Open Post: The Arms of the Emperor are Never Idle

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon spends her mornings in the practice yard, bright and early, despite the cold. She jogs and stretches to get her blood pumping and her muscles warm before she draws her sword, and then after drills she brings Tally her coffee, and then after that it's back to more sword—unless Tally hauls her off to some other activity, which she pretends to hate but is secretly devastatingly grateful for. The absolute worst part of this place is all the time. Endless stretches of time, with barely any work to be done.

In some ways it's just like the Ninth—except on the Ninth she knew her exits. They were few, sure, and near-impossible, but she knew them: buy her way out, fight her way out, trick her way out, or truly earn it.

None of those apply, here.

She breaks for lunch, and wanders the halls trying to locate various Clues and Mysteries that might end up giving her a way out, and mostly just finds people. More and more people.

She's not antisocial. She likes the people here, more than she's openly liked anyone in her life, individually or as a group. But a gnawing restlessness keeps her on the move rather than letting her time fill up with idle conversation as so many here do. She's always hunting for something to keep her busy, to wear out her body so that when she sleeps her mind is forced to rest rather than serving her a lovely buffet of the worst things she's ever seen and even worse things she hasn't, the things she was yoinked away just in time to miss.

Sometimes it even works.

[This post is open in perpetuity until something happens to make me close it, at which point I will edit it and say so! Feel free to find Gideon in the morning doing sword drills, or tooling around inside, opening and closing drawers and trying peel the wallpaper off in case there's flesh underneath.]

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[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon pauses to watch her, her face suddenly blank. "Nobody can survive falling from orbit," she says, with the finality of someone who absolutely knows. "Unless you're in a bio-container, and that only worked because I was a baby."

She'd already known Tally was surprisingly strong, but it's still something to see it in action. She tries to enjoy her lifting an entire couch with ease rather than thinking about her mom.

[tallyyoungblood]

"Okay, what?" Tally demands. "You're like, oh, Tally, you fall off stuff too much, and now this reveal?" She puts the couch down and then catches sight of Gideon's face. Ugh, okay, the cheering up is totally becoming cheering down. Her voice softens. "What happened? Some kind of space accident?" No one in Tally's world actually lives in space, though it's possible. Maybe in Gideon's world people fall from orbit more often.

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon shrugs, a little jerkily. "I don't know," she admits. "No one does. It's been this mystery my whole life." Not that anyone was particularly invested enough to try and solve it, other than her. "The Ninth House—that's the planet I'm from—it's mainly a big prison, up on the surface, and then the House itself is built down in this huge mining shaft, and then at the bottom is the catacombs and the Tomb. My mom—she fell down the shaft, with me, when I was one day old, but there was no, like, record of her in the prison, so she had to have come from orbit, even though she was just dead, not exploded or burned alive."

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally listens with wide eyes. "I'm sorry, Gideon-la, that sounds so beyond bogus." Tally knows she herself lived in a prison of sorts, but at least it wasn't a mining shaft. At least she had snow and, like, parents. "Do you think your mother was trying to escape from somewhere, if she left behind all her identification and jumped out of space? At least she made sure you lived, so that's something."

[ninth_cavalier]

"She must have been," says Gideon. "No one goes to the Ninth on purpose." Again, unbidden, the memory of Harrow—small and wet and pathetic and impossible to deny, ordering her to go back, to protect the Tomb she herself had desecrated—

She shakes herself. "Anyway. Doesn't matter. That whole thing is, like, way down my list of mysteries, right now." She pastes on a little grin. "Number one is how long it's gonna take before you stand a chance against me, let alone a horde of the undead."

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally stands up straight and nods. She wants to press further--who took care of Gideon if her mother is dead?--but she knows she'll have to be subtler than that.

"Alright. Tell me what to do." Unconsciously, she balances herself on an imaginary hoverboard, feet apart and offset and hands by her sides.

[ninth_cavalier]

"Right," says Gideon. "So the first thing to remember is that this?" She waves Tally's sword at her. "This isn't the weapon. You're the weapon. The sword's just the part of you that doesn't bleed." She sets the sword aside and comes to stand across from Tally. "I'm going to push you over now," she says, and then does—stepping forward and shoving, hard, at Tally's shoulders, hooking a foot behind one ankle to make sure she really goes down.

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally automatically relaxes, the way she would if she fell off a hoverboard so her crash bracelets could catch her, and is proud that she only makes a small noise of pain as she hits the ground. It's very bubbly-making, and she gives Gideon a grin. Part of her had been worried about being treated too gently, but she knows she'd already be forming ugly bruises if she wasn't pretty.

She's definitely never thought of herself as a weapon, but she kind of likes the idea. It seems unselfish somehow. Noble.

"How was that?" she asks. "I feel like I totally flopped over like a dead rabbit."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Not bad," says Gideon, because it hadn't been—the hardest part had been convincing herself not to swoop down with her and catch her head before it hit the ground, but clearly she at least has that part down, so hopefully that instinct will lessen over time. "You know enough not to get seriously hurt by the fall itself. There's two other aspects to falling, though: first, figuring out how not to get immediately skewered by whatever knocked you down—ideally by getting back up as quick as possible—and second, figuring out how not to get knocked down at all." She offers Tally her hand to help her up.

[tallyyoungblood]

"Right. Getting skewered, totally ouch-making." She lets Gideon pull her back up, her hand warm in the large, drafty room. "I guess step one is, like, backing up if you tell me you're going to push me over."

[ninth_cavalier]

Pulling Tally back up like that puts her firmly in Gideon's space. Gideon wonders, a little guilty, if the operation makes everyone in Tally's world smell this good. "Where I come from we usually call that dodging," she says, drily. "But yeah, let's try that."

