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It’s not that they don’t leave each other’s side— they do. It’s simply that those sidereal revolutions are so short by Sixth comparison, his moon returned to face her sun before anyone has noticed they’ve ever been apart. It’s that, ceteris paribus, their perihelion and aphelion are similar enough to need no distinguishing name. It’s that, even when they have separated, the other is always there, obliquely. A slant of conscience. A daemon running in perpetuum.
It’s that Camilla feels most alive in the places where their orbits overlap.
It’s that Palamedes can conceive of anything except a universe without her in it.
They’re walking the halls beneath the hatch again. Lower Canaan House is a subterranean morass of overlapping corridors and disused rooms, a veritable tomb of a place that makes the Warden twitchier than he usually is and causes Camilla’s hands to stray continuously to her tiny knives in their tuck spots. The dusty industrial tunnel that leads to the equally dusty, and largely deserted, laboratories is worst of all; he’s been back to it for four days running, growing increasingly fretful with each press of his fingers to its walls, floor, or crumbling adornments.
He’s pacing it now, ten metre lengths up and down, from the base of the ladder to the first archway with its bone relic. His fingers keep straying out to trace things. A rivet. The corner of a grille. One length of the fraying cloth tied to those bones, again, like he’ll somehow find the answer he’s looking for in its archaic flax fibres. He mutters soundlessly as he works. He throws her half-finished sentences as he scrambles from one point to the next, to the next, casting, cursing, repeating. Each new reading increases the channel of worry between his eyebrows, or sends his hands carding through his hair, leaving his already messy curls more tangled still. For about the tenth time in as many minutes, Palamedes narrows his eyes at whatever his fingertips are telling him and pushes back to his feet, tugging absently on a strand of hair as he stalks back in the direction of the hatch once more. He pauses halfway along to run his right index finger down a barely visible seam in the metal sheeting that lines the tunnel.
Camilla shivers, engulfed by the eight-hour-old memory of that exact fingertip ghosting down the length of her spine. Always tactile before, the Warden has been relentless since they left the Library, all the energy and focus he’d poured into running their House now free to run over her, across her, along her, mapping a universe against her body. His hands and mouth seek her out constantly, and for all the shoulds and oughts that have been ingrained in her — in both of them, if she’s being fair — she can’t bring herself to stop him. There’s a peace to leaving herself unfolded. To surrendering to his gravity after a decade of attempting to withstand its pull.
He’s resumed his attempt to wear a groove straight through the metal flooring before Camilla can ask what he hasn’t found this time. She follows, not quite the full half-step behind she would have been a month ago. Just as he reaches the ladder that leads to the hatch above, he stops abruptly. The memory of his touch is still coursing through her, and the extent of her distraction becomes clear the second she makes contact, grazing his shoulder with her own; Camilla halts, not a fraction behind her necromancer, but dead even with where he’s standing.
He’s looking at a space to the left of the ladder and his eyes flicker to hers as their shoulders bump, his fingers already halfway to the grey stonework. He finishes the movement with a single step forward but even as his hand brushes the wall, he turns back to her. Camilla catches the very moment it happens: his eyes rake over her face, their glimmering monotone darkening as they lock on her own. The crease in the centre of his brow eases fractionally. His fingers slip from the stone behind him. With a voice hungrier than a revenant, he utters one hoarse, desperate syllable.
“Cam.”
And then she’s somehow up against the wall he was just touching, its rough stone blocks digging unevenly into her shoulder blades, her feet worryingly unsteady beneath her. The realisation knocks the air from her lungs. He’s never had the strength to push her anywhere. The mere thought of him doing so — to say nothing of the fact that he’s just done it — is so antipodal to everything she knows that Camilla comes utterly unmoored; she collapses back against the wall and loses herself to his hands, his mouth, the whole skinny length of him. Entire minutes pass, saturated with his smell, sound, taste, before she regains enough presence of mind to recall where exactly they are, and pushes his hands — currently working their way under her robes and into the waistband of her trousers — away gently, murmuring, “Warden, wait.”
