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Gideon has quite the shiner. She’s sitting on a cot in her and Harrow’s shared BoE quarters, the swelling around her eye just starting to recede, giving way incrementally to the purpling of burst blood vessels.
Harrow bends at the waist to inspect the damage, first aid kit spread out on the bed next to Gideon--there are two cots in the room, but one is rarely unmade, as Harrow has wordlessly crawled into Gideon’s each night since they arrived here--and prods at the edges of the shallow split that cuts across her cheek. Gideon hisses, more in anticipation, the skin so inflamed that she barely feels the featherlight touch.
“Do you even know what you’re doing with that stuff?” Gideon asks, as Harrow picks through the kit, peering at labels and, at one point, sniffing a tiny bottle of something noxious and wrinkling her nose at it. Harrow ignores the question, eventually settling on tearing open a small packet and unfolding the sharp smelling wet-wipe inside.
“This was completely unnecessary,” Harrow says, the this in question being Gideon’s fist fight with a handful of Edenite recruits overheard making unsavory remarks about Harrow in a crowded corridor. Gideon hadn’t even started the fight, technically, but when she told the offending parties to shut their mouths, it turned physical, and she wasn’t complaining about the chance to show a few assholes what happens when they take a stab--verbal or otherwise--at her necromancer.
“I can take care of myself.”
“Gotta take issue with that claim, my dreary comrade. We’re in space. Vanishingly little death juice out here, and you’re a regular old necromancer again. What’re you gonna do, throw bone dust in their ey-- ah !” Harrow presses the wipe to Gideon’s cut, dabbing at the half dried blood, and it stings enough to make her eyes water.
“I wasn’t in danger. They weren’t going to hurt me.”
“Says you! And that’s beside the point. They were talking shit.”
Harrow appears unperturbed by this, tossing the used up wet wipe to join its crumpled wrapper in the small wastebasket at their feet. She compares bandages and says, “My existence is an affront to every belief they hold dear. They can say what they like about me as long as they don’t forget we’re allies. Hold still.” She starts to line up the adhesive bandage, and Gideon pulls just out of reach.
“Yeah, fuck that,” Gideon says. “They don’t get to talk trash just because you were born to be a bone witch on the wrong shitty planet, in the wrong shitty empire. They haven't tried getting to know you. They don’t even know what a heinous bitch you are!” She smiles up at her adept, the skin around her eye still tight--maybe the swelling hasn’t gone down as much as she thought.
“Thank goodness you’re here to defend my honor against such aspersions.”
“I’m serious though. What kind of cav would I be if I let your name get dragged by some douchebags who wouldn’t even know a metacarpal from a phalange?”
Harrow’s mouth tightens into an almost-smile, unbidden--the Reverend Daughter in her is thirsty for a little bone talk--but then the crease in her forehead deepens, dark eyebrows threatening to bridge the gap over her frontal sinus. Her voice is low and grave as the dirt of Drearburh when she says, “That oath is based on a lie, Nav.”
Gideon stares at her, and Harrow uses the moment to stick the bandage in place. She lets her thumb linger after, pressing the adhesive down.
“It was true when I said it.”
Harrow’s face falls, like Gideon just said the worst possible thing, and it feels like those BoE chuckleheads gave the soft meat under her ribcage a black eye, too.
“I don’t want you to be my cavalier.”
“What, Harrow--no. I am your cav. I know I was piss poor at it at first, but--near the end there, we were good. We were so good; tell me I’m wrong.”
The stiff mattress (actually fairly plush by Drearburh cell standards, but Gideon has some basis for comparison now, and quickly learned an appreciation for softness) sinks almost imperceptibly when Harrow sits down next to Gideon.
“You’re not wrong.”
“Okay, then why do you look like you ate a whole crate of expired field rations?”
Harrow gathers herself up, back straightening like she’s overseeing morning prayers.
“I won’t have you subservient to me. The cavalier oath is based on the lie that you’re disposable.”
“Oh,” Gideon says, heart fluttering back to life. “If I’m not your cavalier...what am I to you, Bone Queen?”
