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The moment Gideon found herself in her own body again, fully alive and functional, she started counting hours before Harrow did or said something stupid about it. Her necromancer had that face as she watched Gideon's physical being come back together, the uncomfortably humane desperation and longing, that Gideon first saw in the Canaan House and that always made Gideon choke on panic ever since. Gideon just knew that something was definitely going to come out of it sooner or later, and since it was Harrow, it was really hard to figure out which option was worse.
For a while, there wasn't anything that would fit into "normal from other people, weird coming from Nonagesimus" category. There just was so much shit to do first before they could even approach sorting out... whatever the hell that this was between them now. Then when they sorted all the urgent shit on interstellar scale, Gideon just wanted to sleep for long, long time.
The sleep turned out mere nine-something hours, but time is subjective anyway, Gideon thought to herself. They were back at the dying castle of the First House, the same room designated to the Ninth. Just a stop, a brief pause after the finale of all the cosmic cataclysms after which thinking about the inevitable "What now?" question was just as hard as, well, not dying in the fight against god himself.
She almost missed the light smell of sea salt and mould in the air, but only almost. Waking up and not finding Harrow in close proximity, she did a workout, jogged through terraces that were the least suspect to crumbling under the weight of time, decay and Gideon's feet, and indulged herself by taking a bath. She was getting used to the concept of soaking her tired and sore muscles in hot water with soap. It wasn't bad at all, even.
This was probably her mistake. Gideon dropped her guard after the relaxing bath, lying back onto her bed, drowsy and still a little tired, comfortable in her own body again, and this was why she absolutely missed the moment when Harrow appeared in the room and rapidly approached her, like one of those terrible azure waves thrashing against the castle outside.
Harrow pounced onto her. Like- like anything in this world except Harrowhark Nonagesimus, because in Gideon's worldview, Harrowhark Nanogesimus didn't do that ever - she brooded and hovered and merged with the shadows, she clinked with her bone and teeth jewelry and swished her robes dramatically, all black and dreary. As the first shock of having Harrow on top of her passed, Gideon noticed that Harrow's face was bare and unpainted, black eyes shining with feverish luster, all too bright, too humane, and her brain promptly stopped functioning, preventing her from interrupting the inevitable.
Harrow kissed in the same way the necromancers did everything, each action ritualistic and precise and somehow final.
Her mouth hot against Gideon's, she bit her lips and clawed at Gideon's cheeks and neck. Having Harrow's tongue pressing into her mouth broke something in Gideon's head. She was still grappling with the idea of Harrow having a physical manifestation - yes, weird, all things considering, but she spent so many years knowing Harrow as only this wraith-like onion layered in black robes and facepaint, that the image of a girl underneath simply did not fit into her mind yet. And now this girl, that had apparently existed under the crust of black and white paint all the time, was aggressively trying to devour Gideon's mouth. Really, it wasn't her fault that she simply couldn't keep up, right?
Stunned beyond her capacity to immediately respond, Gideon lied under Harrow still, her hands somehow already on Harrow's knees that were set apart and squeezed Gideon's sides hard as she straddled her. Harrow's tongue, hot and wet, claimed Gideon's mouth, the sensation of it brushing against Gideon's making something shake in her chest violently as it was slowly sinking in: Harrowhark Nonagesimus was kissing her. Harrowhark. Her, Gideon. "Hey, Harrow, quick question: what the fuck?" Gideon thought her mouth was asking, but what happened was actually her parting her lips and making an undignified noise at Harrow immediately pressing her mouth closer to hers.
None of Gideon's wide assortment of comics of various lewdness and educational value could prepare her for this. Yes, they often featured hot-blooded necros jumping - pouncing - onto their good-looking cavaliers, and what followed usually made Gideon sigh and consciously grip onto her suspension of disbelief a little harder before shamelessly indulging herself with reading this trash. This way, she wasn't completely clueless about where this all could be going to, her body responding with cinders of anticipation igniting within her. But the problem was that none of the authors of such literature had imagination depraved enough to depict anyone even remotely close to her necromancer, as far from the real deal as possible.
The real deal was almost lightless weight on top of her, the bird bones of Harrow's skeleton only barely punctuating her presence, all taunt with tension. Harrow's thin, nimble fingers were gripping Gideon's jaw, and Gideon was stunned again to learn that Harrow wasn't cold, no - her hands were warm, and her whole body radiated heat as if she ate Dominicus for breakfast and forgot to tell Gideon about it. And her teeth, little and sharp, bothered Gideon's lips as their kiss got clumsier and harsher.
This wasn't how Gideon imagined her first kiss would happen.
She suddenly remembered that for Harrow, this kiss wasn't actually her first. Next she remembered Ianthe, and she groaned into Harrow's mouth, her mood infinitely worse. Could that be that Harrow was just looking for something in her mouth, just like with the terrible Third twin?
Gideon threw her head back, pressing it into the pillow, breaking away and gulping for air. Her eyes met with Harrow's, this silent "What the actual fuck?" hopefully conveyed through the glare she gave her, and she was taken aback. This feverish shine was still bright in Harrow's anthracite eyes, and they were fixed on Gideon's face with such intense focus that Gideon got an impression she suddenly became transparent and there was some super duper interesting necromantic theorem written on the blankets under her.
Harrow blinked without breaking eye contact, her lashes fluttering for a briefest moment, and Gideon was struck with how tender, vulnerable Harrow looked without her face paint, full of rosy color of blush touching her high, sharp cheeks instead of the usual skull mask covering her expression. She licked her uncomfortably red lips with her no less uncomfortably pink tongue, so real and fleshy and unlike anything that Harrowhark of the Ninth House always embodied.
Then she leaned down, chasing after Gideon's mouth, and touched it with hers again.
No tongue this time, just short, brief pecks on Gideon's mouth, this kiss was no less shocking than the first. Maybe even more so - because each peck punctuated the feeling of Harrow's wet lips, because now Gideon noticed how ragged Harrow's breath was, how she was leaning into Gideon heavily, each consequent kiss somehow more desperate, more urgent than the last, as if the necromancer was tasting her meal and making up her mind before devouring it whole.
The thought that she, Gideon, was the meal, and Harrow was preparing to devour her, made Gideon's blood run hot and her limbs go slack, because there was no way this was happening for real. She lifted her chin up, meeting Harrow's next predatory peck, nipping her lips in return, thinking: since there was absolutely no fucking no way this was happening for real, she might as well have played along just to see what was going to happen next. In this half-stupefied, half-relaxed mindset she finally noticed that Harrow was shaking with her entire body as she kept mashing her lips against Gideon's, so much that Gideon couldn't help herself, putting her palms on Harrow's sides in case her necromancer was about to collapse, which felt like a possibility in the moment. Under her hands, she could feel Harrow's ribs moving in juggering breaths, right under the cloth of her blouse, so unbelievably corporeal that Gideon wanted to dig her fingers between them.
Distracted by this urgent need to thoroughly examine Harrow's ribcage and how her tremors seemed to only increase from her touch, Gideon didn't notice that Harrow took her hands off her. The awareness arose only when Harrow's prehensile fingers locked around Gideon's wrist and dragged her hand up, firmly pressing Gideon's palm against her chest.
Gideon inhaled sharply as she realized that she felt Harrow's bare, smooth skin under her fingers, a lump of soft flesh fitting neatly into her hand being nothing else but Harrowhark's breast.
"Harrow," finally, Gideon's throat was able to form words, though her brain still lagged, and she didn't know what sort of words should have been used in this moment, because what do you even say when you have a hand full of the Reverend Daughter's tits? Gideon had no fucking idea.
The sound of her voice startled Harrow, though. She froze in the instant, taut with tension, not even breathing, as if being called by her name reminded her who she was and it sent her into deep existential contemplation. Her heart was beating rabidly against the sternum, and Gideon felt it as if she held Harrow's heart in her hand, and for a second, even her tremors stopped.
Looking over her necromancer, Gideon swallowed audibly. She regretted she didn't have a camera with her or something, because this all - this was a sight.
Before, she'd seen Harrow in her solemn, dreary glory of the Ninth, clinking her praying bones and full of sneering contempt that always silently told Gideon: "I'm a child prodigy and the Lady of the Ninth House, and you, Griddle, are fucking nothing". She'd seen Harrow ashen with exhaustion from her ghastly necromancies, facepaint smudged and mixed with dark red of blood sweat, full of murderous determination or passed out from it. Even that challenge where Harrow had all her clothes eaten away by the evil entropy field couldn't make a dent in this impression that Harrow was always all wrapped in black. The only thing in common those Harrows had with this one was the silent, desperate expectation in her black eyes pinning Gideon down as she stared at her, unblinking. The familiar wrinkle on Harrow's forehead, formed by intense overthinking, seemed utterly alien on this bare face with flushed cheeks and red lips, puffy from kisses (from kissing her, Gideon). Bangs of her grown out hair stuck to the side of her face, slick with sweat, and Gideon found that she kind of wanted to flick it away. She never thought of it, but now she really, really wanted to know if Harrow's hair was as soft and silky to touch as it looked.
