signy1
in
tinman_fic
To Me A Kingdom, 12/?
Title: To Me A Kingdom
Author: Signy
Characters: The whole kit ‘n caboodle
Pairing: none
Warning: none
Summary: This is it-the showdown.
Disclaimer: These characters are not my property.
Notes: Ev is another Baumian country that borders on Oz. I don’t know why he was so hung up on monosyllabic nomenclature.
Previous chapters:
One: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/108716.html
Two: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/124535.html
Three: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/134664.html
Four: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/154648.html
Five: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/164634.html
Six: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/172442.html
Seven: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/183698.html
Eight: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/210560.html
Nine: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/229832.html
Ten: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/242492.html
Eleven: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/272942.html
“No, no-you don’t seem to understand. I’m just going out for a couple of hours. I live here, you know,” Glitch was saying as Cain and Raw approached the castle.
“Yes, sir,” the guard repeated wearily. “I am aware of that. My orders say that you are to remain in the palace until further notice.”
Cain and Raw traded glances and quickened their pace. The guard perked up at the sight of them. “One moment, please,” he told Glitch, with just the faintest hint of ‘shut up’ in his tone of voice, and turned to greet the newcomers.
Cain produced his badge. “Commander Cain of the Central City Police,” he identified himself. “And my friend, Raw of the Viewers.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” the guard said. “Go right on in.”
“Cain!” Glitch, gods be thanked, had apparently forgotten about whatever errand he had been prevented from completing. “Hey, Raw! You’re back!” He barreled into the Viewer’s arms, pleasure written across his thin face.
“Raw glad to see Glitch, too,” Raw said, returning the hug.
“How is everyone? Kalm, and the rest of your people?” Glitch asked, as the hug ended and the three of them meandered into the castle.
“Kalm is well,” Raw began. “Recovering. Raw’s whole village is recovering well. Very tired of little pills,” he said with a sly sidewise look, “but happy.”
Glitch grinned. “Everyone’s a critic,” he said cheerfully, accepting the gentle teasing for exactly what it was and not rising to the bait.
Cain wasn’t smiling. “Glitch,” he said. “What was going on, back there at the gate? Where were you going?”
Glitch looked blank. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just a misunderstanding, I guess. Where’s Jeb? Didn’t he come over, too?”
“No, Jeb took a patrol down to the Ev border; there’s been some talk of leftover Longcoats raiding, and he went to straighten it all out with the Evians,” Cain replied automatically, and he and Raw traded another glance. Cain had told him all about Glitch’s upcoming exodus; Raw was the only one Cain had told. It did not, however, take a Viewer to guess that someone else had found out about it and taken the appropriate precautions, and that all his carefully-thought-out scenarios for breaking the news gently were now obsolete. Truth be told, expecting a headcase to keep secrets was not unlike expecting a sieve to hold water, and Cain told himself that he should have expected it.
“Huh,” Glitch said. “I hadn’t heard about that. When did he leave?”
“Couple of weeks ago,” Cain said. “From the reports I’m getting, it’s going pretty well. Good thing, too. Last thing we need, right about now, is another war.”
“You can say that again,” Glitch said.
“That’s your department,” Cain shot back, and they all laughed.
“Are there really a lot of Longcoats out there, though?” Glitch asked.
“I doubt it,” Cain said. “Most likely it’s the usual nonsense that crops up on borders-neighborly disputes over strayed cows, small-time smugglers, somebody’s daughter getting in trouble by somebody else’s son, and then the whole thing gets blown out of proportion by a bunch of young idiots cooped up in the barracks itching for some excitement. Besides, you know what they say-spell ‘Evian’ backwards and you’ll get something resembling the truth of the matter.”
Glitch chuckled at the old joke. “Well, that’s good news, at least. I think DG is in the library,” he said. “Studying the imports and exports of various regions of the O.Z. and hating every minute of it. Let’s go find her first.”
“Preferably before she throws the book at the wall, right?”
“Too late,” Raw predicted.
