Major spoilers for LIE. You have been warned.

Today, evicted from his box of a studio apartment, he is Creon, having the world crumble in on him for just trying to follow the laws and right and wrong. Tomorrow he knows he will rise from the ashes—he already feels them burning his hands—as Apollo, with lyre-calloused fingers. His fingers already have callouses, he smiles, from working his craft, from the dirt of his art. From observing people… From bartending to get the cynicism just right, from living homeless to get the old rough edge back on his voice and demeanor.

The day after he will be worse off than the day before the day before that, as another Creon—the one with Medea's poison eating away his skin.

Every day he is a shadow.

Today is the last day he's given himself with them, the characters, killing his darlings with a formal goodbye before he rejoins himself. After everything that's happened recently, he knows that it's necessary. Painful, but necessary. So he takes himself to his favorite graveyard back home and exhumes the spirits behind names and epitaphs in characters crafted on the spot. It's his favorite pastime, although he always thought—hoped—that he'd be drawn to something happier.

Grigor—or Grigor-Antipode, as he has christened himself in internal monologues—stares at a grave so worn that the lettering is completely gone, leaving it eerily blank. He hadn't been lying back in Greece when he said that getting a theater and giving back to those who helped him was his dream. The lie had identified Plutus names as his angel investors. He had actually convinced itself it was true at the time, just to get the emotion across, so what the Drew girl saw was pretty much what she got. He'd be destroyed.

Now that he's an ex-convict it's about ten thousand times less likely to happen. But he'll find a way. If he was able to get out of north Philadelphia, he'll be able to get inside his own theater. The hard part is already done.

He's keeping the name, but he's got to get rid of the character.

Grigor-Antipode continues through the graveyard, his feet sinking into the soft ground. He stops in front of another grave and smiles wan.

Grigor Karakinos.

He still remembers the day his namesake died. At fifteen, Grigor-Antipode had spent more time at the theater than he did at his foster home. He was close to aging out, anyway, and here he always felt the freedom wash down his throat like a cool drink of water to someone who's thirsty. They were all running a dress rehearsal that day for The Prisoner of Second Avenue, where the teenager had a silent role as one of Mel's antagonizers. He wore a black windbreaker over a sweater vest and white button up from another rehearsal, his high school production of Inherit the Wind. There, in a smaller auditorium, he played reporter E. K. Hornbeck. Grigor, or Old Man G.—a cringeworthy epithet, reflecting now—had bristled at the sight of mini-me showing up with a tattered jacket and incongruous immaculate hair to match Hornbeck's clothing. From then on, he had gone to school rehearsals with the messy hair of his Second Avenue teen character, arguing that Hornbeck's rebellion more than accounted for what he did and didn't do with his hair. Still, G. had been unhappy that Teen G. was playing a "young" character who was in his thirties and grumbled darkly about high school theater, but he took on Hornbeck along with all of the other characters in the teenager's head—and Hornbeck was by the far the most developed and the most cancerous. This was why the old man started him off with smaller, more austere characters and helped him build up to the bigger, richer ones: the smaller ones would get out of his system more quickly. The bigger ones would possess him. He wasn't ready for those. In another gesture to combat Hornbeck, G. gave him the black windbreaker to wear for his Second Avenue character, firmly requesting character development on that end. The teen knew that G. was pulling him in a direction for this one—the black windbreaker mirrored James Dean's red one in Rebel Without A Cause—and he let him do so. He even turned around and made the swap for Hornbeck, playing him more bitter, less snarky, as if he not only knew the world for what it was but cared a little more than he showed. As if he had lived roughly.

But that night, for Second Avenue, Old Man G. never saw the plumage of costumes, many of which he'd provided. That night, the teen thought about not only the clothing he'd been given, but the character. Neil Simon's script didn't call for some punk kid to goad the protagonist. Most of the principal actors would have preferred going without and made no bones about it through their whispers; they were annoyed by that teen who always hung around. But everybody reluctantly agreed with G. that his audition was dynamite, only he wasn't quite the age that all of the other characters were. The only way to appease the old man was to add a silent character.