But the most intimidating thing of all was Harrow's blouse, unbuttoned halfway down and dragged off from just one of her shoulder and revealing so much of Harrow's body underneath it that it surely broke a multitude of laws of this universe and triggered its inevitable and terrible collapse. Her neck was slender and smooth, she had pronounced clavicles curving in a way that normal clavicles did (Gideon had to admit to herself she had an uncomfortably vast expertise when it came to bones), but at the same time Gideon kind of wanted to brush her thumb on them to confirm it. And below that, the blouse opened and revealed Harrow's left breast, but Gideon couldn't take a good look at it because Harrow kept Gideon's palm firmly against it.
Should she take her hand off? Was it more impolite of her to just keep it here or move it to actually take a look at Harrow's tits? Gideon still struggled with the concept of them, despite having very physical proof of their existence right in her hand. She squeezed it a little, just to make sure.
Wow. Soft.
Harrow was sepulcherously silent above her for a while, not breathing or blinking. The air between them grew awkward real quick.
"I thought," Harrow suddenly said, voice gruff, edging on this all too familiar contempt and disappointment she subjected Gideon to too often, "that you'd be able to take it from here on your own, Griddle." Her fingers gripped her wrist hard, not so subtly making an accent on what exactly she meant.
Gideon choked on next inhale and started coughing, taken aback. This Harrow she knew well, with her boobs out or not.
"Nonagesimus, there are less complicated things I can do if I want to get myself immediately buried under approximately three billion skeletons," she responded, habitual snark bleeding through her words.
This gave Harrow a pause. She hovered above, eyes narrowing as if she was already scheming up some nasty plan to remind Gideon of her place in the Ninth House, and Gideon almost, almost believed this was the case, almost bared her teeth in preparation for a fight, verbal or physical. Harrow pressed her lips together tight, deep in thought, and shivered under Gideon's palm, her heart still beating like it wanted out of her chest.
"I must admit," Harrow said in thick voice, her arching brows knit closely together in a deep frown, "that I didn't expect you'd be repulsed by the idea of a necromancer trysting with their cav." Her lower lip trembled, barely noticeable, but Gideon was so close that it couldn't have escaped her.
"I'm not?" Gideon answered without thinking. She was so utterly shocked to see something on Harrow's face that resembled a doubt that she failed to process what Harrow had just said. "Just- Nonagesimus, what the hell?"
Under Gideon's palm, Harrow's heart skipped a beat as her chest moved in a discontinuous inhale, and she looked down between them. Though nothing changed, it felt as if she clamped up, as if she was wrapped in her pitch black robes and masked in Whatever Skull Of The Week again, and realization of something horrible finally broke into the forefront of Gideon's mind.
"Harrow," Gideon said, her mouth still not entirely in sync with her brain, and thus she sounded softer, almost pleading this time, "you have a really weird idea of a first date. Like, completely bonkers."
The necromancer dropped her hand off Gideon's wrist.
"Your favorite literature seemed to suggest otherwise," Harrow responded, on edge, not looking at Gideon's face anymore.
Oh shit. Oh fuck - who would use that as a guide on how to woo anybody? Gideon thought, the irony of it only barely escaping her, and she scrambled up, sitting upright. Her brain was finally catching up and now blared alarms aloud in her head: she, Gideon Nav, was a massive idiot. She had a lap full of the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House, a hand full of titty of the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and a head full of ossified tissue, apparently.
She'd disappointed her necromancer, discouraged her so terribly.
"Harrow, these magazines are utter crap, you told me this thousand times," Gideon said, voice dropping to urgent whisper. She felt that Harrow was about to recoil from her, so she put her hand around her necromancer's waist firmly (she could count each of spinous processes of her lumbar vertebrae with her fingers), and resisted the urge to take her other hand off Harrow's chest (she didn't trust herself to think clearly in case she actually caught a glimpse of Harrow's breast, and she wasn't thinking clearly anyway in the moment). "The articles are the only thing worth reading in them."
She watched Harrow's mouth quirk in a shadow of a crooked smile. Her lips curved so prettily, Gideon thought suddenly as she realized how rarely she saw this mouth just doing what normal mouths did, without visual distortions of black and white paint on top of it. And she found that she never even considered what it was like, to kiss Harrowhark Nonagesimus, because of the constant, preemptive phantom taste of paint on her tongue. But now that it happened, now that Gideon knew the veltety texture of Harrow's thin lips against hers, it was difficult to resist chasing this feeling again.
Just as Gideon finally nailed down this complicated thought, already moving onto giving in to the desire to check how Harrow's mouth felt once again, Harrow bit her lower lip, frowning hard. As dense as Gideon felt in this whole situation, it was obvious even to her that something too awkward for kissing was about to come up, and she stilled.
"I know I'm not your type," Harrow uttered, looking at Gideon's shoulder, refusing to raise her eyes higher. "Nothing like these drawn women from your sick magazines." ("If by "sick" you mean "radical", then I agree," Gideon's mouth responded automatically because that was just how it worked, and Harrow just as automatically ignored that completely.) "Definitely unlike that Tridentarius twin either," she added, quieter.
There were a couple of things in that statement that Gideon considered problematic. First was the implication that Harrow grew enough self-consciousness to compare herself against someone else (cartoons and Third House necromancer were a narrow selection, but a starting point nonetheless) and moreso - to find her appearance less than adequate. Gideon didn't like it. She wanted to fight this implication right now. And second was - Tridentarius? Really?
"I cannot, under any circumstances, call Ianthe my type, Harrow," Gideon said because she couldn't just leave that one unaddressed.
That made Harrow look up at her, her forehead wrinkling as she frowned in confusion.
"Ianthe?" She sounded so bewildered that Gideon mentally recounted all Houses just in case she got the wrong necromancer. "Nav, I meant the other twin. Coronabeth."
Oh. Definitely the wrong necromancer (still strong on counting though).
Gideon was dumbstruck. How did she manage to forget so completely about someone as unforgettable as Corona? How did the bleak twin came into the foreground of her mind instead? (That was the kiss, Harrow's first kiss that Ianthe stole from Gideon, she knew it deep in her soul, but it was still so bonkers to even think about.)
The unflattering comparison made slightly more sense now, but even though Gideon was still appreciative of Corona's luxurious gorgeousness, she found herself unable to imagine the bright Third twin with herself in a situation similar to hers right now. Nor she wanted to.
"Anyway," Gideon cleared her throat awkwardly, trying to deal with this realization as quickly as possible. There was a feeling of urgency in her as she observed her necromancer trembling in her hands, still unsure, still chagrined, this tiny crack in her shell ready to close again unless Gideon figuratively put her boot in to prevent that as soon as possible. "Corona is too sweet for me. There's just not enough, you know, brooding in her, or dismal scheming, I can't even imagine her threatening me with a thousand skeletons all simultaneously kicking my ass, and I want no woman who can't kick my ass with a thousand skeletons, Nonagesimus."
One of Harrow's eyebrows crawled up, skeptical of these dubious compliments.
"I'm not brooding," she said, brooding.
Gideon finally gathered enough courage to move her hand, chanting to herself, "Don't look down, her eyes are up there, Nav", dragging her palm up Harrow's neck and cupped her cheek. Her fingers brushed Harrow's raven hair, and it was as smooth and light to touch as she imagined before.
"Yes, you are, my melancholic princess," she murmured, leaning close enough that she didn't have to worry about looking anywhere except those captivating black wells of Harrow's eyes, "and I wouldn't have it any other way."
To make her point clearer, Gideon kissed her. Harrow emitted a surprised, soft "Mffh!" against her mouth, her body momentarily going slack in her cavalier's hands as if in shock. Emboldened by Harrow's compliance, Gideon quickly deepened the kiss, knowing by now that mashing tongues against each other was fun and eager to try leading her necromancer in it. She moved her hand up Harrow's back, feeling the vertebrae under her fingertips and how Harrow arched and tensed almost immediately.
