Archive of Our Own

She hadn’t even opened her eyes, hadn’t even realised she was asleep, until the pain dragged her, choking, into consciousness. There was no gentle, warm, weak-kneed stumble towards wakefulness. No, this was a blazing, torturous agony that swept over her all at once like the howling tides of the River, the myriad souls a hundred thousand nerve endings all alive and screaming in their torment, climbing over each other in their ravenous demand for her attention. Underneath it all, the faintest whisper that something was missing, something important, something she was surely damned for forgetting.

She swallowed against a bone-dry throat, and a whimper as embarrassing as it was pitiful slipped out from between cracked lips - tasting iron when her swollen tongue darted out to try and moisten them. She took slow, ragged breaths as she came back to herself, feeling her awareness return, struggling to be heard over the animal noise of her body. Familiar thanergy tingled at her fingertips and crackled at the base of her skull in the space between her axis and atlas vertebrae, sweeping over the agony of her body like a balm to a wound. She was back on the Ninth. 

She was home, returned to her post, and yet, something still wasn’t right, still missing. 

Burning eyelids lifted slowly, dragging against scratchy sclera, dried discharge cracking. She forced her eyes to open, the dancing shadows above her fuzzy as she struggled to focus, bringing a migraine to needle at her optic nerve. She gasped at the sharpness of the sensation, her lids sliding shut of their own volition, before she grasped the pain with both hands and used it as a focus, gritting her teeth and opening her eyes once more. 

She knew the stone above her. Roughhewn and grey, flickering candlelight throwing the imperfections in the porous rock into sharp relief. This was not her childhood room, but she knew it all the same. It had been Great Aunt Aisamorta’s rooms, not far from the Chapel. They had moved her there after the arthritis had ravaged her knees and she wasn’t strong enough to take the stairs for services. 

Her whole body throbbed painfully. Her skeleton sat heavy in her flesh. Her nail beds stung. The connective tissues that bound muscle to bone burned and ached, like she’d been torn asunder and hastily put back together. Calmed momentarily by the familiarity of her surroundings, she turned her thanergy inward as she had learned on the Mithraeum, and discovered that her body had, in fact, been ripped apart, or close to it. The tendons and sinews in her arms and legs had been regrown, her teeth felt young and unmarred, and her left ventricle felt different. Something is still missing.

She let her head fall to the side to look at the small bedside table, the space between vertebrae cracking like stone beneath the chisel. Her orbital socket sandpapered her eyes as she scanned the dusty table beside her, her halting gaze coming to rest on a small tin cup of water. 

Her parched throat came back with a vengeance, and she grit her teeth and prepared to move. She knew it’d hurt, but she still wasn’t quite ready for how every atom of her body screamed as she pushed herself up onto her elbows, the bones of her spine groaning and popping as she twisted, like the gears of some great, rusted machine. A pained wheeze whistled out from between clenched teeth, the overwhelming thirst clawing at her throat pushed her forwards, reaching out with numbed, clumsy fingers for the cup. She fumbled with agonising sluggishness, desperate not to knock the only water she had over, before her fingers finally, finally found purchase around the dented surface, swallowing a groan as she pulled it towards her. 

When it cleared the edge of the bedside table, the sudden weight of it in her hand nearly made her drop it, the weakened flexor digitorum superficialis and lumbrical muscles screaming as they struggled. She brought the tin to her chapped lips and drank greedily, the metallic tang of the lukewarm water blending with the coppery taste of her ragged throat, soothing as it flowed down her oesophagus and—

Something’s still missing what —

Gideon.

Harrow’s throat spasmed, spluttering water all over her hand and down her front, body juddering as she choked, the strain on her oesophagus swept away as it all came crashing back; her time in the Body; returning to her own broken, starved shell; the Body (Alecto, a voice within her murmured) swearing fealty to her; the kiss… the calamity of it all rendered insignificant by the fact that Gideon Nav was dead. 

A ragged, keening cry clawed its way up her throat and out, echoing in the small bedchamber, emaciated, skeletal hands fisting in hair longer than she remembered, limp, greasy strands pulled taut. All her desperate, scrabbling attempts to preserve her Cavalier’s soul, for nought.

Gideon Nav was dead.

Her aching body pulled in on itself, curling into the foetal position as she wept, the grief so much sharper than in the embolism in the River she had created for herself; prying open her sternum, ribs cracking, snapping, those cold, ravenous fingers carving out her heart with blunted nails. The place within her that Gideon had made her home for those precious, fleeting moments on the First now bereft, a chapel echoing the silence of a lost congregation.

Her mouth opened, the masseter muscles stretching taut, aching, and a wail tore from her throat, her straining, parched vocal chords forgotten. She reached inside herself, combing through her mind, body and soul for any trace—any trace that her gamble to avoid consuming her cavalier had held and found nothing. No fractured mind, no well of Lyctoral power. 

Nothing. 

Gideon Nav was dead. 

She clutched at her face, digging her nails into the flesh of her hairline as she sobbed. The chasm that grief had made of her chest ached and wept, tearing at her with a ragged, rusted edge, flaking off and turning her blood to poison, hot agony boiling in her veins. 

Gideon Nav was dead. 

She lay there, body curled into a small, pitiful lump, crying like an infant, her wailing turning to cries, turning to sobs, turning to sniffles, until she lay, numb and silent, grief pulling her into the yawning abyss she remembered from her younger years: cold, dark, and all consuming. She stared out between her fingers at the wall, unseeing. Time slowed. Minutes may have passed, maybe hours, she couldn’t tell, didn’t care to, because she had let Gideon Nav die. 

Again. 

Years yawned between beats of her heart.  

Gideon.

Second dragged out into hours crammed between minutes. 

Gideon.

Decades passed in the blink of an eye.

Gideon.

Each breath lasted a myriad. 

She was unsure how much time had passed when she became aware, dimly, that there was another person in the room with her; drawing close with a precise, steadfast gait as familiar to Harrow as the beloved grey stone of the Ninth, and just as unflinching despite the erosion of time. Marshal Aiglamene limped her way into Harrow’s peripheral vision, dark eyes narrowed, caution sitting uncomfortably on her carved face, one hand ghosting a breath away from her rapier. 

“... My Lady?” She said, and Harrow was struck by the hesitation in the voice of a woman who had always seemed so unflappable. It would have been terrifying on any other day. As it was, Harrow hadn’t the strength to respond, hoping her silence would be enough to send the old soldier away and leave her to her grief. 

“Reverend Daughter?” she prodded once more, one pace closer, sword hand inching even nearer to the black wrapped blade, and Harrow grimly accepted she would need to answer. 

“It’s good to see you, Marshal,” she rasped from her place curled on the cot, finally looking Aiglamene in the face. The older woman’s shoulders relaxed from where they’d been raised in grim resolution to what looked to be a distant relative of relief. Her right hand left its vigil near her sword to lay across her chest as she dropped awkwardly to kneel before Harrow.

“You honour me, my Lady,” Aiglamene replied, tilting her head up to look her in the face, eyes narrowing again, appraising. “It pleases me to see your spirit back where it belongs.”

She struggled back to her feet, slowly, her ragged face giving no hint of strain as she straightened, standing on her mismatched legs to look down upon Harrow. 

“That is good news,” she murmured, and Harrow wondered who the words were meant for. “Good news, sorely needed.”

Harrow let her gaze drop numbly back down towards the floor. Questions buzzed around the fringes of her awareness like moths to a fat candle: What had happened on the Ninth in her absence? Where was Alecto? What of the Tomb? Where were their allies? Things that she knew reasonably needed to be answered, but instead, what left her mouth was:

“Was her body recovered?”

Harrow looked back up in time to see something behind Aiglamene’s eyes shutter closed, and while she betrayed no outward change, Harrow could feel more than see the Marshal’s demeanour grow cold. A pit to rival Drearburh’s mine shaft grew in Harrow’s stomach, echoing the yawning silence in the suddenly claustrophobic bedchamber.

“I had hoped for better from you, Reverend Daughter.” 

