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[we_bring_hell]

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.

Comments

[we_do_bones]

"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.

[we_bring_hell]

"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.

[we_do_bones]

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."

[we_bring_hell]

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

[we_do_bones]

"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."

[we_bring_hell]

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.

[we_do_bones]

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."

[we_bring_hell]

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."

[we_do_bones]

"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."

[we_bring_hell]

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?"

[we_do_bones]

"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?

[we_bring_hell]

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.

[we_do_bones]

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

[we_bring_hell]

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

"Of course," she says.

[we_do_bones]

She looks at Harrow a little more closely.

"Why?"

[we_bring_hell]

"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?

[we_do_bones]

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."

[we_bring_hell]

"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.

[we_do_bones]

"Is that something I should have been worried about?" she says, astonished. She feels certain that she's missed something, maybe something important, but has no idea what it might be.

[we_bring_hell]

"No," she says. "But I have never given you assurances in that direction."

"This is absolute nonsense," she says dismayed. "I have no idea what I'm talking about any longer."

"I believe Lady Ingress was struggling to understand the... nature of our relationship, whether it was friendship or chivalric or sororal, or, or," She has climbed all the way up to the top of the diving board, looked down into the shimmering waters of the word 'romantic,' and is now trying to figure out if she can climb down.



"--otherwise."

[we_do_bones]

That otherwise is like a landmine between them; Gideon stares at Harrow and thinks she sees the reflection of her own panic there under the layers of paint, and is that color she sees? Has she lost her mind? Is Harrow trying to look extra nice, and if so, why?

"Uh," she says, eloquently. It's just as well that she has no words, because her heart is in her fucking throat and she's pretty sure she's about to choke to death on it and then it'll be a moot point! And Harrow can have her bones just like she always planned.

She wants to run and she wants to move towards Harrow and that otherwise is lying there, just waiting to trip her whichever way she goes. There's a flush building into her cheeks, and she doesn't even have her sunglasses to hide behind, and Harrow – Harrow –

...She has never made Harrow look at her the way Harrow looked when she talked about that freezer-burnt dead girlfriend of hers. "I'm your sworn sword," she says, finally. "You're my necro. Everything else... whatever people want to think... it's just noise, Harrow. It's just words. We don't need them. It's always been you and me."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow's shoulders stop their slow progression into her scarlet ears, and breathing becomes easier.

"That is what I said," she says. "That you are my cavalier, and that you are the most important person in my life. That I cannot imagine how you could ever not be. But that we are not... that I could never be..."

She exhales.

[we_do_bones]

There are absolutely no words. Zero! – that can accurately describe Gideon's feelings towards her adept. She doesn't even know how to begin to try to find one, let alone a whole sentence full of them. At the same time, they seem to be hurtling towards some cliff she hadn't been aware they were even standing near only a few minutes ago, and she is extremely worried that she may have just drop-kicked them both off it.

"You're my adept," she says, firmly, because I could never be shouldn't ever apply to Harrow, unless it's I could never be as funny as you, Gideon. She's not sure what she should be saying; she's only sure she should head whatever this is off at the pass. "You're everything I need you to be and more. And I –"

I've spent my life breaking myself on the rocks just to get your attention seems wrong, so she doesn't say it. "I'm better when you're there. We both are. We... I don't know! I'm not good with words, Harrow. I just want to be with you. I want you to want me with you."

[we_bring_hell]

She smiles; the heart-bursting terrifying warmth she woke up with today is back, and it scatters her confusion like ashes.

"It's all right, Griddle. It's all right. You were right. It's just noise."

She puts her hand on Gideon's arm. Squeezes it, and runs the eyes of her necromantic senses over her bones, the thanergetic reservoirs and the busy cells producing marrow and white blood cells and at the ends still busily pushing back the frontier; she's not even done growing. Good God!

Every one of us has a skeleton, and yours is mine, she thinks, with dreamy satisfaction. "Never mind any of it."

[we_do_bones]

That smile of hers is absolutely heartbreaking; Gideon would swallow her own tongue before she said anything that would wreck that beautiful curve. She huffs a relieved breath, dimly aware of having barely avoided running face-first into this thing that is suddenly lurking in the room with them, just as big and just as terrifying as the thing in the bowels of Canaan House.

But it doesn't matter. It's just noise.

"I know that look. Stop lusting over my bones, you freak, I'm not dead yet."