Work Text:
Gideon Nav lived, and she died, and that was it. Her life sucked balls and her heroic sacrifice was kind of a highlight by comparison, which is really fucking sad when you stop to think about it, so Kiriona just… she doesn’t.
In fact, Kiriona’s perfectly happy never thinking about Gideon’s sad miserable life ever again — especially now that she’s got her sad miserable death to think about, with the parades and the shiny boots, and whatever the fuck is going on between John and Admiral Sarpedon that makes her gag just thinking about it. She doesn’t want to think about falling to her death on those spikes, especially the part where she hadn’t even died right away, and then Harrow…
And now Harrow won’t. Fucking. Leave it.
“I’m sorry,” were Harrow’s first words to her, once she was Harrow again and not some ancient slut puppeteering Harrow’s body about. Kiriona half-grunted to say, Fuck off, you wimpy bitch, and that should have been it.
The thing is, Harrow should be fucking sorry, what with rejecting Gideon’s sacrifice fifty times over, and also for the bit where she went and kissed the frigid queen the moment she was back in her body, leaving Kiriona stuck on the Ninth, again, and with Ianthe of all people. Harrow’s got loads to make up for, and it wouldn’t be a bad thing if she grovelled a little, maybe, and Kiriona doesn’t mind an apology. She just didn’t want it like this.
She hates the way Harrow keeps staring at her all sideways, biting down on her tongue when Kiriona knows she’s got plenty to say, those wet-cow eyes all sad with pity. Kiriona fucking hates pity. She hadn’t wanted a crumb of it when she was a shaggy-haired little foundling running afoul of Crux’s cane, and she definitely doesn’t want it now.
Besides, she doesn’t need Harrow’s pity, anyway. She doesn’t need Harrow’s concern whenever her eyes linger on the scarf tied around Kiriona’s neck and then flicker away like she can’t bear to look. Kiriona’s a gorgeous fucking corpse, nothing like the Reverend Parents were after Harrow patched them up. She’s is hot, she’s a Prince of the First House, she’s thriving. She’s just dead.
As always, Harrow ends up having her way. For a week she keeps on skulking around like the universe’s most passive-aggressive penitent, throwing Kiriona those mournful side-stares until even fucking John notices, and takes her aside with paternal concern.
“Look, kiddo, not that I’d call myself an expert on matters of the heart, but have you noticed how Harrowhark—”
“No!” Kiriona says, stomping out, leaving John to shake his head mournfully all by himself and tell himself that he tried. Then she goes looking for Harrow, because she’s fucking had enough.
She drags Harrow off into a side room, her gloved hand grasping Harrow’s scrawny arm, and it’s the first time they touched since Harrow took the two-hander from Gideon’s dead hands.
“Non—” Nonagesimus, she wants to say, but her voice fucking cracks through her torn-off voice box. “What the hell do you want?”
She doesn’t know what to expect. It’s Harrow, but it’s Harrow with her brain scrambled and death by stabbing and spending six months in the Locked Tomb, so who even the fuck knows. She’s half anticipating Harrow will say something perverted and Ninth, like asking Kiriona to whip her in front of Dad’s altar or whatever. Instead, Harrow’s little teeth dig into her painted lip, and her eyes go narrow and scary.
“Undress.”
“What the fuck,” Kiriona says. If she still had a heart it’d be dancing in her throat right now, but as it is she stands there numb until Harrow clears her throat.
“I would like to look at you.”
Kiriona could make, like, fifteen jokes just from that. She doesn’t.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she asks the room.
Harrow, it seems, is not fucking kidding. She just stands there, hunched like a twig with zero core strength and the arrogant demeanour of a Fleet Admiral, like she’s forgotten Kiriona doesn’t have to do what she says anymore, she hasn’t since she fell on those spikes and—
“Yeah, no,” Kiriona says, and she turns on her heels to leave.
And then suddenly she can’t. There’s a rope-like tendon tripping her, enveloping her boots at the ankle and then up her legs — Kiriona grabs it with her gloved hands and rips it up, watches it wither and fall apart like necrotising tissue, but another takes up its place.
