Work Text:
For Fiona’s thirteenth birthday, Sasha makes her fifty dollars. It takes hours and hours with the UV light, making counterfeit fives, ones and tens. It needs to be realistic, so she can’t exactly just make ten dollar bills. A diverse range of counterfeits and more bills meant more chance of them being accepted. At least that’s what Felix said.
She rolls them together and wraps them in crinkled red paper, and when Fiona unwraps it, her eyes light up and those hours all seem worth it. She looks way happier with Sasha’s present than the cake Felix made her, or the goggles he’d bought her.
“Sasha! This is amazing,” she says, laughing, “You made all these by yourself?”
“Hold on there, dear,” Felix says, taking the fake money from her hand, “Sasha, do hand me the UV light.”
Sasha’s heart sinks, but she gets up and does what Felix says. Felix always manages to find issue with everything she and Fiona does. And Sasha can’t help but privately think that he’s nicer to Fiona far more often.
Fiona says it’s for their own good, and so does Felix. Sasha is sure that’s right, but it would be nice to just be able to do something without it always turning into a lesson.
“Well, these are a fair effort Sasha. A great improvement upon your previous attempts,” Felix says, slowly and carefully, “Although I’m afraid for the most part these are not useable forgeries. The colouring, for one, is distinctly different from that seen in an official bill… Although that is only one of many points, I’m sure you can spot your other errors yourself.”
Sasha tries not to look too deflated. Felix rolls the false bills up and binds them again, pressing them into Fiona’s palm.
“Though feel free to keep them for sentimental value,” Felix says, and then gets up to go put another record on, “I’m sure your next efforts will be much more successful, Sasha.”
Fiona gives her a helpless look, part ‘Eh, Felix, what you gonna do?’, and part big sisterly disappointment. Sasha supposes that there was nothing you could do to Fiona that would be meaner than wafting a wad of money under her nose and then taking it away. She should have just made a macaroni picture or something.
The rest of the party, the dollar bills remain rolled up on the kitchen counter top, but Fiona wears her new goggles in her hair all night.
“Come on, don’t be a baby!”
It is Sasha’s tenth birthday, and Sasha is giddy. She sits on a stool in the caravan, kicking her legs and grinning at her big sister. She has been bugging Fiona to do this for weeks, but finally, with her birthday and the threat that Sasha would do it by herself if she didn’t, she gives in. Fiona looks at the long safety pin in her hand dubiously.
In great thing about it being your birthday is that everyone has to do whatever you say. Even if that thing is shoving a piece of metal through your flesh.
“I’m not being a baby, Sasha,” Fiona says, trying to get the “Just…Felix will kill us if he catches us. Why do you even want this girly crap anyway?”
“Uh, because it’ll look awesome?” Sasha replies, folding her hands. Fiona snorts, all tomboy derision. Since cutting all her hair off, Fiona has been getting mistaken for a boy more and more. Even the pink streak doesn’t do much. Everyone thinking you’re a guy all the time would annoy Sasha, but Fiona doesn’t seem to mind. She almost seems to thrive on it.
Her sister doesn’t have much of a feminine side.
Not that Sasha has much one of one. There isn’t a whole lot of room for femininity on Pandora. Sometimes, Sasha thinks it’s kind of a shame. She’s seen magazines and TV shows from off-world, and always finds herself staring agog at the women in them, how soft they look, wondering whether they smell like flowers and fruit and all the things women smell of in books.
She told Fiona that once and Fiona simply gave her a very, very weird look and patted her head.
Fiona manages to flick their crappy old lighter on.
“Alright! We’re in business.”
Sasha grins and grabs the cork from the bench, holding it behind her earlobe, bouncing a bit on the spot, the stool rattling and rocking beneath her. Fiona grabs the leg with one hand, stopping it and Sasha toppling to the floor.
“Chill out Sash.”
“Come on, do it, do it!”
“Hold on, I need to like…sterilise it or whatever first, right?” Fiona says, checking the ECHO net website she’d managed to drag up on their old comm. Half the images hadn’t even loaded, sure, and a good third of the screen was obscured with a spiderweb of cracks, but Felix wouldn’t be able to say they’d just made it all up, at least.
Fiona holds the sharp end of the safety pin in the flame for a few seconds, before the lighter splutters out. She shrugs with a ‘Well. That’ll do’ sort of look on her face.
