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As the fake stepped away, it was hard not thinking how the real deal would be like. What would kissing Harrowhark Nonagesimus feel like? Kiriona had almost blown her cover (almost because only the fake-Harrow had seen it and not the mother scorer) simply because it was her, but it wasn't. It would only take one look to understand whatever had kissed her wasn't Harrow.
If asked what was so glaringly obvious about it not being Harrow, Kiriona would probably just say everything. Her posture was not straight enough, her chin not high enough, she looked like her lips could easily slip into a smile. She kissed her. The clothes weren't layered properly, the make-up not put on as perfectly as possible, she had come close to Kiriona way to easily. She had kissed her. Most of all, it was hard to say what was so wrong about that, what felt completely out of place. It was something Kiriona didn't want to dig into much, because no matter what, Harrow's heart belonged to her corpse girlfriend.
She was still lying on the bed and her eyes were still closed, and she kept mulling it over in her head. Would Harrow ever kiss her? Would she ever like it? Would Kiriona want it?
She could at least hate her still. Kiriona really wished Harrow could hate her still, but she wondered if she would after Canaan House, or even if she had any sort of feeling towards her after forgetting her. It hurt more to think Kiriona would be forgotten than to think she wouldn't be wanted.
She got up suddenly and quickly, anyone could enter the room at any moment, but she had to look through her diary entries. The idea came from dear old dad who thought it was good for her to work through her emotions. It was hard to tell whether he thought so for her benefit or his.
There were not many diary entries. Kiriona didn't make a costume of writing in any way, shape or form, unless she felt like she was going to explode and there was not any sword in sight. When this happened, she sometimes refers to whatever she wrote with as her sword (later she would wince at this comparison).
She didn't always write about the nun because her life was more important than someone she hadn't talked to in over a year, grow up. However, as she flipped through her diary now, she understood the entries about her were always the most charged. Kiriona tried to read one of those then:
"Yell at me. Come to me and shake me and kick me and punch me and tell me that you hate it. Tell me that you hate me. I know you do, but I need to hear it.
"Tell me that while you're still looking. between recognizing who I am and deciding to look away.”
There was a lot more to it, but she was not in the mood for this, and as such tucked the diary under the bed.
Her diary had Harrow in almost all its pages, not her name, she barely wrote her name in it, but you could feel her presence there constantly. In the way Kiriona refused to speak of anything related to her childhood enemy, in her yearning for anything that had to do with Harrowhark, mostly in her yearning that she was out there, even if now she knew her body was being possessed, she must be somewhere.
Why did she sound so much more like Harrowhark while she wrote? Kiriona didn’t really sound that much like her, but it felt much more like something the Harrow would write than herself. Perhaps the queen of darkness's way of speaking had to do with how much more she read and wrote in comparison to Kiriona, but she pushed that idea aside, the last thing she wanted to feel at that moment was dumb.
Kiriona could see it in her mind, she could see herself walking up to Harrow and talking to her in the same manner as her, could see the nun’s surprise at that, at everything that had changed in the red-haired woman. The fact she was the heir to the Necrolord Prime, her white clothes, her grey skin, the gaping hole in her chest and the fact that she was now Kiriona.
All at once it hit her that she was now Kiriona Gaia, not Gideon Nav, and if she was not Gideon she wasn't Griddle and as horrible as it sounds, her stomach twisted at the thought.
Of course, Harrow would have nothing good or bad to think of her, even if she did remember Gideon, the person who would show up in front of her would not be Gideon. The person the imposter had kissed had not been Gideon. And Harrow would never kiss Gideon. She wouldn't ever see Gideon again and that's a whole lot of "Gideon", huh?
If she was Kiriona Gaia, she was not the Ninth's punching bag anymore. She was not Harrow's property, and Harrow had no more debts, no more reasons to be tied to her. And as the red-haired girl tried to tell herself that was a good thing, her stomach told her otherwise. She ran to the bathroom from besides the bed and for a few moments could only hear her own retching.
There was an oddly placed mirror above the toilet (there were oddly placed mirrors everywhere in the ship but that's what you got for traveling with Ianthe Tridentarius). But as Kiriona pulled away from the toiled and investigated said mirror. As she looked at all the things that made her dead, she thought to herself: She will never see me again, huh? and she didn’t even notice anything that felt wrong about that phrase.