Between Chapter 27 and Chapter 28
Sep. 1st, 2020 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
we_bring_hellObserve Harrowhark Nonagesimus, flopped full-length on a sofa in Milliways, moaning into a cushion. She looks like a heap of coal-filthy laundry, like a bad black snake trying to wriggle into a crack in the fabric of reality and never return.
(When I release you from my service, Nav, you will know about it.)
She fucked up.
(It's just me. Go back to sleep.)
She fucked up so bad.
(Never work with children, Griddle. Their prefrontal cortexes aren't developed.)
She wants to die. For one golden moment she had done something right. Something worthy of what she's been given.
(Death first to vultures and scavengers.
It was good. You were good.)
She is a dullard. An imbecile. A fool. She had screamed herself hoarse upbraiding herself, then left Griddle with that viper Septimus to go do--what? Nothing useful. Nothing to bring back the flower of the Fourth. All she'd done is give Dulcinea Septimus more time to thieve the loyalty of her cavalier.
She wants to die, but she isn't allowed to die, not until she has redeemed the deaths of two hundred (and two!) children. Not until she's sold her poor mortgaged soul to the Emperor and the Corse of the Locked Tomb and renewed the Ninth. All of their hopes ride on her, and she is sinking under them, and the golden eyes of Gideon Nav are all their eyes; the eyes that can't believe that God and chance have entrusted their fate and their fidelity to this failure.
(Harrow, I hate you. I never stopped hating you. I will always hate you and you will always hate me.)
(When I release you from my service, Nav, you will know about it.)
She fucked up.
(It's just me. Go back to sleep.)
She fucked up so bad.
(Never work with children, Griddle. Their prefrontal cortexes aren't developed.)
She wants to die. For one golden moment she had done something right. Something worthy of what she's been given.
(Death first to vultures and scavengers.
It was good. You were good.)
She is a dullard. An imbecile. A fool. She had screamed herself hoarse upbraiding herself, then left Griddle with that viper Septimus to go do--what? Nothing useful. Nothing to bring back the flower of the Fourth. All she'd done is give Dulcinea Septimus more time to thieve the loyalty of her cavalier.
She wants to die, but she isn't allowed to die, not until she has redeemed the deaths of two hundred (and two!) children. Not until she's sold her poor mortgaged soul to the Emperor and the Corse of the Locked Tomb and renewed the Ninth. All of their hopes ride on her, and she is sinking under them, and the golden eyes of Gideon Nav are all their eyes; the eyes that can't believe that God and chance have entrusted their fate and their fidelity to this failure.
(Harrow, I hate you. I never stopped hating you. I will always hate you and you will always hate me.)