“Yeah, now I just…shove it through your flesh. Great,” Fiona said, sucking her lips into a thin line, “Sasha, are you sure, I mean, it’s not like we can buy earrings”
“I’ll do it if you don’t,” Sasha warns her again. Fiona looks at her, bites her lip, and plunges the needle through Sasha’s ear.
Although Sasha swore she wouldn’t, she screams like a wounded banshee.
Tears in her eyes and a blood-soaked safety pin later (Fiona stumbled and caught her face), Sasha is admiring her home-made earring in the mirror. It had been a lot of shining and soldering bits of scrap metal together, but Sasha thinks it was worth it.
“Happy birthday, sis. Never say I never do anything for you,” Fiona says, still looking a little ill.
“Soooo…can I do yours now?” Sasha asks.
“Hell no,” Fiona says, putting her hands over her ears. At her crestfallen face, she relents and adds, “You can paint my nails though.”
When Felix comes home and sees what they’ve done, Sasha is banned from having any of her birthday cake until the next day.
Sasha doesn’t have nightmares.
When you’re a super cool, super tough con artist, that isn’t a thing that happens. You especially don’t have nightmares when you’re sharing a bed with your even cooler, even tougher con artist sister. Nightmares are for soft little off-world babies, not kids like Sasha who grew up with Pandoran grit in her blood and bones.
So when she wakes up, sweating, the face of a bandit with a knife in hand still in her mind’s eye, she doesn’t cry out and she doesn’t gasp. She presses a hand over her mouth to keep the sounds coming out, and she tells herself there must have been a noise outside or something. She isn’t scared.
If she hadn’t woken up, after all, even dream-Sasha would have kicked the knife out of his hand and hit the bandit hard enough in the solar plexus to force him to bend over. And then she would have smashed his chin with her knee, smashed her elbow between his shoulder blades, and kicked him while he was done for good measure. She would have done it without even wincing.
That’s what would have happened. It wasn’t a nightmare. It was just…a cool dream about having a fight. Nothing to be scared of.
And she only gets out of bed because she really needs to pee. That’s all. Honestly.
They’re in the safe-house overnight. Yesterday went bad, as in the-caravan-might-be-compromised-for-good bad.
It had been such an easy con as well. Felix had invited a few of his local “friends” over for a poker game. Sasha’s role was to act as an adorable distraction, show the guests her drawings, enthuse over the food, and just really push the image of them as a happy, cutesy family. The kind that wouldn’t rip you off. Fiona played poker, pretending she’d never played it before, while Sasha bounced around behind them, occasionally communicating to Felix and Fiona with silent gestures, winks and nods.
It was a quick rap they’d done a few times, usually when they were coming to their end of a stay in town. No better way to ruin their relationships with whatever friends they’d picked up by getting them drunk and robbing them blind.
Sasha wasn’t sure what went wrong. She has a feeling it was her fault, but it had ended with a knife at her neck, Felix punching a guy in the face, and the three of them having to run and leave their caravan to the angry rampaging of Felix’s poker buddies.
Sasha hadn’t been scared. Fiona had said she hadn’t been scared, so there was no way Sasha had been scared.
“No. You can’t see them.”
Sasha pauses on the stairs. Who is Felix talking to? She creeps slowly down and leans across to peek through the door. The light is still on, and Sasha can hear Felix’s slow, careful footsteps. He’s pacing. Never a good sign. Sasha crouches down by the door and listens carefully. As far as she knows, Felix didn’t have any real friends or any other family. Nobody he’d be talking to in such a serious voice in the middle of the night.
Sasha wants to rush upstairs and get Fiona up, but she can tell, somehow, that at the slightest hint that the girls were awake, Felix would hang up.
“You know why. I don’t want them involved with any of your…particular brand of nonsense. Me and my girls may not live on the right side of the law, but we do not live the same kind of life you do, Vallory.”
Vallory?
“No…I don’t know how you found out about tonight, but it isn’t going to work. You can keep the caravan. You don’t get my girls.”
Sasha has a hand over her mouth, holding in her breath. Felix paces some more, and is quiet for a long time. The only noises he makes are little ‘Hm’s and sighs, the noises he makes when he’s thinking very, very seriously and secretly about something.
