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There are things she remembers, and things she does not.
Things she remembers include Cristabel’s shaved head, her jokey near-incompetence with the rapier, the way she was all gangly and narrow and entirely unsuited to physical combat, yet picked up the sword again and again and again, until she was good at it, until she was useful with it, because that was her duty, and they both shared an appreciation for duty.
Things she does not remember include her shock at seeing that shaved head for the first time, the first time the wimple came off. She wasn’t certain what hairstyle she’d expected a nun to have under her habit. Whatever she’d half-imagined certainly hadn’t prepared for the sight of half-inch stubble.
Mercymorn doesn’t remember a lot of the things she wasn’t prepared for in regard to C--- (not Cristabel, back then, just as she was not Mercymorn, more things she does not remember there, too). M---, a lonely child grown into a lonelier adult, always a bit too high-strung for close friendships, too neurotic and prone to snapping at people, not particularly fun, had been freshly shocked at every new closeness granted both to her and by her, every new and easy assurance, every single tiny, mundane moment of companionship. Late-night conversations out on M---‘s balcony, shared bottles of wine, C--- helping her move, wiping her sweaty forehead with the back of her hand and laughing, Jesus, those books of yours are heavy –
Isn’t that taking the Lord’s name in vain, M--- had asked. C--- had laughed again, all bright and easy and kind (always so fucking kind, it made her feel guilty by sheer virtue of being around her, both in the world she can remember and the world she does not) and said, I’m allowed one transgression per day.
Things she does not remember, but does not need to, because the shape of the feeling is still there even if the words are not:
Her thought, just after that. Guess that means you can’t kiss me today. Since your quota is all used up.
-o-
They meet – or, well, M--- and C--- meet – at a hospital, because that’s where M--- spends most of her time back then. M---, reliant on energy drinks and dry shampoo, twenty-seven years old and fresh out of university, brilliant at keeping people alive and so terribly afraid of killing someone. Others have their own incompetence to calm themselves with. The patient died because no one could have saved them. M--- knows that the category of ‘no one’ does not include her. If her patients die, it is not because of an impossibility, but because of her personal failings.
C--- in that dark habit, dark like a crow. Taller than M---, which she found unusual even back then, because M--- is tall for a woman. Narrow and sharp under the sackcloth of her robes, a certain androgyny to her brisk, certain walk that M--- finds vaguely surprising in a nun even when all she’s ever seen of C--- are brief glimpses of passing her in the hospital hallways. She asks a colleague, once, what a nun is doing here, and receives a distracted wave of the colleague’s hand followed by vague descriptions of the hospital chapel and the spiritual and psychological services provided there to the sick, the dying, and those who are burdened with loving them.
M--- does not see anyone for the psychological services she’s half-aware she needs. Instead, she schedules precise, five-minute long breakdowns to have out behind the hospital’s bio-waste dumpsters whenever the need strikes.
During one such perfectly-scheduled breakdown:
M---, flitting through the back door unseen. Then the shock of someone else standing in what she’s come to think of her secret hiding spot. The secondary shock of it being that nun. And then, the killing blow: noticing that the nun is smoking a cigarette.
‘You alright?’ The nun asks, in her voice that is deeper than M--- expected. It’s also less surprised than anyone should be at the sight of M--- in this state.
It’s kinder than it should be, too.
M--- sways back and forth in front of the nun, mouth open, like a gutted fish. That kindness hits her like a punch from the first time she encounters it. M--- is notoriously bad at being kind. To others, but mostly to herself. That’s why she is a doctor. If you can’t be kind, be helpful.
‘Hey,’ the nun says, still calm, but concerned now as she steps closer to M---. ‘You good there? You look a bit like you’re about to faint – ‘
M--- stares into her eyes like they are the last thing mooring her to this world. Sandy hazel, shot through with grey, a calm grey, grey as a neutral space, a space to rest in. The skin around them is unwrinkled, younger than M--- expected. Nuns are ancient, in her head. This one is only a few years older than her. Thirty-five, maybe.
She’ll later learn it’s thirty-three, which, isn’t that just fucking perfect.
‘I just,’ M--- says, ‘I just –‘
‘Yes?’
‘I just have to do my best,’ she whispers, only half-aware of what she’s saying, even less aware that she is showing something of herself to a stranger that even her parents and her boyfriends and her friends never get to see. She hasn’t slept in thirty-six hours and isn’t certain anymore how much shitty break room coffee she downed within that timeframe. And the kid – patient, she should be thinking of him as a patient, that is what her Attending has told her, but it feels nearly impossible to do – the kid is dying, dying, dying.
