Before the monsters caught up to you

"I'm just saying you're going to make her miserable."

"I don't think so," Maedhros says.

"I wasn't accusing you of doing it on purpose." He turns and looks out the window. He doesn't like looking at Maedhros. Maedhros had dyed his hair so it looked like it was greying, or possibly deliberately greyed it, and surgically rounded his ears and wrinkled his skin. He looked a well-preserved forty. Everyone Maedhros worked with knew he was immortal. Celegorm couldn't think why he'd bothered. It made him uglier.

"I won't learn anything if I make her miserable," Maedhros says. "I need to figure out how she's going to work with resources and allies that are less - romantic - than a devoted mysterious immortal tormented bodyguard, and if -"

"It's not romantic."

"I don't mean that she wants to marry you."

"She doesn't."

"No, she doesn't. I mean that - working with people is always easier than working with institutions, and working with intriguing, compelling, supernaturally gifted people who are training you to achieve your destiny is the easiest sort of arrangement. And if I want you out of that damned city I obviously need an adequate substitute, which means I need to figure out how she can interact with an organization as effectively as she interacts with you. I won't make any progress towards my goal if she's miserable, so I won't let her be miserable, so you can stop bristling at me."

This really shouldn't be reassuring but it is. Betting on Maedhros's competence is always much surer than betting on his compassion. And if Maedhros wants her to have a good summer vacation for reasons other than appeasing Celegorm then he doesn't have to worry that things will get worse if he lets himself be appeased. It's very clever and he resents it immensely. He walks to the window and turns around to scowl at Maedhros's ugly face.

"I also think this is a good idea from Karen's perspective," Maedhros says peaceably. "She doesn't know much about us."

"She hasn't asked."

"She should care, a lot, about the motives and attitudes and competence of people who will be coming to join her in Sunnydale. She should care how they think about presently inactive vampires like her friend, she should care how they think about sixteen-year-olds with superpowers, she should care what their vision of success looks like, and whether they're competent to pull it off. I think if she spends the summer figuring that out she'll be happier than if she spends it roaming around the cemetery staking vampires you let her have because it's good for her self-esteem."

"Or," says Celegorm, "you could tell her, and then she would know, and then she could spend the summer doing whatever she likes."

"I don't know yet. Who I send and what they want and how they operate is going to depend on her, and what she works best with, and I need this summer to get that right."

"Fine."

Maedhros doesn't smile. Maedhros's smiles are all lies and Celegorm hates being lied to. "Thank you."

"I haven't done anything."

"You heard me out. I know you hate that."

"If I ever won an argument with you I wouldn't hate having them."

Maedhros looks mildly surprised. "That's not true. If it were -"

" - I mean, if I ever won an argument with you and it wasn't because you let me win in order to make me more willing to hear you out generally."

"Tyelco, sometimes you're right and I'm wrong, and sometimes we don't agree and you end up getting the thing you want, and sometimes I end up making a lot more concessions than I planned to and sometimes I end up getting nothing I want. The only sense in which you've never won an argument is that you've never walked away feeling like you're adequate. That's not what it looks like when I have conversational superpowers, it's what it looks like when you have a searing inferiority complex."

"I don't want to talk about this," he says, because the alternative is trying to come up with words in response to that and he doesn't have any. "I'll tell Karen to go to summer camp."

"Tell her why, too."

If this conversation were with someone else he'd end it by threatening them, but you can't threaten someone who wants, more than anything in the world, for everyone who loves him to stop so that if he ever finds a way to die he can pursue it guiltlessly.

"Don't hurt her, Nelyo."

"She'll have a lovely time."

Total: 624

Posts Per Page:

‹ Previous 1 2 … 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 … 24 25 Next ›

« First ‹ Previous 14 of 25 Next › Last »

known-the-dragon

Possibly.

on-the-clock

Anyway, I think it's a reasonable list of ambitions. Do you think you're making progress on them here?

known-the-dragon

I don't know if they're mostly the sorts of things that you ever actually make progress on.

on-the-clock

They sound like the kinds of things that you make progress on. People pass classes and buy trucks and make friends in lots of different places and kill baby-eating demons and visit Yellowstone and write books and get better at doing the laundry.

known-the-dragon

I guess some people have in theory done some of those things at some points in human history.

on-the-clock

The great heroes of legend have even done two or three of them in the same lifetime.

known-the-dragon

known-the-dragon

I think I don't think about it that much because a lot of things are things that I can't get very much closer to for a long time, and some of them don't make very much sense anyway. And also I have this sense that it'll get depressing.

on-the-clock

It is possible that humans are different this way but I find it really helpful to have some things on my to-do list that are a thousand years out. It helps with - hmmm, one thing it helps with is that when you're tempted to ask yourself 'who am I to be doing this' you can answer 'the kind of person I'll need to be to do these important things eventually'.

known-the-dragon

I think maybe that only works if you think you're ever going to do anything really important.

