Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It all started when Harrow's flight got canceled.

Well, really it had started four years earlier.

—

Harrow hadn't expected the trip to still happen.

Then again, she hadn't expected any of the last seven years to happen, either. Losing her parents, having Aiglamene move into the main house full time, having her take custody of Harrow, having her bring her foster daughter–Gideon. Having the elementary school neighbors and childhood rivals live in the same space. Under the same roof. For seven years.

At first they'd stopped trying to tear each other apart, then it had gotten worse, then it had cooled and they'd entered into a tentative friendship. The first two years of high school, they had even almost been friends. Gideon had been obsessed with watching Harrow's back and making sure she was safe whenever she wasn't trying to win accomplishments for being The Loudest Gay in the school. It embarrassed Harrow, that behavior. She stayed away from it.

Not because she had issues with someone being gay. Not because she had issues with Gideon being gay. Not because she had issues with school. But she certainly took issue to the loudness, and that had been part of what drove them apart.

The second was how, after finding out about Gideon's nth girlfriend, Harrow had finally said yes to Ianthe Tridentarius.

And then it turned out Harrow and Gideon's cross-country road trip plan for the summer was abruptly off.

—

Home got weird, after that.

It stayed weird for the next approximately year and a half, up into the culmination of their high school experience. Absolutely no one in Colma, CA had a normal high school experience, but theirs was odder simply due to their barely speaking to each other when they'd been in and out of each other's pockets growing up. Before they even lived in the same house. It only continued afterward.

And it remained weird when Harrow's flight to university got canceled.

Out of nowhere, Gideon said, "I guess we're driving across the country together after all."

—

The shock wasn't that Gideon said it, or even that Gideon cared about Harrow's timing being all screwed up. The shock was that SFO was canceling flights all over for the next week. It was apparently a weather issue; it was something that made no sense. It was fate interfering. It was the world conspiring against Harrow. She had just about made it somewhere, and who shut down repeated flights to Atlanta, for crying out loud?

"It's cool," said Gideon Nav, Harrow's nemesis and dearest—only—friend. "I can drive a truck. Then we don't have to mail any of your stuff."

"Fuck," muttered Harrow, and put her face in her hands.

Chapter Text

It wasn’t a U-Haul, and Gideon insisted on that, because she didn’t ‘want any U-Haul lesbian jokes.’ When Harrow argued that she wasn’t a lesbian, it was all her stuff and she wasn’t moving in with Gideon or anyone else in particular for that matter (only admitting there was anyone else at all she would be living with when Aiglamene pointed out she was going to university and living in a dorm), Gideon just spun her laptop around and said “I found something else.”

“Aren’t Penske trucks huge? I don’t have that much—“

“They have tiny trucks too,” Gideon argued, and Harrow didn’t find out until later why they’d ended up with a truck that was a little bigger than she was expecting (but not by much). She wouldn’t find out for some time.

About the three days they had on the road, in fact.

—

Music had been a problem from the beginning, and it was one that hadn’t changed even as they’d skipped the trip years in a row and then figured they’d never go on it. Harrow only wanted to listen to Depeche Mode, Anberlin and that one song by Dionysia—“Card Trick”—over and over (the one song changed from time to time, but right then, when they finally made it onto the trip, it was that song), and Gideon absolutely wanted to blast a combination of hard rock and bubble pop.

Shockingly, they compromised on Carly Rae Jepsen.

“I really didn’t know she was so catchy,” Harrow confessed, looking down at her lap. “But we are definitely playing the Crüxshadows next.”

“Who?”

When Harrow switched the song to “Sophia,” Gideon was the one who was surprised to find she liked it.

Harrow, who knew all the words, wasn't surprised one bit.

Chapter Text

“What do you mean there are no suites?”

“Hang on, Harrow, that’s not really a big deal—what do you mean the fitness center is closed,” Gideon interrupted, giving the hotel’s poor night auditor a much more intensely stern look than Harrow’s high-pitched irritation could have. And yet the gentleman barely blinked at her.

