Chapter Text
The nurse was still talking. Still flipping through pages of Harrow's chart. Harrow hadn't heard a thing she said in the last five minutes. Not with those two words bouncing around her head.
“ Who did you call?”
“Gideon...” the nurse flipped back several pages, “Gideon Nav.”
“Why?”
“It was the only number we had. You were unresponsive, Ms. Nonagesimus, she was defacto your emergency contact.”
“Don’t call me that!”
The nurse looked up at her. Outside her room the security guard straightened up in his chair. She hated the expressions they both wore; long-suffering pity. Why couldn't they just leave her alone? She forced herself to relax, to let the restraints fall slack against the uncomfortable stretcher.
“You shouldn't have called her.”
“Would you like me to call her back?”
Harrow nearly laughed at that. Five years without speaking to one another just for Harrow to have someone else call Nav not once but twice in one weekend. As if she hadn’t done enough already.
“Don’t bother,” she muttered. It’s not as though Gideon was going to show up. Best-case scenario she’d come to spit in Harrow’s face one last time. “It doesn't matter. I'm fine now, you can let me go.”
“Ms. Non- sorry, Harrowhark, we can't discharge you until you speak to a doctor and work out your care plan going forward. None of us want to see you right back here again.”
“I spoke to a doctor already.”
“A psychiatric doctor.”
“This is ridiculous,” hissed Harrow, “I am fine .”
“You very nearly died,” said the nurse, as if it mattered.
“Well you should have let me!” Harrow snapped, “then this wouldn't be an issue!”
The nurse sighed and put the chart aside.
---
Gideon Nav was having a weekend. She wasn't sure if it was good or bad yet. It was definitely interesting. She’d nearly got into a fight at work, which she would have won if it came down to it thank you very much. She'd placed third in the longsword group at the latest regional fencing tournament and then got completely hammered with Pash afterwards. She'd met a girl who was absolutely one of the hottest people she's ever seen, besides herself obviously, and also absolutely impossible to get a read on.
And now this.
Now Pash was holding the phone out to her and saying words that made no sense.
“Say that again.”
“It's the hospital,” her cousin repeated slowly, “calling for you, Gideon Nav, about Harrowhark Nonagesimus.”
“What? Why?”
“I don't fucking know, dumbass, is my name Gideon Nav? Do you want me to tell them to fuck off?”
Yes, was the first thought that popped into her head which is why it shocked her so much to hear her voice say, “no, I’ll talk to them.”
This got her a weird look. Not the usual Pash weird look that said ‘fucking moron' but a new Pash weird look that almost said ‘you sure?’ She didn't actually say it, though. She handed the phone off to Gideon and stomped away.
“Hello?” said Gideon in lieu of ‘what the fuck?’
“Hello, is this Gideon Nav?” asked the pleasant sounding woman on the other end in her best customer-service voice.
“Yeah,”
“Good afternoon Ms. Nav. My name is Sarah and I'm calling from St. Mary's Hospital with regards to Ms. Harrowhark Nonagesimus.”
“What the fuck,” said Gideon.
“I’m sorry?”
“Sorry,” Gideon cleared her throat and shook the image of Nonagesimus lying on a table in the morgue from her head, “I mean, why? What happened?”
Why me?
“Ms. Nonagesimus is in the Emergency Department currently. I am calling to inform you, as her emergency contact, that-”
Gideon hung up. She regretted it instantly. Regretted not telling the nurse to pull the plug or whatever she’d been asking about. Five years, five fucking years she’d been free of this. She wasn't about to get dragged back into another one of Harrow's sick mind-games. She felt hot, feverish. She was going to throw up.
The phone rang again. She stared at it. Her hand was already on it. It kept ringing.
“Pick it up, fuckass!” shouted Pash from the kitchen.
She picked it up.
“Ms. Nav? It's Sarah from St. Mary's again, I think we lost connection.”
“Yeah.”
“As I was saying, we have Harrowhark Nonagesimus here at the moment and I am calling to let you know that she is currently unresponsive.”
Good , thought Gideon. Her mouth said “okay.”
“We also don't appear to have a home address for her, would you happen to have one?”
Sixty-Six Hell Avenue, the Underworld, thought Gideon. Her idiot mouth said something completely different.
---
“Hello Harrowhark. Is Harrowhark okay?”
Harrow rolled over on the stretcher to assess this new arrival. He was on the taller side of average and dressed like someone's idea of a fisherman. His salt-and-pepper curls hung down around his ears and his beard was haphazardly trimmed in a way that Harrow was sure must have taken extreme precision. He gave her a warm smile that wrinkled his face pleasantly and did not quite reach his eyes.
She was about to tell him to go away until she saw the doctor’s badge hanging from his sweater. So she told him to fuck off instead.
