"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."
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.
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."
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."
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
"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.
The kiss, light though it is, seems to linger on Harry's skin for a moment after, an imagined prickling sensation, not unpleasant.
"My teachers always said as much," he says with a smile. "And when I think of all that has happened over the last few months, and all that I have come to accept, I suppose it is still true."
"I have high hopes for you, young man," Jedao pronounces, affecting a precisely schoolmarm demeanor which was rather more mutually recognizable between Victorians and Vidona than one might hope.
Not knowing about the Vidona himself, the unfortunate connection isn't there for him, but he does laugh at that manner, and the words which precisely echo those of his first anatomy professor.
"There is some ... well, I suppose it is rather happy news, related to some of the things I have learned."
He looks, as he says it, a little like a schoolboy who's just given a girl a flower for the first time.
"Harry," Jedao - doesn't quite squeal, only by virtue of being his bass voice, scooting a little closer. His tone somehow manages to be reproachful and filled with sheer unalloyed delight at the same time. "Don't go holding out on me now."
"Tris," he says. "I confessed to her something I had only lately realised—my regard for her, that it was more than friendship. And happily, I discovered it was reciprocated."
Someday Harry will be able to talk about this without sounding like a Jane Austen character. Today isn't that day.
"Harry," Jedao exclaims again, well-nigh launching himself across the small patch of floor between them to grab Harry's shoulders in a hug as Jedao kneels next to him.
"Fox and hound, of course it was, that's so cute, oh my goodness."
Jedao's effusive response takes Harry by surprise (later he'll think he
really should have seen it coming) and only the fact that he's already on
the floor keeps him from toppling over.
"You seem almost as pleased as we are," he laughs.
"I must admit that in some ways it is all ... rather strange," he says. "I had given very little thought to such things—in a distant sort of way I suppose I expected I would eventually marry, raise a family, just as my father did, but it was hardly at the forefront of my thoughts. This ... understanding with Tris is nothing that I could have ever imagined. But I am glad for it."
It's not just the unexpectedness of it all that he's referring to, of course, and Jedao can probably figure that out without too much trouble.
He isn't sure what characterizes their understanding, but part of what Harry says twangs right in his breastbone. He targets on it without even entirely seeing his own intuitions.
Jedao tilts his head.
"You can't imagine a family with her?" His tone is utterly mild, utterly neutral, neither shocked nor intimating. A clarifying question. Is that what he means?
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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."
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"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.
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"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.
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(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."
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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."
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(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.
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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."
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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.
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- 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.
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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.
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"My teachers always said as much," he says with a smile. "And when I think of all that has happened over the last few months, and all that I have come to accept, I suppose it is still true."
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"There is some ... well, I suppose it is rather happy news, related to some of the things I have learned."
He looks, as he says it, a little like a schoolboy who's just given a girl a flower for the first time.
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"Tris," he says. "I confessed to her something I had only lately realised—my regard for her, that it was more than friendship. And happily, I discovered it was reciprocated."
Someday Harry will be able to talk about this without sounding like a Jane Austen character. Today isn't that day.
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"Fox and hound, of course it was, that's so cute, oh my goodness."
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Jedao's effusive response takes Harry by surprise (later he'll think he really should have seen it coming) and only the fact that he's already on the floor keeps him from toppling over.
"You seem almost as pleased as we are," he laughs.
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It's not just the unexpectedness of it all that he's referring to, of course, and Jedao can probably figure that out without too much trouble.
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Jedao tilts his head.
"You can't imagine a family with her?" His tone is utterly mild, utterly neutral, neither shocked nor intimating. A clarifying question. Is that what he means?
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