Chapter Text
Gideon Kiriona Nav had spent every hour every day for eight weeks thinking about one thing and one thing only; Harrowhark Nonagesimus. And that was just recently. He had come into her orbit for the first time since they were kids in January, when he had transferred to her school with a black eye and a bad attitude. The sheer pitiablity of transferring to a new school for only the last semester of grade twelve gained him a lot of attention, and his positively disdainful reaction to anyone outside of a tiny circle of fucking goth skids gained him a period of being a subject of vicious gossip and then he faded into obscurity.
Strangely, Gideon had been outside of her own orbit for a few months when he had first arrived. Her dad (yuck!) had insisted on her applying for opportunities to study abroad this year, and she had been way out of this shit hole. In Drearburh, French had been spoken alongside English and Latin because Catholic inspired death cults seemed to be a big hit with Quebecois old people who had never quite recovered from Vatican II. Thank whatever higher power for this fact, because Gideon had spent an equally confusing, arousing, and educational time in France for the first half of the semester. Questions that she had not actually asked herself, hadn’t really known how to ask herself, solidified and she started moving through the world with a curious gaze at those around her. She had grown up in such absolutely shitty circumstances that she did not think that she had ever really felt safe enough to have a crush. The gentle unwinding of some of the terrible pressure in her chest; leaving the orphanage; finding John; getting actually not that bad grades at school; had left her open to metropolitan charms in a way that had dizzied her a bit. Boys and girls had winked and run fingers through her hair in parties. The attention was welcome, but Gideon would bow out early in an attempt to preserve the precious fluttering feeling of her heart. When she got back home after the March Break, Harrow sat behind her in history. Gideon had walked into the room, and upon seeing Harrow, wearing eyeliner (?!?!?), legs stretched under the chair in front of him, she turned the fuck around. With just a moments delay, Harrow’s head came out of the door and saw her.
“Nav?”
His voice was different than she expected, she hadn’t seen him in years. Melodic.
“Nonagesimus,” Gideon grit out.
“Your right shoe is untied,” he said, and returned to his fucking seat.
Gideon really had intended to ignore Harrow entirely, she felt that she could let by-gones be by-gones, but Gideon had always been kind of a sucker for the dramatic. And fuck if Harrow wasn’t dramatic. He seemed to be the only boy in school who had developed any sort of personal fashion sense, even going down to Queen St W on weekends to go to thrift stores. He played bass in a goth alt band. They were alright. At school, he was snappy, sarcastically cutting down peers for incredibly variable reasons. Gideon was growing obsessed. She was shitty and loud as well, and getting his attention, feeling the dig of his claws was fucking intoxicating. At the beginning of June, she arrived in history to find Harrow has added green raccoon stripes to front of his bangs. When they were little, the cult nuns had always shaved his dark hair down to the scalp, which often Gideon had also done, at least half in solidarity. Since leaving Drearburh, he had rebelled by growing out a frankly perfect emo swoop, the back of his hair just longer than his Muse tee-shirt collar. For some reason, the green seemed like a shocking addition. Gideon tried to think of some pithy comment between the door and her seat.
All she came up with was, “Discount night for asswipes at Shopper’s last night?” which was admittedly weak, so she kicked his chair for good measure.
Harrow did not look up from his book (fucking Anne Rice, of course) and said, “Haven’t had a coffee yet Nav, or just one too many hard knocks completely liquefied whatever critical thinking you had left?”
Gideon flipped him off, putting her hand on the open pages where he could not ignore it. He looked at it with disgust and without interest, then brought his gaze to Gideon’s eyes. A slow smile spread across her lips, anticipating carnage.
“Oh, Gideon knows that skid?” said a girl, sotto voce.
“I don’t know what the fuck is going on there, but it’s fucking queer,” a guy responded.
Harrow and Gideon froze. Gideon’s… whole thing had by and large been overlooked. Being markedly not feminine in the right way was not required when you were dragging the lacrosse team to provincials on your back, but she still occasionally felt the needle pricks of fear and rage at targeted words from her classmates. Generally, she just wanted to get to university and out of this shit town, so she did not respond at school. She was usually happy to wait for a house party to get even. She couldn’t quite bring herself to take the same approach when it came to Harrow though, and just as she was about to say something, Harrow drawled,
“Fellas, is it gay to talk to a girl?” A few anxious laughs went around the room. Gideon laughed with her full chest, but never took her eyes off of the guy.
“You’ve got your head so far up your own ass that it seems a little queer to me, but you don’t see me mentioning it,” Gideon flashed canines as she said it, a smile that had become a snarl.
