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Gertrude's car is outdated by at least two decades and faster than it has any right to be. It has a cassette deck that hasn't been touched but spews static every time the car is turned on, like it's daring Gertrude to put a tape in, like it's been brought by the Institute enough times that it'd spurt forth a statement instead of whatever music she'd chosen.
"It was my mother's," Gertrude tells Agnes as Agnes gets into the passenger seat. The leather of the seat is warm beneath her touch. She doesn't bother with a seatbelt.
"Oh," Agnes says.
Smoke clings to both their hair, and three mere blocks away they can see the flames licking into the sky from the burning archives: a collaboration, a job well done, a freedom sorely bought. Months spent planning this, months of Gertrude keeping careful seals around her mind lest Elias’ prying eyes get through, months of sneaking explosives enough to demolish a city block into old artifact storage, and now —
Now it’s over. Gertrude no longer feels the Eye at her back.
Of course, supernatural threats notwithstanding, the sirens roaring steadily towards the Institute are of a more pressing concern. Gertrude has eluded authorities on more than one occasion, but she’s not exactly looking to be put on trial for arson at the moment. She may be guilty in the technical sense, but she has no doubt in her mind that anyone would have done the same, with fire itching in their veins and monsters in the corner of their sights and neither of those things mere metaphor.
So Gertrude slides into the driver’s seat and grins her brightest over at Agnes.
“What now?” Agnes’ voice is always soft, but it’s got an excitement to it that Gertrude has rarely heard in all their whispered plotting sessions. The satisfaction of a meal well-burnt.
“I have a few safehouses,” Gertrude says, because she is always prepared, Girl Guide roots serving her well thirty-odd years on. Most of her safehouses have been collecting dust since the day she’d signed their under-the-table leases, paychecks saved up for months to afford even the most dilapidated out-of-the-way places, but it’s made her feel better, knowing she has a place to escape to.
Agnes stares out the window for a long moment, London rushing past, fire trucks heading in the opposite direction, towards the scene of the crime. “Okay,” she finally says, and she smiles over at Gertrude, fire still reflected in her eyes.
“Are you sure you’re alright to drive?” It’s a question perhaps best asked ten minutes ago, before Gertrude had gotten behind the wheel, if Gertrude’s raised eyebrow is any indication.
It’s a fair question, though. The Eye’s defeat — temporary as it may be, because Gertrude is nowhere near naive enough to believe that she has vanquished a seemingly-eternal god of fear just like that, because the world has never been that kind — has taken a toll on her. A catalogue of her own body: her eyes are sore, though her sight is once again clear; her legs ache from their running; she’d burnt her hands a bit, though burns no longer hurt the way they should, whether due to her bond with Agnes or her improved healing as Archivist. She’s got the start of a migraine pounding behind her eyes.
None of it is life-threatening, and for that she is thankful.
“I’m fine.” Her voice is dismissive. Who else is going to get them far, far away from the Institute? She’s incredibly doubtful the Cult of the Lightless Flame ever bothered getting their savior a driver’s license. “It’s not as if you could take over.”
“I do know how to drive, Gertrude.”
Hm. So Agnes continues to surprise Gertrude against all odds. “Really?” Genuine curiosity in her voice; not the Eye’s, but Gertrude’s. She wants… She wants to know everything about Agnes. She has for a long time, but she’d chalked it up to Beholding wanting knowledge she could weaponize against the avatars of the other fears.
Now, she isn’t so sure.
“Mm. Raymond taught me. I crashed into a tree the first time he tried. The car exploded the moment we were out of it.” Agnes has a certain tone when she talks about her time at the house on Hill Top Road. Gertrude has never been able to place whether it’s nostalgia or regret. She supposes it doesn’t matter, but she thinks she would quite like to know. “I did better, after that, of course.”
“I’d certainly hope so.” Not much worse she could do than fiery explosions, after all, though Gertrude is truly in no place to judge that particular subject at the moment. “I’ll take it for now, though.”
