//------------------------------// // Chapter 3 // Story: The Crazy Girl // by I-A-M //------------------------------// Our food got to the apartment about fifteen minutes after we did. I consider that to be one of the major upsides of having a bunch of delivery apps on my phone. It helps that I don’t have to pay for any of it, though. Between Grubber’s skills at manufacturing identities and the absolutely bonkers amount of money that Adagio, Aria, and Sonata have accrued over the years, we don’t have much to worry about financially. With that said, we still all have jobs, mostly so we can stay above-board paperwork-wise.  Tempest, Sour Sweet, and I work night shift security at an industrial park. Tempest is the night supervisor and is surprisingly good at her work. Sour and I are partnered up and our job mostly involves driving our little car in circles and occasionally calling in a break-in which is rare, but it definitely happens. Tonight is our night off though, Sour Sweet’s and mine, anyway. Tempest picks up extra shifts whenever she can, but not because she needs the money. She works so she doesn’t have to think about Sunset, which I get. I don’t know if that’s the healthiest coping mechanism, but I understand. We all do. So it’s just me and Sour Sweet tonight, which isn’t unusual. What’s a little unusual is that we’re sitting on the couch, curled up, sharing a few plates of curry and a giant pile of jasmine rice, while a movie about giant robots punching interdimensional sea monsters from space plays in the background. I’m not really watching it, to be honest, I’m just enjoying leaning against Sour Sweet while we eat.  Sour isn’t what you’d call a dainty eater and she’d probably eat curry with a trowel if I let her. She also does this thing where she doesn’t give a damn how hot the food is and just inhales it, then immediately starts breathing like an asthmatic dragon while simultaneously trying to swallow the bite she just took so she can take another bite despite knowing damn well how hot the food is. It’s a disaster and I kind of love it. “Breathe, Sour, breathe,” I groan as I swat her back repeatedly while she coughs around her latest inhaled bite of red curry. “I swear to god if you die to a bamboo shoot down your windpipe I’m gonna kill you.” “Ack! Bleh!” Sour hacks and coughs a few times before swallowing, then grabbing a beer and chugging half of it down and sighing in relief. “Ah! That hit the spot.” “You almost died, genius,” I grumble as I settle back under the blanket and lean against her. “Pfff, I did not,” Sour wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me closer, and warmth colours my cheeks. I rest my head in the crook of her shoulder and turn my eyes to the TV, even though I’m not really seeing it. I can’t stop thinking about what Sour Sweet said while we were out today, about my anxieties over my hallucinations, and my sense of smell. For a moment, I close my eyes and just breathe. I take long, deep breaths, trying to focus on just my sense of smell and try to pick out the individual scents of the room around me. I can smell Sour Sweet, and all her myriad scents, from her cotton candy bodywash to her vanilla lotion. The smell of curry is rich in the air, obviously, but beneath that is the incense that Tempest burns every so often in her room and fills the air with a kind of smoky savor that I actually find calming. I pick out each scent and to my relief, I can find a home for every one of them in my memories. Sour Sweet is right, my sense of smell might be my most trustworthy sense after all. “I know I bought dinner but maybe wait til we finish it first?” Sour’s sardonic lilt breaks me out of my half-trance enough to realise I’d pressed my nose right up against her neck. Scarlet embarrassment creeps up my cheeks for a moment but Sour Sweet just laughs and tugs me closer when I try to back up. “Sorry,” I mumble against the cotton tee that’s covering her shoulder. “I was thinking about what you said before… about my sense of smell.” “Oh, yeah…” Sour frowns, then grabs the Gamestation controller and pauses the movie. “Wait here, okay?” Sour sidles out of the mass of blankets we’d ensconced ourselves in and walks over to her room. I can hear her bustling around in there for a while, sounds that are briefly broken up by muffled swearing before she comes back out carrying something wrapped in folds of leather. I open up the blankets again in a silent invitation that Sour accepts, and