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Let me tell you, Nonagesimus, I thought the weirdest bag of bones I’d ever wake up in was yours. With all the flesh-jumping everyone’s doing, it’s easy to forget that your microbial ass has only ever been in its own body, so it’s hard to tell you what it’s like - but I’ll never forget it.
I mean, the sword in your gut, the killer bees, Ianthe, my dad - they make the whole experience pretty memorable. But looking down at myself and seeing your hands - yeesh. Did I ever tell you, at first a part of me kept thinking it was your hands out in front of me? I knew it wasn’t, of course, I was the one moving the hands, and also I can barely remember a time you let yourself get within smacking range like that, except for a few times on accident and once on purpose. But to my wrung-out brain they were your hands moving around, and the sound of your footsteps echoing through the hallways of that fucked-up spaceship, and when I looked in the mirror, it was your stupid nose and your stupid hair and your stupid eye-sockets with my stupid fucking yellow eyes staring back at me.
But I’d catch glimpses of myself in mirrors, sometimes, you know? Or in any of the reflective windows - and I’d catch myself thinking, There’s Harrow, or expecting to hear your voice, or starting to straighten my back so you wouldn’t jam a finger in my spinal cord for slouching - but it was just me. It was always just me.
I mean, it was and it wasn’t, you know? I figured you had to be in there somewhere, trapped in that brain that you let Ianthe Tridentarius cut up like it was a damn apple. Lord knows I didn’t know how any of this necroshit lyctor mess worked, but I told myself you were there just as I had been, surfacing and drowning, surfacing and drowning, rise and repeat etc. That was the logical conclusion, if there was any logic left at this point in our lives - so it wasn’t just me.
And also, like I said, any reflective surface, and there you were, right in front of me like you’d never gone away.
I practiced your walk a few times to see if I could really trick myself. I’d hunch your shoulders and glare straight ahead, then walk like there was some sexy popsicle bitch I had to go see. If I was passing a wall of windows, I’d watch the reflection go - and just for a few steps, there you were, Nonagesimus, as tiny and bitchy as the day you were born. I did this every chance I got - I figured the more I could mimic you, the easier it would be for me to show up back at Drearburh and convince Crux that actually, you’d changed your mind about the Ninth, and would be absconding for the Third immediately, ice bimbo in tow. Just to see his face.
I never could get your voice, though. It didn’t matter what I said or how gremlin-y I pitched it, I never sounded like you. I had your arms and your legs and most of your face and your vocal cords but at the end of the day, I didn’t have you there with me.
Which, really, was for the best - watching you try to worship my dad might have been the final nail in my coffin.
He didn’t tell me, you know. My dad.
I guess it doesn’t even matter, but I want it to be known that he didn’t tell me before he took me out of your body. I told you I’d keep the home fires burning, and I fully intended to keep that promise. I did, I swear - I had this whole plan, you’d come back and I’d go “See how your thumbs are still attached and you have the barest hint of deltoid muscles now? That was me.” and you’d go “Well, Griddle, I guess you’re good for something after all,” while I scoffed and maybe flexed a little. I did all the exercises you did not do even once - every night I brushed your hair, washed the paint off your face, put your body to bed (new for you, I know), and then one morning I woke up and here I was, and you were nowhere - not even in the mirror.
I thought yours was the weirdest bag of bones I’d ever wake up in until I woke up in this thing. I don’t recognize anything when I look in the mirror. It doesn’t look like me.
And I mean, I guess it’s not - Gideon is mega-dead, and like Pops tells me, it’s Kiriona time now. But I don’t even get it, this is supposed to be my body. The legs have the muscles I expect, I know every scrape and bump on the arms, the gaping fucking hole in the chest is just where we left it! But somehow I think it’s worse that it’s supposed to be mine and it’s not.
Because it is most definitely not. Let’s get that on the record as well, okay, Nonagesimus? This is not my body. Like, I don’t even know if it can be called a body anymore. You know dear ol’ dad made me mega-invincible? Since I’ve arrived in this particular flesh bucket, not a single scratch. Not a bump, not a bruise, not scrape, let alone a drop of blood spilled. I don’t know if it’s a symptom of this magic armor or just part of being, hello, a re-animated corpse, but I don’t feel anything either. No pain, but also none of things like temperature, or fabric on skin, or a person putting a hand on my shoulder in a brutal attempt at paternal affection - nada. I mean, light pressure, maybe, otherwise I’d be going around dropping things and falling over my own feet, but not really feeling.
And the other thing, which absolutely should not be a big deal, but I just can’t get over - Harrow, I am the color of a snow leek. I’m the color of thousand-year-old oss polished by crepsular hands for another thousand years. I’m paler than you ever were - I’m Ianthe colored. No wonder I don’t recognize this body in the mirror, or these hands in my periphery - they are fully a body and hands I have never seen! It’d be the same if you dipped me in whatever purple dye the Third house loves so much - this body is a color it has never been before, and I don’t know it like this. I can’t feel, my skin is wrong - not to mention, like, the thousand other things that wig me out here - this is not my body.
