Once, after that sunny Sunday, Eleanor showed Richard a picture of a sculpture. The Caryatid Who Has Fallen Under the Weight of Her Stone, by Rodin. She just tapped it with a fingertip, giving a subtle hmph of recognition from her nostrils. Recognition. Familiarity. Understanding.
They haven't really talked about it, and do not need to. It meant something the next time he came, and studied with her. It meant a little more every time she saw that he did not treat her differently, or with less respect or greater concern. It meant still more ever time she remembered that simple: I'm glad you go on.
She does not burden him to know this, but having someone to teach, not just at the university but in this way, passing along not her knowledge of the law but her comprehension of the spheres and the Chodona, helps. More than he can know. Some days it is what makes her put her feet on the ground beside her bed and rise up, even when the weight of it all makes it difficult to stand.
She has already floated the idea of him going abroad with her this summer as a research assistant. It's not certain yet, but it's been brought up: where and how. Why. So perhaps he thinks she has more information for him, when she calls him after his finals are over.
"There's something I have to do this evening," she tells him. She sounds... sober. Serious. Very much so. "And I will understand if you do not feel ready to witness it. But I think you are."
RichardThe truth is Richard is probably not going to go into law, academic or professional. All the same, he was receptive at the idea of accompanying Eleanor for summer research. Even outside the demarcations of their more supernatural dealings, she's a good teacher. She's a good mentor. And undergraduate research experience is a valuable thing. They've talked about how to spin his project; how to make it as broadly applicable as possible. They've talked, too, about where they might go. How he might help her. What he should brush up on before summer comes.
What they don't talk about is that sunny Sunday. It's not a dirty secret, it's not something they try to forget. It happened. They both know it. But it's not something either of them feel compelled to dredge up or discussed. It exists: something that happened, something that altered -- and strengthened -- their dynamic in some deep and subtle way.
--
Around finals, he comes around less. He shows up at her office hours once, two days before her final, when her office is crammed with panicked students. She stays late that night, and so does he, and at the end -- when everyone else has left -- he walks her to her car out of some archaic sense of chivalry.
Bikes her, actually. Or rather: he bikes beside her as she walks, swaying the front wheel this way and that to keep balance as they inch along.
--
Then finals week.
Then a small radio silence, ended when she calls him. Wherever he is, it's noisy in the background. He shouts for her to wait, wait just a second, please --
and then it's abruptly quieter, the crowd sound receding away. He's somewhere outside, laughter still on his voice. Fading a moment later as he hears what she says. The tone of it. A small silence. Then:
"Where should I meet you? And when?"
Eleanor Yates"Just stay where you are and I'll pick you up. Soon."
That's all she says on the phone. All she says before she hits the End Call button, setting it aside and taking her foot off the gas, doing a quick three-point turn, and then pulling out of the driveway she's in.
A driveway, somewhere.
--
He can feel her coming. Perhaps a few people around him feel it too: the more sensitive ones, the ones who seem to get other people's feelings more acutely, the more religious, the brilliant scientist. The ones who see or sense just a bit more than the average person, for whatever reason, may notice the shiver in the midst of the weather, may suddenly want to stop drinking because they feel like they're going to choke. It is not just the way one can feel her peripherally, dimly at the edges, but
the way she feels when she is working. When she is showing him things like scrying, or truly deep meditation. He can feel her magic down the block, before her car comes around the corner and slides to a stop in front of the house. She leaves it running. She does not text him. She just waits outside.
RichardThe house is not on Professor Row. It's not on Frat Row either. It's one of the many large, extensively subdivided, rather ramshackle houses on the shabbier side of campus where any number of undergrads -- the ones who weren't born with their very own trust funds, who weren't sent to college with their very own brand-new entry-level luxury coupes -- have made their homes. Or well. Their small living spaces where they stash their books and their gym shoes and their clothes and maybe an XBox.
There are, in fact, people drinking in the house right now. There are also people making quite a bit of noise. The two activities are not exactly related, however. The noisemakers are four boys moving out of the attic suite. The noise is actually the thud and bang of cheap furniture making their way down from several flights of stairs.
The drinking, on the other hand, is something Richard is doing with two of his housemates. They're on the porch, shorts and flip-flops. They're sipping beers, and perhaps earlier he was helping his other housemates move -- the rough, raw look to his palms and his knuckles suggests it -- but right now he's... well. Chilling out.
He's waiting.
And when that car pulls up. When it comes to a standstill, but not to silence. When his housemates sharing the afternoon with him fall silent and uneasy: then, Richard upends his beer bottle, drains it to the dregs, and sets it on the small patio table on the porch.
"There's my ride," he says, like maybe he was going to dinner, or perhaps on a stock-up trip to Costco. "See you guys later."
His flip-flops flip and flop all the way down the porch steps. He goes to the passenger's door without hesitation, pulls it open, and folds his not-inconsiderable height in. Shuts the door.
His face is serious when he turns to Eleanor. "Where are we going?"
Eleanor YatesTechnically, this house can't be on Professor Row because there is no Professor Row. No real Frat Row either. Several of the sorority and fraternity residences are right on campus, some newly built, some more aged. At least a couple are right on the campus green, right beside Sturm. But they are littered throughout, and even more speckle the neighborhoods around, where many students rent homes together. Eleanor lives just a few miles away, but her neighborhood is made more for young families: there's the Cory Elementary, the Merrill Middle School, and the usually clogged thoroughfare of Colorado Boulevard that if you're smart, you avoid driving on when you can. She does not have a young family, though. There is no red and yellow plastic play car on her front porch, nor even a dog leash hanging beside her front door.
