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Chapter Text

Gideon put down the head and she picked up her sword and she waited for Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Her knuckles were white on the pommel; she was unblinking as the Seventh cav beside her, pointedly not looking at the scattered minutia of the necromancer's life. If she turned things over in her mind she would see all the signs that she should have caught sooner - a rampaging skeleton monster, really - and so she pointedly did not. She sat and she waited.

It felt like hours before Harrowhark showed her detestable little face. There was no remorse in the twist of the mouth or the line of the black-wrapped shoulders that finally darkened her doorway. She didn't even seem surprised to find her cavalier bloodless and armed on her bed, though she did arch a brow at the presence of her two-hander. Her eyes flicked from Protesilaus back to Gideon, and Gideon could have sworn that her face momentarily smoothed out in relief.

"Griddle," she began. Even for Harrow, this was an astoundingly bad opening.

Gideon lunged for her. Almost reflexively, Harrowhark pulled out one of her shitty bone hunks and threw up a wall, only to give Gideon the pleasure of smashing through it with her longsword. She kicked in the kneecaps of half a dozen skeletons, and they crumpled like so much flimsy beneath her boot. If she didn't know better, she would think that the necromancer was trying to get herself stabbed. She had her necromancer on the run without even landing a blow; she was backing step by step into Gideon's quarters, a light bloodsweat beading on her face. She tripped over Gideon's musty-ass blanket pile with a startled yelp, which would have been worth a good laugh if she wasn't a quintuple murderer. Gideon stood over her, breathing hard without even the satisfaction of exertion. Harrow threw her twiggy-ass arms over her face like an idiot, and Gideon batted them away with the flat of her blade.

"No offense, Nonagesimus?" she gritted out. "I'm  hardly that good."

Harrow looked up at her then. A bruise was already forming on the side of her face, but she wasn't bleeding, not yet. Her eyes were wider than usual, but they were as dark and soft and pitiful as they had been in last night's vision. "What could I have against you?", she breathed

And there they were; the Nonagesimus lies, the manipulations, the traps to fall into. With a wordless cry of frustration, Gideon struck.

Once the red faded from her eyes, her sword was still hanging limply from her arms. Harrow Nonagesimus, all, like, 4'1" of her, was sprawled before her in increasingly blood-soaked sacramental garb. Gideon dropped to her knees. For some reason a sick panic was rising inside her; for some reason it abated a bit once she saw that the other girl was still breathing. She might have told herself that Harrowhark had to stand proper trial for her crimes, or she might have told herself that she didn't want more blood on her hands no matter how worthy the victim. She could have told herself any number of things. What she did was pick up her necromancer and run to the Sixth's quarters.

Camilla Hect didn't bat an eye; Palamedes blinked twice, but that was all. Camilla gestured to let her take her necromancer's legs, but Gideon deposited her on the Sixth's couch unassisted. The other cav looked like she wanted to roll her eyes at this, but satisfied herself with leaving the room for a moment, returning with bandages and Gideon's favorite piss-smelling ointment. She knelt beside where Gideon stood and began unrolling the former, pausing to ask, "Are there any bone shards that need to be removed?"

"None that she didn't put there herself."

Palamedes, who had been hovering behind them like a particularly nosy nurse's assistant, at this moved to stand opposite them. "Then this wasn't the work of what killed the Fourth."

Gideon swallowed. "No." Then, for posterity, "She killed Protesilaus."

Palamedes looked over the necromancer critically. "Defense wounds?"

Cam whistled a short note through her teeth. "Didn't think the Seventh had it in him."

Blood roared in Gideon's ears. "No, I- " Cav and necro turned as one to look at her, forcing her to look away from the point on the wall she had been staring at, scorched by their gaze. She attempted to start over: "I- found his head in our rooms, and I- she- "

"Ah," Cam said, rocking back on her haunches. "Should I fetch the evidence, then, Warden?"

He nodded his consent, already moving to take her place. Gideon attempted to find her favored section of wallpaper again, and instead found her eyes drawn to the room's shuttered windows. So like the Ninth, she mused again; even if she pulled through she couldn't imagine Harrow as creature of the sunlight. Not that she'll have the chance, she reminded herself, since she'll probably be rotting in the Ninth prison installation until she dies for killing five of the most important people in the entire fucking empire. Maybe there was justice in the world.

