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“Do we have any... money,” says Dream, out of approximately nowhere. “Like, money of our own, that doesn’t belong to Georgie’s parents. Or ways to get money.” “We could rob a bank?” Sophie suggests. There’s an awkward pause while they all consider this plan, including Sophie, who hasn’t actually thought it through. She imagines threatening the teller with guns, or using a blow torch to break into the vault. Probably they would get arrested if they threatened the teller, though, and do banks even have vaults anymore? “We could sublet Georgie’s shed,” Dream proposes. There’s another pause to consider this. Subletting, the problem is, has logistics, a term which all three of them mentally pronounce like a foreign loanword. They’d have to find renters. They’d have to make the shed somewhere a person might want to live. There’s probably steps to that, but at minimum they’d have to fix the leaky roof, which Sophie does not know how to do, and probably install air conditioning and get the place plumbing and things too, which Sophie definitely doesn’t know how to do. There’s probably building code stuff. Georgie’s parents might have to get involved, since Georgie and Dream and Sophie aren’t actually the ones with legal rights to the house. Sophie isn’t really sure what happens, exactly, if Georgie’s parents come down from their Wall Street jobs in New York and actually check up on what their daughter is doing? But she’s pretty sure it would be bad. “You can’t rent out my shed,” Georgie finally says, interrupting all trains of thought about parents and New York and air conditioning installation. “It’s my shed.” There’s another long silence, before Dream shrugs. “That’s fair, I guess,” she says. “And if I did I wouldn’t have anywhere to do my war crimes, so.” So it’s Georgie’s parents’ money they buy groceries with. Which is, like, fine? It’s not like Georgie’s parents are going to miss it. Honestly, it’s not super clear why Dream even asked the question. Or maybe it is, at least if you have a generous definition of clarity, because Dream’s gotten weird lately, since Wil Soot went witch. Or like, Dream is always weird, she’s Dream, but she’s gotten weird weird. She’s always in combat mode, full puella magi gear and a mask over her face, even when everyone else in the house is in sweats and pajamas. Sophie can count on one hand the number of times this week she’s seen Dream with her face out. Sophie can count on one thumb the number of times this week she’s seen Dream with her face out. “What, uh— what do you do in Georgie’s shed,” she asks, at some point. “...I mean. War crimes, obviously,” says Dream, in a perfect deadpan. “I violate the Geneva conventions constantly, I torture prisoners of war, I attack medics, I— I paint red plus signs on boxes.” There’s a spot of dead silence and then they’re both cracking up laughing and, well— Dream is still being weird. But it’s a kind of weird Sophie’s not too worried about, at least. So the setup is like so: Georgie Lore-Foundless lives in what is on paper her parents’ second house, and in practice just Georgie’s. Has since she was in fifth grade and failed out of New York City prep school by refusing to do anything or care or not sleep in class. For a while they hired someone to drive her around, but these days she just makes Sophie or Dream do it. Karla Jacobs still lives with her parents and goes to normal school and shit, so there’s a limited amount that she and Sophie can live together— having Sophie in the house for more than a couple nights a week tends to lead to awkward questions; Karla leaving for more than a couple nights a week tends to lead to worse ones. So she and Sophie see each other after school hours, and her parents think they’re friends and that’s it. Sophie, meanwhile, does not so much with the having of parents these days. She would say it’s an occupational hazard of being a magical girl, which makes it sound like something tragic and badass happened, but actually what happened was not even a little bit badass and instead was mostly just dumb and pointless. So she lives with Georgie, sleeps in what would probably be the guest room, and appoints herself in charge of making sure everyone eats. Dream had parents, at some point, probably, because that is how being alive works, unless she was created in a lab like in a sci fi movie, except even then she’d have parents because someone would have to have created her. She