we_bring_hell | (no subject)

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You would need an advanced degree in Nonagesamics to realize that Harrowhark is ecstatically happy this morning, but even the layman can tell that her usual spikes are retracted somewhat. Not the spikes on her boots--Gideon liked these boots, and she has no intention of wearing anything else for a while. But the metaphorical spikes.

Aside from her boots she is back in her standard habit--black trousers, black long-sleeve shirt with the high collar. No gloves. Her hair is freshly cropped back to her scalp. Her face is painted with exceptional care, in what Harrow considers the sexiest pattern, because Harrowhark has opinions about things like that. This one is called The Chain and has considerable, immodest flourishes. She has edged the perimeter of the painted skull with midnight purples and deep blood reds, an even greater departure from propriety.

She is writing in her journal, and since she writes in code there is no way anyone can tell she has doodled One Flesh One End approximately one hundred times. She has been eating oatmeal, and by God she even ate the raisins.

Things are good. For now, for once, things are good.

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Harrow reaches to her ear and drops a phalange, which bounces twice on the wooden floor and then bursts into an unfolding scaffold of bone. The skeleton takes the blade, creaking with the weight.

"It appears that I can," Harrow says serenely.

Edited 2020-10-21 00:15 (UTC)

Ingress is duly impressed.

"Very nice, Harrow. Very nice. Come on, let's go get some bows from Bar, so you can get this gift to her."

Harrow manages to make the word "Bows?" sound like "Genital herpes?" at the suggestion, but follows dutifully, with her skeleton in tow.

-----------------

The door to room 99 unlocks and Harrow enters with her skeleton.

"Griddle, wake up,"

Edited 2020-10-21 00:57 (UTC)

Harrow was correct: Gideon is exhausted in body and soul and she slept like the dead all through the night, curled next to and around her necromancer. She startles awake at Harrow's voice, and sits up, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

"...What? What? Something wrong?"

She blinks blearily in the general direction of the door. Harrow is up and dressed, which isn't unusual, and her face is painted, which, same, but there's something different about her this morning. Gideon squints.

"...is that a new skull?"

"It's The Chain, you've seen it before," Harrow says dismissively, but not without a darkening of her ears and a little flutter that would disgust her if she could see herself.

Your eyes aren't fooling you, Gideon. Those are colors, penciled into the edges.

"I have something for you, wake up." The skeleton groans under the weight of a oblong something wrapped in black. There are, despite Harrow's best attempts to resist, bows.

Harrow's face is completely painted and she's swathed head to toe in black, but to a foundling raised by the black nuns of Drearburh, the faint tint in her ears is like watching fireworks go off.

Gideon grins, asymmetrical and ridiculous. "I like it," she says, simply, just to see if that blush brightens.

But the novelty of Harrow bringing her something – bringing something for her, which, what? soon distracts her. "I'm awake, what do you mean you have something –? Harrow, what is that?"

Because that is the right size and shape for only one thing, and Gideon spares a quick moment of panic that Harrow has at last found the false bottom of her trunk. She gets up and pads, barefoot and rumple-haired, to the skeleton.

Gideon and her crooked smile; Gideon and her ridiculous splash of red hair, like a torch in darkness. She feels like the paint is going to burn off her face.

"It is--a gift," she says, stilted.

"A what?" says Gideon, taken aback. Harrow has never given her a gift. She's reasonably sure no one ever has. "...What for?"

But the shape in the skeleton's arms is calling to her, and she can't help but reach for it.

"A cavalier carries a rapier, by tradition," she says. "It isn't written anywhere that a cavalier carries only a rapier. The right tool for the right job."

Softer: "Besides. We don't need to fool anyone anymore." Because it doesn't matter anymore. Because it's not a con anymore.

The black cloth falls softly to the floor. Beneath it is only the lethal sheen of steel.

Ten thousand years of tradition, Griddle.

I don’t have ten thousand years of tradition, bitch. I have ten years of two-hander training and a minor allergy to face paint. I’m worth so much less to you with pizza face and a toothpick.

Gideon reaches for the longsword like a woman in a dream. The skeleton's joints sigh in relief as she lifts it, hefts its weight.

It isn't her beloved two-hander, but fuck! It'll get the job done. It's wickedly sharp and well cared-for, and she's pretty sure she recognizes it from her trip to the forge.

