“Aren’t there like, health and safety guidelines against me doing this?” Valorous asked as he scrubbed the cloth over the tabletop, firmly working away the various sticky rings from different mugs of tea and glasses of water and all the rest. He didn’t know if it was normal to get your therapists stuff for Christmas, but he didn’t really care – Dot was going to be getting coasters to use in her office.

She’d told him where the cleaning supplies were kept when he’d asked, and Faizah had opened the cupboard for him and let him take what he wanted. Dot had sat back in her seat and watched as he’d lined up bottles in order and started with a bowl of hot, soapy water.

Faizah’s office, Valorous could only guess by how well-stocked the cleaning supplies cupboard was, was fucking spotless, and he didn’t doubt that Manny’s was similar enough – they did hire a cleaner to come in once a week and change bins and do the main dusting and hoovering, but that wasn’t the same as a big clean.

“He does more extensive cleans twice a year,” said Dot, smiling slightly as she looked down at him, resting her chin on her hand. “And yeah, probably, but what are you going to do? Report me?”

“If I was going to report you for something, it wouldn’t be for letting me clean your office,” Valorous said, and Dot laughed. He leaned forward on his knees, firmly scrubbing over the table before he reached for a clean cloth to dry it off.

“Cecil’s house spick and span?”

“The kitchen floor was shining when we left, and Ruby’s not pissing inside basically at all anymore.”

“That’s great.”

“Yeah.”

“How about your flat?”

Valorous didn’t say anything, and the two of them settled in silence for a few seconds as Valorous focused on drying off the table and then reached for the wood polish.

“You handed in your notice,” Dot said.

“Yeah,” Valorous agreed.

“Anything prompt that in particular?”

“I’d already been thinking about it.”

“No straw that broke the camel’s back?”

“Can camels backs actually get broken?”

“If they fall and hurt their spines, sure,” Dot said. “But if you put too much weight on a camel’s back, its knees will buckle, same as might happen to you – although a camel would do it out of protest long before the weight was too heavy for it to physically handle. They’re pretty communicative animals.”

“There a lot of camels in Sudan?”

“Uh huh.”

“You miss them?”

“Yeah, sometimes,” Dot said, and she tilted her head to the side as if she was taking time to consider the question, really consider it. It was a relief, Valorous thought, that therapy could be a conversation sometimes, that it could go both ways. “Ava, she sees Manny on Wednesdays as well, she goes riding, and I’ve been out there, but horses aren’t the same. They’re skittish in a way camels aren’t, and camels are just… I don’t know.

“Camels aren’t just intelligent or friendly, they’re… They’re patient. We never used to have camels of our own, but I’d be around them, spend time with them. You can sit with a camel and she’ll take an interest in what you’re doing, and you have the sense that she’s comfortable waiting for you to do something, you know? A camel is an animal that extends a lot of grace to humans, and it doesn’t come out of what feels like obedience or capitulation, like with some dogs. I suppose it’s more like how cats see people – it feels like camels see as equals, and want to be kind to us, and be treated kindly in turn. I really like that about them.”

Dot’s smile has softened, and she was playing with one of the edges of the silk wrap around her hair, loose behind her ear. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I do miss them a lot, actually. I really hadn’t thought about it.”

“Sorry,” said Valorous, not knowing what else to say.

“No, don’t be sorry,” Dot said. “It’s nice, sometimes, to know what you miss, to be aware of how and why you miss the things you do – it lets you be grateful for what you do have, or prompts you to seek out the things you miss, bring them back into your life.”

“You think Manny would let you keep a camel?”

“You gonna report me?”

“Nah,” said Valorous, and the both of them laughed, and Valorous felt himself relax just a bit as he put aside the cloth and looked at the polished tabletop, taking in the lemon scent of the polish. “I don’t think anything prompted it, specifically. Like, it wasn’t something that happened, it was what… what didn’t happen. I realised how much I wasn’t talking about. Not just that thing with Ursus Hound, wanting to chase after him when he hadn’t done anything, but… but anything. Cecil. The dog. Magic. Fucking, bouts on the radio. I didn’t want to talk about anything in that office, in the earshot of anybody, because of how it could be used against me, or because if I talked, someone else would talk, and they’d tell me something about themselves, and it would be disgusting.