lived somewhere before moving in with Georgie, presumably, and might even still have access to that place. It’s a mystery nobody knows the answer to and nobody asks. And Quackity’s parents aren’t in the picture for a variety of reasons, all of them bad, and fresh out of living in Jessica Schlatt’s apartment— on Karla’s front porch, after she and Karla and Sophie had spent the night in a puppy pile in Karla’s bed, after they’d learned via trial and error how to kiss all three at once and after they’d promised that they were all three each other’s, after Quackity had lied to Karla’s parents over French toast and Hershey’s syrup that morning about how she and Sophie were definitely normal teenage girls who went to school and had favorite subjects and knew what trigonometry was— she looked Sophie in the eye and admitted she didn’t know where she’d be staying. So Sophie said “you can stay with us” and figured she’d talk Georgie into it later, and when later came Georgie didn’t turn out to need talking into, and now they’ve got a fourth person in the house. It’s... nice. It’s warm. It’s domestic. Quackity is nervous like she’s expecting something to go wrong, and she’s not talking about whatever the thing that happened between her and Schlatt or her and Wil Soot was, but— it’s nice. Sophie gets to make her pancakes, and hug her in the mornings. They don’t kiss without Karla there, but still. Sometimes Sophie goes to sleep with Quackity in her arms, and then wakes up in an empty bed. Sometimes she goes to sleep alone, Quackity having decided she’s taking the couch tonight, and then at three in the morning she wakes up to her girlfriend climbing into her bed and pressing close to her like a cat seeking warmth. Sometimes they spend the whole night wrapped around each other, Quackity taking little spoon or the two of them pressed forehead to forehead together. Sophie doesn’t make a thing out of it. Making a thing out of it is, she’s pretty sure, the fastest way to scare Quackity off entirely. In the meantime, Dream is doing politics shit again. Sophie doesn’t get why and she’s honestly not super paying attention, but something to do with what’s left of L’manberg. Clementine Innit steals something from Georgie, and Georgie is vocally pissy enough about it that Dream makes it a thing, and then they’ve got a Clem in the shed, so Dream can make sure she doesn’t get into trouble; and Sophie is busy, keeping an eye on Georgie, teasing Karla while she does her math homework, trying to get Quackity to be less scarily thin. She’s got no goddamn clue why keeping Clementine Innit in their house— or like, next to their house, Georgie would be incredibly a bitch about it if she was in their house— is even supposed to help? But it was Dream’s idea and Dream keeps being very self-satisfied that she got it to happen and frankly, Sophie has other, not-fourteen-year-old things and people to worry about. It’s not that Quackity doesn’t have her own clothes, or even that she doesn’t like wearing them. It’s just that she steals Sophie’s a lot, Sophie’s pajamas and Sophie’s shirts and Sophie’s jackets. Sometimes Karla’s and Georgie’s too. And it’s not that Quackity doesn’t look good in her own clothes, because she does— holy shit, she incredibly does, Sophie genuinely doesn’t know sometimes how she got this lucky— but in a stolen too-big sweater, no makeup, not doing anything specific with her hair, she looks softer. Less like she’s trying to be hot; more like someone you could actually hug or live with or make breakfast for. Somehow both more and less touchable at once. It’s a really good look on her. “Does Dream ever wear civilian clothes?” says Quackity, over breakfast. “Or does she just, like, dress like that.” Sophie nearly chokes on orange juice. “What? No. —wait, why would you think she just dresses like that? Why would anyone just dress like that?” “I don’t know! I don’t know her life! Maybe she has the world’s most specific fashion sense! Maybe she has horrible scars on her face so she distracts from it by wearing a mask but having her thighs out constantly! Maybe she saw her magical girl form and thought it was cool so she got a dozen copies and now the only clothes she owns are anime cosplay thirst traps! I don’t pretend to understand Dream!” Which is the point where it hits Sophie that every single time she’s seen Dream with her face out since Quackity moved in on the seventeenth, Quackity wasn’t there for. Quackity has been living with them