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_do_bones]

"Who knows?" Gideon wonders. "Try ordering me to do something stupid and see."

[we_bring_hell]

"Hm... fetch me a flower from the greenhouse, then," she says. "No roses."

[we_do_bones]

"Is that a...right away kind of order," she asks, more to tease than to stall for time. "Or a sometime this week, put it on your to-do list kind of thing?"

[we_bring_hell]

"My orders are never sometime-this-week tasks, Griddle," she says imperiously, a spark of mischief dancing in the dark wells of her eyes.

What could more romantic stupid than going out in the dark of night to search for a flower for your Stygian sovereign?

[we_do_bones]

She straightens and salutes. "At once, my shadowy sorceress." And she turns on her heel as crisply as any Cohort recruit to shove her way out of the crowd.

Outside, she takes a deep breath. The crisp air is cool and refreshing, and it's a nice break to be in the quiet grounds surrounding the Bar rather than in the middle of the crush inside. She takes her time, and saunters into the greenhouse with her hands in her pockets, looking around.

At first she thinks it'll be next to impossible to find a flower that isn't a rose – the small glass building is filled to the brim with them. Many are growing wild; it seems whoever first brought them has left, and no one has come along to continue their work.

She walks around, looking critically at each bloom before considering or rejecting it. She finds a large white blossom (the label names it Lilium_candidum, Madonna lily) with long graceful petals and stamens sticking out like tongues; its fragrance is faintly funereal and she thinks that will please Harrow, so she plucks one long stem and turns to leave, only to be arrested by a small patch of sweet-smelling purple flowers.

After a moment's hesitation, she plucks one of these as well and makes her way back to the Bar.

Inside, it seems louder and more crowded than ever; she makes her way through the crush back to Harrow and bows with exaggerated manners, offering the lily for her to hold.

"For you," she says, and then straightens to gently tuck the violet behind Harrow's ear, and smile at the effect. "That one's for me."

[we_bring_hell]

She freezes completely for the first few seconds, then tucks the white flower into the button hole of her lapel. She adjusts it to the perfect tilt, then very, very delicately reaches her fingers up to touch the little purple flower.

"Griddle," she says, her voice uneven.

Inhale. Exhale.

"You are certainly a good girl."

[we_do_bones]

"Told you," she says, smug.

[we_bring_hell]

She thinks for a moment, then transfers the white flower from her own lapel to Gideon's, tugging her cavalier closer.

"That's better," she says breathlessly, smoothing down Gideon's suit. It's not especially subtle.

[we_do_bones]

It's funny: the lily matches Harrow's costume, and the violet matches Gideon's, and they're each wearing the other's flower.

Maybe it's not all that strange, actually.

Harrow's hands are warm even through the fabric of this suit, and Gideon's crooked smile is going absolutely nowhere. "Any more errands, Reverend Daughter?"

[we_bring_hell]

With Harrow on a stool, and Gideon standing there, they're almost at the same height.

She draws the other girl closer and kisses her, slow and searching. "I release you to use your own initiative," she whispers, from close up.

[we_do_bones]

"Finally," she says, and slides her arms around her adept to grin into another kiss. It's a good thing this blue skin isn't paint, or it would seriously mess up Harrow's look; as it is, her necromancer escapes relatively unscathed but for a slight smearing about her mouth.

"Remember," she murmurs, almost directly into Harrow's mouth, "when you told me I wasn't allowed to do that in public here, or at all? So did you like, rescind that order, or...?"

[we_bring_hell]

"Oh no," she whispers. "I have been debauched."

In truth, she's anxious about being in public... but who is going to judge her? And who is even going to know? They're in disguise, and only four or five people here even know them by name.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon nudges their foreheads together and winks at her before pulling away again. "Does this mean other rules can be negotiated?" she wonders aloud, idly twining their hands together.

"Those mudslides that Ingress is always drinking look really good."

[we_bring_hell]

"It is customary in a negotiation that both sides receive benefit," she hums. "What do you offer in return for me in allowing you to poison yourself with intoxicants?"

