Chapter Text
I didn’t want to write these pages until there were no hard feelings, no sharp ones.
I do not have that luxury. I am sad and angry and I want everyone to be alive again.
I want more landmarks, less landmines. I want to be grateful but I’m having a hard time with it.
Camilla hasn’t worn a dress since her sixteenth birthday.
She holds still and watches herself in the mirror while Coronabeth zips up the back of the purple dress that she bought at the thrift store down the street. It’s eerily similar to the one she wore on that birthday, right down to the color; a rich purple satin with a plain skirt, no sleeves and a neckline that dips slightly, draping down to show her collarbones.
“You look nice,” Corona says in her ear, smoothing her fingers through Cam’s hair, tucking some of it behind an ear. “You look uncomfortable.”
“Did you have to do my makeup?” Camilla watches her expression morph into a grimace.
“It looks nice!” Corona defends, taking Cam’s hand and spinning her around to face her. “You look beautiful. Let’s go.”
It should be more disturbing that Corona knows her way around Camilla and Palamedes’s apartment, but it’s not. Camilla takes it all in stride; she lets Corona march her to the door and smiles at Palamedes over the taller girl’s shoulder.
“Are you wearing heels, Camilla?” Palamedes asks, a little shocked, from the kitchen, where he’s bent over a sleeve, fiddling with his cufflinks.
“I convinced her,” Corona says with an air of satisfaction.
Camilla strides over to Palamedes and grabs his hand, stilling his motions over his immaculately crisp cuffs. “Stop. You never do it right.”
“There’s a wrong way to do up cufflinks?” Bewildered, he steps around the kitchen counter to present his wrist to Cam. Camilla doesn’t even realize how Palamedes is cradling her wrist with his hand until she goes to release one cuff and reach for the other.
“What are you doing?” she asks quietly. When he doesn’t answer, she lifts her head, nearly slamming hers against his forehead by mistake.
He looks away from her with a sharp jut of his chin. “Sorry. You can finish.”
Cam doesn’t think about why she can feel the hammer of her heartbeat in her fingertips. She simply finishes fixing his cuffs and stalks toward the door.
“Thanks,” Palamedes calls after her. Corona locks them both out with the keys she grabbed from Cam’s hook by the door.
“You okay?” she asks once they’re out on the street. It’s a three-block walk to the building where the honors society gala is being held. It will take Cam half that time to get herself together.
“Yes.”
“You sure?” Corona waves her hand in the air a little. “That was certainly...a moment.”
Camilla rolls her eyes. “It was nothing.”
Corona stops at the street corner. Across from them is the campus, cast in darkness and shadows. That view is why Camilla prefers walking in the dark. There’s beauty in hidden things.
“You have feelings for him. A little.” Corona says it casually. When Cam nods her head the smallest bit she can, Corona grins. “So is that why we had that one-night stand? So you could forget him?”
Camilla regards Corona in her silver dress, her curves on full display, her hair and eyes dancing in the street lights. Her fingers catch around the other woman’s hand. Corona laces their fingers together steadily. “No.” Her voice is nearly swept away by the wind. “I slept with you because you were beautiful. And I stayed around because I like you.”
Corona grins a devilish grin, her purple eyes gleaming like a cat’s. She lifts their twined hands and kissing the back of Camilla’s. “I’m so glad.”
Gideon’s got to hand it to the honors society. She didn’t even know their college had a venue quite this nice, and can’t believe they let students use this place for events.
Heels and dress shoes clack against the shiny stone floors as students sweep their way into an atrium with high ceilings and glowing stained-glass windows. There’s music echoing from the DJ’s sound system into the hall Gideon is hovering in, waiting for the rest of her friends to show up as she fiddles impatiently with her vest.
“Stop touching it!”
And there it is. Gideon turns toward the sound of Dulcinea’s voice and obediently lets go of the vest’s hem. The older girl hustles down the hall as fast as she can, her breath whistling in her lungs, her hair swinging around her arms like a series of deranged pendulums.
