Deep Space Pillow Talk

by kabretoss

Summary:

Harrow was learning to be warm.

She squirmed to turn over, stretching out so she could press her back against Gideon's long flank, shoving a pillow in place so she could comfortably stay tucked with her head in the dip between the woman's bicep and breast. Harrowhark's lover (what an odd notion) stirred, the snotty purr of her snore interrupted for a moment.

"Good?" came her voice, loud and slurry with sleep.

"Mmm," Harrow reassured, knowing this for a false awakening. Gideon always slept well, after.

"Mhmhmmhm. Took care'a you good," she chuckled with sleepy lechery.

Harrow huffed, the echo of exasperation wrapping a painful fondness. "Nav, go back to sleep."

Notes:

This is post-canon based entirely on vague ideas and hopes about how this thing might end. What you will get here: smut, character moments, smut, Side Character Paul, smut, mediocre grief processing, gender gremlin Harrow, tenderness, smut.

I wrote this like a poem, or a braid: each scene is either an elaboration on, a response to, or a refutation of the one directly before it. Expect nonlinearity.

CW for discussion of penises. Canon-typical references to wounds and injuries.

Chapter 1

Sometimes, Gideon came to bed in a mood.

"I wanna be the big spoon," she'd say, and Harrowhark would know she was in that kind of mood.

Gideon Nav was a frustration. She was crass and she was noisy, she bragged and talked shit, she could be anxious and solicitous at all the wrong moments, and she tended to overestimate how much taking care of that Harrowhark needed. And Harrow loved her terribly, so when Gideon came to bed in that kind of a mood, more often than not Harrowhark would allow herself to be taken care of.

It did have its benefits.

Gideon would wrap around her like a weighted blanket, all-encompassing and warm, arms like a safety harness over Harrow's front. She'd hum and she'd adjust and she'd manhandle Harrow a little until she was content with the degree to which she had her held, which generally meant maximizing the number of places their skin was touching, and making sure Harrow was bundled up into as tight a little package as she could be in the curve of Gideon's body. And if Harrow felt herself responding in a particular way, as so often she did, and if she pressed back a little harder, a little more in the hips, she was rewarded by the near tangible bloom of joy in the woman behind her.

Moreover she was rewarded by the warm movements of hands over and over her body, the flex of the toned torso behind her. The intensely vulnerable rush of sensation that came with being stroked and petted while so held would sometimes be too much, metastasizing into an up-rush of prickly overstimulation that would make her grab at Gideon's wrists and still her hands. But that happened less often lately.

If she encouraged it, though, Gideon would hold her tight with one arm, and always, always ask "may I?" when her other hand slid down Harrow's stomach, and if Harrow (usually trembling fit to burst by then) gave her little noise of assent, those rough-textured fingers would ghost so gently lower.

There would be praise for how wet she was. (This had set her all crabbed up with tension, alert for condescension when they had first been learning each other, but no, for all that Nav was crass and terrible, when she was taking care of Harrow the praise was sincere, almost worshipful. The Reverend Daughter liked it and disliked it, both in a very complicated way that she would not admit aloud.) There would be clever fingers, spreading her with earned practice, teasing her clit with all that wet or pressing further, opening her swollen labia and seeking out the aching core of her.

This always set Harrow to noises that she was always vaguely embarrassed to make, and when the tension got to a certain point she'd scrabble at Gideon's glorious shoulders to pull her over and on top of Harrow, or she'd pull one of those hard thighs up between her legs to grind against for a handful of trembling jerks of her hips, and that would be it: she would be undone, as they briefly moved together like a single creature.

Sometimes, then, Gideon would let Harrow take care of her in turn, but other times, she would just want to hold her. She seemed to spend herself in the giving.

 

Sex had become a kind of shorthand for the long and often challenging process of getting to know each other again, after everything that had happened. Conversation was too often hard or sharp-edged, feelings were always hard, and figuring out where they stood with one another now was a byzantine puzzle of frustrating proportions. They weren't enemies anymore, that was the surest thing. That had been true for longer than either had been prepared to admit. That vacillation had well and truly flipped.

However, even knowing that, everything else was a question mark. The places they had occupied in the mythos of their universe had been obliterated, and they were both stuck now reckoning only by the compasses of who they were without what had made them important to anyone else before.

But there was a violence to sex that was familiar to both of them. Not in that the sex was violent (nine times out of ten no one came out the other end with more than a hickey or a few scratch marks), but the invasion of bodies by other bodies, the hunger, the chasing of an instinct — for that matter, all the flexing and the spasming and the noises. Finding themselves spent and trembling afterwards. To Harrowhark, at least, their endless scrapping back when they had hated each other was the cousin to what they had found together in the bedroom. Probably it had been the prologue.

That was to say, there was a prodigious amount of fucking happening in the Ninth's chambers of late.

 

Harrow was tucked under Gideon's arm after one such night of care, pressed into her pit and feeling the rough hairs there. As a rule, fluids and scents and wet heats and organic messes were not something she relished for their own sake, but she had discovered that she did not so much mind them when they were Gideon's. Her deep breathing rocked Harrow like gentle waters, and the salt of her sweat was a welcome sting. Harrow was learning to be warm.

Still, there was only so long she could lay one way. She squirmed to turn over, stretching out so she could press her back against Gideon's long flank, shoving a pillow in place so she could comfortably stay tucked with her head in the dip between the woman's bicep and breast.

Harrowhark's lover (what an odd notion) stirred, the snotty purr of her snore interrupted for a moment.

"Good?" came her voice, loud and slurry with sleep.

"Mmm," Harrow reassured, knowing this for a false awakening. Gideon always slept well, after.

"Mhmhmmhm. Took care'a you good," she chuckled with sleepy lechery.

Harrow huffed, the echo of exasperation wrapping a painful fondness. "Nav, go back to sleep."

Gideon mumbled one more incomprehensible little missive, and then her breathing settled to a light snore once more.

Harrowhark stayed awake a while longer, drifting, floating, taken care of.

 

Paul had set them up on the emancipated Sixth — well, not quite on, per se.

"I think we should keep you two low key for now," they had told the pair, once the dust had settled and they had decided on the Sixth rather than trying to make the charge back to the Ninth for the time being. "You're still both controversial figures, especially with the talks going on. That will cool down, so long as we let it. I have an idea."

The idea had been a residential shuttle, of which the Sixth had a good number and at least one that could be offered up to house the ex-Lyctor and ex-Tower Prince. Paul had bundled them up into it, and in turn tucked it right up behind the moon the Sixth now drifted sedately alongside. They weren't hidden in any real, substantive way, but they were mostly out of sight and out of mind.

Paul had firmly given them the instruction to be docile little lambs, to resist their inevitable urge to get into shit, had graced them both with one long, inscrutably fond look, and left them there.

Now they got a supply delivery every handful of days, and an outgoing line they could use to contact anyone they needed to contact, and a comfortably appointed place in which to kill time. There was a pull-up bar in the main living space, which Gideon liked, and a heftily stacked bookshelf, which Harrow liked, and if either of them noticed it they were both ignoring Paul's inclusion of "So You've Suffered Several Concurrent Life-Changing Traumas and Now Have Some Time To Decompress: Self-Therapy For Dummies".

There were better things to do, namely each other. So perhaps the sheer volume of sex was influenced by a surfeit of time to fill, just a little.

 

Sometimes it was Harrow who came to bed in a mood, and that was fun.

Hell, sometimes it happened before bed. Gideon knew that she was in trouble (affectionate) when Harrowhark grabbed her hair in an unforgiving fist, either pulling her down for a kiss, or — if in bed — pulling her into an embrace. That was the most surefire signal Gideon got that Harrow was hungry (metaphorically; bitch didn’t even eat crackers, most days). And Harrow being hungry tended to be a good thing for Gideon and her libido. It was enough these days just to feel a fist in her hair to get her wet.

That was new. She couldn’t complain. Well, she could, and she did, because not every day was a worship-at-the-shrine-of-Harrowhark day and if she didn’t run her mouth now and then it got bored.

“Come the fuck on, Reverend Daughter, if that’s all you’ve got we’ll be here all day,” she crowed, working to keep the strain out of her voice. Harrow was three fingers deep and Gideon was feeling it — hard to keep her hips still, if she were honest — but she wanted to feel it more.

Harrow had never been above whipping out the bone magic to even the playing field now that she'd regained some proficiency, and as such today Gideon found herself half held down by a couple of clever little bone shackles while Harrow glared at her from between her legs, spindly arm working with all its ferocious might. The thumb on Gideon’s clit was just about undoing her: Harrow was, as ever, a precision creature, though tonight she’d opted to try her hand at the brute force route and Gideon was absolutely here to egg her on. Not just because her head was light with want and her cunt was pulsing with need, but because watching Harrow bare her teeth in erotic fury was absolutely worth every single price of admission.

“Fuck you, Nav,” Harrow growled, catching the look on Gideon’s face.

“Yeah—ugh—that’s what I’m saying! Get on it, bone bitch! Hah!” That wasn’t a laugh at the last there, Gideon’s head tilting back for a moment, her eyes unfocusing. Her hips rolled without her permission. “Not—aaaah—not my fault you’ve got fucking baby fingers.”

Harrow screwed up her face and scowled up at her. “Don’t be disgusting, Griddle.”

“I’ll stop being disgusting when you make me.” Not her sickest burn, but delivered with gusto. She was heady with a slightly manic kind of combativeness. This was fun, it felt dangerous, a little. Not physically, not that, but in some other way she didn’t think too hard about. She was at Harrow’s mercy, fully spread and held down and spitting fire was the only tool she had to wind Harrow up.

She could feel Harrow consider, and then readjust, working to get a fourth in there, and Gideon braced herself.

But instead of rocking Gideon’s world to the point that she could no longer even pretend to be unimpressed, Harrow made a discontented noise and stopped and pulled fully out, fingers stringing juices back to their origin till she wiped her hand on her bare thigh. She shook her hand out, flexed her pruney fingers. Gideon made a horrid high little noise of dismay, turning a round-eyed stare at the necromancer.

“Be careful what you ask for.” Harrow came up and over Gideon then, none too gently bringing a hand down on her sternum. Her other hand (the wet one, Gideon noted with interest) was between them, but apparently she was playing with herself because although Gideon could see that forearm working Harrow sure wasn’t touching her.

Had she pushed it too far? Was she gonna get a full-on look-but-don’t-touch? That would be new, and the idea of it sent an excited throb all through every engorged bit of Gideon. She craned her neck, but Harrow canted her hips out of view, and used that spare hand instead to grab Gideon’s jaw and make her look at Harrow’s face.

A very interesting set of expressions played over that face, ones Gideon didn’t have the first clue how to decipher. She frowned, grimaced, glazed over for a second — seemed to be far off, but then shuddered once and came into sharp focus again on Gideon.

“Stay still,” she commanded.

Despite herself Gideon stayed still.

Harrow dipped her hips, and something touched between Gideon’s legs that was not fingers.

“The fuck?” She tried to peek, and Harrow shoved her down again.

“I said stay still, Nav, or I’ll make you.” She was speaking now between gritted teeth. That press was something hard, and did not feel like flesh. It felt like. Well.

The vibe of the moment was breathless and intense, but Gideon couldn’t help herself. She howled a short, sharp laugh, tilting her head back to just absolutely marvel at the miracles of the universe. That she got to say what she was about to say.

“You’re going to, actually, genuinely — hnnnnghhhh—“

Harrow had headed her off at the pass there: what spread her now was blunt, broad, slightly tapered, and Harrow was not gentle about it. Gideon’s breath fully caught in her throat and she stalled out.

“Don’t say it,” Harrow warned in that voice that brooked no argument. “Don’t you dare.”

The dip of her hips was unpracticed but precise, all of the time she’d spent learning Gideon’s body playing into it as she made use of the bone phallus and its bone harness around her hips. She slid between Gideon's labia and into her entrance, and after some careful adjustment and probing for angle, bottomed out in one unhesitatingly long stroke. It was hard, it was not the yielding cleverness of fingers or mouth, and Gideon was sorely pressed.

“How could you,” she panted, begged, “and not even let me — come on, Harrow, it’s right there—“

Every time she felt like she got her voice back Harrow was doing something new to derail her again: she’d pull back, press in again in a testing stroke, and then with purpose, she started working Gideon in earnest.

“If you’d like to test how incoherent I can make you, do feel free to try me,” she told Gideon with a coolness that absolutely drove the woman mad.

It was the first time she’d had something inside her other than fingers or tongue, and it was intense. No way she could have gotten her hands on a proper toy back at the Ninth, and now this change in the way they related to each other was too new: Gideon had suggested the idea of ordering in something on one of the in-bound shipments and Harrow had shuttered up with mortification. Which was fair. Gideon hadn't quite made it to the thought that Paul probably read all their manifests, which, no.

She let pretense drop — couldn’t keep it up more accurately — and simply fell into it, under Harrow’s mercy entirely. She finally let herself groan, straining to cant her hips in time to that fucking, that absolutely merciless fucking. She’d’ve assumed something like this after all that teasing would have sent her right over immediately, but — hell, it was actually taking some adjusting, some learning how to accommodate.
The pleasant burn of too many fingers was nothing like this. She couldn’t even bring her arms up around Harrow for anchoring, she was still thoroughly held down.

She was making all kinds of noises, she was sure of it. That hard breadth spreading her over and over demanded all of her attention. Fucking kudos to Harrow, credit where credit was due: Gideon was overwhelmed. She was so far past whelmed that she didn’t even remember what whelmed felt like.

There was a point somewhere in the middle where Gideon found her mind for a moment, long enough to look down at Harrow again, working with such erotic industriousness away at her. There was a surprisingly intense look on the necromancer’s face. She was biting her lip. It was a nice view.

Harrow realised Gideon was giving her a look and glowered back, then dropped her head to Gideon’s breast and fastened her teeth around one nipple.

That was a trick she’d learned early on and it absolutely did the job: Gideon yowled, entirely thrown back into incoherence as the bright harsh flush of sensation ricocheted between her breast and her cunt. Harrow didn’t let up, either. Those thrusts were coming faster, moving in a way that made Gideon think of how Harrow sometimes moved when she was close: tight, precise, spiralling ever in towards the most effective stimulation.

It did for Gideon, too. That and the way that Harrow was absolutely gnawing her breasts. She’d moved to the other. There would be marks, and with every bite Gideon’s cunt jolted again, until the confluence of penetration and pain and Harrow’s attention made her arch her back and cry out, a long, shuddering howl. She managed to yank one leg free of the bones and closed it hard around Harrow’s skinny hips, her own working desperately as orgasm lit her body up from the inside out and fried her brain. Turned out it hurt a little to clench so hard around such an unyielding penetration, but she did, over and over, as if her cunt were desperate to meet the challenge.

“Ahh,” Harrow’s voice came high and almost warning, almost pleading, incongruous, but Gideon was too blasted to get out the mental decoder ring for that.

What was more diverting was that Harrow didn’t stop then, even with Gideon’s obvious peak, and her bearing didn’t quite suggest that this was for Gideon’s benefit. She sunk her teeth into the skin over Gideon’s ribs and — really, she could only describe it as rutting, making use of Gideon to satisfy some manner of desire on her end. Frankly it was a lot post-orgasm, but it was so fascinating Gideon shuddered and took it, watching her Harrow with wide, hazy eyes.

She came to the end of it with a shuddering, high cry, and finally pulled out. She was followed by a gush of fluid and Gideon's groan all over again as she reckoned with the intense feeling of being empty after having been full.

"Holy fuck, Harrow," she shuddered out in her relief, chest heaving as she worked to recover herself. "like, wow."

Harrow looked up. She was a sight, kneeled there in the mess of sweat and juices they'd worked up, hands on the bed on either side of Gideon’s thighs, panting. She raised a hand and the bone restraints around Gideon’s arms and remaining leg dissolved.

Gideon shakily dragged herself into a sit, getting her first and only look at the tool Harrow had so effectively used on her.

It rose between her legs, anchored by bone that ran along her iliac crests, and more that dipped under and between her legs, something of an echo or an extension of her usual pelvic exoskeleton. It looked not much at all like the dicks Gideon had sometimes flipped past in her ratty collection of dirty magazines — it looked like a lightly curved column of bone, now covered in slime. It looked smaller than it had felt, wow.

“Did you like, give that thing nerves?” She had to ask. “Kinky.”

“What?” Harrow was hazy as she looked up.

“I mean, you’re all,” she gestured at Harrow’s shaking, sweating form.

“No,” she said shortly, clearly post-orgasmic. Instead she brought a hand between her legs: the bone harness dissolved and with a little hnnngh noise she pulled the thing free. There was one end that had been used to such effect on Gideon, but apparently it also had another that had snuggled right in there for Harrow too.

"Oh, shit, that's," that was a really compelling sight. There really wasn’t a part of it that wasn’t dripping with their combined mess. "Nice."

Gideon held out her hand, and Harrow passed it over. She was smirking, clearly pleased by her own ingenuity and Gideon's appreciation of it. Gideon turned it over in her hands, marvelling, ran her fingers along the slicked length that had been riding inside Harrow. The scent that rose from it was of both of them, which was deeply, primally satisfying.

There were a lot of feelings bouncing off the walls of her chest just then. The prerogative of making the thing had been hot as hell, to the tune of Gideon's cunt still pulsing with afterglow that could easily be turned into a round two, even if she could feel she was going to be sore, sore. There was the matter of thanking Harrow for her tricksy shit, in the way Gideon best knew how to: by flipping the script on Harrow and making that wet spot twice as big.

But there were priorities to be seen to, first.

“Clever, Nonagesimus,” she finally said. “You actually did bone me.”

Harrowhark made a noise of utter disgust and the double-purpose phallus dissolved in Gideon’s hands, sending decidedly unsexy bone dust everywhere. "You are a boor."

Worth it.

 

Later, Gideon was still turning the whole encounter over in her head.

“I mean, could you?” She asked, apropos of nothing: they’d been noodling around in the kitchen, neither that interested in cooking (they'd learned that lesson) but Gideon had been browsing for easy snacks and Harrow had been contemptuously flipping through another cookbook.

“Could I what?” She asked without looking up.

“Make one of those bone things but give it nerves. That might be fun.”

She did look up, then, the crease between her brow back, the one that said she was thinking. “I’ve done something like that before,” and yeah, Gideon knew that, she'd been watching and yelling about Harrow's life choices from Brain Jail. “I suppose I theoretically could. It would take some doing, though.”

Harrow, if she ever really had been, was no longer a proper Lyctor. Gideon couldn’t complain given that it meant that Harrow was no longer chowing down on whatever remaining bits of her soul they hadn't entirely been able to scrape out of Harrow's chest and back into Gideon's. However, it did mean those prodigious skills that had come so easily, that she now spoke about so distantly, were no longer really open to her. She was, once again, only a prodigiously skilled necromancer.

Gideon knew she missed it. She also doubted that Harrow had lost all the skills. They were still connected, which Gideon suspected would give Harrow some sort of edge at least, and there was something to be said for muscle memory. So she liked to push a little, to try and goad Harrow out of the necromantic rut she was in. That bone cock had been the most interesting thing she’d pulled since they’d been squirrelled away in the shuttle. And if what it took to motivate her was lust? Gideon was not above using that.

She boosted herself up to sit on the counter, taking a bite out of a very boring root vegetable. “Think you could make a flesh one?”

“I don’t do flesh magic,” Harrow shot back, clipped.

“That’s a fucking lie, I’ve seen you do flesh magic. You know how.” When Harrow just made a little growl back at her, she added, “what, too gross for you? Not the right vibe?”

“Hardly. It’s all just tubes and fluids,” she waved a hand contemptuously.

“So it should be easy.”

Her brow was just fully wrinkled at this point. “I think you are somewhat misunderstanding the difficulty of what you’re suggesting. It’s one thing to throw around cutaneous tissue or stretch a tendon from here to there — it’s another to make a functioning organ, attached to a living body.”

“All just tubes and fluids,” Gideon quoted.

“Why are you pressing me on this?” Harrow asked, sharp. “I’ve said I can’t.”

“Because I don’t believe you,” she said, putting the half turnip or whatever down beside her. There were several feelings, and several more thoughts, all churning up inside her just then, surprising her, because, you know what? “If you don't want to, that's fine, that's a whole nother thing. But I don't believe you can't, greatest necromancer of our generation. I wanna see you do it."

Gideon sucked in a breath. Cocks had no specific draw for her, both for themselves and in that they were most often attached to men. But she got the idea of a strap, she really did. Harrow in a strap. Harrow fucking her in a way as liable to tumble Harrow off the edge as it was to get Gideon off, maybe with a little less bone-related soreness the next day, sounded worth a genuine, game try.

She leaned forward, balanced on the edge of the counter. "That other night, that was hot. I wanna see you lose it like that again.”

“I can easily do that again.”

“Yeah, but I’m saying and, not instead of.”

Harrow slapped the cookbook in front of her closed, searching Gideon’s face with an expression that was a little too flat for Gideon to read. Again she got that surge of nerves that said you pushed it too far this time, bucko, but she put her poker face on and waited rather than backtracking or putting up for a fight.

“Leave it, Nav,” she snapped.

Gideon shrugged and looked away, blood thumping.

 

That night, while Gideon was taking her usual frankly disgusting amount of time in a very hot bath, Harrow called Paul.

“Good to see you,” they said over the slightly tinny onboard video calling service. The shuttle was an older model. “You look well. A bit forbidding, but well. You’re eating?”

“I don’t need mothering,” Harrow said, very dryly. “Yes, I’m fine.”

“How’s Gideon? Is she climbing the walls with boredom yet?”

She had been spending too much time around Gideon; she was not at risk of actually making the dirty joke, but she thought it, and frankly that was heinous. Awful. Bad influence.

“She’s finding ways to keep herself busy,” Harrow said truthfully, in that it was also a lie through her teeth. She tried not to read too much into the look Paul gave her. “I, however, have a favour to ask.”

“Ask away.”

“I want to exchange some of the books we’ve got on hand. I’ve made my way through most of the ones I’m interested in.” That was true: most of the time not spent fucking she had spent reading. “I’d like to request some tomes on spirit and flesh necromancy. Specifically, anatomical or medical uses, things like healing and living body modification. I am thinking of trying to work back to some of my old skills.” That, she assumed, would be sufficient cover.

“Spirit and flesh, medical, anatomical, healing, body modification. Got it." Paul looked down for a moment as if making a note, leaving a beat, and when they looked back up they wore a slight smile. "That’s admirable. Don’t push too hard. You’re brilliant, but you’ve been through a lot. If there ends up being anything you want a hand practicing, do let me know. I’m happy to make time to visit.”

Harrow wrinkled her nose and said noncommittally, “Mmm.” She would not be requesting a hand from Paul for this. Then, belatedly remembering the niceties and that perhaps she owed their friend at least that much, she asked, “And how are you. How are things.”

“Oh, well. The talks are moving along. Aim’s handling herself with a great deal of deftness. Very practiced, that one. Very few surprises on this end as of yet, and in the same vein, only glacial progress. Expected.” Was Harrow imagining things, or was Paul intentionally leaving out any actual details? Well, if Harrow was keeping secrets here, she was going to leave it for another time to try and dig into theirs. “I’m stellar, as always. You really can’t beat being your own best friend.”

She found Paul’s grand-lysis-adjacent jokes, which they did whip out now and then, in terrible taste. That did not seem to put them off, however. Harrow was surrounded by tacky jesters.

“Can we include anything along for Gideon?” they asked, seeming to sense the conversational gates closing.

“I didn’t ask,” she said honestly, never mind that this was for Gideon’s benefit. “I’ll tell her to call you if she thinks of anything.”

“You two are getting along, cooped up like that?” Paul asked with some apparent concern, a small furrow appearing between their almost perennially smooth brow. Harrow wondered if she was playing it a little too cool. Overcompensating.

“We’re managing,” she said, trying to gentle her tone. “We’re alright.”

“I’m glad. Love you both, alright?”

Harrow nodded, and Paul smiled again in farewell before cutting the feed.

Notes:

I imagine both Harrow and Gideon being exclusively woman-attracted. What that means in practice, however, is always and inevitably more complicated than what cisheteronormativitiy implies. That is to say there will probably be a penis in later chapters, so if that's not your thing, don't say I didn't warn you.

I wrote the first 9k of this in a NaNoWriMo-fuelled haze, as a way to take a break from my main project. Then — whoops! — it became my main project. It’s also my first fic in more years than I care to admit so I’m hoping it’s not too embarrassing an offering. I have been enjoying it while writing it!

I'll be chunking this out in little chapters as I edit what I've already got, breaking where it feels like it makes sense for the flow of the thing. We get deeper into how these two got where they are in future chapters, but I wanted to start out with a bang (ha ha).

Thank you to my wife for being my beta-reader. Bless her Griddlehark-loving heart.

Chapter 2

Notes:

A smutless chapter, whoa. Later chapters make up the difference, never fear.

We get a peek into the earliest days of their shuttle confinement.

I will never name my chapters, because I am a coward.

Despite herself, once the books arrived and she really sunk her teeth into them, Harrow found herself compelled. Not necessarily — or, not solely — by the anatomical implications.

She had avoided thinking much about her diminished self, for even if she had decided that it was worth it to be cut down small again, she missed the sheer potential of her Lyctorhood. It stung. It was like an amputated limb that she sometimes still tried to use, and raged in the private cage of her own heart that it was now forever beyond her. Whatever connection still strung between her soul and Gideon’s, whatever piece of one was still in the other, the connection was latent, and she would not seek to re-open it.

That way was blessedly closed to her, by her own hand. She did not regret it. Nothing would be worth losing Gideon again. Not saving the world, not saving herself — and certainly not making a fun fleshy sex toy.

But, by the dead God of the Nine Houses, she was still the daughter of the Ninth, she was still the greatest human necromancer of her generation. She had the mind for it, she always had. She had the power that was still the burden of her birth. And, honestly, this stuff was not as complicated as she had been fearing.

Anyone who had come to the Ninth had already been of an age that they’d transitioned or they’d decided not to: the idea of transgender people had not been a top-of-mind one to Harrow. But it made sense well enough, and there was a whole branch of flesh magic centered around aiding those who might need such aid. A small branch admittedly, but a fecund one: a great deal of anatomical, hormonal, and developmental research, a genuinely clever set of solutions to bring a person one way or the other. Most effective before puberty, and easiest then, but since Harrow was not looking to become a man, she could read that for interest’s sake and then dismiss it.

The anatomical changes — they were about building off of what was there. That was much, much easier than what she had imagined. It was about tracing certain tissues back along the path of foetal development to before hormones triggered differentiation, and then down the other side of the binary flex point. The tissues were largely already there in a different configuration, and what wasn’t there could be effectively faked.

That was to say, in the most general terms, turning a clitoris into a penis was the approach. Intellectually fascinating.

And, that night, curled up under Gideon’s arm again and thinking about how her beloved (which still felt like saying the quiet part out loud) had moved while she’d been fucking her, she felt a tingle between her legs for the notion.

Alright.

 

Mornings in the shuttle generally went like this:

Gideon up first, to make a racket of what running-about she could do in the four rooms of the shuttle. Harrow up some time later, squinting, to go “can’t you do that somewhere else?” to Gideon’s pounding feet.

“Get me to a snow leek field and I’ll do it there,” and then, last few days, she’d been experimenting with landing a slap on Harrow’s ass as she went by. So far so good: Harrow had yet to rip her bones out over it.

Finish in the kitchen in order to stick her face under the faucet and simply drink direct from it, to come up to Harrow’s beautiful, familiar, sleepy glare over the cramped kitchen counter. Fine, glass of water, then, and one for Harrow too, which went down alright. Something from the fridge she could just stuff in her face without fuss. An apple was better than a snow leek any day, even raw.

She’d try to give Harrow a good morning kiss, Harrow would demand she’d brush her teeth first, and they’d sojourn to the bathroom together to take care of those various dull self-care sundries that, on examination, maybe she didn’t find quite so dull since her resurrection. Except she didn’t examine because who wanted to look at that.

So they’d be clean, and awake, and cooped up. Harrow would go for the books. Gideon would go back to lifting things, pushing things, pulling things, or, in dire circumstances, poking around the shuttle to see what she could get into. She had checked out the books, too, but she capped off at about half an hour of reading at a time before getting restless. Sometimes she’d come sit with Harrow and peer over her book and say, “hey, what’s that?”

Harrow would squinch up in furtive delight at the chance to go off about bones or whatever, or lately medical necromancy, and as long as Gideon could keep up well enough to ask a question or two, she was rewarded by increasing engagement from her brainiac.

Usually they didn’t last till noon before coming up with some excuse to come together, and really, at this point it was any excuse or none at all, and anywhere in the shuttle.

The bedroom was actually Gideon’s least favourite spot to get it on, except if they were already there. The waste recycling on the shuttle was mainly meant for organics, and the small reservoir for unrecyclable garbage hadn’t been big enough to cram the little cav cot into, so it still sat wrecked at the foot of the big bed.

 

The first night in the shuttle had gone like this:

Paul had dropped them off. Harrow had locked herself immediately in the bathroom, and Gideon had prowled the rest of the shuttle from head to toe, shoulders prickling with the discomfiting knowledge that they’d been stashed with, like, a couple of feet of bulkhead between them and vacuum and very little idea of what to do if something went wrong except call for help.

The infirmary had released them both the day before, with basically what amounted to a shrug and an admission that there wasn’t really anything else that could be done for either. They were basically fine, physically, barring the effects of a long convalescence.

“We kept you maybe longer than we needed to,” Paul had said, “but we wanted to be sure. And, you know, barring prison, the infirmary’s actually the safest spot on the Sixth.”

It had been stupid and Gideon had hated every minute of it. Harrow had done the real work, had crammed everything she could of Gideon’s soul back into her body, had done what Gideon’s father had sworn up and down was impossible. Neither had come out of that process unscathed, though in Gideon’s mind Harrow had borne the worst of it. Having bodily functions again had been fucking awesome. She’d just had to… adjust. And come back to consciousness. Which had apparently taken weeks. Whatever, she didn’t remember it.

It was just that she’d been down for so long, she reasoned, that’s why her body felt so restless and why her brain wouldn’t shut up. She had to make up for lost time. Cram all the shit she didn’t want to think about down the mind-hole and get her body good again. Except how was she supposed to do that in a six hundred square foot shuttle?

“Your pacing is maddening.” Harrow had emerged and was staring at her, fully painted and swathed in her old, dark vestments. They hid how little there was of her left: she’d been down for weeks too, from what Gideon understood. The facepaint hid sunken eyes to most people, but didn’t trick Gideon, and it made her mad all over again to see Harrow so pathetic. “What are you doing?”

What was she doing? Hell. “You could hear me from in there?”

“Evidently the bulkheads are not made to be soundproof. Yes, I can hear you thumping around.”

Fuck, good to know. So no rubbing herself raw in the bathroom, then. It was the weirdest thing, being back in a body with a heartbeat: she’d half forgotten how all that blood went places, and did things. The whole business felt like Puberty 2 a little. She was hungry all the time, full of energy, and hair trigger on the boners. It wasn’t like anything about the last week had been even vaguely arousing, but all it took at the moment was the seam of her pants rubbing at a funny angle. Her eyes slid away from Harrow, and she clamped down as hard as she could against combining what she was thinking about with who she was talking to.

“I figure, you know, better get to know our new digs.” She waved a hand vaguely and retreated towards the shitty little sitting room and its antiseptically unlived-in upholstery. It wasn’t until she made a tight little circuit around it and got back to facing Harrow that she noticed how slow the other woman was moving.

Frowning ferociously, she swept in. “You know what, actually, I’m knackered. It’s midnight somewhere, right? Come on, we can split up the bedding.”

She hadn’t been in the bedroom yet; something in her had kinda shied away from it. Somehow it felt like Harrow’s territory, even if she didn’t really love the idea of letting Harrow out of her sight ever again. Now that the white-hot radiation of the moment of reconciliation had passed, though, they had to figure out how to live with each other, because by unspoken mutual agreement it was going to be with each other.

Only that didn’t really give her a roadmap, because she sure as fuck wasn’t Harrow’s cavalier or Harrow’s scrappy and charming child nemesis anymore, and what did that leave, if she planned on never letting Harrow get more than sixty feet away from her again in their lives?

The sight of the cramped little bedroom had stopped her short.

So, apparently, Paul had stashed them in a shuttle meant for use by a necro and their cav. Gideon stopped just inside the door and stared at the two beds, ignoring the vague crunch around her heart.

“Love it when a problem solves itself.” Maybe it’d just be like Canaan House again. That hadn’t been so bad, had it? In retrospect. Compared to everything afterwards.

“What?” Harrow peeked around Gideon’s bulk and then, impatient, went to scoot around her. Gideon was already moving again, though, beelining for that dinky little cav bed set up at the foot of the larger one.

“Dibs,” Gideon said with great, huge irony, and sat hard. The stupid thing creaked. “Just like old times, huh? You just can’t beat the familiar to soothe a hurt heart.”

But Harrow had gone still, and she was staring at Gideon. She’d looked a little shaky before but now she was trembling, and Gideon had seen that face enough times as a child that she knew Harrow in a rage when she saw it. It was radiating off of her small body fit to fill the room.

“No,” she said, short and sharp. “Get off of that.”

“What?” Gideon’s brows crunched. “You want me to sleep on the floor? It’s a perfectly good bed. Well, no, honestly it’s kind of shitty but it’s better than the floor.”

Harrow’s hand had gone to her ear, fingering out a bone plug. “Get up.”

“Chill, Harrow, it’s—“

“Gideon, get up!”

There was a manic and dangerous gleam in Harrow’s eyes, enough so that Gideon, all too aware of her own lapsed invulnerability, got the fuck up. Not even the instant after she’d started to rise Harrow threw her little bone pebble under the bed and in less than a heartbeat there was a great rending, cracking sound behind Gideon that made her literally jump.

She almost collided with Harrow in her hurry to whip around, and even knowing in her heart that the other woman would cut out her own eye (or, case in point, her own brain) rather than do Gideon harm at this point, her body had too many years of fighting like a couple of cats in the dirt not to react.

Harrow had sent a forest of thin, wicked bone spikes up from below the thing, shattering the frame and tearing the bedding to ribbons.

“You are not sleeping on a fucking cavalier bed, Gideon.” Harrow’s sharp chin was as high as her voice and she was glaring Gideon down, her rage having peaked and ebbed into this hawklike stare. But she was still shaking, and when Gideon leaned a little in she could see the faintest pinkish sweat at her temples. That more than anything put a chill through her. A double fistful of bone spikes should have been nothing to Harrow, even before she’d been a Lyctor. “Never again.”

“I mean, fine, that’s actually fine, but I wish you’d let me salvage the blankets and shit first,” she said. “The floor would’v’e been better with the—“

“You are not sleeping on the fucking floor either!” Harrow raised one hand, pointing it right directly at Gideon’s chest: it was a gesture that made both of them flinch, and that Harrow turned into an imperious wave.

“Where, then? If you want me to go sleep on the couch I’m gonna take issue with that, because fuck you I don’t want to. I’d rather the floor in here than the couch out there.”

Nonagesimus, infuriatingly, pointed at the bed. The bed into which Gideon was still trying to usher her, because now she was swaying vaguely.

Gideon shook her head. “No. Nope. Harrow, that’s yours.”

“I don’t need the whole thing.” The fury had completely cooled now, though the urgency had remained, of a flavour that Gideon didn’t entirely recognise. It was a little pathetic, in a way that made her want to be soft, which felt like uncharted territory. “It’s big enough. We can share.”

Gideon scrubbed her face with one hand. She didn’t want to argue with Harrow, not when the necro looked like she might just topple any second. But she did not want to share a bed. God in Hell, she didn’t want to — not hair trigger like she was. Something about the idea of bedding down in the selfsame bed as Harrow was also — something about the inevitability that at some point in the long, dark, soft night she’d wake up horny, or think the wrong thought and get that way, and have to just lay there next to Harrowhark —

It was already setting her blood to pounding. The pressure behind her breastbone was shame, right?

“I can’t,” she said a little helplessly. “I really can’t, Harrow.”

Harrow’s robes sunk as her thin shoulders bent. She drooped all over, clearly trying not to, but there was some sort of fight that had gone out of her. “Fine.”

Then she’d gone to the bed herself, and for a moment Gideon had felt a complicated and kind of bummed-out victory, except that then Harrow had gathered up the top-sheet and two of the six or so pillows and was dragging them laboriously onto the ground next to the bed.

“I can do that myself,” she protested. Harrow glared at her miserably and instead of responding, she had arranged the whole mess into a pile, onto which she then arranged herself.

“Turn the light off, Nav,” she told Gideon.

So they’d spent that first night in the shuttle sleeping a terrible sleep on the floor on either side of the bed.

 

It wasn’t till the second night, after a day both spent crabby and snappish at each other, that Gideon had caved. She wasn’t sure why, except that maybe the sight of Harrow curled up in a little ball under her claimed bedding was pathetic in a way that ached her heart and she wasn’t sure how else to break the stalemate.

Still, it took her till the middle of the night for her to say into the very complete blackness, “Harrow?”

There was a pause and a stirring from Harrow’s side of the room. “What?”

“The fuck are we doing?”

Another beat, and then Harrow’s scratchy-soft just-woke-up voice. Gideon could hear the furrow in her brow. “Sleeping?”

She’d sighed then, and all at once grabbed a pillow and the blanket and heaved herself up onto the bed. She’d made her way across, hands and knees, and fished around on the other side till she felt the sheet Harrow had wrapped herself in. Getting a good hold, she yanked.

Harrow went spilling out with a noise like a dropped puppy. Gideon grunted, snagged a still-warm and now-vacated pillow with her other hand.

“Get up here,” she said, putting resignation into her tone. “Come on.”

A bit more scrabbling in the dark from Harrow’s end, and another pause. “You’ve come to your senses?”

Still an argument to be had there about whose sense was good in that regard, but it wasn’t an argument Gideon especially wanted to have right then. “Seems that way.”

Everything was just so much easier to hear in the dark, and Harrow’s sudden little sigh had such texture to it. It was the gentlest noise she’d made all day, and there was something of a surrendering relief to it, which was weird. She had expected self-satisfaction, maybe a taunt about Griddle being slow on the uptake. Curling up on the far edge of her side of the bed, she chewed on that as she felt the very slight shift of the bed with Harrow’s very slight weight.

There was a care to the necromancer’s movements as she settled in, and Gideon felt a kind of held breath between them, but she wasn’t really equipped to unpack that just then. It wasn’t like the original problem had resolved, after all. She would just have to learn to sleep horny.

She flipped out the blanket as well as she could without being able to see a damn thing. It came fluttering down and it covered her up, more or less. She felt a few tugs as Harrow got settled, and let her take as much as she needed.

“Thank you,” Harrow said, very carefully. Gideon hummed a nothing-response, feeling shy in the dark and suffering a glowing tightness in her chest — behind the scar through which Harrow had so recently given her back the missing bits of herself.

And then, a few minutes later, out of the dark with the same slightly brittle carefulness, “I do not want… ever again…” A pause, the intake of breath between teeth, and Harrow tried again delicately. “I want us to be on equal footing. Do you understand?”

It was Gideon’s turn to pause. She clutched one of the extra pillows to her, both arms tight around it, and reckoned fiercely with how that ache and that glow both grew.

There were a dozen things behind her teeth that needed saying to that, two dozen. But the air felt brittle, and she didn’t trust the recourse if things went bad. When she inevitably said the wrong thing and things went bad. That glow died back, which was a relief that made her feel deeply sad for some goddamn reason. “I… yeah, no. Sure, I get it.”

Another little sigh.

“Good. Good.”

And so that had been that: they had begun sharing a bed entire days before they had started sharing a bed.

 

“I think I’ve found a way,” she told Gideon casually, when she’d finally worked up the courage to bring it up.

“To what?” Gideon was taking a rest between sets, stretched out with her arms crossed behind her head, sweaty and glowing.

“What you asked.”

The ex-cavalier’s eyes squinted, then rounded, and she half sat up. “You mean the—“ She wiggled a couple fingers up from her pubis.

“Ugh. Don’t make me regret looking into it.”

Gideon laughed a little, but Harrow could tell she was interested. Her ears had practically perked up. Harrow wasn’t sure, but she was reading a seriousness there that was puzzling.

Gideon had had some moments since that last conversation, some pensive moods that Harrow hadn’t been able to figure out. She supposed Gideon would come out with whatever it was eventually, or maybe she was just growing bored. At the time that thought had summoned a chill in Harrow’s stomach that she hadn’t liked, but Gideon had been no less affectionate when they were together and the fear that Gideon was losing interest faded.

“But yes, that. I’m not ready to try. It will take some time to… figure out the steps.” To practice enough that she could make something she didn’t hate. “You’ll have to be patient.”

“Yeah, no, of course. Obviously! Take your time.” Gideon held her hands up. "Can't rush a good boner, I hear you."

Harrow turned more towards her, eyes narrowed. “I thought you’d be pleased.”

“I am!” Her golden eyes were round, and, fair enough, a flush had risen on Gideon’s cheeks. “Seriously, that’s fucking cool, Harrow. I knew you could do it.”

Gideon got a very strange look on her face, then, something pinched that Harrow couldn't read. Her cheeks were shading redder.

"If you can — I mean, the one part — can you, uh, I mean, could you make everything?"

Harrow narrowed her eyes. "What do you mean?"

Gideon looked away, more pinched and pained with a kind of embarrassment that Harrow was cataloguing away in her rolodex of unusual Gideon reactions. "Nevermind," she said.

Harrow huffed exasperation, and came down to join Gideon on the floor. She straddled her legs, grabbed her face by the chin, and made her look at Harrow.

“Spit it out, Griddle. You're not cracking jokes so this is either serious or you think it's beyond the pale. What, Gideon? Do you think I'd be put off if you wanted one? Have you awakened something in yourself, hmm? I’d thought of that, you know. It shouldn’t be too much more difficult to do on someone else than on myself.”

"What? No— I mean—" She blinked, seeming genuinely surprised by the vein of questioning. "Would you?"

"Would I what?"

"Be put off?"

"No. Like I said, it's all just tubes and fluids." She was already considering what she might build for Gideon, size and shape and texture and heft, certain that she'd hit on it, when Gideon picked her up bodily. The muscle-bound woman earned a crabbed, annoyed noise for her efforts as she set Harrow to one side.

Now, face as red as her hair, Gideon looked almost pained. She crossed her legs, put her hands on her knees.

"Oh." There was a tone to that, one that said Nav was filing it away for the spank bank. That tone shifted again, however. "But it's not, though."

"Not what?!" By now Harrow was annoyed: Gideon was being obtuse.

"Just pipes and fluids or whatever. I mean, they do things."

Harrow narrowed her eyes, feeling the conversation turning a direction but not believing the direction enough to be able to follow it. Gideon made a noise of utter embarrassment and twisted half facing away, but the pressure of Harrow's silent presence compelled her to make some more noise to fill it.

"I mean — and don't fucking take this to heart, I'm just thinking about a thing here — but I keep thinking about, I guess, the way I... uh... happened. And the way you did. It's all fucked up. It's just... we're both secrets and lies and murders, bullshit piled upon bullshit right from the beginning. Weapons. Tools. Neither of us had a chance, you know?"

Harrow had gone fully still, her eyes narrowed to slits. Of course she hadn't forgotten. She could never forget.

"And I keep thinking," Gideon's voice had gotten higher, maybe with mortification, but Harrow was short circuiting such that she couldn't really read it. "I keep thinking, like, what if Jeannemary and Isaac hadn't had parents who were okay sending their kids to die on the First at fucking fourteen. They were just kids. And I know it's not just them. I mean the Cohort is half kids." She swallowed, voice getting a little more ragged. "And then I think about, what if — if mine hadn't just wanted a bomb, I mean I know they'd never've, but what if — and the, what if yours hadn't—"

She'd started waving her hands at some point, but she stilled them now.

There were things they couldn't say to each other, even now. They had done more fucking than serious talking, neither wanting to look back, or inwards, or outwards: just at each other, depth of focus tight enough the rest of the universe blurred out. Gideon was clearly struggling, now, with even the oblique saying of it, and it was a discomfiting reminder of everything both of them were running away from. Still, she pushed on, trying again, and Harrow watched the effort and felt the hot seethe of it against the ice in her own brain.

"It's just that none of it's fucking fair, Harrowhark, it's all a tragedy and here we are at the end of it. The last of it."

"But that's a good thing, surely." Harrow could hear how flat her own tone was, but she had no extra processing power to modulate just then.

"I don't know." That pained squint again. This was a beyond-the-pale embarrassment Gideon was suffering.

"If you want to have a baby, that's your prerogative." Still flat, but this time she felt that appropriate. Her innards felt frozen. "You don't need me for that."

Gideon buried her face in her hands. "That's not what I— shit, Harrowhark," dropping her hands again she turned all at once, going to grab Harrow's wrist, leaning forward in earnestness. She was limp with shock and allowed it. "I don't want to fucking have a baby like it's whatever. I don't know shit about babies. They poop a lot? They're small and squishy? I don't know. I just keep thinking, like, what if we had just been allowed to be kids. What if we had just — does this, is any of this landing? Shit, Harrow, I don't want — I'm not fucking asking you to—"

The swears per capita were going up. Gideon was panicking. Harrow leaned forward and slapped a hand over the other woman's mouth to keep her from digging herself deeper.