The first shoots were just beginning to peek their heads above ground; one foolhardy crocus in the palace grounds had gone so far as to produce an early bud. It was, without a doubt, spring, and Cain remembered the bargain he had struck with Glitch in vivid detail. What he didn’t know was whether Glitch-this cheerful, vague, empty-headed Glitch-remembered any of it, and he didn’t want to ask, for fear of reminding the man of his half-baked escape plan and rekindling the desire to throw himself on the negligible mercy of the open road.
DG was in the library. So were Azkadellia and their parents, and the expressions on all four royal faces stopped the three men in their tracks. The Queen’s stone-faced displeasure was bad, Azkadellia’s rigid mask was worse, and the unshed tears glittering in DG’s eyes were just plain unfair, Cain thought, bracing himself for the worst.
“When were you planning to tell us, Ambrose?” the Queen asked quietly.
“What?” Glitch asked the question with what Cain thought (and Raw knew) was true confusion. It did not mollify the Queen an iota.
“When were you planning to tell me?” she repeated, and threw a sheaf of papers onto the table. They proved to be maps, all done in Ambrose’s unmistakable hand, and various points on each map had been color-coded in some intricate system. Cain stared at them, knowing that the careful details must have been the result of countless hours of painful, painstaking concentration. “Or were you even planning to tell me at all?”
Glitch picked one up at random and studied it, waiting for the penny to drop. It was a map of the southern part of the country; he had marked several likely routes in green pencil. One led to a small pond that had, legendarily, been the site of several miraculous healings. Two more led to citylets that, theoretically at least, contained skilled bio-alchemists, he dimly recalled. That shadow of a memory opened the floodgates, and the entire Plan swept back into his mind for the first time since… since… since that morning, actually. Which, now that he was thinking of it, was why he had been heading into town; he had some supplies he’d been intending to purchase.
Of course, the fact that the guards were under orders to stop him must have meant that his Plan had been discovered some time before that morning, which was problematic. There would be questions asked, no doubt about it… wait-there had been questions asked! And he was supposed to be answering them… wasn’t he?
It was too late, anyway. The Queen, quivering on the boundary between anger and tears, slammed her hand onto the table. “How could you, Ambrose?” she asked. “How could you do this to me?”
Questions. Questions he was supposed to be answering. Questions. Plan. Supplies. Maps. This map. The maps he’d drawn himself, after coming the atlases and other reference works for months on end. The maps that he had kept safely hidden in the secret drawer of his desk, where nobody could ever find them. Nobody except somebody who had a desk just like it, with a hidden drawer that only three people in the world could open; nobody except the couple he’d built it for and the man who’d designed it. Questions.
“This was locked in my desk,” he said slowly.
Judging by the expression on the Queen’s face, that wasn’t the right answer.
“Why didn’t you tell us you wanted to leave, though?” DG asked before the Queen could respond. “Were you afraid to tell us, and thought you had to sneak away?”
“No,” Glitch said, shaking his head definitely. “No. I was going to tell you… but not until I had everything worked out and planned. I wasn’t ready yet.”
“You didn’t ask for help, though,” she pressed. “Why not?”
“Because I didn’t want help,” he said simply. “I wanted to work the whole thing out for myself, and then show you the result.” He thought about it for a moment, then added, “That was kind of the point.”
Ahamo nodded, almost imperceptibly. He’d been right.
“When did you think you’d be ready?”
Glitch looked at his map, then glanced out the window. Winter hadn’t quite given up yet; the nights were still downright cold. “I don’t know. A week? Or maybe two. Spring.”
DG nodded. “But why?” she asked, her voice losing some of the district-attorney bite. “Why did you want to run away from home?”
“Because I’m not whole,” he told her, openly and honestly. “As things stand with the alchemists… well. No point in going over that. But I can’t stay like this. So. I’ve charted routes to every place that I can think of that might have an answer for me. And I’ll check them, one by one, until I’m myself again.”
“That’s absurd,” the Queen protested. “There’s nothing you could find out there that I couldn’t have brought here for you, and in a fraction of the time. Do you think I haven’t been doing everything I can to take care of you?”
Glitch looked at his hands for a long time. “That’s not even a question,” he said, finally. “I don’t think there’s much you wouldn’t do to help me, in fact. But…”
“But?” the Queen asked sharply, when he didn’t finish the thought.
