Three days before Gideon’s planned escape attempt, she failed to intercept a bucket of bone dust that landed square on Harrowhark Nonagesimus’ head. Or, more accurately, she didn’t bother to stop it, because it was funny and Harrow was a horrible hell-bitch who deserved to have buckets dropped on her everywhere she went.

Two days before Gideon’s planned escape attempt, she was summoned to the Reverend Daughter’s rooms and told she’d been the victim of a horrific curse and/or necromantic accident, not to tell anyone, but to be prepared to serve her House as she had been bound to by the unfortunate circumstances of her birth. Gideon had said, “If she’s turned into a skeleton it’s no big deal. No one will notice the difference,” and had been chased out of the room.

One day before Gideon’s planned escape attempt, she found out that the curse and/or necromantic accident was pornographic in nature. All of the Ninth House’s most devoted dusty bone douches ushered her in and then locked the door behind her. And Gideon, for some dumb reason, let them.

“I still think it was the bone dust.”

“Why would you ever assume bone dust would cause rampant, out-of-character lust leading to a desperate need to have sex with a human being or risk death?”

“You know, reasons.” For one, Harrow had wanted to bone down with her before this. Gideon was very sure of that, because Gideon had been having sex dreams about Harrow for a humiliatingly long period of time. Obviously there was no way she was alone in that. “Wait, are you saying you’d rather fuck a skeleton?”

Harrow gave Gideon a flat, ‘of course I’m saying I’d rather fuck a skeleton’ kind of look, the effect of which was totally ruined by her sweaty brow and shaky hands. “Holy shit,” Gideon said, unable to avoid the truth despite how completely gross it was, “you already tried.”

“Are you going to help me or not.”

“I mean, I think I kind of have to, if I don’t want to end up in a crypt. That was the implication when they dragged me in here.”

“Your bones will serve the Ninth long after your substandard mind and spirit have departed,” Harrow said, “as I’ve told you before, Griddle. But Aiglamene has told me I can’t compel you to - to -”

“Fingerblast the curse out of you?”

“Fix my problem.”

Gideon stood very still while the bones embedded in Harrow’s bedroom wall shook with her rage. Or arousal? Gross. Okay, fine, this was fine. “What’s in it for me?”

Harrow’s pinched face got even more skeletal somehow. She looked like a mummified grandmother sucking a lemon. A horny mummified grandmother. “The Ninth House’s gratitude and my personal thanks.”

“Try again.”

“I’m not going to play this game with you. How am I supposed to know what your diseased mind thinks is worthwhile payment for solving this problem?”

“You know what I want, Nonagesimus.” To leave the Ninth and never look back. To serve in the Cohort and make Harrow eat it when Gideon won a zillion medals and the Emperor Undying himself commended her and hotties throughout the galaxy begged her to join their orgies. She’d been planning to escape anyway, but this - a clean deal - was way better.

“Yes,” Harrow said, her voice inexplicably throaty; then she bit her lip and said, “I mean, yes, I know. Fine, you can have it. I’ll deliver you to the Cohort myself.”

“Before I so much as sniff your cooch -”

“Disgusting -”

“- I want it in writing.”

It was touch and go just then. Gideon really thought Harrow might try her hand at murder. She turned bright red, and her hands flexed, and Gideon had a weird dizzying moment where all she could think of was how crazy she’d be if she had been dosed with some kind of sex curse, how bad it would be to be achingly wet, nipples hard, needing someone to touch you. Needing Harrow to touch her.

But only because the other candidates were, of course, dead or so old they might as well be dead. Right. “A recording is fine too.”

“I could claim it was fabricated.”

“Well, I’m not sure you’re in your right mind to be signing a contract either.”

She kind of regretted pointing that out. Harrow’s eyes widened, and she looked at Gideon like she wanted to pull her bones right out of her body. Gross. This whole thing was the absolute worst. “Fine, then. Come here.”

“At no point did I agree to let you tell me what to do.”

“Quit being obtuse. Do you really think you can solve my problem from across the room?”

Gideon had actually read an entire erotic comic about basically that, but she didn’t think Harrow would want to hear about Wayward Women on Planet Fuckbot. “Fine, keep your shirt on. Or don’t, actually; I know you’re a crusty bone-fucky virgin.”

