Open Post: The Arms of the Emperor are Never Idle

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon spends her mornings in the practice yard, bright and early, despite the cold. She jogs and stretches to get her blood pumping and her muscles warm before she draws her sword, and then after drills she brings Tally her coffee, and then after that it's back to more sword—unless Tally hauls her off to some other activity, which she pretends to hate but is secretly devastatingly grateful for. The absolute worst part of this place is all the time. Endless stretches of time, with barely any work to be done.

In some ways it's just like the Ninth—except on the Ninth she knew her exits. They were few, sure, and near-impossible, but she knew them: buy her way out, fight her way out, trick her way out, or truly earn it.

None of those apply, here.

She breaks for lunch, and wanders the halls trying to locate various Clues and Mysteries that might end up giving her a way out, and mostly just finds people. More and more people.

She's not antisocial. She likes the people here, more than she's openly liked anyone in her life, individually or as a group. But a gnawing restlessness keeps her on the move rather than letting her time fill up with idle conversation as so many here do. She's always hunting for something to keep her busy, to wear out her body so that when she sleeps her mind is forced to rest rather than serving her a lovely buffet of the worst things she's ever seen and even worse things she hasn't, the things she was yoinked away just in time to miss.

Sometimes it even works.

[This post is open in perpetuity until something happens to make me close it, at which point I will edit it and say so! Feel free to find Gideon in the morning doing sword drills, or tooling around inside, opening and closing drawers and trying peel the wallpaper off in case there's flesh underneath.]

Comments

[onthewillowsthere]

That's something he definitely wants to tell Kade about. He nods, and then, on a whim, begins shading the disc of a halo around her head.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon is silent for a while, glancing sideways at Galahad occasionally. "I still want to go home," she says, finally. If anything the gun, the ghost, it all makes her want to go home more, get herself back into a space where someone will know more than she does about what's happening. "But—I think it might take a long time. How do you, like. How do you be?"

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad is silent for so long that it might begin to seem as though he's not actually planning to answer. He works on the drawing, which is beginning to be what he wants it to be; he tries to convey the strangeness of her eyes, as yellow as Lan Wangji's.

When he does speak, it's abrupt in the silence. "It was hard. Magnus told me I had to find small purposes, because the purpose of my life was gone." The soft scratch of his pencil on the thick, creamy sketchbook paper. "I chose things. Small choices. Because I wasn't allowed to have choices before. I wanted to die, but I did small things of no value." He glances up again. "I still despair. But most of the time I'm happy to be here."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Small choices," Gideon echoes. It feels kind of impossible. Like, aren't all her choices here limited anyway, just like they used to be? She can't leave, she can't speak to the people she most wants to speak to, she can't die--not and have it mean anything. But those are all the big things. The smaller scale... finding out the flavors she likes with Sagramore at his feast. Choosing outfits with Tally. Stuff that's about her, and only her.

It's weird to think about. All of the choices she's made for herself have been defiant, before. Calculated to piss someone, somewhere, off, and that's just another way to choose based on someone else. That--haptic feedback, the friction, the reaction, was a guidepost. You must be doing something right. Everyone is looking. "How do you know if you're choosing the right stuff?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"I don't. I just try things. It's hard sometimes."

[ninth_cavalier]

That's--dissatisfying, but it's not like it's Galahad's job to solve her restlessness problem. She guesses she's happy for him that it seems to be working. She straightens up with a sigh, and then freezes. "Oh, sorry--can I move?"

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad looks down at the drawing. "Yes. Thank you." Then, suddenly lifting his head again, "You're allowed to choose someone else. When the person you love isn't coming. You can choose people here."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon stares at him for a long time, no I'm not on the tip of her tongue. But she doesn't say it. "I'm sworn to the Ninth House," she says, finally. "Cavalier primary to Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the greatest necromancer of her age. And I only found out what that meant a few days before I got here." She sinks down in the chair properly, her chin in her hand. "I didn't choose it in the first place. But I chose it again, at the end, and that matters. It--needs to matter. I don't know how to choose someone else, or someones else, without making it not matter anymore."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Percival chose me." He sets the sketchbook down and draws his knees up on the chair. "God chose him for me, but when I met him he chose me. Before him I was alone, and after him I was never alone." A pause -- talking about Percival feels important, but it's also hard; it reminds him that Percival isn't coming back. "I miss him. He's-- he's good. A good person. And I won't see him again. If I waited for him-- I could wait for him. But then I would be alone again."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon takes a long breath, and then lets it out. "And it's not like waiting would make him show up any faster. Or—make him show up at all."

[onthewillowsthere]

He nods; Gideon understands what he's saying. "I love Claudius, and Magnus and Shen Yuan. I chose them. I haven't stopped loving Percival. But I chose them."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon doesn't know who Shen Yuan is, but Magnus and Galahad being close makes sense to her. Novel fucking idea, having friends—having friends who don't die or turn out to be disguised ghouls the minute you decide you're friends, anyway. Not that she and Dulcinea were friends, exactly, but—agh.

She wants to scrub her hands over her face, but she's in her paint, so she settles for scrubbing them through her hair again, nails against her scalp. "Right. I—fuck it. Okay."

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad gazes at her, quiet, waiting.

[ninth_cavalier]

"I'm teaching Tally self-defense," Gideon says. "She's—she helps. Gives me shit to do. And I'm sparring a lot. With—your dad, actually, and Lan Wangji." Is that right? she wants to ask. Is this what you mean? But he's just said she won't know, that no one can tell her, that she just has to do it. "I'm—I am. Trying." She closes her eyes. "It's hard."

[onthewillowsthere]

"It's hard. And-- sometimes I don't think about it for a while, and when I do I feel-- ashamed. For not remembering what I've lost. Sometimes I can't think of anything else. I want to go back. I want to stay here. I can't-- get up. Out of bed."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon nods. Now that he's named it, it's so obvious that what she's feeling is shame—a deep, horrible well of shame at the idea of giving up, of taking back her sacrifice, of enjoying herself when so many people never will again. Not just Harrow and Camilla and the others, but a generation of children of the Ninth. She and Harrow are the same: survivors of something they never chose, inheritors of an impossible weight of death. They've struggled beneath it their whole lives, hating it and each other, and they were supposed to be compressed together under its squirming mass into one being, one fucked up vessel for vengeance and glory and eternal duty.

She wasn't supposed to be able to live. She wasn't supposed to be able to leave.

She stands up, abruptly, and crosses to Galahad. She leans down and pulls his forehead to her forehead like a Ninth nun paying obeisance to the carved obsidian skull of Anastasia the First. She breathes in, once—one for the Emperor, first of us all—and then releases him, straightening back up. "I think," she says unsteadily, "that I am really, really angry."

[onthewillowsthere]

"Yes."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon sucks in another breath. Two is for discipline, heedless of trial. "Cool," she says, and sits down on the floor next to Galahad's knees. "Fuck."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I want to be beautiful," softly, "because there's no reason for it. I am made to be a weapon. An object with a purpose. I want to feel beautiful because it has no purpose. Like the frog."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon looks up at him, the corner of her mouth turning upward despite herself. Three for the gleam of a jewel or a smile. "The frog?"

[onthewillowsthere]

He takes the bone frog from his pocket; he always has it with him.

[ninth_cavalier]

"Oh," says Gideon, and smiles for real, small and quiet. Four for fidelity, facing ahead. She tucks her knees up to her chest. "Yeah."

[onthewillowsthere]

Galahad tucks the frog away again, and just sits with her, then, running through his own prayer. And they shall see his face; and his name shall be in their foreheads. And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.