“You can quit pretending to be asleep,” I say as I settle back against the table.

There’s a shuffle of sheets and skin from my right. A girl’s yawn that melts right into a playful, moody voice, dancing against my eardrums in a way I’ve grown unusually attached to since I started spending more time around it. Her cadence is nothing like her brother’s. Nor is the casualness with which she lays atop a sanisteel operating table just like mine, hands hooked behind her head like she’s sunbathing at the beach.

Freed from the cuffs, I’m able to shift over enough to watch just as Cal waves a sarcastic, dismissive hand at the ceiling. “No no, please, finish the tearful reunion with your aunt. I see where I rank now.”

She’s smiling faintly with her eyes closed. Not just smiling. Giggling, and doing a shit job of hiding it. Like me, she lays on her back and is covered up to the chest by a white medical sheet. She still wears her Relic, and she’s almost entirely undressed. But the arm that Relic is attached to makes me flinch as I see it.

A blackened infection of color-sapped skin rages from Cal’s wrist to her elbow like a parasitic tattoo sleeve. Her Relic glows faintly with electric-pink light, activated even now to keep the poison from spreading. She took the last attack that was about to hit me on herself instead. The monster that ambushed me was kitted to the fangs with natural weapons. Not hard to imagine that it saved a toxin as a last-ditch weapon in case the hunt went as far south as it did.

Cal doesn’t seem phased by the venom eating up her arm. She plays it off easily, like it doesn’t hurt enough to need the IV drip of pro-grade narcotics plugged into her shoulder. She does her best to not draw attention to the wound. Nor let me become mired in guilt over seeing what it cost her to keep me alive. Telling me through actions, not words, that it was a price she would gladly pay again. And that she doesn’t want me to worry about it.

My eyes still flick to it sometimes, drawn unconsciously to the pitch-black color and the way it surges back and forth through her veins, waging a constant war against the Relic’s influence. But I respect her focus instead on the sight before me. The little way her shoulders lift as she chuckles. The way her bangs drift near her eyes. The animated twists and turns of expression her face makes as she gabs on and on and I’m not really listening to any of it, just watching her go, enjoying it, enjoying us, this lighthearted banter and the comfort it instills in my soul, the old-friend familiarity we have after everything we’ve been through together, and you know, it’s probably rude that everything she’s saying is going right over my head, but I don’t really think she minds it because she totally just caught me staring and she’s looking right at me. And now she’s smirking. And my face is flushing. Great. Great job, Tets. Very covert of you.

Peeking open one yellow eye, Cal looks right at me, that knowing smile still tugging at her lips. Heat spreads through my cheeks.

“…but really, I’ve hung around Jolie a lot, and I’ve never seen her like that,” she goes back to saying, as animated as ever. “Not even around Mars. She’s so… gentle with you. Not that I blame her. I’m soft on you too.”

I shoot her a raised eyebrow. “I guess I just have that effect on people.”

“Between you and me, I think it’s the small town girl energy that does it. Or the freckles.” Her eyes softly inspect the parts of me that aren’t covered by the sheet. Slowly, minding her poisoned arm, she shifts on her side to face me.

Holding her gaze, I’m lost in my own head, replaying the last moments of consciousness that I remember. “How did you even get back to me? I must have been hallucinating. There were wings, feathers…”

She tilts her head at the two spheres resting on a table between us. “Just because I choose not to use a JOY doesn’t mean I can’t. I’ve got classes too- Assassin, Light Elemental. They don’t work when my Relic is on, though.” Her wrist trembles faintly. “You doing okay?”

“Better inside. Worse outside.” I grimace as I try to mirror her position, but my right shoulder feels like it’s being stabbed with needles the moment I put pressure on it. I stay on my back. “Jolie said I might not walk again.”

“You’ll be fine. You’re too stubborn to be a paraplegic.” She winces at her own joke. “Did give me a good scare though.”

I swallow hard.

“I’ve never seen that much blood,” she continues, scratching at her poisoned arm. “It was like looking at a slaughterhouse. I almost didn’t even recognize you. I don’t know how you weren’t dead already.” The breath she was holding leaves in a resigned exhale. “You can’t do that to me again. I thought you were actually going to die.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“If you hadn’t come, I would have.”

“Don’t thank me yet. You look like a zombie under that sheet.”

