That Bit In Gtn Where "protesilaus" Draws On Gideon While She's Kneeling Over Cytherea, And After He

that bit in gtn where "protesilaus" draws on gideon while she's kneeling over cytherea, and after he stands down, harrow comes up behind her to chew out cytherea about it, and she's got her thumb pressed to the place where protesilaus's sword was the entire time. like. gideon takes it as a threatening gesture in the moment, but was it? i don't think so. if anything, if feels protective. posessive. he could've killed her so easily. is she trying to check for damage, just to be sure? is she only reassuring herself that he didn't actually hurt gideon? is she trying to make the point to cytherea that gideon is spoken for, that there's someone looking out for her? is it a completely unconscious gesture, born only from her impulse to place herself between protesilaus's sword and the back of gideon's neck?

harrow is rattled by that incident on several levels and one of them, i think, is her realization of how dangerous this challenge is. she could've lost gideon. she could've lost her, right there, immediately. and of course gideon doesn't, can't appreciate just how terrifying that was for her.

i don’t think the emperor or any of his surviving original lyctors can possibly comprehend how grateful they should be for whatever harrow’s done to scoop gideon out of her brain because if harrowhark nonagesimus was in possession of the the full knowledge that her first enemy and only friend in the whole world Gideon Nav had given her life so that Harrow could sit at a dining room table while God and his first two saints got wine drunk and argued about which of the cavaliers they’d murdered to achieve immortality was the most bangable and made your mom jokes then i do not believe there would be any force in the known or unknown universe that could keep her from deicide

good morning. thinking about “do you know, i miss harrow terribly” again.

imagine you are palamedes sextus. you spend twelve years exchanging letters with a woman who is seven years your senior. you become the heir to your house just to meet her as an equal. you love her to the point of invention. you both know that her time spent alive has an expiration date sooner than most, and so one day you decide to propose to her - even though you know that she can spend the rest of her life with you but you can’t with her, even though there are imperial rules forbidding interhouse marriages between necromancers, even though you’re here and she’s there and you’ve never even met in person - but you want her to spend her days with someone who cares about her. but you’re so young, only nineteen, and there are still all of those reasons listed above, and so she turns you down. but it isn’t because she doesn’t want to say yes. and then over the next year the letters come fewer and farther apart. and then you’re both invited to the emperor’s house - both of you, together, physically in the same place for the first time - and you show up and she’s here. and it’s like she doesn’t know you. she doesn’t spare you a glance. and you’re still so tender with her - you can’t help it, there’s care baked into you, and you can’t resist helping her, loving her, going so far as to kiss her knuckles in front of company - but still. she doesn’t acknowledge anything that happened between you. she’s moved on. she must have, because she’s spending all this time with the cavalier from the ninth - who is, by the way, two years younger than you, and that doesn’t escape your notice because nothing does - and what can you do? what are you supposed to do?

you tell your cavalier that you’re glad she’s spending time with someone who makes her laugh.

happy valentine's day who wants to throw themselves on a fence spike for me while reciting biblical wedding vows as your last words so i can consume your soul and gain immortality but after confronting god who says he cannot bring you back i become so overtaken with grief that i lobotomize myself to erase my ability to conceive of you in any capacity to prevent my body from absorbing and using you as an eternal battery after which i send myself to a purgatory dream state and you surface in control of my body and defend it from the alien bug soldiers of a murdered ghost planet that are trying to kill me for the sins of the emperor i worship and then i stay sleeping in hell while you end up back in your own body and then my body kisses your body but it's while being inhabited by the soul of the earth and eventually you try to sacrifice yourself for me again but you can't because you're dead now and then i wake up in my own body finally in the same room as you but i faint and get carried off by eldritch barbie before i can hear you assert your devotion to me by calling her a slut. either that or we could get coffee

i do find it hilarious that for most of gideon the ninth harrow is like “sextus your megatheorem idea is stupid. you’re jumping to conclusions. you have no evidence. your premises are flawed and your conclusion is both invalid and unsound. bitch.” and then when ianthe reveals the lyctoral process at the end of the book harrowhark is the FIRST PERSON to go “oh fuck. the megatheorem”