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The first time they sleep together, it starts over breakfast.
Well, not literally. Pyrrha’s not generally a fan of mixing sex with food, although she’s made exceptions before. Plus, scrambled eggs aren’t exactly an aphrodisiac.
That morning, Camilla is cracking her neck, back and forth, in between halfhearted attempts at eating. “That sounds crunchy, Hect,” Pyrrha says, pouring more hot sauce onto her eggs.
“Didn’t sleep well. Two more bites, please,” Camilla says to Nona, then with a curious, tiny shift, clears her throat. “Actually, we were thinking.”
“The Sixth thinking about things, very new,” Pyrrha says, wiggling her eyebrows at the kid to include her in the joke, and Nona giggles, although whether or not she really gets the sarcasm is up for debate.
Camilla purses her lips like she’s blocking a smile, keeps her eyes fixed on her bowl. “Palamedes says—well, this body is holding a lot of tension between the two of us, and Pyrrha, we were wondering if you could maybe help out sometime with the…” She pauses, glances at Nona. “The physical side of things.”
“Like doing exercises? Like press-ups?” Nona frowns.
“Yes, like press-ups?” Pyrrha asks, innocently, even though she knows immediately that of course it’s not fucking press-ups they mean. Hect looks at her, exasperation mixed with something else twitching at the corner of her eyes, and Pyrrha just smiles, brows raised, and shovels a healthy forkful of egg into her mouth.
“I was—never mind, this was his idea, he can explain it better,” Camilla says, flushing a bit, and taps the watch to start the timer, closes her eyes to bring him out. Pyrrha normally hates when they duck out of conversations like this, but she has to admit that in this instance it’s very funny, and she always likes seeing Camilla blush.
“Palamedes, Pyrrha is going to help Camilla do exercises like press-ups,” Nona chirps. “Although, Pyrrha seemed like she was joking about the press-ups, specifically.” (The kid is getting better at sarcasm, it seems.)
“Oh, really?” Palamedes shoots Pyrrha a glance. Pyrrha winks at him, and he shakes his head wryly. “Well, whatever she’s agreed to, that’s awfully nice of her. Two more bites, Nona, come on.”
“I just did that with Camilla,” Nona sighs, exasperated.
They finish eating, and Palamedes does not explain further what he and Cam were talking about, and Pyrrha does not ask, because she knows it has to do with the heavy question that hangs between her and Camilla, the months of charged glances and hand brushes over the breakfast table and each catching glimpses of the other half-clothed in the morning. The question that’s been there ever since Pyrrha had dragged Nona’s body by the armpits onto that shithole of a cargo vessel Blood of Eden was using, covered in oil and blood and scum and River pus and slicked through with her own sweat, and she’d beheld the coiled energy and the gray, shining power of Camilla Hect’s grief and resolve. Hect had looked at her, too. Pyrrha had thought: hmm, well. Living for a little longer might not be such a bad idea.
Their morning progresses from there—the timer goes off, Palamedes retreats, Cam begins readying Nona for school, avoiding Pyrrha’s gaze. Pyrrha moves just a fraction slower than usual as she shaves, chewing the brief conversation over in her head. She considers pulling Camilla aside, making her clarify what, actually, it is that she wants, then reconsiders, remembers cradling Camilla’s bloody head in her lap just a week ago after the incident at the beach. Pyrrha knows what Cam really wants, all the time, a burning ache that won’t go away. The question isn’t what Camilla Hect wants; it’s what Camilla Hect wants that Pyrrha can actually give.
—
The first time Pyrrha surfaced after she died was in the middle of Gideon fucking someone, which, honestly, was not exactly ideal. She’d come to, gasping, Gideon’s cock buried hilt deep in some pretty brunette Cohort officer with a fantastic ass, and Pyrrha was so shocked at the simple act of being alive that she’d promptly begun screaming her head off, fantastic ass be damned. It felt like coming up from underwater in a cold salt lake, except it was a lake she’d been swimming in for thousands of years, and she’d been holding her breath the whole time. The poor little officer had started screaming, too, and that had, in turn, been surprising enough to knock Pyrrha out again for another few decades, at least. (She never found out what happened to the officer; she hopes Gideon at least gave her a promotion, or something, for the jump scare.)
After the next few times (she’d love to find those women, too, and apologize for screaming bloody murder in the middle of making love) she started getting more used to it, tried to hold it together a little better, but reentry was always a bitch before she figured out her methods. Being dropped into Gideon’s body wasn’t the issue. She knew how he moved better than he did, so taking over his rangy limbs, his misshapen musculature, was like second nature. And his cock—Pyrrha had had dicks before, a whole drawer full of them, in fact, and turns out having a dick connected to her body was way fucking better than she could have imagined; she was a natural from the jump. But it was the shock of living itself—the gift of drawing breath, the bright sensations of the world, the sharp pains of the heart—that ran her over like a truck, every time. Even now, when she’s the only one living in this big, empty body, it still catches her unawares sometimes, the heady rush of existence, the way it all feels.
