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Shrill, incessant, and painfully loud, her alarm clock screams its greetings as it always does: in a way that makes her want to throw it against the wall.
The beginnings of a headache welcome her back to consciousness with the unpleasant company of a dry mouth and a slightly sore throat, her room is somehow simultaneously too cold and suffocatingly hot, her hearts are racing in her ears like a herd of spooked seahorses, and just to put the icing on the colossal shitcake her morning has already baked up and served to her on a silver platter, she also really, really needs to take a piss.
She opens her eyes and watches. Waits. Takes a breath—once, twice, thrice.
Her alarm continues to ring.
Reluctantly, Three drags herself out of bed to turn it off. She trudges over to the bathroom to answer the call of nature, washes her hands, fumbles through her cabinet for some over the counter pain pills that are definitely either expired or close to it, and downs exactly three of them with water greedily slurped straight from the tap.
She lifts her head to meet the gaze of a stranger’s face in the mirror and only pushes down the urge to punch it by turning her attention elsewhere.
A Splattershot that hasn’t seen use in months is haphazardly grabbed from her closet, keys are snatched up from the midst of a rapidly expanding mess on the counter, and turf name Typh00n is promptly registered in the next available game of Turf War she can snag a spot in.
Turfing after everything is… strange.
The Splattershot clasped in her fingers is familiar yet not; its stock slightly too thin, its range slightly too small, its fire rate slightly too slow. It sprays sunny yellow out to form a path under her feet that she knows by heart, thrums under her fingertips to a familiar rhythm that agitates just as much as it calms, and responds to her every touch like a well-played instrument that’s just barely out of tune. Nothing about any of it feels quite right but pointing her gun at any blue she sees and pulling the trigger.
Three minutes.
A flash of blue passes her by and she takes aim and fires—practiced, easy, smooth.
One.
Another blue figure. Predictable movement, poor awareness, sloppy skills. Aim, fire, repeat.
Two.
This one does manage to see her coming. Swim, aim, dodge bomb, aim, fire, repeat.
Three.
Three dips into sunny yellow ink and takes a breath—once, twice, thrice.
Two and a half minutes left to go.
Splat after splat, moment after moment, things quickly start to blur together. The before, the after, the now, everything is coated in various shades of blue and green and teal she no longer knows how to pick apart. There’s nothing left but the movement of enemies in front of her face, but her gun in her hands and hearts in her throat and the movement of her next target: a flash of blue a little past her three o’clock.
Three takes aim and fires—easy, practiced, smooth.
Her target—eliminateneutralizedestroy—cries out in alarm, but doesn’t disappear.
“What the shell, man?!”
It’s an inkling, she realizes. Blue tentacles, inward-facing suckers, pointed ears, narrowed eyes, angry glare.
(Their skin, she notes, is not green, and their weapon, she also notes, is not pointed at her.)
“Did you not hear the buzzer? Game’s over, asshole. Watch where you’re shooting.”
Three lowers her Splattershot and they huff at her, lingering for just a moment to glare at her some more before storming off to see the results.
She stands there. Watches. Waits. Takes a breath—once, twice, thrice, hearts beating like drums in her ears, screaming of danger she knows, logically, isn’t there anymore.
The thing is, you can’t just go from clutching your gun like a lifeline and constantly watching your peripherals to turfing and reading and stocking shelves part-time. You can’t just flip a switch and stop the nightmares. You can’t just press a button and stop the sweating, stop the itching under your skin, stop the gut-deep need to getitoffgetitoffgetitoff. You can’t just reach up and tear off the cloak of fear that’s been clinging to your shoulders like armor for weeks, always watching, always waiting, always vigilant.
No—it’s not that quick. Not that easy.
Everything you look at sparks like a lit fuse, a constant reminder that you need to be faster, be stronger, be better. That you need to pick up your weapon and snuff out the embers before they start to burn. That you need to eliminate, to neutralize, to destroy, else the flames start nipping at your heels again.
It’s just Turf War. The game’s over. Finished. Three minutes, done and gone.
It’s all over. It’s all been over.
But it never truly feels like it, does it?
Blurry figures taunt her in the darkness and Three takes aim and fires—easy, practiced, smooth.
She sleeps. She splats. She wakes up.
She sleeps. She splats. She wakes up.
Over and over and over again, Three takes aim and fires—easy, practiced, smooth.
Over and over and over again, the ghosts she shoots away always come back to haunt her.
Eliminate, neutralize, destroy.
Destroy, destroy, destroy.