‘It’s not like there’s anyone else to do it,’ she rambles on, ‘and I just – I have to do my best. My very very best, and I just never know whether it’s good enough, what if I’m not good enough, but who else is there to even try – ‘
The nun nods. That fucking kindness again.
‘Skill is a duty,’ she says. ‘And duty is fear.’
-o-
Things Mercymorn does not remember:
The lunch breaks. How C--- brings her Tupperware containers full of food, which they eat sitting on the weird concrete art installations in the hospital courtyard. How they discover they are both vegetarians, for ethical reasons. How M--- feels safe around her, how their conversations make her feel lighter, unburdened.
It’s the responsibility of it all.
C--- nods. Tells her about her own responsibilities, her own duties, the secrets she has to carry. How people break down in the hospital chapel and tell her of their sins just before they die. How those left behind stumble between the pews and confess to acts of hate and love towards those who have gone. How she takes in those secrets, tucks them away.
M--- adds her own secrets to C---‘s pile. Her failures. Failures to save someone, failures to be kind. All those thousands of times she’s turned rigid and insular in the service of a goal, how she’s hurt people time and time again for the greater good, broken up with a half-dozen boyfriends who got in the way of her education, never calls her mother back on time –
I keep telling myself that I have to do these things so I can help people, she says. But sometimes, I wonder whether that’s just cover for being a bitch.
-o-
It takes them weeks to broach the topic of religion. M--- is careful about it, hedgy. Religion is foreign to her, she is the child of an upper-middle-class household of agnostics. C---‘s habit and wimple and cross are symbols she is vaguely frightened of.
‘I’m so sorry if this is insensitive, but why did you –,’ M--- finally asks.
C---‘s laugh. M--- is addicted to it by then. The kindness of it, the ease, the way it promises refuge.
‘Why I became a nun? Oh, you don’t need to worry about asking that question. I love talking about it.’
She tells the story of a young girl raised in a family that believed in sacrifices. An adolescence spent in service: shepherding children on youth group hikes, soup kitchen cookery, then two years doling out medicine in Ethiopia. What would Jesus do? He’d help, in any way he could.
‘Do you believe it?’ M--- asks, cautious and almost incredulous. It seems a bit absurd to her, all that stuff about dying on the cross and rising from the dead and the miracles of the blood and the body.
C--- shrugs. Her feet in their dark, sturdy boots dangle from their concrete perch. Always a shock, seeing something usually hidden under that habit. M— is surprised time and time again by the outdoorsy androgyny of the things happening underneath it: the boots, the trousers, the faded, worn-out men’s shirts.
‘I believe that what I believe does not matter all that much,’ C--- says. ‘I believe that we are not called to understand God. We are called to serve.’
M--- leans back on her hands against the dirty concrete. She mulls that statement over, feels its shape in her mouth.
‘Yes,’ she finally says. ‘Yes, I agree with that.’
-o-
Things Mercymorn does not remember, but does not need to, because they happen again in mirror-image:
The first time C--- is in her apartment. The shock of seeing someone like that traverse her pinkish-neutral carpet (M---, always a sucker for rose gold, for pastel markers and bullet-point journals and neat notes from class), dark robes brushing the floor. The way she crouches down in front of a bookshelf, turns her bewimpled head over her shoulder, grins, and says oh, I’ve read that, too. The shock of that normalcy in someone so decidedly unusual.
The moment’s echo, one apocalypse later:
Cristabel Oct in her dark, loose trousers walks into Mercymorn’s room, and Mercy is not afraid of someone entering a space she has designated as hers for the first time in both of her lives. Cristabel sits down on one of Mercy’s little chairs. The two of them are still childishly new to life (life after death, at least), are still easy to delight with the mundane. Mercy makes tea the way toddlers make soup out of sticks and dirt and water, and serves it up to Cristabel.
‘Oh that is wonderful,’ Cristabel says. ‘I do the same thing with the strawberry leaves.’
Mercymorn shows her a new trick she’s just learned: something with her follicles and scalp that shifts the colour of her hair into the same watery, pinkish, liquid-sunset shade as the tea within their cups. Cristabel laughs, all delight and ease and kindness – Mercymorn always feels so free with her, so very much like she can show the lighter, easier parts of herself – and then peers into her cup to compare the colours.
‘Really almost the same,’ she says, grinning between Mercy’s face and the cup.
And, without her grin fading at all, a fact Mercy will only recognise as carrying horrifying implications about the circumstances of their existence centuries later:
‘Like you’ve put blood in the water.’
They are children.
They have been given unsuitable toys.
They drink the blood which is given to them.
