Chapter Text
Harrow has always known the rancorous taste of death, she thinks.
Something thick and unbidden behind her throat, in some cracked crevice of her molars. It has always been a part of her, in such a very real sense.
She remembers the way their mouths moved, strangely in the night but captivating, nonetheless. How, later, in the mirror she’d try to replicate the flashing of her mother’s teeth as she gave the homilies, her father’s stern jaw while negotiating, the Drearbruh flicker of their eyes.
She remembers, perhaps too well, the way their mouths moved when they first told her about their heretical sin. What they’d done. How it is now her burden—how every step Harrow takes is two hundred for the Ninth House, how every breath she takes is for the remembrance of their sacrifice. How, at the end of her life, she will be spread amongst two-hundred graves instead of one.
This had upset her then, and she had cried. But she was only five years old and to a five-year-old, her parents were God. They were God and they told her that she must suffer because she is alive, and she is alive because she must suffer.
And so she had.
…
She had no way of knowing that God himself would also ask the same thing of her only years later.
…
And here’s how it happens:
Harrowhark Nonagesimus never goes home.
In the end times, they find themselves on some half-flipped moon. It’s got great soil, breathable air. Harrow doesn’t remember too much of the fall. She’d been too…overcome at the time to remember being stolen away in Pyrrha Dve’s arms and shuttled into a ship. When she awoke, she’d found herself in a four-poster bed, ship-lapped walls surrounding her, the quiet smell of pollen in the air.
The Saint of Duty had done more than merely dreamed and hoped of this place. In small moments, he had sequestered away and started to build. At the end of his life, Gideon the First had managed to upright a small farmhouse in the middle of a green-gold field. He fancied a wrap-around porch, high arching windows, peaked ceilings with a second floor and plenty of space, room for three.
It was now four months after the fact, after everything. And Harrowhark Nonagesimus — heir to a House that no longer exists, ninth saint to have served the Great Deceiver—roams the walls of the house like a phantom. She spends her time avoiding mirrors, carving herself into the scarce tomes that had been brought along—mostly ones that consisted of flesh magic, very little bones—and learning to cook.
If she was going to be honest with herself, she would admit that she wasn’t much doing in the way of learning to cook as she was praying to cook. It was with a certain amount of hopelessness that she approached the task of cooking a meal for the whole of the house. When Pyrrha, apparently “sick and tired” of her “moping around the house,” had assigned her chef duty, she had fought greatly against it. Harrow knew Pyrrha to be the superior cook—why couldn’t she do it?
Pyrrha had only said, “Because I said so.”
Which was not really helpful, nor was it, frankly, an answer.
Harrowhark stares into the bottom of the pan and ponders her creation. Thick stew, or an approximation thereof, bubbles and pops wildly into the air. Hints and bursts of mostly organic-smelling vegetables steam silently. She grabs the ladle, tastes it. And it tastes the way that she knows the way gardens tastes with a startling intimacy. Harrow feels her mouth twist down, so she grabs the jar of salt and pinches some into the pan. She tastes it again. Salty vegetables.
“Good God,” Harrow says, tossing the ladle across the counter. Impossible! Absolutely ridiculous! How she craves Pyrrha’s heat death, how she cultivates being the one to undo her at the behest that Harrow waste her talents on something so trite as cooking a meal! As if she were in charge of the domestic work!
“Not nearly,” a voice sounds behind her. “Actually, I thought we’d agreed that he was, in fact, not a good God.” Paul from behind her, spreads their hands wide. “Which is why we are here now, struggling to cook a meal.”
“Paul,” Harrow turns, knife now clenched readily into the small of her palm, “if you are here with the idea that I’ll willingly subject to your jokes and dance for your entertainment, it would be best for you to leave now. I’m in no mood today.”
Those wintertime irises roll, and Paul says something under their breath that may have been “but you are in no mood, any day,” but Harrow can’t be sure. They step forward, hair slipping and shuffled, the light from the star that was once called Dominicus highlighting the hands of Camilla Hect, the scars there. “Let’s investigate further, shall we? Harrowhark Nonagesimus—once Reverend Mother to the Ninth, our great and divine Deliverer who offered us all salvation from the hands of our God, our death, is now rendered scion to the kitchen and struggles to make soup.”
