Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

1.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Here Pearl is, crouched behind a fuckin’ wall like a criminal, holding a pair of dualies and sweating her ass off because it’s January on the surface and she’s dressed for it, but it’s like... the tropics in these damn domes. No wonder the octolings are wearing such revealing clothing—otherwise they’d die.

But, that’s off topic. Keep it together, Pearl. Here she is, crouched behind a half wall like a criminal being pursued by the police and there are small globs of ink bouncing past her at regular intervals, so it’s clear that that stationary octarian beyond the wall knows she’s still here. She doesn’t want to splat it though—just wants to roll past and keep truckin’.

“Take out that octoslob, Agent Five!” Marie mutters in her earpiece. Pearl sighs.

“Not Agent Five,” she mutters. “I’m just here for Marina. Then I’m outta here.”

“If you want to find her, you have to get past that octarian—” Marie says it like a curse.

Pearl sighs again. “We really need to have a talk about your prejudices.” She peeks over the wall and is rewarded with the octarian swiveling toward her and letting off two small rounds, sending them bouncing toward her like bloblobber shots. She crouches back down.

There’s only one course of action here: distraction. She reaches over her shoulder, grabs a splat bomb from the top of her ink tank, and chucks it blind, high, over the wall, where it sails past the octarian, drawing its attention. Then, Pearl, rolls out from behind the wall, using her dualies to get more distance, and ducks behind the next corner.

“Smooth move, Pearl!” Callie calls, also in her ear. “Though, you don’t have to avoid them, you know. You can take them out.”

Pearl shakes her head and wipes at the sweat on her brow. She pushes the sleeves of her giant, yellow sweatshirt up and shoves her dualies back into the holsters on each hip. She has her reasons for not killing the octarians, most of them starting with M and ending in -arina, but she’s not going to try to explain that to the gung-ho twins in her ear. She loves the Squid Sisters, she does, considers them some of her best friends, but in this, she really isn’t in the mood.

She rounds the corner again and is rewarded with a large, flat area. “Uh oh,” she mutters, because she knows a battleground when she sees one.

“Uh oh,” Calie and Marie intone, harmonizing without realizing. Above her, a high pitch voice lets out a familiar call, a squeal of joy from a superjump, and an octoling lands right in front of her, brandishing an octoshot. She points the gun right at Pearl, and Pearl rolls backward, out of range, and then is struck by how much this octoling looks like Marina—same hair, same outfit she remembers meeting her in, same octoshot, same goggles. Hell, it could be Marina, except she’s way too short.

That brings her pause though. There’s no way she can fight, no way she can splat this octoling, not when she’s clearly just like Marina was—brainwashed, lonely, scared. Pearl backs away further, heading back the way she came.

“What are you doing?” Marie calls over the radio. Pearl smacks her hand against her ear to mute it.

No, there has to be another way. There has to be another way to get through these damn domes. There has to be—

It hits her at approximately the same time that the first bullets do. She knows what she has to do.

She’s rolls away again, runs back, and, once she’s clear, superjumps out of the dome, back through the kettle, and ignores Callie and Marie as she dives back into the sewer to go back to Inkopolis.

Pearl’s on a mission. A mission to retrieve her most important thing: her wife, her partner, her beautiful, guiding light, who was stolen from her very dramatically in the middle of the night. Knocked her out after a concert when they were transferring from the limo to their apartment—the one vulnerable moment of their lives—and whisked Marina away. The last thing Pearl heard before she was pistol whipped by an octoshot was Marina smashing some poor octoling into the ground and the shattering noise of a pair of hypno goggles as they made contact with the concrete. When Pearl woke, Marina was gone, but the octoling was there, sitting there with her knees pulled into her chest and staring at her with wide eyes. Her pupils were blown wide and she looked terrified, confused, without direction.

It didn’t take Pearl long to figure out what to do. She pulled out her phone and played the Calamari Inkatation as loud as the small speakers could handle, and watched the octoling’s eyes clear up, her face relax, and she blinked once, twice, a third time, took in Pearl’s face, seemed to recognize her (possibly from her mission briefing or whatever), and launched into a long string of speech that Pearl had no hope of understanding.

Pearl prided herself on her nerve and her cool head, especially in situations like this, so she packed up her new charge (ally? friend?) and towed her to the sewer, where Callie and Marie still hung out. Callie was there, thank goodness because she could speak the damn language, and she quickly put together what happened.

Marina: kidnapped. Pearl: pissed. This octoling: a fan of the Inkantation.

There was only one thing to do.

Originally, they wanted to send Three or Four, but Pearl insisted. She grabbed the hero dualies and shouldered an ink tank, cast a look of disgust at the bright neon vest Callie offered her, and hopped into the first kettle.

The Zapfish was missing too, not that Pearl cared. She only had one goal: Marina. She would burn this whole place down if she had to.

Until, of course, she came face to face with the first octarian. It gurgled at her menacingly and she stared at it, stepped to the side to avoid its shots, and it was just so sad. She almost dropped her dualies and walked away, convinced there had to be another way. Marina hadn’t told her much about Octo Valley, but she knew this: the soldiers were brainwashed. The octarians weren’t even fully formed, just tentacles with enough brains to operate machines, and she couldn’t splat them. She wasn’t sure they would respawn, and she knew that Marina wouldn’t want her to. Marina, with all her compassion, would do everything in her power to free them, or to at least show them mercy, because they didn’t know any better.

So, Pearl weaved her way through without splatting anything. She didn’t get very far though, before she saw her first octoling.

Which is why she now finds herself standing back in front of Callie and Marie, a whole twenty-four hours later, with a boombox at her feet. It’s ancient, from her father’s childhood, and takes large batteries that Pearl had to have overnighted. It only plays cassettes too, but she has that covered. She’s not exactly a computer genius like Marina, but she knows how to record onto cassette, so she holds a long, wired mic up to Callie and Marie and waves it.

“Go on,” she orders. “Sing your anti-brainwashing song. I got places to be.”

“You’re gonna... use that—” Marie begins, pointing at the boombox.

“Yeah. The song wakes them up, right? I mean, look at Betta over there. She’s like a normal kid now.”

As one, the three of them glance toward the octoling that Pearl brought here. She’s dressed in some of Callie’s hand-me-downs and she’s looking up at the sky, watching the clouds, as if she can’t believe that they’re real. When she sees them looking at her, she sits up and grins a sunny grin.

“This is suicide,” Marie says. “They’ll splat you before it gets through the first verse—”

“I’m good at dodging. C’mon.” Pearl waves the microphone in their faces again. “The longer we take, the longer Marina is stuck in that hellhole.”

Callie and Marie share a heavy look. “Pearl,” Marie begins, “you know that the odds are that Marina’s been brainwashed again, right? You need to be prepared—”

“Yeah yeah, whatever. I know Marina better than that. She’ll fight it. Besides, even if she is brainwashed, this is the only way to free her. No way I’m fighting her. So, c’mon, sing your pretty song with your brain-rewiring harmonies or whatever. I gotta go.”

Marie sighs but Callie nods and clears her throat, runs through a quick warm up, and then nudges Marie, who begrudgingly does the same.

After the recording is done, Pearl plays it back, just to be sure, and when it’s done, they hear Betta sigh. “I love this song,” she says, wistful, in Octarian, and it’s exactly what Marina would say every time she heard it, so Pearl understands it perfectly. She feels her chest twang and forces it away. She doesn’t have time to be sad or scared. She has to keep moving.

“She said—” Callie begins.

“I know,” Pearl cuts in. She shoves the hero dualies back onto her belt, tightens the straps on the ink tank, and hoists the boombox. “I’m out. See ya when I see ya.”

“We’ll be on comms,” Marie answers.

“Of course you will.”

She arrives back at the first battlefield easily. The boombox makes dodging harder because she can’t use her dualies with only one hand, but it’s worth it. She uses bombs to distract the stationary octarians and skirts past the moving ones by slinking by behind their backs. When she swims, she has to jury-rig the boombox to her ink tank and tow it that way, swimming with it on her back, above the ink, but it’s so heavy when she’s in her squid form that she only does it when she has to. Otherwise though, it’s pretty smooth sailing.

She arrives at the first battlefield and that’s when things go wrong. She hits the play button, but the octoling is clearly far more concerned with attacking than listening, so she has to dance and dodge to the side, trying to balance with a huge, bulky radio on her shoulder. She turns the volume all the way up, hopes that maybe she can brute force it, but the octoling keeps coming, tossing bombs and shooting erratically to trip Pearl up.

Eventually, the song ends and she has to scramble to rewind it, while still dodging. All the while, Callie and Marie are in her ear, giving her pointers, and she wants to mute them but she can’t with everything going on. Instead, she tunes them out and jumps as high as she can, right over a bomb, before it detonates. The explosion catapults her forward, toward the octoshot, and she braces herself for pain, for splatting, and, most importantly, to lose her boombox. She might respawn, but the boombox will be left here, and who knows if she’ll see it again.

But then, as soon as she sails within the weapon’s range, the octoling freezes. Her whole body relaxes, her hands fall, and the shooter drops to the floor. Pearl, dumbfounded, takes a few steps closer, ignoring Marie’s worried squawking, and the pounding of the boombox beats through her chest. She reaches up, grabs the hypno goggles, and rips them off. The octoling smiles at her, like she’s drunk, or maybe just in awe at freedom, at peace, at the releasing power of the Inkantation.

“Damn, that’s one hell of a drug,” Pearl mutters. The octoling starts at her voice, but Pearl holds up her free, empty hand up, a universal sign of peace.

“You okay?” Pearl asks.

The octoling clearly doesn’t understand, but she reaches out and touches Pearl’s palm, jerks her hand away, and smiles to herself as she looks down at the pads of her own fingers.

“I’m free,” she says in return. Pearl recognizes that one too, because Marina used to say it a lot, back in the first few years, when she would get up in the morning or when they could see the sky or when she was eating lunch.

Pearl hears Callie take in a small breath to translate, but the octoling speaks again before she can.

“She said her name is Raye.”

“Pearl,” Pearl answers, placing a hand on her chest. She’s used to this, knows that in order to get her point across, she needs to keep things simple, use as few words as possible.

Raye is smart, just like Marina, and she nods once and points. “Pearl.” Then at herself, a verification that they’re both understanding. “Raye.”

Pearl points back. “Raye.”

Raye looks satisfied and she nods again. Then, she leans down and picks up her octoshot. She says something quickly.

“She said she’s coming with you.”

“What?”

Callie snickers in her ear. “Your dodging is sloppy and she’s worried that you’ll be splatted sooner or later. She wants to help, since you freed her.”

“She doesn’t even know me! Or what the hell I’m doing! What the fuck do you put in this song? She just got freedom and the first thing she does is pal it up! Isn’t she confused?”

Raye doesn’t understand her, but she can read her tone. Her speech comes quickly, and she places a hand on Pearl’s shoulder.

“You’re the one who helped Iida,” Callie translates, slow, waiting for Raye to finish. “We all know you. There was a message broadcasted to every set of goggles. They took her to Slimeskin Garrison, where her reintroduction will be conducted. They want her to design the next Great Octoweapons.”

“Great.” Pearl groans. “Why’s Marina gotta be so good at everything? This wouldn’t happen if she was mediocre...”

Callie lets out a small laugh and Raye looks at her inquisitively. Begrudging, Pearl offers her her left earpiece. She only needs one anyway. Raye listens with a careful look on her face as Callie translates what Pearl said.

