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DAY 1
The first planet that Harrow set foot on after the implosion of Dominicus did not have a name. There was a very basic base set up there, the inhabitants ranging from ex-Edenites to New Rho refugees and some completely alien, barely sentient intelligence. This base was set up by the inhabitants long before Dominicus’s implosion. We Suffer told Pash and then Pash told Paul and then Paul told Harrow about it. They took the next flight over.
How it had happened didn’t really matter, but Harrow had lost her shoes during the implosion, so she was barefoot when she stepped out of the shuttle. The first thing Harrow felt when she touched down on the unnamed planet, twelve light years away from the Ninth House, was wet grass between her toes. The first thing she did was fall to her knees and touch her forehead to the damp mud there. The second thing she felt was the dew of the grass soaking her shirt sleeves. The third thing she felt was grit and mud pressing into her forehead. The fourth thing she felt were little pebbles digging into her knees as she knelt. The fifth thing she felt was the ground shaking softly as a bag plunked next to her. The sixth thing she felt was the shuttle’s ramp rumbling behind her. The seventh thing she felt was the shuttle lifting off and leaving her behind. The eighth thing she felt was the drip, drip, drip of tears marking her dust-stained face. The ninth thing she felt was Gideon Nav’s hand finding a place on the small of her back.
There was a central outpost that brought the inhabitants of No Name supplies: seeds, rations, batteries. If they needed something in particular, Harrow could write a note and leave it at the outpost. Three days later, the item she requested would appear just like that. She had no idea who she could possibly be writing to, or who was bringing them the supplies in the first place.
They hadn’t met any inhabitants yet. The lot of them, though there were not many, seemed to live far enough away from the outpost that Harrow couldn’t see their property even if she squinted. That was just fine.
Their first night, Harrow and Gideon slept in the outpost where the shuttle dropped them off. There was running water, so they drank. Gideon pulled out a water bottle and filled that up, too. She was prepared. Harrow was not. She didn’t even have shoes. That night, she found a stick and snapped it to the length of her foot. She then found a piece of flimsy and a pen and wrote, One pair of shoes the length of this stick. She thought about it for a moment, thought about this mysterious benefactor who would somehow bring them supplies, and then added, Please.
Gideon found a blanket and laid it out on the floor, gathering some shirts from her bag and bunching them up to make a makeshift pillow. Gideon then plopped her body next to this makeshift bed, on the bare, wooden floor of the outpost. The fight was already draining from Harrow, so she did not expend her energy to argue with Gideon about this sleeping arrangement. She figured she would have the energy in the morning. She laid down on the makeshift bed and makeshift pillow, turning her head away from the golden gaze of Gideon Nav. The shirts that made up her pillow smelled like her ex-cavalier. They were six inches apart like this. They did not touch. Harrow slept eleven hours.
DAY 2
The next morning, Harrow woke to Gideon handing her an opened can of corn. “This is all I’ve found in the outpost,” she explained. Harrow was not hungry for canned corn, but under the watchful eye of Gideon, she tilted the can to her face and took two big swallows. Gideon seemed only somewhat satisfied with her attempt, but Harrow's stomach constricted and she could not handle any more. “There’s a shack two miles from here just like Paul said.”
Harrow did not dawdle on the implications of that too long. That meant that Gideon had woken up without waking Harrow, walked to the coordinates that We Suffer gave to Pash gave to Paul gave to them, and then walked back.
The first thing Harrow set about doing was finding a way to cover her unfortunate soles. She really only needed a way to prevent twigs and rocks knicking and bruising her heels and toes while they walked the two miles it took to get to the shack. The predicament she was in was utterly embarrassing, but the only person to be embarrassed about it to was Gideon, and that was worse than anyone else, so Harrow resolutely just decided not to be embarrassed about it at all.
Gideon offered her shoes, which made Harrow look like a clown, so she declined. Harrow ended up cutting some fabric out of the blanket she slept on and tying it around her calves. At one point, Gideon had also offered to carry her, but that really was embarrassing, so that was another no.
The walk to the shack was two miles too long for Harrow, a malnourished, ex-necromancer who had no shoes. The rocks and twigs did not bruise her tender flesh, but the glare of the star that was the center of No Name’s solar system burned the back of Harrow’s neck, even when Gideon had given her her hat. She was tired. And weak. She did not have necromancy to aid her, so she was in particularly poor spirits.
Gideon did not chide her. She did not make fun of her. It would have been in poor taste likely, though Gideon did love her jokes made in poor taste. Maybe Harrow looked so pathetic and wet and sad that making a joke was cruel. Harrow was not a stranger to cruelty.
In the end, Gideon put Harrow on her back and carried her the last half-mile. This was an easy task for her ex-cavalier. All she had in her hands was her duffle bag and Harrow the burden. Harrow looped her arms around Gideon’s neck, resting her cheek on a strong shoulder. Gideon’s hands were strong and sure as they clasped her thighs. The burden closed her eyes and let Gideon carry her.
The shack was a shack in all senses of the word. One story. Slats falling off the sides. The door was cracked and gray and creaking with a sign that read —’S HOME. The original name could not be read by Harrow in the least, scratched off and worn through by age and weather. There was nothing on the property but the shack and a well.
Gideon tipped the water bottle on Harrow’s lips and Harrow took a grateful sip even though she had not walked the last fourth.
Gideon pushed open the front door and Harrow peaked her head around Gideon’s body. The living room had furniture, though that furniture was eaten through by some animal. Stuffing, from what Harrow figured was once a couch, decorated the floor in filthy heaps. A cracked picture hung precariously on the wall, though Harrow could not make out the picture through the film of dust and grime. A rocking chair had been shoved into the corner and a coffee table, or the remnants of one, was split down the middle.
To the left of the living room was a small kitchen, much in the same state. Each appliance was covered in grime and dirt, all without electricity. Harrow wondered how they would get electricity out here, if they could. Did they need a working fridge? A working freezer? What about lights? Harrow did not know or understand the seasons of No Name, which was incredibly foolish of her in hindsight.
Gideon told her through a haze that they did not have running water yet, but she would figure it out, and then they could clean it up, and hey are you okay you look tired, let’s see if there’s a place for us to lie down.
There was a door at the top of the living room that led into a hallway. At the far left corner of the hall was a door that led to the outside, probably for easy access to a garden of some sort. At the top of the hallway to the left was a room without a door and a singular, dingy and bare mattress shoved in the corner. Harrow felt particularly gross, longed for the baths back in Canaan house which seemed so long ago, but she found herself walking with her clothed feet over the squeaking wooden floor to that left room. She collapsed face-first in the mattress and immediately fell asleep.
She awoke to the sound of furniture shuffling across the sodden, wooden floors of the shack. Her shack. Their shack. Harrow peeled her eyes open and groaned, twisting her body so she was looking out at the room instead of the peeling wooden slats of the wall. The eeeeeee of furniture sliding across the floor did not stop. There was a large window against the far wall, barely covered by some moth-eaten, shitty blinds. It was already starting to get dark. How long had she slept for? She felt very bad, all of a sudden, but she usually felt very bad, so the feeling wasn’t disconcerting. Had Gideon been cleaning up the place while Harrow wasted away the day sleeping?
Harrow rubbed her eyes and twisted her body so her clothed feet hit the floor. She sat at the edge of the mattress and peeled the cloth off. The last shower she had taken had been over three days before and she knew that she would need one again soon. She knew there was a bathroom, but she was afraid of looking at it after seeing the state of the rest of the shack. Maybe she and Gideon could throw buckets of water at each other and call it a day.
Harrow stretched her arms above her head and stumbled her way up, taking a long look around the sad little place she would call her room. It smelled musty and moldy. It already smelled better than Drearburh, which reeked of osteoporosis and snow leeks. The sun of No Name was beautiful, for what it was worth. Golden, orange light bathed her dirty room and almost made it look peaceful.