"You are imagining some manner of do-over."

When Gideon dropped her eyes and didn't even try to respond from behind Harrow's hand, Harrow finally recognized that pinched expression for what it was: shame.

That was enough. She brought her hands to Gideon's jawline and held her face.

"It's a noble impulse." It was, in the abstract, though to say Harrow had given any thought to the practicalities of childbearing would be overstating the matter and she could not quite make the pieces make sense in her head now. "You think we could do better." It was half a question.

Gideon was silent for a long moment. "I don't have the first idea of whether we could do better. But up until ten minutes ago I didn't even think that was a possibility for, um, us." She finally flicked her eyes up to Harrow's, tentative. "We could start a kid better than we were started. That's all. I don't know if that means anything."

Harrow could feel rising in herself the urge to say something cruel, to shut Gideon down and storm out. Having just watched Gideon panic and having taken it upon herself to get the other woman back out of it, though, was a dismally double-edged sword: all she could do right now was grudgingly acknowledge that she was panicking, that it was her turn.

So she took the middle route: she pulled a few feet away and thumped on her back on the floor, hands clenched over her chest, just breathing. She waited till she could find something to say. She ignored the very tangible way Gideon kept glancing at her.

Finally she heard Gideon lay down on her back too, joining Harrow in the calming pastime of staring at the ceiling of the shuttle’s living room.

“I absolutely have no interest in gestating a foetus,” Harrow said, suddenly very sure of that at least.

“I mean, you wouldn’t have to.” Gideon said, sounding like she was trying for bravado, “hilarious as that would be. You'd be fucking spherical, wouldn't you? But I’m not the one who can build myself a DIY dong. Besides, I’ve had weirder shit done to me for worse reasons.”

That was true, and it was a wash of cold water over the prickling heat of the conversation. They both lay there for a minute and just sort of digested that.

"You know we don't need to involve a penis at all if that was something you wanted. Or a flesh womb. Vat wombs are common enough, now that we're not constrained to the Ninth's facilities."

"Huh." Gideon said. Harrow peeked at her sidelong and it became apparent that, whatever sex ed she'd scraped together for herself at Drearburh from dirty magazines and opaque library tomes had left out gamete redifferentiation and vat wombs.

“Either way. They’d all be girls,” Harrow said.

Gideon propped herself up to peer at the necromancer. “What, you have something against boy babies?”

“No, I mean I can’t manufacture a Y chromosome whole cloth. They’d all be XX.” Not strictly true in practice, but there was no one Harrow was interested in borrowing a Y from.

Gideon, who had a shaky grasp on genetics at the best of times but a very particular sense of humour, made a noise that might have been a snicker. Harrow shot her a warning glance, but she was already the picture of seriousness again.

“I mean, I’m gonna take a second here,” Gideon said, treading carefully in that way they were learning to tread carefully rather than snap at each other during tense moments, “and push this firmly back into the hypothetical, but hypothetically, that’s not a problem for me if it’s not a problem for you.”

Harrow still didn’t sit up and stare down the other woman, mostly because that would be too much with all the internal calculations she was still doing in order to calm down. But she shrugged, raised a hand in a dismissive little wave. Not a problem.

“I’ll have to ask Paul for literature on precedent.”

“Uh, maybe don’t,” Gideon replied immediately, a tone of panic back in her tone. Harrow did prop herself up then, brows crunched together in a question, and the other woman waved her hands. “Look, I just about had a fucking embarrassment aneurism even bringing up the, again, very hypothetical idea of it with you, and there’s only so far they’re gonna buy that it’s intellectual curiosity, or horny stuff, and I don’t want them putting the pieces together and showing up on our doorstep with fucking — I don’t know — diapers? Parenting books?”

Harrow made a strangled little noise at the idea that Paul might have already put together that she had been asking after the literature for reasons of, as Gideon put it, horny stuff, and nodded. She did pull herself up then, knees to chest, a frown deep on her face.

Gideon reached for her then, extending an arm. “Can I?” she asked.

“Mmn.” Harrow responded by picking herself up and going to the other woman, but not nestling into the crook of the arm that was being offered.

The only way she could ever even make a go at encompassing Gideon was when the other woman was sitting, and now she came next to her, high on her knees, and put her hands to either side of that open face. Leaning down, she kissed Gideon, slow and deliberate. Kissing in any depth had still mostly been constrained to realm of sex, and had a delicate quality outside of those heated moments. After everything, they were both being so, so careful with each other. Gideon made a little noise and leaned up into it, lips warm and moving against hers.

When the kiss concluded, Harrow pulled Gideon’s head to her own thin chest, stroking that copper hair. It had taken her time and trial-and-error to even try to be effectively comforting — none of the tender parts of their new association came naturally to her, except the part where she knew in her bones that Gideon was hers to love — but running her fingers through her hair always seemed to do the trick, for both of them.

“You have such a painfully good heart, Gideon Nav,” she told her.

Gideon had nothing to say to that, but wrapped her arms tight around Harrow’s middle and hid her face against Harrow’s flesh.

Notes:

The girls continue to talk about things by talking about other things instead.

This isn't going to become an "and then they had a baby" fic, but I think Gideon in particular is still processing finding out about her origins, and the particular awfulness of having had shit parents who never intended to have her. And Harrow is, as ever, centered around the question of "how do I keep Gideon".

Thanks to everyone who commented and kudos'd the last chapter! Your delight fueled my weekend writing. And thanks, as ever, to my wife for betaing!

Chapter 3

Summary:

Sex and scars.

They didn’t really talk about it again over the next handful of days but there came to be a tone to their fucking sometimes, after that. Gideon wasn’t actually sure if Harrow noticed that she was sometimes getting more intense with it, that sometimes when she'd pulled out the boner construct again (ha!) and was bone-deep (double ha!) in Gideon’s cunt she’d glare up at her with a look, a hungry, speculative, possessive stare that Gideon felt all the way through her.

It made her squirm. It made her immensely horny. It made her lock legs around those skinny hips and ride for all she was worth even against the painful jut of bone that still made her walk a bit funny the next day, because what the hell else was she supposed to do? She couldn’t be sure exactly what Harrowhark was thinking in those moments, but honestly that only added to it.

Look, she thought to herself, one time afterwards, while she was jelly-boned (metaphorically) and panting on the bedspread and Harrow was dissolving today’s boner with an immense look of satisfaction. At one point in your life, all you wanted in the whole fucking universe was for this girl to eat you. It’s the same thing, you thirsty bitch.

It was kind of comforting (in the places that it wasn't reflexively agonizing), to imagine that at this point in her life, the same deep impulse that’d driven her to throw herself on a spike amounted to just another way to make their bedroom time a little spicier. That imagining Harrow giving her a risky fuck could take over the job that her whole suicidal impulse had done before. Maybe it was calm seas from here on out. Maybe she could sexualize herself out of a martyr complex.

That was too much, rattling around the old dome, so she turned over and took stock.

Harrow had draped herself over the bedspread, taking up more room than her little stick body should be able to. Gideon took that opportunity to drape herself half over the woman, flopping onto her stomach over and between Harrow’s legs, arms coming up and around her mid-back. She kissed Harrow’s chest, over from one breast to the other.

She propped her chin on Harrow’s sternum, looking up at her, and said, “you know I’m yours, right? Like, that’s it, that’s the whole of it, right?”

Harrow, eyes narrow slits, flicked her gaze down to meet Gideon’s. She spoke very gently. “I know.”

That sent a thrill through her. Oh, she liked that.

Harrow’s fingers came to card through Gideon’s hair, stroking rather than grabbing, but it was too late. The tone had shifted. Gideon might be well done and knackered, but not everything was about getting her rocks off.

Sometimes things were about getting Harrow’s rocks off, and in the process, satisfying some deep, inarticulate need in herself.

She kissed her way down from Harrow’s chest to her stomach, nuzzling into the concave curve there, leaving lots of time and shooting lots of glances up to make her intentions clear. Harrow made no move to stop her, and when Gideon was down low enough, she canted her hips up so Gideon could loop her arms back and around them.

Holding the bowl of Harrow’s pelvis like it was a life raft, Gideon nuzzled her way down, feverish but unhurried. First she nosed into the crease between leg and hip, kissing the soft skin in the bend there until she felt Harrow relax, and then with delighted intent, moving into the sparse thatch above her vulva.

The sharp scent of Harrow's sex greeted her strongly, and for a moment she was struck by the wonder of it having grown familiar to her. She opened her mouth and tasted her, not for the first time, except in the way that every time might as well have been the first: in that it made her heart try to beat its way out of her chest in breathless excitement and powerful adoration. Her tongue skidded over an abundance of slick wet, pulling it into her mouth greedily.

She couldn’t help it: she groaned, mouth open against Harrow’s labia. Harrow stuttered out a quiet, riveted noise in return.

Her tongue found the hood of her clit and flicked, further noise emerging from her chest somewhere. She looked up, and Harrow was staring down at her with an unusually laser gaze, one that set Gideon’s little hairs all on end. The flush was high on Harrow's dark chest, and her nipples stood like tiny monuments to Gideon's good work.

She moaned again, swallowed, and began that work in earnest. Harrow gasped, closing her legs tighter around Gideon’s ears, but did not once look away even as her hips began to move against that wickedly clever, worshipful tongue.

Gideon’s back arched, her arms tightened, she lifted Harrow’s hips from the bed to press them to her face. Harrow's heels dug into her back. Her legs closed around Gideon's ears. All of her senses were encompassed, here: everything was Harrow, her world was just Harrow, the hot slick wet of her labia between Gideon’s tongue and gentle teeth, the subtle jut of her clit around which Gideon fastened her lips.

She’d never gotten worship until she’d found her way here. Devotion, sure, sacrifice, sure, but not worship. Something in that had been a sea change for her, mirroring some sea change in Harrow that had happened around the same time. Rediscovering each other outside of the context of tragedy had realigned both of their priorities with a shocking entireness and Gideon felt like finally, here, things were as they should be.

Harrow was crying out. Leaning a little to untwine one arm from around her hip, Gideon made to bring her fingers into play, but Harrow’s legs immediately clamped tighter around her head.

“Don’t,” Harrow gasped, and Harrow almost never said anything when she was this gone, so Gideon immediately didn’t.

She felt a hand in her hair, grabbing tight, pressing her in tight against Harrow. Harrow bucked her hips, hissing through her teeth, and when Gideon fastened lips around her clit again and sucked, the skinny woman mewled transcendently.

So she did it again.

Harrow thrashed. Gideon’s mouth was full of her flesh, wide and welcoming to it, the pressure of suction letting her tongue do its work on Harrow’s clit in the comfort of Gideon’s own mouth. She could barely breathe, but it didn’t matter: she’d stay here till she passed out if Harrow would only keep making those noises.

This felt like — more, somehow, it felt like this was pushing a little past where Harrow would usually tap out and beg overstimulation. Gideon didn’t look a gift horse in the mouth when her own mouth was full of pussy, though, and the other woman’s hips began to buck rapid-fire. The hand on the back of Gideon’s head dug crescents into her scalp.

It wasn’t subtle when she came this time, the spasms of her body accompanied by a high keening. Gideon could feel Harrow’s cunt clenching beside her chin, and a flush of further slick drenched her throat. Her own pulse throbbed in her ears in time, and she did not let up on that hot pearl of a clit.

Harrow’s body was an arched rictus for an eternity of heartbeats before she collapsed back, spasms dying down to shuddering quivers. Her legs went lax, freeing Gideon to get some air just as she’d started seeing stars herself.

“Ah,” she panted, feeling like she wanted to say something, but too breathless and shimmering to put words together.

That hand on her head had remained, and now it shakily pulled at her, pressed her not against Harrow’s still-hot cunt but against her hip, inviting Gideon to lay wrapped in the tangle of her skinny legs. She obeyed, letting herself drape with a huff, revelling. She could feel Harrow's pulse by way of her whole vulva, which was pressed wetly against Gideon's shoulder. Nice.

Harrow surprised her by speaking, or trying to. “You’re,” she said, and then, “that,” and then, “you looked…”

Gideon patted Harrow’s flat ass, grinning an absolutely drunken grin, her face slicked fully from cheekbones to throat with cyprine.

“No need to thank me, my sepulchral not-so-maiden.”

That earned her a bump upside the head with Harrow's leg, and she buried a cackle against her thigh, smearing her with more of her juices. She was surrounded by that scent. This, this was the shit.

A handful of slowing breaths and easing heartbeats later, Harrow began to tug at her hair again, the inchoate little tugs that were a plea rather than a demand. Gideon climbed up beside her, even as Harrow had found her voice and was saying smally, "come here, please, come up here."

She never really got tired of hearing Harrow say please. She also could absolutely never say no to it.

They tangled in each other's arms then, Gideon kicking the blanket down and then toeing it back up over them. There was still so little to Harrow, once all the vestments and artifice were stripped away, and she was so easy to hold. In turn she seemed determined to wrap as much of herself around Gideon as she could, throwing a leg over Gideon's hip and her arms around her ribcage. Her fingers splayed one low and one high across that broad, muscled back, and her face buried against Gideon's right breast.

They still avoided each others' scars, whenever possible.

 

The curled, snarling line of scar tissue that disfigured Gideon Nav’s otherwise fantastic left tit was not exactly a secret, to her or Harrow or really anyone who’d seen her chest in the last year or two. That didn’t mean she loved having it looked at.

Its mirror image on her back had healed more cleanly, maybe having been less of a subject of rumination. Somehow, not being able to see the exit wound had made that one feel less real even when it had been open: on the other hand, she’d been able to look down and see the echoing hole that she’d punched in herself for a woman she’d come to believe saw her as a millstone around her neck and nothing else. Over time, to her eye, it had begun to look as achingly hungry as her shitty half-revenant soul had felt.

And, of course, in the end that wound had closed only at Harrow’s behest. So she had complicated feelings about that scar: better than the wound, sure as fuck better than the wound, but a reminder nonetheless. And at the same time, the last hand to lay upon it had been Harrowhark's, and that, too, deserved remembering.

More pressingly though it cramped her style. No low-necked shirts for Gideon Nav; no running around in just her bandeau, the stupid thing peeking up over the edge. She was more self-conscious of it than she had been of the awful wound, because how the fuck could she care about a gaping wound in her chest when her world had turned to ash? Only now she had Harrow back, and she still had this stupid little monument to all their sins sitting on her breast.

It was a little better now than it had been, at least; Harrow knew not to linger her eyes on it, so at least she could take her shirt off during sex. Small mercies.

 

It hadn’t been so great in the early days of their shuttle time.

“Are you going to be done in there anytime soon?”

Just like Harrowhark, to eschew knocking and just jump straight to the acerbic comment. Gideon wondered if she even noticed she did that kind of thing, or if a lifetime of being — well — Harrowhark meant that it slipped off the tongue too easy to even notice.

“No,” she hollered back.

The fact that the shuttle had a bathtub meant the whole thing was a luxury setup. It was an absurd thing to include in a living space the size of theirs. Still, Gideon was going to take every advantage. She’d tried hot baths as a corpse. Yuck. Things got soggy and wrinkled and other things filled with water. Sonics had done just fine. As a living, breathing human who had worked her muscles to aching, though —

Yum.

“You’re going to have to drag me out of here if you want a turn,” she yelled back through the door, sinking deeper. The tub was fucking tiny, either her knees stuck out like mountains or her whole upper half was left high and dry, but it was still a delight. She filled the tub so full that her getting in displaced a little wave over the edge, and the overflow drain gurgled and sucked down water urgently. "Which, good luck, stick-arms McNoAss!"

“Nav, there’s one bathroom on this horrible shuttle and you are hogging it.” Harrow had begun to sound less disdainful and more urgent. “You have been hogging it for an hour. You must be done by now.”

“Ugh,” She sunk the lower half of her face below the water’s surface for a couple of heartbeats, before she surged up and out of the tub. She heaved her dripping self over the edge, pulling the drain with a hearty plarp.

In her mind’s eye she could practically see Harrow doing the pee dance, and that was funny, but she had to grudgingly admit it would only be funny to a point. “Yeah, fine, hold it for just like a second here.”

Shake off a bit, grab one of those plush-ass towels, scrub her hair into slightly drier disarray, wrap it around herself from tits to thighs. She slapped the panel for the door and there was Harrow, looking as scrunched and uncomfortable as Gideon had imagined.

She was already complaining as Gideon went sideways to allow her to charge into the bathroom, “ugh, how do you always leave it so wet, are you bathing on the—“

A side effect of their difference in height was that Harrow’s head came to about tit level. This was not generally a problem, as Gideon liked having the high ground and was pretty proud of her breasts. Just now, though, Harrow’s carefully glancing pass over Gideon’s chest snagged right on that snarl of scar tissue, and she stopped as short as if she’d been yanked.

So did Gideon, feeling that gaze like a hot hand.

She pulled the towel up over it. It was risky, but at the moment she’d rather gamble on Harrow not looking down than stay so exposed.

Harrow looked away, cheeks darkening. Gideon didn’t linger to watch her disappear into the bathroom but headed for the bedroom, her face feeling hot with discomfort and something like shame as she firmly shut the door behind her.

She dried off, itched the scar, went looking for clothes. Her head felt staticky. Fuck, all the good relaxation of the bath just kinda got tossed into the sun there.

Thankfully she’d already hopped her way into a pair of knee-length shorts when Harrow’s voice startled her.

“Does it still hurt you?”

When had the door opened again?! “Fuck, Harrow, knock, you know about knocking, right,” Gideon babbled as she urgently yanked the shirt down over her head, hoping she wasn't blushing as full-body as she felt like. “I’m pretty sure you do, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard you knock on a door before, so what, are your knuckles broken? Slam a book too hard on them or something?”

But the necro just stood there, fingers twined in front of her like she was trying not to fidget. Her cheeks were darker than they had been before — which, fair, if she’d been standing there watching Gideon dress.

“How long’ve you been there?” She asked, suspicious.

Harrow shook her head. “Your modesty is preserved. Not long. I wouldn’t intrude.”

"You literally just did—"

“Does it, though?” It was a reiteration of the question Gideon had done such a good job just breezing by, asked in a smaller voice now. “Has it not fully…?”

Covered by now, Gideon nonetheless felt those eyes on her chest. She put a protective hand over the scar, feeling that burning in her face intensifying. “It’s fine. Healthy as a cow or whatever.”

“The back looked more healed than the front,” she said, worry creeping into her tone that did nothing to assuage Gideon’s hideous feeling of having been perceived. So she’d been there long enough to get a gander after all. Harrow stepped forward, reaching a hand out and up. “I’m concerned. If you’d let me look at it…”

Gideon stepped backwards. “No. Infirmary said I was fine, fuck off.”

That did stop Harrow short, although her hand stayed up as if suspended for a few extra seconds before she slowly lowered it. She bit her lip, grappling with something. Yeah, thought Gideon, must be hard to take no for an answer after years of not.

“You’re sure? It isn’t still hurting you?”

Feeling a little wigged out by how intense the air was between them just then, Gideon stepped back once more and turned away. The room was tiny, so that meant she was already bumping up against the side of the bed, so she sat, staring at the dresser rather than Harrowhark.

“Yeah, no, it’s fine. It doesn’t… hurt.” And it didn’t, really. What it did sometimes feel was… pulled. Or hot. Warm, maybe, was a better word. It didn’t burn. Sometimes it felt overfull, discomfitingly replete. And if ached was the only word she could think of to describe it, it wasn’t quite right either. The line it drew through her chest from front to back was warm like hands put in front of the space heater after a walk in the cold of Drearburh, pummelled by reviving warmth, punctuated right in the middle by the thunderous beat of her heart that still startled her sometimes.

Harrow had come to sit beside her while she’d been ruminating, a couple of feet between them. There was a deep line between her eyes, and after a beat of not looking at Gideon, she reached a hand across and put it, very tentatively, over hers.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

It could have been for a million things, but really only for one thing.

“Don’t,” Gideon told her ferociously, feeling a throb all through her that wasn’t only because of the cool smooth of Harrow’s palm over the back of her hand. Harrow opened her mouth to inevitably refute. Gideon headed her off at the pass. “Just don’t, okay? We’re — we’re alive. Good enough. Better than expected, hell. Can we just… not rake back through it?”

Harrow’s face squinched up, and Gideon readied herself for a fight, but after another beat, she said in that same small and almost timid voice, “alright.”

Shit, alright. Gideon had to admit Harrow was hitting above average on the respecting her wishes, here. A knot in her chest loosened just slightly. On impulse she flexed her fingers.

Harrow’s curled in turn, curving around the side of Gideon’s palm, in what could only be described as Harrow holding her goddamn hand, and Gideon found herself suddenly holding her breath.

It only lasted for a moment before the necromancer looked away and stood up and left the room silently, her face turned away, her ears red.

Gideon picked up her hand and pressed her fingers to her chest, unthinking, her whole body tingling with something she couldn't pin down. She flopped on her side, trying to decide whether she wanted to yell or have a hideously snotty cry or call Harrowhark back in, except there was also the matter of her body knowing it had been touched affectionately and was responding by flushing all the blood to all the usual inconvenient places. It was not a conversation that should have gotten anyone horny, except Harrow had respected her wishes, and Harrow had cared about how she was doing, and Harrow had held her hand.

Heck.

It didn't make a lick of sense, any of it. It really, especially, shouldn't have undone her like it had. It hadn't even happened at an especially intense moment, at least by the metrics of their averaged-out moments. She should've been angry about the intrusion, or at least, she should've fallen back on her usual smokescreen of needling at Harrow. But she hadn't, and she didn't even wish that she had.

She understood neither the gesture nor her own reaction to it. She could only lay there and feel a way about it, as hard as she could possibly feel.

But that had been early days, and small fry.

Notes:

Gideon has damage. Will that come up again later? You bet your bottom dollar. Will it be resolved? Not within the container of what is essentially a cabin smutfic... but it might get a little less tangled, at least.

A little bit of a short one this time, but only because the next chapter is a DOOZY. Tune in next week for: gender gremlin Harrow, gym rat Gideon, a full moon, bad cooking, thin walls, and Fingers In Her Mouth Friday.

Chapter 4

Summary:

Firsts.

Notes:

Sooo this one's almost as long as the others combined, but I couldn't bear to break it up. It's one long, dizzy breath of a thing. Enjoy.

There's a Tom Cardy reference somewhere in here. If you know, you'll know.

CW for talk of penises and body dysphoria.

The first time Harrow tried it, she locked the bathroom in the middle of the night, sat down on the counter under the fluorescents in only her nightshirt, and focused.

It didn’t go easily: it took will and strain to look inside and start rearranging things, and she could feel the beginnings of blood-sweat on her forehead. She hated how much effort it took, when this kind of work had been so easy before, but she did feel a grim satisfaction when the theorem took shape and things started to shift. It hurt, which was nothing.

When she cracked open an eye and moved the hand she was hovering over her own genitalia in order to peek at the results so far, a stab of unexpected panic shot through her to see a protrusion there. She shoved everything back into place.

Her heart pounding, she clutched the edge of the counter.

It was similar to the weird panic she remembered feeling when she’d been old enough to really parse that she had holes in her body, ingresses and egresses, one of which seemed biologically intended soley for other peoples’ use: a man’s on the way in, a baby’s on the way out. Learning about sexual reproduction had horrified her. She’d come to terms, but her genitalia were something she had largely been content to ignore.

Until the first time she’d felt sexual arousal, recently pubescent and dreaming on the subject of the Body. Oh, she’d thought, that’s what that’s for.

The idea of sexual desire had been introduced into her world with her first sight of Alecto's impossible, slumbering corpse. Even at the time it had not been un-fraught, and she had struggled between ravenous curiosity about that new hunger, and pious shame over base bodily needs.

She was finding a very different fruiting of the concept in the way she desired Gideon. Both had old, old roots, but she hadn’t really seen the latter for what it was until much later.

Until the last handful of weeks, she’d only rarely found use for her genitalia. If she spent too much time thinking about the practical details of sex while unaroused she still sometimes ended up wrinkling her nose. The mechanisms of arousal must have come into existence before the act of sex, because who would try that without the overwhelming prerogative of instinct?

Except that she had an answer for that, now, too, and though it still made no real, logical sense, she couldn’t deny it. Gideon’s smell made her wet. Gideon’s attention made her wet. Gideon made her wet, and none of it was because of some objective assessment or decision. It was like her body was looking for an outlet for all of the overwhelming energies of her feelings. And now she wanted to chase sex, pin it down, get everything she could out of the act, try it every way they came up with to try it, because what it meant was connection. Wet and raw connection, and something more than that: something transcendent when they were both chasing the same goal.

The closest they’d got to that feeling before now had been that brief, shining time between the saltwater pool and Gideon's damned fall — and even that had largely been awful. She did not want more violence, or more loss. She wasn’t content with beautiful agonies when it came to Gideon Nav. She didn’t know the first fucking thing about performing intimacy, but she wanted to. Dead God, she wanted to.

If they could get there with sex, she wanted every scrap of it she could get.

Including this. It might have been Gideon’s idea, but she’d taken it and made it her own. Her own wretched heart would not defeat her with fear. She knew in her gut that the fear wasn’t a fear of a wrong body: she’d read those introductory passages in the literature Paul had sent, read them and considered them and discarded them when she lined them up against ideas of her own selfhood.

It hadn’t been bravado that let her dismiss it all as tubes and fluids to Gideon. She was used to what she had — she’d spent the time coming to terms with it — but her satisfaction of self-image had never been tied up in her body in the way those textbooks had talked about could sometimes be the case. She had never been satisfied with her self, and body was the least of it. A cavity or a protrusion, a flatness or a softness, breadth in the hips or in the shoulders: there was a fundamental meaninglessness to it all, when she thought of herself. She was two hundred hungry ghosts; she was a monster who had nearly eaten the person dearest to her and destroyed herself in order not to; she was the terminus in a line of promises barely but faithfully kept; she was a killer of God. She was a girl, she supposed.

It was the potential for failure, she realised, that was making her sympathetic nervous system florid with chemicals. Trying and getting some measure of success meant she had to get this right, meant that she had the capacity, and for some reason that scared her. After everything that had happened, here she was again, pursued by the hideous spectre of not being good enough. Or of not being capable of trying hard enough.

There was a hard, bright line that I can’t could draw inside one’s soul, she had discovered. After a lifetime of I musts that had stripped her down to the raw cold wretchedness of suffering, some traitorous part of her had thought that perhaps she finally deserved the cold comfort of inability.

But what was that other than cutting off her own hands, if it wasn't true?

Gritting her teeth, she tried again.

 

The next morning Harrow was woken by the usual thumping racket around the shuttle, and shuffled herself to the kitchen counter. She set up there with a package of crackers and tried not to hate the fact that she was conscious, watching her companion doing her enervatingly monotonous laps around the shuttle.

Gideon didn’t try and mother her like Paul did, but she knew her former cavalier kept an eye on how much she ate, so she made sure to visibly be nibbling every time she swung by on a lap. Which was about every twenty seconds.

There was one upside: the view.

Gideon was luminous — well, full stop, but she was especially nice to look at when she’d worked up a gleam of sweat and darkening flush under her burnished skin, and was panting a little. She hadn’t ever been blind to it, really; Gideon had always been the most egregiously, flamboyantly gorgeous living thing the Ninth held within its austere walls. It was nice, now, to be able to simply watch without the pretence of a contemptuous glare or the feeling that she should disapprove of such beauty in their midst. Gideon was the rising sun the way she’d always read it described in books.

When the woman in question jogged to a stop and asked, in her habitual casual-cocky manner, “enjoying the gunshow?” then flexed her impressive arms, Harrow simply said, “yes,” and finished her cracker.

The first time she’d done that it had clearly flustered Gideon. She covered it better now but Harrow could still spot a bit of that half-surprise in her, that gratification.

“You know,” Gideon said, coming round the counter to lean in towards Harrow from the other side, “I know I’m never gonna get you to do a push-up, but you know you could join me, right? Like, with your stuff?”

Harrow raised her eyebrows. Gideon waved a hand, kind of reeling the conversation forward. “Throw a couple of bones, pop up some ol’ skelly-boys, do a theorem?” She smirked, one half of her gorgeous mouth pulling wide, and stole one of Harrow’s crackers. “I know you’ll hate it if we get out of here and you’re the only rusty one.”

“What is it you think I’m doing with the books, if not that?” She left the whole package of crackers with Gideon.

The sweaty woman snatched a second and gestured with it. “I figured that part was just fun for you.”

“It is, inasmuch as work can be enjoyable.”

“Great, but it can’t all be brain work,” Gideon asserted.

Wrinkling her nose, Harrow gave her a dry look. “Would it look more convincing if I was breaking a sweat while reading? No, Gideon, most of it is understanding the underlying theorem. The rest is having the will and the available power to execute. You underestimate simply because you’re not inclined towards it and refuse to hold even the simplest necromantic knowledge inside that thick skull of yours.”

“Hey, I rode around in your brain for the better part of a year.” Gideon moved away from playful challenge, invoking that. Harrow felt her shoulders tighten for the reminder of that time. “Even then you had to like, do it now and then, get some practice in. Isn’t it like building muscle memory?”

“Well… in a manner of speaking. To a degree.”

Gideon spread her free hand and wiggled her eyebrows, licking cracker crumbs from the fingers of the other, which was distracting in and of itself. “Well? You doing anything else right now, my penumbral gal-pal?”

Harrow could see the conversation unfurling before her, its exhaustingly predictable branching paths, Gideon’s pushing, her own resistance. Gideon didn’t easily take no for an answer when she got a notion, which Harrow liked about her, except when she didn’t. She could even see what the other woman was trying to do, here, splitting the difference as she so often did between astute and hideously irritating in her correctness. Except Harrow had been all night fucking practicing, and was not in the mood to explain that.

She felt grey and tired and a little stretched beyond her means. She hadn’t ended her experimentation with work she was willing to show. It was bad enough being so diminished, but doing necromancy in space, even orbiting a flipped moon in a necro-friendly shuttle with grave dirt seeded through the bulkheads, was a slog.

“Harrow?” Gideon asked, craning her neck to peek at the necromancer’s face. Harrow jolted up out of her ruminations.

“I did not sleep well last night,” she admitted.

Gideon crossed her arms on the counter, bending so she could put her chin on them, gazing up at her consideringly. There were a few curves of red hair that had gotten glued to her forehead with sweat that Harrow couldn’t stop looking at. “Yeah, I thought I felt you out of bed a lot.”

Harrow scoffed. “How would you know? You sleep like a stone.”

“I ache for you in your absence, my inky inamorata,” Gideon intoned. “My brain may be in gentle repose but my arms know the lack.”

Springing back up she flexed again. Exercise seemed to put her in almost as high spirits as sex did, and grudgingly, Harrow felt the edges of her mouth tug just a little. The gleam in Gideon’s eye as she came round the counter said that she had spotted that, and she crowed, “I’m deprived. You’ve deprived me. And you know what I hear is a real good solution to insomnia?”

“Let me guess—“

Gideon didn’t.

She grabbed Harrow and tossed her over her shoulder, not even a fireman’s carry so much as that of a pannier of bones. But Harrow got to press her face to that impeccably built spine and take a deep breath of Gideon post-workout, which sent a warm glow all through her direct from her hindbrain. So, small boons.

One of Gideon’s arms curled up and around to hold her tight to her shoulder, and she straightened with no apparent effort, heading back towards the bedroom.

“You’re so fucking light, Harrow,” she complained, and then with her free hand slapped Harrow right on the ass. “Crackers and gruel! More crackers and gruel for this woman! Damn, we gotta get you some cakes. Like, even pancakes would be an upgrade.”

She continued the crass narration while Harrow enjoyed the hand on her rump, which lingered and further fuelled that bloom of warmth in her veins. One of the most unexpected side effects of a sexual relationship, it turned out, was this sort of casual touch. She wasn’t yet used to it, she hadn’t yet figured out how to incorporate it into her own behaviour. But she liked it more than she would have expected.

Gideon kicked the door panel on their way in, which slid the bedroom door shut and plunged them into darkness.

“Alright, you can put me down now,” Harrow demanded. Being upside down was making her dizzy and her patience was about worn out.

"Okay!"

In a disorienting flop punctuated with a Hua! she whipped Harrow down on her back on the bed, obeying the request in spirit only.

A squeak of protest escaped her lungs along with most of her air. "Not what I meant!"

"You're down, aren't you?"

It was dark enough in the bedroom with the door closed that Gideon fumbled a bit, but she did manage to unhook Harrow’s simple everyday-wear cloak and whip it out from under her, then do the same with her socks. Then she came down on the bed next to Harrow with a great huge whomp, getting a very worrisome screech from the bedframe and sending the whole thing to shaking.

“I’m not going to get much sleep if you break the bed, Nav!”

Harrow went to sit up, but Gideon’s arm came down over her none too gently, flopping them both down into the softness of the pillows and blankets.

“Bitch and moan, the bed’s fine,” Gideon countered unsympathetically. She scooped her other arm under Harrow and pulled her in, sending goosebumps down the back of Harrow’s neck when her breath flowed warm past her ear. “So you wanna guess now what solution I was suggesting?”

“Hnnn?” Harrow prompted, pressing in. She was forever surprised by Gideon’s capacity to goad a reaction from her. She was exhausted, she had been in a bad mood, and now here she was, wrapped in Gideon’s arms in the dark and feeling that particular bloom of readiness. Her heart opened like a security lock calibrated to Gideon’s biometrics. Everything between her legs sighed with extra blood.

“Getting cuddled.” And then, infuriatingly — faking it, obviously faking it! — Gideon yawned, loud and long and luxuriant, right next to Harrow’s ear.

Harrow clenched her jaw. The traitorous thing worked, though, pulling laboriously open in a shuddering stretch of musculature under tension. Her eyes narrowed, closed; her rebellious diaphragm flexed, her intercostals expanded and her ribs pulled wide, wide. Her ears popped and her eyes watered, and for a long moment, deaf to the world, she was replete. She yawned.

“Good.” Gideon was grinning, she could hear it.

“That was a dirty tr—“ She yawned again. “Dirty trick. Brute force.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Gideon rolled them, then, so that she was on her back and Harrow was nestled on her chest. She threatened as she fished for the blanket, “I’ll do it again.”

“Don’t,” Harrow complained after a third yawn, wiping her streaming eyes on Gideon’s shirt and resting her cheek between her breasts. Gideon’s hands had begun to run up and down her back, a soothing rhythm.

She could sit with her arousal for a while, she decided, feeling the heaviness of her limbs as a counter-argument to the exertions of sex. She had very little fear that she’d wake up and Gideon would be gone, and she could collect on the debt then.

 

 

Five days into their time on the shuttle, the air had been so brittle between them that Paul’s plan seemed certain to be ill-advised and ill-fated. They’d been circling each other like predators in captivity, pulled towards one another like hungry ghosts to their old meat, like a microcosm of their years at the Ninth.

“What are you doing?” She hadn’t meant it to sound so sharp, but she’d found Gideon on the tiny navigational cabin of the shuttle, apparently flicking switches at random.

She’d jolted like she’d been hit by a rock, coming up quick and turning her big body around to face Harrow in a guilty loom. “Uh, learning the controls? In case something goes to shit and we have to high-tail it out of here?”

“Do you know how?”

“I read the manual.” When Harrow narrowed her eyes, Gideon squinted back and amended, “skimmed it. I’m pretty sure I know what not to touch, anyways.” As the two glared at each other, she reached over to the control panel and flicked a switch.

The blast shutters on the front windshield slammed down and Harrow jumped. Gideon smirked and flicked them back up.

Flustered, Harrow was finding it very hard to stick to her determination not to snap at Gideon. Never mind that that ship had already sailed, she had hoped to be able to reel it back. She peaked her fingers so as not to fidget and said carefully, “I have some concerns.”

“What, worried I’m going to crash us into the moon?”

“In fact, that,” Harrow agreed tightly, "yes."

Gideon scoffed. “There are so many fucking failsafes on this thing I’d have to grab the joystick and ride it manually till we hit ground.”

“Let’s not test that assertion.” Harrow had imagined it and did not like the image. She could feel her voice getting high and tight.

Gideon’s hand inched for said manual control rod, and though it was currently recessed and not actively in control of anything, Harrow’s tension ticked up a notch.

“Oooh, look, oh no, I’m gonna do it, I’m gonna ram us into that big ball of rock out there, just to piss you off, oh nooo.” She stared Harrow down, colour high on her cheeks, her golden eyes bright and hard.

“Nav!” she snapped. “Leave it!”

“I’m not going to crash us into the fucking moon, Harrow, do you think I’m a fucking idiot? Still?”

“See — see that you don’t!”

Harrow turned and high-tailed it out of there herself, in a high temper that was one part fury and one part crawling shame. She could have said I don’t think you’re an idiot, or she could have said I was terribly afraid, forgive me, or she could have said why don’t we look at the manual together so we’ll both know how, but instead she’d snapped, because it was familiar and because she was scared.

So, that could have gone better.

Again and again, she made the same mistakes. It had been all Harrow had wanted, to have Gideon back in the world. She had decided the moment that she’d first realised what she’d lost that even if Gideon came back loathing her, it would be worth it. It would be fair and just, even, to be hated. But now, as they sparked and split and sparked again, in the privacy of her own heart Harrow was despairing.

Maybe it was inevitable that, finally given a moment of peace, they were recapitulating their own interpersonal ontogeny. Only, Harrow did not want that. Their endless fights in the end had only ever been to ensure that Gideon didn’t leave. Now they didn’t know any other way to relate, and she was afraid that selfsame pattern would in fact drive the end that she was so dreading.

The idea that even if Gideon hated her, at least she’d be somewhere out in the universe alive, felt like cold comfort suddenly. It had been enough before. When had that changed?

It was almost worse that there had been moments, little shining moments of accord between them. In the brief and incredible aftermath of restoring the soul and life to Gideon's body, she had been so sure for a time that they would be able to meaningfully come together outside of the double-trap of Lyctorhood and the gravity well of the Ninth’s secrets. She didn’t know when exactly that surety had fractured, but the miserable tendency of transcendence to dissolve in the face of the day-to-day had worn down those hopes into something smaller and more frightened.

By the time she had squirrelled herself back in the bedroom, Harrow was feeling deflated. She stared at the ruined cav bed. She hadn’t made herself well-understood then either. How was it that she was so bad at anything but being sharp-edged and demanding?

There were other ways, she knew. She had seen it. Palamedes and Camilla — not quite what she wanted to emulate, given, but they had had such a deep bond and it hadn’t been reliant on conflict and hierarchy. She had spent abysmally little time studying Magnus and Abigail, but their tenderness had furtively intrigued her. Her own parents had not been much of a model but she scraped her memory and decided that they had been kind to one another, but it had been a distant, dusty, burnt-out kind of way. Crux had taken care of her devotedly, but his kindness had been servitudinous, solicitous, and sharp; there had been precious little warmth there.

Could gentleness be learned?

Would she be given the grace to try? Did Gideon even want that?

She balled her fists in the blankets, still rucked from morning. Nights were no better than they had been. Gideon would curl on her side of the bed, right on the very edge. Sometimes she tossed and turned badly once she fell asleep.

Last night Harrow had taken the chance of putting a hand to Gideon’s forehead while she had been in one of those states, it being one of the few soothing gestures she remembered from her own childhood. Gideon had awoken all at once and pulled away like Harrow had burned her, gasping.

They’d both retreated to their respective edges then, lying awake in the dark, saying nothing and both of them as still as the grave. All she’d been able to hear was the rabbiting of her own heart.

It was funny to want something so badly and not know what to do about it, or even if it was possible to have.

 

She had tried for the rest of the day to be extra courteous. It was a futile pursuit, because it really was all guesswork. She could see that Gideon’s back was up and it was kind of a flounder to figure out how to bring it down. Ironically (infuriatingly) what came to mind was some of the lessons of her time on the Mithraeum about getting along in an enclosed space with a limited selection of others. Hateful dry little whispers about good manners and conversation that wore Augustine’s voice. John saying read a book, cook something, the little things. Ianthe and her constant games of psychological dress-up.

It all felt poisonous still, but she was a little desperate. She picked the only one she had even nominally successful experience with.

So that afternoon had found Harrow standing in the kitchen, a bit at a loss in front of the refrigeration chest. The sitting room with the books and the kitchen were connected, only separate rooms by conceit of function. Gideon was sprawled across the way on the couch, her nose in one of the small handful of books of fiction.

The cookbooks, all three of them, were on the bottom shelf forgotten in one corner. Harrow crossed, pulled one out, and realised Gideon was watching her.

“I thought I might… make something.”

Gideon snorted. “So long’s we’re not looking at another marrow soup here. I’ve seen that show already.”

Harrow flinched. “Ah. I forget sometimes you were… there for that.”

She thought she saw Gideon flinch then. “Yeah, no, I know.”

Oh, this was already going so well. Very good choice of words, Harrowhark. “Only inasmuch as that entire time has gotten a bit foggy on recollect.”

“Sure. Brain trauma and all that.” Gideon had given up the pretence of reading now, was staring at her with a gaze Harrowhark was a little too frozen-up to read accurately. “That soup shit, though, that was sick. Did I ever tell you how fucking impressed I was by that stunt? And, like, grossed out?”

Harrow could recognise an olive branch and would be damned if she slapped it away. Still, the memory of that whole protracted war with Gideon the First held a quality of gnawing her own leg off to get out of a snare trap, and her returning smile was a bit brittle.

She went back to the kitchen and flipped through the book, fully at sea. She peremptorily flipped past the hot dishes (including soup), which was most of the book, and ended up in salads. Which, on examination, largely seemed to be simple assortments of vegetable matter. In a few cases someone had gotten wild with it, apparently, and had put a little fruit and salad together. Make a fruit salad, huh.

Nope. Not a winner.

Their initial supplies largely consisted of nonperishables, but when Harrow went rooting around she found a few green things in the back with what looked like the approximate right textures. No leaves, but other things. Next step, chopping.

At some point Gideon had drifted over and set up with her book on the other side of the counter, and was very clearly doing more watching Harrow than reading. With all her heart she resisted the urge to give Gideon the stink-eye until she went away: she may have been feeling stupid, but on examination, this was the most time they’d spent together today without sparking off one another. Was there something to this?

She was in the midst of a complicated chess-game wherein she tried to watch Gideon watching her whilst also not allowing Gideon to watch that she was watching her watching her when Harrow’s knife slipped.

“Ah—“ It didn’t really matter that it was a papercut next to the mountain of literally everything else her body had undergone, the cold shock of injury made her animal brain cry out without thought.

Gideon was on her feet that second, startling Harrow in turn. “What?!”

“It’s fine!” she yelped.

Maybe she could have been more graceful about it, but days of this weird brittle air had her wound up. She popped her finger in her mouth like a child and sucked on it, doing the quick necromantic patch job there rather than bleed on the cutting board some more for Gideon to see.

Callused hands on her wrist made her realise Gideon had made it round to her side of the counter. She let her finger slide from between her lips again, giving her ex-cavalier the opportunity to examine the healed finger for herself while Harrow managed her startle response. Gideon seemed intent, though once she’d determined for herself that the wound was gone, there seemed to be a flush rising on her cheeks. All at once she let Harrow go and stepped back.

“Guess you’re not going to bleed out from a little knife like that, huh.” Harrow was practiced enough to read forced joviality in Gideon’s voice, and wondered at it.

“It would take concerted effort even if I wasn’t an adept,” she noted, dry.

It was a weird moment, and left a weird emotional residue on the activity in question, but it hadn’t been a fight and Harrow considered that a win. When she was done and had a little bowl of chopped-up bits of plant, she placed it between them with a vague sense of presentation.

Gideon seemed as nonplussed as she did.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just, like… eat the cucumber? What’s the point?”

Harrow considered her handiwork with dissatisfaction.

“I expect you might be right.” Salads were summarily filed away in the ‘not worth the effort’ section of her two-card recipe catalogue.

 

At the very least it meant that when they retired to bed, they seemed to be in greater accord.

Gideon had seemed so discomfited by the arrangement the last few nights that tonight, Harrow had decided to try staying up reading for a time after the other woman disappeared into the bedroom. If not real privacy, she could at least give her the illusion thereof. It would help, she was sure of it: the tension had been spiking around bedtime in a weird way, Gideon refusing to even look at Harrow once the door was closed for the night, and this wholly sidestepped that awkwardness.

She had to admit, with a sad, soft discontentment, that she understood. Even if her traitorous heart had hoped and even expected otherwise, it was unfair to assume Gideon wouldn’t want, need, her own space.

They would simply have to make do until Paul sent word it was safe for them to be out in the open again.

Harrow crept into the bedroom some sixty minutes after Gideon, enough for it to make her past the shallowest stages of sleep. She moved with exaggerated care not to make a noise and wincing at the sshhhth of the door as it slid open and then closed behind her. She’d washed her face clean of paint, and then taken the liberty of disrobing down to her underthings before she’d come in so as to further keep the noise down, and set her folded cloak and shirt and pants on the dresser blindly in the dark.