There are exactly one thousand, four hundred and seventy-three large lines on the small smattering of fake hardwood in her kitchen. The tiles on her bathroom floor, off-white and lacking all the interesting whirls and swirls of the patterning of her kitchen floor, have exactly four cracks: two on a tile in the leftmost upper corner by her sink and two more on a few tiles next to the bathtub in the bottom right. On the dusty old carpet in her bedroom, one can find exactly six stains: three medium-large, one medium, and two small—the only ones of the bunch Three remembers being the cause of.
Her apartment is safe. Stable. Unchanging. An ocean of calm in a sea of uncertainty, an anchor in a storm, it’s strong and sturdy and unshakable in its offer of sanctuary until the moment someone knocks at the door and shatters every ounce of peace and quiet she had carefully built up all at once.
They knock—once, twice, thrice, each time louder than the last. That’s all the warning Three gets before her fortress of solitude is promptly placed under siege.
Callie barges into Three’s apartment with all the subtlety of someone popping Tenta Missiles in an open field, grease-stained paper bag clutched in one hand. In her other, she precariously balances a small cardboard tray with two milkshakes, her phone, and a small pink key lanyard that dangles dangerously close to the edge of her pinky finger. It’s a delicate tightrope act she walks, effortless until the moment she dumps everything on the counter in one fell swoop.
(For a few years now, Three’s Tuesdays have always involved Callie and food. It’s a tradition that—although sometimes interrupted by conflicting schedules, remains unwaveringly steady in its singular rule: if they have the time, they will grab nutritionally trashy takeout, talk about trashy cartoons, and then proceed to watch even trashier reality TV for hours armed with the trashiest snacks Makomart keeps on the shelves.)
“Wakey-wakey, eggs and bakey! Get up, Threepyhead, your GooTuberEats is here!”
With a lazy, mocking salute, Three peels herself out from a mountain of blankets, pushes herself up off her couch, takes a deep, long breath, stops for a second to stretch her suddenly sore back, and immediately makes use of the fact Callie is busy unloading food to snatch one of the milkshakes she’d left unattended on the counter.
Three digs into her first sip of sweet, sweet, milkshake heaven and is promptly rewarded with the opposite.
“The other one’s yours,” Callie informs her, amused. “Vanilla.” She reaches for the other milkshake and holds it out in Three’s direction. “If you had waited five seconds before running off to the milkshake races, I could have told you that, you know?”
Three shoots Callie a look that clearly says they’re both well aware she wouldn’t have waited.
Callie lets out a laugh as they exchange milkshakes and Three would give her a look for that too if she weren’t busy washing the taste of strawberries out of her mouth with something actually palatable.
“I still don’t get what you have against strawberries.”
Three raises an eyebrow. She doesn’t have anything against strawberries, she just doesn’t like them.
“What? They’re delicious,” Callie insists, like a liar.
Three doesn’t dignify that with an answer, choosing to let her silence speak for her.
Callie gets the memo loud and clear with a small sigh and a wave of her hand. “Yeah, yeah, strawberries literally killed your grandma and spat on her grave or whatever.” She slides a still-wrapped Seanwich across the table toward Three before grabbing one for herself. “Drama queen.”
This time, Three does shoot Callie another look. She takes another large gulp of sweet, sweet vanilla heaven, reaches for her Seanwich, and brings her free hand up to point a finger in Callie’s direction with a raised eyebrow.
“Sorry, what was that? I can’t quite hear you over this milkshake. It’s strawberry, by the way. Which, if you weren’t aware, is way better than boring old vanil-lame.”
Three’s pointer finger is promptly swapped out for her middle finger.
Callie almost chokes on her drink.
It takes about four episodes of Real Housesquids of Inkopolis for Callie to get bored of it and two episodes of The Squachelor are more than enough for Three to expeditiously gain the desire to superjump out the nearest window.
Nonetheless, by the end of this week’s Triple-T Tuesday, Three finds herself reluctantly admitting that she had a nice time. Not that she had a nice time sitting through the Squachelor, mind, but in general—gossipping about nothing, sharing snacks, having company—it’s refreshing. Normal.
It’s a feeling that disappears just as quickly as it comes, washed away by waves goodbye and shut doors and the haunting silence they leave behind.
In general, Three doesn’t like people in her space. Too much company for too long makes her feel like the sky is falling and the sea is rising and she just can’t breathe, but it’s turned into a bit of a problem when she now can’t stand the silence she used to wrap around her shoulders like her favorite blanket.
