Chapter 1: been drowning in the shower tryna wash out the stain
Notes:
As a disclaimer, someone entirely losing their memories of their past is highly, highly improbable. Aside from the general premise, however, I've tried to include reasonably accurate (or at least minimally inaccurate) depictions of some of the relevant aspects of TBI recovery.
Anything that's inaccurate... well. She's lesbian Jesus. We can't expect her to have a typical recovery, can we?
Please make sure to check out the lovely artwork by the-purple-duck on tumblr at the end of chapter five :)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
You’re so still. You’re so quiet. You’ve never been this quiet in your life. If you pull through this, it would do you some good to hold onto some of that. It would do me some good, at least. For years I wished I could cancel my subscription to the Gideon Nav Reacts Livestream, but not like this. Not even I would wish this on you, though I know you’d find that hard to believe.
Sometimes it looks like you’re sleeping. Mostly it doesn’t, though.
I stop by for at least a little while nearly every day now. Everyone has said how important it is for your cognitive rehabilitation to have visitors and to keep talking to you, which is consistent with what the research I’ve read suggests as well. It’s on my way home from campus anyway.
I’ve taken it upon myself to compile a record of your days. The idea that so much time could pass, let alone the important decisions made on one’s behalf, without one’s awareness is horrifying, and this is the only solution I could think of to ameliorate that existential dread. It’s the least I can do, given the circumstances, and I’m already several days behind.
Most days I’m here before Pyrrha. She’s not done at work until later in the evening, so I’ve been coming after my afternoon classes and doing my own work largely from the armchair in the corner of your room to ensure you’re not alone longer than necessary. I suppose “alone” isn’t entirely correct, as there’s a near-constant stream of people in and out of your room: nursing staff, physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists, case manager. I’m stapling in your weekly schedule, which was initially a lot of evaluations and baseline measurements. I’ve added a table to the back of this notebook where I’ve been logging the date, time, type, and findings from each test for your eventual perusal. The color key is inside the back cover. Where possible, I’ve included reference values in the left hand margins. Once we have more repeated measurements, I’ll be able to chart them to show your trajectories.
All of the coming and going makes for a poor studying environment, but I have no right to complain. There have been unexpected perks, though. During your downtime and after your therapies are done for the day, I’ve been reading my notes out loud to you, which has the dual benefit of aiding my memory and providing auditory and linguistic stimulation for you. Aside from rote memorization, you’ve served well as a model for hand studies in particular. The lighting here is horrendous, but I won’t deny the convenience of having a model who so rarely moves.
Pyrrha was initially not so keen on my being here. I don’t blame her. Maybe you wouldn’t be so keen on my being here, and I wouldn’t blame you either. I am trying to make myself useful, but I do acknowledge that really anyone could log the daily happenings of a comatose patient, if they had the time or inclination. I have the inclination, and I’m finding the time. As soon as you’re able, the first words out of your mouth may very well be telling me to fuck off, at which point I’ll be gone with no objections. But not before.
You’ve started opening your eyes. The nurses were quick to assure us that you weren’t awake, not in the typical sense, which we were prepared for. We would have known, regardless. You’ll be pleased to hear that nearly everyone who’s come in while you’ve had your eyes open has commented on them. How unusual, how pretty. It’s understandable, but they never saw them before. The color hasn’t changed, still that bizarre amber, and neither has anything else. And yet, they’re not the same. No one who’d seen your eyes when you were truly awake behind them would think these were anything to write home about.
One of the nurses said something about it to your physical therapist earlier today; I believe the phrase she used was “liquid gold.” Pyrrha laughed when she heard that one. She said you’d be crushed to have missed all the pretty girls mooning over you. In an effort to objectively log all information relevant to your interests, as I have pledged, I am obligated to report that the nurse in question blushed at that statement… and that she was indeed quite pretty.
Camilla and Palamedes came by today, though they couldn’t stay for long. Palamedes was openly inquisitive about your recovery thus far, though I have no doubt he would have been even more so had propriety not held him back. I’m sure there’s a joke about taking the student out of the medical school that would work here.
Camilla returned your phone to Pyrrha. I didn’t know she had it. When Pyrrha asked, “You’re sure you got everything?” Camilla only mimed zipping her lips, for which she earned a hearty “Atta girl,” from Pyrrha.
I waited a moment, thinking more context would be provided, but none was brought forth, so I asked, “What do you mean by ‘got everything’?”
Pyrrha shrugged. “I went through her last few calls and texts to see where she might have been heading that night – obviously, since I called you – and to get some numbers to let people know. I don’t know if I’ll need anything else off it, but I don’t want to stumble across anything she wouldn’t want me to see so I put Cam on clean up duty. You know,” she continued, as though the implications had been lost on me, “texts from the weed man. Personal photos.”
That was not something I wished to dwell on. “That’s disgusting.”
“Not inherently, but I certainly don’t want to see them. But we can always trust Cam.” Pyrrha nudged Camilla with her shoulder, and for a second I actually thought she might smile.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she had everything she deleted backed up on an encrypted hard drive, ready to be returned to you upon coherence. Not that she’d ever divulge the existence of such files to us. I’ve yet to wring out of her what, exactly, her employment entails other than “data” and “software” and “security” so I’ve no doubt your distasteful secrets are safe with her, meticulously logged in a password protected spreadsheet.
Palamedes noticed all the materials piled next to my armchair. I’ve been leaving a lot of it here lately, as it’s not particularly efficient to keep hauling everything back and forth every day. He wanted to see what I’ve been working on. I hedged a bit and pulled up some classwork from last week. I am aware that he was hoping to paw through my sketchbooks again, not skim through lecture notes and diagrams, but the ones I have here are mostly warm-up drawings of you and I’ll be damned before I let Palamedes Sextus see me using your state for my own benefit. I never should have let him see those in the first place; nearly every time I’ve seen him since then he’s attempted to flatter me into giving him another look.
I’m sure they’ll be back for another visit before too long. I’m leaving myself a note to hide my sketchbook before they get here next time.
Your visual tracking has improved. It’s still a bit hit or miss, though. I’m not always sure if you’re actually watching, actually looking at me, or if I’m imagining things. Something’s sharper about your eyes these past few days though, like a fog is dissipating.
It’s still not consistent, but your therapists have been working on having you follow commands. They’re relatively small commands, asking you to look at certain things, to make small movements or gestures. They feel big, though. It’s a huge jump from where you were initially, and it’s evident how laborious it is for you. It takes some time for you to work up a response, and even during a good session we know we have only a limited time before you fade out again and need to rest.
You could’ve used this before the accident, to be honest. You never were very good at following directions.
Pyrrha finally cracked and said we had to do something about your hair. It’s been constantly in your eyes lately and your increasing capability for emoting has made us well aware that you find that to be irritating. She put it off until Saturday morning, thinking it would be better to try when you weren’t tired from therapies.
When I got here this morning, Pyrrha was ready to go with her little hairdressing kit and a plan of attack. Top priority was out of your eyes and off your neck, and then depending on how well you were tolerating it, she’d trim up the rest. I had anticipated that getting you upright and keeping you there could be a challenge, but it was your hands that ended up being the issue. You’re in a “grabby phase” per one of your therapists, but once I pulled a chair over to sit next to you and hold your hands, you seemed to settle down. Pyrrha worked at a steady pace, pausing to have me call your attention back each time you tried to turn and look at her.
“Feels kind of wrong, doesn’t it?” she said, catching a swath of that ridiculous red between her fingers and taking several big snips out of it. “To do this, when she doesn’t get a say? I don’t have any doubt that this is what she’d want, I wouldn’t do it otherwise, but…”
“But under typical circumstances it’d be a violation of her bodily autonomy to fuck around with her hair without her full knowledge or consent?” You had squeezed Pyrrha’s hand earlier when she asked if it was alright, but there was no way to know for certain how much you understood or even if that was truly meant as a response.
“Not particularly flattering phrasing, but yeah.” Pyrrha stowed her scissors in her back pocket for a moment to card her hand through your hair, shaking loose a shower of clippings. “It was either this or butterfly clips though, and I think we both know which she’d prefer.” She brushed her fingers across your cheeks, sweeping away the trimmings that had caught there. You blinked against the light touch and started to turn your head towards her.
“Hey, Gr- Gideon. Look at me.” As much as it pains me to forfeit your most detested sobriquet, I’ve made the decision to give up my “Griddle” habit. Hopefully this is a temporary arrangement, but I feel it’s best to be consistent with how the others address you so as not to introduce unnecessary confusion into your cognitive recovery. It’s been hard to fight the muscle memory, my mouth rounding out those two stupid syllables that you probably couldn’t even understand. When you were facing me again, I gave you two more: “Good job.” Perhaps you understood those.
“I haven’t done this for her since she was a kid. Not since she got too big and too cool for me, you know how it is.” Pyrrha resumed her work, brows furrowed in concentration. “Thank God she’s not doing the mullet anymore. I don’t think I could’ve brought myself to leave it alone, the Temptation would’ve been too great. Were you around for that?”
I shook my head. I’d been away for college then. “I saw, though. On Instagram.” Unfortunately.
She pointed the scissor blades at me, pinning me in place with her stare. “Okay, be honest: was that cool? Like, did you like it?”
“I wouldn’t presume to know anything about ‘cool,’ but…” I glanced at you, but your attention was fixated on our hands, which I was grateful for because it would have felt too much like kicking a puppy at that point. If you’re reading this though, you’re in a better headspace to receive information that could possibly hurt you. I looked back at Pyrrha and shook my head.
“See, I didn’t think so! Coronabeth said it was hot, and normally I’d trust her judgment with that kind of thing but… I dunno man, some trends should stay dead, that’s all I’m saying. I’d take her eyeliner phase over the mullet any day.”
This aspect of your relationship with Pyrrha has always baffled me. I have never been able to make sense of how she can express disapproval so bluntly and yet with so little venom. I suppose I’m not used to parents who have opinions rather than implied expectations.
She attempted to tip your head forward but you resisted. “Alright, we’ll make it work,” she mumbled, crouching a bit to trim along the back of your neck. I kept a hold of your hands as I slipped out of my seat and onto the floor, hoping you’d track my movement and tilt your head down. “A little better,” Pyrrha confirmed. “Thanks.” I could tell she was working faster, trying to take advantage of the opportunity while I had your full attention. If I’m lucky, you won’t remember the sight of me literally kneeling at your feet, but in honor of the promise I made when I embarked on this endeavor I am compelled to record it here. After a moment Pyrrha gave me a thumbs up and I got stiffly to my knees and shuffled back into the chair.
We could tell when you started losing patience: the muscles in your neck and shoulders were growing tense, your forehead was beginning to wrinkle. “I know, kiddo, I’m going as fast as I can,” Pyrrha murmured. You groaned in response. I chafed my thumb across the back of your hand; in hindsight I’m not sure if my intention was to soothe or to distract. In any case, if you had noticed the sensation, I couldn’t tell.
“We’re so close, gimme just one more second… Done!” Pyrrha stepped back, hands up as though she’d just beaten the buzzer on a game show.
It still took a moment to get you cleaned up, though it went faster once one of the nurses brought in a lint roller. I am continually impressed by their repertoire of solutions to problems I hadn’t even known existed. You were asleep almost immediately once you were back in bed, completely spent.
Softly, so as not to disturb you, Pyrrha ran her fingers through your hair, brushing it into place. “Not too bad, all things considered.” I agreed, and she lifted an eyebrow at me. “Want me to do yours, while I’ve got everything out?”
I shook my head. I still don’t know if she was joking or not.
I could not have anticipated this scenario in ten thousand years, but today you flipped off a nurse.
And then everyone clapped.
Really.
That’s “purposeful communication.” It wasn’t polite communication, but it was definitely purposeful. You were not interested in getting out of bed for your therapies, and you let her know. It’s good to see some of your personality coming through; manners have never been your strong suit anyway, so you’re one step closer to getting back to the old Griddle.
In all seriousness though, it was encouraging to see. This is the first time you’ve spontaneously communicated, though, rather than simply indicating a response. Even after Pyrrha finally stopped laughing, she was still wiping at her eyes. I pretended not to notice. They said it would be like this, with progress in unpredictable jumps and spurts, but it’s been a surprise as to exactly what form those jumps and spurts might take.
You’ll think it’s hilarious when you hear. I’m making a note to remind my future self that when future Griddle is obnoxiously amused by this anecdote, there was a time when we were actually grateful for this.
We can nearly always get a verbal “yes” or “no” from you these days, and a few other things besides. You’re initiating those interactions more often as well. It’s not always immediately apparent to me what you’re trying to communicate, but it is always immediately apparent when you’re getting frustrated with me because of that.
One of the first things they told us when you were admitted here was to always announce ourselves, to say who it was coming and going from your room. Even when you appeared fully unconscious, we could never be sure exactly how aware you were and that letting you know who was nearby would help to lessen anxiety and orient you to your surroundings. You recognize our names, and the names of some of your therapists and nurses. You’ll look at or point towards us when we’re referred to by name, so I had anticipated that you were close to beginning to verbalize them.
Pyrrha had gotten done at work earlier than usual and made it here in time for the end of one of your speech therapy sessions. When your therapist asked you to tell her who had just gotten here, it wasn’t necessarily a surprise that you gave an answer. But it was a surprise that your answer was, “Mom.”
I have never seen Pyrrha freeze like that. She had just set down her bag and was pulling off her jacket when you stopped her in her tracks. It had slipped halfway down her arms before she got her wits about her to respond. “Yeah,” she said, “It’s good to see you, kiddo.” Her voice was casual as she leaned down to press a kiss to the top of your head, but when she turned to hang her coat up, she was blinking hard.
Even when we were kids, it was always just “Pyrrha.” She didn’t even like us calling her Ms. Dve, back when she would chaperone our elementary school field trips. She’d wrinkle her nose and tell us to “save it for the adults who actually deserve some respect.” I avoided calling her anything, a compromise between the obedience and deference towards adults that had been drilled into me by my parents. I’ve never heard you call her anything but Pyrrha, and certainly never “Mom.” Until today.
Everyone in town knows. Or rather, we know enough. It’s never been a secret. We know Pyrrha and your biological mother had a… tempestuous relationship, that she disappeared and when she turned up again later, she had you with her. To hear my parents talk, we know that Pyrrha should have known better than to take her back, and we sure saw it coming when she dropped off again, leaving her kid behind and saddling Pyrrha with you forever. But I’m no stranger to the rumor mill. I can only guess what they say about my parents. About me. You could probably tell me though, couldn’t you? If only you’d get a move on with the speech therapy.
You dozed a bit after your therapies wrapped up. I got some work done, and Pyrrha was in and out, taking phone calls in the hallway, talking with your case manager, a million little logistics to sort out. There has been so much more red tape to all of this than I ever could have imagined, and that domain is one where I am of no use to anyone. I was reluctant to leave you before she returned, but I’d left a textbook at home and I needed it for an assignment due tonight.
I had only taken a few steps out of the main hospital doors when I heard Pyrrha call my name.
“Harrow?” She was leaning against the brick of the building a ways down from the door. She dropped the butt of a cigarette onto the pavement and ground it out beneath her heel; by the time I made it over to her, she was propping a fresh cigarette between her lips. She held the carton out to me inquiringly as she fumbled through her pockets for a lighter.
I shook my head, which earned me a small laugh from her. “Smart girl,” she said around the cigarette. “Don’t be like me.” I waited as she lit the cigarette and took a deep drag; smoking was almost certainly prohibited this close to the hospital entrance. Her long, slow exhale did nothing for the tension coiled tightly along her shoulders.
She squinted out into the evening, scanning the parking lot as if she were waiting for a car to pull up and collect her. “Do they call me that?” She glanced back towards me for just a second before taking another drag on the cigarette. “Her nurses and stuff, I mean. Do they refer to me as her mom? That’s where she got that?”
“Not that I’ve heard…” I shifted the straps of my tote bag over my shoulder, absolutely unprepared to have this conversation and fundamentally unequipped to manage the implications it conveyed.
“And you don’t call me that.” Her eyes flicked back to me, their green taking on some of the gold of the sunset. “Right?”
“Right.” I couldn’t tell what response she was hoping for more.
She nodded slowly, scanning the horizon once more. “Right… yeah.” That thought was going to end up polished smooth if she kept turning it over in her mind like that.
I mumbled a goodbye and set off towards my car.
“Hey, Harrow?” she called again. I turned around, and she looked at me for a long moment before raising her cigarette in a small salute. “Drive safe.”
You don’t remember it. They told us you likely wouldn’t remember the accident, and you don’t. Everyday recently, you’ve asked both me and Pyrrha what happened multiple times, and we tell you. In broad terms, at least, which is what they’ve advised us to do. You were in a car accident, you hit your head very hard and had some other injuries, you’re here in the hospital to get better.
It’s not just your memories of the past, though. Your ability to develop new memories has also been impacted, hence the repetitive questioning. This should improve as your recovery progresses, hopefully quite rapidly at first, though it may be years before it’s back to your baseline, if it ever gets there.
You’re often fairly disoriented, which is more apparent as your verbal communication improves. You sometimes say things that aren’t true. It’s not lying, per se; your brain is desperately trying to make sense of the gaps in your memories, to provide its own structure for an experience that is existentially nonsensical. When asked what you did earlier in the day, for example, you’ve been saying you went to work, though you haven’t been able to specify where “work” is or what you do there. We’ve been told to gently redirect you, so my response has generally been that no, you didn’t go in to the garage today. I leave out the part where you haven’t been to work in weeks. I leave out the part where you won’t be going back for the foreseeable future.
Pyrrha’s been constantly in meetings and on the phone, making arrangements for your eventual discharge. She’s taking on extra hours at work too, so that she can take time off when you go home. This might be a good time to mention that you’ll be moving back in with her for the time being. Her lawyer friend talked to your landlord and wrangled some sort of deal to get you out of your lease. With the cognitive effects of these kinds of injuries, living alone won’t be safe for you by the time you’re discharged. Pyrrha’s been packing your things up in increments; Camilla and Palamedes have been helping, and Coronabeth’s been over a few times as well. I’ve offered, but Pyrrha hasn’t taken me up on it. I’ve only heard about their little packing parties after the fact.
That’s fine. I get it. I wouldn’t want me rifling through your shit either. Besides, there seems to be a large emphasis on pizza and beer on those evenings, and neither of those things hold any interest for me.
Ever since the rec therapist set you up with an Xbox in your room, we can hardly get you off of it. Or maybe it’s not an Xbox, maybe it’s a PlayStation. I don’t know. It’s not Mario, which is the only video game I can reliably identify. It’s supposed to be good for your fine motor control and a whole host of cognitive skills, but right now it feels like the main function is to provide enough noise to prevent me from hearing myself think.
Pyrrha must have had her phone set to vibrate; when she managed to get your attention to pause your game, she held the screen out to show you a string of text messages. “Do you want visitors today?”
“Yeah,” you said immediately.
“Let me rephrase,” she said, her voice measured and even. “Are you feeling up to having visitors today?”
“Yes,” you reiterated. The impatience in your voice was so heavy that it was nearly tangible. You’d woken up this morning with a headache and had been snappish with everyone since. My observation that staring at a screen with rapidly moving images was perhaps counterproductive to headache amelioration had not been well received. Your moods turn on a dime these days, frustration flaring at the slightest provocation while your emotion regulation systems work their way back online. “My head is fine.”
Pyrrha opened her mouth to respond, presumably to tell you that your head was not “fine” in any sense of the word, but thought better of pushing the issue and turned back to her phone to tap out a response. “Are you going to want to change clothes before Cam and Pal get here?”
“I’m fine, Pyrrha.” You turned your game back on and slouched back against the raised head of your hospital bed. Pyrrha sighed before disappearing into the bathroom. Your clothes were technically fine and you would have just changed into a different iteration of the same outfit anyway - loose basketball shorts that fit over the bulky brace on your left knee and a tee shirt with the hospital’s logo on the chest - but they were rumpled from having been slept in the night before.
She returned with a comb and a package of face wipes that she set on the bedside table. You shot her a dark look, but she held up her hand to stop you. “They’re just there if you decide you want them.”
You grumbled but returned to your game. You weren’t making much progress though, as you kept losing points (lives? something?) when you got distracted asking us when they would be here. After about the sixth time, I got up and wrote “3:00” on your whiteboard, directly underneath the digital clock on the wall so that you could easily compare the two times. I said a small prayer that I would not have to manage the inevitable barrage of questions if they were late.
By the time they arrived (a few minutes early, to my relief), you had decided you did actually want to wash your face and comb your hair into some semblance of order. I had even remembered to stash my sketchbook deep within my bag ahead of time, avoiding a last minute scramble to hide it from Palamedes’s prying eyes.
Palamedes had brought a vase of garishly dyed rainbow carnations. “These,” he said as he set them on your table, “are from Dulcie.”
You looked from the flowers to Pyrrha and back to Palamedes. “Okay,” you said flatly, as if you were awaiting some further explanation.
Pyrrha cleared her throat. “Tell her thank you for us. Right, Gid?” You nodded. “Okay, pop quiz time. For 500: what are the names of your two visitors?”
“Camilla,” you said confidently, “and Friend.”
The corner of Camilla’s mouth twitched, but Palamedes only gave a half shrug in resignation. “Assigned supporting cast at hospital, I suppose.”
“One more try.” Pyrrha cued, “It starts with a P.”
You looked over at me, brows drawn together in confusion. You looked back at Pyrrha when you realized I wasn’t letting slip any hints. Letting you work through these small challenges gave you a chance to practice cognitive strategies you’d been working on in your therapies. Coming up with nothing new, you slowly repeated, “Friend?” as though this should be obvious to us.
Camilla’s lips briefly pressed into a thin line before she asked in a cautious voice, “Gideon… are you referring to our dear pal, Friend-amedes?”
“Yes!” You sank back against your bed in relief. Camilla, though, had slapped a hand over her mouth and pivoted to face the wall, shoulders trembling with the force of holding back her laughter.
(“Can’t believe that’s what broke her, of all things,” Pyrrha whispered to me as she watched Camilla’s silhouette battle for composure.)
“The human brain truly is a marvel,” Palamedes conceded. “You were incredibly close semantically, if not phonetically. I’ll be the first to admit ‘Palamedes’ is a tough one.” He repeated his given name a few more times for you to echo, reaching out for a high five once you’d gotten it down.
Having regained her composure, Camilla lifted the strap of her cross-body bag over her head and pulled out a tablet as though nothing had happened. “Dulcie’s back home and asked if we’d give her a call while we were here.”
“Back home from where?” you asked.
“She was in the hospital like you for a little bit,” said Palamedes. “Just routine stuff,” he added at Pyrrha’s concerned look.
You agreed to take the call, and they spent the next few minutes preparing with the precision of seasoned Broadway stagehands. The tray table was swung over your bed, tablet propped in its case and angle adjusted. Palamedes settled his spindly frame next to you on the bed - on your right, to avoid jostling your bad knee - and Camilla leaned against the safety rails of your bed to perch over his shoulder. Palamedes attempted to wave me over, intent on having me join the cramped tableau, but I declined and instead tucked my legs under me, pressing deeper into the back of the recliner. He hit me with his best Irritated Wife look, but proceeded with pulling up the Facetime call.
I couldn’t see the screen from where I was sitting, but I could tell when Dulcinea picked up by the way both Palamedes and Camilla’s faces softened. “Oh, Gideon! Hi!” She sounded slightly out of breath, but even that couldn’t hide the excitement in her voice.
“Hi,” you repeated, again sounding as though you were expecting something more.
“You’re looking much better than I expected, to be completely honest. How are you feeling?”
“My head hurts,” you said flatly. (“I knew it,” Pyrrha hissed.)
“I bet. I heard you had quite the accident.”
“I guess.” Before Dulcie could respond, you turned to Palamedes and asked, “Is she one of my friends?”
The pause that followed lingered for a moment too long. Pyrrha and I glanced at each other, a furrow forming between her brows. “Yes-” Palamedes started to say as Dulcie jumped in, already smoothing things over. “I’m so sorry, I should have, um, I should have introduced myself. It’s Dulcie. Dulcinea. We haven’t talked in a while and I know you’ve had a hard time with your memory lately, I should’ve said right away. I’m friends with Camilla and Palamedes, that’s how we know each other.”
I cleared my throat. “She’s also Palamedes’s girlfriend,” I added, remembering an offhand comment Palamedes made once regarding the flame you briefly carried for her when you initially met. Per Camilla, that was quashed somewhere between marathoning schlocky horror movies and collaborating on inflammatory comments to post on Reddit advice forums. With your currently limited capacity for impulse control, I thought it better to head that off from the start.
“Well, yes, that too, but that seems sort of secondary. Was that Harrow?” Palamedes picked up the tablet and held it out to face me, seemingly determined to use the full lank of his lanky arms to extend the screen closer to me. I raised a hand in greeting. She waved back. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Well,” I said, “here I am.” I have never been entirely comfortable with video calls, to say nothing of video calls facilitated by Palamedes stretched out over your lap in a futile effort to not have me shouting across the room.
“Harrowhark has been here almost every day,” Palamedes said lightly as he returned the tablet to its original position.
“Really? That’s… kind of her.” Dulcie’s efforts to mask the shock in her voice were unnecessary but impressive. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do the same in her place.
Pyrrha popped her head into the camera’s view momentarily. “Pyrrha’s here too. You feeling better?”
“Not really, but life goes on!” Dulcie chirped.
Pyrrha laughed. “Ain’t that the truth? Gid, tell her what they said yesterday after PT.”
“I don’t remember,” you said quickly. This has been your go-to answer lately. While your memory for recent events is still spotty, it seems that oftentimes when you say this it’s less that you don’t remember and more that concentrating is difficult and you impulsively blurt out that you can’t rather than pausing to allow yourself the opportunity.
“Let’s give it a shot anyway,” Pyrrha prompted. “They told you something about your goals.”
“Oh! They’re increasing my goals for physical therapy.”
“Because…?”
“Because I’m doing really good and making progress faster than they expected.”
I couldn’t see the screen, but from the squeal Dulcie let out I assumed she was bouncing in her seat with delight. Palamedes nudged your shoulder affectionately with his and Camilla reached around him for a fist bump, which you gladly returned.
Everyone has been truly impressed with how far you’ve come. Your knee seems to be the limiting factor at this point, only because it’s healing at the expected rate rather than the accelerated timeline the rest of your body is apparently on. From what I’ve heard, it’s been enormously helpful that you were so physically fit prior to the accident. Of course there’s been some degree of deconditioning, even I can see that you’ve grown thinner, but even so your level of stamina and retention of muscle tone has put you at an advantage. You’ve been able to compensate for quite a lot with your upper body strength.
You had such a big grin on your face as they showered you with praise and congratulations. You hadn’t smiled like that since… I’m not actually sure. Since before the accident at least. Certainly not that night.
It was a relief I didn’t deserve, to know that I hadn’t been able to take that from you.
Camilla and Palamedes visited again today. They brought Coronabeth as well, which, in hindsight, was the first horseman.
Pyrrha said later that if she had known Corona was coming, she would have talked to you first. I’m doubtful that it would have stuck; the impulsivity, the social disinhibition… It's completely typical after a brain injury. Expected, even. I could say today was like watching a car crash in slow motion, but I think once was enough.
When Coronabeth Tridentarius enters a room, everyone notices. And you… you were noticing.
“We ran into each other when we stopped for coffee,” Palamedes explained helplessly.
“Careful, please.” I wasn’t entirely sure who Pyrrha was directing her warning towards; Corona had bounded over to envelop you in her arms, but you were certainly reciprocating.
Corona pulled back but left her hands on your shoulders as she perched on the edge of your bed. “How are you doing?” she asked, her violet eyes sweeping over you.
“Really good,” you said eagerly. “So good.” Credit where credit is due: you were clearly putting in a great deal of effort to maintain eye contact with her rather than looking… elsewhere. You weren’t entirely succeeding, but you were trying, and therefore no one could criticize you.
“I hope they’re taking good care of you here.” You nodded enthusiastically, and Corona laughed lightly. “Everyone being nice to you? No rude nurses I need to take care of?”