Harrow shifts, and at first Gideon thinks she’s standing up, but instead she brings her legs up under her, kneeling on the bed instead of sitting. She’s got a couple centimeters on Gideon this way, holding herself upright stiffly, and she reaches out to touch the side of Gideon’s face that isn’t a bruised wreck. She squeezes her eyes shut, and then opens them, and then--
They’re kissing, or Harrow is kissing her, eyes wide, and Gideon--making a sound somewhere between a gasp and a grunt--is too stunned to close her own, so their lips are pressed against each other, unmoving, each with the other’s half-panicked gaze hovering in front of them like double vision, too close to focus, like they’re drunk, and Gideon’s never actually been drunk--not first hand--but she wonders, wildly, if this is what it’s like.
Harrow pulls away, her hand retreating to her thigh as she sits back. “I’m sorry,” she says, as if there’s something to apologize for. Her cheeks are dark, and Gideon’s feel hot, even discounting the unnatural heat of her inflamed left eye. “You don’t--”
“We should try that again,” Gideon says, because that kiss was blatantly awful (she wouldn’t trade it for anything), but she knows they can do better.
“Do you understand?” Harrow asks, and Gideon’s hand finds hers, thumb pressing into the extremely modest calluses that form a broken semicircle on her palm.
“I think I’ve got the gist,” Gideon replies, and the kiss is better this time.
Their eyes are closed, for one--at least, Gideon assumes Harrow’s eyes are closed?--and Gideon tilts her head, lips slotting with Harrow’s like tailor-made cogs, working in messy, stuttering, perfect time. When Gideon clutches Harrow’s waist, she’s met with the sensation of her necromancer leaning in, of one leg swinging over her thighs, and then--holy shit--Harrow is in her lap, and they’re still kissing, and it’s a good thing they’re already in bed, because Gideon needs a lie down.
“I don’t care what you call me,” Gideon says when she pulls back to breathe. It’s a slight exaggeration, but true enough. It’s somehow easier to say this than to start extrapolating all the things that might result from Harrowhark in her lap. “I’ll say or not say any oath you want. Just let me be right here for you, okay? Don't relegate me to the back seat again.”
Harrow is holding the sides of her face, careful not to touch Gideon's bruise. “You’re not beholden to me. You never should have been.” Harrow’s throat constricts around the words, like they’ve got barbs, like they hurt. “Tell me you know that.”
“What if staying is what I want?”
Eyes shining, Harrow presses her mouth to Gideon’s, to her cheek and her forehead and her nose and her jaw, like she wants to map the whole of her face like this, like she’s counting out a new string of prayer bones. Harrow’s slender fingers are in her hair, pulling it back so she can press a kiss to the hairline. Gideon is at a loss, her hands fidgety at Harrow’s waist.
“Harrow, baby,” she says unevenly, and immediately feels like a fraud, because usually there's a veneer that the pet names are a tease, a dig (at Harrow? Or at herself?), but it slips out now, inescapably real. “What can I--What do you want me to do?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” Harrow says.
“Okay, but--give me something. There’s a Reverend Daughter in my lap and I’m losing my mind over here.”
Harrow pulls away, her hands dropping to Gideon’s shoulders--okay--and then, like it’s still wrong, she sits back and folds her arms in front of herself, which is awful .
Gideon trusts her instincts enough to reach out, hands flat against the back of Harrow’s ribcage, fingers dipping into the little nobs of her spine. “No, please, you don’t need to stop--please don’t. I just don’t want to--mess this up.”
Watching her, Harrow’s face pulls together with focus. Her eyes clear, and she takes her bottom lip between her teeth in thought. “You won’t mess up, Griddle.” Her palms press into Gideon’s collarbone, her weight leaning forward until Gideon gets the hint and lets herself fall, slow and controlled and disbelieving as her back hits the mattress. “Let me?”
Gideon lets her. The very last thing in the world Gideon wants to think about is Harrow’s corpsicle (ex?)girlfriend, but she cannot help but remember the stumbling, desperate, half-real advances on the Mithraeum, the rejection, and the helpless torment of watching Harrow discover a fresh reason to hate herself, to witness a new shame blooming in her, taking root in the tangled mass of her psyche.
She isn’t riddled with shame now. Her eyes are wide, like she’s afraid, but there’s a shade of anticipation to it, like she’s testing a new necromantic theorem that might prove her prowess or flay her alive. Her body is hot on Gideon’s, warmth radiating through their clothes as the artificial gravity presses them together. There's nothing Gideon wants to do more than make this--whatever it is, whatever it might be--good for her.
"Harrow," she says, threading fingers through hair that's grown too long, "please."