Harrow pushed herself up into a sitting position, cheeks burning in indignation, arms that bordered atrophy struggling under even her meagre body weight. Grimacing through the effort, she stared Aiglamene in the eye, her lips curling back to bite out a response. 

“Her body was not recovered,” the Marshall started again, as if she hadn’t already spoken.

Harrow grew horrified at her bottom lip, and the traitorous way it trembled in front of the Captain. 

“But it has returned of its own volition,” she continued. “Along with the audacious soul to which it belongs.”

At this, Harrow’s bottom lip ceased its trembling, instead dropping embarrassingly with her whole jaw in disbelief, her brow rising against her will.

“What? How is that possible?” Harrow demanded. 

“I was hoping you could tell me,” Aiglamene replied, and if Harrow were any more aware, she’d almost think there was more than a little venom in the Marshal’s voice. As it was, Harrow’s mind was too busy trying to wrap itself around the mere idea that Gideon may be alive. Her cheeks were still wet with the proof of her grief, and now she was presented with the chance that all may be saved, that her efforts were not in vain. It was almost too—

“Take my hand,” Harrow ordered sharply, thrusting her own brittle fingers forward. 

Aiglamene’s head tilted a degree off centre, her shrewd eyes gleaming in question, before a look of quiet understanding dawned on her face. She limped the handful of paces left between them, and reached forward.

Harrow stared at the cool leather of the Marshal’s glove as it creaked closed around her waifish hand, her head filled with a heady cocktail of relief and trepidation. Relief because the contact meant that her mind had not betrayed her, and trepidation because…

“What you said,” Harrow croaked hollowly. “It cannot be true.”

“I assure you, it is.” Aiglamene released her hand. 

“I watched her…” Harrow’s voice trailed off, humiliating her in its betrayal. 

“I’m sure you did.” There was no mistaking the coldness in Aiglamene’s voice this time. The iciness of it had Harrow’s head jumping up to look the Marshal in the eye once more. Her face was as implacable as ever, giving away none of the emotion that may have leeched into her voice. 

“She died.” Harrow forced out at last, hating the way her voice frayed at the edges. “I saw it happen.”

“I know,” Aiglamene said, voice carefully flat. “Speared right through the chest.”

Harrow screwed her eyes shut as she tried to smother the memory of the exact way Gideon’s body had broken around that piece of railing; the wet squelch as the iron pierced her chest cavity, the crunch of bone as it punched through her sternum and the quiet sigh that had broken her lips as she breathed her last, all reverberating around her skull. Her gorge rose. Her fists clenched around her knees.

“As I said,” Aiglamene said when Harrow failed to respond. “I had hoped for better from you, Reverend Daughter.”

“‘Better’?” Harrow spat, eyes and tongue burning as she looked back at the captain of her guard. 

“Aye,” she replied with uncharacteristic boldness. “Better than yet another adept who commands their cavalier to die for them.” 

Fury and indignation blazed in Harrow’s breast where something caught alight, its flame coursing through flesh and bone, burning hot and angry in even the smallest specks of osseous matter.  Incensed, she bolted to her feet, exhaustion and pain forgotten as she crowded into Aiglamene’s space. 

“‘Commanded’?” she spat, shaking with rage. “You think I would ever dare to ask such a thing of her? She, to whom I gave everything—my power, my very mind—in the hope of preserving her?”

Spittle gathered at the corners of her mouth. Her face burned. 

“You forget yourself, Marshal,” she hissed. “First in speaking with such insubordination, and secondly in daring to assume that I wouldn’t have given anything, everything to take her place. That I would not have traded every soul in this House, traded what power had been granted me, to cast myself upon those spikes in her stead—so that she may live, freely and out of the shadow of the Tomb. I have lived a wretched half-life since that day, knowing that there was no justice, because if there was, she would have lived and I would have died, my soul joining the cursed mausoleum erected by my conception.”

Harrow’s hands trembled by her side. Aiglamene’s face was unchanged. Part of her wished the Marshal would react; apologise, shout back, reprimand her for her outburst, something, anything other than the cold detachment that stared back at her. 

The fire that had urged her to her feet began to die, the indignant kindling that had fed it burned to ash, with only embers remaining. Harrow stood there, trying not to sway as she panted, surprised by the toll the exertion had taken on her. 

“I went—” The edges of Aiglamene began to blur. Harrow closed her burning eyes. “—I went before God, and I asked him to return her to me.” She dared not speak the words above a whisper, still too scared of all they held. “And he said it could not be done.” 

A strange, pitiful sound left her lips, like a sigh that was in mourning. She opened her eyes again to look Aiglamene in the face once more, the Marshal as placid as before. 

“So when you tell me that she lives…” Harrow trailed off, afraid to finish the sentence, afraid of the unspoken you are saying that God lied to me, again that hung between them, the last remnants of Harrow’s faith as the condemned from the gallows. 

Aiglamene’s mouth twitched at the corner, the masseter muscles flexing visibly under the thin, marred skin of her left cheek as her eyes narrowed. There was something in them that Harrow could not quite fathom. A reappraisal, perhaps, or an understanding. She had always struggled with the quiet emotions. 

“I did not say,” Aiglamene said at last. Slowly. Carefully. “That she lives.” 

💀

Her boots scraped rhythmically on the stone floor, their loud report ricocheting along the carved corridors. Centuries-old fluorescent lights flickered and hummed overhead. Aiglamene had given her one of her old robes and a veil, both of which billowed out behind her like wisps of blackened smoke. The thick layers of cotton and lace did an admirable job of keeping out the Drearburh chill, but despite them, she still felt naked without her facepaint and bone earrings. 

Walking through the halls of the Ninth after what felt like a myriad should have been a momentous occasion. Retreading the paths she knew better than her own face, seeing the obvious signs of new life in her treasured House after the Resurrection, should have filled Harrow with some semblance of joy. It was, after all, her sole desire while on the Mithraeum after ravaging her own brain. She recalled, with faint shame, how she had begged John Gaius to allow her to return, to see the fruits of her labour, of Gideon’s death, even if she could not remember it at the time. Treading the halls, seeing rooms that hadn’t been lived in for decades show signs of life and home, should have warmed her heart. Should have. 

As it stood, the only thing that was on Harrow’s mind as she stalked towards the chapel, feet guided by years of muscle memory, was Aiglamene’s description of Gideon and where she could be found. The fury Harrow had felt at Aiglamene’s earlier accusation had returned a thousandfold; her nails dug into her palms where her fists were clenched, knuckles white and straining, and her molars creaked and ground from how hard her jaw was clamped shut. 

She turned the second-to-last corner toward the chapel, mind honed on the task ahead. She could, and probably would, curse the man she had spent eighteen years of her life calling God for the rest of her days, but that energy was better spent elsewhere. Specifically, on how she was going to undo the calamity she had wrought upon Gideon’s body. She used the burning, righteous anger licking at the insides of her ribs to push through the way her stomach flipped as she recalled the exact way Gideon had fallen upon the wrought iron railing to plan out the repairs that would be needed.

The sternum and ribs would be the work of an infant with her first finger bones, as would the pectoralis major. The minor may take time, depending on damage, but that would be down to detail as opposed to complexity. She swallowed the rising tide of bile as she recalled the way the rusted spike had protruded sharply out of Gideon’s back and added the trapezius to her list, and the infraspinatus fascia and the latissimus dorsi just in case. Muscles, while not her forte, were easy enough. Hearts, on the other hand…

Her own heart had jumped somewhere into her oesophagus when Aiglamene had briefly described the cavernous, fleshy gash just off centre in Gideon’s chest: ragged edges, visible bone, but not an ounce of blood, like someone had just pulled her off that cursed railing, dried her off and sent her on her way. She shuddered at the image, and the distant memory of the dead weight of Gideon’s body under her desperate hands. She had no idea as to the extent of the damage, of what she’d need to repair, but the mere thought of coming face to face with it again, the proof of yet another life sacrificed in her name, was almost enough to stay her feet. 

Almost. 

