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gideon

[gideon]

Maeve has no idea what she's walking into.

She had offered, though, and Gideon is one of her closest friends, and so she has her bag slung over her shoulder, shoulders hunched against a bit of rain that pricks at her face as she walks toward Gideon's building. She'd thought her own arrival was bad, but the idea that Gideon is dead keeps rolling over in her mind and she doesn't know what to make of it, doesn't even know what to think.

But Maeve, for all her attempts to keep to herself and for every irritated word she spits out against people as a whole, she's also unwaveringly loyal to the people who earn it, to those who deserve it. And Gideon does.

So freaked out or not, she's headed there now, texting Steve to let him know she'll be out for the evening, she'll talk to him when she gets home again. She keeps up texting with him for awhile, passing the walk, letting him ease her anxiety a bit when he sends her a picture of a cute dog he'd seen at work.

She's pretty lucky with Steve and by the time she reaches Gideon's building, she's a little more relaxed. She doesn't know how long it'll last, though, and as she buzzes Gideon's flat, she brings her hand to her mouth, chewing on her ragged thumbnail.

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Gideon doesn't remember the last time she was this tired; probably back at Canaan House. Harrow is alseep in her bed, nested in blankets. Gideon sits staring at the shaved side of her head for a long time and, when she needs the door, she gets up and pads out of the room, closing the door behind her.

When she opens the door, she gives Maeve her best lopsided smile.

"I'm sorry," she says, by way of hello. "I totally blanked on the fact that you didn't meet me the day I got here."

She steps out of the way so that Maeve can come in.

"Yeah, that's not the sort of thing most people drop into casual conversation," Maeve says as she comes inside, but her voice isn't angry and she keeps it low, not knowing whether Harrow is asleep or awake or if she's going to come screaming into the room.

Maeve doesn't know a lot about her either way.

She closes the door behind her, then kicks off her boots so she can leave them by the door. With a look at Gideon, she raises an eyebrow, waiting to be told where to go so she can properly be told what's happening.

"Come on," says Gideon, turning away and padding down the hallway in her bare feet. The kitchen no longer looks like a place where brain surgery happened; Gideon has swept away all of Harrow's shorn hair and cleaned her vomit from the sink. She's not long made a pot of tea and she grabs another mug for Maeve. "It's all so fucked up," she says.

"Yeah," she agrees, because Gideon has just told her via text that she's dead and it's information that sits uncomfortable and heavy in the pit of her stomach. This isn't about her, none of it is, she's here for Gideon as she tries to deal with this new arrival, but it's still a lot to take in.

Her friend is dead. Not here, of course, she's here and she's alive and Maeve just doesn't want to think about her in any other way.

"So... where do you want to start?" she asks.

She pours them both tea and nudges one of the cups across the table to Maeve. "I...can't remember how much I've told you about what was going on back home before I got here. What I've told you about Harrow and me..."

"Not a lot," Maeve says as she sits and takes the offered mug with a small smile of thanks. Not that you're dead, she thinks, but doesn't say. This isn't about her, no matter how thrown off she feels by that information.

"Maybe start at the beginning," she says with another small smile. "And I'll let you know if there's anything I've heard before."

Gideon goes quiet for a moment, her fingers curled around her mug.

"I grew up in a shit hole," she says. "Nav is a Niner name, but I don't know where I was born. My mom fell down a mineshaft dead, with me in a bio-pod. Gideon was the only thing they could get her to say when they called her back so," she shrugs. "Here I am. They didn't adopt me. They put up with me. I was basically a thing. By the time I was six, they knew I wasn't going to be a necro. By eight, it became really clear that I was going to be a really shitty nun. So Aiglemene - she was my captain - put an infantry sword in my hands."

There's still a lot in that explanation Maeve doesn't understand, words like Niner and bio-pod, but she figures they're not terribly important, not in terms of the whole story.

"I can't imagine you ever being a nun," Maeve agrees with a small smile, one she doesn't really feel. Somehow she thinks it's necessary anyway, to at least show Gideon she's here for her.

"So you were eight and they gave you a sword," she says. "Seems kind of dangerous."

"Might have been if I wasn't so fucking good at it," she says, her smile listed lopsided. "I wanted to join the cohort, be a soldier. A hero." She shrugs. "I ran away to join up like... Eighty times by the time I turned eighteen. Tried to, anyway."

"And why couldn't you just do that?" she asks. "Why'd you have to run away?"

If she was so good at it, Maeve figures they would have wanted her. And she's not sure what this has to do with Harrow, although she can see how it might connect to dying. Her stomach turns a little and she takes a sip of tea to cover it, exhaling a little into her mug.

"Because...I knew something. That Harrow couldn't afford to get out into the air. So she was never, ever going to let me go." She sighs and lifts her mug, taking a sip of her tea. "So Harrow's parents were in charge. Reverend Farther. Reverend Mother. Which would have been fine, only, they'd been dead since I was eleven and Harrow was ten. She figured out how to...puppet then." She sets down her mug again. "Basically a huge bag of ass and Harrow couldn't afford me opening my mouth and giving the game away."

