Writing Portfolio

Wouldn't It Be Nice

“Here.” Rome offered a paper tray piled high with a trio of corn dogs. “You're Amerikan, right? This at least should be familiar.”

Soda gaped first at the food, then her, breathless from running to catch up across the boardwalk. “Wh— yes? But I,” she added helplessly, “I've never had corndogs, they're like— they're a fair food, we never went to fairs.”

Rome blinked. “Oh.” A pause. “I thought— nevermind.”

“Ain't sayin' I'm mad about it,” Soda protested, expression creasing, shaking her head just enough to send her short tentas bouncing and keep her eyes on Rome. “I— I, uh— thanks.” She took one off the top and stuffed it in her mouth to avoid further conversation, and pointedly looked away from Rome's amused half-smile.

Truthfully, she appreciated it, so much it embarrassed her. Rome was always doing things like this; it had been her idea to come to the boardwalk in the first place, but even still she'd offered to go back home after seeing how much the place overwhelmed Soda. She could've been a better judge of character, but it wasn't like Soda minded; she couldn't remember the last time someone had offered her that kind of courtesy.

Neither was it like Soda wasn't delighted to take in the sights: the boardwalk was soaked with hot afternoon sun and ocean salt-spray, crowded with attractions and tourists and local kids starting their summer off with a bang. A section of ocean had been cordoned off with buoys and dense nets for swimming, monitored by lifeguards and a Geiger counter; pale beaches encircled a broad crescent around the shallow bay, and waves beckoned by the strong sea-breeze beat up against support beams where the platform hung over the water. It might as well have been a city itself if Soda didn't know better; there were clothes shops and restaurants and plazas shaded with colorful canvas, rollercoasters and arcades, hotels and a casino, even something that looked like an amphitheater positioned in the center of the bay.

Walking off from the food stand, Rome caught her line of sight. “It's a construction project,” she supplied. “They're thinking of building a stage here, but it's still in development.”

“How d'you know?”

She thinned her lips in poorly-veiled annoyance; Soda opened her mouth to apologize, but she just said, “My sister. She's important enough to be told the broad strokes of that stuff, even if she doesn't get the details, or like, a say.”

Soda didn't have anything to say to that; she just took another corn dog.

“…Do you like them?” Rome asked, a little awkwardly.

She nodded hastily, swallowing. “Pl— plenty, yeah.”

So they stood in silence.

Despite the breeze, the tropical sun beat down on them, and the fresh hot food hadn't helped. Soda levered herself onto the bottom rung of the railing, being otherwise too short to prop her elbows on top and intent on squishing the cool surface of her tentas against her cheeks. She'd grown accustomed to their new length, and even though it made her face look even chubbier it was more than made up for by the literal weight off her shoulders. Rome had the benefit of extraordinarily thin tentas, a match to her wiry build, and therefore little weight to contend with.

Her ink was bright, hot pink at the moment, stark compared to her light skin and Soda's namesake—their team's signature, thanks to Lyn's not-insignificant trouble with changing color. Her face was slim, with a sharp chin and shallow nose, her thin lips set in a brooding frown. Soda thought she was the prettiest person she'd ever seen.

Not that she was going to tell her that.

“Um, what kind of food did you have?” Rome asked, glancing over. Soda managed to wrench her gaze off her just in time to look natural.

It took her a moment, both to remember and, more frantically, get her thoughts in order. “Well, stuff we grew and found mostly. Ma would go to the market once in awhile and home-cook with whatever she found, and specially we'd get Da's olive oil cake.”

Rome's face twitched. “You mean a farmer's market?”

“In some places it was a store,” Soda answered, oblivious. “But ‘sides from the city it was mostly open-air, yeah. Da called it the agora.” The word sounded strange in her mouth: like augur with an extra a, and its vowels strained; she paused and looked to Rome from the corners of wide round eyes, chin propped between her palms, weighing her reaction. “The folks from around would come in to sell their farm food, milk and fruit and meat and stuff, but to get anything else you had to take a car to town.”

She watched as Rome went from perplexed onto tenterhooks and then settled for polite dismay, trying not to make her floundering for which question to ask first too obvious. “Oh,” she said, eventually, and then left it at that.

Soda kept her mouth shut, for lack of anything to add. Instead she hooked her foot around one of the railing's beams and turned to study the boardwalk. Maybe Rome would ask about the car. She'd seen much fewer cars since arriving in Inkopolis, but there were a lot of bikes and an expansive monorail, so she guessed that made up for it. There were a lot of food stands, too.

“What's olive oil cake?” Rome asked finally.

She hadn't prepared for that one; her face flushed cold with surprise. “Like— it's a dessert from where Da grew up? You make it with olive oil instead of butter so it ain't so sweet.” An embarrassed beat. She continues, slower and pulling hard on her shirt with one hand, “We— um, it was too wet to grow olives where we— we were, so we didn't get it often.”

Rome nodded, slow and deliberately. Soda doesn't notice her following her gaze, still pointed very much not on Rome, across to the refreshment stands littering the scuffed boardwalk.

“...Did you not like sweet things?”

Soda scratched her arm absently. Rome had made her put sunblock on, but it still itched. “Um, we didn't get those much. I dunno? Ma didn't make... like... pastries or anything. And Da didn't cook very—much?”

She'd hardly got the words out before her wrist was caught in Rome's long calloused fingers and she's being pulled across the boardwalk, headed for a stand labeled with a bright flag emblazoned with a vaguely star-shaped symbol.

“Kakigōri,” Rome pronounced for her, offering a small triumphant smile and letting go of her wrist much too soon for Soda's tastes. She turned to the vendor and ordered rapid-fire, too fast for Soda to keep track of when she's never heard of the thing; when she turned back it was to explain, airily, “It's finely-shaved ice, and a really popular treat in Inkopolis. Let me know if it's too sweet for you, okay? I got strawberry.”

“Okay,” Soda answered, because what else was she supposed to do?

It wasn't as strange as she'd worried it'd be, thankfully. She scraped at its milky topping with the proffered spoon while Rome counted out G to the vendor. It looked a little like the shaved ice cups her dad would request in the other city across the ocean, though much taller, and less creamy. She might've mistaken it for cotton candy if Rome hadn't told her otherwise, and if it wasn't so blissfully, wonderfully cold.

She definitely would have been content to just stand there and devour, the cup sticking to her hands, but Rome pointed her toward a two-seat table near one of the many small docks jutting out from the main walk. It was quiet at this end, opposite the majority of attractions, so almost all the seats were open—periodically, the orange coaster would roar above them, its legs plunging into concrete on the inland side. Rome smiled again, leaning forward a little over her own melon-flavored cup: an orangey-peach color this time. “What about this? Do you like it?”

All Soda had to do was glance up looking like a deer in headlights, her serving half-gone.

Rome laughed, honest and for some reason a little relieved, and Soda thought her hearts were going to melt straight out of her like a weird mint-flavored milk topping.

“Yes, then?”

“Yes,” Soda managed, nodding emphatically. “Th— Thank you, so much. Really.”

“It's nothing.” But she glows, almost literally, her freckles reflecting the sunlight. “I get it all the time when it's hot. There's stands or stores around almost every battle stage; they make it pretty obvious.”

Still. Saying thanks didn't feel like enough. Rome was so pretty, and kind, and patient, and she couldn't figure out why this all felt wrong. It was the sweetest thing she'd ever had, but she liked it enough. She liked being here. Soda stared down at the kakigōri, unsure of what to say, for the trillionth time. “No, it's... I didn't... get to do stuff like this. Ever. So it's really nice. You're really nice.”

Rome drew in a breath. “...Oh. Thanks.”

Silence with her wasn't uncomfortable, Soda noticed. It wasn't anticipatory, or expectant, like waiting for her brother to interrupt or waiting for her mother to tell her what to do. It was just quiet.

“I used to get it with my sister,” Rome mumbled, almost too low for Soda to hear. “It was a tradition. I took her with me to battles and we'd get kakigōri after.” She paused. “So... it's nice for me, too.”

Soda smiled gratefully, a little sadly, drawing her shoulders in—the ache in her chest cinched tight, almost unbearable. Rome gave a light little laugh and pressed her own serving across the table. “Here, try mine. And let me have a bite.”

After that, they talk about the rollercoaster. Rome frowns about Soda's fear of heights but doesn't push it; they compromise with the Ferris wheel. She takes her in the tourist shops and the arcade with its blacklights and retro music. Soda spends at least two hours trying to win a big fat stuffed animal, to Rome's eventual pity, dwindling funds, and one-hit knock-out success. She turns out the last of her pockets to finance dinner under the pavilions. Construction on the amphitheater resumes as the sun starts to sink, and under a sky turning brilliant orange and blue, they stand on the boardwalk and theorize possible layouts.

When the stars come out, they take the monorail home.

Soda tucks her knees to her chin and leans her head on Rome's shoulder, eyelids heavy, watching her scroll Skitter. Tournament season begins in earnest tomorrow and the app's already alive with debate and predictions. She can still taste her candied dessert on her tongue.

“Hey, Rome,” she mumbles.

“Yeah, sleepyhead?” Rome answers.

“Thanks.”

“Of course.”

In their lull, the monorail hums.

“We should, um... do that again.”

Rome glances at her, amused. “What? I need more money before we do that. Did you forget everything so soon?”

Soda doesn't have the energy for anything but a half-hearted raspberry. “Naw, silly. I think I'll remember it forever. I just... enjoyed it a lot.”

She watches Rome from the corner of her eye. “Yeah, why not? We have all the time in the world, Soda.”

Midsummer Night's Drone

“You're better at metaphors,” Marlo grouses. “Gimme somethin' colorful for this god damn heat.”

“It's hot,” Ness supplies, helpfully.

“Fuck you,” Marlo bats back, a half-step ahead of the beat. “Gimme a king if you're gonna be an asshole about it.”

Ness flicks his eyes from his hand to Marlo to the stock stacked on the patio table they lean on, opting not to move a muscle and therefore generate unnecessary sweat. “Go fish.”

Marlo mutters to themself, but obliges. Otaku Journalism's patio light flickers under the wings of half a dozen moths and paints them both in dim, pale light and heavy shadows. Across from him, behind Marlo and nestled in the damp grass of his lawn, the resonant drone of cicadas fills the empty space in Ness' head and drowns out whatever sluggish thoughts the heat may've allowed him.

Marlo wipes the condensation off their face with the back of their hand, bare skin paled and shimmering with sweat; the vestigial chromatophores inlaid in it dilate and shrink again in a faint, hypnotic rhythm. Ness pulls, self-consciously, at the loose collar of his black tank, and stares at his cards without processing them.

“Your turn,” Marlo reminds him, so lethargically it's almost a drawl.

“Um,” he thinks aloud. “Got any threes?”

No answer. He doesn't glance up until he hears Marlo's chair scrape—thick and metallic, eugh—across the concrete patio. They lever themself up on the table, heading toward him, toward the screen door left ajar behind him and back inside…

“Where are you—?” he starts, until they crouch down beside him, face entirely neutral in that dead serious way of theirs.

“What—” and then it clicks.

It must've registered on his face, because Marlo immediately cracks an impish grin and crumples into laughter. For his part, he gives up in the spectacular fashion of tilting his head over back of the chair and huffing out a sigh, despite the smile in it.

“Okay,” he says. “Heat's rotted your brain.”

“I don't have a clue what'choure talkin' about,” Marlo says back, except it's punctuated by a series of very self-satisfied chuckles. They place a hand on the arm of his chair to push themself back up, offering no apology except the lilt in their voice and an obligatory, “Go fish, love.”

“If I were not a holy man—” He draws a card with a flourish of the wrist and sinks back in his worn wicker seat. Seven of clubs. Unfortunate. (Chances are Marlo's got one of those, though.)

“Yeah, yeah.” Marlo drops themself back into their seat with a grunt and leans back, crossing their legs at the knee. “Getting ahead of yourself. Let's make sure you can beat me at the card game before you get caught up in the rest of me.”

Ness watches himself unstick a card from his palm, listening for the pseudosilence of the summer night and letting it settle, heavy and dull, back in. He makes a low noise in the back of his throat. “Don't count your chickens. You'll make yourself predictable.”

Marlo hums their perfunctory acknowledgement, and again drags their hand over back of their head, drawing momentary trails through the faint steam rising off their tentacles. Already, sweat gathers at their temples again, where they've tied their tentacles back; Ness' fins fan out a little in sympathy. He finds he doesn't mind them so much like this—their absentminded tapping of a claw against their cards—or at least not the moments where they've got enough courtesy for that so-called sense of humor.

