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Lucy Frostblade finished braiding her own hair as Kipperlilly started stirring from the bed of blankets she had made on her floor. She’d tried to insist, just once, that they could share her bed. That there was more than enough space for the both of them. She knew she was big, limbs she hadn’t grown into yet as her grandmother would say when she thought Lucy wasn’t listening, but Kipperlilly was small and the bed was also big and it didn’t have to be weird.
It wasn’t weird. She was just trying to make sure she was comfortable was all.
She shoved a few extra pins through the ends of her braid, tucking the tail into the same neat style that her mother had done on her first day. The one Kipperlilly had said looked complicated on that same first day but she said it with one of her smiles. One of the rare ones that wasn’t just all teeth. Lucy didn’t need the extra pins, she knew her hair would stay, but sometimes she needed extra lock picks and then extra pins were useful to have on hand.
They were a party. A team. A cleric's job was to be helpful. She liked helping Kipperlilly. No more than she liked helping any of them, she told herself. She used to believe it. She was good at belief. At the type of faith that seemed unappealing to other people. So she told herself she liked helping her just as much as she liked helping any of them.
She didn’t have to heal her often but when she did her hands felt so warm she almost couldn’t pull magic through them. Her skin sparking against Kipperlilly’s and another of those few and far between, more than precious, smiles.
Lucy couldn’t remember the first time she had made up the nest on her bedroom floor but she remembered her voice small in the dark saying she didn’t normally sleep that well. Then a few times later when she at least heard quiet breathing in the dark. The trust she knew that sound contained, that she was even letting herself be heard.
It was a cleric’s job to be helpful. She liked helping her as much as she liked helping any of them. Another hairpin just in case.
Kipperlilly stayed with her at least once a week now. Enough that her mother had started to ask questions about “that smallfolk friend of hers” where her emphasis on the word friend wasn’t quite right but she didn’t know how to navigate that. So Lucy just nodded and said her parents worked. They couldn’t always give her a lift to school on the days where her classes didn’t start at first period.
And maybe her mothers questions made her face feel icy cold and when she tried to ask them in front of Kipperlilly Lucy shooed them away but it was just- There was something small and cold in her chest next to her faith. Just another devotion she was committed to. That was all. She was being a good friend. She was.
Kipperlilly arrived at her elbow as she considered another pin. She hadn’t heard the steps between the blanket nest on the floor and her arrival but that wasn’t unusual. Sometimes she tried to keep watch, so she could see the moment her friend’s eyes went from sleepy and soft to the sharp eyes of a mastermind. She’d caught it once, she thought, and seeing the armour form around her edges had made Lucy feel a little sick. Watching her Kipperlilly disappear in favour of the one that slipped through the rest of the world unseen and untouched.
“Would you do my hair as well?” Sleep clung to the edges of her voice. She hadn’t quite slipped it off yet. Hadn’t scrubbed off all the little pieces that made her just as real, just as much of a person as Lucy.
And Lucy knew it was selfish, when she worked so hard to erase them, but she collected all the moments for herself to keep. A handful of freckles on her shoulder normally hidden by a starched shirt collar. Petal pink blush that Lucy had never seen outside of her house. The way sometimes when she was studying, she would curl entirely into her chair, tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth.
Kipperlilly sometimes seemed impossibly old. So Lucy collected all these little moments to remind herself that she was sixteen too. Kipperlilly was younger than her by two months and sixteen days and when Lucy reminded her sometimes she’d scrunch up her face in mock anger.
Sometimes she’d snap. Disappear from Lucy’s house for a while and only talk to her through the rest of them. Information passed through Oisin and Ivy who would both look at her like they knew something she didn’t.
Lucy nodded and shuffled back on the bench seat in front of her dresser mirror. She sat up onto her knees, clearing enough space for Kipperlilly to sit in front of her. They both needed to be sat. If she stood, she had to hunch sort of awkwardly over her friend, to close the expanse of space between them.
She pulled two ribbons from a drawer in her dresser, leaving them on the table before turning back towards her friend, neither of them speaking. She dragged her fingers in a line from the crown of her head to the nape of her neck, parting her hair down the centre. Kipperlily didn’t flinch at how cold her hands were. That was something Lucy appreciated, she never flinched.
Lucy took strands from the front of her head, careful not to leave any loose. Kipperlilly liked her braids tight and perfectly neat. None of the softness Lucy liked in her own. She took her time, twisting perfect section over perfect section into one neat braid before moving onto the next. She tied each with a blue ribbon, almost the colour of her own hands but with far more of a shine.
Once she finished she moved her hands to her lap, tried not to fidget. Her mom and Kipperlilly both had told her it was a bad habit. One that gave away too much of herself too fast. She couldn’t picture Kipperlilly ever fidgeting, not even as a baby. She wasn’t sure Kipperlilly had ever been a baby even. It would feel right, Lucy thought, for the statue of a girl still sitting on the bench in front of her to have sprung from the soil fully formed.
She poked one cold finger into her side and Kipperlilly watched the reflection of her in the mirror do it.
For a second Lucy held her breath.
Watched as she decided if she was going to be angry about it.
She’d always told Kipperlilly her anger scared her.
Kipperlilly breathed out first, face melting into a smile all the way up to the corners of her eyes. Lucy breathed out second letting her smile match hers.
Her anger scared her more and more. She was getting more angry, not less. The days where Kipperlilly only talked to her through the rest of them seemed like they happened more and more. Where was the point in the guidance counsellor if she was just getting angrier? It wasn’t fair.
But Kipperlilly was smiling and she was at her house more often in her nest of blankets and books and the desk chair she’d claimed as hers even though it was far too big for her and her hair was tied in two neat braids with ribbons the colour of her hands. So Lucy let herself breathe out too.
***
Kipperlilly could feel the ribbon tying her ponytail slipping but her hands were still bloody with Lucy’s- No.
Not Lucy’s.
Lucy had been last year.
Her hands were still bloody with Buddy’s blood. She hated that they’d had to be so damn messy with it but they needed to be sure. They needed a cleric and Lucy had been so damn stubborn.
Her hands were bloody and the ribbon tying her ponytail was slipping and she couldn’t fix it because her hands were bloody and the ribbon was blue and-
They needed a cleric. They needed to be sure. Lucy had always said her anger had scared her which was silly because her anger felt halved back then when they were still a pair. Her anger was bigger now. More certain. She wouldn’t have had to be so angry if Lucy had come back just like they had planned she would.
Lucy was last year and there had been two this year but they could be sure now. She rubbed her hands on her skirt, watching the fabric grow darker. She wiped them again just to be sure.
She tightened the ribbon tying her ponytail back. Her hands still felt sticky. She was sure she was leaving red marks on the blue.