Between Chapter 27 and Chapter 28

[we_bring_hell]

Observe 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.)

Comments

[we_bring_hell]

She tilts her head towards him. "If it pleases you. I have found it... calming."

[lightamidchaos]

"That is its purpose."

Lightly, softly, he begins to play a more relaxed version of the previous song, one that can flow beneath words rather than over them, if she wishes to speak further.

[we_bring_hell]

She sighs, "In this way, at least, the arts of Gusu Lan surpass ours indeed."

"How long have you studied your instrument? I'm sorry, I didn't record the name."

[lightamidchaos]

"It is a guqin," he tells her.

"Since I was very young."

He's not actually certain when he first began, but he knows it was earlier than the usual disciples' training - for him and Xichen both.

"Maybe fifteen years. Or more."

[we_bring_hell]

She nods slowly, absorbing the information. "It must be nice to have a skill that brings no harm to anyone."

[lightamidchaos]

He looks a little uncomfortable at that.

Lying is forbidden in the Cloud Recesses.

"It can."

The same gentle melody keeps rippling forth as he talks.

"Not this. But there are techniques."

[we_bring_hell]

Her eyes widen. "Ah. I should not have assumed."

"I wonder if the Seventh House has pursued such things," she says heavily.

They have! But the danse macabre has never crossed Harrow's radar.

[lightamidchaos]

"It is fine," he reassures her.

"Reverend Daughter. You are troubled."

[we_bring_hell]

"Indeed," she says levelly. "But your art has helped. I am under control again."

[lightamidchaos]

It is not hard to read that tone of voice, especially given how private he himself is.

"Mn."

After a moment, during which the melodic line rises and falls again in the flow from one variation to another, he adds,

"I will play for as long as you like."

[we_bring_hell]

"I appreciate it very much," she says quietly.

[lightamidchaos]

He nods to her, and continues to play.

This variation emphasizes centering and calm through creating stillness within. As his fingers move deftly over the strings, a faint blue glow shimmers from time to time at points of particular resonance.

Continuing to pour spiritual energy into the music for an extended length of time would become difficult very quickly for some people. For someone whose cultivation and golden core is as powerful as Lan Wangji's, it would take hours before tiredness would become a factor.

[we_bring_hell]

For a while, she sits with the music and breathes.

(Have you realised that this whole thing has been about the union of necromancer and cavalier from start to finish?)

"Hangguang-jun," she says eventually. "Can you see what Wei Wuxian sees when he looks at me?"

[lightamidchaos]

"The resentful energy."

Nothing about his manner changes.

"Yes."

As he considers that, however, he amends,

"But I do not cultivate it the way Wei Ying does. He knows more."

[we_bring_hell]

Her throat thickens as she tries to find something to say about that.

Uncomfortable silence spins out between them. It's such a long habit of secrecy, so tightly kept , so dangerous to her and to everyone she knows.

"I wish you couldn't," she whispers.

[lightamidchaos]

He looks up at her in surprise, although the music does not falter.

"I am sorry."

He does not understand, given how open she had been about her necromancy the day they met. Why would it matter, that he can sense the resentful energy she carries within her?

[we_bring_hell]

She shrugs helplessly. She's not saying what she wants to. Words are always vicious and slippery for her; it's so much easier to be cruel than vulnerable.

"Wei Wuxian is dead, isn't he."

Maybe resentful energy has poisoned her temperament. That would be nice to think.

[lightamidchaos]

His fingers freeze on the strings, the instant's silence somehow strangely discordant.

--Wei Ying on the cliff's edge, falling, falling--

Wei Ying!

--the desperate fight at the Burial Mounds, too late, too late, too late--

The Yiling Patriarch is dead! Isn't it great?

--weeks of fever and months of pain in the cavern, every heartbeat a betrayal and every breath a loss, playing Inquiry until his fingers cracked and bled --

Wei Ying. Come back.

"Yes."

He resumes playing once more, sending the calming, tranquil notes forth, distancing himself from the whip-slice of renewed pain with his own music. He's dimly glad to notice that his voice is steady, somehow.

"Wei Ying is dead."

[we_bring_hell]

She's intrigued, in a distant way, by the way their names work. It's no more complex than a system where she can be Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Harrowhark the Ninth, Lady Nonagesimus or the Reverend Daughter, but she doesn't know the rules and there's a fragment of her brain that worries at it.

It's a distraction from her feelings, which are chaotic and violent. "I thought so. I was told it was possible and--I thought so."

"I don't chose to sense that. You don't choose to see--" that I am a crime "--what you can see." Her voice is almost even.

[lightamidchaos]

"You told me. That you were a necromancer. When we met."

The Song of Clarity swirls around them. He needs the complexity of the music now, for both their sakes.

"Why does it matter? What I sense?"

[we_bring_hell]

He doesn't know. Of course. He has no idea what he's seeing. She closes her eyes.

Harrowhark is a genius. She knows this like she knows the bones of her hand. She knows it is the only thing that makes the crime of her even marginally redeemable.

So why can't she stop being stupid?

"What you see is not because I'm a necromancer," she manages, before the chains of the Locked Tomb wrap around her throat again.

[lightamidchaos]

He remembers thinking that it was unlikely a fierce corpse would be so polite.

(Wen Ning's face floats in his mind's eye for an instant before he forcibly puts the image aside.)

"Why, then?"

[we_bring_hell]

She raises her hands to to press against her eyes. Behind the veil her mouth works soundlessly.

"I cannot," she says finally. "I thought you already knew."

"I cannot confess it, even now. I thought perhaps I could." Her voice sounds compressed; almost frantic. "Ask Wei Wuxian. Tell him I give him permission. You do not lie, isn't that true?"

[lightamidchaos]

"Lying is forbidden in the Cloud Recesses. It is a sect rule."

He pours a little more energy into the music, concerned at her rising tension.

She is like me. Doesn't that bother you?

"I will ask him. You need not say."

[we_bring_hell]

She exhales, and her cruel mouth strikes again without her conscious intent. "You are an upright young man, Hanguang-jun," she says, images of Silas the Eighth and his white robes flashing before her eyes.

(Good. Now we need not speak again.)

"You may not wish to share your gifts with a black nun once you know what I am."