Memories and a Harvest Pie

[Glenn]

She was still living. His excuse was better. They'd both been through unnatural experiences; more accurately, unnatural experiences had been through with him. If he had any sort of job or duty or mandate, it was to forget. Hers was to remember, to honor, to make sure it was all worth it. He could do nothing of worth, nothing of value. He was worthless. His value was past tense. His currency was all spent, twiceover even.

"As Inquisitors go, you are one." There was nothing quite like a tortured, parched rasp to accentuate such an annoying declarative statement. "A blunt hammer and hammers are only as effective as their swingers, no, their wielders," he amended, playing with a language that hadn't been his own even in life, "wielders are dedicated. A hammer held back never secured a nail or shattered a bone or pounded out a truth. If you wanted to know your father's name, you'd know it. You prefer the absence."

It was a dangerous thing to say to one so good at wielding bluntness, figuratively and literally, but then he was already dead which provided a certain sort of freedom. "I had a tutor. He taught me of power and pressure and leverage. I had a father too but he taught me more of women, wine, and song. Mostly women." The rasp turned to a barking laugh. That was possible even if a spit was not. "And a mother that taught me just enough about the violence of consequence, the consequence of violence?" The statement turned into a question for he wasn't sure which of the two it was. "The tutor had tutored them both. Three disappointments, I think. Maybe he was not a very good tutor, no?"

[Rance]

Maybe it was this place that muted the responses, or sucked the aggression out of the air: it would have been exhausting to be angry at an observation so true. "I do prefer it. And if still he lives — which I highly doubt, given Jernoah's brutality — he'd either love me more fiercely than I could ever imagine, or detest what I've become. I'd be able to bear neither of them."

Strangely, it was nice to hear him laugh. It was what shook the death out of him. He seemed, for a few moments, alive — or a counterfeit of it, a clever ruse created against the backdrop of dull colors and old memories. In life, she'd hated Giuseppe Chiavari; now, though, that was so many years ago, so many miles, so many steps ago, everything about him had lost its luster. When he mentioned his tutor, her mind flashed briefly back to Sylvius: a man who been her instructor, her teacher, her friend. Trying to imagine Giuseppe as a fledgling in the custody and responsibility of someone else became increasingly comical. Hadn't he just leaped, fully-formed, into this life, as crude and as cruel as he'd ever been?

"Or he was too good," she reasoned. "Good enough to shape not just you, but your whole family into acts of civil disservice. Please tell me this story ends in you finding a way to outwit him, or — or run him through in his sleep. It wouldn't be anything like the you I came to know if it ended in some other fashion."

There was some morsel of this mention of ending, of killing, that seemed to pull the color out of her cheeks, and she stared down at the ground where her own saliva still glistened.

"All the things you did when you were alive, I could almost forgive them. Because now, I think, I understand their utility. At least to a certain degree.

"But what you did to Genny," Gloria said, the line of her lips hard as stone. "You tell me: Do I let it go as easily?"

[Glenn]

"No, no, nothing like that. I fell in love and was a disappointment to everyone." And now, even as this half creature, he was able to look disappointed at her. "Wynsee, it's almost never a straight line, not with anyone interesting. You're a straight line, though, aren't you? At least until you got here. This place ah, what is the word," and to say he struggled would have been a falsehood for he was not capable of such things anymore, but it did take time, "refracts, a large word, a scientific one, yes? It refracts, but only in the stupidest, most ridiculous ways."

He did not bark out another laugh though, not yet. Not so soon to the mention of love? "I was sent away to do better. I did worse. So it goes. I did well enough here, though. There are certain, shall we say, experiments, that can only be done when there's a madman in power. Magic spoils the mix, you see, but it was interesting enough, I'm sure. They would have seen my death worth it. My unlife too, for it gave it all just a bit more time."

Which brought him to that laugh, that second laugh, as she brought up the Tolleson girl. "Genevieve, Wynsee? Out of all of them, out of all of you, she's the only one I did well by. You have to forgive it, you hagged grumpy lump, for it was the only thing with good intentions! There's a whole wide world to blame for that, then, not poor Giuseppe, dead twice over."