Work Text:
i.
The Warden is seated at his desk. His head is bent so low over the flimsy he appears to be working on that it’s almost a wonder it doesn’t twist right off the fragile reed of his neck, or at the very least weigh it down until his forehead is pressed flat against the desktop. His hair is the spiky kind of mussed that it only gets when he’s several weeks overdue for a haircut (add that to tomorrow’s agenda) and has been tearing at it in prolonged agitation. His hand is flying over the flimsy, scratching out letters that Camilla can tell by the speed of the writing won’t be legible to almost anyone else in the world, unless they’re transcribed (add that to tomorrow’s agenda, too).
He does not seem to have noticed the faint groan of the door as she opened it. He does not seem to have noticed, either, that she’s just hit the switch and turned off the overhead lights in the room, leaving him only the offensively intense desk lamp to work by.
“Hmm,” Camilla says, neutrally, and starts walking.
The new rooms are large by Sixth House domicile standards, of course—which is to say, not particularly large. The doorway she’s just come through, the one that leads to the attached cavalier quarters; a bed, a lavishly proportioned desk, a dresser, some shelving for books and knickknacks they haven’t gotten around to filling in all the way yet; a tiny kitchenette which came pre-stocked with more tea bags than she’d ever seen in one place before, wedged into a corner; a second doorway out into the corridor and a third to a private en-suite bathroom—perks of the office—and enough oil-derivative carpeting to pace back and forth across, lost in thought, without getting dizzy at the frequency of the directional changes required. Everything, in short, that a respectable scholar might need or want, he said of them, plus the bed on top for good measure.
Camilla’s response was along the lines of, “Sleep isn’t optional,” and his response in turn was something like, “Agree to disagree?” and her response to that was a silent promise to herself that she’d be in at two hours past the start of the night-cycle to check on him and to continue the argument if necessary. Camilla Hect has never been fond of agreeing to disagree.
But then, neither has Palamedes Sextus, really.
A change in lighting wasn’t enough to rouse him from his work; the muffled footsteps-on-carpet sound that is Camilla crossing the darkened room without making any particular effort at quiet doesn’t seem to do it either. Nor does her presence at his shoulder once she arrives—she stands behind him, tapping her fingers across the back of the chair as she debates how to approach the problem. In fact there are no signs that he notices her at all until the moment that she comes to her decision, and neatly drops her weight into his lap.
It’s not actually all that easy to do. He has the chair pulled in fairly close to the desk, and Camilla has to do a bit of maneuvering to fit herself between him and the underside of the work surface, which takes a moment to accomplish. She braces the full flat of her palm atop the back of the chair and swings one leg over his, twisting it sideways so as not to bang her knee on the desk; she plants the foot on the floor, and then pushes herself forward off the palm, bringing the rest of body between him and his work, and lowers herself onto him—slowly enough so as not to fall onto him and knock the wind out of him. Quickly enough so as not to give him the chance to escape before her weight has secured him in place.
Not that he would have had much chance at doing so, anyway, given the abysmal state of his reflexes. Even once she’s actually sitting on him there’s a full two seconds of stunned confusion before he seems to realize what’s going on, and starts squirming as if in a feeble attempt to push her off.
“Cam, what—”
“Had to get your attention somehow. You’re supposed to be sleeping.”
“—you’re crushing me,” Palamedes complains, which only seems like cause for legitimate concern until he follows it up with, “and I can’t see what I’m writing anymore.”
Camilla spends a long moment glancing down at the page on the desk. In that time, she just barely makes out the letters “Warden” at the top of the flimsy, distinguishable from the letters “Navdcm” in his handwriting mostly by context clues. “Would it make a difference if you could?” she asks, tamping down the inconveniently-timed pride that swells up in her chest to keep her voice even and flat.
He wiggles a bit more underneath her, presumably trying to push her out of his field of view with the hand that isn’t holding his pen. “Very funny,” he says, just as flatline-voiced as she was, and then: “You are crushing me a bit, though. I’m losing feeling in my lower extremities. Must we do this, Cam?”
“You can sit in my lap instead,” says Camilla. “If you prefer it that way.”
A brief pause. Then behind her, into her ear (his breath is warm; Camilla feels hair on the back of her neck standing up and resolutely ignores it), the Warden makes a noise that is presumably indicative of some strong emotion. Which strong emotion is frankly unidentifiable without a visual on his facial expression. Camilla refuses to lower herself by twisting herself around to look.
“Why must anyone sit in anyone’s lap?” he asks.
Stupid question. “There’s only one chair, Warden.”
She feels his breath on her skin—warm against the back of her neck, stirring her hair and bringing out goosebumps—as he lets out a huff of indignation. “Yes, I suppose—we’ll have to remedy that once I have some time for interior decoration, but—wouldn’t you be more comfortable on the bed, anyway?”
Now Camilla does shift her weight in his lap (he makes another little yelp, which she ignores also, deliberately) until she can twist her head far enough around to look at him. The gooseflesh on her arms hasn’t gone down—it’s hardly the first time they’ve stared at each other with this small a distance in between them, not given the way they’d kept resolutely cramming themselves into one another’s shucks in the juvie dorms for months after they’d outgrown the point when they could do it without overlapping in every direction. But still. Palamedes’ eyes never get any less intense to look at. They’re the same color as the polished steel of any of the various swords and knives in her steadily-growing collection. Arguably more dangerous than any of those weapons, when they’re pointed at you. Infinitely more difficult to care for properly. Swords never argue with you when you put them back in their scabbards and tell them to stay there for the rest of the night.
Often—he’s the only one this ever happens with; Camilla Hect has always been the second-last person on this entire planet to ever back down from a challenge, which is possibly why they approved her application to become his cavalier in the first place, but—often it’s her who looks away first.
Not always. Not now. Now Camilla stares him down—blank, expressionless—until he appears to rethink what he’s just said to her, and then, to his credit, displays a modestly appropriate level of shame. “Yes, alright, fine,” he says, casting the sharp edge of his gaze carelessly up towards the ceiling. “I’ll go to bed. Just—give me a few more minutes at least, won’t you? I’ve got this letter almost wrapped up, I promise.”