I rolled my eyes. There are a few we don’t like, but I do my best to keep an eye out during their shifts. Most of the staff here would bend over backwards for you, though. You’ve thrown yourself into therapies, to the delight of all your therapists. I’ve seen them with some of the other patients, the ways they find to eke motivation and effort out of them, things they never have to do with you. For them, the worst part is probably just trying to keep up with you. A lot of the nurses spend more time than strictly necessary hanging around your room, especially when you’re in a good mood. And when you’re not, everyone wants to make things better. You have that effect on people.
“Everyone’s really nice, except a lot of them think Harrow’s scary.” That got a great honking snort out of Corona.
“Well, she’s always been a little intense.” I could tell by the way Camilla and Pyrrha looked at each other, and by the way Palamedes seemed ready to jump between Corona and me, that they expected me to take offense to that. It’s a true statement, though. No one could accuse me of doing things halfway and I refuse to feel ashamed of that.
You sighed. “Yeah, but I wish they liked her more.” Corona’s face softened but that didn’t hide the confusion in her eyes when she glanced over towards me. I don’t know how anyone else reacted. That comment did shame me, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at anyone else.
Corona hesitated, casting about for a new subject. She reached out to tap her well-manicured nails lightly against the brace on your knee. “So when does this guy get to come off?”
You looked over at Pyrrha, who made an equivocal gesture with her hand. “They’re planning to re-evaluate next week, but she’ll just switch to a different brace for now.” You scowled. “I know. But probably fewer restrictions once you’re out of this one.”
“Wait…” You turned back to Coronabeth. “How do you know Harrow?”
Corona tilted her head, giving the impression of a golden retriever puppy who’s just heard a noise it doesn’t understand. “What do you mean?”
“You said she’s always been intense. Do you know her from somewhere?”
There was a brief flash in time where everyone’s uncomprehending concern hung heavy in the air. And then all at once, it came crashing down as we each realized what you were asking.
“I know her the same way you do,” Corona said slowly.
“From the hospital? You just got here, though.” You looked over at me like we were playing a trick on you. I wish we were playing a trick on you. I so badly wish this was an atrociously nasty Harrowhark Nonagesimus trick, just one more in a long line of spectacularly awful things we’ve done to each other.
“Gideon…” I began, unsure of how to move forward in light of what I suspected. Camilla had gone still except for her eyes as she followed the conversation. “Corona and I went to school with you. And Corona’s sister. We all grew up together.”
“I don’t think so,” you said, as though this were an urban legend and you were skeptical of the plausibility. You looked at Pyrrha, trusting her to set the record straight.
She nodded in confirmation. “You’ve known Corona since you guys were little, and Ianthe. And Harrow, too.” Pyrrha cleared her throat awkwardly. “You know what, actually? It’s okay, we can talk about it later.”
But you wouldn’t let it go. “There’s no way,” you insisted. “I would remember if we’d met before. There’s no way I would forget a rack like that.”
“Gideon!” I yelped. Pyrrha was simultaneously sputtering, “I’m so sorry, it’s just– you know, with the brain injury. Her filter, it’s not, ah, we’re still working on that.”
Somehow, above all this, I caught Camilla’s low murmur: “They might have to build that one from scratch.”
“It’s fine,” Corona reassured Pyrrha. “Really. I mean, I know Gideon,” here she gave a bit of an apologetic half shrug in your direction, “and I know she wouldn’t normally… Well, actually, I was about to say I know she wouldn’t normally say something like that but that’s not entirely true. I know she wouldn’t mean anything by it though.”
“I’m right here,” you growled.
Coronabeth swept you back up in her violet gaze. “I know you are, I’m so sorry. I should go, this is clearly… a lot for you.” She gave your good knee an affectionate squeeze, ignoring your protestations that she’d just gotten here. “It was good to see you though. Really.”
Palamedes caught Corona by the elbow as she left, no doubt giving her a rundown on all the neurobabble your doctors had relayed to us. Camilla followed behind after shooting us an apologetic glance and promising to talk to us later.
The room was perfectly silent: Pyrrha standing at the foot of your bed, me in my usual armchair. That is, until you opened your mouth.
“Well now what?” you demanded angrily.
“I don’t know,” Pyrrha said blankly. “I don’t know.”
Gideon, you have to believe me: we didn’t realize how bad it was until today. Even once you were more responsive, you were pretty inconsistently oriented so it was hard to tell what you remembered and what you didn’t, and it wasn’t always clear if something was a memory issue or a language issue. We knew you didn’t remember the accident.
When you didn’t remember Dulcie, we were all concerned, but you also haven’t known her as long. Palamedes had pulled me aside afterwards to ask if I thought being on Facetime was disorienting for you – I wasn’t sure, possibly – and you’d had such a headache, which always made things worse.
We thought you knew who I was. From before, I mean. But it looks like you knew me because I’ve been here nearly every day since you can remember, which is admittedly not that far back. Camilla and Palamedes had likewise been visiting regularly, though obviously not as often, and in hindsight you probably heard Pyrrha and me talking about the two of them quite a bit.
You knew Pyrrha, obviously, even if you didn’t remember specifics. But you don’t need to remember her to know her. Some relationships transcend memory.
It took Corona’s visit for us to see what was happening, without those other confounding variables. I’d never brought up anything from high school – why would I? That’s the whole reason you’re in this mess, if we’re really going to trace it all back to the source. It would only have upset you, provided you actually remembered.
As I sit here combing back over so many conversations over the past several weeks, there are perhaps a few times that might have tipped us off, but you were so compliant and agreeable. In hindsight, it wasn’t so much that you were “agreeable” as much as it was that you accepted what we told you without question. When Pyrrha said you wouldn’t be going back to work any time soon, for example, you’d shrugged it off and said that was fine. In the moment, we were so busy being relieved that that news didn’t trigger a meltdown that it didn’t even occur to us to be concerned. We thought you could see why it wouldn’t be safe for you (or anyone else on the road) to be working on engines and transmissions. But of course you didn’t mind not going back to a job that you didn’t remember, that you didn’t know you loved. You had no idea what Pyrrha was talking about, you just trusted her to be taking care of everything.
Pyrrha realized this evening that you don’t remember Nona. That was a tough one for her.
They’ve reiterated so many times that the recovery process is different for everyone, that the human brain is finicky and unpredictable. Pyrrha got that whole song and dance again when she talked to the nurses; they said it’s not unusual to have some degree of amnesia after a traumatic brain injury, and that it’s usually not permanent. But I saw the concern in their eyes as they said they’d put in a message to neuropsych. I’m no doctor, but I know my way around a medical textbook. I’ve done my reading, pored through every journal article Palamedes forwarded me. And it’s awfully late in the game for you to still be experiencing this degree of memory loss.
I had started out this record with the intention of giving it to you upon your recovery. It was meant to be my penance for everything the night of your accident. But Gideon, if this is permanent, if you truly don’t remember anything from before the accident… God, I can’t ever let you see this. You can’t know. Your world is so small right now; I’m not only one of the people closest to you, I’m one of the only people you actually know. I can only imagine how it would devastate you to find out that this entire thing is my fault, to live with the knowledge that this was entirely avoidable if I hadn’t been so fixated on getting in another little dig at you.
I’m already responsible for you losing your past. I won’t be responsible for ruining your future too.
“Tell me something about us from when we were kids.”
I looked up from my sketchbook. I was mapping out the anatomy of the knee joint for an assignment – your knee, technically, given that I was referencing a printout of one of your X-rays. You were in the midst of assembling what looked like some sort of popsicle stick model, but I couldn’t see the packaging of the kit to see what it was meant to become. You’ve finally accepted that limiting the time you spend searing your eyeballs on screens limits the amount of time you spend laid up with headaches and eyestrain, and have instead thrown yourself into becoming, quote: “An Arts and Crafts Bitch.”
“Like what?” I was struggling to think of any acceptable shared childhood memories, and I certainly wasn’t going to find one without a more specific prompt.
“I don’t know. What about Corona? And this sister I haven’t met. What kind of stuff did we do together?” You grimaced as you attempted to force two model pieces to slot together.
“You’re going to break those if you keep pushing that hard. And I don’t know, we didn’t really do things all together. You and Coronabeth were on some of the same sports teams, and Ianthe and I were… friends.” I do wish there was a more suitable word in the English language than “friends”.
“What about us?” One of the wooden pieces in your hands gave an ominous creak and I shot you a warning glance. You slowed and twisted the pieces just slightly, easing them into place. Satisfied, you looked back at me and I realized you weren’t going to let me out of answering this one.
After far too long, I said, “We didn’t really get along.” This wasn’t false, but it was inaccurate by several degrees of magnitude.
Your eyebrows drew together in a look of consternation usually reserved for popsicle sticks. “Why not?”
“Because you were an obnoxious, loudmouth jock and I was a nerdy, goth art kid? I don’t know, Gideon. We were just stupid kids, always getting on each others’ nerves.” This had been true, at first.
“So when did we get to be friends, then?”
“We didn’t, really.”
“But you’ve been here this whole time. So… what the fuck, basically.”
I worried the inside of my cheek between my teeth. I’d been waiting for this to come up; you weren’t the first to ask. The first was Pyrrha, firmly saying that I didn’t need to keep visiting, relenting only after several consecutive days of passing me by in the common area.
Then it had been Palamedes, plucking at my sleeve to pull me out into the hallway the first time he and Camilla had visited; you hadn’t been responsive at that point yet. We’d stared at each other for a long, silent moment before he caved.
“Forgive me for being blunt, but why are you here?” he asked.
I crossed my arms over my chest, pulling my sweater in closer around me. “She was on her way to my house,” I said plainly.
“That’s what Pyrrha said. So what? You cut her brake lines or something this time?”
“Of course not,” I said. I haven’t touched your car in years. Also, I don’t know what brake lines look like.
“And yet you hold yourself responsible for this.” A statement, not a question. When I didn’t respond, he pressed, “Explain it to me like I’m five.”
My face burned with shame, and I was glad of the hideous fluorescent lighting in the hallway for once. “She was driving to my house because she couldn’t find her sunglasses and she thought I took them.”
He took his own glasses off to scrub his hand across his face. “You’re an incredibly intelligent young woman, Harrowhark. Please don’t make me explain cause and effect to you.” If only we could’ve gotten that lecture at sixteen. “Unless there’s more to this than what you’re telling me.”
There’s always been more to us, Gideon – more than I could have told him even if I wanted to, and I very nearly wanted to. That crystalline gray gaze may as well have been a searchlight for how exposed I felt beneath it. He hadn’t put his glasses back on, leaving me bereft of even that paltry glass buffer. I looked away first.
“It feels like the right thing to do,” I said haltingly, the only thing I could bring myself to say.
At this he did put his glasses back on, and he took a step closer. “Harrow…” He extended an arm towards me, his hand stopping just short of my shoulder. “Can I?”
I shook my head. “I’m fine.”
When I looked up at him, his eyes had lost some of their flintiness. “You know, I’ve actually been known to offer hugs to friends even when they’re fine.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Sometimes I even ask because I’m the one that wants it,” he said. His brows were drawn together in a way I’d never seen them before. “She’s my friend too.”
Fuck. I steeled myself. “Fine.” He gave me a small, sad smile before pulling me against him. (It wasn’t until later that I would begin to contemplate his specific use of “too” here.)
I set my arms around his waist; he’d completely wrapped his around my shoulders. He was tall enough that he had to lean down a bit to do so, and my spine protested mildly at the unintentional backbend this had forced me into. I could tell he was being careful, though, still trying not to overwhelm me despite the fact that he was the one who was meant to be being comforted. I know he’d have pulled anyone else off their feet, buried his face into their shoulder. Not with me though. I’ve never been any comfort to anyone.
You used to know that.
But now you were looking at me with wide golden eyes, far too trusting. If I couldn’t explain to Palamedes everything there was between us, how on earth was I supposed to explain it to you?
What I went with was: “It took a coma to do it, but you grew on me once I got the chance to spend some time with you when you weren’t running your mouth.”
“Ha ha,” you deadpanned, yet again attempting to jam a new pair of the wooden model pieces together. “But you must’ve had a reason to visit in the first place. Gloating at my insensate form?”
I winced. That would have been a pretty reasonable conjecture if you had any sense of what to base it on, and you weren’t even being serious about it. In the end, it was easier to say it to you than Palamedes. I don’t like what that says about me.
“I just felt bad. You’d been on your way to my place to look for something you thought I took, and I felt like checking in on you was the least I could do. No matter how annoying you were in high school.”
You paused your war on particle board to shoot me a withering glance. “It’s not like it was your fault.” That you knew of. “What about now?”
“What about now what?”
“Are we friends now?”
If the word “friends” was inadequate for my relationship with Ianthe, it was completely ineffectual in describing our ties to each other. I turned it back on you. “Do you want to be friends now?”
You didn’t hesitate. “Yeah.” I should have pressed you, reminded you that this isn’t what you would have wanted, but… I didn’t want to. And then you yelped in surprise when one of the model pieces in your hands snapped with a pop and the moment was gone.
“Give it here,” I sighed, leaning across to your bed, hand outstretched. “There’s glue somewhere in one of these baskets over by me.” You dumped the pieces unceremoniously into my palm and glared at the rest of the intact components scattered across your table.
I hefted one of the tote baskets with your craft supplies into my lap, rummaging around until I found a tube of glue. “Can you keep working on a different part, or is this piece load-bearing? The glue probably won’t be sturdy until tomorrow.”
You shrugged and pawed through the jumble of little wooden fragments. “I’d have to look at the instructions.”
“Are you… not using the instructions to build this… contraption?” You shook your head, confirming the reason that I had not been able to parse what the model was meant to be. “What exactly is your strategy here?”
“Just looking at it, I guess.”
This wasn’t entirely surprising. One might have chalked it up to your as-yet-recovering cognitive skills and impaired problem-solving abilities, but you’ve always been good with your hands. Anything you could visually inspect and physically take apart, you could eventually put back together. In theory, that is. From what I could see, it didn’t look like you were fully ready to rely on that particular tactic again yet.
I untangled my legs from under myself and stood to take the pieces to the window sill in hopes that the sun would speed the drying along. Crumpled tissues propped them up so that they wouldn’t stick to the sill, and I skimmed away a line of excess glue from the seam of the broken edges with my thumbnail.
When I came back, you were craning your neck to get a look at my sketchbook where I’d left it sitting open. “Can I see your drawing?”
“I suppose.” I handed you the pad of thick paper and leaned my elbows on the railing of your bed so that I could see over your shoulder.
You traced your broad index finger down the line of the femur. “Is this me?”
“Minus some hardware, but yes.”
“You should add it in.” The pads of your fingers ghosted across where the screws and plates now resided in your flesh and blood counterpart.
“Why?” I shifted my gaze to your face, watching as you beheld yourself translated by my hand.
You shrugged. “It’s just part of me now.”
You officially have a discharge date. It’s still somewhat tentative, but as of now almost all of your therapies are focusing not on making progress, but on getting you ready to function at home.
Somehow, Pyrrha seems more stressed now than I’ve seen her thus far. She took a few days off work to be here during the day so that she can be trained on how to assist you at home. I’ve been doing a small amount of training as well. Pyrrha had protested at first, but in the end it was the most practical solution; having me around vastly increases her flexibility with work and other responsibilities. She has some time off remaining that she can use to stay home with you at first, but longer term, I’ll come over most mornings to stay with you until I have to head to campus for classes.
“I mean, if I have to have a babysitter then I’m fine with it being Harrow,” you had said when we first proposed this to you. (“Or maybe that Coronabeth…” you’d added wistfully, but Pyrrha had shut that one down quick for a variety of reasons.)
We have reiterated several times that you don’t need a babysitter, it’s just supervision as a safety net and it’s not forever. Part of this is cognitive; lapses in memory and attention happen to everyone occasionally, but right now you need a little extra support with it happening more frequently. Compounding that, your reaction time and judgment aren’t yet back to baseline – if you forget to turn off the stove and something catches fire, for example, how quickly and effectively can you get a plan together and put it out? Part of it, though, is physical. Impaired balance plus a recent major knee surgery is not exactly a winning combination. It’d be so easy for you to slip in the bath or lean a little too far off the couch and end up lying there until Pyrrha gets home in the evening. And if you hit your head again at this point… that’s a much bigger problem than you lying on the floor with a re-fractured leg.
Camilla and Palamedes stopped by today, so you got to tell them the news. Palamedes threw his arms out to his sides and whooped before catching you up in a tight embrace. Camilla was ecstatic as well; I could tell because both corners of her mouth turned upwards when she heard.
They called Dulcie to let you tell her – she probably knew better than any of us how having a date to look forward to was both a relief and renewed pressure. We all held our breaths for a moment, but you recognized her this time. She was, of course, thrilled to hear.
After hanging up, Pyrrha recruited Camilla and Palamedes to help us carry some things to her car. The amount of stuff you’ve accumulated in your room over the past several weeks is frankly startling; I hadn’t noticed just how much of it there was until I looked around and thought about how we would get it all back to Pyrrha’s place.
A lot of it had been sent to you by friends and acquaintances, people from your work and Pyrrha’s: flowers, cards you’d tacked up on your walls, a cluster of balloons in one corner. Those aren’t so much of a concern – flowers don’t live forever and balloons deflate after a while. But there were also the things that had either migrated from your apartment and Pyrrha’s place to your hospital room or been newly acquired. Extra blankets, stacks of fresh tee shirts and clothes, the mountain of crafting accoutrements that steadfastly refused to be contained by boxes and baskets and bins. Certainly more than one carload, hence she’d spent the afternoon setting aside anything you didn’t think you’d need in the immediate future to take back with her tonight.
One of the nurses was at your bedside for a vitals check when we traipsed back in from the parking lot. She had a digital thermometer at your temple but smiled at us once it beeped and she’d taken down the reading.
“I thought I saw your boyfriend in the hallway earlier! I didn’t realize everyone was still here.”
“Him?” you asked, incredulous. Pyrrha snorted.
The nurse glanced around at us, clearly sensing she’d made a mistake. Camilla was watching Palamedes intently, as though waiting to see what sort of tall tale a small child might come up with to explain who had been fingerpainting on the walls. Palamedes, for his part, only cringed a little, which was quite an impressive feat.
“I’m sorry, are you two not…?”
“Nooooo,” you said firmly. After a second you looked at Palamedes for confirmation. “Right?”
He nodded resolutely. “That is correct. Anyone would be lucky to have you, Gideon, but I would certainly be doing you a disservice in that role.”
“Right, like I’m not even…” you paused before slowly looking to Pyrrha, brows drawn together in concern. “I mean, I’m not, right?”
She shot you a withering look. “I’m not even gonna dignify that with a response. You’d have to hit your head harder than that.”
Your look of relief was made all the more comical contrasted against the nurse’s pink cheeked expression of suppressed embarrassment. Everyone politely waited until we could hear her computer cart wheels had made it farther down the hallway to comment further.
“I think Dulcie would share if you asked politely,” Camilla said mildly.
“That is generous but unnecessary, given that I’m not going to ask politely,” you responded, slightly less mildly.
Camilla considered this and mused aloud, “She’d probably share if you asked rudely too, to be honest.” (“Oh, definitely,” Palamedes agreed, as you groaned that you weren’t going to ask at all.)
Pyrrha ruffled your hair teasingly and you whined at her to knock it off, which did absolutely nothing whatsoever to deter any of them from continuing to rib you about it. Watching you and Pyrrha interact is both fascinating and perplexing. The lack of memory didn’t stop you from falling right back into that same old dynamic, bizarre as ever. Perhaps “bizarre” is too strong of a word. I feel less equipped than the average person to determine whether the relationship between you two is out of ordinary, but it’s certainly nothing I’ve seen before.
It’s obvious now where you get your affinity for physical affection from. It’s the common denominator in so many of my memories of you: sweeping your teammates up in your arms in celebration after a game, roughhousing in the hallways with your friends, playfully shouldering a classmate, your hands on– I don’t need to go on and on; the examples are endless, really. Suffice it to say, my personal observations of your behavior align neatly with my more recent observations of the woman who raised you.
When she’s here, you never go long without a hand on your back or an affectionate shoulder squeeze, a kiss pressed to the top of your head even when you pretend to hate it. Camilla and Palamedes get a little of it too, but not nearly to that extent.
She tried it with me, once. Just the once. I’d been clearing your dinner tray off your table or something equally mundane when she’d arrived, and as she passed by me to greet you, she’d laid a hand on my shoulder. I know she felt it when I flinched. She’d dropped her hand away casually, but I knew. I loathe being touched, but watching the two of you… I’ve begun to think that maybe it’s not that I loathe it. Maybe it’s that I’d rather avoid others’ touch than have them deny me the same. What I truly loathe is the way I wish she’d try again.
You asked me today if I thought we would have ever “gotten over ourselves and been friends” which was a stunningly astute characterization of our previous dynamic, to be quite honest. You may have gotten that particular phrasing from Palamedes, now that I think about it.
“Not on our own,” I said at last. “Not without something happening first.”
“Something like totaling my car and getting a traumatic brain injury?” You were still working on that popsicle stick model, determined to get it done before you went home. It was looking less like popsicle sticks these days and more like the photo of the vintage truck that was printed on the box it came in.
“Interesting that you put totaling your car ahead of the brain injury, but I suppose. Ideally, it would have been something less life-altering than amnesia.” My sketchbook was propped against my knees, open to a page with a sketch I’d been chipping away at for weeks. It was your hands, fingers nearly intertwined as they joined two abstractly shaped model pieces. I kept flipping back and forth between this one and others I’d done earlier on, your hands still, at rest, nestled between the folds of a blanket.
“If it was going to happen, at least I got you out of it.” You looked up at me when I didn’t respond. “What?”
You were so supremely casual in that statement, acting as though one of my greatest shames was somehow a prize you’d managed to win. “Don’t say things like that.”
“Oh, lighten up. I’m fine.” You tossed the model pieces in your hands back down onto the table and turned to look at me.
“Gideon, you are not fine.” The words were difficult to push out, as though I were speaking underwater. “You could have died.”
“But I didn’t.” You crossed your arms across your chest defiantly. “Or maybe I did,” you added breezily. “Maybe I did and came back, like lesbian Jesus.”
“Please be serious about this,” I pleaded, although that would perhaps explain how quickly you’ve been recovering.
“I am being serious. I have never been so serious in my entire life that I remember: whatever our beef was before, I forgive you.” Your eyes were so wide. So golden.
I inhaled deeply, closing my eyes as if that somehow protected me from your gaze. You had no idea what you were saying. “I don’t deserve it.”
You made an exasperated sound. “Yeah, that’s how it works. You’re forgiven. It’s done. It’s over. It’s not up to you.”
When I opened my eyes, you were still watching me. We watched each other for a long, long moment before you spoke.
“I’ve got like two days to finish this truck, are you gonna help me or what? I’ll even let you look at the instructions.”
Earlier this morning all of the staff had cycled in and out to say goodbye; they brought you a giant card that they’d all signed. You have a binder now loaded up with discharge information, numbers to call with questions, dates and times of follow up appointments to attend. Pyrrha had gotten almost all of your stuff home in the past few days, but the last few things were stuffed into a backpack that she hefted onto her shoulder. We glanced around the room for anything we might have missed, and you led us out.
You got into the passenger seat, holding Pyrrha’s arm for balance, and closed the car door. You waved to me through the window, and I raised a hand back. I’m planning to come over this weekend to have Pyrrha show me around and walk through things before she eventually goes back to work, but she wanted a few days to let you settle in. From your perspective, you’d never been to her house before and this was a lot of change at once.
Pyrrha turned to me and smiled softly. “Thank you,” she said. “I know you two have… had your differences. But I appreciate it.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything. She gently cupped the side of my face in her hand, stroking her thumb across my cheekbone a few times. I froze, but I didn’t cringe away. She tucked a strand of hair behind my ear before dropping her hand away.
“You’re a good kid,” she said. “We’ll see you around, okay?”
She spun her keychain around a finger and headed for the driver’s side, and I dug my own keys out of my bag as I made my way over to my car.
I watched you two drive away.
I unlocked my car, sat down in the driver’s seat, turned it on.
I drove home.
This house never felt empty before.
Notes:
PSA: wear your seatbelt! It's what Gideon would want! There's tons of statistics out there regarding the massively increased risk for traumatic brain injury or other serious injury when you're not wearing a seatbelt. On a personal level, though, I'll say this: I worked on a TBI unit for a bit, and of all the inpatients I saw who sustained their TBI during a car accident, I cannot think of a single one off the top of my head who was wearing a seatbelt. I cannot possibly stress enough how important it is. If you're ever tempted to go without a seatbelt, please imagine a tiny Gideon on your shoulder reminding you to buckle up!
And now back to our regularly scheduled chapter notes:
Feel free to play Spot The Reference throughout, I've had a fun time sprinkling them in! Title and chapter titles are taken from the song Cupid by Xana, a song that made my jaw physically drop the first time I listened to it. Nothing but the best for MY space lesbians.
I've also got my playlist for this fic on Spotify if you want to keep the vibes rolling even after you're done reading. Might I have hidden a couple of lyrics from it later chapters? Who knows!
A big thank you to Raxheim for the indispensable beta read and all around support! Thank you also to Char for cheering me on with this story from day one!
I'm on tumblr as lady-harrowhark if you'd like to say hi :)
Chapter Text
“Tee shirts: hung up or folded?” Pyrrha pulled a shirt out of the bag she was unpacking and held it up as an exemplar. “I think these ones came out of the dresser. Cam, do you remember?”
Camilla looked over from where she was unloading a box of books onto the bookcase with Palamedes. “Yeah, those were from the dresser. Second drawer down, I believe.”
“Folded then, I guess,” Gideon decided.
Pyrrha gathered an armload of shirts out of the bag and dumped them unceremoniously onto the bed in front of where Gideon was seated. As she began to fold, Harrow leaned over and snaked an arm up to the bed to pull a few into her lap. This was no small feat, as she was half sunk into an old bean bag chair that had shifted under her as she moved; once she had successfully righted herself back into a sitting position (which took only two wobbly tries that Gideon conspicuously observed without a word) she silently began folding as well. There was a stack of jeans and sweatpants next to her, ready to be transferred to the drawer the next time she got up.
“Ooohhh, Gideon – you don’t remember these, do you?” Palamedes handed her a thick paperback book. She studied it, turning it over to read the back cover.
“Her sword looks insanely cool but it’s not jogging anything,” she said, passing it back to him.
“Oh good!” he exclaimed. Noting both Gideon and Harrow’s offended looks, he added, “Sorry, I just meant these were your favorites. Our favorites, actually, you were the one who got me into them. I don’t envy you much about this situation but God, I’d love the chance to read them for the first time again.”
Gideon’s eyebrows shot up nearly to her hairline. “That good, huh? How many in the series?”
“Three. Well, four, but three that are out and one more coming. It was only supposed to be three but then the first act of the planned third book took on a life of its own and… here we are.”
“Intriguing. Maybe I’ll start with those.”
“I’ll warn you, though – how do I say this?” He tapped the edge of the book against his chin as he considered. “If you feel like you don’t understand them, it’s not because you’ve had a recent brain injury. It’s because they’re actually just Like That. But everything comes together! Just, so you know ahead of time that it’s not you, it’s the books.”
Gideon considered this, nodding thoughtful as she continued to fold. “Ah yeah, the literary ‘it’s not you it’s me’ gambit. That old chestnut!” Harrow privately thought that perhaps these were not the best books to start right now, as she knew Gideon was still only able to read for brief periods of time before developing a headache. Although, maybe the bizarre structure of the series would be made all the more immersive by the stops and starts.
There was a scuffling sound from the other side of the room, but the source was blocked from Harrow’s line of sight by the bed.
Palamedes sighed. “Nona, please, don’t get into those. I’m concerned about what you’d do with them, considering that you can’t read.” He bent to scoop the tiny dog into his arms and she pressed her head under his chin contentedly.
“Nona? Get into mischief?” Pyrrha shook her head. “You must be thinking of a different dog who looks just like her. She has done nothing wrong, ever, in her life.”
“I know this,” Palamedes agreed, holding Nona out to look her in the eyes, “and I love you.” The little dog wriggled in delight.
Palamedes looked from Nona to Harrow, an odd expression on his face. “This is going to sound bizarre, but she kind of looks like you.”
Pyrrha let out a resounding guffaw, and Camilla nodded in agreement, adding, “It’s the hair.”