G. had kept a very active presence at rehearsals, especially when it got closer to performances. Everybody had waited fifteen minutes for him.

He had never showed.

Not after fifteen minutes, not after an hour, not after rehearsal was finished.

Hornbeck became clearer to Teen G. that night than he or anyone else he'd ever studied ever had. The old man couldn't catch up with him and mold him back into himself. For the first time, he walked home still in character. And the character didn't stop. When his foster mother came into his room that night without knocking he threw her some snide comment that was Hornbeck's.

And when she told him flatly that that theater creep had died, he wasn't sad or shocked, just thoughtful.

Grigor-Antipode was twelve when he met his future namesake. He wore the same jacket he had just attempted to steal on stage that night, and the old man had sent him home with it. After work as an extra, the boy had gone out to the library and got an armful of monologue books. He worked through them all in a static night, fueled by some sort of lightning charged through his veins. When it closed for the night he retreated into the restroom and bounced words off the walls. Each character came so quickly to him that he found himself forgetting things, things he couldn't get out of his head since the day his parents died. He grew in age for the graying men and fell back for the teenage rebels. He never had to mark the lines to keep track of his character intentions and objectives. It was something that came straight from his nature, and he couldn't not do it if he tried. He didn't understand how it was hard for the others at the theater or why the director had to tell them to feel. Didn't they have this same ability as he did? Weren't they paying attention to all the things they could draw to the surface from themselves?

The next day he went back to G.'s theater and showed him what he learned. What puzzled him was the troubled expression on the old man's face as he spewed a hundred other people at him.

He kept waiting for the smile, diving into new monologues until the old man showed some appreciation for what he had done. None came, and he finally scowled and asked, "What gives?"

The old man shook his head. "Almost none of these is age appropriate. Let me give you one of my books."

His anger gave way to confusion. "Age appropriate?"

"My boy," G. sighed, "you assume all of the troubles of those who are much, much older than you. You absorb their pains, then say their words. It is wasted effort, though, when today you will not be cast as a sixty-year-old man."

A smile crept along Antipode's small young lips.

Later, G. had elaborated on that answer. He spoke of the power of empathy. He said that it's nearly impossible to understand and internalize the mindset of an age he has not yet reached. Recalling younger years is easier, since he has been there. He smiled, then, accentuating all of the wrinkles on his face, and said that he could tell that his young protégé would not have appreciated this answer as an impatient boy.

When the then-teenager laughed at this, the old man raised his finger and said, "See? You remember what it was to be that age."

That was the last time he tried to act older. Later he'd use the same retort to adults who said "Damn kids" when they caught him graffitiing walls or playing a prank. It made things easier. It made him happier.

And remembering these, he had been smiling the moment after being told that G. died.

It didn't really hit him for a long time, definitely not for all the times G. never came to rehearsal after that. Because if he isn't here, Teen-Antipode always thought, he's definitely somewhere else. But in that time, he learned to forget about himself. He forgot all about the exercises G. gave him to get out of character, to stop acting.

For a while before it had looked like he could have lived as a person, not a house of characters. But with G. gone, he went haywire. He forgot about the smaller characters and started leaping ahead to the bigger ones again. By the time he saw it happening, it was too late. They had sunk in too far.

Eventually he made time to visit Grigor's grave more because he felt like he should than he actually wanted to. And even then he wasn't sad like he expected himself to be. It was just a name on a slab of stone. He could dig the name and the character up from the dirt, rescuing them from obscurity. Then the old man wasn't really dead, not if he lived in somebody else as a character.

From that moment on the grave felt like home. It should have been strange to him, but it wasn't. When he thought of Old Man Grigor he thought of a fatter, grayer man with skin wrinkled by smiles. It could still be him in half a lifetime.

