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The most unexpected thing about all of this, the thing that Camilla Hect does not know how to comprehend, is how uncomfortable she is in her own skin. She has always loved her body, loved the feeling of her hands on a weapon, the sharp salt burn of sweat on her lips, the ache in her muscles. In this strange half-life she’s in now, though, there is none of that comfort. Everything feels just sideways of how it should be.
This, she knows, is absolutely absurd. She should not be the one who flinches back from mirrors, who catches herself breathless in the dark, who can’t sleep. She perpetually feels like she's falling, like she's waking up from a dream, like none of this is real. But this is her body. This has always been her body.
Except the eyes, of course.
The first month, she never flinched at her reflection. She told herself over and over to look until it didn’t hurt.
The second month, she wakes from a nightmare she can’t remember—had Palamedes taken control while they slept?—and stumbles to the bathroom. Her throat hurts like she’d been screaming. Her hands are shaking. She braces herself against the sink and looks up, and—
Those goddamn eyes.
Her stomach heaves. There’s nothing in it to expel, because eating is not something that she’s been particularly concerned with lately, and that makes it worse. She tastes acid and salt and falls to her knees.
“Fuck,” Camilla says to no one because he’s not here. Pressing her back against the cool, cracked porcelain of the tub, she tries to steady her breathing. Get it together, Hect. In for five. Out for five. This was the plan. You always knew this could happen. You prepared for this.
Her inner monologue sounds like Palamedes, which makes her want to throw up again. Camilla presses her still-shaking fists to her eyes.
It takes her forty two minutes to get her breathing under control. Another twenty before she forces herself to uncurl from the clenched ball she’s rolled in to and stretch. She stands, makes a fist and settles into a fighting stance. Her muscles are obedient, strong, hers. She jabs, follows up with a right hook, pivots into a backhand strike. With her eyes closed, in the dark, the familiar motions settle into the rhythm of her bones. This part has always belonged to her.
After shadow boxing for fifteen minutes, Camilla opens her eyes. She can almost forget. Almost, almost. But there’s still something strange in the back of her mind, a prickle of tension at the nape of her neck, the furious, howling weight of grief on her chest. She can never take a full breath.
He’ll wonder why the body is tired, when he is the one wakes in the morning. She decides not to tell him. They’ve never kept secrets from each other, not like this, but this body is hers and this grief is hers, too.
“Okay,” Pyrrha says seventy two days into their new lives. “We need to talk.”
Camilla, knees drawn up to her chest, keeps her eyes fixed on the dirty bathtub. She’s turned all the lights off, so everything is mostly shadow. She can’t tell if she’s hungry or if everything just hurts because that’s how her body feels now. “Talk about what?”
“You.”
Camilla takes as deep a breath as she can manage. “There’s nothing-“
“Don’t.” Pyrrha leans forward and tilts Camilla’s chin up. Her touch is shockingly gentle, and Camilla freezes instead of striking out or pulling away. “You can’t go on like this, kid.”
“Don’t call me that,” Camilla whispers automatically. She aches and aches and aches.
“You need to let yourself grieve, Camilla,” Pyrrha says with the quiet authority of someone who has lived for myriads. Cam often resents it, but she’s too tired to have any emotions about it right now.
“Have you?” Camilla asks. “Grieved Gideon?”
Pyrrha’s jaw clenches. She takes a deep, long breath, and then climbs into the tub.
Camilla scoots back to make room. This too, feels like falling, like she's stepping deeper into the dark, into her own skin. Her spine presses against the back of the tub, cold and curved. She wants to be sick. She swallows hard.
“Yes,” Pyrrha says finally. “I always will.”
“Palamedes isn’t dead.”
“I know,” Pyrrha says quietly. “But he is still gone.”
“I didn’t think it would feel like this,” Camilla says, finally since she knows Pyrrha is just going to stare at her until she says something. “This is my body. Why do I feel like this?”
“Because it’s not just your body anymore.”
They breathe for a few seconds in the dark. Camilla counts. She wants to say that it isn’t fair, but that doesn’t matter. And who is she to say that to Pyrrha?
“You know,” Pyrrha says. “I’m starting to forget what my voice sounds like. This is his, you know.”
“I miss Palamedes’ voice,” Camilla says, and her eyes burn. “That really is gone. Forever.”