It’s almost smothering, in a way—how it crawls up her nerves, how it traces its fingers lovingly over her cheeks and whispers that no matter how far she runs, no matter where she hides, the end result will always be the same: she will not win.
The goop is a part of her now. That is the irrefutable truth, the indisputable fact of the matter.
Regardless of what angle she approaches things, anything she touches carries the blood of its sins and the weight of its decisions. How many lives had she almost hurt? How many souls had she almost let slip through her fingers, let slip through her control, when it wrenched her gun from her hands, pointed its muzzle at Eight, and decided to pull the trigger?
(Three shudders to think of what would have happened if Eight had not won that fight, but it is a thought that crosses her mind frighteningly often.)
Any comfort she used to take in her solitude must now be shared with the ghosts the Metro left burned on her skin, and it is a burden that often feels hard not to drown under.
Three swims and swims and swims, but for every breath of fresh air she manages, there is always a mouthful of saltwater eagerly waiting to follow.
Turf player Typh00n is given a two week turfing ban after a few too many slip-ups.
Too many kneejerk reactions to things that got a little too close, too many shots at things that moved just a little too quick and just a little too jerky; the writing had been smeared on the wall in blood, sweat, and ink long before she’d ever been written up for it.
“Repeated demonstrations of poor sportsmanship,” it reads. “Unauthorized special use.”
She doesn’t bother giving the rest much more than a passing glance, but most of the violations cited, she observes, were from games where the enemy team’s ink color was some shade of blue.
Three closes her eyes and takes a breath—once, twice, thrice, tries to sleep, and fails.
Parties, Three thinks, always seem to suck. Too many people, too little space, too much noise and too much… well, everything; to be quite honest, she’s not sure why she even bothered to come.
She doesn’t like parties. Never has. And here she is, attending one. Willingly. Like a fool.
Perhaps she’d been lured in by the promise of familiar faces. Perhaps she’d been deluded into thinking she’d changed, that the rumbling beat of the music wouldn’t rattle her this time, that the flash of the lights and the blur of conversations she won’t remember later won’t bother her just this once. Perhaps the Metro’s influence is not as gone as she thought, and it had agreed to come on her behalf, had pulled her out of bed, peeled off her pajamas to ready herself for a night out, and locked the door behind her as she left the safety of home. Whatever reason she had ended up here, it matters little when the fact that she is here, stuck amidst the ever-moving waves of a dancing crowd, does not change.
Four says something to her at some point Three doesn’t quite catch. Callie and Marie, expressions of concern Three doesn’t remember. Pearl and Marina, Three had seen, but not spoken to (which makes sense, really, considering this is Pearl’s party and both have been occupied with other, far bigger issues). She truthfully doesn’t quite know when Callie swings by again and pulls her aside, but when a hand is placed on her shoulder and directions to the estate’s garden are gently offered with a reassuring squeeze and a small, knowing look, the relief that washes over Three makes it more than clear that getting herself out of all the chaos was long overdue.
So Three does what she never does: she runs.
She runs, back turned to her worries, no gun in her hands, through dimly-lit hallways. Two lefts, one right, head straight…
Three takes a breath—once, twice, thrice, wraps herself in the cool air of the night, takes in the soft chirping of crickets, and only notices that she is not alone when a flash of pink catches her eye as something causes a nearby bush to rustle.
Three doesn’t understand Eight.
It’s not because of the language barrier. No—that much, Three gets. That much makes sense.
Picking up a new language isn’t easy. It takes time and practice and an ungodly amount of work and although Eight has clearly already put in her fair share of all three, her Inkling is nowhere near perfect. Among other issues, she still struggles with grammar and a rather limited vocabulary, her reading skills could use some work, and she generally has problems with idiomatic expressions and more uncommon slang. And even given all that, Eight is still plenty understandable.
So no, communication issues definitely aren’t the problem here. Three can comprehend those. Three can work around those.
Words, body language, they’re all easy to decipher with enough practice. She had made a career out of it, even—both in and out of the Hero Suit. Reading others is a skill she had long since honed to perfection, a go-to tool stored lovingly beside her Splat Bombs and Splattershot. It’s one of the biggest reasons why, to be quite frank, the parts of Eight that Three can’t seem to wrap her head around are not the things Eight says, but rather the things Eight does.
It’s been less than a month since the Deepsea Metro. Less than a month since Eight had saved everyone in Inkopolis from the horrors that lurked within it. Less than a month since Three had fought a girl with misty blue eyes and a will of steel and lost.
And yet here Eight is: flitting about flower beds like a butterfly, taking every available opportunity to quite literally stop and smell the roses.
