undonewithout | up against these things I can't see

Entry tags:

gideon

up against these things I can't see

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

In her sleep, Gideon feels the mattress give under Harrow's weight and, stirring, she rolls towards her. This isn't new, none of this is. Half unconscious, she slips her arm around Harrow's skinny waist and pulls her in closer against the curve of her body, into the cradle of her hips. Her nose pushes into Harrow's hair - even now, even here, she still smells like ash.

"Hey," she mumbles. "You okay?"

Gideon turns and moves, pulling her in, her arm heavy around Harrow's waist, her fingers close to the jut of her hip where it presses into the mattress, her chest broad and solid and sure against the line of her back. Her breath is warm along her neck when she noses her way into the curling tendrils of her newly grown-out hair, and Harrow feels her face heat up in response.

"There were sirens, " she says. "Outside. They woke me up, I thought..." Slowly, she shakes her head, her cheek brushing the soft cotton of the pillowcase. "It doesn't matter. It wasn't real."

"You can tell me," says Gideon, stifling a yawn. Her fingers curl lightly in the fabric of Harrow's nightgown over her hip; Gideon is, as usual, sleeping in shorts and a tank top. "Bad dream?"

"Not a dream, a delusion," says Harrow. The shift of her nightgown as Gideon's fingers curl is nearly imperceptible, but Harrow still tracks every displaced millimeter of fabric. "I thought it was the alarm bells on the Mithraeum. That the Heralds were coming, or...worse. I reached for the sword and panicked when I found it missing." She doesn't clarify which sword, or look towards the corner of Gideon's room where she knows the rapier usually is when it's not at her cavalier's hip; it feels unnecessary.

"It wasn't real," she repeats, humiliatingly unsure which of the two of them she's talking to.

"Definitely wasn't real," murmurs Gideon, sleepy, still resisting the pull of surfacing fully. Eyes still closed, she presses a kiss to the back of Harrow's neck .."You're fine. I got you."

That half-asleep murmur is more soothing than Harrow wants it to be, feeling the low rumble of it in Gideon's chest against her back or in the soft exhalation of her warm breath. It's only when she feels her move closer still, her lips grazing the back of her neck, that Harrow flinches.

"Don't do that."

The flinch combined with Harrow's tone of voice is lack a slap to the face or a punch, like the buckets of cold and ammonia scented reclaimed water that had sometimes woken her at Drearburh.

She pulls away.

"What did I do?"

In an instant, Gideon moves away, letting her go, and the relief Harrow feels is great enough to subsume the twist of regret that had formed in her stomach when Gideon's arm first slipped from her waist. She moves closer to the opposite edge of the bed, putting more distance between the two of them, aware of Gideon's eyes on her with every inch of reclaimed space.

"You kissed me," she says, still facing away from Gideon, her eyes on the dark, flat expanse of the wall by the bed. "Don't pretend you weren't aware of it. That demeans us both."

"I didn't..." Still sleep befuddled, Gideon scrubs at her eyes with both hands. "I didn't mean it like that. I just...I was just being affectionate."

She should have known better.

Harrow's face burns, her ears ringing. It wasn't fair that Gideon sounded so helpless, so lost, so in need of the kind of solace they'd both drawn from exactly this: late nights pressed close and waking up entwined, never addressing it further in the brighter light of day. More was never an option. They weren't built for it, even in this softer, safer place.

"I shouldn't have come here."

"Bit late to decide that," says Gideon, miserable and really awake now. She draws herself up into a half sitting position, her knees bent, one hand pushed into her hair. "You've been in here every night this week."

"I know I have," she snaps. In Gideon's bed is what she'd meant, and not; in the worst moments, the darkest parts of the day, her sense of unbelonging spiraled into wishing she'd taken the apartment she'd been given on her first day here, or that she'd never been in Darrow at all. Wishing she'd been left in the River, or the Mithraeum, to face whatever end she'd been so unceremoniously torn away from.

It all roils sickly in her belly, and as Gideon staggers upwards, Harrow moves too, sitting at the edge of the bed, her feet dangling off the mattress and her back to her cavalier. Her arms wrap around her middle, her shoulders rolling forward. "I let myself grow weak. Needy, like a...I forgot myself. It never should have happened."

Something bitter lurches at the back of her throat and Gideon chews on it for a moment. She twists her fingers into the longest strands of her hair.

"I thought you were going to try, but it's just if you don't," she says, her voice rough. "I can live with it if you're not."