once she’s comfortably beside me again, she pulls up the wrapped object and starts unraveling the leather cord that’s tying it closed. “What’s that?” I ask. “It’s a present!” She says with a smile that morphs into a frown a second later. “Hope you won’t have to use it.” The folds of leather fall loose and Sour Sweet lays the bundle down on the cover between us, pulls the last fold away, and lifts up a two-foot-long, sharpened, bone-handled machete. “What the hell?” I raise an eyebrow as I reach out and run my finger along the thick, heavy spine of the blade. “Do you like it?” Sour asks, holding it out. “It doesn’t take much practice, but you can definitely take someone out at the knees with it.” I wince and laugh weakly. “I… wow, Sour, this is… kinda intense.” “You don’t have to take it,” she says quietly, and I can see her mood starting to dive. “I just…-” “No! I love it!” I hold my hands out for it, and Sour smiles again, then holds out the machete, hilt-first, towards me. I take a firm grip on the weapon, heft it, and find to my surprise that I actually like how it feels in my hands. It’s solid, sturdy, and certain, which doesn’t describe very much about me or the life I’ve lived, but this machete…  “I still practice my bow because I like knowing I can defend myself,” Sour starts in a quiet tone. “Just in case one of those things ever comes back for us.” A shiver goes up my spine at the sideways mention of the Killers, and I nod. “So uh,” Sour starts again, then shrugs, “I thought m-maybe you’d feel the same way. I can teach you how to use it.” I turn the machete over in my hands several times, admiring the hard, sharp lines of it. For some reason, it reminds me of Sour Sweet. Just a little bit. The straight-backed spine of the weapon contrasted by the smooth, lunar curve of the edge, and the sturdy, unyielding weight of it all definitely appeals to me. It isn’t a graceful weapon, nothing like Sour Sweet’s gorgeous bow and her incredible archery skills, but she’s been honing those for years. I’m more of a scrapper in a fight, so a machete probably fits me better. Plus, the blade is short. If I have to practice with something to defend myself I’d rather do it with a weapon that will force me to get close enough for me to be certain it’s… real. “I’d really like that,” I say finally and smile back at Sour. “It’s kind of messed up, but I think knowing how to use it would make me feel a little better.” “I mean, it is a little messed up,” Sour admits, “but we were also trapped in a murder dimension, so fuck it.” I can’t help it. I start laughing again, and Sour Sweet joins me a second later.  Objectively speaking, I know how bad off the pair of us are, and Tempest isn’t any better. Maybe Aria and her sisters are handling things a little more in stride because they’re so damn old, but the three of us are just vanilla humans. We don’t have the benefit of like, a thousand years of mental padding to fall back on. I set the machete back into its leather wrap carefully before folding it up and tying it off with the cord. As far as presents go, this is definitely a weird one, but it’s thoughtful in a very ‘Sour Sweet’ sort of way. The wrapped machete goes onto one of the end tables, and I curl back up against Sour Sweet for the rest of the movie. I’ve seen it before, and it’s a fun one, but I can’t wrangle my focus enough to care about it right now. As the final scene is playing out, I start to hear it again. Thump-thump Thump-thump I know it’s not real, but I hold on to Sour Sweet tighter anyway as a familiar prickle goes up my neck and a chill goes down my spine. Back in the Trials, that was always my way of telling if I was being watched or not. Now that I’m out it’s a pretty good indicator that there’s something in the corner of my eye that I should probably try very hard not to pay attention to. “Starlight?” Thump-thump Thump-thump I clench my eyes shut. This is ridiculous. I know there’s no one there. We escaped, the Entity and his hunters can’t get us now! I’m safe! I’m in my apartment with Sour Sweet and I’m safe! “It’s okay.”  