She’d never admit it out loud, but Harrow could see what they meant. Pyrrha had found Nona wandering one of her construction sites and scooped her up, thinking she’d look after her just until they found her a home. When she’d told Harrow this, she’d remarked, “I swore up and down that I wasn’t a ‘little dog person’ but the test results showed that was a lie.” Whatever unknown mix of breeds Nona had in her lineage had resulted in long wisps of silky black hair that feathered out from her ears and draped down from her belly and legs and the little tail that curled up over her back.
Harrow tucked her own hair, a similar silky black, behind her ears self-consciously; she still forgot about it sometimes. It wasn’t so much that she was growing it out as much as that she had simply neglected to cut it since starting grad school, a low priority task on her to-do list that never quite made it to the top. It hadn’t been this long since she was a child, and she still hadn’t quite figured out how to tame the wisps that sprang up along her hairline or the ends that curled up softly around her jaw. In her more generous moments, she might have thought the overall impression was that of an academic too preoccupied with their studies to be concerned with their appearance, but apparently the reality was more in line with an abandoned pup.
“Same big dark eyes, too,” Pyrrha cooed, widening her own eyes in an approximation of a puppy dog pout. Harrow only partially agreed with her on that one; both their eyes were dark, but Nona’s were a golden-toned brown, whereas her own were a brown so dark that the irises were nearly indistinguishable from the pupil.
Palamedes looked between Nona and Harrow once more, comparing the two, before lowering her to the bed. “Why don’t you go hang out with Gideon, where there’s no paper for you to eat, hmm?”
He set her on the mattress and gave her a gentle scoot towards Gideon, which she didn’t need, as she was bounding into her lap from nearly the moment her paws touched the plaid bedspread, her wispy black hair flying around her. Harrow could only watch the onslaught as Nona lapped her little pink tongue against Gideon’s cheek.
Gideon squinted against the dog’s affection but didn’t pull away. “Why do you always do this? You act like I haven’t been right here all day.”
“Maybe you just look like you want to be kissed,” Pyrrha suggested.
“Sure, but not by a little mop dog!”
“Beggars can’t be choosers, Gideon,” Harrow chided. Pyrrha pointed towards her in agreement.
Out of the corner of her eye, Harrow saw Camilla and Palamedes glance at each other. She hadn’t realized until this moment that she had never reverted back to “Griddle.” The name that had felt for so many years to be too horribly intimate had become something that tripped thoughtlessly off the tongue. She resolved to gradually decrease her usage of “Gideon” and simultaneously increase her “Griddle” frequency, as though this could mitigate the blood rushing to her cheeks, the feeling that she’d been caught out.
She might have thought longer on this, had a neon yellow tee shirt not hit her in the face.
When she pulled it off her head, Gideon had already turned back to her folding. “The next one you throw at me,” Harrow said solemnly, “you’ll never see again. Are you sure you don’t want your –” she paused to read the large, fuchsia block letters on the front of the shirt. “Oh, Griddle…” (she’d always been a quick study) “I couldn’t have planned this better if I tried. Are you sure you don’t want your –” she wasn’t even trying to keep the smirk out of her voice as she held this shirt up for Gideon to read: “Virginity Rocks shirt?”
“That’s not mine,” Gideon said quickly.
Pyrrha barked out a laugh. “That’s one of your favorites, actually.”
“No…” Gideon’s voice was somewhere between a denial and a plea, and Harrow watched as confusion battered the gears turning behind her eyes.
After a long moment, Pyrrha took pity on her. “Joke, Gid. It’s a joke.”
“Oh,” Gideon breathed in palpable relief. “Yeah, no, you can disappear that one,” she told Harrow.
“Well, hold on a second there.” Pyrrha held up a hand to pause the both of them. “The shirt is a joke. It is one of your favorites, though.”
Gideon flopped backwards onto the bed and pulled a pillow over her face, her muffled voice barely discernible as she groaned, “Just shove it in the back of the closet.”
When Harrow arrived, Pyrrha was pulling on her boots while simultaneously tossing reminders over her shoulder at Gideon, who was placidly spooning cereal into her mouth at the kitchen table, unperturbed by Pyrrha’s demands that she not touch the power tools in the garage while she was gone.
Nona was dancing around Harrow’s feet, occasionally bouncing up to paw at her shins. Harrow watched her, unsure what to do; she’d never spent much time around animals, and Nona seemed a bit more like an intermediate pet owner kind of dog to her. Harrow toed her shoes off, slowly, to avoid the little dog’s paws, and drifted over to the kitchen. Nona enthusiastically loped along behind her.
“She’ll calm down in a second,” Pyrrha promised. She was quickly loading things into a lunch sack. “Have you had breakfast? We’ve got, uh, breakfast stuff… Gideon, you’ve got your phone?”
“It’s in my room.”
“Grab it next time you’re up then, okay? So you can call if anything happens.”
“Literally nothing is going to happen,” Gideon groaned. “I’m going to sit on the couch and watch TV until my head hurts and then I’ll take a nap on the couch and when I wake up I’ll probably work on that paint by numbers kit. From the couch. All while Harrow watches me like a hawk from the other end of the couch.”
“That is a fantastic plan, because as you do all that from the couch, your phone can sit right next to you, on the couch.”
To this, Gideon only slurped milk loudly off her spoon.
Pyrrha ignored this and grabbed her keys off the hook by the door. “Harrow, just… I don’t know. Don’t kill each other, please.”
Harrow wished she had used any other phrasing. Gideon gave a half-hearted thumbs up.
Once the door had banged shut behind Pyrrha, Gideon and Harrow looked at each other. They looked at each other for a long while, and then they looked at each other some more.
Gideon abruptly shoved her chair back from the table. “Yeah, this is super weird, I’m gonna go watch TV. You can join or not.”
“You mean you’re going to go get your phone, and then go watch TV.” Harrow crossed her arms and glared at her in a way that did not so much imply an ultimatum as much as laser engrave it into Gideon’s corneas. “I’ll be in the living room. I have studying to do.”
Gideon,
I’ve done a lot of terrible things in my life – most of them to you – but this was by far the worst. And you deserve to know the truth. You said you forgave me, but you wouldn’t, not if you knew, which makes my carrying on this charade all the more egregious. I would love to say that I never meant to hurt you, but the point of this letter is that I don’t want to lie to you any longer.
It was always my intention to hurt you, but not like this.
“What are you working on today?”
Harrow glanced up from the tablet propped on her knees. Gideon had turned the television off maybe 20 minutes prior, and Harrow had assumed she was asleep. Maybe she had been. “Histology readings.”
“I don’t know what that is. Did I ever know what that is?”
“Probably not. It’s microanatomy – cells and tissues and that sort of thing.” Harrow pulled up an image and enlarged it before flipping the tablet around to demonstrate. “Like this.”
Gideon pushed herself up on her elbows to inspect the image. “What am I looking at here?”
“Bone marrow.”
“That’s some real science shit, huh?” Harrow fought back the urge to ask what sort of fake science shit Gideon had been expecting. After squirming into an upright position, Gideon reached out and took the tablet from her to get a closer look. “So, what? You’re reading about like, how to draw these little guys?”
Harrow wrinkled her nose in distaste. “You don’t get into this kind of program without knowing how to draw. If it were solely about replicating anatomical likeness you could learn that anywhere. It’s largely a biology course; you have to understand how everything works in order to create meaningful graphics. Medical illustration isn’t meant to be decorative, it’s meant to convey information. Often it’s not feasible to directly observe or depict the processes and anatomy in sufficient detail and clarity, which is where a medical illustrator comes in.” Harrow had given this explanation so many times that she nearly had it memorized. It’s not that art for art’s sake wasn’t valuable, but that wasn’t what she was doing. This was art for science’s sake. “In order to create such a portrayal, I have to understand the function of what I’m meant to portray.”
Gideon considered this. “So like, real science shit then.”
“I– yes.” She hadn’t expected Gideon to catch on so quickly and had been fully prepared to shrug it off dismissively. So few people understood the distinction, particularly outside of the medical field.
“I’ve seen your drawings, plus you’re like, smart smart. I bet you’re good at it.” Gideon raised her eyebrows appreciatively.
Harrow raised hers back. “I am.”
“What do your parents think? Are they like, super proud?”
It was always going to come back to this. “They don’t think anything. They’re dead.”
Gideon paused, a small crease forming between her brows. “I didn’t know. Or, I’m sure I did at one point... I’m so sorry.”
This time would be the time she’d get it right. “It’s not your fault.” The words came out so much softer than she had intended.
Opposite her, Gideon shrugged. “I mean, I know that but… I’m still sorry. What happened?”
“They killed themselves,” she said simply. “When we were in high school.”
“Oh my God, I’m so–” Harrow cut her off with a shake of her head. “Harrow…” Gideon breathed.
“Don’t make this weird. Please.” Harrow took the tablet back from Gideon’s lap and pulled her readings back up.
After a moment, Gideon said, “Maybe it would be less weird if you helped me with this paint by number poster. This one’s got… um… a sea turtle on it.”
Harrow looked up from the tablet to find Gideon peering at her with those wide, amber eyes. She didn’t think the paint by number kit would have that color.
“Okay.”
And so the days went. Harrow would arrive in the morning, attempt to step over Nona without losing her balance, ignore whatever nonsense Gideon put on TV, and make her way through as much of her coursework as possible. Occasionally Gideon’s giggles would become too hard to ignore, and Harrow would look over to find her trading Snapchat selfies with goofy filters with Dulcie – she always made sure to show Harrow the “best” ones: Dulcie’s face on a chicken nugget, her own with dog ears, Harrow with a sheriff’s hat and cartoonish mustache. Sometimes Gideon would nap on the couch, usually a craft project was started or finished, and at some point they’d have lunch.
Gideon had quickly grown tired of the frozen dinners Pyrhha had stocked the freezer with and began making forays into cooking. Harrow pretended not to be watching her from the kitchen table as she nibbled her daily peanut butter sandwich lunch, and Gideon pretended not to notice that Harrow was pretending she wasn’t watching.
Pyrrha had helpfully left Post-It notes on anything she deemed unsafe – bright yellow swatches of paper proclaimed “NO :)” from the knife block, the ladder in the hall closet, a bottle of bleach under the sink, the box of matches in the junk drawer, the power tools in the garage (obviously), and, after one nearly-disastrous impulsive bathroom haircut, the box of hair cutting supplies. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that one has the inalienable human right to fuck up their own hair in the middle of the night if they want to,” Pyrrha had said, “but perhaps baking in a few extra seconds of hesitation wouldn’t hurt in this case.”
Harrow would drift a little closer while Gideon used the stove, and occasionally deigned to partake in a small bowl of pasta, provided that Gideon dished it up for her with a bit of butter prior to adding any sauce. “How’s it tasting?” she’d ask. “Not too spicy for you, I hope?” or sometimes, “We’ve got salt and pepper if you’re feeling adventurous.”
Harrow didn’t mind Gideon’s teasing, despite her generally irritable responses to others’ comments about her eating habits. Gideon’s teasing felt more like acknowledgement: she noticed what Harrow liked and didn’t like, checked with her about what she wanted if she wasn’t sure, never pressured her to do anything differently. Harrow had so rarely had someone consider her preferences in this way, let alone make allowances for them. Gideon, though, would save out a dish of pasta before adding sauce. When she made grilled cheese, she’d make Harrow’s first before the pan got too hot, because she knew Harrow hated it when the bread got burnt.
With Gideon, Harrow felt noticed rather than watched, a distinction she had heretofore failed to appreciate.
“What color are we doing today, gloom mistress? Caliginous Coal? Or are you shaking things up with a little Penumbral Pitch?”
Harrow held up a bottle of nail polish, a burgundy so dark it was nearly black. She’d taken to bringing her little case of polishes and supplies with her every so often to do her nails, typically while Gideon worked on making lanyards or origami stars or whatever her Project of the Week was. She had gotten into the habit of keeping her nails painted a few years back in an effort to quit biting them, tired of ragged, raw cuticles and sore fingertips, and found that she enjoyed the ritual of it all. She couldn’t stand the feeling when they grew longer, though, and kept them neatly filed down, with no jagged edges to resurrect that unattractive tic of her girlhood.
Gideon set down her yarn (Project of the Week: teaching herself how to crochet, resulting in what so far resembled a spiderweb moreso than a scarf) and took the bottle of polish, holding it up to the light to inspect. “A bit risqué for you, don’t you think?”
“It’s nail polish, Griddle. How is it even possible for nail polish to be risqué?”
“I don’t know.” Gideon shrugged. “It just is.”
Harrow pushed the travel case with the rest of her polishes towards Gideon and began methodically running a file along the edge of her thumbnail. “If you hate it so much, pick something else.”
“I don’t hate it,” Gideon said quickly. “I like it. A lot.”
“Fine, give it back then.” Harrow held out her hand expectantly.
Gideon hesitated. “Can I try?”
Harrow let out a short laugh. “It’s not going to match your cargo shorts, but sure, knock yourself out.”
“No, I meant like… can I try doing yours?”
Something squirmed inside Harrow. Her mouth nearly said no, so ingrained was her distaste for being touched. She remembered holding Gideon’s hands steady in the hospital, though, and arranging them gently in a dozen different poses for references. She remembered the pages and pages of sketches – she knew the lines on those palms, the delicate veins just barely visible at the insides of her wrists. But most of all, she remembered watching Gideon – with Pyrrha, with Palamedes and Camilla, with her high school teammates – and the easy, comfortable touch she shared with them. She remembered how the wanting felt like shame.
She nodded, and felt like throwing up a little bit.
“You’re gonna have to walk me through it,” Gideon said.
“I can do that,” Harrow said, a reassurance that was not entirely for Gideon’s sake.
She finished her filing and shaping while Gideon made sure her cobweb scarf was put away where Nona couldn’t get to it and unravel all the shaky progress she’d made thus far. She lined up the supplies on the table. When Gideon was ready, she nudged the bottle of base coat towards her and explained how to wipe the excess off the brush on the lip of the bottle.
Gideon held her hand out and Harrow cautiously set her own against it. She watched quietly as Gideon turned her hand over and stroked the tiny brush across her thumbnail.
“See?” she said. “Nothin’ to it.” She tilted Harrow’s hand to move on to the next finger, holding it carefully between two of her own.
Harrow still felt like there were bats in her stomach, but when she focused on the warmth of Gideon’s hand against hers, the bats seemed less important. She was surprised at how gently Gideon touched her. It wasn’t as if she’d expected Gideon to handle her roughly, but she had the sort of hands that looked like they did everything deliberately and forcefully.
“How am I doing so far?” Gideon asked as she set Harrow’s left hand down. “Do I have the okay to continue?”
“It’s good so far,” Harrow confirmed without taking her eyes off their hands. She lifted her right hand into Gideon’s when it was offered and let her adjust the angle. “Don’t get a big head about it though, it’s just the base coat."
“Beginner’s luck, maybe. How long does this stuff take to dry?”
“Not very long, the other hand will be dry by the time you finish this one.”
Gideon made a small sound of surprise at this and finished the last nail. She swapped out the bottle for the risqué burgundy, and then Harrow’s hand was in hers again.
“It’ll need two coats for sure,” Harrow commented as Gideon brushed on a first layer, dark but sheer. “Maybe three.”
“You’d better keep count, you know how my memory is these days.”
“Very funny, Griddle.”
“What’s with that, anyway?” Gideon asked.
Harrow glanced up at her, but she was concentrating intently on her task. “With what?”
“The ‘Griddle’ thing. Is that some sort of inside joke, or what?”
“Not exactly. It’s just…” It felt stupid to say it out loud. “I don’t know. When we were little I used to pretend to get your name wrong to annoy you, and Griddle stuck for some reason. I wish there was a better story. I suppose you can blame seven-year-old Harrowhark for that one.”
“It could be worse,” Gideon said. She briefly recapped the bottle and attempted to wipe away a stray bit of paint that had spilled over onto Harrow’s skin. “I could’ve been… Granola. Or Gizmo.”
“I could see you as a Gizmo,” Harrow mused.
Gideon laughed. “You’re going to make me mess up!” She switched hands, and Harrow inspected the first one. Not perfect, but also not terrible for a first try.
The polish felt cool against her nails as Gideon brushed it on, but her hands were warm, and every time she lifted her hand away, there was a brief moment where Harrow missed the contact. She’d never noticed how sensitive the skin along the sides of her fingers was; she felt every shift of Gideon’s hand, each small adjustment in her grip. It seemed as though the texture of Gideon’s skin was magnified each time it grazed hers, though Harrow knew it was her own attention that was magnified.
Harrow watched their hands, suddenly very conscious of how small and fragile her hands looked in contrast to Gideon’s, so much bigger and sturdier.
She wasn’t the only one who noticed. “That paint by number was pretty good practice, I think. All those itty bitty sections were getting me ready for your tiny little nails."
“They’re… proportionate,” Harrow conceded. Gideon snorted.
“They should put a picture of your hands in your histology textbook, since you’ve got such microscopic anatomy.”
Even Harrow had to admit that was a good one. She looked up, and Gideon was waiting to catch her eye with a goofy, lopsided grin, clearly proud of her wordplay.
“Soooo… was that two or three coats?” Gideon asked, returning her gaze to the bottle of dark polish.
Harrow paused, feeling as though she were coming back to herself.
“I lost count.”
Gideon,
You deserve so much better than this. You deserve so much better than me. Which is why it has been so hard for me to tell you the truth. I want to give you what you deserve, and I can’t; that ship has sailed. I have to stop stalling – every day that passes compounds the difficulty in coming clean.
Fuck. There has to be a better way to do this.
Harrow zoomed in on the picture Gideon had just sent her.
Look what Pyrrha found in the attic, the accompanying text said.
The picture itself was of a stack of hardcover books fanned out across what appeared to be Gideon’s bed. There was a black blur in the upper left corner that could only be Nona, caught on film in the midst of darting into Gideon’s lap, but the lettering on the book covers was clear.
Their high school yearbooks.
Harrow hadn’t purchased any of them, and as she took in each of the covers, she realized she had never actually looked through any of them. She had a vague memory of signing a few… Coronabeth’s, maybe? Ianthe thought that sort of thing was trite, and she couldn’t think of anyone else who would have specifically asked her. Certainly not Gideon, and definitely not after sophomore year.
After a moment, she replied: Does anything look familiar?
Haven’t opened them yet. Waiting til you’re here, came the response. We could look at them tomorrow.
She pulled up a calendar to double check before typing, Tomorrow’s Saturday.
I know. Will you come over anyway?
Harrow bit her lip, fully aware of the inherent irony of looking through yearbooks with Gideon Nav, of all people. Her seventeen year old self would have disowned her for it, but Harrow sent the text anyway.
Yes.
Pyrrha looked confused as she pulled open the door. “Forget your key?” She pushed Nona back from the doorway with her foot to let Harrow in.
Harrow had sat in her car for several horrifically long minutes debating whether she should ring the doorbell or simply let herself in as per usual, given that this was more of a… social visit than usual. She had eventually decided to err on the side of caution, and from Pyrrha’s reaction, she had indeed erred. “I just thought… since I’m not here for… that, today…”
Pyrrha shook her head dismissively. “Nah, you don’t need to do that.” Harrow thought this must be the adult version of being told not to address Pyrrha as “Ms. Dve.” “Just shout or text or something so you don’t sneak up on us.”
She called down the hallway for Gideon (who, in turn, bellowed back that she’d be out in a minute) before turning back to Harrow with a roll of her eyes. “She has been bouncing off the fucking walls since I got that box of pictures and shit down last night,” she said lowly. “Maybe she’ll cool it now that you’re here – the Adderall hasn’t done jack today.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Harrow muttered as Gideon’s bedroom door flung open.
Gideon’s gait was still a little uneven, favoring her injured knee, but overall she was looking much steadier these days and right now, she was clearly on a mission. “Did you put it in the kitchen?” she asked Pyrrha, not stopping to wait for an answer as she passed by.
“It is exactly where it was an hour ago,” she confirmed in a tired tone that implied this was not the first time she’d been asked this question.
They followed behind Gideon into the kitchen, where a fairly large plastic storage tote was sitting on the table. Gideon snagged the yearbooks from where they were stacked on top of the storage tote’s lid and pushed it aside to make room on the table.
“C’mon c’mon c’mon,” she urged, waving Harrow over. “I wanna see us in high school! I’ve been trying to decide if we should go in chronological order or reverse, but it probably doesn’t matter, honestly. We’ll get to all of them eventually, right?
“Right,” said Harrow slowly. “But… you remember, though, that we weren’t really friends in high school?” (“That’s one way to put it,” Pyrrha muttered under her breath.) “I doubt there’s any pictures of us. Not together, at least.”
Gideon was already distracted, flipping open the volume from freshman year. “Yeah, I know.” Harrow had expected her to tear through the pages, looking for faces she recognized, but she paused on the first page, examining it thoroughly before turning to the next. Harrow stepped closer to look as well, though the introductory photos of the school and staff weren’t novel to her.
“Here, you’ll be in some of these,” Pyrrha said from over their shoulders as they reached the athletics section. “Look for number nine, that’s what you always picked for your jersey if you got a choice.”
“Because we’d have such a hard time spotting her otherwise, you mean?” Harrow glanced back over her shoulder at Pyrrha.
“Fair point. You don’t exactly blend in, kiddo.” Pyrrha reached out to ruffle Gideon’s bright ginger hair, still damp from the shower. Gideon blindly smacked half-heartedly behind her at Pyrrha’s arm as she continued to flip pages.
Sure enough, as soon as she turned to the soccer team’s page, there she was, immediately identifiable in the back row of a team photo. Gideon picked up the book to look at it more closely.
“That’s so freaky,” she said at last. “Like, that’s obviously me, I don’t need a close up to know that it’s me, but… nothing. I’m fine,” she added quickly when Pyrrha laid a hand on her shoulder, “it’s just weird.”
“I was actually just going to point out Corona, on the end there.” She tapped the photo. The girl she indicated was tall, but she had her blonde hair tied in a loose knot on top of her head that added several additional inches.
“Oh, shit, you’re right!”
“You know, I would’ve been horrified if you’d told me thirty years ago that I’d be a soccer mom someday.”
“And a basketball mom,” Harrow added.
“Yep. And softball, up through middle school. You wanted to go out for football too but I–” Pyrrha stopped abruptly with a pained laugh that was nearly a groan and scrubbed a hand over her face. “I said no because I was worried about you getting a head injury. And now look at you!”
Gideon looked towards her sheepishly. “So what I’m getting out of this is that you can stop being so overprotective, since it didn’t help anything.”
“Oh, yeah right. Not a chance.”
Gideon looked at the photos for a moment more before turning the page to find herself in the other team photos. Across the next several sections, they were able to spot Gideon in the background of a few photos, but she became antsy when Harrow was nowhere to be found. “I’m discreet,” was Harrow’s only explanation. “Go to the individual photos. We’re probably right next to each other, alphabetically.”
Gideon flipped ahead, scanning through the rows of students until she found them. “Huh,” she said, and, “It’s still weird.” She nudged Harrow with her elbow. “Look at you though! You’re a baby!”
They did make an odd pair, even within the lineup of individual photos. They both sat in front of a dappled navy backdrop: Gideon was giving the camera a huge, cocky grin, whereas Harrow’s perfunctory smile looked like the photographer had just barely been able to coax it out of her. Gideon’s hair had been a bit wilder back then; Harrow’s had been neater. They both looked young, Harrow thought.
“You’re both babies – that’s fall semester of freshman year, so you guys are what, fourteen there? I think there’s some of your actual baby pictures in here, Gid,” Pyrrha said as she opened the storage tote and fished around inside. “There’s older school pictures too, Harrow’s gotta be in some of the ones from elementary school.”
“Wait, really?” Gideon leaned over the table to peek over the side of the plastic tub.
“Mmhmm… Oh man, here’s a really old one.” She held a stack of a few photos out to Gideon, and Harrow leaned in to look. “You’re maybe, I don’t know, a year and a half there?”
In the photo, toddler Gideon was asleep sprawled across a woman’s lap, her face smushed comically against the couch cushions, but that wasn’t what Harrow noticed first. What she was immediately struck by was the fact that the woman looked startlingly like Gideon. “That has to be your mom,” she said without thinking.
Pyrrha laughed. “What gave it away?”
Gideon blinked at the photo, taken aback. “She really looks like me. Or I look like her. Whatever.”
“You’ve seen pictures of her before,” Pyrrha said cautiously.
“Yeah, no, I remember, I can just see it in this one even more. Like, that’s me, just with darker eyes and long hair.”
“And a worse attitude problem,” Pyrrha added, somewhat fondly. “There’s those fucking sunglasses again. Good riddance, really.”
Harrow studied the photo again, ignoring the twinge of guilt. The woman was indeed glaring at whoever was taking the photo, arms held out to her sides slightly as though she were demanding an explanation. The familiar aviator shades were perched atop her head, nestled into her vivid red hair. Toddler Gideon was oblivious to it all. It looked like she might have fallen asleep in her mother’s lap and wiggled herself nearly off the couch as she dreamed. Her little legs stuck straight out across her mother’s lap, one tiny sock barely hanging on. Where her face was squished against the cushion, her open mouth left a little damp spot of drool.
“Those eyes, though…” Pyrrha shook her head. “God only knows where those came from.”
Gideon turned to the next photo, a shot of her, maybe three years old, sitting on a concrete driveway and surrounded by sidewalk chalk and toddler scribbles. Her hands and legs were coated in chalk dust, and one sleeve of her tee shirt seemed to have a splatter of mud across it. She had a scratch across one cheek and her hair looked like a ginger haystack, but she was smiling so big that her eyes were barely visible.
“Aw, I love that one,” Pyrrha said.
“I look feral!” Gideon blurted.
Pyrrha laughed. “Yeah, kinda. You were always playing hard and I was too busy trying to keep you from taking a swan dive off the back patio to care about what you looked like. As long as you had a shirt and pants on, I considered that a win. Shoes were extra credit. School pictures are probably the only ones we have of you looking relatively tidy until middle school.”
She pulled out a stack of folders and quickly thumbed through them. “These look like they’re from the right years, but obviously I never got around to organizing any of this stuff.”
Gideon took the folders from her. The first one was stuffed full of old school assignments: spelling tests in scratchy little kid handwriting with colorful stickers at the top, crayon drawings, a certificate declaring that an eight year old Gideon had met her reading goal for the quarter. The next folder, though, had the crinkly school picture envelopes she was after.
“Second grade,” she breathed as she pulled out the class photo, which had little rectangles with each student’s photo marching across the page beneath photos of their teacher and principal. “Oh my God, look at us…” She traced her finger beneath the photos of herself and Harrow.
Gideon looked just like Harrow remembered, all round cheeks and golden eyes. The school photographer used to always give them silly words to say instead of “cheese” – Gideon must have gotten a good one that day to be caught mid-laugh like that. Her wide smile showed off a missing tooth.
And Harrow–
“Little Wednesday herself,” Pyrrha said with a wink in Harrow’s direction.
“Not you too,” Harrow groaned. “I thought I’d heard the last of that.”
“Oh, come on, you can’t blame us! Besides, you were so cute! Just a tiny little sourpuss.”
“I don’t get it,” Gideon said, looking between the two of them. “What’s the deal with Wednesday?”
Harrow let out an exasperated sigh. “There was an old TV show with a character named Wednesday and people would call me that because my mom would put my hair in braids that looked like hers.”
“Well… and because of everything else,” Pyrrha said somewhat apologetically.
“And because the show was about the whole family being spooky and macabre,” Harrow added begrudgingly.
“I don’t think you look spooky. You just look kind of worried.” Harrow followed Gideon’s gaze down to the photo of her younger self.
She’d always been smaller than the other children her age, her face sharply angular even in childhood. Her dark eyes seemed to be looking beyond the camera a bit and her mouth was a hard line that bespoke great effort at not curving into a frown, all framed by two dark braids that rested on her shoulders.
Harrow tugged the inside of her lip between her teeth. “Maybe a little.”
“Eh, lots of kids don’t like getting their picture taken,” Pyrrha said. “Some random guy is telling you where to look and there’s bright lights and your mom makes you wear an itchy sweater that you hate. Picture day’s weird for everyone.” She pinched Gideon’s cheek lightly. “But the parents like having it! And then after a few weeks of it sitting on the counter you toss it in a Rubbermaid container just to get it out of the way for now and tell yourself you’ll put it in an album or something later, even though you know that’s absolutely not going to happen, you know? And that’s what it’s all about.”