It really didn’t help that there was something about sex and desire that thinned the walls inside her necromancer, made it much easier for her to come to the front, so she was constantly regaining consciousness in the middle of Gideon’s orgasm, or while he was talking to someone extremely good-looking. In those early millennia, before it became clear to her what her presence in his brain was doing to his sanity, it was around those moments that she figured out ways to take over, that she honed her stable of tricks to push him to the back and let her have the body for a while.
Sometimes, she’d come to the front when he met them. Gideon never noticed when women noticed him, which just made them want him more; wingmanning him had always been one of Pyrrha’s favorite pastimes. When they shared a body she’d push him to the back for just a brief moment, so she could make eye contact with a stranger and feel the pheromone rush that comes with a pretty girl perking up under your gaze. She’d flash them her smile—the famous Pyrrha Dve smile, the smile that got anyone she wanted into bed while she was alive; the smile that, incredibly, translates smoothly to Gideon’s burnt out, blocky face. It always worked. Shooting fish in a barrel, really, Pyrrha and Gideon together.
Other times, she’d take over while they were in the bedroom. He wasn’t a bad lay, but Gideon really only had one setting, and that was fucking like the world was ending. Pyrrha liked to think she was doing him a favor when she took over in the middle of sex, when she slowed their strokes, showed the women how Gideon’s fingers could tease, how his mouth could draw them out to the edge and back again for more, how languid and delicate could do as much (and more) as rough and intense. You’re welcome, buddy, she’d thought more than once when a partner had stumbled love-drunk out of Gideon’s bed, stars in her eyes from the whole experience.
What she really loved most, though, in those early days after she first woke up, was figuring out how to share consciousness with him. Not full synthesis, obviously, she wasn’t enough of an idiot to get even near that—but there were tricks she could pull that got her in the same vicinity. From the inside of Gideon’s soul, she learned to approach the volcano edge of his consciousness without stepping into the fire—to ride behind him, for a while, like being the back seat of one of those old tandem bikes. It was easiest at first when he was having sex, although it didn’t really have anything to do with sex, in the end. It had to do with Pyrrha and Gideon.
When she was floating achingly close to the surface, riding in tandem with him, she felt like all the things she loved about him—all the things she’d agree to die for—were palpable, tangible, alive under the ridges of her nonexistent fingertips. His face in the early light of Dominicus as they rose to lead their officers on morning jogs, sleep still crusted in his eyes, jerking his big head side to side to get the kinks out of his neck. The way his gruff voice got even and patient when he taught her about composting. The way his laugh came out like a shout on the rare occasions when he found something really funny. How he’d only asked for vodka and a belt to bite down on the first time she’d cracked his skull to sieve out his brain fluid, how he’d barely made any noise during all their torture exposure sessions for all those years, but had screamed and sobbed like a child as she lay dying in front of him. His broad fingernail beds and the craggy stubble feathering his smile lines and the warm brown sugar callouses on his hands—all part of her body now, technically, but she fiercely missed being able to look at them from the outside. When they were riding in tandem, all those beautiful little things melted into the walls dividing her off as separate and soaked into her in a divine rush. In those moments the woman in front of them would melt away, and Pyrrha could tell that Gideon felt the golden glory of their togetherness, too, better than any lay either of them could have in this life or the next. One flesh, one end—it was fucking real, for a while, wasn’t it?
—
That night is a good one. Pyrrha makes an ass joke at dinner (“Can I borrow your butt? Mine has a crack in it”) that makes Nona laugh so hard she falls out of her chair, and she practically wiggles with joy as she adds a tally to the board. She’s still giggling as Camilla bundles her off to bed, and Cam flashes Pyrrha a rare smile, too, one that sends a jolt of electricity through her body. They still hadn’t said anything specific after the conversation that morning, but the air has shifted around them, palpably, that charge morphing from a possibility to a definite. Pyrrha’s no dummy. She knows what’s about to happen.
“She’s asleep, so couch, I think,” Camilla says later, abruptly, after brushing her teeth and double-checking on the kid. “If we’re quiet.”
“Well, that last part’s up to you,” Pyrrha says, standing up from the couch and grinning in a way she knows looks roguish. Camilla side-eyes her, hums some sort of indiscernable noise, then touches Pyrrha’s arms, gently, fingertips one-two on each sinewy brown bicep, and stands on her tiptoes to reach her face up.
Hect’s first kisses are efficient, and orderly, and to the point: a means to an end rather than a seduction, a way of keeping her desire behind several layers of chain link fence. Pyrrha immediately sees how difficult it may be to get her to unwind for this. Pyrrha fucking loves a challenge, especially a beautiful one.
“Hey,” she says, putting her hands over Camilla’s as the other woman starts to unbutton Pyrrha’s pants; she’s surprised to feel they’re shaking. “Slow down. Let me drive for a bit.”
