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The room is too small, too loud. A chaos of noise like glass fragments, slicing over her skin. Harrow curls her fingers hard into the hem of the hoodie she's drowning in, curses herself once again for agreeing to this.
Under normal circumstances, nothing would ever possess her to show her face at a birthday party for the Tridentarius twins. Ianthe and her odious interest in Harrow, which seemed to germinate from nothing at all; Coronabeth, who Gideon looks at with her mouth practically hanging open (not that Harrow cares. It just makes Griddle look even more ridiculous than usual, that's all.)
The point is that she would never have come here. She would have peeled her skin off with a fork rather than show up at this door. But she and the first odious twin have a group project, and Harrow is not going to fail because of her. All attempts to reach out otherwise have been met with silence or deflection, until come to my birthday, won't you, Harry? we can talk about it there.
And Harrow, after furiously replying, I will not answer to that moniker, had gone to ask Gideon if she was going to the party with a feeling like she was stepping to her doom.
So now they're here, in a room that is, in fact, quite sizeable, the Tridentarius privilege flaunting itself again. Quite sizeable, maybe, except it's crammed full of people, drinking alcohol and laughing obnoxiously loud and tangling their flesh together, and Harrow wants to claw her way out of her skin. Maybe her bloodied bones lying here on this carpet would get them all to stop.
Gideon keeps watching her, too. Harrow had said I'm fine snappishly when she offered to stick by her side. Go and ogle Coronabeth.
Gideon had shrugged and said, as you wish, my midnight hagette, and gone to stand by the drinks table affecting a casual pose, like Harrow can't see her surreptitiously smoothing down her hair and fidgeting endlessly with the carabiner at her belt.
The noise redoubles, overlaps. Harrow peers between bodies, searching for Ianthe. She's sitting on the arm of Coronabeth's chair, dressed in sickly lavender silk, a cigarette pinched carefully between gold prosthetic fingers. The smoke wafts through the room. Harrow coughs, silently curses the bloodline of the Tridentarii and everybody else present.
By the drinks, still alone, Gideon shoots her a grin, almost cocky but slipping bashful. Some small, shameful, queasy part of Harrow amends, almost everybody. She considers and discards smiling back. Isn't sure she could summon one that isn't a rictus, regardless, because the room is too loud and sharp and crowded.
She's sweltering in the black of her hoodie, wants desperately to tear it off, feel cool air on her skin, but she doesn't want to be reminded, either, of her flesh. Doesn't want to look at it, still less bare it to other eyes. Her gaze drifts back to Gideon, bold in a tanktop, biceps out in the light. Wonders what it is to see your body as a home; wonders if that's something either of them will ever be able to claim. Gideon uses her body like a tool, a weapon, a battered shield.
Perhaps Ianthe sees her watching. Perhaps it's merely whatever connection she's fabricated between them. But either way, when Harrow glances away from Gideon again, she meets the cool gaze of eyes like dead lilacs. Ianthe unfolds herself from the arm of the chair and weaves her way through the room, pinching the cigarette out between the fingers of her left hand, the side where she can feel the burn.
“Harry,” she drawls, all lines of affected disinterest, leans her shoulder to the wall beside where Harrow stands. “You came. Allow me to express my sincere joy and surprise.”
“The project, Tridentarius,” Harrow says, through gritted teeth. Her capacity to cope in this room is plummeting with each excruciating second.
Ianthe sighs. “All work and no play. Come and join us. Let's have a round of...” She hesitates, lifts the snuffed cigarette, then drops it at her feet, grinds it delicately into the ground with one razor-sharp stiletto heel. “Hm, what are they onto now? Truth or Dare? Never Have I Ever? Come on, Harry. Corona never did quite grow up, poor baby. Help me bear it for her.”
Harrow glares. Ianthe smirks. “And then the project. I pinky-swear it.”
She extends a finger with heavy sarcasm. Harrow fixes her with a look of utter disdain. Ianthe shrugs, curls a hand round Harrow's wrist and tugs. Harrow yanks back, feels her skin burning. Locks fists into her hem again to keep from flailing like a rat caught in a trap. Follows Ianthe with a sense of impending doom.
Her tolerance is expiring. No project is worth the humiliation of the games Ianthe suggested. She'll wait at the edge till Ianthe deigns to turn her way again, make one final attempt at reason, and then flee back to the safety of their flat, curl into a ball under the covers, try not to claw her way out of her body.
