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This was, she thought wretchedly, the single most cowardly thing she had ever done.

She had gone through the usual and unavoidable process of self-justification: she had requested from Nis a visit, she needed a second pair of hands for a day on the Garde, she didn’t know how the weather there worked and for all she knew October setting in would make the place too cold or rainy for the promised picnic on the water, she had a certain vague optimism that perhaps Nis - and maybe Tagg - being present would somehow coax her own wisp into popping into a opalescent seal pup or lilac dolphin or whatever was hanging out in there.

And these were all true, which was not much of a mitigation to her disgust at herself for knowing her actual motive, which was that if she brought someone back with her to the Garde, she would be completely delivered from having to be alone with Gouvernail and having to have any kind of discussion about what had happened last time.

This was beneath her. It ran counter to her every proud idea about herself. She fell into the arms of the idea with euphoric gratitude the second it occurred to her anyway, and dispatched her message the same way that Nis had: via signet ring, in a message that asked her both to take her up on that picnic and also, if she could spare the time and didn’t mind being roped into work, do some light housekeeping of the “helping to hang curtains” variety.

She was still not sure exactly how exhaustion worked when bringing up loot and visitors, but she had chanced it once before with heavy armfuls, and another time with two guests at once, so she would chance it now and hope that whatever had got her palms glowing her also served to make this easy on her. But she was heavily laden enough as she arrived to meet Nis at the appointed spot to be somewhat uneasy.

She’d gone through the process of setting up a bedroom once, and she’d already brought over a few odds and ends on other trips, so she had leveraged what she’d learned then: vacuum sealed mattress in the tiniest possible box from the manufacturer, and everything else she hadn’t gotten over before in a vacuum sealed storage bag flattened to within an inch of its life and groaning with the threat of bursting at any moment. What couldn’t fit into subspace in anticipation of the picnic she had in a bag dangling from her overladen arms, and she was showing the strain of trying to get so much up at once, but her greeting, nonetheless, was one of bright cheerfulness. If the sincerity of that cheer was primarily relief at her impending delaying of the inevitable, there was nothing to betray it outwardly.

“Lovely to see you. I’d give you a hug but, well, you see.” She couldn’t even gesture to demonstrate. “I brought some stuff I’ve been meaning to get over. Let’s make this quick, I think my wrist’s about to give out,” she added, just as cheerfully.

She was, in fact, only too happy to share the burden, her only hesitation being whether it would impact how much actually made it through to the other side, as well as an unwillingness to make Tagg uncomfortable - the owner of a spoiled little dog instinctively doing what such people did, and deferring to a cute animal's naptime. Nis, like Encke before her, was cheerfully given a substantial handful to carry without the requirement of a second offer, and then without another moment of conversation they were whisked away.

The sky was a pale grey streaked with occasional blue, and there were seagulls, of course. The noise of them distantly wheeling over the river was so much of a piece with the air of the place - which, as it always did, had that distinctive smell that you only got where freshwater ran down towards the ocean and mingled with it - that since their arrival Joy almost couldn't recall what it had been like before. There had been birds, cicadas, crickets. But the seagulls made the Garde feel alive in a way that nothing else had.

The place, however, was manifestly not alive, at least to Joy. This was because there was still a dead man haunting the ribs of it, who now stood as if prepared to meet them just as he had last time, compelled by some ineffable instinct to be where Joy would be and when.

She dropped her things unceremoniously on the ramparts where they had arrived, everything falling with a chaotic clatter. This at least gave her a second to avoid his eye, which was openly astonished. She put out her hand, however (her inward pause too brief to register to anyone but him; her stomach turning unpleasantly), and as they had last time, they pantomimed that formal, detached greeting of his pretending to kiss her fingers. He could not quite school his face to stillness, however, and he had a strange and unreadable expression which was only mostly-mastered as he turned to offer that courteous little bow to Nis, as he had before. It was, perhaps, a kind of contained anger or frustration, but Joy turned away from it and towards her guest with determined cheer.

“I've brought Nis back for a visit and to help me out with some things,” she said brightly. Again, a little formal movement of acknowledgement. He was growing very, very calm, and he did speak at last, in a voice of polite quiet.

“It is good to see you return,” he said. And he paused as if perhaps wanting to say more, before lapsing instead into silence again. He had not seemed thrilled by visitors before; Joy herself had implied that he remained uncomfortable with them. This apparently applied to those returning as well, if his visible discomfort was any indication. Sociability was not his strong suit; hospitality even less so.

