Chapter Text
Afterward--long afterward--Gideon would marvel at how the whole thing had begun on the most ordinary day imaginable.
“Long day?” Camilla asked in her usual laconic manner, watching from the other side of the counter as Gideon stretched herself upward, catlike, grunting appreciatively as a few sharp pops emitted from her back.
“They’re all long days,” Gideon replied, moving on to rolling out her neck, head lolling slowly from side to side. She breathed into the sensation as the muscles reluctantly released their deathgrip on each other, then eased her head back upright. “You mind ordering something? Aiglamene’s going to get on my ass if I let you just sit there.”
Camilla raised an eyebrow. “Palamedes ordered a coffee.”
“Yeah, two hours ago.” Together, they looked at the man in question, who was hunched over a messy stack of papers in a nearby booth like a studious scarecrow. The coffee Camilla had mentioned--twelve ounce drip, black, the most perfunctory order possible--sat at his elbow, long since forgotten and cooled to room temperature. Gideon would’ve bet her favorite pair of shades that he hadn’t even drunk half of it.
“Fine,” Camilla conceded, turning back to Gideon. “You have any of that pie left?”
Gideon flashed her a grin. “Coming right up.”
There was, as it turned out, just a bit of the pie left. Magnus had been in earlier that afternoon with his two dreadful teens, and predictably the old pushover had let them tear through the bulk of it. Gideon had opined, as they were on their way out, that Abigail was going to be annoyed with him when they got upset stomachs in a couple of hours’ time, and he’d just laughed in that way of his that meant You’re probably right, and I’ve accepted it. The remaining pie was not enough for two slices, but distinctly more than one--about a slice and a half, give or take. Gideon eyed it for a moment, then unceremoniously flipped the whole thing onto a plate. Figuring out how to cut it was too much trouble this late in her shift, and besides, she liked Camilla.
Camilla raised an eyebrow again as the oversized slice of pie was set before her. “That’s a lot of pie,” she observed.
“Yup,” Gideon agreed.
“Don’t know if I can finish that.”
“So take it home with you.”
“You’re not charging me extra?”
Gideon leaned onto the counter with one hand, doing her best to assemble her face into an expression that said, I am doing this because you are my best friend, and also I am an awesome sexy person who would never gouge anybody, which was maybe a bit much to be asking of an expression, but apparently she’d done well enough because Camilla held her gaze only a moment longer before picking up a fork and neatly sectioning off the tip of the slice with it.
“What’s Sex Pal working on that’s got him so wrapped up, anyway?” Gideon asked.
Camilla didn’t bat an eyelid at Gideon’s usual nickname for Palamedes, unhurriedly chewing and swallowing a bite of pie before answering. “Dunno,” she said. “One of his projects. He’s got something like six of them going at the moment.”
“But what kind of projects?”
“Whatever catches his interest.” Camilla shrugged. “You know him. Occult stuff. Biology stuff. Occult biology stuff.”
“Huh,” said Gideon, who had to admit that did sound exactly like him.
“He says there’s actually some labs in the area doing related research,” Camilla added.
She was distractedly shuffling the substantial remainder of her pie around on the plate with her fork; Gideon preemptively ducked behind the counter to grab a to-go box. “I hadn’t heard anything about that,” she said as she reemerged, handing the box off.
“Well, it’s not the sort of thing you tend to advertise,” Camilla said. “Apparently they’re pretty buttoned up about it. He reached out to them a while back and got completely stonewalled. He wasn’t even trying to pry, just wanted to compare notes.”
“Ah, creepy spook bullshit. Classic.”
“Gideon.” Gideon turned at the sound of her name; Aiglamene was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. “Closing time. Quit jawing, clear them out, and clean up.”
“Well, you heard the lady,” Gideon said as Aiglamene hobbled her way back into the kitchen. Camilla had already withdrawn a crisp, neatly folded bill to hand to her. Gideon accepted it, tucking it into her apron pocket, then with a practiced flick of her wrist sent her cleaning rag flying across the room; it caught Palamedes full in the side of the head with a soft thwap. “Hey, Sex Pal! Closing time.”
“Huh? Oh, right. Thanks, Gideon.” Having thus thanked her for the rag in the face, he suddenly recalled the existence of the coffee at his elbow, raised it to his lips, and upended it, chugging the lukewarm remains down in a single smooth motion. Watching him, Gideon stuck out her tongue and made a soft gagging noise.