Richard did not tell her where he was. No one sent her some flyer about some post-finals party. Most undergraduate students don't have a clue who she is, unless they are already distinctly pre-law and aiming their sights upward. But here she is, slowing her car to a stop, looking straight ahead, waiting. She taps her hand idly on the steering wheel. She has pulled to the other side of the street, and cannot be seen with perfect clarity on the dim road, but perhaps the drunken students see a blonde woman inside, not much older than Richard, who is probably older than they are. So like, maybe whatever, y'know?
That's his ride. The passenger door is unlocked.
When the passenger door shuts, he hears a sound. Thumping. From behind them. It's not very energetic. Eleanor puts the car in gear and begins to drive. "To work," she says.
RichardHe is not dim. He is reasonably curious. There is thumping behind them, and so he turns; he investigates the back seat, and then he thinks of the trunk.
He thinks of her work. They are driving away from the house where he lives, or at least rents a room. One of the larger ones, with an en-suite. They are driving away from his neighbors and housemates, the other students, most of them younger than him, the only ones around his age already in grad school or beyond. They are driving away from the life he knows. He thinks of her work, and he thinks:
she has someone in the trunk.
Someone she's going to kill.
--
He turns forward again. He pulls the seatbelt over his shoulder as she picks up speed. He slides the seat back to make room for his legs, and he drums his fingertips on the armrest, and the tries to relax. Stay calm. Center himself the way she taught him to.
"All right," he says quietly, and at least for now, asks no questions.
Eleanor YatesIt's not the gentlest way she could introduce him to this. Any of it. To pick him up late at night, out of nowhere, with someone in her trunk who is going to die. They aren't thumping or yelling very loudly, though. Maybe they're weak. Injured. Drugged. God only knows. She hasn't told him any plans.
For what it's worth, she does not seem very at ease with this. And as they drive, northward, she tells him:
"This isn't how I would have wanted this," she tells him. "The truth is, though, I don't do this very often anymore. I don't seek it out. I didn't want your first experience with this to be like that, either... hunting for it. Looking and searching for someone to murder, stalking them, just to give you a proper learning experience."
Eleanor shakes her head. "I ran into him at a farmer's market. He bumped into me and I just... felt it. But that was last weekend. And I had to be sure. I even went to one of the seers," what she calls the time-mages, the Cultists at the chantry, "to look back and tell me what they saw."
Her eyes skate over to him at a red light. "If you want me to circle back and let you out, I will. As I said: I think you are ready for this. I will answer your questions as best I can. But I also need you to trust me."
RichardA red glow through the windshield. Takes the blue out of his eyes, and hers. He glances back at her. No answer to her offer just yet: the option to back out. To circle around, let him out, let him go back to his pseudo-sleeper's life again. At least for a little while. Maybe he could go on like that. Maybe he could be an Akashic or something.
Richard turns forward. His fingers tap again, restlessly, nervously.
"Why him?"
Eleanor YatesThe light turns green, and Eleanor looks away.
It's a complicated question. The right feeling, the right sense from the spells. The visions from the seer.
"Sometimes, particularly to the uninitiated, it seems easier if you can paint them as a monster," she says quietly. "Child rapists, murderers, men who abuse their wives, women who abuse their children, politicians who have gone too far. If you can make them seem hopeless, evil, for a while it is easier for other people to accept it."
They turn left.
"He's toxic," she goes on, almost sounding... sad. Maybe disappointed. "It started with things out of his control: a history of abuse, a recurring sense of being unwanted. He escalated it when he was older. He got violent in high school. From what the seer told me, he date raped a girl or two. Maybe more. He was a bully. He terrorized anyone weaker than him. Everyone around him passed it off as normal behavior, and he justified it, too. We humans can get used to just about anything, even when it's rotting us from the inside out.
"He's lost multiple jobs because of his anger issues. He's been given the opportunity, by employers, a pastor, his now ex-wife, many others, to enter programs or therapy. He has refused every time. There is nothing wrong with him, he says. He poisons the people around him: the people he works with, the women at his church that he flirts with and then blames when he 'sins'. People reach out to him again and again, and he takes their energy, taints it, vomits it back out to them.
"I saw webs reaching out from him," she says softly, driving onward in the dark. "He is not just carrying around his own core of bitterness, stagnation, and warping of the laws of nature. He spreads it. He infects others with it everywhere he goes."
They are approaching a simple office building, dark inside. Everyone's gone home. But they come to the entrance to the underground parking, and Eleanor takes one hand,
he will see now that they are gloved in black,
and taps an access card against the scanner before coasting her car downward into the empty garage.
"This is where he works," she tells Richard. "It's too cheap for security cameras. We'll be in the janitorial galley in the stairwell. It has a door at either end, easily blocked. It's surrounded by concrete. That is where they'll find him." Her car slides into a parking spot.
"He's unconscious for now," she whispers, in the hollow darkness. "But he will need to be awake for this to be a Good Death."
RichardSometimes it seems easier.
He looks at her. He listens to her, and he hears all that she tells him. All that might unburden a man about to commit murder for the first time, or at least watch it be done. All that might make him feel better about all this, make him go through with all this. If he were someone else entirely. But if he were someone else entirely, he wouldn't be here at all.
When she's finished, he is quiet. Quiet, but with a certain intensity, a certain laser focus that reminds her suddenly and sharply that he is not simply the cheerful, sunkissed creature lounging by the poolside with his friends. He is not simply the intelligent, happy non-trad undergrad who carries books instead of a laptop, who tosses golden hair out of his eyes when he bends that long torso to scribble his notes, who flashes that relaxed grin at anyone and everyone who crosses his path.