“Nice dress,” Gideon says appraisingly, taking Dulcinea’s hand and twirling her around so the midnight blue skirt fans out around Dulcinea’s ankles. The dress’s gold and blue sleeves flutter.
“Thanks.” Dulcinea smiles prettily just to see Gideon grin. “You clean up well, too.”
“This entire outfit was literally your idea.”
“I know.” Dulcinea tosses her hair over her shoulder. “I’m a genius.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Camilla’s dry voice sounds from behind them. She rests her hands on Gideon’s shoulders and looks her up and down. Gideon has the distinct feeling of being back in uniform inspection at fencing practice. “Not bad.”
“Gee, thanks, Cam.”
“Are we going in or hovering in the hallway?” Dulcinea asks. “And where’s Coronabeth?”
“She’s already in there.” Cam fiddles with the neck of her dress.
“Okay, then let’s go.” Dulcinea leads the way, the picture of confidence. Cam trails behind and Gideon starts to follow, but a scuff of shoes on polished stone and a commanding “Griddle” stop her cold.
“What?” She turns toward Harrow, feeling her shoulders tense with every passing second. The high-low hem of skirt of Harrow’s high-necked black dress fans out behind her as she walks quickly down the hall, every inch the dramatic picture of a young goth queen.
Harrow says nothing. She halts about six feet from Gideon. Her eyes sparkle in the light from the atrium. A couple lights made to look like lanterns flicker on above them. Behind Harrow, Gideon can see the sunset through the windowed doors to the outdoor courtyard.
“Kay, fine, I’m going in.” Gideon turns away.
“Gideon, stop.”
Despite all her instincts, Gideon stops. She doesn’t turn around this time. “What, Harrow?”
“I’m sorry.”
Now Gideon does turn around. Despite her contrite words, Harrow’s chin juts out defiantly. “Sorry for what?” Gideon asks. “Sorry for texting me? Sorry for yelling at me in the car? Sorry for breaking up with me?”
“Sorry for telling you that I loved you.”
Gideon’s blood runs cold. “That’s it. I’m done.”
She makes it all the way into the atrium and locks eyes with Cam across the room before she feels Harrow grappling at her sleeve. “Griddle, for God’s sake, just listen-“
“Everything alright?” Corona asks, appearing at Gideon’s other elbow, holding a glass of wine in one hand and her skirts in the other. “Hi, Harrow!”
Harrow ignores her. “Griddle, come into the hallway. Please.”
Corona’s eyes dart between the two of them. Gideon can tell from the grin crossing her face that the older girl has come to the wrong conclusion. “I’ll…leave you two alone,” she says elegantly, lifting her wine glass to her lips and drifting off toward Cam and Dulcinea. When Gideon looks over, both Cam and Dulcinea are staring at her.
Harrow says, pleadingly, “Gideon, please,” and Gideon, despite all her better judgment, follows.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” is the first thing Harrow says, rounding on her from where they stand under one of the electric lantern-looking lights. The shadows cast lines against her pale cheeks. “I meant… I just- I was sorry for texting you that because it wasn’t fair. Not because I regretted it.”
Not what Gideon was expecting. Not by a long shot. It takes her a second too long to get her bearings. She hears the faint tapping of shoes and the closing of a door, but when she turns, there’s no one there. Maybe someone was going to the bathroom.
If they really are alone, she can say what she wants. “I don’t care if you regret it, Harrow!” Okay, that’s not super true, but Gideon’s heart is racing and her hands are shaking and she just wants this all to stop. “I want to know WHY!”
“Why what?” Harrow goes from contrite to spitting mad in 2.5 seconds. Good to know. “Why I love you? The list is shrinking by the minute, Griddle.”
“You told me why you matched with me, but why did you show up everywhere I was?” Gideon throws her hands in the air, runs one through her overgrown hair and tugs on the section at the back of her neck. “Why did you break up with me in the first place? Your Tinder explanation was great but it’s only one piece of a really shitty puzzle, Nonagesimus.”