“Tell me if you need to switch?” There’s a pleading in Agnes’ voice. It doesn’t suit her. Gertrude risks a glance over, and Agnes is looking down at her own hands, fiddling with them.
Something in Gertrude reaches towards something in Agnes — not Beholding but bonded, spidersilk sewn between them — and she feels, for a brief moment, what Agnes feels. The desperation for a purpose, even as she leaves hers behind. Longing to be useful, to help Gertrude, to be by her side; fear that the Eye or the Flame will track them down in anger; a jittery anxiety Agnes does not know how to name.
It’s all terrifyingly similar to how Gertrude feels herself, and leaves her short of breath as she pulls back, their emotions echoing twofold in her chest.
(Agnes coming with Gertrude after they’d finished up at the Institute had never truly been a question in either of their minds, but Gertrude had still asked, a few days ago. “Would you like to?” Questions have never sounded quite right in her voice; even lacking the Archivist’s static-compulsion which Gertrude so hates to use, she’s a woman who seems like she should always be sure of herself, should always know the answers.
Agnes had thought about it for a too-long too-quiet moment. “Yes.”
“Will your Cult be happy about that?”
“Probably not.”
“That doesn’t concern you?”
“I don’t think they’ll be happy if I stay, either. Not really.” And Gertrude had known, via accidental skimming of information or the inexplicable workings of soul bonds or simply spending a lot of time with Agnes, exactly why: that Agnes was quickly coming to the realization that she could not be what the Cult wanted from her, and that she would rather be anywhere else.)
“I will,” Gertrude says. It holds more weight than it should, feels heavier as she rolls it around the air of her mouth: more like a promise than the subject at hand warrants. “In a bit, perhaps. I’d like to get out of the city first.”
“Alright,” Agnes says. Gertrude can tell she’s smiling without looking, and smiles back.
(It’s been nearly a year, now, since Gertrude appeared at Agnes’ door. Agnes had known who would be there before opening it, that being-watched sensation pricking at the back of her neck even as her bones sang with warmth, the kind of warmth that only truly came when Gertrude was near.
“I need your help,” Gertrude had said, wincing as if it hurt her to admit the slightest lack of complete independence. Perhaps it did. Gertrude has always struck Agnes as the most stubborn woman she’s ever met, though whether that is a good or a bad thing changes day to day.
“There is a way,” she’d said later, sitting on Agnes’ couch with a cup of too-hot coffee cradled between her hands, “to bring down the Institute. I believe Elias is planning something, and I cannot imagine it is anything good — but, well.” A smile, the kind that’s just yearning for danger. “A building is a building, no matter how embroiled in the powers that be it is. And I believe even the Panopticon can burn.”
“Why do you need me for that?” Anges’ head tilts, hair falling in a curtain across her shoulder with the movement. She’s heard what sacrifices Gertrude is willing to make for the greater good. She doesn’t believe Gertrude would sacrifice her — but Agnes has had quite enough of just being a thing to be sacrificed, tumultuous thoughts of the Cult pushing themselves to the forefront of her mind. The Lightless Flame may not know how she feels about being their martyr, the realization of these emotions still a relatively recent development, but Gertrude does.
She’s shared so much with Gertrude and nobody else, in quiet moments where she thinks they may almost be something.
“I don’t,” Gertrude had said simply. Plainly. Like it was obvious. “But I’m not sure I’ll survive it, attached to the Eye as I am. And I’d like someone there to finish the task if need be. And, well,” a sparkle in her eyes, smile back on her face, “who better for an arson than you, my dear?”
Something in Agnes had sparked at the phrase, the softness with which Gertrude had spoken. She wasn’t naive. Chances were good this was a manipulation — Gertrude seemed to be awfully good at that, after all.
The promise of setting something aflame side-by-side with Gertrude, though, was alluring enough to put all doubts to the wayside.)
(Gertrude didn’t die, in the end, though Agnes had had to lead the both of them from the tunnels at full speed, Gertrude’s vision consumed by fire and fire and nothing else for a good ten minutes before the Eye heaved its last and she was freed.)