The other envelopes held class photos from other years; in each one they looked a little older or younger, with varying configurations of missing teeth and more or less enthusiastic smiles. In their fourth grade portraits, Gideon had the greenish yellow ghost of a black eye (allegedly from tetherball), and Harrow had ditched the braids for shorter hair.
“Should we circle back to sophomore year, then?” Gideon asked, once they’d examined the extant photographic evidence of their grade school years.
Pyrrha caught Harrow’s eye and pushed back from the table. “You guys keep going, I’m gonna hit the grocery store. Text me what you want for lunch this week? I think we’re set on peanut butter, unless there’s something else you’d rather have.” This last bit was directed at Harrow, who confirmed that peanut butter was fine.
Gideon whooped when she finally found a photo where the two of them were both in the frame, but her excitement quickly dwindled. They were in the background of a snapshot of their English class while a classmate gave a presentation. It had been one of the last days of school before summer and everyone was presenting their final projects, but Harrow remembered it for other reasons. Gideon was glaring daggers at Harrow; Harrow, on the other hand, was leaning forward in her desk to talk to a girl with pale blonde hair who was seated in the desk ahead of her.
“I would like to formally retract that holler,” Gideon said sheepishly. “I look like I want to strangle you.”
“You probably did. You were pretty mad at me that day.”
“About what?”
Harrow’s stomach felt like it was full of thumbtacks, but she only shook her head. “Stupid teenage stuff,” she said. Because I keyed your car the day before, she thought. Gideon had been so annoyingly proud of that piece of junk, which had been equally loud, ugly, and old, and it had made such an easy target.
“Idiots, both of us. Who’re you talking to there?”
“Ianthe. Coronabeth’s sister.” The fact that discussing Ianthe was preferable to the previous topic said very little about Ianthe in this case.
Gideon flipped back to the individual photos and searched out the Tridentarius twins. “Huh,” she said. “She looks like string cheese.”
A laugh bubbled out of Harrow. It wasn’t an incorrect comparison by any means. Ianthe was pale and linear in all the ways that her sister was golden and soft, sardonic where Corona was sincere. “If Ianthe’s string cheese, what does that make Corona?”
Gideon considered a moment. “I mean, is it too on the nose if I say ‘fried mozzarella stick?’ I can go with curly fries if I need to.”
“You really don’t need to,” Harrow promised.
“So what’s her deal?” Gideon asked. “Like, she doesn’t live in town any more, right?”
“She’s been out in the city for a year or two, working at some big PR firm to spin cover stories for politicians who get caught behaving badly, as I understand it.”
Gideon’s nose wrinkled. “Ew.”
“Ew indeed,” Harrow agreed. She tried not to think of the text that was still sitting in her phone’s messages: Corona said you’ve been hanging around with Nav. It was dressed as a statement, but Harrow knew it was an accusation at best. At worst, a threat.
They continued flipping through the pages. Harrow wasn’t in any other group photos, but the page for the art department included a piece she’d done for class, which Gideon paused to inspect. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, because this is really good,” she said, “but you’ve gotten a lot better since then.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Harrow said airily. “It’s only been seven years and an undergraduate degree, with a graduate degree in progress.”
“Point taken.” Gideon closed the book and swapped out sophomore year for junior year, and Harrow’s stomach lurched a bit.
Junior year. The first school year she started without her parents.
Gideon flipped through as she had with the other yearbooks, making stops along the way to see her team photos and look for Harrow in the background of the art classrooms. Harrow hadn’t hung around campus much that year, though, and as she expected, she once again largely eluded candid photos.
She turned, then, to their individual photos. By junior year, the childhood roundness of Gideon’s cheeks had given way, leaving her square jaw more prominent. Harrow had amassed a small collection of jewelry in each ear that glinted under the photographer’s lights.
“Is your hair purple? ”
“Only some of it.” Harrow felt her cheeks growing warm under Gideon’s incredulous stare. She glanced back down at the photo. “I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that.”
“I mean…” Gideon stared at her as though this should be obvious. “I figured your dedication to the all black aesthetic applied to more than just your wardrobe, you know?”
“I do not wear all black.” Gideon’s eyebrows rose in skepticism. “I don’t! I wore a white shirt literally yesterday.”
“You wore a white shirt with a giant dark-gray-almost-black cardigan covering most of it. And black jeans.”
“That’s not all black.”
“Semantics.” Gideon looked back at the photo again. “It just doesn’t seem like your thing.”
Harrow shrugged one shoulder. “I always found it very satisfying. It’s just chemistry and color theory in the formulation, and then the application is all precision and timing.”
Gideon rolled her eyes. “I take it back, that sounds exactly like your kind of nerd thing. Did you ever do other colors?”
“I cycled through pretty much all of them at one point or another.” Harrow paused. She nearly didn’t say it, but eventually added, “Except orange.”
“Why not? What’d you have against orange? …Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s probably fine though, to be honest. If you wanted to match, it’d probably be a lot easier to just swap friendship bracelets or something.”
“Mastering the art of friendship bracelets is next on your project list then, it looks like.”
“Would you dye mine, if I asked you?” Gideon asked abruptly.
Harrow stared at her, stock-still. She was surprised by how intensely her stomach twisted at the idea of Gideon with anything but her distinctive red hair. The thought of bleach sapping out that vivid copper felt like a crime against nature itself.
“If you were sure,” she said at long last, her voice stony. “I’d probably make you sleep on it a few days first to make sure you didn’t change your mind, but if you were really set on it... I suppose.”
Gideon barked out a laugh. “You should see your face right now. You look like I just asked you to perform a homebrew lobotomy on me. God.”
Harrow turned back to the table and pulled the senior year edition of their yearbook towards them just for something to do with her hands. “It’d just be a shame,” she muttered under her breath.
“I heard that, you know.” Gideon bumped her shoulder into Harrow’s. Or rather, she bumped Harrow’s shoulder with her upper arm, given the discrepancy in their height. “Don’t worry, I don’t actually want to. I was just curious if you would.”
Harrow was worried, but not about that.
Harrow was worried because she was beginning to realize there was very little she wouldn’t do, so long as Gideon was the one asking.
Gideon,
I keep trying to write this letter to you, but my remorse is more than I can put to words. What hope can ink on a page have of capturing the human heart?
I know you won’t read this. I know I’ll never give it to you. I am too selfish to give up the act, but I hope you would believe that part of this is for you. I am aware that my drafts have become self-flagellatory, but I keep hoping I’ll stumble onto the right words if I just keep writing.
If I could go back and change it all, I would.
“Sorry you have to drive me.”
Harrow glanced over at Gideon where she was sitting in the passenger seat. The gray light filtering through the drizzle outside the window made a valiant attempt at draining the warmth from her bright hair. “That’s such a weird thing to apologize for.”
“Sorry for apologizing for weird things.”
Harrow’s lips thinned. “Out of any number of things to apologize for, you choose needing a ride to occupational therapy?”
Gideon made a noise of begrudging agreement. “Sorry I… ate your leftovers last night?”
“Better. Apology accepted.” The rhythmic swish and squeak of the windshield wipers punctuated the silence between them for a long moment. “Wait, what leftovers?”
“Your pizza that you didn’t finish from this weekend. Your none pizza.”
“Oh.” Harrow had forgotten about the pizza they ordered on Sunday. She’d slowly nibbled through two pieces over the course of the evening while she studied. For her part, Gideon had spent the evening watching Netflix, occasionally rewinding and elbowing Harrow to pay attention to the funny scenes. Before Harrow had left for the night, she’d wrapped the remaining slices in foil and stuck them in the fridge. She’d told Gideon they were in there for her lunch tomorrow, but a push for an appropriate apology now would only draw attention to her memory lapse. She compromised with: “I wasn’t going to finish that anyway. And it’s not ‘none pizza.’” She didn’t want to start down this road again, but it grated on her to let the assertion stand.
“When I asked what toppings you wanted, you said, and I quote, ‘none.’”
“Well, I don’t think of cheese as a ‘topping’. Cheese is both a standard kind of pizza and a standard component of nearly all pizzas.” Harrow could hear the exasperation in her own voice, having already worked their way through these arguments two nights prior.
“And the light sauce,” Gideon interjected.
“Yes, but that’s the opposite of none pizza. That’s two things pizza.”
“One and a half.”
“You cannot have one and a half toppings, a topping is either present or it’s not. It cannot be half present, ergo light sauce is still a whole topping.”
Gideon thought about this for a moment. “I thought you said cheese wasn’t a topping.”
“You can walk the rest of the way,” Harrow warned. She didn’t take her eyes off the road, and Gideon didn’t protest for the rest of the drive.
“Do you want to learn?” she asked Gideon as she pulled into a parking spot.
“What?”
She put the car in park and turned to her. “To drive. Do you want to learn to drive again?”
Gideon exhaled and thought a moment before nodding slowly. “Yeah. I think so.”
Harrow searched her eyes. “Why did you say it like that?”
Gideon groaned, leaning her head back. “I don’t know. I feel like it should scare me but I just… I don’t remember it. Like there should be like, trauma or something, right? But there’s just… nothing.”
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. That may still be on the horizon,” Harrow muttered.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. But okay, say that it is. What if I get behind the wheel and freak out?”
“Then we pull over and deal with it. We’d start in an empty parking lot, and I’d be right there. You’re not going to hurt anyone.”
“Okay, flip side, what if I get behind the wheel and actually do remember how to drive?”
“That’s not even a problem, you’re just saying things to say things now. See what OT thinks. Knowing how to drive isn’t the only–”
“The reaction time and judgment and coordination, yeah, I know,” Gideon drawled.
“I know you know.” Gideon had her head leaned against the window as she stared out through the windshield. “It’ll come.” Harrow lifted her hand but paused, drawing back slightly. She took a breath, and reached for Gideon’s hand where it rested in her lap, fiddling with the zipper tab on her hoodie.
Gideon flipped her palm up to catch Harrow’s fingers in hers, zipper forgotten. She turned to Harrow with a smarmy grin, glancing from her to their hands and back again. Harrow obstinately refused to return the grin, but she knew her eyes were giving her away.
After a moment, Harrow broke the silence and pulled her hand back. “You’d better run in before it starts raining any harder.”
Gideon nodded and flipped her hood up over that bright crop of hair. She steeled herself, and then threw open the car door.
“Ask OT!” Harrow called after, a verbal race against the closing of the car door. Gideon raised a hand in acknowledgement as she jogged towards the doors. She didn’t look back.
“Alright, I’m headed out. Call if you need anything.”
“Get out of here,” Gideon chided, lightly kicking at Pyrrha’s leg from her seat on the couch. “Go have fun with your friends.”
“Oh, we’ll have fun,” Pyrrha reassured her. “My wallet won’t, but we will. Over twenty years later and I’m still making good on my promise to buy a round of drinks every time we go out in exchange for Cassy helping me out with your custody and adoption mess back in the day.”
“You have to eternally cover drinks and you got stuck with me? That’s rough, buddy.”
Pyrrha ruffled Gideon’s hair, and Gideon wrinkled her nose in faux annoyance. “It’s my cross to bear, I suppose.” She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead dramatically. “I shall have to drown my sorrows in ale, methinks.”
Gideon kicked at her again, squirming when Pyrrha caught her ankle and gave it a shake. “Leave already,” she whined.
“I’m going, I’m going.” She patted her pockets to check for her wallet and cigarettes and gave a final salute before heading out the door.
As soon as the door clicked shut, Gideon’s head lolled to the side to look at Harrow. “I think this is the first time she’s been out since I came home.”
Harrow thought about it for a moment. “Probably. She wouldn’t have left you alone until the last couple of weeks, so unless someone else has been staying with you that I don’t know about…”
“Nope, I’m a one woman kind of gal,” Gideon chirped, prompting Harrow to roll her eyes. “It worked out that you were coming over tonight anyway. It feels weird being in the house alone now.”
Harrow knew that feeling.
She cleared her throat. “What was it you said you wanted to watch?”
“Oh! The giant robots movie! Palamedes said I like it and that you’ll like it too if you actually watch it instead of scoffing.”
Harrow suppressed a scoff. “He thinks he knows everything.”
“You were about to though, weren’t you?” Gideon smirked as she reached for the remote. (Now it was Harrow’s turn to kick at Gideon.)
Once the movie was going, they assumed their typical positions: Gideon with her legs outstretched, feet propped on the ottoman, and Harrow curled into the opposite end of the couch with a sketchbook perched against her knees. Her pencil smudged idle silhouettes onto the page, but she assured Gideon that her attention was mostly on the screen.
At least, it was in the beginning. More than once she realized she’d drifted deeply into the flow of a sketch, absorbed completely by the texture of paper beneath graphite. Each time, she resolved to rein in her focus – Gideon had been so excited and she didn’t want to disappoint her – but soon enough, she’d realize she’d been pulled away again.
The movie was nearly over when Harrow felt the couch cushions shift slightly beneath her, and she looked up in time to see Gideon pushing herself upright, hastily wiping at her eyes as she turned her face away. Harrow glanced up at the television, where the protagonists seemed to have been reunited safely.
“Gideon…” she said softly. Gideon shook her head, still facing the other direction. There was an audible sniffle as her shoulders trembled. Such tiny movements, but Harrow felt like there was a fist around her heart. “Gideon,” she repeated, “at least let me get you a tissue.”
“I’m fine,” Gideon choked out.
Harrow set her sketchbook and pencil on the side table, no threat to her attention now, and took the remote to pause the movie. “They both made it, okay? They’re both fine.”
“No, I know, I just–” Gideon’s voice was watery. “But like, before that, they had to have been so scared and if that had been– I wouldn’t be able to take it…”
“Gideon, will you… will you look at me? Please?”
She clearly deliberated for a few seconds before turning to Harrow, and at the sight of her face, Harrow nearly wanted to cry with her. Her skin was flushed red and tears glossed her eyes and darkened her lashes. She didn’t look at Harrow for more than a second before squeezing her eyes shut, a single tear leaking out to roll down her cheek.
The fist around Harrow’s heart tightened its grip, and she was barely thinking as she crawled towards Gideon, murmuring reassurances. “I’m right here,” she said softly. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” She swept her thumb across Gideon’s cheek, brushing away that lone tear.
“I’m fine, it’s just, you know, this fucking… TBI shit… makes me emotional. Over stupid shit, sometimes.” Her voice was coming out in great juddering gasps, her eyes still closed. “It’ll pass.”
Harrow’s own eyes stung and her throat felt tight. She smoothed Gideon’s hair back from her temple, buying herself a moment to get her voice under control. “That doesn’t mean it’s not real. Knowing that doesn’t make it stop hurting. It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Gideon opened her eyes, gold irises made all the more luminous in their veil of tears. Harrow barely saw her face begin to crumple before Gideon turned away again.
“No, Gideon, please don’t.” Harrow pushed forward, but even rising up on her knees wasn’t enough. She pressed closer, steadying herself with a knee on either side of Gideon’s thighs. She laid a hand along Gideon’s jaw, gently guiding her back. “Please don’t hide from me.” She eased herself down, settling her weight into Gideon’s lap.
Gideon blinked hard as several tears dripped down her cheeks in quick succession. “I don’t think I could hide from you if I tried,” she said, voice raw. The fist around Harrow’s heart became a dagger as Gideon leaned forward and laid her head on Harrow’s shoulder.
One hand came to rest cradling the back of Gideon’s head, fingers threaded through her hair; the other trailed slowly up and down her back while Harrow kept up a steady stream of whispered reassurance. The collar of her shirt grew damp with tears, warm at first but cooling as Gideon’s breathing gradually slowed.
Time seemed liquid, unspooling lazily between them. Harrow couldn’t have said how long it had been when Gideon pressed her face into the crook of her neck and whispered, “I’m so lucky to have you.”
Harrow took a shaky breath. “I could say the same.” She stroked her thumb along the soft skin at the back of Gideon’s neck.
“I wish I’d known you sooner,” she breathed. Harrow could feel her eyelashes against the hollow of her throat.
“You did, though, and–”
“That wasn’t me. Not really. I want more time with you.” As she spoke, her lips ghosted across Harrow’s collarbone. “I want our before.”
Harrow shook her head, but she could barely think with Gideon’s chest rising and falling against her own, the weight of it nearly narcotic. “You don’t, Gideon. We– we haven’t always been like this.” Slowly – so agonizingly slowly – the tip of Gideon’s nose traced a line along the column of Harrow’s throat. “You barely know me now,” she exhaled.
Gideon pressed her lips to the corner of Harrow’s jaw, breathless as she spoke against her skin. “I know what I need to. The past doesn’t have to be who we are.”
Harrow’s voice was little more than a sigh as she said the only word she could bring to her lips: “Gideon.”
Gideon lifted her head to meet Harrow’s gaze, color high on her cheeks. “I know who you are,” she said.
And then it was Harrow’s lips on Gideon’s, Gideon’s on hers, and Harrow felt the world had somehow slipped out from beneath them. Sensation blurred into emotion, boundaries between her hands and Gideon’s skin became nebulous, insignificant. She gasped against Gideon’s mouth as if she could breathe her in.
Hands bracketed her ribs, large enough to span the slight curve of her waist. Harrow could have sworn her chest had bloomed open at the touch, those hands the only thing holding her together. Held steady in her grasp, Harrow curled a hand into Gideon’s hair, sliding down to cup the back of her head as Gideon kissed a line along her jaw, her mouth soft and hot where it paused below her ear.
Harrow arched into the contact, desperate for more, and felt Gideon’s lips curve into a gentle smirk against her neck. “Please,” Harrow exhaled, unsure what it was, exactly, that she was asking for. Her pulse thrummed with it: more, more, more. “Come back… come back to me.” She shifted, catching Gideon’s lips once more against her own, unsure of where she ended and Gideon began, of where desire became action.
There was salt on their tongues, and Harrow’s cheeks were wet but she didn’t know whose tears they were; she may well have been crying Gideon’s tears, and Gideon hers, so surreal was the taste of it.
“I’m here,” Gideon breathed across her damp skin. “You’re here.”
Gideon,
This is the worst thing I have ever done.
Notes:
I was listening to Yellow by Xana on repeat for DAYS while working on that last scene, should you desire a little mood music. It's also on the playlist I linked in the previous chapter's end note :)
Chapter 3: (freaking out) loving something that could be taken from me
Chapter Text
Hurricane Pinterest had hit the Dve-Nav household. This was immediately apparent upon opening the front door; Gideon’s whereabouts, on the other hand, were not.
“Gideon?” Harrow called out, stepping gingerly over a pile of small boards and what looked to be an architecturally unsound birdhouse. The floor was littered with the detritus of a dozen different projects: scraps of fabric, yarn, containers of beads, crumpled paper, paintbrushes… Harrow sighed and leaned down to pick up an open jar of bright pink fabric paint. She scanned the rest of the crafting paraphernalia strewn across the floor, looking for the lid.
“I didn’t hear you come in.”
Harrow startled and nearly dropped the paint. After a steadying breath, she stood. “That makes us even, I didn’t hear you come down the hallway.”
“I wasn’t trying to sneak up on you,” Gideon said apologetically. “Just, you know. Socks.” She kicked out one leg, showing off a foot clad in a hot dog patterned sock.
“Nevermind that.” Harrow brushed the hair out of her eyes and took another look at the living room. “What is going on here, exactly?”
Gideon shrugged. “Bored. I haven’t seen you in like, three days. I made some stuff for you though, as a reward for finishing your big project. Did you get it turned in?”
Harrow nodded wearily.
Gideon eyed her with concern. “When was the last time you slept?”
Harrow knew she looked like a black rag that had been thrown in the bottom of the laundry basket and was in need of a good ironing, but aesthetics hadn’t made an appearance on her priority list in days. “Where is the lid to this?” She held up the paint.
“I don’t like that you didn’t answer that, but if it’s not out here it’s probably in the kitchen.”
Harrow inspected the pot of paint as she made her way into the kitchen. “Do I dare ask what you’re making with neon fabric paint?”
“You’ll see it, it’s drying on the table,” Gideon replied, hot on her heels.
A tee shirt was stretched out on the tabletop, corners pinned down with cans of soup as though it was being vivisected. As Harrow drew closer, she could see that it featured a large, neon pink heart emblazoned with the words “SEX PAL” in ornate but not particularly neat black lettering.
“I’m not wearing that,” Harrow swore immediately. Her cheeks pinkened. “It’s not even true,” she mumbled.
“It’s not for you.” Gideon rolled her eyes. “It’s for Palamedes. It literally has his name on it.”
It took Harrow longer than it should have to put together what she meant, but a worse realization hit her at the same moment. “He’s going to wear that everywhere,” she groaned.
“Yeah,” Gideon said fondly. “I made one for you that’s even better but it’s still in the wash. But I’ve also got something for you in the–”
From somewhere behind Harrow, an electronic beep blared loud enough to make her jump.
“–oven…” Gideon finished weakly.
Beneath the paint dripping down her shirtfront, Harrow’s heart pounded, slow to return to its natural tempo.
After a brief silence, Gideon tentatively offered, “Maybe it’ll come out if we wash it right away?”
Harrow was so tired she could only nod as she blotted the mess with a wad of paper towels.
“I can start scrubbing on it if you want to go find something of mine to put on.” Gideon rubbed the back of her neck awkwardly. “Just, uh, throw your stuff in the hallway and I’ll grab it.”
Harrow trudged down to Gideon’s bedroom, holding the hem of her shirt out from herself to avoid any further drippage, and shoved the door closed behind her with her foot. A cursory attempt to avoid smearing paint on herself was made as she peeled the shirt off over her head, folding it carefully once it was off to keep the paint from smearing on anything else. She cracked the door and dropped her shirt in the hallway. She sighed at the sight of pink splatters on her jeans and shimmied those off as well before shoving them outside the bedroom door.
With the door clicked shut behind her, Harrow turned to the closet, feeling very exposed despite crossing her arms tightly over her chest. There was no universe in which any of Gideon’s clothing would ever fit Harrow appropriately. This meant she was faced with the choice between looking like a child in hand-me-downs with oversized long sleeves and pants rolled up several times over, or looking like a child in hand-me-downs with oversized short sleeves that would only emphasize the twigginess of her limbs, which was at least half of why she so hated to leave them exposed.
In the end, a pair of sweatpants and a flannel shirt won out. There was no hiding that she’d had to turn back the cuffs and pants multiple times, but the hem of the flannel at least hung long enough on her to cover up the fact that the drawstring on the sweatpants had been cinched tight and the waistband rolled down to keep it from sagging down her hips.
She shuffled back out to the kitchen where Gideon was running her shirt under the faucet, already coated in thick, foamy bubbles.
“Google said cold water and dish soap, and it seems like it’s working okay so far…” Gideon’s voice trailed off when she turned to Harrow, one corner of her mouth tugging upwards as she looked her up and down.
“Don’t start,” Harrow warned.
Gideon shook her head, still grinning. “I was just gonna say that green’s a good color on you.”
Harrow re-rolled one of the plaid flannel cuffs. “Thank you,” she said stiffly.
“And that maybe you should wear my clothes more often.”
She wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything, just grabbed her jeans from where Gideon had left them on the countertop and held them under the tap. Her stomach turned over when Gideon talked like that, but not in an entirely unpleasant way. Ianthe made suggestive remarks to her all the time, but Harrow knew that at least half of those comments were somehow insulting even when she couldn’t quite pinpoint what the insult was. Gideon meant these things, which felt discomfitingly vulnerable in a completely different way.
The flecks of paint on her jeans were coming out quickly; most of the splatters were small enough that she could pick them away with her nails, the neon pink clinging to the edges of her black polish. The same couldn’t be said for her shirt, which had taken the brunt of the impact.
“You should go take a nap,” Gideon said, bumping Harrow lightly with her hip. “I’ll keep working on this, since it’s, you know, my bad.”
Harrow scoffed. “That’ll be a great look for us, Pyrrha coming home to find me asleep on the couch in your clothes.”
“Go sleep in my bed, then, if you’re so worried about her seeing.”
Harrow stared at her. “That’s worse, though,” she said. “You do see how that’s worse, right?”
“This is a real blow to my ego to admit,” Gideon said as she turned off the faucet, “but I honestly think she’s more likely to assume that I threw paint on you than to think we were doing anything PG-13. Not that she’d care if we were. I mean, it’s Pyrrha.”
A fair assessment of the situation, Harrow had to admit.
“Did I tell you she gave me like, The Talk 2.0 after last weekend?” Gideon continued scrubbing the shirt as if she could scrub the memory from her mind.
Even if it was Pyrrha, Harrow wasn’t a huge fan of anyone thinking about her and Gideon in that context, let alone discussing it. “How’d that go?” she asked apprehensively.
“I mean, fine, I guess?” Gideon shrugged, sending a few soap bubbles flying. “Like, I get it. And conceptually, I appreciate it. But I do not want to personally have that conversation ever again.”
Harrow had known Pyrrha would find out sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later. The primary factor was that there was no way Gideon would have been able to go more than a few days without caving and telling her everything. But Harrow had assumed they would have those few days, or at the very least, a chance to discuss how they wanted to bring it up with her.
Alas.
They had eventually broken apart that night, all tear-stained cheeks and kiss-swollen lips. Gideon had fallen asleep at some point, her head pillowed on Harrow’s lap. Harrow stayed awake for some time after that, trailing her fingers through Gideon’s hair and watching the soft rise and fall of her chest. She told herself that she would head home once Gideon stirred, but she’d succumbed to sleep as well before that happened, not waking until she heard the creak of the door as Pyrrha came in and flipped on the overhead light.
Pyrrha paused, watching the two of them a moment, but smirked when she noticed Harrow was awake. “You staying here tonight?”
Harrow blinked into the light, shuffling through the file drawers of her brain for a response. “I thought I’d leave once– I didn’t want to wake her…” She gestured to Gideon’s sleeping form.
“You’re welcome to stay,” Pyrrha said as she kicked off her shoes. “I’m heading to bed, but just lock up behind you if you decide to go.”
Harrow nodded mutely.
Pyrrha was about to step into the hallway when she turned back. “Oh, and Harrow?”
“Hmm?”
“She’s got a little graphite,” she said, gesturing towards the corner of her lips. “Just there.”
Harrow glanced down at Gideon’s face, so relaxed in sleep, and quickly swiped her thumb across what she had thought was a shadow along Gideon’s jaw. The pigment that came away on her hand was indeed, not a shadow, but graphite. She felt her eyes grow wide, realizing Pyrrha’s implication.
“Good niiiight,” Pyrrha sang. She raised a hand to wave playfully as she turned the light back off and disappeared down the hallway.
Harrow had waited several agonizing moments to make sure Pyrrha wasn’t going to re-emerge from her bedroom before she could bring herself to move.
“Gideon!” she hissed quietly, shaking Gideon’s shoulder. “Wake up!”
Even in the lamplight, Harrow could see Gideon’s eyebrows scrunch together at the unwelcome intrusion. She let out a low groan and rolled over to face Harrow, settling one hand on her waist. “What time is it?” she asked blearily, eyes barely open.
“Definitely past last call, considering that Pyrrha just came home.”
“Oh shit, really?” Gideon mumbled through a yawn. “S’okay though, you can just stay here if you’re too tired to drive.”
“The time is not the issue, Griddle,” Harrow said, unable to keep an accusatory lilt out of her voice.
Gideon deigned to open her eyes approximately three quarters of the way. “Enlighten me.”
“The issue is that you were asleep in my lap and she pointed out that you had graphite smudged all over your face.”
“Oh shit, really?” Gideon was fully awake now, golden eyes staring directly into Harrow’s. Harrow momentarily thought Gideon’s wide-eyed, thin-lipped expression was one of fear, but then her shoulders began to shake with suppressed laughter.
“It’s not funny, you ass.” Harrow bounced one of her legs beneath Gideon, attempting to knee her in the side, but Gideon only curled her body in closer around Harrow’s, pressing her face against Harrow’s stomach to stifle her giggles.
Her voice came out muffled against Harrow’s shirt between staccato bursts of laughter. “We can be embarrassed once the sun’s up… but right now… it’s so fucking funny.”