“Goodnight, Gideon.” Camilla was wished goodnight in turn and waited for a moment with the appearance of perfect patience for Palamedes to collect his papers into an unwieldy pile, and then the pair of them were out the door, leaving Gideon alone in the diner’s empty front. Everything after that was straightforward--the kitchen was Aiglamene’s domain, so all there was left for Gideon to do was wipe down, sweep up, and sort out the cash register, and soon enough she was headed for the door herself.
“Night, Aiglamene!” she called over her shoulder. There was a vague noise from the kitchen that might have been a reply, or merely a grunt. Undeterred, Gideon shouldered open the door and emerged into the crisp evening air. The sun had sunk out of sight, leaving only a ring of feeble light ringing the horizon, silhouetting the endless sea of trees that extended in every direction, interrupted only by those small patches that had been cleared for human habitation. There was barely enough light to see by, aided intermittently by sputtering streetlights.
A shape by the footpath stirred as Gideon tromped towards where her bike was parked. One could just make out the shape of what had to be technically called a dog, albeit one that had been put together by an exceptionally unskilled taxidermist and then left to moulder in an attic for a few decades. “If you could contrive to drop dead before I get in tomorrow morning,” Gideon said as she passed it by, “I’d consider it a personal favor.”
Aiglamene’s dog Crux lifted his head just enough to fix her with his beady eyes and let out a low, throaty growl. Gideon offhandedly flipped him the bird in response. He’d been a crotchety asshole of a hound for as long as she’d known him--which was an increasingly improbable amount of time, now--and yet he stubbornly continued to cling to life, apparently just to spite her.
Undaunted, Gideon continued on her way until she reached her bike, mounted it, took a moment to retrieve her shades from her jacket pocket and pop them onto her face, and then kicked the bike into gear and pulled out of the parking lot onto the familiar road home.
- - -
Doublesummit was the kind of place that came immediately to mind when you heard the words ‘sleepy little town’. It was just close enough to the highway not to roll over and die completely, but far enough that nobody paid it much mind. It was the kind of town where all the residents knew each other by sight at minimum. Nestled in the nooks and channels that had been carved through the teeming growth of the forests that covered the area, it had been Gideon Nav’s home for as long as she could remember.
Her bike’s engine purred as it carried her the last few yards up to her house. It was a modest one-story affair, not much to look at, but by the time Gideon had come of age she and Aiglamene had been in total (and somewhat desperate) agreement that she needed a place of her own, so… it was hers. It wasn’t too far off the beaten path, but that was by Doublesummit standards, so it wasn’t as if there was anybody in shouting distance, either. That suited Gideon fine; she could crank her stereo as loud as she wanted whenever she wanted and not have to deal with anybody complaining about it. It was the definition of a perfect arrangement, in her book.
Parking her bike, Gideon tromped across the untamed yard and up the wooden steps to her front door, shucking her jacket and boots with practiced ease once she had stepped inside. For a moment she stood, listening to her body complain of its weariness from the day, and then she pushed herself back into motion. A large section of the front room’s bare wooden floor had been left clear, marked only by the presence of a few untidily stacked weights along the walls. Gideon went to work in the middle of her makeshift exercise floor, first going through a series of stretches to work out the kinks and aches of the day, then into a basic routine--crunches, press-ups, and simple cardio. Working out regularly, morning and evening, had been her routine for years, going back as far as when she’d been living with Aiglamene. Moderate weariness had never been an excuse to break that before, and it wasn’t going to be tonight.
Finished, she padded over to the kitchen--which was honestly the same room as the front room and dining room, with a line of cabinets making a halfhearted attempt at separating it off--and yanked open the door to the fridge, retrieving a tupperware container which held the last remnants of something she’d thrown in a pot and boiled a few days ago. With that in one hand, and a fork from what passed for her utensil drawer in the other, she returned to the front room, settling into a sprawl on a modest couch in front of a modest television set, both of which had been tucked away into the corner not set aside as exercise space. Picking up the remote from where it was laying on the floor next to the couch, she flipped the TV on as she scooped a bite of cold food into her mouth with her other hand.
This was an ordinary evening for Gideon--coming home from work, scraping together the lowest-effort dinner she could get away with, and idly flipping channels on the TV. As usual, there was not much on offer (she only had the most basic of basic cable packages), but through years of practice she had perfected the art of surfing until some mildly interesting nature documentary or reasonably mediocre action movie presented itself.