Harrow stepped out of her room into the hallway, both of which had no door, and admired the way Gideon’s biceps flexed as she dragged the couch from the wall into a corner of broken furniture. Gideon set down the couch with a thump and a huff, swiped her hands across each other, and then stood up. Her eyes caught Harrow’s and she offered a lopsided smile. “Hey. Did I wake you?”
“No,” Harrow lied. “How long was I asleep?”
“Seven hours or so. You were tired,” she said, resting a hand on her hip. The bags under Gideon’s eyes did not go unnoticed by Harrow. Gideon blinked tiredly. Harrow was in the motion of saying, You should get some rest, when her ex-cavalier pulled a piece of flimsy out from her pant pocket. “I’ve been taking stock of what we have and what we’ll probably need from the outpost. Right now we just need to focus on the necessities.” She walked over, Harrow noticed she was barefoot now, her heavy, sure steps thudding against the creaking floor. She handed the piece of flimsy over to Harrow in the doorway and Harrow took it delicately.
THINGS WE HAVE:
1. About a month’s worth of food supplies
- Canned food
- Protein paste (blegh)
- (Maybe we could trade for some other stuff from the other inhabitants? I want us to be self-sufficient, but right now that’s not possible)
2. Water
- Currently not hooked up to the shack in any meaningful way
- At least we have water
3. REALLY cruddy mattresses
THINGS WE NEED RIGHT NOW:
1. Soap, cleaning supplies
2. Better mattresses/places to sleep
3. Shoes for the nun (that’s you, Harrow)
4. Seeds for planting + self-sufficiency
- Inhabitants of No Name might have some
5. I need supplies so I can build us stuff and fix up the place
THINGS WE NEED EVENTUALLY:
1. Bed frames + new couch I think
2. New doors
3. New slats
4. New roof
5. Entirely new bathroom (do not go in there I’m scared)
6. More to come as I think of it
“Some of this wood is still good,” Gideon said, pointing to the pile of broken furniture in the corner. The couch, the kitchen table, the coffee table, and the bed frames were thrown in here. “Not all of it, though. I bet I could figure out how to make us some cruddy bed frames from the leftover wood if we get me some tools.”
Gideon was trading her sword for a power drill. There was a metaphor in there somewhere.
“Okay.” She handed the flimsy back to Gideon, who unceremoniously shoved it into her bandeau. Harrow did not look. “You look horrible,” she said, because she did not know how to approach a situation delicately. “You should rest.”
Gideon’s eyes flitted to the creepy mattress in the creepy room and took a slight step back. “I have some work I want to do before I go to bed.”
Gideon always ran herself into the ground, or into a fence spike, whichever came first. “Are you afraid?” Harrow asked. She dug her fingernail into the soft wood of the door frame, a splinter digging into her flesh and grounding her.
“Of—of what?” asked Gideon, her voice wobbling slightly.
Harrow did not know. Was she afraid of the dark? Of being alone? Or was she afraid of the unknown? Was she afraid that if she went to sleep, Harrow would not be there? Was she afraid of dying again?
“If you,” she said slowly, “go to bed, I’ll go to bed with you.”
Gideon swallowed. Harrow’s eyes fell to her throat as it bobbed. “At least take me to dinner first.”
Harrow wasn’t tired, had just slept another seven hours on top of eleven before that, but she was itching to fall back onto that mattress and deal with their issues in the morning. She didn’t imagine them sleeping in the same twin-sized bed, imagined that Gideon would drag the other mattress into her room with a foot between the two, but she still thought of strong arms around her shoulders and blushed.
“You’re very sleepy today,” Gideon continued.
“It’s fine,” Harrow said. She curled up a fist and dug her fingernails into her palm. Actually doing things with your body instead of having skeletons aid you was awfully tiring. “I’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Gideon murmured, obviously not really taking her for her word. She leaned back on her feet. “I’ll go to sleep if you get something to eat. We have canned corn and canned green beans. Take your pick.”
Harrow rubbed her eyes and moved past Gideon to pad her way to the kitchen. Gideon hadn’t really touched the kitchen besides moving the dining table to the living room, and then putting all of the edible food from the cupboards on the counter. She was right: there was canned food and protein paste in excess. Gross. Harrow picked a particularly dingy looking can of canned green beans, to switch it up from her breakfast of canned corn, and struggled with opening the latch. Gideon offered her assistance after watching her struggle for a few moments, grumbling under her breath about her abysmal lack of muscles. She popped it open with ease.
Harrow managed to eat half of the green beans with her hands before she handed off the rest to Gideon. “We need utensils, too,” Gideon said around a mouthful of green beans.
Harrow wiped off her hands on her pants and said, “Let’s go to the outpost tomorrow and write a list of things we need.”
Once Gideon slurped out the rest of the can, Harrow led her to the bedroom she had picked out, falling to the mattress in a tired heap. Gideon did not go to the other bedroom for the other mattress. She simply slid in right next to Harrow, not even pretending to deign the floor this time, knees to knees, chest to back, arms circling her waist. Though Harrow did not think she could sleep again, she found herself nodding off with puffs of warm breath against her neck.
DAY 3
Harrow slept a few more hours before her body protested that sleeping this much was not possible. She awoke to a dark room and heavy arms around her waist, warm breath against her ear. She decided to be useful, or as useful as she could be when she was malnourished with no muscles, and gently removed the hands around her waist. Gideon did not stir.
The planet of No Name had two moons, so while she had no artificial light or the light of the sun to aid her as she meandered around, the moons were bright enough where she could walk without stubbing her toe into anything. Her first order of business was finding a proper light source. There must have been a lamp, or a candle, or something…
The layout of the shack was pretty functional, considering it was derelict and falling apart. The front door led to a living room and to the left of the living room was a door that led into the kitchen. Behind the living room was another door that led into a hall. The far left of the hall held another door to the outside. The far right of the hall held a storage closet, Harrow figured, and there were three more doors at the top of the hall. The left bedroom Harrow and Gideon had inhabited, then the bathroom, then the right bedroom that Gideon should have gone in but did not. There was no basement or upper floor, considering it was a shack. Harrow worried about what the seasons of No Name would bring because it did not have functional air conditioning or heating.
But this shack was her new home. She only needed a few things in her life to consider it a home: a bed, food, water, and Gideon. She had all four of those things, even if the first two were stupendously shitty.
Harrow shuffled to the storage closet and struggled while she tried to open the door. After huffing and puffing, she managed to eke it open and take a look at the contents. Of note, there were some moth-eaten blankets she could probably repurpose into rags, a broken broom that would likely give her splinters, what must have once been a mop, a couple of buckets, some half-used candles, and a few broken matches. She pulled each item of the storage closet out one by one into the living room, making different piles for different uses. She threw the mop into the throw away pile, along with some other indiscernible items or items she could not possibly reuse. She found a little tray to put the candle on, which crumbled and could not be lit in any meaningful way. She threw the candles in a pile she named for later use. Maybe they could reuse the wax.
She made her way out to the well with her buckets, pulling on the rope to bring up a bucket of water. This took a long time and a lot of work for someone who did not have the necessary strength to do this, but she persisted anyway because there wasn’t much else she could do.
She filled two buckets halfway full with water, because she could not conceivably carry anything greater than that, and then struggled back into the shack. She set the two buckets down next to the moth-eaten blankets, and then started ripping the blanket into rag sizes. She did not struggle much with this, the blanket was flimsy and thin, and once she was satisfied with this endeavor, she shoved the rags in one of the buckets. Grime and film immediately sloughed off the rags and into the water. Harrow agitated the rags with her hands. The rags needed to be at least somewhat clean before she used them for actual cleaning.
Once the water was disgusting enough that Harrow probably shouldn’t touch it, she carefully grabbed each rag from the first bucket and strained out the excess water, and then plopped it into the second bucket. Once all of the rags were in the second bucket, she agitated them with her hands so she could get the extra grime off. This didn’t work as well as she wanted it to, she needed soap or some other cleaner to reasonably do this, but it was all right. After she got as much as she could, she pulled the rags out of the bucket, strained them again, and draped them over the broken furniture in the corner. They’d be dry by the morning and then she could actually use them to clean.
