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Dorothea’s eyes trailed over Ingrid’s profile. As the car turned out of the city and onto an open road, the summer sun poured through the windshield and over their faces. Dorothea marvelled at the light brushes of pink over Ingrid’s nose and cheekbones, and at how the sunlight spun her straw hair into gold. She wondered how a girl like this had been born in frigid Faerghus, of all places, when she seemed to bloom out here.
Dorothea reached over from the passenger seat to tuck a lock of Ingrid’s hair behind her ear. Ingrid dipped her head.
“Stop, you’ll distract me,” she grumbled, gripping the wheel.
Dorothea hummed. “Sorry, couldn’t help myself.”
“And I won’t be able to help myself if I accidentally swerve us into a deadly ten-car pile-up and one of my future colleagues has to drag our bodies out of the wreckage.”
Perhaps at the mention of their imminent demise, Mercedes mumbled in her sleep in the backseat.
Ingrid grimaced and lowered her voice. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Dorothea replied.
“No school talk,” said Ingrid.
“No school talk.”
If Dorothea had Mercedes’ affinity for napping, she would’ve been asleep too. She was exhausted. They all were. The academic year was drawing to a close and each of them were neck deep in it. Dorothea was desperately trying to convert a degree in acting into a viable career, and every second spent not grinding herself into a deadly triple threat was spent bussing tables for enough money to live and eat. Ingrid was days away from becoming a certified paramedic, and had been witness to more death and tragedy than she was entirely able to process between exams and fending off a disapproving and overbearing family. Mercedes was in the depths of medical school, almost seven years into higher education but still years away from beginning a residency and actually realising the dream she’d desperately worked for for so long. They were all in urgent need of a break.
The beach had been Mercedes’ idea, and by some miracle they had found an afternoon that they could all spare. Ingrid had the car, Mercedes had the cooler, and Dorothea had the tent -- leftover from a time when it was more than just a tent.
In the backseat, Mercedes yawned and stretched, then leaned forward between the front seats. “Is your radio still broken, Ingrid?”
“Yes, sorry,” Ingrid replied.
“That’s okay,” said Mercedes. “We’ll just have to play ‘categories’ instead.”
The whole front seat groaned.
Mercedes tapped her chin. “The category is… cereals.”
Dorothea laughed. “Hungry, Mercie? Choose something more exciting!”
“Okay, ummm… birds!”
“Boo!”
“Fine! The category is… people Dorothea has flirted with for tips!”
“What? Hey, no!”
Ingrid jumped up in her seat. “Ooh, Annette!”
“Bernadetta!” called Mercedes.
“Caspar!” Ingrid added.
“Guys,” Dorothea whined, “at least give me a chance…”
A dozen rounds of ‘categories’ later, they pulled into a parking spot above an empty stretch of beach. Ingrid jumped out of the car and retrieved the flat-packed tent from the trunk before tearing down toward the sand, twitchy from sitting for so long. Dorothea and Mercedes took a more leisurely pace. They each gripped a handle of the cooler and heaved it out of the car and onto the ground. Dorothea looked between the weighty box and the beach, which suddenly seemed at great distance from one another.
“Did we have to fill it with so much stuff?” she lamented.
Mercedes frowned thoughtfully at the cooler, and Dorothea watched her mouth resolve itself into a determined line.
“We’ll be grateful for it soon,” Mercedes finally said with an encouraging smile. Dorothea suddenly wished she could shoulder the box all by herself with Mercedes sat atop it, and march her down to the sand like a princess. But gym memberships were expensive, so Dorothea contented herself with sharing the load with Mercedes and stumbling over to where Ingrid had found a pile of unburnt bonfire wood.
From there, all went swimmingly. Dorothea produced a lighter from her pocket, Ingrid began pouring over the tent assembly instructions, and Mercedes threw open the cooler lid to reveal -- among other things -- several dozen bottles of beer.
Hours later, the three of them were pink and lounging around the crackling bonfire. The sun began to set.
Dorothea watched Mercedes screw up her face as she pulled herself into a seated position then tottered up and over to the cooler. She opened the lid and let out a little gasp as she plunged her hand into the half-melted ice, pulling out a large airtight bag. She closed the lid, opened the bag, and passed one foil-wrapped parcel to Ingrid and Dorothea each. It was a sandwich -- rainbow salad, meat, and dressing.
Ingrid gawped at her meal, let out one reverent ‘I love you’ to Mercedes, and dove in. Dorothea managed slightly more restraint. She shuffled over to Mercedes and took her face in her hands.
“You are the perfect woman,” she said, channelling the charismatic lead man of one of her latest performances.