“Just let me see. Let me,” Harrow says in a voice that almost resembles the old Reverend Daughter, back when Kiriona wanted nothing more than to punch her in the face.
So, naturally, Kiriona says, “Fuck no.”
She reaches for the knife at her waist, the blade as sharp as Ianthe’s tongue, kicks off another stray tendon reaching for her. Thanergy doesn’t work on Kiriona these days, but it’s not like Dad made her immune to being tied up.
“Are you serious?” She twists into the bindings to absolutely no effect. Her knife falls to the floor. “Harrow, you little freak, let me go.” The tendon-y restraints are growing like tumours, sneaking up Kiriona’s legs and wrapping around her thighs, her uniform trousers stretched tight around her quads in a way she’s been told looks sexy, but now the cloth feels thin and flimsy and she can feel Harrow’s constructs pawning at her.
“You’re insane,” she says. “You’re actually insane. Harrow, you little—”
Back on the Ninth, she’d always suspected that Harrow got her saintly nun hands on her stash of skin mags, the kind with the sleazy necrobabes and steamy space adventures, and this is starting to feel like it’d fit right in, but it’s Harrow. That can’t be where this is going. Harrow tying her up after telling Kiriona to get naked is more likely to end with ritual sacrifice than a smutty story right out of Borderland Bombshells.
Kiriona kicks at the ropes, to absolutely zero success. The room had been a supply cabinet a moment ago; now an altar lies in the middle of it, built up from intricately carved bones — all nice and spooky; Sister Canace would be thrilled.
And Kiriona’s being dragged to lie on top of it, pushed by Harrow’s twisty pale constructs, thrashing every inch of the way until she’s splayed out and pinned by her limbs — this is the kind of shit Harrow used to pull on her all the time, the kind that made Gideon spit blood up in her face and daydream of revenge before falling asleep. Now she’s only just annoyed.
“You know, if you’re trying to apologise for being a huge fucking bitch, I don’t think this is the right way to go about it.”
“I’m not, I don’t… Just stay still,” Harrow spits out, gruff and not looking at her face, still chewing at her lip like she’s about to tear a bloody chunk off it and do something evil with it.
Kiriona wonders what’s going through her sewn-up mess of a brain. Maybe Harrow is going to do her very best to destroy her, try her hand at unmaking what God Himself has put together, and why the fuck not. Not like it’s going to work, but at least it’d be a new thing to try. Numb as she is, she can’t even find the spark within herself to hate Harrow for it.
Harrow picks up Kiriona’s discarded blade, the one she got from Dad that has killed countless creatures that shouldn’t exist and sliced through dozens of Ianthe’s fatty constructs. It’s a gorgeous knife, fucking handy as far as offhands go, the kind of weapon she’d dreamed of having as a kid. Harrow handles it much like Ortus would handle a rapier.
The blade strikes. Kiriona thinks: Fuck, she’s gonna slit my throat. She’s gonna cut into my brain.
And then she thinks: Not like that’d do shit.
Instead, Harrow slices her jacket clean open. She cuts through the scarf tight around Kiriona’s neck and her magnificent Cohort frippery and the starch white shirt and the bandeau around her tits — and then the tendrils flicker up, grabbing the cloth and ripping it off, and Kiriona is completely naked from the waist up.
“You could’ve at least bought me dinner first.”
“I’m not — get those perverted thoughts out of your brain,” Harrow snaps like it’s Kiriona’s fault that she’s half-naked and tied up to a creepy altar. “I do not have designs on you.”
She says it with all the disdain of the Tomb, the filthy little liar.
“Bet you say that to all the girls.”
“That’s not…”
Then Harrow falls quiet. Her brows arc up under her face paint and she paces a circle around the tiny room, steps etching a circle into the floor as she looks her fill of Kiriona’s body. Harrow’s hands twitch at her sides like she’s itching to do something perverse and undoubtedly lame, but mostly she just stares, with the kind of intensity she’d reserve for the skeleton of a martyr in a dusty crypt back in Drearburh.
And stares.
