wintersday (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wintersday) wrote2021-01-02 05:53 pm
wintersday) wrote2021-01-02 05:53 pm
Fic: No Fear of Time
Title: No Fear of Time
Fandom: Friendsim
Major Characters/Pairings: Folykl/Marsti, Kuprum
Wordcount: ~4,500
Rating: Teen
POV: Second person
Summary: Marsti drops by the junkyard again. It’s not an accident. It might not even be a mistake.
The scrubgirl shows up again a few nights after the first night you met. She leans against a broken part of the fence, where the barbed wire has fallen in and the planks are short enough for her to rest on folded arms, and waits until you bother to acknowledge her presence with a warning scowl.
“Is this where you live?” she asks.
Not exactly. Not exactly not. You and Kuprum have a lot of haunts, some nicer than this but none of them permanent, as a matter of choice for him and necessity for you. He says he hates being tied down, which is frankly ironic as shit, but you think it might also be true. You’re officially dead, and you need to keep under the radio-based suborbital vessel detector if you don’t want to be unofficially dead too. But none of that is any of her business, and you’re happy to let her know it.
“Nah,” you say. “It’s the headquarters of my multi-billion caegar Heiress ablutionwater business. Why the fuck do you want to know?”
“Thought it was polite to ask before I started cleaning the place up.”
Seriously? you think. Is she for real? She’s hauling around something heavy-sounding and wheeled that clatters like a scourdray, so probably.
“Knock yourself out.”
That’s all the permission she needs to jimmy open the useless lock and drag her scourdray on in.
She stays out of your way, and you stay out of hers, but you watch her as she works, tracking the shift and stretch of lean limbs marked out in a dim filigree of energy. There’s nothing bright or crackling about her, but she moves like a machine, with a steady physical endurance that makes your mouth go dry with envy and something more complicated. She scrubs and sweeps with brusque efficiency, turning your familiar terrain into something more like her own. You’re getting pretty fucking annoyed about that, actually, because it took you time to learn your way around the place – until she finishes sweeping the trash from the empty space where a rusting wheelcart used to be, thinks about it for a second, then drags the wheelcart back where it belongs. Huh. Point one to scrubgirl. And she does clean the place up, starting with the crumpled tins and glass bottles that that people keep throwing over the fence on their way to somewhere else. It’s nicer without them, you guess, which means it will be harder to keep the normies away, but also that you won’t have to be as careful about stepping on sharp shit with your bare feet, so it probably balances out.
After maybe an hour, she doesn’t seem close to done, and you’re feeling low enough that you don’t really care about guarding your precious junk against intruders armed with saturated scrub poles, or whatever other dumb impulse made you sit outside for an hour watching someone clean. You duck back inside the little shed that you and Kuprum have temporarily claimed for your own. He’s busy with something on his husktop, but he still reaches for you when you drop down into the pile of old computer junk at his side, pulling you almost automatically into the crook of his elbow.
Yes, you think. Hell yes. He’s a reservoir of concentrated lightning. You wrap your arms around him, bury your face in his shoulder and press your hand against the skin of his back, drinking it all in. He laughs and calls you greedy, and lets you drain him until everything hurts a little less.
“Who the fuck is that?” he asks, angling his head toward the hole that passes for an open window.
“Scrubgirl. She’s fine. Got some kind of dirt fixation.”
“So she’s trying to get with you, then, lololol.”
You’re pretty sure she’s not, but your weird little hornless alien buddy mentioned her getting up in some highblood’s face and almost getting her ass culled like that, so maybe she is. A death wish is a hell of a drug. Whether you’re willing to entertain the possibility or not makes no difference to your reply.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Get her number.”
You’re not going to try to get her number. She doesn’t seem easily rattled enough to make it funny, and if you felt like playing against unbeatable odds, you’d be buying slaughtery tickets instead. And what would you even say to her, anyway? Yeah, I’m a living energy sink. Wanna make out? Hey girl, still got that deathwish? Fuck that noise. Telling Kuprum that is not the way to get him to shut up about it, though, so you make a noise of assent and cling a little tighter. He’s a jealous fucker sometimes. He likes to be reassured.
You nap for a while, too tired for daymares, and wake snuggled up in Kuprum’s lap with one of his old sweatshirts draped over you for warmth. You’ve also managed to shove one of the sleeves in your mouth and start chewing on it, which you know he’ll make fun of you for later, but whatever. It’s not like you haven’t caught him in more compromising positions before.
When you poke your head back outside, the air is dry and warm with the threat of sunrise, and the scrubgirl is gone.
.
She comes back.
She keeps on coming back, working for an hour or so, then packing up and moving on. You learn her name – Marsti Houtek – and probably more about her schedule than she intends to give away. Sometimes she says a word or two, and sometimes you say a word or two back, surprisingly few of them variations on the phrase fuck off. Mostly, she cleans and keeps on cleaning, scouring your junkyard right down to the cracked dirt ground, taking long enough that you begin to suspect she’s looking for things to do. By the time she starts acid-proofing the fucking fence, you’re sure of it.
“Hey,” you say. She sets her roller brush down and turns to look at you, in no particular hurry.
“What?” she asks, not unfriendly.
“Why do you keep hanging around here, anyway?”
She goes quiet, like you’ve thrown her off her feet and she needs to think it through. What she finally comes out with is, “You’re an unknown.”
