Work Text:
“Gideon?”
“Yeah?” she replied from where she was perched at the foot of the little cavalier cot, absent-mindedly spreading her tangled nest of blankets over it. She glanced briefly at Harrow, who was sat on her own bed watching Gideon work and chewing at the inside of her cheek like a dog with a particularly gristly bone. She’d been watching for a while now, and Gideon was starting to feel oddly comforted by her regard.
“Gideon,” she said again, this time without the question. Gideon let go of the bit of blanket she was flapping around uselessly and turned to give her necromancer the full sum of her attention.
“Yes again, my woeful mistress?”
Harrow faltered, spilling syrupy apprehension into the air between them. “Earlier,” she began, her words as clipped and choppy as the sea outside Canaan House, “it looked a bit like you were going to do something incredibly stupid.”
“You’re gonna have to be more specific.”
Harrowhark had never been a hesitant person before, at least not around Gideon, but something in their earlier exchange must have crystallized in her jaw, increasing its resistance. Maybe it was the salt? She said, “It looked a little like you were about to – kiss me?” and she screwed up her face on the last words and winced as though Sister Lacrimorta herself might appear from the shadows to rap her across the knuckles with her rosary.
“Are we trusting each other now?” Gideon asked. She shifted to face Harrow, who smiled sadly and looked down and picked at a loose thread on her blanket.
“I believe so,” she answered.
Gideon stared at Harrow, intensely, then stood up all at once and paced over to hover awkwardly in front of her. She gestured at the bed next to Harrow. “Can I sit?” Harrow scooted over to make room. “I think we’re done lying to each other. Hopefully. Or at least I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve thought about it – I mean for most of my life you were the only other person around my age within like a billion miles, of course I’ve thought about it. I just… for a while you were trying to kill me pretty regularly, and then after that I didn’t think you’d want me to.”
Harrow sighed and worried at the little string, which was too stubborn to pull all the way out. She chewed her lip. “I… You’re a disappointingly kind person, Gideon,” she said at last.
Gideon paled. “Don’t start complimenting me again –“
“When you’re not being a complete asshole, of course.”
“Oh thank God.”
“What I mean is, it’s really bizarre to spend so much time worrying about how I’ll feel when I’ve only ever been cruel to you.”
“I can’t argue with that.” Gideon shrugged. “Anyway, I didn’t want to make all of this weird,” she said, gesturing lamely to the entire room.
Harrow shifted a little on the bed next to her, turning to sit cross-legged and hunched up like a wad of thin tissue. She looked at Gideon through her eyelashes, and seemed strangely shy all of a sudden. She said, “There’s an increasingly large likelihood that one or both of us will die soon.”
Gideon faced resolutely ahead and pretended her nerves weren’t drying out her throat. Tension pooled in her jaw, thickening like a cheap gravy. She heard more than saw Harrow move.
In one of the earlier labs they’d explored, Gideon had found a stack of dusty old glass boxes in which a multitude of desiccated insect corpses had been carefully pinned and labeled. The specimens ranged in size but were no bigger than her thumb around the thorax, and several were possessed of massive gossamer wings that spanned their bodies twice over. At the time she had paid them little mind, but now Gideon found that one of her few remaining brain cells had wandered off to ruminate on just how big of a nerd you’d have to be to spend hour after diligent hour on the preservation of something so small and ultimately insignificant.
It was with this same imagined care that Harrow now levered a single sharp elbow against the cartilage at the base of Gideon’s sternum and pressed down and down and down until her back lay flat against the necromancer’s bed, which was only a little softer than those musty old cases, and she became as immobilized as a muscle-bound swordswoman could be by an 80 pound malnourished insomniac skeleton.
Harrow whispered, “Stay,” and it didn’t echo throughout the room at all; it drifted like thick smoke in the cavernous space between them, almost visible in the stagnant air.
“Um,” Gideon replied, like an idiot. She had to cross her eyes a little to focus on Harrow’s angled face, which was suddenly way too close. “Uh, this seems weird,” she croaked.
“I’m willing to concede that I’m a weird person, Griddle,” Harrow said, and like a drop of water into a much larger pool she slipped down, sinking into Gideon’s warm frame so that the point of her nose pressed inelegantly into the space between Gideon’s clavicle and jaw, alarmingly close to her jugular.
Gideon brought a single large hand haltingly up to pat at her head, and it only felt a little condescending. “You could have just asked for a hug,” she muttered, to fill the vacuous silence that had settled over the room.
Harrow pulled back like a frayed bowstring, propping herself up on shaky rail-thin arms, and reluctantly looked Gideon in the eye. “I’m not going to explain myself to you anymore tonight,” she advised, then she relaxed her puny biceps just enough to bring her face even with her cavalier’s and carefully slotted their lips together.
Gideon let out a tiny shocked sigh but otherwise lay there and let herself be kissed awkwardly by her former nemesis. In the prison of her own consciousness her heart beat loudly, visceral and liquid in the place between her ears, and she felt a crack run through her brain as her train of thought completely jumped the rails.
After a couple of heartbeats Harrow pulled away. “What,” Gideon said, and lay there like a landed fish.
“No more explanations,” Harrow reminded her, and sat back to regard her like a bird of prey might regard a dying fish that was simply too big. She cocked her head slightly to the side, asked, “Alright?”
Gideon closed her mouth and swallowed, nodded, and then held very still as Harrow leaned back down.
Huddled together in the dubious safety of their overlarge chambers, Harrowhark Nonagesimus and Gideon Nav passed back-and-forth a measure of peace, and for a little while they ignored the thundering silence of the eye of the storm that surrounded Canaan House.