Thread by @coastafterdark

Days late and pushing the limits of "micro", but the rules r made up and the points don't matter, sooooo

#NtNspoilers content warning: nebulously sentient chussy

"It can taste you," Gideon says, the words breathy and catching. She tries not to inhale too deeply, and risk enveloping more of Harrow's hand before she's ready.

Harrow observes, watches her knuckles disappear past the raised ridge of flesh that never really became a scar, just a chasm.

"What do I taste like?"

Her fingers, careful, pet the tender, deadened flesh of Gideon's chest cavity. When she grazes the severed aorta of her missing heart, Gideon gasps. The wound clenches, grips, and Harrow doesn't flinch.

"Like a snack," Gideon says, mouth turning up even as her eyes stay narrowed, braced for pain or--something else. "Nah, that must be me. Really, though, salt, mostly. Metallic--iron and plasma."

"How does it--" Harrow starts, the answer to her unfinished question beginning to coil around her fingers, dipping in between them to taste the foreign skin.

"They get really,uh--active, around--I guess fresh thalergy? It likes blood--pretty gross actually, but--shit," the tongues, long and rough and slick, tug Harrow's hand gently deeper, "it really likes you."

Harrow doesn't recoil. She lets her fingers be drawn deeper, caressing the surface of one fluttering lung. Gideon knows it should hurt, but her body's all wrong, and it just feels nice having Harrow close again, staking her birthright claim on Gideon's flesh. Maybe her

brain's all wrong, too.

"Could be a self-sustaining reaction," she says, clinical but for the awed tremor in the words, "something to maintain your body when you're deployed out of the Emperor's sphere of necromantic influence?"

"Maybe," Gideon says, suddenly wanting very much to change the subject away from dear old dad. "Probably. All I can tell you for sure is--hell--it wants more of you. It wants me to let it take you past the elbow, probably more, until you're--" Harrow's fingers twitch, Gideon's

dead diaphragm leaps into her throat, "--fuck--coming out the other side."

(Wasn't sure if I'd continue this, but here we are!)

Fearless, Harrow nudges her way in another few millimeters. The space is getting cramped, but Gideon's insides part for her inevitably.

The wound clenches again, and there's friction in the slide now as one of the jagged bones--teeth? They're sharp, is what matters--catches on the heel of Harrow's palm. Gideon barely registers that it's cutting before she's hit with a jolt, stuck like a kid with their finger in

an electrical socket. She can't speak, can't force a breath into her sickly mauve lungs for a second, three seconds. She has no idea what her face is doing.

"Ow," is what she manages to croak out.

This, finally, makes Harrow's eyes go wide. She starts to pull back, and it's blinding--white hot pain behind Gideon's eyes and radiating from her chest. She grabs Harrow's wrist, holding her in place.

Gideon starts to remember how to form words in the face of excruciating pain. She used to do it all the time! Although, in fairness, that was usually just kid stuff, like a construct dislocating her shoulder, or Crux making her scrub floors until her fingernails split and bled

and then she had to clean up the blood, which really seemed like a waste of everyone's time. None of that had really prepared her for her nerve-endings flaring to life with a hand rifling around inside her chest cavity.

"I haven't. Felt this--real pain--in months. I haven't felt *real* in months," she says, and leans forward, hissing as the small--downright dainty when you really looked at it--hand pressed back into her.

Harrow's eyebrows knit together in an expression that Gideon would laugh at if laughing wouldn't definitely feel like having about 2000 nails dragged through her torso right this second.

She's looking between Gideon's face and her own hand--well, her wrist, and trying to work it out.

"I want to try something," Harrow says.

"Don't stop," Gideon pleads, her voice already broken from the growing lump in her throat.

Harrow looks genuinely distressed, but her voice is steady when she says, "I'm going to--unsheathe. I'll be careful, and it will only be a moment. Can you handle that?"

Gideon's body wants to say no as much as it wants to launch Harrow across the room just to make the pain stop.

Gideon closes her eyes, and nods. After a few seconds, she uncurls her hand from around Harrow's wrist.

The pain starts to dull before Harrow's fingers have fully exited the premises, and it should be a relief, but it feels like watching a door close, like being shut out when the grown-ups are talking.

Luckily, it's really hard to cry in her souped-up dead bod, so she manages to not make a total ass of herself.

Gideon watches, rapt, as Harrow sharpens a shard of bone in one hand, and uses it to slice open the first finger on the other. A bead of red gathers at the tip, and the tongues in Gideon's chest writhe.

Harrow places that finger at the opening of the wound, slips it just inside, and the feeling is back--less intense this time, just like she's got a big hole in her chest but not like anyone is currently using it as a hand warmer.

It hurts, it *hurts*, and Gideon realizes with creeping awe that it doesn't just hurt. Her eyes are burning, watering. She can feel warmth seeping into her limbs, tingling and awful and incredible. She feels--so, so precariously--alive.

"Your blood," she says at exactly the same time Harrow says, "your soul."

They stare at each other, unblinking, Harrow's finger nestled just inside Gideon, the trickle of blood satiating--barely--the tongues and sending waves of sensation prickling through her body.

"What about my soul?"

"It longs for the flesh." Harrow squeezes the tip of her finger with her thumb, and Gideon shudders. "The flesh longs for the soul."

"But I'm already--I'm in it. I'm here."

"Your revenant soul, what the Emperor could grasp of you, is occupying the space of your body, but both of them--" her voice catches, just barely "--are dead. Or one is dead, and one is the reanimated inanimate. The beguiling corpse."

"Then it's your blood that--"

"Your living soul," Harrow says, and opens another finger, scraping it on the mean-looking bones in Gideon's chest, "what I consumed to achieve--a modicum of lyctorhood. It's in me, which means some immeasurable portion of it is in my blood."

Harrow's fingers retreat, licked clean. She slices open her palm with a decisive stroke of bone-knife and sets it flat against the wound. Gideon gasps.

The tongues are thirsty, completely gagging for it the more they get, and, to be honest, Gideon is too. Gross. Hot. Grot.