It takes them ten hours to reach Gertrude’s chosen safehouse. There are closer ones she could have chosen, even a few scattered about London itself, but she had decided before even leaving the Institute’s walls that she wanted to be as far away as she could manage. If not for the worry of leaving a trail, she would be on a plane to another continent.
As it is, Scotland will do.
Agnes is driving when they arrive, Gertrude navigating from the passenger seat, squinting at the wrinkled map in her hands, sighing with frustration every few minutes. It isn’t that Agnes is a bad driver, just that she is horrifyingly, achingly cautious, driving a good twenty kilometers per hour under the speed limit, and doesn’t seem to understand just how much Gertrude is dying to collapse into a real bed.
(It does, she muses, feel good to be annoyed at something so small.)
They’ve each gotten a few restless hours of sleep in their turns in the passenger seat, but Gertrude’s car is of the sort that trembles as if the earth is quaking around it at all moments. It does little to rock even the most exhausted body to sleep. They’ve stopped at four roadside rest stops for coffee for Gertrude. At the first of these, Agnes had ordered a single black coffee, and it had stayed undrunk between her hands for two hours before Gertrude’d asked if she was intending to drink it, and Agnes had handed it over silently, and it was as burning-hot as if it had been poured only a moment ago.
“Oh. This is it,” Gertrude says.
It’s more quaint by far than most of her half-dozen scattered safehouses. She’d fed the real estate agent some story about wanting to settle down with a family she resolutely does not have, and had lied convincingly enough to get a discounted price on a one-story building best described as a cottage, complete with an utterly neglected garden around the side and a picket fence around the perimeter. No neighbors for several miles on any side, which had, for Gertrude, been the number one selling point of the place.
It’s been years since Gertrude has been here. She wonders what the inside will be like, after all this time — how many webs they will have to sweep away, how many days it will take to get rid of the dust. She wonders if Agnes will like it.
That’s an unexpected thought. Gertrude has never cared much at all for how others think of her, and does not truly wish to examine why she suddenly cares so much about Agnes’ opinions.
Agnes is out of the car already, waiting beside Gertrude’s door, holding out a hand to help Gertrude out. Gertrude is just stiff enough from the hours upon hours of driving to take the assistance.
She marches into the house like it’s a war zone.
Agnes trails somewhere behind, turning the webs in the corner to faint wisps of smoke as Gertrude enters every room, eyes sweeping around each doorway like she’s expecting to find some monstrous thing lying in wait for her. It takes three walk-throughs of the house, as well as two around the outside perimeter, for her to feel remotely comfortable. She’ll set up more safeguards in the morning.
She’s about ready to do a fourth sweep of the house, just in case , when she feels a warm hand on her elbow.
“Get some rest, Gertrude,” Agnes says at her side.
She’s about to argue, or to insist that they set up shifts for taking watch, or to shake that lingering hand away from where it burns — not literally, they had established early on that Gertrude is the rare sort who does not scald under Agnes’ skin, but in a deeper, tingling way. The placebo effect of a spot that should , by all rights, be smoldering and singed, combined with some emotion Gertrude has no name for.
She takes a step away, watches Agnes’ hand fall, and ignores the cold it leaves behind. Files the feeling into a box labeled to be dealt with in the morning, which sits in her mind conveniently close to a box labeled to be ignored forever , that it might be moved from the former to the latter and forgotten, if she chooses to do so.
“Alright, then,” Gertrude says. Only because the room is swimming in front of her and her yawns have turned more and more cavernous, like the exhaustion is hollowing her lungs out. It’s been quite a while since she’s gotten a proper night of sleep, after all: even before the last twenty-four hours of sleeplessness, the Eye’s nightmares have prevented her from truly resting for… longer than she can recall. She has not woken feeling anything but bone-tired in at least a decade.
Within a few minutes, Gertrude has changed into sleepwear, pulled the sun-bleached secondhand duvet from the linen closet and made the bed, and all but collapsed on top of it. She’s nearly asleep when she notes the eyes on her: Agnes, in the doorway, standing stock-still.