Harrow kissed back, not at all meek and obedient. She bit Gideon's lower lip at every chance, licked into her mouth and, okay, maybe it resembled how she explored Ianthe's jaw and tongue simply because she didn't know any other method of kissing. Gideon silently urged Harrow to figure out a better way together with her and found with glee how much she loved getting more and more entangled with Harrow in this dance. Harrow followed, responded and pushed back, putting her slender fingers onto Gideon's arms and digging nails into her skin whenever Gideon squeezed Harrow harder in her hands.
Soon, Gideon noticed that Harrow's weird squirming and shaking didn't stop as she seemed to have relaxed against Gideon. On the contrary, whenever Gideon dragged her palm Harrow's back, shying away from disturbing already unbuttoned and parted shirt yet (she didn't even think about looking down, too), Harrow's whole body quaked as if she was about to recoil from her, like she couldn't handle the touch. At the same time, whenever Gideon caved in and moved her hands away, Harrow's desire for it swelled, making her kiss Gideon with graceless hurry, scratch her fingernails against Gideon's arms and press herself to Gideon's chest as if she was dying and Gideon was her only life support.
All in all, the experience resembled interacting with a cat who is screaming at you to pet her only to immediately liquefy her entire feline body and slip away as soon as you attempt to touch her, and she will scream at you even louder if you decide it's not worth the effort and stop trying to pet her.
Gideon thought it was adorable. She decided not to think too hard about how "Harrow" and "adorable" managed to simultaneously coexist in her mind right now and focused on preventing Harrow from recoiling from her touch instead.
She tricked her, arms sliding off Harrow's back entirely, instantly gratified with Harrow advancing onto her, like a tidal wave following the gravity of the Moon, careening them both to fall back onto the bed. Grinning into the hungry kiss, feeling her lower lip pulled by Harrow's teeth, Gideon subtly moved her hands between them, finding the button on Harrow's shirt where she stopped undoing it.
Harrow did notice that, making a long, almost pained groan through her nose, and that motion again - as if she was repelled from Gideon by magnetic force of identical polarities, but was glued to her at thighs where she sat and at Gideon's face that she kissed, so tightly that she couldn't get away from her no matter how she tried. Gideon grinned wider, her fingers going through the buttons, mildly dismayed at how tiny they were and the sheer amount of them. If Harrowhark had to button and unbutton them all every day, then it was no wonder she was such a cranky bitch, and really, Gideon was doing her a service by removing this responsibility from her at this very moment. A random thought of maybe having a full-time job consisting only of undoing zips, laces and buttons on Harrow's many robes and blouses and shirts all the time made Gideon a little woozy.
When the infinity of buttons unexpectedly ended, Gideon hesitated and stilled for a second, struck by unreal physicality of Harrow straddling her hips again. The Reverend Daughter was radiant, her breath wet and heavy against Gideon's lips, her fingers already tangled in Gideon's hair, holding her head up to her as she mediated between biting and kissing Gideon's lips and looking down at Gideon with eyes like burning cinders. It was already so much to handle, and Gideon had a healthy suspicion that if she added any more tactile or visual stimulations to this pile, she was going to instantly combust.
Small price to see a boob, she thought pragmatically and sat up abruptly, startling Harrow and putting her on her back. Time for her to hover over the necromancer.
Shocked by Gideon's actions and touch, Harrow was paralyzed once again, looking up with wide eyes at her. Her hands automatically moved to close the shirt on her, but she stopped, frowning at this reflex and almost audibly thinking to herself something like, "Stop this silliness, Nonagesimus, you want this, you want Gideon, you brooding idiot", or whatever it was that necros thought to themselves when they decided that they wanted to bone their cavs.
Gideon almost didn't want to look away from Harrow's face, from those eyes that had their own gravity wells like little black holes. She saw her own nervousness mirrored in them, molten lust and near disbelief in what was happening, enthralled. The next moment, Harrow blinked, visibly getting her shit together and forcing herself to lie back, pretendingly relaxed. Her pointy face assumed a familiar expression - Gideon almost saw the lines of black and white paint on top of it, she knew it so well, - the condescending expectation, a dare for her Griddle to do something stupid in response to her perfect provocations just to mock her afterwards. Except, her face was bare and flushed with anxious desire, lashes fluttering, lower lip bitten, animated and alive, these new and old traits of Harrow merging together beautifully.
Below that, Harrow's throat moved in trembling gulps for air and her chest rocked with heavy breaths, and Gideon took a moment to absorb the way her body reacted to her looking. She was a peculiar sight, so Harrow-like. Her neck was so frail and slender that Gideon felt as if she could snap it with just a flick of her fingers when she put her hand to it, feeling the pulse beating in Harrow's carotid rabidly under her thumb. Her ribs and clavicles were pronounced on her torso, scrawny and unintimidating without her robes and bones, with small breasts and nipples pointing upwards in accusatory Nonagesimus way each time Harrow's ribcage heaved. Her stomach looked soft, with hip bones sharply protruding from the sides of the lower part, concluding her necromancer's physique. Only now it struck Gideon that Harrow didn't wear a bandeau or a corset or whatever else under the blouse - not that she needed to, apparently, but Gideon had never concerned herself with imagining what sort of underwear the Reverend Daughter could be wearing, so this was an entirely unexplored territory now. Did she just never wear a bra? Or did she ditch it just for this one special occasion? What about panties? She could probably check, right? Her head was getting woozy again.
With these exciting thoughts buzzing in mind, Gideon leaned to kiss Harrow's neck.
"Say something stupid, Nav," she heard Harrow saying above, her fingers already going through Gideon's hair again, "I'm starting to doubt it's really you when you're this quiet." Her voice was thick and trembling slightly.
Not expecting that, Gideon chuckled.
"Lo! The Reverend Tits of the Ninth, have never seen daylight in their whole titty lives," she obliged happily because, yeah, she was just contemplating if blurting this out loud would be too rude.
To her utter shock, Harrow laughed. It was a short and fleeting noise formed deep in Harrow's throat, over before Gideon realized what it was, but it was definitely a laugh.
"You're hideous," Harrow said in her most doleful intonation right after, but when Gideon glanced up at her, she saw Harrow's lips stretched in a small smile, satisfied like Gideon just successfully passed some authorization check.
"And that's what you love about me," Gideon grinned insufferably at her.
The idea that her bad flirting (bad in an awesome kind of way, Gideon insisted on believing) had worked on Harrow was too complicated to chew through in the moment, so Gideon opted out from further examining it by dragging her hand over Harrow's neck and down the shoulder. Her skin did seem like it had never seen sunlight, or anyone else's stares or touches, very soft under Gideon's calloused palm and very warm, it begged for Gideon's fingers to linger on it and examine all the ways Harrow trembled and flinched under them. Eventually, inevitably, Gideon reached in her exploration Harrow's breast, the one she was already familiar with, and cupped it in her palm. Small, in a cute way, it fit nicely into Gideon's hand, and the nipple in the center of it wrinkled and tightened when Gideon brushed her thumb over it by accident.
Harrow reacted with a surprised sigh, a low whistle of air going through relaxed vocal chords without the real sound, and Gideon felt a jolt of heat rushing through her as the hot, liquid wave of excitement hit her and pooled low in her belly. Emboldened, she circled the tip of her thumb around Harrow's nipple, evoking a ragged exhale from Harrow and gleeful joy in herself from causing this. Without thinking, utterly engulfed by these new and bewildering sensations of causation and effect intermingling inside her - touch, reaction, want for more touch, - Gideon leaned to kiss Harrow's neck, where the sternum and the clavicle met in a joint and sprouted the thin, sharply defined ligament upwards into the muscle. In the same motion, Harrow wreathed her arms around Gideon's shoulders, palms sliding under the hem of her shirt hotly, fingernails pressing into Gideon's skin with a warning: don't even dare to get up now, Griddle.
And Gideon didn't want to - right there between them, finally, all the important things were happening. The pattern of Harrow's shuddering under her lips and hands changed, her touch-repulsed spasms enriching with slightest trembles from Gideon nipping her neck and kissing her pronounced, slightly concave sternum between the breasts (her heart was beating so hard, she almost felt it on her mouth), ramping up to full-body tremors as Gideon discovered Harrow's second boob with her lips. In the moment when Gideon licked the areola of that nipple, Harrow proved once again that she wasn't at all just reactive to Gideon, writhing under her until Gideon found Harrow's angular knee between her legs, pressing to her groin hard. Not expecting that, Gideon buckled her hips forward, grinding against Harrow's leg and groaning. Just that, it was enough to set Gideon's entire body aflame with arousal, that molten pool of pleasure pulsating between her legs and spilling down her thighs and up her spine as she became aware how eagerly she longed for that from the second she found Harrow's lips pressed against hers.