She doesn’t do it with a smile upon her face, nor does she look particularly happy as she leans down to take a whiff of a lavender bush and promptly scrunches up her nose in disgust, but still Eight keeps on going. Bloom by bloom, plant by plant, she makes her way through the garden with a sort of methodical grace that most definitely doesn’t fit the actions she’s applying it to.
No matter what way Three looks at things, none of it makes sense.
Three watches the movements of an octoling with misty blue eyes and a will of steel and where she expects to be met with an open book, finds nothing but blank pages.
It’s downright puzzling, to say the least.
Three doesn’t know exactly how long she watches Eight for, but when Eight rises to her feet, turns on a G, and immediately looks Three dead in the eye from across a veritable wall of rosebushes, it’s clear that she had been at it long enough to be noticed.
“You loud,” Eight says.
If she’s at all bothered by Three watching her, she doesn’t look it.
“You words not loud,” Eight clarifies a moment later, when Three doesn’t move to fill the silence that settles smoggy thick in the air. “You loud. You stand loud.”
There’s a question written in the furrow of Eight’s eyebrows, in the slight frown that curls its way upon pursed lips, but it’s not one Three knows how to answer. Loud as Three is, she decides to simply not say a thing when she can’t find any words that fit.
“You be watching me.” Eight says it like an observation, something worth the same amount of idle attention as the flowers she keeps shoving her face in. “Why?”
She sounds genuinely curious rather than angry. Three doesn’t know what to make of it. She doesn’t know how to answer Eight’s question either, so she doesn’t.
Instead, Three points to one of the many lavender bushes all but littered around the place and asks, “You don’t like them?”
Eight hums, eyes turning upwards toward nothing as she seems to genuinely consider things for a moment. “No. Not much. Is, how you say… whelming?”
She waves her hand in some vague gesture Three doesn’t bother trying to interpret and mutters something under her breath Three doesn’t bother trying to catch.
“Smell… it smells strong. Too much smell.” Her eyes shift to meet Three’s, big and blue and curious as she asks, “You? Do you like flowers?”
Three blinks—once, twice, thrice, before her brain catches up with the fact that she’d been asked a question. “Not really a lavender person.”
“Lavender…” Eight tests the word out on her tongue with a small nod, curious and fascinated by its every syllable. “Fits. Pretty name for something smelt too pretty.”
“Smells,” Three corrects. “A pretty name for something that smells too pretty.”
Eight blinks, pausing for a moment to process before she agrees, “Smells, yes. Smells too pretty. My thanks.”
Three offers her a hum of acknowledgement and watches as Eight finds another flower to try.
As it turns out, Eight doesn’t like the smell of yarrow either.
Days pass.
(The coals under her feet grow hotter by the moment. She is playing with fire in a game she never wanted to be a part of, setting everything she sees ablaze and forced to watch as it all turns to ashes. And deep in her gut, curled up alongside the twisting feeling that never seems to go away, she knows it is only a matter of time until she gets burned too—not an if, but a when.)
Some jerk and stutter and trickle by, thick and heavy and sticking to her every move like used gum; some go by in a blink, their memories swept away in the winds of wasted time, left to rot in a yesterday perpetually growing further out of reach.
(It always crawls up her face. It clings to her skin like tar, scalding everything it touches and any attempts to stop it, to halt its approach, to rip and tear and pry it off, always fail.)
Life goes on. The sun still rises, the world still turns, her alarm still rings. The little old lady next door still blasts Frank Squidatra on Tuesdays like the walls aren’t paper thin, the guy who delivers her usual Friday pizza order still slips her an extra breadstick or two on occasion for tipping him well, and the streets of Inkopolis don’t lose a wink of sleep over the things lurking beneath their waters they’d never known about and likely never will.
(She always hears its honey-sweet whispers telling her to eliminate, to neutralize, to destroy. It urges her to just let it take over, to just let it keep her safe, to just give in. Its words are always lies and she knows it, knows it like she knows that she is not safe and she needs to getitoffgetitoffgetitoff, but it drowns out her concerns long before she ever gets a chance to act on them.)
Three wakes up from dark tunnels and glowing blue ink to find half of a blurry blue stranger’s face staring back at her from the mirror and just barely resists the urge to punch it.
(She always gets burned.)
She throws her alarm clock against the wall.
(Sooner or later, she always gets burned.)
Tick tock. Time’s up.
If Eight had thought Three loud, then Three does not know what word Eight would use to describe Four.
