Work Text:
“They are,” Camilla declared, “idiots.”
She said it as neither insult nor accusation, but a simple statement of fact. One plus one was two. One idiot plus another idiot was two idiots. Palamedes didn’t ask, he didn’t look up from the stack of papers he sifted through to see who she was talking about. He didn’t have to. It was a familiar conversation.
“They are idiots,” he agreed.
“It’s unprofessional.”
“It’s extremely unprofessional. Fingers.” Camilla’s hand darted away from the back edge of the case. With practiced ease, Palamedes slid the coiled bracelet that held the shop’s myriad keys from his wrist to his hand to unlock one of the jewelry cases. He counted the display jewelry with the same methodic approached he always used for inventory, mentally reconciling which of those on display Harrow wanted more of, and which weren’t moving. The chains were getting more popular…
He closed the case and moved on to the next one. It probably would have been easier if Camilla hadn’t been sitting directly on top of the case, but he moved easily around her, unbothered.
“At least they’re happy,” Camilla said begrudgingly.
Nearly two weeks had passed since Gideon and Harrow had defied all logic and defiled Gideon’s studio with sweat and tears. And probably a little bit of blood, what with the tattoo and all. When asked about the bra that had been left dangling on the hook in the studio, Gideon had sworn on the life of her dead mother that nothing had happened on her bench other than maybe a kiss or two, you had to take your bra off for a sternum tattoo, and this wasn’t the first time someone’s undergarments had gone unclaimed in the studio space she shared with Cam. Harrow had coldly told them it was none of their business, her usual bite numbed slightly by the way her hand had been entwined with Gideon’s.
It was easy to forget, what with the way they still squabbled — but they were happy. It could be seen in the way the two of them would seek out excuses to go to the other’s workspace between clients, the angle of their bodies when they leaned against opposite sides of the counter, bent toward one another. They still poked and prodded at one another, pushing their way under each other’s skin with flirtations that had the thinnest veneer of snark. It was weird, at first. Weirder still when they were caught in those odd quiet moments. Gideon’s chin resting on the top of Harrow’s head to watch a video with her, or Harrow casually pressing her hand into the crook of Gideon’s elbow when the two of them headed out for the night. They had never been physically close, not the way that he and Cam were. They still weren’t quite at the same level, which made each brush within the studio all the more apparent.
“At least they’re happy,” Palamedes agreed. He locked the final cabinet and returned to making notes in the margins of his notepad. “They can keep each other occupied...”
“ ...without destroying the parlor,” Camilla said, doubtlessly remembering the more… colorful confrontations between Harrow and Gideon. The first few months of cohabitation had been rough, when the two of them would have gladly killed the other and stuffed their chopped up remains into the autoclave. Even rougher was the period after that, when their relationship moved from violent confrontation to painful flirting.
Camilla drummed one finger against the glass counter, clearly thinking. In a turtleneck and crisp plaid pants, she looked as pristine as ever. She could have been a librarian or a schoolteacher or a secretary, had her sleeves not been pushed up to the elbow. Save for the odd scrap of bare, bronze skin, her arms were nearly as black as her shirt. The one that Palamedes could see at this angle was host to a mesmerizing geometric sleeve that he knew trailed up further, all the way to the strong slope of her shoulder, a gradient of countless dots that he could probably reproduce with his eyes closed — to less of an astounding effect, but still. It wasn’t the kind of tattoo Camilla really gave, but it was the kind that she liked. It danced all the way down to her fingers, including the one that was currently smudging the pane she sat on.
She shook her head, dark bob swaying with the movement. “Have you seen the tattoo?”
“I have seen a picture of the tattoo.” Cropped. Mercifully cropped. “It looks fantastic. Gideon should put it in her book once it’s healed.”
Camilla scoffed. “Harrow will love that.” She sat up straighter. “I just can’t believe Harrow let Gideon give her a tattoo. I can’t even get you under the needle, and I’ve never called you an emo Pomeranian with a God-complex.”
Palamedes’ hand — markedly bare, compared to Camilla’s, and Gideon’s, and even Harrow’s — stilled.
