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Myth had won the competition, of course. Having a professional reason as well as a personal reason to Acquire the Goods put her a couple of leagues ahead in terms of motivation, and besides that, there had not, at any stop, been any boxes of old postcards and photos for Elaine to plunk down her money on. She'd come away with only some velvet curtains, a couple of votive holders, and a floor runner.

She had, of course, attempted to have a friendly squabble about whether it made more sense for the loser to pay for lunch, but she was content to let it drop until the check came. They had reached - apparently, and somewhat strangely - that comfortable area of a friendship in which these types of arrangements could be sorted out on the fly without any undue risk of hurt feelings.

The sun had come up, and had warmed the air from a not-too-chilly to actually-pleasant, and so Elaine had proposed the tables outside, wishing she'd had the foresight to pick up Petitcru to enjoy the mild sunshine as well, and after they'd placed their orders and were chatting over their drinks - Elaine having opted for something with a bite to it, given both that she wasn't driving and that she'd need the help sleeping in a few hours - she let her eyes wander over the deserted patio, and up to the string lights. They reminded her that she needed to get better string lights for the chapel bedroom on the Garde, which led to other thoughts, and she fell uncharacteristically quiet, abstracted.

She spent too much of her daily life dancing around things she couldn't reasonably tell anyone. It was always unnecessarily exhausting to play pretend at being someone and something she wasn't, but even more so to play pretend at not being something she was. And there was, besides, the uncomfortable knowledge that after she'd had a chat with Encke and Viatrix - and possibly again with Lyndin, if she could swing it - that she was going to have to find a way to share what she'd learned, just in case it might be useful to someone besides - well, it had already been useful to someone besides herself, but more broadly useful. That had been the entire point, right? Or that's what she'd told herself, at the time, thinking it true.

"I keep wondering if it'll get cold out there," she said distractedly, not having to clarify where she meant. "It didn't last year, but I didn't show up until late in the winter and there was - you know - extreme weather," she said, with a grim inward laugh at this euphemism for a world-ending, universe-eating eldritch snake. "There's no fireplaces - building's too old. There's a hot shower. Can you believe it? Comes up from underground somewhere. Outside, though, which is gonna be a bit of a b***h if the cold comes in."

She was, as she spoke, absently turning the signet ring around her finger. It was a longstanding habit of hers when she was thinking; the weightiness of it - in her civilian glamor looking a bit like she was wearing a man's ring for sentimental reasons - invited fidgeting.

She was startled by this sudden question, but only a little. Elaine, for all her many - many, many - flaws, was not a person accustomed to hiding things, except where absolutely necessary, and in such a strange bubble as she inhabited with the woman across the table, it was even more difficult to detach her thoughts from and sail past every reminder of what didn't want to be said.

She hesitated, however, and wrinkled her nose in an expression of disgust.

"Maybe just me," she said. "Can't think of anyone else to blame, much as I'd like to."

She paused again, and the arrival of their food was a welcome opportunity to gather her thoughts at least until the server had departed, although all she did afterwards was prod the edge of an omelet with her fork.

"You know that sleep study I was working on?" she asked, subdued, as she tried to sort out what she was about to say. "The one that I said got different after I got some help with it?"

She laughed, a little weakly, at how exactly contrary to the truth this was, and shook her head.

"No, no. Nothing like that. Nothing bad. Just - just really, really weird."

She paused yet again, and spoke very quietly. She was talking as much as she could in code, but it was not possible to be entirely opaque. "You remember I told you - when the storms came -"

When Gouvernail had, as Joy had phrased it to Nis in some desperate hope that a Cosmos Knight might have some sort of answers, been given an awful hope that he hadn't asked for.

" - I asked him, a while back, about things going weird . And he said it was the worst thing, after all those years of resignation, to think that - well. But he also said - you remember how I was saying I felt so ******** awful for him? -" she said, an understatement; it had pushed her to an open display of fraught emotion such as she did not enjoy indulging in, "- he said, because it was useless to say it so I guess he felt like he could, that if a man had been in prison for as long as he's been - chained to a house he can't leave - that he might do anything to feel the sun again, even if it was only for a few minutes and even if it made things rough after. And I never was able to shake it. That's why I went to - to the professional I talked to you about. I thought maybe he could clear up some questions I had about that whole thing. And he did, in a way."

