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Imogen has been restless all evening – fiddling with her hair (which Laudna may have taught her by accident? Oh, gods, is she giving Imogen all of her tics? She must stop fussing with her hair, fuck) and gnawing on her lip and looking generally perturbed. Everyone else at the tavern’s table is acting strange, too – they keep looking at her and Imogen and then looking away again. Which: what the fuck.
Imogen, Laudna says mentally, is something going on?
Kind of? Imogen says. It’s…you’re gonna think it’s stupid.
As if any idea of yours could be stupid.
Thank you, Imogen says, her mental voice smiling and wry, but it isn’t mine. Chet’s, weirdly enough.
Oh, god, are we getting naked again?
Imogen muffles a laugh into her fist. No, she says, I’m s'posed to lure you up to our room and lock you in there with Pâté. For ‘bonding’.
“I don’t need to bond with Pâté!” Laudna says out loud, and the Hells’ conversation around her stumbles and dies.
“He’s literally me,” she says to the silence. “It’s not like we have problems.” She takes in everyone’s faces. “Why are you all looking at me like that. We don’t have problems!”
“Laudna,” Orym says carefully – he thinks has to be careful around her now? – “you keep…throwing him at things?”
“Yes, so I can cast spells through him, obviously–”
“I mean,” Imogen says, and even her voice is softer – quieter – gentler – “you really used to be nicer to him, Laud.”
“Well he used to be a craft and now he’s his own – you know, his own thing! I don’t want to coddle him! It’s time he grew up and saw the world, you know.”
“I felt the same way,” Fearne says, “when I had a son.”
(“You have a son?” Letters blurts.
“Oh my god,” Ashton drawls, “we can’t have this conversation again.”)
“Look,” Chetney says, and he puts his tankard down on the table so he can point an authoritative finger at Laudna. (She does not bite it off, but she’s tempted.) “When you’ve been around the block as much as I have,” he says, “you pick up a few things about…relationships. And sometimes what you gotta do is lock yourselves in a room and fuck it out until you’re too tired to fight anymo–”
“Chet,” Imogen says.
“–but obviously, as I was about to say, Imogen, that’s not appropriate for this scenario! So you two just hang out. Catch up. Shoot the shit. Fuck that puppet in your lovingly-crafted, wooden house. I don’t know what the hell you get up to. Go do that.”
“And if that doesn’t work,” Letters says, “I’m happy to try couples’ counseling with you two.” They are met with grumbling. “Now everyone said that was a bad idea, but–”
She hates the way that all of them are looking at her – that mix of disgust and dread and nervous anticipation. Like it’s five years ago and she’s a mangy little thing digging through someone’s garbage. Like they’re going to clap and shout and chase her away.
“Fearne doesn’t have to do this with her monkey,” she says.
“Mister and I once spent twenty minutes staring into each other’s eyes,” Fearne says, “and now I can read his thoughts.”
“Oh,” Laudna says. “Really?”
“No.”
“Right,” Laudna says, and she claps her hands together definitively. “Right, right, getting back on track, this is all ridiculous, you’re being silly. Imogen, you’re being silly, obviously I don’t–”
Imogen’s mouth goes a little sour at the edge. “Pâté,” she says, “what do you think?”
Laudna goes to say I just told you what I think–and then, jarringly, Pâté speaks up from the tangles of her hair. “Laudna’s right,” he says, which shouldn’t make her twitch. “We got the same mind, can’t get much closer than that.” His voice turns lascivious, sly. “Unless you want to try to–”
“Shut up, Pâté,” Laudna says. “See, this is why I don’t let him talk. He was going to say something horny and gross and it would be weird because it’s weird now, when he says shit like that! So it’s just better if he doesn’t talk. And he may as well be useful. And–”
Orym gets that stupid fucking furrow in his brow, which may as well be him shaking his head in fatherly concern. I’m literally older than you! Laudna wants to shriek, but for the thousandth time she swallows it down.
“Fine,” she says. “Fine. Since you all know so much better than me, I guess I’ll go hang out with my fucking dead rat alone in our room. Sure. Whatever.” She shoves her chair back from the table, gets a deep sick satisfaction from the way the legs scar the floorboards. (It’s impossible to get out!) (Good!)
