Sunset had grown ears, Trixie had not, and the feeling had been incredible.
Sunset had thought that she’d need to find a closet with Wallflower to deal with unwanted emotions, but Wallflower was with Trixie, and . . .
Ok, that could have easily been dealt with, but the moment Sunset showed up Wallflower had asked, “Hey, you both play guitar, right?” and then a conversation that Sunset couldn’t quite remember led to the two of them jamming in the CHS music room while Wallflower listened.
Sunset hadn’t realized how much she’d missed playing guitar with someone else until she actually did it again. The high was enough that she could actually suppress the . . . things that needed suppressing.
Obviously it wasn’t nearly as effective as her usual method, which meant that it would probably wear off fairly quickly, but Sunset was surprised it was effective at all. Apparently she’d needed more music in her life.
It wasn’t actually to ruin the mood, but Sunset said, “Just to ruin the mood,” to Trixie as a lead in to, “how was your first week of being hated?”
“Trixie has had tomatoes thrown at her before,” Trixie said. “The solution is to eat them.”
Sunset smirked and said, “I’m pretty sure tradition calls for rotten tomatoes.”
“Clearly those who throw vegetable-fruit do not care about tradition,” Trixie said. After a beat, she added, “Those were good tomatoes.”
Sunset raised an eyebrow, but decided not to get into that. She ate out of dumpsters all the time; who was she to judge Trixie’s tastes in food?
Instead Sunset said, “I’m still trying to understand why anyone would have whole tomatoes at school.” It wasn’t as though one could slice them on-site. Any decent tomato knife was strictly verboten. Cutting a tomato with a plastic cafeteria knife seemed like it would be an exercise in frustration.
Wallflower, apparently, was thinking along entirely different lines. “I’m surprised they threw anything at all,” she said. “No one’s thrown anything at Sunset.”
Sunset initially planned to let Trixie respond to that, but the magician was uncharacteristically quiet. So Sunset said, “I’m guessing you couldn’t hear what Trixie was saying from where you were.”
Wallflower shook her head.
“They deserved every word that the Profane and Polysyllabic Trixie threw at them,” Trixie said.
Wallflower laughed. Sunset said, “You’re lucky, perhaps more so than you understand, that Luna arrived after you’d finished speaking.”
Trixie shrugged.
“Anyway, I meant overall, not the one incident I definitely saw firsthand,” Sunset said. “Now that you’ve sided with me, the whole school is against you, and--”
Trixie actually put some thought into that. Or made a show of pretending to put some thought into it, which would arguably be harder than simply putting in the thought. Then she said, “I’m fine,” she seemed to be finished, but added, “and I doubt it’s the whole school,” a moment or two later.
“If you know of anyone else who isn’t on Team ‘Sunset is Evil and must pay for what she has done,” Sunset said, “I’d love to hear about them.”
Trixie said, “What about your friend,” Sunset suppressed a flinch, “with the super sci-fi boombox car?”
That . . . was a good question. Sunset had no idea about Vinyl Scratch.
“She’s not a Rainboom,” Trixie said, “and you saved the world together.”
“That does put her in the same category as Princess Purple Pony,” Wallflower said, though she seemed to be speaking primarily to herself.
That caught Sunset completely off guard, and she ended up laughing very hard.
⁂
Wallflower couldn’t remember the last time this many people actually noticed her, much less spoke to her.
Vinyl, it turned out, was receptive to offers of friendship, and wherever Vinyl went, Octavia Melody was sure to follow. Remembering Wallflower proved harder for them than it had for Trixie, but with Trixie and Sunset supporting her, Wallflower was able to do something that had always hurt too much before: engage directly with the fact that they’d completely forgotten she existed, work through it, and repeat until they did remember her.
That meant that four --four-- people were noticing, remembering, and talking to Wallflower. And Octavia and Vinyl both had tons of friends, once they figured out where those friends stood on Sunset, Wallflower would be on the path to being known by so many people it was nigh unthinkable.
So, that was good. It was absurdly good. Very fast too. It was like some kind of chain reaction. Trixie remembered Wallflower because Sunset had refused to let Trixie ignore her. Without Trixie and Sunset, Vinyl never would have remembered her. Without Vinyl and the others, Octavia wouldn’t.
It wasn’t a full solution. She was still as ignorable and forgettable to everyone else, and Vinyl and Octavia always seemed like they might be on the verge of losing track of Wallflower’s existence, but it was like nothing Wallflower had ever known.
