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_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.

[we_do_bones]

"Harrow, what's going on?"

It comes out more plaintive than she knows what to do with, almost hurt; she takes a breath and tries again. "Why does everyone here know who I am before they've even met me? Why did you bring Moiraine Sedai to Canaan House?"

Another question tries to force its way out; she wrestles it into submission and banishes it before the words can even begin to form but it niggles at her brain anyway: Harrow has been kind. Harrow has been forthcoming. Harrow has been a friend.

Just not to her.

[we_bring_hell]

She lets out a long weary breath. Tries to work out what she can say without breaking the timeline. Her head hurts.




"I brought Moiraine Sedai to Canaan House because I thought I broke you, Griddle. She's a healer."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon stares at her, flummoxed.

"She healed me? That's why... that's why I felt fine?"

She doesn't understand any of this, least of all why Harrow would give a shit about her recuperation. "So you get to overreact but I don't? Is that how this goes?"

[we_bring_hell]

"She didn't heal you. Not much. You were fine," she says, dismissively. "You're right, I was overreacting."

"I overreacted by bring you a healer from another dimension; you overreacted by screaming at me in a library. Do you see how those things are different, Griddle?" she snaps.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon stares at her, mouth tightening, but it's too much: she reaches for her sunglasses and slides them back on, twitching them up her nose. Her insides feel like a mess, all goopy and squirming and upset. It feels like Harrow stabbed her with Naberius Tern's trifold knife; it feels like she's back on the Ninth getting dressed down by Aiglamene.

"You made me your cav," she says slowly. "I didn't choose this. You make me paint my face, you didn't let me talk, you order me around with notes and apparently you've been talking about me to anyone here who will listen! I am trying, Harrow. I'm trying! But if you want me to stop, just say the word. I'll be happy to leave you right the fuck alone."

[we_bring_hell]

"When I release you from my service, Nav," she snarls, "you will know."


She looks stricken, and her hand flies to her mouth, but the words are out. Full circle. Her head spins.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon doesn't understand why Harrow looks the way she does right now, but she can't bring herself to care: she throws her hands up so she can keep from throttling her necromancer. "Then I guess I'll look for another note!" she yells, pissed off and hurting and fearful of something she can't define.

"I can't believe I thought...for even a second! That you might have my back."

You did good.

"You don't want me here? Fuck! I don't want to be here! I could be doing something useful with my time, like looking for Protesilaus the Seventh!"

[we_bring_hell]

Then Harrow does something completed unexpected; she vomits into a trash can.

[we_do_bones]

"...Shit."

Gideon is at her side before she knows how she got there. "Harrow, c'mon. Let me –"

Even with their fight still ringing in the air, Gideon can't help herself. "Just let me help."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrowhark crumples against her cavalier, eyes full of tears, her body ringing with shame from her loss of control.

Fidelity! Fidelity! echoes through her brain; not something she ever heard, but a nightmare in the tremulous tones of Gideon's voice.

"It's just me," she says incoherently. "It's just me, Griddle."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon has only been this close to her necromancer once before, and she's amazed and startled and a little unsettled by how light she is, like a collection of fragile feathers brushing against Gideon's shoulder. She burns like the heart of Dominicus itself, and Gideon does the unthinkable once again: she puts her arms around her adept, eases them both to the floor, lets Harrow rest against her like she's a sturdy piece of furniture.

"It's okay," she says bracingly. "You're – you're okay." Harrow's breath and the trash bin both smell awful, but Gideon doesn't move. "Hey, Harrow. C'mon, yell at me. That always cheers you up."

[we_bring_hell]

"I can't do this," she whispers. "I can't, I can't, I can't."

Deep, shuddering breaths. God of the Nine Houses, Gideon's bicep is the size of her head, firm and strong, not the mealy meat of the ancient almost-dead of Drearburh. Harrow lets herself, in this moment of weakness and rejection of duty, pillow her head there.

[we_do_bones]

"You're not supposed to do it alone," says Gideon, and her voice now is as low as if they were in chapel and Gideon were the sort of person who cared about that kind of thing.

"Idiot. That's the whole point of having a cavalier."

[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."