A few months afterward, Teen-Antipode returned to this idea. Sixteenth birthday blew him more off course than Aeolus could ever boast when he discovered that he couldn't live on just what the theater paid him. More concerns branched from there. But he never forgot. Once he was sure he didn't have to live on the streets, Antipode got the paperwork and legally changed his name.

So little has changed since then. Even today, here, in the same graveyard, Grigor-Antipode recognizes the more cynical side of him as Hornbeck.

His eyes refocus on the grave, and he reads the line below Grigor's name:

"Let the tears which fell… be sacred."

Charles Dickens. Oliver Twist.

Grigor-Antipode remembers the full quote from a former production of Oliver! in which he played Bill Sikes. His internal council of characters had railed against him for accepting the part. As a result he'd thought himself so woefully miscast for the role he'd read the book and memorized all of the passages detailing Sikes to compensate. But somewhere between pages he had grudgingly fallen in love, and he found he couldn't coldly cut out the other characters' sections as if they didn't matter. Maybe Dickens had him under his thumb, or maybe Grigor had Dickens under his thumb. Either way it felt like a betrayal, to Dickens, to Old Man, to all of the other identities he'd assumed over the course of his career, to everything that had gotten him out of that cardboard box next to a dumpster on the corner of Ridge and Clearfield. Antipode knows that he's one of those lost passages, that he only got out because somebody once paid attention to him. So he read with all his might.

Standing there, he finishes Grigor's epitaph. In it, the orphans had cried and embraced one another, but somehow the pain had left them.

He always likes to think that the embrace made them whole, a conglomerate of struggling traits and temptations that made a person. Literally it wasn't applicable anyway, since he never got on well with his foster siblings. There was always an unspoken competition between them, seeing who could be the best kid and who would stay the longest. No, the orphans here are those in his head, the thousand souls, screaming, each fighting to break free and take over his body. The thousand souls who shivered and all laid down with him on the frosted ground, who cried with him when at fourteen he was carried by the scruff of his neck to a padded theater seat where he slept for two days straight, who cried again when he turned eighteen. They, too, vie for approval. Some shove others down. But they work together, coordinating their voices to speak at the same time in a mighty roar. It gives him a headache, everything that exists inside his head.

Yet to be rid of it is to be launching himself into the gladiator ring naked and without a shield.

Two years later Grigor-Antipode has the name-changing papers. He's lying back in a chair in the box office on a slow day at Jones Theater and holding them close to his face, squinting at the fine print, physically ill at the thought of another year of feckless self-itemization. He is about to give Grigor back. It's nothing more than a name anymore. Been too long; the old man is never going to be on a marquee. He's giving it back because he no longer deserves to hold it. He's not the man G. was, and now he knows he never will be.

Casting off the thousand souls within him was just as painful as he feared. For a full year he stopped acting and fell back on his second job of waiting tables. He went into withdrawals more times than he could count. For the first month, they were nonstop. It seemed like it never slowed down, the way his head swarmed with inky blackness from sheer effort of distancing himself every time he saw a movie or read a book.

Finally it did slow down. The characters stopped pecking at his psyche, screaming to get inside. From there it took an even greater effort not to drink himself to death, that puffed-up tradition of out-of-work actors before him. The gaps didn't close by themselves. It was painful. It forced him to develop a personality of his own just to have something to talk about on job interviews or dates. He started small… favorite color, favorite fruit. Now he's up to favorite animal. Most show habits that imply fascinating character qualities. And it's hard to say which one is the best when he really appreciates them all.

But keeping hold of any personality whatsoever is impossible when Grigor-Antipode is working the box office like he is today. At best it's lots of free time between visits, during which he almost creates characters to keep himself occupied. But he doesn't. He promised himself.

"Hi."

Grigor puts down the papers and sits up.

Some guy had crept in when he wasn't paying attention. He's got dark hair, mid-thirties, and looks down and scratches his ear as he talks again. "I wanna purchase a ticket for tomorrow's performance of Bacchae," he mumbles.

