IC Inbox

[ninefox]

Comments

[magician_king]

Maybe.

If you remember this, know I'm out here thinking that with all my heart though.

[ninefox]

Thank you.

[magician_king]

No, it's the least I can do.

[ninefox]

Does it bother you that I feel gratitude for what you consider a small thing, or that I'm expressing it?

[magician_king]

I think it bothers me that you don't know that it's something the universe owes you, just a drop in the bucket of the massive cosmic debt of good things that you should be owed. Like, you shouldn't thank me, you should be railing at me for not being able to make things close to right.

[ninefox]

I'm not thanking you because of what I think I'm owed or not owed by you or the world or anybody.

I'm thanking you because it makes me happy.

[magician_king]

Really?

[ninefox]

Yes.

I may be ambivalent about being saved, but I like being cared about.

[magician_king]

Well, that is something I can give you, unreservedly.

[ninefox]

I haven't had it a lot. I thought

[There's a pause where he reconsiders whatever he'd been about to say.]



It's heartening.

[magician_king]

Then thank you too.

[ninefox]

Earlier you said you wanted to give me books.

[magician_king]

Oh okay yeah let me come find you?

[ninefox]

I'm in Jedao's cabin.

[magician_king]

A few minutes later, he knocks. His enthusiasm is subtly dimmed, tempered by caution, but he still smiles when he sees him.

"Hey. I picked non-fiction, I didn't want you getting weird ideas about what Earth is like."

[ninefox]

"It's open!" he calls. He's sitting cross-legged in a chair he dragged from the table to set in front of Jedao's fish tank, half-twisted to look over at Quentin as he comes in.

After hearing Quentin's reasons, a small, bright burst of laughter catches him by surprise.

"Jedao's notes do seem...a bit too dramatic to take seriously."

[magician_king]

"Like what?"

He asks, quietly. He had been planning to cut and run, but now he's curious.

"Some of it's probably true. He overreacts to weird things."

Like ducks, for example.

[ninefox]

"He's got pages trying to figure out how the prejudices work, and whether or not Steve is fucking with him about some kind of elaborate legal hallucinogen called a bill of rights? And there's an entire screed on the Festival that doesn't know if it's about monsters or not. Would you like tea?" he asks, because despite how few people he ever invites into his quarters on the Citadel, he still understands propriety.

[magician_king]

"The bill of rights isn't a hallucinogen, it's one of the founding documents of the country."

He says, brow furrowing.

"Tea would be nice, thank you. Do- you mean Halloween?"

[ninefox]

"A legal hallucinogen is like a legal fiction, but moreso," Jedao says. "And more volatile, I think? I'm not a rahal, I don't know when he picked up the nuances."

Jedao unfolds and gets Jedao's tea set down from a cupboard. His movements with it aren't as thoughtlessly smooth as Jedao's, but he clearly knows how it basically works.

"Strongly caffeinated, right?"

[magician_king]

"Oh god, this is my least favourite argument." But he's going to get into it anyways. "So your whole world, thing, all this memetic warfare and ritual and stuff, you know that at a certain point it was developed, right? Created, invented?"

[ninefox]

"Given that we know the inventor, it should be hard to miss," he says dourly. "But how is writing a document any less of an invention?"

[magician_king]

"So what do you imagine government was like before he came along?"

Pausing this train of thought.

[ninefox]

"I barely know how it worked after. He said children used to starve. Which certainly has less visual panache than remembrances, I'll give him that," Jedao says, unassuming but deep and cold, like the glassy surface atop a shaft of well-water.

[magician_king]

"That's true. My world still has scarcity. The cost of anarchic disorganiation and total freedom is tremendous inequality."

Says Quentin, with a soft frown.

"But that happens because we do enshrine the rights of the individual."