[b]Pink:[/b]

Fiona does some math in her head. 

There’s sounds from downstairs. She pushes Pink away, just to the edge of arms’ reach and holds her hands tight. “It’s just the lizards,” she says, “but let’s get a bit out of the way just in case.” 

The nearest room is a conservatory, where John keeps the plants flourishing. Gone are the daughters’ collections of exotic nightshades, replaced with little hydroponic tanks of blueberries and bugs in the tanks to clean their roots, both for feeding to the lizards later. The room is warm, and humid, and the light from the high windows makes rainbows in the glass, and fresh berries float on lilipads as healthy roots overflow the containers and seep flowering onto the chequered tile floor. 

It’s nice. It should be a nice room. It’s very pretty.

Pink was locked in here for eight days once. Before the lizards, this had been a place for bees that could only drink from the nectar-rich flowers in this room, so Everest could ensure even the honey in her tea was tailored to her exact tastes. The flowers were temperamental, but they were also beautiful, and so that was just… Pink’s job. 

The door jammed behind her, wax seizing just the wrong part of a mechanism, and she couldn’t get out. And to call out that she was trapped would be… disruptive. Only bad girls raised their voice. But that was fine. Everyone should have known what Pink was sent to do. They should have known to look for her. But Everest told her sisters she had been sent to do something she couldn’t remember, and that meant Pink had been [i]sent[/i], and that was the end of it.

It wasn’t until a week later, when Pink could not be found to be sent back into this room, that anybody checked the door to realize what happened. And then it took one more day to wait for Blue to get the parts she needed to take it down, because they would not break the door down for her.

But that’s not so bad is it? To be left there until your batteries drain and you lose consciousness because there’s no charging equipment for you anyway but maybe it was kind of nice to just, sleep and not have to do anything for a while, so why complain? Maybe it still eats at you that nobody cares about you so much they wouldn’t notice if you died and this is something that felt so close to it you relive it behind your eyes as proof that can never fully be contradicted.

Left forgotten in a cupboard like you were just a vacuum someone had finished with because that’s all you were.

And maybe nobody cared and maybe it felt like even your sisters weren’t allowed to care about you because they didn’t come looking for you but they were just trying to survive too and nobody touched you, nobody hurt you, nobody, nobody [i]beat[/i] you or anything. They just didn’t care. You’re not entitled to care. Nobody [i]did[/i] anything to you here. Nobody did anything to you for eight days. 

(This is why we repress things. Because if we believe it didn’t matter it doesn’t. But what would it mean if we did matter? What would it mean that we were only worth this much even when we mattered?)

(Because if we matter now and we didn’t matter then we are safe now because we matter now, but if we mattered then we can’t be safe now because it wasn't enough. If it wasn’t our fault this could happen to us again. Recovery is only temporary. We could be sent back [i]here[/i]. We always still were here.)

She wasn’t worth breaking the door down for.

Fiona didn’t pick a particularly bad or traumatic room. All of them are like this. This is just the story of this one. 

…

Fiona sees how Pink looks at the door and even though they’re explicitly in here to hide she takes a potted plant and jams it in the doorway so the door cannot close behind them. 

….

“I know tomorrow’s going to be a bad day for, for everyone, but I think… I know a mechanical pinball museum in Apollo where they let you take the machines apart so you can watch all the pieces move while you play, see how everything works, and you’re never going to beat my highscore on the [i]Bad Moon Witch[/i]. There’s a place near there that deep fries this stuff that smells like potpourri but it actually tastes as good as potpourri smells, I can’t describe it better than that. Then I’m going to buy you two of every Lego kit in the nearest toy store, and we’re going to take it to a skate park where there’s plenty of open cement and people can see you make anything you want out of it. And then we’re just going to leave it there and watch some kids break it down and make whatever they want with it, and tell them they can take it home with them, and we’re going to be their favourite people for the rest of their lives for it.” 

“And then when we get home I’m going to break you down myself, one limb at a time piece by piece, and we’re going to clean and polish every single piece of your internals, because I’m going to make you feel beautiful on the inside too. You’re going to shine and sparkle in a way that only we’re going to know it’s there, but we’ll know.” 