“Ma’am,” he said, “it’s two in the morning.”

Harrow cut back in with, “And I reserved a suite.”

“And,” said the night auditor, “you’re late, aren’t you.”

—

There was only one bed, and Harrow could’ve burst out in sick laughter when she saw this. It was a complete fiction trope come to life, and all she wanted to do was find a way to pull the beds separate, run a rope across the room and throw a sheet over it just to say she had; it was a crucial moment in classic film history, and one that had been referenced many times over. Harrow wasn’t known for being a film buff or a romance buff by any means, but even she had some appreciation for Claudette Colbert.

(Not anything like Gideon’s appreciation. When Gideon had seen Harrow watching one such film, she had immediately begun to demand to know everything about the woman on the screen, and quickly surpassed Harrow’s own knowledge. Then she complained for weeks about the lack of lesbians in films made in the thirties, and eventually got over it. Harrow still had a poster of Colbert that she’d gotten for Gideon and never given her. It had, unfortunately, not made the trip and was still back in the garage in Colma.)

“No walls of Jericho, huh?” Gideon said as she came out of the bathroom and simply climbed right into the bed.

Harrow stared at her, at how cooly she was handling everything about this trip, about the fact they were even on this trip, that they had driven for fifteen hours and were getting to a hotel at two o’clock in the morning and hadn’t killed each other, that they were now walking into an “only one bed” trope and didn’t even have a classic film reference to drop on it, and she was—

She was sleeping in boxer shorts and a sports bra, and she’d also just gone ahead and made Harrow’s classic film joke.

“No,” sighed Harrow, and went into the bathroom to change, trying not to think too hard about ... any of that. Any of what she'd just seen and experienced. It wasn't like she'd not seen Gideon in boxers and a sports bra a hundred times; it wasn't anything special. It wasn't that this trip didn't seem as awful is Harrow feared, even if it was nothing like what she'd wanted from this road trip when they had first talked about doing it. When they had been everything to each other. When Gideon was the axis around which Harrow's world tilted.

Before she'd screwed it up by only wanting to have something special, too.

—

When she woke up two hours later to go to the bathroom, still no sign of the sun in the sky, she was practically falling off the bed. And Gideon’s arm was wrapped around her tightly.

It seemed as if Harrow had squirmed away from Gideon’s cuddle attempts in her sleep and Gideon had just kept on going, until she’d gotten to the edge and one of Harrow’s feet was hanging off. Slowly, she extricated herself from Gideon, who murmured something sad and reached for Harrow once she’d stood up. When Harrow came back five minutes later, she sighed, and nestled herself back into Gideon’s reaching arms again. (Gideon, as far as Harrow knew, didn't wake until her godawful annoyingly tuned 6:30 alarm.)

Chapter Text

The fitness center was open the next morning, and if Gideon remembered the chasing Harrow across the bed nonsense, she didn't say anything about it. Breakfast was like breakfasts of old, all of a sudden; stealing each other's food insofar as Harrow wanted to eat anything at all (but if she wanted to eat anything more than the little amount she had, she wanted to eat off Gideon's overfilled plate, and Gideon kept taking single grapes out of Harrow's bowl).

"Okay," muttered Gideon as she parked the truck at the pump. "Fuel for driver, fuel for truck, pee breaks as necessary, and we're back on the road in like... eight minutes, right? Race you!" and was out of the truck, with the keys in her hand, running toward the gas station door before Harrow had even taken her seat belt off. By the time she made it inside the building, angling for the bathrooms, Gideon was already torturing the instant-cappuccino machine. As she headed back out to the truck, which really did look meekly cute next to the huge tractor-trailer at the next pump over, she saw Gideon give up on balancing the coffee and the gas pump at the same time, and set her cappuccino on the roof of the cab so she could wrestle the gas cap off using both hands.

"That was nine and a half minutes," Harrow said blandly as Gideon started the truck again, waggling her phone's stopwatch screen a little.

