Prince of Time (Girl Genius)

[cliffc999]

She was so beautiful.

I'd stopped as soon as Agatha first came into view down the hallway. My heart gave a little lurch, the same way it always did whenever I first saw her again after any significant absence. The lines of her face, her brilliant red-blonde hair, the elegant functionality of her spectacles perfectly framing her eyes-

My lips thinned as I began to note the other details of her appearance. The hunched and defensive body language as she hurried down the corridor, avoiding eye contact with any of the other students. The functional, shapeless clothing that had been expertly tailored to conceal anything distinctive or attractive about its wearer. The way her skirt and vest merged together without any distinctive lines, the badly-fitted sleeves, the drab heavy tweed that they'd chosen for the fabric, it all blended together to outright crush any possible first impression she could make.

I compared her current clothing with the memory of that bilious sea-green dress she'd worn to dinner at Sturmhalten along with the make-up and hairdo precision-crafted to coordinate with it. That one had also been a deliberate optical illusion intended to take a beautiful, vibrant, radiant young woman and dampen her flame to deliberately discourage any possible seductive interest. And it had done its job beautifully- had my father or I been merely the average lecherous lout taking advantage of their station to impose themselves upon traveling young actresses, four castlemarks would have gotten you five that her presentation alone would have cooled our ardor enough to let her walk back down to Master Payne's circus unscathed. But the armor of fashion that her circus friends had woven around her had only hidden Agatha's fire, not doused it. 'Madame Olga' had been presented as so wholesome and romantically uninteresting as to strongly discourage any possible seduction but she'd still been an intelligent and outgoing conversational partner and dinner companion. Perhaps slightly nervous at the unfamiliar social circles she was travelling in, but still entirely willing to speak her mind and stand up for herself.

Agatha here, however... her flame wasn't banked, it had been extinguished. Everything they'd swathed her in and draped around her positively shouted I am helpless. I am worthless. Please do not take any notice of me. And she'd been wrapped in it and weighted down by it for so long that she'd already internalized it. I could still see her courage, her intelligence, and everything else that made her Agatha- but that was only because my memory could fill in the gaps. To the rest of the world 'Agatha Clay' was a mildly pretty yet washed-out young woman of no distinction, no accomplishments, and no reason to be worth cultivating. And a bitter taste filled my mouth as I saw that it wasn't a pretense.

I intimately knew what it was like to consistently present a false front of incompetence to your entire world, and to live as if revealing your true capabilities to anyone would mean your death. But Agatha wasn't doing that, I came to a horrified realization. Her eyes weren't maintaining a discreet watch for potential threats. Her behavior wasn't subtly altering for maximum affect as she measured and judged the immediate reactions of others. She wasn't showing any of the markers of a deep-cover agent 'in character' - and yes, I wasn't always infallible at spotting those. I had missed Zola, after all. But Agatha hadn't had that degree of training, and even at her best she shouldn't have been capable of sustaining such a seamless verisimilitude against me. No, Agatha wasn't playing the helpless incompetent lab assistant here. She genuinely believed that she was.

What had they done to her?!?

Violetta's thumb dug lightly - for her - into my kidney. I could almost feel her silent glare at my back that was shouting You're missing your cue, you idiot!

I flickered a discreet hand signal to her behind my back. Abort. I turned and headed back into the laboratory that I'd been using, that I'd been waiting inside the doorway of to 'accidentally' head out into the hallway at just the right time to almost-bump into Agatha and set up our first meeting in an innocuous fashion, and the door swung closed in front of us the instant before she came into our line of sight.

We weren't foolish enough to discuss anything on a campus that was potentially full of Doctor Beetle's listening devices, so we both patiently went back to the afternoon's experimental runs for long enough that it would be plausible for us to take a break and then walked off-campus to a nearby coffee shop. A discreet check for eavesdroppers produced no results, and I nodded to Violetta to signify that we were clear to talk.

"Seriously? That's your girl?" she burst out like a stuck safety valve on a boiler finally popping free.

"We knew that she wasn't aware of her true identity at this time," I replied to Violetta, trying to moderate my tone. "And that her Breakthrough was being suppressed by her locket. But that was far more than merely suppressed. That was brainwashed."

"Or beaten down," Violetta said with quiet anger. "She was acting almost like the castle staff back in Sturmhalten." I winced at the comparision, but yes, the shattered self-confidence and excessive eagerness to please of the household servants that my father had consistently brutalized did have at least some relevance to Agatha's situation here at TPU.

"Would you be willing to surveil her home situation?" I asked her. "Discreetly? The simple fact that she's dressed like that means her foster parents have something to do with this, as unbelievable as that seems."

"They'll never see me coming." she agreed. "What will you be doing?"

"Getting myself invited to one of the major ongoing research projects here." I replied. "Doctor Beetle insists that she be present for as many of them as possible, so I can meet her there and see how she's being treated in her professional environment."

"How long?" Violetta asked me.

"One week." I replied. "If we're still this much in the dark after that long a surveillance then we'd have to entirely change our approach anyway."

"Got it." she acknowledged me, then immediately segued to an offhanded "So, how do you think Tinka's doing back home?" I could hear the metallic footsteps of one of the Clockwork Army coming down the street behind us on its patrol circuit that had prompted Violetta's shift in conversation.

"Well-" I began artlessly.

* * * * *​

Useful life lesson: when mysterious other-dimensional creatures decide to help 'expand your perception of time', they don't always know what they're doing.

The summoning that Lord Snackleford and his conspiracy had performed in the undersea dome of Albia's Royal Society of Sages, Adepts, and Prometheans had gone entirely wrong. Then that strange creature had confronted General Higgs and myself as we'd been frantically trying to figure out a way to intervene, and it had done something to my mind, and things had gotten very confusing after that until I'd somehow woken up back in my old bedroom in Castle Sturmhalten.

Fortunately I'd had long practice at only screaming in confusion and fear on the inside, so I'd managed to keep Father and Anevka from noticing anything new to suspect about me. And I'd soon enough worked out that somehow I had mentally travelled back in time to my younger body, a little over a year before Agatha had begun her journey from Beetleburg. She'd never spoken much to me about that period of her life but I knew the basics; that she'd been unaware of her true name and heritage, that she'd been raised by Punch and Judy under their identities of 'Adam and Lilith Clay', and that her locket had suppressed her breakthrough as a Spark.

Agatha...

After I'd oriented myself I'd taken almost a week to decide on what I was going to do. There were so many disasters and dangers to avert, so great a potential threat to Europa to avoid...

... and as disgusted as I was with myself to admit it, so many opportunities to exploit.

I freely admitted that I had learned a lot in my travels with Agatha and Gil, not the least of which had been all the things that I'd been wrong to believe. Every last Hive Engine and every mind capable of reproducing that technology needed to burn. The mind of Lucrezia Mongfish had to be prevented from re-entering the world at all costs. The mystery of the Muse of Time needed to be solved, although it was at least still trapped for now in the crypts underneath Paris and could only be released by bringing a possessed Agatha to that spot- a sequence of events that I'd do everything possible to avert, of course. And all the needless wars to come should be avoided whenever possible.

But those would be the less difficult parts of my journey. The real challenge would be properly managing the state of affairs in Europa after a victory against the Other. Because to simply allow the Wulfenbach Empire to continue as it was was not a viable idea. The Long War had essentially returned as soon as the Baron had been openly shown to be vulnerable. The Empire had collapsed when he'd gotten trapped in stasis in Mechanicsburg, and even the best that Gil could do barely held even a fraction of the Empire together. With the benefit of hindsight I would reluctantly admit at this juncture that Klaus Wulfenbach was not a brutal usurper but a man who had forged a legitimate and necessary peace out of an era of chaos... but one that he'd forged via methods that could not endure. His grasp of strategy and conquest was perhaps the greatest in known history, but for all that he ruled one of the greatest empires in Europan history his understanding of how to be an emperor was woefully incomplete. He disdained all the theater and pageantry of rule as useless frippery, not understanding that while indeed it was frippery it was hardly useless.

Even Martellus had understood that rulership was ultimately a thought that existed in the minds of the ruled, and that like all thoughts it needed symbols to help articulate and refine it, ongoing positive reinforcement to encourage its growth, and repeated conditioning to make it stick. That's what all the theater and pageantry was for. Andronicus Valois had been a master of that craft, and had brought together a coalition of squabbling Sparks and fractious nobles to forge a peace that had arguably exceeded even the Wulfenbach Empire at its height. And then it had all tragically come apart, yes, but that had been because of his other flaws as a king and a man. And yes, I knew that I was a flawed person myself and that I was as yet entirely untried as a king. No, I was certainly not Andronicus Valois.

But by the same token, Agatha was not Euphrosynia Heterodyne. She was... good. Oh, she was as at least as frightening as any of her ancestors when she really got going, but she wasn't remotely like them. She cared about people, she liked people, and she helped people. Even that lunatic Othar Trygvassen conceded that she was a good woman who only wanted to help save everyone, and that man thought every other Spark should be killed just for existing. No, she was a true daughter of the Heterodyne Boys, a heroine and a princess of legend. She was magnificent. And with her helping me... well, then I just might be able to actually pull it off.

As for Gil, by now I'd forgiven him for all the stupid misunderstandings between us. In hindsight, they hadn't really been his fault anyway. I certainly didn't wish him any harm, and even if I was planning to ultimately bring about the - hopefully as gentle as possible - downfall of his father's Empire it's not as if he'd been eagerly looking forward to inheriting that mess to begin with. From what I recalled of the future it had largely been several years of unrelenting misery for him, and while the Baron's mental overlay had had a lot to do with it I hadn't exactly seen anything that would indicate he'd have been much happier as ruler of Europa even entirely in his own mind. No, I entirely hoped to chart a route to the Lightning Crown that involved Gil as my valued and much-rewarded ally than as my enemy, but such a route was entirely possible.

And with all three of us pulling together and the myth that the Order of Jove had so carefully crafted to place the hearts and minds of Europa at the feet of their chosen candidate, a myth that I could adopt for myself simply by being in the right place at the right time, then the Storm King and the Heterodyne Girl would be in position to hopefully bring about lasting peace in Europa at last. And even in the worst-case scenario we'd still last at least as long as the Pax Transylvania would, and almost certainly with an at least somewhat softer crash landing if our future generations turned out to be unable to maintain things.

Which is why I felt just a tiny bit guilty at maneuvering to romantically cut Gil out before things even began.

But Violetta's analysis of the situation that she'd shared with me while we were busy repairing Castle Heterodyne had been entirely correct. Agatha and Gil had certainly had a driving passion for the ages. The dramatists in Paris had literally made grand operas out of their relationship, for goodness' sake. But even with all that passion neither of them could fully escape the ramifications of who they were and what they had been borne to. The methods by which the Wulfenbach Empire maintained the stability of their rule simply could not tolerate the existence of a historically troublesome yet militarily unassailable rogue state within Imperial territory. The only long-term place Lady Heterodyne could have in any stable iteration of the Wulfenbach Empire would be as an obedient vassal to the ruling dictator, and that didn't remotely make for a good marriage. Unlike the power structure that the Order of Jove had been crafting, one where the Lady Heterodyne would also be the Storm Queen and an equal partner in helping their husband forge a dynasty for the ages from the start. A structure where a good and lasting marriage could actually endure, instead of continually being stressed by an uneven and unfair balance of power.

As for Gil? As cliche as it was to say, there were indeed other fish in the sea. Seffie would certainly love him and take care of him as much as any woman possibly could, even if it would take extensive coaching on my part so she stopped choosing the wrong approaches and did something that might actually work. Honestly, cousin, how can you normally be so perceptive and yet so utterly fail to realize that Gil is positively allergic to politics? And even if Gil never warmed up to Seffie there were still other possible candidates; I'd already begun to notice something starting to spark between him and Trelawney Thorpe shortly before I'd been sent back in time, and as with cousin Seffie that would also have the benefit of being a highly useful political alliance for the Shining Coalition to come as well as being based in honest affection and concern.

I wasn't enough of a hypocrite to tell myself that I was doing it only for their own good. I knew full well why I was doing it. I'd openly told Agatha my true motives and desires during the final battle of the Siege of Mechanicsburg, right after we'd shared our first kiss. That I loved her for a thousand reasons and more. That I'd decided that no matter how things looked to be going between her and Gil I still wasn't going to give up on hoping that she might come to care for me after all. And that if Gil did win her heart in the end, then he damn well wouldn't do so without a fight. And if Fate had chosen to somehow give me a second chance, even one where I had an entirely unfair opportunity? Then God help me, I'd take that opportunity. I'd never made any promises to fight fair to begin with, and they'd known that.

And so I had resolved to use the time I'd been given to go and meet Agatha first, to come to know her and woo her before Gil had even entered the picture, and help her reclaim her true heritage without having to go through any of the false starts and stumble and trials and travails that she had the first time. And definitely to not have to go through the agony of being possessed by the mind of her own mother. Honestly, if I could have figured out any way of burning that Summoning Engine to the ground without being caught and murdered for it then I would have already done so before I'd even left Sturmhalten. As is, I'd have to settle for doing my absolute best to ensure that Agatha never went remotely near my home until we were ready to return there in force and tear Father and all his co-conspirators out by the roots. I'd sooner turn myself in to Baron Wulfenbach and confess everything before I'd allow Lucrezia to ever hurt Agatha again.

Of course, that would be far easier said than done. I couldn't even leave Sturmhalten without presenting an acceptable excuse to my father, let alone actually draw upon any troops or substantial resources. There weren't any Smoke Knights in this castle that I'd trust, not even the ones theoretically assigned to me. In fact, there was only one Smoke Knight in the world that I'd actually trust.

Persuading Father to allow me to do a year at Transvylania Polygnostic was not overly difficult. My entire family already knew of and wearily tolerated my obsession with the Muses, and Dr. Beetle was widely acknowledged as one of the leading experts on Van Rijn's work. Dangling the bait of hopefully being able to learn what might help us fully repair Tinka in front of Father got him to agree to let me take a sabbatical, and the negotiations with Dr. Beetle as to the exact circumstances under which Prince Tarvek Sturmvoraus, summa cum laude from the Paris Institute of the Extraordinary and a major Spark in his own right, would attend TPU as a graduate research fellow took only several more weeks.

And a bit of subtle overreach on my part in the wording of one of the requests prodded Beetle to forbid me to arrive with any royal honors or an armed escort. That left me an opening to point out to Father that Violetta, in her current cover identity as a recent resident of Mechanicsburg, could herself apply to attend TPU as an undergraduate and thus resume her old duties as my bodyguard in a way that could be finessed past Dr. Beetle. Our immediately meeting and striking up an acquaintanceship on-campus could even be covered by simply using the truth; we were cousins, after all, and Violetta was in the public record only as a minor relation to the family and not any kind of armed retainer. And both the appeal to practicality and the desire to put one over on the officiously offensive Dr. Tarsus Beetle readily persuaded Father to help make the arrangements, and so in something under a month's time both Violetta and I met again at Beetleburg.

She was not happy to see me, of course. Having been framed for incompetence by her own cousin had that effect on a woman, even if I'd done it to get her reassigned from being my bodyguard shortly before a wave of attacks had begun that had killed my next dozen bodyguards after her. And she was more than willing to deal with her confusion over whether she should be happy she was at least out of her dead-end posting at Mechanicsburg or frustrated that she was back to being my bodyguard by trying to beat me over the head with it.

Ironically, perhaps the single greatest thing that helped in reconciling with her had been something I hadn't needed future knowledge to do - that is, to actually fight back versus Violetta hard enough to leave her checkmated. I'd consistently played at being the hopeless student in Smoke Knight training as part of my general program at letting my family underestimate me as much as possible so as to live as long as possible, but even at this point in my original timeline I'd have been capable of giving her a far harder fight for it than she'd expect. So if she chose to believe that my newfound competence was due to several more years' of hardening and crisis... well, I still told her the truth. Afterwards.

And I'd also told Violetta everything else. Everything. One of my primary reasons for that was that I honestly didn't believe that I could mentally keep it together for a prolonged infiltration without at least one additional agent on the team as a confidant. Long-term undercover operations without any support risked going unstable as is due to the dangers of emotionally identifying with the cover role and the subjects, and that was under normal conditions. Given how emotionally compromised I already was by the subject...?

No. I needed my favorite cousin back if I was going to have any real chance of pulling this off, and so the first thing I'd done was rebuild the relationship with her that I'd lost. I had several years' of future knowledge to help me know how to do that, and for all our surface belligerence we had always cared about each other the most in our family, so I set out to make amends and I did. Let alone the fact that one of my very last memories of the future before I'd been sent back was that Violetta had gone missing after a mysterious fight in Agatha's quarters at the Royal Society and had been as dead as you could possibly get without actually seeing the body. I certainly couldn't allow that to happen again, or anything like it.

And even on an entirely impersonal strategic level Violetta was still the ideal choice for my first backup plan; I trusted her completely, she wasn't in pawn to any of the opposition, and if she had any room at all to run then it was essentially impossible to catch up to her. For all her inferiority complex about 'not being a very good Smoke Knight', by the end of my time in the future she'd blossomed into being one of the very best of our generation. And not because she'd needed the experience to unlearn what she'd learned but because she'd always had it in her all along. All she'd needed was the proper motivation. Even if I failed, she'd survive to get the word out.

And in the horrible event Violetta failed as well? We'd already set up a dead-man post-box service that would, if we both missed two bi-weekly check-ins in a row, automatically forward a care package to one Airman Third Class Axel Higgs via the smooth efficiency of the Imperial military post. A care package that would have a very informative letter concealed within the inner wrappings, as the military censors only inspected mail, not boxes of pastries sent 'from home' to lonely airmen. And we'd done it via a contact with the Mechanicsburg underworld that Violetta had made during her time there so as to minimize the possibility of premature compromise by any other player in the game. If all our efforts failed then at least the Jagers could still hope to take things from there.

So that had been the plan. Use my time in Beetleburg to approach Agatha, win her trust, find an opening to tell her the truth, and then escort her to claim her heritage. Preferably with the absolute minimum of interference from anyone else along the way, especially the Baron. And double especially my own family.

And of course, just like all my plans, cruel reality dashed them upon the rocks at the very first hurdle. Because the Agatha that we'd found here... wasn't entirely Agatha.

* * * * *​

"Damn." I swore as I stared down at the laboratory workbench I'd put together in my rented suite of apartments off-campus. We of course had to assume that everything on-campus was potentially monitored, and unlike our own quarters we had no excuse on-campus for routinely sweeping for surveillance devices.

"She's brain-locked?" Violetta asked me as we both stared down at the blood sample she'd discreetly obtained and I'd just finished analyzing.

"She's not." I sighed. "There's no signs of any mental overlay in place. I actually wish there had been. I'd know how to fix that."

"Well, what are there symptoms of?" she asked me practically.

"Pain." I spat out. "Very high levels of cortisol and cytokine in particular, along with other secondary markers of a heightened level of physiological stress but also signs of increased adrenaline tolerance-" I waved one hand at the charts and calculations littering the workbench. "Violetta, you only see these kinds of diagnostic markers in someone in chronic agony. Whatever it is that they've done to her it's torturing her! Every day!" I stopped and tried to catch my breath, and blinked my eyes repeatedly because clearly there was some dust in here-

"Shit." Violetta swore in what for her was vehement language indeed. "Who the hell does that kind of thing to their own kid? Even by our family's standards that would be messed up."

I gritted my teeth as I tried to silence that little voice whispering from the depths of my Madness Place telling me to have Violetta grab our gear and head on over to Clay Mechanical with me to drug her foster parents and then burn the place to the ground with them in it to cover the dart wounds. "People who either don't know, or don't care." I finally gritted out.

"She's... really good at not letting her pain show." Violetta tried to reassure me. "Maybe they don't understand the full effects of that thing?"

"What did you observe regarding her home life?" I asked professionally.

"Her folks are strict and old-fashioned, but very attentive." she reported didactically. "I can't get much of a read on Adam what with the whole not-talking thing, but Lilith is a very intelligent and observant woman who has a lot of empathy underneath that matron routine. They're keeping a certain distance as foster parents - she calls them 'Adam' and 'Lilith', not 'Dad' or 'Mom' - but they still act like parents. Certainly better than our parents ever did. And they've got this whole construct charity thing they run out the back door of their shop- Lilith spends pretty much all her spare time when not teaching piano on canning food to give out to the local construct population who aren't human-looking enough to get easy jobs, and also networks among the community to try and find them jobs, and Adam pulls extra shifts to bring in enough coin to pay for it all. By all appearances you'd think they were the perfect wholesome townfolk family, and on top of that being extremely charitable people who advocate for full sentient rights."

"I hear a 'but'." I said knowingly.

"But... yeah." she reluctantly conceded. "Her foster parents are basically hyperaware of her headaches. The average response time to her starting one to one of them helping her sit down and get her a glass of water is under fifteen seconds. And somebody gave them at least some legitimate training in tradecraft. They sanitize their garbage, they habitually use different routes every time they go somewhere, they're both diligent about doing lookouts before doing anything that would reveal their construct nature, and their situational awareness is well above civilian average. And they've got fully-loaded bugout bags already stashed in their stable loft. They're nowhere near Smoke Knight good, of course, but they're still pretty good. So..." Violetta sighed regretfully. "There's no way they aren't at least partly aware of how much Agatha's hurting. They're just not oblivious enough to have missed it, and the fact that they're living like sleeper agents means that they know they've got something to hide."

"And yet they still allow it to continue." I said angrily. "How can you love someone and yet deliberately hurt them?!?" I shouted at the world.

"When you think it's the only way you can keep them from dying?" Violetta replied immediately, and then shot a death ray straight through my soul with her next sentence. "Because that's what you did to me, remember?"

I slumped down on top of the nearby lab stool and hung my head down in shame. "You're right. That's exactly what I did. But-" I said, rallying.

"But it still wasn't constant brain-hemorrhage level physical pain." she semi-apologized. "My quality of life after you set me up, only kinda lousy. Hers? Abysmal. I don't blame you for wanting to punch things whenever you think about what's happening. I'm just saying don't actually punch things because that would be dumb. Now. What did you observe on-campus?" she tried to refocus me.

"Very little." I admitted embarassedly. "Beetle is deliberately keeping her away from me. She got taken off the one major project I could get committed to almost immediately after it was too late for me to back out, and her schedule has been subtly adjusted to avoid conflicts with mine without making the pattern too obvious to either of us. I haven't even gotten a chance to so much as say hello to her yet."

"Which are significant clues by themselves. Specifically, they confirm your intel that Beetle knows who she is." Violetta analyzed. "And highlights that he wants her kept isolated and dependent on him. And we're already stuck in the middle of his town, his army of clanks, and his surveillance grid, ugh. Good thing we were already using full enemy-territory drill."

"But now we'll have to be even more careful." I agreed. "All right. If we can't get acquainted on-campus, then off-campus. Did you observe Agatha having any substantial social life or off-campus friends?"

"You're kidding, right?" she replied sardonically.

"Damn. And it's not like I can count on-" and then an idea struck me.

* * * * *​

"You're doing very well, Herr Sturmvoraus." Lilith Clay complimented me as I finished a recital of Pachebel's Canon in D on her piano. After all, if you teach piano for a living then you regularly admit students to your home, and playing a musical instrument is something that people from all walks of life choose to learn. Violetta loved to play the gamba, for example. And while I wasn't the most enthusiastic student of the piano I had learned it as part of Father's insistence on a classical aristocratic education, so making a regular arrangement with a local instructor to 'keep in practice' during my year away at university was an entirely unremarkable thing. I gathered that Mrs. Clay made a goodly part of her living as an instructor from students like me who didn't really need detailed instruction, just an opportunity to rent time on a piano while away from home and occasional coaching.

"This is a wonderful instrument, Frau Clay." I complimented her in return. "I've seldom heard one so beautifully kept in tune."

"You're a piano tuner as well, Herr Sturmvoraus?" she asked me curiously.

"I have perfect pitch." I replied. Which was entirely true, it was a minor side benefit of my Spark. "I'm not much at actually tuning them, but whenever I have to play one that isn't-" I shuddered theatrically.

"I'll pass your compliments on to my husband then," she replied, warming up a little. "He loves to tinker with it."

"Work that you love isn't really work at all." I agreed with her, and right then the door opened as Agatha returned from her Saturday morning shift at the university. Lilith had scheduled my first several lessons so as to be during Agatha's working hours, but I'd deliberately last-minute rescheduled today's lesson by half an hour to make certain we'd connect.

"Adam, Lilith, I'm- Oh, hello!" Agatha called out to me, noticing the stranger sitting in the living room of her house alongside her mother.

"Good afternoon," I smiled back at her. I vividly reminded myself that her foster mother was standing right here and so it was very important that I only smile a little- "I'm sorry, my lesson started late- here, let me get up so that you can start yours." I said, rising to my feet and cutting off Lilith's reply.

"Oh no," Agatha waved me off. "I live here. Don't get up on my account."

"Agatha, this is Tarvek Sturmvoraus, one of my latest students." Lilith introduced me to her. "Herr Sturmvoraus, our daughter, Agatha Clay." she continued.

"It's nice to meet you, Miss Clay." I said with a little courtly bow.

"And you, Herr Sturmvoraus." she said. "Do you play very often?"

"Father made me start learning when I was ten," I told her. "I let it lapse for a bit during my undergraduate studies, but I decided to start getting in practice again when I came here."

"Sturmvoraus..." Agatha trailed off thoughtfully. "That's right, you're our new graduate fellow aren't you?" she said, and Lilith turned to look at me more critically at hearing that I was already an adjunct graduate researcher at my young age. "Oh! Your Highness!" Agatha said, bowing again. Oh damn, she knew that?

"'Your Highness?'" Lilith looked at me suspiciously.

"... my father is Prince Aaronev Sturmvoraus, Protector of Sturmhalten." I admitted with visible reluctance. "And when I first came to TPU as a research fellow Dr. Beetle made it abundantly plain that he had no absolutely patience for 'royal pomp and nonsense', as he put it, and that I would be treated solely as any other graduate student and naught more. Hence my presenting myself both on-campus and off as 'Herr Sturmvoraus'. I apologize if you felt deceived."

"That does sound like Dr. Beetle," Lilith conceded reluctantly. "But you honestly don't ever mention it?"

"Frau Clay, do you have any idea what a relief it is to interact with people who don't look at me and see several hundred years of family history before they actually see me?" I spoke to both her and Agatha. "To be frank, the sensation of simply being treated like everyone else is getting positively addicting. I honestly don't know how I'll adjust when I go back home and it's all the silly bowing and curtseying again!" I finished, making a joke of it and actually getting Agatha to chuckle along with me. I then continued as if it had only just occured to me. "Err, how did you recognize me?" I asked Agatha.

"I'm Dr. Beetle's assistant so I saw your name - your full name - on some of his mail," she blushed. "I'm very sorry, I shouldn't have violated a confidence like that. Either yours or his."

"I certainly won't mention it to him at all if you won't," I told her with utmost sincerity. "And please, no apologies between us."

"What field of research are you here for?" Lilith probed.

"Primarily advanced clank construction, with a specific focus on Van Rijn's Muses." I answered truthfully. "Not that we advertise it much, but Father actually has a Muse at home." I said, to Agatha's gasp of curiosity. "Tinka, the Muse of Dance."

"How marvelous!" Agatha exclaimed. "To possess an actual Muse of the Storm King!"

"A malfunctioning one, I'm afraid." I dampened her enthusiasm. "Even between Father's Spark and my own, we haven't been able to fully restore her. With Dr. Beetle's own focus on the Muses I'm hoping to pick up enough here during my sabbatical year to be able to finish the job."

"You're a Spark?" Agatha asked me, her curiosity drawn to me like a magnet by that revelation as Lilith tensed like a bowstring.

"Let me reassure you that the tales about Sparks are often exaggerated," I said with a sideways glance at her mother.

"Of course they are. I work with Dr. Beetle every day." Agatha interrupted her mother. "I was just wondering- what's it like? How does it feel to have such insight and how does it differ from the regular scientific method non-Sparks use? Does it hurt to think that hard? Is the- ow!" she winced and started staggering, her rising enthusiasm having been off in mid-word by one of her headaches.

"Agatha!" I shouted in alarm, leaping forward to catch her as she fell over and completely blowing my cover with how precipitously I'd reacted. I hadn't remotely suspected that I could trigger one of her attacks with just a simple conversation! I frantically tried to think of what could I do now-

"Do you have blurred vision?" I started asking her hurriedly as I helped her to the nearby couch and Lilith only just started to get moving behind me, having been cut off by my frantic rush forward. "Is the pain on one side or does it seem to move? Are there-?"

"I have her, Herr Sturmvoraus," her voice cut me off crisply, gently but firmly pulling Agatha's arm loose from my hands and settling her upon the couch as she less-than-gently nudged me aside. "You don't need to concern yourself overly with my foster daughter." she continued frostily.

"With respect, Frau Clay, I have advanced medical training and I greatly doubt that you do!" I shot back with my best 'offended professional dignity' voice. "Acute pain that sudden combined with dizziness is not just a normal headache! Your daughter should be examined immediately for signs of a cerebral hemorrhage!"

"Ah," she said, settling down a little at her apparent understanding of why I'd overreacted. "I'm sorry, you wouldn't know. Agatha's had these headaches since she was a small child. They're not acute, they're chronic."

"Oh," I said, not needing much acting talent at all to sound shocked.

"I'm all right, Lilith." Agatha said weakly, as tears filled her eyes while she huddled on the couch and that was not all right at all-

I stepped back and waited for Lilith to finish settling Agatha down, then silently inclined my head at her to signal You and I have a conversation to finish.

"You may think me out of place if you wish but if you're aware of how quickly Sparks can accumulate academic credentials then you may not be incredulous at the fact I have completed my examinations as a physician in addition to my engineering studies." I drove at her insistently, riding right over her words. "So as the actual medical professional in the room, stranger to your home or not I will be taking an interest. Have you been doing anything to see to your daughter's welfare in this regard?"

Lilith glowered at me in both mixed proprietary disgust that a strange young man was telling her how to raise her daughter and what appeared to be actual respect at the legitimate parts of my concern. "We've taken her to several physicians. All they could do was prescribe painkillers, but if you're a doctor then you know better than we do why that's not a viable long-term solution."

"It isn't, not in the strength you'd need to alleviate that kind of pain." I agreed. "But please at least tell me it hasn't been getting worse progressively over time, has it? We're not dealing with a tumor here, are we?"

"No," Lilith said. "Doctor Beetle did a scan once- it's not that." she reassured me.

"Doctor Beetle is a masterful engineer but his Spark isn't medical at all," I said. "Would you be offended if I took an interest?"

"Why are you so concerned?" she replied.

"Frau Clay, I'm almost insulted." I replied.

"Insulted or not, I'm her parent and you're clearly a much more worldly young man than Agatha is a young woman." she glared down at me like an angry bear in braids.

"Do you know why I've studied both medicine and advanced clank engineering?" I told her, deliberately pitching my voice just enough that Agatha could hear it too without making it obvious that she would. "Because when I wasn't even old enough for undergraduate studies, one of my father's experiments went wrong and almost killed my older sister." I ignored the faint gasp from over on the couch and continued. "She was in a coma. She was dying." I tried to slow down but I kept hearing the words tumble out of me. "But I couldn't- there was too much damage for her to ever be healthy again. Her brain had-" I stopped, took a deep breath to try and silence Anevka's distant screaming, and continued.

"I had to single-handedly invent a notable portion of what is currently known about life-support engineering just to keep her stable. I had to reverse-engineer systems from Tinka to help me build advanced prostheses. It took me months to just get Anevka able to walk again, and she still can't go very far without-" I stopped and wiped my eyes. "Let's just say that there are still serious quality of life issues." I continued in a calmer tone of voice. "So now do you understand why I don't like seeing a young woman in pain, Frau Clay? Why I can't-" I ground to a halt.

"You have my sincere condolences, Prince Sturmvoraus." Lilith replied to me gently. "That's... the only word for it is 'horrible'. I think it says a great deal about you as a person that you've let your experiences give you so much empathy for other people who are suffering."

"Prince Tarvek," I corrected her automatically. "Prince Sturmvoraus is my father. But- Frau Clay. I honestly believe that I can help. Please, may I help?"

"I-" she began, looking guilty. "Agatha has had to endure these attacks since she was five years old. She may well have to endure them for the rest of her life. I don't want her to have any false hope."

I bit the inside of my lip hard, drawing blood, to avoid stabbing this woman in the face. She KNEW how to end Agatha's suffering with a single gesture and yet she STILL SAID THIS-

"When you think it's the only way you can keep them from dying?" Violetta's voice echoed in my ears, and I calmed myself.

"I'm sorry," I apologized to her as she'd begun to draw back in alarm. "I think I almost slipped into a Spark fugue there. Young women with neurological problems... the memories are very bad."

"I understand," she said kindly. "But I still think it would be best if we just continued onward as we have."

"Frau Clay?" I asked mildly after a meditative pause. "How old is Agatha?"

"Seventeen." she replied. "Why?"

"My term of study at TPU will end at the close of the upcoming spring semester." I told her. "Will her eighteenth birthday be before then?"

"... yes." Lilith admitted reluctantly, already seeing where I was going.

"Then on the day Agatha becomes legally able to make her own decisions about her medical care, I will present myself to her again and offer my help to her in any manner that she chooses to accept or not." I told her firmly. "You can throw me out of your house, you can forbid me to ever see her again, but that won't stop me for as long we both live in Beetleburg. You know this."

"I still don't agree with you." she said. "But I respect your conviction. So please respect mine; Adam and I, in full knowledge of the situation, sincerely believe that what we are doing is the only way to keep Agatha as safe and secure as possible."

"The ability to endure suffering when necessary is a virtue," I agreed with her. "But the pitfall of such fortitude is when you normalize suffering and accept it as the natural state of life. It isn't, and it shouldn't be. I-" I shrugged. "As storied and wealthy as it is my family's history is nothing to be proud of, and we certainly haven't lived by a philosophy of trying to minimize suffering in the world. I don't want to be like them."

"I think we're not going to reach an agreement on this topic today." Lilith said after a reflective pause of her own.

"Almost certainly not," I said. "Am I still welcome here for my next lesson?"

"Lilith," Agatha called softly from the couch. "You know how everyone else leaves after they see me have one of these attacks. Please don't push away someone who wants to stay."

"All right, Agatha." Lilith eased off. "But don't you push." she turned, saying to me. "Remember that you agreed to wait until her birthday."

"As we agreed upon, Frau Clay." I said. "Agatha, are you feeling better?" I said turning to her.

"A little," she said, smiling up at me. Oh Gods, that smile- "Do you really think you can help?"

"Your mother asked me to wait," I replied. "And even if we disagree on some things, she's entirely right in that having hope and then losing it is worse than having none in the first place. I don't want to even imply anything until after I've had enough opportunity to precisely narrow down exactly what's going on and if there's any way to change it."

"All right," Agatha said. "And please don't feel bad if it turns out there's nothing you can do. The fact that you care at all-"

"I think I'd better go before I wear out my welcome," I said, one step ahead of Lilith.

"Probably," Agatha agreed ruefully. "But still, thank you. And I'm so sorry about what happened to your sister."

"Miss Clay," I said, with a little courtly bow to cover the fact that I had so many possible responses I could make and none of them would be a good idea right now. "Be well, and until we meet again."

"You too," she said, and Lilith escorted me to the door.

"Great job there, Romeo!" Violetta griped at me as soon as I'd gotten home and brought her up to date. "Now I'm going to have to camp out on the rooftops all night until we can be sure they're not going to just pull up stakes and flee town, because I'll have to bloodhound along after them if they do! Do you know how many classes I'm going to fail if I miss that much sleep?"

"But if they run then at least they'll be outside of Beetle's zone of control," I pointed out. "At which point we just steal that damn locket off her neck and do it the hard way."

"Okay, that's a nice move." Violetta conceded.

"Exactly. If she stays, I have their permission to intervene and investigate in just a few months. If they run, we can just move up the timetable."

"Yup!" Violetta agreed. "It all fits so well that someone who didn't know you would believe you'd planned it that way all along. Instead of your just completely losing it the instant that she got hurt and having to scramble like hell to recover."

"Violetta!" I said with genuine hurt. "We tease each other about everything else, yes, but not the woman I love."

"The woman you love, or the woman you hope to make into the woman you love?" Violetta asked me penetratingly. "Look, have you even considered how lopsided your power dynamic is right now? You literally know more about her than she does about herself, and you've got the key to whether or not she's ever able to reach her full potential!"

"I'd tell her everything right now if I could!" I pleaded with her.

"I know," Violetta reassured me "I know. But you can't right now, not without almost certainly getting someone killed. And that means you totally shouldn't be getting romantically involved until you're where you can be on more even footing. And that's before we get into the ethics of mixing romance with a doctor-patient relationship."

"It's a bit late to avoid that," I pointed out.

"I meant her," she said. "If she falls for your Prince Charming routine before you tell her the truth, then how deep are you sunk when she thinks that you manipulated her all along?"

"Violetta, as the room's expert on the feminine point of view would you please tell me how I avoid making 'Agatha Clay's' heart flutter even the slightest bit when I'm a handsome young man with manners, breeding, wealth, taste, legitimate emotional concern, and am the only person her age who still wants to be friends with her at all?' Even before we get into my tragic backstory, Sparkiness, and mysterious yet compassionate agenda?" I sighed. "I'm practically a living caricature of a penny-sparkly at this point. So again, you tell me, how do I keep Agatha at a distance without a permanent rejection?"

"... severe facial scarring?" she replied sarcastically. "Okay, yeah, given the starting conditions there's really not much we can do here except keep on keeping on. You really are sunk without a trace, aren't you?"

"I was all along." I breathed heavily. "I was all along."

"Well, if I'm going to be doing stakeouts for you again then you owe me some decent food." Violetta said practically. "So make with the castlemarks, 'Your Highness', I'm getting deluxe takeout tonight."

* * * * *​

After the first week we judged that the Clays looked to be standing pat, and Violetta got back on a more regular sleep schedule. I'd been politely unavailable for my next lesson at the Clays' so as to give them a few more days to process events and feel less immediately threatened, but I turned up at their house a week later entirely on the dot. After I finished my latest round of lessons I went and sat in the living room sofa and waited for Agatha to come home from her Saturday morning shift again as a wordless request to be allowed to see her again, and Lilith wordlessly granted that request by serving me tea. I noticed that Adam was nearby working on something in the house instead of his usual location in the forge so clearly things were still a little on edge right now, but they were at least giving me a chance.

"Tarvek! You're here!" were Agatha's first words to me as she entered the house, even before greeting her parents.

"Hello, Agatha." I said, standing and greeting her with another bow. "I do hope you didn't miss me Wednesday but I thought it would be best to give my uncertain welcome time to settle in a bit more. But I think I'm being at least provisionally accepted for the duration."

Agatha pretended to ignore the maternal chaperone sitting in the corner armchair as she joined me on the sofa - at a socially acceptable distance - and I poured her a cup of tea as well. We raised our cups and drank.

There was a mutual round of awkward smiling at each other before Agatha sheepishly admitted "I'm not really very experienced at this."

"Not your fault," I reassured her as I took a sip. "I think we're both still entirely at sea as to precisely what 'this' even is, particularly given that it's still early days. But if nothing else, I would certainly like to be friends."

"I'd love that," Agatha agreed as she looked down into her cup. "I... haven't had very many of those." she finished, raising her eyes tentatively to mine.

"You'd mentioned something last week about people leaving after learning about..." I tried to make my voice as nonthreatening and reassuring as possible "... your situation?"

"Yes." she sighed.

I mentally sorted through several pithy or philosophical ways to observe how society was often disappointing, and then finally settled on a simple "They shouldn't have."

"I suppose I can understand why people would sometimes rather not deal with a burden unless they were obligated to," Agatha matter-of-factly admitted, and I inwardly winced at-

"Agatha," I remonstrated with her gently. "I'm not really in general practice but I am a physician, and at home I live with someone who is a... semi-invalid, I suppose would be the simplest way to phrase it. And while we've only just met twice here and that briefly, from all that I've seen about you or heard about you on campus-"

I winced again at Agatha's smile suddenly growing brittle as she thought about what I'd almost certainly heard about her.

"-you never use your illness as an excuse for not doing your best at everything." I reassured her. "Do you know how rare that is?"

"But that's nothing special, is it?" Agatha asked. "Surely that's just what people are supposed to do."

"Last week I mentioned my sister," I felt myself prodded to say. "And how much I loved her, and wanted- still want to help her. So perhaps I shouldn't say this, but while I do love Anevka I don't really like her very much." I continued to her shock. "I remember her being a better person when she was a young woman, but ever since what happened to her she's changed." I took a moment to steady myself, and continued. "She grew hard, and bitter. She wears her condition like a suit of armor. She uses it to justify being petty and cruel to others, because how can the world not understand how much she's suffering?" I looked up from my cup at Agatha's wide eyes and continued. "And while you're certainly more mobile than she is, if the intensity of the headache I saw you have last week is your baseline-"

"It is." Lilith said quietly from the corner, joining our conversation for the first time.

"-then your degree of chronic pain is significantly higher than hers. And yet..." I shook my head in gentle wonder. "You don't act like Anevka does. Not at all. With everything you have to carry, with all the unfairnesses your situation has put upon you, it never even occurs to you to stop trying to be the best person you can be. And that's really a very amazing thing." I finished, and then took a deep breath and rapidly changed the subject. "But I promised your mother last week that I wouldn't push you on health issues and I think we're slipping into that, so..."

I allowed Agatha to draw me off into a round of questions about my current research and even a little bit about the nature of being a Spark, although this time we were very careful to moderate her enthusiasm so as not to trigger another episode. Eventually we finished our tea and had second cups, and after carefully judging the mood of the room I made my farewells and rose to leave.

Lilith escorted me to the door again, and I turned to her at the step. "I promised not to push the issue with Agatha, but it occurs to me that said promise doesn't extend to you." I held up a hand to forestall her objection. "From what I noticed last week, one of the triggers for her attacks is intensity of emotion."

"Yes, but even if she remains calm for a prolonged period of time they eventually recur." Lilith agreed. "What are you thinking?"

"That if it's even partially linked to elevated heart rate and brain activity, then bio-feedback relaxation exercises might be used to at least lengthen the period of time between occurences. I know several that I might be able to teach her." The Smoke Knights had several meditative mind-over-body techniques for slowing heart rate or maintaining prolonged motionlessness without muscle strain, after all. If I could work out a simplified regimen based on the principles of those-

"That might help," Lilith agreed with me surprisingly. "I'm no formally trained physician but in my youth I worked as a village healer and a battlefield medic in turn. If you work something out, bring it to me and I'll have a look at it first."

"Absolutely," I agreed, and turned to go- to be forestalled by her raised palm.

"Prince Tarvek," she asked me firmly. "What, precisely, are your intentions regarding Agatha?"

"I believe that she's an amazing young woman that deserves every chance in life." she said. "And as you already remonstrated with me last week, I am aware that she is a thoroughly wholesome young person who up until now has led a somewhat sheltered life while I am... not."

"That doesn't exactly answer my question," she insisted, albeit somewhat less firmly.

"I want to offer Agatha any possible support that I can give her, and to press nothing upon her that she is not ready to give a fair judgment upon before accepting." I replied after a long pause.

Lilith looked up to meet the gaze of her husband, who I only now realized had come up behind us while we were talking. I looked back just in time to catch his nod to her.

"All right," Lilith said. "Please, bring us those exercises as soon as you think you have them ready. And we look forward to your next visit."

I politely made my farewells and headed down the sidewalk. As soon as I was around enough corners to be unobserved I unbuttoned my cuff and checked the readings on the miniaturized etheric detector rig I'd had strapped to my forearm the entire time.

Damn!

I'd hoped it was something Dr. Beetle had been doing to her, or even some sort of unplanned interaction between the locket and various environmental factors at TPU, or even some sort of allergy caused by the local biosphere, but it wasn't. The waveform readings my short-range receiver had picked up from Agatha's locket were definitive. It and it alone was the cause of her neurological disorder. Agatha... in the future she'd certainly mentioned that she hated what the locket had done to her ability to concentrate or how it sabotaged her every attempt to build something, but she'd never mentioned this pain!

I rebuttoned my sleeve while inwardly cursing myself with every filthy word I knew. From this point on, every day I remained silent I became an accomplice in the ongoing torture of the woman I loved. But I couldn't interfere now. To trigger Agatha's Breakthrough under such conditions, when I already knew what that had led to the first time and with the clear fact that Dr. Beetle also knew everything I knew about her locket and its side effects and yet made no effort to alleviate her suffering at all-

No. Even if the Clays believed that Beetle was their protector, he clearly had his own long-range agenda for Agatha and nothing in it involved actually valuing Agatha or her quality of life. She was a tool to him, or a potential tool, and nothing more.

I had to save her. But how?

* * * * *​

Author's Note: People who follow my work on SB have already read this one, becuase I wrote it... God, two and a half years ago? Where the hell has the time gone? But I figured that after how my last one ended QQ Creative Writing deserves some proof that I can actually finish a story that's longer than a one-shot, and so here it is, ported over to QQ at last.

This is going to be a do-over shippy fic, and in the genre of Victorian romance. Along with the Girl Genius ambience and weirdness, yes. It won't be as high-action as it could be, its largely a drama with coffee-table elements, but I quite like it.

The opinions of the characters in this fic are not necessarily those of the author re: the most viable long-term future of Europa or the relative worth of the Storm King vs. the Wulfenbach Empire, but Violetta and Tarvek were canonically partisans for that plan in canon when it was still a viable option so they're going to be saying what they're saying.

 

[cliffc999]

"Well, the simplest solution is we just kill Dr. Beetle," Violetta shrugged. "One dose of Aunty Mehitabel's Natural Causes and it's over by next Tuesday. And for all his precautions against the more obvious stuff he's really not a genius with security systems design; the man has huge mental blind spots."

"The death of a major Spark ruler without an heir?" I pointed out. "Even if it's apparent natural causes and in an elderly man that would still bring in one of the Baron's Questors. The Baron knows about our more subtle toxins, even if few other people do, and as soon as it shows up on the autopsy-"

"Ugh, yeah." Violetta groused. "He drops a whole army on the town and turns it upside down looking for Smoke Knights."

"And even if he doesn't, with Beetle gone and no other protector for the town the Baron still has to put Beetleburg under direct Imperial rule even if Beetle's own death isn't seen as suspicious at all. So whether or not our presence is suspected, the army comes anyway." I analyzed.

"Come clean to her parents?" Violetta suggested.

"How clean? If I tell them just that I've figured out the locket is the cause of Agatha's issues, that means I admit I know she's a Spark. I say that and nothing else-"

"They run." Violetta said matter-of-factly. "And while the stern chase does give us options, there's all sorts of reasons why it wasn't plan A to begin with."

"Not least because we don't have any place of our own right now to let her work through her Breakthrough in safety that would be sufficiently secure from the Baron's observation network that's always on the lookout for young Sparks." I said. "And if I admit that I know she's the Heterodyne heir and I want to help her reclaim Mechanicsburg-"

"They already know your real name and who your dad is, which means they might figure out what an heir of Andronicus Valois would want with the Heterodyne Girl. And then they run." Violetta agreed.

"Not least because I actually do want to use her for that purpose." I spat.

"No, you want to offer her the chance to join you in that purpose." Violetta objected. "Seriously! Do you think I don't know how thoroughly you could have had her wrapped up and believing you hung the moon and the stars right now if you were only willing to really manipulate her? We already had that conversation!"

"If I tried that then the Clays would see through me in a second." I objected.

"Pffft!" Violetta snorted. "If you were Tweedle- okay, if you had Tweedle's lack of ethics and all your skills because he couldn't be remotely this subtle or charming even with a brain transplant- would that be stopping you? Even I could work out a scenario by which she's tragically orphaned and has to cling to you as her only hope in the world. You could even sign Beetle's name to the crime, or the Baron's, and really get her hooked to you forever. So the only reason you don't already have ten entire op plans for that sort of thing churning away in your weasel brain right now is because you are actually trying to do this the right way."

"The right way isn't getting us anywhere!" I cried.

"Tarvek, I know it sucks but please remember that in the original timeline Agatha endured these attacks for almost another year and still came out of it as strong as you knew her to be." Violetta said. "This thing is awful, yes, but you have certain foreknowledge that it's not going to do her any permanent damage. Don't rush ahead too fast and blow the whole op because you're... not liking all that it entails." she trailed off diplomatically. "You recruited me at least partly because you needed a second head to bounce things off of, remember? This is my advice."

"Your advice doesn't take something into account," I replied. "Specifically, that there's another viable option that we are not using, and why we're not."

"What's that?" Violetta said.

"The only reason Agatha wasn't raised under Klaus Wulfenbach's protection her entire life is because the Clays don't trust him. But we know why they don't, and how false that intel is. As soon as we intervene there she could be in the safest place in the world for her, handling her Breakthrough under ideal conditions, and a simple datadump of what we know to the Baron results in Lucrezia's plans being obliterated before they have even the slightest chance to reach fruition. And the only reason I'm not doing it is because I want to be with Agatha, and not have her meet Gilgamesh until after I've already solidly hooked her-" I shook her head. "I'm deliberately being accomplice to the torture of the woman I love for my own personal gain. And that's wrong. We should call him right now-"

"And then you're betting everything on Gil being able to hold the Empire together as soon as Klaus falls. And sure, he's a great guy and he'd try his best but you already saw the structural weaknesses of the Empire in the future, remember? We need the Storm King back for the best chance at a long-term future for Europa. Obviously we can't force it to happen if Agatha doesn't choose you of her own free will because we're not goddamn Tweedle, but that's the only major failure point we can ethically accept without at least trying to change it. We certainly can't abort before we even really get started." Violetta insisted.

"It's so easy to make the 'right' decision when it involves untold power and privilege coming your way." I said cynically.

"So, thought experiment. If we were in some weird alternate universe where your only two choices were take the Lightning Crown and build a Shining Coalition that falls apart on your deathbed, or give it to Martellus and watch him beat Europa into line permanently, which one would you do? You actually saw him put the damn thing on in the future, and saw at least something of how he was beginning with it. Column A or column B, no third option, no weaseling, what's your first reaction?" she pressed me rapid-fire.

"Give it to him," I said with a flinch.

"You see?" Violetta insisted. "You don't want the shiny hat so it can give you things. You want it so you can try to give Europa a better life."

"I wish I had your confidence." I sighed.

* * * * *​

"Isn't it gorgeous?" Agatha said cheerfully as she waved her hand out over the view of the river flowing through the heart of Beetleburg in mid-summer. While the city wasn't purely a tourist center like Mechanicsburg's current iteration, it was a prosperous and stable urban center in its third generation of being ruled by a powerful and relatively stable Spark dynasty and one that had traditionally maintained their city as a neutral ground and center of learning. Transylvania Polygnostic University alone was a major draw from all over, and between that and Beetleburg's presence at the confluence of several trade routes the city was a relatively small yet cosmopolitan center. And the heart of the downtown area had certainly been prettified up enough to serve as a tourist attraction.

"It's beautiful," I said, looking out at the gentle restaurant terraces and parkways lining the river bank. "We certainly don't have anything like it in Sturmhalten."

"What's your home like? Is it is as beautiful as this?" Agatha asked me innocently.