Camilla considers.
“Pajamas first,” she decides. “And go brush your teeth. Then you can come back and finish.”
“Fair enough,” he replies, still rustling her hair with the words, voice weighed down with cheerfully begrudging acceptance.
He doesn’t have far to go—en suite bathroom; perks of the office. While the door is closed between them Camilla stretches, cracks her knuckles, and fidgets with the top button of her own pajama shirt, then takes a seat at her desk and pulls the mostly-written letter towards her. It’s not bad work on the whole, she thinks, scanning it from the top. Once she does a quick editing pass at it tomorrow it should be fine to copy out and send off.
When he returns from the bathroom, appropriately pajama-clad, he walks back over toward the desk, his feet making little scritch noises on the carpeting, and waits politely behind the chair for her to stand up and move. She does not. She hasn’t finished reading yet. He sighs, and then—gingerly, awkwardly—he goes to sit down in her lap.
He’s not as graceful about it as she was. He does bang a knee on the underside of the writing surface, and jumps backward hopping on one foot and hissing a breath in through his teeth—she makes the concession of scooting the chair backward from the desk by a foot or so to let him squeeze his way in.
He makes a humming noise that she takes for gratitude and eases himself down until he’s balanced roughly atop one of her thighs. His weight is still half in his feet, planted on the ground on either side of her leg, or it must be, unless he’s lost even more of it in the past couple of weeks than he looks like he’s lost. His wrist as he goes to take the flimsy from her hand is painfully thin, scarcely more than skeletal—she could encircle it with a thumb and a forefinger. Probably she could snap it with just that, too.
He needs a rest, as soon as possible—preferably now, actually, but she’d given him her word on finishing up the letter, so she lets him have it. Neither of them waste time with further discussion—he picks his pen back up with his other hand, twists his upper body down until he’s hunched back over the writing surface, and gets to work. She continues reading over his shoulder, catches up to the bottom of what he’s written so far and then follows along as he scratches out a final paragraph and a sign-off of appropriate politeness, and then sets down the pen with a sigh.
He can encircle his own wrists with a thumb and forefinger too, it turns out—he massages the right with the left gently, working it up and down, as he says, “That’s the last of them from the Fifth, I think. I’ll just have the Fourth to finish up with tomorrow, and that shouldn’t be long… God, I ought to have listened to the Archivist and just sent off a form letter and called it done with. I hadn’t planned on spending this much of my first days in office drafting formal inter-Housal communications.”
Camilla doesn’t argue with him. She’d said as much at the outset—in fact, her own suggestion had been to toss the whole pile of notices of heartfelt congratulations slash thinly veiled petitions for future preferential treatment regarding the queue for visiting researchers which he’s received from the various high-ranking personages of the Fifth and the Third and every other House that takes any interest in the current political affairs of the entire system—which is to say, all of them except for the Eighth and the Ninth, who have been predictably silent on the matter—into recyc without so much as a read. Would have been a real power move.
He’d disagreed: “We ought to get a better sense of who we’re going to be dealing with,” and “Don’t make that face, there’s nothing to be lost in extending a few pleasantries, playing by their rules a little while longer until we’ve found our own footing,” and so on.
Nothing to be lost, Camilla thinks, but sleep and peace of mind, and maybe another five pounds Imperial due to the stress. None of which he has in quantities to spare.
He takes off his glasses and sets them down on the desk, rubbing his eyes. “It’s just been so annoying trying to keep track of what the proper titles are for half of these people, and who’s related to who, and how… What a House needs with an aristocracy that size, I’ll never know. To hell with it, what a House needs with a hereditary aristocracy of any size I’ll never really know. As a system of government it must be ridiculously inefficient, if not outright unjust—”
“Unquestionably, Warden. Certainly it stands in stark contrast to our own Oversight Body, which is the epitome of bureaucratic efficiency and entirely free of any nepotism whatsoever.”
Palamedes scoffs, but it’s in the particular way he scoffs when he’s halfway to a laugh. His breath had hitched, when she said Warden, like he still can’t believe his own ears on hearing it even a week after the examination results were first publicized, even sitting now at the new desk in the new rooms. Camilla feels a grin threatening to start pulling at the corner of her own mouth, and heads it off neatly at the path.
“Oh, come on, half that’s unwarranted. Not nepotism to keep voting your cousins onto the board when nearly every viable candidate in the field is your cousin, I’d argue. Inefficient is fair, though, only don’t remind me about it just now, I’ve made it my goal not to think about the hell I’m undoubtedly in for at my inaugural meeting until tomorrow night, if at all possible—”
Camilla cocks her head to one side, fingers pausing for a moment before resuming the pattering rhythm they’ve been tapping out on the synthetic-wood desktop.
“You’ll have a hard go of it,” she says. “Come tomorrow at noon, when the meeting starts.”
Palamedes freezes, then; she can feel every one of the spare, underdeveloped muscles that are the only thing standing between the bones of his excessively-long legs and the skin at the surface as they tighten in a sudden jolt, and his head jerks upward so abruptly that the back of it might have broken her nose if her reflexes hadn’t been faster than his. “Oh, God, what?” he says—his voice gone high, and tight as his muscles against her. “No, I could have sworn it was on the day after tomorrow, we talked about it—”
“Indeed, Warden. We talked about it yesterday. When it was on the day after tomorrow.”
“Oh, God,” he says again, and, as if those words were a trigger of some kind, he comes undone, sprawling out across Camilla’s lap, the weight of him shifting against her as he hunches forward over the desktop. His hands go flying—the right snatching up the pen he just put down, the left reaching over to rustle through the mess of papers off to the side. “Where’s the agenda? I need—I’ve hardly glanced at it, I thought—I don’t know what I was thinking, actually, but the time’s all gone somewhere, and—I can’t even read any of this, where are my—”
His glasses are right on the other side of the desktop where he left them, but Camilla doesn’t give him the time to discover them there. Enough has been enough. As he scrambles to hold the paper he’s seized a mere finger’s breadth from the tip of his nose, presumably so that he can make a go of deciphering his own handwriting sans glasses, Camilla makes her move: she wraps one arm around his upper body, pinning his forearms to his chest, tucks the other under his knees, and whisks him rapidly out of the desk chair.
