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When John shuffles by the training room, a quiet, silky muttering drifts out. He stills in the doorway, resting the ceramic rim of his mug against his lips without actually parting them to drink.
The lights of the ship’s circadian night cycle keep the hallways dim. Inside, the training area stinks of sweat and abused vinyl, is lit jarringly white. Alone in the center of the mats, Ianthe doesn’t notice him.
She holds out her rapier—which, he can’t help but notice, seems to have been previously bedazzled with plastic rhinestones—in a perfect lunge. Heels flush to the floor, front leg straight and bent at a right angle, back leg pointed sideways, thumb atop the hilt, offhand flung behind.
After a moment; dipping the point to the gym mats, Ianthe falls out of the pose, teeth bared and lips stretched white in silent frustration. She shakes her flesh hand as if air-drying it out, then with her other, more dazzling appendage (Valancy would be proud), bends back her fingers one by one until they crack at the metacarpophalageal joints. She heaves a breath through her nostrils.
“Fine,” John twitches his head, nearly spilling his tea, then realizes she’s not talking to him. Ianthe’s voice is cool as leaked vanilla ice cream crushed at the bottom of a freezer. “Fine, Babs. I’ll get your stupid little…”
She readies herself again. The tea in John’s mug has been lapping fruitlessly at his lips for a hot minute. they’ll get chapped, at this rate, and there’s always been a deficiency of lip balm on the Mithraeum.
He slips away.
Tomorrow, he will stop by the training room again. Augustine and Harrow will be there. Augustine barking at Ianthe as Harrow hunches off to the side, that monster of a sword—a universal constant—strapped to her back.
On her meat hand, Ianthe will be wearing a glove. Immaculate white, and—if the gold-trimmed cuff ending abruptly at the base of her palm is anything to go by—made for someone with slightly shorter hands than her own.
*
Cristabel always wore the same earring—just the one. He remembers, of course, because Mercymorn would bitch and moan about the horrid asymmetry of it. And Cris would smile in that slightly-mischievous, mostly-dopey way only she could, and go, “Oh—no worries, Cee! I can get you one to wear on the other ear, then we’ll be a matched set,” and that would shut her necromancer right up.
The earring was charming, in a got-it-at-Claire’s sort of way. A dangly little stalk of sweet-pea, balm-pink. It would swing to and fro when Cris threw her head back to laugh. He remembers that, too. She always put her full body—head, shoulders, everything—into her laughs.
She tugged on it, gripping the delicate porcelain petals between her index finger and her thumb, when she was nervous, or thinking. Neither of these occurred particularly often, except during those terrible last few days before the first Ascensions.
(She and Alfred asked to speak with him once, alone, faces utterly devoid of their usual merriment, set as the grave. As if the three of them were discussing treatment options and hospice care for a terminal illness.
John had been expecting them to come to a conclusion eventually. Their current arrangement could not go one forever. He’d been dropping hints for weeks.)
After everything, Mercy’s refusal to pierce her ears is shriller than ever.
But one morning-cycle, days or centuries into being his Second Saint, she glides into the kitchen, robes betta-fin floating and face set in its marble grief-mask. Her hair is held back with a hand-made clasp; carefully fashioned so the repurposed sweet-pea remains the exact same.
Mercy wears that hairpin until the day she dies.
*
Gideon doesn’t smoke. Never has, never will. Even with immortality, he says, it’s still a foul waste of time and resources. And it smells like ass.
He and Pyrrha used to get into these long staring contests—Pyrrha would stick a ciggie between her lips, lock eyes with her necromancer, and light up. The entire time she spent drawing in scuds of tobacco, neither of them would look away. They didn’t even blink.
Pyrrha knew Gideon didn’t approve of her vices. Gideon knew Pyrrha wouldn’t stop unless under a direct order.
For whatever reason, it was an order he never gave.
John still sees that lighter, sometimes. Silver, scratched, with a ragged groove on the back where Pyrrha would claim it stopped an Edenite bullet from grazing her thigh.
Deep in thought, Gideon flips it between his fingers in flashes of steely light. But he doesn’t smoke.
(What John does not notice until too late, is the lighter slowly depleting despite Gideon’s lack of use. Or “Gideon” occasionally slipping one of Augustine’s refills from the supply room. Or Gideon tasting tobacco fug between his teeth for reasons he can’t even begin guessing.)
*
Despite how they would all joke about him and Cristabel (to Mercy and Augustine’s undying displeasure), Alfred Quinque wasn’t a ladies’ man. Nor was he a fella’s man. Nor was he… He never had any particular interest in anyone.
But Alfred did always remind John of a period-piece gentleman love interest, the type people would buy books just to sigh over and draw fan-art of him in his waist-coat and high-waisted pants. A thoughtful man, a mild-mannered man, a soulful man, a man you could picture sweeping you off of your feet.