Harrow nods, something manic in her eye, and her hands are slipping under Gideon's shirt, seeking out more skin. Gideon's own fingers have retreated to the thighs still straddling her hips, trying to stay out of the way but still itching to touch.
Harrow shuffles downward, and Gideon is almost relieved when she only (only!) pushes her shirt up and starts using her mouth to map Gideon's abdomen. Gideon reaches out to brush Harrow's hair to one side, so she can see her face, the eyes closed with concentration. Harrow's hands clear the path for her lips and the occasional scrape of teeth, until she reaches the bottom edge of Gideon's bandeau.
As soon as Harrow’s eyes meet hers, Gideon is nodding. She takes in a lung full of air when Harrow pushes the bandeau up to her armpits, because her tits are in Harrow's face--fuck--shit, and she's leaning down, paying them, just, no attention, instead closing her eyes again and pressing her mouth reverently to the light, discolored patch of skin, cut jagged and ugly (and kind of badass) over her heart. Oh, hell.
Gideon never did scar especially easily, which was something she didn’t give much thought until the truth about her parentage came to light. Now it's something she tries not to think about, and anyway, it shouldn't be surprising that this scar sure stuck around--dying will do that, Gideon supposes. Harrow breathes against Gideon's skin, unmoving, kneeling over her like a prayer, mouth pressed to the evidence of her death and rebirth like devotion. Like an oath.
"Hey," Gideon says, cutting through the reverent silence. "Be honest, do you find me more attractive now that I'm technically undead?"
Gideon feels Harrow's sneer more than she sees it, and the effect is dulled somewhat by the fact that she's still nestled between Gideon's breasts as she seethes.
"I've changed my mind. I still don't want you to be my cavalier, but not for any of the reasons previously stated. It's actually because you're a dreadful human being."
Gideon grins, and Harrow sits up, the air suddenly cold on Gideon's exposed skin.
"Hmm," Gideon starts, her hands growing bold, sliding up thighs to clutch Harrow's bony hips. "I seem to remember something about flowers and houses? About being the greatest cav maybe ever? Get your story straight, Nonagesimus."
“I will not be held responsible for things said under duress.”
"The old 'we were gonna die, I didn't know what I was saying' excuse? You can do better than that, my sepulchral ally."
Harrow's fingers splay over her abdomen, which tickles a little, but Gideon manages to keep it together. Harrow chews at her lip, eyes downcast as she thinks.
"I dreamt of you," she finally says, not looking up. Her voice is no longer the Reverend Daughter's. It's Harrow, buoyed in salt water; Harrow, maintaining a shelter of bone as a fallen saint rains down hell. "When I couldn't remember, and I could not make sense of your absence. I wouldn't let you go, even when I didn't know what I was clinging to."
Gideon lets that linger a minute before she asks, "What kind of dreams?"
Harrow blushes, burning crimson darkening her cheeks, and Gideon's eyebrows shoot up.
"That steamy?"
"No!" Harrow says too quickly, and then sighs. "It wasn't--you were there, but only in the periphery. I couldn't see you clearly enough to…" as her words trail off, Harrow's fingers press into Gideon’s skin.
"Okay well, we're definitely circling back to that, but for right now I'm--" Gideon grips Harrow's hips a little tighter "--very interested in what you'd like to do now that you can see me."
The creases in Harrow's forehead do acrobatic things while she considers this. "Nothing equitable. No act would earn your place at my side, and in no universe would it be enough to atone for your life--your whole wasted life, wasted at my order, to say nothing of your death."
“You can’t undo all the bad shit, Harrow.” Her necromancer’s eyes fall shut with pained resignation, and Gideon slips a hand up, thumb brushing her cheek. “You don’t have to. You’ve already atoned more than I ever asked for--more than I ever wanted you to, you brain-scrambled weirdo. I don’t want a damn thing from you if it’s penance.”
“It’s not,” Harrow says, and she leans down to kiss Gideon again, rushed, like water escaping containment. “I want you,” she murmurs, “I want you,” she breathes, “to the exclusion of aught else.”
With her arm around Harrow’s waist, with her fingers in Harrow’s hair, she says, “you’ve got me.”
Harrow’s kisses trail down again, and this time as her mouth meets Gideon’s sternum, one thin-fingered hand rises to cup one breast. Gideon flexes her pecs a little, and Harrow lets out a very small sound against her skin.
“That’s,” Gideon says, squirming under Harrow, wanting to touch her everywhere, “more like it.”