"It's... a very harsh sort of beauty. Nothing like this at all." I said. "Sturmhalten was originally built by Andronicus Valois, the first Storm King, as a military fortress to control one of the primary mountain passes around the Mechanicsburg valley when the Shining Coalition was attempting to pen in the raiding expeditions of Blutharst Heterodyne. So first and foremost it was built for defenseability and terrain control. Lots of thick stone walls and battlements." I shrugged. "Also, it's at the highest point of a mountain pass."

"He means it's cold." our agreed-upon chaperone for this outing cut in. "I don't know what a Beetleburg winter is like, but it's probably only marginally worse than our summer."

"Have you lived in Sturmhalten all your life?" Agatha asked Violetta.

"Born there, mostly raised there, but I moved out several years ago." she said. "Until I reconnected with cousin Tarvek here at TPU I'd been living down the valley in Mechanicsburg."

"The hometown of the Heterodyne Boys," Agatha asked curiously. "What's it like?"

"Tourist trap," Violetta replied, before moderating her follow-up with a bit more tact. "It's a very bustling place, bigger than here. Tourism is one of their huge industries but they've also got food exports, the metalworks, monster cages-" Violetta shrugged. "But sometimes the atmosphere is kinda sad underneath all the 'Welcome to Mechanicsburg!' smiling. The town's doing fine enough, I suppose, but they really miss their Heterodynes. Sometimes I wonder if all the tourism industry is their weird way of mourning them."

"You sound very knowledgeable about it," Agatha agreed.

"I was working as a clerk in the city burgermeister's office." Violetta said. "So yeah, I could probably write you a report on the Mechanicsburg balance of trade." She shrugged. "But you can't push paper around forever, so I decided to go back to school." She cocked a thumb at me and continued with a grin. "Besides, I got him to pay the tuition so hey, why not?"

"Oh, that's so generous of him- of you," Agatha said, turning to me.

"Agatha, the 'Prince' in front of my name means that money is never really a concern for me." I shrugged. "Having a lot of it doesn't make me a better person, and I don't ask people to admire me for it."

"Tarvek, you don't seem to ever ask people to admire you for anything," Agatha said insightfully, and I drew a sudden breath.

"So, how about that sports team?" Violetta dropped into the awkward moment. "I hear they hit a ball or something."

"Have you traveled much besides Sturmhalten and here?" Agatha asked after a moment.

"I did my undergraduate studies in Paris." I admitted.

"Paris!" Agatha gasped in wonder. "Really? Oh my goodness! What's it like?"

I decided this would be a good point to end our stroll, so I led us over to a nearby cafe table and we ordered some light afternoon refreshments. While we waited, I continued.

"All the tales you may have heard of Master Voltaire's engineering abilities are, if anything, understated." I began. "It's the largest city I've ever seen, and it positively shines. It's population is at least a full order of magnitude larger than Beetleburg's, let alone Sturmhalten's."

"You must have never wanted to leave." Agatha said.

"Actually, by the end of my time there I was looking forward to going home." I said. "The pace of life there is exhausting. I never really had a chance to stop and breathe. And then-" I gave a rueful chuckle. "Master Voltaire's well-known policies regarding strict law and order do not apply to the category of 'student hijinks'. I suppose he allows it as a sort of safety-valve for otherwise irrepressible Sparks, but the Paris Institute's campus can only be charitably described as a running madhouse." I sighed with the weight of so many memories. "There were points at which I was sincerely confused as to how anyone managed to graduate."

"That's certainly the opposite of how Dr. Beetle runs our campus," Agatha agreed.

"He's exaggerating hugely," Violetta said. "I visited him there a couple times early on. Admit it, cousin, you were having fun."

"Sometimes," I acknowledged. "And then other times-" I cast about for a distraction and realized that if I was willing to embarass myself greatly, I could find one. "Would you believe that there was one time in Paris where I was actually impressed into service on a pirate ship?"

"You have to be joking!" Agatha said incredulously.

"Wait, you're telling that story?" Violetta asked me. "The 'let us never speak of this again' story? The 'I wish I could invent a Sparky device to permanently burn these memories out of my brain' story?"

"He actually was?!?" Agatha turned to her in shock.

"For almost a week, until I jumped overboard to escape." I confirmed. "That madwoman of a captain thought it would be a hilarious joke to have a prince scrubbing her decks for her. I never actually participated in any piracy, but I suppose if the prince business ever fails for me I could find a berth onboard any airship as an apprentice deckhand." I said lightly.

"What was a pirate airship even doing in Paris?" Agatha said, still not sure if she believed me.

"Taking advantage of the enforced neutrality to pull into drydock for repairs," I explained. "Imperial arrest warrants can't be enforced in Paris, and so long as they never actually raided within Paris' boundaries..."

"You've lived such an adventurous life," Agatha said, looking at me in awe. "I sometimes wonder why you even want to walk out with me. Paris, pirates, princes... compared to that my life seems like a stale, dry biscuit."

"You don't want my life, Agatha." I replied flatly.

"Why not?" she asked me challengingly.

"Because you have a wonderful heart, and you deserve better." I said.

Violetta kicked me under the table. I nudged her back.

"Some of my family are palace guards," she decided to throw me a life-line, "so I know some about fighting and training to fight. Adventure isn't like the Heterodyne stories, Agatha. People get scared, people get hurt..." she shrugged. "But it's a good thing to still be ready for trouble, because even in the safest places sometimes it comes and finds you anyway." She cocked a thumb at me. "Case in point, Prince 'I can get kidnapped by pirates even in the most heavily defended city in Europa' here."

"Sometimes I wonder if Adam and Lilith had adventures before they settled down and took me in," Agatha said, and I was impressed yet again with how even the locket couldn't damp her intelligence and insight very much. "I've heard Lilith say similar things, and I saw Adam fight once against an attempt to rob the smithy. From a distance, of course. But he didn't just use his strength, he fought like he knew..." she trailed off.

"Like he had training?" Violetta nodded. "Well, your foster parents are old enough to remember before the Pax Transylvania, after all. If you didn't live in a strongly defended city all your life then pretty much anybody their age did at least a little fighting in their village militia."

"That must be it," Agatha agreed. "And Lilith taught me a little about what to do if I'm grabbed by someone, but not much else."

"At least you live in Beetleburg." I said. "And... actual combat does involve elevated heart rate and adrenaline levels and other things that aren't very good for you. Which reminds me, are the exercises helping any?"

"Oh yes!" Agatha said brightly. "I get my headaches only about half as often now."

"That's wonderful!" I agreed, and right then Mr. Tock chimed the hour.

"And that means we have to get you home before the Clays send out the search parties," Violetta said, and we all rose to our feet as I left a handful of coins on the table. "But hey, at least your mom didn't insist on being the chaperone."

"Tarvek, they actually do like you." Agatha reassured me as we started walking her back towards Forge Street. "They're just..."

"Agatha, your mother pointed out to me the day we first met that I'm several years older, much wealthier, and have more varied experience." I told her. "And there are a lot of stories about princes using their advantages of position to impress themselves upon young ladies in unfair ways. Those stories aren't all tall tales," I nodded at her. "I entirely understand why they're a little suspicious of me, and I even agree that it only makes them good parents. You don't have to defend them to me."

"Before Cousin Foot-In-His-Mouth finishes biting it off, let me point out that the 'varied experience' he refers to does not include girls." Violetta defended me. "He hasn't courted any girls before you."

"You haven't?" Agatha looked at me curiously. "But you're so-"

"Father-" I tried to explain. "There's not really much of a wide social circle in Sturmhalten, to say the least. And he's not in any rush for me to get married, so he never really tried making introductions or arrangements." Of course he hadn't, one of the Order of Jove's contingency plans required me to be available to marry their false Heterodyne Girl. "I suppose he might have been hoping I'd meet someone in Paris, but Parisian girls-" I shook my head. "They're very frivolous."

"Colette wasn't." Violetta broke in annoyingly, and Agatha turned to look at her suddenly.

"Colette Voltaire?" I asked her archly. "The Master's own daughter? Don't joke, Violetta. Does the phrase 'impossibly out of my league' not even remotely ring a bell?"

"I thought she liked you." Violetta replied as Agatha looked back at me, slightly alarmed. Good God, cousin! What the hell are you doing!

"She liked me because I was the only male lab partner she had that wasn't trying to seduce or pine hopelessly after her," I said. I turned to Agatha. "Young women who are the heirs presumptive to enormously powerful and influential stations attract a great many suitors, most of them only interested in her for her position rather than herself. I certainly wasn't going to add myself to that parade. Besides," I shrugged. "She's a highly intelligent and personable young woman, certainly, but there wasn't any..." I waved my hands.

"Spark?" Agatha asked.

"I'm sure she'll break through within the next several years," I replied automatically. "Oh, you meant attraction." I realized with a bit of embarassment. "And, no."

"Ah," Agatha said bemusingly, and we walked along in companionable silence until we reached her home. Lilith stood waiting in the doorway for us like any mother expecting her daughter back from walking out with a young male friend (suitably chaperoned by female relative or not), and we politely made our goodbyes.

"What the hell were you doing?" I hissed at Violetta as soon as we were away. "All right, maybe the scene needed an injection of cold water but did you have to use an entire firehose?"

"What, you didn't like how I simultaneously got on the table that you legitimately thought that she was more attractive than Colette Voltaire, that you got to give her the lecture about how girls who are heirs to dynasties need to watch out for ambitious greedheads so that later on when you make your pitch she remembers you said that first and so really aren't one of those greedheads, and under circumstances where nobody actually crossed the ethical barrier by making a romantic overture this early? All in one move?" Violetta smirked at me and buffed her nails. "Because I thought I was being pretty awesome."

"And here I thought you'd picked up nothing from me except fashion awareness." I eventually replied.

"You're a disease, and I've totally caught it." she jibed back, and we both felt a little better.

* * * * *​

The lab lights flickered out as a circuit breaker visibly went *THOOM* in the hallway. I swore and cursed-

"Do not turn that thing on without checking it." Violetta whispered urgently into my ear in the darkness, and then flickered away before anyone else noticed her she was there. If she was going to the extent of using full stealth on campus, something was urgently wrong-

I immediately had the inspection panel on the large-scale experimental actuator open and peered in at it with a hand-light. I cursed incredulously and ran to the master power switches on the test board, then safety-locked them into the 'Open' position. We'd been just about to turn it on for its first operational test, and if we had-

The lights flickered back on as someone in the hallway reset the breakers.

"Oh, it was just a brownout." young Moxylotyl said. His father was one of the tenured professors on-campus, and he was attending as a legacy. He'd been my lab partner for this latest round of experiments-

-and if we'd turned that actuator on in its sabotaged condition, it would almost certainly have killed at least one of us and under circumstances where it looked like rank incompetence by the senior researcher - me. If he'd died, his father would almost certainly demand my expulsion from the campus at the least and Dr. Beetle would have graciously granted it. And if I'd died... well, then I would have died.

"We have a problem." I said, pointing into the opened inspection panel. "How did those flux couplings get reversed? I certainly didn't do that."

"I didn't either!" he said, looking alarmed.

"Someone must have snuck in here while the lights were off," I pontificated, taking advantage of the fact that the average civilian's eyewitness memory of an event was abysmally inexact and very easily susceptible to suggestion if you phrased it correctly, which is why eyewitness testimony was actually one of the least useful categories of evidence in a homicide investigation. By theorizing out loud with the correct emphasis I easily got Master Moxylotyl to think the blackout had been a couple minutes longer than it had been, a plausible enough gap of time to perform the sabotage. When what had actually happened of course was that Violetta, who'd been standing discreet overwatch, had noticed the saboteur and then pulled the breaker herself to give her an opening to warn me.

"We'll have to let the University conduct a full academic sabotage investigation," he agreed with me. "Damn. This is going to set us back by at least a week."

"Better a week than the rest of your life," I advised my undergraduate assistant. "Would your father be willing to take charge of the investigation?"

"I can't imagine him letting anyone else do it!" he agreed, and headed off to arrange that very thing while I stayed behind to 'secure the evidence'.

Sadly, there weren't enough clues left behind for me to deduce an obvious perpetrator, although the suspect list was quite short. Obviously young Moxylotl had turned his back long enough for someone to do the fiddling, seeing as how I'd been visiting the watercloset immediately before the test. Unless he'd been the saboteur, of course. But even if he was, he wouldn't be the mastermind.

Hmmm. It was still over two months to Agatha's birthday. We were going to have to see if we could expedite that timetable.

... or delay someone else's.

* * * * *​

Dr. Beetle was a cautious and meticulous Spark and one of Europa's greatest mechanical engineers, but he was also an intellectually arrogant tyrant with a height complex. He clearly had no one on-staff who was any kind of real security expert and probably wouldn't have listened to them telling him what he was doing wrong if he had. And while the Clockwork Army had been the finest fighting automata of the previous generation, he hadn't updated them in at least a decade. And his human guards were simply militiamen, large and adequately competent with weapons but with no advanced training at all. Beetleburg was suitably proofed against direct assault, large-scale disorder, or street-level violence, but vs. actual trained intelligence operatives? Tarsus Beetle was largely alive simply because nobody who was able to play the game at our level hated him enough to kill him.

So it wasn't any real effort at all to regularly dose his coffee with Movit-2 for a week straight, during which he noticed nothing wrong except that he was feeling positively exhilarated and full of ideas. Like any Spark in an excited mood he threw himself straight into his research, fugueing happily away.

And then I stopped the doses and let the crash hit. Between suddenly bombing out of an extended fugue and the simple physical stress at his age... well, he wouldn't be in any danger of actual permanent damage - that's why I'd used Movit-2 instead of, oh, 4 or 6 - but by the time he finished recovering from extended bed rest all the traces would be out of his system. Really, it's not as if the Beetleburg hospitals knew what to look on a toxicology screening as is. Beetle wouldn't he be in any shape to do any extensive plotting again for almost another month, and all that he'd think is that he'd gotten carried away and overindulged in Spark fugueing which was a thing we all did from time to time even when trying not to. It's just that at his age, fugueing that long was pushing the limits just a bit, and so off he went to several weeks of enforced bedrest in the hospital. And thus we gained a little maneuvering room.

Of course, the effect from Dr. Beetle's absence from the campus is that it placed his second-in-command Dr. Merlot in charge. And Silas Merlot was not only an officious petty tyrant that Beetle habitually used to play the heavy to his own carefully-maintained facade as the campus' benevolent yet distant grandfather figure, but as it turned out he was also Agatha's chief tormentor on campus. Agatha's desire to not burden other people with her problems meant that she hadn't mentioned him to me by name in this timeline, nor had she spoken to me in detail of her early life in the future.

So I had no idea that given entire uninterrupted weeks to have at her without Beetle available to restrain him, he'd do his best to try and drive her into such a collapse so as to send her fleeing from the campus forever. I had no idea why he had such a hatred of Agatha, and I couldn't afford another mysterious medical emergency in the University chain of command after the one I'd already caused so simply having Dr. Merlot catch a sudden case of Hogfarb's Resplendent Immolation wasn't feasible, but regardless of the overall risks to the plan I simply had to do something before he drove Agatha into a crippling relapse. Not least because I was responsible for it happening in the first place.

Which is how Agatha was led into her very first covert operation, even if it was the most elementary form of social engineering. I explained to her that if we made Dr. Merlot think that working with me was the last thing she ever wanted to do, then he'd personally throw her into my laboratory wrapped up in a bow. And so, over my strenuous objections made to the record and with suitable stage-managing, I was forcibly 'assigned' the 'least valuable' lab assistant on campus 'to keep her out of the way of important researchers until Beetle came back and dealt with her himself'. I even managed to fail so hard at campus intrigue as to get temporarily reassigned to a much worse lab and lower-priority project.

The strict discipline of the laboratory, made more strict by my kibitzing undergraduate of a cousin, still kept the atmosphere at the distance I was hoping to maintain. But the simple fact that I was giving Agatha better treatment than any other supervisor she'd ever had, letting her work at her own pace to accomodate her medical issues as much as possible, and genuinely valued her contributions to my work meant that she was being happier in this little laboratory with me than she'd ever been happy in her academic life. And standing there and watching Agatha be happy and in her element was an addictive drug.

In the future I'd seen Agatha Heterodyne in full spark fugue. I'd seen her standing like an angry goddess, wreathed in lightning and thunder as Castle Heterodyne fully reactivated from the atmospheric accumulators and sent the Baron's entire army in flight. I'd seen her drink from the river Dyne and ascend to some mysterious state of being beyond the Spark itself. I'd seen her raise the dead. I'd been one of the two men she'd raised from the dead.

And yet as I stood and watched Agatha 'Clay', with her Spark fully shackled and unable to do more than the simplest scientific procedures - well, 'simple' by comparision with things she'd pulled off at her height, and still very complex and erudite by the standards of average students - I wondered at how she could, even as weighed down as she was, still seem to shine as brightly here as she ever had in the future. Was I even seeing her, or was I seeing only my memories of the woman she'd become? Was Violetta right, and I was trying to force her to become someone she wasn't instead of helping her to become the person she really was?

I sighed and smiled back weakly at Agatha as she turned to notice me standing and watching her fuss among the bits of the busted clank again and smile cheerfully at me, and then stepped forward to help gently untangle a malfunction she'd overlooked in her latest assembly due to that damnable locket's limitations. Even with all the mitigating therapies I'd managed to get an increasingly-less-grudging Lilith and Adam to agree to she still couldn't build anything complicated on her own that didn't explode, but every week she needed less and less of my help. I positively itched with the desire to tell her that she was still only hobbling where she could potentially fly, that all she had to do was reach up to her neck and give a good hard pull on her restraints to be free-

No. If I did that, it would be allowing her flame to burn far more brightly but far more briefly. Beetleburg, the entire city, was a cold clockwork trap that she had to escape before she could be free. But not as penniless refugees fleeing down a country road, as that would only be a journey from danger into danger. No, she had to be led down the right route- to choose the right route-

I sighed and stood back and watched the sheer delight on Agatha's face as the clank started up and ran smoothly, letting her exult in an actual success even if I'd had to provide a little assistance. I knew that even this little was certainly far too good to last. I had to figure out a way to break the deadlock. But until the Clays trusted me...

Agatha's birthday, I told myself. If I haven't broken the ice with her parents by then, then I'll tell her the truth as soon as they start letting me 'treat' her and ask her to run away with me. Away from Dr. Beetle, away from her chains, and away from- well, I'd certainly tell her parents where we were, I'd just want enough of a head start first.

If she'd be willing to come with me, that is. And for all that we were becoming good friends, I still had no idea if she would.

* * * * *​

"I know what you're up to, boy." Tarsus Beetle said hoarsely. He still wasn't entirely over his 'overexertion', but he'd recovered enough to get back to his office and take charge of the campus again. Agatha had of course been immediately vanished back into her old routine under his personal supervision and I'd been reassigned to my more normal adjunct researches... which had themselves been reassigned into another section of the university complex entirely.

"Sir?" I inquired.

"Miss Clay!" he thundered at me. "That girl is under my personal protection!"

"Has she made any complaints?" I asked innocently, knowing full well she'd have done nothing of the kind.

"Pfffft!" Beetle sneered at me. "You've turned her head all around with your little ways and you know it. Everyone knows what your family's like, Sturmvoraus! I told you when you first came here that if you tried putting on airs you'd regret it, and yet here she is swooning around like a lovestruck girl and calling you 'Your Highness'!"

Damn. I certainly couldn't tell Dr. Beetle that Agatha had learned it by snooping on his mail. So, who could I blame-?

"My cousin loves to mock me with my title," I came back without hesitation, "and Agatha must have overheard her and asked her why she was addressing me as such. You certainly can understand why my own family wouldn't be ignorant of my identity. As to Agatha's 'swooning around', I'm entirely unaware of it."

"Insult my intelligence one more time and the last thing you'll feel in Beetleburg is my boot on your ass." he said levelly.

"Doctor, I am simply being respectful to her. As my father raised me to treat young women." Oh, now there was a lie so awe-inspiring as to make the Adversary himself blush. "And it's a sad state of affairs that her treatment on-campus from literally everyone save yourself is such that she could mistake that minimal an accomodation of her dignity for a deep affection! If she's under your personal protection, then why is she so bullied?" I retorted, placing him on the defensive.

"Well, I can't be everywhere," he muttered.

"If you want me to go and explain to her that I didn't mean to mislead her, I will." I said. "And as she's been reassigned, her paths and mine shouldn't really cross again." Right. If he's been surveilling her off-campus as well as on, he'll know that I just- oh, damn. He knows.

"Won't they." he glowered.

"I admit that I take piano lessons at her mother's, but Doctor, if you think you're concerned about threats to Miss Clay's propriety then I recommend that you speak to her parents sometime. If Frau Clay didn't need my castlemarks so much I honestly believe she'd have let her husband throw me so hard that I bounced twice. As is, I've met nesting mother bears less suspicious of threats to their offspring."

"I will speak to her mother, don't think that I won't! And you- stay away from her from now on." he ordered.

"I have no intention of doing otherwise," I said, mentally crossing my fingers behind my back, and then I left Beetle's office and headed home.

"That's not good." Violetta said as soon as I'd gotten back and brought her up to speed. "You're still sure about Aunty Mehitabel's?"

"The questor would be far less suspicious of death by heart failure after his recent health episode, but that still gets us the Imperial army to take and defend the town." I sighed.

"Could we just accept that and stay under their radar? The instant Beetle drops dead, Merlot expels her from TPU forever. She'll be living at home and the Imperial occupation forces won't give two coppers about a blacksmith and a piano teacher living down in the craftsmen's district. And the jerk already tried to kill you once-"

"Probably, but I'm still not certain that wasn't actually just University politics. You know how grant competition can get sometimes."

"Fair enough, but you know my opinion of coincidences."

"Look, you tell me that you can even have even 65% confidence that the streets being even temporarily full of patrolling Jagers, any one of whom can potentially recognize Agatha by scent and will recognize Punch and Judy on sight, won't trigger them running or get them discovered, and I'll turn you loose right now."

"... eugggggh." Violetta moaned. "So you are saying that we literally have no plan except 'maintain the holding pattern and keep ducking the murder attempts'."

"Well, it's not as if we haven't done that before."

* * * * *​

When I saw the pair of assassins loitering down the hallway as I was leaving my apartment I'd originally thought that cousin Martellus had been sending me another greeting, but after seeing them both actually move I sighed with resignation as I realized that these two particular hired knives clearly weren't from my family. They were thugs- vicious and effective ones in their milieu, no doubt, but they were certainly not Smoke Knights. Nor were they any of the more skilled varieties of freelance assassins. As hard as it was to believe sometimes, there actually were people in Europa who made a professional study of how to stealthily take human life that I wasn't related to. No, I had an appallingly large suspicion as to who these gentlemen were and who had sent them, and I didn't like it.

"Oh dear," I said, patting my pockets in the old 'Drat, I've forgotten my coin pouch!' routine and then shrugging and turning around to unlock my apartment door and step back inside as if I hadn't seen them at all. I could hear them grinning to themselves behind me at how conveniently their pigeon was giving them an opening. Not only did they not have to kill me in the hallway now, they could supplement their pay by more easily looting my apartment! And I was such an oblivious young fop that I hadn't even noticed them in the hallway!

I actually had time to close and lock the door behind them before I was behind the one with the scruffier boots and had my one hand over his mouth and my knife in over the collarbone and down in the simplest of the silent-kill-from-behind positions. Also, when you used this particular one rather than going for the kidneys it left a lot less blood spattering around and that definitely was a major concern right now. Violetta certainly wasn't going to clean it out of the rug if I was careless enough to leave any there.

His partner had barely dawned to an awareness of something wrong before I put out his lights with my sap. A brief round of questioning with one of the milder truth serums produced the knowledge that these two people were, as I'd expected, longtime denizens of Beetleburg's criminal underworld. They'd been contracted for both our deaths, had been hired through one of the local brokers in the Thieves' Market and had no clue who the client was, and had been given no special warning about me and Violetta possessing any fighting skills at all.

In other words, neither they nor their client had had the slightest clue who they were really dealing with. So after dispatching the second one I used my own refinement on one of the more handy chemicals from the Smoke Knight pharmacopeia, the one that used a self-sustaining catalytic reaction to dissolve nonliving organic tissue into a nice thin resin that you could easily wash down the bathtub drain. I neatly wrapped up their clothes and knives prepatory to dumping into the river and left a coded note for Violetta in the apartment dead drop, and then I pondered what my next move should be.

It was clearly Dr. Beetle, of course. The Clays certainly weren't going to commission assassins- they were the original Punch and Judy, after all. They'd followed the Heterodyne Boys for years. They had ethics. And even if they were sufficiently desperate to abandon those ethics then they also had the skills to do the job themselves, or at least they'd believe so.

So, someone had noticed that despite my earlier promise and my heightened discretion afterwards, I'd still remained an acquaintance of Agatha Clay off-campus. One with a specific interest in her neurological issues and enough Spark to quite likely get to the bottom of them. And they had decided that they simply weren't having any of it.

I tsk'ed to myself at how inconvenient this was all going to become.

All right then. If I moved quickly enough I could get this done and still be only half an hour late for my date. The Clays had finally decided it was appropriate for me and Agatha to go walking out alone, even if only as friends, apparently because they'd accepted she'd be a grown woman in only a couple weeks.

"You were robbed?" Agatha asked me with alarm as we walked towards the performing grounds set up alongside the main marketplace.

"Burglarized," I corrected. "I never saw them, I just came back from a trip to the corner to see my apartment door hanging open and the place ransacked."

"How horrible!" she said.

"Agatha, my family is my family." I pointed out. "I lost nothing that I can't easily replace. Better that it happen to me than to someone who can't so easily recover financial losses, like your parents."

"You're just lucky you weren't there when they arrived," Agatha said. "Or that Violetta wasn't either."

"That would have been considerably more... sanguinary." I said with what was a distressingly common pattern with Agatha of me telling the truth in deliberately misleading ways.

"I can only imagine," Agatha said. "When I was a little girl, I didn't live in Beetleburg. My uncle was a traveling tinkerer, so I was with him. We crossed the Wastelands a lot, going from village to village. So I- I know that sometimes bad things happen. I'm glad they didn't happen to you."

"Across the Wastelands at that age? With your health?" I asked in honest shock. When Agatha had shared the story of her life with me in the future, she hadn't remotely gone into detail on this part.

"I think that's why my uncle left me with his friends the Clays," she said. "At least, that's why I like to believe he did."

"What other reason could he possibly have had?" I asked in astonishment.

"Well..." Agatha sighed. "Sometimes I wonder if he just... didn't want to be bothered with me."

She'd thought that the man who'd been Barry Heterodyne didn't want to be bothered-

"Are you telling me that Adam and Lilith honestly let you believe that your uncle thought you were worthless-" I shouted, hearing my voice slipping straight into the Madness Place despite my best efforts to stop it.

"No!" Agatha insisted. "They always told me that he loved me every much! And I always remembered him doing it! I just-"

"I'm sorry," I said, turning away from her and slumping on a nearby ornamental railing. "I- I'm not going to blame the Spark for that one." I said. "That's taking the easy way out. Agatha, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have lost my temper, and I shouldn't have scared you."

"You never scare me, Tarvek." Agatha said warmly, and it took everything I had to avoid wincing as if I'd been stabbed. Oh Gods, I was so done. I was so, so done. I'd always known that I was hopelessly in love with Agatha, but she just kept doing this to me even when she didn't know- "And I know my uncle wasn't like that. It's just-" she trailed off.

"You can only keep the doubts away for so long. You have to keep fighting them, and they keep coming back." I said softly, knowing what it was like myself. "And then sometimes you don't have the energy to fight anymore, and the doubts just sit there and whisper at you until after you can rest and then get back to fighting them the next day."

"Yes," Agatha said. "That's exactly it. And sometimes I can't even when I should."

"That's your health, and the fatigue issues." I reassured her. "Agatha, what you're describing is normal for chronic pain sufferers. If anybody expects you to show identical endurance to a healthy athlete then they're expecting too much of you. It's... it's okay to not be okay."

"I thought you were the one who said that suffering should never be accepted?" she replied to me intelligently.

"All right, I confess, I am literally made out of hypocrisy and double standards," I said lightly. "But at least I try to orient them to always benefit my friends."

"Your father must be so proud of you," Agatha said in all innocence, and my stomach lurched.

"My father..." I said, taking a deep breath.

Oh Gods, I was so tired of lying to her.

"My father is a heartless manipulative power monger who barely lifted an eyebrow when my sister was maimed, and despised me as the family weakling up until after I'd learned how to put up enough of a cold front to convince him that I'd stopped trying to care about people." I said tonelessly. "If my mother wasn't dead and him not really at all interested in remarrying, he'd almost certainly get rid of me and try to train a replacement even now." And even that was only mostly the truth, because I couldn't explain at this juncture about the Summoning Engine or how Father had willingly put Anevka into it.

Agatha gasped in horror. "You can't mean that-" and then she stopped herself and her face collapsed. "Oh, no. That explains a part of your story that I'd always wondered about. Why you had to fight so hard to save your sister's life when your father already was an experienced Spark. He'd already written her off as beyond saving, hadn't he?"

"He had." I agreed.

"Tarvek, I am so sorry," Agatha said, spontaneously lurching forward into a hug- our first hug- before I could stop her. "No wonder you said you were so happy here in Beetleburg, where you don't have to be a prince-"

"Where I can pretend not to be a prince," I said, my arms coming up to very gently and loosely hold her. "Where I can pretend a lot of things."

"You're not pretending to be a good person," Agatha said. "And you're not pretending to be my friend."

"Friend-" I choked with the guilt. "Agatha, I am far more- emotional about you than I have let on-"

"Oh!" Agatha said with a sly grin. "Are you saying that you like me, Your Highness?"

I mentally apologized to Gilgamesh for ever having teased him about turning into an idiot whenever he was near Agatha, because right now it was all I could to do remember my own name- don't kiss her, I chanted to myself. Do not kiss her-

"We promised your parents- when they agreed to let us walk out as friends-" I breathed heavily. "That we wouldn't-"

"Sorry!" she said, immediately disengaging and letting us both take a moment to cool down.

"Agatha," I began after the moment had ebbed a bit. "I... yes. I like you. I more than like you. I am a positive fountain of inappropriate feelings and impulses." I held up my hand to pre-empt her reply. "And I shouldn't be. Not now. I'm going to be- helping you with your health even more soon, and then- ethical issues. So many ethical issues."

"I like you too," she smiled at me. "And more than Adam and Lilith are comfortable with."

"Agatha..." I began. "I can't even begin to explain everything I'm thinking or feeling right now, but can I at least tell you something about what I believe and what I hope for?"

"Of course you can!" she said.

"I believe that you are an incredibly stronger person than you even know," I said, letting relief flow through me at even partially getting to share my true feelings. "I believe that you won't be cursed with these headaches forever. I believe that you will go on to do amazing things." I said passionately. "And I hope that even after you've learned more about yourself as a person, and about me as a person, that you'll still want me there alongside you to help you do them."

Agatha actually blushed and sniffled, and she and I grinned at each other like mindless dolts-

-and right then the throwing knife landed in the tree next to us.

* * * * *
​

Author's Note: Yes, I stole the line straight from Dragon Age 2. I freely admit it, I have no shame. *g*

Readers of the draft version in my snippets thread will note a lot of new content in here. I decided to stretch out and fill in the Beetleburg wait some. Yes, its a bit sedate, but this is primarily a romance. A sweet, slow, Victorian romance. Just, y'know, with random outbreaks of Sparkiness and ninja murder. Because it's Girl Genius, after all.

As to Beetle sending not remotely enough assassin for the job, I lean to the headcanon that while the Fifty Families' political reputation is widely known, its only in certain circles that you also know that the Valois are basically the League of Shadows as well. I mean, the entire point of being ninjas is that you don't tell everyone that you're ninjas. And Beetle just doesn't play in the major leagues, even if he thinks he does.

 

[cliffc999]

"Run!" I shouted at Agatha, the adrenaline rush instantly snapping me back into combat mode. I grabbed her and started dragging her straight into the nearest and narrowest alleyway I could find. "They're trying to kill us!"

"Who's they?" Agatha gasped, still stunned from the instant shift in atmosphere and being half-dragged by me as we tore down the narrow alleyway. I frantically looked around-

"Doctor Beetle!" Violetta said, dropping down from the rooftop to land beside us in her combat black-and-purples and start sprinting alongside us without missing a beat. It had been her knife that had been thrown at us, with the color-coded cord wrapped around the handle as our signal for Get clear immediately!

"Good job on the burglary fakeout to justify hiring private security for us tomorrow but you overestimated how subtle he's being! He's decided to just cut his losses and go for broke!" Violetta continued.

"Which means the Clockwork Army's coming at us right now!" I said. "We've-"

"What is going on?" Agatha shrieked at us.

"High-level political intrigue between ruling Sparks that just went from cold to hot!" I called out to her truthfully but incompletely. "And with you caught directly in the middle!"

"But surely he wouldn't-" Agatha began.

"INCOMING!" Violetta shrieked, and we both immediately had Agatha up off the ground by her elbows and into cover in a nearby doorway as a C-Gas grenade came spiraling in.

The angle of the grenade told me that it had been fired down into the alley, and by a compessed-air launcher rather than thrown. I'd barely finished reaching for my pocket breather before Violetta's throwing arm got an impressive workout as she nailed the grenadier square in the face with his own grenade, which she'd caught before it could even land.

The sound of footsteps closing in told us that Beetle had sent more than just one, not that we'd expected anything else. His strategy was obvious - take us all, then disappear or kill us and either spin his actions to Agatha as a rescue or use force majeure, whichever he had an opening for.

"Agatha, stay down!" Violetta called to her as the first set of footsteps finished double-timing towards us from the direction we'd run from, and as soon as they rounded the last turn we both leapt into action. Violetta had had her full combat loadout strapped on and had brought enough drugged throwing darts for everyone, so she began liberally scattering them with both hands. The squad of militiamen started falling over like tenpins. My job was to deal with the clank.

"HALT-" the Clockwork soldier began as the damnable thing lowered its autogun and I heard the breech engage. I didn't remotely trust a decades-obsolete design to have the necessary trigger control to only target us without catching Agatha with a stray shot, and that meant I couldn't rely on evasion alone. My best fighting dagger dropped down into my hand from my sleeve as I sprinted in as fast as I possibly could, threw my kerchief square at the primary visual sensor, and used the momentary loss of line-of-sight to launch myself into a running slide directly underneath it. A kick-out with my heel to bring myself to a halt, one quick thrust as I passed beneath it into the back of the leg joint at precisely the right angle, and I left it firing at the sky as it suddenly staggered. I rolled to the side and let the recoil of its own heavy weapon send it tumbling to the ground right where I'd been lying before its brain caught up enough to stop firing. I then rolled back and put a quick overhand strike with my knife at just the right angle into the neck actuators, with my Spark to help me intuitively understand the complex mechanical forces at play, and-

The clank shut down as its head sheared free with a screech.

"Contact high rear!" Violetta cried in alarm as the last militiaman finished taking a nap. Two more fire-support clanks up above on the roof down the alleyway- I frantically heaved at the damn inert clank's arm, then jammed my knife into the shoulder joint and twisted at just the right angle-

Violetta followed my motion and grabbed the clank's arm in both hands, helping me hold it steady as the autogun chattered into continuous full automatic fire from where I'd shorted the circuits together. The fusillade of high-velocity heavy-caliber rounds erupted forth as we clumsily combined our strength to try and direct the fire, tearing loose chunks of brickwork from the corner of the building and sending several stray rounds screaming off into the sky as the remainder of the salvo was walked on target and tore the two rooftop gun-hoppers to shreds. I pulled out my knife and the fire ended.

"Agatha!" I said, looking frantically round. If she hadn't stayed put-

"There'll be more of them!" she said frantically. "So many more! If even the roof-hoppers are out then it's a full mobilization-" she kept explaining as she came to help me up. I absently noted that despite being an untrained civilian who'd just been unexpectedly dropped into a bloody urban combat she was still doing her best to organize and present available battlefield intelligence-

Gods, she was magnificent.

"You saw some of Beetle's defense plans?" Violetta burst my bubble. "Please tell me that he doesn't have a clank contingency for the drains!"

"No," Agatha said as we kept running. "I never saw anything-"

"Then we're still going for the down-and-out!" I decided as we doubled right back into the breach in their perimeter we'd made by taking out the blocking force behind us. The strolling crowds had already finished clearing the plaza at the appearance of the Clockwork Army by the time we made it back-

"I've got her!" Violetta said, leaving behind a target decoy where Agatha had just been standing and practically teleporting them both ahead behind a sturdy tree. That left just me as the focus for the gun-clank that had been left covering the plaza at the end of the street, so thank you very much cousin!

Still, I did my job as a good little decoy as Violetta helped Agatha crouch-walk behind the fountain and stay in cover while I was frantically tumbling and flipping and scrambling along an oblique path to their line of travel. I knew how to use available trees, garbage cans, and bushes at the right angles of approach to confuse my target silouhette to the clank sensors, and I wasn't entirely unarmed even in my civilian clothes so I had a smoke grenade handy to lay down a concealment zone during the most critical part of the terrain crossing, and so none of the autogun rounds came within more than five feet of me.

"Fire in the hole!" I heard Violetta cry, and then one of her breaching charges blew the storm grating that we'd been heading for in the center of the plaza wide open. I caught up to them just as they reached the lip of the hole and swept Agatha up into a bridal carry, and we both leapt down into the exposed sewer tunnel.

"Gas mine, there!" I called. "Tripwire, there!" and Violetta's hands blurred as she set up a hasty rig to catch our first group of pursuers. "Agatha, are you all right?" I asked her urgently as we started running down the drainage tunnel.

"They tried to kill us!" she cried hysterically.

"She's fine." Violetta said calmly.

"How are you doing all this?" she asked us, still slightly wild-eyed as I put her back down on her feet and we kept moving.

"Violetta's not just my cousin but also my bodyguard," I explained. "And in our family we start training to fight very young."

"Oh yeah," Violetta explained to her. "I mean, God knows our family sucks and is full of horrible people but I'll give them credit for this much. If you can survive our relatives then you can survive damn near anything."

"And to think girls grow up envying princesses!" Agatha said dazedly as we tore along. "Um, what's our next move?"

"We get the hell out of Beetleburg and stay out." Violetta explained. "Seriously, the ruling Spark that runs the entire city and has a whole clank army wants you dead? What else do you do?"

"My parents-" Agatha began.

"I paid a street urchin to run them a message as soon as I set out to warn you guys," Violetta said. "Hopefully they'll get out in time, especially since Beetle would want you solidly in hand before going after them."

"Why is this all happening?" Agatha said. "What did you do?"

"We tried to save you," I told her, waving down Violetta's astonished glare.

Because I'd had enough. No more secrets, I promised myself. No more lies.

Besides, my life expectancy might very well be measured in minutes at this point. And I had to finish the mission.

"Tarvek...?" Agatha asked me doubtfully as we finished rounding enough corners to outrun our immediate pursers and Violetta called a halt so she could scout ahead.

"Agatha, may I have your locket?" I asked her, and she looked at me for a long moment of suspicion before relenting and handing it to me. "This locket, that your Uncle Barry insisted you always wear," I said, flipping it over and cursing at how expert the construction was before my fingertips found the hidden catch. Thank goodness for the advanced safecracking lessons-

I opened it, showing her the complex mechanisms inside. "Sparkwork. It suppresses brainwaves. It makes you unable to concentrate."

Agatha gasped. "You knew-?"

"Because it suppresses Breakthrough." I told her. "Your Uncle Barry made this for you, Adam and Lilith forced you to wear this, because if you ever took it off then you would almost immediately reveal yourself as a Spark. Because you are a Spark, Agatha. And people notice Sparks. You'd be investigated. You'd be pursued. And then this would come out." I flipped the locket open.

"Bill Heterodyne and Lucrezia Mongfish," I said, pointing at one face and then the other. "They were your parents... Agatha Heterodyne."

Her mouth gaped open wordlessly at me, and I closed the locket and handed it back to her.

"Agatha, Beetle's almost certainly not going to kill you but he will kill us if he catches us." I said hurriedly. "If that happens, if we don't get away, then you have to pretend that you don't know, do you understand? You have to still be Agatha Clay. You have to keep this on-" I choked at the thought of asking her to torture herself. "Until you're away from him. Now I came here to try and rescue you, and I'm so sorry I lied and hid things from you until now, but I am on your side, Agatha. Do you believe me?"

"I..." she paused, and I was ready to just collapse and die when she continued. "I believe you." she said.

"If we escape then I'll tell you everything, I promise. What I know, how I know, when I learned it, what all my intentions were and are. If we don't all make it and you're still free, then first and foremost never go to Sturmhalten. If you go there then you are doomed. It's dangerous to openly be a female Spark almost anywhere, because my father keeps sending people to drag them in! And you can't really trust any member of my family except Violetta. They're the worst enemies your family has! Next, if you need help then go to any Jagermonster and tell them your real last name. The Jagers are sworn to protect and serve your family above any loyalty they might have to the Baron, and any one of them can recognize your bloodline by the scent. They'll all help you, do you understand? And-" I paused, then swore and continued onwards. "If Baron Wulfenbach reaches you first, he will probably protect you but he might be frightened of you. If that happens, if the Baron isn't on your side, then you need to ask for help from Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, the Baron's son. He's..." I paused. "He doesn't always do the wisest thing, but he's a legitimately good-hearted person. You definitely shouldn't let him make all the plans, but you can trust him. And tell him that 'Gilgamesh Holzfaller owes Prince Tarvek for Paris'. He'll know what it means."

"I understand," Agatha told me. "Anything else?"

"Yeah, let's close the drama valve and get moving." Violetta said from behind us.

"This was legitimately mission-critical information!" I complained to her as we started travelling down the sewers again.

"That's what you always say." she griped as we started running again.

"So, how am I doing for my first Heterodyne adventure?" Agatha actually tried to joke as we fled.

"We're still alive, aren't we?" Violetta jibed back at her, and despite everything that was going on I couldn't help but smile.

Dr. Beetle clearly didn't have any militiamen who were experienced at or eager to run down drainage tunnels after fugitives, particularly not after the first bunch who'd tried following us were left taking an involuntary nap. So while our pursuit was certainly forcefully driven it wasn't entirely what you'd call well-managed or even johnny-on-the-spot. And the Clockwork Army hadn't even been designed to come down here. Beetle had had more than a bit of a blind spot when he'd built his 'finest mechanized fighting force in Europa'. Most Spark rulers considered ugly, pedestrian things such as sewers and drains to be beneath their notice and didn't pay them more than the most minimal and utilarian attention. That's why they were so popular as clandestine routes for both common criminals and people like us.

Oh, the Clockwork Army was an effective enough instrument at what it was designed to do. I certainly didn't want to try taking any more of them of on in direct combat with anything short of an Imperial task force. But as they weren't even intended to come down into the drains, and weren't very flexible in their programming, we had them entirely neutralized as a threat so long as we stayed below ground level. Evading the men that Beetle had sent down into the sewers after us was only marginally more difficult, especially given that we were being pursued only in a stern chase from our entry point instead of having further detachments mobilized and sent down manholes ahead of us on our probable escape routes. There was obviously no preprepared doctrine for underground interdiction and pursuit any more complicated than a simple 'After them!' These men certainly weren't the Sturmhalten Sewer Rats.

The most arduous part of our journey was that I was the only person present who wasn't dressed for the occasion. Agatha had worn one of her better dresses for going out on the town with, but between her general lack of social life and her constant laboratory duties and living at a blacksmith's basically the only footwear she owned were sensible steel-toed safety boots. And Violetta, of course, was in her full combat gear and thus entirely waterproof up to her shins. Which left me busy walking along sewer walkways, and the sort of condensation that built up on sewer walkways... in thin leather dress shoes and one of my best pairs of spats.

Ah, the things we do for love.

We hadn't exactly mapped the entire sewers ahead of time but as a "down-and-out" - that is, 'head into the drainage systems and don't come up until you're outside the city walls' - had been our primary emergency escape plan from Beetleburg from the beginning we had marked the several best exit points from the storm drainage network and the main trunk routes leading to and from them. At that point all it required was a pocket compass to keep up us heading in the right direction down the various side tunnels and branches until we crossed one, and following the trunk from there. We only encountered one pair of searching militiamen at all, and they went down even faster than the hapless duo I'd met earlier tonight outside my apartment had. They certainly hadn't noticed a single thing before we'd hit them.

And so my heart leapt into my chest when we turned the final corner, having finally started to believe we were safe, and then saw a pair of large silouhettes in the dimness waiting for us at the exit-

"Adam! Lilith!" Agatha joyously cried, and ran ahead of us straight into her foster parents' arms. Adam folded her protectively in his grip while Lilith kept a wary, if not hostile, eye on us.

"You told them our escape route? Via an unsecured courier?" I angrily whispered to Violetta.

"No!" she replied earnestly. "I just gave them a run signal and a mail drop!"

Lilith cleared her throat. "A full mobilization of the Clockwork Army is designed to control the streets and rooftops, but Dr. Beetle overlooked the sewer and drainage tunnels. That's why the tunnels were planned as our primary escape route if necessary. And since one of the best exit points for you to use would be this one, which was the one we were also using, we simply waited for you here."

"Oh yeah, you're good." Violetta acknowledged. "Truce?"

"Lilith," Agatha said. "Prince Tarvek doesn't want to hurt me. He told me what you're frightened of-"

Well, that certainly drew a reaction. Adam's hand came up as if prepared to throw something, Lilith clenched both her fists, and Violetta and I both took a discreet step away from each other and got ready to duck.

"-but he wants to help." Agatha continued earnestly. "Remember, you only knew to be here because Violetta told you I was in trouble. If they'd just wanted to carry me off then they wouldn't have sent you that warning."

"That... is certainly a valid point." Lilith agreed with a nod, as her and Adam relaxed from their own ready stances.

"We're going to be on an enforced neutral ground for the next stage of the trip anyway," I pointed out reasonably. "So we'll have every opportunity for a civilized conversation. If you don't like what you hear- if Agatha doesn't like what she hears- by the end of the first leg, then we couldn't stop you from leaving if we wanted to."

"Truce," Lilith agreed after sharing a look with her husband. "But since your actions precipitated this, Your Highness, you're paying for the train tickets."

* * * * *​

Since our primary escape route had of course been the drainage tunnel access closest to the Corbetite terminal servicing Beetleburg, it didn't take very much longer before we'd all gotten ourselves safely on the train. Oh, Beetle certainly had his men out at the entrances to the train station but not even a major Spark ruler in their own city dared to directly violate Corbetite neutrality, so there were limits as to how deeply he could pressure anyone inside the station. Adam and Lilith were able to openly escort Agatha as just another average couple taking their daughter on an outing, and with Violetta and I as spotters and distractions at need they were able to navigate a slightly meandering route through the passenger terminal without any of Beetle's men ever getting a direct line-of-sight on them. Getting ourselves through the terminal without being spotted was of course simplicity itself; I wasn't usually one for old school pride but at some point you just had to admit that being a Smoke Knight was a very useful thing indeed.

After our going through the necessary confession to board and my paying for a private compartment on the train, we all settled down facing each other. Violetta and I were on one side and the Clays occupied the other. I hoped that this wouldn't be an omen for our continuing relationship.

"Agatha, where's your locket?" Lilith asked first thing.

"In my pocket. Prince Tarvek also told me what it did. All that it did." Agatha glared back angrily, at both her parents and- all right, me.

"Agatha, I know that it hurt you-" Lilith began guiltily, before her face collapsed and her eyes glittered with unshed tears. "Oh Agatha, it hurt you so much! And we hated it!"

"Then why did you-!" Agatha began to angrily retort, and I raised a hand for peace.

"Because they legitimately believed that to publicly reveal you as a Spark, let alone as Agatha Heterodyne, would lead to your death." I said. "Even if they fought as best as they could to protect you."

"If you knew that as well, then why did you ever let her take it off?" Lilith asked me.

"Well for one, because at that point Dr. Beetle was already attacking and I had to tell her why." I replied forcefully. "Herr Clay, Frau Clay- I wanted to rip that damned thing off her neck and stamp it into the dirt the very instant I realized it was what was causing her attacks. And yet I still kept my silence for weeks." I sighed. "Agatha, if you're going to hate your parents for what they did then I deserve your hatred too. I certainly didn't keep silence about it for as long as they did, but one day would still have been too long."

"And all those pretty words about your being a doctor?" she replied heatedly.

"I am a doctor, among my several other fields of expertise." I said pleadingly. "Everything I said there was true. Everything I said about Anevka was also true. I- I obviously wasn't being entirely honest with you, or with your parents, but I was still trying to be as true as I could."

Agatha blinked as if in a sudden revelation, then began to quote my own words back to me in a soft, low voice. "I believe that you won't be cursed with these headaches forever. I believe that you will go on to do amazing things. And I hope that even after you've learned more about yourself as a person, and about me as a person, that you'll still want me there alongside you to help you do them." she finished, nodding. "That's what you'd just said to me right before we were attacked. And you certainly weren't expecting us to be attacked, so you wouldn't have told me everything about the locket or all the other things you mentioned after we were already running. You would have just left things there."

"I would have." I said. "Until..."

"But you were already trying to tell me the truth, weren't you?" Agatha pressed onward. "That's why you phrased things so precisely. You were confessing that you were keeping secrets from me, about both me and yourself, and that you were hoping that I wouldn't hate you after all the secrets finally came out. Which would mean that you were already intending for them to all come out, just not as soon as they did. You- you weren't trying to manipulate me, any more than Adam and Lilith were ever trying to manipulate me. You were just afraid. Like they were."

"Yes." I said relievedly. "Although not afraid of all the same things- but yes."

"You really do care for Agatha, don't you?" Lilith said to me evenly.

"I love her." I said hopelessly. "Even though I shouldn't."

"May I ask why?" Lilith probed gently, gently laying a hand on Agatha's to interrupt her own question.

"This is the crazy part." Violetta broke in matter-of-factly. "But- okay, no one could have been more skeptical of my cousin here when he first broke the news to me, and he still convinced me. And if you know what Smoke Knights are-"

Adam and Lilith both startled a bit at that.

"Then yeah, we are." Violetta continued. "So take it from somebody who has a lot of relevant training in the field, he wasn't lying."

"Young lady, if you know who we really are then you know who we accompanied on what kinds of adventures for almost two decades." Lilith said tolerantly. "I seriously doubt you're going to say anything that we haven't already heard stranger."

"You wanna put some castlemarks on the table?" Violetta smirked.

Adam reached into his pocket and laid a ten-castlemark coin down between us, then leaned back and crossed his arms in anticipation. Violetta matched it, still grinning ear to ear.

"Time travel." I said calmly, to a pair of suspicious glares and an incredulous eyebrow raise. "And to prove it..." I suddenly chuckled at the sheer absurdity of it all. "You know, I just realized that for perhaps the first time in history the awkward conversation with a young woman is actually going to be made easier by the presence of the parents. Because Agatha and I have gotten to know each other well enough that I can plausibly know anything about her early life, but you certainly haven't been as forthcoming to me about yours. So if I told you that I knew that contrary to popular belief Bill and Barry Heterodyne had constructed you as their first student project and not as purpose-built adventuring companions...?"

"That still doesn't get you your ten castlemarks." Lilith said somewhat less suspiciously than before, while Agatha tried to fight back a grin.

"Then in the category of far less innocent revelations... Barry Heterodyne last spoke to you eleven years ago, not the over sixteen that is commonly believed. And on that occasion he warned you that Lucrezia Mongfish was the Other, that her servants the Geisterdamen would come and take Agatha if they ever learned where she was, and that he believed Baron Wulfenbach to be working with the Other."