She shrugs.

"So I kept trying to run away."

"What?" Maeve asks, blinking. "She faked her parents being alive? For that long? How?"

That isn't even beginning to touch on how unfair it is to expect someone to stay just to keep a secret. Gideon should have been able to do whatever she needed, whatever she wanted, and while Maeve has promised herself she'll try to go into this all without judgment, it makes her a little angry on Gideon's behalf.

"I was eleven and she was ten," says Gideon, turning her mug against the table. "And we were seventeen and eighteen when we left for Cannan House." She shrugs. "She's the best necromancer of her generation. Of any generation, probably. She's..." Something in her face softens. "She's astounding."

"Wait, so when you say puppet, you mean..." Maeve pauses, takes a breath. "Like, literal puppets."

Because that's what a necromancer is. Maeve has read enough speculative fiction to understand that much and she has no idea what to think of that. What to say.

Instead she says, "What's Cannan House?"

"Yop. She did a good job on the faces but she kind of... botched it from the shoulders down." She makes a face. "Not good." She'd expected to feel more guilty telling Maeve this but maybe she'd broken the seal when she'd told the Warden.

"We were the Ninth House; Canaan House is on the First," she says. "It's where the Resurrection began." She picks up her mug and takes a sip of her tea. "Harrow was summoned. As the heir of her house. Her and her Cavalier were supposed to go and compete for Lyctorhood - undying saints who serve the King Undying."

"I... have no idea what any of this means," Maeve admits with a soft breath that might be laughter and might be something else. She's trying to follow what Gideon is telling her, but so far all she's got is that Harrow made literal puppets of her parents and then she and Gideon had to go somewhere to compete for something.

To serve some king. It all sounds like more pressure than anyone deserves to live with.

"That's because it's completely fucking absurd," says Gideon, huffing out a breath and taking a sip of her tea. "The Emperor became God. God became the Emperor. The most necromanciest necromancer of them all. We went to Canaan House because Harrow wanted to serve him. She went as an adept, and I went as her Cavalier." She tries to think of a simpler way to put it to Maeve. "Her sworn sword. Her bodyguard."

"What does that mean? For... for both of you? Serving someone like that?"

Maeve has no idea what this person -- Emperor, God, whatever -- was like. Maybe he was kind or maybe he was a shit, but either way, serving someone doesn't exactly sound like it's a good time. She can't understand wanting that, but she's trying to be openminded and remind herself that her life and Gideon's life have been very, very different.

"It's... complicated," says Gideon. She's telling Maeve a story in a vaguely linear fashion and she doesn't know if she's ready to spill what she'd finally figured out about the Lyctoral process. "For Harrow, it meant a chance to renew the Ninth to former glories. There's...not a lot that she cares about more than that." She rubs the end of her nose. "Do you want to skip to the end or do you want to hear what happened next? I was, you know...in it, so it's difficult for me to have perspective here."

"I want you to tell me whatever is important to be told," Maeve says honestly. It might be a lot of information, much of which she doesn't fully understand, but she's here for Gideon.

When it comes to her friends, there's not a lot Maeve won't do. Even if the information is hard to process, she's here to listen, she's here to be a support.

"I honestly don't know what's important anymore," says Gideon, a wave of tiredness spilling over her. She curls her hands around her mug and glances at her bedroom door. "Is it weird that I kind of want to tell you the whole stupid, awful thing, just so someone who wasn't there for it knows?"

"So tell me," Maeve answers. She might not understand all the nuances and all the details, but she's here to listen. "Sometimes you need to, you know? Just... get it all out there with someone who cares."

That's pretty rich coming from her, considering she likes to keep everything to herself and doesn't like the idea of burdening her friends with her bullshit. But on the flip side, if someone she loves wants to talk, she doesn't consider it a burden or bullshit.

Gideon smiles, faintly, shifting her leg under the table so that she can nudge Maeve's knee with hers.

"It's a really shitty, ridiculous story," she says. "So, the necromancers were all...in competition, I guess? And Harrow promptly fucked off and left me to my own devices, but only after she'd told me that I couldn't talk to anyone, so there I was - robes, skull paint, the whole nine years. Looking like a complete Bone nun douchebag. And, remember, I'm not a proper fucking cavalier, so I was just...faking it for all I was worth."

"Why couldn't you talk to anyone?" Maeve asks. "It's kind of fucked to tell you that."

Especially if Gideon was all alone. Alone and trying to fake something and unable to talk to anyone at all. That sounds painfully lonely and while Maeve is used to loneliness, she still thinks it sounds awful.

"She didn't trust me not to put my foot in it, I guess. Plus she's got a tendency towards being a massive fucking control freak." The twitch of the corner of her mouth is almost fond, even if she is still angry. "Anyway, eventually, we worked out that we had to...complete trials so that we could earn keys? The first one was fighting this big bone construct, a really ugly fucker. And Harrow has to be..in my head for it. Use my eyes. It felt fucking weird."

And, as it turned out, had been a huge fucking spoiler for what was eventually going to happen.

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