“And you think you’re so entitled to my explanations, is that it?” That’s it. The only way Gideon has ever known something matters to Harrow - her anger. “You think you deserve to know everything just because you asked?”
“HELL NO!” Gideon shouts, listening with no small satisfaction as her voice echoes down the long hall, down toward the glass doors and the brilliant red-pink sunset. “I don’t deserve to know anything but I sure as hell would love an explanation since you refused my offer of a post-mortem and made my high school graduation a living hell.”
“You started it!”
“HARROW!” Harrow’s mouth snaps shut. “I want to know why. I want to understand. I want to apologize if I hurt you or fix it if I can, but right now I just want to know what we’re doing.”
Harrow looks taken aback. “What…we’re doing?” Her voice is cautiously soft.
“You could’ve blocked me, but you didn’t. You didn’t have to show up everywhere I was, but you did. You could’ve asked me not to come tonight and I wouldn’t have, and don’t bother saying you didn’t know that because we both know that’s not true.” Gideon steps close enough to the wall to lean against it. “What are we doing?”
Harrow stays where she is, standing in the center of the hallway, looking like a lost and opaque ghost. “I… I broke up with you because I didn’t want you to hate me.”
Gideon says nothing. Harrow turns to face her, and Gideon is genuinely shocked to see tears in her eyes. “I helped cover up a double suicide, Griddle. I didn’t want anyone finding out. Least of all someone I lo– Someone who didn’t hate me already.”
“How the hell would I have found out?” is all Gideon could think to ask. “And who died?” as an afterthought.
Harrow’s eyes grow impossibly sad. “My parents. Their company’s shareholders got tired of excuses. They wanted to see them, and me, when I turned eighteen. They wanted to meet the girl who would inherit the empire. I had to take apart my own lie, and I didn’t need anyone who knew me to watch me do it.”
Silence. Gideon couldn’t think of anything to say. So Harrow kept talking. “They died when I was a child. Aiglamene agreed to help me run the company, keeping my parents alive on paper until I was old enough to take over. I’m not making any business decisions yet - that will wait until I have my degree - but back then, I had to pretend to be both of them.”
“Hold up, wait, they-" For once, Gideon doesn’t say the first thing that comes to her mind; she bites her tongue around the words they killed themselves?! and instead asks, “Why are you telling me now?”
“Because you hate me.” Harrow says it blankly, like all her emotional capability has been sucked out. “So I couldn’t make anything worse, even by telling you the truth. If I had told you then, you would have left.”
“You don’t know that.” Gideon holds up her hands when Harrow opens her mouth. When she closes it, Gideon sees her lips trembling. “I would’ve stayed. All you had to do was ask. All you ever had to do was ask. Ask me to keep your secrets, ask me to give you some space, ask me to leave you alone…whatever. But you never asked. You just assumed you knew what was best for both of us. And yeah, you know what’s best for you. Maybe. But you shouldn’t have made that choice for me and you should’ve told me why you did.”
Harrow sniffles, a tiny sound that echoes off the walls, even with the loud music coming from the party behind them. “I’m sorry, Harrow,” Gideon says, a little softer, a little gentler. “I’m so sorry for what happened with your parents. You didn’t deserve that.”
Harrow rears back, regarding Gideon through narrow, gleaming eyes. Her chest heaves; Gideon sees a mottled flush rise up from her throat to her cheeks.
“YOU’RE SORRY!” The shout rings in Gideon’s ears. Somewhere behind her, Gideon hears a muffled hacking cough that doesn’t quite register as anything important. “I broke your heart! I hurt you irreparably and then came back to you and refused to let you get close to me but also refused to let you go. I was cruel and withholding and awful to you and you have the temerity to tell me that you’re SORRY?!”
Gideon reaches for Harrow’s hand, then pulls away when Harrow steps back. The smaller girl’s hands are shaking; her eyes are glossy with tears. “I- Wait here,” she says abruptly before turning tail and racing toward the doors, her black head and long skirt bouncing as she runs.