Sour fingers card through my hair in gentle petting motions, and something about the repetitive sensation pushes away the impending panic attack, heading it off at the pass while Sour hums, soft and wordless, next to me. She can’t hold a tune in a bucket, but I don’t care, it helps, and I cling to her. “I can hear it,” I whisper, and Sour’s slow, metronomic motions stutter for a moment, but don’t stop. “The heartbeat… and their eyes… I can feel them watching me.” “There’s no heartbeat, Star,” Sour says. “Believe me, I’d know.” “But what if there is a heartbeat?” I ask with the painfully high tone of a terrified child. “Not… not now, but one day… what if they come back for us? And what if I ignore the heartbeat because it’s not real, but then it is real, and then they-” “Then I’ll hear it,” Sour says. “I don’t hallucinate, I just have a mood swing on nitrous!” “But what if you’re not there?” I ask in a tiny voice. “Then I guess I’ll never leave you alone again!” I flinch at the acid in her voice. She’s tired of me… she’s losing patience, I can feel it. I… I can’t… “I… shit, that…” Sour takes a long breath, sits up straight, and pulls me close. “I… didn’t mean for it to come out like that,” she says slowly and carefully. “I mean it, I… I just won’t leave you alone… ever.” I stare at Sour as she refuses to meet my eyes. For a moment there… no, I’m certain of it. She did her absolute best to keep her tic under control specifically because she was serious. The movie rolls to credits in the dead silence of the living room. I’m not really sure what to say, or even if there is anything to say. Part of me wants to just restart it, or start a new movie, or anything so long as it means I don’t have to get up and go back to my room, alone, and try to sleep. Which is when an idea comes to me. It’s a little nuts, but then again, so are the both of us, so maybe…? “Hey Sour?” I start cautiously, and she looks down at me curiously. “Can uhm… can I stay with you tonight? Like, in the same bed?” Much like laughing, blushing isn’t something Sour Sweet does often either, but I really do like when it happens. It’s pretty, and her freckles stand out a little more. I give her my best ‘please’ smile and bat my eyelashes a little for good measure. To my surprise, she crumples. “Ugh… y-yeah, okay.” Sour disentangles herself from the covers, stands, and holds a hand to me. I take it. To my surprise she lets me lace my fingers with hers. In fact, she actually squeezes back a little. I grab the machete on our way out of the living room, and I follow her, still riding a little endorphin high from being able to comfortably hold hands with Sour, and we go into her room. I’ve only been inside once or twice because she usually keeps it locked. Her entire room is freakishly neat, clean, and, in a word, compulsively well organised. There’s a perfectly measured rack on the wall where she hangs her bow and quiver, along with a set of hooks, all screwed into the wall perfectly level with one another, that more quivers hang from.  There are two shelves in Sour Sweet’s room. One is dedicated to books which are organised by subject, and then suborganised by the author’s last name. The other shelve is mostly empty but the few things that are on it are knick-knacks that I can’t readily identify. A small, wooden comb. A string of wooden beads. An origami crane. Nothing specific, just little objects that seemed to exist apropos of nothing. She never commented on them and I never asked about them. I’m not even sure where they came from, only that one day they weren’t there, and the next day they were. Her dresser has four drawers, and each drawer has precisely folded outfits, but she only ever chooses four to wear in any given week. I once asked her why and she just shrugged and told me she gets anxiety if she has to choose more than four, and only wearing three outfits a week just seems trashy. It was a very ‘Sour Sweet’ answer. Sour’s bed has a grey mattress cover, grey sheets, grey blankets, grey pillowcases, and is made with such perfect, military precision that I swear she does it with a construction level.  Once we’re inside the room, I take a seat on her bed as Sour Sweet goes through her paces of dressing down. I’ve seen it a couple of times, and it’s a little eerie how it’s always the exact same motions. It’s like, the moment she gets into her room she turns into a robot with a set of pre-programmed motions. She lets down her hair first, then picks up the comb from the shelf, cocks her head to the left, brushes it all the way through four times, then cocks her head left and repeats the process. Once she finishes, she tidies up the comb, throws any loose hairs into the garbage, and puts the comb exactly back where she found it. Then she picks up the string of beads and counts them. It’s almost like she’s counting a rosary or something, but not quite. She doesn’t say anything, she just stares at the crane while she thumbs past each individual bead. I have no idea how many times she counts it but it takes her a few minutes to finish. And then the beads go right back to their place. Only when she’s done all of that, does she relax, turn, and smile at me. “Okay, ready?” She asks, and I nod. She pulls off her shirt and pants, and pulls on a loose sleep shirt. I just strip down to my skivvies like always, burrow under the covers, and shiver at the feel of the cool sheets on my skin as I relax on the right-hand side of the bed.  