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Gideon looks back.
In her mind, Harrow can still see her. It makes this image easy for Harrow to construct. One foot on the edge of the terrace, Gideon’s palms wet and slick with sweat. Her left knee, crushed and trembling to support her weight. Harrow can still picture her face perfectly, carved into Harrow's memory as with a knife. Gideon, with her top lip split and swollen and her teeth shining red with blood; her horrible crooked smile and her ridiculous orange hair and her gorgeous, beautiful golden eyes.
Gideon looks back and she stops. Not for long, but just enough. She stops for just long enough for Harrow to close the gap between them. To push her screaming, weary, traitorous body forward, to lunge and seize at the hot flesh of Gideon's wrist, to yank her back from the edge so they can face the kinder death, together. Gideon yields to Harrow’s tug in a way she never would have in life – in what world was Harrow ever able to move her, in what world was Harrow’s will ever stronger than Gideon’s own – and her arms reach out and grab fistfulls of Harrow’s robes. Gideon pulls Harrow into an embrace and their world shatters, Cytherea’s construct finally breaking through Harrow’s wall of bone, bearing down upon them both in sweet finality.
Time stops.
She smiles. A different smile from before; this one is a sad, tight smile, that reminds Harrow of the faces of the numerous dead she had prayed over all those myriads ago, when she was only the Reverend Daughter and Gideon was not the Ninth . The peaceful smile of the dead, walking towards their end comforted only by their faith and a child’s prayer.
Gideon says, softly, “This isn’t how it happens.” And suddenly Gideon isn’t holding Harrow. Suddenly Harrow is holding Gideon, and Gideon’s body is dead, and Gideon’s soul is fractured inside Harrow, already wending itself into Harrow’s own.
Harrow grits her teeth. No. This can’t be how it happens . Gideon’s body is so heavy in death, and her eyes are clouding, milky film already crowing in over fading gold. No . Harrow can’t do this. Harrow simply cannot do this. Gideon’s voice is gone from her ear and Gideon’s body is heavy in her hands and Harrow screams, and her grief rips the universe apart.
The scene resets.
Gideon, standing on the terrace. Harrow, fool that she was, laid nearly sensate against the wall of the bone barrier. Gideon walks towards the edge of the terrace. Gideon never looks back. She moves to her death, too slowly this time, her weight already shifted into open air and falling. Harrow screams, lurching herself forward to grasp at Gideon’s wrist, her hair, her shirt, to hold her, to stop her, to–
Harrow’s fingers hook onto the back of Gideon’s shirt. She’s panting, her joints screaming with effort, grounding herself to the terrace with three huge skeletons. Gideon flails widely, her arms pinwheeling and she rocks back and forth, her feet scrambling to find purchase above her certain death. Harrow looks down and finds Gideon’s eyes, expects them to be wild and frantic, but they aren’t. They’re just sad. Her eyes don’t match the rest of her, which is grasping and scrambling at the edge, peaceful pre-death calm aborted, suddenly, quiet assuredness replaced with open terror.
“Stop,” Gideon says, and her voice is in Harrow's ear now, her breath hot against Harrow’s neck. Suddenly, it isn’t constructs that are holding Harrow back from falling, but Gideon’s warm, solid embrace. “Stop,” Gideon says again, and suddenly the body in Harrow’s hands is still, and the weight is gone.
“This isn’t how it happens,” says the voice in her ear, and then the weight is back in Harrow’s hands, and the constructs holding her are crumbling. Gideon’s flailing body is too much to bear and Harrow’s shoulders are wrenched forward. Her hands are slippery and she’s drenched in bloodsweat; she can’t fucking see, the blood is in her eyes. And then the world explodes. Cytherea’s monster shatters the bone barrier as Harrow loses her balance and tips forward, Gideon and her both slamming into the iron railing.
Fuck.