He just laughed and said, “yes, they did say you were having a rough day. I'm Dr. Gaius, John to my friends. I'm one of the psychiatrists here. Your nurse asked me to come say ‘hi’ and check in with you.”
Harrow rolled back onto her side and pulled her legs up. What was this insistence on torturing her? At least they’d taken the restraints off finally.
A chair scraped across the floor lightly and she heard the doctor take a seat. He didn't say anything else, he just started reading something.
It's a game, she thought, a ploy to get me talking. It's not going to work.
Fifteen minutes of teeth-grinding silence interspersed with the sound of pages turning later, however, she turned her head slightly and said, “what are you doing?”
“Waiting,” said Dr. Gaius.
“Don't you have better things to do?”
“Not at the moment,” he replied cheerfully.
She turned her head away. She could outlast him.
“I’m not going to talk to you,” she said, ten minutes later.
“That’s fine,” he replied in that same, infuriating tone.
“What are you even reading?” she hissed after another five minutes of silence.
“Your chart.”
She rolled over to face him. He had a little pair of reading glasses balanced on his nose. Insufferable. “ Why do you have my chart?”
“I’m your doctor. One of your doctors, I suppose at this point.”
“You're not even a real doctor,” she needled. Clearly he wasn't going to leave unless she gave him a good reason.
“What makes you say that?”
“Psychiatry is made up. It's not real medicine.”
“Interesting,” he went back to reading.
“My chart can't be that long! I’ve barely been here three days.”
“Do you remember your last doctor’s appointment?”
Harrow tried to burrow into herself. She did, no matter how much she tried to forget.
“I see,” said Dr. Gaius, “well, I won't retread old ground but you went to one of our satellite locations.”
“You have my whole medical record?”
“There's a bit of a gap here which you could fill in for me-”
“No.”
“-fair enough, another time. Yes, I have your medical history up to about age eighteen and then starting again three days ago.”
“Go. Away.”
“Harrowhark, do you want to get better?”
What an insane question. What was she supposed to say? ‘No?’ They’d send her straight back to the psych ward faster than she could blink.
She settled for saying ‘yes’ under her breath.
“Good,” said Dr. Gaius and his magic ears, “but I can't make you better by myself. I need you to help me. And you can start by telling me a little bit about what's going on.”
“ Nothing is going on,” Harrow protested.
Dr. Gaius sighed and pushed the glass door closed, muting the noise from the rest of the emergency department. “Harrowhark, I have here a rough estimate of what medications were in your system when the ambulance brought you in. Do you need me to read it for you?”
Harrow shook her head.
“I also have here a report that you,” he paused to look at her over his glasses, “ bit a nurse. With your teeth.”
“They tied me to this bed!”
“She was trying to help you. All of us are trying to help you.”
“No you aren't!” Harrow’s voice cracked. She couldn't stand this, couldn't stand being lied to and patronized anymore, “why do you keep pretending?! Just let me die!”
Why couldn’t they just tell her the truth? ‘Harrowhark Nonagesimus, the world is better without you in it.’ Simple and blunt. She could not fathom for the life of her why they maintained this pantomime, why they wasted so much time and effort on some sick joke that she could not see a punchline for. Was there some perverse enjoyment to be had from pretending she was a person? Perhaps it simply looked bad to let her rot where others could see, perhaps her mistake had been to die where she was visible. No matter. The doctor would find an excuse to leave her now. Everyone did when the truth came out.
Instead, he wrote something down and then said, calmly, “Harrowhark, do you believe you deserve help?”
---
“Hey,” said Gideon weakly. The security guard didn’t seem to hear. She cleared her throat and adjusted her sunglasses. “Hey,” she tried again. He looked up at her. He looked at her sunglasses, her leather jacket, her boots. She flashed him a smile, she knew she looked badass.
He frowned back. She faltered. Maybe badass was not the right look for a hospital.
“Can I help you, miss?”
“Uh,” Gideon had not thought she would get this far. She had been positive that her good sense would return on the drive over and she’d go get a sandwich instead of something. Now she was standing in the waiting room of St. Mary's, surrounded by sick people, trying to rationalize the statement ‘I’m here to see Harrow.’
“If you're feeling sick you can talk to registration and they'll get you sorted out,” said the guard helpfully. When this did not spur her to action, he gestured to another desk behind a plexiglass safety window.
“No!” said Gideon, hurriedly. She hated hospitals, “I’m here to see someone.”
“Ah, okay. Provider or patient?”
“Huh?”
“Do they work here or are they a patient?”
“Patient,” she answered before adding, “I think.”
“Okay. And the patient's name?”
