Chapter Text
Pity, as a rule of thumb, is an emotion that Era has grown well and truly sick of. She hated seeing it on her parents’ faces, back when she was a kid with a short temper and a brand-new misdemeanor record at her school. She hated seeing it on teachers’ faces, whenever Era turned in blank career path forms. She hated seeing it on coaches’ faces, whenever she was skipped over in drafts for an amateur Corestrike team.
Right now, she hates the way it hangs off the curve of Kai’s brow, subtle and painful and entirely too much. Era feels her fingers wrap around the heart-stamped card in Kai’s hands as if from far away. The paper crinkles in her hand as she grips it, an almost cragged sound that cuts through the muffled feeling of barely-there-ness that had washed over her like a rising tide.
“See you tomorrow on the field?” Kai’s voice cuts through the ringing in Era’s ears she hadn’t even been aware of. She’s sure he'd had more to say, but she only manages to catch the tail end of it, the part where his voice lilts in what Era has long coined as his ‘PR tone'.
That hurts. Being relegated to... to nothing more than someone who has just concluded “business” with him. The weight of it presses slow and heavy against her gut.
“...Okay,” Era says, and what hurts the most is that she means it. She’ll show up tomorrow, and the day after, and the one after that, and she’ll work herself to the bone all for him, even now. Her heart burns itself into fine-powder ash in her chest. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Kai walks away. The dark hallways of the stadium’s backstage echo with the faraway roar of a crowd. Faintly, she hears a chant pick up, calling the name of some new rookie that had been making waves on the field. Juliette, she thinks her name was. Her feet carry her to an empty storage closet as if by sheer instinct. A familiar door of peeled-off paint greets her, and she steps inside, closing the door behind her with a click.
Silence.
Era slinks to a corner, dragging her hat from the top of her head and running her fingers through the tangled mess of hair it leaves behind. Weariness sets in like frostbite, nestling itself in the marrow of her bones, hollowing her out until she is nothing more than a fairy-studded smudge against the shadows of the empty room. Popcorn drywall scratches at the open stretch of skin on her back. The beat of a thousand feet pounds against the inside of her skull. Every sensation feels at once multiplied tenfold and shoved through a muffler. Era’s not really sure if she even cries, if she’s being honest. Crying feels like something that should happen if you’re overwhelmed by emotion, not when you’re... weirdly devoid of it.
Vaguely, she hears the tell-tale patter of steps beating against the floors of a nearby hallway. Era absentmindedly tilts her head, ears picking apart the strange sound of what she assumes are metal soles clanking a harsh beat. Less absentmindedly, she notes, with increasing horror, the fact that they seem to be headed straight for the empty room Era has sequestered herself in. Her idle heart drumrolls against her ribs, a hummingbird pace that sharpens and kicks against her skin as the door to the closet opens, drowning her for a moment in pale, sickly white and bubblegum pink and cyan blue.
A pair of mismatched eyes lock onto Era’s. A shock of anaglyph-pink tail coils in loose circles. White-tufted ears flick back and forth between a stock-still Era and the rapidly approaching din of a stampeding crowd. Feline-slit pupils bore into Era like a dull knife. The fairy on her shoulder shudders and keens.
And then, the door slams closed.
The other girl’s hair, fur and a few stray bands of her clothes light the dusty corners of the dark storage room in an aster-hued glow. She holds a clawed finger to her lips, sending Era a sharp look. Era hastily nods her head up and down, sticking her hat back atop her head and pulling the edges of it halfway down her face. Belatedly, she drags a thumb across the corner of her eyes.
Her finger comes back dry. She doesn’t know how to feel about it.
A hurried rumble of steps rolls across the hallway, a dozen shadows flickering in the light seeping from under the door, long, inky vines that stretch across the pallid pink of the far wall, right next to Era. She hears gruff voices and excited squeals, murmured assurances of ‘She can’t have gone that far,’ and ‘I swear I heard her turn into this hall.’
Era’s eyes catch on the way the girl’s chest seems to still, shoulders hunched and breath held. Her fingers twitch, little cat-paw bubbles popping against her nails. The whole of her seems to shake and shudder between something solid and something more like static, a sound like waves breaking on sandy shore fizzing against the back of Era’s neck like a physical thing.
The crowd moves away. The shadows on the wall slink through the gap under the door, slithering and dejected. Fluorescent pink still lights the walls of the room, and there are still no words spoken between Era and her fellow stowaway. The silence between them hangs stilted and wrong.