Once she was done with this, she dumped one of the buckets into the other bucket, trying to think of a way they could conserve this gray water. Maybe for flushing the toilet once they got it working? She still hadn’t braved the bathroom, though.
She decided to grab the broom and began sweeping the kitchen, though some of the grime and muck was so embedded into the floor that the broom did nothing. She thought about the stuff they should ask for from the outpost. She figured it needed to be reasonable in size, something Gideon could carry for two miles. They probably wouldn’t be able to ask for a bed frame outright.
Soap, for sure. They had trees on No Name, lots of trees, perhaps they could get some actual paper. Power tools so they could fix the furniture. Harrow had learned to sew when she was younger. Maybe they could ask for fabric and a sewing kit and some stuffing so she could take care of this mattress issue herself. Was that unreasonable? Maybe their neighbors, wherever the fuck they were, had sheep or wool. Did they have anything they could offer as trade?
Harrow yearned to be self-sufficient more than anything, but she was finding the task incredibly difficult. She was out here on No Name, floundering like a fish out of water. Gideon could be handy and figure out how to repair stuff sure, but what was Harrow to do without her necromancy? Necromancy was always who she had been, the beginning and end of her, and who was she without it? Could Harrow even expect to live out here without dying in the first two months?
Maybe more importantly: did Harrow want to live for the next two months?
Even from the kitchen, Harrow could hear the little piglet snores of one Gideon Nav. She thought about the sleeping woman and her piglet snores in the other room, and decided she ought to try living for the next two months.
A sleepy Gideon accosted Harrow several hours later. “What are you doing?!”
Harrow was mid-scrubbing the floors of the living room when she looked up at her ex-cavalier curiously. Gideon stood in the door frame that attached the living room and hallway, bicep leaning against the wood there, legs crossed. She still had bags under her eyes, though they had lessened slightly, and there was a familiar little frown placed on her lips. Harrow rolled her eyes and continued scrubbing. “Cleaning,” she said.
“Don’t do things without me,” Gideon said. She stretched for a long moment and yawned and then found a place next to Harrow on the floor, grabbing a rag to help her out with a particularly grimy spot.
Harrow reached for her wrist to stop her. “You are needed elsewhere,” she said. Gideon frowned and Harrow removed her fingers from her wrist, dropping the rag on the floor to grab a piece of paper from her pant pocket.
“Where’d you find paper?” Gideon asked, concerned with all of the wrong things.
“This planet has a lot of trees. I don’t think paper is going to be an issue like it was on the Ninth.” She didn’t say where she found it, which was shoved behind several tarps in the storage closet. She had to fight a spiderweb with her broom to access the stack of paper and the singular pen. She shook the pen so hard to get it working that it had given her a headache.
If you’d be so inclined to provide us these necessities, we can pay the benefactor back at a later date:
1. Soap + bleach
2. Mop
3. Power drill
4. Kerosene lamp + supplies
5. Sewing kit
6. Seeds
7. Axe
“Axe?! Are you going to murder me in my sleep?”
“You’d think I would have done it by now, don’t you?” Harrow asked, slightly miffed at the accusation, even if it was a silly joke. She had lobotomized herself so Gideon would not die. They hadn’t talked about that yet, though. Harrow didn’t know if they would ever talk about it.
Before the implosion of Dominicus, Gideon’s father’s last act was to heal her heart and birth her anew (something he could have done several times over by then, but Harrow was perpetually bitter). After the implosion, Gideon had said, What do you want? and then she amended it with, What do you need? and Harrow had responded, To be alone. Gideon understood that she meant alone together. So then Paul wrote down the coordinates and now here they were without ever talking about what they actually meant to each other. Harrow knew what Gideon meant to her. She felt like she made it pretty clear by lobotomizing herself, but still. Communication was not her forte.
“What do you want me to do with this?”
“Take it to the outpost. I still don’t have shoes.”
“Oh, I see. I’m just your mule.”
Harrow wanted to say, You are everything to me. Instead, she said, “Yes.”
Gideon grumbled and complained, she always did, but she eventually put her shoes on and took her bag with her to trek the two miles to the outpost. “Have you eaten anything this morning?”
“Yes,” Harrow lied. She had tried to shove some protein paste down her gullet but was ultimately unsuccessful. At the very least she tried.
“I know you’re lying—” Gideon huffed out something irritated, and then rubbed a hand over her face. “I’ll make you eat something when I get back. They might have like—a fucking protein bar, or something at the outpost.” Harrow doubted this. She grabbed her rag and continued to rub at the spot on the floor. Gideon made another irritated noise, and then left the shack. If the door wasn’t falling off its hinges, Harrow imagined that Gideon might have slammed it.
While Gideon was gone, Harrow finished the living room floor to the best of her ability. There was no more she could do after a certain point, so she focused her gaze elsewhere.
She started tearing down what could once be considered curtains and threw them in the pile of stuff she could reasonably re-use. She took a peek into the bathroom and then turned around and noped immediately after, wondering if they ought to just close it off as an artifact of time and erect a porta potty somewhere. When Harrow did need to take care of business, she got a piece of paper and dug a hole. It wasn’t the most glorious situation she’d ever been in.
She then cleared and cleaned the kitchen counters, telling herself she’d focus on the floors another day when she had soap and possibly bleach. She wiped and dusted the pantries, mostly getting the grime out because it had been closed off to the elements, and then reorganized the food Gideon had found so it wasn’t just hanging out on the derelict counters. She opened the broken fridge to take a peek in there. It wasn’t as bad as she imagined. It just needed to be cleaned and bleached, but there weren’t colonies of bacteria in there like she originally figured. She wondered if they could even get electricity. A generator?
Telling herself she’d focus on the kitchen floors another day did no good, as she started sweeping the kitchen immediately after. At this point, Harrow wondered when Gideon would come home. She figured that Gideon would be back in two hours, probably less. Gideon was in-shape where Harrow was not, so it most definitely shouldn’t take an hour for her to get to the outpost and an hour to get back. Harrow did not have a clock yet, could not figure out how many hours were in a day on the planet of No Name, but she figured that more than two hours had passed at that point. She wasn’t trying to be nervous about it, but the last time Gideon and Harrow were separated, Gideon had died. So.
She ended up eating something, canned corn again, and then focused on her task at hand. She refused to think about Gideon Nav dying for the second time.
After sweeping the kitchen floors, she hauled out the dingy mattress from her (their?) room and yanked it outside through the side door. She whacked and thwacked it with her broom, dust and dirt careening out in hideous puffs of air, causing her to double over and cough for a bit. She pulled it back inside with much heaving, and then kind-of just shoved it back in the room without much thought to the aesthetics of it all. She went outside again to survey their yard. She tried to remember what she had learned about gardening from snow leeks. She remembered nothing. Two months was generous, she thought.
It was when Harrow was surveying their yard that she saw Gideon in the distance. She knew it was Gideon, could recognize that lick of red hair from anywhere, but she was—moving far too fast for someone walking at a normal pace. Then she saw that she was on top something, an animal of some sort, and that animal was heaving something behind them. Harrow blinked, rubbed her eyes, and then looked again.
Yep. That was real. Harrow did not recognize the animal, had never really interacted with animals, if she was being honest, but it was big and brown with six legs. Gideon was sitting on—some type of leather, with reins around the animal’s snout. Harrow watched as she rode this animal to the front of their shack, hopping off with what seemed like practiced ease, and then tying the reins to a tree branch. She didn’t grab the goods out of the cart behind the animal, just immediately bounded up to Harrow with a smile so wide it nearly broke her face.
“What,” said Harrow immediately.
“That’s a horse!” Gideon explained, pointing to the six-legged animal that was hemming and hawing against the tree.
What had happened, according to Gideon, was that she ran into a few people at the outpost. She got to talking with them, explained their current situation, and then one of them offered some help in exchange for services.