A questioning look.
“There’s only one,” Agnes says.
A furrowed brow.
“One bed,” Agnes clarifies.
“Yes,” Gertrude says, and she is half-tempted to begin naming other things in the room, there is one window, one dusty curtain over it, one vine snaking up the outside of the house and covering a bit of the upper-right corner of the window. There are two doors, one to the hallway, one to the bathroom. There is a god-awful painting of a tree on the wall. It came with the house. I wish it hadn’t, but I never stayed here long enough to justify carrying it all the way to the curb.
“I’ll take the couch, then,” Agnes says after a drawn-out moment, in a tone that says she has made an important decision, though Gertrude cannot fathom why .
“That couch,” says Gertrude, matter-of-fact, “is older than either of us and has stuffing coming out of its sides. The bed is big enough for both of us.”
Agnes is quiet for long enough that, if Gertrude could not see her in the faint moonlight coming through the window, she would assume she’d left. It’s only the dip in the other side of the bed, the creak of the bed’s springs, that assures Gertrude that Agnes is truly there.
“Goodnight, Gertrude,” Agnes says, soft enough it’s almost a whisper, almost not there at all.
“Goodnight, Agnes.” Gertrude turns to face away. It occurs to her that perhaps she should talk to Agnes about what comes next, how long they will be here, safety measures they’ll put in place to ensure nothing comes to find them — but before she can summon the energy to speak, her eyes have drifted closed. In the morning, they’ll discuss things.
For now, Agnes’ body heat radiates underneath the blankets, and between the warmth, the exhaustion, and the blessed lack of the Eye’s nightmares, Gertrude sleeps better than she has in years.
(It isn’t, contrary to Agnes’ fretting over the matter, the first time they have slept in the same bed.
The first had been nearly a decade ago. They’d had run-ins, several of them, enough that it couldn’t quite be chalked up to coincidence on either side. The soul bond, the ties that the Web had used Gertrude to create between them, drawing them towards each other again and again.
They’d been separately angry with it for a long time.
Agnes had been weaker than ever in the wake of the soul bond, her purpose taken from her in the blink of an eye: the Cult didn’t seem to know what to do with such a useless symbol, and Agnes did not know how to be herself without the promise of a world turned to a hollow-burnt husk. Gertrude’d had dreams of saving the world, of being some mythical figure, some protector — but it hadn’t taken long for her to realize even that was a manipulation.
So when Agnes had appeared in Gertrude’s apartment for the first time, three-or-so years after the binding ritual had been completed, it had been a surprise.
Gertrude had known Agnes would be there before opening the door, of course, though whether that was the archivist’s Sight or the call of their bond, neither could say. In the end, they’d talked, and Agnes had asked: it will not burn you, if I touch you. May I?
It’d been a long time since anyone had touched Gertrude. When Agnes’ hand hovered overtop her own, wide eyes searching for an answer, it was so easy to bridge those few inches, curl their fingers together, and feel the warmth seep into her bones.
Agnes had stayed, that night. Nothing had happened , but it had been nice to sleep next to another, just once.
Later, when Gertrude had appeared at Agnes’ door and begun their clandestine planning sessions to bring down Beholding, it had happened a few more times; the Underground only runs so late, after all, and Gertrude’s flat was clear on the other side of the city, and sometimes it was simpler to sleep over. All innocent: glancing brushes of hands, a certain spark in the way they look at each other, but both unwilling to bridge that gap, to cross that line, to reach out and do anything . Too much else to focus on, anyway.
They had an Entity to bring down. Everything else, Gertrude had reasoned to herself in the quiet hours, curled up beside Agnes, mind racing far too quickly to sleep; everything else could wait until afterwards.)
The morning brings gray clouds and the sort of rain that sits in the air, heavy and constant. Gertrude wakes to an empty hollow in the bed where Agnes had been.
It’s still warm, when she reaches out. Agnes’ heat has a tendency to linger in a space, but she can’t have been gone for long.
