Work Text:
History repeats itself. Somebody says this.
History throws its shadow over the beginning, over the desktop,
over the sock drawer with its socks, its hidden letters.
History is a little man in a brown suit
trying to define a room he is outside of.
I know history. There are many names in history
but none of them are ours.
Pyrrha sticks her head into the bathroom and then realizes she’s actually completely and totally not at all equipped for what comes next.
“Camilla?” she hazards, as the stricken face and shuddering hands of what of the body she can see over the tub remind her of the cavalier, not the necromancer.
“Yes.” Her voice sounds shot through with gravel, like she’s the chain-smoker in need of a Sixth House nerd’s lecture on lung failure. God , Cass would be proud. “I’ll be out in a moment.”
If she were a better man, Pyrrha would ask are you alright? or do you want to talk? But Pyrrha is a terrible person, and so she comes in and squats down next to the tub, and makes herself a witness to a grief she thinks she used to understand.
“It hurts,” she says, a statement of fact. Blut and sharp. It makes Camilla’s face twist a bit.
“You don’t remember,” the girl says back.
“No,” Pyrrha admits, “but I’m not a fool.”
Camilla regards her, her eyes grey and red-rimmed and exhausted. The same kind of exhausted Mercymorn wore. The same kind of exhaustion John always tried to hide.
What was it they used to say? How God takes and takes and takes.
Pyrrha remembers just enough of all that mess to feel ill at the sight of history repeating itself. She cannot rewrite it, even though this time – because Camilla is a kid, barely old enough to have lived, and because Pyrrha cannot help but notice how Palamedes has to eat for her before she returns to her body – she kind of wants to.
“I-” Camilla says, and then stops. She looks at Pyrrha then, for a long moment, and her eyes are wide and dark and deep, and in the edges of her irises, Pyrrha can see the entire seventy minutes of human desire’s history mapped out amidst the pain.
“I’ll let you get cleaned up before I do,” is all Pyrrha says. When she stands up, her knees crack. The stiffness bleeds away moments later.
She paces the kitchen and waits, and can’t quite untangle what this feeling is resting near her sternum and in the pit of her stomach until she can – and then she stops and curses John and all his fucking fraudulent Saints.
Fear.
She cannot remember history, but she can see it being replayed before her; can remember remembering standing before someone she loved and giving all of herself, again and again and again-
And then she thinks about how young Camilla is – not just young because she’s so fucking old this should be illegal, but young because she hasn’t even made it to 25 – and she kind of wants to throw something across the room because she can’t remember her past but she remembers remembering how much justice mattered to her once.
“Fucking casualty of devotion, my ass,” she grumbles just to make herself feel better. Then, she jumps as Nona tells her from the next room to put a mark on the board.
Pyrrha rarely dreams, but when she does, it’s not about anything she remembers. That, honestly, feels like a win. She can't imagine being Nona, being forced to interrogate what of her dreams are real and what are just...whatever dreams are.
The dream she had last night fell somewhere between “nice sex dream” and “terrible nightmare about River horrors,” and if she were going to parse the middle ground she would need a cigarette…or several.
It’s ass o’clock in the morning, too, and Pyrrha doesn’t want to go back to sleep – because sleeping off nicotine cravings never actually works, in her experience – so she sneaks into the bathroom to get a shave in before Nona wakes up. It’s out of routine, but her body is too; she feels ragged and off-center and, strangely, a bit lonely. Hollow, in ways her mind struggles to recall and her body instantly rejects.
Somewhere between the start and end of the shaving process she could do in her sleep by now, Camilla appears behind her in the mirror Pyrrha has propped up on the sink. “Ah,” the voice says, which is how Pyrrha knows it’s really Palamedes, “so that’s the secret to a close shave.”
(Personally, Pyrrha thinks Palamedes wasn’t ever the kind of man who had to shave. She doesn’t tell him this because she would have no way to know if he was lying or fucking with her if he refuted it, but it’s a theory she holds all the same.)
“What is?” she asks instead.
“Fearlessness around a blade near your jugular.”
Pyrrha snorts a bit, meeting those brown eyes in the mirror. As always, there’s a tiny jolt of huh, Camilla Hect really was the perfect specimen, which is accompanied by the thought that if she were older…
Nah . Palamedes doesn’t seem like the type who shares.
“Why are you awake?” he asks, perching like a grey crow on the edge of the tub.
Pyrrha shrugs. She also jolts the razor blade a bit; it cuts her, and then the skin heals. That was always strange; she remembers remembering liking some pains every now and then, back when she was in her own body. Her old body. She doesn’t remember it anymore, but she does remember remembering it.
