IC Inbox

[ninefox]

Comments

[ninefox]

"Oh," he says softly, fanning out the cars in a long, smooth spread. "Oh, Harry. They're lovely."

They're perfect.

[bestsir]

Harry smiles, relieved, and only when the tension leaves his shoulders does he realise it was there all along.

"I am glad you like them," he says quietly. "I'm afraid I know nothing of the games that they are used for, but—I am sure something can be worked out."

[ninefox]

"I bet the rules changed every time." It was that sort of place. Even in the throes of his own savage destiny, Jedao had recognized that, had loved it for that.

[bestsir]

"I watched a game," he says, "and could not follow it in the slightest—a winning hand one moment was useless the next. I saw enormous wagers change hands, but everyone seemed to leave the gaming table with as much as they took to it."

[ninefox]

Jedao scoops the up and starts shuffling, shuffling, shuffling. Learning the feel of them in his hands.

"Shall I tell your fortune, Harry?"

Of course, with cards he doesn't know the meaning of, he'll have to make everything up, but that's the fun of it.

[bestsir]

"If you like," he says, a faint smile flickering across his face. He can't take his gaze off Jedao's hands as he manipulates the cards.

[ninefox]

Jedao lays down four cards in an odd, overlapping rhombus sort of shape, then rests one finger on the corner of the topmost card, the Three of Stones.

"The lie at the surface," Jedao murmurs, one finger resting on the corner of the card. "A new beginning, a successful transition." He raises an eyebrow. "I wonder what that could be."

[bestsir]

"Do you really need cards to tell you that?" Harry asks, amused. Though there's also a quiver of unease—lie at the surface.

What, he wonders, is Jedao going to tell him about himself this time, in the guise of a game?

[ninefox]

"I might. I've fallen down on my usual stalking, lately." Which makes this as good a way to fish for gossip as anything.

[bestsir]

"I had rather thought my being here at all as a new beginning," he says. "But that is a rather obvious interpretation, perhaps."

He's not consciously trying to be evasive about the recent developments in his personal life; it just seems to happen naturally. Probably an ingrained reticence born of his era.

[ninefox]

Jedao hums and arches an eyebrow, as if to say, well, I did invite you to lie. He touches the next card down, stepwise around the shape. "The lie it is covering." Eight of metal, the drawing a scarred tree with eight nails pounded into it.

"Eights tend to mean struggle. Metal for righteousness, for autumn. For the measuring out of life, longevity of forged things or executioner's blade, for harvest before hibernation. There is a lie about something changed and new, covering the lie that your life is over."

He moves his hand to hover over the third card, the Seven of Stones. Where the Three of Stones was depicted by three tall menhirs, the Seven has a little pile of smoothed-over river stones, easy to fit in the hand.

"Seven, hmm, tricky. Since my death, sevens have become an ill omen. Betrayal and chaos. But when I was alive, sevens signified thoughtfulness, completion, balance. And stone for interstitial times, for slow erosion, for steadiness, for things achieved by the work of hands. So, seven. The lie lurking beneath: you cannot find peace, for all the things which have been lost or sunk or worn away."

He moves to trace the outside edge of the final card, two of its corners hidden under the others, the first card he set down: the Duke of Clouds. He lifts his hand, fingertips brushing over Harry's cheek. "The Duke of Clouds is you - water for agility of mind, inverted into the sky, away from the bitter cold or salt sting of the tides. The Duke, like the Knight, a lesser face. Competence without mastery. You yourself are the lie at the heart of the matter."

Jedao has long considered Harry a kind of anti-Vidona, a doctor and a surgeon and a scholar and a zealot, yes, all of those in his way, even a creature of poison. Deathtouch buried in his own flesh, summary justice when pushed too far. And yet, somehow -

"The lie that you are exactly what you are. That you are not what you have done; that you are only what you have done; that you are what you have not done."

[bestsir]

Harry is thinking of a friend from university who spent an evening (increasingly incoherent as more and more sherry was consumed) explaining how fortunetellers "read" their marks, how what seemed like clairvoyance was in fact a subtle manipulation. Of course this isn't the first time that Jedao has picked out insights about Harry with unnerving accuracy, but there's something about his use of the cards for the purpose that renders the whole business positively eerie.

His breath catches audibly when Jedao's fingers brush his cheek, and his gaze drops to the Duke: a seraph-like figure holding a scroll. Hears in memory his brother Joseph reading aloud from Revelations, for reasons he no longer remembers: And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.

"What is a man if not the sum of his deeds?" he murmurs. It's not a question he has any kind of answer to.

[ninefox]

"Do they believe in souls on Earth, Harry Goodsir?" Jedao asks, sliding the cards back into the middle of the deck one by one, the Three of Stones first.

