It is early May. The snow finally stopped and the weather began to warm up just a few days ago; winter was long this year. The semester at the law school has come to a close, instructor evaluations have been turned in, and final exams are underway. Meanwhile, the spring quarter for the undergraduate university is still in the thick of classes. It's likely --
no, certain
-- that Richard has not had reason to be in the Sturm College of Law for a week or more, unless he wanted to visit Eleanor during office hours. They've kept that up, since their conversation in March. On-campus discussions are often more philosophical, as they always were: the nature of the universe, the nature of law, questions of ethics. They do not always agree, but Eleanor is not a Hermetic or Choirister; she shares options, and even on occasions when Richard's perspective flies in the face of what is sacred to her, she reminds herself that she is a guide on his path: he is not a visitor upon hers.
They have made time outside of her office hours, too. On evenings or weekends when Richard is not too caught up in his other work, or Eleanor in hers, they have coffee or get takeout and study more deeply at her house. This is where they speak directly about magic. This is where they meditate, often in the basement, every light blacked out and the darkness filled with only the dim sound of their measured breathing. And it is where she sits on a cushion on the living room floor as they play games of dice, watching the natural play of probability and putting just
a little bit
of pressure on it.
Eleanor is not hesitant about teaching him to harness his ablities and expand on them. She teaches him the names the Euthanatoi have for the spheres; she brings him a few selections from the chantry's library, histories of the Awakened, though he cannot take them from her house. From what he can tell, Eleanor does not engage often in the taking of life. Regularly, when he sits in her house reading in silence, she is also studying, poring over materials with titles like Devotion to the Wheel: An Index of Chakravanti Incarnations and The Chodona in Each Lifetime. She composes emails and even hand-written letters, and explains simply that she is researching her own reincarnations over time, absently, as though she cannot even take her eyes off the book to tell him more.
After one day, and due to needs to get Richard access to a book when Eleanor has to be at the university and it causes a lot of frustration, she just gives him a key. They both know by now that he isn't going to steal from her. It is not hard to tell that she does not really have anything to fear from him. So he has a key; that is one more thing that they don't need to dwell on, despite how... odd it might be, given the roles they play among Sleepers.
They talk a lot. Eleanor is rather physical, but more importantly: Richard is. And she is his teacher. When and how they can, they talk while walking, while -- no joke -- having a catch in her yard, while playing Wii. He knows in due time that Eleanor is both a yogi and a vegetarian. You pick these things up about a person. She has a dry sense of humor; it has a touch of the gallows on some of her not-as-great days.
Most of her days are average. Some days she is filled with energy, like that first time he came to her office. Some days are harder, and though Eleanor does not claim to be sick or call him to cancel, he can see the purple bruises beneath her eyes, the ashen tint to her skin beneath winters paleness, and her attention wanders more easily; she sends him home earlier. Just tired is a good enough excuse.
Then one day, early May, he arrives on a Sunday morning. Her car is out front. They had scheduled a time to meet. But when he knocks, the sun glittering all around him and the day giving a gentle breeze through the warmth, she does not answer. Not the first or second time he knocks.
RichardEven before March, Richard was a regular at Eleanor's office hours. After March, he becomes a regular fixture in her life both in and out of school.
He continues to show up to those office hours, appearing at her door with books in hand, questions and queries and discussions and debates in mind. The nature of truth comes up. The nature of crime and guilt as well. Law as an extension of morality vs. law as a reflection of social stability. Morality itself as a reflection of social stability vs. morality as an extension of What Is Right.
Outside of school, he sees her perhaps even more often. Once, twice, sometimes three times a week -- sometimes scheduling ahead, and sometimes simply dropping by. After she gives him a key, sometimes she comes home to find him on her couch, folded over with his elbows on his knees, some borrowed text in hand. Sometimes they have debates over Wii tennis. Sometimes they play games of chance, and he talks to her about advanced probability, about chaos, about quantum reality where dualities and dichotomies are,
in fact,
so often false. Things can exist in two places at once. Two states. Two versions.
--
The weather grows warmer. He stops wearing his thick insulated jackets. He goes around in hoodies and sweatshirts, and sometimes in t-shirts. Sometimes they have their discussions in the early morning, jogging. They try to take paths that lead away from school and places frequented by students. Their relationship, seen through human eyes, would be positively scandalous at this point. Rife with room for speculation and misinterpretation.
