Prince of Time (Girl Genius)

[cliffc999]

This one originally just exploded out of me back when someone in the original SB thread joked about the GG characters reading the story and doing a reaction, and my muse just wouldn't give me a minute's peace after that. Like, it was just compulsive. So, they got this.

---

To whoever made that damned 'The Characters Read' suggestion earlier, know that you have contributed to the ongoing psychological torment of a fellow human being.

But at least it got you ungrateful bastards some new wordcount. *g*

--------------------------------------
"Why are we in this room?" Agatha asked. "What's that screen for?"

"Apparently we're being forced to review a fictional penny-sparkly that was written about our lives," Tarvek said.

"They are literally selling those by the crate in Paris!" Gilgamesh groused. "Why should we have to sit through one of these just because some arbitrary entities from beyond conventional reality force us to? I told you that we shouldn't have tried that experiment in trans-dimensional harmonics!"

"Science demanded it!" Agatha insisted heatedly.

"Yes, well science has apparently demanded that I get to be the star of this one," Tarvek said interestedly as he peered at the small display screen on the control unit of the device on the table.

"Oh no, Sturmvoraus, you're putting that up where we can all see it." Gilgamesh said, as the two of them began to wrestle over the controls- immediately before Agatha whacked them both across the back of the head.

"GANGWAY!" Violetta cried as she was randomly dropped in through a hatch on the ceiling to land on the couch. "Okay, which one of you idiots is responsible for this and what body part do you want bruised first?"

The dispute over the exact assigning of blame prompted a frank exchange of views wherein the merits of various positions were vigorously discussed at length. However, eventually...

"Did they have to tie us to these chairs?" Agatha said.

"I can't even strain these chains, let alone break a link!" Gilgamesh cried. "What are they even made out of?"

"This is ridiculous!" Tarvek cried as he tried and failed to pick the lock on his shackles behind his back. "We're both Smoke Knights! This shouldn't even be working on us!"

"Eugggggh," Violetta moaned as she failed to wriggle free of her restraints the tiniest bit. "Okay, okay Mysterious Time Beings, you win! Somebody hit the damn foot pedal so we can get this over with!"

Agatha reached out and stomped her foot pedal, and the text started scrolling up on the screen.

When Tarvek got a do-over he promised himself that it would be different. He promised that he wouldn't let Agatha fall in love with him until after she knew the truth. He had it all planned out.

"What's a 'do-over'?" Violetta said.

"Wait, not falling in love with you until after I know the truth?" Agatha looked at Tarvek. "The truth about what?"

"Ummm..." Tarvek said. "Could somebody advance the text so we could try to narrow down the possible categories?"

Tarvek never did have very much luck with plans.

"They know you so well, don't they?" Gil smirked at him.

"Oh like you can talk." Tarvek returned fire.

"Yeah, but you try harder," Violetta snarked. "Which is why you have so many more plans blow up on you."

"KEEP GOING!" Tarvek shouted.

She was so beautiful.

I'd stopped as soon as Agatha first came into view down the hallway. My heart gave a little lurch, the same way it always did whenever I first saw her again after any significant absence. The lines of her face, her brilliant red-blonde hair, the elegant functionality of her spectacles perfectly framing her eyes-

"Is this seriously what goes on in your head?" Gil asked Tarvek incredulously.

"Oh like you can talk Mr. 'I Lose The Ability To Be Verbal Whenever Agatha Touches Me'!" Tarvek snapped back.

"... I think it's kind of sweet, actually." Agatha said interestedly.

"Do not encourage him!" Violetta cried. "Please, do not encourage him!"

My lips thinned as I began to note the other details of her appearance. The hunched and defensive body language as she hurried down the corridor, avoiding eye contact with any of the other students. The functional, shapeless clothing that had been expertly tailored to conceal anything distinctive or attractive about its wearer.

"Wait, what?" Agatha said.

"Is this one of those penny-sparklies where they just write completely different people and use your names?" Violetta said.

The way her skirt and vest merged together without any distinctive lines, the badly-fitted sleeves, the drab heavy tweed that they'd chosen for the fabric, it all blended together to outright crush any possible first impression she could make.

"Okay, this is just stupid-" Gil began, only to be cut off.

"I have a very bad feeling about this..." Agatha muttered worriedly, and then stamped the pedal before anyone could react.

I compared her current clothing with the memory of that bilious sea-green dress she'd worn to dinner at Sturmhalten along with the make-up and hairdo precision-crafted to coordinate with it...

"Keep going," Tarvek said, and Agatha held the pedal down to let the scroller keep advancing continuously.

"Do you really write entire fashion essays in your head whenever you have an idle moment?" Gilgamesh said dazedly as the text rolled by.

"Yes! Yes he does!" Violetta shouted.

Agatha here, however... her flame wasn't banked, it had been extinguished. Everything they'd swathed her in and draped around her positively shouted I am helpless. I am worthless. Please do not take any notice of me.

"Oh no," Agatha said, turning pale with realization.

"Agatha, it's just a story." Tarvek said reassuringly. "It's only someone's bizarre imagination writing fiction about us, like 'The Lusty Loves of Lady Heterodyne.'"

"Yeah, we laughed like crazy at those, remember?" Violetta said as Agatha kept the text scroll advancing. "Don't let these idiots get you down. This isn't-"

[...] To the rest of the world 'Agatha Clay'

"... Clay? Wait, this actually happened to you?" Violetta turned pale in shock, and Agatha nodded pensively.

"THEY DID WHAT?!?" Gilgamesh screamed. "CLEARLY FATHER AND I DID NOT INVADE BEETLEBURG HARD ENOUGH!"

"For once I will enthusiastically endorse the brutal tyranny of the Wulfenbach Empire!" Tarvek agreed passionately. "In fact, I will criticize you for having been insufficiently brutal!"

"But what are you doing here?" Violetta asked Tarvek. "This far back you didn't even know she existed!"

I intimately knew what it was like to consistently present a false front of incompetence to your entire world, and to live as if revealing your true capabilities to anyone would mean your death. [...]

"Well, they are certainly writing us true to life," Agatha acknowledged wearily. "Especially you, Tarvek."

[...] What had they done to her?!?

"I will have every single person who was involved in these atrocities personally tortured by DuPree before they are burned at the stake!" Gilgamesh ranted madly.

"No you will not!" Agatha sharply corrected him. "But... thank you for the thought."

[...] Violetta's thumb dug lightly - for her - into my kidney. I could almost feel her silent glare at my back that was shouting You're missing your cue, you idiot!

"WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE?!?" Violetta cried.

"This has to be some kind of time travel narrative." Agatha deduced.

"That... would make sense." Tarvek agreed slowly. "If I somehow ended up in the past then I'd certainly want to come and help you as soon as I possibly could."

"You mean help her right into your waiting arms." Gilgamesh sulked. "Am I even going to be in this story at all?"

"Oh Gods, its getting worse." Tarvek said as the text kept scrolling.

[...] "Or beaten down," Violetta said with quiet anger. "She was acting almost like the castle staff back in Sturmhalten."

"It was that bad?" Tarvek whispered.

"Agatha," Violetta said soberly. "Just... just give me their names. Just point 'em out to me. And I promise you, bodies will hit the floor. If the 'us' in that story think you were as bad off as what Prince Aaronev was doing to the-" she gulped.

"When you go to Beetleburg, you're taking me and Gilgamesh with you." Tarvek said flatly.

"Nobody is killing anyone!" Agatha said. "I mean it! It's sweet in a very scary and disproportionate and more than a little psychologically unstable manner for you all to offer to kill everyone who was mean to me, but it was just campus bullying!"

"That you can say that and sincerely believe it is why you are the finest woman we have ever known." Tarvek said sincerely.

[...] "Would you be willing to surveil her home situation?" I asked her. "Discreetly? The simple fact that she's dressed like that means her foster parents have something to do with this, as unbelievable as that seems."

"Wow, we are in serious mode on this." Violetta said. "This is reading like we set this up as an entire tactical op."

[...] "Got it." she acknowledged me, then immediately segued to an offhanded "So, how do you think Tinka's doing back home?" I could hear the metallic footsteps of one of the Clockwork Army coming down the street behind us on its patrol circuit that had prompted Violetta's shift in conversation.

"Enemy-territory drill," Tarvek nodded. "We're certainly not taking any chances."

"Is this the sort of training you had?" Agatha asked them curiously.

"What, you thought Smoke Knights were just about sleight of hand?" Violetta asked her in return.

Useful life lesson: when mysterious other-dimensional creatures decide to help 'expand your perception of time', they don't always know what they're doing.

"Oh thank God, we've left the psychological horror and are entering an exposition section." Violetta said. "Maybe now we can get some context."

"Or at least fewer nightmares." Gil agreed.

Agatha kept scrolling, and soon enough...

"Oh God, the summoning." Tarvek groaned. "Yes, I imagine that if that creature had botched the job my consciousness could have ended up re-anchored anywhere in my personal timeline."

[...] and things had gotten very confusing after that until I'd somehow woken up back in my old bedroom in Castle Sturmhalten.

"And now we have a time frame." Violetta said analytically.

Fortunately I'd had long practice at only screaming in confusion and fear on the inside-

"That's not what Captain DuPree says." Gil smirked at Tarvek.

"Oh, do you want to trade embarassing Paris stories in front of Agatha, Holzfaller? Do you really?" Tarvek glared back.

"... just keep scrolling." Gil groused.

After I'd oriented myself I'd taken almost a week to decide on what I was going to do. There were so many disasters and dangers to avert, so great a potential threat to Europa to avoid...

"This doesn't quite sound like you." Gil said.

... and as disgusted as I was with myself to admit it, so many opportunities to exploit.

"Whoops! Never mind!" he smirked.

"Wulfenbach, look me straight in the eye and tell me if you went back in time you would have invited me to be there so we could both meet Agatha together." Tarvek replied.

"I would have invited you to be there so we could both meet Agatha together," Gil said, staring at Tarvek with a perfectly straight face.

"Said the man with his fingers crossed behind his back," Agatha said disapprovingly as she leaned to look over the back of her chair.

"Dammit!" Gil swore, and Tarvek and Violetta traded matching grins.

But those would be the less difficult parts of my journey. The real challenge would be properly managing the state of affairs in Europa after a victory against the Other. Because to simply allow the Wulfenbach Empire to continue as it was was not a viable idea.

"HEY!" Gil cried.

The Long War had essentially returned as soon as the Baron had been openly shown to be vulnerable. The Empire had collapsed when he'd gotten trapped in stasis in Mechanicsburg, and even the best that Gil could do barely held even a fraction of the Empire together

"Okay, that part is true, but still! I'm trying my best!" Gil whined.

"I think the point 'myself' is making is that the situation was so flawed from the getgo that not even your best could salvage things, and is using that as their justification for making historical changes." Tarvek replied.

With the benefit of hindsight I would reluctantly admit at this juncture that Klaus Wulfenbach was not a brutal usurper but a man who had forged a legitimate and necessary peace out of an era of chaos

"Wow, thanks." Gil said, looking at Tarvek.

"Well, I'm not wrong." Tarvek agreed.

but one that he'd forged via methods that could not endure. His grasp of strategy and conquest was perhaps the greatest in known history, but for all that he ruled one of the greatest empires in Europan history his understanding of how to be an emperor was woefully incomplete.

"Definitely not wrong!" Tarvek smirked.

[...] Even Martellus had understood that rulership was ultimately a thought that existed in the minds of the ruled, and that like all thoughts it needed symbols to help articulate and refine it, ongoing positive reinforcement to encourage its growth, and repeated conditioning to make it stick.

"You're seriously comparing me to him?" Gil cried. "And I'm losing?"

"Only in political science?" Violetta tried to reassure him.

"That's not helping!" Gil shouted.

[...] And yes, I knew that I was a flawed person myself and that I was as yet entirely untried as a king. No, I was certainly not Andronicus Valois.

"... go ahead, say it!" Tarvek snarled.

"What, and discourage your slow, tentative efforts towards actually achieving self-awareness some day?" Gil smirked. "But that would interfere with your ongoing positive reinforcement, wouldn't it?"

Tarvek's response could be described as verbal only by an exceptionally charitable narrator.

"Is this going to be some bizarre show where the punchline is that the whole experiment they claimed was going on was a distraction and we're really here just to emotionally torture each other?" Violetta said.

"Don't be absurd!" Agatha insisted. "That would be the most ridiculous notion ever!"

"Of course it would be!" Tarvek said. "Both scientifically and ethically unsound in the extreme!"

"Absolutely!" Gil said. "Without a valid control group, it would merely be pointless torture!"

"... I have just realized that I am the only sentient being in this entire dimension who is not a Spark." Violetta slowly intoned in horror. "HEY UP THERE! IS IT TOO LATE TO ASK FOR A MERCIFUL DEATH?"

But by the same token, Agatha was not Euphrosynia Heterodyne. She was... good. [...] No, she was a true daughter of the Heterodyne Boys, a heroine and a princess of legend. She was magnificent. And with her helping me... well, then I just might be able to actually pull it off.

"Awww." Agatha sniffled. "Thank you, Tarvek."

"If you're going to be giving Violetta that merciful death she asked for, could I have one too please?" Gil sighed upwards.

As for Gil, by now I'd forgiven him for all the stupid misunderstandings between us. In hindsight, they hadn't really been his fault anyway. I certainly didn't wish him any harm

"Your timing is horrible." Tarvek gently teased him.

and even if I was planning to ultimately bring about the - hopefully as gentle as possible - downfall of his father's Empire

"What bizarre definition of 'not any harm' are you USING?" Gil looked at Tarvek probingly.

it's not as if he'd been eagerly looking forward to inheriting that mess to begin with.

"That definition," Tarvek smirked back at him.

From what I recalled of the future it had largely been several years of unrelenting misery for him, and while the Baron's mental overlay had had a lot to do with it I hadn't exactly seen anything that would indicate he'd have been much happier as ruler of Europa even entirely in his own mind.

"I can only pray that by the end of this you have all had as many embarassing secrets thrown open to share as I have." Gil swore.

"How can it be a secret if I already knew about it?" Tarvek asked him. "Because I do! It's not as if you're particularly hard to read!"

"Please stop teasing him so much," Agatha asked. "I think he's going to be at enough of a disadvantage by not being a main character in this story."

Everyone present politely ignored Gilgamesh's pained whimper.

No, I entirely hoped to chart a route to the Lightning Crown that involved Gil as my valued and much-rewarded ally than as my enemy, but such a route was entirely possible.

"Of course you'd be going for that again." Gilgamesh growled.

"You just heard my story-self's justification!" Tarvek replied. "Can you really disagree with them, given the different starting conditions they're under? And obviously I-he- the story intends to go about it in the most ethical and least harmful manner possible!"

"Well it would be hard to be more harmful than the route you actually took, even if most of that was an accident!" Gil shot back.

"Please don't remind me," Tarvek asked quietly.

"Sorry." Gil apologized.

[...] Which is why I felt just a tiny bit guilty at maneuvering to romantically cut Gil out before things even began.

"... to be honest, Tarvek, the fact that you're feeling any guilt here at all is impressive. Really." Gil admitted. "Because if I got a do-over I'd be doing everything on Castle Wulfenbach with Agatha as differently as possible and probably not even remember that you existed until after I was addressing wedding invitations."

"You both love me, and in any alternate world where the other one of you wasn't already competition you certainly wouldn't be in any rush to invite them as competition." Agatha said. "And maybe that doesn't make either of you a perfect saint, but if you were saints then I wouldn't even recognize you. I love you both just the way you are. So let's just all agree to not feel guilty over what hypothetical alternate selves of us might be doing in bizarrely different circumstances."

"And if the second chapter suddenly goes all 'The Lusty Loves of Lady Heterodyne'?" Violetta asked her penetratingly.

"Provisionally agree." Agatha continued. "Let us provisionally agree."

Gil, Tarvek, and Violetta all chorused their assent to that, and the scrolling continued.

But Violetta's analysis of the situation that she'd shared with me while we were busy repairing Castle Heterodyne had been entirely correct.

"What analysis is this?" Agatha and Gil said in stereo as they both turned to stare at Violetta.

"Ummm..." Violetta stammered, and eventually was persuaded to share the whole thing.

"Well, I suppose that was a fair analysis at the time," Agatha said, "but the changed political circumstances post-stasis bomb have rendered it entirely moot. Gil and I would have to rebuild his Empire almost from scratch as much as any new Shining Coalition would need to be built from scratch, so you're both back on even footing again."

"That particular silver lining existing in my complete and total failure to do my father's job only makes me feel worse." Gil sulked.

"Gilgamesh, even I won't say that was your fault." Tarvek sighed. "The Other ruined everyone's life that day. Week. Month."

"Century." Violetta continued.

"All of recorded history and more, if Queen Albia is to be believed." Gilgamesh contributed.

"Other girls merely get mothers who won't let them eat sweets, or wear calf-length skirts, or date until they're thirty. Why did I have to get a mother who was evil incarnate?" Agatha sighed. "Why?"

"Well, she tried to die but then Hell threw her out for lowering the property values." Violetta said portentously. "And so Lucrezia Mongfish must walk the Earth."

"Hell is supposed to be Earth's disposal site for human-shaped refuse, not vice versa." Agatha replied passionately.

