Like. To Gideon, love is sacrificing yourself for someone else. It’s violence, especially violence enacted upon the self for another’s benefit. It is objectifying oneself, making your body a tool of another. Love is a baby having oxygen its mother doesn’t have. It’s the Ninth’s endless devotion to Harrow. It’s Jeannemary screaming for Isaac, even though he’s already dead and going back would only kill her. It’s Palamedes blowing up to kill Cyth. And that’s why she makes the choice she does, why she has to go nuclear. She can’t express love except as violence, as sacrifice. And then to have this sacrifice so universally rejected is to have her love rejected. She feels dumped.
But Harrow didn’t feel loved when Gideon did it. She felt alone, and vulnerable, her parents swinging for the greater good. Her house’s future destroyed, all to keep Alecto in her tomb, a tombkeeper necromancer of Anastasia’s line. The first flower of her house, dead, for Harrow, again, who has said that she can never be enough to justify it. Harrow feels too keenly the injustice to be able to accept that sacrifice. She can never justify what has happened, so her work must be to remedy it, however poorly. Thus, the puppets, the need to be a lyctor, and thus, the lobotomy. They’re all too-small measures, they don’t solve the wounds, but she must do something because she can’t bear the weight of the entirety of fucking Pluto on her shoulders.