Part 4 - Terra

Chapter 17 - 17,520 Bells

"... is that the resupply could take upwards of a month, but the only other option would be to cut dangerously into the parameters of safety, and that's assuming that nothing else goes wr-" he cut himself off as he finally glanced away from Pieter, only to find the undersized blonde waif buried nose-deep in some oversized tome at the dinner table. Clearing his throat and dabbing at a corner of his mouth to draw her attention, he addressed her with an ultra-calm, "Giselle?"

"Yes, Seneschal Corrigan?"

He had to admit, despite initially expecting to meet with limited success, she'd been picking up on his lessons quickly. Distracted as she was, her voice had still warmed with an unexpectedly flattering breathlessness, as if she were sure someone (especially someone as important as he) would have no interest in her, much less know her name. Even had he not looked, he could have heard her smile in that mellow timbre: eagerly accommodating and a touch shy and naively endearing. Had he not taught her each subtle variance, he might have thought it genuine.

Working towards an educational rebuke, he wove a measure of incredulousness into the cadence of his phrasing as he queried, "Is that a book? At the table? And you haven't even touched supper."

"Mmm," she replied vaguely, smile slipping absently in its corners in response to his tone as she read.

One brief, shining moment, he thought witheringly. She had a long way to go.

Before he could launch into a scathing lesson or speculate on her lack of decent breeding, her face snapped left as if struck by some invisible hand. Her breath hitched reflexively and a spot of bright, angry color blossomed across her right cheek. Pieter's doing, he was sure, and well deserved if the delicate combination of socially appeasing, realistic expression (which the Inquisitor Lord had requested) and the masterful, thoughtless etiquette (which he himself knew she'd require later in life) was to be fulfilled. Not too terribly long ago, he reminisced, another little girl had sat at the same table with the same blaze across one cheek. Her subsequent glare at her master had earned her a match for it; and despite Corr's efforts, she'd adopted Pieter's brusque reticence and short temper.

This one, though, did not direct an ounce of attention to her master. Instead, she leveled those delicately crafted features to Corr himself. He knew immediately that it was earnest, raw contrition that bent her brow, face hot with shame as embarrassed tears quivered and threatened to spill over her lashes. Her throat worked once to ensure the careful modulation he'd shown her only that afternoon to keep emotional tension from robbing her voice of its typical depth her in her plea of, "Forgive me, Seneschal Corrigan. That was incredibly rude of me."

There it was - the potential upon which any hope he might have of her success hinged: the currently unspoiled spark of humanity that he knew would slowly fade as time jaded her. If he could teach her to lie using half the details and control she employed now, though, she might even be able to convince him. "It was," he agreed with a dispassion to which, he'd found, she responded aptly. Seeping bored indifference into his drawl, he twisted the screw, "And what was it, that so demanded your attention and robbed you of civility?"

"The primarchs, Seneschal Corrigan," she replied in a small voice while unobtrusively closing the cover and sliding the offending object as far away from her as she could politely reach. Then, with that naturally occurring, curiously appealing vulnerability he'd noted early in their lessons, she ventured timidly, "I think Sanguinius is my favorite." She paused a breath and searched his face, looking for some indicator of the topic's acceptability before asking with legitimate interest, "Do you have a favorite, Seneschal?"

Surprising. She'd handled that transition better than he could have expected from a six year old. "Rogal Dorne," he indulged her, letting the previously brewing rebuke pass as reward. Either his reply or her realization of that mercy inspired the smile he'd so carefully coached her to in response; he didn't doubt it was both.

"And you, Master?" here he could see the clumsy artifice of her calm: the subtle inhibition and anticipation of failure. Still, she tried. Not, he knew, to cater to the demand of social expectation, but because she wanted to know, and would gamble an encounter with the man's temper to do so.

The Inquisitor Lord didn't disappoint. "Little better than spoiled children," he snapped, and glowered at her meaningfully as if to convey that she, too, currently fell into that category.

A week ago she might have blanched at that, but now her head bowed briefly as if deferring to the wisdom of that statement. Her pointed chin lifted and she redirected her gaze to a spot just short of the two men at the table. Little fingers secured her utensils, not with the inherent grace she possessed while at ease, but with enough control to produce a reasonable facsimile of it as she set to work industriously addressing her meal. She made the noises only of barest necessity, taking great care not to scrape the plate with the tines of her fork and to chew slowly with her mouth firmly closed. Even after she'd (unprecedentedly) finished the contents of her dish and she was excused from the table, she slipped away to re-shelf the origin of her gaffe and retreat to her room without a sound.

Every inch of her skin felt prickly and tight, and her face and neck overheated as the rest of her frigid form shook uncontrollably. She retched for the third time, the anxious knot in her stomach twisting until it pushed out every bite she'd forced down during the interminable torture that had been dinner. Panting, she swiped her sweaty fringe from her forehead and closed her eyes against the spinning of the room.

"That was well handled."

