Night Comes To Tallahassee

[we_bring_hell]

The Bar does her best to mother the underage patrons of the Bar, nudging them gently towards self-care and withholding harmful things, but she is not omniscient. She couldn't have known not to give Harrowhark Nonagesimus pushpins and index cards and colorful string.

Harrow has secured a small sideroom in the library, the equivalent of a grad student cubicle, and something awful is taking shape there; the crazy conspiracist murder board equivalent of the bone construct lurking in the depths of Canaan House. There is color-coding. There are crossreferences. There are Tarot cards mixed in. There's a map of Canaan House. There are accidental yarn pentagrams that have somehow not yet summoned the soul of Pepe Silvia.

Harrowhark is dressed way down, and yet somehow at her most feral and goblin-like, sockfooted and gloveless in soft pants and black hoodie, as she shifts the cards around and examines new configurations. Ever so often she refers to her journal. She is humming something under her breath.

Comments

[lightamidchaos]

It is the humming that draws his attention, soft though it may be.

Wei Ying is downstairs seeking additional medicine from Ford-daifu -- and, he suspects, expressing additional thanks for her help. For his own part, Lan Wangji had decided to seek out the library he has been told of to see if it holds any music that might be appropriate for guqin or dizi, or preferably both.

(He is moving a little stiffly as yet, which increases his determination to make his next stop the lake shore, to practice sword forms and test his flexibility. Music comes first, however.)

Not wishing to intrude, he glances only briefly into the small space to see who the musician might be - and stops in surprise at the sight that greets him.

"Harrow?"

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow's eyes widen, and she sets down the card in her hand very carefully on the table.

"Today is a day for shocking entrances, I see," she says; she is not as flabbergasted as she was when Gideon surprised her, but she's definitely surprised, and pleased.

[lightamidchaos]

"Wei Ying mentioned my absence," he realizes. Of course he would have, and Lan Wangji is glad that he had someone to speak with, given how worried he now knows that he had been.

"I am sorry to have ... shocked you. It was unintentional."

He glances over the collection of cards and string and papers with some bemusement, then looks back at Harrow.

"Entrances?"

[we_bring_hell]

"He did indeed," Harrow says, with profound understatement. "And I noted it as well."

"You have seen him, I presume? Before coming here."

[lightamidchaos]

"Yes."

His ears flush light pink with the single word, and something about his expression softens.

"He was downstairs when I arrived."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow grew up on a planet where most people's faces were covered with paint; she can read an ear like a book. Her smile deepens, just briefly. "Yes, I believe there was a matter he desired to discuss with you, unless I am mistaken."

[lightamidchaos]

"More than one."

The look he gives Harrow is a little quizzical, then shades to a dawning awareness.

"You did not--"

[we_bring_hell]

"I knew all," she says. Smugly, I'm sorry to say. "You both spoke plainly to me instead of each other, and of course I was forbidden as a matter of honor to simply lock you both in a room. And then you disappeared."

"But you have returned, and unless I miss my guess, felicitations are in order?"

[lightamidchaos]

"I apologize for disappearing. I did not intend to."

He is still eyeing her a little closely, at first, but then lets out a slight breath and nods.

"If the cave did not make matters clear, a room would not have," he tells her, and his tone as he says that is dry as dust. "But yes."

He cannot prevent the small, warm smile from appearing, and in truth he does not even try.

"Wei Ying loves me, and I him. We understand each other clearly now."

[we_bring_hell]

"Then it is very well," she says, both pleased and, as always, embarrassed by any kind of real human intimacy.

She gestures at a chair which is only mildly heaped with papers and cards.

"But you are injured. Should you sit?"

[lightamidchaos]

"Very well indeed."

He does not wish to show weakness, but glances at the chair all the same before looking back to Harrow.

"Is it so obvious?"

He will definitely have to do additional recovery work, if so.

"Do not worry. I am all right."

It is very possible that Harrow will recognize the tenor of this particular 'all right' as rooted more in stubbornness than anything else.

[we_bring_hell]

"Only to one who senses the life and death energies within your body," she says calmly. "And who was expecting it."

"Accident, or penance?"

[lightamidchaos]

"Penance implies regret for the action that required it."

There is something very carefully level about his observation - and not a hint of regret.

