#cannot WAIT for nona the ninth to punch me repeatedly in the face while going 'stop punching yourself! stop punching yourself!' honestly

[vaguely-concerned]

thinking about how augustine puts all the blame for what happened to alfred on cristabel and by extension mercy, because if he didn’t direct all his anger that way he’d have to be angry with john......... and even, most painfully and fraught of all, with alfred himself. and that is so deeply incompatible both with his devotion and loyalty and love and with his immense eternal-life-long guilt. (it somehow feels like there’s something alike here to the dynamic that happened between harrow and gideon after the suicide of harrow’s parents to me -- the trauma-weight shifting blame and guilt and responsibility around to wherever will hold it when it’s too painful to look at straight on -- though I can’t actually explain it properly yet, and in that situation there wasn’t also a notorious deific gaslighter involved to intentionally muddy things up even further over centuries lmao). augustine is definitely not a reliable narrator of what happened back then because of all of this, but notably mercy never really defends cristabel against this particular accusation of being the instigator of the suicide pact either, for all that she clearly loved her immeasurably and will fiercely defend her against any other criticism. so it appears they’re more or less in agreement about what happened back then, they only differ in what they think it means? I don’t know honestly haha I have only Vibes here and from the outside it’s of course easier to spot that at the end of the day the real blame lies with john and the system of empire he set up around him anyway.

there’s also a really interesting contrast between mercy and augustine in how they relate to their cavaliers in the now -- mercy sort of keeps cristabel alive, she keeps bringing her up in conversation, makes idle observations about what she might think of things; to her cristabel seems to be very much still present even in her absence. meanwhile augustine, during the divine threesome dinner party (I love these books), describes being prompted to talk more about alfred and what happened back then as ‘oh very well, then, just dig him back up’, like he wants to at least let him rest in peace, considers him dead and buried in some way that’s of course at odds with the fact that he’s kept forever alive inside him as fuel. (which are also the opposite impulses of what they envision for themselves after their bout of some light recreational mutual deicide -- at that point mercy wants to be buried with cristabel in death, and augustine feels the obligation to keep himself and alfred alive at least until they’ve done what little they can to mitigate the damage they’ve caused. I love how they trade roles back and forth like that at the end of the book it’s so neat. ‘mom said it’s my turn to have the hysterics so you gotta keep your shit together for a few minutes before we switch again’)

mercy says ‘she’s still here’ and augustine says ‘he’s gone’, and they’re both right and they’re both wrong. and this is the system john put in place at the start of his new world: a world where nothing is truly alive but grief.