He still won't thank them for coming down, but he doesn't have to.

“Alright. How 'bout a seven?”

After Cuttlefish gives her the hat, she stays there for awhile.

Well, he doesn't really give her the hat. He takes it back with him, but they both understand it to be hers, now. She isn't holding it, but she's wearing it. It doesn't make sense to her either, but she can feel the weight of it.

She stays in the Valley. She's used to it. He gives her the hat in the morning after a night spent in the domes. It's cold and misty on the surface, the air thick and dense with the humidity of an impending storm, just the way she's used to, just the way she likes it. It's that reason she ever fell in love with the Valley to begin with—it reminds her of the forests she grew up in, the hideaways nestled in natural formation. Someplace to be wonderfully, rapturously alone.

It's an old haunt. Where the world slowed down and stopped for awhile. Nothing else had to matter, here—just the old weeping trees and the chipped concrete and Octavio's fractured globe, still with the stickers on it, to keep her company.

('Keeping an eye on those Octarians?' the Captain'd asked her.

'You could say that,' she'd answered.

It's the clean way of not telling him she's trying to sleep with the one next in line for the headdress.)

In the morning, he gives her the hat, and she stays in the Valley. She likes to lean on Octavio's old dome and stare out over the landscape. It isn't anything more than junk at this point, but she'd gone to all that trouble and brought it back to where it belonged, and it's important to her.

He gives her the hat, without really giving her the hat, and she stays in the Valley. Even after all this time, and everyone moving to Marie's cabin in Canyon, the shack still needs its upkeep. There are still Zapfish plushes and old photographs, all of which she'd taken for archiving and replaced, which Cuttlefish had never noticed. There are canisters of power eggs she'd never used and the bench where she'd put on her Agent equipment both quilted with dust. She wipes it off.

She used to spend days in the Valley. She used to watch the sun rise and with it the mist disperse. It got warmer as the days wore on, when it got suffocating in the shack, especially in summer. For awhile the air isn't so heavy. Outside there was almost always a breeze blowing off the sea, and in its aftermath the scent of rust and salt suspended in the air.

Weathering like that was inevitable in an outpost as old as this. She polishes the railings and drags the frayed electrical cables back into piles, her steps resounding on the grates and blacktop. Sunlight glitters off the metal. No sound comes out of the kettles anymore.

She used to watch the sun set with her back to the tree and her notebooks sat in her lap, occasionally watching Octavio twist his limbs around themselves in the globe. She never could exactly get right the colors of the red-gold sunset and the way it glowed off his headdress.

He doesn't really give her the hat—not literally—but she stays in the Valley till nightfall.

Octavio liked the stars. He didn't get to see them underground. He had an interest in astronomy, she'd learned; the stars in the domes' sky were his design. She used to sit on his saucer, almost a mile into the air despite her fear of heights, to try and figure out what he saw in the space between. It was cold and quiet up there, just the way she likes it; a place to be wonderfully alone.

Octo Valley had become a hideaway. It was the place to run from itself, if that made any sense.

It used to be that, after it got dark, she either went underground or left. Sometimes, moreso in the later days, after she left Rome, she would make a pallet on the shack's floor and sleep there.

('Don't you have anything better to do?' Octavio'd asked her, gruff and annoyed.

'Sure don't,' she'd said, totally cheery.

It was the kind way of not saying she'd miss him otherwise.)

Jumping to the saucer is too much trouble, old and tired as she is by now. She folds herself in upright form into the remnants of his globe, even still swallowed in the cavern of broken glass, and stares at the stars. She isn't holding anything, but she can feel the weight of it. She stares at the infinite space between.

What she loved most about the Valley was how it existed in its own pocket of space. It was a place where the world slowed down and stopped for awhile. Nothing else had to matter here. It's quiet. Entirely silent. Not even the insects are out in a cold like this.

On all sides of her, the ground drops away into a void. The night is wide and endless, reaching far over the shining black ocean and the warm distant lights of the city. She watches the flickering light of an airplane as it makes its way from Inkopolis, and remembers too well the dim blue-and-white cabin of the one that brought her here—the strange sensation of being in-between places, both alone and in company.

There is not a single other soul for miles around. She is wonderfully, horribly alone.

She tucks her worn, scraped knees to her chin and starts crying.

She doesn't know the last time she cried. She screws her face up, makes it ugly, and sobs like a child. She presses her broad shoulders back into the curve of the dome and the calloused pads of her fingertips into her calves until it hurts and it still doesn't hurt the way it has to. Her face is sticky, the saltwater smudged on her nose and chin itchy, pressure built thick and distracting behind her eyes.

Octavio's globe is heavy and hard against her shoulders. Her hands are empty. Cuttlefish doesn't even really give her the hat and she can't find it in her to leave. She spends everything she has left to do and she's still left with her empty hands and the weight of it.

He'd asked her: Don't you have anything better to do? No, of course not. She had never wanted anything else but that fucking captain's hat.

That's the funny thing. She'd started to want something else.

Now there is an infinity in the space between that she can't reach. There's a place anywhere but here. It's starting to get cold again, and the first thin haze of rain begins to fall. Her skin is thin enough that a downpour poses an actual threat, but she doesn't care right now.

She loves the Valley. She loves the smell of rain and the translucent fog that gathers at her feet. She loved the long autumn days during monsoon season when she listened to the rain on the corrugated roof and spent her time studying the begrudging appreciation in Octavio's expression.

She drags the back of her hand against her dripping nose and swallows a sob.

She hasn't cried like this since she realized her brother wasn't coming home.

She loves the Valley. It's the last place that ever felt like home. Where nothing else in the world mattered or held weight, a place suspended in time and ephemeral childhood nostalgia, despite the thick blood on her hands. She could always come back just as she left.

Cuttlefish gives her the weight of it and leaves her on her own. He gives her a place no one in the city so much as knows about and tells her, in so many words, to keep her mouth shut. He gives her a place where she is alone and he leaves and he doesn't think twice.

(Octavio watches her warily, but he still listens.)

Cuttlefish all but fucking shoves her off a ledge into that beautiful void.

(She knows it's still her fault, of course. She sniffs and grins sardonically to herself.

And breaks into another sob.

It's pathetic. It makes her feel like a child coming home to her ma with scraped knees and wildflowers, scolded for staining her best white dress. At least then she could understand what she was doing wrong.)

She's kept the shack stocked with tissues for a few years now. Even after all this time, the rain still stings against the old scars on her ankles. She braces herself against the wall, levering herself down onto the crowded bench, flanked by vacant-eyed stuffed Zapfish. Her head is pounding. Ever since the sanitization episode, her ears haven't stopped ringing.

She doesn't think she's leaving, tonight.

'Ha-ha,' Ness says flatly, the next morning. She's invited him out for coffee just to get his roommate off her back and he's halfway through a hot chocolate and his third pastry. 'Unfortunately, I know. He got to me first, being that I've got the title now, and had no idea who I was.'

He picks at the lid of his to-go cup. Glances at her out of the corner of his eyes. She puts on her best insouciant grin.

He frowns in that worried way of his, brows knit and eyes closed for a moment. It's spring. He's wearing a yellow t-shirt with the Firefin logo and pastel-purple jeans. His palms are pressed flat to the plastic tabletop.

'Don't look at me like that, Marlo,' he mutters, 'I know it doesn't change anything. But I'm so sorry.'

Moment's Silence

He tells Tanaka not to let anyone disturb him, but there comes a trilling at his door anyway. Rather, there comes a Trill at his door. He leaves one hand light against the table as he stands and snaps, “What now,” but lets it fall to his side when the door hisses open and Wednesday Lie steps over the threshold.

“I brought you water,” he says, entirely neutral. “CMO's orders.”

Marlo frowns, but steps clear of the curved divider and further into his line of sight, placing that one hand on the white metal. There's a concern in the back of Wednesday's mind his face doesn't betray, as it never does. Typical. Always one to sweat the small stuff.

“Well, come in,” Marlo amends, gesturing across the great red rug in the quarters' center, spread wide over the Federation emblem seared into the floor. Wednesday's pristine boots sunk into it—an old thing, frayed but thick, a sign of goodwill from a Talaxian freighter—as he crossed, stopping just short of the edge, and Marlo's own boots, cracked and still caked with pale brown dirt.

In the stark white light of Marlo's captains' quarters, the dark speckling on Wednesday's skin stands out in sharp relief against the brown when he inclines his head; he does not offer out the water.

“Your CMO,” Marlo says, after a moment, without lowering his gaze to Wednesday.

“My head nurse,” he returns, “and your CMO.”

“I was doing just fine with the EMH,” Marlo snaps.

Wednesday stares at him, brows almost imperceptibly raised. “No, you weren't. Your Achilles' tendon never did heal correctly.”

“Your point.”

Wednesday's eyes soften, all but imperceptibly again, at the same time a guard goes down in his mind. “Take care of yourself,” he says, the thick snaking of a genuine affection coiled deep in his belly, only the surface exposed. “You know how to pilot this ship better than my own crew. I would prefer to have you at the helm when we return—but that requires you to stay alive.”

Marlo smiles, all teeth, even as the space between them opens itself into a chasm within him, eager and waiting for an excuse to gnaw. “If I didn't know better, I'd say you were concerned.”

Wednesday doesn't laugh, of course; he doesn't even smile, but Marlo knows the leaping sensation. He takes Marlo's hand, Marlo's broad, weathered palm and roughened fingers, and presses the canister into it; wraps his own hand over Marlo's fore and middle fingers, soft by comparison.

Oh, how tempting the rope bridge is, wild and swaying over the canyon.

“You shouldn't be here,” Marlo says, as quiet as he can make it.

“I am only here to ensure everything is still in working order,” Wednesday answers, and withdraws his hand, steps back in the same motion. He turns to face the mounted viewscreen, still glowing with the schematic of a Class-L planet, its broad deserts and quartzite mares outlined in blue.

Marlo waits, feeling out the shape of Wednesday's worry as it deepens. He knows what Lie means to say before he puts the words to it. “We picked up a supply of freshwater a week ago. I'll have some sent over. Computer—lower temperature in this room, ten degrees.”

“Don't bother telling me to lie down; I heard it already,” Marlo says over the answering chirp, but there's no venom in it.

Wednesday casts him a glance over his shoulder. “Lie down, and stop making a habit of getting trapped on strange planets.”

Marlo grins something fierce, and barks a laugh. “Nah, I'm just tryin' to relive the good ol' days.”

Wednesday turns again, but not before Marlo catches the ghost of a smile on his mouth, and he can't do anything to conceal the rueful amusement lapping in the base of his throat. He knows as well as Marlo the hundred emotions entwined in that sentence, a braiding of fear and resentment and warmth; the familiarity earned in long black nights in an alien home and the lingering weight of his fingertips on Marlo's skin. A memory of a memory.

Now he stands in the bitter white light of a stolen starship, the long black night at his back and a silver floor colored red before him. Wednesday lets his eyes rest on Marlo's desk, a curved silver thing, lined with terracotta fragments from some Delta Quadrant ruins and a sleepy, pine-green houseplant.

“You've made quite a home of this place,” he says, and Marlo can shape the width of the chasm within him.

“You'll want a report,” Marlo says, instead.

Wednesday inclines his head, again, and there the guard goes back up in his mind. “When you can,” he concedes. “I want you in your right mind first.”

Marlo sets the water canister on the table with a metallic clunk and steps across the room to him, the old boots leaving pale dust to mingle with traditional Talaxian patterning, to stop just short of his side. “Your nurse told me I should work on getting my fine motor skills back up to par,” he says. “I've got this big knit blanket I'm working on for the bed. You should come see it when it's done.”

Wednesday says nothing at first, his face entirely neutral. Marlo can't trace his breathing over the hum of two transwarp engines in tandem—he doesn't hear anything else at all, but traces the thing that spreads itself wide in Wednesday's chest. And then he laughs, a huff of breath, ruefully amused again.

“You know when our night shift begins,” Wednesday says, and turns back to face him, raising his hand to Marlo's face: the pads of his fingers to Marlo's jaw, cheekbone, temple, catching on the curlicue ends of his pitch-black hair. “A few thousand kilometers should be enough of a buffer.”

“I'll be turning left,” Marlo confides, trying not to smile.

“I know,” Wednesday says, as quiet as he can make it.

“You should stop by the mess hall before you beam over,” Marlo says, lifting Wednesday's hand from his face and gathering them both within his. “I think some sand might've got in the replicators. Did you know Harmon's trying to pick up cooking? Says I was an inspiration.”

