undonewithout | while my blood's still flowing and my heart still beats

“But I was stabbed through the stomach!” Harrow shouted over the howling wind and the sick clatter of the tentacle disgorging another shower of plex slides. “What’s happening out there?”

There was little time for Magnus or the Lady Pent to answer the question, or for Harrow to remain where she was, curled in a rictus of agony on an ancient mattress, though right then she might have cherished the indulgence of either. She allowed herself to be helped upright, Magnus coaxing her hand gallantly--and foolishly, always foolish in his gallantry, and how could she have forgotten that about him?--into the crook of his arm to keep her close. They followed Abigail out of the room and into the hall, past the drifts of bloody snow collecting in the corners and dusting the humped shapes of furniture already half-buried. That much, she remembered from before, the cold and the snow and the sheer broken loneliness of Canaan House; what was new were the twisting pink organs making incursions nearly everywhere, and the bits of debris they were leaving behind. As much as she could, Harrow slowed her steps, dawdling to a degree she would have never permitted of herself before in the hopes of examining them, acquiring information even as they continued to flee.

There, a window shaded over with a thin film of tissue, the veins within blue and fat with blood. In one corner, a pile of rusted syringes half-burying an inert skeleton. In another, a pulsing tube split as though cut with a scalpel, releasing specimen containers full of cloudy fluid, something small and lumpen suspended within. It was all disgustingly physical, unnervingly medical; when her foot brushed against a heap of oblong pills, scattering them with a rattle, Harrow startled.

“Keep moving,” said Magnus as one of the tentacles behind him shuddered, emitting a gush of watery blood that sluiced over the floors, freezing slick in spots. Even frozen, the stench of it was meaty and obscene. “No time to take in the scenery.” Harrow looked up as though chastised from the skeleton she’d been examining--not a First House construct at all, those were Drearburh tools in its bony hand--and closed the distance between them, falling back into step with both shades of the Fifth. She’d had no right to pull them in, to cast them or any of the others as actors on her now-besieged stage. Their ghosts deserved the current of the River, swift passage to whatever shores lay beyond--but somewhat pathetically, she was glad of their presence anyway. “Where is this room?”

It was not the question she should have asked of the myriad already on her mind, but the more she remembered of the real Canaan’s halls, the more Harrow recalled there were safe places and unsafe, doors she’d catalogued that first day and sorted into one category or another. The mental map she had of them was faded now, fractured, and as she turned corners and scuttled down corridors, Abigail and Magnus only a step or two ahead in their heavy coats, she wished for a pencil and a piece of flimsy. Anything to begin setting another part of her mind to rights, after all that was lost.

“Close by,” said Abigail, turning her head so the words would not be lost in the increasing screech of the wind. “The others will be there already, if all’s gone according to plan--take my hand, we’re heading outside.”

Like the trusting child she’d never been, Harrowhark reached for Abigail’s mittened hand, and the world broke once more. The terrace she’d been about to step onto deliquesced into nothing, melting away beneath her feet, the howl of the wind turning into the rush of water, sweeping her away. It was the River, and not the River, a current of darkness taking hold of her and dragging her down; Harrow again tried to take the reins of her power and pull, finding that same butt-fuck nothing from before happening again. There was no escape from what this was, just a swirl of--

She is ten and standing on a chair, coarse-woven rope in her hands. Beside her, three bodies step in unison into the empty air, that final, frantic walk she imagined for herself so many times already--and now, of all times now, she cannot make her feet obey the command to move.

She rolls on the floor of the Mithraeum, hands bracketing the blade protruding from her stomach, broiling in the hot air and yet shivering at the same time, her blood smearing against the walls and the tile, dyeing the ridiculous fabric of her robe a red only the Cohort could admire. From somewhere far beyond, the incessant sound of the klaxon rings, and rings, and rings…

She feels a ripping inside her head, a pain that blanks out all else except for the sudden flash of golden eyes and for a second, Harrow, you look at me, and I look at you, and the experience is deeply fucking weird for us both.

When the world crashed back in, it revealed nowhere Harrow recognized. The scuffed brick of a wall swam into her field of vision, metal cans lined up against it; she could feel something equally hard propping her upright from behind, the ground firm and flat underneath her. All of that was hazy beneath the pain radiating outward from the blade still lodged inside her, the hilt pressed close to the small of her back. If she screamed, it was a sound she was used to by now, thin and animal in its agony. She slumped to the side and lay there, cheek against the gritty surface of the pavement, grasping for the threads of her power to close the wound and stabilize the damage, panting with the effort. Faintly, she could feel the blade move, a shuddering lurch of metal pushed this way and that by tissue regrowing at a rate she could not in this state comprehend.

