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"Go fish."
Gideon tried to will what she was experiencing into making sense. She could strain until she burst a blood vessel in her not-actually-dependent-on-blood-anymore-brain, and it wouldn't get any less stupid.
Playing card games was allegedly something families did. To "bond".
Gideon wasn't buying it. She didn't consider either of her sources trustworthy, no matter how earnest John was about it. He told Gideon the First to kill Harrow and then lied about it to her face for months. If his standards for honesty were that low, he could lie about six fake family traditions before breakfast without breaking a sweat. Ianthe got a speck of additional credit for being nominally helpful to Harrow since she tried to kill her, but she did try to kill her. Trying to kill her adept was a hard stop for the Gideon Nav Friendship Train, please exit to the left.
And Gideon objected on principle to having Ianthe included in family anything, and she didn't care if the game was supposedly less fun with only two players.
She sighed. "Any eights, John?"
His face got stretched-out sad, like it always did when she called him John instead of Dad. Too bad, he didn't care that her name was Gideon. "Go fish."
Before "family" game night was wedged into her life, the only card game Gideon was particularly aware of was the monthly section in Thunder Thighs from the Third where all the cavs played strip poker. She made the mistake of saying so when she was trying to tempt Ianthe into uncharacteristic rebellion alongside her against the institution of family game night. Ianthe just said, "Well, you aren't going to get up close and personal with my thighs so easily." Blech.
"Any threes, Kiriona?" The accompanying eyebrow waggle said Ianthe knew exactly what Gideon was thinking about. Obnoxious innuendo was her department, she refused to be won over by Ianthe trying to steal her schtick.
"Sweetheart?"
She couldn't help her look of disgust at the endearment. She was trying to be better about that. The honeymoon phase wouldn't last forever. She'd been ready to die instead of cooperate with John, but he'd shown that he had options far worse (and grosser) than just death.
In maudlin moods, Gideon wondered if Harrow would like her better dead and moving, full of holes. She knew Harrow wouldn't appreciate that joke, but it wasn't like Harrow had any similarly close relationships with anyone who wasn't dead, what with her parents and all. Gideon didn't count Crux as alive, he was as cold as any sepulcher. Maybe death was the best way to acquire the cure for Nonagesimitis. Harrow already went head over heels for a corpse once.
Jon scared the hell out of her. His capacity for violence and self-delusions scared her, and Gideon Nav was nothing if not an expert at both. His commitment to the ordinary family charade scared her. It scared her how alike they were. She would rather clean skele-gunk out of all the mortar of the Anastasian Monument with her toothbrush, as Crux had threatened on more than one occasion, than make the exact same joke in unison with John again, but it was an increasingly common occurrence anyway.
Ianthe poker her in the shoulder with one of her creepy glittery bone fingers. Gideon suppressed another sigh and handed over the two threes Ianthe needed to complete her set. She tried to summon up a Nonegesimic expression of disdainful boredom instead.
She missed Harrow. Who else could possibly be an audience for the seventy-eight jokes and counting she had about comparing the Dreadful Duo to Harrow's corpse-puppet parents? Anyone else would think she was inconsiderate or insane, or else be much too into the necromantic talent blah blah demonstrated by the effectiveness of the ruse blah at such a young age blah blah blah. Gideon had room in her life for exactly one font of freaky fossil-boners, and that position was filled, thank you very much!
"Got any fours, Ianthe?"
"I'm going to throw myself into the sea," Gideon said before Ianthe could answer. Dead bodies didn't even sink, she'd be fine. But it felt like an appropriate scale of response to the misery creeping from coccyx to her cold, dead fingers.
"We can play again after this game," John said in his Reasonable Adult voice. "Maybe you'll win the next round!"
He always tried to frame negative emotions expressed during or about Family Game Night as poor sportsmanship. The only cure for poor sportsmanship was more Family Game Night. She'd only managed to escape that fate once, by impulsively insisting that they needed to wrap up because she and Ianthe had planned a Ghouls' Night and needed to go put on pajamas and pop popcorn. Ianthe insisted she simply couldn't bear to lie to John, once they were out of earshot, and actually held her to it. Now John asked if she was alright every time he saw she wasn't wearing a friendship bracelet.
"Go fish."
Gideon wanted to scream. "Any twos, Ianthe?"
Ianthe smirked, but at least she would drop the facade and use the right name and join in at least some of Gideon's complaints once they were in private.
How sad was that, that somehow Ianthe Tridentarius, of all the ghouls in the world, was her best friend?
It was all so lonely, living in the blank spaces of people none of them ever expected to lose, that Gideon made it all of a day after arranging a tragic accident for her friendship bracelet before they wound up making a new set. At least John was so happy to see them getting along that he let them do it instead of Family Game Night.
"Go fish."