Archive of Our Own ^beta

The days on New Rho finally grew cold enough that Cam had to wrap Nona up in a scarf whenever they left the building. Nona did not enjoy the scarf. Its prickly fibers made her nose itch and it smelled vaguely of damp animal whenever it got wet, which was frequently, as Nona couldn’t consistently remember not to look up directly at the falling rain. Still, she hadn’t had a tantrum in weeks, because she was quite mature now, and ruining that good record over a scarf would be humiliating.

On a particularly cold, wet evening, Pyrrha came home from her long day at work whistling a happy tune that Nona had never heard before. For once, her brown eyes were bright, not strained and tired, and the corners of her mouth twitched in a way that said happy happy happy, even if her face wasn’t quite smiling.

“Hello, Nona Bologna,” Pyrrha said, easily scooping Nona up into her arms and spinning her around. Cam, who had been washing dishes with a set to her shoulders that warned stay away! don’t ask me questions about interesting things like why elbows work like that!, poked her head out of the little kitchen to eye Pyrrha suspiciously. Her serious face flashed into Nona’s vision on every rotation.

“You keep spinning her like that, and you can clean up after her when she’s sick,” Cam said, wiping her hands with the good dish towel. The bad dish towel had a burn hole in it that Nona preferred no one brought up.

Pyrrha eventually set Nona back on her feet. The room still spun around and around in a strange but familiar way that made Nona’s heart ache with loveliness. She didn’t feel sick at all. She could spin forever.

“What are you up to, Pyrrha?” Cam asked. She squinted her clear, gray eyes.

“Who says I’m up to anything?” Pyrrha asked.

“But you are up to something!” Nona said, because she was, obviously, up to something.

“Oh, you two are no fun,” Pyrrha said. She pulled a folded sheet of paper from her pocket and smoothed it out on the kitchen table. Nona couldn’t read it, of course, but she looked all the same, because it also had a drawing of happy children dancing.

Cam peered at the flier and squinted harder. “A carnival?”

“It can’t always be sad times on this miserable little planet, can it?” Pyrrha asked.

“Pyrrha, that rhymes!” Nona said, and then, “And it’s not a miserable planet. Don’t be mean! I love this planet. It’s my favorite planet of all,” because Pyrrha had a tendency to be unfair about the planet, which was perfectly lovely, with its busy streets full of cars and its salty water full of jellyfish.

Pyrrha’s face fought a smile. “Have you been to any other planets, Nums?”

“That’s beside the point!”

“You might like another one better,” Pyrrha said. “You might love it.”

“I wouldn’t!” Nona said. “I love it here!”

“Don’t get her worked up,” Cam said.

“I’m not worked up!” Nona insisted, quite a bit worked up. “I want to go to the carnival.”

Cam’s smooth brow furrowed and she tapped her fingertip to the flier once, twice. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Who could it hurt?” Pyrrha asked. She bumped her bony hip against Cam’s. Cam frowned.

“Yes, who could it hurt?” Nona said. “Please, Cam? Please, please? Ask Palamedes. Palamedes would say yes!”

“Sextus would probably say yes,” Pyrrha said, “but I’m asking you, Hect. You deserve a little fun, too, don’t you think?”

“Hmm,” is all Cam said.

“Just think it over,” Pyrrha said, and when Cam didn’t immediately say ‘no’, Nona knew the answer would be ‘yes’.

Two days later, the rain let up, and even though the scarf wrapped around her neck and face was as itchy as ever, Nona didn’t complain at all as she, Pyrrha, and Cam stepped out into the cold afternoon together. Nona held Pyrrha’s broad, rough hand on one side, and Cam’s slim, calloused hand on the other, feeling like she might be the luckiest girl in the whole universe.

When they arrived at the carnival itself, Nona knew she was the luckiest girl. The whole street had been barricaded at either end to keep out the cars, and stalls now lined both sides, where usually there was only cracked sidewalk. Twinkly white lights hung between the streetlamps in swags, reflecting in the lenses of Cam’s dark glasses, and colorful paper streamers had been wrapped around the poles. Everywhere Nona looked, she saw brightly colored ribbons, shiny foil stars, and faces of every color smiling and laughing. The smell of sweet, fried food filled the crisp air.

“I love the carnival,” she said. “I wish it was the carnival every day!”

“We haven’t even gotten to the good stuff yet, kiddie,” Pyrrha told her. “Just you wait!”

The first booths they passed were like small shops, each selling a specific sort of item. One had rows and rows of candles, all in different shapes, while another displayed gleaming jars of jam. Nona longed to put one of the red glass beads from a jewelry vendor in her mouth, but withstood temptation... mostly because Cam started watching her keenly the moment she touched her fingertips to the tray of beads.

