returned to the path.

Richard

Summer is days away, and it's still light out when Eleanor and her apprentice step out of the Frank H. Ricketson Jr. Law Building. When the weather is inclement she seems to drive to work more often, but on a lovely day like this a mile-and-change isn't too far to walk.

For his part, Richard has his bike -- an extra-large-framed, 29"-wheeled, ultra-lightweight that he bungee-cords his backpack to. Unlocking it from the rack, he pushes it along with thoughtless one-handed familiarity. There's something soothing, he thinks, about the precise and crisp ratcheting of the bike's freewheel as they stroll homeward.

Eleanor's home, that is -- though with all the time he spends there, it is beginning to feel more and more like a second home to Richard. They cross the quad in companionable silence, the apprentice's stride long and easy. Richard walks with his free hand relaxed in the pocket of his jeans, his head high so he can enjoy the breeze.

"I liked him," he says after a little while. "Elijah, I mean. Do you think he'll become your apprentice?"

Eleanor Yates

Elijah leaves after the madcap weather of the evening has passed. Stormclouds have cleared and given a golden but eerie light back to the wet, ice-cluttered world. Leaves were torn from twigs and lay plastered to the sidewalk and the sides of buildings and the tops and windshields of cars. Eleanor has finished her tea and rinsed out the mug in the lounge but when she comes back to her office she stands there a moment, looking out the window, considering something.

Nothing particularly profound; she's just trying to decide if it's worth staying here and finishing up some work and risking getting caught in another downpour or taking it home. It's not a very in-depth decision to make, and she makes it easily, but for a few seconds she is just looking out the window, and when she is done, she gives a long sigh.

They leave, and she locks up, and they begin walking. They will pass down University, still busy, under the overpass and past the police station and into a tree-lush residential area. They will pass the Korean church. They will not keep walking all the way up to Bonnie Brae to get ice cream, though they have walked from her house to that little corner shop on a few occasions in the past. Nor will they walk a bit farther to Washington Park and stroll around one of the little lakes therein, though they have done this as well. They will turn right and walk through houses that run the gamut from miniature new-build mansions to tiny and aging ranch homes, boxy modern houses and 'Tuscan' style houses and houses overgrown with trees and madcap gardens. Then up her street, familiar. Then up the steps to her lawn, her porch, the dark door to her pale house. Maybe, if the storm doesn't come back, they will build a fire out in the pit in the back yard and dry off patio furniture to sit and watch it burn.

If Richard is beginning to feel that her house is a second home to him, perhaps he would not be so surprised to find that Eleanor already considers it so: she is never surprised when he shows up there, never put off, even if it's very late, very early. She does not grill him on where he's been or when he'll be around: he has a key. He knows her schedule. He knows where she keeps the extra toilet paper and what day they pick up recycling and which day she parks on the other side of the street because of the sweepers. He knows what it looks like in spring, and summer, and fall, and winter. He knows how to use the remote, which perhaps holds the greatest significance.

Eleanor is thinking about these things in time with the clicking rhythm of Richard's bicycle as they walk away from the building. He walks slowly beside her, because he must: if he doesn't caution his steps, the sheer length of his stride puts him ahead of her without effort. For what it's worth: Eleanor lengthens her own stride, which is hardly stubby to begin with, but does not hurry. They walk together often. They have a feel for their own rhythm, the cadence of each other's footfalls.

"He's likable," she agrees, or... states. Eleanor does not know yet if she likes him, and is not withholding her liking of him so much as she is trying not to prematurely perjure herself by saying something that may only be true as long as she remains somewhat ignorant. She does think he's likable. But she has only met him twice.

When Richard asks about apprenticeship, though, she lifts her eyebrows, looking over and up at him. He is, thankfully, walking to her right side, and looking up at him does not also include looking up into the lowering sun. "I don't know," which is the simplest version of an honest answer. "When we met, I told him I was a Euthanatos, and he didn't know what that meant. I recited to him the first law of the Chodona and he asked if we could talk again." She is looking forward now, speaking thoughtfully. "He's eager to learn. He wants to live fully. He wants to help people."

Eleanor goes quiet a moment. She inhales deeply, richly of the smell of the neighborhood, the grass, the turned earth. But really: they will leave DU's manicured lawns soon and pass through the shops -- the Renegade pub, Mustard's Last Stand, Bruegger's Bagels, the yogurt place, the convenience store -- and into concrete before they will walk back up into the residences of University Park. She speaks again, after she exhales:

"I don't think he would make a bad apprentice, no."

Richard

"But you're not sure he'd make a good one yet, either?"

Richard is smiling at her. He is smiling at her from that absurd height of his, his hand now planted on the seat of the bike. It's a small feat of balance and dexterity to keep the bike going straight like this, but he manages.

"When did you decide I'd make a good apprentice?"

