[Closed Post: Be You and I Behind an Arras Then]

[timebethine]

The moment draws nigh. Laertes will soon speak to Aornis in the library. All is in readiness--Asmodean long since in place, invisibly veiled in saidin; SecUnit's drone watching from its customary vantage.

In the game room, SecUnit, Claudius, Sagramore, and Nightingale gather around the grainy CRT television, watching the drama unfold ...


[This post is for live reactions from the war room! Participation in this thread is totally optional.]

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[sagramore]

Sagramore has stopped pacing, but he has replaced it with fidgeting. He twists the chain of his pendant around his fingers over and over.

"...Did he just ask her if she's happy?"

[recognizance]

The video fuzzes and freezes for several seconds, during which SecUnit doesn't bother to confirm the obvious. It has no idea what Laertes is getting at there; it's still digesting the bit about "the actors". I mean, wow.

[rememberettersberg]

Nightingale still isn't sure what to make of Aornis. He knew he would need to be here, to be a part of whatever this plan turned out to be, but... he also knows that he's the outlier here. If Aornis does have the power to send them all back from whence they came, then he'd say goodbye to this second life with nothing but the mildest regret and a promise of fond remembrance. His primary concern is anything else Aornis might be up to and, if she truly is stuck here, what her frustration and boredom might lead her to.

"If only this was like a more usual interrogation," he muses aloud. "I wish we could call him outside to direct his next steps."

[recognizance]

"--are happy here," Laertes continues, as SecUnit switches in the next video clip. (It is of course following the conversation itself in realtime, two or three seconds ahead of the screen, which is slightly disorienting. It doesn't like the way Laertes says hope of returning, or the way its threat assessment module keeps making the module equivalent of small unhappy noises. But none of this is perceptible to the rest of the room.)

[rememberettersberg]

As the conversation progresses to loss, Nightingale finds himself reaching for Sagramore and enclosing his wrist in a loose but steady grasp. He's not sure himself if he means to comfort or restrain.

[recognizance]

SecUnit frowns. "What the hell is she talking about?"

[wickedwit]

Claudius freezes, the instinct of a prey animal, but the calculating, human part of him thinks this is still to our advantage. The point was to present Aornis with a weakness, Laertes’s fear of fulfilling his fate Elsinore, and see whether she would make moves to exploit it. But this hits upon something that seems far closer to her. Claudius knows that when Laertes speaks of how it must eat at her, being here and unable to answer a sibling’s death, he’s speaking from newly-understood empathy. He knows his hope that someone may visit the mansion after death (like Grantaire, like Enjolras, like Courfeyrac and Combeferre for a day) is genuine.

Aornis could use this. There is no one better to understand the grief of loss and frustrated revenge than Laertes as he is now. Claudius has faith in Laertes’s judgment and still, if he were in Aornis’s place, he’d know how to sway it to his side. And Claudius does want to know, desperately, what she has to say, what she might reveal about her brother and his visit to play on Laertes’s sympathies.

This might be her true motive, to do whatever she must in her brother’s memory. If it’s a weakness in Laertes, it’s a weakness in her, too. It’s something Claudius can use to deal with her, to negotiate a better arrangement.

Does that justify it? Can he sit back and wait for her to manipulate Laertes at his most vulnerable, just to see whether she’s capable? Past all his calculations, he feels the fierce pangs of protectiveness for the man he loves, the desire to deliver him from that room now, and be the one to care for his wounds. He could have, if he was the one to give Laertes the news. He didn’t want to hurt Laertes, the way he’s surely hurting now.

There is, he decides with a sigh, something he should try. This is the ideal time to try it, when her reactions seem the most genuine, when it could still take her by surprise. He waits until she’s started a sentence, after the delay on-screen.

“Aornis¹,” he says sharply.

¹Ping.

[sagramore]

(Sagramore freezes when Nightingale grabs his wrist, and it means he misses exactly what happens between Aornis and Laertes in that moment, only catches Claudius' deliberate choice to say her name.)

[wickedwit]

Claudius releases a breath he didn't know he was holding, that frozen, fearful moment replaced by a feeling like pride. Laertes knows what he's doing, knows what he's done, from the moment he let that mask of careful, retreating deference slip for familiarity in grief. Later, he thinks, he'll kiss Laertes for his cleverness and his deftness, and -- apologize, all the same. This isn't a test he should have had to take.

"Take care with that name," Claudius says at last, to the others in the room. "She can sense it being said. I'm rather confident in it." Magnus's experience, Lan Wangji's words, and now the avouch of his own eyes.