“Gonna study me?” You grin, baring all your fangs. “Should I be taking my clothes off? I’m down for playing doctorturer if you are.”
It doesn’t have the effect you’re hoping for. There’s no reflexive sound of disgust, no physical recoil, though you suppose she could be staring at you in open revulsion and you’d never be able to know. That doesn’t track with the little laugh you hear, though, amused and apologetic at the same time. She doesn’t say anything immediately, but you register the shifting topography of energy as she sits down on an upturned crate and leans forward.
“What I meant,” she says, “is that every single piece of my life from the moment I was hatched to the moment I die has been and will be predictable. Except for you. And that’s interesting.”
You’re not sure what you think about that. It’s not the usual reason people find you interesting, but her definitions of a lot of things seem a little askew.
“Is that why you go around provoking clowns?” you ask. “Because it’s unpredictable?”
“Have you been spying on me?” she asks.
“A little alien told me.”
“Oh. Well. That’s... something else.”
You’re not expecting her to elaborate. She doesn’t seem like someone who usually does, and you’re sure as shit not planning to ask, but she looks down at the packed dirt, and you can read an answer in her stiff shoulders and bent neck. She looks tired. You know how that goes.
“I know it’s smarter to back down,” she says. “Live another day, right? And I do, usually, but – I’m not stupid, OK? I’m not brave. But sometimes, it’s like my back hits a wall and I just can’t.”
You don’t have to ask what she can’t. Back down, shut up, take the shit they give her and keep on shoveling. And you get it, almost. You’re going to cling to the world even when it hurts, because every night you’re alive is another little piece of fuck you, but she doesn’t have that. She’s got a future instead, which is more than you can say, but – maybe not much of one.
“Guess we all have our limits,“ you say.
“I guess we do,” she says, and tilts her head like she’s giving you a look. It’s hard to know what she means by it, or any of this – except for the fact that she keeps coming back here and talking to you, like that’s something she actually wants to do. But you know that she knows that trolls with voidrot don’t survive to your age unless they’re at least two out of three for very lucky, very smart, or willing to kill. You know she must be looking at you and wondering about your intelligence and your luck.
Whatever she’s thinking, she doesn’t say it, and you’re willing to return the favor by not hassling her back. If she wants to clean, you’ll let her clean. But for once, she doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to pick up her scrub pole again, and you don’t really want to move either. There’s a light breeze ruffling your hair, carrying the smell of dust and greasy food, and her silence is undemanding; she might find you interesting, but she doesn’t seem inclined to ask for more than you’ve got to give. That’s another favor you’re willing to return. It’s almost comfortable just sitting there, saying nothing.
It can’t last, because your body is a mechanism winding down, and sooner or later the breeze and city sounds and the quiet of her company are going to be outweighed by the empty chill and the pain threading its slow way back through your muscles. But you draw it out while you can, and for a while, the world is OK.
When you rise to leave, she’s the one who calls out to you: “Hey.”
“Yeah?” you say. You can stay a little longer. You’re curious what she’s got to say.
“I don’t mean to be presumptuous, though I don’t actually care whether you think I’m being presumptuous or not. But...”
“But?”
“If the reason you haven’t showered is because you don’t have access to an ablution trap, you can use the one in my hive.” She stops, like she’s realizing what she just said, and then buries her head in her hands. “OK, that was pretty fucking presumptuous, but I mean it. I won’t make it weird.”
“You already made it weird,” you say. “You made it weird just now.” It earns you another little hah of self-deprecating amusement.
“I guess I did,” she says. “Sorry about that.”
It would sting, you think, from anyone else. If you thought it was any kind of platonic pity talking, you’d want to turn your claws outward and tear her a new one in any way you could, but Marsti says what she means, without trying to be delicate about it, and there’s a kind of respect in that. Plus, her face has gone hot enough that you can read the change in her energy signature, and you think, Yeah, OK, Kuprum’s been right before.
“The reason I haven’t showered is because I fucking hate water,” you tell her. “But I like weird.”
.
Fact of the matter is, you have access to whatever you want. You just have to go to a little trouble to get it.
Sometimes that means providing a valuable community service wherein you teach dumbshit highbloods the importance of network security. Sometimes it means breaking into some kid’s abandoned hive. It’s never smart to hang around places like that for too long. Drones know who’s supposed to be there and who isn’t, and sometimes they keep an eye out. But they’re good for looting, and it can take a while before the water is shut down. Kuprum’s going to handle the former, as soon as you can get him to let you manage the latter without an honor guard outside the door.
“You know I can take a bath on my own without expiring,” you say.
“Not convinced,” he says. “Once dirt is gone, might be nothing left.”
You give him a double middle finger salute and step backwards onto the cold tile of the ablutionblock. Mission initiated. Time for your least favorite experience short of actively dying.
Even if Marsti is right about the insulation, it it still scares you a little, stripping off the layers you keep between yourself and the world. Once this is over you won’t even have a protective covering of grime to keep the assholes out of your face. But you have to do it, so you do: phone and headphones first, then the sweatshirt that’s been with you since you were so small it hung to your knees like a shitty dress, and the t-shirt with Kuprum’s sign beneath. Sweatpants and boxers next, leaving you bare-assed and shivering. You toss them all outside the door, away from the water, because if there’s anything worse in the world than cold, wet hair, it’s cold, wet clothing.
