movies - excerpt from Sabrina Blackburn's diary

"Sabpyon." Perfect. She was waiting for me in my room when I got back, just sitting on my bed.

"Sabpyon, what did you do with my tablet." The vox whatever in her helmet makes it pretty hard to figure out what Mal's thinking most of the time, but this was...even, I guess. Little more even than usual.

What tablet?

"Don't screw with me, Sabpyon."

I told her I fed it to Lily, because I totally thought about it for like...probably longer than it took to make me the biggest asshole. I couldn't keep the shit-eating grin off my face, though - but hell, that's half of why I wear a helmet.

"Bullshit. If you're going to be like this, I'm going to go find it." She stood and made for the door, like she was gonna squeeze past me. I slammed my arm into the frame at about her chest-height, and when she tried to duck under, blocked even lower than that with my pipe, then shoved her back with it. I pulsed a little rust her way, but it fizzled against her. It was just to make sure she knew I wasn't fuckin' around - I could take off my suit and shove my tongue down her throat and I couldn't do shit against her.

She seemed to get the hint, anyway. Stopped trying to get through, just glared up at me with her hands on her hips.
I gave it to someone, see, to hide for me. So she couldn't mindread it out of me or whatever until she'd actually taken a fucking day off for a change.

"Oh. So Nakajima has it."

Fuck! N...no.

She slipped under my pipe, awkwardly squeezing through the door while I stood there like a retard trying to figure out a better plan. I didn’t really come up with one, but I had to do somethin’. So I jumped her and put her in a headlock.

Mal ain’t a pussy. She can get out of a headlock, usually with the careful administration of a couple of kidney shots. So I expected that, kinda. But all she did was start laughin’. Which was great. I could work with that.

“This really means a lot to you, huh?” I explained that I’d set things up so that nobody’d explode if she wasn’t babysitting for a day. I talked Miss Mami and Dorothy into accompanying the big shots for the day, and between those two there was no way anyone out there was gonna have any kind of fun. Unless they had fun by quietly sipping coffee at a café somewhere and talkin’ about…sweaters, or someshit.

C’mon, Mal. Don’t be a dick. Be a dude.

“You can let me go, Sabpyon. Just make sure I get it back when we’re done.” Yessss. This was gonna be awesome. Fuckin’, we never got to do this stuff, what with Mal pretty much fucking running the Ninth. I didn’t let her go until I’d dragged her all the way back into my room and shut the door behind me.

---

I didn’t keep a whole lot of shit in my room. Bass guitar that I probably needed to practice more. Bed. High-end PC I mostly used to zone out when I was tired. And the centerpiece, a big-ass motherfucking TV surrounded by piles of…fucking, media, I guess. VHS. DVD. Blu-ray. Even had a coupla laserdiscs but those were mostly, y’know, collector’s items. The TV was my baby, though – had Dorothy help me pick out something made for pretty much a home theater, since she’s into that shit, too. Made it easy to spend days just…sitting and watching movies.

And that’s what Mal liked to do, when we got the time. No fuss. No runnin’ around. No cleanin’ up. She was part of the reason I got this big motherfucker, but I wouldn’t tell her that. She’d pro’lly never believe how much I fucking love this TV again.

We were on our third movie. …’The Last Song’, after ‘The Notebook’ and ‘Nights in Rodanthe’. …Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Okay? Mal was…she liked that kind of shit. We were gonna marathon all of Sparks’s movies. Have a big fuckin’ crygasm.

Her visor was flipped up by the end of ‘The Notebook’, and her eyes were all pink and puffy. …Uh, more pink than usual. At this point her nose was turnin’ red from all the tissues she was burning on it, and…well, I guess mine wasn’t much better. Neither of us said anything, though. Bro code. I wasn’t allowed to be a girl about this shit, and nobody got to pretend Mal was anything but an immovable, sarcastic rock.