"Could somebody finish the first chapter before one of us needs a bathroom break?" Gil broke in.

As for Gil? As cliche as it was to say, there were indeed other fish in the sea. Seffie would certainly love him and take care of him as much as any woman possibly could

"Why does everybody keep saying that me and Seffie should be together?" Gil asked plaintively. "She's only interested in me because of the politics!"

Tarvek and Violetta both looked at each other and sighed.

even if it would take extensive coaching on my part so she stopped choosing the wrong approaches and did something that might actually work. Honestly, cousin, how can you normally be so perceptive and yet so utterly fail to realize that Gil is positively allergic to politics?

"... explain." Gil said firmly, glaring at them both.

"Seffie is convinced that you could never possibly fall in romantic love with her, both because of Agatha and before you'd met Agatha because she didn't think she was the sort of girl you'd be remotely interested in," Tarvek reluctantly admitted. "So she never admitted that she was legitimately attracted to you because she had no expectation you'd actually care about that piece of information. All of her expectations were lowered down to the absolute minimum of an arranged marriage to you driven by political pragmatism and then the possibility that you might eventually grow to like her after you'd already been required to live together for years."

"... that makes absolutely no sense." Gilgamesh said dazedly. "I mean, okay, I admit it, I'm not great at understanding women, but that one is a full order of magnitude less comprehensible even than my usual state of confusion!"

"Your cousin sounds like a woman whose external poise conceals a serious internal struggle with self-worth issues." Agatha said to Tarvek and Violetta.

"What, and this surprises you guys? You have actually met our family, right?" Violetta replied incredulously.

[...] I wasn't enough of a hypocrite to tell myself that I was doing it only for their own good. I knew full well why I was doing it.

"Yes, because you love Agatha and you want to be with her." Gil shrugged. "I'd be a hypocrite if I said that was a bad idea to have!"

I'd openly told Agatha my true motives and desires during the final battle of the Siege of Mechanicsburg, right after we'd shared our first kiss. That I loved her for a thousand reasons and more. That I'd decided that no matter how things looked to be going between her and Gil I still wasn't going to give up on hoping that she might come to care for me after all. And that if Gil did win her heart in the end, then he damn well wouldn't do so without a fight.

Tarvek looked at Gil expectantly, only to be met with a respectful nod and shrug. "Hey, we already agreed on this in the Castle, remember?" Gil told him. "When I asked you if you were ready? And you said-"

"That I was so ready," Tarvek nodded back.

And so I had resolved to use the time I'd been given to go and meet Agatha first, to come to know her and woo her before Gil had even entered the picture, and help her reclaim her true heritage without having to go through any of the false starts and stumble and trials and travails that she had the first time.

"If either of you ever end up thrown back in time by some bizarreness, you have my permission to try this." Agatha said. "I certainly wouldn't mind getting that locket off earlier, or not watching Lars die, or any of the rest of it."

"Who's Lars?" Tarvek asked curiously, only to be met by Gil's shrug.

[...] As is, I'd have to settle for doing my absolute best to ensure that Agatha never went remotely near my home until we were ready to return there in force and tear Father and all his co-conspirators out by the roots. I'd sooner turn myself in to Baron Wulfenbach and confess everything before I'd allow Lucrezia to ever hurt Agatha again.

"Okay, if this story ends up with you and Agatha living happily ever after and me left by the roadside..." Gil sighed. "Then I'll try and be happy for you guys. Because at least your heart's in the right place this time."

"What do you mean 'this time'?" Tarvek replied sharply.

[...] And a bit of subtle overreach on my part in the wording of one of the requests prodded Beetle to forbid me to arrive with any royal honors or an armed escort. That left me an opening to point out to Father that Violetta, in her current cover identity as a recent resident of Mechanicsburg, could herself apply to attend TPU as an undergraduate and thus resume her old duties as my bodyguard in a way that could be finessed past Dr. Beetle.

"Wait, you deliberately schemed to get me back?" Violetta said, staring at Tarvek. "I thought I was going to end up in this thing by some bizarre coincidence! You literally had time-loop foreknowledge and you wanted me for this? One year before the death of Dr. Beetle- I was just about ready to kill you back then! For real, I mean! That was a really, really low point for me!"

[...] She was not happy to see me, of course.

"Yeah, master of fucking understatement!" Violetta said, still wide-eyed in shock.

[...] No. I needed my favorite cousin back if I was going to have any real chance of pulling this off, and so the first thing I'd done was rebuild the relationship with her that I'd lost. I had several years' of future knowledge to help me know how to do that, and for all our surface belligerence we had always cared about each other the most in our family, so I set out to make amends and I did.

"You are making me cry. For this I must hurt you." Violetta sniffled.

"By any chance, are you and Bangladesh DuPree distant relatives?" Gil asked.

Let alone the fact that one of my very last memories of the future before I'd been sent back was that Violetta had gone missing after a mysterious fight in Agatha's quarters at the Royal Society and had been as dead as you could possibly get without actually seeing the body. I certainly couldn't allow that to happen again, or anything like it.

"Oh dear God, that's correct." Tarvek said in horrified realization. "That creature had 'temporally re-aligned' my mind shortly before you'd been revealed as the intended sacrifice. If I'd gone back in time from that exact moment..."

"... then you'd have thought I was dead." Violetta said. "Okay, no wonder you tried to get back together with me as soon as possible. If I'd gone back like that-" she sniffled again. "Yeah, I'd have wanted to go reassure myself you were alive again as soon as I could as well."

[...] For all her inferiority complex about 'not being a very good Smoke Knight', by the end of my time in the future she'd blossomed into being one of the very best of our generation. And not because she'd needed the experience to unlearn what she'd learned but because she'd always had it in her all along. All she'd needed was the proper motivation. Even if I failed, she'd survive to get the word out.

Everyone else present decided to politely pretend that Violetta hadn't outright blushed and cried happy tears. Not least out of fear of the possible consequences after the restraints finally came off if they hadn't.

[...] "She's brain-locked?" Violetta asked me as we both stared down at the blood sample she'd discreetly obtained and I'd just finished analyzing.

"You'd have seriously stolen a blood sample from me without telling me?" Agatha asked heatedly.

"If we'd thought you were under some kind of hostile coercion?" Violetta said incredulously. "Hell yeah! If I had a castlemark for every time I've given Tarvek a stealth blood test because I'd thought he'd been dosed, I'd be rich enough to buy Sturmhalten!"

"Your family is so very odd," Agatha said bemusedly.

"Do you hear us disagreeing?" Tarvek sighed.

"Pain." I spat out. [...] "Violetta, you only see these kinds of diagnostic markers in someone in chronic agony. Whatever it is that they've done to her it's torturing her! Every day!" I stopped and tried to catch my breath, and blinked my eyes repeatedly because clearly there was some dust in here-

"Ohhh snap." Violetta said worriedly.

"Violetta?" Agatha asked her.

"That sort of thing always brings up bad memories for me," Tarvek said softly.

[...] "She's... really good at not letting her pain show." Violetta tried to reassure me. "Maybe they don't understand the full effects of that thing?"

"They did understand them," Agatha said sorrowfully. "I-" she halted. "I can forgive them. I did forgive them. Why can't I forget it?"

"Because prolonged suffering carves notches in the soul," Violetta said. "Being human would suck a helluva lot less if it didn't."

[...] And somebody gave them at least some legitimate training in tradecraft. They sanitize their garbage, they habitually use different routes every time they go somewhere, they're both diligent about doing lookouts before doing anything that would reveal their construct nature, and their situational awareness is well above civilian average.

"I never noticed any of this, and I was living through it!" Agatha said wonderingly.

"You were never trained to look for it," Tarvek explained. "And since it was done throughout your entire life with them, you never knew that it wasn't normal."

[...] "And yet they still allow it to continue." I said angrily. "How can you love someone and yet deliberately hurt them?!?" I shouted at the world.

"When you think it's the only way you can keep them from dying?" Violetta replied immediately, and then shot a death ray straight through my soul with her next sentence. "Because that's what you did to me, remember?"

"Ouch," Violetta winced. "Okay, that was brutal even for me! I guess story-me didn't totally forgive you yet."

"You weren't wrong, though." Tarvek agreed stoically.

[...] "You're doing very well, Herr Sturmvoraus." Lilith Clay complimented me as I finished a recital of Pachebel's Canon in D on her piano.

"Oooooh, nice one!" Violetta congratulated Tarvek. "Verbal high-five, weasel-boy!"

"And to think that these reflexively deceptive infiltrator-assassins are some of our best friends." Gil said to Agatha ironically. "The people we love and trust."

"Gil, people who keep death ray collections like ours should not throw stones," Agatha chided him.

"I don't own that many," Gil said plaintively. "And most of them are just for research purposes!"

[...] "Adam, Lilith, I'm- Oh, hello!" Agatha called out to me, noticing the stranger sitting in the living room of her house alongside her mother.

"I actually do remember that I was that innocent once, but it's still bizarre to contemplate," Agatha sighed.

"Good afternoon," I smiled back at her. I vividly reminded myself that her foster mother was standing right here and so it was very important that I only smile a little- "I'm sorry, my lesson started late- here, let me get up so that you can start yours." I said, rising to my feet and cutting off Lilith's reply.

"Wow, three entire seconds from first meeting to first lie." Gil said. "Even for you that's exceptional."

"It's called 'undercover' for a reason!" Tarvek winced.

[...] "Oh! Your Highness!" Agatha said, bowing again. Oh damn, she knew that?

"'Your Highness?'" Lilith looked at me suspiciously.

"... my father is Prince Aaronev Sturmvoraus, Protector of Sturmhalten." I admitted with visible reluctance.

"Did an untrained civilian seriously detonate your cover ID in thirty seconds flat?" Violetta gaped.

"I'm beginning to understand why the foreword to this story said what it said." Tarvek sighed.

[...] "Frau Clay, do you have any idea what a relief it is to interact with people who don't look at me and see several hundred years of family history before they actually see me?" I spoke to both her and Agatha. "To be frank, the sensation of simply being treated like everyone else is getting positively addicting. I honestly don't know how I'll adjust when I go back home and it's all the silly bowing and curtseying again!" I finished, making a joke of it and actually getting Agatha to chuckle along with me.

"Even I'm going to compliment that recovery," Agatha said, looking at me. "You technically aren't even lying!"

"Considering how much we both hated living in Sturmhalten?" Violetta said. "'Technically' has nothing to do with it."

[...] "I'm Dr. Beetle's assistant so I saw your name - your full name - on some of his mail," she blushed. "I'm very sorry, I shouldn't have violated a confidence like that. Either yours or his."

"Of course," Tarvek sighed. "It's always the simple things that trip you up. And given that Agatha's the primary target and where she's employed, its not as if it was even theoretically avoidable."

"Yeah, that was just the fickle finger of fate having flicked." Violetta agreed. "Can't dunk on you when that happens."

[...] "Of course they are. I work with Dr. Beetle every day." Agatha interrupted her mother. "I was just wondering- what's it like? How does it feel to have such insight and how does it differ from the regular scientific method non-Sparks use? Does it hurt to think that hard? Is the- ow!" she winced and started staggering, her rising enthusiasm having been off in mid-word by one of her headaches.

"And time to you completely losing your spaghetti in three... two... one..." Violetta sighed wearily.

"Agatha!" I shouted in alarm, leaping forward to catch her as she fell over and completely blowing my cover with how precipitously I'd reacted.

"Zero." Tarvek finished resignedly.

"It's not a thing to mock!" Agatha reproved Violetta. "He legitimately cares!"

"I wasn't mocking," Violetta said soberly. "I was sympathizing."

[...] I stopped, took a deep breath to try and silence Anevka's distant screaming, and continued.

"Tarvek?" Agatha said softly, turning to look at him worriedly.

"That's the most serious form of shell shock," Gil said. "I mean, right there you're having a waking auditory hallucination that's a flashback to a traumatic event. Tarvek, why didn't you ever say anything?"

"We're talking about the guy who you once picked up with a million stab wounds and half of Night Master Jaron's venom collection in his bloodstream, and he tried to make a joke out of it." Violetta said. "Getting this lunkhead to admit that he's in pain is like pulling teeth. Out of a dragon."

"I would have appreciated knowing this about him so I could help him, Violetta!" Agatha snapped.

"This is from the period of time that she was my personal Smoke Knight, not yours." Tarvek pointed out. "Which means that she's oath-sworn not to reveal anything about it that could possibly be used against me, not without my permission. Which..."

"You wouldn't ever give even with a gun to your head." Gil said. "Yeah, well, you're an idiot. We're your friends, and we want to know this kind of stuff not to manipulate you with but to help pick you up when you fall."

[...] "You have my sincere condolences, Prince Sturmvoraus." Lilith replied to me gently. "That's... the only word for it is 'horrible'. I think it says a great deal about you as a person that you've let your experiences give you so much empathy for other people who are suffering."

"That's Lilith," Agatha said proudly.

"That's my cousin," Violetta said with equal pride.

[...] "Then on the day Agatha becomes legally able to make her own decisions about her medical care, I will present myself to her again and offer my help to her in any manner that she chooses to accept or not." I told her firmly. "You can throw me out of your house, you can forbid me to ever see her again, but that won't stop me for as long we both live in Beetleburg. You know this."

"I still don't agree with you." she said. "But I respect your conviction. So please respect mine; Adam and I, in full knowledge of the situation, sincerely believe that what we are doing is the only way to keep Agatha as safe and secure as possible."

"I... two people I love are disagreeing entirely and they're both right." Agatha said. "What do you even call that kind of tangle?"

"Life." Gilgamesh said simply.

[...] "Lilith," Agatha called softly from the couch. "You know how everyone else leaves after they see me have one of these attacks. Please don't push away someone who wants to stay."

"Did you seriously get ditched by that many people just because you weren't perfectly healthy?" Violetta said incredulously.

"Remind me again why we're 'disproportionate' in wanting to tear this place to the ground?" Gil said.

"Speaking as the only person in this room who spent their early life not growing up in a castle," Agatha said, "I am sincerely envious of all your illusions about the average tolerance level and lack of ignorance of the common citizen."

"... for the first time in my entire life, I'm actually not regretting my birth as a Mondarev." Violetta said, shocked to her very core.

[...] "Miss Clay," I said, with a little courtly bow to cover the fact that I had so many possible responses I could make and none of them would be a good idea right now. "Be well, and until we meet again."

"Is there a school that you go to learn how to- to- talk like that?" Gil said plaintively.

"Actually, yes." Tarvek replied. "They're called 'deportment and elocution lessons' and pretty much every nobleman who can afford them pays for at least some for their children."

"THEN WHY DID MY FATHER NEVER BUY ME ANY?" Gil cried. "I don't like always saying the wrong thing!"

"Gil, your father is one of the most intelligent men alive but there is a reason his manual on workplace communication was anathematized by every major religious denomination in Europa." Agatha pointed out reasonably.

[...] "The woman you love, or the woman you hope to make into the woman you love?" Violetta asked me penetratingly. "Look, have you even considered how lopsided your power dynamic is right now? You literally know more about her than she does about herself, and you've got the key to whether or not she's ever able to reach her full potential!"

"I'd... never considered that about the ethics of time-loop romance." Tarvek said.

"She's talking about the locket." Gil pointed out reasonably. "The time-loop could be handled simply by telling her about it before actually trying to go from friendship to romance."

"A goal that, according to the summary, I fail at." Tarvek said. "Am I going to be the hero of this story or the villain?" After the prolonged silence that fell after his remark, Tarvek burst out angrily "WHAT?!?"

"I was actually trying not to say it!" Gil said guiltily.

"Hero," Agatha reassured him. "I am certain you will be the hero."

"But what if I fail?" Tarvek asked her worriedly.

"If failing once made you stop being a hero, then Othar Tryggvasen's career would have lasted maybe a week." Gil pointed out reasonably.

"Oddly, that actually helps," Tarvek said with a rueful chuckle.

[...] "I meant her," she said. "If she falls for your Prince Charming routine before you tell her the truth, then how deep are you sunk when she thinks that you manipulated her all along?"

"I would say, pretty damn far." Agatha reluctantly admitted.

"Violetta, as the room's expert on the feminine point of view would you please tell me how I avoid making 'Agatha Clay's' heart flutter even the slightest bit when I'm a handsome young man with manners, breeding, wealth, taste, legitimate emotional concern, and am the only person her age who still wants to be friends with her at all?' Even before we get into my tragic backstory, Sparkiness, and mysterious yet compassionate agenda?"

"You don't." Violetta replied to the screen. "You really, really don't."

"I'm practically a living caricature of a penny-sparkly at this point.

"'Practically'?" Gil snarked.

So again, you tell me, how do I keep Agatha at a distance without a permanent rejection?"

"... severe facial scarring?" she replied sarcastically.

"Other-me is a wise woman," Violetta said matter-of-factly.

[...] "Tarvek! You're here!" were Agatha's first words to me as she entered the house, even before greeting her parents.

"Hello, Agatha." I said, standing and greeting her with another bow. "I do hope you didn't miss me Wednesday but I thought it would be best to give my uncertain welcome time to settle in a bit more. But I think I'm being at least provisionally accepted for the duration."

"Oh, we're courting!" Agatha said wonderingly, staringly raptly at the screen. "Real, old-fashioned romance novel courtship! And here I was afraid this would be like those lurid penny-sparklies!"