“If she was mediocre, she wouldn’t have been able to break free the first time. She was the only one who did back then.”

Pearl sighs, but she has a point, so she just shrugs and adjusts her grip on the boombox. “C’mon then. We got things to do. Callie, explain everything to her.”

2.

Marina doesn’t know how long she’s been in here. There are no windows and the door is so airtight that light doesn’t get in. She’s sitting in this bare, metal room, still dressed in her loose joggers and hoodie—her favorite post-concert outfit—on the only piece of furniture, an uncomfortable metal chair that’s bolted to the floor, and she’s annoyed. She’s annoyed because she’s been here so long and she really wishes they would get on with it because she really has places to be.

She’s also annoyed because she’s here in the first place. She’d become complacent in the last five years, hadn’t she? Here she thought with octolings crawling all over Inkopolis, she was safe. She’d really thought they’d forgotten about her, the prized prodigy, the great combat engineer. And she hadn’t been able to fight them off, because there were three of them and Pearl was there, in the line of fire, and Marina couldn’t take them all and keep Pearl safe. It was all she could do to take out one, then the others overwhelmed her and dropped Pearl so fast she barely got to heave out her name before she hit the ground.

But, Marina isn’t worried about Pearl. Pearl’s been through worse than a crack on the head, and, besides, they left her there. They didn’t bring her along, so Marina can rest easy that at least they don’t plan on blackmailing her. No, they’re gonna try to brainwash her again, because that’s the easiest way to control her. Kidnapping Pearl would have complicated things, even if it was the only ironclad way to manipulate Marina into what they wanted. But then—it’s also possible that the octoling that Marina took out before the other two overwhelmed her was supposed to gather Pearl up and deliver her.

And now she’s achy from sitting in this chair, and she’s exhausted because she hasn’t slept much, and her eyes hurt because she hasn’t taken her contacts out in over twenty-four hours, and her clothes are grimy, and she’s hungry, and thirsty, and she really just wants to get out of this room. Anything would be preferable at this point.

Earlier, Marina didn’t so much wake as ascend into consciousness. One second, she was knocked out, seeing nothing, feeling nothing, and the next she was up, rolling to her feet, darting across the room to the door, where her fingers searched for seams that she could exploit. No luck though—the door was built to keep octos in, so there were no spaces, no possible places to slither through in octopus form. The bottom of the door was flush to the ground and the rest was sealed with plastic from the outside. There was no way she could get out.

A check of the perimeter revealed no weaknesses, so she was stuck. Best guess was this was Slimeskin Garrison—she recognized the metal and this room had to be an old training room, albeit without the weapons hanging on the walls or the blueprints plastered across everything. If she was right, she knew how to get out of here, at least in theory. It depended on the kettles and the domes. Things changed a lot.

So, she sat here, and she waited. She’s pretty sure she nodded off at one point, leaning against the wall, and then amused herself by seeing how many times she could walk from end to end of the room, toe to heel, before she lost count. The chair was an interesting distraction for a few minutes, as she analyzed the bolts and ran her fingers over them, trying to identify how long it’d been here. She considered worrying, but the truth was that she was just annoyed. She didn’t have time to worry, not when she knew that as soon as the door opened she was on the clock. She’d only have a few minutes to find her way out of this situation before they wiped her brain.

Eventually, the door does open, and she squints into the bright light of the outside. A familiar shape steps forward—an octoling soldier, clad in the typical leather, goggles, with an octoshot aimed right at her. “Iida,” she greets. Her voice has the tell-tale flatness that Marina remembers from her youth, a clear sign she’s under direct orders, and she carefully holds her hands up.

“Guilty,” Marina says, and it strikes her for a second that she sounds just like Pearl.

A bundle of fabric sails through the air and lands at her feet. A pair of boots follows with a thud. “Put that on. You are to come with me for reintroduction.”

Okay, yeah. Marina has an appointment with a pair of hypno goggles. She kicks at the bundle and a black leather uniform unfolds in front of her. “And if I don’t?”

“I will use force.”

Marina knows better than to try anything now. All the soldier has to do is close the door and she’ll be stuck in here again, which is getting her nowhere. Better to play along. She stands and puts her hands on her hips.

“Do you mind?” she asks, channeling her inner Pearl again. “Privacy please.”

The soldier stares at her blankly. The goggles reveal nothing, and she doesn’t so much as twitch. Marina sighs, stoops down to grab the bundle, and retreats to a dark corner.

She changes as quickly and discreetly as possible. Once she’s done, she worries with her ring, spinning it around her finger as an impulse, and then yanks it off. She has nowhere to hide it except in her clothes, so she stoops down to pull on her boots and slips it into her sock, against her ankle.

“Let’s go,” the soldier intones and angles her octoshot at Marina again. She motions Marina through the door. It shuts behind her, and she crosses her arms over her body. These clothes are uncomfortable for her now, because they just remind her of what she used to be, of how blind she was, make her feel small and useless. She hasn’t worn anything like this since she changed into her first set of surface clothes, borrowed from Pearl’s closet, all those years ago, hasn’t so much as looked at that old uniform, just shoved it under the bed in a box and tried to forget, to move on.

But then the ring shifts, slipping a little further down, and Marina feels it press into her skin. That gives her strength, reminds her of who she is now, of how she’s grown beyond it, found music, found a future, found love. She’s more than this uniform, than this past, than this moment. She uncurls her arms and lets them fall, hands in fists. The hallway they’re in is deserted, but she thinks she recognizes it now. She’s deep in the garrison and will need clearance to get through the doors, if the place isn’t completely abandoned, but she can probably get it if she steals a pair of goggles.

“You know,” she mutters as she continues to walk, counting her steps until they’re supposed to round a corner, “you probably should have tied my hands.”

She drops, swipes her leg out, and uses it to sweep the soldier off her feet. She crashes down like she’s made of brick and Marina has a decision to make: go for the weapon or run.

She runs, using the full length of her stride, and makes it about five feet before something slams into her back. Her whole body goes up in lightning, and she hears, before her ears go up in ringing, a familiar tone, the one that always set her teeth on edge, that resonated with her whole body, down to the molecular level, and ordered it to ragdoll, to give up, to drop, limp, to the ground, and she hits the floor without falling. Her body is a sock and her brain is nothing more than a soupy, swampy sluice of gray.  

Her vision is blackening around the edges now. A shape hovers over her, expressionless, and she blinks once, hard. It takes all of her energy from her.

“They told me you’d do that,” she hears, from very far away, as if she’s deep in the earth’s core, swimming in the molten rock, and the voice is coming from beyond the moon.

The last thing she thinks is just how sorry she is—to Pearl, because she couldn’t get out, because she’s about to lose herself again, and that’s the worst part. She’s going to lose the Marina that she became, the Marina that Pearl helped create.

She blacks out, and the ring slips further into her sock.

“Welcome Iida. Please wake so we may begin reintroduction.”

Marina’s head is heavy, and she simultaneously can’t feel her body and can feel every single cell as they respirate, as they try to get control, as they try to deliver sensory information and health diagnostics to her discombobulated and zapped brain. Her eyes hitch open and everything is tinted red. It’s familiar and makes fear spike through her gut, except her vision is wider than she expected. A different version of the goggles most likely.

She’s leaning against a slab of metal—an elevated medical table of some sort—and her hands are strapped down at her sides by built in metal cuffs. Her feet are uncuffed, but that doesn’t really matter if she can’t get her hands free. She tries to turn into an octo, just to be sure, and is rewarded with a hearty zap to her whole body, resonating from her eyes. It resonates in a clashing harmony through her brain, shaking the gray matter apart so that she can’t switch forms. She hisses and lets her head droop.

She’s stuck and they already have the goggles on. This is it. The only thing she can do now is hope that Pearl went for help, that there’s an inkling in a bright neon vest racing toward her, and that they recognize her if they ever cross paths.

Her eyes are hot now, full of desperate tears, as she realizes that she’ll probably never see Pearl again. And that’s what hurts the most. The last time they kissed, it was right after the concert and they were exhausted, wrung out, spent, changed out of their sweaty clothes. Something seized Marina then, as they stood together in Pearl’s dressing room, hips brushing, gathering their things off the makeup table, and she grabbed Pearl’s face between her palms and kissed her right there. It was desperate, as if the world was shattering around them. Pearl crashed back against the wall but she didn’t care, just wrapped her arms around Marina and tried to climb her like a tree. Marina laughed, but it felt like a ghost in her throat, and she forced herself to memorize this feeling.

And now, they would never kiss again. She would never hold Pearl’s face between her hands, or feel Pearl’s hands on her hips, or see Pearl smile sideways at her, or hear Pearl singing full tilt in the shower at three in the morning, or feel love so intense she was sure her chest would burst if she didn’t get it out. In just a few moments, that would all be gone, replaced with an empty head, ready for orders, ready to behave, ready to hate the one person her life revolved around, no more music, no more rebellion.

No more love.

“Reintroduction will begin in five seconds. Please look into the hypno shades.”

Marina closes her eyes, turns her head to the side, as if she can hide her face from this. The goggles, no, shades, begin to glow a bright red and she bites down hard on her lip.

“I’m sorry, Pearl,” she whispers.

There is a loud, trumpet blast of noise, of dissonance, of brain-ripping notes, and then the soft swell of synthesized violin—comforting, reaffirming, rewiring.

...

“Welcome back, Combat Engineer Iida. All previous clearance has been reinstated. Report to DJ Octavio’s wasabi unit at nine hundred hours. Your room has been maintained and you may spend your leisure time there. Find your seaweed and your preferred weapon in the armory.”

Chapter Text

3.

Pearl isn’t exactly sure how this happened, but when the time comes to confront the first Octoweapon, she has three friends: Raye, Fome, and Kona, all woken by the Inkantation and all steadfast in their conviction to accompany her. Raye, with Callie tirelessly translating in her ear, is the de facto leader, the one who never leaves Pearl’s side for anything and relays all messages to the others. Fome and Kona look different from Raye though, have sunglasses instead of goggles, and Callie quickly explains that that’s mostly likely because Raye is from a unit that was skipped over for equipment upgrade. “Most likely, her unit wasn’t combat-based and instead was there for defense. They weren’t attackers.”

Pearl finds herself squinting at the shades. Fome wears them pushed up on her forehead, like a fashion accessory, and Kona’s are hanging from the neck of her shirt. Neither looks willing to put them back on, but they also refuse to be rid of them. “Y’know,” Pearl muttered once, as she watched Kona lob a splatbomb at an Octo Sniper. Her shades swung with the momentum of her body. “Those look just like the shades Marie gave Marina, back when we were doing the news.”

Callie let out a small, incredulous laugh. She was worried and hiding something, Pearl realized.

“It’s because Callie wouldn’t stop putting them back on and getting re-brainwashed,” Marie intoned. “Marina disconnected the brainwashy bits.”

“You... you were brainwashed?” Pearl demanded.

“Hey, they’re fresh!”

Pearl looked at Raye, who was watching her with a furrowed brow. She didn’t quite understand what was being said, but she could read Pearl’s body language and tone really well, and she pegged Pearl’s stunned desperation for what it was.

“Am I the only person in Inkopolis who hasn’t been brainwashed?” Pearl demanded, suddenly feeling very woozy.

“No,” Marie answered. “I haven’t. And Four hasn’t.”

