Sisters

You two had a fight?
 Come here,
 You can cry on my shoulder.
 I know it's hard to argue,
 But once you've finished crying,
 Put away being upset.
 You two care for each other
Too much to let a misunderstanding
 Tear that away.

"You've been back for a while, and you're doing pretty well," Marie says. She refuses to think about the glasses incident (she wound up calling Sheldon to come to the apartment and take them away and hide them, and had to hold Callie back so she wouldn't follow him out). "People are starting to ask questions. We need to do something—a public appearance, a, what's wrong?" she interrupts herself because the more she's talked the less Callie has looked at her.

Callie draws on the table with one finger. "Are you sure you want a comeback with me?"

This came out of nowhere. "Of course I do," Marie says. "You're—"

"An average singer at best, no good at coming up with lyrics, and a complete liability who's likely to vanish at any moment," Callie says.

Marie balls her hands into fists beneath the table. "You've been reading the comments."

"The internet only thinks the last one," Callie says, "but I knew all that even before I got back online. You're better off without me, Mar. Marie," she adds, glancing up for a moment. "I didn't forget."

Marie presses her lips together so hard they hurt. "You are amazing," she says, "and I was completely lost without you. I would be, if you left again."

"You'd get over it," Callie says, still tracing nonsense patterns on the table. "You have Drown, and—"

"They are no substitute for you and you know it," Marie informs her. She shoves herself to her feet and stomps to the fridge, gets them both glasses of egg nog—it's well past Squidmas but cod Callie still needs to gain weight and Marie likes it, too—and grabs their music notebooks from the shelf before stomping back to the table. She shoves a glass and Callie's notebook at her, blows the dust off her own notebook, then brushes off the dust too old and caked on to move. "We are going to sit here and we are going to write a song and neither of us is going anywhere until it's finished."

Callie doesn't touch her eggnog. She stares at the notebook in silence, not opening it, even as Marie gets hers to a clean page and sets up her laptop. When Marie glances at her, she's tracing one finger along her name on the cover, swooping through the fancy calligraphy. "Cal?"

"The last time I used this," Callie says, "I was in Octo Valley, ignoring Octavio's insults while struggling with," she pauses to clear her throat, "with Bomb Rush Blush."

Marie's eyes sting as she turns back one page. The last thing she wrote in here was when she was finalizing lyrics for Tide Goes Out.

The start of everything tearing them apart.

And every time Bomb Rush Blush comes on the radio, Callie gets a funny look on her face, and turns her clip-on speaker up full blast, and doesn't say anything until it's over.

The last time either of them sang, it was with DJ Octavio. Where they both sang their solo pieces—Callie, some Octarian version they'd helped her write, convinced her was better; Marie, whatever parts of Tide Goes Out she could fit around Callie's song, improvising her way around it, until the two meshed into something amazing that saved Callie.

They're always better together.

Marie grabs Callie's notebook out of her hands, flips through it to all Callie's notes and at least a dozen pages of different lyrics and cross-outs and music, and rips out every page.

"Marie, what—"

Marie rips Tide Goes Out from her notebook, too, and tears all the pages in half. Quarters. She tears again and again, furious with everything that kept them apart, until bits of paper litter the table and floor around her and Callie's outright gaping, then she tosses whatever remains in her hands like confetti. "I am never performing a song without you again," Marie informs Callie. "We can put some lines from each of our songs into this new piece, but we're staying together."

Callie snorts, and covers her mouth, and laughs. "Can I choose my favorite part from yours?"

"And I'll choose my favorite part from yours," Marie says. "Which'll be difficult. It was a great song."

"No it wasn't," Callie says automatically. "It was—"

"That's only what the Octarians needed you to think," Marie snaps. "Bomb Rush Blush was super fresh. But you never need to sing it again for anyone or anything, not unless you want to." Giving up Tide Goes Out will be easy if it makes Callie smile again.

And there's a gleam in Callie's eyes, now, as she grabs her notebook back from Marie and makes sure every bit of her notes are gone, then grabs some of the paper littering the table around them and tears it into smaller pieces. "Let's call it Fresh Start, then. Because that's what we're doing." She throws the pieces in the air, their own personal confetti. "I know! We should start it really simple—just la la la, like when we're warming up or kids are learning to sing—and then harmony, before we move onto anything complex. Like we're starting over and going through the learning stages all over again." Then she looks down at her cup, cheeks stained pink. "Unless you think that's stu—"

"I think that's brilliant," Marie says, typing that on her laptop. "I was thinking, maybe there should be a no-singing section? Where we just dance?"

"Absolutely," Callie says. "Maybe right before we do our separate parts and sing together again." She grins at Marie, all excitement and hope. "We've got this."

We.

Marie's never loved a word more.