“Very kind of you,” he says finally, voice so dry that Sasha instantly imagines a flat piece of stone, cracking loudly across the middle, “I appreciate that you want to see them again, but I am afraid that things being as they are I cannot allow it. These reports are already the limits of my boundaries, and more than you are owed.”
Whoever he’s talking to laughs so loudly even Sasha can through it, tinny through the ECHO comm. It’s the kind of laugh that sounds like a crackling fire. It makes Sasha shiver, for some reason, even though it’s not cold and she’s not scared.
“…I’ll retrieve the caravan in the morning. Do not take another actions such as this Vallory, or I promise you, you will never even hear of these children again. Some things in this world cannot be won by force,” he says, and then sighs, “…Yes. Not even on Pandora.”
Felix hangs up. He breathes out a big sigh, and Sasha hears him collapse onto his chair. She stands to go back up the stairs.
“Sasha.”
Sasha freezes as though caught with her hand in the cookie jar. Which does, occasionally, happen. Not that she’s ever in a great deal of trouble for it. Pickpocketing practice is something Felix is enthusiastic about.
“I must commend you – that was an excellent little bit of eavesdropping. Were it not you attempting to escape too early, you would have gotten away with it entirely,” Felix says, “Perhaps we should specialise your training in stealth. You seem to have a talent for it.”
Sasha creeps past the door, and stands at the wall, her arms folded. Felix looks at her from his chair, looking strangely tired, and old. Sasha doesn’t really think of Felix as old. Well, no older than any other grown-up anyway.
If he’s about to give her a lecture, he should really start. Sasha hates the waiting around for it to start almost as much as she hates sitting through it.
“Do stop looking at me like that, Sasha. While I don’t appreciate your intruding upon my privacy, I should have been more attentive,” he says.
“Who’s Vallory?” Sasha asks.
Felix rubs his forehead.
“An uncouth sort of woman. Not the type you should associate with.”
Felix says things like that a lot, but Sasha sometimes wonders what he even means. After all, they were thieves, criminals and con-artists, the three of them. Felix has wanted posters all over Pandora, and Fiona is determined to get her first before she’s 18. Aren’t they, really, the exact sort of ‘uncouth’ people they should be avoiding?
“Is she our Mom?”
Felix looks at her as though she’s just said some horrific curse word, and Sasha immediately regrets even asking. She hasn’t asked anything like that since she was really little.
Her and Fiona’s parents are dead, Sasha knows that. Felix never beat around the bush about it – they asked and he told them. They were dead, Felix had taken them in, that was it. It wasn’t a big deal. A lot of kids in Pandora were in situations like theirs. And a lot of them were a hell of a lot less lucky. Sasha had seen the street kids, and the bandit children, and she hadn’t envied any of them for a heartbeat.
Yet here was this woman asking after them…
“She’s not,” Sasha answers her own question, “I know, okay, don’t lecture me. I don’t even know why I asked.”
Still…it was strange, wasn’t it? They were orphans. Nobody else on Pandora should care whether they lived or died. Sasha feels her heart speed up, making its way to her throat, and she starts thinking wildly of battered teen novels she’s read and stupid movies she’s seen, those million and one stories where a kid has some big destiny and gets swept away from their dead-end normal lives.
She and Fiona were special. After all. Why shouldn’t that kind of thing happen to them?
Because it was dumb, that was why, she thinks
Felix just continues to look at her, but his gaze softens.
“Go to bed, Sasha.”
There’s a finality to his tone that even Sasha can’t argue with.
“Don’t sleep in your chair. It’s bad for your back,” she says.
Just because she can’t argue back doesn’t mean she can’t get the last word. As she goes back upstairs, she hears Felix quietly laugh to himself.
The next day, they return to the caravan to find it untouched, Fiona delighted and unquestioning, Felix unwilling to be questioned, and Sasha only half-remembers why.
Sasha gets her first boyfriend just after she turns thirteen years old. They’re in a snowy town in the north at the time, Fiona working on some scam that, if it works, will be wanted poster-worthy.
According to her, anyway. Sasha isn’t allowed to know the details yet. She’d be sore about it, but Felix isn’t allowed to know either. Fiona takes getting her first wanted poster weirdly seriously. Felix disapproves, as far as he ever disapproves of Fiona, anyway.
