Fic -- Hero of This Story (Don't Need to Be Saved) [5/9]
Katelyn rubbed the sleep out of her eyes as she padded into the bathroom. Erin stood in front of the sink, staring into the mirror and looking a little hopeless as she stroked on a segment of her hair with a comb. Katelyn smiled a little at the crease that formed itself over Erin’s straight nose. She wrapped her arms around Erin’s tiny frame and kissed the bit of her shoulder that was hanging out of her crooked t-shirt.
“What’s the matter?” she murmured into Erin’s neck.
Erin stretched her neck back and reveled in Katelyn’s touch for a moment. She sighed a little when she looked down to see the time on her phone. “I’m going to be late,” she groaned, resting back against Katelyn’s body.
“Hey,” Katelyn said, turning her around and peering into her eyes, “what’s the matter?” She rubbed her hands in circles on Erin’s back.
“We’re actresses; the indignity-”
Katelyn laughed, “This coming from a girl who never had to work in a sewer.”
Erin sighed and rested her head against Katelyn’s chest, “At least when you worked in a sewer we didn’t have to hide who we are.”
“Erin,” she said, stroking her long hair, “we’ve always had to hide who we are. It’s kind of the deal with this whole agency that we got wrapped up in.”
Erin laughed sadly. “Don’t I know it? But, I mean, when we you worked in a sewer, we didn’t have to hide this,” she said, picking her head up and gesturing at Katelyn’s hands that were wrapped around her.
“Hey, let’s be fair, when I worked in a sewer, we didn’t have anything going on. I was going through my angry-at-the-world phase, remember? Plus, I don’t think you would have touched me if I still worked in that sewer. I reeked.”
Erin wrinkled her nose. Katelyn hovered her palm over a spot on Erin’s ribs and held it there with a smirk plastered all over her face.
“Say I’m right,” she laughed, her eyes twinkled as she curled her fingers over Erin’s ribs.
Erin’s eyes went wide and she gasped, a little panicked. “Oh no. No!”
Katelyn broke into a grin and started to tickle Erin, “Say I’m right,” she taunted.
Erin was shrieking and gasping and wriggling herself all over Katelyn.
“Say it.”
“Okay. Okay,” Erin said, trying to catch her breath as Katelyn calmed her hands. “Okay. You’re right. You’re evil, but you’re right.”
“Sometimes I have to resort to drastic measures to make you smile. That isn’t my fault, now is it?" She pecked Katelyn's lips quickly with her own. LAnyway, yesterday you said you liked acting.”
“I do. I just don’t like that they’re torturing my poor hair and plastering me with make up and taking my picture all of the time.”
“Really?” Katelyn cocked one of her thick brows, “You’re sure you mind that last part?”
Erin looked out of the side of her eyes. Before she could help it, a smile spread out on her face. “Maybe," she said, her eye linking deeply with Katelyn's.
“And how much of this is actually about your hair?”
Erin laughed.
“That’s my girl,” Katelyn said, kissing her on the cheek. “You’re gonna be late. Now get in the shower.” Katelyn wormed her hands down Erin’s waist, fingering the soft fabric of Erin’s boy shorts. “Because if you wait any longer, then there won’t be any time for me to get ready, and you’d have to share.”
Erin rolled her eyes, “Go make breakfast.”
“Hey,” Katelyn said as she walked out of the room, “it would be good for the environment. Maybe that’s our mission. We don’t seem to have another one.”
“Right now,” Erin said while she started the hot water, “your mission is to make me breakfast.”
--
Erin was sprawled across the couch in her dressing room, dressed up like the most put together teenager that Katelyn had ever seen. She could never fully believe that Erin was sixteen when she saw her, but Katelyn always felt a little ridiculous when she was supposed to portray a perfect, type-a overachiever who was too pretty to contain herself by herself.
It was a little odd, pretending to be in this world where the worst thing that could happen was a bungled audition or a miscommunication between a couple of kids stuck permanently in their awkward phases.
But it was a little odd and ridiculous and beautiful that sometimes Erin got dressed up in genie costumes or a nurse's uniform that must have come straight out of Katelyn's imagination.
Erin fiddled with the buttons on her phone as Katelyn shut the dressing room door. She could hear the boys on set strumming guitars and shouting at the top of their lungs; she could almost see them staring at each other adoringly like the carefree, sloppily-in-love kids that they were. Katelyn double checked that the thick door was latched; she didn't appreciate the idea that the rest of the cast could see her looking just as sappy as the rest of them.
"Hey, you," Erin said as Katelyn sat down.
"Hey, you hungry?"
