Characters: Marnie, Emma (played by orie)
Content Warnings: None
Location: Convenience store The Records
Everything carries over from the dream of mirrors.
Marnie and Emma finally have a heart to heart.
The Records is silent. It has been for the past several days.
Or weeks.
Or minutes.
Time has less significance here.
Even without the chatter of customers and stocking shelves, the sounds of daily life could typically be heard. The sounds of footsteps, the creaking of sat-in chairs and couches, the idle motions of waiting.
The hum of flourescent bulbs is quieter, now. Only one remains operational, shining a spotlight on an unmoving tableau within one of its aisles.
But, after what could only be felt as an eternity, something in the scene changes.
Her low and slow breaths start to become a bit heavier, more present. Hands absentmindedly twitch as a tired eye opens.
Emma Miller is awake.
Her hair is stiff, stuck to her face, semi-permenant bends forming from the position she remained on the ground. She doesn’t bother fixing it.
There is still an agonizing pain in her stomach, but whether it be the passage of time or her brain dulling her senses, it’s not enough to force her to black out again.
Her vision is hazy, and while the light above them does help her a bit, she squints as a result of it’s flourescent shine.
Her arms shake and wobble as she tries to push her up from her lying position.
“Hh-” she heaves out. Her throat is dry. After a slow and heavy sequence of movements, she manages to get herself seated up against the shelves.
She sees the outlines of strewn about products around the floor, and the glint of a discarded rapier makes her twitch. The events that occured that put them into this position slowly start to deep back into her mind.
She doesn’t want to look at Marnie’s wound, but she knows she’s next to her. An arm raises itself and weakly nudges her shoulder. Emma’s eyes manage to focus on what she’s pretty sure is Marnie’s head against the shelf.
“…Marnie…?” It comes out broken, cracking, quiet, and weak. Hoarse from disuse.
Marnie Song is unconscious beside Emma.
A spot right below her ribcage is gaped wide open, showing the tiled floor underneath. If it weren’t for that, and the lack of any rise and fall of her chest, she’d almost look simply asleep.
Of course, it’s not hard to gather how much this isn’t the case.
When Emma nudges her shoulder, the girl doesn’t react, but the wound does. Emma can see it, how unnaturally it begins closing in on itself. Slowly, painfully.
The girl’s breathing starts anew. She can probably notice now that it’s wholly artificial and cosmetic. Marnie Song has no need to breathe. Her new form demands it anyway.
Emma’s face doesn’t move much at the lack of verbal response, but she does force herself to look down towards the wound and observe the wound closing, stitching itself back together.
And Emma feels the same.
(She knows that’s not what’s actually happening to her, her vision is starting to clear up now and she can see that her own torso is perfectly fine.)
Not quite the regrowth of artificial skin and tissue that she’s witnessing, but something within her mimics the feeling as best it can.
As the sensation spreads, the pain she had been experiencing began to fade, bit by bit.
She leans back flat against the shelves, and lets her arms lay limp, though keeping a hand near Marnie’s, touching side by side.
All she could really do was wait.
Emma tilts her head up, and watches dust particles fly in, out of, and around the flourescent spotlight.
It’s unclear how long it takes. Maybe it’s hours. Maybe it’s just minutes. Maybe it’s a fleeting second that lasts an eternity only due to the nonexistent passage of time in the records.
She wakes up before the gap in her stomach is fully closed. It’s still healing, but it might’ve determined that Marnie would be at a point where, realistically, the injury wouldn’t kill her anymore. You can no longer look through the hole and see tiled ground.
The first sign of life from her is a defeated, sad laugh. She squeezes Emma’s hand and curls in on herself and realises that not even getting a blade through her stomach can free her from certain death.
Fuck. Fuck.
Finally awake, Marnie Song laughs.
Normally, Emma might have flinched as Marnie suddenly squeezes her hand. A sound of surprise, maybe. But her current level exhaustion is deep-set into her soul.
Her hair remind covering about half of her face, multiple strands sticking to it directly, and overall being in a state of slight unkemptness.
At Marnie’s laughter, Emma slowly turns her head towards her, eyes just a little larger than their currently half-lidded state. Her mouth opens.
And then closes.
There’s nothing worth saying here.
‘Sorry?’ Sorry she couldn’t let her die? Fufill what apparently was her request if Gojo’s words were anything to go by? Apologize for being the sole reason that the both of them are stuck here? Apologize for being the reason that she wants to die?
Apologies mean nothing coming from her anymore.
