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

[ninth_cavalier]

"Oh—here? You don't want to, like, sit somewhere? Should I pose?" She strikes a bodybuilder pose—one arm up, fist curled and bicep locked, the other curled down at her side, and then immediately relaxes out of it with a little laugh.

[onthewillowsthere]

It's not a bad pose for showing her musculature, and he attempts to make a face that reflects that, raising his eyebrows slightly. "We can sit."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Okay, uh," Gideon looks around, then jerks her head over at a sitting room off the hallway they're in, abandoning her half-peeled wall. Despite asking, she doesn't sit—she's not much for sitting, generally—and instead puts one foot up on an ottoman and leans on her knee while waiting for Galahad to choose where he wants to be.

[onthewillowsthere]

That's also pretty good. Galahad pulls a chair over where he wants it and settles into it, sketchbook in his lap. The charcoal pencils Laertes made him have little imperfections that make the process of drawing in some ways more pleasing -- he likes when the points are worn on an angle and create a thick textured line that's like a paintbrush.

"Stay like that," he instructs her; he already has pencil to paper. He hasn't drawn anyone with muscles like hers before, and the challenge of it is as pleasing as the charcoals. He lets his hand sweep each curve before coming back to shade in details, savors the tactile nature of sketching. It's soothing.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon stays. Thankfully it's a relatively easy stance to hold, and she has good balance.

She zones out, a bit, in the quiet; there's a window in this room that looks out across the grounds, and she watches the wind in the trees.

There's a figure trudging back toward the woods; too tall to be Magnus. Little John, then. "Hey," she says, "jumpy. Do you know how to fish?"

[onthewillowsthere]

"No." It's easier to talk when his attention is focused on something else -- in this case, getting the short locks of her hair just right. "Percival fished for us. My friend at home."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon nods, spends exactly two seconds imagining Harrow trying to fish, and then cracks up. "Hey, speaking of—you didn't mention the gifts you had us summon were supposed to be romantic."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I said it was a gift for your person," as he shades an unruly curl of hair. "Mine was for Claudius."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Yeah," admits Gideon, "but." She goes quiet for a few moments. "I guess when most people hear that, they do think romance." And like—she's not fucking stupid. She's had her little revelation about this already. She knows what it means, when she sees Harrowhark in the glory of her skinny, furious, impossible power and everything in her starts chanting eat me, eat me, eat me. But—

But what? If she'd known, she wouldn't have chosen embossed skull truck nuts? She would have found something else, something actually meaningful, something that conveyed what she really meant in a way that she'd never been able to say in words, except maybe once, in the depths of a subterranean pool? One flesh, one end, bitch. Get real. She'd tried to give Harrow a gift, the only one she had, in the split seconds before coming here, and either Harrow or the universe had rejected it.

She shakes her head. "Nevermind. The truck nuts were still a good joke."

[onthewillowsthere]

"They were a good joke," he agrees, gaze flicking up for a moment to confirm a detail. "Why did you realize what I meant?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Oh, Crowley told me," says Gideon. "He said he summoned a book for Aziraphale as part of the same experiment." She squints a little. "I don't think the gun was a romantic gift, either, unless something real weird is going on."

[onthewillowsthere]

This time Galahad does look up. "You're still wrong. He is too. A gift for your person doesn't have to be romantic. I also said someone you love. Susan made one for her brother¹."

¹She didn't, but he doesn't know that.

[ninth_cavalier]

"Oh," says Gideon. "Yeah—fair enough." That's—more comfortable. Easier. Was the ghost thinking about someone they loved, then? Someone they wanted to kill god with, and Gideon was just the most useful vessel? "I think I did figure out the gun thing, though—uh, Lan Wangji says my sword is haunted. And the ghost involved wants to kill God."

[onthewillowsthere]

He looks at her, and there is in this moment an intensely Lan Wangji-esque aspect to the way he says, "What," so flat it might as well be explain.

[ninth_cavalier]

"The nunnery I'm from," says Gideon. "It's also a prison planet. I think the ghost was imprisoned there, and it was Blood of Eden before it died. That's the symbol on the gun, you remember? The drop of blood, the snake."

[onthewillowsthere]

"I remember." He can picture it exactly, the red drop of blood, the black snake with its fangs bared. The way Gideon dropped it like a burning coal.

[ninth_cavalier]

"Yeah," says Gideon. "So. I think it, like, also did your experiment? And the gift was the gun. Who knows who it was for, though."

[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."