Gideon's topic of conversation when they got back in was unexpected to Harrow. "I'm kinda surprised, considering you two, that Ianthe decided to go somewhere else."

"Ianthe and I—aren't, anymore," Harrow said softly. "I did think you knew that. I mean, we are friends. Is that what you meant?"

"I do know that. Uh, I knew that eventually. I actually figured that out because you haven’t talked to her even once this entire time and then I eventually just asked Coronabeth—" Harrow snorted. “—But it does surprise me. Of course, it also surprised me that you were dating her in the first place, and it was weird to me that for a while it seemed like you were thinking about trying to find the same college as her because before that happened, like, hadn't it always been supposed to be you and me?" It was a good thing, probably, that she couldn't see Gideon's eyes. That she couldn't tell if this was serious or playing. They'd hated each other as young children, they'd bonded more as teenagers because they had to, and she'd never considered Gideon Nav in any other context than fire-forged friend, but they weren't really friends, and if Harrow saw her face and realized she wasn't just playing (and the cadence of her voice did make it seem as if she was more nervous than playful)—

"That," answered Harrow, pushing her own sunglasses up her nose again and turning to look out the window, "is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”

Her peaceful moment was shattered when something suddenly spilled down the windshield. Gideon, the only one of them who could actually drive the truck, let out a loud bark of laughter, mixed with the words "fucking wipers," as Harrow shrieked, realizing that Gideon could not see anything.

"Griddle!" There was light brown liquid everywhere? "Griddle, what are you doing, you can't see anything! What happened!" It managed to come out a shrill yell instead of a question, and yet was still clearly a demand for information. Gideon, who was pulling the truck onto the shoulder, was still laughing.

"It's my coffee. I left my goddamn coffee on the roof of the cab."

"You are such an idiot."

"Geez, Harrow, it's okay—"

"You can't see!"

Evidently she could see well enough, because Gideon did manage to pull the truck onto the shoulder to clean off the windshield. Rather than let her use anything from the suitcase of Harrow's, which definitely had a few towels in it, she forced Gideon to use her remaining gym towel.

"It absorbs fluid better than my terrycloth," she argued.

"You suck," said Gideon, but she listened anyway.

They drove over the coffee cup with a satisfying 'crunch' as they got back on the highway, and Gideon swore. "Now I'm even a litterbug."

"Please don't drive backward to go and get it."

"Now I kind of want to."

"Griddle."

She didn't.

Chapter Text

Halfway across Mississippi, or at least the section of it they were supposed to be driving on, they hit The Traffic: a wall of parking lot worthy of the first few hundred hours they'd oozed through Los Angeles, starting in a national forest and giving no signs of stopping. The first hour passed with Gideon only showing some signs of restlessness; tapping fingers on the steering wheel, fidgeting around in her seat, adjusting the mirrors and the vent flaps, trying to coax the anemic wheeze of the A/C into at least pretending to blow cooler air at her. As the second started, the A/C decided to overheat and go on strike, with the result of air blowing into the truck cab that was actively warm.

Gideon started talking at it, or more accurately cursing at it and sweet-talking it at the same time—which was to say, paying nowhere near enough attention to the road. Harrow, bitterly giving up, rolled down her window... and then immediately scrambled to dig her sun hat back out of the crevice behind her seat where it had somehow ended up lodging itself the last time she'd taken it off.

Then, with about seven layers of relief, she reached over and decisively shut off the cab's fan.

"Hey, what the–!" Gideon started to object, and so Harrow cut her off mid 'f—':

"Roll down your window, Griddle. The air's at least ten degrees cooler, and you're on the shady side of the truck, and I am tired of listening to your mechanically-inclined threats of vehicular molestation!"

Gideon, mouth still pursed for a curse word, just stared at her, at that, until her sunglasses had slipped halfway off her nose, a glint of gold was visible above the mirror of her lenses, and the driver of the car behind them had apparently decided to either smash their face against their steering wheel or vent all of their frustration by slamming a hand into it with all the force available to them—which was to say, only the long-blaring horn eventually redirected Gideon's focus back to the 1.82 car lengths now available for them to ooze forward into.