"I know!" Violetta said eagerly. "Oh, this is getting good!"

"Good Lord," Tarvek said, raising an eyebrow as he also concentrated on absorbing every word.

"I at this point entirely abandon my philosophy of agnosticism and petition to enter the Church," Gil said tonelessly. "Because I now have objective proof for the existence of Hell, and by inference therefore of Heaven."

[...] There was a mutual round of awkward smiling at each other before Agatha sheepishly admitted "I'm not really very experienced at this."

"That's so cute!" Violetta said eagerly.

"Not your fault," I reassured her as I took a sip. "I think we're both still entirely at sea as to precisely what 'this' even is, particularly given that it's still early days. But if nothing else, I would certainly like to be friends."

"That's so sweet!" Agatha gushed.

"And I at this point reconsider my religion, because the consistent failure to answer my prayers begging for the sweet release of death is objective proof of the nonexistence of God." Gilgamesh continued even more tonelessly.

"Gil, if you don't at least try to understand this sort of thing then you will never overcome those speaking-to-women difficulties." Tarvek pointed out reasonably.

"Is there at least a way to start with lower dosages and gradually build an immunity?!?" Gil asked him desperately.

[...] I mentally sorted through several pithy or philosophical ways to observe how society was often disappointing, and then finally settled on a simple "They shouldn't have."

"... okay, that actually was good." Gilgamesh said, shocked.

"While I would normally disdain literary criticism from a man who thinks Trelawney Thorpe adventures are the highest form of literature, the fact remains that broken clocks are still right at least once a day." Tarvek retorted.

"Whose side are you on?" Gil retorted angrily.

"Agatha," I remonstrated with her gently. "I'm not really in general practice but I am a physician, and at home I live with someone who is a... semi-invalid, I suppose would be the simplest way to phrase it. And while we've only just met twice here and that briefly, from all that I've seen about you or heard about you on campus-"

I winced again at Agatha's smile suddenly growing brittle as she thought about what I'd almost certainly heard about her.

"-you never use your illness as an excuse for not doing your best at everything." I reassured her. "Do you know how rare that is?"

Agatha's response to this passage could only be described as being somewhere between a whimper and a squeak.

[...] "I remember her being a better person when she was a young woman, but ever since what happened to her she's changed." I took a moment to steady myself, and continued. "She grew hard, and bitter. She wears her condition like a suit of armor. She uses it to justify being petty and cruel to others, because how can the world not understand how much she's suffering?"

"Did you seriously describe your sister in exact literal detail without once even implying that she was a homicidal clank?" Gil said, blinking heavily. "I didn't even know words could do that!"

"Said a great many people, shortly after first having met Prince Tarvek Sturmvoraus," Violetta continued in the tones of a professional announcer.

[...] "-then your degree of chronic pain is significantly higher than hers. And yet..." I shook my head in gentle wonder. "You don't act like Anevka does. Not at all. With everything you have to carry, with all the unfairnesses your situation has put upon you, it never even occurs to you to stop trying to be the best person you can be. And that's really a very amazing thing."

"Wow, I think you can actually hear the exact second at when story-Agatha's heart falls hopelessly in love." Violetta said, awestruck.

[...] "That might help," Lilith agreed with me surprisingly. "I'm no formally trained physician but in my youth I worked as a village healer and a battlefield medic in turn. If you work something out, bring it to me and I'll have a look at it first."

"You have the best mom," Violetta told Agatha urgently. "I mean, the whole 'she thinks she has to keep you locked in that thing to keep you from being hunted down and murdered' thing is still between you, but she's going straight at the first chance she can see to even slow down the grief coming at you. She really wishes she had the power to change your situation for the better, she just never thought she did."

[...] "Prince Tarvek," she asked me firmly. "What, precisely, are your intentions regarding Agatha?"

"Oh no, she asked that question." Gil said. "I never even had anybody available to ask it of me and I still know how terrifying it is."

[...] "I want to offer Agatha any possible support that I can give her, and to press nothing upon her that she is not ready to give a fair judgment upon before accepting." I replied after a long pause.

Gil turned and looked disgustedly at Tarvek, while Tarvek positively preened.

[...] I politely made my farewells and headed down the sidewalk. As soon as I was around enough corners to be unobserved I unbuttoned my cuff and checked the readings on the miniaturized etheric detector rig I'd had strapped to my forearm the entire time.

"Of course," Gil snarked. "Can't have a sweet, romantic courtship without the hidden surveillance devices!"

[...] The waveform readings my short-range receiver had picked up from Agatha's locket were definitive. It and it alone was the cause of her neurological disorder.

"... damn." Gil cursed himself. "Okay, if you're doing it to eliminate hypotheses and confirm the diagnosis, that's legitimate necessity."

[...] I rebuttoned my sleeve while inwardly cursing myself with every filthy word I knew. From this point on, every day I remained silent I became an accomplice in the ongoing torture of the woman I loved.

"Oh no," Violetta moaned. "Tarvek..."

"It's just a story," Tarvek recited. "I am out here, not in there." he continued, then took a deep breath. "But dear God, do I really pity my other-self right now."

I had to save her. But how?

"I really hope you find an answer in there." Gil said.

 

[cliffc999]

"Well, the simplest solution is we just kill Dr. Beetle," Violetta shrugged.

Agatha and Gil wordlessly craned their heads over to look at her.

"Yes, let us sympathize with the guy who was deliberately keeping you ignorant of your true heritage and in agony because he wanted to use you to control HIve Engines." Violetta said tonelessly.

"I'm with Violetta," Tarvek agreed. "Your foster parents could legitimately say they feared to let you Breakthrough as they lacked the facilities to protect or manage you. A major Spark ruler of a strong city does not have that excuse."

[...] "And even if he doesn't, with Beetle gone and no other protector for the town the Baron still has to put Beetleburg under direct Imperial rule even if Beetle's own death isn't seen as suspicious at all. So whether or not our presence is suspected, the army comes anyway." I analyzed.

"Oh joy, its one of those things where the strategic and tactical factors mean that the thing you least want to do is the only thing you can do," Gil said. "My sincere condolences to you guys in the story."

[...] "Pffft!" Violetta snorted. "If you were Tweedle- okay, if you had Tweedle's lack of ethics and all your skills because he couldn't be remotely this subtle or charming even with a brain transplant- would that be stopping you? Even I could work out a scenario by which she's tragically orphaned and has to cling to you as her only hope in the world. You could even sign Beetle's name to the crime, or the Baron's, and really get her hooked to you forever. So the only reason you don't already have ten entire op plans for that sort of thing churning away in your weasel brain right now is because you are actually trying to do this the right way."

"For once I'm going to say that Martellus might be unfairly maligned here," Agatha said.

"Remember, this is the me of several years ago," Violetta pointed out. "And most of what made us stop calling him Tweedle - most of the time - happened after the summoning so again, nobody in this story knows that he legitimately helped us get your mom out of your head."

"Besides, the larger point Violetta is making is true," Tarvek pointed out. "Even if that particular relative of ours wouldn't be quite that absolutely morally bankrupt, I can name any number of them who would be."

"Yeah." Violetta nodded. "I mean, have you noticed that we are operating with no support in this story, despite the fact that at that point the Order of Jove would have considered a living female Heterodyne heir a direct gift from Heaven? Obviously we didn't dare to even begin to admit your existence to our family."

[...] "The only reason Agatha wasn't raised under Klaus Wulfenbach's protection her entire life is because the Clays don't trust him. [...] "I'm deliberately being accomplice to the torture of the woman I love for my own personal gain. And that's wrong. We should call him right now-"

"Wow," Gil said. "I didn't expect that."

"And then you're betting everything on Gil being able to hold the Empire together as soon as Klaus falls. And sure, he's a great guy and he'd try his best but you already saw the structural weaknesses of the Empire in the future, remember? We need the Storm King back for the best chance at a long-term future for Europa. Obviously we can't force it to happen if Agatha doesn't choose you of her own free will because we're not goddamn Tweedle, but that's the only major failure point we can ethically accept without at least trying to change it. We certainly can't abort before we even really get started." Violetta insisted.

"... I should have known." Gil continued, slumping. "I really am not going to be in this story at all, am I?"

"I take comfort in knowing that your ability to always make yourself the center of attention at my expense at least fails to function in the realm of the hypothetical," Tarvek said.

[...] "Isn't it gorgeous?" Agatha said cheerfully as she waved her hand out over the view of the river flowing through the heart of Beetleburg in mid-summer.

"Wait, we're walking out alone?" Agatha said. "What kind of romance is this? They skipped all the build-up!"

[...] "He means it's cold." our agreed-upon chaperone for this outing cut in. "I don't know what a Beetleburg winter is like, but it's probably only marginally worse than our summer."

"Ah, we do still have a chaperone, but one who is a younger female relative and not the suspicious parent." Tarvek said. "So we have left the initial tentative attraction and entered the tension-building phase."

"Is that what they're calling it now?" Gil snarked.

[...] "But sometimes the atmosphere is kinda sad underneath all the 'Welcome to Mechanicsburg!' smiling. The town's doing fine enough, I suppose, but they really miss their Heterodynes. Sometimes I wonder if all the tourism industry is their weird way of mourning them."

"According to Carson, it was." Agatha said softly.

"Wait... Violetta, is story-you subliminally putting 'You have a responsibility to Mechanicsburg' thoughts into Agatha's head? I thought Tarvek was the manipulative one!" Gil noted.

"Ummm..." Violetta said embarassedly.

[...] "Agatha, the 'Prince' in front of my name means that money is never really a concern for me." I shrugged. "Having a lot of it doesn't make me a better person, and I don't ask people to admire me for it."

"Tarvek, you don't seem to ever ask people to admire you for anything," Agatha said insightfully, and I drew a sudden breath.

"... that's right, you don't." Agatha said with realization. "I'm surprised story-me caught that and I missed it, especially since she has that damned locket still on!"

"If this is weeks later and you've been continously courting the whole while, she's actually spent almost as much time with her Tarvek as you have with ours and under far less chaotic conditions." Gil said analytically. "And from what my father said about that locket it wouldn't have made you stupider, just inhibited your concentration to keep you from ever Breaking Through."

"The centers of the brain that control emotion and intuition would be least effected, while those that control mechanical and mathematical faculties would be the most." Tarvek agreed. "So even your locketed self is still as empathetic and perceptive as ever, she's just struggling much harder with her professional or scientific duties. As well as chronic pain issues and the fatigue which accompanies it, of course." he finished with a spit of disgust.

[...] "Paris!" Agatha gasped in wonder. "Really? Oh my goodness! What's it like?"

"My other self, you will be so disappointed if you ever go there." Agatha sighed. "Oh, the architecture is wonderful enough but the welcome was direly lacking."

[...] "Would you believe that there was one time in Paris where I was actually impressed into service on a pirate ship?"

"Yes!" Gilgamesh said with the greatest of cheer. "Yes I would!"

Tarvek groaned in agony.

[...] "Wait, you're telling that story?" Violetta asked me. "The 'let us never speak of this again' story? The 'I wish I could invent a Sparky device to permanently burn these memories out of my brain' story?"

"Now I have to hear this." Agatha said, leaning forward towards the screen in rapt attention.

[...] "For almost a week, until I jumped overboard to escape." I confirmed. "That madwoman of a captain thought it would be a hilarious joke to have a prince scrubbing her decks for her. I never actually participated in any piracy, but I suppose if the prince business ever fails for me I could find a berth onboard any airship as an apprentice deckhand." I said lightly.

"Why do I have this odd sense of familiarity...?" Agatha asked.

"Because he's describing Captain Bangladesh DuPree." Gil smirked. "It was her ship."

"Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, you did not!" Agatha said, rounding on him angrily.

"Huh?" Gil said, taken aback before realizing. "No, I didn't! I certainly didn't tell her to do it! I had nothing to do with it!"

"Except being the reason she was in Paris in the first place!" Tarvek snapped.

"THAT WAS MY FATHER!" Gil cried plaintively.

[...] "Taking advantage of the enforced neutrality to pull into drydock for repairs," I explained.

"That was her cover story for being there," Gil said. "And I can get why story-you isn't telling Agatha the real one, because the last thing he wants to do is mention "Gilgamesh Holzfaller" or explain who he really is."

"If that madwoman had any other reason for being there, I certainly didn't pick up on it at the time!" Tarvek snapped. "I was too busy trying to avoid involuntary participation in her favorite game of 'knife tag'!"

[...] "You've lived such an adventurous life," Agatha said, looking at me in awe. "I sometimes wonder why you even want to walk out with me. Paris, pirates, princes... compared to that my life seems like a stale, dry biscuit."

"You don't want my life, Agatha." I replied flatly.

"Why not?" she asked me challengingly.

"Because you have a wonderful heart, and you deserve better." I said.

Two feminine 'Awwwwws' and matched sniffles echoed through the room while Gil and Tarvek wearily commiserated with each other.

Violetta kicked me under the table. I nudged her back.

"Does story-you have no romance in her soul?" Agatha asked Violetta, shocked.

"No, she has a burning sense of annoyance that her partner is verging perilously on breaching the 'no romance before reveal' agreement." Violetta said flatly. "Although to be fair he was actually only trying to be nice, its just..."

"The entire emotional context that both of them are interacting in means that essentially any display of concern or affection is unavoidably intertwined with deepening and furthering their romantic attraction, because they are both strongly attracted to each other already even if both of them, for differing reasons, are highly reluctant to openly express it." Gilgamesh said matter-of-factly.

Three incredulous stares combined to pin him to the wall.

"WHAT?" Gilgamesh shouted. "I HAVE FORMALLY STUDIED PSYCHOLOGY! I CAN ACTUALLY FIGURE THIS STUFF OUT!"

"Your every attempt to sweet-talk Agatha ever begs to differ," Tarvek said suspiciously.

"... I can figure this stuff out when I'm calm." Gilgamesh admitted sheepishly. "As soon as I'm actually feeling something then its all... wibble."

"Well, they do say that admitting you have a problem is the first step," Agatha said compassionately. "It's all right, Gil. We know each other well enough by now that I can translate from 'wibble'." she said, before pausing and continuing. "Well, usually."

"Some of my family are palace guards," she decided to throw me a life-line, "so I know some about fighting and training to fight."

"I never knew you were that good at lying," Agatha looked at Violetta curiously.

"By at least one definition she's a better liar than I am," Tarvek said, grinning. "After all, I am routinely suspected, but she virtually never is."

"It doesn't work anymore if you tell them," Violetta moaned.

[...] "And... actual combat does involve elevated heart rate and adrenaline levels and other things that aren't very good for you. Which reminds me, are the exercises helping any?"

"Oh yes!" Agatha said brightly. "I get my headaches only about half as often now."

"Even through the locket, you cut those horrible headaches in half?" Agatha said wonderingly.

"Tarvek, story-you is going have to decapitate Dr. Beetle in front of her with his bare hands to put her off at this rate," Gilgamesh wisecracked.

"Gil, I'm sorry I kept blaming you." Agatha said suddenly. "It wasn't until far too much later that I understood Dr. Beetle had been trying to kill me with that bomb, not you. I'd thought that a good man had died unnecessarily because you'd wanted to show off for your father, not that a man who'd used me and then tried to murder me was getting what he deserved."

"Agatha, I wasn't even thinking about that when I teased Tarvek. And I don't blame you now, even if I was a sulky brat about it then. You had no way of knowing any of this at the time." Gil said understandingly.

"But if I hadn't been so quick to judge you in the absence of all the facts-" she sighed. "A lot of things would have been very different. And almost certainly at least a little better."

"We're reading a story about 'maybe better' right now," Violetta said wisely, "but that's being driven by the plot device of someone getting a second chance at events. You had to make your decisions at the time as first and only chance. Hindsight kicking yourself over might-have-beens because late-arriving intelligence was late due to reasons not your fault doesn't improve future performance, it just erodes self-confidence."

"Thank you," Agatha said simply.

[...] "I entirely understand why they're a little suspicious of me, and I even agree that it only makes them good parents. You don't have to defend them to me."

"I get that you're actually trying to cool the emotional temperature down here, but seriously. You are being so Prince Charming at this point that if Agatha was even marginally less of a proper young lady at this point, story-me would have needed to throw a bucket on you two." Violetta said. "Did story-you even consider being just a tiny bit of a jerk at any point if he needed to slow the roll?"

"Story-me is emotionally compromised all to hell by both guilt and affection," Tarvek pointed out. "So perhaps we should blame his support for not fully thinking it through herself?"

"You suck," Violetta said tolerantly.

[...] "Colette Voltaire?" I asked her archly. "The Master's own daughter? Don't joke, Violetta. Does the phrase 'impossibly out of my league' not even remotely ring a bell?"

"I thought she liked you." Violetta replied as Agatha looked back at me, slightly alarmed. Good God, cousin! What the hell are you doing!

"Oh you manipulative little witch!" Tarvek said to Violetta admiringly. "And I mean that in the good way!"

"Excuse me?" Agatha said. "Could somebody please translate from Valois to normal person here please?"

"I think I see what they're getting at, but since this story has to be comprehensible to the average reader then there will almost certainly be exposition to outline it for us anyway before the end of the scene," Gil said.

[...] "Spark?" Agatha asked.