Accountant. Easily pegged with the requisite ink stains, too spiffy for a writer.

"Matinee or evening?" Grigor asks, shuffling around for the seat plans.

"Evening."

At worst, box office duty is tedious. Saying the same things to the same people over and over again. It kills anything that made a person different from another.

It takes him a second to realize that the patron is still talking to him. When he does, he realizes that what he heard was a series of vocalizations that didn't resemble words. "What?" he asks.

"Are you in the show?" the accountant repeats.

Grigor adjusts the pencil behind his ear. "Yeah. Dionysus."

"The main character?" he asks in surprise. "What are you doing in the box office?"

"I volunteered," Grigor lies as he tears the ticket off the printer. "Here. Hope you'll enjoy the show."

The accountant jerks his head up and down in a short, tight movement.

Grigor's eyes trail after the accountant, fighting guilt. It's simpler to lie. Better to let people continue thinking that acting is glamorous. That being the lead actor in a small theater gives a person some kind of clout so he's excused from doing more than one job like everybody else.

More time passes. He settles back into his chair.

Once he gives the old man's name up, he's giving up on his greatest dream. Giving up on everybody who ever helped him. On the idea that there was any purpose to him reaching adulthood.

All his life, he's been concerned with survival. Whether on the streets, in foster homes, in tiny, non-heated or air-conditioned apartments, or the theater, he's always done what it takes to make it. Always wanted to do what it takes to make it.

Now it doesn't seem so important.

His cell phone rings. Grigor doesn't want to move to pick it up even though it's just lying on his chest. But it might be the director. With a sigh he sits up and lets the phone fall to his lap, then inches his arm toward it and slides it open.

"Is now a good time?" mutters a voice, alto, female, slight vocal fry, her accent whipping him backward into another world. The chair skitters away from the window as his feet kicked without recall.

He still knows that voice. He never forgets a voice, just in case he wants to borrow it.

"I never thanked you," says Niobe. "I never thanked you for what you did for me."

It's the plea deal she's talking about. Got him tried in Greece while X—and T—

His mind catches on the names that still knit beads of sweat at his temples. This though both of them were dead.

For him, misdemeanor charge and a year in the clink. Probation and work release for Niobe.

"I know you're having trouble," Niobe continues.

"What are you talking about?" he finally asks, loosing breath from his lungs. Only a few seconds into the conversation, and she's already struck a nerve.

Like she knew the first thing about his life other than what he told her the few times he helped her with reproductions in the workshop. He hadn't told her anything more than he told anyone else, which wasn't much.

There is a shudder in her sigh. "Please, let me finish," she says.

Grigor stays silent.

"I know who I am. My career may be over, but you... you..."

She stops. Straggles off thoughts neither of them can voice or bear to remember.

"Niobe, I didn't do anything. You deserve a second chance."

"Grigor," she snaps.

He stops, struck by her conviction.

"I know what you've wanted for all these years. And I want you to have it."

Grigor wonders where she's getting at with this. It's too late for follow-up phone calls, friendly check-ups. And Niobe is the last person to reach out to anybody.

"I need to thank you, actually," she laughs a little. "Not just for that, but for the past few weeks. The courage you've given me. I wouldn't have been able to…"

He doesn't speak to egg her on. He doesn't dare. There's something here, some vestige of the feeling he got when he pretended that the Plutus list was comprised of angel investors. A glimmer of real had eaten away at him, then, until he was shouting about how his dream was ruined and he believed it was so.

Forgetting that his dream was ruined years ago.

There's something in her voice, in what she's saying, that mirrors what the Drew girl had been saying that day when she poked around too much, that makes him stop. He feels fear. The gravity of change.

"I talked to my friend, Grigor."

He feels it, something, although he doesn't yet know what it is.

"I talked to her. I let her see me. I let her see what I've been hiding from everybody else. I just let her see it for herself and didn't say a word."

He knows he needs to give her time, but it's harder and harder to keep quiet.

