eggos | (no subject)

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Eleven likes the library. She likes learning, and she likes knowing and understanding things. She's not a stupid person. She learns 'remarkably quickly,' according to her teachers, which she thinks is a good thing, even if they always seem surprised when they say it. Right now, she has a stack of books about a variety of different topics, and she's sitting in a corner by herself, leafing through them. It's not homework. It's just... studying. For fun.

She's learning about cats, right now. She has one at home that she needs to take care of, and she wants to learn everything she can about them so she knows she's doing the best she can for him. The book she's reading keeps referencing another book, though. A different book, one not in her stack. She sighs and sets it aside, then stands and starts looking through the shelves for the right title.

There it is. She reaches for it, then frowns. It's just out of reach, not more than six inches. She glances around for a stool or a ladder, but there isn't one immediately in range. She waits a few seconds, to see if any library staff walks by. Nothing. She sighs.

Looking back up at the book she needs, Eleven frowns at it. She debates for a second or two on if she should even use her powers. A step onto the shelf would do the trick, probably. But she doesn't know if it'll support her weight. She's not large, but she's not a book, either. Finally, she reaches up for it again.

It flies into her outstretched hand and she grips it, then opens it right there and starts flipping through the pages, without even bothering to look around to see if anyone had noticed.

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Harrow still hasn't forgiven them for the post-disappearance insult of charging her fines for books they hadn't even been available to receive, but unless and until she enrolls at Barton, the Darrow Public Library is regrettably her most-frequented location in town. She's browsing the shelves, a thin, bony figure all in black, when she comes around the corner in time to see another, younger girl pulling books from the shelves with little more than a concentrated look on her face and an extension of her hand. In a way, it's impressive--and deeply suspicious. Harrow's dark eyes narrow, but she steps closer.

"What was that?"

Eleven's eyes go huge and she lifts her head from her book to stare at the shelving in front of her. Slowly, she turns to look towards the voice, eyes still wide.

"What was what," she echoes, but she's never been good at lying.

The look Harrow gives her is flatly unimpressed. "Deflection and obfuscation work poorly when someone's already witnessed you moving things with a mere wave of your hand." There is the whisper of doubt at the back of her mind, the coldly mocking voice that reminds her of her chronic insanity, asking can you trust the evidence of your own eyes, Harrowhark?, but she brushes it off, smothers it until it dies--or at least subsides. She knows what she saw, and she knows that it was real; that is enough.

"I ask again. What was that?"

That earns a little frown. She does look around, this time, and then steps a bit closer.

"Against the rules," she says. "I'm not supposed to show anyone. I... wasn't thinking." She looks around again, then begins hovering the book above her hand. She spins it in the air, then lowers it into her palm again. A small dribble of blood slides out from one nostril. "I don't know what to call it. Not magic." Not like Daine's. They'd talked about it.

The trick with the book is as remarkable the second time as the first, more so because Harrow cannot detect a familiar signature--thanergenic or thalergenic--powering the theorem, if a theorem it was. She has her doubts on that front, and the mystery therein both disturbs and intrigues. What catches her attention most, though, is the nosebleed; that is all too recognizable, and all too recent a memory.

While Harrow's expression grows no less imperious, her rigid posture relaxes, just fractionally. "A distressing number of my acquaintances would say rules are bullshit," she says. "I do not always agree, but in this case..."

Her lips pinch, her ears attuned to the sound of someone else approaching--her Lyctoral senses, too, listening for the wet and repulsive sound of a heartbeat--for a moment before she lifts a hand and works a bone stud out of her ear. "A fair exchange," she says, then presses the rounded bit of bone to the side of the nearest bookshelf. Almost on contact, it unfolds itself, roots itself to the wood with barbed hooks of bone on one end while the other moves upwards, shaping itself into the long bones of the arm, then blossoming into a perfectly articulated hand. It reaches up, plucking a book from the highest shelf before moving to lay it on Harrow's outstretched palm. Her dark eyes cut over to the other girl's, her expression just slightly smug.

Eleven stares at it. It should be gross, or scary, or weird, but it's none of those things. Instead, it's interesting, and she reaches out to touch it, careful that she doesn't hurt it on accident.

"Bone magic," she says, then looks at the girl. "Thalergy and thanergy. Like Palamedes?"

The girl's first reaction, that fascinated awe and the hesitant way she reaches towards the construct, is close enough to what Harrow had been hoping for. It settles pleasantly over her, that sense of being appreciated, being beheld in even this small fraction of her power--only to be snatched away at the last moment when terms the girl ought not to know come falling out of her mouth. Her tight-pinched face screws up even further.

"Not like Palamedes," she says. Harrow studies her, realizing with no small amount of irritation that she has to look up into the face of this adolescent. Her eyes narrow. "He is...a competent necromancer, but his facility with bone is unequal to mine." She lets that sit in the air for a moment. "But...you do have the terms correct. I will grant that."

She thinks, at first, that maybe she'd upset the girl. It seems like she doesn't like Palamedes very much — or maybe she just doesn't like anything very much. But she isn't being rude, so El has no reason to dislike her yet. She even concedes that Palamedes had taught her the right words.