For a second, Pearl almost asked about Three, but then she remembered the underground and the goop. “Fuck,” she groaned. “This is fucked. Callie, how the hell—”

“Look, that’s not important. You need to keep moving,” Marie cuts in, and then adds, with a smile in her voice, “Agent Five.”

“Not Agent Five.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t she be Agent Nine?” Callie asked.

Finally, Kona took out the Octo Sniper. Pearl tried to ignore how guilty she felt, but Raye had assured her that the octarians respawned just like they did, just slower, as if they couldn’t find their way back to the respawn pads.

“I already told you,” Marie answered. “Agent Eight is called that because she’s an octo.”

Pearl stood, dusted herself off, pointed a dualie at her feet to get rid of some of the sniper’s green ink, and stepped lightly across the newly pinked surface. She really didn’t feel like slogging through right now, and the boombox was heavy, doubly so now that she had a small waist pouch full of batteries—acquired because she didn’t want to take too many trips back to Inkopolis. She was on the clock.

“Shouldn’t Pearl be Agent Ten then, since she’s a squid and—”

Marie groaned.

“Would you two shut up?” Pearl demanded, and reached up to mute them. She cut off Callie’s quick, peppy assurances that she was actually completely incapable of ever shutting up.

Now though, the time has come to retrieve a zapfish and power down a Great Octoweapon. They have to in order to move forward, and she’s kind of itching to get her anger out. She’s been trying hard not to worry, but she can’t stop thinking about Marina, about how this all feels so slow and she wishes she could just blast through all of these domes, dodge rolling over enemies and tossing bombs to clear paths. Damn her conscience. Damn Marina for turning her into someone who cares about shit like this.

So, she places her boombox carefully outside of the kettle and rolls her neck. The dualies fit in her hands now, despite how little she’s used them, and she taps her toes against the ground, checking the tightness of her laces. She’s ready, ready to fight, ready to finally do something that isn’t lugging around a radio with a low-quality recording of the Inkantation and hoping that she doesn’t get splatted before it can break through the fog of brainwashing.

Raye steps up, places a small hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t speak, just nods once, and moves toward the kettle.

“Together?” she asks in Octarian. For a second, Pearl sees Marina, backlit by the sunset beyond Mt. Nantai, with her short hair and those same goggles pushed up above her forehead, sixteen and fresh to the surface world. She held her hand out and asked that—Together? Together into the future, into an unknown, into a partnership that would someday, years from then, bloom into heart-pounding panic, promises, ties forged by rings and vows, and a future that was always them.

“Yeah,” Pearl says now, as she said then. She blinks hard and Marina disappears, is replaced by Raye, and Mt. Nantai is replaced with floating land and domes. Raye smiles at her, a rueful thing, and disappears through the grating on top of the kettle.

Pearl dives in after her, leaving Fome and Kona to guard the boombox.

After, Pearl is saddled with a boombox and a zapfish, and she holds the small, squirming baby under her arm and considers her options. Marie is in her ear, telling her that she needs to jump back and deliver the fish, but she wants to keep moving. She needs to ride this momentum as far as she can before she crashes. She’ll need to sleep soon, but she knows that she can probably go a little farther before stopping, and every second counts.

Marina is worth a little exhaustion.

She sends Fome back with the zapfish, traces the trajectory of the jump and points out the Squidbeak Splatoon base way above them, and Fome tucks the baby close to her chest and nods, a sharp, sure move. When she jumps, Pearl shades her face with her hand and doesn’t look away until Marie confirms her arrival.

Kona says something as they jump to the next island, as they stare at the jungle gym of walls and sponges, inkable ground and platforms, all with invisible kettles waiting for them to unearth. Callie mutters it into Pearl’s ear: “Iida has been reintroduced. Message just came in from the shades.”

Pearl knows what that means, had it explained to her by Raye, via Callie, yesterday, when it was just the two of them and the boombox. They threw conjecture back and forth, with Callie and Marie, and came to the conclusion that because of the quality of the recording, the cassette, and boombox’s old speakers, the song only worked when the volume was half and Pearl was close to the octolings, close enough for the song to resonate against the skin, in the ears, through the eyeballs. She had to be within an octoshot’s range for it to work. “Well fuck,” Pearl muttered. Raye, who understood curses perfectly because of Pearl’s fondness for them, merely chuckled and assured her that things would be okay now.

Raye also explained, as well as she could, what was probably happening to Marina: reintroduction involved a secondary brainwashing via a set of hypno goggles or shades. Secondary brainwashing was only used on problematic recruits and it involved negative reinforcement if the victim seemed to be breaking free. When Pearl asked, chagrined, what negative reinforcement was, Raye grimaced and Callie muttered that it was probably brain zaps right from the goggles. The octarians used music to control their troops, though some degree of free will still remained—after all, they were free to be themselves (within reason) when they weren’t on duty—so they would blast a special sound that caused the brain to submit and also had a lovely side effect of being incredibly painful.

At the time, Pearl tried not to think too hard about it, even as she bit her lip so hard she made herself bleed, but now she’s confronted with it. She looks at Kona and Kona looks back, unblinking, without an ounce of sympathy because this is the reality that they have to accept: the Marina they’re looking for isn’t the Marina Pearl remembers, not anymore. As far as they’re concerned now, she’s just another soldier, one who will experience incredibly painful brain zaps if she tries to become Pearl’s Marina. She is being actively corrected back to who she used to be.

And that? That fucking sucks.

And it makes Pearl so angry she can’t speak for at least six hours.

Fights with octolings go like this: Pearl doesn’t trust anyone else with the boombox, not even Raye, so Raye and Kona (and eventually Iri and Vimi and Esna, their three newest recruits) distract and subdue—but never splat—the octolings and Pearl dances close with the boombox. She steps over cast-aside splat rollers and blasters and brellas and rests the boombox on her shoulder and presses play even as the octoling struggles against the hands that hold her still. Pearl watches as their bodies stop squirming, as they lean toward the music, as they go limp, relax into the familiar hands of their awake sisters, and Raye removes every set of goggles or shades and says the same thing: “Welcome to the world.”

Every octoling joins them. They form a gaggle around Pearl when they forge into a new kettle, as they explore every dome. Pearl never has to use her dualies, except on the Great Octoweapons, but that’s only because her small army lets her have that, lets her end the weapons and gather the zapfish, because they know she’s going through hell. In the end, she has a mass of ten friends: Raye, Kona, Iri, Vimi, Esna, Stel, Azo, Ceela, Javi, and Quen. They come from a variety of backgrounds in the army, but they all know one thing: Marina has been reintroduced and she’s somewhere near Slimeskin Garrison, which has been shuffled around since the canyon days. Even Quen doesn’t know where it is, and she’s what Raye calls, voice full of derision, a seaweed head.

They trek ever onward, sending octolings back to Callie and Marie with the baby zapfish when they have to. These octolings never return, though they do appear on comms every now and then. Betta even speaks to Pearl, in broken Inkling. For a second, Pearl manages to put away her anger and focus in order to be impressed because it’s only been a few days and she’s already stringing sentences together.

Octolings are smart, she reminds herself, and ignores the pain in her chest because that just reminds her of her first week with Marina, those years ago, when she picked up Inkling faster than Pearl could teach her. She found a library and somehow got her own card, despite barely being able to write her own name, and appeared at Pearl’s house with grammar books and worksheets she printed off. Her enthusiasm for learning was only matched by Pearl’s fondness for her quirks, even back then.

With her small army, Pearl makes her way through the domes quickly. She can’t stop them from splatting octarians now, and their power eggs fly into Pearl’s ink tank. They look a lot like the same power eggs she encounters on Grizzco jobs, and Marie unhappily confirms that the Octarian Army and Salmonids trade. “Those shields on the front of Scrappers?” Marie mutters. “Octarian shields.”

It doesn’t surprise her, and Pearl doesn’t dwell on it. She has other things to focus on—namely moving as quickly as possible. She stops to eat and sleep only when she’s forced to, and she doesn’t taste the food that her new friends shove at her. They send Quen and Azo for food most of the time, because they’re willing to put the hypno shades back on. They’re both combat engineers like Marina, though much older than she was when she defected, and they know how to disable all hypno shade functionality. The others don’t trust this, even when Quen points at the severed wiring, and Pearl doesn’t really blame them.

So, Quen and Azo head into settlements and always come back with food, though Pearl doesn’t look at it—just shoves it down her throat so they can keep moving. She trades the boombox between shoulders and forces her body forward, through the fatigue. She doesn’t have the time to feel tired, not when she has a wife to find.

Which is why, after the third Great Octoweapon, she steps out of the kettle and promptly drops, like a sack of old shoes, right on the ground. Raye surges forward and catches the boombox, not Pearl, because it’s far more valuable than Pearl’s squishy body is, and the last thing Pearl thinks before she gives in to the small night skies that are encroaching on the sides of her vision, is Thank fuck. The boombox is okay.

4.

Combat Engineer Iida retrieves her seaweed and a brella from the armory on autopilot. Everything is in the same place, and she traces the halls of her childhood without trouble. Slimeskin Garrison was her first real home, after she was fast tracked through training, and she made her first friends here. She knows it well, remembers running down the halls with recruits twice her age following her—before she was fitted with her first set of hypno goggles. Back then, she didn’t have the body she has now, but the memories live in her regardless, and she finds herself feeling nostalgic and fond for those bygone years, before she was tricked by in Calamari Inkantation and wasted so many years playing at being an inkling.

The truth is that she was never cut out for life in Inkopolis, not really. Sure, she found success, but that was largely a fluke.

 N-no...

It was a fluke because she happened upon a caring and kind inkling, which really just shows how weak they are. The girl, she looked at Iida in her combat attire and didn’t put it together, just offered up her home and her life without pause. So trusting, and Iida fell for it, didn’t she? She was enchanted by inkling life because it’s so easy. And why’s it so easy? Their lifestyle is built on the destruction of the Octarians. What a fool she was, to go along with it for long.

Pearl... I’m— I’m trying... Not... weak.

The brella feels different in her hand. The octarian models aren’t balanced like the inkling ones, she realizes, and she considers putting it back and retrieving an octoshot because that’s what she knows best after all. What’s a few years of using a brella compared to a lifetime of training with the octoshot?

Something in her can’t do it though. She hesitates as she moves to put the brella back on the rack and that’s enough for her to reconsider. She shoves the brella under her arm, affixes the seaweed as well as she can without help, and marches out of the room without a second glance at the octoshot.

Recognize me...

Her room is where it used to be. The truth is that she didn’t live here long, especially because she was promoted so quickly, but she always considered this home. Back then, she was the youngest person to frequent the garrison, but she still received respect from people twice her age. These days, there’s only other high-ranking recruits stalking the halls, muttering to themselves, with blueprints under their arms and seaweed in their hair. It suits her better, especially because she’s of a similar age as everyone else now. No more baby Iida. Instead, she’s on equal footing.

Her room is nothing more than a small cube, a bunk, a tiny sink, and a small set of drawers, but it’s home. It’s nothing like the place she shared with that inkling back in Inkopolis, but she prefers the cramped quarters and isolation. The privacy is better, she tells herself, because she can get more work done.

On the wall, there’s still the map she drew out in a frenzy, after hearing the song. All the way to the surface. She planned her defection here.