Fiona just spends a lot of time holed up in her room, sketching out ideas and making complicated diagrams and drawings that nobody but her could decipher. To deal with the boredom, and the loneliness, Sasha starts hanging out with a group of street boys.
Well. By hanging out with, she means “fighting with”. Apparently, she can throw a harder punch than any of the scrawny town kids put together. Who knew boys liked that!
His name is Kneecap, he’s probably older than her but he isn’t totally sure, and he likes shooting people in the kneecaps.
Hence the name.
His Mom is a big deal or something, hence the fact he can shoot people in the kneecap and not die. She’s the head of some local gang in the area, but pretty much any kid on Pandora will say their Mom or Dad’s a gang leader. It’s one of the few things a scrawny maybe-11 maybe-15 year old can do to not get shot and sold for parts around here. Sasha humours him anyway.
Sasha isn’t carried away. She doesn’t think she’s in love (gross), or that they’re going to get married (does anyone on Pandora even do that?), but well, she is happy.
Also, Fiona’s never had a boyfriend before. For once, it’s something she’s done first.
They make out for the first time after Sasha breaks Kneecap’s brother’s nose. Violence, she’s discovering, is the quickest way to a man’s heart.
But.
Well.
Making out is kind of…
Maybe she’s just doing it wrong. But. She isn’t really sure what’s supposed to be nice about bumping your noses and teeth together and getting drool in each other’s mouths and having a tongue shoved down your throat. For all it had been hyped up, she had kind of expected something a bit less...boring and gross.
Like hell she’d admit it, though. As far as anyone who asks knows, Kneecap is a great kisser and making out with him is, like, the most fun.
Which is what she tells Fiona the second she gets home.
“Ew, what.”
Fiona looks like she’s going to hurl, but it makes her look up from her desk.
Sasha can’t help it, she glows with delight at putting that look on her face. Especially since Fiona has barely spoke to her in weeks, all consumed with her big scam.
Fiona could hardly think of her as her baby sister any more. After all, Fiona had probably never even kissed anyone before. She had always been too busy with her budding criminal career for…anything else, really.
Sasha’s different. She wants to do things other than just drive from town to town, screwing over everyone in sight.
Those things probably wouldn’t include Kneecap, really, if she was honest with herself. Really, she didn’t know what those things were. But a boyfriend was a start, right?
“Well, I didn’t have much else to do, and he liked me, so why not,” Sasha said, “You know he can shoot a guy in the knee from twenty metres?”
“What more could you possibly want in a boyfriend,” Fiona said dryly, “Sasha, you’re…you’re too –“
“Don’t say I’m too young, Fi. Do not even say it.”
Fiona shakes her head.
“Fine. I won’t.”
But I’m thinking it, was the unspoken part of that sentence.
‘Too young’ was a phrase that Sasha was sure Felix had invented. And, obnoxiously, Fiona had picked it up over the past couple of years. She hadn’t heard it anywhere else on Pandora. For other people on Pandora, ‘too young’ didn’t exist. Kids worked and killed and blew shit up and swore and smoked and drank just as much as anyone else on this planet, because that’s all there was to do on this planet.
If this was where they had to grow up, Sasha didn’t understand why they had to have special rules on top of that. Felix always talks like he wants them to be better, but he never wants them to do better, and no matter what jobs they manage to pull, they never make a real effort to get off-world. It was needling at her more and more, lately, and she didn’t get why it didn’t bother Fiona more.
“Still. Since when were you interested in having a boyfriend?”
Sasha shrugs.
“Whatever,” Fiona replies, “Just don’t get in over your head.”
“I won’t. I never do. But. Don’t tell Felix,” she says. Fiona shakes her head, fiddling with the goggles around her neck.
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
She makes out with Kneecap a lot over the next week or so. It’s still…
It’s fine, she guesses. It’s eh. It’s…well it’s a bit sucky, but it’s very grown-up and she doesn’t have anything else to do.
Really, the best thing about having a boyfriend is the access to his firearms.
Sasha discovers she really likes guns. She didn’t know there was so many different kinds, and so many different makes.
She’d grown up hearing of the big corporations that seemed to loom over Pandora, but she’d never really thought of them as anything but vague boogeymen. Like old faceless gods, Torgue and Hyperion and Dahl and Maliwan, and people seemed to venerate and fear them in equal measure. Although nobody seemed to know what, in particular, they did.
