Solo Log: The Weight of Hope and Secrets

**Early-mid spring, 501 AOV**

"I don't know how you do it. Keep secrets, deal with matters of life and death, read the news and compare it to what you know..."

Cleone groans, sprawled over the couch in Florette's apartment. "I couldn't even take a year of this. I don't know how you've been handling ten."

Florette for her part is unfazed by Cleone's drama, instead focusing her attention on giving Floyd a good polish as she sits next to Cleone's head. "It helps that I don't attract the same kind of trouble you seem to, Lady Weld."

"Don't get me started on that!"

Ever since stepping back on Danoran shores Cleone's knighthood has felt like a lingering dream, the sort that leaves her unsettled long after she's woken. But it's real, as the sash in her suitcase can attest, and to hear the closest thing to a sister she's ever had in this life call her a lady is frankly too much.

Florette laughs, because she knew exactly how Cleone was going to react. "Well, you're going to have to get used to it. You did go and get yourself knighted, after all." For a brief moment, Cleone feels like the child she's never been alongside an unruffled mother: given Florette is approaching her mid-thirties with a sturdy patience and a few signs of physical aging, she certainly looks the part.

"And I hope it was the right thing to do." Cleone curls in on herself a bit, and Florette leans a little more against her in response. "I...I accepted it, telling myself it would be good for our country to have a Danoran knighted in Risur. But there were other reasons too."

Namely Aodhan and his readiness to declare war against Danor, and his demands of Cleone. Cleone still isn't sure how much of her acceptance was for the sake of improving relations, and how much was an unspoken plea not to worsen them. It was a small difference, but it's weighed on her since the ceremony.

Florette can know none of this, because the fact that the king of Risur was a few inches from declaring war on Danor is extremely something Cleone can't divulge. But Florette's always been good at reading between the lines, and she seems to understand *something* anyway.

"Well, Cleone." A nudge and cool metal against her cheek, as Florette rests Floyd in the gap between her head and the couch's back. "Do you think we're better off for your having taken the knighthood?"

"I hope so. But I don't know." Cleone turns, angling her head to nestle Floyd under her chin. "I'm scared."

"Of what?"

Cleone is silent for a moment, and they both know she's carefully editing the words in her mind down into something that won't reveal anything unwanted. "I'm scared that I'm too blind to realize I'm on the wrong path. That in the end, everything I've done will have made the world worse...and that maybe I might still believe I was right."

Like Alastor. Like Elanor. Like Alexander, possibly. Like the first of her lives, who helped kill a goddess and decimate an entire race of people.

She doesn't think her coworkers in Risur understand her desperation to make sure she's on the right path. The weight of karma accumulated over five hundred years, the knowledge that her existence comes at the cost of an entire race's steady survival, that her country holds no sympathy towards the dignity of those who remain...the memory of a blond man with his fatherly smile, praising her (him) for murder. Marcel and Gatria are too focused on what's close to them, Hoya is too straightforwardly compassionate to go bad, and Mona...well, she isn't sure about Mona.

Florette is the closest of anybody to understanding for sure: they'd lived together for years during and after university, including during the war. Between Florette's intelligence work doing you-don't-want-to-know-what and Cleone's hazy but unsettling dreams of the past whenever she turned down an offer in the military sector, they both knew that good intentions and love for their country only went so far without questions.

"...I remembered a little bit about him, by the way. The asshole." Cleone feels the couch underneath her shift as Florette does, and a hand on her shoulder. "Not that much. But enough to know that he isn't any better than I thought he was, and that he wouldn't feel any worse about whatever he did."

The conversation(?) from the Ziggurat of Apet still echoes in her memory: *You'll understand that I had my reasons soon enough.*

Florette is quiet as she takes it in, and it occurs to Cleone that she's much more used to Florette's pauses than the other way around. Florette also takes less time to speak up again, though: she's been in the practice of watching what she says for over a decade now. "Cleone, do you remember when I convinced you to learn how to fight?"

"Uh...well, of course I do." Weird time for Florette to get back on the I-told-you-so train, but all right. "Yes, yes, I know you were right, your nagging back then has saved my life more times than I can count now. What does that have to do with this?"

"Do you know why I knew you'd get yourself into trouble?" Florette's voice is soft, but there still is a hint of smugness in there. Which...okay, Cleone had to give her credit where credit was due.