She was driven on by the desperate, urgent, selfish ache burning in her own wretched heart to see Gideon again, to right the wrong that had been done her, to hear her voice, and to throw herself at her cavalier’s feet and beg for a forgiveness she did not deserve. Her thoughts began to spiral, running through every possible outcome of her conversation, each one ending in her cavalier casting her aside in contempt long before she could even begin to repair her flesh. Her heart pounded hard against her sternum and her breath drew short, her palms prickling in panic.

As Harrow turned the last corner towards the chapel, she ran her tongue over her teeth, from left to right, counting and naming each one as she did as a child. Low left third molar, low left second molar, low left primary molar, low left second premolar… by the time she’d begun to work her way back from the maxillary teeth, her heart, which had begun to rabbit in her chest, slowed. It had been a long time since she’d used this method, and while part of her burned at having to resort to calming herself as she had as a child, she would take the result all the same. 

She took a deep breath as she closed on the final stretch to the chapel doors, the echoing of her boots much louder in the close, arched corridor. She was pulled sharply from her thoughts by a sound that froze her in place: the slow, rhythmic rasping of rock on steel that could only come from a blade beneath the sharpening stone. 

Her breath caught sharply in her throat as her whole body stopped, ears straining to focus on the sound that hissed at her from beyond the chapel doors that hung ajar, mere meters away. Her memories of the Mithraeum may have been mangled by the months-long stroke she had subjected herself to, but the sound of the lyctors sharpening their blades between training sessions had burned itself into her Dura Maters. Her stomach and frontal lobes had ached in accompaniment to the sharpening stone’s song. A whetstone, a voice somewhere in the far forgotten corners of her mind provided. 

The sound she heard now, whilst nauseatingly familiar, was different; the metallic, rattling breaths of the stone were longer, deeper than those of the lyctors’ rapiers, as if it was borne from a larger creature. Her brain immediately conjured an image of a large, two-handed black blade—one she had carried on her back for months despite not knowing why, only that it was important, and the rakish smirk beneath mirrored glasses that had once wielded it. 

She found herself on the precipice, one clammy hand on the large, carven doors of the chapel, drawn across the last few paces by the sound, the strange hypnotic rhythm of it, and the promise it held. She took shallow, sharp breaths through her nose, her tongue resuming its cataloguing of her teeth as her heart began to gallop in her chest once more, her mind once again beginning to weave out innumerable what if ’s.

Her jaw clamped shut, her teeth sharply nicking her tongue as she clenched, forcing herself to focus. She was the Reverend Daughter, damn it. She would not be cowed before the entrance of her own chapel, no matter who may—

“You can stop lurking, Harrow,” a voice, that voice, called between breaths of the whetstone. “I know you’re there.”

Where before her body had been uncomfortably fast in its fear and anticipation, with pounding pulse and desperate breaths, the echoing, tired tones of a voice she thought she’d never hear again shocked her into glacial stillness. Her fingers and scalp prickled with a cold that rivalled her memories of the Tomb. 

Despite it all—the anxiety, the dread—she was drawn slowly forward once more, a frozen planetoid to a black hole of that voice. The chapel door’s hinges screamed as she made her way through, eyes fixed on the floor to give her as much time to prepare as possible. The harsh rasps of the whetstone ended—Harrow held her breath—and in their place the quiet ringing of fabric against steel. 

The familiar smells of the chapel wrapped themselves around her; incense, wax and candle smoke, scented oils and old tomes, all undercut by a newer, sharper bouquet. The familiar tang of old blood that burned her nose and stuck to the back of her throat blended with the heady chemical, plastic smell of the oils she remembered the lyctors applying to their swords. The latter, like the sound of a blade being sharpened, had given her a migraine on the Mithraeum, but as she made her way between the pews towards the pulpit, she suspected it was because Gideon had reeked of the stuff. It wasn’t until she was halfway down the aisle that she had the strength to look up from her boots and face her cavalier, her breath catching in her throat as she did. 

Gideon Nav had pulled a low stool before the pulpit, and had a black two-hander across her knees—one hand wrapped around the shaft of the handle as one would hold a lover, the other running a cloth along the blade in slow, languid strokes, the sword singing quietly beneath each caress. The dark steel glimmered in the candlelight—the dancing flames reflected in hypnotising clarity in its oil slick surface, the spaces between the same pale green as the bioluminescent powder on the high vaulted ceiling above. 

The woman herself was draped in a white Cohort uniform that, even from this distance, Harrow could tell had once been beautiful. The breast and cuffs awash with fine detail of pearlescent thread and glimmering white buttons, the pale sleeves rolled to her elbows, contrasting with her warm skin. Her unruly red hair shimmered in the candlelight, held in place by a delicate white crown of phalanges and blossoms, a couple of golden strands escaping to frame her face, with deep shadows pooling around her eyes and mouth, spilling down her front, throwing her chest into darkness.

Watching her, Harrow could almost trick herself into believing that the summons from the Emperor Undying had never come; that the Gideon before her was the same blasphemous, unrepentant, unruly and warm child she’d once been. She took a second to indulge herself, drinking in the sight of her cavalier, the first flower of her House returned to her halls, to her House. To her, a quiet, needy thing inside herself whispered. It was selfish, she knew, to find so much joy seeing Gideon back in a place she had so many times tried to escape, but the aching, bleeding thing in her chest sang out for the sight all the same. She watched the way the extensor muscles in Gideon’s forearms flexed and shifted beneath the skin with each pass of the polishing cloth. 

Her feet began to move forward of their own volition, her body moving closer to try and get a better view of the miracle of which she had so often dreamed before her. Blind to all else, even her own thanergetic awareness, she failed to notice an errant bone which lay forgotten on the carven floor. 

It rattled loudly across the stone, bouncing off the foot of a pew, shattering the breathless silence that had enveloped the chapel before rolling away into shadow. Harrow turned away from where the bone—right fibula, adult, approximately sixty-seven years old—had been lost to the gloom between pews, looking back at Gideon to find that her cavalier’s eyes were already on her, glowing in the candlelight. Twin flames of molten gold burned out from deep within the blackened pools of her eye sockets, luminescent in the half light, the intensity in them setting the veil that had been over Harrow’s own eyes alight and revealing the awful truth of Aigalemene’s words:

Gideon Nav was dead. 

Where her mind and the flickering candles had tricked her before, she could plainly see the lifeless pallor of her skin, and her nostrils and mouth were a mottled purple, the same kind she had learned to hide on her parents’ bodies. The edge of a bruised gash peeked out from under the edge of a blue handkerchief tied around her neck, and the ends of her fingers were tinged in black where they grasped blade and cloth. Harrow felt her gorge rise at the sight of it. 

Golden eyes narrowed as they stared at her. 

“Yeah, that’s you alright,” Gideon Nav said, gold searching black. “I’d know that affronted look anywhere.” 

Her bloodless lips twitched into something that might have once shared a crypt with a smile. 

“Welcome back, Harrow.”

Harrow swallowed around a desiccated throat, mouth opening and closing, tongue twitching impotently as she scrambled for words, Gideon’s voice ringing in her ears like the last muster call fateful day. She dug her nails into her palms, using the bite of keratin to focus thoughts that rattled around her head like so many bones in a sack. 

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t tell me you’re actually speechless.” 

Gideon squinted at her. Harrow tried to remember how to breathe. Gideon’s jaw flexed under a waxen cheek while she waited. 

“You’d think after all those years giving sermons,” she said, when it became clear that no response was forthcoming. “That you’d be a little quicker on the draw.

“I mean,” she went on, gesturing about herself with the hand that held the cloth, index finger pointed out at the chapel. “I even gave you home-field advantage. This is your turf.”

As she moved, the flickering orange glow of the candlelight melted away the shadows across her front, and from between the unbuttoned breast of her jacket, Harrow could make out the swell of cleavage, and in the centre, the gleaming ends of snapped ribs and the dried, fleshy mess of her chest cavity. She was going to be sick. 

“Oi, quit oogling my speedholes,” Gideon chastised. “My eyes are up here.”

