Edward

“Clack. "I cannot bear the thought of using you."

Pause. "Love and freedom don't coexist,

Warden."

Clack. "This is all there is to love? Simply by being in your life, I have added indelibly to its weight?"

Pause. "Yes."

Clack. "Camilla, I mean it."

Pause. "I meant it too. You used to say it to me."

"We are one flesh." Clack.

"I am your end."

Pause. "That didn't mean I got squatting rights in your soul. I never would have asked for that. I never had rights to that."

Clack. "Sure. That's why I gave them to you."

Clack. Pause. Pause. Pause.

"I hope you know that I adore you, Scholar."

Clack. "Indubitably, Warden.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“I have built a you within me, or you have. I wonder what of me there is in you.”
― Amal El-Mohtar, This Is How You Lose the Time War

“Won’t you look at me, Camilla Hect?”
Camilla murmured something that Nona could not hear. The body said, “I died, and you carried me. I gambled, and you covered my bet. You kept the faith, and were the instrument of both my vengeance and my grace. And now I have fought through time, and the River, and Ianthe the First—fought and bested Ianthe the First, and I hope I never fight her ever again…Will you not look at me now, Cam, and know me?”
Camilla raised her chin. She looked at the dead face. She said quietly—“Yes Warden. I will always know you.”
Their foreheads touched. Camilla reached out with her slippery hand, and Palamedes clasped it with Ianthe Naberius’s cold, gloveless one. Because both of their hands were very messy, it made an embarrassing squelch, but neither of them appeared to notice or care. Nona had to look away.
She heard Palamedes say, in the voice of Ianthe Naberius—“Pyrrha, I can barely do anything. I’m only the hand in a sock puppet. I don’t think I could unpick a single ward, and I can’t do a damn thing for Cam’s bleeding—thank God nothing’s protruding.”
Cam said, without opening her eyes, “Don’t worry about me, Warden. I’ll walk it off.”
“Yes, thank you for your input,” said Palamedes pleasantly. “I’ve taken it under advisement and will add it to the next agenda.”
Camilla smiled that wonderful hot-metal smile that Nona loved as long as she had been alive.
“Jackass.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth

“I’ve just never met someone like you," as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.”
― Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart