Chapter Text
When Marcy opened her eyes, the rest of her body wasn’t working.
It was a feeling she’d gotten used to over the past few months, her neural connections having been severed and handed over to someone else. What made this particular instance terrifying was that this time, there was no one else in there; it was just her, alone, in a body that refused to respond to her and give a physical outlet to her panic.
She couldn’t turn on her side or kick the covers off, but her chest still heaved as it tried to take in as much air as possible - and then her breath hitched, and a sob managed to make its strangled way out of her throat, and it was then that she decided to make the most of what little she could actually do. She’d take her body back, bit by bit. She’d make her presence known if it killed her.
Something moved in the room she was in. As it was, she could only see a wood-tiled roof over her head, and her memory was too slow to pinpoint exactly why it looked so familiar before a face swam in her field of vision, hovering above her.
“Marcy?”
Curious brown eyes peered down at her under a tangled mass of equally brown hair.
Her heart remembered before her brain did. Marcy couldn’t feel pain, either, which was maybe the only upside to this whole thing - but she swore something in her still ached. “Anne?”
It was barely a whisper, but Anne politely waited for Marcy to finish rattling it out before rushing forward.
Anne didn’t even try hugging her. She just dropped down on her, going as limp as Marcy’s whole body felt. Someone else came up on her other side, too, and threw their arms around Marcy’s neck, and held her so tightly it almost cut off her breathing. She still smelled of bubblegum, even under the more acrid tang of Amphibia that clung to everyone’s skin.
“Sash -”
“Don’t speak,” Sasha said, sounding infinitely small. “We didn’t know if you’d ever wake up. Save your strength.”
Marcy’s system was a mess of mixed responses and brain chemicals as it got used to her presence again. She knew because she literally felt the adrenaline that had sustained her in the fight, and possibly kept her alive after, come down as her friends held her, and she had the sudden urge to laugh until her throat was scratched and bloody. She hadn’t fought off Amphibia’s greatest minds to come back to herself and stay silent now.
“Let me look at you.”
She didn’t care if she sounded like she was begging. Her world had ended once already, when she’d died with her friends hating her. It could end again, for all she cared, if this time around she at least got the opportunity to make things right first.
Anne and Sasha immediately complied. They didn’t stop holding her, not for one second, but they backed away just enough so that she could see them, front and center. Anne snaked an arm around her back to help her sit up as Sasha fluffed up her pillow, so she could also see the rest of the room now - the Plantars’ basement, of course. All of Anne’s things were still where Marcy had last seen them, but Sasha had scattered around her own stuff, too. Sasha’s armor lay next to Anne’s battle of the bands outfit, her guitar next to Anne’s bass - and one of Anne’s magazines was opened facedown on the floor, next to two makeshift beds that had been laid out almost on top of one another in a corner of the room.
Marcy, on the other hand, seemed to be in a real bed, or at the very least, on a real mattress. Anne and Sasha were in their pajamas, and the light coming in from the window was pale and dim, so she could only assume it was night. They’d been sleeping, possibly even finally resting after the heat of the battle, and they’d sprung up and run to her because they’d heard her whimper.
She’d missed them so much. She wanted them to know, and she wanted to touch them, to make sure they were real and not just more of the cruel illusions the Core made to trap her in her mind - but she couldn’t.
“I can’t feel my body.” She thought it was important they knew - both so they could keep track of any adverse side effects, and so that they didn’t wonder why she wasn’t hugging them back.
Anne rolled off to the side immediately, perhaps worried they were crushing her. Sasha, on the other hand, seemed to understand what she meant. She was wearing her hair down, which framed her face messily. It made for a vulnerable look that Marcy wasn’t used to seeing on her.
She took Marcy’s hand, ran her fingers over it like tiny pinpricks.
“Do you feel that?”
“Yeah.”
“You feel it. That’s good news.” She seemed to be watching Marcy’s face for confirmation, but Marcy couldn’t nod. So she just made a noise of assent.
Her other hand was taken by Anne, who went on to do much of the same thing. “What about this?”
“Yeah.”
“And this?”
“Anne, I don't think this is doing what you think it’s doing.”
“I’m doing what you are,” Anne insisted, holding Marcy’s hand directly to her cheek.
“You’re scaring her. Her heart rate’s gone up to like, six thousand.”
“It’s fine,” Marcy promised, hoping that the simple reassurance, if delivered with enough desperation, would be enough to keep them from pulling away. Their hands on her were her only point of contact; she felt numb everywhere else. “I feel it. I just can’t move. Please, don’t leave.”
It might not have gotten them to stop worrying about her - Sasha’s fingers still circled her wrist, checking her pulse, and Anne looked even more alarmed than before, like she’d found her friend to be even more fragile than she thought - but it did get them closer again. More specifically, it got them to pull the covers back.
“Never,” Anne said, climbing in after Marcy immediately. “MarMar, we’re never leaving you, okay?”
“We’re here for you,” Sasha concurred. “We’ll take care of you. You don’t have to worry about anything.”
They wrapped themselves around her and tried to talk her into sleep, offering reassurances and shushing sounds and stories of fun adventures they’d had in their time apart. They’d talk about the really big stuff later - for now, they could pretend to live in a world where Anne’s greatest distress had come from trying to keep Hop Pop from getting scammed, and where Sasha had had the time of her life leading a townwide rebellion.
They kept going like this until they were too tired to keep speaking, and Marcy too tired to keep listening. She kept looking, though. At some point in the night, Anne and Sasha’s hands sneaked out of the covers to touch, and they stayed entwined there, over Marcy’s stomach. They stared at each other from across the small bed, eyes never wavering - and Marcy felt caught in it, too.
In popular thinking and abstract reasoning, it’s common to associate the brain solely to logic and rationality, with the heart being responsible for love and all other feelings. The calamity gems reflected that idea, separating heart from wit - and so did the Core, which had tried everything in its power to erase Marcy’s feelings.
But Marcy knew the truth, which was that the brain is the one in charge of all cognitive processes - the rational, as well as the irrational. A conglomerate of Amphibia’s greatest minds was always bound to have an equally great untapped potential for love; and that had been its undoing.
Marcy, who according to the Core was the brightest of them, liked to think this meant she had a certain affinity for that sort of stuff, as well. Something had happened between Anne and Sasha while she was gone, and while it didn’t take Marcy a lot of time to figure out, she couldn’t help but wonder if Anne and Sasha were aware.
Granted, Marcy had a lot of free time these days, and she filled it by getting accustomed to her body again, and to the world around her, and observing the people she loved - so some of it might have just been the conjecture of a bored mind left with nothing to do but rest. Yunan and Olivia helped her bathe and dress up in the morning, then some Newtopian nurse looked over her physical therapy, and she spent the rest of the day being wheeled around Wartwood, eating to regain her strength, and talking to the villagers to regain some sense of normalcy.
Still - some things stood out to her, and she noticed.
She noticed, for example, when Anne and Sasha rounded the corner hand in hand and, seeing her reading in the garden, dropped them immediately. She noticed them talking in hushed tones in the kitchen when the basement door was ajar, Anne touching Sasha’s shoulder and leaning in to her and Sasha’s soft, unintelligible replies.
She noticed when Anne chose Sasha’s training ground as the spot for her and Marcy to hang out at, and how she kept throwing glances Sasha’s way whenever there was a lull in the conversation.
“Again,” came Grime’s voice, who was moving back into position. On his cue, his and Sasha’s swords bristled in the air again.
Marcy couldn’t blame Anne for looking. This was when Sasha was at her best, all her fierceness and rage channeled in the fight, eyes glinting under the stray locks of blonde hair that escaped her ponytail. Like Marcy, Sasha couldn’t be still for very long, but while Marcy’s energy was aimless, Sasha always found a way to redirect it towards a cause she believed in - be it defeating an evil newt king once and for all, or protesting for better food in the school cafeteria. Sasha found herself in the action, and with it she found purpose.
She seemed to notice their eyes on her - Anne’s, she noticed Anne’s, her eyes never left her face - and smirked, visibly entering showing-off mode. This was her cause now, this had always, perhaps, been her cause: catching Anne’s attention and keeping it.
She was just a little bit faster, put a little bit more strength in her blows, and when she had Grime down at swordpoint she threw a glance their way to see how the fight had been received.
Marcy had no doubt Sasha had gotten what she’d wanted. Anne hadn’t spoken for about ten minutes, and even if she’d tried at one point, Marcy certainly wouldn’t have noticed. Everything in Sasha seemed to soften at once - her shoulders, her demeanor, her smile. Because Anne had been watching, open-mouthed, Sasha had become the vulnerable girl from the other night again, only to be reminded that the fight wasn’t over yet by being absolutely decked in the face.
“I am not above playing dirty,” Grime gritted out, jumping up again. “We march on Newtopia in a week. If your friends aren’t gonna train with us, maybe they should be somewhere else.”
Marcy, who would’ve very much liked to train but was only just regaining feeling in her legs, looked expectantly at Anne. Anne, who was always down for a good sword fight, muttered something about needing to get lunch under her breath, and she and Marcy left the scene.
It should be pointed out that by getting lunch, Anne really meant grabbing something off Hop Pop’s stand while he wasn't looking, which had them scrambling to get away as fast as Marcy’s wheelchair would allow. Anne kept pushing her all through town, never speaking except for when someone spoke to her first, and always offering words of encouragement to whoever did.
All of Wartwood was in fervor today, preparations for the oncoming fight rippling through every street - people carrying crates, forging or trying out weapons, sitting around in the town square telling stories and delivering motivational speeches. It was also more crowded than ever, what with it being no longer just a tiny village in Frog Valley, but also a base of operation for the resistance against Andrias. Any place on Earth would have either run itself ragged with dread over the incoming fight or spent what could have been their last days trying to ignore they’d be the last.
Not Amphibia. They’d learned to take life as it came. The constant prospect of death, or destruction, or annihilation only made each moment everyone was alive that more important. Marcy, who’d died twice by now, could relate. It was why she decided to speak.
“I look at her too, you know,” she said, turning back to watch Anne’s reaction. Her friend startled like she’d been lost in thought. “I mean, it’s hard not to.”
Anne grimaced, almost imperceptibly, but Marcy had a lifelong experience in reading her best friend’s moods. “This is… different.”
“Yeah? Different how?”
“Don’t worry about it, okay? Just focus on getting better.”
“How is you telling me what’s going on between you and Sash getting in the way of me getting better?”
“‘Cause Sasha thought it would hurt you. We know you get weird about… stuff.”
It wasn’t very eloquent, but Marcy still got the jist of it. She couldn’t exactly hold it against them - she’d done her best to hide how much it hurt to feel excluded, how much effort she put into turning most of the time Anne and Sasha likely planned to spend alone into a group hangout, but sending herself and her friends to another world so they wouldn’t be separated must’ve undone a lot of that work very quickly.
As for what she was reading between the lines, it didn’t come as a surprise. It was something she’d been afraid of for a long while, but at least now that she knew it was happening, she could stop dreading it.
“So you like her.”
Anne did not reply. Instead, she made an abrupt stop, and then an equally abrupt turn onto the path leading towards the woods.
“Oh my God, you do.”
“Marcy, I am going to dump you on the track and leave you to the killerpillars.”
“Please, you can’t leave your best strategist to die. Your last battle plan was let’s storm Andrias’s castle and hope for the best.”
“And it worked, didn’t it?”
“Anne.” Marcy lowered her voice, thinking maybe it was the lack of secrecy that was making her friend so uncomfortable. “When did things change? I mean, last I checked, you didn’t even want to be friends with her anymore.”
Again, Anne didn’t reply, but she didn’t look like she was going to ignore the question altogether. She also didn’t look like she was leading Marcy to her next death. She seemed to be guiding them back towards the Plantars’ home, supposedly thinking it over as they went.
Marcy couldn’t blame her; if someone asked her when she’d started wanting Anne and Sasha as she did, she wouldn't have been able to answer, either. Part of her thought she'd been born with that want, with the lack of them at the center of her.
“She held me,” was what Anne settled on eventually. The house was empty around them, and Anne was already toiling away on the kitchen counter, cutting and slicing produce into a pot and even preparing little side dishes with fruit and berries for Marcy to munch on while they waited for the water to boil. Marcy couldn’t use her hands though - or her legs, or any muscle from the neck down, really - and she was afraid she was going to have to remind Anne of that, until Anne sat down with her and started going through her food for her.
It was still humiliating, to be sure. Anne and Sasha had already spent their lives trying to keep her from dying in a ditch, and she’d expected fighting a technological abomination for them to be the first step to paying them back. But instead, because she couldn’t even keep the king from killing her, much less come back right, they were now stuck having to feed her and wheel her around and walk on eggshells around her, because poor little Marcy had already been through enough.
Any day now, they’d grow tired of her, and they’d leave her, and they’d be well within their rights to do so. She just wished it would show on their faces when it happened, so she would know when to brace for it.
“But not, like - patronizingly, or anything. I just, I’d been holding it together for so long, and I’d finally managed to make it back from Earth, and though there was still some tension between us, seeing a familiar face just broke me. Even if that person was Sasha, or - or maybe because it was Sasha, and I was so used to letting her take care of things for me.”
Anne held a blueberry up to the light flooding in through the window, making sure it was good to eat. There was a sense of warmth and familiarity to that kitchen, to the soft sounds of the pot sizzling in the background, to the spoon slipping past Marcy’s lips, that made Marcy ache.
“But she didn’t try to take control, or tell me what I should do, or - or insist she was the one who had to do it. She just held me, and I let her. I told her everything that was on my mind and she listened, for hours.”
Marcy’s insides were getting all tangled up again. She would have liked to be the one to hold Anne when she needed to; she wanted to hold her just as much as she wanted to be held by her.
“And now I just - I can’t stop thinking about it. She did something to my brain.”
Marcy couldn't help her smile - especially when Anne force fed her another berry to keep it from turning into a smirk.
“Have you told her that?”
“Well, I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t have kept it hidden if I tried. She kept my nightmares away, and one night, I just - blurted it out.” She would have expected Anne to be more flustered than she was. Her dopey smile betrayed no regret. “I wasn’t trying to get at anything, either - not with the war going on, and you still in Andrias’s clutches. I just needed to say it, you know? Even though we agreed it wasn’t the right time.”
And there was that guilt again. Marcy was glad Anne had had someone, despite everything, and she was even more glad that person was Sasha - someone who Marcy loved just as much. Who she’d wronged just as much. They deserved to have that happiness together, and Marcy had taken that away from them, too. Shouldn’t she apologize for that? Nothing could ever excuse what she did, but didn’t she owe them that, at least?
“I’m sorry I got you into this mess. You really don’t have to be so nice to me.”
Anne looked up from the spoon hovering over Marcy’s lips. “No one deserves to starve, Marcy.”
“I mean, it’s my fault all this happened in the first place. You didn’t choose any of it. So I guess I want you to know - it’s fine if you hate me. You have a right to.”
Anne seemed to take that in for a long time, putting the spoon back down and frowning down at it. She just stared, and Marcy found that knowing something was coming didn’t make you any more prepared for it. The simple prospect of Anne realizing she did deserve better and taking her on her word had Marcy wishing she’d done this when she could actually use her legs, when she wasn't bound to a wheelchair and forced to watch all the scorn, all the hatred slowly morphing her friend’s face -
“Marcy, I could never hate you.”
Marcy blinked. “You should. I brought you here, I took your lives away -”
“And then sacrificed yours so I could get mine back,” Anne insisted. “I’m not going to say all is forgiven, but you’ve been through enough. You died. You got possessed. I don’t even know how you broke free of that thing’s control, but you’re here now, and - Sasha and I are not going to waste any more time resenting you. We love you. Nothing’s ever going to change that.”
It was sentences like that which activated Marcy’s scientist brain, as well as the self-destruct button hidden in the back of it. When she heard something being stated with such absolute certainty, she got the urge to put it to the test. Marcy didn’t believe in anything she couldn’t prove herself, and she took a weird sort of pride in being able to prove people wrong - even if it came at her own expense. Perhaps having died once or twice already had only made her more reckless in that regard.
Or perhaps Marcy was just really fucking tired, and lonely, and secretly wished with every bit of herself that Anne really meant what she said.
“Do you promise?”
“Of course.”
That wasn’t enough. She needed to hear Anne say the words, at least to delude herself into thinking they could be true, because she didn’t know if she could give up her biggest secret otherwise. It had been hers for such a long time, and now she was just going to reach inside her chest - maybe through the gaping hole Andrias’s sword had left - and take out a monstrous bundle of shame for her best friend to see.
Marcy tried to reach for her - she could move her fingers, if she really wanted to, but lifting her hand was still terribly taxing. “Can you hold my hands? Like we do?”
Thankfully, Anne seemed to understand exactly what she needed and why she needed it. She smiled, and grabbed her hands, all of her fingers held between Marcy’s thumbs, and swore: “I promise.” Then, to Marcy’s sustained, fearful stare: “Marcy, what’s going on? You can talk to me.”
But could she - could she really? She’d ascertained Anne to be safer than Sasha, but that didn’t mean much when Anne still had as much power over her as she did. Come to think of it, maybe rejection from Sasha would have been better - Sasha, at the very least, was cruel as a state of being. But to be the one who turned Anne into a spiteful, distrusting thing would probably kill her.
Then again - what else had she to lose? She’d been so afraid of them rejecting her, but she’d probably be moving away from them soon anyway - that is, if they all made it back from Amphibia in the first place. She’d been openly resented, and stabbed, and possessed - what more could be done to her? What more could be taken from her?
She opened her mouth to start a sentence about half a dozen times, only to settle on: “Do you want to know? How I broke free?”
Anne held her gaze. “Sure. If you want to tell me.”
“Oh, Anne. It was so easy. I’d just been thinking about it all wrong.” The words started flowing out of her as she walked Anne through her thought process, like she always did when strategizing or DM’ing or trying to solve a math problem. “You see, the Core held the most brilliant minds of Amphibia - of course I wouldn’t be the one to outsmart them all. But that doesn’t mean the hivemind didn’t have a weak spot, because those weren’t just minds, they were people once. People with a life, and loved ones, and - all the memories that made them who they were. The Core tried to erase all of that, but it just couldn’t have functioned as well without it. ‘Cause head and heart aren’t separate. Do you understand what I mean?”
“Anything with memory has a soul.” It came out of Anne so quickly, so thoughtlessly, that Marcy figured she must’ve been quoting someone else. She nodded.
“It meant those people had to be in there somewhere. I didn’t need to beat them - I needed to free them. Which was easy, because fire catches quick when you share a hivemind. The smallest spark reaches everyone, and before you know it hundreds of thousands of millions of memories, and feelings, and faces are flowing in, and everyone is burning.”
She looked at Anne only long enough to make sure that she was still following, then immediately turned her face away. She didn’t need to look at her for this. She probably would never be able to look at her again.
“I thought of you two. How much I didn’t want to hurt you. How much I loved you, even if -” She swallowed down the rest of her doubts. “Even if you didn’t love me the same way.”
Anne’s voice seemed to come from so far away. Marcy couldn’t even tell what lay underneath it, and still it kicked her fight-or-flight response into gear. “Marcy -”
“I held it in for so long, Anne, but - it saved me, in the end. I can’t keep pretending it doesn’t exist.”
“Marcy, I had no idea.”
That’s when the regret started seeping in.
What had she done? Anne had just told her she and Sasha didn’t want to hurt her, that that was why they hadn’t acted on their feelings yet - and now there she went, not only confirming it for them but telling them the hurt would have gone even deeper than they’d imagined. And yet part of her wanted to ask, wanted to scream How did you not know? How did you not realize that I was rotten?
She’d been alone in this for so long. Maybe if they’d paid just a little more attention -
“I mean, Sasha, I expected,” Anne continued. It caught Marcy so off guard that it actually stopped her rapidly spiraling train of thoughts. “I assumed she knew you felt that way for her, and that’s why she didn’t want to tell you about us. You just - understood her in a way I never could, and she seemed to understand you just the same. I felt like I was always struggling to keep up.”
Marcy did not understand. She could buy that Anne had been unaware of her own feelings, but that she’d been so unaware of Marcy’s, of Sasha’s? When she and Sasha had been playing a silent tug of war all along, each wanting Anne’s affections to herself?
Then little innocuous moments started flashing before her eyes, and Marcy could see how easily Anne had misconstrued them - Marcy sinking into Anne’s arms to keep herself from falling, only to be lifted out of them and on Sasha’s back; Marcy always taking Sasha’s side in an argument, because she cared more about preserving what she held dear than potentially disrupting it by trying to make it better. All that time Marcy had been pining, she’d kept her feelings so close to her chest that none of them had ever gotten through to Anne at all.
Marcy had said already that she loved them both, but that would never be enough for Anne to believe her. She needed to address her directly, to see her directly - as her own person, and not just as part of the Anne-and-Sasha creature that lived in her head.
“I always admired you so much, Anne. You were everything I wanted to be.” She would have liked to touch her cheek, but all she could manage to do was brush Anne’s fingers. Marcy’s hand shook with the effort. “I’m sorry I was so afraid to show it.”
She watched little pieces start to fall into place in Anne’s mind, and she finally seemed to reach a certain understanding - but whatever it was, it only seemed to make her sad. Not angry or resentful, as Marcy expected, but mournful, maybe, her voice coming out in a whisper:
“I don’t know what to do about that,” she said - and then, even more terribly: “What do I do about it now?”
Some awful feeling leapt inside Marcy. She didn't let herself process it - she wouldn’t allow herself to hope, not at the cost of the guilt that was sure to follow.
“Look, I’m not trying to get at anything either. I’m not even going to tell Sasha - the last thing I want is to get in the way of you two.” She’d do anything in her power to give Anne some peace of mind, but maybe there was just no peace to be found. It didn’t stop Marcy from rambling on, always hoping the next word would be the one to fix those that were already out: “I’m sorry I had to lay all this on you. It's just like you said - you can’t simply lock feelings away. Sometimes they demand to be spoken.”
“I know,” Anne nodded once, twice, three times - then she reached out to wrap her arms around Marcy, letting her curl into chest like a little kid, or something equally fragile. “MarMar, I’m the one who’s sorry - you should never have been that afraid of us.”
It wasn’t until Anne started hushing her that Marcy realized she was crying. She’d held it back for so long, but it seemed everything was finally flowing out, all at once. She’d shown Anne her bleeding, beating heart, expecting her to be disgusted by it, to finally see Marcy how she saw herself and run.
But not only did Anne not run - Anne held true to her promise. We love you. Nothing’s ever going to change that. Anne finally saw right through her and accepted all of it and apologized, and though Anne had nothing to apologize for, the soft reassurance that You should never have been that afraid of us while Anne’s arms were around her and Anne petted her hair made her want to sob and sob until her throat was raw.
“If you want to, then you should be able to tell her,” Anne murmured, wiping down some of Marcy’s tears. “I think she deserves to know. She needs to be reminded, sometimes - that people love her.”
Marcy thought about it. She did want to tell Sasha; now that she’d started speaking, it felt like she would never stop, and not even her fear of rejection would keep the words from bubbling up in her throat. She’d read enough fan fiction to have come across Hanahaki disease more than a few times, and she remembered thinking it was pretty stupid; but she understood it now, the idea of something physical growing in her lungs that would’ve killed her if she didn’t choke it out.
“When?” Her head rested on Anne’s heart. “Now? Or after the fight?”
“Whenever you feel up to it, Marbles. But if you want my advice - do it before. Give her one more thing to come back to.”
She was going to tell Anne not to sell herself so short, that Sasha had already done the hardest thing in the world and changed herself for her, of course she would live for her, too - but the smell of smoke and burned food filled the room before she could speak, and Anne had to scramble up to turn the stove off and keep the whole kitchen from catching fire.
Sasha’s tent was eerily silent. It was only partially so because it was the middle of the night, everyone who’d been sitting around the strategy table having already left shortly before; most of it was due to Sasha staring at Marcy, frozen in place, her eyes flickering between Marcy’s face and Marcy’s hand on her wrist, where she’d stopped Sasha from leaving to join the others around the fire.
Marcy held her stare. She’d regained most of her strength by now, but she was still abysmally weaker than Sasha. She could pull away if she wanted to - if what Marcy had said had hurt her, or bothered her. She’d done it once before, after all.
But this time, Sasha just whispered: “What was that?”
“I said,” Marcy replied, trying not to think about her wrenching her hands away again, hating her, cursing her, “that I really love you.”
Even in the face of that confirmation, Sasha just sighed. It was an underwhelming reaction, to be sure, but mostly it was a weird one. “Look, I know Anne is worried about me, but I’m fine, alright? I’m not going to do anything stupid. No need to get emotional.”
“Why do you think I’m doing this for Anne? If I hadn’t found the courage to tell you tonight, I would have just told you tomorrow.”
She could tell Sasha didn’t believe her, but she smiled at Marcy like she did, even running her thumb down Marcy’s chin. “That’s so sweet, Marcy. You’re sweet. Thank you.” And then she made to leave, and in the split second of her turning around and back towards the tent’s opening, Marcy caught her smile dropping.
“I wanted to ask you to prom.” That stopped Sasha in her tracks, giving Marcy the chance to pull her back. If her friend was still keeping track of her pulse, perhaps out of habit, she would have noticed it racing. “Both of you. I thought about it, but I could never bring myself to do it. I was too scared.”
Sasha’s face was kept carefully blank. “You said you weren’t going to prom.”
“Because you’d made your plans without me already, and I didn’t want to get in the way. You seemed so happy to go to prom together, and - you clearly weren’t asking for a third, were you? I mean - who is, ever?”
“We are,” Sasha just said. “Marcy, of course we would have wanted you. It’s not like Anne even realized it was a date, or that I wanted it to be, for that matter. We totally could have gone as friends, all of us.”
“But that’s not what I wanted.” It wasn’t entirely true - Marcy had fought to keep even the tiniest shreds of their affection, and would still take anything they wanted to give. But Sasha was just not getting it. “I had two invitations ready, and I couldn’t choose between them. I didn’t even like that I had to. I felt - like the most greedy, most selfish person in the whole world, and if I’d told you, you would have despised me, too. So I never did.”
She let go of Sasha then, fearing that to keep touching her after those words would be overstepping, but Sasha grabbed her right back.
“What did my invitation say?”
Marcy dared to step more into Sasha’s space, checking to see if she would let her - and she did. She laid a hand on Sasha’s cheek, and to her surprise, Sasha leaned into it. “That you were the prettiest girl I’d ever seen. The kindest, too. And that you didn’t have to be so strong and in control all the time, like - like you were afraid of being seen for what you really were. Because it was all lovely.”
Sasha looked at her behind her eyelashes. She wasn’t about to run, which was more than Marcy could’ve hoped for, but Marcy couldn’t tell what she was thinking at all. Not until she saw her face crumple.
“No, no, no, no, no, please, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable-”
“I didn’t know,” she whispered, more to herself than to Marcy. “How did I not know?”
“It’s fine, Sasha, it’s really just -”
She didn’t have the time to figure out how to finish that sentence, because Sasha started crying. Quiet, dignified tears at first, that Sasha tried to wipe away as soon as they fell - but from then on it only got worse. In absolutely no time at all, she was heaving desperate, body-wracking sobs that wouldn’t stop for long enough to let her breathe, and Marcy had to keep talking her through it. She was careful not to touch Sasha too much, lest she freak out even more, but it was Sasha who wordlessly reached out to her, Sasha who dragged her down with her to the floor while she tried to get her bearings back.
Sasha had never reacted like that to anything before - not as long as Marcy had known her, and not where she could see her. She wondered if Anne had been wrong, and if treating Sasha to the added stress of a love confession on top of an upcoming, possibly deadly battle hadn’t been such a good idea. She repositioned the two of them so she could be more comfortable and hold Sasha tighter.
“Sash, hey - talk to me. What’s wrong?”
“This is so stupid,” she managed to choke out, and then she must have felt Marcy freezing under her, because she rushed to explain: “I’m being stupid.”
“You’re not. I just want to know what’s up so I can help you, okay?”
It only made Sasha cry harder. Marcy decided she would just wait for Sasha to speak, to prevent herself from making the situation even worse.
“You keep doing that,” she murmured. “Saying such nice things. Doing such nice things. I never understood how Anne could forgive me, but at least I proved myself to her first. I did nothing to deserve this.”
It made Marcy flinch. Hearing her talk like that hurt - a reminder, perhaps, that she had something to sympathize with her on, that she also had too many things to make up for, and she could only hope her love would be enough to fix it.
“I don't think Anne would like hearing you talk like that. She’s always cared about you, and - so have I.” She swept back some of the hair that was matted to Sasha’s face, tears gluing it to her skin. Marcy never looked away from her, like that would take Sasha out of the moment and break it irreparably.
This was who Sasha was, underneath it all. She didn’t want to scare her into hiding it again.
“I’m so proud of who you’ve become, Sash, but the person you were before - she was good, too. She deserved love, too.”
“I was awful.”
“You were always good,” she said, because she knew Sasha, and she knew Sasha just wanted to hear her say it again, “and I love you. Flaws and all.”
Not despite them, and not because of them. Just, flaws and all. Just Sasha as she was - as Anne no doubt loved her as well.
Marcy had gotten so close to her - Sasha’s eyes red and puffy from all the crying she’d done, tear tracks running down her cheeks like dried rivers - and was so full of this euphoria that came from finally coming clean, like everything was possible and the world was in her hands, that she was in for a rude surprise when Sasha pulled away abruptly. She just got up and brushed herself off, suddenly stilted, like breaking out of a spell.
“I’m sorry,” she said carefully, her features schooled back into a vague detachment that betrayed neither cruelty nor pity. “I don’t feel the same for you.”
Marcy got up off the floor, too, trying to ignore the soft pang in her chest. Knowing didn’t exactly make it better, but it didn’t hurt nearly as much as she thought rejection would feel like. “It’s okay, Sash. I don’t mind. Will you just - remember that? That we want you to be okay?”
Marcy tried to reach for her wrist again, and this time, Sasha didn’t let her. “This is just - a lot,” she stammered, not looking at her. “I have to go.”
A whiff of cold air made its way into the tent, forcing Marcy to cling to her cape, as Sasha quickly fixed up her armor and stumbled off into their last night in Wartwood.
The first time Marcy went looking for Anne and Sasha after everything was over, she found them kissing in a remote hallway of the Newtopian castle.
She hadn’t managed to get a hold of them for days. Sasha seemed to be avoiding her, their interactions limited to Marcy sometimes catching Sasha sneaking glances at her when she thought Marcy wasn’t looking; Anne, on the other hand, was too busy making sure everyone’s spirits were adequately lifted for the upcoming battle to make time for her. Whenever she was able to, she’d assure Marcy that Sasha didn’t hate her, that she just needed some time - but it did nothing to quell the fear that they were all going to die, and that her big mouth had made sure she wouldn’t even be allowed to hold her friends for one last time before then.
But now, finally, they were both there, just around the corner, alive and well and - by the looks of it, happy.
It would have been impolite to interrupt, and impolite to stare, waiting for them to be done; so she backed away and disappeared around the corner again, her insides feeling like an indistinct squiggle on a piece of crumpled paper.
The second time, she found them still kissing, but hushed words were being exchanged all the while. Marcy was too far away to understand even the gist of it, and it just wasn’t worth it to add eavesdropping to her growing list of friendship crimes - so she left again.
The third time, she followed their laughter from the other end of the castle. Anne and Sasha were pushing each other around like kids on a playground and squeaking out grown-up insults such as:
“Get away from me, you freaking stink-”
“How dare you treat your girlfriend like this when she saved your life-”
“Did she? Must have missed that. Was it when you were thrown against the wall again and I had to turn blue -”
“I get in the line of fire for you and this is what I get, you ungrateful little - Marcy!”
By the time she realized Sasha was not, in fact, calling Anne an ungrateful little Marcy, but rather addressing Marcy herself, Anne and Sasha had already thrown their arms around her, and - yeah, maybe Anne did have a point about Sasha, but she was gonna let it slide because they were all alive, and together, and who knew how long it would be before that stopped being true.
“Did you see us?” Anne was saying, shaking her back and forth like a ragdoll. “Did you see us dragging him to jail?”
“Forget that. Did you see us beating his ass?”
“Guys,” Marcy gasped out, breathless from all the laughter. “What are you doing here? I think these are the royal guards’ barracks.”
It was only then that Anne and Sasha seemed to become aware of their surroundings.
“We were looking for the throne room,” Sasha murmured, genuinely confused.
“And you. We were looking for you.”
“Why?”
“So you could take us to the throne room, duh.”
“What’s so important about the throne room? We’ve seen it before,” Marcy tried to say, but it was probably lost on them since Anne grabbed her hand, instantly remembered she had no idea where to go, and resorted to pushing Marcy to the front so she could lead the way as planned.
Despite the fight that had just occurred, the throne room had stayed untouched like it refused to acknowledge anything that went down outside its walls, the seat of the king’s power frozen in time like ripples of the king’s fall had yet to reach it.
This meant that they found the room entirely empty, looking much larger than it already was. The only things that took up space were Andrias’s standards (Sasha tore them down as soon as she came in) and his throne, which would either be destroyed or pass on to someone else in the morning. There were whispers of Lady Olivia taking the throne for herself, though Marcy knew firsthand that her establishing a council was much more likely; but it did seem like a waste, that such a beautiful throne should be in front of them with no one sitting on it.
Sasha clearly had the same idea, because right after she was done with the decor she set her eyes on the other end of the room and - foregoing all elegance - sprinted right to it to plop down on the coral seat, claiming it as her own. It was a visual Marcy very much approved of, and not just because it was as removed as could be from Sasha’s last attempt at a coup.
“We could’ve ruled this place,” she declared, probably aiming for a more solemn tone than her exhaustion would allow. Wordlessly, she turned to Anne, and wordlessly, Anne came forward. “We would’ve been damn good at it, too. I can’t believe you made me be a good guy instead.”
The throne was adjusted to Andrias’s size, so it was big enough for two, maybe three people. But Anne still sat on its left arm, immediately reaching out for Sasha as she laughed.
“Please, no one can make you do anything. That was exactly the issue.”
Marcy couldn’t tell if Anne was pretending not to see, or if she was just that oblivious. Anne might have never outright asked for Sasha to change - because how could she, when Sasha had made it clear how much she didn’t want to - but it was ridiculous to pretend she wasn’t the underlying reason for Sasha deciding to take that step. She was only propped up a few inches over Sasha, yet Sasha was looking up at her like she could never hope to reach her - like she was towering over her, and she was lucky to have caught a hand of hers and to be kissing it.
She never stopped staring, and she never stopped pressing kisses to that spot at the center of Anne’s palm, and it was all too much for even Marcy to handle. She’d grown used to their softness, to mutual attraction; she didn’t know what to do with that kind of adoration. She turned away almost as if on instinct, as if it burned her eyes, and faced the windows; but she still saw them reflected in the glass.
“Marcy?” She heard her name being called, and Sasha motioned for her to sit on the other arm; but it didn’t register that they were talking to her until Sasha spoke again. “Don’t you agree we would have done well?”
Marcy blinked, trying to refocus. “Oh, better than Andrias, for sure.”
“Yeah? How do you picture us?”
That was a dangerous question, but then again, it was what they’d asked for - so she fished for more details on that specific scenario as she joined them on the throne.
“I mean, I guess I have some ruling experience. For a while there I pretty much ran every operation in Newtopia, what with being the king’s advisor, chief ranger, royal engineer -” With a shake of her head, she got herself back on track. “And I know Anne would make the people love her, because she always does, while Sasha would keep them in line. She’d rule with an iron fist when necessary, and be a flawless diplomat the rest of the time.”
Anne smiled at her from the other end of the throne. “You’ve thought about this.”
“I think about us. I thought that was clear.” By the awed looks on Anne and Sasha’s faces, maybe it wasn’t. She felt the inexplicable need to apologize for it, or at least course-correct, before they told her that wasn’t allowed - that they’d agreed to tolerate her love when she couldn’t help but let it out, not to let it leak all over the place. “I mean! I brought you here. The least I could do in the months I was alone was come up with several playable scenarios for us so we’d never get caught off guard.”
“And you made me a diplomat?” She couldn’t tell if Sasha was really offended, or just playing up her annoyance for fun. “No offense, Mar-mar, but I think those days are long gone. I’d be out on the battlefield, fighting to protect the kingdom.”
“Well, what if there was no war? I mean, that’s the goal, right?”
“Then I’d be out protecting you.”
And, saying that, she took Marcy’s hand and kissed it as well.
Marcy’s thoughts were reduced to static.
“You’re so cheesy,” she heard Anne say, as if from some far away place. “We can take care of ourselves.”
“Marcy doesn’t mind. Right, Marcy?”
“I don’t mind,” Marcy confirmed, way too quickly, because Sasha was still staring right at her and her hand was still holding Marcy’s and going against anything she said was unthinkable.
Leaning back in her seat, Sasha smirked at Anne: “She doesn’t mind.”
“Well, yeah, that’s because you broke her. Marcy, have some self-respect, dude.”
“I don’t mind her protecting us. I think it’s romantic.” But something Anne had said had struck a chord in her, and there was something she wasn’t okay with. She might as well voice it now that her brain-to-mouth filter seemed to be broken. “It’s just, I’d never want you to be away from us for too long. I couldn’t bear it. I regret what I did, but I - I brought us here so we could be together. And yet, since coming to Amphibia -”
Well, maybe she could leave that part out. Anne and Sasha looked at her, expectantly, and she cowered under their gaze. “I’m sorry. I know I have no right to complain about that.”
“About what, Marcy?”
Her head dropped to her chest.
“I feel like we’ve barely spent any time together. We were dropped in three different places, leading three different lives, and even when our paths crossed, there was always something tearing us apart again. And that’s no one’s fault,” she made sure to add, because it wasn’t, and she wasn’t gonna let Anne and Sasha think she blamed them for not spending enough time with her in Amphibia when she’d stolen them from their lives, “but if I could choose, I guess - I would have wanted for you to stay with me.”
She couldn’t look at her friends. She felt like all her life, she’d been begging them to pay attention to her, to be burdened with her - and yet every time they had a choice, they chose to leave her. She remembered watching Anne run after the Plantars’ fwagon, hoping and praying until the sun was down that Anne’s heart would lead her back to her instead; she remembered calling for Anne and Sasha as soon as she was out of the tank, expecting them to have saved her as they always had, and finding Olivia and Yunan in front of her instead; and then how she’d been left alone after opening her heart out, because of how unforgivable it was, for her to keep demanding things of them.
Her eyes burned.
“I’m so sorry -”
“Hey, hey, hey. No tears today.” Sasha easily scooped Marcy up from where she was perched and settled her right into her lap, Marcy’s head tucked under her chin. Marcy cried even harder into Sasha’s neck. “What are you apologizing for?”
“I missed you so much,” she confessed, because so long as she kept doing and thinking and wanting shameful things, she’d never run out of confessions to make. “After the last few days, I- I was afraid you wanted nothing to do with me anymore.”
“Hey, no. Never. Marcy, look at me. I’m kissing your hands right now.” Sure enough, she was. The back of it again, as opposed to her kissing Anne’s palm - chivalry against devotion. Marcy’s eyelids fluttered along with her heart. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I should’ve just talked to you, but I was - scared. Thinking about it now, after almost dying - it feels so stupid.”
“No, Sash, it’s okay. I know I can be too much, so I shouldn’t be surprised that you needed time away from me. I just couldn’t stand knowing you’d be risking your lives, and that I couldn’t do anything about it. I wanted to be able to protect you, too. Both of you.”
“And you did, didn’t you?” Anne shuffled closer to press a loud, self-satisfied kiss to her forehead. “You made the plan. You and that beautiful brain of yours. You saved us.”
“And you’re not too much. You’re perfect. You and Anne -” Sasha paused, as if debating whether or not to press through, or perhaps trying to find the right words. “You were on my mind all the time.”
It took Marcy entirely out of the moment, and of her self-pitying spiral - if only because she was now sure none of this was real.
“We were?”
“We were?” Anne echoed, delighted.
Sasha avoided both of their eyes, but she only held Marcy closer. “Yeah. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. About the three of us, together. I’d never really - considered that before, and with a war going on, the timing was less than ideal, so - I freaked out.”
Sasha really thinking about her feelings was only slightly better than not thinking about them at all, but she didn’t seem to be disgusted, or to want to push Marcy away. By the way she cradled her, she’d dare say it was the exact opposite. “Oh.”
Sasha shrugged, though it would have been more accurate to say that her shoulders shook more or less of their own accord. “I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I thought you couldn’t feel that way for more than one person at a time, but my feelings for you didn’t make my feelings for Anne any less intense. If anything, they only got stronger, and they were already more than I could handle. I mean, what crazy feats do you need to accomplish before you can deserve something like that?”
Her head was running. She should’ve asked for clarification, maybe - for a pause in the conversation, so her brain could catch up and understand what exactly was happening here. But said conversation just barreled on without her, unraveling in front of her, not caring if she could keep up with it or not.
“There’s nothing to deserve,” Anne murmured, on the other side of Sasha. “We want to be with you, and you want to be with us. Why make it more complicated than that?”
Sasha blinked back at her, clearly caught off guard. “You wanted nothing to do with me until I made an effort to be better, and you were right.”
“Do you think I didn’t love you before?” She was fully holding Sasha’s face in her hands now, whispering into the small space between them. “When you tricked us, do you think that made me stop?”
“But both of you? I feel like - like that would be pushing my luck, you know? I mean, is that even allowed?”
This all felt like something Marcy should not be privy to - but one of Anne’s hands rested on her shoulder, her other on Sasha’s cheek so that they were both connected to her through touch, and Sasha still traced lines over that spot on Marcy’s hand that she’d kissed again and again.
She slipped her other arm around Sasha’s middle, watching for any discomfort, and sighed in relief when the other girl melted into her instead. A tangle of limbs, they were now. The three of them had never been closer than this.
“It’s allowed,” she said to Sasha - to herself. “You’re allowed.”
Sasha seemed disbelieving at first. Marcy could empathize - despite proof being right in front of her eyes, this felt like cheating. It felt like hubris. In the old myths, that never ended well for anyone.
But Sasha had never played by the rules. She’d always wanted more than she could reasonably have, and she’d always found ways to drag Anne and Marcy into it, and now, as Sasha beamed at her - now Marcy couldn’t help but be grateful to her for it.
“Good. Because the war is over now. Andrias is gone, the Core is gone, everyone - everyone who threatened us is gone, and we’re still here. I never want to leave you again either.”
Marcy closed her eyes against some sudden emotion that was rising in her. It grew and grew until it was almost painful, spread its wings as if wanting to take flight inside her too small ribcage - then suddenly sinking into the pit of her stomach.
“I don’t know what happens when we get home,” Marcy muttered, holding the hem of Sasha’s tunic like she could just refuse to let go of it forever. “My parents might still want me to leave with them.”
She had no idea how the situation with her family had evolved, if it had evolved at all. She hadn’t asked. She’d managed to shut the thought out for as long as possible, but they’d be going home soon, now - and it’d be time to deal with everything she’d left behind.
Sasha didn’t let her get lost in her head, though. She ran her hand down Marcy’s back soothingly, grounding her to the only reality that mattered at the moment.
“Good thing we’re not home yet, then,” she mumbled under her breath, and Marcy sighed at the vibration of it in Sasha’s chest, where Marcy was currently hiding her face. “What do you say we make the most of the time we have left here? Wear something nice, celebrate just - being together. We can figure out the rest later.”
Marcy chanced a look at Anne, and Anne looked back, steady as always.
Oh, Marcy thought. This is happening.
“Just to be clear -” She cleared her throat. “You’re asking me out on a date?”
“No,” Anne said. “We’re asking you to prom.”
Prom turned out to be a ball in Newtopia - the first continental ball in a thousand years, meant to unite frogs, newts and toads at last to celebrate the beginning of a new era.
The Newtopian events Marcy had attended thus far had been little more than chill gatherings of intellectual and politicians where she’d mostly just kept to the sidelines, munching on bug appetizers and studying newt dynamics from afar. This party was different, though. It was more people in one room than Marcy had seen in a long time, and more noise than she should’ve been able to stand - between the mindless chatter, the music blasting from Anne’s phone, and the classical music playing out in the garden.
One last hooray to the human girls, they all said. To the three stars.
