Remember last September when you all said I should write the sequel to the mixed media scene AU?
I have written the sequel to the mixed media scene AU.
Presenting My Heart Will Always Be The B-Side To My Tongue (Act I) - your favourite scene kids are back, and as hopeless about one another as ever. Cam/Palamedes, the usual cast of side characters, 50k words total (this installment 14k). Because I am Not Evil, I will be posting this in three parts, to spare my beta's vision and my readers' collective sanity.
Sixth House enjoyers! Christmas Eve is upon us, and therefore, so is my annual Cam/Palamedes holiday fic.
thy deep and dreamless sleep [T, 12k] - Amidst a fight to improve parenting concessions and thereby increase the declining Sixth House population, Palamedes discovers an archaic, pre-Resurrection ritual — which might just be the key to getting his proposed legislation past an Oversight Body who love nothing more than an excuse to party.
Re-reading Nona, I was struck by this line from Pyrrha, which I've never really liked because it's a gross simplification (not to mention misunderstanding) of Camilla's character. In the world where death is a power source, and the Empire kills people and planets without a second thought, Camilla Hect is one of the few characters who openly refutes that. There's nothing in the narratives that suggest she wants to be violent. Her uses of force, life-stopping or otherwise, are driven by love or duty, not by desire.
Insert obligatory "in this essay, I will", but I'm actually gonna write the essay.
The above exchange in NTN is followed by Pyrrha trying to convince Palamedes to give up attempting to save anyone from the Cohort Barracks, or anyone in the city, and simply look after himself and the Sixth House. There's a lot to unpack there, but I want to focus on what she says about Camilla:
Yes, Cam's angry. Of course she is. Her family have been held hostage! The man she loves is a disembodied soul that she can't talk to except via notebook and tape recording!! She has every right to be filthy mad about the whole world. But anger doesn't make her a killer. Nor does it imply that she'd be a good one. She might manage the act of killing well, because Camilla does everything she sets her mind to well, at least according to Nona:
And we know from the beach scene with Merv Wing that she can kill, if pressed. I'll come back to that. The question we should ask is, could she cope with the psychological impact of murder outside a self-defence situation? Could she manage the trauma and mental carnage that being a frontline cavalier would cause you? Would she survive long-term as a BOE insurgent or a Cohort officer, where every mission further whittles away your humanity and compassion?
I doubt it. Camilla is practical, but she's also an idealist. This is proven beautifully by her unshakeable belief that she can bring the Warden back from a couple of shattered bones. Her faith in him parallels Harrow's faith in the Tomb and (at least pre-HTN) God. There's a reason she was given the line "The Cohort took the rest of him away. And I don't know where they have put him." I am deliberately not mentioning "Palamedes surveyed his work, and he saw that it was good", but know that I'm always thinking about it.
I do want to acknowledge the final line from Nona's quote, because I've seen several people interpret "move out of the apartment forever" as evidence that Camilla killed this unnamed domestic abuser. I'd like to challenge that. Nona - who can literally read body language - states outright that Cam spoke to the man. Working through even the vaguest practicalities of murder, where is she going to dispose of a body? Why would she do this on a foreign planet, surrounded by people who hate House citizens, thereby putting her own life, as well as Harrow's/Nona's and Palamedes' soul, at greater risk than it already is? How would she do it without anyone seeing? Threatening the abuser might make sense; cold-blooded murder simply does not.
The two clearest hints to Camilla's beliefs regarding violence are during the duel with Marta in GTN (via Palamedes) and in NTN when Nona is relaying what Pyrrha, Cam, and Palamedes teach her. Both of these instances suggest that she resorts to physical force only when every other approach has failed:
This is supported by the narrative overall: the only times we see Camilla fight are when the lives of people she cares for are seriously threatened. Outside that direct, immediate threat, she typically falls back on watching and waiting, or on de-escalation techniques: calm demeanour, quiet voice, short and simple sentences.
So to return to that opening quote: for me, it feels like a very sly way of saying that Pyrrha doesn't really know or understand Cam. She doesn't grasp her motivation in Chapter One. She still hasn't grasped it by Chapter 28, when everything is fall apart around them:
And that's not entirely her fault. Per Harrow, Camilla Hect is a creature of locks and clasps, of hidden everything. We get only the briefest glints into the emotion she keeps buried beneath her surface. Pyrrha Dve doesn't understand her. (Pyrrha Dve did not know she had a sibling, an incredibly normal thing to have and speak about!) The Second House didn't understand her. Cam's own dads don't understand; Camilla herself admits this in the Paul scene. No one understands Cam, except - as the text makes abundantly clear, by the snippy retort he gives to Pyrrha when she says how angry Camilla is - her necromancer. Palamedes understands her, because he's the only one she really ever truly opens up to. (In this essay, I will...)