Even when he lived the life of a sleeper -- lived that way because he wanted to achieve on his own terms, and not those of a universe that might bend for his will -- he was never just another average human. He was exceptional. He was one amongst a million or more; off the curve, beyond the standard deviation. Different, and more, and driven to be more than he already was.
"Thank you, but I don't need this to be easier, Acarya."
That is the first time. He pauses: not because he is surprised by himself, but out of respect for the word; the moment. Its weight.
"I don't need him to be a monster. I don't need to justify it by my own morality. You're the one that teaches me again and again that the dichotomy of good and evil is false. You serve the Wheel, and I am your student. I need to know why the momentum of the world would wear down if he continues to exist in it. And I need to know that releasing him from this life will allow his essence to move forward.
"I need to know why he needs to be awake, too. Not because I think he deserves the mercy of dying without waking -- or because I think he deserves to suffer with full knowledge of what is about to happen. I need to know because ... because I need to learn. I need to understand the process and logic of your work, as divorced as possible from whatever emotional burden I might feel."
Eleanor YatesThey both pause there. At the word. The acknowledgement, and the fact that he means it. She has not turned the car off yet, but she reaches over, touching his arm.
"You are uninitiated," she tells him quietly. "But not in the way I meant."
She means sleepers. She means traditionalists who are not counted among the numbers of the chakravanti. The ones who don't, or can't, understand why they do what they do, who don't believe it is necessary,
though the fact that they do not all rise up and try to destroy the Euthanatoi suggests that many of them, deep down, know that it is.
--
Eleanor listens as he goes on, though. She wonders how much he says to clarify for her, and how much he says to hear himself say it, to put it into words, to admit, confess, commit like this. Then he tells her what he needs. She nods.
"As I said," she tells him, "the stagnation of his own inner self is revealed in the toxicity of his existence. He does not create new things. He does not permit new things to grow in his presence. This is what he does, when he denigrates the ideas of his peers, undermines his superiors, outright crushes and silences and steals from those beneath him. He is not even filled with ambition; everyone craves some degree of comfort and equilibrium, but he is not seeking that. And the more he is permitted to exert his influence over his family, his parish, and his coworkers, the more he drags others down from their own growth, their own dynamism and cycles. It may sound like a pseudo-zen cliche, but even the smallest stone casts ripples.
"His stagnation has reached a point where he insulates himself from basic karmic rebalancing. You see this all the time, because the world has grown skewed: those who do harm do not have harm done to them. The Threefold Law that so many Verbena follow does not always work."
She takes a deep breath. "As for whether releasing him will allow his essence to move forward, that is part of why he needs to be awake. I have not described for you the rituals of a Good Death because they are unique. If you should find your path following the Wheel, you will find your own way of transitioning a soul from one life to the shadowlands. Your own way of seeing; whether souls drink from the River of Lethe or scatter apart into atoms that are purified by their separation from each other, whatever it is." Eleanor finally turns off the car, sensing that Richard is not going to ask her to leave.
"He needs to be awake because this is not simply an assassination," she murmurs, as the car goes silent. "He will not, at first, understand what he has done, what he has become. I have to help him see, and understand, if I can. And when he does, or when I have taken him as far as he can go along that path, then I will kill him, and he will return to the original source to be reborn. And in the new life, he will begin anew... or he may carry some remainder of his darkness with him. But less. He will be farther along the path, because of what I do tonight.
"At worst," she admits, "he will be removed from continuing to spread harm in this life."
RichardIt would be a lie to say Richard is comfortable right now. That he is at ease, and at peace. That some part of him does not quail and shudder. That the prospect of killing a man,
and not just killing him but waking him, speaking to him, explaining to him that he must die, and why he must die, and hoping that he will somehow come to terms with the one thing that most people fear more than anything else in the world,
doesn't rock him to his foundation.
But he is not -- uninitiated in the way Eleanor meant. He is not a sleeper. He is not incapable of understanding. He has begun, in fact, to touch the core of that terrible and blank-eyed truth of the Wheel. And he is, in the end, brave.
So bravely, he takes a breath. And he nods. "All right," he says. "I'm ready."
Eleanor YatesShe wouldn't like it if he were comfortable. She'd be lying if she said she were comfortable, and she's been doing this since college. Eleanor waits for Richard, watching him, because they have not yet crossed over the line where he can't leave. In part because that line, like most dichotomies, isn't real.
The car is off. Richard takes a breath, to either tell her he needs to leave, or tell her
I'm ready.
Eleanor just nods. It's what she told him over the phone. She gets out of the car, closing and locking it behind her by hand rather than setting off the beep-beep from the fob. She popped the trunk before rising from the car, and that is where she has their... well. Let's call him what he is. Their victim.
He is not a very tall man, but even so, the trunk is small for him. He is bound, ankles and wrists, with zip ties. He's a bit overweight, not heavy but pudgy, and it shows in the face, which has a dark beard. There are glasses lying beside his head, partly twisted. He doesn't look dangerous. He is unconscious. Drugged. He is lying on top of two very large tarps, both black, and there's some plastic sheeting in there as well
Eleanor hands Richard a pair of large black gloves as they stand there.
"His name is William Hayley," she tells him quietly. "Everyone calls him Billy."
--
It takes one trip, with the two of them, to carry the man -- Billy -- into the elevator bay and up one floor, around the corner, into the stairwell, and through a door into the janitorial galley. It's a long, narrow space containing all the cleaning supplies for the building. The mop shower. The utility sinks. With both doors closed, it is eerily quiet but for the hum of mechanicals. Light comes from a few long, thin fluorescent bulbs that stretch over the top of the galley ceiling.
