"I don't-- I don't see how you could feel like that about London if you've seen Ulthar."

"So-- I live in a boarding house for dockworkers. My best friend, who lives with me, is named Joan Clark, and she loves birds, she calls me robin because robins will just go right up to people. She's from Northern England, she came to London because there was work here, and to this day if she hears birds she can identify them with her eyes closed. And she's so gentle, she's great with animals, when she's gotten a bird to eat out of her hands it's hard to believe those are the same hands that do dock work."

"But I spend most of my time in the library, and one of the people I've met through math is Emma Stark, who's kind of a dumbass in a lot of ways-- she's an alcoholic who spends way too much time at parties-- but she also adores math, and she's so good at it, she approaches everything like a puzzle, if there's a problem in front of her she lights up at the idea of getting to solve it."

"Or, Oscar Latz runs a bookshop and he's not brilliant but he's driven, he's served prison time because he cares so much about making banned books available to the world."

"And I can keep going, you know? There are thousands of thousands of people in London and every one of them is a complicated and fascinating world and I will never in my whole life have enough time to know them all, not if I spent every waking minute on it."

Carter starts to very quietly sob.

Oh no.

This is some ugly crying. His nose is leaking snot.

Inaaya has no idea what to do with that. She knows what she'd do if it were Joan or even Emma, someone she was close enough to that she could just hug them. With Randolph Carter, though, she's just-- frozen.

"It's gone," he says.

"I'm sorry," very quietly, well aware that this is incredibly weak. "I don't-- I'm sorry."

"I wasn't good enough to keep it."

That's--

She wants to protest five different things about that statement and they tangle on themselves and she winds up protesting nothing.

"It's the only thing I want in my life and you're saying-- if I wanted something else I would be able to have it."

"I don't know what it would take for you to be able to have it."

"How well do you remember it?"

"I don't-- I have sense memories? Mostly? I know what it feels like, I have some procedural memory, I can talk to cats even in the waking world, but I don't-- keep facts, mostly, I know I once dropped everything to go climb a mountain but I couldn't tell you the first thing about mountaineering."

"I remember all of it. Names, locations, everything. It's more vivid than the waking world, sometimes."

"I'm sorry."

"And-- I'll never be able to go back. I can't stand to be in Providence anymore, it just-- reminds me-- London is ugly so it's better, I can't mistake it for there-- In the right moment, in the sunlight, Providence looks like home."

"I--" she swallows, "I haven't figured out yet how to get people there who don't go already, but I'm working on it, I swear I'm working on it--"

"I would die to be able to see Ulthar one more time."

Inaaya loves the Dreamlands. She has always loved the Dreamlands. She's loved them since she was four years old and learning Cat with the stubbornness of any small child who wants something just barely out of reach, since she was seven and climbing trees, since she was nine and reading everything she could get her hands on, since she was eleven and trying desperately to tell her waking self that the Dreamlands were real and that meant she knew how to live on her own and she could just leave Bombay if she wanted to.

She does not love them enough that she'd die to see them one more time.

It-- feels deeply, deeply wrong, that you have to not want it in order to have it. It feels like it can't be right, or maybe she just desperately does not want it to be right, which is not how the truth works she knows that's not how the truth works but part of her is still screaming that there must be some other answer.

"If I knew what it would take to get you that I'd give it to you, I don't know how, I'm sorry, it's not--" and she is not going to cry she is not she is not.

"It's all right," he says. "Someday I'll figure out how to go back. And if not-- death is an end. That I learned in the Dreamlands. It's-- the only piece of hope I've had in fifteen years."

....yeah okay fuck it she doesn't care that he's a man she just met he's getting a hug.

Hug. Sob sob sob into Inaaya's shoulder.

Meanwhile--

"Hello?" Chu Chu says. She sounds. Stressed.

This was much easier than Sal expected. Maybe Charles John just sucks at this.