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Despite what others said, Pearl thought she could be quite cluey sometimes. At least when it came to Marina. Pearl felt strangely in tune with her, more than she had with anyone else in her life. She supposed it came with the territory of being bandmates with her best friend, and as a result spending all her time with her.
As such, she could tell that Marina had been… off, this broadcast. Their usual banter that flowed so well felt stilted and one sided.
She sneaks a surreptitious glance to her side, trying to pinpoint exactly what was different from Marina’s usual behaviour, and therefore what she could do to help Marina feel better. She knew something was bothering her, she absolutely knew it. Marina was the consummate professional, she never missed a beat and delivered every line flawlessly with the tone and expressions it required to land.
Had she skipped breakfast again or something? That was so like Marina to do, getting so wrapped up in work, likely re-reading over the script for today’s big Splatfest announcement and making last minute edits in pursuit of perfect dialogue to forget to care for herself. She works so hard, Pearl would say too hard, in instances like that.
But Pearl understood. Marina felt like she needed to be exceptional, without exception. Her fear of failure drove her to work herself to the bone to prove that she deserved to be here, to ensure that she would never have to go back to that half life of survival that was all she knew before Off the Hook. Nevermind that she had Pearl, or that Pearl would rather saw off her arm with a butter knife than ever let that happen. Marina was fiercely independent and wanted to make her own way in life, which was something Pearl respected the hell out of. It just makes her a little worried sometimes, when they would be chatting in Marina’s dressing room before a broadcast and Marina would be caking a thick layer of concealer underneath her eyes to hide her massive eye bags.
She narrows her eyes in concern, watching Marina as she woodenly reads her line. Her posture is stiff and her eyes are squarely downcast at her script. Warning bells start to toll in Pearl’s head as Marina botches her delivery, inadvertently arguing for Pearl’s team.
Marina glances up for a brief moment, and Pearl determinedly tries to catch her eye in an attempt to ask ‘are you ok?’, as much as she can on live television. Marina seems to be pointedly ignoring her though, and Pearl slumps back into her bean bag. She’s been told before that she wears her emotions on her sleeve, so she tries to disguise her growing worry for Marina with an airy wave of her hand as she cracks a joke, her tone much too lighthearted.
Marina startles her by letting out a robotic laugh that is strikingly loud against the quiet backdrop of their newsroom set. Pearl almost jumps out of her chair in shock. It’s a total 180 from her previous somber exterior and Pearl is unsure whether to laugh too. She knows she missed her calling as a comedian, but she’s not that funny. And Marina seems to be laughing without actually smiling, which is not something Pearl had thought a person could actually do. Least of all Marina, who felt every emotion deeply and loved expressing them to the people she valued.
She hesitantly joins in, before Marina abruptly stops, her face immediately clearing of any faked mirth and becoming blank, leaving Pearl to trail off uncertainly.
“It’s funny, because we’re all living in a simulation and free will is a lie.” Marina says stonily.
There is a long pause that Pearl feels every second of. She makes fleeting eye contact with their producer, whose deeply furrowed brow and thunderous expression does not bode well for anyone. He taps his watch pointedly, and this spurs Pearl into action.
She hastily spews a line to fill the looming silence, telling viewers they can sign up for a Splatfest team at the box in the square. She completes the sign off with their signature pose, Marina mechanically following along. Pearl notices out of the corner of her eye that her face is impassive as the broadcast is cut by their producer sharply slicing his arm down in front of the camera.
“What the hell was that?” Their producer exclaims, finally breaking the silence and the trance that had left everyone hesitant to move. “I know I give you some leeway with improvising lines, but come on now!”
Marina shakes her head, forcefully pushing her turntable away from her. Her mouth is a thin line as she rushes out of the room, ripping her headphones off and letting them clatter to the floor. Pearl’s eyes widen, Marina never takes those things off, especially not in public. Hell, Pearl herself rarely ever sees Marina without her headset soundly covering her ears.
