#some sixth stuff some stuff with gideon trying to figure out wtf happened here

[altschmerzes]

🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹

here's a clip from, as a bit of a curveball bc i was just recently reminded people also care for this project of mine and so very much do i, my gideon the ninth 'fix it but break it way worse first' resurrection fic :)

so, from my dead are mine (and yours as well as mine), from very far ahead in chapter 9, after the dust has settled and we all have to figure out what to do now, how to interact with each other in this weird new normal we're arriving to:

“Silas!” It’s impossible to tell which of the Fourth had been the one to holler the name from far across the room, and it takes Harrow a few moments to realize that this is because it hadn’t been one of them at all. The voice had been two voices, Jeannemary and Isaac yelling over in twin tandem, melting together into one high bird’s call that aims to summon the boy over to them for some unknown purpose. Glancing at Silas, Harrow is not surprised to see the hard, stone expression on his face or the rigid stiffness in his body. Colum is the only person she has ever heard refer to him by his first name. Harrow doesn’t know what sort of operation they’re running in the Fourth or Fifth, but she can’t imagine it’s smiled upon to take that sort of liberty in the Eighth House. He doesn’t react at first, just stands there and stares across the room at them. At his sides, Silas’s hands are held in tight fists.

“Silas, come here!” This time it’s just Jeannemary, exasperation tinging her voice as she yells to be heard from where she and Isaac stand, almost outside the room entirely. Harrow is not the only one who’s noticed the way Silas has reacted to them. Abigail, who’s seemed to materialize out of nowhere for the dozenth time, leading Harrow to wonder if that might be some kind of special necromancy they teach you in her House, gets his attention with a light touch to one tense shoulder. He gives a very faint, almost imperceptible twitch that Harrow might not have noticed if she hadn’t herself bit back enough flinches to know what it looks like when one is just barely not all the way smothered. “They mean it well,” Abigail tells him. Her own voice is quiet, deliberately kept low enough not to be heard by the teens she refers to. The sound of the words and the look on her face is not quite a warning, but it’s not quite not a warning either. “That’s probably our fault, Magnus and I. We’ve never been formal with them. But they mean it well.” There’s no reply. Silas barely glances at her before he’s looking back across at Jeannemary and Isaac, still impatiently waiting for him at the doorway. “If you must correct them,” Abigail goes on, once it becomes clear that he’s not going to say anything, “I’d ask you please do so kindly.” This time she gets an answer, if only in the form of a quick, sharp dip of Silas’s chin. He nods to Abigail, ignores Harrow completely, then starts across the room to where two pairs of hands have started to beckon him, waving in the air like they might physically pull him over faster by doing so. If Silas says anything to them about the name, rebukes them for using it or orders them never to call him such a thing again, he doesn’t do it within earshot, even of Harrow’s sharpened hearing. The only thing that filters through the doorway in that deep, resounding voice unmistakable for anyone else, is, “What is it, then?”