“I wish I had died,” Harrow mumbles into Gideon’s too-still neck, no pulse left to move it. The body lies in her arms and her back aches, but she won’t let Gideon go. She reaches up to brush Gideon’s forehead and gently pulls her eyelids down over her unseeing golden eyes. “You should have been the one to survive. You always wanted to.”
“It doesn’t work like that.” Suddenly, they’re back in the pool, frigid saltwater coming up to their ears. Gideon holds Harrow close, and Harrow doesn’t feel cold at all.
“Besides,” Gideon says bracingly. “Couldn’t do that to Camilla.”
“It’s not fair,” Harrow whispers, and buries her head into Gideon’s chest.
“Don’t you see?” They’re back on the terrace. They’re facing the monster. Harrow half dead, Gideon with her shattered knee and torn open shoulder. Camilla with her own blood running in rivulets down her skin, the hot iron of grief etched into every line of her.
"I can't," Harrow sobs, and feels the lie burn in her mouth. She can see ten thousand futures, and only one end. Harrow isn't a fool. She just doesn’t want to understand.
“It had to happen,” Gideon says, her voice soft in Harrow's ear, her body heavy in Harrow’s hands. Harrow wonders, suddenly very frightened, if this is truly the last remnants of Gideon’s soul or if it’s just her brain’s hallucination, trying to absolve herself of a debt she will never be able to repay. Harrow can see Gideon’s smile, carved knife-sharp into her hippocampus. And Harrow can still hear the horrible grinding crunch of Gideon’s sternum yielding to iron, the wet rip of the railing tearing through pericardium and absolutely obliterating the heart.
The scene resets. Gideon, walking to the edge of the terrace. Harrow, scrambling behind her, screaming, reaching out, missing Gideon by only a hair's breadth and--
Gideon falls.
Harrow resets the scene. She sees it in her mind, frozen, dissecting it with an anatomist’s gaze, trying to find her mistake. Trying to find a way to fix it. The terrible, overwhelming feeling that she let Gideon die, if she had just thought faster, been smarter, realized sooner what Gideon was planning to do. Her stupid pride, her blinding conciet. Harrow had assumed she had accounted for everything. She had assumed and accounted for every possible end, except one where Gideon was dead and she was alive. That isn’t how it is supposed to happen. It should be Gideon, alive, and Harrow, dead at her feet. That’s how it was always supposed to be, as sure as the Body lies still in the Tomb, as sure as strong, eleven year old fingers wrapped around her throat.
Harrow resets the scene. She could have stopped Gideon. She should have stopped her. It was her responsibility to-- if only she had moved faster, if only she had realized sooner. If only she had yelled louder, if she had stopped letting her foolish pride infect her so thoughurally, maybe Gideon would be here. If she hadn’t been so selfish and brought Gideon to Canaan. If she had allowed Gideon a shred of decency in their whole miserable lives. If she hadn't fought back, if she had let Gideon finish the job, strangle her in the dirt when she was ten years old.
And what then? The traitorous voice whispers in the back of her head. Gideon’s voice weaving into her mother’s, her father’s, into the voice of every adult who had hurt her and cursed her and told her it was going to be worth it in the end. It’s as easy as simple arithmetic. Cytherea, even with her body destroyed from the inside out, Sextus’ last gift eating her alive – even with her, Cytherea would have killed them. Without her consumption of Griddle’s soul, they’d all be dead.
Harrow is filled with despair. She would have preferred that death over this one. Sinfully, selfishly. If she couldn’t die at Gideon’s hand, then at least she could die alongside her. Their lives had always been entangled, and so more it be, so would their deaths: one flesh, one end.
But Gideon died first.
Why did you make me live? Harrow wanted to wail. She wanted to shed fifteen years and wail and cry and scream like the child she was never truly able to be. Why did you make me live, when all I wanted was to die . You have killed me, cursed me, revived me to a fate worse than death.
