[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Collector

Genre: Slice of Life

Length: 2782 words

B/D: Writer's block sucks. As it turns out, I had to can all the things I wanted to do and just do something that appealed to my simple nature.

She rolls a coin between her thumb and forefinger, feels the rifled edge against her artificial skin. Minted three decades ago, she notes by long force of habit, but too small a denomination to be worth changing the mint frequently. On one side is a crest that means nothing any more, and on the other a dove, to symbolise peace.

Having contented herself that she doesn’t need it for her collection, she slots it into the vending machine and hears it drop with a satisfying clunk. She’s collected almost everything at some point or another. It doesn’t particularly matter to her what it is. All that matters is that it gives her a reason to get out of bed and stride out into the world again, and then, when she’s home with her prize, it spins into all sorts of other miscellaneous tasks to keep her busy: documenting, mounting, networking with other collectors, checking lists and reading books. She usually sells the collections off when she’s done with them, and donates some of the money to causes that catch her interest – usually robotics and natural disaster relief. But there are a few that are open ended, so she’s never really done with them. It’s important to have that there – a source of activity that won’t go away.

After a few seconds of fiddling with buttons, two cans of cold apple juice fall down. The day is extremely warm, even though Spring has only just begun. It won’t be long before the fields are carpeted with daffodils, visible even from the sky. There’s rain coming, too, the short and sudden showers that perk up the landscape and wash the pall of winter from the ground. She picks up the cans and presses one against her forehead, sighing gratefully as the condensation hits her skin.

“Here,” she says, and tosses the other can underarm in a low arc towards the benches. Her aim is a little off – throwing isn’t exactly her strong suit – but Sora plucks it out of the air with ease and cracks the seal eagerly.

“Ahhhh… So good,” she murmurs, after a four or five gulps. She looks back at Nath with furrowed eyebrows. “Is the ring pull okay?”

Nath smiles. Is the ring pull okay? Are the buttons okay? Are the chopsticks okay? Sora always asks it that way. She never says, “Can you do this?”, but always makes it seem as though the thing she’s trying to do is just broken or flawed in some way that would prevent her doing it. It’s a simple way around a complex linguistic problem, and it’s not meant to be condescending. In fact, just the opposite – Sora knows what she’s capable of. The answer to ‘Can you do this?’ is almost always yes.

“They’re annoying, but I can work them. I’ll save mine for later,” she says, and takes a seat on the bench, letting her companion lean up against her. “It’s only going to heat up as the day goes on.”

Sora groans, soft and low. She’s already sweating, which to Nath seems like a contradiction in terms. Sora shouldn’t be sweaty. No Sora she has ever known seems like they should be able to sweat. In the war she was a sleek, idealised killing machine – some otherworldly thing, not a person. She had learned that wasn’t the case when they met; for a few precious seconds, they were both human, both fallible. Both hurting. And now? She’s just as otherworldly, but in a different way. Like a fairy, or an alien. Hime calls her a space cadet, which seemed the best way to sum up up her mysterious ways of thinking. She has a train of logic with no brakes and that pulls in at some very strange stations.

But sweat she does, although it always seems strange when Nath sees it. Today she spent most of the day gardening. Suguri and Hime had tied her hair up in a ponytail, given her some dungarees and a vest top, and sent her to attack what had been empty space and was now looking like a passable allotment. When Nath arrived she had already developed sun-blushed shoulders and an insatiable lust for ice cream, and wandered over for a short and somewhat sticky hug. Nath had returned it a little dully; her brain was still stuck on ‘Sora with a ponytail’. It made her look brighter, cleaner. More girlish, insomuch as it was possible for a 10,000 year old war hero to look girlish.

“Do you want some of mine?” Sora asks, back in the present. She shakes the can, and a little liquid sloshes around the inside. Not enough. She looks at the can mournfully, as if she can convince the apple juice to undrink itself by looking sad enough.

“I’ll pass. You need it more than I do,” she replies, and something like relief washes over Sora’s face. She drains the rest of her can. “We’ll add getting more drinks to our mission objectives.”

“Roger.”

Of course, they’re not really on a mission. It’s more of a shopping trip – ice cream, seeds and bulbs, an office fan, and now as much fizzy drink as it will take to prevent Sora from collapsing in the heat. But they’ve both taken to calling their outings ‘missions’ – a dark joke, but a shared one. What kind of shopper Sora is seems to change with the phases of the moon. Sometimes she’s relentless in her desire to get in, get what she wants, and get out. Other times, she’ll peer through every shop window and stop to smell every metaphorical rose before she finally decides what she’s looking for.

Nath hopes that today is a rose-smelling day, herself. It’s been a little while since they last had a day out together. Since they came to watch the fireworks at the turn of the year. It seems like the garden has been taking up all of Sora’s time – all of her mind. Occasionally she rings up with some bizarre yet completely urgent question (Nath, what kind of fruit do you like?, or, Nath, I need to know about barrels) and they chat for a few moments, but neither of them is the type to spin out a phone conversation beyond what’s necessary. Part of her wonders if this new and busy life she had with Sora and her friends was just a momentary reprieve. She hopes it’s not the case.

“Nn. You’re thinking too hard. You’ll get wrinkles,” Sora says, gently tapping a finger against Nath’s forehead.

“If that was true, I’d be nothing but wrinkles by now,” she sighs, and climbs to her feet. “Come on. One of the places I wanted to stop has air conditioning.”