Augustine isn’t the same, obviously. Augustine is more the flame of a racier novel, one you might blush to find tucked away in your grandmother’s sock drawer. Science nor necromancy could explain how he was the younger of the Quinques and exude far more the genial-faced sharp-toothed character of a silver fox.
Tucked into the waistband of his snap-pressed pants—front crease honed enough that one trip and fall might slice open the ship’s carpet—Augustine keeps a coppery brown handkerchief.
Never once does John see him use it, (not that much of a priss, he can almost hear his First Saint say) but it’s always wrinkle-free and clean, same as it would have been back when it was tucked into Alfred’s breast pocket.
*
Compared to other planets, the First is comfortably warm. Not Sixth or Third House deadly hellfire scorching, but “humans are capable of living without their brains stewing or their eyeball-jelly freezing” warm. The First is, and will always be, the only House that doesn’t need a temperature-regulating dome.
It’s rare to get a bitter winter at Canaan, but frigid spells would bite at their heel occasionally. Mostly when it was least convenient. They’d break out the winter gear, and go on with their lives.
It became customary to see Loveday dropping random cold-weather doodads onto her necromancer. Ear-muffs, hiking boots, bobble-hats, anything that was probably good for a sick woman to wear if she wants to stay alive. Loveday never fussed. She placed the accessories wordlessly onto Cytherea’s head/ears/neck, then released her hands. Trusting the Seventh Saint to be able to adjust it to her own liking.
Heptane had a peculiar scarf she wore constantly, in a small, neat twist at the base of her throat. Chiffon, purple. She had a ropey scar cutting through one side of her platysma. She didn’t like people seeing it, apparently.
But the second the temperature started dropping, the first thing Loveday would do was unwind that scarf with her large, careful hands. Stonily knot it around Cytherea’s vein-streaked neck. Never fret.
When they collected Heptane’s body, her neck was bare, scar curling around her sternocleidomastoid like the thumb-stroke of a lover. John had thought he was never going to see that scarf again.
He was right, mostly.
Then, Cytherea’s post-mortem. Upon finding that strip of fabric, John’s first thought is, ridiculously, I didn’t know Cyth was married.
Because what he sees, at first glance, is a wedding garter.
It’s not. Is it not? Perhaps not just. It’s a gauzy, plum-skin ribbon, torn from her cavalier’s scarf, and hitched firmly around her thigh. The edges are still ragged. His Seventh Hand never did have the patience for darning.
*
Amongst ship medical professionals and Cohort officials alike, Harrowhark the First becomes commonly known as that crackhead girl with the whopping-great sword glued to her arm. It’s the first thing anyone notices about her for good reason; that two-hander is six feet of well-kept blade, longer than its owner by a not inconsiderable margin.
The whopping-great sword with the crackhead girl glued to it might achieve the same titular function. The two of them are never, and he means never, seen outside of arms’ reach of each other. They’re like the wind and the sea, or the protagonist of a horse-girl book and her soul-horse; there’s simply no point in trying to separate them. People have tried.
(Harrow was asleep in her med-bed—still tuckered out from ascending to demi-godhood—when one of the nurses came by, evidently decided a sickly girl sharing a bed with a giant, razor-edged sword was too much of a liability, and tried to do something very unwise.
Testimony divulged Harrow had to be pulled off them by the scruff of her hospital gown, one red-tipped hand bracing her sword to her chest, the other continuing to claw at air. The nurse is lucky to have kept both their eyes.)
John sits and looks at the fuck-off humongous sword, cradled back safely in its owner’s arms.
When they picked up Harrow and Ianthe from the First, Harrow, limp—unconscious or just deeply, deeply traumatized—had clutched something in her hand. The same desperate, almost childish grasp in which she held the sword now; like a hypothermic girl to a half-box of matches.
She’d been so fragile, in that grieving, baby Lyctor way. He hadn’t dared try to pry her fingers from the bundle of dark edges.
A pair of sunglasses, smeared with whitish blackish Ninth face paint along the bottom rim.
He will never see Harrow wear those sunglasses. He wonders if she’s keeping them metaphorically tied around her metaphorical thigh.
*
The chains are just for show. He’s pretty sure his Hands know that; if Annabel wakes up and somehow breaks the wards to the Tomb (which she won’t, as he has assured them, but if she did) a few measly little rings are not going to keep her from—from whatever she would do.
Just iron. They’re thick, heavy-duty. Cold and knobbly under his palms as he had leaned in, pressing one last kiss to Annabel’s white, unmoving brow.
Sentimental bastard that he was, he’d gotten their team of blacksmiths to make a single link of the same metal, separately, for himself. Just one.
Fashioned it into a band, stubby and unmarked. Wore it every day on the fourth finger of his left hand.
“You said I killed you,” John says, twisting the ring. Pauses; “Haunt me, then.”