“I know.” Pyrrha reaches a hand out, tentative, then seems to think better of it. “It was never supposed to be this way.”
She says things like that sometimes, an echo of a person from ten thousand years ago.
“Well it is,” Camilla says. Her legs are starting to cramp. She digs her chin into her knees and hunches until her shoulders sting.
“Don’t I fucking know,” Pyrrha says. “I know neither of you want to listen to me, but I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t try.”
“Please don’t tell him.”
“He knows, Camilla.”
She knows, that, of course. No one has ever known her better than the Warden.
“Does it get easier?”
Pyrrha does reach for her now. She brushes the hair out of Camilla’s eyes like she might with Nona. Camilla has to admit it is something of a comfort. Touch is a grounding thing, and she no longer has Palamedes to steady her shoulders, stay her fists.
“No,” Pyrrha says quietly. “And yes. Your body makes space for the hurt. You need to stop holding it all in your chest or you won’t be able to breathe, Cam.”
Pyrrha doesn’t call her Cam very often, and the sound of that nickname makes her so angry she can’t speak. Or, wait, maybe she’s not angry. Her eyes are burning and she can’t breathe again. Fuck.
Pyrrha presses the tape recorder into Camilla’s shaking hands. “Tell him,” she says. “I’ll leave you alone.”
When the door closes Cam presses record and whispers, “Warden,” into the dark like a prayer.
She blinks. Breathes. Blinks.
She presses play and hears, “Camilla, what’s wrong?” And it’s not his voice, it’s hers, but it’s his cadence and she wants desperately, furiously to cry. She can tell that he did; her cheeks are salt-stained.
She laughs and tilts her head back, and then there’s a rush of air in her lungs from an inhale she doesn’t take and the room spins and she falls and falls and falls and when her head clears she scrambles to press play again.
Palamedes says, “sorry. Stupid question. When was the last time you sparred, Cam? We haven’t been sore.”
He always asks the right questions. She hasn’t had time for sparring, but that’s not the answer he wants to hear. Camilla curls her right hand into a fist, and doesn’t answer.
Her body does adjust to the weight of two souls, eventually. They navigate the strangeness together, she knows, even though she feels so horribly, wretchedly alone. She learns to breathe into the new aches she wakes up with, to steady herself when she loses her balance unexpectedly. She’s become so familiar with sensation of falling, of waking up in her own skin after a long sleep. Ninety two days after Nona had woken up, Camilla asks Pyrrha to spar. They don’t have the space or the luxury of time, but there must be something in her voice because Pyrrha sighs and agrees.
Camilla Hect is the best caviler the sixth house has ever seen, and her body remembers. They can’t fight properly without waking Nona, fighting in close quarters is its own thrill. It's all fist on flesh, quick join locks, the scrape of nail on skin. A game Camilla has forgotten she knows how to play. Her body sings with the heat of it, the familiar commands, all hers. They scramble together in a silent mess of tangled limbs, and she loses herself in the focus of it. This is a new kind of falling.
Camilla has Pyrrha in a headlock when the other cavalier lets out a low laugh that vibrates every bone in Camilla’s body, brings her back.
“Damn,” Pyrrha says, tapping Camilla’s bicep until she relents and lets go. “I could kiss you.” There’s blood on the corner of her mouth. Blood on Camilla’s knuckles. They’re both breathing hard, a muted, wild symphony of sound in the dark she hasn’t heard in so long: the rush of heartbeats and sweat and breath and adrenaline.
Camilla rolls her shoulders, flexes her fingers. Her body responds immediately, humming with adrenaline, toned and obedient and perfectly hers. That would have made the Warden laugh. He is—had been—is better at flirting than she is. Camilla says nothing at all. She breathes in. She breathes out. It’s a little easier.
Ninety-three days into their new life, Camilla looks in the mirror and sees Palamedes’ eyes staring back at her. She’s managed to keep food down for two days, mostly because Palamedes is relentless about eating properly when he’s in control. Her skin still feels stretched too-tight and hot, like she has a fever, but she can breathe.
“You’re doing wonderfully,” Palamedes had said in her voice over the tape the last time they had talked.
Of course she is. She’s always excelled at every single thing she’s done. She’s Camilla Hect. “Don’t sound surprised, Warden.”
“I’m not.”
That had made her smile. She could feel that he’d just smiled too; her mouth is sweet with it.