He pulls a face placed somewhere between a grimace and unrestrained delight; Marlo knows the leaping sensation. “Infecting the rest of the crew with your anti-replicator rhetoric, are we? I shudder to think—but in the interest of thoroughness…”

And there neither of them have to say anything—there's a thick, nauseating coil wound over itself in Marlo's belly, even as Wednesday draws his hands back to himself and smiles. Almost imperceptibly: just a twitching at the corner of his mouth.

“I'll see you soon, then,” he says.

“In eight-thousand light-years it is.”

With that, he's gone, the door hissing shut and the clicking of his boots fading down the corridor.

Marlo's own make no sound over the rug; he unscrews the lid of the canister and drinks without tasting it. He sinks, finally, into the black leather cushion, picking idly at the topline of one boot.

In the long window behind him there is only an endless black night, and a birds' eye view of an alien home, and no sunrise left to keep him company.

But the bad part is at some point she didn't notice anymore.

Her couch is very short. That much she does notice, over and over again. More of a loveseat than a couch, but the most that would fit in her labyrinthine excuse for a living room and a very nice antique she'd found for cheap. Shiloh is also very warm, which she does notice, over and over again, draped into the couch and dozed off across from her. By which she means he makes a nice cushion for her aching head, because her couch is very short. She would sincerely like to follow his example, if she can manage, already.

It's late in the day; the only thing she's done is play video games on their new old GameCube and the pain is getting worse. Sore. Itching—badly. Her leg is hardly half-regrown, a thick gelatinous mass of pitch-dark blue ink, her skin on fire where it frays at the end. Into... whatever used to be her limb.

The rush of a maws through ink, the ceramic click of its jaw interlocking. The sequence plays in her head without her asking for it. She knows the sound on instinct, a rhythm, a melody she autocompletes faster than her own heartsbeat. The moment of hesitation, the burst of ink, the clink of its tackle gear against the ground. Over and over again. Clanging of a stinger. Whistle of a flyfish. That makeshift rattle, gunning of an engine she always expects a scream to punctuate—

Every blue thing in her room has turned purple under the ludicrously rich orange sunset. She flicks the c-stick back and forth, fidgets. The start screen doesn't respond.

Her head is stupidly thick, like lined with cotton. Lethally so—the shift set to automatic Play in her mind's eye starts and stops and fades in and out, unresponsive. Shiloh is very warm, and she is comfortable. Ultimately. Aching with exhaustion, but the adrenaline is just theoretical: she doesn't have to stay awake. She's not trying to, dammit.

She's alone, tired and resting. With him.

She blinks drowsily at the paisley pattern of her wallpaper without processing it. It's very quiet. On some distant level traffic drones faintly through the door. The game's menu music is almost muted, a jaunty, idle loop she tuned out forever ago. Infinite and halcyon.

And this—is what she's going to wake up to again tomorrow.

And her FUCKING LEG ITCHES.

It aches so badly it hurts.

She's never going to hear the surge of a maws beneath her or behind her in person ever again. As in, she could if she wanted. She's healing fine; doctor said it'll be like normal once she goes through physical therapy. But that's not what she wants. It's so quiet that she can hear him breathing—soft and shallow, in the same slow time as the resonant pulse of a slammin' lid's field. Same as the rush of ocean waves in the dark beneath her. She focuses on a trio of dark blue dots in the pattern, frowning in concentration, cognizant even now of the hysterical tremor in his voice pleading not to die.

The bite of the wind on their long roundabout walk, her yanking sharply at his wrist, the insulting total of his payout. Shiloh shifts beneath her, unconscious, and she doesn't react. More important is the heavy, gratifying weight of her slumping back onto him. They'd paid for each other's dinner so many times it became tradition; she'd learned a long time ago that Grizzco was Grizzco, and there was no use crying about it.

But the bad part was the point where she didn't notice anymore. The faint haze of the question, as in: when had it engraved itself in her head like this. When had the water started boiling. Made her the frog. Her fingertips' tracing over the slick scab of her leg makes her motion-sick, anticipation for an attack already come and gone. She can't think past the itch, gaze fixed on the paisley, in her mind's eye watching herself tug on the hem of her athletic shorts instead.

She's so tired. For what.

Ten years. Years of grime and muck and air that tasted like metal in her mouth. Of on-your-six, side-step, hollow-boned reflexes. A year of this, at home, no sound but the click of joysticks dampened by embroidered pillows, drowsing with the sunset spilling in, until she's healed. She leaves the lights off to mitigate her headache. Shiloh is very warm.

Her couch is very short. When Shiloh goes to bed at night, his legs fold over the edge of it. He makes her coffee in the morning, and he's starting to get the hang of it.

It hurts.

But the bad part was—at some point she didn't care anymore. If she woke up in the morning. It wasn't like it wouldn't just be the same old tune, over and over again. She can't make her eyes stay open now. Her head is heavy. Thick and aching. She's alone—no sticky film of the slopsuit against her damp skin, no ghost of her coworkers through the fog, no headset clamped down on her ear and staticky taped voice filtering through the cacophony. Once the sun sinks past the horizon she won't listen for the whisper and rustle of glowflies. Instead it's this, warm stale air of her living room, dry blankets and the faint rhythm of Shiloh's breath, his shoulder gradually rising and falling.

It'll be the same thing tomorrow. For a lot of days after that.

In her lap the controller is warm, gone silent. Dusk blurs the white and blue pattern into a wavering plum color. Makes her vision murky, the polished knickknacks on her shelves blending in with the gloom. She doesn't know when she got used to it.

This. Indefinite purple dusk braided with phantom pain and never another thundering beat of the helicopter's blades reverberating in her veins. Never another of her signatures on the splintered sign-in board for a shift. She doesn't have to stay awake. She's not trying to stay awake.

She's sore to the point of nausea, but at some point the exhaustion has to win out.

No sunrise over Sockeye's worth it.

There's nothing left but the quiet and his heartsbeat. Which she does notice. Over and over. And over again.

Spencer strikes a match. Bronze and pink, fog suffuses the nascent morning light over Junction, darkening the broken asphalt, the distant metal pillars gleaming with lustre. Four and a half long hours have gone, left with the last Goldie to slip under the waves. Nobody has spoken in half as long. She sits, slouched matte white and gray-blue, on the lip of the withdrawn basket; hisses as the flame leaps to attention at the end of her glove.

Sharp light glitters off her fractured glasses and reflects in her eyes, narrowed, focused, reverent, as she presses the match to tinder. Ungrateful, idle idiots, the lot of them. At her ankle, their impending breakfast slouches, eyes lolled and unseeing, out of a stinger's pot. There are eyes on her. Fire catches, and she glances up, orange dancing and spitting under her chin.

Shiloh's watching, silently. She thins her lips, then lifts an eyebrow, invisible under the cut of her bangs. He grins anyway.

One of my good friends and writing inspirations wrote about collecting a digital garden on an old version of her website. (Which continues to be excellent, and you should read her work.) Its definition has some flexibility, but the general idea roots itself in the cultivation of an unorganized, organic space with plenty of potential to grow and change. In contrast to the rigorously-cultivatednote In a manner of speaking. You still have to work with what you have. portfolio tab, I intend for this page to display more of that philosophy, and so many of these have an unfinished quality to them—whether they lack an ending, reflect some dubious version of canon, or could just use some finessing. In any case, I would also be remiss to just not consolidate my OC writing.

Since their sources are so scattered, or relocated from their original milieu, these aren't dated; they are more akin to curiosities, so their only tags are organizational. The significant majority are also written without regard for the uninitiated and include relevant author's notes. You're welcome to read them; or don't. Or consult my OC wiki; or don't. Art without context is good for your brain.

They’re warm.

It’s kinda weird. They’re not used to it.

Rome would be, though. It’s February, and yet it’s rain, not snow, greying out their bedroom window and drumming out an endless round. Something about Inkopolis and its natives—warmth just came with the literal territory.

It’s been a few hours since they woke up, and half one since the sun rose. It’s still dim outside, suspending the broad and mostly empty room in a soft, liminal twilight; Rome is tucked tightly against their chest, her vivid orange tentacles sprawled over the comforter.

They could get used to it.

Marlo traces their thumb over her shoulderblade and listens as her breathing lightens.

Without shifting a centimeter, Rome mumbles, “How long have you been awake?”

They press a kiss into the top of her head, habitually. She even smells warm—like orange spice and the laundry she hangs out to sun-dry. “Awhile.”

Rome doesn’t say anything, but her breathing doesn’t even back out, and Marlo doesn’t move.

“I think you love me, Sturmaz.”

Marlo grins to themself. Heat, pleasant and satisfied, spreads through their chest. “That’s a mighty powerful accusation you just made, Clementine.”

She only murmurs wordlessly. (Her voice fritzes at the edges, when it sinks low enough—she does her best to mask it, using a lighter, primmer register for the sake of her image, and only lets it slip in half-asleep, languorous moments like these. Marlo can’t think of a sound on Earth they covet more.)

“You let me go, I got breakfast all set to go,” they add, softer.

Rome finally tilts her head back to look at them, scrutinizing. Even her eyes are warm. They’re rich red-brown in the low light.

“Thanks,” she says.

She doesn’t let them go.

She’s warm. She twines her long, thin fingers around Marlo’s front tentacle and leans in to kiss them soft on the mouth. Rain drums against the window to the beat of its endless round. It’s February, just over a year since they met her again, having spat out the rainwater of an unseasonable monsoon and cold to their metaphorical bones.

Of course they love her. Of course. Of course. They’re used to the worst, and there are far worse things to be convicted of.

Through the wall at their backs and beneath their shoes the familiar noise of Anarchy Rainbow thrums through the city, a heartbeat customary to Shiloh's town, a familiar rise and fall Spencer mentally fingers the neck of her guitar to. They're both dumped against the filthy concrete wall just around the corner of the main plaza, yellow guardrails to their right and leaves spilling out their planters in front of them, the unbroken rushing and rumbling of water filling in the last strains of silence with white noise. It's a crisp night near the end of winter and she's grateful for her layered shirt, if envious of Shiloh's jacket.

Despite the temperature, the night is warm: the lamps above them softly glowing bronze, buildings lining the square lit pink and gold from within by the lights of their inhabitants, a thousand lanterns floating past them in the sky. Spencer watches as a few of them drift past the moon, soft yellow pinpricks against the perfect silver of it.

Next to her Shiloh hasn't twitched in minutes—typical of her, not very typical of him. Even under the thick folds of his bomber he's visibly taut, wound tight, bent over himself and glowering at something on the other side of the courtyard. The stark light from above carves his features into something even sharper. Sure, she knows what he's thinking: she curves her fingers around the plastic length of her squiffer where it's sat in her lap, playing over the match in her head, every shot she'd stuttered on. Easy targets, sitting ducks. She just wasn't steady enough. Either way—of course she would break his trance if she wanted, but it isn't very often she gets to languish in his quiet misery. Shiloh's always moving too fast. She'll take her chances when she gets them.

She'll get another, though.

"You're taking our series of humiliating losses well," she says quietly, even and just enough for him to hear over the pulsing drumline.

She watches—blinks languidly—as Shiloh jerks his chin up, shows his fangs. Not quite a smile. "I am so angry," he grinds out, "I cannot move."

Significant. Coming from the guy who she's known to—how had she put it?—splutter in impotent rage at least every other match.

It’s late autumn in the forest, and he isn’t cold at all. No matter where he glances next, it’s red and gold and bronze and brown, the pathway packed an even mahogany, walled in by plant life in all directions, just him and Eight and a long winding path to nowhere in particular.

Eight is searching for something in particular, but Two-tone doesn’t know what it is, and he doesn’t mind not knowing. Anyway, it’ll be some time before they get there, even though he doesn’t have the sense that time is going anywhere or moving with them. It’s calming. Neither of them have anywhere else to be.

Eight’s rich red braid is swaying with his gait, his boots making no sound in the soft beaten dirt. He’s pointing out plants and things, tiny landmarks, how this plant was edible or the indications of a snake trail, as if trying to explain them aloud would get them closer to their port of call. It’s all military things, from the surface training on Mt. Nantai, the days-long heavily-surveilled excursion entrusted to the elites. Eight thought the ritual of it might pull on some forgotten muscle memory.

At one point, Eight glances back at him, waits, and signs, “Why are you staring at me like that?”

Two-tone’s stuck his hands in his jean pockets, admiring. Eight’s face, sharp and dark and handsome, only furrows further with suspicion. His unnaturally yellow eyes are bright and intelligent, his nose crinkled, mouth almost imperceptibly parted. He’s still got one hand half-raised, forgotten, as if paused halfway through a turn, the perfect fluent quality of his motion preserved.