“Fuck you, Paul.” A pause. “And it’s stew.”
“Is it?”
“An approximation.”
“How did you know! I have been hungry for an approximation to stew for weeks now.” Paul steps forward and gently moves Harrow to the side, hands placed on her waist. She stiffens at the contact. “This should be an easy fix.” Paul reaches into the cabinet and pulls many spices down, too many, none of them that Harrow had thought viable for this dish and altogether too flavorful. “I appreciate the attempts to make sure we’re getting all our minerals, Harrow, but I would prefer not to taste the dirt in my meals.”
“I don’t see why not, Paul,” Harrow says. “You are but a worm gnawing and bothering into my rot.” She relents though, and places the spoon into their hand, and watches Paul work. How their shoulders shift in the light, the bounded muscles of Camilla, the stiffness of Palamedes. Her heart hurts. Oh, God does it hurt. She would never admit this to anybody, herself, God, her salt-water thing, nobody. But she misses the Sixth. She misses the handsome lines of Camilla, her taut hands, the way she smelled—lavender and leather. And Palamedes, his wit against hers, the small jokes between them, the debt and care, his gawky limbs. Gone. Both of them. Forever martyrs to the horrors of love, the sacrifice of devotion.
But even after all this, it is strange to be able to breathe with God’s blood beneath her nails. Strange to think that, of all the death she has tasted, his is the one that rots under her tongue. In the happening, she had never planned to walk out of it alive. Her death was to be the last in the life of sacrifice. Her life forfeit—the way it was always supposed to be.
“Kids, could you lighten up a little?” Pyrrha shoulders her way into the house, tracking mud from her feet and trailing dirt from where it dusts the thickness of her forearms. “Daddy so hates to come home to fighting. Paul—I thought I told you not to cook for Harrow anymore.”
“I wasn’t aware you had a palate for poorly steamed carrots.”
“Harrow needs to learn. The only other time I can remember her cooking a meal was when I ingested marrow from her tibia. And the soup wasn’t that good, really.”
And in many moments, Harrow hopes that Pyrrha had hurt, somewhat, from being exploded outwards.
Another figure shoulders through the door, carrying logs, the splinters coming away into the soft blue flannel of her shirt. Gideon. Gideon and the broadness of her shoulders, square jaw tight. Her Gideon and that red hair that curls lightly behind her ears. Her Gideon and Gideon’s soft smile, the smoothness of her lips, the yellowed coin of her iris, the way sweat drips into the hollow of her throat—
Gideon looks up. Solar eclipse and flare meet in a surprise. Death and rebirth. The darkness of the night and the promise of the sun. Always and forever. Harrow’s mind spins, dizzying, grabs the ledge of the counter behind her for some semblance of balance. There’s amusement somewhere in the tops of her brows, in the slow crooked smile.
“Fighting? Again?” Gideon asks, throwing the logs near the fireplace. They crack together, pieces of bark fly across the floor that Paul had swept not two hours before.
“Not fighting. I’m trying to show Harrow the ways of stew, Kiriona.”
Kiriona.
Harrow looks down at the ladle in her hands, her vision blurring, face hot and flushed. A deep breath in. A deep breath out.
Gideon smiles wider, an almost laugh forms in her voice. “Good, I’m starving. Harrow—”
It is her name being uttered that’s her undoing. Harrow hastily slaps the ladle into the palm of Paul and says, “Sextus—Hect—Paul. Paul will be taking over for dinner. I’ve other matters to attend to.”
She feels a pair of golden and black eyes follow her all the way up the stairs.
…
A clack. Deadened space. A pause that chills.
Paul’s eyes are obscured by a pair of glasses they don’t need to wear, their movements soft and fluid when they shift their weight from one leg to the next. “Thank you for meeting with me.”
Harrow says nothing and occupies her gaze elsewhere—outside of the prying winter-blue eyes of Camilla Hect and the analyzing gaze of Palamedes Sextus. It hurts. It hurts. She has lived in hurt her whole life, been burned and scabbed near to death many times, but never before had she craved Death and Her peace the way she does now.
