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.

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Just to be stubborn, she slaps Gideon's hands back before letting her arms fall to her sides. Her toes curl against the icey floor in worry as her cavalier's eyes close, but she doesn't fall and Harrow breathes what she hopes is a silent sigh of relief. Then she's grabbing Gideon just above the elbow in a vicegrip and leading her out and away from the reminder of death.

Edited 2021-10-10 05:37 (UTC)

God damn it. She wants to slap Harrow’s horrible little hand even more to assert dominance, but the dizziness robs her of her chance. It’s more-or-less the worst thing that has happened to her lately.

She stumbles behind her necromancer, just as glad to be leaving the morgue behind.

Suck it up, buttercup, Harrow has no intention of letting Gideon be dominant or make any decisions whatsoever for a hot minute. Since clearly she makes very terrible decisions.

They make it only a few meters from the morgue door before a small swarm of officers descend on them. The way Harrow puts her body in front of Gideon's as a buffer would be funny if it weren't so sad, though she uses the full force of her Reverend Daughter presence as if that could make her taller and wider. She doesn't have any reason to think the staff of the Emperor's ship would be a threat, but after everything they've been through in the past however-long, she's paranoid. Sue her.

When Harrow bristles, Gideon wishes immediately for her sword. She realizes in a horrible, stomach-lurching moment, she has no idea where they are, or what the circumstances of her resurrection. Did Harrow steal her corpse? Is Harrow in trouble?

She puts a hand on her shoulder. Freshly dead or freshly alive, she's the cavalier here. If there's gonna be violence, it's going to be on her.

"Back off," she growls with a ferocity she doesn't feel. It's enough to get the officers to blink, but that's about it.

There's a tense moment of silence until one finally calls out, "Fetch a flesh magician, she's still bleeding!"

The hand on her shoulder is both the reassuring brace Gideon clearly meant it to be and also extremely infuriating. The stupid cav is still half-dead, and she's trying to be the protector still? Harrow is going to tie her to the bed to make her rest!

Harrow has to fight to not roll her eyes when Gideon tries to vocally intimidate the pack of soldiers. Hypocritical, maybe. Harrow lifts one thin hand to rest on top of Gideon's fingers, debating the relative merits of trying to suplex the cav in the awkward silence that follows.

She practically deflates with relief when someone barks for help. Another one produces a chair from God-knows-where and mumbles something about a stretcher as she tries to encourage Gideon to sit. In an uncomfortable realization, Harrow remembers that Gideon probably has no fucking clue where they are. "It's okay, Nav, sit." She will crouch down next to the chair like a perched crow, a hand on Gideon's knee.

The mood shifts too quickly, and her still-exhausted mind can't keep up. She startles at the appearance of the chair, as if perhaps that too is a threat. Are they fighting? Are they running? Sitting, apparently!?

The jolt of adrenaline she felt when Harrow put her body in front of her is keeping her pulse hammering in her ears, but returns little strength to her limbs or clarity to her mind. By the time Harrow convinces her to warily drop herself down into the chair, everything feels distant, like she's reading about it in a flimsy comic and not living in it herself.

Someone in the grey fatigues of the Sixth takes her arm to feel her pulse. She tries to snatch it back but it's held firm. Another hand grabs her chin, and someone is shining a pen light in her eyes.

"Harrow," says someone, who's voice sounds strangely like Gideon's. "Harrow..." the voice sounds plaintive, pathetic. She wonders who it is.

Edited 2021-10-10 20:56 (UTC)

Gideon looks dizzy down to her very soul. Harrow worries at her lip in sympathy, watching everything that's being done to her cavalier with hawklike intensity. Her thin fingers tighten their grip.

"I'm here, Gideon. I'm not going to leave you. We're on His Kindly Majesty's ship. These officers are going to make sure you're stable, and then we're going to get cleaned up."