Once, they run into each other at the university gym. She's coming out of some yoga session, mat neatly rolled under her arm. He's sitting at the side of the lap pool, lean and golden and his wet hair streaked dark and light, legs in the water. He is with friends, a small gang of good-looking young people that laugh and joke and say dude and awesome a lot. Perhaps it's no surprise at all that her unofficial apprentice, her cheerful grim-reaper-in-training, has friends. A rather large network of friends, actually, though none of them terribly close or dear. Perhaps that's not a surprise either.
Neither of them make any attempt to communicate with the other in depth. He does, however, look straight at her and acknowledge her with a nod and a friendly half-smile. As she's walking away she hears him lying to his friends:
just my criminal law professor.
--
Then it's early May, a Sunday. One of their planned visits, which is gradually being superceded by those more frequent drop-ins. But he did bother to call ahead for this one, and he wanted to, because he wanted to show her something he had just learned to do With Magic, and so --
he's not merely surprised, but a little disappointed, when no answer comes. On her front porch, Richard shifts from foot to foot. He tries the doorbell again. And then he knocks.
And then, supposing her out for a morning run or perhaps a trip to the grocery store, he uses his key to let himself in.
Eleanor YatesIt's not that people don't notice. They think Richard the non-traditional undergrad is considering a course in law. They also think that among their professors, Eleanor is young, and new, and not unattractive. But something about her, no matter how strong the over or subconscious desire to denigrate her gender, negates the very thought of such a scandal. She is not charming. She smiles, but not often. Some people -- Richard is one of them -- walk around with a lightness to them, a brightness. In Eleanor, even if it is there, it is shaded somehow.
Bluntly put, it is hard for any of her colleagues to imagine she even has sexual interest. In anyone. The general consensus is that, though it's none of their business of course, she's a lesbian, and probably the sort of woman that owns or will own several cats.
That is her end of it. She has no idea what looks or questions Richard gets, but she's not oblivious to the fact that a few people can't keep their noses to themselves. Neither she nor Richard shyly avoid talking about it, but neither do they dwell, obsess, organize every day into an effort to Not Get Caught. In truth, there is nothing to catch.
--
Her colleagues do not know he has a key to her house and that he is there two or three times a week, including nights and weekends, and that they have dinner together and play games together and spend hours talking or in companionable silence, which would freak everyone out because that is what couples do. But then, her colleagues also do not know what she has in her basement, or the knowledge she has in her skull. When she has company, she lets Richard know, and he steers clear. He does not just drop in carrying a Chipotle bag -- sofritas and black beans for Eleanor, of course -- on those occasions.
But they are rare.
Perhaps it's no surprise at all that his unofficial mentor, his low-key, cold-exteriored Wheel-Turner par excellence, does not have many friends. Perhaps she has no friends at all. She has 'colleagues' at the university. She has 'acquaintances' at the chantry. She has an apprentice. She does not have cats. But she does not speak of friends.
They jog through her neighborhood some mornings. She mostly does yoga at home, sometimes while he is meditating, sometimes while she is teaching. Sometimes she goes to the gym, though, and sees him there, and just nods back, walking onward. She hears the lie in the word 'just'. She reflects that the word 'just', in many meanings and for many definitions, is often a lie.
--
Today they were planning on meeting because she had some new materials for him. True to her role in the sleeper world, Eleanor gives him plenty of reading, which they then discuss, at length and in depth. Some of it is extraordinarily difficult, hinting at understandings of reality so far beyond the highest levels of quantum mechanics that it would make a sleeper scientist twitch and gives even Eleanor a headache. She does not expect him to understand everything. Mostly, as he can likely tell from the variety of materials from all traditions and some obscure craft lines, she wants him to be exposed to it, to know it's out there, to rest his foot on each path and see if it is one he can run with.
She has books for him, and he has something new he just figured out, he just got it, he can do it without luck or breaking a sweat or banging his head against a wall, it clicked and now he knows, he owns it, he wants to show her, watch me, watch me. She was pleased to hear it. She said she was looking forward to it. And she is not there, or he thinks she is not there, because she does not answer him when he rings and knocks.