Twenty minutes, one mile, and three immediate-repeats of Sophia later (plus a smidge more), the truck suddenly lurched onto the shoulder and abruptly accelerated, giving Harrow the opportunity to blurt out a few curses of her own, and maybe sink her fingernails into Gideon's forearm a little. Making sure she wasn't falling asleep, maybe. Or embarking in rage—well, no, that probably was what she was doing, actually, but at least they were only illegally driving on the shoulder for less than a quarter mile, and then they were actually on an exit ramp.

To be fair, that abrupt acceleration wasn't actually all that intense; it was just that a steady rate of 10 MPH, when they'd been driving stop-and-start averaging up to... well, three miles per hour, if they managed to maintain their current rate... would obviously seem shocking and terrifying, especially when:

"Griddle, you could have said something before doing that!"

"Sorry!" Gideon answered in a far too cheerful and not-at-all-sorry voice. "I just couldn't stand it anymore, but also, feel that breeze!"

The force of air blowing in through the windows was finally enough to get the hair off the back of Harrow's neck; that much was true, and a blessing so profound that her eyes slipped closed in a moment of furtively-enjoyed near-bliss. A moment, and a short one, because: "Where are you going?"

"I have no idea! But there's going to be something here, a gas station at least — it was on the sign! — and I bet that we can detour around all that shit and make the time back, or at least the person at the gas station will have a guess as to how much further it stretches on and if it's worth going back on the highway."

"That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard," Harrow muttered with a sigh, and went back to forcing her hair up under her hat and off her neck.

It turned out that there was a US highway that was only a few miles further south, that would spin them back east again and meet up with the interstate once they were a little ways into Alabama. It also turned out that the sun kept getting worse and worse, and Harrow's hat kept getting less and less effective at keeping it off her, and she hadn't even realized she was leaning her entire body away from the window (and the sun) until it was too late: a low, breathy chuckle that was right against her ear, and then Gideon's arm was wrapped around her ribs, outright trapping her in her awkward contortion over the seatback/armrest between them.

"Well gosh, Harrow, I didn't know you felt that strongly about Mississippi detours!" she quipped, with a shit-eating grin Harrow could feel even as there was absolutely no way she could see it.

"I am going to stab you in the kidneys from here," was the immediate, flat reply that came out of her mouth and sat in the air with no input from her brain.

She wasn't prepared for Gideon to steal her hat in retaliation. She wasn't prepared for a game of keep-away in a truck cab, for pity's sake. And she definitely wasn't prepared for Gideon to have her hat out the window as they drove with a bump onto a bridge, and then:

"GRIDDLE YOU LOST MY HAT YOU HAVE TO GO GET IT BACK!!"

Her nails were digging into her palms hard enough to leave dents, if not draw blood; it was either that or grab the steering wheel after all and hang the drivers' license, but at least Gideon was pulling them off on the shoulder again, just at the end of the bridge. She hopped out of the cab and sprinted to the edge, squinting out over the water.

"Well," Gideon said philosophically, just loudly enough for Harrow to hear her from the front of the truck, "here's hoping there aren't leeches."

Two minutes later, the splash; and as Harrow glanced in the side mirror, she realized that Gideon's clothing and boots were strewn across the landscape between the truck and the river, clearly showing how she'd stripped down to just her sunglasses as she went.

"You have got to be kidding me," Harrow muttered, and carefully picked her way along the crumpled garments until she could see entirely too much of Gideon Nav in the surprisingly clear water of the river, swimming with powerful strokes toward a black blob floating downstream that Harrow earnestly hoped was actually her hat. "You're insane!" she hollered through cupped hands, the better for Gideon to hear her.

"The water's nicer than the air!" floated back to her, as Gideon kept on without turning back.