"I'm sure she'll break through within the next several years," I replied automatically. "Oh, you meant attraction." I realized with a bit of embarassment. "And, no."

"Boooooooooooooooooooo!" Violetta called out loudly. "Horrible, horrible pun! Boooooooooooooooooooo!"

"At least you can admire story-you's professional detachment, in that she's holding in her reaction because she's in-role right now." Tarvek said.

[...] "What, you didn't like how I simultaneously got on the table that you legitimately thought that she was more attractive than Colette Voltaire, that you got to give her the lecture about how girls who are heirs to dynasties need to watch out for ambitious greedheads so that later on when you make your pitch she remembers you said that first and so really aren't one of those greedheads, and under circumstances where nobody actually crossed the ethical barrier by making a romantic overture this early? All in one move?" Violetta smirked at me and buffed her nails. "Because I thought I was being pretty awesome."

Agatha and Gil looked at Violetta, who sheepishly blushed. "I spent practically my whole life with Tarvek?"

"And here I thought you'd picked up nothing from me except fashion awareness." I eventually replied.

"Wow. Eerie." Agatha commented.

"You're a disease, and I've totally caught it." she jibed back, and we both felt a little better.

All four of the reviewers burst out laughing.

[...] Hmmm. It was still over two months to Agatha's birthday. We were going to have to see if we could expedite that timetable.

... or delay someone else's.

"Why do I imagine that I really wouldn't want to be Dr. Beetle right now?" Agatha said.

Dr. Beetle was a cautious and meticulous Spark and one of Europa's greatest mechanical engineers, but he was also an intellectually arrogant tyrant with a height complex.

"... I've got nothing." Agatha shrugged.

[...] And then I stopped the doses and let the crash hit.

Gil winced. "Okay, now I start to get why my dad bio-engineered my digestive system so I could practically gargle neurotoxin."

"And what, did you think Violetta and I regularly dosed ourselves with antidote regimens from the age of six because we liked the taste?" Tarvek snarked back at him.

"I'm really starting to feel nervous that I never got any of this." Agatha said. "Everybody needs to eat and drink sometime!"

"Yeah, that is kinda an oversight now that you bring it up," Violetta mentioned. "All that running from crisis to crisis, barely any time for you guys to actually be in the same lab for longer than a few days. When we get back we're gonna need to take some 'me' time and have you three put all your Sparky brains to work on getting Agatha immunized."

"If the world ever allows us to," Gil sighed.

"There comes a point at which you just have to start beating on the world until it finally backs off and agrees to give you some space," Agatha said. "The trick is knowing exactly what point and exactly what part of the world to punch first."

[...] Of course, the effect from Dr. Beetle's absence from the campus is that it placed his second-in-command Dr. Merlot in charge.

"Uh-oh..." Agatha said.

[...] Agatha's desire to not burden other people with her problems meant that she hadn't mentioned him to me by name in this timeline, nor had she spoken to me in detail of her early life in the future.

"Uh-oh." Tarvek agreed.

So I had no idea that given entire uninterrupted weeks to have at her without Beetle available to restrain him, he'd do his best to try and drive her into such a collapse so as to send her fleeing from the campus forever.

"He would." Agatha agreed ruefully. "Oh, he so would."

"Wait, is this the same guy who interrupted the first time I tried to kiss you in Mechanicsburg?" Gil asked. "The guy who shot at us with machine guns? The guy whose clank I picked up and threw out to where the Castle squished him flat?" Gil asked.

"Yes." Agatha agreed. "Did I remember to thank you properly for that at the time?"

"Zola got in the way, remember?" Gil sighed. "Multiple times."

"Oh my God, she was by far the worst part of that entire experience," Tarvek agreed. "Which considering that she was competing with our multiple near-death experiences, our actual death experience, the entire insane psychotic castle, the Fun-Sized Mobile Agony and Death Dispensers, fighting Lucrezia in her lair-"

"Or just how that one damned day seemed to last for years-" Violetta moaned.

"Can I apologize again for interrupting your attempt to strangle her to death?" Gil asked.

"No need," Tarvek sighed. "She'd never done anything really evil where you could see, so by all appearances I was murdering an innocent. I forgave you at the time."

"You did?" Gil asked wonderingly.

"Well, I didn't tell you I forgave you at the time because I was still a little mad," Tarvek admitted.

"OK, that makes perfect sense." Gil agreed.

"Story!" Agatha said, refocusing them on the screen.

[...] and I couldn't afford another mysterious medical emergency in the University chain of command after the one I'd already caused so simply having Dr. Merlot catch a sudden case of Hogfarb's Resplendent Immolation wasn't feasible

"Dammit!" Gil swore.

"I feel your pain." Tarvek agreed.

[...] Which is how Agatha was led into her very first covert operation, even if it was the most elementary form of social engineering. I explained to her that if we made Dr. Merlot think that working with me was the last thing she ever wanted to do, then he'd personally throw her into my laboratory wrapped up in a bow.

"Oh, and now we get laboratory romance!" Agatha squeaked eagerly.

"Just as long as we don't get any 'lab accidents'." Violetta teased her.

"Chin up, breathe deeply." Tarvek reassured Gil. "You can get through this."

"That's easy for you to say!" Gil said. "These are your romance scenes!"

[...] The strict discipline of the laboratory, made more strict by my kibitzing undergraduate of a cousin, still kept the atmosphere at the distance I was hoping to maintain.

"Ooooo, it's going for the slow burn." Violetta said. "Man, the explosion is going to be awesome when it finally pops."

"I don't know," Agatha said analytically. "This is very classical romance so far. We might end up with just a kiss and a proclamation of love."

"But what about the intensity?" Violetta asked. "You can't bring something like that to a proper conclusion without some actual heat to it!"

But the simple fact that I was giving Agatha better treatment than any other supervisor she'd ever had, letting her work at her own pace to accomodate her medical issues as much as possible, and genuinely valued her contributions to my work meant that she was being happier in this little laboratory with me than she'd ever been happy in her academic life. And standing there and watching Agatha be happy and in her element was an addictive drug.

"As I said," Agatha nodded to Violetta with a wide smile. "Classical."

"Awwww," Violetta replied.

Do you even know what they're talking about? Gilgamesh wordlessly signaled to Tarvek with his confused expression, only to be confronted with Tarvek's equally wordless shrug of No, but let's not admit that where they can hear us say it. Gilgamesh silently nodded back to Tarvek, the two of them united in that moment by the sacred man code.

In the future I'd seen Agatha Heterodyne in full spark fugue. I'd seen her standing like an angry goddess, wreathed in lightning and thunder as Castle Heterodyne fully reactivated from the atmospheric accumulators and sent the Baron's entire army in flight. I'd seen her drink from the river Dyne and ascend to some mysterious state of being beyond the Spark itself. I'd seen her raise the dead. I'd been one of the two men she'd raised from the dead.

"That was so awesome," Gil and Tarvek both said in perfect unison, mutually nodding at the memory.

And yet as I stood and watched Agatha 'Clay', with her Spark fully shackled and unable to do more than the simplest scientific procedures - well, 'simple' by comparision with things she'd pulled off at her height, and still very complex and erudite by the standards of average students - I wondered at how she could, even as weighed down as she was, still seem to shine as brightly here as she ever had in the future.

"Oh my goodness." Tarvek said.

Was I even seeing her, or was I seeing only my memories of the woman she'd become? Was Violetta right, and I was trying to force her to become someone she wasn't instead of helping her to become the person she really was?

"You're... you're actually falling in love with her all over again." Gil said, wonderingly. "Even without her Spark at all, even when she's still locketed-"

"Well, it's not as if that made her a different person!" Tarvek replied. "Or a lesser one! Just a..." he struggled for words.

"They already mentioned it in the first the first chapter," Agatha said softly. "I'd been trying my very best all along. Removing the locket only changed what my 'best' was, not how hard I was trying-"

"Or what you were trying to do, or how. How much you cared for people, what you believed in-" Gil said. "The Tarvek in this story is falling in love with his Agatha because he admires her heart, not her achievements. That's-" Gil blinked rapidly. "Uh, sorry. Kinda dusty in here."

"Yeah, it totally is." Violetta agreed, nodding very rapidly.

"Entirely." Tarvek rapidly chimed in. "Honestly, do they even have ventilators?"

Agatha was still staring wordlessly at the screen, and had to be prompted several times to put her foot back on the scroll pedal.

I sighed and smiled back weakly at Agatha as she turned to notice me standing and watching her fuss among the bits of the busted clank again and smile cheerfully at me, and then stepped forward to help gently untangle a malfunction she'd overlooked in her latest assembly due to that damnable locket's limitations.

"Awwwwww," Agatha and Violetta both chimed, as Gil and Tarvek tolerantly smiled at each other.

[...] I positively itched with the desire to tell her that she was still only hobbling where she could potentially fly, that all she had to do was reach up to her neck and give a good hard pull on her restraints to be free-

"But you couldn't." Agatha said. "Dr. Beetle would immediately go spare. Even on the day that your father was standing less than thirty feet away from his illegally sequestered Hive Engine, his first priority was still noticing that I'd lost my locket and insisting that I go find it at once."

"I remember." Gil said simply.

[...] I sighed and stood back and watched the sheer delight on Agatha's face as the clank started up and ran smoothly, letting her exult in an actual success even if I'd had to provide a little assistance.

"I'm- I'm building things." Agatha said, awestruck. "With the locket on. And yes, you're still helping a little, but... I'm actually building." she finished. "Do you know for how long and how desperately I'd kept praying that I could one day be allowed to do that? Even just once? Right now, story-me would think she was in heaven. You could ask her to do anything for you."

"Well I certainly hope I don't." Tarvek immediately replied.

[...] Agatha's birthday, I told myself. If I haven't broken the ice with her parents by then, then I'll tell her the truth as soon as they start letting me 'treat' her and ask her to run away with me. Away from Dr. Beetle, away from her chains, and away from- well, I'd certainly tell her parents where we were, I'd just want enough of a head start first.

"But where would we go?" Agatha asked. "Your story-self seems to have slightly less of a plan than you normally would here, Tarvek."

"He can't really plan to take you somewhere unless he knows what you're willing to do." Tarvek said. "Although I really should be able to read the room better than this."

If she'd be willing to come with me, that is. And for all that we were becoming good friends, I still had no idea if she would.

"After everything that I just read?" Agatha said, aghast. "You could have asked my story-self to follow you to the Forbidden City and I'd only have asked for barely enough time to pack a suitcase! How has he so completely misjudged me?"

"I think I know, but as was pointed out earlier the story will tell us something this important in due time, so why guess?" Tarvek sighed.

"The guessing is the fun part!" Violetta said. "Although yeah, right now story-you is emotionally compromised all to hell. What am I doing in all this? Why haven't I dope slapped you yet?"

"You almost certainly have." Tarvek said. "But as you well know, it doesn't always work."

"I know what you're up to, boy." Tarsus Beetle said hoarsely.

"Now do I get to kill him?" Violetta asked plaintively.

[...] "Miss Clay!" he thundered at me. "That girl is under my personal protection!"

"Protection!" Agatha spat disgustedly. "Oh, I was so horribly naive back then!"

"Didn't the story outline that Beetle had a scam going where he'd been convincing TPU students he was actually their benevolent old distant mentor for years, and all the crap was due to his underlings?" Violetta intelligently pointed out. "You got skunked by a guy who'd put a lot of practice into that one particular con routine."

[...] Damn. I certainly couldn't tell Dr. Beetle that Agatha had learned it by snooping on his mail. So, who could I blame-?

Violetta immediately turned and gave a death glare to Tarvek, who winced.

"My cousin loves to mock me with my title," I came back without hesitation,

"Uh-huh." Violetta kept glaring.

[...] "Doctor, I am simply being respectful to her. As my father raised me to treat young women."

Both red-heads in the room immediately began choking and gagging.

Oh, now there was a lie so awe-inspiring as to make the Adversary himself blush.

"Blush, nothing, I'm pretty sure he fainted dead away on the spot." Violetta said, and Tarvek absently nodded.

[...] "I will speak to her mother, don't think that I won't! And you- stay away from her from now on." he ordered.

"Amateur," everyone in the room chimed at once.

[...] "Look, you tell me that you can even have even 65% confidence that the streets being even temporarily full of patrolling Jagers, any one of whom can potentially recognize Agatha by scent and will recognize Punch and Judy on sight, won't trigger them running or get them discovered, and I'll turn you loose right now."

"Ah, I'd been wondering why you were so fearful of any Imperial occupation in the town, but I hadn't thought about the Jagers recognizing them." Agatha mused analytically.

"... eugggggh." Violetta moaned. "So you are saying that we literally have no plan except 'maintain the holding pattern and keep ducking the murder attempts'."

"Well, it's not as if we haven't done that before."

"How are you two even partly sane?" Gil said, looking at Tarvek and Violetta. "Growing up the way you did?"

"... divine intervention?" Tarvek shrugged.

When I saw the pair of assassins loitering down the hallway as I was leaving my apartment I'd originally thought that cousin Martellus had been sending me another greeting

Agatha was looking at Tarvek and Violetta with eyes wide as saucers. "He was trying to kill you that far back?"

"Well-" Tarvek began to explain before he cut himself off, him and Violetta exchanged a complicated glance, and he turned back to Agatha. "For the sake of simplicity, let's just go with 'yes'."

"And if we weren't being simple?" Agatha asked them, eyes narrowing.

"Then we'd be here all night." Violetta said. "Story!"

"Story," Agatha reluctantly agreed.

[...] I actually had time to close and lock the door behind them before I was behind the one with the scruffier boots and had my one hand over his mouth and my knife in over the collarbone and down in the simplest of the silent-kill-from-behind positions.

"Wow, these two so broke into the wrong apartment." Gil said.

Also, when you used this particular one rather than going for the kidneys it left a lot less blood spattering around and that definitely was a major concern right now. Violetta certainly wasn't going to clean it out of the rug if I was careless enough to leave any there.

"That is your primary concern here?" Agatha said. "The rug?"

"Hey, it's not like these two bozos are even remotely challenging him," Violetta said. "And listen, evidence etiquette is important. Sure, if there's an operational priority going on then clean-up is done by whatever pair of hands isn't needed for a higher-priority task even if they had nothing to do with making the mess in the first place, but otherwise? Unless there's a dedicated gravedigger team available then your corpse, your cleaning. You don't drag assassins home and then leave that crap lying around for someone else to scrub up because you're feeling lazy, that's just rude."

Gil and Agatha looked at Tarvek and Violetta as if they had suddenly been revealed as creatures from another planet.

"... it's a Smoke Knight thing?" Tarvek sallied weakly.

"For the first time in a very long while, my intellectual curiosity is not feeling curious at all." Agatha eventually said after a long pause.

[...] They'd been contracted for both our deaths, had been hired through one of the local brokers in the Thieves' Market and had no clue who the client was, and had been given no special warning about me and Violetta possessing any fighting skills at all.

"Dr. Beetle." Gil said matter-of-factly. "Well, your period of time in Beetleburg is rapidly drawing to a close."

So after dispatching the second one I used my own refinement on one of the more handy chemicals from the Smoke Knight pharmacopeia, the one that used a self-sustaining catalytic reaction to dissolve nonliving organic tissue into a nice thin resin that you could easily wash down the bathtub drain. I neatly wrapped up their clothes and knives prepatory to dumping into the river and left a coded note for Violetta in the apartment dead drop, and then I pondered what my next move should be.

"You have instant body disposal solvents?" Gil asked.

"I'm well aware that the height of Imperial evidence disposal technology is the shovel, but I suppose it's easier to get by when you're allowed to legally make corpses." Tarvek drawled sarcastically.

[...] All right then. If I moved quickly enough I could get this done and still be only half an hour late for my date. The Clays had finally decided it was appropriate for me and Agatha to go walking out alone, even if only as friends, apparently because they'd accepted she'd be a grown woman in only a couple weeks.

"Oh, so you're going directly from a cold-blooded assasination-" Agatha began.

"In fairness, it was a counter-assassination." Gil reasonably pointed out.

"-to a date with my innocent younger self, without even breaking stride? I certainly hope you at least washed your hands!" Agatha finished.

"Agatha, you and I went directly from a pitched battle around and over Mechanicsburg to our first kiss. While I was still literally coated in Hive Queen guts from the fight for the Vespiary airship and you in grease from repairing war-clanks." Tarvek pointed out, slightly wounded. "Neither of us is exactly a blushing innocent in this regard!"

"She is," Agatha said, "and I suppose I was feeling motherly or sisterly or something about 'myself'." she finished, before resuming with more embarassment. "But you're right, they were both hired murderers who'd come to kill you and Violetta... and when they believed you were harmless civilians, too."

[...] "You're just lucky you weren't there when they arrived," Agatha said. "Or that Violetta wasn't either."

"That would have been considerably more... sanguinary." I said with what was a distressingly common pattern with Agatha of me telling the truth in deliberately misleading ways.

"Oh," Violetta said. "That's why you're mentally knotted up and I haven't pulled you out of it. You're backing up guilt from all undercover lying to her, on top of your accumulated guilt about not getting the locket off her earlier, and given the operational constraints there's literally nothing I can do about either except pray to God your willpower holds out."

[...] "Are you telling me that Adam and Lilith honestly let you believe that your uncle thought you were worthless-" I shouted, hearing my voice slipping straight into the Madness Place despite my best efforts to stop it.