It’s not as elegant as it could have been. She knocks one of his knees on the underside of the desktop in the process, the same one he’d knocked there himself earlier, and he yelps—less from pain, though, and more from protest at what’s happening as she folds him up in her arms and half-carries, half-drags him the three paces between desk and bed, dumps him out onto the surface of the latter, and lays her own weight face-down across his chest before he gets the chance to struggle back upward.
He protests, of course. “Now you’re really crushing me—get off and let me up, I can’t even breathe properly—”
Another gross exaggeration; he’s doing perfectly fine for himself, and he has to know that she knows that. It’s a strange sensation, feeling herself carried up and down slightly by the rise-and-fall of his chest beneath her as his diaphragm flexes and his lungs inflate.
Still, she props her head up on her elbow, taking some of the weight off him, and regards him. He’s got ink on his chin from where he scratched himself with the pen in his pinned-arm struggle, she notices: a thin black line smeared along the jawline, stark against the washed-out brown of his skin under the fluorescence of the desk lamp. It only brings out nearly-equally dark bags under his eyes.
“Good,” she says, and reaches over to take the pen and paper from his hands, tucking it into the waistband of her pajama pants. “Maybe you’ll pass out from the lack of oxygen. You need to go to sleep, Warden. You can look over the agenda tomorrow morning while I cut your hair and make you presentable. There’ll be enough time.”
“But I’m not even tired,” he complains.
“That’s too bad,” Camilla replies. “I am. I think I’ll lie here on the bed a while longer.”
Palamedes heaves a sigh so long and dramatic that as she slowly descends with the air whistling out of his chest, she’s reluctantly impressed. Good on him for it. She wouldn’t have honestly believed he had the lung capacity.
“It is a rather comfortable bed,” he concedes, eventually, once he’s run out of sigh and had to inhale again. “Much better than the old one.”
“Perks of the office, Warden.”
“Almost worth the effort of having all my books transported halfway across the station. But, God, what a waste of an afternoon overseeing that whole process was—and then here I’ve been all evening long, chatting away with Ladies Quint and Quinquest and trying to figure out how to work the kettle in here, accomplishing jack shit… Tomorrow at noon! I’m going to have nothing whatsoever to say for myself, I’ll be lucky if I’m not laughed out of the room. Shortest-serving Master Warden in House history as well as the youngest—at least my name will be preserved in the record books.”
He’s talking fast even by his standards, voice still tight and slightly stunned. Camilla squints at him.
“Have you been drinking caffeinated tea at night again?”
“Unimportant,” he says, which of course means yes, and goes half the way to explaining why he’s currently acting like a wired-up child. The other half she can account for as well. This isn’t the first time—it makes little sense to her as a stress reaction; she’s the exact opposite, herself, but—he’s gotten like this before. Before the examination, a week and a half ago, he was the same way: relaxed, confident and cheerful for days on end beforehand, with the test looming over them, and then suddenly going to pieces over a misplaced pen on the morning of until she got a new one into his hand, talked him down, and saw him off.
Now here they are again, him having finally achieved the position the pair of them have been working him towards together since they were eight years old, neither ever doubting they’d get him there, and as soon as he’s about to get properly started in office he’s suddenly doubting his own capabilities over the small fact of the misremembered date.
Up to her again to set him straight. She rolls her body off of his to lay beside him atop the mattress, one arm still flung across his chest in case he tries to rise, but he doesn’t, just curls sideways in on himself into the loose fetal position he always favors.
“I won’t let them laugh at you,” she says. “I can go in first and warn them off it if you like. Tell them if they don’t cheer and clap for you the whole time I’ll blow this whole House up.”
His expression at these words is one of horror—but it’s a horror with amusement lurking somewhere behind it, visible in the arch of the brow. Camilla is pleased.
“Oh, God,” he says. “Imagine the loss. All of the archives, erased from being. I could never live with myself—”
“You wouldn’t have to. We’d all be dead—”
“Yes, and then my mother would hound my ghost all the way across the River, for all of time. No rest even in death—”
“It’d be me she’d go after. I’m the one who destroyed it, not you.”
“Don’t be facetious, we know my mother. The day she blames you over me is the day Dominicus goes out. Anyway, it would be my fault really, if anything like that happened to the House on my watch. No—” he heaves another sigh. “I’m strictly forbidding you from setting off explosives of any kind tomorrow. At least without my express say-so—maybe I’ll have changed my mind by the end of this godawful meeting. If it’s really as tedious as the minutes from all the previous ones have made it sound I might welcome a few fireworks to liven things up in the meeting room.”
Camilla snorts. “Should I be flattered you’re taking my threats this seriously? As if I’d actually be capable of destroying the entire House.”
A brief pause, and then when he speaks again his voice is serious, lacking entirely the jesting horror of the past few minutes. “Camilla Hect,” he says—and his face is so close to hers that when Camilla turns her head sideways to look at him she can pick out the pores on his cheeks and the individual dark, curled lashes framing the knife-flat stare he has fixed on her, even in the dim that is the room lit only by his desk lamp several paces away. “I’d never doubt it of you. Haven’t I been admiring your capacity for accomplishing the impossible long enough by now?”
Another moment passes as they stare at each other, opposite cheeks pressed flat into the pillow at the top of the Master Warden’s bed—and then, suddenly, it is over, him rolling onto his back from his side and her turning her head back, tipping her chin at the ceiling. She doesn’t know which of their eyes closed first, this time.
“You flatter me, Warden,” she says, finally, eyes fixed to the ceiling.
