tushanshu_logs | but you didn't have to cut me off

Entry tags:

but you didn't have to cut me off

Characters: Skulduggery Pleasant

skeletonenigma and Solomon Wreath

peacefullywreathed
Date: After this network thread, around the beginning of the second week of August
Location: The common room of their suite, HUO-WEI in the Fire District
Situation: This animosity has got to stop. People are going to get hurt. Also, Skulduggery has a theory.
Warnings/Rating: Spoilers for the sixth book onwards, references to death and pre-canon torture, and a side helping of unintended emotional manipulation. Shouldn't be any present-day violence, though.

The rest of the day passed by agonisingly slowly. Time wasn't meant to pass slowly in the middle of a war. Even during the few brief rests Skulduggery enjoyed during the war with Mevolent, there was always something going on, something to pay attention to or something to plan. Here, the time passed slowly, and it passed quietly. It was enough to drive him mad.

He was the first one in the common room - not that that was a surprise - and he was early. Being early was a surprise. Skulduggery wasn't used to being early, but it was difficult not to be when the meeting place was the living room of one's own dwelling. There wasn't anything to read, and there wasn't anything to listen to, so he resorted to a very light meditation to pass the time. He refused to admit, even to himself, that a second and more important reason for the meditation might have been to calm himself down.

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For a moment Solomon was inclined not to answer. What was the point of it? That situation had told him all he needed to know, and giving Skulduggery more information only ever enabled him to manipulate people further.

And yet it hadn't given Solomon all he needed to know. It hadn't, and the urge to dismiss the question, the strength of that urge, wasn't like him. Solomon asked questions. Not always, true, but usually. Why would he deny that one so vehemently? Even the questions he didn't ask, he recognised as questions. Why not the same of that one? That one, of all others?

Why that one, unless he'd been conditioned into dismissing it to begin with?

"I don't know his name," Solomon said instead, but stiffly, and still not looking in Skulduggery's direction. "He said it was Dillon, but it wasn't. I remember trying to use it against him. He claimed to be your brother."

Skulduggery's instinctive response was to ask why on Earth Wreath hadn't mentioned that at the time - why he thought being kidnapped and tortured by Skulduggery's own brother wasn't information relevant to the both of them. Under the circumstances, however, Skulduggery didn't need to ask. He knew, immediately, which brother Wreath was talking about. And he knew why Wreath dismissed the option of coming clean every time it came up.

He took an unnecessary breath and released it slowly. "His name was Lugan. He had the power to subtly affect memories. Powerful magic for a sorcerer who knows what they're doing, but he was born and raised mortal - he had no idea. It was relatively harmless in the short-term, or if you knew what he was capable of. In the long-term, he could erase... well. Almost anything."

Lugan had erased Skulduggery's memories of Wreath. Even after Skulduggery realised what Lugan was and dealt with him, he hadn't known just how much he was forgetting. It took centuries, a chance encounter, and a considerable amount of anger before he regained those memories again.

It took a moment or so for Solomon to realise his cup was empty. He stared down at it for a moment and then rose suddenly and went into the kitchen for a bottle of hard whiskey given to him by a kedan who wanted to know how a member of her family had died. It wasn't a particularly good bottle, certainly not of the standard Solomon preferred, but right now, he didn't particularly care.

He brought it into the living-room, poured himself a glass, downed the glass and poured himself another.

So the part about being Skulduggery's brother had been true. Solomon had never quite decided whether or not he believed it, and in the long rung it had never really mattered. The fact was that his captor had spoken with too much angry bitterness to have been lying about his accusations, and the longer Solomon spent chained and starving in that dirty cellar, the more it seemed time had proven him right: Skulduggery used those he saw fit, manipulated them until they didn't even known it had happened, humiliated them for his own benefit and then discarded them when he had no more use.

Solomon threw back the second glass and then set it down. He hadn't had dinner, yet. He wanted to be drunk for this conversation, and he couldn't afford to be. Skulduggery hadn't remembered him, after they'd parted ways. Solomon had protected Nefarian Serpine from him, and Skulduggery had acted as though he'd never seen him before in his life.

"You're telling me," he said very carefully, "that your brother is the reason you didn't remember me, that day in the Midwest? That he is the reason I, apparently, don't remember things about our association which I should?" Solomon gazed down at the whiskey, decided to hell with it, and poured himself another glass. "There's one flaw in you assertion. What possible reason could he have had to kidnap me?"

In Skulduggery's experience - experience very far-gone, to be fair, but experience nonetheless - being drunk never actually helped. It seemed to, but the fix it provided was only temporary, like a band-aid which hid a wound without healing it. Once you woke up in the morning, you had nothing to show for the attempt but a pounding headache and the added bonus of shame at whatever your drunken actions had been.