“I wasn’t going to eat them!” Nona said, as Cam hustled her out of the booth, then, more truthfully, “Well, not all of them, Cam. Just one. Or maybe two.”

“The red ones?” Pyrrha asked. “Those did look tasty.”

“Yes!”

“Don’t encourage her,” Cam said, though Nona couldn’t tell which one of them she was talking to. Both, maybe. Pyrrha just flashed her most charming grin at Cam—why, Nona didn’t know, as Cam remained perpetually uncharmed by Pyrrha’s grins—and propelled Nona forward.

“I think I can find a better treat than beads,” she said, steering Nona towards a small cart where some sort of machinery emitted a high-pitched whir. As they got closer, the air smelled sweeter, and Nona noticed small flecks of something pale and fluffy drifting up from the cart. It looked like the cotton balls they kept in the medical kit with the pain medication and antiseptic, which Nona wasn’t allowed to eat under any circumstances, no matter how much she liked the way they squeaked between her teeth.

Armed with that knowledge, Nona was surprised when—after haggling for a solid minute with the stocky man running the cart—Pyrrha presented her with a wooden stick wrapped in a giant wad of the fluffy stuff. Nona took the stick, eyeing the fluff and then Pyrrha suspiciously.

“What do I do with it?” she asked.

“It’s candyfloss,” Pyrrha said. “You eat it.” Nona immediately looked to Cam for confirmation, shocked to see Cam nodding her approval.

“It’s just sugar, Nona. The spinning turns it into floss,” Cam explained.

Nona dragged the itchy scarf away from her face and took a tentative bite of the fluff. Sweetness exploded across her tongue as the bit of candyfloss melted away. Her eyebrows shot up.

“Oh!” was all she could manage.

“Good?” Cam asked.

Nona nodded. “Yes! Would you like some?”

“It’s a bit too sweet for me,” Cam said.

“Let Sextus have a taste then,” Pyrrha said. “He has a sweet tooth.”

The shift from Cam to Palamedes seemed as natural to Nona as the transition from day to night, though all it had been carefully explained to Nona early on that most bodies have only one person living in them, and that she wasn’t to mention it to anyone outside of their household. One moment, Cam stood there, stepping lightly from foot to foot, her back straight and shoulders square; the next moment, Palamedes’s shoulders relaxed forward into a slight slump, a hint of a smile tugging at his mouth.

“Candyfloss?” Palamedes said, tapping the timer button on his watch. “I haven’t had that since my fifth birthday. They banned it for my cohort after someone put bone dust into the centrifuge to see if they could make bone floss.”

“Was that someone you?” Pyrrha asked.

“I can neither confirm nor deny,” Palamedes said. Nona tipped the candyfloss towards him, and he delicately plucked a long streamer of spun sugar from it. He ate it less delicately, but with obvious relish. Pyrrha helped herself to some, as well, and Nona soon learned one of the best parts about candyfloss was that you could eat it and eat it, but you never felt full. Another best part was that it didn’t take any chewing, which made eating so much less tedious. Nona wondered if the cotton balls in the medical kit would go down as easily.

“You’re still not allowed to eat the cotton balls,” Palamedes said.

“I didn’t say I was going to!” Nona protested, because she had only been thinking it, and hadn’t planned to say it aloud.

Palamedes and Pyrrha both laughed at her, but Nona found she didn’t mind. They finished the candyfloss and discarded the stick, then continued down the carnival row until they reached several booths filled with games. Pyrrha shot a pellet gun at horrible inaccurate metal cutouts of skeletons and was rewarded with a pink stuffed animal of the like Nona had never seen, but which Pyrrha called a ‘horse’. She handed the horse to Nona, who hugged it to her chest. Palamedes’s timer beeped.

“Tell Cam thanks for the candyfloss,” he said, then his back straightened, his shoulders squared, and it was Cam standing beside Nona again.

“Palamedes says thank you for the candyfloss,” Nona said.

“This doesn’t mean you’re allowed to eat the cotton balls,” Cam said.

“I didn’t even say I would!”

“You’re an open book, Nona,” Pyrrha said. “It’s okay.”

Before Nona could get cross, however, her eyes fell on something wonderful. Two booths down from the skeleton shooting game, a young woman sat on a stool painting a picture on the face of a little boy. Nona grabbed Pyrrha and Cam’s hands in her and dragged them to the booth.