Mercedes giggled and swatted Dorothea’s hands away. Dorothea wondered how she could produce that giggle again.
She couldn’t help but notice Mercedes’ shy smile as she delicately ate her food, or Ingrid’s contented stretch after she finished hers. As the three of them sat quietly around the fire, so comfortable that nothing needed to be said, Dorothea felt a familiar nervousness. She looked at the tent, now neatly put together, and imagined the three of them curled up inside it. She wondered how they would lie. She could press herself up against Mercedes’ soft back, nestled in her hair, with Ingrid wrapped around her from behind. Maybe Ingrid would lie flat on her back, with each of them curled into her sides, hands linked in the middle. Or Mercedes would cradle Dorothea, and Ingrid cradle Mercedes.
She found she’d stopped eating. Her hands were sweating. She hopped up and grabbed another beer, then held one out for each of the others. She avoided looking as they took them. She stared into the fire as she sipped.
Small sparks flew into the air and flickered out. She imagined she was one of those sparks, alive for a mere moment before being thrown into the unknown, perhaps to disappear forever, perhaps to exist on another plane that simply couldn’t be seen from this one. She watched them intersect, combine, break apart, being often so intertwined with each other’s lives that she couldn’t be sure that the spark that leapt up from the flame was the same one that petered out moments later.
Around the fire, the sky darkened. It might have been the fading light, but it seemed to Dorothea that the sand beneath her feet was congealing, softening, becoming soft and earthy. The fire itself grew. It didn’t support just the three of them, but many. Their comrades crouched on logs or squatted, cold hands wrapped around tin containers, eking out warmth that dissipated quickly into the wet autumn air.
One of Dorothea’s hands held a battered flask of soup. The other was in a splint. She’d broken a finger, somehow, in today’s battle. She supposed it must have happened near the end, when her body was ringing with power as she exhausted her reserves of magic. She often found herself physically numb in those moments. Today, her body had issued her a warning which she ignored, and for her troubles she had failed to notice when her hand had been crushed in the chafe of conflict. Really, she was lucky. There were a million worse alternatives to a broken finger.
At the thought of those alternatives she instinctively wanted to turn to her friends, just to see them alive and well, until she remembered that she was supposed to be giving them the silent treatment.
Mercedes sat beside her, quietly sipping her soup. Her bishop robes were grey with dirt and smoke, her front soaked with the blood of their comrades. Her short hair was dull. Her eyes were distant. On the opposite side of the fire sat Ingrid. Her fingers thrummed anxiously against her empty flask as her hungry eyes darted about. Her gambeson was shredded in shapes that spoke of dangerous near-misses. She still wore her lower-body armour, too tired or too wary to fully undress.
The atmosphere was icy. Dorothea and Mercedes had argued after the battle about Mercedes’ unwillingness to have some self-preservation and stick to her assigned position at the back of the group where she could be safe and provide them with support from a distance. It was neither her responsibility nor her right, Dorothea had informed Mercedes, to put herself directly into the line of literal fire to heal some soldier or other who might’ve survived his stab wound even without her intervention. Mercedes had retorted that Dorothea was not her commander, and that it was neither her responsibility nor her right to dictate who Mercedes healed. At that, Dorothea had almost boiled over, desperate to but seemingly incapable of expressing to Mercedes that she didn’t care who Mercedes healed, only that she did so with a view to her own safety and to sparing Dorothea the constant screaming fear of her own friend’s demise. Of course, Ingrid was whole other story, standing there impotently as Dorothea implored her to make Mercedes see sense, only for Ingrid to clam up because nobody could ever expect her to deviate from her own heroic suicidal ideation or have any consideration of how Dorothea might feel about it all.
Dorothea seethed. It was infuriating, feeling so selfish about two people so selfless.
She huffed, determinedly looking anywhere but at those two people. She looked down at her robes.
Years before, at Garreg Mach, the night before Dorothea was due to take her gremory exam, Mercedes and Ingrid had appeared before her in the library and unceremoniously dragged her over to the dormitories, then into Mercedes’ room. From Mercedes’ wardrobe they had pulled a beautiful set of deep red robes with custom embroidery. They’d had a local artisan dye and alter a set of the monastery’s standard issue robes, and Ingrid had exchanged favours with Bernadetta for her to help Mercedes with the embroidery. Dorothea almost dared not touch the robes, but the others insisted she wear them. She demurred, saying it would be like the groom seeing the bride in her dress before the wedding day, but promised she would wear them the minute the exam was passed.
Dorothea was never able to officially complete her class certification. A war broke out, and they were all forced to step into their uniforms long before they were ready.