Harrow had summarily banished her to the other end of the couch to sleep.
Which is to say, Gideon had found that situation significantly more amusing than her recent chat with Pyrrha. “I told her not to say anything embarrassing to you about it,” she said, wringing the water out of Harrow’s shirt, “but the more I think about it, all that means is that now she’s definitely gonna say something embarrassing to you about it.”
“Great,” Harrow muttered. “Did you get your stuff out of the oven, by the way?” She took a step towards the oven, but Gideon quickly stepped in front of her, hands flinging water droplets across the floor.
“You’re not allowed to see yet,” she said firmly. “But they’ll be ready by the time you wake up from your nap,” she added sweetly. Harrow rolled her eyes but allowed herself to be steered over to the couch, where for the second time in less than a week, she fell asleep.
And for the second time in less than a week, she was awoken after an indeterminate amount of time by Pyrrha coming home. Except this time, rather than quietly turning on the light and kicking off her shoes, her first moments inside the door were spent stumbling over a rickety birdhouse and confiscating a marker cap from Nona.
“Gideon, what the fuck? ” she called, surveying the debris field that had once been her living room.
Harrow pushed herself upright at the commotion, blankets slipping off of her and to the floor. She optimistically raked a hand through her hair in hopes of taming whatever degree of bed-head had been attained since she last looked in a mirror.
“Sorry,” Pyrrha said gingerly. “I didn’t expect anyone to be under that pile of blankets. Looks like you hit the post-project crash.”
Harrow nodded. “I got it in, though, which is what matters.”
“That’s what she said.”
Harrow sighed at the sound of Gideon’s approach.
“I would love to laugh at that,” Pyrrha said, “but first we’ve gotta talk about why it looks like a Joann’s threw up all over my living room.”
Gideon shrugged. “Because that’s kind of what happened? I got bored and nothing was really hitting the spot, you know?”
“I do know, but you can’t just leave shit out everywhere like this.” Pyrrha held up the chewed up marker cap she’d recovered from Nona, who was presently dragging a tangle of yarn across the floor, occasionally stumbling as her little paws caught in the red string. “Nona almost ate a marker cap.”
Gideon looked chastened as she bent to scoop Nona up and held her to her chest, murmuring apologies. She gently tugged the yarn from Nona’s mouth; Nona interpreted this as a game and wriggled eagerly until Gideon set her down.
“Alright. New house rule,” Pyrrha announced. “Gotta put away supplies before you move onto another project. Doesn’t have to be finished, just put away.”
“That’s probably fair after today,” Gideon admitted begrudgingly.
Pyrrha cocked an eyebrow. “Does this have anything to do with how Harrow got into your pants?”
“Oh, absolutely.” Gideon snickered.
Harrow scrunched her eyes closed, but it didn’t spare her the sounds of Gideon and Pyrrha high fiving. They were still laughing when she forced herself to look again.
“You didn’t want the Virginity Rocks shirt? Bummer. That green’s a good color on you, though.” Pyrrha’s laughter ceased as she turned to Gideon. “Seriously though, have you seen my Post-Its lately? You’re getting reminders on all your craft shit.”
“Why would you ask me, a girl with memory impairments, this?”
“I suppose you get a pass this time.” Pyrrha mussed Gideon’s hair as she passed, off in search of her most favored labeling medium.
Gideon grabbed a bundle of dark cloth from the side table and dropped onto the couch next to Harrow. Over the sounds of Pyrrha excavating the junk drawer from the other room, she said, “Are you ready to see what I made you?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” Harrow said, curious as to what could possibly rival the Sex Pal shirt and furiously hoping it wasn’t a custom Virginity Rocks jersey.
Gideon unfurled the garment in her hands and held it up. “Behold!” The sweatshirt was black, perhaps only one size too big for Harrow, with a human ribcage printed on it in a lighter, rusty brown. “What do you think?”
Harrow pulled the shirt closer to get a better look, rubbing the material between her fingers. “It’s… really cool, actually.”
“I’m choosing to ignore the tone of surprise.”
“Well, I was expecting something a bit more…” Harrow contemplated a moment, searching for the right word. “Irreverent.”
“Nah, I got my jollies with the Sex Pal shirt. Besides, I was hoping you’d actually, you know, wear it.”
Harrow studied the shirt a moment longer. “Did you do the design with bleach? Isn’t the bleach DEFCON Post-It Note levels of forbidden?”
Gideon smiled innocently. “I’ve got one more thing, but only if you stop questioning where I source my materials.”
Harrow rolled her eyes but nodded, extending her hand when Gideon instructed. Gideon dug something out of her pocket and dropped it into Harrow’s palm.
Two somethings, actually. Two hooked earrings with a small charm made of clay dangling from each. Harrow picked up each in turn, inspecting them. One was a skull, meticulously sculpted, and the other was two crossed bones.
“Probably not worth throwing paint on yourself, and definitely more irreverent despite the Gloom Mistress motif, but I dunno. I had fun making them for you.”
There was certainly something endearing about them, despite the campiness. Perhaps the aforementioned fun had somehow baked into them. Harrow reached up to remove a stud from each ear and slipped her gifted earrings into place.
“How do they look?”
Gideon smiled. “Bitchin’.”
Gideon,
How many times have I written this out by now? I’m sorry for everything, I didn’t plan for it to go this way, I really have changed, ad infinitum. They’re just words.
I keep saying that they’re just words, but we’ve hurt each other plenty with words, haven’t we? So why can’t I fix this with words too? Sometimes I wish I could just put you inside my head, share my very heart with you and cut out the poor middleman of language.
“It’s… normal.” Gideon squinted up at the Nonagesimus house, one hand shading her eyes from the morning sun.
“Yes, Griddle, I live in a normal house. I’ll be inside when you’re done gawking.” Harrow stalked up the back steps to the door. She didn’t regret allowing Gideon to come with her as she retrieved her forgotten tablet, not exactly. But it was uncomfortable all the same.
It was fairly nondescript, as far as houses went: a square little thing with beige siding that had seen better days. It wasn’t big and it wasn’t fancy, just a bit isolated on the edge of town. There was an old oak tree that shaded the yard, a reasonably large covered porch in front, a garage out back.
Harrow’s keys stuck a moment in the lock, just like they always had, but she had long since figured out how to jiggle the doorknob at just the right angle to release them. The back door opened into the kitchen, and she dropped her bag unceremoniously onto the small table. Gideon jogged up the steps before the door could close behind her.
Harrow spread her hands out at her sides, a small gesture towards the room. “So what’s the verdict? Is the kitchen normal?”
Harrow knew it was outdated and worn, but it was functional for her purposes. It even stayed fairly clean, which was because her purposes were largely limited to providing a dumping ground for her bag and containing her stores of peanut butter, granola bars, and the like (although she had been known on occasion to get a little wild and heat up a can of soup on the stove).
Gideon nodded as she looked around the room. “I give it two very normal thumbs up.” After a moment, she added, “I don’t know what I expected. I guess I just thought it’d be more… you?”
“And what, precisely, would that look like?” Harrow was, of course, enjoying needling Gideon to defend her position, poking holes in her assumptions. But Gideon had just cut to the heart of it: she wanted to know what Gideon considered “Harrow.” She wanted to see herself as Gideon saw her, and maybe then she could pretend that was real too.
Watching Gideon mull over this question nearly made her reconsider her commitment to not biting her nails. Her hand drifted up to her mouth, a reactivated muscle memory, but she stuck to running her thumb back and forth along the edge of her lower lip instead.
“I’m not sure what the right word is,” Gideon finally said. “Sort of like ‘intense’ but not quite that. I just thought it would be like, A Lot. I didn’t really have anything in particular in mind, but I figured whatever it was, it was going to be really that, you know?” She gave a soft smile. “You don’t do things halfway.”
Harrow hadn’t been expecting that, despite being described as “intense” for much of her life. When others said “intense,” what they usually meant was “too much” or “intimidating.” But when Gideon said it, when she described it, it sounded… admirable. She didn’t expect Harrow to make herself fit in; she expected the very environment to keep pace with Harrow.
“Well,” Harrow said after a moment, unsure how to follow that up, “it’s paid off, so…”
“This is where you grew up?”
Harrow nodded, shoving away thoughts of the last time Gideon had been there, and the last time Gideon had tried to get there.
“Do I get the grand tour, or is this like, a tablet extraction mission only?” Gideon was looking around the kitchen appreciatively, as though this were a museum of Harrow’s childhood.
In some ways it was, inasmuch as that the decor and furnishings were largely the same as they had been in her teen years. In the ways that mattered, though, this was just a house. Gideon wouldn’t find any ghosts of Harrow’s past here. Harrow was the only one who could see those.
“There’s not much to tour, really, but I suppose.” Harrow gestured around the room once more. “Kitchen, which you’ve previously been acquainted with.”
She led them through a seldom-used dining area and a living room with an enormous threadbare sofa. The table to the side of the sofa held several drinking glasses with varying amounts of water remaining in them. Down the hall there was a bathroom and two bedrooms.
Harrow pushed open the door of the first bedroom. “Box room, mostly,” she said. The bed and part of the floor were indeed stacked with boxes. “It used to be my parents’ room — it’s fine,” she added, closing the door before Gideon could say anything to make it more awkward.
“And my room.” Harrow watched from the doorway as Gideon stepped inside, carefully avoiding a pile of discarded clothing and the books scattered around the floor next to the unmade bed. A notebook and a stack of papers were wedged under the clothes that had been haphazardly and precariously piled on top of the dresser.
When Gideon glanced from the pile of to-be-worn-again clothes to Harrow, Harrow fought back the urge to stomp her foot. “I didn’t know I was going to be having guests over today!”
“Right,” Gideon said, smirking.
Harrow watched as Gideon looked around the room and tried to imagine seeing it for the first time like she was. Saying it was “sparse” was not exactly true, not with the amount of books piled onto a bookshelf that leaned slightly to the left and the heaps of clothing that never made it to the hamper or the closet. But neither did it give much away about the occupant, other than that they had read a lot of books and wore a lot of black.
“So… Do you know where you left it, your tablet? Or is this more like a search and rescue situation?”
“No, I had it last night…” Harrow clambered onto the bed. “It’s somewhere in here.” She pawed through the dips and valleys of her bunched up duvet, a voluminous, deep purple thing that puffed up around her as she searched. She eventually felt the weight of it shift and unearthed the tablet from its resting place deep in the folds of the bedding.
Gideon was looking at her curiously, an expression that somehow incorporated smugness as well as fondness. Harrow scowled at her, and that was all it took to elicit an explanation.
“Oh, come on, it’s kind of funny. Little Miss Buttoned Up Perfectionist uses the floor as her room’s largest shelf?” She crossed over to Harrow’s side of the bed, taking Harrow’s hands in hers to help pull her to standing.
Harrow allowed herself to be pulled up. “Remind me: which of us is it, again, that needs Post-It note reminders to put away their things?”
“That’s an unfair comparison, actually,” Gideon said blithely. “I get reminders because I forget to clean up. You just choose not to.”
“I know where everything is,” Harrow insisted.
“Sure, sure,” Gideon agreed, less than convinced. She plucked the tablet off the bed. “I’ll quit teasing, I know you’ve got work to do so we can get going.” She paused. “Unless you want to stay here. We can do that too.”
Harrow shook her head. “Your place is fine. Besides, what would you even do if we stayed here?”
Gideon shrugged. “I’m pretty good at finding ways to entertain myself, although my preferred form of entertainment is unfortunately booked for the rest of the day.” She wrapped an arm around Harrow’s shoulders and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “Very tragic.”
Harrow felt the corner of her mouth tugging upward, unbidden. “Maybe she’ll have some unexpected availability. If she can get on the road and see to her prior commitments, that is.”
“That’s true,” Gideon said, her gaze locked on Harrow. “Maybe I’ll get lucky.”
Gideon,
You keep brushing right up against it, and I still can’t bring myself to say it out loud. You looked right at these letters, no idea that they might be the very thing that destroys us both, and never even missed a beat. You’ve let me into every corner of your life without reservations, and I want to do the same. It’s a bit of a catch-22, isn’t it?
“Have you guys picked yet?” Gideon groaned. She was in her usual spot on the couch, but her legs were draped over Harrow’s lap. This conveniently allowed her to nudge Dulcie with one socked foot to punctuate her complaint.
“Not yet!” Dulcie scolded. “We haven’t found the right vibe. This is all for your cinematic edification, you know. Show a little respect for the process, please.”
Camilla sat on the floor in front of Dulcie. She had the remote in one hand, scrolling through lists of titles on the TV; with the other, she scratched behind Nona’s ears. The little dog had been glued to her side since the moment she stepped in the door, and she now lay contentedly across Camilla’s legs.
Palamedes emerged from the kitchen, balancing two large bowls of popcorn and one smaller one in his arms. The first bowl he passed off to Gideon and the second went to Dulcie. “And no butter, no salt for Harrowhark,” he said, handing the last and smallest bowl to Harrow before plopping down in the old bean bag chair that had been dragged out from Gideon’s room. His legs jack-knifed upwards as he sank unexpectedly into the beans.
“You guys haven’t started yet, have you?” Pyrrha called from the kitchen.
“NO!” everyone called back in unison, though with varying degrees of annoyance.
“Oh, good!” Pyrrha appeared in the doorway, a bottle of beer in hand. “Beer for anyone else? Cam?”
Camilla nodded, and Gideon called out, “And one for me!”
“Sure,” Pyrrha said pleasantly. “Just as soon as you can produce a doctor’s note saying you’re fully recovered and cleared for it.” Gideon booed but Pyrrha ignored her. “Harrow?”
“No thanks.”
Gideon bounced the back of her heel against Harrow’s thigh. “Come on, have one on my behalf.”
Harrow set her forearms over Gideon’s legs in her lap, stilling them. “I don’t drink,” she said, glancing over at Gideon before feigning interest in the movie selection.
“Ugh, boring,” Gideon groaned.
Pyrrha’s response was swift and sharp. “Gideon. Drop it.” She held Gideon’s gaze for a moment, brows raised slightly in warning, before turning back towards the kitchen.
A few seconds passed, uncomfortably quiet, but Dulcie abruptly ended the silence by gasping and bouncing up in her seat. “Princess Bride!” she shrieked. “Go back, go back! We’re watching The Princess Bride!” Palamedes and Camilla agreed enthusiastically. Or rather, Palamedes agreed enthusiastically and Camilla agreed neutrally but then scrolled back to the movie without hesitation. Even Pyrrha shouted out her support from the kitchen, having heard Dulcie’s declaration.
Four different voices overlapped each other, each assuring Gideon that this was the only correct choice for tonight, but amid all this, Harrow felt Gideon nudge her leg with her foot.
Sorry, Gideon mouthed when Harrow looked over at her.
It’s okay, Harrow mouthed back. She rested her hand on Gideon’s good knee and gently trailed her thumb back and forth, waiting until Gideon smiled to turn back to the television. She could feel the corners of her own mouth pulling upwards, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Dulcie and Palamedes exchange an amused look.
Pyrrha returned with an armload of drinks to distribute while Camilla got the movie going: bottles of beer for Camilla and Palamedes, water for Harrow and Dulcie, a can of soda for Gideon. She’d forgotten a bottle opener but Camilla knew some trick to pop the caps off without one, which seemed to impress Pyrrha.
Harrow tried to pay attention to the movie, and she didn’t even have her sketchbook to distract her, but she found herself distracted all the same. Her eyes kept drifting back to Gideon, watching her watch The Princess Bride for her second first time. She could hear the music resonating from the TV and Palamedes and Pyrrha reciting their favorite lines along with the actors. She was aware that Camilla had leaned back against the couch, putting her within arm’s reach for Dulcie to idly play with her hair. None of that had a hope of pulling her attention away, though. She could have watched Gideon like this all day, distractions be damned.
Watching Gideon getting to re-experience all of these things, Harrow felt like they were new to her too. There were new movies to watch and songs to listen to and places to go, but it wasn’t just that. There were experiences that were new for Harrow that were less well-defined, less concrete, than an old favorite movie. Sitting in a room with five other people without feeling the need to self-monitor her every move was not an experience she had had before, for example, to say nothing of the fact that one of those people was currently sprawled halfway across her lap.
It was a novelty for Harrow to be so thoroughly taken into account the way that Pyrrha and Gideon did, almost seamlessly woven into their lives. They assumed she would be part of their day, part of their lives, without a second thought. She was slowly becoming used to living a life filled with the luxuries of “good morning” texts, a cupboard stocked with her preferred brand of peanut butter, casual kisses (as well as less casual kisses), and multiple people who not only remembered when she had big assignments due but also inquired about them with genuine interest. It was a louder life without a doubt, with more conversation and music and laughter in these past months than she’d likely had in the rest of her life combined. She still had her limits and caveats, but she found that her tolerance for this new loud life had grown.
For the first time, she found herself looking forward to the future rather than merely accepting the inevitability of its approach.
After the credits rolled and Gideon had thoroughly debriefed everyone on her favorite scenes and characters, Harrow found herself helping Pyrrha carry empty popcorn bowls and beer bottles to the kitchen while Gideon walked the others out to the car.
“You’re going to have to tell her eventually,” Pyrrha said lightly as she put the cans and bottles in the recycling.
Harrow stopped, popcorn bowl in hand, and looked at her.
“I didn’t mean to put you on the spot earlier. That part’s your own business. But she’s going to find out eventually, and the longer you wait, the harder it’s going to be."
“I wasn’t aware that you knew about… that.” Harrow studied the light glinting off the shiny surface of the bowl in her hands.
Pyrrha laughed, not unkindly but with genuine amusement. “Oh, please. Teenagers always think adults don’t know anything about what’s going on, but we see more than you realize. And vice versa, I suppose – adults always think teenagers don’t know anything about what’s going on, but that’s not true either.”
She wiped her hands on a dishcloth and hung it back over the oven door handle. “Of course I knew. She came home in tears still buzzed, which she didn’t think I noticed, and she spent the next three days hiding in her room and barely looking me in the eye, but she cracked eventually. She always does, if you give her some time. She told me everything, she just needed some space to get a head start on sorting her thoughts out herself.”
Harrow would rather eat glass than verbalize her recollection of that night to anyone, let alone to Pyrrha, whose opinion of her had been so hard won. The shame burning inside her was already nearly unbearable, and Pyrrha didn’t even know the half of it.
“Everyone’s stupid when they’re sixteen, Harrow. Even me. Especially me. Don’t let it outweigh all the other stuff.”
Harrow so fervently wished that that was the only thing on that side of the scale, but she nodded anyway. Across from her, she could feel Pyrrha hesitating. She risked a glance up at her and was surprised to be met with an expression she could only remember seeing on Pyrrha’s face during the early days of Gideon’s recovery.
“I’ve been wanting to say this for a while but I’ve never figured out how to say it in a way that wouldn’t make you uncomfortable, so I’m just gonna say it and hope it helps more than it hurts. You don’t have to say anything, I just need to get this out.”
Despite the shame burning within her, Harrow felt like the very breath had frozen in her lungs. Her mind was skipping through worst case scenarios at unprecedented speeds.
“I want to apologize to you,” Pyrrha said, which was not a statement Harrow had included in any of her rapid fire imaginings.
“When you were growing up, I–” She stopped to clear her throat and started over. “We’re not a small town by any means, but we’re not that big either, you know? Everyone kind of knows a little bit about everyone’s business here, or at least they think they do, and… We had all known for a long time that your parents weren’t doing well. I don’t think it’s news to you that they weren’t particularly well liked, but that’s no excuse.”
Harrow could feel her face pinching together in confusion, utterly lost as to where this was going. She was distantly aware that the way her brows drew together probably made her look angry, but she didn’t have the necessary energy to modulate that right now.
“Somebody should have been checking in. You were just a kid, and someone should have been looking in on you at least once in a while. So often I’d see you out at school or wherever and I just had this feeling that something wasn’t right. I thought about stopping by myself a few times and I just… never did.” Pyrrha shook her head, and it occurred to Harrow that she too looked faintly angry. On the heels of that recognition, she realized Pyrrha was angry with herself.
“The second I heard about your parents I felt so ashamed that I’d never followed through. It probably wouldn’t have changed anything, but you deserved to have someone looking out for you. So I just wanted to say how sorry I am that we failed you and your family like that. And that I’m glad to have you here now.”
Harrow felt like she’d hit a bottleneck trying to take all that in at once and was grasping at straws for a response. “Why would you–? I mean, Gideon and I were always–”
Pyrrha didn’t let her finish. “Harrow, honey, it doesn’t matter. You were a child. Remember those school pictures, that little girl? There is nothing you could have done to change the fact that you should have had a safe home to go back to at the end of the day. Everyone deserves that. Even shitty teens who pull a fast one that ends up with my kid coming home in tears. That’s not something you earn through good behavior.”
In theory, Harrow agreed with her. But it felt different when she turned it back on herself. She’d spent her entire life relying on her own self-sufficiency, and it injured her pride to hear that she’d not been as successful as she’d thought, even as a child. She realized this was directly antithetical to what Pyrrha was saying, but she felt it just the same.
“You don’t have to believe it for it to be true,” Pyrrha said, her smile taking a bit of its usual mischief back on. “Maybe you just try to trust me on this one while you let it marinate a little, okay?”
Harrow nodded, more out of social obligation than agreement, thoughts still tumbling around in her head.
Pyrrha laid a hand on Harrow’s shoulder as she passed and gave it a gentle squeeze. It had been a while since she’d tried that, but Harrow wasn’t surprised after such a talk. She was surprised, though, when Pyrrha leaned down and briefly pressed her lips to the crown of her head.
And then she was gone, leaving Harrow to figure out what the fuck she was supposed to do with all of that.
Gideon,
It seems right, doesn’t it? I should have seen it coming. I should have known the only way I’d ever have something like this was through some sort of Faustian bargain. It is so easy to be with you, so easy to love and be loved by you. It’s all the more terrible for that.
I don’t want you to hate me, but I don’t want you to hate yourself. Mutually assured destruction is all we are. How can you possibly expect me to pull the trigger?
Harrow held her phone between her shoulder and her ear, listening to the ringing on the other end of the line as she hunted through a basket of clean laundry in search of socks. She’d texted Gideon earlier than morning, but she hadn’t answered and Harrow didn’t want to spring this on her.
The voice that answered wasn’t the one she expected. “It’s me, hi,” came Pyrrha’s voice. “She left her phone in the kitchen, one sec.” She must have pulled the phone away from her face; her voice sounded distant as she called out, “Gideon, phone!”
Even more distant, probably from her bedroom doorway, Harrow heard Gideon shout a reply. “The old Gideon can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Oh! ‘Cause she’s dead!"
There was a faint sigh from Pyrrha and a pause as she waited for Gideon to come closer. “Hey, let’s not. I don’t like that.”
Harrow could hear Gideon groan. “It’s from–”
“I know it’s from Reputation. And if you were a trillionaire popstar who hadn’t recently had a near-fatal brain injury, it’d be different but for now I don’t wanna hear that from you, okay? It makes me sad.” There was a brief silence, and Harrow could imagine the exact angle of Pyrrha’s eyebrows, the trajectory of Gideon’s eye roll. “Harrow’s on the phone for you.”
It was Gideon’s voice that spoke into the phone next. “Hello?” she asked. Harrow knew Pyrrha was still standing right next to her, because she could hear her singing over Gideon’s voice: “You’re on the phone with your girlfriend, she’s upset–” until Gideon shoved her away, if the soft grunt of impact was anything to go by. “Stoppp. And she’s not upset. You’re not upset, right?”
“I’m not upset,” Harrow confirmed. “I thought you were a Speak Now household though?”
“We are, but also, in this house we don’t pit bad bitches against each other.”
Which was great, because Harrow wasn’t really in the mood to have to go to bat for Folklore. “What are your plans for today?” she asked, finally fishing two matching socks out from deep within the laundry basket.
“I was tentatively thinking I’d sit around at home and wait for you to tell me what we’re doing.”
Harrow sat on her bed, struggling to keep the phone against her ear while she pulled on the elusive socks. “In that case, what would you say to driving practice?”
There was a pause. “What?”
“Driving practice.”
“Yeah, no, I heard you, it’s just not what I was expecting you to say.”
“I was thinking that the high school parking lot would be empty on a Saturday and then we could go get lunch or something, but we don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
Gideon didn’t say anything for a moment, and Harrow could have sworn she could hear the gears inside her head turning. “I do want to, it’s just that I’m…”
“Scared?”
An exhale. “Yeah. Or, I don’t know. Scared that I will be scared?”
“I wouldn’t let you get behind the wheel if I thought you wouldn’t be safe.” No response. “I’m leaving my place in a few minutes. You don’t have to decide right now, but at least think about it.”
Gideon grumbled an agreement. Somewhat more brightly, she added, “I’m excited to see you.”
“You saw me yesterday.”
“I know. I’m still excited though.”
Harrow could feel a smile creeping across her face despite herself as she assured Gideon that she would be there soon.
When Harrow pulled into the driveway, Gideon was waiting for her at the front door. She was freshly showered, her hair still wet and water-darkened, and Harrow rose up on her toes to meet her when she leaned in for a quick kiss.
Gideon closed the door behind them as Harrow stepped past her, heading for the kitchen to say hello to Pyrrha. She hadn’t made it more than two steps when Gideon’s hand closed around her wrist and pulled her back to kiss her again, more deeply this time.
“Good morning,” she said, moving her lips to just below Harrow’s ear.
Harrow couldn’t help but tilt her head, giving Gideon full access to the column of her neck. “It’s almost noon,” she said.
“Wrong.” Gideon’s lips curved into a smile against her skin.
Harrow was trying to figure out what that was supposed to mean, but she was having a hard time concentrating on anything other than the brush of Gideon’s fingertips at her hips, where they had found a sliver of exposed skin between her shirt and the waistband of her jeans.
“My day doesn’t start until I see you.”
“Shut up,” Harrow groaned. Too many cheesy lines, too many words. There would be no more talking: only Harrow’s lips moving against Gideon’s. She smoothed her hands down Gideon’s arms, secretly glad that she’d worn short sleeves, nothing to come between her palms and Gideon’s shower-cooled skin.
It was long moments later when Harrow murmured, “Is this a ploy to delay having to decide about driving lessons?”
“That depends, is it working?” Harrow could feel the thrum of Gideon’s voice in her chest.
“Only short term.”
“Damn. I guess this is just for moral support, then.”
Harrow hummed, considering. “I’d be willing to bet that if you put in a good effort with driving practice, there would be some more moral support where that came from.” She pressed a kiss to Gideon’s collarbone, just inside her shirt collar, breathing in the scent of crisp soap mixed with the warmth of her skin.
“As a treat?” Gideon’s arms had encircled her fully now, wrists crossed low against Harrow’s back.
Harrow pulled back just enough to look Gideon intently in the eye. “As positive reinforcement,” she said. She brushed her lips briefly against Gideon’s once more before breaking away from her arms.
When they entered the kitchen, Pyrrha was still in pajama pants and an old sweatshirt, refilling her coffee. As per usual, Harrow declined to have any; Gideon plucked a bottle of alarmingly neon Gatorade from the fridge.
“Is that new?” Pyrrha asked Harrow by way of greeting, gesturing to her ear.
Harrow lightly touched the edge of her own ear, feeling somewhat self-conscious. She’d added the new piercing a few weeks ago, but she hadn’t expected anyone aside from Gideon to notice. She supposed it was more visible today, with her hair partially tied up, but she was still surprised. “Relatively, yes.”
“You at least sterilize the needle this time?” Pyrrha took a sip from her mug of coffee.
Gideon’s eyes widened. “You didn’t do that yourself, did you?”
Harrow pursed her lips as she shot Pyrrha an unamused look. “Of course not. I had it done professionally.”
Pyrrha raised an eyebrow, unconvinced. “Right. And the others?”
Harrow hesitated. “The others were… acquired through a variety of means.”
“Wasn’t born yesterday, Harrow.” Pyrrha smirked at her over her coffee. “You’re not the first rebellious teen with a sewing needle and you certainly won’t be the last.”
“You shoved a needle through your own ear?” Before Harrow could respond, Gideon was sweeping her hair back away from her ear to inspect the eclectic assemblage of jewelry. “Which ones?” she demanded.
“Don’t touch it.” Harrow pushed her hand away and scowled at Pyrrha. “It was a long time ago, they’re fine.”
