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The first time Nimona died was in the arms of her best friend, a thousand or so years before her heart stopped for the first time. Even though it sure felt like she’d suddenly, spontaneously, decided to stop living when Gloreth had leaned down and played a kiss against Nimona’s forehead as they play-fought.
Nimona had swatted at her, and Gloreth had simply cupped her cheeks and grinned.
“C’mon,” she’d said, “C’mon, Nimona. You have to learn how to kiss if you want a husband.”
And after a beat of silence and Gloreth’s hot breath against Nimona’s skin, she’d agreed. And she’d been kissed. She hadn’t kissed back, not immediately. Believe it or not, she used to be timid. Instead of kissing back, she’d let Gloreth take what she’d wanted, and Nimona had raked her hands through that golden fucking hair. Girls love each other like animals, you know.
And Gloreth, pretty fingers still against Nimona’s cheeks—Gloreth had smelled of ichor and rosemary.
Without doubt, Gloreth was the person who taught Nimona how to love. Which is a pity. Because Gloreth’s love was no good.
More often than not, fucked up things start in childhood. Ambrosius has panic attacks about his dark roots showing not because every gay man with bleached hair is going through something, but because that his parents (mainly his mother, his father is, as Nimona has pierced together, complicated) dyed it from Practically Infancy (Nimona has not asked what exact age that would be, because Nimona doesn’t like Ambrosius enough to want to sucker his mom).
Bal hoards food because he remembers how hunger pangs feel. Ambrosius has the apartment sparkling even when his baby cousins visit out of habit. Bal is afraid of the dark and dentists. And Nimona? Nimona’s a dick because people who weren’t supposed to let her down did.
Nimona made a life out of chasing a ghost and even though she hates to admit it; that took its toll. For a while, she got along. For a while, she thought she was as happy as she had any right to be. She thought that if she existed for spite and hatred and for proving Gloreth wrong, at least she still existed. And Gloreth didn’t.
But Gloreth is everywhere.
And Nimona isn’t talking about the stupid statues or pretentious posters. She’s not even talking about the institutions that Gloreth’s legacy propped up or the fact that the street next to theirs is named after Gloreth of all people. She’s not even being pissy about the fact that Ambrosius kind of has the slope of Gloreth’s nose or the sharpness of her chin or that he dyes his hair to look like hers.
Gloreth is haunting Nimona.
Gloreth has been haunting Nimona for as long as Nimona’s known her.
And Nimona doesn’t know how she’s supposed to get out of this mess.
The most common way to learn how to kiss is by sucking face with a tomato.
Two weeks before Nimona was kissed by Gloreth, Gloreth had insisted that kissing a tomato was boring.
“They don’t kiss back,” she’d argued, “And they don’t tell you if you were a good kisser. How are you supposed to know if you’re a good kisser if you can’t be told whether you are?”
“Isn’t it just a thing you know?” Nimona had asked, genuinely curious in a way that would be replaced by just being an asshole because that’s easier than wearing your heart on your sleeve even if you tuck a knife next to it, “Like, you know whether you’re horrible at sword-fighting and you know whether you’re horrible at kissing.”
“I don’t think so,” Gloreth had countered, and upon the mention of the sword, she’d wrapped her fist a little tighter around the wooden replica she was aiming at Nimona. Nimona blocked its advance with her own. “I think that kissing is a thing you can be good at in different ways. I think each person thinks a good kiss is something different.”
“Hm,” Nimona had challenged, levelling her sword at Gloreth’s throat but not pressing her advantage, “What’s a good kiss to you, then?”
“A kiss that someone remembers long after.”
Nimona’s not very good at living with people.
Most of the time, Nimona’s taking notes. First, when she lives in the tower with Ballister and she’s sleeping on the arm of the couch as a cat and he’s snoring underneath her—and then when Ballister insists, despite her protests that she’d liked their old arrangement, that they couldn’t stay. Even though she’d put all that effort into coming back to life for him.
