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They find their way into the new shape of things over the next month. The barriers and boundaries, walking the tension between what Gideon desires and what Harrow can allow, all of it kept secret and safe within the walls of their apartment. It doesn't always work; there are fights and frigid silences, Gideon throwing herself into workouts as an act of aggression and Harrow immersing herself in a book or Sextus' latest draft of theories and theorems with as much pointed intensity. When it's successful, though, when all the fractured pieces of themselves come together into some temporary whole...

Harrow does not find it unpleasant. Not entirely.

She insists that they act no different than usual in public, still necromancer and cavalier, still as Ninth as they can be in a pre-Resurrection backwater. It's the only way it can work, and though Gideon makes no secret of her opinion, grumbling at home and out, trying to catch Harrow's hand or stand a little closer than ordinary, she bears it with an aggrieved stoicism that sets Harrow's teeth on edge and almost amuses her all at once. She harbors no illusion that Gideon's patience will last forever; this new change will soon find itself brayed to the world--or merely to the Sixth (bad enough, and Harrow already suspects the Warden and his Hand know some scrap of it anyway) and Maeve (even worse)--but for now something close enough to privacy reigns between them.

The one topic Gideon can't let go, refuses to let go despite arguments and at least three battles with constructs, is the idea of a date. The term isn't unfamiliar, nor the concept, but both strike Harrow as wholly unnecessary. They know what they are, what they've become to one another; that should suffice, and yet for her cavalier, it's only the beginning. She wheedles and pleads, starts dropping it into conversations at points both ludicrous and logical, and while Harrow will never admit to being worn down, she's intelligent enough to see that getting this out of Gideon's system may be the only way of shutting her up.

The one least liable to result in questions or a disapproving look from Sextus, that is.

Gideon picks the day, and Harrow the place. At the appointed hour, they set off for Petros Park, Harrow casting furtive looks at anyone they pass and keeping her hands tightly folded, her arms rigid to discourage any soft touch or brief tangle of fingers. "I forbid you from enjoying this," she mutters as they walk, when everyone else is out of earshot. "So wipe that smile off your face. You look like a loon."

It isn't every night that Harrow crosses their narrow hallway in the middle of the night, slipping quietly into Gideon's room--but it's most of them. The solidity of her cavalier's presence, even deep asleep, is a greater reassurance since last month's disappearances, the inexplicable vanishing and subsequent return that still triggered an alarm response at the back of her brain.

Most things in and out of Darrow did, as Gideon was annoyingly apt to point out, but that didn't change the truth of it.

Tonight, Harrow wakes with a jolt to the sound of passing sirens, the tone close enough to the panicked klaxon of the Mithraeum bells that she scrabbles her way into a sitting position before she's even fully aware, fumbling for the sword that should be at her side in its protective coffin of bone. It's not here; it never was, but as the blue and red flash of lights filters into her room she tears the sheets towards the end of the bed in a half-awake and desperate search. Reality catches her after only a minute, less than that, but her pulse still pounds in her ears, her breath coming in jagged, helpless gasps. Execrable flesh magician though she is, she knows enough to slow the beat of her heart and purge the remaining adrenaline from her system. It helps, just enough.

She's fully awake now, though, alone in the ruin of her bed, and falling back to sleep here seems all at once impossible. Quickly, she slips out of bed and goes across the hall, listening at Gideon's closed bedroom door for a moment before she turns the knob and pushes it ajar. She can only just see the shape of Gideon curled under the blankets, warm and solid and deep asleep; she stays in the doorway for another moment, watching her, before she takes the last few steps to the edge of the bed and curls in at her side.

Shameful as it is, the bathtub in Gideon's apartment still fills Harrow with an apprehension she knows is misplaced. This is not the Mithraeum; there are no threats lurking around the corner or waiting patiently just above the plaster of the ceiling, no need for wards on every surface and a wary eye at the door. Being aware of that doesn't stop the flutter in her chest or the twist in her guts as she tries to bathe, or limit the few seconds of panic she feels when rinsing her hair leaves her vision blurred with water, every inch of her waiting for rough hands on her shoulders and the hard push down.

She hasn't found a way to explain it to Gideon yet, to tell her about the Saint of Duty and his ceaseless siege against her, no reason for it she knows or can provide. She asks, instead, for her cavalier's protection, a seat outside the bathroom door and the black rapier in her hand. There are questions in Gideon's eyes every time--but every time, she nods and finds a chair.