She froze, swallowed hard despite the sour taste in her mouth and the acid burn in her throat, and assembled her expression into the closest thing she could get to unexpected pleasure at an intruder's awkward company at such a vulnerable time before looking over her shoulder. "Forgive me, Seneschal Corrigan," in spite of her best effort to use the tone of ingratiation he'd been teaching her, her voice was still hoarse from the recent trauma of her bile, "I thought I was alo-"

"You know you can never assume that."

She froze. He may as well have struck her other cheek. "Of course, Seneschal," she replied apologetically, closing the lid to the toilet ensuited in her quarters and forcing herself up off the floor with the smoothest, most dignified motions she could manage in her current state.

He surveyed her a long moment. Despite her strengths lying outside of telepathy, she could read at least a general disposition when most people stared. The seneschal was not most people. Even having spent some hours with him over the past few weeks in the new series of lessons he provided, the occasions upon which she could glean intention from the bald, scarred man remained appallingly slim. Finally, he held out the large tome she'd remanded back to the shelf's custody and instructed, "Sort yourself, and get back out there."

The very thought of reading again tonight seemed appalling.

She'd had no intention of leaving her room for the rest of the evening, much less picking that book up ever again.

Obviously, he'd seen straight through her and found that timid retreat unacceptable.

"Yes, sir," she ensured that the two tiny words conveyed her understanding of his unspoken disapproval as she gingerly took the heavy object from his single-handed grasp. Despite her inability to divine the complete purpose of his lessons, it seemed that they practiced both the art of saying something without saying it and authentic expression in equal measures. In light of this, as he turned to leave, she called his attention once more with a composed, "Seneschal Corrigan?" His head canted a measure of degrees in reply and, with a fortifying breath and a frown directed more at herself than anything, she related a heavy, genuine, "Thank you."

Here he looked past his shoulder at her with his one good eye. Pregnant silence reigned for a long moment, but finally he replied, "You're welcome."

Later, as weariness began to claim her, she closed the cover of the book and leaned against the Lord Inquisitor's shin. After a moment, she rested her head on his knee and let out a soft, thoughtful sigh as her eyes drifted shut. At the sound, he prompted a somewhat impatient, "... Yes?" without looking up from his own studies.

With a dreamy hesitance, she wondered aloud, "If you could spend a day doing anything you wanted, what would it be, Master?"

"Not answering your inane questions," he replied, immediately and without humor.

Nearing the edge of sleep, she couldn't quite help the single compression of a giggle that bubbled out. "I mean anything anything."

"As did I," he returned evenly, though it seemed more for posterity than feeling. Here she heard him shift as he looked up from his reading to regard the top of her head. After a period of considering silence, he rumbled with something between practicality and real humility, "My days are spent in service to the Emperor, Giselle. Necessity may demand it, but I must choose it. As must you. Self-indulgence is something we can ill afford."

With a stubbornness quite alien to her, and not wholly in control of her tongue as the waking world drifted away, she pressed, "What if I indulged you, though? Just on important days?"

"Then those days would be blissfully quiet."

"Mmm," she agreed, nuzzling into him contentedly. Just before sleep claimed her, a single, final thought passed through her mind that, for a birthday, today hadn't been too terribly bad after all.

"... that unlike the blessed machines of Mars, it is entirely possible for an ork vehicle to successfully maneuver without anything resembling a satisfactory steering system. Do you have any questions?"

"No, Master, thank you."

Both his natural and augmentic eyes narrowed at her suspiciously. As was his wont, he'd asked at the end of each lesson, and as sorely tempted as she'd been, she'd understood the material he'd presented, and so deferred her curiosity. After a moment, he demanded gruffly, "Are you ill?"

The question startled her, for surely even the last time she had been (over a month ago, spurred by the gut-churning debacle of her reading at the dinner table), she'd taken great pains for him to not notice. Nor had he asked a month prior to that, the first time her head had throbbed until she'd thought she'd die of the psychic strain and her nose had literally fountained blood under the pressure. In accordance with her intervening lessons in proper facial expression with Seneschal Corrigan, she guilelessly widened her eyes and generated a tiny "V" between her brows. "No, Master," she assured, "thank you."

He continued to gaze at her until the silence became distinctly uncomfortable. And, while every instinct demanded she break it, to defend her health and explain the days' quietude, it had been silence he'd asked for: the only thing he'd wanted to make the day special. So she remained resolute and obliged him that request.

He let it pass.

After supper, as he and the Seneschal lingered over a glass of amasec, she emerged from the kitchenette of his suite where she'd washed the dishes, bearing a slightly lopsided (and, if she was to be honest with herself, obviously inexpertly decorated) cake. Still, she couldn't remember a time dessert had graced his table, and, though it wasn't quite as lovely as she'd hoped it would come out, its presence alone, she justified, distinguished the day from all the preceding ones.

Nonplussed, he stared at it, then at her. "What's this?"

"Unsepkinven Mar," she replied with real affection and an uncertain smile, offering the platter to him as she bit her bottom lip and shyly asserted, "I made it myself."