Gideon, in her absence, had migrated to the middle of the bed. Harrow could feel the divot of her weight pressing the mattress down and was careful to arrange herself without touching the other woman. She listened to the even breathing, which had the rhythm of sleep though with a shallowness to it that spoke of dreaming, and was gratified her gambit had been successful. Gideon had been allowed to bed down peacefully, tricked into enjoying the space like it was her own.

That put a very small smile on Harrow’s face as she settled. She closed her eyes and listened as Gideon’s breath deepened for one long inhale, a second, and then something like a sigh.

Harrow was beginning to drift off herself when Gideon’s sleep grew restless.

It was one thing when she was tossing and turning on the other side of the bed, but another when she’d rolled her way right to the middle. Gideon was making little noises of distress, her body twitching and shuddering, once arching her back in a way that pressed her right into Harrow’s space.

On the one hand, Harrow was getting nervous she was going to get thrashed right off the bed. On the other, it was genuinely distressing to see Gideon in such helpless upset. It was no wonder she had nightmares. Harrow could imagine all too vividly what she must be reliving in the torment of her own dreaming mind.

There had to be something she could do.

“Gideon,” she tried.

That got a weird little throaty noise back, but no sign of waking. Gideon did turn over, facing her, but it was an insensate flop.

“Gideon,” she tried again, and recalling the other day, she reached out carefully under the covers and found the other woman’s hand. “You are having a nightmare.”

Gideon whined. Those warm, thick fingers squeezed her, and a moment later the sleeping woman inhaled. She could feel in the dark how Gideon tensed all at once, the restive twitching harshly silenced into rigid shock. Whether she’d meant to or not she was still squeezing Harrow’s hand, and that condition persisted for a long moment.

“Wha—“ Gideon’s voice was thick and gravelly with sleep confusion, the sound of which in the dark felt like a great intimacy.

Harrow tried for a soothing, sensible tone, “You were dreaming.”

“H—“ It was fortunate, Harrow thought, that Gideon was so large and so strong: it made it easy to read body language in the dark, from the way the bed shuddered when she shuddered.

“You’re safe.” It seemed the thing to say.

All at once Gideon pulled away.

“I have to piss,” she said in a rush as she tumbled from the bed and thumped out a rapid and primal retreat. Harrow’s chest clenched up with failure and she snatched her hand back to her own breast, furious with Gideon, furious with herself.

 

Gideon was in hell. Well, no, she’d been there and that was worse, but this was a damn near second place option. She stumbled senselessly to the bathroom, slapping the wall blindly till she hit the panel to slam the door shut.

Why did Harrow keep touching her? It made her feel so hideously dirty — dirty with want, because her god damned body responded without her god damned say so every god damned time, left her shorts wet, left her chest tight and her skin prickling for more when all Harrow had done was lay a palm on her face or on her hand or whatever. The tender little touches were going to be her undoing.

She was trying so hard to be good. All she needed to do, she was sure of it, was have some peace and quiet and privacy to jerk off and trick her clit into thinking it had gotten what it wanted. But there was nowhere. There was no time and holy fuck there was no space.

Shoving a hand between her legs, she checked the state of herself, though she didn’t really need to. Her underwear was soaked through.

She’d tried, she really had. She’d even made a furtive, shameful attempt when it seemed like Harrow had given her a merciful second to herself tonight, but the paranoia of being caught out at it had left her unable to finish the job, despite the throbbing ordeal of her cunt absolutely begging for it. Worse to maybe be witnessed at it by the very subject of her need than to suffer eternal blue-balls. She was sure that deep-space gaze would bore through her skull and see the torridness there, and be disgusted. So she'd fallen asleep horny and unsatisfied, and paid the consequences in impossible, very wet dreams.

Mashing her palm over her mouth, Gideon whimpered, “fuck.” She rubbed her hand over her jaw, then over her face, and covered her eyes. Her butt came down hard on the low bathroom counter, and she burned.

She was way past the point of being able to raid her mental catalogue of smut rags for busty beauties of the Third or whatever. It wasn’t like she hadn’t given it a go, but her body knew too well by now what it wanted.

And why not? her terrible, traitorous hindbrain whispered, that unstoppable libidinous part of herself that had, ironically, spite-masturbated to the idea of hot young skull nuns back on the Ninth because she knew it was blasphemous and would piss Harrow off. There wasn’t any fucking profit now in denying what she wanted or coming up with convoluted pretenses about it. Share a soul, share a body, share a bed — wasn’t there something that seemed to be missing from that list? How was sex a more profane intimacy than what they’d already undergone?

Hell. Stuff that back down the mind-hole. There was no way. Harrow would never, and Gideon would never, never. She didn’t deserve to and would never be invited to try.

But her hungry cunt was already throbbing with furious deprivation and it was not going to shut up, she knew.

She leaned her back against the mirror and covered her mouth against a groan of despair. So: her standard spank bank was leaving her cold, and she was sure as hell not going to let herself imagine Harrow, imagine her smooth subtle planes, imagine trailing kisses down her slip of a body and burying her face in —

Nope, no.

Back up. Try again.

She had to do something about this. Maybe it could just be mechanical. Sure as hell she was horny enough this was not going to take much of anything. If she could just keep her mind — clear — as she worked, maybe that would be enough. Her whole body was feverish with the worst case of frustrated arousal she’d experienced in the whole of her existence. It had never been like this before. It was just because she was back in a living body now, it had to be. Surely she’d just do one circuit of her own engorged clit and be done just like that.

Her hand leapt to stuffing itself into her underwear the moment she decided. It was some relief to finally be doing this, though only in the psychological sense: her body, offered opportunity, jumped at her own touch the way it hadn’t since she’d been a wretched teen, herself. Slapping a hand back over her own mouth she admonished herself not to make a fucking noise, and plunged her fingers beyond her own thatch and between her thighs with businesslike ruthlessness.

It was a fucking oil slick down there. It was a mess. It was going to take forever to clean up and she hadn’t even come yet. Gideon’s fingers dove between her labia with no resistance, slicking and slithering between those plumped folds in an experimental stroke that left her eyes rolling back.

She knew what got her off. Once she’d discovered touching herself, she’d dedicated a fair number of her nights to getting Olympic-level good at the sport. Great. Good. Efficiency was key here.

Without preamble, she hooked two fingers into herself and pressed the heel of her palm to her clit. The rough handling sent an almost painful jolt through her but she leaned mercilessly into it, groaning as silently as she could.

Squirming, straightening her arm, she leaned forward on the counter at a dangerous angle until she could grind her hips down and trap her hand flat against the cold surface. Her fingers flexed unforgivingly, rubbing a harsh rhythm against the front wall of her very ready cunt, the flex of the tendons in her hand playing a rhythm in turn against her clit.

She rocked her hips, falling into a familiar rhythm. Make no sound as she gasped, think of nothing, think of nothing—

don’t think of Harrow on the other side of that thin wall —

don’t think of Harrow getting, coming to the door, seeing her at her lurid work —

don’t think of Harrow’s small, cool hands come to make her fever worse —

She tried to swallow a cry as she came all at once, harsh and hard and heralded by a strong gush of wet that soaked her hand over and over in the same pulses that drew her whole body taut. She crushed her own fingers with it, rode the orgasm hard, almost panicked in her need until she felt the crested wave finally, finally abate.

 

Back in the bedroom, on the other side of a wall much too thin, Harrow lay wide-eyed in the darkness, comprehension blooming floridly all through her body.

 

She took her time coming back. She made good on her cover story, washed her hands -- like, really washed them, just in case -- spent a moment wishing she'd had the forethought to stash a spare set of underwear in here. Two options, there: go back to bed sopping, wiped off as best she could with what was in the bathroom, or ball up her underthings into the bathroom laundry tube and go back to bed commando. It was dark enough in the bedroom Harrow wouldn't see, and she was tempted, because sleeping in soggy underwear sucked.

Even with a brain full of the vague after-static of a strong but ignominious orgasm, though, she ended up thinking the better of it. Time to suffer, then.

As she shuffled back towards the bedroom, she reflected. That'd been a good one, and she'd only kind of thought of Harrow at the end there. That would buy her the rest of tonight if she didn't get stupid and start thinking about things she shouldn't. Tomorrow -- she'd deal with tomorrow then. For now, her chest felt heavy with unearned release, and her head was clearing up sharper than it had been in days.

Back into the night-black bedroom, then, unlit by window or lamp. Bump into the bed with a leg, edge around to her side. Resist the urge to belly-flop down in case Harrow had gotten back to sleep in the meantime. Crawl in and under the blankets. Heave a vague and quiet sigh, let her eyes close.

"Gideon."

Her eyes popped right back open.

The way Harrow shaped her name in her mouth, like she was turning it over her tongue for the first time, had a quality to it that set all of Gideon's alarm bells going. Even with the sluggish lackadaisy she'd earned her body with all that fingerfucking, she felt herself tense.

"Uh?" Try to sound sleepy, not guilty, Nav.

There was a long silence, long enough that Gideon's tingling limbs began to feel suspended and weightless, and she wondered if maybe Harrow'd just spoken in her sleep.

No such luck. Her ears sharp with adrenaline, she heard Harrow turn over, heard her half sit up.

"Why haven't we kissed again?"

 

Like being hollowed out all over again. The same rending as skewering her cardiac muscle on a sharp pole, but in reverse. The raging absence in her chest, its hungry gash screaming open to the world, suddenly covered by a small and familiar hand. It had felt awful, a wound getting crammed with gauze, if the gauze was twisting and alive.

Harrow's other hand on the back of her neck. Harrow pulling her down. Harrow's lips on hers, and the final piece of it. Heat had ripped through her cold body through the hole in her chest -- closing! -- and ran roughshod from one small, determined pair of lips to the other, open and graceless and parched.

A warm animal again, in the hands of another. The breath of life passed between, exhaled from a willing heart into lungs inhaling for the very first scream of a new life.

 

Gideon was clutching her chest. She realized it but couldn't stop, though it didn't hurt. It throbbed with recollection, which made it really fucking hard to parse out Harrow's question into something she could respond to in any universe.

"If it's that you do not want to," Harrow was still speaking with that high, delicate care, "if it's that, I would... understand... however... I -- I would like to know. For certain. I realize it's--"

But Gideon found herself laughing, a really stupid unhinged cackle that wheezed from her lungs like she'd just been sucker-punched. Harrow shut up in a way that Gideon vaguely parsed as scandalized, and to some degree, yeah, she felt bad for laughing at that. She did. If she'd done what Harrow had just done and gotten laughed at, she'd be heading for the airlock right now, that would be it, the end of Gideon Nav.

But it was just -- so --

"I didn't think," she tried to explain, as the sounds she was making were edging away from laughter and into something that didn't bear examining but seemed to be trying to close up her throat, "I thought--"

"Did you," Harrow asked, in a tone Gideon just couldn't with right now, "think that it was just part of the, part of the process of soul transfer?"

"Yeah, kinda."

Gideon thrashed into a sitting position, chest heaving. She could get a hold of herself, here, she had to. Her heart was beating strangely. All the tension in her body was transmuting, and she'd just rubbed one out, so this wasn't a case of an inconvenient boner.

She sucked in a breath, trying to loosen the tight bands around her chest. She could practically hear Harrow waiting for a response.

"It hasn't exactly been -- I mean, that was really a moment, you know? Things happen in heated moments. And I didn't want to, um, assume."

The wordless sound that passed between Harrow's parted lips then made Gideon tense up reflexively. She used to live for that noise of frustration, way back when. Here, quiet in the dark, talking about kissing, it was a hell of a thing.

"The walls are not soundproof. And," Had she ever heard Harrow stumble so much on her words? "And -- you are not the only one who -- who wants, Gideon."

That was way too huge a thing to unpack, thought Gideon's brain, while at the same time, Gideon's body said, oh. A tingling was working its way abundantly up Gideon's back and chest, up through her throat, up to the top of her head, like she was dissolving into heat shimmers.

Harrow was moving. The sound of her grew close, her breath suddenly intimately near in the darkness. It was coming quick and deep. Gideon imagined that thin chest rising and falling so rapidly.

"It did not have to be part of the soul restoration." The faint, wet pop of her parting lips. That breath, trembling on the exhale. "I had thought that it would... but if you have really been labouring under the presupposition -- I was overeager to allow you full prerogative, I was --" Seeming to catch and arrest her stumbling, Harrow paused and sucked her breath behind her teeth. Her next words were lower, stronger, quieter, sounding as if they were almost to herself.

"I have failed, again, to make myself known to you. I can fix this."

And then she closed the gap.

Gideon remembered not much of that first kiss from Harrow, all of the little things having been obliterated in the blinding plasma burn of coming back alive. Some part of her brain was apparently entirely unwilling to let that happen again, because now she felt preternaturally tuned in. The cool softness of Harrow's lips, faintly chapped and slightly firmed with an uncertain determination. The hold of her breath, maybe self-conscious of it. The taste of her, the strange neutral organic quality of someone else's spit. The way she only half seemed to know what she was doing, head tilted, nose bumping once against Gideon's, lips moving only a little during the long, firm press.

The way she was panting when she pulled away.

A dam burst.

Gideon didn't think: she moved after Harrow's lips, questing with little more proficiency but backed by all of the heat in her body. So maybe some of it was the pre-fireworks show of her clit booting back up, but that wasn't the whole of it -- not even close to the largest part. Making a sound hideously like a whimper she reached for Harrow, both arms, and found her. She thought it felt like Harrow was reaching back but she didn't give them the chance to find out, ungracefully crashing into her, toppling them both back towards Harrow's side of the bed.

She kissed her, and kissed her, and kissed her, her heart horse-kicking against the inside of her chest. Harrow was kissing back, their lips finding each other and breaking apart with a clumsy eagerness to ascend this new learning curve. Gideon had held Harrow before, but never quite like this, and she rolled with the joy of it onto her back, bringing Harrow wrapped in her arms on top of her.

And then she was laughing, because there was this great huge bubble of feeling growing in her chest, and it was going to come out one way or another.

"Don't laugh, Gideon," Harrow sounded genuinely aggrieved, and Gideon stopped. She was functioning on reflex and instinct, and running her hands down Harrow's back and back up it again, an apology. For all her plaintive tone, Harrow was arching into the caress.

"Sorry, sorry," she said, though she was grinning like an idiot. "I swear I'm just -- shit, Harrow, it's absolutely not that I don't want to kiss you. Cross my heart. Promise. I don't know why I laughed," she admitted that one, feeling unmoored and giddy, and at the same time, more anchored than she had been in years. Maybe ever.

"So you do want to kiss me." Harrow half-asked.

The urge to laugh evaporated like it had never been there, in the face of Gideon's sudden need to be understood in turn.

She rolled them over again, earning a heady huff from Harrow, until she was propped up over the small woman by her forearms. Harrow's hands skittered over her body, uncertain and eager, finally finding Gideon's sleep shirt and balling her fists in it.

"You know, the first time I wanted to kiss you was like, years ago, right? At Canaan? I almost did, I thought about it, but I didn't. I just thought you liked -- I mean I thought--" She tried again. "Fuck, Harrow, I want to kiss you so badly. More than anything else in the whole pointless black expanse of space, more than anything above or below or in the River, more than anything that could've happened or might happen." The dark made her brave -- no, Harrow's regard from within it made her brave. "More than swords. More than anything."

This time when she kissed Harrowhark they both melted into it. They had taken their practice runs. Now Gideon's lips pressed and parted Harrow's, which met her and opened with a hunger so tender it ripped Gideon to shreds. The universe was reorienting itself, rearranging, and she could only go along for the ride with dizzy eagerness. She slid her arms in around Harrow, one behind her shoulders, one behind her head, and pulled her close, close.

Harrow made a little noise into the kiss and arched up against her. She realized all at once and with a fuzzy starburst of shock both the quality of that noise and the quantity of Harrow's dress.

"Have you been sleeping in your skivvies the whole time we've been here?" she burst out from between lips that felt a little swollen with kissing.

"Yes," Harrow answered, brushing aside the question impatiently. She was nearly wriggling within Gideon's arms, shifting with a restless energy. "And I would very much like to rectify that."

"Holy fuck, if I'd known that -- ahh. I mean, I can grab you one of my shirts--"

"Not what I meant." Harrow leaned up and latched her mouth to Gideon's neck, a sucking and hungry kiss that didn't quite know what it was doing but that sent a shock all the way up and down her body.

"Haaah," Gideon did not laugh. So maybe she'd come less than twenty minutes prior, but this was wholly something else, to the point that she couldn't quite bring herself to believe it. Like, all the signs were there, she wasn't dumb, she could read body language that blatant, but the little Gideon in her head that was tasked with managing her feelings about Harrow had spent so long diligently yanking those particular wires out of their moorings that, when told to reconnect them, seemed a bit at a loss. "Harrow--"

"If you ask me whether or not I am sure, I am going to throw you back where I found you, Nav," she interrupted, strident and high-voiced. Then, though, doubt seeped into her tone. "Unless. If you don't want to."

Gideon made a horridly embarrassing little sound. "Wasn't it you who was talking about thin walls? Shit, you heard what I was uh, up to, didn't you?"

"I should not presume that was -- about me."

"I mean, I was trying really hard to make it not about you. Which was really fucking hard, you know? Like, 'don't think about the skull that's always floating right behind you', you always think about the skull that's always floating right behind you, right? Especially if the skull is like your very favourite -- shit, this metaphor is falling apart. You know you kinda get into a person's head, right? I can't even lie. It was definitely about you."

Harrow squirmed again, a full-body thing that pressed her chest up against Gideon's, and made absolutely the most animal sound Gideon had ever heard her make. She could feel Harrow's nipples (holy hell) hard and pressed to her even through two layers of fabric, could feel the give of her sparse breasts (holy fuck) yielding and hot.

And then, in a finishing move that Gideon would later wonder if Harrow had known would be so devastating, she said, "Gideon, I want you."

That was it. She felt her mind briefly leave her body, maybe trying to die and cross the river, because she was never going to hear a sound that good in her life ever again. It was fair; in their scrapping days Harrow had won most of their fights, so this stacked. This was absolutely the coup de grace. Call her licked, because she was totally rolling over under that boot and welcoming the curb-stomp with a grin.

In the handful of moments before her brain rebooted her hands were already moving over Harrow's body. The motion was confused somewhat as Harrow seemed to be trying to do the same to her, all in the perfect darkness of their bedroom, and it was a minor miracle that she managed to fumble Harrow's bra off before someone ended up with a faceful of elbow or a finger in an eye. Harrow gave as good as she got: Gideon found her shirt unceremoniously rucked up, had to lend a hand to get it all the way over her head. Maybe the darkness was a good thing, because she wasn't sure she wouldn't have frozen up at the sight of Harrowhark half-naked, especially if she looked as needy as she sounded. But as it was, Harrow grabbed one of Gideon's hands and put it to her chest, and Gideon absolutely took the suggestion to heart.

She had never looked. Okay, she'd never intentionally looked, even though there had been times that she had seen. But even for that, she had never touched, and if maybe now and then in a weak moment she had imagined how Harrow's tiny, perfect breasts would feel in her hand or in her mouth, there was no comparing to the real thing. Especially with the way Harrow arched into the touch.

She bit her lip against a gasp of her own, feeling the softness over the ribs of Harrow's chest. She was a perfect palmful, peaked by a tight nub, and it was the best thing Gideon had ever felt.

Cupping her hand experimentally, she flexed her palm against that taut nipple. Harrow sucked in a heavy breath between her teeth. She could feel the quivering of Harrow's body ticking up a notch with every new thing she tried. That held true as, head pounding with possibility and absolutely growing arousal, she took Harrow's nipple between her fingertips and rolled, oh so gently.

Harrow squeaked.

She pulled away, and for a moment, Gideon was frozen thinking she'd done something wrong. But she heard the shifting of fabric, felt the way the other girl's legs squirmed, and realized Harrow was doing away with her last bit of clothing.

"That was okay?" she asked in a belated gasp.

In response, Harrow whined, grabbed Gideon's hand, and brought it to her other breast.

Gideon groaned and obliged.

It took very little more until Harrow was panting voiced, needy breaths (what a goddamned sound!), and Gideon undertook the task with a growing sense of wonder.

"I'd never thought--" Her own voice was grown ragged, she realized. "I mean, I knew you weren't, like, sexless, I saw how you talked about Alecto, but I didn't think--"

Another impatient noise and Harrow leaning up to grab her lips in a kiss silenced whatever Gideon had been stumbling to say, and that was well enough. What came more as a shock was Harrow's sneaky little hand first skirting over her hip and then absolutely wrecking Gideon's shop by diving between her legs. She was still wearing the shorts she'd absolutely soaked through earlier, now hot with a fresh batch of arousal, and she let out a loud and stuttering groan against Harrow's mouth at the unexpected touch. Her clit jumped. Her glutes clenched.

Harrow's fingers pressed, trembling with excitement, but did not linger. "You have never been subtle," she asserted, breathy and distracted, and to Gideon's ears with that touch still echoing between her thighs, it didn't feel like a criticism, "but you have, perhaps, been unobservant."

Her vaguely damp fingers slid back up Gideon's side.

"Rude," said Gideon more plaintively than she'd meant to, though she wasn't sure if it was for the words, the touch, or the leaving.

Then Harrow slid down so that she was straddling Gideon's thigh and all thoughts of reckless giddy verbal back-and-forths fled the redhead's mind at the hot wet that met her skin. Harrow was so slick that when she shifted her hips she slid against Gideon with no real resistance and left a trail behind her. She was making little noises, twitching her hips needily, and Gideon found it hard to breathe.

Hand to Harrow's hip, she pulled the other woman to her, and then, thinking better, urgently nudged her away. Just enough that Gideon could get a hand between them, which made her groan aloud as her fingers met first coarse hair and then the shimmering, silky slickness of labia plumped to what she knew from her own intimate experience must be aching readiness.

"Harrow," she exulted. "You're so wet."

Harrow was shuddering already. She mewled. Gideon shuddered all through in response. Her head as well as everything between her navel and her ass pounded with blood. She dipped her fingers down into that ocean at the juncture of Harrowhark's thighs.

Her clit, it turned out, was as small as the rest of her. It hid modestly behind its sheltering hood, but given how hot she was, that little pearl was hard enough to be a beacon to Gideon's fingers. She mapped that topography breathlessly, circling and listening to Harrow cry out against her chest. She curled over and turned her head without thinking so she could kiss Harrow's throat, her jaw, up to her ear, half to anchor her, half for Gideon's own joy.

She slid her fingers with almost meditative slowness around once more, and then down, feeling Harrow's slight labia slipping between her fingers, then -- oh wonder -- parting under them. She felt the give there, the dip that called for a clever finger to slide inside and coax forth further stridence. But Harrow squirmed her hips at that touch and Gideon retreated.

"Too much?" Her voice was rough from the panting she'd been doing.

"Mmmn," Harrow whimpered, moving her hips down, away, back again in indecision.

"It's okay, it's okay," she reassured feverishly. Anything was okay. "I won't."

Harrow panted, and Gideon felt her shake her head. With seeming great effort she summoned up, "Not yet. Another... another time."

"Course, of course, yeah, not a problem." The words tumbled forth, Gideon hardly paying them attention. Another time. There might be another time!

Way beyond giddy by now, she slid her fingers back down to Harrow's clit and the smaller woman opened her mouth and cried out a long, shuddering noise. Yeah, okay, that -- that was the thing. In a fit of inspiration Gideon nudged her leg up again, pulling Harrow down to grind again while Gideon worked her clit. She had to curl over her, but the arm she was using to prop herself up still remained under Harrow's shoulders and held her close as they worked.

They quickly found a rhythm, dictated by the jerking undulations of Harrow's hips. Gideon didn't know if it was actually that Harrow was rising quickly or that time had melted under the heat of the moment, but it felt like only a flash between them finding that rhythm and Harrow beginning to arch and scrabble at Gideon with abandon. It didn't matter: for a million years or a second, everything was right.

Harrow tilted her head back and screamed, short and sharp, her voice either breaking or cutting off as she heard herself. But her hips juddered with their own abandon, and Gideon could feel the spasms of her cunt against her leg, those utterly soaked labia spread wide against her thigh.

She clutched Harrow to her, chanting little praises, little extolments that she didn't even hear herself saying. She worked her finger the best she could as Harrow crushed it between clit and leg. She was kissing her again, neck and throat and face and lips and forehead and hair, everywhere she could reach. Her own arousal had plateaued somewhere in the realm of incandescent, but there was something utterly singular about how she felt: every nerve singing desire, but in a way that bent it all on the small body below her. It was like fucking Harrow, feeling Harrow come, was being allowed to do every good thing she'd ever wanted to for the daughter of the Ninth, but in a way that felt correct. Felt beatific.

It wasn't quite what she had expected to feel, going to bed with Harrow. It was better.

She realized she was rocking Harrow, just a little, as the other woman's aftershocks shuddered down to stillness. Here in the afterglow, though, Gideon became a little less sure of herself.

"You good?" she asked, suddenly needing, absolutely needing, to hear Harrow still felt okay about this post-cum.

Harrow panted, insensate, and Gideon was on tenterhooks. When the smaller woman squirmed to be let go, Gideon's heart was in her throat, but she let her go. Harrow scooted back, pulling back into a sit, and in turn Gideon sat back on her own heels, feeling naked and suddenly terrified.

 

Harrow reached over and turned on the side-table light.

It was an effort: she had never felt lassitude like this after orgasming by her own hand, but somehow that made sense. Immediately it proved itself to be an effort worth making, because when she laid eyes on Gideon it was a revelation.

The look on her oldest friend's face was something like ribs cracked open, like flesh flayed wide to the heart, and at the same time in every way she was the flower of the Ninth in full bloom. Her eyes were wide, blown out with huge pupils that constricted only slightly as the yellowish light of the bedside table turned their gold molten. Her cheeks were flushed deeply, all the way down to her chest, to which Harrow's eyes were briefly diverted before darting back up. Her kneeling legs were wide. Her lips were parted, wet. Her hand was wet, which was a heady sight itself. The lines of her body canted forward, sketched long, taut, ready and drawn toward Harrow like gravity. The overall effect was an openness that Harrow had never seen in such full force on that face before -- no, that she had seen maybe for a moment, in a pool on a world long ago. Now Gideon wore it nakedly, kneeled on the bed, her hands bracing her on either side of Harrow's body.

Harrow did not know if she looked the same, but like a moon to a sun, she felt herself oriented towards it. There was fear in that look too, and Harrow was immediately resolved to fix that, to wash her clean.

She reached out with both hands, ignoring how exposed her own naked body felt in the light, and put her palms on either side of Gideon's face.

"Yes."

Gideon let out an explosive breath and her head dropped, face burrowing into those palms. Harrow pulled her forward and she followed, wrapping her arms around Harrow's middle and coming to shelter against her sternum.

Harrow closed her eyes against seeing her own nakedness, out of a kind of surprise more than out of real shame: somehow undressing in the dark had been easy and almost abstract, and now it was real. Her own bare legs stretched to either side of Gideon. Her vulva, still throbbing with the beat of her heart, was covered by Gideon's warmth. Red strands of hair were tickling one of her nipples.

"That was really okay?" Gideon's voice came muffled against her skin -- a novel sensation that made her heart shiver. There was a plaintiveness to the question.

"Yes," Harrow said, trying to gentle her voice. It was hard, after all that noisemaking. "I told you, I want you. Why do you doubt me so completely?"

There was a long pause, and then, "I don't know. I..." Gideon trailed off. "Uh, precedent?"

Harrow's heart broke a little, which she kept to herself.

Words, apparently, had not worked. Or, they had, but with limited efficacy. It hadn't been an exaggeration. Even here on the other side of her peak, even as she was hearing Gideon spiral into the stripped-bare self-doubt that underlied her habitual bravado, Harrow couldn't stop sliding her eyes down Gideon's warm brown skin hungrily, over and over the parts she could see. Gideon's libido had always been out there for everybody to witness, but Harrow's hunger was still waters.

Gideon was still wearing those briefs.

"Gideon," she said softly, though she watched the woman hear something in her voice and subtly tense all of those glorious lines. "Up."

Gideon upped.

Harrow knelt forward as the other woman came up to her knees again, looking deeply aroused and deeply nervous. She bit her lip and let her eyes roam, not speaking yet. This needed to go right, and that meant reckoning with herself as much as with Gideon. It was nearly too much, in the same way the idea of being penetrated had been both something she had deeply wanted and something she hadn't been sure she'd be able to bear. But this needed doing, now.

Sex had always been only an incidental part of the dogma of her faith. Nothing about it had been specifically verboten, per se. Some scriptures about marriage beds being holy, but little more. That condemnation had fallen to the ideas of desire and indulgence.

Harrow, growing up, had always considered herself fortunate that her body had rarely wanted things. She had grown up privately imagining her disgust of rich foods as a sign of a natural spiritual superiority, even though in turn that made her guilty of the sin of arrogance. The same had been true once of her other fleshly desires, so weak as to be easy to deny herself.

The idea that it was good, virtuous, not to hunger, not to desire, had been something that had allowed her pride in herself; maybe the only thing aside from her necromantic prodigy, which was itself complicated by the origin of that talent.

To have that bastion of spiritual comfort taken out at the knees when she had realized just how much she wanted Gideon Nav --

She had long since stopped hating Gideon for being so wantable. But even so, there was still shame there. There was the small, old pinch of panic that she was failing at something important, something vital to her concept of self. There was pain over the idea that her own hunger, which felt so good on an animal level, made her less holy somehow. Her faith was now an injured bird that lived in her heart, though, stunned and maybe dying or maybe simply in need of rest.

The lessons it had taught were hard to un-learn, but she had a window, she could feel it. In this moment of time she rejected with every iota of her will the notion that what she felt here, now, was unsacred.

"I need you to watch me," she told Gideon, gaze sliding back up to the other woman's gold-coin eyes. "I need you to watch my face. I need you to pay attention to what I do now."

"Okay," Gideon breathed, her brows drawing together slightly.

This would be difficult, in a way. Harrow knew that sometimes what she felt didn't show up on her face in a manner that communicated to others, which she had often turned to her advantage; here, she hoped her actions would make up the difference, and that Gideon's familiarity with her would do the rest.

There was also the matter of how to choose what to do. She knew what she wanted to do, but communicating to Gideon was more important. She had no experience to draw from. Though here beside the warmth of another body she felt in turn a warm instinct that was new to her, she also knew that she and Gideon did not always speak the same language.

"Okay, I'm watching," Gideon cut into the silence, a hard nervous edge to her tone. "And, uh, I'm seeing a glare? I think? What's that look for, what am I doing wrong?"

"Nothing." Harrow took Gideon's big hand and lifted it to her own lips. That would do, as a place to start. She flicked a glance up at Gideon's face: the other woman had not relaxed yet, but she was watching. "Be patient."

She turned Gideon's hand over in hers, palm up now, and traced lines over where she knew the metacarpals lay, down to rest the pads of her fingers over the carpals. She could feel each, but she wanted to feel them more.

Holding Gideon's hand she dipped to press her lips against her palm, the pad of her thumb, then her fingertips. On a moment of inspiring recollection of one of Gideon's dirty comics that she'd peeked at after having it confiscated, she hooded her eyes and sucked Gideon's index finger into her mouth.

With a frisson that rose the hair on the back of her neck, she realized she could taste herself there. That was -- unique. A sourness, an organic complexity that spoke of flesh. It was a lot, and she was mortifyingly interested. Rolling her tongue against the pad of Gideon's finger, she contemplated it for a long moment, sucking what she could from the digit, and then after a time simply enjoying the subtle flex and tremble of Gideon's flesh. It took her another long moment to remember to look up at Gideon's face, and when she did she felt a bloom of warm satisfaction behind her clavicles.

Gideon looked frozen, entirely attentive, naked breasts rising and falling rapidly. Harrow subtly moved her grip on Gideon's wrist to feel the radial pulse point, and was satisfied to feel the quickness there.

She let the finger slip from her mouth without a sound, and began to work up Gideon's arm. Fingers traced the lines of radius and ulna where they lay swathed in skin and muscle, followed by her lips, deliberate kisses planted, each a message that she didn't know how to speak aloud. She felt a surge of deep and frankly long-awaited satisfaction as she got her mouth on Gideon's bicep. The humerus was a fine piece of osseous artistry, but the muscles with which Gideon had worked so tirelessly to dress hers were getting the attention now. She gave the bone a silent apology for such a betrayal, and then turned her attention fully to rubbing her face on this very tasty piece of Gideon.

"Heh." That was a watery sound, for all its play at cockiness, and when Harrow slid her eyes to Gideon the other woman was wearing a tattered and version of her usual brash grin. She felt her own lips curl in turn, where they were busy against Gideon's skin.

"I knew it. How long have you been wanting to do that, Nonagesimus?" She raised her arm a little, getting a flex in for Harrow's pleasure.

Well, points for bravado.

"Long enough." Harrow parted her lips and, following puzzling but deep-seated impulse, she gently pressed her teeth to the swell there.

Gideon chuckled again, and it was stronger but shaky, like some engine was shaking loose inside her. Harrow did not interfere; instead she moved up to Gideon's shoulder and the complex interplay of flesh and bone there. She shifted closer in order to properly limn that warm brown skin with kisses, slotting her knees between Gideon's and resting the fingers of her free hand, feather-light, against the hem of those still-offending shorts.

Gideon was shaking just slightly as she made her way along her clavicle, and down to her sternum, counting ribs with the splay of her fingers.

Recalling how Gideon had asked, she took a moment to glance up and enunciate, "good?"

Gideon swallowed, throat working, and nodded in two quick, emphatic nods. Her eyes were bright.

Harrow hummed, bending her focus again to the task at hand. She turned her cheek against Gideon's sternum and considered her right breast.

It was a remarkable softness rising like a mountain from the toned plane of her pectoral, surprising in its departure from the hardness of the musculature around it. Harrow had little basis of comparison for its size or shape: she supposed on recollection Coronabeth's may have been bigger, but then, she hadn't spent much time looking there.

She flattened her palm and slid it up Gideon's ribs until she was cupping the breast she was facing. It filled her hand, the weight pressing against her palm pleasingly. She closed her eyes for a moment, simply luxuriating, lifting that heft, tightening her fingers against the fascinating balance of give and resistance. Gideon shuddered, and Harrow craned her neck to look up without pulling away from the woman's faintly freckled skin, and the look on Gideon's face was -- really quite something. She was biting her lip.

Recalling what had been done to her to such great effect, and without breaking eye contact, she slid her fingers up and around Gideon's peaked nipple and with great deliberateness squeezed.

"Nnnnngghhh," Gideon groaned, and Harrow could feel the sound through her cheek. She smiled, and did it again.

This time, a noise and a shudder, and Gideon was being so obedient to her request: she hadn't stopped looking at Harrow once, as far as she could tell.

Following instinct again, she nosed her way to that peak and replaced fingers with her lips. This time out of the corners of her eyes she saw Gideon's hands clench in the sheets when the larger woman groaned. That wouldn't do: she grabbed one of those hands and brought it to her back, and hummed approval as Gideon's warm palm pressed against her. The other joined it shortly, and satisfied, Harrow closed her eyes and worked Gideon's breast with her lips.

It was much like kissing, wasn't it? Except with the side benefit of leaving Gideon's lips free to part and usher forth such wordless exultations as she was. She rolled that tight brown nipple between her lips, pulling it into her mouth a little more so she could tug her head back and watch Gideon's chest follow her. She opened her mouth then and sucked as much of that soft flesh into her mouth as she could, which did not encompass all of what was there as Gideon's mouth had embraced hers. A shame.

She tried with more suction and Gideon shuddered out a much louder sound, body jerking, which startled Harrow. Without meaning to she clamped down, teeth to skin.

"Aaaaa--!"

It froze her for a moment, but that had not been a noise of pain. Looking up just with her eyes, she caught Gideon's again and raised both of her eyebrows.

Gideon, who had been red in the cheeks before, blushed a much deeper shade.

She'd relaxed the pressure, but this required investigating. A judicious application of teeth once more rendered forth another of those noises and a bucking of Gideon's hips, although with Harrow's eyes on her face Gideon seemed to be trying to bite the reactions back. She looked embarrassed. For the first time her eyes slid away from Harrow.

Something about that was at the same time annoying and wildly titillating. She tried again, teeth closer around that painfully taut nipple, and Gideon's sound this time was even higher. Her whole body shuddered.

"Harrow, you've gotta stop, you can't just, oh my god," Gideon babbled, though her hands running nervously up and down Harrow's back didn't seem to be trying to pull her away.

Harrow did, however, pull away, letting Gideon's breast slip from her mouth with one last goodbye of firm suction.

"Why not?"

Gideon shifted, and Harrow realized she was sliding her thighs together in a way that she recognized as trying to relieve unbearable arousal. The bigger woman was so off-balance. Tender as she was feeling, Harrow could not quite resist leaning into that just a little bit, and she gave Gideon her best I'm-waiting look.

"Because, um."

"Gideon," she pressed.

"Because if you keep doing that I think I might come just from that, and that would just be --" She cut off with a mortified whine, running her hand through her hair. Oh, she had been unravelled by that, hadn't she? "That would be so incredibly uncool and unswag of me and I'm pretty sure once you come back to your senses you'd never fucking let me live it down, so, uh, please don't?"

Harrow smiled. She leaned in -- Gideon tensed up -- and landed a very chaste kiss on the upper side of Gideon's right breast.

"Very well." Gideon wasn't totally wrong; outside of the solemn joy of the moment, Gideon getting brought to orgasm just by getting her breasts mauled by a novice was worth a taunt or two. But she was still definitely filing that away for later.

She realized a problem with her plan as she began to nose and kiss her way down beyond Gideon's solar plexus. Pulling away once more, she put her hands to Gideon's hips and backed up, tugging; Gideon followed, and Harrow shimmied backwards and then off the side of the bed. She watched as Gideon seemed to catch on where this was going, and a fresh flush of blood darkened her cheeks from where they'd been slowly clearing the last blush.

"Harrow--" she said.

"These are in my way," she interrupted, plucking at the fabric of Gideon's underwear. Obediently her hands came down to hook thumbs in the waistband, but Gideon hesitated.

"Are you sure?" she asked all in a rush, as if guilty.

If she hadn't felt for herself how wet Gideon's sex had rendered her underwear, Harrow was sure she would have misunderstood this hesitation. If Gideon had shown such recalcitrance before having so eagerly, explosively guided Harrow to and through her own pleasure, she would have been effectively chased off. But -- no. A threshold had been crossed. It was finished. It was done. It could not be taken away.

She stood, all at once, and trying to find expression sufficient to her surety she sunk her hands into those gloriously ruddy waves of hair. She tugged so that Gideon had to look up at her.

"Griddle, you have spent half of your life trying to convince everyone around you that you are, as I recall, a freak in the sheets. You have spent half the time I've known you strutting around and telling anyone with ears what hot shit you are. And to the credit of the cheque your mouth has been writing, you were glorious, earlier." She leaned in, searching. "I told you to watch me. What have you seen?"

She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again. Her eyes shifted minutely back and forth between Harrow's, unable to settle. Gideon Nav struck dumb was a sight Harrow knew she would be bringing back out to rotate in her brain later, when she had some time to think.

She tried a different tack. Letting Gideon's hair go, she slid her hands down to her shoulders. "Was it good, earlier? For you? When you were..."

Okay, now Gideon's hands came up to Harrow, palms warm at her waist. "Yeah," she breathed emphatically. "Yeah, Harrow, that was the best. That was incredible."

"So let me have that." She leaned in and kissed Gideon, the action still new enough to send a shimmer through her.

It was absolutely dismal that she suspected she could pinpoint the root of Gideon's hesitance to be seen to. A lifetime of Harrow making her small, denying her anything and everything she had professed to want -- it didn't bear thinking about, and forgiveness didn't erase the mark left by the initial sin nor did it render simple the act of trusting. She realized, as she watched Gideon struggle, that it might take a long time to convince the ex-cavalier that she was wanted without caveat.

And yet there she was, hooking her thumbs into her waistband, flexing her hips so that she could slide the garment down her hips and then her legs. She stared at Harrow as she toed off her underwear and sat, finally naked, in the warm directional light of the lamp. A start.

Harrow pressed her lips to Gideon's hair, and then dropped to her knees.

This time she started worship from the bottom. Lifting one of Gideon's legs, she pressed her cheek to the top of her foot, turned to kiss the jut of her medial malleolus. The pale hair of Gideon's leg tickled her cheek as she worked her way up, perhaps not as slowly nor as methodically as she had her arms. There was a glimmering tension in Harrow's stomach that was driving her to more active purpose; that and the scent of Gideon's sex, which had been faint before but with the removal of her last undergarment now filled Harrow's senses.

She found herself using more teeth as she found her way to Gideon's thigh, which was sending little jolts through the other woman. Sexuality as compared to ravenous hunger was beginning to make more sense to her now; it wasn't exactly the same, but the things she wanted to do with her mouth were certainly echoes. When she turned her head to suck against Gideon's thigh, she could hear the other woman's breath hitch and judder, could see one of her hands clutching hard at the bedsheets.

Nudging one thigh a little wider open, she cast her eyes to the juncture of Gideon's legs. The curls there were thick and abundant and a few shades darker than those on Gideon's head. Where they had been crammed up against her vulva, they were slicked wet and in disarray. It was an incredibly messy, organic sight, and Harrow took a moment to regard, darting her tongue out to moisten her own lips.

She realized faintly that in addition to being thirsty as if she were parched, she was nervous.

This was going to be overwhelming. The faint taste of her own liquids left over on Gideon's fingers had been a curiosity, the faint strains of a reasonably familiar hymn. This was going to be standing amongst the choir, while at the same time trying to learn the song.

Panting open-mouthed, she refused her nerves and leaned in all at once. It barely took the touch of her nose against those labia to part them and be greeted with a great glistening landscape of slick. Gideon had more going on down here than Harrow did and for a moment she was disoriented, but she pressed her face forward. Faintly she could hear Gideon cry out, and could feel the intense and sudden tension of her hips and legs, but most of her focus was encompassed by the rough scrape of wet curls against her nose, the shocking heat of engorged labia embracing her cheeks. The slippery texture was familiar but strange to feel against her face. But the scent--

It blazed through her. Whatever else happened, however they related after this, she could feel the taste and smell of Gideon burning itself into her synapses. She felt dizzy with it. Panting through her nose, she drew out her tongue and licked, long and quick. Her mouth filled with the sour-sharp flavour and she whimpered.

Even as Gideon's hands were coming to stroke nervously at her shoulders, though, Harrow was burying herself in it. She barely noticed Gideon petting her hair, panting little words of encouragement: she was rooting for Gideon's clit with lips and tongue and, finding it, she pressed the advantage.

Gideon's hips jumped. Good. She lapped like Gideon was a fountain and she'd been in the desert. She leaned in with all the force of her body, shouldering Gideon's knees further apart, and clutched her hips with her hands. She found herself mindlessly whining, tiny noises against Gideon's flowering cunt, and she was possessed of a desperation that dimly surprised some part of her. It wasn't that the taste was pleasant, not in the way of food, but some overwhelming prerogative of instinct had taken hold at the first mouthful and Harrow was lost to it. She drank, and she drank, and she drank.

Gideon's hands ended up on Harrow's head at a point. They did not pull or press, but the weight of them was a ramping-up of intensity that Harrow met instinctively. It was clear Gideon was holding on hard to self-control: Harrow could feel the tectonic shivers of her hips, trying to let off steam before the coming earthquake.

She did not want steam to be let off. She flicked her tongue out to press up under the hood of Gideon's generous clit, and then fastened her lips around the whole arrangement and sucked as she had on her breast.

"Aaahhh!" Gideon's hips arched. Harrow was taken for the ride with them, but refused to be shaken off. She clamped her arms hard under and around Gideon's hips, and she did it again.

She couldn't watch Gideon thrash but she could feel it, and some feral part of her reveled in the loss of control she could elicit. Her own body felt as taut as a tendon, blood pumping. Now one of Gideon's fists curled against her hair, clutching at the too-short strands. Good.

She ran her tongue around and up and over, sucking, breathing what air she could through her nose pressed as it was into Gideon's thatch. She worked as hard as she'd ever worked, head spinning, neck working, eyes squeezed shut. She pulled noises from Gideon like she pulled bone pebbles into full, perfect skeletons; her heart soared high. She was merciless.

"Harrow, Harrow, Harrow--I'm--aahh--AHHH--"

For all that, Gideon's orgasm caught her by surprise. She bucked, upper half arching back against the bed while her hips pressed to Harrow's face. She did everything she could to stay anchored on Gideon's clit, with enough success that she could watch the woman twist and buck over and over with each flick of her tongue. It was incredible to feel the way that tension ran through her in waves, centered out of her vulva, and Harrow suffered a moment of sharp disappointment as they began to die down.

Her mouth followed Gideon's hips back to the bed, automatic and hungry. It was only when Gideon patted her shoulder in a desperate tap-out that Harrow relinquished her prize, panting hard.

She sat up, and realized she'd been grinding herself against her own heel. She had expected the intensity -- she had expected to be riveted by the experience. She had expected it to be illuminating and good. She had expected to be deeply satisfied by giving Gideon pleasure. She had not quite expected to enjoy it that much.

She wiped her face on the back of her hand, finding that she was trembling.

So was Gideon. Kneeling back on the floor like this, she had the best view of her spread-open sex, which was flushed a deep warm purplish hue, and of her legs. She put a hand to Gideon's quivering knee, and was met with a deep and wavering groan.

