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Put That Thing Back Where It Came From Or So Help Me
Desolation. That's what Harrow feels when the King Undying tells her that what she wants most is impossible. Not even what she wants, but what she needs. She cannot live without Gideon Nav, and she will not. Unending life, in spite of being what she had sought after in the beginning, is now unthinkable. She looks up into his surprisingly normal face, his unearthly eyes, and lets her gaze drop.
A horrible certainty rises in her, and becomes a morbid hope. Her face is serene with unspeakable grief, none of her wild plan showing as she asks to see the body of her cavalier. He grants her this, and she walks like a woman to the gallows down the ship to the cold storage. He has the grace to leave her alone with her grief, of course, and she opens the door with her heart in her throat.
The chill of the corpsetorium echoes the cool calm of her mind. Her chest aches, her throat is sore from screaming, but the sight of Gideon, hole in her chest, laying on a slab like so much dead meat does not inspire the crushing grief she had expected to. It fuels her. Motivates her to think harder, to dissect the theorems she studied and the one megatheorem that led to this cursed conclusion (damn Sextus for being right).
Harrow has no idea how long she sits there, her mind working in overdrive, peering inward to slowly pull out the stitches she had made in her own soul only mere hours before. It feels like only seconds at the same time it feels like eons. She has to do this carefully, slowly. I will not live without you. she thinks to herself and to the traces of Nav that exist inside her. She repeats it like a mantra. I told you that I am undone without you. We are both undone if I must go on alone.
It's the most delicate work she's ever done, and it hurts. It's a pain right down to her marrow, like she's trying to peel layers of calcium off of her own bones. At the end of it, it feels like she's holding a doll in her metaphysical hands. A little gauzy imitation of Gideon Nav. She pulls it free of herself, feels blood drip from her forehead into her eyes, and with all of the ferocity she had to hold back during the excavation, she slams the soul back into its rightful body.
A horrible certainty rises in her, and becomes a morbid hope. Her face is serene with unspeakable grief, none of her wild plan showing as she asks to see the body of her cavalier. He grants her this, and she walks like a woman to the gallows down the ship to the cold storage. He has the grace to leave her alone with her grief, of course, and she opens the door with her heart in her throat.
The chill of the corpsetorium echoes the cool calm of her mind. Her chest aches, her throat is sore from screaming, but the sight of Gideon, hole in her chest, laying on a slab like so much dead meat does not inspire the crushing grief she had expected to. It fuels her. Motivates her to think harder, to dissect the theorems she studied and the one megatheorem that led to this cursed conclusion (damn Sextus for being right).
Harrow has no idea how long she sits there, her mind working in overdrive, peering inward to slowly pull out the stitches she had made in her own soul only mere hours before. It feels like only seconds at the same time it feels like eons. She has to do this carefully, slowly. I will not live without you. she thinks to herself and to the traces of Nav that exist inside her. She repeats it like a mantra. I told you that I am undone without you. We are both undone if I must go on alone.
It's the most delicate work she's ever done, and it hurts. It's a pain right down to her marrow, like she's trying to peel layers of calcium off of her own bones. At the end of it, it feels like she's holding a doll in her metaphysical hands. A little gauzy imitation of Gideon Nav. She pulls it free of herself, feels blood drip from her forehead into her eyes, and with all of the ferocity she had to hold back during the excavation, she slams the soul back into its rightful body.
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Harrow, blessedly, doesn't get the chance to worry about any more important things. All she thinks of is Gideon, alive and with her, before she slips away into proper sleep.
It's even restful, until it isn't.
Nightmares are not a new experience for Harrowhark, but that has yet to stop them from having power over her, unfortunately. She twitches and groans pitifully in her sleep, rolling away from Gideon and curling herself down into a tight little ball. She's sweating, and her sweat is tinged pink, her face a screwed up mess of suffering.
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She blinks heavily once more, then reaches out a hand to shake her shoulder. "Harrow. Hey, Harrow. Wake up, numbnuts."
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The stimulation of the waking world often has an effect on dreams, when the dreamer does not immediately wake. This happens to Harrow. She thinks the hand on her arm is part of the nightmare, one of the many hands of the murdered children who haunt her, shaking her. She thrashes and gasps.
Then Gideon's voice cuts through the dream like a knife and parts the vision like it's ripped paper. Black eyes snap open and are swallowed by blacker pupils as she tries to see in the dim light.
Her chest is still rising and falling rapidly. She drags a hand over her sweaty face, impatient with her own anxiety. She rolls onto her back.
"...Numbnuts?"
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By that logic, "nonagesimus" also probably has too many syllables. Harrow snorts very quietly, but does not fight the arm drawing her in. She moves with the pulling, rolling onto her side and tucking her head under Gideon's chin.
The Reverend Daughter is a small thing, short as she is skinny, and in comparison to her skeletal frame, Gideon feels huge. Warm and dense with muscle, much softer at the edges then her emaciated necromancer.
Harrow feels the stray thought wonder when the last time someone held her so close was, recalls the event in the salt pool, and tries to think before that. She aborts the mission quickly.
"You are a furnace." She complains, but doesn't pull away.
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"I know and you're welcome. It's call a metabolism. Living humans have them."
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If Gideon thinks her smutty magazines count as instruction on romance, she's about to have another thing coming. Harrow is willing to let the cavalier have a win this time, though. She is the genius who managed to unknit their souls and resurrect Gideon, after all. That's going to be enough of a win to keep her going for awhile yet.
"I suppose you enjoy hugging skeletons in that case." Is that humor we detect?
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"So you admit that you are literally all bones."
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A soft snorting sound. "I am not literally all bones, Griddle." She has some flesh and organs and meats and shit, unfortunately!
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"Go back to sleep... I've got you."
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Selfishly, she grumbles again and wriggles in closer, her small bony hands clutching at the front of Gideon’s shirt. Her mumble sounds like “you’d better” but it’s very muffled and carries none of her usual ice.
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The silence stretches on for what could only be a few minutes but it feels like a myriad. "Go to sleep, Griddle," said the pot to the kettle.
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The arm around her goes slack and in her half-awake state Harrow responds by pressing in closer. By the time they're truly asleep, she's tangled herself around Gideon like she's an oversized muscle teddy bear. Harrows pointy little face is pressed into Gideon's neck, and she's practically pushing her over to lay on top of her like a blanket again.
She wakes up like this, and does her best to not move at all because Gideon waking up means she has to be embarrassed about it which means she has to move and stop clinging.