"Neck-rome-answer," she echoes, much like she had the first time she'd heard the word. "You can make skeletons walk around, too?"

"That cannot be what Sextus reduced it to," Harrow says with no small amount of horror. A series of expressions from the disgusted to the murderous cross her face, before she lets out a sigh and closes her eyes. "Yes," she says stiffly. "I can make skeletons walk around. And I am adept at far more things than just that. I am the greatest necromancer of my generation."

One corner of her mouth quirks up; even if none of the others from home are there to hear her say it--and given their likely reactions, Harrow's glad they're not--it still satisfies her on a deep and abiding level.

She makes a lot of expressions in rapid succession, and Eleven frowns, worried she's upset her. Then she seems to accept what she's heard, even if she still doesn't like it. El doesn't know what makes a neck-rome-answer great, but the girl in front of her seems proud of herself, so she smiles a little, too.

"Bitchin'," she says with a nod. "I'm El."

Bitchin' is definitely a thing she's heard out of Gideon's mouth before, and Harrow has the briefest moment of horror wondering if this child has met not only her necromantic rival, but her infuriating sham of a cavalier as well. It wouldn't surprise her; Gideon's made connections in Darrow far beyond anything she might have dreamed of on Drearburh, friendships more solid than whatever the Cohort could have provided. She'd always dreamed of popularity--and now she has it.

"Harrowhark the First," she says, letting the rote formality of introductions push away that turn in her thoughts. "Ninth saint to..." She trails off then, the words tasting oddly false, oddly stiff and ashen, in her mouth. She lets out a sigh. "I'm Harrow."

"Harrow," she echoes. She knows that's a word, but she hadn't realized it was a name, too. Then again, most people don't know that 'Eleven' is her name. It's supposed to be a number. She frowns, though, thoughtfully. "How can you be first, and ninth?"

"One is a shift in identity, the other a mark of..." Harrow finds she can't quite make sense of the appropriate word, the clearest description to explain her new position in the world. The thing she'd bought with the bloodiest price. "Status," she says eventually, after a too-long pause that twists unpleasantly in her gut. "The Emperor and all who serve him are members of the First House, and for the myriad of his reign, there have only been nine who've ascended to Lyctor. To necromantic sainthood, of a kind. I am the last. The ninth."

Eleven doesn't know what a Lyctor is, or what myriad means, but she knows what an emperor is, and her eyebrows go up a little.

"You worked for an emperor?" she asks, hoping she'd understood that. "Was he nice? School says they aren't always nice."

"He is the god who became man, the man who became God," she says, though she knows it's not an answer to El's question. "If he is kind, it is by his will alone. If he is cruel, it is a rebuke well-deserved. It cannot be...conventional questions of nice or mean don't enter into it. It's impossible."

Harrow thinks of the Emperor's kindly smile, the tea and the biscuits and the frayed collars of his shirts. The patience in his every dealing with her, even at her most disgraceful, and the tone of his voice when he'd said You'd make a hell of a daughter, Harrowhark. It sickens her as badly now as it had then, a lurch in her stomach that has her wishing for something sharp and brittle to cast herself onto. In the absence of nothing else, she digs her nails into her palm, lengthening them just enough to hurt.

"Yes," she says. "He was nicer than I deserved."

El doesn't think a man can become a god, any more than she believes a god can become a man. It sounds like Papa, like someone who makes themselves bigger than they are, to scare people into doing what they want. But she doesn't say that. Instead, she says, "Why do you think you didn't deserve it?"

That question slams the doors in Harrow's expression again, her thin, pointed face going rigid and cold. The truth claws inside her ribcage and tries to fight its way up her throat, and she shoves it down again, sinks it as fully as she can--just as she'd done her whole life. Just as she'd had to do, because she learned too well the consequences of indiscretion.

"I do not think," she says. "I know. And the reasons why are mine to hold."

"Oh," she says. She frowns, watching the girl with something like concern and something like sadness. It would be easy to leave it like this. It's probably what Harrow wants. For El to end the questions there, or turn them back to something easier.

She doesn't do that.

"Did you do something bad?"

El's pity is an insult, the stark clarity of it on her face only disgusting Harrow further--and when the question comes, it's the final, shattering blow to whatever fragile thing they'd been building between them. Harrow's fingers twitch, the skeleton arm still hanging off the bookshelf duplicating itself in an instant. It multiplies into a network of arms, a screen and shield to keep the younger girl back as Harrow turns and starts to flee.

Eleven doesn't understand why Harrow seems so angry. It's on her face, and then a moment later, barely a breath, she's leaving. She frowns, then calls, "I'm sorry," lifting her voice a little so she knows she's heard. She hadn't meant to upset her with her questions. She'd just wanted to know. The screen of arms might scare her, if she didn't know there was an exit to the row at the back. It is a little uncomfortable to look at, though, so she backs away from it, unsure if Harrow has even heard her or if she's going to turn back.

Harrow ignores the thin sound of El's voice, the apology too little and far too late, carrying a confusion she can't address. She doesn't stop until she reaches the front of the library, and even then it's just a moment's pause, a twitch of her fingers to crumble the bones into a dust that filters slowly down and onto the library floor. Once it's done, she pushes the door open, stepping back out into the harsh, bright light of the afternoon.

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