“What do these services entail?! Are you whoring yourself out?!”
“Well, if you’d let me explain—”
Gideon was not whoring herself out. One of the ex-Edenites, someone by the name of The Mighty Maker Died Ka Ahora Ahau Ki A Koe Ake Ake Undercut McQueer (though Gideon opted to just call her Miss Mighty), said that she could come out and show Gideon her way around fixing stuff up, as well as hooking up the well to get them running water in exchange for some help around her ranch. Gideon then explained that she went to this ranch with Miss Mighty (how she hadn’t gotten murdered was beyond Harrow—she needed an abundance of caution), was given a horse, a cart, a thing of soap, fresh vegetables, and apparently some Harrow-sized shoes, and then she came back home.
This was all a little too much for Harrow, especially when she handed her the shoes. They looked brand new. “What about the ones I requested from the outpost?” She did not ask how Gideon knew her shoe size.
“Well, it doesn’t hurt to have two pairs of shoes.” That was reasonable.
Harrow slipped the shoes on and Gideon brought her out to meet their new horse. They couldn’t agree on a name (Harrow was absolutely not going to name their horse Carpetmuncher), so they decided to not name her for now. It seemed appropriate for a planet with no name. Gideon untied the horse from the tree and Harrow approached her carefully. She was sweet, not at all skittish like Harrow was. Harrow managed to pet her mane for a few seconds before she backed away on her own accord. Gideon detached the cart from the back of the horse and Nameless the horse trotted away to the field, munching on the grass.
Harrow brought in the vegetables and set them on the cleanish counter, wondering what each vegetable was. Maybe Gideon would know. Probably not.
Harrow came back outside while Gideon was pulling up several buckets worth of water from the well. She carried those buckets to where the soap was resting, against the wall of the shack near the side door, and set them down for Harrow. “Shower time,” Gideon explained. “You first.” She ran inside and grabbed a couple of rags and some clothes for Harrow.
Harrow didn’t know if this was an act of chivalry or if she smelled really bad (knowing Gideon, it was likely both), but she was grateful for this shitty shower, even if it was probably the worst shower in the history of showers (not the worst bath in the history of baths—she had experienced that already). Gideon went back and did whatever the fuck she planned on doing, probably perusing the vegetables like a grazing board, and Harrow set about rinsing herself off to the best of her ability.
She stripped out of her grimy clothes and set them in a disgusting heap in the mud. She dabbed soap on one of the rags and then soaked that rag with water, scrubbing at all of her bits as hard as she scrubbed the floor. She doused away the dirt and grime the best she could, which was fairly better than before, and then dropped a bucket of water over her greasy hair. She rubbed globs of soap through her hair, aware that it might strip her hair of its natural oils, but she honestly didn’t give a fuck.
Once she was as clean as possible, Harrow put on Gideon’s clothes. She didn’t have any clothes besides the one on her back, and those clothes desperately needed to be cleaned, so it would have to do.
Inside, Gideon was laying on the mattress in their room that Harrow had covered with a somewhat clean blanket. She was chewing thoughtfully around a red little vegetable—or maybe fruit, Harrow didn’t know. “Your turn,” Harrow said, water from the well pooling in her clavicles. Gideon’s eyes shot up at the sound, and her long appreciative gaze admiring Harrow in her clothes did not go unnoticed by Harrow herself. Gideon stared at her dumbfounded, mouth slightly agape, red fruit hanging on her tongue deliciously.
“O—kay,” she said, her voice rough. She wiped a hand over her face and shot up from the mattress, peeling her eyes away as she all but ran out of the room. Harrow moved herself forward and fell to the bed, burrowing her face in the blanket. She told herself not to think about Gideon Nav and that red fruit on her tongue.
DAY 4
The next morning, Gideon set out to the outpost again to gather the shoes that should be there and Harrow got started on her tasks for the day. She had very carefully laid it all out in her head, how she would clean each room in what order. Anything seemed possible now that they had soap. It was interesting, Harrow thought, to be so excited about soap.
While Gideon was gone, Harrow braved the bathroom, not before stuffing two somewhat clean rags into her nose. The toilet was still hooked up, but Harrow was unsure exactly where the sewage went. The sink was broken into pieces, ceramic jutting out from the floor, threatening to slice her foot. Harrow shoved some of it out of the way with her broken broom.
There was a dingy bath and shower combo, the ceramic of the tub crushed and obliterated into little pieces. She left the room to collect her thoughts, blood rushing through her ears, wondering if it would be too out-there to request to completely remove the bathtub.
She braved it again a few minutes later. She’d likely need something to unclog the drains. She had sticks and rags. That would probably work in the meantime. The shower curtain hung on by a thread. Harrow grabbed and yanked it off, coming back to the living room briefly to drop it off in the no good pile. There was a little window at the far end of the bathroom near the toilet. Harrow stepped over the broken ceramic, grateful that Gideon had gotten her shoes already, and propped it open with some struggle. They could air it out while they figured out what to do.
Harrow ended up finding a large basket, which she delegated as the trash, and started shoving stuff from the no good pile in there. She picked up the ceramic from the broken sink and tub with a blanket, shoving that in there, too. She didn’t want to brave cleaning the toilet and shower without Gideon’s moral support, so she instead focused on clearing the bathroom floor of hazards. She swept what she could, then dumped some water and soap on the floor, and scrubbed what she could as well. Even through the rags plugging her nose, Harrow could tell that it started to smell a little bit better, and that was at least some progress.
She meandered back to the kitchen for a meal of canned green beans and protein paste (blegh was right), and then went into her bedroom and dragged out the mattress to the living room. Her main two concerns were the kitchen and the bedroom, because they could get by without a bathroom (in the barest sense of the word) and a living room, but they needed a place to eat and cook—and Harrow loathed the idea of sleeping in a bedroom that was probably giving her mold spores. It’d be nice to come back to a clean room every night while they fixed the place up.
There was a closet in there, so Harrow opened it up and grabbed all the items out, telling herself she’d sort through it later, and dumped it all unceremoniously in the living room. She noticed that there were some more blankets, which were good enough and just needed to be cleaned, some hangers, and a kerosene lamp, which was also great. Now she could reasonably work into the night.
She propped open the window of the room, and then used her broom to hit the wall of the closet a couple of times, taking down spiderwebs and spiraling dust probably straight into her lungs. She found a little crate and propped it up so she’d be able to stand on it, standing on her tippy-toes while she wacked the broom around. She eventually used a dry rag to wipe the shelves and walls of the closet, then a wet rag globbed with soap to wipe down the muck that was still there. She found this task dull and quiet, something which she appreciated, and devoted her attention to getting off all the grime. She figured she could probably bleach it when they got bleach, but the closet in the bedroom was quickly becoming the cleanest area of the shack. She might even be willing to put Gideon’s clothes in there.
Back in the living room, she dumped the hangers she found in the soapy bucket she was using to clean their clothes. She took the hangers out after a few minutes of soaking, washed and dried them, and then went ahead and hung Gideon’s clean clothes on them in the closet. Gideon didn’t have many clean clothes left, just a few shirts and a hoodie and some pants, and Harrow felt so achingly domestic it was almost laughable, but being able to set her mind to something and following through on the task almost made the mold spores and dust in her lungs worth it.
Gideon came home (the word home almost made Harrow giddy—almost) on Nameless a few hours later. She had a second pair of shoes for Harrow, a power drill, some bleach, a sewing kit, an axe, and Miss Mighty. Harrow did not greet Miss Mighty. She simply said, “The outpost brought us the stuff pretty early.”
“Wasn’t the outpost, gloom mistress,” Gideon said, hopping off Nameless with ease. “Miss Mighty et al said we could borrow some stuff if we needed to.” Borrowing implied an exchange of services, Harrow thought.
Miss Mighty didn’t greet Harrow either. She simply jumped off her horse and said, “Show me where the well is?” so Gideon showed her where the well was.