"I don't think it is holding out," Tarvek sighed.

[...] "I- I'm not going to blame the Spark for that one." I said. "That's taking the easy way out. Agatha, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have lost my temper, and I shouldn't have scared you."

"You never scare me, Tarvek." Agatha said warmly, and it took everything I had to avoid wincing as if I'd been stabbed.

"Awwwww," Agatha gushed. "That's so sweet. But why are you so hurt by it?"

"Keep reading." Violetta sighed.

[...] "You can only keep the doubts away for so long. You have to keep fighting them, and they keep coming back." I said softly, knowing what it was like myself. "And then sometimes you don't have the energy to fight anymore, and the doubts just sit there and whisper at you until after you can rest and then get back to fighting them the next day."

"He's emotionally exhausted," Violetta said. "He's been undercover for a long time, he's totally gone on you to begin with and emotional compromise with the subject always makes it multiple times harder, and then there's his having to leaving you in constant pain when he could possibly intervene but hasn't, which he has a thing about-"

"I'm about ready to collapse there." Tarvek agreed.

[...] . "Agatha, what you're describing is normal for chronic pain sufferers. If anybody expects you to show identical endurance to a healthy athlete then they're expecting too much of you. It's... it's okay to not be okay."

"You're talking as much to yourself there as you are to me," Agatha nodded.

[...] "Your father must be so proud of you," Agatha said in all innocence, and my stomach lurched.

"My father..." I said, taking a deep breath.

Tarvek and Violetta both drew equally as deep a breath as soon as their eyes read that passage.

Oh Gods, I was so tired of lying to her.

"I think you're about to confess." Gil said.

"My father is a heartless manipulative power monger who barely lifted an eyebrow when my sister was maimed, and despised me as the family weakling up until after I'd learned how to put up enough of a cold front to convince him that I'd stopped trying to care about people." I said tonelessly. "If my mother wasn't dead and him not really at all interested in remarrying, he'd almost certainly get rid of me and try to train a replacement even now." And even that was only mostly the truth, because I couldn't explain at this juncture about the Summoning Engine or how Father had willingly put Anevka into it.

Agatha gasped in horror. "You can't mean that-" and then she stopped herself and her face collapsed. "Oh, no. That explains a part of your story that I'd always wondered about. Why you had to fight so hard to save your sister's life when your father already was an experienced Spark. He'd already written her off as beyond saving, hadn't he?"

"He had." I agreed.

"Jesus, you are teetering right on the edge there," Violetta said. "I think you caught yourself maybe half a sentence before you just blurted out the whole thing!"

"Tarvek, I am so sorry," Agatha said, spontaneously lurching forward into a hug- our first hug- before I could stop her. "No wonder you said you were so happy here in Beetleburg, where you don't have to be a prince-"

"Where I can pretend not to be a prince," I said, my arms coming up to very gently and loosely hold her. "Where I can pretend a lot of things."

All four people there just shook their head in sad empathy at story-Tarvek's exhausted agony.

"You're not pretending to be a good person," Agatha said. "And you're not pretending to be my friend."

"He's not." Gilgamesh readily agreed. "Not at all."

"Thank you," Tarvek sighed softly.

"Friend-" I choked with the guilt. "Agatha, I am far more- emotional about you than I have let on-"

"To say the least," Tarvek crooked a wry grin.

"Oh!" Agatha said with a sly grin. "Are you saying that you like me, Your Highness?"

"I think I might have been wrong about 'classical'." Agatha said to Violetta, staring fascinatedly at the screen.

I mentally apologized to Gilgamesh for ever having teased him about turning into an idiot whenever he was near Agatha, because right now it was all I could to do remember my own name- don't kiss her, I chanted to myself. Do not kiss her-

"Apology accepted," Gil said without a pause.

"We promised your parents- when they agreed to let us walk out as friends-" I breathed heavily. "That we wouldn't-"

"Sorry!" she said, immediately disengaging and letting us both take a moment to cool down.

"Okay, classical it is." Violetta said. "But wow, what a magnificent tease!"

"Agatha," I began after the moment had ebbed a bit. "I... yes. I like you. I more than like you. I am a positive fountain of inappropriate feelings and impulses."

"Understatement of the century!" Violetta catcalled.

I held up my hand to pre-empt her reply. "And I shouldn't be. Not now. I'm going to be- helping you with your health even more soon, and then- ethical issues. So many ethical issues."

"I like you too," she smiled at me. "And more than Adam and Lilith are comfortable with."

This time the 'Awwwwww.' was a unanimous chorus.

"Agatha..." I began. "I can't even begin to explain everything I'm thinking or feeling right now, but can I at least tell you something about what I believe and what I hope for?"

"Of course you can!" she said.

"This is it..." Violetta whispered eagerly.

"I believe that you are an incredibly stronger person than you even know," I said, letting relief flow through me at even partially getting to share my true feelings. "I believe that you won't be cursed with these headaches forever. I believe that you will go on to do amazing things." I said passionately. "And I hope that even after you've learned more about yourself as a person, and about me as a person, that you'll still want me there alongside you to help you do them."

"Eeeeeeee-!" Agatha squealed softly.

"You told her everything," Gil said. "Not everything facts, no, but everything feelings. Everything that was really important about what was lying between you. You laid it all out as much as you possibly could."

"And you still did it in a way that didn't compromise the mission." Violetta said in awe. "Story-you is wow."

"If my story-self gives you any grief later on like 'How could you lie to me?' when you finally confess the truth, then I swear I will reach through the screen to slap her silly little face!" Agatha husked. "That was magnificent!"

Tarvek was still breathing heavily. "Gods, part of me wishes that were real so much-" he shook his head. "But no. It would have been so wonderful to be there, but- then we wouldn't be here."

Agatha actually blushed and sniffled, and she and I grinned at each other like mindless dolts-

"JUST KISS ALREADY!" Violetta screamed, to the vigorous nods of everyone else in the room.

-and right then the throwing knife landed in the tree next to us.

"Damn it! A scene transition?" Tarvek swore.

"Where's the next chapter already?" Agatha shouted.

 

[cliffc999]

"Run!" I shouted at Agatha, the adrenaline rush instantly snapping me back into combat mode. I grabbed her and started dragging her straight into the nearest and narrowest alleyway I could find. "They're trying to kill us!"

"Okay, so that's my knife." Violetta said sagely.

"Who's they?" Agatha gasped, still stunned from the instant shift in atmosphere and being half-dragged by me as we tore down the narrow alleyway. I frantically looked around-

"Doctor Beetle!" Violetta said, dropping down from the rooftop to land beside us in her combat black-and-purples and start sprinting alongside us without missing a beat. It had been her knife that had been thrown at us, with the color-coded cord wrapped around the handle as our signal for Get clear immediately!

"Don't you think this action scene feels a bit tacked-on?" Gil asked.

"The transition was certainly sudden, but the gradually rising tensions with Doctor Beetle were foreshadowed all throughout the second chapter." Tarvek said. "And this is his second or third attempt to take lethal action, depending on who you believe was responsible for that lab sabotage. So it's not out of nowhere."

"It is kinda dumb, though. I mean, sure, so he flipped out when his two thugs missed check-in. Or maybe he actually saw them get wasted and how." Violetta analyzed. "But even with all that, what the hell sort of reaction is this? He needs Agatha's story-self alive and complacent, right? Why is he sending anything so overt that I'd need to send a scramble signal like that?"

"It does make a certain horrible sense," Agatha disagreed. "Doctor Beetle was a great scientist but an awful tactician. Gil, do you remember how he genuinely believed that your father, perhaps the single greatest strategist alive and the man with the largest army on the continent, could be successfully held hostage with one siege clank? As if he didn't even consider that you would have brought a reserve force, despite that being the most elementary military practice?"

"When was the last time we even saw an enemy that... uncomplicated?" Gil asked bemusedly. "Because outside of Beetleburg I can't even remember. It's all just been the Other and revenants and massive secret societies and continent-wide wars and complex four-dimensional event chains that we can't even begin to puzzle out the time paradoxes of-"

"And the politics-" Tarvek sighed.

"And our family-" Violetta whined.

"But let's not be redundant." Gil snarked.

"If my father or uncle ever show up again and try to tell me how rough they supposedly had it during their adventures, then mine will be a bitter, bitter laugh!" Agatha agreed passionately. "One madboy with a fortress and a town and some clanks or monsters and no grand intrigue, just a good old-fashioned fight? That would be a vacation for us!"

"Good job on the burglary fakeout to justify hiring private security for us tomorrow but you overestimated how subtle he's being! He's decided to just cut his losses and go for broke!" Violetta continued.

"Oh wonderful. We're battling a fool." Tarvek sighed.

"You can never predict those." Gilgamesh agreed.

[...] "What is going on?" Agatha shrieked at us.

"High-level political intrigue between ruling Sparks that just went from cold to hot!" I called out to her truthfully but incompletely. "And with you caught directly in the middle!"

"Technically correct is not the best kind of correct." Agatha said crisply.

"Be charitable, you are literally running for your lives right now!" Violetta insisted.

[...] "INCOMING!" Violetta shrieked, and we both immediately had Agatha up off the ground by her elbows and into cover in a nearby doorway as a C-Gas grenade came spiraling in.

"Case in point." Gil reluctantly agreed.

[...] I'd barely finished reaching for my pocket breather before Violetta's throwing arm got an impressive workout as she nailed the grenadier square in the face with his own grenade, which she'd caught before it could even land.

"Woo! Spotlight time!" Violetta caroled.

The sound of footsteps closing in told us that Beetle had sent more than just one, not that we'd expected anything else. His strategy was obvious - take us all, then disappear or kill us and either spin his actions to Agatha as a rescue or use force majeure, whichever he had an opening for.

"Wait!" Agatha cried in shock. "Are you- is Doctor Beetle seriously thinking that he can just crash in, spirit me away by force, haul me off to the heart of his power surrounded by his army, and then earn my gratitude by claiming that he was rescuing me from the devious, scheming, underhanded Prince Tarvek who clearly had no sincere desires for me at all but could in Tarvek's place offer me his more straightforward business transaction which, while colder, at least had the alleged virtue of integrity?"

"Oh my God, we actually lived through this one already!" Violetta moaned. "He's pulling a Tweedle!"

"I hereby withdraw any and all complaints about the alleged implausibility of the narrative, vocalized or implied." Tarvek said wearily. "Even if the events are all different, this is certainly being written as true to our real lives and characters as possible."

"Yes, and frighteningly so." Gilgamesh said. "It took a while to sink in, but while this is fiction its not just your average penny-sparkly. Whoever's writing this knows about us, has access to knowledge and insights that penetrate even to our innermost doubts and fears. They haven't really made a wrong call about us yet, have they?"

A chorus of subdued yet still shocked agreement was his answer.

"So is this how mysterious creatures from beyond reality amuse themselves?" Agatha said angrily. "Or..." she trailed off wonderingly. "Are they trying to tell us something?"

"... Gilgamesh, do you remember when your father sent you that storyteller during the Siege of Mechanicsburg?" Tarvek said with slowly dawning realization.

"Yes!" Gil said. "He was- he was trying to send us a message that he'd been ordered by Lucrezia never to send, by taking advantage of the fact that he'd never been ordered to not tell fictional stories! So he disguised the truth of the situation in an entire huge thing of allegory and fairy tales-"

"-that you needed me to interpret for you." Tarvek cut in smoothly.

"-that is beside the point!" Gilgamesh insisted. "But yes, that's how he warned us he'd been slaver wasped. If we go with that theory, then what are these creatures trying to warn us of?"

"Well, the best way to find that out is to keep reading." Violetta sensibly pointed out.

"Agatha, stay down!" Violetta called to her as the first set of footsteps finished double-timing towards us from the direction we'd run from, and as soon as they rounded the last turn we both leapt into action. Violetta had had her full combat loadout strapped on and had brought enough drugged throwing darts for everyone, so she began liberally scattering them with both hands. The squad of militiamen started falling over like tenpins.

"I am kicking so much ass in this story." Violetta said joyously.

My job was to deal with the clank.

"You'd seriously try to take on a Clockwork infantryman in your street clothes? With what, your bare hands?!?" Gilgamesh said incredulously.

"Of course not my bare hands!" Tarvek denied heatedly. "Who do I look like, you?"

[...] My best fighting dagger dropped down into my hand from my sleeve as I sprinted in as fast as I possibly could, threw my kerchief square at the primary visual sensor, and used the momentary loss of line-of-sight to launch myself into a running slide directly underneath it

"Oh, I was wrong! You brought a knife! Yes, that's totally different." Gil said sarcastically.

[...] The clank shut down as its head sheared free with a screech.

"You're right, it entirely is." Tarvek smirked back.

"Contact high rear!" Violetta cried in alarm as the last militiaman finished taking a nap. Two more fire-support clanks up above on the roof down the alleyway-

"Hoppers!" Agatha cried in alarm. "And you're already boxed into a killing ground-!"

[...] Violetta followed my motion and grabbed the clank's arm in both hands, helping me hold it steady as the autogun chattered into continuous full automatic fire from where I'd shorted the circuits together. The fusillade of high-velocity heavy-caliber rounds erupted forth as we clumsily combined our strength to try and direct the fire, tearing loose chunks of brickwork from the corner of the building and sending several stray rounds screaming off into the sky as the remainder of the salvo was walked on target and tore the two rooftop gun-hoppers to shreds. I pulled out my knife and the fire ended.

"YES! We rule!" Violetta cried joyously.

"You certainly do," Agatha said absently, and then started in realization. "Violetta... exactly how long did you train together with Tarvek, to be able to instinctively coordinate with him like that?"

"From the age of six until we first parted ways several months into my studies in Paris," Tarvek answered for her.

"Right," Agatha agreed, nodding. "Then I think I can already see one thing we're being warned of here."

"Agatha...?" Violetta turned to her questioningly.

"Violetta," Agatha said reassuringly, turning to her. "You are one of my very closest friends, and one of the most devoted soldiers that I've ever commanded- and I say that as a woman who is already the liege of several thousand Jagerkin." she finished with a smile. "You saved my life at least twice on the very first day we met- you were unhesitatingly willing to die fighting Zola to save my life yet again- despite your not knowing me from a lamppost. You've helped save all our lives any number of times since. I'm not professionally qualified to judge the skills of a Smoke Knight but if this narrative wishes to claim that you are one of the very best there are short of the most elderly Night Masters, then I wouldn't dream of disputing it. Zeetha may be my kolee and I her zumil, but I don't need Skifanderian oaths or fancy words to say that if she's my strong right arm then you are equally as much my left."

"Agatha, what are you trying to-" Violetta tried to interrupt, but Agatha kept speaking.

"But Tarvek didn't give you a choice when he transferred your service to mine. He couldn't, because he was dying, and so he wanted to keep giving me what support he could even though he thought he wouldn't be able to do it himself any longer. Just as he wanted to give you a place where you could be supported and valued, when he thought he couldn't do that for you any longer."

"And I'm happy to be here and with you! I really am!" Violetta rushed to reassure her.

"I mentioned the Jagers earlier. Remember that the Jagertroth that requires them to give me their absolute devotion. And that devotion has sometimes been very much abused by my ancestors. Even my own father and uncle did, when my father carelessly ordered them to submit to the whims of my mother not knowing or caring how she'd abuse that power. Or when both my father and uncle essentially destroyed themselves by refusing to accept the aid that the Jagers were so desperate to give them. Their relationship to me is not balanced in the slightest. It only remains even mostly humane so long as I make a continuous effort to never abuse my authority either capriciously or carelessly... and so long as the Jagertroth is only entered into freely and of their own will." Agatha finished. "And I've only given you one of those two things."

"Please don't send me away," Violetta whispered. "Please, not again."

"No!" Agatha said pleadingly. "That's not what I mean at all! I would be so very happy if you stayed with me and kept things just as they are!" Agatha took a deep breath. "But I would also be so very happy if you chose to resume your original service under Tarvek. Or if you chose to go be a woman of leisure for the rest of your life in whatever faraway place would let you escape the insanity currently in Europa. Or if you gave it all up to become a wandering gamba player in a circus. Or if you went anywhere or did anything else, just so long as you were happy there."

"I- I- really?" Violetta finished weakly.

"Violetta," Agatha said. "Essentially your entire life has been nothing but expectations and choices that other people have made for you. And that's not necessarily wrong, if that's the life you want to have. But if it's only the life you have to have-" she nodded. "Then you don't have to have it anymore. If you ever want to change what you're doing or where you're doing it, then just come to me and I will gladly help you go there with all my best wishes. And if you don't want to, then I will be equally as glad to keep everything just the way it is now."

"Can I... have some time to think about it?" Violetta asked faintly.

"Take all the time you need," Tarvek said compassionately. "And please understand that everything Agatha just told you, I fully endorse."

At this Gil decided to give Violetta some breathing room and stomped on the scroll pedal again.

[...] "There'll be more of them!" she said frantically. "So many more! If even the roof-hoppers are out then it's a full mobilization-" she kept explaining as she came to help me up. I absently noted that despite being an untrained civilian who'd just been unexpectedly dropped into a bloody urban combat she was still doing her best to organize and present available battlefield intelligence-

"The author is really trying to give me credit here for intelligence and willpower despite my stlil being Agatha 'Clay'," Agatha acknowledged with a nod. "It would have been far easier to just write me having an attack right now and needing to be carried the rest of the way. In fact, I'm mildly surprised that I'm not. This sort of stress was very bad for me back then."

