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The sides of the dice reflect in the candles splayed in a line across the table, shining into its eyes as the simple game of chance provides much better entertainment than the briefing currently taking place.
Although, it knows it has to cling to every word spoken in the meeting, every whisper of information shared through dictation and tone. It doesn’t know if the state of the castle’s imports and exports are entirely it’s priority subject, but it may as well be worth listening to and picking apart later for key information.
The king sits directly across from it, at the head of the table designated for him. It holds back a laugh at the puny glass of water set on the table in front of him, despite the fact that his knees sit above the heads of the newts surrounding them. He keeps glancing over at it, for approval, perhaps, whenever he speaks, but quickly turns away after he realizes it’s not going to look back.
Good. Let him think I’m not paying attention.
The words are still odd to hear as an inner monologue so familiar, and not a chorus of voices that seemed like they could never quite agree on the same key.
“I’ll have Lady Olivia look into that, when she returns,” the king mutters, his voice dropping to a tone much deeper than what his earlier conversations were held in, and he stares straight ahead at it, waiting for a physical response, a reaction.
It truly almost gives one, an itch within it wanting to snap its head towards him and plead for answers, but it supressess that. A larger, more logical side knows that it itself is the one in power.
It had realized the other night that perhaps Olivia’s absence could be a self imposed act of rebellion, as much as a strategy from the king; to keep the only one that would feasibly have the courage to save the host away. Yunan leading conquering armies throughout smaller villages with valuable resources was a quick start to the gradual hostile takeover of Amphibia, a suggestion proposed by the chorus of voices themselves.
“Do you have an estimate of when that might be, your highness?” A question posed by the newt sitting to the right of it, his snout stuck in the notepad as he seems to be scrambling to record all of the information. It lets the dice drop onto the table, a clattering sound left in its wake.
The king taps his foot in thought, a habit that sends a loud thud through the hall, rattling the silverware on the table. The dice reads fourteen.
“I do not have a definitive guess. Her party has run into some… complications-” it holds back a smile at his very telling pause- “according to the letters we’ve received, but I should hope no later than five days.”
Five days.
The next step to its plan so, so close.
Yet so out of its hands, so out of its control.
The king clears his throat. This time, it cannot help but make sparing eye contact, merely a light glare of orange flitting over to see the king’s own eyes turn away promptly. Logically, as the king’s superior, it cannot be left out of any of such strategizing meetings, and it seems that the king goes out of his way to verbally announce a request for it’s presence at every chance he gets. However, it knows that the king doesn’t want to risk contact between the host and someone who might have the conviction to rescue it.
So, it supposes, it’s a good thing that he doesn’t know that “the Core” has been dormant for two weeks now.
“If needed,” the king continues, choosing to make eye contact with the newt despite the orange glare pinning him down in his seat, “I will send reinforcements to Lady Olivia and her party, but every second she spends traveling is another chance for new information to be gathered.”
“And another chance for collected information to get delayed.”
Choosing to speak in such meetings is the trickiest part, it thinks. Every word and implication is calculated; it would be unwise to rally in support of the frogs in Wartwood, of one General Yunan and Lady Olivia, or the general local climate; those are not the concerns of the general chorus of minds, yet ones of the mind that is supposed to be dormant instead. It supposes it will have to lay low for a while, to give only vague answers of “waiting for the right time to strike,” when asked about Wartwood.
It’s still not sure how it could make the order to attack citizens itself in sacrifice for maintained cover. The hope is that it won’t have to, that, should it ever have to happen, the decision will be made by the king alone.
“Right,” the king agrees, as he always does. “Shall we send out reinforcements to her party then, my lord?”
It almost heaves a sigh of relief at the chance to remain neutral, to not have to broadcast the true spirit of the host.
Instead it offers a small chuckle, an attempt to maintain part of the personality that was reaped from the host in the early few days. “No, no. Our power should be concentrated in support of our squadrons involved in more, you could say, active affairs.”
The king relaxes his hand on his knee. It picks up the dice again, studying intently. It has said it’s piece today.
“Well, that settles it. If none of you have any further questions or concerns, this meeting shall be adjourned.”
It lets the dice clatter to the table as it stands.
A faded three faces the murals on the ceiling.
-
Most days, it’s a lot. There’s never a day where Marcy doesn’t feel it, the dread of what would happen if she were discovered, the hopelessness eating its way through the pitch of her voice when she has to talk about her friends like they’re her enemies. Though he yields to her command, she can never quite get rid of the fear that would happen if she were discovered; if possessing her was the plan from the start, what could possibly be next?
