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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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"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.

Honestly, that doesn't sound like a proper friend, someone who doesn't even trust Gideon to speak, and Maeve's mouth tightens a little, but she tries to cover it with a sip of her tea.

"That sounds bloody awful," she says honestly. "Having someone else inside you like that. You had to fight with her inside your head like that? Why?"

Maeve doesn't do a great job of hiding the look on her face and Gideon smirks, picking up her own mug.

"I needed to know where to hit it to beat it," she says. "And I can't normally see thanergetic signatures because, you know. Not a necromancer." She sips her tea. "But I could see them with her in my head."

"Maybe this is a stupid question, but why didn't she do the fighting herself?" Maeve asks. "Why is it necessary to get into someone else's head and have them do all the hard work?"

What if something had happened to Gideon? Something that couldn't be undone? Maeve swallows as she realizes something had happened to Gideon and maybe it was only Darrow that had been able to undo it.

"Because it needed doing with a sword," says Gideon, her smirk crooked, her hands curled around her mug. "And her arms are basically noodles."

She shrugs.

"Anyway. That was only the first test. They got worse."

"Maybe she should lift weights," Maeve replies, knowing it isn't fair, knowing she's going to have to at least fake liking Harrow at first. Nothing she's heard so far makes her seem all that special, except the fact that Gideon likes her.

But Maeve knows how easy it is to like someone just because they've always been around.

"So they got worse and you had to face them all?" she asks.

"Don't think I haven't told her that," says Gideon. She shakes her head. "We didn't do all of them. Harrow didn't see the point if someone else got there first - it there wasn't a prize at the end of it." She remembers the realisation that they could have gone through the Avulsion room and found nothing at the end. "Pal and Cam did all of them, I think. Except there was one that...Pal wouldn't do." Her eyebrows draw together at the memory. "We did that one."

These are other names Maeve knows only in passing, from Gideon having mentioned them before, and she knows at least one of them is in Darrow already. Pal, she thinks, but she also doesn't know that many people.

"Why not?" she asks. "Why wouldn't he do that one?"

And why did Gideon have to do it in instead? Is that the thing that killed her? Maeve doesn't know that she wants these answers.

"Because he figured out the cost before he did it," says Gideon. "It basically...okay. So there was this box at the end of this...tunnel. And a field that like...stripped life away? And the only way to get from one end to the other was to draw on a source of thalergy - like...life energy - outside the force field. Pal reckoned he could do it, but it would probably have ended up with permanent brain damage for his Cav, Cam." She rolls one broad shoulder in a shrug. "Either Harrow thought she could get through without that...or she didn't bother to think about it."

For a moment Maeve can't say anything. She sits there, her rapidly cooling mug of tea held between her hands and all she can do is just look at Gideon. At her friend across the table, sitting there, talking about someone risking her like that without even thinking about it.

"What the fuck?"

It's the only thing she can think to say. She wants to march down the hall to Gideon's room and pull this girl out of the bed and kick her square in the bloody teeth. She doesn't. She stays put, but only because she doesn't think Gideon would want her to do anything.

"It's okay, man," says Gideon, her voice lighter than the expression on her face, the look in her tea coloured eyes. "I'm like...ninety percent sure that my brain is totally fine. It hurt like a fucking bitch, though." She rubs her face with her hands. "So we got through that and then...people started dying. All around us. Necros. Cavs. Dropping like flies."

"That isn't what I'm what the fucking," Maeve says, though she decides to let it go. The possibility of Gideon being hurt matters, of course, but it's the idea that Harrow didn't consider it that gets her.

She chews on her ragged thumbnail for a moment, then asks, "Why? Why were they dying?"

"Something was killing them. Someone, as it turns out." Gideon drains the last of her cold tea and reaches for the pot, topping up her mug again; she raises her eyebrows in Maeve's direction. "One of the adepts was a lyctor in disguise who, it turned out, was really fucking pissed off at God. We...tried a lot of things to stop her but, in the end, there was only one that worked."