Oh, buck up you sad sack, Gideon says. Imagine how cool and sexy you’re going to look with my eyes.
Awareness comes to Harrow unwillingly. It comes with a piercing headache and the overwhelming roar of something, some things , pulsing just beyond her comprehension. The dream still clings to her, delicate as a spiderweb in morning dew, and Harrow is terrified that when she opens her eyes the spell will break. She’s terrified that when she wakes, really wakes, it will be too late. That Gideon will be gone, totally.
Desperation drives her to her own flesh – sends her necromantic powers seeking towards her brain. Harrow tears through her frontal lobe with crude, clumsy strokes and blissfully, unconsciousness finds her once again.
She rips through her memories like a wraith, dissecting them with an anatomist's gaze. It's futile. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what she could have done, what she might have known and what, had she deserved even a shred of the power and knowledge and trust that her congregants had trusted her with, she might have been able to do. It doesn't matter. Gideon's soul is already diffusing and weaving into the disgusting patchwork of Harrow's own but it’s not fully incorporated. Not yet.
But Harrow is running out of time .
She resets the terrace. Just her and Gideon now, in an endless expanse of white. No use bothering with the rest of it. Just her and Gideon, like they always were, tangled up in eachother. No wall of bone. No monster. No iron spike.
With two hundred already, what's one more?
One more would tear the world asunder.
“I can’t keep you,” Harrow says.
No , she hears, barely a whisper. You could never keep me. But this way, you get to keep yourself. And you have to find out how to live with it .
“No,” Harrow says, and she wakes, and she knows what she has to do.
“You should be thanking her,” Ianthe says, lazily, one eye violent amethyst and the other blue shot through with river stones. “She went willingly, she wanted this for you.”
Harrow is bent over the sink, three fingers still knuckle deep in her own eye socket. The flesh is already healing over, the iris forming vibrant gold around her fingers. She removes them and her blood is already skeletoning on her fingers and flaking off into the sink into a fine pink dust. Her eyes are already back in her face. Her eyes are already back in her face. Like egg yolk, or the lemon slices of her childhood that had tasted so sharp they hurt her teeth.
“Gideon didn’t kill herself,” Harrow snaps back. She didn’t. She had no choice. She was trapped, with certain death on either side. It was never a choice. "She was murdered." Was Cytherea the killer? Was Harrow ? “If you say that again I’ll take your other arm.”
“Unnecessarily hurtful,” Ianthe says, in the tone of someone who is trying not to roll her eyes at a very stupid child. Her right arm is aborted just above the olecranal apex, the skin lying smooth and baby-soft over the stump. There is no scar. Ianthe rubs her temple with her left hand. “She didn’t just trip and get impaled accidentally , and it’s an insult to keep treating her like she did.”
It takes everything inside of Harrow to keep herself from Ianthe’s throat. “If you don’t shut up,” Harrow grits out, threading corded sinew through Ninth House black obsidian, “I’m going to enjoy this.”
“Oh, kinky ,” Ianthe purrs. “Whatever. As long as you’re sure you’ll still be… able to hold up your end of the bargain.”
Harrow closes her eyes. She can see her and Gideon, fighting to the death in Ninth House dirt. Gideon and her in Drearbough, Gideon making rude gestures and obscene facial expressions as Harrow watches her through slitted eyes, knucklebones clattering between her fingers. Her and Gideon exiting the shuttle at Canaan, Harrow half blinded by the brightness of it all and Gideon, standing wide-eyed and open mouthed at the vast, endless blue sky. Gideon .
Gideon, Gideon, Gideon.
“The Ninth doesn’t renege on it’s promises,” Harrow replies, and when she opens her eyes they're scattershot, black and gold. She sets the needle against the edge of Ianthe’s mouth with hands that do not tremble. "Stop stalling. We're running out of time."
“Alright,” Ianthe says, leaning forward to run her tongue up the side of the needle, smiling like a knife. “Let’s begin.”