Chapter Text
“Doesn’t this seem a little dangerous?” Marcie asked, as the vehicle jolted yet again and she bumped her shoulder against the windowed rear door.
“Don’t worry! I do this all the time,” Ally reassured her, as she carefully spread out the fabric along the back floor of the bus. A wheelchair was folded up and locked onto the wall, but there was still just enough room for the two of them and the cosplay to be on display.
Marcie looked the costume over. The outfit seemed to consist of a long tattered loincloth, thigh high boots, a strapless bra, and shoulder high arm warmers, all in dark navy and maroon. For the sake of modesty, and not getting body paint everywhere, the outfit was stitched onto a lavender bodysuit. The whole display would probably look a lot more menacing, if not for how deflated the whole thing looked without a person inside. “Won’t it get dirty?” Marcie asked, clinging onto the bar of the wheelchair ramp.
“A lint brush is a cosplayer’s best friend!” Ally declared, draping her wig, with demon horns attached, over the edge of the back bus seat.
“Next to duct tape, hot glue, and a spare needle and thread, at least,” Kit added with a warm smile as they watched the two girls.
“That’s a lot more best friends than I could handle,” Marcie said, spicing her humor with a dash of self-depreciation.
“Weren’t you friends with the four kids and their dog who disappeared?” Ally asked, looking up from where she worked on pulling the mask and wig out of their box.
“Velma was my only friend."
“Of the group, you mean,” Ally clarified, hopefully.
Marcie frowned. “So, who is this a costume of, anyway?"
She was too busy determinedly not noticing the looks Ally and Kit exchanged to notice the looks Ally and Kit exchanged. They let the change of subject go, however, and Ally answered the question with slightly forced enthusiasm. “This is Dark Lilith! If you’ve never heard of the comics, I am sooo fixing that when you get to the con. She’s seriously the coolest ever."
“Dark Lilith…” Marcie rolled the name around on her tongue, but she knew there wasn’t any way she’d heard of it before. She’d never set foot inside the comics store in Crystal Cove, and the forums she frequented primarily consisted of science and technology, not fantasy. So why did the name sound so familiar? “Wait, what are those?” Marcie snapped out of her circular thoughts when Ally pulled something else out of the bag.
“Wings, of course! The cosplay wouldn’t be complete without these."
“Can you fly with them?” Marcie pressed, reaching out to feel the wing’s membrane. Ally had used some kind of tough, semi-transluscent fabric for the wings, and along with some careful airbrushing, they looked like they could have been torn off of a real life dragon.
“No way! That would take some serious engineering! I’m part of the anime club, not the chess team. Besides, the size her wings would have to be-"
“Chess team wouldn’t be able to help you fly either,” Marcie cut in, unable to restrain herself. "Maybe if your school has a robotics club though…” She tested the flex of the wings, and found them surprisingly maneuverable. Some rough calculations in her head told her the full surface area wouldn’t be enough to provide the drag required, even to fall gracefully, let alone remain airborne, but given the way they moved-
“Were you on the robotics team?” Ally asked, watching Marcie bend and flex the wings.
“I was.” With Velma.
Ally claps happily. “That’s so cool!” Then after a few seconds of watching Marcie bend and flex the wings, her smile grew wider still. “You really are thinking about how to make it fly, aren’t you?"
Marcie pulled the wing up in front of her face, so as to get a closer look at how the mechanisms attached. It definitely looked strong enough to, say, move a neutrally buoyant body a fair distance through the air... “I wouldn’t go that fa-"
She was interrupted by the wing being pulled back down, revealing Ally’s face sporting an excited grin. “If you can figure it out, I’ll let you borrow it!"
“I can’t invent flight in a day, and the wings are far too small to sustain flapping - which by the way, is one of the least efficient ways for a body to maintain airborne velocity!"
“But you had an idea.” Ally insists, her eyes wide and somehow… sparkling.
It hurts to look, so Marcie gives in. “Fine! You’ve got me… but we’ll need to get something from my packs."
----
The back of a moving bus is not the most ideal workspace, but with determination and assistance, Marcie rolled up her sleeves and set to work to the tune of Ally’s excited babbling.
“She first showed up as a villain, in The Righteous Coalition, issue twenty-two, terrorizing a small town just outside of Metropolitan City! Dark Lilith is actually a demon from another dimension, and she was causing all sorts of problems. So Owlgirl and her team - I mean, Owlgirl isn’t really the leader of the team, that’s actually Mastermind’s role. He’s basically a big jock though. Don’t get me wrong, he’s smart in his own way but omigawd he’s so oblivious sometimes! Owlgirl is the one with the real wisdom, and she’s totally my fav of the Coalition."
Marcie worked very carefully, inserting thin, flexible tubing into seams and hems. Fortunately, now that they were out of the rural hills and onto flat highways there weren’t too many potholes to cause scissors to go flying.