Pearl thinks she catches a glimpse of some tears rolling down her cheek.
“I’m taking my break.” She doesn’t even have to think before saying them, the words are automatically rolling off her tongue before the door even clicks shut behind Marina.
She’s already at the door before Marina’s turntable comes to a complete stop, its one squeaky wheel piercing through the tentative sounds of the sound crew packing up their microphones. She hears her producer shout something after her about ensuring she only takes her allocated half an hour, but she pays it no heed. She had more important things to concern herself with.
Namely, whatever the hell was going on with Marina.
Skidding out into the hallway, Pearl notices the double doors to the right leading away from the studio and towards the talents’ dressing rooms slowly swinging back and forth. She’s glad Marina hasn’t left the building entirely, because she might actually be able to catch her now.
Hastily breaking out into a speedwalk, Pearl bypasses the break room and heads straight for Marina’s dressing room. She doesn’t cross paths with anyone in the short few minutes it takes to get to the corridor where their dressing rooms live next door to each other. Most people who worked in this building would’ve had to be present for the broadcast and were probably still on set. Pearl is silently grateful for the lack of interruptions.
She picks up her speed going around the corner to the dressing rooms, Marina’s tearstained face at the forefront of her mind. The thud of her platform boots disturb the unusual silence, and Pearl is suddenly worried she’ll be intruding. She’s never seen Marina that troubled, would she even want Pearl to comfort her? Would she rather be left alone?
Gazing at the little green octopus icon stuck to the wooden door, Marina’s half of the Off the Hook logo, allows Pearl to gather her resolve, reminding herself that they’re a team and she is going to at least check in on Marina, even if her presence afterwards isn’t appreciated. At least she’d remind Marina she’s thinking of her and wanting to help.
Pearl quickly raps on the door, before she can convince herself she’s doing more harm than good disturbing Marina.
“Yo, Marina? Are you in there?” She asks, her voice shockingly soft. She can practically hear the question dripping with concern.
There’s no answer, and Pearl feels a sudden jolt of fear that she's got this all wrong. Maybe Marina actually wasn’t in her room and she’d left instead and was somewhere miles away. Pearl wouldn’t be able to find her for far longer than Marina should be alone right now.
She twists the metal doorknob gently, and was surprised to find it unlocked. Shit, then Marina probably wasn’t in her room. Pearl starts to feel a wave of panic rise up her throat, causing a lump she has to fight her next words out around.
“Rina, if you’re in there, I’m coming in. Ok?” She warns, before pushing open the door to Marina’s dressing room.
To her everlasting relief, Marina is sitting at her small vanity desk, curled up in her swivel chair. She’s drawn her knees up to her chest, burying her face into her arms that were crossed around them.
“Oh, Rina…” Pearl is at her side in a flash, absently kicking the door shut behind her.
She kneels beside her chair, placing a comforting hand on Marina’s arm. It’s only then she notices the subtle shaking of Marina’s shoulders.
Pearl is overcome with a forceful need to make it all right for Marina, but she’s not sure how. Usually she would just throw handfuls of cash at a problem, money had a wonderful way of immediately drying any tears. Although she’d never had to try stopping a breakdown with a wad of cash on anyone older than ten.
Fuck.
She feels really lame kneeling next to a distraught Marina, her mind blank of all the reassuring words she wished she could conjure up to ease Marina’s pain. For a rapper, she sure sucked at talking. She instead settles for what she knows most, a calming touch and hoping her physical presence could make up for the words she couldn’t muster.
Marina is compulsively tearing at her face, like she was trying to remove something off her eyes. Pearl can’t bear to sit there and watch Marina’s mounting desperation so she catches her hands gently, and Marina finally meets her eyes.
“Pearl,” she breathes. “Please, take them off. I can’t do it, I don’t know why I can’t. Just get them off.” Marina is almost begging.
