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There’s a radio in their apartment. Pyrrha fiddles with the dials on the first night and receives mostly static, which she supposes serves her right for trying to listen to something ordinary and sweet in the middle of the fucking apocalypse. She’s alone in the kitchen, so she bangs the thing twice with Gideon’s too-big, clenched fist and it shutters out more god awful static at her like a scream.
There’s the soft whisper slick of footsteps behind her and it is only because she’s already checked and re-checked all the possible exits and entrances of this shitty place that Pyrrha doesn’t flinch or pull a weapon. Camilla Hect moves beside her, near-silent in the blue-lit dark. “You’ll wake her up,” she says. She says the words in that way she always does, short, sharp, only slightly blunted by the way she leans against the kitchen table. The table trembles a little, like it’s barely remembering how to be a table and also like it’s scared Camilla might rip it to shreds.
Fuck, she’s spending too much time with Nona. It’s just a table.
Pyrrha turns off the radio. “Can’t hear anything anyway,” she says.
Camilla looks at her, frowns a little. Pyrrha is still learning to read her expressions, and she’s not quite sure what to make of this one. “What were you expecting?”
Pyrrha shrugs. “It doesn’t matter.”
Camilla isn’t capable of sitting still, so she moves from the table to the sink, back again. She’s barefoot, walking on the balls of her feet, heels slightly raised. She switches on the second pass to walking on the side of her foot, toes curled in. Knife edge, she’d told Pyrrha once, muscles taunt in a phantom kick.
“We’re going to figure this out,” Pyrrha tells her.
Camilla does not stop her pacing. “Of course,” she says.
They don’t have a choice.
When she leaves eventually, muttering something about washing her hair, Pyrrha lets her. She knows Camilla is just going to go sit in the dark bathroom by herself and hold in all her screams, like Pyrrha doesn’t know, can’t see every line of want and agony and rage in her every move. But she’s young. She’s trying. She’s the cavalier to a dead necromancer who is the Warden of the Sixth House, and everything is fucked.
Pyrrha sits in the dark for a long time, humming a song she almost doesn’t remember. It feels good, the vibrations in Gideon’s throat. She wants to smoke, wants to taste something terrible, wants to burn something. She closes her eyes and lets herself imagine something sweet, lets the sound carry her far, far away from here.
In the morning, she refuses to throw out the radio, and Hect doesn’t ask.
The radio does eventually find a signal somewhere, because despite everything Pyrrha deserves a small mercy, and the universe grants her this one. The static resolves into scattered reports and propaganda more often then it doesn’t, but sometimes—
“What are you looking for, Dve?”
This is Palamedes, she knows instantly, because Camilla almost never calls her by her name and also because there’s a smile under those words, a curling to the question like he likes the way it tastes. Shameless flirt. Pyrrha doesn’t turn around from her fiddling with the radio dial.
“Music, Sextus,” she says. “Is Nona asleep?”
“Yes,” Palamedes says, his tone long-suffering and drawn out in a whine that would make Camilla pull a weapon if she were here. In Camilla’s voice it sounds horribly wrong. He must flinch back from the sound of it, because he lets out a shaky breath and says a little unsteadily, “but she might not last long. I think she’s having nightmares. I barely got her down.”
“I’m assuming you made a note of that.”
“Obviously.” He crosses the distance, leans his elbows on the sink beside her. “Has it ever actually played music? I think it’s broken.”
Pyrrha flicks the radio. “Sometimes. Although it’s quite possible that I’m imagining it.”
He snorts. “I doubt that.”
“We’re all a little mad here, Warden.” She looks at him, finally, finds him watching her. “You keeping Camilla home tonight?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” He raps his fingers on the sink, a sharp staccato rhythm. “Did you want to dance?”
She’s so startled she laughs, the sound barking and chest-aching, even after all this time. She doesn’t laugh like Gideon, but she still likes hearing it. “What?”
“You said you wanted music.”
“I don’t dance, Sextus.”
He quirks an eyebrow. Holds out a hand.
The worlds really must be ending. She takes his hand. Camilla’s palms are calloused, but so are hers. They both have blood and dirt under their nails.
Palamedes is bold, if uncoordinated in Camilla’s body. He steps close enough to kiss, pressing his forehead to Pyrrha’s shoulder without asking. When she lets out a shocked gasp he laughs, flicks the radio dial behind them both.
Crooning static and haphazard strings shake the whole kitchen.
“You’ve certainly woken her up,” Pyrrha mutters, ducking her head close to his ear.
Palamedes sways to sounds from the radio, holding her tightly. “Live a little,” he says, because he’s reckless and young and trapped.
Pyrrha lets him lead, holds her breath for screaming, but Nona is quiet. “You’re in a mood tonight.”
“I’m trying to make living marginally more bearable.”
