NOVGO.NET Movement Six — Let Me Out, This Is Mine
The words arrived in him mid-strike, sudden and clear enough that for one disorienting instant he thought someone else had spoken them.
Let me out. This is mine.
He knew that shape of thought. He had heard some version of it, or felt some pressure very much like it, gathering at the edges of himself often enough, across enough centuries, to recognize it immediately — the particular cold, absolute certainty that belonged to the most dangerous piece of himself, the one that had surfaced, so far, exactly once, over something as small and forgivable as a household dispute, and had frightened him badly enough that he still flinched, faintly, whenever he felt its edges stir.
It took him a full exchange — a strike thrown, a strike dodged, the cold-honey drag of borrowed blood pulling at his pulse again before he wrenched free of it — to understand that the thought had not come from the Absolute I at all.
It had come from him.
That was the part that frightened him more than anything the man in front of him had managed to land. Not the alter ego reaching for control, which he had at least learned, however imperfectly, to recognize and resist. This was smaller, quieter, and entirely his own — some plain, ordinary, wholly Eremos-shaped part of him looking at an opponent who moved like he'd already memorized every choice Eremos was about to make, and concluding, with a certainty that had nothing manufactured or borrowed about it, that whatever was happening here was his to answer. His fight. His danger. Not something to be handed off to a piece of himself he barely trusted, dressed up as necessity.
He held that thought a moment, turning it the way he turned everything, slow and deliberate even under pressure, and understood, with a clarity that cost him another glancing graze of cold blood-drag across his forearm for the delay, that the thought was not entirely wrong and not entirely safe either. It was true that this was his to answer. It was also true, watching the man reset his stance for another strike that would land exactly where Eremos's own body was about to be whether he willed it there or not, that answering it himself and answering it adequately had, somewhere in the last several exchanges, stopped being the same proposition.
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And underneath that ordinary, frightened, entirely human part of him, something else was listening.
The Absolute I did not think in the language Eremos thought in. It did not reason the way the rest of him reasoned, patient and slow and willing to sit with uncertainty until uncertainty resolved itself honestly. It simply knew, the way it always simply knew things, absolute and unhesitating and entirely unbothered by the smaller, gentler parts of Eremos that flinched from its certainty — knew that the man in front of them possessed something that reached, unearned, into places belonging to Eremos alone; knew that a power capable of reading a person's next move before that person had finished choosing it was not a threat that patience and roots and borrowed vines were built to answer; knew, with the flat, unbothered logic of something that had never once doubted its own conclusions, that if this man truly carried what Eremos suspected he carried, then the ordinary, restrained, careful version of Eremos currently standing in this fight was not enough, and further restraint from this point forward was not caution. It was simply a slower way of losing.
Let me out, it said again, and this time Eremos understood clearly that the voice belonged to both of them at once — his own fear and its own cold certainty arriving, for one unsettling moment, at exactly the same conclusion from two entirely different directions.
He had spent centuries actively avoiding this. He had told himself, more times than he could count, that the Absolute I was a danger to be contained rather than a tool to be deployed, a fear to be managed rather than an answer to be trusted, and he still believed that, standing here, blood dragging cold and sluggish through his own veins while a stranger who somehow already knew him reset his stance for another strike. He believed it completely, and he let the fear out anyway, because the alternative — continuing to answer this, restrained and patient and entirely inadequate, until the man in front of him finally landed the exchange his uncanny certainty had clearly already decided he was going to land — frightened him considerably more.
Fine, he thought, and felt something in his chest crack open the way it had cracked open exactly once before, over something so much smaller than this that the memory of it embarrassed him now. Fine. Take it. Just — don't let it be for nothing.
He did not fully understand, even as he thought it, whether that last plea was aimed at the Absolute I, at himself, or at whatever remained of the ordinary, patient, root-souled man he'd been for every single moment before this one.