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"One flesh—one end," Harrow repeated fumblingly.
Gideon pressed her lips to her Harrow’s chilly forehead, blinking rapidly. She pulled back and considered before returning her mouth to the bridge of her now-paintless nose. Harrowhark let out a hard, sudden breath as though Gideon had aimed a square kick in her solar plexus. And then, before she could question the impulse, Gideon kissed her little black bundle of a necromancer right on the lips.
Harrow stilled for a moment before tilting her head down to press against Gideon’s chest. So, okay, not too bad.
Until Harrow started sobbing, which was definitely bad.
“Harrow?!” Gideon tried to pull away, but suddenly Harrow’s bony hands were fisted in the back of her shirt with a strength she would not have suspected they possessed, having no regular exercise routine outside the dramatic finger-wiggling that tended to accompany tidal waves of humeri and tibiae.
“I’m sorry,” Gideon tried. "I don't know what I—that was stupid, I'm sorry."
Harrowhark sobbed against her chest, shook her head, and gripped even tighter.
“I could—go?” Experimentally, she tried pulling Harrow’s arms away. Another shake of the head.
“I’m getting some mixed signals here, sweetcheeks.” Gideon reached down to cup the back of Harrow’s head, and she went as limp in her arms as a sack of bones. Tentatively, Gideon pressed her lips to the top of her necromancer’s head and leaned back against the edge of the pool. Harrow shuddered again. “I can stop doing that, you know. If you want. Just say the word.”
Harrow said nothing.
“You know, I may regret saying this, but please say whatever words you like right now. Unlike you, I cannot fucking read people’s minds and I’d like to know what’s going on in there, thank you very much.”
She thought she felt Harrow sob against her again, but was relieved to realize it was a more Harrow-typical indignant huff. “I told you, I can’t read your mind, you nincompoop—(“Aaaand she’s back again.”)—and even if I could, I’d hardly find anything in there other than big sword, smash things, and—well, I know you have unspeakable taste in magazines, so I won't speak of it.” Throughout this speech, Harrow had burrowed further into Gideon’s chest, pushing aside the collar of her shirt with her nose. Gideon started when she felt hot lips press at her sternum.
So she coughed, for some reason. “Excuse you, I think about a lot of things that aren’t swords, smashing, and—well, smashing,” she grinned.
Harrow bit her.
Fair enough.
Her face was warm against Gideon's chest, little breaths coming fast against her skin.
Very tentatively, as though she might get shredded with bone shards at the wrong move, Gideon pulled Harrow's head away. She looked down into eyes that flickered open and grew wide and inky black. Gideon brushed their lips together again.
She wasn’t sure what she expected, after last time, but certainly not an absolute tsunami. Harrowhark kissed Gideon back like she was possessed, which, given the circumstances, might have actually been a reasonable explanation. Her mouth burned against Gideon’s, intense and questing, desperate to get closer, deeper. She shifted in her arms and pulled at the collar of Gideon’s shirt, wrapping a hand around the back of her neck.
Well. When Gideon had imagined her first kiss—which, shameful as it was to admit, she'd done with some regularity back on the Ninth—it always involved a lot of heroic feats, a soft-eyed and effusive necromancer chick in a pretty tight Cohort jacket, and the subsequent rapid removal of clothing. Then marriage, or something.
So her current situation, which had begun with a sitting-room murder investigation, evolved into a a soul-spilling water aerobics session, and culminated in a tonsil inspection from a heretical bone witch with major attachment issues — well, it was a little far outside the realm of things she had prepared for, is all.
Gideon held her gently, working to calm Harrow’s frenetic energy into something softer, more languorous, running her hands gently up and down her slender back. It was weird, but good.
But Harrow was still trying to go supernova in her arms, which was also weird, but also good. Did she not need to breathe? Gideon needed to breathe.
“Shall we”—Gideon struggled to extricate herself from Harrow’s clawing grasp—“shall we move this to a better venue?”
“No,” Harrow gasped, ducking down to suck at Gideon’s collarbone. “Pool only, Griddle.”
“Why?”
“Because the pool is for hiding—for things you can’t say or do elsewhere.”
“Oh, well. Ouch.”
Harrow’s sharp, tearstained face was in motion, her eyes flickering over Gideon’s face, teeth worrying at already-red lips. “Nav, I don’t—I’ve never, obviously, done anything like this before, and—”
“I should hope not,” Gideon interrupted. “Unless good ol’ Ortus—”
“Nav! Be serious.” Harrow hit her arm lightly, though she had probably intended to hit it hard, and it was just her pathetic necromancer physique getting in the way. Gideon lifted her up under the thighs so she was wrapped around Gideon’s waist, her spidery black legs still dangling in the pool.
“That enough?” Gideon asked, splashing her necromancer with a bit of the saltwater.
To which she received a trademark Nonagesimus eyeroll, which meant everything was back to normal again, and nobody had gone permanently insane in the close, alien humidity of the training room.
Gideon leaned back in, but Harrow stopped her, her hand wrapped around Gideon’s jaw.
“I didn’t mean—” she sighed, as though frustrated at the words not coming fast enough to mind. “When I said that, what I meant is that I—I can't allow myself to—ugh, Griddle, quit it with the eyebrows!”
Gideon becalmed her raised eyebrows and schooled her expression into one of Ninth-house-penitent seriousness.
“Better. Gideon, I said it before, but I don’t deserve this—this—”
“Face fencing?” Gideon supplied helpfully. “Jowl jostling? Saliva swapping? Maw—”
Harrow covered her mouth with a hand, muffling the last, really quite funny word. “Affection. Care. I’ve been awful to you, as I’ve stated. So it doesn’t make sense that you’d want to do... well, any of this.”
Gideon wrapped her up in a tight hug. “Well, you silly ascetic ass, you’re not the only one who gets to be mysterious all the time.”
And that was that.