She sits on the outside of the cluster, statue-stiff, as Coronabeth laughs expansively, cheeks flushed; tells a story Harrow can barely parse through the chaos of the room. (What she catches is enough to make her glad of the fact).
They go several rounds like that. Harrow's nausea mounts. She tugs on the hoodie's drawstrings, fastens it closer around her head. Wishes with silent desperation for the battered noise-cancelling headphones lying in her top drawer.
And then, suddenly, her name, like a sharp shock. Her name, or something regrettably close enough.
“Harry,” Ianthe says, and Harrow shoots her a glare that would have anyone else withering down into nothing. Ianthe shrugs it off with a flick of her sickly blonde hair. “I dare you...” A glance, a slow smirk. “To kiss somebody.”
Beside her (as Harrow's world narrows to a tunnel, crackling red with panic and rage), the twins' obnoxious pompadoured friend scoffs. “What are we, thirteen?”
“Hush now, Babs,” Ianthe says, sweet as honeyed ice. “This is practically perversion as far as Harry's concerned. She's a nun, you see. Have some sensitivity.”
Harrow chokes on bile. Thinks of clawing the other girl's eyes from her skull, drowning in a stifling agony of furious shame.
“It's Truth or Dare, Ianthe,” Coronabeth points out, mild. Her words reach Harrow in lurching snaps, between the laughter and chatter and the heat closing in, crushing the air from her lungs. “You didn't give her a choice.”
Another shrug, so fluid, eyes sharp. “Fine. Truth: who have you kissed? Now, pick.”
Harrow attempts to unlock her jaw. Attempts to spit crawl to a graveyard and wither away there, Tridentarius, attempts to stand and leave with dignity, but the room claws at her, the sound, their lurching flashing faces and too-wide grins, their endless hideous laughter, she's a nun, you see–
Instead, Harrow stumbles to her feet. Almost trips on the thick soles of her own boots. Flees the room with breaths heaving in her chest, the heat strangling her, their laughter chasing her through the doorway. She wants to turn and slam her fist into every face in the circle, wants to rip free of her body, wants to be gone–
She can barely see the whole way home, walks on autopilot. The night air does nothing to leach the panic from her bones.
And then she's home, through the door of the scrap of a flat they can barely afford, tearing off the hoodie and casting it to the floor. She drags herself to her room, crawls beneath the bed in a fit of searing fear, imaginary perception burning at her skin. Finds herself barely able to move as soon as she stops there, curled with her back to the wall. Shuts her eyes against the faint light that reaches her.
When she opens them again, there's a girl who is not a girl and is not there – a vision of frozen loveliness, caught forever as Harrow saw her corpse – pressing one chilly hand to Harrow's burning cheek.
Harrow cannot move to reach for her phone, flick open the camera, direct it out into the room to measure what she sees with her eyes against what is real. Has no need to, regardless, because she knows what she has known ever since the first time: the girl is not real. The coolness she offers is not real. And yet Harrow's skin feels soothed all the same, the feverishness dying.
Beloved, she thinks. Cannot find words aloud, cannot begin to shape them, but that has never mattered when the Body visits her. You were supposed to be gone.
Has been gone, indeed. Harrow has swallowed the antipsychotics religiously, if such an adjective can befit an apostate. 'Mechanically' is preferable, perhaps. It is a steady part, now, of her morning routine. The banana flavour cloys her tongue, swirls nausea in her stomach, but she has learned to endure. The Body's absence has been her reward, if it can be called such. That and the relative silence of the air and walls around her.
The Body does not answer, only kneels at her side. Harrow presses into the cold touch minutely, as much as she can move. Closes her eyes once again. Feels distantly ashamed, but her heart is still racing, breath dragging through her chest. The touch is all that she can bear. Every other input has her itching from her skin, a feral trapped thing clawing at her ribcage, begging to be freed.
Some moments pass, hours, maybe, a vague lurching interstice of time. The panic dies a little, in slow protesting increments. The cold touch fades from her cheek and Harrow feels a child again, small and lost and begging don't leave me.
Footsteps, finally, a soft shuffle on the carpet. They are not the Body's. She glides, almost, leaves occasional soft-frosted indentations. These are heavy like reality, but like reality does not always mean much.
Harrow drags her eyes open, sees battered brown work boots on the carpet. Hears, soft, through the fizzing in her ears: “Harrow? You in here?”
The boots shuffle in place, turning. There's a mumbled, dammit, Nonagesimus, edged with something sharp as panic. One point against this being a hallucination.
