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Your name is Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter and heir to the Ninth House, and as of today you are seventeen years old.
This is a feat. There is very little else to it; this cold, gray morning lodged in the center of a cold, gray world is the culmination of a small series of herculean efforts, the peak of a push-pull between you and your morals and your feelings and the guilt-induced sense of duty that has barely managed to keep you up and running, but barely gets the job done and so here you are. Rolling out of your bed (you slept for three hours last night, the only celebration you’ve allowed) and into the light, stretching your arms high above your head and listening to the crack and creak of your bones as they shift beneath your skin. You slept strange so you tug at the tendons in your neck, flex your fingers and stamp your foot against the ground over and over until there’s a cloud of dust kicked up into the air and the pinpricks that had been creeping and crawling and itching and scratching at your insides have gone and fucked off somewhere far, far away.
Today is not a day for celebration, because you have work to do. You tug on a robe that is the same as every other robe that you’ve ever worn, black and hooded and made in such a way so as to feel cheap but look carefully and decadently expensive- what a fine line you walk- and you pull on a pair of sturdy black boots and a pair of sturdy black gloves and then you situate yourself in front of the mirror and apply your paint with a care befitting Harrowhark Nonagesimus, newly seventeen. Today is going to be a long day, so you begin to mentally designate some times where you can slip away to fix any pigment that may see fit to make your life more difficult; lunch maybe, or where lunch ought to be if you bothered with it, before the rites and before the rituals but after the ceremonies and the speeches (that are little more than rattling bones and a half-dead rasps by this point anyways), before you resume your research and then after again when you’re forced to emerge from your rooms and stumble through another public appearance as head of your meager house. God, this is complicated. Being alive is exhausting. You are exhausted.
For a moment you even stare at your two-tone palette and wonder if you can’t just slip it beneath your robe and send the whole house (all thirty-something of you) brimming with rumor and distaste by whipping it out during dinner and touching up your fragmented orbital sockets in the reflection of the bone-white dining table, because the thing is shined within an inch of its life anyways and you think that it ought to be put to some sort of use even if there aren’t many of you left to actually eat at it . It’d be making two constructs from one knucklebone. You’d get to fix your paint and at the same time embarrass yourself to the point where you could justify walling yourself up somewhere in the tunnels forever and ever, never to show your (newly painted) face again. Happily ever after, the end.
But your puppeted parents would have something to say about that, and you’re not sure you’ve got the energy to tug your mother’s mouth into reproach or your father’s eyes into dull, dry (dead, dead, dead) amusement, and god knows that you don’t have it in you to mete out shame and receive it all in the same breath, so the palette gets tucked back into its drawer for now. You fluff your hair out around your ears next, ignore the shadows in the corner with a devoted vehemence- you do notice, against your will, that there are more of them today, because birthdays are difficult and birthdays dredge up ugly emotion and ugly emotion lends itself to all sorts of nightmarish things- and then you give yourself one last look before sweeping out of your room, primed and ready for whatever the day may throw at you.
That is, of course, a lie. You lie like you breathe; through your teeth, without a second thought. Being alive is exhausting.
More so for you than anyone else, you think as you wander through the halls, watching the lights throw shadows against the wall and the bleached-bone skeletons toil away at their menial tasks, fingers clicking and ribs giving soft death rattles as they break loose and clatter to the floor. From the moment that you were born, you were half-dead; blue in the face and gasping, a squalling mass of blood and bone and one fervent, desperate hope, bound up in a scrap of cotton and placed with an undeserved reverence in the thin arms of your mother. You were a pudgy lump of flesh with a dust of black hair dashed across your head and ten little fingers and ten little toes, limbs soft with infancy and spine bent by two hundred homegrown tragedies wrapped in the weight of the world and rolled across your shoulders.
It sits there to this day, heavy as a stone beneath a skull full of conscience that’s grown as dark and dull as the dirt beneath your feet through the years, weighed down by sin after sin after lapse after sin.
They are as follows: when you were born, you were born from death. When you were four you hid your vegetables beneath your napkin but claimed you ate them anyways. When you were seven you skipped a lesson to read an old novel you’d found hidden in the depths of the library, slipped between a dusty old shelf and the wall, and you read it all in two hours and for those two hours you did not think even once of what you were. When you were nine you knocked over an urn and blamed Gideon Nav for it. When you were ten you opened the Locked Tomb and that brought death and disgrace upon you all, shame and curses and blights, etc, etc, so on and so forth, really there’s only so many ways to say it and so many ways to rehash your one great shame before it gets a little dull. Look at it from any direction, turn it over in your hands and hold it up to the light and you’ll see that the end is still the end, and you are still a means to an end and you are still mean because of it.