Pearl frowns, confused. “Whaddya want me to take off, Rina? What’s wrong?” She cups Marina’s face, using her thumb to wipe away the wetness on Marina’s cheek left by the trail of tears.
Marina leans into her touch, but a realisation seems to hit her like a truck and she jerks back with a gasp. “That’s not- you… you’re not real, you can’t be, how did you touch my face through the goggles?”
She collapses back into her chair, her face plainly displaying her distress as she mumbles to herself all the while. Pearl can’t catch much of it, as much as she strains her ears to hear, she struggles to even get little snippets like “Oh my god, was none of it real?”
Marina feels increasingly far away, and Pearl is so lost on how to navigate the sea of Marina’s despair.
“Marina…” She murmurs. “Tell me how I can help?”
“But you’re not real…” She pauses, overwhelmed. “I don’t want to wake up back there, Pearlie. I want to stay here with you.” Marina whispers her confession in a scratchy and wavering voice, a far cry from her usual playful and confident tone. Pearl feels a hand reach into her chest and squeeze her hearts viciously at Marina’s barely disguised pain.
“You don’t have to go anywhere, Rina, we can stay right here.” Pearl slowly brings her hand back to Marina’s face, not wanting to startle her. “Look, I can put my hand here. No, ah, goggles.” She smoothes a thumb over Marina’s eyebrow tenderly.
Marina’s face falls, her forehead creasing and eyes hardening. “No, you’re not listening! They’re there, I can feel them.”
Pearl holds her hands up in a placating gesture. “Ok, ok. I’m not arguing."
Instead, she stays. And listens as Marina begins to ramble about her past, the words pouring out of her in an unstoppable flood. Not that Pearl would ever want her to stop, she could sit there and listen to Marina talk about anything for hours with a fond smile on her face that she found only Marina could draw out of her.
She got the impression that Marina tried not to think about her life before Inkopolis too often, much less share it. Pearl just felt honoured that Marina trusted her with such an intimate part of herself, and she was glad to get to know her better. See what experiences had shaped her into the person she was today, the girl who waved to the Zapfish everytime they walked past, the girl who took it upon herself to upgrade the electronics she saw as ‘lacking’ just for fun, the girl who had to close her eyes to hear music better.
All she’d known about Marina’s past was from that dossier that the Cap’n had leaked and the odd offhand snippet Marina would wistfully let slip when a rare nostalgic mood struck her. Each little thing she let slip Pearl treasured, adding each piece of information to the increasingly extensive list in the back of her mind.
Pearl hadn’t realised what being an elite Octarian soldier truly meant, or really, an Octarian in the domes at all. It was horrifying. She can’t think too hard about it right now, or she’d be even more useless as a comforting presence to Marina, too wrapped up in her anger at the world.
Soon, Marina has trailed off, nothing left to say. Or maybe she can’t say anything more.
Pearl can’t believe Marina had been hiding that all beneath the surface. She was so strong. Too strong for her own good, it eats away at her that Marina had grown up with such hardship and she’d never said a word about it.
And on the other hand, anything Pearl had ever wanted, she’d had delivered to her practically on a silver platter. By virtue of her name and even the fact that she’d been born in Inkopolis at all. Even when she’d renounced her name in favour of making her own way, her own fortune, she’d never really escaped from the shadow that ‘Houzuki’ brought. She doesn’t really know life without a safety net, even when she’d started her first real band and had to find and finance her own place. When that had all gone to shit, she’s gotta admit she’d been close to throwing in the towel on a couple occasions. Her father would’ve let her move back in in a heartbeat despite their differences and she would’ve taken him up on it, despite her stubbornness. She’s determined to make sure that Marina could always lean on her as the safety net she never had, and with no strings attached (unlike the ones Pearl was accustomed to her father attaching to everything).