Far be it from Skulduggery to remind Wreath of any of that, however.

"Yes," he said simply. It was a surprisingly simple answer to such a complicated question. The next question was even simpler, and yet the answer was complicated enough to make the detective pause.

"Because," Skulduggery eventually said, "he was jealous."

Solomon laughed and it came out sudden and sharp. "Jealous. Of me?" He laughed again, and drank the third glass, and put it down with a deep, not quite steady breath. "He had nothing over which to be jealous," he said calmly, "and any idiot could look at me and tell you that."

Waif, half-trained, mortal-born. He'd never quite been accepted in the Temple, used and appreciated and disdained because of what he could offer--even more than most. The Temple didn't particularly like acolytes who came in from the outside, even those of use.

The time he didn't spend at the Temple he'd spent trailing after Skulduggery like a little lost puppy. It was ... pathetic, really. Even more so that once Skulduggery had come back into his life, Solomon had found himself falling into old patterns.

I never really did know who I was, he thought bitterly. He hadn't even been able to be a proper Necromancer.

Skulduggery agreed on the jealousy front, but not for the reasons Wreath believed. And that was what made this whole conversation so much harder than it had any right to be; Wreath wasn't even capable of considering the truth. That was, in a way, Skulduggery's fault. He'd abandoned the investigation far too early.

"He felt betrayed," said Skulduggery, "by me, for something that happened years earlier. He believed I'd forgotten him." And he'd been right, but since that was partly Lugan's own fault, Skulduggery considered it beside the point. "He was jealous of you because I'd taken an interest. Rather than confront the both of us about it, as any rational and mature adult would have done, he decided the world was out to get him and I needed to be punished."

Lugan had succeeded there, far more than he knew. Skulduggery shook his head. "I'm sorry. If I'd known for a moment he was involved - "

- he would have done what, exactly? Tried harder to convince Wreath that the Temple was the wrong path, for all the good that would have done? Skulduggery didn't know, so he cut himself off.

An apology from Skulduggery Pleasant. Solomon would have to mark the date, particularly since that one sounded spectacularly genuine. Then again, he always did, didn't he? That was part of his charm. He could be lying through his teeth--Solomon had seen and heard him lying through his teeth dozens of times--and still sound completely genuine.

"I see," Solomon said, and the words came out icily. It was a surprise; he didn't feel as though he was capable of emotion of any depth. "So it wasn't about me, then; it was about you. Of course it was. Everything was always about you."

Part of him dimly realised he shouldn't have had those drinks. That he would be more in control if he hadn't. That part of his anger came from liquid courage, rather than anything else. The rest of him didn't particularly care. Years and years, centuries, of bitter incomprehension laid bare, and what, exactly, did it change?

Absolutely nothing. He'd always been in a shadow.

Skulduggery tilted his head. "Everything?"

Funny. His recollections were completely different. Not so funny when you understood exactly why, of course, but centuries of habit and conditioning were still making it impossible for Wreath to see the truth. And why would he? No wonder he needled Skulduggery at every possible opportunity. No wonder he'd always been so bitter. If he truly believed half the things he remembered, it was a wonder he still agreed to help Skulduggery at all.

"You don't remember a Lady Grey, do you?" Skulduggery finally asked, referencing a woman - a fabrication - he hadn't spoken of since the last time he used her as a disguise. "Or the time I was sick and you went on to solve my case for me, or the time I tripped right at the moment of truth and you had to save my life? That's why you looked so surprised that afternoon with Hayley. You truly don't remember any case I didn't solve with outstanding aplomb."

"Stop." His head hurt. Mechanically Solomon poured another glass, and then put it down without drinking it to press a hand to the bridge of his nose. He felt as though he'd woken up from a hazy dream, or possibly a nightmare, and still wasn't sure what he wanted to be real and what he wanted to be fantasy.

He didn't want those memories back. If he got them back, even if they were true--they wouldn't be memories of what he'd had. They'd be memories of what he'd lost. What had been taken from him. Not just half the memories of five years; but the robbed potential of four centuries.

And why should you care? he asked himself. Why should you CARE that it was taken from you? Why should you care--as if it matters that you'd be a different man today?

"I don't care," he ground out, and it even sounded genuine. "What does it matter? What would it change?"

He wasn't a different man, and no amount of wishing or pining or remembering things he'd lost would make it so.

Skulduggery stopped the moment Wreath asked him to stop - or demanded he stop, to be more accurate. He sat in the silence for a very long time, watching Wreath pour a glass of whiskey without drinking it, giving the necromancer time to try and sort out his own head. Lord knew Skulduggery understood how it felt, to realise you'd lost a part of yourself and have no idea what to do about it.

It also gave him a unique perspective on what you did do about it.