“I have waited,” he growls against her ear, nipping the lobe. The thrill of his teeth on her skin wrenches at her insides. “I’m sick of waiting.”
“Patience is a virtue, I’m told.”
“I’ve been patient for five years. To hell with virtue.”
Years. Decades. A lifetime. It’s been all of these. It’s been eight and a half hours, at most, and her skin is blazing like a comet where his hands are pawing up and down her clothing. She wants him to tear it off her, right in the middle of this dank, decaying tunnel. She wants to kiss that pretty smirk off his face.
His lips graze her forehead, the bridge of her nose, her left cheekbone. Camilla ducks her head away before she goes drifting into them forever. She recentres herself, affixing each limb and cell back to her own gravity instead of his, and says with a serenity she absolutely doesn’t possess right now, “I was patient for twelve, if we’re congratulating ourselves.”
Whatever protest he’d been about to make at her movement is bitten off, his mouth snapping shut as he frowns, blinks, and finally says incredulously, “Twelve?” And then he laughs, a sound too full of life for the dying space they’re stuck in. His thumb brushes along her jaw. He turns her face slowly back to his, presses his mouth to the corner of hers where the dimple sometimes shows, and asks in a low voice, “You’ve wanted me since you were eight?”
She hasn’t blushed at a single thing Palamedes Sextus has said since they were twelve, but it’s a near miss, close enough that he must surely feel the heat rising up through her core. She twists to one side, away from his questing hand, now marking a path down the plane of her neck.
“Obviously not like that.”
“Like how, then?”
She doesn’t need to look at him to know he’s smiling; it’s in her ears, in her marrow. Camilla looks anyway, cataloguing the bony body she’s circled for as long as she can remember. His robes: too voluminous, swathing him like a child in a costume. His eyes: wide as moons and soft as the dawn on this verdant, oceanic planet. The tilt of his head as he watches her assess him. The limbs that mirror her own, habit of a lifetime, tugging her truth out without a single overt movement.
“Like I didn’t want anyone else to touch you,” she admits, half-surprised by her own candour. “Or look at you. Be near you.”
“Oh?” The ragged edge of one fingernail drags along the skin of her clavicle. “Why ever not?”
“Because you were mine.”
“Yours?” His hand pauses at the clasp beneath her throat, flicks it open with far too little effort, moves down her sternum to settle over her breast.
“Yes.”
It takes two seconds and three simple movements to grab his wrist and spin him bodily so that it’s his back scraping the wall, his feet scuffing the metal grille of the floor for purchase as she pushes against him with a leg wedged between his own.
“Mine,” Camilla repeats, one hand lightly pinning the wrist she’s still holding above his head, the other embarking on a journey of lazy finger-steps down his ribcage. Palamedes whines like the wind off Dominicus, high and thin, and she tightens her grip fractionally, pressing forward a centimetre, two, three.
Their heads move as one to the sudden spasm of movement against her thigh.
“Careful, Warden.” Her heart is thumping in her ears. Her fingers brush the last of his ribs and she trails all four of them down the cotton-covered valley of his abdomen. “One might think you were enjoying yourself.”
“Say that again,” he breathes.
“What?”
“That I’m yours.”
Camilla leans against him, a fourth centimetre, a fifth, their bodies now flush against one another, every atom of her being corybantic. His pulse, his bones, sing in the circle of her hand. She mouths along the line of his throat, feels the shift of cartilage under his skin as he swallows.
“You,” she murmurs against his ear, letting go of his hand so that she can shove his robes out of the way, her fingers moving first to their fastenings then to the buckle of his trousers, “are mine.”
He keens as she says it, which is, for one heady moment, the most delicious noise she’s ever heard in her life — right up until she punctuates her statement with a sharp tug on his trousers and drops to nuzzle at the bulge now on display, and Palamedes makes an absolutely filthy whimper that will stay with her for the rest of time. She opens her mouth on impulse, sucking at him through the cloth of his undergarments. Her bottom teeth drag over the fabric as she rocks back onto her heels to look up at him. His glasses are crooked; robes as well, hanging half-off his shoulders like a blanket. His face is already flushed and his hair has lost any semblance of order it ever possessed.