“And you, me,” he replies—hastily, cheerfully. “Enough of this Warden business for now, wouldn’t you say? Let me earn the title properly first. If I make it through a week without getting impeached and inspiring an age requirement for future exam-takers, then you can say it all you like.”
“I’ll be holding you to that,” she says. “They won’t impeach you. They’d be idiots to and they know it. You won the position for a reason.”
“That reason being,” says Palamedes, “I’ve had the absolute best cavalier anyone could ever ask for to hold my hand and keep me going the whole way there. It’s as much your win as mine—and that’s not flattery. Just the truth as I see it.”
Inside Camilla’s chest, a series of bombs that might well have the power to wipe out the Archives after all, if she let them out of her, begin to detonate one by one. She doesn’t let them out. Too dangerous. She allows herself a deep inhale and a tight smile, and knows without looking at him that he’s smiling too as she says:
“If you think that highly of me, you can listen to me now when I say it’s bedtime. Can I trust you not to get back up and make a break for the desk as soon as I leave?”
He makes a vague reluctant noise that she decides to interpret, generously, as an affirmative. So she withdraws the arm restraining him across the chest and rolls over, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed until her feet find carpet and rising to stand.
He’s quiet as she goes, quiet enough that she looks back at him with some amount of concern once she’s standing over the desk with her finger on the lamp switch. He looks ragdoll-pathetic, sprawled atop the covers where she’d flung him, long and skinny limbs in every direction. His eyes are still open, fixed on her. He doesn’t look particularly like he’s in the mood to close them, still.
Camilla looks from him to the door to the cavalier quarters, with their own probably-ridiculously comfortable bed, made up for her by persons unknown ahead of the transferral of her clothing and personal items to the new rooms earlier in the day. Then she extracts his pen and paper from her pants where she’d tucked them, sets them down on his desk, and flips the switch, closing him out of her peripheral vision entirely, and paces with moderate caution across his room.
When her weight depresses the mattress beside him he makes no sound of surprise: he just folds himself up and rustles over further toward the wall to make more space for her. She tugs on the bedcovers, pulls them out from under him and lays them over the pair of them—he’ll freeze next time the air-cyc vent kicks on otherwise; there’s no fat on him to keep him warm.
“Decided you don’t trust me after all?” he murmurs, sounding amused, once she’s settled into place beside him.
Camilla decides it’s her turn to reply only with a vague, arguably affirmative noise. Let him interpret it as he wishes.
And then there is quiet in the room, but for the rhythm of their breathing in and out. As she always does when they sleep this close to each other, she listens for what seems a long time to his, waiting until it drops all the way off into sleep before she allows her own to do the same.
ii.
Camilla starts drafting her declaration of war on their assigned quarters in Canaan House before they even make it all the way there.
The First has chosen, for whatever reason, to house them up near the top of one of the towers—spindly; crumbling; Camilla hates to even speculate on the stability of the place; yet another reason to get through the work as quickly as possible, before everything falls down on top of them—and they have to spend what seems like half of a dizzy eternity working their way around and around a tightly-wound spiral staircase up from the ground floor before the white-robed skeleton servant gestures them toward a door and backs away with a bow.
Real wood, by the looks of it. Palamedes takes a moment to run a hand down it before he settles on the doorknob, perhaps to check. Or perhaps just to take the moment. He’s wheezing with moderate asthmatic intensity after the trip up the stairs.
And then he throws the door and a visible cloud of dust comes billowing out of the room behind it, which doesn’t help matters.
Camilla is going to need to have words with Teacher at the first opportunity, she decides.
The next several hours are fairly busy. Camilla flags down another of the skeleton servants when it reaches the top of the stairs carrying an armful of the luggage they’d left behind on their shuttle, and attempts to convey to it, via language and pantomime in conjunction, her desire for cleaning supplies. Palamedes remarks, upon its return bearing a broom, a bucket, some soap, and a whole stack of rags, how fascinating it is that the skeleton was able to understand a request of that nature, and verbally resolves to bring it up in conversation with the Ninth when he gets the chance. Camilla, who got in a look at the sullen girl that the famously secretive Ninth House has sent in to represent them, chooses not to verbalize her own opinions about the likelihood that the Ninth will ever deign to make social conversation with Palamedes in any capacity, but instead goes to work attacking the problem before them while Palamedes, still fighting to get his breath back, perches at the top of the staircase and begins unpacking their suitcases.
She throws open one of the windows to air out the room somewhat—every inch of her rebels against this course of action, of course, but the rules are all going to be different here. Might as well try to get used to it.
The sun was most of the way down already by the time they’d made it to the top of the staircase, and by now it’s so dark that she can hardly make out the surface of the endless water ocean outside, but she can hear the distant tides crashing back and forth down at the base of the structure’s foundation. There’s a reasonably strong air current coming in off all that water—they won’t be able to keep it open once the room inevitably starts accumulating notes made on loose flimsy, or everything will be blown away and lost.
She leaves the window and sets about stripping down the beds, dumping the highly suspect lengths of cloth that had been serving as sheets in the bottom drawer of the dresser (it sticks when she first tries to pull it out; she has to give it a good hard jerk to get it open) and making things over again with the sheets they’d brought along from home. She wipes down the surfaces of all the shelves with the dust rags. She nimbly maneuvers the broom around the various corners of the rooms, and also around Palamedes, who contrives to be perpetually in the way as he carries their changes of clothes back and forth between the luggage piled at the top of the stairs and the dresser (he can’t get either of the upper drawers open; she has to come over and do it for him).
Despite the fact that he’s just met his physical superior in the form of a mildly stubborn pair of drawers, Palamedes appears to feel no amount of shame. Nor does he appear especially bothered by the frankly unlivable state of their new rooms. In fact, he has the nerve to seem to find her efforts to make the rooms no-longer-unlivable somewhat amusing.