for weeks now but has never seen Dream half asleep in Georgie’s pajamas, has no idea what it looks like when Dream smiles without the mask in the way. (Crooked, freckled, her eyes crinkling up until they’re almost closed, Sophie knows that look so well, and her girlfriend doesn’t know it at all—) Sophie doesn’t have an answer for her. And she doesn’t know what to say, about not having an answer. Hanging out with Dream and Clem is— honestly, it’s kinda nice? Dream still has the mask on but Sophie can hear in the tone of her voice and see in the way she’s got her shoulders the way she must be smiling behind it, and things are almost normal again. Until afterwards, when Sophie asks, again, more tentative this time, “what are you guys doing with the shed?”“I told you. War crimes,” says Dream, immediately, still in perfect deadpan, this time dripping with sarcasm. Sophie tries not to feel hurt by that, tries not to get defensive about how it’s a reasonable question, god. “I do things to Clementine Innit that would be illegal to do to POWs. The United Nations would hunt me down with, with skewers, if they got wind of it.”“Oh my god, Soph, why do you even care,” says Georgie. “I don’t! I literally am just curious, you’re the one who’s making a whole thing out of it—” But it’s too little too late, and if things were ever normal, they sure as hell aren’t anymore. The fight— it gets a capital letter in Sophie’s mind afterwards, The Fight— isn’t even over anything. Or if it is, it’s over something stupid that isn’t the actual point, to the point that she barely even remembers what it was.What she does remember is: Dream saying she doesn’t care about anything but grief seeds, and immediately trying to walk it back like they hadn’t all just heard her, loud and clear. Getting mad enough, finally, to start yelling. Georgie, between them, breaking down fucking sobbing. Dream yelling at Georgie, while she cries, saying you’re a baby, you’re a baby, you don’t even care, you’re just being a baby, over and over again while Sophie tries and fails to get a word in edgewise. Dream, eventually, giving up in disgust, leaving the house entirely, slamming the door behind her.Quackity, shoulders curled inward, tiny in one of Karla’s eyesore jackets, half-hidden behind the door frame. “That’s— that wasn’t just me, right? That was fucked up?” Georgie’s face is crumpled and she’s angry-crying, or possibly just regular crying— and the thing is, Georgie can totally cry on command. Sophie’s seen it. They’ve all seen it. It’s her favorite move to pull out in public spaces when she wants something and isn’t getting it. But when Georgie cries on command it’s all pretty, delicate tears, shoulders shaking just enough to be visible across the room, little whimpery noises to punctuate her point, and what she’s doing now is ugly, choking, whole-chest sobbing that turns her face blotchy red, and Sophie kind of wants to set Dream on fire about it. “Yeah,” Sophie says. “Yeah. That was fucked up.” Saturday morning. Dream’s out, Georgie hasn’t woken up yet, and Karla and Quackity are sitting at the kitchen table around a laptop.“What are you looking at?” Quackity jumps and reflexively minimizes her browser window, then actually looks at Sophie and goes back to the website she was on before. “Apartments,” she says, and turns the laptop so Sophie can see better. “There’s one that’s only five hundred a month but it’s for seniors over sixty-two and I look older than I am but not that much older—” “I think you could,” Karla says. “Like, maybe shouldn’t. But could!” Quackity doesn’t look older than she is, really, not unless she wears a full face of makeup and really tries, but Sophie doesn’t say so. “...you know we’re not gonna kick you out, right?” “Yeah, I know.” Quackity goes back to scrolling through real estate listings. “Just, you know, it’d be— it’d be good to have options.” She frowns at the screen. “If I don’t have standards for anything except price there’s one with... wait no they want employment history and good credit. They all want employment history and good credit. I could fuck the landlord and see if that helps, I guess.” Sophie tries not to let it sting that Quackity would rather sleep with a landlord than trust her to keep them safe. That’s a kind of trust that Sophie has, demonstrably, not earned. “Could you move in with Phil?” says Karla.Quackity doesn’t respond for a couple seconds. Sophie almost repeats the question. “I maybe could. She offered when