The air is fucking freezing without a few layers of clothing, and so is the porcelain of the tub when you climb inside. You fumble for the hot water tap and turn it up quickly, but the shower is cold when it hits, and it sends a jolt of panic right through you. It feels – not quite like dying, and you’ve come close enough to know, but like you’re going to die. Like you’re losing something – a barrier, your energy, slow seconds of your life. Like you’ve stepped into a river, and every moment you stay in there, it carries a little more of you away.
The water turns warm after a few stuttering seconds, and that’s better. You uncurl from your place on the floor of the tub and reach out carefully, feeling for the bottles of shampoo or whatever still lined along the edge. There are a lot of them, and some smell more expensive than most rusties could afford in a perigee. You go for cheap and fake-floral instead, mostly because if you accidentally slathered yourself with rainbow drinker serum, Kuprum would never let you hear the end of it.
OK, it would probably be pretty funny to paint your skin in ghastly reflective goo and see if you can get any normies to shit themselves when you start lurching in their direction, but if you’re going to do that, you’d rather do it on purpose.
You wonder whether the kid who used to live here would have been that easy to freak out, and then, before you can stop yourself, you wonder what happened to them, and whether they left anything behind other than a row of half-used shampoo bottles in an empty hive. It’s a lonely thought, and you shove it to the back of your mind where it belongs. You need your space sometimes, but you’ve never much liked lonely.
Eventually, the water turns cold again and you finally drag yourself out of the tub, your hair dripping down your back and a trail of water behind you. It sucks. Bathing sucks and you hate it. But at least mystery dead kid has a fluffy towel hanging up, and it’s almost big enough to envelop your scrawny frame like a snuggleplane, so that’s alright.
Kuprum is waiting outside again by the time you open the door and step out. Actually, he’s been pacing outside for the past few minutes and probably fretting like a cluckbeast lusus, but he’ll act like an ass if you call him on it, so you don’t. He takes one look at you and says, “Who are you and where did you hide my moirail’s grody body?”
“Don’t get used to it,” you say. “I’m just proving a point.”
“Don’t want to get used to it,” Kuprum says. He lifts you with a crackle of psionic force that resonates through your bones, deposits you halfway down the hall in a pile of looted snuggleplanes, and cannonballs in beside you with a whoop. You pap his face and dishevel the hair around his terrible goggles, snickering when he rubs his face against your palm like a meowbeast getting its ears scratched. Classic. Sometimes you pity him so much you don’t even know how to deal with it.
Evidently, Marsti knows her shit, because even that brief contact sends sparks traveling up your arm. The tiny jolt reorients you. It feels like waking up, a sharp reminder that there’s a world to get back to and you need to be aware of your surroundings. Your phone’s nearby. You can just barely sense its infinitesimal glow through the protective cover that keeps you from murdering the battery every time you touch it. You have no clue what happened to your clothing.
“Where’s my hoodie?”
“Laundrificator.”
Great, you think. That means if the drones show up in the next half an hour you’ll be making your escape with only a towel between your naked ass and the world, but such are the sacrifices that other people must make for your survival. You’re not complaining. It’s comfy here, and there aren’t any drones yet, so you nestle back in Kuprum’s arms, your head on his shoulder, and let him talk about the thing he’s obviously going to talk about.
“So. You and scrubgirl.”
“Like I said, I’m just proving a point.”
“She offered to let you use your ablution trap.”
“She’s obsessed with cleanliness,” you say, only to realize your mistake immediately afterward.
“Obsessed with filthy moirail, maybe, lolol,” Kuprum crows, digging his claws into your hair and shaking you slightly. “She wants you nasty.”
“Bite me.”
“You should go for it,” he says, and you’re pretty sure he isn’t fucking with you. He believes it. He also has kind of an overinflated perception of your desirability to anyone who doesn’t have a battery fetish, but what the hell. Maybe you’ll buy some slaughtery tickets on the way back, too.
“Yeah,” you say, and the thing that worries you is that this time, it doesn’t feel like such a deflection.
The drones don’t come before the alarm on the dehydration spinner goes off, or before Kuprum throws your clothes at you in a bolt of telekinetic force. They’re still warm and staticky when you pull them on, soap-scented, soft enough to sink into. You’re feeling good. You’re feeling really good, with a brittle charged-up intensity that you know won’t last, but you’ll take it while you can.
“Don’t worry,” Kuprum says. “All the stains are still there.”
And yeah, there’s something you’re not about to admit out loud, but you’re weirdly relieved to hear it. There’s history in that old hoodie. You wrap yourself up in it, surrounded by heat, holding onto the thought that not everything about you can be so easily washed away.
.
This time you don’t wait for Marsti to wander by your junkyard. You intercept her early in her night, before she’s had a chance to exhaust herself with work, parking yourself against a brick wall on a quiet street and waiting until she rounds the corner with scourdray in hand.
She stops when she sees you, brought up short for the first time since you’ve met her, then keeps walking at the same measured pace until she’s close enough to talk without shouting. What she says – the first thing she says, before and probably instead of anything resembling a social nicety – is, “You took a bath.”
“Thanks for the investigative reporting, Decapitatain Obvious,” you say, but you’re smiling as you say it. “Shocked? Disappointed?”
“Surprised. I was expecting you to refuse on principal.”
“Maybe I did it to spite you.”