Harrow went back inside, somewhat miffed and embarrassed. Self-sufficiency was bullshit. And now someone—by the name of The Mighty Maker Died Ka Ahora Ahau Ki A Koe Ake Ake Undercut McQueer, no less—could tell that they were floundering, that Harrow was useless without necromancy, that Gideon ought to have just shoved her off the shuttle when she had the chance.
Harrow went back to cleaning the bedroom. She heard Miss Mighty and Gideon enter the shack after their escapade by the well, was able to pick out Gideon’s heavy footsteps anywhere, but she just ignored them and continued to clean.
It was when she was wiping away the grime on the window in their bedroom that Gideon’s head popped through the door frame, and then the rest of her, hands in her pockets. Harrow stilled her hand and looked over, her big black eyes like a baby calf. “Miss Mighty said she’d bring her wife over tomorrow so she could get started on hooking up the water. I guess I should call her Mrs. Mighty.”
A stupid joke that Harrow did not deign with a response. She just huffed and rolled her eyes, turning back to her task at hand. Gideon must have sensed something in this simple act of defiance, because she grabbed a rag off the floor and joined Harrow in cleaning the window. The task was simple, it really did not require four hands, but Harrow let her anyway. “The bathroom doesn’t look so scary anymore,” she said, conversationally, almost. “You did a good job.”
Harrow tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, wiping gross window muck across her face. “Just say what you want to say, Griddle,” she said, digging a fingernail into the rag to get under a crevice.
“I feel like you’re mad at me, or Mrs. Mighty, or something, and I don’t know why.” The cloth of Gideon’s shirt sleeve touched her cheek to wipe away the muck she had just placed there. “I’m not a mind reader, though it’s not for lack of trying.”
Harrow realized two things at once. One, that she did not know how to deal with someone simply being kind and soft to her. And two, that she did not know how to put what she felt like into words. Putting things into words was probably a post-lobotomy issue, or maybe she was being too kind to herself, and this had always been a problem.
It wasn’t that they were out in this shack by themselves, it wasn’t like Harrow was expecting a life of luxury—honestly, Harrow was surprised she was alive in the first place. But to rely on others felt so cheap. It felt like giving up. They’d spent a grand total of four days on this planet, and they had already taken a six-legged animal, cleaning supplies, a power drill, and more from a single neighbor. Now Harrow was indebted to someone she didn’t know or want to know, and she hated owing things. She hated not being able to be self-sufficient, that Gideon had to rely on other people and not just her. Sure, the shack wasn’t livable by any means, they had no food besides canned corn and green beans, no clean clothes, no place to sleep besides a shitty, dilapidated mattress—but still, it felt like giving up. Giving in. To let people help you.
Harrow did not know how to say this, so she just said nothing at all.
And because Gideon did not know what it meant to back down, she said, “I can wait.”
The words could have been malicious, or obstinate, or a whole host of other words Harrow could not think of, but Gideon was tender in her words, despite it all, tender in her intention. I can wait meant that Harrow didn’t have to elaborate now or in the near future. I can wait meant that Gideon was going to stay.
Harrow leaned forward into her forearm, squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, and said, “Okay.”
That night, Harrow awoke to a migraine, aches all over her body, and a charley horse in her calf. Gideon’s arm was heavy over her waist, her breaths sure and sound. Harrow groaned, trying to wiggle her way out of her hold. She succeeded somewhat, managing to get Gideon’s forearm over her head, before Gideon blinked open her eyes blearily and said, “Huah?!” She dropped her hands down and pulled Harrow closer by the waist.
“I’m going to go for a walk,” Harrow reassured, rubbing at her calf to try and dissipate the kinked muscle. She had never worked her body this hard in her life, it was obviously fighting back on many fronts. She tried to wriggle out of her hold but was unsuccessful.
“Are you aching?” Gideon asked, somehow attuned to her ex-necromancer, knowing her so innately that it was embarrassing. She used her hands to flip Harrow over by the waist and Harrow’s hands immediately went to her own face, futilely trying to cover her deepening blush. She flexed her foot in an attempt soothe the charley house. It helped a little bit.
“Yes, Griddle,” Harrow said, muffled between her fingers. “I am tired. And sore. After cleaning and scrubbing a derelict shack for three days straight.”
“I can give you a massage,” her ex-cavalier said, and she sounded serious. Her left hand dropped down to grab at Harrow’s calf and Harrow kicked her away weakly. She was not going to have Gideon feel her up, even if it was in an entirely non-sexual context. She did not need this right now.
“A walk,” Harrow repeated, wriggling her way out of bed before Gideon could do any more damage. She slipped on her shoes and high-tailed it out of there, taking a brisk walk to the well to cool herself down. She leaned back against the wall and slid down into the mud, leaning her head back against the cool, weathering brick. Gideon did not chase after her, which was fine. She did not want her to chase after her.
She sat out there, under the light of two moons, and thought about all the ways she wanted Gideon, and all the ways she thought Gideon wanted her. The venn diagram in Harrow’s mind had little intersection.
DAY 5
Mrs. Mighty came over with her wife before Harrow and Gideon had even woken up for the day. Harrow knew this because she awoke to the sound of drilling outside of the shack. She rolled over with a groan, her forehead smacking straight into Gideon’s bicep, and her migraine worsened. She peeled off Gideon’s fingers around her waist and then kicked her a little bit, mostly to wake her up but slightly because it was delightful.
“Whuh?” Gideon said, blinking her eyes open, puffy with sleep. A little drool had dried at the corner of her mouth. Harrow shoved her face away with her hand, scrambling over the weight in the mattress, and flopping to the floor with as much grace as she always had (re: none).
Harrow slipped on her shoes and walked outside to the well, Mrs. Mighty and her wife poking around it with tools that Harrow could not name if there were a sword to her throat. “Huh?” was all Harrow said, and then turned around on her heel before either one of them could answer.
Gideon was awake and ambling around the kitchen with a toothbrush in her mouth, using her water bottle to wetten and clean it. Harrow licked at her teeth and followed suit on this endeavor.
After they had spit out the toothpaste and gurgled some well water in their mouths, Harrow said, “Why are Mrs. Mighty and her wife here poking around the well like inspectors?”
“She said she was going to hook up the water for us. I didn’t think she meant today, but that’s awesome.”
The two of them had differing definitions of awesome, but Harrow also imagined a shower with adequate water pressure, and she wasn’t nearly as bugged about the drilling as she thought she would be. “I think…” she said, running a tongue over her teeth, “we should start cleaning up the bathroom, then.”
Gideon managed to get Harrow to eat some protein paste covered corn (blegh!!) and a green-yellow vegetable that she couldn’t name (and also didn’t like).
They pulled on the longest clothes they had, stuffed their noses with rags, wrapped a cloth around their mouths in a makeshift mask, covered their hands in more cloth, and the two of them braved the bathroom together.
If you were to ask Harrow later what exactly went down in the bathroom, she would not be able to tell you. What mattered was that, in the end, the toilet would work once the water got hooked up, and the drains were clean. A lot of bleach was used in the process. Harrow also threw up her disgusting breakfast.
The bathroom still wasn’t great by any definition, but the rank smell of it wasn’t clogging up the house, and the ceramic was cleared away, and once Mrs. Mighty and Mrsrs. Mighty got the water hooked up, they could wash their hands and take a shower. It still looked like someone had been murdered there.
DAY 7
Two days later, after a week of living on the planet of No Name, Mrs. Mighty and Mrsrs. Mighty (Harrow had learned that Mrsrs. Mighty’s name was actually Penny) managed to hook up the water properly.
At this point, they had mostly demolished the surrounding bath and had placed tarps around the shower instead. Harrow took the first shower. The water was so cold she felt it in her bones, but the water pressure nearly peeled the skin off her brittle body, and Harrow had never felt cleaner in her life.