She said something, then, that she'd said many times since, to many people and also to herself: "No one else can help him," she said, an echo of that long-ago conversation, during which she'd compared a human man to a sickly dog foisted on the care of someone who had no choice but to save them, and therefore get attached.

Things had always - as Nis had often perceived - felt a little strained between Joy and the ancestral ghost of the Garde. There had never been any indication that her desire to help him had been anything but an obligation. There was no indication of it now. If her voice was a little faltering, it was only because she was confessing to doing something that felt like an awful manifestation of power of the exact kind that Joy had often protested she wanted nothing of. Maybe it was normal, to sound a little horrified that you'd done something approaching a miracle, even with help.

"He's - he can never sleep," she said delicately. "But he can dream, you know?"

This was, theoretically, enough. It was enough to tell someone that she had in some way brought something like momentary, illusory-but-compelling life, to a dead man. For a moment she told herself that it was as much as she was going to say, and that she was glad she'd chosen to tell it to Myth - to Nis - who had always imagined even more conflict between Joy and Nail than actually existed. It gave a tidy cover to the wholeness of the truth, and suggested that Joy had merely neatly achieved the goal of giving him relief, which had been foisted on her as an unwanted responsibility.

But she felt herself teetering on the brink of saying more, inwardly considering whether it would not feel better, and more to the point, whether it would convince this other Knight to avoid being so hard on him, even when he admittedly deserved it, if she could filter her comments through the screen of what Elaine had to admit even to herself was a kind of fondness.

There was a measure in relief in Myth getting there by herself, somehow. She wasn't sure how - although if she'd thought about how the Garde looked to an outside pair of eyes it might have clued in for her - but she didn't actually care. It kept her from having to find some way to say it.

She did not turn red, much as she had expected it. Instead she felt the cold tide that suggested that had, instead, turned white, and she buried her face in her hands with a noise of agony, pulling her feet up onto the edge of her chair so that she could hide behind her knees.

"It's complicated," was all she could manage, sounding a little strangled. "Really, really, really complicated! You have no idea how complicated."

She was making protesting noises at being ushered out of the restaurant, entirely too happy to just let the conversation continue in the safety of coded speech that would inevitably force it to pass quickly and let them both move on with their lives. She kept making said noises even past the point that this was futile, but it stopped very abruptly at Myth's question. It stunned her for a moment beyond reaction, until it caught up to her and she yanked her arm out of Myth's grasp, giving her a look of unmitigated, unmasked reproach.

Elaine, for all she stood five-foot-three and was wearing a ratty sweater half the time, had a way of looking queenly even out of her powered garb. It was a certain all-consuming dignity that had no concern for what she was wearing or where she was, born out of a total confidence in herself that had rarely been shaken for the last several years. It gathered around her now, aloof and ice-cold.

"Of course it ******** was," she said. And then: "How dare you?"

There was a long, long, inward struggle that passed in silence, during which Elaine attempted to swallow her pride. This, given the size involved, was possibly a choking hazard.

She debated throwing it in and calling an Uber. She wished she hadn't said anything at all. She tried to reason with herself that Myth, who could not see into her head, had asked a reasonable question for reasonable reasons. And while it was making it a little easier to act rationally, it was not doing much to dampen the rage roaring along inside her.

"No, I wouldn't," she said at last, somewhat stonily, deigning to continue walking with her back very straight. "Because if it had been a friend of mine, I would have thought worse of them if they had the nerve to say that it was complicated. Nothing's ******** complicated about that. That's simple as hell."

There was the timely interruption of their takeout containers being handed to them as they arrived at the front counter, and Elaine was dimly glad that she had not, after all, insisted on being the one to settle the bill. It was a petty thought, but a comforting one. It was not much of a pause, but it was enough of one for her blood to go from a boil to a simmer and for her more charitable, more rational thoughts to get more of a foothold over the torrential anger sloshing around in her chest.

