It is over. How strange, even now, the words sound--my mind has not yet adjusted to the idea. After such a year of doubts, to think that all is come to conclusion, all doubts laid to rest . . .
It's no use. Red Home is barely past Mendellia's borders and already new doubts assail me, a hundredfold stronger than any I entertained before today. The scene replays itself again and again in my thoughts, more vivid, more accusing each time.
I do not know, though it is the foremost question in my mind now in this moment, what went wrong, nearly a year ago. The last time we were together, really together, heart to heart as fully as hand in hand, it was Christmastime, and not this Christmas just a month ago celebrated, but the one a year before that. Kirret and Reth were wed in that season, and Thayer and I shared in their joy, dreaming together of our day yet to come.
Then I went home, to school again and my old life. I'd been changed by the birth of Terra Group and my part in its adventures, changed likewise in that part of me awakened when first Thayer kissed me: but not, apparently, changed enough to withstand the changes now working in my former life. I had come to the final stretch of my schooling, and the most rigorous. Student teaching soon consumed all my thoughts and energy. Somewhere in that year, I let slip something to which I should have clung more tenaciously than to life itself.
I can only surmise that, in the pressures of his first year ruling his country, Thayer did the same.
A year's accumulation of doubts and their associated regrets weighed as a great anxiety on me in our first days in Paris, but soon another weight increased their burden, when, amidst second thoughts about the promise I'd given Thayer more than a year ago, I let myself take second thought for another: friend, comrade, and teammate--and not only to me but to Thayer as well, and Thayer was his lord as well as friend. I feared what I felt, sure as I feared what it might take to put right what had gone wrong with my fiancé.
And yet--there was an enticing joy in this new desire.
And yet--I knew, I know I knew, that to give in to the new joy would be to embrace a possible good thing--at the expense of a thing certainly better.
No wonder I took so wholeheartedly to Thirteen's care. She kept me too busy to be anxious any longer for my own dreaded choices.
I almost left Mendellia without even seeing Thayer again, largely due to my own reluctance to face him after Paris. But perhaps it was better, after all, that I did see him, that a conclusion was reached, even if things had to turn out as they did: as I now see constantly in my mind's eye, just as it happened mere hours ago. . . .
The briefing of Terra Sancta Group concluded, I go to gather the last of my things together. Eager for the mission to proceed, after what I'd learned from Fir, I've been mostly ready since a few minutes after the briefing was scheduled, but yet a few things remain. These quickly dealt with, I am about to head on to the Batcave, but passing through a familiar hallway, I hesitate. I know this place: the Dictator's office is just around the corner. I've consciously or subconsciously kept my distance from it and its master since we returned to Mendellia, but now my heart gives warning. I should--
I can't. I turn away, to take another route: but it is too late. There behind me he stands, as if in like paralysis to the one I've just suffered, his face, once so familiar, unreadable now to me. When he moves at last it is only to nod greeting, but there is no greeting in his eyes--only caution. At least I tell myself it is only caution.
He can't know about Paris, I think: so why am I so anxious? But I know, and that's enough. What am I to say to him, knowing how things have changed? If they have changed. I'm still not fully sure how I feel about Josh; I'm less sure than ever how I feel about Thayer. How things may have changed from Thayer's perspective, I can't begin to guess.
Awkwardness. Cool civility at first, but we both know that can't be right; after what once existed between us, to behave like nothing more than polite strangers is unthinkable. Must it be either Odi, or Amo? [1] Mixed feelings indeed: How frightened I am, waiting to see what he'll do, wondering how things stand between us--and yet, there's still a part of me that rejoices simply to see him and hear his voice again.
But the voice, reserved and cool at first, soon turns unmistakably chilly. Veiled insinuations. Allusions to the mission I've just returned from; I counter with allusions to the mission I must soon leave for. I remember that Vickie told us he'd been in Paris, at Bertie's. Not for the first time, I wonder why. I begin to suspect he does know something, so I get more nervous--but also more defensive, I think.