"You," he answered. "Me. Our respective versions of our world, should we ever go back. Knowledge can be a powerful thing if you don't let it go to waste." He tilted his head. "Alternatively, you could forget any of this happened and continue living as though nothing has changed. Personally, I've found that a mixture of the two works best."

He said that so easily. As if it was a foregone conclusion that, of course, either or both of them could change if they wanted to, just like that. And, of course, for him it would be, Solomon realised belatedly. After who Skulduggery had been, after what he had done--Skulduggery had had to change.

Solomon didn't know if he could do that. Skulduggery thrived in uncertainty. He enjoyed discovering things. But Solomon needed to be certain about at least one thing, and if he accepted these memories as truth, he wouldn't even have that.

Be honest with yourself, just this once. You haven't had it in months.

Since the dream of his father. Since the duel with Bakura. Since the portrait he'd been given. Since the Dreaming gates. All these years of certainty in his faith, and somewhere along the line Solomon had lost it, and he couldn't even tell when. He exhaled slowly and drank the whiskey, and it churned in his gut. "I don't know what I'm doing."

"You're drinking whiskey," Skulduggery offered helpfully.

He let a beat go by for his own amusement, but spoke again before Wreath could decide he didn't want to hear any more. "If you're referring to the next course of action to take, might I suggest not taking a course of action at all? You're fortunate enough to have something else to focus on - this war, and what happens if we lose. Focus on winning, and you might just find that the rest eventually takes care of itself."

It wouldn't, of course. Not completely. The passage of time didn't bring magical solutions. What it did do was make potential solutions clearer, or easier to achieve. Wreath needed time to think about things, but it wouldn't work if he thought he actually needed to think about things during that time. The war, horrible as it was, provided a convenient distraction.

In spite of himself Solomon barked out a laugh. It was a brittle sort of laugh, sudden, not quite mirthful. He traced a finger around the rim of the empty glass and stared at the wall, and turned Skulduggery's words over and over in his head.

Part of him wanted to do the opposite to what Skulduggery said, just out of petty spite. But the rest of him wasn't sure he could. Where would he even begin such a search, anyway? He had no idea.

But he had research to undertake here in Keeliai, and yes, there was a war to fight. Those were things which had nothing to do with Skulduggery; things he could do regardless. "I can sense things from other planes now, you know," he said suddenly. "The monks trained some of us to detect energies which didn't match the plane in which we stood." He poured a glass. "It wasn't terribly difficult. I was already halfway there." Especially after his, ahem, experiment in the magic-gate with Raine. "Keeliai's covered in a dark mist," he murmured, and drank.

It was an abrupt change of subject, but Skulduggery didn't mind in the least. On the contrary, he leaned forward, intent in a way he'd never been able to manage outside of situations he was able to remain completely objective over. "A dark mist?" he repeated curiously. "The Death plane, I assume."

With Malicant still controlling the palace, Keeliai being partly in the realm Malicant controlled didn't surprise Skulduggery in the slightest.

He paused, mulling the implications over, and then he interlocked his fingers underneath his chin. "Did the monks' teachings come with more control, then? Or have you simply lost interest in your lantern?"

"No," Solomon said abruptly. "It--has similarities. Perhaps, once upon a time, it belonged in the death-plane, but since then it's changed. Energy, in its own plane, belongs. This mist ... it doesn't belong here. And, if it went back to the death-plane, I don't know whether it would belong there either."

He poured another drink, debated stopping, debated how to answer that. He didn't have the energy for an evasion. "No," he said. "It was Asti's boon." He lifted the glass and idly put the bottle aside, and then belatedly realised he probably ought to put himself out of reach of it. So he turned to wander back to his chair. "He removed the addictive qualities from my magic."

In other words, Malicant might have been capable of tainting even energies from the Death realm. That was worrying. Useful, perhaps, for being able to tell the difference in taints and dark mists, but still. Worrying nonetheless.

Skulduggery opened his jaw to ask whether specific kedan or Foreigners in the city had the same dark mist covering them separately from Keeliai, but Wreath spoke first and succeeded in distracting him from that question completely. "Asti," he eventually said. "You asked Asti to remove the addictive qualities from necromancy."

On the one hand, Skulduggery was reluctantly impressed that Wreath seemed to have a change of heart about ushering in the Passage. But, on the other hand, the non-withdrawal must have been one of the most painful things he'd ever experienced.

"Actually, I asked for my cane back," Solomon muttered a touch belligerently, "but he couldn't do that; and then I asked for my soul back, but he said that would be a bad idea. He was probably right." He took a sip of his whiskey. His head was feeling comfortably light, now, but not so much that he didn't have some awareness of what he was saying; just that he didn't care quite so much.

"It wasn't," he said ironically, "as I'm sure you know perfectly well, very fun immediately after the fact. Occasionally it's not particularly fun even now, actually. I have more control, it's true; but who would have thought that death would be so sharp? No wonder it's addictive. The high keeps you from realising how badly you're being cut by your own sword."