To his credit, Palamedes didn't attempt to ask questions or make small talk, about the traitorous little freak she had brought him or otherwise. He just dabbed at her wounds with a moist towel until Cam brought back the goods.

The second he got his hands in the box his face took a turn from the carefully neutral to the pensive, then fully to the concerned. "Ninth, when did you get here?"

Now she was getting irate. "A few minutes after you did. Is it important?"

"You're certain?" he said, instead of answering the damn question.

"Yeah, Sex Pal, I'm pretty certain I came in the same shuttle as her raggedy ass. And I repeat, why does it matter?"

Palamedes didn't flinch. He pushed his glasses up into his hair and said, "Because, Nav, this man's been dead for weeks"

...

Gideon had probably burned her tongue in half a dozen places on the Sixth's tea, but she couldn't feel it, so she kept drinking the cups they pressed into her hands. She dimly wondered if they'd drugged her; she couldn't blame them if they had, seeing as she was apparently the kind of goon that would attack her own necromancer on the flimsiest possible evidence. Not that Harrow was going to get it phrased to her like that; as far as she was concerned, Harrow had made her bed with all her secrets and her lies and her goddamn ambiance, and she could lie in it. Gideon had a whole fuck-you salvo ready to bust out the second that Harrow was back on her feet. Still, Gideon found herself sitting beside her, long after Camilla and Palamedes had left for dinner, and long after they returned. She felt like the biggest imbecile in the world, waiting at Harrow's bedside like a penitent, like a worried partner. But she found that apparently she couldn't leave, or fall asleep, or eat, until her necromancer woke up. At least she wasn't the one who had to look her over for injuries this time.

The other girl came to quite suddenly, it seemed to Gideon. At first she seemed to be looking at someone over Gideon's shoulder, and almost smiled. Then her gaze resettled on Gideon, and she was met with an only slightly more familiar expression of cautious confusion. "Nav?" She scanned their surroundings, something of her analytical eye coming back to her.

"We're in the Sixth's", Gideon said, more to break the silence than anything.

"I can see that," Harrow snapped. The salvo was rising to the tip of Gideon's tongue, bedside manner be damned, when she sighed tiredly and turned to more fully face her. "Sextus...told you?" Gideon nodded mutely, and Harrow seemed to sink further into the cushions in relief. Then she shot up onto her elbows, ignoring Gideon's warning outstretched hand. "What the devil was he doing in our rooms?"

Gideon tilted her head, foxed by this. "He hasn't been to our rooms," she said dimly. "Cam went, to get the head..."

Harrow's eyes narrowed. "Then why am I here?" She looked suspiciously at the pillow Palamedes had put under her head, as if it had been behind this afternoon's assassination attempt.

"I ... brought you here?"

Harrow looked at her as if she had said the Emperor brought you here, and gave you a sticker for good behavior while he was at it. "Why," she repeated.

Somehow, Gideon had not expected to have this question put to her. Other, more obnoxious ones, sure, but not the one that she had been specifically trying to avoid asking herself.

"Griddle. You had me alone and you had the element of surprise. You had ample reason to suspect that I was behind one, if not many, of the slayings that have taken place here. You had the opportunity, and you certainly had the provocation - Emperor knows you've had the provocation for years." Harrow was looking at her like she was an idiot, which she was, so fair. She said slowly, deliberately, "So why am I still here?"

Gideon sighed, running a hand through her hair. She needed a haircut, a bath, and a nap, and she needed this conversation to be over three days ago. "Probably the same reason I'm still here," she said tiredly. When Harrow opened her mouth to protest, she said, "You were pulling your punches too, sweet thing."

Harrow's throat worked once, twice. "It is not at all the same." Her voice was pathetically raw, her face paint mostly sweated off. "I've used you as my whipping girl. I brought you here, to both our deaths, because I was selfish. You should walk put of here without me and not look back, no matter what method you use to cast me off." She looked like she was melting, like she wanted to melt and get washed down one of her precious Drearburh drains. "You should have killed me."

