Sour Sweet tossed her bag of loot on the bar, a half-rotted stretch of wood already long-since coated with random bits of plunder. It hit the planks with a rattling crunch, the thousands of pieces of bronzed gears and varnished panels and shattered glass quickly becoming indistinguishable within the piles of trash that filled the bar’s common room. Sugarcoat merely raised an eyebrow.
“Did you find anything useful, or are we eating canned soup again?” Sugarcoat asked.
“That’s a nice surprise, I didn’t think we had any left after you scarfed the lot.” Sour said.
“We’ve still got enough food for a few days.” Sugarcoat said, limping over to the bar, fishing out a cuckoo clock from the nearest heap of junk.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. We’ll be totally fine for the week, and then we’ll starve to death because somebody expected Us to do all of the work.”
“I’ve told you before, Sour Sweet, I’m injured. As much as I want to help you scavenge for vital supplies, I can’t.” Sugarcoat said, loosening a side of her threadbare bathrobe and pointing to the bundled of bloodied bandages that coated her shoulder.
“Thanks for reminding Us, Sugarcoat. What do you think We are exactly, a brain-dead idiot who forgets that they saved their best friend’s life by dragging them out the burning wreckage of a car crash and shoving their ungrateful bones back in the right place?”
“I’m flattered.” Sugarcoat deadpanned.
“We try, We really do” Sour Sweet smiled, “but it is so hard to actually get anywhere dragging around a sad sack that can’t get over herself. Can you remind us how long its been, y’know since we’re so forgetful?”
Sugarcoat rolled her eyes, not looking up from her spot in a booth, where she was surrounded by a pile of gears and the shattered remains of the analogue brown noise device.
“Come on Sugarcoat, We saved your life remember, the least you can do is not fucking ignore Us!” Sour shouted, marching over to the scratched wood bench where her friend was buried in her work.
“It’ll be three months tomorrow, Sour Sweet. It takes people a long time to heal, especially if the medical care they receive isn’t hospital quality.”
“Was that an insult?”
“Do either of you want it to be?” Sugarcoat said, before looking back down and unscrewing the box’s plaque for the eighteenth time that month. Suri’s own addition to the brass plate had long since been scratched to illegibility.
Sour Sweet groaned and turned away. “You’re impossible.”
“At least both of you can agree on that.”
A few seconds passed, silent save for the clicking of unfitting gears and Sour’s heavy breathing. The mantra wasn’t working. The mantra never worked. Cadence was a liar. Sour stood up and walked into the safehouse’s storeroom.
“You know” Said Sour, a few minutes later, once she had returned carrying a half-eaten bag of nearly expired jerky, “That’s actually a really nice table. In fact, it's the best one in the whole bar and I really would like to actually use it one of these days!” Sour slammed the bag, and her fist, on the metal, knocking a cascade of golden widgets and rusted dust off of it.
“You could just eat in your room.” Sugarcoat said, gingerly bending down and waving around a magnet to catch the errant components.
“My room’s comfy and all, but it's a damn storage closet I can’t even stand up in without banging my head on a pipe that still somehow manages to drip even though we’re in the middle of fucking desert!”
“I’m getting better. It should only be another month or two.” Sugarcoat said, sorting the miniscule gears back into their appropriate cans and jar.
The sound of clinking brass against tin and steel against glass filled the air for longer than either girl wanted it to. Eventually, Sour spoke, “Do you know how hard it's been?”
“I can imagine. You weren’t the only one to spend the last three years of your life in an apocalyptic wasteland.” Sugarcoat said, screwing a cracked mason jar shut.
“And I hope you don’t mind Us asking, Sugarcoat, but what was the scariest thing you ever did? When was it that you felt like your heart was going to explode right out your chest exactly?”
Sugarcoat dropped the jar.
“The fight outside the gas tanker. I honestly thought that I was going to die right there, having lost Lemon Zest and having never found Sunny Flare. Does that answer your question, or I should tell you the story in excruciating detail, again, just so that you can fall asleep without spending half the night bickering with yourself?” Sugarcoat said nearly a minute later.
“Thanks, but We neither need nor want your sympathy. We want you to be useful, for fuck’s sake, We want you to actually do something and not be some shitty kind of leech in our miserable life!” Then Sour Sweet smiled or, at least, she tried to, “And in case you were wondering, We’ve done worse than your little firefight. Risking my life in this shithole city is all We’ve been doing for the last three years and now that We’re also doing it for somebody else, maybe, just maybe, We might actually appreciate some gratitude.”
Sugarcoat raised an eyebrow.
“We’d appreciate getting the old Sugarcoat back. Because she wasn’t some useless, misanthropic layabout who hides behind an injury she doesn’t have anymore and whines about her dead girlfriend all day while her actually-alive friend goes outside and fights zombies, fucking zombies, to make sure the both of them have enough to eat!” Sour continued, “Now, is that really so much to ask?”
“Sunny isn’t…” Sugarcoat started.
Then she remembered the dream.
Sometimes, the things you left for dreams don’t want to leave just yet.
“I never asked, did I?” Sugarcoat finished.
“Asked what, exactly? What Our life was like, living in fear every day because some psychopath who was even crazier than you might try to abduct and torture you? That she might then try and rip your heart out in a sacrifice to their fucked-up god? That, even if you get away, and escape their Tartarus-on-earth tower city, they’re still looking for you? That once you think you’re safe, you have to kill your friends, again and again and again because they don’t die no matter what you do? That you see your allies, those people you thought you could trust, slowly turn into mindless undead monsters? That when you find somebody, somebody you actually genuinely like, and you find that she’s okay, she hasn’t gone mad yet? That might really just need a shoulder to cry once in a while…” Sour blinked the tears out of her eyes, “Yeah, We know exactly what that feels like. We lived through it.”
Sugarcoat looked down and sighed. “She really is dead.”
“My condolences, Sugarcoat, We’ve only been telling you this for the past two months.” Sour Sweet put a hand on her friend’s shoulder, who, for once, didn’t wince.
“Yes. I should’ve believed you.” Sugarcoat said, looking over to the boarded-shut window where, among most of the other furniture, a single pink suitcase lay, still unopened, with a nametag still unread.
“We don’t have to do much. Not immediately.” Sour said, sliding onto the bench next to a blankly starting Sugarcoat, sliding an arm around her and pulling her into a hug, “We should just do something, alright? To get you off of your ass and back on your feet.”
“Thank you.” Said Sugarcoat, “I promise that I’ll pay more attention to your… issues in future.”
“That’s so considerate of you, it isn’t like everyone else who said that didn’t but We appreciate it anyway.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know, you’re always so serious you sucked the life any party you ever went to.”
Sugarcoat smiled weakly, “I know. It was important that Indigo Zap knew the difference between a barrister and a bannister before she tried to slide down the former.”
“There she is!” Sour hugged her friend harder, hard enough to actually hurt, “Now we’ve still got a few hours before sunset, so let’s go and kick some ass!”