“She brought a friend,” added Joy, with a certain caginess entering her relentless brightness as she gestured at the otter. Nail only looked at him with a vague, skeptical hesitation. This was, perhaps, understandable from a man who was acquainted with talking cats. He might be waiting for a formal greeting. For all he knew Tagg might be some sort of dignitary.

It was good to look at Tagg, in all his innocent and unworldly sweetness and probably incapable of hurting anyone or anything, while she stood and pretended not to feel quite wretched and hurtful herself. It gave her something like a second wind for powering through the feeling - one that she was not frequently accustomed to having, and was already vaguely pissed at herself for not confronting.

"Well, a picnic," she said briskly, picking up a few of the things she'd dropped to begin shuttling them towards the keep. She walked along the ramparts at a brisk step, without looking to see whether Nail shadowed her. "So it's up to you whether you want that to fortify you for future labor, or as a reward for the labor after you've done it. Not that the labor is very intense," she confided. "Mostly just someone to help me wrestle bedding onto a mattress that's still inflating and hang some curtains. One of the guest rooms magically decided to become habitable, and I think it'd be nice to not have to ask people to sleep in sleeping bags, or else sleep in my bed while I'm in the sleeping bag, as much fun as a sleepover type of thing is. But we should probably at least get everything inside in case it decides to rain."

This was a convenient excuse to look back towards what she'd left, as if to gauge how many trips it might comfortably require, and see that they had not been followed, and that they had, in fact, been left alone. She paused, a little off-kilter despite herself.

"All your cute little lanterns and things inspired me," she said, assuming the previous cheerfulness as best as she could, which was pretty decently. While she might not have a great deal of experience lying, she did have a great deal of professional experience in acting, and that was good enough for the time being, although it felt a little strange not to be doing this in some sort threatening coo. "I thought I might run into you at an estate sale at some time this week, actually, but I guess our paths never crossed."

"Next week, maybe. I definitely still have a lot of s**t I need to pick up," she said, and she continued to move briskly as they spoke: dropping her things at the foot of the staircase off the keep, going back to shuttle the rest inside, and procuring an Ikea bag from the main hall that apparently served as the closest thing she had to a toolbox, with a drill in it - the battery charged and in subspace - and other odds and ends.

"It rains here a lot," she said. "I haven't seen an actual thunderstorm since - well, you know. The Hollow," she said, uncomfortable. "But I get little showers that come and go. I don't know how the seasons work exactly - it was December in the real world the first time I turned up, and it was chilly and windy, but that was also in the lead up to. Well." She made a vague roll of her shoulder rather an allude once again to the Hollow. "I want it to snow this winter, but I don't know if that happens. Maybe seasons come back with everything else. Maybe it's perpetual early spring until magic wakes back up." She glanced back out one of the tall, unglazed windows before setting up the stairs, vacuum packed roll of mattress pushed up in front of her as she went. "But I think if it does rain it'll blow off. And if it doesn't, we can find out how waterproof that canopy on the boat is."

There was a certain air to the place that was less ruined and more lived-in since last time, but it was hard even for Joy to pinpoint what was her own effort and what was a self-willed return to life. The murals crumbled a little less - she hadn't done that - but the floors were cleaner - and she had been tackling them. As they wound up the narrow staircase, they passed an open doorway that showed nothing but scattered debris, but they went right past it and into another, more spartan and smaller, where a once-canopied bedstead had risen from the pile of rubble and some threadbare tapestries were gently tossed in the air from the windows.

"I've been cleaning it," she said, rooting around in the Ikea bag for a box cutter. It always felt strange to do mundane moving-in things in the atmosphere of the Garde, but it was stranger with a visitor to watch it happen. "I was hoping if I cleaned it enough I'd show up one day and the bed would make itself. But I guess the Cauldron sees fit to make me drag a mattress up the stairs."

She was, still, talking quite a bit, but this also wasn't necessarily unusual for her, and was in fact in keeping with her when she was in an ebullient mood.

"Can I get you a drink before we get started? Pal is off in the woods somewhere, I guess, but she can't make it up the stairs anyway if you wanna let Tagg roam around while we work." She gestured at the mattress. "You ever opened one of these things? It's sort of terrifying."

