Post-Halloween

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow is working. Very seriously. She is not mooning over her new relationship with Gideon even a little bit; she has too much work to do.

She is, however, wearing a skull with accents of deep, almost black purple, with a starburst or floral pattern just below her temple, that she has never been seen to wear before.

Other than that sentimental embellishment, however, she is entirely focused on Obaeg's Toward a Common Haemographology. She is making copious notes in the margins--courting future simian fury--and thinking that she should have found this for Moiraine before they started working on her weave notation.

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[we_do_bones]

After, Gideon presses kisses to Harrow's flushed face and wraps her arms around her adept again to just hold her safe and close.

"Harrow," she says, quiet, reverent, but she doesn't have any other words; she just holds on, arms firm, eyes closed, her face pressed against Harrow's fresh-shaved scalp.

She's not much for quotation, but Ruth keeps floating in and out of her head: where you go I will go; where you stay I will stay. It's as good as anything else she knows for defining this determination that never leaves or sways.

[we_bring_hell]

Gideon's arms holding her steady; Gideon's breath on the sensitive skin of her scalp. Gideon all around her. This is the opposite of hallucination; this is safe, solid, real.

"Griddle, are you still fully dressed?" she grumbles in a voice very like, indeed, a purr.

[we_do_bones]

"Uh..."

She has to actually look to make sure, because it has honestly completely slipped her mind. "Yep."

[we_bring_hell]

"Disgraceful," she says, stirring. "How dare you." She squirms in Gideon's lap, trying to shift around to a straddle and pry up her shirt.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon releases her, laughing, and submits to being clambered on as though she is a tree or ladder.

"Well, you were busy."

[we_bring_hell]

With absolutely no grace or romance she strips Gideon's shirt and hurls it into a far corner.

"Hmph."

She concludes that there is no way to get Gideon's pants off while sitting in her lap and rolls more fully onto the bed. "Undress for me, please, Griddle," she says, in a fussy, bossy voice that is eminently familiar from less enjoyable errands.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon sketches a sarcastic bow, but stands and does as Harrow bids without wasting time on teasing her further.

Well, not teasing her much. She pauses before climbing back beside Harrow, and does a turn. "Better?"

The Ninth's platitudes about vanity have never really landed for her.

[we_bring_hell]

"Spectacular," she says, rising up on her knees to draw Gideon back to the bed. "Absurd."

"I could use you to teach anatomy. I am going to devour you, Gideon Nav."

It isn't quite pillow talk; she is talking like Harrow, just a slightly unhinged Harrow, a type of Harrow Gideon has seen before. Harrow drunk on some unheard of necromantic accomplishment, except the the accomplishment is having Gideon, here, glorious and naked.

[we_do_bones]

"You could, except your head would explode with jealousy when all your students see me naked."

Said as she swarms right into Harrow's arms, pressing kisses to Harrow's mouth and not being able to find a reason to stop grinning in response to it all. "On second thought, forget it. You should give me an anatomy lesson. Right...now."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow is not strong enough to impel Gideon backwards, but she presses gently until her cavalier is recumbent, straddling her stomach. She leans down in a long sweet kiss, then scoots backwards, hitching up the shoulder of her gauzy nightgown.

She runs her hard-bitten nail along the the tendons of Gideon's neck, tracing over the yellowing bruise left by her teeth. "Sternocleidomastoid," she enunciates with relish. "Because it connect your sternum--" She trails fingers down Gideon's sternum, between the other woman's breasts to slip under the skirt of her nightgown---then back, following the muscle up to her cavalier's jaw, hooking over the mandible and pressing her fingers between her lips. "--to your mandible."

[we_do_bones]

Something about the way Harrow relishes this loving dissection of the disparate parts that make up one golden-eyed cavalier make this whole scenario a lot hotter than it has any right to be. That, and the personal bias Gideon fully acknowledges is washing all of it with hormones so thick that it almost seems downright romantic.

Harrow is practical. She's fascinated by the ways the body works, and what she can do with that information, and Gideon is absolutely helpless beneath her scholarly touch, beneath Harrow's obvious enjoyment of the body Gideon works hard to keep fit and ready. Despite her teasing, Gideon's muscle aren't for vanity's sake: she trained to be Cohort-ready at a moment's notice. Not just ready, but outstanding. Excellence.

Harrow's love for her body feels like acknowledgment of all that work and dedication and she never knew she needed that like she needs water when she's thirsty.

She settles one light hand on Harrow's hip and stretches the other behind her head, and watches Harrow with heavy-lidded, hugely dilated eyes, shivering deliciously as Harrow trails her fingers expertly over her skin, opening her mouth to gently bite at and kiss the fingers which rest there. "Your favorite?"

[we_bring_hell]

"My favorite? Oh, since you ask..."

Harrow slides further back until she is kneeling on the bed between Gideon's knees, stretched across her body from stem to stern.. She licks her lips, startling in their pinkness instead of the black stain they almost always have.

"Let's skip over all those mirror muscles... a good little jock like you knows what those are called." She slowly curls back on herself, dragging her hands down Gideon's body and coming to a stop with her hands on Gideon's knees.

"This here..." She runs the back of her fingers up the inside of a thigh, beginning at the knee, black eyes marveling at the perfection she is beholding. "This is the gracilis, Gideon, and I love it best because it jumps when I--"

And she leans forward and suits actions to words.

[we_do_bones]

It does jump. And then some.

Harrow can play out a symphony across and under her skin; she loves to watch Gideon's body react and she's the conductor at the same time. This tiny, birdlike necromancer with no more muscle mass than Gideon's pink finger can reduce her strapping cavalier to nothing more than a mess of soft begging sounds, shivering muscles, and firing nerves.

She can. Does. Is. Until Gideon, glazed with sweat, throat dry, shudders and dies, momentarily, of bliss.

At least, that's what it feels like.

In general most people wouldn't consider cuddling with Harrowhark Nonagesimus to be all that rewarding, but then, most people aren't Gideon Nav, reaching for her adept with a blind, flopping, lazy hand and nudging her to move back up beside her.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow, fastidious to a fault, wipes her mouth on Gideon's sheet on the perpendicular bed before she rejoins her cavalier, squeezing into the margin between Gideon's bicep and her serratus anterior and wrapping an arm across her torso. "My Griddle," she murmurs.

[we_do_bones]

"Harrow," she says, soft and sleepy, and curls her arm around her necromancer.

"Always."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow reclines on Gideon's shoulder and watches Gideon fondly. Harrow sleeps rarely but sleeps like the dead; Gideon can glide in and out of catnaps all day long, and often does, when an afternoon takes a pleasant turn like this one. That's why there's a small stack of interesting texts on the end table nearby.

But for now the broken umbrella lies still and watches the anatomical dummy drift off. She leans forward to kiss Gideon's cheek.

In a moment she will take up her notes again; in a moment. For now, however, in the twilight, she drifts...

(It's always the same dream these days. The throne of skulls. The cliff. The shriek of seabirds, but there are no seabirds at Canaan House. That ocean is dead and rotting.

There are two thrones, one for her and one for Palamedes Sextus. She does not see Camilla Hect. She does not see Gideon.

Palamedes looks at her with muddy earth-coloured eyes and says, "It's wrong. There's a flaw in the underlying logic. It's an ugly mistake." He doesn't move his lips--nothing moves in this dream, in this one eternal snapshot--but he still says it)