Her adept is, frankly, a mess.
“King and fucking Saints, Cam,” he whispers, pupils as large as coins.
Camilla smiles, yanks his pants to his knees, and lowers her mouth over him.
He’s hot against her tongue, alight with the same fire that’s currently burning right through her centre. His hips stutter as the head of his cock hits the back of her throat, and she flattens a palm across his abdomen, pushing him firmly back against the cool stone bricks. Slowly, a fraction at a time, Camilla withdraws, her free hand wrapping around him as she does, thumb rubbing gently back and forth over spit-slick skin. She pauses at the final inch, letting her incisors scrape lightly over the little ridge there. His hand, stroking over the back of her head, clenches in her hair and she pulls back to blow a stream of air over the ruddy tip of him.
“Easy,” she murmurs, running the pad of her finger up the underside of his length, committing each tremor and jerk to memory. His grip loosens, hand moving slightly sideways; his fingers start massaging gentle circles into her scalp. Camilla tilts her head into his touch, still holding his cock upright, trapped between her palm and his pelvis, then leans in to run the tip of her tongue from base to crown.
Palamedes’ head falls back against the stone wall with a muffled thud. When she glances upward all she can see is the sharp triangle of his larynx, the promontory of his chin. “Easy for you to say,” he groans, dragging his free hand through his hair before letting it drop to her shoulder, spindly fingers curling around the back of her neck.
This time when she takes him in her mouth she holds his hips firmly in place, and instead of jutting into her tonsils, he slides neatly past. Camilla closes her eyes, works her tongue up and back, up and back, just as she’d done with her thumb, pausing for a moment as his hips start to rock against the pressure of her hands, the fingers at the base of her skull tightening and straightening by turns. Another quick glance up; his head is lolling sideways, glasses almost off the end of his nose, and he’s staring myopically at her in a way she can only describe as wondrous. She hums around him, and is rewarded with a sharp inhalation and another scrape of nails against her head.
“I do- don’t know when you found - ah - found the time to practice this in the Spire,” he manages, and Camilla laughs through her nose with her mouth still full of him. She closes her teeth very gently around his girth, squeezing with one hand simultaneously. It makes him twitch, and she bumps her nose gently into the fine black curls in front of her before sliding off with closed lips and an audible pop that should fill her with shame, but instead sends a gush of heat and want through her abdomen. She can’t even find it in her to be embarrassed by the thin strings of saliva that stretch between her mouth and his skin as she pulls away.
“You don’t want to know,” she says. His cock twitches again, a tiny pearl of moisture beading at the head. She cranes forward and licks it from him.
Palamedes, both hands now cupped on either side of her face, closes his eyes and moans.
He does want to know — or at least, part of him does. He’s asked before. The last time was forthright, self-deprecating, and she’d said with a shrug that she was a quick study. Which is true, but the real reason, the one she doesn’t yet have the words for, is that it’s easy with him. Is that every one of his gestures is a syllabary stored in her blood; is that, over these last few weeks, his very thoughts have somehow started beating through her brain. What he wants. What he needs. She’s still learning his body, all its hollows and ravines, its jagged geometries, but she knows him inside and out, has known him as long and as well as she’s ever known herself.
His fingers slide into her hair, more possessive than affectionate, a distinction she’ll never get over the thrill of. She shuffles slightly on her knees, reaches up to cup her hands beneath his cock like an offering. Delicately, methodically, Camilla places a series of kisses — just like the ones he’s peppered her hands with — down the entire length of him, inch by blessed inch, before opening her mouth and letting him slide in once more. She closes her eyes again, moves with him on pure instinct, magnetised to every shift and shudder. She breathes him in and wonders how there was ever a time when they were more separate than they are in this instant. Her fingers dig into what little flesh covers his cuspate hipbones, gripping him tighter with each jolt and jerk, and she’s so full with the feel and the scent of him that she’s more or less forgotten where they are until his voice breaks upon her ears.
“Cam,” he says, hands out of her hair and pushing, gently but insistently, on her shoulders, then more urgently, “Cam, wai- fuck, sweetheart.”
