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If anyone asks Firefly how she managed to make a friend such as Stelle in a high school off 43rd Street on an inconspicuous planet, she will tell them that she has no clue. There are not many things she is bad at, to put it in human terms, but for the things she is bad at, it is exacerbated. The high school was supposed to be prep for her next mission per the script. She was to keep her eyes on the mission, to not indulge in making friends.
The second part had seemed easy at first, since Firefly is naturally quite shy. But the thing about quite shy individuals, is that they are not-so-shy-people magnets. And thus, she found herself at odds with a curious girl named Stelle.
Her wheelchair wasn't the issue. This was strange, considering Firefly had been teased for it before because it’d always been in public view. No, Stelle’s reservations about her lay in her secret.
“Do you train in the Paralympics, Lumine?” Stelle had asked one day at lunch together.
“No,” Firefly blinked. She’d never even been to Dr. Ratio’s home planet. Their professor didn't speak much of it, only occasionally lamenting on how the only thing everyone knew about Eleusis-VI is that it hosts the yearly Olympic games of this star system. “Why?”
Stelle blew a rogue strand of silver hair out of her face, leaning on the palm of her hand. “No reason. Keep eating.”
Later, she would learn that on one of her mini-missions that had broached school property, she’d done something too out of the ordinary. Courtesy of the school gossiper, Guinaifen, Stelle had gotten wind of how Yours Truly had been in one of the dining halls and then in the next three minutes, in the wisteria garden all the way on the other side of campus to “attend the gardening club”. The truth is, the school is too poorly funded to even have any clubs, and she was actually there to kill off a rogue marmot that would have wiped the entire school out with a deadly case of the Black Plague. Things began to complicate themselves, and that was how Firefly found herself expelled from the fourth high school Kafka had enrolled her in within three months of enrollment. And because admin knows Firefly comes from a “rich family”, the amount of fees she had to pay to repair the South Garden would probably be enough to fund a gardening club and a half.
Firefly had never been a very good liar.
“So what?” Blade turns a corner with one hand on the steering wheel. She’s fairly sure her colleague is running on at most three hours of sleep. “You’re weird. That’s the norm for us. Don’t expect to be accepted. Don’t subject yourself to that heartbreak.”
“Oh, Blade.” She sighs. “That was part of the script.”
“Eradicating the plague-carrying marmot in the South Garden with a well-timed squeeze?”
“Well, yes, but—” She puts her face in her hands. That’s the only place in the school that he knows, because right after she’d attended the gardening club, he’d been ready to let her hop on and drive back to her dorm. Knowing her, she couldn’t transform into SAM a second time that day, so their colleague had called Blade to help. Blade is an extremely fast driver. Safe, not so much.
“Tell me.” Blade prompts, and she looks up at him in belated surprise.
“What?”
His face is tense. A bead of sweat drips down his face. His eyes flicker like undying candles in a crypt. “Tell me.”
“You need sleep. And rest, and probably more rest.” She groans. “Are you sure you can get us back to Kafka’s mansion in one piece?”
“This car has autopilot.” He grumbles. “The mara is testing my patience. Tell me. Your script ordained that you would not make any friends here? Is that correct?”
By this point, he’s talked more than he has in the entire few years or so in which she’s known him for. The conversation he wants her to strike is likely to get his mind off his mara. Firefly will not pass this opportunity up. “Yes. But there was something about her. And so I tried.”
“You tried, knowing people like us are not meant to enjoy companionship.”
She laughs dryly. “You think I don’t know that?”
“I never said you didn’t.”
The car hums as he accelerates to a comfortable eighty MPH on the highway. His phone pings, but he doesn’t bother to spare even a fleeting glance at it. She picks it up for him. “It’s Kafka. She wants us to pick up some takeout on the way.”
He grunts and swerves a lane. Firefly nearly falls sideways into his side of the car, which would not have been good for either of them. “Blade, please! The speed limit is outlined in neon yellow on the road! You’re running ninety on a seventy!”
“Rules were made to be broken,” He grumbles, swerving another lane with, thankfully, a little more tact than the last one. A strong bout of deja-vu hits her. Stelle had once said the same thing, in a very different yet nonetheless similar context.
He glances over, narrowing his eyes.
“Eyes on the road, Blade.” She says patiently.
“They are.”
“Are not.”
“Why didn’t Stelle want to befriend you?”
“She hates me.” Firefly smudges her nose against the window before a low quit that from the other has her recoiling. “Sorry. She wanted to befriend me. I’m not sure how much the other students did. They made fun of her for it. And I get it. Girl in a wheelchair most of the time, anti-social and can’t pick up social cues.”
“We don’t need to pick up social cues,” He offers blankly. “Just takeout.”
War. Death. Takeout. Whatever’s required of them per the script, or Kafka’s orders. Firefly smiles wanly. “That’s a really bad way to comfort someone.”
“I wasn’t trying to-”
“Thank you. But I can live with my own mistakes. Losing a friend isn’t the end of the world.”
“It can be.”