-o-
The first time M--- kisses C---, she is drunk, and has just broken up with yet another boyfriend after yet another argument about how she spends too much time at work.
‘Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus,’ M--- scrambles, backs off from C--- on her sofa like she’s burnt herself. ‘Oh my God, I’m so so sorry, oh my God, I can’t believe I – I’m so sorry, I don’t know what I – Jesus, you must hate me, I don’t usually do this –‘
C---‘s eyes, wide and dark. M---, frantic, words coming out of her without conscious thought.
‘I’m not even really into girls, unless, like, you count those couple of times in school and that one time at university and that other time in med school and that one weird thing last year after my team finally published that paper and maybe whatever the fuck I had going on with that one Attending of mine, and I know this is, like, really not compatible with your religious beliefs – oh my God. I assaulted you. I assaulted a nun.’
‘M---,’ C--- says, very calmly. ‘You did not assault me.’
M--- heaves in a breath and realises belatedly that she’s crying a bit. She notes, very flatly, that she did not cry when she broke up with the boyfriend earlier today.
‘Didn’t I?’
C--- shakes her head. Sighs.
‘I wasn’t entirely honest with you,’ she says, then. ‘When I told you why I became a nun.’
M--- gapes at her. The idea of C--- not being honest with her or anyone else is bizarre.
‘Do you remember what I told you back then,’ C--- asks urgently. ‘About different people being called towards different kinds of service. And how in Catholicism, the two main branches of service are marriage, and religious life.’
‘Yes,’ M--- echoes dumbly. ‘And you said you felt such a pull towards religious life that you discarded the idea of marriage.’
C--- closes her eyes for a second. There’s something almost pained in that gesture.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I felt pulled towards religious life. But I also felt – pushed away. From marriage.’
M--- stares at her.
C--- sighs.
‘Come on, M---. You’re a smart girl. Why do you think a young woman might choose a convent over men.’
M--- leans back on the sofa and feels something rise up in her. Something hard and cold and blazing. It is feeling that is very true to herself: a decisive thing, sharp like a spear-point.
Like every feeling she ever had that was true to herself, it is double-edged. She points it at C---, but as she does so, it bores into her own chest.
‘Tell me just one thing,’ M--- says. ‘And tell me the truth.’
C--- nods.
‘Am I a project for you. A thing you want to help. Like those people in the chapel who confess to you.’
C--- shakes her head, and M nods crisply, even as she could cry with relief.
To be helped, to be protected, to be cherished – she could never deal with that. It is not how she can take being loved. It makes her crumble with guilt.
‘You are a thing that helps me,’ C--- says. Her eyes are dark, dark, dark. M--- laughs, even as nothing about this situation is particularly funny.
‘Even as I lead you on a path of sin?’
M--- is surprised by how easy it was for her to call the thing she’s just done sinful. She is a child of modern times. She thinks of herself as open-minded. She has friends who are –
It’s suddenly difficult to think the word.
C--- shakes her head again. ‘No. You don’t lead me on a path of sin, you help me stay on the track of duty. Duty as I define it.’
‘How do you define it.’ The words are bitter, coming from her.
C--- wrings her hand together. ‘To help. To wear your bones down with all the helping that you do. You make my bones more resilient.’ She laughs. Humourless, almost rueful.
M--- nods again. Something settles in her gut.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, I agree with that.’
-o-
Sex: usually a high-strung affair for M---, a thing that involves many implements and utmost concentration. She treats her body as an insular, well-kempt thing, and always felt her boyfriends’ touch as an intrusion. She tends to schedule sex – in her mind, without her boyfriends’ knowledge. She tells herself that this is due to her busy schedule, but is semi-aware that the true reason is some vague sense of duty towards the men she dates, which might be indicative of a failure of feminism on her part, but might just be a symptom of her character. As a rule, she refuses to spend more than twenty-five minutes on the act. M--- knows it is yet another act of dubious feminism to fake an orgasm, but with those boyfriends who prided themselves on their ability to make a woman come, sticking to that time limit required occasional theatrics.
There were exceptions, of course. Encounters that were easy, natural, during which she did not think about her body at all because she was too busy staring, feeling, touching. Those couple of times in school, that one time at university, that other time in med school, that one weird thing last year after her team finally published that paper, and maybe whatever the fuck she had going on with that one Attending of hers.
She has constructed two lines of defence against the obvious conclusion to be drawn from the difference between those encounters and the sex she has with men: first, that the encounters barely count as sex (she has a different excuse for each of them, ranging from We did it standing up, I didn’t even see anything through only I came, it’s only sex if you touch the other person, too right down to we didn’t turn the lights on and didn’t even talk about it as we started touching each other, that’s basically just opportunistic masturbation with your friend’s hand instead of your own), and second, that she was drunk for most of them. Brilliant scientific mind she is, she clings to those excuses even as she knows that the first is threadbare bordering on insane and the second easily disproven by her inability to replicate the looseness and ease of those encounters with her boyfriends no matter how much wine she downs in preparation.
