Chapter Text
It’s that time of the month again. Even if Harrow didn’t keep a meticulously blocked-out calendar, complete with phases of the moon and colour coding for core days and standard variation; even if Griddle didn’t begin to smell more like—well, more like herself, Harrow would know that it was coming up to that time of the month again. Gideon Nav had taken it upon herself to be a hugger aged thirteen and a bit, when she’d finally settled in with her new family. Harrow hadn’t needed to be subjected to the indignity before circumstances brought them back together. And then she learnt that, as that time rolled around, Gideon wasn’t simply a hugger. She was a cuddler. A consummate, unstoppable cuddler. It was also something that Gideon had little control over. If there wasn’t a well locked door between herself and the overgrown ginger, Harrow would go to sleep of a night and wake up to find herself encased in well-muscled arms or smothered beneath far too much smooth brown skin.
She’d fought it, at first. Of course she had. But she found that the only way to win that fight was to be out of the house entirely—Gideon was tireless—and so she, instead, gave in. She allowed herself to be cuddled to within an inch of her life. She accepted waking up to Griddle, abashed but buoyant and entirely underdressed in her bed. She grew used to coming home after a long day at work and finding Gideon curled up in a mess of Harrow’s dirty clothes and used blankets. It was, simply, life. Her life, specifically, with Gideon.
She would never admit to the pleasure it gave her to be able to say that.
*
“Griddle?” Harrow called, stepping over the piles of shoes (mostly hers) in the hall, not bothering to take off her outerwear. “We don’t have much time. Where are you?”
It would be nigh on fraudulent, she thought, to give the impression that Gideon Nav was ever easy to handle. She was not. But she became borderline impossible as the full moon neared. There were still people who managed her—her foster parents, for one, and Hect (God alone knew how or why) for another—but Harrow was not of their number. What little intelligence the girl had slipped away as the wolf approached. Still—this was routine. Gideon should be used to this. If she wasn’t here, waiting for Harrow, that meant she was somewhere else, which in turn meant that today would probably be particularly difficult.
Still. No need to borrow trouble. Harrow’s mother used to say that. Perhaps. Or maybe it was Great Aunt Lacrhimorta? Or Aunt Glaurica? They blended together in her mind: they formed a singular mass: the Old Wives’ Tale, Anthropomorphised.
When it came down to it, there were only so many places Gideon would be on a day like today. She was, for all her bluster and bravado as a human, a creature of habit and familiar comforts. If she wasn’t in their apartment—curled up in Harrow’s bed instead of her own—then she would be in the laundry room. Squashed into the little space between the dryer and the wall that she, by all rights, should not be able to fit in. If she was not there, then she might be in the attic of their building. If not there, she might—might have braved the outside world, in which case Harrow would get a call at some point tonight or tomorrow morning from Pal or Cam, telling her they’d picked up a stray, would Harrow be willing to take care of it? They would, but Dulcie is allergic.
But: Gideon is in the first place Harrow expects to see her. She is still person-shaped. This makes things easier, but only in a very literal sense.
“Gideon,” Harrow says, unbuckling the collar she holds in her hands. “You are lucky that literally everyone else living here would rather let you bleed out on the floor than call an Authority.”
Gideon doesn’t answer. Unsurprising. She is blessedly non-verbal around this time, although the sounds she sometimes makes – Emperor Undying. Harrow does her best to excise the thought. It’s not easy, though, especially as she sets one hand to combing through Gideon’s short, rough-cut hair. It’s a distraction that always works: Gideon leans into the feeling of Harrow’s hand every time, and every time she doesn’t notice the other hand with the collar in it coming up until it’s too late. Gideon whines and snaps a little at Harrow’s fingers when she feels the collar pressed against her neck, but this is practised. Harrow’s timing is perfect, and her hand reaches Gideon’s nape when she needs it there to catch the buckles of the collar. Then she’s fastening and clipping the lead in. Gideon still has use of her thumbs, but her brain (questionable at the best of times) has fled the premises, and so she paws at the collar with her large, exquisitely-turned hands.
(It’s not that the sounds she makes like this, or as the wolf, are particularly human. That would be refreshingly uncanny. No, it’s that the sounds that she sometimes makes—while alone in her room when she thinks Harrow is sleeping, or on one of the few occasions that she has been out and brought someone home with her—are eerily reminiscent of the wolf. Harrow doesn’t quite understand how her vocal cords even do that.)