"What was that?" Maeve asks.

She tries not to let any wariness to creep into her tone, although she worries she might not want to hear the response. Everything Gideon says just creeps closer and closer toward being the reason she died and Maeve is still trying to figure out how to settle with that.

"I figured it out," she says, turning her cup by the rim. She doesn't look at Maeve for this part. "Lyctorhood. The megatheorum. Well, not the theorem, but I knew what I had to do." She swallows, lifting one hand to ruffle her fingers through her hair. "I never sword the oath that Cavaliers swear to their necros because, you know. Not a real Cavalier. But I knew what it was by then." She raises her mug in a lazy toast, her amber eyes flicking to Maeve's face. "One flesh. One end."

"Well that doesn't sound good," Maeve answers, the dry tone disguising what she really feels. At least in part, she hopes, because by now she also knows Gideon knows her well enough to have her figured out. The dry, smart-ass remarks are as much armour as her jewelry and her makeup and all the black she wears to make herself appear more intimidating.

"So what?" she asks. "You figured it out and you... sacrificed yourself? To stop someone who wanted to kill a god?" Maeve doesn't believe in god, she doesn't believe in an afterlife or anything like that, and she sure as hell doesn't think a real, physical person can be any sort of god either.

Gideon nods. She still doesn't look at Maeve - looking up right then feels like it expose too much, like stripping naked in the middle of the kitchen.

"It was the easiest thing in the world in the end," she says. "All I had to do was fall, and know that I was dying before her. So I wouldn't have to watch if she did."

She didn't help but think about Pal and Cam right then.

"Jesus Christ," Maeve says and she releases her mug finally, rubbing both hands over her face. Like with Sean, she wants to be mad. She wants to get up from the table and shove Gideon and ask her why she would do something so fucking stupid, but Maeve knows she doesn't understand Gideon's world properly.

"And now she's here and she's pissed at you?" she asks as she drops her hands.

"Sort of," says Gideon. "She's been angry with me about something our whole lives though.". Two hundred dead children wasn't her story to tell, so she keeps that part behind her teeth. "In this case, she sees it less as a suicide and more as a murder and she...went to some fucking extreme lengths to stop the process completing."

"And did she?"

More and more, Maeve doesn't know what she thinks of Harrow. The way it sounds, if someone had treated her like that, Maeve would have walked away and never looked back. But she's always had an easy time in cutting people off. She's been on her own for so long, she knows she would never keep someone around if they couldn't be kind.

Except she kept Otis around, no matter how bloody stupid he got.

"She did," says Gideon, something sullen smoldering in her golden eyes for a moment. "Rolled a stone over me. Don't know what I think about it yet. But... It was the one thing I ever really chose in my life and she couldn't even let me have that."

"Why do you care so much about her?" Maeve asks and she regrets the words the moment they're out, but they're out there anyway. She can't take them back and she doesn't think she really wants to.

"It doesn't sound like she gives a damn about you," she says honestly. "It sounds like she was lonely and selfish and kept you around because she needed you, but never gave you anything in return and that's a shite way to be a friend."

It's a question that Gideon doesn't entirely have an answer to. She'd started to realise something on the First, something that had felt formless and painful until a couple of hours ago when she'd seen Harrow for the first time in months and something coalesced. She rolls one shoulder.

"I love her." Her coppery eyebrows draw together. "I'm in love with her."

"That doesn't mean you have to put up with being treated like..." Maeve trails off and gestures. "I love my mum, but I still wouldn't let her live with me again. Not after all the shit she did."

It isn't exactly the same, but in the end, Maeve still thinks manipulation and abuse are what they are. Romantic love, familial love, people just use it all as a reason to treat someone like garbage and she doesn't think anyone needs to put up with that.

"Things started to change, before," says Gideon. She lowers her head to rest in her hands. "I've...got to believe they can keep changing. Maybe they can't." She looks up at her friend and rolls one shoulder in a shrug. "But I've got to try."

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