Title: the things I touch are made of stone
Fandom: The Locked Tomb Series (Tamsyn Muir)
Rating: T for Terrible Sixth House Coping Mechanisms
Length: 2,307
Content notes: "As Yet Unsent" spoilers. Grief; numbness; canon-typical light self-injury; Coronabeth Tridentarius is uncomfortable when we are not about her.
Summary: I didn't need a calendar. I could have counted it out in seconds, if not for the various times I'd been under sedation.



For six days after they gave me my hands back, I counted tally marks on my thigh. They'd been admirably careful to make sure I didn't have anything -- apart from the obvious -- that could possibly break skin, much less leave a mark on my prison walls, but my nails grow quickly. I managed to chip one down to a scratching edge before anyone would have thought it worth the trouble to cut them for me.

I was a model prisoner once they saw sense about the Warden, and they liked to consider themselves very reasonable. Once the restraints came off, Coronabeth managed to persuade them on my behalf that I didn't need supervision in the lav, although I think there was something on the door that raised an alert when I'd been in there more than five minutes. I did my calendar there, for six days, and then I realized that the first day's scratches would be healed over entirely when I went to do the seventh.

At no point did I seriously consider scarifying the marks. I want to be very clear about that. That would have required more resources and more time than I could reasonably anticipate, and I don't think I could have cut deep enough without resorting to use of the bone fragments. There was one that would have just about sufficed, but the Warden would never have trusted me with a damn thing if he'd believed for a second that I could wilfully contaminate his thalergetic signature in a fit of adolescent self-indulgence. Even direct skin contact would have been irresponsible, and needless to say I hadn't managed to keep the gloves.

In any case it wasn't hygienic. Neither was constantly reopening the shallow scratches, and there was no point. I didn't need a calendar. I could have counted it out in seconds, if not for the various times I'd been under sedation. Coronabeth did her best to catch me up on that, but she wasn't accurate to within more than a few hours, and she didn't try to persuade me otherwise.

I did a lot more physio, after I gave up on timekeeping. Right up to the edge of overtraining my injuries. They'd done something for those, but they must have done it while I was out, which annoyed me deeply. I had been perfectly capable of cooperating. The Warden would have pulled his own eyeteeth with pliers for a coherent firsthand description of what they were doing as far as curative science, and I doubted Captain Deuteros would ever be persuaded to give one. Even if she lived. I took what mental notes I could on what they were doing for her, but my data was patchy at best, and I am absolutely certain I must have misunderstood some parts very badly.

I had Coronabeth's company for my physio, after a while, which at least provided some novelty. She was either very curious about my techniques or an unsurprisingly good liar. I didn't particularly care which. It didn't escape me that she'd been getting extremely chummy with our captors, but as I had already benefited from it myself, I decided they were welcome to any Cohort secrets she could glean from my exercise program. It was only good protocol for her to know enough to spot me, anyway. And she was a fair learner.

Better than fair. On every front. Had I been in the Captain's place and yet retained my own capacity for craniorectal extraction, I would have been terrified of her. I should have been terrified of her in any case, but that seemed a waste of my time. It didn't escape me that if she once found a target to suit her, God help the rest of the universe, but neither did it escape me that the target in question would likely have her sister's pallid face tacked onto it. He may have trusted the Reverend Daughter implicitly, for reasons I had made myself take on faith, but he'd maintained a healthy and perfectly explicable abhorrence of Ianthe Tridentarius. A liminal magician with the sheer slithery ingenuity to reverse devise the Lyctoral process from first principles, and then the moral nullity to test it --

I knew the Warden would never forgive me if I resorted to dealing with her for his sake, but I was never the one with principles. I thought I could do worse than to follow where Coronabeth's new interests might lead.

Besides, she eventually persuaded someone to let her bring me some proper resistance bands, for which I became lastingly fond of her. They were made of that unpleasantly tacky chemical-smelling stuff that seemed to be locally in favor, but I was in no position to be fussy.

"I'm getting all sorts of toothache from everyone about trying to recruit you," she said, a little while after that. It wasn't in her golden-syrup voice, either. More dreamy and pointed. "King's cav f3."

"D5," I said.

"I keep telling them it can't be done, I honestly do, and if they don't know it by now. After you nearly put that lovely boy's eye out just for following orders. C4."

I heeled my palm into the place on my right thigh where I'd been keeping the days, before. One of the scratches, the last one, looked like becoming a pale thread-thin scar after all. It itched sometimes for no reason whatsoever. "D4," I said.

"I keep telling them," she said, "that I imagine you'd ford the River on whoever's backs were available, if it were the best way to get what you wanted. And since I never really thought the Sixth gave a single used hankie about the glory of the Emperor in the first place, it's silly expecting you to develop any grand cause now. But if they can get you something you do want, I expect you'll return fair value. That's what I've told them. B4."

I played like a children's primer for the rest of that game and the two following, just to remind her about consequences, and used the rest of my mind to count up the assorted incidental nicks and scrapes on the walls.

