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]

She settles herself between Harrow's knees and puts her arms around Harrow's thin body and tucks them together like two magnets. Harrow's forehead is feverishly warm against hers, and she can feel everything going on in Harrow's body: the steady pulse of her heart, the calm in and out of her breath.

All her jittery need to go go go has evaporated; she sighs and closes her eyes to revel in the physicality of this moment.

All of it real. Harrow's breath, Harrow's body, Harrow's heart. She opens her eyes again, and smiles, embracing the ache in her chest. "Harrow, I love you."

[we_bring_hell]

"I love you," she murmurs.

She feels... languid. Safe. Calm. Nothing hurts. Her anxieties hold their breath and wait for the moment to bite down again, but right now they are scared away by Gideon's arms.

She crosses her ankles behind Gideon's legs, locking her in place.

[we_do_bones]

Love is so stupid. It's placed them both here in a softly but practically lit bathroom, and Gideon still doesn't want to move even an inch.

(Unless it's to make use of that tub which she and Harrow are both here. That might be worth moving.)

She likes how Harrow clings softly to her, like silk caught by a breeze against a statue. She likes how Harrow feels in her arms, she likes the thrill that scrambles along her nerves when Harrow says she loves her. She likes being on the same side as Harrow; she likes no longer watching every step she takes, wary of traps set in the night.

"Thanks for letting me feel useful," she says, softly.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow skims a hand over her scalp. "Thank you for making me feel..."

She has no word for it. "I wish we could barricade the door and stay here forever."

[we_do_bones]

"We could."

She says it gently, knowing that neither of them would ever actually agree to do so. "People make this place their home all the time."

They could. But they won't. All they can do is grasp a little more of this reprieve before taking what they've learned and returning to the fight.

"But wherever we are, Harrow...you'll always have me. I swear."

[we_bring_hell]

I want to say I'm sorry for things I haven't done yet.

"One flesh. One end."

She adjusts the tilt of her head so she can kiss her cavalier; delicately, gently. She doesn't want to go make Gideon taste too much makeup.

[we_do_bones]

"One flesh, one end," says Gideon, when the kiss ends, and grins. "You got it, sugarlips."

[we_bring_hell]

"Sugarlips?" she says. "I think perhaps not sugarlips."

[we_do_bones]

"Excuse me!" says Gideon, affronted. "You just told me I could have my own opinion."

But she says it while leaning in and placing kisses along the column of Harrow's throat, so she probably doesn't actually mean it.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow makes a noise that undermines any attempts at dignity. She lets her long, skinny fingers tangle into Gideon's untidy ginger mop of hair.

"Fuck, Griddle."

[we_do_bones]

"If you insist," Gideon says, like an idiot, because her blood is up and, goddamn, she loves it when Harrow grips into her hair like this.

"But maybe not where there's a bare razor blade right next to you."

[we_bring_hell]

"Coward." But she tugs Gideon away. "...get the cold cream, then," she says, with a badly faked stoic resignation.

"Honestly, I don't know why we bother putting clothes on at all anymore. I think you're oversexed, Griddle."

[we_do_bones]

"Me?"

She steps back, affecting a level of wounded innocence that says she's been spending too much time with Wei Wuxian. "Okay, probably."

A long, boring puberty with nothing but swords and some dirty magazines? Yeah, okay, she's maybe a little. Add shaving Harrow's head to the long list of things she never thought about as turn-ons, but damn! It's only been a few days. A week, maybe. This is all still plenty new enough that neither of them seems able to get their fill of each other.

"Trying to say you're sick of me already, Reverend Daughter?"

(But she gets the cold cream as she teases.)

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow hops down from the counter and inspects herself in the mirror, running her hands over the dome of her skull. "Perfection," she murmurs.

"I am not sick of you in the slightest, Griddle. I just don't recognize myself. Resisting the pleasures of the flesh was so much easier when they didn't..." She scoops cold cream out; they don't half go through towels in this suite.

"...look like you."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon, standing behind her adept, wraps her arms around Harrow and rests her chin on Harrow's narrow shoulder, nudging her mop of unruly red hair against Harrow's ear and newly shaven scalp. "It's good for you," she says, confidently.

"Good for me, too." (Hey-o!)

"Although when they write poems and songs about our epic, super hot, super romantic love story, they'll probably just gloss this part over anyhow."

[we_bring_hell]

She drops the towel from her bared face, and reaches back to wrap her arms around Gideon's neck.