Billy is left lying on his left side on the ground while tarps are spread, while plasting sheeting is hung around them. Eleanor moves quickly, directs Richard with a familiarity that is, at best, disconcerting. But she is not comfortable. She is not happy. This is not a lark.
Then they move him to the top of the black tarps, and they turn off all but the light above the sinks, a couple of bare bulbs. Eleanor directs Richard to stand, or sit on a stool as he likes, at the edge of one of these tarps. She stands at the other end, crouches down, and unpacks the bag she brought in:
a nine millimeter. A clip, beside it. A large knife. A pair of razor blades. A bottle of pills. A length of thick rope. And finally, a pad of white legal paper and a fountain pen.
After setting out this gallery of foreboding, Eleanor walks over to the sink, fills up an empty Solo cup with cold water, and begins pouring it, slowly, over Billy's face. Lets it trickle into his ear, over his nostrils, over his eyes, til the icy cold and the reflex to thinking he is drowning makes him jerk, stirring, only to find that he is tied up.
In a dim room.
The first thing he sees is the point of that knife Eleanor laid out, pointing at him.
--
The second thing he sees is Eleanor, crouching beside him, dressed in black, saying quietly:
"Billy. It's time."
RichardRichard isn't sure what he expected in the trunk. Perhaps, despite everything, he expected a monster. Some hulk with a shaven pate, goatee and tattoos, perhaps. Some steely-eyed mobster glaring up at them in defiance. But it's just a man, and one who runs a little toward fat like so many Americans do. One who wears glasses. One who has a name.
William Hayley. Billy. Richard mouths the name to himself as though to remember it more deeply.
--
They drag Billy into the building. Richard does most of the muscle work here, though he suspects -- he knows -- Eleanor would have found a way to make it work if he wasn't here. They stretch the tarps out and hang the sheeting up, and the stink of polyurethane in the air makes Richard's stomach start a slow series of pirouettes. One for every weapon Eleanor lays out. Gun. Knife. Razors. Pills. Rope. Paper for a suicide note.
He understands, seeing the tools of her trade, what the ruse will be. He understands where the road will end, but not how it will get there. As Eleanor begins to wake the man, Richard, looking awkward rather than leanly, languidly athletic in his height and the length of his limbs for the very first time since she met him, paces a few steps along the edge of the tarp.
He folds his arms tightly across his chest, then. Fists balled up under his biceps. His face tense, drawn, he watches.
Eleanor YatesIn the beginning, Billy struggles in predictable ways. He fights the bindings on his wrists and ankles. He demands to know who they are, what's the meaning of this, he even threatens Eleanor despite the fact that when he tries to move to his knees, she plants a booted foot on his shoulder and with the barest of efforts, shoves him back down. She has to do this twice before he even begins to understand that he does not have the upper hand here.
That is when the fear sets in. Through her silence, through Richard's silence, that is when awareness of his own vulnerability starts to flash like a red light in the back of his mind, pulsing, beating, terrifying. That is when his heart starts to match the rhythm of his fear.
He starts to argue. And neither Eleanor nor Richard have said a word yet. He starts trying to figure out why he is here, who they are. He makes up half a dozen stories on the spot, circling back to rage when Eleanor will not answer him. He swears at her, spitting invectives at her, calls Richard names trying to goad him, thrashes, yanking and pulling on the zip ties that hold him bound, the nausea and dizziness that remain from his drugging. At least once he rolls over, retching to one side, vomiting against the tarp.
He is quite still after that.
It has been a half hour or more of silence. It is surprising even to Eleanor, sometimes, how quickly people panic in the face of silence.
--
She wets a cloth in the sink, warm this time, and walks over to him. In one hand she holds the warm, wet cloth. With the other, she picks up the knife. And that is when she speaks, as she kneels near his head.
"Billy," Eleanor says quietly, holding that knife where he can see it, where he can remember that she has it, while she reaches out and begins wiping his mouth, cleaning his jaw and his cheeks. There's a nurse-like efficiency, as well as an almost maternal gentleness, in the way she does this. She looks at him, her brow stitched.
"Billy, it's time for you to go," she says quietly, watching his eyes as she cleans him, turning the knife slowly. It catches the light, and his eyes, but his gaze is steadily drawn back to hers. And Richard begins to feel her work in the air, changing this place. They are in a submarine. The water is pressing at the edges of the room. In the periphery of one's vision, it begins to look like water is trickling through the seams of the walls.
It is very cold. The world feels reduced to this one room. Everything else has broken away.
Eleanor holds Billy's eyes.
"It is time for you to understand who you are."
The cloth is laid down atop the puddle of his vomit. Eleanor rests her gloved hand on his brow, staring into his eyes. The pressure in the room intensifies. It feels, momentarily, that the ceiling may no longer be there; if they look up, the world will be darkness and stars, slowly falling snow.
Billy begins to cry. There are tears in Eleanor's eyes, too, but they do not fall.
RichardIt is difficult for Richard to watch as this man struggles, as he rages, as he covers fear with anger, as he tries to rise and is pushed down again, again, again. Until the anger recedes. Until the fear comes. It is hard for Richard to watch him lie, and argue, and shout. It is hard for Richard to meet his eyes,
but he does, unflinchingly and evenly and levelly and silently, all the remarkable clarity and depth-of-color of those irises lost in this small, stinking janitor's closet.
