007. atone

[outsidebones]

cw: suicide

You are Harrowhark Nonegesimus, ten years old, a tiny genius. You are the pride of every member of your House, though they are adults, every one of them, the youngest seventeen years your senior, and most octogenarians, and then your parents, even more proud, even though your mother almost never speaks and neither of them can stand to look at you for long even with their evident pride. There are no other children in your house except one, the brawny, angry red-haired girl a year older than you, the only one here who doesn’t look at you with a combination of awe and fear.

One day, you come upon the orphan girl in the tombs, next to the niche where they buried the braindead corpse she was found with, lugging about her stupid sword, a piece of garbage she found in the catacombs and has insisted on carrying everywhere with her ever since like she knows how to use it. She’s speaking to the burial niche, carrying on a conversation, telling it she loves it and calling it mum, and you utterly loathe Gideon Nav, so you taunt her for this and explode bone shrapnel in her eyes. And you fight, the way only two furious, love-starved children can. You taunt her, and she has you on your back, bigger and stronger, and she wraps her hands around your neck and chokes you until your vision goes black, and she says I bet my mother loved me a lot more than yours loves you as you claw desperately at her face. When she lets go, you aren’t dead, but you can’t even stand. You crawl away, and you throw up, and you lie there in the crypt with your neck throbbing unable to breathe, hands bloody, and you decide that you will die.

You have a few plans, for dying. You could go to the surface and walk and walk until your oxygen runs out, or you could smash the sealant to the crypts and suffocate, or you could simply stow away on a shuttle and drift off into the coldness of space. But even at ten, you are ever so goth, so instead you go to the one place you are not permitted, the place you have always been taught will bring about the apocalypse should it ever be opened. Every day in your prayers in the chapel you pray with bone prayer beads between your hands that the rock will never be rolled away, but you walk into the tomb, and you break the locks, and you roll away the rock with your bloodied hands, because you are every ounce the necromancer you were created to be.

And inside, you see something that makes you decide not to die after all. The thing inside the Locked Tomb that your family guards and worships and fears is a woman, frozen and dead, and she is beautiful. You sneak back the next day, and the day after, and you stare upon her, both in the thrill of the little you can make out of her beneath the ice she’s encased in and the thrill of the blasphemy you have done, the one thing even the Reverend Daughter is not permitted to do.

And then, when you leave the tomb, you see that smug, hateful little cuckoo Gideon, and she catches you, and she runs off before you can stop her.

When you next enter the familial chambers of Castle Drearburh, they are waiting for you. Your father, so stern and tired, your mother, as always, never speaking, and their elderly red faced cavalier primary, Mortus. They are so terrified of what you have done, and they are so kind. It is only that you have brought the apocalypse upon them, and more than that, you have proven the lie of their every justification of the events that brought you into the world. There is so much regret and sorrow in your father’s eyes as he delivers the instructions and helped Mortus onto his chair, and your mother is the most kind and gentle as she has ever been to you as she ties her own noose and then helps you tie yours.

You watch what they do, you owe them that much, but you cannot do the rest of what the Ninth House has asked you. You gazed upon the Tomb and decided to live. So you wait in the room with your mother and father and old Mortus, purpling and hanging from the rafters, and you wait, until you are discovered by Nav hiding outside the door.