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In her restless sleep, Nona is gritting out the electric twitches between the joints of her thumbs, her jaws, her wrists, her ankles. The throbbing freezing feeling on the tips of her toes and fingers. There’s a hot thick pain lodged in her throat that only seems to grow bigger and bigger every time she tries to swallow it whole, and Nona misses Camilla and the way she always sleeps so lightly—a fact that Palamedes claimed had been the way it was since she was a child, but had been cranked up to the highest degree when Nona came around.
Nona and her tendency to elope. Nona and her tendency to meddle with knobs and cabinets and all sorts of things she shouldn’t be meddling with, at ungodly hours of the night no less. Nona and her terrible, terrible object permanence that turns out to morph into separation anxiety as she gets older. Camilla would always come running at the slightest distressed noise, with Palamedes at her heels, and Pyrrha’s footsteps thumping against the—
A dainty swish-swish-swish of feet against the carpet. Frail, slender fingers, colder than her own hands, a slim palm pressing against her forehead. “Hm. You’re running a temperature.”
Nona could almost imagine the voice being Camilla’s as the figure swam in her half-lidded vision, but—she isn’t home. That was the whole problem. She’s ill and upset and the only thing that Camilla would keep saying to her when it happens is you’re home, you’re with me, with us now, but she isn’t, and then the figure darts by its heels to leave the bedside, and Nona doesn’t know whether to be glad or upset about it.
The footsteps return—a different one, a sort of thump-thump-thumping like Pyrrha’s, and the room abruptly bathed in yellow light, pinpricks in her eyes—
“Shit—I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and the room goes dark again. “I’m sorry, Nons—no no, it’s okay, it’s just Gideon.” The bed dips as a pair of large hands run up and down her shoulders, easing her back against her sweaty pillow. “Jesus, Harrow's right. You’re fucking burning.” There’s a slight jostling around the bed, and her body rolled gently into a pair of arms—Gideon’s big, buff arms, so Pyrrha-like without the familiar roughness of scars that it makes Nona’s chest clench and squeeze.
Before she could even shuffle the mental Cards of Feelings that she used to play with Palamedes when she’d been younger to identify what she’s feeling, tears were welling up in her eyes, and Gideon hushed with an edge of alarm in her voice, “oh, Nona, don’t cry.” The meat of Gideon’s palm pressing gently against her cheek. “Harrow’s going to come back and get mad at me if you cry. She’ll say,” and her voice dips into Harrow’s low, monotone voice, “Gideon, I left her with you for one second and you made her cry. What does this say about how you treat women?”
Nona couldn’t help but choke a strained, breathy laugh at that, only to end up wheezing over her breaths for another few moments after. Gideon slips an oh, shit and reaches under her shirt to rub circles on her shoulder blades, gently thumps her palm against Nona’s collarbone when she starts hacking up thick phlegm. “Okay. You’re okay. Jus’ get it all up, sweetheart.”
Harrow’s slender hand comes back just as the bitter taste starts to gather in her mouth, guiding her chin into a wastebasket. “"Come on. Spit it out.”
Nona lets it drip off her mouth, shuddering, and absently thinks how glad she is that the night lamp stays off. She’d seen how gross it could get when she had pneumonia last winter—the sight of bile would promptly set her dry heaving and afterwards, Palamedes would keep his palm over her eyes whenever she had to spit any sort of bodily waste out, and then she thinks of Palamedes, and Camilla, and Pyrrha, and home, and her chest aches.
“I know it feels gross, peanut, I’m so sorry,” Gideon murmurs, exchanging the wastebasket with a glass of warm water, pressing it against Nona’s parched lip. “Could you have a sip for me? It’ll soothe your throat, promise. Or would you rather have tea? I hate the taste of warm plain water, and Harrow hates tea. What about you, hm?”
“Peppermint,” Nona breathes out between swallowing. Cam always makes her peppermint tea with honey for everything.
“What’s that, champ?”
“Peppermint tea?” Harrow asks. “I think we have some in the cupboard. I’ll make it for you after you have some medicine.”
“You hate the smell, babe, I’ll do it,” Gideon says. “Nona, do you think you can swallow a few pills?”
“No,” Nona whines against the meat of Gideon’s arms. “Throat hurts.”
“Okay. What about—cough syrup, do we have that? Shit, okay. What time is it? I could run over to the corner store and get some syrup.”
“You don’t have to,” Nona murmurs, grasping the fabric of Gideon’s sleep top. “Gideon, I’m sorry, you don’t—”
"Shh, don't be silly,” Gideon hushes sharply, and promptly soothes Nona’s startled shudder with a kiss to the forehead. “You sound like Harrow.” And then, not really to Nona, “Oh, don’t complain, you do sound like that.”
“I’m sorry,” Nona apologises anyway. “Gideon, m’sorry.”
“Nona, Gideon’s going to go get syrup from the store and make you tea,” Harrow tells her, scooting up the bed, her fingers gently prying Nona's away from Gideon's shirt. “In the meantime, I’m going to put socks on you to keep away the cold, yes? Give me your feet.”
Gideon stifles a laugh at that as she’s leaving the room, and Nona hears the gentle smack of Harrow’s hand. “Swear it feels like I’m dating someone from my siblings’ middle school class…” she grumbles. “Flex your foot, please, Nona—yes, like that. Good. Is it alright if I dab chrism oil on you? It’s sandalwood and balsam. It helps soothe my airways when I’m ill.”