“I love you,” Two-tone hears himself say, lilting by the lift of his grin.

“You do?” Eight answers automatically, not quite startled, but drawing himself up in a way—in the way that Two-tone had learned to read a long time ago, meaning, I was right the whole time.

Two-tone makes a nervous laugh, leaning back on instinct as Eight falls back into line with him, leaning in, his face now bright and intrigued. “I do,” he manages, his grin growing ever stupider, ignoring the warm fluorescent yellow light rising to his own face. He waits—a nanosecond he isn’t sure will ever end—and, on abrupt impulse, pecks Eight on the jaw.

Eight’s grinning back, and it’s a strange, delightful sight, framed in the brilliant burnt autumn light filtering through the canopy and against the black of his turtleneck. He pulls Two-tone flush to him in one motion, lacing one arm around his waist, impish, and easy. He doesn’t say a thing, but Two-tone can read the question in the incline of his head, the curve of his mouth, the ghost of a touch on Two-tone’s other arm, an invitation.

“I—I have for awhile,” Two-tone stammers, trying to think past the pounding of his heartbeats and the weight of Eight’s body. “I—I like you a lot.”

Eight hums a slow, painstaking, Mmhmmm, on a frequency that pulls waves through Two-tone’s ink, and makes a point of planting a peck at the corner of Two-tone’s mouth.

When she finds herself standing on the black metal plating of Cephalon’s saucer, fluorescent yellow gun in hand, it already feels hollow.

It is silent except for the faint music bleeding through the grate beneath her, no hum, no clank of machinery. The air is still and warm. Strong winds don’t reach this deep in the canyon. Mist furls in ghostly, aimless banks over the maroon sea, and there are no stars in the evening sky. Her tentacles sway at her calves as if they were bored of the whole thing, fluorescing green, shining with the reflection of mint and magenta neon.

Rome recalls the night Three came home to her, the windows dark, apartment silent, the kitchen light on. Gone for half a week and not a word of their whereabouts. She’d figured out only a few months ago that they’d left to fight DJ Octavio—not all of them had come back.

Marie does not say anything.

She’s got this far because she keeps asking why?—and she isn’t any closer to finding out the answer.

Their steps are silent on the carpet, stupidly tall off-white walls marching down on either side of them, a ceiling so high it might have vanished into the summer sky when she wasn't checking. More than anything it reminds her of the many high-end buildings her father's worked at, overflowing with sunlight and minimalism. Spencer tracks the ornate baseboards as they walk; the brutal simplicity doesn't exactly strike her as strange for Greater Inkopolis, but she's used to the offices, not the blacktops.

Bernadine twirls to a stop in front of a set of birch wood doors, turning toward Spencer and curving her fingers around the handle in the same motion with an impetuous grin on her face. "In here," she says, and shoves them open with a great rattle of the knob.

Immediately the academy's music room opens up before them: a semirectangle squared off on one side and round on the other, soaring windows and shallow stairs leading onto a short dias set into the curve. Chairs are stacked in uneven columns against the far wall, instruments lined up on a rack at the left end, a grand piano and various drums all artfully organized, except for a gong set up near the stage. Someone's left a music stand smack in the center of the place. Light pours in like a physical thing, throwing long rectangles on the immaculate white walls and making the room glow.

Bernadine strides across the length of it, her long yellow-white sundress swishing around her legs as she went, stark against black cowboy boots and pastel compliment to her lilac ink. She pivots again with a flourish, both arms raised tall above her head, and her palms turned up toward the open height of the space. "Tah-dah," she sings, a defiant note in her voice. "All ours."

Spencer doesn't say anything. She runs a hand over her short crop of tentas, her fingers catching in the cut of her bangs. She doesn't have to check a mirror to know she sticks out like a sore thumb in the place, navy ink and a plain black t-shirt, nice dark jeans, the silver rims of her glasses her only saving grace. She sticks her hands in her pockets and tries to find an innocuous place to settle her gaze; anywhere but Bernadine.

"What are we s'posed to do in here?" she asks, after a moment.

"Have fun!" Bernadine answers, almost mocking, if it weren't for the warmth softening her voice that Spencer knows she reserves for her—that's my Spencer, naïve and dull as ever. "Waste time! Who gives a damn! They ain't missin' us." That she gives an authentically disparaging scoff. "You mean to tell me you'd rather waste your time listenin' to our parents go on about figures 'n stock market bullshit than tryin'a find somethin' else which might provide a moment of entertainment? I won't allow it."

"Fine," Spencer replies, trying not to smile. She glances back up at Bernadine, those skinny arms linked over her chest, her thin lips and sharp features furrowed in faux doubt.

"Okay, okay," Spencer repeats, glancing over at the instruments. "Right. I'll try to have fun. In this big empty space that doesn't belong to me, with no instruments I can play."

“Cheap fuckin’ shot—you disgustin’ sonnuvabitch!” Soda was shrieking at the top of her lungs, but there was that gleeful smile in her voice and she was trying to make her point from halfway across the skatepark, so he didn’t take it to heart.

He was nice, and let her catch up with him on top of the central tower so he didn’t have to shout back. “Try moving next time.”

She grins at him so wide and bright he could have contrived to compare her teeth to a half moon, pressing the blunt point of her Aerospray into his chest, and leans against it—hard. “Ain’t you a gentleman? Gimme some courtesy nice like that.”

“Only when I’m offered it first—” he says through gritted teeth, knuckles white with the effort of drawing his charger. “—And I’m not patronized by my opponent playing an Aerospray.”

“Yeah; we’ll see how long you keep singin’ like that, Nikolai.”

Well, it's given her cause to think.

She's strumming idly on her guitar with her leg bent under her, the battered old Stratocaster she's had for almost twenty years now, more for the sake of occupying her hands than making a productive noise. Apart from her Shiloh's spilled over the loveseat, blue-inked and frowning slightly at that new Pokémon game her sister'd bought for her (or, she thinks it's the newest one; it's not like she'd heard of Dynamaxing before), his brows knit, faint lines already starting to carve themself in. And it's just that she doesn't want to distract him, and she's not sure how she could put it in words, so.

It's two things put together, realistically. Yeah, she very much had got her fucking leg bit off like an idiot, which wasn't an inconsequential thing. Not fun to live through. But it's just that, back then, she'd thought it'd be... you know, worse.

Didn't think she'd live this long.

Instead, Shiloh's in her house twenty-four hours a day, doing her chores and helping her up, and she isn't so disorganized that she doesn't figure it's starting to do funny things to her head. Like: neither of them are the type to mope over hypotheticals, but...

He grins, then, wide and smug about it; a victory tune plays from the game. It isn't in her line of sight, but his patience must have paid off.

And it's just that—

She's lived to see his laughter lines.

Her mama raised her well enough to know that someone has to be thanked for that. Yeah, she'd saved his life—not even once, but twice. Except he'd gone and returned the favor, and she's starting to think he's done it twice himself, even without realizing it.

She drops her gaze back down to her fingers, plucking at the strings without real intent; the sunlight glows on the metallic wires and the silver ring on her finger. Like, hypothetically—it's just that if it weren't for him, she doesn't know what would've become of her. She would've continued taking shifts, beating her fist against the wall, waiting for a way out she knew wasn't going to come and baring her fangs at anyone who came close enough to notice.

It's not a fight she's all that sad about losing, in the end.

"Top," Shiloh's voice fritzes through the familiar weight of the headset over her ears, just as thunder rattles through the mudmouth's gaping maw in answer. The heat of the Explosher's engine licks at her knuckles through the thick turquoise gloves, a gentle and seeping burn, faint against the bright chill of the night air; her breath steams, fog collecting and uncollecting and recollecting on the rim of her lenses. Salt and the impending presence of rain hang in the air around her.

Spencer shifts her grip, her weight, savoring the fresh bite of bitter air against her fingers and the heavy pull of the thing on her arms, the rigid tension in her lower back: she gives into the sway of momentum, white-knuckling the top of its arc twice, and then thrice, and the mudmouth shivers and melts into a dozen globules of sewery sludge.

Eighty-six of— Eighty-sev— Eigh— Eigh— Eighty-nine of thirty-two— Ninety of thirty-two eggs acquired.

In dreams, Marlo is always kind to her.

Most people have repetitive nightmares. Whatever Rome has are repetitive, but not nightmares, at least not in description. You don’t call dreams where you go out for brunch or walk a nudibranch you never owned or have the best afternoon of your boring mundane life with your old best friend nightmares. But Rome doesn’t know a different word for dreams that thrive off making a home under your skin.

Doesn’t know a different word for people that do that, either.

For a long time, it was only ever dreams. She could take solace in that. Hypothetical at worst, nonreal. She could wake up and get on with her life, leaving Marlo to vanish into the dim, grayish corners of her room where the dawn light didn’t reach. Memories of Marlo’s easy grin, her short crop of tentacles, her round face that so easily crumpled into anger and dismay. Rome didn’t even know to call her Marlo, then.

But Marlo is kind to her in the living world, also.

Marlo laughs, and apart from a little bit of acquired roughness, the sound hasn’t changed at all.

“What are you laughing at?” Rome jabs, grinning, with an incredulous, lilting inflection which did for her own form of laughter. Marlo’s laid alongside her on the bed, face bright with mirth, holding herself up with one arm. Rome’s flat on her back, hands behind her head, sunk into the soft cotton pillows and still in her worn-out tank top and athletic shorts.

“Nothing!” Marlo answers, her laughter unrepentant. “Nothing, just—you’re too clever. You always catch me off-guard.”

“You? Off-guard?” Rome answers back, mocking. It makes her chest hurt in a way she doesn’t belie; tied up with memories of Marlo jumping at Rome’s hand on her shoulder, her face in a snarl before she recognizes who’s behind her. “You haven’t come off-guard since your mum came home from the hospital.”

“Never did,” Marlo says, finally coming down off her bout of laughter and lapsing into simple contentment. “I mean, she—I didn’t get born in a hospital. I hatched at home.”

“Explains a lot,” Rome says, although it doesn’t. It’s just something to say.

“And what’s that supposed t’ mean?” Fair enough. Marlo matches her affected incredulity, and she matches Marlo’s stupid, playful little grin, tilting her chin up impishly.

Even in the faint warm glow of evening light filtering through their blinds, her old best friend’s eyes are bright, alert and searching her face. Her tentacles are longer now, spilling over broader shoulders, a fuller frame she’d grown into with great effect. Her eyes are dark as ever, though she’d lost one of them along the way. And that easy grin.

“I love you,” Marlo says, thick with adoration.

Rome holds her gaze, and says nothing.

It isn’t fair to tell her otherwise. Rome has a policy, a simple one. She lets people hear what they want and think what they want, and just doesn’t say anything to the contrary.

She offers up a little smile. Marlo gives her back a soft, smitten exhale and levers herself down to kiss her, a gentle pull at her top lip before Rome lifts her hand to Marlo’s chin and reciprocates. Marlo is slow, deliberate. Careful and soft. Her spare hand, braced on Rome’s other side, bores her weight into the covers.

“I do,” Marlo murmurs against Rome’s mouth. “I’m in love with you.”

Rome doesn’t say, You’ve loved me for a long time. Doesn’t say, You’ve never known a different word for it. She opens Marlo’s mouth.

She doesn’t call this waking. Doesn’t call it living. When the sun comes up and the dawn filters grayish and pale into her room, she can wake up and get on with her life, leave Marlo drowsing until the light comes in with real force. She will call it unreal until then.

New Albacore was the kind of place Rome felt at home, which was to say it was a hotel-venue. It was something of a force of habit more than comfort, but everything about it was familiar. All self-respecting hotels, and her old apartment at Flounder Heights had things in common: too much air conditioning, too long hallways, and a suffocating sense of impartiality. It wasn’t a surprise Rome had turned out this way, in light of that.

It afforded her advantages in the venues, though, on floor-shows and conventions, which SquidForce or one of its subsidiaries were quick and sharp as piranhas to snatch for themselves. She was unabashed, a loud voice, a flittering presence, and best of all a pretty thing to draw the eye. They paired well together: the place was so cold, she didn’t have to think about warmth.

Still, it only made her rent, and made her very glad when it was over.

Rome sank into place at a tall, skinny table in the hotel’s bar, in earshot of the bartender and out from the rest of the lingering patrons. It was late. Later than she cared to know. The trade-only fairs started late and didn’t empty out until later, after midnight if there was food and drink. She didn’t show her face during those lulls, too many rich old men; no, she was left to pick herself up after everyone else had gone.