It was at this point that the evening took a sharp swerve off the road of ‘ordinary’ to go careening over the sheer cliffs of ‘what the actual fuck’.
It began almost imperceptibly, a noise that was lost in the other ambient noises that were drifting in from the night outside. It wasn’t until the soft rattling became an outright clatter that Gideon’s attention was pulled away from the hunt for mindless entertainment. She muted the TV and tilted her head, listening; the clatter came again, from a direction that was unmistakably the side of the house where she kept the garbage cans. “Ah, shit,” she muttered, rising reluctantly from the couch. Likely just a raccoon foraging for dinner, but it was best they didn’t learn that they could get it here.
Jacket and boots redonned, flashlight in her hand, Gideon set out around the house to confront the tiny bandit. “All right, little guy,” she said, flicking the flashlight on. “I--” She stopped short as the beam fell over the garbage cans. The bandit she was confronting wasn’t nearly as tiny as she’d expected. There, bent over one of the cans, one hand still inside, was a girl-- a young woman, petite, with a sharp face framed by a shock of pitch-black hair, dressed in all black with a simple long-sleeved shirt and pants.
They stared at each other, frozen, for a long moment.
“Uh, hi,” Gideon said, mostly because her mouth was on autopilot in the absence of her brain. She took a step forward, and the mystery woman stiffened, hackles raising. “Whoa,” Gideon said, softly retracting the step. “It’s okay, I’m not--”
She was interrupted by a soft scrabbling sound. Frowning, she followed it down to the ground. There, drifting between the stalks of grass, was some sort of fine powder--Gideon first assumed it was dust, but it quickly coalesced into bone, sprouting outward at an astonishing speed into full skeletons of various animals, raccoons and squirrels and one that must’ve been a fox. Gaping, Gideon returned her gaze to the young woman, who still had a ferocious glare trained on her.
“What the fu--?!”
One of the skeletons lunged, taking a flying leap at Gideon’s face that was frankly incredible given its utter lack of musculature, and Gideon batted at it on sheer panicked instinct, managing to swat it out of the air before it could give her an unpleasant clawing. The rest of the skeletons were moving as well, a rushing, clattering swarm that came at her in a stream of osseous matter. Gideon kicked at them; light and fragile, they went flying with a sharp crack, but for every one she got rid of, there were three more nipping at her ankles and trying to claw their way up her legs.
“Easy!” she found herself yelling. “Easy, easy, easy! Just chill!”
The mystery woman did not look like she intended to chill; she was still glaring at Gideon, clutching the side of the trash can so hard that it was starting to bend underneath her fingers. Gideon took a lurching step towards her, which was a mistake, because the skeletal creatures went into an even more aggressive frenzy in response, swarming up her legs until there were so many of them latched onto her that she couldn’t walk properly. She pitched forward, hitting the ground with an impact that made her teeth click. The skeleton party came up and over her, and she felt their bones around her legs and arms, not just gripping but shifting, deforming until she was locked in place under a frame like an unyielding net.
The woman kept her hard gaze on Gideon for a few more moments and then, apparently satisfied that she was thoroughly incapacitated, turned to stalk away into the darkness.
“Wait!” Gideon called.
The woman froze, possibly due to the sheer improbability of the request. Gideon couldn’t say herself why she’d called out. Maybe it was because nobody went rooting through a garbage can in the middle of nowhere unless they were short on other options. Maybe it was that she’d recognized the cold light in the young woman’s eyes as neither anger, nor violence, but fear.
Making her voice as calm and reasonable as possible, Gideon continued, “Are you… are you hungry? I’ve got food inside, if you want to eat something that’s not half-rotten…”
The young woman stayed fixed in place, contemplating the offer silently. Then she whirled around, marching back over to Gideon, stopping and dropping into a squat in front of her as she scanned her face critically.
Gideon tried to muster her best winning smile despite the circumstances. “Why don’t you come in…? I can feed you, and then if you’re in some kind of trouble, I can see what else I can do to help…”
The young woman stared at her a moment longer, then shot back up to her feet in a single, sudden movement. At the same time, Gideon felt the pressure on her limbs release as the cage of bone around her began to crumble away. “Great!” she said with an overabundance of cheer as she unsteadily made her way back up to standing. “Fantastic. Right this way, then, Miss…?” The young woman swept by her without a word, making a beeline for the front door. “...okay,” Gideon mumbled to herself, before jogging to catch up with her impromptu guest.
