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You spent almost a year on that terrible space station. You were just one of the Emperor's collectibles, trying to function as a deficient Lyctor and waiting for Resurrection Beast Number Seven to arrive (four years and so many months remaining in the countdown). Ianthe was fine by now. You had fixed her arm and rendered her a whole Lyctor. This meant that Augustine and Mercymorn regarded you as less useless, not to mention the Saint of Duty, but no less hopeless. Cytherea's corpse walked, but as far as you were able to discern no one else saw it. You reached the unpleasant conclusion that you had discovered yet another new type of hallucination after Ianthe failed to see it under your bed in front of both your faces.
Then Cytherea, or whatever was in Cytherea's skin, got bored, or impatient, or decided it hungered for brains. I don't know how these things work, Harrow. Maybe Nonagesimus brains are a special delicacy: two hundred brains condensed in one. Anyway, she walked out of her burial chamber and into your room with one of those ancient guns, and she shot you right in the face. Pulverized it. A round of bullets emptied into someone's head does not sound good up close, Harrow, and I didn't want to hear it, least of all yours.
Fortunately for us, God came and put you back together, and whatever Cytherea had intended by it, we woke up.
I woke up.
I was lying in your bed, in the totally empty quarters you'd been given. I hadn't been around for the whole last year, only pieces, and I had to go digging in your head to find out they'd been meant for somebody named Anastasia - the Anastasia, actually, the one the tomb was named after, which was seriously a trip to realize. She had never actually lived here. You had unpacked the minimal possessions Ianthe gave you - and the news that you'd trusted Ianthe Tridentarius with your things was a serious blow - but let's say that interior decorating was not emphasized in your education. Your room blowed, Harrow, it was all blank steel walls and empty shelves.
Most damningly, it had Ianthe Tridentarius in it.
She was sitting on your bed, and I wasn't facing her, which was why I had time to realize it slowly. She was entirely too fucking close, but she wasn't looking at your face, and I had a chance to observe hers first. That was how I realized it: she felt guilty. Of course, if she'd admitted that Cytherea's corpse had ended up under your bed - and I would seriously like to know what she thought was going on with the corpse that was clearly there and why she chose that particular time to screw with your head, which, no offense, is already as screwed up as any head needs to be - well, then, Cytherea might not have had a chance to shoot you in the face.
Thinking about that, I sort of understood why I had woken up. You had broken open your skull and rearranged it so that you wouldn't remember me. You wanted that badly to avoid living with me as a part of you, because you never could fucking stand getting help from anyone, especially from me. But when God reassembled the soup Cytherea turned your brain into, he did it to standard issue. He got rid of the temporal lobe damage and the weird mechanism you'd put in your skull, whatever the fuck he thought of that. He fixed your self-inflicted brain damage. (I'm aware you think having me in your brain is damage, but suck it up, sister.)
Watching Ianthe sit on your bed, her horrible pale lips pursed, fiddling with the gilded bones of the hand Cytherea had cut off, I had only one chance to reveal myself. "Tridentarius," I said, pushing your body up. Your body, by the way, was terrible. There was no muscle on you. I shook, pushing myself up from that bed, just trying to sit up. Would it have killed you to lift weights? I knew in a general sort of way that you had been carrying my sword around, but I had no idea how you had lifted it.
Ianthe smiled, and it was, if not the most unnerving thing I'd ever seen, definitely in the top ten. She was happy for a moment, expecting to see you. Your continued existence rocked her socks. "Harry!" she said, and then she actually saw me and her face fell.
"Harrow made that arm, right?" I said. "Nice. Classy gilding, skeletal fingers. I've seen enough hentai to know where that's going."
"Nav, if you don't shut up, I am going to smother you with that pillow and hope that when your eyes open next time, Harry is behind them."
"You're not really disproving my point." Before we could get hung up on it, I moved on. "What the actual fuck do you think you're doing, jerking her around like that? Pretending you can't see a body that was obviously there? And now--"
"That point has been slightly made, Nav."