“Is it?” Harrow asks, but her uncertainty has all but sloughed off her. She ducks her head to the breast in her hand, pushing it until her lips meet pebbled flesh.
“Ah--” Gideon gasps, and it’s not even the sensation, really--nipple stuff doesn’t do much for her most of the time--but the--”you wanna talk about atonement, Nonagesimus? You wanna talk about crimes against--fuck--humanity and also me personally? Let’s talk about your god-damn mouth.”
Her eyes flicker up to meet Gideon’s, which is devastating in its own right, but then she tips her chin up and says, “you may talk if you must. I am otherwise engaged.”
She descends, the lean lines and sharp angles of her body not graceful, exactly, but resolute. Stubborn.
Gideon doesn't want to wonder if Harrow had imagined this before, one frozen object of devotion, half-woman half-apocalypse, in Gideon’s place. The thought comes anyway, and Gideon clutches at Harrow’s hand on her hip until their fingers thread together. Harrow looks up, and the expression doesn't go through her at all. Harrow's gaze burrows, it gets in under Gideon's skin, sends a rush down to her chest.
Long fingers pause at the waistband of her trousers, hovering at the fly. "May I?" Harrow asks, more polite than she's ever been in her whole life, and it's all Gideon can do to choke back whatever undistinguished noise she was about to make and nod beseechingly.
The hands are careful, precise, opening the buttons, pulling the trousers down Gideon's legs, stripping her down to her rucked up shirt and close-fitting second hand BoE issue boxers. In what feels like an instant, Harrow’s face is in the space between Gideon’s thighs, her mouth just brushing the fabric, and she inhales , which is--something--and for just a moment she looks as dazed as Gideon feels.
“Oh, fuck--Harrow,” Gideon breathes out in a rush, and tries chivalrously not to thrust her hips directly into Harrow’s nasal bones, but a fat lot of good it does, because in the next moment that same face is pressed firm against Gideon’s pubic bone, making the fabric wetter with her breath, and she’s opening her mouth, dragging her teeth bluntly over it like Gideon’s pussy might just be a piece of fruit she wants to eat without bothering to peel first, and shit, okay. Gideon’s blood pressure spikes impossibly higher but she’s not complaining, and then Harrow pulls the underwear down, just enough to dip her chin inside.
Gideon can’t spread her legs as much as she wants to, but Harrow isn’t deterred. Her tongue, a shock of pink between her kiss-darkened lips, dips into the blood-flushed seam, light and feathery over the hood of her clit.
Gideon watches it all happen, laser-focused, like the footage has been slowed down, but a shocked sound still escapes her throat at the point of contact. The noise Harrow makes in return is satisfied and more than a little hungry. She retreats, and then she’s tugging Gideon’s boxers the rest of the way down, tossing them away from the cot, and when she returns she coaxes Gideon’s thighs apart herself.
That fearless mouth descends again, the press of lips and tongue light, methodical. She's experimenting, Gideon realizes--getting a feel for the task at hand. Or mouth, as it were. Her brow furrows, and Gideon is propped up on her elbows to get a better look, muttering you’re-so-good and fuck-baby-please on a jumbled loop as Harrow’s tongue dips near her entrance, almost imperceptible but impossible to ignore, like a single lit candle in the depths of Drearburh.
Her face--the half of it Gideon can actually see, at least--is still so serious, and Gideon has to physically shake her head to clear it. “Harrow,” she says, gasping and scrambling one hand down her thigh to find where Harrow’s fingers are curled around it. “You can stop whenever, if this is too weird or something.” It about kills Gideon again to suggest it, but she knows it would be a thousand times worse if she only realized after the fact that Harrow was going through miserable motions just to get her off.
Harrow lifts her head, and her mouth and chin are shining , Gideon’s wetness glinting in the light. Even if Harrow never wants to do this again Gideon is never going to get that image out of her head.
“Why would this be weird?” Harrow asks, accusatory.
“Oh, you know. Me, you, the novel sensory experience of it all? It could be a lot.” Before Harrow can respond, Gideon tacks on an “especially when you’re experiencing all these new sights and smells and, uh, tastes with such a stunning example of divine sexiness?”
Harrow doesn’t quite smile, but the pre-emptive hurt washes out of her eyes, which is basically the same thing.
“I have pursued the careful study of anatomy nearly my entire life. There is no bodily function or fluid you could hope to surprise me with, Griddle.”
