the last truce we ever came to from our adolescent war

[undonewithout]

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.

Comments

[wedobones]

"Why change the habit of a lifetime?" She rolls her eyes when Harrow throws up the wall of bone. "You're a lot of things, Nonagesimus, but you've never been a coward."

[undonewithout]

Harrow seethes on her side of the wall, pacing the few steps she's able to take within her little self-imposed cell. "I'm still not getting in that water. There's no point to it, and if you used what little brain you have, Griddle, you'd see that too."

She sits, folding herself up into a small black bundle on the tile floor and glaring in the direction of her cavalier. The bone may be opaque, but Harrow can still sense Gideon's presence on the other side, steady and patient.

[wedobones]

Gideon kills the taps and peels off her sweats, stepping into the lukewarm water in the tub. She stands with it lapping around her shins.

"We can't keep going like this and you know it, Harrow. Get your ass in the water." She closes her eyes. "I'll talk if you do."

[undonewithout]

"I despise you," she says, her voice full not of venom or hate but something shamefully weaker, a note that sounds altogether too young and too tired. Harrow listens to Gideon move and settle in the tub, the water making a quiet noise around her body. She looks down at her hands, takes in the way they already shake, and curls her fingers into fists until she feels the sharp bite of her nails slicing into her palms. The cuts heal as soon as they're made, but the memory of the pain, at least, lingers.

With effort, she stands, letting the panels of the bone wall fold in on themselves again, reducing until the chip of bone they'd come from is small and inert again, resting on the tile floor. Harrow looks at Gideon in the tub, her eyes burning, another hideous blush creeping along her cheeks and down her neck at the sight of her in nothing but boxers and a shirt, the lean muscle of her legs on full display.

It's like death to beg for pity, to ask it of the girl in front of her. She can't, and she wants to, and the struggle of it shows all too clearly in her face.

[wedobones]

There's that look on Harrow's face, that flush creeping across her cheekbones again. Gideon can't even begin to fathom what's going on, and she can't keep doing this. It's too much. She's too tired.

"Get in the water, Harrow. We're doing this."

[undonewithout]

“You have no conception of what you’re asking of me,” she lies, knowing that of the two of them, it’s Gideon who’s always been the more clear-eyed when it comes to things like this. To feelings, and the capacity to open oneself up enough to allow someone else an unobstructed view.

Harrow looks towards the door, thinking once more about running, about setting a skeleton—a hundred of them—on Gideon before she can get out of the tub and give chase. Instead, she shrugs out of the hoodie, letting it fall to the floor, strips off the socks she’s wearing, stands there in her shirt and her trousers, steeling herself. It’s only three steps to the tub, but each of them feels like shedding a layer of protection.

After testing the water with one thin, bare foot, she steps in, one hand pressed to the wall above the tub to keep her balance.

[wedobones]

"Whatever it is, we'll figure it out together," says Gideon, because she honestly does believe that. "We bring hell, remember?" Harrow steadies herself against the wall as Gideon sinks down onto her knees in the bathtub, the fabric of her t-shirt floating against the muscles of her belly and, without thinking, like she had that day in Canaan House, she holds out her hand.

[undonewithout]

"We showed them what the Ninth House does."

The memory aches, that reminder they'd come so close to solidarity, managed it for a handful of moments before it was gone again. She'd made herself into a necromancer alone, afterwards, and cheated herself into thinking that was better. Gideon sinks into the water, shirt billowing up as it had in the Canaan House pool, although there the dark had masked the glimpse Harrow gets now of taut skin and defined muscle. Her flush deepens; she is no flesh magician, and has no wish to be, but she still understands the sight of a body beautifully crafted.

When Gideon extends her hand, at first Harrow can only stare, her face young and narrow and her expression unsteady. Slowly, she lets go of the wall and reaches down, her fingers sliding over Gideon's.

[wedobones]

Gideon's hand closes around Harrow's and, inexplicably, she finds herself squeezing her necromancer's slim fingers.

"You're definitely blushing," she says. "Sit down and tell me what the fuck is going on."

[undonewithout]

Helplessly, she lets herself take strength from that squeeze to her fingers, even a form of comfort despite wondering if she deserves either. "I know I'm blushing," she says, because the presence of the saltwater sanctifies this place, demands her honesty no matter how reluctant she is to give it. "I'll...I don't want to tell you, but I will. I promise."

