The brush went up. The brush went down. And Up. And down. Up. Down. It left a lovely, rich teal colour on the wood wall. And on Nicole's fingers.
"There, you missed a spot," Ghost said, wiggling his way up to a thinner patch where the old cracked paint still peeked through.
She huffed, raised the brush — and rather than adding a coat to the wood, flicked it down over one of his fins.
"Noo— not there. Why'dyoudothat," he complained, his voice heavy with theatrics as he bounced out of reach of a second swipe.
A second Ghost— Felicia —rolled close to him the moment he'd settled in the air. She had to inspect the swath of colour, after all, and chirp cheerfully all the while.
She reminded Nicole of a bird. An exceptionally social and chatty bird, full of questions and trivia that'd followed Nicole the entire morning.
Ghost narrowed his eye and shimmied back a few inches.
Nicole allowed herself a small smile and went back to painting. Up. So Ghost was a little jealous. And down. Which was kind of sweet. And up some more. But they'd get along one day, wouldn't they? Then down some more, until the last section of wood that'd needed repainting on the Daily Revive's outside wall shone a pretty teal.
Nicole stepped back, put her hands on her hips, and gave her handiwork a long look. "Not bad," she said after a moment of staring at nothing in particular at all. The words lingered longer than they should have, sticking to her like the colour did to the wood.
Not bad.
She fidgeted. Not bad was about how today had gone so far. Waking up had been… uneventful. Early, but uneventful. All she'd done had been staring at the ceiling, her mind lugging around heavy thoughts while the sun had climbed the horizon.
After that, walking. The air had been brisk. The City quiet as it could be. One foot in front of the other she'd gone, her eyes set on Ghost leading her. The world had rolled by like water.
Felicia had joined them a little after that — and then Nicole had patted a cat while eating warm bread and drinking the day's first coffee.
Not bad.
"Ah!" Felicia said all of a sudden, and when Nicole turned to look, Felicia had hopped up in the air and behind Ghost. She whispered something to him and Ghost's shell pulled down in what Nicole had started to understand as a defeated sigh.
"I know who that is," he said, right before nodding his entire self into the direction of— Oh.
John.
Him and Darrow stood out amongst the slow foot traffic passing by the Revive. Mostly, because they were the only people she recognised. Which— ah— people? Had she just thought of Darrow as a person? Was he a person? She glanced at Ghost. Time had gone and stretched the meaning of personhood while she'd been dead.
Though John stood out regardless. Whether she'd recognize him or not. He wore the same set of armour he'd donned when she'd first met him (minus the horned helmet), with the chain link on his arms catching sunlight. That, and he carried a bundle of flowers. Chrysanthemums. Matching ones to fill out the vase of three she'd noticed Ariel had put up on the counter.
At least the flowers drew her eyes away from the pair of golden, embossed wolves howling at each other on John's chest. And made her remember that she still clung on to a wide brush dripping teal colour. Fumbling, Nicole let it drop into its bucket and wiped her hands down her trousers, painfully aware that she was probably getting smears on them. Not like that mattered. Her clothes were already a disaster.
"Hey." John's greeting came with a subtle smile — and a quick look from her to the work she'd been doing. Whatever he thought about it remained a mystery though.
"Hi," she managed — before Ghost rolled in in front of her and asked the question very much on her mind.
"What're you doing here?"
John's brow made a quick hike upwards — and his eyes landed on the mismatched splotch of paint on Ghost's shell and he said coyly, "Maybe I was looking for a Rubix cube to solve real quick. You're not a cube, but you're almost colored like one now."
"It suits me, yeah?" Ghost pushed each of his fins out in turn — while behind him, Felicia good as stretched herself as far as a Ghost could, like she tried to peer over him.
John's smile widened as he walked past them, right for the door. "I'm here to drop these off—" He gave the flowers a slight wave. "—and get a Kinderguardian to go."
