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The problem, Harrowhark decided with all the single-minded assiduousness of the powerfully overwhelmed person, was her hair. It was untenable; it was a disgrace to her House, her Order, her station; it was… long. Unfathomably long—impossibly long, considering that, according to Hect (Paul, she reminded herself. Just Paul.) and the person formerly known as Gideon the Ninth, only something like seven months had passed since she had last operated her own limbs. Hair did not sprout two extra feet of length in half a year, and yet, here she was, with braids down to her ass.
Seven months.
Her face in the mirror was wan and sharp with the wasting sickness caused by Alecto’s soul struggling for a grip on her body. It was barely her own face anymore, and she thought that fit: nothing else in her life was hers, either. She had lost half a year; Camilla Hect was basically dead; the Body walked and Harrow was purposeless. The Mithraeum was a ghost town, absent Mercymorn’s bluster and the fug of Augustine’s cigarettes, and Alecto made strange company. God had seen fit over the last two days to keep himself to himself—she had it from Ianthe that he was performing a complex ritual of grief and shoving his head up his exalted, immortal ass.
She did not particularly want to think about John’s ass, nor did she want to think about Ianthe. Her desire to think about Alecto waxed and waned by the minute. Paul itched at her thoughts—How, she wondered. How had they done it?—and Pyrrha, a stranger in skin Harrow had known only as a threat before this. Neither of the last two had elected to join Ianthe on the return to the Mithraeum, so Harrow imagined they would remain unquantifiable mysteries.
And then there was her. From the back of Harrow's mind came the tattered edge of a thought that had never been hers: Saddest girl in the world.
No. Nope. She was not touching any of this. Not until she had solved the hair problem.
Grasping a braid in one hand, assembling a blade from the mound of one knuckle on the other, she began to cut.
Hack was a better word for it. Saw, maybe. There was some definite sawing action involved. She sharpened the blade’s edge, and sawed, and sharpened, and sawed. The braid was thick, and the angle was bad, and at the end of the day she had about as much strength as a sickly kitten.
Desperation was an old enemy, clawing her full of holes as she worked, till she ought to have leaked effluvia like the beat-up collander in the kitchen. She needed the hair gone, and it wasn’t going. She was incompetent, a waste of immortality and the breath she still wasn’t sure she needed anymore. Her skin was too small for her skeleton.
Anxiety turned towards frustration, the tide of her six month apocalypse dream coming in. She had always been a frustration crier, and it was all too much. Everything in the bleak, finite universe pressed on her at once, and she cursed the heat pricking in her eyes, and she cursed the knife, and she cursed herself, and God, God—and above all, she cursed her thrice-damned hair.
All a litany that was, of course, far from silent. She had run out of silence, and she had run out of rage, and she did not know what was left.
“Fuck!” she cried, tearing at her braids with ragged-nailed, ineffectual fingers.
“Huh,” came the unexpected reply. Harrow flinched; she had not heard the autodoor open. “Not what I expected to find, but you know, I’ll take it.”
“It is generally considered appropriate to knock before entering private rooms,” Harrow said, the sound ground to splinters between her gritted teeth.
“Sure,” said Gideon with the same old crooked, half-dimpled grin. “But you wouldn’t have let me in, would you?”
“No,” said Harrow.
“So here we are,” Gideon replied. She sauntered further into the room, and Harrow thought for the hundredth time that white was somehow an even worse color on Gideon than it was on her. A large part of that was probably how very dead she was, waxen and pale lipped, but the white of the jacket made the red of her hair even more impossible. It wasn’t a good look.
“What,” she said, tucking the shredded braid further behind her shoulder, hoping to keep it from that sharp golden gaze, “do you want?”
It was a mission failure: Gideon’s eyes followed the movement and latched unerringly on the mangled hair. Her eyebrows quirked with interest.
“I heard yelling,” she said, approaching with all the casual grace of a prowling cat. “Wanted to see if you were being murdered or what.
“I am not being murdered,” Harrow said, fighting her impulse to match each of Gideon’s steps with one in retreat. “Now leave.”
Gideon ignored her, and gestured between the bone knife still jutting from Harrow’s knuckles and the paltry disaster Harrow had made of her hair.
