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

[we_bring_hell]

She swallows and nods.

She needs her cavalier. She needs them to be from the same point in time, with no lies between them. She needs it like she needs air.

"Gideon," she says. "I must trespass on your trust a little longer."

"Will you hand me my journal? It's on the desk."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon shifts, weirdly reluctant to move too far from her necromancer, and stretches until the tips of her fingers brush up against Harrow's horrible leather-bound journal. A brief scuffle later, she has it in hand and gives it to her adept, trying not to think too hard about a. why they're sitting here on the floor, curled together; and b. that fact that apparently she is willing to trust Harrow. At least a little.

[we_bring_hell]

While Gideon does that, she waves her hand at the garbage can and the refuse rapidly decays to ash. She takes the journal and scribbles a note, face set in familiar hard lines of Nonagesimus determination.

"I must go back," she says. "You may come when you are ready. We are not synchronized, Gideon. I lied to you."

She waits for the protest while she tears the sheet of flimsy out and folds it over itself.

[we_do_bones]

Harrowhark Nonagesimus lying to her and writing something mysterious should not feel like the only breath of normalcy in this increasingly weird day, but apparently Gideon depends on it the same way she does on gravity.

At the same time, Harrow called her Gideon for the second time ever. Gideon wonders, a little wildly, if she's dying again.

"What happens if we go through together?" she wants to know. "You'll end up in one time and I'll end up in another? Or would it get... mixed up somehow?"

[we_bring_hell]

"I have no idea," she says. "Shut up." She shoves the note at Gideon. "Don't read it yet."

Intent, her black eyes burn, meeting Gideon's amber ones.

Like a trashcan fire in a prison cell
Like the searchlights in the parking lots of hell

"I will fail you, Nav. You will lose trust in me. You will think me capable of anything to become a Lyctor. And I cannot tell you are wrong. I cannot tell you anything. But when the time comes I will ask you to come here with me again. And if you doubt me--as you surely will--read this. Do you understand?"

[we_do_bones]

Gideon takes the paper more by instinct than by intent, but she doesn't look down at it, even though everything in her chest and head is screaming at her.

She can't trust Harrow. Harrow's promises mean nothing. Gideon had told Wei Wuxian just earlier that Harrow would do anything, anything at all, that nothing was past her. And Gideon is a farce of a cavalier, a whipping girl dragged up to prominence because she was the only one left who could handle a sword.





She pockets the paper anyway and nods. "Yeah."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrowhawk exhales; wipes tears from here eyes, smearing her makeup irretrievably. Wasn't that how she entered, she thinks? In tears and ruins. She shoves herself shakily to her feet.

"Come. I have to lock this. And change clothing. And then I will return."

"You may follow in your own time. It will all be the same to me. You are the one with the wait ahead of you." Wait. Weight. Whatever.

[we_do_bones]

"Harrow, wait."

She could swear her brain didn't give her hand any kind of order, but she's already reaching for Harrow's face before she knows it. Gideon's hand, calloused and strong, isn't used to being gentle, but she tries anyway as she wipes her thumb over the smudge of makeup just under Harrow's eye, cleaning it up as much as she can.

It doesn't really help. She steps back, feeling jittery and anxious and like she would really prefer to just be attacked by someone with swords instead of hands so she no longer has time to think about what she's doing. "Okay."

She slips her dark glasses on, and waits for Harrow to go first. "Lead the way."

[we_bring_hell]

She sets her jaw and nods.

It's happening. At last, it's finally happening.

They step out of the cubicle and Harrow locks it behind her, inserting a tiny shard of bone into the keyhole that expands on the other side into a ward that will hold the door against a horde. Then she stalks down the hallways to room 99.

Still moving with determination and fervor, she heads for the closet, unzipping and tossing aside the hoodie; revealing the parchment-pale skin of her back and the knobs of her spine like a ladder from coccyx to the base of her skull. She doesn't look back at Gideon at all.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon turns her eyes away and goes to where she'd tossed her own clothes onto the bed she hasn't used and strips to her bandeau, feeling unaccountably and wildly nervous as she silently slips back into the trousers, shirt, and robe she was wearing when she first arrived.

Gideon isn't willing to wait, whatever Harrow might say about taking her time.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow turns back from the closet, dressed in her habit and rusty, ancient robe. She puts her journal into the pockets and looks around the room; but none of the rest of this can come with her.

She toes on her old, shitty boots, eyes the shiny spikes of her new ones with regret.

"Ready, Nav?" she asks.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon twitches her sunglasses back up her nose. Her hair has finally finished drying, and it sticks up like a ludicrous flame burning down a black candle.

"I was born ready, bitch," she says. "Let's go."

[we_bring_hell]

A grin twitches for just a second over Harrow's badly-painted face. Just a flash.

"All right."

She sweeps down the stairs as only the Reverend Daughter can sweep, in the arrogant confidence her cavalier is on her wings.

[we_do_bones]

She is.

Half a step behind. At her shoulder. Exactly where she's supposed to be.

[we_bring_hell]

She faces the door. On the other side of that door, Camilla Hect is waiting for her with handcuffs. So is a Gideon who has seen the Fourth die, screamed all night with nightmares, threatened to desert Harrow to serve another.

So is the head of Protosilaus the Seventh.

"Farewell, Gideon Nav. I'm sorry."

Always one to get the last word, Harrow darts through the door.

[we_do_bones]

"Harrow!" yells Gideon, breaking her silence with deep annoyance.

But the door has already swung shut, and when Gideon opens it again, Harrow is nowhere to be seen.

What she does see is Isaac Tettares braiding Jeannemary the Fourth's hair up out of her face as they mutter to each other. They look up as Gideon steps through the door, but don't seem to notice anything: Gideon glances over her shoulder and only sees the doorway to the eating-atrium. There's Harrowhark, with Palamedes and Camilla the Sixth, just like Gideon remembers.

"Have you two been paired a very long time?" asks Jeannemary's small voice, and Gideon looks at her in surprise as Isaac moans in embarrassment.

"It feels like forever," she says honestly, and slips her glasses on, feeling instantly better. "Come on. Let's go."