Gideon stands there. It’s her chest’s turn to heave, her eyes’ turn to fill with tears. The creak of a door and a series of loud hacking coughs do little to break her focus on the glass doors that lead out to the courtyard, now swinging slowly closed, buoyed by the cold December wind outside.
“Are you okay,” Coronabeth asks softly. She, Cam and Dulcinea are all there, leaning against a wall, all with varying expressions of tensity, discomfort and/or embarrassment.
“They were eavesdropping from that closet,” Cam points with a thumb to a nondescript door. “I feel like there’s possibility for an ironic joke there.”
“Oh, and you weren’t?” Corona takes a sip from her wine glass. Gideon clocks the way Cam watches Corona’s throat work, and tries not to grin despite herself.
“You shoved me in there!”
“You were going to interrupt them, Cam,” Dulcinea points out. The back of her hand has a smear of blood on it, as if someone used the skin to blot a particularly strange shade of lipstick. Gideon looks to it, then to Dulcinea, who waves her off. “I’m fine.”
“Do you want to leave? Or go back to the party?” Cam’s voice is low and reasonable, and it somehow helps calm the rapid hammering of Gideon’s heart.
“No,” she says. Her denial visibly startles all three girls. “I told Harrow she just had to ask. And she did. So I’m waiting.”
Dulcinea’s face shifts from confusion to understanding to pride. Camilla looks, strangely, very uncomfortable. Corona frowns. “Well, okay then. I don’t get why you’re waiting around for her, but okay.” She raises her empty glass in solidarity. “We’ll be around with drinks when you’re done.”
She sweeps away in a silver-skirted whirlwind, pulling Dulcinea along behind her. Camilla lingers, her dark eyes studying Gideon like she is a particularly rare specimen.
“Don’t let her hurt you, Nav,” Cam says after a second, equally the tough fencing captain and worried friend. “You’re too good to let her jerk you around like that.”
The tightness in Gideon’s chest eases. She hadn’t even realized she was holding in a breath. “I won’t. Thanks.”
Cam opens her mouth, then closes it again. She gives Gideon a peculiar nod and stalks away, back into the mess of a party in the atrium, its loud music and partially-drunken cheers. Despite herself, Gideon smiles. Who knew honors kids knew how to pregame?
There’s a bench down the hall, a little closer to the courtyard door. Gideon sits down, hands clasped in her lap, feeling a little like a kid waiting outside the principal’s office. Despite herself, her eyes continue to stray to the door.
“She’ll come back,” she says aloud before she can stop herself. “She always does.”
Harrow doesn’t know if she wants to scream, cry or both.
She doesn’t get the chance to do either. As her shoes clatter obnoxiously on the pavers ringing the small courtyard and her teeth chatter from the cold wind, she realizes she’s not alone only seconds before she bursts into tears.
“Sextus.”
Palamedes turns to regard her. In the dim light from the frosted windows of the atrium where the party is in full swing, his grey eyes shone like two pale stars. “Harrow.”
He’s standing near a bench and offers her a seat there with a sweep of his arm. When she sits, arms and face and heart all numb, he puts his jacket over her shoulders and lowers himself down beside her. “What brings you out here?”
Harrow’s heart still hammers against her chest. She feels her mouth shaking, her traitorous hands trembling even when she balls them into fists. “I needed…a moment.”
“Are you okay?”
A tear spills forth. “I- I don’t know.” Another one runs down to her chin, streaking through her makeup.
Palamedes rests a tentative hand on her back, patting it gently when she sniffles. “Anything I can do?”
Harrow shakes her head. She feels her lips twist up in a rueful smile. “Not unless you can turn back time.”
She feels, rather than hears, Palamedes sigh. When he speaks, it’s with the air of a man who is imparting advice to someone else that he has no intention of believing for himself. “I have found,” he says slowly, “that there are many ways to remedy the past without wishing for a time machine.”