Gertrude follows the humming warmth in her veins outside, leaving her boots unlaced and her coat loose around her shoulders over her pajamas. She follows it down the driveway and past the fence and into the field that runs into the side of the property, and it’s there that she finds Agnes, standing entirely still in the middle of the tall grass, face turned upwards, eyes closed. Agnes isn’t wearing a jacket, and Gertrude feels a chill run through her own body at the sight of Agnes’ bare arms specked with dew.
“Aren’t you cold?” There’s a traitorous hint of worry in Gertrude’s voice, the sort she has vowed to tamp down every time it appears. She isn’t sure where that particular urge comes from. That whispering voice within her that declares no weakness , even when she is alone with someone who could see into her very soul if she so chose — old habits, she supposes.
“Freezing,” Agnes says pleasantly. “It’s nice, though.”
“Is it?”
Getting Agnes to speak about herself can be like pulling teeth, and Gertrude waits a long moment for a response. She’s patient, though. There’s no trace of Archivist left in her questions now, just a curiosity and a care, neither of which she can repress well enough to hide.
When Agnes does respond, her words come slowly, quietly. “I forget, sometimes, that I have a body. That I’m something beyond what they say — just flame and fire and apocalypses and no self to speak of. The cold… it helps.”
Gertrude has never been able to forget about herself. She has spent every waking moment since the day she knew what knowledge was in search of it; she is a hungry and selfish creature, and selfish things do everything possible to remember themselves, to have themselves be remembered. Everything for the good of humanity, and everything for her own survival. She can’t imagine being as detached as Agnes, being able to disappear from herself that way.
But the look on Agnes’ face is equal parts joy and sadness, wistful and mourning, and Gertrude reaches out her mind and understands .
She nods. “I’ll leave you to it, then.”
“No, I was just about to come back.” A sheepish smile as Agnes ducks her head, tucks her hair behind her ear. “I’m not… mortal, I don’t think, not the same way you are, but I can still get sick if I stay in the cold long enough. I’d rather you not have to take care of me if that happened.”
“That’s probably for the best.” In an ideal world, Gertrude would say she wouldn’t mind taking care of Agnes in any scenario, but it wouldn’t be the truth. She cannot lie to Agnes. It’s not a moral stance — Gertrude has told plenty of lies in her life, after all, to any number of people — but a practical one; Agnes would be able to tell, she’s sure.
In lieu of comforting words, which are decidedly not Gertrude’s forte, she reaches out and takes Agnes’ hand as they walk back up the long driveway and to the cottage. For once, Gertrude’s skin is the warmer of the two. She feels as Agnes heats up, and by the time they are inside and Gertrude lets go, Agnes is warm again and things are as they should be.
It takes a week for Gertrude to begin getting restless.
She is a woman of action first and foremost: her time at the Institute had rarely been spent behind her desk, preferring to go into the field and conduct her follow-up investigations herself. The previous Archivist, so Wright said, had had assistants for that sort of thing. She’s considered getting some of her own, if only so the more dangerous investigations involve someone else’s skin at risk, but as of yet hasn’t had the need to. Gertrude is still young, not even forty. She’s more than capable of handling things herself.
So after fourteen years of stopping potentially apocalyptic rituals on a bimonthly basis, it is hardly a surprise that Gertrude finds being cooped in a safehouse to be utterly, disastrously boring. Seven days of wandering the cottage, feeling its walls press in around her so keenly that she thinks, sometimes, that perhaps Choke has a hold of her, and Gertrude is at her breaking point. Past it. Uncontainably annoyed with everything around her — the stubborn dust that clings to surfaces no matter how many times she wipes it down, the few books she’d thought to pack that she’s already read twice over, the radio she’d kept in the cabinet for news that mumbles static more often than it picks up any signal at all.
Without fail, Agnes is gone when Gertrude wakes. She’ll be in the kitchen, or in the still-disastrous garden, or on the ancient sofa.
Usually she’s just sitting there. Doing nothing. Staring out a window or at her own hands.