“I’m not -”

Gideon paused midway through unbuttoning her pants, having discarded her shirt while trying not to think about Harrow’s virginity. “What?”

“Nothing,” Harrow gritted out, sounding about as sexy as a midnight service. Bad comparison, actually, Harrow probably preferred those to jerking off.

“Shirt,” Gideon reminded her, and finished getting naked.

Harrow got undressed with profound reluctance. It was pretty obvious why as soon as Gideon saw her. Stripped of her layers of clothing, she wore only some bones and a light sheen of sweat. It was pretty sexy; it was awful. Gideon felt sort of queasy just looking at her.

“You should take the bones off, too.”

Harrow crossed her arms over her tits - her tiny, definitely subpar tits - and glared. “No.”

“You don’t know what actually boning down will do,” Gideon pointed out. “Since you’re cursed, and a virgin, and being a curgin -”

“Oh, spare me.”

“- means maybe you’ll stab your own stomach open. You don’t know. And I’m not going to risk my own skin saving you.”

“Isn’t that what you’re doing right now?”

“Getting laid is different.” And that’s totally all this was, getting laid. Doing Harrow a favor so she could finally leave the Ninth House and all its creepy bullshit behind. “So, uh, spread ’em.”

“Seriously?”

“Hey, one of us has done this before and it’s not you.”

“Who would you even have done it with.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

Gideon was lying, of course, but if there was one thing she was confident about, it was that the Reverend Daughter hadn’t so much as peeked at the most refined pornography the houses had to offer in her whole withered hell-demon life. Who had the time when there were skeletons to animate and Gideon to torture? Not to mention all her duties as the head of her family. She might’ve squirted all over the Locked Tomb a time or two, but that counted even less than titty mags. Of the two of them, Gideon was the relative non-virgin and she was the one who wasn’t slimed to the knees because of a dank necromancy curse. She had the obvious upper hand.

“I hope you fall into a necromantic paradox and are torn limb from limb by a flesh magician,” Harrow snapped, and spread her legs.

“Oh shit,” Gideon said. She stumbled forward even as it occurred to her that Harrow’s dank curse might actually be contagious. It didn’t matter just then. The Lady of the Ninth House might be a dried-up hag with a personality several degrees worse than most of the skeletons on her cursed planet, but her thighs were - okay, fine, twiggy beyond all understanding. Pathetic, actually; how did she even climb stairs? But between her thighs - well. Dark hair, wiry and unremarkable. And all the usual anatomy, which looked pretty normal to Gideon’s (totally expert) eye. But -

She was so wet. Her thighs glistened, and trembled a little when Gideon reached out. The unremarkable hair was soaked, and she was pink and swollen -

“If you don’t touch me, Nav, I swear you won’t make it out of this room alive.”

Something narrow, hard, and cold poked Gideon’s shoulder. She tore her eyes away from all of it to see -

“Is that a fucking bone.”

“It’s a radius and an ulna, fused and transformed. Take it or leave it.”

“I’m going to take it and use it to give myself a concussion so powerful I forget I ever knew you,” Gideon said. “Just - okay. No, okay.” She grabbed the fused bone dildo and tossed it on the floor. “How do you feel about foreplay?”

“Don’t -”

But it was too late. Gideon was on terrible autopilot now, and maybe had a sexually transmitted curse. She kissed Harrow before Harrow could tell her not to, and Harrow reached up and grabbed Gideon with a grip that was frankly embarrassingly weak, but unfortunately worked for Gideon anyway. Harrow had mean fingers with little scratchy nails, and she used them to clutch Gideon’s hair and scrape down Gideon’s back as Gideon sucked on her tongue.

“Disgusting,” Harrow said when they finally broke apart to breathe. “You kiss like a lecherous uncle.”

“You’d know.” Gideon reached down and pinched one of Harrow’s nipples.

She’d done it to get Harrow to shut up. It failed, because Harrow screamed. Her back arched; her little noodle arms braced against the bed. She didn’t look beautiful or even hot, really, except that her hair was sticking to her skull. Her face, humiliatingly bare of skull paint, flushed along her jaw. Her breath stuttered as she bit her lip, clenching her hands into (really bad, ineffective. Embarrassing) fists.

