Chapter 207: A Normal Chat
Bob noticed her noticing him and gave her the broad and immediate smile that Bob gave everyone, which was large enough to be slightly alarming at close range if you were not expecting it.
Rin blinked.
"That is Bob." Jane said, beside her. "He is fine."
"I am excellent." Bob corrected cheerfully, and went back to whatever he had been doing.
Ileana found Neil before he had gone far into the domain’s interior, which was how Ileana always found him, through whatever combination of awareness and attention meant she generally knew where he was before she went to look.
She looked at him with the thorough and immediate attention she gave to his physical state when he came back from something, and her expression moved through several things quickly.
"You healed." She said. Not a question.
"Yea, it was the fruit." He confirmed.
She absorbed this, and then the relief she had been carrying on behalf of his condition, the sustained version of it that she managed without expressing it constantly, released slightly in her expression in a way that he recognised.
She reached up and put her hand on his face briefly, a light touch, checking something she would not have been able to articulate but that satisfied whatever question it was answering.
"That’s good." She said.
Then she looked past him at the new buildings in the domain and at Jane standing nearby with Rin and at the general state of expanded activity that the merger had created.
"The domains merged." She hummed.
"Yes." He said.
She looked at it all for a moment with the assessing quality she had when she was mapping a new situation and working out where everything fit.
"Jane is a sub-lord now." ileana continued.
"Yea..."
Ileana nodded once, a nod that contained a great deal of thought compressed into a small gesture, and then she turned back to him with the settled expression of someone who had processed the development and arrived at their position on it.
"Come and eat." She said. "You have not eaten properly since you left for the Realm."
"That was yesterday." He said.
"Yes." She agreed, with the tone of someone for whom this confirmed rather than mitigated the issue.
Dinner that evening was larger than usual, the combined domain population sitting across the extended table arrangement that Fay and Ray had assembled with the practical efficiency of people who understood feeding groups of varying sizes and had the equipment for it.
Bob sat at one end and talked at a volume that covered approximately half the table’s length without effort, describing the merger from his perspective which was apparently one of great structural concern followed by great structural approval, and Rob corrected his account at several points with the quiet precision of someone for whom accuracy was a value independent of whether the audience noticed the correction.
Mob ate without contributing to the conversation, which was Mob’s consistent relationship with group dinners, and Leon sat with the measured attention of someone who was present and engaged but never the loudest thing in the room.
Rin sat between Jane and Fay, which had not been the original seating arrangement but had happened through a series of small adjustments that Fay had facilitated without appearing to orchestrate, and she ate with the careful quality she brought to everything in the new environment while Fay asked her questions that were warm and direct and not intrusive.
The elven archers from the perimeter rotation came through in shifts, eating quickly and efficiently in the way of people whose primary identity was professional rather than domestic.
Neil sat between Ileana and Jane, which was the configuration that dinner had arrived at, and ate the food Fay had made, which was more substantial than the previous evening’s meal and was the kind of thing that communicated someone had known he was going to need proper feeding.
The conversation moved around the table in the easy way of a group that had been together long enough to have established its own rhythms, and the new additions, Jane and Rin, were absorbed into it at the pace they were comfortable with rather than being required to integrate faster.
At one point Rin looked up from her food and found Leon looking in her direction, and the two of them held that for a half-second before Leon returned his attention to his plate with the practiced composure of someone who had not been doing what it had briefly appeared he was doing.
Neil saw this also.
He ate his food and said nothing.
After dinner the domain settled into its evening rhythm, the perimeter rotation continuing, Magnar occupying his preferred position, the various subjects finding their ways to their sleeping arrangements. Bob and Rob had a conversation of some length about the structural implications of the new wall configuration that Neil was not close enough to follow but that appeared to conclude in satisfaction on both sides.
Jane walked beside Neil for a short time during the after-dinner movement through the domain, not saying much, just present in the way she had always been comfortable with. There was still the resentment in him, honest and real, and he was not going to pretend otherwise to either of them. But there was also the Jane who had always been able to walk beside him without filling the silence unnecessarily, and those two things existed in the same space.
Eventually she went toward the healing hut where her room was, and he watched her go with the complicated and unresolved feeling of someone who had not yet decided everything he was going to decide about a situation that was still developing.
Ileana found him again near the campfire where Magnar was sleeping.
"How are you." She said. The real question, the same one she had asked on the path.
"Still sorting." He said. "The same things and some new ones."
She leaned against him, her shoulder against his arm, and looked at the unlit fire and the sleeping familiar.
"We have time." She said.
"Some." He agreed.
They stood there for a while in the quiet domain, the barrier luminescent at the edges, the night settled around the wooden walls, and then Ileana went inside and Neil stood a while longer thinking about cores and origins and kingdoms that were lost and people who were held against their will far away, and the considerable distance between where he was now and where he needed to be.
’Nemo.’ He said internally. ’Find me another domain that I need. Any tier, any race, closest available.’
"Searching, master." Nemo said, and the quiet of the night continued around him while she worked.
Neil’s room was quiet and warm in the way the domain always was at night, the barrier holding its low luminescence at the perimeter while everything inside it settled into the easy rhythm of sleep, and he lay beside Ileana in the comfortable dark and let the day decompress around him.
She was already in bed when he came in, sitting up with her hair loose and a small light floating beside her that she had been using to read by, and she put the reading away when he arrived without making it look like a concession.
He lay down beside her and they talked the way they talked at the end of days that had been full, unhurried and without agenda, moving through the things that mattered without requiring them to be important enough to justify the conversation.
He told her about the twelve hours on the field, the full version of it, the cores colliding and the ruptures forming and the dual temperatures propagating across the landscape in both directions while he held the method without stopping. She listened in the way she listened when something had been difficult and she wanted the honest account rather than the managed one, her expression moving through things she did not always put into words.
She reached over and put her hand on his chest when he described the worst of the pain, not saying anything, just placing it there.
He told her about Freya observing the whole process and what Freya had said afterward, and Ileana was quiet for a moment with that particular quality of quiet she had when she was thinking about something properly before responding to it.
"She trusted you to finish it." Ileana said.
"She taught me the method." He said. "That was its own kind of trust."
Ileana thought about this.
"The two of you have similar situations." She said. Not a question, just a thing she had been putting together from the pieces he had given her over time.
"More similar than either of us expected." Neil spoke.
She nodded slowly, her head moving against the pillow.
"That is good." She said. "Having someone who understands from inside the same experience rather than from outside it."
He looked at her in the low light of the room.
"You understand things from outside the experience and it is not lesser." He said.
Her expression shifted into the warm and slightly exasperated version of itself that appeared when he said something that she wanted to argue with and could not find the argument for.
"I know." She said. "I am not competing with her."
"I know you are not." He said.
They lay in the quiet for a moment.
"One more core." She said. "And then the evolution."
"One more core." He confirmed. "And then both of them, the domain and me."
She was quiet with this for a moment, feeling the weight of how close it was.
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Thanks for reading... adios