“You don’t have to—“ Camilla says. “We can just—“
“Come on, Hect. Don’t rush this. Buy a girl a drink, first, would you?” She smiles, and Camilla exhales, drops her hands.
Pyrrha hasn’t done this in a while—Gideon had stayed away from women, after the airlock—but it’s old habit, it’s a road she’s traveled thousands of times before, even if this one is new. The shirt off, first, and taking a minute to trace that gorgeous clavicle with the rough tips of her fingers, drinking the all of her in in the soft silence of the little apartment, feeling the rise and fall of Camilla’s breath in front of her. Next the bandeau, and Camilla’s tits are so surprisingly, perfectly full that Pyrrha lets out a low, inadvertent rumble of appreciation. Kissing them is in order, then, worshipping them as long as Pyrrha pleases, pretending they have all the time in the world, noting out of the corner of her eye how Camilla swallows hard as Pyrrha’s lips pass over her left nipple, the sharp hitch of her inhale as Pyrrha’s teeth gently graze the right. Her mouth lingers there as her opposite hand gently palms the softness of the other breast, no thoughts beyond the simple pleasure of skin on skin, and Pyrrha senses approximately one-tenth of the tension leave Camilla’s body. A tiny victory.
“You are all coiled up,” Pyrrha murmurs against her. “Like a damn rusted spring, ready to pop.”
“I am not— mmmm,” Camilla stutters, as Pyrrha rolls her nipple delicately between her thumb and forefinger, and her hand reaches up automatically to lightly palm the fuzz on Pyrrha’s scalp. Interesting. Pyrrha drags her mouth up the center of Camilla’s chest, nipping at the soft skin of her neck, and Camilla gasps.
“Of course you’re not,” she whispers just below Camilla’s ear, tickling the soft dark hairs there, and twists her nipple again, just to savor those divine little noises she’s making. “Sit down and let me get a better look at you.”
Ever the obedient cav, Camilla sinks onto the couch behind her; Pyrrha gently parts her legs and kneels between them, regards her for a moment. Hect is still ramrod straight on the edge of the cushion, fingertips drumming little nervous staccatos on the sides of her thighs, but her eyes—fuck, they look almost ravenous.
Pyrrha rises up on her knees, leans her left arm on the back of the couch behind Camilla—even kneeling, she dwarfs the other woman, envelops her in the wideness of her torso—and uses her right to push her back against the sagging old cushions. “I want you relaxed,” she says.
Camilla looks at her and takes a breath, pauses as if she’s making a decision, then shoots up a hand onto the back of Pyrrha’s neck and pulls Pyrrha down to her, kisses her deeply, wild and hungry and searching, the release of months of tension, nothing like her little proper kisses from before; this is more like it, Pyrrha thinks, this will do nicely, and starts unbuttoning Camilla’s pants with her right hand, grazes her knuckles just minutely over the shadow of her cunt under the cotton underpants. Camilla moans into her mouth, and the sound goes straight to Pyrrha’s cock.
“Off with these,” Pyrrha says, pulling the pants down Camilla’s thighs and tugging them from her ankles as she sits back on her heels; then it’s just those no-nonsense underwear left, a shy little dark gray spot forming where she’s—God damn—already getting wet, and Camilla’s breathing heavier now, if Pyrrha hadn’t been living with her for months she wouldn’t be able to tell anything was amiss but she can can see Camilla’s control is quickly going out the window, her eyes are heavy-lidded with anticipation as she gazes down, so Pyrrha takes off the underwear to have her naked and spread and dusky pink before her, and Pyrrha has been alive for millennia but has rarely seen anything so beautiful.
She grazes her teeth gently on Camilla’s left kneecap, puts her hand on the right, starts kissing up her thigh, feeling the well-formed musculature of her quadricep. There’s years of training and discipline and athleticism here, a physical record of the commitment that has made Camilla so wonderfully Camilla, and Pyrrha’s only goal right now is to have these legs clamping around her face and Camilla screaming her name above her. She plants a little nip at the crease of her thigh, can hear Cam’s sharp inhale in the heavy quiet of the room; good, that’s good, and she smells fucking good, too. Pyrrha runs the tip of her nose through the neat patch of dark curls, loops her left arm under Cam’s thigh to rest her hand on her belly, and touches the tip of her tongue experimentally on the hood of her already-swollen clit.
Camilla moans, and the sound is abruptly cut off; Pyrrha looks up, and Cam has her hand clapped over her mouth to stifle the noise. Pyrrha’s own hips jerk forward at the sight, hungry for her, the animal within demanding to flip her over and have Camilla right then and there, but she wants to take her time with this, she wants to savor this, so she keeps eye contact, laser focused on Camilla, the way her breath is making her breasts rise and fall beautifully, the way her brow is beginning to furrow pitifully in need. Pyrrha can feel her mouth fall open in a slight, mischievous smile as she runs her middle finger over the soft folds of Camilla’s already messy cunt, then enters her. She runs her tongue over her lips as Camilla lets out a gorgeous whine.