"Mmm. That feels good." She hesitates, and then says, "They might, you know. Remember us for that."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon watches them in the mirror and gently sways them back and forth, just to feel Harrow's birdlike weight in her arms, the warmth of her pressed all along her body. She flattens her hands on Harrow's belly and ribs, and considers sneaking at least one of them up under Harrow's shirt.

"For not being able to keep our hands off each other?" she asks. "Or because against all odds we fell in love and it is romantic in the extreme? Honestly, I'm okay with both, although I feel like most of those songs and poems end with someone's tragic death and I just want it noted that I am philosophically against that in this situation."

[we_bring_hell]

"The latter, I hope."

Looking at herself in the mirror and Gideon's hands on her makes her feel very weird; her eyes bounce away and flick back. Her breathing speeds up.

"G-Griddle."

[we_do_bones]

"So long as they get my hair right."

She notes the rising color in Harrow's face, the way her eyes can't seem to land on any one spot. She's not sure if it's racheting up into anxiety that she should halt at the pass, or if Harrow is into this, or some combination of the two.

She settles for pressing a kiss to the nape of Harrow's neck and another just behind her ear. "Quit hogging the sink," she says, smiling. "Unless you want my paint all over your face."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow isn't sure herself.

She puts her boney hands over Gideon's powerful ones. "I can't move if you don't let go off me, Griddle," she says, very reasonably, but makes no move to change it, either.

Without the paint her face is defenseless, the need she feels written large across her sharp features and heavy lidded eyes.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon studies them in the mirror: Harrow's thin, deft hands hot over her strong, callused ones; Harrow's pointy-jawed, dark-browed face that always seems to be one furrow away from frowning in concentration; how she has to curl over Harrow in order to put her chin on Harrow's shoulder. Harrow is all angles and points and she is soft curves of muscle and flesh and it all just works.

Maybe Harrow doesn't see it. It's fine. Gideon can see and appreciate it for her. She slips the hand on Harrow's belly up under her camisole, lays it flat against her soft skin.

She wants more, but she also just wants...this. Whatever it is. Just the two of them here in this crystallized moment. She wants to bury her face, grease paint and all, into the angle between Harrow's shoulder and her neck; she wants to spend ten thousand years making sure Harrow is safe and loved.

She takes a deep breath, and pulls back to grab the cold cream from the counter. "I feel like the Bar is gonna start charging us extra for towels."

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow takes a deep breath in tune with her, as the hand slips up and lies firm on her hollow middle. She closes her eyes and exists in that same moment, unmoving. She is cherished and her heart responds with a deep, ferocious desire to have and keep Gideon Nav.

When Gideon moves, she startles out of her meditation and moves out of the way in turn. "You're not wrong," she says, in a rusty voice.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon would be more than happy to forego both paint and trouble for however the Bar launders towels, but it matters to Harrow in a way it doesn't to her.

So she'll wear it, and ruin towels, because she loves her adept and her adept loves the trappings and secretive rituals of the Ninth.

It's giving her a hell of a breakout along her jaw, though: she frowns at the smattering of acne revealed by the cold cream, pink and sore from scrubbing her skin and the hot damp towel she's using to wipe her face.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow, meanwhile, slips into the bedroom and opens a dresser drawer.

She had had to put the request in writing because it was too embarrassing to say outloud even to a piece of wood, but she did ask for some more interesting underwear. Slightly more exciting. She changes out of her trousers and into a filmy black nightie that still covers a fair amount of surface area, but not as much as her usual full-coverage nightgowns.

She fidgets anxiously while Gideon finishes in the bathroom, and is on the way to the closet to chicken out when she emerges.

[we_do_bones]

Gideon has occasionally entertained fantasies of all Harrow's awful Ninth nun clothing spontaneously combusting or falling prey to some mysterious fabric-destroying accident, but fantasy is the operative word, there.

So she is fundamentally unprepared, emotionally speaking, for a Harrow who is wearing something that might be described as discreetly sexy, something filmy, something that looks like a whisper made fabric, something that shows her elbows.

It's not that elbows generally make Gideon wild with lust, but the novelty of it all hits her like a ton of bricks, and she intercepts Harrow's retreat to the closet with a wide, shit-eating grin of pure delight.

"Oh, no no no! You dressed up for me! I get to fully enjoy this before you find that one with the turtleneck again."