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Qiana has been stolen from, again and again and again, and the only culprit to find is the boy whom everyone holds to believe is the victim of a horrible crime.
poor thing, they call him in the hallways.
"What a dreadful accident."
"All of them, gone... bless him for continuing."
With every time she remembers, she slices the paper as angrily as she can, as choppily and with as much force as her scissors can take. The paper falls to the ground in folded pieces.
With every cut she makes, she imagines it to be a memory cut off, removed, but she always remembers.
---
She is nine, and he is as well; equals as far as every kid is ever concerned, yet he was already different. She should've known that.
But all she knows is that she is in the big meeting room, and Oliver's face appears on the webcam screen; he asks where his family is, what happened to the rest of the crew, as if they could even know what happened on the Arno when they're lightyears away (paper falls to the floor, red triangles that reach out for the mother sheet).
Director Langley walks out. Director Langley walks back in, takes her hand, and points her to a woman standing in the corner of the room.
Saito waves.
In all present truth, Qiana truly does miss Saito, did admire her as if the older woman was her true mother, but the fact is that one day her father was there with his crooked smile and the next, she was being fitted for a small uniform with people she didn't know.
And the connection she's made is that it is quite an odd thing that Oliver calls Langley and just minutes later, Langley steps out of the room, only for her to never see her dad again.
It is Oliver's fault, of course, and with that she cuts off another piece of paper.
---
She was ten, and he was too; ten tries, ten times her face fell every time her wave went unnoticed, every time he would ignore her when she said hi.
Ten times, and it left Qiana feeling very lonely in a world surrounded by people.
---
Of course, sometimes Oliver requests things, and the FCP runs to serve whatever it is he needs, because they're his precious lapdog that does whatever he wants. He has influence over them. The funny thing: if the Arno accident never happened, he never would've been this powerful, this spoiled, in a sense.
(she wonders, sometimes; did he fake the incident, just to get what he wants?)
"Oliver needs us to send him the 3-d printing pattern for new cameras," someone says as if announcing the end of the world. "Hurry, hurry, who's on tech base right now? Qiana, can you run to the filing cabinet and pull out the pattern?"
"I don't see why--"
"Go!"
She runs down the hallways with posters of old, outdated propaganda on the walls and into the filing room. Old cabinets are lined in a row, but for each cabinet there is about nine computers on a table, glowing misty blue. She sighs, thumbing through some old records and finding what they're looking for. It's simple. Did they need to get it to him within the minute?
Oliver's fault, naturally, is the reprimanding she hears when she sends it to him and it's found out that she sent it within three minutes, not two. Who knows what could've happened if he didn't have it, who knows--
(another piece cut off, a circle that lilts to one side; paper litters the floor.)
---
Why had she been so naiive, so silly to put her hopes on a boy who obviously couldn't even care less that she was trying to make a friend?
He turned away, and suddenly she was scared and alone, though nothing changed in the first place; it's not as if they had ever been friends, ever known each other, and she was so bold enough to think that they could be, so scared that she felt as if her best friend for years had left when he simply didn't want to talk.
But the thing is, she's seen him talking to other people: the techs, the maintenance crew, Langley and Dr. Kim.
Yet he doesn't talk to her. He doesn't talk to her, even though she's probably the first person at the FCP who's his age and simply just wants to have a conversation, because it feels like years since her last day at daycare, walking out with a papercraft and a piece of candy in her pocket.
It has been years, actually.
It hits her when her NetGear glasses show her the date on the upper right hand corner and she recognizes it all too slowly as four years since that day. At this point, why is she so surprised? It doesn't feel like it's only been a day; she has had her outfit altered multiple times, hair lengthened, aptitude grown quieter than before, yet somehow, her brain is still reveling in the fact that the FCP has been her home for so long.
She blinks, then gets out of bed and gets into uniform. It's PT day, double laps. She shouldn't be late.
---
In all honesty, she still carries an old piece of paper and safety scissors, more to open her drawer and stare at than actually do anything with; a chain of small paper-people, all holding hands in symmetrical unison, no faces on the blank surface. She almost envies them, in a way. They will never separate or break apart.
Except for the one she cut off at the hand, alone and lost somewhere in her drawer.
The safety scissors meet more than just paper. She faces herself in the bathroom mirror some day when she's fifteen and she trims her bangs, her hair getting jammed, but nobody comments at lunch the same day when she appears with her tray of sandwiches and orange soda and very distinctly unevenly shorn bangs.
(a triangle, this time. It unfolds on the ground and becomes a rectangle.)
---
And when Qiana is sixteen, too old to be treated with smiles and concealment of the raw truth but still too young to be considered a real officer, instead being a drone op and spending most of her time on her NetGear glasses playing videogames, Saito sweeps a hand out on all of them and barks at them to exit the room. Riggs and Felix march out. Qiana hesitates, looks back--
(Saito waves.)
Qiana's arm moves up and her wrist tilts slightly before her hand drops completely and she moves with the other two operatives out of the door.
She'll ask Saito later.
---
Later never came, Qiana exhales sharply, biting the inside of her cheek and reaching for the roll of tape on her desk. Later never came, and Saito didn't come either.
She left. She was gone.
Qiana blinks hard.