Harrow crawled back up on the bed then, feeling very much the mated mammal as she followed impulse and curled up against Gideon's side. She tucked her knees in, and drew a hand across the other woman's chest to rest on her far shoulder.

"Thank you," she said gravely.

For some reason that made Gideon groan again, of a different timbre, and the bigger woman turned on her side and grabbed Harrow. She pulled her in tight, saying, "Harrow, Harrowhark..." But for the second time tonight Gideon's words seemed to fail, and she didn't say more.

Enclosed in the safe cage of Gideon's arms and enclosing her in turn, Harrow rested her head under the other woman's chin and sighed a deep, full sigh. How strange, to be naked here after the flood, with Gideon naked against her: yet at the same time, she could not imagine any other way that this night should have ended. Whatever had shaken loose in Gideon earlier, Harrow fancied she felt the same in herself now; something unwound, something gentled, and she invited it in. What it was, she spent no more time thinking of.

All she wanted, instead, was to feel Gideon against and around her and drying on her face. She twined her arms around Gideon in turn and closed her eyes.

 

Gideon lay awake longer, coming down from orgasm in steps.

Everything about that had been unbelievable. Being invited to fuck Harrow had been one thing. Harrow's face between her thighs was wholly another, an image that she sure hoped was burned into her retinas forever.

As she came back to her clear mind, in fact, unbelievable became less joyful hyperbole and more legit worry. It took a long time of watching Harrow resting in her arms, waiting for the other shoe to drop, before she began to trust that the little ex-Lyctor wasn't going to jump up and -- she didn't know, crumple her pelvis like discarded flimsy? -- or worse, ask her what the hell she had been thinking, taking such liberties, that she was going to put an end to all of this and call Paul tomorrow to be brought somewhere else.

The memory of Harrow taking her hand, though, kissing her way up her palm and arm, kept coming back to Gideon's mind. More even than what had come after, that kept coming back.

Getting everything she'd ever lusted after with Harrow had relaxed some chasing part of her, had put that bit into a deeply contented sleep. Whatever had been beneath was exposed to the air now. Gideon felt stripped bare of her thick skin: dangerously, vulnerably bare.

Her eyes were wet and she didn't understand why, because she wasn't sad. She was sure Harrow was asleep, her breathing even, her arm lax over Gideon's side. That was good, Gideon was thankful for that. She wasn't sure she could have explained why she was crying to Harrow, and she wasn't sure she wanted to try.

Instead she turned her face against the bedspread and let them disappear into the cloth like sighs. They wouldn't even be there anymore by the morning.

Notes:

I know “pikelets” would have been more accurate to their mode of speaking, but I couldn’t resist the pancake pun.

I've also put a fair bit of my own experiences into Harrow here: the gender stuff, some of the things around how her brain functions. I hope it's not too egregious. It felt right. I do feel like I should enter this into some sort of "longest and most analytical sex scenes in fandom" contest. I don't think I'd win, but I might get an honourable mention.

My notion of Gideon's resurrection was explicitly inspired by this fanart: https://www.tumblr.com/jillothewisp/699198973287776256/put-that-thing-gideons-back-where-it-came

The next chapter is going to be a short intermission, and then there might be a short break while I work up a backlog again after christmas. On the upside! The intermission is Side Characters Paul and Pyrrha!

Chapter 5: Intermission

Summary:

A glimpse into the wider universe and what might be going on there. The girls have someone looking out for them, watching them pupate and tenderly putting leaves into their jar.

“Double sixes!” Gideon had been trying out nicknames. "Six times two! Twelve-for-one!"

“Hey, Ninth,” Paul greeted with an easy, knife-sharp smile. They examined Gideon through the video feed, took in the grin, the healthy glow. The very slightly manic energy. The finger guns. “It’s been a while. How are you?”

“Oh, you know.” Gideon shrugged, dropping her hands. “I think I’ve done about ten thousand pushups on every horizontal surface in here by now. Thanks for the pull-up bar by the way, turns out the towel bar in the bathroom wasn’t up to the challenge.”

Mmhm. Pushups. It was a good thing Paul was already grinning. Gideon was loose and relaxed in a way that she had definitely not been, coming out of the infirmary, or any time Paul or their component parts had seen her before. “Are you wrecking my shuttle? Do I need to send over a treadmill so you can burn off some energy, are you that bored?”

Gideon pulled a face at treadmill, but it didn’t stick like that. “Nah. We’re doing good at keeping ourselves entertained. I haven't even tried to take this thing for a joyride.” She slapped the console. She also didn’t seem to quite catch her own slip into we, but Paul noted it. “I think I deserve a medal for that, actually. Oh, hey, though, Harrow’s gonna need some new nerd tomes soon. And do you have any more of those books with the guy and his sentient sword? Those were the coolest shit.”

“I’ll look into it,” Paul said, and marked one more point for themselves for having included those to begin with. “How did you like the reveal at the end of the first one?”

Gideon papped her hands excitedly on the console, which made the feed wiggle slightly. “Oh that was, what the hell, like the sword used to be his girl? Does she ever get changed back? Don’t tell me,” Gideon thought the better of it and waved her hands.

“I’m not a monster. I won’t spoil you.”

“Yeah, you better not!” Gideon had laughed too, easy and bright. She leaned forward. “I know where you live. Anyways, how's it going? How’s shit? You hear from anybody recently?”

In fact Paul had heard from a great many people lately, but people pertinent to Gideon on a personal level? “Nothing from Crowns, which isn’t surprising. I don’t think she’ll come anywhere near us with Ianthe onboard. I did hear from Judith two weeks ago. She’s continuing to work the Cohort angle.” Paul shook their head. “It’s a valiant effort.”

“It’s bullshit,” Gideon said bluntly. “They’re not going to change shit without word from the Prime Jackass. Are they still refusing to believe John’s in the hole for good?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Shitheads. You gotta convince her to give it up. Nobody in that outfit remembers how to work their own brain. She should talk to the Houses instead.”

Paul spread their hands. “She thinks she can change minds. She will or she won’t, in her own time. I do hope she comes back, but I think my word will just make her dig her heels in deeper at this point. No one can really turn around and give up a lifetime of believing in something, just like that.”

Gideon’s face scrunched. “Yeah, fine, fair enough. How’s Ianthe? Stirring shit?”

“We don’t really give her the opportunity to.”

The ex-Tower Prince snickered. “Good. Fucking muzzle her if you have to. Actually can you do that anyways? And send me a picture?”

“I didn’t realize you were into that,” Paul laughed. Gideon turned about the shade of a tomato and wrinkled her nose. Paul, merciful as they were, cut in again before she could come up with some sufficiently strident negatory. “How’s Harrowhark?”

“Oh, uh, good, she’s good. Hey, HEY HARROW—“ Gideon had twisted, was shouting over her shoulder, clipping the audio real good with the volume. Paul leaned away from their console.

“No,” came a faint returning shout from further in the shuttle.

“HARROW, IT’S PAUL, YOU WANNA SAY HI?”

A pause, wherein Gideon grinned and then laughed at something Paul couldn’t hear, and then closer but not quite in frame, Harrow’s voice, “Hello, Sixth.”

“Hello, Ninth. All’s well?”

“Yes.”

Gideon, who was looking unreasonably proud of the interaction, turned back to the little vid screen. “Oh, she’s heading back to reading I think.”

“Good to hear her voice,” and that was true enough, though Paul wished she’d come into frame. It would have been better, extra data, to see the two interact physically. Harrow was too effective at camouflaging any feeling out of her words. “Now, is there anything else I can set up to send to you two? Really, Gideon, anything at all.”

There was a speculative gleam to Gideon’s eye, and Paul observed her glancing over her shoulder just a bit.

“A couple things, uh — I guess first — Harrow was reading me some shit about metabolic processes, and it got me curious, so I got reading some of those fitness mags, you know, with the dietary stuff? Did you know you’ve got to eat, like, a certain amount of fat and protein and whatever? I thought food was just food.”

Well, everybody’s got to learn a thing sometime. Paul propped their chin on their hand and nodded patiently. “I’m aware of the concept of a balanced diet, yes.”

“Well — look,” she leaned in closer to the speaker. “Turns out, Harrow eats like shit. You got anything I can mix into her slop so she’s getting all that stuff? You know, whatever she doesn’t already get from crackers and oatmeal.”

“You can’t really supplement yourself out of the effects of mediocre dietary habits, but I’ll look into it,” Paul agreed.

“She won’t like it if it tastes like anything,” Gideon warned.

Paul fought a little smile, didn’t quite win over it, though it was as much a pang of loss as of fondness. “I’ll keep that in mind. Try making pikelets. I’ll send some mix.”

“Yeah, sure,” Gideon agreed, clearly skeptical. She glanced over her shoulder again, and lowered her voice another notch. “Listen. I’ve got another thing to ask after, but you gotta keep it on the down-low. I was wondering if you could get us a couple of—“

“Gideon.” That voice of alarmed warning came from a lot closer than before, and Paul nearly jumped. Gideon definitely did, although Paul thought they caught a grin working itself over the redhead’s face as she twisted.

“Oh, come on,” she complained.

“No. No. I forbid it, Griddle. We talked about this.”

“We didn’t talk about this, I asked and you got all crabbed up! Equal footing, remember? What if I wanted it just for me, huh? I've got needs!”

“I said no, Nav!” There was a note of panic in Harrow’s voice, rising at about the same rate as the mischief in Gideon’s. Suddenly she was in frame, but standing, so all Paul could see was a swirl of black cloth. She seemed to be reaching for the console but Gideon was getting in her way, intentionally.

“It’ll be fun! I promise!”

Surprisingly Harrow didn’t seem to have a cogent response to that; she made a noise of fury, and in one motion she leaned over Gideon’s arm and into frame. Paul was surprised to see her face naked of paint; it still felt a bit like seeing the Ninth nun without clothing, every time they saw her not done up like a death's head They took note, too, of the blush.

“We’re fine, goodbye,” she exclaimed all in a rush. Paul heard the slap of a palm on a metal console and the feed went black.

They sat back in the comms center chair and hummed thoughtfully, tallying supporting evidence and arriving at a satisfying conclusion. Well. It was good to see the girls getting along.

 

The emancipated Sixth had required a lot of very jerry-rigged, improvised adaptation to settle into its new home. That had been a foreseeable hardship, as had the necessity of reaching out to certain extra-Dominicus forces, not just to fulfil their long and secret promise, but to negotiate and secure the kind of material support that they'd need to survive long-term. The flipped moon they had set up in orbit beside let their adepts largely avoid the worst effects of being outside of the reach of Dominicus's cold light, but there was an inevitable weakening overall.

The Sixth was adaptable, though. The Sixth relied as much as any necromantic house on their adepts for certain things, but the wonderful thing about a big brain was the way it could almost always chew a hole out of any trap it got stuck in. New problems just sharpened the teeth.

All of it did require oversight, and the Master Warden-plus-Warden's Hand was inevitably responsible for a lot even with the council taking on more than before. Considering the defection from God and everything He had stood for, there was an understandable undercurrent of suspicion around the lysis and their allegiances.

Paul, if they were honest, wouldn't have had it any other way. A clean unity of opinion would have inevitably left out or papered over something important.

Lyctorhood got a great deal of reverence in the Houses, and a very justifiable loathing outside, and so the Sixth, as it straddled the divide, did have a unified answer to the question of whatever Paul was. But Camilla and Palamedes had both been deeply well-respected, and that carried weight. As did their actions in dealing with the issue of the girl. As did their actions on the Ninth and after. If discussion was ongoing, it was at least in part because the Sixth debated like other Houses politicked: relentlessly.

Pyrrha had been permitted to reside at the Sixth as well, on the strength of her own actions and Paul's good word (and a certain degree of precedent) but she was an even more controversial figure. Her presence did not help with keeping the vibe immaculate when dealing with non-Dominicus worlds — no Lyctor or Lyctor-adjacent personage would have, regardless of good deeds rendered — so she stayed mostly in the shadows.

What it all meant practically was that Paul was a busy creature and Pyrrha had little to do. Paul delegated when and where they could, which was plenty, but the delegating alone took up a good chunk of their time. That was not even to mention the two-handed balancing act of negotiations: in one hand trying to convince the Houses to emancipate en masse, in the other trying to find or negotiate somewhere to put them.

How, then, Paul found time either for finessing their pet project of the erstwhile Ninths, or having a drink with Pyrrha, was a mystery for the ages.

But there they were, deep into the after-hours portion of the day. All of the deals that could be wheeled had been so wheeled, all of the egos soothed, all of the off-record reassurances reassured, and still Paul had found time to swing by Pyrrha's cramped quarters with a bottle of something and a couple of scrounged cigarettes for the cav-in-a-lyctor-suit.

"I'm just saying, a pressure cooker isn't always the great idea it seems like on the outset." Pyrrha propped her feet up on her table. "I get the setup. If you're just going for romance novel tropes it’s classic.”

They were sitting, looking at the closed heat-shield windows, now down largely to keep too much heat from venting off the cold side of the station into space. The problem with the Sixth having been constructed to deal with the great torrential outpouring of heat from Dominicus was that setting up any further from a star meant they were having to deal with the opposite issue.

"I admit to the stereotypical nature of it,” Paul said, cradling a glass between their hands, "but sometimes the simplest solution is the best."

"You stuffed two traumatized kids in a shuttle under the general assumption it's going to force them to work out their issues," Pyrrha pointed at Paul, "but what's the over-under on them just tearing each other to bits instead?"

"You didn't see them at Canaan House. We actually did have a running bet on how long it was going to take for them to finally make good on all of that unresolved tension, but it was never going to be homicide despite all their posturing. It wasn't subtle, Pyrrha. You took my word on this before, and you saw at least a little of how far each of them was prepared to go for the other, why the doubt now?" But the lysis demurred. "Besides, it's not just relational machinations. Not even the largest part. I do need to keep them close, and I do need to keep them out of sight, and this is a practical solution to both of those parameters."

"So's tucking them in some basement quarters here."

Paul barked a little laugh. "There is approximately a zero percent chance either of them would have been able to resist the impulse to get underfoot at the worst possible time. We absolutely cannot have that right now. Pyrrha, you're worried," they assessed, leaning forward in their chair. "Don't be. It won’t end the way it might have if they had had a chance to simply be two normal teenagers in a normally torrid teenage emotional entanglement, but either way, it's going to give them a chance to reckon, which they both badly need.

"Besides," and here, Paul grinned a thin, sly little smile, "it's working. I'm sure of it."

Pyrrha put down her glass. "You talked to them again?"

"Mmmhm. I wasn't certain when Harrow called. There are too many reasons she could have been asking after that literature, most of them innocent. But Gideon's an easy read now that she's living and breathing again."

“You sure that isn’t just R&R doing the trick?”

Paul snorted and shook their head. “No. Wholly aside from the timbre of the conversation, neither of them does extended inactivity well without a project. I’m sure you know the type.”

The Lyctor grunted. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. So how long do you think that’ll keep them?”

The grand lysis sat back, thoughtful. They had drunk very little of the spirits they’d brought along, but held their glass nonetheless, fingers sliding over smooth cool surface as they considered the roll of the liquid within.

“I might ask for your wisdom in that arena. How long can a love affair stay in the explosive stage? If it’s been powderkegged-up ahead of time? Especially if the involved parties have particularly thick prickly outers around their tender centers?”

“Gee, Paul,” Pyrrha said with deep irony, “I'm definitely the person you want to ask about that. All my moments were stolen things. Not so much a pressure cooker as a shitty little sprinkling of grabbing what I could, when I could.” She sighed and knocked back the rest of her own drink, pushing the glass onto the table, and seemed to be eye-flirting with the cigarettes. “Torrid's accurate enough, but honest to that thumb of a man we used to call God, none of it was a good template for doing romance right. I know you know how it ended.”

“I still believe that between the two of us, you have more experience with it than I do,” the lysis said, sincere and practical. Pyrrha snorted, and Paul let off. “But with or without a dataset to work from, I pray that it’s a long time. Inasmuch as either of them is capable of taking downtime, I don't think either would have been able to without the other present in some capacity. This may be the only way to get them to rest.”

That made Pyrrha laugh, though it didn’t seem wholly born of humour.

“So, like mother, like daughter, then.” She ran a hand over her own hair, left to grow out a little longer till there was a tight wave to it. Pyrrha had maintained a careful distance from Gideon, almost a timid one, but Paul got these glimpses now and then of a yearning. Wake’s daughter. At one point, Pyrrha’s own Schrodinger’s-daughter. “What literature did you send them? Don’t tell me your necro friend has developed a taste for porn. She seemed like such a little goblin — but I s’pose even goblins have libidos.”

“Trans care necromantic textbooks,” Paul said shortly. When Pyrrha cocked her head, they added, “not in so many words, but the intersection of her requests squarely Venn-diagrammed it. If either of them had spent literally any time off the Ninth as youngsters Harrow probably would have known better than to ask. It’s a bit of a trope. They wouldn’t by any means be the first necromantic couple to turn such knowledge to bedroom pursuits.”

Pyrrha burst out a larger, more sincere laugh from her chest, deep and bass. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

“It’s a flamboyant use of thanergy,” but Paul was grinning. “Absolutely extravagant.”

Leaning her chair back so that the front legs lifted a little off the floor, Pyrrha coughed another chuckle. Then they were silent together for a while, Paul humming over a pile of flimsy they’d brought along, Pyrrha turning the conversation over in her head. She left the cigarettes on the table.

“When you see Harrow,” Pyrrha asked, after a good long time, “you ever have trouble not seeing, well...her?” She paused. “Eyes aside.”

Paul looked up, gaze even and set with a simmering empathy. Slowly, thoughtfully, they shook their head.

“She’s nothing like her, really — neither of them are, we should have been able to sort that out in the first two months.” They sighed. “I’m sorry. I miss her.”

“Me, too.”

“She was a good kid.”

Pyrrha bowed her head for that. “The best.”

 

Blades flashed under the buzzing lights. Paul's chest rose and fell in quick, tight breaths as they pressed the advantage, hurling forward to meet their opponent. A whirl of their left-hand blade and a tight thrust under with their right.

Pyrrha dodged away as decisively as an iceberg falling from the floe. Armed with a pair of blades mirroring Paul's she returned in kind with a furious set of slashes. Her greater weight would have been a liability to her dexterity, except for ten thousand years of practice.

She quick-stepped in and went for the low lunge, sliding away from a strike to her back that Paul tried. Paul followed the turn.

Their blades met with a bright, hard crash of a noise, the longer of Paul's two daggers catching Pyrrha's on the cross.

No time to linger; they dodged away again before either could strike with their offhands.

"I think you were pulling one over on me when you suggested this might afford you a handicap," Paul called, voice just as bright and hard even in jest.

"It's been a good couple centuries since I went for these little things," Pyrrha called back, flipping her longer dagger and catching it again without looking. "This is a handicap. I'm rusty."

"We have differing definitions of handicap."

Pyrrha did not smile, but looked sly. "Had enough?"

The slash of Paul's smile, dark across their face, spoke strongly of one of their component parts. They did not answer aloud, for Pyrrha hardly expected it: instead they made answer by surging forward once more.

The two, aside from the experiential gap, were as well matched as either could be on the station. Neither a proper lyctor, nonetheless neither was fully bog-standard human anymore. It made a difference: to speed, to processing power, to healing ability. They both moved like fire, like water, like air: to each other, though, they moved like humans.

Working up to a lather honing themselves against one another was a luxury of time that Paul rarely had lately, and the coiled-up tension in Pyrrha was apparent. They had found her places where the station maintenance teams wanted for extra hands at hauling and fixing and lifting and manual labour of low enough stakes that it wouldn't be a political nightmare if the Lyctor-adjacent personage was found doing it, but it hardly sufficed.

As with most of their bouts, this one ended with Pyrrha's blade at Paul's neck and the match called for the Second. They were both dripping, shining with sweat, bright with exertion.

"I was right," Paul teased as Pyrrha straightened, cricking her neck and shaking out her forearms. "If you want to level the playing field, I'm going to start tying your main behind your back."

"Yeah, well, call me in a myriad."

"You'll still be a myriad ahead by then."

"Sad for you," Pyrrha chuckled. "Maybe I'll take up farming, really get rusty."

As they toweled off, hydrated, stretched, went through the small rituals that marked passage from the sparring ring to the wider universe and everything in it, Paul watched as Pyrrha's tension crept back in: around her eyes wrinkles folded subtly, and her shoulders set up just a little. They watched as Pyrrha glanced at the great plex windows of the sparring gym, still covered over by heat shields, the stars beyond invisible but not gone: for a moment her tension was arrested, but when she looked down again she sighed and squared herself to the world.

Paul was a creature full of prerogative and even-keeled good sense. Paul had the obstinacy and the ingenuity to fix most things they set their mind to. But some things couldn't be fixed, and sometimes a change was as good as a rest, or better.

They watched Pyrrha return to the work of living with a grimmer sense of weight than she ever had on New Rho, and they did some reckoning of their own.

Notes:

So this was the last one I had prepared and ready in the barrel, so scheduling might get a little looser than this nice tidy once-a-week I've been managing to maintain. Patience! There's more on the way. I just have to figure out how it fits together.

Pyrrha is so fuckin HARD to WRITE FOR, ugh. I love her so much. I don't have her voice down to my satisfaction and I'm dying, squirtle.

Chapter 6

Summary:

Reckoning and retrospect.

Notes:

A gentle little thing. It's been a minute, and I can't promise it won't be another minute till the next one, but it's still on the simmer like a good broth, I promise.

I am a No-Ass Nonagesimus truther. I will not apologize.

"Hey, Harrow?"

It was pikelet day. The sizzling from the pan on the hob was unnerving, a new sound in the shuttle's cramped interior. (Except for the one time with the bean patties, which, the less said the better.) The cloying cooking aromas had implacably suffused all four rooms after Griddle had gotten it started, which had followed after maybe fifteen minutes of inordinate fussing with some food powder Paul had sent along in the last shipment.

Instinctively Harrow had retreated into the bedroom and shut the door to try and escape it. Except she was realizing, with creeping confusion, that the sweet, oily scent wasn't putting her off. Point of fact, her stomach had given one or two quiet, bemused glubs as the fumes intensified.

So when Gideon called she came, squinting her misgivings at the pan as she approached. She shifted that suspicious look to Gideon. "What?"

"What, uh, colour would you call that, my darkling darling?"

Harrow checked. The arrangement in the pan was of flat, pallid things, both of them ragged around the edges, with clumpy crumbs of fried stuff haphazardly clinging to Gideon's spatula. "Tan?"

"So, not golden brown?"

Harrow shook her head, more consternation than a proper negative. "That's two colours."

"I mean, it's what the box says." She proffered the plastic rectangle, with its printed PIKELETS label and some cheery sunburst-shaped creature wearing sunglasses menacing a plate piled high with things that looked only vaguely related to Gideon's project. Harrow took it, and Gideon helpfully corrected, "other side."

She read the instructions. She peered in the bowl of slurry beside the stove. She stared with increasingly put-on incredulousness at the things in the pan. "Have you been using a timer?"

Gideon scoffed.

"Griddle, they give you time estimates."

"Yeah, but that's for chumps, not master chefs in the making. I've decided one of us should know how to cook."

"And you're doing so... by not following the instructions." She put the box down and leaned over the pan again, frowning. Gideon took the opportunity to sling an arm around her shoulders, heavy and warm, and though Harrow absently made a little noise of objection, she leaned into it, too.

"Yop."

"You're an idiot."

"I'm improvisational! I've got the instinct."

By the time the pikelets made it to plate they were even more mangled from an ill-fated extra flip, but Gideon presented them with undue pride regardless. She mashed the two fried breakfast shapes side-by-side, and brandished them with a patented and very foreboding Gideon Nav Stupid Grin.

"Hey, Harrow, look, it's your ass." She bowed as she put the plate down in front of the necromancer, who had taken seat on the far side of the bar-style counter. Harrow stared at her with a new level of perplexity, prompting the redhead to clarify unnecessarily, "because they're flat, get it? And your butt curves inward when you're standing up? Get it? Huh?"

"You used that joke two days ago."

"And you didn't laugh then, so I thought I'd give you another chance." Gideon smirked her beautiful, asymmetrical smirk at Harrow even as she was pouring more of the runny mix into the pan.

Harrow propped an elbow on the table, chin on her hand, wrinkling her nose. "I would like to put it on record that the joke is not funny and not laughing was a deliberate decision," she told Gideon crisply. "So. What. You want me to... eat my own ass?"

Gideon stopped, stared, and then howled a laugh, bent over nearly all the way forward with it.

Surely it was a disproportionate reaction to the joke's level of humour, but even so, Harrow was privately gratified that Gideon hadn't thought the train of thought through to that logical conclusion. Lewd japes were not her forté, in general and by choice, but considering their new and radical openness with each other it had been an irresistible assist. She was not, however, interested in letting Gideon know she'd experienced any satisfaction in dishing out a dirty joke; it did not signify. So she gave her lover a very dry look across the hard plastic counter, and waited for her laugh to die down.

"Only if you think you can handle it," Gideon finally wheezed back. Her eyebrows were doing a lot of the legwork in that innuendo. "Didn't think you were that flexible, but I guess if anyone can pop a few ribs out of place for a minute or five it'd be a necro."

"Tend your pan, Nav." She picked up her fork and worried at the edge of one pikelet. "Or you'll end up burning your ass."

"My ass looks nothing like these," Gideon countered. "My ass is luscious." For emphasis, she waggled her bottom in Harrow's direction. Harrow did take the opportunity to enjoy the little show, and Gideon did obey the suggestion, poking at the frying cakes with all the meddling interest of a first-time parent or an Eighth House priest at the secrets of the Ninth. It was a moment of easy accord of the sort that was growing increasingly and incredibly precedented between them.

Gideon finished up the second batch and slapped them on a plate for herself, coming round to the sitting side of the counter to slot in next to Harrow on the other stool, bumping into her with shoulders and hips in a companionable crowd. By then, Harrow's pikelets had cooled enough that she was nipping one of them into little pieces with her fork. It hadn't escaped her notice that Gideon kept surreptitiously glancing up while cooking to see if Harrow had tried the fried breakfast yet.

It didn't escape her notice, either, how Gideon leaned in expectantly when she finally popped a piece in her mouth.

She considered it. Thoroughly room-temperature, good. The form factor was well-suited for a quick cooling time, point in its favour. Sweet; not ideal, but the sweetness was not overwhelming, and the overall starchy quality was comforting to her in a way she couldn't quite place. She liked the texture, soft in her mouth and light. She mashed it, more tongue than teeth, hummed, and swallowed.

"Well?"

"Well what?" Harrow sedately brought another piece to her lips.

Gideon full-on grinned and bumped against her again, looking so pleased with herself that Harrow smiled back. She didn't even wrinkle her nose when Gideon smeared her own breakfast with a thick layer of the ambiguously red-purple preserves that had been sitting in the cupboard since they arrived, a suspicious relic of some previous resident.

The idyllic little breakfast was only interrupted when the untended pan on the still-hot hob started to smoke and Gideon launched herself back to her feet to keep the shuttle's anti-fire measures from kicking in.

 

The bean-patty incident had been much worse, all told. Those actually had caught fire, and Gideon and Harrow had discovered very quickly that the in-shuttle sprinkler system worked very efficiently and smelled exactly like the leek fields back on the Ninth. Their sins had been drowned in a horror of closed-shuttle greywater.

Horrid. It had put both of them off of bean patties entirely. Those early days had been hard.

 

The days only shortly after the bean-patty incident, though, were something else entirely. Their first night together had been a flex point, inevitably and in the expected ways, but in other more subtle ways as well.

The outside universe ceased to exist almost entirely during that time. It was a head-trip: now they orbited each other like stars, like a binary system, like two birds on a thermal, like a bright mirror of their time on the Ninth. Everything changed, except some fundamental thing that never would.

Not to say it was easy, exactly. Just that it was implacable, and imperative, and joyful.

The first thing Harrow did the morning after was to headbutt Gideon.

This was not strictly her fault: she woke up to the sight of Gideon over her on all fours, grinning a grin that showed all of her very well-formed teeth. For a flash she was transported back to seven years old, Drearbruh's grit digging into her back, one eye blackened and a chunk of Griddle's hair still clutched in her clenched fingers, and she flung herself up to sitting with a force she didn't know her abdominals could exert.

This in turn threw her cranium directly against Gideon's with a resounding crack.

Gideon yelped and fell back on her ass. Harrow rebounded immediately flat on her back, seeing stars and hearing nothing for a moment. When sound came back, it was Gideon's laugh that greeted her first, a loud and hooting cackle that was oddly muffled.

"Shit, sweet cheeks, I assumed if you wanted to give me critique you'd use your words," she crowed. Harrow pushed herself back up once more, head spinning a little. The door was open to the main living space behind her, light spilling in just sufficient to see by. "I know you've got plenty of those, and I thought we were maybe past the headbutting stage."

Gideon was naked: fully, gloriously bare head to toe, kneeling on the bedspread in such an echo of her pose last night that Harrow was just as dizzily thrust into very vivid recollection. Except, of course, for the part where Gideon had a hand over her nose, and a few drops of blood on her magnificent chest. Harrow gasped and scrambled forward then, one hand extended, eyes round.

Gideon's wheezing laugh redoubled. She swiped the worst of the gore from under her nose, held her hands up. "It's already stopping, see?" she said, grinning like the sun if the sun had blood on its teeth. "Uncross your eyes, Nonagesimus. You gotta try harder than that."

"I don't doubt that your skull is quite thick enough to sustain any number of hits," Harrow snapped. She was already reaching out to anxiously touch Gideon's forehead, though, feeling into her skin and bone and flesh to check for damage.

Gideon stayed surprisingly obedient to the little pats and strokes of Harrow's fingers. All looked well, barring a ruptured blood vessel behind her nasal bones. Harrow sighed and sat back.

"Good news. Your grey matter is cushioned by a sufficient volume of fluid that it didn't even notice a direct blow. Sadly we now have an explanation for your dismal cognitive capabilities."

"Are you calling my brain small?" Gideon scoffed.

"What were you doing?" Harrow's body was calming, and she became acutely aware of just how naked she was, too. The blanket had come with her when she'd surged forward to pap at Gideon's forehead like a worried mother. Now she clutched it to herself, trying to be subtle about it.

The same thing was happening to Gideon, she realized. She was laughing again but it was of a different timbre, one that Harrow vaguely connected with how Gideon had laughed on Canaan when Corona had leveled the high-beams at her with some flirtatious comment or other. She averted her eyes, and Harrow watched with real fascination as she ran her less-bloody hand through her hair, as she pulled back a little into herself.

"I mean," she said, "I was gonna, I guess, I was thinking I'd try and wake you up nice." There it was: her cheeks were nearly as red as the smear of blood still lingering under her nose, and as if trying to make them a matching set. "Sorry."

There had been many, many moods between Harrow and Gideon over their long and sordid history. Shy was a new one.

Gideon was still looking away. Harrow dropped her head to one side, watching the red-haired sculpture of a woman from the sides of her eyes, trying to work through the sensation happening in her chest. Shy felt unpleasantly like shame with a giddy edge. She was once again caught in the crossfire of her own conflicting motivations.

Instead of answering she reached forward again, into that vertiginous space between them, and thumbed away the remaining blood from Gideon's face.

The way Gideon leaned into it was not subtle. The gesture was enough, apparently, to nudge Gideon off the axis of her fear too, and her eyes slid up Harrow's arm to her face. She could almost feel the trail of it on her skin.

"I was gonna kiss you," she clarified, asking something.

Harrow tilted her head, answering, "was?"

Gideon's teeth flashed, her cheeks bunched, her pupils dilated. It was a hell of a grin, and it made some part of Harrow dizzy, unless that was the headbutt still affecting her inner ear. She leaned in as Gideon did, following the gravity of their bodies.

Their lips met, uncertain and slow, and the world was once again singular. Harrow would have gasped except it would have meant stopping. Her whole body was lighting up again, in sequence from her mouth all the way down. She felt Gideon's lips part, and parted her own in heady welcome, ready to revisit their new intimacy.

And then a second later she pushed Gideon's shoulders, leaning hers away, her nose wrinkling in a reflexive grimace.

"Griddle," she told the other woman firmly, "brush your teeth."

 

The shyness did not go away, but the giddy edge of it got stronger, fizzing and sizzling inside both. It was in the way Gideon kept shooting Harrow unbelieving little looks and grinning like an idiot. It was in the way Harrow kept stopping partway through a task, as if having to restart the complex machinery of her mind every time she remembered Gideon's body edged by bedside light.

It was definitely in the way that they fell onto the couch together halfway through the morning, hungry all over again. It buoyed them both through the fumbling, and the sex was simple, and wonderful, and felt almost as unexpected as it had the night before.

It only left them more twitterpaited. It was a horrible upward spiral of cloud-brained joy. It was a terrifying runaway train of heart-opening and leg-opening. Harrow's system was queasy with it, ill-prepared for so much delight all at once.

 

She also wouldn't have stopped it for the world, even if she could have, and she was not sure that she could have. Case in point: every time Gideon disappeared into the bathroom that day, Harrow found herself thrown back in her mind to those long moments in bed last night as she had finally understood the muffled sounds coming from the other side of the wall. She'd come back to herself and find her underwear soaked, whatever she'd been reading or working on forgotten in her hands. It was inconvenient: she was going to run out of clean underwear.

They talked, that day, in bits and pieces propelled by the rocket-burn of this new liaison. Like a stone skipped across a river, they touched and flew over ground they had tread before in a new light, the momentum of that first day keeping them glancing away from any of the depths.

"Back home," Gideon asked, curled on the floor around Harrow in a break between kisses, "I mean, is this why you hated me so much? I mean, was it like, 'maybe if I pull her hair she won't notice I like her'?"

Harrow had painted her face that morning, but by now half of that paint was on Gideon's. It kept drawing her eye, the hazy grey-smeared echo of her own skull on Gideon's skin, which for some reason looked better to Harrow's eye than any of the half-assed paint jobs Gideon had given herself.

She had to think about the question for a long moment, but she answered honestly, as she couldn't imagine any other way to answer, "no. I hated you. I wanted to see your flesh stripped from your bones." This was not news to her. Harrow watched Gideon from behind her lashes as she spoke. "You were beautiful and blasphemous. You were... a reminder that the Ninth is tiny in the vastness of the universe. You were there, and you defied, and you never let up. You took up too much space.

"I couldn't help but hate you." Just as she could not help but love her now, though Harrow didn't say that. Even thinking it made her heartbeat go arhythmic for a moment. She ran her fingers feather-light down Gideon's shoulder instead. "I was certain you despised me just as primally."

"I mean," Gideon said, letting it hang for a moment. She'd taken a little breath in at beautiful, but had not commented. "Yeah, fair enough. I wanted to beat you to a pulp pretty much any time I thought of you. I think I liked you for a bit when we were, like, four years old? But after that you were objectively the worst fucking thing in my life, and I knew Crux.

"Except," and now she gave a little ha ha and spoke in a rush, "except sometimes, I mean, last night wasn't the first time I jerked off to you. Kind of shitty, in retrospect, I mean, I did it because I thought you'd hate it so much if you knew. I think."

Harrow pulled back and gave her an incredibly affronted look. In fact she did not feel as dismayed by that as she felt she should, riding on an endorphin high, but she did want to make Gideon feel at least a little embarrassed of her past self. "You hate-masturbated to me?"

Gideon looked pained. "Who the hell else on the Ninth was there?"

"You had a library of pornographic magazines! I know! I had it confiscated multiple times!"

"I'm sorry." Gideon was wrinkling her nose. Scrunching up her whole face, point of fact, red again. "Gross thing to do, yeah, I'll take the L on that one."

A thought flushed all through Harrow. "Did you do that while we were at Canaan?"

"Holy shit, no! No no no," Gideon reassured, hand up, "holy shit no. That would have been, I mean, it started feeling weird to do even before I got conscripted to be your cav."

Harrow snorted, relaxing back down. "Well." A pause, as she watched Gideon try and gather herself together again. "I expect all your future masturbatory fantasies including my personage to be sufficiently motivated by affection, not spite."

"Not even a little bit of spite?" Gideon teased.

"I've said my piece, you cad."

Another time, later that day, because they had to take breaks between big revelations:

"So I mean, when did this," Gideon gestured between her chest and Harrow's, "flip over from hating my guts?"

They were sat in front of the bookshelf. Gideon had tangled her feet with Harrow's companionably, the both of them dressed again after a sonic, feeling fresh and clean and warm together and still sated. It was prodigious, really, how often Harrow's body and mind were willing to be tempted back into debauchery.

She cocked her head, curling her socked toes subtly against Gideon's calf. After the sonic, she had left her face bare. It suited.

"Canaan." That required less thinking than the other had.

That for some reason made Gideon smile in a way Harrow read as slightly pained, as complicated. She ran her hand down her shirt front, smoothing it over her left chest. "Figures."

"Not like that," Harrow corrected. "Before... before then."

Again she sensed a moment where their shared high kept them from getting pulled under. Gideon's strange expression grappled a moment longer, and resolved into a smug grin. "Won you over with my mad sword skills, did I?"

"No," Harrow inclined her head dryly. "If I could be swooned by martial prowess, I would have seen Hect fight and never given you a second look."

"Ooh! Straight to the fucking heart!" Gideon clutched her chest and swooned backwards. "Can't blame you, though, holy shit. Same, girl. When, then? I gotta know."

Harrow chewed her lip, but with a meditative thoughtfulness rather than the anxious gnaw the poor flesh was more used to. "When did I feel it, or when did I recognize it?"

"Uhh... both?"

She crept her toes further up Gideon's calf, considering. "It wasn't all at once. The Avulsion trial shamed me into reassessing my assumptions about you. I think it began then, though in retrospect it's difficult to say. There were other... small shifts I did not recognize at the time. Most of them before I told you of my secret. I recognized it..." No. "It took me longer to recognize it. Though not too much longer."

Another skip of the stone. Gideon recognized the dodge and let it fly by. It would not always be this easy, but that day they were held gentle in the same grace as they had been after the pool.

Harrow moved into the offered space, once again very dry. "And when did you go from -- and I still cannot believe that this is a sentence I have to say -- did you go from hate-masturbating to the genuine article?"

It surprised her that Gideon ducked her head in embarrassment. "I mean I stopped jerking off about you before I started liking you, Harrow. And that's easy. Stepping in for the Sixth."

Harrow sat back and furrowed her brow at Gideon. "That's all it took?"

"I mean, you were still being a heinous bitch to me most of the time so no, it's not like I went all heart-eyes just because you backed me up. But, like, that was the first time we were simpatico. Where we were, like, a team. It changed shit." She gestured vaguely.

"Not Winnowing? I recall we worked well together on that one."

"No. You had to do that. And, for the record, that felt just about as good as a whisk to the brain. You didn't have to defend the Sixth, and you trusted me to beat Babs's horrible ass, which, babe, very validating."

Thinking about how frighteningly proficient with a rapier Ianthe had been after eating said horrible ass, Harrow had to agree.

 

But, honestly, the whole idea of having been a masturbatory fantasy for Gideon began to occupy more space in Harrow's mind as the day went on. She could not quite work out how she felt about it; no, she did know how she felt about it, but she didn't understand why; no, the why was self-evident, but, oh, hell, thinking about it made her head spin. The images it conjured up, as well as simply the act of conjuring them, were a shock to her system.

So towards the end of the day, after some quiet time with books wherein Harrow hardly managed to parse an entire paragraph in one go, she got up, took Gideon's hand, and led her into the bathroom.

"Don't think we need another shower yet, babe," Gideon teased. She seemed to be trialling babe, and Harrow was still deciding whether she should put a stop to it. It made her feel funny.

Rather than answer, she stopped once they were both in, turned, and stood in front of Gideon. Desire had made her bold, but she still felt just on the edge of quivering. Gideon gave her a curious look.

"Show me what you were doing in here, last night."

Gideon, in a move that Harrow was becoming familiar with, turned bright red under her freckles and said, "uh."

"I want to know what you do to yourself when you think of me," she demanded, before she could backtrack.

The taller woman almost squirmed: she squeezed her shoulders up, like a shrug that got stuck, and she arched back towards the counter. There was a furiously incandescent quality to her blush, set off by her grin in a weird melange of embarrassment and clear excitement.

"And, what, you just watch?"

"I want to know how you do it to yourself." That came to her in a moment of inspiration: her reasons were baser than that, but the justification wasn't untrue. "I want to see what you like."

"You can always just ask," Gideon waggled her eyebrows and winked, "I'm not shy."

Harrow was a little too diverted to call out the half-truth there. Instead she took a step towards Gideon, who sucked an almost imperceptible breath in. "I'm a visual learner."

"You like to watch?" Those eyebrows were at it again.

"We'll find out. You're stalling." Another step in and she put her hands on Gideon's hips. She hooked her thumbs into the waistband of the other woman's pants, but Gideon had her beat to the punch, undoing her belt with a quickness and dropping her bottoms in one fell swoop.

There was a difference to the timbre, here, that Harrow was becoming aware of. Gideon was nervous again. "Do you have performance anxiety?" she asked suddenly, surprised.

Gideon's returning grin was all teeth, was something challenging. Suddenly Harrow could place it: it was the same excitement she'd shown at Canaan when asked to exhibit her rapier proficiency for strangers. "We'll find out."

With that, Gideon hopped her hips back and up onto the counter, thighs spread languidly. Harrow had to bite her lip against the urge to drop and again take what was hers -- the sight of Gideon, spread, was no less compelling than it had been.

"Ah ah." That look must have been more naked on her face than she'd thought, because Gideon was taunting her. She reached out to touch Harrow's chin, tilting her head up to meet her golden eyes. There was wickedness there, mischief, and a huge radiant affection that rendered the first two charming. "You're not here. It's just me, my imagination, and Righty." She waggled the fingers of her right hand and Harrow nearly scoffed.

But, obedient, she stepped back instead, hooding her eyes and lacing her fingers in front of her. It was a cramped bathroom, and the lip of the tub was cold on the backs of her calves.

After a furtive glance or two Harrow's way, Gideon seemed satisfied that she would stay where she was. Her eyes hooded then, those golden irises shadowed to a greener hue, and she seemed to fall into herself. She didn't so much hunch her shoulders as curl her spine, hips pulling forwards and shoulders back in a subtle posture change. She held the counter's edge with one hand, her other slipping with no-nonsense intention down her front, skirting over her still-on shirt and sliding more languidly over her flexing lower abdominals, over her mons.

Harrow tracked Gideon's fingers as their tips disappeared into the cloud of red curls that rioted between her legs, noting each inch taken and the way that they spread out, second and third fingers parting to a purposeful V.

Gideon dropped her head and huffed a breath. Her breathing was the only sound in the close little room. Harrow wished she was close enough to hear the wet part of her labia as her fingers pressed, wished she could lean in and absorb each detail as those swollen folds accepted their familiar invaders. She could see the dark-flushed parting of those lips, and the way Gideon's fingers curled not yet into herself but first a little further up.

She could tell when Gideon found her own clit between middle and third finger because her hips shuddered and her breath caught. There was no careful testing-out: Gideon knew exactly what her body wanted and Harrow was struck by the contrast.

Gideon began to work herself in earnest. Harrow watched those fingers flex and pull, imagining how that would feel: clit bracketed by callused fingerpads, pressed between, caught and slicked mercilessly...

She imagined Gideon in her cell back on the Ninth, in that blackest black night, working away on herself. How often had she gone to train the next morning with fingers still bearing the traces of her own private pleasure? How often had her own fluids been under her nails when she and Harrow had clashed? Even if that arousal hadn't been for her at the time, not really, in retrospect it echoed back and Harrow found herself hungry for the idea of it. She had not always wanted Gideon, but now she did, and to some time-blind animal part of her that meant she always had.

But she was getting lost in herself again. She realized with alarm that she'd almost missed Gideon getting lost in herself.

That hand was sliding further, Gideon's hips curling in anticipation, which rendered more of her vulva on display for Harrow to watch, burning, as she sunk two fingers deep into herself.

They disappeared to the knuckles in one motion, hips scooping to meet them. The sight sucked the air from Harrow's lungs, and Gideon grunted high in a moment of twinned satisfaction and desire.

Harrow's imagination closed around those fingers, buried deep inside that obscenely organic cavern of flesh, filling a space whose emptiness had not been evident a moment before. Making themselves unignorably known. She could not stop imagining their width and texture, the breath-stealing jolt of their presence.

When the tendons in the back of Gideon's hands started flexing, matched by the roll of her hips, Harrow whimpered. She realized she was biting her knuckles, but didn't stop, even when she dimly noticed Gideon flicking a look up to her. Her eyes were pinned on that hand, which, though it now covered most of the explicitness of Gideon's vulva, suggested its own motions within in obscene clarity.

Then Gideon was tilting her head back and her body forward, rolling her hips to trap her hand against the counter and grinding her hips down against it with ferocious industry. She could no longer see those fingers disappearing between Gideon's legs. This was unacceptable.

Suddenly it was all unacceptable, the animal of Harrow's body clawing at its cage. She rushed the two steps between them, the hunger in her throat taking voice. "Gideon," she entreated.