Gideon just sighed. "Don't you think I know that better than anyone?" Harrow lapsed into silence, worrying at her lip with her teeth. Once Gideon decided that she probably wasn't going to get impaled for it, she tentatively put a hand in her hair. Harrow shuddered at the touch, but didn't lean away from it, so Gideon curled it more closely against her skull. "It's like that stupid oath said, I guess. One flesh, one end."

This time Harrow did lean away. "You shouldn't say that to me," she said. Horrifyingly, tears were beginning to form at the corners of her eyes. "Please, Gideon, you don't know all that I've done, all that I've ... cost."

Gideon swiped thoughtlessly at a tear with her thumb. "I have a pretty good idea." Harrow looked ready to get up and fight her at that, so Gideon hummed a low, placating note and ran her thumb along the length of Harrow's face. "Cam and Pal are trying to sleep over there, Bone Empress. You can take me to a secluded spot and yell at me about your dark past later. But for right now, I need to hear you say it back."

Harrow looked at her like she was going to dissolve, or turn out to be a construct, or yell "KER-PRANK" and bounce. When she did none of the above for about thirty seconds, she said, "Are you certain?"

"Unfortunately."

Harrow shakily put her hand over Gideon's, who was surprised anew at her necromancer's warmth. With more gravitas than should have been possible under the circumstances, she said, "One flesh, one end."

Chapter Text

Harrow spent the next few days in a thoroughly uncharacteristic quiet anticipation. She took the food Gideon gave her (on a plate, because Gideon was a girl pure of heart and strong of mind) with almost no complaints. She let Camilla change her bandages, and she convinced Palamedes to wait for her before presenting the evidence of Dulcinea's deceit without it escalating to a shouting match. Gideon put a hand very forbiddingly on her shoulder when she tried to insist on going with him immediately, which probably didn't do anything to sway her necromancer but made her feel better.

She kept catching Harrow looking at her furtively while she was doing nothing at all - getting through her crunches, or sharpening her two-hander, or drooling over Cam's weapon collection. Whenever she did the other girl looked away airily, as if Gideon was just as interesting to her as a lamp a few feet behind her. Which was fucking weird, but it wasn't as if Gideon was ready for extended eye contact, so fine. She presumed that her necro was just biding her time until they were out of the Sixth's hair and she could ask her uncomfortable questions to her black little heart's delight, and tried to enjoy the peace while it lasted.

All things considered, it didn't last long. One night she awoke to find Harrow's pointy-ass face inches from hers, and nearly had an aneurysm then and there. "The fuck?" she stage-whispered.

Harrow retreated quickly, until she was kneeling roughly a foot away from Gideon. "You weren't waking up," she said simply. "We need to talk, Nav. But not here."

Gideon rubbed her eyes blearily. "And it can't wait until morning? Can you even walk wherever it is yet?"

Harrow stood impatiently. "Yes. I already took a few practice laps."

Gideon tried and failed to suppress a smile at the image of her necromancer taking practice laps around the Sixth's flimsy-stuffed fire hazard of an apartment. "In that case, you should have woken me up sooner."

"Nav!" Harrow was already at the door.

"Alright, alright, I get it," she relented, getting to her feet. In her lowest register, "It's go time."

For a moment she thought that Harrow was hesitating, but she was just holding the door open for her. "Quite," she said.

Harrow led her down one flight of stairs, then another. Gideon offered her arm for support, and was validated when Harrow tried to use the railing and watched a good chunk of it crumble under her negligible weight. At first she thought that Harrow was leading her to the room Jeanne had died in, which she probably would have balked at. Instead they took a turn for the underground pool.

The place was spooky as hell in the dark, especially considering that Gideon had no experience with water, which Harrow elected to add to by growing uncannily large skeletons to guard the exits. Despite herself, Gideon was glad she had the energy to. Harrow wasn't even breaking a sweat, just staring at her in that single-minded way of hers. All in all, she wasn't doing much to undercut the 'you're-going-to-die-here' vibe, even if that probably wasn't what she had in mind.

Gideon, for something to do, shoved her hands in her robe pockets. The ancient paper that bore her name crinkled against her fist - yet another thing they were going to have to go over at some point. "So?"

