Kirin prepares himself mentally for the day: he can't regress, not now. He has to keep insisting on his autonomy. The younger maid—the only maid now really—is also fond of morning baths for him, and she checks on him early in the morning with a tray of tea. He's forgotten by now the frenetic toll of living on four hours of sleep a night, that desperate drive to elude his own limits. He doesn't measure how long he sleeps now, can't measure it in truth, but it's mostly through the night.
"Will you make the water hot?" he asks her earnestly, when she runs the bath, remembering his newly rediscovered preference; as she adjusts the taps, a kind of hope starts in him. Perhaps, he really can take care of himself this time. Perhaps, if he just tries hard enough, he can make it work.
She starts to prepare to bathe him, but he stops her.
"I want to try," he tells her. "By myself."
Surprise flashes across her face, this is an unusual request, but she lets him. Perhaps this is just another manifestation of how he's changed since she last saw him. "I'll be back in a little to check on you," she says. "I'll set an alarm so I don't forget."
Kirin is hopeful. Everything seems to be manageable again. He can manage bathing, everyone can. He just has to try. His body is his own again.
Only when the door closes behind him does he realize what a horrible mistake it was.
He can't remember what he was meant to be doing there. It's just him and his memories, and those are all scattered. There's rooftops and Breanna's blood and broken glass in his head, and he's not sure how to separate them out from the present. He suspects he's late for the Academy, even as he knows that time has passed. It is not even a contradictory thought for him: those memories simply live next to each other, loosened from any linear temporality.
Everything is wet: he can't write in the notebook unless he wants to ruin it, and a helplessness comes over him. He tries to remember what he was doing in the bath, but it eludes him, only to be swiftly replaced by his fears that he's not trying hard enough. Perhaps he's damned to regress to that horrible, lonely state in his dream world—that distant state of his mind's wanderings and dreamings of the glorious machines that will never come to life, the plans that will never be realized, only glimpsed in a camera obscura. But what's the alternative, spending the last twenty years of his life trying to regain the skills he had in his first ten? There's no point. He's found out how well he can ever get, and it's not enough.
His thoughts keep unraveling, as he tries to hold onto the present. Surely this won't last: the maid will give up on asking what he wants, and he'll become another object of other people's actions and wants.
He's badly confused now, and the water's gone cool. Somewhere, a kitchen alarm goes off—the one from earlier, he tries to reason through his exhaustion. Yes, that must be it. It's almost painful how much he just wants to slip away.
There's a light knocking at the door. "Everything ok?" she asks.
He can't really manage a response now, his thoughts are frayed with fear.
Hearing no answer, she peeks in. "Are you alright?" she asks. "Do you want—sorry, are you alright?" She's still having trouble adjusting from asking multiple questions at once, but she's trying. He's just afraid of the day she decides to stop trying, and the world becomes harder to understand.
He gestures ineffectually, and she closes the door behind her. She sits down by the edge of the tub.
"You've done so well," she says cheerfully. "Let's finish."
He doesn't know how to tell her that he doesn't like when his unclothed body is touched, that he was never comfortable with being undressed in front of other people, and that it tore at something inside him every time he either had to take off his clothes or had them taken off for him, and it tore inside him so badly that the only way for him to endure it was to not be there anymore. He had taken care of himself for more than thirty years, and the details of his own body were a secret to others, but not now. Now, there's an unsettlingly large number of people who know what he looks like without clothes now, and all he wants is the privacy other people get. And yet, he can't reconcile that with the reality that he simply can't manage the steps to take care of himself in this way, not at this point in time, not without help. He thinks of the dream world, and much easier it would be able to endure this if he just wasn't there at all, but that would entail its own loss. He just doesn't know which loss is harder to shoulder: his bodily privacy or the present.
He know what giving up the present feels like, and so he tries to bear the present as well as he can; to her credit, she is gentle with him, but that cannot erase his unease. His nerves are taut and tender. Then, her hand falls on his shoulder, and it's like lightning through his body. He gasps and retreats from her. He doesn't know why he's sobbing; he just comes to it, like someone waking up, another split moment in time.
"Oh," the maid says. "Oh, don't cry. It's ok. I'll let Dr. Hypatia know. She'll fix it, I'm sure."
