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When the door creaked open that night, the distinct click of key scraping lock and the low swivel of metal handle: the sound reached straight for my heart and staked it with potent, acrid fear.
I was lying idle in the room where they kept me, playing dead—a new hobby of mine I think I’ve gotten pretty damn good at, not to brag, but. I’m bragging. In this state I was only half-conscious really, suspended in a fugue haze, rotting away, for all I knew. Except for the small fact that I was, you know, still mega-dead, and haunting my own incorruptible corpse, and couldn’t actually rot anymore beyond the giant holes in my body. Still, it really felt like rotting, so maybe it was my soul that was going sour.
But even in that state, my body—my corpse—which was recreated as an impenetrable and divine construct of my father’s empire, was never less than hyper-aware of its surroundings. I was molded by his hands and his will to be the best weapon I can be. For him, good old Dad. All I ever wanted, right?
In my case, this hyper awareness would turn into hyper vigilance, which then turned to extreme paranoia. And so that faintest noise hit me like a brick, and I was fucking scared. Harrow, I never used to get scared. Not even before I fell on that damn spike was I scared, not really. Nothing scared me. Nothing scared Gideon fucking Nav.
But now? Just the noise of a door hinge moving blasted the fear of God straight to my heart, a pun that’s horrific whether or not it’s intended. The sound of doors opening had not been a good harbinger for me at all in the last six months; the sound of your door opening can never be a good sound when your body, your corpse, doesn’t belong to you, Harrow. It’s like my body’s conditioned now to expect nothing but the slap of meat and bone, my meat and bone, when I hear that sound. So when I heard that noise that night, my whole body went rigid with fear.
I didn’t dare move a single fraction of my corpse’s titanium sinews of muscle. I was supposed to pretend to be dead around most people who would be doing…things to my corpse. Tests, experiments, poking, prodding, and worse, much, much worse. Unspeakably, unthinkably worse, really. But don’t feel sorry for me, Harrow. For the love of G-Dad, don’t fucking feel sorry for me. Just suffice to say I had already gotten a ton of practice pretending to be like really, truly dead-dead. Which is totally different from mega-dead. Please, try to keep up, I don’t enjoy talking about this crap so I won’t want to explain again. Not that you’re ever going to hear this. Listen to me, having whole imaginary conversations with myself here in the dark.
Once the fear of father dearest clanged through my impervious and holily blessed bones or whatever, I strained my supersonic freakazoid zombie hearing and waited, and there was nothing for like, five whole agonizing seconds.
And then I heard it—the unmistakable sound of tiny, barely-there feet pattering on the floor in my direction, making a beeline for me. And I swear Harrow, it sounded just like you. You, my tiny shadow queen with your hollow bird bones, who I could probably pick up with, like, a few fingers if we’re being honest, if my fingers had a greater surface area and gripping capacity. And I was so sure that I was imagining things, hearing you everywhere like some sort of love-sick moron, wishful thinking making me hallucinate your feather-light creepy-ass necromantic tip toeing in my delusional and pathetic posthumous state. The soft shuffle got closer and I told myself it was not, could not, under any circumstances be you, Harrowhark. It was going to be someone horrible to take me off to more horribles doing horrible heinous foul things to me and I shouldn’t expect anything less. And in those moments, when I could tell the footsteps and in all fucking likelihood whoever’s feet were making them was meters, then inches away from where my corpse lay, I’m sure looking dead as a fucking doornail—I was so grateful to no longer have a beating heart, because I’m sure it would have been thumping loud enough for Sister Lachrimorta to hear, and she was deaf in at least one and a half ears.
I would have been holding my breath even if I didn’t need to breathe—which I don’t, because I’m, yeah, again, a fucking corpse. A permanently 10-minutes-rotted cold, dead, body.
In case I haven’t made that clear yet.
See, look at me, Harrow. I haven’t lost my funny bone. Least that one’s been preserved in this undead dead sack of flesh I’m haunting and hauling around.
I felt the hand reach out for my stony flesh before it touched me, that’s how warm it felt. Next to my glacial, unyielding skin, the warmth of a living, breathing, whole person with warm, fresh blood pumping through their veins every single second, thump, thump, thump, felt like a fiery revelation. I could sense that somehow, which was a complete marvel. I could feel the warmth with my soul haunting my dead body. This was a novel experience for me since I’d kicked the bucket—any of the times I’d been touched by my father’s followers or any of the House folk doing fucked up things to my body, they groped and snatched at my limbs too roughly for me to feel the warmth that preceded their touch, the soft glow of it, like a gentle warning.
