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She can’t tell if it’s the fault of those prophesied powers finally kicking in, or the adrenaline rush, but it keeps Sasha upright throughout the exhaustion, albeit woozy and heavy footed.
Seeing her friend again, the way time slowed when she heard the air expel from the helmet, rejecting the former host so quickly, makes her weak in the knees, puts a weight on her chest she’d fought to keep away when she was quick and light on her feet.
But no matter how heavy, it keeps her stable. It keeps her tethered to the ground, to the limbs limp in her grasp, her body’s instinctual wince nullified by the emotion carried in the moment.
Marcy, in her arms. Her breath shaky and shallow, the orange diamond in her chest flickering before dying out, but it still rises and falls.
The relief that floods her is enough to distract from the gash across her spine, urging her to feebly put herself back together, yet she cups her friend’s forehead, a pointless protection Sasha feels blessed at the chance to provide. Her fingertips are light in their course, wiping through the dirty, dirty cheeks of one that had been only considered as a vessel for so long. Sasha’s composing herself, trying to whisper pleads she doesn’t process as words yet, only a core, guttural yearning for Marcy to make it out alive, the knowledge that Marcy’s life is no longer something she can fight for a thorn in her side.
There is nothing she can do but kneel and plead for something out of her grasp, oblivious to the cavalry arriving through the blasted hole.
It is only when Anne places a hand on Sasha’s shoulder and uses the other to cup Marcy’s head that she looks up, grounded straight into reality and she’s looking into Anne’s eyes and she is afraid. If she is strength in this trifecta, she may as well be as useful as her swords lying limp on the floor, those she so easily kicked aside to worry about someone she’d already seen die.
What a sight she must be, hunched over a corpse, pleading for her breath to mean something more than just a slow, prolonged death.
Anne joins her soon enough, and Sasha’s sure she asked something about how long they’ve been there for, if they were both okay, but she can’t bring herself to answer. But she finds a small comfort in how Anne’s voice is wavering too, how both of them seem to suppress their shaking.
“She’s not waking up,” Sasha stammers.
Anne shakes her head, like she wants to offer some sort of comfort, and Sasha wants so badly for her friend to be able to say something comforting, to offer a truth that has the power to soothe as well; She will wake up. But fear reaps itself into her heart in the silence, in the absence of absolute certainty of Marcy’s safety.
Yet it’s almost on cue, the way her breath stutters once and Sasha holds tighter, only for her eyelids to crease suddenly, her mouth creasing into a line and release.
A release that tips her back into the castle floating above her hometown, not into a realm entirely unknown that may not even exist.
Sasha knows that eventually, she won’t be able to say the same truth. Or she’ll go down first, as will everyone she loathes and loves, herself a mere speck in the timeline of the world and the change that will all happen without her someday, as it had before her.
But for now, her feelings make her feel bigger than she possibly should be allowed to feel, enough to repeat the obvious and temporary truth like it will cement it forever, tie the three of them down to this floor and take the decaying passage of time down with it.
“You’re alive!”
Both her and Anne tighten together, their bodies shielding someone that, against all odds, can hold them back. Sasha doesn’t miss the way Marcy’s hand just misses the hearth of her wound, nor the stinging pain that comes with it, but it feels like a mere footnote for the moment.
And the body she clings to starts to shake, in a violent show of all the energy it's somehow saved.*
All the composure Sasha’s been building for this exact moment shatters when Marcy’s first conscious breaths come out with sobs, peppered with profuse apologies.
“We’re just glad you’re okay,” Anne croaks, pulling back only to tuck another strand of hair behind Marcy’s ear. Something inside Sasha cracks yet again, thinking about how Marcy told her she loathed the feeling of hair stuck to her neck back on bleachers that seem almost forgein now.
“But what I did was wrong, and-”
“We still love you,” Sasha says wearily, tracing a circle over Marcy’s shoulder, over the leathery, unnatural surface of the armor plate. “Trust me,” she whispers, “we’ve all done wrong things.”
“We love you,” Anne repeats, her words washing over Sasha like a crashing tide of hope and emotions she’s not sure she could ever dream to label wholly.