“I used to get on with Subha, I used to like him a lot, he’s funny, his mother is a poet, he likes these honey cakes his sister makes at work. Then he said this offhand thing about fucking… about mundie football fans, and it wasn’t even that nasty, it was just cavalier, I guess. About knocking some sense into them, about the fact that if it was magical cops that did it, they could sort them out and there’d be no consequences, and it was just— It was a joke, right? Like, he was just joking, he’s not going to actually do that. But it was the thought. The fantasy behind it.”

Dot nodded her head, and Valorous put the basket of pens (no dead ones left, all with caps, all laid in the basket facing the same way) and the other stuff back on the coffee table, then went to start on Dot’s desk, clearing stuff aside and taking care not to look at any of the documents so that the angelic writing wouldn’t make his head throb.

He was careful to keep everything in the chaotic not-order Dot had it in, and he could see that she was grateful for how he kept the piles of random shit in the same random order she’d stacked them in, even as he moved them aside to give himself space to clean.

“Every time I was in the office, I was thinking about it. Cecil said that Sergeant Stark, my old boss, beat his daughters, and I’m pretty sure he hit his wife before she died too, and I couldn’t not think about that, if he hits his new wife. If he kicks their dog. If Evelyn hits her girlfriend. How many of them have used the police computers to look up records on someone, to stalk them, abuse them, rape them.”

“Like you did with Cecil,” Dot said, and Valorous gestured at her emphatically.

“Exactly!” he said, waving his wet cloth and sending soap suds everywhere, although Dot moved her legs out of the way of the little splash. “Sorry. But that’s what I mean – I’m a fucking, I’m a creep, Dot. Everybody fucking knows that. They all knew I was obsessed with Cecil even before I joined up, and they all knew I was looking stuff up about him, that I was going to his house, looking in his windows, staking him out, and some of them joked about it now and then, but that was it. It’s not like anybody gave a fuck – if anything, some of them were upset that I just fucked him, started, dating— whatever we are, whatever this is – instead of beating the shit out of him in an alleyway and throwing him in the Channel.

“And of all the people who are meant to care, who are meant to say, hey, Valorous, do you think maybe you shouldn’t fucking stalk people? That you shouldn’t fucking drug them up or trick them into fucking you, because that’s kind of like, you know, rape? Which is a crime? You’d think it would be them! But they don’t, because they all do it, and that’s why they’re cops. If they do it, it’s fine – it’s only when other people do it, the other element, that’s when it’s bad.

“It’s like, it’s like it’s not doing the crime that’s actually the problem, whatever’s criminalised, it’s the idea that criminals do it. The criminal is already gonna be targeted by them to rough up or arrest or whatever, and whatever they do is retroactively criminal or suspicious.

“And I know, I know, that’s like— that’s like basic, basic anti-abolitionist theory or whatever, but it’s… It’s shit. It’s shit. Cecil’s been saying about— My Uncle Heinous was in town, and he said that before I came here, to Lashton, before I came to stay with Jack and Noble, that he and Indistinguishable were going to take me in. Buy a house together, look after me full time.

“And he was asking like, what he should have done differently, if I wish he’d done that, or whatever, and I don’t know, I guess for me, like, the past is the past. There’s nothing I can change about it one way or the other, right? But I think about it. I know it’s not real, the past, changing the past, that it’s happened and done and you can’t change it, but I think about it. Constantly, I think about it, now. What would have happened if I hadn’t become a knight, or if Cecil had fucked me, or if I’d been with Indistinguishable and Heinous, what destinies I’d still fulfil, and what ones I wouldn’t.

“Cecil was saying about if I took more after my dad, I’d be more of a criminal, because Kings, we’re criminals, and in Lashton, we are – we’re smugglers, enforcers, we traffic weapons and drugs and all kinds of dangerous shit. Except I never got that label, that, that criminal assignation. Because I was a knight by the time I was fourteen – and if I’d lived in Camelot, if I’d lived with Heinous and Indistinguishable, whether I became a knight or not, I wouldn’t have been thought of as a criminal there either, because they’re a fucking academic and an army general’s clerk. So I still wouldn’t have been tarred with that brush, but I still might have gotten the others.”