She snorts with ungraceful laughter. You don’t think there’s even a chance she believes it. The sound leaves you feeling giddy and hollow, and you want to hear it again.
“You know,” she says, and takes a deep breath, like she’s got a confession to make. “I wasn’t lying when I said you were interesting, but I also wanted to make sure you‘d be OK.”
Huh, you think. OK. It’s hard to say how that revelation takes you. It travels through you like a shock, like electricity: she was worried about you. You can’t tell whether or not that hurts.
“And?” you snap. The words What’s your prognosis, doc? are close behind, but you bite them back. You don’t actually want to hurt her like that, and she might roll with your bad temper, but you get the feeling she has lines that can only ever be crossed once. Marsti isn’t Kuprum. She won’t return fire. She’ll just leave.
“And I’m pretty sure you will,” she says. “You never needed me.”
You didn’t. You don’t. And she doesn’t need you, but the idiot string of words that falls from your mouth against your will is still, “So you won’t be back.”
“Do you want me to?”
You don’t say no. You don’t say yes. You freeze up like a fucking chump, because what you want from her and what you don’t want share exactly the same word, but since you’re not about to go around saying what you mean and having emotions like some kind of normie, that’s not a problem. You’re about to tell her that – that it’s not a problem, you don’t care – but before you can, she steps toward you. Not away. Her energy field blurs as she moves, and then she’s sitting down against the wall, halfway between where she was and where you are. You get the message. She’s not looking for an excuse to peace out.
Neither are you, and now that saying so isn’t required, it’s easier to cross the rest of the distance and sit down beside her. Your hand settles on the gritty concrete between the two of you; after a moment, hers joins it, resting an inch away.
“I’m thinking I made a mistake,” you say, and she tilts her head towards you, waiting for you to catch your breath. “With the ablutions, I mean. Should have let you make it weird instead.”
“You haven’t lost your chance,” she says.
Heat floods your face as her words sink in, because you can keep telling yourself that you’re just fucking with her and you won’t be hurt if she’s just fucking with you, but that doesn’t make it true. There’s a beat of silence, stretched taut and filling the air between you. She’s the one who breaks it.
“Can I kiss you?”
It’s just like her, you think, to say shit like that without prelude or warning. It’s not a joke. Everything else might have been, but she doesn’t seem like someone who jokes about things like that.
“I don’t know,” you say. “Can you?” You’re about to add that the last person you tried that with keeled over half dead in the street, but then you realize you’re not sure that ever actually happened. It feels more like a weird daymare than anything else, and you can’t slot it into the timeline of any of your memories. Thinking about it too much makes your pan hurt. The ground spins beneath you like you’ve let yourself get drained to the point of collapse, and you fall back against the wall, palms splayed against the sidewalk to steady yourself, just breathing.
The next thing you know, Marsti is kneeling above you and gripping your shoulders carefully, holding you up.
“Hey. Are you alright?”
“Right as acid rain.”
You smile to show you mean it, and as you focus on her and what you know is real, the world rights itself. Her hands are still on your arms, light but purposeful, and there’s nothing but her gloves and your newly-clean hoodie between her skin and yours. It feels too thin. You feel too bare, with your scrubbed face, and you can’t stop thinking about how close she is. Most trolls would be backing off rapidly right now, if they even touched you at all. She just lets go, settles back on her heels and says, more quietly, “Can I try?”
She’s a little bit psychic – enough to lift a decent sized rock, maybe, if she put some effort into it. Enough to make her tempting. Not enough to keep her safe. But you recognize that edge in her voice as the sound of someone who’s spent too long listening to assholes tell her she doesn’t have what it takes to do something, and fuck it. She won’t die. She might just learn her lesson.
“Knock yourself out.”
You’re not expecting her to back out at the last minute; she doesn’t seem like someone who steps away from a challenge. You’re also not expecting her to strip off her gloves. It’s a considered gesture, and you don’t know what to make of it, unless it’s just that she doesn’t want to get you dirty again.
Good luck with that, you think, and then she wraps her hand around the back of your head and pulls you forward, her fingers curling in your hair as she bends down to meet you, and you don’t think about anything at all. Her lips are warm and soft. She doesn’t pull away when you open your mouth to hers, or when you touch her other hand where it rests uncurled against her leg, or let your tongue slip past the sharp edge of her teeth. Her fingers clasp yours. She holds on so long that you’re about to push her away for her own safety, then half-stands and reels back, breathing hard and shallowly.
“I think I need to rest for a minute,” she says, and sits down heavily at your side. You can sense her thorax rising and falling, the gentle slump of her shoulders, and it occurs to you, with a distant sort of calm, that if there’s going to be a time when she realizes she can’t do this, it’s probably now. That’s fine. You’re expecting it, and you’re not going to let it get to you.
“That good, eh?” you say, sardonic.
“Yeah,” she breathes, and touches her mouth like she can’t quite believe what just happened. “That good.”
She leans back against the wall, her face tilted up towards the night, while you focus on the sound of traffic and the shape of her beside you, the heat rising from the concrete beneath your bare feet and the flickering network of cables and connections spanning the hivestems above. Stargazing’s overrated; you like where you are better. Moment by moment the beat of your bloodpusher slows, and as the silence turns easy again, she brushes the back of your hand with her thumb, just once. It feels like a promise: she’s here. She isn’t going anywhere.
