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_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."

[we_bring_hell]

"It's a failed experiment," Harrow mutters, trying to press pass her to the closet.

[we_do_bones]

"It absolutely is not," says her delighted cavalier, who opts to bypass this game of keep-away and simply scoops Harrow into her arms like she's carrying a new bride over a threshold.

Harrow weighs almost nothing, so it isn't hard, but the material of this new nightie is soft and thin and Gideon's nerves are all misfiring at once. Plus, Harrow's newly shaven head is really bringing out the finer points of her delicate bone structure, and frankly? Gideon is here for it.

"You can't call it failed yet. Where are the trials? Where are the...peer reviews?"

[we_bring_hell]

"I look ridiculous," she sputters. "I look like a broken umbrella."

"This was a mistake."

[we_do_bones]

She does kind of look like a broken umbrella, but then, that has always been her aesthetic.

"You look cute," says Gideon, firmly, walking her adept away from the closet and towards the bed. "And you tried something new! I love that. Soon you'll be stealing my work out tank tops and then I will have to work out with no shirt, oh noooooooo."

[we_bring_hell]

"I will not be doing that," Harrow says. "But you can work out without a shirt any time you please."

She can't really complain too much when Gideon is carrying her around bodily.

[we_do_bones]

"Sure, you say that now, but later it'll be all 'stop distracting me with your incredible abs, Griddle' and then my feelings will be hurt."

Rather than dumping Harrow directly onto the mattress, she takes a seat herself, and settles Harrow into her lap. It cuts the height difference nicely and she's used it many a time for exactly this: to be able to lean forward just a little and kiss her adept softly on the mouth.

[we_bring_hell]

"If I ever said that, I was delirious," she says.

Sitting on Gideon's lap is nice; being kissed is extremely nice. The spiky defensiveness begins to drift away again.

"Again," she says.

[we_do_bones]

"Your obedient servant," says Gideon, low and on the breath of a laugh.

She kisses her adept again. And then a third time, just to be safe.

[we_bring_hell]

Harrow makes a soft sound and relaxes into Gideon's arms, nuzzling into her neck.

"I love you, Griddle."

"Do you really like this silly thing?"

[we_do_bones]

Every time Harrow says it, Gideon worries that the way her heart expands will eventually just crack every rib around it.

She loves it. And she loves how Harrow settles her face into the crook of Gideon's neck because Harrow trusts her and loves her and wants to touch her. It all speaks to a deep-seated protectiveness in her that she hadn't realized existed until they landed on the First, and she wants to fight for that feeling almost as much as she wants to fight for Harrow. "Yeah."

Not because it looks cute or is sexy or any of the usual reasons – although the all apply – but because Harrow (Harrow!) decided to sacrifice her dignity at the altar of trying something new. "And it looks comfy," she adds, smoothing a palm down Harrow's side and along her hip and reveling in the feeling of thin, quality fabric and how Harrow's body feels beneath it.

"But if you really don't like it, I guess I could help you take it off."

[we_bring_hell]

The way Harrow's body feels beneath it is extremely warm, and extremely knobbly, and coiled like a spring. But as Gideon holds her that tightly-wound quality attenuates, and she gradually softens. Nothing but time and food will put more flesh on Harrow's bones, but the more she relaxes the less she feels like an armful of railroad spikes.

"Whatever you want," she murmurs. "It's for you."

"I just feel like when I wrapped up your sword." No amount of wrapping or bows will make anything as sharp and angular and deadly as a sword look like something else.

[we_do_bones]

Harrow, she thinks, will probably never stop trying to make up for seventeen bad years on the Ninth; for before Canaan House, before Milliways. And Gideon doesn't mind, exactly: but Harrow's defining characteristic is trying too hard and honestly, she doesn't have to, with this. It turns out Gideon is an extremely easy lay.

Case in point: her hand resting flat and comfortable on the collection of knobs and bones that is her necromancer and just really not giving a shit what case Harrow comes in.

She wants Harrow. And Harrow wants her. Easy.

"You don't need to wrap yourself up in something you don't like, just for me," Gideon says, gently. Honestly, neither of them are very practiced at gift-giving, even (maybe especially?) when the gift in question is themselves.

"I like it because I like you."

[we_bring_hell]

"It's not... bad," she says, stiltedly. She really has no words for this kind of conversation.

"I just get in my own way."

She finds a spot behind Gideon's jaw and kisses it, then bites gently.

[we_do_bones]

"That's because you are a control freak," Gideon says, but it lacks heat when that kiss and the light rasp of Harrow's teeth against her skin make her shiver.

She reaches down for the hem of the nightie's skirt, and slips her hand beneath to run her palm up Harrow's thin leg. "And because you grew up with a bunch of bad nuns and a bunch of responsibilities that all taught you it was wrong to care about frivolous things like clothes."

[we_bring_hell]

"It feels like--" Harrow begins, but then Gideon's hand crosses the Rubicon of her hem, and she just moans and bites down on her cavalier's neck like the vampire of enemy propaganda. She shifts in her lap to open herself to the questing hand.

[we_do_bones]

"Like?" says Gideon, evilly, while taking advantage of the newly available room. Harrow's knees are bony, but the skin of her inner thighs is soft even if she lacks much muscle beneath it.

[we_bring_hell]

Oh, as if her train of thought had any chance of surviving that.

"Gideon," she gasps against the bite mark. "Queen of my heart. Jewel of my House. Beloved. Beloved."

"Don't you dare stop."

[we_do_bones]

Gideon, trained to run headfirst into battle, to find weak points and use them to shatter an opponent, ducks her face into the crook of Harrow's neck and does not stop.

She couldn't. She loves it all too much. Harrow's short gasping breaths, the words that spill out from her mouth and sink into Gideon's skin. How she feels. How Gideon feels about making her feel this way. She's learned a lot in the last week, about what Harrow likes and what she loves, and Gideon is a quick study.

Her touch is gentle and slow, but she does not stop and she does not hesitate. She is as relentless as an incoming tide that promises to swamp them both.

[we_bring_hell]

If Harrow could have completed her thought, it might have read something like this:

It feels like I died long ago and have been a construct for many years, a servant of my heartless intellect, and you have brought me back to life. Is that blasphemy? If it is, I do not regret it.

Gideon Nav, my Resurrector; my beloved.

Except probably not, because the part of Harrow that wants to explain itself lacks that kind of eloquence. Harrow's body has been neglected and mistreated for most of two decades; it is a feral creature. But Gideon has been winning its trust, and now it curls up and purrs for her, metaphorically.

Literally, too, once the gasps and trembling pass.