Henbane and Hemlock: Silt and Starlight

[Rance]

He angled his finger toward her. She stood staring at him, clutching a blanket clotted in blood like a shawl over her shoulders. Again, this was not the Gloria that he expected: she was an older girl, the skin of her face driven into rippling wrinkles, her hairline peppered with starbursts of gray. "You think I'm still yours? That like some -- some coveted memory, or some worthwhile bauble, you have a right to dictate what value I mean to you?

"If you came here by choice, because you had something you must say, then -- then I implore you to say it, and be gone. Who do you think I am, Elliot Brown? What rules have you broken down recently?"

She was bright, hot, a Glass Sun that had somehow been poured into a bloody, woolen dress, leering back at him down the length of his pointing finger.

Behind him, the Elliot Brown she had formulated whispered to the interloper, "This is not a wall you can shatter with a few well-placed hammer-strikes, yeah? You vanished. She tried to fit herself into your shoes, not for you, not for anyone else, but for her. You're looking to unravel that little pocket of her already-dull mind that tried to keep you safe, secure, and familiar. In a Myrken Wood where minds get altered, broken, and raped, do you think your being here is something she can perceive as anything but a farce, a trickery?

"You're an invader. To her, you're the herald of someone trying to slip into her brain and turn her against herself. You're nothing more than someone's clever apparition. A mind-meddler's fortuitous ruse. She's no Marshall Emory," the shadow said, as if it had tapped into his conscience to draw out the words -- but if this was her dream, what wasn't accessible to her? "She's no Sylvius Duquesne. She's a frightened girl trying to keep herself whole in a world that constantly reminds her that she is wrong."

In a breath of vapor, the echo of a Dream-Elliot vanished, and the intruding image was left to look upon the aged Jerno, surrounded as she was by a thriving corona of poisonous vines and stinking hemlock. She turned down her chin, regarding the tips of her feet as they peered out from beneath her hanging skirts.

"I don't know the -- the laws of this game, the way it's meant to be played," she said. "I simply miss my friend."

(Tennant's touch was a warming balm against her trembling feet. Her toes ground down into the sheets, the edge of an uneven toenail tugging at an errant thread on the bedding. Her head turned, closed eyes trying to angle themselves in the direction of his voice. Lovely, he'd said, and then her name, her name, a comforting and infuriating conflation of ugly sounds with beautiful ones. She knew even in sleep that her name belonged nowhere behind that adjective. He turned to leave. A fortress of shivering fingers clenched her blanket-edge, tugged at it--

Drugged and slumbering, she mumbled vague noises she believed she only said in her dreams.)

"I'm cold," she said, within (and without). The seas fell calm. All went still.

"I hate being alone."

[Glenn]

When you looked at your own reflection, how did you know that was really you? When you saw yourself in a lake, the water rippling, was that how others saw you? If so, why didn't that match up with the image you carried in your own mind? This Elliot, the one behind him, may have well been how he looked to someone else, to everyone else, even, but here, in this nebulous place, the image didn't match up with the one inside his head. In a world that was askew, it was simply askew too. That made it fit in but ultimately stand out.

Still, he listened, because there was wisdom there. He listened to it. He listened to her. She was smarter than him in some real ways. He knew that. The problem was that it was hierarchical. He couldn't word it, but he could feel it. Because he was smarter than her in some very simple ways, the other, more complex and even worldly ways that she was smarter couldn't ever come into play, not really. This bridged the gap, at least a little, whether it came from her or him, or both of them.

The point became a stylized flick of his wrist, and then an outstretched hand; within it was a key. He bent down, inserting it within the foliage and twisting. It began to withdraw. "I can't make it better Gloria. I'm not some stupid hero who saves the day like that. I could pat your shoulder, smile, and tell you that you're a Myrkener now. That you made it. That the place beat and bled it into you. You finally passed the test. Hooray. Maybe that's even true. Maybe it doesn't matter because what you lost is more than what you gained, right? I don't know and I'm not going to do it juts to make you feel better. That would be a lie. I didn't come here to lie to you.

