sugarlips | Put That Thing Back Where It Came From Or So Help Me

Put That Thing Back Where It Came From Or So Help Me

Desolation. That's what Harrow feels when the King Undying tells her that what she wants most is impossible. Not even what she wants, but what she needs. She cannot live without Gideon Nav, and she will not. Unending life, in spite of being what she had sought after in the beginning, is now unthinkable. She looks up into his surprisingly normal face, his unearthly eyes, and lets her gaze drop.

A horrible certainty rises in her, and becomes a morbid hope. Her face is serene with unspeakable grief, none of her wild plan showing as she asks to see the body of her cavalier. He grants her this, and she walks like a woman to the gallows down the ship to the cold storage. He has the grace to leave her alone with her grief, of course, and she opens the door with her heart in her throat.

The chill of the corpsetorium echoes the cool calm of her mind. Her chest aches, her throat is sore from screaming, but the sight of Gideon, hole in her chest, laying on a slab like so much dead meat does not inspire the crushing grief she had expected to. It fuels her. Motivates her to think harder, to dissect the theorems she studied and the one megatheorem that led to this cursed conclusion (damn Sextus for being right).

Harrow has no idea how long she sits there, her mind working in overdrive, peering inward to slowly pull out the stitches she had made in her own soul only mere hours before. It feels like only seconds at the same time it feels like eons. She has to do this carefully, slowly. I will not live without you. she thinks to herself and to the traces of Nav that exist inside her. She repeats it like a mantra. I told you that I am undone without you. We are both undone if I must go on alone.

It's the most delicate work she's ever done, and it hurts. It's a pain right down to her marrow, like she's trying to peel layers of calcium off of her own bones. At the end of it, it feels like she's holding a doll in her metaphysical hands. A little gauzy imitation of Gideon Nav. She pulls it free of herself, feels blood drip from her forehead into her eyes, and with all of the ferocity she had to hold back during the excavation, she slams the soul back into its rightful body.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The look Harrow turns on her cavalier could wither steel. It's lucky that there is nobody else visible in the hallway or she might combust and kill everyone in the vicinity.

Gideon considers this look carefully. "I'm taking that as a maybe."

In practice, she is likely to fall asleep the moment her head hits the pillow, but in theory she will start kissing Harrow and then never stop and everything will be OK forever due to the kissing.

The audacity of this woman's optimism. Harrow rolls her eyes and marches off, expecting Gideon to follow.

Does she know where she's going? No. But one of the staff on the Erebus can tell her, and they are happy to direct her toward a room.

Once inside, she frowns slightly at the door, considering. Only for a moment, then she's producing a needle from somewhere and stabbing herself in the cheek, drawing precise but quick patters on the back of the door. Just a ward that will warn her the minute someone touches the door so they aren't taken by surprise, but if she wasn't paranoid before, Canaan house sure made her so.

Gideon follows readily and without complaint. It’s clear that Harrow doesn’t quite have her bearings either, and she’s more than a little relieved when they are finally shown to a bedroom. She let’s Harrow be her paranoid, control freak self without barb or comment, while she herself inspects the traditional bed-and-cot arrangement.

“Yeah no,” she decides. “Hope you’re ready to fucking snuggle.”

She can explain everything that happened after Gideon impaled her stupid self later. After sleep. When she can properly translate everything into idiotese for her single minded cav.

The sound of her voice makes Harrow turn around, finished with her ward. She huffs softly, a little more color on her face than had been there before. Hard to believe it had only been several weeks since Gideon made off with a pile of blankets to sleep in a completely separate room.

"I have no interest in allowing you out of my line of sight." That's as much of a yes as Gideon's gonna get.

"Same goes for you, my macabre liege," she said. Harrow might have a little more color but that doesn't mean she doesn't look even more like shit than she usually does. And Gideon might be a shit cavalier, but she's not so shit that she can't recognize that tell-tale puffiness around the eyes that means that it's been a fucking while since Harrow let herself rest.