“But… I don’t want to be taken care of anymore,” he said. “I’m a headcase, Majesty. A zipperhead. Not a child. I think… this is something I need to do for myself. It’s my problem to solve, really. Being Glitch, that is. It’s my problem. And I want to solve it for myself.”
“But you can’t,” the Queen burst out in a rare moment of unthinking honesty. “You aren’t… capable,” she trailed off.
Glitch nodded woodenly.
Raw had annuals of practice at accepting pain, which was about the only reason he didn’t run from the room. There wasn’t a soul in the room that wasn’t aware that something irreparable had just happened, the Queen least of all. Their hearts weren’t crying, but that was only because they were in pain too profound for tears.
Cain found himself in the unpleasant position of not knowing what to hope for. On the one hand, the Queen was right; Glitch wasn’t going to find any magical cure even on the off chance that he didn’t get himself killed out there in the ass end of nowhere, and he rather thought that they all knew that the halfwit would be far safer in the palace.
On the other hand, trust an iron suit survivor to know to the last grain the precise difference between living and not dying. And to know how little joy not dying afforded.
Glitch, as matters presently stood, was not dying. He was locked in an iron suit, staring helplessly at the gaps in his mind, but he wasn’t dying. As well, there was this to consider; Cain hadn’t been able to inflict a lifetime of not dying on his worst enemy. And Glitch was something very akin to his closest friend.
Glitch didn’t like heights. It wasn’t really so much that he was afraid of falling. When he looked down from some high point-say, like cliffs, or towers, or cages-he didn’t waste much time worrying about inadvertently falling. There just wasn’t much profit in worrying about the sort of things he couldn’t do anything about. There were more things he couldn’t do anything about than he could shake a stick at, and worrying about them was nothing more than a waste of precious and irreplaceable synapses, and heavens above knew he didn’t have any of those to spare.
No, what scared him was the idea that he might lose control of his mind long enough to jump. It wasn’t as though that kind of thing didn’t happen on a painfully regular basis, and leaping from a height was the sort of mistake one didn’t generally tend to get to make twice.
…Except that he had. Jumped, that was, and lived to tell the tale. More than once, now that he came to think of it, and had disliked it every time, but it was usually better than the alternatives, and what was he thinking of, again?
Right. Jumping off cliffs. Anyway, there were exceptions to every rule, and it was only a metaphor anyway. Not important now. The point was that he felt balanced on that same sort of precipice, a metaphorical precipice, and all he could do was choose in which direction to leap. He could accept the Queen’s judgment, and discard his maps, his plans, and his last faint hope-and that was a fall he was pretty sure he wouldn’t survive. Either of him. Or he could defy her, and let himself plummet by the light of his burning bridges back into the outcast’s world that had been all he’d known before DG had shown him what he was missing. Brutal honesty forced him to admit that there wasn’t a whole lot of chance his Ambrose-spark would survive for too long out there alone, even if Glitch did manage to keep body and soul together.
It was no choice at all.
A bare second before the headcase began to speak, his entire demeanor changed; neither Glitch’s genial confusion nor Ambrose’s intense competence, he now emanated a peaceful serenity none of them quite knew how to name. Cain tensed, certain that he was about to issue his ultimatum-freedom or captivity-and that if he did, something irreplaceable would shatter forever.
But he didn’t. “Your Majesty,” Glitch said gently. “I’m so sorry. But there’s nothing I can do to give you back the years you lost with your children. I don’t think even Ambrose could fix that. I would if I could, but I can’t.”
The room went silent. None of them so much as breathed.
“I wish I could,” he continued. “Just spin time back like a TDESPHTL and unhappen everything for you all. I wish.” He shook his head. “But I can’t. Likewise, my Queen, I can’t stay here as your helpless child-surrogate, either. I know how badly you wanted to save Azkadellia, and you couldn’t. And I know that you did everything you could to save DG, and I even know that you sit up at night torturing yourself because you couldn’t do more. And you couldn’t save me-not when Raynz took me, and not now.
“You can’t save me,” Glitch repeated. “You know that. And you have to know that I don’t blame you-not for trying, and not for being unable to manage it. I love you, your Majesty. I always will. But I have to save myself. This is something I have to do for myself if I’m ever going to be whole again. Can you forgive me for needing that?”