“You want help with that?”
Harrow paused, eyes narrowing.
“What?”
Gideon sighed and rolled her eyes so spectacularly that it was something of a miracle that her slightly death-filmed eyes stayed in her skull.
“Let me cut it for you,” she said. “You’re just gonna fuck it up worse, and probably slit your own throat by accident in the process.”
“I’m shaving it,” Harrow said, somewhat uselessly.
“I can do that,” said Gideon, and before Harrow could protest, she was shrugging out of her pristine jacket and cuffing her sleeves. Harrow watched, numb and fascinated against herself at the perfect flexion of those corpse hands, the pallid and familiar scars across the broad knuckles, the wide palms, the steady, competent fingers.
“If you think for a moment,” Harrow said, eyes locked on the shifting of tendons beneath Gideon’s skin, “that I am letting you touch me, then you have lost a great amount of memory recall.”
She could feel the skeptical dance of Gideon’s eyebrows, and refused to look.
“Would you prefer I call Ianthe in here? Wouldn’t be the first time you let her at your head,” she said, and for how tightly Harrow’s jaw clamped shut, she really should have cracked at least two molars.
They had not discussed this. She refused to discuss this.
But silence had always been its own language with Gideon, and so she straightened her spine and presented her back to her cavalier, staring her down in the mirror rather than fumble for an insult, or an apology she wasn't sure she would mean if she tried. Gideon's face was strange and passing strange in reverse, drawing Harrow’s gaze to a slight asymmetry of Gideon’s mandible that she had failed to notice. She marveled that a crooked jaw could be rakish.
Gideon huffed out a laugh that lacked anything like amusement.
“I honestly can’t tell if that was a guilty conscience or acknowledgment of how gross Ianthe is,” she said, and another breath found a knife in her hand and a fist around Harrow’s hair.
“I thought you were friends,” Harrow said, clenching around the urge to flinch away as Gideon lined the knife up with the disaster of a cut Harrow had already made.
“We are,” Gideon said, and sliced through the remaining half-inch of braid like it was a particularly stubborn bit of butter. Harrow felt as though something smaller and more wretched had been severed along with it. Gideon's grin was as achingly familiar as a hated old coat, sleazy and charming at once as she held the terrible twenty-something inches of hair up and shook it at Harrow like a dead ferret. “Which means I extra know how gross she is. Just the absolute worst person alive.”
Harrow batted the braid away, and Gideon let it fall to the floor with an unsettlingly solid thump.
“So why, for the love of all that is holy, are you friends with her?”
It was a bigger question than Harrow could ever hope—or want—to articulate. The weight of it fell between them like a chill, or a funeral shroud, and she felt something akin to relief as it took Gideon's banter out at the knees. It was unnatural to hear from those death-pale lips, ringing insincere as it never had before.
Gideon shrugged, eyes darting to meet Harrow’s in the mirror for a fraction of a second. Not long enough to identify the feeling there, but more than enough to know it hadn’t been there a moment ago.
“She was there,” she said, quite now as she took the remaining braid in-hand. Harrow could feel, distantly, the drag of Gideon’s thumb over the frazzled weave of her hair. She handled it with a gentleness, and Harrow refused to categorize the shape and quality of the lump in her throat.
“That’s all it takes to make someone horrible a friend?”
Again, their eyes met, gold to black. It was, Harrow knew, as much of an answer as she was going to get. She didn’t need one, anyway—she knew. They had been friends once, after all. For a second.
By mutual uncomfortable agreement, they lapsed into silence. The second braid was tougher, and Gideon had to pull it tight, straining Harrow’s neck as she hacked through it in three hard slices. Harrow hissed a curse and Gideon rolled a shoulder in response, half of a shrug, what do you want I should do?
She let the braid fall. There was a stillness then, filled with the shell-shocked shuffling of Harrow’s remaining hair from its former confines, and then—fingers, soft as they carded the locks loose. A pinkie brushed the shell of Harrow’s ear, and she shivered, and swallowed, and forced herself back to stillness.
“Down to the scalp?” Gideon asked, her voice hushed with the strange fact of her hands in Harrow’s hair.