All the attention would have overwhelmed Marcy, too, had she not spent most of the evening with her head burrowed in Anne’s neck or in the bubble Sasha drew her in whenever they spun on the dance floor together, whispering jokes and compliments and wry observations about the other guests. Her girlfriends gave her all the attention, all the affection she needed, and she floated above everything and everyone else like her consciousness at the edge of a dream.
She laughed in Sasha’s arms, because of the breath tickling her cheek - and then laughed again as she was passed off to Anne, simply because she was Anne, and Marcy was so happy to be dancing with her, and Marcy loved her.
She loved them both. She told them every day, simply because she couldn’t help it, but she couldn’t make them understand. The peace she felt at just being with them, the relief of having their forgiveness - it was bigger than her still recovering body could contain. It poured out of her messily, like wine dripping out of an overflowing glass. Marcy did not appreciate the waste; maybe if she’d been less herself, less used to smothering herself, she would have known what to do with it. She would have let it crystallize into something, given it a physical form outside of herself, so that she could finally breathe again.
It was a numbing kind of joy that pressed painfully against her ribs, and it must’ve shown on her face, because before the current song could fade into the next Anne slowed to a stop, eyebrows pinched together, and held her hands out to the two of them.
“Come on,” Anne said, “let’s go get some fresh air.”
Marcy’s gown rustled on the floor, her shoes nearly stepping on the fabric in her haste to follow her. Sasha chuckled under her breath, pulling Marcy close to press a kiss to her temple and help hold her up. Her coordination still wasn’t the best, even for Marcy standards - but one day at a time, she was getting back full control over herself. Maybe eventually her mind would heal too, and she wouldn’t have to wake up to nightmares of being trapped inside her head anymore. For now, having Anne and Sasha sleeping next to her helped. It was so easy to fall back asleep with their arms around her.
Anne led them out of the ballroom and through the castle, stopping every time they turned into an empty hallway to spin Marcy and Sasha around, the sound of their laughter rising up into the warm Amphibia night when they finally reached a quiet spot in the gardens, away from prying eyes and from the mindless chatter. A fountain spouted multi-colored light - pink, blue, green; pink, blue, green - like a signal fire, guiding them forward.
“You okay, MarMar?” Anne asked as soon as they were by the jet spray and out of view. “You looked a little off. Did you need a break?”
Without offering an answer, Marcy held her arms out impatiently and head-dove into Anne’s embrace, sinking into her. Anne, though confused, responded immediately, and soon Sasha was there at her back, too, and it was perfect. She could’ve stayed like this forever.
Then Anne touched a hand to Marcy’s chin, gently turning her head up, and pulled back just enough to look at her - which wasn’t nearly far enough not to make her lightheaded. If Marcy only leant the tiniest bit forward - which she realized, with a sudden jolt, was something she could do now - their lips would be touching.
And she very much wanted that.
“MarMar, what's wrong?”
Anne’s question was punctuated by Sasha’s fingers threading through Marcy’s hair - and that was when an issue she hadn’t even considered until now made itself known.
If this had been a movie, this would have been the time for her to spontaneously kiss her love interest and show them how she truly felt - no words needed. The fact that there were two of them complicated things, and her brain was running, trying to find a way out of her dilemma where no one got the short end of the stick.
She had no idea how any of this translated on the outside of her, but Anne and Sasha looked very concerned.
“I’d like to kiss you,” she confessed. “But I can’t kiss you both at the same time, and I don’t know who to kiss first.”
It didn’t matter how stupid her qualm seemed to her; Anne and Sasha would never make her feel stupid about it. They did share a perplexed look over Marcy’s shoulder, perhaps wondering how exactly to go about this, but it was clear to Marcy that this was something they’d talked about, in some form or another - which only flustered her more. She was on their mind, just as they were in hers. They’d thought about this, too.
With one last stroke of her thumb, Anne said: “Okay. Close your eyes.”
And she did. Of course she did. She felt her eyes closing on their own the moment Anne’s touch left, like she’d cast a sleeping spell on her.
It took a bit of fumbling around with their positioning, hushed whispers being exchanged all the while - You go stand beside her and I’ll stay - Alright, we’ll both stay in front then - Wouldn’t it be better if we all sat down - but eventually they were both turned into her, close enough to her face that Marcy couldn’t repress a giggle. It might have come out more like a squeak, though, because Anne and Sasha paused whatever they were doing to check in with her.
“Is this alright?” Sasha asked. Marcy felt either her or Anne clipping a few stray locks back into Marcy’s bun. “We’re not crowding you, are we?”
“No,” Marcy whispered, although barely any sound came out. She accompanied the word with a shake of her head.
Then one of them got closer to her than anyone had ever come before, and their lips brushed hers.
They were timid, like they were afraid to break her if they applied too much pressure, and incredibly soft. They were what she always thought Anne’s lips would feel like, when she did think of them; but when her arms reached up to their shoulders they felt broad like Sasha’s under her hands. Her fingers dipped to the hollow of their neck, like that would help her figure it out, and felt their heartbeat.
So this was what a kiss felt like.
It was weird. Marcy always needed something to keep her body and mind occupied - something to tap her fingers on, to munch on, to hum. It was like she was always chasing that optimal amount of stimulation that would keep her in the flow, but she’d accumulated so much nervous energy during her time under someone else’s control, and then on a wheelchair, that it seemed she would never be able to sort through all of that.
Right now, though, her brain was entirely still. Its only preoccupation was keeping track of the lights flashing behind her eyelids.
Pink. Blue. Green.
Then the person kissing her pulled away, and the world was too loud again, and Marcy would’ve cried like a homesick child - except someone else leaned in and kissed her now, or maybe it was the same person who was kissing her again, and they kept kissing her in turn and she kept chasing them when they left.
At one point, she felt warm tears dripping all over her face. They weren’t her own. She knew it was Sasha before she opened her eyes and found her there, furiously wiping at her own cheeks, trying to muffle her sobs.
“Hey. It’s just us,” Marcy whispered, through a wave of affection that nearly drowned her. “It’s just us.”
Sasha shook her head firmly, as if wanting to protest that, but in the end she gave in to her and Anne’s touch, to their comfort. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I can’t keep it together.”
Marcy smirked against Sasha’s hair. “Did you cry when Anne first kissed you, too?”
“Who says it was her and not -”
“She did,” Anne murmured. “You should’ve seen her. Lots of sobbing and sniffling.” It was meant to be teasing, probably; it failed only because it seemed Anne was fighting through some fondness of her own, and losing miserably. “You’re so cute.”
When Anne kissed Sasha again now, it felt to Marcy not like a wound, but like a cycle closing.