This is Halloween!

[we_bring_hell]

The Bar loves her holidays, but she is also capable of respecting religious strictures. That's why she put a lot of thought into finding a Halloween costume for Harrow that works with her face paint and general insistence on the monochromatic.

Harrow, for her part, is baffled by the white-pinstriped black suit and the oversized bow, but the gloves are very cool, and the buckled shoes suit as well. She has no idea what's going on but she can live with this.

The Bar seems even more unusually populated than usual, and there are a lot of gourds around. Hm.

Comments

[we_bring_hell]

Gideon will always, always win at intimacy chicken. Harrow looks away and colors vividly, even under the paint, and pushes against Gideon's shoulder. Not very effectively, it must be said.

"You know I have not." She clears her throat. "If I find a subject worth studying, you know I will persist until I attain mastery."

[we_do_bones]

"You're definitely getting there," says Gideon, smirking in a way that probably means she deserves to get punted back into the lake again.

But oh noooooooo, she's not anywhere near it!

She does at least offer Harrow a reprieve by straightening and relaxing with her elbows back on the Bar. "I was talking with Ingress about how she grew up here the other day," she says, manfully refraining from mentioning that the conversation had grown out of Gideon being dramatically sad because she'd upset Harrow. "I can't even imagine. Look at this! I bet the Fifth is into this kind of stuff. I feel like Magnus would have loved this party."

[we_bring_hell]

She just colors further; Harrow is a teacher's pet at heart, and lives for good grades.

"You are not wrong. The Fifth and Third. Tradition and hospitality; decadence and social maneuvering." She waits a beat, and then says: "You might have had the chance, if I had been less bloody-minded seven years ago. But I might have had to marry Ianthe Tridentarius."

[we_do_bones]

"Ugh!" says Gideon, disgusted beyond restraint. "That tall glass of crazy? Harrow, no. Go for Corona, she is way hotter."

She doe not say that seven years ago Harrow would have delighted in keeping Gideon locked away on the Ninth, no matter what new people or riches might have arrived or new opportunities been offered by the Third or Fifth.

[we_bring_hell]

"I don't think you're given freedom of choice in such political marriages, Griddle," she says with a grim smile. "Indeed, one of the Tridentarii might be aiming high for the birthright of Drearburh, given the conceit that they are co-heirs; it would probably be some cousin or other."

[we_do_bones]

"Good thing you're going to be a Lyctor, then."

This is something she hasn't let herself think about, and she's not going to start now, just skirts the big empty pit in the center of that topic and pretends it isn't there. "You never hear about them getting married. You'll restore the Ninth all on your own."

[we_bring_hell]

"Perhaps they did, ten thousand years ago," she says softly. "So much is lost."

[we_do_bones]

"Someone must know." Gideon pulls out a barstool, finally, and sits beside Harrow with her elbows on her thighs and her fingers loosely clasped between her knees.

"I bet Abigail did. It's got to be written somewhere, right? I mean, we know who the first Lyctors were. Are. Don't we?"

Not her, obviously. But the nerds must.

[we_bring_hell]

"Abigail Pent did," she agrees. "I have wondered if it is related to her death."

"We know very little. I assume each House knows the name of their own Lyctor and cavalier, as we know Anastasia the First and Samael the Ninth. A few other names are spoken of--but it appears the Lyctors bear new names after ascension, virtue-names given by the Emperor."

"I remember hearing, much against my will at the time, that Matthias Nonius dueled against the saint named for Duty at one time."

"There was once a history of those days written by Anastasia. But it was destroyed or lost four thousand years ago. We searched for a copy desperately before I left, but it is gone."

[we_do_bones]

Not for the first time, Gideon feels a pang of loss for Abigail and her kind-eyed husband, and shakes her head. "Maybe," she says. "What else could it be? It's not like Abigail and Magnus were stirring up trouble or posing a threat. They made us dinner and tried to help us all get along. There was dessert. It was nice."