The first time Three met Four, Four had proceeded to run her mouth for all of thirty minutes straight. Even despite tuning out a good portion of it, Three remembers it vividly because Four had only decided to put a cork in the stream of unfiltered nonsense leaking out of her mouth when Marie called her over to do something or other—Three doesn’t recall exactly what.
It’s a record, it seems, that Four will be attempting to challenge today, given she has not closed her mouth in exactly twenty-eight minutes and thirty-two seconds.
This, to be quite frank, is probably the biggest reason why Three does not realize the misfortune in today’s patrol assignments until it’s already too late.
She’d been assigned patrol with Four.
Four, who is still talking as they gear up, having easily broken her previous record of time spent running her mouth at an impressive forty-three minutes, fifty-five seconds and counting. Four, who is still talking as they head off to their patrol site of the day (some corner of Octo Canyon Three doesn’t remember the name of and doesn’t care to), continuing her streak at a whopping fifty-two minutes and thirty seconds as they make their way out. Four, who only goes silent after fifty-nine minutes and twelve seconds when she leans against a guardrail to look down at the vast expanse of empty air below and promptly breaks her silence by turning, looking Three dead in the eye over her shoulder, and confidently proclaiming:
“You look like shit.”
It’s admittedly probably a true statement, but it’s also one so awe-inspiringly brazen that it catches Three completely off-guard.
“I don’t know you super well or nothin’, but I like to think I’ve gotten real good at readin’ Miss Marie. And lemme tell ya, pal, she’s clearly thinkin’ the same thing I am: you’ve been lookin’ like a pile of hot steaming crap lately.”
For once, the shit-eating grin perpetually plastered on Four’s face is not present. Its absence is somewhat unsettling—like a river without water, an ocean without waves, Four looking this serious is unnatural in a way that makes Three’s stomach twist.
“She’s been pretty worried about you.”
She shouldn’t be. Three can handle this. Three is good at handling things. Three always handles things.
“Miss Callie ain’t gonna flat-out tell you this, but I think she’s been worryin’ about ya too.” Four shrugs, turning her gaze back down to the canyon, idly kicking at a pebble with her boot til it clatters off the edge. “‘S mostly hidden in the stuff she mentions sometimes—sayin’ you’re hiding in your apartment again and ain’t gonna be here today. That you forgot to eat again and she’s grabbin’ takeout if I want anything. That you’re not sleepin’ well again and ya won’t pick up the phone ‘cuz you probably haven’t gotten outta bed yet.”
Three hums, neither confirming nor denying the truth in any of the facts Four had just listed.
Leaning both arms over the railing, Four kicks another rock over the edge. “My Pawpaw was in the Great Turf War. Didn’t fight along with Gramps, but he fought.”
Three makes her way over to the railing, taking a spot next to Four and briefly catching her gaze before turning her eyes outward.
“Guy was smart as a whip,” Four says. “Sharp as nails, too. Didn’t take shit from anyone. Taught me everything I know about shooting worth a damn.”
“He sounds like a good man,” Three says.
Four’s lips curl upward into a small, fond smile. “He was.” A beat of silence settles over them like smog, thick and feeling far longer than it lasts. “He didn’t talk much about it, but the war… it left a mark on him, y’know?”
Three does not like the look Four shoots her way at that statement. She offers Four a look in return, but Four brushes it off like its little more than an overly persistent gnat.
“He got real quiet sometimes. Looked out into nothin’ for hours, just thinkin. Watchin’. Seein’ stuff we didn’t.” Another pebble clatters off the edge and bounces off a jagged piece of canyon wall with a sickening crack. “Occasionally he forgot to eat, or slept with his Bamboozler under his bed. Some days, he—”
Three doesn’t want Four’s pity. She’s not a war veteran. She’s not a hero. She doesn’t need pity.
“I’m not your grandfather.”
“You’re not,” Four agrees, “but you don’t gotta be.” The words hit like a dynamo roller to the chest. “All that shit that went on down in the Metro? It clearly left a mark on you too.”
Three can still feel it crawling up her face sometimes, can still feel it pull the curtain over her eyes and tell her to exit stage left. She can feel the burning, can smell the chemicals, can feel herself being shoved in the passenger seat of a war machine nobody but her was ever meant to drive. A mark was the least of the problems the Metro had caused, and as Four’s eyes drift to it, Three does not appreciate the sentiment she sees behind them.
“Thank you for noticing the obvious. Is there anything else you want to point out while you’re at it, or is that it?”
“You know that wasn’t what I meant.”
Three does not dignify that statement with an answer, nor does she move to break the quiet that takes its place.