Again: being alive is exhausting. You are exhausted. You are wandering through the halls with your head held high, face sweltering as it’s caked with paint and shoulders drooping beneath your cheap cloak, and you should be alone but there is a shadow on the wall beside you.
You stop. Your cloak swirls around your ankles, sufficiently dramatic for the moment, and the corridor that you’d been working your way through- dimly lit in yellow-red, bearing the same marks of disrepair as the rest of your godforsaken house- is suddenly filled to bursting with the sounds of life. Somebody’s blood is rushing, somebody other than yourself, and you can hear their heartbeat like it’s your own, strong and steady and struck through the soft, staccato sounds of someone who is breathing but is trying to pretend that they are not. The shadow on the wall is frozen in place, formless and loose and barely recognizable as human save for the jut of the head and the slant of a shoulder and then the silhouette of a single hand stuck out from its side, splayed so that all five fingers are visible. You stare at it for a moment and it does not stare back at you but you can feel eyes boring into the side of your head regardless, and then from somewhere behind you there’s a muffled curse and the sound of frantic, fast footsteps as the shadow breaks from its standstill and hurries down the hall.
You turn on your heel. And lo and behold, right there with a bag slung over her shoulder and her red-brown hair slicked back with sweat, with a sword strapped to her back and all the panicked energy of someone who’s obvious escape attempt has just been thwarted is Gideon Nav.
“NAV,” you snap before you even realize what you’re doing. The command is implicit, and you’re in a mood today so it comes through strong and sharp enough to make Gideon stop in her tracks. There’s another swear, louder this time, and then she tugs her fingers (that are so calloused and strong-looking that you can see it from there) through her hair and swings around, shooting you a big grin and spreading her arms wide, holding her body lax and loose like she’s greeting a friend. She is not, and she wouldn’t make that mistake, so you reach into your pocket and take a quick inventory, run a thumb over the joints and knucklebones you keep on you just in case. You can never be too careful. Life is rather dangerous if you know where to look.
“Nonagesimus!” she says, cheery as can be, and you hate her stupid voice that’s all low and loud and warm, and you hate her stupid striking eyes and stupid solid hands and all of her stupid, stupid muscles. You hate her like a secret hates an audience or an audience loves a secret, and you hate her like your mother hated you and your mother’s mother hated her, and you hate her in the same way that a corpse hates you when you make that corpse work or your body hates you when you make your body breathe. Gideon Nav is a nightmare, and she thinks the same of you; Gideon Nav hates you like one of those dead things that you brought to life, hates you like a corpse does or else your body. She lives in your head and your head is a tomb, and you worry and worry that you may be killing her.
And you worry and you worry and you worry .
And today you hate her more than you ever have before because today you look at her and her horrible red hair and her horrible gold-brown eyes, and you marvel at the light haloed around her head and the shift of the dust motes over her faded black shirt, and you notice the way that her muscles shift beneath the thin fabric and the height of her as a whole and then the jawline that’s as sharp as a knife where it hovers over the top of your head. You notice things that you’ve never noticed. You look at her, and then you keep looking at her because you can’t tear your eyes away, and as you’re busy burning holes into her collarbone you think: you’ve always been a foregone conclusion. This is no exception.
And then you think: fuck .
You push those thoughts away. You focus on the task at hand.
“What are you doing,” you say flatly, in such a way so as to imply that you already know exactly what she is doing here. You do; you’ve done this before, and you know her well. Well enough to know that she can’t read minds anyways, which you are quite grateful for at the moment.
“Uhhhh,” Gideon says. She looks around wildly and then stoops to scoop up a stray rib from the ground, waving it with an air of nonchalance as she leans up against the wall and tries to look casual. “I lost my rib. I’ve been looking for this little fucker everywhere, and look at that! I found it! And yeah, yeah, that’s all that I needed soooooo I’m gonna go now-“
She peels herself away from the wall and juts the rib over her shoulder as if it were a thumb. She’s backing away slowly and looking right at you, nodding rapidly and biting hard enough at the inside of her cheek that it caves in a bit, and you feel like something’s crawled beneath your skin and died.