He’d just spoken more in one go than he thought he’d had in years, all while scrubbing over Dot’s desk, and how he took a breath to look over it, breathing a little heavily. His skin felt hot and a bit too tight for his body, his hair an uncomfortable weight on his shoulders, and he dropped the cloth to roughly tie his hair up into a bun. They’d been making comments at the station about how long it was getting, but it wasn’t like he had to cut it any longer.

He kept thinking about how it was unwieldy, his hair growing as long as it was now, down about his shoulders, to have that much hair and shove it into his helmet, and then he remembered, each time as a kind of little shock, that he didn’t have to care if a helmet fit any longer, that he never had to wear a helmet again, if he didn’t want to.

Each time he remembered, he felt a bit sick, and he didn’t understand why.

“What others?” Dot asked.

“What?” Valorous replied, looking up from the glistening service of Dot’s desk to Dot herself, wiping at his eye with the back of one of his thumbs before he waved his hand, drying off the tabletop with a wordless thought before going for the wood polish again.

“You wouldn’t have been tarred with the criminal’s brush,” Dot said quietly, “but what others would you be tarred with?”

“I don’t know,” Valorous said. “My dad, I guess – that I killed the man who killed him. That my mother didn’t want me. And people still would have fucked me.”

“Would they?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because they could,” Valorous said. He was standing over Dot’s desk with the wood polish in one hand and the cloth in the other, both of his hands held loosely at his sides, his feet feeling rooted to the spot. The pit of his stomach was bubbling like it was suddenly filled with lava, and he felt a bit of bile in the back of his throat. “That’s why people fuck kids, right? Because they know they can, and that no one will stop them, and that it’s… So long as they pick the right ones, everyone will let them – society will let them. That’s what it means, when someone’s a criminal, or, or when they’re, um… I don’t know. It’s like an invisible mark, and it’s a kind of permission that everyone knows about, but doesn’t talk about. That you can fuck those kids, and hurt them, and no one will do anything.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“You’re not arguing with me?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Do you think that’s the way the world is?”

“I think if that’s the way it feels like the world is to you, there’s a reason for that,” Dot said quietly, and Valorous felt his shoulders, which had risen up and stiffened, loosen again. “Why do you think the kids who get targeted get those invisible marks?”

“I don’t know,” Valorous said. “Because they deserve it.”

“And do they?”

“Because it’s their destiny.”

“You said to me before that destiny is almost retroactively applied,” Dot pointed out. “That you never know for certain that something was actually destined until after the fact.”

“Yeah. No. I guess. Because— they’re sacrifices, I guess. If those kids are marked, and these kinds of people fuck up those kids, then they won’t go for the normal ones. The ones that don’t deserve it, the important ones, the ones that matter. And then it’s, I don’t know. Like, fair trade.”

“Wouldn’t it be fairer if no kids got fucked up at all?”

Valorous didn’t tell Dot that he was going to be sick, because she could read his fucking thoughts, so it wasn’t like she needed the forewarning. As he retched powerfully into one of the rubbish bags from the cleaning caddy that he’d grabbed and roughly opened, she went across the room to pour him some ice water.

He’d fallen to his knees on the floor, and he retched until there wasn’t anything in him anymore, until all that was coming up was watery bile, and his stomach felt like it had fucking turned inside out. His tongue tasted like stale acid, and he felt dizzy, and there was sweat dripping down his brow.

“My apartment isn’t clean,” Valorous said slightly hoarsely. “It’s filled with crap, and it’s a mess, and it’s… I barely go there.”

“Do you want to?”

“I want Cecil to go with me.”

Dot’s voice was pretty much the gentlest it had ever been, her eyes soft, as she offered, “Do you want me to help you ask him?”

Valorous’ eyes were tearing up as he nodded his head, and he felt pathetic as Dot gently took the bag of fucking hot vomit out of his hands, replacing it with the ice water and nodding for him to drink.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I’m a doctor, Val,” she reminded him. “Bag of hot vomit isn’t much in the scheme of things.”

That just made him cry harder, for some reason, strangely grateful tears, and he nodded silently as he swallowed down the water hard and rough, trying to make it hurt, trying to make the sensation hit him hard.

A few minutes later found Valorous in the seat across from Dot like usual, one of her blankets from the shelf by the door wrapped loosely around his shoulders. He’d suddenly felt very cold, and with the weight of the fleece around his back, he at least had stopped shivering. He’d wiped the tears off his cheeks, but there was still a sticky sensation from having cried, and it wouldn’t go away until he’d properly washed his face.

