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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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."

For several moments, Skulduggery didn't move. He was glad that Wreath was alright - however reluctant that feeling was - but it slipped past his notice almost instantly in favour of the more important implications.

He'd always been under the impression Malicant wanted to kill all the Foreigners. Taking out all your opponents was certainly the easiest and most direct way of taking over a continent, and Malicant had never been one for subtlety. Powerful magic-users of any kind rarely were. Until then, Skulduggery had operated under the assumption that the only reason Malicant had to work through more subtle methods to achieve his goals was because he was still stuck in the Death plane and incapable of reaching them otherwise; but if he didn't kill even when someone stumbled unknowingly right into his territory, then it begged a number of other interesting questions.

"Either he's not quite as in control as he'd like us to believe," Skulduggery eventually said, "or your survival wasn't an accident. That's interesting. What was sparring with Bakura like?"

"I'm still unsure which it is," Solomon said. "Frankly, I was exhausted--the only power I had came from the death-plane itself. It shouldn't have been terribly difficult to kill me. And I visited the death-plane again, briefly, during the monk's training."

He shook his head. "Possibly he can't kill people while in the death-plane itself, but I'd have thought he'd at least seek to control them, or some such."

It was something Solomon had been letting turn over in his head, but he hadn't come to any conclusions about it, and they were probably a bit beyond him at this point--a fact he was at least sober enough to recognise. "Enlightening," he admitted, though he had no intention of explaining the primary reason why. "It did help work through my magic, which is what I needed, but his world has an interesting way of using magic, to say the least."

Leaving aside the nuance that the khajbit wasn't technically magic at all.

Skulduggery's almost instant distrust of Bakura had fallen by the wayside ever since Gene's public apology. He didn't particularly like the Egyptian and didn't think he ever would, but he'd also placed that feeling aside so he could focus on the more important concerns - i.e, Malicant. Bakura was an anomaly, but not, strictly speaking, as immediate of a concern.

Having said that, Skulduggery didn't become one of the world's most efficient detectives by ignoring whenever useful information on anomalies came along, whether he could use that information or not. So he asked anyway. "How does his world use magic?"

"Technically speaking, it isn't magic, per se," said Solomon, "though those who have magic tend to be better at it--magicians, Bakura calls them. It's more to do with the soul."

He spread his hands and the air between them darkened and became deep with shadow, but it wasn't the sort of shadow a Necromancer usually summoned. This looked out of reality and into another, the area wisped with purple edges. "It involves summoning monsters and spells from the khajbit--a kind of shadow plane. How well that happens, and whether or not it backfires on you, depends on the strength of your soul, your convictions, and your understanding of your self."

Solomon looked at Skulduggery up and down. "You would probably cause the world to implode. Or at least yourself. Bakura can summon from the khajbit, but the duel we held happened within it, and the khajbit ... does not like to be controlled. It tests you, even while you're fighting an opponent. It seeks out your greatest weaknesses and manifests them against you. And if you fail the test ..." He shrugged, closing his hands together to make the small portal close. "We never got that far. I took us out of the khajbit and into the death-plane, and that was the end of the duel."

Thankfully. Solomon still had no idea whether the choice he'd made was a winning or a losing one.

"A shadow plane?" Skulduggery wondered, making no attempt to hide his fascination. If any of Wreath's pointed comments about Skulduggery's own fitness with regards to that shadow plane bothered him, he certainly wasn't showing it. Wreath was right, after all; there was a reason Skulduggery hadn't tried to fiddle with his own soul lantern yet. He didn't trust himself to be able to handle the consequences. "So that's why you were so adamant about each plane being accessible from every universe. In that case, Keeliai could be one of many. It only sits on the crossing of three planes."

It also meant Skulduggery needed to avoid the death plane from now on. He'd been there once before, and come out thankfully unscathed, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Or at least, that was how the saying usually went. Wasn't it?

"How skilled was Bakura?" he asked, standing up to take Wreath's empty glass back to the kitchen. "Would he have been alright on his own, or did you rescue him as well?"

"That was my glass," Solomon grumbled, watching him move away and then return. "I did say I'd researched this, you know. But yes, that's why. The khajbit doesn't seem to be a place of death, but where other parts of the soul reside. That makes it a potential fourth plane otherwise missed or inaccessible to the average person in Keeliai."

Which made sense; by Bakura's own admission, the khajbit was a place that could only be accessed with magic or by extreme strength of soul. The Ring seemed to have something to do with it too, but for whatever reason, probably because of the whiskey, Solomon couldn't remember if Bakura had explained its connection to the khajbit in detail.

But at that, Solomon had to laugh. "Bakura isn't a man who needs rescuing from anything--except possibly himself."

Rather like Skulduggery, in fact. Idiots. Both of them, they were idiots.

but you didn't have to cut me off

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