Harrow, without looking away, let her outermost robes drop to the pool floor. Gideon's heart rate spiked alarmingly high. The other girl, thankfully oblivious, said heavily: "The Ninth House has a secret, Nav. Only my family knows of it. My mother had a rule that we could never discuss it unless immersed in salt water, and if I am to break my family's most sacred trust I find myself bound to at least follow that stricture."

Gideon nodded, the gravity of the situation beginning to sink in. "So you want me to get in the pool."

Harrow rolled her eyes. "Yes, Griddle, I want you to get in the pool."

Gideon obligingly got in the pool, shrugging off her robes but leaving her trousers and shirtsleeves. Harrow did the same, jacknifing in with nary a splash but coming up wincing and sputtering. Gideon had the advantage of her feet touching the bottom, and floundered to what she thought was a sensible distance from Harrow. She waited for the other girl to start, but she seemed more out of it than usual, ransacking her brain for the right words to use.

"Alright," Gideon said. "Do you know who the killer is, or something?"

"No," Harrow said decisively. "A motive would be more useful than a suspect, Griddle, but I haven't got that locked down either. I've eliminated the Sixth-"

"Because Cam and Pal are nice?"

"- because they don't have one, and because if they were that good they would have killed us already."

"Okay, numbskull. Then what's all this woo-woo, big dark secret drapery about? After all, I'm the one that killed your parents." Gideon found that her voice dropped out under her on the last syllable - she had never said it out loud before.

Harrow looked at her with genuine surprise. "What? My parents killed my parents. I should know."

"Huh? But I-"

"My parents killed themselves because they were frightened and ashamed and they thought we were already dead. They expected me to join them. I broke into the Tomb. They thought that I'd triggered the apocalypse. It was my transgression, Griddle, not yours."

Gideon knew something of the Ninth's half-fearful worship of the thing in the Tomb, and knew better the combination of hubris and pure boredom that had probably led her to open it. She was still stuck on that second admission. "They expected you to what?"

Harrow's face was very still, except for the reflection of the water playing across it. "They were very kind to me. They even tied the nooses - one for each of them, one for me, two for Mortus. I'd already decided to die long ago, Gideon. I thought that I could. But in the end I knew that my life had incurred too great of a debt for me to die."

Gideon moved closer to her in the water. "Harrow-"

Harrow just kept going, as if she either hadn't noticed or couldn't bear to acknowledge it. "I'm not saying that I didn't blame you. I did, for years. It was so goddamn easy to have someone else to blame." Her tone was bitter now in a way Gideon had heard only once before - a thousand years ago, in the Imaging and Response room - contemptuous of herself. "I hurt you because it was a relief, and bringing you to this killing field as my serf was the closest thing to even ground I ever thought to bring you!"

Gideon, as gently as she could manage, put her hands on Harrow's shoulders to ground her. "And so you did." And not that that wasn't important ground to cover, but - "Back up for me, Reverend Daughter. What do you mean, you had incurred too great a debt? You were ten."

Harrow stared through her. "My parents were desperate for a necromantic heir before my birth, Griddle. My mother had already miscarried multiple times. Did you know, you can control whether the child you bear is necromantic if you're willing to take advantage of certain resources."

"And by taking advantage of certain resources, you mean..." the words of the Eighth came back to her unbidden. "Fuck. The crêche flu."

She nodded affirmation. "They told me how, in detail. Toxic nerve gas released through the nursery vents - my great-aunts went blind just from releasing it. To manipulate her womb they used necromantic theorems I could reproduce for you now, if I had the flimsy. The infants alone generated enough thanergy to power an entire planet. Babies always do, for some reason."

Gideon let go of her shoulders for a well-earned underwater freakout. When she resurfaced Harrow said, "Say something."

"Gross. Ick. The worst. What do I say to that? What the fuck could I say to all that?"

"It let me be born, and I was...me. I am two hundred sons and daughters of my House, Griddle, my whole generation. I came into this world a necromancer at the cost of our future, because there is no future without me."

And Gideon had to ask, even if it made her the biggest dick in the world, even if she already knew the answer. "Do you think you were worth it?"