Harrow, too horrified to blush, looked back up at Gideon’s face, and into those Dominicus eyes, a richer gold than the glimmering epaulettes on her shoulders. 

“I—” Harrow croaked, voice found at last. “I’m sorry.”

Gideon flinched, recoiling like Harrow had marched up and slapped her. 

“Yeah, well,” Gideon recovered. “You’ll need to be a bit more specific. I mean, are you apologising for the state you left my sword in, not doing a single minute of cardio, or for, I don’t know, throwing my noble sacrifice back in my face like the Nine Houses’ most ungrateful twat?”

Harrow’s jaw dropped open of its own accord as she stared at Gideon, aghast. 

“‘Ungrateful?’”

“Yes, Harrow,” Gideon condescended. “When someone offs themselves so that you can ascend to demigodhood and kill an eldritch oncology patient, it's generally considered ungrateful to then shove that someone’s soul into the bottom of a well and forget about it, even if you do hate their guts.”

Harrow felt her thoughts spin out of control all over again. Is this what Gideon had thought —that Harrow despised Gideon so thoroughly, thought so little of her life, that she’d lobotomise herself because she was too proud to consume her soul? Too proud to carry Gideon within her for myriads?

“Like, come on, ” Gideon continued, oblivious to Harrow’s turmoil. “I gave you my life, Harrow. Not as some indentured servant, but freely, because I wanted you to live.”

Harrow’s knees shook. Her mouth worked, opening and closing, her mind screaming at her accursed vocal chords to say something, anything. Tell her she’s wrong tell her why you did what you did do it why won’t you SAY ANYTHING?

Lifeless fingers clenched around the handle of the sword and fisted in the oiled rag. 

“I gave you my life because it was all that I could give you, and you didn’t even want it.” 

Harrow flinched. Gideon’s bitter mutter was barely audible, but she might as well have grabbed Harrow by the lapels and screamed in her face. Her sight blurred, eyes burning. She felt that cavern hewn out from her chest grow deeper. But beneath it all—beneath the grief and disbelief and shock—there was fury. Fury at Gideon, for being so blind, so inconceivably oblivious to Harrow and her motives. Fury at the Emperor, at Crux, at everyone, but most of all, fury at herself. 

“Your life is worthless to me,” Harrow’s voice shook, barely contained agony and anger clawing at its edges. She might struggle with quiet emotions, but nothing Gideon ever did was quiet: her face twisting into a hideous cocktail of vindication and hurt. She opened her mouth to speak, but Harrow cut her off. 

“Your life is worthless to me,” she said again, eyes threatening tears. “If you are not the one living it.”

Gideon’s face went very still then, her mouth slightly agape and her brows raised up towards the ceiling. 

“Gideon,” the woman in question flinched at the way Harrow’s voice broke around her name.

“I’m sorry,” she continued. “I’m sorry for treating you so poorly that you would think my actions those of rejection, that I was too proud to accept your gift.”

Harrow sank to her knees gracelessly, boots scraping noisily on the stone floor, robes crumpling awkwardly around her, all the while feeling Gideon’s eyes boring into her. She stared down at her hands as they gripped her knees to avoid those golden pools, and the way they searched her, stripping away layers of cloth and flesh and bone to stare her in her core as she struggled to find the right words to explain how far Gideon was from the truth. 

“I - When you - when you died.” Harrow tried, hating the way her larynx choked on the word died. “I could not—would not—accept it. Enough people have died for me already, one more is too many, but you—”

Harrow forced herself to look Gideon in the eye again. 

“Yours is a soul I couldn’t allow to join the charnel house that I am. I had taken so much from you already, what right did I have to take your soul as well?”

Gideon’s masseter muscles flexed in the half light of the chapel as she clenched her jaw. She turned away from Harrow, glaring into some shadowed corner, the hand that held the sword’s grip clenching and loosening around the leather-wrapped handle in a creaking heartbeat. Harrow’s hands tightened around her knees, nails digging into skin. 

“Weren’t you listening?” Gideon said at last. “You didn’t take shit. I gave you my life, willingly, because I chose to. Because I wanted to.”

She looked back at Harrow, eyes burning with an alchemy of emotion that she couldn’t quite parse. There was frustration and anger, those were easy to tell, with a faint undercurrent of sadness, but beneath all of it was something else that Harrow couldn’t quite divine. 

“Because, you miserable witch,” Gideon went on. “I wanted you to live.”

“And I wanted you to live!” The words forced themselves out much louder than Harrow had intended, flooding out like the sudden wetness running down her cheeks. “You deserve life so much more than I! How could I accept the life you had given me when it cost your own! I carved out my brain not as some insult or refutation of you, but to preserve as much of you as I could. The Emperor told me you could not be resurrected, but I refused to accept that. I had thought, perhaps in vain, that I could find some other way, carved through cartilage and fluid, that I could prove even God himself wrong—that I, a bone adept from the Ninth, could return you to life when he could not!”

Harrow grew breathless, but pushed ahead, the damn broken and the words swarming out of her mouth from her place on her knees. 

“I performed brain surgery on myself, I let a third House flesh adept near my brain —I allied with Ianthe, by the Tomb. Ianthe —I lobotomised myself, condemning myself to a miserable half-life, all because I had hoped, selfishly, that if I could hold off consuming you in your entirety, that you could re—”

Her throat clamped shut. A wet, ragged breath wheezed its way out of her mouth. She screwed stinging eyes closed, cheeks wet and burning. Her own voice echoed in her ears, and a distant part of herself told her that she should be ashamed for such a wanton display of desperate emotion, but, she reasoned, Gideon deserved honesty, no matter how messy and unbecoming. 

“That I could what?” Gideon pressed when Harrow took too long to reply. 

She swallowed wetly and briefly considered pleading ignorance; that she didn’t know what she was going to say, that it was nothing. She then wondered, briefly, why saying so would have felt like lying. She dug her nails in harder. She could lie to herself all she wanted, but she had lied to Gideon enough for several lifetimes over.

“That you could return to me.” Harrow admitted at last, sotto voce. 

She had expected some degree of mortification to fill her at the admission, but instead, she felt as though a small weight had been lifted from her shoulders. The quiet of the chapel grew into a yawning, terrible silence, broken only by Harrow’s sniffling breaths, the quiet crackle of burning candle wicks, the hum of fluorescent lights and the thunderous beating of her own heart, which grew louder and louder with each passing moment. Harrow dared to look up at Gideon once more, and was disquieted by the blank look on the other woman’s face, the set of her jaw the only tell that she’d heard her at all. 

“I swore you an oath, remember?” Harrow said, staring at her knees once more as she grasped for a justification when Gideon’s silence grew long enough to make her sweat. Her pulse pounded in her ears loud enough to deafen.

“One Flesh,” she said, feeling the weight of it in her larynx and the marrow of her bones. 

“One End, ” Gideon finished, her voice suddenly close enough to make her jump. Her neck clicked with the speed she looked up at Gideon, finding the cavalier crouched a handful of breaths in front of her, an unreadable expression on her face, her molten gold eyes smouldering with something unknown to her. 

“Exactly,” Harrow croaked, throat bone dry in the sudden close proximity.. “One end meaning that we go together. Not ‘One Flesh, one of us dying when convenient to the other.’ ” 

Gideon’s face remained blank. 

“At least,” she said, cheeks burning. “That’s how I understood it.”

Something happened then. Something as beautiful and terrible as the dawn: Gideon’s face cracked, achingly slowly, as a sly, shit eating grin wormed its way onto her face. 

“Why, Harrow,” Gideon said, voice sparkling. “I do believe you just admitted you actually like me.”

Harrow felt her brow drop in confusion, recalling the confessions she’d made in the pool in Canaan House. Was that in any way unclear?

“I—” she started. “Yes? I thought we’d had this—”

“And!” Gideon pushed ahead. “I’m pretty sure you just tried to tell a joke!”

Harrow scowled. 

“Be serious, Griddle. I’m trying—”

Gideon threw her head back and laughed—a beautiful, warm, full-bodied thing that glittered the colour of the richest sunrise and made Harrow’s heart clench in an awful way. 