Most of the time, Nimona’s trying not to. But her mind’s a bitch just like she is.
So, she notices patterns.
She notices that Ambrosius always, always pisses before he goes to bed. Even if there’s absolutely no need, even though she’s watched him excuse himself from their board game thirty minutes prior to use the bathroom, he still pads out in his ratty pyjama bottoms with the anthropomorphic olives which aren’t just a weird choice because they look nothing like what he’s supposed to be wearing but also because this man is the kind of deathly allergic to olives where he actually stops breathing instead of just suffers through Gastrointestinal Armageddon for his hubris.
(Nimona hadn’t known. It’d just been tofu fried in olive oil. She thought Ambrosius would prefer olive oil over the sesame oil they seemed to use for everything. Olive oil is fancy. Nimona had been sure, when the doctor had told Bal in the waiting room how lucky they’d been, that it’d be what did it. That he’d choose Ambrosius over her. That Gloreth would win again, even in another lifetime.)
In the tower, Ballister had whimpered in the middle of the night and clutched the air where his arm wasn’t and Nimona hadn’t known what to do. In front of her, on the coffee table, atop their half-finished game, laid his arm charging in the extension lead that hissed the hiss of suspicious scavenged electronics. He’d curled in on himself, the whimpering turning to a low keening, and Nimona, still a cat, had hopped down onto the space he’d made on the couch and nuzzled against his stomach.
Even though he didn’t realise it, he’d held her so tightly that it’d hurt and she’d been unable to move until he’d woken up and been bashful about it even though she hadn’t said anything and even tried to pretend that she was still asleep.
Ambrosius sings loudly in the shower, and at first, that had annoyed Nimona—and then he’d stopped doing it for a week or two (seventeen days) after visiting his family and Nimona had asked Ballister why Ambrosius wasn’t singing in the shower and he’d done that thing he did where he scrunched up his face instead of giving you a straight (like he ain’t, ha) answer.
He’d shot her the look that said please for the love of all that is holy and I’m not going to say Gloreth because I know that you’re weird about me saying Gloreth or you’re not actually, you’re actually totally fine about me saying Gloreth but for some reason I think you’re not and so, I get weird about saying Gloreth and that makes you weird of course because it’s really fucking hard to not respond with weird when you get weird, right? And that’d been it. Nimona knows that she’s not supposed to ask questions or ask for clarification when she’s fucked up: she’s just supposed to know and she’s supposed to not fuck up in the first place.
Nimona’s not very good at living with people.
Bal’s an agoraphobe, according to Ambrosius.
Nimona doesn’t know what the fuck an agoraphobe is, so she spits out some of her noodles and asks: “The fuck’s an agoraphobe? Actually, if it’s some kind of weird kink, I don’t want to know, it’s already bad enough to know that you fuck and the only thing standing between me and your fuck noises is those noise-cancelling headphones that you (Ambrosius, very bashful) got me—”
“An agoraphobe is someone who’s scared of going outside,” Ambrosius interrupts, sighing but sighing with affection as he waves his fork in the air. Ambrosius talks a lot with his hands, especially when he’s explaining something, so Nimona prepares herself for something that might be a lecture.
“Agoraphobia is a type of anxiety disorder,” Ambrosius starts, glancing at Bal, who’s decided that he’s very eager to glare at his food like giving it the stink eye would make it spontaneously combust so they’d have something else to deal with instead of his apparent agoraphobia. Unfortunately for both of them, it doesn’t and Ambrosius keeps talking.
“A person with agoraphobia is afraid to leave environments they know or consider to be safe,” he explains, “Bal’s in therapy, and one of the things he’s working on is getting out more. In severe cases, a person with agoraphobia considers their home to be the only safe environment. They may avoid leaving their home for days, months or even years. We’re trying to not do that. Bal wasn’t always agoraphobic, and he can recover.”