“Do you want me here?” she murmurs, even though it’s very clear from how wet Cam is what the answer is, and Cam nods wordlessly, so Pyrrha says, “good,” and crooks the finger up inside her, slowly, and flattens her tongue again for a firm, leisurely lick over the length of her, and Cam clenches around her and her hips buck and she’s breathing heavy, she clutches for purchase at Pyrrha’s scalp; “easy, tiger,” Pyrrha says with a chuckle, a little surprised that she’s so keyed up already. She takes another long, debauched lick, almost sighs at the sublime taste of her. The world outside may say otherwise but in here, on her knees, she’s got nothing but time, nothing but years to work Camilla over like a masterpiece, to take her apart time and time again in her rough hands until she begs to be remade, so she plants her lips soft and cushioned around Cam’s clit, her tongue caressing it gently, adds her index finger inside her and curls both fingers up, beckoning.
It isn’t long until Cam gets desperate for more, grabs Pyrrha’s face and starts grinding down on her mouth, her tongue, throwing her leg over Pyrrha’s shoulder to give her a better angle. Pyrrha growls in excitement at the shift, feels herself smiling around Cam’s pussy as she readjusts her body, planting her lips firmly on her clit and starting to suck, adds another finger to stretch, she can take it, the good glorious girl. Her cock is almost painfully hard, the tip brushing against the bottom of the couch with each inadvertent thrust as she leans into her forearms, fucks into Camilla slowly, powerfully, one hand three fingers deep inside her and the other pulling up the soft skin of Cam’s stomach to expose more of her to Pyrrha’s mouth. Her hands have done beautiful things, horrible things, when they’ve been Gideon’s, when they’ve been Pyrrha’s, they’ve ripped apart insurgents at the joints and swung swords at countless bodies and plunged into corpses’ viscera, rooting around like the ribcages are treasure chests; they’ve made love to thousands of people and written orders to blow apart entire planets; they’ve opened an airlock, they’ve fired a gun. But right now, they seem to have been created for this purpose, to be inside Camilla, holding her down, lifting her up, and that’s all Pyrrha wants to do, work her over like this forever. Until—
“I need—please,“ Camilla pants.
“I know, I know,” Pyrrha says, “tell me,” she says; she’s looking up to meet Cam’s eyes, mouth still full of her, her low voice rumbling around her clit, and Cam arches her back so hard she’s almost levitating off the couch.
“Up,” she gasps, “I…” She stops, whines with her pretty mouth open, tongue pink and glistening and wanting as she tries to articulate.
“Use your words, sweetheart,” Pyrrha teases as she plants wet kisses on her labia, hedonistically, spreads her fingers apart inside Cam for more traction and thrusts again, delighted at the gorgeous mess she’s made of the woman in front of her. Camilla makes a strangled sound in lust and frustration—it’s so fucking beautiful that Pyrrha starts laughing, low and velvet, with the sheer pleasure of it all—and grabs the fabric of Pyrrha’s undershirt. There’s that athleticism, then: Pyrrha’s got quite a bit of height and weight on Cam but finds herself spun around and sat hard on the couch, and Camilla is attacking her pants like a wild animal, ripping the boxers off with them so Pyrrha’s cock springs free. Cam flings a long tan leg, smeared slick on the inner thigh from the both of them, over Pyrrha, straddling her as she positions herself, and cries out, totally lost in sensation, as she sinks down on her.
“There you are,” Pyrrha purrs as their hips latch together, and winds her hand through the dark bob to pull the other woman’s face down to hers.
Camilla is in it now, eager, wanting, debauched and open as she begins riding Pyrrha, her fringe sticking to her face with sweat and mouth open with need, panting out minute moans every time she grinds down. Pyrrha can’t stop staring at her perfect face, can’t stop running her hands up and down her firm little ass, her full hips, her surprisingly delicate waist. She splays her hands around Cam’s ribcage, framing her fingers along the muscular dip of her spine, and pulls her forward to get her tits back in her mouth; Pyrrha groans into the left breast, feeling Cam tighten around her, and puts her teeth on the nipple, worrying it gently. Camilla caresses her scalp and keeps making her sloppy little noises; Pyrrha thinks she hears her name in a whisper, but she can’t be sure.
Suddenly, Cam puts one arm on Pyrrha’s knee, arches backward; her eyes roll back into her head, a bead of sweat runs down her sternum, she lets out the most divine sound—
And then he’s at the front, blinking owlishly at the transition.
“I—“ Palamedes says, looking around, down, then inhales sharply with the sensation, face alight with surprise. “Oh, we—Pyrrha—“
“Ah.” Pyrrha reluctantly wills herself to still, catches her breath, puts her hands on Cam’s hips to steady her thrusts. “Sextus. Well, hello, I guess.”