“I’m trying,” Harrow tried again, cheeks blazing in mortification. “To let you know just how much you mean to me.”

“Oh, I know,” Gideon interrupted, giving Harrow a salacious wink. “Trust me, sweetheart, you’re doing great.”  

Harrow grit her teeth in embarrassment as Gideon straightened up, leaning slightly on the sword still grasped in her left hand, before extending the right to her. 

“C’mon, get off the floor. That can’t be comfortable with your bony knees.”

Heart in her throat, Harrow took Gideon’s calloused hand and let herself be pulled to her feet. She hadn’t the heart to say no, not in this moment. What respite she’d felt that approached joy waned as her meagre fingers closed around Gideon’s own, larger hand, the mortuary coldness of the limb snaking its way up her arm and into her heart. The matter of Gideon’s corpse still needed to be attended to, but part of her still wasn’t ready to relinquish this moment, desperately clutching it to her chest. She should broach the topic, offer to repair the damage, and yet…

Her eyes locked onto the blade, its handle still held loosely in Gideon’s sure, practised grip. 

“You got a new sword,” she said instead, unwilling to let go of the moment.

Gideon’s jaw dropped, mouth opening and closing in shock. 

“I—yes,” she said, confusion and disbelief painted clearly in each vowel. “You can tell?”

Harrow allowed herself a moment of smugness.

“The end part is different,” she said, gesturing, before correcting herself.  “The pommel.” 

Gideon’s face broke into something that looked dreadfully close to naked adoration.

“Say that again.” She murmured huskily, eyes twinkling.

Harrow rolled her eyes, doing her best to purse her lips disapprovingly, but found the corners lifting of their own wretched volition. She turned away to hide the evidence.

“Absolutely not.” 

She could feel Gideon’s giddy smile burning the back of her head. 

“What about ‘crossguard’?” she pressed. “Or ‘fuller’?”

Harrow briefly considered using necromancy to paralyse her own facial muscles to avoid mirroring Gideon’s infectious smirk. Instead, she turned back to her and looked at the ragged mess of Gideon’s chest. Her stomach roiled.

“Maybe after we do something about that, ” she said, gesturing at what Gideon had insanely dubbed her ‘speed hole’. Gideon took a sharp breath in, seeming to Harrow to suck all the air from the chapel. The shimmering joy that had painted itself across Gideon’s face was gone in an instant, and part of Harrow desperately wanted to claw the words back in the hope that their moment could return.

“Do what about what?” Gideon said at last, quiet and pensive, releasing Harrow’s hand.

“You know what I mean,” Harrow said, surprising herself with the softness of her voice and with the raw animal part of her that mourned the loss of Gideon’s hand and how it fit around her own.

“I do, but as father dearest said,” Gideon muttered bitterly. “Nothing to do about it.”

Harrow’s mood soured further. 

“Forgive me if I don’t take John Gaius’ word on it.”

Gideon arched a golden brow at her. 

“Why, Reverend Daughter,” she said dryly. “Unless my ears deceive me, you just called capital-G God a liar.”

Harrow’s mouth twisted in harmony with her stomach. She didn’t particularly want to get into the matter of the Emperor, not now, in the moment that ought to be about Gideon. 

“We can litigate my crisis of faith another time,” she said, looking into Gideon’s golden eyes. “ After you can actually live in your own body, rather than be merely tied to it.”

A distant cloud passed over Gideon’s sunrise eyes, a faraway look misting over her face, making Harrow’s heart twist painfully. Pursing her lips in determination, Harrow retook Gideon’s hand firmly and pulled gently, drawing the despondent cavalier’s attention back onto her. 

“Come”, she said, tugging on Gideon’s arm. “We have work to do.”

💀

Only the Reverend family had ever known of the sacred salt pool beneath the Ninth House chapel, and of that limited number, only Harrow remained. While she hadn’t initially planned on visiting the pool that had previously only been used for sharing their House’s most closely guarded secrets, given how many things she’d shared with Gideon already despite her best effort, she decided to err on the side of caution in case her mouth betrayed her once more.

That, and its secret nature, afforded the pair a degree of privacy for what was about to take place. 

Hot wax ran down from the candle clutched in her left hand, the palm of her right sweaty and hot where it clasped Gideon’s grave cold fingers, leading her uncharacteristically quiet cavalier down the steep, spiral staircase of steel and stone. Their steps ricocheted a staccato rhythm off the bare rock walls as they descended. Harrow ran back through the list of repairs she’d drafted; the bones she’d need to grow and reconnect, the muscles that required restitching, not to mention the heart. She had no idea how much work would be required in its reconstruction. She’d only caught a handful of glimpses of the ruptured organ, and even then, it had been shrouded in shadow. She assumed that there’d be at least a through-and-through puncture that’d need closing, the walls and atrium could use reinforcement, too, perhaps. 

Reaching the end of the stairs, Harrow pushed open the ancient door, its hinges creaking in protest, and led Gideon inside. Her cavalier squinted as she looked about herself, trying to make out the room’s layout in the dark while Harrow started moving about the room with her candle, lighting the iron and bone scones that stalked the perimeter of the chamber. As she made her rounds and the light grew, the room revealed itself from the dark. 

It wasn’t as large as the pool in Canaan house, nor did it have the same shape; where the First house was maybe fifty meters long and half as wide, with sharp right angles, the chamber they found themselves in was a cube of maybe twenty meters, the pool itself round, and big enough for a small handful of people to sit together comfortably, the stone sides gently sloping down to the bottom in a lazy arc. 

Harrow could feel Gideon’s eyes on her as she made her way to each sconce of candles with the quiet devotion of the faithful to a votive stand.

“Y’know,” Gideon said, speaking up for the first time since they left the chapel proper. “Despite you telling me that this room exists, I’m somehow still surprised that it actually does.”

Candles lit, Harrow placed the one she’d carried down with her into a sconce forged from an old tibia, before returning to stand in front of Gideon. She looked up into her cavalier’s face as the dancing candlelight played across her skin in a way that almost made her look alive, finding herself unable to look away from the shimmering pools of gold set in her eye sockets. Her hands itched with the urge to reach out and touch her, to sweep away one of those errant strands of burnished copper hair that framed her face so handsomely. 

She baulked internally at the thought. When did she start thinking that anything of Gideon was handsome? Furthermore, why did it come so naturally? She shook her head to banish the thought. She could interrogate it all later, she had work to do. 

“You look good,” Gideon said. Harrow felt her eyes widen.

“Healthy, I mean,” Gideon rushed to correct herself. 

“You sound surprised.”

“Well, yeah.” Gideon fiddled with a silver button on her bone white jacket. “Ianthe said you were wasting away on the Mithraeum, like you were decomposing with your heart still beating, so it's good to see you so, uh…”

Harrow felt a brow raise itself as Gideon spoke. 

“Gideon, what part,” Harrow said as she reached up to the fastenings on her robe, undoing them one at a time. “Of ‘I am undone without you’ did you not understand?”

Harrow’s robe whispered as it slipped from her frame and pooled at her feet, leaving her in her small clothes, and Gideon’s face slipped into a quiet ‘oh’. Harrow gestured towards the large basin of salt water with one hand. 

“Shall we begin?”

Gideon stilled for a moment, lips pursed, before nodding. 

“Yeah,” she said hoarsely. “Yeah, okay.”

Harrow stood with her hands clasped in front of herself as Gideon propped her sword against the chamber door frame and disrobed, shrugging off her white jacket and toeing off the brown leather boots, wiggling awkwardly to shake them off, before shucking off her white trousers and standing next to Harrow in plain grey briefs, hands crossed pensively in front of her. Harrow felt her cheeks heat as she realised that Gideon wasn’t wearing a bra, although the self-consciousness was short-lived when her eyes alighted on the ragged maw between Gideon’s bare breasts, its pearly teeth glimmering in the candlelight. 

“You first,” Gideon said, and Harrow fought not to roll her eyes, but followed along anyway, bare feet padding along the freezing cold floor towards the pool, surmounting the lip and then slowly lowering herself into the icy brine. 