Harrow considers motion, reassurance. Feels, even, an urging towards them. Makes it as far as unpeeling dry lips from each other, and finds the words resistant to her tug on them.
She focuses attention on her fingers, raw-bitten fingernails on the roughness of the cheap carpet. She scratches at it, once, twice, the feeling scarcely bearable on tender flesh. But it's enough.
The voice that sounds like Gideon's mumbles, what the fuck, which counts again in favour of this being real. The booted feet shift, joined by knees on the carpet, then a hand, and finally a silhouetted face, peering, faint light catching the absurd orange of her hair.
“Harrow?” Gideon asks. “Shit, are you okay?” A slow breath. She flattens herself better to the floor, wriggles half in under the edge of the bed. “Yeah, right, bad question. Sorry. I would've come back sooner if I knew– I just looked round and you were gone, had to ask the creepy twin where you'd got to and couldn't get it out of her for the longest time. I just mean, I dunno if you want me here, but I'd still've come back. With you. If I knew.”
Harrow exhales. Strangely, shamefully, she finds it easier to breathe.
Gideon wriggles a little closer. “Can I get you anything? Water, meds, headphones? That super heavy blanket? Food? Probably not food. I can go. As well. If you want. Uh.”
Harrow considers this. Discards answers not worth the effort of making. She should, really, summon the words and say yes, go. History's still gnarled between them. Their shared space is born of necessity rather than comfort. And even if things have been changing, even if they might now, unspokenly, be something akin to friends, even if– Harrow does not let people see her like this. Not when she can help it.
To curl into Gideon now, to ask her to stay– the shame of that would be as great as allowing the icy phantom touch. Worse, perhaps, because there is another to witness it, to see her bared here.
And yet Harrow is trying to loosen shame's vice grip on her throat, her upbringing's gifted shackle. And yet she breathes easier, with Gideon here.
She forces words, stiff and stilted, over dry cracked lips. “Stay if you wish.”
The words should be haughty, imperious, as much as anything could be with her curled under a bed against the wall, clutching at herself with thin bare arms. (She does not wear, as a rule, anything that would show them, even with a secondary layer like the hoodie she shed. But daily tasks have weighed heavier and heavier these last weeks, some tangle of pressure and the exhaustion her medication worsens. And asking for help is a shame she has not trained herself to, yet. These are the only clothes she has left clean.)
The words should be distant, should be cold, but they come out small and hoarse and ringing like a plea.
Gideon shuffles till her whole body is under the bed, still a foot or so from Harrow. Rests a careful hand on the carpet between them.
There is a tight claustrophobia to it, the two of them in so little space, Gideon between Harrow and the open air, Harrow and the light. And yet there is a strange comfort in it: Gideon a shield more than prison bars; the space an odd embracing tomb.
Gideon fidgets. “Ianthe sucks,” she mumbles, awkwardly conversational. “I mean, seriously. Ick. The worst. I'll pull her whole ass off if you like.”
“Nav,” Harrow manages. “Be quiet.”
“Sorry,” Gideon says. “Shutting up, but– yeah. I'd kick her down the stairs. If you asked. You know?”
In a weak fleeting moment, Harrow finds motion, reaches out a hand. Aborts its shameful reach halfway, so it lies instead still some inches from Gideon's. Gideon shuffles hers a little closer. Lets their fingers brush. Harrow tries to suppress the spasm her face makes, the awful longing flinch. Doesn't pull her hand away.
“I know,” she whispers.
It's too dark to see, but she thinks that Gideon smiles. Can see it clear in her head, that ridiculous asymmetrical grin of hers.
They lie there a while longer. Harrow's breathing evens. Her muscles unlock. Her skin settles into place.
It gets darker. Sound outside crests and dips and starts to die. And still Gideon stays.
Somewhere in the fog of it, Harrow drifts into sleep. Wakes still lying there, a blanket tucked around her shoulders. Wakes to light hitting the carpet past the shadow of the bed, glancing off a glass of water, her medication, a plate haphazardly stacked with the saltless crackers she can bear to eat.
There's a note tucked under the glass. Harrow drags herself from beneath the bed, fumbles for it with aching fingers, scans the paper. In scrawled handwriting, Feel better, my crepuscular queen. Sorry I had to go, I had class and you seemed fine snoring. Text me if you need me to come back. Text me anyway. Gideon
Harrow rolls her eyes. Fights a losing battle with her smile.