“Stop that. You’re embarrassing the both of us,” you tell her, crossing your arms over your front like that’ll do anything, like if you try hard enough you can keep the emotion ( disgusting ) building up inside of you from bursting out into the open and turning your life from the living hell that it already is into a living hell with emotional depth which you absolutely cannot condone. As it is you are still sharp, so Gideon stops. She huffs out a breath, mirrors your stance, and a moment later you silently concede that it looks better on her than it does on you, her with her broad frame and her height and her muscle-corded arms. You are small, angular. She could probably pick you up with one hand.
That is not a productive train of thought. You put it to a fast and inelegant end.
“C’mon, I’m not doing anything wrong, ” she groans, like someone who is doing something wrong. “Just hanging out, looking for my rib, nothing to see here. Or did you maybe just want an excuse to talk to me, Nonagesimus? Did you wanna have a conversation, tell a few jokes, maybe some good-natured ribbing -” the rib is poked towards you here, and you feel your eye twitch- “-or a maybe a heart-to-heart or like, whatever else it is that all the cool necromancers are into these days. I’m kinda out of puns, so feel free to jump in at any minute now.”
This is normal. Gideon is fluent in antagonism, and sometimes you think that she must revel in making you want to crack her open and empty her soul out into the nearest trash receptacle. She acts with the same sort of thinly-veiled hatred turned hostility that you yourself have come to favor as you’ve grown older, though once upon a time you two would fight just to fight no matter the consequences; once when you were nine you told her that she made you feel sick, and she responded by telling you that your face made her wanna throw up so you did what any reasonable nine-year old would do and immediately engaged her in a brawl that ended with a loud crack as someone- you couldn’t tell who, not when your flailing arms may as well be hers and the nature of fighting like this was so that if you were to land a punch than you would be hurt in equal measure- got themselves hurt enough to warrant a trip to the medbay.
These days neither one of you is so careless, though you are not nice either. Your capacity for cruelty has grown with you through the years. You’ve gotten smart about it. Nowadays you are quick as a whip and sharp as a knife, and it would be a waste not to put yourself to use so you open your barb-filled mouth and then you speak.
“You were trying to run,” you say. And then: “Stop. I don’t feel like putting up with you today.”
“Then don’t!” Gideon exclaims, gesturing wildly. That rib of hers comes dangerously close to taking out an eye, and you feel your lip curl in distaste. “In fact, don’t bother putting up with me ever again! Do us both a favor and let me go, and then you can go back to doing whatever creepy shit it is that you do, and you’ll never even have to think about me ever again. It’s perfect! Everyone wins!”
If you ever stop thinking about Gideon, it will be because you are dead. And if there is a speck of justice left in your dry, dying world, or if some small mercy decides to grant you one last bit of cohesion, then her face will be the last thing that you ever see. When you were younger you even used to hope (so much that it hurt) that a strange bout of strength or sudden surge of hatred would drive her to strike you down where you stood; you hope now that one day she’ll come to her senses and drive that horrible sword she insists on carrying around with her everywhere straight through your heart.
Today is not your lucky day. She doesn’t take a single step towards you and her sword remains sheathed at her side, so you resign yourself to yet another day of living (and god oh god, you’re seventeen today, you’ve been at this for so, so long, and some deep and dreadful part of you wonders if you aren’t so unlucky as to be immortal, if some by some cruel quirk you won’t be forced to live forever) and heave a deep breath.
“That’s not going to happen, Nav,” you say. “This is ridiculous. This is childish. This is beneath you.”
You stop and grimace, realize your mistake. Gideon looks thrilled, and again you wish that she would just pull her head out of her ass and put you out of your fucking misery.
“There are worse places to be,” she- well she sort of laughs and sort of snorts, it’s an ugly sound and you don’t know what to call it but it’s downright crass, and yes that joke may have been downright tame for her but it’s the principle of the thing.The principle .
“Shut up,” you sigh. You nearly bring up a hand to pinch at the bridge of your nose but your paint hasn’t quite dried yet and it’s still quite a while before one of your allotted times for reapplication, so you force it to remain still. “Shut up, shut up, shut up , Nav. Shut up. Shut up.”
She blinks at you. Her head lolls onto her shoulder, hair red-gold in the light. “Wow, Nonagesimus. Tell me how you really feel.”