A slow, shuddering breath gasped its way out of her lungs at the shock of the sheer frigidity of the water as it rose to her sternum. She schooled her breathing, forcing herself to take deep, measured lungfuls of air, before turning to watch Gideon approach the pool. 

“It’s really quite cold,” Harrow warned.

The cavalier climbed in with no hesitation, making her way towards Harrow, the freezing water rippling around her waist. She found her eyes drawn to the way the freezing saline beaded on the fine red hair beneath Gideon’s navel. Harrow tore her eyes away as she drew near, shame colouring her cheeks.

“It's fine,” Gideon said dismissively. “I don’t really feel anything, anyway.”

Harrow nodded, heart clenching as she stared at the ragged wound that punctured Gideon’s chest. 

“So,” Gideon prodded. “Got any new deep, dark secrets to confess, or shall I let you do your thing?”

Only one is coming to mind, I fear. 

“Turn around, please,” Harrow croaked. “I should close that first.”

“Yeah, okay.” 

The water gurgled and rippled around Gideon’s waist as she turned on the spot, baring her wide, pockmarked back to her. Her trapezius rippled distractingly as she reached out a hand to the rock lip of the pool to steady herself. 

Harrow raised her hands to the wound that gouged itself out of Gideon’s flesh, examining the way the bones of her ribs had snapped and the muscles torn. She reached out, before pausing a hair’s breadth from the surface. 

“I’ll need to touch you,” she said, sotto voce. “Is that okay?”

There was a moment of silence that seemed to last forever, the rippling of the water echoing loud in the cramped chamber, Harrow’s breaths loud in her ears. 

“Yop,” Gideon said, voice fraying strangely at the edges. “Work away.”

Harrow’s finger tips grazed the planes of Gideon’s back, lightning jumping along her arms to her brain. Gooseflesh prickled along her forearms, her nape buzzed, and the marrow of her bones came alive and singing, the thanergetic connection blooming and dancing along her spinal cord. Touching Gideon now, feeling the sheer power imbued in her, was like staring at the sun. Harrow blinked suddenly oversensitive eyes at the sheer intensity of it. She could see and feel every atom of Gideon, she could even taste her—dancing and sparkling on Harrow’s tongue in flavours so much richer than she was used to; something thickly fruity, salt musk, with a liquid bitterness that reminded her of Augustine’s coffee, and something sharp and chewy that prickled at the tip of her tongue and stuck to the lining of her cheeks. 

With her direct line to Gideon’s flesh, Harrow was able to properly inventory the work that needed to be done. There was… a lot, unsurprisingly, but she was determined to undo the damage. Gideon gasped under her hands as Harrow set to work, weaving the strands of the trapezius together, gritting her teeth against the strain being put on her still recovering body as she reconnected the severed atrophied fibres and bridged snapped ribs. Sweat beaded on her upper lip as she grew out the marrow and osseous matter of the fifth through eighth ribs, feeling her own back ache in harmony. 

“Ah”, Gideon gasped, voice tight. “That tickles.”

By the time Harrow finished two of the four ribs, a river of sweat had begun to pour down her back, washing away and mingling with the saline of the sacred pool. She stared at her work, refusing to be distracted by the way Gideon’s back flexed under her palms, or the sounds of her laboured breathing. Harrow’s own breaths started to come in pants, her body struggling under the thanergetic strain after so long without her usual practice regimen, but the sight of Gideon’s flesh knitting itself back together spurred her on. 

The seventh rib clicked back together, new bone meeting old, and Gideon let out a strange, strangled noise, and Harrow could feel sweat running down the side of her face in thick rivulets. The gash that had torn itself into Gideon’s back shrank, new skin rippling like water as it closed over the repaired ribs, kindly allowing Harrow to see her progress as she wove the back of the eighth rib back together. Not that she needed it, of course, not with the direct line she had to Gideon’s flesh, but she wouldn’t take any chances. 

As she worked, she felt her clammy fingers start to subconsciously dig themselves into Gideon’s skin, nails biting into cool muscle. She flinched a little against Gideon’s back, trying not to break the contact, determined to see her task through, even if her body’s reaction was disconcerting. She reconstructed the eighth rib, evidently the one which had borne the brunt of the impact, and thusly had to regrow at least an inch of marrow and bone. The process, which she could have done in her sleep a year ago when constructing her servitors from scratch, took significantly longer this time, and she wondered if it was down to her body’s poor energy reserves or the pressure to make sure she did it perfectly for Gideon. 

As each millimetre of new bone was grown, the muscle strands would lengthen to cover it, wiggling slightly as it sought out its other half. Harrow felt something hot and sticky run down her nose, and a headache started needling at the space behind her eyes. She watched the ends of the rib connect, melting together like two streams of liquid bone, the layers of muscle weaving together on top, and then the skin bubbling and pulsing over that.

When the last layer of skin had been regrown, Harrow let herself slump backwards, hands slipping from Gideon’s back.

Gideon cleared her throat and rolled her shoulders experimentally. 

“Y’know,” She said, a strange note colouring her voice. “I’d never noticed that there was a massive hole in my back before, but now that it's gone, I’m like, ‘Oh, shite, how did I live like that?’”

Harrow stared at the unmarred skin, watching the muscles flex and shift beneath as Gideon stretched her arms out, and fought against the rising tide of bile that threatened vomit, Gideon’s words echoing loudly in her ears. ‘How did I live like that?’ I did that, she had to live like that because I wasn’t strong enough, because —

“I can feel you spiralling into another one of your ‘I’m the worst thing that ever happened to Gideon’ pits, Harrow.”

There was a sound of sloshing water as Gideon started to turn, and Harrow quickly wiped away the blood on her upper lip with the back of a hand before meeting Gideon’s eyes with no small amount of guilt. The quiet intensity of Gideon’s gaze was nothing short of terrifying—the gold shone —luminescent and gleaming in the halflight, burning its way into Harrow, and she found herself torn between wanting to run and hide from that solar gaze and desperately wanting it to scour every inch of her, molten gold burning away the sin and regret. 

“It's true, though,” She started. “If I had’ve been—”

“Nope,” Gideon cut her off, raising a hand. “Nope, we had this conversation already. I am sorry that I put you in that position, but I made that choice all on my lonesome. I don’t blame you, so stop blaming yourself, got it?”

Under those Dominicus eyes, Harrow found herself powerless to disagree, only able to nod silently, unable to look away, unable to run. Desperately hoped that Gideon couldn’t see the way her mouth had dried out, her heart pounded traitorously or how her fingers still tingled where they’d touched her sacred flesh, itching, begging, praying to touch her once more. 

She staggered back a pace as hot shame flooded her cheeks, and she desperately wanted to turn away, but how could she? How could she ever again turn away from Gideon Nav? She, whom Harrow had refuted her Lord for, for whom she had given sacred oaths to lusty wretches in order to preserve. 

She, who looked at Harrow with eyes full of something that was awfully, dreadfully, beautifully close to tenderness. 

She, who Harrow would—

“So,” she said. “Shall we attend to my chussy, or do you need a break?” 

Harrow grit her teeth and waded towards her, trying to ignore that ridiculous word and the way she almost found it funny, instead reaching up and grasping Gideon’s broad shoulders, and pushed against her, doing her best to ignore how her bare forearms had grazed Gideon’s breasts.

“Quiet,” she muttered, ears burning at how close it sounded to a whimper. “Let me work.”

She pushed at Gideon’s shoulders, and there was a moment where the two stood still, Harrow’s arms straining slightly against Gideon’s implacable form, before she allowed Harrow to push her back against the carved side of the pool. 

Gideon, it seemed, decided to grant Harrow a small mercy, not acknowledging the way that her hands trembled on her shoulders, and letting Harrow’s gaze drop from her eyes to focus on the ragged gash torn in her chest. It was long, slightly ovoid and layered; there was the initial layer of warm, brown epidermis, and then a distinct, pinker layer of sheared muscle underneath which ringed the press of red flesh and aorta, and there was a strange bud of muscle at the top of the gaping slit which Harrow realised was the severed subclavius. 