She rips it down and balls it up, tosses it in the corner. No one’s been in here—privacy, even of defectors, is the rule of law, and besides, if anyone else saw the map they’d get ideas. They probably sealed her room and left it at that.

Please... Listen... You... Not...

Iida lies on the bed. It’s as hard as she remembers and that suits her just fine too. Who needs piles of fluff?

I do.

It’s just big enough for one person. Privacy and isolation are the best way to ensure the victory of the Octarian Army.

No.

Who needs a warm body next to theirs? Who needs to wake up all tangled up and sweaty? Who needs that when the pursuit of knowledge, of victory, is enough?

 ME!

A sharp blast of sound. Sparks through her eyes and ears, through her head, turns her brain to jelly. She convulses once, almost bites her tongue in half, and stares up at the ceiling, smiling.

Ah, there I am, Marina thinks to herself. The secondary brainwashing chord is active, which is just great. Every time she asserts herself a little too hard, she’ll be zapped as they try to get rid of her completely. But, the zap is reassurance.

I’m still here. Under layers of protocols, of signals, of orders, of prioritizations to follow orders and to do what she’s told, Marina is still in there. All she has is her identity and her memory and the small ring still in her boot, but she’s not giving up, not when she has so much to fight for.

Another zap, this time filled with more dissonance. It resonates wrong, breaks her focus, and Marina loses herself for a few seconds, becomes only Combat Engineer Iida, and when she wakes again, she’s at the sink, staring at herself in the small, cloudy mirror. The hypno shades are in her hand and she can see the rounded edge of her contacts in the mirror.

Of course...

Her hand rises, as if to pluck the contact out, and she fights. She pushes all of her conscious ability toward that hand, to hold it back, and it stalls, inches from her eye. She stares at her own hand, at its shaking, and forces it down.

Need these to see, she reassures herself, and feels her muscles relax. Her body needs excuses to not remove the offending inkling object, explanations why she feels so weird, and the other half of her consciousness, the one that desperately wants to follow rules, to curse the inkling species to hell and back, buys it too.

She’s operating on three different frequencies now: her body, her brainwashed self, and the small shred of consciousness she has left. She just has to get control, or at least negate as much damage as she can, until she can get out or someone finds her.

The hypno shades are heavy in her hand, but she knows she has to put them back on if she wants to walk the halls. Her eyes hurt because of the contacts and the shades, but she has no choice. She just hopes that she doesn’t damage her eyes completely by the end of this.

As she steps away from the mirror, shades back on, she feels the ring, snug against her ankle, caught slightly on her sock, and she feels her true consciousness dig in a little deeper.

She won’t be giving up that easy.

Another blast of sound, but she’s prepared for it. She falls against the wall, but isn’t scrambled this time. She laughs, a wild, pleased sound.

She spends the rest of the evening reorienting herself with the grounds. Other engineers give her a wide berth and she hears them whisper things about her, things like defector, traitor, treasoness, and it bothers her. The small section of herself that cares, that wants to be welcomed right back into the fold, fidgets and glares when she hears, and the other part of her, the part that just wants to get out, relishes in the discomfort. It’s because I don’t belong here, she whispers, trying to soothe the part of her brain that’s caught up in the brainwashing song.

The hypno shades aren’t actively working anymore, but as soon as she gets direct orders they’ll flare back to life. For now, they’re nothing more than a decorative accessory, and that suits her just fine. She doesn’t want to be scrambled again, so she tries to lay low, tries not to flare up. The brainwashing chord is when triggered when she yells a little too loudly, so she just sits back and lets her body do what it wants. And right now, it wants to get to the mess and back.

She gathers food she can eat in her room, and when Marina blinks, she’s back in her room. She lost herself somewhere between the mess and here, and that’s alarming, but she tries not to dwell on it for too long. She knows that she doesn’t have that much grasp on consciousness, no matter how determined she is, and the more she asserts herself the more likely it is that she’ll be blasted with painful sound. She needs to relax back into her own head, a passenger in her body, and just let the brainwashing take hold of everything else.

At least, until she can figure out what to do.

She eats an apple slowly, shoving her nail under the peel and pulling it off, because she’s never liked it. Pearl doesn’t like it either, and it was one of the first things they bonded over, back then. She could barely speak the language and all Pearl had to eat in her huge mansion that didn’t require cooking was apples. “Dad’s a health nut,” she muttered in Marina’s direction, though Marina only picked up on every other word and had no idea how her father could be a nut—like a walnut? It didn’t make sense.

They sat at the table and Pearl took a peeler to her apple, skinning it with long, smooth pulls of the metal tool, and Marina watched, fascinated. She’d never seen one of those before, had just peeled her apples with a knife, and when Pearl offered it to her, she took it eagerly, if a little awkwardly. Pearl watched her fumble; then chuckled and reached over to help.

Her hands were warm, and she smelled of the wind off Mt. Nantai, and she wrapped her short, stubby fingers around Marina’s hand and showed her how to cut into the flesh of the fruit, how to pull its waxy surface free. When she leaned away, Marina focused on the apple and managed to get it after two practice swipes. On the third, she felt it snag and pulled it in a smooth movement.

Pearl cheered, and then cheered again when she replicated it, and then looked surprised when she did it a third time. “Good at that,” she said, speaking slowly for Marina’s benefit.

“Learn fast,” Marina answered, which made Pearl laugh.

“Good. I don’t like slow movers.”

Back in her room underground, Iida pauses in her slow peel of the apple, suddenly struck with an intense fondness in her chest that she can’t explain. She smiles to herself and focuses back on the fruit, trying to pull the peel free in a long curl, as if that will wake the memories that are just beyond reach.

The hypno shades begin to hum in warm up, and she drops the fruit. Slowly... she hears, and it’s warm and sounds just like her. Soon, you’ll understand... It’s reassuring and she decides that that voice must be where the warm fondness is coming from.

The shades are rising in frequency now, adding more notes, and the voice comes again, Clear your mind... Save the pain.

She does as she’s bid. It’s easy, to revert back to the blank-minded state that she frequents as she moves through her duties. She thinks of nothing, just stares at the apple, at its green surface, reflecting just enough light, and relaxes into the peace of the unknown.

The shades quiet, relax, as the vibrations of sound disappear, expended of their energy. She’s in the clear soon enough, and the thought relaxes her further. She’s already sick of being zapped.

Good...

Chapter Text

5.

When Pearl wakes, she’s in Cuttlefish cabin. She’s never been in here before, but she just knows. It smells like an old person, like her grandfather’s room used to smell before he kicked the bucket a few years ago, and there’s weird half-light coming through the gauzy curtain—the half-light of being partially underground. Odds are, the sun is disappearing over the horizon, just beyond the edge of the rock walls of the canyon, so it’s creating weird shadows.

There’s an octoling asleep with her head on the bed next to Pearl’s arm and for a second Pearl is convinced it’s Marina. But then she looks again, blinks hard, and realizes that yes, those are a familiar configuration of suction cups, but the hair is too short and the skin on the back of her neck isn’t quite the right shade, even with the weird light. She sighs and leans back, realizing exactly where she is and what’s happening, and closes her eyes again.

She messed up. She pushed herself too hard and passed out and now she’s here, with Raye next to her, which means that everyone is back here. They probably lost so much time, and who knows what Marina’s been through in that time. She could’ve been tortured or brainwashed even harder or even killed and Pearl just took a nap and she probably broke the boombox and—

Wait...

She glances around, panicked, and then leaps from the bed. The boombox is nowhere to be found. The thin blanket lands right on top of Raye’s head, which startles her, but Pearl barely notices because she’s too busy scrambling around the small room, tossing anything she can aside. She stoops and clambers under the bed to look, but finds nothing except old, flat cardboard boxes filled with heavy crap.

“Pearl?” Raye calls, and Pearl realizes, in the back of her head, that she doesn’t have her comm or Callie’s soothing, translating voice, so she and Raye can’t really talk to one another. That suits her just fine though. She has to find that boombox.

She tears open the closet and dives inside, tossing aside old bamboozlers and hats, a box of photographs of tiny, blobby Callie and Marie, but doesn’t find it there either. “Fuck,” she mutters between her teeth.

“Pearl!” Raye is up completely now, and she grabs Pearl’s shoulders before she can dive into her next conquest: the dresser. “No!”

“Yes!” Pearl returns, and tries to fight her off, but Raye is way stronger than she is—just like Marina. She holds her in place with the strength of iron. “Need boombox!”

Raye shakes her roughly, sending Pearl’s head snapping back and forth on a bobble. “Quen took!”

“What? Quen has it? Why?”

“Clear way, duh!”

Pearl goes slack. Her mind goes blank for a couple seconds and she blinks hard. “What? She...? Wha?”

Raye doesn’t say anything else, clearly satisfied that Pearl has calmed down. She lets go and goes back to her seat. Then, she pointedly pats the bed.

Pearl stares at her, suddenly sapped of all of her energy. She didn’t have much to begin with, really, if that one little burst took it out of her. “Quen took the boombox,” she repeats, because it’s all she can manage. “She’s... clearing the way?”

Raye nods once.

“Why didn’t you go with her?”

Raye gives her a look that’s pure exasperation. “You... difficult.”

“I’m difficult?”

One of Raye’s eyebrows rises.

“Just because I freaked one time... Listen, that boombox is my only hope— It’s Marina’s only hope. I can’t just let it go missing! I can’t lose it right now! Not when so much is on the line! So excuse the fuck out of me if I freak a little when I can’t find it and—”

“Can’t understand,” Raye says, a little too gleefully. Pearl knows that’s bullshit because Raye’s been picking up the language faster than anyone else, probably because Callie’s been giving her pointers when Pearl has them all muted for her own sanity’s sake. But still, right now, she’s giving Pearl a look that’s pure innocent confusion and Pearl just wants to sigh.

She really is tired though. She has no idea how long she was passed out for, but it wasn’t long enough. At least according to her body. She wants to get back out there to find Marina, but she knows it would be stupid to do so if she’s dead on her feet. She won’t do Marina any good if she’s splatted or the boombox gets destroyed because her reflexes aren’t up to snuff.

Raye pats the bed again. “Rest. Quen back tomorrow morning.”

Pearl crosses her arms. She knows she’s going to get back in that bed, but she’s going to be a little stubborn about it. “How long was I out?”

Raye holds up six fingers.

“Six hours?”

Raye nods. “Dreamed of Iida. Said her name. Go back to her.” She pats the bed a third time.

Pearl doesn’t remember her dreams, but Marina did tell her once that she was a sleep talker when she was especially tired. Apparently, after splatfests, Pearl held whole conversations with herself. Or she snored.

It hurts a little, to think that even in her dreams she’s searching for Marina.

“Rest,” Raye insists again. “Find Iida tomorrow. Promise.”

“Promise?”

Raye nods. “Promise.”

6.

Combat Engineer Iida is declared not suitable for work on the wasabi unit. Too many zaps, half of which are so strong they leave her twitching on the ground. Her fellow engineers merely step over her body as she lies there, staring ahead without seeing anything. Right after the zaps, she feels truly alone. The warm voice disappears, and stays gone for longer and longer periods after each one, which terrifies her for reasons she can’t articulate, and everyone around her ignores her, or worse, glares at her for her treason and her continued defiance.

She’s trying to be good. She’s trying to become what she was before. She hates inklings and Inkopolis. She wants to see the liberation of her Octarian brethren. She wants to assist the army in any way she can. She’s already brainstorming ideas for new octoweapons. Yet, to everyone else, she’s nothing more than a traitor.