"Thank you for making me brave. I guess... I guess I know that out of all of this could come something more beautiful than I could sculpt."

Tears start at his eyes. He closes them, wondering what's possessing him to lose it.

"She's going to help with your theater. I kept pestering until she promised me."

He doesn't feel shame for crying. He is alone in the box office, and Niobe is a close friend. In a matter of minutes, she is as close a friend as he's had since the old man passed on.

"That means she's going to be very hands-off. She's content to throw as much money at you as she can without actually coming out and helping."

"Niobe," Grigor says hoarsely, "I don't know what to say."

For a long time Niobe doesn't speak. Then she begins, so quietly at first Grigor doesn't think he hears correctly. "I'm sorry I waited so long."

He can't speak, really can't speak this time.

"Promise me you will live happily. Promise me that two lives and careers won't be ruined by what happened at Ph—Phideas," she stammered, tears pinning her voice to her cords."You care just as much about acting as I do about art. I didn't understand how anyone could care for acting until I watched you. I didn't appreciate it myself until you helped me. You gave me something to fight for, and you allowed me to win."

"Niobe," he tries again, in vain.

She sighs. "My friend will give a lot of money. You might not need other investors. If you do need more, she'll go out and find more. She has friends."

There is a click on the line. It takes a few seconds to register with Grigor that she has hung up. Swiping at his cheeks, he peers out to the lobby and nearly jolts with surprise at its tidiness. It's like a tornado, the magnitude of this news, sending everything into a mess, giving him the feeling that his life has been both created and destroyed.

Sinking down below the window he continues to cry, but it's different now. Withdrawal. Rebound. He wants, needs to have her name, her character, her quiet strength, her radiance to delve into, but he doesn't know how. Not when she's a woman and all of his dead characters with any credibility are men. He can't be a Niobe without drag, his masculine features would always be a parody of her gentle femininity when it wasn't a parody at all, when she made him.

Some of his thousand souls had been women, the sylphs who motivated and shaped his characters without ever showing themselves. But though Niobe would be content to stay below the surface, shy as she is, he knows she doesn't deserve that.

He doesn't know how to pay her back without the honor of her name, and he despairs. He feels, as put in a line from a Dylan Thomas poem he read when he was studying the role of Huw in How Green Was My Valley, "green and dying."

Building a cast is a process. Grigor-Antipode never really cared much for X—, apart from what he had to fake in the flirt for survival, but he feels for her the first time he tries directing. A friend of his, Evan, wrote the script, so at least he didn't have to do that, too, although there are so many cheesy lines that ring false that he wishes he did.

Just a few years of it, and Grigor-Antipode is sick of being himself. The name change had gotten shoved to the side but everything else, de facto...

He could assume so many different characters to prove that Evan wasn't writing people. He was just writing words. But Grigor is trapped into the conventional lifestyle of one character. And Grigor could hardly consider himself a character.

This is just another step toward the theater. He's building his reputation, branching out. He knows he's getting there. Once he networks, gets to know people, rounds up a group of cast and crew, gets a few productions under his belt…

The next contender comes out. She's young and tiny, with a tangle of dark hair engulfing her figure and nearly covering her face. Possible character actor. "I'm Maia Bick," she mutters, shoving forth a resumé.

Grigor smiles at the name. Resumé handwritten, writing so legible and uniform that it might have been typed. Spaces perfect.

Most of the supporting characters are male, and the one who's a female is supposed to be in her forties.

She's here for Phoebe, the oracular female lead. He can feel it.

Phoebe is also hopeless simpering ingenue, butchering Grigor's vision for the play. Next time he'll hire a professional writer. For sure.

"I didn't bring a monologue," Maia says. Her hand taps her knee, and she looks down at her shoe. Her lips barely move. It's almost like she's trying to talk out of the corner of her mouth. "Evan gave me a copy of the script. I'd like to read Phoebe's monologue on page 47."

Grigor's eyebrows rise. Usually people don't read from the script until callbacks. He pulls his copy of the script from the pile on the armrest of the chair next to his. "Uh, okay."