“Um,” Era manages to croak out, voice embarrassingly raspy. The other girl’s tail twitches, like she hadn’t been expecting Era to talk at all. She clears her throat, tries again. “Uh... are you okay? Why were those people chasing you?”
An annoyed sigh, growled out past sharp canines that glint in the low light, “Pictures, probably. Vultures, the lot of them. Can’t a girl get some damn privacy after her match?”
The realization slams into Era much, much too late. Every distractedly noted feature seems to scream at her an obvious conclusion that, she argues, she would normally be able to pick up on much, much more easily.
This, Era thinks, qualifies as a far-from-normal moment. She’s allowed this much.
“Ai.Mi,” Era breathes, her fairy looping in lazy circles around the tip of her hat. She pulls the brim up, catching the way the other girl’s—Ai.Mi’s, she admonishes herself—eyes widen. “You’re Ai.Mi. The... the app assistant turned girl turned Corestrike player, right?”
“The one and only,” Ai.Mi huffs, the line of her shoulders relaxing. Her eyes bleed some odd mixture of fear and what feels like apprehension. “Thanks for laying out the timeline, by the way. Most people stop at app assistant.”
“Um. You’re... welcome?”
“I mean, seriously! How many times am I going to have to tell them I’m not actually an app assistant anymore? I’m a real girl for crying out loud!”
“Uh.”
“And it’s not like they can point at my ‘powers’ as a reason for me not actually being real. Have you seen what some of those people on the field are doing? There’s an alien crocodile that can go invisible! There’s some random guy with a literal shadow demon possession... thing! I’m not even the weirdest person on the pitch at any given moment!”
Era thinks, really thinks, about everything she has just heard, and finds that they are facts she has taken for granted as... normal. The fairy on her shoulder hums a couple octaves higher than the low rumble in her own chest. “T-that’s true—”
“But no, I’m the one who people keep saying is some kind of anomaly, just because, what, I popped out of my parent company’s servers?” Ai.Mi grumbles, arms across her chest. Her nails dig into the pale skin at the bend of her elbow. “It’s stupid. They’re stupid.”
Era elects to stay quiet, this time.
Silence, again.
Ai.Mi’s tail, puffed up in a jagged line of neon fur, slowly smooths its bristled edges against the floor. Ai.Mi pats absentmindedly at the electric fur, hands shifting and melding into the red-blue-aberrated mess of it. Era’s eyes track the motion with something like wonder. Ai.Mi shifts, the moment breaks.
“Why are you here?” Ai.Mi’s voice cuts, straight and true. Era’s heart stutters, her breath hitches, her fairy drags its wings across the side of her neck in an attempt at something soothing. “If you don’t mind me asking, at least.”
Era thinks, for a moment, and wonders if she has ever had anyone to confide in for things like this. Her mind draws blanks, even as Kai and X’s faces flit across the backs of her eyes like an ache. It saddens her, suddenly, to think that the only two people in her life she considers something like friends still stand so far from her. She chews through words between her molars like tough meat.
“I’m... also running away, I guess,” Era lands on, dragging her fingers through a lock of tangled lavender hair. “Someone I loved... Someone I love... hurt me. Kind of.”
Ai.Mi’s face twists with worry. Her ears flick towards Era. “Hurt you? Like, physically? Do I need to call emergency services?”
Era gasps, breath catching in her throat and wheezing from her lips in a ragged cough. “God, no!” she manages to blurt out, pounding a hand against her chest. “No, no, he’s perfectly cordial, he doesn’t hit me or anything. I meant hurt in a more... emotional way.”
“That doesn’t reassure me as much as you probably think it does, you know?”
Era sighs, throwing her head back against the cold concrete of the pink-tinted wall behind her. A breath whistles between her teeth as she lets it out, long and slow.
“...It’s really not anything like that,” she murmurs, fingers pulling at the frayed edges of her hat. “It’s just... an unfortunate conflict of interests.”
“A conflict of interests that leaves you looking half-empty in an abandoned storage room like a heartbroken widow?” Ai.Mi snarks, and okay, that one hurts a little bit. She tries not to let it show too much, but apparently not enough. “...Oh.”
“...Yeah.”
“I’m, uh... sorry for your loss?”
Era snorts. “He’s not dead. But I am... heartbroken, I guess.”
“Oh, thank God,” Ai.Mi mutters under her breath, before the fur on her ears puffs back up into a prickly mass of hot pink. “Not! That you’re heartbroken. That’s not good. But it’s a good thing he isn’t. Dead.”
A pause.
“It is a good thing, right?”
“Yes, Ai.Mi. It’s a good thing.”
“Okay. Cool. Good.”