You won’t hold her to it, but just for now, you’ll let yourself believe.
Fandom: Friendsim
Major Characters/Pairings: Folykl/Marsti, Kuprum
Wordcount: ~4,500
Rating: Teen
POV: Second person
Summary: Marsti drops by the junkyard again. It’s not an accident. It might not even be a mistake.
The scrubgirl shows up again a few nights after the first night you met. She leans against a broken part of the fence, where the barbed wire has fallen in and the planks are short enough for her to rest on folded arms, and waits until you bother to acknowledge her presence with a warning scowl.
“Is this where you live?” she asks.
Not exactly. Not exactly not. You and Kuprum have a lot of haunts, some nicer than this but none of them permanent, as a matter of choice for him and necessity for you. He says he hates being tied down, which is frankly ironic as shit, but you think it might also be true. You’re officially dead, and you need to keep under the radio-based suborbital vessel detector if you don’t want to be unofficially dead too. But none of that is any of her business, and you’re happy to let her know it.
“Nah,” you say. “It’s the headquarters of my multi-billion caegar Heiress ablutionwater business. Why the fuck do you want to know?”
“Thought it was polite to ask before I started cleaning the place up.”
Seriously? you think. Is she for real? She’s hauling around something heavy-sounding and wheeled that clatters like a scourdray, so probably.
“Knock yourself out.”
That’s all the permission she needs to jimmy open the useless lock and drag her scourdray on in.
She stays out of your way, and you stay out of hers, but you watch her as she works, tracking the shift and stretch of lean limbs marked out in a dim filigree of energy. There’s nothing bright or crackling about her, but she moves like a machine, with a steady physical endurance that makes your mouth go dry with envy and something more complicated. She scrubs and sweeps with brusque efficiency, turning your familiar terrain into something more like her own. You’re getting pretty fucking annoyed about that, actually, because it took you time to learn your way around the place – until she finishes sweeping the trash from the empty space where a rusting wheelcart used to be, thinks about it for a second, then drags the wheelcart back where it belongs. Huh. Point one to scrubgirl. And she does clean the place up, starting with the crumpled tins and glass bottles that that people keep throwing over the fence on their way to somewhere else. It’s nicer without them, you guess, which means it will be harder to keep the normies away, but also that you won’t have to be as careful about stepping on sharp shit with your bare feet, so it probably balances out.
After maybe an hour, she doesn’t seem close to done, and you’re feeling low enough that you don’t really care about guarding your precious junk against intruders armed with saturated scrub poles, or whatever other dumb impulse made you sit outside for an hour watching someone clean. You duck back inside the little shed that you and Kuprum have temporarily claimed for your own. He’s busy with something on his husktop, but he still reaches for you when you drop down into the pile of old computer junk at his side, pulling you almost automatically into the crook of his elbow.
Yes, you think. Hell yes. He’s a reservoir of concentrated lightning. You wrap your arms around him, bury your face in his shoulder and press your hand against the skin of his back, drinking it all in. He laughs and calls you greedy, and lets you drain him until everything hurts a little less.
“Who the fuck is that?” he asks, angling his head toward the hole that passes for an open window.
“Scrubgirl. She’s fine. Got some kind of dirt fixation.”
“So she’s trying to get with you, then, lololol.”
You’re pretty sure she’s not, but your weird little hornless alien buddy mentioned her getting up in some highblood’s face and almost getting her ass culled like that, so maybe she is. A death wish is a hell of a drug. Whether you’re willing to entertain the possibility or not makes no difference to your reply.
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Get her number.”
You’re not going to try to get her number. She doesn’t seem easily rattled enough to make it funny, and if you felt like playing against unbeatable odds, you’d be buying slaughtery tickets instead. And what would you even say to her, anyway? Yeah, I’m a living energy sink. Wanna make out? Hey girl, still got that deathwish? Fuck that noise. Telling Kuprum that is not the way to get him to shut up about it, though, so you make a noise of assent and cling a little tighter. He’s a jealous fucker sometimes. He likes to be reassured.
You nap for a while, too tired for daymares, and wake snuggled up in Kuprum’s lap with one of his old sweatshirts draped over you for warmth. You’ve also managed to shove one of the sleeves in your mouth and start chewing on it, which you know he’ll make fun of you for later, but whatever. It’s not like you haven’t caught him in more compromising positions before.
When you poke your head back outside, the air is dry and warm with the threat of sunrise, and the scrubgirl is gone.
.
She comes back.
She keeps on coming back, working for an hour or so, then packing up and moving on. You learn her name – Marsti Houtek – and probably more about her schedule than she intends to give away. Sometimes she says a word or two, and sometimes you say a word or two back, surprisingly few of them variations on the phrase fuck off. Mostly, she cleans and keeps on cleaning, scouring your junkyard right down to the cracked dirt ground, taking long enough that you begin to suspect she’s looking for things to do. By the time she starts acid-proofing the fucking fence, you’re sure of it.
“Hey,” you say. She sets her roller brush down and turns to look at you, in no particular hurry.
“What?” she asks, not unfriendly.
“Why do you keep hanging around here, anyway?”
She goes quiet, like you’ve thrown her off her feet and she needs to think it through. What she finally comes out with is, “You’re an unknown.”
“Gonna study me?” You grin, baring all your fangs. “Should I be taking my clothes off? I’m down for playing doctorturer if you are.”