Wallflower wasn’t reaching for the memory stone nearly as often, most of the times Sunset went to the roof it to actually enjoy the view. Wallflower went with her. And not just to make sure Sunset wasn’t going to jump, either; they’d watched Sunset’s namesake together.
So, again, absurdly good. But there were problems. Three problems really.
Problem one: none of this brought them any closer to making Wallflower rememberable or, more importantly, proving Sunset’s innocence.
Problem two was that some of the ways in which it was good flat out disturbed Wallflower.
Trixie, Vinyl, and possibly Octavia (it was too early to be completely sure with her), made Wallflower feel things that only Sunset had made her feel before. And, sure, friends were supposed to make you feel good. Wallflower had always heard that. At the same time, though, it was too much.
The way that seeing their faces or talking to them could turn Wallflower’s day around and make her feel wanted, important, and loved wasn’t supposed to . . . “Just” friends shouldn’t make her feel the same way her girlfriend did, she was quite sure of that.
And so she was afraid, terrified even, that she would turn out to be some sort of unfaithful . . . Wallflower didn’t actually know the right word, but it definitely wasn’t complimentary. What if all it took for her to fall in love was someone to notice and remember her? What if these feelings grew stronger and she . . . did something.
So, she had all of that going on.
That was problem two. Problem three was the fact that Trixie had a cute butt. It wasn’t helping matters in the least.
⁂
Things were good and bad. This Sunset knew. What she was less clear on was why.
The good was obvious. More friends. People who didn’t constantly shower her in hate and recrimination. The knowledge that Wallflower was both happy and safe at times they couldn’t be together. So on, and so forth.
It was the bad that Sunset didn’t understand.
Wallflower seemed to be perpetually on edge for reasons that she either wouldn’t share or didn’t understand herself. It could be that she just wasn’t used to being around this many people, but Sunset was rarely in a state of mind where she believed the least troubling explanation to be true.
Sunset herself was . . . feeling less . . . something. “Passionate” might be the word.
Being able to go up to the roof with Wallflower, for example, should be an unmitigated good thing. It let Wallflower know that she wasn’t going to jump while she was up there, it let her share an experience she’d loved for years --the view from the roof was always wonderful-- and it just . . . wasn’t working the way it was supposed to.
It was enjoyable --worth doing repeatedly in fact-- but it wasn’t quite right. There was some spark, or something, missing.
And the things that already had sparks? They’d gotten smaller. The things, the sparks, the everything.
Without the urgency of needing the relationship for the sake of her own physical safety and Wallflower’s continued existence as someone who could meaningfully be described as “Wallflower Blush”, Sunset couldn’t seem to hold things together.
The obvious answer was that she was still a monster, and had only been using Wallflower. As Wallflower became less necessary, Sunset gave fewer shits, and everything faded into nothingness. She refused to believe that.
Her relationship with Wallflower was nothing like her relationship with Flash had been. She genuinely loved Wallflower, she knew it, and that’s why it was so frustrating and incomprehensible that she couldn’t maintain the energy or enthusiasm from before.
Given that “before” being defined as a time when she’d had only one friend, frequently headed off with the intent to kill herself, and had a distinct lack of energy and enthusiasm regarding all aspects of life.
Or, to look at it an entirely different way, this was the most alive she’d felt in all the time since the Rainbooms abandoned her. Her relationship with Wallflower felt less alive. How and why were these two things happening concurrently? Sunset had no answers.
⁂
Wallflower was jolted from her thoughts by Trixie loudly saying, “Ok, the two of you have been stuck in your own heads for like a week and a half,” in her general direction.
“By which the Embellishing and Hyperbolic Trixie means,” Octavia said in a fairly good Trixie voice, “‘about three days’.”
Vinyl signed, basically, “What’s up with that?”
Wallflower said, “Uh,” while Sunset said, “Um.” They both drew out the words for long enough that Octavia could have played a concerto to accompany them. Ok, it wasn’t anywhere near that long, but it felt that way.
“Things made more sense when it was us against the world, I guess,” Sunset said. “Everything was simple and clear cut. Now . . . now things are complicated again.”
That was definitely true, but Wallflower decided to add, “I, uh, got used to Sunset being my only friend.”
“It certainly is a complicated world,” Octavia said, “but it’s the only one we have.”
Vinyl signed that it was good to have them back in that world.
Trixie said, “Provided you are, you know, in it, and not--”
“--stuck in our own heads,” Sunset finished.