Emma blinks a few times, slightly presses her lips into a line, and looks straight ahead, back at the opposing series of shelves.
Inherently, she understands that something about holding Emma’s hand is what’s allowing her to heal. So she doesn’t let go, even as she laughs, curled in on herself.
She rolls over to meet Emma’s eyes right as her mouth opens. Marnie’s own eyes are dull and tired and very slightly amused.
If she squints enough, Emma’s hair almost looks red. She closes her eyes instead.
“You were going to apologise, weren’t you?” An entire infinity together has tuned her closer to Emma than anyone or anything else in the universe. She’s still smiling. “You can’t even say you weren’t.”
Her eyesight’s returned to its typical 20/20 vision.
She wishes it had stayed blurry. Familiarity would’ve been nice.
Her head mainly remains forward, but tilts slightly towards Marnie as she speaks to her. Her eyes look towards her even if she can really only see her in the peripherals.
There’s no point in lying if you both know the truth.
“…Yeah.” Exhales. “…I was.”
She looks down at their entangled hands. Stares for a few seconds.
…Nothing else to say comes to mind.
It’s the same routine. She just woke up, and they’re back to the same. Marnie hates how they have no choice but to be miserable.
She pushes herself to sit up, but stops with a wince as the movement reopens some of her wound back up. She lies down again beside Emma again.
“I’ll let you apologise once. But..you better mean it, and it better make sense.”
Emma’s free hand reflexively twitches as Marnie’s would partially reopens. A quick twinge of the mouth as a small grimace.
She gives a slow nod.
This is it. She’s said it before, but this is it. They’ve arrived at the most extreme scenario they could ever possibly have in here.
In the wake of extremity, she’s felt the most herself she’s ever been.
She has one chance. She’s always meant it. She needs it to make sense.
Emma thinks for a while. Every time she formulates the words in her head, she scribbles them out.
She can’t prepare everything in advance. She just has to say something. After a fit of silence, and a slow exhale, she starts. her head remains aimed at the ground.
“…I don’t think I even know how to start.” She almost laughs.
“I could… work my way backwards. That I left you alone with Gojo. That you’re forcibly attached to me. That I’m so boring and it dulled you as a result. That we’re stuck in this stupid store–” Her free hand scrunches her hair near her scalp and breathes. She pulls her knees in.
“…I should’ve talked with you. I should’ve stopped lying whenever you asked me how I was, should’ve just, gone to therapy or-” She can’t keep harping on this. no point in thinking of hypotheticals. Her mouth purses before she starts again.
“And now, now my string of fuck-ups has put us in, into this impossible situation. You can’t talk to anyone, you’re not even human anymore, we can’t leave, Gojo nearly killed us and no one seems to care–” A realization.
“We can’t even die–!”
A sniffle. Another inhale and exhale. Emma finally turns her head to Marnie. Looks her straight in the eyes.
“…There is nothing. Nothing I could say to you Mari that would convey amount of regret, that would that would make up for anything I’ve done. What I didn’t do. All the things you’ve been forced to go through because of me.”
Her free hand goes to wipe her eyes.
“You don’t deserve to be treated with silence though. So…”
Her mouth clenches. She pries it open.
“…I’m sorry.”
She turns away and lets her head fall into her knees.
Emma sounds more like her than she has…ever. She can even hear the echo of her voice, of her inflections, and it hits Marnie how much she’s missed every part of her. How, if she almost closes her eyes and tunes out these words…
It’s almost them, having a serious conversation they never had. Where she would’ve finally told Marnie everything she’d been going through and Marnie would’ve chastised her for not confiding in her sooner, for not trusting in her and her mom to help her off the ground. Help her get better.
Help her live a life worthy of Noemi Plath.
Marnie’s noticed, ever since she woke up. She has to force herself to breathe. To exhale. Otherwise, the air just sits idly in her lungs. Every part of her very being except for her soul is all too busy fixing her death.
“…..” She squeezes her fist and tries focusing all her energy on not crying. This body isn’t real. It’s false enough that it works, even if all the pain remains strikingly clear.
“….you didn’t work backwards,” she finally speaks up, nags. “–remember when we met and you made me my strawberry latte with cow milk and I had to drink it to be polite even though you knew already that I hate how cow milk tastes?” A pause. A weak laugh.
“–and–you left your goddamn sweater at my house, so when you went missing the cops thought I had something to do with it. And one time I almost flunked out of our algebra class because you forgot to let me copy off of your homework and I didn’t turn it in in time.”
More silence. She keeps her eyes squeezed shut. If she opens them, it’ll be Emma again, Emma and this endless convenience store they live in now.