So here she is once again. Indulging in an exception. It is proof of something – she does not want to think about what that something is – in and of itself that she thinks, very distantly, that this will be difficult to rationalise later, but that it will be worth the effort.
C---‘s body is rangy and lean under her clothes. M--- learns this not by sight, but by touch. Neither of them undress fully. Only select garments come off: M---‘s loungewear trousers, C---‘s wimple.
There’s that shock: her bare head, shaved down to a stubble. M--- runs her hands over it, is fascinated by the texture.
‘Rules of the Order,’ C--- says. Everything about her is fractal: the rough dark shapeless sackcloth of her robes, her sinewy arms, her darned socks, her face without a stitch of makeup, the cross around her neck. Two different women, glued together, a thing that could have been and a thing that is. M--- suddenly thinks of a different version of C---, one who believes in God more than in duty, a version of C--- that wears cargo trousers and works in humanitarian aid somewhere and does not think the universe demands her service.
(Later, much later, one apocalypse later, when God is someone else, those two versions of C--- will meld together. For a time. Their new God will not believe in certain sins, but he will continue to believe in duty, and he will continue to demand sacrifices.)
M--- kisses her. Climbs up into her lap. Her long hair with its scent of dry shampoo swings around them like the curtain of a confessional. C---‘s hands, those deft capable hands, tangle up in it, then drop down to M---‘s waist.
Nothing about it feels like a secret, nothing about it feels like an experiment. It’s a thing out of time. The usual rules do not apply. There’s no use conducting experiments in a universe whose physics do not align with your own.
That is another way M--- rationalises these things. She wonders whether C--- does the same.
There is no fumbling. They are both too practiced at this for that. C---‘s hand slip into M---‘s sensibly feminine underwear (pastels, pinks, but muted so they’re not too girlish, always walking that line, that thrice-dammed line, intelligent but feminine, professional but non-threatening, woman and scientist, doing her duty to every expectation she was born to fulfil, she’s so fucking good at it, it makes her want to scratch her own skin off, makes her want to ask C--- to scratch her skin off) and deliver three precise circles around her clit. M---‘s breath hitches, then she keens.
‘Inside,’ she breathes against C---‘s neck. The stubble of her hair catches against her nose. C--- has almost no scent, just a faint hint of the human underneath an even fainter one of laundry soap. It’s all so spare, that convent life, but M--- is a master of constructing an image, she recognises that the lack of detail changes nothing about the precision of this particular construct of womanhood.
C---‘s finger slips up into her. Crooks. M--- clutches the front of C---‘s shirt where the robes gape open, breathes more harshly.
‘More,’ she whines, and then moans when she gets a second finger. C--- crooks them forward, sure and certain, knowing precisely what she’s doing. M--- wonders about more encounters like this in the convent, nuns carving out spaces that aren’t real during the night, when nothing you do is real at all.
‘More,’ she whispers, lost in it, rocking back against C---‘s hand, wet and dripping and desperate. She is the body. For once, that is not a statement of anatomy, but one of sensation. She feels without thinking of the nerves that allow her to feel.
That is a freedom, too.
C---, in a gesture M--- is deliriously thankful for, does not question her desires. No you sure? or I don’t want to hurt you. If this isn’t real, it can’t leave lasting damage.
A fourth finger. M--- whines, clutches C---‘s shirt more tightly. She’s distantly aware she’s babbling, saying something like Oh God, oh God, oh God. That is cliched, and slightly tasteless, so she bites it back and changes it into a whine of the first syllable of C---‘s name (she’ll stick to that, later, when she’s forgotten C---'s name: during sex, Cristabel becomes Cris.)
She doesn’t need to ask for the fifth. Her body comes loose, turns liquid, her bones become goo. Her brain is a thick, sludgy thing, pleasantly quiet and malleable. There are no thoughts, and where there are no thoughts, there are no things being done.
A few sloppy, grinding thrusts. The sackcloth of the robes rough against M---‘s cheeks. She is a floating thing. The noises are obscene – thick squelches, heavy breaths, her keening little exhales – but that is not bothersome right now.
She feels it building up in her, that heavy molten heat in her stomach, sloshing around like liquid metal, dropping deeper and deeper and deeper –
Then M--- does something insane.
Just as the thread snaps, just as the liquid spills over, she draws back her head and looks into C---‘s eyes as she comes.