“It’s like watching the Oversight Body every time we get in somebody important from the Fifth for a visit,” he remarks from behind the tottering stacks of books he’s now in the process of transferring into their new quarters, as Camilla tucks the broom under her arm and begins dragging one of their very sorry-looking armchairs away from its corner so that she can sweep the floor beneath its old position. “Company is coming! Get rid of the couches, we can’t let people know we sit—”
Camilla drops the armchair and shakes the broom at him. Dust comes flying off it, and he nearly drops the books as he breaks off into a coughing fit. She finds she isn’t at all sorry.
“I wouldn’t sit on that, Warden,” she says, with another skeptical glance at the sad, sagging chair. It was probably a very nice chair once, actually—real wood on the legs, et cetera—operative word being once. “Don’t trust the structural integrity.”
“Can’t be any worse than the whole of this tower, can it?” he asks in immediate response, one corner of his mouth twitching upward as he bends to set his stack of books on the floor at the foot of the bookshelf. She elects not to acknowledge this particular attempt at humor on his part. He continues: “Anyway, I had no plans to. We’re almost out of shelf space already—I think we’re going to have to appropriate half the furniture if we want to get all the books in here.”
Camilla finishes sweeping out the corner previously occupied by the chair before she looks back over at him. He’s not exaggerating about the shelf space. Even as she watches he’s forced to give up on trying to stuff the last few books in with the others, and to reach up—arms above his head, robe pulling tighter around his shoulders—and stick them atop the bookcase itself.
“How many of the bags have you unpacked?” she inquires.
He pauses, still in the act of reaching. “About half?”
By the time they get through the other half of the bags (he was right about the furniture; in order to keep enough space clear on the floor that they can walk around the rooms properly, they have to convert two of their four chairs into emergency shelving) Palamedes is stifling yawns when he thinks she isn’t looking. Good, Camilla thinks—it’s felt like an incredibly long day. Even she’s more tired than she feels she ought to be. Perhaps it’s the darkness outside the window, she thinks. It’s much darker than the dimmed night-cycle lights of after-curfew corridors back home.
Either way, it will do them both a favor if he turns in early, and she follows him. She moves toward the dresser, wiggles the top drawer backward and forward until it opens to her with minimal protesting, extracts her own sleep clothes, and turns to face him, pajamas still in a nearly-folded bundle under her arm, without closing the drawer behind her.
He takes her point without argument, though not without reluctance. It is only ten minutes later when he collapses onto the newly made-up bed—collapses rather more heavily than she would have liked, but the frame handles the sudden demand of his nothing-weight without immediately snapping in half after all, which at least reassures her it’ll likely last the night—but he does not immediately settle in. His glasses reflect the limp and sallow light of the overheads as he lies sprawled atop the bed on his back like a dead thing, blinking up at the ceiling.
“I can’t help but feel,” he says, “that we’ve been wasting too much time up here messing around with boxes all evening. A whole day on-planet and we’ve got nothing to show for ourselves.”
“Except a clean living space.” Admittedly, clean is pushing it, and to be honest so might be living space; it’s much better than before in here now that she’s swept off enough of the dust that he isn’t constantly sneezing and they aren’t leaving visible tracks on the floor anymore, but the whole place is still rickety and foreign, nothing in design or execution like any habitation quarters she’s ever encountered.
From the way his nose scrunches, one hand coming up to rub the side of it in one of the many deep-in-thought tics with which she’s familiar, he shares her instinctive distrust of the place, but he doesn’t voice it directly. “Yes, but,” he says, “surely there are bigger priorities here, aren’t there?”
“I’m not going to spend the next few months living amongst dirt and boxes, Warden.”
“Of course you won’t. I expect we’ll be done here within weeks.”
His typical smart-aleck cockiness, ahead of the task’s beginning. The part of Camilla that wants this to be easy, that dislikes the thought of every extra moment he’ll have to spend in this crumbling, unstable palace filled with other House heads that she feels she has every reason to distrust around him, hopes he never gets an opportunity to become panickingly disillusioned this time. The part of her that is an incurable realist, that has spent the majority of her waking hours over the last several weeks since the arrival of the Emperor’s letter soberly confronting the gravity of exactly what he’s going to be undertaking here, and feels also that in any event he could stand to acquire a little more humility lest Sainthood inflate his already-overlarge head so far that it explodes shortly after his ascension, remarks: “It took the first generation entire decades of research before they cracked Lyctorhood, supposedly. If you recall.”
“I am familiar with the stories, yes,” Palamedes says, agreeably. “I’m also familiar with about ten thousand years of necromantic scholarship that they had to go about it all without any knowledge of; it’d be a disgrace if I couldn’t put that advantage to good enough use to accelerate the whole process somewhat. Anyway, I think we’ll have to move fast, if we want to stand a chance of moving very far at all. Stiff competition, and all that… What are your thoughts, by the way? I meant to ask earlier, but you seemed busy and I didn’t want to bother you.”
“On the competition?” Camilla considers. It doesn’t take her long. “Third and Ninth look dangerous. Second and Eighth look irritating. Fifth look irritatingly overfriendly. Nothing we shouldn’t have expected.”
She pauses for a moment. She tries to find something she wants to say about the Seventh, and comes up with nothing. He doesn’t prompt her on it.
Probably it’s better off that way.
“What about the Fourth?” he asks instead, just a second before the pause in their conversation grows long enough that he’d have to make a point of stepping around it. His hand is still rubbing at the side of his nose.
The Fourth. Indeed. Camilla sits gingerly down on the edge of the bed—it takes her weight as well without much fuss—and plucks the glasses off his face, setting them down on the end table at her elbow. “Too young to have been allowed here,” she says. “This isn’t a task for children.”
He blinks several times in succession, hand moving over from his nose to rub at his eyes instead. “Oh, come on now, Cam. Doesn’t that remind you of anyone?” he says, a slight smile touching the corner of his mouth.