It is hard for him to watch Billy vomit. It is easier when Eleanor goes to him, and cleans him like a nurse, or a mother. Or a midwife. None of that strikes Richard as strange, or unnatural, or out of place. It makes him think of the ministrations seen in nursing homes, in palliative care facilities. It seems to make sense. It makes perfect sense that the Billy's life should be closed the same gentleness and efficiency with which it began.
The air changes. It is cold, and it is deep, and they are underwater. They are a hundred feet beneath the surface of the ocean, a thousand. They are in a janitor's broom closet, and they are at the bottom of the sea. They are drowning together. Richard's heart struggles. He takes a breath, and it comes out short and sharp, like a gasp. He who swam since he could remember. He who all but made the water a second home.
He unfolds his arms. His hands at his sides then. He unfolds his fingers too. The ends tingle, as though electricity passes through him. His throat moves as he swallows. He wishes he had a mask, a hood, something to hide himself from the nakedness of the moment, but he doesn't.
So: he watches. He does not turn his eyes away.
Eleanor YatesMore than a few midwives have been not just the 'witches' that the church burned because they knew the secrets of women's bodies, but members of the cults that were thought to be death-worshippers. In truth, the Euthanatoi follow the same cycle that the Verbena do. They just refuse to deny the other side of it. That does not mean they do not relish life, or hold it sacred. It does mean that they do not fight death. They do not overmuch grieve it.
Sometimes, they inflict it.
--
Eleanor speaks to him as she presses emotions into his mind, taken from visions and observations, translated through her understanding of the universe and given back to him. She lets him feel the pain he has caused. Very little of it life-destroying. All of it building, building, revealed not just in the people he touched but the people they touched, growing, expanding, until it becomes overwhelming. He is choking on sobs, coughing up spittle, hating himself, and her brow is tight, even as she describes for him what he has done, and what it has wrought.
Her hand withdraws. He is saying he's sorry. Many many times, sobbing that he's sorry, calling himself stupid, swearing at himself the way he swore at her over and over. She touches his hair, smoothing it back, and she nods.
"You are," she whispers. "You could have been so much better, Billy. You had every chance."
His eyes fly open. He is going to beg again.
Eleanor shakes her head before he can speak.
"No," she says flatly. "It is too late for that."
And he is angry again, all but smashing his head on the ground through the tarp, swearing, starting to scream until Eleanor reaches -- for the gun and clip, at first, but she stops. She reaches for him instead, grabbing him, stopping him from hurting himself, her arm tight around his shoulders, the other cradling his head. "Stop," she urges him quietly, and covers his mouth with her hand. "Stop, Billy. Not like this. Don't go like this. Stop. Stop, Billy," she whispers, until
he is crying, sobbing against her pant leg, begging her to please just let him go.
"I will," she promises him softly, stroking his hair again. "I will."
--
Time ticks onward. Eleanor helps Billy sit up, arms still behind him, legs still bound, and talks to him. They talk about his mother. They talk about his girlfriends and his jobs. They talk about his choices. They talk about his despair. Mostly, they keep talking about his fear. His fear that he is unlovable, his fear that he is broken somehow, his fear of losing people, of people changing, of not having control. They talk about his hatred of certain people, and his fear that they might succeed. They keep coming back to that fear, paralyzing and choking, until it feels like a tangible weight in the air, overpowering, stifling, even the ever-moving molecules of air calcifying in place around him.
They talk for a long time, and then Eleanor, sitting cross-legged on the tarp, begins talking to him about rebirth. About the cycle, the Wheel, about karma. He's scared. He's not been good, he knows it; he doesn't want to come back even more wretched.
She tells him:
"Billy, it's not about whether you're born in a gutter or a palace. These things will help you or hinder you, but what you take to the next life with you from this one does not have to determine everything. And the one thing, for you, that will rebuild this identity for you over and over, life to life, is your fear.
"You have to let go."
He sniffs, loudly, looking as though he's scared to even let go of his fear.
They keep talking.
--
It's been a long time now. And she is holding his face in her hands, staring into his eyes. She is telling him he doesn't have to be this. She is telling him he can do so much better, be so much better. It can all begin anew. And she asks him, softly, near the end,
if he would like to write. Billy just nods at that point, sniffling again, and she takes her knife, reaching back and cutting his zip tie. She slides the pad of paper and pen over to him. He cries while he writes, but there's a softness to it, a strange sort of relief, as he pens a note to whoever finds him, and then beneath that, a letter to his ex-wife. He doesn't reach for any of the weapons. Eleanor doesn't even have to put the clip into the gun. She sits near him, and cuts the ties on his ankles, massaging blood back into them, easing away the marks that were pressed into his skin through his slacks. When he hands her the legal pad, she sets it aside, taking his hands and massaging his wrists as well, erasing the marks of the zip ties, smiling tenderly at him.
"How do you want to go?" she asks him softly, and he tells her doesn't want to leave any more messes for anyone else to clean up. At least not really bad ones.
Eleanor smiles, achingly, and puts the gun, clip, knife and blades away. He chooses the rope. She nods, and looks at Richard. "Bring me that stool," she says quietly.
RichardIt is not how Richard imagined it. It is not how anyone would imagine what is, at its heart, a murder. An assassination. But it is not how he imagined it, either.
It takes longer than he ever thought it would. She talks to Billy more, and more intimately and understandingly and comfortingly than he ever thought she would. She listens. She works with him, and works her magic upon him, and sometimes there are minutes on end when both are silent and still and transported, out of the plane of existence in which Richard's mind dwells.