DAY 9
At the back of the shack, on the walk to the well, there was a shed hidden behind two trees. Gideon had to hack away at the tree with her axe for an hour before they got access to the shed, which ended up having a padlock. The padlock didn’t matter, because the wood was rotting away at the seams, and Gideon got the door off its hinges with a singular good kick.
Inside the shed were farm tools. Some of them were beyond repair, the wood shedding off the handles practically splintering them just by looking at them. Some of them could be fixed with tape or glue or screws for the time being. Some of them were perfectly usable as they were.
This was great news to Harrow, who was so sick of taking and taking from her neighbors that she was considering setting up a sign on their front lawn that basically read, STOP GIVING ME STUFF. Once they got ahold of seeds, she could get this fucking garden started, and then maybe people would stop taking pity on her.
She and Gideon spent the rest of the day pulling the items from the shed, directing the tools to different piles depending on usage and whether or not it was usable, and then clearing the little garden space just outside the side door so they could plant when they got around to getting seeds. Harrow knew how to do this part, had watched the bleached skeletons in Drearburh do it for seventeen years but—good grief, it was exhausting.
She took several breaks and made Gideon take the breaks with her even though she knew she didn’t need to, not wanting her ex-cavalier to put more work into it than herself. Once she was done with her measly break, Gideon got her to drink some water, said, “Wear your hat or you’re going to turn into leather,” plopped the hat on her head, and they continued to clear the yard.
It was only later, long past when Gideon had fallen asleep against her ear, Harrow realized that she had never given Gideon her hat back from the second day, and she had called it hers.
DAY 12
It wasn’t a New Rho refugee or an ex-Edenite that gave Harrow her first seed to plant, but a mysterious benefactor. This mysterious benefactor, apparently not affiliated with the mysterious benefactor of the outpost, dropped off a package on their front doorstep. It was wrapped in a brown wrapping paper—yes, paper! Using paper so flagrantly was still such a shock—with a note that detailed exactly how she should plant and water and take care of this seed on the planet of No Name. The seed, according to the note, would grow into potatoes.
That day, Gideon was busy with chopping down trees and hauling wood out to the shack so she could build them some better furniture. The bedroom she was supposed to inhabit, but never did, became a place for her to work on building things, kind of like a workshop.
Because Gideon was not there and was actually busy, Harrow kept this little package to herself. There were several things she wanted to do: figure out who this benefactor was, question them as to why they were helping her in this way. But mostly, with an excitement she hadn’t felt in years, she wanted to plant these seeds and actually do something.
Fixing and cleaning up the shack was tedious work that left little room for breaks. Their bedroom was livable now, clean enough where Harrow wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night with a sneeze attack, and the bathroom was serviceable and could be used for bathroom-related duties. The kitchen was still a work in progress. They still didn’t have electricity, which was honestly fine, but Penny was always sad when they had to deny her tenth home cooked meal of the week because they didn’t have a fridge to keep it good. Generators were in short supply, and the outpost benefactor wasn’t that much of a benefactor, honestly. The only thing they had actually brought were Harrow’s shoes that one time. Everything else they got was through neighborly goodness.
The living room still needed to be cleaned thoroughly, along with the storage closet, and Harrow didn’t even want to think about the roof—but Harrow saw the chance to take a break and do something else, so she took it.
Harrow laid out the instructions on how to plant the potatoes on the grass, pulled the tools from the shed, and went to work.
DAY 17
During the breaks Harrow sometimes allowed herself, she sat on the rocking chair in the living room.
By then, Gideon had either dumped the derelict furniture or shoved it in the other room to work on later. The only piece of furniture that didn’t need to be taken apart and put back together again or thrown away was the rocking chair, so Harrow liked to sit.
The living room was the best it could probably be. Harrow had scrubbed and swept and cleaned so thoroughly that her skin had cracked and she had gotten blisters. One night, Gideon came home with some type of salve and rubbed it into Harrow’s raw hands, and the next day, Harrow continued to clean and disinfect. Gideon often helped her, but there was a lot of stuff Harrow could not conceivably do that Gideon could, and so Gideon was often undertaken with other tasks.
She sometimes felt silly in the rocking chair, sewing pieces of fabric together to create a mattress stuffed full of feathers, but she mostly felt at peace. When her fingers ached from sewing for so long, she’d stop her task and stretch her fingers, take a walk around the shack, maybe sort through their growing collection of non-canned foods, and then she’d find her way back to that silly rocking chair.
When she didn’t want to clean or organize or sew, she’d pull out a stack of paper, whip out her singular pen, and she’d draw. She wasn’t very good at drawing scenery, but she found that she was very proficient at drawing people. Bodies. She knew the exact anatomy of a person, exactly where the bones went, and so it came easy to her.
There was only one other person in her shack besides herself, so she drew Gideon when she had nothing else to do. She drew her when she had things to do, too. She drew her when she was bored, or when Gideon was out chopping wood and she became lonely. She had studied that beautiful, sun-kissed face for seventeen years, and the three succeeding years after, and she knew it like the back of her hand—better than the back of her hand. She knew the shape of her nose, how far it jutted out, she knew the curve of her lips and the exact color of her tongue. She knew exactly how sharp her jaw was, and where that little freckle on her eyelid was. She knew exactly how far her ears came out from her face, and the way her shoulders rolled when she lifted something.
Sometimes Gideon would come home early, and Harrow would fold up the drawing, tuck it in her pant pocket, pull her knees to her chest, and lean back on the rocking chair. Gideon always greeted her with that beautiful, wide smile.
DAY 21
The third week in, Gideon emerged from a shower without properly wrapping up herself in a towel, and Harrow saw the scar on her chest. It was an ugly scar. It was not beautiful. It etched across her skin like an insult, mottled and thick and white. There was nothing divine about this scar. It was simply the proof of Harrow’s failures.
Harrow didn’t know what she was seeing at first, or maybe her brain was trying to protect her from the image, but after it had finally clicked in her brain, and Gideon saw the look on her face, she tried to say, He resurrected you but didn’t take away the scar? but it mostly came out like, “Heuahhhh?!!” in a great, big sob.
The two of them had been doing so good up until then. One of No Name’s inhabitants—not Mrs. Mighty or Penny, another ex-Edenite whose name shortened to Scurvy—had come around the past couple of days and retiled their bathroom so they weren’t walking on bare cement and showering on the cracked ceramic of what once was a bathtub. And Harrow was dutifully taking care of her potatoes, though they hadn’t sprouted from the ground yet. The mattress was all finished too, and Gideon was working on the bed frame like she promised she would.
She didn’t know why she figured the scar wouldn’t be there. Maybe this was a final act of cruelty from God—to give her what she wanted with a reminder of all the ways she had failed as an adept, leader, and Lyctor.
It felt like the shack she had worked so hard on, to clean and tidy and to make livable with the only person she really cared about, was crumbling around her, caving her in. She was back in Canaan house, under that bone shield, the structure cracking and shaking as she bled through every pore. She was back in Canaan house, Gideon pushing her body onto that fence spike. She was back in Canaan house, the thalergy of Gideon Nav sharply turning into thanergy. She was back in Canaan house and she was eating her cavalier, sucking her soul into her own. She was back in Canaan house and pulling Gideon off the spike, laying her down, a tight smile on her beautiful cavalier’s face. She was back in Canaan house, Gideon’s chest ripped open, an eternity in front of Harrow without the one person she wanted to keep.
Through the haze, she felt strong arms wrap around her torso, tucking her head into a now clothed chest. Two large hands spanned her back and pulled her in, thumbs flitting out to rub her skin. She felt a wet head of hair against her own, a cheek squished into her parietal bone.
Harrow didn’t know when she stopped crying, only that she couldn’t cry any longer because there were no more tears. Gideon brought the water bottle to her lips and urged her to sip and so she did. Gideon shuffled her through the shack and to their bed to lie down and so she did.
When Gideon laid down next to her, their kneecaps touching, Harrow wiped her puffy eyes, feeling distinctly like a toddler who could not get her feelings under control, and said, “Let me see it.”
