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The first time I heard her laugh, I thought I was hallucinating.
We were ten, and I distinctly remember having made a particularly clever remark about Crux’s hairline when I heard a giggle from behind me. My head whipped around to find the source, and I was met with her familiar stony look of annoyance. It made no sense, so I convinced myself I’d made it up. After all, Her Reverent Gloominess Harrowhark Nonagesimus didn’t laugh. Especially not because of me.
When I was eleven, I realized I should have known better. Harrow Marrow Eat-my-ass was perfectly willing to laugh at me. I will never know why exactly she found my torture at her hands funny but I can’t say I hate her for it anymore. It’s no excuse, but people do shitty things when they’re hurting. And to be fair, at the time, I had been convinced that I had killed her parents. Still, back then, it was so easy to get her to laugh at me. To get her to laugh with me? Would take nothing short of a miracle.
A miracle that I thought I would never see. A miracle that I convinced myself I never wanted to see. By the time the path toward it had even begun, any lingering curiosity or affection I’d had for her was buried deep under the pure hatred I’d developed after years of pissing her off and her pissing me off in turn.
This time she’d pissed me off worse than she had in so very long. Dangled my freedom in front of my face and snatched it away in a myriad of ways over the course of only a couple of fucking hours. I would have been impressed if I hadn’t been so fucking angry.
And batshit insane, apparently, because not even a week later, I’d been somehow convinced to agree to become Her Nunliness’s knight in shining skull paint. Never mind that I was the only option they had left. After all, while they had been out thirsting over the literal definition of bony asses, I studied the blade.
Now at this point you may be wondering, “Why did you do that if you hated her so much, Gideon? Just walk out. You can leave. If it sucks, hit the bricks. Real winners quit.”
Did I forget to mention that I was indentured to the House of the Ninth, and failed to escape eighty-seven times? Much as I loathed it, becoming the Cavalier Primary to the Necrophiliac in Chief was the best chance I had to escape and live the life of battlefield glory and hot babes that I’d always dreamt of.
If Harrow were here she’d tell me to “halt my incessant rambling and get to the point, Griddle.”
The point is, the ancient, ruined, drearier-than-Drearburh shithole commonly known as Canaan House was the last place I ever expected to find myself in. And it was definitely the last place I ever expected to find her. Or for her to find me in, for that matter.
But I did, somehow. In passive-aggressive notes. In a fake vow of silence broken in the face of the fact that my necromancer had been gone for twenty-seven hours and I had no means of reaching her without the aid of the Sixth’s resident Sex Pal. In finding Harrow half-dead in a bone cocoon in a creepy lab because The Reverend Pain-In-My-Ass had decided solving a mystery on minimal food, water, and sleep was a truly stellar idea. In the fact that Harrowhark Nonagesimus complimented my swordsmanship. Truly, I wondered if she was brain-damaged or my animal magnetism was finally starting to work on her.
Anyway, what shocked me most about everything was when she told me she could no longer accept being a stranger to me, and it was then I realized I no longer loathed her as deeply as I had. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to trust her. Or perhaps I had already long since trusted her. The fact remained that people were dying left, right, and center and against all common sense, I really didn’t want her to be next.
But I was scared. Hell, I was terrified. The blood of the Fourth was on my hands, for all it was worth, I felt as though I had murdered them myself. Then Her Necrotic Bitchiness forbade me from seeing Dulcinea Septimus, who I had thought to be dying, and everything bubbled over in a fit of rage. My self-hatred expelled outward at her. It was like we were children again as we fought in a way we hadn’t since before my last escape attempt.
Don’t tell her this, but it’s one of the few things I regret. I probably always will.
And then I found a head in her closet. And then I learned about the literal dead man who had been the Seventh cavalier. And then Harrowhark brought me to the pool and promised me an explanation once I shut up and got in.
She was vulnerable, for the first time I’d ever seen, perhaps for the first time ever to someone who wasn’t a shambling pile of bones. She was vulnerable, and in turn so was I.
We came undone in that pool. Everything unraveled. All our secrets laid bare, all her pain laid out for me to see. So I held her, and kissed her, and swore my flesh to her as I would’ve been as undone without her as she was without me. Then I learned she was in love with the corpse of the girl that laid within the Locked Tomb. My answer came in true Gideon Nav fashion.
“You mean to tell me you have the hots for some chilly weirdo in a coffin?”