“Did you cry much as a child, as a teenager?” Dot asked gently.

Valorous shrugged, but thought about it.

As a kid, he’d cried as much as any kid cried. People sometimes expected his dad to pull that “boy’s don’t cry” stuff, but he never had – Valorous remembered when he’d dislocated his shoulder falling out of a tree, that he’d started crying. His dad had been so surprised and scared, running over, that he’d started crying too, and they’d both just sat there in the grass sobbing for a minute or two before he could pull himself together and help Valorous pop it back.

The smile on his hips pulled uncomfortably at the salt-sticky film over his face, and when he looked up, he saw that Dot was smiling too.

“How old were you?” she asked.

“Oh, not sure,” Valorous murmured. “Young. I think looking back that it might have been just after my mother left. Four. Three. I was a little kid – just old enough to climb the tree, maybe not quite old enough that he should have stepped back to let me.”

“So crying was okay with your dad. What about later, with your Uncle Jack and Aunt Noble?”

“Jack cries – he cries at movies and stuff, really ugly tears too. Sobs at weddings – not just family, I remember we got stuck in traffic once behind this lesbian wedding party and they had matching dresses with loads of flowers and stuff? He teared up and Noble was like, “God, really?” and we all made fun of him a bit while we passed him tissues.”

“Noble doesn’t cry much?”

“She doesn’t disapprove of it,” Valorous said. “It’s not her being tough or something, she just finds it really hard – she doesn’t find it easy to show any of her feelings, is kinda flat. She laughs at funerals.”

Dot blinked, and Valorous laughed a little. “Yeah?” she asked, and he nodded.

“Not on purpose. It’s a nervous thing, I think. She tries to hold it in, and it just makes her whole body shake, and she laughs. She cries then, her eyes water – everyone told her a lot of jokes at my dad’s funeral, funny stories and stuff. I didn’t really get it until later in the night, seeing her giggling and kind of going between smiling and grimacing, going between seeming like she found everything funny and then just doing these little sobs.”

Dot nodded her head, slowly, contemplatively, and then asked, in a graver tone, “And the king regent?”

Valorous didn’t say anything at first.

He had a piece of dry skin next to his left index fingernail, and he was staring at it, wanted to pick at it, to peel it off, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop once he started, that he’d end up degloving half his hand. He’d used to do that when he was a kid, had used to pick at his fingernails or the skin on his lips and around his fingers when he was nervous or overwhelmed.

Myrddin had put spell-caps around the tips of his fingers and on his mouth, so that if he tried, he got a sharp, sudden shock for his trouble, and he remembered he’d redirected it for a bit, had started to curl hair around his fingers and tug some of it out once he curled it so much it tangled and he couldn’t get it unknotted.

The regent had asked if they needed to shear him to keep him tidy, gripping a fistful of his hair and tilting Valorous’ head back to look up into his face, and Valorous had stopped doing it at all.

It reflected poorly on himself, but more importantly, on the palace, on the king, for him to look unkempt, for his fingers or his lips to look picked at or rough or scruffy or scabby.

“But I can just heal it,” he’d said when Myrddin had grabbed him by the wrist after he’d broken his thumb nail and ended up peeling half the thing back, leaving the pink flesh underneath exposed and a little bloody. “What does it matter if I do it if I can just—"

“Why don’t I simply kill you?” Myrddin had interrupted in soft, dangerous tones. “What does it matter, if I can easily bring you back?”

“It’s weakness,” Valorous told his knees in a mumble, his voice very quiet. “Crying in front of people – it tells them you’re weak, makes you a target. It’s messy, too, and people remember those imperfections, even if they’re not documented, and they often are documented.”

“In my office?”

“You’re making notes, aren’t you?”

“Not notes the king regent can read,” Dot pointed out, and Valorous exhaled, reluctantly nodding his head. “Tears, they’re a loss of control?”

“Yeah. Yeah, basically.”

“A bit like your nightmares,” Dot said, and Valorous furrowed his brow, glancing up and looking at Dot’s face, which was politely interested and engaged, but didn’t give him any clues as to what exactly she meant by that.

“How?” he asked.