Harrowhark gave a tight little nod, and then Gideon’s palm found the knob of her skull, the back of her neck, and her traitor spine unwound, taking her breath with it. Gideon’s fingers dug in, and for a moment Harrow thought This is it and gaped at the frailty of her spinal column juxtaposed with the easy strength of those hands. But it was only a kneading, Gideon’s thumb dragging up the rigid line of her trapezius on one side, back down on the other. For a moment, her palm curved to the shape of Harrow’s nape—and then it was gone.
She told herself that she would not have died anyway, had Gideon decided to snap her neck, but just as every other time she had witnessed her ramshackle body stitch itself back together, it was more a disappointment than anything.
Gideon made quick work of the trimming, slicing away thin hanks of Harrow’s hair with short, pulling cuts. She circled Harrow as she worked, careful around the vulnerable jut of her ears, brushing gentle fingers over the corners of her eyelids to guide her eyes shut when she moved to the front.
Deep in Harrowhark’s abattoir soul, something shuddered and wailed and resolved itself into a fine, miserable dew, dusting her thoughts with the shape and texture of a loss she had lobotomized herself rather than feel. Gideon steadied her head with a hand cradling her jaw, the knife dragging in short strokes over uneven tufts, reducing her to stubble.
Held and grieving, Harrow let slip the words that had circled her mind since that first awakening in the Tomb—since that first glimpse of this so-called Tower Prince, this Kiriona, this pale flicker of a light that had long burnt out.
“You’re not her,” Harrow said, too tired to recoil from the quavering smallness of her own voice.
She did not have to clarify, for Gideon went still as her undeath.
A moment passed, a precipitous height, a dizzying held breath, and then Gideon’s fingers shifted—tightening, loosening. Harrow's heart beat, and the knife swept anew over her scalp.
“She died,” said Gideon, hollow hollow hollow—and there, at last, was what Harrow had sought. The emptiness.
Gideon Nav had been the most alive person she had ever known. Gideon Nav had railed at the world, had sought activity the way most people breathed, had quipped and snarked and joked for the simple pleasure of people’s reactions. She had drawn attention to herself like a blanket, or water, or air.
This person with her cold fingers on Harrow's skin—she was not. Not alive, not smug, not searching for the dumb pleasures of attention or food. Harrow's possessor had been right: she had never seen anyone so sad in her whole life, and the worst part was that Gideon—Kiriona—refused to acknowledge it. She was a fine actor, with all of Gideon’s mannerisms, her gestures, her kinetic bearing. But the attitude was wrong. She was, at turns, cold and hungry, in a way Gideon had never been.
Something was, very simply, missing, and Harrowhark doubted very much that it could be reclaimed.
The knife and the hands went away, their job suddenly finished. Opening her eyes, Harrow found her old self in the mirror—dark stubble, sharp chin, downturned mouth and furrowed brow—and behind her, a hollow-eyed corpse with a ducked chin and misery etched in her every line.
“Gideon,” Harrowhark said, feeling as she did that it was a long-gone ghost she called to, not this weak shadow of a revenant. Gideon averted her eyes, brow furrowing, and everything within Harrow crested at once, and broke. She inhaled the memory of brine and solvents and the stale air of Canaan House as she turned and slid her arms around the solid, soft waist of her dead cavalier, who had deserved every good thing and got only death. “We have all failed you,” she said, cheek to chest. “I’m so sorry.”
Like this, she felt the tectonic quake of Gideon’s long-held sob rattle through every part of her. It took them both out at the knees, and had it not been for them propping each other up, the fall would have been short and hard.
Harrowhark thought, not for the first time, that it would have been very nice if people would stop dying for her, and start living for her. But she thought, too, that maybe in this case, she could let it pass.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again, her own cheeks wet as she craned up, found the curve of Gideon’s cold neck, and pulled her head down to rest against her, forehead to forehead. “If I could have ended with you, I would have.”
“I know,” said Gideon, shattered beyond hope of repair. “God fucking help me, I know.”
“Don’t bring God into this,” said Harrow.
“Blasphemy, Nonagesimus.”
“I know. It’s just that he’s very bad at his job.”
Gideon laughed, and it was horrible. They were horrible.
They did not unwind for a very long time.