There it was, that strange fact that had hung over them, unspoken, for the last two weeks. Harrow had let Gideon give her a tattoo. Harrow had let Gideon give her a tattoo. Harrow had let Gideon give her a tattoo. Regardless of where the stress fell, regardless of how many times Palamedes ran the idea through his brain, it never changed. Somehow, between the fighting and the flirting, Harrow had trusted Gideon enough to allow her to leave an unknown, permanent mark on her skin forever.
Camilla had offered only once, years ago. When it had been just the three of them and a handful of part time employees trying to make ends meet, back before someone had the bright idea to expand the studio and rope in a piercer who would change their dynamic forever. Palamedes was the only one who went unchanged during that time, accruing none of the tattoos and piercings that Camilla and Gideon had collected over the years.
“It’s quite the commitment,” he had said noncommittally, when Camilla offered.
“It looks cool as hell, though. Life’s too short not to take a few risks,” Gideon had said, in Gideon-typical fashion. Palamedes, who had seen many of the “risks” her clients had taken and come in to try and cover up, had politely refrained from pointing out that some risks were more painful and expensive than others.
Camilla had studied her arm, her sleeve still half-formed at that point. “It’s worth it,” she agreed, lifting her cool brown eyes to meet Palamades’ grey ones, “if it’s done by the right person.”
“I’ll think about it,” Palamedes had said, and hadn’t stopped thinking about it since.
“Laser.”
“No, I think I can do it.”
“Laser.”
“Okay, but maybe like a chest—”
“Laser,” Palamedes said, echoing Camilla’s statement. The three girls looked up from where they sat crowded together, faces illuminated in the pale light of Gideon’s laptop. Palamedes set the tray of coffee he carried onto the display counter, then stepped back like a gamekeeper after throwing a raw steak to a pit of lions as the three of them claimed their elixirs of choice.
“You can’t just agree with Camilla all the time. You haven’t seen it.”
Camilla looked up from the computer to Palamedes. She stood behind Gideon, arm propped up on the back of her chair. “Laser,” she repeated.
From her awkward perch against one of Gideon’s knees, Harrow shifted. She wasn’t quite sitting on Gideon — Harrow and her misplaced pride were too dignified for that— but she might as well have been, the way she was leaned against her. The girl was all angles, and judging by the twist at Gideon’s mouth, it probably hurt a little. “I don’t think you should do anything to it,” Harrow said, tone flat. “People get the tattoos they deserve.”
She undeniably meant it as an insult — but Palamedes didn’t miss the way one of Gideon’s hands brushed at Harrow’s side, just under the rise of her healing tattoo.
“Look, throw a giant skull down, or some roses—”
“—how banal—”
“— you could probably salvage it.”
“Even if you peeled the skin from his chest, you could not salvage that.”
Palamedes slipped around the desk, moving to join the dog-pile behind the computer. Camilla moved only minutely when he approached, shifting the angle of her body so that he could get a better view. He still had to fold himself nearly in half to see the screen, and he leaned forward, resting his chin against Camilla’s shoulder.
The tattoo in question was irredeemable. What was meant to be a photorealistic rendition of a woman’s face over a pectoral muscle had turned into a grotesque caricature of a human being. The ink had bled, turning an already terrible mess of poor linework and inadequate shading into a monstrosity with a sliding face, the lovechild of Junji Ito and H.P. Lovecraft. Every time Palamedes blinked, it seemed worse in different ways.
Even worse was the name stamped out underneath it. Sabreena, in a font that could only be described as an affront to calligraphy and god alike.
“Laser,” Palamedes agreed. He could feel the vibration of Camilla’s small laugh against his chin.
He didn’t need to look at Gideon to see she was rolling her eyes. She pulled the laptop closer to her, arms caging Harrow in with the movement, and said, “ I don’t mind a challenge.”
“Please don’t land us with a lawsuit.”
“Isn’t that what your waivers are for?”
“Please don’t land us with a social media disaster.”
“The lack of faith,” Gideon said, explosively abusing her keyboard to type out a follow-up email, “is astounding.”
