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“Someone reliable, maybe?”
Nature had long ago laid claim to the city and the mall is no exception. It’s less an open wound than some of the structures in the area, but vines still cling to crumbling walls and footsteps are still made to crunch along chipped concrete and dead leaves blown in from the streets.
“Someone who can be kind of gruff or selfish at times, but you can still count on them.”
The mall directory had listed 18 restaurants, 12 clothing stores, 5 electronics retailers, and 15 assorted specialty shops, the majority of which had long ago been sealed off by metal security gates and never opened again. Of those specialty shops, one bears the name Sonica Records on a faded sign above the entrance. The store is well preserved, all things considered; there had been no food here, no resources worth scavenging. Only plastic tubfuls of CDs.
“Was he anything like that?”
No.
Their answer is blunt. The wall between them is often permeable, these days—thoughts, feelings, memories pass readily between them in almost every instance—but it can still grow solid from time to time, and when it does, it’s almost impossible for Elfilin to surmount alone. The line becomes too clearly demarcated, then. One of them carries history and one of them does not. They cannot see past no.
They take a CD from a bin. On the cover, a woman posed regally amid fine brushstrokes of abstract colour gazes stoically skyward. “What was he like, then?”
Doesn’t matter.
Then:
Being annoying.
“I don’t think I’m being annoying,” Elfilin protests. There’s a red kiosk towards the back labelled Listening Booth, and they drift towards it, album in hand. “You shouldn’t say things like that. It’s mean.”
Meaningless questions.
“They’re not meaningless!”
Annoying, Elfilis repeats, and they sound almost happy, as though they like having found a way, however small, of needling Elfilin.
They aren’t very nice. On their more indistinct days, when the wall is barely there and everything of them spills into everything the other is and they become only one, Elfilin feels not-very-nice too.
But they always try to be. That counts for something, they think.
Of course, there’s more to it than just the not-very-nice. There’s the mud, always the mud—the anger and the fear and the resentment—but they know, because of how it is for them, that there must occasionally be something else threaded through those feelings, too. And so they ignore this lick of spite, instead saying, “I just don’t know what it’d be like. The animals here don’t really have older brothers. Not in the same way, at least.”
Acting like you know.
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking!”
The listening booth has headphones, but they’re the wrong size and shape for their current form in at least three different ways, and so they don’t bother, instead fiddling with the CD player until sound pours from the speakers directly. The music that follows is dreamy and lush, the vocals like moonlight, and if they close their eyes, let it wrap around them, they can almost slip out of their self and into something both long-forgotten and familiar.
Almost. But—
Not right.
“Yeah,” Elfilin agrees. “Sorry.”
The songs they had heard before coming to this planet had come from a woman with dark hair and an enigmatic smile whose face they could not see. The woman on this album cover has dark hair, but her voice doesn’t resonate, not in the same way. There is no story carried on her voice, not in the way they can remember.
Still. They let the song play on, let the singer tell a tale of a journey down a river long-since vanished, and Elfilis does not argue.
After a moment, they say, wasn’t like how pink one said.
“Their name is Kirby,” Elfilin reminds them. “They’re our friend.”
Elfilis doesn’t like this, but frankly, Elfilin doesn’t care what Elfilis likes when it comes to Kirby, and they’ve seemingly made that clear enough in the past for Elfilis to not have anything grumpy to say this time.
Wasn’t like that, they reiterate.
Back in Waddle Dee Town, an expedition into the city had brought back, among other things, a collection of old electronics—a television, a desktop computer, a CD player, and more. These had been presented to the king, who had declared the television and computer worthless without functional networks to connect them to. The CD player, though, he had taken the time to repair. Everyone had been so excited when it was done; the Deedly Dees had improvised proudly along with what working old-world CDs they had, and everyone had danced late into the night. Everyone except the king, that is, who had instead looked on with a bored expression, demanding his retainers bring him food to thank him for his hard work.
Elfilin has remarked—incorrectly, perhaps?—on how funny it was that he was so beloved when he bossed the Waddle Dees around so much. But Kirby hadn’t been angry or upset—hadn’t looked at them like they’d said or done anything wrong. Instead, with something like pride, they’d said, that’s just how he is, you know? Everyone knows he’s a good person, really.
He’s kind of like everyone’s big brother.
Now, Elfilis says, Ours wasn’t good.
“You don’t think anyone is good.”
This is their own little lick of spite, their own little taste of sharpness, but their thoughts are close enough to Elfilis’s to know that they don’t care. They still think they’re right.
Our nature, Elfilis says, despite the effort they’ve clearly been expending to speak for so long, is to evolve. He was. More evolved.
And they must be tired, now, because rather than words, what comes to Elfilin next are thoughts of empty planets and once-living animal pulses, souls condensed into something glorious and terrible and hungry.
“We were like that too,” Elfilin points out.
No answer, this time. But they suppose they kind of expected that. If speaking has become too difficult, then the only way to argue would be through recollecting what had happened afterwards—the consequences of that glorious, terrible hunger—and for all their spite, Elfilis would not do that. The wall between them is never more solid than when holding back such memories, these days.
“I just wonder why he came,” Elfilin says. “If it was really like you say.”
They aren’t expecting a reply. If they close their eyes, they can almost see the purple skies of elsewhere. They wonder if they should join them, but at the same time, a part of them is already there.
It’s probably unfair of them to keep going, as though without a counterargument, they can only be correct. And yet they do so anyway, saying, “I calculated the initial trajectory of the meteor. If it had landed where it was supposed to…”
The song ends. A new one begins, something melancholic. In a long-forgotten tongue, a woman sings: close to home, feeling so far away.
“Well, it just made me wonder, is all.”
This time, Elfilis answers.
Being kin. Does not mean. There is a bond.
“There doesn’t always have to be a bond. Sometimes people help each other just because they want to, and the bond comes later."
A long, bruising silence.
Then:
He could have. Come sooner.
And at this, Elfilin falters.
Because he could have, couldn’t he?
“Maybe something stopped him,” Elfilin ventures.
What could have done it, though? He was so powerful; they had seen that for themselves. The starries? Had he been stopped by and broken free of them more times than they knew? How many starries would have been lost, if he had been trying to make his way to them all this time?
Was it wrong, to almost wish for that?
If so, then maybe that’s just another little piece of incorrectness about them. There are more and more of those, these days—all these little ways they’re crooked, despite theoretically now being complete.
No, Elfilis says.
“Huh?”
No, they repeat.
From old, crackling speakers, the voice of a diva long dead. In the present, no voice but their own and the echo of their thoughts.
Nothing had been worse than being alone.
But that’s over, now. It’s done. Nothing can change that it happened. For either of them.
What difference does it make if someone they didn’t know had tried to come for them or not?
“I don’t know why he did it,” they say, and it could have been either one of them who spoke.
The song ends. A new one begins, this one without words. An awoofy noses through the leaf litter by the entrance as dream-like synths stir.
“Maybe I’m being silly,” Elfilin says.
Simple, Elfilis says, as if correcting them.
“It’s the same thing.” And there it is again, an overlapping sharpness, a bitterness that both is and is not their own.
But then, with an overlapping softness, a thread of something that both is and is not their own, Elfilis says: you should stay simple.
Again, Elfilin closes their eyes, and to anyone else, it would look as though Elfilin were alone inside the ruins of a music store.
But with their eyes closed, they can almost imagine it’s the two of them side by side, neither apart nor indistinguishable. Just me, and you, and us.
There had been nothing worse than being alone. Whatever else, they are glad they are not alone, now.