"Which means I have to tell you this, then." He didn't pat her on the shoulder. He just took a step back. "I don't know. You took me to that stump with a plan, remember? You had it all worked out in your head. I didn't. If I'm trying to break into somewhere, I have a plan, maybe. I'm not now. I'm just here. You were a bright light. I don't have any answers or questions for you. I could ask about Niall but I don't think you're the one she'd want me to hear it from. So, you miss your friend and that's all you get right now because you get me for a few moments and maybe a promise for some more but you don't get closure or wisdom or power or confidence or anything like that because you don't, okay? You just don't." And if she looked about, everything would have stopped. The vines had been withdrawing but they were frozen in place now. Even the distant stars' twinkle was caught mid blink. "All you get is me and all I get is you because I'm cold too and I miss everything, too, even Gloria Wynsee, all three of her, so just for this moment, that's what we get."

[Rance]

"I don't want you to make it better," she said. Not as a statement of belligerence or discord, but one of quiet resolve.

He came forward toward her, upturning his hand to reveal the mildewed key in his grasp. To her eyes it was an object of black, pock-marked iron, a Golben-key, a precious heirloom (tucked away in her footlocker, hidden beneath a pair of riding boots and a gaggle of books; these, however, did her little use in the Rememdium). She followed its motion as it thrust itself into the tangles of hemlock. The artifact struck crude, invisible tumblers. The wiry vines began to slither away. Others were overtaken by a rusty brown, and the tiny, aromatic flowers cowered into drooping eyelids.

Elliot Brown always knew how to break in, break out. He was a rogue and she a rhetor -- or they had been, a year ago; they had wanted to be these things, but what had they become when the world's constant, aimless spinning had tossed them like discarded toys onto other avenues, into the pathways of other futures?

All you get is me and all I get is you because I'm cold too and I miss everything, too, even Gloria Wynsee, all three of her, so just for this moment, that's what we get.

The girl closed her eyes. Fast enough, perhaps, to miss the poison branches seized in their withering state. Just long enough to be blind to the blinking, twinkling of dream-stars hanging like holes in the canopy of night above their heads.

("He'll Sing," said the withering, poppy-addled girl against her pillow. Someone had touched her, stirred her, she was cold, frigid, and the desperate leg reached out across a thousand oceans to know those fingers again. "He will Sing, and -- and I didn't even give him a sip of the Black Tea.")

But here again, in a dream upon the seas, lofted on an otherworld Atlas-spine:

"I killed Niall, by Cherny's hand. It was stupidity," she confided, inaccurate words comprised not of truth, but of her remote and buried regret. "I did with her as I needed, to -- to try to awaken you. There were contingencies, means by which to keep her whole. Pass your judgments upon me if you like, but all I did to preserve you was in your interest. No one else except Mister Catch seemed to even care you were gone. Stand steadfast in the wind long enough, Elliot, and -- and you begin to buckle, you begin to wonder if you ought to let it take you. I missed you, still miss you, but..."

She opened her eyes. In her left hand, freed from the hemlock, there was the mirror-edged blade he'd forged her, its crossguard the pewter butt of a broken tankard.

"Your body is no longer yours. It cannot be. Cherny needs that hope as the rest of the world needs breath."

[Glenn]

At some point, you really had to be direct. That was hard in dreams. Amazingly hard. It was one thing for the dreamer, to have your feet on the ground at least, but Elliot Brown hovered and flew. He drifted and darted and made it all seem so effortless. You couldn't even buckle against the wind when you didn't have your feet planted firmly. Dreams were like prophecies. They were rarely to the point. They had rules of their own.

She had asked what he was rebelling against. The answer was the dream itself.

"You can't see what's going on when you're in the middle of it. You just can't. It's all swirling around you and pulling you down. I think you just have to decide who you want to be and then go out and be that person and you can't go back and say it's not that easy because it is even when there are impossible choices and other people to think about. You decide what you you want to be and you be that you and that's all there is to it. Maybe that you is a you that makes a bad choice for someone else. That doesn't make you less of the you. It makes you more of the you because you just value that over something else that you thought might have made you more of a you before."