And there’s something in her shoe. But wait. No. It’s fine. It’s supposed to be there.

Ah, there’s the voice. Back again, at mention of the lump in her sock. If it’s gone for too long, all she has to do is think about her foot or taking off her boot and it reappears, strong and insistent that there’s nothing wrong. That suits her just fine. As long as she has this warmth, this fondness, this sense that someone is looking out for her.

In the mess for lunch, she gathers her food as quickly as she can and goes to escape to her room, ashamed that she can’t find her place or perform her duties like she used to. Tomorrow, she’s being assigned to patrol, which will put her out of sight. Banishment to one of the isolated domes, to protect an area that no Squidbeak Splatoon idiot would ever venture to. She’ll be truly alone then.

“—heard? There have been at least ten defections in the outer domes! Rumor has it there’s an inkling and—”

Iida freezes. Marina stirs. Marina spots the gossiping soldiers at one of the tables, hunched over their lunches, and she makes a split-second decision. She takes her tray, sets it down next to one of them, and slides onto the bench.

“Defections,” she says by way of explanation. “I know something about that.”

The three women, lower-ranked recruits from the looks of it, probably security for the garrison on break for lunch, stare at her, and then at each other. They clearly don’t know what to make of her, especially since this is the first time she’s interacted with anyone directly. Fair enough—half of her has been too scared, and the other half just wants to get out—so she’s been avoiding them. But now she has a reason.

“Well?” Marina asks, and ignores the way the hypno shades are starting to resonate. She needs to make this quick, but she’s determined. She puts on her forceful voice, the one she used to use on Pearl when she was fighting off sleep for on reason. “Well?”

Three sets of eyes track up to her head, where the seaweed is still in her hair, and they realize they have no choice but to answer her. “Ten defections,” the one furthest from her says, leaning away. “In the outer domes. Apparently there’s some inkling convincing our weak-minded comrades to join her. Must be that damn Inkantation.”

Pearl...

The shades are vibrating now, but Marina needs to ask one more question because that has to be Pearl. “She short?”

“Yeah,” another of the soldiers answers. “Short and weak. All of the traitors are doing the fighting for her. No one knows what she wants.”

The shades are buzzing now, but that’s all Marina needs. She falls back, lets Iida, or whatever her brainwashed self is calling herself, take over, and buries herself as deeply as she can underneath Iida’s placating, soothing energy. The shades slowly power down, just in time too.

That’s Pearl. Only Pearl would be dumb enough to forge into the domes, and only Pearl would be able to befriend so many newly freed Octolings. She has a knack for it, after all. Marina is living proof.

It fills her with pride, fear, and peace. Someone’s coming for her and it’s Pearl. It’s Pearl and she’s going to get herself killed. But she loves Marina so much that she’s coming herself and she’s found herself a little army to do it.

That’s... That’s inspiring and terrifying and Marina has to find her. She has to get to her.

Any way she can.

7.

The next day, Pearl accepts the boombox back from Quen with a rested body and mind. The sleep did wonders, and a couple regular meals perked her right up. She feels like she’s back in her skin, like her body can take on anything, and she’s determined to blast ahead. She just hopes that that little detour didn’t waste too much time. Marina is strong and she can hold on, Pearl knows it.

Before they head out, Pearl checks over the boombox. It’s not that she doesn’t trust Quen (she does, she tells herself), but that this is literally the only lifeline they have right now. She doesn’t have time to go with plan B.

But, the boombox is in better condition than when she last saw it. The plastic paneling has clearly been cleaned of any scuffs and the speakers are bigger, meatier. The tape deck, which used to be held closed by a well-placed piece of gray duct tape, is fitted closely and perfectly in the body and the buttons look new. Pearl casts a shocked, confused look in Quen’s direction.

She speaks quickly, but Pearl knows exactly what she’s saying before Callie can translate. She fixed it. In the middle of forging through three full domes and gaining six new friends, she fixed the boombox.

Octolings, Pearl thinks to herself, and shakes her head fondly. She feels a twang in her chest because that’s exactly something Marina would do—is something Marina has done, with Pearl’s phone and the TV and the equipment at someone else’s concert when they were supposed to be watching from the audience. That’s Marina for you: she can’t help herself, has to fix anything that looks broken.

Pearl doesn’t know if it’s a trait that all octolings share, but these few that Pearl’s had the pleasure of knowing, these helpful, loyal few, have proven to her that octolings are a people of tenacity and ingenuity. She’s thankful for that. This whole situation might be terrible, but at least she has this—these friendships with these amazing people.

“Thank you,” Pearl mutters in Octarian, before Callie’s finished translating Quen’s rapid speech.

Quen smiles at her and places a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s get Marina back.”

8.

Combat Engineer Iida didn’t want to transfer to one of the outer domes, but now, inexplicably, she desperately can’t wait. She packs her things, shoves her brella under her arm, and stomps out of her room. As the door slides closed behind her, she thinks: Good riddance.

She’s not sure where that came from, but she agrees with it.

She’s stationed in a beach dome, with its beautiful sky and water. It’s all a canvas of blue, and she already knows that she’s going to get sick of seeing it. She misses the gray of the city— The city? No, the garrison. She misses the gray of the garrison, broken up by the bright tentacles of other soldiers— Or the neon, rainbow colors of inklings.

What?

What?

She misses color.

Blue is grating, and the water is sparkling and tempting for no reason other than to be pretty. She doesn’t find it pretty, and it makes the octarians and the few other octolings look washed out. Their bright pink tentacles clash with the blue backdrop, and she has to look away.

Her new room is small and underwater. She slips into a kettle to get to it, and she deposits her bag on the bed and stares down at her boot. The ring is still there, nestled against her ankle, and she’s only seen it twice, when she undressed to shower. She put it on her finger and stared at her hand and was rewarded with flashes of a bright, quiet day of green leaves and impeccable clothing. There’s Pearl, in her short dress and huge boots, and Marina in her pantsuit and everyone they know looking up at them, and there’s Pearl smiling up at her in a way that she’s never seen before—it’s tender and relaxed and excited. And then the weight of the band, searing a bond between them that Marina promised to never break.

Outside, water presses against the window and it’s all blue. Iida finds herself desperately wanting pale pink.

9.

Quen and the others pushed so far ahead that Pearl doesn’t have to do anything at all. They dodge around a few octarians because they managed to respawn in the time since Quen came through, but otherwise the domes are empty. In the distance, small settlements wink their lights at them, and Pearl swears that she hears music from one of them as they swim past. When she asks, Raye merely shakes her head and mutters that music, while used to control, is still important here, weaved into their very DNA. Pearl understands that, and it makes her ache a little. All of her music is Marina’s music too and it connects them in ways that Pearl can’t articulate. When they’re writing or singing or performing, she feels like they blend in ways that they can’t anywhere else.

First thing she wants to do, once they get home, is curl up on the couch and hum together, feel her voice vibrate out of her throat and then spin through the air with Marina’s, with no words to get in the way. Just sound. just them.

They make good time, superjump past dome after dome, and eventually reach the deepest dome of them all. Octavio likes to hang out where it’s the most ominous, but, most importantly, the garrison is here.

They stand outside, hidden around a corner, and Pearl gazes up at the large, square, gray building and feels something shift inside her. There’s no way Marina is here. It... feels wrong.

“Callie,” she says, and ignores the way her stomach is twisting. “What’s the latest chatter on Marina?”

“Give me a sec.” There’s a sound of rustling and then keys tapping, and then a shout for Marie with the same question, and eventually Marie comes on the line to answer. All the while, Pearl feels herself getting twitchier.

“Reintroduced at Slimeskin Garrison,” Marie reads, keeping her tone even. “Reintroduction a success. Adjustment positive. That’s it. Why?”

Pearl squints hard at the building. “She’s not here.”

“What? How do you know?”

“I just do, okay! She’s not here! She’s fighting hard to get out of whatever brain fog they got her in, I know it! She’s not just in there drawing blueprints and talking about how to skewer inklings!”

“But the chatter—”

Raye, who can’t understand their words but can hear their tone, steps up next to Pearl and touches her hand. She says something in Octarian and Pearl doesn’t recognize a word of it except Quen’s name, so she just stares blankly, waiting for the translation.

“Let me and Quen go in,” Callie says quickly. Then, she answers in quick Octarian before Pearl can say anything. Her tone is short, panicked, and Raye answers with a measured voice before tapping the octoshot on her hip. Quen steps forward and holds up a blaster.

“What the fuck is going on?” Pearl demands.

Raye turns to her and puts a hand on her shoulder. “We will get Marina back,” she says in slow Inkling, measuring each word with her tongue. Behind her, Quen nods and pulls her hypno shades down, right over her eyes. Her smile disappears and suddenly she looks like a serious elite octoling again. Raye squeezes Pearl’s shoulder and does the same with her goggles, and it chills Pearl through when she looks at her with a blank face. It’s so wrong, nothing like her smart, loyal, bubbly friend.

They turn together and talk toward the garrison. At the gate, Quen says something that Pearl can’t hear and probably wouldn’t understand anyway, and they’re admitted after only a short pause.

“What the fuck is going on?” Pearl repeats.

“What does it look like?” Callie answers, tart. Just there, Pearl can hear her pacing. “They’re going to look for Marina.”

“They’re what?”

“This is suicide,” Callie mutters. “If they’re caught, that’s it. Reintroduction will be a dream compared to what’ll probably happen to them.”

“Why would they do that?”

“You freed them, Pearl,” Marie says, quiet. “They’ll do anything to help you.”

Pearl looks back toward the garrison, mouth dry. Behind her, the rest of her friends huddle close.

Nightfall and Pearl doesn’t sleep. She and her small army move away from the corner and huddle in a small abandoned building. There are no people around; this dome was cleared of civilians long ago, and the only octolings that live here now are locked in the garrison.

Pearl stares at the garrison, waiting for any sign of alarm or panic, ready to jump to her feet and blast toward the building, dualies alight in her hands. She doesn’t care anymore about splatting, not when her friends are on the line.

But that moment never comes. Pearl eventually nods off to a fitful sleep, full of half-baked dreams featuring Marina, Raye, and Quen’s faces, floating just out of reach. She wakes in starts and stops, but every time she blinks her eyes open, nothing’s changed.

In the morning, she’s woken by a sure hand shaking her shoulder. She jerks up and reaches for her guns, but then a familiar face appears, speaking quickly. Callie is still asleep so Pearl doesn’t get a translation, but she doesn’t need one because Raye is back and Quen is behind her, polishing her blaster against her skirt. They aren’t injured and their hypno shades and goggles are back on their heads, as if they never left.

“Thank fuck,” Pearl cries, and throws her arms over Raye’s shoulders to pull her into a hug. The octoling stiffens in Pearl’s arms, as if she’s not used to this, and it occurs to Pearl that maybe she isn’t. But, just now, she doesn’t care. She’s just so fucking thankful that she didn’t lose another friend in this mess.

During the hug, Raye speaks: “Marina not here,” she says, in that measured, careful way that she tackles Inkling. “You right.”

“I knew it,” Pearl mutters, and lets her go so she can look at her. “Where is she?”

Raye answers with a string of syllables that Pearl can’t understand. She furrows her brow and Raye sighs. “Water,” she says. “Blue.”