And all the while Pearl had been stewing in her teenage angst trying to figure out who she was separated from her father, Marina had been spending endless sleepless nights building weapons of mass destructions (because she was smart as hell like that) believing that they were the only thing that stood between total annihilation of her loved ones and their shared home and culture. And then she’d had to fight her way through the wilderness after escaping the only life she’d ever known, fueled by a glimmer of hope that there must be more. More to life than floating through the same mundane routine underneath the uncaring and artificial LED sun of the domes, goggles weighing heavy over dulled eyes. And their paths had crossed, by some miracle that Pearl was grateful for each and every single day afterwards.
Pearl shifts off her knees to sit down when they start to ache. She removes her hand to readjust, intending to switch it right back but Marina shoots her a slightly panicked look, whispering “Don’t let go.” That’s how they end up sitting in somewhat comfortable silence holding hands, Marina terrified for her perceived inevitable.
The more time that passes, the more tentatively Marina allows herself to relax into her chair, unconsciously angling her body towards Pearl next to her on the floor. Her red eyes clear, and her breathing slowly becomes more steady and deep. Pearl notices that her eyebrows knit together deeper in thought the longer their companionable silence continues. She periodically brings her hands to her face, anxiously probing the area where she felt the goggles. Pearl watches her, lacing their fingers together and giving her hand a reassuring squeeze whenever she does so.
Marina starts glancing over at Pearl randomly, considering her deeply. Once, she opens her mouth to say something and Pearl sits up a bit straighter expectantly, but Marina decides to bite back her words instead. She instead continues to get increasingly antsy, shifting in her chair and picking balls of fluff off her pants with her free hand.
Pearl realises with a start that she’s probably been focused on Marina for a little too long now, so she lets her gaze instead wander around Marina’s dressing room. It’s just so her, and all the little scattered trinkets that intensely remind her of Marina make her smile. Like the pieces of the little half-built model excavator haphazardly swept into a corner or her portable keyboard covered in stickers of her favourite bands leaning up against the far wall.
Her eyes catch on the digital clock at the edge of Marina’s vanity, calibrated to military time. It takes Pearl a second to convert it, and her eyes widen when she realises she doesn’t have long at all before their producer begins tearing the place apart looking for them. She doesn’t want him ruining what little peace and calm Marina has managed to find and he would just be an unwelcome reminder of the event she’s fairly sure Marina would already be feeling embarrassed over. Her professionalism ran deeply.
She taps Marina’s hand and whispers something about locking the door for privacy, waiting for her nod of assent before springing to her feet. She can feel Marina’s keen eyes trained on her the entire time, and she’s not sure how to interpret the shiver that runs up her spine because of it.
Before she can sit back down in her post by Marina’s chair, she’s stopped in her tracks by Marina calling her name.
“Pearl,” Marina says hesitatively, but picking up conviction as she continues. “I’m more and more convinced that this might all be real. I think you’re not just a figment of my imagination because I could never hope to dream up someone as good as you. But the threat of waking back up in the domes has made me realise that time is precious and I cannot waste a moment. I have to do this at least once.”
Marina decisively hooks her fingers into the comically large zipper on Pearl’s shirt and tugs her in. Pearl’s nearly knocked off balance by her urgency, but it all works out because somehow her hands end up framing Marina’s face to keep her footing and now Marina is kissing her with fervor and Pearl’s reeling trying to reconcile her previously dull, colourless existence where she didn’t know what Marina tasted like with her current reality, a reality she thought was too far fetched to ever daydream about. Pearl moves one hand down from Marina’s jaw to her arm, where she slowly flexes her fingers against Marina’s solid bicep and relaxes into the kiss.
Marina pulls back and examines Pearl’s face for a long moment, her expression unreadable. Pearl’s hearts drop into her stomach, whilst the Crusty Seanwich she’d eaten earlier threatens to make a reappearance.
“This definitely can’t be real,” she sighs and leans back in.
