"Prilkop and I have discussed this. Neither of us thinks I should risk being around you too much. I could make a serious mistake. There is far less chance of my making a mistake if I do not go back with you.”
oh, goody. another separation. how unprecedented.
"Hush!" he rebuked me sternly. "Do you think this is easy for me? Do you think that lofty reason is my only one? Do you think it is easy for me to part my ways from yours? No. There is a more personal element that divides my path from yours. It is because of what I glimpsed on a far smaller scale. I saw you, after my death, taking satisfaction in the things and people you had so long denied yourself. Living the life you were meant to have, after my death. You gave me another piece of life. Shall I use it to rob you of yours?" More slowly he added, "I can love you, Fitz, but I cannot allow that love to destroy you and what you are."
i suppose he’s right in several ways but i resent the truth of his statements and also prilkops’s meddling. something is afoot.
"We were talking," I reminded him quietly. "About your coming back to Buckkeep with me."
"No. We were talking about my not coming back." He tried a smile that failed.
"Could you have been content to live with Nighteyes among the wolves?”
"I would have been willing to try," I said stubbornly.
"Even if his mate could never completely accept you?"
molly if she ever saw fitz and the fool in the same room at the same time:
“…What purpose could it serve?"
"Exactly. So you will always love him as a son, but treat him as your prince. One step away from where you long to be. Because even if you told him, you could never be his father."
I was starting to get angry again. "You are not my father."
"No." He stared at the fire. "And I'm not your lover, either."
I felt suddenly weary and sour. "Is that what this is about? Bedding with me? You won't return to Buckkeep because I won't bed with you?"
"No!" He did not shout the word, but something in the way he said it stunned me to silence. His voice was low, almost harsh as he spoke. "Always, you bring it back to that, as if that is the only possible culmination of love."
one step away from where you long to be….not your lover………..
but ohh my god fitz, you’ve been over this before. plus you had soul sex already just give it up
“You know what I am. You have been within this body, and I in yours. And I have felt, oh, gods help me against that memory, I have felt what it is to be human, fully human, in the moments that I held your love and pain and loss within me. You have allowed me to be as human as it is possible for me to be. What my teachers took away from me, you restored tenfold. With you, I was a child. With you, I grew to manhood. With you...just as Nighteyes allowed you to be the wolf."
another reminder that the fool is not human. close-ish maybe but not quite.
just unalive me already bro
He turned his head away trom me, as if by doing that, he could keep me from knowing that he wept. I sat, feeling numbed in the way that one does after a terrible injury.
"I am just tired," he said in a small, quavering voice. "Just tired, still. That is all. I think I will lie down again."
the fool is now dead wife-coded
The Black Man looked at me kindly. "No. You don't." He studied the map again, and then, as if speaking to himself, said, "The letting go is hard. Yet, this you must do. Both of you. Let go. If not, you will make more changes. Blindly. If, because of him, things you do make changes, what comes of them? No one can say. Even a little thing. You bring to him bread. He eats. If you do not bring this bread, someone else eats it. See, a change. A little change. To him, you give your time, your talk, your friendship. Who then does not receive your time? Hm? A big change, maybe, I think. Let go, Fool's Changer. Your time together is over. Done."
It was none of his concern and I very nearly told him so. But he looked at me so kindly and sympathetically that my anger died almost as soon as I felt it.
i’m still trying to decide if prilkop can be trusted. but now he’s associated with their millionth good-bye and i can’t take it anymore.
In that last dance of chances
I shall partner you no more.
I shall watch another turn you
As you move across the floor.
In that last dance of chances
When I bid your life good-bye
I will hope she treats you kindly.
I will hope you learn to fly.
In that last dance of chances
When I know you'll not be mine
I will let you go with longing
And the hope that you'll be fine.
In that last dance of chances
We shall know each other's minds.
We shall part with our regrets
When the tie no longer binds.
that’s one hell of a breakup text
Then he revealed, "The Fool was here, two weeks ago. I'd give a lot to know how he comes and goes from here so unseen, but he managed. I heard a tap at the door of my private sitting room, late at night. And when I opened it, there he was. Changed of course, as you said. Brown as an apple-seed, all over. He looked weary and half-sick, but I think that could have been his journey through the pillar. He did not speak of the Black Man, or indeed of anything except you. He obviously expected to find you here. That frightened me."
I set the empty brandy glass down on the table. Without asking, Chade refilled it for me. "When I told him we hadn't seen you, he looked stricken. I told him how thoroughly we'd searched, and that my private premise had been that you'd gone off with him. He asked if we'd used the Skill; I told him that of course we had, but that it had yielded no trace of you. He gave me the name of an inn where he'd be staying for a week, and asked me to send a runner immediately if any news of you came in. At the end of the week, he came back to me again. He looked as if he had aged a decade. He told me he had made inquiries of his own about you, with no positive results. Then he said he had to depart, but that he wished to leave something with me for you. Neither of us expected you'd return to claim it."
oh, god. imagine how sick he must have felt after breaking things off with fitz and then thinking he’d run off again…or worse.
Ours was a ragged and uneven parting. Each of us had intended to see the other again. Each of us had had final words to say. My days with the Fool ended like a half-played game of Stones, the outcome poised and uncertain, possibilities hovering. Sometimes it seemed to me a cruelty that so much was unresolved between us; at other times, a blessing that a hope of reunion lingered. It is like the anticipation that a clever minstrel evokes when be pauses, letting silence pool before sweeping into the final refrain of his song. Sometimes a gap can seem like a promise yet to be fulfilled.
I miss him often, but in the same way that I miss Nighteyes. I know that such a one will not come again. I count myself fortunate for what I had of them.
I do not think I will ever Wit-bond again, or know such a deep friendship as I had with the Fool. As Burrich once observed to Patience, one horse cannot wear two saddles. I have Molly and she is enough for me, and more.
listen…it was insane when burrich said it, and it’s not any more normal coming from fitzchivalry (aka the son burrich and chivalry shared). you have to choose between your female lover and your dear male friend? you can’t possibly have both? and why is that?