Finally, out with it: He can't hide anymore, and in one swift oration like the stab of an assassin's dagger, makes the accusations that have been growing these many days in his heart and mind. Stunned as I realize (a) that he saw the kiss and (b) how much more than a kiss he's inferred from it, I'm more and more speechless the angrier I get. Angry to realize how much I've lost his trust. Angry to realize it's my own fault. He's angry too, more so as I get quieter--my usual, introverted, reaction when I'm angry, but I realize now: we don't even know each other well enough for him to be aware of that reaction, and he inevitably misinterprets my silence.
Then everything pours out, on both sides, loud and bitter with the hurts we've done each other. My frustration with trying to balance a secret engagement with college life. His frustration with defending me to the Council. Both our frustration at not hearing from each other--but at this point neither of us wants to accept responsibility for breaking contact, we're both too mad. Ira furor brevis est. [2] Pressure from his mother. Fears (mostly on my part, I suspect) of going ahead with such a huge step--not just marriage, but queenship.
Now he shows how he can be cruel, as the rumor among his mother's ladies had once labeled him: not physically cruel but verbally caustic. He's always been atypically verbal anyway. Now his anger pours out in sarcasm. He thinks himself betrayed, he feels too strongly how much he seems to have lost. His heart's hurt makes him desperate. He saw the kiss; he wonders what went on that he didn't see? How long has this been going on behind his back? How could he have trusted me? How could I have so betrayed his trust?
All too strongly I feel both the injustice and the justice of these complaints. He's right on some things--I had felt already quite guilty about the kiss, and beyond that, about forgetting my fiancé for so many months--but what he's wrong about infuriates me; he assumes too much. How little he knew me if he could believe such things! I suppose I'm offended as well as angry. Thus the silent treatment. I just don't know what to say. I fear what I might say, if once I started to answer his charges. Only silence will answer.
He takes my silence for lack of argument, assuming that means it's all true, worse even than he'd imagined. Crushed once more, he turns away. Perhaps we were fools, he says. Didn't know what we were getting into. Maybe it's for the best that we never really got into it, that we waited this year. At least, now that all this has happened, we are still free.
Free? It's a crippling freedom, I start to think.
I release you, he says.
Is that what you want, Thayer?
What I want no longer seems to be at issue, he says.
He broods, turns away. Faced suddenly with this prospect of breaking it off, at first I have a sense of, indeed, freedom--I don't have to go through with it, maybe that's what I wanted all along, not to have to go through with it--but, overwhelming this freedom, is the beginning of the most grievous weight and regret I have ever felt. I know what I've lost. I begin to realize what he'd felt he'd lost when he saw that kiss. Hindsight is 20/20. We were foolish, after all--but not a year ago. Not then.
One last, desperate effort: I want to explain it away, try to start patching things up. Thayer, listen to me, it wasn't like that. You don't know--
Comlink. Seven to Three: It's time to go. Get down here or we leave without you.
It would take too long to fully explain. Thayer watches me suspiciously.
I have to go.
Go then. Leave me and go to him. Don't come back.
He turns away again with a sense of finality I can feel even across the distance between us. I start once more to appeal, but--
I know it's useless. Crying inside but, from some place beyond myself, bemused by how utterly tearless I am outside, I let go. As I turn to go, I remember the ring. No use to me now--I'll never be Queen, and he who gave me this symbol has cast me away.
I cast the ring away in turn; it clatters to a stop at his feet. And I leave for Jerusalem.
Only after I've gone does he allow himself to kneel down and collect the ring, and there in his loneliness to weep over it. He too knows what we've lost. Proud, and foolish, both of us.
In my chamber on the Red Home, the scene begins in my mind once more, but I have no tears left for it now.
[1] Allusion to Catullus's poem to his ex-girlfriend Clodia,
beginning with the words "Odi et amo": I hate, and I love; a
distillation of his mixed feelings about her.
[2] Ira furor brevis est: Anger is a brief madness. (The full quote,
from Horace: "Ira furor brevis est; animum rege, qui, nisi paret,
imperat." Anger is momentary madness, so control your passion or it
will control you.)