Of their own volition, her hands drifted from the place on Gideon’s sure shoulders and down her front, her left hand resting on Gideon’s right clavicle, her right splaying itself along her left side. Gideon gasped sharply at the sensation, and Harrow’s own breaths came out shallow and quickly, her heart pounding in her throat and wrists. 

The warm, fruity musk of Gideon’s essence poured itself across Harrow’s tongue once more when her hands made contact, heady and intoxicating in an incredibly distracting way, but Harrow’s eyes were drawn to the bloodless gash in Gideon’s chest, unable to look away. It had been a long, long time since she had seen it this close, pressed against Gideon, body to body, the previous occasion being when the wound had been inflicted. It felt profoundly intimate in a way that made Harrow both extremely nervous, and unspeakably reverent. Being so close, seeing Gideon’s very core with her own bare eyes was something she felt heinously unworthy of. She had done this after all—

“Hey,” Gideon said, wrapping a hand around Harrow’s where it lay on her breast. 

“I can see you thinking,” she said, impossibly gently. “ We don’t need to do this now. It can wait, I mean, shit, Harrow—you’re shaking.”

Harrow tore her gaze away from the ragged wound to look back up at those pools of molten gold, and nearly choked at the depth of emotion. Much of it was too quiet to parse, but there was an undeniable wealth of warmth there that made her insides churn. Gideon’s hand squeezed her own, the motion reminding her that she was, in fact, still shaking. She grit her teeth. As generous as Gideon may have been to offer Harrow this out, she would not, could not, accept Gideon spending another moment so incomplete, so bare. The rose of her House deserved more. 

She surged forward, doing her best to push Gideon bodily flush against the side of the pool, drawing on strength she didn’t know she had. Gideon let out a quiet ‘oof’ that was swiftly cut off as Harrow pushed her way forward to stand between Gideon’s thighs, the fingers of her right hand ghosting along the puckered, torn skin that lined the wound. She watched Gideon’s pupils blow wide, Dominicus eyes eclipsed by a dark heat that was unfamiliar to her as Gideon registered their position.

“I’m going to start now,” Harrow said, voice thin through a dry throat. 

“Whenever you’re ready, sweetheart,” Gideon husked in a voice that was lower than Harrow was used to and buzzed in her bones. 

A shaking sigh ghosted out of Harrow’s thirsty lips, the first dribbles of thanergy flowing about her fingertips as she ghosted along the edges of the bloodless gash. Gideon’s breath hitched as deadened ends of muscles and bones were coaxed back into awareness, caressed into life by waves of necromancy.

Gideon’s head lolled back as her heart started twitching, pulsing as the thanergy flowed through veins and ventricles and valves, Harrow feeling them all through it, noting every tear and ridge and puncture, how every fold of flesh lay over itself, how it bunched and flexed with Gideon’s every breath. 

Harrow took a deep, steadying breath and reached forward, eyes on the lump of folded flesh that was Gideon’s heart and slid her fingers through lips of torn sternum, palm up, and into Gideon’s chest cavity. Gideon made a ragged, strangled sound as moist skin and muscle slipped over and around Harrow’s hand, velveteen and pulsing with thanergy as she pushed deeper, feeling curtains of flesh part around her digits. Through her thanergy connection with Gideon’s flesh, Harrow could feel herself draw close to Gideon’s core, her own chest aching and clenching in harmony. 

She grit her teeth, panting, as she started the repair in earnest, grasping the severed strands of muscle and weaving them back into shape, duplicating and reshaping marrow and bone, sculpting the ribs around where she’d slipped her hand into Gideon. She did her best to tune out the ragged, breathy sounds Gideon was making, refusing to allow herself to be distracted during such critical work, but the little gasps and sighs breaking Gideon’s lips crawled into Harrow’s ears and carved themselves into her brain and chest. She pushed her fingers deeper still, through layers of wet, pulsing flesh as she breathed new life into the atrophied muscles and arteries.

“Fuck, Harrow,” Gideon gasped as Harrow’s fingers made contact with the ragged mess of her heart, the velvet flesh twitching under her fingers. Harrow’s face was drenched in sweat, thick rivulets of moisture running down strained, feverish skin. 

Not a strong enough contact point, Harrow thought, gritting her teeth and sliding her middle and ring fingers through the puncture and into the pulmonary trunk and right atrium, respectively, feeling the whole organ twitch and then clench around her fingers as the thanergy set to work. 

If the noise Gideon had made before was distracting, the sound she made now was downright sinful; ragged, desperate and amorous, her whole body twitching, flexing toward Harrow, one hand flying forward to grab at Harrow’s upper arm as it worked inside her, clenching hard enough to bruise. A strange, wanton sound of her own pushed at the inside of her mouth that she had to clench her jaw shut fiercely to hold back, reciting prayers of the Tomb in her head to keep her focus. She set her gaze firmly on the way Gideon’s chest bubbled and rippled as it knitted itself back together, dragging all of her attention to the way the chambers of the heart flexed and clenched around her fingers, the muscle starting to pulse as she knitted the back of it back together. Wet heat bloomed around her fingers as blood began to flow in the repaired arteries, gushing around the seal of her fingers in the torn, squeezing flesh. 

A strange motion caught her attention—the bud of red flesh at the peak of the wound was throbbing as the torn subclavius tried to reattach itself to nothing. Releasing her hold on Gideon’s upper arm, Harrow brought her left hand over, bracing her fingers along the plane of Gideon’s left shoulder and brought her thumb down, pressing into the red bud and began massaging it back into place with small, circular motions. 

Gideon hissed out a long, agonised curse, her heart clenching around Harrow’s fingers hard, and the water around them seemed to tick up in temperature a couple of degrees. 

No sooner had Harrow finished repairing the back endocardium of Gideon's heart, than the organ began to move.

           - Thump. 

Thump- Thump. 

Thump- Thump. 

“Holy fuck,” Gideon moaned, dragging out the words into a wanton, desperate sound. 

Her work on the subclavius almost complete, Harrow risked a quick glance at Gideon’s face, and what she saw almost stopped her own heart. She was beautiful; sweat beaded at her brow and her pupils blown wide, and her skin was returned to its gorgeous, warm, living tone. More than that, she was flushed, her cheeks blooming in lusty pinks, her lips vivid magenta. Her jaw hung open as she panted, a bead of sweat rolling down the curve of her cheek, and something animal and wanton in Harrow wanted to lick it from her skin. 

Mortified by the unabashed hedonism of the thought, Harrow tore her eyes away from Gideon’s face, making herself focus on her work once more. The myocardium started to knit shut around her fingers, and something hot and sticky gushed around her fingers as another artery was able to carry blood once more. Blood sweat started to break out across her body, sticking her underclothes to her and turning the salt water around them pink. Harrow’s breathing had, at some point in the last few minutes, turned to desperate wheezes, and she scrambled to gather the last of her strength to close the pectoral and dermis around her wrist now that the subclavium had been reattached. 

“Shit, Harrow,” Gideon panted. “You’re bleeding. Do you need to stop?”

“Absolutely not,” Harrow ground out. “We’re not done.” 

The muscles of Gideon’s aorta pulsed and throbbed around Harrow’s fingers stronger with every beat, the pressure almost trapping her fingers as she knit the right atrium shut and tried to reposition, sliding both fingers into the aortic valve, curling them up to pour more thanergy into the lining directly. 

Gideon threw her head back, making a ragged, gasping sound as her heart pounded harder, reaching up with both hands to cling to Harrow, her hands gloriously hot as circulation returned. 

“Gahhh,” Gideon hissed through clenched teeth. “Harrow.” 

“I’m almost done,” Harrow managed between pants, her fingers working and body shaking from the strain. 

“Harrow,” Gideon gasped again. 

“Almost.”

“Harrow,” Gideon said, urgency thick and heavy in her voice, one hand swivelling to grasp the back of Harrow’s head and tilt it up. 