It doesn’t have the effect you’re hoping for. There’s no reflexive sound of disgust, no physical recoil, though you suppose she could be staring at you in open revulsion and you’d never be able to know. That doesn’t track with the little laugh you hear, though, amused and apologetic at the same time. She doesn’t say anything immediately, but you register the shifting topography of energy as she sits down on an upturned crate and leans forward.
“What I meant,” she says, “is that every single piece of my life from the moment I was hatched to the moment I die has been and will be predictable. Except for you. And that’s interesting.”
You’re not sure what you think about that. It’s not the usual reason people find you interesting, but her definitions of a lot of things seem a little askew.
“Is that why you go around provoking clowns?” you ask. “Because it’s unpredictable?”
“Have you been spying on me?” she asks.
“A little alien told me.”
“Oh. Well. That’s... something else.”
You’re not expecting her to elaborate. She doesn’t seem like someone who usually does, and you’re sure as shit not planning to ask, but she looks down at the packed dirt, and you can read an answer in her stiff shoulders and bent neck. She looks tired. You know how that goes.
“I know it’s smarter to back down,” she says. “Live another day, right? And I do, usually, but – I’m not stupid, OK? I’m not brave. But sometimes, it’s like my back hits a wall and I just can’t.”
You don’t have to ask what she can’t. Back down, shut up, take the shit they give her and keep on shoveling. And you get it, almost. You’re going to cling to the world even when it hurts, because every night you’re alive is another little piece of fuck you, but she doesn’t have that. She’s got a future instead, which is more than you can say, but – maybe not much of one.
“Guess we all have our limits,“ you say.
“I guess we do,” she says, and tilts her head like she’s giving you a look. It’s hard to know what she means by it, or any of this – except for the fact that she keeps coming back here and talking to you, like that’s something she actually wants to do. But you know that she knows that trolls with voidrot don’t survive to your age unless they’re at least two out of three for very lucky, very smart, or willing to kill. You know she must be looking at you and wondering about your intelligence and your luck.
Whatever she’s thinking, she doesn’t say it, and you’re willing to return the favor by not hassling her back. If she wants to clean, you’ll let her clean. But for once, she doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to pick up her scrub pole again, and you don’t really want to move either. There’s a light breeze ruffling your hair, carrying the smell of dust and greasy food, and her silence is undemanding; she might find you interesting, but she doesn’t seem inclined to ask for more than you’ve got to give. That’s another favor you’re willing to return. It’s almost comfortable just sitting there, saying nothing.
It can’t last, because your body is a mechanism winding down, and sooner or later the breeze and city sounds and the quiet of her company are going to be outweighed by the empty chill and the pain threading its slow way back through your muscles. But you draw it out while you can, and for a while, the world is OK.
When you rise to leave, she’s the one who calls out to you: “Hey.”
“Yeah?” you say. You can stay a little longer. You’re curious what she’s got to say.
“I don’t mean to be presumptuous, though I don’t actually care whether you think I’m being presumptuous or not. But...”
“But?”
“If the reason you haven’t showered is because you don’t have access to an ablution trap, you can use the one in my hive.” She stops, like she’s realizing what she just said, and then buries her head in her hands. “OK, that was pretty fucking presumptuous, but I mean it. I won’t make it weird.”
“You already made it weird,” you say. “You made it weird just now.” It earns you another little hah of self-deprecating amusement.
“I guess I did,” she says. “Sorry about that.”
It would sting, you think, from anyone else. If you thought it was any kind of platonic pity talking, you’d want to turn your claws outward and tear her a new one in any way you could, but Marsti says what she means, without trying to be delicate about it, and there’s a kind of respect in that. Plus, her face has gone hot enough that you can read the change in her energy signature, and you think, Yeah, OK, Kuprum’s been right before.
“The reason I haven’t showered is because I fucking hate water,” you tell her. “But I like weird.”
.
Fact of the matter is, you have access to whatever you want. You just have to go to a little trouble to get it.
Sometimes that means providing a valuable community service wherein you teach dumbshit highbloods the importance of network security. Sometimes it means breaking into some kid’s abandoned hive. It’s never smart to hang around places like that for too long. Drones know who’s supposed to be there and who isn’t, and sometimes they keep an eye out. But they’re good for looting, and it can take a while before the water is shut down. Kuprum’s going to handle the former, as soon as you can get him to let you manage the latter without an honor guard outside the door.
“You know I can take a bath on my own without expiring,” you say.
“Not convinced,” he says. “Once dirt is gone, might be nothing left.”
You give him a double middle finger salute and step backwards onto the cold tile of the ablutionblock. Mission initiated. Time for your least favorite experience short of actively dying.
Even if Marsti is right about the insulation, it it still scares you a little, stripping off the layers you keep between yourself and the world. Once this is over you won’t even have a protective covering of grime to keep the assholes out of your face. But you have to do it, so you do: phone and headphones first, then the sweatshirt that’s been with you since you were so small it hung to your knees like a shitty dress, and the t-shirt with Kuprum’s sign beneath. Sweatpants and boxers next, leaving you bare-assed and shivering. You toss them all outside the door, away from the water, because if there’s anything worse in the world than cold, wet hair, it’s cold, wet clothing.
