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[we_bring_hell]

Harrow has requested a box of makeup from the Bar and is prepared to consecrate it, so that she can resume her effigial rites. However, first she wants to take stock of what is in the box and make sure all the pieces are there.

She is reviewing and cataloging a dozen or so sticks of makeup ranging from alabaster white to abyssal black and a variety of grey and ivory tones in between. She is wearing black trousers and a black hoodie, with a veil wrapped around the lower part of her face.

Comments

[we_bring_hell]

"Yes," she says. "The Ninth was built to guard it. It is why I was born. Why my parents ended two hundred lives."

It comes out, just like that. Her mother's superstition had always irritated her, but the salt water does help. She licks her lips and tastes her own blood mixed with salt spray.

[lightamidchaos]

Starlight shines down on them both, soft and gleaming.

O corse of the Locked Tomb, beloved dead, hear your servants--

"Your duty."

--to the reverence of thee, sleeper who must never wake--

At the horizon, the moon is beginning to rise, casting a silver path over the water. The icy darkness of before is no longer present.

[we_bring_hell]

"My everything," she says, simply.

"Come a little closer, Hanguang-jun," she says, with chilly formality, "and hear the rest of the tale of a black nun of Drearburh. Learn why the other Houses call me heretic. Someone must be told. Why not you, why not now?"

The wounds around her mouth are bleeding again.

[lightamidchaos]

He remains still for a moment, watching her, assessing.

My mother had a strict rule that if such things must be discussed, we did it in salt water--

Without saying a word, Lan Wangji walks forward into the ocean. The ebb and flow of the tide drags at his robes, but he continues until he reaches her side.

[we_bring_hell]

He's so damn tall.

She inhales; exhales. She's soaked through, and the water is blood-warm. She feels like she's floating. (Maybe some of that's blood loss.)

"Ten thousand years ago, or a little less, God defeated... something. Something he could not kill, but only lay to rest. Something he could not defeat again. And so the Ninth House was built to hold the Tomb, and he set a seal on it that only he could open."

"Some say the Ninth was never meant to last this long; that the Tomb should have been left to itself long ago. Some say we are heretics who worship the creature that even God feared." She blinks; her eyelashes, long and ridiculously lush for someone so concerned with modesty, are crusting with salt.

"My parents wiped out a generation to ensure their child was a necromancer to continue our watch. They left it to me to figure out how the House would survive with only two children and average age of 65. I was told from the moment I could comprehend it what I had cost and what problem I had to solve."

"You pity me for this, I know. You should not. A head start is the only advantage you can claim by choice. And even with mine, I am not smart enough. Not good enough."

She stops to catch her breath.

"But by the time I was twelve years old I was smart enough to open the tomb."

[lightamidchaos]

He turns to stare at her.

"You opened it."

Incredulity paints his words. The locked and sealed tomb, the ghost of which -- surely it was a ghost presence, somehow, he cannot imagine that the physical vault could have crossed the worlds so -- brought with it a whirling vortex of resentful energy, and Harrow had opened it?

[we_bring_hell]

"I went inside," she says. "I wanted to see what it was all for. I had just about made up my mind that if I thought it wasn't I'd--"

"Well. No matter. I went inside, and I came back out, and my parents had found out, and they killed themselves," she says. Extremely matter-of-fact. Blank, staring at the starlight reflecting off the water.

[lightamidchaos]

His already abysmal opinion of her parents, who had murdered two hundred children, plummets to subterranean levels.

"Because it was opened?"

[we_bring_hell]

"Yes," she says. "They had sold their souls for me, bet everything on me, and I had failed. I had worse than failed. I had done the unspeakable. I had done the thing I was born to prevent."

"They had a noose for me, too, but I..." She shakes her head. "Well, obviously I did not, because here I am."

"I was ready to die if she wasn't worth it," she says. "But she was. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen or ever have. I have lived every day since as the devoted handmaiden of a sleeping corpse. I have become everything the Ninth is accused of being."

[lightamidchaos]

He stands silent for some time, right hand at the small of his back and left at his side, considering all of this. Slowly, the tide begins to roll in, soaking both of them more with each wave.

Lan Wangji suspects that Harrow expects him to -- do something. Strike at her, perhaps, whether with blade or music, or even merely depart in disgust, rejecting her and her necromancy and her tomb and her corpse.

He knows that there are those in his own sect of Gusu Lan (not to mention the other Great Sects) who would expect him to do the same.

"She still sleeps? In the tomb?"

He glances sideways at her.

"I assume she must. You have said it, and the energy was..."

[we_bring_hell]

She doesn't--quite--expect it. It might be more accurate to say that she wants him to do it. Wants to prove that she is a monster and settle the matter once and for all.