Tonight has been quiet for them both, a simple dinner and a softly companionable few hours in the lounge, Harrow reading a book while Gideon sprawls on the couch, her headphones in and connected to the television. Once or twice, Gideon's fingers brush her ankle, and Harrow doesn't flinch away. As the show Gideon had been watching ends and the credits start to roll, Harrow marks her place and sets her book down.

"I was going to take a bath," she says when Gideon pulls her headphones from her ears. She worries her lip in her teeth. "Would you...?"

She's never been a truly deep sleeper, but her time on the Mithraeum forced Harrow into an even shallower cycle, forever anticipating footsteps in the corridor and the feeling of her wards being tripped, alerts over the comm at any hour. Even, occasionally, the cool gaze of the Body from the corner of her room, a presence both soothing and portentous--and with little way of telling one from the other. The habit carried over into Darrow; the deepest sleep she'd had only came that first day, exhaustion and stress sinking her like a stone, leaving her to rise hours later better rested than she'd felt in months.

Tonight, she wakes up in the blackest part of the early morning, the space that's too late and too early all at once. It'll do not good to toss and turn, no good to lie awake and wait for dawn either. Instead, Harrow slips from her room, barefoot and small in her nightgown, and pads across the hall to Gideon's bedroom. Her cavalier doesn't even wake at the creak of her door as it opens, and Harrow lets out a quiet, half-relieved breath. Tiptoeing to the empty side of the bed, she hesitates a moment before sliding beneath the covers.

To touch her is too much, but she moves as close as she dares, pulling the sheets up and turning away, the soft curve of her back only an inch away from Gideon's. Just her presence is enough to soothe, and after only a minute, Harrow slides back into sleep until the morning.

Whatever balance they might have had early on is lost in bits and pieces over the next week or so, replaced by chilly silences and sheer avoidance, each attempt at conversation--usually Gideon's--turning all too quickly into yet another argument. They keep it to a minimum around the Sixth, at least, but Harrow doesn't fail to note the looks traded between Sextus and his cavalier when some tense exchange inevitably occurs between Gideon and her necromancer. Slowly, both of them spend more of their days apart than they do together, retreating into their respective rooms and treating the common spaces as contested territory. Gideon goes on more runs than usual. Harrow even ventures out to the library a time or two, excursions that leave her miserably unnerved by Darrow's noise and bustle, half-blinded by the glare of the light from a star that's not yet Dominicus and may never be.

There's nothing surprising about the conflict; they'd been arguing since they both could speak, fighting well before Gideon could hold a sword or Harrow could craft a construct. Nothing could change that for either of them, not Gideon's miraculous return or the restoration of some little shred of Harrow's sanity, because it's as much part of them as anything else. They fight, because it's what they've always done. Anything else is an aberration destined only for a swift correction.

Knowing that doesn't keep Harrow from replaying lines from Gideon's letter in her head, doesn't stop her from watching her out of the corner of her eye when they can bear to be in the same room as one another, doesn't make her wonder what if in the middle of the night with a foolish and misplaced hope.

By now Harrow knows Gideon's schedule, more or less, the points during the day she'll have the whole apartment to herself and when she'll make a considered retreat to her room until having some meal forced on her yet again. They've not yet reached the stage of a tray left in front of a closed door, but she suspects it's only a matter of time. For now, the place is quiet, and Harrow slinks out of her room and heads for the lounge, a book in hand. Curling up in her hoodie, on the absurdly soft cushions of the couch, she starts to read.

“But I was stabbed through the stomach!” Harrow shouted over the howling wind and the sick clatter of the tentacle disgorging another shower of plex slides. “What’s happening out there?”

There was little time for Magnus or the Lady Pent to answer the question, or for Harrow to remain where she was, curled in a rictus of agony on an ancient mattress, though right then she might have cherished the indulgence of either. She allowed herself to be helped upright, Magnus coaxing her hand gallantly--and foolishly, always foolish in his gallantry, and how could she have forgotten that about him?--into the crook of his arm to keep her close. They followed Abigail out of the room and into the hall, past the drifts of bloody snow collecting in the corners and dusting the humped shapes of furniture already half-buried. That much, she remembered from before, the cold and the snow and the sheer broken loneliness of Canaan House; what was new were the twisting pink organs making incursions nearly everywhere, and the bits of debris they were leaving behind. As much as she could, Harrow slowed her steps, dawdling to a degree she would have never permitted of herself before in the hopes of examining them, acquiring information even as they continued to flee.