What’s one more death sentence to her, anyways?
The ache is almost comforting, in a way. It reminds her that she’s still, miraculously, human , and her capacity to feel is still intact, though all her worst fears and feelings from before seem so mild and trivial.
What’s hardest is faking the apathy.
Pretending it doesn’t hurt her when she reviews the programming in all of the frobots, watching the strategists explain how they are explicitly designed to subdue, to incapacitate, to destroy. And why would she say no? How could she possibly come up with a cover story for that?
What else is there to do but send these robots straight to her friends?
It’s undeniable that Anne must’ve found a way back, from the way battle preparations seem to have a sense of urgency they didn’t before. She gets the sense, even from the limited information disclosed to her, that each side is holding their breath; waiting to strike, or preparing to defend against one.
But it only brings Marcy another storm of questions; Anne found her way back without the music box. How? Was there another way that the power of the gems could be harnessed remotely, possibly through the powers she gained that haven’t seemed to manifest in either Sasha or Marcy?
This time, mulling everything over, she’s found a revamped guest room, now filled with boxed food rations for fieldwork missions, to hide out in while her breath is far too rapid and verbalizing even simple assent feels like a burden far too intimidating.
Truly, she just needs to calm down . They were words she’s always hated to be told back home, when everything was far too loud or bright for her to think properly, much less express what she was feeling to others, but there’s an unfortunate truth in her reasoning that there are no immediate solutions to any of her worries.
She can’t just leave the palace like she’s left stores and classrooms and events in favor of a more quiet, controlled space. She can’t just “communicate her feelings” like those school counselors always preached. She can’t just surround herself with a safe support group, not that she’s ever really fully understood what that meant.
There’s no way to lessen the burden, the fears and the anxieties and the dread, to throw a couple pounds overboard when there’s nothing on this lifeboat but herself.
And yet still, there’s one that she keeps mulling back on. One that she’s done her best to suppress but hits her smack in the face, curled into herself in the corner of the room.
She is alone. No one has come to her rescue.
The last time her friends saw her, she might have been as good as a corpse. One that had betrayed them. Never bothered to tell them her plans, one that had valued her own fantasy over their livelihoods.
That’s what she did, didn’t she?
And even deeper is the fact that she can’t quite be her anymore.
Her body, her memories. All taken away so quickly, her back penetrated in mere seconds. Is that all it takes to take her away? To break her down, steal away her consciousness and cause her to collapse for what seemed the last time. Only to scavenge through the pieces left of her for the valuable parts, only for the worst parts of her to survive, here.
Scattered in a mess on the floor, devoid of the energy others often complimented her on. Devoid of the wonder she relied on to carry her throughout everyday. Beaten into a mixture of memories that shattered her to live through, and more precious and happy ones she still clings to, despite the fact that they’ll never outshine the hatred and despair.
So all she can do is cry. Press her forehead to her knees, kick the helmet at her feet out of sight, ignorant to the damage that could be caused. Her elbows grace the wooden cart she’s found a crevice to hide in beside as her arms curl around her shins, protective.
It’s taken away a fundamental part of her.
Andrias. The Core.
Amphibia.
It’s taken away the biggest parts of her.
And greedily snatches up more and more, through the way that her back is pushed so tightly to the wall in a way she never cared to focus on before, desperate to give it any sort of protection against the terror of the truth.
-
Marcy yelps, almost falling out of her chair at the sight of the front steps of the castle out her window. Though she can’t see her face from all the way up, the sight of the familiar lace-decorated figure makes Marcy’s heart swell with hope.
It reminds her of what seems like forever ago, the first time she and Olivia were separated. It was merely a vacation dedicated to one of the most loyal and hardworking members of Andrias’ royal court, not whatever conquest Andrias had sent her out to do this time. Marcy remembers going to sleep every night with a pit in her chest, trying to throw herself into the books she’d picked from Olivia’s study that had language simple enough for her, at the time, very limited fluency in runes.
She remembers the world melting around her, becoming something very distant and far away as she got absorbed into records of traditional frog architecture, careless to the room around her and the storm that had started outside the window. Unknowing to the fact that on the night Olivia had returned, she had been in the seat just behind Marcy for at least an hour unnoticed, reading.
Now it takes all of Marcy’s self control not to come sprinting down the steps, doing her best to remain calm and formulate a plan on how to grab Olivia’s attention and not the rest of the court’s.