Lilith expressionlessly pushed both coins across the table to Violetta, who pocketed them without a word. "Agatha knew the timing of Barry's last visit, but we've never told a living soul any of the other things you just said. We told you this in the future?"

"Agatha did," I nodded. "You and I never had the opportunity to meet."

"Were they-?" Agatha asked worriedly.

"Onboard Castle Wulfenbach, approximately a year from now. They were successfully revived several months later, but our paths still never had the chance to cross."

"And in the future... we were together?" Agatha asked me shyly, cutting off Lilith's attempt to ask me a no doubt much more strategically relevant question.

"No," I said to her distinct surprise. "I was courting you, certainly, but you had more than one suitor. And as of my journey back you had yet to make any decision between us."

"Who were the others?" Lilith asked me searchingly. Oh damn, I'd promised no more lies but I really hadn't wanted to mention-

"Gilgamesh Wulfenbach and one of my other far-too-numerous cousins, Prince Martellus von Blitzengaard." I replied. "We can and you certainly should entirely discount cousin Martellus-"

"He's a total jerk." Violetta cut in.

"-and his motives in pursuing Agatha were entirely political and avaricious." I continued without a beat. "Gilgamesh..." I ground to a halt.

Damn it.

"Gilgamesh loved you at least as deeply as I did," I said to Agatha, forcing every word out of the truth out of my mouth as if I were trying to swallow knives. "And he would have died to protect you as readily as I would have." I shook my head. "It was a very complicated situation even when we were hated rivals, and grew exponentially more complicated when he and I resumed being friends."

"If it was like that, then I can see why I'd have a problem choosing," Agatha said. "Because I was wondering who could have made future-me hesitate to choose you even for a single moment, or how."

"Myself," I answered bitterly, "and via several poor life choices I thankfully won't be repeating."

"In the interest of fairness I would like to point out that both of future-you's boyfriends were being idiots, at least going by the form card that I was told." Violetta said. "Everything my cousin is giving you is gonna be coming through his down-on-himself filter."

"Violetta, I have the full context and you only have my rendition of events at second and third-hand." I remonstrated with her.

"Yeah, and you also have a serious self-image problem." she shot back before turning to Agatha. "Look, I'm not going to pretend that he isn't a fixer-upper but he sincerely does mean well. So don't bounce him just because he keeps telling you what a horrible person he really is on the inside, 'cause he's not that horrible."

"Not that this isn't something we certainly need to discuss as soon as practical, but if we could refocus for now on the more strategic concerns?" Lilith said primly.

"All right." I said. "First off, at the top of the priority ladder-"

"How you time travelled and why." Lilith interrupted me.

"An accident during an experiment involving other-dimensional summoning at the British Royal Society of Sages, Adepts, and Prometheans between three and four years from now." I replied unhesitatingly.

"Ah, so you didn't plan this time trip." Lilith interpreted for Adam, after a penetrating examination of my body language by them both.

"No. Now, as to the primary sources of danger against Agatha, first and foremost among them is-" I began.

"-our homicidal Other-worshipping relatives among the Order of Jove." Violetta cut me off again. "What? You hate talking about your dad."

"You warned me about your father," Agatha said aghast, "but you didn't say-"

"They'd have cut Tarvek's throat in a minute if he hadn't pretended to grow up to be one of them." Violetta defended me. "So when he starts telling you about all the horrible things his father did that he didn't call the authorities for, keep that in mind. He was like three when his dad started doing the worst of it."

"And the Order of Jove is...?" Lilith asked.

"A secret society among all the various of the Fifty Families who are ultimately descended from Andronicus Valois," I said. "Their generations-long dream has been to revive the Shining Coalition by marrying a direct-line claimant of the Storm King to a Heterodyne princess and thus vastly invigorate common support for their rule all across Europa by directly invoking all the myths and stories tied to that legend. Plus, of course, the usual networking and powerbrokering among the various royal families to support such a claim, suitably arranged pageantry and spectacle, financial and political incentive to useful Sparks, and all the other things that go into forging a successful continent-wide governing body."

"Didn't the Baron already do that?" Agatha asked intelligently.

"The Order of Jove is several generations old," I pointed out. "The original plan didn't encompass the Baron's existence. The revised and current plans- well, some of the varied sub-factions in the Order hope to outlive him, and some hope to assassinate him-"

"AKA the morons." Violetta said.

"-and some to assemble sufficient force to defeat him militarily."

"AKA the epic morons." Violetta cut in again.

"And then there's by far the worst and most dangerous of the Order's various factions. Specifically, the one that believed that Lucrezia Mongfish was their key to power."

"Wait, they're how The Other intended to consolidate their power after devastating Europa?" Agatha said alarmedly.

"Yes." I said. "Simply bombarding everyone from the sky and devastating cities with Hive Engines is not the key to stable rule. The Other remained so incredibly anonymous because they intended to consolidate their conquest by appearing as the savior to the attacks, not as the terrifying figure behind them."

"So that was Klaus' role in her plan." Lilith said grimly. "But then how does this Order fit in?"

"Actually, the Baron had absolutely no role in anyone's plan save for his own." I pointed out to their distinct surprise. "Barry Heterodyne had either been deliberately misled by the Other so as to split him away from his greatest potential source of support, or else had just gotten some very bad intel."

"You're certain of this?" Lilith asked after her and Adam shared a hasty sign-language conversation.

"In the future that was, the Other's return-" I held up a hand to pre-empt questions. "-was fought against by Baron Wulfenbach to the utmost of his ability. There is no living man in Europa with a greater hatred for Lucrezia Mongfish, or a more fervent desire to destroy her and all her works, than the Baron." I sighed. "But it wasn't enough to save him."

"If you're certain of this, then... we should go to him right now!" Lilith cried, before slumping in relief. "And warn him of what's to come! Oh thank God! I was terrified that we wouldn't be able to get Agatha to safety, or that there wouldn't even be any safety to find."

"You need to hear all the rest of this before you make that decision," I insisted. "And we come now to the single most horrifying revelation I have out of an entire saga of nightmares. Agatha, if you start to feel overwhelmed at any time, let us know."

"I am not that delicate!" she shot back at me, insulted.

"No you're not." I agreed forcefully. "You are an incredibly strong young woman. Even with the locket still on you were, and without it you'll rapidly grow to where you will barely recognize yourself in the mirror... but in the good way!" I hastened to reassure her. "My point is that with the suppression field off you'll almost certainly start to enter early Breakthrough soon if you aren't already, and as one Spark to another please believe my warning. Emotional extremes get problematically amplified for us as a normal course of business, let alone when breaking through. You saw a bit of that with me earlier tonight."

"Okay," Agatha said, breathing deeply. "So. Keep calm. Right."

"Lucrezia Mongfish's greatest achievements as a Spark were in the field of consciousness transfer." I stated. "She intended to live forever by transferring her mind from one body to another, then again and again whenever the current stolen body grew too old in turn. And her foremost choice of new host bodies was intended to be-"

"Me." Agatha paled as the pieces came together for her.

"Agatha..." Lilith said, clutching her hand reassuringly. "Remember! Stay calm!"

"I AM PERFECTLY CALM!" Agatha shouted. "I AM-" She began hyperventilating. "I am just a little freaked out right now!"

Adam rummaged in his coat pockets until he came up with a small bag, then helped Agatha hold it over her mouth. We all waited for her to regain her center a bit before I continued.

"The device that holds or summons an imprint of Lucrezia's mind into a host body is called the Summoning Engine." I lowered my head, shamefaced. "And it's located in Castle Sturmhalten. My father is it's custodian. The reason female Sparks in Europa disappear so often is because he keeps arranging for them to be abducted to try and summon Lucrezia into." I kept going without heed for anyone else's reactions because if I didn't get this all out at once then I probably never would. "He is so fanatic to get Lucrezia back he'd use anyone for the purpose. He even put Anevka into that damnable machine, and that's why she almost died-" I kept going, faster and faster, sobbing as the words exploded- "And that's when I knew he was doing it! I'd finally found out that he'd killed all those young women but I still never told anyone! I just stood there and smiled and pretended he was doing a good thing-"

My head rocked to the side as Violetta slapped me hard across the face. "Quiet, or I'll hit you again!" she angrily demanded. "Agatha, what I said was true." Violetta turned to her earnestly. "They really would have killed him in a heartbeat if he'd tried to do anything."

"But you couldn't have helped protect him?" Agatha asked Violetta.

"When it started getting bad, he arranged to have me sent away so I wouldn't get killed." Violetta said. "But he did it by framing me as incompetent, do you believe it? He actually set me up to get cashiered and reassigned to the worst dead-end job the Order had to get me out of danger, instead of just telling me what he was doing. He didn't care if I hated him forever so long as I was safe. That's what this idiot does. He keeps trying to make the people he loves hate him and go away so that they don't have to be part of his horrible life. He doesn't ever stop to ask if anybody might want him to go with them." Violetta shrugged. "I mean, he just told you that his childhood was really messed up. Mine was no picnic, but compared to his? Yeeesh." she shuddered dramatically.

"I watched them die, Violetta." I whispered thickly. "All the ones after Anevka. They died while I stood there and did nothing. He made me watch."

"That's horrible!" Agatha choked, and I winced at her rejection before she got up and practically flew around the table to desperately hug me. "Oh Tarvek! I can't believe that all happened to you!"

"Agatha, Violetta is my cousin and so she supports me even when she shouldn't." I said, determinedly not leaning into her hug.

Lilith leaned across the table to take my hand in hers. "Prince, we've only recently met but you're almost certainly aware that the reason we agreed to let you wait until Agatha's 18th birthday before bringing up her medical issues again was so that we'd have a suitable period of time to observe you carefully. A chance to make at least a preliminary judgement on what kind of person you really were before we'd trust you with our daughter's health or even the lesser of her secrets."

"Well, now you know." I said brokenly. Because of course they knew. They knew I'd been a silent accomplice to mass murder. They knew I'd deliberately concealed the presence of an entire network of the Other's servants. They knew that-

"Yes." she said, nodding meaningfully. "Adam and I accompanied Bill and Barry on almost all their journeys save the very last ones. We fought alongside them against dozens, hundreds of villainous Sparks and warlords and pirates and constructs. And it wasn't like the stories and plays, Agatha." she said to her daughter. "It was nothing remotely so innocent. It was monsters, and madmen, and every variety of atrocity imaginable." she sighed softly. "More than almost anyone, my husband and I know what evil looks like. And we also know what the scars and pain that evil leaves behind looks like." she said to me compassionately. "And we know which one of those you look like, Tarvek." she continued in a motherly tone of voice as she looked me directly in the eye. "From what you and your cousin have said, your father is one of the worst monsters in human skin that we've ever heard of. But he did not raise a monster for his son."

"But I didn't help-" I began.

"But you didn't die." Lilith reassured me as Adam nodded in support. "And here you are, at the first viable opportunity that you have found, and fighting against your father with everything you have."

"Oh, altruism is not my motive there," I said viciously. "All right, last card on the table. We talked about the Order of Jove's original plan, and Lucrezia's variant on it re: inserting herself into the Heterodyne princess that was to be married so as to orbitally bombard her cake and eat it too, but we never talked about who the Storm King that would marry the Heterodyne girl to cement their claim would be, did we? Going by the current bloodlines the second candidate in line for that position is my cousin Martellus, hence his aforementioned ambition. Would anyone care to guess who the first one is?" I finished flatly.

"Wait, how could you be so powerless if you were potentially heir to such a powerful-" Agatha began in shock as she drew away from me, only to be cut off by Adam and Violetta almost simultaneously making gestures as if they were operating hand puppets.

"They were raising him as a political pawn to be used by the rest of his family, dear." Lilith explained. "Which explains the apparent contradiction between the thoroughness of your training and your relative lack of agency."

"Oh no," Violetta said. "Prince Sneaky here deliberately bombed the training and learned it all on the sly. I'm the only member of the family that knows that he can so much as punch his way out of a paper bag." I noted with a flicker of amusement that Violetta didn't mention exactly how recently she'd come to gain this knowledge.

Lilith looked at me penetratingly. "Your Order's plans would not have been entirely abandoned after Barry took Agatha away from Lucrezia's servants as an infant and thus rendered their original one non-operative. But without Agatha, the Heterodyne bloodline would end entirely. What's their backup plan?"

"To wait until the operational portions of Castle Heterodyne have decayed enough that it can be either suborned or deactivated, then fake a proclamation from it for a phony heir." I said. "Which barring disruptions to their schedule they anticipated happening at some point a few years from now. They already have a false Heterodyne Girl that they've been preparing for years. She's Lucrezia Mongfish's niece via her sister Demonica, Zola Malfeazium. She was recently operating in Paris under a cover identity as a dancer and singer, 'Zola la Sirene Doree'."

"That girl is bad news," Violetta insisted. "Seriously. She's a Smoke Knight like me, and in the future we fought and she solidly kicked my ass. Don't be fooled by her harmless fluffball blonde ditz act-"

"An act that, for the record, successfully fooled me for years the first time around." I cut in. "And I like to believe that I'm very perceptive."

"He is," Violetta agreed. "And this girl still had him skunked. And she's a trained killer and a total psycho. You even think you see her coming then don't ask questions, just run."

"Would you be able to draw us a sketch?" Lilith asked calmly.

"Good idea," Violetta agreed. "Catch me tomorrow and I'll do one for you."

"This was the girl you were supposed to marry?" Agatha asked me, aghast.

"I'm as horrified at the thought as you are!" I reassured her.

"Yeah, I mean even Tweedle wouldn't deserve that." Off of everyone's expressions, she continued. "And now you know cousin Martellus' embarassing childhood nickname. If you ever meet him, feel free to torture him with it."

"Your family reunions must be horribly fascinating," Lilith replied to her with grim amusement.

"Don't get her started," I said, cutting Violetta off. "She can go on for hours. Hours. And before we get distracted-"

"Agatha," Lilith said, holding up her hand to ask for silence. "I believe Tarvek is trying to make the point that because of who you are and what inheritance you were born to you will never have a romantic relationship that is entirely free of political concerns, and that will inevitably complicate the motivations of even the most sincere suitors you could possibly have. You're the last Heterodyne and that means at some point you will have to go back and take up the claim you were born to, that of the rightful ruler of Mechanicsburg. Like Doctor Beetle you will be a Spark ruler one day and responsible for an entire city, only more so than him."

"I remember Violetta once telling me how sad the city was without their Heterodynes," Agatha said softly. "I don't have a choice, do I?"

"You could-" I began, and Agatha shook her head.

"No, Tarvek. I meant, I don't have an ethical choice. You're the heir to Sturmhalten, just as I am to Mechanicsburg. As much as Sturmhalten only contains bad memories for you, would you walk away from it? Abandon the duty you were born to just so that you could have a life of ease?" Agatha asked me. "Or do you still hope to one day save your home?"

I looked back at her, pleading with my eyes. I didn't have any answer that I could give in words.

Lilith sighed. "Agatha, you're entirely correct. As the last Heterodyne, the responsibility for Mechanicsburg is yours. And we did nothing to prepare you for those responsibilities, and we're ashamed that we didn't. But we never expected Barry to be gone so long, and without him we had no way to safely get you through a Breakthrough when you were old enough without risking the attention that we had thought would doom us all." She turned to look at me. "You were the first sign of hope we had in such a long while, did you know that? Dr. Beetle had said that there was nothing he could do for Agatha except what was already being done, but we had no way to check if he was telling the truth. And then you came along. A powerful and experienced Spark yourself, a medical expert in addition, and someone that genuinely cared for Agatha-"

"We just discussed why that isn't true." I said, and felt Agatha wince through her arm on my shoulder.

"I don't believe that," Lilith contradicted me, "even if you do. You didn't see the expression on your face when you first leapt to catch my daughter when she fell, Tarvek. You were so nakedly desperate to reach her that I was honestly alarmed at the intensity of your emotions towards a young woman you'd only just met. I was less alarmed after your explanation that part of you had been mentally back in the moment and watching your sister suffering again-"

"I'm sure he was." Violetta said, giving me other shoulder a brief affectionate squeeze.

"-but it was more than that, wasn't it? You truly do love Agatha for Agatha, not because of any title or crown or lands that come with her. If she were merely a means to an end for you then you would be possessive, and perhaps even affectionate from time to time, but you wouldn't truly care." Lilith finished, as Adam nodded along with her every word. "But you obviously do care for Agatha. So much that you can't even express how much without confusing yourself. And that caring is why we didn't try to separate you. As soon as we'd known you long enough to be entirely certain of your sincerity we'd planned to tell you about the locket and ask for your help with it. To see if you could somehow lower its intensity, find a way to retune it so it didn't cause pain, even to remove it entirely if Agatha's Breakthrough could be handled safely. We aren't Sparks, and we were helpless to do anything with sparkwork except just continue on as we'd been instructed. We'd hoped that you could find us a way out of our dilemma." Lilith shrugged. "And if not remotely in the manner that we'd expected, you have."

I felt Agatha's arms settle around me again, tighter this time, as her head affectionately leaned on my shoulder. "I'm sorry. I didn't understand." she whispered in my ear.

"Thank you, Agatha." I said. And then, with more peace than I'd felt in a long, long time, I reached up to take Agatha's hand in mine... and lift it from my shoulder. "But even if your parents approve, this is not what we should do."

I turned to face Adam and Lilith. "It will be a little over two days until our train reaches its destination. I'll spend the rest of tonight telling you all- with or without Agatha present, if you think she needs the rest- everything else about the future that I saw. And then-" I held up a hand. "You will sit and discuss what you think needs to be done, as a family. Not just Agatha's choices of the heart, but the strategic choices facing us all as well. And you'll take as much time as is available to process what you've heard and be more certain of your feelings." I turned to Agatha. "And when we arrive, then and only then will you decide if we get off the train together, or if only one family does while the other goes on their separate way."

Adam and Lilith both beamed at me as if...

"I told you," Violetta said proudly. "He only thinks he's a horrible person."

... as if I were their own son?

"Thank you," Lilith said, squeezing my hand. "You'll still be available in the next couple of days if we have further questions, of course?"

"We'll be right in the next car," Violetta reassured her.

"All right," Lilith said, patting the seat next to her. Agatha gave me a final squeeze and stood up to walk back across to the other side of the table and sit down next to her mother. Lilith pulled a notebook out of her jacket pocket and a pencil, and laid it neatly in front of her.

"In the original timeline, Agatha's locket was lost next March when-" I began reciting.

* * * * *​

Even though it had depleted my purse more than a bit I'd financed enough purchases at stops along the way to give us all sufficient clothes and sundries to outfit ourselves decently. The Clays had already brought along a set of emergency supplies for each of them in their prepacked getaway bags, but I felt obligated to provide more than the minimum. I intended to give the Clays the remainder of my purse as a generous travel fund to continue on with if we parted ways. It didn't matter if I got off the train without a bent copper coin to my name, as I could easily replenish funds at the upcoming stop.

Agatha's Breakthrough had indeed begun before we'd even gotten halfway there. Fortunately the Corbetites had some experience with giving sanctuary to young Sparks only just beginning to realize what they were and frantically fleeing one step ahead of an unpleasant home situation, and Agatha had mentioned the possibility of this in her initial confession while boarding, so they were entirely understanding of the sleep-construction incident that had turned half of their available silverware into a rather bizarre attempt at a dishwashing machine. In fact, the train's chief engineer, a Spark himself, had shown a positive delight in helping Agatha tear it down and rebuild it. Brother Ulm, our conductor, had merely made a polite "request" for an additional donation to cover replacement silverware and by the end of the affair we'd actually had the dining car's new automated silverware polisher up and running. It had been far less traumatic or violent than her Breakthrough in the original timeline, but then she'd been far less full of negative emotions and with far more support available.

Still, all journeys must eventually end. And so as the train slowed and began our final approach through the outskirts of the city, I debated with myself as to whether to stay in my compartment or go try and see Agatha for one final conversation in the last half-hour before we finally arrived. After all, I didn't have any real expectation that she'd choose to stay with me. She sympathized, certainly, but after hearing all the things I'd done? All the schemes I'd tried to weave around her? All the mistakes I'd made? And how, even after being given a second chance, I'd still been so selfish as to-

"Tarvek?" her voice came from behind me, and I spun to see her in the new dress her mother had picked - well, with a tiny bit of assistance from yours truly - for her at our last clothes stop. Unlike the outfit that I'd first seen Agatha in this one was still entirely within the limits of decorum, certainly, but was anything but drab or shapeless. Her outfit fit her like she was born to it, and it clearly projected I am strong. I am cherished. I am worthy. Or perhaps that was the young woman wearing it...

She was so beautiful.

"Agatha." I said, forcing myself to smile gently. "Here to say goodbye?"

"No," she said, as my eyes opened in astonishment.

"But-" I began dazedly.

"Sssh," she said, placing one finger on my lips as she stepped into my compartment and let the door slide closed behind her. "It's okay."

"Agatha, are you sure-?" I began again.

"No, I'm not." she said to my shock. "But... are people ever really sure about things like this?" she continued, as I confusedly tried to follow her thoughts. "Think about it. You literally came back in time with more foreknowledge than anyone ever recorded, and you still aren't really certain about your why your heart wants it wants. So how can I be?" she finished.

"Agatha, if you choose this then you know what comes with it," I told her. "The Lightning Crown. The politics, the lies, the betrayals-"

"The future of Europa." she said. "One that doesn't fall back into the Long War, like you saw it do with your own eyes. And my future, too."

"Your future could be whatever you wanted it to be," I said. "I might need you to advance myself in this world. But you don't need me. You don't need anyone to survive and thrive except you. Agatha Heterodyne, Lady of Mechanicsburg."

"You're wrong, Tarvek. Everyone needs someone. Even in the future that you knew, I still needed my friends." Agatha replied. "And in this time and place, I need both my friends and my family." She placed her hand on my heart. "And I need you."

"I'm not the only one," I said, struggling against what I couldn't even name.

"Gilgamesh," she acknowledged. "You know, for a man who says he hated his romantic rival you did an exceptional job of talking him up even when you were trying to pretend not to. He really was your best friend, wasn't he?"

"Until Violetta and I finally reconciled, he was the only one I'd ever had." I said. "And there I was, repaying him for that friendship with a knife right between the shoulder blades. I suppose that really does make me a Storm Lord in truth, doesn't it?"

"Tarvek," Agatha said. "I understand why it's complicated for you. Try to imagine how complicated it is for me! But what you described was-" she chewed her lip. "It was real to you, because you were there. But I wasn't there, do you understand? That was another Agatha, in another time."

"If we accept that as a starting postulate then that makes my love for you-"

"-perfectly normal." Agatha said. "Even in this time alone, we've known each other for months. That's more than enough to at least begin a courtship. Goodness, my mother's seen marriages happen in less time."

"Do I love you?" I asked her. "Or do I love another woman that you resemble, that I'm trying to make you into-"

And then her lips were on mine, and mine on hers, and the world no longer mattered.

"Were you kissing a ghost, then?" she asked when we finally separated. "Or were you kissing me?"

"I don't know." I whispered.

Agatha smiled at me, then laid her hand on my heart again. "This is just a little bit broken, isn't it? Oh, it still beats as fine as ever, but you've been hurting for so long that you don't know how to hear it clearly. But it's all right." she reassured me. "They heal eventually, with enough care."

"It's still not too late for you to go take the less broken one," I replied.

"It's not a contest, Tarvek. It's not a matter of more worthy versus less worthy. And even if it was, my mother's already told you. You are so much better a man than you think you are." Agatha reproved me mildly. "Think back on all you've said and done. Even if your journey across time was an accident, you still used it to try and help me as much as possible. And even if you stood to gain something as well, every time you had the choice to place your own interests over mine... you chose mine." Agatha's grin lit up the world as she poked me in the breastbone lightly with her finger. "And I asked my mother about the same doubts and fears you've been having. About all the complications and ethical questions about a relationship that is asymmetric across time, about parallel universes and prophetic foreknowledge and oracle's paradoxes. And do you know what she said?"

"Something very wise, I would imagine." I said.

"She said that love was something even the greatest Sparks couldn't ever hope to analyze, either logically or mechanically. And that whatever else may or may not have happened around or to us, a good relationship ultimately came down to two questions."

"Which were?" I asked curiously.

"Tarvek, have you ever considered that Adam and Lilith once faced a relationship puzzle fully as complicated as our own?" she asked obliquely.

"How would they-" and then I began to realize.

"Precisely," she said. "They were literally constructed together." she said. "Made to order by a pair of brothers, who like teenagers everywhere could get soppily romantic over the strangest things. It probably never occurred to my father and uncle that there was something just a little bit strange about building a pair of constructs and then expecting them to just... pair up because they're expected to, like Barry and the High Priestess always are in Heterodyne shows. How do you imagine that they handled that?"

"I wouldn't begin to speculate." I said.

"Well, they first began by deciding that no matter what anyone else expected of them, it was their bodies and their lives and they had the right to choose what to do with them," Agatha said. "As you and I both have, and freely acknowledge about the other."

"And then?" I asked, fascinated.

"And then they angsted about it for the incredibly longest time." Agatha nodded. "But eventually they grew old enough together to realize that they'd been asking all the wrong questions all along. That it didn't matter how odd the route was by which they'd gotten there, or what was expected of them, or whatever other bizarre life complications that sparkwork could throw in their path. The only two questions that truly mattered were 'Do we truly care for each other?', and 'Would we be good for each other?'"

"Agatha-" I gulped.

"And my answer to both those questions is 'Yes'." she said.

"Yes." I answered her after a long wondering pause. "Mine as well."

"I love you." she said simply.

"I love you too." I echoed, and we held each other silently. "No regrets?" I eventually asked.

"About the road not taken?" Agatha replied. "I wish Gilgamesh well, and I look forward to one day meeting him as your friend. But nothing more."

"Paris!" the porter yelled outside in the hallway. "Paris in five minutes!"

"We'd better grab our things." Agatha said.

"The porters will get them," I reassured her.

"Do you think your grandmother will like me?" Agatha asked tentatively.

"Like the girl whose existence will upset years of scheming with a major new variable?" I inquired ironically. "Like the fact that the ongoing race among her grandchildren just got scooped by a massive upset win out of nowhere? Like that the family pawn will be promoting himself to a king, right alongside a promoted queen?" I grinned at her. "She'll love you. It'll be the least bored she's been in years. And you and I are the best chance that the Order of Jove will ever have, and even if there will be others too foolish to see that for themselves my grandmother is never a fool."

"And that's before we explain to her exactly how many schemes of Lucrezia's people we'll be imploding by raising up the genuine Heterodyne Girl over a fully-operational Mechanicsburg rather than the cardboard cutouts that Uncle Selnikov's cronies were trying to sell her! Hell, we can just drop some anonymous tips for the Baron and distract him with chasing after them for months!" Violetta called to us cheerfully from the doorway. "Hey, Agatha! So, you finally decided to give him a try?"

"I think it's been going well so far." Agatha grinned back at her.

"Well, if you decide to turn and jump right back on the train after you actually meet Grandmother and all the rest of our big screwed-up family, then rest assured absolutely no one will blame you." Violetta said.

"Least of all me," I chimed in. "Although I would appreciate an offer of sanctuary in Mechanicsburg if we choose that route."

"Oh, I'm sure I could find you both a place somewhere." Agatha joked back. "I hear that my new house just loves guests." she grinned wickedly.

"And so we see that the savage and heartless nature of the Heterodyne dynasty is upheld for another generation," I said portentously, and two peals of feminine laughter greeted my ears.

"About what you said about a 'courtship'," I asked Agatha as we walked down the corridor. "You understand that my family will be expecting a firm betrothal up front, and have significant expectations about living up to it? As far as they're concerned we've already 'courted' and are now committed."

"Of course," Agatha said. "But the wedding can't take place until after I've reclaimed my place as the Heterodyne in Mechanicsburg, and once that's happened it'll be beyond their power to force me to do anything. The trick will be to keep their eyes so focused on the shiny prize that they don't entirely realize that until it's too late." Agatha took my arm in hers and we continued to walk along together. "If we don't work out..." she shook her head. "Mother and Father taught me that miserable people live miserable lives, and do their best to force their children to be miserable as well. Even my blood father and uncle didn't entirely escape that. And you or Violetta certainly didn't. Even I didn't, not entirely."

"Wait. Mother and Father? When did-" I asked.

"Ours wasn't the only relationship affected by all the recent confessions and re-examining of our lives." Agatha said. "Adam and Lilith hadn't let me call them that before because they'd felt guilty over what they'd been helping do to me." she explained, tapping the place on her neck where a trilobite locket had once sat. "But that's no longer between us now. And I intend to do nothing similar to my children when I have them one day. Even if it means breaking a betrothal to great political inconvenience because some nasty old people wanted to force a commitment before we were truly ready."

"You two are crazy about each other and you will be just fine." Violetta eye-rolled behind us. "Eugh! I wanted you to boot him out of his martyr complex, not catch it from him!"

"She's just pointing out that no matter what the rest of our family will try to trap us in, we're still free." I gently remonstrated with my cousin.

"Okay, I can't argue with that." Violetta agreed.

"Agatha. Tarvek." Lilith said to us both as we both came up to where they'd been standing by the door. "Is everything settled?" Her only reply was Agatha snaking her arm around my waist just as I did around her shoulders, and us both grinning at her parents like idiots.

Adam slapped his palms together and gave us a thumbs-up, and Lilith smiled back at us like a proud parent should.

"Paris, arriving!" the conductor called, and the train gave a gentle lurch as the already-slowing cars came to a final halt. After a brief moment the doors opened as the porter pulled on them from the outside, and then he placed the step in front of the doors.

"The City of Love," Agatha said with a meaningful squeeze, as we all headed down the steps into the great echoing halls of the Paris station.

"Tarvek!" I heard cousin Seffie call, and we all turned to see the welcoming party that had been alerted to our arrival by heliograph from our most recent stop. Seffie had brought her personal Smoke Knight Varpa and enough footmen to move the bags, but none of the rest of the family.

"Hey Seffie!" Violetta called.

"Violetta! You and Tarvek are assigned back together?" she said, looking at my and Agatha's arms around each other and then at our guests with an analytical eye. "Oh cousin. Here I'd thought you were merely taking a sabbatical year to study clanks, but clearly you've been up to things again."

"Agatha, this is my cousin Princess Xersephnia von Blitzengaard, who we all call 'Seffie'. Seffie, this is Agatha Heterodyne and her foster parents, Punch and Judy." I introduced them matter-of-factly, as if one brought living legends to life every day.

"Although we currently go by Adam and Lilith Clay," Lilith explained equally offhandedly.

"Well," Seffie said after a pause during which I honestly had to admire her sheer savoir-faire at not visibly jawdropping. "It certainly is a pleasure to meet you, Agatha." she said, politely shaking hands. "Adam. Lilith." she greeted them in turn with a courtly nod.

Violetta wordlessly held out her hand and I dropped a ten-castlemark coin in it. Seffie took one look at our byplay and started giggling, and that set off an explosion of laughter all across the platform.

"Come along, everyone." Seffie said cheerfully after we settled down, waving us all to the nearby steam coach. "Your arrival here had already had drawn Grandmother's curiosity, but now? Now, I do believe that you will have her attention."

* * * * *
​

Author's Note: And so our love story reaches its end, on a train to Paris no less. I was going for the full penny-sparkly romance when I wrote this, and I did.

I know the usual pattern in fanfic is for Agatha to bust out and start dramatically showing her strength when the locket comes off, but I wanted to try something different. I know a little about chronic pain sufferers IRL, although nothing remotely as awful as Agatha's situation. So I wrote from that along a theme of 'She was that strong all along.' Because as Tarvek pointed out in chapter one with his comparision to Anevka, it takes fortitude to suffer that harshly on a constant basis and yet continually restrain yourself from ever venting that suffering on others.

So, I went heavy into exploring Agatha's pre-unlocketing life and how it could be different, and with Adam and Lilith as well. The webcomic didn't really give them more than a couple chances to show that the Heterodyne Boys' sidekicks for most of their adventures would themselves logically be epic-level adventurers, but they are, and even if I didn't get to fully showcase it I at least got to play with it a little. And I wanted to give them a chance to be good parents, too, and so they are. And really, when you think about it, the circumstances and expectations that their relationship was originally forged under really was as fucked up as any time-loop romance could be.

And thus begins Agatha Heterodyne's journey in this timeline. Not a thing of rayguns blazing and dramatic escapes from death (although that may well come later), but simply a tale of a young man who crossed time to help a young woman learn who she truly was when she'd believed that she was so much lesser... and then for her to turn about and do the same thing for him. And who, along with her family and friends, has simply decided that this is the best chance they have to try and build a better future.

I'm also amused that for perhaps the first time in GG fanfic history, Agatha is in a relationship with the full support of the family and 99% chaperoned Victorian style.

And be honest. How many of you thought it was Mechanicsburg right up until the porter called Paris? I am a great beeg schneeky pants sometimes. And I never said which family was going to get off the train and which one would stay on had Agatha decided not to go with Tarvek, did I?

"Prince of Time" was originally posted in the format of the three main-story chapters and then several sidestory stand-alones chronicling both Tarvek and Violetta's reconnection shortly before the events of this story begin and several reaction shots of events in Europa after they get off the train in Paris. I'll post those tomorrow, so people have a chance to read and digest this. (Or you can just head over to SB and spoil yourselves, if you want).

 

[cliffc999]

"You!" Violetta spat at me furiously. "Of course, it would have to be you! And I thought it couldn't any get worse than Mechanicsburg!"

Of course Father hadn't briefed her on why she was being reassigned here, and neither would the Order. No, it would have been just 'Apply for undergraduate status at TPU. Find and rent an apartment suite of these specifications. Await your protectee there.' and nothing more. I really should have sent her a letter and given her a chance to prepare herself to see me again. Then again, if I'd done that she might have deliberately put herself on the injured list to avoid having to report here-

"Hello, Violetta." I said evenly. Given the circumstances of our parting prior to this point in the original timeline I hadn't expected anything less. I could only imagine how many knives she'd thrown at my face painted on a target.

"That's it?" she glowered at me. "No 'Hey, Violetta, I'm sorry about ruining your whole career?' Or 'You won't believe this, but I didn't actually mean to sabotage you multiple times, stage my own poisoning to make you look bad, and falsify those readiness reports?' Not even a-"

"You gave me years of devoted service and I did nothing but abuse your trust and lie to you?" I said.

Violetta stopped dead and peered at me suspiciously. "What are you up to, weasel boy?"

"First off," I said professionally, "I hope you already swept for listening devices."

"Like duh," she sneered. "The orders said prepare this place as an operational safehouse, so I di- oh crap." her face fell. "Let me get this straight. This isn't just you going to college again, is it? No, you're going to be trying to pull active measures on a major Spark ruler in in his own town, with no backup except yours truly, who will almost certainly end up having to carry your incompetent butt on her back through the entire Clockwork Army? Was getting me busted to the most dead-end job in the Smoke Knights not enough cousin torture for you?" she came to a halt. If we hadn't been under enemy-territory drill she'd almost certainly have been shouting loud enough to shake the walls, but as is the intensity of her hatred still came through even though the volume could not.

I turned and locked the apartment door behind us. "Ah. As to that-" I shrugged. "Hit me."

"Did you mix up your antidotes again?" Violetta asked me, while cracking her knuckles. "Because you know what happens whenever we-"

If I'd been foolish enough to be caught flat-footed then I'd have deserved everything she called me and more. Of course she was going to try and sucker-punch me while we were still talking. We were Smoke Knights, after all.

"Damn!" Violetta said as her knuckles came to a halt one inch from the inside of the door, and she immediately reoriented to face me where I was standing behind the nearby armchair. "How out of shape did I get on sleeper agent duty?"

"Bare hands and nothing that wakes the neighbors, please." I said. "The operational concerns on this are going to be very tight."

"Yeah, yeah," she said, and then the armchair was over in front of the door- she'd actually been improving- while she stood directly where it had used to be and came in with a feint to the shins and then a knee strike to the oh dear that would not have been fun at all if it had connected-

Violetta went from anger to rage to sheer incredulous fury to outright disgust and self-loathing over the course of the next five minutes, as we both stretched our unarmed combat drill and our silent killing drill to the maximum while fighting to a stalemate. Fighting in an apartment building while not making any noise that would disturb the neighbors was its own entire science, and doing so while simultaneously not compromising any combat capability was an art.

"Fucking dammit!" she almost broke noise discipline with the volume of her yell, and then threw up her hands in surrender. "I am so awful at this! I can't even beat you anymore-" and then her eyes went wide as saucers as I drew her into a hug.

"I missed you." I said, my voice rasping. "I shouldn't have sent you away."

"Why?" she asked me, the hurt thickening her own voice. "Why did you do that?"

I needed to do a hasty bit of mental arithmetic to make sure my casualty report synced with the current timeline.. damn, exactly how many had I lost in only the last year before Mechanicsburg the last time... ah.

"Because your next ten replacements are all dead now." I put it as simply as I could. "Things got... bad."

"And you didn't think I was good enough to even try?" she demanded.

"Violetta," I said. "I barely even knew some of their names. But you and I grew up together! We were raised together-" I sighed. "I would sooner have lost Anevka than lose you." I said to her furious disbelief. "And I know what I'm talking about."

"So, you're saying that you 'love' me so much that you wouldn't even let me do the one thing I trained my whole life to do? That you 'love' me so much that you'd frame me? Even for our family, what the hell kind of 'love' is that?" she raged.

"I didn't say I was being smart!" I replied, stung deeply by the justice of her remarks.

"What the hell happened to you?" she said slowly, as she peered much more closely at me, noting my body language, my fatigue, my- well, my degree of emotional compromise.

"First off, I want you to go back and objectively re-evaluate the combat we just had," I said didactically. "How fast we were moving. What maneuvers we were both executing. The amount of adaptation and perception we both needed. Because I wasn't keeping up with you because you'd gone that slack in Mechanicsburg, Violetta. You're actually better than you were when you were first assigned there."

Violetta actually spent a full minute silently running it through in her head... several times, as she didn't believe her results.

"Okay," she said. "Yeah, you're right, that wasn't low-speed at all. So you've either been training like crazy since we split up or you were sandbagging the whole time."

"Both." I agreed. "Is there anything to drink in here? It was a long trip."

"Water and juice," she said, pointing me at the kitchen. I headed to the refrigerator and pulled out my selection.

"Do you want anything?" I asked.

"Grape," she said, and I poured a glass for her as well as myself and brought it back to her. We each took our seats in the living room, and I tried to decide yet again what the best conversational approach would be. I'd been preparing for this conversation for weeks, but I hadn't yet settled on an ideal approach.

Violetta, for all that she saw herself as only a simple bodyguard, was actually almost as intelligent as I was. We had different interests and had also had different emphases during several portions of our training, and I was of course a Spark and she wasn't, but in the categories of sheer deviousness and psychological manipulation she was nowhere near just being the simple attendant or athlete that she affected to be.

So I had to be very tricky in making sure that I used none of my usual conversational tricks, especially not by habit. We'd been first assigned to each other when we entered the preliminary training cadre at age six. She'd been with me since until I'd managed to get her cashiered for alleged incompetence several months after beginning my studies in Paris. She knew me better than anyone, certainly far better than any other member of my family. But then we'd grown apart-

Professional first, I decided. To draw her interest and make her know at least the approximate magnitude of the stakes. And to let her know how badly I needed her.

I withdrew an advertising pamphlet for a Heterodyne show that I'd brought along as a prop, and held it up for her while pointing my finger at two specific faces. "The last surviving child of these two people is currently living here in Beetleburg, unaware of her true heritage." Violetta almost dropped her glass on the floor as my finger settled on Bill Heterodyne and Lucrezia Mongfish's drawings. "Her guardians know but are keeping her sequestered, largely out of fear of the consequences of her reveal and an inability to manage it on their own. Doctor Beetle also knows who she is, and is preserving her in ignorance for some agenda of his own- I'm not certain which, but probably not in her best interests."

"You mean a real one," Violetta said, almost whispering. "Not some pretender that either we or somebody else has been setting up. You found a real one."

"The real one." I agreed. "The very last of her line."

"Jesus-" she swore. "An actual honest-to-God heir... and a girl, too! That's the Holy Grail of the entire project! So what, we're just the vanguard then? How big a task force is the Order going to be sending on this?"

"You and I are the only two members of the family who know," I said. "My information source was direct to me and I have not even dared breathe a word of this to anyone else. No backup, no extraction. We're doing this as our own private intrigue."

"What do you mean 'we'?" Violetta said reflexively, before recovering. "Okay," she breathed. "Yeah, I can get why you'd want to get your shot in first before calling in anyone else, given that everybody from Tweedle on down would go nuts trying to climb over your corpse to reach her. And you picked me for your only support on this? How desperate are you?"

"Violetta," I remonstrated. "You are, in literal truth, the only Smoke Knight in the entire world I would trust with these secrets or to watch my back through this."

"Don't try to con me," she snapped. "I know you better than that."

"Precisely," I said. "We know each other. There's a reason primary personal Knights are assigned to their protectees at as early an age as they are. Its the only way there can even begin to be any actual, personal bond of trust between two people in the festering snakepit we call an extended family."

"Yeah, until you broke that trust." Violetta burst out. "Even if you thought you had good reasons, even if you thought you were saving my life, that still isn't enough to justify what you did. I would have given my life for you! That was my duty! And in return for all that devotion, what did you give me?"

"Freedom!" I snapped back. "Not having everything chosen for you at birth. Not being looked at as merely a tool to be wielded. Not having to die an unmourned death in an unmarked grave keeping another useless redundant prince alive for another useless filthy day! Yes, Mechanicsburg was an obscure posting that could be filled by a half-trained monkey but that was the point! So long as you made monthly check-in nobody would care whatever you did! You could-" I shook my head. "You could play the gamba, you could make friends, go to parties- live a normal life-" I choked. "Stay the hell out of fucking Sturmhalten-"

"Did you ask me if that was what I wanted?" Violetta replied tightly, although not angrily.

"Violetta, can you name a single occasion in your entire life that you have chosen what you wanted as your first priority?" I sighed.

"Are we talking about my life or yours here?" she asked me perceptively.

"Well, they do say people like to give away at Winterfair all the gifts that they secretly wish somebody else could give them." I replied after a long pause.

"Okay," she said, after a sigh. "You were dumb. You were thinking you were doing me a favor, even if it actually ripped my guts out, but that's the dumb. You didn't-" she sighed again. "You obviously wouldn't have picked me as your solo backup for a mission this insane if you didn't legitimately have faith in my professional competence, trust issues or not. It'd be less risky for you to try and find some really sweet blackmail on somebody like Obsidian and armlock him into this, or risk cutting a deal with Grandmother even though you have nothing to bargain with in hand right now, than to drop yourself into crap this deep with a partner who wouldn't be up to the pace and no support beyond that. So... okay." she agreed. "You screwed up, and you will be owing me for that screw-up for a long, long time, but you still believe in me and you still want my help. I'll take that as an apology."

"Thank you." I said softly.

"So," she said briskly. "How certain are you of your intel? What was the source and could it even possibly have informed anyone else? What cover story did you use to get us both here and how much do you think your father, or anybody else, believed it?"

"Get your blood test kit out," I directed. "Because there's no way you're going to believe that I haven't been taking the wrong doses until after you've read the reagent strip for yourself."

* * * * *​

Of course it wasn't as simple as just telling her. Violetta was a professional, and I was trying to tell her the most absurdly unbelievable story imaginable. She'd outright exploded as soon as I'd said 'time travel', swearing and cursing at me for trying another attempt to con her after supposedly reconciliating with her.

And then she interrogated me for hours, making me run through the salient points again and again, using every trick and misdirection imaginable to try and catch me in a contradiction or giving suspiciously too few or too many details. And she forced me to tell the story strictly in the order of her questions, as scattershot and random as they were, rather than let me try to organize the presentation. That could come later. What she wanted now was as many facts as possible to put on the whiteboard and see if they made a consistent yet not-too-perfect picture, or if they showed the telltale signs of either a tissue of lies or a precision-crafted web of disinformation.

But as she drew me further and further out and onto more and more emotional topics, she needed less and less tradecraft to confirm what I was saying. We'd known each other most of our lives, after all. I could still fool her if I tried - I had done so consistently for years about my alleged lack of competence on the combat courses, after all - but I couldn't fool her when I wasn't really trying, and I certainly couldn't fool her when I was legitimately emotionally compromised to the degree that I was.

I certainly hadn't been able to even remotely keep my composure when I'd reached the part immediately before my departure to the past. The part where Violetta had gone missing in the Royal Society's undersea dome, after a bloody fight in Agatha's quarters versus an unknown assailant. The part where she'd been missing long enough, even through all the alarums and excursions that followed, to have no realistic chance of still being alive even if Agatha's party had never found a body. And the sheer despair and rage that had filled me, that even my single-handed rampage versus the dozens of monsters and constructs filling the entire dome hadn't done the slightest bit to ebb, when I'd received the news.

"Damn," Violetta said. "Look- you know that's how I'd have wanted to go, right? Whoever that assassin was that was waiting in my lady's chambers- future-me's lady- I obviously took the bastard with me. His extraction team might have cleared my corpse along with theirs but they'd scrubbed their whole op." She sighed. "That's what Smoke Knights do. We keep our people alive and make their enemies dead."

"You're not just a Smoke Knight, Violetta," I said. "You're my cousin- no, I have lots of cousins, and I loathe most of them." I shook my head. "In every way but blood, you're my sister." I said to her complete, jaw-gaping shock. "Everything that siblings are supposed to have, we had. I loved Anevka when I was younger, and I still mourn for the girl she was, but-" I shrugged. "She's only the woman I share parents with. You're my family. In the future I had to mourn losing you and Anevka both, and I know which loss made me sigh. And which one made me weep."

"If you dare make me cry then I swear, I won't be the only weeping person in this apartment," Violetta mock-threatened me as she sniffled.

"Too late," I said, as my own eyes glittered with unshed tears and I didn't even try for the 'My, dusty in here, isn't it?' gambit.

"And I'm sorry about Anevka," Violetta said softly. "God, that had to be so hard for you. But she was already a ghost, right?" she tried to reassure me. "You were just laying her to rest, after she'd already passed?"

"At the time I... deactivated her in the original timeline, that's what I sincerely believed." I said. "Or perhaps that's just what I was telling myself at the time so I could make myself actually go through with it." I sighed. "But it is incontrovertible scientific fact that Anevka's original, organic body is clinically dead and only kept as warm it is by the life-support engines." I continued. "I made sure of that again before I left Sturmhalten this time, just in case I'd come back far enough to still be able to-" I sighed. "But no. The only 'Anevka' that now exists is the clank. And I still couldn't tell if you if there was an actual consciousness transfer, albeit inadvertent, or if there was merely a personality emulation caused by the long period of close-coupling between the clank brain and Anevka's dying one." I shrugged. "You'll need a far better philosopher than me to tell whether or not that consciousness is really 'her'."

"But either way we're still talking about a situation like the experiments the Hurwood brothers were doing in Paris," Violetta said. "With the post-vital personality drift issues."

"And by this point Anevka's had far too much drift-" I agreed.

"I suppose it's better to think that the reason she's a killer robot now is because of the technological issues and not because she was a chip off your dad's block all along." Violetta said, still not entirely over having found out about Father's serial killing of young lady Sparks in the Summoning Engine. Or about how my discovery of that after Anevka's "accident" had been a large part of my decision to drive Violetta away, even if it had taken me over a year to finally nerve myself up to start doing so.

"I should have just let her die," I said quietly.

"Hey, don't you talk like that!" Violetta corrected me. "I saw you then, remember? If you'd made the same decision your father had, to abandon her like a sack of meat, then you would have just laid right down and died alongside her when your heart broke! You had to try your best to do the right thing for Anevka, because you needed to do it. Even if it turned out bad later, that was because of Fate hating on you. Not because of you."

"I don't know what to do about her this time." I confessed.

"You said that her brain can be deactivated, right?" Violetta shrugged. "And put into long-term storage, where it won't drift any further? So we do that when we can, and then wait for the state of the art in clank consciousness to advance. Even if your grandkids have to be the ones who haul Great-Aunt Anevka out of storage and finally fix her up, you can at least have hope."

"Succeed or fail, we won't be able to go back to Sturmhalten for quite a while. What happens with her in the meantime?"

"She's a sociopath, not a psychopath," Violetta said. "And her position sets her up for intrigue, not assassination. So overwhelming probability is that she won't kill anybody without either a legitimate practical need like self-defense, or else a really hot personal grudge. Which means her probable victim pool is pretty much limited to your dad. And you and I both know, the son-of-a-bitch so has it coming."

"Still-" I meandered.

"Tarvek," she said gently. "You'll do what you can for her, as soon as you practicably can do anything. But until after you can then what she does is not your responsibility. In this damn stupid family we're barely able to carry the weight of our own sins. You can't carry your father's, or Anevka's. And they don't deserve you trying."

"This is why I needed you back," I complimented her. "You- you keep me on track."

"You get lost in your own head sometimes." Violetta agreed. "But that makes total sense. Seriously, you've spent your whole life unable to admit even to your own family - especially to your own family - who you really are or what you really want. You couldn't even fully open up to me. The inside of your own head is the only place you ever got to live your real life. No wonder you built an entire damn hedge maze in there."

"And what did you build in your head?" I asked her, having decided to at least try to make this a two-way exchange.

"A target range," she grudgingly admitted. "Where I kept angrily throwing shit at the mental walls because I couldn't take out my frustrations on the real ones around me."

"My shinbones would dispute that theory." I snarked. "As would my skull, my solar plexus, my-"

"That doesn't count, you let me get all those beatings in." she jibed back. "As part of your 'brilliant master plan'."

"Yes," I said. "The master plan that ultimately hinges on the free will of a young woman who has had no preparation for what she must become, in any of the possible variations in which she'd become it." I shook my head. "That's not a plan. That's a goal."

"But it's a good one," Violetta assured me. "You are literally the only candidate in the race that would allow her to turn you down, do you realize that? That's why you're the only one who deserves to win." She leaned over and gave me an affectionate shoulder punch- and unlike all her other ones, this one gentle enough to not even sting. "And that's why I'm with you on this, to the end of the line."

"Looking forward to becoming First Knight to His Majesty himself, are we?" I asked her amusedly.

"Not a bit," she said to my immediate consternation, and then my surprise when she openly and affectionately smiled at me for the first time since we'd been twelve. "But I'm really looking forward to helping my brother."

* * * * *​

Author's Note: Fuck it, looks like I'm writing sidestory content because my brain just won't shut the hell up.

And so, we get Tarvek and Violetta's reconciliation scene.

When I started writing this I hadn't planned on them to apologize before he mentioned time travel. And then the conversation started writing itself. And it actually does seem to make it work better this way, that he got the big issue out of the way before he invoked oracular authority. And that he did it by showing her professional respect, not just appeal to emotion.

 

[cliffc999]

I walked away from the postal clerk's booth onboard the Rozen Maiden with a sense of mild confusion and more than a bit of caution.

For one thing, nobody should have known I was here to send a package to. This wasn't even an assignment, just doing a stretch of role maintenance. Maintaining cover identities in multiple military forces in Europa all simultaneously wasn't a job for an amateur. I had long practice at forgery, stealth, and otherwise taking advantages of the cracks in military bureaucracies to cover long absences and not actually having enlisted or decommissioned from anywhere the regular way, but even with all the accounting tricks in the world to let every step in the administrative chain think you were supposed to be somewhere else you still had to spend at least a fair percentage of your time actually showing up for duties.