Pyrrha wonders, idly, if Palamedes or Camilla ever felt the way she sometimes does, in the moments she doesn’t like to think about: like when you look in the mirror and feel a bolt of…not a feeling of not-belonging, but a feeling of Oh, that’s what I’ve walked around looking like all day? I don’t know what my body is, but it doesn’t feel like it should be this.
She had heard Cytherea talk about that, once. Cyth had made some joke and Mercymorn had snapped, and Cyth had said: Oh, well, I’ve never had a healthy body so I’ve nothing to yearn for, but imagine how our poor cavaliers would feel if they knew what we were like.
Mercymorn had sworn at her. Pyrrha had realized she herself was never really conscious of her meat unless it was about how she was using it. That was all it was good for, she supposed: fighting and fucking.
She does remember how to do that, at least: the fighting and the fucking, though fighting looks different these days. She can strip a gun, load and reload, do it again as many times as she wants...there’s a double entendre there, she supposes, although one kind of load can’t be reloaded quite so quickly.
She cleans off her face and catches Palamedes studying her. “You feel sorry for us,” he says quietly. He always drops his voice when he speaks, like Camilla’s voice sounds strange to his ears. It probably does. When you’re used to a voice coming from outside you, hearing it on a recording – or from within your own body – is strange.
Pyrrha can’t believe she remembers remembering that.
“I don’t.”
“You feel sorry for Camilla.”
Pyrrha blinks. She turns to face him. Those inscrutable eyes look up at her, and Pyrrha thinks how the fuck did the Master Warden not give you whatever you wanted when you looked at him like that?
“Yeah,” Pyrrha says, and her voice is rough. “Yeah, I do. She almost killed herself for you. She is killing herself for you.”
She expects an argument. Almost wants one, what with her whole body still humming from that bad dream – Wake, she thinks, was there. Wake hasn’t been anywhere in…well, a long time. – and her anger at not being able to remember remembering rising like a River tide. But all Palamedes says is, “I’m angry with myself too. If that helps.”
“Then why didn’t you stop her?”
“Because she asked.” The response is instant, but Palamedes gives it as though he has to remind himself at least twice a day. “God help me, Pyrrha, she asked me to let her save me, and I let her because I would give her anything.” He lifts his cavalier’s hand to push nonexistent glasses on, then grimaces and puts the hand down.
“She’s not eating.” He changes the subject abruptly. “I don’t know if it’s because of the strain this soul places on her body or because she has lost the will to live, but please be sure she eats.”
And then he blinks and it’s Camilla. “What did he say?” she asks Pyrrha.
Pyrrha just sighs.
Pyrrha dreams about the farm sometimes.
The hypothetical farm, the farm that she’s not allowed to have, the farm on which Nona could be safe and Camilla and Palamedes can be…alive, maybe? Away from the big blue thing in the sky? Definitely.
Anyway, in the dream, she wakes up and can do something about her meat that isn’t simply force it to survive. She uses the skills rooted so deep in her bones and muscles and sinew for good, and Nona can have one of those damn dogs she always wants to have, and maybe Camilla could learn how to smile…
Maybe Pyrrha could learn how to exist in a world – maybe a life? – where she actually has a life. Is that what she wants? She doesn’t know. She remembers remembering what she wanted in life, some six thousand years ago, but that’s about it.
Does Camilla remember what she wants? Does Palamedes? Do they know? Pyrrha remembers remembering how to be a cavalier. They were practically bred to be sacrificial lambs.
Camilla deserves more. Nona deserves more. So does Palamedes, but Pyrrha understands his bent toward self-punishment.
Maybe she should be a bit harder on herself too.
Whatever you think we’re about to do, we’re not.
Pyrrha stares at the back of…Paul’s…head and tries not to remember, for once. Tries not to remember it was good. We were happy because sweet fuck did that break her heart. Tries not to remember Matthias Nonius. Tries not to remember how to remember Gideon. And Augustine, and Mercy, and John, and the end of the world and–
It wouldn’t be easy to think back over myriads. To remember what she was before she was a cavalier. Before she was…this.
That’s all. Just this.
Maybe, Pyrrha thinks, this is all she is meant to be in this lifetime. Maybe she is meant to be the bearer of her partner’s child that she once thought was also hers; maybe she is meant to go back to where Anastasia went to rest and try to give these kids at least a little bit of damn peace.
Maybe that's alright, she thinks as they careen through the River, her soul-mate's final resting place. She does recall that, or, at least, her body does. Maybe living isn't for her. But it's for them.
There are many people she has known over the course of her history. She is rapidly realizing the person she knows the least is herself.