Food was a simple matter, as it always was in the Nav household; Gideon grabbed some tortillas and canned chicken from the pantry and a bag of shredded cheese from the fridge, and one microwaved minute later she set the results down in front of the mystery woman, who stared down at her plate as though it were the single strangest thing she could possibly conceive of. “It’s a quesadilla,” Gideon said, and when she received a blank look in reply, elaborated, “It’s good. Go on, eat up.” The young woman’s eyes narrowed slightly, and Gideon heaved a sigh. “I’m really not trying to poison you here… look.” She reached forward--the young woman flinched back slightly--and tore off a chunk of the quesadilla between her thumb and forefinger. “Mmmm,” Gideon said with unnecessary theatricality, chewing it and swallowing down. “See? Good. Now you try.”
The young woman glared suspiciously down at the quesadilla. Gingerly, she picked it up with one hand and took a tentative nibble off the edge. She chewed it contemplatively for a long moment, and then with sudden, shocking violence, wolfed down the remainder of the quesadilla in less than ten seconds.
Gideon’s eyebrows shot up. “Well, I guess I was right about you being hungry. You have a name? Or do you not talk?”
The young woman fixed her with another one of the glares that she seemed to have in inexhaustible supply. “Harrow,” she said, apparently by way of reply to the first question.
“Oh, you do talk.” Gideon grinned. “Well, then, I guess I’ve had a Harrowing experience tonight.”
Harrow stared at her.
“Right, uh… you still hungry? You want another quesadilla?”
Harrow’s gaze dropped back down to the empty plate in front of her. “Yes.”
Gideon prepared another quesadilla and served it up. This time there was no hesitation; she barely had time to pull her hand away before Harrow set upon the quesadilla, devouring it. Gideon frowned softly as she watched. The glimmerings of intuition she’d had before were only deepening. Harrow ate like a stray cat, like someone who didn’t trust that their food wouldn’t be snatched away at a moment’s notice.
“Where are you from, Harrow?” she asked.
Harrow didn’t answer, busying herself with wiping her mouth on the back of her hand.
“You run away from home?” Gideon persisted. “Or do you not have one?”
“You can’t help me,” Harrow said flatly.
“Okay, well, maybe we can find someone in town who--”
“You can’t help me,” Harrow repeated. She rose to her feet and strode around the dining room table, bristling when she saw that Gideon wasn’t moving aside for her. “Don’t try to keep me here.”
Shit. “Look, Harrow,” Gideon said, lifting both hands in a placating gesture. “Of course I won’t keep you here if you don’t want to stay, but… where exactly do you intend to go? It’s late, nothing’s open in town, and there’s fuck-all in walking distance of here.”
“I can take care of myself.” Harrow’s eyes were locked on Gideon’s face; Gideon wasn’t sure if she was even blinking.
“Right, sure, okay, but consider…” Gideon stepped backwards into the front room, Harrow tracking her as she went. “You can go out there, sleep on a rock in the cold, maybe get rained on if the weather decides to be a bitch, or….” She patted the back of the couch with one hand. “You can sleep on this couch, which admittedly isn’t the best couch in the world, but I can guarantee that it beats a rock. Not a high bar to clear there. And as a bonus,” she gestured upward, “a roof over your head.”
Harrow kept her gaze on Gideon, worrying slightly at her lip with her teeth. “Fine,” she said at last. She crossed to the couch at a brisk pace--Gideon pulled aside as she maneuvered around her none too gently--and laid herself down on it. The couch was long enough that Gideon could put her head on one armrest and have her feet dangle off the end of the other, so it held Harrow’s diminutive frame quite comfortably.
“Cool. Great. Make yourself comfortable. My name’s Gideon, by the way.” Gideon went to the dining room and retrieved the dish Harrow had been eating off of, transferring it to the To Do stack in the kitchen sink. “Right, so one last question… how did you do the thing with the--”
There was a sharp SKRNCH sound from the living room; startled, Gideon poked her head out of the kitchen to investigate. Where Harrow had been lying on the couch moments before, now there was a dull off-white lump, like a roundish cocoon, just about the right size and shape to envelop a Harrow-sized figure curled into a fetal position. Tentatively, Gideon ran her fingers over its surface. It was hard and, well… bony.
“Huh,” Gideon said, because there really wasn’t anything else to say about it.