Pearl's hearts return to their rightful place from her stomach, hammering away in her chest like she hadn't just thought she’d ruined it all somehow. She wants to correct Marina, remind her how mindblowingly real this all truly is but she is too consumed by Marina’s hands, Marina’s lips, Marina’s body. She just hopes she can convey how true it is to her with her actions.
She meets Marina eagerly, her raw enthusiasm almost causing her to fall into her again. Pearl manages to catch herself but her momentum causes her to stumble unintentionally into the space between Marina’s legs, but she’s definitely not unhappy to have found herself there.
She rests a hand on the armrest of the chair to try to stabilise herself, her other busy tracing soothing patterns into Marina’s shoulder. Pearl feels an aching need to be closer, it’s simply not enough as they are, she needs their bodies aligned and connected in every possible way. She needs to feel Marina beneath her, and this goddamn chair is getting in the way at every opportunity.
Pearl dares to capture Marina’s bottom lip gently between her teeth, swiping her tongue across it. Marina tilts her head back, her head thumping solidly against the chair. Pearl slips a hand up to cradle the base of her skull, hoping her hand was more comfortable to rest against than the hard plastic backing of the chair.
Marina places a soft little kiss against the corner of her mouth, her mouth curving uncontrollably into one of her slight smiles. The sharp contrast of this loving gesture against their increasingly heated kisses makes Pearl’s head spin and her body feel giddy with happiness. As sad as it is that she has to breathe, she knows they both sorely need the opportunity to catch their breath and so she reluctantly pulls away.
Pearl doesn’t go far, captivated by the raw beauty of the girl underneath her.
Her dark eyes are especially mesmerising, and Pearl nearly forgets herself under Marina’s piercing gaze that rakes approvingly up and down her body. Marina’s eyes flick back up to meet Pearl’s tender gaze again, seeming chastened at having been caught ogling Pearl so obviously.
“I don’t..” Pearl’s voice is low and rough, crackling with the same energy swirling around in the air between them. She licks her lips, tasting Marina, and clears her throat. “I don’t mind.”
The delicate smile returns to Marina’s face, and Pearl is hit with the crushing realisation that all she wanted to do for the rest of her days was make that smile reappear again and again.
Pearl pushes back into her, consumed by an overwhelming need to close the distance between them. She braces a hand above Marina’s head against the back of the chair, bracketing her in, and slants her lips against Marina’s once again. She feels Marina slide a hand to her hip, and her arm that had been resting over the back of Pearl’s shoulders constricts to bring Pearl further into her embrace.
Marina’s tentacles seem to have a life of their own, flitting every which way against Pearl and seemingly unsure of where they wanted to be most. One meanders its way up her back to the base of her neck, where it curls softly and tangles itself in the sensitive area on her nape where her baby hairs grow. Pearl gasps, the sound muffled against Marina’s lips, and she can feel Marina smirk against her mouth as her fingers toy with the hem of Pearl’s shirt.
Pearl suddenly feels a little overwhelmed by it all, as Marina’s hand finally dares to slip under the edge of her shirt. She’s holding literally everything she’s ever wanted in the world in her arms right now, and Pearl is sure the feeling of Marina’s warm hand against her stomach will remain branded into her memory for the rest of her life. Marina’s hand drifts back to its previous spot on her hip, holding Pearl steady against her and her warmth is contributing to the fire building low in her gut at an alarming rate.
Pearl tears her mouth away from Marina’s regretfully, panting into the crook of Marina’s neck and trying desperately to get a grip on herself. Marina whimpers at the loss, and Pearl is chuffed to hear that she is similarly affected. She distracts herself by placing a few gentle kisses on Marina’s collarbone, trailing a path up her neck, before briefly brushing their lips together and pulling back. Marina chases after her, her chest heaving.
This had been building for a long time, and Pearl wants nothing more than to continue, encouraging Marina’s hand to resume the path it was on, heading lower and lower. But she has self control (at least she thinks she does, it’s hard to hold onto it when Marina is touching her like that, arching against her and making those irresistible sounds).