“If you do not stop this nonsense and go back to training right now,” you start as the last dregs of your patience slip away, “I am going to put your stomach where your heart ought to be. I am going to remove your arms and switch them with your legs. I am going to make your ribs stand to attention and march them through your bloodstream until you are screaming for mercy. ”
She nods at that, very solemn in a silence that is as heavy as a stone. One of her boots scuffs against the ground and the hand with the rib taps incessantly at her leg, the only sound in a corridor that feels as if it’s growing longer and longer by the second, that feels buried beneath tens upon thousands of tons of rock. You shift beneath your robes, glaring at her with all the weight that you can manage.
“Kinky,” she says.
You give a wordless shout of rage and she laughs, mean and full-bodied and low and loud, the sort of laughter that moves through her shoulders and jumps into yours. It would be infectious were you anywhere or anyone else, but as it is you are Harrowhark Nonagesimus, newly seventeen, and you are toiling through the dreary old halls of the Ninth House, and you are not one for laughter. Being alive is exhausting. You are exhausted.
“C’mon, Nonagesimus,” Gideon huffs through her laughter, looking straight at you with those horrible, horrible eyes of hers. “Let’s get this over with. Let me go. Let me run and you’ll never have to hear another one of my hilarious jokes, and you can think of it like a birthday present or something. C’mon. Think about it. Think about it.”
You think about it, and then you look at her. She is lighthearted and gleeful and puffed up with pride, blotted bright against the low stone walls characteristic of Ninth House architecture. Her hair is flecked with gray grave dust and falls back in tufts against her forehead; some of the strands creep down the sides of her face and are just barely long enough to curl down around her ears. You’ve both always kept your hair short out of convenience, but while yours hovers just above your shoulders Gideon’s is cropped close to her head and is always, always uneven, no matter how often you tell her to fix it before she embarrasses you all. She cuts it herself- as you do yours- because there’s really no other options. The both of you are products of your environment, harmless habits and harmful tendencies and all. She is just like you, and you hate her and you hate yourself and you’ve hated yourself since you could attach a body to your brain and a face to your fury, since you learned what you were and learned what you meant.
You are alive today, and you’ve been alive for seventeen years, and everything is so much all the time. Gideon is alive today, and she’s been alive for eighteen years, and she is so much all the time. You haven’t touched her in a long, long time, not since you learned that the best way to inflict damage on somebody as lonely as yourself was to deprive them of the warmth and weight required to bruise, and you think that if you were to try to now something terrible would happen, something that would chew you up and spit you out. She would burn you, you think. You would burst into flames.
“Uhh, Nonagesimus?” you distantly register Gideon saying. She’s waving that fucking rib again. “Are you alive in there? Did I break you?”
You do not respond. You look at her. You look at her eyes and her ears and the curve of her mouth, and you look at her arms and the bones of her wrist and the subtle pulse of skin where her jaw meets her neck. You look at her, and you wish that you never even knew her name. You wish that you could scrub every trace of Gideon Nav from your mind because surely there is nothing worse than this, than this warm and angry feeling that’s working its way up from your stomach, than this ache that’s sweet and pervasive like a whisper in your ear or the press of a hand into the crook of your arm. People who look at other people and imagine what it would be like to feel something towards them other than blinding, indomitable hatred are not people who are at their best, as you need to be if you stand any chance of penance. People with nothing to lose are people who don’t get hurt. When you are alone at night you think about the curve of her neck, and that will be your ruin.
“Fuck off, Griddle,” you finally say, averting your eyes. “Go swing a sword at something. I expect to see you at dinner this evening.”
These encounters end fast if you know how to say the right things, and you’re done playing now and Gideon knows it. She glowers and groans, flicks the rib that she was holding to the side and then tugs at her bag with one hand, makes a rude gesture with the other. You refuse to react and instead stand there, short but still somewhat menacingly you hope, until she kicks a rock to the side and turns back the way that she came, grumbling all the while. You watch her as she goes, rage and embarrassment boiling soft through your stomach.
You look at her until you can’t anymore, until she’s slipped out of sight, and then you think: Gideon Nav is your biggest shame, the best and worst of you, and Gideon Nav is a weight on your conscience because you want to hurt her. Gideon Nav is a shove between your shoulderblades, a mean-spirited push down over the edge and down to hell because you look at her and you want so much that it’ll be her undoing, because you want to wind her around your fingers and you want to breathe her in and you want your arm to bleed her blood. It’s a strange kind of wanting, a hungry, echoed longing that you don’t know the origins of but feel howling through you all the same, flowing from your head to your fingers and down to your bones; you want to sink your teeth into her shoulder, you want to hold a civilized conversation, you want to land a punch smack in the middle of her face- one hard enough that you can watch the purple-lacquer bruise bloom over your fingers- and you want to listen to her stupid jokes so that you have an excuse to laugh and laugh and laugh .