There's no strangeness inside. Just that pervasive cling of winter around the home, as though if he turns around he won't see a sunny spring day but a land cloaked in ice, middle of the night, the stars looking like cut crystals against a blackened sky. Just that cold clarity, and a slight sensation in his lungs as though they are trickling full of water.
Most of all, though, the house feels broken. It would not be out of order if he doubted the floorboards under his feet. If he was looking for shattered glass. If he looked up and found that the roof was gone, the walls split at the seams, every canvas torn and every cloth threadbare. But no: it looks normal. It just feels very, very broken.
Perhaps he studies a bit, waiting for her to get back from a jog or a run to the store or something. In any case, it isn't too long before he hears the sound of someone upstairs. A door, and then the muffled sound of a toilet flushing, water running, the door again. This is a nice house, and it is newly built; sometimes it is still settling, but everything is rather well insulated here. He hears it only because he hasn't put headphones in yet or turned on the television or something. She is home.
RichardShe is home.
Or someone's home. For a heartstopping moment, Richard's mind leaps straight to intruder! and burglar! and axe murderer! He is, in fact, unwinding headphones -- his hands freezing, his eyes darting to the ceiling.
Then logic overcomes paranoia. A criminal wouldn't flush the toilet. A criminal wouldn't wash his hands. That leaves, however, an almost more unsettling conclusion: she's home. She didn't answer the door. Maybe it was something he did. Maybe she wasn't feeling well.
Richard re-winds the headphones, slips them back into their case. He sets the case down on the coffee table and then he walks over to the stairs. It occurs to him he's never been upstairs. Some sense of modesty or respect for her privacy drives him to knock on the banister.
"Professor Yates?"
Eleanor YatesIf only she had some voice in her head,
Eleanor thinks sometimes.
If only, like so many of the others she meets, there was some personification of her soul that would come around every so often, in times of great distress or in times of deep loneliness or on the cusp of true understanding, and just talk to her. If only she felt that nudge, saw that vision. She does not really regret that she does not; she does see it as a weakness of identity, a childish need for an imaginary friend to explain power. Eleanor has no need for the avatars as they are commonly seen and understood by the vast majority of magi; Eleanor needs only her own strength of will. She is the source of her own power, not some angel or demon or animal or icon.
But sometimes, like right now when Richard is downstairs knocking on the banister and calling up to her, she wishes there was some other voice to rely on sometimes. She closes her eyes again, allowing herself two more moments of self-pity and anguish, then begins to remind herself who and what she is. She has to keep her eyes closed at first. She has to breathe shallowly, in and out through her nose, shakily, before she begins pushing her hands under her, lifting herself again from the bed she's been sunken into all morning.
Her throat rasps when she tries to speak, but she clears it, tries again: "Just a minute."
She sounds flat. Not congested or wracked with coughs, just flat. Swept clean, laid bare. Hollow.
But just a minute it is.
--
About that much time passes, and then he hears a door open upstairs. A few seconds later, Eleanor comes down the stairs and around to the landing, padding quietly down toward him. Her hair is down, loose, only combed as much as her fingers might do, but that is rather usual. She is in a set of pajamas: buttons, lapels, long sleeves, the works. They are pale blue. Her robe over it is summer-weight but white, and her feet are -- as usual -- bare.
She looks awful, beyond that. Almost like she's lost weight, though that's more of an impression than a reality. The weight of her sadness comes with her down the stairs, oppressive and enormous, edging in on his awareness.
They have been working on that. His awareness. His ability to sense magic, to sense shifts in unseen currents. She thinks he must have a talent for it already; he knew she was a mage within a matter of weeks, even when she was not actively practicing.
This is merely human awareness, too: the ability to sense someone else in pain, no matter how impassive their features.
"I apologize, Richard," she says, her voice still a bit ragged at the fringes. "I should have called to cancel."
RichardJust a minute. A cue to stay where he is. Downstairs. The polite, well-mannered part of him knows that. The compassionate part of him, though. The part of him that is bright, and laughing, and warm, and kind in a way that goes beyond superficial charm: that part knows differently.