“Bones! You studied bones! Your constructs are fine--” Harrow’s eyebrow rises a millimeter “--they’re great ,” she amends, adding for good measure: “an elevation of the art beyond all who came before you--” the eyebrow descends again. Phew. “--but I would bet all my desserts for the next forever that not a one of them comes equipped with a wet-ass pussy.”
Harrow closes her eyes, a barely-there tightness in her cheeks. “A fair point,” she concedes, still parked stubbornly between Gideon’s legs. She looks up at her, steady and genuine. “But irrelevant. Do you want me to stop?”
“No!” Gideon chirps, and clears her throat. “No-no-no! I’m good if you’re good, my Osseous Lady.”
Harrow’s tongue sweeps quick and unceremonious over her shining bottom lip. "I'm good," she says, and she lowers her head.
After that, Gideon’s two remaining brain cells flee the premises. Harrow’s movements become more direct, more intentional, and when she sucks just so at Gideon’s clit, Gideon’s elbows slide out from under her so she can fall back against the bed, one hand clasped over her mouth. She feels like there’s too much blood in her face, and her bruised eye throbs, but it’s dim and distant compared to the circulation between her legs.
Gideon has, in the years since puberty, gotten pretty good with her hands. She knows what buttons to push, how to tip herself over quick or slow or anyway she needs it, but Harrow’s mouth? Harrow’s mouth is a revelation. Gideon’s half convinced she’s doing advanced sex math between her legs, and she knew those dusty old necromancer tomes Harrow always buried her nose in had to have a chapters on, like, bedchamber theorems. Either way, Harrow is focused , and the serene little bow of her lips is soft and slick and encompassing on her cunt in a way Gideon’s fingers never were. Her tongue is a storm, hidden over the horizon but in severe danger of rattling Gideon apart down to her baseboards. In lieu of craning her neck up to see--as much as she wants to--Gideon settles for resting her other hand on Harrow’s head, fingers threading into the too-long hair. Harrow’s hair, on Harrow’s head, that contains her big, mean, stupid genius brain, and it’s Harrow’s mouth on her, humming a pleased little hum, and Gideon is going to--
“Oh, God,”--poor choice of words, but no use crying over disappointing paternal figures/deities at this point-- “just like that, Harrow, baby-- please , I’m gonna--”
She does, with a breathless shout and Harrow’s tongue working her through the shuddering, ungraceful arrhythmia clenching her cunt up through her whole torso.
When coherence begins trickling back into Gideon’s brainstem, she finds Harrow where she left her, eyes downcast, hands clutching Gideon’s thighs, and her own legs are--shifting, squirming against the sheet beneath them.
“Oh, honey,” Gideon says, voice a little cracked, thumb trailing down Harrow’s hairline to brush over her cheek. “Get up here.”
Harrow’s gaze bores into her as she gets up on all fours and crawls her way back up Gideon’s belly, her chest, and stops, hovering when their faces are level. Gideon surges up, closing the final inches like she’s sixty feet underwater and Harrow is sweet, sweet oxygen. For some reason it only makes the burning in her chest hotter.
Harrow tastes like her, and Gideon groans at that inescapable fact, and she doesn’t dare break away even as she coils one arm around Harrow’s waist and pulls their bodies flush. Gideon uses her bulk against Harrow’s bird-bone frame and presses them together until she’s on her side and Harrow, nestled under her arm, is on her back.
Gideon’s free hand slides down Harrow’s stomach, hesitating. She considers slipping under her shirt, testing those waters, but Harrow’s hips keep trying to pivot in her direction as Gideon swallows tiny, needy sounds poured into her mouth by the kiss. She changes direction then, maybe a little boldly, and slips between Harrow’s thighs.
Through the canvas of the trousers, Gideon can’t tell much other than the fact that Harrow is hot, all but scalding to the touch and radiating. She drags her fingers forward and back, experimentally, and Harrow goes silent , taking a tremulous breath through her nose and curling her own hand around the back of Gideon’s neck, clutching like she can’t risk letting her go.
“That what you’re looking for?” Gideon asks against one flushed ear, and presses a fraction harder.
“Griddle,” Harrow says, weakly.
She already sounds wrecked, sounds utterly disarmed , and that sends a bolt of cocky desire through Gideon’s chest and up her throat. “What’s my name, sweetheart?”
“ Gideon ,” she whimpers, “please--”
“Please what, baby?”