There are tears. There is anger, and sorrow, and regret. There is fear, so much fear. Sometimes things cycle backwards. Sometimes it seems -- it almost seems -- he won't be able to move forward at all. She won't be able to give him a Good Death, only death. Sometimes Richard grows aware of his own body, the ache in his back from standing so long, the ache in his feet. Sometimes -- guiltily, because he understand the nature and importance of the work he is witnessing -- he finds his mind wandering. He finds himself drifting; pulls himself back with a hard blink or a clench of his fists.
--
Then something different. Something a little like relief. Perhaps even acceptance. Perhaps even peace.
And Richard knows they are near the end. He gathers his will, and there at the edge of the tarp he folds his hands behind himself; straightens his spine and pops, subtly, the joints in his body. Eleanor asks Billy how he wants to go. There is a gun, there is a knife, there are razors, there are pills. Richard realizes he is hoping for the pills. It is easiest for him. He is ashamed of this, too.
But Billy chooses the rope. And Richard's eyes are there to meet Eleanor's, clear and steady and
maybe just a little hollowed-out
when she speaks to him for the first time since this began. He nods. He looks over his shoulder, locates the stool, and brings it over. When he sets it down in the center of the tarp, the clack of the legs against the floor seems very loud.
Richard holds his hand out to Billy, then. He tries to be gentle as he helps the man to his feet.
Eleanor YatesBilly takes his hand. He has shouted towards Richard, demanded information from him, but ultimately he has always been brought back into the demands of Eleanor's attention. Eleanor and Richard both help him up, this man who has been drugged, has thrown up, has been brought to the brink, has faced himself as though in a mirror. He is weak, and he is shaky, and he cries again at the compassion in the way he is brought to standing. His face is tear-stained.
Eleanor already has the noose tied. She finds an anchor point and Richard, being so very tall, helps here as she hands him the rope, twisting it through, tying it off against the pole of a shelf near the wall, built-in, bolted-in. She slips the folded letter into his front shirt pocket. They both help Billy up to the stool, and she nods to him, tells him quietly that
it's okay
as he slips the noose over his head.
--
Eleanor holds his hand while he dies. She looks up at him, as he instinctively, in a panic, fights for air. She endures when he clutches her hand, gasps, kicks. She looks up into his eyes, holding them, even as the very last light is fading from him.
In the end, she draws the back of his hand toward her brow, resting them together for a moment, saying nothing. Then she lets him go, and steps back away from his hanging body. With her other hand, she reaches to Richard, not to hold his hand but to merely touch it.
"We should go," she tells him, because however reverent the moment,
they cannot stay. They have to clean up. They have to pack things back into her trunk and leave Billy here, behind, to be found come morning.
RichardAs ready as Richard is, this is not easy for him.
It is not easy for Eleanor either, though. She just has more practice at it. She has seen this enough, done this enough, that she can hold the hand of a dying man while he transitions from man to corpse. She can look into his eyes.
Richard can't. Not today. Not yet. He helps Billy up onto the chair. He murmurs a quick word to Billy as Billy is climbing up; an impromptu suggestion, an attempt at something like compassion. Or kindness. Or mercy; as much as he can give. You should jump up into the air and let yourself fall, he tells Billy. It's faster if you break your neck.
He doesn't know that, really. He's only heard it before. Picked up somewhere in a book or a movie; maybe a text.
--
His hands are shaking while Billy slips the noose over his head. He clasps them tightly behind his back to quell it. He watches Eleanor take his hand, he watches Billy take his last breath
and jump
and he watches the rope snap taut. The height of a human jump -- particularly that of a weakened, recently-drugged, none-too-athletic human on the tail end of extreme emotional catharsis -- is not the same as the height of a hangman's gibbet. The momentum just isn't the same. It is a quick death, but it is not instantaneous.
There is an instinctive fight for survival. There is a kick, an awkward twist, a horrible angle of the neck. There is an audible crack in the air, deafening to Richard's ears. He does close his eyes,
if only for an instant,
but when he opens them again Billy's body has stopped moving. Eleanor is stepping away. She is reaching to Richard, and for a split-second he does not, cannot bear it -- and then it passes. She touches his hand but he grasps hers, tightly, clutching at it for a beat.
"Okay." It comes out in a rush, like a gasp. He swallows. "I'll get the sheeting down."
Eleanor YatesEleanor looks to Richard when he speaks to Billy. Billy doesn't seem to know what to do. He just nods, eyes shutting, tears rushing anew. He covers his face with his hand, and Eleanor rubs his back, but he gets up on the stool.
He doesn't jump high, because he is shaken and weak, but he does jump. And he does die, not as fast as a bullet into his skull, not as slow as bleeding out, not as easy as simply falling asleep. Eleanor's hands do not shake. Her eyes do not look away.
When Richard flinches from her touch, she begins to withdraw it, nonjudgemental, but blinks as he grabs her hand, clutching for a moment. Her grip tightens back on his through their gloves, because she understands. If he had no compassion, if he were unaffected, she would not want him for a student.
She nods.
--
Richard gets the sheeting down. Eleanor leaves the pen and the legal pad on the floor beside the fallen stool. She gathers up the tarp, folding it over the vomit and the cloth; she'll wash them at home, rather than risk doing it here. She does a once-over, putting away anything out of place, checking for signals that anyone other than Billy was ever here, making sure his building and garage access card is in his pocket. Then, she hoists her bag containing other means of death over her shoulder and listens at the door before they slip out, back down the elevator, back down to her car in the garage, stowing items in the trunk, including their gloves.
She takes them out, back onto the street, and just starts driving.
