When the actors had gone, Lenore stood alone at the centre of the stage and felt something she had not let herself feel since resurrection.
Rage. Not the hot kind that burns clean and leaves you empty. The cold kind. The kind that had been accumulating since she woke naked in his room with black eyes and ink-blood and the knowledge that even death had not been private — that even murder had not freed her from being observed.
Edward. With his grey eyes and his belief that the world owed him. Edward, who reminded her of —
"Casimir," she said aloud, and her layered voice made the name resonate painfully. "He reminded me of Casimir Grey. Before he became — that." She gestured at the empty space where Apirael directed the auditions, sorting the desperate into roles like words on a page.
Mr. Hollow materialised beside her, cold and patient, saying nothing — because he was Apirael's discarded words, and understood that the important things are the ones you can't hold in any longer.
"I hate him," Lenore said, and the admission felt like being cut open. "Not Apirael — him I can barely feel about, he's too much gray nothing. But Casimir. Casimir Grey, who saw me. Who looked past my performance to the machinery beneath. Who cried over what he'd done — those beautiful black tears on my white dress, like proof that even monsters feel something." She laughed, terribly. "When he cried, when he put his dead hand on my chest and felt my heart through the connection his poem made — I thought, maybe he loves me. Maybe being seen that clearly, even though it destroyed me, meant something."
"But it didn't," Mr. Hollow said.
"But it couldn't. Because he wasn't crying from love. He was crying from recognition — seeing his own monstrousness reflected in what he'd done to me. He cried for himself. I was only the evidence. The mirror that showed him what he'd sacrificed to matter." She moved across the stage, the stained white dress whispering. "And then Jack killed me, and carved his message into me like a signature on Casimir's work. And I was grateful. Grateful to stop being compulsory truth. Grateful to stop being the proof of his power. To stop being bronze when all I'd ever wanted was to sing beautifully and be loved for who I pretended to be — instead of hated for what I actually was."
"But he wrote you back."
"He didn't ask." Her layered voice made the walls vibrate. "Didn't wonder if I wanted resurrection. Didn't consider that maybe I'd earned the mercy of ending. He just needed to prove Jack couldn't unmake his work. And the worst part —" her voice dropped — "when I came back, when I kissed him and asked is this some kind of love, part of me wanted him to lie. To tell me bringing me back was love. That violating me twice was somehow proof of caring."
"But he couldn't lie."
"He'd traded away comfortable delusions when his mind dissolved. He could only be precise. So he said no. I've lost love. You're a sick man, Apirael. And I kissed him anyway. Because I'm sick too. Sick with needing to be seen." She looked at her ink-blood hands. "Sick with being his equal now. No longer victim — accomplice. No longer written — writer. He gave me his power when he resurrected me, and I should hate that. And I do. And I'm grateful. I hate being violated and I crave being seen that clearly. I hate that seeing Edward today, that grey man with his entitled hunger, made me remember what Casimir was before he dissolved."
"And so you cast Edward to play him," Mr. Hollow observed. "To show you what Casimir was."
"I want to watch someone perform my violator," Lenore said. "To see it from outside. To understand if I could have stopped it — if I'd recognised what he was doing the first time he looked at me."
"You couldn't. He didn't ask permission. He just looked, and wrote, and made you true whether you wanted truth or not."
"I know that. But I need to see it. Need to make it visible, so I can understand whether what I feel is —" she struggled — "whether hating him is justified. Whether wanting to destroy him while also needing him to see me seeing him — whether that's love, or anything at all, or just ink-blood calling to ink-blood because we're the only two things in London that exist in this space between written and real."
Mr. Hollow was quiet. "He loved you the only way he knew how. By reading you. By making you permanent through precision."
"That's not love."
"No. But it's what he called love. I see you truly. I write you honestly. I make you matter. That was his language for it."
"That was violation," Lenore said. "And I'm going to make him watch it performed. Make him sit through his own origin story. Make London watch what precision looks like when it destroys someone. And maybe — maybe performing it will give me what just being it never did." Her voice cracked. "Agency. For the first time since he looked at me, I'll be the one choosing how the story is told. I'll be the author instead of the authored."
"You're going to destroy him."
"No. I'm going to perform him. And when London sees what desperation becomes when it's given power — when the invisible are told yes at any cost — they'll understand that Apirael isn't a monster. He's just what any of them might become. Every overlooked soul in that audience could become Casimir if given the chance. Could trade everything for visibility." She turned to the empty seats. "Three weeks. Three weeks to write the script, and stage it, and decide whether I forgive him."
"Will you?"
"I don't know. I don't know if I can forgive someone who can't ask for forgiveness. Can't even feel guilty — can only perceive, intellectually, that he was wrong. You can't forgive grey. You can only understand it." She put her hand on the door. "And I hate that I still hope he'll somehow remember how to love me. That consciousness will spontaneously regenerate. That the grey man will choose anything over precision — and prove he's still human enough to choose at all."
"But he won't," Mr. Hollow said. "Because Casimir Grey is dead. And Apirael doesn't choose. He only manifests."
She stepped through the threshold and was gone.
And from the shadows where he had been the whole time — where he had heard everything, read her rage like text, understood her hatred with the same terrible precision that had created it — Apirael stepped onto the stage.
"She hates me," he said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"And she's right to."
"Yes."
"And I can't feel anything about it except the perception of the fact of it." He moved to where she had stood, looked out at the empty seats. "She's going to make me watch Edward play me. Make me see what I was before dissolution. And all I'll be able to do is perceive it as accurate. I won't be wounded by my own origin story." He paused. "Could I stop her?"
"Could you?"
"Yes. I could unwrite the resurrection. Violate her a third time — prove I value my comfort over her agency. Prove I brought her back not as a peer but as a puppet." He looked at his black hands. "But that would make me the monster she believes I am. So I won't. Let her have this. Agency. The power to tell her own story, even if telling it wounds me in ways I can no longer properly feel." He turned for the door. "Even if it costs me another piece. Even if watching my own crime performed somehow teaches me that mattering was never worth what it cost."
He left, and Mr. Hollow stood alone in the cold, thinking about rage and love braided until they were one thing, about the death poet and his creation preparing to perform their mutual violation for an audience that would become part of it whether it wished to or not. Three weeks. And the theatre — cold, dark, waiting — seemed to agree that something terrible was being prepared.