Era scratches at a spot on her cheek. Ai.Mi’s fingers flex across a fresh wave of bubbles. The tension between them hangs like humid air, stuffy and thick.
“Look at us,” Ai.Mi huffs, throwing her head back against the door with a rattle and shake of old hinges. “Two complete strangers hiding from the world together.”
Era’s smile is halfway to a grimace. “It... really is kind of ironic, yeah.”
Ai.Mi smiles back, a small thing that is barely a lift of her lips and a twitch of something fond in the blue and yellow of her eyes. Era notes, somewhat amusedly, that her eyes have widened from thin, feline slits to full circles of Vanta black. There is a strange pull in her chest, something that bides her to drown in those deep, inky depths. She shakes the feeling away as Ai.Mi slaps a hand onto her knee, raising herself up off the ground with a grunt.
She opens the door slowly, carefully, ears twitching atop her head for the sounds of stampeding feet and overeager crowds. The pale white of the hallway lights washes away the dreamy haze of pink on the far wall of the room. The way Ai.Mi’s tail drops between her legs serves as enough of an answer for Era. The coast is clear, it seems. Still, she pauses for a second. Her eyes flick between the outside world and Era.
“I know we really only met because of circumstance, and I know our problems aren’t... exactly the same,” Ai.Mi says haltingly, the words seeming carefully picked. Her nails rap a sharp roll against the door, poking holes in the flimsy paint. “But I do know what it’s like to... to not be accepted. I’m lucky enough to have a friend who can help me through it, most of the time, but you don’t seem, uh... that. Lucky?”
Era hums, a pained smile on her lips, a high note of assertion. Ai.Mi’s throat bobs.
“Don’t be a stranger, is what I’m really saying here. I’m... always around. Somewhere. Only if you want, of course!”
Era’s smile shifts, the iron hand around her lung loosening its grip just the slightest bit. She tilts her head to the side, a laugh whistling past barely parted lips as she feels her eyes crinkle. She drowns in a foreign fondness for this stranger of bubblegum pink and fiery words and awkward support. Ai.Mi’s cheeks dust over with red.
“Thank you, Ai.Mi,” is all Era says.
And then, she’s gone. The door closes behind her with a gentle click, and the world is once again nothing more than Era and her fairy and a dark, empty room.
But, well. If a hint of rosy pink has creeped into the edges of her world, she won’t complain about it.
The roar of the crowd, as always, is a deafening, hollowing thing that claws at Era’s chest as it rumbles through her. Kai and X, also as always, bring up the front of the team, waving at fans and jeering for reactions. The limelight finds them easily as Era slips into their shadows. She subtly pushes a pulse of magic around their feet, quickening their progress towards the center of the pitch, even if only for a second. She drags the brim of her hat just above her eyes, sweat prickling on her shoulders under the blazing sun.
Era’s thoughts clamor loudly against the inside of her skull, drowning out the announcement of the opposing team’s names and members. She feels Kai’s presence at her side like a weight. Yesterday’s events are no longer debilitating, but they are far from insignificant. Vaguely, she thinks she feels a whisper of static brush against the back of her neck. Distantly, she thinks she hears a pop of cat-paw bubbles around—
A clawed hand, darting beneath her downturned eyes. Era’s head snaps up.
“Hey there, stranger,” Ai.Mi jeers, a smirk on her lips and eyes slit into thin bands. Her hair burns a deep fuchsia against the blue skies of Ahten City. She feels, truly, like a cat, poised to pounce.
It’s endearing, really.
Era laughs, a quiet thing that is mostly a shake of her shoulders and a happy trill from the fairy circling above her head as it drags a wing across Ai.Mi’s cheek. Kai and X look at her as if she has grown a second head, but she finds she doesn’t care much for their stares, right now.
Era takes Ai.Mi’s hand in hers. It is surprisingly smooth, she notes somewhere in the back of her mind. “Hello, stranger.”
And though they don’t say anything else about their conversation, and though Kai is still there, and though everyone stares and cheers and screams, Era finds herself oddly calm. The hammering of her heart eases to a muted thump. The sweat on her back cools the heat spreading up her spine and across her neck and to the tip of her ears.
“See you after the match?” Ai.Mi asks, a note of something that is halfway between expectance and apprehension coloring her voice.
“...Only if you want,” Era says, echoing Ai.Mi’s words from the day prior, something halfway to sly in her voice.
And even though the match hasn’t started, and even though they stand on opposite sides of the pitch, and even though she’s sure she’ll get a hard time for this later, the laugh she gets in response feels like victory all the same.