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Feb. 24th, 2019 01:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dantealighierikitmarlowes on tumblr said:
Sam had been…wary of Sibyl, at first, because she seemed worryingly prone to niceness. She was beautiful and well-bred and put-together; and what other people might mistake for fussiness Sam saw for a kind of razor-sharp organization. Years on the beat had taught him the value of intelligently categorized information; he recognized in Sibyl’s habits a similarity to those of a practiced investigator. Oh, they were after different things— the solution to a case, the capture of the perpetrator; the right strings to pull and buttons to push to get a particular proposal through this or that committee. But both relied on the presence and placement of precise information. The difference, and what had set Sam’s teeth on edge at the beginning, was that Sibyl was, unfailingly, nice. She’d socialize with people she hated, agree with stupid statements and flawed arguments Sam knew, he knew she saw right through. Sibyl was sharp as a tack and deceptively eloquent, she had no truck with this sort of nonsense. She’d told Sam as much. And for a while he’d thought that whatever this was it bore a distressing resemblance to the behavior of the sort of aristocrat who would let all sorts of atrocity slide under the pretext of civility— who would smile and nod and politely disagree, while under their watchfully averted eyes the machine of great crimes revved up its engines.
It had taken him a while to bring it up with her. Though she wrinkled her nose at the sausage metaphor, by the time he got to the end of his speech— and it was a speech, really, he’d practiced it and everything, because as much as Sam Vimes prided himself on the stony-facedness that was the hallmark of his ancestry he had a tendency to forget himself in Sibyl’s presence— she was smiling a smile he’d only seen her wear at moments of particular satisfaction. She’d taken his hand in hers and, as ever, he couldn’t help noticing the difference: small and dark and calloused enveloped by pale and soft and well-maintained. After a brief raised eyebrow at the state of his bitten-to-the-quick nails (at which Sam shrugged sheepishly) she’d squeezed his hand and grinned wider, almost conspiratorial, and said:
“You know, dear, nice has its uses.”
And that it did. Because what Sam Vimes, even with his copper’s eye, had neglected to notice at first was that Sibyl used nice in the way that Carrot used a crossbow— as a weapon, inconspicuous and deadly precise. He’d known since they met that she and Vetinari had grown up together, but until now he’d never quite realized the extent of the similarities between them. Vetinari’s chilly demeanor, the sense of danger he exuded, was if anything less effective than Sibyl’s effervescence, her fussy letter-writing and her high teas and her little black book full of information Sam ventured to guess might be more important to the daily workings of Ankh-Morpork than all the files in the Oblong Office. And all of it hinged on the linchpin of niceness— Sibyl’s brand of niceness, specifically, which in a manner quite similar to the sort Sam Vimes detested could hide all sorts of things. Or— not hide, so much as cloak, sugarcoat, convince. Vimes had never really stopped to consider that such deception might be a two-way street.
Once, Sam saw Sibyl convince an aristocrat who owned dozens of tenement blocks (full to the definitely-only-semilegal teeming with the poor and downtrod, all struggling to make rent artificially higher than a troll on Slab) to donate ten times as much as Sam makes in a year to a charitable hospital she and her friends were organizing. Said aristocrat’s exploited tenants, the citizens he’d been leeching off for years— the hospital was put in place to help them, among others. She’d persuaded the man to remedy years of unimaginable systemic cruelty, to part with money he valued more than anything living, through that special sort of niceness. Sam couldn’t touch the man because there was nothing technically illegal going on; Vetinari couldn’t either, because it would have been politically compromising. But Sibyl could. And she did.
Sam doesn’t understand it the way Sibyl does, sure— he’ll never be able to rub shoulders with people he’d rather be putting in cuffs (though the law hasn’t yet caught up with him), or smile when he’d rather scowl. (At least not for a period of time longer than a state dinner.) But he’s come to realize that there’s power in the way Sibyl operates, real and tangible power that may be less official than his or Vetinari’s, but that’s there nonetheless. Sometimes more there even than Law, or Order. Really, Polite Society is a beast a bit like one of Sibyl’s dragons: Sam won’t pretend to know it like she does, but he’d be a fool to write it off because he can’t wrap his head around it. Years watching in awe as his wife re-shapes the world over brunch and high tea (and some nasty burns incurred when he tried to pet one of the more excitable members of the Ramkin— whatever you call a group of swamp dragons) have taught him that.
write me sam and sibyl!!!!!