What they did, apparently, was make awesome stuff. Fiona takes another shot with the Maliwan corrosive pistol Kneecap had lent her, and watches the metal target just about evaporate with a sizzle, leaving a carcass of green and dark iron in its place. God, that’s satisfying.
“Alright, more targets!” she says, and sets up another. Kneecap groans.
“You’ve been at it for ages.”
“Oh come on!” she says, and then goes to set up some more targets, “Is there any way to see if I’d be able to hit a guy in the eye? I really want to shoot a dude in the eyeball.”
Kneecap tries to take it from her, but Sasha elbows him in the face, and stacks up a row of bottles and cans on the shelf.
“C’mon, a few more rounds,” she says.
“Mom’ll be home soon,” he say, with that stupid tetchy voice he’d been using on her more and more. Like she was some kind of annoying obstacle on the path to getting another chance at grabbing her (non-existent) boobs.
“Whaaat, scared of your Mom? Why would she even care you were playing with a gun,” she says, shrugging.
Besides, she knows the only other thing she and Kneecap do together, and she is just not in the mood.
“Urgh. Just give it a rest! I’m bored!”
“Well, when you want to do something boring for hours, I don’t complain.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Kneecap says slowly. Not really the brightest guy, Sasha can’t help but think.
Or the most handsome.
Or the most charismatic.
Or…the best smelling.
And now that she thought about it, she’d never seen him shoot a kneecap from a big distance, or any distance. Just kind of brag about it.
In fact, on the targets he kind of…
Sasha looks at a line of bulletholes on the far wall, scattered like the many pockmarks on Kneecap’s zitty cheeks.
“We’re breaking up,” Sasha blurts out.
“What?”
“I’m keeping the gun.”
She walks out.
Or at least she tries, because at that point Kneecap runs and tackles her to the ground.
“Get off me, you jerk!” she cries out as she thuds to the floor, holding him away from her with both hands as he lunges, as though unsure whether to punch her or kiss her. She would prefer the former.
“You don’t get! To just! Break up with me out of nowhere, just like that! Who the hell do you think you are, you dirty little drifter!”
“Get the hell off me!”
Sasha whips her fist forward and hits him hard across the bridge of the nose with the butt of the gun. Kneecap stumbles back, and Sasha manages to wriggle out from under her. He’s on top of her again in a second, yanking on her arm so hard to make her yowl and bring tears to her eyes.
Kneecap turns her onto her back, pulling back a fist. Sasha shoots him in the shoulder.
She’s pretty sure it’s the shoulder. She doesn’t look for very long or very hard.
Shoving him to the floor and getting to her feet, she kicks him with all the force she can muster in the stomach. Kneecap writhes and screams, his flesh sizzling as the corrosive eats through tissue and muscle. Sasha walks off, her grip tight enough on the gun to draw out sores.
When Sasha gets home, she doesn’t cry. It isn’t the kind of thing to cry over. It’s the kind of thing to be pissed off over.
Fiona doesn’t comment on the black eye, or the furious look on her face, and Sasha is grateful. Instead, she hands her an icepack, and sits next to her in silence until Felix comes home. Sasha doesn’t cuddle into her, or cry on her shoulder, and Fiona doesn’t squeeze her hand or anything like that. That’s not the kind of sisters they are. But Fiona does stay, even though she keeps glancing back at her notes, and would clearly rather be anywhere else in the world.
Felix comes home and doesn’t say anything either.
They leave town that night, but Kneecap’s mother and her men follow them for weeks.
Guess she hadn’t just hit the shoulder.
She feels like the weight of that should hang heavier on her. Like she should constantly be looking at her hands, with a gawping, wide-eyed look of horror. Flinching at every flash of a gun, or maybe curled up on a ball, wracked with shudders of guilt.
None of that happens. She doesn’t feel very much at all. She’s sick of Kneecap’s Mom following them, and sick of Felix’s dark looks, and maybe a bit hungry, but that’s about it.
Early one morning, exhausted after driving all throughout the night, Felix says to himself that Fiona would have never gotten them into this mess. He doesn’t say it quietly.