There, a window shaded over with a thin film of tissue, the veins within blue and fat with blood. In one corner, a pile of rusted syringes half-burying an inert skeleton. In another, a pulsing tube split as though cut with a scalpel, releasing specimen containers full of cloudy fluid, something small and lumpen suspended within. It was all disgustingly physical, unnervingly medical; when her foot brushed against a heap of oblong pills, scattering them with a rattle, Harrow startled.

“Keep moving,” said Magnus as one of the tentacles behind him shuddered, emitting a gush of watery blood that sluiced over the floors, freezing slick in spots. Even frozen, the stench of it was meaty and obscene. “No time to take in the scenery.” Harrow looked up as though chastised from the skeleton she’d been examining--not a First House construct at all, those were Drearburh tools in its bony hand--and closed the distance between them, falling back into step with both shades of the Fifth. She’d had no right to pull them in, to cast them or any of the others as actors on her now-besieged stage. Their ghosts deserved the current of the River, swift passage to whatever shores lay beyond--but somewhat pathetically, she was glad of their presence anyway. “Where is this room?”

It was not the question she should have asked of the myriad already on her mind, but the more she remembered of the real Canaan’s halls, the more Harrow recalled there were safe places and unsafe, doors she’d catalogued that first day and sorted into one category or another. The mental map she had of them was faded now, fractured, and as she turned corners and scuttled down corridors, Abigail and Magnus only a step or two ahead in their heavy coats, she wished for a pencil and a piece of flimsy. Anything to begin setting another part of her mind to rights, after all that was lost.

“Close by,” said Abigail, turning her head so the words would not be lost in the increasing screech of the wind. “The others will be there already, if all’s gone according to plan--take my hand, we’re heading outside.”

Like the trusting child she’d never been, Harrowhark reached for Abigail’s mittened hand, and the world broke once more. The terrace she’d been about to step onto deliquesced into nothing, melting away beneath her feet, the howl of the wind turning into the rush of water, sweeping her away. It was the River, and not the River, a current of darkness taking hold of her and dragging her down; Harrow again tried to take the reins of her power and pull, finding that same butt-fuck nothing from before happening again. There was no escape from what this was, just a swirl of--

She is ten and standing on a chair, coarse-woven rope in her hands. Beside her, three bodies step in unison into the empty air, that final, frantic walk she imagined for herself so many times already--and now, of all times now, she cannot make her feet obey the command to move.

She rolls on the floor of the Mithraeum, hands bracketing the blade protruding from her stomach, broiling in the hot air and yet shivering at the same time, her blood smearing against the walls and the tile, dyeing the ridiculous fabric of her robe a red only the Cohort could admire. From somewhere far beyond, the incessant sound of the klaxon rings, and rings, and rings…

She feels a ripping inside her head, a pain that blanks out all else except for the sudden flash of golden eyes and for a second, Harrow, you look at me, and I look at you, and the experience is deeply fucking weird for us both.

When the world crashed back in, it revealed nowhere Harrow recognized. The scuffed brick of a wall swam into her field of vision, metal cans lined up against it; she could feel something equally hard propping her upright from behind, the ground firm and flat underneath her. All of that was hazy beneath the pain radiating outward from the blade still lodged inside her, the hilt pressed close to the small of her back. If she screamed, it was a sound she was used to by now, thin and animal in its agony. She slumped to the side and lay there, cheek against the gritty surface of the pavement, grasping for the threads of her power to close the wound and stabilize the damage, panting with the effort. Faintly, she could feel the blade move, a shuddering lurch of metal pushed this way and that by tissue regrowing at a rate she could not in this state comprehend.

“What is happening,” she tried to say yet again, though it came out garbled and choked, her teeth slick with the blood welling up from her throat. Harrow retched, spitting out a clot, a globule of scarlet all the brighter against the dull grey of the concrete. It cleared her airway enough to let her drag in another ragged breath; then another, and still more after that. Her vision grew dark around the edges, but Harrow focused, helplessly, on the fact she was still breathing. From somewhere behind her came the sound of running footsteps.