"It hasn't been made. It's sorrier than the sword Harrow's been mutilating for the past year. Ianthe, this is the point, and this is your general trajectory if you think this is over." I illustrated this with my hands. "You see how far apart they are?"
"God save me," Ianthe muttered, and closed her eyes. "Fine. This might as well happen." I was starting to accept it myself, and working up to a great speech about ripping her ass off. It would have been mesmerizing and awe-inspiring and badass. But before I could get started, Ianthe distracted me by saying "I have a letter for you," and she took out a bulging envelope and handed it to me.
It was in your hand-writing, Harrow, and time blurred. I could see that you'd been angry and rushed when you wrote it - which you usually were when you left me notes, but this might be the angriest Harrow handwriting of all of it. It did things to me. When I opened the envelope, I saw you'd kept my sunglasses and if Ianthe hadn't been there I might have cried. Don't tell anyone. There was a little strip of paper, just one four-letter message in that bulging envelope: ONE FLESH, ONE END.
I wanted to kill you.
"Right," I said, and slipped the sunglasses over your eyes. "Where does Harrow keep flimsy?" I could have gone rummaging in your head again but it would have taken time I wasn't sure I had. I had to stop you from doing all this shit again, Harrow. You'd nearly died to avoid being indebted to me. I couldn't take it a second time.
"A love letter? How romantic," Ianthe said. "I assume she'll put it straight in the incinerator, the way she tried to destroy her memories of you."
"Get fucked," I said, and she showed me the flimsy. I stared down at your flimsy with Ianthe the pale ghoul watching me mockingly, and I had no idea what to say. It isn't like you ever listened to me before, and I couldn't - what? Threaten to punch your face in if you kept trying to drown me instead of digesting my soul? Finally I scrawled out, Eat me, you ungrateful witch, I gave you my soul and you threw it away. I had absolutely zero hopes that Ianthe wasn't going to read it the second I took my eyes off her, so I didn't try sealing it, just set it down on the table and put the pen away.
"Eloquent," Ianthe said. "It didn't help, you know."
I was about to ask just what hadn't helped, but something lurched inside me, and I had a feeling we'd run out of time. I hadn't been feeling one hundred percent since waking up - pretty much ten percent, actually, your muscles were nonexistent and you never slept - but now my vision was browning out. I grabbed the edge of the table.
"Nav?" Ianthe sounded almost concerned.
"If you keep fucking with Harrow because you think she's alone, I swear--"
I didn't get to finish that threat, which was, honestly, good, since I couldn't think of anything that might have worked.
You were back.
Cytherea had snuck up on you, which was to say she had walked up quite plainly, but you had eventually decided that you were honestly crazy at least when she was concerned, and there was only room in your heart for devotion to one hallucinatory corpse. You'd ignored her. Nothing bad happened because of it until she blew your skull to bits. When you woke up, standing in your own quarters, you stumbled in reaction to a blow that had come more than a day ago and nearly fell.
"Nav," Ianthe said, mocking and bored, and you looked up and said "What?" and she said, stunned and disgustingly pleased, again, "Harry? Thank God."
You let this pass. You looked down at the sheet of flimsy you had just noticed on the table in front of you, and you read my note, and you remembered. You shook for me, Harrow, you said, "Griddle," and you nearly fell.
I hadn't cried earlier when I read your note, but I had been prepared for it. You had carved your memories of me out more than a year ago, and you were caught entirely on the wrong foot. You sank into a chair and you wept into your hand, for everything you had forgotten and for the fact that the plan had, obviously, failed, totally heedless of Ianthe staring for once in your life.
I always thought you hating me was the purest attention you could ever give me. It turned out that your grief was a thousand times more intense. I hated it. But I was sinking back down in your head, Harrow, maybe for the last time. The only person with you who could actually talk back was, unfortunately, Ianthe.
What she chose to say was, "I told you this was a bad idea."
"Tridentarius," you said, hoarsely. "If you do not close your unholy mouth at this moment, I will rend your living flesh and process your fat for soap as it runs off your body."
"Hot," said Ianthe. "Is that how they do it on the Ninth? I did hear rumors. Tell me, how does human fat work as a personal lubricant?"