It's awkward to sit, but she manages, sinking into the water of the tub and feeling it seep through her clothes. It's not the same as the River, nor the pool from before, a warmth and brackishness to it, the grains of salt that hadn't dissolved forming a grit at the bottom of the tub. Letting go of Gideon's hand, Harrow turns until her back is to the faucet protruding from the wall, leaving Gideon the smoother, wider end to lean against. She watches her, dark eyes taking in every angle of her face, every bright spark in her flame-colored eyes, the soft fall of her red hair.

"Why did you miss me?" she asks. She knows the answer already, having heard enough of it from Gideon's own mouth, having regained her own memories of how complex and fraught their connection had been, but approaching from this angle is the only thing she can manage. "Those seven months after you...when you came here. Why, out of everything, was it me you were waiting for?"

[wedobones]

Once Harrow settles, Gideon does too, fitting her back into the end of the tub, her knees bent, her hands floating over her lap. Harrow asks her question, and Gideon tilts her head back against the tile, trying to put something complicated into words.

"One flesh, one end, bitch," says Gideon, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth. "What's the point of me without you? A Cavalier without a necromancer?" She worries her lip with her teeth. "It was more than that, though. I...I've never been without you, Harrow. My whole life, you've been there."

[undonewithout]

"Your whole life was immeasurably poorer for having me in it," she says, letting the statement rest in the air between them. "Everyone feared you. Everyone hated you. Including me. The things I did to you in life were bad enough, but in death..." She looks at a point beyond Gideon, a complexity of emotions running over her face. "You should never forgive me for that. Not..."

Harrow's throat locks up on love me, the words too immense to say so early. "It should break our bond, not have you seeking to make it stronger."

[wedobones]

"My life would have been shitty on the Ninth no matter what happened," says Gideon, her voice low and level, her golden eyes fixed on Harrow's face. "At least with you around, I got to be the centre of someone's attention sometimes." Her jaw works for a moment. "Tell me you didn't feel it in Canaan House...things start to shift between us. Tell me it was in my head."

[undonewithout]

Something in her clenches when Gideon looks at her like that, an uncomfortable and unexpected feeling she never wants to have happen again--and wants to keep feeling, over and over. She thinks back over all her once-lost memories, trying to see them from another angle, trying to understand how they could be expressions of her regard and not instances of her hate. It's not as difficult as it seems: their fights always started with one of them seeking the other out, choosing to roam the corridors and levels of Drearburh, sometimes for hours; every trap laid in Gideon's cell almost an afterthought once Harrow had rifled through her things or simply stood in the center of the room, trying to comprehend the girl who all of it belonged to.

Everything they'd ever done was deliberate, and their motivations weren't what they'd convinced themselves they were.

Harrow gnaws on her lip in the wake of that question, Gideon's plea for verification of a thing she'd been so desperately trying to ignore. The salt water laps around them both, Harrow's clothes heavy with it already, compelling and reminding her of what she owes the other girl, and is owed in return. "It wasn't," she says. "In your head. Canaan House...changed things."

[wedobones]

"And you can't take that back now," says Gideon. "No matter how much you want to."

She thinks about seven months without Harrow, about how it has felt. About how gutted she'd been when it had been Sextus standing on that beach, and not Harrow. The wrong necromancer.

"I missed you because you're a part of me, Harrow. For better or worse. I know you don't like hearing me say it but, God, it was so easy to die knowing that I wouldn't have go watch you go first."

[undonewithout]

"I know the rules of this, Nav," she says, with only a fraction of her usual spite. "I will not take it back. I...don't want to take it back." The nakedness of that admission has her blushing again, but her eyes are steady on Gideon's. She watches her think, and feel, and listens to her speak; the thought of being part of her cuts deeper than one flesh, one end ever had, even though the driving principle of both is the same at its basic level. One was a saying. The other was true, and terrifying, and full of more beauty than a thing like Harrow deserves.

Her jaw tightens when Gideon says again how simple she'd found it to die, how willingly she'd been part of her own murder. "I hate when you say that. I hate that it...that Lyctorhood demands that. Sextus has the right of it, you know. It never should be asked of any of us." She fists her hands in the hem of her shirt, beneath the water. "Do you remember what I made you swear? If I had died, and you had lived?"