It’s incredible how one can live for thousands of years and still experience the thickness of an awkward pause. They both look at each other for a moment, their borrowed chests rising with exertion and their borrowed bodies fused together, slick and hot and shadowed in the weak light of the barebones lamp on the side table.
Part of Pyrrha wants a cigarette, but she also—surprisingly—maybe wants to see where this goes, with him.
“Do you…want to stop?” Pyrrha ventures.
“No,” Palamedes says, almost immediately, then quieter, “no, you’re—“ he rocks Cam’s hips a tiny fraction, and Pyrrha almost moans at how different he feels, which is a little embarrassing, given how many people she’s had like this, “—she’s—we—“ he gasps, and even this sound has an undercurrent of scholarly observation, like everything he does.
He’s taking notes on what it means to be fucked with a cunt, Pyrrha realizes, and almost laughs out loud.
“Okay,” she says instead. “You’re okay. We’ll go slow.”
They do not go slow for very long. He’s surprisingly enthusiastic, and is soon bouncing on top of her like he was born for it, making soft little mewling noises, more pliant than the rough gasps that were coming from Camilla minutes before. “Quick learner, Sextus,” she grunts, and understands a nanosecond too late that even if Palamedes is working with new equipment now, it’s almost certainly not his first time riding a dick. (Not my business, she decides, which is a thought she’s had constantly since she started living with the Sixth.)
“She wants to come back,” Palamedes manages to gasp out, near the end, and Pyrrha nods, and then it’s Camilla again, grasping at Pyrrha’s neck as she stares into her eyes, grinding onto Pyrrha with a renewed urgency, letting out a crescendo of loud, unrestrained moans—“don’t wake the kiddie, shh, darling,” Pyrrha says—so Camilla kisses her instead as she comes, screaming beautifully into her mouth, and Pyrrha’s secondhand old heart feels sweet and heavy as molasses as she swallows the other woman’s sounds.
Later, Pyrrha realizes she isn’t sure if that first switch was intentional or not. She doesn’t ask.
—
It’s too simple to blame her on how it all ended. Pyrrha and Gideon had been separating, slowly, inside him for centuries even before they met her. Any partnership, no matter how good, would be tense after ten thousand years of being stuck with each other. “Til death do us part” is a promise, after all.
Still, from the moment she’d walked into their lives Pyrrha knew it was all over. Pyrrha and Gideon had been fighting her for weeks when Pyrrha gave up and gave in and kissed her. They’d been ground into the dirt of some shithole planet with her knee digging sharp into Gideon’s stomach, a gun cocked inches from their temple, about to be fucking obliterated by this redhead from Hell, probably; Pyrrha had still kissed her, and apologized for it. She’d pistol-whipped Pyrrha in the face in response and knocked out a front tooth, and then when she’d kissed her back she’d jammed her tongue into the newly empty space in Gideon’s gums and shot through all the fresh and trembling nerve endings there. She was a real dick like that.
So their first kiss had tasted like blood. A lot of their kisses had tasted like blood. Pyrrha had never wanted anyone so badly—but Gideon had wanted her, too. That old ease Pyrrha had felt taking over for him in the bedroom didn’t exist when it came to her. Whenever she was around Pyrrha inside Gideon turned into a tiger in a too-small cage, throwing herself at the bars to escape, feral and rabid for any chance at contact; his subconscious became her jailer, strong-arming her to the back. Two years of exhaustion, when she was around, as they grappled like hormonal teenagers for who got control.
When she and Gideon had sex it was like two dying stars collapsing together, all growls and aggression and claws, never relenting, never soft, and Pyrrha had watched it all from the back of his brain, fuming. The first time Pyrrha had managed to come to the front during sex she and Gideon had already fucked a few times; Pyrrha had kissed her first, gotten the ball rolling with her first, and Gideon’s subconscious, it seemed, was jealous. When she wrestled control from him Pyrrha had had no idea if she knew what they were, but then again, Pyrrha honestly hadn’t been doing much thinking at that moment, fueled only with the animal need to be inside her, around her, to let her burn Pyrrha up completely, like Gideon had been supposed to do with Pyrrha.
But even though she was facing away from them she’d noticed the switch, almost immediately, had said stop, stop, then twisted around and squinted hard up at Pyrrha’s—Gideon’s—face.
“There you are,” she’d said. “I was hoping you’d come out.”
She’d pushed Pyrrha off her and sat up, mouth still set firm as concrete but with a dangerous, wry softness in her eyes. She’d taken Gideon’s—Pyrrha’s—cock in her hand, tossed that long red hair over her shoulder, and leaned forward to kiss her.
“Let’s slow down, shall we,” she’d said. And Pyrrha was gone forever.
