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It’s a good thing that driving in LA, and especially around LAX specifically, is always a nightmare. It makes it so much easier to not noticeably stare and stare and stare.
It’s not that Sasha doesn’t know what Marcy looks like, now. They video chat! Sometimes. They have video chatted before, anyway. They… they’ve texted! Recently! …To set up their plans for today, at least.
And, well, okay. Lapses in direct communication aside, Sasha keeps up with Marcy’s socials. Granted, they’re mostly about anime and webcomics and the endearing ramblings of a creative mind, these days (or, to be honest, all days since she’d made them), but every once in a while a photo of Marcy herself will sneak onto her feed. Her at a convention, a photo someone else took of her laughing and smiling and talking shop at an artist’s booth. Some cosplay, too.
That, though… It’s hard for that kind of thing to hold up when Sasha’s seen real-life superpowered Marcy flying around Amphibia’s atmosphere and blowing things up with twenty-sided dice, but, well. Unfortunately, for as many amature iPhone videos as there are of the “Frogvasion,” no one had been around to document that last battle on Amphibia.
Or at least, Anne had still had her phone on her when they flew up there, and then she’d given it to Sprig in the end anyway, so the point is moot.
Ten years is long enough that Sasha wishes she had something like that. She’s glad Anne left the phone, she is, and she knows how important it was, to both Anne and Sprig, to have that last piece of connection, of remembrance between them. And Anne could get a new phone, but on Amphibia…
But. What she wouldn’t give for… For just one photo, of everything. Of everyone. Ten years is long enough that it’s hard for Sasha to remember exactly how her, Anne, and Marcy’s magical-music-box-power-gem-generated super glowing armor had looked, it’s true.
But ten years is also long enough that it’s hard for her to see him clearly now.
Grimesy. If Sasha had even a pound of Marcy’s artistic talent, she’d have drawn a million pictures just to have something to hold onto. As it is, Marcy most likely has already drawn those herself, but…
Even now, after years of therapy and of learning psychology on her own and now even getting to put it into practice with her new job, Sasha still has trouble asking for things like that. And it’s hard for Marcy, too, she knows, to remember all of that. Though, Sasha has no doubt Marcy’s memory is probably clearer than her own.
Maybe not of Grime, necessarily, since they didn’t really get to know each other. (And oh, how Sasha wishes she could have seen the havoc they’d have wreaked together. Two of her favorite people, both incredibly stubborn, both incredibly capable of giddy wanton destruction. What Sasha wouldn’t give to wind them up a little and set them loose together so she could just sit back and…)
But, well. Sasha chances a glance at Marcy, who is tilting her head back to soak up the sunlight like a starved plant. Or, maybe, like a sunning lizard.
Anne would probably have her head for finding the comparison humorous and apt. Something something, amphibians and reptiles something something. Not the same there are major biological differences it’s important not to conflate the two because science reasons or blah blah whatever.
Oh, Frog, Sasha misses Anne. But Sasha is also nervous to see Anne again, and she hasn’t even had the time to adjust to her current Marcy-related crisis. And it’s not like it’s even been that long, technically speaking, since she and Anne have seen each other, but…
Ten years. Ten years. Once again, Sasha feels a pang of guilt over the date. The anniversary is emotionally destabilizing enough as it is for Sasha every year. She still hates herself, just a little—psychology be damned—for her part in the way everything went down. Look, she can know how best to counsel someone for the situation she’s in and still have a hard time setting it all down, okay. It’s just– It’s Anne’s birthday. It should be a happy day for her, she should be able to be carefree and enjoy herself, but Sasha knows better than anyone what a loaded day this is for her. For all three of them.
From the looks of Marcy, with her eyes closed and smiling beatifically and tilting her head just a little towards the window to feel more of the wind in her hair (even though the roof of Sasha’s convertible is down already, Frog, it shouldn’t be as endearing as it is), she certainly looks happy and carefree, maybe enough for all three of them.
But Sasha knows very well that looks aren’t everything. Marcy has been nothing but buzzing with excitement since Sasha, hesitantly, broached this whole—idea with her. But she’d bet good money that Marcy has her own internal battles to fight today, just like Sasha and Anne.
And that’s the part that still has Sasha in a bit of a chokehold. She might never fully get over the guilt of the fact that, somewhere along the way, today became the anniversary of leaving Amphibia and not Anne’s birthday.
At least, it did for Sasha, and she’s not sure she can ever fully apologize for that.
Marcy shifts, and Sasha watches as surreptitiously as one can watch their (ex?-)best friend get a stream of messy, thick black hair tangled around the passenger seat headrest of one’s car. (Sasha truly isn’t sure how she manages it, but, well, the woman did trip over a rock in space. Anything is possible with Marcy. And why shouldn’t it be? She’s Marcy.)