Kiriona feels like she’s a corpse on a fucking slab, watching Harrow watch her. Then Harrow’s arm raises — she makes a move like she wants to cup Kiriona’s tit, but it turns out she’s aiming for the wound in her chest, and Kiriona jerks by instinct, because — no. Nobody touches that.
“Just because you’re hot for corpses, Nonagesimus, it doesn’t mean you can fuck with me like that. Fucking stop this.”
She’s starting to feel uncomfortable, in a way she forgot she could even feel, back when emotional disquiet was a thing she went through on the daily. Kiriona’s nerves only half-work, but her skin prickles in the way it always does when someone’s staring at you, and this is Harrow.
Kiriona’s fingers tap the surface of the bone slab at her side. Her nails don’t grow but they can’t break either, which is a first. She likes the clip-clap it makes.
“Let me go now and I won’t fuck you up for this. But I swear, Harrow, if you don’t I will hunt you down and rip out your fucking liver, I don’t care what John—”
And then she stops dead, because Harrow looks up at her, and Harrow is fucking crying.
Her eyes are shiny. There are little pearls trapped in her eyelashes, and Kiriona can’t believe she’s wasting time looking at Harrow’s eyelashes at all. A drop drips down into the face paint, then another.
“Okay, what the fuck.”
And then Harrow touches her.
Kiriona jumps.
So her nerves are a patchwork mess, and she doesn’t feel pain, but she feels pleasure just fine. Like, loads of it. All the good sensations are heightened, and being touched feels… it’s a lot, alright. But it feels so fucking good.
It’s one of the worst things John has done for her, but when she’d said — after she was walking and talking and moving, sort of, and he came to check in, Kiriona made a joke that she was mostly dead even down there, and he went and flushed, the Emperor of the Nine Houses looking all awkward as a Ninth House nun.
He’d cleared his throat and said, ‘Yeah, okay, let me… let’s outsource this bit, alright?’ and then he’d called Ianthe and, anyway, Kiriona may be dead, but being touched fucking rocks. Especially when it’s a hot girl doing it. Harrow’s not hot, and she’s more creep than girl, but her hands are alive and blood-warm over Kiriona’s cool skin and, fuck.
Kiriona wriggles a little bit. She may be dead, but if Harrow’s going to tie her up and strip her — well, that freak is a necrophiliac, isn’t she? A girl’s gonna get ideas
But the little witch ignores Kiriona’s dead tits and her dead rock-hard abs, and the way her dead his are straining up against the bone slab, and her eyes stay fixed on all those holes that Kiriona really doesn’t want her to stare at. Down her abdomen, on the side. On her throat, that big gash that was made with teeth. And the wound over her chest where Gideon’s heart used to be, and now there’s only half of it, torn out and chewed up. Harrow’s fingers circle the jagged rim of the bloody wound, and Kiriona hates that it feels good.
Harrow’s head is still bent down, and something warm falls down over Kiriona’s skin.
“Are you…” Her voice sounds strained. Can you be short of breath if your lungs don’t work?
“I’m not one of your holy relics, you know,” she tries instead. “You wanna go weep at something, there’s a portrait of the Saint of Patience down the hall.” John commissioned it himself, the sentimental fuck. “Harrow, what are you—”
Harrow’s finger digs into the wound. It’s the hole in the middle of her chest, the big one, and it doesn’t hurt and it feels weird, but it’s a good sort of weird, and she hates that she doesn’t hate this.
“Thought you were saving yourself for Alecto,” she snarls around the name. “You know, I’m pretty sure she fucked my dad. Or at least, she’s fucked her fist through his—Harrow, shit,” Kiriona yelps. “You filthy pervert. You freak. Stop that.”
Harrow’s fingers are doing something. There’s two of them now, fingering the wound—Kiriona sort of wants to giggle at that, hysterically; Harrow is fingering her. It feels weird, and then Harrow’s dark head bends over her chest, and she’s sort of breathing into the wound, like…
Kiriona squirm. She feels like her soul is being stroked, whatever little is left of it, gnawed off in bits and pieces. Harrow’s other hand moves to the wound in her abdomen where the spike went through, and then one over her clavicle that hurt like a bitch when the bone splintered.
