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On Thursday, the gang sets out to save the world again.
Noelle is there to watch them go, and then to watch the two halves of the launch bay doors rumble back into one piece. The boys don’t know it, but the Moonbase also claps when they leave: a burst of shared relief that sounds like Solstice Eve, just a moment before midnight.
It’s pretty funny, Noelle thinks. But there’s a curious moment before the world’s sealed up again where the noise feels almost unbearable.
Angus, bloodless, trembles down from his spot at the console. Some nice folks walk over to tease, and hold out their elbows for him to cling on to. One of them ruffles his hair and tells him he did a fine job. Heck, Noelle thinks. Watching him, now. He sure did.
He catches her staring, and offers a shy, nervous smile. With her hand that still looks like a hand, Noelle gives him her best facsimile of a thumbs up.
She wonders, later, if she could ruffle someone’s hair. Then she just feels silly that she wondered.
It takes a whole day for her audio processor to stop over-attenuating. She probably won’t go to the next launch, she decides. Too sensitive, she thinks. The dang racket made it skittish.
Maybe she’d like the joke more if she could clap.
—
Fridays, as a matter of course, are spent in the training room, where— for all the clanging noise of Killian methodically turning training dummies into porcupines, and Carey launching off the walls to try and catch her bolts before they land, and the furious admonishments pursuant— Noelle finds herself feeling rather tranquil. She can’t practice her own shooting, of course, but she doesn’t much mind that either. She’s learning a lot about them, even just watching like this.
Then Carey suggests a game of Dodge the Bullet, and Killian declares that training is over. It makes Noelle faintly disappointed— but, she supposes, she does have some work to get done.
A moment later, they ask if she has plans, and it turns out she’s not busy at all.
—
Something’s wrong on Saturday— or it just feels that way. Noelle doesn’t think she ever had much intuition — mostly because that’s a word she’s certain baffled her, uttered over her head (in every sense) by women who winked at one another, and made it drip with arcane implication she absolutely could not grasp, while she looked back and forth between them admiringly. It was probably feminine : another word she solemnly supposed she’d understand eventually.
(Noelle never learned to wink, though she tried very hard. She squinted crookedly at apples for a solid fortnight, quietly certain this was at least step one to understanding about womanly things, until the ladies saw her and said they’d take her to a clinic if she didn’t stop by harvest’s end.)
(She did keep trying, though, when no one was looking. And then, at length, she didn’t. Maybe when I’m older, she appeased herself. I’ll understand eventually .)
(She doesn’t really mind, now, that she won’t. Mostly, she wonders which one was her mother.)
By evening, Noelle can’t remember what felt wrong in particular with Saturday; it was probably just in her head.
—
Sunday’s quiet, which is all right. The quiet days aren’t so bad, Noelle thinks, as long something keeps her occupied; even if it makes her feel like withering, the anxious noise of this planet full of strangers is preferable to letting her thoughts wander.
The occupation doesn’t last her through the night. But neither does the quiet. In true rogue fashion, Carey slips into her room half a step before a single memory.
Noelle could love her, maybe, even just for that.
She sits with a bounce on Noelle’s bed without asking— without politely pretending it’s ever been used, and making Noelle dwell on how it hasn’t.
It’s nice.
“So, hey!” She says, in lieu of a hello. “What has two thumbs, finally gave her girlfriend a really ugly handmade duck box, then went no, shit, no, that’s a prank and I need it back and ran away?”
“...Oh, boy.”
Carey falls backwards, rumpling the comforter, thumbs still raised. “This guy!” she confirms. Then her hands drop with her tone, crumpling into a scaled tangle across her stomach. “Yep. It’s me. I am the guy with the thumbs.”
To Noelle’s credit, she takes her seriously. “I thought you were going to give her the ring?”
As suddenly as she fell over, Carey sits up again. “Yes! I was! It was in the box!” Her tail swishes. “But okay— Look, I gave it to her, right? I handed it over, and everything just sort of… stood still , and it was like one long enormous moment where I was looking down at our hands, and the duck in our hands, and I just realized with, like, complete clarity— that? Is too much butt for one box. ”
Noelle agrees. But now’s not the time to rub salt in the wound. “So, you took it back?”
Carey gives the ceiling a haunted look. “No,” she says quietly.
“You didn’t? Then—”
“I tried,” Carey insists. “But the thing is… she’s just so goddamn tall .”
“Ah.”
“Okay, look! When you think about it, her entire job is playing keep away. She’s a literal professional .”
Noelle realizes, dizzily, that she likes this; getting whisked away in the momentum of a whirlwind conversation. “Well,” she reasons, “I guess in the end you did give her the ring, in a technical sort of way.”
Carey breaks character; her face melts from deeply stricken & martyred into an impish sort of smile. “Technically. I really screwed it up though, right? Hah!”
Noelle whirs solemnly. “I’d say you did about as bad as you possibly could’ve,” she confirms.
Carey flops over onto her stomach in an intensely smooth motion, and leans up on her elbows to look Noelle dead on. “I thought you’d like the story.” She grins, with more and sharper teeth than a mouth should hold. It makes Noelle feel warm and pleasant— that she thought so. “Besides— you were practically my co-conspirator. If she asks, you’re getting half the blame. Heads up.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon ? ” Noelle chirps back, floating cheekily. “All I did was tell you to go for it. I’m an innocent third party in this relationship.”
And suddenly, Noelle’s momentum is thrown off; Carey doesn’t say anything. She just looks at her, still smiling, with a thoughtful, inscrutable brightness in her eyes that reminds Noelle suddenly of being small and real and not understanding a great deal of probably very important things.
“I think,” Carey says, suddenly, timed just right to catch Noelle off her guard again. “I want to make dinner for her. Like, a romantic one. To make up for it. Candles and stuff. What do you think?”
“Oh!” Noelle isn’t thinking much of anything , right now, but she says, “I think that’d be nice.”
Carey snaps her fingers. “Great. Do you think I can get Angus to do it?”
—
Noelle passes Killian coming out of the elevator on Monday morning. There’s something uncontained about her; some private happiness pressing out between the stern lines of her face and her armor.
The ring looks good on her.
—
On Tuesday, Angus knocks softly on her door to ask if she wouldn’t possibly mind helping him reach some of the taller cupboards in the kitchen. And maybe, if it’s not too much of a bother, does she know of any recipes that are “good” and “edible” and “won’t kill Miss Carey with poison so that then Miss Killian has to kill me too?”
He cries for thirty minutes with his little head pressed against her shoulder, and it takes another hour before he’s calm enough to cook. She pats his hair with her hand-that’s-still-a-hand. He calls her Miss Noelle, and doesn’t seem to mind at all.
—
On Wednesday, she feeds her old name to the Voidfish.
The Director isn’t terribly supportive, but Noelle is firm; she’s thought it over.
It must be worse, she’s decided; knowing exactly what you had, and what you lost. It must be even harder moving on.
It’s a kindness, to the people that she doesn’t quite remember. She understands at least a little, now.
—
On Thursday, Killian is still wearing Carey’s ring. But Carey has another, and it’s wide enough to slip over Noelle’s hand-that’s-not-a-hand, and dangle from her arm.
“Like a friendship bracelet?” she asks. The wood shines with the same lacquer as the wood on Killian’s finger.
Carey only laughs, and smiles that dang smile again.
They look at her, and it’s still a look she can’t completely understand.
But she’s getting there.
They ask if she would like to come to dinner. Yes, she would.