Gideon did not stop, but she cracked an eye in surprise, and then both. Her hips rolled and her breath shuddered. She was close and knowing that, seeing that without being involved with it, made Harrow sublimate into undiluted desire.

She reached out and grabbed Gideon's arm, the one whose tendons she could now feel still working to pilot the fingers bringing her such pleasure. "Gideon," she demanded, and the other woman shuddered to a halt. She didn't know how to ask for what she needed. It was too new. It had been hard enough to articulate wanting at all. "Please."

Gideon's pupils dilated. She did not precisely freeze, but she stilled, and though Harrow could see her confusion too, the redhead grinned. "You... uh, good?" she checked, between breaths.

Harrow nodded twice, because yes, she was so, so good.

Gideon cocked her head and Harrow made a frustrated noise, and then leaned in to kiss her, hands grabbing her shirt. It was as hard a kiss as she could manage, wanting to impress herself upon Gideon despite the relative frailty of her own flesh. Gideon leaned into it, groaning, and as she did Harrow pulled her hands away to fumble with her own clothing.

She stepped out of her pants, ignoring Gideon's curious peer, stymying any questions with another kiss. She tugged Gideon's hand, still trapped at the junction of her legs, until she pulled it up and around Harrow instead, and then pushed Gideon further onto the counter.

Only then did she break the kiss, panting. She shed her shirt, turned, and with shaking arms, boosted herself up to sit between Gideon's legs, her back pressing to the larger woman's front.

There was a wet smear of slick left behind by Gideon on the warmed surface of the bathroom counter. She positioned herself over it, claiming it, and then pulled Gideon's wet hand around and down between her own legs.

"Oh," Gideon said.

"Show me how," Harrow said, weaving between a beg and a demand. Both hands slid down the contoured column of Gideon's arm. "I want -- these -- the way you were doing to yourself."

Gideon was already nuzzling in behind her, a warm and grounding blanket still pulsing with her own unsated lust. She slipped an arm around Harrow's middle, the dry palm sliding warm, soothing lines against her fevered skin.

"You sure?" she asked, right in Harrow's ear, which was fair, given.

"Please," she confirmed, the syllables rounding on her tongue, and she heard Gideon's breath shiver out just faintly at it.

Harrow found herself enveloped, kissed up and down the column of her neck. Gideon's fingers were still wet as they found their desired path down Harrow's stomach and through her forest of her pubic hair, which brought Harrow back all over again to the thought of Gideon's fingers inside Gideon's body. She leaned her head back and moaned, heart pounding, before Gideon had even found her slit.

How was it that every new step could make her so nervous and so rapacious all at once? She had never let fear put her off doing something she wanted to do, but this was different. The fear, though there, never stood a chance under the avalanche of wanting. The fear was almost another reason to chase it. She arched her hips forward, spread her legs so that her thighs pressed against the warm inner planes of Gideon's.

"Good girl," Gideon praised. Harrow popped an eye open to look at her sidelong, the praise hitting strangely, but the woman's fingers did not hesitate to slide between Harrow's parted labia. "I mean, if you weren't, I've got plenty to spare, but you're so wet," Gideon crooned, and Harrow relaxed into it.

More than relaxed. Those callused fingers found Harrow's clit -- easier each time -- and tested her out, earning a squirm and a deep noise. She arched her hips again, more stridently, and felt Gideon chuckle behind her.

"We'll get there, gorgeous, I promise. I'll take care of you. You'll get what you need." It was more, and more confident, talking than Gideon had taken to in their admittedly only twenty hours or so of sexual escapades. Harrow struggled a little with it; was she expected to respond? She could not think of words to save her life, not with Gideon's fingers slipping down beyond her clit and back up in a long and frictionless cycle of teasing. It was making her want to climb up and put her whole vulva right up on Gideon's mouth to shut her up, not because it was bad, but because she didn't quite understand the script and it was taking her out of the moment. On the other hand, hearing Gideon's voice behind her, and hearing it spoken with such sureness, warmed her, and she wanted more of it.

And then she gasped out loud, head emptying of racing thoughts in a flurry to make room for the feeling of Gideon's fingerpad pressing against the opening of her vagina.

It was just one finger, of the at least two that Gideon had crammed herself full of. It was one of those same fingers. Harrow wanted to scream with eagerness and fear, with the exquisite sandpaper of imagining herself opened. It was not as if she had never slid a finger within herself. She'd tried it, now and then, a single digit that she generally found unsatisfying.

But this was different somehow.

Gideon was just lingering her finger there at the threshold. She could feel tension in the body behind her, attention. Harrow cried out again and squirmed her hips, but Gideon's other hand had come to the bowl of her pelvis and rested heavy against her iliac crest, providing resistance.

"Gideon!" she burst out in frustration, working her hips harder, forward, trying. Only then did Gideon allow her fingertip, just the tip, to slip beyond the sentinels of Harrow's labia.

She threw her head back to thump against Gideon's clavicle, gasping. The gates had been thrown open: now Gideon slid that one finger, slowly, impossibly slowly, millimetre by millimetre, into the space inside Harrow that had never felt empty before.

There was someone else inside of her body. Gideon was inside her body. Harrow mewled, thrown into a strange confusion, like she'd unlocked a cage full of birds and they were loose in her chest. She writhed. She was obliterated. Some part of her felt completed for the first time since she'd put Gideon's soul back in her chest, and another piece rioted immediately and entirely against the first.

But there was no room for thought, only feeling, because now Gideon's palm was seated over her vulva, warm and encompassing, and her finger was buried as deep as it would go. There was a natural limit: she could not consume Gideon.

Another senseless noise tore from her throat. It felt unbearably dangerous to be so racked with pleasure by feeling Gideon inside her. It felt impossible to want to stop. She was strung taut between the two.

But the dangerous notion of her own prerogative was shattered when Gideon reminded her, by rocking her hand and curling her finger, that she had wholly given up control of the situation. She was in the other's hands, literally and metaphorically, and she was the one skewered. She panted, open-mouthed and dizzy, and rocked her hips thoughtlessly.

"That's a girl," came breath against her ear once more, bright and light. Gideon had been kissing her head, her neck, her shoulder, all throughout, Harrow realized. Now her voice grounded Harrow, the talk bringing her back into the moment. Gideon was not afraid. Gideon's tone was honey, it was the sun, it was warm and safely ignorant of Harrow's tempest. "That's right, I've got you. Tell me if you need me to change it up. I've got you."

 

Harrow was shaking as hard as Gideon had ever felt her shake.

It would be worrying if she didn't so obviously and completely want it so badly. Feeling her working so hard to shove herself down on just one finger had been insanely tasty, and the way she had been riding it since, juddering and wholly without artifice, told Gideon better than anything just how good a time the other woman was having.

Who knew the sight of her getting herself off would trigger such a thirst in Harrow? She should have jerked it in the bathroom way earlier, she thought giddily as she moved with her lover. Harrow was tight around her finger, tight and already fluttering. Gideon was having the best time she'd had all day, which was saying something.

"Gonna jiggle yourself right off my hand here," she murmured in Harrow's ear while she shook herself to bits, and because Gideon couldn't conceive of veiling her feelings right now, it was limned with a laugh.

Harrow let out a high and wandering whine, trying to get ahold of her shudders but succeeding only in suppressing them for stretches punctuated by even harder quakes. Gideon could feel that around her fingers, too, as she continued to slowly fuck Harrow. Wow.

Harrow gasped, arching her back in another ill-fated attempt to regain composure. "I can't help it. It's not funny."

Gideon struggled for a moment, too. The urge to backpedal or up the ante both rose in her: she didn't think either was right, somehow, though, not with the nakedness of Harrow in front of her and the nakedness of her own feelings.

She had to try something new.

"It's okay, Harrow, I'm not laughing at you," she told her, earnest, urgent. She held Harrow close with her free arm like a safety harness, pouring all the affection she had into her words and into the rock of her hand, which never ceased. "Just, everything we've been through and this's the thing we can't posture our way through. You know?" Her fingers curled, released, curled. Her heart was a pulsar, dictating those loving flexes, and fuelling her fumbling attempts to put words to the weird sensations of her emotions. "It's okay for it to be a bit funny. It's other things more. It's really hot, too. And it's really, really good, it's so fucking good I can't not make noise about it."

And that would have to do. She nosed behind Harrow's ear, almost shy again, and lipped curiously at the curve.

Slowly, she seemed to relax, her shakes returning full force. She let out a whispered breath, and while Harrowhark didn't laugh, Gideon felt her make a long, low sound in her chest. Her hips moved, jerky at first and then with growing smoothness. She was letting go of something. There was trust there, and it made Gideon heady with a desire to prove her own trustworthiness.

"How do you do that," Harrow gasped, raw as she rode. "How can you say such -- things -- and make it feel so good."

"I dunno," she murmured in Harrow's ear. Her heart glowed. "I'm just really good at sex I guess."

She felt it as Harrow unwound. She cradled her as it happened. Years of getting herself off meant she could fingerfuck almost on autopilot, but her mind was in every flex of her fingers here. When Harrow started to clench her thighs hungrily around Gideon's wrist, she took a moment and brought her own legs together, boosting Harrow up into Gideon's lap to be further held and bolstered. She rocked her own hips just a little along with Harrow's. She turned her head and closed her eyes, burying her face against the side of Harrow's jaw.

"You're so fucking hot, Harrow." Her fingers flexed. She couldn't help but let the words tumble from her. "You feel so good, so good," she murmured, feeling the slick running down her palm, "don't ever stop, I want to stay here forever," her fingerpad against the rough-slippery front of Harrow's cunt, pressing in rhythm with Harrow's cries, "good, so good, yeah, I've got you, you can let go, Harrow."

Harrow's hips lifted, chased each flex with just as much urgency as she had in the first moments, but now Gideon met each leap. They moved together, Harrow clasped to Gideon, and as her cries began to crack into something rawer, Gideon felt her cresting and pressed deep, ground her palm firm against her clit and curled her finger hard.

Harrow's slight body was a bridge, an arch, held back only by Gideon's firm grip. Gideon gasped, her own cunt throbbing in an echo of the hard clench she felt around her finger, the spasm after spasm of Harrow's orgasm.

"Fuck yes," she exulted, goading, "yes, Harrow, holy shit, that feels incredible."

When Harrow sagged back into Gideon's lap, she was so entirely spent that Gideon had to catch her and hold her up. She withdrew her hand only reluctantly, eliciting a parting shudder from Harrow, so that she could hold her secure. She was grinning.

"Tight grip you've got there, bone mistress. Guess I know where you're keeping all your muscles."

Harrow, who had slumped sideways into one of Gideon's arms, popped her eyes open from where they'd fluttered shut and stared at Gideon in a kind of confused incredulousness.

Gideon winked at her.

In a first for the entire galaxy, one that Gideon would cherish forever and occasionally whip out when she was feeling smug, post-coital Harrow laughed a delicate, high little ha. If she then ducked her head and surreptitiously wiped her eyes, as if the action could be hidden in such intimate quarters, Gideon let her have that little moment to herself.

 

Penetration never really stopped being intense for Harrow. The intensity was compelling, when she felt up to it, and as the weeks carried on, Gideon got absolutely pro at reading when she felt up to it.

Things went that way across the board, largely. The benefit of a tight depth of field was a specificity of focus, and they began to grow used to each other, gloriously so. They learned patterns. They taught preferences. The beginning was a firework, which lit the bonfire they carried on with. In the privacy of her heart, it made Harrow very smug: she had never known before how to do any of this. She had not known how to be tender. She had not practiced wanting or giving. But then, she had always been a good study.

And Gideon would no longer have to hide in the bathroom and masturbate. Not unless she wanted to. The next time she woke from a wet dream, Harrow understood the signs, and she was there in the sleepy confusion of waking to press up against Gideon, to run her hands wordlessly down that wanting body to finish the job her imagination had started. If she never got the hang of -- egh -- dirty talk, she would make up for it in other ways.

But wet dreams happened less often, when their days were filled with each other filling each other.

When, sometime in the latter half of their days in the shuttle, Harrow woke in the night to Gideon tossing and turning once more, she welcomed it. It had been a week or so since the last, and some part of her coveted the particular flavour of their midnight liaisons.

It must have been an intense one: Gideon's throaty noises were strident, and the arching of her body, which had started out subtle, was growing quite dramatic.

If just the dream was making her gasp like that, Harrow had no doubt that she could drive her to losing her voice. Maybe she'd whip out the bone cock, once Gideon was just awake enough to know what was going on. She slid up against Gideon, nosing against her broad shoulder. She slid a hand over the other woman, cleverly fingering at the bottom edge of her bandeau, sneaking beneath in search of a no-doubt peaked nipple, nibbling the skin above Gideon's clavicle in a little greeting.

Gideon woke up screaming.

Notes:

...and the next one is liable to be a little rough, so buckle in buckos. I did say I wasn't done with Gideon's damage.

Thanks again to my wife (Cherrehc on AO3!) for betaing, and to all of you for being so damn patient with me in the meantime!

I've also put a tentative chapter count on this thing. Liable to change if a planned chapter goes tits-up or metastasizes, but I can see the end from here one way or another.

Chapter 7

Summary:

It's hard to know what to do when someone you love is hurting in a way you don't fully understand. It's hard to let yourself be taken care of when your self-image hinges on never being seen as weak.

Notes:

CW for mentions of vomiting and diarrhea, for implications of exercise as self-harm, for descriptions of canon-typical horrors, and for a description of PTSD symptoms.

It had been easy. It had sucked and it had been awful, and it had been easy.

John Gaius, sitting on a chair in front of a table piled with notes and missives and schedules and more than one tablet, like some normal administrator with the world's worst vanity contact lenses, looking like neither a shit nor a god. She hadn't taken long at all to work out how much of a shit he was, but it had only registered as a point of interest, not a problem exactly. After all, hadn't people been telling her all her life how much of a shit she was? Turned out, shithood was next to godhood, and it was possibly genetic.

John Gaius, sitting there, looking up and giving her everything she had ever hoped for: "How do you feel about a command in the Cohort, kiddo?" he'd asked, a parent fondly bequeathing their beloved child their very first big-girl responsibility. "You're a bang-up swordswoman, and I think you should have a chance to really do some good in the universe."

"Oh shit! Hell yeah," she'd said, emphatic, leaning forward a little to drive home just how emphatic. Emoting was a reflex. Emotion was a thought. She laughed, because she felt like that's what she would do here. "Just show me where to sign. I'm ready. I've been ready."

John smiled. "Great. I'm going to pair you up with one of my more experienced commanders while you're learning the ropes, but I'll bet you'll be leading the charge in no time." He sat back, tilting his messy-haired head at her. "I'm so proud of how involved you've gotten, Kiriona. So proud."

Her dad was god, and god was proud of her.

She grinned wide with one side of her mouth, and stood up straighter. Because that's what she thought she would do here.

 

It was easy to decide how she felt about things when it wasn't her body doing the feeling. Easy to decide that John's reasons for being a shitty absent father made sense, and John's plans for the Cohort and the Houses were a great and not at all awful way to make sure the Houses remained secure. Easy to say yes to lending her sword to the cause. Easy to decide, yeah, this was what her kid self had always dreamed of, right?

Easy to leave the shitty entanglements of her youth behind, to toss them in the bin like worn-out socks. Easy to say, yeah, fuck her, what had Kiriona spent years in her orbit for anyways? It was hard to remember why she'd thought even for a second that throwing herself on a spike for Harrowhark would have turned up any way except bad for her.

What she did remember was vaguely embarrassing, in that she could recall but couldn't work out posthumously why it had all seemed so important: great balloons of sensation and energy in her chest or moving her limbs before her brain had a chance to weigh in, or rushes of surety without a shred of evidence, or strange heavinesses and lightnesses like shifts in gravity but puppeted only by the chemical whims of her body.

If she felt like half of her old decision-making faculties had been cut off, that could be nothing but a good thing, right? It was the dumb half. The body half. Her brain would do a better job on its own.

So her body became a tool that she threw against the problems her brain decided were important, which was what she had always tried to make it. Over and over and over again, she threw it against her commander training, she threw it against the Cohort dicks who side-eyed God's smart-mouthed daughter, she threw it against Ianthe and her pathetically needy indifference, and eventually she threw it against the devils.

She had been powerful, she had been wanted, she had been useful, she had cut down monsters by the hundreds without a flinch even when those monsters had worn human faces, she had won planets for her father. And every time, she felt the absence of her body's screaming like tinnitus.

 

When she had been in the infirmary recovering, she hadn't been able to keep food down. She'd been on a bleaker diet than Harrow's crackers-and-gruel, and had vomited her face off every time anyways. It had been a week or two and then things had finally begun to stay down, after which point she'd spent just as many days shitting herself inside-out twenty minutes after any food went in. After that had been the constipation, and the less said about that the better.

There were things the Sixth House white coats had said about toxic shit in her system left over from being dead, and other things they'd said about all the living things in her guts having died when she had, like she'd been a flipped planet and they the doomed wildlife.

They'd said the system had to restart, like a glitching computer, and that the puking and the shitting were an unfortunate but necessary part of that process. There were things in her that needed to get out, and things she was missing that had to get back in.

 

When she woke up screaming, it didn't last very long. Really it had only been like five seconds of screaming, seven tops. Compared to the amount of screaming in the universe, or even the amount of screaming either of them had heard in the past year, it'd been nothing.

So really, Harrow had no reason at all to freak out as hard as she had.

"I'm fine." She shoved Harrow off, limbs clumsy with sleep and overcharged with adrenaline. Devils still writhed behind her eyes, which was a hell of a thing that she hated very much and wanted to get rid of. Which she couldn't do with Harrow up in her face. There were all sorts of new tender sides to Harrow she'd been seeing over the last couple of weeks, but right now she wanted none of them. The open, startled guilt on the other girl's face was too much. "Get off, I'm fucking fine, okay?"

"You were screaming."

"You know what a nightmare is, right? Like I mean you probably see all sorts of creepy necro-shit in your dreams and go hmm, yeah, nice, but you get that other people get freaked out by that kind of shit, right? Back off."

Harrow backed off, affronted. She was rumpled with her own sleep, the pillowcase's folds imprinted on the side of her face, and Gideon did not find it charming just then when Harrow very visibly rallied herself back from her instinctive pulling-away. Ominously, gently, she asked, "What were you dreaming about?"

"None of your fucking business is what." Gideon spilled out of the side of the bed. Her limbs were trembling. The last thing in the whole universe she wanted to do was to talk to Harrow about it. She had to nip that in the bud. Several ways to do that occurred, and credit where credit is due, she did keep herself from the worst of them. Instead she snapped, "I'm gonna go take a sonic."

 

There was toxic shit in her heart. She could feel it like the way food had felt like a rock stuck in the ramp of her bowels in those early days back alive. She had felt it after that first night, after all the good feelings had been felt to completion. She was feeling it now at night, when she was asleep and couldn't shove it back down the mind-hole. She didn't know how to move it along. She didn't know how to puke out a feeling. There were no nurses with mortifying little tubes of feelings-laxatives waiting in the wings. Had it always felt this way when she'd been alive before but she just hadn't noticed? Or had being dead broken something in her?

Sometimes she wished she could be just a little bit more Kiriona, go back to deciding how she felt. It was unutterably crappy and miserable that her body was calling the shots now. Except Kirinoa wouldn't have been able to find Harrow the way Gideon had now found her. It would've been impossible.

That seemed so fucking unfair.

She realized her hands were fisted in her hair and she was pacing. She hadn't made it to the washroom, which was really something since it was right next to the bedroom. Instead she was standing in front of the couch, freaking out.

"Fuck," she said.

Dropping directly to plank, she started a furious series of push-ups. It'd worked well enough back on the Ninth on those days she'd been so stir-crazy she'd been ready to scream. Maybe that was the trick of it: if her body was going to swirl this shit around like tar in her psyche, she'd give the stupid thing something else to focus on. Once her arms were burning she flipped over and tore into her abs, flinging herself into crunches. Her muscles were screaming, which was great and she'd missed that while she was dead — god damn it — which was great because her body was too busy to make her remember things and whine like a little baby.

Except she became aware of two things more or less at the same moment: Harrow was standing in the little through-way between the bedroom/bathroom and the kitchen/living room, and Gideon's stupid body was cheating, because the noises she was making with each crunch were not the nice butch grunts of exertion that she fancied made her sound like a total swoon-worthy beast, but instead little snivels that sounded a lot like she was whining like a little baby.

"Are you trying to give yourself a reason to take a sonic?" Harrow asked dryly. Great; Gideon's attempts to get her to fuck off and mind her own business had just made her bitchy. "You were already sweating sufficiently to furnish an excuse."

"Shove off, Harrow," Gideon growled between sits.

Harrow did not shove off. She approached, despite a wet growl from Gideon, and dropped to a crouch at Gideon's feet. She didn't do anything then, just stared, for long enough that Gideon felt herself faltering. Her crunches slowed and she glowered, willing the other girl to give up whatever the fuck this was and go away.

Harrow reached over Gideon's knees and touched her face, brushing the firm pad of her finger across Gideon's cheek at the peak of a sit. Gideon flinched, and then stopped entirely when Harrow held up her fingers. They were wet.

She had been unable to cry when her body had been dead. She missed that. There was nothing hot or cool about crying.

"I'm. Fine." She was gritting her teeth, but her voice was betraying her. "Leave me alone, Harrow."

Harrow pulled back, pulled her knees to her chest and crossed her arms atop them: a closed-off posture, but her eyes were stones on Gideon's chest, cool and heavy. "I'm not going back to bed."

"Fine, then you can fucking sit there and twist," Gideon snarled.

To get away from the complicated, frustrated expression she'd managed to summon onto Harrow's face, she shoved to her feet and went for the pull-up bar. There was plenty more of her body to hurt into silence, if the fucking thing was intent on playing rough.

Still, Harrow didn't leave. She could feel the little gremlin at her back, watching.

"Gideon," she said, some minutes into her watching. There was strain in her voice. "I want to help."

There was a surge of something nasty up in Gideon's core, some muck that globbed around those words bitterly. Some hurting thing in Gideon latched onto them and used them to twist her attention away from the horrors she kept inside her. She dropped the bar and turned on Harrow. "That's fucking rich!"

Harrow was standing, her expression flat and tight in a way that Gideon couldn't read. "It's true. If you would just--"

"You know you'd be the first, right?" She took a step towards Harrow, who was ramrod-straight and did not yield to the looming ex-cavalier. "No one wants to help me. Mom wanted a bomb. The entire Ninth wanted me dead. Cytheria wanted -- I don't know, a chew toy? Even dad didn't want me, not really, I was just a cool little trinket he found and got tired of. No one wants to help me. No one even wants me. No one ever did." It was spilling out of her. She spat it up like bile right in Harrow's face. Inside, Kiriona raged cold and defiant against Gideon, the tower prince against the cavalier, the empty nihilist against the scrappy kid. "Not even you. I've just been trying to go with it, but you know it's really kinda going against the grain, right? What with the more than a decade of trying to kill me, and then throwing my fucking soul away like a cumrag when you couldn't stand to look at it because I tainted your victory. I'm due a little skepticism. No one wants me."

Harrow's expression cracked, pushed far enough. She closed the distance and shoved Gideon's chest, hands pressing to her sweat-soaked shirt, fingers curling like she wanted to carve white lines on brown skin. She pressed against Gideon down with all her might, which was not much, but the naked force of her glare fixed Gideon in place like a pin through the chest.

"No. Enough. You will listen to me. I have done you wrong in many ways, but you cannot deign to understand what has gone on in my head and heart--"

"Beg to fucking differ, I lived inside your--"

"Shut up! You did, and that only serves to underscore how little you comprehended! You cannot tell me what I have felt! You, you black hole of self-loathing, you--"

"That, coming the Queen of self-flagellation--"

Harrow slapped a hand over Gideon's mouth, and Gideon bit her palm. She kept her hand there and stared holes all the way to the back of the other woman's skull. This had become a different argument than it had started as, but Gideon had opened something that was less a can of worms and more a grenade of snakes.

"I have always wanted you! When I hated you I wanted you! I have told you every piece of this! I have laid it out for you over and over -- you have ignored me every time, like a flesh magician with a scrap of bone you have long since used all the meat from, and you are starving for it! What language should I have used? What would I have had to do to make you hear it?"

Gideon spat Harrow's hand out. "Eat me. You would have had to fucking take what I gave you and LIVE, not stuff me in a box under your bed like a dead pet!"

Harrow slapped Gideon.

The larger woman grabbed her arm and wrenched it wide, flung her off Gideon's body. They went to the floor together, one and then the other, Harrow dragging Gideon down with spiteful fury. It was the closest they'd come to the feral, desperate, hateful scrapping of their youth since Canaan, and Gideon was shocked at how easily the reflexes still came. It stopped her in her tracks, stopped everything going on in her head and heart as cold as a tumble into vacuum.

She let Harrow's arm go, sitting up and turning away, heaving breaths to get ahold of herself. There had been an awful moment of shock in Harrow's eyes.

"I never wanted you like food." Harrow was relentless even in the midst of it, though. She'd sat up too, on all fours towards Gideon but not touching her again. "What a wretched way that would be to love someone."

Gideon felt her body shudder with that particular word, but Harrow didn't stop.

"I wanted you whole. I wanted you beside me. Even then. You took that away from me. And you would have had me aid and abet that cruelty."

"To save your fucking life? Yes!" Now Gideon twisted. She was desperately off-balance, like she'd taken a knock to the head, but she grabbed her self-righteousness like a cane. "And I'd do it again!"

"And yet you resent me for doing the very same!" Her eyes were cold, furious, relentless. "If you drove a spike through your heart for me a thousand times, I would cut my mind open for you a thousand and one. You live. You are alive enough to throw epithets and oaths at me for the fact of your life. And yes, for mine too. There are so many things I have done to you that I will fall to my knees and beg forgiveness for but this is not one of them. It will never be. You cannot claim a monopoly on sacrifice. You cannot hate me for doing whatever it took to save you.”

She shifted closer. Gideon was fixed in place again, for Harrow's eyes were a strange, cold tempest, motion and fury around a still, entreating core.

"Cytheria would have killed us if I hadn't. We would've both been dead." It felt weak, coming out of her mouth.

"Yes. And if I had digested you," Harrow said, soft and precise, "you would be dead."

"I should've been. I was." She nearly choked on it.

“You did what you had to do. You saved both of our souls. I will concede: there was no other way out for both of us. You were right. And then I did what I had to do."

"Because you couldn't fucking accept that you needed someone's help!"

Harrow squeezed her eyes shut and hissed a curse word. "I will slap you again."

“Don’t,” Gideon said immediately, urgently. The tonal change was quick and strange enough that Harrow’s eyes popped open once more. Gideon’s hackles were still well and truly raised, but she’d raised her hands in surrender, too. “Harrow, I don’t want to fight you.”

There was so much packed into that plea: they had broken ground on another way to live with one another, and the moment of physical violence enacted in anger had jarred them both. Things were shaky and strange, and though arguing was not new to them, maybe a new line needed to be drawn in the sand. Their pain and fury filled the room, combined. It was like a gas leak in a windowless cell. They weren’t stuck on the Ninth anymore, though. They didn’t have to strike the match.

So instead of slapping her again, Harrow pulled away. She clenched her fists on her knees and trembled, hissing breath between her teeth. Gideon knew how she felt. It had always been nearly physically painful to get this mad, and without fighting she didn’t quite know what to do with it.

Thankfully, Harrow gritted in a measured voice: “I wanted you in the world to curse at me for not swallowing the jagged pill that you gave me, and if you are going to hate me for it then so be it, but I will not have you misapprehend my intentions for the agenda of your own self-loathing.”

She could hear the words, she could understand the concept Harrow was laying out for her, but somewhere there was a hard, smooth core in her that would not let the idea sink in and take root. Maybe she had kept more of Kiriona than she'd thought, but it was the wrong parts. She unrolled her own fists, finger by finger, leaving her palms up and open on her lap, gazing into them like they held the solution to this problem.

It felt impotent, somehow, to have vomited up her most loathsome knowledges about herself, only to have them met by ‘you’re wrong’. That bile was so caustic it’d been burning a hole in her soul, and Harrow ran her hands through it like water, turning it into a lake of tears. There was injustice in that, though Gideon didn’t understand quite where.

And then there was the question of the devils, which, given even a moment's leeway, crept back up between the folds of her brain. It was like the nightmares had unlocked the cage, and nothing she could inflict upon herself could shove them back in. All of it together was too much and Gideon crumbled: she tucked her forehead against her knees and wrapped her arms over her head, like she was six years old and alone again, and moaned.

Still, Harrow didn't leave.

 

"Well, that thing's not doing you any good, is it." His tone had been sympathetic, lightly so, a parent cleaning a child's skinned knee. A parent trying to teach a child that it wasn't a hurt worth getting so upset over. "Ooh, you really did a number on it. It's in hideous shape. Looks like you left most of it back on Canaan, that must have hurt. Why don't we just..."

It had hurt more to put it back in than it had to take it out.

 

She was so weak now. All of the things that had imprinted themselves into her brain like brands -- the spike, dying, being torn away from Harrow's body, the devils, the hellish journey, all of the other moments great and small -- they had all come to mind from time to time when she'd been Kiriona, but she had been strong enough to dismiss them then. Oh, a little bird; shoo it away. Now each one was a gruesome puppeteer pulling the strings of her body to make her heart race and her breath go uneven, to drag her back into their horrid domains. Her chest would hurt. She would smell blood and the stink of perforated guts. She would see rings of teeth, jagged halos around burst eye jelly, or she would see her sword and pieces of people. She would feel fingers probing obscenely inside her ribs. In the infirmary they had had drugs for sleep, and they had had someone who had come to talk to her about the nightmares, but the drugs had been better so she'd asked for those instead of humouring the soft-faced idiot who had blathered on and on about shit that didn't matter.

She'd thought she was home free when they'd been shipped off to this shuttle, when the nightmares had been so aggressively usurped by the agitation of being trapped in close quarters with Harrow. The whims of a new body, maybe: nightmares for a while, incorrigible horniness for a while, you know, gotta run through it all. A systems check.

To finally admit that it had been a reprieve, not an escape, was a blow.

It blew.

She snivelled, curled over on the floor. She hated it. She'd hated the vomiting, too, but on balance she'd've taken it over this.

Things went like that for a while, Gideon's full-body heaving ebbing and peaking. It wasn't crying until quite late in the process, but at all times its claws were sunk deeply in. Her world had narrowed so that she was barely even aware of the familiar physicality of Harrowhark beside her, sitting and thinking, and then finally moving.

She did not at the moment have the capacity for a higher-level kind of surprise, but her body did jerk when Harrow's small hand curled around her wrist. Harrow remained clamped on, though, and tugged, insistent in that way that she had. Gideon, fully lost, obeyed.

Harrow led her to the bathroom. She left her standing for a minute while she went to the little pit of a tub and plugged the bottom, cranked the water on.

She undressed Gideon with a brusque tenderness, very different from the times she had done so before. She undressed herself, with similar unselfconscious efficiency, and ushered them both into the sonic while the tub filled.

The static-shiver of the sonic's waves prickled Gideon's skin and rose the hair on her arms like it always did. The tightness of skin dried-over with salt lightened off of her cheeks. Harrow's hands guided her to the tub, and when she could not nudge her in, she stepped into the hot water herself and coaxed Gideon forward with open hands instead.

Thin, cool arms around her then, and hot water shocking life into her ankles. When Harrow tugged her down she sat, her back to Harrow's front. She folded her knees to her chest to fit. Their combined bodies displaced water over the edge with a slosh, and the first thing she remembered noticing as she came back to herself was the way it ran over the bathroom floor, thin and thinner, an invisible sheen spreading over the flat metal.

The second thing she noticed was the way Harrow's breath came fast against her back. It took a while before she gave that a second thought, as she was coming back to herself in exhausted, depleted pieces. She hurt, but that was nothing. It was stranger the way she felt like all her strings had been cut, like there was some vital piece of her own Gideon-ness that had gone inside-out and was now flapping in the wind.

But she could breathe again, which had to be considered a win. And there was the vice-grip of thin arms around her lower ribs keeping her anchored.

She didn't know how to deal with any part of what had just happened, so she didn't try. Instead she groaned and slumped, knees going higher, torso slipping down. She ended up with her feet on the wall and her head cradled against Harrow's shoulder, the water lapping at her chin. She closed her eyes.

The bathwater had cooled to simply warm by the time Gideon was steady enough to feel the tension in Harrow's body and wonder about it.

Her eyes popped open and she looked up. The view was not flattering: aside from the awkwardness of viewing someone from below their chin, Harrow was managing to look pale and sweaty at the same time, high points of colour flushing her cheeks, the rest of her face ashy. Her eyes were closed.

"You don't like baths," Gideon said.

Harrow's eyelids lifted and she looked down. She didn't answer.

"You don't like hot water," Gideon added.

Harrow's eyebrows rose. Damn her; even looking vaguely queasy, she managed an arch expression.

"You're back?" Her voice, however, was as gentle as Gideon had ever heard it.

Whatever colostomy bag of feelings had exploded inside Gideon's brain had apparently been enough to leave everything taken down a notch, though; where she'd've almost certainly felt furious frustration at having made Harrow feel the need to discomfort herself on Gideon's account, she only felt a vague and resigned tickle of shame.

"Yeah," she said, and reached around behind the both of them to fish for the plug.

Harrow grabbed her arm to stop her, and Gideon let herself be stopped.

"Good," she said, other hand coming up to touch Gideon's forehead, which was slick with sweat. "Good." She paused a beat, and then she looked away and said, "I am sorry for slapping you. I will not lay a hand on you in that manner again."

"I was being shitty," Gideon admitted, with another dull throb of shame.

"As is your prerogative. I will not strike you for it." Her lips were thin.

She didn't have it in her to be mouthy, even if she'd thought mouthiness was the move here. "I think... I think that's good, Harrow," she said, low in her chest, inward-pulled. "I won't hit you either. Ever, okay?"

"Agreed," Harrow said, and smoothed her hand over Gideon's forehead again. Gideon floated, feeling wretched and relieved and just a little exorcised.

The bath cooled more before they spoke again.

"Will you tell me what you were dreaming about?" Harrow asked.

It brought Gideon out of almost a doze, cradled as she was against her necromancer's spare chest. She squirmed, literally, finding tired muscles beginning to tighten up now that she was feeling her body like she was in it again. Her brow furrowed; she frowned.

"I don't think I can," she admitted.

Harrow's eyes narrowed in puzzling suspicion. "Physically, or psychologically?"

"I just don't want to get back into it," Gideon pleaded. No one had necromantically locked her jaw into secrecy, though it kind of did feel like she imagined that would feel. "I don't want to, okay?"

Harrow sighed, but nodded.

Gideon tried to rest again, but only for a moment, really. She shifted, grimaced again, and felt enough like herself to deflect a bit. "Your ass must be asleep by now, Nonagesimus. Mine sure is."

"Nnh." It was as close to an admission of weakness as she was liable to get from Harrowhark, and though Gideon still felt like her mind was on peg-legs, she had to grin a little. Shifting, sending water sloshing, she pulled away and turned around. Her fingers were pruney and she felt like she was sloshing along with the water, but even so, she reached out and scooped Harrow up just as she was sitting up herself.

Gideon kneeled in the remaining bath, holding Harrow scooped to her chest, a beloved bag full of bones. She nuzzled into Harrow's hair and said, "thank you, my waterlogged warlock."

It must have been serious because Harrow didn't scoff. Instead she wrapped her arms around Gideon and kissed her gently on the neck.

 

Things shifted again. Gideon didn't realize that Harrow was paying closer attention to her exercise regime for several days after. Well, she had noticed, but mostly she'd just vamped and put on a bit of a show for her adoring audience whenever she caught Harrow staring. It took a few instances of that before she picked out the subtle difference between Harrow when she was observing in admiration (eyes narrowed, face neutral, penetrating stare) and Harrow when she was observing critically (eyes narrowed, lips pinched, penetrating stare).

When she finally did conclude that yeah, they were different, she stopped between squats and squinted at Harrow. Harrow squinted back, one eyebrow pulling in just a little more.

"What?" Gideon demanded. When Harrow cocked her head, Gideon expanded, "what's that fucking look for?"

Those lips pinched thinner and so did Gideon's patience, but Harrow finally said, "I had never fully grasped that your excessive focus on exercise was emotionally motivated."

"First of all, excuse you, excessive? It's called dedication, bone mistress. And second of all, what? Not, uh, to be redundant."

Harrow's frown blossomed. She waved a hand vaguely, seeming caught on the thing she was trying to articulate. "That you were... using it... the way you were using it a few nights ago. I thought it was vanity, not escape."

Gideon, who had never given it that much thought and who now felt her cheeks warming defensively, did not like the implications. "I wasn't using it like anything. I was just... just doing something to get out of my head. That's all." Even as she said that she felt the trap of it closing around her. She turned away and grabbed the towel she'd snitched from the bathroom, scrubbing her face.

"Does it work?" Harrow asked.

She had tried her best not to think of the other night again after it had happened, though there was something creeping up in the back of her brain like a ticking clock. Some knowledge that it was only a matter of time until it happened again, but like, what the fuck was she supposed to do with that information?

"I dunno," she snapped, "you tell me."

Harrow made a face back at her. "It didn't seem to."

"Listen, that, the other night," she reached for what she meant and found it slipping through her fingers, "that wasn't, like, normal. I mean that wasn't usual." There was some part of her that was afraid Harrow would take this away from her, if given a reason to. She'd always been so contemptuous of Gideon's propensity for the physical, at least before these last few weeks. She wasn't sure she could deal with that. "I'm just looking to be the universe's hottest hunk, right?"

Harrow snorted. She also sat back on the couch a little, which Gideon decided to interpret as a concession.

Still, she decided a coup de grace was warranted, and waggled her eyebrows at Harrow although she didn't quite feel as saucy as she was putting on. "I still think you should join me. You're letting your 'universe's creepiest necro' badge get rusty."

It had been meant to gently annoy Harrrow enough to get her off the topic of Gideon's Bad Night. It caught her entirely sideways when Harrow thoughtfully fingered one of her remaining bone studs, then eased it out of its moorings.

"Oh yeah?" She grinned brilliantly and stepped off to the pull-up bar, which was handily off to the side of the living room. If Harrow's face pinched up a bit, Gideon magnanimously ignored it. "Floor's yours, babe."

As she pulled herself up, Harrow pulled bone after bone from that little seed.

It was nice, it was a totally different vibe, doing their respective work in parallel. The weird creak of Harrow's prodigious skele-skills was familiar and encouraging. When Gideon finally finished her routine, she and Harrow went to the sonic together, and Gideon kissed the beads of blood from her necromancer's forehead, and Harrow wiped the salty sweat from Gideon's chest.

 

It wasn't the last time Gideon had nightmares. There wouldn't really be a last time, not for many years.

But the next time she woke up with death in her ears and eyes and nose, it took a little less time for her body to turn towards Harrow, and she didn't disappear as completely into it. Every part of it would always suck, when she went to that place, but the balance began to shift.

If the heart had a gut biome, maybe there was a way through. Maybe she had to feel frantic and shitty and low-key hate the universe and herself for a while, like the nausea that came before a good puke, and then afterward remember that there were things and places she didn't hate, like where she loved Harrow.

It was fucking exhausting and would never not be kind of mortifying. She did not love Harrow seeing her be so weak: there was no way it didn't make her look pathetic to her necro, right? But those were the breaks, and she couldn't deny that in her weak moments she was pathetically grateful for the anchoring.

Eventually, though not until very near the end of the time that they had in that shuttle, she did close her eyes after one such bad awakening and tell Harrow, in very spare words, a few of the things she dreamed about.

Notes:

This was a delicate one to put together. Please let me know if I've missed the mark with it. I don't myself have much experience with PTSD (thank goodness) but I tried my best.

But look! the girls are making progress! Sure, they argued about something by arguing about something else, and sure, Harrow backslid a little on respecting Gideon's boundaries and on not being heinous at the wrong moment, but then they actually talked about things a little.

Anyways, sorry for all the poop and puke talk. I want you all to know I cut a poop joke from the very end. I was on the fence about it, and I miss it just a little, but it really didn't fit so rip in peace my little tonally-jarring poop joke.

Chapter 8

Summary:

"She didn't think she was overthinking it."

Notes:

Next to last chapter here, folks. Featuring: oatmeal for wicked girls, Harrow overthinking her boner, explicit mention of granny panties, and Ianthe being terrible without ever once setting foot in this fic.

I'm sad to report this is another less-than-completely-horny chapter, but I'm setting stuff up, I promise. Sex later, banter and feelings now.

If yall are in the mood I've started a playlist for this fic. Listen on desktop if you can: I'm picky so it's a short playlist, and the things Spotify adds to it to make it "long enough" are garbage trash. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0hS0f99ePDKuCpJXeFUSyG?si=0BdZfV4TQ9em15EZ7POVhQ

In the latter half of their days on the shuttle, Harrow called Paul. She did this after a great deal of thought, and just as much uncertainty. She thought it likely that her intentions were going to be misinterpreted, but saw little way around it.

"Paul," she asked, when the niceties had been as briefly seen to as possible, "what does it take to learn to be a medical necromancer?"

Paul's eyebrows both rose high on their forehead, nearly disappearing behind their sharp bangs. She was grateful to discover that the lysis knew her well enough to leave the obvious questions unasked, after all. She would have closed the connection immediately.

"Generally, several years of study and apprenticeship," they said. "It's a lengthy process, and does vary significantly based on area of study and specialty. It's a lot of school, in most cases," they offered, as if they were presenting a choice morsel.

Harrow wrinkled her nose.

"How unfortunate for those pursuing the trade," she said acidly. "Include a selection of reliable high-level texts on medical necromancy in your next shipment, please, as well as anything you have handy on planetary sciences."

Paul was still eyeballing her speculatively when she hung up.

 

Complexity kept imposing itself upon simplicity like exponents upon a base, and on the one hand, there was something that sucked about that. The days immediately after their puzzle pieces had clicked into place had made the universe feel easier than it had ever been for either of them: the full force of each other's regard had made every strife seem both meaningless and hilariously surmountable, the way that imminent death could sharpen intention and ability to a deadly point, but in the other direction.

But as it turned out, being newly in love and horny didn't make the universe kinder, nor did it heal every historical fracture. At the very least they didn't yet have to face the fact that their new accord didn't mean jack to anyone outside of their very tiny orbit: that was better ignored for now, because figuring out that it actually didn't wipe their own slates clean was hard enough.

On the other hand, there was a kind of softer existential kindness to the learning.

Gideon's occasional night terrors meant Harrow made the executive decision to cease waking her up with a hand down her shorts. But the care inherent in that decision made the alternative bearable, which would not have otherwise come easy to Harrow, who had never in her life asked anybody (other than God) for permission to do anything. Soothing Gideon to wake gently and then probing for consent was difficult to have to learn how to do, for it opened the door to being turned down, but over time the small and gentling act of asking came easier.

It helped to be wanted. It helped to be unequivocally desired. It was complicated to learn to trust that that was still true when the answer was sometimes no, but Gideon's hunger for Harrow came back around with a reassuring reliability.

In her heart of hearts Harrow had to admit that she had nearly as difficult a time as Gideon did, believing that she could be wanted for something as effortless as herself. It took looking away from her own doubt just enough to keep from freezing up but not enough to forget that she had to watch herself. She didn't have any other choice but to believe that it could work. Indulging her fear's impulse towards self-sabotage would result in losing Gideon, which was the only unacceptable outcome. It was the base prerogative that had slid into the space that her faith had occupied. It was now the primary project employing the significant machinery of her mind.

She didn't think she was overthinking it.

One day when she was on the couch furrowing her brow over a textbook over the secondary project employing the significant machinery of her mind, Gideon snuck under the hem of her cloak and pushed in between her legs.

Harrow hadn't anticipated the move — she'd been casually ignoring Gideon's showy bicycle crunches, which had very easily been repurposed into a sneaky slither across the floor when Harrow had ignored her for too long. Now she had a looming blob of cloak upsetting her book.

"Hey," the blob said.

Harrow, clutching her book to her chest so as not to lose her page: "Can I help you with something?"

Gideon looped her arms around Harrow's hips. She always ran hot, especially after exercise, and those arms were warm steel bands.

"Dunno," Gideon said with mischief.

"You don't know?" she grammared by example. She was feeling her oats, as it were, which may have in fact been the case considering that breakfast/lunch had been the slimy and comforting neutrality of unsweetened oatmeal. "I should hardly be surprised, I suppose, and yet here we are. Dare I ask why you are interrupting me, then, or shall I fall back on throwing the bones to divine the reason?"

"You know 'throw the bones' means dice, right? Like it's not actually a bone thing?"

"In this case it means making a construct shake you upside-down until sense falls out," Harrow told her. "Though it may be a fool's errand as I'm not sure there's any in there to shake out. So, absent that: why have you invaded my vestments?"

"Dunno," Gideon replied with incrementally more bothersome glee. Her fingers spidered under Harrow's waistband, wiggled it down an inch or so. "Maybe I'm trying to figure out where you keep your sense, and rob you blind."

"You are a pest." This was — this was wildly silly. She was fighting a smile and losing. Gideon was still just a black mountain under Harrow’s cloak. Flummoxed, she undid a fastening and flipped the top open, even as Gideon's thumbs were working their way inside her underwear. "If you're bored, there are more productive ways to spend your time than malingering under my skirts."