Huge news for lovers (😏) of the Sixth House and situationally-appropriate numbers! The 600th work in your favourite tag is the story of a woman with perfect vision but terrible perception, and a man with rubbish vision and ironically great perception.
On a clear day, you can see forever [T, 21k] - the optometry AU you never knew you needed.
I'm told that technically, having a work in beta would have made my total work count for yesterday's WIP meme 41 entries Please enjoy the secret 41st WIP, which is now no longer a work in progress, and is instead my 33rd Cam/Palamedes fic.
we'll do more than just get by together [G, 3k] - on the first day of school, Palamedes Sextus makes a new friend
Good morning to Sixth House fans everywhere. This isn't the fic I was supposed to post next, but it is the first one I've ever posted on AO3-not-beta. 😏 Sorry it's a sad one. We'll make up for that in due course.
She's My Winona - T, 1400 words - In the aftermath of Camilla walking out of her birthday drinks, Palamedes and Gideon talk.
I've been thinking about this scene (and specifically Camilla's reply) for the last six hours, so I am going to put Some Thoughts under a cut.
If you need me to warn for Cam/Palamedes content, you shouldn't be here.
What I'm thinking about, friends, is that this reply - "I wouldn't have left you alone for twenty-seven hours" - is not an interrogative. Camilla doesn't ask Gideon why she left her necromancer alone and unprotected. Her immediate response is to turn to her necromancer and assure him that she wouldn't have acted that way. And I know everyone loves to handwave that Cam is the most capable, put-together person in the room (because let's be real, she so often is), but this is a defensive behaviour. It's a self-reassuring, self-validating behaviour. It's the behaviour of someone who, deep down, is fundamentally insecure about how capable they are, how important they are. It's the response of a perfectionist, of someone who has had to repeatedly justify their skills or intelligence, and of someone who has spent a significant amount of time questioning whether or not they truly matter to the person they're interacting with.
Now, you may ask me: why would Camilla be questioning, in this particular moment, how much she matters to Palamedes. And I would answer that she's thousands of kilometres from home, for possibly the very first time in her life. She's away from every familiar, comforting structure and routine that she knows, in a place that poses incredible risk to someone who is both her duty and her love. And! Also present in this place is the woman who has commanded a not-insignificant part of her necromancer's attention for almost a decade, and who has hurt him deeply. Anyone would be stressed! Anyone would be on edge. Anyone would be forgiven for wondering "Okay, but now that he's here, and she's here, what does that mean? For them? For me? For us?"
Additionally (and I have spoken to my wonderful friend Lindsay about this before), we can also consider what growing up Sixth does to a person. Camilla herself says that any gifted teenager in the Library is "the system" behaving as it's supposed to:
Her reference was necromancer-specific, but given what she says (and what we can infer from elsewhere) of her training as a cavalier, as well as how young she was when she took her vows, I think we can make a pretty strong case for all members of the Sixth House undergoing some fairly robust educational requirements. Which leads me to ask: what does "the system" of the Sixth House do to someone like Cam? How does it shape or warp someone who has very obvious perfectionist tendencies, who pours so much of themselves and their identity into their title? Why is a twelve year old so intent on proving she's "the best in the Sixth", and what on earth does she do at fifteen that proves that to the entire station? I would dearly love to know if the Oversight Body of the Sixth House is occasionally making tweaks on consanguinity tables, letting the really-truly-gifted distant cousins have a kid or two with one another, for cleverness' sake, in the same way the Seventh deliberately kept heptenary cancer in their bloodlines "in case it produced poetry down the line".
This is another thought for another time, however. For now, back to Cam: she looks at a cavalier who has lost sight of their necromancer, let her walk into danger alone and unprotected, and she turns to hers and swears "I would never". And what does Palamedes do? In front of a total stranger, he says "I know" and then highlights exactly how lost without her he'd be. He blatantly implies that they've never spent a single day apart in their lives, and that they aren't about to start now. He picks up on all the unspoken questions baked into her defensive, emotional response, and just as succinctly, reassures her that yes, she's capable; yes, she's important; yes, she matters to him. 😭
I am going to leave you on that, hopefully with feelings as injured as my own are. It has once again been a pleasure extrapolating with you all.