And that was why Ambrosius had brought up the fact that Bal was an agoraphobe in the first place. It wasn’t to shame him—it was because they were talking about going to some kind of fair, something-something-Gloreth-related, and Ambrosius had apologised even though he was sure that Nimona didn’t want to go (something-something-Gloreth-related) and that Bal probably wouldn’t be the “best support for you” because he’s not a fan of crowds. And then Nimona had started to ask why, and had started to cite the fact that he’d been fine bobbing and weaving through crowds when they’d been on the run.
She brings that up again, when Ambrosius is done with his lecture. She’s not sure why. She’s not sure what she’s got to prove, but it’s something.
“Sometimes,” Bal says, stabbing at his food with his fork but not picking any of it up, “It takes shit a while to sink in. I thought I was fine after everything, or at least somewhat fine, the kind of fine where people didn’t need to be concerned and I didn’t need anyone’s help—professional or personal—but I was wrong. Sometimes things take a while to settle, the body keeps the score or whatever. Sometimes you have to feel safe first, and then everything hits you like a ton of bricks.”
Nimona looks at Bal, looks at the empty sleeve where his arm should be if it wasn’t charging on the coffee table. Sighs.
And then she goes back to eating her food and not asking questions she shouldn’t.
Nimona still knows Gloreth’s birthday and her mother’s favourite song.
She knows that Gloreth bitched and hissed and exaggeratedly groaned and even once tried to bite when her mother brushed out that famous long golden hair, and how she’d confided in Nimona that sometimes, she dreamt about taking her father’s straight razor to it and watching it all fall off.
Nimona had offered to do it for her. No, scratch that. Nimona had been eager to do it for her. She’d practically been jumping up and down, giggling at the prospect of seeing just how horrified Gloreth’s annoying fucking stage parents could get.
Gloreth had raised her hand in the air and it’d been more effective of a shut the fuck up than anything Gloreth could have said.
“I was kidding,” she’d said, “Just because I think of it, doesn’t mean I’m actually going to do it, dummy. I’m a girl.”
Bal tries to make her talk about her childhood, sometimes. Usually, it’s when the booze had made him slow and touchy and she’s left wondering if she’s got a freakish high tolerance or if he’s an embarrassing lightweight despite his denials. Anyways, talking about her childhood with Ballister would be useless. Ballister was a street kid who got a gnarly scar and didn’t like talking about it, but Nimona was a girl.
And girlhood is everything from a pair of hands clasped tightly around your bobbing throat to sharp hips against your lips, to hunger, to being so full of your tongue that you’ve been swallowing since you turned ten that you don’t even think blowing a toothbrush could relieve you even if it does make you retch all the wrongness out of you, heave by heave. Girlhood is being half daughter and half apology and all the wrong kind of love, all fire.
Girlhood is above everything else, a blood-soaked performance. So bloody. You’re basically skidding around the stage. Growing into a woman is living life on ice skates and always landing on your feet. Nimona didn’t grow into a woman because Nimona stumbled somewhere along the line and ate shit on the frozen lake.
Nimona is the shape that her life made her—and her running answer to why she is the way that she is that filth teaches filth. And that’s the kind of answer that makes Ambrosius study the floor like it contains all the secrets to existence and do that thing he does when he’s anxious and awkward and he wiggles his feet because he doesn’t have anything better to do but he knows that he has to get himself out of whatever mess he’s found himself in without surrendering himself to the heat.
So, Nimona doesn’t talk about her childhood even when she’s very obviously encouraged and sometimes even kind of guilted to. She’ll throw little kernels of truth onto the floor and watch them become glass shards when Bal prods too much to them, watches them cut open the fragile skin on the pads of his fingers, and watches him be uncaring, anyways.
He still tries to pick them up.