“Which. Ones.” Gideon repeated.
Harrow looked to Pyrrha for assistance, but she only shrugged. “I’m kinda curious too.”
Knowing that this would become a recurring point of contention throughout the day if she didn’t answer, Harrow begrudgingly acquiesced. “I want to preface this by just reminding everyone that I am fine.” She held up a hand to stop Gideon’s protests. “I don’t recommend doing it yourself, but it turned out fine for me.” If you didn’t count the three that had become infected (through no fault of her own, she maintained) and necessitated removing the studs to let them heal over.
Pyrrha winced at each piercing that Harrow indicated and Gideon’s face had taken on a distinctly green pallor by the time she got to the last one.
“I actually don’t remember if I did this one or not,” she said, fiddling with one of the tiny hoops.
“How do you not remember something like that?” Gideon asked, thoroughly appalled.
Harrow shrugged. “It was years ago and I’ve gotten several since then.” She wasn’t about to admit that the initial attempt had most certainly been a DIY job that she’d had to let close up; the part that she couldn’t remember was whether she tried again or if she’d had it done while she was already at the shop for something else. That might have been the other side, though.
“No more. Please,” Gideon begged. “I’m gonna throw up if I think about you stabbing yourself again.”
“Of course I’m not going to do any more myself. I’m not a stupid seventeen year old anymore.” In most ways, at least. It was nice to focus on inconsequential teenage stupidity for a change. She pushed that thought from her mind. “Maybe once you’re driving again, you can take me for my next one,” she said airily. “Hold my hand and all.”
“Like hell I will. You do that shit on your own time. Besides, I’d pass out just watching and you’d have to drive us home anyway.” Gideon took an annoyed and unnecessarily loud slurp from her Gatorade.
“This is a lot of angst for a hypothetical situation, Griddle.”
Gideon wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, lips tinted slightly blue from the drink. “I think I’ve had enough needles for several lifetimes after this stint in the hospital, thank you.”
“It’s so hard to win arguments with her when she’s always got that in her back pocket,” Pyrrha grumbled. “Like, one could argue that most of your needle sticks happened while you were either minimally conscious or completely out and they don’t count because you don’t remember them, but that feels like kind of a dick move.”
“Yeah, hard agree.” Gideon rolled her eyes. Harrow concurred; she would have taken them all and more for her if she could.
“So what’s the driving plan?” Pyrrha asked. “Would you rather take my car?”
Gideon glanced at Harrow. “I think she’d have to be able to see over the dash to do that.” Harrow wanted to protest, but Pyrrha’s SUV was, as Gideon would say, “an absolute unit” compared to her sedan, which she found intimidating regardless of her ability to see the road. Plus, Gideon’s response had not been a flat out “no” to driving, so she wasn’t about to push back.
Pyrrha saw them out the door with faux sentimentality (“All grown up and ready to drive!” she said, pressing her hands over her heart) that Harrow felt was probably masking a kernel of sincerity. She and Gideon had both been in agreement, though, that Pyrrha was likely to be a less-than-helpful driving instructor, though not for lack of care. Much the opposite, Harrow thought: for all that Pyrrha wanted Gideon to get back to her typical routines, her aura of suppressed anxiety with Gideon at the wheel was liable to be a distraction at best.
Fifteen minutes later, Gideon was in the driver’s seat, parked in the deserted school parking lot. Several minutes more were spent adjusting the seat, fiddling with the mirrors, and double checking the locations of various components of the car, all of which were technically necessary but they were also clearly serving a dual purpose of stalling for time.
Eventually, though, there were no more things to check.
“When you’re ready, put it in drive and ease off the brake,” Harrow said.
Gideon stared out the windshield, and Harrow worried for a moment that she had changed her mind. “Can you stop phrasing it like that?” Gideon said without taking her eyes off the pavement in front of them. “I’m never gonna be ready.”
Harrow bit back a sigh; she didn’t begrudge Gideon needing a push and was well aware that this wasn’t easy for her, but having her words picked at like that still got under her skin. “Put the car in drive and let up on the brake.”
Somewhat mechanically, Gideon complied, and Harrow further instructed her to keep going to the end of the lot and make a turn to follow the perimeter. “Do you want to stop and debrief?” she asked once Gideon had made the turn and taken them partway down the length of the lot.
“I think… I think I’m okay.” She was sitting ramrod straight, vigilant even in the completely empty parking lot. Harrow could see the tension that had settled into every inch of her body, but it was her amber eyes that truly showed the effort of keeping her full attention on the road.
Harrow so badly wanted to reach across the center console and lay a hand on her arm, her knee, brush her fingers through her hair, any contact to transmit the gentle pride she felt at Gideon’s steady hands on the wheel. Physical affection had rapidly become less aversive to Harrow, at least with Gideon. Without the instinctive recoil she’d lived with for most of her life, Harrow found herself taking every opportunity to touch her and be touched, often without realizing or even meaning to, like taking in great lungfuls of air after breaching the surface of a river. Gideon clearly savored it as well, which was why Harrow didn’t dare risk the distraction.
After several winding loops around the parking lot, Gideon slowly pulled into a parking space and shifted the car into park.
“How does it feel?” Harrow asked.
“It’s… a lot to pay attention to at once. But it feels more natural than I expected it to, I guess? Not easy or anything, but some of it seems like I can just do if I don’t think about it too hard.” Gideon drummed her fingers on the edge of the steering wheel.
“That’s encouraging, that the procedural memory is still there. This is what we were hoping for.” For all Harrow’s relief, Gideon seemed less than enthusiastic.
“Yeah. It’s just weird to think how many hours and days of my life I must’ve spent driving to build the reflexes and muscle memory…” Gideon pushed her hands back through her hair. “And I don’t remember any of it.”
“Is it more weird than the rest of it?” Harrow hoped Gideon understood that this was a genuine inquiry; she wasn’t being rhetorical.
Gideon shrugged. “Kind of? It feels like half a memory, with no foundation to support it. It’s unsettling. And then part of it is that I really thought this might be the thing that finally sent me into a freak out and it didn’t.”
“That’s a good thing,” Harrow said, finally giving into her impulse and taking Gideon’s hand from where it lay on the center console. “There’s no ‘normal’ reaction to this sort of thing, we’ve heard all the doctors and psychologists and therapists say it over and over again. You’re doing so well. You’ve been doing so well, with all of this.” She folded their clasped hands back towards herself and pressed her lips to the base of Gideon’s thumb.
Gideon tipped her head back against the seat, eyes closed. “I’m just tired of waiting around for the day when I lose control.”
I got a job.
Well. Pyrrha got it for me.
But I HAVE a job now, I guess.
Harrow read the text messages several times over before cautiously responding, May I please have an emoji to clarify your feelings about this before I respond?
Gideon sent back an emoji with a squiggle for a mouth, which clarified very little.
Thank you for the context, Harrow typed back. I’m happy for you. Or sorry that happened.
Thanks lol, Gideon replied. It’s just a few hours a week as a stocker at the grocery store down the road. Pyrrha’s crew had a job at the manager’s house and I guess they got to talking and he offered.
Harrow waited for the typing dots to give way to another message bubble.
It’ll be nice to get out of the house and have something to do, and it’s close enough that I can walk as long as the weather’s decent. It doesn’t pay much but bringing in any amount of cash feels good at this point.
A third popped up shortly after.
But like. Idk. Obviously I’m doing a lot better but new stuff is still hard to follow sometimes and I forget things and blurt out stupid stuff that I regret and get frustrated easy. Which is less than ideal for starting at a new job, and I don’t want everyone mad at me.
These were valid concerns, all things that still sometimes disrupted her day to day and likely to come up on the job as well. Harrow chewed the inside of her cheek while she reread Gideon’s texts. Especially over text message, she was having trouble finding a response that was supportive but not dismissive or directive, but at least she trusted Gideon to interpret her words in good faith.
I think it’ll be good, Harrow typed out. Once you get there and get a feel for it, we can strategize the parts you have difficulty with. Besides, do you really think Pyrrha would be okay with it if she thought that guy was going to be a dick?
Not right NOW, but under normal circumstances I think if the pay was good enough she’d tell me to either suck it up or unionize.
That did sound like something Pyrrha would say.
When is your first shift? If you’re not too exhausted afterwards, we could do something to celebrate.
Gideon’s reply was quick. Monday. And that sounds great, because I’m sure I’ll be in desperate need of ~moral support~ by then.
Harrow rolled her eyes. I could probably pick you up. What time do you get off?
I think I have to wait until AFTER you pick me up to get off. I’ve heard employers frown upon that kind of thing on the clock.
Harrow groaned. Delete my number.
…my shift ends at 4.
Going back to work was a bigger adjustment for Gideon than Harrow had anticipated. By all accounts, her manager was accommodating and her coworkers were helpful and understanding. But the fact of the matter was that she didn’t have the same stamina as she used to, even for shifts that were just a couple of hours a few days a week. The physicality of it was less of an issue, aside from a few days of soreness after her first shifts from all of the bending and lifting.
Cognitively, though, she came home from each shift drained, a fatigue that usually colored the rest of the day. Most days she needed to lie down for at least a little bit after getting home, occasionally with an ice pack for a headache. Being tired made everything else just a little bit harder too: remembering details, paying attention, keeping frustration in check.
“She needs to take more breaks when she feels it first start coming on, not just when it gets bad,” Pyrrha commented to Harrow one day when Gideon was out of earshot. “And it’s not even a ‘poor judgment because of the TBI’ thing, you know? That’s just how she is. If she was sixteen I’d send a note in with her to her manager and ask them to enforce a break for her, but she’s an adult who gets to make her own decisions.” She sighed, a sound that bordered on a growl. “Even the ones that make me want to kick her ass for making me worry and then lock her in a tower where she can’t get hurt.”
They’d been spending more time at Harrow’s house these days as well. At least once a week, Harrow received a text from Gideon asking if she could pick her up when her shift was over and if they could hang out at her place for the evening.
“Sometimes work just drains my social battery worse than other days,” was Gideon’s explanation when Harrow had asked what the difference was between her place and Pyrrha’s, if Gideon was just going to nap and watch TV regardless. Harrow could certainly relate to that part of it. “She tries to be chill about it but some days I just don’t have the patience for her like, surreptitiously analyzing my every move to make sure I’m okay, and I don’t want to snap at her but I also know I don’t have the energy to stop myself.”
“You don’t think I’m making sure you’re okay?” Harrow had asked.
Gideon laughed. “Nah, you totally are, but I have a separate reserve of patience for you.”
Every once in a while, she hit a particularly rough day, and it was always immediately obvious from the way she dropped herself into the passenger seat of Harrow’s car. Remembering what Pyrrha had said, Harrow held herself back from trying to extract answers about what was wrong. Typically, by the time they’d made it onto the main road outside her neighborhood, Gideon would turn the music down and clue her in.
This time, though, they made it all the way home without Gideon saying a word. Harrow spent the drive trying to decide how long she could bear to let it go on before she pressed for information. In lieu of talking, she rested her hand on Gideon’s thigh as she drove.
Eventually, it was a microwavable frozen burrito that broke her. Specifically, it was having to pull the packaging out of the trash twice to check how long she was meant to microwave it.
“I hate being so stupid,” she groaned. She hit the start button on the microwave with more force than necessary and dropped the wrapper back into the garbage disdainfully. “I fucked up inventory today too.”
“You’re not stupid,” Harrow said with all the patience she could muster. “You’ve quite literally had a brain injury that you’re still recovering from.” Harrow winced as Gideon slumped into a chair across from her at the tiny kitchen table.
“Yeah, well, I get the impression I wasn’t exactly a genius before that either,” she muttered.
Harrow’s brows pulled together. “You were perfectly average, Gideon. You hated academics, but you were plenty intelligent.” Her teenage self had told Gideon the exact opposite many times, but it had never been true.
“Not like you.” Gideon traced the wood grain of the tabletop with her finger, avoiding Harrow’s gaze.
Harrow hesitated. “No, not like me,” she said after a moment. “Statistically speaking, very few people are. But I’m not talking about statistics, I’m talking about you. You got decent grades, you had a good job, and you got along perfectly fine in the world.” The microwave beeped, and Harrow stood, waving Gideon off when she started to get up. Over her shoulder, she added, “Besides, there are more important things.”
“Like what?”
Forgiveness, Harrow’s brain screamed at her, the most important thing she can think of. She pulled the plate out of the microwave, the sleeves of her shirt pulled down over her hands as makeshift oven mitts. “Plenty of things,” she said.
Behind her, she could hear the creak of floorboards under Gideon’s feet; a second later, Gideon’s freckled forearms wrapped around her waist. “Like… having a smokin’ hot girlfriend?”
Having set the hot plate down, Harrow turned within the circle of Gideon’s arms. She made a valiant effort not to become distracted by the way the sleeves of Gideon’s polo shirt stretched over her biceps, but she wasn’t entirely successful. It went against every one of her aesthetic sensibilities, but she loved seeing Gideon in her work uniform. There was something unbearably sweet about the black polo with the grocer’s logo embroidered on the chest and the khakis that made Harrow’s heart feel so tender. Pride, maybe, at how hard Gideon had worked to get to this point, all the progress she had made. But also, she just looked really fucking good in it.
“I suppose that might be up there,” Harrow conceded.
Gideon’s golden eyes glittered. “Top three for sure.”
Gideon,
You wouldn’t think that pride and shame could mix like this. It seems like they ought to be oil and water. And yet, I’m so incredibly proud of everything you’ve accomplished, even as you minimize it all. The shame is simultaneous, an insidious clawing inside me that colors every piece of good news with the knowledge that if it weren’t for me, these accomplishments would be completely unnecessary. I am trying to swallow it whole, nothing to leak out and contaminate your own pride. I hope when you find out, you’ll be able to hold on to that, at least.
Harrow woke one morning to rustling sounds somewhere off to the side of her bed. She froze, trying to place the sound, but it wasn’t any of the typical old house noises she was used to. Cautiously, she rolled over to look.
Gideon was sitting on the floor, cross-legged. There was a pile of rumpled clothing on the floor in front of her, a stack of neatly folded clothing next to her, and a partially folded shirt in her hands. Looking around, Harrow realized Gideon had gathered all the clothes that had been previously strewn across the floor to be folded. Behind her was a basket of clean laundry - which Harrow typically just left sitting on the floor, pulling pieces out as needed as she dressed - that had also been folded. The books that had been scattered on the floor next to her side of the bed when she’d fallen asleep last night were also neatly stacked against her nightstand.
“What are you doing?” Harrow mumbled groggily. “What time is it?”
“Sorry,” Gideon whispered. “I was trying not to wake you. It’s a little after seven.”
Harrow’s face crumpled in on itself as she squeezed her eyes back shut and she flopped back down onto her pillow with a groan. “It’s a Saturday,” she said, voice muffled slightly by the duvet that she’d pulled up to her chin. “Come back to bed.”
Gideon stood and motioned for Harrow to scoot over so that she could slip under the covers with her. Harrow made a noise of dissent. “You go lay on the cold side. I’m not the one who abandoned my post.” Gideon rolled her eyes but accepted the terms.
“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Gideon reiterated once she was back under the covers, lying so that they were face to face, a scant few inches between them.
Over Gideon’s shoulder, Harrow could see that the notebook and stack of papers she’d wedged under a pile of clothes on top of the dresser was still in place, and a mental jolt ran through her mind. She hadn’t even considered Gideon finding those, and she made a fervent mental note to move them first thing once they were up.
“Why are you even awake?” Harrow squinted at Gideon, who looked more alert than Harrow had ever felt at seven in the morning.
“I’m usually awake by now, I just usually don’t fall asleep in your bed.”
Harrow had known Gideon was a morning bird to her night owl, but she hadn’t realized this unholy personal shortcoming extended to Saturdays. It wasn’t as though they had made plans for the morning, though. They hadn’t actually made plans for last night either.
Harrow had picked Gideon up from work, which had been going somewhat more smoothly recently. She’d begun to settle into the routine and had figured out a few ways to help herself with the things she often struggled with. She’d made checklists and written guides for her tasks, and after one truly horrible post-work migraine, set an alarm on her phone halfway through her shift to remind her to take a break if she needed it.
They’d stopped for ice cream on the way home, which Gideon insisted on paying for now that she was earning regular paychecks. Harrow had gotten a small cup of lemon sorbet; it was so sweet that her teeth ached, but she made herself finish it in an effort to not spoil Gideon’s excitement at being able to pay. Gideon, on the other hand, had gotten some radioactive blue cotton candy monstrosity with cookie dough and gummy bears and whipped cream.
Back at the house, Harrow had worked on readings for class curled up against Gideon, who was continuing to read a sci-fi novel that Palamedes had told her was a top priority. Later on she’d swapped her book for a TV show Harrow had never heard of and pulled Harrow into her arms, shifting so that Harrow could lean back against her chest while she read. Harrow had continued her readings, tablet propped against Gideon’s forearms where they wrapped around her waist, but she could only hold out so long against the soft warmth enveloping her. Once she’d set the tablet aside, Gideon had taken to updating her about the show - some reality competition program for chocolatiers - and its rules, the contestants, all sorts of chocolate trivia, from over her shoulder.
If not for the break in commentary, Harrow might not have realized Gideon had fallen asleep, arms still wrapped around her. Harrow slid out from where she’d been sitting, bracketed by Gideon’s legs.
“Gideon,” Harrow said gently, hating to wake her. She skimmed her fingers back and forth along Gideon’s arm, hoping to ease her out of sleep. “It’s getting late. I need to take you home.”
Gideon stirred, her brow wrinkling as her eyes blinked blearily open. “Can I just stay here tonight?” she asked, voice thick with sleep.
Harrow paused, having not considered that possibility. “If you text Pyrrha so she doesn’t worry when you don’t come home.”
Gideon nodded, one hand pushing her hair back from her forehead, the other fumbling for her phone in her pocket. Pulling it out, she tapped at the screen, frowned, tried again, frowned more. She held it out to Harrow, stifling a yawn. “Can you…? I’m so tired I can’t even see straight.”
Too tired to make it home tonight. Staying at Harrow’s. Talk to you in the morning. She hit send and the phone in her hand buzzed with a response almost immediately. “She says, ‘eyes emoji’ and then ‘smiley face with sunglasses emoji.’”
“Can you send her the middle finger emoji back, please?” Gideon scrubbed a hand across her face.
“Yes, but then no more emojis.” Harrow sent it and then put the phone on silent. “You need to sleep. Do you want the couch or my bed?”
“If I say your bed, will you sleep there too?”
Harrow paused to process; that’s what she had been thinking when she asked, her mind only on whether Gideon wanted to get up for a more comfortable arrangement or just stay where she was. She hadn’t meant to imply anything by it, although even the idea of sleeping together – in an actual bed, intentionally, for an entire night – felt incredibly intimate.
At Harrow’s pause, Gideon shook her head. “I didn’t mean– I just don’t want you to give up–”
“I knew what you meant. I’ll sleep there with you.”
Gideon groaned as she stood from the couch, slightly wobbly. “Your bed, then.”
Back in her room, Harrow dug out the biggest tee shirt she owned (a freebie foisted upon her when she happened upon a student club fair while on her way to class her freshman year of college) and offered it to Gideon. She turned her back and changed into her own pajamas as quickly as she could, waiting until she heard Gideon getting into bed to turn back around.
“You don’t have to like, avert your eyes so intensely, you know.” Gideon mumbled as Harrow slipped under the covers. “I mean, you don’t have to look either, but it’s just changing clothes. It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”
Harrow had nodded, and within moments, Gideon was asleep. It had taken her ages to fall asleep, so aware of Gideon’s form next to her, but when she briefly awakened during the night, she was pressed close against Gideon’s chest. Gideon had one arm draped over Harrow’s waist, gently rising and falling in time with both of their breaths. Harrow had fallen back asleep within minutes.
Now Harrow was the one barely able to fight off sleep, and Gideon lying awake next to her.
“I hope I didn’t overstep,” Gideon said quietly. She’d taken a strand of Harrow’s dark hair, fiddling with the ends of it between her fingertips. “I should have asked.”
“It’s fine, as long as you weren’t doing it in a judgmental way.” Harrow was moving her lips as little as possible, hoping she could keep herself from fully waking up, eyes drifting closed again.
Even with her eyes closed, she could feel Gideon shake her head. “Just woke up and it seemed like something quiet to do while I waited for you to wake up.”
“You can do the rest later if you really want to.”
Gideon pressed her lips to Harrow’s forehead, right at the juncture of her nose and frontal sinus. “I’m glad you said that because it actually really has been bugging me.”
Gideon,
I keep turning it over and over in my head, trying to find a way out of this labyrinth. I’m both the architect and the prisoner. I’ve been praying that I can find a way to be your red string.
Days later, they were sitting on the front porch at Harrow’s house, the sun on the verge of setting. Harrow had her legs tucked up beneath her, leaning against Gideon as she read – Gideon had begged her to reread the novels Palamedes had recommended with her so they could talk about them. Gideon was playing some game on her phone, gently rocking the porch glider beneath them with one foot.
“Hey, Harrow?” Gideon asked quietly.
“Hmm?”
“I know you said we weren’t friends in high school…”
Feeling Gideon’s breath hitch, Harrow set down her book and sat up to look at her. “Right…” Harrow wasn’t sure where this was going.
At least, not until Gideon held her phone out to her.
On the screen was a photo of them. Harrow knew what she was looking at immediately. In the photo, her sixteen year old self was turned away from the camera, her profile barely visible, head ducked but clearly mid-laugh. From the debris in the background, it was obviously taken at a party, plastic cups and cans and empty glass bottles strewn across the countertop behind her. The reason her face was so obscured, though, was that it was pressed against the crook of sixteen year old Gideon Nav’s neck. The younger Gideon smiled softly down at the younger Harrow.
“So what is this, then?”
Chapter 4: won’t be a fool for you, some things i just refuse to do
Chapter Text
Harrow stared at the photo on Gideon’s phone. She knew exactly what it was, and where it had been taken. She just hadn’t given it a second thought since the moment it’d been snapped seven years ago.
“Where did you find that?” she asked after several beats too long.
“It came up on my Snapchat memories.” Gideon’s face was morphing from pure curiosity into something more confused.
“Your what?”
“Snapchat memories. It sends you notifications with like, old Snapchats you’ve sent and stuff, like a time capsule I guess.”
Harrow had had no idea this feature existed, nor would she have considered it. She hadn’t even remembered the photo until it was in front of her face on Gideon’s phone.
Gideon’s breath hitched, almost like a laugh. “What is it? It’s okay if it’s something embarrassing or whatever. Was this for like, a romcom-esque fake dating prank, or what?”
Blood was draining from Harrow’s face, leaving her lightheaded and shaky. She felt like her heart had sank all the way down, coming to rest somewhere at the level of her iliac crest.
“Oh my God, Harrow, you’re freaking me out. What’s going on?” Gideon set her phone down and lifted her hand to reach for Harrow, but set it back in her lap instead. The porch glider had stilled beneath them, her foot no longer keeping up the steady swaying.
The letters. Harrow tried to remember something, anything, that she’d written over these past long months, but it was as though someone had upended all of the filing cabinets of her mind and then taken a leaf blower to it, thoughts and words swirling around her.
Her voice came out in stuttering breaths. “I didn’t– I wanted to tell you. It felt like it was too late and I couldn’t figure out how–”
Gideon cut her off. “Were we… together?”
“No,” Harrow said forcefully. Nausea rose in her throat at the sight of Gideon’s face so intent with concern. She could tell that Gideon was beginning to understand that there were more serious implications to this, but it hadn’t yet overridden her worry for Harrow’s state of distress.
She took a breath, knowing that she had brought this on herself. Somehow, the thought that this was what she deserved made the task ahead easier to bear, even if just slightly.
“By the time I realized that you didn’t know… it would have ruined everything for you. And for me.” She shook her head. “It’s the same thing at this point. I didn’t want you to have this weighing on you again, and I didn’t want you to hate me.”
Gideon’s face was still, but her eyes held a fear that Harrow had never seen before. “Start talking,” Gideon said warily.
Harrow knew she was about to take everything from her.
“You took this picture at a party during spring break of our sophomore year.”
“Everyone in this town is so fucking boring,” Ianthe sneered as she leaned against the wall, watching the sea of bodies coming and going. “I can’t wait until we get out of here.”
Harrow only nodded. Ianthe was of the impression that Harrow wanted to attend the same university with her and Corona, and spoke often of everything that awaited them at some prestigious campus on the coast. Harrow had never corrected her. Then again, she had never agreed with her in the first place; Ianthe hadn’t exactly asked.
She was only here, in the home of some faceless upperclassman, to prove a point. Gideon Nav had laughed outright when she overheard Coronabeth ask Harrow if she was going that morning before class.
“Is that a serious question? When have you ever seen Harrowhark voluntarily attend a non-required social function?” Gideon had asked, leaning against the locker next to Harrow’s. There was something in the way she shook her obnoxious red hair out of her eyes that infuriated Harrow. Heat flooded her cheeks, which only increased her frustration; at least her pounding heart wasn’t visible to all assembled.
“I’m just being polite,” Corona replied. Harrow said she would think about it.
Gideon snorted. “You know it’s not like, a literary salon, right? There might be loud music, or even beer pong.”
“I’m not sure how you’d know what literary salons are like,” Harrow said icily, “given that being literate is a prerequisite for entry.” Ianthe snickered, but the look in Gideon’s eyes had made the choice for her: she was going.
They’d spent the first part of the night trailing Coronabeth as she’d flitted from room to room, person to person, giving Harrow ample opportunity to observe that Gideon had been correct about at least two things in her life: there was indeed loud music, and there was indeed beer pong.
Harrow couldn’t decide if she was grateful for Corona’s attempts to include her in her conversations or not. On the one hand, it felt safer to have the Tridentarius Stamp of Approval so explicitly emphasized, a reminder to everyone within earshot that she was allowed to be here. But on the other, there was something that flickered across the others’ faces each time Corona mentioned her, and each time it was a subtle confirmation that she might be allowed here, but her presence was merely tolerated.
It wasn’t long before Ianthe had tired of the “social niceties,” as she said, and she (and therefore Harrow) had retired to the outskirts of the room. Ianthe was intermittently sipping from a plastic cup of some foul smelling drink; she’d rolled her eyes when Harrow took a cup but declined to actually drink any of it.
“Literally every party is just the same people, the same gross beer, everyone mooning over Corona until she disappears for a bit and by the time she turns up again, she’ll have hit the sloppy phase. At that point there’s only about thirty minutes until she moves from “sloppy” to “weepy” and I’ll drag her into a bathroom – actually, it’ll be good to have you as a second set of hands for that – and get her calmed down and tidied up so that we can make an appearance and dip out before she either throws up on someone or catches an STD.”
“Sounds like you’ve got it down to a science,” Harrow mumbled, staring at her hands as she slowly swirled her cup of warm beer.
“Judge all you want, Harry, but this way, Corona gets to have her fun, I stay in the good graces of the social elite by association, and by the time we hit school on Monday, no one remembers if they saw Coronabeth Tridentarius getting messy at some house party because something else ridiculous will have happened in the meantime, and besides, the last anyone saw of her, she looked fine.” She cut her eyes at Harrow. “You can get messy tonight too if you want. I’ll take care of you, since it’s your first time and all.”
“I do not plan on getting messy tonight or any other night,” Harrow said stonily.
“Suit yourself,” Ianthe said, pushing off the wall. “I’m going to go check on Corona and see where we are on the timeline. If you change your mind… all you have to do is ask.”
Harrow waited for her to disappear into the crowd before going in search of somewhere to dump her disgusting drink.
“You actually showed.”
Harrow turned to see Gideon Nav sauntering towards her, one hand shoved in the front pocket of her jeans; her other hand held a plastic up. Harrow had wandered through most of the house and had eventually found a kitchenette in the basement with a sink to pour her drink down. It looked like it had been used as a makeshift bar earlier in the night but was now abandoned, haunted by the debris of drinks past. She’d planned to stay there as long as she could before Ianthe came looking for her, as the basement was quieter than the rest of the house by a good margin, though people were still milling about.
“The way you talk, it sounded like these things were the highlight of your youth. I’ve got to say, though, now that I’ve seen it… Well. It’s not particularly flattering for the rest of your youth, Griddle.”