…When we finished ‘The Last Song’, something that was nagging at me a little bit finally…I guess I finally had the chance to say it, without fucking up the atmosphere. This wasn’t the first time we’d sat and watched sappy movies together, but we didn’t usually get enough time to think about it. I guess I wanted to know why she liked ‘em so much. I was surprised when she seemed to take the question so seriously, but it’s not like that was weird for her.

“I watch movies like this to remind myself that love makes people do stupid things.” She only thought about it for a second, and there was no hesitation in her voice at all once she spoke. Creaked a little bit because she’d been cryin’, though.  Then she offered that smile that…I guess felt like it only belonged to me. I don’t think anyone else ever got to see it. A smile that kinda pushed my worries way to the back of my mind. Mal really had a way of making everything seem okay, even when they were already pretty good.

“What about you?”

…Me? Never really thought about it. It was different from everything, I guess. It was stuff that I never thought’d happen to me when I was in the hospital, and it’s all shit that’s…a hell of a lot fluffier than life now. Not that I’d trade what I got for some cheesy romance novel. …I had a girlfriend that got up early to bake apple pie whenever she was gonna be busy working all day.

I’d give up a lot of shit for that pie.

---

We were up to ‘A Walk to Remember’ when the door cracked open. We moved in unison – two visors snapped down at once, and in about a second and a half, a couple of tissue boxes and a huge mound of wadded-up tissues were swept off the bed, and instead of some sappy movie neither of us’d ever be caught dead with, Die Hard was on.

…Then it was just Lily, and I think both of us felt a little retarded. I sure did. Lily didn’t care, and she wouldn’t say anything. Looked like she’d been crying, too, and she sniffed loudly as she poked her head in.

“Lieutenant Hartford. What brings you to this very super-important Culexus strategy meeting?” Malal straightened up immediately and assumed a faux-military tone. Man, she really knew how to deal with kids – I could never pull that off with a straight face. I wondered how much she did this kind of thing back at the Ninth. Lily sniffed again and let herself in the room, closing the door quietly behind her and snapping a half-hearted salute.

“Miss Marigold’s leaving, and I don’t know what to do.” She settled in between us on the bed and Mal took her hand and squeezed it. I ruffled her hair a little, myself, and she smiled a little. Malal gave me a look over the top of her head, and over our helmets’ private comm channel, she urged me on.

After a second, I reached over and dug out a half-used box of tissues for her. I wasn’t sure what to say right away, but under Mal’s visor, I could almost see that smile.

…Sometimes love makes people do…weird things. I said it, but it sounded half-assed coming out of my mouth, so I was pretty quick to try and follow it up. The Warmaster…Miss Marigold found someone really special to her. Special enough to jump ship.

“But I’m not special enough for her to stay…?”

Shit. Damn it Mal why are you just sitting there. Her voice crackled through the comm channel again.

-Step it up, senpai.-

So I did. I told Lily exactly what I thought about the whole thing. Warmaster Marigold was batshit crazy and she was probably leaving so she and the Spiritual Liege of the Seventh could bloodfuck every goddamn day without anyone being able to stop them. …Lily stared up at me with the eyes of a kid that didn’t know what the hell they were just told. Which was probably pretty accurate. It seemed to dawn on her after a couple of seconds, though, and she nodded.

“The Spiritual Liege is strong, so Miss Marigold wants to eat her.” Mal snorted in her mask, and I had to fight back a laugh, too.

Yeah, Shortcakes. That’s exactly right. Kid didn’t seem all that happy about it, but at least she wasn’t crying, now.

With the grace and timing of someone used to cleaning up other people’s shit every day of her life, Mal whipped out a jawbreaker a minute later, after Lily’d calmed down some. Made a cute comment about it being bonus pay, since she was being such a good soldier about all this, then tossed it into the air a bit. A second later, it was in Lily’s mouth, wrapper and all, and after an earsplitting crunch, she spit out the wrapper, with just a little bit of candy-colored saliva in it.

Man, Lily sucks at jawbreakers.