Suppressing a shiver that followed Harrow's hand dragging nails on her back, Gideon looked up and instantly lost herself in Harrow's eyes, shining like volcanic glass, transparent black hiding pressurized heat of incandescent metallic core within. She judged she got an advantage still, planting her own knee firmly between Harrow's thighs, subjecting her necromancer to the same kind of treat as she just did to Gideon, and squeezed her breasts in her hands, one of the nipples between her lips and wet from her tongue drawing nils and eights over it. She watched Harrow's eyes widening and moved to do the same to her other nipple - Harrow's hand went to Gideon's head with lightning speed, grabbing her by hair, but so utterly powerless to stop Gideon from advancing and pushing her leg between Harrow's harder. Gideon decided she couldn't choose a favorite reverend tit and opted for mediating between each of them, each time she switched the breast to lap on, wringing out a quiet, muffled moan from Harrow and making her grind herself on Gideon's knee.
It was meditative, and Gideon found herself almost spacing out as she continued with her assault, enjoying the necromancer's body on her mouth and hands in ways she could never even imagine before, squeezing Harrow's knee between her legs and feeling obscenely wet, soaked through her underwear on it. She looked up, longing to confirm that Harrow was just as wrecked, and was flabbergasted to see Harrow biting her lower lip in such a lewd way, eyes half-closed and starless, upper lip curving like a bow as she still couldn't quell a throaty noise coming from her, that every nerve in Gideon's body was struck with tingling electricity. Not knowing this, Harrow raised her hand and put it onto Gideon's and brushed it up her forearm and shoulder, slender fingers and thin wrist put against Gideon's massive bicep and deltoid, seemingly smaller and even more frail.
Gideon thought dumbly: this Harrow, with hair in delicate disarray and forehead touched with sweat, with her cheeks flushed and lips bitten red, with her eyes dazed and breath heaving, with her breasts fondled in Gideon's palms and her body pinned under her cavalier, she could be straight out from those awful pinup magazines. Never let the Ninth nuns know that she had that thought.
While she was dealing with this view, Harrow suddenly gripped Gideon's shirt and urged her up, closer to her, and just as dumbly, Gideon obeyed the physical demand, letting Harrow snake her hands up her shirt and remove it alongside with the bandeau in one impatient motion. Harrow ran her fingers up Gideon's arms, down Gideon's neck and chest confidently, like she owned her, eyes burning with sootless flame once again as she lavished Gideon's body before her with her gaze. Gideon felt her brain sending alarms of critical failure and inevitable shutdown approaching.
"Whoa, it's not your turn!" She blurted out, catching Harrow by the bird wrist and preventing her from cupping her breast, only barely able to conceal her fear that this touch would immediately render her immobile. "I'm not done with you yet, Harrow," she bluffed her best douchebag grin and caught her breath.
Harrow's eyebrows married in a wrinkle above the bridge of her nose, and Gideon maybe died a little on the inside from how she visibly had to tear her stare from her tits to look Gideon in the face.
"Oh, really," Harrow drawled, dark eyes fixed on Gideon's with the universal "Don't look down, her eyes are up here" expression, and at this point it was just only mildly weird and staggering to see it on the Reverend Daughter's face. The blood vessel on her temple was bulged and beating rapidly. "I thought that was all you got and decided to take matters into my hands," she licked her lips, and, seeing her tongue, Gideon almost took her words back and even considered begging Harrow to continue whatever she planned to do to her.
"Honey, you can take matters," Gideon waggled her eyebrows, "into your hands later, I promise." Her voice was only slightly trembling and a tiny bit raspy.
The look Harrow gave her consisted just of tiny amount of wanting to strangle her and lots and lots of anticipation, and Gideon quickly recognized a win for what it was.
"Then don't slack off on me," Harrow said, lying back on the pillow, managing her best bitch face, and it looked so endearing to Gideon by now that something in her head emitted a little "Aww" at seeing it. "Griddle."
"Call me by my name," Gideon blurted out, feeling heady and provocative and terribly tender. "That nickname is super unsexy."
Harrow gave her a languid stare, as if estimating Gideon and all her worth. Then corner of her mouth went up, just one, in a wickedly beautiful smile.
"Earn it," she said simply and fell silent, concluding this exchange and inviting to take this banter onto more physical level once again. Gideon felt hot from her toes to the tips of her ears.
Then she started earning it right away.
She lunged down to kiss Harrow because her capricious mouth looked awfully kissable in this moment, and then she felt the gravitational pull of the rest of Harrow's body making her move lower, leaving wet kiss marks down her chin and her jaw and her neck. Harrow arched upwards, the tide of her body rising to meet Gideon's mouth as Gideon descended down the column of her neck, acknowledged her pretty clavicles and couldn't pass by her tits without stopping there to tease Harrow. Her necromancer was still trembling from watching Gideon gently taking her nipple between teeth, her fingers scratching Gideon's forearms, when Gideon already moved to the previously unexplored area of Harrow's stomach. There, Gideon discovered another kind of Harrow's writhings - hearing an undignified yelp the moment Gideon's tongue licked a stripe above Harrow's navel and feeling it rippling as she tried to recoil, Gideon realized that the Revered Daughter was ticklish.
Harrow gripped the sides of Gideon's face when she kissed her belly again, making her shake violently, but the logical resolution of this move - yanking Gideon's head away from her in the same way you'd drag a pet away from eating your mother's beloved flower plant - never came. Gideon peered at her, completely forgetting for a moment what she was even doing her from the sight of Harrow's chest going up and down in hard, deep breaths, feeling how she sorely needed Harrow's knee between her legs again, and attempted to put her lips down to Harrow's skin, slow, almost reverent. Harrow let her, her hands firmly holding her cavalier's head just a hair away from allowing Gideon to smosh her entire face against her soft stomach and irritate her with hot breaths. Guided by Harrow's demanding nudges or prohibitive grips on her hair, Gideon found a path on Harrow's belly that made her gasp and moan, licked and nipped and kissed all the way from under the ribcage and across her middle, down to the hipbone. There was an especially sensitive hotspot of nerves - just a mere exhale onto it made Harrow's breath hiccup and her hips buckle upwards, while still leaving the impression that Gideon was torturing her with the slick softness of the tip of her tongue gliding sharply on the gentle, unkissed skin, her body twisting under her so hard that Gideon had to hold her down.
When Harrow's hold grew lax, one hand even starting to caress Gideon's cheek lazily, calmed down, Gideon realized she got too much into exploring just this one part of Harrow. Hell, she was stalling. There was still the entirety of Harrow's pants to deal with.
The thought knocked Gideon wide awake, and she involuntarily gripped Harrow's hips harder as she looked at the aforementioned pants, distantly guessing how many buttons the fly had and cowardly hoping that there was a lot of them. To her stunned terror, there was only one, and it definitely looked like under it was just a normal zip fly that was so, so easy to open. She could pull it down with her teeth if she wanted to.
Gideon gulped and looked up without meaning to, nervous, feeling sweat cooling on her back, and was met with Harrow's hard, unforgiving stare, which told her everything, and specifically how easily Harrow could take the turn from Gideon again, even if she'd have to raise a couple of skeletons to flip them and hold Gideon down. The mental picture made something twitch funnily in Gideon's lower regions, but she decided she wasn't ready to participate in a skeleton gangbang with Harrow as their grim and sexy puppeteer yet.
There was only one way Gideon could proceed: by turning her brains off, just like when listening to the nuns clinking bones in prayers on the Ninth, and let her hands lead the way. She pushed the consciousness away, stopped thinking how fucking hot it was that Harrow was visibly shaken to see her shirtless, and dragged her palms up Harrow's hips and sides in a wide arch, then drew them together over her belly, one thumb pushing under that lonely button of her pants. The reflex kicked in, the functional movement of her fingers simply getting rid of a piece of clothes she didn't want anymore, even if that wasn't her she didn't want it on, unbuttoning and unzipping the fly and casually moving hands to drag the pants off Harrowhark in one fluid motion. She didn't register any of this, caught by her necromancer's eyes and staring into them, feeling like a butterfly pinned by two hot needles with black beady heads, unaware how they were getting gradually, dangerously naked before each other.
Harrow's ankle got stuck in a twisted trouser leg, and Gideon broke out of the spell that Harrow's eyes were casting on her as she rushed to help her out. She threw the pants away into some corner, pointedly irritated at having to waste what little mental capacity she had on them, and then she found herself holding Harrow's bare calf in her bare hand. Then she looked.