Gideon sighed. This was ridiculous. This was some stupid game. She was going to say the name and it was going to turn out Harrow had never been here and this was just an excuse to make Gideon look dumb.
Harrow always lies.
The guard was looking at her expectantly, though. There was no way out, she was committed. Gideon braced herself and said the name. Instead of laughing, however, the guard looked at something behind his desk and said, “okay, and your name?”
“Gideon. Nav.” Gideon deflated slightly.
“One second please, Ms. Nav.”
“Gideon is fine,” she mumbled. He wasn't listening, he was talking into a radio.
“You can head on back through those double-doors, take a left and follow that hallway along. Her nurse is waiting for you.”
Gideon followed these directions in a daze. She was slowly coming to grips with the unlikely possibility that Harrow really was in the hospital. That she really was sick and they really had called Gideon.
Maybe she died, thought Gideon, horrified. She'd promised to marry whoever killed Harrow and she was not ready for married life. Especially not with whatever priest had managed to exorcise Harrowhark Nonagesimus.
She found herself at another desk, saying the name to another person, confident that this one would reveal the scam. But she didn't. She called over an exhausted woman in blue scrubs.
“You're Gideon?”
‘The one and only,’ Gideon barely restrained herself, “yeah.”
“Your friend Harrowhark? She's a bit of a mess right now.”
“Is she okay?” asked Gideon, followed hastily by “she's not my friend.”
“She's better than she was forty-eight hours ago, but no.”
“What happened?” Gideon asked, more out of morbid curiosity than any concern for Harrow.
“I can't discuss that with you, unfortunately. Once the doc is done speaking to her, feel free to ask her yourself though.”
“I don't want to talk to her,” said Gideon automatically.
This got her a look . Not the Pash kind of look that said you were being stupid and she wasn't wasting breath on you. It was the kind of look that made her think she was being held after class.
“Why did you come here, then?”
Gideon did not have an answer for that. She opened her mouth to say something. Anything. To her credit, the nurse gave Gideon a solid ten seconds before pointing her to a chair and saying, “you can wait there.”
And so she waited. She waited and she stared at the room the nurse had indicated and she tried to come up with an answer that wouldn't make her sound like the kind of pathetic wet idiot who came running the second the girl she hated more than anything called.
“Griddle?”
It was hollow and weak and tired and it made Gideon's head snap around so hard she nearly broke her neck. There she was, right past some twerp in a terrible sweater. Harrowhark Nonagesimus. She looked a mess; her hair had grown out into shoulder-length tangles, whatever clothes she had had been changed out for paper pyjamas, and she was covered in dirt and grime. Her face was the same old collection of sharp angles and thin lines with two pools of almost-midnight-black except that it was twisted around in unfamiliar ways. It took a second for Gideon to work out that she was not seeing spite or anger or hatred or any of the other usual Nonagesimus emotions. She was seeing pure, abject terror .
---
It wasn't until Dr. Gaius offered Gideon a handshake that Harrow realized the other girl was really there, that she was not some apparition come to remind Harrow of her many, many failings. As her brain settled and she looked closer she saw other signs that should have tipped her off; her Gideon wore faded hand-me-down sweaters, not leather jackets. Her Gideon’s dying-ember hair was close-cut and neat like a sunset through clouds, not vibrant and wild like a bonfire. Her Gideon wore poorly-applied makeup, not sunglasses.
Her Gideon never looked at her.
This Gideon hadn't stopped.
It was hard to tell under the glasses but Harrow could feel those eyes on her. Appraising. Judging. She felt them even when Gideon turned her head to Dr. Gaius. She wanted to hide from them, needed to hide from them. She pulled her knees up against her chest but was too scared to look away. The moment she looked away the illusion would be broken and Gideon would be gone again.
Gideon who shouldn't be here in the first place. Gideon who she had summoned wholly by accident. Gideon who had always been too nice for her own good. Gideon who would see her and pity her and let her back into her life. Gideon who would get hurt again and again and again and blame herself every time.
Gideon who was walking into her room. Harrow scooted back as best she could. Gideon had taken her glasses off, revealing those sun-bright golden eyes full of emotions that Harrow could not place. Concern? Confusion? Hatred? Sorrow?
---
“Griddle,” said Harrow again, cold and sharp as a knife, “what are you doing here?”
There was the old Harrow. Gideon toyed with the arms of her glasses and gave it a moment to see if the scared child would return. The doctor had said she was behaving erratically to which Gideon had replied ‘what’s new?’ He’d made a note of that.
“You tell me,” said Gideon. Harrow wouldn't meet her eyes.
“The nurse made a mistake. You can go.”
That was it. No ‘you look good today, Gideon,’ or a ‘sorry for vanishing for five years, Gideon.’ Not even a ‘thanks for coming to see my corpse, Gideon.’