“Fuck off, dyke,” the guy said.
Nearly simultaneously, Gideon took two steps towards him, and Harrow hit him hard across the face with a closed fist. Blood sprayed from his mouth and across a desk. There was a second of calm before shit hit the fan. The teacher walked in a matter of minutes later to a full brawl that took the help of the massive gym/civics teacher to bust up.
Gideon and Harrow had both been suspended, and Harrow had started running laps through Gideon’s mind non-stop.
School ended and Gideon and Harrow once again did everything together. Harrow would pick Gideon up from the lacrosse field, eating plain, saltless, French fries while sitting on the bumper of his car.
“How’d you afford this?” Gideon asked one afternoon in August while pouring water over her head and then shaking her hair like a dog.
"Ortus got it for me. Said that he doesn’t like me walking around town here.”
Gideon allowed the silence to stretch between them, just for a moment.
“There’s a party this weekend,” Gideon said, attempting to maintain a completely neutral tone.
“And?”
“You wanna crash? We could leave this town as flip cup champions.”
“I’m not leaving.”
Gideon realized that they had never discussed either of their post high school plans. Gideon had a lacrosse scholarship and was going to Brock. John would go back to Toronto to be with his weird co-dependant friends, and all of her connections to this bum-fuck town would disintegrate. Well, apparently except one.
Q“Why the fuck are you staying?” Gideon demanded, unsuccessfully keeping an edge of panic from her voice.
Harrow looked at her, his eyebrows knitting slightly, before relaxing into their natural state—smug and sarcastic.
“Are you afraid to go to school without me, Griddle? Worried that they will realize that after one injury, say a torn ACL, you add nothing to society?”
Gideon dumped her remaining water into Harrow’s fries. “Shut the fuck up. Why would you stay here?”
Harrow had shut his eyes and was gripping the bridge of his nose firmly. “You think that you should be privy to my schemes?”
Gideon went against all of her instincts and shut up about it.
“Guess that Ortus would not cope well with solitude, he probably needs you to tell him to like change his socks. Come to the party, dipshit.”
Harrow relaxed minutely when Gideon did not push.
“And why, pray tell, should I?”
Gideon Nav smiled in a way that was all teeth and fangs. “To cause problems, of course.”
Harrow was left with no choice.
***
Gideon Kiriona Nav felt like God’s perfect fool. She awoke at 6 am, 30 minutes before her alarm, to a silent apartment and a gently aching right shoulder. Harrow had not been quite right all those years ago—it hadn’t been an ACL, and it hadn’t happened during her undergrad, but her body had nonetheless not tolerated the wear and tear put on it. Whatever dreams she had of a professional sports career (not that women’s lacrosse had ever really reached the point where anyone could do it as a career) had died in her twenties between her increasingly regular but minor shoulder injuries and the sheer fear that Aiglamene’s painful existence had put into her heart. Aiglamene was the university coach, a woman whose body was a testament to the cruelty of sports careers before the advent of physiotherapy, and judging by her age, probably also like penicillin and pasturization. After hearing just a few of her horror stories, Gideon knew that she would have to find something else to do with her life or else suffer the same five fused disks in her back. Now, at 35, she ran a coffee shop attached to an art cinema owned by friends. She was happy, but every once in a while, she would not perform her exacting sets of stretches and exercises, only to suffer the consequences of her own actions. Groaning softly, Gideon rose to attempt to bring this day back into line.
After a hot shower, gentle stretches, and an ibuprofen with her oatmeal, she had managed to get to the shop. Camilla dropped off the day’s baked goods that morning, already waiting when Gideon got to the door of the shop, even though Gideon was five minutes early.
“How long have you been here?” Gideon asked, juggling keys, phone, and water bottle to open the door.
“Long enough,” responded Camilla primly. She never had to juggle, Gideon noticed as Camilla elegantly swept into the shop even holding large boxes of doughnuts, bagels, and cookies.
“My deepest apologies that I am not entirely in sync with your schedule,” Gideon bitched, a little unnecessarily. Camilla’s only response was a slightly raised eyebrow, but she graciously overlooked Gideon’s shitty attitude. Camilla co-owned a bakery with Dulcinea, and both of them were in a polycule with a man named Palamedes, who Gideon had met in passing a couple of times, but did not know well. She was under the impression that he wrote puzzles for newspapers for a living, but she also had no idea if that was a joke that Camilla made that just went over her head.
“Are you going to the screening on Friday?” Gideon asked.