The air is fucking freezing without a few layers of clothing, and so is the porcelain of the tub when you climb inside. You fumble for the hot water tap and turn it up quickly, but the shower is cold when it hits, and it sends a jolt of panic right through you. It feels – not quite like dying, and you’ve come close enough to know, but like you’re going to die. Like you’re losing something – a barrier, your energy, slow seconds of your life. Like you’ve stepped into a river, and every moment you stay in there, it carries a little more of you away.
The water turns warm after a few stuttering seconds, and that’s better. You uncurl from your place on the floor of the tub and reach out carefully, feeling for the bottles of shampoo or whatever still lined along the edge. There are a lot of them, and some smell more expensive than most rusties could afford in a perigee. You go for cheap and fake-floral instead, mostly because if you accidentally slathered yourself with rainbow drinker serum, Kuprum would never let you hear the end of it.
OK, it would probably be pretty funny to paint your skin in ghastly reflective goo and see if you can get any normies to shit themselves when you start lurching in their direction, but if you’re going to do that, you’d rather do it on purpose.
You wonder whether the kid who used to live here would have been that easy to freak out, and then, before you can stop yourself, you wonder what happened to them, and whether they left anything behind other than a row of half-used shampoo bottles in an empty hive. It’s a lonely thought, and you shove it to the back of your mind where it belongs. You need your space sometimes, but you’ve never much liked lonely.
Eventually, the water turns cold again and you finally drag yourself out of the tub, your hair dripping down your back and a trail of water behind you. It sucks. Bathing sucks and you hate it. But at least mystery dead kid has a fluffy towel hanging up, and it’s almost big enough to envelop your scrawny frame like a snuggleplane, so that’s alright.
Kuprum is waiting outside again by the time you open the door and step out. Actually, he’s been pacing outside for the past few minutes and probably fretting like a cluckbeast lusus, but he’ll act like an ass if you call him on it, so you don’t. He takes one look at you and says, “Who are you and where did you hide my moirail’s grody body?”
“Don’t get used to it,” you say. “I’m just proving a point.”
“Don’t want to get used to it,” Kuprum says. He lifts you with a crackle of psionic force that resonates through your bones, deposits you halfway down the hall in a pile of looted snuggleplanes, and cannonballs in beside you with a whoop. You pap his face and dishevel the hair around his terrible goggles, snickering when he rubs his face against your palm like a meowbeast getting its ears scratched. Classic. Sometimes you pity him so much you don’t even know how to deal with it.
Evidently, Marsti knows her shit, because even that brief contact sends sparks traveling up your arm. The tiny jolt reorients you. It feels like waking up, a sharp reminder that there’s a world to get back to and you need to be aware of your surroundings. Your phone’s nearby. You can just barely sense its infinitesimal glow through the protective cover that keeps you from murdering the battery every time you touch it. You have no clue what happened to your clothing.
“Where’s my hoodie?”
“Laundrificator.”
Great, you think. That means if the drones show up in the next half an hour you’ll be making your escape with only a towel between your naked ass and the world, but such are the sacrifices that other people must make for your survival. You’re not complaining. It’s comfy here, and there aren’t any drones yet, so you nestle back in Kuprum’s arms, your head on his shoulder, and let him talk about the thing he’s obviously going to talk about.
“So. You and scrubgirl.”
“Like I said, I’m just proving a point.”
“She offered to let you use your ablution trap.”
“She’s obsessed with cleanliness,” you say, only to realize your mistake immediately afterward.
“Obsessed with filthy moirail, maybe, lolol,” Kuprum crows, digging his claws into your hair and shaking you slightly. “She wants you nasty.”
“Bite me.”
“You should go for it,” he says, and you’re pretty sure he isn’t fucking with you. He believes it. He also has kind of an overinflated perception of your desirability to anyone who doesn’t have a battery fetish, but what the hell. Maybe you’ll buy some slaughtery tickets on the way back, too.
“Yeah,” you say, and the thing that worries you is that this time, it doesn’t feel like such a deflection.
The drones don’t come before the alarm on the dehydration spinner goes off, or before Kuprum throws your clothes at you in a bolt of telekinetic force. They’re still warm and staticky when you pull them on, soap-scented, soft enough to sink into. You’re feeling good. You’re feeling really good, with a brittle charged-up intensity that you know won’t last, but you’ll take it while you can.
“Don’t worry,” Kuprum says. “All the stains are still there.”
And yeah, there’s something you’re not about to admit out loud, but you’re weirdly relieved to hear it. There’s history in that old hoodie. You wrap yourself up in it, surrounded by heat, holding onto the thought that not everything about you can be so easily washed away.
.
This time you don’t wait for Marsti to wander by your junkyard. You intercept her early in her night, before she’s had a chance to exhaust herself with work, parking yourself against a brick wall on a quiet street and waiting until she rounds the corner with scourdray in hand.
She stops when she sees you, brought up short for the first time since you’ve met her, then keeps walking at the same measured pace until she’s close enough to talk without shouting. What she says – the first thing she says, before and probably instead of anything resembling a social nicety – is, “You took a bath.”
“Thanks for the investigative reporting, Decapitatain Obvious,” you say, but you’re smiling as you say it. “Shocked? Disappointed?”
“Surprised. I was expecting you to refuse on principal.”
“Maybe I did it to spite you.”
She snorts with ungraceful laughter. You don’t think there’s even a chance she believes it. The sound leaves you feeling giddy and hollow, and you want to hear it again.