She tries to wipe his tears away with a dry washcloth, but that only makes him sob harder. Setting the washcloth aside, she pulls him close and rocks him gently, humming a Serkonian melody he doesn't recognize. In turn, he sobs into her shoulder, dampening the black cotton. He is an open wound, uncontained and painfully raw, but she holds onto him anyway. He sobs for everything he can't remember but which still resides inside him, a phantom pain haunting him.
And when it's all over, and the hurt slips away from him, they stay there for a while.
"I'm very tired," he tells her at last, but he doesn't know what to ask for. His mind is static; the words have drained out of his mind.
She considers a moment. "Do you want me to finish?"
He nods, and she's careful to work quickly. "You did so well," she tells him as she helps him out of the bath.
He doesn't feel the same, but he's happy to be dressed again. The words are still difficult to find: she notices this.
"Let's—sorry, do you want to lie down a little?"
It's a struggle to think now, to consider the option of lying down for a little, or even what that would entail. He nods, desperate for any relief at this point. He doesn't know why he's shaking: is it exhaustion, or fear, or another neurological malfunction?
The maid doesn't seem to mind either way. She guides him back to bed, and tucks him back in. As she turns to leave, a fear resurfaces in him that he's being put aside as an inconvenience, tucked out of sight and out of mind.
"I'm afraid," he tells her. "Please, would you stay?" The words fall fast and out of order, but she understands.
"Of course," she replies. "I'll be here if you need anything." And as if to prove it, she draws up a chair by his bedside. She bends over to smooth the blankets over him. "Just rest for as long as you'd like. And when you're ready, we'll start the day."
What if I never get any better, he means to ask, what if this is the best it'll ever be, but the words are caught there in his throat, too shameful to say. Instead, he opens the notebook and writes down a few lines to remember, before they leave.
Half an hour later, his thoughts quieter and clearer now, he resolves to try the world again.
After a late breakfast, he gets distracted by a book of maps that Daud has left out for him. He traces through the various topographies, marveling at the scattered mountain ranges, the vein-like rivers splitting up the land, and the deep lakes. And as he does so, Daud sits down to speak with Hypatia.
"I would send over someone from Addermire," he says. "I know the place was closed for the longest time, but someone needs to be coming over here. He's not going to improve on his own. He's going to keep engaging with the world, and it's best if he knows how to navigate it."
Hypatia considers this. "I'll send a message. I just—" She holds her head in her hands. "Surely he's not of concern to the Empress, not now?"
"The Empress doesn't know. The Lord Protector called in a favor, asked me to keep an eye on Breanna, in case she tried to get her powers back. As for me, I'm interested in whomever the black-eyed bastard's interested in. He likes to play with all of us." Daud pauses. "I may not know what he's intending here, but I aim to find out."
Hypatia mulls this over as she drops a sugar cube into her tea.
"Have there been an attempts to, I don't know, integrate the Void with this world here? Some grotesque Void-powered machine?"
Hypatia shakes her head, as she stirs her tea. "Spatial reasoning... is very difficult for Kirin now. I don't think it's possible for him now."
"What could he want with him," Daud says to himself. "There must be something."
Kirin steps into the room, having reviewed his notebook. "Daud," he says haltingly, half out of intense concentration and half out of shame (the name is familiar to him in some way), "When I am very afraid, I couldn't speak well. I am afraid of this."
Daud thinks this over. "That is tricky. Do you know sign language?"
Kirin frowns.
"Good," Daud says. "Always a good day to learn. It's another way to communicate." He pauses. "What do you feel the most? Let's start there."
Kirin considers this. "Afraid," he says, ashamed to reveal this. The maid, collecting dishes nearby, gives him a surprised, worried glance, but he misses it.
Daud walks him through the sign. "Next time, try this." He turns to the maid. "Practice it too," he tells her. "That way you can recognize it."
The maid does so, and there's wonder and curiosity on her face: she had never considered this possibility before. "How did you learn this?" she asks.
Daud smiles. "That's a secret. It comes in handy."
"You have many secrets," Kirin replies. Sign language feels intuitive to him somehow. Perhaps it's the hand movements, perhaps it's the possibilities it opens up for him.
Daud hums a noncommittal response. "What else do you feel the most?"
Together, Kirin and the maid learn the signs for tired and pain. The last one Kirin struggles with, and Daud ends the session, sensing Kirin's frustration with his own limitations.
"This is a start," Daud tells him, and Kirin desperately wants to believe him. But why are all beginnings so painful?