Gideon shrugged. “It’s something to do.” She downed the contents of her cup and set it on the counter with the rest of the mess.
“I can think of several things I’d rather be doing. Reading the phonebook, watching paint dry, walking across hot coals.” Harrow ticked each activity off on her fingers. “I can keep going.”
“Have you even tried to have a good time yet? Like, for real?” Gideon was watching her, head tilted slightly to the side. “Or have you just followed Ianthe around and ruminated about how much better you are than everyone else?”
“I’m not– I don’t think I’m better than anyone else,” Harrow stammered out.
Gideon’s eyebrows rose sharply.
“I don’t!” she sputtered. Harrow couldn’t help but notice that Gideon’s lips were pressed together tightly, resulting in an expression that looked worryingly close to pity.
“But you were following Ianthe around.” Not a question. Gideon leaned back, propping herself against the edge of the countertop next to Harrow.
This was not how Harrow had wanted this conversation to go, and at all once she was hit with the crushing realization that it was never going to happen any other way. She’d been stupid to expect otherwise, foolish not to foresee that being here would only throw her intrinsic nature into relief against the backdrop of teenage normalcy. When Gideon had laughed at the idea of Harrow going to a party, when the others had nonchalantly agreed, they hadn’t meant her physical attendance. What they had found so impossible to conceive of was the idea that Harrow was the sort of person who belonged at a party, who knew how to do the sort of things other girls did at parties.
She had always known this, but it wasn’t until she was looking it in the face that she finally felt the full weight of the knowledge –
She was just a girl two steps removed from someone who was actually wanted, two steps removed from normal, and showing up at a party was never going to change Gideon Nav’s mind about that.
Drained of her fight, Harrow held out her hands helplessly, palms upturned. “I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do here.”
Gideon stared at her for a long moment, her golden eyes softer than Harrow had ever seen them. “I guess that makes sense, I just didn’t expect you to actually admit you don’t know something.”
“Don’t get used to it,” Harrow mumbled, clawing back a shred of her dignity.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” Gideon grinned, one side of her mouth tugging up higher than the other. “So, High School Rager 101. You had a drink yet?”
“I was in possession of one, yes. I assume you’re asking if I drank it, though, and the answer to that is no and will remain no. That was disgusting.”
Gideon let out a short laugh. “Of course it’s disgusting. It’s cheap room temperature beer.” She looked around at the cans and bottles littering the countertop. “I’d normally say we should go look for something more palatable upstairs but, you know, baby steps.”
Harrow watched as Gideon pawed through the mess of beverage leavings, not feeling particularly optimistic about the endeavor. After a moment, though, Gideon exclaimed and held up a glass bottle with a few inches of clear liquid remaining.
“Now we just need something… aha! Oh man, am I good or what?” Gideon had found an unopened can of soda and proudly displayed it with a flourish. She snagged a cup out of a mostly empty sack and poured a horrifically large glug into it from the bottle of liquor that she’d scavenged. She topped it off with the soda and took a swig, grimacing as she swallowed.
“Okay, so, this is also disgusting, but I think it’s disgusting in a way that you might be able to tolerate.” She held the cup out to Harrow, who reluctantly took it.
Against her better judgment, Harrow took a drink and immediately understood why Gideon had grimaced. The soda did little to hide the burn but was at least a pleasant taste to accompany it.
“Tolerable,” she confirmed even as she scrunched her eyes shut at the taste, which made Gideon laugh. It was a different kind of laugh than Harrow usually got from her, though. She wasn’t being laughed at this time.
They stayed there for some time, trading sips of the tolerable concoction, talking about nothing. A flush crept into Harrow’s cheeks, and her limbs felt slightly heavy. At some point, she became acutely aware of how much taller than her Gideon was, and pushed herself up to sit on the countertop. It was nice not to have to look up to see her any longer, now that they were face to face.
“Do you want to head upstairs?” Gideon asked eventually.
Harrow had no idea how long it had been, but she shook her head. “Too many people upstairs.”
Gideon smiled wryly. “That’s what a party is, Nonagesimus. A bunch of people gathering in one place.”
“I think we’ve established that I’m not really a party sort of person.” Harrow took another sip from the cup – they’d poured a second round but there wasn’t as much soda left for this one. On one level, Harrow could taste just how much stronger this one was, but on another level she found that she cared much less. She’d adapted by taking tiny sips, although Gideon had told her she’d be better off just knocking it back.
“A party of two, then. Just us.” Gideon’s fingers brushed Harrow’s as she took the cup from her. “Still plenty of activity options for your High School Rager Experience.”
Her face was already flushed from the alcohol and Harrow was glad of it; she could think of a few things that two people could get up to at a party. “What did you have in mind?” She sounded breathless, and she told herself it must be from the drink.
Gideon shrugged. “Well, we could start off with a classic. Truth or dare?”
The few times she’d played truth or dare with Ianthe and Coronabeth had left her wary of the game, but Harrow found herself saying, “Truth,” anyway.
She had to wait for Gideon to take a long sip before she got her first question. “Why are you always so snotty to me?”
Harrow pulled back, caught off guard by the question. “Right for the jugular with that one,” she mumbled.
“Sorry, but… You’re actually like, super fun to talk to when you’re not putting on the superiority act, you know that? So what gives?”
Gideon was watching Harrow with an odd expression, and Harrow couldn’t force herself to keep making eye contact any longer. It was like trying to stare into the sun.
“I don’t know when it started. You’re nasty to me just as often. But most of the time it’s…” Harrow risked a glance at Gideon, who was still watching her intently as though she were mentally working through some sort of puzzle. Harrow was momentarily confused by this until she remembered that she was the puzzle in question. She picked at a stray thread on her jeans, trying to put her thoughts back together after that distraction. “Some of the time you really are just that irritating. A lot of the time. But mostly I think I get irritated because people like you so much, and you don’t even try or anything, they just do. Even if I were willing to try, it would be pointless. You, though… you can’t help but make everyone like you. Even me sometimes, even while I’m still annoyed with you. And that’s infuriating.”
“I try really hard, actually. I don’t think I always realize how hard I’m trying, but yeah. I’m trying.” Gideon rubbed at her neck awkwardly. It was the first time Harrow could remember her looking like she didn’t know what to do with her hands.
From Gideon’s hands, Harrow’s gaze drifted to the line of her jaw, the constellation of freckles across her cheeks, the dark flash of her eyelashes as she blinked and the intense amber they fanned above. Almost like beer if it wasn’t gross. Gideon had stepped closer, but Harrow wasn’t sure when.
If it weren’t for the way those eyes crinkled at the corners with the ghost of a smile, Harrow wouldn’t have realized Gideon had said something. “What?” she asked, coming back to herself.
“I said it’s your turn. Or my turn. Whatever. Your turn to ask, my turn to choose.”
“Right.” Harrow cleared her throat. “Truth or dare?”
“Fair’s fair, I suppose. Truth.”
Harrow felt like her brain was on shuffle as she tried to find something to ask. One question kept bubbling to the surface, drowning out the others. “What do you really think of me?”
Gideon blew a slow breath out between her lips, clearly bracing herself. “Honestly, Harrow? I don’t really know what to think of you. You’re a huge bitch most of the time but, I dunno, when I stop to think about it, I just feel kind of bad for you? Like, you’ve made it to spring break of your sophomore year and still the only person our age you seem to spend time with on the regular is fucking Ianthe. I know your taste in friends can’t possibly be that bad so the only explanation is that you’re desperate or you don’t have any other options. Or both. And I don’t even know what the deal is with your parents since they barely talk to anyone, so that’s a huge fucking question mark.”
She wasn’t wrong about Ianthe (or her parents, for that matter), but the thought of being pitied made Harrow feel like her lungs had been dropped to the bottom of the ocean. Gideon was on a roll though and showed no signs of stopping; Harrow tried to prepare herself, unsure of how it could get worse but sure that it would.
“But also like, you’re probably the smartest person I’ve ever met, and I don’t know anything about art but when I pass the display case outside the art classrooms it’s always super obvious which ones are yours because they’re so much better than all of the other ones. And you’re actually really, really funny but I kind of think most people are too stupid to catch it.” Gideon had barely stopped to breathe during all of this, but she paused now. “Sometimes… sometimes I think we might have been friends if we’d met without having ten years of antagonizing each other behind us.”
Harrow felt like the world was lagging behind her, or maybe she was lagging behind the world. Either way, she was surprised to find that her mouth had said, “Maybe we still could be,” while her mind had been slowly examining the fact that this was the longest string of nice things anyone had ever said about her and it had come from none other than Gideon Nav.
“You must have drank more of this than I realized.” Gideon let out a laugh, soft and low in her chest. “Maybe we’d better start with ‘civil.’”
“Maybe,” Harrow echoed. She felt as much as heard something from Gideon’s pocket. She watched as Gideon pulled her phone out and checked the screen. “Do you have to go?” she asked, suddenly gripped with apprehension.
Gideon looked back at her. “Nah, it was just– actually, you know what?” She grinned slyly. She’d moved to slip her phone back into her pocket, but she stopped and tapped on the screen to pull up the front camera. “If we’re gonna be friends, right?”
Harrow nodded, and Gideon stepped nearer. She leaned close, her thigh pressed against Harrow’s where she was still perched on the counter, and held out her phone, angling it in an attempt to get the both of them in the shot.
Gideon turned to look at her, and Harrow could feel her breath on her neck when she said, “It’s Snapchat, not a JCPenney portrait studio, dumbass. Loosen up.”
Harrow tried, she really did. She rolled her shoulders and shook her arms out, but everything felt a little bit liquid and she was afraid that if she moved too much now, she’d lose track of where the counter was beneath her and fall.
“This is horrifying, it’s like you’ve never taken a selfie before. Gimme something to work with here.”
“I don’t have Snapchat.” Harrow was too busy being embarrassed about the photo to be embarrassed about how that statement had sounded more like a whine.
Gideon let out a belabored sigh. “We’re gonna have to work on this. For now just–” Her voice cut off as she slipped one arm around Harrow’s waist and repositioned the camera with the other. “Okay, next part’s harder: try to look like you actually like me.”
She punctuated her last instruction with a poke to Harrow’s ribs. Harrow flinched and there was a moment between when her muscles twitched and when her brain remembered how to keep her body upright where she was certain she was about to receive the gift of a broken nose, courtesy of the floor. When she stabilized, she found she’d grabbed onto Gideon’s shoulder for balance, and Gideon had a solid hand on her waist again.
“I may have overestimated how much someone your size can drink.” Gideon sounded apologetic, but there was a hint of laughter in her voice.
Harrow’s heart was still pounding, and she leaned her head against Gideon’s shoulder – the only thing that felt stable – while she caught her breath, Gideon’s sleeve still clutched in her fist. As her breathing slowed, she focused on the detergent scent of Gideon’s shirt. Beneath the detergent was soap and something warm, all caught in a haze of stale beer.
It was all so absurd - the party, the alcohol, Gideon - and a laugh bubbled out of Harrow completely unbidden. She felt the rumble in Gideon’s chest as she laughed too, and again when she spoke. “There we go,” she said softly, and, “You doing okay?”
Harrow nodded into Gideon’s collarbone before taking one more deep breath and pulling back. When she lifted her eyes, Gideon turned her phone screen so Harrow could see. She’d taken the picture while Harrow had been pressed into her. Harrow’s face was partially hidden but even at that steep angle, the curve of her lips and the fullness of her flushed cheek betrayed a smile. Above that, Gideon was looking down towards her, a gentle amusement on her face.
“It’s a good one,” Gideon said softly. She hit save and pressed send. “You can let go of my shirt whenever you want.”
“What if I don’t want to?” Harrow was still a little breathless and her voice came out a whisper.
Gideon took half a step, coming to stand directly in front of Harrow. “Then you don’t have to.”
Harrow felt it when the gravity shifted between them, when Gideon leaned down and–
“Oh my God.”
Harrow’s hand dropped immediately from Gideon’s sleeve. The world might have felt blurred, but the edge in Ianthe’s voice was distinct enough to set alarm bells ringing in Harrow’s head.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything.” The set of Ianthe’s eyebrows telegraphed a similar, though not identical, message: I’d better not be interrupting anything.
Harrow slipped down from the counter; Gideon stepped back but quickly retook the distance to catch Harrow by the arm when she stumbled. Harrow pulled her arm back as soon as she got her feet under her. She could feel two sets of eyes on her but she struggled to look at either of them.
“Oh, Harry…” Ianthe’s voice dripped with reproachful condescension, a faux pity that she knew would get under Harrow’s skin. “You can’t be serious.”
This was what it always came back to with Ianthe. What she and Harrow had was less a friendship and more a social transaction. Harrow was afforded the protection that came from associating with Ianthe Tridentarius and someone to eat lunch with to boot, but she paid for it in compliance. Consorting with Gideon Nav was most certainly an unsanctioned pursuit, one whose consequences would ripple throughout the rest of Harrow’s life – or at least the rest of high school, which was basically the same thing.
After years of operating under this treaty, Harrow could ignore the ooze of resentment coiling in her belly as she attempted to shape her voice into something akin to nonchalance. “Of course I’m not serious,” she said. “I just wanted to see how far I could get her to go.”
“Oh, right.” Gideon let out a cynical laugh. “That’s what that was.”
“Surely,” Harrow said, then paused to focus on the sensation of the solid floor beneath her shoes for a moment before starting again. “Surely even you would know better than–"
“You’re such a fucking bitch, Nonagesimus,” Gideon interrupted. “You’re gonna blow every chance life hands you, and it’s what you deserve. Have fun with Ianthe – you’ve earned it.” She swatted an empty liquor bottle off the counter as she pushed past the two of them, leaving the glass shattered on the floor behind her.
“Well,” Ianthe said after a brief silence. “You know what they say about redheads and tempers.”
Harrow didn’t respond. She knew the next time she opened her mouth she’d either vomit or cry.
She hoped it was vomit.
She was still in the bathroom with Ianthe and Coronabeth when the cops got there.
When she thought back on it, her memories were predictably blurry, snapshots more than scenes. Sitting on the stairs up to the front porch, Corona’s arm around her shoulders while Ianthe did the talking for all three of them. Their father — taller even than his daughters, his hair closer to Ianthe’s pale blonde than Corona’s gold — speaking with an officer just out of earshot. The way he clapped that same officer on the shoulder before ushering the three of them into a very expensive looking SUV. Breathing slowly and deeply in an attempt to not to puke in a car that probably cost more than her house.
By the morning she had a pounding headache, swollen eyes, and a dozen missed calls from her parents. On the other side of the bed, Ianthe was already awake and far too bright eyed.
“I have news,” Ianthe said. “Are you awake enough for news?”
Harrow shook her head, which she immediately regretted. She closed her eyes, hoping that the feeling would pass but knowing it wouldn’t.
“Great! So, bad news first: my dad called your parents and told them. I tried to get him not to but he gave me this whole thing about like, actions having consequences and parenting and blah blah blah.”
The only coherent thing that Harrow could think in response was, Fuckkkkk.
“But! The good news is that he plays golf with one of the officers who was there last night so they let us off with a warning. And by ‘us’ I mean me and Corona and you, because I made a very moving plea to our dad about how you came with us so it would be unfair if you got a citation while we got out of it, et cetera.”
Harrow fisted her hands in the sheets, a feeble attempt to convince herself that the bed wasn’t actually spinning. “I appreciate that,” she said, eyes shut tight, “but I will be able to express my appreciation better when I’m not at imminent risk of turning your expensive Japanese linens into a barf bag.”
“Ugh, go ahead, they’re not even soft. But anyway, that’s not even what I wanted to tell you.” Ianthe’s voice sounded like a bubble of gossip flavored bubblegum that was about to pop. “I overheard my dad on the phone this morning and the person who called in to report the party didn’t even fucking star-six-seven themselves.”
“Get to the point,” Harrow groaned.
“The number that called it in is registered to Pyrrha Dve.”
That was the beginning of the end in every way that could possibly matter, the epicenter of the destruction of Harrow’s world.
Her parents had always been cold and somewhat stilted, even she could recognize that, but the eerily calm reception she received upon blearily returning from the Tridentarius house was a level of ice she’d never witnessed from them. Harrow was allowed out of the house for school and to get groceries. There wasn’t much else she would be doing if she were allowed, but she felt trapped anyway.
It took a few days, but the anger eventually worked its way to the surface, and nearly every time they crossed paths ended in an argument or a shouting match. Sometimes it was rehashing how irresponsible it had been for her to be drinking, let alone at the home of someone she didn’t even know. Sometimes it was that she’d come home from school and dropped her backpack on the floor with an attitude. In the end, though, it was really about one thing: that her parents had endured so much hardship to have her, and that anything less than perfect was a dishonor to everything they’d sacrificed, to their losses, to her mother’s health. She had failed them, and they had failed her, and so failed themselves.
Her parents spent more and more time secluded in their room, emerging at odd hours. On a few occasions, Harrow even woke to one of them in her bedroom doorway, ready with a scolding about something that apparently couldn’t wait until morning. She knew the signs, could read them like storm clouds on the horizon. It was only a matter of time before they started getting letters from the electric company threatening to cut their power, before bottles started piling up in the trash, before her mother began refusing to get out of bed, before her father would disappear and return a few days later as if he’d never been gone.
This wasn’t what concerned her. They’d been through this before, and at sixteen, Harrow could take care of herself and the household. Her eye for shape and form had made quick work of mastering her mother’s signature at an early age, so writing checks to cover the bills was no issue. She’d gotten her license earlier that year — exactly one week after her birthday, the first day she could get her mother to take her to the DMV — and was eternally grateful that avoiding an underage drinking citation meant she wasn’t in danger of having it revoked. She absolutely could not have afforded to lose it, not with her parents in this condition. These bouts had been harder on her when she was younger, and harder on her parents too, she recalled, but she was older now.
What concerned Harrow was the way they spoke. The arguments and the raised voices had dissipated, but they’d begun to speak about her the way one might speak to a photograph in an old album, a memory of something they’d lost. Her parents may have addressed her directly, but she felt quite distinctly that they were not speaking to her so much as the idea of her. This was unlike anything she’d seen before.
Harrow wasn’t stupid. Of course she had thought about calling someone. She thought about this every time the storm clouds began gathering. They had no close family, no friends to speak of. Her father’s family had lived in this town for generations; he had been raised in this very house. But most of the Nonagesimus old money had long since dried up, and their reputation with it. Her parents were not pleasant people even under the best of circumstances, but they were proud – a combination that had neatly whittled the list of people Harrow could have called on down to nothing.
She woke late one morning in the height of summer. There was a stillness to the air in the dim house, and heat lightning on the horizon outside.
She wasn’t surprised when she got the call that her parents’ bodies had been found.
There were too many people to talk to after her parents died, too many arrangements. She didn’t remember half of what she was told and only remembered half of what she said.
One of her great-aunts had come to stay with her; she was nearly a stranger to Harrow but seemed to think that having held her a few times as an infant was all it took to form a familial relationship. It was better than the reverse, though. She’d rather have a stranger in her house than be a stranger in someone else’s. Ostensibly this was to provide Harrow with “stability” at home and school, but it’d been a while since she’d had either of those things.
From spring break through the end of the school year, the tension between her and Gideon had hung in the air like an electrical charge, frequently sparking enough to sting. Those shocks were always oddly exhilarating in a way Harrow couldn’t quite decipher. She could nearly feel the static on the back of her neck when she landed a witty insult, and the surge from dragging her key down the length of that hideous car had sustained her for days.
Or maybe it was just exhilarating to feel anything at all.
There wasn’t a public service, just a memorial service for the few extended family members who chose to come to town: the great-aunts, a cousin she had vaguely known existed. She’d gotten a few text messages from classmates expressing their condolences, but she hadn’t responded. She hadn’t talked to anyone from school since classes let out for the summer.
Until Gideon Nav showed up on her front porch, that is.
Harrow had come to the door when her great-aunt called for her, and upon recognizing her visitor, swiftly stepped out onto the porch and shut the front door solidly behind her. She felt she’d elicited enough disappointment from the adults in her life without her great-aunt witnessing whatever this was about to be.
“What do you want?” Harrow’s voice was sharp, but given the circumstances she felt that it was a supremely gracious response to Gideon’s presence.
Gideon raised the disposable foil pan in her hands for Harrow to see. “Pyrrha wanted me to bring this over. We heard about your parents and we’re… I’m just really sorry. Pyrrha is too.”
Harrow stared at her, fighting to keep her breathing even. “You’re really sorry,” she repeated flatly.
“It feels kind of trite to say, but yeah.”
“You’re really sorry?” Harrow’s chest felt tight and she knew she was losing the battle to control her breath.
“Of course I’m sorry, even if we–”
“I don’t want to hear that from you. Not when it’s your fault they’re dead.”
Gideon’s face, which had been solemn, shifted into an expression of confusion. “What do you mean, it’s my fault?” she asked slowly. “How could it possibly be my fault?"
“Do you know, Griddle, when things started getting bad? What kicked off this particular spiral?” Harrow could feel herself trembling, the pressure behind her voice increasing.
Gideon shook her head, still looking utterly lost.
“They thought I was staying at Ianthe’s. They never would have known I’d even been at that party if I hadn’t gotten picked up there. Everything completely fell apart after that.” Harrow didn’t take her eyes off Gideon, nearly didn’t blink, so she saw the moment Gideon began to put the pieces together, her gold eyes widening infinitesimally. “How does it feel being the one who made the phone call that sent my parents to their deaths?”
“How do you even–?” Gideon’s brows pulled together as she connected the dots. “Tridentarius.”
“You forgot about caller ID, you absolute imbecile.”
They stared at each other, silent. Harrow could see Gideon’s chest heaving. Her face had taken on a pinched look and a furious flush had spread across her cheeks. Harrow was sure her own was just as red: the tears that had been welling up had finally spilled over. She could feel them dripping down her cheeks but refused to give Gideon the satisfaction of seeing her wipe them away.
After what felt like an eternity, Gideon abruptly turned and made her way down the porch steps. She was nearly to the driveway when she stopped and walked back to the house. Harrow expected some nasty parting shot, maybe even a half-assed, snarky apology with a handful of insults embedded within.
Instead, Gideon bent and set the casserole tin on the first step. “350 for forty five minutes,” she said stiffly. “Or it should freeze fine too. It’s lasagna.”
Harrow didn’t move, only watched as Gideon went back to her monstrosity of a car and drove away. She retrieved the tin and went inside, breezing past her great-aunt without stopping to answer when she asked who it was who had come to visit.
The lasagna made a very satisfying thump as it hit the bottom of the garbage bin.
“You were just going to let me forget that I was involved in your parents’ deaths? ” Gideon’s face looked like it was about to crumple in on itself under some immense weight.
“You weren’t, though!” Harrow’s voice came out like a plea. “I blamed you for it because I was angry and sad and embarrassed and stupid but you were never responsible for it, never. We were sixteen, just kids! It wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t my fault either – my parents are the ones who made that decision.”
“But I set it in motion. That’s cause and effect, Harrow.”
Harrow could hear herself growing louder, pitch rising slightly. “This is exactly why I didn’t tell you! You don’t need to carry this anymore and I knew you would do this! I’m not going to let something horrible I said years ago be the basis of how you feel about who you were and who you are!”
“I don’t know how I feel about it yet because I literally just found out about it and you don’t get to keep things from me just because you think you’re not going to like how I feel about it!” Gideon stood abruptly. “Especially not when they're my own fucking actions!” She took a few steps before realizing there was nowhere to go and settled for pacing the same few feet of the porch.
“Gideon, please,” Harrow closed her eyes, her pleas turning to prayers. “I was trying to find a way to tell you and I am so, so sorry–”
“Yeah, I’m fucking sorry too, but you don’t get to decide how I feel about it.”
Harrow’s eyes blinked open; she could feel the pressure of tears building up. “Do you remember what you said to me, back at the hospital? You said you didn’t care what happened before, that you forgave me and it wasn’t up to me because it was already done? Do you remember that?”
“Oh, good, let’s bring the memory issues into this too. Might as well, right?”
“Not that part, you jackass, that’s not what I–” Harrow shook her head, cutting herself off. “Even if you were responsible, it’s not up to you whether or not you’re forgiven! You already have every ounce of forgiveness that I have to give, despite the fact that being involved in something does not mean you are responsible for it!"
“I could be, though! I’m not willing to take that as a blanket statement right now.”
The tears that had been building in Harrow’s eyes leaked down her cheeks. “I have to believe it’s true though, because–” She wanted to keep it in and she wanted to say it, and for a moment she was frozen, aside from the trembling of her eyelashes, as the two halves of her heart tore apart from each other. Her throat felt tight and there was a flash of time where she had the absurd thought that if her throat would just close up, she wouldn’t have to choose.
“Because I can’t live with myself if I’m responsible for your accident.” A sob finally slipped out of her despite her best efforts to keep it imprisoned behind her ribs.
Gideon rubbed both hands over her face, groaning into her palms. “No, Harrow… I can’t do this. Please don’t say that.”
“I never meant for this to happen,” Harrow said haltingly. “I would give anything to change it.”
Gideon tilted her head back, gaze unfocused. For a moment there was only the distant sound of the road and their faltering breath.
She turned back to Harrow, and Harrow could see in her eyes that she knew this was their last, improbable chance. “Tell me the truth about what happened that night, and I’ll believe you.”
Harrow nodded, and took a long, shaky breath.
“She’s gotten way too comfortable here. I’m only back for a few days and we still have to go pick her up? What are we, her chauffeur?”
Harrow stared straight ahead at the road, wondering where Ianthe was getting “we” from. She’d flown in to stay with her parents for the holidays, so Harrow was the one driving tonight. It was just as well, since “going out for drinks” really meant “going out for a Diet Coke while Ianthe and Coronabeth got drinks.”
Ianthe kept up a steady stream of prattle as Harrow drove to the bar where they would be collecting Corona. It wasn’t particularly late but the winter sun had set early, and the cold drizzle had Harrow pulling her jacket collar up as they made their way inside.
It was a divey sort of place with dim lights and cheap drinks where every available surface seemed to have a sticky film accumulated from decades of spilled beer and greasy hands. Ianthe had made her thoughts about the place clear in the car and now that they were inside, she settled for pursing her lips and going out of her way not to touch anything.
This was slightly harder than it may have otherwise been given how crowded the bar was. It may have been Ianthe’s height and pale hair that drew looks from the other patrons, or perhaps that she was recognized as a Tridentarius. It was more likely though, Harrow thought, that she was attracting attention for wearing a meticulously tailored beige pinstripe suit to an establishment where the walls were covered in shag carpeting. Coronabeth’s easily-identifiable golden curls, on the other hand, were nowhere to be seen.
Ianthe checked her phone again and rolled her eyes. “She hasn’t responded. I’ll take this side if you’ll scout off to the left,” she said. “If we split up maybe we can find her faster and get out of here sooner.”
Harrow begrudgingly made her way towards the back of the room, slipping between bodies in the crowd, planning to take a lap along the way. She didn’t want to be here any more than Ianthe did, and she didn’t have the advantage of Ianthe’s height to scan the room.
She heard Corona before she saw her: a full-bodied laugh like a heavy bell that floated above the din of conversation around them. She picked up her pace and stepped around a group of people, relieved to see Corona leaning against the wall behind a pool table.
Unfortunately, standing next to her was Gideon Nav. Her cocky grin was just the same as it ever was, and the way it neutralized upon seeing Harrow was the same as it ever was too.
“Did you see our texts?” Harrow asked when Corona turned to her. She shoved her hands in her coat pockets and inclined her head towards the door. “Let’s go.”
Two figures emerged from the crowd just then, both holding a beer in each hand. Harrow’s heart sank when she realized the figures were in fact Palamedes and Camilla. Camilla had set her drinks on a nearby table, but Palamedes had followed Corona and Gideon’s gazes over to Harrow before he’d had the chance.
Harrow hated that she and Gideon had both separately ended up acquainted with the pair by happenstance – she’d met Palamedes at a university event, and Gideon apparently went to the same gym as Camilla. It’d been an unwelcome shock when Harrow had put the pieces together and she hated to see Gideon in their presence, hated for them to see what she and Gideon turned into around each other. It had only happened a few times, but each instance was a disheartening reminder that Harrow could never truly leave her past behind.