She turns down the blankets and gives the bed an inviting pat, like she was trying to lure over some feral, skittish little creature, which was sort of true.

Edited 2021-10-31 01:46 (UTC)

As she had threatened to do and against her better judgement, Harrow has in fact started to enjoy the stupid epithets. She rolls her eyes over their intense dark circles that she can no longer pretend are just stains from her pigment.

There's something infuriating about the way Gideon peels back the covers and pats the bed. It isn't even salacious the way Harrow would expect that kind of gesture to be coming from Nav, but it makes her feel like a fragile thing, gently handled, which always makes her want to grow bone spikes out of her body and scream.

She does neither of those things. She approaches the bed, drawn in more by the promise of actual relieving rest than by Gideon's little pose. (Though part of the reason she can actually rest is in knowing that Gideon is alive and will probably stay that way for a little while.) Once lying down, Harrow is faced with a horrible decision. She has to choose whether to lie on her back, supine and vulnerable to Gideon, or on her side directly facing Gideon. Rolling to face away from her is not an option because the minute Harrow takes her eyes off of her she might disappear. She squirms and stares up at the ceiling for a moment before rolling onto her side, curling her knees up slightly and tucking a hand under the pillow.

It is a tender gesture. Because they are playing a dangerous game of tenderness chicken, and Gideon is playing for keeps. No way no how will she be pitifully calling Harrow’s name and fainting again thanks.

She crawls into bed next to Harrow, also facing inwardly. She’s about to say something- something sharp and sexy and cool- when instead a huge yawn commandeers her face. Embarrassing.

Edited 2021-10-31 04:58 (UTC)

It's horribly embarrassing for a moment, laying face to face, Gideon so close and getting a mostly unimpeded view of Harrow. She has spent so much time without her veil on around other people in the last week it's starting to be unbearable.

The tension breaks a little for her when Gideon yawns, a flicker of a smile starting at the edges of her lips. "Perhaps the most eloquent thing you've ever said." She agrees. The yawn catches and Harrow's jaw pops with it. She keeps her eyes closed afterward, but untucks her hand from the pillow, so it lays in front of her chest, between them. An invitation or a meaningless gesture, it's unclear.

“Yeah, then yours is the sweetest,” she shoots right back, with only on eye still open. Her one open eyelid begins to droop, and she looks at the offered hand. Or was it offered?

But they had kissed. And they had bathed.

But how foolish will she look if it isn’t an offer? If this is a wish too far?

She rests her hands next to Harrow’s, letting their knuckles rest against each other.

The quip needs no reply so Harrow gives none. She just breathes, letting the exhaustion creep up on her.

It has such a hold on her that when Gideon’s knuckles touch her own, her response is automatic. It’s easy to not be ashamed when your eyes are closed and you’re too tired to think. Harrow makes a soft sound and curls closer to her cavalier, spreading her fingers so that they slot between Gideon’s. Strong, calloused hands… Harrow sighs, half asleep already.

Oh that’s… that’s really nice. Is it OK how nice it is? To have Harrow’s boney little finger entwined with hers? Is it ok to think about how nice it is? She probably has more important things to think about.

She tries to think about those more important things. She tries to worry about what Harrow did to her, what she did to Harrow, where the fuck they are and what the fuck happens next.

But instead, she thinks about that tiny bridge of connection, and she falls quickly asleep.

Harrow, blessedly, doesn't get the chance to worry about any more important things. All she thinks of is Gideon, alive and with her, before she slips away into proper sleep.

It's even restful, until it isn't.

Nightmares are not a new experience for Harrowhark, but that has yet to stop them from having power over her, unfortunately. She twitches and groans pitifully in her sleep, rolling away from Gideon and curling herself down into a tight little ball. She's sweating, and her sweat is tinged pink, her face a screwed up mess of suffering.