There’s such panic in his voice that she lifts her head without thinking, peering up into the darkness above them, but the only person coming is Palamedes; he barely manages to shove one skeletal hand between them before he spills over their fingers, the front of her robes and the bottom of his own.
Camilla kneels, utterly still, for two heartbeats, filled with so many emotions she can’t name or explain that the only thing left to her is laughter, which is probably inappropriate given how mortified her adept currently looks. Instead, she sits back against her heels, briefly assesses her hand, and shrugs to herself as she wipes it on the folds of her robes. Palamedes looks at her, flustered and flushing, and groans to himself as he does the same. She gathers a pleat of soft fabric in one hand, his sticky cock in the other, and begins to gently wipe him down.
“Should’ve let me,” she says.
“Cam.”
There’s something beautifully innocent, oddly touching, about what he’ll let her do for him, this creature of contradictions who will pleasure her in the filthiest ways she can think of but works himself into knots at the mere suggestion his bodily fluids might end up near her face. As though all his attention, all his devotion, is making up for something.
As though she’s ever needed him to.
“What? I don’t mind. And that’ll be a bitch to clean.”
“One of these labs must have running water. None of them have your toothbrush.”
“You’re very sweet, Warden.” She narrows her eyes slightly, glances at him through her lashes as he tugs up his trousers, calculating exactly where the edge is. “Literally, sometimes.”
“Camilla.”
His blush is instant and ferocious, and this time she does laugh, gripping both his hands in hers as she pulls herself to her feet. His cleanest one shakes itself loose, reaches out to tuck her hair back behind one ear. He kisses the soft space under the lobe and Camilla shudders, the primitive beats of want and take and have pounding through her veins.
“I ought to take you back to our room this instant.”
“And teach me how respectful Scholars speak?” His cheeks darken even further. She’ll deny — absolutely, positively, under threat of edged weaponry — that hers do the same. “As much as I’d enjoy that, I thought you wanted to find out what was wrong with this building.”
“The building will still be here later.”
“So will I.”
Palamedes holds her gaze for one endless moment before he leans forward, kisses her, and tugs her after him as he strides down the tunnel.
He keeps her beside him as they walk, fingers tangled up in hers, shoulder bumping gently against her own every few metres. Just before they step into the wide, empty atrium with its arterial corridors, he squeezes her hand, clears his throat, and says “Cam?”
“Warden?”
“When you— you said— how long was it? The… wanting.”
Camilla stops walking. She turns to the lanky boy standing beside her, studying him in the weak glow of the overhead lighting. His robes are still askew, tugged too high up his shoulders, clasps dangling over his heart. His hair’s a disaster. The thick lenses of his glasses catch pinpoints of light like stars, glittering back at her in the dimness, and behind them his eyes are the pale, perfect smudge of First House atmosphere, the twin of the foam that lingers atop the waves battering this ruin. He’s right in front of her, as he’s always been, but also tucked away inside her: a sliver of a voice she’s heard subconsciously for fifteen years, deafening now that she’s paying attention.
His hand reaches for hers, again, always. She takes it. Takes a breath, a sideways step, amazed and somehow unamazed at the way he shadows her so perfectly, as if it had been his life spent a fraction behind hers.
There’s no sound in a vacuum until it’s pierced. Camilla takes another breath, lets herself drift into the prosody that’s wound through her for three-quarters of her life. She can do — has always done — action, but words are his forte, and the ones bubbling up in her throat are things she’s not meant to say. It’s not how it’s done. But they’re no longer in the Library, and nothing else at Canaan House has made any sense so far either.
“Since the first time you kissed me.”
Behind his lenses, behind his lambent eyes of pearl, he catalogues and retrieves, faster than light speed. “In the archival room?”
She nods.
“When we were twelve?”
“I was two days away from thirteen.”
“That’s seven years.”
“Seven and four months. I know.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Why didn’t you?” Vacuum broken, the deluge pours in, all the fears and sentiments she’s kept buried in the deepest recesses of her soul crashing out around them. “We were alone that whole night.”