Harrow flicked her wrist disdainfully at the screen. “This is why I could not tattoo. The stupidity of the general population is unfathomable.”
Gideon followed that up with a comment on how the only artistic bone in Harrow’s body was the one she had drawn on her. It earned her a heel to the shin. Camilla shook her head at their antics, and the smooth sweep of her bob tickled Palamedes’ cheek.
“This is part of why I avoid name tattoos,” said Camilla. The other part being that she found lettering boring. Gideon didn’t like it that much either, yet somehow most of those clients were redirected to her.
“Did they separate?” Palamedes asked, and Gideon barked out a laugh.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “After he misspelled her name and turned her face into a mutilated thumb.” As if to illustrate her point, she zoomed in on the face. One eye was significantly lower than the other and tragically misshapen, a macabre tribute to Dali’s sliding clocks. “We should track down this guy’s artist. Pal could use some ink.”
“Not on your life,” he deadpanned.
“Fine, on Cam’s then.”
Palamedes did not say he would let a psychopath with a tattoo gun cover every inch of his lanky body, dealer’s choice, on Cam’s life. He was pretty sure he didn’t need to.
What he did say, upon looking up and seeing a mass of muscle loosely bound together by tattooed skin standing politely outside the glass door of The Locked Tomb, was, “Gideon, your nine o’clock is here.”
Months passed, Harrow’s tattoo healed, and it only became slightly less weird to see the two of them together. He nearly felt comfortable teasing the two of them about the PDA in the parlor (which, for Gideon, was surprisingly tame) until Harrow shut him down by pointing out the fact that he and Camilla were on top of one another all the time. Palamedes went back to minding his own business.
Mostly.
“Did Gideon talk to you about the photo book?”
Harrow looked up from her perch behind the display counter, hunched over a laptop like a vulture. She looked dazed. Unlike Gideon and Cam, most of her clients were walk-ins, and there had been a steady stream of them today, including an entire sorority that had quickly gone from giggly to whiny when they realized they couldn’t go into the studio all together. She had eventually hit a lull in the final hour of her shift and, true to her workaholic tendencies, was using it to peruse vendors’ websites for jewelry.
“What?”
“Your tattoo,” Palamedes said. “It would be a good one for Gideon’s portfolio.”
It was almost funny, the distinction between Camilla and Gideon’s portfolios. Camilla’s work was smooth and pristine, rendered mostly in neat blackwork and shades of smoky grey. Gideon’s was vibrant. She favored bold styles, loved to pack each piece with color so bright that it outshined her more understated works. When every page was an explosion of neon color and glow-in-the-dark ink, it was easy to forget that her blackwork was equally as stunning.
Harrow’s harsh mouth flattened into a firm line. “Have I no choice?”
“Of course you have a choice.”
Because Harrow was the only person on the planet who was possibly more repressed than Palamades himself, she said nothing. He didn’t try to drag it out of her. The rational part of Palamedes, the part of him that governed his daily life and staved off his wishful thinking, didn’t quite understand. People fucked up their tattoos every day by not allowing them to heal properly, too absorbed in the excitement of showing off a new tattoo to care for it. Their emails were flooded with people sending images of healed pieces, and client’s lost their minds when their designs were featured on the parlor’s social media. What was the point of a tattoo, if not to show it off?
But then he thought about Camilla and her dark eyes. When their gazes met across the shop, or over a cigarette, or over Harrow’s head. He thought about her eyes when they were trained down on someone’s arm, or back, or thigh, her brow furrowed in concentration. He imagined what Harrow must have felt, with Gideon staring down at her like that, and understood what it meant to want to keep some things private.
“Why do you even work here?” Asked Harrow, point blank. She had grown up in a funeral home, and the dead didn’t teach manners. “I would assume other things lined up more with your…interests.”
Because Camilla asked me to, probably wasn’t what Harrow was looking for, so he went with the other, equally true answer.
“They would have gone bankrupt without me,” he responded, equally direct.
Thankfully, Harrow did not ask why he stayed. Their alliance had been a shaky one ever since her arrival at the parlor, when she had been undeniably talented yet distrustful. The two had almost nothing in common, and yet they shared an easy understanding of what could be left unsaid. Perhaps even more so now.