"I mean, there really aren't," Gideon's grin gained intent, incisors bared and glinting pearly-wet in the shadows of Harrow's cloak. "I'm done all my sets. I've done my drills twice today already, which I think I deserve some extra points for since I had to do them with a broom. My balance is going to be all fuckered when I get my hands on a sword again," she complained, and then capstoned mortifyingly, "I even got you to eat, babygirl." As if Harrow having lunch were the greatest victory amongst those. "I've been real good. You've just sat here and read books the whole time. I'm bored. I'm gonna make my own fun."

"Babygirl?" she deflected.

"Sweet cheeks. Sugartits. Candy cunt." Oh, she was being goaded. Gideon licked her lips.

Harrow was not made of stone. She was not unaffected. Her cheeks were not above a telling blush. In fact, this probably would have undone her in a flurry of arousal and embarrassment if this had still been the early days of their liaison. Smaller things had flustered her into perturbated dumbness before. Clever fingers were sneaking around front and undoing her drawstring, and she felt the natural impulse to lift her hips accommodatingly, but instead she stared down at her tormentor with a beetled brow.

"Why," she asked, aggrieved, "do all of those involve tasting of sugar? Your cunt doesn't taste like candy. I'm almost certain a vagina tasting sweet would be a sign of a medical issue. I think on balance I much prefer the nicknames that paint me as some fell necromantic potentate. Candy cunt lacks my preferred level of gravitas, which is some, not none."

Gideon rolled her eyes. "It's figurative language, my malefic magus of rot and ruin."

"Yes, I'm aware of figurative language, I did also grow up in the same House as Ortus. But why that figurative language?"

"Uh, because palates not monogamously in love with the taste of beige usually like sugar?"

"So what you're saying," Harrow clarified, closing the trap or perhaps stepping into the trap laid for her, "is that you enjoy the taste of my cheeks, tits, and cunt."

"Shit," Gideon enunciated, with all apparent earnestness, her eyebrows ascending in great innocent arches. "Have I been playing too cool about that? Guess this is why figurative language exists, huh?"

"Cool is not the term I would use." Harrow, who had been successfully riled and who was getting to the point of considering herself teased, and who was also nearing the end of her composure for raunchy back-and-forths, shoved Gideon's head down into her cloak again before she could be verbally bested.

That this put the incorrigible swordswoman in the perfect position to whip Harrow's pants down and lean in to feast was pure coincidence.

 

Gideon's penchant for service had been a known and unspoken note of consistency in their revels, ever since that very first night. In turn, Harrow had discovered both her own tendency towards being sexually demanding, and spent a fair amount of downtime picking at the problem of teaching Gideon that she could have what she wanted, not just what she thought would make Harrow feel best. Harrow knew too well what it felt like to be kept around only for what she could do, and she sometimes worried that Gideon was experiencing some species of that same feeling.

She had not considered coming at the problem from this angle.

The tableau: Harrow, on her back in the living room, next to the couch. Gideon, over her, one hand on Harrow's wrist and the other on her chest, close to her throat. An angry red bite mark on Gideon's shoulder.

Both of them staring at the other wide-eyed, for very different reasons.

One scrambling minute later they were sitting side by side naked on the floor, red-faced and shook.

"Sorry," said Gideon, mortified in a complex way.

"It's alright," Harrow replied, referring to more than one thing.

"It's just that was a really hard bite. I didn't mean to like, flip you though. You gotta gain some weight, you're like a sheet of flimsy," Gideon complained, waving her hands in a way that spoke of formless agitation more than it illuminated the metaphor. "I could sneeze and accidentally flip you."

"I've bitten you that hard before. You liked it." Harrow, in all honesty, was short on processing power: she was using most of it on parsing out her own reaction, and Gideon's frittery embarrassment did not require responding to.

"Yeah, well, I've manhandled you before and you never made that noise."

"Hn." That was just so.

They had been making a mess of each other on the couch, just the preliminaries; Gideon being bratty in that way she seemed to enjoy being, getting her hands up on Harrow in ways that made the bony woman all elbows and teeth with near-overstimulation. Tickling up her ribs, running smart-ass down her spine, alighting and departing from her hips, making hideous ill-intentioned sojourns up to her armpits. Rather than whip out the bone shackles (the couch didn't lend well to them) or telling her off (she really had no excuse for this one) she'd gotten back by getting her teeth around the other woman's shoulder. So maybe it had been a bit hard, testing the bounds of the kind of pain that Gideon had seemed to lean into in the past, and a second later they were on the floor and naked Gideon was pinning naked Harrow down.

The noise Gideon had made, though, a kind of snarl that was a step beyond the snitty quipping she leaned on. And the way the movement had been seamless. The way she'd been wholly at her mercy. Okay, a bit like a piece of flimsy, except that metaphor was idiotic.

She knew she was attracted to the power in Gideon's body. She did not know to feel about how strongly she had reacted to having been subject to that power. How disappointed she'd been when Gideon had registered shock at her own move and immediately pulled back.

So here they were.

"That really wasn't okay," Gideon was saying, sounding aggrieved. It still registered a little weird to some part of Harrow to hear Gideon being so unreserved with her, rather than building a maze of awful jokes and sarcasm around herself. "I got really aggressive. I'm sorry. I'll be better about that."

"No," Harrow said, still really in the woods about what to say and how to say it. "It was fine." Fine?!

"We promised not to hit each other."

Harrow was chewing aggressively on her lower lip, brain full of bees all trying to wiggle out esoteric bee messages to one another. She could still feel her cunt throbbing with a vague, hopeful arousal.

"I think," she said, carefully, "I think that was different. Besides," when all else fails, fall back on technicalities, "you didn't hit me."

"You know what I mean, asshole," Gideon moaned. "This is more important than semantics."

"Still."

"Okay, fine, different how?" Gideon challenged.

Harrow hazarded a glance at the other woman, took the temperature. Gideon was clearly upset, although if Harrow was reading correctly it was only a midrange level of distress. She was gesticulating, not shut down, though her face was all scrunched up in a grimace. Absently, Harrow patted her hand against her own chest, telling her rabbiting heart to cool down a little and let her think.

"Did I bite you too hard?"

Gideon's face scrunched tighter, frustrated, though Harrow wasn't quite clear on frustrated with what. "A little, I mean, maybe."

"I apologize. I'll modulate." She rubbed her hands together, fiddled with her thumb, bending it back and forth. The smooth function of a hinge joint always grounded her a bit. "But... sometimes you enjoy being bitten."

Gideon looked away, huffed. "When you put it that way it sounds weird."

"What, exactly, about sex isn't weird," Harrow empathized dryly.

Gideon sat back a little and stared, confused and affronted and a little hurt. "Shit, tell me how you really feel, Nonagesimus."

Oh, that hadn't hit right. She held up her hands, annoyed with herself. Watch your words, Harrowhark. "I didn't mean it like that. I'm saying..." She quieted her fidgeting and folded her hands primly, ignoring the fact that they were both still quite naked and probably leaving little wet spots on their respective bits of floor. Ignoring the part of herself that was trying to squirm away from the conversation, because she knew where it was going. There was a shitty little Ianthe in the back of her brain saying things like oooh, choke me daddy, and the juxtaposition was making Harrow want to vomit or gelatinize into a black hole forever. It took several moments, and several attempts to flowchart how the conversation might go, before Harrowhark could say, "you wouldn't go up to someone and just say something like 'I like to be bitten', would you."

"Well," Gideon said, and bully for her, she had recovered her shitty self a bit in the interim, because she was sounding a little smug. "Depends."

"Alright. Bad example to use on a chronic exhibitionist," Harrow drawled. This was not helping her desire to disassemble into glistening heaps of her component meats and fats. "To rephrase: if someone, and I cannot emphasize this enough, came up to you in a fully non-sexual context and bit you, you wouldn't react well, would you? It's not something you would consider part of the general portfolio of events Gideon Nav considers to be enjoyable."

"Well—"

"For the love of the Tomb, Nav, before you say it depends again—" One success, at least: Harrow was not horny anymore. She was in fact just on the edge of giving up the whole endeavour as a bad deal. "I am trying to say something!"

"Okay, okay, queen of my boner." Nav put her hands up. Harrow awarded her no points for creativity and nearly told her so. "I'm all ears."

That being so, Harrow felt a sudden cowardice freeze her in place. She shifted her eyes, thought about Gideon on top of her again, and gritted her teeth.

"Just that," she said delicately, "I understand the contextual difference between — actions taken in anger, and actions taken in — the heat of, ah, intimacy. And. I don't think the latter necessarily constitutes a breach of our... agreement."

She could feel Nav's damned golden eyes on her, no doubt tallying the darkening of Harrow's cheeks and counting the pauses in her speech.

"Okay," said Gideon, and Harrow heard the question in the drawn-out syllable.

"I simply understand that there was no ill intent," she added, feeling her tone get higher and tighter.

"Sure," said Gideon.

 

She got herself caught in a logic loop later that night, thinking it over.

On the one hand, the noble impulse to encourage Gideon to be a little selfish, to prioritize whatever it was she wanted for once. On the other hand, the way she'd reacted to Gideon very viscerally taking charge for a moment.

Did it really count as an altruistic motive if the thought of it made her wet? Did she want Gideon cocksure and calling the shots because she thought Gideon deserved it, or because it spoke to some shadowed pool in her libido? Because it made her breathless from a cellular level with some sublimated desire for obliteration at Gideon's hand?

She bundled up that last thought and carefully put it aside, alongside every notion of faith, obedience, and self-annihilation that she did not currently have the capacity to examine in any detail, much less from the angle of base sexuality. But, as all such things do, it whispered to her from the back row.

It wasn't like how Gideon seemed to have a good time when she was at Harrow's mercy. Gideon seemed to relish the invitation to be an asshole and face the sexy consequences of her smart mouth; Harrow, too, had to admit she liked having a way to let her shitty childhood nemesis off the leash in a way that in turn invited her to take retribution, in the way that they'd discovered they both enjoyed so much. There was a familiar pattern of goading and combativeness there, a dance of squirming violent energy and the push-back of discipline, even if it was the pantomime of a play-fight rather than the destructive roots from which it had sprung. Harrow was realizing, with a kind of growing mortification that squeemed between her lungs that it was not that she wanted to flip the script. She did not want to fight Gideon. That hadn't been what she'd wanted in that moment.

Ultimately, she decided, it couldn't be that she wanted it for both selfish and altruistic reasons. That would be too tidy, too easy, and altogether not in line with Harrowhark's experience of the universe. It had to be that her own unrealized desires had coloured her imaginings of what it would mean if Gideon could have whatever she wanted.

That was frustrating — only because it put her back to square one, of course, not because it left her with some brand new, absolutely torrid imaginings that she didn't know what to do with.

She stared into the black above their bed and tried to trace out just how crossed her wires had gotten.

 

At least there were still, after that, other things she could do for Gideon. She had not forgotten what she had promised to look into, though Gideon had stopped asking after it a week or so ago.

She needed everything to be perfect before she showed the other woman her work. She was getting closer, in her midnight necromantic sojourns. Never would she admit it, but it seemed that Gideon had been right: Harrowhark, in the space beyond lyctorhood, now only a nominally normal adept once more, had needed some practice to get herself back up to strength. And she was getting there. It was getting easier.

And until she was ready for the big reveal, she could do some other detective work. Harrow fancied herself a passably good solver of mysteries.

 

Gideon was doing her best to ignore Harrow The Detective. Harrow thought she was being sneaky and clever but the shift in her priorities from the textbooks to wheedling something out of Gideon had been annoyingly clear.

She'd asked for this, hadn't she, when she'd complained about all the reading?

Harrow had started to pepper shit into their dialogues. Things like are you enjoying that? or what would you like to do next? It was a little too silly to imagine Harrow was suddenly so uncertain of her own decision-making that she was genuinely turning to Gideon for the final decision on such pressing questions of how to pass an afternoon, so it had to be Harrow building a case to prove some point or other.

Maybe it was the microcosm of the shuttle at work, honestly; there was really nothing to notice here except each other, which hadn't really been a problem before. And, okay, Gideon wasn't sick of Harrow, not even slightly. Even getting the gimlet-eye of scientific observation furtively over the bad camouflage of a hardback was kinda winsome, in the same way she imagined it'd be cute to be stalked by a soggy stray cat.

It did come at kind of a strange time, as Gideon was still mulling over the weird turn Harrow had taken the other day after that bite. Gideon made a little bet with herself that it'd take four days of this squinty-eyed sleuthing before she came out with it in the most agonized way possible.

"Gideon," Harrow asked, on day three, voice seething with gravitas. "What do you want?"

Okay, not what she'd expected. It'd been out of nowhere — well, after a stretch of Gideon ignoring Harrow staring at her like she was a puzzle without a box. She looked up over the edge of book two of the graphic novel version of Oops! My Girlfriend Is A Sword?! (derivative and silly compared to the novel, but you can't beat a scimitar with titties) and said, "A new sword and a couples massage from some of those absolutely stacked Third underwear models."

"Where did you— Be serious." Harrow seemed to be trying to follow her own advice, and the admonition was only a little tart.

"I'm always serious, my portentous starling," she intoned.

"That's provably untrue. Truly, if you could have anything you want right now — be anywhere — what would you be doing?"

"Hmmm." Gideon drew out the syllable, pursing her lips. Pretending to think, she watched Harrow lean in a little. The earnestness was actually a little off-putting. She wasn't in the mood to match that energy. She'd been enjoying the way they'd been relaxing into banter recently, like old times but better. This was different.

("What do you want to do with your immortal life, kiddo?" echoed a little memory, souring in the back of her mind.)

"I'd be on a better couch maybe six inches to the left," she exclaimed, "this one keeps making my ass go to sleep. I'm talking like a really fucking plush couch, one of those ones you can't get back up from without flailing a bit. Except without the funk those thousand-year-old relics back home had."

Now Harrow was glaring a little. That was a nice, familiar look, although it lacked the homicidal edge she'd grown up used to. She grinned back fondly. "As for what I'd be doing..."

"That's really all you want?"

"Can't fault a girl for wanting an unasleep ass, can you?"

"What I mean is — is — what would make you happy?"

What a fucking question. She flopped her book closed, set it aside, and stared at Harrow, answering as baldly as she knew how to answer such a fucking question.

"I'm happy right here, babe."

"And, what, you want to stay here and do pull-ups until all of the meat in your head displaces to your biceps?" Harrow needled, dryly unbelieving. "You’re content in this shuttle taking baths and having sex until the end of time?"

"There’s sure as hell nothing else for me out there." Gideon waved an arm, dismissing the entire hot and terrible universe in one casual, contemptuous gesture. There was a weird spider of feeling crawling out of her heart, making her insides prickle against the interrogation she was getting. Seeing that look in Harrow’s eye she rounded on the little necro, "and what? What would you rather be doing? You wanna get all tangled up in the Sixth’s doomed quest to get the Houses to relocate? You aching to go back to the Ninth?"

Harrow stopped, then, as completely as if she'd run into a wall. For about a breath's time she was blank with what Gideon understood as surprise, and then there was a flicker of something raw across her face before the shutters closed.

"Yes, actually." Her tone was even and quiet, completely different than she'd been a moment ago. Almost astonished. "Terribly."

That in turn stopped Gideon in her tracks.

The fucking Ninth. If this shuttle was a kind of prison, at least it had everything she cared about inside it. At least she could nominally leave, even if she couldn't think of a reason to. She hadn't been kidding about that; she'd found a kind of contentment here she'd never found before. She couldn’t help a knee-jerk reaction to the notion of Drearburh and its greasy, frozen halls, filled to the brim with bones and not-yet-dead bones. The only thing worth having on the Ninth had been Harrow.

"So why the fuck aren’t we doing that?" she asked, following the change in tone, and because she wanted to know.

"You hate it there," Harrow said, and it wasn’t quite a reason, more of an accusation.

"I kinda hate it everywhere now," she said, "anyways, beside the point. Why aren’t you pushing to slap the old face paint back on and go take up the altar and the throne?"

Harrow fidgeted with her long black bore of a skirt, an echo of her vestments. Gideon let her, didn't press as she thought.

"Because," she finally said, "I don’t know what I would be doing there." When Gideon sat up and leaned forward, elbows propped wide on her knees in a clear ‘I’m listening’ posture, Harrow grimaced. "I am Reverend Daughter of a religion whose god I had a hand in killing."

"And who was trash anyhow," Gideon cut in.

"...and who did turn out to be badly in need of killing, yes. I am also the guardian of a tomb that now lies forever empty. The rock has been rolled away and shattered. Anastasia’s promise has been fulfilled. Alecto is as gone as John. I have seen to completion the entire reason for the Ninth’s existence. I have even seen it re-peopled, resurrected in miniature from the slow death of diminishment inflicted by the sin of my birth. I have done everything I can for it. It has no need of me. And yet, it sits in my mind, and perplexingly it pulls me."

"You’ve popped the zit," Gideon said, in a fit of inspiration.

Harrow blinked. "Excuse me?"

Harrow’s ever-crass companion waved an arm again, this time writ smaller. "The whole thing — the Tomb, Alecto, all of it — it was just huge, ripe, just begging to be popped, one of those nasty painful whiteheads, and you came along, a big fucking thumb made of loneliness and desperation and two hundred ghosts, and you did. You did it, and then it was a huge fucking bloody mess."

"This is disgusting," Harrow complained. "Could you get to the point?"

"The point is, Reverend Daughter, we’ve been cleaning up what that infected thing let loose and now it’s all washed out and de-pussed. And now it’s the next day, and you’re like, shit, it itches, I don’t even want to look at it, that probably one’s gonna leave a scar, I should look at it and poke it some more, you know?"

"No," Harrow said.

It was a good metaphor! What was that look for! "I mean the point is you do want to look at it, and you’re going to look at it, and there won’t be a zit anymore but that doesn’t mean you can ignore it. Trust me." Grease paint had rendered many sins against Gideon’s pubescent face. "You’re dithering about purpose when what it really is, is that the thing hurts you and you want to see if poking it will make you feel better or worse."

Harrowhark’s brow had furrowed, and she rubbed her nose in consternation. "I am getting the sense this is drawn from experiences a little too literal to be applicable."

"I mean, take it or leave it," Gideon said, putting her hands up. "Whatever."

The other woman shot her a grudging little look for the defensive reaction. "You may have... a kind of point. A very disgusting kind of point. But it doesn’t refute anything I have said."

"Okay, how about this," Gideon tried again, "you saying it doesn’t need you anymore doesn’t mean you don’t need it."

That hit home: Gideon watched Harrow wince and felt a fierce satisfaction for having been right. She spread her hands. "Harrow, you fucking are the Ninth. I used to hate you for that, it was so plain to see. All the rest of that stuff’s set dressing."

Now Harrow was peeking at Gideon from the sides of her eyes, face turned down towards the floor. Gideon pressed her thigh to Harrow’s, letting the littler woman work through what she had to work through, but letting her know she was there. She was a little proud of herself for the move, even. She was getting better at figuring out when she should just shut up.

"I have been thinking," she said carefully, "that perhaps, if anyone could convince them to consider Paul’s proposal, perhaps I might stand a decent chance. It seems a shame to repopulate the Ninth and then leave them under the sword of Damocles."

"‘Stand a decent chance’," Gideon scoffed. "I’m pretty sure most of the old guard’d be packing their arthritis creams and granny bloomers tomorrow if you told them to. You’re the ascended Daughter of the Ninth."

Harrow shook her head smally, but didn’t put voice to whatever contrarian bit she had between her teeth. Instead she said, in an even smaller voice, "and I have been thinking, I should probably lay my parents to rest. Officially."

Gideon sat back, feeling a pang of old reflexive guilt. "Shit," she said, a couple of shades lower than she had been, "I’d forgot."

Harrow looked away. "Unless something has changed dramatically, I believe the charade has held. I have not... checked."

That’s grim, Gideon didn’t say. She also had her doubts that, in two disastrous, upheaval-filled years, no one had taken a peek into Priamhark and Pellemena's chambers. Instead she snaked an arm around Harrow’s shoulders. The daughter of the Ninth leaned in, her gaze far away. The erstwhile daughter of her rejected God tucked Harrow’s head in under her chin, and said really gently instead, "We’ve gotta, then."

Harrow turned completely, climbing into Gideon’s lap, her arms around the bigger woman’s neck. "Will you come with me?" She asked, very carefully.

"Anywhere. Everywhere."

"Even though you hate it there?"

Gideon tugged her in close without a second thought. She ran her hands up and down that alarmingly slight back, soothing. It gave her a moment to think about her next words.

"You know... I think I stopped like, really loathing the Ninth when I stopped hating you," she admitted, looking across at the far wall of their tiny little sitting room. "It’s just a place. A shitty place, sure. But even if I hadn’t, Harrow, I mean it and you know it: anywhere. I don’t give a shit where we are, as long as it’s we."

Harrow’s sigh at that relaxed her whole body against Gideon’s. She turned to press her head against Gideon’s neck, and nodded. Gideon sighed and leaned back, bringing Harrow with her, and they just sat like that for a while. Harrow’s weight in her arms still made her heart effervescent, but just now she kept that for herself. It was a back-note to every time she got her arms around Harrow, in whatever context, but hey! Small victories, she was no longer so hair-trigger that she was sitting here with deeply inappropriate wet briefs. Instead it was a more diffuse kind of tingle, one that kept her holding Harrow as long as she’d stay, one that even made her entertain the notion of rocking the other girl a bit.

"Not quite yet, I think," Harrow said into the private little cavern of space between her shoulder and Gideon’s chest, bringing the bigger woman out of her reverie.

"Yeah?" She asked. "How long, do you figure?"

"I don’t know. I have to... think about some things. And it's under one condition."

"What's that?"

"That you think about what you want to do. That you decide where we go after that."

Gideon nodded, and then nosed into Harrow’s hair, letting that be that. She wasn't so sure she could pony up on that last, but she could feel the brittleness in Harrow and didn't push back just then. There was a comfortable enough margin of time between then and now that she was sure she could come up with some bullshit that would satisfy Harrow.

It was interesting, she thought, how different this conversation would have gone without the refuge of touch. How that if they had gotten so close to genuinely snapping at each other like that in their first days on the shuttle, she was sure Harrow would have slammed that door in her face much earlier. Sure as hell Gideon would have ollied out.

It was like they had a built in truce mechanism, now, and something about that made Gideon want to laugh. Was this what they had always been missing back on the Ninth, huh? Well, no; that and not hating each others’ guts. That and an understanding that all they really had was each other. An understanding of the consequences of schism. A little practice at something other than fighting and hurting.

Well, whatever; they were here now, and she could sit here and hold Harrow and breathe her in until they felt the poison drain out of history's wound just a little bit more.

Notes:

I wanted to get both of the final two chapters written before posting one of them, but I'm about a quarter of the way through the final chapter and it's been a million years so you get this one now.

It's hard bringing this thing to a finish. I'm fighting it a little, agonizing over what needs to be wrapped up and what can be left an open thread. Send me fortitude, please, and if you're feeling bold let me know if there are things you're dying to see resolved before this thing ends. I make no promises, but I love the concept of fanfiction as a dialectic process, so nyah.

Thank you again to my wife for betaing!

Chapter 9

Notes:

I lost a month to covid but it's finally here so let's GOOOOO

CW peeeenis. also canon-typical bloodsweat.

"Pyrrha."

Paul had sought her out. Tonally, it was a departure from their relaxed camaraderie stolen in the after-hours and interstitials. Rather than continuing the same conceit of a quiet shared life that they had been collaboratively indulging in, Paul had called her through official channels and asked for a moment of her time.

Something was chewing on them. Pyrrha couldn't help but keep a finger on the pulse of the Sixth's moods, even more so Paul's. It had gotten easier over time: she felt like she'd grown into the brain she now had sole dominion over, which was bittersweet if a bit heavy on the bitter. She didn't know if she had been rewiring Gideon's orphaned brain to her preferences, or whether it had been rewiring her, but it was a hell of a thing to be embodied again and have to stay that way. The flatness of her affect had long since worn off, except when she put it back on for strategic purposes. The flatness in her heart had tracks too deeply worn to completely recover from, but grass was growing in the ruts at least.

"Paul," she responded with a sarcasm that swooped playfully at the lysis.

Paul's mouth quirked. "You can sit, you know."

She did not, leaning against the doorframe and crossing her arms instead. "Why do I feel like I got called to the principal's office?"

"Have you done something that needs an authority to tut about disapprovingly?"

Pyrrha snorted. "That depends on who you ask, I'd guess."

Did Paul look a little abashed? If so, it passed quickly. "Nothing like that. I need to ask you a favour."

"Under the authority of the Sixth?" That was interesting.

"Yes, inasmuch as the Sixth has left this initiative in my hands," Paul admitted, folding their own long fingers, slotting one-then-the-other together in a tidy tessellation of digits. "At the very least it'll be on record and I've had it approved. So I suppose I am the principal in this metaphor. I'm going to need you to pick up the girls and babysit them for a little while."

The flat affect would have been nice camouflage just then, but Pyrrha was old enough that when her heart missed a step, reflexive dissembling of another sort sprung up to protect her. "You're calling that a privilege?"

 

Back on the emancipated Sixth, before the shuttle, Gideon and Harrow had been brought to the infirmary together. When the paramedics had made gestures at separating them Harrow had refused to allow Gideon, who had been fully insensate, to be taken from her. She had not had the sense in her head to appeal to Paul's authority, so she had resorted to bodily holding onto the unconscious form of Gideon. The nurses had threatened sedation. She'd threatened to invert all of their skulls.

They hadn't needed sedation. The first moment Harrowhark had tried to extend her distal phalanges through her flesh into shivs, her eyes had rolled up into her head, every pore in her body had turned into a little blood waterfall, and she'd passed out.

She'd actually needed a blood transfusion after that, mortifyingly. When she'd woken up and the first thing she saw was a ragged and pale Gideon looking back at her from a hospital bed two metres away, hooked up to as many tubes and bags as she was, Harrow had nearly passed out again from relief.

Both had been in bad shape. Every doctor or nurse or medical necro who came in to talk to them about their situation had made themselves pestiferous explaining just how badly they had been doing and just how much they needed to rest and how fragile they both still were and and and. What Harrow knew was that whenever she reached for her necromancy, it was like shoving her whole fist through the puckering pink-yellow cliffs of a wound and rooting around. That was just as it should be; Harrow knew what she had done to herself to get Gideon's heart beating again. The doctors could talk at her all they wanted about her own body's travails and she held onto none of it. She would survive.

She watched Gideon's progress much more closely.

Gideon was in and out. Gideon was better and worse. Gideon was unprecedented. Gideon was incorruptible but incredibly fucked up. Gideon was a resurrection not of the King Undying. Gideon was a revenant who was now no longer a revenant, or did that depend on the semantics of what a revenant was?

Gideon was constantly puking everywhere. It made the erstwhile Saint of Emesis a little nostalgic, actually.

Every time they needed to do something to her Gideon, Harrow had demanded to know what was being done and why. She had done this at first openly within earshot, until Gideon had had enough strength in her to get angry and embarrassed and fight her on it. Then she'd resorted to cornering nurses when Gideon was asleep or having some procedure done elsewhere. Half the time, Harrow didn't understand all of what she was told, but she furiously memorized terms. The other half of the time it was necromantically related and she had the groundings to comprehend, although much of it was spirit magic, which was still an intolerable blind spot of hers. Even so, she began to build a picture.

No one had really known what to do with Gideon overall, so they'd treated problem by problem as they came up, and bit by bit, Gideon went from being a soul superglued back into its own breathing body to being a whole person.

Harrow took feverish notes. Harrow scrutinized each step of Gideon's recovery. Harrow made herself an insufferable nuisance to every part of Gideon's care team. Harrow became the keeper of all of it, all the while recovering herself.

She would and could not entrust Gideon's life and safety to anybody but herself. She had too many years of the opposite to make up for.

 

" '...cells must continually obtain more energy to replace what's used by the plethora of chemical reactions that are the cell's machinery, just as living entities must consume food or die. All of the thalergy-involved chemical reactions that transpire inside cells are the cell's thalergenic metabolism.' "

"So food gets turned into thalergy?"

"Food gets turned into energy," Harrow corrected, almost lazily, as Gideon's hands slid up and down her sides. "Thalergy being one type. We map those pathways individually where we can."

They were laid out on the couch again. Harrow was stacked tidily in the valley of Gideon's body, back resting on her chest and hips between her legs. Gideon's arms around her held the big textbook that Harrow was reading aloud to her, at Gideon's request. They had worked through one chapter already, a high-level overview of the systems of a multicellular organism. Gideon had stopped at every diagram, the internals so tidily and comprehensibly laid out: liver here, lungs, heart, the ropes of the intestines, the fatty curls of the brain, clean and neat and ceraceous. A few times she had turned the page in some hurry, and Harrow pretended not to notice. They'd both seen too much of the internals of the human body to believe those bloodless drawings.

But mostly it had been a surprisingly lovely experience. Harrow's voice broke a little at the prolongation of speech necessitated by reading aloud, but she'd carried on gamely, Gideon alive and curious at her back.

"Shall I go on?"

"Mmm," Gideon agreed, though Harrow privately figured she could sense the other woman's attention drifting. Gideon didn't have the longest patience for study — a trait Harrow did not understand in the slightest, and did not go out of her way to humour — but it seemed to be balancing out well with her endless patience for cuddles.

Cuddles was an awful word, in Harrow's private opinion. It sounded like a scuttling sea creature. It was far too small and trite for the satisfaction she had discovered could sometimes be found in that kind of prolonged physical contact. She had yet to come up with an adequate alternative, which didn't mean she was going to abstain from the behaviour.

Shifting a little, settling back, she carefully slid the corner of the page from under Gideon's thumb and turned it. Gideon lifted her other thumb for Harrow to settle the turned page under: a simple, emblematic moment of easy wordless cooperation. It lit another little candle in her soul.

She cleared her throat.

" 'Bioenergetics section 1a: Carbohydrate Metabolism,' " began the page. There were arrowed diagrams across one half of the page. " 'The metabolism of sugar, a simple carbohydrate and one of the main metabolic fuels of all life, is a good basic example of the chemical processes that use and produce energy. The following equation...' "

She could do this forever, creaky voice allowing. She could live in this space until every sun went cold. She read on autopilot, occasionally stopping to simplify some concept or other or explain a diagram, but the rhythm had her and she practically drowsed in it. At some point Gideon propped the book up against their bent knees rather than holding it, and snuck her hands under the bottom hem of Harrow's shirt. She shifted her hips, sighed, ran warm fingertips slow over Harrow's stomach. Harrow could feel her mouth smiling around the words she read, just a little.

In a pause between pages, Gideon's warm sweet alto hummed against her back. "Can I finger you?"

She tilted her head up, the gesture indicative rather than providing her a view of Gideon's face. "Don't tell me you find cellular metabolism arousing."

"What, cells eating sugar? Nothing hotter." But Gideon was nuzzling her hair, cutting her own teasing off at the knees with a deeply fond, "nah, I just want to."

"Hm," Harrow sighed. She ran her hand over the page they'd been reading, then closed the book with a careful decisiveness. Gideon took it in hand then, putting it on the floor beside the couch; another little moment where four hands seamlessly took on one task, and Harrow watched those warm brown fingers with unabashed affection.

She murmured, "alright."

Gideon kissed her hair and boosted her higher, so that Harrow's head lay on Gideon's shoulder, and gathered her up into a little curved bundle.

She turned her head, but could only nose against Gideon's jaw. The other woman turned to meet her, and though the kiss was awkward, it was easy. Gideon held her tender-tight with one arm, the other rucking up her skirt, simple, intent.

Starting from zero, it was sometimes a gamble, but Harrow found she was not in the mood to humour her body by taking it slow. She drew her fingers over Gideon's strong forearm, closing her eyes in favour of the intensity of the tactile. Gideon made such warm noises as she ran the pad of her index up and down the thin cloth keeping Harrow nominally modest, and then pushed it aside.

She shivered, sighed back, call and response. She curled her toes, propped her feet up against Gideon's knees, let her own fall wider, and tried to relax into the hello Gideon was caressing along her vulva.

At the peak of every stroke Gideon paused over her clit. It was a strong sensation even through fabric, and as hormones began their complex cascade her body grew bright in response. Her hips twitched. Feathery wavelets of sensation rilled out from where Gideon's fingers had found soft flesh, riling up hunger that lived low and deep against her spine, sending blood to engorge sensitive tissues. Her skin stippled. Her nerves clamoured at their signalling.

"Gideon," she summoned up from the stirring tide inside her, not caring that it was a high whine of a thing. She felt helpless to it, could feel frustration beginning to run its claws lightly down her intercostals.

"Yeah?" Gideon kissed Harrow again, a small press of lips to the side of her temple.

Harrow arched her back, a single expressive writhe, and turned her head, squeezing her eyes shut against the shuttle's lights. It was frustrating. Sometimes her arousal was a wave that lifted, other times, a tide that drowned. Sometimes it was all just too much noise. Gideon's touches slowed, likely recognizing the signs, and Harrow bared her teeth in a hiss.

"Don't stop," she demanded, terse as words became hard.

"Huh," Gideon said, and did not stop, though for a few breaths her fingers kept their new molasses pace, which was a relief — disappointment — both. Harrow fisted her hands in her skirt. "Alright, bone mistress, I'm gonna try something. Stop me if you want to get off."

And then Gideon flipped her.

It wasn't the feral thing that had so turned her on the other day, but it was a quick, sure motion. One moment she was laying on her back on top of Nav, legs open, face open to the whole wide shuttle, and the next she was face-down on the couch with the heaviness of her beloved's breathing body weighing her down.

Gideon's leg had sunk close between her thighs, but did not grind. She was propped on both forearms over Harrow, but not enough to put any airspace between their bodies. Impulse made Harrow press her back up against Gideon's front, and the glorious living monument of Gideon's flesh pressed back. There was relief; something in the pressure was also pushing back her own overwhelm, and here the dark behind her eyelids was perfect, not tinted by the glow of light through capillaric blood. A surrendering helplessness that, as long as she did not look right at it, soothed. Almost despite itself her heart began to slow, and she parted her lips in a grateful little breath. She lifted her hips.

Gideon was there. Blessed Gideon; clever Gideon; Gideon, the flower of her heart, who knew her body from the inside. That muscled bastion of security shifted her weight to one forearm, and the other slithered between Harrow and the couch, scooping her lower body tight against Gideon's own. Her fingers deftly shoved down the hem of skirt and underwear all at once.

Even while nearing overwhelm Harrow's body had been quietly continuing its sweet anthesis, and Gideon's fingers met warm and slippery folds. Harrow turned her face to muffle against the couch. Her throat worked, giving voice on the compromise of having it disappear into upholstery. The animal of her body, allowed to call out its pleasure, redoubled.

Gideon pressed her down, her breath a rough, humid bloom behind Harrow's ear. As Gideon's fingers found slick and dragged it to the apex of her labia, Harrow arched her neck, panting, and cried another feathery cry. As Gideon flicked fingerpad over clit, she squirmed, clutched the couch cushion with crabbed fingers. It was surge and recede, surge and recede, waves that made her writhe, made her frantic. Their breath syncopated. She felt Gideon's hips press down against her own, harder, a response to her own need. She chased the obscenity of the grind, found oxygen in it better than her lungs ever found in air.

And then Gideon pressed her mouth behind Harrow's ear, and said, "I want to fuck you."

It wasn't asking permission, in the words, and that surface layer had Harrow exulting. But in another way it was, and she turned that exultation into a furious nodding of her head, not trusting her profane, gulping throat to form words. As if her lordosis, hips tilted and shoved back against Gideon's desperately, wasn't answer enough.

There was no chuckle, no teasing words from the redhead, no deflecting joke. Just a hand that took a moment to yank Harrow's skirt and underwear fully down and off. She heard the snap of a seam-stitch, the creak of cloth, and unthinkingly wished Gideon had pulled just a little harder.

Gideon's mouth latched to her shoulder where it met the neck, sucking skin. Her fingers dragged between Harrow's labia, pressed and tested. Harrow uttered a truly salacious whine, dragged rictus fingernails down the cushion she clung to, anticipating the maddening pleasure of invasion.

The moment did not disappoint. As fingertips broached her cunt, her groan turned guttural. Her whole body prickled and flooded with the sensational reaction to Gideon's fingers, two of them, shocking her hindbrain with their presence. They twitched, a test. Shock resolved into urgency and she scrabbled against the couch, shoving up, shoving back, hungry for that particular flavour. She was dripping wet, she could feel it slicking the insides of her thighs, and she needed Gideon to move—

Ah. Yes, like that.

She was a loose association of flesh and nerves, glued together by need, and by the way Gideon bore her down into the couch over and over. She began to fingerfuck her with firm, purposeful surges into her cunt. The creature that was Harrow had never deserved the kind of sweet unravelling she felt now, but greedily she chased it, hungrily she gave over to it, as much as she knew how. And Gideon fucked her.

The senseless, oversensed meat of her writhed, opened hungrily as far as the natural bounds of flesh could open. Her body caulked the intolerable empty spaces between them with cyprine and desperate motion. The empty wet of her throat slipped its neurotic leash and cried out directly into the quiet of the shuttle, un-muffled, as each segment of spinal column articulated, arched, lifted. She was the smallness of a body held down and held, and the vastness of a perception stretched taut in the distance that kept two people from truly becoming one thing. And Gideon fucked her.

The moment of greatest urgency came like the crashing impact of a sudden death. She felt herself go rigid, body clutching at Gideon's fingers in the dumb and glorious spasms of orgasm.

She sagged. The blissful revenant of her spirit did not abandon its meat. How could it, when the whole felt a warm sea, a rocking, pulsing, circulating, secreting holiness? When it was so cradled? When she could feel the weight of it by way of the arms around it? She had been as aware of Gideon as she had been of her own body.

Her lover was already slipping free, shifting their positions. She turned Harrow to her, and Harrow pressed her face to Gideon's chest. She was slow getting ahold of herself and Gideon didn't rush her, instead tucking them together in an exhausted, parallel horizontal that sheltered Harrow between Gideon and the couch back.

She realized, after enough time had passed that the transcendence of sex had gently receded into the sticky warmth of the postcoital, that she was waiting for something. It took her a little longer to puzzle out what.

Pulling back a little, she looked at Gideon. The other woman had a leonine smile on, eyes mostly closed in contentment. That smile pulled up on one side, those yellow eyes opened a bit further.

Harrow cocked her head.

Gideon, finally, asked, "what?"

But she didn't crack a joke. No little jape about cell metabolism, about how much sugar she must've just turned into cum or whatever. Harrow, blinking, smiled back, and came back to rest against Gideon's chest. "Nothing."

 

That first night they had spent on the shuttle, when they had tried so hard to out-petulant each other and ended up in two separate piles of bedding on two separate scrunched patches of floor, Harrow had not slept easy. She could hear that Gideon hadn't either, from her discontented shifting. Her own agitation had cooled quickly into a slightly jumpy acceptance of a job adequately done, particularly when she'd thought of the ruined cav cot.

Gideon was no one's cavalier. She was not a thing to be eaten and used up, burned to a cinder and turned into a universe of loss. Perhaps Harrow couldn't undo years of mistreatment, but she could make sure no one ever mistreated Gideon again, not the least of which and perhaps especially herself.

When Gideon had been quiet for some time, Harrow had crept around the bed, quiet and low to the ground. She had gone by feel and sound, which did not bother her; touch had always been the most reliable of her senses, and the song of Gideon's even breathing brought her in as slow and sweet as a sea creature drifting on a current.

Arriving, she carefully, carefully, lowered herself down into a posture of surrendered repose: knees up, one arm tucked to her chest, the other reaching with infinite care into the dark.

Her fingers brushed Gideon's forehead. She stopped at the barest touch. That was all she needed to feel in.

The shape of the other woman sketched itself out to her in the dark like Gideon had figured out how to spontaneously bioluminesce: every inch of skin, every vein and nerve, every elegant wet curve of bone, every sweet rhythm that pulled and pushed and expanded and contracted. The life of it was effortlessly perfect and vivid.

If the working called up blood sweat Harrow refused to care in the dark, but if it did, it was less than any other kind of necromancy she had left to her. That made sense.

It was particular to Gideon. It was a gift, though she was undeserving. It was a precious leftover, it was the tiniest granted kindness from the universe to Harrowhark, who was grateful for it. She would have given up as much of her own soul to bring Gideon back as was needed without expecting a thing in return and still considered that bargain a worthy one.

For a long time she watched and listened to the calm flow of sleep through the other woman, drifting along alpha and theta waves, rocked by the beat of her heart.

When she felt the cycles of sleep move again towards wakefulness, she withdrew and crept silently back to her own pile of sheets and pillows, shame beginning to creep alongside her.

That touch had been a comfort, and she had stolen it; aware of that, she did not make excuses; she had wanted the comfort of feeling Gideon alive and well and here and had taken it without asking, after Gideon had made it so clear she wanted distance between them. Curling up and pulling her sheet over her head, she resolved without surprise not to do it again.

It was the latest — and, dead god willing, last — in a long itemized list of things she had taken from her without asking. She would never again ask anything more of Gideon than what Gideon freely offered.

 

"Nonagesimus."

"Mmm?"

"What's up?"

"Is this the setup to a joke?" Harrow inquired, mild as she shucked her shirt. "Am I going to say, 'I don't know, Gideon, what's up?' and you're going to say 'the ceiling?'"

They were getting ready for bed, which (on days when they didn't get there by tumbling headfirst into sex) had become a familiar pattern. Gideon, in her sleep shorts and nothing else, was stretched out long in the middle of the bed, arms crossed behind her head as she watched Harrow drag herself through her own evening routine. She disrobed, tossing her clothes in the corner pile that would grow until one of them ran out of shirts and remembered to dump it all down the laundry tube.

"See, that's what I mean," she teased, "I think even you can do better than that. Your vibe keeps getting weird. It's been happening since the other day. Not like, bad, and not all the time," she hurried to add, "just weird."

"My vibe is weird," Harrow quoted inaccurately, looking over her shoulder with dry disdain for her reclined companion. "Can you be even a little bit precise, Griddle?"

"Look," she said, turning a little corner into seriousness, "if you wanna call Paul and ask about heading back to the Ninth, we can do that tomorrow. No use fucking around here any longer if you're set on it."

That seemed to startle the adept a little. Harrow turned, half-naked, brows cinched. Gideon admired the sight of her spare chest and shoulders outlined in light from the still-open door, realized she couldn't count as many ribs as she'd been able to when they'd first seen each other naked in this bedroom. Hell, if they did end up leaving tomorrow, that wasn't nothing. That was good work done.

"That's not — I told you, I'm not ready for that yet," Harrow said, and Gideon had to admit she was a little relieved.

"Cool, that's fine." She rolled over onto her front, crossed her arms, propped her chin on them. "You not getting enough sleep again, then?"

Harrow turned away again to shrug on the long nightshirt, and slip out of her shorts. Taken together, their favoured jammies equaled about one full outfit. "I'm sleeping acceptably."

"Is it your dick project?" That was a fun prospect, at least. Gideon grinned and waggled her fingers upwards in the same lewd pantomime she'd gotten Harrow to wrinkle her nose at before, hoping for more of the same. "Look, if you've run into a hitch, I'm in no rush. This pussy's on tap anytime, necro-dick or no."

It was crazy; Harrow didn't even have to say 'Nav' anymore. She had the long-suffering obsidian glance of disapproval knapped for peak brevity and enervation, ready to whip out at moments like this.

"Progress on that front carries on as expected," Harrow told her, which wasn't a no, but wasn't a yes either.

Gideon leaned to one side and opened an arm. Harrow tapped the bedroom door panel closed and climbed onto the bed, slipped under that invitation of a limb and slotted into the place she'd grown accustomed to occupying against Gideon's armpit. Gideon closed her arms around her slip of a necro, hrrrmmming a grumble of contentment and squeezing her a little for emphasis. Harrow nosed into the crook of Gideon's neck, cupped a hand over one of her breasts. Gideon buried her face in Harrow's nose-ticklingly fine head of hair, breath stirring a sweet grassland of strands.

She yawned, settled in, and said, "This about you getting off on getting flipped, then?"

She didn't really need to see Harrow flush, she could feel the rigor mortis set in. Okay, she'd wondered. She'd been pretty sure. Harrow, in addition to being the queen of bones and the queen of Gideon's mushy parts, was the queen of avoiding addressing the obvious so stiffly that the obvious would take her for a corpse and carry on with its day.

"Excuse me?" Harrow croaked. Oh yeah, she'd hit on it.

"Is this about," she clarified, really resisting the urge to make fun, "you wanting me to manhandle you but in a sexy way?"

"What — makes you think—" Harrow sputtered and went out.

"Well, for one, that's some pretty piss-poor Nonagesimus contrarianism right there. I don't think you even really expect me to believe it. Not even one threat to my bones. A token effort, two stars and only because you're sleeping with the judge." Was she feeling a bit nervous? Maybe, but not enough to arrest the momentum she'd accumulated by pushing herself down the hill of this conversation. She ran her hands up and down Harrow's back, nominally to soothe the necro, but it was also for herself a bit. She nosed in alongside Harrow's ear. "I didn't think this was still a secret, you seemed pretty okay with me sneaking a little bit of Harrow-mashing in yesterday on the couch. Look, I'll meet you halfway. I like it when you bite me. And you...?"