“Harrow—”
“Let me see it,” Harrow begged, scrabbling forward to rip the shirt off herself.
Gideon’s hands fell to her wrists and pulled her away with a gentle tug. “Harrow,” she said, and there it was—the pity. God, Harrow hated pity, but she hated it most from Gideon, someone who had sacrificed her very life to ensure Harrow’s continued survival, someone she had tormented for seventeen years. It was insulting. She was—had been—the best necromancer in the history of necromancers, she had been the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House, she did not need pity, even if she was so-very piteous.
“Do not pity me, Gideon Nav!” Harrow said, though the words did not come out as menacing as she desired, because her voice was still raw from sobbing. “Do not—”
“It’s not that, you creepy cadaver—” and then she flushed red all over. “Harrow,” she said again with emphasis, “it’s not that I pity you, but—it’s right in between my fucking tits, and you’ll have to take a good, long look at them.”
“I don’t care about the—about the tits!” Harrow said, though this was mostly a lie, because she cared very deeply about Gideon’s tits. “Let me see it. I need to see it.”
Gideon must have taken pity then, because she sighed and closed her eyes, grabbing the bottom of her shirt and pulling it over her head. Harrow very briefly looked at her tits, but then her eyes caught on that scar again. It was worse up close, but she wasn’t seeing it for the first time out of nowhere, so she didn’t descend into a dazed panic like before. She closed her eyes tightly, her hand flailing forward before she could stop, and she touched the tight scar tissue there. Gideon let out a pained breath.
Harrow opened her eyes and took in the way Gideon heaved under her touch. “Does it hurt?”
“U—um,” Gideon said with some effort. Harrow’s fingers trailed the puckered skin there, ridges of imperfect skin against a beautiful, brown canvas. The sight was shocking. “No?”
“Why didn’t he—” Harrow started, and then immediately stopped to take a panicked breath. “When he—why didn’t he—”
“Take it away?” Gideon finished, one of her strong hands finding its way on top of Harrow’s. She didn’t move it, just held her hand there. Harrow struggled to see the scar through their hands. Maybe that was the point. “I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of some crazed necromancer,” Gideon said. “But if I had to choose, I’m glad he didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
Harrow swallowed back an aggrieved scream and said, “This—it’s a reminder of—of—guh—awwaghhh—auhhhhhh—” The sobs were starting to build up again, the texture of the scar beneath the pads of her fingers rough and unwelcoming. She did not pull away.
“It reminds me of all we went through, and I don’t think that’s—I don’t think that that’s a bad thing,” Gideon said, the sound of her voice worming its way in Harrow’s ears and running through the folds of her brain. “Because we went through all of that and still ended up here, together.”
The hand that wasn’t holding Harrow’s hand to her chest found its way to her face, rubbing a calloused thumb down a wet cheek. Harrow heaved in a great big breath, the thick tissue of the scar rippling under her fingers, and she was back at Canaan house again, but she was also in this shack on the planet of No Name, but she was also in Drearburh and eleven, and she was also on the Mithraeum and in the River and she was running and running.
It made sense to her, then and now, to lobotomize herself, to rid her brain of Gideon Nav in an insane attempt to save her. And though it had worked in the end, of course Harrow would not deny the added benefit of forgetting the pain of losing her. Harrow was a runner. She ran away, no matter how noble her intentions were originally. She could not run any longer, there was nowhere to run. All she had was this shack and Gideon, and one of those things she had wanted her entire damn life, and it would be a disservice to the Harrow of old to run away now.
Harrow cried, but she did not run.
DAY 30
Around one month in, Harrow saw the sprouts of the potatoes pop from the ground. To celebrate, Harrow hauled out the rocking chair to the garden, pulled out her papers and pen, and drew the scenery from the garden to the best of her ability.
It was awful, awful, bad. She really could not draw scenery.
DAY 36
It was on the thirty-sixth day when Gideon finally replaced the door into their home. This was a surprise to Harrow—something Gideon had been working on awhile in secret. She did all of the handiwork herself—picked out the wood and its grain, cut it to size, sanded it all herself, replaced the hinges. On the night of the thirty-fifth, Harrow went to bed with the same old creaking sound of their front door, and woke to an excited smile on Gideon’s face as she beckoned her to the living room.
The door was great—well-built, obvious care put into it, no drafts seeping through the cracks. But that wasn’t it. Gideon pulled her outside so she could properly appreciate her hard work, and there, on the front door was a sign: HARROW AND GIDEON’S HOME, carved with the steady precision of her ex-cavalier’s sword hand.
DAY 43
During the sixth week, while Harrow was planting lettuce seeds that Scurvy and her partner had given them, Harrow’s hand slipped and the spade sliced it open. She never wore gloves while she gardened and planted, hadn’t even thought to ask their neighbors or the outpost for something like that.
Harrow, though she had sliced down to the bone of her metacarpals, was confident in her ability to take care of this herself. They didn’t have a first-aid kit, or bandages, or anything, really, to help—and Gideon was helping Mrs. Mighty with something on the ranch—but Harrow wrapped her hand tightly in her shirt, scurried inside to the sink to wash off the grit and dirt threatening to infect her wound, and then made do with some clean(ish) rags to stop the bleeding. Her hand ached and sizzled. She clenched her teeth. It was fine, though. She knew it was fine because she told herself it was fine.
There wasn’t much she could do while she waited for Gideon to come home. Gardening was obviously a no-go. She couldn’t surprise her with a meal unless she wanted it stupendously bloody. She fell back to art like she always did because she hadn’t sliced her dominant hand. She sat at the Gideon-built kitchen table that wobbled a bit because of uneven legs, gnawing on her pen as she thought, drawing the contours of an ever-familiar face. The pain of her hand dulled in the back of her mind.
Sometimes, when she was feeling particularly brave, she’d draw Gideon without her shirt, etching the scar on her skin, the faint memory of the rough tissue under the pads of her fingers.
Harrow really didn’t realize how bad it looked when Gideon got home. “Harrow,” she said, bounding through the door with something in her hand, bringing in the smell of freshly cut grass, “look what I found for you! A book—oh my fucking god!” Harrow looked up from her drawing of Nameless the horse to look up at Gideon, beautiful glowing face pallid from shock.
“Hm?”
“You’re—Harrow, you’re fucking—” she didn’t even manage to finish her sentence, dropping the book to the floor to grab Harrow’s hand. She flipped it over with careful precision, and then Harrow realized that it had begun to bleed again through the cloth. Oh dear. She must have lost a lot of blood.
“Oh,” Harrow said.
“What the—Harrow, what—” she was saying, though it went in and out of Harrow’s ears. Harrow let Gideon lead her to the bathroom, let her slip the cloth off her fingers and place her hand under the cold well water coming through the pipes.
Harrow said, “I didn’t realize it was that bad.”
“You hit bone, you fucking idiot,” Gideon said through gritted teeth, though the delivery lacked a lot of malice behind it, so it came out rather weak and sad and wet. “You’re going to need stitches.”
Harrow resolutely did not trust anyone to give her stitches, so she said, “I can do it.”
“That is insane,” Gideon said.
“I do not trust anyone on this planet except me to adequately give me stitches, and my dominant hand is not the one that was injured, so yes, Griddle, I can do it.” Gideon stared at her dumbfounded, blinking slowly in disbelief, and then she nodded and went to go get Harrow’s sewing kit.
Through a mouth full of rag, Harrow sterilized her wound and needle with alcohol, and then stitched her hand closed. She cried. It hurt like a fucking bitch. Though these moments were rare, it was then when Harrow longed for the healing abilities of Lyctorhood.
Exhausted from this endeavor, she took a cold shower and laid down on their bed, face hot and puffy from the exertion and tears. There was still that inkling of pride, though—to actually be able to take care of this issue by herself rather than turn to her neighbors like she always did.
“Harrow,” Gideon said, comfortable in her pajamas like she usually was at this time of night, “it looked like a fucking murder scene in the kitchen.” The What the hell is wrong with you? was implied.
