“Well that was unpleasant, and messy. We’ll need to spend a fair bit of grace to clean this up properly.”

“And you’re sure that Accessor Polono was going to betray us Vaingloth?”

“His correspondence to the Summerest Council was rather explicit on that score Wepan.”

“Was it envy that drove him? I know we rejected the idea of offering him a place in our cabal, but I cannot fathom why he wouldn’t have used the evidence he’d procured to blackmail a spot for himself among our number?”

“Do you imagine any of us would have reacted positively to a blackmail attempt?”

“Of course not, but ours isn’t an alliance based on mutual appreciation. We’ve chosen who is a part of our number based the qualities we possess which are required to ensure our plan comes to fruition, and he was a talented Accessor.”

“That is certainly a significant element of how our members were chosen, but there is a quality which we also share, one which rather transcends the individual contributions we are capable of offering to the endeavor.”

“Is there? We are so diverse, I am curious what quality you might be referring to?”

“When I approached you with this proposal, what was your first thought?”

“Hmm, I suppose I couldn’t see how we would focus the influx of grace sufficiently. I must confess, I thought you were quite mad to even suggest such a thing might be possible.”

“I believe you spent, an hour was it?, explaining in great detail how the original theory I presented wasn’t viable.”

“Well, yes, no offense, but so many of the assertions in that original paper were just incorrect. I mean, full marks for the overall structure, but even the first transformation would have failed cataclysmically if we’d pursued that path.”

“And what did you do next?”

“Well, I got back to my own work. Yours had been an unexpected interruption after all.”

“And that night?”

“I, yes, well I was curious you see. Your plan, it was madness, but to your credit, it was madness hung on the scaffolding of genius. I thought for sure the equations would never balance, but isn’t that the real joy in life? We push at the impossible and through the labor of our minds we surpass what could have been before. That’s our who aim here is it not? To be the ones to make a new world, a world that without us could never come to be!”

“Exactly.”

– High Accessor Vaingloth illustrating what the other High Accessors in the their cabal most cared about, as well as what (and whom) they didn’t.

I had spent literally days worrying myself sick. Well, not sick, but as physically unwell as it was possible for Malgenia’s body to get. Days, I say! I’d struggled with what I wanted to say, how I should say it, the arguments I could marshall in my favor, the arguments that I didn’t want to make because they were unfair, the arguments that I absolutely couldn’t make.

It had been a lot.

I’d put so much thought into the moment I saw Responsibility again.

It’s worth noting here that you hadn’t exactly reached any actual words you were going to say though. I think that’s an important point, Beauty unnecessarily observed.

I think that’s better, Inhibition said, speaking from the heart can cut through a lot of the nonsense.

Is that an observation from personal experience? Reason asked.

Well, no, not as such. Inhibition, like all of the rest of us, was a much better dispenser of wisdom than practitioner of it, which was oddly comforting.

“Y-you’re in?” I asked, even divine power proving insufficient to keep the stammer out of my voice.

“Yes.” Responsibility looked entirely composed. “I’m in.”

“In to what?” I asked. 

I’m not stupid.

I knew what she was saying.

But did I really?

I mean…just…what?

“Your plan.” Responsibility hadn’t moved. “The whole thing.”

“But…” 

But…everything. How could…why would? 

You two need to use more words, like a lot of them, Beauty said.

“Did…did you change your mind? Do you…” Responsibility asked, her composure fracturing just a little.

“What? No. That’s…”

“Oh for the love of…” Beauty said, manifesting in between us. “You,” she pointed at me. “Tell her how you feel.”

“What? Why me?” I asked. It wasn’t very divine and certainly not at all like Malgenia to shy away from the ghost girl who was stabbing a finger at me, but I make no apologies.

“Because she was brave enough to tell you how she felt already and you owe her, you git,” Beauty said.

I could have fled.

I want it recorded that I could have fled.

And to my credit, I did not.

“I…I…” I managed to squeak out.

“You. What.” Beauty’s demand didn’t help, but what really made me want to be literally anywhere else was seeing the emotions that swirled behind Responsibility’s eyes.

Responsibility was waiting on my reply.

She cared what I said.

Dammit.

She cared.

I blew out a long breath.

“Go away,” I say dismissing Beauty’s projection with a wave of my hand.

I’m pretty sure she only went because I knew she was right.

See. You are definitely not stupid, Beauty said.

“Can I sit down?” I asked, pointing to a space on the bench beside Responsibility.

“Of course,” she said and started to rise.

“No…with you. I’m not Malgenia remember.”

“I…I know,” Responsibility said as she dropped back into her seat.

I gathered the robes I was wearing and plopped down onto the seat beside her, leaving a hand’s width of space between us. It felt familiar, but also more comfortable since I wasn’t locked into full eye contact with her.

“I…thank you,” I said, because it felt like she deserved that first and foremost. “You were right. I…wow, this is a lot harder than I thought it would be.”

“What’s harder?”

“Everything,” I said. “I thought I had everything figured out. I thought my plan would make everything work out.”

“It still could!” Responsibility said. “I can hate you. We can make this work.”