“Sleep well?” Agnes says on the eighth morning as Gertrude sets coffee to brew, already changed out of her sleepclothes. Perhaps, sharing space so closely with Agnes for a full week, coming into the kitchen in the nightshirt she wore to bed shouldn’t seem so uncontainably and disgustingly vulnerable, but she’d thought about it this morning and near-shuddered before changing into her last set of real clothing. She’ll have to do laundry today, she notes.
“You were there, weren’t you? Why do you ask?” It’s sharper than she means it to be, knives in her mouth to claw at that tenderness. She’s the type to bristle at soft things, and Agnes has been so soft with her lately, like she’ll scald or shatter.
Gertrude’s back is to Agnes but she can feel just how intensely Agnes does not look at her. “It’s what people do.”
“We’re hardly regular people .” Dismissive. Gertrude knows Agnes is well aware of this fact.
“The Eye is gone, Gertrude.”
“And?”
“You could be normal, now.”
Gertrude has spent a decade and a half hunting down eldritch things, defeating the stuff of nightmares. She’s given up the lofty dreams of being the world’s savior she’d had at the start, but she sort of is , isn’t she? She’s saved the world singlehandedly plenty of times. It’s not for the credit or the accolades or the rush of it all (though the adrenaline is a nice bonus, keeps her going towards the next and the next and the next). It’s not because Beholding made her, though it’d pushed her in certain directions, given her the information to work with that had made any of it possible.
It was for herself — she isn’t deluded enough to think there was no self-interest at play in saving the world, as she would hardly like to live in the ruined aftermath of any of the Fears’ rituals — but it was also for people. Regular, ordinary people. Gertrude had accepted long ago she would no longer rank among them, and that’s fine .
“Agnes,” and it’s somewhat disappointed the way she says it, like Agnes has missed the point entirely, like Gertrude’s hesitant to explain herself. She finally turns her gaze from the drip of the coffeepot to Agnes herself, meets the burnt orange-brown of her eyes. “Of the two of us, which of us wants to be normal?”
Agnes is silent a moment too long, so Gertrude continues, marching forward with the confidence of a soldier: “I did not destroy the Archives for myself. I’m not the only one who was held in its grip, after all — if some of them could get peace, that would be more than enough. But I don’t expect my work to simply end because I am no longer employed to be doing it.”
“Oh.” Agnes gnaws on her lip a moment. Gertrude knows exactly how Agnes fidgets when she has something to say, so she stays quiet, lets Agnes work through her words. “So what will we— what will you be doing now?”
Gertrude notices the slip-up, the we quickly erased, but does not comment on it. “Once things calm down in London, I expect to return. Until then, I’ve got Adelard looking out for any leads — it’ll be more complicated without the Institute’s resources at my disposal, but I have my ways.”
“And until things calm?” There’s a feeling on Agnes’ face that Gertrude cannot quite place. She thinks about reaching out — hands on Agnes’ shoulders, cheekbones, fingertips brushing warm skin. She thinks about reaching out in another way, feelings entwined. She doesn’t do either.
“Well, I expect to stay here.”
Something sparks up in Agnes’ eyes. Gertrude feels, very suddenly, that she is burning under the weight of Agnes’ gaze. It isn’t a sensation she’s familiar with — that softness not quite disappearing but being overtaken by something stronger. Gertrude understands, suddenly, why it had been so easy for those of the Lightless Flame to worship Agnes as their god.
“Gertrude,” Agnes says, slow but firm. “Why am I here?”
Gertrude could have tried for hours to guess what Agnes would ask and would not have landed upon that. There are some pieces of information that are so constant that they seem to be a given — the sky is blue except for when it is gray, and London stinks in the summer, and books deserve to be marked-up and dog-eared to show you care about their contents, and —
“Because I care for you,” Gertrude says.
She’s refined the skill of masking any emotion that flits its way across her mind, but she doesn’t bother to hide herself now: the confused furrow of her brow, the truth radiating off of her in waves. There’s a wave of expression that crosses Agnes’ face and is swallowed by another wave, and another: Gertrude sees shock and that now-familiar tenderness and confusion amongst them.