Almost everyone.

It made her a few unfortunate acquaintances, too.

She watched Marlo dully, stilled the tracing of her glass and left her fingertip rest on its rim as they dragged up a chair. Cuttlegear was a familiar face at these shows and Marlo belonged to it. They had a loud voice and a big presence, but they weren’t pretty; they were tall and brawny and energetic more than anything, but when their face lit up with enthusiasm they could give Rome a run for her money, as far as she was concerned.

She hated it. They smiled at her, tired, sympathetic, face a little flushed—half-drunk already. She wasn’t surprised. For all their breadth, they couldn’t hold alcohol better than her and her own skinny little frame. That was how it was with them: just intimidating enough to fool, so no one would stick around to guess at the soft parts.

And then they cut you open anyway.

“Glad to see you,” Marlo says slowly, working through the syllables. They’ve rested their arms atop the table, leaning forward slightly. Their eyelids are heavy—not with exhaustion, Rome notices. With... sadness.

“Mm,” she replies, and drains her drink.

Marlo waits for her to return from the bar, gaze never leaving her face. “You look— amazing.”

“... Thank you.” She finishes her second fast as she can and scrambles off for another.

She finds herself an indeterminate amount of drinks later, having made excuses of all of them, and Marlo leaning further forward, intently.

“You’re red,” they say. “Your cheeks.” Their accent has thickened with each of their own glasses—one for every two of Rome’s.

For her own part, Rome is too caught up in staring downright censoriously at Marlo and the way they’re worrying their bottom lip to retort.

Marlo doesn’t retreat, but they withdraw for a moment—Rome almost wonders, reflexively, if she’s done something wrong, but she stops herself: in this place, there’s no space for that. She blinks and resettles her face into cold indifference.

“Rome, love...” Their voice is soft, their one visible iris darting between her and the drink and the wall. “Do you, uh... remember... that tourney we won— the Tower Control, when you, umm— kissed me on it, after?”

It comes out in a rush, and it would’ve taken Rome a minute to process even if she hadn’t been mostly drunk.

She did—she hadn’t thought of it in years. She can’t remember why, but she remembers the sensation: the blazing afternoon sun, ink and sweat sticky on her skin, adrenaline racing hot through her veins. Final bracket had been best of five, and their two teams tied, and hers had won a lead in the last few seconds of the battle screaming into overtime— Marlo had been on the tower with her, caught kneeling after a last-ditch superjump, and Rome had grabbed them by their collar and kissed them to the tune of the deafening roar of the crowd.

She feels herself go redder, unsure if it’s anger or embarrassment, and watches Marlo’s throat flex as they swallow.

“...What about it?”

“Um.” Marlo hides behind the warped bottom of their glass. “I, uh. I never got to... kiss you back.”

Rome inclines her chin. Glasses clink in the background, but all the patrons have gone to their rooms; silence weighs behind them.

“You had plenty of chances.”

Marlo’s lips twitch in a minute grimace. “I— I should’a taken them. I should’a done a better job of showing you, how I...” They trail off, not even looking at her.

Agent Three was short, and stout, and a force to be reckoned with. Their signature color was “soda ink”. They could be identified by their yellow workman’s vest, but by then, it would be too late. They were unpredictable. Elusive. Technology seemed to break wherever they went—power cuts, of course, and radio signals jammed, but security cameras which fritzed out when it was convenient, or “Restricted Access” areas blown wide open. Not even footage from the soldiers’ goggles could be fetched; they were always shattered, or missing. And no soldier made it back to tell the tale in person.

Three struck at random, with only a bias to the upper, defensive domes: a natural consequence of easy access. Despite high command’s best efforts, they were un-trackable. Too quiet, too clever. Covered all their bases. Never announced themself until they’d blocked all the exits. Ruthless. No-nonsense. No one had thought an Inkling was capable of it all. Her commander’s voice still rang in her head, her black tentacles writhing, eyes alight and furious: “Under no circumstances are you to let them sneak up on you. You hear me: at all costs!”

Tanaka stood with her back to the tree, shoulders tight, spine stiff as a board, and adjusted her weapon for the sixth time in as many minutes. Hers was a deep, unimportant dome. At least not to Agent Three, it wasn’t important—presumably—she hoped; in the scheme of things, as a farming dome with a natural reservoir, it was very important.

At her right, two dozen paces away, the earth ended in a twenty-foot cliff and dropped off sheer into deep water, which the pipe system breached at intervals. Some met cracks in the expanse of sky-panels, or others tunneled underneath. Beyond her left was the impressive part: a broad, flat field of rice paddies, stretched to the dome’s horizon, divided into long neat rows. The plants were green and healthy, and the water ran clean. Unlike many domes, it was bright with pseudo-sunlight, having benefited from the recent pick-up in Salmonid trade.

A muffled jangling noise took her out of her thoughts, then faded quick as it’d sounded. She’d been hearing that all morning—still couldn’t figure out what it was; the announcement speakers malfunctioning, was her best hypothesis. Nothing else would make a sound. Apart from the domes’ constant hum, of course. A handful of farmers were working in the distance, on tending duty, but out of earshot.

She would be lying if she said she liked her job.

Watching the farmers was the most interesting thing about it, and not very, and their shifts were shorter than hers. Though the sky-panels were in good enough shape to cloud-gaze, at least.

There’s that jingling again. Louder.

—And closer.

Tanaka pushes off from the tree bark at the same moment something grabs her by the strap of her goggles; with a resonant snap like a bolt cutter, the tension vanishes and both she and her goggles spill forward. She, at least, catches herself. Whips around fast enough to snap a vertebrate’s neck and—

There is an Inkling. Upside-down, their knees folded over a branch. Short. And stout. And grinning very wide.

A peculiar sort of fascinated terror rises in her: Agent Three, with the shimmering yellow vest, with the face no one had been able to describe. Their face was round, soft-cheeked. Deeply-tanned, uneven skin. Their eyes were grey and sharp as gunmetal, heavy-lidded and underlined with deep, bruised blue. Their ink color—like reports said—a pale, cold green-blue, their short-cropped tentacles flopped downside-out as they hung. (Something is wrong with their vest.)

She should be proud to say her training doesn’t fail her. Tanaka jams her Octoshot in Three’s face before either of them get a word out, to the abrupt tune of a squawk and a shout which sounded both unflattering and not entirely Inkling. And their kicking outward. And falling face-first forward out of the tree.

She stares.

She can’t help it. She lowers her gun. Agent Three pushes themself to their knees and clambers up over themself, spitting mud out their mouth. Their vest’s reflective stripes are covered—are those fishing lures? A dozen fishing lures pinned to each side and layered like scales, six more strung along their utilities belt: colorful, and drab, and thin, and chunky, shined like new, and rusted through.

Tanaka’s frozen stiff. Three furrows their brows and pouts. They’re dressed for the occasion, maybe: blue jeans and thick-soled, waterproof boots. Why they would come here to fish, though, is beyond her.

Three hooks their thumbs in their coat, grins conspiratorially, and rattles the whole ensemble.

What?

Tanaka flicks her gaze from their face to their twin revolvers, still holstered, to the vest and back again.

Three’s grin grows a little wider, a little more pointed, and they jangle the whole thing twice over.

“You like it. Yes?” they ask. In Octarian.

Tanaka opens her mouth. Nothing comes out.

In her defense—she might as well get a jump-start on her report—this had been roundly absent in basic training. She’d just watched Agent Three fall out of a tree. Their face and knees were still dappled with mud. That sort of thing went a long way toward humbling a person.

Warily, she unfolds from her defensive stance and into her full height. Her hands are still wrapped around her Octoshot’s grip. Her goggles are still at her feet; she doesn’t dare retrieve them.

Three only adds, “It is tradition.”

Tanaka flounders. Gapes much like a fish. “What are you talking about?”

Agent Three sucks in a breath; Tanaka tracks their smile, spreading nervously. “Um. You... do not understand?”

However much it irks Marlo, the fact of the matter is that Ness knows them better than they know themself. He’s got the whole nine yards on them: finishing their sentences, reading past their painted faces, undermining a thoughtful and carefully-laid plan he personally thought Marlo shouldn’t execute because it would put them in jail or whatever by placing a tripwire just where he knew they would step. However, there is an upside to this: Marlo knows Ness better than he knows himself. He would debate that, but it doesn’t matter, because Marlo knows it’s true.

Neither of them have reason to see each other very often, though — it doesn’t matter to him that Marlo’s day-job is informant for the city’s top intelligence agency; he still likes to get his headlines the hard way, and doesn’t resort to their help except when he wants to lord it over them. They’re fine with that. They’re busy, too.

Like right now. They’re sitting in on a very important showing for some new weapon. Another generation of the city’s most efficient killing machine. It’s cleared regulation testing and will be available for the new kids on the block this summer. Very important.

They’ve picked their seat with precision, of course: their back to the partition, apart from the crowd and to its side, out of the speaker’s direct line of sight. Two young athletes stand murmuring to each other at their left, ink-color matched, hands clasped; to their right is the backstage entrance, just a gap in the panelling for the AV techs and presenters’ easy access: untrafficked as long as the showing remains in session. No one could come, and no one could go, without their noticing.

“Hey,” says a voice in their ear.

“Christ,” is the first thing out of their mouth, even before they snap their neck.

Ness stands grinning at them, one hand still on the partition — wearing a Volunteer card around his neck on a lanyard, a navy blue blazer, and his mother’s favorite shade of lilac ink.

When she grabs the zapfish for the first time, it shivers and stares and it doesn’t hurt. She stands on the glass-top altar while the remaining troops continue fire at its underside, holding it in both hands, while Cuttlefish crows in her ears.

It’s soft, and squishy. A little slippery, but not damp. She can feel the current thrumming off its skin. It wriggles a little and twines around her left wrist, its big black eyes meeting hers and not quite kind.

She doesn’t find the scroll hidden in that dome until much later. Instead, Cuttlefish spins the tale for her when she returns—the Great Zapfish didn’t just power the city, it was a living myth. A literal legend, rumored about for centuries, which had come to the Inklings in their hour of need during the Great Octarian War and bestowed its power. No one knew where it had come from, but since then it had lived upon the lookout tower. All the other zapfish just... happened to follow, as if heralded.

Soda stands there and listens, and watches the little thing inspect her hands. Its yellow back almost matches this vest. It doesn’t shiver even in the valley’s cold, wet air. She holds out a finger to it, and flinches a little as its whiskers flicker and draw sparks over her soft, clumsy hands. Not quite gentle, and not quite kind.

Cuttlefish tells her to strike a pose for a photo album. While she awkwardly complies, he boasts again that the Great Zapfish powers the entire city all on its own.

She doesn’t quite believe him. Why bother with the little ones, then?

She starts getting desperate, so she starts getting sloppy.

Each mission is harder than the last. Stranger obstacles, specialized troops. Her hands start callousing where her fingers meet the gun. She throws down a seeker from ten paces and steals the zapfish under a rain of ink, fist wrapped around it not quite hard enough to strangle. A sound like hissing and a flash and a burning pain in her hand.

Ever since Inkopolis had grown more centralized and the monorail had been installed, most of the old trains that ran between it and the countryside had been closed. Most lines were intercity—if that counted for the cities swallowed under the name, if not jurisdiction, of Inkopolis—and underground stations were fewer and farther between than the overland routes. But a few still ran, maintaining stops out to Bluefin Depot and Saltspray Rig and Camp Triggerfish.

Yes, the kettles could take her straight into the heart of the city—but scuffed up as she was, Agent gear still flashing, dragging a stolen suitcase for reasons better left unquestioned, it’d earn her more looks than she wanted to bargain for. And she didn’t feel like gambling a place to lie down. She hadn’t been sleeping lately, didn’t have the energy. Her eyes were half-shut and dull. Tired. Always tired, lately.

So. She’s taking the long way home.

Two fingers push one earbud in; a turn of her head, then the other; the high, soft collar of her jacket brushes against her cheek and her knuckles bump against her headset. She stands stiff and still, feet a hips-width apart. This station’s on the outskirts—abandoned, once, then reopened a few years ago without much explanation. It was a money sink, but no one in government had complained. Still, the trains here only ran thrice every twenty-four hours (10 AM, 6 PM, 2 AM, said the scratched placard on the wall), and nothing but silence echoed in between.

A guest speaker drones on about humanity’s fourth world war in her ears. She watches the mounted analog clock tick closer to two and studies the walls—concrete, water-stained, covered with faded graffiti and posters whose features ended a long time ago. Some of the symbols that peek through look familiar: an octopus shape and an arrow painted in magenta, and a sticker she’s almost sure she saw on a parka in Jelonzo’s shop. Plain wooden crates loom in stacks in the corners: some are rotted, others splintered and scattered across the floor. The back of her neck prickles and she curls her lip instead.