She kisses Pink’s forehead. She’s trying to be brave about this too because what she’s going to say is going to hurt her when she’s already hurting so much. “That’s just one day, Pink, that’s just what [i]one [/i]day with you is worth to me. That’s what was taken from you, every day you were here. Ten years is… If you counted each day like that as just a second, it would take an hour.” 

And Fiona knows enough to say ‘to me’. It’s not just an expression of love, but it is that. There is indisputable, inarguable value in what we give to others - and we must have at least that much value if we can give it.

It’s unhealthy to keep down that path, to [i]only[/i] see our value that way. But… In here? She has to make a stronger case than eight days that contradict her. Then an hour’s worth of seconds worth of days after that.

Then Fiona starts counting. One second a second. It feels slow bordering on excruciating because she's being measured, but the worst part is actually how fast the seconds come and that this would still take an hour. 

“One”

“Two”

“Three”

“Four”

“Five”

“Six”

“Seven”

“Eight”

[b]Hazel:[/b]

Her eyes go wide. “That’s where I was going wrong. It doesn’t have to be big it has to be-” she tosses the napkins away in disgust and looks around the convention hall for inspiration. No. None of this will do. “My room. 17 on the third floor. Do you need me to write it-” She looks up at Yellow. “Right.” 

Then she’s off, high over the crowd and towards the exit hall, wings twisting on their tilt rotors with an organic flex that drives her like a dragonfly. It is insanely, lethally dangerous if you think about the forces involved but the fae is so perfectly correct that nobody ever will, not even her. 

The door is open for you when you make it up there, six suitcases spilled across the floor filled with props and dresses and styles and aesthetics in different moods and seasons, steampunk and cybernetic and neon and spring and summer and autumn and winter and fire and ice. All different ways to look like her true self. 

The rough on her fingers is wired into the display of the big hotel TV screen, and she sketches a dragon that has borrowed human shape to walk among her subjects. 

Her feet never touch the ground. Hazel has drawn it with a disconcerting effect, not like the dragon is lifted but that her feet are perfectly flat as she levitates like she is held up by no force but simply rejects the premise of ground, flying so low as to be unnoticable but creating an uncanny, hindbrain ‘what the fuck’ feeling until you notice what you’re noticing. 

The eyes are organic and serpentine. The flesh is solid gold, and while its real material value isn’t what it used to be the cultural aspect of it remains pure. Every seam in the body is hidden, and the metal would move like liquid. Hazel sculpts her naked, with a warriors build - the metal-to-flesh with the treatment of renaissance marble sculptures, that uncanny impression of life in unliving material that is both and neither. She doesn’t bother suggesting clothing or she’d be here all night on that, her suitcases are a testament to that, drapery is left to Yellow’s imagination. 

This is a body that says; I do not fear disloyalty, it would only mean I would have to kill you myself.

It’s an impression that goes beyond the morality of power and simply into the nature of it. Was krakatoa evil for its eruption? Was the asteroid that wiped all life on Earth evil for is impact? It is without malice and cruelty. It is simply an unstoppable authority.

“The thrust would have to be completely silent for the effect to work.” Hazel says of it. “And no light, either. Your shadow being wrong is going to be a big part of the effect of it.”

Maybe someone else would hesitate, even a moment, at the implication of thinking [i]this[/i] is what was being asked of her. The work is simply too pure for Hazel to care.


[b]Black[/b]

He wordlessly arrives at the train station and moves to the sideline, where a private railcar waits for him. Serino’s company made this one, actually, Blue might have liked it - the entire personal pod is made of one-way black mirror in the aerodynamic shape of a droplet, stylized with rippling fins and vanes of rainbow that give the entire pod the impression of being a prince-rupert’s-drop made of obsidian glass. He has staff waiting for him at the pod, a guard and a valet. 

Just like the weakness in opsec represented by picking the sushi bar because it was the good place nearby, some mistakes are made to visit old friends to reassure them in crisis with our presence. That’s the only thing this could mean.

How do you tail a public railcar without a booking, with private and protected destination logging? There are ways, but as for a direct chase you might as well attempt to tail a private plane by trying to book an economy flight at the same airport.