I groan and try to fight upright. Damage-bleached white hair spills down my shoulder. The strands glow with an internal light. As do my chest and stomach as the sheet falls. A pale, celestial glow illuminates the mottled map of pink and vat-grown skin grafts that coat my body. Cal’s feet are already swinging to the floor. She’s over and beside me just before my strength fails, catching me before I can fall. Laying me down, she carefully pulls the sheet up to my chest.

“Didn’t you hear your aunt? Your back is broken. If you need something, just ask for it like a normal person. Geez.” She talks like she’s mad, but she still fusses with tucking the sheet in. “What were you even getting up for?”

“I was going to thank you.” I mutter, not meeting her gaze. “For this. Me, you, here. The fact that we’re even still talking.”

“And you couldn’t have done that without moving?”

“Not, like…” I grapple with the words, “Not in a way that means what my heart wants to say.” Her head tilts quizzically to the side while she keeps tucking. “Because of you, I just hugged my aunt who I haven’t seen in years. I am alive in a way I haven’t been for years. My heart isn’t hurting me. My ki is fixed. I’m me again.” My fingers clutch against my chest. I open my eyes to find her looking down at me, just like the day we first met. I don’t look away this time. “You saved me, Cal. I owe you my life.”

“I… it's not as serious as you're making it,” she says, defaulting to deflection. Caught flat-footed by the sudden honesty. She lets go of the sheet and starts to turn away. “Anyone would have done the same.”

“You’re not just anyone. Not to me.”

Bracing for the agony I know is about to come, I reach out, snag her by the arm, and pull her back. I drive my index finger into her sternum. Panting against the pain. Staring at her eye-to-eye.

“Don’t you turn your back now,” I gasp.

Her eyes narrow dangerously. Then I keep going, and slowly, they begin to widen.

“Before you got to me, I’d already lost. That monster was gonna eat me or drag me back to Gami or worse. But you know what got me back up on my feet again, when I should have been dead ten times over?”

Unsure of how to react, Cal stays completely still as if I’m scolding her. I drive my finger weakly into her chest again.

“You did. I was alone in the dark. I was alone, and I was going to die. But then I heard a sound that reminded me you were coming. That I wasn’t alone anymore. That I had you and you had me, too. I just had to hold on.”

I fall back against the table, golden hair pooling beneath me. My hand drips limply off her and falls to the metal. Chest expanding and contracting with uneven rhythm as I fight for breath. My voice tremors with emotion. Skin flushing with full-body rosy color, the internal glow brightening with my feelings.

“I survived because of you. I hung on even when my heart stopped because I knew you’d be waiting for me when I finally woke up.” My panting slows. I hold her gaze unblinking, a tired sliver of a smile daring to form. “Because I knew you would never let me die. You’re my guardian angel.”

She leans back, face an unreadable mask of hesitancy. “That’s a cheap shot.”

“It’s the truth.” I wait, wordlessly asking her to look at me. “Before I went into the Shocks, the only thing I could think about was that I wished you were with me. When I fought that monster, I would have died on my own. But I’m not alone, not anymore.” When she starts to deflect the conversation with another joke, I shake my head, reach up, and cup her jaw in my palm. She easily catches my wrist. But she listens as I whisper, “I’m done fighting for hate or for the past. I want to fight for something better. And I want you with me when I do.”

Slowly, Cal’s fingers release from my wrist. The mask she dons when she wants to keep her distance has fallen to the side. In the orange-hued moment, so stripped of our walls, I see more of her depths than I ever have before. I see her hesitation. Her doubt that the little good she has done could outweigh the darkness she carries. The way her shoulders hunched protectively inward the moment I laid my feelings bare. She doubts I could mean what I say, because no one has ever said to her what I just did. No one could ever look at her like I do now. Seeing not the charismatic shell she faked until it became reality, but the self-consciousness she has kept so firmly buried: the deep-rooted fear that no one would ever see her as more than the sibling of someone else.

But she is so much more than that. She is just and devoted and confident and a warrior all her own, one who reminds me even now that there are so many things in this life that are still worth living for. And she is first among them in my heart.

Words cannot convey what I yearn to tell her. So I don’t bother with them.

I take Cal’s fingers in my hand. I press them to my heart. And when she still wavers, I pull her to my chest in a desperate embrace. Eyes squeezed shut as shallow breaths tremor through my lungs. I clutch her tight there silhouetted by the colors of a sinful sunrise, and in the hospital quiet that follows, my heart whispers its thanks one tender beat after another.

This time, she doesn’t pull away.