Her heart sinks, though, as she steps away from the window, and a familiar realization washes over her.
Despite the fact that Olivia’s purposeful absence might’ve been an act of rebellion, she’s back, isn’t she? What would be the point in returning if her intentions were truly to abandon Andrias and his plight?
And she agreed to this in the first place, didn’t she? Who was Marcy to make assumptions about the loyalties of one of the most faithful figures in the Newtopian court, when she was the one who was still new to this place, a foreigner trying to get home?
It’s hard to calm herself down when she understands that this is more than just catastrophizing, worst case scenario anxiety speaking; it’s her basic survival instincts, too. The instincts that she’s built from facing hard truths, taking on necessary pain.
And she understands it’s high time she listens to that part of her, after everything with Anne and Sasha.
Marcy closes her eyes for a second, her thoughts muted by the attention she pours into the methodical tapping of her heels against the ground as she rocks back and forth, ever so slowly.
She’ll only be able to know Olivia’s true intentions if she can get a conversation with her alone, and if not her, there’s still hope in trying to reach Yunan.
It’s time to join the welcoming committee.
-
It doesn’t miss the way her face falls when it walks into the room, though the expression of horror is quickly washed away when she makes eye contact with Andrias, inviting Olivia to take her seat at the table.
Suppressing the heart within it that aches to say something more, it continues to be transfixed on the die in its fingers, like every faded tip of the printed numbers haven’t already been so heavily scrutinized. It offers a small, “Well met, Lady Olivia.”
Olivia’s maintained composure is hardly a surprise, coming from someone born and raised within the royal court, but it can detect the shake in her voice. “Pleasure to be back, my Lord.”
“Will the rest of your party not be joining us?” Andrias asks.
“No, I’m afraid that my companions are receiving very necessary medical attention at the moment,” she responds smoothly, as if her words haven’t caused the lingering whispers across the table to go silent.
“Well,” Andrias says promptly, giving a gentle smile. “Tell them I send my condolences.”
Olivia takes her seat, pointedly looking straight ahead and away from the eyes trained on her. “Well, I’m sure they’d appreciate your warm regards in person, Your Highness.”
It tries to suppress the memories. The faces that pop up in its head, when Olivia mentions her group, because it knows that the newts that brought it breakfast in bed every morning in it’s first month in Amphibia might have been exposed to whatever radiation Andrias has weaponized against his own kingdom.
From a satchel strapped to her side, Olivia pulls out a worn folder with torn edges. A map splays out in front of her, one that it couldn’t begin to comprehend from the distance with the filtered vision of the helmet. Yet still visible are bright red crosses, slashing through primarily what it recognizes as large watersheds and bogs.
“Here, me and my team have marked every place in our journey where we were attacked by wildlife.” Olivia slips another yellowed page out from under the map; each corner is packed with letters, like the person writing on it was afraid of losing space. “Each creature, notably, was wearing a purple collar.”
It doesn’t understand what she’s getting at until she looks to face Andrias dead on at the head of the table, and her voice drops two octaves, tone dripping with demand.
“The collaring needs to stop.”
“And get rid of our best foot soldiers?” Andrias fires back immediately. Gone is his usual lighthearted facade, and replaced is the demeanor of a ruler. A king. “This is our best source of leverage in quelling those smaller, more trivial local rebellions.”
“Do you not have a care for your actual foot soldiers?”
Olivia’s comment seems to certainly act as a turning point, and the tension in the room suddenly becomes very presently palpable. It’s gaze pours into Olivia’s backside, no longer worried of being deemed suspicious or ruled by the emotions of it’s host as the entire room’s attention is focused on the pleasantry-laced argument starting to boil.
“Well, of course not. The frobots and the collared creatures take care of the dirty work, so our field experts can do the rest. It’s a cooperation.”
Olivia scoffs, such a simple mannerism that implies much more. The hint of disloyalty in her tone makes Andrias’ gaze suddenly unreadable, though it has no doubt of the disapproval that sits behind it. Though it can hardly afford to jump to conclusions, the seeds of rebellion in her defiance make it hopeful.
“A cooperation?” The chair’s whine echoes through the high ceiling of the hall as Olivia stands and steadies herself with a clenched fist on the table. “These animals are out of our control. We cannot continue to endanger ourselves, or the environment, in a manner that is bound to backfire.”
Her argument still comes off cool and collected, despite the sharp, jerky motions her body does in collecting her documents.