- and it's not even like I don't do that, OK, I don't think I'm gonna go kill Lurconis next Thursday, but knowing that I wanna lets me at least imagine that doing hard stuff is maybe getting me ready to do harder things someday, if I ever actually get that far, which I probably won't, but - if I thought about life in terms of figuring out how to actually kill Lurconis, or whether I was getting any closer to it, I'd crash and burn and give up in two weeks, and then I wouldn't be anywhere.

on-the-clock

That's interesting. Because there wouldn't be enough days where it felt like you'd made enough progress?

known-the-dragon

Because I wouldn't be accomplishing anything. And because - you'd have to -

I don't know how to say it.

Alex does this thing for the other kids in gym class where if they run farther than they've ever run before, or if they run a whole lap faster than they've ever run one before, then they get a cookie. And that's not easy to do it on any given day, not if you haven't been gaming it the whole time, but it's manageable, it's a thing you can theoretically do. You don't have to be a person who can run a mile in six minutes, you don't even have to aim for it, you just have to be pushing yourself in that moment and trying to do better than you've done before. And if he just gave cookies to people who ran a mile in six minutes, or whatever, then almost nobody would ever get a cookie, even at the end of the year when they've had all year to train for it, because it'd be so far away and so difficult and there'd be nothing to sustain anybody on their way there, so they'd give up before they started.

And - the thing about Sunnydale is that, like, it's sort of a terrible place, but it's always got all of these little problems lying around to be solved, if you can find them? And so even if you can't do anything really transformational, there are lots of chances to stretch the limits of your abilities just a little. And - man, I feel like even telling you this is going to break it, but - if I only thought about really big things then I feel like I'd never get to any of them, and then I wouldn't be getting anything done at all.

I don't even know if any of that is right, just -

on-the-clock

You don't have to defend it to me. We're not trying to make you change plans here. We're - I've got a bunch of people who are not quite as good as you at arresting demons but capable of doing it at all, and we're trying to figure out where they will do the most good, and it seems like it's important to have some of them in Sunnydale, but it also seems like you've done a tremendous amount of good in Sunnydale and need the space to keep doing that, both for the sake of the city and for the sake of letting you keep getting stronger. So the challenging thing - and I'm sorry about putting you through all of this, but we need to know you to get anywhere on any of it - is figuring out where people should be so that you have more leverage on the problems where more leverage is helpful without having people overlapping you enough that it makes your work harder.

known-the-dragon

I guess that makes sense.

I don't know if I really have plans.

on-the-clock

Can I suggest some? If they're small and attainable?

known-the-dragon

You can suggest them even if they're not, I just get to veto them if I think they'll wreck everything.

on-the-clock

Kara Wilitzer, the climbing coach, wants an assignment in Sunnydale next year. I know the climbing class is a bit of a waste of your time - I know the whole camp is - but it'd be good to know if you get along with her. Zach Befton in cabin 8 hasn't made any friends and has been eating dinner in his cabin so it's not obvious he's not sitting with anyone, you could intercept him. Emmy Sandovol hasn't been going to Mass because no one else in her cabin does and she doesn't want to go alone.

known-the-dragon

She doesn't really feel like making friends is one of her core competency areas, but she said she'd be nice. And she really doesn't have anything better to do now that the summer camp isn't evil.

I can try. And I think tend to reserve the phrase 'waste of my time' for things that don't result in learning several government secrets and making at least one friend.

on-the-clock

Oh good. In the future if you want to learn government secrets you can try less felonious channels, not that I'm upset. Alex doesn't tell you everything you're allowed to know because he associates telling people things with giving them homework and figures you'll ask if you're curious.

known-the-dragon

Oh. Huh.

I mostly only commit felonies when I think someone might be trying to murder a bunch of people, though.

on-the-clock

That's good. I could get you out of trouble regardless but I'd be awfully concerned if I was routinely springing you for grand theft auto.

known-the-dragon

I mean I do tend to have 'someone is trying to murder a bunch of people' as a live hypothesis. But I will try to avoid actually stealing cars unless I really really have to.

on-the-clock

You have my undying gratitude. - we're not any kind of dead, we're just immortal. In case you were wondering.

known-the-dragon

I just kinda figured you guys were aliens.

Is your age a state secret?

on-the-clock