So that was her, and it was direct, as direct as he had ever gotten in the waking world at least. She was giving him more information now, though, and that was one of the problems with breaking the rules of a dream. The more you did it, the more chance that the dream itself would be broken. You could fight against anything, but you couldn't stay in the dream of someone who was no longer dreaming.

That was her and now it was him. "No one told me anything. Duck Noose said he'd talk to Niall. If she was dead, he wouldn't have said that. You couldn't have done anything to Niall without her wanting you too and Cherny even less. Cherny's stupid anyway. He's a stupid kid and what he needs is what we know. The world is stupid, but in the opposite way of him, and unfair, and wrong and terrible, and it's up to us to squeeze every bit of happiness we can out of it, every bit of safety, every bit that we can. No one else can do it for you. I can't do it for you. You can't do it for me. In the end, you do what you can for him, because that will make you feel best about you, even if it means doing what's worst for me. That is what it is and you are who you are and I'm okay with that. I'm just not okay with you lying to yourself about it, not when it involves me."

[Tolleson]

Someone had touched her, someone had stirred her. And soon, if sensation permeated the viscous fog of drug induced sleep, that someone would hold her. Untangling legs from sheets, sliding an arm behind her neck and under her knees, he lifts her up and steps away from the putrid bed.

She is held close to keep her thrashing at bay and he is warm from the midday sun soaked into his shirt. Perfumed by sweat and wine on his clothes, it is an earthy scent that mingles with the pungent orange and clove that clung to his hair. A nurse came to change the bed and while she did he held Gloria, rotten and stinking, nonsense words escaping.

Nonsense except for the mention of black tea. He looked down at her, he studied her face, he furrowed his brow.

Ripping the sheets away, ripe and stained, her face pulled away only slightly, diligent and with expert motion she cleared the old set. Another minute and her work is done. A hearty slap at the old pillow and she smiled to the red haired man.

Against the sleeping girl’s ear it might be thunder, the low and distant rumble of speech that began in the chest and escaped as words. The words might be unclear but he asked the nurse to lead that they might carry her to the bath.

Perhaps her smile flinched, something small that wished to say, I am busy and haven’t the time for such nonsense. Especially for a man, who had most certainly spent a night at the teahouse and smelled as if he preyed on barmaids most of the night before. An explanation then, a promise of good intention, of only meaning to help – he would carry her and leave her to the care of a nurse.

At least wash her hair, if they hadn’t the time for it.

[Rance]

Me, you, me, you, me, me, you, you, you, me--

She could have built a fortress out of his rambling, implacable slant-words. He may have been Elliot Brown in this place, because this was all Elliot Brown could be. But she was a self-projection, a tangled and corrupt image of herself long past the years of her own inevitable death, a Gloria that was inexplicably exhausted and ill-equipped for reason.

"Stop," she said, a vicious snap of a word that slithered with its first consonant and shattered glass with its last.

The point of the mirror-edged blade lifted, angling itself toward him as if to display the rigid edge.

"This is how they plant their seeds," Gloria said, perhaps more to herself than to him. "They find you when you are vulnerable, ease you into confidence and comfort by giving you something you wish too dearly to have. And then one by one, with swift, directed kicks, they knock the supports out from under your legs and send you sprawling. When you fall -- and you will fall -- you reach out to grasp at a ledge, at the only thing nearby that you can trust.

"That thing, that confidence, that comfort drags you up to safety. They breathe lies into you, fill you so full of deceptions and -- and uncertainties in yourself that your only recourse is to spread wide the legs of your mind and let them rape their false truths into you."

(There were days of ease when her body responded to the treatments, salves, and potions like a child eager to learn its health. And there were other days, too, when the ghostly pains of a once-hand were etched bone-deep and she thrashed, twisted, bucked like an insensible beast against the reality: she had lost a hand, how would she sew, how might she write, how could she embrace. She was a mumbling, poppy-milked wastrel in his arms, clinging at Tennant's collar with what fingers remained on her other hand.