She looks to Harrow, and back to the sword, and back again, and finally says, stupidly: "I didn't get you anything."

"It's for both of us, Griddle," she says. "One flesh, one end, right?"

"Right, my crepuscular queen," says Gideon, who is beside herself and just letting her mouth talk, like a reflex.

She turns a glowing face to Harrow and shoulders the sword, feeling its weight, looking like an idiot.

"All we need now is a fight."

Crepuscular queen is nice to hear again.

"Lady Ingress thinks I should get you armour too," she says. "Leather is probably a bad idea up if we're up against a necromancer back in Canaan House, but we may have other opportunities."

Assuming Gideon is okay with Harrow having even theoretical power over her clothes.

Edited 2020-10-21 02:39 (UTC)

The sword is a classic two-hander of a slightly different style than her own; it weighs about two and half kilograms and is perfectly balanced between the long straight blade and long simple hilt. It's nothing fancy. It is very clearly meant for one purpose only: to put holes in people. She loves it on sight.

She lays it down on her neglected bed, resting it next to the black rapier and knuckles of the Ninth. It's not Camilla Hect's impressive collection of weapons, but it works for her, and that's all they need.

"I honestly don't know if armor would help," she says. "Unless you're talking sheet metal, and that would slow me down so much it would probably just make things worse. Besides, I've got you." Her smile is crooked and as absolutely simple as the sword now nested on her bed.

"If you can't keep that thing off me, nothing can."

In her heart of blackened hearts, on a layer she doesn't share even with herself, Harrow had hoped that the gift might merit a hug. Now, hearing Gideon's profession of simple faith, she launches herself forward and embraces her cavalier. She is not--remotely--strong enough to lift her off the ground as Gideon once did for her, but she squeezes her fiercely and tightly. With her sharp angles and high body heat, it's a little like being hugged by a radiator.

"Oh Griddle," she says. "You say the nicest things."

"Oof!" says Gideon, who was not expecting to be attacked by a high-velocity Harrowhark, and her abused solar plexus is making her all too aware that she still needs to be able to breathe. But her arms work independently of breath, or thought, apparently, because once she's regained her balance they've wrapped themselves around Harrow's narrow shoulders.

She's just glad Harrow waited until she'd put the sword down; it's probably considered amateurish to accidentally run one's necromancer through with the sword she just gifted.

"Thanks," she adds, because she's pretty sure you should thank someone when they've given you a present, especially if you've never had a present before, especially if the gifter in question would have laughed themselves sick at the idea only a few months before. "You did good."

Edited 2020-10-21 13:58 (UTC)

You did good. She presses the words carefully in a mental scrapbook of victorious moments, then carefully lets go of her cavalier.

"What did you intend to do today?"

"Eat, train. Up the average level of physical attractiveness in any room I happen to inhabit. The usual."

She scrubs a hand through her hair, and thinks. "Maybe see if I can find Wei Wuxian. He was helping me with a...training exercise."

That's close enough, right?

She nods. "I will be in the library, or perhaps outside, if I can find Moiraine Sedai. There was a certain working she had offered to show me that requires space."

"Griddle, do you remember when I used to promise to take your skeleton?"

We all have a skeleton inside of us, and one day, yours will be mine.

She shrugs, rotating one shoulder to loosen it. "Sure. I hated it. I always assumed that was why you said it."

She thinks about the strange, tense conversation with Ingress and flounders in the face of expressing... any of it.

"Of course," she says.

She looks at Harrow a little more closely.

"Why?"

"It struck... someone else... as oddly..." Her face heats up wildly; she feels light-headed. "Affectionate."

Is it possible to get a nosebleed from embarrassing yourself?

Fortunately for Harrow, this isn't an anime.

"...How? Wait, no, never mind, I'm not sure I want you to answer that."

Admittedly, if anyone were going to express affection via laying claim to her skeleton, that person would be Harrow. "Besides, I'm not the type of girl to give someone her skeleton all willy-nilly on the first date."

"Gideon Nav, I formally swear I will not take control of your living skeleton without your consent," she says, with the weird formality and tension that marks Harrow in the grip of some strong and incomprehensible emotion.

Dead skeletons are fair game.