Harrowhark Nonagesimus was lying before her, her long legs with thin ankles, bony knees and thighs only barely thicker than Gideon's arms spread apart and making a spot for Gideon to kneel between them. It was so utterly shocking, outright blasphemous to see so little black on the Reverend Daughter - an ink blot of her hair gently laid out around her head on the pillow, the flawless black of her eyes fixed on Gideon's face and then, much lower, a small triangle of black cotton panties, plain and completely boring, hugging her hip bones. Gideon's palms went up Harrow's leg, burning from how hot and smooth her skin felt against her, from knowing that nobody alive or dead in this world has ever dared to brush their fingers on the inside of Harrow's legs like that before this very moment. As they stopped at Harrow's thigh, fingers brushing against the black cloth and feeling that there were still more Harrow to uncover, Gideon Nav came to her senses as if she just had a bucket of water with ice dumped onto her head and back.
Fffuuuck, she thought. It's go time. It really fucking is.
A shiver ran through Gideon's entire body. It transferred to Harrow through her fingertips as Harrow watched how she prostrated herself before Harrow's body, bowing down to that little altar of black with religious reverence. Her lips landed on the skin and the fabric of the underwear, causing the necromancer to flinch so hard that she involuntarily pushed back in the aftershock, pressing closer to Gideon's mouth with the motion. Gideon's hands were still thinking on their own, dragging up Harrow's trembling thighs and sliding thumbs under her panties as Gideon looked up and winked at the Revered Daughter, all while her head was just full of echoing litany of "Oh shit, oh fuck". Harrow held the eye contact with far more dignity than Gideon, but still exhaled with a sharp noise and twitched her legs as if trying to close them if not for, well, the entire Gideon half-lying between them comfortably.
Gideon hesitated before pulling the panties down. The insane intimacy she shared with Harrow right now was making her head spin, and she wanted to savor it just for a little longer, feeling with her lips the exceptional softness of Harrow's skin on the stomach right above the the line of the panties. Harrow smelled like ash still, distantly, but Gideon thought of the pits of Drearburh less now in association with it and more of Harrow herself, which was fitting as the Reverend Daughter was the Ninth incarnate. And Gideon, pressing her face to Harrow's pubic bone still covered by thin cloth and inhaling her scent, laced with sex thickly, was overwhelmed and feeling almost painful pull of arousal between her legs, and she thought with delight how she was about to eat the Ninth incarnate out, and how she was going to love it.
Already familiar shudders ran through Harrow's stomach as Gideon's fingers brushed against those sensitive spots near the hip bones (are they really called just that, hip bones? Gideon felt like there is a more fancy name for those, but suppressed the urge to immediately ask Harrow, even though Harrow would know for sure). While she was suddenly distracted by, of all things, bones, her thumbs hooked the panties and her hands (by this point, admittedly much smarter than her head) pulled the last bastion of Harrow's devotion to black rags down. The action was punctuated by Harrow's tense inhale, and Gideon started kissing the closest parts of her immediately, soothing, trying to tell her that everything was okay, it was just her, Griddle, there was nothing for Harrow to be afraid of.
Harrow relaxed just by a fraction after Gideon covering lower parts of her stomach and pubes with kisses, her legs still locked by Gideon's sides with all Nonagesimus's nonexistent physical strength. Her breaths above were fast and loud, her fingers were digging into Gideon's hair, ready to lead Gideon once again by gripping it hard and guiding her cavalier's head wherever she wanted, though for now Harrow hesitated to push her down. Gideon glanced up at her, full of awe, taking in the sight of this lovely, peculiar face with high cheeks and wide span of eyebrows, always yearning to knit together in a deep frown at her, Gideon. Her chest rose and fell, and her perked up nipples followed the hard breaths (if Gideon didn't have a lot more exciting things right below her nose, she'd have loved to watch those hypnotizing movements forever), and her belly rippled with quivers of anticipation, or maybe also because of the nerves, or perhaps even both things at the same time. Gideon admitted to herself that this was super anxiety-inducing, but she was too into it, too aroused to let it stop her. She pulled the underwear down Harrow's leg and let her gaze drop lower.
Down there, Harrow was as unreal and holy as everywhere else. Gideon forced her legs a little further apart, noting the oddly hairless pubes and labia majora that looked squishy and soft, puffy and deep pink, slightly parted from arousal, smaller bits of brighter red labia minora peeking from between, touched by a wet gleam of the lubrication, already waiting for her. Gideon felt her mouth filling with drool and swallowed, and licked her lips, blood quickly boiling in her veins from raw anticipation as she memorized Harrow's lower regions. Harrow's grip on her hair grew so incredibly weak as another quake shook her entire body.
Gideon's brain was completely fried and she was so utterly fucked, and so, she whispered reverently into between Harrow's legs:
"Bone appetit."
Harrow buckled with her entire body, trying to break out of her hold at that.
"Fuck you, Nav," she hissed, and okay, even Gideon was impressed with how bad that pun was (she'd do it again though), but then: "Ah!-"
Gideon was quick to fix the ruined impression. Those lips were for kissing, too, and so she lunged down and put her mouth against those puffy labia, coaxing Harrow into calming down. Then she kissed her a little lower, feeling the lubrication wetting her mouth, and then landed the third kiss, now firmly against her opening, and that was enough for wring out a long, desperate noise from Harrow, as if she was dying. Gideon brushed her fingers on Harrow's thighs, trying to soothe her, but somehow this simple action led to her yanking both Harrow's legs onto her shoulders, evoking a cracked yelp from her necromancer. This was comfy, and gave her more access, Gideon thought smugly and she kept coaxing Harrow with more kisses and feeling hot from Harrow pressing her thighs to the sides of her neck and head.
Before Harrow's legs locked her head in place completely, Gideon sneaked her hand between them to part her labia with fingers and take a better look at what she was dealing with, finding dark pink pearl of her clitoris shyly peeking out of its hood. She put her closed mouth to it quickly, silently promising to return soon and give it the best treatment in the world, and then stuck her tongue out and pressed it to the lower parts of the vulva where Harrow was slick and soaked with arousal. Immediately, she got a mouthful of her taste, tangy, with metallic, sanguine overtones, but sweeter and exhilarating. It made Gideon wish she had a third hand just to shove it into her pants and press between her legs hard, and chasing this taste more, she licked Harrow between the lips with flat tongue all the way up. It didn't escape her how Harrow's body twitched on her mouth as she passed this little nub of flesh, hips buckling to meet her as Harrow discovered that her clitoris and Gideon's tongue made an amazing pair together with a surprised, but appreciative noise.
She lapped on her vulva some more, spreading the lubrication thoroughly on the area and, without intention, on her chin as well, kissing her like she'd kiss Harrow's mouth, pushing tongue inside and feeling her wet little cunt spasming around the tip of her tongue hotly at each intrusion. Harrow was noticeably quieter during these motions, Gideon noted with intense, methodical attention to the smallest details she only had when she had her sword in her hands. There was still a lot to explore, and so Gideon did that, nipping at the labia and the skin of Harrow's inner thighs on her way up to the point of her eager interest.
"Nav," Harrow's voice came from above, husky and low, her fingers going through Gideon's hair, but Gideon didn't indulge her necromancer yet and didn't grant her eye contact yet, too well aware that she'd get trapped in staring at Harrow's face again.
So Gideon shut her eyes tight and propped Harrow's hips higher for better access, squeezing them in her hands in reassurance for both of them, then pushed her mouth between those adorably puffy labia and took whatever she found there in between her lips. She sucked on the clitoris gently, trying out how it felt (fantastic, she wanted to die just like that, lying on her belly with her face between Harrow's legs, thank you for asking) and paying attention to Harrow's reactions closely.
Harrowhark hiccupped on a moan, her legs spasming involuntarily as she buckled her hips, ending up pressing herself closer to Gideon's mouth and squeezing her head with her thighs. Oh, Gideon thought with delight, feeling Harrow actually rub herself against her lips as she kept sucking on her clit, oh, she could get used to that, to the feeling of Harrow's warm legs at her cheeks and temples, to the sound of her ragged, arrhythmic breaths interrupted by moans wrung out of her each time Gideon delicately brushed her tongue around the clitoris while pressing and rolling it between her lips.
"Nav, I can fucking feel you grinning."
Oh shit, really? Gideon couldn't, not until Harrow pointed that out in heavy voice. She grinned more, now with intention, and slid a palm up Harrow's thigh, over her stomach (still ticklish), and blindly found a breast to squeeze. Her other hand was enough to hold Harrow down as she twisted in Gideon's grip from feeling Gideon's fingers pinch her nipple in the same moment as Gideon's mouth forcefully sucked on her clitoris and labia.