It slides down her spine like glacial surging, slow and cold and shivering. She scuffs her foot on the floor and ignores it, ignores the rumbling in her stomach, ignores the distant aching of her limbs. Her vest is frayed and her legs are bare and the station’s wet chill sinks its teeth in deep. So many electric lights keep flickering. It must have felt like home to them.

Finally, the train roars in the distance. She’s almost there.

(And it will be as cold and dim and beaten-down there too. But—she has to remember—it’s in these places that she thrives. Homes are no more than people and places she trespasses on.)

Camp Triggerfish’s Main Station is cleaner than this: a metal pavilion open to the elements, covered in summer-camp stickers and trinkets and crafts, raised on stilts like trellises that the weather force fields can’t stop vines from scaling. But it’s still another twenty-minute ride into the surrounding wild before she finds her cabin. Her footsteps will echo hollow on the diamond-plate platform, and she’ll push apart the undergrowth to find her bike, tie the suitcase down over the back wheel, and tumble into the valleys beyond.

Oh, she says she’s not afraid—it becomes a mantra, a chanting, a war cry. Oh, she says she’s not afraid, but she’d be a liar if she said it wasn’t ‘cause she’s used to it.

Well. It’s just. Rome likes mirrors. Marlo really, really doesn’t.

It was one of her first orders of business when she moved in here—the walls are old and drab on their own, panels the kind of faded brown of a place that would be tastefully old-fashioned but hasn’t gotten the kind of care it should’ve. Not Rome’s style in the least. And Rome likes things clean and she likes mirrors, so without the ability to plaster it all with wallpaper, it followed that she’d cover some with mirrors. Not half a dozen to a room or anything, but half a dozen more than Marlo’s ever owned in the entire footprint of their penthouse.

And it’s fine. She likes it. It’s just. Marlo really, really doesn’t like turning around and spotting their own face.

It never looks like it should. Like they think it’s going to.

It’s them, of course: it’s their features, what they’ve come to associate with themself. Big crooked nose. Mouth always frowning because they don’t bother putting on a show for themself anymore. All the little flecks and pockmarks of old minor ink stains. Dull, oily skin, the color uneven. The one tired black eye with no light in it, the black canvas of the eyepatch stuck inelegantly to their face, staring gaping back at them like a human’s skull.

Supposedly, that’s Agent Three. Well. Was. Is, but also was.

If it’s Agent Three, it’s also Marlo. Since those are the same things. And if it’s Marlo, it’s also them, but that’s where it falls apart.

Experimentally, they wave their fingers at their reflection: not their whole palm, just a little back and forth tumbling motion. Agent Three waves back. Marlo expects them to grin; they don’t.

Marlo blinks. It blinks back.

It’s a nice mirror, with a simple, nondescript but fashionable flat silver frame. Rome hung it above the table they put all their keys and stuff on, but it’s also right at the end of the hallway into the adjacent unit, so Marlo walks right into it every time they want to come tell her something. There are three other mirrors in the bathroom, two in the bedroom, and one each in the kitchen, the living area, and the spare room Marlo’s trying to turn into a library. One of them she brought with her from Greater Inkopolis, circular with a woven frame, an antique given to Rome by her mom.

They’re all totally incongruous with the rest of the house. It’s not a modern building. Not much of Splatsville is, but Marlo’s employer couldn’t be bothered to get prime real estate in the big city, so you could imagine the kind of place they get out here.

It’s a very nice illusion, but of course it doesn’t really turn out like that in the end. It wasn’t ever like that in the beginning.

Of course it’s their face in front of them, and that face contains them. Getting this house was a very nice deal on the surface, but of course the back end of it looked a little different.

It’s fine. It’s just the card life dealt them.

They scrunch up their nose. Stick out their tongue, mint color. Rome’s said that they taste like mint too, but that’s not the kind of thing they can verify for themself. It’s not something Marlo can quantify, the sensation of their hands on her, or her thoughts when she studies their face, but of course that and the one in the mirror are the same things.

“Marlo?” Rome pokes her head around the hallway arch, her pointed nose and her eyebrows pointedly raised. “We’re ready to go. Are you alright?”

Marlo blinks; it blinks back. “Mm. Yeah. Sorry, love.” Their mouth moves in unison. “Coming.”

She inclines her head, and vanishes back into the main room. In the mirror lingers her thin mouth pursed in preoccupation, all the red-orange freckles scattered on her with a glitter-like iridescence, the bright, intelligent consideration in her eyes. It doesn’t capture the sound of her voice, or what she thinks of Marlo’s long detours into Alterna, or why she hung the damn thing in the first place.

It’s still Rome, of course. It’s not like it’s anyone else. Intangible or not.

Well. It’s just. Nothing is ever just what it looks like. And what about everything that gets lost in between?

Alcohol has a bad habit of making reality blur. Leaning against the windows of their penthouse, knees tucked to their chest and half-drunk, the height and the lights are dilating—the night stretches on and on, plunges downward, the cityscape an ocean of rippling luminescence. Marlo might as well be able to feel the wind on their face—cold and bitter, tinged with sea salt—feel the metal of that saucer stinging against their bare skin.

A slow, distant blink.

There’s a kind of despair in it that she can’t quite get her thoughts around, words she can’t quite wrap her fingers around. So a life like this. So a reliving of a war she’d reignited. A war she couldn’t hope to understand—a depth of heartache she couldn’t hope to comprehend. So a life spent studying. A life like an endless vastness, so big and broad it couldn’t be known. A life spent—lives wasted—both machinations and an old heart rotting.

An unfinished symphony. A last soliloquy. And nothing, nothing, nothing to show for it.

Why does that feel like comfort? Why does the song of their epitaph sound like envy?

Dead silence.

The last salmonid tail slips beneath the murky water with a soft plunk. Hydroplant doesn’t echo. In the distance, the plant itself hums and whirs, the only ambient noise as the runners stand in abject, stunned quiet. Staring. Nobody, circled around the life raft before them like a particularly spit-eager bonfire, moves.

Shiloh’s raft quivers, spare ink shivering in its cup. Spencer, as if she’d only just noticed, lifts the enormous plated Dynamo in a vertical swing and—with an awful heavy, dull squelch and very little sense of ceremony—slams it down onto the ground directly on top of him.

He crackles back to life. Extra ink sludging back into place. His mouth forms first. Then lungs. Pain pricks bright and eager into place in his chest. He drags in a breath, his eyes solidify; the evening sun and shift ink briefly turning the whole world a soft, suffused orange. He opens them wide. Furious.

“Which one—” Raw breath. “of you motherfuckers—” Catch in his throat. “—DID THAT?”

He tunes back into reality with half a heart, leaving his eyes shut and letting the world filter back in slowly, one sense at a time. The sea breeze is cold and familiar coming into the wharf's narrow strait, carrying the sound of chatter and seagulls and the ocean looping its gentle hands around the decking in a lazy rhythm. The stink of fish in the hot sun, the barnacles and kelp knotted against the shore; an overheated scent, beaten plastic left too long in the sun mingled with sweat and metal that would burn to the touch.

He'd dozed off in the back of his dad's stall, and his voice filters back to him, loud and quick as he negotiates with a customer. He'll most likely have Two-tone run a box or two or something or other down the road in a minute, lightheartedly scorn Eight for lazing around and taking up space, but for now Two-tone just follows along with the strange cadence he's known all his life. He's temperate under the shade, slumped down on the battered ledge technically meant for storage.

It used to gaze out to sea from here, but now he's got a great view of the new wing. SquidForce's installation of an ink-battle stage had done nothing to slow the place down; it was an obvious choice, actually—the wharf was in the old part of town, and dealt with an enormous amount of foot traffic despite its age and demographic. It wasn't hip and new, but it had potential. With the construction came new sounds, distant hollering punctuated with the rush of respawn machinery and beat of ink-fire. He isn't really sure what to think about it yet.

He blinks both eyes open.

It's on the roster right now, and he watches a kid fling themself into the air and open fire before they even land, solid, steady, hit the ground running. He'd walked the stage in the morning once before its open hours, on the pale new concrete, the awnings yet unbeaten by weather, almost clean of bird shit. All he could think was the word uncanny.

Eight notices, sitting next to him alert and straight-backed. He points to the stage across the strait, and signs, "I have been watching them."

"What ‘chou thinking?" Two-tone responds, his voice still drowsy.

"They're not very good," Eight answers. "Very untidy. I could have beaten them many times over."

"You're an outlier, handsome," Two-tone says, affection clear in his voice. His own arms are a warm and welcome weight over his chest and he doesn't want to unfold them, or sit up, but he smiles at Eight sidelong. His boyfriend's in her favorite combination of black turtleneck and skinny jeans, capped off with the big spiked boots and red gradient claws, never having given up on wearing her tentas in a long neat braid.

Eight sniffs. "I know. But it's a disgrace."

Neither of them say anything for a minute, listening to Two-tone's dad bustle packing up an order and the constant uneven hammer of footsteps on the dock. Gradually the orange team gains ground against the blue, though the blue has better synergy, fluid and attentive to their own teammates' movements, the ritual motion of giving and taking turf.

"It's strange... hard to watch my own kind like this," Eight admits. "The picture of us, I remember what they gave. I didn't think we had it in us... to lose."

Beneath them the waves continue to lap, a soft and practiced rhythm. Two-tone doesn't respond, but they both let the lapse run long and comfortable, the wind rustling Two-tone's oversize jeans and an old paper bag over the water-stained planks.

He doesn't really want to think about it. He's never liked it.

He stares at the stage—the newest enactment in a long, long line of an old familiar tradition—and the future staresback.

One of life's great miracles, Rome maintained, one of the things that kept it worth living, was the chance to have a hot shower and a hot cup of tea. Even more-so after a redeye flight and a trip spent doting on her little sister—she loved her mom, she really did, but there was only so much backstage bedlam and babysitting she could handle. Just because she was older—hadn't been waited on hand-and-foot growing up—didn't mean she could cope better with being hauled overseas. To be home again, in her own apartment, without family to breathe down her neck, was well-appreciated, is what she meant.

She had dumped her bags unceremoniously in the entry-hall, kicked off her shoes, and stared into the middle distance for a moment before remembering it was midnight and she had meant to shower.

It did cross her mind, as she danced over the freezing kitchen tile (insofar as tripping ungracefully over your own feet and threatening to faceplant into the inverse equivalent of hot coals could be called dancing), that, if she were honest, the apartment didn't feel that different from the hotels she'd been traipsing through for the past weeks. And that'd been true since she moved in. Flounder Heights was little more than a compound of glorified hotel suites, minus the housekeepers: a series of overpriced and too-cosmopolitan rooms, often too cold and humming with the sound of heaters, with stiff carpet and too few windows and cookie-cutter floor plans.

It had no personality, and that's what made it palatable—and normally she'd be annoyed about that, but…

She'd landed with relief in the carpeted den, plucked up at random a handful of laundry—dumped on the couch and forgotten in her rush to leave—and slinked around the corner into the bathroom. After a certain point, grime sinks into an Inkling's very ink, and has to be centrifuged out; though she'd been too meticulous to let that happen, sitting in an airplane for hours on end did things to a person.

She'd tracked her reflection in the mirror as she pulled the off-white tank over her head; it'd beamed back at her. There were perks to Flounder Heights, not least of which it was built with Inklings in mind, so the water was filtered and soft, and the pressure low. Showering at boiling temperatures was not recommended, but oh? What was that? No one was around to tell her what to do.

It would turn her skin blotchy, in the end, and set all her bioluminescent freckles flickering like an overwrought LED display; it didn't matter to a self-satisfied Rome lounging on a couch an hour later. Home again, in her own apartment: there was an elation in it, a certain kind of triumph in being alone. If there was paradise on Earth, she mulls, it would look something like this: her tentas pinned up, a peach fleece robe, the tv babbling some trashy late-night reality show, and hot orange tea in hand.

Even though it's summer, it's late, and the heater kicks on. Rome blinks, lulled into contentment by the familiar sound and warmth, reminded of her drowsiness. She knows, in the back of her mind, that none of this should be special—not her apartment, not the simple tranquility of relaxing after a long trip. These sorts of things weren't even notable to her sister. But it's peaceful, to her. And it's hers—carved out of her own personality. No pressure, for once. Just warmth.

She yawns, bothers to set her mug on the coffee table, and pulls the cable-knit blanket off the back of the couch to cozy up beneath it.

