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Kodeira knows this look. Even after having not spoken to Amber for a long time, she knows the look. Face turned away, shoulders inward, fingers woven together and clasped between her knees.
“I can feel you starin’ at me.”
“Then look at me, will you?”
She turns only her head. Yeah, that’s the one. Rare that Kodeira sees her in this state. Something’s eating her, and not just the usual Amber shit. Her eyes are narrowed, like whatever it is she’s ready to take it out on Kodeira, but only for a moment. Something softens when Amber looks at her, even if only slightly. Some things never change.
“Don’t let that kid get you down. Things will even out, they always do. Eventually he’ll realize he acted like an asshole, maybe something’ll give him a taste of his own medicine, straighten him out, y’know? Then he’ll see you were right.”
Amber barely reacts. “Uh huh.” Turns away again.
“...That’s not it, is it?”
She sighs. Sweeps a hand through thick red hair. Kodeira remembers when it was longer, back on the shore. It’s got streaks of silver through it now, little winding rivers of time mixed in with the vibrance of her youth. Still Amber, always Amber.
“What’s happened to you, Oksana?”
Kodeira raises her brows. Something sinks in her, like the weight of the question and all its answers has begun to push down on her. Silence passes between them for a moment and the blended murmuring of the patrons at the bar in Joshy’s Knuckle becomes more noticeable to her suddenly; even though she’s not in her usual uniform, the worry that the folks down here can sniff out authority like blood in the water is a creeping paranoia.
“A lot of shit’s happened, Amber, I don’t know. I got a good job, made friends with some good folks. Is that really so awful to you?”
The last part triggers a shift in Amber’s expression, however minute. Guilt? She’s not hard to read, not for Kodeira after all these years.
“I…no. You deserve good things. I want good things for you, you know that, right? But let’s cut the shit. We both know this isn’t what you really want.”
“Does it matter? ” Kodeira hisses. “Yeah, okay, sometimes life gives us something we didn’t expect and it’s still good, even if it isn’t what we wanted at first. Shit changes.”
Amber rolls her eyes in exasperation and hunches forward. “Yeah, exactly, and YOU’VE changed. You’re different, Oksana. You took on the name of some omnipotent…god or some shit, and now you’re parading around in that stupid armor and shooting the shit with the cops and–I don’t like seeing you settle. I don’t like seeing you pretend. And yeah, okay, I’ll say it. I miss us.”
And there it is. Kodeira’s pissed, yeah, but maybe she’s angrier knowing that Amber’s right. Arguments with Amber don’t usually go anywhere. She’s stubborn, hard-headed as a bull, and when she thinks she’s right she knows s he’s right. But this? It isn’t about being right. It’s her way of telling Kodeira how she feels. She just happens to be telling a truth that Kodeira doesn’t want to hear.
There was a time back on the shore, when the storm was growing ever closer. Kodeira never understood the training regimens. She’d watch Amber and Joshy and the dozen or so other students sitting on the beach in a line, facing the sea, while Kodeira–Oksana–was helping work on the Biggest Baby. From the unfinished cockpit of the ship she could see red hair glinting in the sun.
Later in the day, Amber had explained. “Gotta stay sharp, focused, y’know? They’re out there and we gotta fight ‘em. So we focus our energies on the sea or whatever and try to sense where they are. Some of us have better luck than others. Joshy says the point is just to keep our senses acute, even if we don’t spot anything that day.”
Oksana had laughed. “So you just sit there and look at the ocean all day?”
Amber shoves her shoulder. “Not all day, bubba, just in the mornings. And it ain’t just looking, it’s feeling. ”
The day she became a finner. How could she ever forget? Something about the way Amber had described it intrigued her. They’d all laughed at the finners, nobody took them seriously. But Oksana knew there was some truth in what Amber told her. Or maybe it was that she’d be willing to believe whatever Amber said anyway, because she always said it with this sort of confidence and world-traveled wisdom that was atypical of a woman in her mid twenties. Whatever it was, it drew Oksana in like the moon pulling the tides. And that was how she’d found herself on daily excursions with Amber and Joshy and the students of the Psychic Blink Shark Fighting School.
Excursions had been long, and boring, and sometimes it’d felt like she was wasting her time. But Amber had made it bearable. Long talks, sometimes, on patrol duty near the beach, after the sun had gone down and the only sounds were the crash of unnatural waves and the distant thunder of the tempest.
“What do you think we’ll do, after this?” Amber had asked. “If there is an ‘after this’.”
Oksana had turned her gaze from the dark, roiling sea to where the moonlight illuminated Amber’s face, her tired hazel eyes. “Try to start over. What else is there?”
Amber had seemed satisfied with the answer. Still, there’d been an unspoken sorrow and fear in the salty air between them. Nobody wanted to think about the possibility that there wouldn’t be a time after the storm engulfed the world. Nobody could think about it, because otherwise how would they keep working? How could anyone keep going with the knowledge that all of it might be in vain?
Oksana’s heart had felt leaden.
She’d reached over across the sand and taken Amber’s hand in her own. There was a new cut grazing her knuckles, covered with a rudimentary wrapping of off-white bandage.
“I want to start over with you.” Oksana had whispered, then.
Their first kiss. Whatever would happen, whatever the future looked like for them, Oksana had stopped caring in that moment for the first time in months. Nothing else had mattered.
On the horizon, black clouds had glistened with an unnatural iridescence and crackled their warning, falling on deaf ears.
In the present, Kodeira sighs. “I’m sorry things ended up different for us.” It’s the best she can offer right now. “If you can trust me, if you can trust that I’m happy, I can try and make more time for us. But think about it, Amber. Did anybody really end up living the dream down here? All I ever wanted was for you and I to make it through whatever that shit was back on the beach. And we did.”
Amber’s posture softens. She slumps into her chair, exasperated, running a hand over her face as the wood creaks beneath her. “Ughhh. I hate when you make sense.”
Kodeira manages a half-smile. “Do you want to get brunch next week? If you’re not, I don’t know, being swallowed by giant clams or something.”
“Shoot, bubba, I just penciled in a date with a big-ass oyster. You’re S-O-L.”