The next day, one of the guards finally brought me a heap of fat skin-soft books, which I set myself to work through in the spirit of pure sociology and respect for the likelihood that this was more real paper than the entirety of Archives had touched in my lifetime. They were naturally opposed to giving me anything useful, though, and the texts themselves were like wading through porridge. I was drearily aware that Xenoanth would have gone to war with the Fifth and the survivors stabbed one another en masse over primary claim on any single chapter of A Death on Deck Twelve, but I didn't have the cross-references to make it interesting. It beat talking to the Captain, sometimes, but only just.

A few days after that, I had a gun to my head, which was instructive. I don't remember feeling or thinking anything at the time, besides oh fuck and I'm sorry -- all things considered it wasn't what I'd call a fighter's weapon -- but I found myself welcoming the adrenal backwash afterwards. It left me curled limp and shivering on the floor of the lav, which was how I discovered to my amazed relief that my body could still experience anything at all besides numb competence and intermittent needleprick misery. If I'd been very, very stupid, I might have gone after that feeling again, although even then Coronabeth's fussing would have been a powerful deterrent.

It crossed my mind there, for the first time, that I might be on a fool's errand. That he might not have been as close to solving it -- I couldn't believe the Warden would lie to me, if the Warden would lie to me we all might as well breathe vacuum, but could he have been too optimistic? Could he possibly have believed that even if it was all but certain to fail, chasing shadows would -- what -- would keep me occupied until I got over him?

I'd known all along why she could never say yes, even if the politics of the whole wide Empire had unrolled themselves neatly to deliver her into his arms. She loved him too much and she would, eventually, have been too tired. It would have broken him to let her go without one more try, one more. It would have broken all of us.

I still had him. There was no one left who could even tell me how to count back as far as her death. I think acknowledging that, at last, must have been what set off the sniveling. Sometimes it's only the recognition of a new angle on the thing --

If I'd had the tiniest fraction of the brain the Warden liked to credit me with, I could have realized first. I could have gone to the thing that killed her. I could have let it talk until I knew that much at least. It had liked an audience, and I thought it had rather liked me.

I could imagine how much he'd hated listening to it. How it must have offended him.

He wouldn't have lied to me. And he wasn't a fool.

If he believed there was even one chance in a billion, then he was right. And it wasn't nothing. That had already been his favorite point of contention when he was too young to be reliable about the T-H in 'nothing.' Given a sufficiently broad sample size, one-in-a-billion odds must come in every day for someone; we may as well assume success. He hadn't gotten all those S's down, either, until we were almost seven.

I got off the floor of the lav and washed my face and did my physio and went to bed.

Coronabeth kept making awkward swooping flights of apology at me for the next day or so; I didn't think she knew herself whether she wanted to apologize for the gun or for Captain Deuteros' failure of alacrity in removing it, and she couldn't seem to believe that in either case I didn't hold any resentment. I told her that resentment was impossible if one had never, even momentarily, expected anything different.

She seemed to think I was being bitchy, but she also seemed to take that as somehow reassuring.

As the days went by, I think she came to feel that way about the entire meltdown. She was one of those people who like to see signs of life, as routinely and flamboyantly as possible. In her eyes, I must have established some basic credentials of humanity. It struck me as an exhausting way of looking at the world, but as things were going I didn't want to be unappreciative of anything that might help her empathize with me.

"Jody accuses me of having designs on you," she said a week later, which I did think was taking the concept of empathy a bit far.

"Do you?" It seemed like the logical next question, although I had no idea how I'd go about defusing if she said yes. Under other circumstances -- under other circumstances, I might have had anything at all to spare for the question of whether it could possibly be other than an inexcusably stupid idea. I didn't, and it couldn't.

Coronabeth snorted very unprincessishly. "Oh, but wouldn't she just pay to watch it," she said, which I noted down as a clearly signaled redirect. "You understand, she's convinced herself she actually does think that. I'm not saying that's why she didn't let them shoot you, but she's being sick-makingly obvious about wanting me looked after once she turns her face to the wall and dies of sheer bloody bloody-mindedness."

She kicked the bulkhead we were sitting on, hard enough to reverberate. The heel of her boot left a distinct scuff.

"As though you're the one to do it in a manner she'd approve of," she muttered, which was certainly a fair point. "As though she has any right to go all The Final Veil on me. Die nobly over most of a volume and leave a will stuffed to the brim with matchmaking directives. When I was twelve, Camilla, I wrote poetry about being trapped in a shuttle crash with that girl and convincing her to kill and eat me to stay alive. Reams of it. Worse than you could humanly imagine. Babs blackmailed me dry for two years. And I'd still damn well do it, too, that's the dreadful thing, only she wouldn't be convinced."

I thought for a while about whether I had anything useful to contribute to that.

"When we were twelve," I said eventually, "the Warden stayed awake for five consecutive days. I spent the last thirty hours end to end working out how I could steal sedatives from Med. Eventually I had to go in through the vent shaft in the dead of night, and then the last records they had for him were almost a year old -- he'd grown about ten centimeters." I showed her with my hands. "I had to calculate the dosage on an estimate. It was the most frightened I'd ever imagined being until Pro…"

I cleared my throat. Coronabeth was merciful enough to ignore it. "You actually dosed him?"

"Had to. I couldn't have anyone realizing I'd let him get into that state."

I didn't say anything else. My hand was pressing against my thigh again. I wondered, from very far above myself, exactly what the hell I thought I was doing.

"Bet he's been livid ever since," she said.

I said, "D4."