Marcy doesn’t seem too bothered to have to pull her hair free from the metal poles holding up the headrest. She laughs, as good a sport about these things as she always has been, and catches Sasha’s eye for just a split second.
Just a split second, because, of course, after that long Sasha viciously throws her own attention back to the road in front of them. Frog, how is she supposed to last this entire trip like this? Long Beach might not be that far from LAX, physically speaking, but it’s LA in the middle of the afternoon, so distance means nothing in terms of how long it’s going to take and how many shitty drivers they’re going to encounter on their way.
Not to mention, Marcy requested the scenic route. It’s definitely not the fastest way between A and B, but Sasha loves a good excuse to drive down PCH with the top down, so she’s not complaining. At least, not about the driving part.
It’s not a bad thing to be trapped in the car with a pretty woman she likes talking to and gets along with. But it is a bit of a complicated thing, and a bit of a Sasha-will-be-taking-this-secret-at-least-to-the-grave thing.
Not even to mention that they haven’t gotten to the part where they surprise Anne yet. Marcy has been very excited, and Sasha knows it’s going to go over well, because it’s Anne and Anne’s a ginormous sap and she will eat a gesture like this up with rainbow sprinkles and a cherry on top, Sasha knows very well that she will. But it’s…
Is it really Sasha’s fault if she’s a mess today of all days? If she can’t distinguish between the familiar and unwelcome butterflies fluttering their way through her intestines and the deep-seated pit of dread collecting dust around where it’s been settled for so long in there.
She shouldn’t be surprised by this kind of thing anymore, not after everything they went through together, not after Sasha herself has finally gotten her shit together and figured herself out (better, of course there’s always more to figure out, self-betterment is really unending, Frog damn it). But somehow, with these two…
It’s been a long road for Sasha to get to where she finally, finally is. But being around these two, especially both of them together at the same time, has a way of making Sasha feel both the burden of all her years and also as though she were five years old again.
Maybe Sasha should open her next session like: A word to the wise, little one. Never, ever, ever fall for your complicatedly childhood best friends. You hear me? Look me in the eyes and repeat after me. I. Will not. Fall deeply and horribly in love with the two people I can’t ever ask that of. You got it, kid?
…Yeah, or maybe she doesn’t want to get fired and lose her ability to practice before she even goes to graduate school. Her current job counseling at the school is fine and all, but ideally Sasha still wants to get her Master’s.
Marcy finishes freeing her hair from the diabolical clutches of the inanimate object she willingly sat herself upon, and out of the corner of Sasha’s eye she can see the way Marcy raises her eyebrow just a tick. Shit. Get it together, Sasha, come on, she can do it, she can act Normal and Platonic and Uncomplicatedly Happy To See Her Friends. She can.
Marcy snorts the cutest little giggle laugh, and her nose scrunches in a familiar yet entirely forgotten way that Sasha is going to drive the car into a ditch and kill them both over. Her breath catches and she stifles the need to cover it, knowing it’ll only look more suspicious.
Time is a funny thing, though. Everything changes, but some things stay the same, too. Sasha can’t believe she’s been remembering Marcy’s laughter wrong, and for how long she doesn’t even know. How can you tell when you start forgetting the things you always took for granted, anyway? It’s not that Sasha is going to be able to promise now to never forget it again, but Frog if she isn’t going to appreciate it so much more now that she’s realized it’s been missing.
Somewhere in between “I’ve missed you so much more than I could ever say” and “You have the cutest laugh in the world and I want to hear it over and over and over,” Sasha manages to save face by vocalizing the thought, “What, you got a problem with me or somethin’?”
She wants to slap herself silly as soon as she says it, but then Marcy laughs again, and it’s kind of hard to consider it anything but a win.
“Or somethin’,” Marcy echoes, giggling. Her tone is bordering on sarcastic, but there’s something in that patented Marcy-twinkle in her eyes that just–
But, driving. Sasha can focus on driving. Sasha is a good driver! Driving is good. Road.
Urghhh. Someone come save Sasha from herself before she really does drive headlong (carlong? bumperlong?) into the sea, never to be seen again.
But then, if she did that, she’d have to kick Marcy out of the car first, and she knows herself well enough to know that’s never going to happen, so. They’re stuck with each other, then.
“Woooow,” Sasha drawls, and she is both grateful for and loathes how well the adoration in her voice is masked. “Why did I even bother agreeing to pick you up, huh?”
Marcy’s nose does that little crinkle again. Sasha starts counting the white lane markers as they blur by.
“Well, it was your plan, you know,” Marcy says, tilting her chin up slightly in mock intellectual disdain. “You would only be ruining your record of good planning if you left a key component of your plan behind.”