—
After that kind of a start Pyrrha and Camilla can’t help but keep sleeping together, nearly every night, and Palamedes joins them, almost every time. Sometimes he just comes up in inadvertent flashes, like he’s popping out to say hello; other nights, they set the timer, and Pyrrha fucks him silly to get him good and exhausted before he goes back under.
It’s fine, Pyrrha tells Cam, she really doesn’t mind—she likes it, even. “Just tell me if you feel a switch coming on, or if one of you wants to come out,” Pyrrha says, “just to give me a heads-up. I know you can’t always control it.” Cam nods, says of course, that makes sense, thank you. And they’re good at that, at first.
“You and Pyrrha like each other a lot more now,” Nona says, brightly, one morning at breakfast. “She and Cam always liked each other, but now it’s even better for them, too. I’m glad.”
Pyrrha laughs, and Palamedes shifts with just a hair of minute discomfort. “I’m glad you’re glad, Nona,” he says, sincerely, dipping his spoon into the porridge.
(The question whether or not to tell Nona what they were up to had been a topic of some heated debate a few days back. “She’s far too young to understand,” Camilla had said.
“If the Ninth hadn’t at least tried something on each other I’ll eat my glasses,” Palamedes had said, some minutes later, when Pyrrha told him Cam’s opinion. “Anyway, they would both be nineteen by now, so she’s at least that old, and you know what Gideon was like.”
“He doesn’t have glasses any more to eat, and Gideon’s proclivities are all the more reason not to expose her too early and corrupt the data,” Camilla had said, which Palamedes had had to concede was a fair point. Pyrrha had rewarded herself with a cigarette for successfully being the go-between for this exhausting conversation. Nona, for her part, hadn’t seemed to care to ask any more questions after Pyrrha told her the night time exercises she was doing with Cam and Palamedes involved sword practice.)
“It’s working for you, too, then?” Pyrrha says now, as Nona miserably moves the porridge around in her mouth. “Make sure you swallow that, don’t just chew, Nums.”
“We can’t help it if we’ve both fallen prey to your considerable charm,” Palamedes says mildly, eyes twinkling up at her from under Camilla’s bangs.
It turns out that in bed Palamedes is a downright tease, which is frankly very delightful for Pyrrha. She’d adored that kind of man when she was alive. Gideon’s tastes had been nearly predominantly heterosexual, and it has been ages since she’s been able to pin a man up against a wall; hear him moan as she puts her fingers in him and fucks him from behind; call him a little brat and make him call her Daddy in return. He even flirts with her now, sometimes, during good days, just little sly glances and making sure she can pointedly see the full firmness of Camilla’s ass when he walks out of the room. It almost makes up for how damn infuriating he is the other half of the time.
But Camilla is—well, she’s Camilla Hect, and everything about her is perfection. Watching Cam in control is a marvel, always, but watching her lose it is like a new religion. Pyrrha has been close to divinity before, so she knows how that feels, intimately.
The little moments of worship pile up as the days do. Camilla at breakfast, coaxing the kiddie to eat, Camilla holding Nona’s other hand as they walk her out of the building into the harsh sunlight, Camilla falling apart on Pyrrha’s fingers, on her tongue, mouth open in silent ecstasy on her back as she tightens around Pyrrha and pulls her closer, locking her ankles behind her. Camilla, still half-asleep in the morning, blinking her eyes like a dazed jungle cat, a rare moment of disorganization. Camilla, riding her backwards on the couch, one glorious elegant arm thrown up behind her to caress Pyrrha’s head as Pyrrha gasps into her neck. Camilla, when Pyrrha’s asleep and dreaming, back somehow with her those thousands of years ago, reaching into her old drawer and buckling on the strap, and Pyrrha full of her this time, getting to moan beneath her. In the same dream, in a not-too-distant future on her and Gideon’s half-flipped moon, Camilla joining Pyrrha in the garden, chastising Nona gently to stop eating the dirt, then touching Pyrrha’s face, briefly, that infernal sadness finally gone from her eyes, before letting Palamedes have a turn with the spring planting.
Most times after they’re done Camilla—it’s always Cam who finishes—kisses her and then goes into the bathroom. For a long time after Pyrrha can hear the clack of the recorder and the low hum of their voices, and tries not to listen as she smokes a cigarette. Her chest stings, in an old, odd way, and she pretends it’s whatever shit they cut the tobacco with on this planet but she knows it’s actually something else.
She loves them, of course. That’s not the hard part. Love was never hard for Pyrrha.
—
It was so bad for Gideon at the end that he didn’t even notice that her ghost was on the Mithraeum. Pyrrha felt like she could smell her through death, across the River, into Hell and beyond; they’d spent so long chasing her, obsessing over her, fucking her and loving her and betraying their friends for her that it seemed impossible for Pyrrha to forget how it felt when she was around. Pyrrha knew the moment the little Ninth girl showed up that she’d somehow hitched a ride—it just took a while to find her.
