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Gideon had been quiet for a long time. She woke up—if woke up was the right term for a dead person whose essence had been absorbed wholly into you to allow you to live forever as an ultra-powerful necromancer/cavalier—only occasionally, if given the right stimuli. Harrow treasured each of these moments with a guilty fervor. The time Harrow had stopped to talked to a few of the Cohort soldiers on the King Undying's ship, and Gideon had murmured in her soul with wistful envy. The time Harrow had taken a bite of a particularly fine dessert and felt Gideon's joy wake in her mouth. The time Gideon had watched Harrow put on her face paint and told her, quite distinctly that it made her look even more like an unattractive wizened aunt with cobwebs in her pussy than usual.
It was nauseating, that Harrow could feel so sentimental about someone so irritating. She was also coming to suspect that it wasn't going to stop. She was going to be trapped in this horrible prison of nostalgia for the rest of her life.
That was why she refused to blame herself for the incident at the gym. Her judgment was understandably impaired. It was only through raw force of will that she prevented herself from seeking out dirty magazines in order to call up a little scrap of Gideon. The gym was the least of her worries.
She'd been wandering the ship, quite innocently, looking for a good laboratory space she could appropriate to conduct her experiments. She'd walked past a room filled with grunting soldiers and large discs of metal, and Gideon had blazed into pseudo-life.
"Hey," said the shade of Gideon. "Hey. We should go to the gym."
"Absolutely not," said Harrow.
"Absolutely yes," said Gideon. "You need to be able to lift my broadsword."
"I don't," said Harrow. "I can use a rapier."
"I can barely use a rapier," said Gideon, always carelessly oblivious of the fact that she had been quite nearly the greatest cavalier in the galaxy. "And I like my broadsword."
"Well, you're dead, so your opinion doesn't count," said Harrow, ignoring the pang in her chest.
"We're going to do push-ups," said Gideon.
"I am not," said Harrow, "doing—"
"Excuse me?" asked one of the soldiers, her abs glistening, all sweaty and disgusting. "Are you all right?"
"Yes," said Harrow, trying to look as if she hadn't been talking to her dead best nemesis who lived in her head. "Don't let me disturb you."
"Push!" shouted Gideon. "Ups!"
---
Harrow did a push-up.
She'd hung her robe in the locker room, and filled a locker with bones. Under all of her accessories she was wearing shorts and a tanktop, which Gideon had deemed acceptable as gym wear. Now Harrow was doing push-ups on the dirty floor, while the soldiers stared at her and muttered under their breaths about the new lyctor.
She did another push-up. It hurt her elbows. If this kept up soon she would be sweaty and disgusting, and there was nothing Harrow wanted less.
"That's terrible," said Gideon. "Look at that, your arms are hardly even bending."
"I'm doing my best," gritted out Harrow. "Some of us spent our youth using our brain instead of our muscles."
"The brain is a muscle," said Gideon. "And I have more and bigger muscles than you, ergo, I have more brains that you."
"You don't even have a body," snapped Harrow. "And the brain is not a muscle."
The soldiers shifted a little, giving Harrow a wider berth. That suited her perfectly well, and she was not offended by it at all.
"You'll have to do the girly push-ups," sighed Gideon. "Go on, put your knees down."
Harrow would've argued, but her arms were beginning to shake.
She managed fifteen girly push-ups, which Gideon was not impressed by, but she’d done them.
“There,” said Harrow. “Push-ups. Can we go, now?”
“I want to use the weights,” said Gideon.
---
They did curls in the squat rack, hastily evacuated by the soldier who’d been doing actual squats there. Harrow wasn’t even able to lift the empty forty-five-pound bar, so she used a five pound weight in each hand instead. Gideon was very upset. She was even more upset when Harrow could only manage ten reps.
"Bone is heavier than this!" she said. "Bone, Harrow!"
"I don't have to lift bone," muttered Harrow. "It lifts itself for me."
They did some crunches. After twenty, Harrow felt like she was going to throw up, so then they spent a few minutes lying on the floor and trying to recover. Gideon despaired. One of the soldiers bit back his fear long enough to ask Harrow if she wanted him to call a medic.
Now they were doing pull-ups.
Technically, however, Harrow was hanging limply from the pull up bar. She'd managed to jump high enough to catch the hand-holds, but that seemed to be the extent of her abilities.
"This is hopeless," said Gideon. "Hopeless. I can't believe I'm trapped in a literal stick figure for the rest of my life."
"You're not alive!" Harrow half-shrieked. "You're a parody of Gideon Nav that my imagination keeps foisting on me because you're dead and I miss you! I miss you! Can you believe that?"
Nothing. The gym was, abruptly deserted. Harrow considered letting go of the pull-up bar, but she thought it very likely that she would twist her ankle when she fell. Ligament injuries, unlike bone breaks, were typically beyond her abilities to repair. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to fix it now.
"Do you really miss me, Harrowhark?" asked the shade of Gideon.
"Unfortunately," sniffled Harrow.
"Oh." Gideon huffed. "Well, at least you get something of me to keep. Now, come on, do a pull-up."
"I can't," said Harrow. "I'm not strong enough to lift my own bodyweight. I couldn't even lift that bar."
"Yeah, but you weigh like, thirty pounds."
Harrow tried to do a pull-up, just one, just so she could say she'd tried.
"Ugh, fine, let go," said Gideon. "We'll do more push-ups instead. This is miserable."
Harrow completely agreed, but she bristled a little at Gideon's tone. "Isn't the point of exercise that you get better at it over time? You weren't born with a six-pack, Gideon."
"An eight-pack," corrected Gideon. "Now, come on. Fifteen more girly push-ups and then you can do your bone stuff."
Harrow dropped to the floor, did not twist her ankle, and did the push-ups. She did get all sweaty and disgusting, but somehow she felt better for it.
“Can we do this tomorrow?” she asked.
“Harrow,” said the Gideon that lived on in her head, infinitely warm and infinitely condescending, “I’m going to insist on it.”