Author: Signy
Characters: The whole kit ‘n caboodle
Pairing: none
Warning: none
Summary: This is it-the showdown.
Disclaimer: These characters are not my property.
Notes: Ev is another Baumian country that borders on Oz. I don’t know why he was so hung up on monosyllabic nomenclature.
Previous chapters:
One: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/108716.html
Two: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/124535.html
Three: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/134664.html
Four: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/154648.html
Five: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/164634.html
Six: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/172442.html
Seven: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/183698.html
Eight: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/210560.html
Nine: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/229832.html
Ten: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/242492.html
Eleven: http://community.livejournal.com/tinman_fic/272942.html
“No, no-you don’t seem to understand. I’m just going out for a couple of hours. I live here, you know,” Glitch was saying as Cain and Raw approached the castle.
“Yes, sir,” the guard repeated wearily. “I am aware of that. My orders say that you are to remain in the palace until further notice.”
Cain and Raw traded glances and quickened their pace. The guard perked up at the sight of them. “One moment, please,” he told Glitch, with just the faintest hint of ‘shut up’ in his tone of voice, and turned to greet the newcomers.
Cain produced his badge. “Commander Cain of the Central City Police,” he identified himself. “And my friend, Raw of the Viewers.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” the guard said. “Go right on in.”
“Cain!” Glitch, gods be thanked, had apparently forgotten about whatever errand he had been prevented from completing. “Hey, Raw! You’re back!” He barreled into the Viewer’s arms, pleasure written across his thin face.
“Raw glad to see Glitch, too,” Raw said, returning the hug.
“How is everyone? Kalm, and the rest of your people?” Glitch asked, as the hug ended and the three of them meandered into the castle.
“Kalm is well,” Raw began. “Recovering. Raw’s whole village is recovering well. Very tired of little pills,” he said with a sly sidewise look, “but happy.”
Glitch grinned. “Everyone’s a critic,” he said cheerfully, accepting the gentle teasing for exactly what it was and not rising to the bait.
Cain wasn’t smiling. “Glitch,” he said. “What was going on, back there at the gate? Where were you going?”
Glitch looked blank. “I don’t know,” he said. “Just a misunderstanding, I guess. Where’s Jeb? Didn’t he come over, too?”
“No, Jeb took a patrol down to the Ev border; there’s been some talk of leftover Longcoats raiding, and he went to straighten it all out with the Evians,” Cain replied automatically, and he and Raw traded another glance. Cain had told him all about Glitch’s upcoming exodus; Raw was the only one Cain had told. It did not, however, take a Viewer to guess that someone else had found out about it and taken the appropriate precautions, and that all his carefully-thought-out scenarios for breaking the news gently were now obsolete. Truth be told, expecting a headcase to keep secrets was not unlike expecting a sieve to hold water, and Cain told himself that he should have expected it.
“Huh,” Glitch said. “I hadn’t heard about that. When did he leave?”
“Couple of weeks ago,” Cain said. “From the reports I’m getting, it’s going pretty well. Good thing, too. Last thing we need, right about now, is another war.”
“You can say that again,” Glitch said.
“That’s your department,” Cain shot back, and they all laughed.
“Are there really a lot of Longcoats out there, though?” Glitch asked.
“I doubt it,” Cain said. “Most likely it’s the usual nonsense that crops up on borders-neighborly disputes over strayed cows, small-time smugglers, somebody’s daughter getting in trouble by somebody else’s son, and then the whole thing gets blown out of proportion by a bunch of young idiots cooped up in the barracks itching for some excitement. Besides, you know what they say-spell ‘Evian’ backwards and you’ll get something resembling the truth of the matter.”
Glitch chuckled at the old joke. “Well, that’s good news, at least. I think DG is in the library,” he said. “Studying the imports and exports of various regions of the O.Z. and hating every minute of it. Let’s go find her first.”
“Preferably before she throws the book at the wall, right?”
“Too late,” Raw predicted.