“Have you thought about getting one?” It was a funny question coming from Harrow, who at one point would have snapped someone’s neck in half for presuming to ask her such a personal question.
Palamedes had thought about getting one. He had thought about getting one every day — how could he not? When Camilla held her tattoo gun in those dexterous fingers of hers, or when she was curled over her sketchbook drafting a design for a client, he thought about it. When she wiped away the blood from a client’s arm with a steady hand, he thought about it. He thought about what it would feel like, how much it would hurt. He thought about Camilla’s gloved hand holding his arm steady, or braced on his shoulder.
He thought, often, about what a terrible idea it was.
“The only time you should have a name or a number on your body, it should be for your mom or your lawyer,” Gideon had told him once. “ And I don’t have a mom.” He knew, from years of watching people beg for cover-ups from ill-fated relationships, how stupid it was to tattoo someone else onto your skin. It was a constant subject of derision in the parlor.
But that was the subject of the tattoo — what about the artist? Gideon was talented. She was skilled. She was a dear friend. But the only hands Palamedes could put himself in for something as permanent as a tattoo was Camilla. And against all reason, against all rationality, that scared him. He wondered how Harrow felt, knowing that no matter what happened, she would carry a piece of Gideon with her forever. He didn’t understand her. He pitied her. He envied her.
Palamedes shrugged. “It depends.”
Harrow arched an eyebrow.
“On if I find the right artist.”
“Is Gideon not booking for—” Cam shook her head, eyes widening in alarm, and Palamedes dropped his voice “— the end of September?”
Camilla’s gaze darted to the door that led to their studio spaces. Gideon was with a client, a beachy blonde chatterbox with a big smile and a bigger wallet, which meant Harrow was probably seething as she fed tools into the autoclave. Summer, warm and sticky, had descended mercilessly on them, sending Palamedes into a flurry of scheduling, scheduling, scheduling as they opened their books for fall and winter appointments. Business had expanded over the last year, and Palamedes was finding himself squeezing appointments and consultations into their calendars like temporal Tetris. It made the gaps in their schedules all the more apparent.
“She’s taking Harrow somewhere,” Camilla said, voice low, “for their anniversary. But don’t let Harrow see that.”
Palamedes’ eyebrows raised over the wire frames of his glasses. “Will it really be a year?”
“I know,” said Camilla stoically. “I’ve aged decades.” She propped herself up onto the display case, the same way she always did when clients were few and far in between and she wanted to spy on whatever Palamedes was working on. He shifted the angle of his arm, so that she could see the screen of his laptop better.
Outside it was the golden hour, and the warm, dying light of a setting sun slipped through the glass of the storefront. It soaked Camilla’s brown skin in honey-like tones, bringing out a hint of chestnut in her dark hair. Even through the door that separated the two halves of the tattoo parlour, he could hear the familiar buzz of Gideon’s tattoo gun.
“You’re booking up fast,” Palamedes said, voice soft. He looked up and caught unreadable Camilla’s eyes on his face. They darted to the schedule immediately.
She slouched down to read it. Palamedes moved back to give her space to read, giving into the familiar push-pull of their relationship, the two of them always moving to equilibrium.
“Well, Sextus,” she said, into the quiet afternoon. “Better make an appointment soon, if you want that tattoo.”
Their faces were close, if Camilla only tipped her head…
...and if only Gideon and her big mouth — and her bigger mouthed client — hadn’t burst through the door at that moment.
Neither of them moved. They didn’t dart away, didn’t rush to make excuses for their proximity, and Gideon didn’t ask as she led her client out. When Harrow eventually trailed into the lobby behind her, looking only slightly less annoyed than anticipated, she was too focused on haunting Gideon to care what the two of them were up to. It was Camilla and Palamedes — they were just like this.
They were always like this.