Harrow found herself paralysed, looking up into Gideon’s glowing, fevered gaze, burning deep into her soul, a solar storm raging, blazing in those twin Dominicus eyes eclipsed by the hot, heavy black holes of those pupils. Her mouth dried out, her hand stilled, and an eternity passed in between the beats of Gideon’s heart, pulsing around her fingers, unable to look away from her cavalier’s eyes. 

Before she was fully cognisant of what she was doing, Harrow threw herself forward and captured Gideon’s lips in her own. 

Years down the line, Harrow would still fail to find the words to describe what happened next. She had kissed and been kissed before, sometimes out of lust, sometimes necessity, but not like this. 

It was akin to that fateful day on the First, when Gideon’s soul had joined hers. It had poured itself into her flesh and out, overflowing from every capillary and the marrow of her bones until every atom of her body had sung the name Gideon, their souls entwined. 

But even that, the literal union of their spirits, was less than the shadow of the thought of the sheer bliss of how Gideon’s lips fit perfectly against her own, the heavenly chorus in the sound of Gideon moaning against her lips, the divine blessing of Gideon’s hand as it tangled in the hair at Harrow’s nape. 

Her eyes slipped shut as her mind went back to the way Alecto had pressed her lips viciously to her own. This is how meat loves meat, she’d said, and Harrow found herself wondering—

What did Alecto know of love, when she found it in Gideon Nav; in the embrace of Her arms, in the tender, divine adoration in Her kiss. In the beating of Her heart around her fingers. 

She wondered: what did John Gaius know of divinity, when Harrow knew God in the sound of Gideon Nav moaning against her lips. 

One of Gideon’s hands shifted to hold her, a warming hand flexing against her hip, sure and strong, the other tangled deeper against Harrow’s sweat-dampened hair, pulling her against her lips tight enough to bruise. Harrow’s left hand left its place on Gideon’s front, trailing up to hold Gideon’s cheek, slowly, reverently, heedless of the way their teeth clacked together. Her thumb smoothed its way across the curve of her face of its own volition, and Gideon flinched, sending Harrow’s heart somewhere into her throat. 

She pulled back, panting, and Harrow felt her fingers clench with the urge to follow her, an urge that keened somewhere in the back of her mind. She was stayed, however, by the wave of guilt and mortification that swept as the tides of the River—a thousand voices within her, screaming, baying, all condemning her for forcing herself on Gideon, for the selfishness of taking even more from her after years of torment, that she was disgusting, she—

“I’m sorry,” she heard herself speaking. “I had no right to, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have.”

“Oi.” A hand squeezed her hip.

Harrow opened her eyes, looking up into those solar eyes, glittering again in that way she couldn’t parse. 

“Stop that,” Gideon continued. “You don’t need to freak out.”

“‘Freak out’ ?”Harrow echoed, aghast. “Gideon, I—I shouldn’t have just, I forced —”

“Oh dear God,” Gideon rolled her eyes. “Harrow, I’m the nigh unkillable child of God, and you have uncooked noodles for arms. You can’t force me to do shit.”

“But—”

“No.” Gideon squeezed in time with her words. “Buts.”

Harrow dropped her gaze away from the golden embers in shame, staring instead at where Gideon’s chest closed around the thin bones of her wrist. Her cheeks burned, realised that she’d gotten distracted and stopped her work. She took a moment to work out where she’d left off, and then continued pouring thanergy into closing the last gaps in the myo- and epicardium. 

“Uh uh,” Gideon chided. “You can’t necromancy your way out of this conversation just because you don’t want to admit that you think I’m hot.”

Harrow spluttered indignantly, her flow of thanergy stuttering.

“I’m not trying to—” She glanced up at Gideon, and then swiftly looked away again when she saw the shit eating grin on her face. 

“This is important, Griddle,” She hissed. “We can talk about my shameful actions and the feelings that incited them after your heart is in one piece.”

Gideon fell silent, and Harrow finished her work on the heart itself, and allowed herself a moment to relish in the strong, steady beat under her fingertips. She closed her eyes, took slow, steadying breaths and tried to commit the beautiful, divine thump-thump thump-thump of Gideon’s heart, and the way her own beat in time to memory, desperately wishing she could carve it into every single one of her senses. She began to slowly pull her hand out through Gideon’s chest, knitting muscle and bone back together as she went.

“What are you saying?” Gideon started, bitterly. “That you’re ashamed of your feelings?”

Harrow’s neck clicked painfully from the speed she looked back into Gideon’s eyes.

“No.” Her voice came forcefully, much louder than intended, echoing off the stone walls of the pool chamber. She pulled out her hand and laid it on the swell of Gideon’s chest, weaving back together the last of the muscle and skin under her palm through feeling alone, her dark eyes never once leaving Gideon’s. 

“No,” she said again, softer. “Gideon Nav, I will never be ashamed of my feelings for you. I am ashamed of how I allowed passion and those feelings to override my actions and take over in such a delicate moment.”

The warm, amber-gold gleam of her eyes glittered down at her. 

“I am ashamed that I took from you, that I forced anything on you.”

Gideon opened her mouth to respond. 

“Because,” Harrow pushed ahead, “I have taken so much, I have forced so much on you in the past, and I refuse to do so again.”

“Harrow,” Gideon groaned, exasperated. 

“I don’t mean this,” she flexed her hand against newly smooth, unscarred skin. “I mean the preceding eighteen years of torment, the—”

Harrow was cut off by the press of Gideon’s lips against hers once more. While not as intense as their first, this kiss was filled with a soft, delicate warmth that made Harrow infinitely more nervous. The first was passion, which Harrow could understand, but this? This felt an awful lot like tenderness, or adoration, or…

“You beautiful, serious, incredible…” Gideon said, smiling against her lips. 

“...gloomy little moron.”

Nevermind.

“‘Moron’?”

Gideon pulled back, and Harrow found herself looking up at her breathless, speechless and a little indignant. 

“When will you get it through that big, gorgeous brain of yours,” she continued like Harrow hadn’t spoken, wrapping her arms tightly around her and pulling her closer, her earlier indignation forgotten as she found herself in the beautiful, gentle, warm embrace of Gideon Nav. Her eyes slid shut, unable to help the way she melted against her. 

“I forgave you for all that shit, like, ages ago, remember?” Gideon whispered against her ear.

“... yes.”

“So you’ll need to forgive yourself, too.”

“I— I don’t—” Harrow’s voice curled up and died. 

“Doesn’t need to be now, sweetness,” Gideon soothed. “But eventually, because I don’t want this to be hanging over us forever.”

Harrow's arms slipped up to circle around Gideon’s neck. Questions buzzed around the fringes of her awareness like moths to a fat candle; How was she supposed to do that? What did the future hold for them? What did Gideon mean by ‘us’? Could there be an us in the face of all that was to come? Things that she knew reasonably needed to be answered, but instead, what left her mouth was:

“I don’t want that, either,” she whispered.

She swallowed. 

“I’ll try.”

She felt Gideon press a slow, tender kiss to the top of her head, smiling into her hairline. 

“I still need to fix your throat,” Harrow said weakly. 

“It can wait.” Gideon soothed, voice thrumming against Harrow’s ear. 

At some point, Harrow knew they would need to leave this pool. They would need to re-dress, re-arm, and deal with Alecto’s return, with John Gaius, with the Revenant Beasts, with whatever scheme Ianthe had surely weaved. They’d need to leave this sacred moment behind, the memory of which Harrow would spend the rest of her life clutching to her chest, however long that might be. 

“We have time.”

So many things that needed to be done, needed to be faced. But right now, in this cold, salted water that made her underclothes stick to her in a way that made her skin crawl, pressed against the beautiful, warm, living body of Gideon Nav, none of it mattered. Harrow let all those questions and concerns and what ifs scatter to the winds, and just let herself be. 

Let herself live, in between those heartbeats, with Gideon Nav. 

Not as Reverend Daughter and bastard child, or Necromancer and Cavalier. Not as Saint and Prince, or Consumer and Consumed, or Gideon-and-Harrow, or Griddle and Bone Witch, but as Gideon and Harrow.

At last.