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If years of watching you puppet your parents' corpses taught me anything, Harrow, it was that necromancy can't make the dead living.
Dear old Dad said they used to describe it like that, ages back, in stories: necromancy = bringing the dead to life. But I never thought it could. Your parents were a poor fucking shadow of living beings, if you ask me, only passable because everyone else in Drearburh had one foot in the grave. (They breathed, sure, but they weren't really alive, so why would they notice your parents being just that one degree deader than they were?)
I can hear your fury now, that I called your body-puppeting skills subpar, but it's true. 'Living dead' is an oxymoron for a reason. Those things don't go together.
Which is why, when I fell on a spike for you (you're welcome), I was expecting an end. Sure, the end I was expecting was you eating me (and not even in the fun way), but that was an end, all the same.
Only you failed at that. You failed on purpose, which might make it not a failure by definition, but it is to me. I gave you all of myself, and you threw it aside, discarded the power you always wanted in exchange for keeping yourself free of any little trace of me. Great gesture, Harrow, really heart-warming. And just when I thought we might be making progress.
You didn't use my soul, and so I stayed there, conscious, in you. It's almost funny: you were so desperate to be rid of me, but even when you forgot I ever existed, there I was. There we were, one flesh without one end.
And then it was just me. Your body, Harrow, your scrawny little arms and low centre of gravity, but not you.
That was the worst of it, seeing your face in the mirror (or almost. Your face with my eyes. Did that make it better? Did that make it worse?), having to fight with your inferior physique, and not getting to hear your voice.
And then, of course, there was the River, and God (my dad, Harrow. Damn, I wish I could see your face learning that one), and turned out my old body was dead but not actually gone. (Sing a chorus of praises. The universe did not have to suffer the full loss of such devastating hotness.)
So here I am, flouting every necromantic rule by being a dead person with my own free will. A dead person conscious.
I guess if anyone could make the dead living, it'd be God. But 'living dead', for me... that might be going a bit far.
Fuck, Harrow, old me would give me even more speed-holes for saying this, but maybe it'd be a living death if you were here. Maybe walking around in cold skin, no heartbeat, a certain sheen of 'corpse' undermining my natural flawlessness... maybe if you hadn't gone and vanished on me, that'd be something like a life.
See, I only ever lived a year or so in the world not knowing you. Your existence was part of mine from the moment I woke up to having an existence at all. It's pathetic, how many times I tried to run when fighting you was all I lived for. If I'd made it out, who would I have been, Harrow? I never knew how to be anybody without you.
All the days I was alive and not a literal drooling infant, there you were. Hating me so devotedly, so religiously. I told you already that it meant more than any love anybody might've bothered to spare me. You hating me meant you were thinking about me, Harrow, and fuck, when it came to it, maybe that was all I ever wanted. To be thought of by you.
You, and hating you, and fighting you, and then not hating you, and fighting for you... that was all I really knew of being alive. God knows (or maybe not; I hope he doesn't) that there was nothing else to live for in that grimy place but the battle we fought, back and forth like a conversation that never ended.
That's the problem: without that conversation, it's too quiet.
I'm a perfect weapon now, Harrow; dead and souped up with everything my father needed. Impervious, like a twisted version of what I used to think I wanted. And fuck, now I have it, I miss you leaving scratches on my skin. I miss being something you could touch.
If the whole point of me was you, if you were my whole life, then I didn't die when I fell on that spike. I died when you vanished, when I couldn't hear your voice anymore.
The thing is, I think there's part of me that wants to be something more than just your sword. Maybe part of me that could have been, one day. But I don't know how to be that, Harrow, when I don't even know where you are. I'm too dead to make my own life, and that's not even because I pierced my heart on a spike. It's because I never found out what being alive was, without you.
Technically, I'm a liminal space: Living dead. Living/dead. Dead living.
Actually, I'm a graveyard for us both. Because one end, Harrow, even if you tried to throw all ties to me away. One end, and most of me is ended, so my death holds you regardless.
If you come back, dammit, crawl up from wherever you're hiding... if you find your way to existing, maybe we can both live again.
No heartbeat, but if you looked at me, Harrow, I think I could become an oxymoron.
After all, I was living, and I died for your smile. So now, though I'm dead, I could live for it.