[wedobones]

"Cytherea did kind of have a point, didn't she? For an evil fuckhead who wanted us all dead, I mean." She watches the movement of Harrow's pale fingers under the water, the way she fidgets with the hem of her shirt. She closes her eyes. That memory, those moments, are all a bit of a tumult, still. "To go back to the Ninth? Do my duty by the tomb?"

[undonewithout]

"I forgot what a way with words you have," says Harrow, and though she keeps a tight grip on the hem of her shirt, her mouth quirks upwards, briefly, into a smile. "Her methodology was flawed, but her reasoning...no, she was insane. I can't even claim otherwise. Insane in everything but that, maybe."

She looks up again at Gideon, waiting and hoping she remembers--and when she does, Harrow rebukes herself for ever doubting her. She nods. "Someone needed to be its guardian, and after...everything we'd done and seen, I trusted it to be you. Finally. And you will hate me, but I wish you'd been obligated to carry out that vow." She gnaws on her lower lip, her eyes still on Gideon's face. "Lyctors cannot return to the Houses of their birth. None of them ever have. Not only did I lose you--not only did I make a choice to lose you further--I have lost the Ninth as well."

[wedobones]

Gideon had never intended to go back -- it had been the greatest joy of her life, getting to leave. But she knows that, ultimately, if Harrow had asked it of her, by the end, she'd have gone home.

"But that's the thing, loser," she says, gently. "I'm sorry we can't go home again. For you, I am. But in terms of losing me? You didn't. I'm right here. That's...it's what this place can give you. I'm right here, doofus."

She nudges Harrow's leg under the water with the side of her foot.

[undonewithout]

"Gideon, that is not the point," Harrow says, instinctively flinching when Gideon's foot brushes the side of her calf. "This place is a reprieve, a bubble of indeterminate origin and unknown motivation. You are restored to me here, and Sextus to Camilla, and that is a miracle I thank the Emperor for. Or would, if I could detect his hand in it, which I cannot. But this will end, and when it does..."

She exhales, shakily. "You are here now, but there are times I look at you and remember that when this ends, I will once again be alone."

[wedobones]

"Only you could make being here together a bad thing, you doofus," says Gideon, rolling her eyes and leaning her head back against the tile again. "There are people who've been here for years, Harrow. We can at least try and make a life, right? Goddamn. Haven't we suffered enough, thee and me?"

[undonewithout]

"Suffer and learn," she says, reciting the words her great-aunts had repeated over and over to the both of them, an admonishment and a twisted kind of solace all in one. To suffer was to give yourself the knowledge of that pain, to take from it something useful. Aside from her necromantic studies, or Gideon's sword training, it was the only education they'd ever really had. "I cannot say it's made us any wiser."

She tries to imagine being here for years, both of them living here, finding a place that's different from anything that could have been back home. It's more difficult than she thinks Gideon would want it to be, but she tries, and after a moment, she nods. "If that is what you're asking of me, I'll try. I...owe that to you."

[wedobones]

The tiniest smile tugs at the corner of Gideon's mouth and she looks at Harrow again.

"Now, are you ready to tell me why you're being such a fucking weirdo? Because you are. Being a fucking weirdo."

[undonewithout]

Just the question makes her blush again, a pink flush against her cheeks that darkens to red as Harrow notices--helpless not to--the clinginess of the damp t-shirt Gideon's wearing. "You have always thought I was a fucking weirdo," she says. "And you've usually been more descriptive. I'm disappointed, Griddle."

She fidgets at her side of the tub, pulling her legs up in a slosh of water and wrapping her arms around her knees, then straightening them back out again. "Did you mean what you said?" she asks, and can't let herself look at Gideon when she does. "In the letter. You may answer for all of it, or only in part, but...I did read it all."

[wedobones]

Now it's time for Gideon to blush, and her colouring ensures that it's obvious as hell, her cheeks burning scarlet. They're in saltwater, and they might not be her rules, but she knows them, and she'll play by them.

She nods.

"You were never meant to actually read it, though. I've been telling myself you threw it away that first night."