- - -
The bone cocoon thing was still there the next morning. Gideon considered whether she should knock to see if Harrow was interested in breakfast, but wound up deciding that she likely needed sleep every bit as badly as she needed food. Instead, she left a note wedged in between the cocoon and the couch cushion.
Need to go to work. Feel free to stay as long as you need. There’s food in the kitchen. - G
It was oddly banal, heading off to another day of work as though she hadn’t gotten buried in animated bone and taken in a half-feral stranger the night before. Gideon took the turns to get her bike to the diner automatically, letting force of habit guide her while her mind wandered to more pressing questions. She’d never seen Harrow around Doublesummit before--it was doubtful she would’ve forgotten that power glare. That said, she hadn’t been kidding when she’d told Harrow that there was fuck-all in walking distance of the town. It was, under the best of circumstances, a few hours’ hike to the closest town over, and that was another dinky, forgettable town; aside from that, the only option for any semblance of civilization was a total ghost town. How long had Harrow been living rough before raiding Gideon’s garbage?
Oh, yeah, and lest we forget--how the fuck did she do all that stuff with the bones?!
No answers had presented themselves by the time Gideon pulled up to the diner; she was so distracted on the way in that she nearly forgot to flip off Crux when he growled at her. Aiglamene greeted her but didn’t offer any comment on her distraction; Gideon wasn’t sure whether this was because she hadn’t noticed, or because she’d learned from years of experience that Gideon would talk about what was on her mind when she was ready and not a moment sooner.
In any event, Gideon was not ready right now. The over-familiar drudgery of her job duties was a relief in a way she’d never experienced before, simple questions with well-known answers to give her a break from the more complex problems swirling in her head.
The front door jingled.
“Hey there--” Gideon looked up, ready to round out the greeting with the name of one of their regulars, only for it to die on her lips as she realized that she’d never seen this person before in her life. She was lingering coyly at the door, hair light brown and curly, skin so pale it was nearly translucent--Gideon swore she could trace the path of deep blue veins through it, which was not exactly on the list of features she considered hot, but somehow it was working for her. Gideon felt her face heat up and was deeply grateful that Camilla wasn’t present to give her shit for being the easiest of easy marks.
She found her voice. “Um--what can I do for you?”
“Well, I was under the impression that you served food and coffee here.” The woman’s deep blue eyes twinkled in a way that invited Gideon to be in on the joke even if it was at her expense.
“Right--uh--” Willing herself to ignore the funny things that were happening in her stomach, Gideon set about clearing a space at the counter. “You, um, okay with a stool?”
“A counter seat sounds perfect,” the woman said, genuinely sounding like there wasn’t anything in the world she would’ve desired more. “All the better to talk to you from.”
Gideon quickly pretended to busy herself with the coffee machine in order to hide what was very visibly happening on her face. Falling back on reflexes built from years of serving customers, she said, “Can I get you some coffee to start with?”
“That sounds lovely. I’ll have… a twelve-ounce of your house coffee, please.”
“Cream and sugar?”
“Generous helpings of both.”
Gideon drew the coffee and set it down in front of the woman along with a fistful of tiny cream cups and sugar packets. The woman opened her mouth, probably to say thank you in a way that would send Gideon’s idiot brain into a tailspin again, but what actually came out was a huge, racking cough so violent that Gideon actually backed up a couple of steps from the counter on sheer startled instinct.
“Excuse me,” the woman said daintily, as though it were a normal, inopportune cough and not something that had Gideon surreptitiously checking her lap for bits of lung.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m… not well,” she admitted. “It’s nothing you have to worry about catching, never fear. My body’s simply not… functioning correctly. That’s why I’m here.” She smiled, wanly. “Traveling while I still can, like.”
Gideon felt the faint, dangerous glimmerings of a long and detailed fantasy in which she dropped everything, got into med school, studied her ass off, became the world’s greatest doctor, then cured whatever was ailing this woman and swept her off her--“I was going to say, I haven’t seen you around before,” she said, willing herself to focus.
“Just passing through,” the woman said, shrugging. “Though I may ‘pass through’ here as slowly as I can get away with. This little town is delightfully quaint.”
The words ‘delightfully quaint’ would’ve made Gideon’s teeth itch if literally anybody else had spoken them, but… “I’m Gideon,” she said.
The woman beamed at her. “A pleasure to meet you, Gideon,” she said. “You can call me Dulcinea.”