"Didn't you eat breakfast right before we left the house?" Erin said, stretching out to reach her script on the table in front of her. "I swear, you're a bottomless pit."
"I-- I didn't mean right now or anything. I just..."
Erin stretched her feet across Katelyn's lap and shot her a look above the pages she was flipping through.
They sat in relative silence for a while, listening to the sound of the ruckus going on in the hallway; Katelyn rubbed her thumbs in circles over Erin's ankles.
"Do you think that, you know, you might be hungry later?" she said, staring at Erin's toes like they were the most important and fascinating things in the world, or maybe like they might turn into snakes that could strangle her at any minute. "Or that you'd want to go to a movie or go bowling or something?"
"Bowling?" Erin said laughing and setting her script down on the ground.
"I don't know, whatever you want to do. We could just go get some tea..."
Erin sat up and stared at Katelyn like she had grown a third eye. "You hate tea."
"No!" Katelyn shouted like a child, standing up and moving to the other side of the room. "I mean, we can just go home. We don't have to... I mean-"
"Why Katelyn Tarver," Erin said, taking on a tone of mock-surprise, "are you asking me out on a date?"
"I don't know." Katelyn said, plucking at the end of one of her ringlets, "maybe. I... Probably."
"So," Erin said walking over to her, "we live together. We are saving the world together. You threaten to jump in my shower every morning. You are the only person on this planet that means anything to me. And you're afraid to ask me to go get sushi?" Erin asked, wrapping her hands around Katelyn's worrying fingers.
"It would appear that way."
Erin laughed and pressed onto her toes to kiss Katelyn on the mouth.
"You are so weird," she said as she opened the door and walked down the hallway and out to the set.
Katelyn gaped at her for a few moments before she shouted at Erin's back, "So is that a yes?"
Erin turned around and beamed at her.
--
"You hated me," Erin laughed when they spilled into the tiny bungalow that they were living in. Or, Katelyn supposed, that Erin was technically living in and Katelyn stayed at. Katelyn had a grimy apartment across the town that whose threshold she had never bothered to cross. She only bothered with it for purpose of the lease, which, like every thing else in her life was in order to keep a secret.
"I did not hate you."
"Kate," she deadpanned, "I was afraid that you were going to kill me in my sleep."
"Okay, let's be fair, I wasn't going to kill you."
"Ha!" Erin laughed, turning around and stepping in close to Katelyn, waving an accusatory finger in her face. "You did hate me!"
They fell onto the couch, full and happy. Katelyn laid on her stomach, one arm crossed lazily around Erin’s hip.
“I didn’t hate you. I just hated being here. And I blamed you pretty much entirely for that.”
“Well that will teach me my lesson about saving pretty damsels in distress from imminent doom. You think you’ve saved them, but you wake up on a different planet and the girl is the dragon.”
“And she’s breathing fire in your face." Katelyn laughed and traced Erin’s hipbone through the material of her dress, "I am sorry about that, you know.”
“As you should be. I didn’t know that you would rather be asphyxiated then spend time with me. Which is a little insulting. And I’d like to think that you think you were wrong.”
“I was wrong,” Katelyn said, wiping the smile off of her face and attempting to look very somber while she was being chastised.
“Some people have even said that I was a catch. Or at least people thought it. Maybe if said people had known that I was invading everything thought, they wouldn’t have thought I was so fetching, but never the less, some people have said that I’m a catch.”
“You are a catch.”
“You would think that someone who was so wrong would be eternally upset about how wrong she was. And about how much hurt and discomfort she had imposed on a certain other someone.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“How sorry?”
“Very, very sorry. So sorry that I imagine I will spend all of my free time over the next few weeks apologizing to you, your majesty, the real princess in all of this disaster.”
Suddenly, the transmitter started up with a familiar whir, poking into the moment with a beeping and buzzing that made the hair on the back of Katelyn’s neck sit up straight. Only this time, there was something about the sequence of bleeps that the machine was emitting. This time, something was very different.
Erin let out a huff of air, “That thing is such a cock block.”
Katelyn’s eyebrows soared into her skull, and knitted up together.
Erin said smoothly, “Oh, you would have understood. And you would have liked it.”
Katelyn swallowed hard against the pleasant lump in her throat. Then it turned to stone, and Dan Schneider’s voice emitted from the machine, in its sick and perverse happiness.
"Hello and good afternoon girls."
Katelyn wondered briefly if Schneider and whoever else happened to be on the other end of the connection heard the audible click of her teeth gnashing together. They were fully grown young women, who were, for better or for worse, entrusted with the safety and security of a highly populated planet. And her boss still referred to them as if they were children.
