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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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.

"That's the part I'm afraid of," said Skulduggery. In lieu of disappearing into the kitchen and leaving Wreath to talk at the air, Skulduggery instead lingered in the doorway and sent the glass carefully over to the sink using the air. Right after the soft clink of it reaching the sink, he turned back around. "People who don't know when to stop tend to make the most dangerous sort of people, no matter how good their intentions might be. I'm glad to see the whiskey didn't deprive you of every power of observation."

Skulduggery had only seen Wreath drunk once before, and that was centuries ago. Yet his behaviour was almost exactly the same. Some things never changed.

"I'm not that drunk yet," said Solomon. Nicely buzzed and vaguely uninhibited, yes, but not so drunk as to be incapable of making accurate observations. "By the way, you can never fight him. Ever. I don't care what your new adoptee might have happened to do or how badly he might need you to cover for him, you can't fight Bakura."

It was a sudden assertion, but a very calm one--the sort of calmness that only came from being uninhibited. Actually, he felt like he could really use another drink, but Skulduggery had taken his glass and Solomon was sober enough that the distance was enough of a deterrent to getting one, shadows or no shadows.

"He's another you," he added a little belatedly and very longsufferingly. "And it would be very, very bad if the two of you had to fight each other."

The only difference between them was that Bakura had far more control; which, frankly, was unnerving all on its own. But if Skulduggery was ever recognised as a combatant by the khajbit--well, everyone on the turtle could say goodbye to living.

That was a conclusion to which Skulduggery had already arrived, so he didn't respond. He didn't know enough about this new Shadow Realm to make any snap judgements, but from what little he did understand, it was a Realm to avoid. Skulduggery had spent the last two centuries fighting his own soul for control; he didn't particularly want to move that fight to a more physical location, and certainly not while someone else was attacking him.

Especially if the person attacking him was fighting that exact same precarious battle for control.

Since Skulduggery didn't particularly want to confide any of that to Wreath, however, he settled back down in the armchair and tilted his head to one side. "Adoptee?"

Skulduggery's silence was more telling than anything else, and Solomon sat there watching him with a deprecating smile. It was difficult at the best of times to tell when the skeleton was surprised, but the fact that Skulduggery absorbed the comment and then changed the subject said he at least realised the wisdom of not prodding the bear, even if he hadn't known details previously.

"The idiot boy with the armour and the Hun complex," Solomon said with a wave of his hand. "Khan. Did you really think an apology would serve to fix things? The only reason Bakura walked away is because he realised there wasn't any reward in either remaining or attacking."

It was impossible to accept an apology from someone who didn't understand why they were apologising, or were apologising only for themselves. That rather defeated the point of it. Khan had claimed to be sorry about the murder--but he hadn't seemed to realise the injustice was as much in play as the harm.

"And people accept apologies because they think there is a reward in remaining or attacking?" Skulduggery asked, amused. A moment later, he shook his head. "It doesn't really matter. I've never expected a murder victim to forgive their attacker, and certainly not over such murky motives. I didn't suggest it for Bakura's sake. I suggested it for Gene's."

Bakura was a man secure in himself, if nothing else. Gene was the one Skulduggery had been worried about from the beginning. Yes, Bakura would probably continue on with seething resentment and anger, but that would be his choice and his burden to bear. Gene didn't have to make the same choice out of fear, and the very fact that he'd agreed to a meeting at all was enough to prove he wasn't irredeemable.

"Since you're drunk," Skulduggery added, "was there anything else you wanted to know?"

"Yes," said Solomon, "that's the problem." He pushed himself upright and sat up straight, elbows resting on the chair's arms, and looked Skulduggery right in his empty eye-sockets. "You never expect a murder victim to forgive their attacker, so you didn't give him the chance, let alone the consideration. He was the one who was wronged, yet because you expected nothing from him you turned the entire charade into being about his murderer. Why do you think Bakura trusts no one, disdains all? It's people like you who have taught him his pain is only relevant when it pains those who hurt him."

Solomon was drunk, but his anger was cold rather than hot; precise and almost calculating, if a drunken man could be said to be calculating at all. "And it's not him, either. You do the same to yourself. You haven't even told your friends about what you did, have you? Of course not. Because you make assumptions for them, dismiss their feelings and their pain, and make it your own. Yes, you poor thing. How sad for you to be powerful and talented and respected, and how we should pity you for the mistakes you've made, instead of grieve for the people you hurt."

Where Bakura was concerned, Skulduggery might have been willing to discuss alternatives. Despite the amazingly popular opinion, he didn't believe his own beliefs were the end-all be-all, nor did he believe that he was infallible. He might even have been willing to discuss what came next, were it not Wreath who was the one saying it.

It made him angry, as he expected. Being angry was a matter of course these days. It had nothing to do with the accusations themselves - they were all valid, if based on faulty assumptions, and Skulduggery had promised himself long ago that he would never begrudge anyone else their opinions. So yes, he was angry, but not by what Wreath had said; rather, that Wreath had said anything at all. Drunk or sober, attacks fuelled by new revelations or ancient animosity, there were very few people who had the right to pass judgement on anything Skulduggery had done since the end of the war. Wreath was not one of them.

"Don't assume," he said coldly, "that a little background context means you know me." He stood up, and very calmly replaced his hat. "A pleasure talking to you, Wreath, as always. Good evening."

And he left without the intention of stopping.

"I do know you, you idiot," Solomon called after him. "And until you see fit to trust your own bloody friends with your guilt, I'm the only one who does."

But the skeleton didn't look back, and Solomon heaved himself out of the chair, muttering skeleton-related obscenities in a dozen different languages as he made his slow way back upstairs.

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but you didn't have to cut me off

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