“I’m afraid I may have overstepped,” she says quietly, a move that especially perks it’s attention from the edge of the table. “My apologies, Your Highness, it was a mere suggestion that I hope you’ll take into consideration.”
The folder is tucked back under her shoulder, and this time she looks to her right, peering straight past the array of eyes cut into the helmet, to the mere two that actually remain active. “Excuse me, I’ll need to get started on my full written report.”
The web of cracks in its heart spreads just the tiniest bit further as the door closes behind her.
-
Marcy paces and pinches the pads of her fingertips, a nervous habit she’s picked up since they started to become worn and hardened by physical wear from missions.
Olivia’s return felt like an anchor for her, giving her something familiar to cling to, the good news she’s been craving since she broke out of the Core’s control. Yet this specific reunion feels weighted with a tense air that hadn’t been there when Olivia was just one in many palace staff tasked with making sure Marcy stayed out of trouble.
Certainly, more has happened in the past couple of weeks- though it was certainly difficult to process time normally- than she could hope to properly process and recover from in years, and she’s been isolated for all of it.
Maybe she’s right all along. She’ll never truly be Marcy Wu again, not in the way that she once was. After her mind was invaded, poked and prodded by those who had never even heard of a human before, existing long past the decay of their physical bodies. After she was literally backstabbed by someone she trusted to give her solace, while coming to realize she’s done the same to her friends and was just too cruel to never notice the pain she’d caused until it slapped her in the face.
So what was there left to love? What was there left to fight for, to salvage , that was worth it?
Certainly not much in Olivia’s scenario, when it would be so much better for her to prioritize her own interests and ditch Andrias for whatever rebellion was the most successful at this point.
The rattling door knob snaps her out of the thoughts and into a much more optimistic reality.
As if on pure instinct, a reaction programmed into her like clockwork, she bounds to the door, the skip in her step a reminder of now old mannerisms.
Yet just like the need to be reunited with someone she loves, the instinct of survival and her cautiousness stop her from doing anything too rash.
Despite the ache in her knees that’s been persistent for too long now, she drops to the floor and presses her cheek to the marble floor. Her heart soars at the sight of only one pair of webbed feet meeting her; the guards had cleared out like she had asked them to, and it would be safe to open the door.
Olivia’s eyes are trained on the floor when the door opens just ajar, and Marcy could shatter at the way her mother visibly shakes. “My lord, I-”
Marcy’s voice wavers, despite how badly she wants to be able to throw in halfhearted responses and not have to calculate every word. “That’s a little formal, right?”
She’ll never underestimate the power of physical touch again. Though the mechanics of hugging Olivia, and any other newt, is wildly different than hugging another human, it’s the light pressure on the small of her back, the arm wrapped around her shoulders, tugging her tight, that provides a similar comfort that hugging trusted humans do and sets her at peace.
Somehow, despite the weight of everything pushing her over the edge of tears too many times to count in the past few days, Marcy doesn’t cry, though Olivia very much does. There’s something akin to acceptance in Marcy’s chest, almost as if she’s been desensitized by processing too many big emotions that this moment, though standing out in how impossibly good it is, seems like all the others. It’s the first time her head has felt even remotely close to clear, grounded to the actual, real, present moment.
There are no words to be said from either of them for the first few minutes. Just two worn souls, grateful to be able to hold one another again.
The hand on Marcy’s back burns to the touch in a way anything that so much as grazes near the scar does now, but it’s a good ache. It’s the ache of something broken, glad to finally be mending at the tender hands of someone else, no longer stuck in a system of exhaustive self-healing.
All of the anxieties, the thoughts of abandonment, the despair, washed away by Olivia’s face when she pulls away just to tell Marcy she’s missed her. It feels like standing in the pure warmth of the sun, and Marcy closes her eyes and lets herself bask, tucking her chin back over Olivia’s shoulder. Their bodies rock in a slow, subconscious motion, tilting ever so slightly to the left, then to the right, coaxing a feeble laugh out of Olivia, who lets out a blissful sigh after.
“I was so worried.”
The gravity of the situation starts to creep back in, then, feelings no longer kept at bay by the pure relief Marcy feels, but this time, it all feels a little less impossible than the worrying spent in solitude and worry.
“How have you been keeping up?” The diction of the question slips dangerously close to doting mother territory, and Marcy finds herself craving the overbearing tone she used to scoff at. “ Frog , and you’ve been alone with Andrias this entire time, how are you even here? Alive?”