Wake up, wake up, wake up, a breathy, whisper-fine not-voice vibrated in the back of her conscience. It told her they were going to drown her as they dipped her like a child into the bath. In that bleak, shifting limbo that pulsed like mud between sleep and consciousness, she thrashed, throwing out her capable limb as a stone-hard first. She struck at silhouettes, at anything, don't drown me, I hate the water, don't put me in, don't drown me, drown me--)

The silent skies opened with force. Blazing stars were smothered beneath a thunderous torrent, a bath-warm downpour. Her ashy hair became a curtain. The steaming rain smoothed her dress around her midsection. Her belly, in this place, was distended, bulging, unnaturally round: she was so fat, so burdened and pregnant with all the lies, corpulent with the clever ambrosia of mind-meddling words.

"Tell me what you want of me," Gloria Wynsee snarled, before she turned the knife down upon herself and lay its rain-splattered edge against her swollen abdomen. She shouted through the storm, "You are not a creature of sentimentality, nor of emotion or philosophy. All you are is a stupid, ignorant boy, and certainly not one smart enough to -- to cling to minds unless driven by some ulterior force.

"Prove to me in simple words that you are the friend I lost, that we lost. Prove to me you exist, that you are not some farce. Or I leave this place."

And had there been a whip, an a'algazsh, this is the moment when it might have been his to hold.

[Glenn]

Stop, she said. So he stopped. She had more interesting things to say than he did right now. He listened. Then, with some frustration, he would answer.

"I don't know how to get anywhere, Gloria. You're the first person I've seen and I think it's just because you're louder than anyone else and maybe that you hurt more than anyone else. I'm not a moth to a flame, okay? I'm not. I wasn't attracted here. I just couldn't figure out anywhere else to be and maybe I'm not smart enough to latch on or whatever, because if I was, maybe I would have gone somewhere else, to see someone else, and when you wake up soon, and you will wake up soon, I'm going to be gone and you probably won't see me again for a while, but I am stubborn, and I am fierce, and I'm real good at hanging on. Real good."

Annoyance, at her, at her words, at his own reality, at the fact that for Cherny, she would let the farce go on forever. She claimed to have put Niall at risk, to use Cherny to do so, and that annoyed him too. His body started to ripple slightly, first from the rain and then as he started to show agitating, this way and that, slight movements that danced him between the rain drops. She got wet. He did not.

"I told you I thought of that. It's stupid. Any secret I could tell you that you told me could come from your own brain. Anything that you didn't know could just be you putting things together. You want something that I'd tell you that no one else would? Fine. I don't care what you believe, okay? That's what I'm telling you. I'm here. You want to let me help, I'll help. You want to keep being stupid, keep being stupid. I don't care. You're lonely. I'm lonely. At least of the two of us, you can wake up. Then you have to live with everything, though." Including the fact that she'd forever choose Cherny over him. Including a thousand things. "Maybe I'm here to help give you a chance. I can't do that if you don't want it or feel like you deserve it though."

[Rance]

At least of the two of us, you can wake up.

And if ever there was a hammer to all this glass, these cleverly-gleaming mirrors, this smoke of a dream--

--it was that, for should a dreamer know she dreamed, could she continue to dream? When the abyss was no longer an abyss, but a falsification, the mind rebelled, the synapses siezed, fired, flailed with wild abandon at the ever-weak seams that separated the real from the imagined.

"The things I've done, Elliot, to secure my humanity, to -- to ensure my own rightness, that I would never wish upon anyone. I am lonely because I have stomped holes through every bridge I've ever sought to construct. You know only a fraction of it, and only you are so wonderfully, stubbornly stupid to think the girl you found here was the same girl you knew a half-year ago.

"I'm sorry to say she's not. I'm sorry to say that I hate her."

Dreams were often a place for truths the mind could not bear to manifest.