“Eh, I’m good at improvising. I’d figure something out,” Sasha replies, as though she isn’t having a hard time even imagining leaving Marcy somewhere, alone and expecting to be picked up. And—also—as though she isn’t having a hard time focusing on the road instead of seeing the first real, in-person, fully and truly there view of Marcy coming out of that terminal playing on repeat, over and over in her head.
Marcy snort-laughs her little snort-laugh and agrees, far too easily and sincerely, “Yeah, you would.”
Sasha can’t take this level of happy, beaming, glad-to-see-you Marcy sentiment head on. She clears her throat quietly enough to not be heard over the wind whipping past the car and briskly changes the subject.
“Gosh, it’s been a minute. How was the flight?”
Boom. Perfectly capable of small talk, Sasha is. Thank you very much. In fairness, she wouldn’t bother doing it with too many people, but for Marcy, she can make the exception.
“Pretty good,” Marcy replies, and for all her ‘popular girl’ manipulation of the past, Sasha doesn’t think she has ever had or will ever have the same emphatic way of amiable pleasantness that Marcy does so much of the time. Two words and Sasha already feels like she could listen to Marcy chit-chat about nothing forever. “Can you believe it’s been ten years?”
What a question. An obvious one, to be honest, that Sasha really should have prepared herself better to answer.
Can Sasha believe it?
It doesn’t really matter, because this is small talk, and Sasha can do this. She can casually arrange a meet up between the three of them, and know that it is her being a little selfish, but it’s also something for all of them. It can be both things. Marcy is happy to be here, and she agreed to come completely of her own accord, and Sasha will make it through today if it kills her. Which it won’t, because life has a funny way of going on.
Sasha doesn’t verbalize any of this. What she says is, “Crazy, right?” which is absolutely inadequate to describe how she really feels, but, for Small Talk, it’s good enough. And good enough is enough. Sasha has spent plenty enough time learning that lesson already, and continuing to learn it, and really, defeating perfectionism is not an easy road to tread.
But really, what else is there to say? Besides, like, everything?
Before she can focus too long on how little of what she really means makes its way into those two words, Sasha presses on, “So, what have you been up to? Still doing that webcomic? I read a few chapters. It’s awesome.”
And honestly, even if it’s just the first topic change she can think of, Sasha would ask it a hundred times more to watch the way Marcy’s face lights up when she talks about her work. And even if she is grasping at whatever she can think of, that doesn’t make any of it any less true. Well, other than the fact that Sasha has read a little more than a ‘few’ chapters. More like, all of it. As soon as it updates. She gets the notifications.
She should probably just tell Marcy this, really, but there are some things she just can’t shake off, and if anything is capable of making Sasha feel closer to a younger version of herself, it’s Marcy and Anne. She’ll tell her. Later. Or she’ll ‘accidentally’ bring up something that happens in a later plot, and she won’t even have to fake her embarrassment when they gang up on her to tease her about it.
She hopes. It’s going to go well. It will, but that can’t stop Sasha from thinking. And… Well, even if it goes well, it’s not going to go the way Sasha really, deeply in her heart, wants it to.
But. But! She’s ready. It’s taken a long time, and they have a lot to talk about, but Sasha knows she’s ready now to be what she hasn’t been able to be for such a long time. And Sasha will be damned if she fucks it up before it even really starts.
But from the looks of things, she isn’t doing a terrible job so far. Sasha is also much, much better at listening now than she once was. Some lessons learned the hard way really stick. Sasha wants to keep Marcy talking about her comic forever, to heap praises on it just to see Marcy blush a little harder, even if it is a little self-serving of her, but before she knows it, Marcy is already expertly steering the conversation back Sasha’s way.
It’s not so much a shock as it is noteworthy. Imagine that, Marcy Wu taking a breath to pause her ramblings about her own interests to hear about someone else’s, right away.
Sasha isn’t the only one who’s learned a thing or two about communication, after all. Maybe the both of them had to learn to listen to other people before they could figure out listening to each other. And even though Sasha wants to hear Marcy talk more, she finds she doesn’t mind talking about herself, either.
She’s proud of her degree and the work she’s doing now. And she’s worked damn hard to make sure that’s really true. Marcy hangs on every word, and if Sasha didn’t know any better, she’d even say it looks like Marcy wants to ask more.
Before she can, though, some asshole swerves across Sasha’s lane without signaling, and it seems to put enough of a pause on that conversation for the time being. And that’s something they have now, time. Time for later, to continue on, to pick up where they left off.
Rather than looking at the expensive car now weaving through the traffic ahead of them, Marcy is looking out the other side of the car, and Sasha gets the feeling she’s got something else she wants to talk about.
“Sooo… Did you and Anne hang out much after I moved?” Marcy asks, and Sasha has the decency to pretend like she doesn’t know that the question has been burning a hole through Marcy’s mind ever since she walked out of the airport terminal. Or, tripped her way out.