She was, in fact, in the process of getting ready to heave it up onto the bed frame, which she did after giving it a testing prod. The furniture not having been exactly designed for modern standardized mattress sizes, it was clear that it was going to sit a little small, as if on some trendy platform bed, which might have been an additional reason that she had set her own bed up on that altar down below, if it hadn't been for the pure zest of the blasphemy.

With a swoop of the X-acto knife, she freed it, and the dramatic way in which it unfurled with a noise that was almost triumphant made her startle, and then laugh. If, in the back of her head, she wondered whether he was near enough to hear her laughing as if without a care in the world, she kept it to herself.

It began off-gassing a plastic smell that was decidedly not in keeping with their surroundings, but Joy ignored it, pushing towards Nis, with her foot, a bag of vacuum-sealed bedding and pillows, presumably expecting her to fall to without further guidance. Not that Joy was holding herself aloof from work herself, almost immediately getting to work finagling the drill and shaking out curtains.

"It's weird," she said, not aware that she was inadvertently answering Nis's unspoken questions. "You go and clean up one part, and suddenly another part repairs itself. But it's uneven. I keep avoiding the trophy room hoping it'll take care of itself, but I'm starting to think it won't."

She paused. "I had one of those Valencyians out here - the Vanguard, you know? - because I'd been talking to Lyndin." This was adjacent to dangerous territory; she kept it light and level. "He thinks that energy - magic or whatever - sort of pools unevenly around a Wonder, or collects, or something. He called them pockets. And she had some little magic metal detector thing, and I guess it does. She found some, but they were mostly things I could have guessed. You know how you just - you just sort of know, or you find things one place but not another?"

Maybe she didn't know; it was hard to say. She started speaking around a couple of screws held between her lips as she dragged over some random, sturdy old piece of furniture to stand on it. "Anyway. I'm trying to focus all my cleaning and repairs for the time being on those places, to see if it speeds up the rest of the place, although maybe it works in the other direction. After I'm done getting a guest bedroom, I mean. I like camping, but not everyone does."

The noise of the drill gave her an excuse to not answer immediately.

"I think so. It's not entirely clear." She hesitated, the pause covered over by her needing to get another screw started. Housework, like cooking, was extremely convenient for navigating a conversation in which one might want to pause and think a great deal, in providing a constant excuse for distraction.

"Do you know Lyndin? I wish I could say he was of mine, since he seems incredibly useful, but I can't lay any more claim to him than him being kind enough to talk to me when I asked. During the - the Hollow - you remember the Vanguard having those shields? He was the one managing all that. I think maybe he saved us all," she added, somewhat absently. "I mean, all of us saved all of us, but I think we probably wouldn't have managed it without him. I latched onto one of them - some low-ranking person; her name is Rhysi, she's a little weird - during all that, because she seemed like the only person in my vicinity who wasn't either panicking or way too excited. And he - Lyndin - knows a lot. I guess their mission - trying to restore life to their homeworld - has made them an expert on a lot of things. I don't like that they work so closely with Chaos sometimes," she added, somewhat grimly. "But I don't think it's out of anything more than pragmatism, and God knows he seemed like the act of doing some good for someone was enough to motivate him to help me out despite everything he has going on, so I try not to - I imagine they have their reasons and their lines in the sand."

The room fell a bit into darkness as the first side of a curtain went up, shading out the fitful grey sunlight. "He gave me a - well, he called it a battery. I need to write a database entry about it, when I know more. He said it was a collection of that energy or magic or whatever it is - like during the Hollow - and he felt the need to tell me, when he gave it to me, that it was ethically sourced." She made an uncomfortable movement. "I don't know if he's got other ones that aren't. I didn't ask."

She might have welcomed the help fifteen seconds ago, but now she merely accepted it. As painful as it was to be judged for what had your own conscience clear, it was worse when you actually were doing something else repulsive to yourself, and not getting yelled at for it. It was like seeing someone turn a hose on a lawn while a car was on fire across the street.

"I get why you're freaked out," she said, swallowing her own indignation over it as much as possible as yet another unfair thing she might have done today, if she wasn't strict with herself. "But consider: a few weeks ago I helped purify an agent. If he'd been yanking starseeds I'd have killed him where he stood if that's what it took. But he wasn't. He was just standing there and waiting for help to come, and now we have one more Glorious Soldier in Our Bullshit Purpose," she said bitterly.