"A—" Nicole started, her brain at first trying to connect the word with a beverage she could make him until it clicked way too late. So late, John had already vanished through the door.
She hurried after him, two Ghosts trailing her, rather than the one she'd almost gotten used to.
When she caught up with him, Ariel had slid a readied cup across the counter for him, almost like she'd known exactly when he'd show.
"Mind if I borrow your new hire?" he asked, waving the flowers in front of her. "Ikora asked me to get her."
"'Get' her? Oh please," Darrow interjected. "You practically pawed at her like a spoiled cat that wanted a treat."
"I had very convincing puppy-dog eyes," he said coyly. "I'm good at those."
"I said cat," Darrow said dryly.
"Whatever. So," John turned back to Ariel with another smile, "can you spare her?" The flowers got another wave.
"Of course," Ariel said and got the flowers traded for… for… her. She didn't waste any time before grabbing the vase and poking the stems in alongside the others, carefully rearranging them to fan out all pretty at the top.
Nicole rubbed at her nose. And was still rubbing at it when John had turned around, though she was too busy watching the flowers go to notice his stare.
"Oh, you wanted some too?"
Her hand remained frozen on her nose. Heat rushed to her cheeks. "What?"
"Flowers," John said, wearing the definition of a sheepish smile.
Wow. Who'd have thought that thin air could go ahead and choke her so easily. Because that was what it was doing right now.
"I— no," she stammered. "No. I don't. Ah. I don't like cut flowers. They're, ah. They wilt. And. Stuff."
"And... stuff," John repeated after her, his right brow hiking a little higher than the left. His lip curled along with it.
Nicole wondered if there was some sort of upgrade to mortified since that was what she felt right now.
"Anyway," John said, going from coy to business at the speed of light. "You've got the Warlock Vanguard excited and there's no way I'm missing out on that. It's nice seeing her find something else than Vanguard business to focus on."
"She," Darrow said, seeming to nod at Nicole, "is Vanguard business and she should be at the Speaker's office. Not— here."
"She," John said, his voice light but with the hint of an edge, "can be wherever she wants to be."
"Yes, Darrow," Ariel added while moving the almost full vase from one spot on the counter to the other. Like she couldn't decide where to put it. Much like Nicole couldn't decide on what foot to put her weight and if she should breathe in or out. "And we like her here. She's a real treasure."
. . .
She was now two layers deep into mortified.
Darrow intoned a frustrated sigh. "Oh yes, here we go, I'm the badguy again for wanting to actually tend to important business instead of ignoring it. I'm just trying to say she might be better off knowing more about the nature of her—" His round shell parted into segments and bloomed out half an inch. "—Light's anomaly."
"Hey," Ghost whined. "There's nothing wrong with her Light. It's perfectly fine."
"Is it?" Darrow went, sounding weary.
Nicole's throat clenched shut. A wash of cold ran down the back of her chest. No. Not cold cold. Not a chill. But that returning lack of warmth, an absence of something that should be there but wasn't.
"It is." Ghost rounded on Darrow, his shell bristling.
Darrow's flared out further in turn. "You're being irrational. You want to play cute with flowers and coffee cups and old music and John wants to play visitor and no one quite knows what… she wants to do, and in the process, all of you ignore the fact that not only is she wasting her potential as a Guardian - and a Speaker, I might add - but she is..."
He was still going.
The cold — the nothing — bunched together. Brought the vertigo that tilted the knot of heat in her chest and whispered of escape.
"Boys," Ariel said — though she sounded distant. Like she'd moved miles away. Miles upon miles upon miles. So far, Nicole barely heard it when she added a surprised: "Wait, did you just say Speaker?"
Words, scents, sensations — the concept of being here — of a physical reality — it all spun off into the distance, like water droplets flung off a beating wing.
She almost went with it. If it hadn't been for something heavy landing on her shoulder, at any rate. A hand. It squeezed, gently, and attached to it was John.