Kiriona swallows, all reflexes. She’s got no saliva and no tears and no blood and no pain receptors, but the touch feels good, all over, like her soul is being rubbed from the inside out, all that pleasant warmth of the living that she forgot could feel like this. Harrow’s lips are on her chest, pressing tear-damp kisses all over the fucking holes, fingers tracing the fraught edges, dipping in, and Kiriona gasps.
“Fuck. Fuck you, I didn’t — you didn’t even ask.” It’s not like she only puts out after the third date or something, and this is Harrow. Gideon died for Harrow. “You pervert. You didn’t even ask,” she says again, whiny-sounding and hating it. “You never fucking ask.”
Harrow looks up, and her face is fully a mask for the first time. Kiriona can’t read the arc of her eyebrows or the twist of her thin lips, can’t read shit under her face paint. It’s all blank, and scary.
And then Harrow speaks.
“Gideon.” Her voice is a croak, like she needs to drink some water. Harrow always forgets to drink water unless someone makes her.
“Gideon.”
“Don’t call me that,” Kiriona snaps. Harrow, for once in her miserable life, shuts her mouth. Swallows. “I just wanted. Please,” she says, so un-Harrow-like. “I just wanted to see if — just don’t move. I’ll let you go, I just want to see if… I know your body…”
That’s what she said, Kiriona thinks, ridiculously. Watches Harrow’s tongue dart out to lick at her chapped lips under the paint, the first hint of any real kind of nerves.
“I can,” Harrow goes on, more assured this time. “I think I can—”
“Fuck with me? Yeah, why not. You’ve always done that.”
“I can fix it,” Harrow blurts out. She lowers her head again, face hovering right over Kiriona’s chest so close that she can feel Harrow’s breaths. Harrow could cop a feel while she’s down there, but instead she presses her mouth to the big fucking wound, wet lips against dead skin.
Eating me out again. The sound dies in Kiriona’s throat; she won’t let it out.
“Isn’t that arrogance, Harrow?” she says instead. “Think you could fix what God couldn’t?”
Harrow’s mouth skirts up. Harrow’s tongue. She bites back a sound — she doesn’t want to moan at the little freak kissing Kiriona’s wounds like she never kissed Gideon’s lips.
“Though, I guess John didn’t have my whole soul to work with,” she says, as harsh as she can make it. “That’s what he said, couldn’t put me back together because there are bits missing. But you’ve got those, right Harrow? Chewed on it a bit. Ate me right up.”
Harrow’s lips are skirting up her chest, so light. Kiriona remembers dying, impaled on those spikes. Step six: consume the flesh. She’d told Harrow to just fucking go for it, just fucking do it, and Harrow had opened her mouth wide and torn Gideon’s throat out.
Drank up the blood. And her heart, later. Ripped it right out. Harrow’s fingers trace the edge of the big fucking wound, caresses that feel like sparks. The touch feels so good.
“Are you getting off on this?” Kiriona says, breathless. Curious. Because Harrow’s mouth is over her collarbones, and she’s licking the skin there. Pressing a kiss. There are no wounds right there, no reason for Harrow to do it like that.
This feels like something they’d do on the Third, sucking and fucking necromancy. She thinks about the gold arm Harrow made for Ianthe — Ianthe loves that fucking thing. Kiriona’s watched her fuck herself with those fingers.
“Harrow.” Kiriona pulls at her restraints, and she can’t move, but maybe it’s better this way. She doesn’t want Harrow to stop touching her, and doesn’t want to admit to it either.
Harrow looks up, so close that their noses almost touch. She’s not crying anymore, thank fuck; she’s got that determined frown that means she’s about to do something impossible and frankly deranged. Kiriona can feel the thanergy emanating off her in waves, prickling at all her senses.
“Gideon,” Harrow breathes, and Kiriona opens her mouth to tell her to fuck off, but then Harrow’s mouth is on hers — Harrow is kissing her.
There is light.