“But anyway, back to Dark Lilith. Like I said, she first showed up in a different comic, and of course Owlgirl managed to foil her wrongdoings, since after all the heroes have to win! But she managed to get away, and ended up so popular, even in just a one-shot that they gave her an entire spinoff of her own! In the spinnoff, we learn that she’s not just randomly invaded from another dimension. Actually, her own dimension was completely destroyed by a great evil, and when she first showed up she was just lost and confused. She’s still kind of villainous in the Dark Lilith books, but I think she’s really more of an antihero who ends up on the wrong side of the law by accident and lack of understanding than because she’s really evil.”
“That’s really neat,” Marcie said, teeth clenched on one end of a thicker tube as she worked it into one of the wing spokes. “She sounds like a pretty complex character. I can see why you want to dress up like her."
“She’s awesome.” Ally agreed. “And then, in some of the more recent issues, Owlgirl figured out what Dark Lilith’s deal was, and they hugged. I couldn’t believe it! I’m hoping to get a poster of that scene at the con. I’ve known there was something more between those two forever, with their perfectly matched rivalry and witty banter. They’ve even worked together a couple of times on common goals."
Normally the incessant talking would grate on Marcie's nerves, but Ally's words were like quicksand. Something about the story felt familiar and as distant as the stars all at once.
She can't let herself get sucked in.
“I can’t say that gives me a lot of hope. Aren’t all heroines in comic books just broken-spined eye candy for men?” Marcie spits the last word out like she accidentally bit into something with gluten. “Won’t that just extend to their relationship too?”
“No way! The author and artists are all women for Dark Lilith’s comic!"
“Oh.” Marcie looked a little abashed. “Well in that case, I guess I could try reading them…"
“So it’s settled then! If you win the costume contest for me, I’m buying you the whole collection!"
“Wait what!?”
“No arguing! You’re the same size as me, and my mom will totally kill me if she sees me more than two feet off the ground at any time in the con photos."
“She’s right,” Kit chimed in with a quiet giggle. “Her parents made that rule after last year. Don’t ask."
Marcie closed her mouth from where it had been hanging open. She wanted to ask, or at least to argue. There was no way she wanted to go up on stage in some ridiculous costume. Even if it was a cool and very well made sort of ridiculous. But… that was an unwinnable argument if she ever saw one. “So uh… how did you get into the Dark Lilith comics?” She asked, feeding another, thinner tube down one of the fingers of the suit.
“My sister’s best friend wouldn’t stop talking about them, so eventually the knowledge trickled down to my ears."
“And now she tells everyone she can about them.” Marcie looked up to find that Nate had made his way to the back seat.
“Oooo, giving up the most important seat next to the driver?” Ally teased, elbowing him.
Nate rolled his eyes, then surveyed the scene from where he sat, squished next to Kit who had tried to make room for him without crushing the other student into the wall. “Ally, what did you rope this poor girl into? You promised your costume was finished before we got on the bus!"
“It was,” Marcie chimed in, “but I’m making some adjustments. I couldn’t help it. I’m a scientist."
“Maybe a mad scientist."
“Maybe I am!”
“Yeah, no maybe about it!” Ally snickered. “You’d have to a lot mad to run away from home like you did, all to chase your girlfriend down."
Marcie blushed and turned away in an attempt to hide it. “If she still is. I don’t know where we-"
“Aren’t your parents worried?” Nate’s concern was a little misplaced, and when both Kit gave him awkward, silent glance, he looked at Ally and Marcie for help.
Marcie, who had frozen, her embarrassment from seconds ago replaced in an instant by the familiar irritation of having to see others pitying her. She should have known one of them would notice she’d never mentioned a mom when she’d told them how she’d ended up stranded in the woods. Nate had missed most of that story. Putting on her best smile, Marcie looked up. “Don’t make such stupid faces, you three. Yeah, of course my dad’s worried."
“Oh…” Nate said. “I’m sorry about your mom…"
“Don’t be.” Marcie said quickly. They needed to stop giving her those looks. “I was seven, it was a whole decade ago!"
“What happened?” Ally asked, oblivious to Marcie’s desperation to change the conversation topic.
“She just never came home one day.”
“So she left you and your dad?"
Marcie sighed, and dropped her smile. “No, more like she went missing. The newspapers all declared her dead a few days later, since they discovered there was some kind of freak accident at her lab, but it’s not like they ever found a body."
Sensing that tact called for a different line of questioning, Kit swooped in to save the day. “So you got your love of science from her?"
Relieved, Marcie nodded. “She taught me… well, not everything I know. I think I can take the credit for a lot of my own knowledge, thank you very much. But she gave me the groundwork, and the love for it. And I inherited all her books. Technically her research too, but, well. Lab accident."
“How bad was the accident that there was no body?” The words were out of Ally’s mouth before she and Nate both could clap their hands over her face.
That didn’t save her from the glare of Kit, but Marcie didn’t mind . This wasn’t pity, so somehow it didn't have the same sting to it that she was used to brushing off. “I don't know," she admits. "Nobody ever really explained it to me, but... it's not like she worked with chemicals, or anything explosive. One day she's going on about some breakthrough, and then..."
Marcie sets the completed wing down, as if to admire her handiwork.
"Then she never came home."
"Marcie-" Kit starts, voice tentative.
Marcie wipes her eyes and levels a determined, if wet, glare at Kit. "It's fine. It was forever ago, and I'm not going to let it happen again."