“You know,” she says, and takes a deep breath, like she’s got a confession to make. “I wasn’t lying when I said you were interesting, but I also wanted to make sure you‘d be OK.”
Huh, you think. OK. It’s hard to say how that revelation takes you. It travels through you like a shock, like electricity: she was worried about you. You can’t tell whether or not that hurts.
“And?” you snap. The words What’s your prognosis, doc? are close behind, but you bite them back. You don’t actually want to hurt her like that, and she might roll with your bad temper, but you get the feeling she has lines that can only ever be crossed once. Marsti isn’t Kuprum. She won’t return fire. She’ll just leave.
“And I’m pretty sure you will,” she says. “You never needed me.”
You didn’t. You don’t. And she doesn’t need you, but the idiot string of words that falls from your mouth against your will is still, “So you won’t be back.”
“Do you want me to?”
You don’t say no. You don’t say yes. You freeze up like a fucking chump, because what you want from her and what you don’t want share exactly the same word, but since you’re not about to go around saying what you mean and having emotions like some kind of normie, that’s not a problem. You’re about to tell her that – that it’s not a problem, you don’t care – but before you can, she steps toward you. Not away. Her energy field blurs as she moves, and then she’s sitting down against the wall, halfway between where she was and where you are. You get the message. She’s not looking for an excuse to peace out.
Neither are you, and now that saying so isn’t required, it’s easier to cross the rest of the distance and sit down beside her. Your hand settles on the gritty concrete between the two of you; after a moment, hers joins it, resting an inch away.
“I’m thinking I made a mistake,” you say, and she tilts her head towards you, waiting for you to catch your breath. “With the ablutions, I mean. Should have let you make it weird instead.”
“You haven’t lost your chance,” she says.
Heat floods your face as her words sink in, because you can keep telling yourself that you’re just fucking with her and you won’t be hurt if she’s just fucking with you, but that doesn’t make it true. There’s a beat of silence, stretched taut and filling the air between you. She’s the one who breaks it.
“Can I kiss you?”
It’s just like her, you think, to say shit like that without prelude or warning. It’s not a joke. Everything else might have been, but she doesn’t seem like someone who jokes about things like that.
“I don’t know,” you say. “Can you?” You’re about to add that the last person you tried that with keeled over half dead in the street, but then you realize you’re not sure that ever actually happened. It feels more like a weird daymare than anything else, and you can’t slot it into the timeline of any of your memories. Thinking about it too much makes your pan hurt. The ground spins beneath you like you’ve let yourself get drained to the point of collapse, and you fall back against the wall, palms splayed against the sidewalk to steady yourself, just breathing.
The next thing you know, Marsti is kneeling above you and gripping your shoulders carefully, holding you up.
“Hey. Are you alright?”
“Right as acid rain.”
You smile to show you mean it, and as you focus on her and what you know is real, the world rights itself. Her hands are still on your arms, light but purposeful, and there’s nothing but her gloves and your newly-clean hoodie between her skin and yours. It feels too thin. You feel too bare, with your scrubbed face, and you can’t stop thinking about how close she is. Most trolls would be backing off rapidly right now, if they even touched you at all. She just lets go, settles back on her heels and says, more quietly, “Can I try?”
She’s a little bit psychic – enough to lift a decent sized rock, maybe, if she put some effort into it. Enough to make her tempting. Not enough to keep her safe. But you recognize that edge in her voice as the sound of someone who’s spent too long listening to assholes tell her she doesn’t have what it takes to do something, and fuck it. She won’t die. She might just learn her lesson.
“Knock yourself out.”
You’re not expecting her to back out at the last minute; she doesn’t seem like someone who steps away from a challenge. You’re also not expecting her to strip off her gloves. It’s a considered gesture, and you don’t know what to make of it, unless it’s just that she doesn’t want to get you dirty again.
Good luck with that, you think, and then she wraps her hand around the back of your head and pulls you forward, her fingers curling in your hair as she bends down to meet you, and you don’t think about anything at all. Her lips are warm and soft. She doesn’t pull away when you open your mouth to hers, or when you touch her other hand where it rests uncurled against her leg, or let your tongue slip past the sharp edge of her teeth. Her fingers clasp yours. She holds on so long that you’re about to push her away for her own safety, then half-stands and reels back, breathing hard and shallowly.
“I think I need to rest for a minute,” she says, and sits down heavily at your side. You can sense her thorax rising and falling, the gentle slump of her shoulders, and it occurs to you, with a distant sort of calm, that if there’s going to be a time when she realizes she can’t do this, it’s probably now. That’s fine. You’re expecting it, and you’re not going to let it get to you.
“That good, eh?” you say, sardonic.
“Yeah,” she breathes, and touches her mouth like she can’t quite believe what just happened. “That good.”
She leans back against the wall, her face tilted up towards the night, while you focus on the sound of traffic and the shape of her beside you, the heat rising from the concrete beneath your bare feet and the flickering network of cables and connections spanning the hivestems above. Stargazing’s overrated; you like where you are better. Moment by moment the beat of your bloodpusher slows, and as the silence turns easy again, she brushes the back of your hand with her thumb, just once. It feels like a promise: she’s here. She isn’t going anywhere.
You won’t hold her to it, but just for now, you’ll let yourself believe.