Of course it does. “This is different,” she says. It is. The Oversight Body were unpleasant enough for a pair of young teenagers to wrangle—are still more than unpleasant enough to wrangle even for a pair of twenty-somethings who have finally fully earned its grudging respect in the intervening years—but despite Palamedes’ semi-frequent melodramatic statements to the contrary in the early days, no one on the Oversight Body ever posed a legitimate threat to their lives. Apparently, according to Teacher, the same can’t be said of the trials they’ll be facing starting tomorrow.
“You’re probably right,” he agrees. Then he sighs. “Still, though. If this letter had come six years ago you’d have still wanted the chance to come, wouldn’t you?”
Of course she would have. More importantly, he would have wanted to go, and she wouldn’t ever have dreamed of failing to accompany him—as far along the process as she possibly can, anyway.
(She’s spent the majority of her waking hours over the last several weeks since the arrival of the Emperor’s letter wondering how far, exactly, as far as she possibly can is going to be. Darling girl, tomorrow you will become a Lyctor and finally go where I can’t follow, and all that—and they haven’t really talked much about it yet, and probably it’s better off that way, and the last thing in the world she wants is to be a thing that holds him back from ascension if he does acquire a more-than-academic interest in Lyctorhood before they reach the trials’ end. For her own part—she doesn’t need to live forever, anyway. She just needs to spend the rest of her life at his side, if he—and the Emperor—will have her that long. As his cavalier, for however many years she’s physically able. As (she struggles to imagine a life in which she isn’t his cavalier any longer. She doesn’t know what she’d be, outside that—) his friend, perhaps, afterward.)
“Incontrovertibly, Warden,” she says. “Of course I would have.”
He smiles then—abruptly, intently, the perfect grey of his eyes rolling upward towards the arch of his eyebrows in mirth. “ Incontrovertibly—how you come up with this many obscure adjectives and adverbs on the spot, I’ll never know,” he remarks, to the ceiling above the bed. “There’s my Camilla Hect bingo sheet sorted for the day, anyway—”
“Bingo already? Shame. I was about to tell you to stop talking and go to sleep. That ought to have checked something off.”
“Maybe I’ll go for a blackout,” he says, and yawns, then picks his head up off the pillow to squint at the window. “Speaking of. It’s really dark out there, isn’t it? Even with all the starlight—I don’t know why, I thought it’d be brighter than this here.”
“Not the first night we’ve ever seen.”
“I know, but—I don’t know. Like I said. It just seems strange, here. Everything about this planet. It feels…”
He shudders as he trails off, hard enough that Camilla feels the bed rock beneath them. He doesn’t pick the thread of his words back up, staying quiet and suddenly lost in thought. Camilla doesn’t need him to. She still remembers the shiver that had gone down her own spine the moment they’d settled into orbit, when he turned to her—face already drawn and pale from the several hours’ journey through empty space around to the other side of Dominicus, eyes startled and haunted and a little bit hungry as they locked on hers—and said, a little bit desperately: “Oh, God, Cam, you wouldn’t even believe the amount of—it’s like every death I’ve ever felt, all happening at once. And it isn’t stopping.”
“It’ll grow on you,” Camilla says now, with a brisk conviction she doesn’t entirely feel, planting her palms on the bed behind her and leaning her weight onto them.
“I hope it doesn’t,” he says darkly, shaking his head. “The sooner we’re gone the better. To be honest, I’m really not convinced we should be here at all.”
She takes a moment to think before she responds to that one. It won’t do him any good to go to sleep in a mood like this, or he’ll probably wake up tomorrow morning in it too, and won’t that be helpful for the both of them as they trudge off to trawl through this whole crumbling building in search of enlightenment.
“I think you’re being ungenerous to the planet,” she settles on, finally. “It seems nice enough to me. Nicer than home, by some standards. You can go outside here without suiting up for it. There’s liquid water and everything.”
He snorts. “Don’t be ridiculous, it’s not even potable. Also, it’s literally everywhere, which unless you’re a fish of some sort is no better as a habitable surface than having no water at all… No, it’s just trading one extreme for another—black or white, as it were. All told I’d prefer some shade of grey, if it could possibly be had.”
Camila stares at him, expressionlessly. “That’s the most Sixth thing you’ve ever said.”
“God, I know, isn’t it?” he says, with boyishly pleased revulsion, and then sighs. “Not even a full day away and I’m getting sentimental already. I really hope Oversight doesn’t run the place into the ground in my absence.”
“They’ll be fine,” Camilla says automatically. Then she takes a moment to think about it. “As long as Kiki and Archivist Zeta are still serving, anyway. After that we might have to worry.”
“Just one more reason to get out of here sooner,” he says, and then yawns again.
He must take notice of her expression while he’s doing it: “Alright, no need for a lecture,” he says—impatiently, the words near-unintelligibly stretched out and lacking in consonants because he couldn’t even wait for the yawn to be done with before he started saying them. She doesn’t have much of a problem understanding them anyway. She’s been translating and transcribing and deciphering for him all her life; if anyone could, it would be her. He finishes yawning and then continues: “Bedtime it is. Look, I’m lying down and everything.”
“Stay that way,” Camilla tells him, and rises from her seat at the edge of his bed to go and hit the light switch.
“You’ll want to go over and close the curtains too, probably,” adds Palamedes helpfully; “I think these rooms face east, that’s where Dominicus rises.” She heeds his advice, for all the good it’s likely to do; the curtains on these windows are light in color and disintegrating slightly on top of that, and even the light of the stars is bright enough to be visible through them.
She’ll have to track down some fabric, she thinks, thick and dark enough to use as proper blackout curtains; she’ll ask Teacher, or raid the Ninth’s living quarters if she has to, once she and Palamedes find said living quarters. Once she and Palamedes find any kind of footing in this strange, crumbling maze of a building, on this strange, uninhabitable planet that was the Emperor’s home once, amidst these strange, dangerous people she doubts she’ll ever be able to trust with her necromancer’s life. Let alone his love.
Enough strangeness for today, she decides, and pulls the last set of curtains all the way closed. It can all be tomorrow’s problem.