It’s a nightly wish. When she bends at the waist and shows dominion, when she clasps her hands tight around her prayer-beads so tight that blood wells from the points of contact. She begs and she wishes to die. She begs and she wishes and she hopes and she prays that she might never wake again from her slumber.
It never happens. Harrow is scared it never will.
(It won’t.)
“Can I ask you something, Nonagesimus?” Silence. “Is it jealousy?”
A laugh bubbles out of Harrow’s mouth so harshly that she’s surprised by the volume. It hurts her abdomen, hurts her cheeks from the smile across her face. “Jealousy? Not nearly. I, personally, have never been so codependent upon someone else that I thought to burn my other half away so that we may live together in perpetual continuity in the same body. Only crazy people do that.”
Paul says nothing and only dips their head down and scribbles something down on a bright yellow notepad. They flip through a few pages, messy with scrawl, before going back to the original page and writes something else.
Harrow so hates when they do that.
These sessions started as necessity after she had been returned back to her body after six months of inhabiting a wound. Only from habit had it borne a routine for the pair and Paul very obviously took more pleasure from this exchange than Harrow likes to think about, as she was getting nothing but an hour each week of being spat in the face and told all the ways she is fucked and evil. Which is something she does to herself every day, quite separate of the embarrassment of having someone else add onto the dog pile.
“Ah, yes the eyebrows,” Paul says. “Would you like to know what I just wrote down, Harrow?”
“I want you to eat shit and also die.”
“I just wrote: Harrow sits before me with her arms crossed in a defensive affect. When asked a personal question, perhaps too close for comfort, she responded meanly in a way that she wanted to hurt. She does not realize that I know that to also be a defense mechanism. Tired. Bags under her eyes that suggests she has not slept. Face thinner, next to no buccal fat to be found in her cheeks. Any and all progress made with Nona’s weight has been reversed thoroughly. Seems to be waiting for something.”
Harrow uncrosses her arms immediately and sits upright, posture perfect. “We are not writing a biography, Sex—Paul.”
It’s the second time she’s slipped in so many hours and the chill of that realization rots between them, falls flat to the floor as a show of her own inadequacies. She hates to look at it. Harrow closes her eyes and breathes and feels the base of her spine into her chair, the soles of her feet against the hardwood floors. Below, Pyrrha and Gideon chat freely. Harrow can feel the heat of a rushed temper that used to belong to someone else hit deep into her chest. It is a struggle to remain neutral—but, of course Paul sees something come to her face and writes something once more.
“Not jealousy, then.”
“No,” Harrow says. “I’ve only wanted her to be free of me. And yet, I remain the thief of her life. No matter what I do; I cannot seem to fathom giving her up.”
At this, Paul closes the notebook and sets it to the side. “I don’t think she would see it that way.”
“How would you know.” Harrow’s voice sounds startlingly flat, even to herself. Coldness seeps through her and she’s so suddenly tired. “How could you possibly know.”
Paul says nothing, but at this, the blueness of their eyes sharpens. “And you miss them.”
Harrow’s feet bring her to the lip of the door, beyond it, angling towards her room and the bed she’s sewn herself into, sewn depravity into. “I never even got to say goodbye to you.”
…
In the dark of the night, when the distant stars flicker, when Pyrrha’s snores sound through the halls, when Gideon has stopped her hundreds of push-ups, when Paul has shut off their reading light—only hours after all of these things does Harrow rise from her bed.
The blue moonlight highlights the deepening curves of each knucklebone, the dried blood on them from hours of tight-gripped praying. Harrow will bend and press into the blooming bruises on both patellae. Her and her shaking hands will touch the center of her forehead first, the center of her chest, left shoulder, then the right. She holds the knuckleheads to her mouth, kisses them and mutters under her breath. A sob wracks her body silently, the hiccupping of forced asphyxiation, and then the tears come more freely after that. Harrow cries. And she cries with her hand pressed tight against her mouth, eyes and heart screwed up tightly. She bites the flesh of her thumb to keep herself quiet. “Oh God,” she says. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, God!”
In the dead of the night, amidst the secrecy sworn to deep space, Harrowhark Nonagesimus prays to the God that she slaughtered.