“What night?”
“When you realised.”
His eyes and hers flicker simultaneously to her left elbow, to the unblemished skin a shard of bone once split. Palamedes huffs, bemused, incredulous. “You knew. Of course you knew.” He inhales slowly, rubs at his temple with his free hand, squeezes the one wrapped around hers. “Dare I ask how?”
“When I woke up—”
“When you woke up,” he mutters, sotto voce, “God, I should have realised.”
“—you were looking at me. Reading me. The same way you read her letters.”
Something very like contrition washes over his face at that. “Cam—”
“But you kept writing,” she presses on. The truth, so difficult by daylight, is an awfully easy gift to him in this forgotten, underground chamber. “You kept writing and— it was one night. You were a teenage boy. It could have meant nothing.”
“I—” His mouth works soundlessly for a moment before he drops her hand and flings his arms around her in a fierce hug, burying his face in the crook of her neck. “Cam. You get exactly one free pass for being the smartest person I know. Apart from myself.”
“Braggart.”
His laugh is warm and muffled against her ear. “How could you think it meant nothing?”
“You didn’t exactly make it clear it meant something.”
“Did I not? Last year I said, out loud, in as many words, that I’d marry you if I could.”
“After your first proposal had been turned down.” She almost manages to keep the sting out of her words. “And actually, if I recall correctly, you said you’d marry me because no one understood you like I did. There was nothing in there about desiring me carnally.”
“I called you my heart, Camilla!”
“You’ve been doing that since we were nine.”
He finally unwraps his limbs from around her and draws back to gaze at her through once-again crooked, and now also smudged, glasses. “That,” he says, palms on her shoulders, most studious frown plastered across his face, “is a fair point and well made. Camilla Hect, light of my life: no one understands me like you do, you are my heart and my soul, and I desire you carnally.”
“Hm.” She reaches up and smoothes the crease in the middle of his brow with her thumb, then lets it drop to brush along the set of his bottom lip. “I did recently hear a theory to that effect.”
“Not a theory; demonstrable fact. Provable probability measure of one. Extremely positive product-moment correlations. Profound—” Palamedes breaks off, eyes dipping to the drying stains across the front of her robes, then further to examine his own. “We are… we look like we’ve been rolling around in a Ninth catacomb.”
“Accurate enough, if you subtract eight.”
“Right, then. There is definitely a lab with cleaning supplies somewhere in this godforsaken place. I suggest that we find it, and that you then allow me to prove the hypothesis of my adoration with evidence-based techniques.”
Camilla glances to the first of the hallways that branch off into the distance. “Divide and conquer?”
“Absolutely not. There’s something incredibly wrong here, Cam. I need— I want you by my side.”
She walks beside him until they reach the first of the hallways, at which point he starts wandering; in front of her, behind her, circling her like a star for the full length of it and back. Almost all the doors are locked. Those which aren’t lead to rooms devoid of either sinks or sponges. They traverse the second hallway to the same result.
The first room in the third hallway is not locked and proves the Warden right: five minutes after they enter it, they emerge damp and rumpled but at least free of anything that might raise eyebrows should they be spotted between the hatch and their quarters. As they begin to make their way back to the atrium, a soft noise echoes in the distance, like dust sighing, like the closing of a book. They turn, first to each other, then to the dimly-lit space that stretches away like a mausoleum.
Camilla’s skin is crawling and the Warden is practically humming with nervous energy by the time they reach the halfway point and stop, as one, to gape at the spattered constellation of blood in front of them. Palamedes drops to his knees immediately and, with the merest of grimaces, sticks one finger into the closest liquid droplet.
“Female, late teens. Generally fair health. Significant necromantic aptitude.” He frowns at the deep red blotches, giving a low whistle as he wipes his finger on a corner of his robes. “Extremely significant.”
“The Ninth.” He nods. “Shit.”
He takes Camilla’s proffered hand, glancing warily around them as he gets to his feet. “I hate to say this, Cam, but we’d best look again. There must be something we’re missing. Back to the hatch?”
“Indeed, Warden.”