"I am trying," she says, because she had been. All the nights that were easier than this one, the furtive brush of Gideon's fingers to her wrist or ankle as they sat on the couch, the terrifying honesty of their conversations as Harrow sat in the tub and Gideon stood guard outside--or in, that one time never repeated since. "I was. When I could bear it, I was."

Slowly, she turns her head, looking back through the dark at Gideon's folded, hunched frame. "You're doing a poor job of living with it right now, Nav."

"Don't bullshit me, Harrow," she says, through gritted teeth. "I know you. Better than anyone. I know why you look like when you're trying and you're still treating me like something you've stepped in. You might have said the words, but nothing's actually changed for you." The words taste bitter and they keep vomiting out of her anyway. "So I'm giving you an out. If you don't love me, it's okay. Just tell me so I'm not hanging myself with hope, okay?"

All of it hurts, every rough and seething word Gideon pushes out from behind her teeth, but it's the last part that feels most like a slap. She gets up from the bed, fists clenched at her side, wheeling around to face her. The dark hides the finer points of the look on her face, but it's there, hard and set and furious.

"If I don't what?"

"If you don't love me, Harrow," she says, still folded in on herself. She hasn't been this miserable since Jeannemary died. She should have been listened to Maeve all along. "I've known that you can't love anyone else, okay? I was there."

Repetition doesn't make it better, Gideon sounding just as agonized when she answers as she had before. Harrow's anger twists and intensifies, folds itself together with the yawning, cavernous shame that's always present, the guilt at her inadequacies and her failures, her all-encompassing sadness. The combination has her closing her eyes, her breath a caught, strangled thing in her throat. She stays there, silent and unmoving, as the minutes tick past.

"Get your shoes on," she says at last, surprising even herself. "We're going to the beach."

"What?" says Gideon, both copper brows shooting up towards her hairline. "No. We're not. It's three o'clock in the fucking morning, you lunatic."

"Yes we are, you coward," she says, reaching for the lamp by the side of the bed. In a twitch of wild and blinding fury, Harrow imagines herself picking it up, discovering the noise it would make in connection with Gideon's head. Her fingers find the switch instead, and she blinks in the sudden flood of light. "You worm. You faithless foundling wretch. If we're having this conversation, and we're having it now whether you like it or not, it's happening in salt water."

Harrow sees Gideon expression change, the argument and question she's expecting her to ask flashing in her eyes. She doesn't seal the other girl's molars together, or lock her jaw, but the thought of it crosses her mind as she holds up a hand instead. "More than fits in the tub, so don't even try asking."

Gideon's jaw tenses and she rolls her eyes but she also gets up out of bed, shoving her feet into running shoes and tugging a t-shirt over her head.

"Fine. Fuck you."

"Don't make me put together a construct to drag you there."

Gideon spits insults at her but starts getting dressed at the same time, and as meager a win as it is, Harrow chooses to take it. Still in her nightgown, she stalks out of the bedroom and down the hall. The temptation to go barefoot is a strong one, the atonement of pebbles on the sidewalk and the roughness of asphalt cutting into the soft soles of her feet; a punishment, equally deserved, on top of whatever this will be. She thinks of kneeling on glass before God, the sting and bite of the shards as they bit into her palms, the way she'd held the wounds open and willed her blood to pour.

Angry though she is, Gideon's likely as not to haul her over her shoulder if she tries leaving without shoes on, and though the streets are likely deserted the mere indignity of it is one thing she cannot bear. Slowly, Harrow steps into a pair of flats she'd left by the front door. They're flimsy, cheap things, bought for her by Gideon like the rest of her clothing, but they serve their purpose.

Folding her arms, she looks towards the still-open door of Gideon's room and waits.

A moment later Gideon emerges, pushing her hands through her hair to try and get it into some semblance of order. She doesn't even comment on the fact that Harrow hasn't gotten dressed. She just grabs her keys and yanks open the front door.

All Harrow wants is to go, to have this finished--whatever it is, and whatever it becomes. To change her clothes means delaying, giving them both time and space to call this off or smother it back into the darkness. Gideon throws the door open, and Harrow slips out ahead of her, already starting towards the end of the hallway and the lobby just beyond.

She doesn't look to see if Gideon's taken her usual position a half-step behind, just shoves the building's front door open and steps outside into the still-warm air of the night. After a moment to look both ways, getting her bearings, she starts walking in the direction of the beach.

They walk in silence and, without thinking about it, Gideon falls in a half step behind. She watches Harrow, the white of her nightdress glowing. She really does look like a saint for a moment.

On the sand, Gideon toes off her shoes and tucks her keys into one of them.

"Not too late to realise this is batshit," she says.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject