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]

"Okay," says Gideon, dragging in a shivering, centering breath and sitting up. She rubs damp hands over her face and through her hair, pushing it all of the way back. "I...you should probably know that I've been...seeing someone. Here."

[undonewithout]

"Who?" says Harrow, more sharply than she realizes. She tries to tell herself it's mere surprise; it partially is, the admission coming as a complete digression from the conversation they'd just been having. The other half of her reaction is a thing she again refuses, instinctively, to contemplate right then.

[wedobones]

"Her name's Octavia," says Gideon, her golden eyes on Harrow's face, quietly watchful. "It's...not serious, honestly. But it's something."

[undonewithout]

Harrow doesn't bother to disguise the face she makes at that name, how utterly Eighth it sounds. It's impossible to imagine Gideon ever wanting to take up with someone like that--and never mind that this place isn't the same, never mind there's no Empire or any of the other countless things she still thinks of as normal, she'll draw what parallels she wishes.

That Gideon also says it isn't serious is a relief, she realizes, unnerved at the suddenness at which she thinks it or the complexity of her gratitude.

"And what do you wish to...do about that?"

[wedobones]

The face is so utterly Harrow that Gideon can't help but laugh, tipping her head back against the tiles.

"Oh, fuck, I don't know," she says. "How do...what do you want us to be?"

[undonewithout]

"Don't laugh at a perfectly reasonable question," she says acidly, though the mere sound of Gideon's amusement sets something strange going inside of her, warm and disconcertingly comfortable. She checks her usual instinct to shove it away, instead letting it rest deep and private in her chest. "And answering with a question of your own is a cheap rhetorical trick. Appalling, in fact."

For all her argument, Harrow does think about it for a moment, both pensiveness and discomfort clear on her face. "I...don't know either," she admits with difficulty. "This isn't anything I have ever contemplated before."

[wedobones]

"It's hysteria, not amusement. Pinkie swear." Gideon covers her face with her hands again, pushing her hair back from her face in fingered furrows. She thinks about that for a second and then she lifts one hand out of the water, offering it to Harrow. "We're...okay. Trying to figure out how we feel about each feels like a good place to start? Don't get me wrong -- I feel like I still have the potential to completely fucking hate you, but it's deeper than that, and I think we both know it?"

[undonewithout]

"Pinky swear," Harrow repeats dubiously, the oath far weaker than one sworn on the Tomb, on the sainted bones resting in the Anastasian, on virtually anything else she can think of. But Gideon asks it of her, and so she swears. When Gideon's hand emerges from the water, drops trickling from the spaces between each long finger, Harrow watches them fall. When she reaches to place her hand in Gideon's, the touch is warm and damp, uncomfortably living, and yet she cannot make herself recoil.

"We grew up knowing we had the capacity to completely fucking hate each other, Nav," she says. "Full offense." For a moment, she almost smiles. "I think you're right to say that won't change. But it's...more than that. It's been more than that since Canaan House, and we owe it to one another to understand what that is."

[wedobones]

Gideon nods. She closes her fingers around Harrow's and then she looks at their joined hands for a long moment.

"Not just as friends though?" she says.

[undonewithout]

Harrow blushes dark, her fingers swallowed up and held so gently in the soft curve of Gideon's closed hand. It takes her a moment to nod. "More than friends. More, perhaps, than just necro and cav. I...don't know what we should call it, but I can only imagine that answer will come in time."

[wedobones]

"Good enough," says Gideon after a moment, swiping her thumb the length of Harrow's, brushing away the water that's beaded on her skin.

"It's a start, anyway." She takes her hand away so that she can push up to her feet, water sheeting off her. She offers Harrow her hands again.

[undonewithout]

The fine muscles of her hand tense at the touch, the sweep of Gideon's thumb humiliatingly intimate. The seeming finality of her words, at least, are a counterweight to that; when she's let go and Gideon stands, it's almost a relief. Even with the damp clinginess of Gideon's clothing, the way the fabric of her t-shirt molds to every ridge and curve of muscle and skin, it's a relief.

"You genuinely find it as easy as that, Griddle," she says, looking up at her. It's neither a question nor a complete statement, just some odd and uncomfortable combination of the two. "To accept the...unknowing of whatever this will be." She reaches up, once again putting her hands in Gideon's.

[wedobones]

"What good is fighting against it going to do?" she asks, leaning her weight back slightly to help Harrow up to her feet. "We'll figure it out. Pretty sure there's nothing in the world we couldn't figure out together."

She steps out of the tub onto the bathmat. "I need to put dry underwear on."

[undonewithout]

"Who are you, and what have you done with Gideon Nav?" Harrow says, the water sloshing around her as she's pulled to her feet. "Fighting is practically your favorite thing. Other than swords and pornography." She can't say anything to the rest, but it does once again sit odd and soft in her chest, a warm, buoyant reaction she only allows herself to feel because of the salt water still lapping around her calves.

She watches as Gideon steps out of the bath, frowning when she speaks again. "I shouldn't think you need my permission for that."

[wedobones]

"No part of this looks like swords, though, does it?" says Gideon. She grabs a towel off the rail and uses it to get most of the excess water off her, offering it to Harrow. "Do you want to...watch a movie or something? Once we're dry, I mean."