"I think that's part of why 'mitigating therapies' were written into the plot earlier." Gil pointed out.

Gods, she was magnificent.

Gil and Tarvek both nodded mindlessly, Agatha caught the byplay and slightly blushed.

[...] "Then we're still going for the down-and-out!" I decided as we doubled right back into the breach in their perimeter we'd made by taking out the blocking force behind us. The strolling crowds had already finished clearing the plaza at the appearance of the Clockwork Army by the time we made it back-

"Wait, what's our plan for the turret?" Tarvek said. "Even Beetle wouldn't neglect something as obvious as terrain control-"

"I've got her!" Violetta said, leaving behind a target decoy where Agatha had just been standing and practically teleporting them both ahead behind a sturdy tree. That left just me as the focus for the gun-clank that had been left covering the plaza at the end of the street, so thank you very much cousin!

A somewhat quavery giggle came from Violetta's chair. Tarvek chuckled along with her.

"Ah yes, the 'throw Tarvek at the monster' plan. An old classic." Gil snarked.

"Oh, it's certainly like old home week all right." Tarvek snarled at him.

"Now I have to hear some of these Paris stories." Agatha said curiously.

"No." Gil and Tarvek chorused.

"You can't deny me forever, and you both know it." Agatha smirked evilly at them. "I have my ways!"

"Be nice, Agatha." Violetta softly remonstrated with her. "Remember, you must use your powers only mostly for good!"

"Only mostly?" Gil said.

However, confronted as he was by the unanimous silent front of the sacred girl code, Gilgamesh Wulfenbach was doomed to have his inquiry go forever unanswered.

[...] "Fire in the hole!" I heard Violetta cry, and then one of her breaching charges blew the storm grating that we'd been heading for in the center of the plaza wide open. I caught up to them just as they reached the lip of the hole and swept Agatha up into a bridal carry,

"The 'bridal carry out of danger'? Seriously? That's even more shameless than the 'bring her family back from the grave' gambit!" Gil said.

"Well it's not like I could use a shoulder carry in that situation!" Tarvek said. "We're jumping down a hole! If she's over your shoulder then you can't help cushion the impact of the landing with your arms!"

"Hey, I always used the shoulder carry in Paris!" Gil said. "And we went down a lot of holes with it!"

"Considering who you were carrying, you should have thrown her down first and used her to cushion your landing." Agatha growled.

"Gas mine, there!" I called. "Tripwire, there!" and Violetta's hands blurred as she set up a hasty rig to catch our first group of pursuers.

"Why the hell is story-you telling story-me things I already know how to do?" Violetta asked.

"Probably to immediately reassure Agatha that someone she trusts has a measure of control over the situation," Tarvek pointed out. "You certainly don't need to hear me order precautions to be taken, but she needs to hear that it's being done."

"... okay, makes sense." Violetta conceded.

"Agatha, are you all right?" I asked her urgently as we started running down the drainage tunnel.

"They tried to kill us!" she cried hysterically.

"She's fine." Violetta said calmly.

"And now we're an action comedy?" Agatha asked, before involuntarily chuckling.

"Well, at least we're not a bad one." Tarvek agreed with her.

[...] "Violetta's not just my cousin but also my bodyguard," I explained. "And in our family we start training to fight very young."

"Oh yeah," Violetta explained to her. "I mean, God knows our family sucks and is full of horrible people but I'll give them credit for this much. If you can survive our relatives then you can survive damn near anything."

Agatha and Gil both looked at Tarvek and Violetta, and then shrugged in reluctant agreement.

[...] "My parents-" Agatha began.

"I paid a street urchin to run them a message as soon as I set out to warn you guys," Violetta said. "Hopefully they'll get out in time, especially since Beetle would want you solidly in hand before going after them."

"Oh!" Agatha said. "I'd been worrying-"

"Your foster parents survived that many years of original Heterodyne adventures." Gil reassured her. "They'll be gone before Beetle even knows they left. They successfully ducked out on the entire Empire for how long when we were looking for them after Beetleburg, remember?"

"Why is this all happening?" Agatha said. "What did you do?"

"We tried to save you," I told her, waving down Violetta's astonished glare.

Because I'd had enough. No more secrets, I promised myself. No more lies.

"Ah, so that's why the writer suddenly had a man with an army of clanks run into the room and start shooting." Gil said sagely. "To force the next stage of the plot along by an immediate time constraint. Yup, classic detective novel stuff."

Besides, my life expectancy might very well be measured in minutes at this point. And I had to finish the mission.

"And fire in the hole!" Violetta called. "The mission constraints were the cork in your big old pressure cooker of emotions urging you to tell her all along but you couldn't, but now that the mission requires you to tell her? It's all gonna blow at once! You're probably going to write a verbal encyclopedia here."

[...] "Agatha, may I have your locket?" I asked her, and she looked at me for a long moment of suspicion before relenting and handing it to me. [...] I flipped the locket open.

"Bill Heterodyne and Lucrezia Mongfish," I said, pointing at one face and then the other. "They were your parents... Agatha Heterodyne."

Her mouth gaped open wordlessly at me, and I closed the locket and handed it back to her.

"For having had only a very few minutes to work with, that wasn't bad." Violetta conceded.

"Agatha, Beetle's almost certainly not going to kill you but he will kill us if he catches us." I said hurriedly. "If that happens, if we don't get away, then you have to pretend that you don't know, do you understand? You have to still be Agatha Clay. You have to keep this on-" I choked at the thought of asking her to torture herself. "Until you're away from him. Now I came here to try and rescue you, and I'm so sorry I lied and hid things from you until now, but I am on your side, Agatha. Do you believe me?"

"Believe him!" Agatha cried. "For the love of God believe him, you silly girl!"

"I..." she paused, and I was ready to just collapse and die when she continued. "I believe you." she said.

"YES!" Agatha cried happily. "I am so very not disappointed in myself right now!"

"If we escape then I'll tell you everything, I promise. What I know, how I know, when I learned it, what all my intentions were and are. If we don't all make it and you're still free, then first and foremost never go to Sturmhalten. If you go there then you are doomed. It's dangerous to openly be a female Spark almost anywhere, because my father keeps sending people to drag them in! And you can't really trust any member of my family except Violetta. They're the worst enemies your family has!

"We're certainly going straight down the operational priority ladder here as quickly as possible," Tarvek said, trying to remain unmoved.

"Story-you is way oversimplifying the family situation, but given that the situation is 'I could conceivably get sniped in the head mid-sentence at any point during this speech' he certainly doesn't have time to draw her the whole scorecard." Violetta agreed.

Next, if you need help then go to any Jagermonster and tell them your real last name. The Jagers are sworn to protect and serve your family above any loyalty they might have to the Baron, and any one of them can recognize your bloodline by the scent. They'll all help you, do you understand?

"And mission accomplished." Gil said. "Even if Beetle personally teleported into the tunnel right at that instant and atomized both you and Violetta, then short of also giving Agatha a brain-wipe she still knows the minimum to be able to get away and to Mechanicsburg and why she needs to go there. Good job." he congratulated Tarvek.

And-" I paused, then swore and continued onwards. "If Baron Wulfenbach reaches you first, he will probably protect you but he might be frightened of you. If that happens, if the Baron isn't on your side, then you need to ask for help from Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, the Baron's son.

Gil turned incredulously to look at Tarvek, who was positively embarassed at his regard.

He's..." I paused. "He doesn't always do the wisest thing, but he's a legitimately good-hearted person. You definitely shouldn't let him make all the plans, but you can trust him. And tell him that 'Gilgamesh Holzfaller owes Prince Tarvek for Paris'. He'll know what it means."

"That would entirely have worked," Gil conceded. "I mean, its not like hearing your name would have made me less suspicious back then but I'd have still broken the code. 'This girl needs your help. Please save her.'"

[...] "So, how am I doing for my first Heterodyne adventure?" Agatha actually tried to joke as we fled.

"We're still alive, aren't we?" Violetta jibed back at her, and despite everything that was going on I couldn't help but smile.

"Felt good to get it off your chest, didn't it?" Violetta said understandingly.

[...] Oh, the Clockwork Army was an effective enough instrument at what it was designed to do. I certainly didn't want to try taking any more of them of on in direct combat with anything short of an Imperial task force. But as they weren't even intended to come down into the drains, and weren't very flexible in their programming, we had them entirely neutralized as a threat so long as we stayed below ground level. [...]. There was obviously no preprepared doctrine for underground interdiction and pursuit any more complicated than a simple 'After them!' These men certainly weren't the Sturmhalten Sewer Rats.

"So, they're totally wrapping up the action phase 'cause it was just a device to get you guys out of town without it being boring." Violetta analyzed.

"The narrative was billed as primarily a romance story, so we don't need continual death-defying and death-rays" Agatha agreed. "I'm assuming that we're going to get away to a safe place and sit down and let yourself finish explaining himself, and then the denouement?"

"There'd almost have to be at least one more twist for it not to be anticlimactic," Tarvek said. "But from a literary point of view, I can't guess what it might be."

"I think I can," Gil said seriously. "But we'll soon enough find out." he finished, and the he pressed the pedal again.

The most arduous part of our journey was that I was the only person present who wasn't dressed for the occasion. [...] Which left me busy walking along sewer walkways, and the sort of condensation that built up on sewer walkways... in thin leather dress shoes and one of my best pairs of spats.

Ah, the things we do for love.

"It must be true love if you're not complaining about how the leather stains." Gil agreed. "I remember that one sewer run in Paris- oh God, you went on for weeks. Weeks."

"Do you have any idea how hard it was to find genuine Italian shoes in Paris that summer due to the trade disruptions?" Tarvek demanded heatedly. "I only had two good pairs to begin with!"

[...] And so my heart leapt into my chest when we turned the final corner, having finally started to believe we were safe, and then saw a pair of large silouhettes in the dimness waiting for us at the exit-

"Adam! Lilith!" Agatha joyously cried, and ran ahead of us straight into her foster parents' arms.

"... I think old age and exuberance just handed youth and treachery it's ass in a sling." Violetta conceded.

"Those two once single-handedly infiltrated Castle Wulfenbach, went through all the security like it wasn't even there, and broke my father's leg." Gil pointed out. "If they hadn't run into Von Pinn when they were completely unprepared for her, it wouldn't even have been a contest. Experience counts."

[...] Lilith cleared her throat. "A full mobilization of the Clockwork Army is designed to control the streets and rooftops, but Dr. Beetle overlooked the sewer and drainage tunnels. That's why the tunnels were planned as our primary escape route if necessary. And since one of the best exit points for you to use would be this one, which was the one we were also using, we simply waited for you here."

"If I ever meet your foster parents, please remind me to be on my absolute best behavior," Tarvek said.

[...] "We're going to be on an enforced neutral ground for the next stage of the trip anyway," I pointed out reasonably. "So we'll have every opportunity for a civilized conversation. If you don't like what you hear- if Agatha doesn't like what she hears- by the end of the first leg, then we couldn't stop you from leaving if we wanted to."

"Truce," Lilith agreed after sharing a look with her husband. "But since your actions precipitated this, Your Highness, you're paying for the train tickets."

"So that's our route out." Tarvek said. "Well, fight's over. Now we're back to the romance."

"You don't have to pretend that it's such a trial." Agatha teased him.

[...] After our going through the necessary confession to board and my paying for a private compartment on the train, we all settled down facing each other. Violetta and I were on one side and the Clays occupied the other. I hoped that this wouldn't be an omen for our continuing relationship.

"So do we!" Gil surprised everyone, not least of all himself, by saying.

"You know, when we get back I have a whole collection I could start you on-" Agatha offered.

"... can we talk about that later?" Gil blushed.

[...] "Agatha, I know that it hurt you-" Lilith began guiltily, before her face collapsed and her eyes glittered with unshed tears. "Oh Agatha, it hurt you so much! And we hated it!"

"Then why did you-!" Agatha began to angrily retort, and I raised a hand for peace.

"Because they legitimately believed that to publicly reveal you as a Spark, let alone as Agatha Heterodyne, would lead to your death." I said. "Even if they fought as best as they could to protect you."

"Do you want to just close your eyes for a bit while I stomp this pedal into the floor?" Gil asked.

"No," Agatha husked. "No, I already went through this conversation with them in reality. I can certainly live through it again in a fictional variation. Just.. scroll a little more slowly, please?"

[...] "Herr Clay, Frau Clay- I wanted to rip that damned thing off her neck and stamp it into the dirt the very instant I realized it was what was causing her attacks. And yet I still kept my silence for weeks." I sighed. "Agatha, if you're going to hate your parents for what they did then I deserve your hatred too. I certainly didn't keep silence about it for as long as they did, but one day would still have been too long."

"And right here story-you could so easily be splitting me away from my parents to further his own interests right now, but is instead doing the exact opposite." Agatha reassured Tarvek. "I told you that you were going to be the hero."

"And all those pretty words about your being a doctor?" she replied heatedly.

"Oh no," Agatha said worriedly.

"I am a doctor, among my several other fields of expertise." I said pleadingly. "Everything I said there was true. Everything I said about Anevka was also true. I- I obviously wasn't being entirely honest with you, or with your parents, but I was still trying to be as true as I could."

"Oh no, this is going to go so wrong-" Agatha chewed her lip.

[...] Agatha blinked as if in a sudden revelation, then began to quote my own words back to me in a soft, low voice. "I believe that you won't be cursed with these headaches forever. I believe that you will go on to do amazing things. And I hope that even after you've learned more about yourself as a person, and about me as a person, that you'll still want me there alongside you to help you do them." she finished, nodding.

"Wait, is this...?" Violetta said wonderingly.

[...] "But you were already trying to tell me the truth, weren't you?" Agatha pressed onward. "That's why you phrased things so precisely. You were confessing that you were keeping secrets from me, about both me and yourself, and that you were hoping that I wouldn't hate you after all the secrets finally came out. Which would mean that you were already intending for them to all come out, just not as soon as they did. You- you weren't trying to manipulate me, any more than Adam and Lilith were ever trying to manipulate me. You were just afraid. Like they were."

"YES! YES! YES! YesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesYES!" Agatha cried joyously.

[...] "You really do care for Agatha, don't you?" Lilith said to me evenly.

"I love her." I said hopelessly. "Even though I shouldn't."

"YOU SHOULDN'T? DO YOU SERIOUSLY NOT UNDERSTAND HOW GOOD YOU HAVE BEEN TO ME IN THIS STORY, YOU LOVESTRUCK IDIOT?" Agatha ranted at the screen madly.

"I really don't think he does." Tarvek said sadly.

[...] "Young lady, if you know who we really are then you know who we accompanied on what kinds of adventures for almost two decades." Lilith said tolerantly. "I seriously doubt you're going to say anything that we haven't already heard stranger."

"You wanna put some castlemarks on the table?" Violetta smirked.

"Oh, they're going down," Gil said amusedly.

[...] "Time travel." I said calmly, to a pair of suspicious glares and an incredulous eyebrow raise. "And to prove it..." I suddenly chuckled at the sheer absurdity of it all. "You know, I just realized that for perhaps the first time in history the awkward conversation with a young woman is actually going to be made easier by the presence of the parents.

"And that truly is the most absurd part," Agatha nodded. "Not the time travel."

[...] Lilith expressionlessly pushed both coins across the table to Violetta, who pocketed them without a word.

"HAH!" Violetta laughed.

[...] "And in the future... we were together?" Agatha asked me shyly, cutting off Lilith's attempt to ask me a no doubt much more strategically relevant question.

"No," I said to her distinct surprise. "I was courting you, certainly, but you had more than one suitor. And as of my journey back you had yet to make any decision between us."

Gil turned to Tarvek. "I'm not going to insult you by saying that I'm surprised story-you did that, but I am going to say that I'm really, really impressed he was able to." He sighed. "Because I'd have lied my ass off."

"And you think you're surprised that I didn't?" Tarvek agreed with him wholeheartedly.

"Gilgamesh Wulfenbach and one of my other far-too-numerous cousins, Prince Martellus von Blitzengaard." I replied. "We can and you certainly should entirely discount cousin Martellus-"

"He's a total jerk." Violetta cut in.

"Understatement much, Violetta?" Agatha laughed.

"-and his motives in pursuing Agatha were entirely political and avaricious." I continued without a beat. "Gilgamesh..." I ground to a halt.

Damn it.

"Gilgamesh loved you at least as deeply as I did," I said to Agatha, forcing every word out of the truth out of my mouth as if I were trying to swallow knives. "And he would have died to protect you as readily as I would have." I shook my head. "It was a very complicated situation even when we were hated rivals, and grew exponentially more complicated when he and I resumed being friends."

Gil stared at the screen for almost a minute, trying to process it, before he shook his head and sighed. "Sturmvoraus, you have officially lost your 'smarmy, duplicitous snake' status for all time."

"Or until the next time I do something that annoys you." Tarvek tried to make a joke out of it.

"No, that would still only get you smarmy." Gil joked back.

"And if I lied to you?"

"Duplicitous, but not smarmy." Gil replied.

"And snake?" Tarvek kept probing.

"Never again in this world." Gil said seriously.