Eleanor Yates

That garners a wry side-smile from Eleanor. "No, I'm not," she says, because she has no reason that she can think of to hedge or lie with Richard. He knows the difference between get that Elijah brat out of my face and maybe. maybe not.

He asks a follow-up question, however, that has nothing at all to do with Elijah. It's about Richard himself, and Eleanor herself, and what evolved between them from that first time he followed her to her office until this afternoon, walking down a sidewalk with his hand on his bicycle and their mis-matched strides somehow keeping pace. She thinks for a while, before she attempts to answer.

"There wasn't a singular moment." This is how she begins. "I had a good opinion of you from the beginning, but I tried not to look too far ahead of where we were in the moment, particularly because I didn't want you to be swayed toward a path that was not naturally your own. There are Traditions that I think apprentices and students can be molded to. To be a Euthanatos, I think the seed of what we are needs to be there from the start. Sometimes, even if the seed is there -- as it was with you, and as I think it is with Elijah -- it might blossom into something else entirely."

She looks at him again as they stroll. "You were eager to learn. You had a desire to give, but not control. An inclination to turning the wheel, but not a passion for violence. A wish for deeper understanding. You were not running from something, only seeking. There were many things that made me think. But even now, I don't think it is something I decided. It is only something I considered, then recognized, then accepted."

Richard

Richard did not ask what he did to fish for praise, and strictly speaking it is not praise Eleanor offers him. It is a statement of truth. It is an accounting of fact.

All the same, we would be lying to say he isn't pleased. That he doesn't flush a little, happily; that he doesn't grin at her in wordless fondness. In the place of anything he might have said, he simply allows his path to deviate just enough that his shoulder bumps hers; leans into hers for a moment.

And also this:

"Thank you." Quietly; almost soft. "It's hard for me to imagine the path I might have taken without you. Or just myself, without you."

Pause. "I suppose you're about to tell me that's because I was fated to meet you," he adds, and the smile is back: wry but broad as ever.

Eleanor Yates

Richard is ridiculously tall. Eleanor is of average height. When he bumps into her, leans into her, it's strangely primitive, the way children and animals might try to show affection without words, without fine motor control. Given that Richard is not only an adult human being but a startlingly intelligent one and one in tune with every atom of his physical presence, this bump-and-lean makes Eleanor laugh. It is a good enough day that she can laugh; she woke up today feeling like a normal human being, not set apart from the rest of humanity by her grief. Today she is human, she feels, she understands, she connects, she laughs.

"I was not looking for you," is the way she answers this. She gives a little shake of her head. They talk louder; they are passed by cars, there are cars overhead. They are in shadow before they are in light again. Everything is cyclical, thus. "I never expected to take on any apprentice in my life. But I didn't expect to become a professor."

Eleanor quiets there for a moment. They both know the truth here, too: frankly put, just a few years into her Awakened life, Eleanor did not expect to live past the age of thirty. She takes a breath.

"Fate, like gravity, can be disrupted in a number of ways," she says. Maybe they were fated to meet. Maybe that fate only came into being because Henrik so profoundly undid a fate she has lived over and over, generations upon generations, for perhaps countless lives. Or maybe it was never her fate: maybe it was a curse, is a curse. Maybe her true fate has always been something else, callously and repeatedly interrupted. She thinks these things. She mulls them over, exhales, because they are heavy thoughts.

Not ones she has not had before, but until this conversation she hasn't really connected them to her relationship with Richard.

"My lives have followed the same pattern many times over. I die in decades. But I don't know when that began, or if it has always been so since the inception of my atman. Now that it has been changed, in this lifetime, I don't know what it means. And now I am thinking: perhaps we were fated to meet. Perhaps we have been fated to meet in other lifetimes and have been blocked." Eleanor closes her eyes, opens them as they walk. She looks over at him. "I am very glad we are walking together," she says,

and does not mean walking together on the way home. She is talking about paths. She gives him a small smile. "I was not looking for this, and never expected it, but now that we're here it does feel as though it was fated. I only wish you could have met Henrik." There is another pause, and even though those words ached, these are made from hope: "Perhaps you will."

Richard

I am very glad, she says, and Richard feels the echo of those words, that sentiment, as though it were his own. It is his own. It resonates from her into him and back, as though they indeed were fated to meet. Always were fated to meet. As though their souls, too, are linked in some way -- some smaller, frailer way than the bonds that tied Eleanor to Henrik, yes, but:

linked, nonetheless.

His answer: again, nonverbal. Eleanor's apprentice is not a foolish man; he is not a mindless imbecile. But he is, first though perhaps not foremost, an athlete. A physical creature. A man attuned with his body, his muscle and sinew and bone. Times like this, it seems easier not to speak. To not try to put his feelings into words, though if pressed he could do so. This is easier, though: to wrap his arm around his acarya's shoulders; to squeeze her in a sideways hug, firm, almost fierce.