“Like what?” She sounds like a petulant child. It’s past time to care about that. For the first time in a very long time, her mind is racing and she cannot, for the life of her, get a grip on her emotions. Hence the tears and petulance.
“Honesty. Communication.” He looks at Harrow for a long moment with a kind of fond expression. The kind she imagines a brother would wear. It makes her heart hurt in the strange hollow place where she keeps her grief over her parents and her despair over Gideon. “I’m assuming you just made an attempt at both.”
Harrow nods. A tear runs down her nose. “I told Griddle…things…and it didn’t go well.”
“She was angry?” Palamedes sounds genuinely shocked.
“No. That’s the problem. Who can look at me, hear what I have to say, and still love me? How do I know she’s not a liar?”
Palamedes leans forward, his elbows on his knees, and looks back and over his shoulder at Harrow. “Has she given you any reason to question her honesty?”
That brings Harrow up short. No, Gideon hasn’t. In fact, she has always kept her promises.
“Ah.” Palamedes says the syllable as if he knows something. “Maybe it’s time you finished what you started. You deserve closure.”
He stands, and Harrow does too, wiping the tears from her eyes and handing Palamedes’s jacket back. Her heart still racing and her eyes barely dry, she starts toward the door before belatedly realizing something and turning back around.
“What are you doing out here?” Her voice echoes the question back at her.
Palamedes sighs and stuffs his hands into the pockets of his suit jacket. “I am…thinking about several errors I have made.”
“The kind that can only be reversed by a time machine?”
Palamedes nods slowly. “I’m afraid so.”
The two regard one another for a moment, a little tense and awkward, but mostly just exhausted. Harrow has a vague feeling that Palamedes’s angst has to do with the Septimus girl Griddle lives with, and probably also his best friend, the harsh girl with an expression like a brick wall.
“I hope you come to a resolution.”
He sounds a little desperate when he answers, “Me too.”
Harrow leaves him to his rumination and steps back into the warm corridor. She isn’t sure what shocks her more: the sudden heat blasting from the old radiators, or the sight of Gideon sitting on a bench, nearly exactly where Harrow had left her.
“What are you doing, Griddle?” Harrow asks as she approaches. Her hands are shaking. Her heart hammers against her ribcage.
“You asked me to wait,” Gideon says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “So I waited.”
Harrow doesn’t realize she’s moving until she’s looming over Gideon, her legs almost bracketed by Gideon’s knees. Griddle’s legs brush against her skirts. “You shouldn’t have waited.”
“I shouldn’t do a lot of things.” Gideon’s calloused hands cup Harrow’s face. Harrow shivers at the warmth and the scrape of her skin, but doesn’t pull away. “But I can do this.”
She presses a kiss to Harrow’s nose where the skin met the bone of the frontal sinus. Harrow stiffens, but can’t make herself move back. When Gideon leans away, Harrow moves; she raises her hands to Gideon’s cheeks and rises up on her toes to crush their mouths together.
“I missed you,” she gasps when they part. She opens her eyes to see Gideon’s looking back at her, beautiful gold gleaming in the faint light. Gideon’s chest heaving and Harrow’s whole body trembling. “I’m sorry, Gideon, I should’ve told you, I should’ve-“
“Too many should’ves,” Gideon says conversationally, pressing her lips to Harrow’s forehead, keeping her close. “How about we just start over?”
Harrow feels Gideon’s breath against her skin. She focuses on releasing the tension in her shoulders, feels her heart rate slow. It’s almost like they’re dancing, like they’re back at senior prom, complete with the slow song playing in the distance, as if the atrium is another world away.
Gideon hears it too. “Isn’t this the song we danced to at prom?” When Harrow nods, she feels Gideon’s answering grin. “Do-over?”
Harrow steps back to take Gideon’s hand properly and allows Griddle to spin her around. “Okay.”
Gideon lets out a tiny cheer. Harrow can’t help but laugh. Together, they dance.