Over the years, Palamedes had become intimately familiar with the studio. He could close his eyes and map it, from the display photos that hung in the lobby to the exact order of jewelry lined up in the display case. He could have navigated their file cabinet, chock full of waivers and paperwork that only he ever pored over — with his eyes closed. The entrance and the lobby was his entire domain, where he greeted clients and detailed legal forms and paid bills and kicked out inebriates. It maybe wasn’t the life he had expected, or the one his parents had wanted for him — but it was the one that was familiar, and the one that made him happy.
Despite his familiarity — over-familiarity, really — with the shop, he still found himself intrigued by the studio space.
It changed, sometimes daily. Gideon and Camilla had their own workstations, partitioned off from one another. Both were scrupulously neat, with pictures of their work — and a few of other artists’, as inspiration — wallpapering the black walls of the studio space. Where the lights in the front were warm and natural, it was nearly fluorescent back here. Harrow had a room to herself, just down the hall, clean and sterile as a crime scene. The only image in there was a laminated paper next to the mirror that said “Hands OFF”.
Back here, things moved. Palamedes would make his way back here to see that Gideon had added another picture on the wall, or that Camilla had added another book to the small shelf in her station. He rarely got to see the two in action any more, but every now and then he would slip through the door to give one of them a reminder or an update. At those times, the studios were filled with new bodies, new voices. Some of them chatting, some of them crying — and all of them, upon leaving, changed.
When he stepped through the door at the end of the day, though, it was just Camilla. The familiar scents of green soap and alcohol lingered in the air, overpowered by the even more familiar scent of bleach.
“Hey,” said Camilla by way of greeting, shucking her gloves into the metal trashbin, “you should come back here more. It’s so quiet. ”
“I thought you were looking forward to it?”
With Harrow and Gideon gone, the parlor was blissfully, unnaturally, scarily quiet. Whether affectionate or argumentative, the two of them were incapable of shutting up in one another’s presence. Even the music that filtered quietly through a Bluetooth speaker on Camilla’s desk, some kind of symphonic rock that she unintentionally bobbed her head to, couldn’t mask their absence.
“I would take your ‘top nerd facts’,” said Camilla, employing Gideon’s favored term of choice, “over those two any day.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” said Palamedes. He knew he was; he had achieved more in the last two days than he normally did in a week. “Your final appointment of the day canceled.”
Camilla’s grey eyes turned upward, as if asking some kind of unhearing God what kind of sick joke they were playing now. “This is the second time. We should fire him.”
“Say the word.”
“And I’m keeping the design.”
“What was it?”
Camilla methodically ransacked her desk, pulling out sketchbooks and folders and neatly stacking them one on top of another when her efforts proved fruitless. When she couldn’t find what she was looking for, she sighed, closed the final book, and jerked her head toward Gideon’s studio space. Palamedes followed, and she continued her search there.
He looked around as he did so. It was jarring, to move between their studios. Both were kept equally neat and tidy, but it was impossible to switch from Camilla’s rich black linework to Gideon’s spray of color without a sense of whiplash. The change warranted a seizure warning.
“I wanted her opinion on a few designs…” Camilla was muttering — more to herself than anyone else — as she combed through a binder full of designs. “Here.”
The stencil that she offered Palamedes was clean and crisp, and no less beautiful for its simplicity. A perfect Fibonacci spiral, uncurling around the axis like the delicate curve of a shell. The rotations trailed delicate threads, expanding beyond the harsher outer curve of the spiral, fading to dotted lines at the ends. The finest of these dotted lines she would do stick-and-poke, Palamedes was certain, with a steady hand and expert eye.
“It looks great.”
“I thought you would like it,” Camilla said. “‘Top nerd facts’, and whatnot.”
Palamedes didn’t know why he said it. Maybe it was the quiet of the room, Camilla’s music a distant buzz on the other side of the wall. Maybe it was being here in Gideon’s workspace, possessed by the spirit of Gideon in all of her stupidity and glory. Maybe it was Camilla herself, still lovely even in the ghastly fluorescent lights, her dark eyes focused in quiet pride on the piece of her work in Palamedes’ hands.
“Is this the kind of tattoo you would choose for me?”