"If standing by while cities burn was Lyndin's line in the sand," she pointed out, "he would have done it already. I don't know how much of his helping during the Hollow was simply because he felt he needed Earth, but he could have left, if he wanted to. They came here with a goal. They knew that magical bullshit happens on Earth and in Destiny City, so they came here to see if it was something they could advance towards their own goals. They were met with Order and Chaos, and - surprise ******** - Chaos was organized and competent and said 'let us help.' Anything we do for the Vanguard, moving forward, is some mitigation of that. But I wasn't even doing anything for the Vanguard. I was doing something for me, and he wanted to help. That's not the action of someone that wants to be our enemy."

A pause for the drill as she scooted to the other side of the narrow window gave her a second to collect her thoughts. "When we were talking he told me he knew the value of a life, and how he acted convinced me he was telling the truth. The fact that he's figured out a way to ethically harvest energy - and remember during the Hollow? We could do that too, in that chamber; I don't think Lyndin can do it that effectively since he said it was expensive and difficult, but that was voluntary - tells me that maybe he's not keen himself on what Chaos is doing, now that he's seen it up close. And he wanted to help me. He gave me much more than I asked or expected, at apparently a fairly large cost to himself - and he isn't necessarily getting anything out of it but a single data point, and possibly not even that. What if I hadn't been willing to give him that? Then he's scuttling right back to Chaos, with all his useful s**t he knows how to do and all his motivation to do it, and getting it from them instead."

All this might have sounded like mere self-justification, but it was not. Joy knew when her own conscience was clear, and she wrapped up with the proof of it: "I don't work with Chaos. I'd rather take my own arm off. I've had the opportunity to do it, and I didn't take it. And even if I wanted to, I could never lose his faith more completely than by doing it. The price is too high. He knows what I did, and he doesn't think it was wrong." Not Lyndin: Gouvernail, apparently, to judge from how she continued. "The Garde used to be around for keeping the peace. Usually you do that by stabbing the people standing in the way of it. But sometimes those people have already gotten to a third party, and then your job is to get a wedge in there, if you can, until they start doing the same s**t. I may have learned things - which I intend to share - which can teach us more about what the Vanguard is doing, and make them more useful to us than to Chaos, in some way. I'm not going to pretend that was my noble goal, or whatever. I was being selfish. But I wouldn't have been selfish if I thought I was helping Chaos, and if they only wanted to help Chaos, they wouldn't have helped us. Me."

And then, subdued: "I could call out how silly it is to get up in arms about those stupid moon-charged quartz bullshit when we're in a secret fantasy dimension in space being magical girls together while a sparkly otter watches," she said, "but I know what you mean. And no. It's not like that. It worked."

Her voice was level, unoffended, as she hopped down from her perch to start disassembling the drill, letting the curtains fall down to shade the room.

"Not sure, really. You know how you find things on a Wonder? The Wonder is powering them, presumably, but it's powering you, too, or you wouldn't - get stronger, whatever."

She paused, rolling the drill bit between her fingers before slotting it back into place. "But I used it with the blindfolds that we ******** around with, because he thought maybe it might make them stronger. It did," she said, with a sudden brief tremble in her voice, and she retreated for a moment to what she thought might be safer ground, unwilling to not dispel some bad feeling, if any lingered.

"I know you're not mad at me, I just have to pre-emptively excuse myself to people who would be, you know? And I don't think you need to worry, but you haven't met him, or Rhysi, so you don't know what I'm working with, so I don't blame you for being nervous, either. It's a justified fear. But I'm not worried. So just - please know that I'm not worried, or scared about it, so you don't have to be either. And I'm never afraid to admit when I'm worried - he's called me a coward for it, you know, but I think he actually approves of me being willing to say when I'm scared -"

She said this with a little self-aware laugh, which when it began was quite genuine, but a second later had suddenly collapsed into a burst of tears. She was already holding up a "don't even do it" hand to ward off any equally-sudden and alarmed hugs.

"This isn't about you, or anything you said," she assured her, walking across the room to lean on the other window and look down over the bailey, for lack of anything better to do. "I'm sorry. Give me like ten seconds, I'll be fine. I feel like every time we hang out I end up getting all maudlin, and I hate it. I swear I'm not like this usually. We should go to an estate sale next week so you can see me not teetering on the brink of theatrics at every ******** goddamned second of the - oh, there's Pal," she added, already bearing up under it, apparently, and wiping her nose on her sleeve. "We should go see her, and then go eat. I'd probably feel better with food and a drink in me."