"... thank you." Tarvek eventually replied.

[...] "In the interest of fairness I would like to point out that both of future-you's boyfriends were being idiots, at least going by the form card that I was told." Violetta said. "Everything my cousin is giving you is gonna be coming through his down-on-himself filter."

"Social bodyguard is not in my job description." Violetta said firmly. "Man, story-you is so lucky that I'm taking pity on his miserable butt right now."

"Well, it wouldn't be the first time," Tarvek agreed with her.

[...] "All right." I said. "First off, at the top of the priority ladder-"

"How you time travelled and why." Lilith interrupted me.

"That's Lilith," Agatha nodded. "Always taking the conversation where she thinks it should go."

[...] "Ah, so you didn't plan this time trip." Lilith interpreted for Adam, after a penetrating examination of my body language by them both.

"If you had planned it, that would a notable indicator for them as to how far you were willing to manipulate events to get what you wanted." Gil pointed out.

"As is, while I could still potentially be manipulative at least I'm not explicitly at 'Would deliberately rend the fabric of time and space asunder over personal desires' madboy level, which means they don't need to grab Agatha and run screaming from the compartment just yet." Tarvek agreed.

"No. Now, as to the primary sources of danger against Agatha, first and foremost among them is-" I began. [...]

"Keep scrolling, we already know all this." Agatha said.

[...] "The Order of Jove is several generations old," I pointed out. "The original plan didn't encompass the Baron's existence. The revised and current plans- well, some of the varied sub-factions in the Order hope to outlive him, and some hope to assassinate him-"

"AKA the morons." Violetta said.

"-and some to assemble sufficient force to defeat him militarily."

"AKA the epic morons." Violetta cut in again.

"You have a rosy future potentially ahead of you as a color commentator." Agatha pointed out amusedly.

"I'd say stand-up comedian, actually." Gil said.

"Ha-ha." Violetta said flatly.

[...] "So that was Klaus' role in her plan." Lilith said grimly. "But then how does this Order fit in?"

"Oh, if only Uncle Barry hadn't been so wrong." Agatha sighed. "But then again, if I'd grown up under the Baron's protection then most of us would have never met."

"Agatha, you know that I love you. But even so, I would not hesitate to trade any possible chance of ever knowing you for a world where Lucrezia Mongfish never returned for so much as a single day." Tarvek said firmly.

"And so would I," Gil agreed.

"We all would." Violetta said. "The whole gang, even those of us who aren't here."

"I certainly hope that this isn't the message these mysterious beings from outside time are trying to lead us to." Agatha worried.

[...] "In the future that was, the Other's return-" I held up a hand to pre-empt questions. "-was fought against by Baron Wulfenbach to the utmost of his ability. There is no living man in Europa with a greater hatred for Lucrezia Mongfish, or a more fervent desire to destroy her and all her works, than the Baron." I sighed. "But it wasn't enough to save him."

"No it wasn't," Gil said sadly. "Hopefully we will be."

"If you're certain of this, then... we should go to him right now!" Lilith cried, before slumping in relief. "And warn him of what's to come! Oh thank God! I was terrified that we wouldn't be able to get Agatha to safety, or that there wouldn't even be any safety to find."

"Okay, its basically a slam dunk that you're not going to end up there, so how are we going to avoid following this huge chunk of common sense here?" Violetta asked.

"You need to hear all the rest of this before you make that decision," I insisted.

"By bludgeoning it to death with an even larger chunk, apparently." Tarvek replied.

[...] "Me." Agatha paled as the pieces came together for her.

"Agatha..." Lilith said, clutching her hand reassuringly. "Remember! Stay calm!"

"I AM PERFECTLY CALM!" Agatha shouted. "I AM-" She began hyperventilating. "I am just a little freaked out right now!"

"I'm taking it fairly well, don't you think?" Agatha asked. But nobody else was willing to touch that one.

[...] "The device that holds or summons an imprint of Lucrezia's mind into a host body is called the Summoning Engine." I lowered my head, shamefaced. "And it's located in Castle Sturmhalten. My father is it's custodian. The reason female Sparks in Europa disappear so often is because he keeps arranging for them to be abducted to try and summon Lucrezia into." I kept going without heed for anyone else's reactions because if I didn't get this all out at once then I probably never would.

"Uh-oh." Violetta worried.

"He is so fanatic to get Lucrezia back he'd use anyone for the purpose. He even put Anevka into that damnable machine, and that's why she almost died-" I kept going, faster and faster, sobbing as the words exploded- "And that's when I knew he was doing it! I'd finally found out that he'd killed all those young women but I still never told anyone! I just stood there and smiled and pretended he was doing a good thing-"

"Tarvek!" Agatha burst out frustratedly. "We already knew about most of this but why didn't you tell us it was still HURTING you so much? Do you understand that we can't support you if we don't know?"

"Agatha-" Tarvek said diffidently. "I- it was enough that you'd forgiven me at all. Really, it was."

"If this is going to be some stupid exercise where you deliberately let yourself remain traumatized rather than ask for proper emotional support as some means of punishing yourself for what you think you deserve, then the instant these chains come off I am going to slap you." Gil said flatly. "Because that's stupid."

My head rocked to the side as Violetta slapped me hard across the face.

"Prophetic," Tarvek joked weakly.

"Quiet, or I'll hit you again!" she angrily demanded.

"Didn't you say the same thing to my mother in my body once?" Agatha asked Violetta.

"Same words, but totally different emotions. Trust me." Violetta answered her.

"Agatha, what I said was true." Violetta turned to her earnestly. "They really would have killed him in a heartbeat if he'd tried to do anything."

"I am so not lying." Violetta reassured Agatha.

"But you couldn't have helped protect him?" Agatha asked Violetta.

"No, because he SENT ME AWAY like a total IDIOT so I couldn't BE THERE when he NEEDED me!" Violetta ranted. "Sorry, I already accepted your apology for that, and I meant it. But really Tarvek! Do you seriously not comprehend how you could have maybe gotten free of that mess earlier, or even maybe just gotten Agatha back down to the circus without the Geisterdamen catching her at that moment, if you'd just let me be there too?"

"Or maybe you'd be a corpse!" Tarvek replied heatedly. "Violetta, it was a miracle that I survived those years. And yes, you're so much stronger than any of us knew back then, least of all me, and you'd probably have survived them too." he shook his head. "I wouldn't have wanted 'probably'. I would've wanted exactly what I did give you then, even if I gave it to you in entirely the wrong way."

"You stupid miserable sap." Violetta said affectionately. "Look, if you can't get your head around it any other way then can you at least understand this much? When the people who love you want to help you and you don't let them, then it hurts them too."

"It does," Agatha agreed. "I had this conversation with Dimo once. During all the years between the Boys disappearing and them finding me, the Jagers were lost when they thought the Heterodyne line had come to an end, but they were devastated from knowing it had happened because my father and uncle had refused them permission to come along or even to follow at a distance. That the family line had ended because they'd been deliberately refused the opportunity to give their aid when it was most needed. The Jagers had been forced to remain helpless by the people they cared for the most, and that's..." Agatha gritted her teeth. "Not a good thing."

[...] That's what this idiot does. He keeps trying to make the people he loves hate him and go away so that they don't have to be part of his horrible life. He doesn't ever stop to ask if anybody might want him to go with them.

"Message received and acknowledged, guys!" Gil called to the ceiling.

[...] "I watched them die, Violetta." I whispered thickly. "All the ones after Anevka. They died while I stood there and did nothing. He made me watch."

"GET THESE RESTRAINTS OFF OF US IMMEDIATELY!" Agatha screamed, and the chains dissolved from three out of four chairs. The fourth set stubbornly refused to vanish until it was too late for Tarvek to avoid the incoming group hug.

"That's horrible!" Agatha choked, and I winced at her rejection before she got up and practically flew around the table to desperately hug me. "Oh Tarvek! I can't believe that all happened to you!"

"Good instincts," Agatha said weakly.

[...] Lilith leaned across the table to take my hand in hers. "Prince, we've only recently met but you're almost certainly aware that the reason we agreed to let you wait until Agatha's 18th birthday before bringing up her medical issues again was so that we'd have a suitable period of time to observe you carefully. A chance to make at least a preliminary judgement on what kind of person you really were before we'd trust you with our daughter's health or even the lesser of her secrets."

"So that's what they were doing," Gil said from where the group had transitioned to sitting closely together on a couch, with Tarvek ensconced in-between Agatha and Violetta and Gil on Agatha's other side. "And of course, your story-self was so weighed down by his guilt and fear that he never noticed them becoming more and more accepting of him. Missed opportunity."

"Well, now you know." I said brokenly. Because of course they knew.

"Please tell me somebody in that room can diagnose guilt issues," Violetta quietly begged the screen.

[...] "Yes." she said, nodding meaningfully. "Adam and I accompanied Bill and Barry on almost all their journeys save the very last ones. We fought alongside them against dozens, hundreds of villainous Sparks and warlords and pirates and constructs. And it wasn't remotely like the stories and plays, Agatha." she said to her daughter. "It was nothing remotely so innocent. It was monsters, and madmen, and every variety of atrocity imaginable." she sighed softly. "More than almost anyone, my husband and I know what evil looks like. And we also know what the scars and pain that evil leaves behind looks like." she said to me compassionately. "And we know which one of those you look like, Tarvek." she continued in a motherly tone of voice as she looked me directly in the eye. "From what you and your cousin have said, your father is one of the worst monsters in human skin that we've ever heard of. But he did not raise a monster for his son."

And at that, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.

[...] "Oh, altruism is not my motive there," I said viciously. "All right, last card on the table. We talked about the Order of Jove's original plan, and Lucrezia's variant on it re: inserting herself into the Heterodyne princess that was to be married so as to orbitally bombard her cake and eat it too, but we never talked about who the Storm King that would marry the Heterodyne girl to cement their claim would be, did we? Going by the current bloodlines the second candidate in line for that position is my cousin Martellus, hence his aforementioned ambition. Would anyone care to guess who the first one is?" I finished flatly.

"When you have both valid personal and political reasons for doing the same thing, its hard to know how much of which versus how much of what is motivating you," Gil said. "I suppose that's why my father just basically abandoned the idea of a personal life at all."

"Well I certainly don't intend to go the same route," Agatha insisted, squeezing both her boys one with each arm.

[...] "Agatha," Lilith said, holding up her hand to ask for silence. "I believe Tarvek is trying to make the point that because of who you are and what inheritance you were born to you will never have a romantic relationship that is entirely free of political concerns, and that will inevitably complicate the motivations of even the most sincere suitors you could possibly have.

"She's talking to you at least as much as to me," Agatha said. "I hope you're picking up."

[...] Lilith sighed. "Agatha, you're entirely correct. As the last Heterodyne, the responsibility for Mechanicsburg is yours. And we did nothing to prepare you for those responsibilities, and we're ashamed that we didn't. But we never expected Barry to be gone so long, and without him we had no way to safely get you through a Breakthrough when you were old enough without risking the attention that we had thought would doom us all."

"I know, Lilith." Agatha sighed softly.

She turned to look at me. "You were the first sign of hope we had in such a long while, did you know that? Dr. Beetle had said that there was nothing he could do for Agatha except what was already being done, but we had no way to check if he was telling the truth. And then you came along. A powerful and experienced Spark yourself, a medical expert in addition, and someone that genuinely cared for Agatha-"

"... wait, that's right. In that circumstance you would be a gift from heaven to Adam and Lilith, if only they could trust you." Agatha realized.

[...] "-but it was more than that, wasn't it? You truly do love Agatha for Agatha, not because of any title or crown or lands that come with her. If she were merely a means to an end for you then you would be possessive, and perhaps even affectionate from time to time, but you wouldn't truly care." Lilith finished, as Adam nodded along with her every word. "But you obviously do care for Agatha. So much that you can't even express how much without confusing yourself.

"So that's why I keep doing it wrong!" Gil said wonderingly.

"You're not the only one," Tarvek agreed.

And that caring is why we didn't try to separate you. As soon as we'd known you long enough to be entirely certain of your sincerity we'd planned to tell you about the locket and ask for your help with it. To see if you could somehow lower its intensity, find a way to retune it so it didn't cause pain, even to remove it entirely if Agatha's Breakthrough could be handled safely. We aren't Sparks, and we were helpless to do anything with sparkwork except just continue on as we'd been instructed. We'd hoped that you could find us a way out of our dilemma." Lilith shrugged. "And if not remotely in the manner that we'd expected, you have."

"I love you, Adam and Lilith," Agatha said quaveringly.

"And not undeservedly," Tarvek agreed.

"Thank you, Agatha." I said. And then, with more peace than I'd felt in a long, long time, I reached up to take Agatha's hand in mine... and lift it from my shoulder. "But even if your parents approve, this is not what we should do."

"What are you doing?" Agatha asked confusedly.

I turned to face Adam and Lilith. "It will be a little over two days until our train reaches its destination.

"That's far too long for the Beetleburg to Mechanicsburg run!" Agatha said. "Where on Earth are we going?"

"As fugitives, we very likely got on the first train leaving the station regardless of destination," Tarvek pointed out. "Or chose to take anything but the direct route to Mechanicsburg because that's where Beetle would be looking for us. So, we're heading somewhere else to change trains."

"You're right, that must be it." Agatha agreed.

I'll spend the rest of tonight telling you all- with or without Agatha present, if you think she needs the rest- everything else about the future that I saw. And then-" I held up a hand. "You will sit and discuss what you think needs to be done, as a family. Not just Agatha's choices of the heart, but the strategic choices facing us all as well. And you'll take as much time as is available to process what you've heard and be more certain of your feelings." I turned to Agatha. "And when we arrive, then and only then will you decide if we get off the train together, or if only one family does while the other goes on their separate way."

"Oh you idiot," Gil said to Tarvek affectionately. "You're seriously not going there, are you? Tell me you are not going there."

"He's entirely going there," Tarvek agreed.

"Going where?" Agatha asked confusedly.

"Only one way to find out," Violetta said. "Hit the pedal!"

Adam and Lilith both beamed at me as if...

"I told you," Violetta said proudly. "He only thinks he's a horrible person."

"He's the best." Violetta agreed with herself. "Even when he's being the worst."

"Your complicated approval fills me with both confusion and joy. But largely confusion." Tarvek replied lightly.

... as if I were their own son?

"Speaking as the person in the room with the greatest knowledge of them, Lilith was almost certainly mentally two pages deep into the wedding planning by that point." Agatha agreed.

[...] "All right," Lilith said, patting the seat next to her. Agatha gave me a final squeeze and stood up to walk back across to the other side of the table and sit down next to her mother. Lilith pulled a notebook out of her jacket pocket and a pencil, and laid it neatly in front of her.

"In the original timeline, Agatha's locket was lost next March when-" I began reciting.

"So, total disclosure of everything." Gil said. "That's good. It would be far too easy to mistake 'I possess unique knowledge' for 'I possess unique insight'-"

"Seeing as how that's Standard Spark Mistake Number Zero Zero One." Violetta, the only professional minion in the room, agreed.

"and only dole out your future knowledge in dribs and drabs as you thought best for your own scheme, instead of inviting 'past-timers' fully into the planning because you acknowledge that having time travelled doesn't actually make you any smarter than you were before." Gil finished.

[...] Agatha's Breakthrough had indeed begun before we'd even gotten halfway there. Fortunately the Corbetites had some experience with giving sanctuary to young Sparks only just beginning to realize what they were and frantically fleeing one step ahead of an unpleasant home situation,

"Oh, they're used to it all right." Gil agreed. "The Corbetites are really a valuable part of Europan civilization in a lot of ways."

and Agatha had mentioned the possibility of this in her initial confession while boarding, so they were entirely understanding of the sleep-construction incident that had turned half of their available silverware into a rather bizarre attempt at a dishwashing machine. In fact, the train's chief engineer, a Spark himself, had shown a positive delight in helping Agatha tear it down and rebuild it. Brother Ulm, our conductor,

"Brother Ulm? That's the Wyrm of Limerick!" Agatha called out cheerfully. "That was our train!"

"Yeah it was!" Violetta agreed enthusiastically. "Oh man, crazy old Brother Matthias was there to help the new Heterodyne with her Breakthrough? He must have been so thrilled!"

had merely made a polite "request" for an additional donation to cover replacement silverware and by the end of the affair we'd actually had the dining car's new automated silverware polisher up and running.

"Because of course you would barely mention that you'd helped me with it too," Agatha said to Tarvek tolerantly.

It had been far less traumatic or violent than her Breakthrough in the original timeline, but then she'd been far less full of negative emotions and with far more support available.

"Oh, how I wish I'd had one of those-" Agatha sighed.

"You still had not a bad one, comparatively speaking." Gil said. "Just- yeah. So many misunderstandings that day."

Still, all journeys must eventually end. And so as the train slowed and began our final approach through the outskirts of the city, I debated with myself as to whether to stay in my compartment or go try and see Agatha for one final conversation in the last half-hour before we finally arrived. After all, I didn't have any real expectation that she'd choose to stay with me. She sympathized, certainly, but after hearing all the things I'd done? All the schemes I'd tried to weave around her? All the mistakes I'd made? And how, even after being given a second chance, I'd still been so selfish as to-

"The odds are zero to infinity against that he's getting out of that train compartment without being kissed," Gilgamesh stated flatly.