By the time she comes down the stairs, he has made it as far as the landing. He has hesitated there, torn between one and the other. When he sees her, he looks
relieved for just an instant. Then: quietly shocked. He says nothing, but he makes no attempt to disguise it. The crushing gravity of her sadness follows her, envelops him, drinks him in. His shoulders tighten a little as she approaches, but he stays where he is.
No. Actually: he doesn't. He straightens, and he takes a step or two forward. There's a hesitation. Then he puts his hand on her shoulder. Just for a moment, and a little awkwardly.
"What happened?"
Eleanor YatesShe is always smaller than him. Not just a little bit, either; she is slender from her lifestyle and she is a full foot shorter than he is. They look a tad ridiculous whenever they walk together. Often she will sit on the couch and he on the floor and they are nearly at eye-level. When she comes down and finds him on the landing, she pauses a few steps up, looking at him.
His presence exhausts her. His shock exhausts her. She closes her eyes, exhaling, about to ask him to just go, when she feels a movement
and then feels his hand.
His question wears her out, too. Makes her brow tighten and furrow. She does not open her eyes for a moment. "Nothing happened," she says quietly, opening her eyes after that, but it takes so much effort to look back into this.
"It's just a bad day," but the tears are filling her eyes two words in, closing again on them, her brow wrinkling roughly again, one hand lifting as though through water to rest cold fingertips against her brow, chin down. She does not want to cry right now, or ever, especially in front of her student, but there are days when it takes everything she has to rise from bed at all, everything she has not to fade into oblivion, and this is one of them.
She curls in on herself, hands to her face, shoulders close to her body. She cries then, as though someone has died. Someone important.
RichardRichard has no idea what might be going on. He has guesses, but they are all wrong. He thinks someone must have died. He thinks maybe she killed the wrong person. He thinks any number of things, and he doesn't have any idea what actually happened or why she's actually this way, but --
well. Maybe none of that actually matters.
The truth is he wants to flee the premises. The truth is this is awkward for him, and shocking, and unexpected, and he has no idea how to react. The truth is he does not flee, and he does not stand there mute and frozen as a mannequin.
He puts his hand back on her shoulder. And as those shoulders draw in, crumple on themselves, he steps forward. He wraps his long arms around her, not without pause or awkwardness. The embrace is light and loose, but he does try to comfort. Without dismissing her sorrow, without so much as a shh it's all right that may or may not be true -- and indeed, without even asking her why she weeps, he tightens his arms around her a little. He rubs circles on her upper back, the way one might soothe children, dying soldiers, men and women whose language one did not speak.
Eleanor YatesThey are not all wrong, Richard's guesses.
Someone did die. And perhaps she did not kill the wrong person, but she killed them the wrong way.
In any case, as soon as he starts to envelope her, Eleanor's weeping becomes outright sobbing. She is not like this. She is not cold or emotionless but she is so reserved, so professional, and this is outside the bounds of that. She sinks into that initially awkward embrace, even though she's not so far gone that she can't sense his discomfort. It just doesn't matter right now. She is human. She is only human, and there are extremities of that experience that require some kind of contact with another human being to soothe them. In fact, it is the only thing that does.
He holds her, and she sobs heavily, mournfully into his shirt, her elegant hands tightening, clutching at the fabric as grief rips through her like a knife, stabbing,
again and again.
--
It has to end, and so it does. Mere physical contact has much to do with that. There are complications to it: moments when his height and his body type are not just similarities but, for once, reminders, and it rips her to pieces to think of it, moments when her sorrow rises up like a shriek and she almost can't contain it, but they seem inexplicable. But eventually it has to end, and it isn't even really that long before the strange embrace, the gentle circles, do the work they are intended to do.
Eleanor's harrowed crying begins to taper off into simple tears. The front of his shirt is wet. She is exhausted, and she is holding onto his shirt even as her body begins to unwind again from the knots she's been tied into.
It begins to end.
--
A little while later, they are sitting on her couch. Perhaps there is tea, if Richard made it. If Richard offered to make it. If Richard thought of it, offered to make it, made it, brought the mug to Eleanor's hands. Eleanor just sits with her legs folded, wrapped in her robe as well as a blanket over her shoulders, looking numb, her eyes red-rimmed. She is recovering, though. She does not look at him, but focuses her gaze somewhere across the room. Somewhere on the floor, where the rug gives way to the floorboards.
