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:

undonewithout

"I don't need your clothing," Harrow snaps, but it's delayed, distracted as she is by her surroundings. Growing up, she had spent as little time as possible in Gideon's cell, at least when Gideon was in it; she knew it as a narrow bed and a sink inset along one wall, scattered bits of mess and flimsy, foul pornographies hidden beneath her thin mattress. The rooms she's led into now are larger, vaster and more comfortable than anything at home or even amidst the ossified opulence of the Mithraeum, but--unlike either of those places--all of it is suffused with something undeniably Gideon.

It should make her head hurt, but the ache, she finds, comes from a different place entirely.

She takes hold of her robes and shakes them, focusing on the blood soaked into the fabric, gathering the energy of it in her mind. In an instant, it skeletonizes, drying to a powder--as do the stains on her shirt and trousers, all of it flaking off at once and drifting to the floor around her feet. "There. It's passable, for now."

From:

wedobones

"Whatever," says Gideon, going into the kitchen and clicking on the kettle, leaning against the side. It's then that she realises that she still has the rapier in her hand. She's spent seven months wanting Harrow here, mourning her loss and now she's been in her company for ten minutes and wonders why the fuck she ever missed her.

"I know you've got no joy in your fucked-up, desiccated little heart," she says. "But you could at least try and look pleased to see me."

They'd started to make progress at Canaan House. And it feels...shit, frankly. To remember the things that Harrow said to her right before she died and see no evidence of them on her fucking face.

From:

undonewithout

It hits her as solidly as if she'd been punched, as accurately as she knows Gideon can strike, and the barrier of a wall between them only makes it worse, somehow. Better, too, because it hides the sudden flash of pain that crosses her face, grief folding in on itself again. This time, there's no mattress to collapse onto, no horrible comfort to be found in the hands of the dead; Harrow grits her teeth and hisses out a breath, forcing it away.

"Griddle," she says, each word dredged up from the memories she'd tried to suppress, weighted now with a meaning that pains her. "I barely even remember about you half the time."

From:

wedobones

That sinks through Gideon like a stab wound, and she has to force herself to put the rapier down before she does something unforgivable with it. If she steps to the side, she can see Harrow through the kitchen doorway, so she does, her eyes fixed on her.

"You said I was the first flower of your fucking house," she says, her voice numb, dead. "You said...Fuck it. When could I ever trust a thing you fucking said to me? You fucking...You fucking broken promise."

From:

hellonspectacles

Palamedes sits in the Barton University library surrounded by a veritable fortress of books when the text comes in. On the whole, he has come to like his phone, appreciating the practicality of instantaneous communication and the unexpected way it can build familiarity. But sometimes, he thinks that he should really leave it at home so that his research cannot be so easily interrupted.

He sighs when he sees Gideon’s name, expecting some joke or half-serious accusation about how he spends his time. But the message is something altogether different.

SHE’S HERE. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out who Gideon means, though Pal does happen to be one. SHE’S BLEEDING. He’s out of his seat in an instant; frankly, it would take a hell of a lot of blood to send Gideon into a panic. Palamedes leaves all his books behind, knowing they will be re-shelved, knowing that he will probably get glares from the library staff next time he visits. But he just doesn’t have the time.

coming, he shoots back, swinging his messenger back over his shoulder and hurrying out of the library. at barton. waiting for bus. he adds a few minutes later, having, for once, entirely abandoned the usual formality of his texts.

Palamedes all but leaps off the bus at his stop and races to Gideon’s apartment, where he raps hurriedly on the door.

From:

undonewithout

"I know the promises I have made, and the promises I have broken," Harrow says, nearly breathless from the slap of Gideon's words. Her fingernails bite again into her palm, their ragged edges cutting deep enough to draw blood. Yet more flows out of her nose, her dark eyes locked on Gideon's golden ones and neither of them willing to look away. "The guidelines by which I have made myself live. How dare you, of all people, you, blight the covenant I have made."

She can feel the sick and horrible truth sitting in her chest, waiting to be spat into the open. If not for the knock on the door, Harrow thinks it might have come forth, in all its excruciating detail. Instead, she makes herself look away. "Get the fucking door."

From:

wedobones

"One flesh one end my ass," snaps Gideon as she stalks out of the kitchen and pulls the door open. Relief stabs through her at the sight of Palamedes on the threshold. "She's in the lounge. Maybe you can get some fucking sense out of her. I'm below that, apparently." She turns and heads for her bedroom. Harrow might have sorted her own clothes out but Gideon's? Are gross.