"Wow, you really are catching on to the genre fast." Violetta said.

"Tarvek?" her voice came from behind me, and I spun to see her in the new dress her mother had picked - well, with a tiny bit of assistance from yours truly - for her at our last clothes stop. Unlike the outfit that I'd first seen Agatha in this one was still entirely within the limits of decorum, certainly, but was anything but drab or shapeless. Her outfit fit her like she was born to it, and it clearly projected I am strong. I am cherished. I am worthy. Or perhaps that was the young woman wearing it...

She was so beautiful.

"Ah, arc words! And your appreciation of Agatha's presentation and dress as a device for what they reveal about the feelings she's carrying, done as story bookends." Violetta said, nodding. "Nice imagery!"

"And here you thought all my internal fashion essays were just word cruft," Tarvek joked at Gilgamesh weakly.

"Agatha." I said, forcing myself to smile gently. "Here to say goodbye?"

"No," she said, as my eyes opened in astonishment.

"Said literally the only person in that entire universe who could possibly be surprised at this happening," Violetta snarked.

"But-" I began dazedly.

"Sssh," she said, placing one finger on my lips as she stepped into my compartment and let the door slide closed behind her. "It's okay."

Two feminine sighs echoed through the room.

"Agatha, are you sure-?" I began again.

"No, I'm not." she said to my shock.

"Whoa, plot twist!" Gil cried out.

"But... are people ever really sure about things like this?" she continued, as I confusedly tried to follow her thoughts. "Think about it. You literally came back in time with more foreknowledge than anyone ever recorded, and you still aren't really certain about your why your heart wants it wants. So how can I be?" she finished.

"When did I get this good at relationships?" Agatha said confusedly.

"In this timeline you did spend the past two days discussing the matter with your foster parents." Tarvek analyzed.

"Agatha, if you choose this then you know what comes with it," I told her. "The Lightning Crown. The politics, the lies, the betrayals-"

"The future of Europa." she said. "One that doesn't fall back into the Long War, like you saw it do with your own eyes. And my future, too."

"I certainly can't criticize myself for lack of decisiveness," Agatha agreed. "So this is how the lopsided dynamic that your story-selves were worried about is resolved. Ultimately, I choose you, not vice versa."

"Remember in chapter one when you told Lilith that you didn't want to press anything upon Agatha that she wasn't ready to give a fair judgement on before accepting?" Gil asked Tarvek. "Because you kept that promise."

"Your future could be whatever you wanted it to be," I said. "I might need you to advance myself in this world. But you don't need me. You don't need anyone to survive and thrive except you. Agatha Heterodyne, Lady of Mechanicsburg."

"Are you simple?" Agatha burst out. "If I hadn't help from so many people, I wouldn't have lived to get off of Castle Wulfenbach!"

"You're wrong, Tarvek. Everyone needs someone. Even in the future that you knew, I still needed my friends." Agatha replied.

"YOU TELL HIM, ME!" Agatha cheered enthusiastically.

"And in this time and place, I need both my friends and my family." She placed her hand on my heart. "And I need you."

"I'm not the only one," I said, struggling against what I couldn't even name.

"You're STILL trying to lose?" Gil gaped at Tarvek incredulously.

"Gilgamesh," she acknowledged. "You know, for a man who says he hated his romantic rival you did an exceptional job of talking him up even when you were trying to pretend not to. He really was your best friend, wasn't he?"

"I hate you so much right now," Gil told Tarvek with blatant insincerity.

"Until Violetta and I finally reconciled, he was the only one I'd ever had." I said. "And there I was, repaying him for that friendship with a knife right between the shoulder blades. I suppose that really does make me a Storm Lord in truth, doesn't it?"

"No, the actual guilt that you're feeling over it TOTALLY disqualifies you." Violetta pointed out matter-of-factly.

"Misplaced guilt, no less." Agatha agreed.

"Tarvek," Agatha said. "I understand why it's complicated for you. Try to imagine how complicated it is for me! But what you described was-" she chewed her lip. "It was real to you, because you were there. But I wasn't there, do you understand? That was another Agatha, in another time."

"I'm a wise woman," Agatha said. "But wait, wouldn't that mean-?"

"That's the reason for the whole 'Falling in love with her all over again' scene." Violetta pointed out.

"Ohhhhhh," Agatha acknowledged.

"If we accept that as a starting postulate then that makes my love for you-"

"-perfectly normal." Agatha said. "Even in this time alone, we've known each other for months. That's more than enough to at least begin a courtship. Goodness, my mother's seen marriages happen in less time."

"Exactly!" Agatha nodded.

"Do I love you?" I asked her. "Or do I love another woman that you resemble, that I'm trying to make you into-"

And then her lips were on mine, and mine on hers, and the world no longer mattered.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-!" both Agatha and Violetta squealed and swooned.

"Congratulations," Gil said to Tarvek with a sigh.

"For what?" he said. "This is just a story!"

"A story that's going to be stuck in her head for weeks. At minimum. You are going to lap ahead of me so hard." Gil sighed.

"I don't think I want to," Tarvek said puzzledly. "Oh, I certainly want to," he said at Gil's shock, "but not like this. It's... just not fair, somehow."

"Thanks." Gil said after a long pause.

"Were you kissing a ghost, then?" she asked when we finally separated. "Or were you kissing me?"

"HER!" Agatha and Violetta shouted.

"I don't know." I whispered.

Agatha smiled at me, then laid her hand on my heart again. "This is just a little bit broken, isn't it? Oh, it still beats as fine as ever, but you've been hurting for so long that you don't know how to hear it clearly. But it's all right." she reassured me. "They heal eventually, with enough care."

"I'm melting," Agatha said.

"I'm totally overloaded," Violetta agreed.

"And I'm... glad you guys are enjoying it." Gil surprised everyone.

"It's not a contest, Tarvek. It's not a matter of more worthy versus less worthy. And even if it was, my mother's already told you. You are so much better a man than you think you are."

"Please tell me that they're going to give us printed copies of this when we leave." Agatha said. "I will have mine bound in leather and put right on my best bookshelf."

[...] "Think back on all you've said and done. Even if your journey across time was an accident, you still used it to try and help me as much as possible. And even if you stood to gain something as well, every time you had the choice to place your own interests over mine... you chose mine." Agatha's grin lit up the world as she poked me in the breastbone lightly with her finger. "And I asked my mother about the same doubts and fears you've been having. About all the complications and ethical questions about a relationship that is asymmetric across time, about parallel universes and prophetic foreknowledge and oracle's paradoxes. And do you know what she said?"

"Something very wise, I would imagine." I said.

"It would certainly have to be, to solve this!" Agatha agreed.

"She said that love was something even the greatest Sparks couldn't ever hope to analyze, either logically or mechanically. And that whatever else may or may not have happened around or to us, a good relationship ultimately came down to two questions."

Everybody leaned forward towards the screen.

"Which were?" I asked curiously.

"Tarvek, have you ever considered that Adam and Lilith once faced a relationship puzzle fully as complicated as our own?" she asked obliquely.

"Oh COME ON!" Violetta shouted. "You teasing bastards!"

"No, wait!" Agatha said. "What on Earth are they talking about with my foster parents?"

"Precisely," she said. "They were literally constructed together." she said. "Made to order by a pair of brothers, who like teenagers everywhere could get soppily romantic over the strangest things. It probably never occurred to my father and uncle that there was something just a little bit strange about building a pair of constructs and then expecting them to just... pair up because they're expected to, like Barry and the High Priestess always are in Heterodyne shows. How do you imagine that they handled that?"

"... okay, yeah." Violetta agreed. "That is just ten shades of completely fucked up. How do you even process that? How did they process that?"

[...] "Well, they first began by deciding that no matter what anyone else expected of them, it was their bodies and their lives and they had the right to choose what to do with them," Agatha said. "As you and I both have, and freely acknowledge about the other."

"Now that we're on the topic, do you think your cousin has finally figured this one out yet?" Gil said to Tarvek.

"It's just faintly possible, but I think we should go hit him a few hundred more times to be certain." Tarvek nodded.

"It's a date, then!" Gil agreed enthusiastically.

[...] "And then they angsted about it for the incredibly longest time." Agatha nodded. "But eventually they grew old enough together to realize that they'd been asking all the wrong questions all along. That it didn't matter how odd the route was by which they'd gotten there, or what was expected of them, or whatever other bizarre life complications that sparkwork could throw in their path. The only two questions that truly mattered were 'Do we truly care for each other?', and 'Would we be good for each other?'"

Agatha's jaw dropped as she stared at the screen as if having a religious rapture.

"Agatha-" I gulped.

"And my answer to both those questions is 'Yes'." she said.

"Yes." I answered her after a long wondering pause. "Mine as well."

"Story-you is officially doomed," Gil said.

"And he's never been happier to be so," Tarvek agreed.

"I love you." she said simply.

"I love you too." I echoed, and we held each other silently.

"That is the most emotionally intense thing I have ever read, and they're not even kissing." Violetta said. "Okay, I seriously need to read a better grade of penny-sparklies."

"Assuming the publishers back home have anything else this good." Agatha agreed. "But yes. Very much yes."

"No regrets?" I eventually asked.

"About the road not taken?" Agatha replied. "I wish Gilgamesh well, and I look forward to one day meeting him as your friend. But nothing more."

"Oh, you are so getting paired off with Seffie in this one," Tarvek said amusedly to Gil.

"Am I even going to be in this one?" Gil said. "Because we're just about at the end!"

"Just because a story only covers a certain period of time or a certain point of view doesn't mean that the readers can't envision the remainder of the universe that the story exists in for themselves," Agatha said. "So if you hope for story-you to get a happy ending in this one, then in your heart you can make it possible."

"Thanks." Gil said. "That does help."

"Paris!" the porter yelled outside in the hallway. "Paris in five minutes!"

"PARIS?" Agatha said, wide-eyed.

"Oh, man!" Violetta said happily. "We got so bait-and-switched! My own sleight of hand positively envies this one!"

[...] "Do you think your grandmother will like me?" Agatha asked tentatively.

"Ah, so that's our plan." Tarvek said.

"Like the girl whose existence will upset years of scheming with a major new variable?" I inquired ironically. "Like the fact that the ongoing race among her grandchildren just got scooped by a massive upset win out of nowhere? Like that the family pawn will be promoting himself to a king, right alongside a promoted queen?" I grinned at her. "She'll love you. It'll be the least bored she's been in years. And you and I are the best chance that the Order of Jove will ever have, and even if there will be others too foolish to see that for themselves my grandmother is never a fool."

"Yup." Violetta said. "I mean, you're in a bit of a fix if she turns you down, but she'd have to have had a stroke first to be dumb enough to turn down that pat a hand. If you step off the train as visibly dizzy in love as you are then who the hell is she going to put forward from the family to marry her off to? Tweedle?"

"Grandfather would be a problem at this point in time, but-"

"It's Paris." Violetta agreed. "Even if you have to move Agatha out to the suburbs to cheat the Heterodyne time limit, by the time he could do direct action in Paris Grandmother would already be moving."

"And that's assuming that we don't secretly contact the Jagers as well." Agatha said. "That contingency with General Higgs was not mentioned in Chapter One for no reason."

[...] "I think it's been going well so far." Agatha grinned back at her.

"Well, if you decide to turn and jump right back on the train after you actually meet Grandmother and all the rest of our big screwed-up family, then rest assured absolutely no one will blame you." Violetta said.

"Valid point as well," Gil said. "You've got up to 72 hours of Master Voltaire's protection to make the initial contact in, and if you don't get a positive reaction then she can't stop you from just getting back on the train to Mechanicsburg. So, its really not a bad plan."

[...] "About what you said about a 'courtship'," I asked Agatha as we walked down the corridor. "You understand that my family will be expecting a firm betrothal up front, and have significant expectations about living up to it? As far as they're concerned we've already 'courted' and are now committed."

"Of course," Agatha said. "But the wedding can't take place until after I've reclaimed my place as the Heterodyne in Mechanicsburg, and once that's happened it'll be beyond their power to force me to do anything. The trick will be to keep their eyes so focused on the shiny prize that they don't entirely realize that until it's too late." Agatha took my arm in hers and we continued to walk along together. "If we don't work out..." she shook her head. "Mother and Father taught me that miserable people live miserable lives, and do their best to force their children to be miserable as well. Even my blood father and uncle didn't entirely escape that. And you or Violetta certainly didn't. Even I didn't, not entirely."

"And that base has been covered as well-" Tarvek began to analyze, only to be cut off by Agatha's sudden comment.

"Wait, WHAT did I just call them?" Agatha shouted in realization.

[...] "Ours wasn't the only relationship affected by all the recent confessions and re-examining of our lives." Agatha said. "Adam and Lilith hadn't let me call them that before because they'd felt guilty over what they'd been helping do to me." she explained, tapping the place on her neck where a trilobite locket had once sat. "But that's no longer between us now.

"Ouch," Agatha said faintly. "Now I feel a little ashamed of myself."

"Well, you know how to fix that," Tarvek said simply. "They're still in touch, after all."

[...] "Agatha. Tarvek." Lilith said to us both as we both came up to where they'd been standing by the door. "Is everything settled?" Her only reply was Agatha snaking her arm around my waist just as I did around her shoulders, and us both grinning at her parents like idiots.

Adam slapped his palms together and gave us a thumbs-up, and Lilith smiled back at us like a proud parent should.

"Her mental checklist has everything from the caterers to the wording of the invitations by now." Agatha agreed.

[...] "Tarvek!" I heard cousin Seffie call, and we all turned to see the welcoming party that had been alerted to our arrival by heliograph from our most recent stop. Seffie had brought her personal Smoke Knight Varpa and enough footmen to move the bags, but none of the rest of the family.

"Hey Seffie!" Violetta called.

"Doomed," Tarvek said to Gil smugly. "Story-you is so very, very doomed."

"Could be worse," Gil shrugged to everyone's shock, before continuing. "Could be Zola."

"If anybody ever wrote that story, then I don't want to even remotely speculate who would read it," Agatha said, shuddering.

"Violetta! You and Tarvek are assigned back together?" she said, looking at my and Agatha's arms around each other and then at our guests with an analytical eye. "Oh cousin. Here I'd thought you were merely taking a sabbatical year to study clanks, but clearly you've been up to things again."

"We are so going to prank the shit out of her." Violetta said to Tarvek smugly.

"Agatha, this is my cousin Princess Xersephnia von Blitzengaard, who we all call 'Seffie'. Seffie, this is Agatha Heterodyne and her foster parents, Punch and Judy." I introduced them matter-of-factly, as if one brought living legends to life every day.

"Although we currently go by Adam and Lilith Clay," Lilith explained equally offhandedly.

"Called it," Tarvek acknowledged to Violetta with a nod.

"Well," Seffie said after a pause during which I honestly had to admire her sheer savoir-faire at not visibly jawdropping. "It certainly is a pleasure to meet you, Agatha." she said, politely shaking hands. "Adam. Lilith." she greeted them in turn with a courtly nod.

"Wow," Violetta said. "I mean, it would be barely 50-50 that even Seffie could pull off that straight a face."

Violetta wordlessly held out her hand and I dropped a ten-castlemark coin in it.

"Apparently our story-selves had the same opinion," Tarvek chuckled.

Seffie took one look at our byplay and started giggling, and that set off an explosion of laughter all across the platform.

"Given how consistently this author has used honest laughter as an omen of good things approaching, I like this as an ending." Gil said.

"Come along, everyone." Seffie said cheerfully after we settled down, waving us all to the nearby steam coach. "Your arrival here had already had drawn Grandmother's curiosity, but now? Now, I do believe that you will have her attention."

"Oh would we ever." Tarvek agreed.

"So, that's it?" Agatha said. "That's all we've got?"

There are several additional sidestories, but you will not be required to analyze them here. suddenly flowed up on the screen.

"You're directly communicating?" Agatha asked. "Then why did you bring us here?"

For the purpose you have already surmised. As well as to help further understanding and communication among those who observe you.

"Can we go home now?" Violetta asked practically.

You may.

"And the print copies?" Agatha asked, before they appeared on the low table before them.

"Hey, leather binding!" Gil said, picking up his volume. "Thanks!"

"Reconciliation? Alliance? Family?" Violetta said, paging to the table of contents. "Okay, that sounds like good things are coming."

"I'm sure, but I think it's time for us to leave- no, wait, one last thing." Agatha said. "A brief review of what I think we've learned..." she chewed her lip, and continued.

"We learned that Violetta sometimes finds it hard to ask for things that she wants. We learned that Tarvek is sometimes afraid to ask for things that he needs. We learned that Gil is a great support to all of us, and that we're lucky to have him in our lives. And we learned..." Agatha stopped, and wiped a tear away from her eye. "That I have been so blessed with so many wonderful people to know that I honestly feel a little overwhelmed sometimes. I'm so happy we're all together, and that we've got so much to share with the people we left back home."

"We do," Gilgamesh agreed as Tarvek and Violetta both wiped away their own tears. "So let's get going."

"To our mysterious hosts," Tarvek began. "Thank you for this opportunity, and we appreciate what you've done. But-"

"-please don't do it again any time soon, if ever." Violetta said. "Because while it was great, it was also exhausting."

Agreed.

"All right," Agatha said. "Let's go."

And then our heroes departed, back to the land where they belonged.