“Come on, Griddle,” Harrow says, standing up from her crouch with difficulty and creaking bones that have nothing to do with her physical age and everything to do with her years upon years of bad habits. She tugs a little on the leash, and Gideon is, for a moment, at a loss as to what to do. But—God may have forsaken Harrow today, but one of His Saints is watching, because Gideon rises up instead of remaining on all fours. The person living in flat 3 once caught them making their way up from the laundry room, Gideon crawling on all fours behind Harrow, leashed and sulky about it, and he has not stopped giving her weird looks since.
Harrow unwinds her pashmina from her neck and drapes it over Gideon who is, quelle surprise, entirely underdressed. (Never mind that Gideon has no scruples going out in just a sports bra and shorts that look painted on whatever the weather. Harrow’s sense of decency comes direct to you from the Victorians and she really doesn’t want to be seen leading a collared, half-naked woman around their building if she can avoid it. Luckily, Gideon can be counted on to snuggle deep into a soft cloth regardless of form.) She tries to arrange the folds of fabric so that they cover the leash and then tugs again. She doesn’t really need to: Gideon happily follows.
They wait out the transformation in separate rooms. Harrow likes to give Gideon her privacy, even though Gideon (in her own words) was born without shame and wasn’t going to pick up the habit now. Harrow waits until the sounds coming from Gideon’s room shift. She’s learnt early on that laying a ‘Griddle-trap’ makes things easier, and so she doesn’t have to immediately field three times her body weight on four legs rushing at her when she opens the door. Instead, Gideon is lying on the blanket, which gives Harrow just enough time to shut the door behind her before Gideon is up on her feet, tail lashing, getting ready to throw her entire self at Harrow. She is always like this, pre-walk. Bouncing off the walls, slathering everywhere. The walks are good for her, but they are also unmistakably to Harrow’s benefit, which is why she insists on them. If she doesn’t, Gideon will irritate her all night. Harrow is (reluctantly!) willing to share her bed with what is essentially a dog on steroids, and will tolerate waking up to said dog-on-steroids in the guise of a naked butch. She will not be jumped on all night and whined at until she consents to play. Sacrificing half her evening is a better option.
At any rate: Gideon is still hard to tackle down, but her leash isn’t. Harrow grabs hold of it as Gideon pounces on her, close to the collar, and yanks. Gideon is lamentably poorly-trained, both as a human and a wolf, but the tug of the collar is one of the few things she responds to, and so she backs off.
It’s nice, really. Harrow would never actually say it, but it’s nice. She has to smuggle Gideon out of the building—less because of the ‘no pets’ rule that the landlady doesn’t bother to enforce unless she really dislikes the tenant in question, more because she doesn’t want anyone to even think questions about where those two weird girls in flat 9 have been hiding their dog. But even that is only a small inconvenience. The guy from flat 3 doesn’t appear to have ever mentioned the infamous collar incident to anyone, after all. (Harrow is not entirely sure that he speaks English. Harrow is not entirely sure that he speaks. She knows Gideon chats with everyone in their building, but she also knows that Gideon doesn’t need to have a mutual language to enjoy a chat with a stranger and find out arcane details about their life. Harrow speaks nine languages and never talks to anyone if she can help it.)
Once they’re out, it’s freer. She still gets looks, of course, and sometimes someone will come up and ask what breed Gideon is (mongrel), or what Harrow feeds her to get her so big (nothing, if I can help it, but she’ll eat anything anyway). People with particularly terrible survival instincts will ask if they can pet her which—okay, it’s fine, the only thing Gideon loves more than cuddles, walks and getting her stupid russet hair all over Harrow’s belongings is being pet by pretty women. (She’s indifferent to most men, but some are the recipients of a menacing growl and the reminder that Harrow at no point indicated she was walking a dog.) But most of the time, it’s just the two of them, walking through lamplit streets to the parklands by their house. Sometimes Gideon will try to run, which is awful, but normally she’s content to stick more-or-less by Harrow’s side, scoping out the scentscape of the world around her. Sometimes the park would be lit by the full moon. Other times, like tonight, the world is cast in shadow and Harrow has to go full creature of the night.
It's peaceful.
After an hour or so passes, Harrow turns her steps back towards the run-down building they live in. She has plenty of money, really: she could live somewhere better, but. Well. The landlady doesn’t ask inconvenient questions and it’s home.
It’s been a long time since Harrow felt like she was home.