she was driving me to your place, right after all the stuff with Wil— anyway, I could definitely check. But like, I can also just stay here? I’m probably going to just stay here, I in fact don’t have money, but at the end of the day it’s not like Phil’s place would be that much of a—” The front door opens and Quackity jumps again, switches to a different tab just as Dream comes into the kitchen. Dream’s kitted out like she’s about to go into a firefight, green cloak over black leather, her mask covering her whole face; Quackity, in sweatpants and one of Sophie’s hoodies, looks painfully small. Dream glances at the laptop screen, which is showing the subreddit for lesbian slime girl hentai. Scans the tabs at the top. Quackity is deathly still, except for her eyes, which are following Dream’s like she thinks something will happen the moment she looks away. Sophie watches them, Quackity holding herself like if she’s stiff enough she’ll turn invisible, Dream standing like she does when she’s facing a witch and about to rain down holy terror, Karla’s eyes darting, nervous, between both of them.“I heard somewhere that if you use an incognito tab you get better prices for apartments,” Dream says. “That’s only a thing for airlines.” Quackity’s voice is quiet and emotionless and definitely not shaking. “Huh,” says Dream, face inscrutable behind the mask, body language still vaguely predatory. “Shows what I know, I guess. I— will leave you three to it, then.” And she does. Quackity watches her go, doesn’t stop being so still until Dream is well out of earshot, and then she lets out a shaky breath and turns back to Karla and Sophie. “If all else fails I could always do what Niki does. —uh, the thing Niki does is she’s squatting in a place that’s up for lease, we got her a box fan and a cooler and someone goes by every few days with a bag of ice. Ranboo keeps offering to get her a tent but she keeps saying no she’s fine—” Sophie says nothing. Just glances at Karla, glances back at Quackity. Lets her ramble on. Quackity stops sleeping on the couch. Which doesn’t actually mean she spends every night in Sophie’s bed the whole night through, it mostly means she sleeps less, but they do spend more time curled up together skin-to-skin. It’s nice, if Sophie ignores everything about why it’s happening. (It’s kind of nice anyway.) “Hey, babe?” Sophie whispers in the middle of the night. Quiet, just in case she’s wrong and Quackity’s managed to fall asleep. Or. Well. If Quackity wasn’t awake before she is now. “Yeah?”Sophie opens her mouth, closes it, opens it again. Finally goes with, “Did you love Schlatt?”“...why?” “I dunno.” Does she? Whatever. “Just— thinking about stuff, I guess.” Quackity’s silent for long enough that Sophie worries she’s scared her, and then she says “I guess that’s fair.” There’s another long moment of silence. Sophie lets her hand run down Quackity’s side from her shoulder to her hip, reaches back up to touch her hair. She’s so soft. God, everything about her is so soft. “I did, yeah,” Quackity says. Still quiet. It’s too dark to really see, but Sophie can imagine her face. “It— wasn’t just what you guys saw at the end? She was sweet sometimes. She did a lot for me. It wasn’t always good but most of the time she was, like, fine— sometimes she wasn’t but when she wasn’t it just, made me want to do better for her, I wasn’t— I wasn’t more scared of her than I loved her, anyway, not until the very end with Wil.”Another pause. Sophie doesn’t know what to say, so she doesn’t say anything. “And—” here Quackity hesitates— “and even if I hadn’t, I don’t know if I’d have done anything different? She was my best option. It’s not like I was gonna do any better, not before you and Karla, and I needed to live somewhere, and at the end— at the end of the day, whatever else happened, she was mine. You know?” “...Yeah,” says Sophie, thinking of Dream, staring down Quackity at Georgie’s kitchen table. Thinking of Georgie with her face red and blotchy, and Dream mocking her for it, and Quackity with her shoulders pulled in half-hidden behind a corner. Thinking of the leaky roof in the shed— it never really gets cold in St. Petersburg, but it rains constantly, and they never did figure out AC. Thinking again of Quackity, small and fragile-looking in a borrowed shirt, curled up in her arms or asleep on her chest. The even rise and fall of her breathing. The weight of her on the mattress at Sophie’s side. “Yeah,” she says again. “I do.”