As it turns out, she’s not entirely correct about that. One more strange thing happens, before the night comes to a close: as she’s turning down the covers on the cavalier cot at the foot of his bed, his voice comes across the distance to her. “Cam?” he says.
She looks over at him. She can only barely see him, in the dim starlight coming through the curtains: mostly he’s just a dark lumpy shape on one side of the four poster bed, something that might be a head propped up slightly on something that might be an arm.
“Go to sleep,” she tells him.
“This bed is more than big enough for two,” he says, and then—he must sense a second admonition coming, he rushes through the next set of words—“If you wanted to join me here, that is. It’d probably be considerably more comfortable than that cot they’ve laid out for you, anyway.”
Camilla is still, midway through the act of reaching for the covers. “Oh,” she says.
“Not that you’re under any obligation,” he continues. He’s still rushing. “It’s just—I don’t know, I thought it might be better that way. Not being—alone.”
Camilla withdraws her hand, tucks it into a pocket on her pajama pants, shifts her weight from foot to foot.
It shouldn’t surprise her—it’d hardly be the first time they shared a bed; it’s been probably hundreds of times over the years, starting from way back when they were young enough that they still lived in the juvie dorms, and would have gotten in trouble if they’d been caught at it—but it does. It’s been a long time since the last time, that’s it. She thinks they might have been… seventeen, maybe. She thinks he might have been ill—feverish, looking for warmth or comfort or some such. Or maybe it was her who’d been sick that time. Or maybe both of them. She still can’t get a look at his face—he’s just a shadow in the darkness—and for all the years she’s spent interpreting him she still doesn’t trust herself to accurately assess the jittery note in his voice without a visual, and she’s not sure whose benefit he’s really saying all this for: has the planet gotten to him this badly, that he’s afraid to sleep alone? Does he think she might be—or?—
She waits another moment, but he doesn’t say anything else about it. Neither does she. Probably better off that way.
But when she paces cautiously around the edge of the cavalier cot over to the empty side of his bed, feeling her way through the darkness with increasing confidence as her vision begins to adjust, she can tell without even looking at him that he’s pleased about it, and she resolves: for the rest of the time here. As long as he’ll have me, anyway.
iii.
By the time Camilla gets Nona to lie down on the bed—lies down beside her to silence the wordlessly agitated protests that start up when she makes to leave—counts water stains across the ceiling while she waits for Nona’s breaths to slow into the steady rhythm of sleep (and isn’t that a familiar feeling, and she wishes that the water stains were much more mentally diverting than they are, it would make not thinking too deeply about it easier)—rises cautiously and slips back out of the bedroom through the door—Pyrrha is gone.
Camilla pulls the door back into its frame behind her, slowly enough that the creak is only barely audible, then untwists the knob and releases it. Empty kitchen. Fair enough. She doesn’t necessarily blame Pyrrha for not wanting to stick around here, not on the first night any of them have relative freedom to move around the city beyond the Blood of Eden compound.
Palamedes isn’t going to be happy about it, though. But there’s nothing to be done about that.
It’s still disgusting in this kitchen, but Camilla decides she doesn’t have the energy to deal with it at the moment. Another of tomorrow’s problems. At least there’s no real unpacking to do, she thinks: that’s one of the upsides of Blood of Eden’s dumping them in this minimally-stocked apartment in the dead of night with little more than two hours’ warning, a too-thin wad of cash pressed into Camilla’s hand, the clothes on their backs, and a set of demands that Camilla and Palamedes agree are unreasonable given the rate of the progress they’ve been making so far. The downside is of course that now they’re going to have to buy things for the kitchen and bathroom if they want to actually live here, and Pyrrha might well be burning through a portion of their stipend already on whatever cigarettes and liquor she can find on her first night infiltrating the city’s black market.
Camilla hid most of it away already, though, so they should be okay for at least the next week or two. After that—one of them will have to get a job, probably. Her vote is for Pyrrha. Camilla has Nona already, and Nona’s enough of a job as it is.
This is yet another reason why I should have never had children with you, Warden, she writes down in her notebook, at the end of her account of the move and of today’s bedtime routine. A real ordeal, tonight: Nona had been up far later than usual with the move, and was accordingly overtired; she didn’t seem to like the texture or the scent of the new sheets (Camilla sympathizes) and didn’t want to have her hair brushed.
Camilla leans back in her chair, pushing it slightly away from the table—real wood, but carelessly scuffed and shoddily put together, one leg shorter than the other. She’ll never get used to how cheap and commonplace organics are on this planet. It couldn’t be less like the Sixth House if it was actively trying.
What was it he’d said once, back when they arrived at Canaan? Not even a full day away and I’m getting sentimental already, or something similar? And to think: it’s been a whole year now.
She sets down her pen and reads over the completed entry before, satisfied, she sets it down on the table before her. She leaves it open to the page—she’s started out with YES, WE’VE BEEN MOVED. DO NOT PANIC, WE WENT WILLINGLY in very large letters; hopefully it’ll be the first thing he sees before he gets a chance to glance around the room and there won’t have to be a crisis. Then, with her gaze still fixed on the writing, she lets the focus slip—lets the letters blur—feels herself being tugged, gently, backward, as if she’s falling asleep with her eyes open—
She wakes up. She’s still sitting in the chair, looking at the notebook—as if she’d never left at all, except that it’s flipped to a new page and has two brief paragraphs scribbled on it in Palamedes’ handwriting.
Have toured the new place, he says. Didn’t take long—especially because I was afraid to do more than peek into the bedroom, lest I wake the baby. For what it’s worth, I’ve always thought you’d make an excellent mother, if it’s something you ever wanted—you did well enough raising me—but God, Cam, I’m sorry I’m always leaving you with her all day long, I know it’s not easy. Hopefully I’ll be able to spend a bit more time out-and-about, now that we’re not constantly under BOE’s supervision (have we confirmed that? No hidden cameras? I tried to move like you, in case they’re watching us from behind the mirror or some such. I can’t have done you justice, though. If you gave me a thousand years to practice I still doubt I’d be half as lovely to watch…)
Camilla has to pause for a moment there to stare at the ceiling before she’s ready to keep reading. Her heart is doing something strange in her chest somewhere.