She really hadn't changed one bit.
“Nope,” said Gideon, stepping closer, “no. We're not doing that. The hospital called me for you for some reason and I came the fuck down here for some reason and you owe me some answers.”
Harrow turned away from her.
“Fucking figures,” Gideon snorted. She dragged a chair over and sat down. When Harrow didn’t react, she put her boots up on the stretcher. “I’m not leaving until you talk to me.”
This, at least, made Harrow flinch.
“Why?” she said, eventually.
Gideon was ready this time. She was cool. She was suave. She was totally not affected by this insane situation. She said, “I’ve got nothing better to do right now.”
“I answer your questions,” Harrow’s voice was slow and deliberate, “and then you leave.”
“Deal,” said Gideon, who didn’t want to be here anyways.
Harrow’s shoulder tensed but she still wouldn’t turn to look Gideon in the eye. “What do you want to know?”
“What happened? I mean, why are you in the hospital?”
There was silence. Fallen at the first hurdle. Gideon was about to poke Harrow with the toe of her boot when the other girl whispered, “I tried to kill myself.”
“Jesus christ, Harrow, what? Why?”
“Why not,” said Harrow numbly.
“Fuck, I’m sorry, I didn’t-”
Harrow’s hand clenched the sheet on her bed. “Next question.”
Gideon’s train of thought was now firmly derailed. She had had questions but-
Harrow had always seemed so-
She’d never been in the best mental state but-
“Next question, Nav.”
Now it was Gideon’s turn to sit in silence.
“If there’s nothing else, get out.”
“Are you homeless?” asked Gideon quickly.
“Yes.”
“For real?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I said you could ask questions, Nav, not waste my time with pointless apologies.”
“Jesus, excuse me for-”
“ Next question, Nav.”
Gideon clenched her teeth. Harrow was trying to get under her skin. She was trying to get Gideon to give up and leave. Gideon wasn’t going to give up and leave. Gideon deserved answers and god damnit she was going to get answers.
“Why me?”
“Ask the nurse.”
“The hospital didn’t just-”
“Next question.”
“No. Fuck no. The hospital didn’t just pick me at random from the phone book. Why did they call me?”
“They had your phone number.”
“What do you mean they ‘had my phone number’? Where did they get it from?”
Harrow seemed to shrink at this. She pushed her face down into the mattress and pulled her limbs in like a dying insect.
“Answer me, Harrow.”
“I had your number,” whispered Harrowhark, “they found it in my pocket.”
“What?” a chill ran down Gideon’s spine. This was some kind of trick, some kind of game. She wanted to get up and leave then and there but that’s just what Harrow wanted. “Why?”
“Just go, Griddle,” said the lifeless shell of Harrowhark Nonagesimus.
And go she did. She walked out on Harrow just like Harrow had walked out on her and just like Harrow always would walk out on her. It was stupid to even try. Why had she even come down here when she knew it was going to end just like this.
Why did Harrow keep a copy of her phone number?
“Ms. Nav?” Dr. Gaius touched her arm lightly as she passed by, “can I speak with you for a moment?”
---
Harrow watched the shadows moving on the wall. She couldn’t turn away. The door had closed, the footsteps had faded, but the moment she turned around she knew what she would see. Better to stay right here where the space behind her was a mystery. She pulled the sheets up against her chest and dug her nails in.
It took an hour by her reckoning for them to try again. The door swung open and two people walked in. Maybe they would take her away now.
“Hello again, Harrowhark,” said the obnoxious voice of Dr. Gaius, “how are you feeling?”
She didn’t dignify that with a response.
“That’s alright, we can talk some other time. For now, I just need you to listen. We’re running out of options to treat you here, unfortunately, but I’d prefer to avoid placing you inpatient if possible. Fortunately, I think this is a perfect opportunity for a new program I have been working on. With your consent, of course.”
“Lobotomy, I hope,” said Harrow.
“Not quite,” Dr. Gaius laughed, “simply put, I believe that people recover better in a familiar environment with friends and family. We will place you in such an environment on condition that you regularly attend therapy and your friend will receive a stipend to help with bills and such. It’s a win for everyone.”
Fresh horror washed over Harrow. She turned to see and, sure as the sunrise, Gideon Nav was standing by the door. All she had to do was say no. Just say no. Just drive Gideon from her life for the second time in the same evening and everything would be well.
---
They put her meagre possessions in a bag for her. A wallet and a rosary. She would have put them in her pockets but her clothes were gone. ‘Unsalvageable’ they said, so they gave her a paper bag for her troubles. She clutched it to her chest and followed Gideon out of the hospital. They didn’t speak the whole way back to Gideon’s apartment.