"Deep breaths," he said.
The vertigo was snuffed out with a snap.
And yeah, so she'd not been doing so well on the breathing end of things (again), holding on to a breath that desperately wanted out — and then in again. When she got that out of the way she took a moment to realise his hand hadn't moved, and that a lot of eyes had settled right on her.
John's. Ariel's. Ghost's. Darrow's. Felicia's, probably. And Sam's, too, who'd come in from the back looking awfully curious.
"I think you were about to blink on us," John said.
Had she been?
Nicole stood under the gentle grip of his hand, unsure where to pick up thinking again. She glanced down though. Because that was what he was doing, his eyes flicking to her hand — where the last, thin tendrils of violet smoke fell from her wrist and dissipated into the nothing where they'd come from.
Except it wasn't smoke, was it. Just looked like it, sort of. And it leaked from her fingers. From her hand. From her. Nicole let out a frustrated groan and pinched the bridge of her nose so hard it smarted.
"Ya know, not that I blame you," he added. "But you'd have me at a disadvantage there, so how about we walk instead?"
She nodded.
"Great. C'mon." His hand still where it'd landed, John turned her on the spot and navigated her to the door. Which was probably for the best, a tiny, reasonably voice in the back of her head insisted, because her knees felt like they'd been replaced with wobbly knobs of pudding from when the vertigo had ripped itself out of her and not quite put her sense of balance back the way it should've.
Behind them, she heard Ariel share the exciting news: "Did you hear that? He said Speaker."
And next to her, John scoffed. "Great work, Darrow. She really needed this."
"You're welcome. They'd have found out eventually anyway. They always do. They are to hearsay what you are to sugar."
"They think it's delicious?"
"Yes, they consume too m— can you stop, please, just for five minutes, with the… with that thing that you do? It's exhausting."
"It's a coping mechanism. Besides, you don't need to get so personal."
Darrow zipped past her shoulder in a blur of purple and swung over to settle on John's side. Ghost, for his part, came up next to her, his eye set on her and his shell arranged in a downward slant.
Worry.
Funny how something so small and made of angles, a ball, and a single light could express itself better than a lot of people she'd ever met.
And then there was Felicia. At first, she hovered outside, staring at them. But when John had led Nicole out the door, she got in their way. Sort of. She rolled vaguely into their direction, keeping low, and asked, quietly: "Do you want me to come with you?"
John stopped. He also dropped his hand from her shoulder, since apparently he needed to fold his arms and quirk a brow at the stray Ghost. And then at her.
Nicole shrugged, helpless. "She's… been following me since I got here today."
"Hey, that's great," he said with a quiet smile. "You're making friends."
Friends.
Nicole wasn't daft. Felicia hadn't come to her to make a friend. She'd flocked to her for the same reason as any of the other unbound Ghosts that'd found her since she'd arrived at the City. Because they needed something from her. Something Nicole didn't know how to even begin giving. Because she didn't know what it was and neither, she wagered, did Felicia.
"No," Nicole said. "You don't got to come."
Felicia's shell drooped a little. Not as openly as Ghost's did on occasion, but the droop was definitely there.
"But— ah—" Nicole turned around a little and indicated the Revive's door. "Maybe you can help out while I'm gone?"
The droop promptly vanished, gone up in a cheerful twirl accompanied by a chirpy "Of course! I can do that! I'll do that! I love doing that!"
And off she went. Straight through the door.
Nicole watched her go. And watched the empty door for a while longer, her mind suddenly tangled in the question of just what did these Ghosts want from her?
At least until John's hand, very hesitant and more of a timid request than a demand, found her shoulder again and carefully directed her forward a step. Then she wondered… just what was it he wanted?
Or her, for that matter.
She sighed and turned inwards, letting John's hand guide her steps. Funny how Darrow had been right in there. About how no one knew what she wanted. Including, surprising probably no one, herself.