"Hnngn," Harrow said.

"Help me out here." Gideon was working to keep the tone light, because that had to be the thing here, right? Harrow had gotten in her own head about something and Gideon had to tease her back out. "I'll get you started. Say it with me now: I, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, wet my panties when you..."

"Griddle," Harrow hissed.

"I do that most of the time," Gideon laughed. "Come on, Harrow."

"I..." Okay, here was the part where Gideon would shut up and let Harrow verbally mince herself to a conclusion. She'd hooked her. "I... cannot."

Fuck. Okay, fine. That breathed up a big old snot-bubble of sympathy in Gideon's chest. Harrow sounded like she was trying to psyche herself up to chew gravel and Gideon was the one offering her the bowl, which, like, fair enough. Gideon wasn't a prude — and she was learning Harrow was way less of a prude than she'd grown up assuming, though maybe that was her own good influence, a thought which made her preen — but thinking for a second what it'd be like to have to cooly and completely articulate some of the things she wanted Harrow to do to her, she could see how it might be a rough ride.

"All good, ghoulish gallant," she kissed Harrow's head.

She gave it a few minutes, but found her brain still chewing on the question. "Wish I had my mags," she admitted, giving Harrow the old gimlet-eye, a small revenge for the past few days, "I think there's one or two you'd really enjoy, now."

That did it: she felt a little shiver like a sigh, or maybe it was a sigh. Hard to tell when Harrow's lung capacity encompassed a whole ounce and a half. Either way, the tone had shifted and Harrow had relaxed because of it. One point for Gideon.

"There is nothing in that puerile library that would alight my interest."

"Oh, come on, I know you must've flipped through every time you had 'em confiscated," Gideon goaded. Actually, she'd always wondered.

"How do you think I know?" Harrow wrinkled her nose at Gideon, seeming to be back enough in familiar territory with the opportunity to show contempt.

"So you did look!" Gideon declaimed, victorious.

"They all functioned upon the same exhausted contrivances," Harrow complained. "The same four or five conceits, grab-bagged tiresomely in order to make a gesture at originality. The sex always commenced one-fifth of the way through the book. I tabulated. Unless it was one of those gag-inducing," and there she held up her fingers, curling them in the deepest and most sarcastic air quotes Gideon had had the pleasure of witnessing, "romances. There's such thing as too much sugar in the diet, Nav.

"And the anatomy was never correct, unless every human involved had suffered the loss of their their floating ribs and gained several inches of femur, fibula and tibia," she added darkly, seeming to resent this last the most.

Gideon had rolled on her side, propped her head up on her hand to listen to this rant. "Shit. I could say something about genre conventions and, like, artistic licence, but — I'm just impressed you paid that much attention."

She grinned at Harrow as the other woman's cheeks darkened a touch.

"I made it my business to know just how heretical you were intent on making yourself," she said primly.

"And here you are now, reaping the benefits. So how would you do it?"

"I wouldn't."

"Too bad," Gideon said, feeling wicked. They were on more even ground; this felt better. "I'd read your bona fide weird bone nun porn. Shit, I'd be your number one fan. Give a copy to all my friends. Have one pride-of-place up on the wall of our bedroom. C'mere, Nonagesimus."

Taking one more moment for a petulant little sneer, Harrow did then finally let go. She snuggled under the covers alongside Gideon, and Gideon flicked the warm bedside light off.

But it took them both some time to settle, and partway into the long black velvet drapery of night in a deep space shuttle, Gideon said very softly, "you know I don't mind, right? That I'm cool with it? I love giving you things you want."

Harrow pressed her face to Gideon's shoulder and shook her head.

 

It'd been Gideon who had called Paul at last, on impulse, on one of the days she was noodling around in the cockpit. She couldn't have even really said what she was meaning to do, at least before she was talking to the lysis; her fingers just moved over the controls, and it must have been providence, because Paul picked up.

"Gideon," they greeted with characteristic muted surprise. "Good to see you. All's well? Are you done the next book already?"

"I think Harrow's almost ready to leave," Gideon blurted, realizing as she spoke what she needed to talk about. It'd been five days, maybe, since Harrow had first admitted her restlessness, and Gideon didn't really know whether Harrow's tension was mounting or if she was just getting more tense about it herself.

Either way, Paul sat back a little. Their expression was too well-controlled for Gideon to get much out of it, but, shit, she hoped that wasn't disapproval? Harrow was going to be pissed. She'd've wanted to game this conversation out more.

Well, fuck it, this was the way it was going to go.

"Is that so?" Paul asked.

"Uh, I mean, hi, how you doing, what's the shit, how're the talks going," Gideon tried.

"No, let's go back to that first thing." Paul, not having it, had leaned forward again, cocking their head so their smooth curtain of hair slid back from their face. "Is everything alright? Last time we spoke, I got the impression that you were getting along with unprecedented aplomb. Enjoying one another's company, even."

Gideon, master of smoothness in the face of innuendo, squinched her brow and said, "uh."

"That is, all seemed well."

"I mean, it was," she tried again, "it is, but we've been in here forever. She's been thinking of the Ninth," Gideon added, feeling disloyal. But she'd keep the depth of Harrow's feeling close to her chest, at least. It was fine to imply the erstwhile Reverend Daughter had thoughts of her old home, wasn't it?

"Hm." Paul, at least, seemed to bear out that assumption. They tapped their chin, nodded, and said soberly, "if she's concerned for their safety, you may want to pass along that Dominicus so far has been putting off some odd readings, but no major flares."

"That's good! I'll tell her." Gideon found herself eager for good news to pass along, which caught her by surprise; she didn't think much of the outside world anymore.

Paul was shaking their head, though, almost regretful. "True. I almost wish it would give us just a little hiccup, just to add a little urgency to the conversation. I don't trust it, but the longer it goes without a light show the less likely the Houses are to believe that it's bound to eventually fail."

"Uh, talks not going too well, huh?"

The assessing look Paul gave her was almost too quick to catch. So very fucking Sixth, to be weighed like that, but whatever the verdict the lysis said plainly, "Blood of Eden is understandably not all that interested in launching a rescue mission for their historic nemeses, especially when the Houses don't seem to want rescuing. It's unfortunate that they're the only extra-system fleet with any real level of organization that's been willing to treat with us. And there's still half the Cohort sailing around the system looking for someone to enact revenge upon, which would make an unarmed extra-House foray suicidal."

They sighed. "Source Gram set my House up well for collaboration. I wish other Houses had had founders with that kind of foresight, but instead what we have is inertia and xenophobia, on both sides. John's removal from the playing field was a major flex point but ultimately, it has not righted old wrongs, and hasn't really changed the available plays as much as I would have liked. There are simply too many outsystem worlds who would be more than thrilled to watch the Houses burn in a fire of our own making." They paused. "But that's nothing for you to worry about. I still want you in particular as far from these negotiations as possible. Harrow wants to leave?"

Gideon shrugged, feeling the uncomfortable wash of cold water that was the world outside her terrarium. She didn't know what to make of any of it. She didn't want to. She knew what was important to her now and absolutely fuck everything else.

"Has the heat cooled down on us yet?"

"Somewhat. I would still prefer another month or two, but... I'll test the waters. Do you want to leave?"

Did she? "Not if we're gonna get a bunch of Cohort freaks down our throat immediately."

"If there's a risk of that I'll let you know and we can find another solution." Paul cocked their head. "But that's not what I meant."

"Any chance we'll get to take the shuttle with us?" Gideon hedged.

Paul smiled. "Probably not. Sorry."

"Bullshit," Gideon sighed. "Help save the known universe and I don't even get my own spaceship."

 

"You should send someone else."

It was after-hours again. Pyrrha had carried the conversation into their shared space. That felt a bit crass, a bit blasphemous, but it had been chewing on her now. She'd had a hell of a time at her make-work today, navigating around other people; the body she wore had felt heavy, too big, a familiar and beloved overcoat worn in a hothouse, its fastenings caught closed so she couldn't even unbutton the top to catch a breeze.

Paul, who had been doing wrist-and-arm stretches, paused and turned those inscrutable, beautiful eyes on her.

"No, I shouldn't." No 'why', no 'here is why I asked you'. It was annoying. She should have expected it.

"I'm not going to be a face either of them's happy to see."

They resumed their stretches, one hand bending the other wrist at an angle that seemed to introduce the question of whether they even needed to be more limber than they were. "If I were choosing based on who they'd be happy to see, I would have some very slim pickings. They're both familiar with you, and furthermore, I trust you."

"Gee, thanks. They don't."

"I think there's more nuance than you're imagining, in that," Paul countered, a little prosaically, frowning sweetly at their fingers. "I'm not denying that it will be emotionally complicated, but I know you can cope in the liminal spaces of relational complexities. Besides," they finished the wrist stretch and shook both their hands out, rapidfire, and then flexed their fingers. In the pause they turned to level the full force of that combined gaze on Pyrrha. "You need to go."

She was a myriad-and-some years old. She was also less than two years into being a person with agency again. The way John had employed Gideon as his unquestioning, unthinking right arm, obedient and dexterous and deadly, had been one thing. She had seen it from time to time, and had hated it with the intimate familiarity of someone who could do nothing about it. She'd hated it until that hate had worn flannel-smooth and soft and easy and familiar. Her necromancer, unknowing of her presence, had in the end meant very little to God, his best friend in the universe; John had cultivated for himself a deep illusion of intimacy, the close knowing of another that made redundant the need to speak, or know, or empathize, or be intentionally human with him at all. A favourite book read so many times the reader had put it down for the last time, assuming the permanence of memory, never caring to note that the precision of details sifted away with the wind of ten thousand years.

But there had been camouflage there. Gideon had ceased to be an object of examination and interrogation, and in that neglect, had made space for his long-dead partner to move unseen and unknown. She did not like being so attended as she was now; she did not like being told what she should or must do.

"That so?"

If the atmosphere between them had gotten broken-glass glittery, Paul did not react overtly to the cuts. Their gaze was calm, even, lucid. What they saw was unclear to Pyrrha, but the seeing was like sandpaper, in that moment.

"Pyrrha," they said plainly, not ungently, "it's not what I would offer you if we had the wide universe in which to choose our preferences, but the way you have to watch yourself here, the constraints the situation puts on you..." They spread their palms out, resting on their knees, a surrender. "We are not making good use of you here, which is a sin for someone as effective as I know you can be. More importantly, it's an unkindness to keep you close just because I want you close, when what it means is that you're spending all day moving boxes and trying to look harmless for politicians."

It did not sit well. "And you're sitting there saying that herding about two kids who hate me is gonna be any more fun? It's not as if those politicians are going to notice me gone, and them gone, and not put the pieces together, either. That won't look good for you."

"Fun might be overstating it, but you need a change. As for the rest of it, I don't think there will be too much fuss in bringing the Reverend Daughter back to the Ninth House. The Ninth still enjoys a reputation mostly of contempt from all angles — fangless, now that their great secret has been discharged." Their thin mouth pulled to one side, curling up, not a smile per se. "I would come with you, if I could."

"I don't love this," Pyrrha said. She sat back, rubbing too-thick fingers over the thin, wire-hard muscle at her temples. "The optics aren't going to be as good as you're thinking. You've got to know that."

"Trust me to handle the optics."

"When did you become a politician?"

That wry little not-smile pulled a little wider, and Paul hunched, propping chin on hands on knees. "About the time you became a box-hauler, and I think I'm about as well-suited."

"Hey, nothing wrong with an honest day's work. I'm a damn good box hauler."

"Yes, and I'm a very good politician," Paul allowed, "but it's terribly tedious, isn't it?"

"Oh, fuck, Paul. I'm going to do this, aren't I."

"Ultimately it's up to you. I hope you do," they said, almost tender. "I can't escape the morass I've gotten myself into here without compromising everything we are trying to achieve, but I can offer you an escape hatch. And I care about those two enough to take the risk of bad optics to have someone I trust watching them."

Pyrrha grunted. She wanted to be able to deny feeling the same.

Paul reached over and put a hand over hers, a long moment of contact.

 

One moment, Harrow was reading peacefully. The next, there was a wall of meat blocking the light and a thin-bound flimsy booklet plapped down over the cellular diagrams she'd been poring over.

"Excuse me?" She was annoyed.

"I wanna do this," Gideon announced.

Harrow closed her eyes. She'd asked for this. She pinched the bridge of her nose and gathered her patience. "I realize that you are being unspecific on purpose, which I choose not to get shitty at you about—"

"Too late—"

"—but for the sake of my headache would you please elaborate?"

"The shuttle," Gideon said. She edged her way onto the couch, plucking up Harrow's legs and scooting under them so she could awkwardly curl around her and flick open the flimsy over Harrow's textbook. "I wanna learn to drive it. Fly it. Whatever."

She had not forgotten their first days in the little bubble of a ship, and despite all her good intentions Harrow gave Gideon a very exasperated look.

"Not into the moon," Gideon clarified.

"Gideon," Harrow started, and then sucked her lower lip into her mouth and bit it. No, she couldn't rely on knee-jerk irritation to carry her through conversations like this; if she had been imagining broader, more abstract, or more pithy answers to the question of what Gideon wanted, it nonetheless made a kind of sense when squared against the woman herself that Gideon's eventual response would be so... literal.

She ran a hand over the inner cover of the little booklet, glanced at Gideon with just her eyes.

"Why this?"

"I dunno," Gideon said, and then, "seems cool," and then, when Harrow turned her head just a little, eyes hooded in an ambiguous little look. "Look, I know we aren't gonna live here forever, but I kinda like the idea that I could like," here she waggled her fingers in a little walking-man shape, "toodle us around in it, right? Just if we wanted."

Harrow, who was trying to work out exactly how badly Paul would react if they scanned for the shuttle only to find it gone, did not realize quite how incredulous she looked.

"Look," that expression had Gideon increasingly jagged, "you can just say you think it's a shit idea, you're the one who asked—"

"No," Harrow cut in. "I can appreciate the strategic value, and even the... cool factor, I suppose. But don't you think this might be better done under the auspices of an instructor? We're not exactly in a position to take test drives."

"No, I know," Gideon said like someone who hadn't maybe thought of that, but her shoulders were up and Harrow could see she was on her back foot. "But there's a how-to manual right here, I could get a head start, and you're so fucking good at textbooks, I thought—" She snapped her mouth shut, thinned her lips.

"You wanted my help with it?"

Harrow, though she perennially walked that meandering line between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, was not immune to the effects of having herself seen by someone as clever, as worthy, as a person to rely on. From Gideon, it was especially potent. For something other than necromancy, it was unprecedented.

Gideon was pushing up, untwining herself from where she'd craned around Harrow. Harrow reached up, grabbed her arm, urgently aware too that this was exactly what she'd asked for, that Gideon was giving her a moment of a chance to do differently than every time in their past that she'd cruelly clipped her wings.

"We could look at it together," tumbled from her lips, worried, offering.

Gideon kissed her then, long and hungry and delighted, which was reward enough on its own.

Outside the front windshield, the moon they languidly circled waxed crescent, the gentle breath of its atmosphere a hazy blanket over the bright-edged slice of its sunrise.

 

The last time she tried it — the first time she got it wholly, acceptably correct — was on that selfsame bathroom counter that borne silent witness to so much growth. She did it in the morning this time, during the span in which she knew Gideon would be deep in her own routine. The clack of the broomstick against the pull-up stand was a comforting staccato through the thin closed door, and Harrow used it as metronome and grounding while she finessed the theorem and unfurled its manifold effects one by one. She breathed carefully, in counted spans against the pain of it and the strain.

She was getting used to it. She was getting used to how hard it was. She had changed. Inside the universe ever-changing that was something she could accept, in a small way: she had changed, at least in part because she had chosen to. Neither lyctorhood nor her ghosts had been things she had chosen. It was never as simple as that when taken in completeness, of course, and complicity encompassed more than just initial responsibility, but... she could accept this part of it, the new difficulty with her necromancy, when it provided in trade the sounds of Gideon moving in the next room.

Finally the perfect result of her efforts lay limp atop the juncture of her thighs, which had been pushed tight together in strain. Its proprioceptive presence in the map of her body no longer startled her; now she felt a smug little satisfaction for the culmination of an effort.

And it had been an effort, the delicacy and specificity of the work making it time-consuming and concentration-heavy. She had a thin sheen of blood-sweat over her skin, the thinnest tinting over her arms and trunk, more on her face and underarms and all of the sudoriparous glands huddled in their clusters beneath the dermis. Eccrine and apocrine both lent themselves to blood sweat, and the organ lay smeared with uneven sweeps of red as if just birthed, having slid across sweating tissue as it formed.

There was a great, relieved unfolding in her chest. She had done it. She had set out to, and she had. Letting her breathing calm, she examined this new member, eyes roving over, checking details, checking off her list.

She touched it. Immediately the intensity made her shy away, made her bright and tight with nerves and interest. She felt it twitch with that interest.

No. Not now. Why did the idea make her blush? She took a moment and several deep breaths, and banished that nascent arousal.

Standing from the counter, wiping clean the red smear she'd left, she stared for a long, long moment into the mirror. She wondered at the way the notional shape of herself was affected simply by the presence of a new piece. She hadn't executed the wider suite of subtle anatomical changes those textbooks had instructed and explained, but at the same time, just the relaxed fall of it made her torso feel longer, and made her breasts a surprise. It didn't matter, but it was... interesting. The meat had always been a nonsense. It was interesting to have it be a new and not wholly alarming kind of nonsense.

Running her hands down her front, she looked at her palms covered in blood sweat, sighed in a hiss through her nose, and went to the sonic.

After, she dressed, shirt and skirt and her most encompassing robe, armour against a particular feeling of vulnerability as she went forth with this new and unfamiliar piece of her. Morning had been a deliberate choice — she needed a rest and a drink and perhaps some oatmeal, she needed a couple of hours to regroup.

There was Gideon, doing her drills. The broom handle was an absurdity, looking like a child's safety rapier. Gideon looked up at the sound of the bathroom door hissing open and grinned, stopping and instead leaning on the stupid sword stand-in. It bent under her weight.

"Hey, gloomy," she called, and slathered sweat off her face with a big hand. "Done in there?"

"Ah, yes."

The clothing had definitely been a wise decision. She had left her underwear off, uncomfortable with the way it incompletely constricted the rearranged anatomy, and almost immediately she recognized the danger in that.

Of course, in the end it was for Gideon, and it wasn't a secret. Only it felt like it would be an ignoble reveal of the grand surprise, getting an erection when all Gideon was doing was casting a sweaty arm around her and saying, "I'll take a sonic and then breakfast time?"

How did those who had these all the time put up with them? She nodded mutely, shifting her robes so they bunched a little more in front of her, willing the thing not to finish rising. Gideon kissed her head and disappeared into the bathroom, and Harrow went to mindlessly rifle around for dry oatmeal.

It was like a live wire at her groin. It was like a compass point that wanted to turn her in the direction of her lover. It was like having a savoury little secret with herself, but if she thought about it too much it seemed to want to shout its presence. It was distracting, even just touching her legs while she walked, and forget watching Gideon prance around the shuttle in the rhythm of her natural showiness. Around midafternoon, it was finally her undoing.

 

Gideon, washing dishes, turned the tap on with a spoon underneath it and ended up with a full front of water and soap.

"Aw, come on." She whipped her shirt and bandeau off and yeeted them both in the general direction of the bedroom. A dumb mistake, but she had to take the edge off her own perfection somehow, right?

Harrow, who had been picking at the corner of a page in one of her textbooks and (as far as Gideon could tell) not reading a word of it, dropped the pretense and stared openly, unusually round-eyed. Never one to turn down an opportunity, Gideon winked and flexed before wiping soap suds from her chest.

She'd meant to go back to her chore after that bit of showing off, but Harrow looked every bit as flustered by a good view as she had in the early days of the shuttle: precious, sure, but also, kind of late in the game.

"Should I take off my pants too?" she called wickedly after Harrow's retreating back, as the necro scuttled to the couch with unusually rat-like furtiveness even for her.

"Ignore me," Harrow called back, high, and curled herself in a little knees-to-chest ball.

"Sure," Gideon said, and absolutely didn't. What she did do was finish the dishes peremptorily, giving Harrow enough time to more or less uncurl, and then she yawned, stretched, and sauntered couchward.

"I'm beat," she announced to the open air of the shuttle. "Good thing there's no one on this couch, I think I'm due a nap."

"Gideon!" Harrow screeched when the bigger woman toppled into what looked a hell of a lot like a face-first flop onto Harrow. The necro turned into a scrabbling ball of elbows and knees, which would have been terrible for Gideon if she hadn't been ready for it. She caught herself on her forearms, taking the punishment of a knee to the boob, and laughed as Harrow smacked her on the back ferociously.

"You—"

"Sorry," Gideon drawled, turning the plank into a side-plank, more or less, though her ribs rested on the far ends of Harrow's knees to prevent another tit-kneeing. "Didn't see you there."

"I didn't know selective blindness was part of your vaunted skillset," Harrow crabbed, panting. Up close, Gideon was getting a good look at this fluster, which had a different flavour than Harrow's familiar baseline annoyance. There was a glazed-over quality to her, as if she were concentrating on something. She'd seen that before, but right now she couldn't for the life of her figure out what had Harrow's senses so distracted.

"What can I say? I take instruction well. What's got your back up?" She stretched, and went to drape more fully on Harrow's lap.

Harrow pulled back her hips and grabbed Gideon in a desperate bid to keep her full weight from descending, squeaking an alarmed little noise.

Oh. Oh. She looked more carefully, where her own weight was pulling robe and skirt tight against Harrow.

Okay, that suddenly made sense.

Gideon sat up, suffering a jolt of giddy, silly excitement that ran fully contrary to every bit of vibe Harrow was putting out.

"You did it, didn't you?!" She made an effort not to just absolutely crow that out, tried to modulate her tone to not completely holler. But hell! This was like she imagined it felt to get a birthday gift. "You did the dick! I knew you'd manage it! Shit, I almost body-slammed your boner! Were you hiding it?!"

"I..." Harrow sounded just a hair shaky. Breathless, maybe. She was side-eyeing Gideon, the whites sky-bright around inky irises, and her cheeks were dark with embarrassment. "It took some time. I wanted to get it just right."

"Shit, nah, girl, I knew you'd get it sometime." She was so fucking proud. She wanted to squeeze Harrow but held off, instead leaning over to patter a few kisses against her cheeks, her lips. She tugged Harrow towards her and felt the other woman uncurl a little, just enough to lean into it. "Why didn't you tell me?! So how does it feel? How's it treating you? How hard was it? Heh — how hard is it?"

"I—" This was a whole new mood, again, this confused embarrassment Harrow was radiating. Fun how many moods they were discovering in this cramped, awesome shuttle. "I don't... really know. I wanted a little time. To get used to it." She swallowed. The proof was in the pudding; that was a boner. "It's proven... unruly."

"Tell me you've taken it for a test drive."

"No." Harrow sounded a little at sea.

Gideon laughed. She felt like a whole-ass summer sky, that weird broad blinding blue that she'd started to really like at Canaan. Fuck the dark of the universe, anyways; she had all the light in her chest. She adored this stupid little necro, who had made herself a dick and hadn't even tried to jerk it. Who did that? Honestly? Who was this ridiculous person she was discovering that lived inside Harrowhark Nonagesimus, her childhood beloathed? She leaned in and kissed her Harrow, short and sloppy and delighted.

She'd tell her what a fucking nerd she was for that later. For now, she said very, very fondly, "Harrow, I wanna see it."

Harrow's face scrunched up tight, relaxing only by half. "You can't laugh."

"Cross my heart," Gideon said immediately. "Why would I laugh? It's your dick, I'm gonna love it."

A little breath, unbelieving or uncertain or simply embarrassed. "Can we turn the lights down?"

Without a moment's hesitation Gideon twisted to reach for the panel of the wall light, slapping it off. There was a lamp in the living room of the same model as their bedside light, and she turned that on instead. The flush of yellow light spilled buttery across the couch back, blanketing the both of them, a kinder limning than the living room light above. Distractedly Gideon realized that she loved that light and seeing Harrow outlined by it; wherever they ended up, she was going to make sure they had warm lamps in every room.

Harrow had her head bowed a little, eyes shadowed and inscrutable with that ominous angular Nonagesimus charm, but Gideon fancied herself the nearest thing to an expert in the field of Harrow body language. Shoulders a bit up, hands down by her sides, legs together; even so, she wouldn't have needed all of that to know Harrow was feeling self-conscious. What was more interesting was the little bit of a forward lean, the tension. The boner was one thing, but under the embarrassment Harrow was vibrating with excitement.

Kissing Harrow once more on the head, Gideon slid off of the couch. She came to a kneel in front of her, hands on her calves.

"Can I?" she asked. Harrow nodded, and then paused, shook her head, and instead pulled her robe over her head herself. They met each others' eyes, and without looking down, Harrow undid the tight buttons of the skirt, carefully opening it to spread like wings on the couch cushions.

Gideon's only reference point for the average penis was her mags, and they'd never really been a focus for her. Look: she knew the mags were inaccurate. Okay, so maybe when she'd gotten out into the wider universe she'd been a little taken aback that there weren't gigantic titties and revealing uniforms all over the place, but only a tiny bit, and it hadn't really been so surprising. Art, right? Of course the gigantic dongs wouldn't be the thing, and after all, the bone cock hadn't needed to look huge in order to make her feel like she was getting wedged right open.

During the weeks Harrow'd been working on the flesh cock, she'd wondered endlessly what it might look like — would it be proportional to the modesty of Harrow's clit? Would she tweak the theorem to give herself a monster dong for ego's sake? Did she have some sort of mathematical proof for the perfect penile proportion that she was referencing? Did the theorem give everyone who used it the same dick, or was it bespoke? — she'd had so many different guesses that it came back around to having no real clue.

She looked down without hesitation. She grinned. She looked up to Harrow's face again, and kneeled upwards to steal her lips one more time, her fingers ghosting to either side of Harrow's hips.

Harrow's hands came to curl against Gideon's chest, clutching a shirt that wasn't there, and when they broke for breath again she whispered, practically vibrating, "well?"

For a second, Gideon found herself not sure what to say. They'd gone around this kind of ride enough times that she knew a joke would land badly here, even if it was her go-to when she felt tongue-tied. And she did feel a little tongue-tied.

But like, fuck that, she knew what to do. Unbearable earnesty was super bearable, actually, in this place.

"Looks like it was made for you," she told Harrow, tilting her head, still close enough that all she had to do was murmur. She sat back as Harrow huffed, her fingertips feeling the shiver that ran through her. Relief?

"It was," she said, not managing to sound tart.

"Were you really nervous I wouldn't like it?"

Instead of answering directly, Harrow said, "It's as close an estimation of what I would have naturally had if I were XY as I could approximate. I thought..." She took a breath, went on, "I thought that would be... most appropriate."

Her sweet dweeb. Gideon fought a grin and lost, though she felt it curl up at the edges with a fun new variation on her usual lusts. Harrow looked so intensely vulnerable, her arousal all standing there to be nakedly seen. Gideon was having some feelings about that.

"That so?" She sat back and made herself comfortable, rump on her heels, body angled towards Harrow's whole business. She ghosted one hand over Harrow's thigh, fingertips back and forth, trailing lines that summoned up goosebumps. "I like it. I like that approach. It's a gorgeous cock."

The look of it was sleek, rising from the low part of Harrow's mons in an artful and contoured swoop. It was a dusky shade in the yellow light, warm and dark. The head followed the same subtle conformation as the shaft, its ridge a low flare. They'd tried different shapes and sizes of the bone cock in their experimentation, and the proportions of Harrow's genuine article was not dissimilar from some of their early models. It was shorter than she tended to play the bone one, but with a more nuanced profile: not that unvaried column but rather gently broader in the middle, a shade narrower at the tip, and then of course that raised edge of the head emerging from its foreskin.

She tilted her head, peeking lower between Harrow's legs: no further equipment, which stacked, she guessed, with not actually wanting to knock anybody up just now. No innie either, though, just an echo of the soft abundant skin of her labia. Would that even have been possible? Gideon was for a moment distracted by fascinating possibility, but put that aside for the moment.

She turned her attention back to that sleek cock. The skin looked soft. Her fingers on Harrow's thigh twitched; Harrow shivered. Gideon flicked a look up to her lover's face, and saw on the way how quickly Harrow's breath was coming and shared a moment of that anticipation with her before she brushed her fingers over it, base to tip. It was soft, the skin, but she could feel the remarkable turgidity right beneath that velvety-feeling dermis.

"I had meant," Harrow said, all in a breath, as if she were trying to keep herself from reacting, "I had meant to get you in bed, like with the bone apparatus. I am, this is, not to plan." Her chest was rising and falling rapidly.

Gideon felt another grin, involuntary, wicked at the corners. "Oh, just couldn't keep the little guy down at the sight of titties, huh?" Rather than go right for the dick she slid one hand up, fingertips finding one of Harrow's nips in turn. "Can't relate."

"Liar." It seemed to be the best Harrow could do just then. She licked her lips. "I know you enjoy the... the bone apparatus. What we do with it. I wanted to... to give you that."

Gideon almost laughed. "I wanted this because you can feel this," she told Harrow, as if instructing a slightly slow child. "I wanna see the ways I can make you absolutely lose it." In demonstration, she wrapped her hand around her shaft, just wrapped, didn't even pump, and Harrow whimpered.

Oh, that was fun. She watched Harrow swallow and again try to wet her dry lips, doing her best to rally. "I, ah, I..."

"Just like that, yep. Oh, you're completely wrecked, huh? You really thought you were gonna hold out and rail me when all it takes to turn you to jelly is a bit of this?" She tried a single stroke, and watched Harrow's eyes roll back, half closed. It didn't look like her usual overwhelm, which was interesting and a relief: what it looked like was that she was trying not to whine her need for the whole shuttle to hear. "Holy shit, this really has got you. Listen, you didn't take this bad boy for a go, that's on you. Let me take it for a test drive. Let's see what it can do."

Harrow visibly bit back a moan, eyes flaring to stare at her briefly. Gideon supposed it had been meant to be a withering look; as it was, Harrow just looked like she was daring Gideon to eat her. "It's not a joystick."

"I dunno," she smirked, "I think I could lead you around by it just fine."

Harrow groaned exasperation, which Gideon interrupted and entirely co-opted with another languid stroke up that hot, silky shaft. It worked a treat to turn the timbre into something much sweeter to the ear.

Panting, Harrow leaned her head back on the couch and finally let slide from between her lips, "please," and then, "it's, it has been, it's..."

"A lot?" Gideon remembered how crazy sensitive her own clit had been when she'd first found it, how it'd taken getting used to. Was that the right frame of reference? She wasn't sure, but Harrow just nodded, ribs working as she panted. Gideon dropped her tone, feeling warm, feeling in control in an unusual way. Harrow had done this for her. Harrow had offered up this huge vulnerable thing just because Gideon had asked it. "I'll take care of you."

She was full to the brim with probably dangerous levels of infatuation for the becocked woman in front of her, and seeing Harrow so completely unmanned by her own sensitivity was making her whole body just light up with a possessive kind of lust.

"You know I've got you." She stroked, half her mind marvelling at the interesting way the skin slid, the way she could feel Harrow's trembling interest with each slow pass of her palm. "I've always got you. You can let it go."

Harrow mewled, shook her head and bowed it, grabbed Gideon's other shoulder and the larger woman felt her own high background buzz of arousal surge. She could feel Harrow's hips twitching in a close, abbreviated way, as if she were trying to hold the motions back. That was familiar, as well as the harsh pant of her breath.

Throwing her head up suddenly, Harrow caught her lover's gaze and held it, staring into her; Gideon searched her in turn, and found the intensity startling. Harrow, borne up on the wave of it, was clinging desperately. She wasn't letting go, even as she was leaning in. Literally, in fact; she broke their gaze in order to surge forward, to press her head to Gideon's clavicle, holding tight and shuddering as Gideon worked her. She tilted her head, fastened her teeth around the web of muscle between shoulder and neck, and panted. She gave some ground to the urge to fuck against Gideon's moving hand.

Gideon would dissect it later; she would consider all the angles and ways that this felt different than fucking Harrow the way she usually did. But now, knowing they were on the ascent, now her lust drove.

Every sign of need that Harrow gave off was like honey, and ravenous for that sweetness, she pressed for more. She was careful, but only barely; she pumped that brand-new cock with all the furor of a good fingerfuck. It was probably too much, for a brand-new thing, but Gideon was thinking with her cunt. Harrow was crying out, writhing, in disarray, and more than anything else she wanted that.

Gideon's hand was getting wet. She realized with surprise that Harrow's cock was pushing forth great pearly beads of fluid — struck by a moment of inspiration, she let go of it (Harrow cried out in protest) to dip between her own legs, hand still wet with that sign of what was to come, in order to gather up as much of her own slick as she could. She slipped a finger into herself while she was there, just a little present for herself, hooking and sliding back out with shudder.

When her newly wet hand returned, Harrow cried out again, transcendent shock, and threw her hips up against Gideon's grip. She licked her lips, turned her head to breathe against Harrow's ear, but couldn't find words that could possibly be any sweeter than the rhythmic cries Harrow was gracing her with.

It lasted too short a time; two pumps with that wet hand and she felt Harrow go rigid, felt that cock throb, felt a splash of hot wet against her own stomach. She was herself riveted as she worked Harrow through the changed spasms of her orgasm; the rhythm was so like the squeeze of a cunt around skilled fingers, but that was the only similarity. The hard column throbbed with each throw of its load, until, spent, she felt it begin to soften in her hand.

Harrow, tied to that organ that was a part of her, sagged too. Gideon caught her and lowered her, panting, to slump against the couch.

"Well, shit," she said, climbing up beside and nuzzling in against her strings-cut necro, "I think it works."

"Hm," Harrow said, eyes closed, and leaned in against Gideon. She stopped when she came up against the evidence of her success, and rearranged so she wouldn't end up all smeared with it.

"Makes a bit of a mess, though," Gideon teased. Okay, so Harrow might need some recoup time, but her own body was still humming and her tongue felt loose. "You could take out an eye with that thing if you aimed it right."

Harrow opened one eye and snorted at her.

Gideon grinned back, the look redolent of her own arousal. "Thought you weren't going to make it able to do that? Guess it's a good thing I didn't take it for a ride ride."

"Hm?" Harrow took a moment to follow, at which point she seemed to barely suppress another sigh, rallying from her quiescence to add, "seminal fluid isn't all sperm, Griddle."

Gideon, who had taken exactly zero additional prerogative to study up on reproductive function and anatomy, said, "sure," and in a moment of buzzing inspiration she slid off the couch and scooped Harrow up.

It was satisfying how Harrow's startle reflex was to throw her arms around Gideon's neck rather than throw hands, and feeling high on the whole thing — buoyed up on the gift of it, on the joy of a new toy, on the warm possessive satisfaction of Harrow's languidity — carried Harrow to the bedroom. Harrow tucked her legs and head in as they passed through the threshold, and tensed up in anticipation of getting dropped on the bed, only to find Gideon putting her down gently and (after a moment to shed her pants and use them to wipe up the mess Harrow had made of her stomach) climb on to join her.

"Harrow." She had a notion. She curled around the tiny woman she'd attached herself to, heart and soul, and tucked her in close with arms and legs. Harrow turned into it, breath smooth, waiting. "We should talk about some stuff."

Okay, good sign: she felt Harrow tense up a bit, but there was a shudder and it didn't seem to stick. "What about?" Her hands rested on Gideon's ribs, small warm patches.

"Sex, I think," she said, having narrowly avoided the urge to prompt Harrow to make three guesses. "Wanting things, maybe. I mean, you know." Harrow sighed, and instead of looking at her face in the gloom of the bedroom Gideon propped her chin on her head. "Think you might be able to? If you can't I won't ask."

"Gideon," Harrow finally articulated, careful and almost resigned, after some long moments. She was present again, the post-orgasmic haze clearly faded from her voice, and she sounded worn in that way she sometimes did. "I can't give you a cogent answer. I can't even give myself a cogent answer."

"That's no reason not to like, talk about it."

A puzzled silence. "That's every reason not to talk about it. Isn't that why you won't tell me what you want?"

"What?" The conversation had been turned on her and Gideon almost wanted to laugh at the deftness with which it was done. She wasn't going to get mired down here, no fucking way. This wasn't going to be dodgeball, not today. "No. Nope. I mean, sort of? But not in that way."

"In what way, then?"

"Well, first off, I've been telling you what I want all week, but like, sure, we'll function off that premise. It's like... it's like, you clearly want something, you just can't figure out how to say it. Or something. I'm all ears, by the way, if you'd like to correct me." She paused hopefully, but only for a moment before carrying on when Harrow didn't take that little bit of bait. "I think it's more like... I can't tell you what I want ahead of time because I don't know what I want till I want it. You remember a couple weeks ago we were talking about kids?"

That did make Harrow pull back and stare at her askance. "You want children after all?"

"No, I mean, that's not what I mean here, that's not the point. But like... you acted like it was the freakiest shit imaginable, right? Whenever I think about big-picture stuff, it's like that for me." She'd had this thought a little while ago. The idea of going back to Drearbruh freaked her out, but not as much as Harrow's instruction that after that it was on Gideon what they did. It had been hard to think about, but thankfully there had been some simple answers she'd been able to skim off the top. Drearily, they were kind of terrible, so she tried to get through this part fast. "I got every big dream I ever wanted and it turns out the big dreams suck. I think I want to dream small for a while. I want to want little things."

"Oh," said Harrow.

"Yeah, shitty, right? So I promise I'll tell you when I want things."

"Oh," said Harrow again, and then, "I've been an idiot."

"Yeah," Gideon said, falling back into the infinite fondness she had for the woman in her arms and snuggling her close. "I think I'll keep you anyways. So what's your excuse? Why won't you just ask me?"

It was a pathetic, wheezing little noise that Harrow made then. But to Gideon, attuned to her lover's semaphore, it was the cousin of a keen, it was a moan alone in the catacombs, it was a sob right from the diaphragm. She wondered for a moment if she'd pushed too far, but she bit her lip in hope, because this sounded less like Harrow backed into a corner and more like Harrow about to ask for absolution.

"I want to." Harrow's voice was soft. The shuttle was always quiet, and in the perfect dark it was easier — the simple, velvet black with the comforting subliminal back-hum of the shuttle's life systems had become a confessional of things kinder and rawer than sins, had become the saltwater for their learning. "But I cannot possibly ask anything of you that you would not offer of your own heart. I cannot ask. I must control my own desires."

Harrow's words encompassed more than just the moment. Gideon could hear it. Harrow had never willingly let go of control in her life, not without the crushing pressure of duress forcing her hand. She could see it: some from moments spent inside Harrow's head, watching hazily from the well as Harrow cleaved tight to the paranoia that kept her alive; some from their long terrible raising, a teenager pulling the strings of two puppets that should have been people who loved her with the knowledge that if she failed the facade for even a moment her sin would be stripped naked for all to see; some from before even that, the child who was only wanted if she learned right and well and completely enough to justify her existence. And now that habit was latching on to her history with Gideon, robbed of other hair-suits to put on Harrow's soul.

She couldn't let it be.

She shifted, propped herself up. Suspended over Harrow in the dark, the scaffolding inside which their shared world was built, Gideon pressed. "Tell me, Harrow, tell me why you can't. Why you want me to make you, why you can't just let yourself ask. I know you, I know your heart. I know all the crap you keep in there. But you've got to say it."

Silence. Breathing, measured, careful. Gideon waited. Harrow rubbed her face, curled her arms over her chest like a corpse ready to be buried. She waited.

"I am... fundamentally and irreversibly a wrongness." She breathed it into that space, barely. "I can only ever fail to be worth the cost of my birth, or atone for the sins of my life. I deserve none of this, Gideon. I cannot in good conscience take more from you than I already have."

"And so if I pin you down and take it, if I decide I want to see you totally at my mercy and with all your careful control broken down and I make it happen all on my own, it's not your idea, and you don't have to feel guilty about wanting it, is that right?"

Harrow swallowed.

"Fuck, Harrow, I can't. I mean I won't just do that." She let herself fall to the side again, feeling her heart beating fast. But this was something that really bore the emphasis, needed it. "Not without talking about it first. Not without knowing you want it. You can't fucking flirt with this and then play coy and expect me to just go for it."

"I cannot deserve to want any of this." Harrow's voice had gotten quieter, risen a notch. "I want only to give you what you want."

"Well — well too bad, bitch, because right now what I want is to give you what you want. Fuck! Harrow," she repeated, "do you hear yourself sometimes? I love you, I'll love you till I'm maggot food, but you need to fucking talk to me. Lord! You're on my ass to tell you what I want, and you can't even — why is this so different from any other part of what we've been doing? I absolutely want to fuck your brains out. Any way you want it, girl. All the ways, as many at once as we can manage. That's not taking something from me. That's doing something with me. But if you want me to fucking pin you down, if you want me to actually use force, you have to fucking tell me that because — shit — because imagine if you decided halfway through you didn't want it, that it wasn't okay anymore? If I misread you? If we put you in a position you couldn't get a bone out to stop me and I couldn't fucking tell? Or if I just pushed too hard, did something too — too mean? What if I hurt you?"

Gideon's heart was thudding strangely, squeezed by her lungs, by her deep and worried breaths. Ever since she'd pieced together what she thought Harrow wanted from her, after that bite, this had been going around her head. "Harrow, it's hot that you want to get done up like a pretzel and fucked. You know what my favourite thing is? Seeing how wet I can get you, and it sounds like that would get you fucking wet. But I'm not gonna risk doing something heinous to you because you — because you don't think you deserve to want things! Ironically!"

The hot second she heard a sniffle, she gathered Harrow up immediately, crushing her in a deep, close hug, pressing their nudity one to the other until sweat made their touching skin sticky. After all that Harrow was half hard again, which Gideon was surprised by, but also wasn't the point just then. She rocked Harrow a little, feeling an upwelling of worry and frustration. Had she pushed too hard?

"How much sweeter is your love than wine," Harrow intoned into the dark, sounding lost. Her arms twined around Gideon. "I do not deserve you, beloved."

"No one deserves anyone, bitch," Gideon said, softly. "Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it."

"I didn't think you had read that one." Harrow's voice was small and ragged, but the sniffling had stopped.

"What, and pass up some classic smut? Of course I read it." She kissed Harrow's head. In fact she had found it dog-eared in the stacks of Drearbruh when she was thirteen and read it for a lark, and then read it again, and then went back to her cell with it and hoarded it till Crux had come after her for stealing holy books. Nothing in the rest of the text had been nearly as compelling as the bookmarked bits. She'd tried not to think about which dusty historical Reverend Whatever might have dog-eared those pages, but the work itself had lodged in her heart at some point. "All that dripping nectar and honey and milk. Nards. I could keep going. You have captivated my heart, my sister, my bride; you have captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace."

"How beautiful is your love, my sister, my bride. Gideon..." Harrow pulled in a silent breath. "I am terribly selfish. I have made a habit of dictating, of taking; I want, now, to give. I wanted to do this for you."

"And look! You did. Now it's tit for tat, necro-cock extraordinaire." Her tone had shifted, though, to something deeply tender. They were both speaking into the quiet like they didn't want to break it. "I asked you to make me a dick and you made me a fucking dick, and if you tell me that's not any weirder than you asking me to do some origami with you as the flimsy I won't believe you."

Harrow didn't laugh — Harrow so rarely laughed — but she made the little Nonagesimus noise that meant I heard you and I am going to pretend I hated it, which was close.

And then she sucked in an audible breath, and surprised Gideon by saying, "I have an idea." And then she told her the idea.

Afterwards, Gideon said carefully, "I don't hate it." An understatement, and she was sure Harrow could feel her flush. "But, like, let's hash out some details, boner boss. What if I do get you in a position that you can't just skeleton me off if you need to?"

"Unlikely."

"But not impossible!"

"What would make you feel better about it?" Some catharsis had been achieved, apparently, because that was close to Harrow's pedant voice. It was a relief, even in Gideon's fluster. "I've tapped out before when... when I've wanted you to stop. You listen then."

Gideon realized that she didn't know. She tapped her teeth shut, feeling the heat at the back of her neck move to her face. Then Harrow's hands were at her hot cheeks, those spindly, nail-bitten fingers held firm against her skin. It reminded her of her own senses: she felt, consciously, the warmth of Harrow's legs tangled with her own, the half-hard cock still resting between their snuggled thighs, the place where Harrow's arms snuck between hers to find her face.

She shivered. She said, connecting brain directly to mouth and letting her own admission of weakness tumble out before she could stop it, "I'm scared of hurting you."

"I know." A thumb stroking her cheek, where it rose to the slope of her nose. "You won't."

"I'm scared you won't tap out if you need to, Harrow, you can be so shit about that kind of thing. You decide you need to do a thing and you do it till it wrecks you."

"I will. Tap out if I need to, I mean."

It was Gideon's turn to make a little noise of disbelief, a skeptical little hnn bounced up by her diaphragm. But then she laughed a little, and Harrow in turn sighed, and they were the same noise, the same helpless surrender to the double bind.