She did not apologize for losing her temper. Nor did she say that she forgave her for incurring it. But when they spoke again, on the sidewalk, she did not recur to the topic, which was maybe as close as she was going to get, for the time being, to letting it go.

"There really isn't anything to discuss," she said, with a touch of reserve. "If I can figure out a way to make that technology or magic or whatever it is available to other people, I'm going to. I've been talking to a lot of them, and I don't think most of them would want it, but some of them would. But I don't know how, yet, especially not without taking it away from him, and I'm not willing to do that." She bit back the urge to add because he's a good man. She was striving valiantly to keep the peace here.

She looked at her flatly for a long few seconds.

"I didn't tell you because I needed your permission," she pointed out, somewhat testily. "I told you because if I hate having to keep secrets and god knows I have enough to keep, and god knows you're one of the only people who knows my biggest one."

She did, however, after a pause, haul herself up into the cab, scrubbing her hands over her eyelids less from annoyance than from needing something to do with her hands while she tried, again, to retract her spines and be a little less prickly and narrowly avoiding slamming the door behind her. She then, being Elaine, anxiously searched her hands to see if she'd dislodged any lash extensions.

"It's complicated because like. Well, you do the math. Imagine how complicated it is to get tangled up with a coworker and then multiply that by like - a thousand isn't enough. It's not like we can just avoid seeing each other."

She did not say what she had thought before, now that Myth's question was still hanging over her thoughts: that if anything perhaps she was the one being at minimum cruel and at worst somewhat abusive. It wasn't like he had any options for alternatives. But if he had known someone that was-and-was-not her, some lifetime ago, that had been the one relief to finding that out: that maybe he wasn't deluding himself when he claimed that he would have picked her out of those alternatives anyway.

Complicated.

"And no, we're not happy with it. I'm not happy with it and neither is he. How could we be happy with this? I wish I hadn't done it," she added, a trace of exhaustion creeping in. "Not for - only because it made things such a ******** godawful mess. I don't - I already told you once I'm not a romantic. I do my thing, I get up, I leave. He is, though. More than you'd think. So this was pretty ******** stupid on my part. I think of what my life looks like six months from now, let alone what his does - not that he has a life - and I feel like I'm going to throw up. But it's too late now. He knows how I feel, or I guess how I don't feel. I can sort of guess how he does from some of the s**t he says. I wish he didn't say it as well as he does. I guess when you spent an entire lifetime not letting yourself have anything and then a thousand years brooding about it you learn to take what you can get and pretend it's enough."

She wanted to bite out a sharp you can't, but it was both unkind and untrue. So she fought it down, endeavoring not to be someone she'd hate tomorrow and equally endeavoring to avoid having to make an apology.

"It was helpful just telling someone," she said, although she couldn't entirely shake the reserve. "It's been ******** - this weight around my neck for weeks, not being able to just - I ******** hate how much of my life now is dancing around being honest," she said, with some heat in it that at least wasn't aimed at Myth this time. "And I'm glad there's someone I can trust if I need to just - say something."

She hesitated, though. "There is something, though. And I know - I'm not mad at you about this I swear, but - I know he doesn't... give the best first impressions. Or second or third, or whatever. He can't help it. Please just - I know it's my fault too - I know I b***h about him - but please cut him some slack. He can't help it," she repeated. "He spent a really, really long time having to dance around being himself too, in a different way, and he never figured out how to get back to it, and if he's an a*****e sometimes it's not as much as I am, and his motives for it are usually better. He's a good man. I don't say that about very many men," she added grimly, "so believe me when I say it. I wouldn't have bothered, if he wasn't. I know he rubbed you the wrong way from the first second. One of the first things you said to me about him - anyway. He did for me too. But it doesn't mean he's an a*****e. He's not cruel. He's not careless. I've never even met another man I esteemed enough to think he was worth being upset over," she added, with the air of something within her boiling over, although she at least did not burst into tears this time. "So please don't assume the worst, if you see him again some time - or if I talk about him - and things seem off like they did that once. Even if I s**t talk him first."