He still keeps her in his life, even when she’s nasty on purpose. When she’s nasty in the way that’s never failed her when she wants to scare someone away. It fails her with Ballister, again and again. She calls is boyfriend names, keeps reminding his boyfriend of his many, many sins. She has to be bailed out of jail one weekend and all Bal says is that he’s proud of her that she didn’t break out and she waited for him instead. The only reason she’d waited for him was because she was sure he wouldn’t come and she needed to prove it to herself.
But he’d come.
And she didn’t know what to do with that information.
One night, Bal woke her up with his screaming.
She’d fallen asleep on the couch, the TV still playing some crappy game show that cast everything in an icy blue glow as he’d barrelled into the living room, the crappy quilt that someone had gifted him when he’d been in hospital after getting his head almost beaten in by Supremely Punchable Face falling off his shoulders and onto the floor.
(Nimona didn’t know that’d happened, Nimona had been busy rampaging through the city, Nimona hadn’t known until Ambrosius had told her and he’d only told her because Bal had gone to the hospital after throwing up for no reason because he had a fucking head injury and Nimona hadn’t known and what kind of sidekick doesn’t know that her boss should under absolutely no conditions take another fall where he hits his head.)
He'd practically thrown himself at Nimona, gathering her against his chest even after her initial reflexive hiss before she relaxed into his hold. He mumbled mostly nonsense against her hair, stroking it, but she picked up a couple of things.
As long as I’m here, he’d whispered, voice harried and flighty like he had to remind himself how to breathe after every word, no one can hurt you. They don’t deserve you, they don’t deserve you, they don’t deserve you.
I wish I could change the way that you see yourself.
Ambrosius had been watching from the hallway, bathed in gold.
They fell asleep in a heap, and Nimona woke to Ambrosius cooking bacon and cussing when he got splattered with grease.
Gloreth married a plain man and had two kids while Nimona learned how to pull sharp objects out of her body. The kids looked nothing like Gloreth except for the fact that they’d inherited her hair. They hated it as much as she had, they hissed and they struggled and they growled and clawed like animals to get out of having it brushed; and still, the town rejoiced at the obvious show of the glory of Gloreth’s blood and that’s the story about why Ambrosius dyes his hair.
(He doesn’t just bleach it. That would be too simple. He tones it, too. To get just that right shade of gold.)
Gloreth died in her eighties of cancer. A completely pedestrian way to die.
It doesn’t say anything about any of that on the base of any of her statues, and not even the secret, true, hidden gravesite in the Institute’s basement that Nimona defaced while chatting to her old gal about the fact that she’s sure that it must have felt like making out with a tomato, when she kissed that plain man that history didn’t even bother to record the name of even though he contributed half of the genes to Gloreth’s legendary line.
It's not that she found someone else after Nimona was a kid with a crush on her and it’s not even that Nimona didn’t find someone else after Gloreth—it’s that the only thing Nimona remembers about him is that he was so fucking boring, and that she’d sought Gloreth out once, when Gloreth was too old to swing a sword and her husband was dead of a cause as boring as he was and Nimona had asked Gloreth if it’d been worth it and all Gloreth had said is: “I don’t want to speak to you. I have a husband.”
And when you say something like that, the bare minimum you have to do is find a bitch more to Nimona’s liking.
Nimona remembers being cold. Nimona remembers being afraid. Nimona remembers being tied up. And all of these happen to be ways that people on the internet describe anxiety attacks, in article after article consumed in the middle of the night. It means that Nimona should technically be great when Bal panics in public or when she pretends that Ambrosius isn’t panicking on the phone with his mom and that she’s just handing him that bag of frozen peas because, fuck, shit, she doesn’t know, she thinks it would be neat for him to stand holding some random frozen peas or she wants to reef through the freezer for the last of the good ice cream that she knows for a fact is in there and Bal just hid it really well because she heard him shuffling around way too much in there.
It annoys Nimona when she’s not good at stuff, especially when it’s something she wants to be good at.