But Gideon hadn’t sensed her at all. He wasn’t sensing much of anything, by then. Giving a person who’s ready to die for what they believe in a millennia-long life sentence of immortality turns out to be a really bad idea. Pyrrha had tried to tell John that, ages ago before it all blew up in their faces, but of course he didn’t listen.
In the later years, Pyrrha had figured out how to retreat into Gideon’s brain, to tuck herself back away for decades at a time. She didn’t want to watch how time was twisting all of them so horribly, to see the people using her friends’ souls as human fuel become barely recognizable to her any more. She didn’t want to watch Gideon keep throwing himself at death, mindlessly taking on any fucked-up task John set before him. Like the whole business with the Ninth—poor girl, raised on God’s own shithole and forced to walk the Eightfold with no knowledge of what it really meant, then shoved into a remote spaceship with an ancient military man three times her size who kept going for her jugular like a strung-out old attack dog. Maybe she’d been right when she’d called them all zombies.
Gideon hadn’t let Pyrrha hide when he’d killed her—when he’d killed them. She’d guessed by then that his subconscious had to be angry with Pyrrha, the parasite that had been squatting there for far too long, that he blamed her for centuries of blackouts, millennia of lost memories. Fair enough, but being forced to watch…Gideon could be a real dick too, sometimes.
The kid had been barely hours old, and she was so weak from labor she couldn’t do much but hit Gideon limply with her fists as he bundled them into the airlock, but she sure as hell tried. Pyrrha and Gideon had both watched her—them—float out, into the emptiness of space. Pyrrha had always…with little ones…well, it didn’t matter, in the end. That was an old want.
Cytherea had been dying for ten thousand years, and when finally given the chance to expire her meat had taken the opportunity and run with it. Even with John’s best embalming theorems, even with those idiot roses he’d scattered everywhere to disguise the smell, the body was in terrible shape before the little Ninth girl had done the damage with that enormous sword that let her hop into the corpse. She’d picked the shittiest place to squat in, as per usual.
Still, Pyrrha had kissed her delicately, fiercely, pressing her face to the decomposing skin as she held the corpse like it was made of glass; not bothering to look away from her worship at the pyre even when the poor traumatized Ninth kid saw her. And once she came to fully she’d fought back like she always did against the intensity of love, digging Cytherea’s graying, molting nails into Gideon’s ropy brown forearms.
“You’re part of him,” she’d said, the dead throat rasping and gurgling around bloated muscle and rancid clots, but her eyes were alight like a gasoline fire. “Like it or not, you’re part of him, you fucking zombie, and you both fucked me over.”
“Please,” was all Pyrrha could murmur, her—Gideon’s—lips desperate against Cytherea’s corpse, “please. Tell me what you want.”
“If you—“ she’d coughed, and a spurt of rotting muck had bubbled up through Cytherea’s new chest wound, and Pyrrha had kissed it away as her fingers traveled further down, the taste of sour old blood like home, “—if you want to make yourself useful, you’ll know what to do with me.”
Just a few months later Gideon had sprinted to his destruction with open arms; Pyrrha had watched him go from his body, and had felt nothing but relief. Hours after that, she’d killed her for a second time. A bullet is much quicker than suffocating or drowning, so Pyrrha had offered one to her daughter, in what she’d thought was one last kindness.
—
The last time they sleep together, it’s been a bad day. Blood of Eden has made a series of particularly aggressive demands about Nona, and Pyrrha had been on a recon mission for nearly all of last night that had resulted in exactly jack shit, intel-wise. Pyrrha considers calling it a night early, catching up on sleep. But Camilla touches her shoulder, just briefly, as she’s putting Nona to bed, and the day Pyrrha refuses Camilla Hect anything is the day Hell freezes over.
Cam’s on top when it starts happening. Palamedes comes out, shifting Cam’s gravelly voice mid-moan up to his softer pitch. He barely gets a breath in before she’s there again—but then Sextus pops right back out, which is unusual.
“You okay?” Pyrrha asks, stills her hands on his hips.
Palamedes doesn’t hear her—back to Cam—Sextus again, they’re speeding up, somehow—Pyrrha starts getting nervous, and then—
“ Warden ,” Camilla breathes, reverently, eyes focused on the floor behind her, and Pyrrha suddenly feels like nothing more than one of those old dicks she kept in the drawer, all those millennia ago. It’s tandem, what they’re doing, it’s like what she used to do with Gideon, but much closer to the edge, much more fucking dangerous—and there’s sex at play too, isn’t there, the desire between the two of them that didn’t exist for Pyrrha and Gideon, that extra want that she’s been trying not to think about. Palamedes is on top of her then but it switches so fast, it’s like they’re spinning a carousel with them both in it, blurring together so quickly that it’s almost an entirely new person riding her, and there’s no way this is accidental—
“Stop,” Pyrrha says, shoving Palamedes—Camilla—Sextus—off her.