It isn’t easy for Gertrude to admit to caring about someone. It isn’t easy for Gertrude to care about people in the first place. As a whole, yes, but on an individual level, she refuses to bog herself down with interpersonal connections. And yet —
“Because,” she says, once the moment has dragged on just a bit too long and the silence has begun to gnaw at her, “you weren’t happy in London, and if I was going to escape the Institute, I wanted to give you an escape route, as well. I could have done it without you, but it wouldn’t have felt right, leaving you.”
“Oh,” Agnes says, so softly Gertrude would think she’d imagined it if she weren’t looking right at Agnes. “Alright.”
“Alright?”
“I wasn’t sure. How you felt.” Agnes’ words are stutter-stepping their way to a point. “Even with the connection — it’s hard to tell if feelings are coming from me or from you, and I’ve never been stellar at identifying my own emotions, anyways.”
Agnes stands. The scrape of the chair against the wooden floor is piercingly loud. Gertrude doesn’t jump at it, nor does she flinch when Agnes walks close to her, nor does she pull away when Agnes places one hand over Gertrude’s own, resting against the kitchen counter.
Gertrude’s eyes close for a brief moment. She wills her heart (or the idea of her heart; she’s no poet, puts no stock into blood-pumping organs as a home for emotion, but she doesn’t know how else to phrase the action) to follow the trail of spider-thread between them and see the contents of Agnes’ own heart.
It’s near-burning warmth. It’s tenderness and softness and care and it’s love , to such a degree it makes Gertrude gasp, her eyes opening. She finds, now that she knows where to look, that the feelings are each reflected in herself.
“May I kiss you?” Gertrude’s voice remains steady as ever, if significantly quieter than its usual.
Agnes’ free hand makes its way to the side of Gertrude’s face, and her breath smells like firesmoke when she leans in. It’s clumsy — it’s been years since Gertrude has kissed anyone, and she can’t imagine Agnes ever has, and their noses knock together and their lips don’t move, just press together for a moment then pull back. There’s no sparks that fly, figuratively or literally, but the glow of their bond reverberates between them, and it feels right .
They drive into the nearest town the next day, the safehouse’s supply of groceries running low and Gertrude still just as stir-crazy despite the resolved tension of knowing where their relationship stands.
It’s miniscule, as quaint as the safehouse; Gertrude’s not convinced the town could possibly fit more than a hundred residents, though the welcome sign at its border boasts nearly 500. She suspects it of lying. It’s possible she’s merely looking for deceptions where there are none — a week is a very, very long time for nothing to try to kill her, nowadays, and everything seems suspect.
When she shares her suspicions with Agnes, Agnes laughs, and Gertrude feels suddenly and undeniably foolish in a way she hasn’t in years. It surprises her that it isn’t a bad feeling.
Gertrude’s car parked at the edge of town, hidden from the main road by trees (that paranoia that sits heavy in Gertrude’s stomach refusing to let up), they stroll through the main (and only, far as Gertrude can tell) street of the town hand-in-hand. It’s a small thing that resolutely does not make butterflies shoot into Gertrude’s chest, and equally does not make Agnes’ face flush, and certainly does not cause the echoing sensation of love double the force with which it courses through their bond.
That would be childish, of course.
Agnes seems to thrill at wandering the town, being counted among its people if only for a few hours. Walking around London, she explains when Gertrude gives a sidelong glance at her grin, had always carried the danger of running into members of her Cult. Even before she’d thought of it as such an uncomfortable and unwanted thing, the sheer amount of attention they placed on her meant that time to herself was a rare opportunity. More often, one of them would be watching her, babysitting their little savior. They’d always expected so much of her, and given her no time to be ordinary ; born into this life and held to a purpose, a destiny.
“Nobody knows me, here,” Agnes says. Her eyes drift shut for a moment, letting Gertrude lead her by the hand. The amount of trust present in that gesture is dizzying . “I love it.”