Gideon allowed herself to peek at her. She was met with the sight of Harrow's sharp, stabby chin looking up and her exposed throat moving from her gasping for air, her face turned up and unseen by Gideon. The noises from Harrow's mouth were loud and clear through, harsh breaths interrupted by high-pitched, short moans interrupted by inhales sucked through her gritted teeth. She put her fingers around Gideon's wrist, urging her to keep her hand at her chest. Her cavalier obliged happily, fondling her tit as she kept lapping on her cunt like it was a delicious dessert she didn't mind smearing across her entire face. Restless, strung up tight from such treatment, Harrow arched her spine and dug her heels into Gideon's back, leveraging herself and pushing herself harder onto this mouth that was serving her so nicely.
Harrow's body was so malleable in her hands and on her mouth, no longer an inconceivable concept for Gideon, as she found her place at it, her head squeezed by Harrow's thighs tightly, her lips slotted against her vulva, her tongue confidently exploring Harrow's most intimate parts. Finding out that the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House was capable of squirming on her tongue like that, moaning so sweetly as Gideon diligently ate her out, felt like the deepest secret of the universe that Gideon wanted to yell about while standing on the top tier of Drearburh. She wanted to shout that Harrowhark Nonagesimus tasted like a dream, like nothing the Ninth could ever hope to produce and raise in its pits, and that she, Gideon Nav, had the privilege of being the first, the only one to learn about it.
Well, maybe not before finishing her task and driving Harrow absolutely blind with pleasure.
Highly attuned to Harrow's reactions now, Gideon noted how Harrow's thighs quivered whenever she paid more attention to flicking the clitoris with her tongue. The amplitude of these trembles varied, and sometimes resulted in a keening moan, sometimes faded to still anticipation of Gideon's next move, sometimes overlapped with a shudder caused by other stimulations coming from Gideon's hand on top of Harrow's breast. She had the burning urge to find out the exact sequence of motions to cause Harrow to squirm and mewl, like a new combination of devastating blows with her sword. She could confidently say she studied the blade enough, and now was the perfect time and opportunity to learn something else.
As if sensing Gideon's intent, Harrow grew quieter for a moment, small tremors still running through her as her cavalier was rubbing her mouth between her legs, refusing to lose any contact while giving a brief rest to her tongue and jaw muscles, and she even managed to crack her neck in preparation for more intense and attentive search for the perfect eating out technique, Harrowhark edition. Gideon's cheeks and chin were all wet with Harrow and her own drool, which the cavalier found strangely hot, her head spinning from the intensity of Harrow's taste biting her tongue and scent enshrouding her nostrils, sparkling the enthusiasm to commit to her task. She started with licking between the labia, flat tongue pressed firmly to her, providing the absolute maximum area of contact, rubbing it up and down diligently. To her dismay, Harrow's reaction was of middling variety, quiet fast breaths and legs twitching slightly, osseous fingers brushing through Gideon's hair in a lazy, unbothered manner.
This was just unacceptable. Gideon's singular goal was to make Harrow moan her name and lock her head with her thighs as she came on her tongue like frenzied. She was going to do better.
She lingered a little still, trying out to ramp it up a little bit, licking faster or pressing her tongue harder, but gradually, listening to Harrow attentively, she figured out where she got it wrong. Eventually, it became evident that carpeting the entirety of the clit with her tongue wasn't doing it for Harrow, and the more pinpoint Gideon became in her attempts to please her, the harder Harrow's fingers gripped her hair. Gideon unglued her face from Harrow for a second, tongue out of her mouth, and circled the tip around it experimentally, her cheeks cooling with air between them, and immediately, Harrow tensed, her breath staggering, inhaling in portions that corresponded with each lap Gideon's tongue did around her clit. Iiinteresting...
Getting exact same reaction upon repeating this, Gideon grinned: she figured it out. She decided to get creative from here, flicking her tongue up and down or from side to side, causing Harrow to shudder and twitch. With great regret, her hand had to leave Harrow's heavenly tit as Gideon needed it down there, fingers helping to keep the labia spread apart for her easy access. The other hand was still hooked around Harrow's thigh, its task of holding the necromancer in place growing more difficult and important as Gideon tried out the patterns of the movements of her tongue. Circling around the clitoris, the very tip of the tongue brushing under the hood, caused Harrow to buckle her hips almost violently in the instant; then she switched to faster, but gentler fluttering over the entire area where the clitoris sat like a pearl in a sea shell, and at first Harrow went very still, her muscles taut with tension and slowly giving in to the quivers as Gideon relentlessly teased her with her tongue.
Gideon liked this reaction a lot, how Harrow, at the peak of the stimulus wave, let out a broken moan and gave in to the full body shudder, desperately trying to keep the contact by grasping at Gideon's hair and pressing her face closer. Having a better control of her movements at the moment, Gideon could manage the desirable distance (the absolute lack of it) better, and so she did, with a certain degree of deserved smugness in her. Her Harrowhark, she was no longer able to contain the spasms that rocked her hips and threatened to ruin her pleasure, so it was up to her, Gideon, to ensure her necromancer wasn't left wanting.
Her lips ended up pressed firmly between the labia majora again as Gideon chased her in her squirming that grew wilder with each high of pleasure Harrow reached on her tongue. The obscene noises she was making with her lips and tongue should've been embarrassing, but neither of them hardly cared for it, as it felt so good. Noting that she could suck and lick the clitoris at the same time this way, Gideon almost missed how Harrow's moan cracked and turned into a discontinued sob as she arched and pushed her hips forward.
The whine repeated, more urgent now, and it almost resembled a word-
"Gideon..."
Okay, that was dope.
Hearing her name turned into a lewd, shaky moan, Gideon snapped her eyes open as if by command and met Harrow's stare, the abyssal black of it gleamed with crazed sparks, watching her cavalier as if she was the only material thing in this universe. And wasn't she?
Gideon wondered how she looked right now, from Harrow's point of view. Let's check: red hair in disarray, with Harrow's fingers working diligently to make it even worse; cheeks burning with blush and squished between Harrow's thighs, bright yellow eyes beaming "Hey, Harrow, look, I'm right where your panties were" at her necromancer, mouth red and overworked and hidden from her sight with her own very body. She smirked after confirming that the view must be absolutely astonishing, and made a rather lazy swipe of her tongue down and up, and Harrow almost reflexively responded with a shudder.
"How," Harrowhark managed and gulped, voice almost gone in dry throat, "how long can you go on like that?"
The question was so surprising that Gideon almost took her mouth off Harrow to respond. It was impressive that she didn't, and then she thought that her freshly discovered ability to lose track of time while eating Harrow out must've been also really fucking impressive. How long had she been going already? Didn't she just start? Harrowhark's absolutely disheveled state and a slight craze in eyes indicated otherwise, and Gideon still had trouble believing that getting Harrow to look like that wouldn't take actual centuries. Or maybe, just maybe, mayhaps even, Gideon's tongue was just really, really efficient at that.
And so, instead of answering to Harrow with words, Gideon just kept on eagerly kissing her cunt, one brief, sharp glare communicating to Harrow that Gideon had better things to do with her mouth instead of talking (imagine the shock from everyone who knew Gideon ever). Harrow's eyes widened as she understood her.
"Ah, then..." Her reply was interrupted by a moan Gideon tore out of her by correctly applying pressure to the entire area around her clit, sucking it into her mouth and letting it out with an obscene wet noise. Harrow's high brows curved in a frown as she shut her eyes tight, and her hand blindly found Gideon's on her thigh, squeezing her fingers weakly, and something inside Gideon dropped and splattered and made her feel all fuzzy in the instant. "Good, very good," Harrow said, breathless, "you're very good, Nav."
She threw her head back onto the pillow, corners of her mouth lifting up, and wow, okay, nobody warned Gideon that positive feedback in sex was such an unsettling thing to hear, or maybe it was because it was Nonagesimus and her stupid smile on her stupid face and her stupid, high-pitched moans, or-
Gideon forcibly focused, performing a mental shake up on her brain going into overdrive and almost leaving her motionless with desire to stare at Harrow's raptured expression forever, and so, she decisively followed the impulse to yank Harrow even closer to her. With Harrow's thighs on her shoulders, she lifted her hips with her as she sat up. As only her shoulderblades were left on the bed, Harrow threw her hand above her head for support, her thin body stretched in Gideon's hands. She didn't let go of Gideon's fingers, though, and just for that Gideon wanted to smother her with kisses.