Sam Vimes has not ever thought of himself as a nice man. Partly because his image of nice men skews toward some vague impression of a banker, or a lawyer, someone clean-shaven and well-dressed and utterly out of place lurking in the shadows of Ankh-Morpork in a small-hours thunderstorm, which is of course an essential habit of any copper worth his salt— and partly because he’d always assumed that there was no room for niceness in his line of work. He considered it to be something like the moral equivalent of one of C.M.O.T. Dibbler’s sausages. Whatever…whatever went into them, you could always slap the label of “sausage” on it, and sell it for tuppence, and be done. Similarly, you could get away with all sorts of nasty behavior in this world, as long as you were nice about it. It was amazing, what went on under the banner heading of niceness. Lord Rust was nice— or he was nice to the people who mattered, so, not Sam Vimes— and look at the sort of thing he spent his days doing. People like that made Vimes prefer the cobblestone-variety criminal, because at least he didn’t pretend he was going for your throat for any other reason than the fact that he was a lowlife and wanted to stay out of prison. None of this nonsense about honor— or, worse, civility. You knew where you stood with him, and you didn’t have to hold your tongue out of concern for that idiotically touchy game of moron’s chess which Vetinari calls politics and Sam calls something a good deal less polite.
It had taken him a while to bring it up with her. Though she wrinkled her nose at the sausage metaphor, by the time he got to the end of his speech— and it was a speech, really, he’d practiced it and everything, because as much as Sam Vimes prided himself on the stony-facedness that was the hallmark of his ancestry he had a tendency to forget himself in Sibyl’s presence— she was smiling a smile he’d only seen her wear at moments of particular satisfaction. She’d taken his hand in hers and, as ever, he couldn’t help noticing the difference: small and dark and calloused enveloped by pale and soft and well-maintained. After a brief raised eyebrow at the state of his bitten-to-the-quick nails (at which Sam shrugged sheepishly) she’d squeezed his hand and grinned wider, almost conspiratorial, and said:
“You know, dear, nice has its uses.”
And that it did. Because what Sam Vimes, even with his copper’s eye, had neglected to notice at first was that Sibyl used nice in the way that Carrot used a crossbow— as a weapon, inconspicuous and deadly precise. He’d known since they met that she and Vetinari had grown up together, but until now he’d never quite realized the extent of the similarities between them. Vetinari’s chilly demeanor, the sense of danger he exuded, was if anything less effective than Sibyl’s effervescence, her fussy letter-writing and her high teas and her little black book full of information Sam ventured to guess might be more important to the daily workings of Ankh-Morpork than all the files in the Oblong Office. And all of it hinged on the linchpin of niceness— Sibyl’s brand of niceness, specifically, which in a manner quite similar to the sort Sam Vimes detested could hide all sorts of things. Or— not hide, so much as cloak, sugarcoat, convince. Vimes had never really stopped to consider that such deception might be a two-way street.
Once, Sam saw Sibyl convince an aristocrat who owned dozens of tenement blocks (full to the definitely-only-semilegal teeming with the poor and downtrod, all struggling to make rent artificially higher than a troll on Slab) to donate ten times as much as Sam makes in a year to a charitable hospital she and her friends were organizing. Said aristocrat’s exploited tenants, the citizens he’d been leeching off for years— the hospital was put in place to help them, among others. She’d persuaded the man to remedy years of unimaginable systemic cruelty, to part with money he valued more than anything living, through that special sort of niceness. Sam couldn’t touch the man because there was nothing technically illegal going on; Vetinari couldn’t either, because it would have been politically compromising. But Sibyl could. And she did.
Sam doesn’t understand it the way Sibyl does, sure— he’ll never be able to rub shoulders with people he’d rather be putting in cuffs (though the law hasn’t yet caught up with him), or smile when he’d rather scowl. (At least not for a period of time longer than a state dinner.) But he’s come to realize that there’s power in the way Sibyl operates, real and tangible power that may be less official than his or Vetinari’s, but that’s there nonetheless. Sometimes more there even than Law, or Order. Really, Polite Society is a beast a bit like one of Sibyl’s dragons: Sam won’t pretend to know it like she does, but he’d be a fool to write it off because he can’t wrap his head around it. Years watching in awe as his wife re-shapes the world over brunch and high tea (and some nasty burns incurred when he tried to pet one of the more excitable members of the Ramkin— whatever you call a group of swamp dragons) have taught him that.