Gloreth’s parents always made a really big deal (a weirdly big deal) about them growing up and serving their community, whatever the fuck that meant. Gloreth had always waited until they left, and then scoffed loudly and surely and said that she was never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever serving shit, and she’d assert that by sticking her tongue and waggling her finger at each of the evers.
It’s frustrating, because Nimona should at least be good at refusing to be good at things; because she remembers thinking that, when Gloreth’s parents got their panties in a bunch because they’d been playing in the lake instead of helping little old ladies cross the street or whatever.
Of course, they were supposed to go do their good deeds outside of the house, where people could see them do their good deeds—because otherwise, how would the community know that they were being served? At home, in the house, they weren’t allowed to do anything because they might fuck it up. They might break a glass or a plate or screw up some eggs while learning how to poach them—and that was unacceptable, and it would always be unacceptable. You had to earn your keep, and you earned your keep by being good at everything and not asking questions.
There are days, even when she’s living in Ambrosius and Bal’s guest room that’s slowly becoming Nimona’s room, when she walks through the supermarket, washed out by harsh fluorescents that fuck with both Bal and Ambrosius’ residual concussions from that crazy bastard’s crazy idea, where Nimona stalls in the pasta aisle. Where she realises that even though Gloreth has been dead for a couple hundred generations, what she most wants to see in the whole world is Gloreth buying boxed tortellini and parmesan.
She would be lying if she said that she didn’t just go places to look for Gloreth. And since the whole city’s still a fucking shrine to her, and really—her fucking stage parents—that’s not hard to find at all. She’s not like Bal; she doesn’t collapse to her knees and hiccup out the kind of sobs that require someone to practically carry her home, because he’s hyperventilating and not completely seeing the world. No, she’s been alone for too long. She’s been in situations where if she reacted like that, she’d be fucking dead. Ambrosius, who thinks he knows everything, tells her once or twice that it sounds like everything’s just waiting to ambush her in a dark alleyway and she didn’t get what he meant at first.
She feels fucking pathetic when she thinks like this. She’s Nimona. She’s the saviour of the Kingdom without ever wanting to be. Kids think that she’s a fucking badass and they’re right. She’s a traveller of the world beyond the wall, and she’s Ballister’s sidekick. She sits atop his desk and glares at people who give him shit and secretly hopes that he’s going to let her set them on fire even though she knows now that he’s annoying goody-two-shoes compared to what he’d been sold to her as. Sure, that hadn’t been his fault, but still, c’mon man.
The point is that she feels like a fucking idiot and there’s nothing she can do to run from the fact that it’s true. That she’s a fucking idiot. That sure, the first time she visited Gloreth’s tomb—hidden underneath the Institute and a weird site of pilgrimage for many a knight on the evening before their ceremony, she’d defaced it. But the second and the third and the fourth time she’d visited after swearing that she wouldn’t come back because she’d already graffitied it, she leas her back against the fading epitaph and breathes out.
And she knows the truth.
She wishes that Gloreth would come back to life like Nimona remembers her. Not old with a thousand grandchildren and weird-haired descendants who have a thing for former street rats, but Gloreth. Nimona’s Gloreth. The Gloreth who hated her parents because they had expectations that Gloreth refused to meet and because her mother always insisted on combing through her hair even though Gloreth had liked it messy. She wishes that Gloreth would come back for just five minutes.
She wishes she’d come back and talk for just five minutes. Nimona wouldn’t do anything. She wouldn’t say a single word, she wouldn’t yell a single accusation. She’d just listen. She’d be so thankful to just listen to Gloreth and she hates herself for it.
She went past the wall wearing a flannel that Gloreth would have liked. It was sharp red and fluffy and was tight on Nimona. She’s always wearing that flannel, ever since she bought it, she’s lived in it—even though she usually prefers things over-sized, even though she usually prefers to steal from Bal’s ample and growing collection of leather jackets when he insists that it’s cold enough and she needs to wear a jacket, Nimona. I don’t have the immune system to survive you having the flu.