They’re big questions, and Olivia seems to realize this, because all she does in the silence that follows is motion Marcy over to a couch in the corner of the study.
“I was writing letters, for a while,” Marcy finally gets out, pushing her cheek further into Olivia’s lap, pouring all of her attention into the fingers carding through her hair, soft, gentle, and slow. “Trying to get information out of Andrias. I figured out that Anne is back in Amphibia, and talked him out of some of the worst operations.”
“That’s why you’re still here?” Olivia whispers. Marcy doesn’t miss the way her eyes keep flicking to the door, another dull ache caused by a reminder that consistent tension is her new normal. “I mean, I wouldn’t have left the castle for a second if I knew it was still you .”
“I wanted to be useful,” Marcy admits. “I thought that if I could collect information and maybe I could figure out a way to get it back to you or just anyone that, I don’t know, it’d be worth staying.”
“You don’t always have to be useful.”
The tender words stop her for a moment, as something akin to hope starts to sprout in her chest. But the despair still claws at her legs, threatening to drag her down the second she starts to believe otherwise.
“I may as well be, if I’m stuck here,” Marcy huffs.
“But you’re not,” Olivia insists, and Marcy can practically hear the unsaid question hanging in the air; Why didn’t you leave?
“I mean, what choice do I have!” she snaps. “I leave the castle, so what, go where?”
“To my knowledge, not the king’s, your friend Sasha should still be in Wartwood, and I’ve heard rumors that-”
“That doesn’t change anything.” Marcy hates it, the venom seeping into her voice, the fact that her initial reaction to the one person she feels she may be able to trust is hostility. But she’s too exhausted to fight and it’s so, so brutally easy.
“That doesn’t change things. What I’ve done.” She curls into herself further, knees coming closer to her chest, breathing labored. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they just turned me away.”
“Marcy, I assure you, you are worth it-”
“And who is that? Who am I , anymore?”
She spits it out so quickly, and the stress and urgency in her voice seem to shift the conversation to a breaking point. One that rips and tears at the warmth once held in Olivia’s gaze, and the guilt Marcy feels from watching her expression change is only a fraction of all the bad feelings bubbling and tumbling through her gut like the old washing machine at home that could never quite handle all her clothes.
“That thing just…”
Marcy swallows, her fingers desperate to find rhythm on her knees, desperate for comfort.
“It had my memories. It had my body. Is that all I am?”
It’s a thing she’s considered many times when everything in her life has aligned in a way that’s far from perfect, yet was paired with a rudimentarily special and magical feeling that she’s always assumed has something to do with the feeling of being human.
And she’s realized, overtime, that it’s not a bad thing. She doesn’t really mind being insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but there’s something so deeply unsettling in the notion that it could all be taken away so quickly.
That if death is supposed to be a big burnout at the end of her life, the death of her very own star, one that is constantly looming only to give her guidance and purpose, how is it fair that it could sneak up on her like that?
How is it fair that she’s lived through everything she has, every fall and scar, every meltdown and time she couldn’t picture herself feeling okay ever again, every crumb of knowledge about the world that will continue on for centuries after her and of those who she clings to now that will meet the same fate, and it could all be stored away and shut down so easily?
Lost, so easily?
Olivia’s said something to her. Marcy couldn’t process a word of it, drowned out by her thoughts, yet she understands the poke in her side as a symbol to sit up.
So she does, slowly, instinctually still curling against Olivia’s body once she’s sat up on the couch. Though Olivia laughs and taps her shoulder again. “Come on, I want to show you something.”
She takes Marcy’s hand as she leads her to a corner of the room, where a pile of scrolls obstruct a worn-out desk, and a small trash can-adjacent bucket beside it is filled with crumpled up pieces of paper.
Simply holding Olivia’s limb starts to untangle the knot raging within her chest. It can’t quite feel so awful to be painfully and fleetingly human in the presence of someone anything but, right?
And this memory, watching Olivia step away from her for the moment to mutter something about Andrias never bothering to tidy up the place when she’s away and swiping up all the scrolls in her grasp, just like all of her others, is something she’d be sad to lose. The pit of Marcy’s stomach screams against the idea that she is the only one that holds this memory from this perspective, with all the relief and fear sewn tightly into the way her hands trace uncertain shapes on her arms and she can’t seem to shake the fact that this is the first time she’s smiled organically like this in a while.
But another part of her basks in this present, in the fact that the only reason she would ever want to cling to the memory is because it’s only happening now.