The shift in their position made Gideon acutely aware of wet hellfire in her own pants, and she pressed her knees together, unsure of which results she wanted from that as it helped her contain the feeling but also made her insides jolt in pleasure. Worse than that, she was getting used to these levels of arousal while having a mouth full of Harrow and her taste. It was driving Gideon to the point where each response from Harrow to her actions, the shudders, the moans, the steady, warm pressure of Harrow's thighs on her cheeks and her neck, the way Harrow still pushed herself onto Gideon's tongue as if what she was ravenous for even more, Gideon felt like her own. Licking into that sweet, sweet cunt and feeling Harrow squirm on her tongue, Gideon herself felt like moaning and trembling, squeezing her knees together in desperate need for stimulation, not daring to free at least one of her hands to ease herself even just a little.
She needed both hands to hold Harrow now, as her necromancer was getting restless, her legs crossed on Gideon's back without any intention to let her go, trembling and doing her best to rub herself on Gideon's mouth. Gideon had to stop it, squeezing her buckling hips with all her might and holding her in place (she tried not to examine too closely the whine that Harrow emitted at that in the moment) and asserting that she was leading right now, burrowing her tongue between the labia and licking her thoroughly. It took almost nothing to feel Harrow, so sensitive, so wound up, instantly tensing up and stilling, ready to receive pleasure from her and allowing Gideon to do more than just teasing. Now Gideon was feeling the faint ache of fatigue in her jaw muscles and tongue, but she ignored it in favor of prepping Harrow with light flicks of her tongue over her clit, making her quiver and let out a long, tormented moan, and instantly switching to longer, closer licks to draw it out, about to take her even higher.
This repeated several times, with Gideon edging her out and finding an obscene amount of joy in listening to Harrow moaning pleadingly and whining her name in low, raspy voice, and holding Harrow down from twisting in her hands, ensuring lovingly that no accidental twitch disengaged them even for a second. She peered at Harrow and was met with her glassy stare, instantly feeling giddy from causing her to look so ravished and so beautiful, so real and grounded in her nakedness, but also ethereal and heavenly in her pleasure, so... hers.
Immensely satisfied with leaving such prominent imprint on Harrow, Gideon decisively got more serious, thirsting to discover how the Reverend Daughter would look crazed with orgasm and whispering her name. She resisted the urge to go hard, knowing that a little finesse was required to coax Harrow into moaning on the tip of her tongue nicely, repeating the fluttering motions that wound her necromancer up so much already. Soft and puffy labia parted before Gideon's tongue obediently, with Gideon's lips covering her entire clit, swollen and sensitive and defenseless as Gideon brushed her tongue up and down, completely lost in how tender and silky Harrow felt down there.
"Gideon, please!-" Harrow's voice resonated through the room as her body spasmed under Gideon's relentless pressure, her knees convulsively drawing together.
Please? Oh, she was going to please her alright. Gideon focused on listening to Harrow's breaths getting faster, each exhale accentuated with a short moan, on feeling of the muscles of Harrow's thighs wound up with tension under her fingers giving into exhausted tremors, on her taste and body heat clouding Gideon's head. The tight knot of arousal between Gideon's legs pulsated almost painfully, she felt so hot and wet there, and the sudden thought that she might see Harrow working her sharp and smart tongue on her like that, maybe even soon, knocked all breath out of her for a solid second.
Imagining things like that was too much for a moment, as right now, Harrow required her full attention, walking on the edge of her release, writhing in Gideon's iron grip, torn between two equally strong impulses to feel everything Gideon was throwing at her and get away from it and catch a break. Gideon didn't let her. She was too into it, enchanted by the intimate act of knowing Harrow like this, by what she was doing to her, there was no stopping power strong enough to sway her from it. So she kept working her tongue, lapping it at the clit, feeling as if she was being treated the best meal in the entire galaxy, and Harrow's increasingly desperate moans wordlessly telling her she did everything right were the best fucking praise she'd ever heard.
All noises from Harrow abruptly stopped, a wheezing whine breaking apart and never continuing as one singular, violent spasm twisted her body, making her turn away and hide her face in the sheets. Her thighs quaked in Gideon's hands, the staccato of tremors interrupting at each swipe of her tongue and renewing stronger. Gideon had a solitary thought echoing through her head rabidly: Don't drop it now, Nav, this is the most important moment in your entire fucking life-
Ow! Harrow's heel met Gideon's shoulderblade in an accidental convulsive kick, and it was such a Nonagesimus thing to do that Gideon wanted to laugh at her (which, in her turn, would be an incredibly Nav thing to do). The tension was leaving Harrow's body in waves as she rode her orgasm, and who'd have guessed, she came quietly, breath stalled within ribcage, thighs squeezing Gideon's head so tight that Gideon would be slightly concerned for the integrity of her neck if she didn't find it so fucking hot. Her only regret was that she couldn't see Harrow's face right now and had to be satisfied with a mess of black hair showing a very red tip of Harrow's ear adorned with her usual bone studs and the soft, smothered "Mmf- ahh" coming from Harrow's throat once she remembered to inhale.
Holding Harrow and feeling her body growing slack, Gideon kept licking her by inertia as she gently let Harrow lie down on the bed. She was abuzz with sensory and emotional overload - she, Gideon Nav, actually made Harrowhark Nonagesimus come on her mouth, and what a pleasure it was! She wanted to savor the moment as she peppered kisses all over Harrow's wet vulva, adoring how Harrow's hips jerked each time her lips touched her oversensitive, exposed clit.
"Enough, Gideon, enough, please," Harrow's beseeching voice registered, but not the meaning of her words, and Gideon only understood the pleas to stop once Harrow ran trembling fingers through her hair and pushed her head away.
For a moment, everything was still, only the sound of Harrow's deep, loud breaths growing slower punctuating that time hadn't stopped yet and the world kept on going. Resting her cheek on Harrow's thigh, Gideon felt dizzy, regretful to tear her mouth away from Harrow and realizing how her lips were all tingy from overuse and her entire lower face was wet and slightly sore from moving so much. She considered solemnly: is there a workout for tongue and jaw muscles? She'd get on it in a heartbeat.
With her head filled with such nonsense, Gideon rose up on her elbows and glanced over her handiwork: exhausted, fucked out Harrowhark lying limply on the bed. She finally turned her face to Gideon, and it looked like she had some celebratory Ninth paint on it - bright spots of blush on her cheeks with red, bitten lips, and eyes like burning coals. Gideon grinned widely at her. She looked so pretty.
"Nav," Harrow breathed in, and okay, Gideon still wasn't used to seeing Harrow's bare chest moving up and down like that, still so obscene and surreal that she instinctively awaited a couple of skeletons to emerge from under the bed and drag her away from her necromancer with judgmental chatter of their teeth.
"Gideon," her mouth spoke up because it was smart enough to bicker and snark without the involvement of Gideon's brain, letting her fully appreciate the sight of Harrow's small, perked up nipples.
For some reason, Harrow didn't indulge her in banter and decided to be agreeable.
"Gideon," she repeated after her smiling, with a reverent note in her voice, savoring her name like a treat, and Gideon suddenly couldn't cope, completely forgetting all witty remarks she could say in response.
The surge of intimate affection washed over her, and she felt like she was seeing Harrow for the first time in her life: an awkwardly naked, touch-starved and touch-repulsed girl with beautifully vicious high cheeks and brows and tenderly curved mouth with small, sharp teeth, a girl who trusted her, Gideon Nav, with herself and, by the looks of it, didn't regret her decision at all. She kissed Harrow's stomach, already knowing how she trembled from the ticklish touch and loving it, and moved up, and up until she reached Harrow's mouth to kiss it, because that's what you're supposed to do to your lover after making love to them, right? You kiss them on lips and savor the moment to remember it once it is over. Emotions overflowed Gideon as she did all that and felt Harrow's smile against her mouth.
Harrow's fingers ran through her hair and along her jaw as she deepened the kiss, surprising her cavalier with unbridled enthusiasm. Gideon let out a muffled noise as Harrow pushed her tongue between her lips, forceful and energetic, and okay, alright, maybe she underestimated Harrow's reserves and shouldn't have mistaken one moment of tenderness for complete exhaustion. She, of all people, knew better than anyone that the Reverend Daughter was a creature of incredible vindictive stubbornness that outshined even all her necromantic aptitude. And yet, giving into Harrow's advances, she was still dumbstruck. Again. She was in awe.
While Gideon was rediscovering what it meant to kiss a mouth that could kiss her back, Harrow let her hands run up and down Gideon's back, sharply reminding her that she was already missing her shirt, and- Well, fuck, now Harrow had handful of her tits, and Gideon was so, so mentally unprepared to deal with that, her brain breaking a little from forgetting how horny she was because she got overcome with tenderness and being reminded about how fucking horny she was in less than a couple of minutes. Harrow's palms felt hot, her quick fingers circling Gideon's breasts in urgent manner, like she hurried to get familiar with them in every way possible (which was, by the way, hot and very sexy of Harrow to do, Gideon thought distantly as she suppressed an embarrassing squeal when Harrow pinched one of her nipples).