She drops Tally's hand and steps back a pace. "Ready?" she asks, and then before Tally can respond she repeats her move from earlier--aiming a shove at Tally's shoulders, paired with a hook around the ankle.

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally's pretty reflexes make it easy to step out of the way, though she just kind of ends up on Gideon's left without really knowing what she's supposed to do next. Should she try to push Gideon over? She decides to go for it, coming at her from the side with both her hands out. She's nervous, though, about touching Gideon deliberately like this, and doesn't use as much power as she should.

[ninth_cavalier]

It's not a terrible effort--but Gideon sees it coming a mile off, and shifts her weight. Nothing fancy; she just crosses her arms and absolutely refuses to be moved.

[tallyyoungblood]

"Damn, you are strong," Tally complains. She takes a couple steps back, resetting. "Who taught you to fight?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"The Captain of the Ninth's guard," says Gideon. "Aiglemene." There are a lot of things she could say about Aiglemene—that she would be ashamed of soft Gideon was being with Tally; that she would kill Gideon on sight for leaving Harrow's side, magical kidnapping Mansion be damned; that she was the person who showed Gideon the closest thing to love she'd ever had, just by giving her an inch of freedom and control. "Fanatically devoted to the House, about two hundred years old,¹ but damn can she swing a blade."

¹ She's eighty.

[tallyyoungblood]

"Bubbly," Tally says, starting to circle around to try and push her over again. She knows Gideon can hear her, but maybe she can distract her enough to do something. "Is swordfighting part of, like, Ninth littlie school?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"Wouldn't know," says Gideon, and then drops into a sideways leg-sweep, trying to knock Tally's feet out from under her. "Never really went."

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally's distraction plan has totally backfired with all the thinking about Gideon as a littlie, and she falls over with a yelp.

"You didn't go to school?" she asks, pushing herself up onto her elbows. "Were you off being totally tricky instead?"

[ninth_cavalier]

"We didn't have school," says Gideon, offering her hand again. "Would've seemed pretty poor taste, I think, funneling the two of us into an empty school, all those rows of empty desks. And Harrow would've had private tutors anyway, even if there had been more kids, so I guess they just decided to toss some lessons my way, too." If Tally grabs her hand, she's going to immediately trip her over again the other way to see how she catches herself when falling forward.

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally's plan is totally working. She mentioned Harrow! Tally tries not to look excited about this.

"So there were only two of you?" she asks, taking Gideon's hand while she talks. Of course, she trips. She instinctively relaxes again, but crash bracelets definitely don't make you fall on your face, so she's not used to the angle. At the last moment she sticks her hands out, but she still catches the edge of her chin on the floor.

When she touches it, it's sticky and warm, so she knows she's bleeding. The pain makes her totally bubbly, everything around her shiny and clear. All at once it hits her that there probably isn't a non-sad reason that Gideon only knew one other child, and also, less importantly, that Harrow definitely isn't an older woman.

[ninth_cavalier]

"Ah, shit," says Gideon, immediately. She doesn't wait for Tally to take her hand, this time, just hauls her up by the arm and cups the side of her face, turning her to see how bad it is. It's hard to tell, with the blood covering it, so she casts around for something to clear it with, and comes up with one of the cloths she uses to clean and oil her sword—clean, thankfully, and tucked in one of the pouches at her belt.

She'd been distracted by all this—Ninth talk. What was she even teaching, here? How to bust your chin open on a hard floor? "Sorry," she mutters, gently blotting at the split in Tally's skin. "This is—there are probably better ways to get at the basics."

[tallyyoungblood]

Between the pain and Gideon touching her face, Tally's so bubbly it's coming close to falling off the roof. She can clearly recall everything: her conversation with Magnus, Gideon looking at her in the woods, the way it felt for David and Zane to kiss her. It hits her like another fall to the floor that with concern in her eyes and her hair falling over her forehead, Gideon is kind of good-looking.

"Um," she says. "No, it's totally fine. I've taken worse, definitely. I just need medspray. Or whatever Rusties use for medspray. And then we can keep going." She reaches up to guide Gideon's hand to catch a drop of blood that had escaped down the column of her throat. "It's bubbly-making."

[ninth_cavalier]

"Right," says Gideon, who doesn't know what medspray or whatever the Rusties might use for medspray is. She catches the drop of blood Tally is guiding her toward, and then stands there like an idiot for a minute just cupping her face before she remembers one of them has to find something like that. She puts the cloth in Tally's hand and ducks out of the room, opening doors (always opening doors!) until she finds a bathroom, in which she also finds what looks like a medical kit of some kind. She grabs it and pops back into the room. "We could maybe, like, put something soft down, too," she suggests, kicking herself for not thinking of it sooner.

[tallyyoungblood]

Tally's not too flustered to note that Gideon is also flustered, and it makes her heart kick up in her chest again. She hopes Gideon thinks her flash tattoo is just spinning from the pain. Or maybe not?

When Gideon comes back, she sorts through the first aid kit and finds old-fashioned Rusty adhesive bandages, and sticks one to her chin. It's totally not pretty-making, but Tally hopes it makes her look dangerous.

"Oh, really?" she says, heart sinking a little. "I mean, I promise I can take a little blood. Don't treat me differently just because I'm pretty. In fact, I heal really well because I'm pretty."

[ninth_cavalier]

Gideon raises her eyebrows. "I mean, if you insist," she says dubiously. "You're about to be rolling around on the ground, though, and I don't particularly want to bruise your spine or some shit, fast pretty healing or no."