This apartment, by the way, he continues, is an absolute shithole. My expectations of BOE were not high, and yet still I’ve been disappointed. I wanted to get a start on cleaning the kitchen before we all become fantastically and exotically ill, but I couldn’t find any cleaning supplies. I’m assuming that’s where Pyrrha’s gone—off to purchase them, at this hour of the night? (That was sarcasm, by the way), he adds, in slightly smaller letters. Camilla rolls her eyes. I hope you hid a portion of the cash somewhere very clever. Anyway, I’ll wrap this up here. I’ve been brief enough that I should be able to come back a couple more times tonight—if you’d like me to, that is. I know you’re tired—I can feel it.
The writing ends there. Camilla stands and paces around the kitchen for a minute before she starts composing her own reply.
Warden—don’t be ridiculous. Would love something like an actual conversation. Come as many times as you like. Don’t argue with Pyrrha tomorrow—I’ll handle it but it’s fine as long as she doesn’t get in trouble. She should know better than to blow all our reserves in one go. Anyway I did hide some away—underside of the middle drawer. Scratch that out once you read it. And leave the kitchen alone. You don’t have the time to waste on it and I don’t trust you to get it clean enough anyway.
She tips her head back toward the ceiling, and fades away. She wakes up. Ouch. And here I was trying to offer you my assistance!, he says, handwriting spiky with agitation. He’s drawn a little frowning face, after the ‘ouch’. She has to bite her lip to reign in the idiot’s smile that’s threatening to burst out of her. I am being serious, though, Cam—I want to help you with whatever needs doing. Don’t worry about time—I have enough—not as if you haven’t spent enough of yours on me, over the years. It almost wasn’t a joke, earlier, when I said you raised me—certainly you’re the biggest reason I made it all the way to twenty before I kicked it.
She wishes he wouldn’t say things like that—not so flippantly, at least. She’s fighting the urge to roll her eyes. Just doing my job, Warden, she says.
And what a job it is I’ve stuck you with. Absolutely rotten work.
Camilla taps the edge of the pen against the table a few times, considering. Her head is starting to ache, probably from all the rapid switching. She pushes it aside—they need a few more times. She’s not done yet. Yes it is, she says, eventually. But someone had to do it. I’m glad it’s been me.
The next time she blinks down at his writing in the notebook, the start of the entry is punctuated by a whole series of little crossed-out phrases, darkened thoroughly enough that she can’t read them even when she squints. The words he left alone are brief: As selfish as it is of me, he says, I’m glad it’s been you, too. And then, after another redacted line: We should wrap this up soon, probably. Your head’s starting to hurt, and it’s getting late.
Camilla has to pace around the kitchen for what feel like several minutes this time before she feels ready to respond. To cross things out this thoroughly isn’t like him, and she doesn’t know how to interpret what little he’s left behind. Why selfish? she asks, in the end.
I’d have thought it obvious. I don’t deserve you, Camilla, I never have. If you gave me a thousand years to earn the level of devotion you have shown me in the last few months alone I’d never be able to do it.
Ridiculous thing to say. She tells him as much. It doesn’t work like that, she says. Love isn’t something you have to earn, or deserve. It just is, or it isn’t. For me it is. Has been, all our lives. I don’t think I could ever have chosen otherwise, even if I’d wanted to.
When she comes back the next time her entire system is flooded with adrenaline—some of which is hers from before she left and some of which isn’t. Do you know, he’s written on the page, I’ve always thought it was sort of unfair that of the pair of us, I’m the only one who earned the reputation as the hopeless romantic.
She laughs—a startled laugh, but quiet. Nona’s still asleep in the next room over. The word romantic is still before her eyes when she blinks. Her heart by now is doing two peoples’ worth of nerves.
You did once propose marriage to a woman you’d never even met in person, she writes.
And by God, did I learn my lesson there. Next time I propose, it’ll be to someone whose face I know better than my own.
She doesn’t know how she dares. This is more than they’ve ever—yes, things have been different the past few months, since Canaan, since not-Dulcinea, since she’d gotten his instructions right for the transferral out of the bones and he’d come back to her in a flood of more endorphins at once than she’d thought possible, and she’d woken in her body gasping with joy before she’d even laid eyes on the heart he’d hastily doodled in pen on the back of her hand. But this is the first proper conversation they’ve had since the first time they’d figured out how to do it, they haven’t risked this many switches in BOE custody since, and they’ve been so busy, and they haven’t quite talked about this, yet. Are they really doing this? Is this what she thinks it is?
Plausible deniability, she thinks. She writes: Anyone in mind?
And he—the absolute shit that he is sometimes, Camilla almost wants to take back “love isn’t something you earn”—he writes back, I’ll tell you tomorrow, dear one. It’s time for you to go to sleep. But beside the words he’s doodled a pair of stick figures—one tall, spiky-haired, and bespectacled; one slightly shorter, with a chin-length bob and a knife in the hand that isn’t holding its companion’s—standing side by side, encased together within another heart.
Camilla feels her eyes welling—or his eyes, welling; the sharp grey of the gaze that should be his and isn’t is undoubtedly clouding over, which is wrong no matter which way she looks at it; she’s seen the Warden cry about five times total since he outgrew the juvie dorms, and she’s probably only slightly outpaced him herself, by virtue of having spent the several months without him last year—and blinks, hurried and hard.
But he's probably right. He so often is. And it's late, and in the morning Pyrrha will be back and Nona will be awake early, because she always is, and there'll be enough time to talk through all of this later—in the daylight hours, once they've had time to rest and to clean their new home together. As together as they can manage. Which is enough, she thinks, for her—for now, if not forever.
Hypocrite, she writes, so it’s the first thing he’ll see when he comes back for her next time, and closes the notebook for the night. When she lays back down on the bed beside Nona shortly afterward, sleep comes more easily than it has in a long while.