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"Find out who you are and do it on purpose, with purpose." -- Dolly Parton, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones
"So. Hey. Nimona."
It's Pizza Night at the Evil Lair, and the Boss has checked out for a second.
A second that lasts entirely too long.
Which means it's just her and Gloreth's great-great-great-great-whatever grandson. She's stopped calling him Nemesis, at least out loud, but that doesn't mean that the two of them are on good terms.
He's at least trying to get used to having her around in his adult years. That's more than Gloreth did for her. That's the main reason she hasn't breathed fire in his face yet.
It had been so hard to resist that urge when he'd suggested potential toppings for their pizza. Of course he'd be the sort who liked pineapple. Of freaking course.
They'd managed to agree to one half pepperoni and sausage, the other half jalapeno and pineapple. Goldy had insisted that the spice was enough to cut through both the sweetness and the tartness of the fruit. Maybe it's petty, but she can't bring herself to try it. Instead, she holds a steaming slice of pepperoni and sausage to her mouth when he speaks.
She narrows her eyes in his direction, deciding to slit her pupils. He flinches, but goes right back to making eye contact with her.
Okay. All right. Point of respect.
"So. Hey. Goldy," she responds.
"I got a question."
"That so?" She heard somewhere he was the second best of all their knight classes. She knows he's not stupid; he must know to tread carefully.
"All the animals you turn into..."
"What about them?"
His brows furrow, much in the same way Gloreth's did whenever she was thinking deep. "How come they're all...pink?"
Nimona stares at him for a moment. "Really? That's...that's your question?" Not a question of how? Not a question of why? Not a question of how long?
He shrugs. "Just curious. I mean, I'm not complaining; it's a great color. It suits you."
If he's trying to butter her up...it's working. After literal centuries of fear and hatred, any bit of praise feels like a sip of water in the desert. "Aw, you." She horks down the rest of her pizza slice, then stands up, shifting.
"Whoa..." His eyes are a different color than Gloreth's--a deep, fathomless brown instead of a pale, piercing blue--but they widen in the same way hers had the first time she saw her change.
She folds two of her six legs over her smooth barreled chest as she lies down. Wisps of her billow away, dissipating into the air. Her gills rise in amusement as her pure black eyes meet his widened ones.
"This was the first form I ever had." Her tail moves as though it has a mind of its own. "This is the first color I ever was. Now keep in mind, this was a long, long time before you were born." She sighs; in this form, she has more senses than the typical five that humans have. She can sense electricity in the air; it's gathered right where Goldy is now. "It was a long time before your whole thing of 'Blue is for Boys, Pink is for Girls.'"
"Wait...boys and...?" He blinks up at her. "You were a boy?"
"Yep!" She shifts back down to her human form and takes another slice. "Then I learned what I could do, and decided that didn't work for me. At least, not all the time."
"Okay; all right." Goldilocks folds his arms on the table as he fixes her with a more serious stare. "That still doesn't explain the pink thing."
"I'm getting there. Keep your hoody on. So, at first, that just...kind of happened. Didn't occur to me to turn into a deer or turtle or fish that wasn't pink. And then I met Gloreth."
"Oh." That's enough to put some kind of look on Goldy's face. Nimona isn't quite sure what it means.
"Everything was great. You know...at first. But then her village turned on me...and so did she."
Goldy at least has the good sense to look a little ashamed.
"I stopped with the whole 'pink' thing. For...I dunno. Nine centuries, maybe? At first, it was because I was trying to blend in. Didn't want her to recognize me in case she ever saw me again. After she died, I kept it up." Nimona takes the opportunity to grin a sharp-toothed grin at Goldy, relishing in the way he flinches away. "Which brings us to your kingdom! The walls went up about two centuries before you were born."
"Right; I do remember that from history class."
"The whole 'blue boys, pink girls' thing is like...way more recent than you think, too. That started...I dunno, a hundred years ago? Give or take a decade. I came back here to see how things were, and saw that, and..."
She turned into a rat. Then a cat. Then back into a human girl. All blatantly, unapologetically pink. "I thought it was dumb. So I started doing this on purpose."
"Ah, okay. So you do it out of spite." Goldy gives her one of those stupidly photogenic grins he used to wear for commercials, and it looks so much like Gloreth's that it almost physically hurts. "You know what? I can respect that. Good for you!"
"Great! Awesome to know I get your approval. That's literally all I live for, you know." Maybe Nimona isn't being one hundred percent facetious. Maybe she's internalized the idea that, since he's important to her Boss, maybe he should be important to her, too.
Just maybe. Not like she'll ever admit to it out loud.
His smile fades, becoming more gentle. More genuine. "I wasn't kidding, you know. You look great in pink."
"Thanks." Nimona twirls a lock of her hair around her finger. "It's a great color." It is, but it's more than that.
It's her. After centuries of self loathing, she'd much rather die than be anything or anyone else.
"What are you two talking about?"
The Boss had come back inside.
"The color pink," Nimona says.
"Right, okay." The Boss rolls his big-ass, anime-esque eyes. "No, really, what are you talking about?"
"Honest! We're talking about the color pink," says Goldy without missing a beat.
"All right, fine. Don't tell me." With a smile that lifts up the corner of his mustache, the Boss takes a pepperoni-and-sausage slice of pizza.
Still hungry, Nimona helps herself to another slice, too. A jalapeno and pineapple slice.
She'll never admit it, but Goldilocks is right. It does taste good.