Sasha goes rigid and bites back a million scathing retorts. She knows that, ultimately, Felix is right. Fiona wouldn’t have gotten them into this shit.
They park up for the night, in a skag-riddled hole that nobody apart from the absolutely desperate would even venture to. Felix has a trick with them. A few years ago, he’d managed to make some kind of gas that they just can’t stand. He sprays it all over the caravan and they keep their distance.
It was another one of his little inventions they weren’t ready to learn about yet. Even though she was sure if they were able to make them en masse they could make a fortune selling them.
Sometimes she thought Felix was worried their fragile little brains would shatter if he tried to put too much in them at once.
“Get some sleep girls,” Felix says, not looking at either of them, “We should try to travel for longer tomorrow, but I can’t drive any longer.”
Sasha can’t sleep.
She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t feel bad about Kneecap. Or even anxious about his Mom finding them. Or guilty about screwing up so badly. She just feels sort of like she’s been hollowed out. Like someone’s crawled inside of her and scraped everything out of her.
Pandora did that to people. That’s what she’d always heard from off-worlders. What “that” was varied. Madness, violence, corruption, hate. It was never anything good.
Any Pandoran who heard them then usually stabbed them.
She gets up and heads to the caravan roof. The warm Pandoran night air is stuffy enough, but with the skag-repeller in place Sasha feels like she’s walking around with a thick, invisible blanket wrapped around her.
It’s a better atmosphere than the one in the caravan, at least. Sasha settles cross-legged on the floor, leaning back. A few skags snooze in piles nearby, most of them tucked away in their burrows for the night. She can see their teeth and spines and drool from here. She can’t believe Kneecap wanted one as a pet.
She leans back and looks up instead. Most of the sky is blocked out by the car, but she can see just a sliver of the outside universe. The corner of Helios, and just a violet curve of Elpis. Beyond that, galaxies and stars she didn’t even know the name of, spinning with planets in a million colours, hosting billions upon billions of people. The kind of people who could only look down on Pandora, shake their heads, and mumble “Oh dear, what a mess”, before getting back to their real lives.
People in old movies always talked about looking out at the universe and looking small. She always thought that was sort of quaint. Like dipping your girlfriend and telling her you don’t give a damn. The sort of goofy, old-timey stuff that had made more sense at the time, maybe.
Now she realises she was an idiot.
For other people, who could actually explore the universe, feeling small in the universe was quaint. For a little girl from Pandora with a body count before hitting puberty, feeling big in the universe was incredibly, incredibly fucking stupid.
“Hey.”
Sasha jumps. Fiona climbs out of the hatch and closes it behind her. She stands over Sasha with her arms folded.
“Thought you’d be up here. Nice place to sit and think,” she says.
Sasha shrugs, feeling too sullen to sleep. She’d been kind of hoping just to mope. Fiona sighs and drops down next to her, leaning her back against the caravan’s railing. The pitying look Fiona gives her only makes her feel worse.
“It’s not your –“
“Don’t say it’s not my fault, Fi. It’s my fault. It is totally my fault. I shot a guy, the guy’s Mom wants us dead, and she’s kind of justified in that,” she bursts out, before she could stop herself. She breathed in and folded her arms around her knees, tucking in on herself, “If someone shot you, I’d want them dead. Felix would…if someone shot you, he’d want them dead too.”
“Sorry,” Fiona mumbles, “That’s just the…thing you say in these situations, right?”
“These situations?” Sasha says, and snorts, “Fiona, this is the only planet where you be like ‘oh it’s just one of those situations where my baby sister killed her boyfriend, now we’re on the run’. Like, standard teenage bullshit, right?”
“Pandora. Gotta love it, right?” Fiona says, “Toilet bowl of the universe. Where all the big players come to squat and take a shit, and where all the flies gather to lap it up.”
“What are we, the flies?”
“Eeeeh no we’re…okay, pretend really cool fish that deserve better live in toilets regularly. That’s what we’d be…the fish. The awesome fish. Getting shit on. Crap, I didn’t know where I was going with this,” she says, “Look, point is, we’re great. You’re great.”
“Fi.”
Sasha thinks about telling her that she doesn’t care about Kneecap. Or his Mom.
She tries to say it, but the words don’t come out. They sit, bitter and heavy, behind her teeth but she can’t budge them a hair’s breadth farther.