“What is happening,” she tried to say yet again, though it came out garbled and choked, her teeth slick with the blood welling up from her throat. Harrow retched, spitting out a clot, a globule of scarlet all the brighter against the dull grey of the concrete. It cleared her airway enough to let her drag in another ragged breath; then another, and still more after that. Her vision grew dark around the edges, but Harrow focused, helplessly, on the fact she was still breathing. From somewhere behind her came the sound of running footsteps.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

wedobones

At first, she's sure that she's imagining things. She's walking home from work, headphones in, hands in her pockets, and then she sees a figure out of the corner of her eye, hears a scream, and it's like her heart manages to stop beating and explode all at the same time. Harrow. She doesn't think. Doesn't hesitate. She just runs.

"Holy fucking God, it's you," she says, dropping to her knees, hard enough that she feels skin under denim scuff, feels her now healed knee-cap complain, her hands reaching for her necromancer's skinny shoulders. "Holy fuck who stabbed you?"

From:

undonewithout

She knows enough about the Heralds to suspect the sound of their motion would be a scuttling, a chittering, not boots on the ground and the sound of a human voice. Still, Harrow flinches as they come closer, fingertips clawing weakly at the ground to pull herself forward, away--until she's grabbed. Her head turns, half-expecting one of the others, a final indignity on top of everything else. Expecting Ortus, though was that ever his name?

She doesn't know, and the pain makes reasoning it through a difficult thing.

Whoever it is is talking, the words only half-comprehensible but the panic all too clear. Harrow's eyes flutter back open, taking in flaming hair and a flash of gold, a crooked mouth open in an o of horror, and everything in her head splits apart. The pain sears through her, blinds her as she convulses. Harrow makes a sound like gnakkkt, blood streaming like tears from her eyes and pouring in a fountain from her nose, yet more clogging her throat.

From:

wedobones

Blood fountains out of her necromancer's face and it's only sheer force of will that doesn't send Gideon skittering backwards. Harrow chokes on her own blood and Gideon hauls her up into her arms as well as she can with a fucking rapier through her. "Spit it out, you dick," she says. "If you drown on your own blood, I'll never fucking forgive you, Nonagesimus. You hear me? If you drown now you're dead to me."

From:

undonewithout

She's limp and pathetic as she's pulled, the motion jostling the blade in her abdomen--held more tightly by bands of flesh, new tendrils of muscle and skin wending their way up towards the tip--and sending another rippling wave of pain through her. Harrow manages a gurgling groan, the voice sending another jolt of pain along her temporal bone, hot and searing but enough to make her retch. It's not compliance, or not entirely, but it gets the job done; she vomits blood and a little bit of bile, a hideous mixture that spatters the ground and the already-soiled cloth of her robes and the shirt beneath.

"How," she says, and there's a myriad of questions behind the word.

From:

wedobones

"We can do how later," says Gideon, assessing the damage, ignoring the fact that Harrow just vomited blood on her nicest pair of jeans. "Are you...okay. Fuck. This is going to suck." She can see Harrow's body healing and grasping around the blade which is...clearly getting in the way. Gideon gulps a breath, pulls Harrow in as close as she can against her side, wraps her hand around the hilt and pulls...

From:

undonewithout

The sword slides out with a wet and obscene noise, a schhhhliiick that's half covered by the thin scream Harrow emits despite herself, her jaw clenching around the noise and the pain of having several inches of metal forcibly and suddenly withdrawn from her body. It happens, and it hurts--and then stops, the wound healing and the blood flaking to powder as though neither had occurred at all, her skin pale and unblemished beneath the ripped fabric of her shirt. Her breath shudders, but steadily.

From:

wedobones

The rapier out of her, Gideon holds Harrow against her, supported with one arm. Her eyes sting and she drags in a breath. "How are you here?" she says. "Where the fuck have you been?"

From:

undonewithout

Being held like this calls up a comparison, the wrapping of arms tight around her as salt water lapped around them both, so close for a moment that Harrow almost hears the sound of ripples against tile. And then, again, the hot sting of pain, a thin trickle of blood and not Canaan House pool water emanating from her ears. She grimaces, another shudder racking her body.

"The Mithraeum," she manages to say once it subsides to a dull ache. Experimentally, she closes her eyes, finding the darkness fractionally easier to continue in. "The Heralds had come. We were to...engage the Beast, and then..." Harrow trembles at the memory of sinking, of resurfacing wounded and pinned on her own rapier like an insect, of crying out for the Tomb and her traitorous mouth falling into a shape she hadn't recognized. "The River. But...wrong."