Harrow didn't flinch. "If I became a Lyctor, and renewed my House, and made it great again - greater than it ever was, justified in the eyes of God the Emperor - if I made my life a monument to those who died to ensure that I would live and live powerfully..." she closed her eyes, bit herself off with a scornful "of course I wouldn't be worth it. I'm an abomination. The whole universe ought to scream whenever my feet touch the ground. My parents committed a necromantic sin that we ought to have been torpedoed into the center of Dominicus for. I am a war crime."

So there it was. And there was Harrow, panting, ready for round two. She was too small and too still in the water - far too small for the weight that had been put on her shoulders. In the end she could only wait for a retribution that was never going to come for her, because-

"Harrow," Gideon said, "I hope you know that I'm not going to attack you for something that you didn't even do. Again," she amended quickly, before Harrow could give the obvious rebuttal.

Harrow closed her eyes and sucked in a breath; for a moment Gideon thought she was giving healthy coping mechanisms a try, but naturally she was just preparing for the next round. She snapped her eyes back open, and the whites were blazing like plasma. "You don't understand! My parents continued our tombkeeper line through sin and inequity, and I would do it again if I had to. I exist because my parents killed everyone and relegated you to a life of abject misery! You witnessed! They would have killed you without a second's goddamn thought, and they were frightened of you for the rest of their lives when you survived that gas! I have spent my life destroying you, trying to make you regret that you weren't dead because - because I regretted that I wasn't! Strike me down! I've lived my whole wretched mercy, yours alone, and God knows I deserve to die at your hand."

Gideon looked down at her necromancer, taking this in. In her mind's eye she saw the Reverend Parent's revulsion shift into horror, the congregation's scornful avoidance to a blind falling-in-step with their leaders. The Daughter was still there in the center of the parade of bad nuns, her hands as empty and grasping as they ever were; Harrow, her nemesis, the only girl raised alongside her. Her only friend.

Gideon took Harrow Nonagesimus in her arms and plunged them both into the pool.

Harrow relaxed against her, apparently ready for everything to go dark. When she realized that she was being hugged, she attempted to thrash away, but Gideon didn't let go. She brought them up at the same time, spitting out mouthfuls of saltwater. She kissed Harrow on the brow, and she made a noise that embarrassed them both. "So what I'm hearing is," she said, "neither of us could die."

She brought them to a more shallow part of the pool, Harrow letting herself be pulled by the hand. She was silent for what felt like a long time, and Gideon spent it examining her paintless face - the jut of her chin and cheekbones, the arches of her brows, the sad slant of her mouth, the empty pits of her eyes. She almost didn't hear her when she spoke: "Gideon, there's one more thing. I need you to promise me something."

Gideon tidied a strand of shadow-colored hair behind her ear, let her hand linger there as Harrow shivered. "I'm pretty sure that I've already made you an entirely unwise number of promises, but you called me Gideon, so shoot."

Harrow said, "In the event of my death - Gideon, if something ever does get the better of me - I need you to outlast me. I need you to go back to the Ninth House and protect the Locked Tomb. If I die, I need your duty not to die with me."

"That's such a dick move." She huffed in genuine reproach, but it was too late to walk this thing back. "Fine."

"I kno- fine?" Harrow glared up at her. "The hell do you mean, fine?"

"I mean, in the highly unlikely scenario where you croak before I do, I'll go back to your weird old bone pile and check in on it." Harrow looked like she wanted to pick yet another bone - heh - so she held up a placating hand and clarified, "I'll do this because you asked so nicely, and because I want to see the look Crux's face when I mondo-demote him."

Harrow shook her head. Her eyes really were lightless, empty now of any anger or reproof. "You are incorrigible, Gideon Nav," she said, "and yet I find myself undone without you."

Something warm and unfamiliar - not foreign, but long ignored - curled in Gideon's chest. "Just so we're clear, I couldn't give less of a shit about the Locked Tomb."

Harrow scoffed. "That's one thing you've made abundantly clear." Gideon pulled herself closer in, moved her free hand so that she was cupping Harrow's face. The other girl flushed nearly black as her chin was tilted up, slowly, gently. "Nav?"

Gideon was intent. "But I do care about you."

Harrow's mouth formed the shape of an oh before she released it. "Yeah," Gideon said, "oh."

She kissed Harrow before she could think better of it, and then she didn't have to, because Harrow's arms were around her neck and she was thinking of nothing at all.