“…………………you know I miss you every day. Even now.” The words hate to say. She hates saying them. She hates knowing she’s as alive as she is dead.
Marnie pulls herself to sit up. Her hand is still entangled in Emma’s.
“If I say I forgive you, would you believe me? Can we just start over?”
Emma lets out a bit of an amused huff at Marnie’s nagging.
She nods and gives sounds of confirmation as Marnie lists all the other things she’s done. The milk and algebra homework memory makes her chuckle a bit.
“……..I’ve missed you too.” A pause. “…Or, us I guess.”
When she came to the café, it felt like her world was going to shatter into a million pieces. A swarm of conflicting emotions and thoughts threatened to drown her every time she saw that signature pink hair in her vision.
But when push comes to shove, when you look deep and hard at the core of what everything stems off from…
She just missed her.
Belief in the things others say involving her was a weird thing. It had been something she struggled with even before all this. Forgiveness was even weirder.
“…It’d take me a little but, I think I’d come around to it.” A half-joke.
If it had only been her appearance, that changed, she’d say yes. Yes a hundred, a thousand times over. But…
“I want to start over, to try again… so badly.” She smiles and laughs, wiping at her eye.
“But, I know eventually, I’ll be… less me.” Honestly, she’s surprised she’s not feeling much backlash from what she’s doing right now. She gets the vague idea that her magic is spreading itself a bit thin as Marnie heals up. Maybe that was it.
“And as much as I care about you, I don’t think either of us getting stabbed again just so we can hold some semblance of a familiar conversation is… ideal.” She jokes. It’s half-hearted.
“…Wouldn’t be fair to you.” A sad smile.
Marnie has missed her since the moment it all crashed down on her. It’s so hard to be attached at the hip to somebody–to see them as your right hand–and gradually lose them. Until one day they’re just gone without a trace.
She’s avoided looking at the blade on the floor because she knows that, if she does, she’ll get angry again. Maybe she’ll stand up, stab Emma, try and end it all again. But this is the closest they’ve been to an actual conversation in so, so long…she can’t do that. Not to her.
“You know none of this is fair to me.” And it’s true. It’s what she just apologised about, even if Marnie said she’d forgive her.
“If I was…the slightest bit more desperate, I’d probably stab myself every day just to get to talk to you like this.” It hurts to laugh. She just huffs out air instead, leans her head on Emma’s shoulder.
She hadn’t noticed all the lights in the shop had turned off except for the ones above them. Lacking any proper windows, it’s almost disconcerting.
“….so I guess this is it, huh? Not even getting impaled can keep me away from you.” Snrk.
It was a constant, nagging feeling of having lost something deep within her. The more she looked for it, the more she seemed to lose. She was so caught up inside her head, she’s not even sure she realized how it seeped into friendship with Marnie, how her inward retreat left her with nothing to offer to the people around her.
“…yeah.” A little apologetic, but more self-aware than anything. There’s not really anything they can do about it. They’ve both known it to be true for the longest time.
The notion of Marnie even hypothetically wanting to inflict harm on herself, just so they could be the closest they’ve ever been since her wish…
It’s nice. The little, doubting part of her mind can’t make sense of it, why Marnie would still care considering everything she’s done.
But, her words make her feel a little better about everything. She won’t try and dissect it to drain it of feeling.
“Yeah.” A small laugh. “…You and me against the world. …And death, apparently.” Ha.
She leans her head against Marnie’s. Closes her eyes. A soft but content sigh. Cracks them back open.
“…Do you think its April yet?”
Marnie had noticed, how she kept retreating further and further into herself. They were both busy applying to college, and taking care of so many loose ends, that she thought she’d be fine if Marnie waited a little longer. That maybe if she was passive aggressive enough, she’d finally get the memo and tell Marnie what was wrong.
She knows it’s cruel to wish that she had actually died instead of this. At least then, Marnie wouldn’t hate her so much. At least then, she wouldn’t have hurt the person she loved the most without even knowing it was her trapped underneath.
“…’s not how I expected my college years to go, if I’m going to be honest with you.” Marnie thought she’d spend them partying, barely passing classes. Cramming in last minute study sessions. Making new friends and maintaining her old ones.
A breath in, and a breath out. She knows it won’t last, but talking to Emma like this is tolerable. It makes her feel like in due time she’ll be able to love her without that damn locket forcing it along.
“…I have no clue. It..was March when this all happened, right? So…..maybe?”
