up against these things I can't see

[undonewithout]

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.

Comments

[wedobones]

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.

[undonewithout]

The walk takes as long as it takes, though it feels like forever. When they get to the beach, Harrow doesn't stop, her steps sliding, her gait turning awkward as her shoes fill with sand. Aggressively, she kicks off one flat, then another. It isn't until she reaches the damp solidity of the shoreline that she stops. The sea roars behind her, waves coming in and going out again. She remembers the sound of it from Canaan House, that white-noise growl that underlaid every day and night they'd spent there.

The only place you couldn't hear it was the laboratories, and those had been filled with other noises anyway.

"You think everything I do is batshit, Griddle, and you're only right a fraction of the time," says Harrow, looking up the beach at her. A larger wave breaks and floods up the beach, water rising to cover her feet and lap around her ankles. She shivers at the feeling of it pulling away again. "Come here."

[wedobones]

Something more fragile than disdain shivers through Gideon's shoulders, but she still rolls her eyes as she walks to Harrow's side, her bare heels sinking into the wet sand.

"I'm here."

[undonewithout]

Harrow watches every step, heat flooding her face and a flush coloring her cheeks as Gideon gets closer. Even the exaggerated roll of her golden eyes doesn't provide respite, and once she's within arm's reach, Harrow has to curl her fingers in the fabric of her nightgown to keep from taking her hand. Words she'd forgotten for too long come back to her now, though she has to swallow hard before she says them. "Then it's...go time. Or close enough."

Turning, she walks further into the water, doggedly pushing forward through the swells of the waves. Her nightgown billows up and she pushes at it, trying to saturate the fabric so it sinks. The sand slopes under her feet, the cold and briny water rising to her knees, her hips, just beneath the slight swell of her tits and higher still. When she's up nearly to her neck, she flails around, twisting, looking for Gideon behind her. A wave hits her in the face and she splutters, wiping saltwater from her eyes with one hand.

[wedobones]

"Oh, God. Is it?"

Harrow wades ahead of her into the water and, helpless to resist, Gideon follows. When the wave slaps into Harrow, when she staggers, Gideon's there, wrapping her arm around her to keep her steady.

"You're okay," she says. "I've got you."

[undonewithout]

When Gideon reaches out, Harrow fumbles forward, clinging to her like a lifeline as she treads water before finding her feet again. Even when she's mostly steady, she doesn't let go. "Different kind of go time," she says first, looking up at her. "But just as...necessary. I think. It should be."

She sways a little with the push and pull of the waves, feeling her nightgown swirl around her body, gliding over her hips and tangling between her legs. Too many things choke at her, filling her chest and her throat with words and sharp-edged feelings. There's nowhere safe she can start in unraveling it; she just has to begin.

"Tell me what it takes, Nav," she says. There's a note in her voice she hasn't heard since the pool, since Canaan, unsteady and lost. Childish, if she'd ever really been a child at all. "If it's not trying, if it's not...all that I've managed to give you, all that I've learned to allow, tell me what it takes so you understand I love you."

[wedobones]

Gideon can't remember ever being this miserable again. She keeps her arms firm around Harrow, steadying her in place, and she does not look down and she does not blush when she sees how transparent Harrow's nightgown is, the shape of her nipples through the fabric.

"I meant what I said, Harrow," she says, over the roar of the waves. "It doesn't feel like you're trying. You...what have you actually given me?"

[undonewithout]

The misery in Gideon's face, illuminated as it is by the moonlight above them, tears at her deeper than Ianthe's thrust of her dead cavalier's knife through her palm, frightens her more than the prospect of Mercymorn's invasive delve into the secrets of her body or the renewal of God's gentle fingertips along her temples. It's hideous, horrible, and Harrow does not give herself the unearned forgiveness of looking away.

"I have let you see me for who I am," she says. "Beneath the veils and the bones, as merely Harrowhark, not the Reverend Daughter. I told you the darkest secrets of my life, of why I have a life at all. Maybe that doesn't matter, because it is the past, and because of...afterwards. Because I cheapened it only days later. Because it's home, and you've left that behind."

[wedobones]

Gideon lets out a shivering sigh at that.