But when you'd been in enough armies then you learned the underlying patterns common to them all, and how to rapidly pick up on the variations. It was like certain schools of music in a way; there was always the same consistent beat underneath, and the melodies that overlaid the beat were all within a certain range. Music was a perfectly believable hobby for a solitary man, so I'd learned quite a bit about it. As well as drawing, whittling, writing, and other pursuits that could be done alone. My life had given me a great deal of practice at being alone. Especially recently.

I didn't dare open this package in my berth. For one thing, my rank meant that I lived in squad bay quarters. I had seven other airmen as roommates and not so much as a privacy curtain around my bunk. So you never read any mail in your quarters unless you wanted to make it the business of literally everyone onboard the ship. That meant that it was perfectly normal behavior to go straight from mail call to climbing up into the superstructure and finding yourself a private little nook somewhere along the walkways in and around the gas bladders. And the last thing I wanted to be doing right now was anything but perfectly normal behavior.

So. I had had a 'care package from home' sent to me in a place that nobody should have known to look for me, and when I had no home to be sending me packages anyway. Well, I did have a home, but it wasn't a place I went very much. Nor were any of the few people there who still remembered me the care package type.

Also, the return address was entirely wrong. My current identity's home of record was an obscure village in the Wastelands that had been overrun and destroyed by a pack of bloodbats eight years ago. My actual home was Mechanicsburg. But the postmark on this package was Saint-German-en-Laye, a small town a dozen miles outside of Paris. It indirectly benefitted from the Master of Paris' protection as one of the belt of nearby settlements around the city that were still close enough that nobody dared go raiding amongst them and the monster population was virtually nil, but it was not actually within his direct span of control. And it was a very wealthy place, with its main source of income being all the country estates that many of the old Parisian aristocracy kept there for access to the nearby forest preserve and because of the town's historical significance as the birthplace of Andronicus Valois. Why on Earth would anyone who lived there care to send me a package?

I carefully picked a position as far forward towards the periphery of the bag as I could, but with the nearest emergency drop-reel outside of the probable blast radius of any explosive device stable enough to survive the process of being shipped here and small enough to fit in the box. A mystery from Saint-German-en-Laye was a virtual guarantee that at least one of the Fifty Families was involved, and while I could think of several reasons that one of them would be sending a care package to a random airman onboard a Wulfenbach airship most of those reasons involved outright sabotage. And if they were sending it to me in particular, because they knew who I was, or even just part of who I was-

Well, if this package was the exploding kind than my current location would keep collateral damage to a minimum but still be where the lack of my corpse would be considered unremarkable. Up here at the tip of one of the forward gas cells the blast would be written off as a hydrogen leak, the nearby drop-reel could be 'spontaneously' knocked loose by the explosion, and I could ride it to the ground and be away on foot while my body would have been assumed to fall out of the hole blown in the outer hull.

I opened the package. Huh. There was a large, hermetically sealed jar of the type you shipped canned preserves in, some wrappings, and nothing else. Not even a note among the wrappings. I held up the jar and sniffed it, taking care not to make any motions that wouldn't look entirely natural to an observer nearby. The possibility that this was some bizarre counter-intelligence test by the Empire also had to be kept in mind. Still, unless the Baron knew what I was then he wouldn't remotely know just how sharp my senses were, scent and hearing both. Not even a Night Master could have tailed me through an area I was this familiar with without my at least getting a sniff. And none of those half-trained amateurs that called themselves 'Wulfenbach Stealth Fighters' would have had the slightest hope. And if he did know what I was, he wouldn't need a test. But that was still no reason to be sloppy.

My sniff didn't reveal any trace of chemicals or explosives. There was a lingering something that I couldn't place, something out of the ordinary, but it smelled... harmless. It somehow reassured rather than alarmed. More to the point, unless the people sending this package were paranoid enough to have removed all chemical traces from the outside before shipping it then there was no bomb in here. And if the people who'd sent this package had known what my sense of smell was like, then they'd know enough to know that an explosive device this size wasn't at all likely to do more than piss me off.

Well, unless it was custom-built sparkwork. But even professional paranoia could only be taken so far before it became self-defeating insanity, so having done all the prudent things I twisted the lid and-

The first wave of scent that hit my nose from the opened jar almost brought me to my knees. It was the taste of lightning in the air, the calming vapors of the fresh valley air, the warm cloying touch of family- it was a scent I hadn't smelled in over twenty years, that none of us had. It was clear and strong and unmistakably Heterodyne. One of the Masters- no, the scent was that of an unfamiliar Heterodyne, a Mistress- was alive.

I frantically pulled the scarf out of the jar and unraveled it, smelling it again and again. I completely missed the envelope that had been wadded up within it until it went flying free, only my superhuman reflexes letting me snag it out of the air before it sailed off the walkway and down into the depths of the superstructure. The scarf was new, not only of the current Parisian style but fresh off the rack, but the scent was very strong. She must have bought it and continually worn it for several days to inundate it as deeply as possible before sealing it in that canning jar and sending it to me as proof of her identity-

The handwriting on the letter inside was that of a woman's, her penmanship meticulous yet strong. The penmanship that you saw from someone who'd clearly done a lot of writing and done it quickly and on a schedule, the kind that I saw every month on my pay stubs from the disbursement clerks. So, someone who'd been working in an office-

Dear Mr. Higgs.

How had she known to write me here? Outside of my fellow generals, nobody could have told her my current location and only a very few other people in Mechanicsburg even knew the significance of my current name. And if the Castle had already been repaired, the word would have rocketed around the fleet- around all of Europa- as fast as heliographs could shine-

If you received my other article, then you already know why I am writing you.

Heh. 'Article', as in article of clothing. Not bad for an amateur. So even if the message was intercepted, it doesn't give away the primary secret-

I have only very recently reached my eighteenth birthday, and only very recently before that become aware of the same facts you that have just been enlightened of, which is why we haven't communicated before. As to my antecedents, I was raised as Agatha Clay, and was a resident of Beetleburg for the past eleven years and prior to then accompanied my uncle Barry-

Master Bill's daughter, then.

-in some of his wanderings. I was raised in Beetleburg by his old friends and my foster parents Adam and Lilith Clay, who you may have once had the acquaintance of in Mechanicsburg before I was born. Adam still has his speech difficulties, and Lilith her peculiar optical prescription, but they are both doing well.

Punch and Judy! That's who- and raising a young woman in secret and telling her only when she'd reached adulthood- I sighed in relief. I didn't understand yet why Master Barry hadn't brought her back to Mechanicsburg for the Von Mekkhans to look after, but he'd still made a very good choice with those two.

I am at present residing as a guest of the family of my betrothed, Prince Tarvek Sturmvoraus-

WHAT THE HELL DID THAT PAIR OF FOOLS THINK THEY WERE DOING?!?

Keep reading, I firmly told myself while trying to still my racing heart. Gather all the intel possible first...

-at the country villa of his grandmother, Dowager Princess Teribithia Sturmvoraus.

Oh wonderful, it was only the goddamned spider-in-chief of the Order of Jove herself! I started mentally roughing out plans for a hostage rescue- we'd be up against so many Smoke Knights on their home territory, and inside the periphery of the Paris belt so simply asking Mamma Gkika for a hundred or so of her boys to help me just run the entire damn place over wasn't a viable option- oh, this situation was very bad.

So far all of our mutual interests have been able to be amiably settled in negotiations, and my foster parents and my betrothed and I all look forward to traveling to Mechanicsburg as soon as my education in practical matters is sufficiently complete.

Of course they want you to just walk home scott-free and reactivate the Castle and be invincibly secure from their control forever, Your Ladyship. And for that and a pair of pfennigs I could get a fried snail! What the hell was going on? How could Punch and Judy not know precisely what kind of scheming vipers the Sturmvoraus were, or what sort of use they'd have for an innocent young Heterodyne heir-

I groaned inwardly as I realized that this wasn't even just a case of an ordinary intrigue regarding designing nobles preying upon a vulnerable young heiress. No, these miserable sons of bitches were going straight at the political stability of the entire damn continent. Their secret society had been muttering ineffectually about bringing back the Storm King for generations now, but now? Now they actually had a shot!

I realize that at this point you may have, to put it charitably, begun to doubt my good judgement.

Was it possible to have a Spark specialty in ironic understatement?

But I assure you that am I here of my own free will and entirely delighted to be. Any investigation you care to undertake will produce the knowledge that slightly over two weeks ago I had left Beetleburg ahead of a concerted effort by Dr. Beetle to abduct me for his own purposes, an attempt that Prince Tarvek and his cousin Lady Violetta Mondarev were of great help to Adam and Lilith in spiriting me free of.

Oh I'm sure they were, almost certainly after having caused that mess in the first place.

Tarvek had already been courting me for the several months before this during his residency at TPU as a graduate research fellow, and you may rest assured that every step of the process was handled in as slowly and gentlemanly a manner as possible and under the full supervision of my parents.

I blinked. Assuming that this wasn't a tissue of lies she'd been writing with a knife to her throat, or that was being written for her- I had no idea what Agatha Heterodyne's handwriting looked like, after all- then that was...

No doubt that the Sturmvoraus could have found any number of slick, smiling seducers that could wrap up a young lady like her and leave her seeing stars. Tarvek Sturmvoraus, I frantically searched my memory. Only son of Prince Aaronev Sturmvoraus, reigning lord of Sturmhalten. Not much for a high public profile, but- damn. Outside of a few lines in a peerage book, I had no idea who this little viper was. But I would certainly find out!

But it didn't fit. Punch and Judy were two of the sharpest people I'd ever met. And the Mistress had to have genuinely known them, because the facts she'd given about Punch's muteness and Judy's mismatched eyes that she needed her special glasses to hide were anything but public knowledge. And while that pair didn't have my centuries of experience they still had had more and varied interaction with other people than I'd been getting anytime recently, and Judy in particular had been the sort of wise woman that you just couldn't put one over on at all. So either this Tarvek was the singlest most dangerous bastard that that nest of underhanded, devious, scheming serpents had produced in generations, or-

And as a more practical detail, the circumstances of my journey with him to Paris were such as to utterly preclude undue influence. The railway is a very civilized way to travel, and the crew of the Wyrm of Limerick were entirely hospitable to my situation as a Spark in the beginnings of a Breakthrough.

I felt an urge to sit down. They'd taken her out of Beetleburg under Corbetite escort? And after having- if she'd had her Breakthrough on the train then they'd revealed to the crew who she really was what with all her heterodyning. Even if Punch and Judy had wanted to hide her true identity from confession in the first place, which they almost certainly wouldn't have. And not even a full team of the Order's best Smoke Knights could have done anything onboard a Corbetite train except die painfully if they'd dared to try kidnapping a passenger.

Indeed, while we were on the train we'd openly discussed the merits of simply changing trains at Paris for a direct line back to Mechanicsburg instead of getting off to meet Tarvek's family first. But after a full and frank discussion of our possible courses of action, Adam and Lilith and I decided that this was for the best.

Over nine hundred years of spying, assassinating, monitoring, and analyzing for the Masters, and they still kept finding ways to surprise me. Over, and over, and over again. And Lady Agatha was clearly getting started on that particular career milestone early, because at this point I had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on anymore.

Of course, when dealing with the Valois then even when things are at their best it's still wise to take a few precautions. Hence this letter.

I wasn't remotely any kind of religious man, but at this point I could only offer a heartfelt prayer to Saint Teodora for having mercy upon me. Young and untried she might be, and inexplicably besotted with a goddamn Sturmvoraus on top of that, but at least she was thinking.

Adam and Lilith have explained to me that you would feel obligated to obey any requests I made even at the expense of your greater judgment and why, so I have only a very few of them and insist that you use your own broad discretion and great experience in how best to fulfill them.

The next church I passed, I was burning the biggest damn candle they had.

First off, please believe me that regardless of what you may justifiably believe about his relatives, Tarvek and Violetta are legitimately on my side. I love him, and she is very dear to me. You will not hurt them unless there is absolutely no other way to save my life, a state of affairs I have absolutely no expectation of ever coming to pass.

On second thought, to hell with the candle. 'Use my discretion' my ass!

Second off, if you believe that it would be wisest to quietly pass on word to your acquaintances the Heliotrope family or your old friend Gkika, then feel free to do so. I request that at this point you do not inform any old comrades you may have among the Imperial military, as things will be slightly complicated in that direction for the near future.

Well, I wouldn't have told those ogres first off anyway. Even Khrizhan too often thought that 'subtle' was a word in the dictionary between 'stomp' and 'thrash', let alone the others. Mamma at least knew how to keep things under the rose.

I also noted in passing that if this letter were a forgery or under duress, then Punch and Judy had to have been cooperating with it. Nobody else on their side of the conversation would have known who the 'Heliotropes' were. And neither of them would ever have talked unless-

I tried to wrap my head around the madness of a world where the goddamn Valois were being considered at least semi-reliable allies of the Heterodynes. No bizarre sparkwork that had ever crawled out of any the Masters' laboratories was half as bizarre as this.

Third off, after you have - presumably, this is not an obligation - finished verifying the truth of the events I have mentioned in my letter to your satisfaction, you are invited to join me at Saint-German-en-Laye so you may reassure yourself of my safety and begin helping me learn the things that I need to know to help our people as best I can. Outside of myself, Adam, Lilith, Tarvek, and Violetta, no one present will have the slightest expectation of your arrival or, for that matter, any knowledge of your existence. You may feel free to postpone your arrival here indefinitely if you feel that other matters more urgently require your attention, although I would appreciate a discreet postcard if you anticipate any great delay.

Dammit. You'd better be right about those two being on your side, My Lady, or else I'll be walking into one hell of a trap. But if you're highlighting that I have the option of not walking in at all... is it a trap?

And lastly, in the event of a worst-case scenario another package awaits you in the care of Master Octavian Sausagegrinder, a resident of the Court of Gears-

And a member of the Blood Circle and underworld fixer.

-one that had originally been set up by Lady Violetta several months ago as a contingency to be sent to you in the event of her and Prince Tarvek's deaths. That contingency has been disabled and Master Octavian has instead been directed to simply hold the package for your arrival, or give it to Gkika upon her request (do please inform her of its existence and significance when you can). Most of the knowledge in that packet related to me is now out of date, but there are quite a few other matters of concern itemized there that I would prefer to explain to you in person but that are important enough that they must be addressed by someone with the next several years even if I and my family, both old and new, are entirely unavailable to.

I reread that paragraph twice to make sure I hadn't started seeing things. What the hell was so important that it had not only had a double dead-man switch on it, but that she considered it a higher priority than restoring the family? What was coming that she thought they might all end up dead? Is this why she was so desparate for a strong alliance that she picked the goddamn Valois?

Not least among them being the possible but hopefully still avertable return of my mother to the affairs of Europa at large, a state of affairs that contrary to popular belief she was not the earliest victim of but instead had caused.

And that one did knock me flat on my ass. Oh, on the nearby railing of course, not the deckplates, but still. Some things made even a nigh-immortal Jager General need to just sit down and take a deep breath.

Lady Lucrezia had been the Other? And they were coming back- no, might be coming back?

Right. I had to get the hell off this ship and back to Mechanicsburg as soon as possible. Then Gkika and I would tear that package open and read every line of it. Jenka could take care of the background check in Beetleburg and with the Corbetites to make sure that this letter's narrative wasn't a crock of-

But please take no larger-scale actions in that regard without consulting with me first, if possible.

Clear skies and following winds.

Yours sincerely,
Lady Agatha

PS: I'm certain it goes without saying, but please destroy this letter.

I chuckled at the thought of a young woman teaching her great-to-the-umpteenth grandfather how to suck eggs, and read the letter again to make sure I got every word down pat. I then wadded it up, chewed, and swallowed. I tucked the scarf into my pocket as a good luck charm.

Right. I had to get to the personnel officer's files as soon as I could and slip in a correction to my home-of-record and a pre-approved emergency leave request for... hmm, 'dead grandfather' should work again, it had been over sixty years since I'd had to use that one. If I also suitably twiddled my family background, I could also apply for an immediate discharge on the 'sole surviving son' clause because I'd be needed to 'manage the affairs of the family'. Old Carson could easily help with suitable supporting records on the Mechanicsburg side, that could then vanish again as soon as my discharge was a forgotten part of the Imperial bureaucratic archives and never to be thought of again. I'd desert if I needed to, but deserting was always the last-ditch option. They chased after deserters, but nobody ever pursued a man that they already thought they knew where he was.

I smelled the scarf one more time, letting the pure scent of home flood through my body and energize my veins. I'd been sleepwalking for the past couple of decades, we all had been, but it was time to wake up and live again. At the edge of our hope, at the end of our time, we'd been given a reprieve that we'd never expected. The family was coming back, and soon enough so could we.

And if the greatest menace that Europa had seen in centuries was coming back as well? Well if she did, then me and my brothers and sisters would be positively ecstatic to give the bitch a fight for it. No more being left behind this time.

After all, we were the Jagerkin. We certainly wouldn't want it to be boring.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: This is still a sidestory. I am finding new ground in showing peoples' reactions to the larger chain of events as they ripple outwards, not writing a second book. Obviously Higgs had to be the first to be shown, especially since we'd already discussed how Agatha would be smart to write him as a reserve contingency first thing. And while we do get a little 'what's happening after the end credits' content, I didn't put the Sidestory tag on it to announce a whole new saga. I don't want to play games with expectations.

The use of something with Agatha's scent on it preserved inside a canning jar as a proof of identity is from Almighty_Hat's excellent "Smells Like Hope" series on AO3, although there it had been brought to the Jager Generals onboard Castle Wulfenbach rather than Higgs.

In canon, during the scene where Tarvek confronted Higgs on his secret identity, he called out Tarvek as the most dangerous one his family of 'underhanded, devious, scheming serpents' had ever produced. So of course I ironically echoed it here.

"Fair winds and following seas" is of course a traditional 19th-century sailor's farewell. I headcanon that in Girl Genius, airship crews use a lot of nautical imagery. As per SMDVogrin's suggestion later on, we used this variant.

Saint-German-en-Laye is a real town in France, a suburb of Paris and historically famous as the birthplace of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who was GG's loose inspiration for Andronicus Valois.

And I honestly don't know why my Agatha keeps talking like a character from 'Pride and Prejudice', but she keeps doing it and my muse won't have it any other way now. *shrugs* Writing is weird.

 

[cliffc999]

The past several months had been incredibly trying. One day things had been going along smoothly as they ever got for my Empire, and the next day it was as if all the usual political undercurrents had suddenly been lit aflame.

The first overt event had been the sudden disappearance of Prince Tarvek Sturmvoraus and his bodyguard from where he had been attending Transylvania Polygnostic University in Beetleburg, a disappearance executed barely one step ahead of a major mobilization of the Clockwork Army and which had apparently required him and his cousin to openly reveal their training as Smoke Knights and disable several clanks and an entire squad of militiamen. The next day Dr. Beetle had made a request for an Imperial warrant for Prince Tarvek Sturmvoraus' and Lady Violetta Mondarev's arrests on the charge of kidnapping a citizen of Beetleburg, one Agatha Clay, as well as their being suspects in the disappearances of her foster parents Adam and Lilith Clay.

Due to Tarsus' Beetle personal involvement Boris had noted the reports for my own personal attention, and when the investigators I had dispatched had turned up an eyewitness account of all three Clays being seen in good health and boarding a Corbetite train for Paris later the same evening I denied his request. A routine request for information to Master Voltaire had produced nothing but his usual form-letter refusal to cooperate with Imperial investigations, and so outside of a certain curiosity as to the involvement of young Sturmvoraus in the whole affair I considered the matter closed.

Eleven days after that Dowager Princess' Sturmvoraus husband passed away from what was announced as 'complications of ill health'. Which in that family was essentially an open admission on their part that he'd been poisoned. And it was at that point that affairs had started scrambling and hadn't stopped.

An anonymous tip had alerted the Empire of an atypical revenant infestation in Passholdt, and after we had cleared the village several of the Jagers had happened across a hidden laboratory where a variant of Slaver Wasp that would work on Sparks had been undergoing research by Professor Snarlantz, along with a cache of Hive Engines. The clues we'd found there had led us to Sturmhalten and that had turned up the horrifying revelations of what madness Aaronev had been attempting with the Summoning Engine. Confronted with the horrible possibility that Lucrezia Mongfish could possibly return I had immediately thrown the full resources of the Empire into finding and tearing out this accursed conspiracy root and branch. And given Aaronev's involvement, I had made finding the fugitive and vanished Prince Tarvek one of the highest-priority tasks for my Questors. But even they had been unable to turn up the slightest trace of him.

And the discovery we'd made in Sturmhalten that the 'shambler' form of revenant was merely the outlier and that the more common form of revenant was entirely undistinguishable from an uninfected person but still a slave to any command of the Other's servants had been something we'd only barely been able to keep secret, lest panic and witch hunts tear the entire Empire apart. As is, a massive expansion of the Vespiary Squads had become necessary and hundreds of revenants had needed to be transferred out of sensitive Imperial positions to more remote duties where they could harm no one else nor themselves. The second discovery we'd made, that the Geisterdamen were not only servants of the Other but that they could command revenants, had at least come early enough that we could contain the situation. Their attempt to use the enslaved civilians of Sturmhalten as human wave assaults to both give them an opening to break free and inhibit our future operations with a massive anti-Imperial propaganda victory had been neutralized by liberal use of C-Gas and strategic dropwall placement, and although the taking and occupation of Sturmhalten had required the concentration of more force than almost any other military operation in the Empire to date we had at least finished it. And without mass noncombatant casualties.

As the full nature of the Order of Jove's perfidity became more clear, the surprising revelation that they were having their own internal power struggle against the Other also began to come to light. Ironically, Lord Selnikov's interrogation had produced the knowledge that the anti-Lucrezia faction among the Fifty Families had even designated their operations against the Other's servants under the umbrella of the "All Shadows Must Come Into The Light" protocol, as well as producing the revelation that the entire operation was being driven by Dowager Princess Sturmvoraus. And that her husband had long since been an advocate for the pro-Lucrezia faction.

It had not taken any great mental effort after that to deduce that the Valois families had finally decided to end their uneasy internal detente and instead have their civil war out once and for all, with the death of the clan 'Grandfather' as the opening shot fired in the war. It was equally as obvious that the anti-Other side was using me as one of their primary weapons. For that matter, for once I couldn't even really object to their manipulations. They could in perfect truth say that all they were doing was bringing criminal activities to the attention of the Empire as soon as they had obtained sufficient evidence to act.

And if the Fifty Families' own internal housecleaning had suddenly taken on an order of magnitude more effectiveness as well, utilizing mysterious new troops of superhuman effectiveness in addition to their Smoke Knights- well, that had been very disquieting but all attempts by my forces to investigate them had been inconclusive. Even the Jagermonsters had found absolutely nothing.

Between all that, the secondary effect of entirely unrelated minor intrigues that were stimulated to act by the increased tension among the Fifty Families, and various pirates, raiders, and smugglers intensifying their own actions to follow even the measured amounts of bloodshed-

It really said something that the sudden arrival of a young Skifanderian woman at my doorstep demanding to speak to 'the man who'd been to Skifander himself' and my discovery that my long-lost daughter had somehow come to Europa was one of the less shocking events of the recent past, even if the mystery of why a young woman matching the description of Lady Mondarev had approached her encouraging her to seek me out, let alone how the hell they could have possibly known about that in the first place-

Well, at least the twins were getting along well, even if Zeetha was making life on the Castle somewhat interesting. And meeting his sister and learning about his mother and his past, and about the threat to our twins' lives that had required Zantabraxus and I to fake Gilgamesh's death and for me to 'abandon' my wife and daughter in Skifander forever 'out of grief' and agree that for our childrens' sakes neither of them should be tormented with the knowledge of a sibling they could never see, or be encouraged to mourn the absence of their other parent- at least it had brought Gilgamesh a measure of peace, and seemed to help him steady down.

And Zeetha had been able to explain to him that the High Priestess' faction in Skifander really would have used such a barbaric superstition to either force the War-Queen's political destruction or else make her acquiesce to the ritual murder of one of her children, and- we really hadn't had any choice.

To be honest, I had been more terrified of confronting my son and daughter with this knowledge and apologizing to them for what I and their mother had agreed to conceal from them than I had been when I'd been forced to allow Captain DuPree and Zeetha to have their duel to the death. Zeetha had insisted. Skifanderian honor was what it was, and I had no way of dissuading her from her course of action without forever alienating her, so despite my strenuous objections and my eagerly volunteering to simply deal with DuPree myself-

But Zeetha had won, albeit narrowly. And Captain DuPree had accepted that in turn for Zeetha's sparing her life, she would forswear her claim of vengeance forever. If anything she seemed actually relieved that she was no longer carrying her own obligation of honor to avenge her fallen men and had actually been delighted to be stretched to her limits by an equal opponent for one of the very few times in her life. The two young women were actually, as bizarre as it was to contemplate, becoming friends now. And here I'd that thought Bangladesh's quasi-sibling relationship with Gilgamesh had been a disturbing notion.

Then again, if Gilgamesh and DuPree hadn't trained and fought together for so long then he wouldn't have been able to coach his sister on how best to deal with her opponent's combat style, and my daughter might very well be dead now. So, bizarrely, it had somehow all worked out for the best.

"Herr Baron?" Boris' voice broke in. I sighed. I'd been getting far less sleep than I should have for the past few weeks, and when I got to a certain level of fatigue and there were no immediate crises my thoughts tended to wander down the same reveries over and over. At least now reflecting on my family was largely a pleasant experience instead of the old, old regrets and longings-

"Yes, Boris?" I asked.

"Your eleven o'clock." he stated.

Oh. Now my memory supplied the knowledge of precisely who had an appointment with me. I closed my eyes and tapped upon the Skifanderian anti-sleep disciplines that I'd actually been using less and less, due to their side effects when overindulged in. The mantras did their work and the nigh-unnoticeable fog that was mental and physical fatigue fell away to be replaced by maximum alertness. When I had extended high-activity periods I had learned that I needed to carefully ration the amount of time I used on these techniques for only the most high-priority tasks, . And there would be fewer tasks this week high-priority than this meeting with the diplomatic envoy that the Fifty Families had insisted on sending me.

"Princess von Blitzengaard," I matter-of-factly greeted the new arrival to my office as Boris ushered her in.

"Herr Baron." Xersephnia replied with her usual impeccable manners. "Will your son be here soon?"

"Sorry I'm late!" Gilgamesh called out on cue from the outer office. "Zeetha wanted to- oh, I'm sorry." he came to a halt on noticing our visitor. Apparently Boris had forgotten to inform Gilgamesh that he'd been wanted here for a diplomatic meeting, so instead of arriving in a presentable condition he'd shown up with his hair a rat's nest, still in his exercise clothes and sweaty from what looked to have been a very vigorous sparring session. The Princess was at least politely failing to comment or admit to noticing- I sighed inwardly as I realized that she not only was noticing, but covertly appreciating. Of course she was.

I acknowledged my son's arrival with a wordless growl and gestured for everyone to take their seats. Boris ensured the door was closed and latched, then took his own chair.

The Princess had brought a small leather carrying case with her, and reached into it to draw out a sheaf of papers. "As a preface, the Dowager Princess and my family offers this as a gift." She leaned over slightly and placed it on my desk, between Gilgamesh and myself. I picked up and shuffled rapidly through the sheets, memorizing each page-

I blinked. What had that summary of conclusions said? I reread it again to make sure I hadn't mistaken things, then handed the sheets to Gilgamesh for his own perusal as I locked incredulous eyes with the Princess.

"Yes," she agreed calmly. "A formula that, if orally ingested, provides permanent immunity to slaver wasp infection."

"And your price?" the words reflexively left my mouth.

"I said it was a gift, Herr Baron." the damn chit of a girl reproved me mildly. I was already slightly off-balance from my sheer distaste at dealing with the Fifty Families at all. I would have to be careful not to let that lead me into further mistakes.

"Um- Thank you!" Gilgamesh gushed, having himself finished assimilating the scientific data and entirely cutting off my own remarks. The Princess smiled at him politely and mercifully left him to his own devices.

"I accept that the Dowager Princess sincerely opposes the Other," I conceded diplomatically. "And I am already aware of her efforts to aid the Empire with information, as well as her own internal efforts against the Other's loyalists. But I must ask- why only now?"

"We- that is to say, Grandmother and those of the family most sympathetic to her goals- only recently gained access to all of the intelligence that we required to act." the Princess replied evenly.

"You cannot have been ignorant of the identities of at least some of the main conspirators," I countered. " Men such as Aaronev, Selnikov, even your own grandfather. Your grandmother and her party would have known at least that much about them, all along. And simply telling me that much would have allowed me to begin breaking up the network."

"Yes," she agreed. "We were indeed aware that several of our family members that controlled a large plurality of our available military force were indeed co-conspirators with the Other. And that the bulk of the remainder of that military force was mostly not strongly beholden to Grandmother, but instead controlled by what could charitably be described as swing votes amongst our extended family's internal debates."

"Princess," I said disbelievingly. "One of the primary of those 'swing votes' is your own brother. Surely he would have supported you, and through you your grandmother."

"Martellus and I do sincerely love each other," she conceded, "and he would never offer me direct harm, nor would I him. But our families are not always as close-knit as yours is, Herr Baron." she said in what had to be one of the greatest understatements I had ever heard in my life. "Among us, even full siblings do not always find themselves in agreement on every goal. And there is a great deal of difference between 'would never raise a hand to me' and 'would muster his forces against Aaronev's faction on Grandmother's behalf because I asked him to'."

"And the reason your Grandmother did not simply use my forces?" I asked.

"When the Fifty Families were still highly riven by internal dissension and with no central rallying figure to coalesce around?" the Princess asked me. "When even Grandmother could only exert influence by being a central arbiter amongst closely balanced tensions, tipping scales one way or the other, but could not lead the families as a whole in any direction there was widespread sentiment against travelling in?" She shrugged with magnificent eloquence. "Would you have stopped merely at the few rulers among us who were guilty, when we could not possibly have stopped you ourselves? Or would you have used the precedent of several of our most prominent being exposed as co-conspirators of the Other to taint us all with suspicion and tear us down, root and branch? Herr Baron, your distaste for the Fifty Families and our style of rule is legendary."

"I would not have been unjust." I stated heatedly, insulted to my core.

"No," she replied, looking back evenly at me, and I bristled even more at her insolence- "Sincerely, no." she pressed forward. "I do not believe that you would have been. I know at least something of the character of the young man you've raised and taught. Through your son, I see a reflection of his father. And what I have seen clearly tells me that you would never have seized upon a convenient political opportunity to destabilize and weaken a large nest of hated enemies if doing so would have required you to condemn the innocent as if they were guilty." she finished, to my significant confusion.

"Then why didn't you ask us for help?" Gilgamesh inquired innocently, thankfully sparing me from having to answer.

"Because, Gilgamesh, I also think that if I had exercised a most due and diligent search I could have found a maximum of four blood relatives who would have agreed with me on that point." she said with a winsome smile at him before sobering and turning back to me. "In short, Herr Baron, our families did not approach you earlier because far too many of us feared what you could potentially have done to us given your... advantage of position." she diplomatically finished. "And can you really blame us for believing so? Fear is ultimately the cornerstone of your rule, after all."

Boris, who'd been a silent auditor to our conversation so far, suddenly raised an eyebrow as he came to some sort of realization. "Princess," he opened inquiringly. "In light of your remarks, would you please tell us what has so recently changed about the political situation that your grandmother would now enact such a change in policy?"

The Princess positively beamed at his remark. "Well done, Herr Dolokhov." she complimented him warmly. "Given that the Baron and his son are both in this room and you still reached the conclusion first, your sagacity is exceptional."

And as soon as her words began to give form and shape to my heretofore inchoate suspicions, at that moment I began to feel as if I had started to lose control not only of this conversation but also my Empire.

"Before I answer your seneschal's question," the Princess said, turning to me. "I would like to first lay the proper groundwork. First off, allow me to emphasize while I am an envoy today I am not a plenipotentiary. I do not have the authority to negotiate terms, nor are you expected to commit to any terms today. I bring you information, reassurance, and an initial offer- naught more."

"Very well," I conceded. "And your information?"

"Allow me to expand on a comment I made earlier," she said. "Your distaste for our families and for our style of rule is legendary. And I would like to submit that it is at least partly unjust and unearned."

"Princess, a recital of the various crimes that the Fifty Families have committed in the pursuit of power would be a compilation of such atrocity as to stagger the mind." I flatly confronted her, which raised the first visible sign of anger from her since this conversation began.

"A recital of the various crimes that the Heterodyne family have committed in the pursuit of amusement would be sufficient as to make the bulk of a continent's population abandon their faith in God," she replied archly. "Oh, I'm sorry. Not 'would', but 'already has'." I took a moment out to honestly admire the sheer accuracy of her riposte. "And yet you claimed two of them as your greatest friends, and all of Europa still mourns them to this day as two of the finest men that ever lived. And I- but let us not be premature." She paused and continued with a slightly acid turn of understatement. "I submit to you that the infamy of the forebears should not be automatically presumed of the children."

"Even if we restricted the compilation to the current generation-" I began.

"-we come in well below that of the average atrocity count of most of the minor Sparks the Empire has had to crush. And ours are at least of more comprehensible, and thus predictable or negotiable, motive." she interrupted. "We're still certainly no saints, but with Aaronev and all those like him extirpated our remainders come in less worse than many that you have already tolerated as local rulers under your umbrella. And if you expected anyone involved in politics to be entirely virtuous, I would question your contact with reality."

"You're here to offer an alliance," Gilgamesh said soberly. "That's why you're trying to convince my father to li- well, to hate you less. We could argue the exact details all day, but what you're ultimately saying is 'Make a compromise with us, because we're not monsters.'"

"I could not ally with a divided, tumultuous collection of families who have no strong center, no central authority." I pointed out. "As you admitted that you so lack."

"Lacked." the Princess shocked us all with a proud smile. "That is my answer to your seneschal's question, Herr Baron. What has changed is thus; our families are leaderless no longer. Oh, we're hardly going to be a model of unity even so, but no kingdom ever is. But we will be a kingdom now, and not a mob."

"And who would follow such a kingdom?" I asked matter-of-factly.

"The hearts and minds of much of Europa," she said. "The majority of the Fifty Families, now that your and our efforts have both removed the bulk of the Other's rot at our heart. Even our 'swing votes' such as my brother rush to curry favor with Grandmother now, so as to earn good positions for themselves before their potential competitors can."

"What you speak of is impossible!" I insisted. "You are bluffing! What one thing could possibly bring such a change?"

"The Lightning Crown," the Princess replied proudly, positively glowing with conviction. "The Storm King has returned! The Shining Coalition will be reformed, and the Wulfenbach Empire will pass into history."

"Seffie?" Gilgamesh asked tentatively. "Are you... feeling all right?"

"I'm fine, Gilgamesh," she said much more conversationally. "And no, I don't expect you to believe me without proof. If I may?" she said, and reached into her carrying case again at Boris' gesture, and came out with a simple trilobite locket of the kind sold in Mechanicsburg.

"Explain." I said tonelessly.

"You are one of the most potent Sparks in Europa," Princess Xersephnia acknowledged to me, "and your specialty is to comprehend and reverse-engineer the works of other Sparks. It is a most magnificent talent, and one that you have used to help build the greatest military machine in known history. This locket was worn continuously by the young woman you would know as Agatha Clay of Beetleburg-"

What did she have to do with this?

"-from the age of five until shortly before her departure from her home city." the Princess continued. "It was built to appear as a common Mechanicsburg souvenir while in fact being anything but. It contains a concealed compartment with a most sophisticated sparkwork mechanism." Her fingers daintily trailed over the locket and popped open the back. "Please examine this, and tell me who you believe was its creator and what its intended purpose was."

I peered in at one of the most intricate yet robust examples of miniaturized construction that I'd ever seen, and concentrated on applying my Spark to its utmost. Gilgamesh leaned over to peer at it with me, using his own prodigious intellect-

"I can't identify the style," my son said, "but this is some kind of interference transmitter. It would... disrupt thought activity? But no, that would kill anyone who wore this for more than a few hours."

"Not if they were themselves a Spark," I pointed out. "But if a Spark wore this, the fact that it applies only a constant small percentage of interference means that the overall effect on their thoughts would be minimal-" and then the pieces started coming together for me. "But if a pre-Breakthrough Spark wore this-"

"-they would never know that they were one, nor would they ever break through." the Princess said. "The side effects would not be pleasant- indeed, they were not pleasant for Agatha at all. But there would be no permanent damage, even if everyone would believe that the wearer suffered a persistent neurological disorder or a learning disability."

"As the reports of Agatha Clay's life as received from Beetleburg noted," I said. "Very well, that is its purpose. Now as to its creator-" I returned to my examination.

The locket hit the table, having fallen through my nerveless fingers.

"Barry," I said, numb with shock. "Barry Heterodyne made that. To conceal- to conceal a Spark from all examination or knowledge, even their own-?"

"Yes," the Princess nodded. "Inside the locket is a picture of Agatha's birth parents."

Gilgamesh snatched it off the table and had it wide open before I could move. "Father-" he said, low-voiced with shock, recognizing Bill and Lucrezia from my old photographs of them as readily as I could from my memories of them.

"I see them," I said. "So. She was Agatha Heterodyne, heir to Mechanicsburg. A Heterodyne princess as per your family legend." I nodded grimly, seeing it all now. "Your cousin Tarvek. He's the closest heir to Andronicus Valois' bloodline, isn't he?"

"He is," Princess Xersephnia acknowledged. "They have been formally betrothed since approximately a week after they first arrived in Paris to seek shelter with Grandmother. They have been courting-" she broke off to smile sweetly at a memory. "-and so very much in love with each other for rather a bit longer than that. Essentially since Tarvek arrived in Beetleburg to begin his studies, in fact."

"And they are now-?" I asked, purely for the record.

"In Mechanicsburg," she said. "If they were on schedule, my soon-to-be cousin-in-law entered the Castle at eight-o-clock this morning. My cousin and their party will have followed her as closely as the Castle's testing permitted them to."

"I received no report of anyone entering." I said.

"When she was operating with the full cooperation of the local Mechanicsburg government?" she pointed out to me. "Herr Baron, we both know that they've smuggled much larger past your checkpoints, and much more often."

"I will not yield to you, your grandmother, your Storm King, or anyone else." I stated flatly.

"You would destroy Europa to save it?" she countered.

"What's your compromise?" Gilgamesh asked. "Because you came here to give one."

"I did." she said. "Our offer is this- His Majesty's offer is this. We will not directly challenge Baron Klaus Wulfenbach's rule of his Empire. In return for this, he will not attempt to abrogate the treaty with Mechanicsburg but instead allow it to reclaim its independence when the Heterodyne comes into her own, as the original provisional agreement stated."

"And what of my son?" I asked. "What does Baron Gilgamesh Wulfenbach receive?"

"Gilgamesh will receive the Grand Duchy of Wulfenbach, not a Barony." the Princess replied. "But not an Empire either."

"So," I said. "You do not wish to conquer my Empire, but instead to let it slowly dissolve."

"To slowly transition," she replied. "Your policies of rule allow for wide local autonomy as is, and you are already committed - by honor if not by binding treaty - to allowing Mechanicsburg to exist on roughly the same terms of independence that Paris already does. And if individual towns or territories choose to enter the umbrella of protection, trade, and infrastructure that the Shining Coalition offers rather than the Wulfenbach Empire's... would you use force of arms to compel them otherwise?"

"We couldn't just let them be abandoned to not being taken care of!" Gilgamesh objected.

"My royal cousin has no intention of any lack of care towards his would-be subjects." she replied. "Ultimately, our rallying cry is the belief that Europa has in the myth of the Storm King finally wedding his Heterodyne Princess, and the peace and plenty that is promised to follow in its wake. If we can't actually deliver on those promises-" she snapped her fingers once, sharply. "Then that for our royal cousin's chances of actually building a lasting kingdom."

"Your royal cousin is a smarmy duplicitous snake!" Gilgamesh finally burst out, pushed beyond all endurance.

The Princess wordlessly reached into her leather case again and withdrew an envelope, which she handed to Gilgamesh.

"What is this?" he said, looking down at it as if it were a live bomb.

"Tarvek's apology," she said. "What lies between you and him - personally, not politically - must ultimately be settled between you and him in person. But-" she chewed her lip, showing nervousness and indecision for the very first time since this conversation began. "He's not entirely the person you remember, Gil. He has been through a great deal since last you met him. His father made him suffer a great deal as well, before Tarvek finally found the strength to break free of him. And while Agatha has been a tremendous comfort to him, as has the support of what portion of the family he actually trusts to any degree, he still misses the man who was once his first and only friend."

"I don't-" Gilgamesh began, to be cut off by me.

"At least read the letter before judging it," I insisted. Because playing on Tarvek Sturmvoraus' apparent desire to reconcile with my son might well be one of the few plays we had left at this point.

"I am presuming that part of this 'Grand Duchy of Wulfenbach' arrangement requires Gilgamesh to make a 'strong gesture of alliance' to the Fifty Families." I said, turning to her suspiciously.

"That is not a requirement," she surprised me.

"Of the pile of rejected marriage offers for Gilgamesh that I have accumulated, your submissions are almost a full five percent of them!" I objected.

"And how far has that gotten me?" she asked simply. "I-" she faltered, before forcing herself to keep speaking with far more effort than she'd required to announce the downfall of the Wulfenbach Empire. "Speaking solely for myself, I would very much like to be with Gilgamesh one day. But..." she sighed. "He will never marry me because either he, or I, or you, or my grandmother, or anyone else in the world finds it politically advantageous to do so. He is the sort of man who will marry for love, or not at all. I have been- with considerable reluctance- forced to admit this to myself. And thus I have abandoned my offers."

"Um..." Gilgamesh began confusedly, not doing very well at interpreting what could charitably be described as mixed signals.

The Princess sighed once, before brightening again a little. "But Tarvek and Agatha will ultimately marry for love, even though the most complicated politics imaginable swirled around them all the while. So perhaps I am not entirely without hope."

Gilgamesh looked at me plaintively, entirely lost as to what she was trying to say. I groaned inwardly and began to mildly regret that I hadn't accepted one of this young woman's earlier betrothal offers after all. Hopefully Zeetha would be able to explain it to him.

"And I should agree to this why?" I asked her flatly.

"Herr Baron," she replied to me. "Tarvek was present at the moment that your son found out that he was your son, even if he did not recognize the significance of what he saw until many years later. But he distinctly remembers that Gilgamesh had not greeted the news with happiness." and I winced inwardly at the shame. "You have continuously prepared your heir to rule your Empire ever since that day despite your Empire bringing you little joy, and knowing that it would bring your son even less, solely because you have seen no other alternative." She shrugged. "But now you have one."

I prepared to tear her argument to shreds while I simultaneously began mentally outlining preparations for a full-scale military mobilization, before my thoughts came to a halt at the expression on Gilgamesh's face.

"Son?" I heard my voice asking. "What do you want?"

"I... want to think about this for a while." Gilgamesh said simply. Well, I certainly couldn't disagree with that.

"As I said," the Princess broke in. "I have no authority to either negotiate or accept terms. That will come after the raising of the Heterodyne banner over Mechanicsburg, and after the Doom Bell rings, and the Jagerkin return home, and my cousin publicly takes up the Lightning Crown. We will all have time to consider our positions at length."

"And negotiate them at even greater length." Boris said flatly.

"Do you propose that the summit be held in Mechanicsburg?" I asked her.

"We are currently in talks with the Corbetites for the use of one of their fortress-depots to host the delegations." she said. "Paris is unfeasible as Master Voltaire's bias against Agatha's family renders her unable to visit the city for more than brief periods of time, and we would not expect this matter to be negotiated in any location where either party's military forces could potentially transgress."

"When you have a site, kindly inform me of the time and place." I sighed wearily.

"Herr Baron," the Princess said softly. "My royal cousin asked me to convey you his words in this regard. He said that it is no comforting thing for a ruler to believe that those he rules are rejecting him, and that he prays to never see that day come himself. We do not patronize you when we say that you have done a far better job of restoring order to Europa after the Long War than the Fifty Families ever did. But neither do we unfairly malign you when we say that we offer the best hope for Europa to maintain that order for generations to come, instead of having it fall apart as soon as either you or Gilgamesh stumble." She nodded at me once, slowly, precisely. "The talents of a conqueror are not always those of a king, nor are those of a king necessarily that of a conqueror's. What you have built is only one necessary part of a greater whole. What we can build is the other."

"Then I have one proposal of my own." I said.

She opened her hand invitingly.

"That if you wish me to join you in this then you never forget that you must have alliance, not capitulation." I insisted. "You say that you fear that my empire would fail after the first generation, but let us never forget that so did the kingdom of Andronicus Valois. Your royal families, your new Storm King, they are no more immune to stumbling than I am."

As she turned to leave, I threw up a hand. "Wait. A personal question."

"Yes?" she asked.

"Why did Lady Mondarev encourage my daughter to seek me out, and how did you know about her at all?"

"To distract you," she admitted. "We never expected you to trace past Passholdt all the way back to Sturmhalten. We were preparing our own eventual comeuppance for Prince Aaronev when you entirely stole a march on us there. And we needed a minimum period of time to finish educating Agatha in how to repair Castle Heterodyne, so-" she shrugged. "Rather than delay you with fresh tribulation, we chose to gift you with a mystery to investigate instead. And in all honest confession, we had no idea she was your daughter either. We simply knew of her as a genuine Skifanderian, and having also heard of your own adventures there-" she shrugged. "It seemed a ploy worth attempting. Besides, Tarvek insisted."

"Why?" I asked simply.

"His Majesty never told me," she said. "You may ask him when you meet him. He may tell you."

A knock on our office door interrupted us. "Herr Baron, Herr Dolokhov," one of the staffers said. "The Jagergenerals are here to see you. They say it's urgent."

I looked at the Princess and she nodded sheepishly. "I apologize. We had asked them to wait-"

"Let them in," I ordered, and the door swung open to reveal the grinning visages of Generals Zog, Khrizhan, and Goomblast.

"Come in, gentlemen." I said resignedly. "I think we all know why you're here, so let's just get this over with."

"If I may?" the Princess asked, and the generals graciously stepped aside to ler her leave first.

"Gilgamesh?" I said evenly. "Would you please see Her Highness safely to her airship?" I finished, to have her whirl back to give me an incredulous smile before tossing her head slightly and recovering her composure. She held out her arm for Gilgamesh to take, which he tentatively did, and they departed together.

The generals came in and sat down, and we began the weary process of 'negotiating' the withdrawal of the Jagers from my military forces and arranging for their expeditious transport back to Mechanicsburg.

As we made the arrangements, a depressingly large portion of my thoughts dwelled on recent events and what they all meant. My Empire had never brought me a single day's worth of joy, but Princess von Blitzengaard had been entirely correct. I did indeed wince with shame at the thought of losing it, as if the failure to conquer everything before me and hold it for eternity was somehow a personal flaw.

But no, I told myself. I had ultimately built this Empire because it was the only way I could see to keep my son- my children- safe and happy, in a world where my grandchildren could live to grow up in peace. And I had always known that my greatest weakness as a ruler was my unwillingness, my inability, to tolerate politics. My intended solution had been to hold the Empire together by main force and hope for it to last long enough for Gilgamesh to do a better job.

So if it turned out that the best way to achieve that safety would instead be to allow my Empire to dissolve instead? Well, I had accepted pain and fear and loss as a necessary sacrifice to try and build my safer world for my children. I would be the greatest hypocrite imaginable if I could not also accept shame. I would of course reserve final judgement until I at least saw whether or not the next several steps of their scheme were actually working, but we were anticipating a certain delay before the summit meeting anyway, let alone the length of time it would take for us to finish a lasting treaty.

And if it did look like their scheme would actually work? Then perhaps I might actually live to see my grandchildren without having to build a continent-wide fortress to shelter them in.

Assuming that my son hasn't finished persuading the Princess to push him overboard by now. Honestly, Zeetha had to teach that boy how to talk to women. I certainly didn't have the knack.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: It actually is canon from the novelisation footnotes that the reason organized religion is somewhat less prominent in Europa than in real life Europe is because after one thousand years of atrocities by the Old Heterodynes and no divine lightning ever striking down for it, it legitimately made a lot of people question their faith. Hence Seffie's retort.

The 'mysterious new troops of superhuman effectiveness' were of course the wild Jagers and Gkika's reservists under Higgs' leadership, helping tear Lucrezia's loyalists a new asshole in the Fifty Families' shadow war. As in, Madwa Korel's rogue cells might have had the loyalist Smoke Knights largely stalemated but when the Jagers joined the party? Sucked. To. Be. Them.

And the mysterious failure of the Baron's own Jagers to find any clues is seriously, do I really need to draw y'all a map there? *g*

I threw in the bits with Zeetha and DuPree solely because fuck it, if we're wrapping this all up then everybody lives, Rose! Everybody lives!

And as to how the heck Tarvek knew about Klaus' old Skifanderian adventures, the answer is that it came up in convo with Punch and Judy. (Remember, the trip that Lucrezia shanghais him on is his second trip there, he'd already been there once with Bill and Barry.) As Tarvek entirely knows that Zeetha is a real Skifanderian, one plus one equals 'This might distract Klaus a bit!' and then serendipity kicks in.

As for those who think that its a tad unrealistic that Seffie can, even with her talents, face down as much heavy talent as she did across that table remember that she wasn't actually there to be a negotiator. She was the messenger delivering a list of talking points, and that's a lot easier.

 

[cliffc999]

I traded a level gaze with my cousin as I strode briskly down the street in Mechanicsburg followed by several of my Smoke Knights, but I did not stop to greet him. I noted and analyzed the significance of his own personal entourage. Violetta, of course, the one person left in the world who would actually follow Tarvek for himself and not just as a pawn he'd borrowed from others. Obsidian, an obvious signal from Grandmother as to how she supported him. No other Smoke Knights, just a pair of Mechanicsburger locals- some nondescript blonde man in sideburns and an exotic pale-skinned constru- no, that was a female Jagermonster whose mutations were few enough they could still largely pass for human. Apparently they were sneaking the more subtle ones into Mechanicsburg slightly ahead of the agreement to not re-enter until after the Doom Bell had rung. Hrm. I could only hope Jaron had also noted this potential complication for himself, as it was too late for me to warn him.

Seffie wasn't there, and that was good. For one, while Jaron and his men had had the clearest instructions to do nothing to harm her combat was never entirely predictable and there was always that faint, horrible chance of an accident. For another, if she were not here in Mechanicsburg then I would not be expected to speak to her. And I did not want to speak to her. She had not, strictly speaking, betrayed me but she had still clearly made the wrong decision. If she had only acted more vigorously then perhaps something could still have been done- but no. She had chosen to follow him.

So I nodded to my cousin and then briskly turned away as if he were not there, and we proceeded down the street to the open-air cafe in front of the luxury hotel where I had booked rooms. We were shown to a table on the second-floor terrace and we sat and ordered refreshments and I waited for the word to come in. And while I waited, I mentally reviewed yet again the series of events that had led to this moment and re-examined them for any errors I'd made or opportunities I'd missed or further openings I might still be able to play.

By the time I was first made aware of what new factor was now in play Grandmother had already chosen to solidly back Tarvek's bid for the throne. And I could not understand why she would. Yes, finding a real Heterodyne heir was a legitimate intelligence coup and persuading her to willingly walk into our family's possession was a competent feat of manipulation, but did one lucky break and one seduction make a worthy king? Agatha Heterodyne had essentially been living as a penniless refugee, with that senile old fool Tarsus Beetle sequestering her like a butterfly in a jar but never actually trying to make use of her. It was no great feat to convince her that an opportunity to be a queen would be preferable to that. Certainly Tarvek had taken the first step for the family, but what about all the steps after that? Was he to simply lay back on Grandmother's cushions while the rest of us fetched and carried for him?