Instead of a verbal response, Harrow shifts until she’s working at the fly of her trousers, pushing them down, underwear and all. Gideon gets the idea and helps, tugging them past her knees until Harrow can kick them off completely, and then she’s trailing her fingers up Harrow’s bare thigh. The thicket of dark hair disappearing between her legs is almost too enticing to bear, so Gideon watches Harrow’s face when she reaches it, one finger ghosting over, tickling. Harrow’s eyebrows come together, and Gideon can see another please forming on her tongue. She decides to be magnanimous.
Her finger slips in, easy as how-do-you-do through the folds, into that searing heat she’d only had an inkling of before, and then it’s not just hot but wet , like Gideon stumbled on a reservoir in the desert. Her finger is slicked up immediately, and she can’t help but move it around then, explore a little. Harrow sighs the sweetest little sigh, and Gideon is fascinated, drawing wide circles from Harrow’s entrance, gathering slippery wet on her finger, up to the general vicinity of her clit, and winding back down again, hypnotized. Lost in the literal and proverbial sauce.
It’s Harrow’s voice that snaps her out of her aimless meandering. “Nav,” Harrow says, and it’s breathy with an undercurrent of frustration. “Can you--flatten your--” her hips jerk a little “--more diffuse, the pads of your fingers--three of them.”
Oh, shit, hell, Gideon is fucking this up. Is it her fault her necromancer apparently has the sweetest, most distracting little pussy in all the Nine Houses? But, okay--not a problem, she can get it back together. A misstep isn’t defeat, Aiglamene had said. It’s inevitable in the long run, but it’s how you recover that counts. And Harrow, in her infinite mercy, is telling Gideon how, all she has to do is--wait.
“Shit, babe, are you telling me how--you do it?”
Harrow exhales, some of her delirium falling away in favor of impatient, imperious irritation. “I’m telling you how to get me off, assuming that’s what you’re attempting to accomplish. Please correct me if I’m wrong.”
Gideon smiles against her cheek. “No, baby, you’re not wrong but… since when do you know how to get yourself off? I spent the better part of a year in your head and, not to call you out, but you made distressingly few attempts at...self love, in that time. I’m, uh, pretty sure I would have noticed.”
Harrow clenches her jaw, sliding one hand down Gideon’s neck, over her shoulder and coming to rest at her bicep. She squeezes it lightly, perhaps reminding herself why she puts up with her. “You may recall I was not in the most stable environment or headspace at the time.” Which, okay, fair point, although Gideon is pretty sure if it had been her she would have made the time, to relieve a little stress if nothing else. Harrow looks down between them, and her eyelashes fanned out over her cheek are positively criminal. “My circumstances now, on that front at least, are much improved. And, perhaps most relevant,” she says, fingers tightening on Gideon’s arm, “is the return of your influence.”
“My… influence?”
“When I am alone, here, I think of you.”
Arousal lurches in Gideon’s gut so pointed it’s almost painful. "Oh fuck--yeah?” An image hits her, half-conceived and razor sharp, and she asks, “You do it right here? And then curl up next to me in this same bed?” Harrow reddens, a flush that disappears under the neckline of her shirt, and Gideon imagines she can feel the heat of it.
Turning her face against Gideon’s shoulder, Harrow says, “The pillow smells like you.”
Gideon groans against her skin and she presses the bed of her fingers flat against Harrow’s vulva, hips rising to meet her.
“I'd like to see that--you getting yourself off thinking about me. Sometime, I mean. Right now I just--" she slicks up the pads of her fingers once more with the wetness still pooling in Harrow's cunt, then brings them back up, drawing firm but indirect circles around her clit. "--like this?"
Harrow clutches her working arm, head falling onto Gideon's shoulder as she nods a little frantically.
Gideon is properly focused up now, and Harrow is blooming for her. Unfolding and smoothing out the tight, overworked creases holding her so rigid all the time. She’s pressing desperately wet open-mouthed kisses to Gideon’s neck and collarbone, still clung to her just above the elbow, still, still like Gideon might retreat. Might disappear on her.
“You got me, sweetheart," Gideon says, her fingers working faster with the tempo of her necromancer's breathing. "You told me once that when I was released from your service I would know about it. Tell me now. Break the bonds of my fealty with a word, Nonagesimus."