This response terrifies her. Her shoulders slump forward and she swallows and nods, taking a deep breath.

"Just start whenever you're ready," Grigor says, feeling badly for being less than encouraging. It's one of the bigger monologues, too, with a dynamic emotional turnaround, which isn't exactly helping her case.

"Yeah. Um." She clears her throat. Then clears it again, squeezing her eyes shut before popping them open again.

In the moment before she begins, Grigor thumbs past the headshot—hair no smaller there—to peek at the resumé again.

Again, his eyebrows rise. Princeton dropout.

Major: biology.

Most recent GPA: 3.7.

Dropout, but not a flunkout.

There are three credits on the resumé, and two are for staged readings. One is for a name part. Only one is a Princeton production—the others are local theaters—and that was for a bit part.

When she starts to speak, she catches him off guard. He flips around in the script until he reaches the page she's at. Then he looks up at her and notices that both her hands are free and trembling.

She has it memorized.

At first glance, there's nothing special about her. Her stage presence is nearly zero, and she doesn't project any more than she did from when she was talking just a moment ago.

'Go back to school!' his mind screams. 'At least you've got that going for you!'

But there are other traps, he knows. An old colleague of his with a Master's degree in theater died of cirrhosis. Had turned to drinking when he wasn't able to get a job, which was always.

And as he forces his thoughts to shut off in order to actually listen to her, Grigor notes that something is off about her. There are more wrinkles in her face, and there's an exhausted hunch to her posture. She had come in that way, but that isn't the way a nineteen-year-old girl looks and acts.

It's... oracular.

He sees it.

Intent.

Quiet, but she's someone. Someone specific. Someone other than herself. Maybe even some version of the two-dimensional character Evan wrote in his stupid script.

But she isn't Maia.

Maia might not even be real.

Raising his fingers to his chin, Grigor sits forward and watches.

Watches, transfixed, as two tears spill from her left eye. Then one from her right.

She's nailing this monologue, words he can't hear, and she isn't even raising her voice.

Then she collapses suddenly to the floor.

He shifts nervously around in his seat. Fumbling for his phone, hoping that his finger will land on the nine.

She stirs.

Anger flashes through him. For a moment he stares at his knees, trying not to mutter, "False alarm, false alarm, false alarm."

But he can't look away for long, can't hang onto a panic grudge for long, not as she finishes the monologue twitching, mumbling, then lifting her head to speak the last line. Then another shriek before her head drops again.

A shiver runs down his spine.

Phoebe.

Maybe it's not the Phoebe Evan wants, but it's his Phoebe.

Grigor's train of thought stops when she rises. She doesn't rid herself of the wrinkle in her face or the hunch, but there's a sudden glow to her eyes that's younger, eager. "Was I..." she begins. Then shakes her head. "I mean… uh… thanks," she mumbles, darting off the stage.

From the wings followed: "Shit."

She's got potential, he admits, though he knows this is bad for her. Inhaling a character without the training to remove it. Grigor has heard of actors killing themselves after going out on stage and playing the same tortured characters every night, living the nightmares over and over again and feeling the tears corrode their insides.

She acts because she needs to. He recognizes it. She didn't leave school for no reason, after all, and all of the acting credits on her resumé are really recent.

She's losing herself.

Grigor remembers himself at ten, remembers sneaking into foster parents' room to clutch their diaries in shaking hands, hoping that reading what they want in a kid will be like looking in a mirror.

Suddenly Grigor is the parent with the diary, the desire for a particular child, and Maia is the kid herself.

He is glad he is no longer swarmed by the thoughts and motives of others.

And someday she will be, too.

It's been so long.

So long.

Finally the theater is ready to open. G.'s, like he promised. Original play, small troupe. A different friend wrote the script for free.

It's two hours before the performance, and house will open in an hour—not the customary half hour. He figured on giving everybody extra time to gush over the interior. He had racked up some serious bills in renovating the place, after all.