Her voice is softer than it has ever been, reassuring but confident. She declares her intent with a purposeful stare at the Second Officer who is shining the penlight and receives a crisp nod that she takes as agreement.

She groans and tightens her grip on Harrow's fingers in response. The hands have released her arm and chin, but another pair is shoving into the ragged hold of her shirt and prodding at her chest. There is some kind of talk about "diaphragm" and "inner pleura" that Gideon absolutely doesn't understand, but in an absolutely sickening sensation she feels her flesh being moved.

"Fucking... gross..." she manages, as her lungs are repaired from the inside out.

Suddenly the work is done, and she can feel her lung capacity increase by what feels like orders of magnitude. She takes one heaving breath, and then another. The flood of oxygen to her brain is a relief she didn't realize she was desperate for. She stands up out of the chair with her newfound strength, then just as quickly goes ragdoll limp.

Harrow would never admit it, but she agrees. Watching Gideon stitch back together from the inside out is a little bit gross. Even worse, the sight of the flesh magician's hands inside the wound, touching Gideon's viscera, has a horrible protective jealousy rearing inside of her and roaring. Gideon's fingers crack under the pressure of Harrow's grip.

The big gulps of air are encouraging, and the medics look on with approval. Harrow feels a breath come rushing out of her that she didn't realize she'd been holding... until Gideon tries to stand and promptly loses consciousness.

"Nav-!" Her throat burns with the effort of shouting, which is pointless anyway because Gideon is already crumpling into the nearest officer's arms.

It takes two of them to hoist the cavalier into a bathroom, where Harrow insists on cleaning her up herself. Medical assistants be damned, this is her cavalier! So when Gideon comes-to she will find herself laid out on towels on tiles, a pillow under her head, her modesty maintained only with more towels, and harrow insistently but gently cleaning the blood and battle and who knows what else off of Gideon's chest where the wound used to be. The necromancer is deeply concentrated, eyebrows pinched, and dressed down to shorts and her bandeaux.

Her second awakening is much, much more pleasant than the first, but no less confusing. Perhaps moreso! For a moment, it is all Gideon can do to lay uncomprehending of the gentle touch.

It can't be real, right? Since this is a hallucination, she can do what she wants, and what she wants is to reach forward and push Harrow's hair out of her face.

Harrow sees the movement in the corner of her eye and turns to look in time to see that hand coming. Her face warms, which makes her press her thin lips into an even thinner line.

"You're an idiot." She breathes it out with excessive fondness.

Gideon's heart clenches as she stares into the face she never thought she'd see again. Distantly, she's still mad at Harrow for spitting her out, but mostly she's amazed.

"I'm alive," she says, still a bit addled. There's a pause, "And naked?"

Harrow sighs heavily out of her nose. "You are, no thanks to yourself." She's still mad at Gideon for dying, so there!

"You were filthy and I didn't want to let one of the staff bathe you. You're welcome."

"OK, so this is happening," she says, very unsure that this is happening. She really still feels like she got landed on by a shuttle and crushed into a grime pit, but she can't deny that Harrow's touch feels good, and that is just extraordinarily confusing.

"Not exactly how I wanted to get naked with you," her mouth says, with no input whatsoever from her brain.

Yes, this is happening, and it's already strange enough as it is, don't make it worse! Harrow has some measure of sympathy for how shellshocked Gideon is. Reasonable, for once in her life.

Of course it couldn't last.

Harrow sputters, dropping the wet wash cloth down onto Gideon with an absurd plop. "I beg your pardon???" she asks with the incredulous offense of someone who's actually saying 'you did not just say what I think I just heard'.

Oh shit. Oh shit. Reality hits her like a wet rag to the face. This is actually happening and she actually said that outloud. OK, Nav, play it cool. Maybe she didn't hear you. Maybe you can play this off.

"What?"

Gideon plays stupid, because of course she does. Harrow inhales deeply through her nostrils, lifting her hands, palms together, to touch the tips of both middle fingers to her browbone.