You glared at her witheringly, through your tears, and you felt incredibly vulnerable without your face paint. Ianthe was unbothered. Eventually you cleared your face and said, "What happened after Cytherea's revenant body shot me?"
"Augustine and Mercy exorcised it," Ianthe said colorlessly and with her usual disdain for spirit magic. "A ghost had crept in, apparently. They think it was some ancient spirit from First House... A dreary little problem, isn't it? It didn't manage to destroy your brainstem, so God had time to fix your brain back together. You started healing on your own after that, so congratulations, Harry, you're a real Lyctor now."
"If you had not convinced me she was not real--"
"You could have kept on about it and convinced absolutely no one?" Ianthe said. "I honestly thought you had moved the body yourself, Nonagesimus. Not that you were playing games - I could see you were upset - but you had forgotten about it." Lest this confession give you the wrong idea, she added, "I thought you were getting ideas from the Saint of Duty. Granted, you never seemed terribly interested in our departed sister when she was pretending to be Dulcinea Septimus--"
She kept speaking, but you didn't listen, because her words had touched off memories, real memories, not the demented and half-thought out replacements you had been running through in your mind. You remembered me: swooning over Dulcinea, fighting with you about her - and your eyes brimmed with tears again.
Which was starting to get seriously uncomfortable, by the way.
The flimsy rustled in your hand, and you stared at my messy scrawl and said, to yourself, "So she is gone, now."
"She's been gone since Canaan House," Ianthe said. "The only thing you accomplished was nearly killing yourself in the process of giving yourself recreational brain damage."
"When I want your opinion--"
"I want you to take this off me," Ianthe said, touching her jaw.
"Pardon?" you said.
"I agreed to you sewing my lips shut because you wouldn't trust me to go along with your plan any other way. The plan's off; there's no use in binding me to silence now. I want it off, Nonagesimus."
You did not want to render her any more assistance, but there was nothing unreasonable about her demand, and there was a certain shred of appeal in the idea of carving half of her face off while she was conscious underneath you. You were a real Lyctor, perhaps, but you had spent a year failing miserably and the temptation to succeed at something - to have a second shot peering at Ianthe's naked skeleton - was unbearable. You considered the matter and said, "Fine."
You had taken Ianthe's arm off and replaced it in a frenzy, as a substitute for her hysterical, self-inflicted stab wounds. This time you had a chance to prepare. You laid out Ianthe on her bed, and spun construct, skeletal arms out of a few chips of your bone to hold her head in place. You did not particularly want her to bite your fingers off while you manipulated her jaw. Ianthe submitted to this with an icy reserve. When the skeletal fingers closed around her head, holding it in place, she said, "Kinky," which in addition to making you blush now made you think of me. You were furious and you blushed, which made Ianthe smirk.
You spun bone from your knuckles for the second time and regarded Ianthe, laying your left hand across her face so that you could see her, skeleton and flesh lit up inside the Lyctor's curtain of privacy. This would be more complicated than the arm in its own way: you had to replace the jawbone but reattach the flesh, which was not so precisely within your expertise. You hated being anything but competent, and while you had been studying, following the instructions of your previous self - now your current self - you were far from the best in this area. It would have to do.
Ianthe swallowed, and you cut her open. The meat of her cheeks splayed out uselessly and blood spurted out. Ianthe sputtered under you and you cleared blood from her airways absently, cauterizing the vessels. Air rushing down her exposed, naked throat whistled frantically, and her stormy, nauseating eyes rolled up in her head.
You continued to cut. Your razor-precise blade of bone severed open the temperomandibular joint, and you smoothed out the pieces left behind. A single, orphaned crescent of white teeth glinted in the top of her jaw as you excised the bottom half. Clearing it from Ianthe's flesh, you saw the pinprick scars left behind by your needle more than a year before: marks that should not and would not have been left in the flesh of a Lyctor if it weren't for your necromancy, and you were obscurely satisfied by it. Ianthe's skeleton was yours in more ways than one, with the arm and now the jaw manufactured by Harrow Nonagesimus, the greatest necromancer ever produced in Drearburh. You had always been afraid of being rendered dependent on the Third or Fifth House, always lived in fear someone would discover your parents' deaths, and it pleased you to see Ianthe the First, once the Princess of the Third House, rendered dependent on you instead. You scraped the flesh from the bone and dropped the bloody scraps into a pathetic pile, and put the clean jaw aside to keep, you perverted weirdo.