"I'm sorry, Richard," she says quietly, again, shaking her head this time, exhaling a sigh. "I don't even know how to --"
Words fail her. Because she doesn't know how to explain this, or excuse it. Or return from it.
RichardIt is -- at least initially -- intensely uncomfortable, and awkward, and disconcerting. Eleanor Yates: professor, law professional, ice-minded turner of the wheel. It's jarring to see her in shambles like this. To see her not merely having a bad day, not merely flat-affected or looking as though she hadn't quite had enough sleep, but in torrents of tears. Falling apart.
Human.
That's the fulcrum on which the awkwardness ultimately breaks. When the subtle realization is made that somewhere beneath the gentle, cool clarity of those rapid-fire questions -- somewhere beneath the assuredness, the confidence, the certitude of her philosophy -- are the same uncharted oceans of emotion that everyone navigates.
So: the embrace eventually feels a little less strange. Those slow circles continue, and are eventually joined by a sort of wordless murmuring. The tears slow. His shirt is damp. He guides her down from that staircase landing -- a veritable altar of heartbreak -- down to the living room, the couch.
He does make some tea. And though he usually trends toward coffee, he pours himself a mug as well in solidarity; sweetens it with a little honey, pours in a little cream. He makes hers however she takes hers, and for a while they simply sit in sipping silence. She huddles under a blanket, legs folded. He sits on the floor, back to the couch.
When she speaks he turns his head. Looks at her up and over his shoulder. A mute shake of his head.
"I don't think you have anything to apologize for," he says a little later. "Or any obligation to explain anything to me -- though if you wanted to, I'll be glad to listen."
Eleanor YatesThe truth is, they have bonded about as much as Eleanor wishes to bond with anyone: mutual respect is a great part of that. She is not sure if she has lost it, now, but any anxiety that would normally garner is only at the fringes right now, and she doesn't have the energy to face it.
So she takes the mug of tea from him, wrapping her hands around it, closing her eyes as the steam rises upward toward her newly dehydrated eyes. She waits for the oddly comforting ritual of tea and tea-cooling and tea-drinking to settle her, and opens her eyes again. It has been a little while since Richard spoke, telling her she had nothing to apologize for, and that she doesn't have to explain.
"I think I do," she says. "Have an obligation to you, I mean." She watches her tea, staring thoughtfully into the dark liquid, which she took unadorned today.
"How much have you studied the texts on reincarnation I've given you?" she asks. It does not sound anything, except in word choice, like the way she might begin a discussion. That is what it usually is: how prepared are you to delve into this with me? but this time, it's simply: what do you know? what do I have to explain, for anything else I say to make sense?
RichardHis tea, by virtue of the cream he poured into it, is several degrees cooler than hers. He sips it steadily; holds it between his large hands otherwise. She has an obligation to him, she thinks. He glances at her; he doesn't argue.
"Enough to have a basic grounding," he says. "Why don't you tell me what you want to tell me, and if I have questions I'll ask?"
Eleanor YatesEverything feels jagged right now. Everything is an intrusion. She does not want to talk, but she does not want to be left alone. And most of all, she hates all of it. The sorrow, the depression, the shame for the sorrow and depression, the exhaustion, the embarrassment over her exhaustion. She wants it all to just... stop.
"It is possible," she begins, slowly and quietly, still staring at her tea, "for souls and atmans to be linked in various ways throughout lifetimes. There are many ways that this happens: some magical, some seemingly natural, others set in mysterious patterns. It is possible for an atman to be fractured into pieces living separate lives in separate bodies, which is a horrific thing in itself: more horrific is what the current incarnations must do to one another, if they wish to restore their atman to a whole."
The atman. Not the soul, but something else: a spark of the divine, perhaps, or one of those imaginary friends that Eleanor disdains. She does not have need for or necessarily believe in those manifested versions, but that does not mean she disregards the atman; it is that which wakes, when one becomes a mage. It is the part of oneself that can tap into the raw material of the universe and recreate it at will. Like a fist clenching when grasping a tool or preparing to strike, the atman is the part of yourself that moves when you affect the world.
"Souls may have companions and enemies that last from life to life, continually drawn together. Sometimes those bonds are relatively weak.