---
She is alone again. Really, it's almost funny; she visits her dad down in the cryotube room sometimes, running a hand over the cold glass and wishing she knew the passcode to unlock him, not that that'd do much except get him and herself thrown into another tube... Saito had filled his position, and now Saito is gone too.
All because of Oliver, she muses bitterly, much too nauseous to even finish her breakfast.
---
But, in the middle of it, there is Amy: nothing like Saito, but a glimpse of familiarity nonetheless in her face, her expressions, the ghost of a smile. She looks tired, but they all are.
Except Qiana is part of the reason that Amy is here, and it is haunting to see the end of one of her ponytails shorn off, likely from a blaster bolt that just missed her head, smile lines that obviously have seen much use but are empty and useless now with nothing to smile about. She is branded with a tracking device. Qiana wishes that on nobody.
"We can't be friends," she tells her firmly. "Just... no."
("Hi," she waves to Oliver, "Do you wanna be fr--"
He walks past.)
This time, it's Qiana who is walking by Amy and ignoring her way of being open and being friendly. This time, it's Amy's face who falls, hand drops slowly to her side.
This time, Qiana grabs her nightlight to rummage around in her drawer, pulls out a papercraft lost after seven years, and unfolds it.
---
With every smile Amy gives her, she clips off more pieces of the paper leftover; with every smile she returns, she forms the shapes of more people, more linked hands.
With the hug she feels, hands pressing on her back and red hair in the corner of her vision, she grabs her roll of tape and connects a lost paper doll to the rest of the growing chain.
"I did it, Daddy," she says, pausing.
("It's just while we're finishing this very, very important project at work," he says, kissing her forehead. "Not for long, sweetie."
"But I don't wanna go stay for the after-school activities," she says. "Nobody in my grade is friends with me. Tasha always hangs out with Maru, and I just always sit alone in class and recess and lunch. That's already bad enough."
"But you're going to be doing activities together!"
"I don't want to," she says, scowling. "Nobody will be friends with me."
"Qiana," he says in that slow, smiling voice of his. "I promise you, if you reach out--" he holds her hand, clasps his larger one over hers-- "there will always be people who want to be your friend. If you are kind, they'll be kind to you. You just have to try, sweetie."
"I don't think it's gonna work."
"Promise, you'll at least try once," he persists. "Okay?"
"... okay."
His crooked smile appears, and she mimics it. "There's my girl. Have fun, okay?")
"I made a friend," she whispers, leaning back into her desk chair, holding the paper chain with both hands and repeating the words in her mind; friend, friend, friend, a friend who is silly and can't lie to save her life but cares, brings her burritos from the breakfast line and sits under the big tree in the front lawn just to watch the sunset.
Paper litters the floor, shapes and pieces, fragments of broken memories that, when she breathes in, smells like melted apple taffy and spiced plums, floor cleaner and orange soda; they are splintered and lost, but there is a picture, an idea, if only she knows how to put the pieces together.
---
She has been stolen from, again and again and again; Oliver, of course. Anyone with one braincell can tell just by the way that Amy will hole herself in the room and call him for hours, microwave a dinner and eat it while he makes a ration on his end.
What does she see? What does she see beyond the dark eyes, the unresponsive behavior, the way he ignores everything that he doesn't want to focus on? He is nothing more human than that husk of metal workings that Dr. Kim fashions for him to inhabit on Earth; even on the maintenance calls, he is always deadpan, always cold.
Yet Amy grins and eats bites of waffle with flush on her cheeks afterwards as if he were all smiles and all love.
Oliver has taken from her, again and again, Qiana sighs, resting her elbows on the desk and pressing her hands onto her cheeks, hard. Oliver has taken her hurt, Oliver has taken her time, Oliver has taken her friend.
But, Amy is happy, so... Qiana can eat alone, if Amy prefers to be eating somewhere else to call him at the same time.
It's fine.
---
It will be fine, in time; it will be fine, plum and apple unearthed under a mountain of darkness, copper and iodine withering away.
---
"I'm here with Qiana--"
"Who?"
The silence that follows is everything that Qiana has felt and deeper; Amy looks at her, horrified. There's no mistaking the audio coming from her HoloNet glasses, though she looks like she wishes she could pretend.
"Uh-- Qiana? Qiana Jacobs, my friend here in the FCP who's been helping me for the past few weeks...?"
"Doesn't ring a bell," Oliver says, unaware that he's stabbing both of them as he speaks.
"One sec," Amy says, then mutes herself. She turns to Qiana, tears already building in her eyes. "Qiana, I am so, so sorry--"
"It's okay," Qiana says, and she thinks of a papercraft lying on her desk, finally completed after seven years' of waiting. Oliver couldn't fix it, but he couldn't stop it from being fixed; in truth, it doesn't hurt so much anymore when she knows the story and she knows her story. Oliver's failings are not her own.
And she knows what it feels like to be alone. To... shut yourself off from the world. Except she went to a virtual reality on her NetGear glasses, and he went to what Amy says he calls the Nothing.
Amy still looks hesitant, so Qiana adds, "Plus, Oliver is just a stupid jerk. Right?"
Finally, a smile. "Yeah."
She obviously doesn't mean it to the fullest degree, but that's okay, because they're still friends, still friends no matter what, and nothing that Oliver does can shake that.
("I made a friend," she says in the dim blue glow of the active cryotubes, mouth tilting up in a crooked smile.)
---