They were silent for a moment, then Gideon asked, "is this stupid?"

"No," responded Harrow, with less hesitation than she would have expected. "It's the only thing that matters."

"What, sex?" she was surprised enough to volley back.

"No," Harrow corrected, "you."

"Us," Gideon corrected back, and they floated together in that little statement for a while. It felt like they were on a little raft, or were a little raft; it felt like the shuttle itself was on an ocean, a broad and subtle movement of waves that ebbed and flowed with their heartbeats, coming to align in the closeness. Gideon felt her cheeks cool, blood slowing its frantic rush.

"Gideon Nav." It was weird to hear her whole name from Harrow, said like a prayer. She listened. "You are a frustration. You are crass, and demanding, and you are anxious about all the wrong things. You know me obscenely intimately. You have been the thorn in my side since I was born."

"Hell, Nonagesimus—" Harrow cut her off by leaning in and kissing her, long and slow and spitty in a way Harrow didn't always seem to like.

"And I love you terribly," she finished, when their lips parted. "I would like to be gentle to you now. We can try my idea later."

They didn't say it, not so baldly, and it shivered Gideon's soul, made her feel abashed in a way she wasn't used to. It really never made a lick of sense — but she had said it, so there. She laughed a teeny and stupid little laugh and said, "ha, ha, you like me," which didn't even put a dent in this uncharacteristically sweet mood Harrow was in.

When Harrow moved down her body she let her, didn't even try to get at her first, and Harrow drank of her slowly until Gideon was a glory of a mess, flesh unravelled into light.

 

Things were looking up. Gideon sat at the kitchen counter, in one hand one of the two kitchen knives they'd been furnished with, in the other a chunk of hard plastic from the wrecked cav bed.

There wasn't much Gideon had taken out of her time as the shining, impervious star of God's shock troops that she enjoyed remembering, so she didn't, but one of the things she had enjoyed was visiting worlds that had trees. She just had to selectively fail to recall all of the murder and death, but when she managed that, she could recall things like paper books, and houses made of logs, and whittling.

The cohort old hands who'd grown accustomed to the insane abundance of plant-based life on out-system worlds had picked up shit like whittling from the locals, and it'd been to Gideon's endless regret she'd never managed to get her hands on a chunk of tree to try it. Seeing one of the older soldiers sitting around outside the barracks whistling away and knifing a bit of wood into some knick-knack or other, it had seemed the most nonchalant, chill pastime anyone had ever fucking invented. If there was anything Gideon wanted to project out into the world it was that she was nonchalant and chill.

"You're gonna be the best little ducky," she told the as-yet shapeless blob, having only the vaguest notion of what a duck was or what one looked like. "I bet you'll even float."

Under the erstwhile hunk of bedpost, a pile of little translucent plastic shavings grew. Gideon whistled while she worked, just to like, drive home how cool she was.

This scene of pastoral-level crafty domesticity was interrupted by the slide of the cockpit door and the consequent emergence of one small and very upright bundle of bones. Gideon glanced up, and then did a double-take.

Harrow was smiling. It was a complicated thing, as Harrow's smiles always were, small and sweet, not much more than an upward tilt and a drawn length of her lips. It persisted as her eyes slid to Gideon, although it changed timbre in a way Gideon couldn't quite work out. Before she could even ask, Harrow was striding across to her, eyes flicking down and taking in the tableau.

"What are you doing?"

"Whittling." Gideon held up her work.

Harrow's eyebrows beetled, looking at it, followed by a stare that Gideon grinned back at. "It's a duck," she added helpfully, offering the cloddy thing forward for Harrow to see.

"You're absurd," Harrow said, in that tone she got sometimes now when she seemed to be trying to work out why exactly she was spending so much time making out with this absolute joke of a woman. It did tend to make her insults a lot less toothless, even while she was giving Gideon her patented what the fuck are you on about stare, and Gideon grinned more widely.

She held the duck up beside her face, pursed her lips, and put on a stupid voice. "Listen, mom number two, I was born like half an hour ago, cut a guy some slack, huh?"

"I wasn't talking to the..." Harrow closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, apparently shaking off the impulse to get involved in a rousing round of bickering, because when she opened her eyes they were the sweet clear black between the stars. She reached out, took the incipient duck, and held it between her hands. "Gideon, keeper of my affection, unexpected resurrection of my heart," she seemed to be searching for words, "we are being retrieved."

She didn't know what she had been expecting. It hadn't been that, though now that it was, maybe she should have anticipated. "Sorry, what?"

Harrow's thin fingers were running over the hacked planes of plastic Gideon had been working on, gentle. "Paul let me know. We are to be brought back to the Sixth," she said, and again, that small, incandescent little smile. Gideon leaned in, watching it form nervously. "And then back to the Ninth."

"Oh, shit!" Oh, shit. She launched off of the kitchen stool, feet thudding hard on the plex tile. Mixed feelings, sure — but hell, they had talked about this, right? Harrow's joy of it was not subtle, even if it seemed mixed with other things. She grabbed her weedy little necro and lifted with all the flex-happy meat of her core and arms, leaning back in a lift and spin that had Harrow grabbing hold, one hand all curved scrabbling, the other still clutching the ducky.

When she finally put Harrow down the other woman didn't quite let go of her, and something had occurred to Gideon.

"Harrow." A grin was drawing her own face wide, easy. "You know what this means. You know what we have to do. Uh, when are they bringing us in?"

"Two days?" she said.

"Right, great, right. Okay. First things first:" and she kissed her, bending the full force of her adoration into one lip-bruising move. Harrow looked a little stunned coming out the other end, which: good. "Now, uh, Harrow, the next part I'm gonna need your help with. We've got a lot to do and not much time to do it. I know your mind's a steel trap, so like, tell me, where haven't we had sex in here yet?"

Harrow almost threw the duck at her then, but the mood was contagious.

 

("Are you prepared?"

A pause. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm good. Harrow... if it's too much, it's okay if I stop, right?"

"Is that a question or a statement?"

"Uh, both, I guess."

"Yes, Gideon. Of course." Hands on a pair of cheeks, warm, coiled energy. Excitement, nerves. "I promise.")

 

Harrowhark's feet on the carpet at their loudest were little more than the suggestion of a susurrus, but Gideon swore she could hear every footfall on approach. She hadn't felt this high-alert since their earliest days on the ship. There, and there; purposeful rhythm, the sub-audible thump of her bird-weight against the unyielding body of the shuttle.

Gideon, fizzing, stretched luxuriantly. She could not quite summon a yawn. She could barely keep from grinning a rollercoaster grin, and then all at once there it was, fist in her hair, pulling her head back, a familiar dark figure leaning down to kiss her hard.

"Hey," Gideon greeted when her lips were released, aiming for husky and landing in breathless.

"Turn over." Harrow yanked her hair again and Gideon rolled onto her back. "Good."

She'd set up on the bed with a magazine, pretending at a normal evening, as agreed. The buzzing anticipation gently boiling her brain had kept her from reading a lick of it, but it hardly mattered. She could do a real good fake nonchalance.

Until the second Harrow had grabbed her and called her good, of course. Latent arousal went from zero to a hundred in a heartbeat that directed all the blood from her brain to her clit. The tidal forces of horniness curled her hips up towards Harrow, nevermind that the other woman was still to one side of the bed. Rather more effectively she went to grab her, arms aiming to scoop Harrow around the waist, planning on pulling her down and in to make a response.

Harrow grabbed one of her wrists in crisp censure. "No, stay down. I'm not in the mood to wrestle today, Griddle."

"Aw," Gideon complained, her grin sharp-edged. This was familiar and she knew what came next. She lived for this shit, watching Harrow wrestle one of her wrists between two thin hands. "Come on, osseous autocrat, don't think you can take me?"

The look Harrow fixed down upon her lover was cold, imperious, an absolute smashing callback of a thing.

"You think you can goad me. Cute."

A bone shackle, from a pebble hidden between deft fingers, snapped into place. On its own it just acted like a bracelet, but reflex brought Gideon's other hand to try and pry the necro's from around her wrist, and the instinct cost her: suddenly it was two, attached. It really fucked with her range of motion.

"Oh, bullshit," she complained, squirming in the trap. "You didn't even give me a chance."

"It can hardly be considered my fault that you don't think before you act," Harrow told her, only then climbing up onto the bed alongside her nominally trussed-up snack. "Maybe one day you'll learn better, but I'm not holding out hope."

Gideon was in shorts and a sleep shirt; Harrow echoed that sentiment, wearing one of Gideon's own shirts, but the skirt she had opted for was tented in a way that was somehow more fascinating than if she'd gone for shorts herself. Gideon, still hungry for the interesting newness of Harrow with a cock, stared.

Harrow grabbed her cheeks and caught her eyes, leaning over. "Pay attention, Gideon," she said, "I'm going to fuck you."

Gideon bit her lip hard against that same looking-over-the-cliff grin, staring back because what else could she do?

"Oh, just like that, huh?" she taunted, giddy. "You got ahold of the little guy? Got him in line?"

Harrow sneered, releasing Gideon's face and sitting back. She hooked her thumbs into Gideon's waistband and stripped her without fanfare, Gideon facilitating with an undulating lift of the hips she couldn't have controlled if she wanted to. "That's only a concern if my main goal is your orgasm."

That was like just the right amount of fingernails run down her spine. Gideon goosebumped. That was spicy, and it was not helping Gideon play it cool. Actually, that ship might have sailed generally; she heard herself groan a stupid laugh, and she hooked a leg around Harrow's back. Her thigh being almost the width of Harrow's entire waist, it knocked Harrow off-balance and pulled her forward.

She hissed, catching herself on Gideon's hips, hovering over her warmed-up vulva like a predatory creature. "Be still, you contrarian nymphomaniac, or I'll get your legs too."

"Oooh, big words from the girl that just said she was gonna use me like a fucktoy." If Harrow could get spicy, so could Gideon, and she was gratified to watch the darkening of Harrow's cheeks intensify. She undulated again, feeling her labia catch and slither at one another. The rise of her hips put her cunt briefly about chest-level to her captor, and Harrow's eyes flicked down to catch the sight of purple-red lips beyond their riotous thatch.

She dug her nails into Gideon's hips again suddenly and when Gideon hissed and flopped back to the bed, Harrow ran sharp little fingers through the hair of her bush, catching and twining and tugging.

"This is mine," Harrow said, dropping her head to look at Gideon, and there was something so off-the-leash about the way she said it that Gideon was briefly silenced. She knew she was Harrow's, that their strings were intertwined as to be one cord together. She did not think she'd hear Harrow say it, in so many words. Was it a bit of play-acting, in pursuit of the goal tonight? She didn't think so; she hoped not; she wondered. It got her throbbing ferociously.

Before she could respond Harrowhark's fingers released her pubes and slipped lower. The wicked things had done their learning well and she was circling Gideon's clit before Gideon could get her senses under her. Then while she was busy gasping about that, Harrow slid those slim fingers further down and sunk deep into her.

The noise Gideon made was throaty. It always caught her by surprise, a shot of too much sensation to too many nerves all at once, the first hit of a fight, that woke up the nerves and the adrenaline. She loved it.

"Ha!" Her leg tightened around Harrow. Harrow curled her finger in retaliation. Gideon squirmed. "Haaaarrow," she panted.

"Yes?" Now that wrist was rocking, falling into a rhythm, pulling back for just a moment to facilitate a second finger joining the first without fanfare.

Gideon's head was bright and fuzzy. She chased those fingers. "You're, uh, you're the worst." Alright, witty banter off the table already, and that was embarrassing and gratifying all at once. Anticipation had sharpened her appetite to a throbbing point, and she knew more was coming, and it was driving her nuts.

"Eloquent, as always."

Proving that she absolutely was the worst, Harrow pulled her fingers free. They were glazed with fresh fluid, and Harrow lazily wiped her fingers on Gideon's shirt, which she eyed in dissatisfaction. "Hm."

"Well, if you hadn't fucking tied me up, I could get rid of it." She lifted her bound wrists and waggled her fingers in a little suggestion of what she could be doing with them if they weren't just sort of uselessly mashed up against one another.

Harrow observed critically, brought a hand to her ear. "I suppose sacrifices must be made."

From one of her few remaining bone studs — proof positive they'd be out of here soon, she was sure she'd get more soon enough to justify making frivolous use of these — Gideon tried not to think about that — Harrow pulled a small, wickedly curved little bone claw. While Gideon was stilled in surprise she pulled it down the front of the offending garment.

It fell in two pieces, open but not off.

"Hey!" That had been maddeningly hot: her now-vacant cunt throbbed. "I keep losing shirts to you and I'm going to be leaving this shuttle tits-out!"

Harrow, seemingly satisfied with her little trick, reverted the stud and thumbed it absently back into its hole, then ran her fingernails down the goosepimpling brown skin of Gideon's right tit. The betraying nipple pulled itself into one big goosepimple in sympathetic response.

"Hmmm," Harrow commented. "On the one hand, it seems a fitting comeuppance for all the vulgarity you've spouted in your life, and I don't loathe the idea of seeing this all day, every day." Rather than fingernails, now, the soft thin pads of her fingers traced back up and over, drawing the curve of Gideon's breast and then down over the flexing planes of her stomach. "On the other," her eyes flicked up, "this is mine, not for every slatternly and lustful eye that might turn at such a display."

"Oh, no fair," Gideon groaned as Harrow's hand dipped between her legs again, cupping her mons. Her hips arched to the touch, cascading with want. "No fucking fair."

She shut her legs tight around Harrow, begging her in close to where Gideon's cunt was throbbing so hot and neglected. The skirt bunched and slid against Gideon's crotch, getting irredeemably messed with a thick streak of cyprine as Harrow shuddered and pressed the hardness of her erection to that veiled heat.

Then she pulled back and unwound the garment, freeing herself to the air. Gideon did a sit-up in order to watch. Harrow shoved her back down.

"Impertinent thing," she accused. "Stay down. I will not tell you again."

Gideon growled, leaned back, panted for air. Her body was effervescent in a way that just kept folding back on itself with every arrogantly assured gesture of Harrow's. Her cunt felt hot with the way it was throbbing, her whole business telegraphing her pulse, she was sure. Harrow wasn't touching her and it was wickedly frustrating, which she knew it was meant to be. She wanted to look, she wanted to at least see, she wanted to run her greedy eyes and hands and mouth over what Harrow was taunting her with. She wanted to look down and see Harrow, shirt on, cock out, wearing such indelible proof of her body wanting Gideon.

Harrow ran two fingers up the inside of Gideon's bound thigh, and every muscle from her core to her knees tensed up to try and follow in on that promise.

"Come on, Harrow," she felt herself all but beg. She had in her head her cue, which had not come yet. This was a tease on two levels, and it was pitiless. She was sweating with the strain of desire and the stymied need to move to its tune. She squeezed her eyes shut and listened to the quickened hiss of Harrow's breath, of the noise she made under it, subvocal, hard to read.

Harrow took one of Gideon's legs, pressing it up and open, firm hands on the back of Gideon's thigh. She spread her wide, kneeling in. Gideon felt the chill of air against her spread vulva, against all that hot longing, anticipation painful in the way it sensitized her sex.

"Fuck," she hissed, and then, at the sudden touch of skin, "fuck."

The bone cock had had no give. It had been cold. It had always been exactly apparent what was touching her when Harrow involved it in their play. The skin-softness of Harrow's cock was its own kind of shock.

As Harrow slicked the hot head of it slowly up and down her slit, Gideon thumped her head back against the pillow and squirmed out her beautific agonies of frustration. "Fuck you, you said you were going to fuck me, you absolute—"

"You have always been so disobedient, Nav." Gideon could hear the shudder in that voice, the fragmenting of that cool assurance, and relished it. Harrow's fingers curled hard against her thigh, clawlike in their drive for control. It telegraphed through the odd point of contact between them, Harrow's cockhead trembling with her hips, surging subtly with her quickened breath. Gideon was obscenely aware of every movement. Harrow spoke low through gritted teeth, "So impatient. I will teach you compliance."

Harrow sucked in a breath, stilled, shifted. When she found the point of give and pressed in, she did so with all the firm confidence she'd used with the strap. She slid in on the heady wet that had been waiting for her, and the head of her cock sunk in easy, easy, and if the ridge of her cockhead caught a little it was nothing but a reason for Gideon to work her hips, press down, press past. That composure lasted halfway through Harrow's first stroke and then she was rictus-clutching Gideon's thigh, as if she were the taken and not the taker, and the high note she made was that of someone completely sent. She was trembling again, which was a hell of a thing for Gideon to feel referred all the way into her cunt way past where fingers would have managed.

"Gideon," she hissed, and Gideon could and did watch her eyes-unseeing expression, feeling the strange, new place where their flesh met. Then those eyes half-focused, slid down to meet hers, and Harrow bit her lip, licked it wet. Her composure was gone: when she met Gideon's eyes, hers were a storm. "Gideon," she implored a second time, and turned her head, and bit her thigh.

There it was. Gideon snarled and shoved her leg out of Harrow's grasp, legs closing tight around her hips — making herself gasp with the way that shoved Harrow all the way to the hilt, making Harrow mewl with it. With a hard flex and a twist of her hands she broke the connection point between the bone shackles, and surged up. Harrow grabbed her even as she grabbed Harrow, the other woman's nails digging in against Gideon's ribs as she surged up and over, shoving Harrow down on her back.

It made her whole body lurch with the way it moved Harrow inside of her during that flip, shocked her cold and hot and made her eyes water. It was on the edge of pain. She shoved Harrow's shoulders down against the mattress and sat hard against her hips, panting against the shock of sensation and letting it die down a little.

"You think," she panted, buying herself a second, "you think you're gonna teach me obedience."

Harrow was scrabbling at her skin with those nails, and Gideon hissed down at her. She snatched both of Harrow's arms, two wrists in one hand, pinned them above Harrow's head: an easy show of force she hadn't let herself before, a show of force that still sent some part of her brain shouting danger. But Harrow's eyes were unfocused again and she was mewling little noises between breaths, somewhere else, somewhere good, and Gideon raked her eyes down the little necro.

"You lost fucking priviledges, cock queen," she told Harrow, feeling more herself. She could feel Harrow seated inside her, and it put her blood to pounding madly. Experimentally, she shifted her hips and Harrow's eyes snapped to her and her mouth gapped open. "For being a hideous tease on a wicked little power trip."

Harrow's sharp little face scrunched in a snarl. Gideon, panting, smiled back with all her teeth.

"You gave me an advantage over you." She tested again: there were maddening little flashes of pressure and pleasure that sparked if she tilted and rolled her hips, familiar but different and insanely heady with the knowledge that Harrow was feeling it too. "All that bone cock shit. I've got practice. You don't."

Harrow groaned, turned her head to try and bite the arm Gideon was holding her down with; Gideon, taking a leaf from Harrow's own book, grabbed her by the face and turned her forward.

"Nuh-uh," she said, low and rough, "you're in time out, remember?" She pressed her palm over Harrow's mouth to forestall any returning sass.

Harrow licked her palm, broad-tongued and thirsty. It sent a shock right to Gideon's cunt, and without even thinking she shoved herself against Harrow.

That got both of them making noise. This was going to be some kinda feedback loop, Gideon realized. She was getting used to the way Harrow's cock spread her, the way it shifted when she shifted her hips, the weird and diverting mix of turgid-hard and flesh-pliant, the warmth of it. Shit, she was glad Harrow hadn't magicked herself up a monster; Gideon would have hopped on and gone off like a rocket, and then had to hide her face in shame for being a five-second fuck. It was a dizzy, ungovernable kind of pleasure, an unyielding intensity that rattled through Gideon's body and heart.

The grinding turned into fucking, a lift and roll of Gideon's hips that dragged that cockhead against the front of her cunt on the out, the place Harrow's fingers had learned to find with such deftness.

Harrow was already glassy-eyed and trembling, little jerks of her hips yearning up into Gideon. That felt fucking good, but Gideon growled, recognizing Harrow's signals too well. Speaking of five-second fucks.

"Don't you fucking come before I'm done," she ordered, hands tightening around Harrow's wrists, "Don't you fucking dare or I'll make you eat it back out of me."

It may have been the wrong move, or maybe the right one: Harrow gasped, mouth a round O, and she redoubled her efforts to still herself. On the one hand, the obedience was twigging something in Gideon that felt heady and dangerous and fun, baiting a predator or making a leap of faith. On the other hand, disappointing: feeling Harrow twitch up into her cunt had been supremely gratifying even beyond the actual sensation.

To make up the difference she fucked harder, riding the stiff wet post of Harrow, making full use of the absolute mess of wet they'd worked up between them already. She clamped Harrow's wrists, hand still over her mouth, except now Harrow's mouth was questing, turning, lipping needily at Gideon's fingers, and she let her suck two into her greedy mouth and swallow against her fingertips. Gideon groaned, full-throated and rattling around the bedroom: it was close, she could feel the build —

Suddenly Harrow was arching, stuttering a defeated cry that Gideon could feel against her fingers, pressing up and in with all the force of her spindly body. Gideon snarled surprise and frustration and ground down hard.

She could feel Harrow pulse, throb with orgasm, like the way she could feel her come around her fingers, but different, inverted — she couldn't feel the surge of wet against the back of her cunt but she knew it was happening, which was almost enough —

"Fuck!" Gideon cried, an incandescent mountain of vexation. Harrow was getting soft, trembling a full-body tremble, her eyes on Gideon round and bright and addled. "You asshole! You half-cocked little bastard, I wasn't done!"

Harrow whimpered, and Gideon pressed her fingers deeper, and only when Harrow lost the last trace of her erection did Gideon dismount. Her whole body was heat and need, and she could feel the gloss of her own come and probably Harrow's slithering down her thighs: she growled.

"You know what? I did warn you." She drew her fingers from Harrow's mouth, against the sucking resistance, and leaned down to stare her in the eye: it was one thing to hold her down, but she searched Harrow's face now.

Gideon grinned, all teeth. "I hope you're thirsty."

The other woman was panting, tiny, soundless breaths. Her eyes were unfocused as they tried to meet Gideon's. She licked her lower lip again, small pink tongue pulling saliva over the often-chapped surface, opened her mouth.

That was enough. Harrow's hair had grown out just enough that she could grab hold of the shaggy strands at Harrow's crown, releasing her hands and moving up her body until she was kneeling at her neck. Harrow moaned a tiny moan and wrapped her skinny arms around Gideon's hips, tugging in little pulls that made a part of Gideon feel huge and unbearably smug; she hovered there long enough for Harrow to start craning her head up against the pull of her fingers in her hair, and then she sat.

Gideon had already been a glowing, fizzing mess of arousal: riding out Harrow's orgasm had sent her whole body scattered with furious frustration and delight, and all of that came back around now to the hunger of the woman below her. Her mouth seeked and lapped, messy, her small sharp nose pressing between splayed labia with such abandon that she had to gulp and gasp for air every time she came up. There was no way to tell whose mess was whose, but she wondered if the flavour on Harrow's tongue was different, wondered if the idea of swallowing their combined tastes was making her as hot as it was making Gideon.

Gideon ground down: Harrow's arms tightened, pulled, and her eyes rolled back. It was an obscene sound, the work she was doing, and when Gideon's hips started juddering in the lead-up to fireworks, she shifted her focus, tilting her head to fasten her lips around Gideon's clit.

Gideon arched and yelled, shocked into an orgasm that had been a long time coming. It was jagged and intense, coloured by the vibe they'd worked up between them, rocketing through her body from her cunt to her fingertips and toes to her head. It flooded her with very physical dizziness, took away gravity and time and then slammed them back fit to topple her. In fact it would have knocked her flat on her ass if she hadn't been fully preoccupied with drowning her lover in cunt, and as it was, as she spasmed she slicked her vulva harsh against Harrow's face, wetting her from her high sharp cheekbones to her thirsty seeking throat.

When the candent pulse of her orgasm began to die down, Gideon finally pulled away. Harrow was shaking worse than she was, mouth open, gasping hard and fast and high in her chest.

Gideon hovered above her on all fours, sweat cooling across her skin, cyprine and cum cooling between her legs, and watched this beautific sight. There, some part of her told another part, there, look at how much she loved that.

It was a warm, sweet thought, held in the dreamy post-nut delight of a very good fuck, and Gideon smiled with it. She slid her eyes up and down the shivering, recovering body of her lover — and discovered that in fact it was a little truer than she'd thought. Harrow was most of the way hard again.

"Holy shit." Gideon was incredulous. "That didn't knock you out of commission? Why the hell didn't you let me know you'd be up for a second round so soon?"

"Ah," Harrow tried to speak, but her wet throat popped and caught with everything she'd been swallowing. She tried again, a high, thin babble, "ah, didn't know, had to tweak the hormonal profile to make it work, unexpected results," she stopped, swallowed again, stared up at Gideon, finally lucid enough to meet her gaze. "I may have — overshot."

"Well," said the cav, feeling her competitive spirit firing up. "Well. No way I'm going to leave that if you've got more juice in you."

She sat back in one smooth motion, grabbing hold of Harrow's wrists again and pulling the other woman up with her. She dangled like well-wrung washing, and Gideon laughed a little at how easy she was to yank around; some part of her revelled in it, some little part she'd been ashamed of before, but seeing the way Harrow's eyes flared and rolled at the rough handling, she felt a stab of pleasure that had nothing to do with what her body was doing. She turned Harrow, pulling her arms around behind her, pushing her into a kneel and looming heavy and hot behind her. She felt Harrow whimper, and pressed against her until Harrow bowed forward under the implacable weight of Gideon's body.

Only then did she kiss at the smaller woman's neck, her ear, her head, nuzzling and considering. Her free hand slipped around Harrow's front, slid down, cupped that erection which in the meantime had hardened to full mast. It was a good cock, she thought. It was a good weight, a good length, and felt pornographically lovely smeared with fluid. She stroked it, earning a gasp from Harrow, fondled her fingers around the ridge of its head and felt it twitch for the attention.

But she realized then what she wanted to do. Her own cunt throbbed use and satiation, the warm afterburn of having taken, and it felt like a contented sigh. Nuzzling in against Harrow's ear again, she told her necro in a low, warm tone that brooked no disagreement, "now put it away. I want your clit back."

She wished she could have recorded the little noise Harrow made then. "Ah, I, that's..."

"Make it happen," Gideon said, patient. "I want to get inside you."

Harrow made a noise of surrender, and something shifted in the way she held herself, some tension running through her. Gideon kept her hand cupped around Harrow's cock, waiting, listening to Harrow pant raggedly, trying to get enough focus to do her work.

She felt it begin to happen. The turgid flesh stayed firm even as it dropped lower on her mons and pulled back, at first very slowly, then more quickly as Harrow gained momentum. Gideon felt it slip back into Harrow's flesh, followed it with unabashed fingertips.

The shift and morph was a weird profanity of the flesh, one that horrified with interest, demanded all of Gideon's curious attention, kind of got her blood going. Harrow was a creature of power, enough so that she could do this: Gideon had always known that, but it was another thing entirely to feel living flesh shift like that, like a naked wet creature pulling away from her touch, turned mutable and malleable purely by Harrow's will. It was wild. It was vivid, profoundly intimate, obscene. It was a reminder of just who it was she loved so much. Gideon's heart was overawed, fully riveted, and horse-kicking the inside of her ribs.

She felt Harrow's back grow damp with blood sweat, and did not retreat. The halfways-between genitalia was still moving against her fingers, foreskin sliding back to clitoral hood, shaft disappearing back into the sheltering welcome of Harrow's body, and Harrow was moaning with effort. She slid her fingers over it, so that the shrinking erectile tissue pressed to the heel of her palm, and felt beyond.

The soft skin of labia had been there, abbreviated, and she felt the cleft begin to form between deepening folds. She bit her lip and chased as soft skin gave further and further, became wet flesh, became internal, dove deeper than she could reach. She followed in as cyprine sprung forth from the artesian source of Harrow and smoothed her way, as Harrow's body shuddered with broad and shocked shaking, as the complexities of texture and width and depth formed and blossomed and engulfed, as Harrow's cunt opened around to her fingers like a wound or like home. The little muscles there quivered in helpless welcome around her.

By the time Harrow's body slowed and finally settled into form, Gideon was two fingers deep to the knuckle. Their bodies slithered together on a sheen of fresh blood sweat. Gideon, heart pounding, felt the tectonic tremors of Harrow's body, and didn't move from where she was arched like the rafters of a cathedral or the close shelter of a blanket over the small woman. She rolled her fingers and felt Harrow strain to cry out, silenced by the effort of the working or by the intensity of the vulnerability she'd allowed Gideon to take in her.

Gideon only knew that her blood was pounding in her ears. If she'd had a cock of her own, it would have been hard, but she was not interested in her own arousal. She was only interested in pressing Harrow into the bed, splaying her legs wide, without moving for a moment away from her.

Her fingers worked. It was a rhythm, an angle, a pressure that had become as familiar as her own breathing, over the weeks and weeks they'd been taking this pleasure in each other. She wanted to yell it to the universe, how insane and incredible that familiarity was, except that she wanted to make no noise at all in the crowded dark of the shuttle's bedroom, no noise that might drown out Harrow's ragged breathing, the subtle shift of knees and chest against blanket, the wet slick of flesh on flesh.

She closed her mouth around the flesh of Harrow's neck, tasted the bright metal-and-meat tang of blood alongside the salt of sweat: she closed her eyes against a moment of disorientation, and on strange impulse lapped her tongue, licked it up. Harrow would help her soothe and rewrite her horrors, and instinct drove her to chase that now, tasting blood as she felt her fingers moving in curl after curl inside this beloved, wicked, powerful, strange, needy creature she'd so gladly bound herself to. She lapped up the blood sweat on the back of Harrow's neck until her mouth tasted awful and her face was a mess of it, and drove her pleasure hard towards peak.

At a point Harrow started to squirm. For a moment Gideon slowed in response, but the slowing got such a noise of terrible despair, and so she had instead redoubled. Holding Harrow down with her body and the hand that still gripped Harrow's wrists, she pressed hips to hips, feeling Harrow arch up into her in her shaking.

They moved together until Harrow's shaking went tectonic, turned into a hard tilting of her pelvis, a very physical entreaty, and Gideon curled and plied and pressed until she felt Harrow unwind, come apart under her ministrations. She felt the bright and breathless peak approach, and so soon after the other she couldn't help but compare the rhythm and intensity and power of it as Harrow cried out and spasmed around her fingers, as she squirmed in holy release.

It was over too soon and Harrow's orgasmic mewling turned plaintive. Gideon slid her fingers free, slowly, reluctantly, and gathered Harrow back against her with both arms. Releasing Harrow from the harsh bind, she pulled her into another, kinder hold.

Only a little while later, when all the blood sweat and cyprine had cooled to tackiness and Gideon had curled them both down together on the bed, did the larger woman ask very quietly, "that was good? That was okay?"

Harrow didn't say anything, but she nodded against Gideon's chest, quick and small and shaky. Gideon kissed her hair, held her close as she slowly, slowly came back to herself. She felt a huge, great glow all through her body, one that she could hold the both of them in as long as she needed to.

 

The first day they had stepped onto the shuttle had been a dragging low-key misery, like the day before it, and the day before that. The infirmary had released them into Paul's care directly, several days after they could have been, by Harrow's estimate. They had both been tired, careworn, ashy-pale, near to gnawing on the bars of their own ribcages with the restless confinement and the aftershocks of all that had come before. They had gone from a million miles an hour to zero in a spectacular crash landing of intention and action, but now the ghost-limb sensation of urgent momentum tormented them both. Doing nothing felt nigh unbearable.

And now this. She had heard out Paul's gentle explanation of their situation with flat disdain: as far as she was concerned this was one prison to another, and she did not care. Could not care. Would ride out any sentence so long as they didn't try and take Gideon away from her.

"It will be for a while," Paul had said. They were standing at the airlock threshold, the space beyond dim. "A couple of months, maybe. You can call any time you want to and let us know what your needs are. The air and water recycling systems will hold you for some time, but we'll have a resupply come by more often than you need. It's by no means a luxurious space, and I'm afraid it's got some antiquated features, but I think it will be more comfortable than a hospital bed."

The sharp smile across the Sixth's face seemed interrogative, and Harrow did not care about that either. Instead she watched Gideon squint into the dark, her shoulders hunched and tense.

"This sucks," she said, swinging around to look at Paul. "Like, you get that this sucks, right?"

"It's the best of bad alternatives," the Master Warden et al. responded plainly. "If it gets to be too much, call and we'll talk about other ideas."

"Like firing us into the sun?" Gideon snarked.

"That's a few items down the list," Paul grinned, and Gideon turned away from the shuttle's maw, nose scrunched up in a displeased resignation. But she reached out to Paul, and the lysis reached back, hand grabbing hand in a squeeze of acknowledgement.

"Thanks for pulling our asses out of the fire."

"I'm glad I could." Paul released Gideon's hand. They turned to Harrow, then, and she pulled her spine straight and glared against the same. The lysis was eerie, the lysis was a reminder of loss, the lysis was oddly compelling in a way Harrow did not want to get any closer to. Seeming to sense that, Paul did not reach for her, but gave her that look, that look that was so like Palamedes that Harrow had to break the gaze first.

"Reverend Daughter," they said, in Camilla's voice. "The same goes for you."

She did not respond, feeling her throat tight, but instead turned her attention into the prison ahead and swept forward. She had had enough of seeing the dead.

The dingy little space through the airlock was not welcoming. She heard Gideon say, "see you, Sixth," and fall into step behind her as she emerged into a darkened kitchenette.

It was sterile and blank, with beige countertops and cold steel cabinets, and a lingering ghost of domestic cleaning antiseptics. Further in she could see the vague soft taupe of upholstery too cowardly to be either white or black, on ultra-low-pile carpet of an unencouraging blue-grey. The corners of the countertop, the backs of the stools, the little designed touches of a living space were curved and softened, vague and noncommittal in their shades and shapes. Touches, she was sure, to offset the plain matte metal of the interior walls, to make the space feel hospitable. To Harrow's sensibility it could not have been less so, not without great nude paintings adoring every wall. The door closed automatically behind them, the harsh thock-hisss sealing their air, and moments later they felt the soft jolts of unlatching.

She did not turn, as the engines kicked in with a low hum. She did not look behind at Gideon, though she wanted to. It hardly mattered if she wanted to be here in this exile of a shuttle or not; here was incidental. She could hear Gideon behind her, heavy steps on plex tile, a huffing sigh. She did not turn to look.

 

Their last day on the shuttle was a celebration. Not, exactly, a celebration of leaving; at best Gideon was ambivalent about that, and Harrow tense in a kind of trepiditious excitement, but nonetheless they'd made a day of it.

It was largely Gideon's prerogative, her impulse towards effusion that Harrow did not know how to emulate or join in with but felt warmly reflective of. Gideon tried her hand at an actual cake — she'd heard of them and there were a couple of recipes in the cookbook — came out with something slanty and of questionable structural integrity, which she had laughed at and made faces over. She'd iced it, sort of, and stopped halfway, so that Harrow didn't have to have any with the makeshift jam icing.

It looked terrible, and Harrow had sat at the kitchen counter and watched her make it with the eye-slitted, soft smile of a look that Gideon had learned was as close as Harrow got to visible contentment. Then they'd eaten it and Harrow had complained about the texture — it was almost uncooked in the middle, unbearably slimy — and nibbled the dense outside edges with more tolerance.

The clock-hand of change was winding up for a tick. They could both feel the potential energy of it gathering at their backs, ready to shove them forward, however they felt about it. The duck sat on the table beside the still mostly full cake-plate. Gideon sat beside Harrow, licking crumbs off of her fingers. The hand ticked over: the shuttle, its autopilot sent instructions from the Sixth, began without announcement or fanfare to spool up its dinky little engines into a purring subsonic hum all around them. Momentum crept back into their bodies.

"Well," Gideon slapped her hands on her knees, leaning back from the counter. "That's it, then, we've got an hour. Come on, Reverend Daughter, time to get made up."

She was up and executing a leg-swinging amble towards the bathroom. Harrow was stayed for a moment staring after her, wondering and then certain she'd misunderstood, before she got up herself and headed to the bedroom to don her own armour.

She pulled out the clothing she'd arrived in: the warm long johns of any proper Niner, faded and many times re-dyed black; the long cloak with its natty embroidery; the cowl, the closest things she had to her proper vestments or a veil. Some had been scrounged from the Sixth's thin general stocks, but the cloak had been a gift from Paul upon their exit from the infirmary, a replica relic that had lived for years amongst the Sixth's relic library. She took several minutes growing her bone corset, an adornment she had for some time neglected to bother with considering how frequently she would have had to doff it again, and a few more stretching the last of her bone pebbles into plugs and other adornments. It was like a movement back in time, one that sent her mind with it briefly.

That Gideon was no longer Kiriona was a private relief. But Gideon Nav's allegiance to the Ninth was not a certainty, Niner name or no. She had been released from obligation; she had by rights been reclaimed by her natal House, and then in turn freed herself from the one-man House of the First as best she could.

But Harrow recalled, as she gathered her tiny stash of grease paint, doing Gideon up before the clock-tick of their descent to Canaan: the gratification she had felt, the furtive binding quality of similarity, the beauty of the moments wherein they had been of a kind and united. At the time it had pleased her sense of symmetry, or that's what she had made of the satisfaction she'd felt. Now she felt an honest pang of loss. Gideon had been beautiful in sacramental paint. She would never be pressed into it again. She was her own woman.

Whereas Harrow would always be, all the way to her marrow, a creature of the Ninth, and nevermind the shifts in her faith she would represent her House's traditions with her own exacting pride. It was her obligation and her satisfaction. But she needed the mirror for that, so Gideon would have to put up with Harrow in the room while she bathed.

She was not bathing.

The bathroom was a chaos. Harrow stopped at the threshold, her brush and her single pot of white and single pot of black clutched one in each hand, and said, "what."

Gideon turned, grinning garishly, and Harrow very nearly took a step backwards. "Hey, my monochrome mistress," the redhead taunted, taunted, because she was not.

The counter held half a dozen little pots of paint. Gideon, the sneaky thing she was, had been so eager to unpack the last supply run they'd gotten, and that had to be because of this, because Harrow would have noticed and flushed them down the toilet.

"Thought I'd do a little homage," Gideon offered cheerily, brush in hand. "Personalize it."

It was a sacramental skull, Harrow would give it that: the black areas, as yet just sketched out, were correct. It was the Laughing Skull, which she personally did not see much use for, but — but —

Harrow moved efficiently through the five stages of grief, or perhaps the five stages of horror, and firmed her shoulders as she rolled herself forcibly into acceptance. "Your edge-work has not improved, Griddle," she sneered, and bulled forward to take the brush.

"Beg to differ," said the completely smug literal bastard, and Harrow shot her such a look. "Hey, hey! Don't mess up the colours, okay?"

"Blasphemer," Harrow muttered, narrowing her eyes and leaning in. "Heretic. Tasteless idiot. I should. I should wash this all off of your horrid handsome face and redo it entire. Properly." But here she was, instead filling in the black dutifully — maybe redoing some of the sloppier shapes where the edges had begun to blend with the chaos of colours. Because it was a chaos.

Where white would have been, Gideon had been filling in with red, yellow, blue, violet brushstrokes blended together in a messy visual cacophony that followed the contours of her face in the practiced directionality that would have resulted, with white paint, in a satisfying matte evenness. Here, it resulted in something Harrow didn't even have words for, some utter unabashed mess. There was no separating out of the colours into sections, or attempt to gradate; a glance at the pots themselves confirmed that Gideon had probably gone about this by choosing at random what pot to dip her brush into next. It was a travesty, an assault on the senses.

She had to admit, it was very, very Gideon.

It looked an iota better bounded and contained by proper, tidy black. When she finished and put down the brush, leaning back to critically eye their combined handiwork, she noticed the look Gideon was giving her and despite herself blushed.

"You're terrible," she told Gideon, who then leaned in and kissed her full and luscious on the lips. Harrow's hands raised reflexively, but she did not touch her lover's cheeks: instead when Gideon pulled back she brought them to her own. In the mirror, she could see her mouth smeared with a rainbow.

"And horrid and shitty and yeah yeah, Nonagesimus, get something new to call me. Can I help get yours done?" She watched Harrow recoil and added patiently, "I'll stick with black and white for you, bone queen, can't go off-brand."

Harrow was objectively better at sacramental paint. She just was. Gideon had the proficiency of having been forced to get good enough at it that she didn't get whupped, but Harrow cared about the paint.

Still... still. Maybe it was that sense of symmetry at play again.

"I will do the outlines," she said, "you can help me fill them in." Gideon saluted, and with her own work finished, started cleaning her brush while Harrow began to set up her own paint.

 

The sound of the shuttle had changed, as they'd gotten close to the Sixth's installation: maybe a slowing or a change of direction, it was hard to tell and didn't really matter anyhow. Gideon had taken them into the cockpit for a little while to watch the autopilot do its work, but as they'd seen their ETA counter tick down into the single digits, they'd moved quietly together back out into the kitchenette.

They looked around as they moved through the space that had sheltered them for weeks upon weeks. It was no longer the sterile desert that they had stepped into: sure, the carpet was still noncommittal and the countertops were still drab, but the character of the space had subtly morphed. Gideon had moved the couch to get the light better; Harrow had been through the bookshelf time after time, disorganizing it and then organizing it again. The washroom was all used towels and soaps and lotions left out, especially messy post-paint, their favourite countertop left with brightly-coloured grease stains that made its plain grey surface opaline.

The bedroom was ruinous. Gideon carried a little rucksack of what few belongings they'd brought with them, but they'd not cleaned up any more than that. The cav bed, shattered and forgotten, still sat at the base of the larger bed they'd shared, which was frankly a gory mess after their last night's pleasures.

"Wow, we got some on the wall," Gideon marvelled, and she thought she could see Harrow smirk even as the necro tugged her along.

The kitchen sink was piled with their small stash of unwashed dishes, the half-eaten cake gracing the countertop amongst a few shavings of plex Gideon had neglected to clean up from her whittling. They had food in the refrigeration chest, the counters were unwiped, the dish towel damp. In the face of departure, of the whole assortment being seen by someone else, Gideon saw the mess a little more acutely — but she couldn't really bring herself to be embarrassed about it. Too many good days had been spent making that mess.

She cast an arm around Harrow's shoulders while the broad, heavy hum of the shuttle's engines shifted again, and got a lean-in for her troubles, got Harrow's head briefly against her shoulder. They both straightened again when a great clang shook the shuttle, the echo of it rattling their bones and their memories of disembarkment.

Gideon glanced at Harrow, who glanced back, and it was the necromancer's slim fingers that reached for Gideon's hand and curled around it. That sent a whole-ass feeling to ricochet around the internals of her heart, like docking clamps attaching in there, too, and she grinned a stupid grin down at Harrow.

"Nervous?" she whispered, feeling tension in Harrow's palm.

Harrow raised her chin, "never."

Change pressed them forward, as always it did. Whatever Harrow's bravado, Gideon could admit in the privacy of her heart that it scared her shitless, the end of this time together. That was a change she didn't want, even as she knew it had to happen. She didn't know if things would ever stop changing, or if that was good or bad: better than worse, maybe, so long as they could move through the never-ending river of change holding each other's hands.

The hiss of pressure equalization popped their ears just a little. The door that had remained closed all this time clicked, and clunked, and slid wide to light on the other side.

Light, and a figure that occupied a broad and familiar space, the muscled wiry shoulders held in a subtle tension, the shrink-wrapped topography of the face rounded only a little since last time they'd seen this body.

She felt Harrow go rigid beside her, and wished in knee-jerk impulse that she had a weapon, even if that was stupid and this was not her awful stony namesake but Pyrrha Dve. There was a too-casual aspect to the way she cocked her head and looked them over

"Hey, kiddies," she said. "Nice paint. Come on back, now, it's time to take you home."

Hand still held in hand, not even having to look at one another, they stepped forward and off the shuttle.

Notes:

Okay but genuinely, imagine the smell in a 600-square-foot apartment that two twenty-year-olds have been doing nothing but having sex and working out in for weeks and weeks. I promise you no one ever taught either of these ridiculous creatures how to do a deep clean.

Whewf.

I have loved this thing very much. It has been experimental and structurally messy, self-indulgent and self-referential, horny and weird, and (if I'm honest) has really reignited in me an enjoyment of the craft.

Everyone who's come along with me for this ride, thank you. Thank you, and I love you, and your engagement has meant everything. If no one had read this thing, I still would have been proud of it for the way I have enjoyed making it, but having others get something meaningful out of it has taken it to a whole new level for me. I don't write fanfiction, or rather, I haven't ever had the confidence to before, and I think I've been missing out.

On a less sappy note, I have about 2.5 scenes written for something that might come after this chronologically, a general outline of events, and a handful of character dynamics and themes that I SO want to explore. There's such limited time before Alecto comes out (maybe?! JEEZ Tamsyn, Tor, give us SOMETHING) that I'm leery of starting something that I may end up abandoning if Alecto makes this thing feel too obsolete, but... This has been a goddamn ride, and I wanna go again.

I don't know. Those of you better versed with fandom, do you still follow stories if they get made redundant by canon? Is it worth doing?

 

Thank you again, as always, and eternally, to my wife for reading and editing this, and cheering me on when I was struggling. I love you.