"Perhaps I will," he echoes; that is what he comes up with in the end. Says it because it is true. Says it because she said it best. "And I think... if the pattern of your life could have been changed, then perhaps it wasn't written into the very fiber of your atman. Because then I suspect no one, not even your soulmate, could have changed it. Not without undoing everything that you are, everything your soul is.

"And you're obviously not undone," he adds, smiling. "So; I don't know what any of it means either. But I think I'm going to choose to believe that we were fated to meet, and maybe Henrik just returned you to this path that you walk now. With me."

Eleanor Yates

Something about that connection with Henrik -- and not just Henrik, but the faceless, hateful third -- burns. Burns so bright that almost everything else is impossible to see: they are not just shadows but they are blotted out entirely by white hot shining. It has encompassed her existence for who knows how many iterations of her soul.

That does not mean that these are the only links she has forged in all of her lives. That does not mean that every new meeting she has in this life is, in fact, truly a new meeting. Some things resonate: a young mage who looks the way he looks, whose magic is so similar to her own but so very, very different, whose path is not the martial one she set upon and has deviated from. Another, even newer will-worker, who feels a bit like the hurricane that so disrupts the sea, sunders what it touches, roars in chaotic spirals.

All these things feel familiar. She needs no explanation for why she loves life and loves this world: she has been upon it so many times, she has come to know it so well, and it is all familiar to her. The sun and moon and stars are like old friends by now.

Still walking, Richard puts his arm around her. It's awkward, simply because of the height difference. It is utterly natural: they do not miss a beat, miss a step, as though they do this all the time, which they do not. Richard's inclination to be physically demonstrative is matched by Eleanor's disinclination towards it, but this is only further evidence of what he means to her: it seems quite natural, quite easy, for her to accept contact like this from him. And even give it back. As she does, touching her head to his side for a moment in answer to that ferocious side-hug.

perhaps it wasn't written into the very fiber of your atman

This is true, what he says. She is glad he says it, because she did not want to keep talking about herself, to go on and on about her own thoughts. He sees he when she is working on this problem: the books she reads, the journals, the way once, when it was Not A Good Day, he found her sitting in her home office, face in her hands, sobbing as quietly as she can because she knew he was nearby. It occupies her dreams, her free thoughts. She keeps busy, she meditates, she clears her mind as best she can, but this is what lives there, always returning: she was supposed to die that day. Henrik died instead. She murdered, and grotesquely. She doesn't know why any of these things happened, keep happening, will likely happen again if she can't figure out a way to stop it.

Killing doesn't stop it. Killing only begins it anew.

But maybe: it is not inherent to her. It is not a part of who she is, who Henrik was and is. If it was, it could not have been changed. He doesn't think so, at least,

and she is inclined to agree.

Eleanor's eyes are darkened with remembered grief, with discomfort, but she doesn't retreat from the conversation. She can deal with pain. She knows better than many that it is possible to live with pain, even great pain. She also knows that they are willworkers. That she remembers the denial of fear, the control of panic, better than she ever remembers the fear itself, the terror itself. They make their reality. They can share that reality with others. This is the great gift. This is what it means to be Awakened.

He chooses to believe.

But it's the words just after that, about Henrik's sacrifice and what that permitted, that makes Eleanor's steps falter slightly. Tears come suddenly and hotly to her eyes. She reaches up, putting her hand over her mouth. Her torso has concaved slightly, as though she's been struck. And indeed it looks so, the way her other arm crosses thoughtlessly over her stomach.

Richard

Those were careless words.

He sees that now. It's not that they were callous words, or harsh words, or perhaps even untrue words. It's that they were careless; unconsidered, in the way children will sometimes blurt things that are on their mind.

He is not a child. He didn't mean to be careless either -- he would never mean to do such a thing -- but he has been careless. He has forgotten that what is for him ancient history, and history he was not even and not ever a part of, was for her something terrible and soul-scarring and indelible. Ever-present. A shadow that haunts her every waking moment, that sometimes, quite out of the blue, will render her very nearly incapable of going on.

She falters. He stops. She is a step behind, then a step ahead, then his arm around her shoulders becomes a hand on her shoulder, warm and concerned. He looks into her face, his forehead going into furrows.

"I'm sorry," he says quietly. "I shouldn't have said that so -- so casually."

Eleanor Yates

Not careless. Not heartless. Profound. Frightening. Hopeful. Painful. Maybe he didn't think too hard before he said them, and maybe there was some element of callousness -- at least among sleepers, it would have been. Henrik has not been dead very long, not really. Eleanor is a Euthanatos, though: death is only an end, not the end. She will see him again. He has been or will be reborn. She, for what it is worth, doesn't think Richard was careless or callous.