Gideon, much to her occasional chagrin, is not the world's lightest sleeper. It takes a moment for the groaning to wake her up, and then another moment to realize what it is. Once, it would have seemed impossible for the high and mighty Harrow to suffer from something as pedestrian as nightmares, but now Gideon knows there's a lot she never knew about the Reverend Daughter.

She blinks heavily once more, then reaches out a hand to shake her shoulder. "Harrow. Hey, Harrow. Wake up, numbnuts."

The stimulation of the waking world often has an effect on dreams, when the dreamer does not immediately wake. This happens to Harrow. She thinks the hand on her arm is part of the nightmare, one of the many hands of the murdered children who haunt her, shaking her. She thrashes and gasps.

Then Gideon's voice cuts through the dream like a knife and parts the vision like it's ripped paper. Black eyes snap open and are swallowed by blacker pupils as she tries to see in the dim light.

Her chest is still rising and falling rapidly. She drags a hand over her sweaty face, impatient with her own anxiety. She rolls onto her back.

"...Numbnuts?"

"Ebony sovereign had too many syllables," after hearing Harrow's pitiful noises, Gideon has the courage she lacked before. The arm that was shaking her now goes fully around her shoulders and tugs her up against the big, warm, living body of her cavalier. "C'mere."

By that logic, "nonagesimus" also probably has too many syllables. Harrow snorts very quietly, but does not fight the arm drawing her in. She moves with the pulling, rolling onto her side and tucking her head under Gideon's chin.

The Reverend Daughter is a small thing, short as she is skinny, and in comparison to her skeletal frame, Gideon feels huge. Warm and dense with muscle, much softer at the edges then her emaciated necromancer.

Harrow feels the stray thought wonder when the last time someone held her so close was, recalls the event in the salt pool, and tries to think before that. She aborts the mission quickly.

"You are a furnace." She complains, but doesn't pull away.

Gideon has never held, or been held, except in moments of violence. But she had fiction, at least, to instruct her, and she knows how a god damn cuddle works. So that put her ahead of Harrow, and therefor winning once again. She shifts a little, trying to get comfortable against the sharp angles of her necromancer, until finally settling down with her chin resting on Harrow's head.

"I know and you're welcome. It's call a metabolism. Living humans have them."

If Gideon thinks her smutty magazines count as instruction on romance, she's about to have another thing coming. Harrow is willing to let the cavalier have a win this time, though. She is the genius who managed to unknit their souls and resurrect Gideon, after all. That's going to be enough of a win to keep her going for awhile yet.

"I suppose you enjoy hugging skeletons in that case." Is that humor we detect?

Hey she read more than smut! She's even read an actual romance or two, when the tits on the cover were big enough.

"So you admit that you are literally all bones."

A soft snorting sound. "I am not literally all bones, Griddle." She has some flesh and organs and meats and shit, unfortunately!

"Your words, not mine." She stifles a yawn. Which is weird, because just the utter proximity to Harrow is sending sparks up her spine. But it turns out that you can be both excited and still exhausted at the same time, because that's where she is right now.

"Go back to sleep... I've got you."

Harrow grumbles, a quiet and not at all actually grumpy thing. It’s *nice*, being wrapped up, face against clavicle with Gideon. For once, not because they’re trying to tear each other apart. But because Gideon is a stupid loyal perfect cavalier that Harrow categorically does not deserve.

Selfishly, she grumbles again and wriggles in closer, her small bony hands clutching at the front of Gideon’s shirt. Her mumble sounds like “you’d better” but it’s very muffled and carries none of her usual ice.

"No you," she says, basically on reflex. But the order wasn't needed, she doesn't intend to let go any time soon. Harrow is here, she is here, they are alive and this is real. Gideon just holds her close and smells her clean hair and breathes as steadily as she can around the lump in her throat.

The silence stretches on for what could only be a few minutes but it feels like a myriad. "Go to sleep, Griddle," said the pot to the kettle.

(no subject)

bonebutchblues - 2021-11-05 17:09 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

sugarlips - 2021-11-06 00:08 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only