The radio continue to snarl something awful, but they don’t turn it off. They sway in the dark and breathe and breathe and breathe.
In the blue-grey light of the morning, before it’s hot, Pyrrha makes breakfast and turns on the radio. Overlapping voices speak in languages she doesn’t understand, and she keeps the volume low enough that she doesn’t think Nona will hear. It’s a nice background noise, and louder than her thoughts, which is the point.
She only remembers to turn it off when Nona skips in after her session with Cam and says brightly, “why are you listening to men talk about fish?”
Before Hect can give her shit about corrupting data, Pyrrha fiddles with the dial so it returns to static. “Why aren’t you putting out the dishes?”
Nona sticks out her tongue, shakes her head. Her hair is unbraided and tangled, and the effect is quite marvelously dramatic. Pyrrha’s chest tightens at the reckless, wild emotion of it.
“Is it eggs?” Nona says, quite sweetly.
“When is it not eggs, No-No?” Pyrrha pushes the rather grey looking eggs into a small lump with her spoon, slides them onto the plate Nona holds out.
Nona goes to sit at the table, and Pyrrha watches her, watches the way she moves. She’s sliding in time with the static on the radio, mimicking the rise and fall of it with each skipped half-step, like she does with voices.
“Do you like the radio, Nona?”
Nona, probably delighted by the question because it means she doesn’t have to eat, looks up and grins. “Very much!”
“Why?” Camilla asks, coming in. She sets the recorder down on the table, her hands barely shaking. Pyrrha takes in the hard lines of her mouth, the shiver she tries to hide when she crosses her arms and privately makes a note to ask her to spar later. There’s far too much anxiety humming under Camilla’s skin, far too much restless rage, and Pyrrha isn’t in a hurry to go chasing after her when she inevitably decides to go storm Blood of Eden herself.
Nona has fully set her fork down and pushed the plate of eggs away from her. Pyrrha pointedly moves to the table and pushes it back.
“I like how it says different things,” Nona says, which makes very little sense.
“Static, you mean?” Cam asks.
Nona rolls her eyes. “It’s not just that ,Camilla.”
“If you heard something important you would tell us, though?”
“Obviously.” She sounds so much like Palamedes when she says it.
Camilla’s lips twitch. “Eat your eggs.”
Three days after Nona’s last swim at the beach, Pyrrha finds Camilla in the kitchen with the radio. She’s sitting with her chin propped up on her hands, staring.
Pyrrha lets her brood and takes her time washing the dishes, fiddling a little with the radio when she finishes the three bowls from dinner as a reward. It’s the little things.
The radio spits static and then croons something melodic, clunking. Keys? It’s nice. She hums it.
“The Warden told me you danced, once,” Camilla says.
“Did he?”
“He’s a terrible dancer.”
“Well, I’m no artist, Hect.”
Camilla smiles one of her rare smiles, the expression quicksilver and fleeting, but true. “I’m quite good,” she says.
Pyrrha turns off the water. The radio hums. “Prove it.”
Camilla stands, stretches, cracks her knuckles.
“Are we sparring or dancing?”
“What’s the difference?”
Pyrrha turns away from the sink and sweeps out her arms. Camilla narrows her borrowed eyes, stands on her toes. She moves with quick-grace, lethal as anything, into Pyrrha’s arms. She has to crane her neck up so they’re eye to eye.
Neither of them have gotten a haircut in awhile; Pyrrha brushes Camilla’s sweaty fringe away from her eyes. “Well then,” she says, low. Her heartbeat is roaring louder than the music. “Show me.”
“It’s like a heartbeat,” Nona tells her, when it’s Pyrrha’s turn to get her ready for bed.
“What is?” Pyrrha asks absently. She’s finished drawing all the curtains tight but she does a final sweep of the room out of habit anyway.
“Nothing’s coming in, Pyrrha,” Nona says, impatient. “You’re not listening to me.”
“I’m always listening to you,” Pyrrha says carefully. She sits down on the bed next to Nona and pulls her close in the way she knows she likes, tucked under one arm, head pillowed against her chest. “What’s like a heartbeat?”
“The radio.”
“Have you been listening to the radio?”
“Only when you do.”
Well she’s going to have to be more careful about that. Nona notices entirely too much. “What do you mean, kiddie?”
Nona sighs. “It’s like when Palamedes gives me kisses for Cam.”
“Love?”
Nona scrunches up her face. “Not quite.”
Pyrrha thinks of Wake, gunpowder and blood on her fingers, crooning a song from a time no one remembers. “Love is complicated, Nona.”
Nona lays down, throws her arms over her eyes. “It doesn’t have to be,” she says. “You all make everything hard.”
Pyrrha doesn’t ask her what she means.
When Nona does fall asleep, she goes back to the radio. Tonight, it plays only static. She listens anyway.