The theater is a little old theater. He likes characterizing it as a person, as Grigor a little old man, with a smile and the wrinkles. He feels a little guilty, but at least he isn't internalizing this character. It's not adding to the problem he used to have. Besides, old habits die hard.

It isn't perfect. He had to hire as few people as possible, and he himself is doubling as the director and producer. The costume designer is a temp, another friend helping out until he can get a "real" job. And he wouldn't be able to mooch off his writer friend forever. The actors are all here on just a little pay, more out of a favor to him than for anything they can get out of it. They had logged a lot of rehearsal time, too, since everybody wants to exceed the audience's expectations. Otherwise they'd all be out of a job… especially the ones with the thinner resumes, which is most of them. One guy has a few summer stock credits to his name; Grigor-Antipode milked that on the Playbill. Some are fresh out of high school. A couple are fresh out of college. Some are around college-graduate age but without the corresponding education. They're all young and idealistic except for one, who is old and idealistic.

Maia is at the forefront of them, the oldest member of his troupe. But her rehearsals are shorter, and after every role she attends a special "reintegration" lesson with Grigor, teaching her to give all of her roles back to the script.

One day Grigor hopes that she'll go back to school. Out of loyalty she probably won't, and she still likes acting even though she isn't allowed to hold onto her characters.

But the street is filling up quickly, and it's still early. A lot of people are showing up. He's confident that this will work.

Nancy Drew is here. He smiles. When she sees him, she rushes over. Her embrace is long, and he senses lingering guilt. Not that it's justified. Her testimony had helped the plea deal actualize. When she pulls away, he notices the ring on her finger. He looks over and sees her date, who apparently is more than a date, crossing his arms and frowning just slightly, a healthy dose of jealousy on his face. Grigor laughs and detaches himself, going over to declare he comes in peace.

Soon he is whisked away to talk with other guests and patrons.

Niobe is here, too. Today she wears her hair free and long, accentuating a small face and the wide in her smile. Her strapless purple dress swirls around her ankles from an empire waist with tiny silver trim, the bodice heliotrope satin and the skirt lilac chiffon.

Goddess of the harvest, the Demeter she hated playing and hated being even more.

Trying not to cry or crush her intestines in the hug, Grigor forces himself to step back.

Though she's a few years older, he'd now take an oath she was younger. She is the mother who didn't have a diary he could read and didn't want him for a mold to fit, who gave indiscriminately. She is the sister who never competed with him, never put the blame on him and got him kicked out of the house. She is the god he worships and, he thinks with a smile, now fears.

"Niobe! You made it!" he says, painting cheer over emotion. "I'm sorry to say that we're not offering a Greek tragedy today, or a Greek comedy, both of which might make you feel more at home."

"Less at home," she laughs wryly. "I'm sure this will be great."

His eyebrows rise. "More sure than me, apparently."

They fall into an easy silence. No talking, not about anything, especially not about Phideas. Too much trauma there.

His voice lowers as he breaks it. "There'll always be a place for you here. I know how you feel about your place in the art world." He wrings his hands in front of him and looks down at them. Being himself is so difficult, now that he feels the last of his mentor—his name—slipping away. "But here you can build worlds and make all the art you want in it. All of the places in history. They're yours."

"You make it so hard to refuse. The owner of Simmons Theatre in London was a visiting professor of mine. She just hired me as a set designer. Wonderful fortune, wonderful work, as is this," Niobe says while admiring the theater.

"Grigor's name is on the marquee. Yours will be over the house doors."

"Really?"

"Yep. Greek spelling, of course."

She tilts her head. "Isn't that unusual?"

"So what?" Grigor grins. "No one can stop us from being trailblazers. Besides, your name has to go somewhere."

Niobe starts to laugh before realizing he isn't. Sheepishly she looks down. "They poisoned us, but we survived," she says quietly.