Pearl considers that for a few seconds, lets her exhausted, relived mind time to wake up fully. It ticks over, considering, running through every dome, every kettle, and eventually lights up on one.

“Oh!” she cries, and leaps to her feet. “I know where that is! Let’s go! We’re getting my wife back!”

10.

Marina thinks this is a feint. Here’s what she knows: an inkling (Pearl) is blasting through domes with an army of defected octolings, probably because she has some sort of speaker or sound system, and she’s using the Calamari Inkantation to jostle octolings free of their bonds, hoping one of them is Marina. She knows this because it’s exactly what she would expect Pearl to do in this situation, and it makes sense. Pearl isn’t someone who would rely on anyone, let alone the New Squidbeak Splatoon and their army of teenagers, to save Marina. She would come herself, with the fires of the sun on her heels, and she knows exactly what freed Marina the first time, hence the Inkantation and the sound system. Hell, she probably grabbed that old boombox from her father’s basement, knowing her.

She also knows that Pearl’s been through this dome already. The recruits in the barracks are few and far between, and when she gets dinner in the mess that night, there are exactly four of them huddled together over their food, whispering and pointing at her. She doesn’t look at them, just grabs food, sits across the room, and leans toward them, trying to listen. Their speech is quiet, but she can make out words here and there: lost, got Stel, Azo too...

A feint, she thinks to herself. They know exactly what Pearl wants, so they moved her here, behind Pearl. She’s probably at the garrison by now, trying to get in. Odds are, her little army will realize that the best way in will be to pretend to be brainwashed. Marina sincerely hopes that the higher ups don’t realize the same thing.

Should warn someone... a halting, exhausted, confused voice says from deep inside her. That’s the part of her that’s detached from her memories, that believes in the Octarian Army, that’s given in to the brainwashing. She soothes it easily, tells it No, it’s too late, and it accepts.

The truth is that Pearl’s long gone and she might not figure out where Marina is, she realizes as the brainwashed voice quietly takes control. Marina is tired and she can’t really fight off the brainwashing’s control for long, so she has to hide most of the time, under the placating, weak energy of Iida, just to keep herself from being zapped.

But, she can’t do this for much longer. She’s getting weaker, and Pearl has passed her by.

She’s going to have to do this herself.

Marina needs to escape.

Iida is stationed on patrol in the middle of a long dock that extends into the water. No one ever comes out here, let alone the Squidbeak Splatoon, and she can’t help but feel insulted. She’s doing better after all—not a single zap yesterday or the day before! The blue is doing her good, no matter how much she hates it. Just goes to show: being challenged is what she needed.

She swings her brella over and over in her hands, tosses it into the air, bored out of her mind. The water is crystal blue and empty—because there’s no fish here underground—and the simulated sky is clear, not a single pixel out of place. The clouds, projected over the blue, move lazily in predictable patterns and she can’t see anything in their shapes. She can feel herself going numb.

Marina hates it here too, but for a different reason. She doesn’t like being moved around like a chess piece, and she doesn’t like being duped. She has a plan though.

All she has to do is walk.

They’re tracking her zaps and they know she’s a flight risk, but they also know she hasn’t been zapped in two days, so they’re not watching her as closely. Iida, for all her annoying tendencies, is playing her part well, following her schedule, saluting perfectly, and Marina knows that suspicion is way down. They probably figure that out here, away from the memories of her childhood, she’s finally falling in line. Maybe out of sheer boredom or maybe just because she doesn’t have all that memory stimulus. Regardless, she’s free to just walk.

So she walks.

And she keeps on walking.

She walks outside of her patrol area, swinging her brella the whole way. She walks past another octoling and gives her a salute. She walks and she walks.

It’s only when she comes to the edge, where she’ll have to superjump out of the dome out of view of any wandering eyes, that Iida stirs. She stirs and lets out a low groan, wonders how she got here, what she’s doing, how this will affect her performance rating, and the shades being to buzz.

Marina panics. She can’t afford another zap. Every time it happens, she feels herself slipping, feels herself being deleted. She doesn’t know how many more she’ll survive, but she doesn’t want to find out.

Find Pearl, she tries to soothe. Iida isn’t having it.

“No,” she says out loud, looking down at her hands, “I’m on patrol. This is my home now. With the Octarian Army.”

Pearl is family.

“No! Inklings are nothing.”

I love her!

That trips her up, just enough. Marina tries to superjump, focuses on her destination and feels her muscles coil, but her body springs back, springs away from the edge, before she can launch.

“NO!”

The shades are resonating a pitch now. Marina braces, ready for the zap, ready to disappear, ready to possibly never come back again. That was it, her last chance, and the brainwashing won out. The fear of retaliation beat the appeal of love and freedom. It’s over.

“Marina?”

Everything freezes.

“Reena?”

Marina Iida turns. Her brella is limp in her hand. She turns and there’s Pearl, with a cluster of octolings surrounding her. There’s Pearl and she has a boombox on her shoulder.

“Ah,” Marina says, “I knew it.”

There’s Pearl, dressed in a bright yellow sweatshirt and she looks healthy. She looks well-cared for. It brings Marina so much relief.

“What?” Pearl asks.

The shades are a projecting a cacophony into her mind now. She can barely hear herself, but she still hears Pearl.

“Marina,” Pearl says again, and steps toward her. One step. That’s all it takes.

“Pearl,” Marina answers.

Six trumpets blare, in close, clashing notes, right against her mind. The last thing Marina sees, as she’s falling, limp, is Pearl lunging toward her to catch her.

Chapter Text

11.

Marina falls and Pearl isn’t fast enough to catch her. Even as she tosses the boombox toward the closest set of hands (Quen’s), shoves away from the arms trying to hold her back (Esna’s), and ignores the voice that calls for her in Octarian to STOP (Raye’s), she knows that she’s not going to catch Marina. Pearl watches her, in slow motion, as she thuds into the ground, lifeless, but doesn’t stop. She follows through on her momentum and throws herself onto Marina, checking her for injuries, stuttering out reassurances and desperate demands (“Please be okay. You’re breathing, thank fuck. You’re fine. I’m here. Please wake up. Mar, I’m here. Please for the love of fuck please still be in there. I need you.”), runs her hands over Marina’s body and face, and eventually grabs her head between her hands and stares at her.

Her face is slack but she’s tense and breathing, so she’s alive. But that thought is only a minor comfort, because she has hypno shades on. Her hair is still long, pulled back against the nape of her neck, which strikes Pearl for a second. Why didn’t they cut it?

Pearl reaches to rip the shades off, but Raye appears and grabs her wrist. “Don’t,” she says, echoed by Callie a few seconds later. “Could trigger her defense response.”

Pearl yanks her hand away. “We have to get them off! They’re hurting her!”

Marina’s body is tense and twitching, and Pearl recognizes the shape of clenched teeth. It hurts deep in her gut to see.

“We have to be careful,” Raye says, translated by Callie’s careful voice. “She’s not like us.” She indicates herself and the rest of their octoling friends with a sweep of her hand. “She’s been zapped multiple times in the last few days. The shades will not want to be removed and will trigger a defense response if we don’t disconnect them first.”

“Then disconnect them!” Pearl cries. She still has Marina’s face between her hands, and she’s convulsing now, small sparks of movement that move her limbs in little jumps. Pearl can’t see her eyes and that’s the only comfort she has; she doesn’t know what she’d do if she saw Marina looking back at her with a glassy stare.

“You have to let go. I will disconnect them.” Raye wraps her fingers around Pearl’s hand and carefully tries to pry it away. Pearl resists a little, has to convince her hands to listen, but it’s so hard after so many days of curling around nothing, of aching for this, of worrying over Marina and seeing her in dreams.

But, she has to let go. She has to trust her friends. She has to let someone else help Marina first.

She lets go and moves back exactly one step, close enough that she can jump into action if she needs to, and watches Raye with unblinking eyes.

Raye motions toward Quen, and she steps forward, still holding the boombox. Then, Raye turns to Marina, moves slowly, muttering in low Octarian, words of comfort, of reassurance, and touches the shades.

Marina jerks and lunges. She shoves Raye off, springs to her feet, and dives toward Pearl, hissing something that Pearl doesn’t catch. Pearl can’t move as the world slows down again, as Marina flies toward her, and all she can see for a couple seconds is Marina, tackling her in celebration after they saved the world with Agent 8, Marina, rushing her to pick her up and pin her to the bed to kiss her silly, Marina, running toward her after a long day in the studio for a hug, Marina, Marina, Marina.

A blur of pink intercepts Marina before she can touch Pearl. Quen, Pearl’s mind provides as she watches her push Marina aside with the strength of an inkzooka shot. Marina is shoved to the side and she rolls, grabs her brella and shoots it twice, right at Quen. Quen can’t dodge, is too busy trying to find her footing, so she takes the brunt of both shots.

She’s splatted in the blink of an eye, and everyone freezes as her soul floats away, looking for a respawn.

Pearl, blindsided, can only turn back the way Quen came, looking for the boombox. Numb. Trying not to think about how far gone Marina is, if she just attacked like that. She’s gone. She’s gone. She’s gone. She’s gone.

There’s the boombox, sitting safely in the grass.

Fourteen octolings throw themselves at Marina, and before Pearl can blink, before she can compute past that, they have her wrestled into submission, back on the ground, on her back, legs and arms pinned under their combined weight. Marina fights, struggles, tries to pull free, yells and snaps in Octarian. Pearl is thankful when Callie doesn’t translate.

“Quen is here,” Marie mutters into Pearl’s ear. “She found her way back.”

Pearl doesn’t have time to be relieved, though she gives herself one breath, one small hitch in her throat, and then she stomps toward the boombox and scoops it up.

Raye meets her, face pale, and apologizes once. Pearl shakes her head and stands above Marina, not wanting to get too close.

“Now we do it my way,” Pearl says, and pushes the play button.

Marina stills.

12.

The Inkantation calls to her.

She reaches toward it.

Stretches.

She is the music.

She is herself.

“She’s relaxed.”

She is a bunch of vibrating molecules, all waiting, all poised, all tense.

She just wants to be free.

“Get off her! She’s calm!”

Stretching still, trying to fit back onto her frame, into her skin.

She just wants pink.

“Marina?”

Something touches her on what she thinks is her face. She claws her way toward it.

“Mar?”

Her eyes open.

Pink.

“Pearl...”

Her breath leaves her.

She...

“Marina!”

“Pearl...”

Her body recoils and she snaps back into shape, small, pushed down, faded around the edges.

Marina is too weak.

The Inkantation isn’t enough.

13.

The Inkantation is working. That’s what Pearl tells herself when Marina relaxes, a dumb little smile on her face. Pearl’s platoon of octolings are piled on top of Marina and they’re all grimacing, clearly unhappy.

“She’s relaxed,” Pearl mutters, mostly to make herself feel better.

Raye watches from next to Pearl, one hand over her mouth. Pearl swears she can hear her counting—beats or breaths or something. “That’s it,” she mutters after she reaches some mystery number. “She should be good.”

Pearl doesn’t have to be told twice. “Get off her! She’s relaxed!”

Fourteen octolings look up at Pearl, then at Raye, waiting for a translation, and eventually Raye gives it, voice far more subdued than Pearl’s. They slowly lift up and back away, hands held out, waiting for Marina to spring again, but she doesn’t so much as twitch. The final octoling, Esna, holding Marina’s right shoulder, looks right at Raye and says something in a tone that chills Pearl through.

