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When Morrigan didn’t come out of her room for dinner, Jack found himself outside the door to Room 85, fist poised to knock (because he was actually mannered sometimes, thank you Morrigan). Before he could hit the wood however, it swung open all on its own.
“Okay for me to come in?”
Something grunted inside, which sounded fairly human, unless Morrigan had acquired a pig recently he hadn’t heard about yet. A soft breeze from the corridor ushered him inside and he followed it, letting the door fall shut behind him.
The fire was out, wind howling down the chimneys like the ghost that haunted the second year boys’ dorms at Graysmark, darkening the room except for a small light on the bedside table closest to the door.
Morrigan was there, sitting cross legged on her bed, her hands pressed down beside her almost flat, gripping the surface of the duvet ever so slightly, so that it was crumpled underneath her fingers. “Hello, Jack,” she said, voice floaty and very… not Morrigan.
He pulled away his eye patch, pushing it up to his hairline and looked at her again, at the wunder haloing her like the evening sun through a chapel window, and the darkening shadow of… something. Something she had seen. And heard. And felt.
“You look terrible,” he said bluntly.
Instead of saying something sarcastic or mildly mean, she just blinked at him. And blinked again. “Yeah,” she said eventually, nodding at his eye patch. “I’m sure I do.”
He found a seat on the octopus armchair, folding his hands over the tentacle-arms, crossing his legs at the ankle, “What happened?” His voice lowered, and he checked that the door was shut. “Was it… you know… Squall?”
Her head wobbled this way and that, “Not really.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Do you want dinner? I think Chef Honeycutt probably has some leftovers, or I can probably try an omelet, maybe.”
“Hm,” was all she said. She barely said that, even. It was more the exhalation of breath through the lips, than any approximate speech. He looked at her again, carefully, and replaced his patch and stood again. If she didn’t want the leftovers after all, he could always stand to go for a second course.
The room saved them from having to work out balancing all the food on the bed or sitting on the floor. When Jack came back in, arms straining with the bowls of custard he’d seconded from a line cook who’d been about to make tarts with them, a smooth wooden table with two chairs was sitting in front of the bed.
Morrigan hadn’t moved. She had barely even shifted.
He put the bowls down, squinting in the low light so that he didn’t knock his leg off one of the corners, and walked back over to her.
“You going to eat?”
Her jaw tightened, but her eyes looked more tired than anyone’s he’d ever seen (and given that he lived with Jupiter North this was saying something). She picked up her spoon and collected up the skin. He winced, hearing it clatter against her teeth as she chewed through it but didn’t say anything.
He waited until his bowl was finished and hers half-eaten as she mixed up the cold custard with her spoon, breaking it all apart over and over, to speak again. “Are you going to talk about it?”
She looked up at him. No, not at him. She looked through him. She looked at the wall behind his head. And the wall behind that. And the wall behind that. And the window behind that. And the building behind that. And at everything on realm in the direction behind him, except for Jack Korrapati himself.
“It’s so much worse,” she said.
He blinked, “What?”
“They got it wrong. They always get it wrong,” her voice was glassy, and brittle, like if a single thing touched it it would shatter into a thousand people. “They were wrong about the Unresting and they were wrong about it. Hani Nakamura was wrong. The Silverborn were wrong. They were all wrong, and none of them can ever get it right.” She buried her head in her hands, pushing the plate over, spilling the custard onto the table so a bright yellow pool gathered just beyond her elbows.
“What were they wrong about?” he asked carefully. A hundred questions rolled into one in his mind, before splitting apart again tenfold. Who was Hani Nakamura and what did she have in common with the Silverborn to be lumped in like that? What were the Unresting? What could be so bad that someone like Morrigan, who had been mauled, drowned, kidnapped, kidnapped again, blackmailed, bullied, threatened, apprenticed to Squall, and a hundred other things was so distressed?
How could he fix it?
“The Manyhands,” she said, holding up her hand. It was completely blank. He removed his patch again, to see something new indenting one of her fingers, coating the whole of it in wunder. His eyes watered and he looked away quickly, putting it back on. He’d seen those, on any Wunsoc member, but Morrigan kept collecting them. She had once told him that you could only see an imprint if you had the same one, but for Witnesses, there were ways around it.
Something tickled in his brain at the Manyhands. Not from history class, or physics, or maths, but from his literature classes. A poem about thanksgiving by some Silverborn that he’d rolled his eyes while reading, about some festival they had, and eating with their hands for the sake of industry. Some of the Silverborn in his class, Tolu, and Barty, and Louis, had spoken about the festival in the poem and how lovely the sculpture was, always strewn with flowers and ribbon. It sounded completely hypocritical and frivolous to him.
But Morrigan had been in the Silver District all winter. She must have gone to this feast, and seen it about. That wasn’t the scary thing that had left her in this state, something else was.
“Hani Nakamura made the Guiltghast,” she went on. “I thought the Manyhands would look like it. I thought it would be fine. I’ve met the Guiltghast. I didn’t like it, but I could handle it.”
“But it’s not like that,” he surmised.
“No,” she shook her head. “I don’t think I could describe it to you if I tried.”
“But—” he paused. “What is it?”
“Oh,” she stopped. “I forgot you don’t know. The Manyhands is a Wundrous Divinity. I visited it as part of my pilgrimage for my Weaving imprint,” her finger tapped the table again.
“Right,” he said slowly, trying, and mostly failing, to process any or all of that.
“I was warned that it would be frightening,” her shoulders shook in half-laughter. She didn’t have to elaborate by whom, and that knowledge sent a shiver down Jack’s spine but he refused to move or react. “It is.”
Her eyes landed on the custard puddle for the first time since she’d spilled it, as if she were only noticing it for the first time. She scowled at it, and a second later it disappeared altogether.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to that,” Jack confessed.
Her mouth twitched at the side, slightly raising, almost a smile. The sight was more heartening than he would have ever expected. “Me neither, I think."