"Punishment. Or discipline, if you prefer."

[we_do_bones]

There was a distinct lack of Harrow when Gideon burst into Room 99 after leaving Ingress and taking the stairs two at a time. Her adept wasn't in the main room, wasn't in the bathroom, and apparently had not been shoved under either bed or into the wardrobe, and in fact there was no sign of her at all except for a note which Gideon read before impotently bellowing: "Harrow!" into the empty room.

The note crumpled in her palm, she considers her options:

1. Go find Harrow now, face paint and shower be damned, so as to take full advantage of this wave of mixed aggravation and fear, or:
2. Do as the note commands, because Harrow might be more likely to listen if Gideon had clearly followed her orders first.

She sniffs delicately at the pit of her shirt and recoils; fine.

Fifteen minutes later, freshly washed and painted and wearing some slim-cut black pants of some kind of thick, stretchy material (she'd tried the jeans Bar had provided in her size, but was dissatisfied in their range of motion) and the first t-shirt that she could find, Gideon the Ninth slams her way into the library and yells:

"Honey, I'm home!"

[we_bring_hell]

Something humanoid but gangling and covered in red hair rouses itself from a nap on a table and hoots, "OOK!" angrily. At the same time, a door into a small room off of the main room bursts open and Harrow hisses, "Griddle!"

[we_do_bones]

Gideon slips off her dark glasses and tucks them into the breast pocket of her new shirt with the effect of having the printed-on skeleton look like it's holding onto them for her, and grins without humor at Harrowhark. She'd worried that the shower and painting and having a few moments to think might dull her aggravation, but nope! Just looking at Harrow is making her blood pressure skyrocket.

"Did you miss me, my sweet?" she asks, a few registers louder than normal, and saunters over with a faint jingle of hardware from the rapier slung at her hip, only to stop at the sight of the... whatever it is Harrow's doing.

"Oh, okay. So you've gone crazy crazy."

[we_bring_hell]

Several of the tarot cards have Xes drawn over them in what it would be really great to imagine was red marker. Yarn in ten colors sprawls out across the desk, and Harrow's grisly leather-bound journal is open.

"I am studying," she hisses, jerking shut the door into the main library before the angry ape can fully rouse himself from the desk. "You hooting baboon!"

Her face is burning.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon studies the pins, the yarn, the notes and X's in definitely-not-red-marker. "Is that what this is? Studying? Because it looks a lot more like a hurtling descent into madness."

She moves closer, lifts a finger, and twangs one of the strings tugged taut between two color-coded pins she can't parse. "Have you been sleeping at all since you got here?"

[we_bring_hell]

"Yes, Griddle," she says wearily.

The string is white and runs between a steel pin and a grey one, stabbed through the middle of the Heirophant and The Hanged Man. They have also accumulated white and black pins.

"I sleep sufficiently. I eat. I even bathe without reminders."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon very deliberately doesn't look at her. She measures out her words like she's reaching some kind of limit on them.

"And you collapse after pushing yourself too hard while playing with bones. So, the same as always, huh?"

[we_bring_hell]

Ah.



"I did not collapse," she says frostily. "I sat down. Abruptly."

"She overreacted, just as you are overreacting. I was fine."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon rounds on her. "That's called collapsing, you absolute tool," she says, her volume rising steadily. "Don't hide behind semantics, Nonagesimus – you went somewhere you didn't know anything about, with someone who had no idea what can happen to you when... and I'm overreacting?"

She's shouting now, and she's afraid she won't be able to stop. Her hands have balled into fists at her sides, hard enough she can feel her stubby nails pressing into her palms.

"You're being careless! How the fuck am I supposed to protect you when you're wandering around another world, Harrow?"

[we_bring_hell]

"You weren't supposed to protect me," she says hotly. "I had someone to protect me. You were supposed to be in an entirely different universe."

"You can't just show up and audit everything I did before you came here, Griddle. Not when you--" She bites her tongue, quite literally; the taste of blood grounds her.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon has no idea why that –

I had someone to protect me

– hits the way it does, but it feels like getting kicked in the stomach by Protesilaus the Seventh. "When I what," she says, and she's not shouting now; her voice is low and dangerous.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow's eyes widen dangerously; terrified and furious. She whirls away, facing the wall. "This is unsupportable," she mutters to herself.