“Laudna,” Imogen says, but Laudna doesn’t listen; she storms up the stairs, finds their room, flings the door open (Laudna?) and slams it shut behind her. Laudna, Imogen says again, I’m really sorry, here, I’ll come up–
No, Laudna says, no, no, I don’t want you to get tangled up in this. They’ll be mad at you too.
Nobody’s mad at you, I promise.
Laudna doesn’t answer; she swallows down the shriek of fury in her throat and rummages through her hair until she can find the disgusting warm lump of Pâté’s body. She rips him from his perch and flings him onto the bed. “Why didn’t you back me up back there?!”
“I did!” Pâté protests. “You were right, I said it!”
“Well then it wasn’t convincing enough!”
“I tried,” he says, “I really tried, I promise you.”
“Well try harder,” Laudna says. “You’re supposed to look out for me! You’re my familiar, why didn’t you–” and she paces across the length of the room, paces back, can’t shake anything out of her body, sits down in a huff. Folds her limbs all around until she can glare at him through the tangle of her bones: Pâté, possibly watching her and possibly watching the wall. The stitches on his neck are so fucking amateurish. What had she been thinking?
“Ey,” he says, “don’t be mad, come on, what’s all the sulkin’ for.”
“You should have stayed in that squirrel,” Laudna snaps. “I don’t know why you went back to this body, it’s so ugly.”
“It’s not ugly,” Pâté says. “I’m a fucking gentleman.”
She snorts a laugh despite herself. “Shut up,” she says, “don’t be funny, I’m mad at you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I’m still sort of feeling it out.”
“I mean,” Pâté says, and then he stops. He stands up and then slumps over into an awkward, humanoid sitting position. He looks like the world’s smallest and most macabre bean bag. “Look,” he says. His head twitches around. “I,” he says, and “I’m just sayin’, you know, don’t get–”
“Oh, no,” Laudna says, the realization hitting her dull and painful. “You agree with them.”
“It’s not that,” Pâté says, “you know I’ve always got your back, but…”
“But you resent me for throwing you at that robot. You got to kill it!”
“I do like killin’,” Pâté says thoughtfully. “But I mean…we haven’t really talked since…”
“We don’t need to talk.”
“We do now,” Pâté says, and frustration grows over his voice even though his face stays exactly the same: blank, empty. “Laudna, I don’t know everythin’, and you don’t tell me–”
“I shouldn’t have to! You should – pick it up! What is the point if I have to tell you everything–”
“You get mad at me if I listen to–”
“I mean, don’t eavesdrop on my private conversations, I’d think that was obvious–”
“How am I supposed to kno–”
And then there’s just a crack, as Pâté hits the wall and then drops limply to the floor. Laudna’s hand is still flung out into space. She doesn’t even know what she’d cast, she doesn’t remember; all that remains is that same awful fury that has been holding her in its teeth and shaking her since she – since she came back. She keeps having to push it down. She’s tired of pushing it down.
Pâté isn’t saying anything. He is so still on the ground. He isn’t dead, he can’t be dead – she would know, surely – but he’s doing a convincing impression. She should apologize; she should command him to speak, so she doesn’t have to just sit there staring at him and trying to figure out if he’s dead. What’s sort of horrible is: when he’s lying there like that, still and empty, she remembers that she loves him. That she used to love him. Before.
He used to be an extension of her hands. He used to be a megaphone for her voice. She loved him and she misses him and when he’s lying there on the ground like that he looks just like he used to, like she could pick him up and hold him in the cup of her hands. And he wouldn’t squirm, or say something disgusting, or make a joke she doesn’t understand, or say something that pierces her with a dagger of self-loathing. He would just be quiet. And she could love him that way. She could really love him.
Maybe it would be easier if he had stayed dead. If he hadn’t come back. When he’s dead, it’s easier to love him – so much easier to bring his body from place to place, and remember only the good parts of when he was alive. It was such a hassle to bring him back, and has he earned it? Has he been useful? No, he’s just been a nuisance. A joke that no one laughs at. Another body to worry about when they’re planning Solstice suicide missions, another fragile spellcaster to keep track of on the battlefield, another mouth that demands magic items and plans and love and touch, if someone would just touch her–
“Get up,” she says hoarsely. “I know you’re not dead, get up.”