I had arrived in Saint-German-en-Laye as expeditiously as I could, prepared to impress upon this Agatha girl the sheer depths of intrigue and potential threats both small and large against her by any number of our extended relatives that she had dropped herself into, and how I could protect her from them substantially more than Tarvek of all people could. After all, what force did he bring? One personal knight only, and that one a cashiered reject whose salvaging from the rubbish heap only underlined how desperately weak my cousin's position really was. I had my Knights of the Hunt, a personal Night Master, a full cadre of some of the Order's most experienced Smoke Knights, and a literal army at my command. The von Blitzengaard family demesnes were extensive and our traditional vassal allies were numerous and also well-provisioned, while the fact that his own father was a bootlicking worshipper of Lady Lucrezia and his own senior vassals likewise meant that Tarvek could not even begin to draw upon the remaining resources of the Sturmvoraus. He was in essence a penniless exile living solely on family charity, while I was a sovereign prince who already ruled a good-sized kingdom. One that could, given the opportunity in play, become much, much larger.

Only instead of arriving to find a devious yet weak cousin desperately trying to play one ace as if it were an entire winning hand and still bargaining for support, when I entered the scene I found him confidently basking in Grandmother's solid approval as if he had already won. Grandmother's warning against my daring to take any direct action against anyone who was a guest in her house was one of the most frightening conversations we'd ever had... and one of the most insulting, given that I'd never contemplated such a notion to begin with. Some things were simply not done. Not unless you were an idiot.

And Seffie's urgent cautions that the emotional bond between Tarvek and the girl ran far, far deeper than I estimated and that to even appear to threaten him would result in her violent alienation against me had more than erased any satisfaction I'd felt at seeing how quickly she'd already positioned herself as one of our new Heterodyne's confidants and friends. I had thought Seffie was doing that for my sake, but no, instead she'd been positioning herself to be on what she saw as the winning side. That... that had hurt. I had always thought that we two would be the exception in our family, but apparently not. The day inevitably came for all of us when we would look up expecting to see a trusted face from our childhood and instead see only a calm, calculating mask like all the rest. The day when the great game swept us up and forced us to stop being able to look after each other and we could only look to ourselves. I'd hoped Seffie and I would be different- but I should have known better.

And so all of my advantages had ultimately meant nothing. I had taken my several opportunities to converse with Agatha Heterodyne as we were mutually guests in Grandmother's house and had found her very pleasant company. She was highly intelligent and well-mannered and even just the tiniest bit vivacious. She of course had no experience with intrigue or any training in the skills we'd all mastered as early as possible just to be able to survive, but you expected that sort of thing when you married outside the extended family. There was an unspoken expectation among us all that you went easy on such people during the course of the usual Valois family competitions if you could. After all, you had to let the new blood survive long enough to raise the children or else we'd all eventually collapse into a pile of inbred fools. We'd almost done that anyway before my and Tarvek's fathers had made their devils' bargain with the Mongfishes to help untangle several of the genetic messes that had begun to complicate our bloodlines.

No, marrying Agatha Heterodyne would hardly have been a trial. She'd have been infinitely superior to that murderous witch of a jumped-up chorus girl that had been part of the original plan. I'd already been working out a preliminary line of research on a dependency toxin that would require her to have regular contact with my still-living skin to avoid dying of withdrawal simply as a safeguard against Zola's murdering me in my sleep the instant it was convenient.

But Agatha had not responded to me at all. She'd been at least slightly more aware of the waters in which she swam than I had expected, but she'd also entirely believed Tarvek's promises that he could protect her. Indeed, she was utterly, sickeningly besotted with my cousin. Clearly he'd been working on her for months, and she was after all a young woman of barely eighteen who'd been raised as a commoner. Her foster parents had struck me as intelligent and forceful people and had educated their daughter as best they could, but they were townsfolk and craftspeople. They did not live in a world of arrangements and intrigues and advantages. They still married their children for love, and raised them to believe in it.

And while Agatha of course still had a basic survival instinct, she entirely did not believe my explanations that I was by far the best, and might well be the only, chance she had for survival. Her love for Tarvek entirely colored her expectations of him and led her to believe him capable of doing far more than he actually could, and her upbringing meant that she simply would not countenance the idea of a loveless relationship. And I could not offer her love. I couldn't even pretend to. Deception was not only not my forte, but that was the one line I simply would not cross. That Tarvek had dared to cross it, that he had done so with such skill as to leave her utterly unaware of the maze he'd forged around her mind, made my gorge rise every time I thought of it. He did not deserve a crown bought by such base artifice. And I had determined that he would not have it.

I had for civility's sake been issued an invitation to witness my new relative's successful claiming of her ancestral seat. I'd assembled what forces I could bring and prepared to make my last throw of the dice. I would have only one window of opportunity to strike before I had to combat against not a pretender but a crowned king, and one who would be living in the most unassailable fortress in the world. If this shot missed then there would be years of waiting and striving before I could claim the Lightning Crown. I would have to outright plan a coup, to make alliances and promises. to overcome the fact that the myth of the Storm King and the Heterodyne Girl had come to a tragic and premature end because a usurper could not allow-

No, I very much hoped it would not come to that. And so, the current plan.

My cousin's fiancee had entered her ancestral home slightly under an hour ago. Apparently whatever heritage test that Castle Heterodyne applied to verify the truth of the blood required the claimant to enter alone, and they could not be allowed any support until after the first test had been passed. Tarvek and his entourage were waiting for the signal that he would be allowed to join his betrothed.

There! The old man who was Mechanicsburg's shadow governor was approaching my cousin now. His party was preparing to leave. I followed their motion with my eyes until they'd moved out of view around the corner. I ordered another cup and calmly waited.

Jaron and his team had their orders. A staged traffic disruption with an overturned wagon would temporarily cut off their route to the main gate. The several nearest auxiliary entrances were conveniently out of direct line-of-sight to the public. My cousin and his party would be killed as close as possible outside the castle and then their bodies tossed into it, to be written off as victims of Agatha's own maddened construct of a home. The testing was only prepatory to the actual repair of the Castle, and that place had been randomly murdering its inhabitants for the past fifteen years and more. Tiktoffen and his people had their own orders in addition, but I hardly considered him reliable enough to be a backup plan, let alone a main one. Still, we hopefully shouldn't need him.

Ten minutes. Any time now-

"Hey Tweedle." Violetta said firmly, and my and my guards' heads all snapped up in shock to see her crouched on top of the portico over the entrance to the cafe's second-floor, with a death ray rifle aimed directly at us-

"How-?" I gasped in shock, while my Knights still tried to mentally process that Violetta of all people had somehow gotten the drop on us all- none of us could possibly hope to twitch before her finger finished squeezing that trigger, and the blast would incinerate the entire table at this range-

"Zap. You're dead." she smirked, and then stood up, safed her rifle, and slung it up on her back. I waved down the immediate reaction of my own Knights as soon as the muzzle was clear, because clearly this was a message and I definitely wanted to hear it before making any new decisions.

"Violetta." I said tonelessly, giving her nothing to work with.

"Violetta," she acknowledged, leaping lightly to the ground. "The little Smoke Knight that couldn't. The failure 'everybody knew' only got by on family connections. The bust-out who got herself cashiered to Mechanicsburg."

"Of course," I spat, disgusted with myself for having missed it. "You'd lived here for years and we had just arrived. You had terrain advantage."

"It's a lot easier to sneak when you already know all the angles, cover, and background noises, and the pigeon doesn't. They taught us that in introductory. Why did you guys let yourself forget?" she smirked again, leaning back against the wall and buffing her nails on her tunic.

"Don't rub it in," I groused. "I take that if you're here rather than with your Prince-"

"King." she flatly corrected me.

"-then it's already over." I finished.

"You wanna ditch the audience before we get further into that?" she asked me. "Or do you not mind sharing?"

"We're in a restaurant." I pointed out.

"Oh, the locals are ours." Violetta said. "Man, woman, and child. You have no idea of what you stepped into when you accepted that invitation. Mechanicsburg isn't like other towns. This place is Minion City, and what their ruling Spark says goes. So if she says 'go deaf' then hey, instant lampposts. And that's also why you didn't plan for heavy weapons. With the local authorities totally compromised right on down to the street-sweeper level, I wouldn't need to be subtle."

"Well, you've made abundantly clear that we're only alive on your sufferance." I acknowledged tightly. "Very well, truce."

"Truce." she agreed. "Okay you clowns, get lost." she glared at my Knights, and at my confirming nod they got up to leave. "Not you, Sparafucile." Violetta continued more politely.

"Thank you," my own First Knight said to Violetta, and they nodded at each other in professional courtesy before my surprisingly capable cousin took her own seat on a nearby bench and we resumed our seats at the table.

"First off, Jaron is still alive enough to talk but you can start notifying the next-of-kin for the rest." Violetta informed us. "And we're probably looking at career-ending injuries for him but you are good at what you do, so you might still be able to fix him up in your lab. Normal physicians, not so much."

"I see." I said. "Thank you for the courtesy of sparing my Night Master, at least."

"Courtesy schmourtesy," she waved me off. "He's living long enough to personally explain to Seffie exactly what kind of crap you tried to pull, so she'll understand if we have to pull your head off later for trying it again. Otherwise we'd have just fed him to the Castle."

"Later," I focused on the most important part of her remarks, trying to ignore the other part-

"Wait," Violetta said, peering closely at my expressions. "Okay, Tweedle, this is dense even for you. Do you seriously think that Seffie ditched you?"

"The results would seem to speak for themselves." I said expressionlessly.

"Oh God, and I thought mine could be clueless sometimes." Violetta eye-rolled. "Sparafucile, you have my sincere condolences."

"Well, we do live to serve," she lightly commiserated with Violetta. "And he's not that bad."

"So as one of the two clueful people present, would you care to explain it to him?" Violetta asked her.

"Princess Xersephnia gave your faction her support to buy her brother's life from you, didn't she?" Sparafucile asked rhetorically.

"Got it in one," Violetta said, glaring at me like an angry instructor from primary. "Look, I do not like you as a person, all right? Not at all. Remember when an intruder mysteriously got past the outer and inner perimeter like an insider had drawn him a map first, back when I was fourteen? He was yours, right? I could have waited a little longer to make my first kill, thank you!" she spat.

"You did your duty," I complimented her. "And you did it well."

"We all do," she said. "Doesn't mean we always like to. God, remember back when we were kids and you were just the older cousin trying to make us laugh with those little bear things?" she sighed. "Wasn't that better than this?"

"I do remember. But we can't stay children forever." I sighed as well.

"Our family sucks," Violetta exhaled. "But yeah. Seffie didn't throw in with us because she wanted to be a winner. She threw in with us because she didn't want you to be a loser."

"My sister had already given up on me before we'd even tried!" I said angrily.

"You had no chance." Violetta said. "You were already done for before we even got off the train. Agatha would never have picked you over him, and if you'd taken him out then she'd have hated you forever. There's like maybe one other guy in the world who could have had the slightest chance, and even then it could only be done 'legitimately console the grieving widow' style and we damn sure aren't related to him."

"Oh, I'm sure Tarvek did an excellent job." I spat at her. "Violetta, for all that you tried so hard in training you've never truly internalized 'Smoke doesn't feel'. Your emotions were always your greatest strength and weakness both in one. So how could you countenance being part of something like this?"

"Something like what?" she asked me confusedly.

"Do not pretend that you do not know!" I shouted.

"No, seriously, what the hell?" she asked me, utterly lost as to my meaning-

"Violetta," Sparafucile asked gently, holding up a hand to request my silence. "Are you saying that Tarvek genuinely cares for the girl?"

"Wait, that's what you were-" Violetta goggled at me, and then doubled over laughing of all things. "Oh my-" she choked out. "Seriously? You thought you were rescuing her from-" she gasped for breath and then lost herself to another round of hysterics before eventually struggling upright again. "Okay, I was Tarvek's close-cover for the whole thing. I got to watch it all from the sidelines front to back. And I had my own private penny-sparkly theater production going on in front of me for months. There was pining, straight up no-holds-barred pining. And there were longing glances from afar, and stumbling over words, and deliberately embarassing themselves because they'd rather pratfall to break the moment than have to actually deal with all the feelings, and over-sharing, and angsting, oh my God the angsting. There were entire 'How could I possibly be good enough for such an amazing person?' soliloquies. There was even the whole big 'I don't deserve you, please dump me and go find someone more worthy!' 'No, I love you and only you!' confrontation. I swear, I am not making this up!" she cried.

"Then that only makes it all the worse-!" I spat out, positively nauseated at what I was hearing.

"I meant him, you idiot!" Violetta yelled.

"-what?" I said drunkenly. I couldn't possibly have heard that correctly-

"Martellus, Tarvek is gone on her. He is so, so gone. She could ask him 'Honey, would you please jump in this spiked pit for me?' and you'd have shish-ka-Sturmvoraus before you could blink twice. And you honestly thought he was using her?" she goggled at me. "If I hadn't already known the score I'd have tested him for your Great-Aunt Rappacinni's 'Love Potion Number Mindless Idiot' because he was just about that bad." Violetta shook her head at the sheer weight of her memories. "And she's equally as gone on him."

"NO!" I heard myself shouting, as I picked up the table and threw it against the terrace wall with a crash. "THAT IS NOT-" I fought for control, shuddering. "He cannot have-" I kicked the remnants of the table into a shapeless battered mass before I finally exhausted my anger.

"My Prince?" Sparafucile asked me concernedly, coming up to lightly lay her hand on my arm as Violetta stood politely behind her. "Are you-?"

"When I first read the journals of Andronicus Valois as a boy-" I said to the wall as they both stood behind me. "And Euphrosynia's letters to him. The contemporary reports of those around them... I was charmed at the thought of such love existing in the world." I kept reciting. "That two people - people of our station in life, not commoners - could be allowed feel so deeply for each other, without having to worry about politics and betrayals and calculations." I slumped my head. "And then I learned how the Heterodyne's betrayal had torn the Shining Coalition apart, and I despaired to think that such love had been a lie. But you know how much I have always loved studying the family history-"

"You always did." Violetta agreed with me softly.

"And so I determined to resolve this contradiction. And thus I kept reading. I went through it all. By the time I was fifteen, I could have obtained a doctorate in history solely from my researches in the von Blitzengaard archives alone. So when I finally began to form the theory that Euphrosynia Heterodyne had genuinely loved Andronicus Valois and yet still had betrayed him for the advantage of her own family- I didn't want to believe it." I sighed.

"He's being sincere, Violetta." I heard Sparafucile reassure her. "I can testify to it."

"But I swore to myself that when the day came when I would try for the Lightning Crown, I would never allow myself to make the same mistake." I continued grimly. "I determined that any woman I married would understand the full nature of the arrangement from the very beginning. That we would be driven by what advantage both of our families could gain. That there would be no romantic delusions, no pretty lies-" I shook my head. "That all our eyes would always be open. If any affection and caring could still grow in such barren ground, then that would be an unexpected blessing. But if it could not, then the clear expectations from the beginning would mean at least neither of us would ever be disappointed."

"Okay, now I'm starting to get why Seffie's ideas about how to hook Gilgamesh were as screwed up as they were." Violetta commented. "Because I never really understood how somebody that smart about people could be that dumb."

"But now you are telling me that I am wrong," I continued, turning to face them both. "That Tarvek will have both the crown and true love. That he will get everything and I will have nothing!" I raged. "And that I cannot possibly hope to change this without-" I paused and reflected fully on how thoroughly I was trapped, by the situation, by circumstance, and by myself, before continuing brokenly. "Without committing the one blasphemy that I will not stoop to, even at my most desperate. To claim that a true love is false, or that a false one is true."

"You won't have 'nothing', Martellus." Violetta said to me gently. "You'll have a sister. You'll even have a cousin, if you want him. Cousins." she corrected herself. "Look, the thing we're trying to do here- we're not aiming for just the same old crap we always had with bigger hats, all right?" she said. "The thing you and Seffie have? The one where you didn't let the intrigue split you apart-"

"Until now." I corrected her.

"Excuse me, but do you remember who got me sent to Mechanicsburg in the first place?" Violetta reminded me. "Or do you seriously not know? Tarvek straight-up lied to and betrayed me and my career as a Smoke Knight for what he thought was my own good, but..." she shrugged. "When I finally understood why he did that, when he finally understood how wrong he'd been to try, we forgave each other. You and Spara aren't related so your relationship is a little more professional, but me and Tarvek? I'm not just his First Knight, I'm emotionally his sister. More than even Anevka is, way more. He told me that." She smiled to herself. "And while we're still cousins to the world, when we're in here?" she said, tapping her heart. "Then he's my brother."

"I-" I began, not believing what she was trying to say.

"We are the descendants of Andronicus Valois. And for two centuries all our family traditions have basically meant only that we were the worst people ever. But we have got to get the hell out of that habit sometime or else the second reign of the Storm King will turn into an even bigger joke than the first one. And I mean as many of us as possible, not just the guy at the top." Violetta insisted. "You just said that your heart still wants to believe love exists in the world even while your mind keeps telling you that it can't. You want to know what Tarvek's heart versus mind conflict is?"

"Why are you sharing so many of his secrets?" I asked her incredulously. "You're sworn to keep them unto death!"

"Because my assignment from him today is to do my very best to talk you the hell down," she said. "And if that means sharing emotional stuff, well, he can yell at me later if he thinks I over-shared. It's not like I'm giving you operational details."

I acknowledged that with a nod. "As you were saying?"

"Your inner conflict is about love. Tarvek's the same way about trust." she said. "Even when he doesn't see how it can possibly happen, he still wishes it could. And we have got to start being able to trust each other when we can. We have got to be able to forgive each other when we can. But hey, Tarvek and I already did." she shrugged. "You and Seffie can and should. And then we build from there, a little bit at a time."

"If you start trying to trust and forgive a great many of our mutual relatives then you'll be dead in a week." I pointed out reasonably.

"Oh yeah," she agreed as all three of us nodded vigorously. "Even with all that we've done to get rid of Lucrezia's people there is still gonna be so much housecleaning to come. The one family war has stopped and the Other's people are pretty much done and dusted, but all that means is that we're gonna get the independent idiots with more ambition than sense start stepping up to get knocked down." she analyzed. "I mean, you've already tried to kill Tarvek at least eleven times that I know of but you are still rational. When there's no point in trying, when you already know you can't win, we can rely on you to stop. But everybody from your Uncle Julius on down is probably going to be a case of 'world's worst swordsman'."

"There's no one less predictable than an ignorant fool." I agreed with her. "And few that are harder to reason with."

"Or who are less able to know when they're beaten. Which means that on top of the regular army that we're gonna be building for actual kingdom stuff, hopefully with Wulfenbach's cooperation-" she waved her hand at my start of surprise. "It's a finesse play. Our royal cousin can explain it to you after you're on board."

"On board what?" I asked confusedly.

"We'll have to come up with some kind of fancy title for it. 'Lord Defender' or whatnot. But basically, His Majesty the Storm King has a job opening for someone with an internal security brief. Not spying out the threats in the first place or taking down the ones that can be handled with a dagger up the strap because that's what people like me and Sparafucile are already here for. But the ones who put together private armies like Uncle Selnikov tried to. The ones who form their own little petty kingdoms or whole conspiracies. The ones who need a loyal right arm of the king with a nice big army of his own to go beat the hell out of them until the stupid falls off. And whose existence, and the example he makes out of the first few idiots, helps slow down the rest from trying."

"And he would give this position to me?" I asked incredulously.

"Oh you definitely weren't the first pick for the job when we got up this morning, even if Tarvek had had an outside hope." she acknowledged. "But you just picked up my number one recommendation for it so I think your chances are pretty good. And let's face it, you might not be particularly adroit at some things but the things you are good at? You're really good at." Violetta complimented me.

"I don't know, I can think of one family member I've been persistently a failure at killing." I said sardonically.

"And I'm proud and happy to claim at least a piece of that failure," Violetta beamed at me. "But it's not like you were that bad. We were just that good. And even better at hiding it."

"So I've noticed," I said with a meaningful nod of my head towards her original firing perch today.

"But you're not trying to kill him anymore, are you?" she asked. "What you just said about your one blasphemy too many? You have no longer have any road to the crown that doesn't lead you through a place that you just don't want to go. You just admitted that."

"I did," I acknowledged with a nod.

"And that is by far the number one item in your 'plus' column right now," Violetta nodded. "Because a relative that we're sure doesn't want us dead? It's not like we've got an abundance of those, is it?"

"And I can also be equally certain that you don't want me dead," I acknowledged with a nod at her still-slung energy rifle, the one that could have so easily riven the life from us all not fifteen minutes ago. "You're right. There have already been better alliances made out of worse beginnings, so why not us?" I shook my head. "How much of this did he already have calculated ahead of time?"

"Well, the invite was entirely to put you in a position where the timing and place of your attack would be predictable." Violetta conceded. "And what with so much of Mechanicsburg's hidden resources that you had no clue existed, they had no chance. As for the rest?" she shrugged. "I found out a lot about you today that I had no clue existed, and I doubt Tarvek did either. We were just hoping that 'We could have easily killed you but we actually don't want to' and offering you a good consolation prize could at least get us a truce."

"Seffie must have made you a great many promises to buy that much forbearance for me," I acknowledged. "How much of her debt can I assume for her?"

"Martellus," she said to me. "Family - real family - doesn't keep score. It took us a long while to learn that, and God knows they all taught us the exact opposite when they were raising us, but we finally did."

"Family," I repeated, trying to taste the newness of the word. "It still sounds insane."

"Like something being a glorious lunacy ever stopped the Valois before." Violetta chuckled, and we all legitimately shared a laugh at that.

"Violetta," a voice called out from the resturant doorway as I turned to see a young blonde man dressed almost as elegantly as my cousin loved to. "It's time."

"Thanks Vanamonde," Violetta said to him, before turning to us. "And that would be the actual 'time to get into the Castle' signal." she said, and turned to leave before stopping to look back at me. "Actually... Martellus, did you bring your tools?" she asked me.

"Seriously?" I looked down at her.

"If we're gonna fix that madhouse then we can use every Spark we can get," she pointed out practically. "And if you actually want to get on board, then we might as well start getting used to it now." she shrugged. "So... what the hell."

"I still have six Smoke Knights in Mechanicsburg, counting Sparafucile." I said. "How many of them would you wish to accompany us?"

"Just Spara for now." Violetta said. "No offense, but-"

"None taken." I said agreeably.

"Sparafucile, please have someone get my tool belt and meet us at the Castle entrance. Also, make sure that they bring my armor." I asked her.

"Yes, My Prince." she acknowledged, and departed.

"So, you ready to do this?" Violetta asked me as I left behind several gold castlemarks on a nearby table to pay for the damages and we headed towards the door.

"I'm not entirely sure." I answered her. "But let's do it anyway."

* * * * *​

Author's Note: And so we have how Martellus joined the team. Which evolved into something notably more emotionally complex than the simple 'He eventually realized he had no shot and decided to just bargain for the best position he could'. I had outlined. Well, okay, it's still the same thing, its just this really outlines the difference between an outline and a full story, doesn't it?

Violetta is doing all the talking here because Tarvek has to stay in place to bait the kill team into, well, getting killed. She can be sent off from the group 'on an errand', but if Tarvek isn't there then Jaron's team doesn't jump at all because, hey, he's the target.

And yeah, in canon, the two unbreakable rules Martellus has are: First, he'll never actually betray an alliance once he makes it, even if he might go straight back to trying to stab you in the face the instant the alliance ends. And second, he doesn't play games with love. If the upcoming relationship is gonna be a cold-blooded business transaction then he won't even try to sugar-coat that pill. This is part of why his seduction approach is so meat-ax blunt; he's incapable of even the littlest white lie on the topic. Well, that's part of it, the rest of it is that he just doesn't have a seductive bone in his body.

As for Martellus' feels - it's not that he's in love with Agatha here, 'cause he's not. He does acknowledge that she's a nice girl and he could certainly do far far worse because that's just facts, but the reason he's so moved is because that the thought of Tarvek winning by faking being in love with the Heterodyne Princess really pisses him off. Given how much he wishes real love and the Lightning Crown could ever exist in the same place and how he despairs at the belief that they never can, when he thinks Tarvek is going 'Ha-ha, I have won the Crown by terminally abusing an innocent maiden's naivete!' then Martellus is gonna go off even more homicidally than normal because that's just stomping his rage button.

As for Agatha, I finally figured out why, as I mentioned earlier, she seems so relatively mild when I'm writing her. It's because in this timeline nobody's really shot at her except Beetle that one time, nobody's abducted her, nobody's C-gassed her, nobody's made really awful marriage proposals to her, nobody's shoved her mother's brain in her, nobody's killed her foster parents in front of her, and Adam and Lilith are right there with her the entire time. Not to mention, of course, she has a literal Prince Charming pretty much strewing rose petals underneath her feet. She's under a lot less stress, has undergone a lot less trauma, and has a lot more support and therefore she's a lot less angry at the world.

And thus while my Agatha is still very intelligent and perceptive and strong-willed and I've written all that, she's also presented so far as almost unrecognizably less madgirl because... she's got almost nothing to be mad about. Tarvek determined to use his do-over to give his true love a better life than her original one and so far? I'm making a note here: huge success.

Lastly, I particularly love my headcanon that Martellus originally started research on the 'Touch of the King' concept because as soon as he found out that the long-range plan was for him to marry Zola, he went 'Oh my God, I need to think of some way to lock her down or else she'll murder me as soon as the heirs come out.'

 

[cliffc999]

We'd convened at Lord Julius von Blitzengaard's castle to discuss the highly disturbing events of the past several weeks. First 'Grandfather' had died of an obvious poisoning, an unprecedented and disturbing escalation in the cold war detente that our forces had had with 'Grandmother's' faction. And while that had been bad enough, it hadn't nearly been as costly a blow as Passholdt had been.

The town of Passholdt's primary value to our conspiracy had been to conceal Professor Snarlantz' research facility into improving the Slaver Wasps, along with one of our largest storage sites for new Hive Engines. Not that we had any way to actually use revenants yet except for the voices of the Geisterdamen, an attack vector that had obvious limitations of its own, but it was still important to keep making hay while the sun shone. The more of Europa that could be infected by stealth, the easier a time we'd have when one of the several lines of effort we were pursuing finally gave us a way to control the wasps again. Whether it by finally figuring out a way to isolate and reproduce the control harmonics ourselves, finally locating Lucrezia's lost daughter, or even that insane idiot in Sturmhalten actually succeeding with the Summoning Engine for once, eventually we'd have a way.

If that fool Aaronev could have been bothered to ever actually build or operate the thing correctly then our faction could've just put me into it and solved all our problems years ago. As is he was busy doing nothing more productive than burning out the brains of Spark after Spark and hoping he'd eventually get lucky, to the point Europa was actually running out of female Sparks in the correct age group. It kept him safely onside and out of our immediate hair, I suppose. But it did make the wait until he either figured out how to finally make that damn thing work or else we found an alternative solution very very frustrating.

Except now we'd lost any hope of salvaging the Passholdt branch of the project. Snarlantz' error had already devastated the entire village and turned everyone into shamblers weeks ago, but outside of having to replace one team of researchers and finding and preparing an alternate site to continue the work that wasn't really a major setback. But making suitably discreet arrangements to transport that many Hive Engines without the Empire catching even a sniff took time. So we'd been forced to leave almost everything in place while a squad of our Knights camped out and kept a discreet overwatch on the remnants of the village, turned away or disposed of the odd traveler who would have reported anything amiss before we were ready to just let the place lay fallow, and ensured no scavengers made off with anything valuable before our moving crews could get there.

But then with absolutely no warning whatsoever, Castle Wulfenbach itself had descended on Passholdt with a rapid drop from extremely high altitude while accompanied by its entire escort fleet of warships. It was the standard procedure for quarantining a slaver-infected town, and the Baron himself had hit the ground leading hundreds of his most elite troops deployed in a no-sparrow-shall-fall coverage several times larger than a typical revenant outbreak, even one of Passholdt's size, would have normally merited. Our cover team had performed an epic feat of stealth and loyalty to simply be able to get the most critical materials to safety and start burning the records that had been preserved for transport, and even then the senior Smoke Knight on the team, the only one of them who'd actually been able to escape the quarantine cordon, had been forced to dispose of the remainder to guarantee they wouldn't be around to spill any inconvenient secrets under interrogation.

Somehow the Baron had found out at least something of what was really going on, despite no one having been anywhere near Passholdt who could have survived to tell him about the revenants. Somewhere, somehow, we'd had a major leak. And so the signals had gone out for several of the significant principals, including myself, to drop what we were doing and with all due precautions and stealth report to Lord von Blitzengaard's castle as soon as possible for an urgent strategy conference.

But we hadn't been there and talking for more than a day when we got hit. Given the relatively small yet potent conventional military assets stationed here as Lord Julius' household guard on top of the Smoke Knights we had available and the castle's own secure defensive position, no force large enough to get through our defenses should have been able to approach without being spotted. The primary lookout tower had been built a hundred feet higher than average just to give that much more observable horizon to the air watch!

And yet the first sign we had of trouble was when the inner perimeter called away a frantic alert. Whoever they were, they'd already taken out the entire outer perimeter and silently infiltrated the castle itself without being spotted. Our first impulse was, if anything, elation. If 'Grandmother' had been willing to feed any sizable force of her own Smoke Knights into our grinder then we'd gladly take the opportunity. I remember Madwa openly laughing at the thought of getting to kill yet more of our "loyalist" peers. After all, what other soldiers could have gotten through the outer perimeter undetected even with Smoke Knights of their own to help remove sentries and lay out lines of approach and be formidable enough to take on the forces assembled here in close combat despite being as outnumbered as they were?

And then our hearts fell as the doors crashed open and we simultaneously saw their visages and heard their age-old battle cry.

"VE HUNT!"

Jagermonsters!

At first glance we thought that 'Grandmother' had somehow negotiated a devil's bargain with the Baron but then we looked again and saw no Wulfenbach insignia. No standardized uniforms, no shiny new hats. These dozen or so Jagers were each decked out in either looted finery or scraps as they each preferred, no two dressed alike, and with a profusion of varied headgear adorning their brows. These were wild Jagers, savage and battle-happy and howling like the old-school Jagermonsters that hadn't been seen in two generations. Not since the last raids of old Saturnus Heterodyne had any place been assaulted in this manner and now, now an impossible visage from the past had returned?

Madwa Korel zeroed in on the one nondescript blond man standing near the front of the pack, visibly neither Jagermonster nor Smoke Knight, as the obvious weak link to attack. Apparently some kind of advisor or commander or something, she'd thought his overconfidence in not staying in the rear would be their undoing. So she flickered out of visibility so fast that even I had trouble following her movements and reappeared behind him, to take him hostage and give us something to negotiate with-

-and I would remember her final gasp echoing in my ears until my own dying day, as the blond man somehow turned and plucked her out of the air at superhuman speed and as easily as a child could catch a thrown ball. In one continuous sequence of motion he then crushed her throat in his grasp like a farmer strangling a chicken, and as her limp body begin to fall from his open hand his other arm blurred and clubbed her hard in the temple before she'd even touched the floor. My last faint hope that it was just another one of my old teacher's tricks died along with her when I saw the actual blood and brain matter fly free from her shattered skull. Even our arts weren't quite up to that level of visceral deception, particularly not without dedicated advance preparation. And as part of my brain noted the details of her death with shocked horror and the remainder of my attention frantically searched for an escape route from this horrifying carnage, the cries and screams of the dying echoed all round me.

The synergy of the 'loyalist' Smoke Knights and the wild Jagers was both undeniable and nigh-impossible to deal with. If left to ourselves as Knights vs. Knights we'd largely cancel each other out for long enough to allow Lord Julius' troops to finish mustering and put our assailants in an untenable position. But the Jagers were a threat we hadn't remotely anticipated or prepared for and our own stealth and evasion was useless against them so long as they had their own Smoke Knights along to act as spotters and use countermeasures. We were trapped into a room with opponents that we couldn't possibly kill in close-quarters quickly enough to do any good and that we couldn't hide from. By the time the remainder of the castle could finish being alarmed and roused, everybody in this room would already be either fled or dead.

So I immediately turned and ran, ignoring Lord Julius' howling protests at my 'desertion'. I couldn't get caught and killed here! I was mission-critical personnel for the long-range false Heterodyne plan, and there weren't any tenable replacements for me! So the instant the situation became clear I fled as desperately as I could, to the point of laying a substantial fire behind me to bottleneck my exit route against anyone following too closely. That this would also trap most of my compatriots as well was irrelevant; in the final analysis I was essential, and they were not.

Even so, evading the raiding party took the most extreme measures. Judging by the noises I overheard a follow-up force arrived while the castle was still dealing with the devastating infiltration force that had made it inside, and beset from both within and without the fortress had fallen. I had to spend three days with no food and only the water I was swimming in to drink hiding in a cistern before I dared creep out into a sacked and burnt-out ruin. They may have left stone on stone, as it's rather hard to knock down a castle without dedicated siege engines, but there was almost nothing left inside that wasn't either burnt, smashed, or looted.

And with two of the most significant supervisors that I acknowledged dead here, the nearest one to report to was Lord Selnikov in Sturmhalten. Which was not a short way away from here, and as my most obvious next destination would almost certainly have people out along the most obvious routes. Add in that I was still in Parisian fancy dress and that the airship I'd ridden to get here was a burnt-out wreck along with everything else behind me, and this was not going to be an easy trip.

Oddly, although at the time I cursed up a storm at how insufferable the delays of travel were, how inconveniently risky the several murders of lone travelers and isolated farmsteaders were re: leaving possible trails of my flight (and yet how necessary they'd still been to replenish funds, useable documents, clothes, and general supplies), and how much I loathed wilderness travel - I had never voluntarily entered rough country again the day I'd finally finished field survival training - the fact that it took me so much longer to get to Sturmhalten than I would have originally wished is ultimately what saved my life.

* * * * *​

Sturmhalten was burning.

Oh, not entirely. The Baron had clearly done his best to take the town intact. But the smoke rising from Castle Sturmhalten was so thick and black that I could see it all the way down from the foot of the pass, where the merchant caravan I'd been travelling with in my identity as a poor young Mechanicsburg scholarship student off to university in Beetleburg had been halted there by an Imperial checkpoint and told that the pass was closed until further notice. Ironically, Passholdt of all places was now open again as the Empire had finished their business there, so that was the alternate route we were being told to use.

Sturmhalten was burning. Aaronev was dead. Any Geisterdamen that hadn't had the sense to flee in time were also dead - I could feel the distant subsonic rumbling of siege tremblors in the soles of my feet even as far away as we were, and knew that even as we stood there the Baron was collapsing as many of the deep tunnels in on themselves as he possibly could.

And worst of all, the Summoning Engine was gone. Our eventual long-range plan of recalling Lucrezia's consciousness from the void to be caught in the "neural trap" that had been so painstakingly developed and surgically implanted into my head, and thus have all of her secrets freely available for our Order to play with as opposed to letting my dear Auntie insufferably lord it over us all again... gone! Lost forever! The only other possible place any consciousness transfer gear of her even could exist would be her secret lab beneath Castle Heterodyne, and that was a place I couldn't dare to go near until Tiktoffen's team finally succeeded in bringing that insane old clank of a home under control - which was still years away at the earliest!

I had no superiors I could easily reach. I had no chance of executing the primary plan in this lifetime. Even the secondary plan would have to wait for years at the earliest, and was minus most if not all of the military force stockpiled for the later phase of it! And without Madwa I didn't know who in the English network I could contact. I knew of Lady Steelgarter's existence, as a name if nothing more, but she didn't know the slightest bit about me. And with my usual support network as unavailable as it was, I certainly had no authority or leverage to make her actually want to aid or shelter me.

I carefully counted what remained of my gold, stolen and otherwise. I may have lost all my other assets but I still had myself. I still had a potential long-term value as the pre-prepared False Heterodyne. And out of the several Valois scions I'd studied as the men I could possibly marry, one of them clearly stood out as an excellent option to go try and leverage for shelter and survival for the years it would take Tiktoffen's efforts to reach fruition, as well as the only one capable of replacing the military force we'd lost with Lord von Blitzengaard's and Lord Selnikov's respective downfalls out of his own family demesnes.

* * * * *​

Despite it being a longer trip from where I was then the run from Lord Julius' to Sturmhalten had been, I'd managed to make it to my next destination in only a few short days by risking most of the route as a passenger on the Corbetite railway. While the trains themselves were wonderfully safe and relatively comfortable, using them was normally a bad idea when you were trying to duck the Order of Jove - either ours or theirs - because of course we both knew enough to watch the train stations. Still, if you were quick and careful and well-disguised, and not actually starting from anywhere near where they'd already be looking for you, you could risk it occasionally.

Very occasionally. Besides, I hated the stupid trainsongs.

But now I'd made all this trip for nothing, because the stupid old butler was telling me that Prince Martellus wasn't available!

"Listen to me you jumped-up houseboy!" I spat at him. "You can't possibly have worked for your Prince long enough to not know that you are not allowed to judge his guests, however odd-looking or irregular, if they give the correct recognition codes! Are you not even a Valois retainer?" I hissed at him.

"You misunderstand me," he said with brittle dignity. "My Prince is not here to be called upon. He has been away for weeks."

"Wait, in this season?" I asked, legitimately confused. "What could possibly take him away from the hunting?"

"He is in Saint-German-en-Laye paying attendance upon his grandmother, Miss, as he has been for the past several weeks."

What?!?

"Ah," I said, smiling politely and even a little vapidly as I inwardly screamed in panic. "Of course. I'll just- see if I can find train passage to Paris, then. Thank you for your time." I politely made my goodbyes and left.

No! Martellus had decided to surrender? Had the damage that our conspiracy taken to date put him that far off his nerve? Impossible! If that brute had one good quality it was that he was not a quitter! He might be a boor, an oaf, an obnoxious caricature of masculinity, nowhere near as clever as he unaccountably believed himself to be, and insufferably dull on any topic outside of military science, hunting, or biochemistry, but he was a legitimately fearless and talented killer! It was about the only thing I found tolerable about him!

Given the compartmentalized nature of my work I didn't have an extensive array of old contacts from training that I could potentially try to re-establish ties with, like most Smoke Knights did. That was the commonest security measure for us against being left out in the cold by the sudden vaporization of your immediate chain of command, but the long-term mission I'd been on couldn't afford that risk of disclosure. I knew a few names I could still go try to look up, in the sense that I'd overheard them during the course of business and knew they were of us, but by this point every single one of the very few people authorized to know about my missions or give me orders were all dead.

So I'd come here, to Prince Martellus' favorite summer hunting lodge - not the Fortress of Storms, he used that for the winter hunting - to try and get his help. He'd never been part of our conspiracy in any sense - his father's death had given him independence and control of the relatively vast von Blitzengaard demesnes and military assets far too early to learn actual subtlety before he was handed the tools to let him survive mostly without it - but he'd always been a pragmatist, always willing to deal when it was to his advantage. He'd never have moved to commit to us without a Castle Heterodyne already in hand, but neither was he foolish enough to refuse us out of hand. And, I had thought, neither would he be foolish enough to discard me out of hand given that several years later, after Tiktoffen's own operation finally succeeded, that plus my own presence would mean he could use me to become the Storm King. Surely that would be worth at least putting me up as a secret houseguest! Honestly, at this point I wouldn't even ask for that much as long as he could guarantee my safety!

But no, I'd misjudged him. And he'd decided to read the writing on the wall and finally cut ties with the possibility of becoming Storm King through our plot once and for all. I had no value to him, except as a bargaining chip to turn in to his grandmother and prove his "loyalty" with.

And since I'd given my real name to his butler - it was the only one that Martellus would have recognized - and for all I knew that insufferable old man was heliograph'ing his Prince right at this moment for instructions, I had to get the hell out of here.

* * * * *​

"KNEEL, YOU MISERABLE MINIONS!" I thundered forth with magnificent fury and presence, my voice washing out over the entire audience and holding them spellbound. They raptly gazed up at me in awe, mesmerized by my sheer vocal talent. Well, they should be. I hadn't sung in the Paris opera for nothing, after all.

And then the applause rushed in on us, and I broke role to smile and take my bows. The remainder of the cast fell in around me and we trooped off the stage as the curtains closed, allowing the stagehands to rush out and start setting up the props and backgrounds for the following act.

"They love you, Dora!" the red-headed peasant girl who played our troupe's High Priestess and several other female roles congratulated me. Of course they loved me, you cow, I was an impossibly more talented and experienced actress and singer than your entire 'Ilonescu's Traveling Pavilion of Wonders' had ever hoped to see. Even if I was stuck playing Lucrezia and nothing but Lucrezia, over and over and over again. And hers had to be the most boring role for actresses in the entire Heterodyne canon! Why did I have to get stuck with it simply because I had much more resemblance to her than... what was her name...? Oh, right. Then Margaret here ever had. Of course I resembled her you fools, she was my aunt. Not that I could ever admit that if I wanted to live.

Yes, here I was, stuck as a player in a travelling Heterodyne Show of all things. I'd joined out of sheer desperation when the travel funds had started running out, because robbing travelers as a long-term revenue stream was a bad idea. Trails of bodies were just that, trails, and trails led to places. Most specifically, they led to you. Not that I lost the slightest bit of sleep over the various people who'd died along the way to replenish my funds so far, but I hadn't spent my entire life training as a Smoke Knight and conspirator to be a common highway robber. You did that sort of thing as an emergency measure only, not a career.

Not that this was any more of a career. Traveling around in rickety old wagons to stupid old villages dancing and singing - badly, in the case of everyone but me - for the amusement of dull-eyed peasants. Dust and mud and chores and indignity, day after day after day. And I thought being a chorus girl had been humiliating, before I'd finally worked my way up to better roles as part of my evolving cover! The lowest-rank backup dancer in Paris had still lived higher on the hog than even the alleged "star" of this miserable show!

I'd taken this up largely out of desperation and hunger. I stayed in it because being a wandering player let you travel erratically, off-the-grid, and still get more news and faster than most stay-at-homes unless their homes happened to be directly under Imperial heliograph relay centers.

But none of the news I'd received was good. Oh, there were little wars and rebellions and disturbances a-plenty, but nothing involving any of the names I was hoping to see. Nothing that would indicate that any of us had been winning. Nothing that would even hint that a turning point being reached in our favor. Those of us in our conspiracy, those who'd even just been sympathetic or useful to it, were either losing on all fronts or abandoning us as fast as they could, just like Martellus had done. If any fragment of the Other's network survived then it was certainly beyond my knowledge at this point, or any method I could possibly use to reach them, and certainly had no reason to care about me.

For all the ongoing crises and flashpoints, there weren't even enough signs of instability in the Empire to create any real hope of an opening that an ambitious independent could exploit. And I was ready to join any team that looked like it might win at this point! I certainly couldn't go to the Baron because nothing but a swift death awaited me there, and even thinking of trying to defect to the Dowager Princess' faction was suicidally insane. That old witch had a finer sense of vendetta than even old Madwa had, and when she'd originally sworn that she wasn't taking any prisoners with us "renegade" Smoke Knights then we'd all known that she was absolutely as good as her word there. Besides, I had nothing to defect or trade with. And thus I'd been stuck with these people for the past couple of months-

"OH MY GOD!" I heard one of the other actors- whatever the one who played Barry was named- shouting like a man somewhere between a screaming panic and a religious experience. "GUYS! GUYS! YOU HAVE GOT TO SEE THIS!"

Solely because my role demanded it, I pretended as much enthusiasm as all the rest and trooped over with them to see whatever silly thing he thought demanded such-

I swooned on my feet and had to be caught by one of the roustabouts before I literally fell over in a faint.

"I know, right?!?" my fellow actress was screaming only semi-coherently. "I can't believe it!"

The thing that was causing such a consternation was a newspaper, specifically a copy of the Mechanicsburg Marvel that was fresh off the train and onto the newsstand. The village we were currently playing in was adjacent to a rail line even though it had no heliograph station, so this was the fastest way of getting news. Although it had been printed two days ago in Mechanicsburg, it was the first that any word of its contents would reach here. And the front page had been torn off and was being posted on the fairground bulletin board even now for all of us to crowd around and read, even as the next pages were going up-

HETERODYNE HEIR RETURNS HOME AT LAST! the headline triumphantly blazed, with a front-page photo that showed a beautiful young red-blonde woman posing arm-in-arm with Tarvek of all people, while- my already reeling mind reeled even further when I distinctly spotted Martellus standing there in frame, by all appearances beaming, literally beaming at his own cousin who I knew as a certain fact he'd tried to kill a dozen times over- The fact that that silly little suck-up Violetta had also somehow reclaimed her spot at Tarvek's side - well of course she had, a part of my brain noted absently, she'd been stationed in Mechanicsburg - was barely a blip on this oscilloscope.

What- what had even happened to the world? How on Earth did Tarvek, powerless and trapped in Sturmhalten, somehow not only discover a real Heterodyne heir - and she had to be real, the Mechanicsburg press was not only gushing about how she'd been acknowledged by the Castle but how she'd fully repaired it - but then clinch his play by betrothing her? While Martellus publicly approved?

Agatha Heterodyne, daughter of our prior ruling lord Bill Heterodyne, who-

Part of my brain absently noted that the Mechanicsburgers apparently weren't reflexively mentioning Auntie Lucrezia in connection with the Heterodynes anymore. As if I needed any other confirmation that the secret of who the Other had really been was about to be publicly brought out by either the Dowager Princess or the Baron or our new Heterodyne, if they hadn't done it already.

-until recently had been safely kept hidden as "Agatha Clay" of Beetleburg and raised as the foster daughter of "Adam and Lilith Clay", better known to us all as Mechanicsburg's favorite son and daughter Punch and Judy-

We'd- we'd been played the entire time, I realized with horror. The entire time. When Tarvek had gone off for his 'sabbatical year' at TPU it had been evaluated as just his obsession with those silly old clanks again, but no. Tarvek had known, he'd somehow known who had been carefully kept there in Beetleburg, where literally no one would ever look for a lost Heterodyne, and under the care of the two most loyal constructs the Heterodynes had ever built short of the Jagers themselves.

Tarvek had known, and he'd never breathed a word to his father, or to any of his uncles, or to any of us. He'd just waited until he had his opportunity, then quietly went to Beetleburg to meet his new fiancee and help escort her first to the Dowager Princess to seal the deal, then finally to Mechanicsburg to claim their own. This is what must have led Martellus to so rapidly leap to cut ties with the plan that I represented once and for all, I realized in horrible hindsight.

Was this an arrangement that had existed between the House of Heterodyne and the Dowager Princess all along? Or had Tarvek only somehow recently seen an opportunity to exploit? It didn't really matter, I dully noted. All that mattered were the results-

-heroically escaped an attempt by the treacherous Dr. Beetle, who'd feigned his protection but only recently turned on her, with the aid of not only her foster parents but her beloved Prince Tarvek Sturmvoraus and his loyal retainer Lady Violetta Mondarev-

So that was what had been behind Tarvek's flight from the city and that silly arrest warrant the Dowager Princess had had to spend so much time shielding him from.

I skimmed through the rest, and it read more like the script of a Heterodyne show than anything I'd actually acted through. Burgeoning love, decorous courtship, sinister old Spark menacing the loving couple, heroic escape, derring-do, romantic proclamations of love on a train to Paris, no no no no NOOOOOO!

Not immediately lapsing into a raving fit like a madwoman was perhaps the single greatest acting performance of my life. I threw myself fully into my best fluffball routine and went off to my trailer to lie down and 'have an attack of the vapors'. Poor silly Dora, so overexcitable, the wonderful news has her positively overcome!

And then I cried and screamed and ranted for real, as I clutched my pillow and curled up into a ball of misery. Nothing. It had all been for nothing. I'd trained my entire life, and plotted, and schemed, and lied, and stolen, and killed, and poisoned, and everything and they'd promised me an entire world and now I had NOTHING! A real Heterodyne Girl had come into her own and that meant nobody would ever have any use for a fake one anymore except as a- as a sideshow act! Which I ALREADY WAS!

This was going to be the rest of my life now, I realized in utter despair. I was of no use to anyone anymore. For all my lethality, all my training, all my multiple and devastating skills, I had no employers. I had no role. I had no purpose. I brought nothing to anyone's table that couldn't be done by some other hired killer or singer or dancer or actress, and all of the others competing against me in the freelance job market would come with infinitely less baggage in their wake. There was literally no pragmatic reason for anyone to employ me anymore, not unless I entirely abandoned every trace of who I was or what I could really do and settled for table scraps like this. Was there anyone in the entire world left who'd just want me for me? Who didn't care about what I'd done or where I'd come from, but would just accept-

Gil.

I hadn't thought about him in years. Not since my role in Paris had expired and it was time to start preparing for the next operational phase. I'd paid my bills, sold my furniture, terminated my lease and vanished without a trace, just another Parisian chorus girl who'd apparently traded her good looks for a solid marriage with some obscure minor noble or rich merchant away from Paris who wouldn't care and whose local friends and acquaintances wouldn't know to ask questions. Gone without a footprint in the metaphorical sand, just like a Smoke Knight should be.

But I didn't have anyone to be smoke for any longer, did I? I didn't have to be any kind of professional anymore, did I? I could allow myself to think about these things again. And for all that I'd had to pretend to be stupid and weak and useless around him, Gilgamesh Holzfaller - that impossibly likeable and even more impossibly patient young Spark of a college student in Paris - the one who'd thought he was saving my life from all those penny-sparkly villains over and over again-

Even when he hadn't wanted me, he'd still wanted to save me. Not because he wanted anything from me, not because he had any use for me, but just because he couldn't abandon me. And for whatever reason he'd done that, whatever impossible impulse drove him to keep coming back over and over again when he had absolutely no reason to-

It all came down to that, didn't it? No matter who he was, what he did, why he did it, or what else he brought to the table, above all else what I really needed right now was someone who wouldn't abandon me.

All right. I might not have to act professional any longer but I still am one. So exactly how did you trace someone after circa two years' separation and when you'd never learned anything about his home or family? And when you can't dare to return to the city you met him in to try and dig up old traces?

I wiped away my tears and got started.

* * * * *​

It had taken several months, and spending my carefully-hoarded wages like water, but I'd finally received an answer to my inquiry. When I'd sat myself down and re-examined every single possible fact that I could remember about all my meetings with Gil in Paris, one conclusion had become pellucidly clear in hindsight.

Gilgamesh Holzfaller had been a pirate.

It explained everything. The odd acquaintances, the talents and experiences well beyond that of your average college student, the obstinate refusal to even hint at any knowledge about his family or background, the lack of visible means of support, his leaving and returning to Paris at irregular intervals, even that crazy woman, clearly a pirate herself, who'd kept hanging around him off and on - he was either a particularly young pirate captain or else a pirate chieftain's son, who'd been buying himself the best education possible to obtain in perhaps the only location in Europa that combined a first-line university with a refusal to enforce even Imperial anti-piracy warrants. Even his fighting showed clear indicators of it when I ruthlessly dissected my own memories in hindsight. Not only did he have excellent training but also actual prior combat experience despite clearly not being any kind of nobleman with which I was familiar, but the way he fought had that particular freestyle edge that you only saw from someone whose combat instructor had grown up in "The Lifestyle".