Sour Sweet joins me a few seconds later, shifts close to me, then surprises me by wrapping her arms around me and pulling me right up against her until my whole body is flush with hers. This is good. This… this feels good. I take a deep breath and brace myself. I want to do this. I want to tell Sour Sweet how I feel, and this… this feels like a good time. “H-Hey, Sour?” I say quietly. “Yeah?” “Uhm…” I let out a slow breath and laugh softly. “If… If I said I really like you, would that be weird? I mean like… I know I’m a lot to deal with, but I thought maybe you’d like to try and go out with me and… and… and why are you laughing?!” My cheeks are flaming red as I pull back from Sour Sweet who is barely managing to stifle a fit of body-shaking hysterics, and a few moments later she gives up and just rolls onto her back and howls with laughter. I’m not sure if I want to have a panic attack, throw up, and punch her in the face, but I’m seriously considering doing all three when she finally manages to get herself together, sits up in bed, and stares at me with a look of total bewilderment. “Star… Starlight… babe, are you seriously asking me out?” Sour asks, and before I can answer her tone shifts and she jerks her thumb back at the living room. “Because I thought we were on like, date three, out there.” My jaw hangs open at that. “W-What?” “Well… I… I just assumed, okay?!” Sour says a little frantically. “I mean… I thought we just kind of, silently agreed to be going out? And so I’ve been trying to be a good girlfriend and shit and-” “When did we start going out?!” I wrack my brain trying to think of three whole dates I apparently spaced on. “W-We went out to lunch and got ice cream last month, remember?” Sour says. “And we went to that antique book store?” “That was a date?!” I sit back and stare up at the ceiling as I think back to that day. Wow, now I finally get why Sour was so insistent on paying for everything that day. Also, she was super thoughtful all day, and she complimented my hair, and- godammit I am so stupid! “And then a couple weeks after that, we went to see-” “-Casablanca at that old theater,” I hang my head as I guess at the next one, “right… in retrospect that one seems kind of obvious.” Sour rubs the back of her head and chuckles weakly. “I uh… I guess I never actually asked, though, huh?” “Well, in both of our defenses-” I gesture broadly between us as I look up at her, “-neither of us are exactly aces when it comes to romance… I’ve never even been on a date.” I pause, then hang my head again and sigh. “Okay, well, actually I’ve apparently been on three dates, I just wasn’t paying attention.” “Wow we are bad at this,” Sour laughs. “Gosh, I sure am glad my parents prepared me for all this! Not!” “I spent ages sixteen to eighteen in a psych ward, so how do you think I feel?” I shoot back. And she laughs. God I love her laugh. I laugh right along with her and before I know it we’re collapsed back on the bed, cackling, and Sour Sweet is pulling me into her arms again. “Okay, so… girlfriends?” Sour asks. “ I promise I’ll tell you when we’re on a date next time.” “Uh, thanks, and yeah,” I move up and kiss her on the cheek, “girlfriends sounds good to me.” “Cool.” Sour kicks at the blankets and settles both us underneath them, then pulls me snug against her. I shiver in delight as she brushes her lips over my forehead “Goodnight, Sour,” I say softly, and hug my new(ish) girlfriend tight. “And thanks for putting up with me.” “Anytime, Star,” Sour says. For the first time in a long time, I don’t wake up to the thunder of a Killer’s heartbeat that night. Maybe because I can hear Sour Sweet’s heartbeat instead. I like to think that’s the reason… even if it’s not true. Whatever, I’m crazy. True has variable definitions for me. Maybe this is just one of the upsides. Starlight Glimmer… crazy in love. Yeah. I like that.