“Okay,” Nona murmurs, just trying to breathe like Cam would tell her if she were here, feeling Harrow’s thumb methodically rubbing over her temples, the crease of her forehead, the shape of her collarbone. For some reason, her breaths keeps hitching. “I didn’t need Gideon to get me anything, you know. I could have just… not had any medicine.”
“But that won’t fix the problem, now, will it?”
“I know, but—” Nona stares up at the ceiling, vision swimming with static and shadow-worms, eyes suddenly prickly with tears all over again. “I don’t mind it. It wouldn’t have bothered Gideon.”
“I know.”
For a long while, nobody says anything—just the humming of the heater, and the ticking of Harrow’s giant grandfather clock from the living room that Gideon swears is haunted. Nona felt like she could have slipped right back into a feverish sleep, but there’s guilt gnawing on her ribcage, thinking about Gideon slipping a coat and her running shoes in the dead of the night because Nona is too picky to swallow a pill.
“Do you ever think of Palamedes and Camilla not being in love?’ Harrow suddenly asks from the silence. The notion of it went through Nona’s head like a bullet—Palamedes and Camilla, not being in love? It would have shattered the sky itself. Some days Nona could almost swear they were born intertwined—which, well, would have made them twins, and that would be weird, but—
“No. F’course not.”
Harrow hums in acknowledgement. "Do you know, I used to TA for an anatomy class with Palamedes for two years. We’d work together every other week, and you know he’s the only man I’d dare to say I love other than my adoptive father, but—at that time, he drives me crazy.”
Nona frowns. “Crazy, how?”
“He drums his leg and fingers and doesn’t ever stop. Shakes the entire table with him. He’s always drinking these strong herbal teas whose scent wouldn’t go away even if I aired out the room overnight. He complains and cries out loud and mumbles to himself and strikes idiotic conversations at every moment imaginable. Sharing an office room with him made me fully understand one of my father’s favourite philosophy quotes: hell is other people.”
Nona feels like she should at least be offended on the behalf of Palamedes for this, but Harrow kept going: “I once asked Camilla how someone as calm and collected like her could ever spend an entire life with someone like him. And she said to me, well, I’ve always wondered the same about you and Gideon. And Camilla was right, you know. I didn’t have to put up with Gideon’s terrible jokes and snoring and piles of dirty gym laundry. And Gideon didn’t have to always be the one making tea because I couldn’t, or stick to pills because it’s the only flavourless medication I could manage, or cook two separate dishes every night—but she does. And I do. And I don’t think the both of us ever really know why, but does it truly matter?”
Nona’s head is throbbing by the time Harrow stops talking to let her digest it, feeling the comforting gnawing warmth of the chrism oil all over her body. “I’m too sick to understand what you said, I think,” she murmurs—and Harrow, to her bewilderment, stifles a soft laugh.
“I know, I’m sorry. I just, I wanted you to know that—Nona, I grew up believing hell is other people, and therefore I also grew up believing that I wasn’t worthy of other people’s love,” Harrow says—and she does the most unbelievable, un-Harrow-like thing Nona’s ever seen her do; she clasps the both of Nona’s freezing hands the way Palamedes would, and gently runs her palm up and down as if trying to warm her. “But when my father took me in, he told me people have always misunderstood that quote. That hell is other people. Of course it could very much be, but the point was that it doesn’t have to be. In the story, three people were put in a room together and because they’ve done terrible things, they think that they’re horrible people, so they believed that the room was hell. But what if they believed it wasn’t? What if they’d believed it was heaven instead?”
“I don’t know,” Nona murmurs sleepily, “but—I think I’d like to believe in that.”
“In what?”
“That you’re heaven, to me,” Nona blinks away the fatigue from her eyes. “Harrow, you told me a story like that once. From the bible, when I was younger, from the first time you babysit me.”
“What was it?”
“The long spoons. There was really nice food to eat at the table but everyone only had long spoons, so they starved to death, and it was hell. But in heaven, everyone uses the spoon to feed each other.”
“Yes, I remember,” Harrow hums, and brushes her thumb over her knuckles as if counting her rosary beads. “You’re so much like me, do you know? Eyes and hair and everything. But you’re so… different, too, and I—I don’t want you to become like me, Nona.”
“Why not?”
Harrow doesn’t answer that. Her breath only hitches for a moment, and then she hums, and doesn’t let go of her hands.
It couldn’t have been more than an hour when Gideon comes back and Nona is startled awake with a series of shuffling and a hushed conversation.
“Hey, honey,” Gideon greets, brushing her knuckles over her forehead. “I’m back. Got your syrup—I don’t know if you like orange or strawberry better, so I’ve got both. What would you like?”
“Orange, please,” Nona mumbles, and she feels a large palm under her neck and a small plastic cup tipped over her lips.
“Take it slow, I have some water or tea with me if you’d like. Good job. And cough syrup—grape, or… what is this, blue raspberry? Are these meds or fucking snow cones?”
Nona giggled. “Maybe you should keep them, so you could add them to snow cones and sodas later in the summer.”
“No, I think that’s just called doing drugs, Nones.”
In the end, Gideon spoons her from the back and keeps her body tucked into hers, small and safe, her big soft palms soothing away the electric twitches in her legs. And Harrow still keeps her inch of space in between, and doesn't hold them both for very long—but her fingers run through the valley of Nona’s knuckles over and over like a prayer.