I put paint on, one time, just to cover this damn skin. You’d know what it’s called, probably the Skull of the Mega-Dead Bitch #88, Our Lady of Darkness and Penitence. But then Ianthe walked in, and laughed that scathing wide-mouthed laugh of hers - “Oh, Daddy will just die when he hears about this,” she’d said, before flouncing out the door. And the next time I saw him, he’d grimaced like he was going to have to explain where babies came from to me and asked me how I was “coping with transition”, so I threw the paint out the window, then called a servant to collect it and throw it out. “You’re not Ninth anymore, Kiriona,” Ianthe had told me later, in case I’d fucking forgotten.
And get this, Nonagesimus: you want to know something funny? That was all I’d ever wanted. I spent most of my life trying as hard as I could to get as far away from the Ninth - from you - as possible. I ran again and again, knowing I’d never really make it, knowing whatever hell you’d rain down upon me when I was caught would ache for months, but desperate to make it off of that hellhole and never see your face again. Even at Canaan house, I was dreaming of all the Cohort badges I’d earn one day, up until Jeanne and Isaac died.
And here’s the punchline: here I was, really and truly without you for the first time in my life just like I’d always wanted, and all I could think about was where you’d gone.
How funny is that? How fucked is that?
First time in my relatively short-ass life. Even when you didn’t want me there, even when you didn’t know I was there (like when you LOCKED ME INSIDE YOUR HEAD), even when it was just your body and not really you, it was the two of us. The first thought Kiriona really had after What the fuck, was Harrow’s gone.
And in that same moment, I hated you - maybe more than I’d ever hated you any time you had me whipped raw for trying to escape or pushed me away when I tried to offer you an ounce of help - I hated you so god damn much because you fucking left me, Nonagesimus, and at least when I left you it was because I was dead, and even then not really gone. You’d left me and were out there somewhere, the farthest you’d ever been from me, just because you wanted to, and I hated you for it.
We’ve always known I’m weaker than you, okay? Nobody is surprised to learn this. When you look up “stubborn fortitude” in the dictionary, your pinched little face will be glaring out from the definition. I never had that integrity - so when I woke up, alone and angry, and my dad was there offering me a crown and Ianthe was petting my hair and fussing over my chest wound - I fell right into it. I dove headfirst, Harrow, and they pulled me in deeper and deeper. I wasn’t consulted about that last body-jump, but as soon as I was there, with a crown and a dad, it was just so easy to keep falling.
That’s another thing I don’t think I’ll ever get used to: my dad. Not him as a person, although that too, but the phrase. It still feels foreign on my lips. My dad, my dad, my dad. It sticks in the back of this throat, like a too-big bite of something chewy or slightly gummy. I can say your dad, and I can say my mom - those were vocabulary words that existed the whole time you and I were raising hell on Drearburh - but I barely even thought the phrase “my dad” until it was suddenly and aggressively relevant.
And I love it. I love it so much, Nonagesimus, and I don’t know whether to be ashamed or not. I have a dad. There’s a person who’s mine, who’s intrinsically connected to me, who wants me there with him and gave me his last name - just thinking the phrase “my dad” was like taking the stuffy and awkward coat of total orphanhood off after 19 years. I think everyone I talked to for the first month or so must have thought I was the galaxy’s most obnoxious name-dropper, mentioning My Father The Emperor every chance I got, but really I was just relishing how the words tasted over and over again. My dad. I had a dad. I was a daughter. I had - look, neither of us have ever really done the whole “happy crowd of blood-relations” thing - but I had family. I was something to someone.
I had been something to someone before, of course. And not even just scion to the Ninth - I had been your cavalier.
Your dutiful knight in shining armor, your most loyal swordhand, your own personal in-bedroom bodyguard - and it had meant something to me, okay, and I won’t apologize. Last thing for the record, and I literally did go to the grave before admitting it to your face, but being your cavalier had been - for the briefest, brightest, moment - something maybe like family.
But then you had IANTHE FUCKING TRIDENTARIUS cut me out of your skull like the moldy bit of an apple, and I got to watch you forget me the same way I used to watch you breathe at night, so clearly, whatever my cavaliership had meant to you was some ugly joke of your past. “Oh, Gideon, I accidentally got myself beholden to her when we were kids - yeesh! Haven’t seen her in ages, lucky me!” You’d laugh, at some fancy dinner party, and all your hot smart friends would laugh, and then you wouldn’t think my name for another decade or two.
So, fucking whatever, Nonagesimus, you’d spat me out like a piece of oss that got mixed into your meal and I wasn’t your cavalier anymore - I wasn’t even Ninth - but at least now I was someone’s daughter.
And that had to be enough for now, because there was no going back, was there? You were gone, off to Planet Who-Gives-a-Shit with your cool friends Nobody Cares and Doesn’t Matter, and I was here, Prince of the Nine Houses, with my dad. What, was I supposed to go back to sleeping at the foot of your bed like some pet? Go protect the tomb together like good little bone girls? Stand guard against nothing all day while you mooned after your icy-ass bitch? No way. Not interested. Not even a little.
There’s no going back, Nonagesimus. You’re gone, and I’m still here where you left me, and until you come back and I can drop-kick your ass to the nine houses and back, I’m not gonna be sorry for taking what is objectively a major fucking upgrade when it’s offered.
We’re not one flesh anymore, Harrow. Your end is up to you, but I’m done dying for someone who doesn’t even want it.