#if you’ve seen my tiktok in any capacity you know im insane about this

[waiting-foratrain]

> ‘your body remembers what your mind forgets,’ or, i think nona being as loved as she was should fuck harrowhark up a bit.

hello! i have a migraine and too many feelings, thus, as promised, im here to have feelings about tlt! (to preface, this is just a thought i have, it very well might not correlate w/ the text. i’m not fact checking x)

(NONA THE NINTH SPOILERS, I ASSUME)

to begin with, we need to talk about memory. specifically, we need to talk about somatic memory, or the physical sensations of trauma that remain in the body even when the brain itself has repressed the memories of said trauma (sound familiar? it should!) — nona, an amnesiac soul in someone else’s body, almost perfectly embodies this concept.

then, please remind yourself that the body that she’s in is belongs to harrowhark nonagesimus.

nona doesn’t remember drearburh, she doesn’t remember being 200 dead children, she doesn’t remember rolling away the rock, or harrows parents suicides, or any of the casual trauma of harrowharks upbringing… but her body does. then, in ntn, we watch that same body that is now experiencing care on a scale it has never comprehended prior.

forgotten trauma is still healable, and though the trauma that nona retains from having been alecto is still very much present and we see it affect her as she remembers more, simply experiencing the level of love and care that the people around her are giving- pyrrha, camilla, palamedes, even crown, aim, we suffer, etc, in their own ways (not to mention the people at the school)- is something that i think should start to sink into her body, even if she doesn’t have the words or the memories to process that anything is happening. it might not help with the somatic memory around nona being the soul of the earth, but i think it should affect harrow, after nona leaves her body.

nona is someone who is fundamentally kind, fundamentally loving, and fundamentally easily open to connection without so much as a whisper of the layers of guilt and shame harrow was brought up with in place between herself and others. nona doesn’t freeze or move away from touch; she constantly turns towards love, towards affection, towards being taken care of

(also, i think there’s something to be said for the lack of love alecto received vs the magnitude that nona did and the affect that has on the way they both turned out, but that’s for another post-)

anyways, here’s the thing: that sticks.

healing isn’t linear, and it’s certainly not instant, but the way nona treats harrow’s body, the way she lives in harrow’s body? i think that has sincere potential to start rewiring the way it responds to the world. so by the time we get to harrow in alecto? nona is gone, yes, but i think that the care she was shown, and the care she accepted should have started affecting harrow on a level she doesn’t even understand.

nona didn’t just exist in harrows body- she taught it, via experience, what it’s like to be loved... and i think that personally, harrowhark should have to deal with the after affects of that physically. (and emotionally. but this post is about physically)