“She’s still tense,” Callie translates. “I can feel it.”

“But it’s the Inkantation,” Pearl retorts, and realizes that she’s pleading.

Raye delivers her response after Callie translates it, and Esna looks at her with eyes like a cavern—wide and dangerous. She doesn’t say anything else, just removes her hands and steps back. She doesn’t go as far as the others.

Pearl paces forward, boombox still balanced in her hands, and kneels. She can’t get her hands to let go of the boombox.

“Marina?”

Nothing. Pearl forces a hand forward and brushes the side of her finger against Marina’s face, trying to rouse her like she used to when they had to get up for their jobs at the studio.

“Mar?”

Behind the shades, Pearl swears she sees something flutter.

“Pearl...”

Pearl’s whole body goes cold.

That’s Marina’s voice, but it’s... wrong. Robotic and emotionless.

“Marina!” She’s desperate now, hands fisted around the boombox’s grip like she’s hanging off a cliff.

“Pearl...”

Marina tenses. Pearl jerks back. Marina’s head turns toward her.

Three long, silent beats.

Marina lunges.

14.

Only three thoughts: get free, get away, get rid of the Inkling.

15.

If you ask Pearl later, she’ll tell you that she blacked out in those moments. She doesn’t remember anything for those two minutes—doesn’t remember Marina springing at her, fingers like rakes, or Raye’s cry, or the cry of at least ten other voices, all combining into a chorus, or the impact of her body against the ground, the gust of wind that it knocks out of her, or even the boombox, flying from her hands and landing squarely on its own corner. She doesn’t remember the crunch of cheap plastic or the grinding of the precious mechanics; the cassette, when she finds it later, is still intact, the only surviving piece.

All she remembers is looking up at the fake, blue sky and seeing a singular cloud. She swears that for a second she can count the pixels.

What she will be told later by Raye, while Callie is patching her up, is that Marina flew through the air and tackled her, right onto her back, and, for a second, simply stared, as if caught in some kind of spell. She stared, and, for another second, it almost seemed like she was herself. She reached out with one, shaky hand, and touched Pearl’s face, just there on her cheek. Raye will say that it was a touch full of tender familiarity, one so stuffed full of history that she was almost too embarrassed to see it.

But then, Marina’s face cleared, and gone was the fog, replaced with another cloud, this one of cold distance, as if Marina had allowed herself one moment to reminisce before she gave in to the zaps and the hypno shades.

Raye will tell her that Marina’s hand rose, searching for her brella, and she managed to get her whole fist around it before she was tackled again.

What Pearl remembers: Raye and Quen take her down together, bodily dragging her away from Pearl with their combined weight, and the others quickly pile on, right back to their places.

Pearl looks up at her cloud.

Pearl wonders if this is how Marina felt, the first time she climbed out of this terrible place, when she first saw the sky.

16.

A moment of weakness, that’s all it was.

But it’s Pearl.

17.

Pearl sits up. She hurts, and she’s not sure why, but that doesn’t matter. Where’s Marina? Why’s she still pinned down? Didn’t she tell them to let her go?

She gets as far as opening her mouth to ask when she realizes that something’s wrong. It’s way too quiet.

Her head moves on a crank, like it needs oil, like it’s on a track, click, click, click. She can feel every muscle in her neck, every muscle in her back, every muscle in her whole body, as she turns away from where Marina is struggling and yelling herself hoarse. Pearl spares a single second to cringe at the damage that must be doing to her voice.

Then, she sees the boombox, lying on its side, letting out a small, quiet whine, just a few feet away, and all thought of singing, of muscles, of pain, of clouds, of screaming leaves her. All she can see is that boombox; all she can hear is each decibel of that sad whine. There’s no way it’ll work now.

Raye is talking. Her hand lands on Pearl’s shoulder, and her body comes back online. Callie is talking. Pearl wants to mute them both.

“—gone,” Callie says, as Pearl’s hand rises, without her input, to do just that. She stills as her brain tries to reverse the last couple seconds.

Raye is still talking, repeating the same rhythmic phrase over and over again, speeding up as she goes. Pearl stares at her and feels approximately like she’s breaking apart just like the boombox, like there’s a great whine growing in her chest.

Marina lets out a loud, commanding yell.

“She’s gone, Pearl,” Callie repeats. Pearl has no idea if she’s translating or if she just knows that. “The song didn’t work. She attacked you. She’s gone.”

Pearl can’t quite comprehend that. Her head is pounding, and she wonders if she smacked into the ground as hard as she thinks she did. Marina is strong and fast, and Pearl’s always had the distinct sense that there was danger lying just under her skin, even if she was the softest, kindest person Pearl’s ever had the privilege of knowing. If Marina shoved her into the ground, that would explain a lot.

But, she can’t just give up, not when she’s so close.

“No,” she says, and puts her feet under her, bends her knees, stands, ignores Raye’s fussing, worried hands. One step, then another, sliding her feet, head pounding even more now, body aching from deep within—that’s from the sorrow, isn’t it? A part of her has already given up and is preparing the funeral inside her lungs, for when she’ll be so breathless it’ll fill her with nothingness—and then she’s there. Marina is straining, digging her heels in, jaw tight, arms straining, but Pearl’s little army have her under control.

“She’s gone,” Callie repeats, even though Raye hasn’t said anything. “Pearl, you have to let go.”

“No.”

Quen appears, and Pearl takes another second to look at her, calculating. Wasn’t she splatted? Respawned in record time. Then, when she’s satisfied, she crouches next to Marina’s head.

Esna has her hands on either side of Marina’s face, holding her still so she doesn’t try to bite anyone, but as soon as Pearl appears in her vision, Marina stills. She smiles briefly, just there, an uplift of the corners of her mouth.

That’s all Pearl needs.

“She’s still in there.”

“Pearl...” That’s Marie’s voice, speaking for the first time in a while. She’s always been so subdued, so calm, so snarky, and Pearl appreciates that about her, but just now, she doesn’t want to hear it.

“She’s fighting,” Pearl mutters, just for Callie and Marie’s benefit. Raye and Quen crouch on either side and nod at her, a silent agreement that they’re here for her, no matter what she does.

That’s all the encouragement she needs.

“Let go.” She directs this right at Esna, who looks at her with wide, confused eyes. She easily recognizes the words from earlier and she shakes her head once. Pearl, prepared to order again, opens her mouth, but then Esna does as she’s bid and steps away.

“Crazy,” Pearl hears her mutter in Octarian. It makes her laugh, deep from within, from that same place that’s already given up.

Maybe she is, but she can’t give in, not yet, not when Marina needs her to fight.

Pearl creeps closer, and Marina watches her. Her whole body is weighed down with other octolings, but her neck is free now, and she cranes to look up at Pearl. She doesn’t make a sound.

Pearl places herself in the grass and crosses her legs. She looks at Marina and Marina looks at her.

“I see you,” Pearl says, and places her palm on the side of Marina’s face. “And you see me. But there’s so much noise in there. I need you to hear me.”

Marina’s face is unreadable now, behind the shades. Pearl doesn’t dare remove them, and she leans forward to press her lips right in the middle of Marina’s forehead.

“Just listen,” she mutters.

And she begins to sing.

18.

Marina stirs.

That voice...

It’s nothing.

It’s everything.

It’s a lie.

It’s...

It’s a lie.

No...

Everything’s a lie.

It’s Pearl!

...

It’s Pearl... She’s... She’s there.

Marina pulls herself up. Marina searches for her body.

19.

Pearl sings the only thing she can think of. The words come falling out of her mouth and she feels the notes vibrate from her throat and spin right into Marina’s skin. Into the Light isn’t supposed to be a solo song and it sounds just on this side of wrong, but Pearl doesn’t care. It’s the only one she can think of, the only song that has intelligible lyrics in her aching head, and she breathes them into life with her whole being, as if she could tattoo them on Marina’s very soul.

Marina stills under her hands, but Pearl doesn’t stop. She keeps singing, and singing, and rapping, finishes the song and starts again. In her ear, Callie and Marie hum along, providing harmonies that help keep her on tune in her distressed state, and Raye and Quen start to sway in time. It reminds Pearl of the first time they put this song together, how Marina sat close and swayed just like that, bumping into Pearl’s shoulder and smiling down at her. It reminds her of how Marina threw an arm over her shoulder and pulled her along, how she gave in, how she swayed alongside, riding the wave that was just them and their music. After it was done, Marina looked at her with an expression that looked like forever.

Pearl can feel every consonant now, every vowel, and she holds them loosely in her mouth, snakes them out from between her teeth only when she has to. She can taste them. They taste like Saturday mornings, sitting up in bed and scrolling through her phone, listening to Marina’s humming, just there, barely audible over the spray of the shower, and then the icy tang of mint when Marina returned to her, clean, with freshly brushed teeth, and leaned over to kiss her, slow and languid, warm and relaxed from the hot water. Pearl desperately misses the bite of mint.

Marina is so still now, not even a twitch. Pearl doesn’t dare look up, not yet, and keeps singing, keeps pushing the rhythms out from her chest.

They’ve been through so much. This can’t be the end. Marina is a fighter, and Pearl isn’t a quitter.

After years of friendship, years of heavy looks, years of feelings, years of marriage, years of Pearl and Marina, she refuses to go back to being just Pearl. She can see it all now, laid out like a grand quilt: Marina in her octoling armor, with her goggles pushed up on her head, looking at Pearl and surrounded by the green of Mt. Nantai; Marina in the first set of clothes she bought, that sunny, yellow tank top and those long, white jeans (Pearl remembers telling her that white was a bad idea, because it got dirty so easily, but Marina didn’t care. Marina said something about color, about light fabric as a commodity, and Pearl shut up); Marina leaning into the microphone to record their first demo, fingers pressed into the headphones; Marina’s face when they landed the news gig; Marina’s first costume fitting, how she covered her stomach and looked at Pearl with an expression that begged for reassurance; Marina beaming at her during their first concert; Marina’s sly expression every time she said something funny when they were live; Marina, flushed and exhausted, as they sat in Pearl’s living room at two in the morning, song lyrics scattered on the floor like lost children, wringing her hands and refusing to look at Pearl as she said the words, “I think I love you.”

Marina saying yes. Marina walking toward her. Marina smiling as Pearl promised to keep being sloppy and to love her no matter what, to fight for her, to find her if she got lost.

She’ll never stop. Pearl Houzuki will never stop loving or fighting for Marina Iida.

Pearl finally opens her eyes and pulls back. Marina is relaxed, breathing slowly, and all of Pearl’s octoling friends seem to be holding their breath. They stare at Marina, look at Pearl, and then back at Marina, and no one moves for five long beats.

Marina twitches. Pearl doesn’t move.

Marina lets out a single, long groan. Her head tilts back, but Pearl can’t see her eyes because of the shades.

She stares down, pressing her promises and her hopes into Marina’s face with the tips of her fingers.

Raye puts a hand on Pearl’s shoulder and leans close.

And Marina...

Marina smiles.

“Pearlie...” She sounds sleepy, like she just woke up from a Sunday afternoon nap. “I knew I’d find you.”

Pearl’s chest hitches and she lets out a single, solitary sob. “Reena...”

Marina tries to move, finds she can’t because there’s still four octolings on her arm, and looks down. Iri, Vimi, Azo, and Stel leap off, followed quickly by the others. They stay close though, just in case this is another feint.