“Pawpaw died seein’ echoes of battles he already fought.” Four kicks one last rock out into the depths before she pushes herself up off the railing and turns. “He never talked about it, but you could see it in his eyes; seeing ghosts all the time—it ate at him.”
She takes a step forward, then another, and another after that.
“If you ever wanna talk about yours, I’ll be here,” Four says. “Even if you don’t like me, I’ll be here. Miss Marie n’ Miss Callie n’ Gramps, too.”
The lump that’s suddenly formed in Three’s throat feels almost suffocating.
“…Thank you.” Four moves to leave, only pausing when Three manages to force the words out of her mouth. “I appreciate it.”
“Eight and I talk about it, sometimes,” Four tells her. “What she went through down there. We do things on the weekends, too. Movies and pottery classes and all that kinda carp she’s never done before. She says it helps.”
She sends one last glance over her shoulder, gaze piercing like a shot from the Hero Charger now comfortably resting back in her hands as she offers, “If ya wanna come along sometime, let me know. We always got room for one more. Think on it.”
Three bends down and picks up a pebble by her feet. Its surface is smooth, unblemished, but thin. Fragile.
She throws it as far as she can and waits—one beat, two beats, three.
It takes four beats for it to shatter against the canyon wall.
“Think on it,” Four had told her.
Against her better judgement, Three does.
Another Triple-T Tuesday, another two episodes of Squachelor reruns. Another vanilla milkshake, another Seanwich, another bout of silly gossip where Callie does not mention the blue draped across the side of Three’s face.
Life goes on. The sun still rises, the world still turns, her alarm still rings. The little old lady next door still blasts Frank Squidatra on Tuesdays like the walls aren’t paper thin, the guy who delivers her usual Friday pizza order still slips her an extra breadstick or two for tipping him well, and the streets of Inkopolis don’t lose a wink of sleep over the things lurking beneath their waters they’d never known about and likely never will.
Life goes on, and Three thinks on Four’s offer.
Life goes on, and the next time Four offers on a shared patrol a few weeks later, Three bites the bullet, says yes, and ignores the lingering taste of salt on her tongue.
Their first outing, of all things, is mini golf.
Three arrives a solid fifteen minutes before their allotted meeting time to find Four and Eight already there, happily sat next to each other on a bench outside the course entrance chatting about something or other that makes Four let out a snorting laugh.
Eight looks… happy. Were it not for the shadows under her eyes as she smiles, Three would be tempted to believe that the Metro hadn’t left the marks it had on Eight that it had her.
But no—some scars, Three knows, aren’t visible. Not like her face is. They’re smaller, quieter, hidden under smiles and laughs and conversations, but they’re there. And if you know what to look for, what they feel like, how to bury them under patchworks of bandages that never quite fit, it’s easy to spot the fresh blood that seeps between the cracks.
Eight wears her scars with grace and hides them well, but Three notices.
She notices the moment of hesitation as Eight sorts through the golf balls they can choose from and pauses as she uncovers one painted in an 8-ball pattern. She notices the slight hitching of Eight’s breath as they make their way through the fog machines surrounding the course’s fifth hole. She notices the way Eight pauses as she hits the ball too hard and it gets sent flying off the edge.
Eight isn’t an open book—not anywhere near it, but there’s enough words on the page for Three to see Eight isn’t okay yet either.
Three doesn’t know why she finds that comforting, but she does.
They go to Wahoo World the following week.
The heat is oppressive and the humidity makes her feel like she just might melt, but they manage to make a good time out of things nonetheless, lingering in shops just for the air conditioning and buying cotton candy and slushies and shitty tourist trap T-shirts that are probably going straight into Three’s supply of pajamas when she gets home.
They spend hours in line for this and that and Eight asks Three about all sorts of things—history and music and even cartoons, once Eight learns they share a similar taste in television.
Four, for once, is not that annoying.
Three arrives home exhausted enough to immediately conk out upon flopping into bed, but the experience is pleasant. Nice.
And it helps.
It doesn’t fix things, but it helps.
For now, that’s enough.
The unfortunate reality of bad experiences is that despite how much you want to forget them, they never truly go away.
Sure, you can push the thoughts down and file them neatly out of reach. You can pretend you’re not always slumping your shoulders under the weight of the fear that sits upon them, can act like you’re not feeling the strain of continuing to bear the burden of battles you no longer have to fight, can try and tell yourself you don’t feel the sting of old wounds bleeding out with every move you make. None of it will ever change the fact that those thoughts, those memories, they’re still there.