"You don't owe me anything, Harrow. We're past that, okay? I love you. I'm IN love with you. I know you can't...I'm not here, and I know that, but that doesn't stop me wishing you looked at me like you look when you talk about her." Her mouth twists. "I want you, Harrow. Every way that counts. I just wish I believed you could want me."

[undonewithout]

Harrow can't remember the first time she thought about her end, about apocalypse and doom, the destruction of the world or just of herself. Occasionally, the two felt like the same thing--and maybe with her ascent to Lyctorhood, they might eventually have been. She'd imagined airlock failures and meteors, a rope and a knife and the sweet surrender of the dark waters of the Tomb. Dominicus winking out, the Body awakening, the rock rolling away once more to unleash terror upon the Houses and their Emperor. So many things, and never once something like this.

The skies do not open, and the seas do not boil, but Gideon's mouth twists and everything inside Harrow cracks asunder.

"I broke myself because I loved you," she says, and the black of her eyes is wide and wet, unblinking, her face damp with salt spray. "Because I lost you, and I love you, and I could not face a world without you in it. My love for the Body is pure and devotional, a veneration I am not worthy of but strive to be every day. My love for you is a rank, stinking pit, base and physical and...wanting."

She can hear how that sounds, and she stops, breathing hard, willing herself to go on before Gideon has the chance to interrupt. "I am in love with you, Gideon Nav. I despise myself for the weakness of it, but I can no more live without you than I can stop believing in the surety of the Tomb and that which sleeps within."

[wedobones]

Gideon doesn't say anything for a moment. She can't. All she can do is stand there, her feet planted in the wet sand, her arms around Harrow to stop her drifting, and she takes every word like a punch. When Harrow is finished, Gideon stares at her for a long moment.

"So tell me what you actually want, Harrow," she says, her voice aching rough. "Because I've been your whipping girl my whole life and even I can't take the way you keep punishing me for whatever is in your head. I know you hate it, Harrow, but shit. You've got to forgive us both for feeling it."

[undonewithout]

The silence that follows her declaration is terrible, a stretch of time broken only by the sound of the water around them. Waves break against Harrow's back and drench her even further, dampening the ends of her hair and sluicing cold down her neck and over her shoulders, but she clings to Gideon for all she's worth, staring into those terrible golden eyes. When Gideon finally speaks, the sound of her voice is a different kind of agony. Everything she says is deserved, unexpected in its rawness and its anger and its fathomless sadness; Harrow takes it all in, letting it burn in the center of her chest and the pit of her stomach.

"I want to know what it's like to touch you and not want to flinch," she says. She could twist it into something more oblique, hide it under her usual veils of inscrutability, but the saltwater demands her honesty as much as the girl in front of her does. "To be touched and not feel as though I have to turn away because it's too much. I need time to learn both of those things, to...practice, and I need to feel as though you're not going to hate me for it." She swallows hard. "You hate me for enough else, that might be an impossibility, but I live in hope."

[wedobones]

"Are you telling me there's at least hope that we'll figure it out?" she says, her fingers fisted in the fabric of Harrow's night-dress under the water, holding her close. "Because, God, Harrow. All I think about is touching you. Kissing you." Her cheeks flush despite the frigidity of the water. "It's all I want."

[undonewithout]

"I'm telling you there's hope we might figure it out," she says. Even with the chill of the water and the push and pull of the current, she can feel Gideon's hands on her, the tension in the fabric of her nightgown where Gideon's fingers twist in. She shivers. "We've worked through puzzles as complex as this before."

Harrow can see the flush on the other girl's face, the color softened by the moonlight but just present enough. Her own face burns with the confession, the naked want in Gideon's voice. Everything she asks for is possible, and impossible, and there's only one way to begin. Trusting Gideon not to let her sink, she lets go of her, the sharp lines of her face settling into an intense, wary determination. She reaches up, twisting damp arms around her cavalier's neck, pulling her down and pressing her lips to hers.

[wedobones]

Harrow kisses her and Gideon's mind goes blank. She's pretty sure her mouth goes slack for a moment, too, before it occurs to her to kiss back. Her arms tighten around Harrow's waist, pulling her in tight against her, the flats of their bodies pressed as close as they can get. She drags in a breath through her nose.