Did Sasha and Anne hang out much after Marcy moved? This question, at least, Sasha had prepped herself for. She knew it was inevitably coming. Yet even though she was expecting it, it somehow still takes her just a little by surprise. Maybe that’s because she’s inexplicably having a hard time keeping her guard up around Marcy.
Sasha replies, “At first, yeah, but we kind of fell into different friend groups in high school. We still talked, but only every once in a while.”
It’s that simple, and it isn’t.
In truth, it had been a relief when Anne had, in typical Anne fashion, found herself absorbed into a new group when she threw herself back into tennis full-force. Sasha knows she did it because she’d been restless, and sitting for 6 hours in school classrooms did absolutely nothing to remedy that. Sasha had felt it too. How could they not?
So Anne had thrown herself into sports to dispel the way everything was too still, too calm, too mundane, after everything they’d been through. And as she always did, she’d managed to conjure up some new friends in the process.
It’s not that Sasha hadn’t liked those tennis kids. They had been perfectly nice to her whenever their paths had crossed.
But it was just… Everything Anne and Sasha were to each other was complicated and all-encompassing and difficult. It was good, after Amphibia, much better than it had been in so much longer than Sasha wishes it were. But it was still hard work, and somehow it had been unburdening to get some space from each other. Space to grow, and consider themselves apart, and Marcy wasn’t there anyway and somehow it had always made her absence feel all the more prominent when Anne and Sasha were together alone.
It had been an unspoken truth between them from the moment Marcy’s parents’ car turned the last bend away from them and their waving hands had slowed and dropped to their sides. It was just different, knowing it wasn’t that Marcy wasn’t just not there right now, but that she wasn’t there.
Sasha and Anne and the empty space where Marcy should be. It was just a little too loud a presence, took up just a little too much space. The two of them didn’t have enough left to share with each other, not up close like that. She knows Anne felt it too.
Now, maybe it didn’t need to have been for so long, so much space, but once they’d gotten in the habit of living their own lives, they’d just…continued. It was good for them, Sasha is confident about that. From what she knows of the human psyche, sure, but also just from seeing where they both are now. She’s not sure if they would have made it so far if they’d felt like they had to hover around each other all that time. And she wouldn’t want the present any other way, not in terms of what they’re doing and where they’re headed.
She thinks Anne feels the same. The problem is she thinks Anne feels that way, but she hasn’t bothered to ask in… Well, honestly? In years. Almost the whole ten, if she’s being really honest with herself.
It’s bittersweet, maybe, but in their own ways Anne and Marcy are so ingrained in the fabric of Sasha’s life that it almost doesn’t even feel like it’s been that long. Or that the distance was so great.
Still, she knows it’s important to say these things. And, again. She’s ready now. Maybe she wasn’t before, maybe another person in her place would have been able to call and video chat and talk regularly and do college visits and drop in to Thai Go unannounced to see the Boonchuys whenever the idle thought crossed their mind. But she’s not anyone else, and she’s learned, and she’s learned, and regardless of anything in the past, she knows what she wants right now.
The only thing she can do is extend a hand. The rest is up to Marcy and Anne.
…Or maybe just Anne. Marcy is still practically bouncing in her seat, after all. Sasha would bottle Marcy’s enthusiasm and keep it on her bedside table if she could. The same sense of wonder at 23 as she’d had at 13, or 10 or 8. If Marcy still has wonder to spare on mundane everyday Earth living after getting possessed by an eldritch being on another world, Sasha is confident she’ll never lose that either.
So maybe instead of bottling Marcy’s enthusiasm to keep in her bedroom, Sasha could…
Except, nope! That’s not what’s important. They are going to see Anne, and surprise her, and then (hopefully hopefully hopefully) they are going to go out and spend the rest of the night together and maybe get a little drunk and maybe talk, for real. But that’s for later.
Sasha isn’t sure if that was the answer Marcy expected, or the one she wanted, but they can figure that out later. With Anne.
“Never mind that, though,” Sasha says, grinning because later.
She’s still nervous, but there’s room to be nervous about later, and that’s exciting in itself. She won’t take Anne’s opinion for granted, never again if she can help it, but Sasha would bet good money that Anne will also want later. It’s Anne.
Sasha takes a small deep breath. It’s Anne. They’re going to be fine.
Marcy is sitting beside her and she’s smiling at her and they’re on their way to the Aquarium of the Pacific and they’re together—and soon they’ll all be together. Finally, a complete set once more.
Sasha doesn’t bother stifling the happy curve tugging at the corners of her lips. They’re going to be better than fine.
“Have you heard what Anne’s doing these days?”
“Yes, and I love it.”