They’re still there, lingering in the wake of an ever-swirling whirlpool of feelings they drag up with them, waiting to drown you if you so much as accidentally stick a toe in the water.
But here’s another thing about bad experiences: as time goes on, you’ll find that you get a little better at swimming.
You get a little better at swimming; you get a little better at treading water on the days you don’t feel good enough to swim; you get a little better at keeping your head above water on the days even treading water feels like a battle. Day by day, little by little, you begin to feel like you’re not at constant risk of drowning anymore.
So you start to stop and smell the roses every once in a while. Buy yourself a treat on occasion simply because you can. Feel the wind weave its fingers through your tentacles and the sun on your skin, feel what it’s like to run and jump and move about with a skip in your step instead of a chain clasped around your ankles. Your feet get wet somewhere along the way—cod knows they always do—but you no longer panic as the water starts to rise.
It’s nice, you think, to be able to do more than just go through the motions.
It’s nice, you think, to finally start to remember how to do more than just survive.
Days pass. Weeks go by. For once, they don’t all feel like a blur.
Hiking, bowling, cooking classes, it doesn’t really matter what—every weekend, there’s always something to do.
The thing is, Four is now headed off on a trip home. She had said it was to see some cousin or other who’s in town, to say hi to her folks, and most importantly, to participate in her local county fair’s sharpshooting contest (which, according to her, she has won four years running), but whatever the reasoning, the end result is the same: Four will not be here this weekend.
Four’s absence does not deter Eight in the slightest from wanting to meet up. This week, she wants to go stargazing.
Four thinks it’s a great idea.
Three doesn’t know what to think anymore.
Compared to the constant noise of Inkopolis, Mount Nantai feels hauntingly quiet. Three would almost be tempted to call it silent, even, if not for the occasional rustling of trees in the wind and the faint cries of a bird somewhere off in the distance.
Soft, low breaths blend with the faint crackling of pebbles underfoot to form background noise that’s quickly tuned out, the hush settling over her and Eight as they make their way up the trail thick, but not suffocating. It’s a blanket of quiet Three wraps around her shoulders like an old friend, savoring the nip of the cool night air against her skin and the breeze weaving its fingers through her tentacles.
No goals to achieve, no objectives to meet, no plan to follow, it’s a sort of freedom that almost makes her feel weightless—all trees and trail and mountains and the quiet company of a friend. (…Acquaintance? Colleague? Good friend? Three doesn’t know what to call what her and Eight have going on anymore and at this point she doesn’t think she should ask.)
Three’s not going to sugarcoat it: she’s not exactly outdoorsy. She doesn’t like traveling and going on adventures and all the carp people put on their dating app profiles but never really mean. Anything outside of her usual routine is usually a drag at best and an annoyance at worst, her only hobby is work, her sleep schedule is damn near nonexistent, and all in all, Three doesn’t know why she even offered to go along with Eight for this in the first place.
Stargazing is the kind of thing that’s supposed to be relaxing. Chill. Fun. All things she… isn’t.
Three’s… just Three. She’s got a turf name based on a natural disaster and a life that’s just about as well put-together and she’s happy with that.
(She was happy with that. She was supposed to be happy with that. Recently, she’s been starting to suspect she’d never truly been happy with that at all.)
“The stars…” Eight says, stopping for a moment to glance up above them as they near the top of the trail, “They are beautiful, are they not?”
Reluctantly, Three will admit that Four was right. You really can’t see the stars for shit in the city and out here, out in the middle of nowhere with nobody around for miles but Eight and the stars, the view is fucking mesmerizing.
“Yeah,” Three agrees. “They are.”
Three turns her eyes upward, allows the familiar embrace of silence to wrap its arms around her shoulders once again, and finds that the stars are, in fact, beautiful.
Minutes, hours, days; Three doesn’t know how long they sit there for. Truthfully, she doesn’t even pay it much mind until Eight’s voice cuts through the quiet.
“When I was in the Metro,” Eight says, gazing up at the sky in awe, “I used to dream of what the stars might look like. What they might feel like.”
She reaches up a hand as if to grab one, spreading her fingers out as wide as she can.
“Would they be bright? Would they glitter? Would they burn like getting too close to a lamp?” Her arm drops to rest in her lap, fiddling with her other hand.
“Everything there was too dark. Either too dark or…” She pauses for a moment to find the right words, pursing her lips in frustration when she evidently can’t find the one she’s looking for. “Or there was too much light. It was feeling like a hospital. Not natural.”
