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.'