RichardEleanor's systematic and methodical nature is oddly a lifeline for Richard right now. You can philosophize about death and the Wheel and the necessity of returning souls to the Wheel as much as you like; it doesn't diminish the awful impact of standing in the same room as death. As watching a man die
because you made him die.
The burden of that responsibility is unbelievably -- almost unbearably -- heavy. The emotional repercussions are things that Richard hasn't even begun to sort out yet. Can't. Not right now. And so: he throws himself into the physical, pragmatic aspect of the work. He takes down the sheeting. He folds it up. They didn't need it; it wasn't a bloody, splattering, struggling death. It wasn't a murder in the classical sense, where they might have had to hold Billy down screaming, bawling, to put a bullet through his temple.
The image of it flashes through Richard's mind. He saw Eleanor reaching for the gun at one point. A shudder flashes up his back; he pushes the thought away, not ready for it yet, and helps her with the tarp instead.
They have to lift that stool at one point. They have to work around the body, that dreadfully swinging ornament. Richard doesn't look at it through most of it, but as they are leaving -- he does look. He makes himself look, long and full.
This is his work, if he chooses this path. He cannot shy from it.
--
Outside, they stow their tools, their tarps, their gloves. They get into the car. She starts driving. It's some time before he remembers his seatbelt. Pulls it over his shoulder as automatically as anything else.
Eleanor YatesRichard looks back, at the very last, as they leave. Eleanor simply waits for him, watching Richard and not the body that once held a soul. After a few moments, perhaps before he is fully ready, she touches his arm, reminds him that they need to go. And they do.
--
Eleanor does not take him back to that party. Nor does she take him to her house. She drives him, inexplicably, to a little park on South Logan and East Iowa. It's just a spot of green, a block of park grounds in the midst of a rather trendy residential-commercial area, but right now, Platt Park is empty. Eleanor pulls her car to a stop alongside the curb, turns it off, and then opens her car door.
"Let's get out for a bit," she says, nodding towards the silent park.
RichardIt's a quiet trip in the car. She doesn't speak, and neither does he. He looks out the window. He looks through the windshield. Sometimes he looks at his hands, opening and closing his fingers slowly as though to feel them move. When she parks, he looks up: doesn't really recognize the park.
Let's get out for a bit, she suggests. He nods, and pops open his door, and unfolds himself out onto the sidewalk.
When she comes up beside him, he shuts the car door. They walk across the grass -- dew or water from the automatic sprinklers glistening under the streetlights, dampening their shoes.
Eleanor YatesEleanor locks the car behind her and just starts walking across the green with Richard, hands in her pockets. She walks until they come to a bench, and then she sits down, waiting for him to sit with her, or stand if he needs to. For her part, Eleanor is simply looking upward. There are not many stars to be seen. But within the silence of the sky above, she knows they are there. Something about that comforts her.
"It's not always like that," she tells him, after a while.
Eleanor Yates[ADDENDUM]
Those words, that confession, hangs in the air a moment, and then she realizes there's more truth to it. Her voice quiets. She adds: "It's always different."
RichardHe does, in fact, stand for some time. But eventually Richard sits. He's still wearing flip-flops. Shorts. A bright, summery t-shirt, XXXL, baggy on his lean frame. It's the last thing he expected to wear to an execution. A euthanization.
A holy, profane rite of passage.
His teacher looks at the sky. He looks at the earth, the tiny beads of moisture on those blades of grass. After some time she speaks, and he turns to attend. A small pause follows; then:
"Was that one of the easier ones?"
Eleanor YatesSince she picked him up, Eleanor has simply been wearing a pair of jeans that suit her frame, surprisingly stylish, but one has to remember that for a professor, she's a bit on the young side. Boots, more utilitarian than fashionable but certainly not lacking in the latter. The jeans are dark, the boots are black. Her shirt is dark blue, the hoodie over it black. She had her hair covered until she woke Billy up. The hood is still down. All told, she looks dressed fine for an execution, as counter to Richard as one might expect.
Her eyes come down from the sky to look at him. "For myself, I don't put it on a spectrum of ease," she tells him quietly, not reproachfully. "But for him, I think it was easier than it could have been."
RichardTo that, Richard nods. He has nothing else to compare it to, but what she said matches with his intuition. It was not painless for Billy. It was not easy. But it was easier than it could have been.
A few moments more pass. Then, scarcely more than a whisper, and with a sense of confession: "It wasn't easy for me. I didn't think it would be, but -- it wasn't easy. It's hard to imagine doing this myself. Beginning to end. Finding someone like that. Someone who ... needs to be ushered on. Planning it, charting the course. Deciding, down to the day, the hour, the minute, when another human being's life ends. Carrying the weight of his death with me thereafter."
Silence again. His fingers lacing together; a sort of aimless motion.
"How do I... how did you come to terms with that when you were the apprentice? How did you move from your first experience to ... that point where you were fully and truly Euthanatos?"
Eleanor YatesHow did she do it? She lets her eyes go away from Richard then, looking at the wet grass, looking up again at the nearly starless sky.
"In part, by realizing that death is not a weight to be carried," she says quietly. "It is a transition. It can be a painful one, and a frightening one, but most transitions are, to some degree. It terrifies most people because they do not know what happens afterward. They do not see the continuation of their own existence. Knowing what awaits changes everything.
"There are many other reasons that death feels like a terror and a burden to many," Eleanor goes on, "but for me... I do not feel as though I am carrying all of that with me from now on. Billy is done now, and gone. But his soul has simply been released, and in that knowledge, I see only the potential it has. I know that he will not cling to the earth and the memories of this life as a ghost or wraith, because he had a good death. This experience, this identity and all the pain and fear and sorrow of it... it's over, now. His soul is free now, and the balance of karma has been eased some so that it will not drag chains of harm done into a new life, binding him to repeat the same cycle again."