"Of all the times to pull out your stupid jokes, Griddle." Because that's clearly what this was. An attempt at humor. More stupid shit like calling her pet names and taking her meaning of inside the wrong way. If she believes that hard enough then it will be true and this won't be the most awkward moment of her horrible little existence.

"Yep. Yes. Stupid jokes," she agrees, as her cheeks heat up, and her ears blush bright. This is definitely like her normal teasing and she's not thinking about Harrow's delicate but purposeful touch, and the sharp, delicate angles of her collarbone, and certainly not about her bare face with it's beautiful little divot in her lips.

She carefully pushes her up on her elbows, takes the cloth and starts scrubbing at her neck.

Gideon is going a truly horrendous job of selling the lie, here, and Harrow is stuck between admitting that Gideon might actually be attracted to her which is earth-shatteringly weird, or pretending to be stupid beyond anything she's ever done before and insulting her intelligence and her whole sense of self on the other. Really it's lose-lose.

The blush on the cavalier's face is something else, and Harrow can see it clearly even as she's pointedly looking at everything else in the room except for Gideon. She takes up a fresh cloth and rubs aggressively at her face, more for the grounding of it than to clean herself, though she didn't really do a thorough job of that yet, either.

She turns around, facing away from Gideon as she runs water and soap through her stringy hair, ignoring that her underclothes are getting wet in the process. "After all, doesn't your type run more wasting and feminine?" She blurts out before she can think about it.

Gideon's been wrong about many things in her life, but nothing so spectacularly, life-fuckingly wrong as her feelings for "Dulcie." The barb stings. The twitterpation growing in her stomach bursts and dissipates like a popped bubble.

She grunts and continues scouring herself, but now she's looking away from Harrow as well.

Harrow scrubs harder at her own skin until it blossoms red from the exfoliation. The sound of that grunt sounds like a door closing, and it makes ice grow around her heart. Sure, they've come so far in their relationship and sure they need each other, but that's not the same as... it was stupid to hope.

She glances over her shoulder and feels her lungs clench down around her heart. She impatiently rips off her wet underclothes and slides forward to the pool set in the tiled floor. She slides under with a soft sound and sinks to the bottom, sitting there, hugging her knees and brooding.

Harrow stays underwater for a nearly worrying amount of time. She isn't trying to drown herself, but she could be mistaken for such.

What? Just? Happened? Gideon is left bewildered and cold on the tiles. Well, she does deserve that, doesn't she? After all, she left Harrow first. She gives herself a quick once-over to remove the worst of the grime, then slides into the warm pool behind her Gloom Mistress.

Of all the things Harrow expected, Gideon sloshing down in beside her was not one of them.

Now that the large red-headed cav is down here with her, though, she realizes it couldn't have been anything else. No matter what else they might hate each other for, Gideon is painfully, stupidly, perfectly loyal.

Harrow opens her mouth and air bubbles out of her mouth, her hair floating up wildly around her head. She finally pushes herself up and surfaces, nudging Gideon with a foot to encourage her to do the same.

She surfaces with Harrow and wastes no time in looping her arms around her and pulling her close. The water here is warm, and fresh, and nothing at all like that cold pool in Canaan House, but she can't help but be reminded of the night that feels like yesterday to her. Distantly she wonders how long it's really been.

Instead she presses her own head to Harrow's and whispers, "I'm sorry. Harrow, I'm so sorry."

Hey, woah, what? Harrow blinks like a startled cat as she's drawn in by wonderfully dense biceps and held close enough to Gideon that she can feel their chests touching. Her face heats from the neck up.

Something about being mutually submerged in a pool has her feeling the same vulnerability all over again.

Of all the things in empire, Gideon starts to apologize and Harrow goes limp as a dead thing. "What?" She asks, deeply incredulous. "Please... don't." She doesn't want apologies! "What are you on about, Nav?"

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