Later, Hypatia has him lie down on the sofa, and holding his arm gently, tests his range of motion while asking him if he's in pain. She checks for any unusual tension in his muscles and finding none, lapses into a bemused pause. "No unusual muscular tension, no surface injury, doesn't seem to be a trapped nerve."
Kirin raises himself to a seated position on the sofa.
"Perhaps a heat-induced injury? No, no, it would have showed. No fracture that I can detect. But what would show up in the bath, but not in an exam?"
And as she thinks it over, a helpless realization comes over her as all the pieces finally fit. She surveys him with a knowing horror. "I'm so sorry," she says, her voice shaking. "I should have been there. I should have known. No wonder you never got better. It all makes sense now. I should have known."
She tries to hold back her tears, but everything has been weighing on her, and this is simply the final thing she cannot bear: the thought of Kirin all alone and being abused, not able to tell her or even consciously remember it, is too much for her. Her shoulders shake as she sobs, a weary thing against the world, a rock slowly eroded by the ocean.
He doesn't understand why she's crying. He's grown fond of Hypatia: she has been good to him, and he has come to like her company, even look forward to it. He's not sure why she's crying as if her heart has been broken; she hasn't been hurt, surely not. There are no signs of injury.
And then, like a marble sinking into water, the realization hits him that she's crying for him. He doesn't think he's ever cried for anyone in his life. The people he used as test subjects cried too, sometimes. He doesn't understand it. To call his victims prey would suggest a level of attachment that he simply didn't have for them. No, they are simply data points, were data points—too uninteresting to be anything more. He cannot fathom why her heart is so tender and expansive so as to cry for him. She can walk away at anytime and never think of him again, and yet, she stays. And in that moment, as she sobs into the soft, grey linen of her sleeve, he starts to understand that there is part of him that he cannot take away from her, perhaps nothing can, and she carries it in her heart with the rest of her hopes and fears and worries.
He doesn't know how to console her, and truthfully, he wouldn't know where to start even if he wanted to, but he doesn't want her to be sad, even if it is really a foolish thing to have such a delicate heart.
His gaze follows the lines of the floorboards, his mind wandering, and as he does so, the lines return to him. These are different, this time, however—these are little golden lines like puppet strings, curling throughout the house. And to his surprise, these are malleable, like thin wire: they bend and sway under his touch without breaking, and he arranges them just so without thinking about what he wants to form, as the Mark warms his skin.
Held together with the golden wires, the inevitable household dust draws itself into the shape of a small songbird, one of those nondescript, brown, speckled birds that flutter and gossip and sing. The simulacrum hops along the floorboards, a rough facsimile of a prototype that will never be realized, but which drifts along in the open sea of his mind. Hypatia glances up, confused yet fascinated by this, distracted from her hurt. Kirin wonders if his dust creature could even sing: he's made metal sing before, but that was a long time ago, something about seawater.
Then, just as quickly as it was made, his little dust creature slumps back into its formless, thoughtless torpor, fading back into a scattered pile on the floorboards, having tasted a moment of respite from eternity.
Even as it unravels, a bit of pride warms Kirin. His drive to create wasn't lost after all, he just couldn't express it before. And just as she may have a part of him, perhaps he has also always had a part of himself as well, something that could never be destroyed, only buried. How many other pieces of himself are scattered out there?
Hypatia smiles at him, her face reddened and blotchy now. "It's very nice of you," she manages. Then, she quickly dabs at her face with her sleeve. "I've been so silly," she says. "I promised to take you over to Aramis's home, didn't I?"
And he is afraid in that moment, to leave this safety behind for whatever may come next, but then again, it never protected him very well.
"There was a lock," he says to Hypatia, as they cross into the enclosed courtyard of Aramis's mansion, her hand in his. "Where is it? You need the answer to open it."
She glances back at him, puzzled. "Was there a lock?"
"At the entrance. The lock, I made it," he replies. "I remember making it. It's a simple variation..."
"A lot has changed since you've been out," Hypatia says gently. With her free hand, she waves at a miner she saw at the clinic last week.
Inside Aramis's mansion, there are clean marble floors and finely wrought silver ornaments and far more people than he's used to. They bustle about like moths: workers, miners, noblemen, and the Duke's men. And yet, there is something wrong with this. He's intensely afraid of all the noise and brightness; Hypatia squeezes his hand in reassurance, as they search for Aramis.