When Marnie first came to the cafe, Emma knew she should’ve just left town. Maybe actually go missing, make a new life somewhere else. Instead, she chose the dangerous game of secrecy and half-truths, constantly treading the line between trying to bury the past and make new relationships as she was now.
In a sense, maybe she had done a good job. It had taken the both of them being put into a purgatorial convenience store to say the truth.
“…Same.” She’d always seen college as a goalpost. Everything she did, every club, every extracurricular, every late night spent studying instead of sleeping… was for college. If she could do her best in that regard, get into somewhere the people around her said she was smart enough to, then she could take a break. It would’ve been a chance to reset from the confines that had slowly morphed around her throughout highschool.
She didn’t know if she had anything to show. Once she got there, what then? Would it have just been more of the same? Could she actually let go? Or had the person people wanted her to be and who she actually was become one and the same?
She’d loosely been keeping track since they arrived here, but the whole ‘getting stabbed and being rendered unconscious for an undetermined amount of time’ sort of made her lose track.
“…Let’s just say it is then.” She gives Marnie’s hand a light squeeze.
“Happy birthday Mari. Sorry that it’s… so shitty.” Ha.
At least this way the question was answered. Marnie knew she would’ve spent the rest of her human life wondering about it anyway.
It all makes sense, at least. She has no more questions about the fate of her best friend.
Marnie just desperately wanted to grow up. She didn’t care much for college, as much as she just…wanted to become independent. Work with her mom and study with her for a few more years.
….shit. Right.
“…yeah. Thanks.” It’s dry, and she doesn’t really mean it. It can’t be much of a birthday. For all they know, the passage of time could’ve changed drastically outside The Records.
But in Emma and Marnie’s reality, it’s April 2nd now, she guesses. One more rotation around a meaningless sun.
She doesn’t want to think about this being the way she celebrates her birthday for all that long.
“…think if we become the only two people alive here, your magic’s idea of normal will change?” Snrk.
And she wanted nothing more than to go back to when she was younger.
When she didn’t have expectations, when she was allowed to fail and explore and not tie everything to a value of how it may look on an application. When embarrassment hadn’t become soul crushing, and she could be childish and not dissect every moment of happiness to search for the elusive why.
Emma hums in response. It’s an empty pleasantry more than anything else. For someone whose days were already so cyclic and regimented, having them abstracted like this, with time loose and unstructured, means anything related to it sort of slips away.
“…It’d be nice if it did.” The analytical part of her wants to add on ‘But its unlikely. If I stayed the same through the creation of a universe, a lack of people maybe wouldn’t change it either. And object in motion tends to stay in motion, and there’s no forces here to act upon it.’
But she doesn’t say any of that. It’d be nice to have hope for once.
She knows, inherently, that it won’t. She’s not sure how, but her being bound so closely to Emma has given her an understanding of how her magic works. If it didn’t make her so sad to think about, she’d probably be able to properly try and use it. But she’d rather pretend her humanity is still intact as it was back in the café. Or…at the very least, how she thought it was.
In the grand scheme of things, the death of their universe and humanity has left magis–with their outlandish outfits and powerful magic–as normal. Marnie could even shake Emma by the shoulders, find Jane, tell her she’s failed her mission to become normal because Emma has got to be one of the weirdest magis out there. But she’s scared of Jane.
“…maybe if we think really hard,” is what Marnie says instead, with a small laugh. “Or…I don’t know. Maybe someone with magic that can help us will drop by…eventually.”
( –Dakota offered, when she first visited them. Not help, necessarily, but she offered to wipe the memories of their previous life once she realised how torturous their existence would become. Marnie vehemently denied. Sometimes she thinks it would’ve been better if she’d accepted. )
As much as she wishes she could be comfortable in the first time she’s been allowed to speak as mostly herself, she can feel the way Jane looms in the background, an unchanging smile as she simply waits.
It’s unnerving.
Emma makes another huff of amusement. Muted laughter really. She closes her eyes again.
She doubts it. She really does. But this is the nicest moment she’s had in so long, she doesn’t want to ruin it with her ‘realistic’ perspective.
“…Yeah.” A pause. “…Eventually.” The words are sluggish, almost whispered.
(Emma, of course, also denied in that apologetic way she always does. Her memories of and love for Marnie were the only thing, the only reason she hasn’t completely let herself fade away, and allow Emma Miller to truly become an unchanging husk. She finds whatever pain she experiences thereafter because of that choice a fitting punishment for what she had done by getting them in this situation in the first place.)
Her grip on Marnie’s hand tightens again. Gently.
END.