She looks at her—he looks at her—in surprise, each seeing Pyrrha as if for the first time. They don’t even know she’s here, she realizes. They can’t see past themselves; she can’t see anything past him. A tiny part of her brain wonders hysterically how long they’d been planning this little stunt, wonders if they know just how dangerous this shit is. Wonders how Cam could have possibly thought Pyrrha wouldn’t have noticed. Wonders how she could have thought, after the beach, that there would be any outcome to sleeping with them other than this.
“What the fuck,” Pyrrha says, “are you doing?”
She blinks—he blinks—it’s Palamedes—then back to Camilla—a pause, then Sextus again, slower than when they were riding Pyrrha but still cycling in and out fluidly. The wheel’s hard to stop once it gets going. The realization of how upset she is starts dawning on both their faces, separately, like a horrible version of one of those little flip picture books.
“I’m not doing this,” Pyrrha snaps, disentangles herself from their limbs, begins pulling on her pants. “I’m not fucking doing this with either of you.”
“Dve—“
“Pyrrha—“ It’s him, then her again, and hers is the last voice Pyrrha wants to hear right now.
Out. She has to get out. Pyrrha pulls on her boots, stomps to the kitchen to grab the mostly-full bottle of scotch and the half-empty pack of cigarettes, charges for the door in a half-blind rage. Camilla, just Camilla now, is huddled on the couch, arms curled around her knees, looking very small.
“Fuck you both, really, and figuratively this time,” Pyrrha says, and slams the door.
There’s a baby crying, somewhere, in one of the floors above, and the sinister hum of an argument below—the guy who’s shit to his wife is at it again, it seems, and Pyrrha considers going downstairs to fight him before deciding against it, for now. She pulls the cork out of the scotch with her back teeth and spits it out, downing the contents of the bottle in one long swallow, with no feeling to show for it except a tiny weak warmness in her stomach. She lights a cigarette, pacing up and down the hallway, thinks of trying the bleach again, except last time it gave her the runs for a week. Not worth it for something as idiot—careless—entirely her own goddamn fault as this.
She could go out. In times like these her younger self would have found a bar, drank everything in sight, torn up anyone in her path with her bare hands, made a real mess of things; Pyrrha and Gideon both had nearly burned down a whole Cohort installation after the airlock. But she doesn’t even have a shirt on, and she worries whenever she has to leave them alone at night. If anything ever happened to Nona while she was out, she’d never forgive herself.
And she really just feels tired, at the end of it. She’s exhausted, and far too old for any of this.
Pyrrha finishes her cigarette, kicks the ground a bit, rubs her face, carefully opens the door—the room is dark, thankfully, they must have gone to bed. She collapses face-first on the couch and sleeps fitfully, dreams of a redhead kid on a faraway moon.
She wakes up to sounds in the kitchen; Nona is rattling off who she wants on her guest list for her birthday party next week, and Camilla is evenly giving feedback. (Hot Sauce, whoever that is, gets an invite. Pyrrha still can’t believe there’s a child named fucking Hot Sauce.) Pyrrha keeps her eyes closed for a minute longer than usual, savoring a little time for herself and the yawning pit in her stomach.
“You slept in your shoes,” Nona says, when Pyrrha finally makes her way over to them. “Is that why you’re so sad?”
“Morning,” Cam says, looking up from braiding the kid’s hair, worrying her bottom lip as she meets Pyrrha’s eyes.
It’s still just Camilla, and part of Pyrrha wishes it always could have just been Cam for this whole thing, even though she loves Sextus, too, even though she knows just Camilla is only ever going to be one half of a whole. Pyrrha had once thought of herself like that, but finally after ten thousand years she’s a glass half full without Gideon; anyone she fucks or fucks over she’ll do entirely on her own terms. Camilla is the glass half empty. Camilla Hect is flooring it towards her own destruction, and she’s not taking her hands off the wheel.
Pyrrha knows how it ends for those kinds of people, and—God help her—she can’t resist loving them as they burn out.
“Pyrrha. We’re sorry.” Camilla pauses, swallows. “And I’m sorry. Really. Please understand.”
That’s the best she’s going to get, Pyrrha knows.
“Sorry for what?” Nona chirps. “Camilla should never have to be sorry for anything, because she’s perfect. I love you, Cam.”
“I love Cam, too, kiddie, and you’re right,” Pyrrha says, and means it all. Nona beams. Camilla’s eyes meet Pyrrha’s for a moment, then looks back down at Nona’s hair, blinking rapidly.
“You shouldn’t be so sad either, Cam,” Nona says, squirming around to envelop her in a hug. “Pyrrha loves you, and you love her.”
Pyrrha likes to pretend they’ve got time, but that’s a fucking lie, of course. All they’ve really got is now. You can live for ten thousand years and still not understand that, but Pyrrha does.
“All right,” she says, steeling her insides and flashing her best Pyrrha Dve smile. “No more sad faces. Who wants breakfast?”