Pâté ignores her. He does not move. After a moment she hears the tiniest little voice: “That hurt.”
“Yes, well,” Laudna says, and then she doesn’t have a follow up. “I’m sorry, I guess,” she says, and she knots her fingers together. “Whatever.”
“It’s okay,” Pâté says. She can see him shuffling slightly, hear the tick of his beak against the floor. “You can hurt me if you want to. If it helps.”
He sounds so defeated. She hates him for that. “It does help,” she says. “It does. And nobody seems to fucking get that, that if I’m mad at you then I’m not…” she waves a hand around vaguely in space. “It doesn’t matter, none of it matters. It doesn’t even matter if you die! I’ll just bring you back again tomorrow! So don’t get upset about it.”
His wings creak and lift him up, slap at the air until he’s close enough to touch one of his nasty warm hands to her shin. “Do you really want to hurt me?” he says.
“Sometimes.”
“Oh.” He leans forward; the polished edge of his skull bumps up against her leg. “Alright. Then, yeah, go for it. I’d probably hurt me too, if I was you.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Okay.”
Laudna sighs, picks him up in both hands; his tail flicks once, carefully weaves itself between her fingers. His tail is so loose, now, so pliable. When she’d first made him she couldn’t for the life of her find the right kind of wire, and so his tail was always hard to maneuver. When she holds him she is a girl again, exhausted from the effort of looking for something in the world to love her back. Deciding that nothing like that existed, or would ever exist, and she would just have to create it herself.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she means it. “I really am. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Nothing’s wrong with you, Laudna. You’re incredible.”
“No I’m not,” she says, “no I’m – don’t say that. Just don’t say that. Don’t say anything. I’m sorry. You can talk. Just don’t – I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m sorry it’s me, that you’re tied to me. If I could I would cut the strings, I promise you. Or I would give you to someone better. Imogen, you could be Imogen’s. Or Ashton’s. You know, I think he really likes you.”
“But I’m not Imogen’s,” Pâté says, “or Ashton’s. I’m yours. And you’re mine.”
“Do you think…” Laudna says. “Oh, never mind.”
Pâté shifts in her grip. “Could you just,” he says, “just once, maybe…could you tell me? What you’re thinking?” And then, his voice so soft and tender – like the pink flesh of the rat’s body, when she’d slipped his skin away – “I miss you, Laudna.”
“I miss you too,” she says, and she blinks away the mist of black over her eyes. “I was only going to say…do you think we’re ever going to be anything else? Or is this it?”
“I dunno,” Pâté says. “I didn’t think I could grow wings. Then I did. So.”
“I don’t think I’m going to grow wings, Pâté.”
“Yeah, for sure, I meant like – you know. Emotionally, or somethin’.”
“Great,” Laudna says, “good to know.” She pulls him close, holds him against the jut of her clavicle. She rests her chin on top of his head. When she isn’t looking at him, she can say it: “Sometimes I hate you.”
“I don’t,” he says. “I don’t ever hate you.”
“Yes,” Laudna says, “that’s why I do.” She presses him close to her chest, closer – like he could soak up the disgusting black ink that leaks from her heart, like he could blot up all the stains she’s left on herself. And then she’d be clean, and they would all want her. And they would look at her like she’s something worth wanting, instead of the way they looked at her down there – like a rat with wings, a fucking monstrosity. Something that shouldn’t exist.
Pâté is obviously useless as a cleaning cloth; he just sits there patiently, his head resting in the hollow of her throat. Waiting for her to throw him, or use him, or love him, or kill him, or bring him back to life to do all of it again.
“Do you want to play around in the dollhouse?” she says, her voice rough and on the edge of tears. “I can get Sashimi for you.”
“Thank god,” Pâté says, “glad we’re done with the feelin’ stuff. Now we can get to what I’m good at.”
His voice is perfectly casual – boisterous, dripping with adolescent lust. But he has the same tics she does. His voice wobbles a little bit too much. Almost imperceptible, if she didn’t know him. If she didn’t know he was her.
“Yes,” Laudna says, “let’s fuck something until they all regret leaving us alone in here.” She plants her other hand on the floor and stands up; they go to play pretend again, until they can believe in it.