From:

wedobones

Gideon doesn't understand a word coming out of her necromancer's mouth (except, fuck me, Mithraeum). She feels her tremble, though and fights the urge to hold her closer. There's a light mist of rain falling and, dimly, Gideon knows that she ought to get Harrow off the floor, off the street. It's what any half decent cavalier primary would do. But here they are. "Wherever you're bleeding from, heal it before you faint, dumbass," she says. "And then I'll take...I'll take you home."

From:

undonewithout

"No!" says Harrow to that, skinny limbs thrashing in a panic, pulling against the idea as her abhorrence takes physical form. She pictures her renewed House, the Emperor's gift, all those sleeping bodies rent in the jaws of the Beast. "We cannot. I cannot go home."

She cannot do this in the dark, beseech the one holding her this close, and so Harrow opens her eyes again. There is an odd and muffled spang in her head, a stab of pain, but it subsides more quickly this time, the blood that flows from one tearduct and out her left nostril a sluggish trickle. She looks again at the face of the person holding her, and knows it with the clarity she always should have had.

She bleeds, and she stares, and she cannot move.

From:

wedobones

Harrow pulls back and looks at her, really looks at her, her face bloody with tears and Gideon just stares. Her body doesn't feel big enough to hold everything that she's feeling right then. She's spent seven months in this city waiting for the right necromancer and now that she's here... Now that she's here, she doesn't know what the hell to do. "Harrow?"

From:

undonewithout

It is her own name that breaks her, the sound of it coming from those lips, the confusion inherent in the fires of those eyes, the insistent and horrible strength in how she's still being held--in those arms--even after her abortive attempt at fighting. Harrowhark thought she understood the weight of grief, the blow it struck as she lay and wept for Gideon Nav only minutes and myriads ago, but the thing that hits her now is twice as heavy.

"But you died," she says, each word wavering and fragile, humiliatingly childish. Her vision swims pink, tears mingling with blood and tracking down her cheeks. Her throat swells against a howl, bitten nails digging into her palm to keep it back. "You died, and I..." She cannot say it. She cannot say it now, to her, nor perhaps to anyone else in the absence of Pent. The next flood of agony, more blood and more weeping, the ripping spike of pain slicing again along the cracked seams of her skull, saves her from that much.

From:

wedobones

She can count on the fingers of one hand now many times in her life she's seen Harrowhark Nonagesimus cry. It's awful. She hates it. She hates it more than the weird bleeding. "I did what I had to do, and then I woke up here." Her jaw tightens and she squeezes Harrow gently. It feels like the only thing that she knows how to do. "Let's go inside, okay. I'll call Sextus. He'll know what to do."

From:

undonewithout

"No," she says, rejecting that, the flippancy of it chafing at the raw edges of her nerves. It was the last thing Gideon should have had to do, not a sacrifice but a murder, a consumption. As God himself had said, an indelible sin. Her breath hitches as she's squeezed, going rigid for a moment before she allows Gideon to further gather her up.

"Of course Sextus would be here," murmurs Harrow when she's calmer, half to herself, though nothing about her surroundings looks at all like the reconstructed Lyctoral rooms she'd last found him in. It's another mystery, but one she makes herself shelve for the time being. Taking a deep breath, she manages a nod.

From:

wedobones

"I told him knowing he got here first would be enough to get you here," says Gideon. Carefully, gingerly, she releases her hold on Harrow and gets to her feet. They're both blood stained and soiled but it's only a few blocks to her building. The rapier in one hand, she holds out the other to Harrow. "Can you walk, Nonagesimus?"

From:

undonewithout

It's a statement that fails to answer where here is, good only for enforcing the idea that wherever they are, it's a place Sextus has been for longer--which is true, if this is the River, but if not it places Harrow at a disadvantage. For the first time in a long time, she feels the flicker of competition she'd had at Canaan House, the real one; the thought that if this is a puzzle, it's one for her edification only. And if Sextus has beaten her again to a solution...

The extension of Gideon's hand breaks into her thoughts, interrupting and intensifying the memory. For a moment, it's the Lady Pent holding a mittened hand out to her again, and it's Gideon offering herself as a siphon, and it's this Gideon now in things she'd never owned on the Ninth. All of them, none of them, memory and reality collapsing in on each other in the way it always has ever since she was a child.

She blinks at the question, putting up no resistance as Gideon picks up the rapier with practiced ease. "Yes," she says finally, her hand half-lifted towards her cavalier's. "I was stabbed through the stomach. My spine was not severed." Pulling her hand back, she grips the wall beside her and levers herself to her feet, wobbling as she makes her slow way upright. The Lyctoral robes hang limp on her frame, heavy with spattered gore.