She's alone, and warm, and it's quiet. And for an ephemeral, blissful moment, nothing else matters.

Leit stands, his back to her, in the open doorway. He’s silhouetted matte black against the iridescent downpour, framed in the shimmering transparent walls of the penthouse’s entrance-way.

“What do you mean, ‘it never rained’?” Marlo says slowly, her inflection not quite making it to incredulous, but gesturing in that direction, still. Now that he’s said it, she can’t remember it ever raining in the domes—but even she couldn’t be down there all the time; and beside that, she had started to doubt her memory of the thing. She’d found she was forgetting things faster, now. “You have an ocean above you,” she clarifies, doubtfully.

“Yes, an irradiated ocean,” Leit says, not turning, or moving at all, for that matter. He’s leaning against the wall like it’s the only thing letting him stay upright: his fingerprints leave smudges on the glass; his oil-slick, black-violet-emerald-blue tentacles shiver in minute waves. “And what about you? You have all that land for the taking and still population control.”

“What’s that—” she begins.

Leit finally turns his head to glance at her. Grey eyes, lighter than hers. She still thinks she knows them from somewhere. “Just because you have something doesn’t make it useful. Or mean there aren’t other problems in your way.”

“Well,” Marlo begins, again. She puts her hip against the little burnished side-table beside her and leans her weight on it, settling her arms over her chest, cradling her elbows. (She’d found she was getting tired of standing more often, now.) “It— it’s for agriculture. S’in development.”

He makes a noise of acknowledgement, in that kind of half-tone that made it clear he didn’t really believe her. “When was the last time anyone built on it?”

She does understand his implication, then—it’s something she has firsthand experience with. No one did. Inkopolis was full of ruins, of abandoned buildings and forgotten foreclosures that could’ve doubled their value given even a cheapskate’s renovation: the kind of places Octarian runaways had made their homes, before...

Well. It was bait. A trap. Inkopolis’ countryside wasn’t much different. They left plenty of space for them and then sprang the crab trap of “jurisdiction” and “land invasion”. It might have stayed a city-state in technical terms, but “Inkopolis”—the thing defined by name and reputation—had made a habit of spreading itself as far as it could go ever since the end of the Great Turf War. Marlo knew very well there was a reason for that.

Neither population had ever grown dramatically enough to justify exiling the other—they just couldn’t come up with a better excuse. Something, something; it’s in the name; it’s tradition.

She doesn’t say all that. Instead she says, “You sure know a lot about aboveground.”

“I work in agriculture,” he amends, finally, a note of resignation in his quiet voice. “I know how it should work. But where I live—um, lived... sunlight is a currency.” He lingers there for a moment, holding the note of silence in pursed lips. “If I carry the metaphor... Don’t you think it’s natural for us to be fascinated by a city of gold?”

Marlo only watches him turn back to her, grateful, despite the context, of the crease of his mouth, the soft lines knit by his brows. He’s got a habit of slouching, a little, wary of his heavyset frame and all that height.

He doesn’t touch her, though. Leit stands to one side like he’s planning to step past her, but stays there, studying her sidelong. He’s planning, definitely. She’s just not sure what.

Not to kiss her, she thinks, but that’s what he does. A little nosing thing on the corner of her mouth. Marlo turns her head into alignment with his and hums, gratefully, into it. She doesn’t have the guts to say it, but she’s found herself thinking, grinning, I can find a way to be useful to you.

He pulls back, still holding her at the elbows, and exhales a sigh at nothing in particular.

“Yeah,” Marlo answers to nothing in particular, and has to try and remember how to switch back to Octarian.

“Yeah?” he repeats.

She makes a noise of affirmation, or she’s pretty sure she does.

It’s still raining. Contenting itself to patter at the empty door-frame and stain the doormat. She really should go close it; she’s just a little bit weak at the knees. Leit murmurs, “I like the fresh air,” and laces his arms, his careworn, practiced hands, around her back.

A dozen different replies entangle themself in Marlo’s head, but she isn’t sure which part of that she’s least-proud of. “You have the rest of the night for the fresh air,” is what she manages, meaningfully.

Warm water runs through her fingers, pouring intricate patterns over the channels drawn where they’re splayed and Shiloh’s bare chest. He’s tilted his head down, and droplets periodically drip from his pointed nose, landing with a rhythmic, reliable, plink. … plink. … plink. on the shower tile. She doesn’t glance up at him, or catch his eye—instead she grazes a forefinger along the shimmery scars which make a broken line across his chest, silently.

His chest rises and falls, shallow but steadily. Water drums against her back, the top of her head, the one long page which reached past her shoulders now. She knows without checking that he’s watching her, his eyes searching, flicking back and forth over her face. She uses her thumb to further ascertain the texture of it, a braver touch—she settles her palm on the side of his chest, testing the edge of it, careful and patient. His breath does catch then.

It’s a shade lighter than his ink, navy blue as though filtered through sunlight streaming in a dusty window; beneath the pad of her thumb it is slightly raised and rough in the same unpolished way, catching gently. He’s watching her like his life and fortune hinges on it. Some twitch of her mouth, the next brush of her skin against his.

Something about it is even more intimate than her lips against the same place. It tightens an ache in her chest and the bottom of her throat—a familiar starvation of breath, an instability no stranger to her, but one which she cannot bring herself to answer to. … She thought she had, so much time ago: Shiloh had drawn his hand over a body and drawn from her a voice that she had designed, and that was meant to be enough. And yet in doing so he’d asked it of her again, himself, without realizing— Mesmerizing herself with the curve of Shiloh’s top scars is an insufficient way of knowing him. Yet it’s better than admitting the alternative, curiosity, a call of the void. It’s an obvious fact that Shiloh and her are alike. It is another to live it, as in the way she lives her heartbeats, or the weight of her hand against her thigh when she yanks on her underwear. It’s yet another to… Like this: no matter how much she inhales, it never fills her out; she never catches her breath. It is a symbiotic pain, a tethering. The unshakeable, intimate sensation that she doesn’t want to die like this.

That she can’t live like this, half-empty. Ravenous.

“Spencer,” he murmurs, and his voice comes out quiet, raw and frayed.

It tugs her back out of her body. In answer she pushes her hand along his flank and digs her fingers into the flesh beneath his dorsal muscle. His half-step forward is a lurch, falling almost flush against her.

She leaves her remaining palm to sit on his chest and tips her head back to smile at him, soft and even. Everything but discernible.

Soda doesn’t let people in. Figuratively, but literally, too. Their penthouse is off-limits to basically everyone but Rome and a handful of coworkers as near as she can figure, and their study, library, archive, whatever it was—the long room with all the bookshelves and glass cabinets—was even less forgiving.

Point is, it’s unlocked, which surprises her.

They’re out of the house for something job-related—top-secret, an urgent call from their handler, Rome wasn’t allowed to know. She’s fine with that, but she’s a little bored. The place is barren. Nothing but white walls, windows, and glass furniture. If that wasn’t a heavy-handed metaphor, she thinks.

She has nothing to do but go exploring, so she does. It feels a little invasive, but she figures Soda must have trusted her enough to leave her alone in the house. She isn’t sure if she should be flattered or not.

It’s technically two stories, but the second is better described as a series of mezzanines than a real floor, taken up mostly with dens and absurd bathrooms; a modest thing when compared to some of the penthouses she’s seen in pictures. Still more than a single person could ever have use for, though. She’s also seen pools in more than a few, so that’s what she’s looking for—it hadn’t been on the patio, though that had been the pleasantest place by a long shot, or even the gym.

Their “archive” was the last place she’d looked—it didn’t make much sense, but then again, sometimes the magazines did show private pools in long windowless hellscapes. She didn’t know. She wasn’t rich.

There is not a pool in it, though it could have comfortably fit one.

It’s the only room in the house that looks lived-in, and still, then, like a museum or trade-show floor more than a home. She’d wager the fact it spanned both floors’ height had something to do with that.

She had seen glimpses before, but being in the room alone was a different matter entirely. It was intimidating. Human skulls and ancient bones stared at her from behind glass doors, on display beside a lifetime’s worth of war artifacts and half a dozen kinds of memorabilia she couldn’t recognize. Almost all of it was inscribed with Octarian. She didn’t look.

There was a desk with an old-fashioned computer at one end, and a staircase to a “second floor”—a half-story furnished like a proper nook—at the other. What catches her attention is the long wood tables lined down the center. If they were furnished with cabinet drawers and boxes, they were carpeted with paper—notebook scraps and printed packets, yellowed booklets, authentic salt-stained scrolls. She picks a packet up. It’s a blog post also written in Octarian, detailing some cultural celebration. Soda managed to print out the website formatting with it.

Another crinkled scrap has a handwritten recipe. One packet is held together with rusted staples on top, covered in typewritten font and marked with a date from fifty years ago. Rome has no idea what she’s looking at.

After a moment’s hesitation, she fishes around in one of the smaller boxes instead. Maybe there’s a translation, or at least something in Inkling. It’s beat-up, its label scribbled out with thick black marker, but she doesn’t think much of it. Her fingers close around something smooth, small and plastic, which she tugs out for a better look.

It’s a cheap tape recorder—the kind you could buy for a 160 G at a convenience store. She clicks the play button, half-expecting it to whir silently, but a voice chirps to life as if it’d been waiting.

“A—gent Three, reporting FO—R DUTY!!”

She drops it like it’d burst into flames and with an awful clatter.

It’s tinny. Crackling. Choked with background noise. But she knows that voice—fifteen year-old Soda’s drawl that splits the silence gleefully, already talking a mile a minute. Rome has to struggle to recollect herself.

“—so I left it rottin’. A—nyway, nothin’ real to report. Dipshits don’t know how to come back at a killer like me, bitch! Killer like badass, I mean. ‘Course. Their leader’s all locked up with me and they can’t do jack shit about it! So I mean to say, it’s been quiet. I’m just fuckin’ around. More worried ‘bout the date I got tonight!”

Soda’s voice hesitates here, which is good, because Rome is reeling.

Fifteen—the summer they’d spent living with Rome, the one they’d spent disappearing and making excuses. For their cryptic ‘agent work’. So this was— She had learned in the end, the night Soda came limping home with their legs cut open. She’d treated their wounds and waited for them. But they’d never told her anything.

“If I’m bein’ honest, it makes me nervous. I don’t know if they’re planning something. Not that I won’t gut ‘em like fishes if they try and pull a fast one on me, but I got me things to worry about, you fuckers.”

She thought it had ended with the broadcast. After they’d come home for the first time in days, bruised and hardly coherent, they’d brushed past her fussing to turn on Inkopolis News. It was past midnight. She’d waited for them. She’d sat on the couch with Soda dozing in her lap, the flickering television the only light, watching the Squid Sisters announce the Great Zapfish had ‘mysteriously’ returned. Soda smelled like iron.

They’d insisted it was nothing worth worrying about. Told her they were still the same girl they used to be.

Rome still saw the changes. Darker lines under their eyes. Always looking over their shoulder. All she could do was hold out a hand that they never took.

“You ain’t gonna keep me from enjoyin’ all that surface life has to offer! If I miss another date I’m on my roomie’s hit-list—boy, would she light me up if she knew all I got up to. But you poor jealous shmucks ain’t got a chance in hell to get me for that!”

She sinks into Soda’s chair without noticing.

A few inches from her hand, the tape recorder clicks, whirs, and clicks again.

“Is this—? Okay. Uhh... Fuck, I don’t know what was on it.”

Soda’s voice—older now—pauses, as if weighing the possibilities, and comes to the conclusion that whatever it was isn’t worth preserving.

“I’m tryin’ to find old stuff for Tartar... Can’t remember the last time I used one of these. Started keepin’ logs on paper instead after Octavio taught me how.”

Octavio—?

There’s an intermission of rustling, and their voice sounds farther off when they speak again. Rome can’t place how old they must be—a few years at least, their voice less like it’d been at fifteen and closer to what it was now: low, roughened, and mellow.

“Must’ve been when I was still living with Rome.”

She can hear the melancholy in it.

Soda huffed a laugh from years ago. “Dammit. What a fuckin’ mess I made of that. ... Not like I could’ve done anything else. ... Like, was I in love with her? So much. Would the Octos have used that against me? Wouldn’t put it past ‘em.”

Then they move on. Like it wasn’t important. Start talking about a place called the Deepsea Metro—Rome isn’t listening anymore. After awhile, the recorder clicks off again.

Her hands are clammy. Trembling. Soda keeps their house ten degrees colder than it should be. She stands and in the same motion picks the tape up and drops it back in the box unceremoniously. It doesn’t matter to her if they figure out she’d found it.