Ianthe keened, a high-pitched shrieking noise from her naked throat. When you looked back at her, you saw half a face. Her eyes were alive with pain, her eyebrows arched in horror, and it animated her in a way that she normally was not. It reminded you of when you had replaced her arm and been able to see, briefly, a resemblance to Coronabeth, though then she had been luminous and now she was utterly helpless. She rocked up against you, sitting on her chest where you had decent leverage. You spun another hand from your construct, unthinking, and pinned her arms down. Ianthe's eyes darted down, and you laid your hands on the sides of her bloody head and spoke again to her skeleton.
The jaw, unlike her arm, was easy: it was only a copy of the one you had just removed. You knew the curve of the bone and the regrown nerve within intimately. It was the way you knew the bodies of the congregants of Drearburh which you had once scrambled to keep alive, held back death from, and subsequently laid to rest before raising again to work once more. Ianthe was becoming known to you, becoming perhaps a part of you in the way the Ninth House congregation was a part, and it made you, God help you, fond. You stroked her temples with your thumbs and sighed, and you spun out each individual tooth from the root outward to the shining enamel crown.
That was the simple part. Now you redressed the jaw in its flesh. You grew the nerves back freshly, anticipating with a strange tension the sob when you connected her, and then you smoothed the scrap of flesh and muscle you had stripped from the previous jaw back over it, opening the closed blood vessels again and connecting them, stringing along muscle, stitching together the flayed and slack tissue at Ianthe's opened cheeks with the jaw again. She would still bear the tiny scars of your stitch work in places, inside both the top lip and its freshly reconstructed sister. You noticed how perfect the shape of those lips was as you ran your thumbs over them, and you dried up and cleared the sticky residue of blood and sat up. And, as an afterthought, you released the construct's grip. (Bad move, my shadow liege.)
Ianthe had been whining, rhythmic and steady, but as you shifted back and released her, she fell back to the pillow and fell mercifully silent, and closed her eyes. She licked her lips with her own original tongue, from the original top across the seam at the side to the reconstructed flesh. She swallowed, and you watched the movement down her throat hungrily as an evaluation of your work.
"Well," Ianthe said, and swallowed a second time. "Well."
"Everything is in order," you said, and made to climb off of her, but it was too late. Ianthe seized your hand, and you, you baby, squawked at her.
"Harry," Ianthe said, looking at you with a distinct note of hunger in her expression. It made you more uncomfortable than anything you'd seen in your life, which considering some of the things you'd seen said nothing good about your priorities. "Thank you," she said, which flabbergasted you, and, without changing expression, "That's the second time you've boned me," which rendered you entirely incapable of speech.
You were blank. You must have known Ianthe was attracted to you. She was not what even you, with your utter inexperience, would call subtle. She had tried to kiss you at least once, never mind that you had kissed her first. But you had been scarcely cognizant of anything consistently in the past months, sleep-deprived and disoriented and humiliated by failure, and utterly alone, and unable to even remember what else had been rent from your life. You had not had a lot of time to dwell on Ianthe Tridentarius's sexual proclivities. She had not attempted to speak with you about them directly. The fact that she did so now, dripping in the blood you had just freed from her veins and articulating with a jaw you had only just created for her, and a tongue you had seen flopping uselessly moments before, would have been enough without the actual content of her speech.
Which, by the way, reminded you of me again, and that tore apart any feeble instinct or thought you had of a reply.
It also reminded me of me.
"Oh my god," I said, and realized as I was speaking that I could speak, that somehow your mouth had become, temporarily, mine again. I had been close to the surface for the last - however long it had been, but it was like I'd been drifting half-asleep in a room while other people were talking and I had to catch up. "I'm the only one who gets to make boning puns here!"