“Still hanging around with Ianthe?” Gideon asked. Harrow couldn’t read the expression on her face: there was a little disdain, a little amusement, a little smugness. It wasn’t so different from the expressions she typically wore around Harrow, but there was a hint of something new in the mix. Harrow thought it could be curiosity; she worried that it could be pity.
“We’re just here to pick up Coronabeth,” Harrow said frostily.
“Gotcha,” said Gideon archly. “Just running her errands. Still under her thumb, then.”
“I think technically it’s my errand, since I asked them to pick me up,” Corona interjected.
“And why you wanted them to do that, I’ll never know,” Gideon muttered.
Palamedes cleared his throat, having set the drinks in his hands down on the table next to the ones that Camilla had brought over. “Drinks are here,” he called pointedly. Gideon rolled her eyes, but strode off towards him. As she passed, he briefly caught her by the arm and said something to her. Whatever it was made her roll her eyes a second time.
As Harrow pulled out her phone to shoot off a quick text to Ianthe, she saw Palamedes approach out of the corner of her eye. “We’ll be out of your hair as soon as we can get Corona out the door,” she said without looking up.
“And I’ll help move her along as much as I can, but for my sake, can you at least attempt not to stir things up with Gideon until then?”
Harrow pressed send on the text message and glanced towards him, irritated that he was asking her to do something she had already been planning on doing.
At her glare, he quickly added, “I asked her too.”
The only reason this didn’t earn him an eye roll was because she refused to react the same way Gideon had just a moment ago.
In a transparent attempt to smooth things over, he asked, “Have you been working on any interesting pieces lately?”
Harrow shook her head. “I’ve been busy with coursework.” This wasn’t entirely inaccurate; she was always working on something, but he had asked about interesting pieces, which she hardly considered her leisure drawings to be. She was fully aware that this answer wasn’t in the spirit of his question, but she was determined that the first time she let him look through her sketchbook, earlier that semester, would be the last. She didn’t need him sizing up her work, surely getting a kick out of evaluating each against his own anatomical expertise, no matter how thick he laid on the flattery.
“I’m sure you’ve done something interesting for your courses, though.” The intensity of his gaze was only slightly offset by his soft smile.
“Not really.” She looked back at her phone, wishing Ianthe would hurry up. When she looked back up, Corona was making her way over. Gideon and Camilla trailed behind her, sharing a glance.
Harrow winced in an attempt to keep Corona’s hair out of her eyes as she gave Harrow a one-armed hug. “I’m so glad you’re coming out with us tonight! We should get you a drink while we wait for Ianthe to catch up.”
“I don’t drink,” Harrow reminded Corona stiffly.
“Right, right, sorry,” she said. (“That’s not what I remember,” Gideon muttered into her beer, earning a sharp elbow from Camilla.) “I haven’t seen you in forever, though! What have you been up to?”
“Just… keeping busy with school.” She wished Corona would turn her attention to someone else, at least until Ianthe appeared.
“Ah, right, the nerd shit.” Gideon had clearly hit her limit of being able to control her mouth; she hadn’t even bothered to say it under her breath. “I forgot you don’t have a real job yet.”
“Yes, Griddle, the nerd shit,” Harrow ground out. “Some fields of study are complex enough that they take years of study and multiple degrees to become proficient in, but you don’t need to worry about that.”
Gideon let out a low whistle. “Man, the claws are out tonight. I love that they’re getting some diversity in the picture book field though – they really need fresh perspectives, it’s been all decent human beings for too long.”
Palamedes had taken off his glasses and was cleaning them on the hem of his shirt, clearly sick of seeing this shit, and Camilla was staring somewhere off into the middle distance. Corona was simply watching the verbal ping pong match.
“I really hope for your sake, Griddle, that the next time you need a doctor, they’ve studied those picture books long and hard.” Harrow crossed her arms over her chest and caught a glimpse of her phone screen, still held tight in her hand, lighting up with a notification.
“And I really hope for–” Gideon’s voice cut off abruptly as she focused on something over Harrow’s shoulder. “Oh, hell no. Not tonight. Anyway, get fucked, Harrow. I’ll see you around.” She turned and pushed her way into the crowd, Camilla on her heels.
“Was that Nav?” Even Gideon had wanted to avoid an interaction with Ianthe. “I didn’t realize you were still spending time with her,” Ianthe said to her sister.
Corona laughed, a lighthearted note that sounded hollow to Harrow’s ears. “Sorry for not telling you every single detail of my life, I’ll make sure to text you with an attendance list every time I go out for a beer from now on.”
“Whatever.” Ianthe looked Palamedes up and down but said nothing before turning to Harrow. “We need to get going.” She turned towards the exit, her hand clasped around Corona’s wrist as they made their way out.
Harrow mumbled a goodbye to Palamedes, who said farewell while giving her a look that she knew meant that they were going to talk about this later. As soon as his back was turned, Harrow finally gave into her impulses and rolled her eyes, a visceral relief not unlike a swig of cold water on a hot day.
As she turned to leave, her attention snagged on one of the tables the group had just vacated. A pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses had been left behind. Harrow quickly strode over to the table and swiped them, tucking them into her palm as she made her way out.
She paused at the doorway and turned back towards the bar, unsure what she was looking for. Through a gap in the crowd, she saw that distinctive vivid hair, and Gideon certainly saw her.
Without breaking eye contact, Harrow slid the sunglasses onto her face. She let a tiny smirk touch her lips, and then she turned and pushed through the doors.
She felt close to sated on this victory, but there was still one lingering disappointment. Between the smoked glass and the dim lighting, she hadn’t been able to see her reaction. It all would have been perfect, if only she could have seen Gideon Nav’s face.
Harrow watched the call go to voicemail three times before finally answering it. She’d been expecting it, though she hadn’t been sure when exactly it would come. She’d accompanied Ianthe and Corona to some cocktail lounge, but eventually the anticipation got to her and she feigned a headache to leave. Corona had agreed to call them a car without a second thought, but Harrow would have to deal with Ianthe’s annoyance at some point.
She took a last moment to savor Gideon’s name on caller ID before picking up.
“Harrow speaking,” she said neutrally.
“I know who’s speaking, asswipe, I literally called your phone. Where are you now? Are you at home?” There was a faint rumble almost like white noise behind Gideon’s voice, Harrow noted. She probably had the call on speaker while she drove.
“It’s a bit late for a social call, Griddle.” She picked at a rough cuticle as she spoke, fighting the urge to use her teeth. She’d have to redo her nails soon.
“Knock it off. Do you or do you not have my sunglasses?”
Harrow let the question hang in the air for a beat while she admired the aviators perched on her bedside table. “I do.”
Gideon let out a sound somewhere between a groan and a growl. “I’m on my way to your place for them. Just put them on the porch or something and we don’t even have to talk to each other.”
“Now why would I do that?” Harrow studied her warped reflection in the lenses of the glasses.
There was the faint rhythmic sound of a turn signal on the other end of the line. “Because you’ve had your fun inconveniencing me and don’t want to graduate to actual petty theft?”
It wasn’t a bad argument. “You’ve had these a while,” Harrow said, voice nonchalant. “At least since high school. They must be pretty sentimental to you.”
“Yeah, dude, they were my mom’s. Not Pyrrha’s, like actually my biological mom’s. So if you could not be a raging bitch just this once, it would be appreciated.”
Harrow felt a twinge of guilt, but shoved it down. She hadn’t known that, and besides, she’d get them back soon enough. “Why on earth do you even want them back?”
“I just want them back. Who cares about my reasons?”
“I certainly wouldn’t want to walk around wearing a reminder of the mother that ghosted me as an infant.”
There was a short laugh, joyless. “You know, Harrow, I wouldn’t expect you to understand this, but I was fine after she left, because I had Pyrrha. I didn’t miss out on anything. I don’t even remember my mom and I’m still certain that I would rather have Pyrrha than anyone else on this planet, or any other for that matter.” Gideon’s voice was calm in a way that made the back of Harrow’s neck prickle. “And I’m lucky, actually, that my mom left before she could mess me up too bad. But your parents? They stuck around just long enough to make sure you were good and fucked in the head before they offed themselves.”
Harrow’s pulse pounded in her ears, face hot with anger and shame. She’d always thought as much, but she hadn’t been prepared to hear those words in someone else’s voice.
“I’m so sick of this,” Harrow spat. “I wish you’d just go join them.”
And then she hung up.
She had paced the house for an interminable amount of time, occasionally shaking her hands out as if they could discharge the nervous energy pent up inside her like an overcharged battery. Gideon hadn’t called again, and she hadn’t heard a car come up the drive, nor seen the flash of headlights through the living room windows.
Eventually, she accepted that Gideon wasn’t coming. It was a good thing that she hadn’t shown up, she told herself. Harrow didn’t want to be anywhere in her vicinity and she could only assume Gideon felt likewise and had turned right around to go home.
She set the glasses on the porch just outside the front door and got herself ready for bed. If Gideon didn’t come get them during the night, she could always hand them off to Palamedes to pass them along.
Sleep didn’t come easily, and in the morning she stayed curled up in bed, drifting in and out of alertness, for much longer than usual. Her eyes felt gritty, as though she hadn’t slept at all, but she dragged herself to the front door to check. The sunglasses were still there. She picked them up and went back to her bedroom.
She picked up her phone, half expecting another handful of missed calls from Gideon. Instead there was only one missed call from early in the morning, along with a voicemail, from a number she didn’t recognize. She hit play on the message.
“Hey, Harrow…” It was a woman’s voice that Harrow couldn’t place. “Sorry to call so early, but, um… Sorry, this is Pyrrha Dve.” The voice paused. “Gideon’s Pyrrha? Anyway. Can you call me back as soon as you get this, even if it’s still early? It’s urgent. Thanks.”
Harrow stomach sank. She stared at the wall a moment as she attempted to get her breathing under control. Her mind was flipping through a Rolodex of worst case scenarios, but she knew it wouldn’t stop until she called back. Swallowing hard, she hit the call button.
The phone only rang once before Pyrrha picked up. “Hello?” It had only been a few hours, but she sounded more frazzled than she had in the voice message.
“It’s Harrow. Nonagesimus. I got your message.” Harrow didn’t know why she clarified her last name.
“Yes! Thank you for calling me back. Uh…” There was a pause that felt like the air in both their lungs had been sucked into a black hole. Pyrrha exhaled, breaking the spell. “There’s not a good way to say this. Gideon was in a really bad accident last night.”
The black hole was back, but it had settled inside Harrow’s chest.
“They found her car in the ditch, and I’m– well, I’m not with her now, they’re still working on her, but I’m at the hospital. They found her phone – I don’t know how it’s not completely destroyed, but it looks like you were the last call she made, and it seemed like she was on her way to your place. I don’t know of anyone else out that way that she would have been headed to. So I guess I was hoping you maybe knew something about what happened or why she was out there.”
“Oh… I…” Harrow was struggling to grab words out of her brain. “I’m so…”
“It’s a lot, I know. It’s fine if you need a minute.”
“No, no. It’s… She called last night after, um, we’d run into her last night, with Corona and Palamedes and Camilla, when Ianthe and I were picking up Corona, and she called me later. She… she couldn’t find her sunglasses and she thought I took them.”
On the other end of the line, Pyrrha groaned. “Those fucking sunglasses. Those things have a body count, fucking hell. Okay. Did you talk to her after that? Did she make it to your place?”
Harrow shook her head, and then felt silly as she remembered that Pyrrha couldn’t see her. “No, that was it.”
She could nearly hear Pyrrha thinking on the other end of the line. “No, thanks, that’s helpful,” she said abruptly, as if she’d forgotten she was still on the phone with Harrow. “Just… let me know, if you think of anything else, okay?”
Harrow said she would. She was about to hang up when she blurted out, “Wait– Is she…? Or, what’s the… How is she doing?”
“I honestly don’t know. I mean, it’s really bad, I know that. She wasn’t conscious when they found her. The last update I got was that they were still working to figure out the extent of it all.”
While Harrow had been pacing the house, walking off her energy, Gideon had probably been sliding off the road. The weather hadn’t been great the night before, but it wasn’t anything unusual, and of anyone, Gideon knew how to handle her car. If she’d been as worked up as Harrow had been, though…
“I’ll let you go,” Harrow heard her mouth say. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” She didn’t hear what Pyrrha said before the line went dead.
She looked at the blank phone screen in her hand.
She set down the phone, pulled her knees up against her chest, and cried.
Neither of them said anything for a long time, the growing darkness settling around them.
Eventually, Gideon broke the silence. “Does anyone else know about this?”
Harrow couldn’t look at her. “Which part?”
“Any of it. Either. Both.”
Harrow bit her lip so hard she thought she might draw blood. “Pyrrha knew about my parents. She knows what you did, and what I said, and how you believed me. You told her everything.”
“And she never said anything to me.” Gideon’s entire body was so tense that Harrow worried she was about to hit something.
“It was my place to tell you. She knows it wasn’t your fault.” Harrow paused, steadying herself. “Camilla and Palamedes knew we had a long-standing grudge, but I don’t think they knew the specifics of why. If you ever told them, they never let on to me.”
“And the accident?”
Harrow shook her head slowly. “I told Pyrrha what I told everyone else. You thought I had your sunglasses.”
“Do you? Still?”
“I did for a while. I had planned to give them back to you. But I don’t know where they’ve gotten to at this point. I’m sorry.”
The silence between them was a dry, jagged thing. Harrow had no more tears left to cry, her face still pink and raw from the salt. Gideon was still, leaning against the porch railing with her arms crossed over her chest, staring at nothing.
When Gideon straightened, Harrow couldn’t have said how long it had been. “You weren’t responsible for me wrecking my car. But you were responsible for hiding the two biggest things in our lives from me.”
Harrow nodded, eyes downcast. “I know,” she whispered.
“I have to go.”
“I know,” Harrow repeated, barely audible.
“I’m gonna call Camilla to come get me. Don’t get up, I’ll wait inside.”
Gideon strode past her. Harrow didn’t raise her eyes until Gideon had opened the storm door, but she nearly wished she hadn’t when she saw the simmering rage burning in her golden eyes.
“And you lied to Pyrrha.” Gideon’s voice was incredulous. “To Pyrrha! What the fuck?”
Harrow didn’t turn away until long after the door had banged shut behind her. She stayed sitting on the porch glider until she heard tires turn into the driveway, knees pulled up to her chest. She glanced up only long enough to confirm that it was indeed Camilla pulling up before turning her gaze back to the weathered porch steps.
She heard the back door close, Gideon’s footsteps, the open and shut of a car door, the receding tires.
She stayed sitting there until the cold forced her inside.
Chapter Text
Gideon had been packing for years. Or at least that’s what it felt like. It had only been a few hours, but she already had several boxes taped up and ready to go. It was nerve-wracking to think about living away from Pyrrha for the first time. Well. The first time that she could remember.
Camilla, Palamedes, and Dulcie had been looking for a new place off and on for months. They had expected that finding something within their budget, near the university, and accessible for Dulcie’s chair would be a challenge, but it was disheartening all the same. When they’d come across this particular listing, they’d asked Gideon if she would be interested in taking the extra bedroom.
She and Pyrrha had occasionally discussed it; they both felt that she was able to safely live on her own, but the finances would be tight. For the time being, staying with Pyrrha seemed like the most practical choice. This arrangement, though, was as close to perfect as it could get. She’d split rent, and she wouldn’t be entirely on her own.
Gideon knew that moving out must be bittersweet for everyone, but she thought it must be especially so for her, without the years of memories behind it. Or maybe it was easier, without the nostalgia to weigh her down. It’s not like she would ever know.
Nona was asleep on her bed, having lost a fight with a roll of packing tape earlier that day. Gideon tried not to jostle the bed, but when it was inevitable, Nona would open one eye and hit her with an indignant look.
Seasonal clothes had been packed up first. Gideon had a rough plan in mind, hoping to keep her room from becoming too much of a disaster between now and next week. It was slow going; she kept finding things in the backs of drawers or shoved in the closet that she had no memory of, things that must have been left there from her younger years. Old notes from classmates she no longer remembered, clothes she didn’t remember wearing, random knick knacks that could have come from anywhere.
She swiped her arm along the center shelf in her closet, trying to reach the farthest corner without being able to see it. Her hand hit something solid earlier than she expected it to, and after a moment of grappling, she was able to find a corner to grip and drag it out into the daylight.
It was a box, the kind you’d store photos in, with a lid and a label that had “Gideon” scrawled across it. She’d forgotten it was there, and she’d certainly never opened it. She looked at it for an uncertain moment. Part of her wanted to throw it out, move on from anything that could possibly be inside. Why keep hurting herself, when she knew that’s what the only outcome could be?
When Palamedes had brought over a big cardboard box of her things that had been left at Harrow’s, the photo box had been with it. Unlike the sweater and the books and the headphones, the box wasn’t Gideon’s.
Palamedes had had to help Harrow dig through her room to locate all of Gideon’s belongings. “You know how she is,” he’d said. “I’d never been in her bedroom before – I’m sure you have – but I’m not surprised.” She’d nearly kicked him for that remark but she couldn’t bring herself to be salty after the favor he’d just done them both. From what he had said when she told him she didn’t recognize it, it sounded like this was a collection of old medical paperwork and other hospital ephemera. “I only lifted the lid just enough to make sure it was yours,” he’d promised.
Gideon told herself that she needed to check and make sure there wasn’t anything important in it, records that she might need later. She shoved down the thought in the back of her mind that said all her records were online now anyway. It didn’t matter. As much as she wanted to toss it outright, she’d known from the second she pulled it back into the light that she was going to open it.
She climbed onto the bed next to Nona and lifted the top off the box, setting it aside. She took a stack of papers out, hospital information like Palamedes had said, quickly shuffling through it. Informational handouts about traumatic brain injuries, brochures for the hospital, printouts of her lab results, all things she had no reason to keep. Once she’d sorted through that stack of paper, she returned to the box.
There was a jumble of what Gideon would politely refer to as “junk.” Hospital visitor badges, old movie tickets, receipts, sticky notes with reminders in Gideon’s handwriting that she’d long since forgotten what they were meant to remind her of. There was a pair of earrings: one inexpertly crafted skull and a lumpy pair of bones. Gideon recognized those. And she recognized what the collection of junk was sitting on.
It was a notebook, one she’d seen in Harrow’s hands dozens if not hundreds of times. The cover was worn and creased, and it was thick with wrinkled pages and extra papers that had been wedged inside. Gideon opened it and flipped the pages idly.
She stopped when her name caught her eye. She scanned the rest of the page, at times struggling to decipher the cramped handwriting. It was dated from when she was in the hospital, and on the page Harrow had detailed one of her physical therapy sessions. The way Harrow wrote, though… she wrote as if she had meant for Gideon to read this someday. Gideon’s eyebrows drew together in confusion as she turned back to the first page, quickly reading through the words inked on the paper.
Gideon couldn’t stop herself from reading, pausing only when she realized she’d read an account of her first full week in the hospital. She turned back to the box and the sheaf of paper that had been resting beneath the journal. She set the notebook face down on the bed to mark her place, and warily lifted the box into her lap.
She unfolded the first page. It was a drawing of two hands, fingers meeting delicately around a small piece of wood. They were her hands, she realized with a start. There were other drawings, and a stack of lined paper.
Not lined paper, she realized as she pulled out the first one. Letters. Her name marched across the top of each page.
She looked back at the notebook, the pieces clicking into place in her mind. She set the letters and the drawings back in the box, and picked up the journal.
Back at the first page, she settled into bed against the headboard, knowing she’d be there a while.
She started reading.
It was hours later by the time Gideon got to the last letter, tear tracks still drying on her face.
The light streaming through her window had shifted to the warm gold of evening, and Pyrrha would be home from work soon. She gathered all of the papers in her hands, attempting to shuffle them into a neater stack to replace them in the box.
As she lifted the box once more, something rattled in the bottom, in a corner that had been cast in shadow. Gideon cautiously reached into the box, fingers grasping around some object she couldn’t quite place. When she brought it into the light, it was a pair of old mirrored aviator sunglasses.
Her eyes welled up again, and she slid the glasses onto her face, hiding her fresh tears. She stood to check her reflection in the mirror, over her dresser. They were a perfect fit.
She pushed the glasses up on top of her head, setting her hair askew as she did so, and pulled out her phone.
I read your letters, she typed. Where are you now?
“Will you hurry up?” Harrow’s arms were crossed over her chest as she stood in the bathroom doorway.
“I’m trying,” Gideon said from between gritted teeth. She pushed her hand through her hair, leaning in close to the mirror to analyze how it fell. Unsatisfied, she tried again, this time combing her fingers through to brush it off towards the side. She reached for a jar of some sort of fragrant hair product, but Harrow made a disapproving sound.
“No more,” she warned. “Unless you’re actually trying for the Naberius look. Besides, you’ll gas yourself if you open that jar one more time.” The small bathroom was filled with a cacophony of scents from various hair products, soaps, sprays, toothpaste… None of them were unpleasant scents on their own, but the combination was certainly potent.
Gideon looked at her. “Naberius?”
“He went by B– you know what? It doesn’t matter, you’re not going to care anyway. What is it you’re trying to do, exactly?”
“You know, kind of like–” Gideon made a vague swooping motion with one hand above her head. “But still like I don’t care too much, obviously.”
Harrow sighed. “You’re going to have to lean down or kneel or something.” Gideon smirked and got on her knees on the bathroom tile. “Do not start,” Harrow cautioned as she pushed Gideon’s hair back away from her face. “I’ll leave without you. I really will.” She made a few more adjustments before smoothing her hand over the back of Gideon’s head. “Alright, you’re good. And if you’re not, you’ll have to live with it.”
Gideon inspected her reflection in the mirror. “How do you always do it better than me?”
“Artist’s eye,” Harrow said dismissively. “My turn with the mirror.”
Once Gideon had slipped past her and out the door, she made quick work of her own grooming. Sharp eyeliner was followed by a sweep of dark lipstick, a twist of her hair pinned back to show off the new earrings Gideon had given her earlier that day. They were tiny silver skulls - an upgrade from the handmade clay ones she'd given her so long ago, Gideon said - but Gideon had taken a Sharpie to them, giving each a tiny fracture. “Get it?” she’d asked. “Because they’re for the brain injury unit charity gala?”
Harrow had certainly gotten it, but she smiled at the memory nonetheless. She smoothed her hands down the front of her dress, relieved that she’d been able to get ready without anything getting on herself. Her long sleeved wrap dress was a burgundy so dark it was nearly black, to match her “risqué” (to quote Gideon) nails. She’d known Gideon would appreciate it the moment she saw it.
“You’ve got your notes?” Harrow called, striding down the hallway to the living room.
“I thought I’d really commit to the ‘memory loss speaker’ bit and forget them, actually,” Gideon retorted from where she’d been sitting on the couch.
“Very funny.” Harrow passed her to grab her bag, and Gideon craned her neck towards her, face upturned. “You look like a baby bird waiting for your mother to come regurgitate a worm into your mouth,” Harrow told her.
“I sure hope that’s not what you’re planning to do, but I wouldn’t put it past you,” Gideon pouted.
Harrow rolled her eyes but leaned in for a quick kiss, swiping her thumb along Gideon’s lips to wipe away the faint smudge of lipstick that was left behind. “We’re going to be late if we don’t get out the door in the next thirty seconds.”
They made it to the car with no further incidents. At the end of the driveway, Gideon leaned forward, looking down the street.
“Are we in the clear yet?” Harrow asked.
Gideon nodded and lifted her foot from the brake to turn onto the street, smiling softly. From the passenger seat, Harrow reached one hand over the center console to rest lightly on Gideon’s thigh. With the other hand, she extracted a pair of mirrored aviator sunglasses from her bag and slid them onto her face.
“Good.”
Notes:
If you've made it this far, thank you so much for reading! I've had such a blast writing this for the Big Resurrection Event, and I'm more proud of this fic than anything I've written in my life! I have never taken on a project this big before, and I actually almost didn't sign up for the event because I didn't think I could hit the 10k minimum word count and was worried I'd lose interest or motivation before I could finish. I loved working on it so much that it very quickly became clear that that wasn't going to be an issue - I'm actually really sad to be done writing it and miss working on it already!
Everyone has been so incredibly supportive over the past few months while I've been working on this, and I've been blown away by the lovely feedback I've gotten. Truly, the response I've gotten thus far makes me feel like I've won the fic Olympics, and I could not be more grateful.
A huge, HUGE thank you to Raxheim for beta reading and general all around motivational support! Big shout out to Char as well, who has been an amazing cheerleader for this fic and has tolerated me through many Rubber Duck problem solving sessions!
The gorgeous artwork was done by the-purple-duck on tumblr - please go check out their other work as well!
I've been daydreaming about this fic for over four months now, mostly to the soundtrack of this playlist that I made for it on Spotify. I'll give the hint that there are two lyrics from songs on that playlist hidden in this chapter - although I suspect one of them is more obvious than the other for most people :)
I'm on tumblr as lady-harrowhark, where I say words recreationally. Feel free to pop into my DMs to eat drywall over these girls with me.
Pages Navigation
nosecoffee on Chapter 1 Thu 27 Jul 2023 07:25AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Sat 29 Jul 2023 10:14PM UTC
Comment Actions
nifffty on Chapter 1 Fri 28 Jul 2023 12:09AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Fri 28 Jul 2023 07:07PM UTC
Comment Actions
DreamlandB on Chapter 1 Fri 28 Jul 2023 12:29AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Fri 28 Jul 2023 07:14PM UTC
Comment Actions
Rachel (Guest) on Chapter 1 Sat 29 Jul 2023 01:20AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Sat 29 Jul 2023 03:35AM UTC
Comment Actions
Mal (Guest) on Chapter 1 Sat 29 Jul 2023 08:08AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Sat 29 Jul 2023 09:50PM UTC
Comment Actions
Colorfulraven on Chapter 1 Sun 30 Jul 2023 03:23AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Sun 30 Jul 2023 04:04AM UTC
Comment Actions
YeeHawmura on Chapter 1 Sun 30 Jul 2023 02:57PM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Sun 30 Jul 2023 08:53PM UTC
Comment Actions
gremlinwithapencil on Chapter 1 Mon 31 Jul 2023 07:29AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Mon 31 Jul 2023 03:24PM UTC
Comment Actions
nixieteeth on Chapter 1 Tue 01 Aug 2023 09:38PM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Wed 02 Aug 2023 02:30AM UTC
Comment Actions
a_big_apple on Chapter 1 Tue 08 Aug 2023 05:29PM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Tue 08 Aug 2023 10:19PM UTC
Comment Actions
sharpbutterknife on Chapter 1 Sat 19 Aug 2023 02:33AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Sun 20 Aug 2023 01:01AM UTC
Comment Actions
miltonia on Chapter 1 Thu 15 Feb 2024 08:08PM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Fri 16 Feb 2024 02:26AM UTC
Comment Actions
unexpected-tigers (Guest) on Chapter 1 Tue 26 Mar 2024 02:27AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Tue 26 Mar 2024 03:21AM UTC
Comment Actions
avatarbeck on Chapter 1 Mon 20 May 2024 11:37AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Tue 21 May 2024 03:08AM UTC
Comment Actions
thelemonisinplay on Chapter 1 Sun 18 Aug 2024 11:05AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Sun 18 Aug 2024 10:39PM UTC
Comment Actions
byesexually on Chapter 1 Wed 15 Jan 2025 08:28AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 1 Wed 15 Jan 2025 07:16PM UTC
Comment Actions
nosecoffee on Chapter 2 Thu 27 Jul 2023 09:48AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 2 Sat 29 Jul 2023 10:31PM UTC
Last Edited Sat 29 Jul 2023 10:32PM UTC
Comment Actions
DreamlandB on Chapter 2 Fri 28 Jul 2023 01:13AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 2 Fri 28 Jul 2023 07:21PM UTC
Comment Actions
t (Guest) on Chapter 2 Fri 28 Jul 2023 08:07AM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 2 Sat 29 Jul 2023 03:54AM UTC
Comment Actions
YeeHawmura on Chapter 2 Sun 30 Jul 2023 03:36PM UTC
Comment Actions
oretsev on Chapter 2 Sun 30 Jul 2023 08:56PM UTC
Comment Actions
Pages Navigation