Archive of Our Own ^beta

The first thing that Echo did when they got back on board Myriad at last was find their way to their cabin, and then to their bathroom, where they pulled their hair up into an impromptu knot with trembling fingers and puked neatly in the toilet.

The second thing was to throw their sword with a violent clatter against the bulkhead. The force of the gesture loosened that tenuous knot of hair so that their ponytail tumbled across their shoulder in disarray, and somehow, somehow, despite everything, that was the bit that made them mutter fuck emphatically between gritted teeth and fall, boneless, to their knees.

The floor was cool and smooth against their forehead—the bulkhead, when they managed to rearrange themself into a sitting position, was just as cool against their back. After the burning midday heat of Quire, it held the same relief as plunging into a cold pool.

I have sunstroke, I guess, Echo thought, and then they started to laugh, out loud, hysterical—laughed harder at the sight of their sword, across the cabin from them—made a terrible noise through the laughter as their brain made the visceral connection between the sight of the sword and the memory that lived in their arms and hands now of the difference between the feeling of a blade sliding through flesh and a blade scraping against bone.

It broke the laughter. Echo breathed carefully through it.

“Stupid asshole,” they said to the air, and encompassed in the phrase the assassin—Grand Magnificent—themself. “Shit.”

By the time Grand knocked on their door, they’d progressed to lying on the bed, limbs spread, hair now entirely loose but no less of a wreck.

When they didn’t respond, the door opened.

“Okay, good, you are in there,” Grand said. “Gig said you were probably dead, but it didn’t sound that likely.”

“I’m not dead,” Echo said. “Get out.”

There were a few more words lingering with bile on their tongue. If you don’t want to be. Fuck, how exactly did anyone manage to talk to Grand without the casual threat of violence to get them through?

They opened their eyes as Grand’s footsteps approached.

Grand looked down at them, nose wrinkled.

They watched one another silently.

“Thank you for earlier,” Grand said at last. The words sounded dubious, like he couldn’t really believe he was saying them. His eyes slid sideways to Echo’s sword. “I’ve been thinking. Your sword isn’t bad, but I could make you—“

Echo stared at him.

“Nope,” they said. Flat.

“Oh,” Grand said. He raised his eyebrows. “There’s no need to be like that.”

“Get out,” Echo said again. It was too much—Grand’s cluelessness, his pretty face with its entire catalogue of infuriating expressions, his ease with what Echo had—

“Oh.”

“Out.”

Grand left.

Echo lay there for a while after he’d gone, breathing through anxiety as best they could, and then they wrenched themself upright in a violent rush and went to clean up properly—first the sword. Then themself.

Breakfast conversation in Old Church buzzed around Echo’s head. The assassin Cascabel sat off to one side, methodical in his examination of his own gear—of Surge’s tools—of some fragments of who knew what that Even had scavenged. Even’s eyes slid to him sometimes, although he was talking to Janie right then. Grand sketched in light on a minute scale across the surface of his coffee, and argued with Gig and Surge about whatever it was. His voice had a particular nasal tone that cut right through the general din, a circular saw in a swarm of flies—

Echo turned their tired face to the wall and listened to the rise and fall of Grand’s voice. Just that. Rhythm and flow. A word: authenticity. A word: totality. A word: trite.

Should’ve sent a lawyer.

Echo supposed there had to be some kind of difference in tone, in the way Grand spoke to his friends and to people he was threatening, but if there was, they weren’t well versed enough in Grand’s weird shit to find it.

Merit. Performativity. Substance.

An ache spread behind Echo’s eyes—threatened to sharpen into the sort of spearing headache that meant the day would be a lost cause.

They stood, wincing at how loudly the stool scraped across the floorboards—went out, out into dusty morning air. Grit between the teeth. Their hair whipping up around them.

There was a difficulty here, a set of pieces they couldn’t put together in a way that made sense:

Grand every minute of his life, being condescending and oblivious.

Grand sitting beside them with the wreck of a Saint, pushing them and pushing them towards understanding—towards putting something they could never have named into a form that expressed it perfectly.

The delicate precision of his hands as they moved through the air. The focused furrow of his brow. A kind of softness to his features in the light of his creation—

But also the way Grand’s face had turned cool and distant at Even’s description of the thing that he’d made—the sight of Even’s wrecked palms.

“Ugh,” Echo said—kicked at the ground, shoulders slouching, hands shoved deep into pockets.

If they closed their eyes, violence was there—not behind their eyelids but in their whole body—that sense-memory again—now the sword slides through cloth—now though skin—muscle and sinew and organs—now it scrapes along the thin crackling bone of a human ribcage. The vibration of it. Echo’s jaw tightened—

No, let it go—

Easier to do that if Grand would.

There he came, wandering out after Echo, looking unconcerned.

“You’re being weird,” he said. “Let me understand what’s up.”

“Why?”

Silence.

“So you can make art out of me, Grand Mag? That it?”

“There’s no need to assume,” Grand said.

Echo laughed, a quick snort. “I get it.”

“I really don’t think you do.”

“You saw me kill a guy and you looked like—”

Grand watched them.

“Whatever,” Echo said.

“No, tell me.”

“You don’t care. I killed a guy.”

Grand leaned back against the wall. “Even’s killed a lot of people, I think. You’re being a bit melodramatic.”

“I don’t,” Echo said. “I haven’t. Killed people.”

“You walk around with a sword.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“I’m just saying—”

It was easy to spin and pin Grand’s shoulder hard to the wall, already slouched against it as he was—he made a small grunt of protest, blinked at Echo in confusion.

“You want to know what’s wrong? I killed a guy for you and you think it’s normal somehow. You’re the smuggest asshole I’ve ever met. You don’t understand anything—”

Grand was wide-eyed now, a sudden understanding, startlement.

“Oh,” he said. “Oh. Alright.”

Echo flushed.

“No,” they said.

“I don’t mind if you want to—”

Grand’s lips were a little parted, damp where he’d touched his tongue to them, but he still looked sort of amused.

“I mind,” Echo said—snapped—exposed in their interest, in their unwillingness to act—in their unease over their place in all of this, if they couldn’t kill a man without—

Without—

Breathe.

Ignore the voice of Independence, the one that said there was only ever being alone. Ignore the disconnecting horror of blood. Ignore it all.

“I’m going to go and do something that matters,” they said, and turned on their heel, and didn’t kiss Grand even once.

They took their sword with them when they went. Out, away.

Eventually, into the mist.