And that was the best news I'd ever received in hindsight! Given how thoroughly a hunted woman I was in most civilized jurisdictions at this point, a clear "in" to life among the outlaw fleets was a godsend. I certainly wouldn't have tried joining up alone, or else I would have already. Regardless of how thoroughly lethal I was in truth I had essentially no way of not appearing to be a vulnerable little woman, not with my height and features. I would have had to kill any number of harassers early on to get the point across, and newbies to pirate crews who did that kind of thing? Well, they had this odd habit of falling overboard...

But as the captain's woman I wouldn't have to worry about that sort of thing, and I could be an incredible asset to any raider crew. Smoke Knights were very versatile, and Gil's would be the only ship in the fleet who even had one. And once I showed him that I actually was smart and useful and that I'd only been pretending in Paris, and explained why, then of course he'd like me and want me. I was prepared to be incredibly grateful at this point, and Gil had always liked smart girls-

And, of course, among the outlaw fleets? Well, I'd still be a hunted woman whose life was forfeit in almost any civilized jurisdiction- but so would they! We'd all be even in that regard, and I could finally let my guard down for the first time in ages.

A little bit, at least. No need to get stupid.

Baron Oublemach, one of the more useful mercenary officers that our conspiracy had employed, had made the money to purchase his barony from having spent several decades in "The Lifestyle" himself. In my few conversations with him in the past I'd noted several useful details, including several points of contact that you could use to get in touch with the network of informants and heliograph operators that kept the pirate community - such as it was - in touch with each other and informed in a timely manner about possible prizes and targets. Using one of those contacts to pass the word around that 'Zola la Sirene Doree urgently needs Gilgamesh Holzfaller's help, and would very much like to see him again' had finally turned up a response, and so I'd left the circus behind - hopefully forever - and gone to the address I'd been given to be picked up by the crewmen I'd been told to expect.

They weren't quite as rough-looking as I'd expected, but it would make sense that a man as intelligent and driven as Gil would run a crack ship. And it certainly was an impressive-looking one! The view as the air-skiff took us up to meet it was impressive; Gil's airship was a fast battle-cruiser fully the equal of any Imperial ship-of-the-line, even if it obviously carried none of the markers or rigging of one.

And there he was! Gil stood at the forefront of the welcoming party for me, accompanied by some green-haired witch with a pair of twin swords and far too much height and muscles and standing far too close to him along with a pair of impressive-looking bullyboys.

"Zola!" he called to me. "It's been years!"

"Oh Gil!" I cried, running to him and hugging him tight. "I'm so glad I found you!" I noted with distress that he wasn't exactly hugging back-

"Not in front of the crew!" that woman ordered me. Ordered me! Oh, was I going to ever-

"It's all right, Sis." Gil said to her. "She hasn't seen me in a long while, and she was always very huggy. Zola, this is my sister Zeetha. Zeetha, this is Zola la Sirene-"

Wait, she's his sister? Whew!

"That's not my name," I said as I let him go and stepped back to a more discreet distance, having already decided to come at least partly clean. "That was my stage name. My real name is Zola... Malfeazium." I reluctantly finished.

Gil narrowed his eyes and looked at me. Oh yes, this was going to be the awkward part. "I've seen that name on Imperial bounty posters recently. And the reward for it is higher than I've seen for some Pirate Queens."

"You were right, Gil!" I admitted to him, letting a few tears flow- but not too many, because if I was going to get my solid place here then I couldn't be the disposable idiot anymore. "You always said that if I kept getting caught up in other people's plots I'd end up in something I couldn't get out of, and you were right!"

"You must have gotten caught up in a doozy, then." Gil said, finally starting to smile at least a little like he'd always done. "All right, I promised you sanctuary on my ship for at least the first leg of the journey and we don't go breaking that kind of promise around here. After all, if we started turning each other in for the Imperial bounties-"

"Oh yeah." Zeetha said hammily.

"So, are you his first mate?" I asked Zeetha as we walked off towards the captain's cabin for a more private discussion.

"If you mean do I try to keep him out of trouble and watch out behind him, then yeah." Zeetha said boisterously. "But he's mostly the brains. Me, I hit things." she finished with a savage grin.

"And I'm sure you're really good at it," I complimented her. If she really was Gil's family then we were going to have to get along well for a long, long time. "And wow, this is an amazing ship! You must have fought really hard to take this kind of prize!"

"Truthfully?" Gil admitted with a bit of embarassment. "It's actually one of my father's ships. We didn't fight for this one at all, she's straight out of the Stockholm Yards."

"Whew," I whistled impressively. "So you are a pirate king's son. That was one of my leading theories. But wait, I hadn't known there were any players that big currently, much less any named Holzfaller, so-?" I trailed off questioningly.

"Oh my dad likes to run more of a dark fleet." Gil said impishly. "You know, like the one Baron Wulfenbach is rumored to have. No obvious banners, no big fleet actions, no infamy that gets you big Wanted posters. Just us quietly going here and there as individuals, nothing flashy, but it all adds up."

"Sounds very professional." I acknowledged, and we reached a little cabin that had clearly already been set up as my guest quarters.

"Okay, Zeetha, I'm going to get Zola's story down and find out what kind of help she needs, so can you go supervise the supply loading-?" Gil asked her.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm on it." she said with a dismissive handwave. "You will pay for sticking me with the boring stuff again, big brother! Just like you always do!" she grumbled at him affectionately as she got up and left.

"So, what kind of help did you need?" Gil asked me, and I started to tell him the story - mostly the truth, if with some parts left out and some other parts given careful emphasis - that I'd been rehearsing, along with an explanation of how I actually wasn't that bad in Paris but I hadn't been allowed to reveal to anyone I had training-

"Captain?" a woman's voice called from the hallway outside after knocking on my compartment door. "Your betrothed wants to see you immediately. Something about bad news from home-"

His WHO wants to see him?!? I mentally screeched to myself.

"Tell her I'll be right there!" Gil said, getting to his feet. "I'm sorry, but she gets upset if I make her wait-" he began to explain hurriedly.

"Wait, you're engaged?" I asked him. "When- how- who?!?"

"It's an alliance my dad is making with another faction," Gil rushed to say. "He's got a son, somebody else has a granddaughter, you know how it goes. And he doesn't absolutely need this alliance but it would make things a lot more convenient for us both." Gil shrugged. "And it's not that bad, really. She's pretty and nice and is even more born to this lifestyle than I am, so even if she's not any kind of fighter at all- anyhow, I'm sorry to ditch you but I really have to take this and like right now. Look, ask my steward here for anything you want to eat or drink, all right? I'm sure it was a long trip." he hurriedly finished, and was gone before I could even begin to organize my thoughts.

No! I screeched mentally to myself. It wasn't fair! Okay, its rational to expect somebody to finally find someone to be with after two years even if they weren't really good with girls at all- maybe that's why Gil's father finally gave up and arranged a marriage for him- but I wanted him! I screamed. This granddaughter of whoever could have just gone and gotten anybody else! I didn't have a lot of choices here! And I was not going to give Gil up!

Right. My window of opportunity was going to be brief as hell here, but fortunately I still had a trick or two in reserve-

I ordered my meal and politely thanked the steward and as soon as he was gone, I stealthed the hell out of this room and went straight for the captain's quarters. I took off my ring, unscrewed the ornamental stone in it just the right way, then flipped the stone over and put it back into the setting. The bottom of the stone contained an almost invisibly thin and fine quarter-inch needle, one that was coated with both a reliable contact anesthetic and a dose of Auntie Mehitabel's Natural Causes. The subtlest and slowest-acting poison in the Smoke Knight toxicology, one dose of Auntie Mehitabel's and you'd go on for days without feeling the slightest symptom, then drop dead of heart failure. And outside of the Valois families or the Imperial Questors, virtually nobody even knew what to look for on an autopsy. It would be a tragic coincidence that Gil's betrothed would die so young but hey, mysterious diseases and aneuryms carried off even the young and healthy sometimes. That's what Auntie Mehitabel's was designed for. And my poison ring's needle could barely be felt as is, and certainly couldn't be felt with the numbing agent on the tip. One backslap, one arm-clasp, one little poke almost anywhere less sensitive than the fingertips or the palms, and it would be done. And then I could console him-

It would have taken a very experienced Smoke Knight to detect me as I entered Gil's quarters. He must have just gotten command of this vessel, I noted absently. His rooms in Paris had been as messy as a bachelor going to college always was, but these barely looked lived-in at all-

My blood boiled as I lurked outside the doorway to the bedroom to see Gil lovingly embracing a sobbing red-haired woman in a- who the hell wore a walking-out dress on an airship? Even I'd put on sensible trousers and shoes for this occasion, and I'd come here deliberately intending a seduction! I noted distressingly that Gil's body language, which had been guarded and defensive all through our conversation, was entirely open and affectionate with whoever this woman was. Damn, this wasn't just a cold arrangement. There were actual feelings here. I'd certainly have to be careful in how I picked up the shattered pieces of Gil's heart afterwards, but I was sure I could console him-

Gil finally settled down whatever vapors Lady Useless here had been having over whatever bad news from elsewhere, and after a final murmured exchange of sweet nothings he turned to leave. I let him walk right past me and then crept into the bedchamber. I hadn't seen her face when she was clinched with Gil and I didn't see it now as she was standing facing away from me, apparently lost in thought. Closer, closer- done! I exulted. I reached out and lightly pricked her with the needle through the thin shift of the back of her dress, and-

My face slammed hard into solid metal as whoever had somehow come out of nowhere had grabbed me with crushing strength and practically thrown me face-first into the nearest bulkhead. I know I hadn't had as much opportunity to practice as I could have for the past couple of months, but how was I this out of shape-

"Zola Anya Talinka Venia Zeblinkya Malfeazium." an amused but cold voice said smugly in my ear. "It's such a pleasure to finally meet you."

I fought as best as I could but whoever had blindsided me wasn't just strong but also fast, and he knew all my moves. And he'd gotten the drop on me and I'd never even seen him. Smoke Knight-

My heart sank as he finished restraining me and turned me around. I'd never met him in the flesh before but I recognized him just as surely as he'd recognized me. Not just a Smoke Knight but a full-fledged Night Master. Night Master Jaron, Martellus' own personal assassin. No wonder I had lost so handily-

And as I peered over his shoulder I recognized the Smoke Knight that was even now test-swabbing the wound on the lady's back from the file photos as Varpa, which- my brain crashed to an incredulous halt as the red-headed woman turned to face me and I recognized Gil's "betrothed" as Princess Xersephnia von Blitzengaard.

Gil re-entered the room, accompanied by Zeetha and another evilly grinning woman in a white airship captain's uniform and a skull tattoo on her forehead. So in addition to the two Smoke Knights and his sister as muscle we now also had Captain Bangladesh DuPree, the Baron's personal killer. And then I noted with incredulity that yes, that was clearly DuPree's face from the file photos, but that was also the same face if an entirely different hairstyle and costume as the crazy woman that had sometimes hung around Gil in Paris-

"Zola, may I introduce you to my betrothed Gilgamesh Wulfenbach?" Xersephnia said smugly.

"... it was a trap the entire time." I said dully. "Of course it was. And everything in Paris- I got it all wrong-"

"No it wasn't a trap!" Gil began tightly, before exploding in outrage. "Zola, I was giving you a chance! Do you really think we'd set up an entire airship full of fake pirates-"

"Hey, who are you calling fake?" DuPree rounded on him. "Do you know how long I spent specially recruiting these guys for my own personal pride and joy?"

"-before setting me up as a fake pirate captain by borrowing Captain DuPree's personal flagship and hand-picked crew," Gilgamesh repeated, to DuPree's approving nod. "All that, just to trap you? We could have done that just as soon as you entered the skiff!"

"Then why?" I screamed at him.

"Despite all of our available intelligence that outlined for us precisely what a morally bankrupt, utterly selfish, and homicidal little witch that you are-" the Princess began.

"And not even in the fun way!" DuPree contributed cheerfully.

"-Gilgamesh still refused to condemn you without evaluating the truth of these reports for himself. And so, once your name came to Captain DuPree's attention via the inquiries you'd made among the pirate information network, we crafted this scenario." the Princess finished.

"Yeah, I'm not really active in the lifestyle anymore - much - but it's not like any of those guys would dare to cancel my account." DuPree smirked. "Sort of a Pirate Queen grandmother clause, y'know?"

"I wanted to believe that you were just caught up in something," Gil said sadly. "Even after knowing you'd been raised as a Smoke Knight your whole life, I wanted to believe that it was because you'd been raised your whole life to believe it. Not because you yourself were that bad. So-" he sighed. "I gave you an out, but also deliberately twinged your jealousy both with Zeetha and Seffie to see if you'd be heartless enough to attack anyone over it. And you did, even after getting my promise of sanctuary in hand, just to try and get your hooks into me even deeper. Oh, and speaking of that-" Gil finished frustratedly, turning to the Princess-

"Gilgamesh," the Princess said softly, coming over to lay her hands comfortingly on his arm. "You already know why it had to be me. You are not a bad actor, witness that you successfully deceived her in conversation, but you would not be capable of embracing a woman you felt nothing for and pretending that you loved her well enough to fool someone as adept at interpreting body language as Zola. And she had to believe that her obstacle was a romantic one, not merely a cold-blooded betrothal, or else she might have simply tried long-term emotional manipulation rather than assassinating the obstacle... and she's good enough at that that we'd never know for certain. Plus, it would have taken a very long time."

I involuntarily burst out "Wait, are you telling me you two are ACTUALLY engaged?!?"

"Oh, we certainly are," the Princess said happily. "And not without great affection, either. But is that truly so implausible, Zola? After all, our scenario had you fooled completely and you know as well as I do that the best cover stories use as much of the truth as possible." Her Highness smirked at me. "Surely you haven't forgotten everything in so short a time."

"Go to hell!" I shouted back at her futilely. "Stupid weakling political power play- you're just a piece to them! Just like I was! What, you think your little 'love' is real?" I spat at Gil. "She's a bigger fake than me!"

"And they call me crazy?" DuPree said incredulously. "Seriously, kid, she volunteered to risk being killed so her fiancee could test whether or not he could give amnesty to an ex-girlfriend and you think that's not her legitimately going way out on a limb for him? Did your training involve lots of being dropped on the head?"

"Seffie, I'm so glad you're okay but I still say it was too risky!" Gil said to the Princess, ignoring me. "What if she'd used something faster-acting than that Auntie whichever's? What if she'd just stabbed you?"

"Then she'd have been far less competent at tracelessly murdering me without suspicion than we knew her to be," the Princess replied to him affectionately. "And I also have the acquired toxin immunities common in our family, so the faster venoms wouldn't have worked. That is the other reason it had to be me."

"The antidote for Auntie Mehitabel's has already taken effect, Herr Wulfenbach," Varpa reassured him. "The Princess will be fine."

"At any rate, Zola, we've gotten the rest of you already." Jaron said proudly. "The Dowager Princess had a little list, and none of you will be missed. So you can at least take pride in that you lasted the longest of them all."

"And now I suppose I'll get to last for a very, very long time." I said brokenly. "And what's the point now? Go ahead, do whatever you want to me. I won't even feel it. I don't even care anymore."

Because I really didn't. Gilgamesh Holzfaller was the last bit of hope I'd had to get anything nice for myself in this world, and now it turned out that he'd never been real either. He'd been as fake and as empty as all the rest of it. Literally everything had been. Even me.

Especially me.

"I'm sure Seffie's grandmother has a lot in mind for her," Gil said, "but this is a Wulfenbach airship. And that means I make the final call."

"As we agreed upon," Jaron said, and then he let go of me and left me standing alone in the middle of the room, with a phalanx of very formidable fighters between me and the only exit and the Princess standing safely directly behind her betrothed.

"I'm sorry, Zola." Gil said to me softly.

I looked back at him expressionlessly, but said nothing. There was nothing left to say. There was nothing left to see.

Gil sighed. "Bang? Make it quick."

"You got it, boss!" Captain DuPree said with a razor grin, as she stepped forward and raised her sword.

I didn't bother to duck.

* * * * *​

Author's Note: A 'coda' is the concluding passage of a piece of music or the concluding section of a dance. Seeing as how she was a singer and a dancer in addition to being a Smoke Knight, I figured it was an entirely appropriate title for the short story that was about the end of Zola's life.

And yeah, Zola's story is a sad one. For a certain value of "absolutely conscienceless murdering psychopath", that is. As should have been made obvious about her by the sheer 'not getting it' of certain parts of her internal narrative. At least I hope it was obvious, because I was certainly trying to be.

And yes, I finally failed my Will save vs. temptation and went 'Yup, its Gil/Seffie. And no, its not just politics, they really like each other.' But hey, even Klaus concedes that Gilgamesh is a very easy person to like. And the fandom knows full well that being liked is Seffie's superpower. So they will live happily ever after, because why not!

"I'm a pirate." is a con job that Gil has actually used in canon. On Zola. So of course I went with it here. Likewise, the 'Wulfenbach Dark Fleet' is an amusing nod to one of the footnotes from the novelisations about an underground smuggler network that is (falsely) rumored to exist among the Baron's own fleet.

And yes, they brought a ridiculous amount of muscle to the Zola takedown, as well they should - that as it turns out they didn't need to use.

"There is nothing left to see." are of course the last words of the Operative in 'Serenity'. I figured it was an appropriate reference to make to someone who had only one thing to live for, and now that's been poofed too.

Now, about me doing yet another sidestory for something I thought I was done with... *shrugs* I blame the reader who asked me how Zola's story ended, because then I started imagining how it could have ended, and this came out!

You're still asymptotic-zero unlikely to ever get the Storm King actually being coronated or setting up his rule afterwards because that's way more worldbuilding effort than I got time for. Or got chops for, for that matter. Or want to stick my metaphorical writer balls that far out on a chopping block for. But these things I've already done are largely character pieces here in the sidestories, and I can do those much easier.

 

[cliffc999]

This one originally just exploded out of me back when someone in the original SB thread joked about the GG characters reading the story and doing a reaction, and my muse just wouldn't give me a minute's peace after that. Like, it was just compulsive. So, they got this.

---

To whoever made that damned 'The Characters Read' suggestion earlier, know that you have contributed to the ongoing psychological torment of a fellow human being.

But at least it got you ungrateful bastards some new wordcount. *g*

--------------------------------------
"Why are we in this room?" Agatha asked. "What's that screen for?"

"Apparently we're being forced to review a fictional penny-sparkly that was written about our lives," Tarvek said.

"They are literally selling those by the crate in Paris!" Gilgamesh groused. "Why should we have to sit through one of these just because some arbitrary entities from beyond conventional reality force us to? I told you that we shouldn't have tried that experiment in trans-dimensional harmonics!"

"Science demanded it!" Agatha insisted heatedly.

"Yes, well science has apparently demanded that I get to be the star of this one," Tarvek said interestedly as he peered at the small display screen on the control unit of the device on the table.

"Oh no, Sturmvoraus, you're putting that up where we can all see it." Gilgamesh said, as the two of them began to wrestle over the controls- immediately before Agatha whacked them both across the back of the head.

"GANGWAY!" Violetta cried as she was randomly dropped in through a hatch on the ceiling to land on the couch. "Okay, which one of you idiots is responsible for this and what body part do you want bruised first?"

The dispute over the exact assigning of blame prompted a frank exchange of views wherein the merits of various positions were vigorously discussed at length. However, eventually...

"Did they have to tie us to these chairs?" Agatha said.

"I can't even strain these chains, let alone break a link!" Gilgamesh cried. "What are they even made out of?"

"This is ridiculous!" Tarvek cried as he tried and failed to pick the lock on his shackles behind his back. "We're both Smoke Knights! This shouldn't even be working on us!"

"Eugggggh," Violetta moaned as she failed to wriggle free of her restraints the tiniest bit. "Okay, okay Mysterious Time Beings, you win! Somebody hit the damn foot pedal so we can get this over with!"

Agatha reached out and stomped her foot pedal, and the text started scrolling up on the screen.

When Tarvek got a do-over he promised himself that it would be different. He promised that he wouldn't let Agatha fall in love with him until after she knew the truth. He had it all planned out.

"What's a 'do-over'?" Violetta said.

"Wait, not falling in love with you until after I know the truth?" Agatha looked at Tarvek. "The truth about what?"

"Ummm..." Tarvek said. "Could somebody advance the text so we could try to narrow down the possible categories?"

Tarvek never did have very much luck with plans.

"They know you so well, don't they?" Gil smirked at him.

"Oh like you can talk." Tarvek returned fire.

"Yeah, but you try harder," Violetta snarked. "Which is why you have so many more plans blow up on you."

"KEEP GOING!" Tarvek shouted.

She was so beautiful.

I'd stopped as soon as Agatha first came into view down the hallway. My heart gave a little lurch, the same way it always did whenever I first saw her again after any significant absence. The lines of her face, her brilliant red-blonde hair, the elegant functionality of her spectacles perfectly framing her eyes-

"Is this seriously what goes on in your head?" Gil asked Tarvek incredulously.

"Oh like you can talk Mr. 'I Lose The Ability To Be Verbal Whenever Agatha Touches Me'!" Tarvek snapped back.

"... I think it's kind of sweet, actually." Agatha said interestedly.

"Do not encourage him!" Violetta cried. "Please, do not encourage him!"

My lips thinned as I began to note the other details of her appearance. The hunched and defensive body language as she hurried down the corridor, avoiding eye contact with any of the other students. The functional, shapeless clothing that had been expertly tailored to conceal anything distinctive or attractive about its wearer.

"Wait, what?" Agatha said.

"Is this one of those penny-sparklies where they just write completely different people and use your names?" Violetta said.

The way her skirt and vest merged together without any distinctive lines, the badly-fitted sleeves, the drab heavy tweed that they'd chosen for the fabric, it all blended together to outright crush any possible first impression she could make.

"Okay, this is just stupid-" Gil began, only to be cut off.

"I have a very bad feeling about this..." Agatha muttered worriedly, and then stamped the pedal before anyone could react.

I compared her current clothing with the memory of that bilious sea-green dress she'd worn to dinner at Sturmhalten along with the make-up and hairdo precision-crafted to coordinate with it...

"Keep going," Tarvek said, and Agatha held the pedal down to let the scroller keep advancing continuously.

"Do you really write entire fashion essays in your head whenever you have an idle moment?" Gilgamesh said dazedly as the text rolled by.

"Yes! Yes he does!" Violetta shouted.

Agatha here, however... her flame wasn't banked, it had been extinguished. Everything they'd swathed her in and draped around her positively shouted I am helpless. I am worthless. Please do not take any notice of me.

"Oh no," Agatha said, turning pale with realization.

"Agatha, it's just a story." Tarvek said reassuringly. "It's only someone's bizarre imagination writing fiction about us, like 'The Lusty Loves of Lady Heterodyne.'"

"Yeah, we laughed like crazy at those, remember?" Violetta said as Agatha kept the text scroll advancing. "Don't let these idiots get you down. This isn't-"

[...] To the rest of the world 'Agatha Clay'

"... Clay? Wait, this actually happened to you?" Violetta turned pale in shock, and Agatha nodded pensively.

"THEY DID WHAT?!?" Gilgamesh screamed. "CLEARLY FATHER AND I DID NOT INVADE BEETLEBURG HARD ENOUGH!"

"For once I will enthusiastically endorse the brutal tyranny of the Wulfenbach Empire!" Tarvek agreed passionately. "In fact, I will criticize you for having been insufficiently brutal!"

"But what are you doing here?" Violetta asked Tarvek. "This far back you didn't even know she existed!"

I intimately knew what it was like to consistently present a false front of incompetence to your entire world, and to live as if revealing your true capabilities to anyone would mean your death. [...]

"Well, they are certainly writing us true to life," Agatha acknowledged wearily. "Especially you, Tarvek."

[...] What had they done to her?!?

"I will have every single person who was involved in these atrocities personally tortured by DuPree before they are burned at the stake!" Gilgamesh ranted madly.

"No you will not!" Agatha sharply corrected him. "But... thank you for the thought."

[...] Violetta's thumb dug lightly - for her - into my kidney. I could almost feel her silent glare at my back that was shouting You're missing your cue, you idiot!

"WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE?!?" Violetta cried.

"This has to be some kind of time travel narrative." Agatha deduced.

"That... would make sense." Tarvek agreed slowly. "If I somehow ended up in the past then I'd certainly want to come and help you as soon as I possibly could."

"You mean help her right into your waiting arms." Gilgamesh sulked. "Am I even going to be in this story at all?"

"Oh Gods, its getting worse." Tarvek said as the text kept scrolling.

[...] "Or beaten down," Violetta said with quiet anger. "She was acting almost like the castle staff back in Sturmhalten."

"It was that bad?" Tarvek whispered.

"Agatha," Violetta said soberly. "Just... just give me their names. Just point 'em out to me. And I promise you, bodies will hit the floor. If the 'us' in that story think you were as bad off as what Prince Aaronev was doing to the-" she gulped.

"When you go to Beetleburg, you're taking me and Gilgamesh with you." Tarvek said flatly.

"Nobody is killing anyone!" Agatha said. "I mean it! It's sweet in a very scary and disproportionate and more than a little psychologically unstable manner for you all to offer to kill everyone who was mean to me, but it was just campus bullying!"

"That you can say that and sincerely believe it is why you are the finest woman we have ever known." Tarvek said sincerely.

[...] "Would you be willing to surveil her home situation?" I asked her. "Discreetly? The simple fact that she's dressed like that means her foster parents have something to do with this, as unbelievable as that seems."

"Wow, we are in serious mode on this." Violetta said. "This is reading like we set this up as an entire tactical op."

[...] "Got it." she acknowledged me, then immediately segued to an offhanded "So, how do you think Tinka's doing back home?" I could hear the metallic footsteps of one of the Clockwork Army coming down the street behind us on its patrol circuit that had prompted Violetta's shift in conversation.

"Enemy-territory drill," Tarvek nodded. "We're certainly not taking any chances."

"Is this the sort of training you had?" Agatha asked them curiously.

"What, you thought Smoke Knights were just about sleight of hand?" Violetta asked her in return.

Useful life lesson: when mysterious other-dimensional creatures decide to help 'expand your perception of time', they don't always know what they're doing.

"Oh thank God, we've left the psychological horror and are entering an exposition section." Violetta said. "Maybe now we can get some context."

"Or at least fewer nightmares." Gil agreed.

Agatha kept scrolling, and soon enough...

"Oh God, the summoning." Tarvek groaned. "Yes, I imagine that if that creature had botched the job my consciousness could have ended up re-anchored anywhere in my personal timeline."

[...] and things had gotten very confusing after that until I'd somehow woken up back in my old bedroom in Castle Sturmhalten.

"And now we have a time frame." Violetta said analytically.

Fortunately I'd had long practice at only screaming in confusion and fear on the inside-

"That's not what Captain DuPree says." Gil smirked at Tarvek.

"Oh, do you want to trade embarassing Paris stories in front of Agatha, Holzfaller? Do you really?" Tarvek glared back.

"... just keep scrolling." Gil groused.

After I'd oriented myself I'd taken almost a week to decide on what I was going to do. There were so many disasters and dangers to avert, so great a potential threat to Europa to avoid...

"This doesn't quite sound like you." Gil said.

... and as disgusted as I was with myself to admit it, so many opportunities to exploit.

"Whoops! Never mind!" he smirked.

"Wulfenbach, look me straight in the eye and tell me if you went back in time you would have invited me to be there so we could both meet Agatha together." Tarvek replied.

"I would have invited you to be there so we could both meet Agatha together," Gil said, staring at Tarvek with a perfectly straight face.

"Said the man with his fingers crossed behind his back," Agatha said disapprovingly as she leaned to look over the back of her chair.

"Dammit!" Gil swore, and Tarvek and Violetta traded matching grins.

But those would be the less difficult parts of my journey. The real challenge would be properly managing the state of affairs in Europa after a victory against the Other. Because to simply allow the Wulfenbach Empire to continue as it was was not a viable idea.

"HEY!" Gil cried.

The Long War had essentially returned as soon as the Baron had been openly shown to be vulnerable. The Empire had collapsed when he'd gotten trapped in stasis in Mechanicsburg, and even the best that Gil could do barely held even a fraction of the Empire together

"Okay, that part is true, but still! I'm trying my best!" Gil whined.

"I think the point 'myself' is making is that the situation was so flawed from the getgo that not even your best could salvage things, and is using that as their justification for making historical changes." Tarvek replied.

With the benefit of hindsight I would reluctantly admit at this juncture that Klaus Wulfenbach was not a brutal usurper but a man who had forged a legitimate and necessary peace out of an era of chaos

"Wow, thanks." Gil said, looking at Tarvek.

"Well, I'm not wrong." Tarvek agreed.

but one that he'd forged via methods that could not endure. His grasp of strategy and conquest was perhaps the greatest in known history, but for all that he ruled one of the greatest empires in Europan history his understanding of how to be an emperor was woefully incomplete.

"Definitely not wrong!" Tarvek smirked.

[...] Even Martellus had understood that rulership was ultimately a thought that existed in the minds of the ruled, and that like all thoughts it needed symbols to help articulate and refine it, ongoing positive reinforcement to encourage its growth, and repeated conditioning to make it stick.

"You're seriously comparing me to him?" Gil cried. "And I'm losing?"

"Only in political science?" Violetta tried to reassure him.

"That's not helping!" Gil shouted.

[...] And yes, I knew that I was a flawed person myself and that I was as yet entirely untried as a king. No, I was certainly not Andronicus Valois.

"... go ahead, say it!" Tarvek snarled.

"What, and discourage your slow, tentative efforts towards actually achieving self-awareness some day?" Gil smirked. "But that would interfere with your ongoing positive reinforcement, wouldn't it?"

Tarvek's response could be described as verbal only by an exceptionally charitable narrator.

"Is this going to be some bizarre show where the punchline is that the whole experiment they claimed was going on was a distraction and we're really here just to emotionally torture each other?" Violetta said.

"Don't be absurd!" Agatha insisted. "That would be the most ridiculous notion ever!"

"Of course it would be!" Tarvek said. "Both scientifically and ethically unsound in the extreme!"

"Absolutely!" Gil said. "Without a valid control group, it would merely be pointless torture!"

"... I have just realized that I am the only sentient being in this entire dimension who is not a Spark." Violetta slowly intoned in horror. "HEY UP THERE! IS IT TOO LATE TO ASK FOR A MERCIFUL DEATH?"

But by the same token, Agatha was not Euphrosynia Heterodyne. She was... good. [...] No, she was a true daughter of the Heterodyne Boys, a heroine and a princess of legend. She was magnificent. And with her helping me... well, then I just might be able to actually pull it off.

"Awww." Agatha sniffled. "Thank you, Tarvek."

"If you're going to be giving Violetta that merciful death she asked for, could I have one too please?" Gil sighed upwards.

As for Gil, by now I'd forgiven him for all the stupid misunderstandings between us. In hindsight, they hadn't really been his fault anyway. I certainly didn't wish him any harm

"Your timing is horrible." Tarvek gently teased him.

and even if I was planning to ultimately bring about the - hopefully as gentle as possible - downfall of his father's Empire

"What bizarre definition of 'not any harm' are you USING?" Gil looked at Tarvek probingly.

it's not as if he'd been eagerly looking forward to inheriting that mess to begin with.

"That definition," Tarvek smirked back at him.

From what I recalled of the future it had largely been several years of unrelenting misery for him, and while the Baron's mental overlay had had a lot to do with it I hadn't exactly seen anything that would indicate he'd have been much happier as ruler of Europa even entirely in his own mind.

"I can only pray that by the end of this you have all had as many embarassing secrets thrown open to share as I have." Gil swore.

"How can it be a secret if I already knew about it?" Tarvek asked him. "Because I do! It's not as if you're particularly hard to read!"

"Please stop teasing him so much," Agatha asked. "I think he's going to be at enough of a disadvantage by not being a main character in this story."

Everyone present politely ignored Gilgamesh's pained whimper.

No, I entirely hoped to chart a route to the Lightning Crown that involved Gil as my valued and much-rewarded ally than as my enemy, but such a route was entirely possible.

"Of course you'd be going for that again." Gilgamesh growled.

"You just heard my story-self's justification!" Tarvek replied. "Can you really disagree with them, given the different starting conditions they're under? And obviously I-he- the story intends to go about it in the most ethical and least harmful manner possible!"

"Well it would be hard to be more harmful than the route you actually took, even if most of that was an accident!" Gil shot back.

"Please don't remind me," Tarvek asked quietly.

"Sorry." Gil apologized.

[...] Which is why I felt just a tiny bit guilty at maneuvering to romantically cut Gil out before things even began.

"... to be honest, Tarvek, the fact that you're feeling any guilt here at all is impressive. Really." Gil admitted. "Because if I got a do-over I'd be doing everything on Castle Wulfenbach with Agatha as differently as possible and probably not even remember that you existed until after I was addressing wedding invitations."

"You both love me, and in any alternate world where the other one of you wasn't already competition you certainly wouldn't be in any rush to invite them as competition." Agatha said. "And maybe that doesn't make either of you a perfect saint, but if you were saints then I wouldn't even recognize you. I love you both just the way you are. So let's just all agree to not feel guilty over what hypothetical alternate selves of us might be doing in bizarrely different circumstances."

"And if the second chapter suddenly goes all 'The Lusty Loves of Lady Heterodyne'?" Violetta asked her penetratingly.

"Provisionally agree." Agatha continued. "Let us provisionally agree."

Gil, Tarvek, and Violetta all chorused their assent to that, and the scrolling continued.

But Violetta's analysis of the situation that she'd shared with me while we were busy repairing Castle Heterodyne had been entirely correct.

"What analysis is this?" Agatha and Gil said in stereo as they both turned to stare at Violetta.

"Ummm..." Violetta stammered, and eventually was persuaded to share the whole thing.

"Well, I suppose that was a fair analysis at the time," Agatha said, "but the changed political circumstances post-stasis bomb have rendered it entirely moot. Gil and I would have to rebuild his Empire almost from scratch as much as any new Shining Coalition would need to be built from scratch, so you're both back on even footing again."

"That particular silver lining existing in my complete and total failure to do my father's job only makes me feel worse." Gil sulked.

"Gilgamesh, even I won't say that was your fault." Tarvek sighed. "The Other ruined everyone's life that day. Week. Month."

"Century." Violetta continued.

"All of recorded history and more, if Queen Albia is to be believed." Gilgamesh contributed.

"Other girls merely get mothers who won't let them eat sweets, or wear calf-length skirts, or date until they're thirty. Why did I have to get a mother who was evil incarnate?" Agatha sighed. "Why?"

"Well, she tried to die but then Hell threw her out for lowering the property values." Violetta said portentously. "And so Lucrezia Mongfish must walk the Earth."

"Hell is supposed to be Earth's disposal site for human-shaped refuse, not vice versa." Agatha replied passionately.

"Could somebody finish the first chapter before one of us needs a bathroom break?" Gil broke in.

As for Gil? As cliche as it was to say, there were indeed other fish in the sea. Seffie would certainly love him and take care of him as much as any woman possibly could

"Why does everybody keep saying that me and Seffie should be together?" Gil asked plaintively. "She's only interested in me because of the politics!"

Tarvek and Violetta both looked at each other and sighed.

even if it would take extensive coaching on my part so she stopped choosing the wrong approaches and did something that might actually work. Honestly, cousin, how can you normally be so perceptive and yet so utterly fail to realize that Gil is positively allergic to politics?

"... explain." Gil said firmly, glaring at them both.

"Seffie is convinced that you could never possibly fall in romantic love with her, both because of Agatha and before you'd met Agatha because she didn't think she was the sort of girl you'd be remotely interested in," Tarvek reluctantly admitted. "So she never admitted that she was legitimately attracted to you because she had no expectation you'd actually care about that piece of information. All of her expectations were lowered down to the absolute minimum of an arranged marriage to you driven by political pragmatism and then the possibility that you might eventually grow to like her after you'd already been required to live together for years."

"... that makes absolutely no sense." Gilgamesh said dazedly. "I mean, okay, I admit it, I'm not great at understanding women, but that one is a full order of magnitude less comprehensible even than my usual state of confusion!"

"Your cousin sounds like a woman whose external poise conceals a serious internal struggle with self-worth issues." Agatha said to Tarvek and Violetta.

"What, and this surprises you guys? You have actually met our family, right?" Violetta replied incredulously.

[...] I wasn't enough of a hypocrite to tell myself that I was doing it only for their own good. I knew full well why I was doing it.

"Yes, because you love Agatha and you want to be with her." Gil shrugged. "I'd be a hypocrite if I said that was a bad idea to have!"

I'd openly told Agatha my true motives and desires during the final battle of the Siege of Mechanicsburg, right after we'd shared our first kiss. That I loved her for a thousand reasons and more. That I'd decided that no matter how things looked to be going between her and Gil I still wasn't going to give up on hoping that she might come to care for me after all. And that if Gil did win her heart in the end, then he damn well wouldn't do so without a fight.

Tarvek looked at Gil expectantly, only to be met with a respectful nod and shrug. "Hey, we already agreed on this in the Castle, remember?" Gil told him. "When I asked you if you were ready? And you said-"

"That I was so ready," Tarvek nodded back.

And so I had resolved to use the time I'd been given to go and meet Agatha first, to come to know her and woo her before Gil had even entered the picture, and help her reclaim her true heritage without having to go through any of the false starts and stumble and trials and travails that she had the first time.

"If either of you ever end up thrown back in time by some bizarreness, you have my permission to try this." Agatha said. "I certainly wouldn't mind getting that locket off earlier, or not watching Lars die, or any of the rest of it."

"Who's Lars?" Tarvek asked curiously, only to be met by Gil's shrug.

[...] As is, I'd have to settle for doing my absolute best to ensure that Agatha never went remotely near my home until we were ready to return there in force and tear Father and all his co-conspirators out by the roots. I'd sooner turn myself in to Baron Wulfenbach and confess everything before I'd allow Lucrezia to ever hurt Agatha again.

"Okay, if this story ends up with you and Agatha living happily ever after and me left by the roadside..." Gil sighed. "Then I'll try and be happy for you guys. Because at least your heart's in the right place this time."

"What do you mean 'this time'?" Tarvek replied sharply.

[...] And a bit of subtle overreach on my part in the wording of one of the requests prodded Beetle to forbid me to arrive with any royal honors or an armed escort. That left me an opening to point out to Father that Violetta, in her current cover identity as a recent resident of Mechanicsburg, could herself apply to attend TPU as an undergraduate and thus resume her old duties as my bodyguard in a way that could be finessed past Dr. Beetle.

"Wait, you deliberately schemed to get me back?" Violetta said, staring at Tarvek. "I thought I was going to end up in this thing by some bizarre coincidence! You literally had time-loop foreknowledge and you wanted me for this? One year before the death of Dr. Beetle- I was just about ready to kill you back then! For real, I mean! That was a really, really low point for me!"

[...] She was not happy to see me, of course.

"Yeah, master of fucking understatement!" Violetta said, still wide-eyed in shock.

[...] No. I needed my favorite cousin back if I was going to have any real chance of pulling this off, and so the first thing I'd done was rebuild the relationship with her that I'd lost. I had several years' of future knowledge to help me know how to do that, and for all our surface belligerence we had always cared about each other the most in our family, so I set out to make amends and I did.

"You are making me cry. For this I must hurt you." Violetta sniffled.

"By any chance, are you and Bangladesh DuPree distant relatives?" Gil asked.

Let alone the fact that one of my very last memories of the future before I'd been sent back was that Violetta had gone missing after a mysterious fight in Agatha's quarters at the Royal Society and had been as dead as you could possibly get without actually seeing the body. I certainly couldn't allow that to happen again, or anything like it.

"Oh dear God, that's correct." Tarvek said in horrified realization. "That creature had 'temporally re-aligned' my mind shortly before you'd been revealed as the intended sacrifice. If I'd gone back in time from that exact moment..."

"... then you'd have thought I was dead." Violetta said. "Okay, no wonder you tried to get back together with me as soon as possible. If I'd gone back like that-" she sniffled again. "Yeah, I'd have wanted to go reassure myself you were alive again as soon as I could as well."

[...] For all her inferiority complex about 'not being a very good Smoke Knight', by the end of my time in the future she'd blossomed into being one of the very best of our generation. And not because she'd needed the experience to unlearn what she'd learned but because she'd always had it in her all along. All she'd needed was the proper motivation. Even if I failed, she'd survive to get the word out.

Everyone else present decided to politely pretend that Violetta hadn't outright blushed and cried happy tears. Not least out of fear of the possible consequences after the restraints finally came off if they hadn't.

[...] "She's brain-locked?" Violetta asked me as we both stared down at the blood sample she'd discreetly obtained and I'd just finished analyzing.

"You'd have seriously stolen a blood sample from me without telling me?" Agatha asked heatedly.

"If we'd thought you were under some kind of hostile coercion?" Violetta said incredulously. "Hell yeah! If I had a castlemark for every time I've given Tarvek a stealth blood test because I'd thought he'd been dosed, I'd be rich enough to buy Sturmhalten!"

"Your family is so very odd," Agatha said bemusedly.

"Do you hear us disagreeing?" Tarvek sighed.

"Pain." I spat out. [...] "Violetta, you only see these kinds of diagnostic markers in someone in chronic agony. Whatever it is that they've done to her it's torturing her! Every day!" I stopped and tried to catch my breath, and blinked my eyes repeatedly because clearly there was some dust in here-

"Ohhh snap." Violetta said worriedly.

"Violetta?" Agatha asked her.

"That sort of thing always brings up bad memories for me," Tarvek said softly.

[...] "She's... really good at not letting her pain show." Violetta tried to reassure me. "Maybe they don't understand the full effects of that thing?"

"They did understand them," Agatha said sorrowfully. "I-" she halted. "I can forgive them. I did forgive them. Why can't I forget it?"

"Because prolonged suffering carves notches in the soul," Violetta said. "Being human would suck a helluva lot less if it didn't."

[...] And somebody gave them at least some legitimate training in tradecraft. They sanitize their garbage, they habitually use different routes every time they go somewhere, they're both diligent about doing lookouts before doing anything that would reveal their construct nature, and their situational awareness is well above civilian average.

"I never noticed any of this, and I was living through it!" Agatha said wonderingly.

"You were never trained to look for it," Tarvek explained. "And since it was done throughout your entire life with them, you never knew that it wasn't normal."

[...] "And yet they still allow it to continue." I said angrily. "How can you love someone and yet deliberately hurt them?!?" I shouted at the world.

"When you think it's the only way you can keep them from dying?" Violetta replied immediately, and then shot a death ray straight through my soul with her next sentence. "Because that's what you did to me, remember?"

"Ouch," Violetta winced. "Okay, that was brutal even for me! I guess story-me didn't totally forgive you yet."

"You weren't wrong, though." Tarvek agreed stoically.

[...] "You're doing very well, Herr Sturmvoraus." Lilith Clay complimented me as I finished a recital of Pachebel's Canon in D on her piano.

"Oooooh, nice one!" Violetta congratulated Tarvek. "Verbal high-five, weasel-boy!"

"And to think that these reflexively deceptive infiltrator-assassins are some of our best friends." Gil said to Agatha ironically. "The people we love and trust."

"Gil, people who keep death ray collections like ours should not throw stones," Agatha chided him.

"I don't own that many," Gil said plaintively. "And most of them are just for research purposes!"

[...] "Adam, Lilith, I'm- Oh, hello!" Agatha called out to me, noticing the stranger sitting in the living room of her house alongside her mother.

"I actually do remember that I was that innocent once, but it's still bizarre to contemplate," Agatha sighed.

"Good afternoon," I smiled back at her. I vividly reminded myself that her foster mother was standing right here and so it was very important that I only smile a little- "I'm sorry, my lesson started late- here, let me get up so that you can start yours." I said, rising to my feet and cutting off Lilith's reply.

"Wow, three entire seconds from first meeting to first lie." Gil said. "Even for you that's exceptional."

"It's called 'undercover' for a reason!" Tarvek winced.

[...] "Oh! Your Highness!" Agatha said, bowing again. Oh damn, she knew that?

"'Your Highness?'" Lilith looked at me suspiciously.

"... my father is Prince Aaronev Sturmvoraus, Protector of Sturmhalten." I admitted with visible reluctance.

"Did an untrained civilian seriously detonate your cover ID in thirty seconds flat?" Violetta gaped.

"I'm beginning to understand why the foreword to this story said what it said." Tarvek sighed.

[...] "Frau Clay, do you have any idea what a relief it is to interact with people who don't look at me and see several hundred years of family history before they actually see me?" I spoke to both her and Agatha. "To be frank, the sensation of simply being treated like everyone else is getting positively addicting. I honestly don't know how I'll adjust when I go back home and it's all the silly bowing and curtseying again!" I finished, making a joke of it and actually getting Agatha to chuckle along with me.

"Even I'm going to compliment that recovery," Agatha said, looking at me. "You technically aren't even lying!"

"Considering how much we both hated living in Sturmhalten?" Violetta said. "'Technically' has nothing to do with it."

[...] "I'm Dr. Beetle's assistant so I saw your name - your full name - on some of his mail," she blushed. "I'm very sorry, I shouldn't have violated a confidence like that. Either yours or his."

"Of course," Tarvek sighed. "It's always the simple things that trip you up. And given that Agatha's the primary target and where she's employed, its not as if it was even theoretically avoidable."

"Yeah, that was just the fickle finger of fate having flicked." Violetta agreed. "Can't dunk on you when that happens."

[...] "Of course they are. I work with Dr. Beetle every day." Agatha interrupted her mother. "I was just wondering- what's it like? How does it feel to have such insight and how does it differ from the regular scientific method non-Sparks use? Does it hurt to think that hard? Is the- ow!" she winced and started staggering, her rising enthusiasm having been off in mid-word by one of her headaches.

"And time to you completely losing your spaghetti in three... two... one..." Violetta sighed wearily.

"Agatha!" I shouted in alarm, leaping forward to catch her as she fell over and completely blowing my cover with how precipitously I'd reacted.

"Zero." Tarvek finished resignedly.

"It's not a thing to mock!" Agatha reproved Violetta. "He legitimately cares!"

"I wasn't mocking," Violetta said soberly. "I was sympathizing."

[...] I stopped, took a deep breath to try and silence Anevka's distant screaming, and continued.

"Tarvek?" Agatha said softly, turning to look at him worriedly.

"That's the most serious form of shell shock," Gil said. "I mean, right there you're having a waking auditory hallucination that's a flashback to a traumatic event. Tarvek, why didn't you ever say anything?"

"We're talking about the guy who you once picked up with a million stab wounds and half of Night Master Jaron's venom collection in his bloodstream, and he tried to make a joke out of it." Violetta said. "Getting this lunkhead to admit that he's in pain is like pulling teeth. Out of a dragon."

"I would have appreciated knowing this about him so I could help him, Violetta!" Agatha snapped.

"This is from the period of time that she was my personal Smoke Knight, not yours." Tarvek pointed out. "Which means that she's oath-sworn not to reveal anything about it that could possibly be used against me, not without my permission. Which..."

"You wouldn't ever give even with a gun to your head." Gil said. "Yeah, well, you're an idiot. We're your friends, and we want to know this kind of stuff not to manipulate you with but to help pick you up when you fall."

[...] "You have my sincere condolences, Prince Sturmvoraus." Lilith replied to me gently. "That's... the only word for it is 'horrible'. I think it says a great deal about you as a person that you've let your experiences give you so much empathy for other people who are suffering."

"That's Lilith," Agatha said proudly.

"That's my cousin," Violetta said with equal pride.

[...] "Then on the day Agatha becomes legally able to make her own decisions about her medical care, I will present myself to her again and offer my help to her in any manner that she chooses to accept or not." I told her firmly. "You can throw me out of your house, you can forbid me to ever see her again, but that won't stop me for as long we both live in Beetleburg. You know this."

"I still don't agree with you." she said. "But I respect your conviction. So please respect mine; Adam and I, in full knowledge of the situation, sincerely believe that what we are doing is the only way to keep Agatha as safe and secure as possible."

"I... two people I love are disagreeing entirely and they're both right." Agatha said. "What do you even call that kind of tangle?"

"Life." Gilgamesh said simply.

[...] "Lilith," Agatha called softly from the couch. "You know how everyone else leaves after they see me have one of these attacks. Please don't push away someone who wants to stay."

"Did you seriously get ditched by that many people just because you weren't perfectly healthy?" Violetta said incredulously.

"Remind me again why we're 'disproportionate' in wanting to tear this place to the ground?" Gil said.

"Speaking as the only person in this room who spent their early life not growing up in a castle," Agatha said, "I am sincerely envious of all your illusions about the average tolerance level and lack of ignorance of the common citizen."

"... for the first time in my entire life, I'm actually not regretting my birth as a Mondarev." Violetta said, shocked to her very core.

[...] "Miss Clay," I said, with a little courtly bow to cover the fact that I had so many possible responses I could make and none of them would be a good idea right now. "Be well, and until we meet again."

"Is there a school that you go to learn how to- to- talk like that?" Gil said plaintively.

"Actually, yes." Tarvek replied. "They're called 'deportment and elocution lessons' and pretty much every nobleman who can afford them pays for at least some for their children."

"THEN WHY DID MY FATHER NEVER BUY ME ANY?" Gil cried. "I don't like always saying the wrong thing!"

"Gil, your father is one of the most intelligent men alive but there is a reason his manual on workplace communication was anathematized by every major religious denomination in Europa." Agatha pointed out reasonably.

[...] "The woman you love, or the woman you hope to make into the woman you love?" Violetta asked me penetratingly. "Look, have you even considered how lopsided your power dynamic is right now? You literally know more about her than she does about herself, and you've got the key to whether or not she's ever able to reach her full potential!"

"I'd... never considered that about the ethics of time-loop romance." Tarvek said.

"She's talking about the locket." Gil pointed out reasonably. "The time-loop could be handled simply by telling her about it before actually trying to go from friendship to romance."

"A goal that, according to the summary, I fail at." Tarvek said. "Am I going to be the hero of this story or the villain?" After the prolonged silence that fell after his remark, Tarvek burst out angrily "WHAT?!?"

"I was actually trying not to say it!" Gil said guiltily.

"Hero," Agatha reassured him. "I am certain you will be the hero."

"But what if I fail?" Tarvek asked her worriedly.

"If failing once made you stop being a hero, then Othar Tryggvasen's career would have lasted maybe a week." Gil pointed out reasonably.

"Oddly, that actually helps," Tarvek said with a rueful chuckle.

[...] "I meant her," she said. "If she falls for your Prince Charming routine before you tell her the truth, then how deep are you sunk when she thinks that you manipulated her all along?"

"I would say, pretty damn far." Agatha reluctantly admitted.

"Violetta, as the room's expert on the feminine point of view would you please tell me how I avoid making 'Agatha Clay's' heart flutter even the slightest bit when I'm a handsome young man with manners, breeding, wealth, taste, legitimate emotional concern, and am the only person her age who still wants to be friends with her at all?' Even before we get into my tragic backstory, Sparkiness, and mysterious yet compassionate agenda?"

"You don't." Violetta replied to the screen. "You really, really don't."

"I'm practically a living caricature of a penny-sparkly at this point.

"'Practically'?" Gil snarked.

So again, you tell me, how do I keep Agatha at a distance without a permanent rejection?"

"... severe facial scarring?" she replied sarcastically.

"Other-me is a wise woman," Violetta said matter-of-factly.

[...] "Tarvek! You're here!" were Agatha's first words to me as she entered the house, even before greeting her parents.