It was one of those thoughts — always just under the surface, always unspoken. Wondering what Camilla would choose, were he to turn himself into her steady hands. It was the kind of thought that normally went unspoken, the kind that could throw the world off its axis if cast out in the open. It didn’t throw Camilla off.
She paused for a moment, considering. Palamedes liked the way she looked when she did that. Not her face, though he liked that too — but the way that her dark eyes seemed to darken even more when she withdrew into her own thoughts, the many cogs and gears that were Camilla Hect turning behind the window of her eyes.
“Not this one,” said Camilla with finality. She plucked the stencil from Palamedes’ hands, and set it on the desk. When she lifted his arm and efficiently folded the sleeve up of his sweater up to his elbow he felt it like a shock in his entire body. It was no different than their usual interactions, the push of Camilla leaning against Palamedes after a long day or the pull of him drawing her in by the elbow to show her something on his laptop — and yet it somehow was.
She flipped his arm over, baring the soft skin of his inner forearm to the fluorescent light above. “I would start here,” said Camilla, index finger brushing at the point halfway between the crook of his bony elbow and the dip of his wrist. “And this would be the sun. And here…” She traced her finger in a concentric circle, just slightly off center. In his mind, Palamedes could see the line she would draw. Careful, precise, delicate. “This would be—”
“Mercury,” he said, without thinking.
Camilla nodded without looking at his face, already tracing the next line with a blunt nail. Her gaze was still trained downward, just as focused as she would be with an actual client. Laying lines down on his skin, mapping the solar system out among the limited space of his arm. The lines that spun out around the center would be fine, perfect, pristine. The sun, the stars, the planets — according to Camilla, master of the universe, they would be stylized like the etchings of an ancient celestial map. She spoke frankly, her tone matter-of-fact as usual, as if she could see it already inked on his skin.
“Would you do it?”
It broke the spell. Camilla finally looked up, eyes widening almost imperceptibly, her thumb still pressed into the tender flesh just above his wrist.
“I thought you had to think about it.”
Surely Camilla would be able to feel the pounding of his pulse, the thundering of his blood separated from her fingertips only by a thin layer of skin. “I mean,” he said, and then stopped. “If it’s the right person…”
How Camilla, five-foot-four to his six-two, managed to close the distance between them, Palamedes would never know. All he knew was the feeling of her hands — skilled, capable hands — brushing at his neck, running through the short hair at the base of his skull, pulling him in. Her mouth met his and it was soft, and hot, and perhaps a little messier than he had expected, and he felt warm despite the studio’s constant chill.
When Camilla finally released him, it was only long enough to whisper his name. Palamedes brushed a lock of hair from where it was matted to her sweaty forehead. The next thing he knew, she was surging forward again, and he was being pushed down into the bench, and her hands were at the buttons of his shirt, and his hands were in her hair, and Gideon was going to fucking kill them.
“I am going to fucking kill you. ”
“Then you should have gotten that lawyer tattoo,” said Camilla coolly. She didn’t bother to look up from the notebook she was sketching in, even though Gideon was working herself into a stroke in front of her.
“My bench! My bench!” Gideon ran her hands through her hair. It was somewhere between the twentieth and thirtieth time she had done so. Palamedes had lost count. Regardless, it showed. “Why couldn’t you do it on your own bench.”
“We completely sanitized it afterward,” interjected Palamedes levelly.
“Well, that takes care of it, Gideon,” drawled Harrow, pointedly standing as far from both Camilla and Palamedes as possible without actually leaving the frontroom. Disgust rolled off of her in noxious waves. “They sanitized it.”
“My bench! On my anniversary!”
“ Our—”
“It wasn’t on your actual anniversary.”
“But it was on my actual bench! We didn’t even do anything on that bench! And you two just sit there!” Gideon motioned rapidly between the two of them — Cam sat cross-legged on on the display case, a sketchbook in her lap, and Palamedes at her side, unbothered plugging away at an Excel file. “Like it’s fine! Like nothing has changed!”
Despite himself, Palamedes’ mouth quirked into a hint of a smile, which only set Gideon off again. Camilla tilted her head, glancing up at him out of the corner of her eye, the same sly smile reflected on her face.
Some things really didn't change.