I expected her to command a skeleton to drown me right there and then. I did end up wet again (that’s what she said) but for once, I got the sense that it was a result of Harrow’s exasperated amusement for once, rather than malice.
Something changed that night as we talked and talked. It felt like we were the only people in all the Nine Houses. We knew it wouldn’t last, but I found I would be glad to die with this memory at the forefront of my mind.
I wish I had.
I’d thought I had.
Remember that miracle I was on about earlier? This is where it happened.
The two of us and Camilla Hect were shielded by a shell of solid bone from a murderous Lyctor who was trying to kill us. A Lyctor who I may or may not have had a tiny crush on while I thought she was Dulcinea Septimus. Oops.
The shield was Harrow’s doing. Harrow, who laid half-dead in my arms from the effort of creating it and holding it up.
We thought we were going to die.
Harrow asked if I’d forgiven her, which I thought was a stupid question. Of course I had. I’d literally said what were basically glorified marriage vows to her just the night previous. The shield began to crack as I basically spilled my heart out to her. I’m pretty sure I was rambling then the same way I am now, dancing around the point that I had stupidly, foolishly fallen in love with her.
Then she laughed. It was the first time I’d ever heard her really laugh in a way that wasn’t out of malice. This laugh was one of mirth, or perhaps even a bitter sort of joy. The sound was bright, but weak, and it carried a raspy quality, as though it came from a part of her that had not been used in years. Perhaps it hadn’t.
To me, it was the most beautiful sound in existence. It was in that moment that I decided I would die for her. I did die for her. Because I loved her, and I had nothing else to offer. I just knew I had to save her and the only way was to give her what I did have.
I should have stayed dead. She should have eaten me then and there and gone full Lyctor. But she didn’t and I wish for all the world that I could ask her why, although I fear I know the answer.
I gave my whole life to Harrowhark Nonagesimus and she didn’t even want it.
I could mimic her and wax poetic about all the ways it tore me apart to find myself in her body with no trace of her. I tried to bring her back, I really tried. You don’t know what it was like, to see my expressions in her face, to hear my words in her voice. And I said- so so so much. But the worst part of it all was staring God in the face and laughing her laugh and it opened up the wound in my chest all over again (there’s a joke in there somewhere). The sound that had once been my miracle, made me crave death all over again. Honestly at this point I should offer to trade names with We Suffer.
And then it turned out that I’m basically a demigod, and that my dead mother was kind of a bitch? Lots of revelation stuff was happening. I was drowning, and taking her with me.
Like- I literally drowned. And we died. Again. I would have really liked to have stayed dead that time too, but it turns out dear old Dad was really fucking fond of being God.
I’d died and I thought I’d taken her with me, seeing as I was the one at the wheel in her body at the time. So you imagine my surprise when I next saw her. Or more accurately, when I next saw her face because the smiling girl in the company of Hect and Pyrrha was not my repressed nunlet.
I want to scream.
I don’t know what happened to her, and at this point I’m desperate. I haven’t seen her, haven’t spoken to her, haven’t known where the hell she is since I gave her my life in Canaan House. I need to know where she is. I’ve been in the dark my entire life about everything and all I need is this one thing. I need to know where she is. Hect Pal doesn’t know. Pyrrha doesn’t know. Fucking God wouldn’t tell me even if he did know.
Worst of all, whoever the fuck is residing in her body doesn’t even know who I’m talking about. It’s all I can do to hope that maybe, maybe, I will finally get some damn answers when we arrive back in the hellhole of my childhood in this fucked up full-circle venture I’m somehow part of.
Harrow once told me I had shockingly vast reserves of self-pity. I wonder if present company even knows the meaning of the phrase. My eyes lock with a gaze of bright gold.
It’s not her, I remind myself as I look at the girl who wears her face. It’s not her, I repeat, as my traitorous eyes roam her expression for any trace of my favorite gloom mistress and find none. It’s not her, I grit my teeth as her familiar voice lilts at me far more cheerfully than I’d ever known it, another’s words coming out of her mouth. It’s not her.
I stiffen as I hear the sound that I had once called a miracle, that had once brightened my life and ensnared my heart against all odds. My hands cover my ears. It is agony knowing that I am within physical distance of the body of the girl I had foolishly given my life to, yet she remains infinitely beyond my grasp, and I don’t even know where .
Through my fingers, I hear her laugh again and I play the reminder on repeat in my brain, like a mantra or even a prayer, to stave off the stupid hope that, unrelenting, prickled in the back of my brain.
It’s not her, it’s not her, it’s not her.