And Yet It Was Not

Anyone who dares ask for context to this story will be prosecuted by Ralph.

Ralph does not appear in this story. Nothing in this story will have anything directly to do with Ralph. Anyone who dares ask for context about why I am mentioning Ralph here will also be prosecuted.

I wrote this initially for fun </3 Now I'm writing for braincell damage.

And yeah this is why I normally avoid using Sandy PoV.

## Begin reading

One could say that it was summer, but that would be mildly inaccurate at best; it was the day two weeks and three after midsummer solstice, the twenty-seventh year of the reign of Emperor Daniel Tiberius, 1814 AE, and it was *exactly* a quarter to seven in the evening.

Emrys waited until the third toll of the bell settled into the streets.

The Lieutenant, Emrys reflected for about the fourth time that day, was not one who often presented himself easily as a fundamentally bad person. While there was some ambiguity surrounding his moral circumstances and indeed a much larger ambiguity surrounding the moral circumstances of the world -- including the question of whether there could be a true definition of relative good and bad or not, a subject which Emrys considered not as half as interesting as what other people thought of the subject -- the Lieutenant did, nevertheless, appear to have standards for the majority of his activities that, on introspection from a third and purely observational point of view, could be mistaken for a rather warped ethic code of conduct.

He made a short pause here, wondering if the subject of his fancies should sense his thoughts and, as some sort of response, give a glance in his direction. Emrys had his back to him, but that would pose no problem; the assassin was always more than able to know when other people had their attention on him, if only because he normally seemed to be so much part of the background. Doubtlessly, the Lieutenant knew of this also, and as such would use any look only as some sort of communicative indicator.

The trouble with all of this was that Emrys didn't know whether the Lieutenant *could* tell his thoughts in the first place (he had his back to him; could he still read him that way? Did the Lieutenant *need* to read him to know what he was thinking?), and thus this lack of any eye movement in the Lieutenant's part could not be interpreted justifiably as another sort of signal.

Did the Lieutenant know he didn't know? Preferably yes, because then Emrys *would* know that the Lieutenant would not choose to apply the absence of action as an action in itself, and the matter could already have been pleasantly settled. But if not...

...well, he would have missed a minor part of one of the hundreds of subverbal conversations he had with the Lieutenant every week, all of which, though not completely progressing in predictable manners, led inevitably to the same conclusions.

Conclusions which did not, on the whole, feel entirely satisfactory to Emrys.

It was at these sort of times that Emrys tended to wonder, when the earliest folds of the night started to brush against his cloak, when the thrummings of the world formed a private layer of silence against his soul; when he could almost see his future laid out in front of him, dark, silken, the scents of temptation lacing his heart. He lived and dreamt and danced and woke and he kept on living, stepping to the whistles and whispers of a nightingale who only he could hear.

And yet it was not. It never had been.

I