She is quiet a little while.
"I also cannot claim to have a normal perspective," she confesses, half a whisper. "I knew more about my past lives than most before I even went on my Agama Te sojourn, and I learned in my twenties about this strange curse on my pattern." Her head shakes slightly. "Not so long ago, I was a frightened, innocent ten year old being murdered in the dark by a stranger for no reason. But if she had not died, that very night, then the life that came after, and the life I have lived in this incarnation, would not be. Certainly would not have been the same. I would not have known Henrik, just as he was in this lifetime, and I would not have been able to help Billy tonight, and I would not be sitting here with you, smelling wet grass."
Eleanor gives a soft huff of exhale. "And if it seems strange to be grateful to my own soul for a horrific death that flies in the face of anything good or gentle or right in this world because I got to know someone I've known since the dawn of time in a different way, or be smelling a certain smell and meeting someone new that I may have met a dozen times or more already, then... perhaps it is. But I am grateful to have died, and died again and again, even in the most sorrowful ways, because those deaths brought me again into new lives, again and again, each one with its own unique wonders."
She doesn't say anything, but the pause is not as long this time. She looks from the stars to the grass to Richard, once more.
"I am thinking now of Billy's soul getting to experience that. And it does not make tonight, or the time I spent learning about him, anything like easy. I don't think it ever should feel truly easy for us. But knowing what I know, of what happens after we die and before we live again, and knowing what I know of what death has been to me, gives me... a different perspective."
RichardIt no longer even bears repeating, because it is always the truth: he listens to her. Attentively, thoughtfully, carefully. He listens to her as she looks at the stars, and after a while he looks at the stars as well. He looks for them, anyway. He reaches out with his senses -- all those remarkable senses he has been blessed with -- and he seeks those patterns, those far-distant crucibles of creation and fusion, so very massive, and burning so hot, that they warp reality a little bit just by existing.
"I do know that," Richard says quietly. "You've taught me all that already, and I ... I'm sorry if I've disappointed you in forgetting. I thought I understood it and accepted it, and ... I suppose some part of me thought I would be able to remember it through everything we did tonight. But I didn't. It was still hard. When push comes to shove, I still see death as an ending, not a transition.
"Knowing it here," he touches his temple, "isn't the same as feeling it here, though." His heart, now. "I'm still learning to feel it here."
Eleanor YatesShe shakes her head when he says he's sorry. But she waits, until he has finished speaking, to answer him.
"I am not disappointed with you, Richard. I'm proud of you," she tells him, firmly. "You cannot, should not, disregard how much I asked of you tonight. Bearing witness is... harder, in some ways. And I think if you ever give a good death, you will see and feel the difference."
There's a beat of a pause. "I also think that when," she almost says if, but stops herself, because he called her Acarya tonight, and he is no child, "you experience the Agama Te, you will begin to feel it, too.
"That said," Eleanor adds, softer, slipping her hand from her pocket and laying it over his forearm, "it's okay to see death as an ending. But you must remember it is an end. Not the end." Her hand squeezes him there, always so surprisingly strong for how delicate she can seem. "There are also many ways of following the Chodona, Richard. And if your path means that you rarely, if ever, turn the Wheel by killing, it will not change my esteem of you in the slightest."
RichardWhen.
Not if. He doesn't challenge that. He doesn't draw a line in the sand: hey, I haven't decided yet. I never said. I didn't. He doesn't, because it would be false. It would be a lie. On some level, he has decided. Before tonight, before he saw her turn the Wheel, before he called her Acarya, before she told him she thought he was ready: subtly, and perhaps without quite realizing it himself, he crossed a line. Accepted a responsibility. Took on a duty, and embarked on a path.
When. Not if.
He looks at her again, quickly, and with undisguised gratitude, when she tells him that her esteem for him would not change. When she's already told him that she is proud of him, her apprentice. The corners of his mouth, solemn for hours on end now but not truly shaped for that purpose, begin to turn up again.
"Thank you," he says. It is quiet, and it is genuine. Then he takes a breath, shaking his hair out of his eyes as he tips his head back to look at the sky. Releases that breath.
"If it's all right with you," he says, "I might crash on your couch tonight. I'd like to read a little before I sleep. Maybe meditate and ... work through what I saw a little more."
Eleanor YatesThe sincerity of what she says will mean more, she thinks, when he knows more about how she spent her career as a Euthanatos before Henrik died. What she did. How she did it. There are many ways to turn the Wheel. Not all of them are easy for the people who die. He'll understand, but tonight is not the night.
She huffs a soft, small laugh. "There's a guest room in the basement, and a guest room upstairs. You may sleep on the couch if you prefer, but you are welcome to either of the rooms."
Richard"Well," and it is good to find that he can still laugh, and that laughter still comes easily to him, "maybe I'll take one of the guest rooms, then."
He stands. He slips his hands into his pockets, and he smiles down at her. For a moment there is only that smile, mute, encompassing some unnamed interweaving of gratitude and relief and affection and -- though he did not expect it -- a quiet sort of exultation. Then he tips his head car-ward.
"Want to go?"
Eleanor YatesEleanor breathes in deeply, exhales, and nods. She rises after he does, more slowly, slipping both hands from her pockets, walking back across the grass with him. "I may be awake a while, myself," she tells him as they stride through the park.
That's all she says. By now, they are both used to existing in the same space, unspeaking, studying or meditating as they will. But she has a feeling he may want to be alone.
And that is okay, too.
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