“Wait, Marina, stop a second.” Pearl says breathlessly, still hovering over Marina. She tenses slightly under Pearl’s grasp and tries to sit upright. Pearl’s brain takes a couple seconds to catch up, still stuck in the very recent mindblowing past, and she hastily moves back to allow Marina to sit up straight.
Lamentably, this means they are no longer touching. Pearl feels strangely lost on how to navigate the situation without the warm comfort of her… bandmate? Best friend? What even was Pearl to Marina after that? She knows what she wants to be to her, but would it be returned in the serious way Pearl found she desperately desired?
She perches herself on the edge of the armrest, leaning against Marina’s shoulder to help balance herself. They’ve always been physically affectionate, so Pearl simply sees it as a reassuring gesture (and she’s not sure who exactly she meant it to be reassuring for).
“Where’s your head at, Rina?”
“In regards to what?” Marina shifts next to her, fiddling with her fingers in her lap. Her uneasiness encourages Pearl just to throw caution to the wind and sling an arm around Marina’s shoulders. A calming touch from Pearl always seems to ground Marina, and to be fair, she had just had Marina’s tongue in her mouth.
“Just… y’know, everything? Are ya with me here, now?” Marina meets her eyes and Pearl gets a little lost in their depths. Marina’s eyes had been the first thing that had drawn Pearl back on Mount Nantai, her expression so guarded but her eyes betraying her hope and wonder.
And so, she is caught wholly unprepared for the sincerity of Marina’s next words, so heart achingly similar to the vulnerability she showed on the last of their ‘coincidental’ run ins, toying nervously with her busted up keytar as she asked Pearl in broken Inklish if she would consider starting a band with her.
“Well, I think this is real. I think you are real. I want us to be real,” Marina says simply.
Pearl gapes dumbly at her, as she feels her face run hot and a wave of happiness crash over her. It takes an inhuman amount of willpower to stop herself from passionately kissing Marina that very instance, but she’s fairly sure there’s an order to these things that isn’t kiss first, talk later. Much later.
Pearl feels like she should’ve at least said something by now, and by God she wants nothing more than to smoothly profess her shared feelings but Marina’s openness seems to have stripped Pearl of all her trademark bravo and larger than life attitude. It’s all been replaced with a broken record playing “I want us to be real” on repeat in her mind, accompanied by Marina’s tentative smile as she said it. She feels like she should pinch herself, just to double check she wasn’t dreaming, but the way the arm rest she’s awkwardly sat on digs into her convinces her otherwise.
Wait, why weren’t they kissing right now? Fuck all that noise about the right words, Pearl knows she could convey all the emotions bubbling beneath her skin in a more timely manner than it would take for her to sit down and think of each and every perfect word to craft into a verse. And hey, that was her shtick, wasn’t it? Brash, bold, jumping into everything feet first?
She reaches out a hand to cup Marina’s jaw, tilting Marina to face her. She scans her face, and sees the face of her band mate, her best friend, someone so incredibly important to her and who’d always stuck by her and done her right. She never gets opportunities to fully take Marina in like this. She’d only afforded herself stolen glances, even those sullied by unsurety. Yet a moment of clarity allows her to see more than usual, to see girlfriend, partner, forever.
Marina’s eyebrows are pulled together in their worried quirk, and an errant tentacle falls into her vision that she absentmindedly pushes away. Her gorgeous eyes are fixed steady on Pearl and brimming with what Pearl could only simply describe as pure hope, but she finds her gaze (predictably) catch on Marina’s lips. They’re slightly swollen, and Pearl thinks she could give the Zapfish a run for its money with the jolt of lightning that rushes through her as she realises that she is the reason they look that way.
She leans in slowly, savouring the moment. Marina’s face relaxes, a smile tugging persistently at the corner of her lips.
This kiss is softer, surer, and infused with the knowledge that there will be many more to come.