“But I’m sorry,” Marcy insists.
“But we forgive you,” Sasha adds. She wants to be the one apologizing to her, to take on the role, for even implying that her friend wasn’t worth saving to Anne, something Marcy hasn’t even heard.
“Moving just seems so scary.”
“I know. I doubt it ever won’t,” Anne supplies.
“And that wasn’t an excuse-” Marcy lets out a fragile hiccup- “but I just… I can’t believe I did that and I’m so sorry it worked.”
The reassurance had been so, so easy. It was easy to just let it come, both Sasha and Anne’s respective subconscious telling them what they felt, forgiveness a mental battle Sasha’s already come to terms with. Yet here Sasha falters and looks to Anne for guidance.
Oh, Anne.
It hurts, to think that without her words and the good in her heart, Sasha might not have said half the things she did*. It sure made her feel like a horrible person, and she supposes the gash on her back is a wakeup call of sorts, a cruel type of revenge.
“You don’t have to be,” Anne says, sparing a look outside the window and to the arsenal she came in with. “I mean we got home, didn’t we?”
Marcy startles, straining to look beyond Anne’s shoulder into the world, but the wince on her face from the sudden movement is evident, and Sasha’s hand splays on her chest, gently pushing her down. “Woah, there,” she laughs dryly, “it’ll still be there once you take time to rest.” Sasha isn’t prepared for how much she missed Marcy’s disdainful eyebrow furrow, and it makes her want to crush her deeper into an embrace, but they’ve both got to be careful.
“Can I… get out of this thing first, though? It’s really sweaty.”
“Of course. I’m just-”
Sasha finishes Anne’s sentence for her.
“Really glad to see you again, Marce.”
-
Getting changed was a scary thing.
The castle was changed by the militarization, of course, but the fundamentals were the same and Olivia was insistent on escorting her through the unrecognizable halls she still used to walk through every morning to eat breakfast in her study.
Marcy laughs when she catches a glance of herself in the mirror. Humorless of course, because she looks like, putting it lightly, shit. Though her feelings are dulled in an attempt to not overwhelm herself more, a part of her is terrified that the dormant eye on her chest will blink open as easily as she herself had.
And in a movement to throw on the shirt, she freezes.
She’s not sure why she thought it wouldn’t be there, but it’s still a shock, and one trace of her fingertips over the new scar on her spine is enough to make her slam the shirt over her head and try not to walk faster than Olivia. Away from yet another reminder, and back to a miracle she’d never thought she’d have.
Their forgiveness.
Anne greets her with a hair ruffle when she’s back, and the touch is so warm, exactly what she’s been denied for so long. It nearly takes everything in her to not lean into Anne fully, see if she’s willing to strain her neck to let Marcy fit under her chin, a maneuver they used to pull sitting behind the big oak tree, dodging PE class participation.
Anne retracts her arm slightly, just to make eye contact and mouth what Marcy makes out as, You okay?
“Well,” Marcy responds plainly, gesturing halfheartedly to the room around them, garnering a laugh from Anne. In seriousness, she answers, “As much as possible, given the circumstances.”
“Good to hear.”
-
“I think… I’m going to stay back,” Sasha murmurs, tapping her finger on the marble banister idly, her eyes still trained on the floor right below Anne’s shoe.
“I won’t push it but…” The rest of Anne’s sentence hangs in the air, an unspoken wish for Sasha's help in addressing the armies.
“It’s okay.” She smiles weakly. “I’m the military commander, and I think we all want my job here to be done.”
“Alright,” Anne concedes. “I’ll be back in a while, but I’m going to see if I can find space in the castle for our friends from Wartwood to stay for the night. It’s a long way back.”
“The ballroom should be empty,” Marcy supplies. “I can help scour up some blankets and pillows-”
Anne shakes her head. “ You need rest. Besides, Olivia and Yunan are already taking care of that.” She reaches out for Marcy’s hand and squeezes, and Marcy almost melts under how tender her gaze is. “I’ll come back to your room after, okay?”
