Before there’s Gideon the First, there’s a man called G–. G– has this best friend, has had him since they were both broke brown boys trying to make it out of the deadends they were drowning in, has been had by him since the very first day. G– has this best friend, and he loves him, and his friend asks him to take a suitcase nuke to Melbourne, and G– doesn’t say Anything for you, John, G– just does it.
G– is atomized and Gideon is resurrected. John rebuilds him from memory and an arm he cut off of G– before he left, not that Gideon knows that. This body is the only one Gideon’s ever known, so it shouldn’t feel so wrong, but it. Does. A stretched out thing of muscle mass, at times too bulky or too frail, bits soldered together in a clunky mess. Gideon’s soul is awkwardly shoved into his skin, and he hones the whole of it into the finest weapon this galaxy’s ever seen, and it hurts every time he swallows for ten thousand years.
Gideon’s lips are not his own. His cavalier - no, he’s hers, before she’s his. Her necromancer, her Gideon. They say John and Pyrrha are the only two people Gideon listens to, the only two people to get him to do something he wouldn’t do himself. Augustine and Mercymorn ascended hours before, and Pyrrha hands Gideon his spear with one untrembling motion, and tells him to kiss her before he plunges it into her chest. He does, and it leaves his mouth bloody and numb, and he sits there for hours until she is cold in him, and they call him the Saint of Duty.
The thing is that. Sometimes, Gideon forgets. He wakes in a room with no memory of walking there. Cassiopeia references a conversation he doesn’t remember having. When he blinks once, Cyrus’ funeral passes him by. He finds himself terrified to sleep lest he miss another moment, and he knows then that he is insane. He cannot trust his mind, and so he hands over every last scrap of his faith to John instead, and it is from him that he takes all direction.
This body is a horror show. It is a constant cave in. He is not invulnerable; he breaks and he mends again. Flesh knits together, bones clatter into place, neck twists one hundred and eighty degrees to right itself. It is detached. It is not himself, but he is not himself, there is something else rattling around in this husk of him, and he does not know what it is. He puts his faith in John. He puts his faith in John. Salvation, to fight and die for him. He fucks him once, bruisegrip on his hips in John’s flagship, and he does not kiss him.
This, then, is to be Gideon: a string of orders, a constant motion. A love, an utter terror. He believed in something once, he did. He’s never been a fool, though he’s always been a landmine, always waiting for the right time to detonate. Hard way to live. Good way to die.
He finds a little moon once, a solid place to farm, twist his everunbroken fingers around a plow instead of a spear. He thinks about it whenever he comes to, cold and unsure of how he got there. He wonders if this thing inside him knows about it too. Wonders if one day, he’ll just wake up there, knuckle deep in the soil, and if he’d ever walk away for anything else.
He doesn’t know that he could. He doesn’t know that he wants to. They die like this: CyrusUlyssesCassiopeiaCytherea, and he hopes John’ll forgive him if he’s next on the list.