Three holds her tongue and doesn’t mention the IVs she had found littered about the place. She doesn’t mention the pitch black hallways full of glowing blue, she doesn’t mention the stale smell of chemicals and cleaning agents and something else she could never quite place, and she doesn’t mention that she hasn’t gone to a doctor in ages because she can’t stand the memories places like that inevitably go dragging up.
“Felt,” Three gently corrects. “It felt like a hospital.”
“Yes, felt,” Eight agrees, after a moment. “It felt like a hospital. Too clean. Too fake. Not real, you know?”
Under the light of the moon Eight’s eyes almost look like they’re glowing, big and beautiful and twinkling in a way that almost makes Three forget her loathing for things that glow blue.
“But here,” Eight says. “This light. This… this…”
Three waits for Eight to finish, but Eight’s attention remains firmly turned toward the sky, mouth opening in a small little ‘o’ of wonder over and over and over again without so much as a sound. All that Eight lets slip from her lips are deep, steady breaths, her train of thought evidently drowned out by the sea of stars above.
“This…?” Three eventually asks.
“This.” Waving a hand in some vague gesture upward toward the wide expanse of the night, Eight turns misty blue eyes on Three with a small, thin smile that feels bright as the sun. “Being here,” she says. “In this place. With you. It is beautiful. Real.”
“Ah,” is all Three says, like an idiot. “I see.”
Because really, that’s what she is: an idiot. She’s not a hero. She doesn’t have superpowers or a charming smile that puts people at ease or the kind of raw, effortless skill that ensures she never fucks things up. Three moves through life like a force of nature and leaves chaos in her wake like it’s easy, but for some reason, Eight still looks at her like she’d personally hung every star in the sky.
“We have a saying, in Octarian.”
Eight switches from accented Inkling to honeyed words Three can’t understand with practiced ease, smile never dropping all the while. It’s a soft, gentle thing—the kind of smile one wouldn’t typically expect from a girl with calloused fingers and the ability to shoot a fly down from yards away.
Eight’s kind and pretty and confident and all the things Three wishes she could have been and never managed to be. Thea was too rough and too blunt. Typh00n was too quiet and too much of a loner to make any real connections among fellow turfers. The few that made it through close enough to the eye of Typh00n to become acquaintances got to learn that Ty was a hermit at best and had commitment issues at worst and Agent Three was no better in that regard. No matter what name she had operated under, nothing had ever felt right.
Eight reaches for Three’s hand with the sort of confidence only worn by someone sure of their actions and Three doesn’t quite know how to answer when Eight follows it with the statement of:
“It does not translate perfect, but it means something like this.”
Eight’s gaze pierces with the force of an E-liter and Three suddenly feels like Eight can see right through her. Blink by blink, moment by moment, second by second, Eight tears through blurred layers of Thea and Typh00n and Three without so much as lifting a finger.
“In the dark, nothing will shine for us. There is light we take and light we make. Light we take always comes at a great price.”
And when Eight finally does lift a finger, when she brings a hand up and gently traces the side of Three’s scar in all its ugly glowing glory, Three thinks that she forgets how to breathe.
“But light you share, light you give? That costs nothing,” Eight leans in, “and it always shines the brightest.”
Try as she might, Three can’t find the words to answer that.
(Eight doesn’t need them. She never has.)
“Thank you, Three. For helping me find my light.” Eight lifts her other hand to Three’s face and smiles at her in a way that makes all her hearts stop at once. “And for sharing yours with me.”
Her touch is tender. Warm. Cozy like the steam from a fresh cup of hot cocoa on a cold day, something that settles deep in her gut and makes itself at home like a Judd curling up on their favorite cushion.
“I will be hugging you now, yes?” Eight asks, and Three cannot do anything but nod even if she wanted to.
Slowly, softly, Eight closes the gap between the two of them, brings her arms around Three’s shoulders, and draws her in close for a hug.
Their embrace is awkward, but beautiful. Something that says a thousand words in none, pressing honey-sweet promises into Three’s skin that everything is going to be okay and whispering reassurances she, for once, somewhat believes. It runs through her veins like a livewire, electrifying and invigorating and so unapologetically right that she suddenly understands the feeling the people who invented the phrase “seeing stars” had been trying to describe.
Tears rush forth like a broken dam as Three shoves her face into Eight’s shoulder, but it’s easily the most alive she’s felt in years.
“My name,” Three tells her, pulling back and taking her first breath in what feels like forever, “is Thea.”
The smile Eight offers her in lieu of an answer is so bright it’s nearly blinding.