-o-
There is no rationalising what comes next. It breaks through all the excuses she has used in the past: We kept our clothes on! and I never even touched her! and It was dark and I didn’t see anything at all!
They fall towards M---‘s bedroom like women possessed. M--- rips at C---‘s robes, then her shirt, then her trousers. C--- wrestles M--- out of her university hoodie and her sensible-but-feminine bra.
M--- stares.
A sinewy rag of a woman, spare and narrow. There’s an asceticism there, and she likes something about the psychology that implies. For a first moment before the apocalypse, C---‘s fractals snap together. The truth of the body, of nakedness.
M--- feels her own selves snap together as well: she’s removed the constructions, and all that remains is herself. Her sweaty face, the way she ties back her hair with an elastic so it won’t get in the way, how the motion is the same one she used to do when it fell into her eyes during her hours-long study sessions in her university library. That motion – she thinks that motion encapsulates all the truth of who she is. It’ll stick with her, through the end of the world and beyond. It’ll stick with her for ten thousand years, longer than her own name.
It's mouths and hunger and dissolution from there. M--- between C---‘s legs, holding her hips down with her hands, daring to want, daring to take. C---‘s hands in M---‘s hair, directing, but her voice, too, giving precise anatomical instructions: clockwise on the clit, firmer, more pressure on the right side. There is not denying the reality of this encounter. They are talking about this in clear, uncouched terms.
M--- ends up on her hands and knees with C--- behind her, fingers driving into her, C---‘s torso bent over M---‘s own, puzzle pieces fitting together, the scrape of her scalp against M---‘s cheek, harder faster more, please –
M--- falls forward when she comes, face against her sheets. She pants.
It’s not a sin, she thinks. The only sins are the things that keep you from your duty.
This makes her bones more resilient, so she can work them down for causes she believes in.
-o-
C--- takes her to church the next morning, because it is a Sunday. That does not feel like a contradiction.
There is no sin. Only abdication from duty.
Mercymorn won’t remember that morning at church, won’t remember the concept of church, even, but there will be things that carry over. Lessons. Beliefs. Feelings.
C---‘s dark robes, her narrow back upright next to M---. She hadn’t known what to wear, until C---, still half-naked on the bed, had laughed and told her Jesus, M---, the Lord won’t mind either way, just put on your jeans.
Cristabel leaning against the door of Mercymorn’s room, laughing, Mercy, I promise your hair is perfectly fine.
The singing. M--- likes that. All those high, clear voices, the way they swell up against the vaulted ceilings like a soap-bubble blown by a child –
Cristabel hums, low and under her breath, as she polishes her rapier. It'll be the same tune, which neither of them will recognise. Mercy joins in where she sits at her workbench, sliding sample after sample under her microscope. The sun refracts from the stained glass window now at that church, and it refracts from the glass slides when Mercy holds them up against the light, one apocalypse later.
Kneeling, rising up, kneeling again. An unspoken pattern, a chain of ritual that reaches back two thousand years, unbroken until - but is it broken? Mercy would not be sure even if she knew how she was once a link in it.
Cristabel kneeling in front of Mercymorn the first time she breaks out into blood sweat. Her face: not concerned, but calm. Wiping away the blood. Mercy’s whisper, you don’t have to do that, Cristabel shaking her head and laughing, one flesh, one end.
Up ahead: the priest’s voice, high and near-wailing. This is my body, which is given for you.
M--- kneels in front of the priest and receives the eucharist. For a bizarre moment, she wonders how the doctrine of transubstantiation squares with C---'s and her own vegetarianism, but when she eats the thing in her hand, she tastes no flesh, no blood. Only papery bread. It’s easy, that way, to eat meat.
Mercy will know the hard way. Later.
M--- stands under the high vaulted ceiling and watches the light reach through the stained-glass windows, fingers of light grasping, shivering, reaching out. Mercymorn stands under the bright-blue summer sky of a dead planet and watches the waves lap against the ruins of Caanan House like licking tongues.
Next to both of them: a brushstroke of dark wool, narrow and tall and so fucking kind.
They will teach each other joy. It will make their bones more resilient as they work them down in the name of duty.
And later, much later, when the taste of blood mingles with the half-remembered taste of paper-bread in Mercy’s mouth, when she looks down at her red and sinful fingers, it’ll be that hardness in the bones that lets her think, yes. If she put those fingers around God’s neck, the bones would be too tough to snap.
She'll tie back her hair with bloody fingers and a motion entirely familiar to her. A motion older than time.
She'll get to work. A new work, but still: Ora et labora. That is her duty, after all.