That was one of the most open hypocrisies regarding the Temple, actually. Any child could tell you that death was bad, and controlling death was therefore worse; yet necromancers claimed it to be a peaceful and malleable phenomenon for which they never received any backlash or ill effect. It was such an obvious thing to question. The fact that so few did was what alerted Skulduggery to the possibility of addiction in the first place.

"Yes," he said sardonically. "Death is sharp. Most powerful magic comes with a personal price, Wreath. Isolation, or insanity, or constant crippling pain. The difference with necromancers is that I've never heard one acknowledge that price." Except, perhaps, for Wreath himself, when he turned on the Irish Temple; and even then, he'd said nothing about the magic itself. Only the Temple. "Are you alright now?"

It was probably a good thing Solomon had drunk enough that the barb seemed dull. He'd spent a lifetime actively not caring about Skulduggery's opinion. The whiskey, bad or not, made it easier to not care even knowing what the skeleton said was true.

"You certainly couldn't tell until after the fact," he shot bad, but with less bitterness than if he'd been completely sober. Actually, that reminded him of a question he should probably ask, and he'd never get a better opportunity. "When you used the death-aura, did everything become more solid to you? As though you lived in a different world and you had to make things fit it, or they'd be nonsensical? Chaotic?"

It wasn't a question Skulduggery wanted to answer. What he wanted to do was jump back, and ask a little more about the dark mist around Keeliai. He wanted to ask what else Wreath had observed, or whether Wreath had seen Evandau recently. He wanted much more information on Malicant and the Death plane than he had, for God's sake - they were fighting a war against an enemy no one had even seen.

But something else Skulduggery had noticed about alcohol was its tendency to remove inhibitions and doubts. Wreath was asking a question he would likely never ask again.

"Yes," he said. The response came curtly, as though he planned to change the subject as soon as he could. Skulduggery took a moment, and then tried again. "Yes. Life is - was - fleeting. Death was permanent. I needed that. I was being swept away without it. Even if I'd stayed long enough to find out what the Passage was, I would never have agreed to doing it."

"Like turning it to order," Solomon murmured, fingering his glass. "It's the death-plane, you know." He smiled deprecatingly. "The death-aura. It brings the death-plane to you, and makes everything in the vicinity part of it. That's why it only seems real once it joins you in the bubble. Of course, push too far and you'll snap back into the death-plane proper. I've already done that, and that wasn't much fun either."

Solomon finish his whiskey and thought for a moment, rolling the empty glass in his hands. "I wonder," he said, "if all universes access the death-plane in their own ways, whether that means using half the lives on Earth is simply the point of--of activation, I suppose. Is it truly blocking the lifestream? Or is it more a matter of combining the planes of life and death?"

"I doubt it," said Skulduggery - this time very deliberately curtly. "It's just as possible that all three planes make up their own separate universe. It's also possible we're all having a very advanced fever dream."

Discussing the finer points of killing three billion people had never really been high on his list of things to do with acquaintances during an evening spent on top of a large turtle. It was a short list, but this discussion had just made the top of it.

"Are you alright, Solomon?" he pressed. "Not right now, obviously. You're drunk. But will you be in danger tomorrow? Will you be putting other people in danger?"

"No," Solomon said, very definitely. "They are able to be interacted with in this particular part of the cosmos, but there are too many similarities between universes for them to be confined to just this part of it. I have been doing things with my time other than plotting the downfall of the planet, you know."

The last came out sarcastic, so at least he wasn't quite so far gone as to be amused by the thought. But he still laughed at Skulduggery's question. "No," he said, "but no. I'm perfectly--" He smiled wryly. "--impotent. I can use the death-aura without going insane, but the payoff isn't nearly worth it. The human mind wasn't meant to see that sort of thing on a long-term basis without the benefit of insanity, and I'd rather not have to face Ma--" He stopped. "I'm drunk," he said matter-of-factly, "and I'm blaming you. I'd rather not have to face Mevolent's older brother on his own ground again, thank you."

He certainly was drunk. And it was equally certainly not Skulduggery's fault. But rather than argue that point, or any of Wreath's many other drunken points, Skulduggery instead tilted his head to the side. "You've fought him in the Death plane before? When?"

"I wouldn't say fought," Solomon said with a wave of his hand, "but the meeting, if you can call it that, was very short and pointed, and amounted to him throwing me out of the death-plane when I took myself there accidentally."

He considered that. "It felt rather like being crushed, actually. As if ... there simply wasn't any room for anyone else, over there." Finally Solomon shrugged and put down his glass. "It was not long after the Jubilee. I was sparring with Bakura to work through the withdrawal at speed."

but you didn't have to cut me off

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