“You used to get dosed with valerian and poppy at night, right? But Myrddin said that showed a lack of discipline, that you needed to learn to control your magical response, your nightmares.”

“How’s that the same? He was right.”

Dot made a little humming noise, kind of non-committal, with a little tilt of her head, and Valorous felt his muscles tense, his lips pressing tight together. He pulled the blanket more tightly around his shoulders, appreciating how heavy it was.

“You think I should have just kept having those reactions? I could have killed someone.”

“You had magic dampening charms when you boarded at school, and you said your friend Cicero had them too. I know cuffs or dampening jewellery can be uncomfortable, but you could have worn them just to sleep. I’m not saying you didn’t need to learn techniques to control your magic as well, merely that you didn’t have to learn that way and at that pace.

“After a nightmare, when you lashed out with magic, out of fear or anger, those were emotional outbursts, right? And Myrddin taught you to keep those outbursts in. Nightmares aren’t just something our brains do to torture us, Valorous – sometimes, they’re our brains’ way of exposing us to our own fears and anxieties, to let us problem solve. Your body has a lot of traumas buried in it, like splinters under the skin – expressing how those traumas make you feel, that’s the sort of thing that can help you work them out. You can’t heal with those splinters still inside you, not properly, not fully.”

“Mm,” Valorous said.

“You don’t agree?”

“Not sure.”

“That’s okay. No rush to decide.”

“I cry sometimes,” Valorous said.

“If it hurts enough – if you’re under enough strain.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you sometimes feel like you want to cry, but you can’t without that strain first?”

“Not sometimes.”

“All the time.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.”

He didn’t know how that made him feel, exactly. “Yeah.”

Dot said, “You wish you could cry easier, because you know it’s cathartic, right? How did you seek out that release when you were a knight, if it was considered uncontrolled? Was Myrddin always watching you?”

“Kind of. He was matching me most of the time, or had ways of making it feel like he was – and sometimes, he’d just skim it out of my head, if I’d been crying for no reason. I couldn’t not think about it when I was in the room with him. But if it was pain or exertion, that was an okay excuse.”

“What would he do if you cried without a good excuse?”

“Nothing. Not like… It wasn’t like he’d whip me.”

“No,” Dot said, too understanding. “You could have handled being whipped.”

“It was the way he looked at me,” Valorous said. “Cold. Cold, and distant, and… It hurt. It— It felt physical, even though it wasn’t, it was terrifying, made me feel like I was drowning, sometimes, when he looked at me like that. I was farther away, left behind, like. Like he’d left me on an island and gotten on a boat.”

“You wanted to be closer.”

“Yeah.”

“Did you start out on the island?”

“Yeah,” Valorous said. “I guess it’s… Yeah. I was always on the island, and sometimes he’d sail closer and act like he was going to make land, and then he never did.”

“Were you always attracted to him?”

“Don’t know.”

“He encouraged your attraction to him.”

“Yeah. Or— I think so. I don’t know.” There was a lump in his throat the size of a fist, and he almost couldn’t breathe. “Can we stop?”

“Of course,” said Dot immediately. “Ten minutes left of our session – would you like to go straight away, would you like me to leave you in here for some time alone?”

“No,” Valorous said, reflexive. “No, can you stay?”

“Yeah,” Dot said. “Want something to drink?”

“Nah.”

“Want to hear a camel story?”

Valorous’ smile was hidden behind his hand, but he still met Dot’s eyes again, because he knew she could see it in his. That she could see the way his eyes crinkled, that his eyes showed a lot more than someone’s his age were meant to.

“One bit Manny on the arse once,” said Dot, and Valorous laughed despite the churn of his belly. “The males can get a bit aggressive, during rut, and they’re big animals with a lot of teeth. He obviously turned away when he saw the mood the thing was in, just wasn’t fast enough.”

“He bit him hard?”

“Tore a strip out of his tunic. Left a big bruise.”

“That’s really funny.”

“He didn’t think so.”

“Did you?”

“God yeah. Pissed myself laughing.”

“You think he misses camels too?”

“Maybe not as much as I do. He won’t even come to the zoo with me and Faizah.”

“Can’t really blame him,” Valorous murmured.

“You want to talk to Cecil about your flat today, or leave it until another week?”

“Today.”

“Okay,” said Dot.

They sat in the silence together until the time ran out.