"Hello, Agatha." I said, standing and greeting her with another bow. "I do hope you didn't miss me Wednesday but I thought it would be best to give my uncertain welcome time to settle in a bit more. But I think I'm being at least provisionally accepted for the duration."

"Oh, we're courting!" Agatha said wonderingly, staringly raptly at the screen. "Real, old-fashioned romance novel courtship! And here I was afraid this would be like those lurid penny-sparklies!"

"I know!" Violetta said eagerly. "Oh, this is getting good!"

"Good Lord," Tarvek said, raising an eyebrow as he also concentrated on absorbing every word.

"I at this point entirely abandon my philosophy of agnosticism and petition to enter the Church," Gil said tonelessly. "Because I now have objective proof for the existence of Hell, and by inference therefore of Heaven."

[...] There was a mutual round of awkward smiling at each other before Agatha sheepishly admitted "I'm not really very experienced at this."

"That's so cute!" Violetta said eagerly.

"Not your fault," I reassured her as I took a sip. "I think we're both still entirely at sea as to precisely what 'this' even is, particularly given that it's still early days. But if nothing else, I would certainly like to be friends."

"That's so sweet!" Agatha gushed.

"And I at this point reconsider my religion, because the consistent failure to answer my prayers begging for the sweet release of death is objective proof of the nonexistence of God." Gilgamesh continued even more tonelessly.

"Gil, if you don't at least try to understand this sort of thing then you will never overcome those speaking-to-women difficulties." Tarvek pointed out reasonably.

"Is there at least a way to start with lower dosages and gradually build an immunity?!?" Gil asked him desperately.

[...] I mentally sorted through several pithy or philosophical ways to observe how society was often disappointing, and then finally settled on a simple "They shouldn't have."

"... okay, that actually was good." Gilgamesh said, shocked.

"While I would normally disdain literary criticism from a man who thinks Trelawney Thorpe adventures are the highest form of literature, the fact remains that broken clocks are still right at least once a day." Tarvek retorted.

"Whose side are you on?" Gil retorted angrily.

"Agatha," I remonstrated with her gently. "I'm not really in general practice but I am a physician, and at home I live with someone who is a... semi-invalid, I suppose would be the simplest way to phrase it. And while we've only just met twice here and that briefly, from all that I've seen about you or heard about you on campus-"

I winced again at Agatha's smile suddenly growing brittle as she thought about what I'd almost certainly heard about her.

"-you never use your illness as an excuse for not doing your best at everything." I reassured her. "Do you know how rare that is?"

Agatha's response to this passage could only be described as being somewhere between a whimper and a squeak.

[...] "I remember her being a better person when she was a young woman, but ever since what happened to her she's changed." I took a moment to steady myself, and continued. "She grew hard, and bitter. She wears her condition like a suit of armor. She uses it to justify being petty and cruel to others, because how can the world not understand how much she's suffering?"

"Did you seriously describe your sister in exact literal detail without once even implying that she was a homicidal clank?" Gil said, blinking heavily. "I didn't even know words could do that!"

"Said a great many people, shortly after first having met Prince Tarvek Sturmvoraus," Violetta continued in the tones of a professional announcer.

[...] "-then your degree of chronic pain is significantly higher than hers. And yet..." I shook my head in gentle wonder. "You don't act like Anevka does. Not at all. With everything you have to carry, with all the unfairnesses your situation has put upon you, it never even occurs to you to stop trying to be the best person you can be. And that's really a very amazing thing."

"Wow, I think you can actually hear the exact second at when story-Agatha's heart falls hopelessly in love." Violetta said, awestruck.

[...] "That might help," Lilith agreed with me surprisingly. "I'm no formally trained physician but in my youth I worked as a village healer and a battlefield medic in turn. If you work something out, bring it to me and I'll have a look at it first."

"You have the best mom," Violetta told Agatha urgently. "I mean, the whole 'she thinks she has to keep you locked in that thing to keep you from being hunted down and murdered' thing is still between you, but she's going straight at the first chance she can see to even slow down the grief coming at you. She really wishes she had the power to change your situation for the better, she just never thought she did."

[...] "Prince Tarvek," she asked me firmly. "What, precisely, are your intentions regarding Agatha?"

"Oh no, she asked that question." Gil said. "I never even had anybody available to ask it of me and I still know how terrifying it is."

[...] "I want to offer Agatha any possible support that I can give her, and to press nothing upon her that she is not ready to give a fair judgment upon before accepting." I replied after a long pause.

Gil turned and looked disgustedly at Tarvek, while Tarvek positively preened.

[...] I politely made my farewells and headed down the sidewalk. As soon as I was around enough corners to be unobserved I unbuttoned my cuff and checked the readings on the miniaturized etheric detector rig I'd had strapped to my forearm the entire time.

"Of course," Gil snarked. "Can't have a sweet, romantic courtship without the hidden surveillance devices!"

[...] The waveform readings my short-range receiver had picked up from Agatha's locket were definitive. It and it alone was the cause of her neurological disorder.

"... damn." Gil cursed himself. "Okay, if you're doing it to eliminate hypotheses and confirm the diagnosis, that's legitimate necessity."

[...] I rebuttoned my sleeve while inwardly cursing myself with every filthy word I knew. From this point on, every day I remained silent I became an accomplice in the ongoing torture of the woman I loved.

"Oh no," Violetta moaned. "Tarvek..."

"It's just a story," Tarvek recited. "I am out here, not in there." he continued, then took a deep breath. "But dear God, do I really pity my other-self right now."

I had to save her. But how?

"I really hope you find an answer in there." Gil said.

 

[cliffc999]

"Well, the simplest solution is we just kill Dr. Beetle," Violetta shrugged.

Agatha and Gil wordlessly craned their heads over to look at her.

"Yes, let us sympathize with the guy who was deliberately keeping you ignorant of your true heritage and in agony because he wanted to use you to control HIve Engines." Violetta said tonelessly.

"I'm with Violetta," Tarvek agreed. "Your foster parents could legitimately say they feared to let you Breakthrough as they lacked the facilities to protect or manage you. A major Spark ruler of a strong city does not have that excuse."

[...] "And even if he doesn't, with Beetle gone and no other protector for the town the Baron still has to put Beetleburg under direct Imperial rule even if Beetle's own death isn't seen as suspicious at all. So whether or not our presence is suspected, the army comes anyway." I analyzed.

"Oh joy, its one of those things where the strategic and tactical factors mean that the thing you least want to do is the only thing you can do," Gil said. "My sincere condolences to you guys in the story."

[...] "Pffft!" Violetta snorted. "If you were Tweedle- okay, if you had Tweedle's lack of ethics and all your skills because he couldn't be remotely this subtle or charming even with a brain transplant- would that be stopping you? Even I could work out a scenario by which she's tragically orphaned and has to cling to you as her only hope in the world. You could even sign Beetle's name to the crime, or the Baron's, and really get her hooked to you forever. So the only reason you don't already have ten entire op plans for that sort of thing churning away in your weasel brain right now is because you are actually trying to do this the right way."

"For once I'm going to say that Martellus might be unfairly maligned here," Agatha said.

"Remember, this is the me of several years ago," Violetta pointed out. "And most of what made us stop calling him Tweedle - most of the time - happened after the summoning so again, nobody in this story knows that he legitimately helped us get your mom out of your head."

"Besides, the larger point Violetta is making is true," Tarvek pointed out. "Even if that particular relative of ours wouldn't be quite that absolutely morally bankrupt, I can name any number of them who would be."

"Yeah." Violetta nodded. "I mean, have you noticed that we are operating with no support in this story, despite the fact that at that point the Order of Jove would have considered a living female Heterodyne heir a direct gift from Heaven? Obviously we didn't dare to even begin to admit your existence to our family."

[...] "The only reason Agatha wasn't raised under Klaus Wulfenbach's protection her entire life is because the Clays don't trust him. [...] "I'm deliberately being accomplice to the torture of the woman I love for my own personal gain. And that's wrong. We should call him right now-"

"Wow," Gil said. "I didn't expect that."

"And then you're betting everything on Gil being able to hold the Empire together as soon as Klaus falls. And sure, he's a great guy and he'd try his best but you already saw the structural weaknesses of the Empire in the future, remember? We need the Storm King back for the best chance at a long-term future for Europa. Obviously we can't force it to happen if Agatha doesn't choose you of her own free will because we're not goddamn Tweedle, but that's the only major failure point we can ethically accept without at least trying to change it. We certainly can't abort before we even really get started." Violetta insisted.

"... I should have known." Gil continued, slumping. "I really am not going to be in this story at all, am I?"

"I take comfort in knowing that your ability to always make yourself the center of attention at my expense at least fails to function in the realm of the hypothetical," Tarvek said.

[...] "Isn't it gorgeous?" Agatha said cheerfully as she waved her hand out over the view of the river flowing through the heart of Beetleburg in mid-summer.

"Wait, we're walking out alone?" Agatha said. "What kind of romance is this? They skipped all the build-up!"

[...] "He means it's cold." our agreed-upon chaperone for this outing cut in. "I don't know what a Beetleburg winter is like, but it's probably only marginally worse than our summer."

"Ah, we do still have a chaperone, but one who is a younger female relative and not the suspicious parent." Tarvek said. "So we have left the initial tentative attraction and entered the tension-building phase."

"Is that what they're calling it now?" Gil snarked.

[...] "But sometimes the atmosphere is kinda sad underneath all the 'Welcome to Mechanicsburg!' smiling. The town's doing fine enough, I suppose, but they really miss their Heterodynes. Sometimes I wonder if all the tourism industry is their weird way of mourning them."

"According to Carson, it was." Agatha said softly.

"Wait... Violetta, is story-you subliminally putting 'You have a responsibility to Mechanicsburg' thoughts into Agatha's head? I thought Tarvek was the manipulative one!" Gil noted.

"Ummm..." Violetta said embarassedly.

[...] "Agatha, the 'Prince' in front of my name means that money is never really a concern for me." I shrugged. "Having a lot of it doesn't make me a better person, and I don't ask people to admire me for it."

"Tarvek, you don't seem to ever ask people to admire you for anything," Agatha said insightfully, and I drew a sudden breath.

"... that's right, you don't." Agatha said with realization. "I'm surprised story-me caught that and I missed it, especially since she has that damned locket still on!"

"If this is weeks later and you've been continously courting the whole while, she's actually spent almost as much time with her Tarvek as you have with ours and under far less chaotic conditions." Gil said analytically. "And from what my father said about that locket it wouldn't have made you stupider, just inhibited your concentration to keep you from ever Breaking Through."

"The centers of the brain that control emotion and intuition would be least effected, while those that control mechanical and mathematical faculties would be the most." Tarvek agreed. "So even your locketed self is still as empathetic and perceptive as ever, she's just struggling much harder with her professional or scientific duties. As well as chronic pain issues and the fatigue which accompanies it, of course." he finished with a spit of disgust.

[...] "Paris!" Agatha gasped in wonder. "Really? Oh my goodness! What's it like?"

"My other self, you will be so disappointed if you ever go there." Agatha sighed. "Oh, the architecture is wonderful enough but the welcome was direly lacking."

[...] "Would you believe that there was one time in Paris where I was actually impressed into service on a pirate ship?"

"Yes!" Gilgamesh said with the greatest of cheer. "Yes I would!"

Tarvek groaned in agony.

[...] "Wait, you're telling that story?" Violetta asked me. "The 'let us never speak of this again' story? The 'I wish I could invent a Sparky device to permanently burn these memories out of my brain' story?"

"Now I have to hear this." Agatha said, leaning forward towards the screen in rapt attention.

[...] "For almost a week, until I jumped overboard to escape." I confirmed. "That madwoman of a captain thought it would be a hilarious joke to have a prince scrubbing her decks for her. I never actually participated in any piracy, but I suppose if the prince business ever fails for me I could find a berth onboard any airship as an apprentice deckhand." I said lightly.

"Why do I have this odd sense of familiarity...?" Agatha asked.

"Because he's describing Captain Bangladesh DuPree." Gil smirked. "It was her ship."

"Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, you did not!" Agatha said, rounding on him angrily.

"Huh?" Gil said, taken aback before realizing. "No, I didn't! I certainly didn't tell her to do it! I had nothing to do with it!"

"Except being the reason she was in Paris in the first place!" Tarvek snapped.

"THAT WAS MY FATHER!" Gil cried plaintively.

[...] "Taking advantage of the enforced neutrality to pull into drydock for repairs," I explained.

"That was her cover story for being there," Gil said. "And I can get why story-you isn't telling Agatha the real one, because the last thing he wants to do is mention "Gilgamesh Holzfaller" or explain who he really is."

"If that madwoman had any other reason for being there, I certainly didn't pick up on it at the time!" Tarvek snapped. "I was too busy trying to avoid involuntary participation in her favorite game of 'knife tag'!"

[...] "You've lived such an adventurous life," Agatha said, looking at me in awe. "I sometimes wonder why you even want to walk out with me. Paris, pirates, princes... compared to that my life seems like a stale, dry biscuit."

"You don't want my life, Agatha." I replied flatly.

"Why not?" she asked me challengingly.

"Because you have a wonderful heart, and you deserve better." I said.

Two feminine 'Awwwwws' and matched sniffles echoed through the room while Gil and Tarvek wearily commiserated with each other.

Violetta kicked me under the table. I nudged her back.

"Does story-you have no romance in her soul?" Agatha asked Violetta, shocked.

"No, she has a burning sense of annoyance that her partner is verging perilously on breaching the 'no romance before reveal' agreement." Violetta said flatly. "Although to be fair he was actually only trying to be nice, its just..."

"The entire emotional context that both of them are interacting in means that essentially any display of concern or affection is unavoidably intertwined with deepening and furthering their romantic attraction, because they are both strongly attracted to each other already even if both of them, for differing reasons, are highly reluctant to openly express it." Gilgamesh said matter-of-factly.

Three incredulous stares combined to pin him to the wall.

"WHAT?" Gilgamesh shouted. "I HAVE FORMALLY STUDIED PSYCHOLOGY! I CAN ACTUALLY FIGURE THIS STUFF OUT!"

"Your every attempt to sweet-talk Agatha ever begs to differ," Tarvek said suspiciously.

"... I can figure this stuff out when I'm calm." Gilgamesh admitted sheepishly. "As soon as I'm actually feeling something then its all... wibble."

"Well, they do say that admitting you have a problem is the first step," Agatha said compassionately. "It's all right, Gil. We know each other well enough by now that I can translate from 'wibble'." she said, before pausing and continuing. "Well, usually."

"Some of my family are palace guards," she decided to throw me a life-line, "so I know some about fighting and training to fight."

"I never knew you were that good at lying," Agatha looked at Violetta curiously.

"By at least one definition she's a better liar than I am," Tarvek said, grinning. "After all, I am routinely suspected, but she virtually never is."

"It doesn't work anymore if you tell them," Violetta moaned.

[...] "And... actual combat does involve elevated heart rate and adrenaline levels and other things that aren't very good for you. Which reminds me, are the exercises helping any?"

"Oh yes!" Agatha said brightly. "I get my headaches only about half as often now."

"Even through the locket, you cut those horrible headaches in half?" Agatha said wonderingly.

"Tarvek, story-you is going have to decapitate Dr. Beetle in front of her with his bare hands to put her off at this rate," Gilgamesh wisecracked.

"Gil, I'm sorry I kept blaming you." Agatha said suddenly. "It wasn't until far too much later that I understood Dr. Beetle had been trying to kill me with that bomb, not you. I'd thought that a good man had died unnecessarily because you'd wanted to show off for your father, not that a man who'd used me and then tried to murder me was getting what he deserved."

"Agatha, I wasn't even thinking about that when I teased Tarvek. And I don't blame you now, even if I was a sulky brat about it then. You had no way of knowing any of this at the time." Gil said understandingly.

"But if I hadn't been so quick to judge you in the absence of all the facts-" she sighed. "A lot of things would have been very different. And almost certainly at least a little better."

"We're reading a story about 'maybe better' right now," Violetta said wisely, "but that's being driven by the plot device of someone getting a second chance at events. You had to make your decisions at the time as first and only chance. Hindsight kicking yourself over might-have-beens because late-arriving intelligence was late due to reasons not your fault doesn't improve future performance, it just erodes self-confidence."

"Thank you," Agatha said simply.

[...] "I entirely understand why they're a little suspicious of me, and I even agree that it only makes them good parents. You don't have to defend them to me."

"I get that you're actually trying to cool the emotional temperature down here, but seriously. You are being so Prince Charming at this point that if Agatha was even marginally less of a proper young lady at this point, story-me would have needed to throw a bucket on you two." Violetta said. "Did story-you even consider being just a tiny bit of a jerk at any point if he needed to slow the roll?"

"Story-me is emotionally compromised all to hell by both guilt and affection," Tarvek pointed out. "So perhaps we should blame his support for not fully thinking it through herself?"

"You suck," Violetta said tolerantly.

[...] "Colette Voltaire?" I asked her archly. "The Master's own daughter? Don't joke, Violetta. Does the phrase 'impossibly out of my league' not even remotely ring a bell?"

"I thought she liked you." Violetta replied as Agatha looked back at me, slightly alarmed. Good God, cousin! What the hell are you doing!

"Oh you manipulative little witch!" Tarvek said to Violetta admiringly. "And I mean that in the good way!"

"Excuse me?" Agatha said. "Could somebody please translate from Valois to normal person here please?"

"I think I see what they're getting at, but since this story has to be comprehensible to the average reader then there will almost certainly be exposition to outline it for us anyway before the end of the scene," Gil said.

[...] "Spark?" Agatha asked.

"I'm sure she'll break through within the next several years," I replied automatically. "Oh, you meant attraction." I realized with a bit of embarassment. "And, no."

"Boooooooooooooooooooo!" Violetta called out loudly. "Horrible, horrible pun! Boooooooooooooooooooo!"

"At least you can admire story-you's professional detachment, in that she's holding in her reaction because she's in-role right now." Tarvek said.

[...] "What, you didn't like how I simultaneously got on the table that you legitimately thought that she was more attractive than Colette Voltaire, that you got to give her the lecture about how girls who are heirs to dynasties need to watch out for ambitious greedheads so that later on when you make your pitch she remembers you said that first and so really aren't one of those greedheads, and under circumstances where nobody actually crossed the ethical barrier by making a romantic overture this early? All in one move?" Violetta smirked at me and buffed her nails. "Because I thought I was being pretty awesome."

Agatha and Gil looked at Violetta, who sheepishly blushed. "I spent practically my whole life with Tarvek?"

"And here I thought you'd picked up nothing from me except fashion awareness." I eventually replied.

"Wow. Eerie." Agatha commented.

"You're a disease, and I've totally caught it." she jibed back, and we both felt a little better.

All four of the reviewers burst out laughing.

[...] Hmmm. It was still over two months to Agatha's birthday. We were going to have to see if we could expedite that timetable.

... or delay someone else's.

"Why do I imagine that I really wouldn't want to be Dr. Beetle right now?" Agatha said.

Dr. Beetle was a cautious and meticulous Spark and one of Europa's greatest mechanical engineers, but he was also an intellectually arrogant tyrant with a height complex.

"... I've got nothing." Agatha shrugged.

[...] And then I stopped the doses and let the crash hit.

Gil winced. "Okay, now I start to get why my dad bio-engineered my digestive system so I could practically gargle neurotoxin."

"And what, did you think Violetta and I regularly dosed ourselves with antidote regimens from the age of six because we liked the taste?" Tarvek snarked back at him.

"I'm really starting to feel nervous that I never got any of this." Agatha said. "Everybody needs to eat and drink sometime!"

"Yeah, that is kinda an oversight now that you bring it up," Violetta mentioned. "All that running from crisis to crisis, barely any time for you guys to actually be in the same lab for longer than a few days. When we get back we're gonna need to take some 'me' time and have you three put all your Sparky brains to work on getting Agatha immunized."

"If the world ever allows us to," Gil sighed.

"There comes a point at which you just have to start beating on the world until it finally backs off and agrees to give you some space," Agatha said. "The trick is knowing exactly what point and exactly what part of the world to punch first."

[...] Of course, the effect from Dr. Beetle's absence from the campus is that it placed his second-in-command Dr. Merlot in charge.

"Uh-oh..." Agatha said.

[...] Agatha's desire to not burden other people with her problems meant that she hadn't mentioned him to me by name in this timeline, nor had she spoken to me in detail of her early life in the future.

"Uh-oh." Tarvek agreed.

So I had no idea that given entire uninterrupted weeks to have at her without Beetle available to restrain him, he'd do his best to try and drive her into such a collapse so as to send her fleeing from the campus forever.

"He would." Agatha agreed ruefully. "Oh, he so would."

"Wait, is this the same guy who interrupted the first time I tried to kiss you in Mechanicsburg?" Gil asked. "The guy who shot at us with machine guns? The guy whose clank I picked up and threw out to where the Castle squished him flat?" Gil asked.

"Yes." Agatha agreed. "Did I remember to thank you properly for that at the time?"

"Zola got in the way, remember?" Gil sighed. "Multiple times."

"Oh my God, she was by far the worst part of that entire experience," Tarvek agreed. "Which considering that she was competing with our multiple near-death experiences, our actual death experience, the entire insane psychotic castle, the Fun-Sized Mobile Agony and Death Dispensers, fighting Lucrezia in her lair-"

"Or just how that one damned day seemed to last for years-" Violetta moaned.

"Can I apologize again for interrupting your attempt to strangle her to death?" Gil asked.

"No need," Tarvek sighed. "She'd never done anything really evil where you could see, so by all appearances I was murdering an innocent. I forgave you at the time."

"You did?" Gil asked wonderingly.

"Well, I didn't tell you I forgave you at the time because I was still a little mad," Tarvek admitted.

"OK, that makes perfect sense." Gil agreed.

"Story!" Agatha said, refocusing them on the screen.

[...] and I couldn't afford another mysterious medical emergency in the University chain of command after the one I'd already caused so simply having Dr. Merlot catch a sudden case of Hogfarb's Resplendent Immolation wasn't feasible

"Dammit!" Gil swore.

"I feel your pain." Tarvek agreed.

[...] Which is how Agatha was led into her very first covert operation, even if it was the most elementary form of social engineering. I explained to her that if we made Dr. Merlot think that working with me was the last thing she ever wanted to do, then he'd personally throw her into my laboratory wrapped up in a bow.

"Oh, and now we get laboratory romance!" Agatha squeaked eagerly.

"Just as long as we don't get any 'lab accidents'." Violetta teased her.

"Chin up, breathe deeply." Tarvek reassured Gil. "You can get through this."

"That's easy for you to say!" Gil said. "These are your romance scenes!"

[...] The strict discipline of the laboratory, made more strict by my kibitzing undergraduate of a cousin, still kept the atmosphere at the distance I was hoping to maintain.

"Ooooo, it's going for the slow burn." Violetta said. "Man, the explosion is going to be awesome when it finally pops."

"I don't know," Agatha said analytically. "This is very classical romance so far. We might end up with just a kiss and a proclamation of love."

"But what about the intensity?" Violetta asked. "You can't bring something like that to a proper conclusion without some actual heat to it!"

But the simple fact that I was giving Agatha better treatment than any other supervisor she'd ever had, letting her work at her own pace to accomodate her medical issues as much as possible, and genuinely valued her contributions to my work meant that she was being happier in this little laboratory with me than she'd ever been happy in her academic life. And standing there and watching Agatha be happy and in her element was an addictive drug.

"As I said," Agatha nodded to Violetta with a wide smile. "Classical."

"Awwww," Violetta replied.

Do you even know what they're talking about? Gilgamesh wordlessly signaled to Tarvek with his confused expression, only to be confronted with Tarvek's equally wordless shrug of No, but let's not admit that where they can hear us say it. Gilgamesh silently nodded back to Tarvek, the two of them united in that moment by the sacred man code.

In the future I'd seen Agatha Heterodyne in full spark fugue. I'd seen her standing like an angry goddess, wreathed in lightning and thunder as Castle Heterodyne fully reactivated from the atmospheric accumulators and sent the Baron's entire army in flight. I'd seen her drink from the river Dyne and ascend to some mysterious state of being beyond the Spark itself. I'd seen her raise the dead. I'd been one of the two men she'd raised from the dead.

"That was so awesome," Gil and Tarvek both said in perfect unison, mutually nodding at the memory.

And yet as I stood and watched Agatha 'Clay', with her Spark fully shackled and unable to do more than the simplest scientific procedures - well, 'simple' by comparision with things she'd pulled off at her height, and still very complex and erudite by the standards of average students - I wondered at how she could, even as weighed down as she was, still seem to shine as brightly here as she ever had in the future.

"Oh my goodness." Tarvek said.

Was I even seeing her, or was I seeing only my memories of the woman she'd become? Was Violetta right, and I was trying to force her to become someone she wasn't instead of helping her to become the person she really was?

"You're... you're actually falling in love with her all over again." Gil said, wonderingly. "Even without her Spark at all, even when she's still locketed-"

"Well, it's not as if that made her a different person!" Tarvek replied. "Or a lesser one! Just a..." he struggled for words.

"They already mentioned it in the first the first chapter," Agatha said softly. "I'd been trying my very best all along. Removing the locket only changed what my 'best' was, not how hard I was trying-"

"Or what you were trying to do, or how. How much you cared for people, what you believed in-" Gil said. "The Tarvek in this story is falling in love with his Agatha because he admires her heart, not her achievements. That's-" Gil blinked rapidly. "Uh, sorry. Kinda dusty in here."

"Yeah, it totally is." Violetta agreed, nodding very rapidly.

"Entirely." Tarvek rapidly chimed in. "Honestly, do they even have ventilators?"

Agatha was still staring wordlessly at the screen, and had to be prompted several times to put her foot back on the scroll pedal.

I sighed and smiled back weakly at Agatha as she turned to notice me standing and watching her fuss among the bits of the busted clank again and smile cheerfully at me, and then stepped forward to help gently untangle a malfunction she'd overlooked in her latest assembly due to that damnable locket's limitations.

"Awwwwww," Agatha and Violetta both chimed, as Gil and Tarvek tolerantly smiled at each other.

[...] I positively itched with the desire to tell her that she was still only hobbling where she could potentially fly, that all she had to do was reach up to her neck and give a good hard pull on her restraints to be free-

"But you couldn't." Agatha said. "Dr. Beetle would immediately go spare. Even on the day that your father was standing less than thirty feet away from his illegally sequestered Hive Engine, his first priority was still noticing that I'd lost my locket and insisting that I go find it at once."

"I remember." Gil said simply.

[...] I sighed and stood back and watched the sheer delight on Agatha's face as the clank started up and ran smoothly, letting her exult in an actual success even if I'd had to provide a little assistance.

"I'm- I'm building things." Agatha said, awestruck. "With the locket on. And yes, you're still helping a little, but... I'm actually building." she finished. "Do you know for how long and how desperately I'd kept praying that I could one day be allowed to do that? Even just once? Right now, story-me would think she was in heaven. You could ask her to do anything for you."

"Well I certainly hope I don't." Tarvek immediately replied.

[...] Agatha's birthday, I told myself. If I haven't broken the ice with her parents by then, then I'll tell her the truth as soon as they start letting me 'treat' her and ask her to run away with me. Away from Dr. Beetle, away from her chains, and away from- well, I'd certainly tell her parents where we were, I'd just want enough of a head start first.

"But where would we go?" Agatha asked. "Your story-self seems to have slightly less of a plan than you normally would here, Tarvek."

"He can't really plan to take you somewhere unless he knows what you're willing to do." Tarvek said. "Although I really should be able to read the room better than this."

If she'd be willing to come with me, that is. And for all that we were becoming good friends, I still had no idea if she would.

"After everything that I just read?" Agatha said, aghast. "You could have asked my story-self to follow you to the Forbidden City and I'd only have asked for barely enough time to pack a suitcase! How has he so completely misjudged me?"

"I think I know, but as was pointed out earlier the story will tell us something this important in due time, so why guess?" Tarvek sighed.

"The guessing is the fun part!" Violetta said. "Although yeah, right now story-you is emotionally compromised all to hell. What am I doing in all this? Why haven't I dope slapped you yet?"

"You almost certainly have." Tarvek said. "But as you well know, it doesn't always work."

"I know what you're up to, boy." Tarsus Beetle said hoarsely.

"Now do I get to kill him?" Violetta asked plaintively.

[...] "Miss Clay!" he thundered at me. "That girl is under my personal protection!"

"Protection!" Agatha spat disgustedly. "Oh, I was so horribly naive back then!"

"Didn't the story outline that Beetle had a scam going where he'd been convincing TPU students he was actually their benevolent old distant mentor for years, and all the crap was due to his underlings?" Violetta intelligently pointed out. "You got skunked by a guy who'd put a lot of practice into that one particular con routine."

[...] Damn. I certainly couldn't tell Dr. Beetle that Agatha had learned it by snooping on his mail. So, who could I blame-?

Violetta immediately turned and gave a death glare to Tarvek, who winced.

"My cousin loves to mock me with my title," I came back without hesitation,

"Uh-huh." Violetta kept glaring.

[...] "Doctor, I am simply being respectful to her. As my father raised me to treat young women."

Both red-heads in the room immediately began choking and gagging.

Oh, now there was a lie so awe-inspiring as to make the Adversary himself blush.

"Blush, nothing, I'm pretty sure he fainted dead away on the spot." Violetta said, and Tarvek absently nodded.

[...] "I will speak to her mother, don't think that I won't! And you- stay away from her from now on." he ordered.

"Amateur," everyone in the room chimed at once.

[...] "Look, you tell me that you can even have even 65% confidence that the streets being even temporarily full of patrolling Jagers, any one of whom can potentially recognize Agatha by scent and will recognize Punch and Judy on sight, won't trigger them running or get them discovered, and I'll turn you loose right now."

"Ah, I'd been wondering why you were so fearful of any Imperial occupation in the town, but I hadn't thought about the Jagers recognizing them." Agatha mused analytically.

"... eugggggh." Violetta moaned. "So you are saying that we literally have no plan except 'maintain the holding pattern and keep ducking the murder attempts'."

"Well, it's not as if we haven't done that before."

"How are you two even partly sane?" Gil said, looking at Tarvek and Violetta. "Growing up the way you did?"

"... divine intervention?" Tarvek shrugged.

When I saw the pair of assassins loitering down the hallway as I was leaving my apartment I'd originally thought that cousin Martellus had been sending me another greeting

Agatha was looking at Tarvek and Violetta with eyes wide as saucers. "He was trying to kill you that far back?"

"Well-" Tarvek began to explain before he cut himself off, him and Violetta exchanged a complicated glance, and he turned back to Agatha. "For the sake of simplicity, let's just go with 'yes'."

"And if we weren't being simple?" Agatha asked them, eyes narrowing.

"Then we'd be here all night." Violetta said. "Story!"

"Story," Agatha reluctantly agreed.

[...] I actually had time to close and lock the door behind them before I was behind the one with the scruffier boots and had my one hand over his mouth and my knife in over the collarbone and down in the simplest of the silent-kill-from-behind positions.

"Wow, these two so broke into the wrong apartment." Gil said.

Also, when you used this particular one rather than going for the kidneys it left a lot less blood spattering around and that definitely was a major concern right now. Violetta certainly wasn't going to clean it out of the rug if I was careless enough to leave any there.

"That is your primary concern here?" Agatha said. "The rug?"

"Hey, it's not like these two bozos are even remotely challenging him," Violetta said. "And listen, evidence etiquette is important. Sure, if there's an operational priority going on then clean-up is done by whatever pair of hands isn't needed for a higher-priority task even if they had nothing to do with making the mess in the first place, but otherwise? Unless there's a dedicated gravedigger team available then your corpse, your cleaning. You don't drag assassins home and then leave that crap lying around for someone else to scrub up because you're feeling lazy, that's just rude."

Gil and Agatha looked at Tarvek and Violetta as if they had suddenly been revealed as creatures from another planet.

"... it's a Smoke Knight thing?" Tarvek sallied weakly.

"For the first time in a very long while, my intellectual curiosity is not feeling curious at all." Agatha eventually said after a long pause.

[...] They'd been contracted for both our deaths, had been hired through one of the local brokers in the Thieves' Market and had no clue who the client was, and had been given no special warning about me and Violetta possessing any fighting skills at all.

"Dr. Beetle." Gil said matter-of-factly. "Well, your period of time in Beetleburg is rapidly drawing to a close."

So after dispatching the second one I used my own refinement on one of the more handy chemicals from the Smoke Knight pharmacopeia, the one that used a self-sustaining catalytic reaction to dissolve nonliving organic tissue into a nice thin resin that you could easily wash down the bathtub drain. I neatly wrapped up their clothes and knives prepatory to dumping into the river and left a coded note for Violetta in the apartment dead drop, and then I pondered what my next move should be.

"You have instant body disposal solvents?" Gil asked.

"I'm well aware that the height of Imperial evidence disposal technology is the shovel, but I suppose it's easier to get by when you're allowed to legally make corpses." Tarvek drawled sarcastically.

[...] All right then. If I moved quickly enough I could get this done and still be only half an hour late for my date. The Clays had finally decided it was appropriate for me and Agatha to go walking out alone, even if only as friends, apparently because they'd accepted she'd be a grown woman in only a couple weeks.

"Oh, so you're going directly from a cold-blooded assasination-" Agatha began.

"In fairness, it was a counter-assassination." Gil reasonably pointed out.

"-to a date with my innocent younger self, without even breaking stride? I certainly hope you at least washed your hands!" Agatha finished.

"Agatha, you and I went directly from a pitched battle around and over Mechanicsburg to our first kiss. While I was still literally coated in Hive Queen guts from the fight for the Vespiary airship and you in grease from repairing war-clanks." Tarvek pointed out, slightly wounded. "Neither of us is exactly a blushing innocent in this regard!"

"She is," Agatha said, "and I suppose I was feeling motherly or sisterly or something about 'myself'." she finished, before resuming with more embarassment. "But you're right, they were both hired murderers who'd come to kill you and Violetta... and when they believed you were harmless civilians, too."

[...] "You're just lucky you weren't there when they arrived," Agatha said. "Or that Violetta wasn't either."

"That would have been considerably more... sanguinary." I said with what was a distressingly common pattern with Agatha of me telling the truth in deliberately misleading ways.

"Oh," Violetta said. "That's why you're mentally knotted up and I haven't pulled you out of it. You're backing up guilt from all undercover lying to her, on top of your accumulated guilt about not getting the locket off her earlier, and given the operational constraints there's literally nothing I can do about either except pray to God your willpower holds out."

[...] "Are you telling me that Adam and Lilith honestly let you believe that your uncle thought you were worthless-" I shouted, hearing my voice slipping straight into the Madness Place despite my best efforts to stop it.

"I don't think it is holding out," Tarvek sighed.

[...] "I- I'm not going to blame the Spark for that one." I said. "That's taking the easy way out. Agatha, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have lost my temper, and I shouldn't have scared you."

"You never scare me, Tarvek." Agatha said warmly, and it took everything I had to avoid wincing as if I'd been stabbed.

"Awwwww," Agatha gushed. "That's so sweet. But why are you so hurt by it?"

"Keep reading." Violetta sighed.

[...] "You can only keep the doubts away for so long. You have to keep fighting them, and they keep coming back." I said softly, knowing what it was like myself. "And then sometimes you don't have the energy to fight anymore, and the doubts just sit there and whisper at you until after you can rest and then get back to fighting them the next day."

"He's emotionally exhausted," Violetta said. "He's been undercover for a long time, he's totally gone on you to begin with and emotional compromise with the subject always makes it multiple times harder, and then there's his having to leaving you in constant pain when he could possibly intervene but hasn't, which he has a thing about-"

"I'm about ready to collapse there." Tarvek agreed.

[...] . "Agatha, what you're describing is normal for chronic pain sufferers. If anybody expects you to show identical endurance to a healthy athlete then they're expecting too much of you. It's... it's okay to not be okay."

"You're talking as much to yourself there as you are to me," Agatha nodded.

[...] "Your father must be so proud of you," Agatha said in all innocence, and my stomach lurched.

"My father..." I said, taking a deep breath.

Tarvek and Violetta both drew equally as deep a breath as soon as their eyes read that passage.

Oh Gods, I was so tired of lying to her.

"I think you're about to confess." Gil said.

"My father is a heartless manipulative power monger who barely lifted an eyebrow when my sister was maimed, and despised me as the family weakling up until after I'd learned how to put up enough of a cold front to convince him that I'd stopped trying to care about people." I said tonelessly. "If my mother wasn't dead and him not really at all interested in remarrying, he'd almost certainly get rid of me and try to train a replacement even now." And even that was only mostly the truth, because I couldn't explain at this juncture about the Summoning Engine or how Father had willingly put Anevka into it.

Agatha gasped in horror. "You can't mean that-" and then she stopped herself and her face collapsed. "Oh, no. That explains a part of your story that I'd always wondered about. Why you had to fight so hard to save your sister's life when your father already was an experienced Spark. He'd already written her off as beyond saving, hadn't he?"

"He had." I agreed.

"Jesus, you are teetering right on the edge there," Violetta said. "I think you caught yourself maybe half a sentence before you just blurted out the whole thing!"

"Tarvek, I am so sorry," Agatha said, spontaneously lurching forward into a hug- our first hug- before I could stop her. "No wonder you said you were so happy here in Beetleburg, where you don't have to be a prince-"

"Where I can pretend not to be a prince," I said, my arms coming up to very gently and loosely hold her. "Where I can pretend a lot of things."

All four people there just shook their head in sad empathy at story-Tarvek's exhausted agony.

"You're not pretending to be a good person," Agatha said. "And you're not pretending to be my friend."

"He's not." Gilgamesh readily agreed. "Not at all."

"Thank you," Tarvek sighed softly.

"Friend-" I choked with the guilt. "Agatha, I am far more- emotional about you than I have let on-"

"To say the least," Tarvek crooked a wry grin.

"Oh!" Agatha said with a sly grin. "Are you saying that you like me, Your Highness?"

"I think I might have been wrong about 'classical'." Agatha said to Violetta, staring fascinatedly at the screen.

I mentally apologized to Gilgamesh for ever having teased him about turning into an idiot whenever he was near Agatha, because right now it was all I could to do remember my own name- don't kiss her, I chanted to myself. Do not kiss her-

"Apology accepted," Gil said without a pause.

"We promised your parents- when they agreed to let us walk out as friends-" I breathed heavily. "That we wouldn't-"

"Sorry!" she said, immediately disengaging and letting us both take a moment to cool down.

"Okay, classical it is." Violetta said. "But wow, what a magnificent tease!"

"Agatha," I began after the moment had ebbed a bit. "I... yes. I like you. I more than like you. I am a positive fountain of inappropriate feelings and impulses."

"Understatement of the century!" Violetta catcalled.

I held up my hand to pre-empt her reply. "And I shouldn't be. Not now. I'm going to be- helping you with your health even more soon, and then- ethical issues. So many ethical issues."

"I like you too," she smiled at me. "And more than Adam and Lilith are comfortable with."

This time the 'Awwwwww.' was a unanimous chorus.

"Agatha..." I began. "I can't even begin to explain everything I'm thinking or feeling right now, but can I at least tell you something about what I believe and what I hope for?"

"Of course you can!" she said.

"This is it..." Violetta whispered eagerly.

"I believe that you are an incredibly stronger person than you even know," I said, letting relief flow through me at even partially getting to share my true feelings. "I believe that you won't be cursed with these headaches forever. I believe that you will go on to do amazing things." I said passionately. "And I hope that even after you've learned more about yourself as a person, and about me as a person, that you'll still want me there alongside you to help you do them."

"Eeeeeeee-!" Agatha squealed softly.

"You told her everything," Gil said. "Not everything facts, no, but everything feelings. Everything that was really important about what was lying between you. You laid it all out as much as you possibly could."

"And you still did it in a way that didn't compromise the mission." Violetta said in awe. "Story-you is wow."

"If my story-self gives you any grief later on like 'How could you lie to me?' when you finally confess the truth, then I swear I will reach through the screen to slap her silly little face!" Agatha husked. "That was magnificent!"

Tarvek was still breathing heavily. "Gods, part of me wishes that were real so much-" he shook his head. "But no. It would have been so wonderful to be there, but- then we wouldn't be here."

Agatha actually blushed and sniffled, and she and I grinned at each other like mindless dolts-

"JUST KISS ALREADY!" Violetta screamed, to the vigorous nods of everyone else in the room.

-and right then the throwing knife landed in the tree next to us.

"Damn it! A scene transition?" Tarvek swore.

"Where's the next chapter already?" Agatha shouted.

 

[cliffc999]

"Run!" I shouted at Agatha, the adrenaline rush instantly snapping me back into combat mode. I grabbed her and started dragging her straight into the nearest and narrowest alleyway I could find. "They're trying to kill us!"

"Okay, so that's my knife." Violetta said sagely.

"Who's they?" Agatha gasped, still stunned from the instant shift in atmosphere and being half-dragged by me as we tore down the narrow alleyway. I frantically looked around-

"Doctor Beetle!" Violetta said, dropping down from the rooftop to land beside us in her combat black-and-purples and start sprinting alongside us without missing a beat. It had been her knife that had been thrown at us, with the color-coded cord wrapped around the handle as our signal for Get clear immediately!

"Don't you think this action scene feels a bit tacked-on?" Gil asked.

"The transition was certainly sudden, but the gradually rising tensions with Doctor Beetle were foreshadowed all throughout the second chapter." Tarvek said. "And this is his second or third attempt to take lethal action, depending on who you believe was responsible for that lab sabotage. So it's not out of nowhere."

"It is kinda dumb, though. I mean, sure, so he flipped out when his two thugs missed check-in. Or maybe he actually saw them get wasted and how." Violetta analyzed. "But even with all that, what the hell sort of reaction is this? He needs Agatha's story-self alive and complacent, right? Why is he sending anything so overt that I'd need to send a scramble signal like that?"

"It does make a certain horrible sense," Agatha disagreed. "Doctor Beetle was a great scientist but an awful tactician. Gil, do you remember how he genuinely believed that your father, perhaps the single greatest strategist alive and the man with the largest army on the continent, could be successfully held hostage with one siege clank? As if he didn't even consider that you would have brought a reserve force, despite that being the most elementary military practice?"

"When was the last time we even saw an enemy that... uncomplicated?" Gil asked bemusedly. "Because outside of Beetleburg I can't even remember. It's all just been the Other and revenants and massive secret societies and continent-wide wars and complex four-dimensional event chains that we can't even begin to puzzle out the time paradoxes of-"

"And the politics-" Tarvek sighed.

"And our family-" Violetta whined.

"But let's not be redundant." Gil snarked.

"If my father or uncle ever show up again and try to tell me how rough they supposedly had it during their adventures, then mine will be a bitter, bitter laugh!" Agatha agreed passionately. "One madboy with a fortress and a town and some clanks or monsters and no grand intrigue, just a good old-fashioned fight? That would be a vacation for us!"

"Good job on the burglary fakeout to justify hiring private security for us tomorrow but you overestimated how subtle he's being! He's decided to just cut his losses and go for broke!" Violetta continued.

"Oh wonderful. We're battling a fool." Tarvek sighed.

"You can never predict those." Gilgamesh agreed.

[...] "What is going on?" Agatha shrieked at us.

"High-level political intrigue between ruling Sparks that just went from cold to hot!" I called out to her truthfully but incompletely. "And with you caught directly in the middle!"

"Technically correct is not the best kind of correct." Agatha said crisply.

"Be charitable, you are literally running for your lives right now!" Violetta insisted.

[...] "INCOMING!" Violetta shrieked, and we both immediately had Agatha up off the ground by her elbows and into cover in a nearby doorway as a C-Gas grenade came spiraling in.

"Case in point." Gil reluctantly agreed.

[...] I'd barely finished reaching for my pocket breather before Violetta's throwing arm got an impressive workout as she nailed the grenadier square in the face with his own grenade, which she'd caught before it could even land.

"Woo! Spotlight time!" Violetta caroled.

The sound of footsteps closing in told us that Beetle had sent more than just one, not that we'd expected anything else. His strategy was obvious - take us all, then disappear or kill us and either spin his actions to Agatha as a rescue or use force majeure, whichever he had an opening for.

"Wait!" Agatha cried in shock. "Are you- is Doctor Beetle seriously thinking that he can just crash in, spirit me away by force, haul me off to the heart of his power surrounded by his army, and then earn my gratitude by claiming that he was rescuing me from the devious, scheming, underhanded Prince Tarvek who clearly had no sincere desires for me at all but could in Tarvek's place offer me his more straightforward business transaction which, while colder, at least had the alleged virtue of integrity?"

"Oh my God, we actually lived through this one already!" Violetta moaned. "He's pulling a Tweedle!"

"I hereby withdraw any and all complaints about the alleged implausibility of the narrative, vocalized or implied." Tarvek said wearily. "Even if the events are all different, this is certainly being written as true to our real lives and characters as possible."

"Yes, and frighteningly so." Gilgamesh said. "It took a while to sink in, but while this is fiction its not just your average penny-sparkly. Whoever's writing this knows about us, has access to knowledge and insights that penetrate even to our innermost doubts and fears. They haven't really made a wrong call about us yet, have they?"

A chorus of subdued yet still shocked agreement was his answer.

"So is this how mysterious creatures from beyond reality amuse themselves?" Agatha said angrily. "Or..." she trailed off wonderingly. "Are they trying to tell us something?"

"... Gilgamesh, do you remember when your father sent you that storyteller during the Siege of Mechanicsburg?" Tarvek said with slowly dawning realization.

"Yes!" Gil said. "He was- he was trying to send us a message that he'd been ordered by Lucrezia never to send, by taking advantage of the fact that he'd never been ordered to not tell fictional stories! So he disguised the truth of the situation in an entire huge thing of allegory and fairy tales-"

"-that you needed me to interpret for you." Tarvek cut in smoothly.

"-that is beside the point!" Gilgamesh insisted. "But yes, that's how he warned us he'd been slaver wasped. If we go with that theory, then what are these creatures trying to warn us of?"

"Well, the best way to find that out is to keep reading." Violetta sensibly pointed out.

"Agatha, stay down!" Violetta called to her as the first set of footsteps finished double-timing towards us from the direction we'd run from, and as soon as they rounded the last turn we both leapt into action. Violetta had had her full combat loadout strapped on and had brought enough drugged throwing darts for everyone, so she began liberally scattering them with both hands. The squad of militiamen started falling over like tenpins.

"I am kicking so much ass in this story." Violetta said joyously.

My job was to deal with the clank.

"You'd seriously try to take on a Clockwork infantryman in your street clothes? With what, your bare hands?!?" Gilgamesh said incredulously.

"Of course not my bare hands!" Tarvek denied heatedly. "Who do I look like, you?"

[...] My best fighting dagger dropped down into my hand from my sleeve as I sprinted in as fast as I possibly could, threw my kerchief square at the primary visual sensor, and used the momentary loss of line-of-sight to launch myself into a running slide directly underneath it

"Oh, I was wrong! You brought a knife! Yes, that's totally different." Gil said sarcastically.

[...] The clank shut down as its head sheared free with a screech.

"You're right, it entirely is." Tarvek smirked back.

"Contact high rear!" Violetta cried in alarm as the last militiaman finished taking a nap. Two more fire-support clanks up above on the roof down the alleyway-

"Hoppers!" Agatha cried in alarm. "And you're already boxed into a killing ground-!"

[...] Violetta followed my motion and grabbed the clank's arm in both hands, helping me hold it steady as the autogun chattered into continuous full automatic fire from where I'd shorted the circuits together. The fusillade of high-velocity heavy-caliber rounds erupted forth as we clumsily combined our strength to try and direct the fire, tearing loose chunks of brickwork from the corner of the building and sending several stray rounds screaming off into the sky as the remainder of the salvo was walked on target and tore the two rooftop gun-hoppers to shreds. I pulled out my knife and the fire ended.

"YES! We rule!" Violetta cried joyously.

"You certainly do," Agatha said absently, and then started in realization. "Violetta... exactly how long did you train together with Tarvek, to be able to instinctively coordinate with him like that?"

"From the age of six until we first parted ways several months into my studies in Paris," Tarvek answered for her.

"Right," Agatha agreed, nodding. "Then I think I can already see one thing we're being warned of here."

"Agatha...?" Violetta turned to her questioningly.

"Violetta," Agatha said reassuringly, turning to her. "You are one of my very closest friends, and one of the most devoted soldiers that I've ever commanded- and I say that as a woman who is already the liege of several thousand Jagerkin." she finished with a smile. "You saved my life at least twice on the very first day we met- you were unhesitatingly willing to die fighting Zola to save my life yet again- despite your not knowing me from a lamppost. You've helped save all our lives any number of times since. I'm not professionally qualified to judge the skills of a Smoke Knight but if this narrative wishes to claim that you are one of the very best there are short of the most elderly Night Masters, then I wouldn't dream of disputing it. Zeetha may be my kolee and I her zumil, but I don't need Skifanderian oaths or fancy words to say that if she's my strong right arm then you are equally as much my left."

"Agatha, what are you trying to-" Violetta tried to interrupt, but Agatha kept speaking.

"But Tarvek didn't give you a choice when he transferred your service to mine. He couldn't, because he was dying, and so he wanted to keep giving me what support he could even though he thought he wouldn't be able to do it himself any longer. Just as he wanted to give you a place where you could be supported and valued, when he thought he couldn't do that for you any longer."

"And I'm happy to be here and with you! I really am!" Violetta rushed to reassure her.

"I mentioned the Jagers earlier. Remember that the Jagertroth that requires them to give me their absolute devotion. And that devotion has sometimes been very much abused by my ancestors. Even my own father and uncle did, when my father carelessly ordered them to submit to the whims of my mother not knowing or caring how she'd abuse that power. Or when both my father and uncle essentially destroyed themselves by refusing to accept the aid that the Jagers were so desperate to give them. Their relationship to me is not balanced in the slightest. It only remains even mostly humane so long as I make a continuous effort to never abuse my authority either capriciously or carelessly... and so long as the Jagertroth is only entered into freely and of their own will." Agatha finished. "And I've only given you one of those two things."

"Please don't send me away," Violetta whispered. "Please, not again."

"No!" Agatha said pleadingly. "That's not what I mean at all! I would be so very happy if you stayed with me and kept things just as they are!" Agatha took a deep breath. "But I would also be so very happy if you chose to resume your original service under Tarvek. Or if you chose to go be a woman of leisure for the rest of your life in whatever faraway place would let you escape the insanity currently in Europa. Or if you gave it all up to become a wandering gamba player in a circus. Or if you went anywhere or did anything else, just so long as you were happy there."

"I- I- really?" Violetta finished weakly.

"Violetta," Agatha said. "Essentially your entire life has been nothing but expectations and choices that other people have made for you. And that's not necessarily wrong, if that's the life you want to have. But if it's only the life you have to have-" she nodded. "Then you don't have to have it anymore. If you ever want to change what you're doing or where you're doing it, then just come to me and I will gladly help you go there with all my best wishes. And if you don't want to, then I will be equally as glad to keep everything just the way it is now."

"Can I... have some time to think about it?" Violetta asked faintly.

"Take all the time you need," Tarvek said compassionately. "And please understand that everything Agatha just told you, I fully endorse."

At this Gil decided to give Violetta some breathing room and stomped on the scroll pedal again.