Just thoughtful, and optimistic, and permitting his mind to expand and wander in her presence. Which are all reasons why she is so fond of him, so approving. All reasons why he is her apprentice.

That is to say: she forgives him instantly, a hair's breadth after the sin is done. It does not even pass her notice but that it is already forgiven. Even if it was terrible, soul-scarring, indelible, haunting.

--

Richard stops with her. Moves his hand to her shoulder, which would seem odd to many that he might withdraw his touch a bit rather than glomp her up and say sorry sorry sorry. But this is what he knows of Eleanor: she might not be able to bear a hug right now. She might hold onto him the way she did that one afternoon, sobbing into his shirt. It is best to put his hand on her shoulder like that, to wait, when he sees her look so stricken.

She shakes her head, closing her eyes, breathing in sharply and lowering her hand. "It's all right," she says, because it is. To her, it is. With him, it is. And also truthfully: "I forgive you." This, she has learned, after so many Good Deaths and many that weren't and endless nights of her own self-torment, is important to say.

Eleanor places a hand on his arm, exhaling slowly as though recovering from a severe dizzy spell. "It's just that I think... it's very possible that you're right. I hadn't quite thought of it that way, though, and... it makes me very sad. And grateful. And..."

She has to look for this word to describe what it is she feels. It's rising up in her like fire, like an eruption, like something alive and dynamic and --

"-- fierce."

Richard

Fierce.

Though that furrow remains in his brow, there's a small smile living in the corners of his mouth. Eleanor covers his arm with her hand. Richard covers her hand with his. Like so, physically, they echo and reaffirm that bond between them.

"Fierce," he repeats, softly; to take the concept into his own mind, and to agree with it. He does agree with it. He does understand it, even. Imperfectly, perhaps -- but instinctually. He thinks he gets it, that sense of strength, of purpose, of will, that might come from knowing -- thinking -- believing that her path wasn't meant to end there after all. That all along, her path was meant to continue on, to entwine with other paths, to fork and branch and reunite. To endure, and perhaps to flourish.

His hand squeezes her shoulder. Then it drops away, and he takes his place beside her again, walking with her when she is ready to move once more.

"I'm grateful too," he adds. "To Henrik, for doing what he did. And to you, for going on."

Eleanor Yates

Richard has, perhaps thankfully, not seen Eleanor at her most... well. Frightening. He has seen her kill, but while there was so much iron will in that, there was also compassion. There was mercy. There was a strange gentleness in the way she helped Billy end a life that had grown stagnant and was infecting others with torpor. He has not seen her stand up, enchanting bullets in an already loaded gun even as she's getting to her feet, aiming, firing, taking something down. Has not seen her do that another human being, even a possessed and murderous human being with their soul being turned inside out. He never saw, hopefully has never imagined, what she looked like when she screamed at Henrik's killer and willed the flesh to melt from his bones, turned his bones to ash, tore his soul from what was left of his body.

She has ferocity in her. Not always that rage, not a core of it, but there is strength there. And it is fierce.

Eleanor turns to him a little, even as he's dropping his hand, and wraps her arms around his waist. They are still close enough to the school that really, she would normally not do this. People who matter to both his academic future and her career would talk, and the things they would say would also matter, and she knows it would anger her beyond reason. But she hugs him anyway. She says nothing, but perhaps Richard -- physical, attuned Richard -- can translate for himself what she means.

Richard

This is not so rare that Richard is shocked or startled, but still uncommon enough that every time he feels a little glimmer of happy surprise. There's no flinch in him, though. He hugs her back. The necessity of keeping his bike upright means he only has one arm to spare, but that long arm wraps tightly around her. He laughs a little, quietly, from the simple joy of the moment.

It is a tight hug, and it goes on for a while. Nevermind that they're still close to campus. Nevermind what People Might Say. He hugs his acarya, near and dear, his eyes closing to enjoy the mammalian comfort of human closeness.

A little later, when they have parted again, Richard lifts his head and looks ahead at the tree-lined streets. "What do you say we go get some groceries," he suggests, "and make veggieburgers tonight?"

Eleanor Yates

He can put his chin atop her head easily. He probably doesn't.

They hug, and it does go on some time, because Eleanor needs a moment to re-center. But more than that moment and she will begin to remember one of the only other people that was not immediate family to her with whom she felt the ability to be close, to be familiar. And he was also very tall, with broad shoulders and broad chest. It isn't lust she's afraid of feeling; it's memories she is afraid of tying, needlessly, to the wrong anchor.

They do part, and she exhales a dry laugh. There is a Safeway quite close to her house: a few more minutes, if that, from the path they're already on. They'll circle back. "Sweet potato fries," she adds, and he already knows they will have avocados with the black bean burgers and sweet potato fries and, quite possibly, a couple of beers out by the fire pit.

"Sounds like a plan."