Sister Cities

Part 95: Ekko

CW for dubcon/semi-noncon(?) - not malicious, but a social stunting/ignorance thing; it's ultimately consensual, but starts out with that language and vibe.

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And now that I'm grown, I'm scared of ghosts

Memories feel like weapons

And now that I know, I wish you'd left me wondering

If clarity's in death, then why won't this die?

I keep on waiting for a sign

I regret you all the time

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 I've just turned my lights off when a knock comes at my door. I put them back on and go over, expecting Scar or Quartz, but what I get is Jinx, holding an armful of bedclothes and peeking shyly over the top.

"Uh... do you need something?" I ask.

Her voice is muffled by her pillow. "Want to have a sleepover?"

It's past midnight, and it's been a crazy couple of days, and I'm thrown off by the fact that she knocked instead of breaking in, so I just assume I didn't hear her right. "What?"

She gets even quieter. "Do you want to have a sleepover?"

I step out of the doorway automatically, like I'm still the president and inviting one of my people in to talk, and she squeezes past me. Rather than kicking her out like I should, all I manage to do is ask, "Why?"

Her bedding plops down on the floor troublingly close to my cot. She's wearing an oversized gray nightshirt with a monkey drawn on the front and striped socks without shoes, so she can't be screwing with me— coming here was the only reason she left her room.

"I just thought," she says, kneeling to straighten her blankets, "maybe if we did it one more time like we did when we were little, it would give us closure."

I watch the back of her head in disbelief. That's the easiest "no" of my life.

Not that I actually say it.

"How would that give us closure?" I ask.

"Because until we give it a shot, we'll always wonder what it would be like. If it could be the same."

"We already know it can't be the same."

Her shoulders slump minutely. "Then let's prove it," she says, standing. "Beyond a shadow of a doubt."

I try again to reject her.

She looks at me with those round eyes.

I close the door.

She sits at my desk with paper and the box of crayons I bought for her on a whim with my UBI. I don't know where she pulled them from. She has a blue flower outlined by the time I've taken the four steps over.

"I'm tired, and there's a meeting tomorrow at nine," I say. "We're not drawing."

"Just one picture, grumpy-pants." She slides over a sheet of paper and a green crayon. Fighting would draw this out longer, so I get to work on a cube.

We drew together sometimes as kids. I'm not an artist like her and Vi, but I've always had a knack for visualizing geometry and movement in a three-dimensional plane, so I did most of our blueprints when we invented, and once in a while I sketched perspective lines or backgrounds for her to draw over. We liked when we used up a lot of paper in a session and made it look like we'd been real productive. Sometimes we filled space with smart-looking nonsense just to push the image in case anyone walked in.