But it isn’t. Pearl knows it isn’t. Marina places her hand on Pearl’s face and holds it there for a second, looking up at her. “My ring is in my boot,” she mutters as she rubs her thumb on Pearl’s jaw.

Pearl barks out a laugh, flummoxed and relieved. She feels like she can breathe again. “We’ll get it, but first we need to get these glasses off.”

Marina flinches, but doesn’t say anything. Her hand falls and she scoots back a little, just so her head is completely in Pearl’s lap. Then, she nods once.

Pearl looks to Raye, who nods in return. She mutters quickly to Marina in Octarian, explaining the process, Callie translates quickly, probably because it relaxes her and Marina both—the technical side of things is easy to understand and there’s predictability to machines.

Raye pauses, one of the wires in her hand, and breathes out. Then, she counts down from five, Marina tensing the whole way, and pulls the wire with one sharp movement. It disconnects with a snap and Pearl’s eyes sear themselves to Marina.

She doesn’t move, doesn’t flinch, and, after a few seconds, relaxes. Her hand comes up and she tugs the shades off.

Pearl, treated to the first unhindered look at Marina’s face since this started, lets out another small, rattling breath.

“It’s over,” Pearl mutters as Marina sits up. She spins slowly, trying to reacclimate to life outside of the shades. She doesn’t say anything, just reaches forward and puts a hand on the back of Pearl’s neck, pulls her in, right into her body, for the hug they both desperately need.

Around them, a cheer goes up.

“Thank you,” Marina mumbles into the top of Pearl’s head. “Thank you.”

“I promised,” Pearl answers, arms grasping tight to Marina’s body.

Marina doesn’t answer, just pulls back, and Pearl looks up at her with eyes that don’t want to blink, scared that this isn’t real. Behind Marina, she sees Raye tackle Quen into a hug, and the others jumping up and down, some crying, some laughing, all celebrating.

But, Pearl doesn’t see past that, because Marina is looking at her with an expression that’s so full of unnamable emotion that Pearl can’t help herself. She pushes herself to her knees and falls into her, looking desperately for her favorite thing in the whole world.

Marina laughs and allows herself to be pulled into a kiss.

+++

20.

Two weeks later and Pearl is on the phone. Marina sits on the couch, dressed in her sunny yellow tank top and her comfiest pair of leggings. She has her feet crossed in front of her and she’s holding a controller in her hands, which she uses to idly move her character across the screen.

Pearl speaks slowly and low, with her back to Marina, but Marina doesn’t mind. She knows that she’s talking to Raye, still trying to put together what happened, how to keep it from happening again, doesn’t want Marina to hear because she doesn’t want to upset her with the wound still so fresh. But Marina is good at compartmentalizing, especially during the day. Sure, she sometimes wakes up at night with voices in her ears and with the distinct sense that she doesn’t quite fit in her skin, and she cries and screams and Pearl holds her and sews her back together again, but come the light of day she’s got all her pieces back in order. She’s not exactly whole, but she’s good at ignoring the bits that are out of place.

And, besides, it’s not like she can’t handle this. She’s done it before, adjusted to living in Inkopolis on top of it too, and now she has a support system, a job, friends, steady income, and Pearl there to catch her.

This is the second time Pearl’s spoken to Raye since they all climbed out of the sewer again. The first was to get her and the others set up in a large rental house in downtown, which Pearl happily wrote a check for, along with handing over her credit card. She introduced them to Eight, whilst casting long, worried looks at Marina, where she was sitting in the car with her head between her legs, because seeing all those octolings again was too much just then, one whole day removed from the domes and the shades. Eight took over from Pearl, agreeing to help get everyone situated while she focused on Marina, and they hadn’t seen any of the others since. Every day, Pearl texted them, asking Marina for help with Octarian at the beginning because they couldn’t understand Inkling (Marina eventually pointed her at an online translator, which was developed by a team of octolings that escaped years ago, and Pearl rejoiced), and relayed information about their progress every night, as Marina laid with her head on Pearl’s chest, listening to the whispers of her hearts and lungs. It was the only way she could fall asleep then.

Pearl is pacing now, and Marina hears her say something like, “...music did it. I broke—”

Marina doesn’t remember much from that last day, especially after that last zap, but Pearl’s explained it, wincing the whole way, over lunch multiple times. Lunch is the only time Pearl’s willing to talk about it, with the sun high in the sky and the light bright on their skin, and Marina’s learned to stop prodding after two in the afternoon. She thinks that Pearl is trying to protect her, because lunch is the farthest she’ll be from sleep on either side—the night before and the upcoming—so that’s when she’s most composed or something.

The last two weeks were marked like this: Pearl cancelled all of their obligations; they spent a large amount of the day in their apartment, doing puzzles, playing video games, reading books to one another, listening to music, cuddled up on the couch and running through memories, just to make sure everything’s still there. They go out at lunch because they need sun and fresh air, and stumble back in at around three because Marina always manages to convince Pearl to go shopping. She wants things to be normal again, and Pearl loves shopping.

They go to bed early, curled into one another like two nautilus shells washed up on the beach, and, sometime around two in the morning, Marina is jerked out of sleep by voices and floating sensations.

She doesn’t take her ring off anymore.

“—don’t think it was the contacts? Really?” A long pause, and Marina turns around, eyes narrowed.

“I know it sounds dumb,” Pearl continues. “But what else—?” She lets out a scoff. “C’mon, Raye. You’re smarter— I mean yeah! Of course I believe in it! I wouldn’t have gone down there if I didn’t!”

Marina groans and drops the controller. She lets her head fall back against the headrest and stretches her legs, points her toes right at the sky, and ignores the twinge in her back. It’s hard to remember that she was dogpiled not once, but twice, and that’s caused all kinds of aches and pains.

“Okay, okay! I’ll talk to her! Goodbye Raye. Tell Quen and the others I said hello. Mm-hm. Is Eight there? She what? No, I don’t wanna know. Yeah, tell Three she still owes me. She’ll know what for. Uh-huh. Okay, for real. I gotta go. My wife is waiting for me. Byyyyee!”

Pearl hangs up and lets out a might sigh. “Raye says hi,” she says as she plops herself on the couch right next to Marina.

“I heard,” Marina answers.

Pearl winces. “What else did you hear?”

“Contacts... And you need to talk to her. I’m assuming that means me.”

Marina already knows what’s coming. She’s been trying to figure it out herself, why the reintroduction didn’t work, why she could fight the zaps off for so long, how she made it so far without giving in... She has a pretty good theory. 

Pearl blows out a hard breath and leans into Marina’s side. Her head lands on Marina’s shoulder and she laces their fingers together. “I’m still convinced it was the contacts—”

Marina’s fingers tighten. “I already told you. There’s no way the contacts counteracted the shades. They use sound—”

“Yeah yeah, sound waves, discordant chords. I know. I know. But what else, Mar? What else was different from before? You didn’t have contacts when you were younger.”

Marina closes her eyes and loops her arm over Pearl’s shoulder so she can drag her into her chest. It’s been a while since she’s held Pearl like this, especially since she’s the one who’s required the holding for the past two weeks, and it’s nice. This is probably what she missed most.

“I can think of a lot of stuff that’s different, Pearlie,” she says, and angles her head down so she can press a kiss to the top of Pearl’s head.

Pearl groans. “Not you too...” She pulls away and climbs to her feet, just so she can pace again, right in front of Marina, back and forth, back and forth. “Why am I the one with a reasonable theory? Me! I’m supposed to be the impulsive, dumb one!”

Marina feels her brow furrow. She catches Pearl’s hand as she passes by and draws her to a stop. “You’re not dumb.”

Pearl opens her mouth to argue, but then sees the hard, tense line of Marina’s mouth and decides against it. “Okay, maybe not, but you and the others! You’re like— Super smart! Science nerds and math nerds! And all of you think that love counteracted brainwashing!”

Marina frowns a little. “Well, when you put it like that, it does sound dumb. It’s more like... The connection and bond I have with you is what enabled me to hold on.”

Pearl lets out a frustrated sound and tries to pull free, probably to pace again, but Marina holds on. She reaches out with her other hand and tugs Pearl down, right into her lap, and Pearl lands in a sprawling, squawking heap.

“Listen, Pearl,” Marina orders, as Pearl is struggling to get away again. She freezes and looks up, half horizontal in Marina’s lap, and then carefully climbs up so that she’s sitting upright, turned sideways, so that Marina can see her pout in profile. She doesn’t move past that. “Think about it. Before I knew you, before I came up to the surface, what did I have? I didn’t have real friends or a life or a future. I had life one day at a time, one order at a time. When I heard the Inkantation, it was like the cosmos appeared in my mind. Suddenly I had all this stuff, all these urges, all of these dreams, so I escaped to find them. But that stuff? It’s insubstantial. It’s not something you grab hold of.

“You though?” Marina wraps her arms around Pearl’s middle and plants a kiss on the side of her head. “You’re real. You are what kept me here, through dozens of zaps. Just you.”

Pearl turns then, eyes unreadable, and pivots the whole way so that she’s kneeling around Marina’s legs, facing her head on, and she carefully brushes a tentacle away from Marina’s face. “I don’t...”

Marina reaches up and rests her hand on Pearl’s jaw, rubs her thumb on the fat part of her lip. “Why don’t you think you’re enough? Why does it have to be contacts?”

Pearl lets out a small, sad laugh. “I don’t know. I— You married me. I should know this by now, but it’s hard to imagine that you could love me that much.”

Marina laughs in return, this one loud and incredulous. “Me? What about you? You put yourself in danger to find me! You— You risked everything.”

Pearl shrugs. “You are everything.”

It’s so simple. Marina feels her eyes heat up and she has to blink hard to keep herself together. “You’re everything.”

Pearl bites her lip and looks away. Just there, Marina sees her reach up to wipe at one of her eyes. “I thought I lost you. I didn’t want to think about what I’d do without you, so I just... Threw myself at the problem. Marina... I missed you so much.”

This isn’t the first time they’ve talked about this and it won’t be the last, but this time it feels different, feels like they’re baring parts of themselves that they’ve kept scabbed over since this all started. For the past two weeks, Pearl’s been the strong, reassuring one, the rock, the unmovable mountain, and Marina’s been the mess, the recovering, healing one. But, Pearl needs to heal too.

“I’m here.” Marina grabs Pearl’s face with her other hand, cradles her there between her palms. “I’m here because of you. Always because of you.”

Pearl sniffles and turns her face to kiss one of Marina’s palms. “I—”

“You don’t need to say anything else,” Marina continues, trying to soothe, to calm. It’s about time she returns the favor. “I love you so much. Nothing will make me stop. Got it?”

Pearl nods and smiles a watery smile. “Got it.” She breathes out once, a rough little shove of air. “Next time though, please take your contacts out. What if you went blind?”

Marina laughs, deep and bellyfull, and pulls Pearl down so she can lace her hands behind her neck. “Fine. As long as you agree to get there faster next time. I was so bored waiting around.”

Pearl scoffs. “Excuse me! I was amassing an army and—”

“Yeah, yeah, just kiss me already. We have to make up for lost time.”

Pearl grins then. Happily, she leans the rest of the way, and catches Marina’s lips between her own. Marina’s hand moves up her neck, and she presses the broad side of the ring on her finger into Pearl’s hairline.