Solo Log: Defined by Shadows

**97 ATE - Aboard the Guiding Star**

Nathan's hammock on the *Guiding Star* isn't really made for two people, but he lets Cleone climb in and squish up next to him anyway with nothing more than a wordless mumble. They’re both too drained to do more than lay there for several minutes, but being tired together is better than being tired alone.

"Your father is an exhausting man," Cleone eventually murmurs into Nathan's shoulder. She intimately understands the look on his face, now, from when they’d boarded the ship earlier. “Did you get the answers you were looking for, when you talked to him?”

“More than I thought I would get.” He exhales, and Cleone doesn’t need to see his face to know that Nathan’s got that specific look that means he’s organizing his thoughts. Another several minutes pass before he speaks up again. “I understand Father more than I ever have. I don’t agree with him, but for once in my life I understand him.”

Nathan rarely speaks about his childhood, but he does so now as he sorts through every facet recontextualized by the Obscurati and the omnipresent pressure it bore on the House of Jierre. The wall that always seemed to exist between him and his father, the one that never seemed to exist for his older cousin. Why his father was so permissive with Nathan’s astronomy research, but restrictive when it came to who he studied with. Why his other cousin was given no leeway with his own studies.

“I was never jealous,” he says. “I just wondered why…why I was the only one he never seemed to have plans for.” He jolts sharply, lifting his head to meet Cleone’s eyes in a panic. “N-not that I would have wanted to be part of the Obscurati. Not knowing what it did to my family, and to you, and to the world.”

“I know.” Cleone shifts to lift a hand to his cheek, coaxing him back down to rest and running a hand through his hair. A conversation from just an hour ago echoes, and her mouth quirks. "You know…according to your father, planning to change the planes is in itself enough to qualify as Obscurati. So I suppose you're included after all, and so am I."

"Is that so." The flatness to Nathan’s response says he doesn't seem to find the idea as funny as Cleone does. To be fair, though, he hasn’t been dealing with the existential dread of Nicodemus' very personal attention.

Amielle Latimer had defined the Obscurati according to its stated goals, much like Han Jierre. But to Cleone the Obscurati will always mean following Nicodemus’ designs, letting him obscure (ha) the larger world so that everyone else sees only what he does. It's certainly the definition Nicodemus seems to operate by.

"We're a pair, the two of us," she muses. "A Jierre left out of the Obscurati whose life was defined by its shadows, and the deva made for the Obscurati who managed to grow up free of its influence." A beat. "As much as any Danoran can, anyway."

"There’s a lot to untangle," Nathan agrees. "You'd know better than I would, but I hadn’t realized just how much it influenced until I heard it from Father himself."

That notebook is still sitting in her bag, discarded nearby. “Your father wrote me a confession of all the Jierre line has done,” she tells Nathan. “I’m going to take it back home so all of Danor will know the truth. I’m also going to…”

Instead of finishing that sentence, she groans and buries her face in his neck for a solid thirty seconds. Nathan waits patiently through her dramatics, running a light hand down her back while she composes herself.

“I’m going back to Danor to officially make a play for sovereign once this is over,” she says finally, rolling over to stare at the ceiling. “I barely like the idea any more more than I did after Cherage, but listening to your father and hearing Florette’s reports…fuck. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but of all the people in the country I might have the best shot at making sure Danor survives all this without being crushed by itself *or* by the rest of the world.”

It feels like arrogance, to voice those words out loud. But it’s also an undeniable truth after their months-long world tour, even if her lack of political acumen is *also* undeniable.

Nathan’s hand finds hers, and he clasps their fingers together. “Father told me you said something like that. He didn’t seem to believe in you, but…he didn’t seem to believe in much at all, at least that he was willing to say.” The disappointment is clear in his voice, and he squeezes Cleone’s hand. “But I think you’re right. People will listen to you, Cleone. I know this isn’t the first thing you wanted, but…”

“I want it enough.” Nathan’s right: if Cleone could find someone better suited for trying to navigate Danor through its own survival, she’d give up any thought of politics in a heartbeat. But if there’s a better candidate out there they haven’t presented themself, and she’ll be damned if she lets the likes of Han Jierre and Eloise Duffet crash and burn her country without a fight. Even if all she can do is try to crash it in a slightly more productive direction.

Nathan watches her carefully, tracing the marks on her face with his free hand. “I think you can do it.”

“I have to try.” Cleone closes her eyes and leans her face into his touch. “But…promise me something?”

Nathan is as aware of what the new planes mean for promises as she is. “What do you need?”

“Promise me you’ll say something if I ever start to act like your father did. Giving up on change, believing the worst of people…giving up on the world.” Cleone suppresses a shudder. “I used to think being forced back into the Obscurati was the worst thing that could happen to me. But I think now that the worst thing would be to lose my hope.”

Kasavarina lost her hope, and was blinded by revenge. Nicodemus…also lost his, she has to admit, and became a tyrant. If Han Jierre had hope he gave it up long ago, and the emptiness Cleone’s seen in him today *scares* her. Even Alastor lost his hope towards the end, she knows, so focused on the evils of the world that he forgot how to see good.

It’s a lot to ask of Nathan, watching out for her like that. Cleone would rather not have to ask it. But Nathan’s always been good at seeing things, seeing *her* when Cleone’s own sense of herself is clouded, and he’s one of the two people in the world who know both her and Han well enough to compare them both.

Nathan, for his part, doesn't flinch. "I will. I don’t think you would make the same mistakes Father did to begin with, Cleone. But…I'll remind you as much as you need."

The hand on her cheek moves to Cleone’s side, tugging her to face him. She obliges, and Nathan wraps his arms around her tightly. “Father resigned himself to following the paths others set out for him. I realized that when we talked, that he let all this happen because he couldn’t betray the legacy he inherited. He reminded me of you, actually, before you came back from Cherage.”

Cleone stiffens, and she has to shove down a kneejerk response before finding the words to a better one. “Reminded you how?”

Nathan huffs a ghost of a laugh into her hair. “You’ve been unhappier since the planes changed. Not just because of the state of the world, but also because being one of the king’s ministers exhausted you. But you wouldn’t walk away, because you thought your work was more important than yourself.”

Cleone distinctly remembers breaking down about exactly that to Florette. She’d tried to hide it from Nathan so he wouldn’t worry about that too, but it seems she failed at that. It figures. She opens her mouth for a rebuttal – walking away wouldn’t have made it any easier to go home again, the world was at stake if she tried to leave – before realizing that anything she said would prove exactly Nathan’s point. “...I see what you mean,” she concedes reluctantly.

“But you came back from that,” Nathan continues. “After Cherage. Even when you hated the idea of getting involved in politics, you were still passionate about helping our country move forward again. That’s something…that’s one of many things Father gave up on, because of everything else on his shoulders.”

Cleone doesn’t know which is worse, the hint of hurt in Nathan’s statement or the fact that he seems to have accepted his father’s failings already. She wants to give him something better than this, something much better, and that thought only further affirms her need to *make* things better as best as she can.

“I don’t intend to give up,” she says. “Even if I’m not much good as a sovereign, I’m still going to try. Just…stay by me?”

“Of course.”

And there’s still a hundred things to deal with outside of the two of them and the one hammock, but Cleone lets herself stay a little longer. Even now, it’s good to remember all the reasons she has to believe in the future.