Maybe saying she doesn’t care isn’t quite right. Saying she’s sad about it, or really guilty about it, that’s not right either.
“You know, I just kind of want things to be better,” she says instead, “Or like, do things better, I guess?”
“We will. Some day. And we do, mostly! I mean, we lie for a living, but nobody gets hurt by it!” she says and then adds with a little cough, “Most of the time. And…hey...we’re dirt-poor. It’s the rich pricks with the spaceships and suits that should be doing things better. I mean, they’re the only ones where it matters when they do good, right? Though. I guess they never do. Which is why everything is like this anyway. Yeah.”
“You know, Fiona, has anyone ever told you you’re really, really bad at comforting people?”
“Hey, I only really know you and Felix. I haven’t had much chance to practice.”
Sasha laughs into her arms. They fall quiet, Sasha’s face buried in her arms, Fiona leaning back and winding her goggles around her hands.
“Fi?”
“Mm?”
“Are you happy like this?”
Fiona turns to look at her, a strange look on her face. As though she’s looking at Sasha for the first time ever, and is surprised by what she sees.
“I guess. I mean, I never thought about it. This is just what I am. A smart-alec who steals whatever’s not bolted down,” she said, scratching the back of her head, “I mean, I don’t think there’s much else for me to be.”
“I think there’s plenty.”
“Well, you would.”
“I mean, I know we talk about going off-world sometimes, but is that - is that serious? Or are you and Felix…”
Humouring the fantasies of a little girl. Like talking to some stupid kid about their dream of being an astronaut or a cowboy or something when they grow up.
She doesn’t know how she’d never seen it before. Of course she and Felix never expected to leave Pandora. They barely made enough to feed themselves and keep the caravan moving, how would they ever afford inter-planetary travel?
“Hey, Sasha, look at me,” she says. Sasha looks up at her over the crook of her elbow, lips tight and she wasn’t going to cry, that would be stupid. Fiona continues, “I don’t know if Felix is, but I am. My kid sister deserves better than this. One day, we’ll open a star map and you’ll just point at whatever planet takes your fancy that morning, and that’s where we’ll be by noon. Alright?”
Sasha forces a wobbly smile.
“I’m going to hold you to that,” she says. She sighs and blinks fast, then presses her eyes into her arms, trying to dry them out before she embarrasses herself.
Something snaps against her scalp.
“Ow!”
She sits up, rubbing her head and feels a length of leather in her hair. Tugging it loose, Fiona’s goggles hang from her fingres, a strand of Sasha’s thick hair already tangled in the band.
“You…think I needed a pair of goggles right now?” she asks, her voice coming out a bit weird and choked, like she’s speaking through a thin tube.
“Hey. Come on. That’s a touching gift,” Fiona replies, looking mortally offended, “Think of them as your…space travel goggles. For when you’re speeding through asteroid belts on a space motorbike.”
“Space motorbike?” she repeats, giggling.
“Whatever, just take them!”
“I can’t, come on, you love them.”
“Yeah, well,” Fiona says, and pushes her bangs out of her face with the tips of her fingers, “I’ve been thinking they’re not very me. I think I should have a different thing. Something that really makes me stick out among Pandora’s most wanted. I’m thinking…a hat. Nobody does hats.”
“You know, that was your cue to say ‘Yes, but I love you more’,” Sasha says.
“Eh. Don’t push it.”
Sasha shakes her head and pulls the goggles around her neck.
“How do I look?”
“Like a badass. As always,” Fiona replies, “The exact kind of badass that should be speeding around an asteroid belt on a space motorbike.”
“Ha. That’s…what I was going for.”
“Sure. I hope you know I’m never letting you have another boyfriend though,” Fiona says, and then thinks for a few seconds, “Not unless he’s a mark, anyway.”
Sasha shakes her head.
“I should have known you would say that,” she says and lies down, resting her hands on her stomach. She can still hear the skags snoring, the smell of the repellent is still enough to make her eyes water, but for a second Sasha can focus just on the crack in the cave ceiling, and the galaxies beyond it. She stretches a hand up and cups up it with the circle of her fingers.
It still didn’t exactly feel within her grasp. But before they had to be on the road again, dodging rockets and gunfire and madmen hot on their heels, Sasha could at least pretend.