The first shoots were just beginning to peek their heads above ground; one foolhardy crocus in the palace grounds had gone so far as to produce an early bud. It was, without a doubt, spring, and Cain remembered the bargain he had struck with Glitch in vivid detail. What he didn’t know was whether Glitch-this cheerful, vague, empty-headed Glitch-remembered any of it, and he didn’t want to ask, for fear of reminding the man of his half-baked escape plan and rekindling the desire to throw himself on the negligible mercy of the open road.
DG was in the library. So were Azkadellia and their parents, and the expressions on all four royal faces stopped the three men in their tracks. The Queen’s stone-faced displeasure was bad, Azkadellia’s rigid mask was worse, and the unshed tears glittering in DG’s eyes were just plain unfair, Cain thought, bracing himself for the worst.
“When were you planning to tell us, Ambrose?” the Queen asked quietly.
“What?” Glitch asked the question with what Cain thought (and Raw knew) was true confusion. It did not mollify the Queen an iota.
“When were you planning to tell me?” she repeated, and threw a sheaf of papers onto the table. They proved to be maps, all done in Ambrose’s unmistakable hand, and various points on each map had been color-coded in some intricate system. Cain stared at them, knowing that the careful details must have been the result of countless hours of painful, painstaking concentration. “Or were you even planning to tell me at all?”
Glitch picked one up at random and studied it, waiting for the penny to drop. It was a map of the southern part of the country; he had marked several likely routes in green pencil. One led to a small pond that had, legendarily, been the site of several miraculous healings. Two more led to citylets that, theoretically at least, contained skilled bio-alchemists, he dimly recalled. That shadow of a memory opened the floodgates, and the entire Plan swept back into his mind for the first time since… since… since that morning, actually. Which, now that he was thinking of it, was why he had been heading into town; he had some supplies he’d been intending to purchase.
Of course, the fact that the guards were under orders to stop him must have meant that his Plan had been discovered some time before that morning, which was problematic. There would be questions asked, no doubt about it… wait-there had been questions asked! And he was supposed to be answering them… wasn’t he?
It was too late, anyway. The Queen, quivering on the boundary between anger and tears, slammed her hand onto the table. “How could you, Ambrose?” she asked. “How could you do this to me?”
Questions. Questions he was supposed to be answering. Questions. Plan. Supplies. Maps. This map. The maps he’d drawn himself, after coming the atlases and other reference works for months on end. The maps that he had kept safely hidden in the secret drawer of his desk, where nobody could ever find them. Nobody except somebody who had a desk just like it, with a hidden drawer that only three people in the world could open; nobody except the couple he’d built it for and the man who’d designed it. Questions.
“This was locked in my desk,” he said slowly.
Judging by the expression on the Queen’s face, that wasn’t the right answer.
“Why didn’t you tell us you wanted to leave, though?” DG asked before the Queen could respond. “Were you afraid to tell us, and thought you had to sneak away?”
“No,” Glitch said, shaking his head definitely. “No. I was going to tell you… but not until I had everything worked out and planned. I wasn’t ready yet.”
“You didn’t ask for help, though,” she pressed. “Why not?”
“Because I didn’t want help,” he said simply. “I wanted to work the whole thing out for myself, and then show you the result.” He thought about it for a moment, then added, “That was kind of the point.”
Ahamo nodded, almost imperceptibly. He’d been right.
“When did you think you’d be ready?”
Glitch looked at his map, then glanced out the window. Winter hadn’t quite given up yet; the nights were still downright cold. “I don’t know. A week? Or maybe two. Spring.”
DG nodded. “But why?” she asked, her voice losing some of the district-attorney bite. “Why did you want to run away from home?”
“Because I’m not whole,” he told her, openly and honestly. “As things stand with the alchemists… well. No point in going over that. But I can’t stay like this. So. I’ve charted routes to every place that I can think of that might have an answer for me. And I’ll check them, one by one, until I’m myself again.”
“That’s absurd,” the Queen protested. “There’s nothing you could find out there that I couldn’t have brought here for you, and in a fraction of the time. Do you think I haven’t been doing everything I can to take care of you?”
Glitch looked at his hands for a long time. “That’s not even a question,” he said, finally. “I don’t think there’s much you wouldn’t do to help me, in fact. But…”
“But?” the Queen asked sharply, when he didn’t finish the thought.