The blade-edge turned into mercury and spattered with the rain down the front of her dress. She started to stumble, stagger, as the floorboards of the ship bent like satin ribbons underneath her feet. He was the only fixture here, the sure and reliable constant; he was, as Elliot Brown had always been, a beacon. He was the brightly-burning quicklime that invited weary travelers and then mutilated their minds with their own flaws, their backward logic, their inverted philosophies. She was that too -- for him. Or could be. Wanted to be, even if he was a lie.

"I want a chance," she said over the gale. "I want to give you one, too. And should you ever find that -- that you can wake from this place, I dread the moment when you find out what a beast I've become. She's an ugly girl, Elliot Brown, who shreds and bludgeons until her friends show her how much they love by -- by forgiving her, time and time again. The most horrible part of it all is that she thinks she does deserve those second, third, fourth, and fifth chances.

"But I can only lie to myself so many times."

A blink. A rush of warm sea-water.

(Her eyes snapped open.)

And in the little tendrils of the dream that remained in the vortex of her
thoughts, tangled, drugged, and addled as they were, disembodied
Elliot Brown might have discovered the last vestige of her
that dared to remain, that left itself behind in this,
his not-his-world that was not his world.
A severed silver hand, bleeding
on the planks. In its fingers
two tiny objects: one, an
ornate hairpin bearing
a thumb-sized stone
that gleamed like
a dream-witch's
all-seeing
eye.

And the other--
A lump of coal for burning bodies.
Like a shell plucked from the sea it mumbled in his ear,
You aren't alone.

It never stopped whispering.

[Tolleson]

Blood had dropped. Blood had splattered. It had trickled hot and in a bright line down the gutter of her clavicle to pool in the valley between her breasts. How he had held her, gravity had taken care to deliver it there, perhaps further.

No longer in Tennant’s arms, the cooled drying blood was wiped with a warm, damp cloth.

Were she to wake now, it is the dim purple of twilight that shines behind the thin fabric of the closed curtains. The air is cool and moist, bed freshly made with a cheerfully flickering candle at her beside. The lamps of the hallway are lit and the nurse is leaving, her words are muted at the door where a familiar voice offers thanks.

She is clean, wounds dressed, her hair, even her remaining fingers and toes were scrubbed. Every bit of her washed, dried, and smelling faintly of roses from the scented water. Even the clothes she wears, though not her own, are clean. A modest, white bed gown with small orange flowers embroidered along the neck. It is a bit too large, but leaves her plenty of room to thrash about.

Orange and clove is at her bedside again, the reek of alcohol burned off. He’ll slide into the chair fitted to his posterior and over the purple, bruised bridge of his nose peer at the no longer sleeping girl.

[Rance]

For the most part, she was capable -- and the attendants at the Rememdium knew as much.

She had exhibited bursts of mobility, hours in which she shifted between seat and bed, seat and bed, trying to find a comfortable position in which to read or practice writing with her unfamiliar right hand; others days, however, were this: she was a withered girl whose body had refused to remember how strong it could be, who left herself at the whims of wellsmiths who might bathe and preen her. Some days she would stare as though she could see through the walls, absorbed in some tunnel of thought from which she refused to escape.

They kept her not on account of her occasional mania and self-inflicted catatonia; no, they kept her because beneath that wild twist of oft-freshened bandages, the flesh constantly dared to go yellow and black, to subject itself to putrefaction. The air might get in, wither her skin; infection might find her veins and crawl to the elbow and beyond--

Elliot...?

Her free hand lifted from beneath the blankets. The pads of her fingers touched with a dreamy curiosity across the orange blossoms embroidered into this other woman's gown. She shifted her legs, still trying to readjust her balance to the flatness of the world. In this bed, she would will away the seasickness; in this bed, she would keep being stupid, lose herself in fancies of dead boys and old friends...

"Does it hurt," she asked Tennnat of his nose, because she knew, she knew. "Do you hate me for it?"