From:

hellonspectacles

Palamedes is reminded, briefly, of the first time he had met Gideon. When he and Cam had told her how long Harrow had been in the Facility, she had been frantic in a cavalier-ish sort of way, equal parts furious and determined to find her necromancer. A dry smile ticks at the corner of his mouth. “I appreciate your faith in me,” he deadpans, darkly amused by the idea that Harrowhark Nonagesimus would listen to sense.

Gideon’s clothes are unsettlingly bloody, though, so his humor is short-lived. Steeling himself for what he might see, he steps into the apartment and goes where Gideon directs him.

He’s not at all ready for what he finds—Harrowhark the First in all her furious glory, pearlescent robes gleaming over what looks like a breastplate of bone, her face streaked in blood. It’s all enough to leave even Palamedes Sextus frozen in his tracks.

From:

undonewithout

She had last heard that voice in the River, the bubble he'd created--better and more solidly than hers, though it still pains her to admit it. Hearing it now imparts no further proof of her surroundings, no clear evidence that this is anything more than another construct, another space in non-space as the necromancer stepping through Gideon's front door had put it to her once. Harrow wonders, half-madly, how many papers he's managed to write on the subject by now.

Sextus sees her then, and freezes, astonishment glinting in the clear grey of his eyes. Harrow stalls too, layers of memory jostling for space in her head; the true and the constructed, reality and unreality crashing in on each other and turning nonsensical the evidence she's beholding right at this moment. The rushing in her ears sounds like water, but as she feels the warm drip of it along her skin, and yet more flowing from her nose--again, and at least Gideon's left the room this time--Harrow knows it isn't.

"I wasn't cognizant of the way I lied, last time," she says, her voice nasal and clogged with the blood flooding her sinuses. "I did know you in that life. I will know you in the next one. But how, Warden, are you here?"

From:

hellonspectacles

Nothing Harrow says means anything to Palamedes—which is too bad, really, since it sounds extraordinarily like a compliment. That hardly matters, anyway, not when there’s suddenly blood dripping out of her nose and ears, further making a mess of her face and staining the transparent white of her robes.

“Haven’t the slightest idea,” he says with the kind of sing-song false conversationally eventually adopted by all medical practitioners. “I’m working on a theory. Sit. Gideon!” This he calls over his shoulder as he waves Harrow towards the couch. “Get me a towel and—Emperor’s bones, please tell me you have some kind of first aid kit!”

From:

undonewithout

"Of course you're working on a theory," she says, and even beneath the blood and the bewilderment, there's a kind of resentful sincerity to it. Reluctantly, she shuffles towards the couch, clearing blood out of her ear and wiping her nose on her hand--undignified, but it works, the blood powdering away a moment later--as she goes. The sound of Gideon's name makes her wince, a needle of pain lancing through her head as she sits.

From:

wedobones

A moment later Gideon appears from her bedroom dressed in clean sweats and a t-shirt, her feet bare and her hair pushed back from her face. She's got a couple of towels in her hand, plus the first aid kit from under her sink. She holds them out to Palamedes. "She keeps bleeding despite healing a fucking stab wound and she's too much of a dick to tell me what's the matter."

From:

hellonspectacles

Palamedes is in the middle of offering Harrow his handkerchief when the blood flakes away, briefly scattering confetti-like on the couch and carpet, and then disappearing. Looking increasingly baffled, he takes the towels and the first aid kit from Gideon and goes to sit beside Harrow.

“The Lyctoral process removes the brakes from necromantic power,” he explains for Gideon’s sake, sounding surprisingly calm, all things considered. “Essentially. So accelerated healing makes sense…” He frowns. “Which, as you point out, doesn’t explain the cerebral hemorrhage. Reverend Daughter, did someone try to crush your skull?” He’s half-joking, but frankly, it’s the only possibility that makes any sort of sense. Maybe she had been able to heal her skull itself, but the internal damage remained.

He exhales through his nose. “Harrow, I need to take a closer look—“ Without giving her the chance to object, Palamedes lightly presses his hands to her scalp. About five seconds later, he jerks back as though he has been burned.

“ Nonagesimus.” His hands are actually shaking a little as he takes off his glasses and cleans them on his sleeve. “What the fuck—"

From:

undonewithout

She is too slow still, addled in a way she should have known she couldn't afford. Compromised, more gravely than she may have ever been before. Harrow only realizes it once she's sitting, Palamedes frowning at her in a way that does nothing for the angular planes of his face--and then he reaches for her.