And without searching for it, he knows where Breanna died—there, on the second floor near the study. It draws him in—a little piece of the past that can never be recovered, only noted. There's no sign of her violent death, no blood, no broken furniture, no splintered wood or smashed glass, only the fading remnant of the thread that bound them. He supposes he should be sad, but he feels nothing for her, not even pity.
She will fade from this world, a name on a ledger, notable only for her career and her treachery, and in time, no one will remember her. She will be just a name and a face in a silvergraph, assuming those survived the move from the Clockwork Mansion. Perhaps her bones are stored in a horrible box somewhere, bleached and identical to all the other bones. Being a curator couldn't save her from being left in the archives. Will he also meet the same fate? The spark that burnt out?
The Clockwork Mansion has begun to break down already. It was always a fragile thing, underneath the grandeur. He overheard the maid chatting to Hypatia about it earlier. What a shame he couldn't remember how to fix it, his great monument to himself, his marionette kingdom, already collapsing. Parts of it are already blocked off from tours. He had been confused when the maid had mentioned that they had asked the Grand Inventor to try to fix it: he couldn't recall being asked to. Certainly no letters or any mentions of it in his notebook. And then in that moment, his heart had sunk—she meant the new Grand Inventor. He understood then that he wasn't really anything anymore, just a reminder of what was and what could have been but will never come to pass—his own ghost.
The world has seamlessly moved on without him.
He's drawn from his morbid thoughts when Aramis spots him.
"Kirin," he says gently. "And Alex. What a treat."
"Kirin wanted to talk with you about something," Hypatia prompts.
"The whales," Kirin replies.
"The whales?" Aramis repeats confused. Part of him does not want to think too deeply about what Kirin is saying. Not now. "Why don't we talk in another room. It's very busy in the hallway."
Kirin picks at the leather gloves Daud asked him to wear before going out. Surely, Aramis wouldn't hurt him? No, not him. Kirin turns to Hypatia. "I would like to talk to him on my own," he tells her.
A small shock registers on her face. She had wanted to go with him, protective of him especially now. A small loss, then: she wasn't yet ready to give up this part of caregiving just yet, but all things must pass, she reasons. She smiles. "Of course. I'll be waiting for you," she replies.
He nods, grateful for her patience. Aramis guides him into another beautiful, immaculate room. This one has a harp, recently tuned and lovingly polished.
"Oh, they're singing again," Kirin says to himself. "They're so much louder here. I was right."
"The whales?" Aramis asks, still unsettled but trying not to show it.
"Yes," Kirin replies, but his thoughts are fleeing again. Aramis loves his mansion full of light and noise, but it disturbs and overwhelms Kirin, who has been accustomed to seeing only a few people at a time. He keeps glancing around the room nervously, picking at his gloves. "I can't—I can't—not here." He forgets about his notebook.
Aramis sits beside him. "What's going on?"
"I'm very afraid of the noise," he says earnestly. "Would you read me something?"
Aramis is bewildered by this request. He's not sure Kirin has ever confessed to having human emotions before, let alone fear; truthfully, Aramis had always suspected that Kirin's greatest wish would be to turn himself into something greater than the sum of his human parts, or even better, burn himself out doing so, but perhaps they have both been changed.
He returns with three books from his shelf: a travel narrative about Pandyssia, a guide to the native fauna of Tyvia, and a memoir from some doctor. The wildlife guide wins out easily.
Aramis feels more than a little foolish reading. He's aware of his size: he's always aware of it, but now, his self-hatred is more than a little present. His hands seem grotesquely too large, too out of place against the delicate pages of the book, but Kirin stays, curled beside him and interested in the subject, surveying with particular fascination the differences between the Tyvian hare in winter and summer.
"It changes," Kirin says to himself. "But how? Does everything change?"
And Aramis, in turn, is more than slightly entranced by the way Kirin leans against him, resting his head against Aramis's shoulder, but he reminds himself that it would be unspeakably cruel to take advantage of that. Instead, he waits for Kirin to focus on a different creature. He can tell by the slightly trailing, incomplete end of Kirin's sentence if he's lost his train of thought, and tries to guide him accordingly. Perhaps Kirin is aware of his own thoughts leaving. Aramis quietly hopes not.
And the longer they stay like this, poring over the book like old friends, Aramis slowly starts to feel less out of place. He reads a few paragraphs of the next page, he and Kirin muse over the animal, and then, they move onto the next creature. Aramis starts to feel needed in a way he's never been before, not as a mining baron or a charismatic leader or an advocate, no nothing larger than life. Just as an ordinary man, reading a book—no breathtaking thoughts, no astounding insights, nothing to be gained or impressed, no status to keep. And somehow, in that moment, it is simply enough to be Aramis the man.