(Had it been a dream, that ship, that void-and-darkness, that loping back-and-forth sway on the spine of a beast beneath the sea? And his words, his annoyance and arrogance, some invader in her mind that she hoped might return--)

Finally, she twisted in the bed, curling into a deflated mass beneath the linens. Her gaze never fell away from Tennant -- when had he gotten there, how long had he been there, had he seen her skin, had he seen all of it -- and she watched him with all the intensity of an unblinking falcon, her cheek crushed against the hay-stuffed bedding and the edge of the coverlet drawn like a fabric gorget around her throat. Her words were sour-breathed poisons against the pillow-side.

"I let him thread the eye of my needle."

[Tolleson]

The attendants at the Rememdium had known Gloria was stubborn and feisty and probably wouldn’t have gone within 10 feet of her if it hadn’t been for a very adamant and generally sweet, redheaded young man. Of course, that wasn’t entirely true, but he had brought her fresh gown and wouldn’t see it soiled so immediately.

“It does and I do,” he smiled beneath the broken nose, but it was not the smile of malice or spite. “Apparently, you still don’t trust that I will save you from sinking,” a small grin in recollection of her fiction, though he spoke it with certainty.

His eyes followed hers, smiling as he was. He didn’t draw nearer or pull away, he had been there all day, though a great deal more sober now.

“You let who do what, now?”

[Rance]

He smiled. His face was a battered mess. Beneath the blanket-edge her knuckle still bore the mark of his tooth where it'd caught the edge of an incisor in its wild, upward swing.

"I am sorry," she said, such common words as of late. "I am. And Elliot won't stop talking to me. He's dead, and yet he won't stop talking."

Apparently, you still don’t trust that I will save you from sinking.

(And the milk-white blindness that a touch from the poppy could bring, it could turn one's eyes into the pearls of a cobra, lend a tongue veracity, for how could one balance in this swaying world without snapping her tongue out to latch onto emotions and impulse likes scaffolds that would keep her from tumbling into sleep--)

"Drowning can happen without water," the girl said. "I scrape at anything, everything to -- to show you how I feel. I think about the wine and our dinner, I think about the hanging-tree, it stays in my head and I just keep doing stupid things, just stupid, idiotic things. And right before I go to sleep I compose stories in my head, live out fantasies with my fingers, and you're in all of them. You're in every one of them.

"But what am I supposed to do now, Tennant? What am I supposed to do with my fingers when I've barely got any?"

Her dry lips pursed, pressed together, instantly regretful of the words and secrets. She held her remaining palm against the socket of one of her eyes, scratched her blunted fingernails into her hairline. A tear dangled like a quivering jewel off the edge of one nostril, threatening to fall but never having the bravery to do so.

I'd b-break the nose of anyone who c-called you a whore, Cherny had said. So m-mind what you say.

(But just this once; just this once, it'd be so true.)

"I put my knees inside his. Some part of my brain wanted to know what -- what it was like to be a woman. I hurt him so much, and I didn't realize it. I despise me too; I repulse myself. But you -- you think whores are very fine, don't you," she asked. "Does that mean you can think I am very fine, now?"

[Tolleson]

“No need to be sorry, lovely Gloria. If anything it’ll only help my reputation,” not that he needed any help in that regard. Had he even bought the nightgown she now wore?

He sucked at the freshly forming scab on lower lip as she went on, talking in circles about strange things. “As much as it pains me to say, Ser Elliot is alive and well,” the knight of course. Despite their similar occupations, he and the former Elliot got along about as well as the thief and the knight. At least the knight wasn’t nearly as rude.

To Gloria’s admission about her rather racy sounding dreams he is at first surprised, but a sweet, devilish grin overcomes him as he shrugs. “Fingers are not the only things that feel,” he is laughing but it is not kind and he quickly puts it to an end.

Her lips are dry and the pursing calls attention to it. While she scratches her head he digs through his pockets, emptying a few items on the bed in a spread, several rolled smokes, a folded corkscrew, and a few small tins. One of them is opened and on his index finger he gathers a thin coat of salve. It’s mostly oil, a greasy beeswax balm, speckled green by fine bits of crushed mint leaf.