"No," she tries to say, flinching back, coming near to crawling up the back of the absurdly squashy sofa she placed herself on like a fool. She remembers rolling off the table in the presence of God, fleeing at the question she knew she could never answer. Hoping, like a child, she's not about to be asked it again. "You cannot, it's..." His fingertips find purchase then, his touch cool against her temples, and Harrow knows she is lost even before she sees the horror dawn in his eyes.

She can take no satisfaction in the quick jerk of his hands when she's finally let go, scrabbling further into the cushions at her back in a panicked attempt to avoid his reach again.

From:

wedobones

Gideon watches all of this play out in front of her like some kind of weirdo pantomime, and, as usual, she has absolutely no fucking idea what's going on. Her golden eyes dart between Palamedes' horrified expression and the way that Harrow is trying to dig her way into the stuffing of her couch like a panicky cockroach. Her coppery eyebrows draw together in a frown. "What?"

From:

hellonspectacles

Palamedes takes a breath, reasserting calm. He thought he’d known what to expect. He’d known the damage would be severe; he hasn’t expected it to be so clearly deliberate. Now he turns to face Harrow where she has scrabbled to the other side of the couch, gazing at her like she’s an uncontrollable child or a spooked horse. Absently, he taps his glasses against his knee.

“Someone has attempted to remove portions of the Reverend Daughter’s temporal lobe.” Though he’s speaking to Gideon, he hasn’t taken his eyes off Harrow. “Badly, I might add.”

From:

undonewithout

That badly is a slap in the face, but Harrow expected--and yes, from Sextus maybe deserves--nothing less. She knew he would see it, understand what she and Ianthe had done even if the particulars were closed to him, but to have the work revealed so nakedly still strikes her breathless for a moment. With Gideon just behind her, and Palamedes in front, there's nowhere for her to run. Momentarily, she considers constructs and bone sanctuaries, ripping a stud from her ear and working it into something to hold the both of them back, but something stays her hand.

"I had little time to craft something elegant," she says, her jaw tight. "Not without becoming further...compromised. It was a brute force solution, but it worked, and that is the more important thing."

From:

wedobones

Gideon has a horrible feeling that she knows where this is going, but she also knows that Harrowhark Nonagesimus has a very nasty habit of doing exactly the opposite of what she thinks she's going to do. "Harrow," she says, doing her very best to keep her voice level. "What did you do?"

From:

hellonspectacles

Palamedes watches Harrow for a long moment, the only sound the very faint tap tap tap of his glasses. Then he says quietly, almost gently, “You must be in a terrible amount of pain.”

He puts his glasses back on. “Even given your ability to heal yourself, these...modifications,” Pal has to suppress a shudder, “will kill you eventually. At the very least, they are likely to cause further deterioration. I think I can repair the worst of it, but I need a better look.”

From:

undonewithout

Harrow bristles at the gentle way he says it, the tenderness in treating her like a child, explaining in small words the things she already knows. "The pain is the penance, Sextus," she says, humiliatingly unable to meet his gaze for fear of what he'll see in her eyes.

She can all but feel Gideon's growing hysteria behind her as Palamedes keeps talking, the small shifts in weight and intakes of breath that suggest her erstwhile cavalier's on the verge of doing something ill-advised and stupid. Whatever it is would be a distraction, something she could use to shift the focus--but it would return. She knows the Warden of the Sixth too well now, again, to believe it'd be anything more than a brief reprieve. She still wants to scream, to run, fleeing into the streets of this strange world she still knows nothing about, but she makes herself nod instead.

"I permit this under the favor I granted your House, solemnized by the sanctity of the rock that remains ever unrolled," Harrow says, meeting his eyes at last as she unfolds herself from the corner of the couch and slides closer. "I will reveal to you only that which is necessary to achieve your aims, but in that, you will have my full honesty. Is that acceptable?"

From:

hellonspectacles

A tiny smile curves at the corner of Palamedes’ mouth. It’s been nearly two months since someone called him Warden, or spoke to him with the self-serious formality of official House communications. As always, Harrow makes it sounds like they are negotiating contested territory and not discussing medical care—though perhaps, in this instance, the two are not so very different from each other.

“It is.” As he moves closer to Harrow, his gaze flickers up to meet Gideon’s. He can’t answer her question for certain; all he has are hunches, and he needs more data. And he needs it quickly if he’s going to figure out how to fix the damage before Harrow’s brain fluid starts leaking out of her ears again.