[...] "There'll be more of them!" she said frantically. "So many more! If even the roof-hoppers are out then it's a full mobilization-" she kept explaining as she came to help me up. I absently noted that despite being an untrained civilian who'd just been unexpectedly dropped into a bloody urban combat she was still doing her best to organize and present available battlefield intelligence-

"The author is really trying to give me credit here for intelligence and willpower despite my stlil being Agatha 'Clay'," Agatha acknowledged with a nod. "It would have been far easier to just write me having an attack right now and needing to be carried the rest of the way. In fact, I'm mildly surprised that I'm not. This sort of stress was very bad for me back then."

"I think that's part of why 'mitigating therapies' were written into the plot earlier." Gil pointed out.

Gods, she was magnificent.

Gil and Tarvek both nodded mindlessly, Agatha caught the byplay and slightly blushed.

[...] "Then we're still going for the down-and-out!" I decided as we doubled right back into the breach in their perimeter we'd made by taking out the blocking force behind us. The strolling crowds had already finished clearing the plaza at the appearance of the Clockwork Army by the time we made it back-

"Wait, what's our plan for the turret?" Tarvek said. "Even Beetle wouldn't neglect something as obvious as terrain control-"

"I've got her!" Violetta said, leaving behind a target decoy where Agatha had just been standing and practically teleporting them both ahead behind a sturdy tree. That left just me as the focus for the gun-clank that had been left covering the plaza at the end of the street, so thank you very much cousin!

A somewhat quavery giggle came from Violetta's chair. Tarvek chuckled along with her.

"Ah yes, the 'throw Tarvek at the monster' plan. An old classic." Gil snarked.

"Oh, it's certainly like old home week all right." Tarvek snarled at him.

"Now I have to hear some of these Paris stories." Agatha said curiously.

"No." Gil and Tarvek chorused.

"You can't deny me forever, and you both know it." Agatha smirked evilly at them. "I have my ways!"

"Be nice, Agatha." Violetta softly remonstrated with her. "Remember, you must use your powers only mostly for good!"

"Only mostly?" Gil said.

However, confronted as he was by the unanimous silent front of the sacred girl code, Gilgamesh Wulfenbach was doomed to have his inquiry go forever unanswered.

[...] "Fire in the hole!" I heard Violetta cry, and then one of her breaching charges blew the storm grating that we'd been heading for in the center of the plaza wide open. I caught up to them just as they reached the lip of the hole and swept Agatha up into a bridal carry,

"The 'bridal carry out of danger'? Seriously? That's even more shameless than the 'bring her family back from the grave' gambit!" Gil said.

"Well it's not like I could use a shoulder carry in that situation!" Tarvek said. "We're jumping down a hole! If she's over your shoulder then you can't help cushion the impact of the landing with your arms!"

"Hey, I always used the shoulder carry in Paris!" Gil said. "And we went down a lot of holes with it!"

"Considering who you were carrying, you should have thrown her down first and used her to cushion your landing." Agatha growled.

"Gas mine, there!" I called. "Tripwire, there!" and Violetta's hands blurred as she set up a hasty rig to catch our first group of pursuers.

"Why the hell is story-you telling story-me things I already know how to do?" Violetta asked.

"Probably to immediately reassure Agatha that someone she trusts has a measure of control over the situation," Tarvek pointed out. "You certainly don't need to hear me order precautions to be taken, but she needs to hear that it's being done."

"... okay, makes sense." Violetta conceded.

"Agatha, are you all right?" I asked her urgently as we started running down the drainage tunnel.

"They tried to kill us!" she cried hysterically.

"She's fine." Violetta said calmly.

"And now we're an action comedy?" Agatha asked, before involuntarily chuckling.

"Well, at least we're not a bad one." Tarvek agreed with her.

[...] "Violetta's not just my cousin but also my bodyguard," I explained. "And in our family we start training to fight very young."

"Oh yeah," Violetta explained to her. "I mean, God knows our family sucks and is full of horrible people but I'll give them credit for this much. If you can survive our relatives then you can survive damn near anything."

Agatha and Gil both looked at Tarvek and Violetta, and then shrugged in reluctant agreement.

[...] "My parents-" Agatha began.

"I paid a street urchin to run them a message as soon as I set out to warn you guys," Violetta said. "Hopefully they'll get out in time, especially since Beetle would want you solidly in hand before going after them."

"Oh!" Agatha said. "I'd been worrying-"

"Your foster parents survived that many years of original Heterodyne adventures." Gil reassured her. "They'll be gone before Beetle even knows they left. They successfully ducked out on the entire Empire for how long when we were looking for them after Beetleburg, remember?"

"Why is this all happening?" Agatha said. "What did you do?"

"We tried to save you," I told her, waving down Violetta's astonished glare.

Because I'd had enough. No more secrets, I promised myself. No more lies.

"Ah, so that's why the writer suddenly had a man with an army of clanks run into the room and start shooting." Gil said sagely. "To force the next stage of the plot along by an immediate time constraint. Yup, classic detective novel stuff."

Besides, my life expectancy might very well be measured in minutes at this point. And I had to finish the mission.

"And fire in the hole!" Violetta called. "The mission constraints were the cork in your big old pressure cooker of emotions urging you to tell her all along but you couldn't, but now that the mission requires you to tell her? It's all gonna blow at once! You're probably going to write a verbal encyclopedia here."

[...] "Agatha, may I have your locket?" I asked her, and she looked at me for a long moment of suspicion before relenting and handing it to me. [...] I flipped the locket open.

"Bill Heterodyne and Lucrezia Mongfish," I said, pointing at one face and then the other. "They were your parents... Agatha Heterodyne."

Her mouth gaped open wordlessly at me, and I closed the locket and handed it back to her.

"For having had only a very few minutes to work with, that wasn't bad." Violetta conceded.

"Agatha, Beetle's almost certainly not going to kill you but he will kill us if he catches us." I said hurriedly. "If that happens, if we don't get away, then you have to pretend that you don't know, do you understand? You have to still be Agatha Clay. You have to keep this on-" I choked at the thought of asking her to torture herself. "Until you're away from him. Now I came here to try and rescue you, and I'm so sorry I lied and hid things from you until now, but I am on your side, Agatha. Do you believe me?"

"Believe him!" Agatha cried. "For the love of God believe him, you silly girl!"

"I..." she paused, and I was ready to just collapse and die when she continued. "I believe you." she said.

"YES!" Agatha cried happily. "I am so very not disappointed in myself right now!"

"If we escape then I'll tell you everything, I promise. What I know, how I know, when I learned it, what all my intentions were and are. If we don't all make it and you're still free, then first and foremost never go to Sturmhalten. If you go there then you are doomed. It's dangerous to openly be a female Spark almost anywhere, because my father keeps sending people to drag them in! And you can't really trust any member of my family except Violetta. They're the worst enemies your family has!

"We're certainly going straight down the operational priority ladder here as quickly as possible," Tarvek said, trying to remain unmoved.

"Story-you is way oversimplifying the family situation, but given that the situation is 'I could conceivably get sniped in the head mid-sentence at any point during this speech' he certainly doesn't have time to draw her the whole scorecard." Violetta agreed.

Next, if you need help then go to any Jagermonster and tell them your real last name. The Jagers are sworn to protect and serve your family above any loyalty they might have to the Baron, and any one of them can recognize your bloodline by the scent. They'll all help you, do you understand?

"And mission accomplished." Gil said. "Even if Beetle personally teleported into the tunnel right at that instant and atomized both you and Violetta, then short of also giving Agatha a brain-wipe she still knows the minimum to be able to get away and to Mechanicsburg and why she needs to go there. Good job." he congratulated Tarvek.

And-" I paused, then swore and continued onwards. "If Baron Wulfenbach reaches you first, he will probably protect you but he might be frightened of you. If that happens, if the Baron isn't on your side, then you need to ask for help from Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, the Baron's son.

Gil turned incredulously to look at Tarvek, who was positively embarassed at his regard.

He's..." I paused. "He doesn't always do the wisest thing, but he's a legitimately good-hearted person. You definitely shouldn't let him make all the plans, but you can trust him. And tell him that 'Gilgamesh Holzfaller owes Prince Tarvek for Paris'. He'll know what it means."

"That would entirely have worked," Gil conceded. "I mean, its not like hearing your name would have made me less suspicious back then but I'd have still broken the code. 'This girl needs your help. Please save her.'"

[...] "So, how am I doing for my first Heterodyne adventure?" Agatha actually tried to joke as we fled.

"We're still alive, aren't we?" Violetta jibed back at her, and despite everything that was going on I couldn't help but smile.

"Felt good to get it off your chest, didn't it?" Violetta said understandingly.

[...] Oh, the Clockwork Army was an effective enough instrument at what it was designed to do. I certainly didn't want to try taking any more of them of on in direct combat with anything short of an Imperial task force. But as they weren't even intended to come down into the drains, and weren't very flexible in their programming, we had them entirely neutralized as a threat so long as we stayed below ground level. [...]. There was obviously no preprepared doctrine for underground interdiction and pursuit any more complicated than a simple 'After them!' These men certainly weren't the Sturmhalten Sewer Rats.

"So, they're totally wrapping up the action phase 'cause it was just a device to get you guys out of town without it being boring." Violetta analyzed.

"The narrative was billed as primarily a romance story, so we don't need continual death-defying and death-rays" Agatha agreed. "I'm assuming that we're going to get away to a safe place and sit down and let yourself finish explaining himself, and then the denouement?"

"There'd almost have to be at least one more twist for it not to be anticlimactic," Tarvek said. "But from a literary point of view, I can't guess what it might be."

"I think I can," Gil said seriously. "But we'll soon enough find out." he finished, and the he pressed the pedal again.

The most arduous part of our journey was that I was the only person present who wasn't dressed for the occasion. [...] Which left me busy walking along sewer walkways, and the sort of condensation that built up on sewer walkways... in thin leather dress shoes and one of my best pairs of spats.

Ah, the things we do for love.

"It must be true love if you're not complaining about how the leather stains." Gil agreed. "I remember that one sewer run in Paris- oh God, you went on for weeks. Weeks."

"Do you have any idea how hard it was to find genuine Italian shoes in Paris that summer due to the trade disruptions?" Tarvek demanded heatedly. "I only had two good pairs to begin with!"

[...] And so my heart leapt into my chest when we turned the final corner, having finally started to believe we were safe, and then saw a pair of large silouhettes in the dimness waiting for us at the exit-

"Adam! Lilith!" Agatha joyously cried, and ran ahead of us straight into her foster parents' arms.

"... I think old age and exuberance just handed youth and treachery it's ass in a sling." Violetta conceded.

"Those two once single-handedly infiltrated Castle Wulfenbach, went through all the security like it wasn't even there, and broke my father's leg." Gil pointed out. "If they hadn't run into Von Pinn when they were completely unprepared for her, it wouldn't even have been a contest. Experience counts."

[...] Lilith cleared her throat. "A full mobilization of the Clockwork Army is designed to control the streets and rooftops, but Dr. Beetle overlooked the sewer and drainage tunnels. That's why the tunnels were planned as our primary escape route if necessary. And since one of the best exit points for you to use would be this one, which was the one we were also using, we simply waited for you here."

"If I ever meet your foster parents, please remind me to be on my absolute best behavior," Tarvek said.

[...] "We're going to be on an enforced neutral ground for the next stage of the trip anyway," I pointed out reasonably. "So we'll have every opportunity for a civilized conversation. If you don't like what you hear- if Agatha doesn't like what she hears- by the end of the first leg, then we couldn't stop you from leaving if we wanted to."

"Truce," Lilith agreed after sharing a look with her husband. "But since your actions precipitated this, Your Highness, you're paying for the train tickets."

"So that's our route out." Tarvek said. "Well, fight's over. Now we're back to the romance."

"You don't have to pretend that it's such a trial." Agatha teased him.

[...] After our going through the necessary confession to board and my paying for a private compartment on the train, we all settled down facing each other. Violetta and I were on one side and the Clays occupied the other. I hoped that this wouldn't be an omen for our continuing relationship.

"So do we!" Gil surprised everyone, not least of all himself, by saying.

"You know, when we get back I have a whole collection I could start you on-" Agatha offered.

"... can we talk about that later?" Gil blushed.

[...] "Agatha, I know that it hurt you-" Lilith began guiltily, before her face collapsed and her eyes glittered with unshed tears. "Oh Agatha, it hurt you so much! And we hated it!"

"Then why did you-!" Agatha began to angrily retort, and I raised a hand for peace.

"Because they legitimately believed that to publicly reveal you as a Spark, let alone as Agatha Heterodyne, would lead to your death." I said. "Even if they fought as best as they could to protect you."

"Do you want to just close your eyes for a bit while I stomp this pedal into the floor?" Gil asked.

"No," Agatha husked. "No, I already went through this conversation with them in reality. I can certainly live through it again in a fictional variation. Just.. scroll a little more slowly, please?"

[...] "Herr Clay, Frau Clay- I wanted to rip that damned thing off her neck and stamp it into the dirt the very instant I realized it was what was causing her attacks. And yet I still kept my silence for weeks." I sighed. "Agatha, if you're going to hate your parents for what they did then I deserve your hatred too. I certainly didn't keep silence about it for as long as they did, but one day would still have been too long."

"And right here story-you could so easily be splitting me away from my parents to further his own interests right now, but is instead doing the exact opposite." Agatha reassured Tarvek. "I told you that you were going to be the hero."

"And all those pretty words about your being a doctor?" she replied heatedly.

"Oh no," Agatha said worriedly.

"I am a doctor, among my several other fields of expertise." I said pleadingly. "Everything I said there was true. Everything I said about Anevka was also true. I- I obviously wasn't being entirely honest with you, or with your parents, but I was still trying to be as true as I could."

"Oh no, this is going to go so wrong-" Agatha chewed her lip.

[...] Agatha blinked as if in a sudden revelation, then began to quote my own words back to me in a soft, low voice. "I believe that you won't be cursed with these headaches forever. I believe that you will go on to do amazing things. And I hope that even after you've learned more about yourself as a person, and about me as a person, that you'll still want me there alongside you to help you do them." she finished, nodding.

"Wait, is this...?" Violetta said wonderingly.

[...] "But you were already trying to tell me the truth, weren't you?" Agatha pressed onward. "That's why you phrased things so precisely. You were confessing that you were keeping secrets from me, about both me and yourself, and that you were hoping that I wouldn't hate you after all the secrets finally came out. Which would mean that you were already intending for them to all come out, just not as soon as they did. You- you weren't trying to manipulate me, any more than Adam and Lilith were ever trying to manipulate me. You were just afraid. Like they were."

"YES! YES! YES! YesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesYES!" Agatha cried joyously.

[...] "You really do care for Agatha, don't you?" Lilith said to me evenly.

"I love her." I said hopelessly. "Even though I shouldn't."

"YOU SHOULDN'T? DO YOU SERIOUSLY NOT UNDERSTAND HOW GOOD YOU HAVE BEEN TO ME IN THIS STORY, YOU LOVESTRUCK IDIOT?" Agatha ranted at the screen madly.

"I really don't think he does." Tarvek said sadly.

[...] "Young lady, if you know who we really are then you know who we accompanied on what kinds of adventures for almost two decades." Lilith said tolerantly. "I seriously doubt you're going to say anything that we haven't already heard stranger."

"You wanna put some castlemarks on the table?" Violetta smirked.

"Oh, they're going down," Gil said amusedly.

[...] "Time travel." I said calmly, to a pair of suspicious glares and an incredulous eyebrow raise. "And to prove it..." I suddenly chuckled at the sheer absurdity of it all. "You know, I just realized that for perhaps the first time in history the awkward conversation with a young woman is actually going to be made easier by the presence of the parents.

"And that truly is the most absurd part," Agatha nodded. "Not the time travel."

[...] Lilith expressionlessly pushed both coins across the table to Violetta, who pocketed them without a word.

"HAH!" Violetta laughed.

[...] "And in the future... we were together?" Agatha asked me shyly, cutting off Lilith's attempt to ask me a no doubt much more strategically relevant question.

"No," I said to her distinct surprise. "I was courting you, certainly, but you had more than one suitor. And as of my journey back you had yet to make any decision between us."

Gil turned to Tarvek. "I'm not going to insult you by saying that I'm surprised story-you did that, but I am going to say that I'm really, really impressed he was able to." He sighed. "Because I'd have lied my ass off."

"And you think you're surprised that I didn't?" Tarvek agreed with him wholeheartedly.

"Gilgamesh Wulfenbach and one of my other far-too-numerous cousins, Prince Martellus von Blitzengaard." I replied. "We can and you certainly should entirely discount cousin Martellus-"

"He's a total jerk." Violetta cut in.

"Understatement much, Violetta?" Agatha laughed.

"-and his motives in pursuing Agatha were entirely political and avaricious." I continued without a beat. "Gilgamesh..." I ground to a halt.

Damn it.

"Gilgamesh loved you at least as deeply as I did," I said to Agatha, forcing every word out of the truth out of my mouth as if I were trying to swallow knives. "And he would have died to protect you as readily as I would have." I shook my head. "It was a very complicated situation even when we were hated rivals, and grew exponentially more complicated when he and I resumed being friends."

Gil stared at the screen for almost a minute, trying to process it, before he shook his head and sighed. "Sturmvoraus, you have officially lost your 'smarmy, duplicitous snake' status for all time."

"Or until the next time I do something that annoys you." Tarvek tried to make a joke out of it.

"No, that would still only get you smarmy." Gil joked back.

"And if I lied to you?"

"Duplicitous, but not smarmy." Gil replied.

"And snake?" Tarvek kept probing.

"Never again in this world." Gil said seriously.

"... thank you." Tarvek eventually replied.

[...] "In the interest of fairness I would like to point out that both of future-you's boyfriends were being idiots, at least going by the form card that I was told." Violetta said. "Everything my cousin is giving you is gonna be coming through his down-on-himself filter."

"Social bodyguard is not in my job description." Violetta said firmly. "Man, story-you is so lucky that I'm taking pity on his miserable butt right now."

"Well, it wouldn't be the first time," Tarvek agreed with her.

[...] "All right." I said. "First off, at the top of the priority ladder-"

"How you time travelled and why." Lilith interrupted me.

"That's Lilith," Agatha nodded. "Always taking the conversation where she thinks it should go."

[...] "Ah, so you didn't plan this time trip." Lilith interpreted for Adam, after a penetrating examination of my body language by them both.

"If you had planned it, that would a notable indicator for them as to how far you were willing to manipulate events to get what you wanted." Gil pointed out.

"As is, while I could still potentially be manipulative at least I'm not explicitly at 'Would deliberately rend the fabric of time and space asunder over personal desires' madboy level, which means they don't need to grab Agatha and run screaming from the compartment just yet." Tarvek agreed.

"No. Now, as to the primary sources of danger against Agatha, first and foremost among them is-" I began. [...]

"Keep scrolling, we already know all this." Agatha said.

[...] "The Order of Jove is several generations old," I pointed out. "The original plan didn't encompass the Baron's existence. The revised and current plans- well, some of the varied sub-factions in the Order hope to outlive him, and some hope to assassinate him-"

"AKA the morons." Violetta said.

"-and some to assemble sufficient force to defeat him militarily."

"AKA the epic morons." Violetta cut in again.

"You have a rosy future potentially ahead of you as a color commentator." Agatha pointed out amusedly.

"I'd say stand-up comedian, actually." Gil said.

"Ha-ha." Violetta said flatly.

[...] "So that was Klaus' role in her plan." Lilith said grimly. "But then how does this Order fit in?"

"Oh, if only Uncle Barry hadn't been so wrong." Agatha sighed. "But then again, if I'd grown up under the Baron's protection then most of us would have never met."

"Agatha, you know that I love you. But even so, I would not hesitate to trade any possible chance of ever knowing you for a world where Lucrezia Mongfish never returned for so much as a single day." Tarvek said firmly.

"And so would I," Gil agreed.

"We all would." Violetta said. "The whole gang, even those of us who aren't here."

"I certainly hope that this isn't the message these mysterious beings from outside time are trying to lead us to." Agatha worried.

[...] "In the future that was, the Other's return-" I held up a hand to pre-empt questions. "-was fought against by Baron Wulfenbach to the utmost of his ability. There is no living man in Europa with a greater hatred for Lucrezia Mongfish, or a more fervent desire to destroy her and all her works, than the Baron." I sighed. "But it wasn't enough to save him."

"No it wasn't," Gil said sadly. "Hopefully we will be."

"If you're certain of this, then... we should go to him right now!" Lilith cried, before slumping in relief. "And warn him of what's to come! Oh thank God! I was terrified that we wouldn't be able to get Agatha to safety, or that there wouldn't even be any safety to find."

"Okay, its basically a slam dunk that you're not going to end up there, so how are we going to avoid following this huge chunk of common sense here?" Violetta asked.

"You need to hear all the rest of this before you make that decision," I insisted.

"By bludgeoning it to death with an even larger chunk, apparently." Tarvek replied.

[...] "Me." Agatha paled as the pieces came together for her.

"Agatha..." Lilith said, clutching her hand reassuringly. "Remember! Stay calm!"

"I AM PERFECTLY CALM!" Agatha shouted. "I AM-" She began hyperventilating. "I am just a little freaked out right now!"

"I'm taking it fairly well, don't you think?" Agatha asked. But nobody else was willing to touch that one.

[...] "The device that holds or summons an imprint of Lucrezia's mind into a host body is called the Summoning Engine." I lowered my head, shamefaced. "And it's located in Castle Sturmhalten. My father is it's custodian. The reason female Sparks in Europa disappear so often is because he keeps arranging for them to be abducted to try and summon Lucrezia into." I kept going without heed for anyone else's reactions because if I didn't get this all out at once then I probably never would.

"Uh-oh." Violetta worried.

"He is so fanatic to get Lucrezia back he'd use anyone for the purpose. He even put Anevka into that damnable machine, and that's why she almost died-" I kept going, faster and faster, sobbing as the words exploded- "And that's when I knew he was doing it! I'd finally found out that he'd killed all those young women but I still never told anyone! I just stood there and smiled and pretended he was doing a good thing-"

"Tarvek!" Agatha burst out frustratedly. "We already knew about most of this but why didn't you tell us it was still HURTING you so much? Do you understand that we can't support you if we don't know?"

"Agatha-" Tarvek said diffidently. "I- it was enough that you'd forgiven me at all. Really, it was."

"If this is going to be some stupid exercise where you deliberately let yourself remain traumatized rather than ask for proper emotional support as some means of punishing yourself for what you think you deserve, then the instant these chains come off I am going to slap you." Gil said flatly. "Because that's stupid."

My head rocked to the side as Violetta slapped me hard across the face.

"Prophetic," Tarvek joked weakly.

"Quiet, or I'll hit you again!" she angrily demanded.

"Didn't you say the same thing to my mother in my body once?" Agatha asked Violetta.

"Same words, but totally different emotions. Trust me." Violetta answered her.

"Agatha, what I said was true." Violetta turned to her earnestly. "They really would have killed him in a heartbeat if he'd tried to do anything."

"I am so not lying." Violetta reassured Agatha.

"But you couldn't have helped protect him?" Agatha asked Violetta.

"No, because he SENT ME AWAY like a total IDIOT so I couldn't BE THERE when he NEEDED me!" Violetta ranted. "Sorry, I already accepted your apology for that, and I meant it. But really Tarvek! Do you seriously not comprehend how you could have maybe gotten free of that mess earlier, or even maybe just gotten Agatha back down to the circus without the Geisterdamen catching her at that moment, if you'd just let me be there too?"

"Or maybe you'd be a corpse!" Tarvek replied heatedly. "Violetta, it was a miracle that I survived those years. And yes, you're so much stronger than any of us knew back then, least of all me, and you'd probably have survived them too." he shook his head. "I wouldn't have wanted 'probably'. I would've wanted exactly what I did give you then, even if I gave it to you in entirely the wrong way."

"You stupid miserable sap." Violetta said affectionately. "Look, if you can't get your head around it any other way then can you at least understand this much? When the people who love you want to help you and you don't let them, then it hurts them too."

"It does," Agatha agreed. "I had this conversation with Dimo once. During all the years between the Boys disappearing and them finding me, the Jagers were lost when they thought the Heterodyne line had come to an end, but they were devastated from knowing it had happened because my father and uncle had refused them permission to come along or even to follow at a distance. That the family line had ended because they'd been deliberately refused the opportunity to give their aid when it was most needed. The Jagers had been forced to remain helpless by the people they cared for the most, and that's..." Agatha gritted her teeth. "Not a good thing."

[...] That's what this idiot does. He keeps trying to make the people he loves hate him and go away so that they don't have to be part of his horrible life. He doesn't ever stop to ask if anybody might want him to go with them.

"Message received and acknowledged, guys!" Gil called to the ceiling.

[...] "I watched them die, Violetta." I whispered thickly. "All the ones after Anevka. They died while I stood there and did nothing. He made me watch."

"GET THESE RESTRAINTS OFF OF US IMMEDIATELY!" Agatha screamed, and the chains dissolved from three out of four chairs. The fourth set stubbornly refused to vanish until it was too late for Tarvek to avoid the incoming group hug.

"That's horrible!" Agatha choked, and I winced at her rejection before she got up and practically flew around the table to desperately hug me. "Oh Tarvek! I can't believe that all happened to you!"

"Good instincts," Agatha said weakly.

[...] Lilith leaned across the table to take my hand in hers. "Prince, we've only recently met but you're almost certainly aware that the reason we agreed to let you wait until Agatha's 18th birthday before bringing up her medical issues again was so that we'd have a suitable period of time to observe you carefully. A chance to make at least a preliminary judgement on what kind of person you really were before we'd trust you with our daughter's health or even the lesser of her secrets."

"So that's what they were doing," Gil said from where the group had transitioned to sitting closely together on a couch, with Tarvek ensconced in-between Agatha and Violetta and Gil on Agatha's other side. "And of course, your story-self was so weighed down by his guilt and fear that he never noticed them becoming more and more accepting of him. Missed opportunity."

"Well, now you know." I said brokenly. Because of course they knew.

"Please tell me somebody in that room can diagnose guilt issues," Violetta quietly begged the screen.

[...] "Yes." she said, nodding meaningfully. "Adam and I accompanied Bill and Barry on almost all their journeys save the very last ones. We fought alongside them against dozens, hundreds of villainous Sparks and warlords and pirates and constructs. And it wasn't remotely like the stories and plays, Agatha." she said to her daughter. "It was nothing remotely so innocent. It was monsters, and madmen, and every variety of atrocity imaginable." she sighed softly. "More than almost anyone, my husband and I know what evil looks like. And we also know what the scars and pain that evil leaves behind looks like." she said to me compassionately. "And we know which one of those you look like, Tarvek." she continued in a motherly tone of voice as she looked me directly in the eye. "From what you and your cousin have said, your father is one of the worst monsters in human skin that we've ever heard of. But he did not raise a monster for his son."

And at that, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

[...] "Oh, altruism is not my motive there," I said viciously. "All right, last card on the table. We talked about the Order of Jove's original plan, and Lucrezia's variant on it re: inserting herself into the Heterodyne princess that was to be married so as to orbitally bombard her cake and eat it too, but we never talked about who the Storm King that would marry the Heterodyne girl to cement their claim would be, did we? Going by the current bloodlines the second candidate in line for that position is my cousin Martellus, hence his aforementioned ambition. Would anyone care to guess who the first one is?" I finished flatly.

"When you have both valid personal and political reasons for doing the same thing, its hard to know how much of which versus how much of what is motivating you," Gil said. "I suppose that's why my father just basically abandoned the idea of a personal life at all."

"Well I certainly don't intend to go the same route," Agatha insisted, squeezing both her boys one with each arm.

[...] "Agatha," Lilith said, holding up her hand to ask for silence. "I believe Tarvek is trying to make the point that because of who you are and what inheritance you were born to you will never have a romantic relationship that is entirely free of political concerns, and that will inevitably complicate the motivations of even the most sincere suitors you could possibly have.

"She's talking to you at least as much as to me," Agatha said. "I hope you're picking up."

[...] Lilith sighed. "Agatha, you're entirely correct. As the last Heterodyne, the responsibility for Mechanicsburg is yours. And we did nothing to prepare you for those responsibilities, and we're ashamed that we didn't. But we never expected Barry to be gone so long, and without him we had no way to safely get you through a Breakthrough when you were old enough without risking the attention that we had thought would doom us all."

"I know, Lilith." Agatha sighed softly.

She turned to look at me. "You were the first sign of hope we had in such a long while, did you know that? Dr. Beetle had said that there was nothing he could do for Agatha except what was already being done, but we had no way to check if he was telling the truth. And then you came along. A powerful and experienced Spark yourself, a medical expert in addition, and someone that genuinely cared for Agatha-"

"... wait, that's right. In that circumstance you would be a gift from heaven to Adam and Lilith, if only they could trust you." Agatha realized.

[...] "-but it was more than that, wasn't it? You truly do love Agatha for Agatha, not because of any title or crown or lands that come with her. If she were merely a means to an end for you then you would be possessive, and perhaps even affectionate from time to time, but you wouldn't truly care." Lilith finished, as Adam nodded along with her every word. "But you obviously do care for Agatha. So much that you can't even express how much without confusing yourself.

"So that's why I keep doing it wrong!" Gil said wonderingly.

"You're not the only one," Tarvek agreed.

And that caring is why we didn't try to separate you. As soon as we'd known you long enough to be entirely certain of your sincerity we'd planned to tell you about the locket and ask for your help with it. To see if you could somehow lower its intensity, find a way to retune it so it didn't cause pain, even to remove it entirely if Agatha's Breakthrough could be handled safely. We aren't Sparks, and we were helpless to do anything with sparkwork except just continue on as we'd been instructed. We'd hoped that you could find us a way out of our dilemma." Lilith shrugged. "And if not remotely in the manner that we'd expected, you have."

"I love you, Adam and Lilith," Agatha said quaveringly.

"And not undeservedly," Tarvek agreed.

"Thank you, Agatha." I said. And then, with more peace than I'd felt in a long, long time, I reached up to take Agatha's hand in mine... and lift it from my shoulder. "But even if your parents approve, this is not what we should do."

"What are you doing?" Agatha asked confusedly.

I turned to face Adam and Lilith. "It will be a little over two days until our train reaches its destination.

"That's far too long for the Beetleburg to Mechanicsburg run!" Agatha said. "Where on Earth are we going?"

"As fugitives, we very likely got on the first train leaving the station regardless of destination," Tarvek pointed out. "Or chose to take anything but the direct route to Mechanicsburg because that's where Beetle would be looking for us. So, we're heading somewhere else to change trains."

"You're right, that must be it." Agatha agreed.

I'll spend the rest of tonight telling you all- with or without Agatha present, if you think she needs the rest- everything else about the future that I saw. And then-" I held up a hand. "You will sit and discuss what you think needs to be done, as a family. Not just Agatha's choices of the heart, but the strategic choices facing us all as well. And you'll take as much time as is available to process what you've heard and be more certain of your feelings." I turned to Agatha. "And when we arrive, then and only then will you decide if we get off the train together, or if only one family does while the other goes on their separate way."

"Oh you idiot," Gil said to Tarvek affectionately. "You're seriously not going there, are you? Tell me you are not going there."

"He's entirely going there," Tarvek agreed.

"Going where?" Agatha asked confusedly.

"Only one way to find out," Violetta said. "Hit the pedal!"

Adam and Lilith both beamed at me as if...

"I told you," Violetta said proudly. "He only thinks he's a horrible person."

"He's the best." Violetta agreed with herself. "Even when he's being the worst."

"Your complicated approval fills me with both confusion and joy. But largely confusion." Tarvek replied lightly.

... as if I were their own son?

"Speaking as the person in the room with the greatest knowledge of them, Lilith was almost certainly mentally two pages deep into the wedding planning by that point." Agatha agreed.

[...] "All right," Lilith said, patting the seat next to her. Agatha gave me a final squeeze and stood up to walk back across to the other side of the table and sit down next to her mother. Lilith pulled a notebook out of her jacket pocket and a pencil, and laid it neatly in front of her.

"In the original timeline, Agatha's locket was lost next March when-" I began reciting.

"So, total disclosure of everything." Gil said. "That's good. It would be far too easy to mistake 'I possess unique knowledge' for 'I possess unique insight'-"

"Seeing as how that's Standard Spark Mistake Number Zero Zero One." Violetta, the only professional minion in the room, agreed.

"and only dole out your future knowledge in dribs and drabs as you thought best for your own scheme, instead of inviting 'past-timers' fully into the planning because you acknowledge that having time travelled doesn't actually make you any smarter than you were before." Gil finished.

[...] Agatha's Breakthrough had indeed begun before we'd even gotten halfway there. Fortunately the Corbetites had some experience with giving sanctuary to young Sparks only just beginning to realize what they were and frantically fleeing one step ahead of an unpleasant home situation,

"Oh, they're used to it all right." Gil agreed. "The Corbetites are really a valuable part of Europan civilization in a lot of ways."

and Agatha had mentioned the possibility of this in her initial confession while boarding, so they were entirely understanding of the sleep-construction incident that had turned half of their available silverware into a rather bizarre attempt at a dishwashing machine. In fact, the train's chief engineer, a Spark himself, had shown a positive delight in helping Agatha tear it down and rebuild it. Brother Ulm, our conductor,

"Brother Ulm? That's the Wyrm of Limerick!" Agatha called out cheerfully. "That was our train!"

"Yeah it was!" Violetta agreed enthusiastically. "Oh man, crazy old Brother Matthias was there to help the new Heterodyne with her Breakthrough? He must have been so thrilled!"

had merely made a polite "request" for an additional donation to cover replacement silverware and by the end of the affair we'd actually had the dining car's new automated silverware polisher up and running.

"Because of course you would barely mention that you'd helped me with it too," Agatha said to Tarvek tolerantly.

It had been far less traumatic or violent than her Breakthrough in the original timeline, but then she'd been far less full of negative emotions and with far more support available.

"Oh, how I wish I'd had one of those-" Agatha sighed.

"You still had not a bad one, comparatively speaking." Gil said. "Just- yeah. So many misunderstandings that day."

Still, all journeys must eventually end. And so as the train slowed and began our final approach through the outskirts of the city, I debated with myself as to whether to stay in my compartment or go try and see Agatha for one final conversation in the last half-hour before we finally arrived. After all, I didn't have any real expectation that she'd choose to stay with me. She sympathized, certainly, but after hearing all the things I'd done? All the schemes I'd tried to weave around her? All the mistakes I'd made? And how, even after being given a second chance, I'd still been so selfish as to-

"The odds are zero to infinity against that he's getting out of that train compartment without being kissed," Gilgamesh stated flatly.

"Wow, you really are catching on to the genre fast." Violetta said.

"Tarvek?" her voice came from behind me, and I spun to see her in the new dress her mother had picked - well, with a tiny bit of assistance from yours truly - for her at our last clothes stop. Unlike the outfit that I'd first seen Agatha in this one was still entirely within the limits of decorum, certainly, but was anything but drab or shapeless. Her outfit fit her like she was born to it, and it clearly projected I am strong. I am cherished. I am worthy. Or perhaps that was the young woman wearing it...

She was so beautiful.

"Ah, arc words! And your appreciation of Agatha's presentation and dress as a device for what they reveal about the feelings she's carrying, done as story bookends." Violetta said, nodding. "Nice imagery!"

"And here you thought all my internal fashion essays were just word cruft," Tarvek joked at Gilgamesh weakly.

"Agatha." I said, forcing myself to smile gently. "Here to say goodbye?"

"No," she said, as my eyes opened in astonishment.

"Said literally the only person in that entire universe who could possibly be surprised at this happening," Violetta snarked.

"But-" I began dazedly.

"Sssh," she said, placing one finger on my lips as she stepped into my compartment and let the door slide closed behind her. "It's okay."

Two feminine sighs echoed through the room.

"Agatha, are you sure-?" I began again.

"No, I'm not." she said to my shock.

"Whoa, plot twist!" Gil cried out.

"But... are people ever really sure about things like this?" she continued, as I confusedly tried to follow her thoughts. "Think about it. You literally came back in time with more foreknowledge than anyone ever recorded, and you still aren't really certain about your why your heart wants it wants. So how can I be?" she finished.

"When did I get this good at relationships?" Agatha said confusedly.

"In this timeline you did spend the past two days discussing the matter with your foster parents." Tarvek analyzed.

"Agatha, if you choose this then you know what comes with it," I told her. "The Lightning Crown. The politics, the lies, the betrayals-"

"The future of Europa." she said. "One that doesn't fall back into the Long War, like you saw it do with your own eyes. And my future, too."

"I certainly can't criticize myself for lack of decisiveness," Agatha agreed. "So this is how the lopsided dynamic that your story-selves were worried about is resolved. Ultimately, I choose you, not vice versa."

"Remember in chapter one when you told Lilith that you didn't want to press anything upon Agatha that she wasn't ready to give a fair judgement on before accepting?" Gil asked Tarvek. "Because you kept that promise."

"Your future could be whatever you wanted it to be," I said. "I might need you to advance myself in this world. But you don't need me. You don't need anyone to survive and thrive except you. Agatha Heterodyne, Lady of Mechanicsburg."

"Are you simple?" Agatha burst out. "If I hadn't help from so many people, I wouldn't have lived to get off of Castle Wulfenbach!"

"You're wrong, Tarvek. Everyone needs someone. Even in the future that you knew, I still needed my friends." Agatha replied.

"YOU TELL HIM, ME!" Agatha cheered enthusiastically.

"And in this time and place, I need both my friends and my family." She placed her hand on my heart. "And I need you."

"I'm not the only one," I said, struggling against what I couldn't even name.

"You're STILL trying to lose?" Gil gaped at Tarvek incredulously.

"Gilgamesh," she acknowledged. "You know, for a man who says he hated his romantic rival you did an exceptional job of talking him up even when you were trying to pretend not to. He really was your best friend, wasn't he?"

"I hate you so much right now," Gil told Tarvek with blatant insincerity.

"Until Violetta and I finally reconciled, he was the only one I'd ever had." I said. "And there I was, repaying him for that friendship with a knife right between the shoulder blades. I suppose that really does make me a Storm Lord in truth, doesn't it?"

"No, the actual guilt that you're feeling over it TOTALLY disqualifies you." Violetta pointed out matter-of-factly.

"Misplaced guilt, no less." Agatha agreed.

"Tarvek," Agatha said. "I understand why it's complicated for you. Try to imagine how complicated it is for me! But what you described was-" she chewed her lip. "It was real to you, because you were there. But I wasn't there, do you understand? That was another Agatha, in another time."

"I'm a wise woman," Agatha said. "But wait, wouldn't that mean-?"

"That's the reason for the whole 'Falling in love with her all over again' scene." Violetta pointed out.

"Ohhhhhh," Agatha acknowledged.

"If we accept that as a starting postulate then that makes my love for you-"

"-perfectly normal." Agatha said. "Even in this time alone, we've known each other for months. That's more than enough to at least begin a courtship. Goodness, my mother's seen marriages happen in less time."

"Exactly!" Agatha nodded.

"Do I love you?" I asked her. "Or do I love another woman that you resemble, that I'm trying to make you into-"

And then her lips were on mine, and mine on hers, and the world no longer mattered.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-!" both Agatha and Violetta squealed and swooned.

"Congratulations," Gil said to Tarvek with a sigh.

"For what?" he said. "This is just a story!"

"A story that's going to be stuck in her head for weeks. At minimum. You are going to lap ahead of me so hard." Gil sighed.

"I don't think I want to," Tarvek said puzzledly. "Oh, I certainly want to," he said at Gil's shock, "but not like this. It's... just not fair, somehow."

"Thanks." Gil said after a long pause.

"Were you kissing a ghost, then?" she asked when we finally separated. "Or were you kissing me?"

"HER!" Agatha and Violetta shouted.

"I don't know." I whispered.

Agatha smiled at me, then laid her hand on my heart again. "This is just a little bit broken, isn't it? Oh, it still beats as fine as ever, but you've been hurting for so long that you don't know how to hear it clearly. But it's all right." she reassured me. "They heal eventually, with enough care."

"I'm melting," Agatha said.

"I'm totally overloaded," Violetta agreed.

"And I'm... glad you guys are enjoying it." Gil surprised everyone.

"It's not a contest, Tarvek. It's not a matter of more worthy versus less worthy. And even if it was, my mother's already told you. You are so much better a man than you think you are."

"Please tell me that they're going to give us printed copies of this when we leave." Agatha said. "I will have mine bound in leather and put right on my best bookshelf."

[...] "Think back on all you've said and done. Even if your journey across time was an accident, you still used it to try and help me as much as possible. And even if you stood to gain something as well, every time you had the choice to place your own interests over mine... you chose mine." Agatha's grin lit up the world as she poked me in the breastbone lightly with her finger. "And I asked my mother about the same doubts and fears you've been having. About all the complications and ethical questions about a relationship that is asymmetric across time, about parallel universes and prophetic foreknowledge and oracle's paradoxes. And do you know what she said?"

"Something very wise, I would imagine." I said.

"It would certainly have to be, to solve this!" Agatha agreed.

"She said that love was something even the greatest Sparks couldn't ever hope to analyze, either logically or mechanically. And that whatever else may or may not have happened around or to us, a good relationship ultimately came down to two questions."

Everybody leaned forward towards the screen.

"Which were?" I asked curiously.

"Tarvek, have you ever considered that Adam and Lilith once faced a relationship puzzle fully as complicated as our own?" she asked obliquely.

"Oh COME ON!" Violetta shouted. "You teasing bastards!"

"No, wait!" Agatha said. "What on Earth are they talking about with my foster parents?"

"Precisely," she said. "They were literally constructed together." she said. "Made to order by a pair of brothers, who like teenagers everywhere could get soppily romantic over the strangest things. It probably never occurred to my father and uncle that there was something just a little bit strange about building a pair of constructs and then expecting them to just... pair up because they're expected to, like Barry and the High Priestess always are in Heterodyne shows. How do you imagine that they handled that?"

"... okay, yeah." Violetta agreed. "That is just ten shades of completely fucked up. How do you even process that? How did they process that?"

[...] "Well, they first began by deciding that no matter what anyone else expected of them, it was their bodies and their lives and they had the right to choose what to do with them," Agatha said. "As you and I both have, and freely acknowledge about the other."

"Now that we're on the topic, do you think your cousin has finally figured this one out yet?" Gil said to Tarvek.

"It's just faintly possible, but I think we should go hit him a few hundred more times to be certain." Tarvek nodded.

"It's a date, then!" Gil agreed enthusiastically.

[...] "And then they angsted about it for the incredibly longest time." Agatha nodded. "But eventually they grew old enough together to realize that they'd been asking all the wrong questions all along. That it didn't matter how odd the route was by which they'd gotten there, or what was expected of them, or whatever other bizarre life complications that sparkwork could throw in their path. The only two questions that truly mattered were 'Do we truly care for each other?', and 'Would we be good for each other?'"

Agatha's jaw dropped as she stared at the screen as if having a religious rapture.

"Agatha-" I gulped.

"And my answer to both those questions is 'Yes'." she said.

"Yes." I answered her after a long wondering pause. "Mine as well."

"Story-you is officially doomed," Gil said.

"And he's never been happier to be so," Tarvek agreed.

"I love you." she said simply.

"I love you too." I echoed, and we held each other silently.

"That is the most emotionally intense thing I have ever read, and they're not even kissing." Violetta said. "Okay, I seriously need to read a better grade of penny-sparklies."

"Assuming the publishers back home have anything else this good." Agatha agreed. "But yes. Very much yes."

"No regrets?" I eventually asked.

"About the road not taken?" Agatha replied. "I wish Gilgamesh well, and I look forward to one day meeting him as your friend. But nothing more."

"Oh, you are so getting paired off with Seffie in this one," Tarvek said amusedly to Gil.

"Am I even going to be in this one?" Gil said. "Because we're just about at the end!"

"Just because a story only covers a certain period of time or a certain point of view doesn't mean that the readers can't envision the remainder of the universe that the story exists in for themselves," Agatha said. "So if you hope for story-you to get a happy ending in this one, then in your heart you can make it possible."

"Thanks." Gil said. "That does help."

"Paris!" the porter yelled outside in the hallway. "Paris in five minutes!"

"PARIS?" Agatha said, wide-eyed.

"Oh, man!" Violetta said happily. "We got so bait-and-switched! My own sleight of hand positively envies this one!"

[...] "Do you think your grandmother will like me?" Agatha asked tentatively.

"Ah, so that's our plan." Tarvek said.

"Like the girl whose existence will upset years of scheming with a major new variable?" I inquired ironically. "Like the fact that the ongoing race among her grandchildren just got scooped by a massive upset win out of nowhere? Like that the family pawn will be promoting himself to a king, right alongside a promoted queen?" I grinned at her. "She'll love you. It'll be the least bored she's been in years. And you and I are the best chance that the Order of Jove will ever have, and even if there will be others too foolish to see that for themselves my grandmother is never a fool."

"Yup." Violetta said. "I mean, you're in a bit of a fix if she turns you down, but she'd have to have had a stroke first to be dumb enough to turn down that pat a hand. If you step off the train as visibly dizzy in love as you are then who the hell is she going to put forward from the family to marry her off to? Tweedle?"

"Grandfather would be a problem at this point in time, but-"

"It's Paris." Violetta agreed. "Even if you have to move Agatha out to the suburbs to cheat the Heterodyne time limit, by the time he could do direct action in Paris Grandmother would already be moving."

"And that's assuming that we don't secretly contact the Jagers as well." Agatha said. "That contingency with General Higgs was not mentioned in Chapter One for no reason."

[...] "I think it's been going well so far." Agatha grinned back at her.

"Well, if you decide to turn and jump right back on the train after you actually meet Grandmother and all the rest of our big screwed-up family, then rest assured absolutely no one will blame you." Violetta said.

"Valid point as well," Gil said. "You've got up to 72 hours of Master Voltaire's protection to make the initial contact in, and if you don't get a positive reaction then she can't stop you from just getting back on the train to Mechanicsburg. So, its really not a bad plan."

[...] "About what you said about a 'courtship'," I asked Agatha as we walked down the corridor. "You understand that my family will be expecting a firm betrothal up front, and have significant expectations about living up to it? As far as they're concerned we've already 'courted' and are now committed."

"Of course," Agatha said. "But the wedding can't take place until after I've reclaimed my place as the Heterodyne in Mechanicsburg, and once that's happened it'll be beyond their power to force me to do anything. The trick will be to keep their eyes so focused on the shiny prize that they don't entirely realize that until it's too late." Agatha took my arm in hers and we continued to walk along together. "If we don't work out..." she shook her head. "Mother and Father taught me that miserable people live miserable lives, and do their best to force their children to be miserable as well. Even my blood father and uncle didn't entirely escape that. And you or Violetta certainly didn't. Even I didn't, not entirely."

"And that base has been covered as well-" Tarvek began to analyze, only to be cut off by Agatha's sudden comment.

"Wait, WHAT did I just call them?" Agatha shouted in realization.

[...] "Ours wasn't the only relationship affected by all the recent confessions and re-examining of our lives." Agatha said. "Adam and Lilith hadn't let me call them that before because they'd felt guilty over what they'd been helping do to me." she explained, tapping the place on her neck where a trilobite locket had once sat. "But that's no longer between us now.

"Ouch," Agatha said faintly. "Now I feel a little ashamed of myself."

"Well, you know how to fix that," Tarvek said simply. "They're still in touch, after all."

[...] "Agatha. Tarvek." Lilith said to us both as we both came up to where they'd been standing by the door. "Is everything settled?" Her only reply was Agatha snaking her arm around my waist just as I did around her shoulders, and us both grinning at her parents like idiots.

Adam slapped his palms together and gave us a thumbs-up, and Lilith smiled back at us like a proud parent should.

"Her mental checklist has everything from the caterers to the wording of the invitations by now." Agatha agreed.

[...] "Tarvek!" I heard cousin Seffie call, and we all turned to see the welcoming party that had been alerted to our arrival by heliograph from our most recent stop. Seffie had brought her personal Smoke Knight Varpa and enough footmen to move the bags, but none of the rest of the family.

"Hey Seffie!" Violetta called.

"Doomed," Tarvek said to Gil smugly. "Story-you is so very, very doomed."

"Could be worse," Gil shrugged to everyone's shock, before continuing. "Could be Zola."

"If anybody ever wrote that story, then I don't want to even remotely speculate who would read it," Agatha said, shuddering.

"Violetta! You and Tarvek are assigned back together?" she said, looking at my and Agatha's arms around each other and then at our guests with an analytical eye. "Oh cousin. Here I'd thought you were merely taking a sabbatical year to study clanks, but clearly you've been up to things again."

"We are so going to prank the shit out of her." Violetta said to Tarvek smugly.

"Agatha, this is my cousin Princess Xersephnia von Blitzengaard, who we all call 'Seffie'. Seffie, this is Agatha Heterodyne and her foster parents, Punch and Judy." I introduced them matter-of-factly, as if one brought living legends to life every day.

"Although we currently go by Adam and Lilith Clay," Lilith explained equally offhandedly.

"Called it," Tarvek acknowledged to Violetta with a nod.

"Well," Seffie said after a pause during which I honestly had to admire her sheer savoir-faire at not visibly jawdropping. "It certainly is a pleasure to meet you, Agatha." she said, politely shaking hands. "Adam. Lilith." she greeted them in turn with a courtly nod.

"Wow," Violetta said. "I mean, it would be barely 50-50 that even Seffie could pull off that straight a face."

Violetta wordlessly held out her hand and I dropped a ten-castlemark coin in it.

"Apparently our story-selves had the same opinion," Tarvek chuckled.

Seffie took one look at our byplay and started giggling, and that set off an explosion of laughter all across the platform.

"Given how consistently this author has used honest laughter as an omen of good things approaching, I like this as an ending." Gil said.

"Come along, everyone." Seffie said cheerfully after we settled down, waving us all to the nearby steam coach. "Your arrival here had already had drawn Grandmother's curiosity, but now? Now, I do believe that you will have her attention."

"Oh would we ever." Tarvek agreed.

"So, that's it?" Agatha said. "That's all we've got?"

There are several additional sidestories, but you will not be required to analyze them here. suddenly flowed up on the screen.

"You're directly communicating?" Agatha asked. "Then why did you bring us here?"

For the purpose you have already surmised. As well as to help further understanding and communication among those who observe you.

"Can we go home now?" Violetta asked practically.

You may.

"And the print copies?" Agatha asked, before they appeared on the low table before them.

"Hey, leather binding!" Gil said, picking up his volume. "Thanks!"

"Reconciliation? Alliance? Family?" Violetta said, paging to the table of contents. "Okay, that sounds like good things are coming."

"I'm sure, but I think it's time for us to leave- no, wait, one last thing." Agatha said. "A brief review of what I think we've learned..." she chewed her lip, and continued.

"We learned that Violetta sometimes finds it hard to ask for things that she wants. We learned that Tarvek is sometimes afraid to ask for things that he needs. We learned that Gil is a great support to all of us, and that we're lucky to have him in our lives. And we learned..." Agatha stopped, and wiped a tear away from her eye. "That I have been so blessed with so many wonderful people to know that I honestly feel a little overwhelmed sometimes. I'm so happy we're all together, and that we've got so much to share with the people we left back home."

"We do," Gilgamesh agreed as Tarvek and Violetta both wiped away their own tears. "So let's get going."

"To our mysterious hosts," Tarvek began. "Thank you for this opportunity, and we appreciate what you've done. But-"

"-please don't do it again any time soon, if ever." Violetta said. "Because while it was great, it was also exhausting."

Agreed.

"All right," Agatha said. "Let's go."

And then our heroes departed, back to the land where they belonged.