She was so turned on it seemed like she might start levitating, and that really was hot, even if it was Harrow.

“Do that again, you useless - can’t you see I like it.”

Gideon stared down at the Reverend Daughter, who despite being in no position to make demands had grabbed Gideon’s hand and returned it to her tit. She stared at her pointy face and bony clavicle and the drop of sweat making its way down towards her armpit. She stared at her thighs and her - mound??? - and her flexing toes and her alarmingly narrow hips.

Something horrible, wet and slimy like a rotted cabbage, flip-flopped over in Gideon’s chestal region.

At a loss, Gideon flexed the hand Harrow had moved, finding her nipple again and scraping her callouses against it. When Harrow started panting again, she leaned down and kissed her.

“Keep going,” Harrow said, breaking away to writhe against Gideon some more. Gideon took advantage of her distraction to kiss her neck, then drag her teeth over Harrow’s neck. It was more than a little alarming to watch the skin darken where Gideon bit her, and it was worse to hear Harrow mewling - to feel triumphant and want to do it again. Gideon’s sex fantasies about Harrow had always been way less involved than this.

But she’d already committed to the bit. She gave Harrow a hickey they’d be able to see in an observational satellite, and just as Harrow started up with the dire threats again, she slid a hand between her thighs.

Harrow made a sound like a dying cat, which was somehow sexy. Gideon couldn’t think. Harrow was whimpering - finally! - and Gideon’s hand was so fucking wet, and Harrow was pushing herself back down onto her fingers - ill-advisedly, she was definitely going to feel that tomorrow -

Fuck, fuck, fuck. She was going to feel Gideon tomorrow.

The whole thing was awful. Harrow might die if they didn’t do it, and Gideon had really been holding out hope for a stacked commanding officer who’d never done a necromantic theorem in her life. Harrow was embarrassing even when she was covered in face paint and wrapped in bones, and now she just looked vulnerable the same way a slug you poured salt on might be. Gideon felt desperate not to hurt Harrow, desperate to hurt Harrow, and just plain desperate.

And horny. So, so horny, a problem Harrow apparently wasn’t interested in at all.

To keep from thinking, Gideon decided it was time to try muffdiving. She moved between Harrow’s legs, pushing them further apart with her shoulders. Harrow’s stomach tensed as she sat up, glaring. “What exactly do you think you’re doing.”

“Oral,” Gideon said, and spread Harrow out with her fingers, leaning down to lick her.

Weird, weird weird. Weird in general and weird in all Harrow’s gross specificity. Her pointy fingers had returned to Gideon’s hair; her skinny thighs clutched Gideon’s head. Gideon had to press her legs together to keep from doing something really humiliating, like asking for the bone dildo again.

Harrow wasn’t too impressed, either. “Give me your fingers again. Lick harder. Do not bite me. Wait - do that again. Damn it, Griddle, keep up a rhythm - oh, fuck -” On and on. Her voice got high and thin and she jerked against Gideon, clenching down on her fingers.

It was better than disarming an opponent, better than the one time she’d broken atmo before they caught her and dragged her back to the Ninth. Gideon cared about a lot of things, like swords and the Cohort, but she had been so pathetically horny for so long that Harrow coming on her fingers felt like the culmination of all her goals and then some.

For a moment Gideon could only sit there, Harrow fucking her face as she screamed her way through a necromantic-cursed orgasm. Then she sat back on her heels, feeling dizzy with it, like she’d run too long without hydrating. She expected Harrow to kick her out. She’d already decided that when it happened, she’d go back to her room and jerk off until she was sore and then, somehow, forget about all of this. She was so busy visualizing a world where she’d forgotten the exact color of Harrow’s nipples that she almost didn’t notice Harrow reaching out to grab her again.

“Lie back,” Harrow said, in the same tone a normal person might have said “I’m here to kill you”, or “you killed my father, prepare to die”.

Gideon said, “Nuh-uh.”

Harrow had a physical IQ of 5 on a good day, so it made no sense that she was able to jam her leg between Gideon’s, hitting Gideon exactly where she was fucking dying for someone to touch her. It distracted her for long enough that Harrow could wrestle her down - or could have, if she had ever done a single push-up. As it was she sort of pathetically grappled Gideon into kissing her, and then Gideon got dizzy for some reason and had to lie down.