Again, carefully, he put his hands on Harrow’s head. In another time and another place, it might look like he’s bestowing a benediction—or conducting a mind meld. Beneath her skull, Harrow’s temporal lobes are like Swiss cheese, and there’s something else as well, something he doesn’t even need psychometry to figure out. The bone plates themselves are all wrong…

“She has re-written her memory centers,” he tells Gideon. “And shaped her skull in a way that ensures the brain cannot repair itself.” He thinks he knows why, too, and it’s dreadful, as horrifying as the Lyctoral process itself. But there’s no time to explain that, no time for Gideon to process it. Palamedes isn’t sure it’s his place to tell, anyway.

“Nonagesimus, the concept of penance is irrational,” he says with exacting patience. “I meant what I said before. We need to repair the damage.”

From:

undonewithout

Harrow shudders a little at the touch, no less welcome even though she'd invited it this time. Her eyes close as he assesses her, and when his voice breaks the silence between them, she has to work to remain impassive. Even these few facts, plain and clinical, are evidence enough of the greater work she'd tried to keep hidden. A muscle ticks, just faintly, in her jaw.

"Irrational or not, it is what I required," she says, though to be called Nonagesimus unlocks something inside of her, a relief at being that and not Harrowhark the First even for the space of a moment. It's enough that she doesn't reject the rest of it wholesale, though her pinched features sharpen further as she looks his way. An ache ripples its way from temple to temple, but it passes. "But to repair it is to undo what I have...to lose..."

She cannot say it with Gideon in the room, with Gideon anywhere in earshot, but it seems she must. Harrow fists her hands in her robe, steeling herself. "Wherever this is, I have been brought to it both in spirit and in flesh. It stands that repairing the damage here will carry over when I return to the Mithraeum, and if that is so, that will represent a failure of work I consider inviolate. It will..."

She cannot do this. She makes herself. "It will destroy what I have left of the soul of Gideon Nav."

From:

wedobones

It takes a moment for Gideon to sort through what they've both just said. Her brain is wrong and her skull is wrong and then Harrow says what she says and, suddenly, Gideon understands, with perfect, infuriating clarity. "Oh my God," she says. "You didn't. You did. Fuck."

From:

hellonspectacles

Palamedes pushes his hair back from his forehead with a quiet sigh. He’d guessed as much, but it’s another thing altogether to have his fears confirmed. If he was a different sort of person, he would have shouted, you didn’t have to. None of you had to. The thought brings him back to the fateful Canaan House laboratory where they had all last been together, to you lied to us and the horror of unnecessary bloodshed deemed holy.

It makes him furious, and it breaks his heart.

But Lyctorhood, whatever form it might take, is not actually the point at the moment. “Gideon,” he says, a quiet warning. She has every reason to be angry, but her anger will only make a delicate situation worse. Returning to Harrow he says, “The efficacy of your plan aside—and I’m not even sure I agree with your theory, by the way, but that’s a matter for another time—your conduct here should have no bearing on your existence at home, spiritual or material. We’ve not been transported wholesale into a new universe. Instead, the timeline has split; we’ve been sent one way, and another version of ourselves has been sent the other.”

From:

undonewithout

The incredulous fury in Gideon's voice brings on another wave of pain; not the kind that sends blood streaming from her nose or leaking out her tear ducts, but something deeper and more central. "Of course I did," Harrow snaps, the barest turn of her head all she can manage for fear of sparking yet another hemorrhage. "You would have been reduced. Consumed. None of us may have spared much affection for him, but we all saw what fucking happened to Tern. And I saw yet more, after."

Even now, she can't pinpoint the exact moment Ianthe's cavalier became just a battery inside her, when whatever remained of him stopped trying to fight. With the creation of her new arm, perhaps, or somewhere shortly after. But it happened, and it was only ever going to happen, and had Harrow remembered then what she'd done to herself, she thinks now that she'd make the choice to do it again.

The firm rebuke in Palamedes' voice quiets her, too, and Harrow tries to breathe as she listens to his explanation, her brow furrowing at the conjecture he draws. "A split timeline? Warden, that is unnecessarily and complexly metaphysical, the energy alone..." She shakes her head. "I assumed it was the River, frankly. Another elaborate projection." Here, she pauses, a shred of the old Harrowhark--or the new, or some conglomeration of both--emerging as the corner of her mouth quirks briefly upwards. "Something of more solid construction than even yours."