“Hello, Mr. Schneider,” Erin chirped. Katelyn was sure that it was undetectable to anyone on the other line, but she could feel the aggression behind Erin’s voice, just like she could feel Erin’s muscles tensing under her fingers.
“I’m here too, Miss Sanders,” came the calm and steady voice of Scott Fellows. “Hello to you too, Miss Tarver. Now, onto business…”
Before he could gather his thoughts and speak again, Schneider’s voice was filling the room, “Well, I almost forgot you were there. You were being uncharacteristically quiet for our little Katie.”
Katelyn choked a little at the sound of him calling her that. He had no business calling her anything but her proper name, but he certainly wasn’t going to call her something her family had, or something that Lucy had; there were pieces of her that would never be a part of The Agency’s control.
“Miss Tarver is fine,” she said, tensing her lips and squaring her jaw, as if he could see the defensive set of her face. She considered how ridiculous it was for a moment, but then again, she could never be sure exactly how much The Council could see from that thing.
Before Schneider could start whining, Mr. Fellows began again, “She’s right, Dan. Let’s keep this little conference of ours somewhat professional, even if it does go against all forms of protocol recorded.”
“Fine. Go ahead, Scottie boy.”
Fellows cleared his throat, “I was planning on it, Mr. Schneider. Now, Agents, we know that we’ve kept you in a horrible place, waiting for the shoe to drop on your mission, but we had a reason. It wasn’t just a wild goose chase. We were waiting to make sure some reported intelligence was correct.”
Schneider interrupted, “Well, a little bit of it was a test,” he chuckled. “We wanted to watch you rip each other’s heads off, actually. You didn’t manage to do that. So we decided to go ahead and give you a mission.”
Fellows coughed into whatever he was speaking into, making a static shock ring through the room. “While some of The Council may have been doing this without the knowledge and authority of the rest of us, I promise that we have been merely waiting for intelligence to come back. Unfortunately, it is what we thought. There is a counter agency out there, actively trying to thwart what we have been attempting to do for years
“They are attempting to expose The Agency to the universe, as well as putting an end to our watching. The safety of an infinite number of lives and planets are at stake without us. It is your duty to stop this. The weight of the world, quite literally is on your shoulders. You must stop them at any means possible. We would like to talk this out, but we cannot say what measures you will have to take.”
Dan laughed. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic as all of that. The only thing you need to do, girls, is annihilate their agents. Make an example of them. Then we’ll blow up their hiding spot. Just like roaches.”
The line shut off with a pop.
Erin sat silently, her eyes wide and the tips of her hair bleaching white. Katelyn had never seen her this frightened. In fact, Katelyn wasn’t sure if Erin had ever been afraid of anything.
Erin wasn’t the kind of woman who got afraid.
Katelyn kissed her softly on her temple, hoping that if she did, Erin’s hair might go back to that rich shade of brown that didn’t scare her so much.
“This could be bad. This is the kind of bad that… espionage is not good. Agents who get sent in to this kind of stuff usually end up collateral damage. No one gets out of these kinds of missions. They only send us because they think that we are expendable.”
“They think all of us are expendable,” Katelyn said with a grim laugh.
Erin just lowered her head into her hands and let her body fold into Katelyn’s a little.
“Hey, I won’t let anything happen to you.”
Erin looked up with a little bit of a shocked expression on her face. “You think I’m worried about dying? I’m not afraid of that. I’m afraid because you are stupid and reckless and will probably do something dumb.”
“Well, thanks!”
“Kate,” Erin said, cupping her jaw, “I feel like I just got you. I’m not ready to lose you. I’m not going to let you die. And I’m not going to let you fall back into that scary and sad place again.”
--
That night, Katelyn laid in her bed, staring at the dirty spot on the ceiling. She supposed that she should be scared, but she wasn’t. She guessed that it made Erin right; she was stupid and reckless and would probably get both of them killed. But there was a part of Katelyn that could help but to be excited by the idea of something like this. Rebellion was everywhere. Someone out there was brave enough to say that not everything The Agency had a hand in was perfect and beautiful and a salvation to the rest of the known universe.
Katelyn wondered who these rebels were and what they were like and, just for a minute, what it would be like to be one of them. She fantasized about breaking The Council. She wondered, even though her better judgment told her not to, if they would let her be apart of them.
Katelyn stopped wondering about anything the minute Erin walked into the room and climbed into her bed. Katelyn thought that maybe there were things that were better than belonging to a rebellion; belonging to Erin felt so much more important.