“No, it can’t.”
“It can.” He flicks on the high beams, then as if thinking better, switches it to low beams. Belatedly, she realizes he’s been driving with no lights for at least half an hour. How he managed to get his license, she’ll never know. “When the High-Cloud Quintet lost one of their members, an entire world was lost.”
“You’re quoting a classic. Ten Thousand Leagues In The Clouds, right? One of my classes had it as a required text.”
“Do not equate history with fantasy.” He snaps. “Those books are nothing like how it went.”
“I told you my business, now it’s your turn.” She slips in a question. “How exactly did your friend die, Blade?”
He gives her a sideways glare.
“To get your mind off the mara. And mine off of my pain.” She interjects quickly.
“Her name was Baiheng.” He says, voice curved and smoothed out to something gentler, something very un-Blade-like of him. “And she wasn’t my friend. She was obnoxious, always pestering me to open up. Very much like a certain colleague of mine sitting to my left is.”
“Eyes on the road, Blade.”
“They are. She was a Foxian Nameless. Loved exploring different worlds, always taking on each planet she visited as if it was her last. And one day, one of them happened to actually be her last.”
Silence.
“It should’ve been me.” He sighs. If she hadn’t known better, she would’ve described his sigh as dreamy.
“Blade-”
“Don’t. I don’t feel pity for her. Nor sadness.” He exits smoothly, pulling up a sheet of paper with Kafka’s loopy handwriting all over it. “Xianzhou Deli or Pier Point Bar?”
“Deli, Silver Wolf doesn’t like alcohol these days. What do you feel, then?”
He pulls into a parking space with a large blue sign. Immediately, someone knocks on his window. Blade rolls it down, the motion comically slow. It’s probably less of him wanting to piss off the officer and more of him exhibiting his skewed sense of time.
“Sir, and–ma’am,” The security officer says, pointing to the large blue sign. “This spot is reserved for handicapped people only.”
“I feel regret.” He says, staring straight into the officer’s eyes. “It strikes me when I’m coming down from a mara-high. Happy now?”
“Sir?”
She facepalms and fishes out her fake ID with a mini-version of the blue sign on it. The officer blanches after Blade practically thrusts it in the man’s face, and, after quickly blurting out some half-hearted apologies, leaves them be.
“Semantics, semantics. I don’t think any of us can ever be truly happy.” She says after a while, as the person in front of her finishes ordering. “Hi, there.” She says to the slightly bewildered cashier. “Two orders of grilled berrypheasant skewers with cold glass noodles, please. And, um, a small ham baguette with iced vanilla coffee for my brother, if you will.”
“Would you like pickles…sir?” The cashier squeaks, positively shaking as Blade glares holes into her. In truth, Firefly knows he’s just zoning out.
“My brother would like no pickles, please.” She has to add extra emphasis on the first part. They’ve gotten mortal authorities called on them before in the distant land of Penacony. Apparently a few passerby thought he was kidnapping a minor in the Golden Hour casino. Blade found it to be an extreme hassle to ask Silver Wolf to hack into security cameras. Firefly had taken it as a compliment, since she is neither kidnapped nor a minor.
“Ah—and please add one of the kids’ toys in there.” Firefly adds quickly. “A Burr sphere will be just fine.”
Blade crosses his arms. “I do not-”
“Will do!” The lady zooms off, likely to shake with fear in private. Firefly drags Blade o the corner and sits him down. “You need something to keep your hands occupied before we get on the road again. Don’t think I don’t know about the other children’s trinkets you keep in your room.”
“I keep them in my room because I don’t care enough about them to do anything with them.”
“They don’t collect dust, though.”
“I should bar you all from free access to my room. And my phone.”
The cashier calls her name after a few minutes. When Firefly gets back, two bags laden with steaming food swinging in her hands, she laughs. “Then you wouldn’t have anything to eat on the way back. C’mon. Let’s go.”
Despite Blade’s huffing and puffing, he viciously snatches the two bags from her hands and juts his chin to the car. “Sit down first. Then take these.”
She obliges. The food bags are warm on her lap, and all is well in that small moment, even if neither of them can be truly happy.
“Wait—” She holds the car door open with one arm as he’s about to close it, the toy still in his other hand. There’s so much she could tell him. She could tell him how she’s feeling a lot more content now, or how his forehead is still slick with sweat but no longer dripping with it. She could tell him that his red luxury tie that she and Silver Wolf had spent half their monthly savings to buy for his made-up birthday is horribly crooked due to his equally crooked driving skills, or how part of the icy condensation on the coffee cup in the bag is seeping past her pant’s fabric. The mundanity of all these things are worth saying to a being even less mundane than she is. Perhaps neither of them can attain anything like mortal happiness, but they can always pretend.
Instead, all she says is an honest, truthful: “I’m hungry.”
He closes the car door with a quiet snort, then revs up the car.
“Eyes on the road, Blade.” She clicks her seatbelt into place.
“They will be.” He says, and off they drive, into the relentless night, onto the sparkling highway.