Nonetheless, the memory almost made her smile.
The fire crackled.
Miles away, the flames of the battlefield still burned.
Dorothea felt suddenly stupid. They had survived the day, but there was no way of knowing what tomorrow might bring. There was no way of knowing whether the cause for which they fought was even the right one, whether history would deem them heroes or villains, whether their deaths would be venerated or celebrated. There was no way of knowing whether they’d be remembered at all.
She’d certainly be furious if anyone’s last memory of her was of a filthy, war-torn prig. Not least her friends.
Ingrid still shifted nervously across from her. Dorothea watched her hands clench and unclench, absently groping for a weapon that had broken on the battlefield.
She snuck a glance at Mercedes. She was unnervingly still, head bowed low.
This wasn’t how Dorothea wanted to remember them, either.
Tentatively, she tucked her flask between her knees and reached her good hand over to rest gently on Mercedes’ leg. Mercedes’ head twitched up ever so slightly. Dorothea felt the dust and cloth beneath her fingertips and willed herself to swallow her pride.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
Mercedes turned her head, slowly, slowly, to meet Dorothea’s eyes. Dorothea sucked in a breath.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I was unkind.”
Mercedes was quiet for a moment, then gave her the tiniest smile.
“Yes, you were,” she replied. “But I forgive you.”
She rested her own hand over Dorothea’s. In the corner of her eye, Dorothea saw Ingrid shift to look at them with a hopeful expression. Dorothea smiled her most reassuring smile, and Ingrid visibly relaxed, setting down her flask and leaned back in her makeshift seat.
Behind Ingrid, one of their tents swayed slightly in the soft wind. As Dorothea basked in the warmth of the fire and Mercedes’ soft hand on hers, she watched curiously as the tent, which before seemed to have been made of treated cotton, seemed to warp into some thinner material. The wooden supports held telescopic lightweight metal rods, with plastic pegs buried partially in the soft sand.
The small fire and setting sun warmed Dorothea, and dulled the ache in her injured hand, which wasn’t injured at all, really, but loosely held a cool bottle of beer.
She looked up to see Ingrid and Mercedes’ running about on the beach. Ingrid chased Mercedes, attempting to splash her with beer until Mercedes retaliated by quickly rounding on Ingrid and jumping onto her back. To her credit, Ingrid managed to stumble with Mercedes’ weight for several steps until her bare feet slipped on the sand and the pair of them tipped onto the ground, laughing.
Dorothea smiled softly as her friends gasped for breath, both flushed and grinning, tilted toward each other. Mercedes reached out and lightly touched Ingrid’s cheek.
The red sunlight was colouring the bare skin of Ingrid’s legs and the strip beneath her ridden-up shirt. Dorothea watched lithe muscle shift beneath the skin. Ingrid was tall -- as tall as Mercedes -- healthy, and comfortable in herself. And Mercedes was fuller, softer, energised. They had each seen terrible things, sure, but they’d never seen war, and hopefully they never would.
As opposed to when? Dorothea didn’t quite know. And the train of thought drifted away from her as she watched her friends pull each other up and dust themselves off.
“Water?” Ingrid asked, and Mercedes nodded.
Ingrid loped over to the cooler. Mercedes headed over to Dorothea, crouched behind her, wrapped both her arms around Dorothea’s front and rested her chin on Dorothea’s shoulder.
“Are you alright? You’re very quiet,” Mercedes asked.
Mercedes’ breath tickled her cheek. Dorothea closed her eyes blissfully.
“I’m better than ever.”
Mercedes giggled. “Good! Did you see that our Ingrid dropped me?”
Dorothea heard the cooler thunk closed.
“I didn’t mean to!” Ingrid protested. “You jumped me!”
“It looked like it was jump-or-be-jumped,” Dorothea replied. She felt Ingrid plop down beside her.
“You could at least pretend to be on my side,” Ingrid sighed, leaning against her so Dorothea was sandwiched between the two of them.
“Oh, I’m just jealous that nobody was trying to jump me,” Dorothea replied, then froze. She thought of the tent. Felt herself sweat.
But her friends only laughed.
“Next time,” said Mercedes. “We’ll do this again. Next summer, after exam season.”
“Ah!” Ingrid exclaimed, leaning her warm body across Dorothea. “No school talk!”
“Oh, excuse me,” Mercedes apologised, then stage-whispered into Dorothea’s ear. “After exam season.”
They laughed again.
Dorothea tingled at the sound of their laughter, at the press of their bodies, and at the wonderful idea that in a year’s time the three of them might still be together in some form.
She opened her eyes slowly. She saw the tent. She wondered how they might lie in it.