[bestsir]

"Yes." He thinks a moment. "'For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?' A quotation from one of our religious books." His gaze still on the cards. "I do not think that souls are a thing that can be bartered or sold—not literally. But I have seen men of whom I would say that their souls have passed and left living bodies behind." Jedao will surely remember the account of unfortunate Private Heather.

[ninefox]

"After I was executed, my soul was kept in a box for many years. In the arsenal, of course. They'd hook me into some hapless volunteer whenever there was a worrisome enough war to risk taking me back out."

The Duke of Clouds returns last to the deck. Jedao shuffles.

"We have weapons which will transform souls into glass. That's what they finally used to put me down for good."

[bestsir]

Harry looks up from those hands on the cards to Jedao's face. His own expression is of horror.

"The place where you come from," he says, remembering that Jedao does not say my world, "seems to me to be a place of unending nightmares."

He's envisioning men and women turned into figures out of a medieval window with the leading ripped away, shattering.

[ninefox]

He's not too far off, although the real remnants were more abstract.

"Yes," he says softly, smiling a little. He doesn't miss the terror of nightmares, but he misses, sometimes, the strange eerie loveliness of even terrible dreams.

"There were things captured in soulglass, things more than memories, more than history." He thinks of his one conversation with Cheris, when the barge's network reached out to her needlemoth, the way he felt like a tuning fork humming with the presence of her, the way he could see himself in her face. "Drives, regrets, wistful loves and flashes of intuition. The inability to sing. A certain way of tilting one's head. There was - potential."

He meets Harry's gaze again, raises one eyebrow delicately. He is about to be - vulgar, again, but he means something worth saying by it, hopes this time it is less intolerable.

"You are more than the sum of your deeds, Harry, in precisely the same way you are more than the sum of your organs."

There is something in the process of life ongoing, something of irreducible worth. Jedao believes that part of Harry must believe that, to be as repulsed by his history as he is, to have been driven by it as he was.

[bestsir]

Harry tenses, swallows. It's not a blow the way the butcher comment was, though it's still not easy to hear; it still evokes images of things to which Harry had thought himself long inured before he sailed with Franklin.

(Twenty. I have performed on twenty. Now twenty-one. If you count Gibson.)

His gaze drops now to his hands, now resting palms up in his lap. He flexes the fingers, thinking that he used to be proud of their strength and steadiness.

"Perhaps that is what I am trying to prove to myself, in this place."

[ninefox]

Jedao tucks the cards into a pocket, the absence of the shh-shh-shh of shuffling suddenly palpable in the air. He reaches out a hand and places it on top of Harry's, palm to glove, fingertips skin to skin.

There are exactly two kinds of people whose hands never shake: surgeons and snipers.

"If I cannot convince you, then I will believe it for you. For as long as you need."

[bestsir]

Harry looks up again, meeting Jedao's gaze directly, and his own green eyes are as bleak as the pack ice.

(As beautiful too, perhaps, though he has no notion of that, never has.)

"Christ," he says, and his voice cracks (like ice, again). "How have I earned such faith from you? Or from Tris?"

I, he thinks, who have almost no faith left in humanity of my own.

[ninefox]

"Perhaps I picked it up where you dropped it, like you did for my shameless limping heart," Jedao murmurs.

He shivers without dropping Harry's gaze, with the sudden intimacy of the memory of being very small and very ragged, tangled and brittle, and all his raw ugly cracks safe in Harry's hands. These hands.

"So I'll carry it a little way."

[bestsir]

There are still hair-fine marks on Harry's fingertips from his attempts to disentangle the goose-heart from its strings, delicate lines of barely-broken skin left from the healed cuts.

He puts his other hand over Jedao's, enclosing it between his own.

"Thank you," he says quietly. There's nothing else he can think of to say, nothing that wouldn't sound ungracious.

[ninefox]

Jedao wants to take his glove off; profoundly inappropriate, but -

- he squeezes Harry's hand. "I learned to have faith in people in those nightmares with no horizons you named so aptly. I may go about it a bit screwy, but I know how to hold on."

He won't let Harry go. Won't lose him, or his belief in him.

[bestsir]

"Then I will try to learn," Harry says. He seems, he thinks, to have been saying this sort of thing to a lot of people lately. It started as something empty and placatory, but he's beginning to think that he may actually start to mean it if he's forced to say it often enough.

[ninefox]

"Thank you." He lifts their clasped hands, brushes a featherlight, downright gentlemanly kiss over Harry's knuckles.

Then he tilts his head. "You seem like a quick learner," Jedao murmurs, grinning a little, gentle teasing meant as both encouragement and to ease the fraught emotion build up between them.