Despite, by all accounts, being on top of Harrow right now, Gideon felt near paralyzed, leaning onto her elbows heavily to prevent herself from falling facedown onto the necromancer. Under her, Harrow was eagerly putting her hands all over her torso, finding the wildest places that made Gideon breathe harder (her back? really? wow!), and she bit and pulled Gideon's lower lip with her teeth with such staggering possessiveness that it made Gideon feel weak in her entire body.
"Harrow- Fuck!" She wheezed once Harrow swiftly ran her hand down Gideon's abs and promptly shoved it into her pants.
This, Gideon thought through the blind rush of adrenaline, was the thing the she's been missing all that time. She felt Harrow gulping for air as she palmed her between the legs unceremoniously, nervously dexterous fingers pressing between Gideon's labia through underwear with forceful enthusiasm and no clear idea what to do.
"You're soaked through, Nav," Harrowhark muttered against her cheek, her voice low and ominously triumphant for absolutely no fucking reason.
Her fingers crawled under Gideon's underwear, clumsy from lack of space in her pants (neither of them had attention to spare and unzip them in the moment), and Gideon instantly felt slicker, wetter from Harrow's fingertips effortlessly sliding by the sides of her clitoris pulsating hotly between them.
"Nng- hah," Gideon moaned as she jerked her hips for more stimulation, wanting to rub herself on Harrow's hand until she was sore. "No shit, Nonagesimus," she retorted by inertia, non-combative. Dizzy, she looked down between them because she wanted to know the sight of Harrow's slender hand disappearing in her pants from this angle.
Harrow's lips touched her ear.
"That's very good, Gideon," she whispered to her hotly, sharp teeth taking the ear lobe between them, and holy shit, Gideon could make peace with her back being sensitive, but now ears too?
This was getting too good. Gideon helplessly hovered above Harrow, letting her quick spidery fingers touch her, pushing the labia apart and poking at the clit, with no real knowledge how to touch Gideon yet and with Gideon not really fit for constructive feedback in the moment. She was overwhelmed with finally being touched where she ached to be touched, and the apparent lack of technique could be overlooked for a bit.
"This is very good," Harrow repeated, circling fingers around her clit, and wow, that was even better, "because-"
A sudden knock on the door interrupted her, and it was the absolute worst thing ever. Because what? Gideon looked at her, waiting for Harrow to continue while Harrow looked to the side in the general direction where the knocking came from with a such a resentful sneer that her cavalier instinctually awaited to her the sounds of someone running away in fear any moment.
Completely unimpressed by the magnitude of Harrow's death glares capable of piercing through doors, the intruder knocked again, more demandingly.
"What," Gideon managed to rasp after a long silence, realizing that Harrow was too paralyzed with rage to even talk.
"We're gathering in the dining atrium soon," the voice of the Sixth House necromancer revealed who Harrow was planning to bury under approximately seven billion kilograms of bone matter very soon.
Gideon wanted to groan in frustration. The outside world very rudely decided to remind about itself, but since it choose Palamedes as its messenger of these bad news, Gideon couldn't really get mad at him, with him being Palamedes and everything. At the same time, the very thought of talking to him while having completely naked Harrowhark under her, with Harrowhark's hand still in her pants was downright terrifying.
"Uh, cool, but we're kinda busy right now," she bleated, desperately trying to come up with a good enough reason to make Sextus leave immediately. No, jokes about his name wouldn't cut it.
"We need to decide on the next step, Ninth," Palamedes, that dim idiot, couldn't take a hint and, worst of all, he was right. There was still so much shit to do, and of course that required necromancers gathering up to discuss every little thing with their cavaliers shaking their rapiers at each other out of boredom. Or two-handers. Whatever.
She noticed how Harrow shifted her attention to her a little too late, vindictive black eyes zeroing on her as Harrow deliberately flicked her wrist and rubbed her fingers against Gideon's cunt. Oh god, Nonagesimus, why are you like this, fuck you, don't stop. She went dumb.
"Okay, man, give us ten minutes and we'll be there in all Ninth beauty just for you," she stammered, all her remaining brain power spent on keeping moans out of her voice and pushing her hips onto Harrow's hand, and none of it went into thinking about what she was actually saying. She just heard Palamedes's confirmation and footsteps fading in the distance and, mentally patting herself on the back, slumped onto Harrow, breathing heavily with a whine, yearning for her necromancer's touch.
To her great confusion, Harrow went still under her.
"Are you implying," the Reverend Daughter uttered in icy tone, "that ten minutes is how long you can last, Nav?"
Gideon blinked at her. What ten minutes?
Oh, right.
"Worked on you, no?"
Harrow's gravely look turned slightly concerned and not-slightly pitiful.
"By my estimations, you spent from thirty to forty minutes down there, Nav," she cocked her head to the side, glassy shine in her eyes indicating that she was reminiscing on these thirty to forty minutes quite fondly right now, and that sight kicked Gideon's heart up to her throat. "And quite frankly, I am insulted that you want to grant me so little time for reciprocation."
Huh. Who knew that time flew by while she was eating Harrow out.
"In my defense," Gideon said, trying to find that defense because first, she took a moment to feel rightfully proud for her stamina, second, Harrow was talking openly about eating her in return, and third, shit, yeah, okay, her thoughts were scrambling into complete nonsense again, "I can't guarantee I know what I'm talking about when you have hand in my pants, Harrow. Anyone would say something stupid."
"I wouldn't have my hand in anyone's pants, Nav," Harrow retorted with unexpected irritation, and Gideon suddenly realized how much Harrow wanted her, wanted to please her, how it hurt her to be denied of it.
Her breath stuck in her chest. She wanted to squeeze Harrow and never let her go, which was well within her physical ability in this moment.
"I appreciate that, my bone mistress," Gideon said instead and kissed her necromancer with as much gratitude and reverence as she could possibly manage.
Harrow's eyes softened just a notch, but that didn't negate her disappointed, slightly accusatory expression of her tightened mouth. She slowly pulled her hand out of Gideon's pants, deliberately making an accent of what she was depraving Gideon.
"I suppose it is possible to do it later after the meeting," she sighed demonstratively and smiled cruelly at Gideon's animal whine as Gideon realized that she was going to have to endure an indefinite amount of time around other Houses pretending she wasn't having trouble walking straight.
"I suppose," Gideon grinned, bluffing her confidence. She was so fucked.
But a spark of a distant galaxy in the void of Harrow's eyes told Gideon that her necromancer had exact same thought in regards to herself.
Then Harrow cupped her cheek and kissed her and ended the kiss just as suddenly.
"Let's not waste time then, Griddle," she said and crawled from under her, looking for her clothes.
These blighted ten minutes were spent on dressing up (with Gideon wasting most of that by staring at Harrow's skin disappearing, covered by usual layers of black) and putting the face paint because even now Harrow insisted on upholding the Ninth traditions. For once, Gideon didn't mind, finding the familiarity comforting. The indifferent white and black hid her and Harrow's lively blush, sealing the secret of shared intimacy between them, and Gideon's hands shook a little too much so Harrow had to chide her and redo the paint herself, letting Gideon gawk at her openly, memorizing the new ways of Harrow frowning at her as she gently swiped Gideon's face with the brush.
In the atrium, Gideon spaced out completely, her still raging lust muting out every outside signal aside from Harrow's voice and her black robes clinking and shuffling when she fidgeted, constantly glancing at Gideon back with suspicious looks. Each time Gideon grinned at her, assuring her necromancer silently that yes, she was imagining Harrow naked now and that no, she wasn't going to ruin Harrow's perfect Ninth vestal impression by saying or doing something overtly affectionate while others looked. And when her adept wasn't looking at her, Gideon tuned everything out, submerging fully in her recent memories of Harrow, baking in her desire for her quietly and awaiting eagerly for the meeting to end.
Despite the hot arousal making her hyperaware of the inside area of her thighs whenever she moved, Gideon felt satisfied. Full and alive, now more than ever, and looking forward to next hour with Harrowhark snarking at her and kissing her and looking at her like she was the only real thing in this universe.
Following a dumb impulse, she lowered her head to her necromancer once the discussion shifted to something that didn't seem to interest Harrow, and whispered to her intimately:
"I can still taste you on my tongue."
And spent the rest of the meeting staring proudly, adoringly at the tip of Harrow's ear reddened with mad flush.