“But… I don’t want to be taken care of anymore,” he said. “I’m a headcase, Majesty. A zipperhead. Not a child. I think… this is something I need to do for myself. It’s my problem to solve, really. Being Glitch, that is. It’s my problem. And I want to solve it for myself.”
“But you can’t,” the Queen burst out in a rare moment of unthinking honesty. “You aren’t… capable,” she trailed off.
Glitch nodded woodenly.
Raw had annuals of practice at accepting pain, which was about the only reason he didn’t run from the room. There wasn’t a soul in the room that wasn’t aware that something irreparable had just happened, the Queen least of all. Their hearts weren’t crying, but that was only because they were in pain too profound for tears.
Cain found himself in the unpleasant position of not knowing what to hope for. On the one hand, the Queen was right; Glitch wasn’t going to find any magical cure even on the off chance that he didn’t get himself killed out there in the ass end of nowhere, and he rather thought that they all knew that the halfwit would be far safer in the palace.
On the other hand, trust an iron suit survivor to know to the last grain the precise difference between living and not dying. And to know how little joy not dying afforded.
Glitch, as matters presently stood, was not dying. He was locked in an iron suit, staring helplessly at the gaps in his mind, but he wasn’t dying. As well, there was this to consider; Cain hadn’t been able to inflict a lifetime of not dying on his worst enemy. And Glitch was something very akin to his closest friend.
Glitch didn’t like heights. It wasn’t really so much that he was afraid of falling. When he looked down from some high point-say, like cliffs, or towers, or cages-he didn’t waste much time worrying about inadvertently falling. There just wasn’t much profit in worrying about the sort of things he couldn’t do anything about. There were more things he couldn’t do anything about than he could shake a stick at, and worrying about them was nothing more than a waste of precious and irreplaceable synapses, and heavens above knew he didn’t have any of those to spare.
No, what scared him was the idea that he might lose control of his mind long enough to jump. It wasn’t as though that kind of thing didn’t happen on a painfully regular basis, and leaping from a height was the sort of mistake one didn’t generally tend to get to make twice.
…Except that he had. Jumped, that was, and lived to tell the tale. More than once, now that he came to think of it, and had disliked it every time, but it was usually better than the alternatives, and what was he thinking of, again?
Right. Jumping off cliffs. Anyway, there were exceptions to every rule, and it was only a metaphor anyway. Not important now. The point was that he felt balanced on that same sort of precipice, a metaphorical precipice, and all he could do was choose in which direction to leap. He could accept the Queen’s judgment, and discard his maps, his plans, and his last faint hope-and that was a fall he was pretty sure he wouldn’t survive. Either of him. Or he could defy her, and let himself plummet by the light of his burning bridges back into the outcast’s world that had been all he’d known before DG had shown him what he was missing. Brutal honesty forced him to admit that there wasn’t a whole lot of chance his Ambrose-spark would survive for too long out there alone, even if Glitch did manage to keep body and soul together.
It was no choice at all.
A bare second before the headcase began to speak, his entire demeanor changed; neither Glitch’s genial confusion nor Ambrose’s intense competence, he now emanated a peaceful serenity none of them quite knew how to name. Cain tensed, certain that he was about to issue his ultimatum-freedom or captivity-and that if he did, something irreplaceable would shatter forever.
But he didn’t. “Your Majesty,” Glitch said gently. “I’m so sorry. But there’s nothing I can do to give you back the years you lost with your children. I don’t think even Ambrose could fix that. I would if I could, but I can’t.”
The room went silent. None of them so much as breathed.
“I wish I could,” he continued. “Just spin time back like a TDESPHTL and unhappen everything for you all. I wish.” He shook his head. “But I can’t. Likewise, my Queen, I can’t stay here as your helpless child-surrogate, either. I know how badly you wanted to save Azkadellia, and you couldn’t. And I know that you did everything you could to save DG, and I even know that you sit up at night torturing yourself because you couldn’t do more. And you couldn’t save me-not when Raynz took me, and not now.
“You can’t save me,” Glitch repeated. “You know that. And you have to know that I don’t blame you-not for trying, and not for being unable to manage it. I love you, your Majesty. I always will. But I have to save myself. This is something I have to do for myself if I’m ever going to be whole again. Can you forgive me for needing that?”