He squeezes her arm. It's true. X— and T— had sniped down 999 of him. 999 of the souls that made him special to others and a powerhouse on the stage. He knew he was somewhere in there. Perhaps he always had known. But now he feels a warmth spreading through him as if he's regaining circulation for the first time in years. He is no longer the plain white of the script page. Color fills him in, as man.

999 souls, dead. And it would dishonor them to pretend they didn't matter. They had gotten him through the first twenty-six years of his life, gotten him to the point where he could deal with the rest on his own. What his own is, he still barely knows. He had skipped the angsty Who am I? teenage years only to return to them much, much later. If he's lucky, he'll be able to catch up in time to face a mid-life crisis.

His acting days are pretty long past, so no new souls capture him enough for him to borrow. A few come close, in the firm voice of a finely-written script, in the glimmer of a moment when one of his actors completely loses himself to the character and he springs up from his seat. The familiar beauty of it pours over him. He has to pinch himself hard and love the pain of being real.

The soul left is his. He's sure of it.

And there's someone else who helped with that. Someone who wrote to the jailed, jaded version of him, expressing faith. He doesn't know why she listened when she was there for another purpose, but somehow he had convinced himself she cared enough for him to justify letters back.

Grigor turns to Niobe. "You know who else we should thank?"

Right away she understands. They turn and look for Nancy.

She is nowhere to be found.

"Wasn't she planning on attending the performance?" Niobe asks.

"Maybe she had to dash out."

"So soon before doors?"

"You know," Grigor bites his lip thoughtfully, "I read something about her solving another case in Iceland just a few days after she left Greece. I remember wondering how she ever got sleep."

"You think she got called away?"

"It's my best guess." His eyes dart up to the marquee, reading Karakinos, and he now at last reclaims himself. Finally, the old man can have his name back. But... not quite ready yet.

Death will take his name, and soon. For now, he remembers. Remembers the spirit of a man who put more money in the theater than he ever got back and was repaid with more happiness than he could have dreamed. Whose life was the paint of backdrops, the silk hems of costumes, the ink of story, the moving air of all the untouchables who had been born here, invincible, as alter egos, more to the actors than just characters.

Sensing the gravity of this moment for him, Niobe steps away and examines the architecture of G.—Grigor's theater.

Grigor-Antipode walks in the opposite direction to the stone on the corner, which is covered. The workers must have forgotten to take the cloth away. Kneeling, he unveils the plaque, revealing the Dickens quote he had remembered in the graveyard all those years ago.

"Let the tears which fell, and the broken words which were excluded in the long close embrace between the orphans, be sacred. A father, sister, and mother, were gained, and lost, in that one moment. Joy and grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears: for even grief arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all character of pain."

AN: So I try not to go back and edit things too drastically after posting, 'cos my name's not George Lucas, but 55,000 words later, I realized I had totally skewered Niobe's character and turned her into the Demeter she loathed. High time to tweak things around now that I've returned from Delphi, so to speak. The structure's still a bit wonky, and I've opted not to add Bess, but I did distinguish Grigor from Grigor a bit more. Namely, "the teen" became [Teen] Grigor-Antipode, and Grigor is now Old Man G.

Antipode because Grigor and Grigor are opposites since they are separate people, and their natures are distinct when they're both alive at the same time. And 'cos Odyssey game.

Niobe's probably my favorite character in LIE, but Grigor is easily the most fascinating. Actors are wonderfully interesting people. I actually have no idea what I was going for with the voice here-maybe the distance is to match his character, his confusion over who he is because of his inability to stop acting. This piece became a lot bigger than what I first intended for it, and Niobe was not going to make an appearance. Now that she has, though, I want to write another piece in which she and Grigor interact. I think that there's a pretty big gap between their almost antagonistic relationship in the game and the closer friendship they have here, so now I want to fill that gap.

Why is Nancy engaged here? No clue. It's a time device, and it felt right. Also, the audition scene and obsession with perfection is inspired a bit by Black Swan. Excellent movie about the psychology of performance.