Olivia finds what she’s looking for in the last drawer of the desk, and Marcy can’t help but gasp upon recognition.
“My seashell collection!” she chirps, immediately reaching out and grasping the box with her hands, a purely impulsive, carefree gesture; she hasn’t been able to afford much of those lately.
Olivia lets her, turning the key in her own hands and lining it up with the locket dangling from the front. “When you were off in Wartwood with your friends,” she says calmly, unlocking the box and tipping over the lid, “I had to do a deep clean of your room.”
Marcy winces, and Olivia laughs at her response. “You left it in quite the state.” She hands the box over to Marcy, who is pleased to find the scroll that takes up nearly a third of the box in itself, a complete key that labeled each shell collected and their likely species, with some small sketches.
Amphibian shells, as Marcy was quick to discover in her first few days of Newtopian life when she wasn’t getting assigned missions and tasks yet, are quite different and much more whimsical than the ones she found on Earth. The collection had been somewhat of a coping mechanism for the first week or so, when it started to truly dawn on her that she didn’t know where her friends were and this could mean being stuck forever .
“The cleaning staff had started to do it themselves, but I had to step in when they weren’t sure what you would want them to keep.”
Marcy frowns, still sifting through all of the shells delicately with her hands. “But my room seemed the same when I came back.”
Olivia nods. “The first thing I happened to stumble across was the box, because it seemed that you were looking through it on your bed, and a couple shells were left out.” Marcy’s hand stutters on the prick of a row of long, thin, spines, one that she identified as similar to the shells of the predatory Murex genus back on Earth. Though she wishes she had the full shell, the fact that the shell of a deep sea creature had been preserved this well in merely the shallows of the Newtopian beaches is quite the wonder.
“In putting them back, I lost hours to that key of yours, in trying to match all the shells to your descriptions and drawings. Eventually, I convinced Andrias to let it go, reasoning that you should learn the responsibility of having to manage your personal things on your own, if you should be allowed such a space of your own.”
“Was there some bigger lesson in that story you were trying to teach me?” Marcy immediately regrets how the words come out almost patronizing, sharp and teasing if Olivia interpreted them that way.
Olivia shakes her head. “Quite honestly, I was hoping that I could come up with something by the time the story was over. I just wanted to give you something to listen to, that you could ground yourself in. Something that feels like you.”
Marcy doesn’t quite have the courage for eye contact, or anything other than the sea of cream colors at her fingertips right now, but something in her heart threatens to burst for how lucky she feels right now. How lucky she is to be here, standing and breathing, veins still full and pumping, and how lucky she is to have people, or newts, like Olivia.
And maybe, just a little bit for herself, too.
“I wanted to come back for you, again,” Olivia whispers, and there’s the unspoken thing hanging over both of them, and Marcy feels her smile start to fade. “And I am truly sorry that I didn’t. I just wasn’t sure if I could stand to see you gone. To see it in your…” Normally, Marcy hates when any sort of conversation is left up to her own interpretation, but the lack of description here feels like a blessing. “But it was selfish. If I knew I could’ve fought for you, please trust me, Marcy, I would have.”
To this, Marcy sets the box down on the desk, tucking the scroll back in before gently pushing the lid closed and wrapping her arms around Olivia, tight.
It takes mere seconds for Olivia’s arms to wrap around Marcy right back, and she tries to drink this moment in as best as she can, tries to savor the small pressure on the top of her spine, yet she understands that recreating this moment, in all of its glory, would be impossible.
And that’s okay.
They spend far more time than they should together, curled back up on that couch, in wonderful silence Marcy is grateful she doesn’t need to fill, though she does with apologies for sounding upset with Olivia earlier. To which Olivia, of course, is ever understanding and reassures Marcy she’s just grateful that they’re together again.
But ultimately, to their equal dismay, a less than ideal world around them still remains.
“Normally they’d be giving me this time to sleep,” Marcy explains, picking up the helmet in her hands, horribly aware of how heavy it feels this time. “But I should get back to my room so no one expects anything.”
“You can’t keep pretending forever,” Olivia retorts.
Marcy shakes her head. “I really want to be helpful. I think there’s still more I can gather for the rebellion here, especially if you’re back and I’ve got someone on my side.”
She can tell that deep down Olivia wants a different outcome, but is pleasantly surprised by her nod of assent. “I still think you’ll need more support inside the castle.”
Marcy raises an eyebrow. “So what’s next?”
Olivia smiles. “I just might have an idea of who to call.”