[undonewithout]

It's fumbling and clumsy, the contact of their mouths sending up a wave of revulsion even before Gideon gets over the worst of her shock and starts to respond. It's not as bad as when it had been Ianthe, though, not by half, and for that reason Harrow's able to let the disgust run through her and then fade. Gideon pulls her in, presses their bodies together, and Harrow's head reels. She makes a noise that embarrasses her, reminiscent of the sound that'd echoed off the pool tiles back at Canaan House when Gideon's lips made contact with the damp line of her frontal sinus.

Here, with a void of stars above them rather than damp and crumbling plaster, it's better somehow.

[wedobones]

Gideon nudges the kiss deeper for a beat and then she lets in break, leaning in her forehead against Harrow's. It's not Gideon's first kiss, but it feels like it, somehow.

"You okay?"

[undonewithout]

Gideon deepens the kiss for a moment, turns it hungrier, and Harrow feels an ember of panic catch light in her chest. It's everything she needs, nothing she wants, and when it ends and there's nothing but the touch of Gideon's forehead to hers, the relief she feels is a sick and humiliating wash. This close, at least, it's harder to look directly at her. It takes her a moment to say anything at all.

"I think so."

[wedobones]

"Okay," says Gideon, risking another kiss to Harrow's wet skin. "Got anything else to say or do you want to go home and try being honest with each other somewhere warm?"

[undonewithout]

This kiss is soft, placed not on her mouth but against the cool line of her forehead, and though her jaw tenses with the contact Harrow can let it happen. She has other questions, a myriad of them, but they can wait until they're home; after a minute, she shakes her head. "We can go back. Unless there's...more you need before we do."

[wedobones]

Gideon thinks about it for a moment, letting her knees relax so they bob a little with the movement of the waves.

"I know it's a process," she says. "I know we need to talk about it. But...just...promise me you won't take it back."

[undonewithout]

"Gideon," she says, but the request is a deserved one; painful and harsh, but no worse than other things they've asked of one another. Better than most, in fact. She sways in Gideon's arms, pushed and pulled by the currents but never drawn out too far. Her next exhale is a shaky one, a letting go of something and resigning it to the water.

"I will not take it back," she says. "Not for a myriad." She could pledge it by the grace of the Emperor or the covenant of the Tomb, speak the oath of their sacred bond as necro and cavalier, and maybe another day she will. Not tonight, when the sea and the stars and Gideon feel, for a moment, like enough.

[wedobones]

"Good enough," says Gideon, and then she shifts Harrow in her arms, lifting her up against her chest, carrying her back towards shore.

"You can wear my t-shirt," she says. "So you don't freeze to death."

The night is close and warm. They'll be okay.

[undonewithout]

"If you hadn't offered, I was going to ask," says Harrow, smirking as Gideon turns her in the water, letting the buoyancy work to make it feel effortless. When they're back on the sand, she takes the shirt when it's offered, pulling it awkwardly on over the clinging and embarrassingly transparent stuff of her wet nightgown as Gideon finds both their pairs of shoes where they're strewn over the sand. In hindsight, Harrow concedes she should have changed clothes before they'd left after all.

Dressed and dripping seawater, they slog up to the boardwalk and into the city, retracing their way home through still-empty streets. Harrow doesn't reach for Gideon's hand, and Gideon refrains in turn, but every so often their knuckles brush, their fingertips finding the back of a hand or the line of a forearm as they cross streets and turn corners.

As Gideon unlocks their apartment door and pushes it open, Harrow glances at her, tentatively, before walking through. "Dry clothes, first," she says, like a reminder to them both. "Then...the lounge?" Either of their beds would be too much, too suggestive; the couch is comfortable, neutral territory.

[wedobones]

"Lounge feels safe," says Gideon, nodding. She pauses, dropping a kiss into the wet tangle of Harrow's hair and then pads off in the direction of her bedroom. She strips off wet things, dropping them in a pile in the corner to deal with later and pulls on dry sweats and a t-shirt, pushing her fingers back through her wet hair. Once she's dressed, she pads into the kitchen, making them both tea. Her mouth keeps trying to twitch into a smile.