“Don’t stay out too late!” Sasha calls after her, relieved at how easy it is to slip into their old banter, even as she feels herself growing fainter.
“So,” Marcy drawls, clapping her hands together and rolling her eyes over Sasha, squinting at her armor. “This is new,” she says plainly.
Sasha laughs feebly, shifting to make sure her back is out of Marcy’s line of vision as the other steps closer, a singular finger pointing to Sasha’s forehead. “Needed a change of pace,” Sasha supplied. “Too much happened in the old armor, and I’ve…”
Marcy’s lips quirk up. There’s tenderness in the way her eyebrows are furrowed just slightly, her features rounding out, softening. And it’s all because she’s looking at Sasha and she’s forgotten what she was going to say, or what she would ever say in a situation like this.
The step into Marcy’s outstretched arms is the lightest she’s taken all day.
Sasha is happy to sink into the feeling, to let the warmth wash over her as the wind trails around them, teasing strands of hair out of the crevice behind her ear, to have her internal monologue purposefully dulled to background noise, just this once. The exhaustion of the day and all her body’s been through keeps her eyes closed shut, and she swears she feels herself already falling asleep.
But she’s learned through Amphibia, the peace never truly lasts.
“Sash?”
Marcy’s voice comes out as a stuttered syllable, and Sasha’s heart drops when she feels the pressure of Marcy’s hand pat on the bulge of the makeshift bandage.
Sasha swears under her breath and stumbles away. “What?” she says, trying to use her years of experience contort her face into genuinely clueless, with a lilt in her tone to cover any sort of pain.
“Why do you have a bandage around your back?”
She’d been quick to patch it up when Marcy had slipped away to get changed herself, staunching the bleeding and tearing off part of her own undershirt to apply pressure. Part of her screamed out for someone to notice, a part she immediately dubbed selfish. The other half told her she could quite literally die if she didn’t say anything, and aches at the fact that even then, through all of this, she’s still using her own mistakes as a reason to stay quiet, to let the blood in her body run its course, keep staggering onwards through a moment that’s almost straight from her dreams, in how final it feels in this chapter of her life.
“Oh, it’s uh- just the other day there was…”
Sasha’s changed. She’s started to care about the blisters she might get if her socks have holes in them. She’s started to get to bed earlier, and reaps the gorgeous colors in the sky in the morning instead of sitting on the begrudging feeling of getting herself under the covers and staying put. She’s started to pay attention to the knot in her stomach, how it tightens and clenches, the string wedging its way through loops of bad memories and thoughts.
And now she knows that pulling and tugging will only make it tighter.
Sometimes it is about tracing back her steps, coaxing the string out of a binding mess, finding square zero in a space that is anything but linear.
And with this in mind, she is tired of lying.
-
And now, Marcy is alone.
For the first time in what has probably been a while, but she has a sneaking suspicion that the defensive processing part of her brain has blocked her from remembering anything of the Core and what it might have fed to her.
Sasha is wrapped in a blanket that was still unmade and creased when they came in, asleep as soon as Marcy finished fussing with the disinfectant and left to quickly dispose of the cloth eerily splattered with dried blood.
Though she’d been adamant against it, like a prayer, last time she had been herself, part of her relishes in this. The world is quiet, and she is breathing and she can look at the carpet underneath her toes or the river winding around the castle out the window or touch her hands to the worn banister of the bed or her fierce girl tucked so comfortably below it.
Hearing Sasha’s description of how it happened had hurt her. Yet Marcy finds herself glad for the emotional numbness washed over her, the blood that is not hers caked under her fingernails only an additional weight, not a sharp, stabbing new pain.
And in this moment she is grateful for the big things. She is grateful to be here, to be carefully settling in next to Sasha without waking her, still leaving space for a third she really wishes she had the energy to drag to bed herself. The
But it’s all so big, so maybe, she thinks, recovery is processing the small.
The warm press of her thighs together as she lays on her side, the hair that falls onto the pillow above her, the feet that poke out of the blanket, the room soaked in enough darkness to mute everything to quiet colors and shadows.
Yet big enough to lull her to a handful of restful hours that promise a new, better life ahead.