a skeletal hand and she’s really not sure which part of it is equivalent to his face. Regardless - he’s back. He’s back. She makes sure to remind him of this several times in the first week of The Hand-Pal Experience, and eventually he grabs a pen and a piece of flimsy to write on.
I never left.
She outstretches a flesh hand for him to hop into and holds him to her sternum for an extended moment. It’s not a kiss, but it’s her heart and it belongs to him, so she lets him feel it. And she remembers that his heart does not belong to her, and that he doesn’t have much say in the matter when being crushed to her chest, but it feels nice to allow some level of physical intimacy. She finds it’s much easier without having to speak or make eye contact.
It soon becomes a ritual at night for him to crawl up her arm and rest, fingers splayed, across her heart. Maybe the rhythm soothes him, or maybe it’s his way of - no. It’s nothing, she repeats like a mantra in her mind. It’s nothing. It’s nothing.
She still dreams of him as she knows him best. Human, whole. Though in these newer dreams, when he speaks to her he presses a hand of bone, muscle, and skin to her chest. In these newer dreams her heartbeat reverberates through the walls of a dance hall and keeps time with a waltz. Usually, she isn’t the one dancing. A blank-faced Palamedes guides Cytherea’s limp body around the floor, trailing blood and mess in their wake.
She thumbs through envelopes against the wall and wonders if he’ll save her the last dance.
-
This is the problem, she decides, with always remembering him. Regardless of how many months she spends cramped in a spacecraft with only his skull to memorize with her hands, or whether he currently exists as a skittering little bone-hand – she will always remember. Each dimple and stray hair, his posture, his speech cadence and the way he pushes up his glasses. The unforgettable richness of his irises. The shape of his mouth. She will never forget any of it. Even when he isn’t physically there, he is; he’s in her reflexes, the corner of her eye, every static portrait and every face she passes. She’s reminded of him in science, in medicine, history, necromancy. Any mention of their house, any accidental brush of her fingers against the letters still stored in her bag bring him to mind. Every time, she can recall every single detail of him in pristine clarity.
The problem with this lies in the simple fact that if she never forgets Palamedes, she’ll never be able to stop loving him. Loving him is dangerous and foolhardy – it leads her across galaxies in search of answers to the question of his well-being – but it is as natural as breathing, as familiar as a childhood friend.
As easily as she can remember him, the danger lies in how quickly she can forget that he is not hers to love.