Agnes’ joy is contagious; though Gertrude isn’t so open with her feelings, she finds herself smiling as they walk. When the shopkeep of the town’s used bookstore (which Gertrude tugs Agnes into, making some comment about how flammable its contents were and that she’d better be careful, but it’s less sharp than it may have been a week or two ago, the words carrying no real judgement) mistakes them for a honeymooning couple, Gertrude doesn’t bother correcting them.
On a practical side, it’s easier if the townspeople who care to question their presence think they have a specific reason for staying nearby. In less pragmatic terms… Gertrude enjoys the assumption. Enjoys the thought of it in a girlish way she’s never allowed herself to enjoy anything before, not really.
She enjoys, too, the way Agnes’ cheeks turn red under the bookseller’s gaze, her hand still twined with Gertrude’s noticeably warming up. Gertrude gives it a quick squeeze, earns an amused smile in return.
After two weeks, Gertrude feels somewhat confident in discussing the what-comes-next.
Adelard’s sent word via a letter, addressed to a fake name but delivered reliably to the safehouse nonetheless. The investigation into the Institute is ongoing, but has been ruled an accident , somehow.
This doesn’t reassure Gertrude as much as it should. She had used explosives, for Christ’s sake. Any ordinary fire, she could understand being chalked up to a candle knocked over (though flammables are hardly allowed in the Archives; Wright had given her an earful about smoking in her office when she’d first joined, what feels like a hundred years ago. Once Elias had been appointed head of the Institute, he’d tried, again, to reprimand her for it — but Gertrude had raised an eyebrow and pointed out just how many times Elias had smoked alongside her while he had been a file clerk, and really, you will need to be more convincing than that , and Elias had fumed and left her alone.) But Gertrude had been very thorough in ensuring no part of the Institute would survive. She could not afford to let any piece of the Eye’s temple slip through her fingers.
That it has been ruled an accident speaks to the interference of an outside force, likely one of the Entities.
They had, at least, found Elias’ body in the rubble. This brings Gertrude some relief.
“I’m going to give it another week,” Gertrude says over dinner one night, “but London seems to be calming down.”
“That’s good,” says Agnes, in a voice that implies she believes it to be anything but.
“You don’t have to come back, if you don’t want to.” A certain frankness has returned to Gertrude’s voice, a practicality that’s been missing for the last few days. She’s allowed herself time to be impractical, to let something deeper and less rough around the edges shine through, but there’s no room for that at the moment.
Agnes considers this. Gertrude can almost hear her run through her options, though she doesn’t do so aloud: staying here is technically one, though Gertrude cannot imagine how dull it would be all alone. Going back to London runs the risk of the Cult coming after her, but —
“I’ll protect you,” Gertrude says. She’s endlessly confident in her ability to do so. “If the Lightless Flame tries to reclaim you, I will protect you.”
“You don’t need to. I can protect myself.” Agnes is still quiet. She sounds so unsure; Gertrude is struck with the urge to take her hand, to lend her some steadiness, and she does not hesitate in doing so.
“I know.” And she does. Gertrude is well aware of Agnes’ power.
She has never, not once in her life, doubted Agnes’ ability to defend herself. She only wants to lighten that burden however she can.
“I think I’d like to help you,” Agnes says, with a weight behind it that says she has finally found something she is sure of, after so many years of false godhood and wavering faith. “Stopping the rituals. Protecting people. I’d like to do it alongside you.”
Gertrude does not do Agnes the disservice of asking if she’s sure — she need only reach into their bond and feel the untrembling nature of Agnes’ heart. She squeezes Agnes’ hand, grins that half-crazed danger-hungry smile of hers, and finds it echoed back on Agnes’ face.
The expression suits her.
“Well then, Miss Montague,” Gertrude says, “I believe we’ll make a fantastic team.”
(Much later, after the destruction of yet another ritual (so many now that Agnes has, frankly, lost count), Agnes and Gertrude will run hand in hand from a burning church with the sort of ecstatic laughter that only comes after a near-death experience. They'll look at each other, bathed as they are in the warm glow of destruction, and they'll each think: she is so beautiful, and I am so lucky.)