"Nav." Ianthe shoved me back, and in your puny, lightweight body I fell off her and she sat up. You couldn't even stand up to Ianthe, Harrow. What did I tell you about lifting weights? "What just happened?"
"Do not ask me, Tridentarius," I said, and became aware of your furious and appalled and absolutely, mind-wateringly relieved presence in my mind. "Harrow's here, though. I don't think she liked your proposition. Which, by the way, five stars, I changed my mind."
"If Harrow is still there, could you put her back?"
"Uh, I don't think so," I said, "I've got a date with kicking your ass."
"This is, actually, Hell. Forget the River. You realize that Harrow's body has approximately no muscle and you don't have your rapier."
"Forget the rapier," I said, but I had no idea where my two hander was. Which, crushing. Way worse than losing my actual body. Probably God had done something with it when he put Harrow's brain back together, but I didn't know what. I prodded at you experimentally, but your response could only be translated as curling up in a ball and smacking my hands away. "Look," I said to Ianthe, "Harrow might, just might be interested in you if you let her cut out every piece of your skeleton and replace it - which, good plan, I'd like to watch - but she's not into you."
"Whereas you are a figment of a dead soul she's presently digesting."
"Well, yeah," I said. "She's not into me, either." Ianthe was nonplussed. I was about to explain your fetish for ex-girl popsicles, but you reached out from within our mind and clamped my jaw shut, which might have been a good thing.
"Griddle," you said, distinctly. "Shut up."
"Thank god," Ianthe said, and then "Griddle?"
"She was three, and she couldn't say my name," I said, rising to the surface of the roiling soup of your mind, spurred by your indignation that I was actually telling Ianthe this. "Which, three year old Harrow? Adorable, in a deeply evil kind of way. Toddling around, raising skeletons to play with and telling them 'Go get Griddle'--"
"Did she go to sleep cuddling them?" Ianthe asked, eerie features settling into profound hilarity.
"Yeah, she did. One time I tried to steal her teddy bone while she was sleeping and she made it grow legs like a spider and grab my face." I shuddered. Ianthe looked disturbed.
You said, indignantly, "You were picking on a sleeping three year old, Griddle! And you, stop looking at me like that, you-"
What you thought Ianthe was, neither of us got to find out, because Ianthe took advantage of our collective distraction to lean in and kiss you. Us.
There was a scuffle here: you were horrified someone was kissing us, and I was horrified that Ianthe Tridentarius was kissing us, but shot through it all was the fact that both of us were a tiny bit thrilled that a girl was kissing us at all. (Which, I never knew you had it in you to make out with a living girl, sweetheart - congratulations, seriously.) It wasn't the first time you had kissed Ianthe, but the last time had lasted only long enough for you to check her jaw was the genuine article and you had been, to put it mildly, distracted. You had a moment of interest, checking the function of the jaw through the view of Ianthe's skeleton that the touch gave you, and I was noticing the softness of the newly-grown skin pressed into our tongue, and that was it, we were really, truly kissing Ianthe. Together. This was seriously not how I expected my first kiss to go - I was picturing a hot babe in (or out) of Cohort uniform, maybe some swooning over my heroic exploits or something. I don't know what you were picturing, if anything.
You noticed the perfect closure of her TMJ joint. I groaned when she caught our lip with her teeth. You found the tiny pinprick scars of your needle's mark in her lips, and I felt her the press of her small breasts in her skinny necromancer's build against your equally-tiny ribcage. (The internal one. Your ribcage.)
You were still at the processing stage, half distracted by admiring your own necromancy, so I raised our hands to Ianthe's breasts. This was the first chance I'd had with breasts that weren't either mine, or glossily printed on paper, and I wasn't going to waste it, particularly not knowing if my consciousness was sticking around or for how long. Ianthe made a girlish and uncharacteristic noise into our mouth as I found her nipples. You were analyzing the fat structure. I seriously do not understand necromancer sexuality, but Ianthe was living, warm and willing against us, apparently, and I had a limited amount of resistance left. I mean, the only girl I'd ever met before Canaan House was you, and you see how much willpower I had once you gave me any recognition.