"Not at the time. I was just at the railroad company back then."

"Back then, yes, but I think even you knew you wouldn't stay forever." Florette nudges Cleone again, playfully this time. "I don't think you foresaw yourself getting knighted, but even back then it was obvious."

Cleone stares at her, mouth agape. Yeah, Florette had been very clear about her getting into trouble, but... *"How?"*

"Well," - and Florette's voice melts into a pleasant, teasing lilt - "How many times do you think I've helped change our country?"

"I...don't know?" Cleone had always considered it better not to think too hard or ask too many questions about Florette's job beyond needed context to make her some useful gadgets. Dealing in state secrets had never been in her plans, even if they'd wormed into her life anyway.

"None. Nothing directly, at least." Florette's voice is light, nonchalant. "Every day I hope that my work keeps our country safe so that others can push it forward. And you're the kind to push it forward, whether it's with railroad infrastructure or peace conferences or whatever you did with that Colossus and the truth of its origins."

Cleone opens her mouth to protest that she hadn't exactly done much at the peace summit and that everyone knew the constables weren't exactly diplomatic go-tos, but given everything that happened after...yeah, it felt a little disingenuous to argue the point. "What does that have to do with getting into trouble?"

"Pushing for change tends to upset powerful people, unless you're already one of them. Perhaps even then. I don't have to know what you've done in Risur to know that you've made enemies of people who would benefit from the status quo."

Naturally Cleone's mind flies to the Obscurati first, although she doesn't know about them enough to say whether they benefit as Florette says. But the point that her team's interference has earned themselves targets on their backs isn't wrong either...

And on a more mundane note, the constant fight for funding between Danoran civil and military services was inherently going to breed enmity on both sides wasn't it?

So the spirit of Florette's point is true, whether or not the letter is. "I never thought about it that way."

"Which is why I did." Florette's still got a flash or two of *I told you so* in her voice, and Cleone resists the urge to roll her eyes.

"Yes, yes, thank you for pestering me back then. What's your point?"

Florette gives her the most blase harumph Cleone's ever heard with her own two ears. "My *point* is that you'll never be satisfied if you aren't pushing to improve the world in whatever way you think is right, starting with the railroads and ending with your current work. It's who you are."

An uneasy ghost of a chill prickles over Cleone's spine as she thinks of that awful day after Borne's appearance. The nausea she felt at being asked to turn her back on her country, to make the people she considered home her enemies...

She'd considered the alternatives a lot, that day. Quitting the RHC and coming home to Gagneux to live a quiet life free of conspiracies and war had been first and foremost. Cleone doesn't have any doubts that such a life would have felt tepid knowing she could do more, but even tepid dissatisfaction would have been better than betraying her heart as Aodhan had asked.

So Florette is right, and she isn't. Cleone could live with dissatisfaction as the cost for avoiding something worse - though she isn't keen on testing the boundaries on what qualifies as worse.

She groans again, picking Floyd up as she sits up on the couch and looks at Florette wearily. "It's still exhausting. And murky. I hope every day that I'm not going down the same path the asshole did."

"And I hope every day that the work I do keeps the peace in Danor instead of ushering it towards another war." Florette shifts again to lean against her, and Cleone leans back. "Doing what you think is right all any of us can do."

"You *chose* this." Cleone doesn't say it as an accusation; rather, it's an expression of awe. Florette had been nineteen years old when they'd met, and already taking her first forays into field spywork. Cleone hadn't even known what she wanted out of life back then.

(Marcel isn't much older than that and look what they've both gotten wrapped up in, she thinks.)

"I did." Despite everything, Florette's voice is as firm as it is tired. "And I don't regret it."

"Do you think we'll ever get to work together?" Cleone knows as she says it that it's more than a bit of wishful thinking. "So that one day we don't have to do this dance."

It's an impossible wish, possibly more so than either Cleone or Florette know on their own. With Danor and Risur's history and the Obscurati and whatever secrets Florette knows from her work...Cleone can't possibly begin to imagine how many miracles would need to happen for the two of them to be able to live with each other free of secrets.

But some feelings can transcend walls of silence, and Cleone remembers that they've made it this long now for a reason as Florette reaches out to wrap her in a hug.

"I hope so, too."