You want her to be an indisputable part of you. You want her, and these are not-good thoughts that you are only having because it is your birthday, and birthdays are difficult, and there’s nothing more to it, and there’s no hidden depth and there’s nothing real. This is unimportant in the grand scheme of things, you tell yourself as you prepare to continue on with your day, because regardless of the scope or strength of whatever feelings it is that you may be having nothing will come of them. You’ll die by it if you must.
But as you turn with a huff and continue making your way down the corridor and to the room where you will make your speeches and perform your rites and your rituals, a memory dredges itself up from the deep and shakes off the dust and lodges itself somewhere near the front of your mind. It’s not a kind memory but you can’t seem to bury it again, so you stop short and breathe in through your nose, reach out to press a hand against the wall as you shut your eyes tight and it tugs you under.
You are ten years old- and this is after the Tomb, after the deaths, after it all when you have become as raw and festering as an open wound and picked up a tendency to sob-scream when alone until your voice goes red and raw and your stomach burns with bile- and Gideon has said something terrible to you. Horrid, the sort of shot that’s soaked in vitriol and meant to kill, the sort of thing that you can only say if you want to hurt someone who wants to hurt you. Pressure applied to a point that she knows of only because you seek her out whenever you’re looking to either hurt or get hurt, a weakness that you revealed to her for the sole and simple virtue of there being no one else to hold it for you.You don’t remember what exactly it is that she says because that’s not important; the only important thing is that you learn that day just what the two of you are capable of if you put your weight behind it, if you really try.
So Gideon says something vile and then you snap back, and then she retaliates again and it leads to the two of you brawling right there on the cold stone floors. For once you have the advantage because your small body is wracked with rage and hardened by grief, so you lash out and you lash out hard and you scratch a long, red line down the side of Gideon’s face. Her skin is warm, her blood warmer, and you watch as her eyes go wide in that big, empty head of hers, and you surprise flutter across her features and then make way for a scowl. You feel your chest heave with exertion, with fear and anger and a sadness so profound as to be deadly, and then Gideon snaps back into motion and lunges for your face and you two embark upon a fight so bad that you can hardly move after.
You cry that night when you are alone, because you realize somewhere around the time that you’re dragging your broken and battered body down the halls and to your room that Gideon Nav is a human being. She is just like you and you hurt her for it, but it’s not enough and it’s never enough and you hurt her but you still want to hurt her more and you want everything and you want nothing and you want so badly and so thoroughly that you can feel it ripping you in two.
The moral- and there is always a moral to your memories, because otherwise they’re just a waste of space- is that it is one thing to want something but another thing to have it. The moral is that you have the capacity to cause harm and the willingness as well; the moral is that you are a nightmare to deal with or hell in a human skin, an abomination and a terror.
The moral is that it is what it is, you think as you open your eyes again, shake the memory from your limbs and stand straight. You stretch your fingers and wiggle your toes, flood yourself with feeling once more. It is what it is, and you don’t know how to change it or fix it or bring it to an end, so for now you will endure like an embarrassing memory or the light of a dead star, and your house will be none the wiser because you will be, for all intents and purposes, exactly as you should be.
Except-
Well, there’s something oily on your fingers so you scowl and take a look and sure enough they’re smeared with the black-white-gray of your face paint. Your scowl deepens. Why would Gideon Nav do this, you think, and then you hiss through your teeth and turn on your heel to start the long and laborious trek back to your room. Your paint needs reapplication, and you’ve got some feelings to ignore; it’s already shaping up to be a very, very long day, and you don’t have the strength for them right now. It’s still your birthday, and you still have a long laborious life ahead of you and a locked tomb to watch over and a girl your age (with awful, horrible biceps) to feel many unfortunate, complex things towards. You wish that you had given in to temptation and slept for a little longer, but you also know that you do not deserve to so though you may be barely functional, you are good. You are depriving yourself of a comfort, and in doing so you are acting in a manner that is morally upright. Barely functional is still functional, and being alive is exhausting.
You are alive, and you are exhausted .