Always your sword, your tool, your creature, the moment you reached for me, Harrow.
Anyway, I caressed Ianthe's bosom with my left hand and reached experimentally downward with my right. You hadn't paid attention to her clothing earlier and I had to discover she was wearing a dress made of trailing green silk and coated in sticky blood. I made a noise that was less than attracted at this discovery and Ianthe said, unhappily, "Nav."
"Yeah, sorry, I think Harrow's still somewhere around 'Why am I not pulling out of this kiss?' We can wait for her to catch up, if you like," I said, because I am a paragon of generosity. "I'd appreciate if you got rid of the clotting blood, though. As a favor."
"I suppose it will have to be both of you or neither, then," Ianthe said with distress. But you - you shot through with hope, Harrow. It was painful. As long as I'd known you and particularly as long as I'd been sitting in the back of your skull you had been so goddamn sad, and you were still sad and scared and waiting for me to be snatched away. But the idea that Ianthe was stuck with both of us, that I might be around for her to be stuck with on condition of having you, that made you happy.
I hadn't realized - hadn't ever dared imagine - what it would feel like, knowing you were that happy just to have me around. I couldn't even have fantasized about you saying so. It wasn't the kind of thing Harrow Nonagesimus would have said. But co-existing in the same brain, an artifact of the Lyctoral process gone off, I got it direct from you, and it made me so happy. I was sitting covered in Ianthe's blood in your tomb-like quarters, and I had heard enough to know we were all being pursued by the angry revenants of planets, but I didn't care. I was the happiest I'd ever been in my life, feeling you that happy to have me.
"Guess so," I said, grinning like I was about to have the best sword match of my life.
Ianthe regarded me. "What did she say?"
"Nothing. She's happy I'm around," I said, because I was too endorphin-giddy to think better of it, and before Ianthe could come up with something insulting I kissed her and shut her up, and I heard you think distinctly, Honestly, Griddle, you would fuck Mercy if she let you touch her tits, which was just fantastic. Hearing you articulate 'tits' in your most disdainful tones would have been fantasy fodder for me for months if I still had my own body to jack off with.
You had obviously given up on refusing to believe this was happening, and you slid into our body, examining Ianthe's skeleton more than the body under your fingers, feeling the flexion of her new jaw and the older arm, the gilded skeletal fingers now tenderly cupping your side. You pulled your head away for a minute and I knew you were looking for the spectral figure you called the Body, but if she was there, I guess she didn't disapprove, because you kissed Ianthe yourself this time, and you put your hand over her skeletal one, caressing the exposed backs of the metacarpals, reveling in your own skill and how it had lasted. I had a terrible moment hoping you weren't going to let Ianthe put bones up you with me around, and I could hear you roll your eyes at me and think, with the same awful fondness you had had for Ianthe earlier, Trust you to be as immune to Lyctoral ascension as nerve gas.
Then in our distraction, Ianthe turned us over onto our back and lifted the sodden green dress off over her head, tossing it aside. She was happy now. Neither of us had seen her happy before, except that previous day when you had put her arm back on, and I was seeing it for the first time, how she was luminescent in her victory, how it made her the moon to Coronabeth's solar magnetism. She kissed us in one, and I knew from the way she trailed her flesh hand up your stomach that she wasn't a virgin. Which, okay, it was probably a good thing one of us knew what she was doing here. She pushed your black skirts up and dropped her head between our thighs, and her pale hair fluttered over us like your pearly First House robes, like a translucent veil.
You were buoyed by your own skill and by shock and relief and grief mixed together, and your awareness was mixed between the pleasure of her actual touch, which might have been too intense for you who were overwhelmed by bathwater to bear, and the more familiar appreciation of your own skill, that she could do this with the jaw you had only just regrown her. I was just happy to finally be getting some. Her tongue fluttered over your clit and those lips, shaped recently by your hand, sucked, and we shuddered together, and for a while there was no discernible difference between us at all, and we were a unified and single whole until we were finished.