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“Sstooory?” says Nona, curled into our back, fumbling her mouth around the word in the dark. She doesn’t talk much like the Reverend Daughter. She doesn’t talk much like an adult human at all, yet. But she’s learning. Not remembering, I don’t think—learning, from us, how to shape the sounds. Those Sixth House vowels.
It’s a comfort. I almost can’t stand it.
“You want me to tell you a story?”
Nona nods, rubbing her face between our shoulder blades. “Yss. Yehss.”
Her limbs are restless; she’s been clingy, tonight. It’s so difficult to know what she needs. Is she cold? Is something hurting her? If I roll over, it’s a 98% certainty she’ll crawl into our arms, which is still—
It’s all so strange.
I roll. She claws her way close. I tuck the blanket in around her bony shoulders, like you would; feel her forehead with the back of our hand. Warm, but she always runs startlingly warm. She leans into the touch like a flower to sunlight. “Does your head hurt, Nona?”
“Stohry,” she insists, and shoves her pointy nose into the dip between our clavicles. Soon we’ll need to start working on the concept of personal space. Nursing is one thing—she needed to be bathed, to be helped to the toilet, to be spoon-and-finger fed when she could barely lift her limbs or open her eyes. Her cavalier—her body’s cavalier, at least—would have done it, I think. Bitched about it, but done it. I’ve done it for you. That flu when we were fifteen. I would have done it for—
You’d probably say that she needs this, too. To be touched, held, as much as she needs someone to keep her from drowning in the tub or getting tangled in a nightshirt. Maybe her differentiation’s been impaired. It’s not my strong suit.
I find places to put my hands. One under my head, the other on her bicep; her arm is snaked around me. Even for a necromancer, her muscle tone is absolutely reprehensible. Doesn’t help that she’s been eating sand.
“What kind of story?” I ask. She’s had a few in rotation recently. How we found her. When we moved in here. Going to the beach, the first time. Her tantrum, and how we learned just how fast she regenerates. Some anxiety there—whether it’s about losing control or getting hurt or hurting us, I can’t tell.
Somehow she’s all knees and elbows as she tries to settle. “Yoo.”
“A story about me?”
She butts her head into our chest. “Yoo.” Unravels her arm from our waist to tug at the clockwork on our wrist. “You peez.”
Polite! Did you teach her that? “Please,” I enunciate. “Llll.”
She’s frustrated now. Slaps her palm onto the clockwork’s face. “YOU PEEZ.”
Hm. “Palamedes?” At least she didn’t stick her fingers in our eyes.
Two eager slaps: bicep, and clockwork again. “You you.”
“Both of us.”
Exhausted by her efforts, she sags and nods. “You you yess.”
“Both of us. All right.” As if every story about me isn’t also about you. Nona quiets while I think, reaching for a story she might understand. “Before we met you, we had two bodies. I had this one, and the Warden had his own. We looked after each other.”
“Nona,” says Nona, her restless limbs already stilling.
“Yes. Just like we look after you. We grew up together. We learned how to think. He learned how to—how to do things like what he did to save you, when we found you and Pyrrha. I learned how to fight, to keep us safe.”
Sleepily she pats our hip; our thigh; our sacrum. She’s got no body shyness at all, and no sense that anyone else might either. Who is that a point in favor of? Certainly not the Reverend Daughter, but not really Nav either, from what I could tell.
Nona doesn’t mean anything by it. Or rather, she does: she’s touching places where I keep knives. I take her hand and hold it, move it to the bed between us. She’s always happy to hold hands. “Yes. We studied the available data for as many prospective scenarios as possible—that means we did a lot of thinking about what could hurt us—and decided the most useful thing to learn would be how to fight with knives.”
“Pamameez?” she mumbles, eyes closed.
“No. He’s hopeless with a blade. No stamina. Negligible muscle tone. High center of gravity.”
Her breaths are deeper now, slowing down. “See Pamamameez.”
“You’ll see him tomorrow, it’s time to sleep now.”
“No. No.” Her favorite word. “Look Pamamameez.”
“What did he look like?”
“Yesss,” she sighs out. Lax, nearly asleep.
“I’ll draw you a picture,” I promise, before I can think better of it. “Tomorrow.”
***
“I told her a new bedtime story last night. Not much of one before she was asleep, just that you used to have your own body, and couldn’t wield a blade if your life depended on it. Didn’t seem to have an effect on her dreams—it’s the water again, you’ll hear. But she might try to ask you what you looked like before. Work on your name if it comes up, she’s struggling with all the syllables. A point in favor of the Reverend Daughter?”