He paused a long moment, regarding her with that harrowingly neutral gaze she found so difficult to discern. "What?"

"Well, not all by myself," she amended self-effacingly, reassuring him she'd not been running rampant alone in his home, liable to burn the place down, "but I helped."

"... Why?"

She felt the color drain from her face, suddenly certain she'd done something unspeakable, before she carefully, hesitantly repeated, "Un… unsepkinven mar?" He said nothing, and she wracked her mind for another way to describe the confection's purpose before beginning to translate, "Sevent-"

"Seventeen thousand five hundred twenty bells," he confirmed he understood what she'd said, but it seemed to mean nothing to him.

Her hope fell further, and, with the ghost of her smile clinging to the corpse of her mouth as if it hadn't yet realized its own demise (though she helplessly felt her brows drawing together), she sought out the room's other occupant, desperate for him to rescue the situation. It seemed Seneschal Corrigan had grasped at least the premise of her intent as he queried, "Unsepkinven mar'e kwa?"

"Since the Black Ship." Her gaze bounced between the two men, platter trembling in her hands, heart fluttering like a baby bird's. Terrified that she'd counted wrong, she licked her suddenly dry lips and beseeched them, "It has been, hasn't it?"

After a beat (she was sure of quick calculations and consideration), the seneschal nodded his endorsement and leaned towards the Inquisitor. Barely catching the murmured communication, she heard him explain, "It's been a year."

The word 'year' sounded like an impressive amount of time, but meant very little to her. With warships' constant shifting between realspace and warp travel, their inhabitants had taken to largely ignoring years (as the Imperium of Mankind decreed them) and counting time experienced by the ships' bells, the only constant measure of their existence. Unsepkinven mar - seventeen thousand, five hundred twenty half-hour increments - had been the standard for celebration: for birthdays and anniversaries and every other thing that remotely mattered. Subjectively, she supposed, that meant it had been a year. A whole year since he'd stepped into her solitary cell aboard the Oriens Ruboris and given her life purpose and direction when she'd had nothing; not even hope. A year of stolen opportunity. A year she could never repay. And all she'd done to thank him was give him a moment's peace and help someone else make a cake. It probably wasn't even good.

'Stop,' the cold little voice of criticism that lingered in the scarred corner of her mind ordered emotionlessly, abruptly truncating her rapidly devolving thoughts. 'Smile like the Seneschal taught you.' She felt her throat work, stilled the tremor in her hands, and eased the muscles of her cheeks up to something less appeasing and more bashful. 'Apologize and retreat.' Pulling the offending delicacy back towards herself, she demurred with the careless tone of charming, laughing self-deprecation in which Corrigan had rigorously drilled her, "It's a silly old tradition. Forgive me," she saw her new tutor's subtle nod of approval as she turned back to the kitchen, only to have the Inquisitor's enormous hand encircle her upper arm, stopping her in her tracks.

"I am under the impression," he raised a brow meaningfully, "that the purpose of cake is to be eaten." At her mute, slightly dumbfounded nod of confirmation, he plucked the platter from her hands, set it on the table, and looked at her expectantly. When she provided nothing more than a slightly shocked expression of reply, he prompted, "Which is difficult to accomplish without forks. Michael, I thought you were teaching her etiquette."

"Attempting to," he returned, his mouth curling up in indulgent amusement. When she returned with the required accoutrements, the seneschal served and was the first to sample the culmination of her efforts. A considering crease formed on his forehead, and he decreed it safe for consumption with that smile that made her quite certain he was laughing at her, "Edible." He paused, thinking, and then generously afforded, "Even palatable." It was, as she was thus distracted, that she only received the impression of movement on her Master's part, but the sheer, genuine shock that subsequently registered on the seneschal's face told her that the imposing man eating cake was apparently an unprecedented development.

That in itself was a pleasing enough circumstance. The Inquisitor Lord's pronouncement that it was, indeed, "... Adequate," detonated a curious, fizzy feeling in the region of her chest that made it impossible not to grin. The seneschal's resulting, stunned jaw drop made it equally impossible not to giggle, much as she tried. Before it became excessive, she stifled herself with her hand, realizing that this was easily the happiest she'd been in more than twenty thousand bells.

Later, as he tucked her in and ruffled her hair as he did on the rare occasions she'd exceeded his exacting instruction, she hesitantly reached to him, fingers curling about his wrist and drawing his hand to her heart with an atypical fervor in her grip. Tucking her face into the captured appendage, lips worrying the backs of his digits, she let out an exhalation that felt much like one that might have preceded tears.

She wasn't sad.

She wanted to thank him - to relate her gratitude. But there were no words for this feeling - to acknowledge the helplessness of a life's worth of debt. And even if there had been, she knew he wouldn't have wanted them. Zealously holding this bit of him near her assuaged the demand to address it by the briefest measure. Closing her eyes, she prayed that, despite her inadequacy, he would understand.

If the succeeding, gentle brush of one finger across her cheek was any measure, it seemed that the Emperor had been listening tonight.