“Nope. It won’t.”

“Do I need to stab you again? I can do it. You know I can do it.”

“It won’t work, and it never would have worked. Even if you did hate me, and, well, I’ll get back to that. But even if you hated me, even if you hated Malgenia, it wouldn’t have worked.”

“Why?” The disappointment in Responsibility’s voice cut me worse than any blade she’d ever held before.

“Because I’m an idiot.”

“Why would that matter?” The fact that Responsibility didn’t feel the need to correct me was all the proof I would ever need that she truly believed I was the Insight she knew.

“Because if one person in the mix loves the other, they’d never be able to fight for Malgenia’s power enough to split it in half.”

“But…I don’t have to love you. I…I just said that, I…” It was only then that it occurred to me how the last few days must have been for Responsibility.

I had the other Deaths and Diyas to talk to. 

She had no absolutely no one she could have asked to share the burden I’d laid on her.

Worse, she couldn’t even have given the slightest hint that she was carrying a burden.

No wonder I’d found her alone and isolated.

“I hope that’s not true,” I said. “But it wouldn’t matter if it was, because I love you to.”

The urge to kiss her was sending lightning through my body.

Those damn lips.

Ugh.

But.

No.

That had to be her decision. She had to have the choice to say no, despite the desperation of the situation and the Divine Power that was wrapped around me.

With how I’d attained my “divine state” was it any surprise that being worshipped, especially involuntarily was the absolutely last literally-goddamned thing I wanted?

There was an upside to fighting my urge to kiss her too.

If I’d sunk into her lips like I desperately wanted to, I would have missed the completely gobsmacked expression she was wearing.

“Y-you…?”

“Love you. Not like ‘I love all the Deaths’. Like I. Love. You. Like I was planning to spend eternity with someone and you were the one I thought of. Like living without you for the last two years has been miserable. Like…like I love you.”

“No. No. No, you can’t,” she said, burying her face in her hands and folding forward to bury them both in her lap.

That was not the response I’d expected, but something in her tear-stained voice made me think I wasn’t being quite as rejected as it seemed.

“I can go,” I said. “I know none of this is fair to you and if you need some time to…”

And I was drowning in her kiss again.

I wasn’t any more ready for it this time than last, but I was not about to let her get away as quickly this time either.

Fortunately she didn’t seem to have any inclination to leave me like she had before.

“I hate you,” she said, when we finally cooled enough to separate by about the width of my pinky finger.

“You should,” I said, still pretty delirious from the kiss.

“I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. You are just…” she said, touching her forehead to mine.

“The worst?” I suggested, because, seriously, she knew me and it’s true.

Ehem, Beauty disagreed.

“Mine,” she said. “I don’t care what the other Deaths think. They can have Malgenia, but I want you.”

I kissed her and asked, “Are you sure.”

“The last two years sucked for me too,” she said. “I didn’t really know why though. I mean, I was happy for you. Or I thought I was.”

“What else were we ever allowed to be?”

“Ugh. Two years! Two years and you never told me. You’re right. I do hate you. You’re the worst.”

“Still want me then? I can’t promise it gets any better than this?”

“I don’t want better. I want my Insight back.”

“If we do this, you’ll have me. I…uh…I only kind of noticed afterwards that my plan is basically like a wedding proposal.”

“Was it now?” And there was my Responsibility. Dangerous and scheming. Maybe about to stab me. Why the hell had it taken me so long to figure out that I loved her?

“Well, I was asking you to be stuck with me forever as my equal partner. I think that’s what marriages are supposed to be right?”

“And are you still?”

“Still what?”

“Asking me to marry you?”

“I mean, do you want to?”

“That depends on whether you’re asking me or not.”

Oh yeah. There was my Responsibility. Mine!

I felt a divine echo in that claim and Diyas’ suddenly near presence.

Insight’s mine, hands off Dragon.

I had no idea what all that was about.

An old friend. No worries. She’s not into stealing. Diyas wasn’t usually cryptic which suggested this wasn’t something I needed or wanted to pry into too much.

“I am definitely asking you. Death of Responsibility will you be mine, my partner, my equal, my love, if I will be yours?

“No,” she said, because she is So Damn Mean! “No, I’ll be all that even if you’re not mine. Even if you can’t put me first.”

And then we both cried out a lot of the misery we’d been carrying for so, so long.

Eventually though we pulled back, to just marvel at each other.

“We wasted a lot of time,” I said.

“It’s not our fault,” Responsibility said.

And it wasn’t.

“Well, I know who it would be easy to blame,” I said, gesturing at myself though Responsibility took my meaning.

“Her and eleven others.”

“Well, eight others. I think the other three were ancient history by the time we showed up.”

“True, but they did help create the whole mess of a world we have, right?”

“They did, and judging from the one other one we have evidence of, I suppose it’s hard not to see how broken everything is as a reflection of what they must all have been like,” I said. “The problem of course is that regardless of how it got like this, we’re still stuck with dealing with it all, and I have no idea how we’re going to do that.”

“That’s not true,” Responsibility said. “You already know how to fix our current problem. We’re going to perform the Assumption Ritual.”