Work Text:
This place is a message and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it.
The gaps between your fingers ache. The body, which was once broken, still mends under clumsy ministrations.
If you close your eyes, you can feel the flimsy under your skin. Graphs and charts, mapping out what you would do. It’s the theory of it, he says, all of fifteen, reedy voice and long limbs quivering. It’s the plan in case something goes wrong.
The theory of storage. Of destruction. Of ripping a hole in one person’s reality while leaving the world a crater behind you.
He should have picked a better way to die.
You scramble over rocks and shove aside rubble. The upper bound for scrying is ten thousand, Warden. A crash as something falls. Dominoes. Either this entire building was scavenged from a garbage hopper, or I am being lied to on a systematic level.
You think, grimly, that you were the one lied to. Honor in death replaced by ruin. A memory that burns in your chest. Knives under your ribs that don’t belong there.
You didn’t know. You never dreamed he would slip away. Not from you. Not like this.
He said you’d know what to do.
You do. There are papers about this. Research. Studies. Expert opinions.
None of that matters. You are alone, and there is gray matter on your hands.
This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here.
You leave the suicide site with a bitter taste in your mouth. Death under duress is not valor, if you ask the woman you’re holding onto, her blood-stained hands over your steady ones. Bold words for a woman with a hole in her gut that matches the barely-patched one in your chest.
The bag against your chest thuds against your ribs like it’s an independent heart. Like a living thing. Something that stores life, not memories.
No one can know it holds both. On pain of death, or worse, if the deal you made for your own safe passage is any indication.
Distantly, you wonder if the Warden would approve of this. Of you using others to a selfish end. He knew, as well as anyone, that you did not care for the elder Third House twin, nor the woman who challenged your necromancer to a duel.
You decide it doesn’t matter. He made you master of his fate. He traded himself like this: sleep for solace, death for life, time for time.
You can’t remember his voice, save for the feeling of it buzzing it under your fingers when you tipped his chin up so he would look at you, or when you pressed your palm to his back to wake him. If you close your eyes and sit very still, you can remember the stretch of his skin under your palm as he stretched, as he turned to you - twisting his neck at uncomfortable angles, mostly, just to hear the vertebrae pop - and smiled with those arresting eyes.
You realize with a start, as you deposit Deuteros inside the Blood of Eden shuttle, that your eyes are burning. Your hands shake. When Coronabeth opens her mouth to ask, you wave her off. You don’t want to talk, unless it is to scream. But you do not have those luxuries.
You are hollow in the way a coffin is, back when they buried the dead. You are a mausoleum to a lifetime of stories and jokes and knowledge. The repository of the history of one man. The sole keeper of secrets.
You think of the letters you hid away. Now that he’s gone, who will keep them safe?
Now that you’re gone, who will mourn him?
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The change comes like a heartbreak. You shatter a mirror in turn.
Coronabeth picks the shards from your knuckles. She marvels at your new eyes. You stare her down until she stops. She tells you the sweetness of his eyes looks strange matched against the anger in your face.
You hear the Ninth House Lyctor’s voice in your head. He’s in there. The ache under your ribs sharpens. Travels to your throat. Catches on tears. The skeletal hand fashioned by that same woman crawls up your arm and taps against your jaw.
“You know what they’ll do,” Corona breathes into the itchy heat of the night, later, when you’re both crammed into bed, inches of covers and miles of silence between you. “If they find out, I mean.”
“No one pays attention.” Four words, ripped from your sandpaper mouth.
The hand in your pocket goes still. Corona falls asleep. You can’t close your stolen eyes. So you walk.
The city throbs like a heartbeat under the papery skin of shimmering heat. The corner store is teeming with bodies. It’s too dark to mind, and you’re too alone to care. So you go inside and stand under fluorescent bulbs and stare at foil wrappers.
Your eyes start to water. Selective photosensitivity. Light eyes have it. Dark eyes don’t. He really got the short end of the stick all around.
The part of you that really isn’t you makes you laugh. Footsteps in your periphery halt, scuffing the tile. Your head snaps up, hand twitching toward your belt.
“Sorry.” The owner of the voice is young, maybe your age. That reminds you, like a punch to the stomach.
“What day is it?” you ask.
She stutters through the answer. You almost feel bad for the panic in her eyes, exacerbated by the eerie lights. You attempt to do the math in your head, then pause when the woman asks “are you alright?”
It’s too late for this. It’s too early to fall asleep. You shake your head and brush past the stranger.
We’re both twenty-one , you think, but that doesn’t carry the same weight without anyone to say it to.
You buy a cake the size of your hand and eat it sitting on the curb outside the looming building your companions call home. The knife on your belt digs into your hip like a bruising thumb. On your opposite side, the bones clatter in your stomach.
“Happy birthday, Warden.”
You make a mental note to read something he would have liked. As a treat.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
You are relieved to go to war.
Back in your world, one where necromancy isn’t a crime punished by ironic means, you are known as a saint for what you and the Warden have done. Camilla the First , you hear Corona repeat mockingly. Saint of Wisdom . Named so for the soul that rattles around somewhere in your skull, just outside of your scrabbling fingers.
You’ve been holding on by your fingernails for so long, you forget what your hands feel like outside of the ache.
You stare into the reflective plex shielding you from the dark vacuum of space and name yourself Camilla the Sixth . And if you must be a saint, you are the saint of mourning.
It’s comforting to tongue those words over your teeth. Even if there’s a headache encroaching behind your eyes because of it.
You call yourself what you are: a wasteland. When you dock at a dead planet, the shriveled plant life calls to you.
You remember the relief, like adrenaline, collapsing you into the grass. He’s in there .
A vessel. An apocalypse. One flesh, one end. This is it.
You aren’t even a little surprised when you wake up that night with Why did you leave me? dying on your lips and as the one cry of your soul.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
He always said he was a man of a single trick.
You are losing, because you are always losing, and he has an idea, because he always has an idea, and leave it to Palamedes Sextus to fight past centuries of necromantic theory and all biologic scientific findings to shove his way to the forefront of your consciousness.
When you were twelve, you told him you would die for him if he asked. He swore he would never.
“What happened to that?” you ask in the here and now, blood dripping over your jaw.
No answer.
“I won’t do this.” You heft the sword. It’s weighted for someone taller. Ianthe Tridentarius watches with those dull eyes. Her sister’s blood is on her hands. You care nothing for that false pain.
If she wanted to retain her humanity, loss is one sure way to start. This is the moral of your story.
“You made yourself a god-killing star,” you hiss through your teeth. Your body was not designed for Lyctorhood, “and now I will make us kill God.”
The sword flashes. The Ninth’s bones lead the way. Once more, you go to war for him.
Sending this message was important to us.
You almost bite the hand that reaches out to hold yours.
His eyes blink at you, brown into grey. Inverted. Singular.
“Harrowhark can’t figure out how to put them back,” that dry voice says. “Neither can Ianthe.”
You choke. You fall. He catches you. You sigh into his chest, some mixture of tears and blood staining the fabric. This body is not his, but somehow the voice is the same. Somehow the feel of your forehead against the beat of his heart – his heart , his alive and beating heart – is the same.
“They look better in your face, anyway.”