She finished talking and he didn’t seem to give a damn about whatever the words are, his hand is poised above her face, his finger to spread the salve on her lips.

“I have always thought you were very fine, lovely Gloria,” but as he pulls away the knuckle of his index finger will catch her tear and his expression will show concern. He seemed to understand what she was saying, even if as ramblings went, it was quite the jumble. He, he who? When had this happened? Why tell him now? For the time, there was only one question that mattered.

“He didn’t force you, did he?”

[Rance]

He was always a wall.

Had she not thrown things at him, ideas and proclivities and attraction, like so many daggers in the past? And here, twisted like some invalid beneath the sheets, perhaps she still expected one might land -- thunk! -- into the oak of his frame right in front of his heart; he would be remiss to deny her advances. And how fetching she thought him, how blisteringly, frustratingly intriguing, that she wished she could will to mind all the talents Veteran Arkessa had suggested she bear.

But instead, because his words deflated her, she lay as still as a chiseled stone as he touched the cooling salve to her lips. His knuckles smelled of stale smoke and the oily odor of wine. Her tear had left a glistening trail along his fingerside.

"Elliot was -- was in your dreams too?" she asked. "On a ship? He came to me while I slept; he was like he was, stalwart and aggravating and senseless, like I remember him. But I could have touched him he was so near, Tennant. He was alone--"

(He laughed and it was sometimes like a spell; she hated that it was like a spell, that he could bend her mind to be calm with him because he always seemed so perfect and his hair was like the Sun and he called her lovely and the two- (was it three?) syllable word made her feel like such a beautiful beam of brightness.)

She dug her elbows into the bed. She lifted herself up, the blankets spread like a tent around her arched legs. "No," she said. "No, he didn't force me. It wasn't his fault; it wasn't Catch's fault.

"I forced him," Gloria said. Her voice became more rapid, sounds spilling out of her with confessional velocity until (By the Nameless, stop crying, you broke him, you broke him) there were more tears than Tennant had fingers, and-- "Try as I can to find one, there's no excuse, there is nothing in it except cruelty. My body demanded and my mind knew it was wrong. I asked him, might you thread the eye of my needle and he said yes, not because he wished it, but because he must, he must, and I wanted him to hold me. Every one else has got sweet-hearts so why not me, if -- if I am so fucking lovely? He was frightened," she said, and then:

"I cannot take it back."

[Tolleson]

He was tall, like a wall. He was solidly built, like a wall. But there is little else wall-like to him, his morality wavered like a reed in the wind, his chivalry and manners present but purposeful. Perhaps he was the shadow of the wall, appearing solid but ever changing, hiding, vanishing.

“He was not,” last he had heard, and not that he had cared, the knight, Ser Elliot was here in the Rememdium. “That does sound like him though, but to dream of him; perhaps it is Elliot, you truly fancy,” he grinned, wiping the rest of the salve from his finger upon his own lips and screwing tight the tin’s lid.

He pressed his lips, rubbing the salve between them, covering both top and bottom. When she sits up he is a little surprised, a little worried. He let her go one with her rapid confession, her earnest grief. Better to let her continue that try to knock her back down into the bed to rest.

“Catch?” a brow is lifted, echoing the name before she spilled into tears.

“Oh, hush now, lovely Gloria,” two syllables, one arm around her, and one hand held her head, fingers in her hair. He was sitting on the bed with no mind for whatever contents of his pockets he crushed. He was quick and gentle, catching her, and holding her to him. Could she even pull away?

“Hush,” he cooed, his voice becoming a whisper. “You’re young and lust for a man, for love,” he pulled away with a plain look, “apologize to him.” There was nothing more to say about lovers, he had no sweetheart and he wouldn’t tell her that she could take it back. Simply, that she would have to confront her wrong-doing if ever she hoped to feel peace.

“I was young once too and wished like hell to lay with a woman, but it made her no more a woman and I, no more a man. Just two foolish children giving into misunderstood urges.” Perhaps that was how he saw Gloria, just a child, still several years younger but with so much growing between them.