[we_do_bones]

"Uhh..."

There must be something she's currently withholding that Harrow wants, right?

"Amusing stories of me making an idiot of myself?" she hazards. "The satisfaction of allowing me to satisfy my curiosity?"

Of course, there is one thing that might work. She eyes Harrow consideringly. "You want to figure out what makes me so unkillable, right? Shouldn't you find multiple ways to stress my system, as an experiment?"

[we_bring_hell]

That shutters the good humor in Harrow's face. "I will not be poisoning you for any experiments, Griddle."

"Does it trouble you that I give you orders, truly? It is one reason why cavalier-adept relationships are... fraught."

[we_do_bones]

"What? No. I'm kidding, mostly."

She would like to see what drunk feels like, but she's not exactly clamoring to lose her focus and ability to fight, so it's all fine.

(And she did, uh...accidentally have some of Ingress' mudslide already.)

"You're the brains of this operation, I'm just the muscle. I'm comfortable with that."

[we_bring_hell]

"You are my heart," Harrow murmurs. "And if you truly wish to drink or forgo your paint while we are here, I will not begrudge you."

"Only it is not the standard I would expect of Ortus, or another cavalier I did not love."

[we_do_bones]

"Oof," says Gideon, now feeling extremely guilty about her little joke. Not up to the standard of Ortus? That hurts.

"Harrow, I'm not planning on taking advantage of your feelings for me," she says, which is still and extremely weird thing to be saying. Harrow loving her is great, amazing, wonderful, but still only a drop in the bucket of their long acquaintance. She reaches to tuck the violet a little more securely behind Harrow's ear. "I know how you want me to look and behave, and I'm not gonna just throw all that in your face. It may not mean anything to me, but it means a lot to you. And that's all that I need to know."

[we_bring_hell]

"I am trying to 'loosen up'," she says quietly. "I do not wish to be a tyrant."

[we_do_bones]

"You are plenty loose," she says, encouragingly. "You're wearing a costume! You let me put a flower – a purple flower – behind your ear! You kissed me in public! Let's not get ahead of ourselves, Reverend Daughter."

She leans to kiss, not Harrow's mouth, but her cheek, softly, like a knight greeting her maiden. "Would I love you if you were a tyrant, fool?" she asks, so that only Harrow can hear. "Does that seem like a Gideon Nav thing to do?"

[we_bring_hell]

"I like my flower," she murmurs, just for Gideon's ears, and squeezes her hand.

[we_do_bones]

The thing is, Harrow is a tyrant, and Gideon honestly prefers it that way. She doesn't need to make the decisions, she just wants to be involved if they're going to allow grievous harm to Harrow's body, or her own. She's not sure what she would do if Harrow suddenly started acting like...not Harrow.

Since that night in the lake, and even more so since they returned from the Ninth, Gideon has sometimes looked over at her adept to see Harrow watching her with a hunted expression like she has just been handed a precious egg for safe-keeping and is surrounded by egg-hunting snakes.

But it's fine. It honestly is. If Harrow could have scared her away from Harrow, she would have had to manage it a long time ago.

Gideon's gaze travels to the flower and back to Harrow's face, and she smiles in satisfaction. "You look pretty," she says, honestly.

[we_bring_hell]

The thing about egg-hunting snakes is that if Harrow finds one she is going to twist its head three hundred and sixty degrees and nail it up as an example to the others. The thing is, increasingly she realizes she needs to worry about cracking the egg herself, from holding it too tight or getting distracted and being careless.

The thing is, Harrow's most hateful enemy has always been Harrowhark Nonagesimus. And in Gideon she has, perhaps, an ally against that tyrant at last.

"I don't know what I think about the stitches," she says, with an light in her eyes that gives the lie to every word she says. "It makes me imagine a world where flesh wizards used facepaint instead of us."

[we_do_bones]

"The stitches? Not the blue skin?"

She holds up a forearm and rolls up her sleeve; indeed, it goes all the way up. She arches her eyebrows, deeply skeptical. "I look like I just died of hypothermia."