"Then," Eleanor says, sighing the word, "there are souls that some believe have been connected since the dawn of their existence, or perhaps existence itself. Twin souls. Twin flames. Soul mates. They are uncommon, but from any standpoint, rather remarkable. With even the basest understanding of certain spheres, each may sense the other's thoughts and emotions, their health, even where they are at all times. It is an almost indescribable bond to have with another person, particularly when you are both awakened."
Her eyes, open for a long time, slowly close. She lifts her mug, takes a sip of the hot tea, sighs softly as she swallows.
"I felt Henrik as a presence, only, when I was very young. My 'imaginary friend', at first, though I only had some made-up name for him then. I did not communicate with him in words, I just felt, always, that I was not alone. It wasn't frightening; in fact, his presence was quite comforting, particularly in moments of fear or indecision.
"When I was a teenager, I began to hear his voice. I sometimes have to insist with people that he was not intrusive or manipulative. We were just... friends. What I know now is that I began to hear Henrik's voice after he Awakened; before that, we were aware of each other, but unable to communicate in anything but impressions. And it was in late adolescence when I felt, through that bond, as he went through the Agama Te.
"That is when I Awoke," Eleanor tells Richard, looking at him. "We still did not meet until I went to university."
Lifting one hand, she rubs at her brow with the heel of it, breathing in more deeply than she has in a while, which is probably a good sign.
"The short version of a much longer story is that we both became Euthanatoi. And though we were members of a particularly task-oriented sect among the tradition, we spent a lot of time together researching our past lives. And in that research, we found a pattern. A third soul, which for reasons I still can't fathom is drawn -- murderously -- to mine. We found in my past lives a mage who lived from 1920 to 1950, was murdered, then avenged by his twin brother. After that, a ten-year-old girl who was killed by a home invader for no apparent reason. Her father shot the murderer. We found others, scattered throughout history.
"I live in ten-year increments," Eleanor says quietly, watching his profile, or his face now. "And then I am killed. Every time, Henrik -- or whoever he is in that life -- tries to save me. He always fails. He always tries -- and often succeeds, but not always -- to take vengeance. And when we have all died and been reborn, we do it all over again."
Except.
She gives an aching little smile. "But this time it changed. We knew it was coming. We even knew what year. Maybe that's what made the difference, at least part of it. But when he came -- it was a he this time -- Henrik had already emptied his clip. I wasn't fast enough. So..."
For a moment, it looks like she's going to shatter. Turn to glass, to ice, and break apart right in front of him.
"Henrik took a bullet to his skull, and I got to feel what he'd felt, lifetime after lifetime, every time I died."
There is a long quiet. There is a clock in this room, too, ticking. Sunlight still streams through the windows, oblivious and offensive. Eleanor drops her gaze to the mug of tea.
"I was a stronger mage then," she says flatly. "And I cannot describe what I was feeling, or how powerful it made me. I made his mind and heart stay alive while I rotted his body around him. When he was a puddle of viscera and dust, I went into a coma from the shock of losing Henrik." Her thumb strokes the outside of her mug, her brow drawn. She heard in her own voice, just now, the rage that still lingers. The vengeful, monstrous wrath. It still has a hold on her. Some part of her does not regret doing that, or even doing it that way, no matter what she knows of the cosmic balance, no matter what she knows of the nature of souls, no matter what she knows about what little good it did: all she did was hasten her enemy's reincarnation.
And darken her own soul. She did that, too. It took time to wash out that stain.
"It knocked me back. The shock, the... wrongness of what I did, all of it. Some of the knowledge I'd gained about the spheres and my own power was simply not there anymore. I had some very specific retrograde amnesia." She takes a drink of the tea, shaking her head. She looks at Richard again.
"I live now on borrowed -- stolen -- time. Sometimes I feel very acutely how close the sword is to my throat: the sense that I was meant to die, and I did not, and now I do not know what may happen because of that. Fate does not like to be cheated," and here, on a normal day, she would give a wry little smirk. She does not; there is anguish in her eyes, and grief laced through her words. "Even though I know we will meet again, it won't be him. I'm afraid that something in the pattern has been changed irrevocably and that he may be the one taken. I'm afraid I may not be able to find him again, or sense him. And even aside from all of that, even with the... the hope that since something changed this time, maybe I can figure this out and undo it entirely... it does not change that he is gone.