She shoves the chair out from under her and darts from the room with its rows of empty-eyed skulls. In the quiet white hall outside, she catches her breath.

Their infatuation hadn’t come as a surprise—not that it wasn’t jarring to hear. They’d never been good at hiding things. She’d thought. They’d told her once they kept the penthouse a secret because they didn’t want people making assumptions. If others knew, they’d think Soda was just another rich person using common man tactics, but it had just happened to come with the job. They’d confided, smiling sideways, that letting her know had been an accident.

Soda doesn’t let people in. Literally, but figuratively, too.

You liar. You don’t feel bad at all.

You’re just scared someone’s gonna see you for what you think you really are.

Oftentimes he gets so used to the sound of the analog clock that he doesn’t register it anymore; it’s long past 3 AM, and he’s actually finished tomorrow’s—well, today’s—deadline, but he just doesn’t want to go to bed.

Tik, tik, tik, tik, tik.

One of those days—one of those days where he just couldn’t manage to outpace the lingering past, a slow, foreboding glacial drift; or maybe a better metaphor was fog, the kind that hung unmoving over the harbor on a cold morning and sunk in no matter how many layers you were wearing, all the lights flashing ‘Low Visibility’ warnings—where everything was just a little off. He’s not upset, just... ruminating.

How do you make sense of that? He can’t even put it into words.

How do you begin to untangle that knot of emotions: the residual anger, righteous fury, his own refusal to be unfair—no one is ever just a monster, no one is an uncomplicated kind of evil—the sympathy, and pity, the perfect clarity of knowing someone is bad for you and the awful ache of longing in his chest when he thinks They are the only other one like me.—? Where can you hope to start?

He leans back in his chair, the ergonomic kind, bracing one shoe against the six-pronged stand and stretching his arms over his head; watches himself cap and uncap and re-cap his favorite red ballpoint pen. His laptop turned itself off awhile ago; both monitors are dark, the dark brown surface of his old-fashioned desk obscured under the clutter of printed drafts and sticky notes and his headphones and a stack of old comics he hasn’t got around to putting back yet.

Tik, tik, tik, tik, tik.

He’ll clean it up eventually. Just not right now.

There are a few aspects of his job—not many, but a few—that Marlo does consider a good thing, or if not a good thing, at least an interesting thing. Galas and conventions and their genre of bullshit was one of these: a consideration that was neither characteristic nor unhypocritical, particularly of his younger self, and of which he was really rather proud, because he could scoff and grimace and pass it off as an obligation and no one would really question his presence.

As for why he liked them at all—well, there tended to be an abundance of very pretty people in very pretty clothes.

Plus it was pretty funny to ask an acquaintance to be his plus-one and spectate their mounting regret.

For tonight's he got lucky as hell—Rome agreed to go, which meant a very pretty plus-one in very pretty clothes for the whole damn night; Marlo had even arranged to pick her up in one of those garish black limousines like a rich kid on prom night—ironically, of course—which he regrets as soon as he manages to fucking tripgetting out of the thing.

He's caught by his cane and Rome's hands on his shoulders, confident palms and lithe fingers, and when he collects himself enough to glance up at her, he can feelwhat little composure he had left melt right off his face.

"Fuck," he breathes, rough and grinning nervously, and Rome raises one eyebrow and one corner of her painted mouth and says softly, "I'm guessing my outfit's up to code, then?"

He swallows and nods and stands back up straight, shoving a palm against his bangs, smiles and tries not to stare. Her 'outfit' is a long, slim dress and sunset-colored, cream at its shoulderless collar fading to a rich, warm red that complimented her ink; her fingers fidget with the slit in her skirt, and her eyes glow faint sepia beneath the night sky.

See, there were a few aspects of his job that were verymuch worth considering a good thing.

At the cost of his dignity, admittedly, when he manages to trip over his own words this time just trying to invite her in.

“Last card,” Spencer says quietly, watching him from beneath her bangs. Her coworker and challenger, a weather-worn man somewhere in his late thirties, waits a moment before setting down a two.

Fucker.

She draws two more cards without comment, folded with her chin to her knees against the biting night wind. Marooner’s sloped surface was kind to her in this capacity, but not in blocking the gust coming off the ocean around them, high tide licking at the rim of the ancient rust-hollowed boat. She bites her lip against the gooseflesh prickling her skin; the thick vinyl of her uniform does very little to stave off the cold.

Somewhere behind her, her two other coworkers make idle conversation over their weapons, the woman muttering obscenities about the lobber’s drain caked with old slime and the other man warming his hands near the explosher’s heater. Neither of them are younger than twenty. Spencer draws another card and plays two more, two spades, back to back.

“You bring your dinner with you?” Milo, the man directly apart from her, asks. His voice is brusque, but not unkind. He’s wearing a battered yellow suit he must have never saw fit to upgrade stuck through with worn-smooth gold boss badges. The big shot is new; he racks up some of the highest totals in the industry, but now she’s the one with the precedent reputation.

Spencer says, surveying her hand, “No.”

“Shame,” he grunts. “Could’ve used it.”

She knows. She’s starving, the gnawing at her stomach almost a tangible pain. She draws another card and glances out over the ocean while Milo takes his turn, the long black expanse fading into the horizon, only a faint undulation distinguishing it from the sky.

Her hands are numb from exposure; the last wave ran off hours ago, all of them stuck waiting for the third and final so they can go home. She’s hoping for a mothership, half a mind paid to listening for the eruption of water at the stern; she’s tired and slow, and doesn’t trust herself to last through a glowflies swarm. She doesn’t know what time it is and she isn’t going to ask—she doesn’t expect the red lamp of her bedside clock to illuminate anything before 03:00, even now, before she gets there. The air’s thin, sour and metallic, biting at her raw nose. She doesn’t have to put her hands to her face to know they’re both icy to the touch.

She licks the salt off her lips just as the guy behind her calls out, “Little Miss Provident forgot her buffet? How unfortunate! Well, now. You’ll just have to starve with the rest of us.” She can picture the sneer on his face without turning around, framed with long, oily tentacles freckled black with chromatophore damage. The first thing she’d ever told him was how impractical they were, and he’d never forgiven her.

“Lay off,” the woman, Jude, says, resignation clear in her voice. She doesn’t sound unlike Spencer’s mother, and might be about the same age. “She’s just a kid.”

“A kid with a thousand shifts in her punch-card,” comes the riposte, but he doesn’t push it. He never gave her a name, but his tag says Chase—an irony, considering how much he liked to lure, often at the team’s long-term expense. He’s one of the youngest in the EVP ranks, aside from her and Shiloh. Jude, though, was a jack of all trades aged out of Ranked, fluent with whatever weapon she was dealt and a lethal talent against Cohozunas. She was one of the only players to take Spencer at her word; Spencer doesn’t like her.

“Which as the voice of experience, it’d do you better to listen to me,” Spencer says mildly, then plays an eight and tells Milo, “Diamond.” Behind her Chase scoffs venomously.

He wakes up without opening his eyes. Waking like an evening lamplight alone in the house. The ambient wash warm and faint.

He's cold, though. He draws a long inhale through his nose, drowsy and slow. It stings, slightly—an eager tang to the air. Wet and thick but a lethargic undertow of metal beneath it, and the bright sting of sanitized ink. Underground. Old dome. Must be a Metro line. No light coloring the inside of his eyes; it's dark.

There is a soft body next to him. Under him. His forehead in the crook of their cold neck. He locates his hand by tensing the fingers just half. Interlocked. Marlo's hand, big and soft and worn, idle with age: He runs his thumb over theirs once, then back again. Old habit.

He draws another half a sigh in through his nose. Frowns in protest and crinkles up his whole face, eyes closed. Marlo laughs whenever he does that. Always makes fun about him never fighting anything so hard as having to get up.

Come on, get up.

Numb air and biting-clean stink of sanitized ink lance at the inside of his nose. It wrinkles on reflex. Strange—the air inside their waystation should be warmer and stale. Though, to that point, he hadn't thought today was a moving day to begin with: dim memory of Marlo asking him down here for some other undisclosed reason.

Okay. Fine.

It could have been avoided, technically; he had seen it was them with a glance through the peephole and could have chosen not to answer, rather reasonably, as it was nearing midnight—he was in his pajamas, scrawling his way through an overdue article with HueTube on, and hot chocolate to keep him company. Almost free of anxiety, for once. So he takes it as a sign that he just can’t have nice things, and besides Soda would have broke down the door if they saw fit, so it couldn’t really have been avoided; and opens the door.

“Nice of you to stop by,” he says, without looking, sliding back into his chair.

Silence.

“—Soda? Are you— crying?”

Why do they have a bottle of vodka?

Oh, he should’ve fucking known.

He closes his eyes. He should count himself lucky that he’s the only one home, but luck is a double-edged word. “Okay. Why are you here?”

Soda only looks at him, miserable and wretched, as he would call it; their face is washed of color even under the warm street-light, making a sickly yellow-green cast, their visible eye underlined even heavier than usual, bluish with too much crying. He gets up, hardly bothering to mask his exasperation, and yanks on their wrist to bring them inside: he couldn’t budge them if he tried, but they get the message, finally.

“I’ll make you tea.”

“Peppermint,” they say automatically, voice even rougher than usual, even though Ness already knows; they sit heavily on the couch, staring blankly at the tv: still bright and flickering with the video essay he’d had on. He doubles back to shut it off—a shame, really, one of his favorites—and busies himself at the stove with a clatter of pots.

“Alright, I’m willing to hear you out, but you have to tell me what’s going on.”

“I know you are,” Soda mumbles, sloshing the contents of their bottle around. It’s nearly full. Ness is increasingly convinced the right word for their case is wretched. “I guess I should thank you.” And ungracious.

“You can when you tell me what’s wrong.”

They grumble; irritable is an improvement, in his book. “I— I don’t fuckin’... An old... I’m bein’ a bitch.” Ness isn’t inclined to disagree. “A girl I hadn’t seen in... years—I had her over to my— house, and... well.”

It was a start. Ness grimaced to himself. Soda lived in a penthouse: an old one, and not a very big one, but still a penthouse and a closely-guarded secret because of its implicit connotations. He was almost surprised, but he was sure Soda had their reasons; he wasn’t about to truly demean them. “And who’s that?” he prompted, taking their lapse to climb on a stool and fetch the teabags: from a cupboard marked For Soda, just as they had a cupboard marked Property of Ness, though that one was fuller than this.

He has to strain to hear, their having spoken in the tone of voice used when anything louder would make their voice crack: “Rome.”

“... An ex?” Ness ventures.

Soda half-wheezes a laugh. “If I’d of had my damn way. No,” they add, tiredly, “but I wanted. She was my roommate, when I was... fetchin’ the Zapfish the first time.”

This time, Ness hissed aloud in sympathy.

“She was nice no matter what.” He spares his glance from the water heating and leans over the counter, watching them stare down the neck of the bottle, and their hands. “I treated her fuckin’ terribly, Ness. And I got the gall to walk her around a fucking penthouse got not even with dirty money but blackmail.”

“I suppose she was mad at you?” he says slowly.

He can’t see their eye from this angle, but he notes their brow creasing. “No. She— She ain’t the sort. Just got quieter. And shorter and... tenser.” Clipped.

He inhales, softly, and turns to take the water off: he focuses on pouring it and doesn’t answer for a moment. He keeps his mind stubbornly blank and turns back—equipped with a spoon, a small plate, and the teabag sinking in the water under a quiet plunk—to Soda taking a swig straight from their bottle and nearly coughing it all right back up.

Faster than they can protest, he exchanges their drinks. “None of that,” he says firmly. “My house, my rules.”

Soda blinks vaguely: stares at him first, then the tea, resentfully. “That shit was expensive,” they grumble. “Nothin’ wrong with it.”

“There is when you hold alcohol worse than Callie.”

“Hey, Callie holds it plenty fuckin’ well.”

“Not sure if I should be concerned about that statement. ...Where do I put this?”

“Somewhere your birdbrained roommate won’t see it,” they snort, and Ness has to give them credit for that; he jams it in the back of Soda’s cabinet. If it spoiled—did it spoil?—oh well, he’d figure it out later.

Soda sips at their tea—a generous phrasing; it would more accurately be called slurping, but their hands tremble too badly to be anything but clumsy even when they aren’t bent on getting drunk—and Ness sits criss-cross on the coffee table, hands placed over his ankles.

Zine History

Note: Works prior to 2025 are credited as Localsprite.
Many finished works can be found in my Illustration Portfolio.