“Yeah, and so are Dulcinea and Palamedes. He knows that filmmaker, H.K. Nav, apparently they're in a crossword Discord together.”
This fact deeply endeared Palamedes to Gideon, but she could not quite process it.
“Wait, the filmmaker has the same last name as me? Huh.”
“Yes, I wondered about that as well. Maybe she's some distant relative.”
Gideon doubted it. She was pretty sure that Priamhark had invented her surname whole cloth. Her first name has the closest thing that she had to a connection with the past. Gideon’s near dead mother had turned up at Drearburh, cried “Gideon! Gideon! Gideon!” and then promptly died. Gideon had been in her arms, umbilical still attached. She had met the man that her mother had likely been thinking of, Gideon Original Flavour, when she found John. The old people, John, Gideon, Pyrrha, Mercy, and Augustine had discussed pros and cons of referring to Gideon: The Sequel as Junior, but that had offended nearly all of them, except Gideon Original Flavour, who has cried as though he was touched. John had suggested Kiriona, and it had stuck. Gideon appreciated the connection that it gave her to her heritage, but only really used it in family settings.
“Maybe we are destined to be wed—she already has my name, right?” Gideon said, waggling her eyebrows at Camilla, who sighed.
“Whatever brings you comfort. I’m leaving now.” Camilla collected her signed receipt, and gave a single wave as she left.
The name H. K. Nav bounced around Gideon’s skull the whole morning and so when there was a lull in business and she had dutifully tidied and set everything to rights in preparation for the next wave, Gideon set to googling. H.K. Nav’s horror films had been written up in a few reviews, but information about her was sparse. There were no photographs of her, and her only biographical information said that she had attended film school overseas and was returning to Canada with her dog in tow. Not much to go on. Gideon found one of her movies to stream, and decided to watch it that night.
The day went on with lulls and rushes. After school, Isaac and Jeannemarie stopped to ‘say hello,’ which actually just included eating yesterday’s cookies and bother Gideon.
“So, have you two watched any of the movies that Nav lady has made?” Gideon asked in what she felt was normal and chill. Both horrible teens’ heads snapped up.
“Wow, so obviously casual,” said Jeannemarie, but Isaac had a glimmer of excitement in their eyes.
“Yes! Her work is amazing, the way that she addresses grief and gender identity is so beautiful!” they gush. “Return of the Skeletons of Bone Farm is my favourite, it helped me to come out to Abigail and Magnus.”
The sheer incongruity of the statement almost made Gideon laugh, but she focused the feeling into a cough. “Oh cool, I’m going to watch that one tonight! Is it scary though, or more like... thoughtful?”
“Magnus threw up when we watched it,” said Jeannemarie.
That basically answered her question.
***
You were a small, brown creature. Sometimes you felt like a porcupine, prickly but in a defensive way, but other times you felt like a wolverine, hissing and vicious. You knew that your parents and the anchorites said that you were a child of God and made for His Glory, but you did not really feel that you could glorify anything. Today was Good Friday, and so you been caught, teeth gnashing, so that you could each go into your cell and dig your grave. Your small hands (paws? claws?) clutched the shovel, and you threw yourself into your work. You were digging a burrow, a home, that would be safe and warm, no one else needed to know that it wasn’t a grave. Creatures didn’t dig graves, after all.
The digging was difficult, but not impossible. You dug the grave last year, and then filled it in on Easter Sunday, and so the soil was not so terribly compacted. This year though, since it was a burrow, you pushed yourself, digging a little deeper, clawing a little further. Your hands ached around the shovel, blisters forming and popping, but when Crux entered your cell at nightfall, he smiled fondly.
“Excellent digging, brother,” he rasped, “Now, into the grave, and contemplate.”
He kindly offered you a hand to help you down. There were no lights, so when the sun set, your cell was dark as night. In your burrow, you could not see the stars that you knew were out, and you coiled yourself into a roll of cloaks to stave off the wintry chill that emanated from the earth. Perhaps the ground of Calvary was warm, but here in Ontario, it was frigid. Curled up like this, you fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
You woke when the moon crept over the edge of your burrow and when you opened your eyes, She was before you. Floating above you, the Lady of the Tomb. You were immobilized, trapped, staring into those golden eyes, you felt the cold breath of the sepulchre on your face, the smell of death upon you, you heard the rattling of Her chains, you could not move, could not look away, could not scream. The Lady reached one sharp hard hand toward you, running a nail like a knife down your face. As you felt the blood well up and warm your frozen cheek, you left this world, you left yourself. You were no longer only your own creature but Hers, anything for Her, you belonged to Her.
You fell in love.