From:

wedobones

Of course Harrow struggles to her feet without help. It should hurt her, but it doesn't - sometimes, she thinks that her body is all scar, and the only things that hurt her are the places where she's not completely healed over yet. It's a process. It'll come. Still, her necromancer is finally standing in front of her again, and that's not nothing. She stands for a moment, making sure that Harrow isn't just going to totter right over again but, once she's got to her feet and seems at least superficially solid, Gideon pulls out her phone and texts Sextus that SHE'S HERE and SHE KEEPS BLEEDING and GET HERE AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN PLZ.

It's amazing how good it feels to have a sword in her hand again, even if it's not hers. Not either of them.

"What happened to my two-hander?" she asks. She knows it doesn't matter, right now, but the question feels important. "Last time I...saw it...you had it."

From:

undonewithout

Harrow watches Gideon type away at some kind of screen she takes from her pocket, small and portable, though her energy's devoted more to remaining upright than in wondering what she might be writing--and why, and to whom. She doesn't like the sick flash of guilt that rushes through her when questioned about the sword, one hand going instinctively to the bone scabbard welded to her back despite knowing she'll find it empty.

"It was given back to me," she says. "After." Her stomach lurches at the memory, recalling God's kindly face as he delivered her the sword and those first disgusting weeks of trying to wield it. Hating it, loving it, unable to touch it but unable to conceive of being apart from it for any length of time. She chances a look over at Gideon and ends up rewarded with another ice-pick jab of pain to somewhere just behind her right eye. "I...kept it with me. From the Erebus to the Mithraeum, I held it in safekeeping."

From:

wedobones

She knows better than to put hands on Harrow again, so she just starts moving, slowly, in the direction of her apartment building. "I'll explain everything once we're inside, I promise, but...can we start with why the fuck you keep bleeding? Can't you...you healed the stab wound."

From:

undonewithout

That Gideon doesn't seem to register anything she'd just said about the sword is a disturbing surprise, but one that's passed over quickly enough by the thing that follows. Her steps falter, the world reeling for a moment. "Do not ask me that," she says, jaw tight. "Ever."

She can feel the start of another bleed, directing energy at her capillaries to shut it off before it's obvious. It's fast, but not fast enough; Harrow ticks her head to the side, reflexively, at the sensation of blood pooling in her ear canal. "And the stab wound...healed itself. I expended no energy in doing it." Her tone is unguarded, naked enough to reveal her own confusion at that fact. Gathering the begrimed skirt of her robe in one hand, she keeps walking.

From:

wedobones

"It worked then," says Gideon, her arms all but aching to reach out and catch Harrow when she stumbles. She can't help but think of the way Ianthe and Cytherea had healed. Like it was nothing. Like it didn't even matter. "And we're back to you not telling me anything. Cool. Cool cool cool cool." She tugs at her phone and texts Palamedes. Again.

From:

undonewithout

"Something happened in the transition from where I was to...now," she says, inwardly disturbed by the suggestion it might be otherwise. That it might be that, because she knows with full clarity what Gideon means. There had been pain as she'd healed, but it had been with the same ease as when Ianthe sliced through her hand with her cavalier's old knife: a flicker only, whereas when the same had been done to her she'd nearly passed out. That was the trade in being half a Lyctor, being fractured, and if she no longer had that...

The work cannot be lost. She will not permit it to be.

Gritting her teeth as Gideon mutters to herself and takes the device out of her pocket again, Harrow turns the corner in stoically stubborn quiet.

From:

wedobones

"This is us," says Gideon, reaching out with her free hand to graze Harrow's bloodied sleeve as she fumbles for her keys. She lets them in and heads for the elevator. Even though it's only one flight she doesn't trust Harrow with stairs yet. "Wait. What do you mean?"

From:

undonewithout

Gideon's fingers catch momentarily on the flowing sleeve of her robe, and Harrow only just keeps from flinching away. She follows her into the building, a place in far better condition than anywhere she's seen before; there's no crumbling walls or hazardous floors here, nor the uncanny preservation of a place like the Mithraeum. What disrepair there is simply makes it seem habited.

As they step into the elevator, Harrow tenses. It's as much from the smallness of the space inside as the fact Gideon chooses now to become annoyingly observant. "Damage of that scale should have taken...effort," she says, tasting the lie at the back of each word, the hint of everything unsaid. "I had a fucking sword through my gut, Nav."

Saying her name brings up another clot of stuff, coppery and thick at the back of her throat. She swallows it back down.

From:

wedobones

"I meant what did you mean about the transition?" says Gideon. "And you still haven't told me why you keep bleeding? Are you hurt, Nonagesimus? Because if you are and you're not fucking telling me..." Pal will be here soon. He'll figure it out. She shifts her grip on the sword in her hand, teeth shifting musically.