With Harrow on top of her.

“You are truly unbelievable.”

“Hey, what happened to gratitude? Pretty sure I just saved your life.”

“Every day I long to excise you from my life entirely,” Harrow said. She leaned down and wrapped a hand around Gideon’s neck.

Harrow couldn’t have bench-pressed a late-season turnip, but it didn’t matter. Gideon couldn’t speak - didn’t speak - and Harrow did not loosen her grip at all as she leaned down to kiss her.

It was more of a kiss-punch, really. She bit Gideon’s lip; she tightened her grip on Gideon’s neck when she moaned. She said, “Don’t even think about talking,” when Gideon tried to ask her to move her knee away from her kidney.

Gideon wasn’t even a little bit necromantically cursed, and it didn’t matter. She was wet and aching and would’ve said yes to being fisted by a skeleton if it meant she got to come.

“You’re pathetic like this,” Harrow said pleasantly. “I wouldn’t put myself out to save your life even given a pile of gold. I’d hesitate if the offer was to restore my House entirely. And yet all it took was a pittance for you to agree, and now you want it.”

Gideon pressed up against Harrow’s grip, feeling almost bruised, almost held. “Shut up and fingerbang me then.”

Harrow, of course, did not shut up, because she was the fucking worst. Instead, she said, “Nav, I wonder at the disease of your synapses that leads you to try to give orders when the smart move would be to beg.” She did a weird little finger wiggle, and bones came out from under the bed to wrap around Gideon’s wrists, anchoring her to the mattress.

Gideon felt insanely turned on, emphasis on insane. She said, “Excuse me, what the fuck?”

Harrow leaned down, her pinched face roughly half as cheerful as the average dying cloisterite, and slid two fingers inside Gideon.

The bone handcuffs suddenly didn’t matter - or enhanced the experience, which was even worse. Harrow’s fingers were too narrow and her rhythm was awkward, but all of that paled compared to the real barrier to bonerville: she stared at Gideon with feverish eyes as she thrust inside, and then she talked.

Gideon had no idea what she said, because she was out of her mind with lust. She fucked herself wildly on Harrow’s hand, straining against the stupid bone-cuffs, desperate for more friction, more stretch, more of everything as fast as she could get it. Harrow was seriously bad at finding her clit, but even that couldn’t ruin it; instead it was the best-worse tease imaginable. Gideon had been a world champion of jerking off for so long that she couldn’t remember her last difficult orgasm, but she had to chase after this one, and work with Harrow to get it.

It felt like hours had passed when she finally came, clenched around Harrow’s fingers, hips moving frantically, pressing her neck against Harrow’s hand in hopes that her skin might bruise. Her vision went fuzzy; she started to drift. She was nearly asleep when Harrow said, in frantic tones, “Nav. Griddle. Gideon, do not fall asleep, you didn’t fix it yet.”

“Bwuh?” Gideon said, and then: “Yes I did. I get that I rocked your world, but I’m not going to pity-fuck you on a lie, you know.”

“You are an imbecile,” Harrow said, “and I still need -”

Gideon had an idea. A terrible, extremely excellent idea. She pushed herself up on one elbow so she could look at Harrow fully: her noodle arms, her mean face, her extremely naked lack of dignity. “What do you need?”

Harrow caught on right away, of course, and glared. “Fuck you.”

“You just did that, so if it didn’t solve your problem, what do you think would?”

“I hate you.”

“And I hate being stuck with a bunch of bone freaks, so we’re even, kind of.”

“I hate you. And I need -” Harrow huffed her breath, glaring up at the ceiling. She looked at Gideon with a sharp, mean gaze. “I need you to fuck me again. Possibly as many as three times, if the readings we took are correct.”

Three times crashed into we took in Gideon’s brain, and the result was that her whole brain stopped and she blurted, “Did Crux swab your cooch?”

“Never say that combination of words in any order ever again,” Harrow said. Her pointy fingers pressed against Gideon’s head again: she kissed her, wet and very gross, not at all skilled. Perfect.