Click.
“How so?”
Click.
“She called her cavalier ‘Griddle.’ Not in front of the other scions. Something between them. Phonological similarity suggests a childhood mispronunciation.”
Click.
“Not in front of me, either! That’s surprisingly charming. If we can get them both back in their right bodies, I’ll have so many questions. But ‘Palamedes’ is a bit more challenging than ‘Gideon.’ I recall you had some difficulty yourself, when we were toddling.”
Click.
“It’s a lot of name.”
Click.
“For a scrawny child, yes. Take it up with my mother, if we ever see her again.”
Click.
“When we see her again.”
Click. Pause. Pause.
“Stubborn girl. I’ve done nothing to deserve you.”
Click. Pause.
“You can eat our breakfast. Pyrrha made mush last night.”
***
I come back to a bowl scraped clean, and a spoon clattering into it from somewhere in the vicinity of our face.
“You have to breathe on it first,” Pyrrha is telling Nona, huffing into the shallow curve of her own spoon. With casual showmanship she nestles it onto the end of her nose and draws her hand away, letting the spoon dangle.
Nona makes a similar attempt, less coordinated, and hisses frustration as it slides off.
“Slower, kiddie. Like this. There you go.”
“Cam! Cam!”
“I see.”
Nona grins, cuts her eyes my way. “You!”
Across the table, Pyrrha grins too. “Come on, Hect.”
“You get better adhesion if you lick it. Is this what you were up to the whole time I was gone?”
“We also covered ‘would Palamedes still hate mush with his original mouth?’”
“And?”
“I’m sorry to say, he’s blaming his textural displeasures on you.”
“Hmh.”
It’s a little ridiculous to sit around our dingy table in our dingy kitchen with spoons hanging from all our noses, but the way Nona cackles with delight is a bit worth it. She keeps still longer than I expected, but eventually the spoon drops off her face and splats back into her bowl.
“Finish that breakfast, Nona.”
She regards it glumly. “Pickchuh? Pallllamameez.”
“We covered that too,” says Pyrrha belatedly, her own spoon still dangling. “I didn’t know you were an artist.”
“Don’t you have to go to work?”
Pyrrha grins, an absolute shit-eating grin. “It’s my day off. Besides, I’m dying to know what your boy looked like.”
“Like me,” I tell her, setting my spoon back in my empty bowl, “but with four more inches and 35% less body weight.”
“Not as handsome, then.” She leans back in the chair as if she’s suave, then fumbles her spoon all the way down to the floor as Nona shrieks with laughter.
I tap the table. “Finish your breakfast, and I’ll draw that picture.”
She’s so small, and yet somehow Nona’s all limbs as she scrambles up to get paper and pencil from the junk drawer.
And this is how I spend the morning sitting in our kitchen as Nona chokes down most of a bowl of baby cereal and four slices of banana, trying to remember the details of your face.
I don’t have your memory. But it comes back to me more and more, as I sketch out the shapes. Carefully shading the hollows of your cheeks. The studious stoop of your shoulders. I get lost, for a little while, trying to recreate the delicacy of your hands. I keep coming back to your eyes. They’re hard to do justice. Maybe because I remember them the best.
After a while Nona drags her chair right next to mine, watching you take shape. Pyrrha does the dishes—if you leave mush bowls too long it all turns hard and gritty and needs soaking—and squeezes our shoulder, just once, as she moves past.
“Palameez,” Nona murmurs, a little uncertain, when I slide the paper over to her. She touches your face. Your nose, more familiar, like the one we share now. Your knuckles. Traces the long sweep of your robes.
“Pa-la-me-des,” I tell her.
“Palamedes,” she repeats. “Where?”
“That body’s gone. He’s just in here now.”
Nona touches your hands, on the paper. Our hand, on the table. She leans into our side with a sigh; looks up at us, and reads something in my expression, and wraps her arms around our middle. Just holding. Not like you would have. Not really. But it’s awful. And it’s good.
“Come on, Nums,” Pyrrha calls from the couch, gentle. “I’ll do your hair.”
“Love you,” says Nona, sliding away. Touching the paper. “Love you.”
(illustration by litzis-art via Fandom Trumps Hate! <3 <3 <3)
***
09:11 - Angry about plaits. N wanted three, P only did two. Pica persists related to distress: gnawing on the ends of the plaits like she’s chewing through a hangman’s rope.