She realizes, abruptly, that there are tears in her eyes, and blinks them angrily away.

"They didn't deserve what they got."

[we_bring_hell]

"No," she says. "They did not." She reaches out a hand for her cavalier. "But it seems only those who did not have died, have you noticed that? People who have made no effort to solve the mysteries."

"If it is a pattern--then the Second should be next. But perhaps it is not a pattern at all."

[we_do_bones]

"I haven't noticed any foot-high letters in blood saying Death to the Second House yet, at least," she says, glum.

She's in danger of spiraling straight back down into that grim place she lived in the night Isaac and Jeannemary died, but she can't help it: as impossible and amazing as these last few days have been, it has hardly been a week for her since they were murdered so viciously.

She still has nightmares about it.

[we_bring_hell]

(Go back to sleep. It's just me.)

"Gideon," she says quietly. "I am here."

No one knows better than Harrow how trauma can make time go soft. There's nothing she knows but to follow Gideon down; to be what the Lady of the Tomb was to her.

[we_do_bones]

She turns her head to the side and gives Harrow a small, tight, sad smile.

"I'm just gonna feel bad about it forever, I guess," she says, with forced lightness. "Someone should, anyway, and it's probably not gonna be whoever murdered them."

[we_bring_hell]

"Who am I to tell you not to?" Harrow says helplessly. "There is nowhere to lay down our griefs outside the grave. But I will be here."

"And when we find out who it was, they will be very sorry indeed, Griddle," she swears.

[we_do_bones]

I'm not going to let it fucking touch you.

She feels bad when she wakes Harrow up in the middle of the night, sweating and panting from a dream where Harrow is splattered on the cold cement floor of the facility below Canaan House, or where Camilla the Sixth is skewered by dozens of horrible whips of molars.

Harrow has not minded, only coaxed her back to sleep, and Gideon owes her for that as much as anything else. Her smile is still tight at the corners, but her eyes are fierce even if they're also a little misty as she nods. "We are going to ruin their whole fucking life," she agrees.

"You could take that construct apart blindfolded with one hand behind your back."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow has her own fears about the future, but she has not seen the bone construct that terrifies Gideon. And there's really only one dream she has anymore.

(I dreamt that I was perched atop a throne of human skulls
On a cliff above the ocean, howling wind and shrieking seagulls)

"We are the greatest necromancer the Ninth has ever produced, and the greatest cavalier," she says, as much a declaration of intent as a statement of ego. "I do not fear."

[we_do_bones]

"Pretty sure Nonius was better than me," Gideon says, with a passable attempt at her usual lopsided grin. "And according to Aiglamene I haven't done a single thing right in my whole benighted life.

"But Nonius didn't have you, so I guess we can call it even."

[we_bring_hell]

"Fuck Nonius," says Harrow dangerously. No one is allowed to wreck Gideon's smug shit-eating grin but her.

(Somewhere, the ghost of Ortus Ninegad shrieks into the void.)

[we_do_bones]

That brings the grin back out in full delighted force. "Reverend Daughter, if your flock could hear you now," she says, laughing.

[we_bring_hell]

"I have forsaken my vows for you, Gideon Nav," she says, shaking her head. "I have done much that would shock the congregation of Drearburh."

[we_do_bones]

"Yeah, but...how much fun are those vows anyhow?" she says, cheeky. "And Drearburh could use a good shock. Seriously. It'd be good for them, like taking a cold shower."

[we_bring_hell]

She shakes her head. "Oh, Griddle."

"Don't you think the surprises would run both ways? Once they got over the initial shock, they'd be in a terrible haste to make you the new Reverend Mother."

[we_do_bones]

She makes a distressed sound and looks at Harrow with dismay. "I hate everything about that, no. And they would hate it too! Crux would probably commit ritual suicide."

[we_bring_hell]

"Don't worry, Griddle," she says, squeezing her cavalier's knee. "I have no intention of returning to Drearburh. Lyctor or death, for me."