“I thought it stopped bleeding,” Harrow grumbled, shoving her face into their pillow, wishing at this point in time that she at least had like, a vague painkiller. She wondered how long she would be out from gardening and sewing. She hated being useless.
“Harrow,” Gideon murmured, their bed divoting with her weight as she sat down next to her. “Why didn’t you get help? Why didn’t you ask for help?”
Help. Harrow did not need help. She could do things on her own, given enough time. She would have created her own soap, or something soap-adjacent, if she had just been given time to figure it out. She could build this shack back up slat by slat and brick by brick without a power drill if Gideon had just let her. She just proved that she could stitch her own hand closed without any help—
“It’s okay to ask for help,” Gideon said, flipping Harrow’s body over so she would look at her. “Asking for help is not a weakness.”
Harrow felt deep embarrassment pulsing through her, wanted Gideon to leave her alone to mull around in her own self-pity, and so she found herself saying, “You would know weakness, wouldn’t you?”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean, Nonagesimus?”
Harrow honestly didn’t know what she meant by that, really just felt like saying something mean because she didn’t know what else to say, so she huffed and turned around, shoving her face into their pillow like a toddler who’d been called out. Her tender palm ached and pulsed something hot. “Go away,” she croaked out.
“You are entirely the worst, you are the worst,” Gideon said, huffing out of the room with a stomp. “Making me worry, looking like a fucking crime scene…” her voice trailed off as she stormed out of the house.
It was twenty minutes later when Gideon came back into their room. Harrow pretended to be asleep. Mostly because she didn’t want to talk it out like Gideon always wanted to. “I know you’re not asleep,” she said. “You always breathe weirdly when you’re trying to pretend-sleep.”
That was embarrassing, because Harrow pretend-slept several nights out of the week. Harrow squeaked and turned around, rubbing at her cheeks as she looked up at Gideon towering over her. There was a wrinkled piece of paper in her hand with little red and brown blotchy spots. “What is it now, Griddle?”
“Sit up,” Gideon instructed. Harrow rolled her eyes and went to turn back over and ignore her, but Gideon said, “Sit up, and I mean it.” Harrow did not like being bossed around, but the urgent tone in Gideon’s voice made her body comply. She sat up against the headboard, the one Gideon had crafted, knees to her chest as she frowned up at her. Gideon flipped the paper over and Harrow looked away, her stomach dropping.
“Since when can you draw?”
“It’s just anatomy to me,” Harrow lied.
“My anatomy,” said Gideon. “And my scar.”
“You’re the only person I see every day. It’s just—”
“Harrow, give it up,” Gideon interjected, sitting on the bed next to her. “You have this—this complex about the scar, and asking for help, and you pretend you’re not angry at me all the time, but I know you are—I know you.” She grabbed the injured hand in her own, her golden eyes searching Harrow’s, her look pleading. “Meanwhile, you’re drawing me without my fucking shirt on—”
“Don’t say it like that!” Harrow seethed, trying to tug herself away but failing.
“Harrow,” she said, “if you don’t want me here, that’s fine. If being around me just reminds you of—the fence, and seeing the scar reminds you of when I died, just tell me. I’ll go. There are—you’re not the only person who offered me a place to stay.”
The I don’t want you here sat on the tip of her tongue, just begging to escape her mouth. It would be so easy this way. To give up. To let Gideon leave, to push away Mrs. Mighty and Penny and Scurvy and that alien that lived four miles south of here named Rockette, to have her potatoes be the first and last thing she grew. Oh, that would have been so easy. But easy had never been in Harrowhark's vocabulary.
And so, though it was not her strength, Harrow told her the truth. “The scar,” she said with some effort, “doesn’t just—it’s not just the fence. It’s everything that led up to the fence. All of the ways—” she swallowed, focusing on the pulse in her palm, “—it’s all of the ways I failed you, over and over again. How I could not protect you on my own, how you were murdered because of me—”
“I am under the impression that Cytherea murdered me, not you.”
“She murdered you because of my inadequacies!” Harrow cried. “If I was a better necromancer, a better leader of my house, if I was—god, if I was simply a better friend, I don’t know, Gideon—I have failed you over and over again, and I wanted to prove to you here that I can protect you now, that we can be self-sufficient, that you can rely on only me and not other people, but I have just proven over and over again that you can’t. Surely we’d be dead right now if it weren’t for Mrs. Mighty and Scurvy, and I am to blame for those inadequacies. It’s giving up. It’s giving in to have people help you. It’s proof that I am never and will never be enough for you, Gideon Nav.”
The weight of this confession hung in the air like a bad smell. “And that’s really what you think?” she asked.
Harrow looked away.
“It’s honestly insulting! People help you because they love you, Harrowhark. That’s right, people love you!” she exclaimed. She waved a hand around frantically, shoving dust through the air. “Accepting help is not weakness, it’s strength—and don’t look at me like that, I’m not trying to be corny, I’m serious right now—”
“Our neighbors do not love me—”
“Yes they do! But you’re so far up your ass that you don’t see it!” Gideon interrupted right back, her hand reaching up to grab and squeeze Harrow’s shoulder, clearly sick of her nonsense. Though Harrow was still as bony as a bird, she had gained some muscle and fat in the past forty-three days from all her hard work. “You should hear the way Mrs. Mighty talks about you on her ranch—she keeps telling me I need to take care of you, that I’d die in a day without you—” Gideon and Harrow blushed in tandem at this, “—and Penny keeps trying to offload at least four home cooked meals a day onto me, even though she knows we don’t have a working fridge, because her love language is cooking.”
Oh, she had missed being properly walloped by Gideon Nav.
“And Scurvy gave you all those lettuce seeds, and Rockette keeps trying to agglutinate you in her weird, pervy mating ritual—but you’re such a sad little sack about it, stuck in your own damn head! And me, Harrow—you don’t think I love you, that I want to help you, that helping you is something I want to do, that I want to spend time with you? I told you that other people offered me places to stay after the implosion and I wasn’t lying, but I stayed with you because that’s what I wanted then and that’s what I want now.”
“Gideon—”
“And enough about your complex,” she continued, clearly on a roll. “I don’t care about your supposed inadequacies. You are the greatest necromancer who ever lived, you were the best leader Drearburh didn’t deserve, and well—you really could have been a better friend, I’m not disagreeing with that.”
“Okay,” Harrow said, pulling her hand away from Gideon’s to cover her face. This was too much at once. It wasn’t the confession she was expecting—or, she wasn’t expecting anything at all. “Okay.”
“I’m very convincing, aren’t I?”
“I never said I was convinced,” said Harrow, who was slightly convinced. “I just said okay.”
“Harrow,” Gideon said, suddenly very serious. She gently grabbed the hands away from her burning face and said, “You must know, right? I want to take care of you. I like taking care of you. I love you. I died for you.” The I’d do it again was implied.
And when Harrow said, “I know,” it did not feel like a lie. She figured Gideon felt the same way she did—and what else could it be if not love? Harrow opened her mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. Instead of me too, she said, “Everything I do is for you.”
A wide smile overtook Gideon’s face, a smile brighter than the implosion of Dominicus. Gideon leaned forward and touched their lips together. This first kiss was not very successful, their matching smiles made anything more than a chaste brush impossible. The following kiss was not very successful either because they were giggling into each other’s mouths.
After their third unsuccessful kiss, Gideon said, “Just give me a minute. I need some more practice.”
DAY 63
Harrow harvested her potatoes on the sixty-second day. On the sixty-third, she piled them high in a wicker basket, closed it off with its lid, loaded it up on the cart of Nameless the horse, and went over to Mrs. Mighty and Penny’s home for dinner. Penny made them baked potatoes, fries, hasselback potatoes, and a whole host of other dishes Harrow could not name. She only enjoyed half of them.
With a working fridge and generator, the two of them left with enough food to feed a family of four for a week.