"Well, in that case," Harrow muttered, and strung the truck's keys on her hair tie, wrapping it around her wrist to keep it safe, and made it to the tree line before grimly shedding her own clothing in the shade and then gasping at the miraculous chill of the water.

All too soon, of course, Gideon was back in her space, splashing in and ruining her peaceful moment with her smirks and eyebrow expressions. "Well, there's one for the bucket list," she crowed.

"What are you talking about."

"Skinny dipping in the river with someone? Isn't that on yours?"

"That is the stupidest—"

"—thing you've ever heard, yeah. I know."

(Possibly the stupidest thing they'd ever done was jumping naked into an unknown river with only one clean towel.)

Chapter Text

Once they crossed the state line into Georgia, things abruptly got more intensely emotional again in a way Harrow didn't really want to think too hard about. But they were getting closer and closer to Gideon not being there, and it was starting to feel like there was a hole tearing into Harrow's stomach.

She was pretty sure it wasn't an ulcer.

She was pretty sure it was something worse.

"You don't have to immediately turn around and leave again," Harrow spoke up quietly, enough she was lucky Gideon didn't comment about having to strain to hear. "I know you can't stay in the student building with me, but I …" She was scared, to be perfectly honest. Not just scared to be in a dorm, even in her single room carefully signed off upon by her psychiatrist. But, she was realizing, also scared to be without Gideon down the hall. 

Gideon got it. Gideon nodded. They'd certainly been growing closer again, and Gideon got everything that came out of Harrow's mouth—and even some things that didn't. She didn't make her say things. Harrow appreciated it.

She appreciated Gideon enough she kind of wanted to vomit, actually. 

"I was thinking about moving here, actually," Gideon said.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Harrow answered as if on cue, and Gideon grinned, then pushed her sunglasses up her nose again, as they'd slipped down a bit so she could (try to) meet Harrow's eyes. 

"No, really! Let me show you, I found something back when I found out you were coming here, I had the best idea, the other half of the truck might happen to be full of my stuff already—"

Chapter Text

So that ended up being official. Being real. It turned out that Gideon had planned to move there all along, and Harrow still wasn't sure what to think about that fact. Except that she was grateful. Immensely, shockingly grateful. She'd know someone. And it was Gideon. And Gideon didn't just completely fucking hate her after all.

The last hour and ten minutes of their drive, which of course they spent unpleasantly damp, Harrow's feeling of unease began to tighten in her stomach. So maybe Gideon was moving to Atlanta also. Maybe she was following her dream of becoming a bladesmith. She'd been so happy about the place she told Harrow about—"the place with the master bladesmith I'm studying under is literally called the Goat and Hammer, Harrow. The Goat and Hammer!"—and she had been planning this surprise the whole times nd she'd said how much she didn't want to leave Harrow, and it set her head spinning so much the entire rest of the trip she couldn't have even been that mad about the impromptu swim.

They laughed the entire time they brought Harrow's stuff up to her dorm room, trying not to get weird looks from other moving in freshmen. The RA, a girl on crutches (the sort that were meant for long term use, which left Harrow with questions she had been taught not to actually ask) called Dulcinea, just grinned at them the entire time after introducing herself. Harrow had said Gideon was her friend. She wondered if people believed her; if people thought they were best friends, or sisters, or something that Harrow still didn't want to think about.

"She's my nemesis," Harrow told Dulcinea, with a straight face.

"I can tell," the resident assistant replied, wriggling her nose affectionately at them a la Samantha in Bewitched. "Hope we'll be seeing your duty-sworn battles around campus sometimes."

And then just like that it was over.

It was definitely time to go their separate ways; Harrow wasn't as excited about it as she'd thought she'd be.

In fact, she was dreading it, a little.

Until the part where Gideon said, "I'll see you tomorrow, sugarlips," and waited for Harrow's growing-thematic line about stupidity—but it wasn't the stupidest thing she'd ever heard, not at all, and instead Harrow smiled before turning around to head back into the building.