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“Do you miss it?”
The Assistant looks at the Soldier, their eyes meeting impassive and serene.
It’s a question that means more than the words it holds, like most questions. It’s not a question either of them even really knows is being asked, or would know how to answer even as it is.
The Assistant bends towards the corn patch again.
Yes.
Of course she misses it.
Of course she misses whatever it is that she cannot remember.
She places the corn in the pile.
+
“How young,” the Soldier says that first night, as they stand and watch their new charges. “Almost as small - “
He pauses. He doesn’t frown, because that’s not something his face can do these days. It used to frown. It used to frown every day, more often than it did anything else.
But that was a long time ago. That was a different life, wasn’t it?
“They won’t be cold here,” the Assistant says, and even as she says it she fetches a blanket, just one, and tucks it in around small shoulders.
“I’ll patrol.”
In another time she would have laughed or rolled her eyes at him. She - she -
Whoever she is now doesn’t do that.
“I’ll watch.”
+
There’s silence here in the Exchange.
The Exchange is wrong. They’re not supposed to be here.
How are they here?
“We did go into the Mechanism, I suppose.” The Assistant - Livira - the Assistant -
The guinea pig next to them nibbles the grass a little harder.
“We’re not supposed to be able to do this.”
“Well, you did tell me to get into - you know this isn’t anything I’m going to understand.”
There’s a pause, a silence, and then as they both sit there in the almost total silence another guinea pig squeals and starts its odd wallowing gallop away from them.
+
“You should know better. Do better.”
It’s almost anger that takes her when she says that - but that’s not something she should feel. She knows better than to be angry. She knows better than -
She knows better -
The years stumble across, and he is here, he is always here, and now he holds something and she knows what it is across every year, across every moment, and her eyes burn as her soul ignites and she stops for a moment.
She knows the book he carries. She knows it like she knows her own soul, and she doesn’t -
She doesn’t know that. She doesn’t have a soul.
The Assistant pulls the husk off the corn by rote.
+
The Soldier walks to her, on his unending patrol, each one taking him somewhere close to her.
“Do you remember?”
She remembers. She doesn’t. Every day it changes, every moment.
“No.”
They stand together, silent by every measure their charges go by, eyes not meeting but not far.
They don’t need to.
+
“How long do you think we need to be here?”
“Well.”
The Soldier stands and stretches. How strange it feels to do that here. He’s always moved before. He’s always been moving.
It’s different, in this place. He glances down and sees the open wounded palms of the Assistant and his heart withers.
“No,” he says, kneeling in front of her, and she looks at him in confusion. “No, I couldn’t - I shouldn’t have -”
“I asked it of you,” the Assistant says, her voice at once like and unlike, so far from what he knows and so close. If he could only reach out and grasp it, perhaps -
“I begged it of you,” Livira says again, and she places her wounded palms on his face. “I asked, as I should have, and you gave what you needed to. And I thank you for it.”
There is no blood from her wounds on his face, nothing except the gashes to indicate his sins.
He has never been so shamed.
He has never been so honored.
+
Clovis breaks the heart of the child who has a heart. The Assistant watches, as she watches everything. She doesn’t stop it, she can’t stop it, she can only watch and teach, as many languages as she recalls, as many stories as she recalls, and then he is sobbing in her arms one day.
“Oh, Evar,” she says, and she doesn’t know what she is saying, she knows it’s from something older and beyond, “Oh, Evar Eventari, she was never the girl for you. That girl’s still waiting.”
It is true, the most true thing she thinks she’s ever said to him.
But she doesn’t know why.
+
“What do we do here?” The Assistant stands, glances at the pools around them, ordered and careful, the shuffling sly heads of guinea pigs glancing out at points. Everything here is careful and ordered and precise.
It’s ordered in a precision that bites at him in a way that doesn’t quite answer.
“Hello!” he calls into the silence.
There is no answer. Nothing calls back to him. There’s no slight slide of foot steps, no shift of a hand on a bow. There’s nothing. Nothing at all.
“We’re not really here,” says the Assistant, sitting in the grass in a way that is so unfamiliar to him that he can’t even look at it.
“I’m always - I’m here,” he says. He says.
He -
+
“He has a fever,” the Assistant says, and as careful as she always is and as calm as she always is there is a slight tremble to her arm that only he can see.
“Here’s a wet towel,” the Soldier says, and he folds his hand over hers as she places it on the child’s forehead.
He takes it back to the pool over and over again, handing it back to her every time as she sits in the make shift bedroom with Evar, refusing to leave his side no matter the crops or the schooling.
The others roam a little wild for those days. He monitors them, as well as he can. They run like the children they are. They run like the children he’s never known how to manage.
It’s a beautiful place.
They will be safe.
He takes the towel back to her.
+
“What do you think happens when we leave here?”
They both sit, looking at the pools around them.
They’re both silent for once.
Or maybe they’ve been silent for a long time, maybe longer than anyone should be. Maybe they’ve been sitting here forever.
It’s hard to tell.
The Assistant touches his arm, points to something in front of them, and it seems so obvious at that moment.
“The mechanism wants us to leave now.”
He hears the draw of the bow, glances and sees a shimmer of something warm and red.
It’s gone.
He takes the Assistant’s hand, and he looks at her.
“Livira, how long have we been here?”
She looks at him and doesn't know the name he called her. She looks at him and takes his hand.
There will be an answer someday.