09:55 - N put on trousers herself. Assistance needed for shirt, still having trouble getting her head in the right hole. Strong resistance to socks.
10:27 - Took N to dairy, stairs both ways for her exercise. Mood buoyed by dairy dog. On the way back up, discussed qty of legs that dogs might be expected to have.
10:41 - N unenthusiastic about the bones. Dug a hole in the carpet with the ragged end of your ulna. Scattered the rest when I took the ulna away. P distracted with a song about a sea monster. I crawled under the bed chasing down your distal phalanges.
11:03 - Obliged to learn the song and attendant motions. Didactic re: stranger danger. N’s favorite part is shouting “No, no, no!”
11:52 - N drawing. Scribbles, mostly blue, generally circular. Darker blue splotch explained to me as the creature from the song, purple splotch identified as you. Evidence of increasing motor skill, outstripping artistic understanding at this stage. P cleaning guns. Laundry underway.
***
Lunch is a battle. We’ve got half a sandwich leftover from yesterday for Nona, and soup with instant noodles for us, and she won’t eat any of it. Not the sandwich, nor its component parts. Not the noodles. Not the broth, on its own in a cup. This last is so offensive that she shoves it away, and then there’s broth on the table, and on Pyrrha’s pants, and on all the drawings, Nona’s and mine.
She can’t help it. I can’t imagine what she’s going through, inside her mind. What it’s like to be so…whatever Nona is. Her face crumples in despair. She wails. Yanks at her braids. I take her wrists when she starts scratching at her own face, and she hates that.
“Water!” she sobs, flushing mottled and dark. “Water SALT!”
“Breathe, Nona. In and out. Follow me. I’ll squeeze your wrist for in, and let go for out.”
“NO! WATER!”
“We can’t go to the beach in broad daylight.”
“Palamedes!” she screams—perfectly enunciated—because she knows you’re a soft touch. “PALAMEDES!”
Maybe it’s gutless. But there’s an edge to her screaming that makes Pyrrha flinch away like she’s been burned, and it’s not the time to hold the line.
I go dark.
***
It’s quiet when I open my eyes; our hand is in our pocket, touching the notebook. Pyrrha is sitting across the table, and Nona is passed out on the couch.
“Wore herself out,” Pyrrha murmurs. “We promised her a swim later.” A cigarette dangles, unlit, between her first two fingers.
“Take that out to the hall.”
One long breath, in and out through her nose. “You’re cruel to me, Camilla Hect.” But she goes out to the hall, and I take out the notebook.
Nona seems to have caught on to my name, at least, says the book in your scrawl. I’m sorry, Cam. Desperate times call for aquatic bribery. Apparently there’s a song?
Pyrrha mopped the floor already. A shame to have missed a look at my portrait before it got souped. Maybe you’ll draw me another? We should have thought of this before, but could be a good tool for deciphering the dreams.
There’s just enough room left on the page to sketch out my own hands, our hands, arranged in a rude gesture, just to let you know what a jackass you are.
Pyrrha comes back reeking of smoke. Locks and bars the door behind her, and wordlessly gets out the weapons.
Her rapier, my blades. There isn’t room inside for a real spar, and it isn’t safe to wield them out. But we can move the table to one end of the apartment and the couch to the other—Nona’s still lax across the cushions and drooling a little—and create enough space in between for a rhythm of mismatched strike and parry.
You said to me once that you didn’t understand how I could train so repetitively, every day. I told you that it’s aggregate data. Ah, you said. Statistics.
Economics, I said. My goods in your service.
Cavaliers, you said.
My goods are your goods, now, in both our service. Pyrrha’s a rake, but she keeps me sharp. She understands the economics.
***
Later, sitting on the beach, I draw you a picture of Nona in the ocean. The bliss in the lines of all her limbs, the moment her feet touch the water. That dog with the eyebrows, tongue lolling, sniffing around the sausage rolls we bought on the way. Pyrrha reading the newspaper her sausage roll came wrapped in. Nona’s sleek head bobbing just above the water like a dark jellyfish. And on a fresh page—because it was a good idea—the chisel-jawed face of Gideon Nav.
When Pyrrha calls her and holds out the towel, Nona comes running to throw herself into it, into Pyrrha’s arms, to be wrapped up in both. I hold out a roll to her, and she takes it, and she eats three quarters of it with no fuss at all, watching the ocean, watching my face with eyes like a sunrise.
“Love you,” says Nona, and eats the rest of the roll.