This time, Gideon tried to pay more attention, beyond just chanting ‘holy fuck’ to herself while she fingerblasted the worst person she’d ever had the misfortune of meeting. Harrow started off stiff as one of her constructs, only a skeleton couldn’t glare at the ceiling the way she did. Gideon discovered it was easy, relatively speaking, to make Harrow relax - and to make her mad about it. She touched Harrow’s tits, which hadn’t gotten any more impressive in the last thirty minutes, and got a moan in response, a noise that sounded more like a death rattle than horny encouragement.

Then Gideon decided to try what had already worked, and it all went off the rails again after that.

The problem was that Harrow was bad at sex. She was repressed and stiff and still until Gideon broke her control - via flicking her clit so many times with her tongue that Gideon sort of thought she might have sprained something vital - but that part didn’t matter so much. What mattered was that Harrow, having allowed lust to take her over, was bossy and mean. She grabbed Gideon’s ears like she was going to reprimand her for having the nerve to make Harrow horny over actual flesh and blood. She kicked Gideon at one point, and she didn’t even apologize. She said, “Griddle, fuck me right now or I’ll string you up by your metatarsals,” and Gideon wasn’t sure what was worse: that she did, in fact, fuck Harrow, or that imagining Harrow stringing her up for sex crimes was kind of…hot?

Gross. Bad. Gross, bad. But there it was.

She doubled down when Harrow started making little bitten-off cries. Her head spun when she felt Harrow tightening around her fingers. It hadn’t occurred to her that everything would squelch quite this much. And it was hot, too, which she was definitely going to have nightmares about.

She held Harrow through her last orgasm. It kind of felt like cuddling a broom. Gideon tried to let both of them keep a shred of dignity by getting the fuck out after - because pumping and dumping had to be better than cuddling the lady of the Ninth, morally and psychologically - but Harrow, still lying flat with her face flushed and her eyes screwed shut, grabbed Gideon’s wrist. “Don’t you dare. I’m not sure it’s fixed yet.”

It would’ve been easy enough to break her grip. Gideon didn’t. She stayed as Harrow fell asleep, shifting out of the way of her bruising elbows. She watched as Harrow’s sweaty, flushed face calmed down to its normal hateful, wan pallor. And she didn’t laugh when Harrow started snoring, though she filed it away for blackmail.

Hi Harrow, how’s the Ninth? Still full of bone dust? Had any food other than gruel lately? Personally I’m a full-on war hero now, so suck my dick, but I need money. Send me some or I’ll tell the nuns about your snoring. Okay, maybe it wasn’t that persuasive.

Gideon fell asleep thinking about how else to turn this whole clusterfuck into blackmailable material. She woke up with barely an hour to spare before she was due to peace the fuck out forever. Harrow had laid off snoring in favor of snuffling very quietly, her hand still curled, claw-like, around Gideon’s shoulder.

Gideon eased away very carefully. Thank God she’d done so many accessories: she needed every stabilizer she had not to jostle the bed when she disentangled their limbs. Harrow was a fucking cuddler.

For a moment, leaving became very difficult. It was the sunshine: it shone as brightly as Gideon had ever seen it on the Ninth, which was to say it came in watery and gray-yellow, bisecting Harrow’s face with unflattering light. Harrow looked ridiculous, small and vulnerable. Gideon wanted to force her to put on skull paint just so things would be semi-normal, so Gideon’s last memory of her wouldn’t be of her slack face, peaceful after a night of being fucked back to health by Gideon’s fingers.

She had panted when Gideon’d eaten her out. Gideon thought she might have been close to hearing the Reverend Daughter beg for it, and despite knowing all the myriad reasons why it was a terrible idea, she half wanted to stay and find out if she could finish the job.

But the other half of her still had common sense, and was like, no, dumbass, you gotta go. So she took one last look at Harrow: her fucked-up hair, her phlegmatic breathing, the bedsheet tangled around one bony ankle.

It would be better to wait, to join the Cohort with a legit commission. Gideon, however, was not a fucking idiot, and had lived on the Ninth her whole life. The Reverend Daughter had been lying; Harrow never intended to let her go. Gideon was going to have to cut the cord herself.

“Later days,” Gideon said to Harrow’s prone body, and went off to grab her stuff.