She finds herself really unwilling to let Harrow out of her sight.

[undonewithout]

"Very little of this looks like anything I'm familiar with," she says, and though her tone is dry she worries at her lip with her teeth as Gideon towels off. They're leaving too many things undecided, unsaid, too full of questions. These aren't the kind that effort and study will ease, either; they're murkier and more human, tied up in things and feelings she's had a lifetime of practice in shutting away--when, that is, she hadn't transmuted them into a devotion of a different kind.

She looks at the towel in Gideon's outstretched hand, her own hands still damp and limp at her side, the water growing cold around her in the tub. She shakes her head. "Later," she says. "Go put some other clothes on."

[wedobones]

Gideon's not sure why it stings, so much like a dismissal. She stands there for a moment, towel in her hand, and then she shakes her head.

"No, Harrow," she says, familiar words that trip off her tongue as easily as they've always done. "We're not...we've still got shit we need to talk about. I do need to put on dry clothes, and so do you but then..." She looks down at her bare foot. "My room?"

[undonewithout]

It happens because Gideon assumed her refusal came from something else, somewhere else, but the stubborn shake of her head is oddly and suddenly reassuring all the same. It took her too long to understand how little she could hide from the girl in front of her, how deeply they know one another after all their years of conflict and rage.

"I know we do," Harrow says, her fingers curling up around the sodden hem of her shirt, holding tight. "I wasn't trying to...with all we've said, all we need to, leaving the saltwater is..." She lets out a frustrated huff, despising herself for this halting vulnerability. "I wasn't going to demand that you stay, if you'd gotten what you needed from it. This is, after all, my family's ritual and not yours."

Letting go of herself, she steps gingerly out of the tub and onto the mat, finally taking the towel when Gideon offers it again. Her teeth snag her lip once more, as she slowly starts to towel what damp she can off of her clothes and face and the short stubble of her hair. It takes her forever to nod. "Your room, then. Once we're both in dry clothes."

[wedobones]

"You're all the family I've got, loser."

Driven by impulse, Gideon steps in and presses a kiss to the short shaved hair over the crown of Harrow's head. She turns on her heel and heads in the direction of her bedroom, her face burning. Once there, she changes, into a pair of baggy shorts, a t-shirt that leaves a strip of skin bare over her waistband. She combs her fingers through her wet hair, trying to make sure it won't dry standing straight up.

She waits and half expects Harrow to disappear into her own room, lock the door behind her, stay there until morning. She waits.

[undonewithout]

Harrow makes a helpless, almost strangled noise at the kiss, half out of surprise and half something more embarrassing. That kind of affection--from Gideon, from anyone--is still too rare a thing for her to have grown inured to it, too gentle and soft to have had any place in her life before now. As she watches Gideon walk away, Harrow wishes the touch of her lips hadn't felt so much like an unearned benediction.

Leaving the towel on the bathroom floor, she moves towards her room, shutting the door and refusing to glance in the mirror above her dresser, afraid of what she'll see in her face if she does. She finds new, dry clothes, losing herself in the simple motions of undressing and dressing herself again, swaddling her skinny frame in comfortable black leggings and a longsleeved shirt borrowed early on from Gideon's closet.

Opening her door again, she looks down the hall towards Gideon's, her cheeks warming to see it standing just slightly ajar. It's easier than she entirely expects to cross that short distance, to place her hand against the wood and push just slightly. The hinges creak, and Harrow manages to look a little embarrassed by the sound.

"I'm here."

[wedobones]

There's something about Harrow wearing her clothes that, as always, lights a candle inside Gideon's ribcage. She flushes reflexively.

"I thought we could order food and like, hang out in here," she says. "I just...we should keep talking, Harrow. Right? And in here feels less...exposed than the couch."

[undonewithout]

"Now who's the one blushing like a weirdo, Griddle?" says Harrow, even though the sight of that pink flush creeping over Gideon's face, along her cheeks and across the long, fine slope of her nose, sparks something in her that's very different from annoyance. She steps through the doorway and into Gideon's room, not yet settling onto the bed but stopping only a few steps away.

"Here is considerably less exposed than the couch," she says, and nods. "We should talk. And have food." She gives her a sidelong, warning look, already anticipating the annoying self-satisfaction Gideon's sure to feel hearing her agree to eat something. "You can choose the place, as long as there's something there I can...that I'll find suitable."

[wedobones]

Gideon steps up onto her bed and then folds down onto herself, crossing her bare legs and reaching for her phone. She glances up at Harrow from under her brows. "Pizza? There's that one place that did that thing you liked last time."

[undonewithout]

She envies Gideon that easy grace, more so when she feels gawky and hesitant in contrast, going to join her and managing only to perch at the edge of the bed. Turning to face her, Harrow draws her legs up, wrapping her arms around her bent knees. "You'll eat more of it than I will," she says. "Just like last time. But I'll...I can manage pizza."

[wedobones]

"Okay," says Gideon, calling up the app on her phone. "I'll get the same pizza as I did last time and those twisty things that I liked and you didn't."

She finishes their order and lies back, her head on her pillow, looking up at Harrow.

"Are you my girlfriend now?" she says.