Gideon leans back enough to take in the sight, as much as it feels wrong and bad and unbearable to not have Harrow nestled so perfectly under her arm. She looks into Harrow's face, finds it contorted with pleasure and a shade of distress, but--maybe she isn't feeling so magnanimus after all--she doesn't let up, doesn't look away or still her hand.
"I am owed--" Harrow says, punctuated unevenly by gasps, "--nothing from you, Gideon-- fuck --Nav. It is a poor and pitiful justice, rendered far too late, but I release you. I release you--" Harrow's whole body is trembling, and her fingers, a counterpoint to her words, grip tighter. "I release you," she says again, a sob this time, and Gideon ducks to press them back together, her mouth against the seam of zygomatic and temporal bone.
"Always your sword, my umbral sovereign."
Which was apparently the correct response because Harrow's eyes fly open, fixed sightlessly on the low ceiling, and she says, "Oh God, Nav--fuck me--"
After maybe one whole second of frozen disbelief, Gideon lets two of her slicked up fingers find their way to Harrow's entrance--she’s so wet it’s laughably easy--and then she's plunging in. Harrow yelps, and Gideon's brain stutters over itself again trying to work out if that was a good yelp or an oh-god-she's-fucking-up-again yelp when words cut through the static.
"For the love of--don't stop. "
Gideon's heart is thumping in her chest, but she curls her fingers, working them deeper. "It's not too much?"
Apparently two fingers, past the second knuckle is the secret off-switch for Harrow’s cerebral language centers, because the sounds she makes, while encouraging, are definitely not words. Question answered, at least.
Gideon strokes her like that, slippery fluid gathering in her palm and the webbing between her fingers, in awe of the squeezing muscle and yielding flesh. Harrow is shrill and keening, and Gideon wants to hear the fucking beat drop, needs to see what’s past the crest of this hill. She pulls her fingers out almost completely before adding a third, and when she slides back in Harrow’s eyes roll back in her head for just a second.
Gideon thrusts freely now, murmuring encouragements in Harrow’s ear, because fuck , she is doing so well, taking Gideon like a champ, and it’s the hottest thing she’s ever seen until Harrow covers Gideon’s hand with her own, holding it in place and grinding down onto the heel of her palm--and that’s the hottest thing, final answer.
Harrow comes, the juddering ripples of it making every attempt to crush Gideon’s fingers. Gideon pets those staggeringly tight walls--grip strength!--and Harrow’s abdomen jerks with the pleasurable jolts of it as she pants, coming down.
Harrow finally releases her, arm falling limply back to the mattress. She looks like her bones have been replaced with the wiggly wet flour shapes the BoE people call noodles, and Gideon hides a smile against Harrow’s neck at how much the image would horrify her necromancer. She lets the smile become a kiss as her fingers slip out with a muted schlorp .
Harrow’s eyes flutter open, black pupils blown wide, making the irises look impossibly darker as she stares up at her. Gideon wants to cradle her face and pull them together, but as she starts the motion she realizes what a sticky mess she’s made of her hand, and in one horny mental blurt she diverts the gesture to stick the offending fingers in her mouth, licking them clean.
“Fucking hell, Griddle,” Harrow says, but instead of offering an explanation, Gideon simply continues with her previous plan, threading her now clean-ish fingers through the hair at the side of Harrow’s head and murmuring “Yum,” against her lips before it melts into a kiss.
They lie there a few minutes, maybe a lot of minutes, comfortably touching just because they can. Eventually Harrow curls around her, leg pinning Gideon’s thighs, an arm around her waist.
“Fuck oaths,” Gideon says. “Fuck ends. I’ve got your flesh and you’ve got mine and anyone who wants to challenge that is formally invited to come at me, bro.”
Harrow traces a meandering, shiver-inducing line up and down Gideon’s abdomen as she considers.
“It’s a deal. With one addendum.”
“What’s that, sugar?”
Harrow moves with a confident fluidity, pulling herself up over Gideon’s middle until she’s again straddling her hips. In one devil-may-care motion, she peels her shirt off over her head, revealing two achingly perfect little tits perched high on her chest, dark nipples already standing at attention. Gideon reaches out, palming one of them for a glorious collection of seconds while Harrow looks down at her, eyes beginning to narrow promisingly.
“I, personally, would prefer to come on you.”
Gideon snorts, and then coughs, choking on her own spit, and then she’s grinning so wide she can feel the cut on her cheek splitting open again.
“I think we can arrange that.”
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