When blood-lined fingertips finally brushed against my limp hand, I felt a live wire of electricity flash up my arm. It almost was painful, because I felt it, the feeling of something touching me, but I also didn’t feel it. It’s really hard to explain if you’ve never been in an undead corpse, Harrow, but it doesn’t feel that great. But it felt like something, which was something more than the nothing I’d been getting. Something different, and new; startling and unexpected. A salvation from the soul-rotting boredom I’d been swimming in these past however fucking long it’s been since my father ripped me out of the back of your brain where I’d been tucked away, hiding, hoping like a wide-eyed idiot that you would just come back.
As soon as the hot-coal graze of fingers skimmed my insensate flesh, my eyes flew open, almost quicker than I could even think about it.
Harrow, if I’d been breathing in that moment, if I’d had a heart in my body pumping gallons of blood through my veins, if I had any bodily systems vulnerable to failure, all of it would have stopped. Because unless I was actually hallucinating now, which is actually more plausible than I want to admit; so I blinked tightly and furiously just once to scrub my vision and make sure—and fuck, Nonagesimus, you were standing close enough to see the light from my body cloaked in white glinting and shimmering in the depths of your obsidian eyes. It was you, Harrow. It was you.
What the fuck?
At this point, hallucination theory started to really pull ahead as a frontrunner, or hell, even a dream; I won’t act like I’m above having dreams about you, the freakish, vexing little nun that you are. So I figured I should take my time to enjoy this opportunity because as far as they go, the tranquil and relatively normal type like what was happening right now was very few and far between when it came to my dreams. It’s very much more accurate to call them nightmares. I won’t bore you with the gorey details.
I realized immediately that your eyes weren’t right and had much more white in them than normal. Wait, why the fuck would I dream that your eyes looked like that? Could you even see me? Before I could panic over that thought, my attention turned to your mouth. Which was making an expression I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen it make before—Harrow, were you meeping? It was so distracting and utterly entrancing to see such a soft and frankly kind of adorable pout to your lips, which usually looked like some variation of either a disappearing line or cat’s asshole, depending on your mood, that I stared long enough for you to almost surely catch me looking at them, which was still less than a second but, you’ve always been way too fast for your own good. If I had blood in my veins, shit, I’m embarrassed to admit I would have been blushing.
Before I could compute what was happening, you closed the little distance between us and pressed your lips—warm with proof of life, searing hot to my pallid skin—directly against my corpse mouth.
Harrowhark, you kissed me. You fucking kissed me.
Being just a revenant haunting my own dead body, I couldn’t feel much, like I tried to explain before. But I felt how soft and warm and pliant your mouth was, and I couldn’t understand what was happening and I just—froze. I felt like I couldn’t move a muscle, like if I gave away that I wasn’t a corpse, you’d freak out and run away, though I have no idea what possessed me to think that completely irrational thought considering we both know how much you love kissing corpses, Nonagesimus. But it was just a dream, so rational thoughts weren’t to be expected. If it was a dream, maybe the nightmare part was that I couldn’t kiss you back.
But then the dream—nightmare—it got really detailed. Because I very specifically remember that even though it was as if I was rooted to the spot, my body at, like, a cellular level rejected that immobility. It felt like every atom inside my chest contracted and vibrated outward with the force of me hitting someone really fucking hard with my pommel who deserved it. So you can imagine, it was kind of intense. The feeling passed through my torso with a deep tremor that seemed to last indefinitely, but then you were pulling away and back from me.
By that point I was still like 90 percent sure I was dreaming, but also puzzling over the few things that weren’t adding up. I couldn’t come up with a reason why I’d dream your eyes like that, and that cutesy face you made looked so alien on your normally pinched and severe facial features, and was it normal to be thinking this much in dreams, and that shivering had shaken me right to my titanium, impenetrable bone.
I must’ve been making a face while these thoughts raced through my mind one after the other almost faster than I could think them. My own dead mug was kind of the last thing on my mind lately, so I probably looked fucking stupid. I know, you’re probably like, since when do I not care about what I look like? What can I say—death changes you.
“You looked like you wanted to be kissed, that’s all.”
A voice that should have been your voice snapped me out of my labyrinth of thoughts, and it sounded like your voice but it also didn’t sound like your voice. Weird. Adding that to the tally of weird things, which was by that point getting pretty high.
Your eyebrows but not your eyebrows were pitched up and together in an expression that was admittedly more familiar to me on your face, looking annoyed and guarded. But still, there was something I couldn’t place about it that felt … off. Some innocence that I’d never known you to irradiate around you, no matter how devout you might act.
I said nothing, of course. My frail brain had already overloaded with information, and immediately my senses began to take over for me, droning out anything else happening around me with fuzzy nothingness. I think you walked away and started talking to someone, but your voices were warbled nothingness to my dead ears.
Though I was faintly becoming more and more certain that whatever, whoever had been in your body, was distinctly not Harrowhark Nonagesimus, there was only one coherent thought that managed to break the surface of my comfortable oblivion was:
Thank fuck I brushed my teeth that morning.