It's been so long that he'd almost forgotten how.
Aramis had felt nothing but a sort of pity when he had seen Kirin again—a child-man obviously terrified of a new environment and painfully out of place. And part of Aramis had not wanted to see that, had not wanted to ever be reminded of that painful wound in his own mind: the dilapidated room with the piano and the flooding light that made an ocean of his mansion. It didn't happened, he knows this now, but the not-memory still fell between the cracks of his mind.
And a terrible, selfish part of him had in that moment wanted Kirin gone forever, locked up in Addermire where he could never remind him of that not-memory. But he had pushed that part down to play the generous host, and when he had seen Kirin's nervous calculations about going with him, he had started to understand that maybe Kirin had already experienced some of the horrible tendencies of this world and how laughably easy it would be to hurt him and get away with it. And Kirin's strange vulnerability had awoken something inside him.
"I'm not afraid anymore," Kirin says.
"I'm glad," Aramis says truthfully. "I liked the part about the ground squirrel," he offers. "Which part did you like?"
And instead of eliciting an excited explanation from Kirin, the only thing Aramis receives is a pause as he considers it and a longer pause as he becomes conscious of the fact that this book is just another thing that had slipped past him even as he read it.
"Forgive me," Aramis says gently. "It was a careless question."
Kirin shrugs miserably, and he regrets his question even more.
"It must get terrifying," Aramis offers instead. "Not remembering."
"There are only pieces now, and they're all out of time," Kirin says. He senses that his loss has been a hot topic of debate in high society. His tone becomes distant, a shield from the intensity of the fragments. "I'm in a chair. My head hurts very badly, and I think I will die of the pain. Everything is wrong somehow. I can't find my way out of the room—" For a moment, there is such an intense horror on Kirin's face that Aramis cannot bear to look at it, the horror of waking up to an incomprehensible world and being unable to express it. Or perhaps even worse, to be considered incomprehensible. Whatever is left of that memory mercifully fades.
And somehow, Aramis knows what it's like to be overwhelmed by a thousand moments, infinitesimal but sharp. Aramis pulls him closer, offering him a reassuring embrace.
Kirin is confused by Aramis's sympathy, but takes it anyway. It's not a bad thing to be so close to him, to have the steady warmth and even breathing of Aramis's body recalibrate his own. They stay like that for a while, until Kirin pulls away.
"I write things down, but there are still gaps." Kirin's fingers pick at the stitching in his sleeve. "I am afraid of what I am missing. Where does it go when it's gone?"
"It's alright," Aramis says. "There is a room I'm terrified of. I can't explain it. I feel as though I'm still trapped there, in that place where time is leaking, and I'm—"
He cannot bear to continue. He doesn't want to think about the aching loneliness of that room, the boarded-up door, the food left at a crack at his door, as if he were a feral animal, piteous but also liable to lash out and bite. The horror at being treated as less than human—a walking, babbling creature cut off from the world. The terror at the strange footsteps and the swirling memories, a new garbled one emerging to supplant the last. He knows it didn't happen—hasn't happened, part of his mind inexplicably fills in—but there's a deep pain and horror in him to the contrary.
"I'll remember the past for you," Aramis says at last. "You can remember the present, and that way, we'll both make it."
Kirin watches him, incomprehensible to him in that moment. "There's a wound in the Void, and it calls me," he says at last. He struggles for the right descriptors. "It draws me in like a riptide."
"The wound's in the study, isn't it?" Aramis replies. "Where time is leaking."
"Yes," Kirin says. "That must be it." And if he can only get there, he knows he will understand everything somehow.
"It might be dangerous," Aramis warns. "No one's been inside for ages. I... hear things in there."
"Time is wrong there," Kirin replies. "I can feel it." He frowns, sorting through the fragments. "I've been there before... and you have too. Breanna, and the Duke... and Hypatia too. There was a séance, an impossibility bridging this world and the Void." He pauses, as the memory slips away from him again.
"I know what you're speaking of," Aramis confesses. "It haunts me. The whales are singing under the floorboards, and they have never stopped."
Kirin considers this. "Will you take me there? To the study?"
Aramis doesn't think of himself as a brave man, but faced with Kirin's earnestness, he decides to be.
AN: Comments are never required but always loved. I really love hearing from readers.