Work Text:
Are Loyal, by Alice Notley
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“Babs,” whispered Ianthe, in the middle of the night, wild-eyed and clawing at her own skin. “Babs, you impotent potato of a human being. You walking, talking duck. You blueberry with hair . Listen to me.” She squeezed her ugly arm into a fist, imagined his fist, brought the fist to her mouth and nibbled on her skin. Coppery blood wept into her mouth, and her eyes smarted with tears as she bit her knuckle, thinking of tasting locks of his hair with that foul-smelling mousse which always made her tongue taste like soap for the rest of the day, of biting the cuticles around his fingernails until they bled and he complained and spent an hour manicuring them, then manicuring Coronabeth’s, then Ianthe’s.
Stop wiggling , he’d snap, scratching off a stray fleck of polish. You always make such a mess of it -
“Stop it,” she hissed, the silence of the space station deep and oppressive. All her life she had listened to her twin’s gentle snores beside her in the middle of the night, and now there was just empty space, and a distant hum of the habitation system circulating oxygen. She had breathed this air once before, or perhaps God had, or her tutor, the Saint of Patience - or perhaps her elder sister, or the awful oozing wound that was Harrowhark Nonagesimus. (Or perhaps even the Saint of Duty, in the obscene wheezing of congress with the dead.)(An extremely funny thought as it were, but ew.)
In her darkest moments, Ianthe wondered if she would ever share the same air as her sister again. They had shared everything, and what they had not shared, Ianthe had engineered to make it look like they had. Corona was an absolute fucking nitwit, but Ianthe had cried for weeks when they first arrived at the Mithraeum, missing her like a septal defect, a hole leaking oxygen-rich blood into her right ventricle.
They’d even shared Naberius, though Corona had demanded more of his time, going through training exercises with him meticulously, weeping at nighttime when Ianthe would say Well isn’t that smart , good on you for trying to be decent at something , and then she would lay next to her sister and listen to her cry in the dark and be breathtakingly cruel to Babs the next morning.
It was an ugly thing, the arm. She hated to see it, though she doubted it held as much malice from the triceps to the fine extensor digitorums as she did in the fucking little finger of her other hand. Babs never was good at hating. Yes, he’d been a fucking bore and a pain to work with and a constant source of frustration so unerringly awful that she’d once given him Charley horses every time he opened his mouth for a week and still hadn’t been properly satisfied by his suffering - but he didn’t quite hate , not the way she could. He disdained. He disparaged. He sneered in hauteur, a common language between them, the three High Sovereigns of Contempt in the utterly Contemptible Court of Ida, oldest and best subject of their adolescent antipathy. Crowned in glory, if by glory one meant unmitigated antagonism. The King Undying should call her the Saint of Being a Complete And Total Bastard.
Not the least because Babs managed to still be a stupid dolt with that look on his face like he was still surprised when she spat venom at him, even after she’d neatly tied off his windpipe (and crushed his brain stem for his trouble, rendering him unconscious by the time he would have realized he was about to die, which Ianthe thought was practically saintlike, in the non-ironic use of the term).
“Well,” God had said, biscuit halfway between teacup and mouth. His lips were oddly pursed, as if he had to think hard to come up with something to say. The tip of the biscuit, laden with tea, crumbled into his lap.
He said, “I’m sure you loved him very much.”
“Teacher,” she’d replied, sipping her tea politely. “I plead that the King Undying does not ever deign to accuse me of such a thing again.”
Frequently she told him of Coronabeth instead, holding out her arm and lamenting that Corona’s arm would have fit better; her nerve endings would’ve understood her sister’s DNA, would’ve slipped it into place as easily and smoothly as if it had been her own.
“She sounds as though she would have been a worthy cavalier,” God said, because he was always looking for something nice to say to Ianthe, who was not by nature a person to whom it was easy to say something nice.
“Oh, she was horrible,” remarked Ianthe, and she fully meant it. “If I’d snacked on her fingernails instead of Naberius, I’d be even more useless with the rapier than I already am.”
She made sure to do this with God often: mention fingernails, or a strand or two of hair, or once, the vague insinuation of swallowing saliva during a kiss (gross!), because it was at a dinner with everyone and she thought it made her sound deliciously interesting.
In reality, reverse-engineering the experiments of eight long-dead lyctors (well, she counted in her head, four long-dead lyctors and one hilariously inadequate Ninth adept she would forever hold over Harry’s head), as it were, was hard . So what if she hadn’t been sure how much needed to be consumed to complete the proper absorption process. It’s not like she’d ever been squeamish about blood. It was all just meat, anyway.
The Saint of Patience spoke of Cyrus the First fondly. When he spoke of Valancy Trinit, which he did not often do, he called her Val , which reminded Ianthe of Babs . What a strange thing, to have loved one’s cavalier so deeply that it inspired the kind of dedication which led to hanging all those paintings of a dead woman on the walls, to watch he who killed her every single night. Almost, she thought, as strange as performing a self-lobotomy in order to preserve whatever remnants of a soul cowered in the dark corners of one’s lyctoral mind.
Ianthe the First was terribly proud that she had never been afflicted with such sentiment.
And yet still, Babs would not listen to her. Extending her evil arm out before her, she hatefully cracked every single knuckle, hoping that in whatever corner Harrow believed in, Babs could feel it, and feel bad for being a shitty cavalier.
Okay. He had been a perfectly serviceable cavalier, at the end of the day. Coronabeth did once tell her that he had absolutely schooled Gideon the Ninth once, so take that , Harry, you non-aesthetically minded skeleton-worshipping caveman. Babs’s failing, one among many, was just that he made for a shitty prosthetic arm.
If her revered elder brother had not thrown a total shitfit the first time Ianthe bitterly but non-threateningly suggested switching sword arms and removing the ill-gotten one entirely, she might’ve torn it all the way off by now. “Your cavalier,” he had said, his expression so flat with anger it made even Ianthe’s stone heart shudder, “spent his entire life honing his skill, little sister, for your benefit. Removing his sword arm is akin to telling him, So what? I don’t want it.”
But I don’t want it, she had wanted to say, but what she really said was, “Of course, elder brother.” Perhaps it was different for Augustine: he had absorbed a brother, much like Ianthe should’ve absorbed Coronabeth in the womb.
Every night, after she cried for her sister and cursed the arm of the boy who had been raised like a lamb to the slaughter, her gaze fell upon the portraits which adorned her room. She could not imagine wanting to be reminded. She could not imagine missing her cavalier. But before, she had never been able to imagine life without her twin, either. Many things she had never imagined were coming true, lately.