She went to the lake where they used to always swim, but it wasn’t enough so she slipped the flannel off and turned into a swan; making sure that the flannel was securely in her beak before flying. She slipped it back onto her shoulders as soon as her girl-feet touched the sand, as soon as she instinctively curled her toes into and around it. She waded out into the water fully dressed, first up to her knees, then her hips, then her waist.
She pictured Gloreth coming to stand by her. She didn’t need to look to know that it was her. She would know Gloreth deaf, blind, bound and gagged and in chains; and Gloreth doesn’t say anything. Nimona doesn’t either.
They don’t need to say anything. The water and the fact that they’re barely-not-touching does all the talking for them.
Nimona wishes Gloreth could tell her what to do, she really does. She knows she shouldn’t, but it would be so simple if Gloreth could tell her to do and Nimona could either do it or flip her the bird and do the exact opposite. It had been easy Before, even though her life was better now on a rational level. It had been easy to just say fuck those costumed freaks at the Institute playing hero, I’m just going to do the exact opposite of them and then everything is going to be fine and I won’t think too much about everything or what I actually want out of this endless existence.
Nimona could tell her anything. It could be one of her long-winded rallying speeches on a tree-stump as she drew her stick-sword and pointed it valiantly towards the menacing, darkening purple sky. She could be mean about it, too. She could say I told you so. She could even say I always knew that you’d be a mess without me. Nimona wouldn’t mind, for once. She wouldn’t lash out like she had all those times she thought she’d heard Gloreth speaking, even though Gloreth had been dead for days, months, years, decades, centuries.
It could be short and sweet, too. The kind that’s barely an acknowledgement of Nimona’s existence and their history. It could be five seconds of Gloreth’s precious, precious time.
She hopes that Gloreth’s life with the plain man was okay. She really does. She hopes she was eating too much pasta with not enough cheese for seventy-or-so years. She hopes she was happy and that Nimona never sees her again.
She misses her. Misses her smile. Misses that stupid nasally laugh that she trained herself out of when she became a big scary hero. She misses that slightly frizzy right-after-brushing-before-it-got-smoothed-out-with-oil-or-whatever-the-fuck-they-put-in-it. She knows she did the unforgivable thing, and Nimona knows she’s wishing for something that’ll never come.
But that doesn’t mean that the exploding sky stretching across the sea isn’t for Gloreth. It doesn’t mean that all of this isn’t for Gloreth. They’re always just for her.
Just like how Nimona would like to stand in the water with her. They wouldn’t have to talk. She would just like to feel the water soaking through her clothes and the heat of Gloreth’s shoulder next to hers.
Whenever she fucks off without explaining herself or explaining herself badly, Ballister waits up for her. This time is no exception, even if he’s got his hand clutched in front of his mouth when she comes in, still dripping, dripping saltwater all over the recently-renovated and painted (a burnt orange that somehow compliments the eggshell white walls well, even though Bal’s also talking about painting those, claiming that they all have their reasons to hate white walls) hardwood.
He doesn’t even show a single smidge of discomfort when he gathers her in his arms. And she doesn’t show discomfort when Ambrosius joins, either.
“I was worried about you, Nim—”
“We were worried about you,” Ambrosius interrupts, “We were worried about you.”
The second time she’d died, it’d been quicker than the first time.
It’d been a blink and you’d miss it kind of thing. The only thing she’d have done differently is that she’d have said something more to Bal, and she’d have hugged him if she could. Just because she wasn’t entirely sure that she’d be able to bounce back from that one.
It’s not every day that you get shot in the everything with a weird laser, after all.
Nimona remembers coming back to her body with the feeling that she’d just been kicked down the street and hit a garbage can full of rotten sushi. And she remembers that her first thought was: maybe it’s time to learn a new way to love.
(Gloreth had evidently been a perfectly fine kisser.)