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Neither of them really knew what it was like to be alone. The Sixth wasn't exactly the bastion of individual privacy, and even if they had been given mansions to themselves, Camilla Hect and Palamedes Sextus were fairly certain they would still choose sitting on the same too-small bedframe with their legs tangled in the middle.
As far as either of them were concerned, Paul was just the natural conclusion to that same impulse - it was killing them both to be so thoroughly close and yet, for the first time so deeply and unerringly alone. Killing them figuratively and literally, in Cam's case, and that would absolutely not stand.
Pal liked to call it sharing the single bed that we call a soul. He thought he was being funny, Cam could tell in the way the crackle of the tape recorder sounded like a wheezing laugh coming from lungs unused to wheezing, but she couldn't laugh.
Cam liked to call it the only way she could get away with never letting him out of her sight again. She didn't think she was being funny, Pal could tell in the damp spots on the letters she wrote him, but he laughed anyway.
The short moments they'd tried it, or a more awful and more explosive version of it, it was just that. Awful and explosive, and horribly wonderful. They couldn't ever do that again, they said, every time. Not until they'd fixed it.
So, they fixed it.
Even with the everything going on around them, the Pyrrha and Nona, the Corona and Judith, The Angel and Pash, the BoE and the whole Sixth House, the God and Alecto, the Gideon and Harrow, even the Cam and Pal, they fixed it.
Because of course they fixed it, Warden and Scholar, they were practically designed for fixing it. Devotion's casualties, perhaps, but what choice did their devotion leave them.
Go loud, he said.
Devotion left them Paul.
Go loud, she said.
So they did.