“Nona, don’t pull,” Cam reminded her, but Nona barely heard her, focused as she was on the face painting. The young woman’s hair was all wrapped up in a bright yellow scarf, and big metal bangles clanked on her wrist as she dipped her brush into the paint and applied it to the boy’s face. As Nona watched, the boy’s face went from regular-colored brown skin to the bright orange stripes of a tabby cat!

“Look!” Nona said, and the painter looked up at her, smiling indulgently in the way adults often did.

“Would you like your face painted?” the young woman asked. Nona could tell she was speaking a language Cam didn’t know by the way Cam’s hands tensed, so she quickly translated.

“Can I?” she asked, after. “Please, please, please?”

“I don’t see why not,” Pyrrha said. “I’ve got a little change to spare.”

Cam’s lips pursed as she considered it, probably weighing whether the change was truly spare enough, but finally she nodded.

“Oh, thank you!” Nona said. She turned to the painter, who had just finished with the boy and sent him off towards his waiting parents. “Only, I don’t want to be a cat, please.”

“Anything specific you would like?” the painter asked.

“Oh. Um. Something beautiful!” Nona said. “I’m not sure what.”

The painter woman smiled. “I know just the thing.” The paint was cold on Nona’s cheek, and the brush tickled, but Nona did her very best to hold still. After what felt like forever, the painter held up a small hand mirror.

“It’s beautiful!” None said, looking at the design spread across her cheeks, nose, and forehead. It looked a bit like a moth, but with wings like flowers. “Only... what is it, please?”

“It’s a butterfly,” the woman explained.

“A butterfly!” Nona repeated. She wanted to ask the painter more about butterflies, but Pyrrha dropped a handful of coins into the painter’s bowl and gestured back towards the street. With a wistful sigh, Nona bid the face painter goodbye.

While Nona’s face was being painted, the sun had set, and the strings of lights twinkled even brighter as the last bits of butterscotch yellow disappeared from the sky. Music drifted through the air. Pyrrha’s hips swayed a little as they walked, like she couldn’t keep herself from dancing. Soon, they came upon a low wooden stage, where people strummed and piped and drummed on an assortment of slightly battered instruments.

Pyrrha lifted Nona’s hand up high in the air and spun her in a circle. Nona’s braid whipped around as she laughed. Other people around them danced, too, some of them moving their feet in a regular pattern of practiced steps, while others just swayed from foot to foot. Pyrrha released Nona to put an arm around Cam’s waist, maneuvering her into a simple two-step.

“Don’t get fresh with me,” Cam warned, but without any real displeasure. Her cheeks flushed when Pyrrha dipped her down low. Nona clapped and danced in a little circle, caught up in the joy of belonging to these lovely people, being at this lovely carnival, living on this lovely planet. It didn’t even matter how much time she had left, really, as long as she got to spend it with Camilla, Palamedes, and Pyrrha.

They danced until Nona’s legs were sore and tired, then Pyrrha used her uncanny ability to sniff out alcohol to find a booth selling beer. Nona wrinkled her nose at the sour smell of it, but Cam accepted a plastic cup filled with the frothy golden liquid. Pyrrha clinked their cups together, and the two drank quietly, leaning against one of the streetlamps, while Nona watched the other people at the carnival pass by.

The rhythm of the crowd reminded Nona of the gentle rocking of the sea. Her eyelids grew heavy, despite her valiant efforts to keep her eyes open. As she began to sway on her feet, Pyrrha steadied her.

“Sorry,” Nona said sleepily.

“Maybe we should call it a night,” Cam said. “Head home.”

“But I don’t want to head home!” Nona protested. “I want to stay at the carnival forever!”

“You’re falling asleep on your feet, Nona,” Pyrrha said.

“I’m awake! Really!”

“I’m getting a bit tired myself,” Cam said, and she didn’t look like she was lying. Her restless fidgeting from one foot to the other had stilled, and not like it did when it was really Palamedes.

Nona sighed. “Okay,” she finally said. “We can go home.”

“Hop on, kiddie,” Pyrrha offered, sinking down and turning her back towards Nona. “Free rides. One night only.”

Nona clambered onto Pyrrha’s back and looped her arms around her neck. She was very tired, suddenly, and rested her chin atop one of Pyrrha’s shoulders.

“I love the carnival,” she said quietly. “I wish it could happen every day.”

Pyrrha was quiet for a while, walking back in the direction of their building with Cam at her side. Eventually, she said, “We can come back next year.”

Nona knew there would be no next year at the carnival, at least not for her, but she pressed her cheek against Pyrrha’s neck and said, “Yes, next year.”

It was easy to lie if you really, really wanted something to be true.