Page 59 of Brave Truth

“The thing I keep coming back to is it being like a ritual. You had Borea straight through for Ritual, I’m pretty sure she did this in your second and third years. How to set up a ritual, make a container for it. Alexander made an argument for doing it then rather than later, and she agreed it was a good one.” It still startled Matty to hear Claudio talk about the Schola professors so casually. He’d only barely got used to him doing so about Thesan Wain and Isembard Fortier, and that was a special case.

But the actual question there, he could answer that. “How the shape of the ritual has qualities for the container. A bowl is different from an urn, a small container different than a large one. All that. Are you a particular kind of container, then? Or want to be?”

“Want to be.” Claudio’s hand stopped moving, still just resting on Matty’s wrist. “I don’t want to crack. Not that. Maybe that’s what happens in the Challenge, I don’t know. What I want is to be is blown glass, I think. Charmed sturdy, if we can do that. But the way that it expands and transforms.”

“From a globe of fire to something shining and translucent.” Matty bit his lip, trying to figure it out, though the image was potent. “Something that can be filled. That shows off what it’s filled with. There’s no argument about a clear bottle, not really. It’s not hiding things.” He rubbed his cheek— a bit of stubble, probably, but Claudio didn’t complain or move. “You don’t show things. Generally speaking.”

“I was taught not to.” Claudio’s voice went soft. Then, just as soft, but now insistent, like Cammie prowling, he said, “What I’m working around to is this, as a statement. I will go as myself or not at all. And part of myself is being a man who loves you. In a variety of ways.”

Matty pushed against the hand suddenly. “You’ve not said it like that. Not before.” He flexed his fingers. “I know you mean it. Doing all— all this.” He flailed blindly in the dark, just the faint shadow of his fingers moving. “But we haven’t, what that means.”

“What do you want it to mean?” Claudio’s voice had that penetrating quality again.

“I don’t know. I don’t know how to know.” Matty’s voice cracked at the end. “Tell me instead about the Challenge. Got to figure that out soonish.”

“Fair,” Claudio took a breath, resetting himself. “A ritual. A container. I want to know— in my body, the ways that are hardest to lie about— what I can take. What I can surrender to. I don’t know what that involves entirely. I don’t think I can. Because it’s about being in relationship to you. Other things too, but you for a start. Before. I hope after.”

“Is there a reasonable worry about after?” Matty asked.

“There is, I gather, an extremely wide variation in after. I don’t actually know about either Mother or Father, oddly. Mabyn knows about Mother, but I haven’t wanted to ask. Orion was laughing and the life of the party, though Hypatia had no complaints once they got to bed. Not that she ever does.” He said that utterly fondly. “Gabe— well. Gabe took all of that glowing power, glowing being a literal reality here— and deflected a couple of bombs before he came back for the announcements. I gather Rathna also had no complaints once they got home. I do think, given that set of data points, we might reasonably want to plan for time alone that night together.”

“Here?” Matty swallowed. “I mean.”

“Play that by ear, maybe. I honestly don’t know what feels right. What will feel right then. I’m going to be rearranging a map. I don’t know what it’s going to look like after. Maybe have something for breakfast here, but bring a change of clothes with you? And I’ll do the same.”

“Fair.” Matty hesitated, then turned his head to kiss at Claudio’s shoulder. “One of the things I like about you is that you think about the practical bits. Like where we’re sleeping.”

Claudio’s fingers shifted, just a whisper on the skin. “And that I am thinking about you as well?” Matty could feel his cheeks heat up. He couldn’t say anything for a minute around the lump in his throat, but he nodded and hoped that would be a start. Claudio gave him a little space. “You should think about what you’re all right with at the Challenge. How I am with you. I can’t— I can’t promise anything about when I come out. What might show?” He said that last bit as if it in particular might be a problem.

It at least got Matty able to say something. “Why is that the thing you’re bothered by and not the rest of it?”

“I don’t have the right to ask you to take risks. That sort. It’s one thing for there to be gossip. It’s something else for it to be visible. And it will quite likely be visible. Boethius’s mother is a gossip. Prosper’s knows just about everyone. Besides, you know, Mother and the actual Council. If you chose not to be there, I’d entirely understand.”

There was a space and distance there that hadn’t been a minute ago, even though Claudio hadn’t physically moved at all. Matty swallowed hard. “And what if I want to take that risk?”

“I’ll be glad of it.” Claudio shifted somehow, again not with his body exactly. “There will be people there who love me and want the best for me. There will also be my mother, whose motivations and emotions are at least half beyond my accurate reckoning. But I will be—” He rolled the word around for a moment before saying it. “Relieved. Reassured. If you are there.”

Matty closed his eyes, holding still. “I don’t know if I can be enough for you. For what you deserve. That’s the place that’s— there’s a chasm, and maybe there’s a way to the other side, and I can’t see it right now.”

“Ah.” Claudio let his fingers move slightly, not constraining, just making it clear he was there. “Do you want to learn?”

“I don’t know what it means if I do. I— we can’t make a life together. Can we? One where people know that, not just gossip?”

“That depends on what you want, a fair bit. If I’m successful, Gabe is right. There have been far worse choices made by people on the Council. We’re chosen for our magic and what we do with it, not who we spend our time with in bed. Or otherwise. I like the not-bed parts with you too.”

“What— tell me about that.” It wasn’t an order. It was more along the lines of what a small, plaintive kitten might attempt to order, and only be granted because they were harmless and adorable.

“Time with you. Lots of it. Having tea or coffee, both of us with whatever we’re doing for the day handy. Newspapers. I keep thinking about being somewhere, a room I don’t really know. Both of us reading, both of us with desks, something like that. Being in the same place, occasionally commenting, but working on our own pieces of the world.”

Matty caught a slight oddness there. “A room you don’t really know?”

“Not one that’s a thing right now? But it’s—” Claudio stopped. “It’s presumptuous.”

“Presume.” Matty nudged him gently. “There. That’s a thing I’m deciding right now.”

It got a small chuckle, and then Claudio went on smoothly. “It’s shaped like the other room upstairs. At Auctoritas. I sketched that out for you. Bedroom, bathing room. And then the rooms that were Mother’s, the entire time I was growing up. My office looks out at the front, but there’s the one she used for her bedroom. Separate bath off of it, that’s the larger of the two, with a broad window along one wall.”

“Large enough for two desks and some range of other furniture. Were we, perhaps, elderly in this view?”