"She still sleeps," Harrow says. "But I have been--haunted by her. Sometimes I see her where she cannot be. Or hear things. No one has ever been able to see it before, not even other necromancers. And it has been a long time since it was this--"

She almost says bad and feels deeply, obscurely, ashamed. "--powerful."

"I have often thought I am simply insane. But hallucination or not, I am her creature. There has never been anyone else. But lately..." She lets that trail off, not ready to look it in the face.

[lightamidchaos]

"Haunted."

That is something he understands. Something Wei Ying would understand, as well.

"First is to liberate," he says, referring back to the three options for dealing with an unquiet spirit or ferocious ghost that he had told her of before. "Second, to suppress, and third, to eliminate."

"If she is suppressed in the tomb, the suppression may be weakening. If it cannot be strengthened, then you must be."

[we_bring_hell]

"Lan Wangji," she says carefully, in case it wasn't clear before. "I love her, do you understand?"

"I am having a crisis, I am bleeding to death in a tidepool, because I love her and I feel guilty about Griddle. Exorcism is not the solution to this problem." She sounds hysterical, even to herself. She is very, very tired.

[lightamidchaos]

"Yes. I understood that."

It would have been impossible for him not to, with how Harrow had spoken of being the sleeper's devoted handmaiden, with the look he had seen on her face when she had stared at the tomb.

I am a monster. Does it frighten you, that monsters can love and be loved? It terrifies me.

"There is more than one problem."

But at this precise moment, it appears the more immediate one is not one that he had realized, before.

"I did not know you were still bleeding. Come."

He turns partly toward the shore, but does not move. Instead, he waits for her to stand, watching her with a pointed look.

[we_bring_hell]

She sighs. She is being punished for her little moment of drama, she supposes, and has no one to blame but herself. She pushes herself to her feet, and it's much harder than she expected it to be. The water feels heavy, and the night air unwelcoming.

Perhaps she had waited too long.

She wipes the blood from her lips again. "It's mostly coagulated," she says defensively.

[lightamidchaos]

"Mn."

It is amazing how much disapproval a single syllable can convey.

"Come," he says again, and takes the first steps toward the shore -- but slowly enough to keep pace with her or react, should she either falter or fail to move at all.

[we_bring_hell]

She follows him as far as the shore, where the bag of symbols and the box wait. She stoops to pick up the box and surprises even herself by getting it off the ground, although she feels distinctly less stable than she did.

She feels chastened, and groggy; she has never been drunk, but any drunk who has ever been herded somewhere by long-suffering sober friends would know the feeling. She hums a song under her breath.

[lightamidchaos]

He reaches to catch her arm before she can carry the box away.

"Wait."

He nods at her hands.

"Bandages."

[we_bring_hell]

She wobbles back when he snags her, and exasperatedly puts the box back down. "I did bring some," she says. She just can't remember where she set them down. She looks around the dark sand.

"Is Wei Wuxian all right? I mean--I assume he is, because you would never be here if he wasn't, but I realize deductions are invisible and from the outside I just look like a heartless narcissist. So I am asking."

"There they are."

She really doesn't feel well. She tries to instruct her body to make more blood to replace what she's lost, but this doesn't seem to be a good time to do theorems.

[lightamidchaos]

He steers her to a nearby rock that has a relatively flat top and is tall enough to serve as a decent seat, then goes to retrieve the package she had indicated.

"He is sleeping."

Without asking, he takes her left wrist and turns her hand palm-up, studying it.

The salt water has washed it clean, at least. He takes one of the cut-cloth pieces and presses it flat against the wound, then picks up one of the rolls of lighter-weight cloth and begins to wrap her hand.

[we_bring_hell]

"Good," she says.

And then, abruptly; "I'm sorry."



"You can tell him what I told you. If it comes up. I mean, I assume anything I say to one of you is to both anyway. One flesh, one end, and all that."

[lightamidchaos]

He gives her a strange look at the last statement, but nods anyway, acknowledging the permission she is granting.

"He did not ask. Nor did I. About the ritual."

As he talks, he finishes with her left hand and reaches for her right, then repeats the process.

"You said you did not expect it, either. Everything that happened."

[we_bring_hell]

She shakes her head. "I was worried he might have a bad reaction after what happened the other day. Or that you might find it distasteful. But I didn't expect... That."

[lightamidchaos]

"No one did."

He ties the bandage in place and considers her.

"Dry clothes. Soup or tea; something hot. Rest. We will talk more, when Wei Ying is awake."

[we_bring_hell]

She stares at him a long moment, clearly struggling.

"I am a bad person to care about, Lan Wangji. Isn't that clear by now?"

"You want to forgive me because you think I'm like Wei Wuxian, and if you accept him you have to accept me. But I'm not like him."

"I--" She laughs mirthlessly. "My heart is an autoclave."