"Thirty years spent with him," she says, her small hand clutching into a fist over her chest, pressing down over her heart as though to staunch a wound, press into a pain, or simply to show Richard here,
here is where he was, since she was a drooling, babbling child. Here is where I felt him,
"and he's gone."
Tears have dampened her eyes again, but she does not shed them, does not break into sobs again. She lowers her jaw, looking down at her lap, her shoulders rounded, weary. After a few moments, she reaches up, brushing her fingertips over her cheek. She sniffs.
"Some days it's just too much," she says, hoarsely, on the verge of but not quite becoming a whimper. It's just small. "Some days it's hard to remember why I go on."
RichardOnce, I killed because I was angry.
That's how she put it. That's how she -- hating to complain, hating to bare herself to someone she barely knew -- first encapsulated the utter horror of what she did, and what surrounded what she did. The terrible loss she sustained. The awful vengeance she exacted. The price she paid for that vengeance, or for that loss, or perhaps: for cheating fate itself.
The life she's led since. A professor of law. A student of the Wheel. The life she leads, day after day, minute after minute, groceries, trips to the bank, refueling the car, grading essays, writing papers, shoveling snow, taking out the trash, doing laundry, picking up the dry cleaning, on and on and on and on and on and on when the other half of your soul has died for you.
When you have cheated the very power you were made to serve.
--
Richard doesn't question, not for a moment, why it might be hard for her to remember why she goes on. He doesn't for a moment imagine he can understand what it's like to stand in her shoes, but even so: he gets it, he thinks. Intuitively, and deeply, he gets it:
how trivial, how pointless, how inconsequential, how small life must seem sometimes in the shadow of that tragedy.
So for a long time, he only sits beside her. He doesn't offer words of comfort. He has none; they are all empty. He doesn't offer reasons, excuses, flimsy props on which to hang her will to live. He doesn't say something so inane as you go on for the memory of Henrik or -- god, worse -- what do you think drove him on after losing you in his past lives? He doesn't question her intuition that what she did was wrong, that what she did thwarted destiny; any of that.
One day he might. But not today.
Today, just the quiet companionship of his presence. And, after a long time: reaching over, taking that hand she had pressed to her heart to show him, here. right here is where he was torn out of me.
"I'm glad you go on," he says quietly.
Eleanor YatesShe has, on the rare occasions when she's shared this story, tolerated or rejected the well-meaning platitudes and misunderstanding encouragements people sometimes offer. They do not know. So far she has not met another pair of souls like her own and Henrik's, and she suspects that only they might understand. Truly, entirely, understand. And perhaps only other Euthanatoi could grasp why she wonders now what may become of her, and of Henrik's soul, and what he may have wrought when he covered her body with his own at precisely the right
(wrong. wrong. wrong.)
moment.
--
Richard, thankfully, does not try to tell her he gets what that must feel like, he can totally imagine it. Richard does not tell her that she's got to keep on going, and ra ra ra, and what do you think Henrik would want, and what about the pretty daffodils. Nor does he recoil from her, because what she did to the one she called her nemesis truly is horrific. Inhuman. Not at all what the Euthanatoi are about. Not at all what Eleanor herself is about, not what she believes. She hasn't spoken much to him of Jhor, and does not mention it now, but he has certainly read about it by now; that sort of death, enacted in that sort of emotional turmoil, with that much hatred and perverse righteousness, could not have done anything but leave a dark stain on her spirit.
Richard just takes it in, and doesn't move away, and right now that -- and the tea, and the way he permitted her sobbing without judgement or rejection, and the fact that he came up to the landing because she did not sound okay at all, at all -- makes Eleanor incredibly grateful.
And now, he also knows why even her resonance feels sundered. Because she is. Because that is how her life, and her magic, were redefined when Henrik died.
--
He takes her hand. Eleanor lets him. It's warm from the mug. She looks at his hand, which is much, much larger, and hers within it.
"Thank you, Richard," she says back, just as quietly. Quieter. For that, and the hand, and the tea, and the embrace.
There is not much more to say after that. She just sits there, wrapped in that blanket over her pajamas and her robe, holding her tea, having her hand held.
Sometimes that is all that can be done.