‘Air conditioning’, it seems, is actually a magical incantation to fully restore Sora’s waning strength, and she springs to her feet eagerly. “Where is it?”

“The comic book store.”

Sora tilts her head, as if by setting her brain's cogs at a different angle she might figure out what’s going on. “Comic books? You like them?”

“Depends on which one. Some are good, some are bad. Why?”

“Suguri doesn’t like them. She says too many of them are based on her.”

Nath thinks for a moment, then shrugs. “I can see that. Flying, protects the environment, actually millennia old. If you put it like that way, she seems like she’d make a good superhero.”

“She says she’s fine with being a superhero. But they keep making her into a cryptid or a space alien and having people beat her up.”

“…Yeah, that’d work too, I guess.”

Despite her misgivings, it seems that Sora’s interest has been captured. Privately, Nath isn’t surprised; a more visual way of telling stories is perfect for a girl who still it laborious to read the language. She almost can’t bring herself to tell her that she’s just trying to find something to collect again, and she’s probably just going to pick a series, mount it and index it without ever actually reading an issue. She finished her last collection shortly before she re-united with Sora and met Hime and Suguri, and they’ve kept her too busy to start another one since. But now that things have lulled, it’s high time she started a new collection.

They reach the store, with its polished glass window affording a view of all the mixed issues, stored in laminated sleeves and set out in cardboard boxes along a great central table. The walls are lined with hard cover art books, graphic novels in bizarre and experimental styles, and weighty tomes of compilation stories. Inside are other weary shoppers, sheltering from the heat and browsing the most colourful offerings. Nath frowns. It’s a lot busier than she expected it to be.

When they step inside, the cool air hits them all at once. It’s only when it does that Nath realises that there is a sheen of sweat on her forehead, chilled by the breeze. Sora sighs in the same contented way she sometimes does before falling asleep on random objects, before immediately making a beeline for the clerk. Nath feels a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Hello. I’m new at comics. Can you tell me the best one, please?” she says.

“Uh, sure. What are you into?”

“I don’t know. Just show me the best one.”

The clerk makes a face that says he goes through this conversation about thirty times a week, and comes a little closer to hanging himself with each iteration. Feeling something like pity, Nath steps in.

“Sorry. She wants something that started recently – no complicated backstories that she’d need to know. Action… is probably good, but no war stories. Better to steer clear of superheroes, too,” she says, glancing at Sora. Something tells her that she won’t find the standard ‘flying brick’ quite as impressive as the average person. After a few seconds of brain-racking, the clerk points them to some of the racks and goes back to tapping at his monitor screen, content that the half-an-hour conversation about why there isn’t an objective ‘best’ comic has been avoided.

“Alright. I’m going to look through the loose issues. You check out the ones he mentioned. If you find one you like, pick it up and I’ll treat you,” Nath says.

“Roger. Thank you very much.”

Sora moves away a touch reluctantly to the new releases, and Nath cracks her artificial knuckles. (It was a feature, the techs assured her, and not a sign of shoddy workmanship). She had collected comics a few times in the past, but had always had to avoid the loose issues due to the problem of not having fingertips at the time. She had trained her entire life for this moment. She was going to find a nice, semi-obscure comic, start in the middle of its run, and then collect both ways until she had them all. Something with a hundred or two hundred issues, maybe, all in one run. That was the ideal.

Quietly and professionally, she began her search. Having a good set of prosthetic arms was going to make comic book hunting so much more convenient. No longer would she suffer papercuts on her toes when she tried to put them in their sleeves. No more would she have to call over the staff to rifle through boxes upon boxes of pulp and paper for her. It was liberating. It was almost worth forgetting she had the arms on and getting them stuck in doors all the time, although not quite. Getting stuck in doors was her pet peeve. Usually they were designed for shorter people, with less heavy machinery on their shoulders.

Eventually, she ffinds what she’s looking for – a philosophical, slice of life story with an avant garde surrealist art style and a protagonist who’s an almost total non-entity, only caring about the contents of his wallet. She opens a copy of issue fifty and reads a few pages, to discover that it’s trash – beautiful, beautiful trash. It’s perfect.

“Nath. I found one.”

Nath did not jump when she heard Sora’s voice right next to her ear. Yes, her feet may have left the ground, and yes, she was a touch surprised, but really her legs just so happened to have become tired at that exact moment and she had taken flight to relieve the pressure on them. This is a very important distinction.

“It’s about these things called biplanes,” Sora continues, ignoring the fact that Nath is now half a foot off the ground. “They’re… I don’t know. I think they’re like helicopters, but sideways. That must be what the rotor on the front is for.”

She opens the book to show a full-page spread of what Nath can vaguely recognise as an ancient flying machine. The art is in soft colours with feathery outlines, transitioning to sharper lines and bolder colours when the dogfighting ensues.

“This one’s the main one. He’s Blue Buzzard. The girl is Red Rocket. Mostly they’re rivals, but sometimes they team up to fight pirates,” Sora explains, sagely. “They fight a lot, but they make up when nobody’s looking.”

Nath smiles. She already has a good idea of how this kind of comic goes. Sora believes she’s in for an action-adventure story of derring-do, but what she’s actually signed up for is a hundred issues of will-they-won’t-they romcom with occasional pirate beatdowns sprinkled throughout. But if this is the one she’s picked, then this is the one she’s picked. Maybe a little lighthearted romcom will do her some good.

“Alright. Take it over to the till. I’ll finish looking through this box and be right with you,” she says, and returns to flicking the covers. She doesn’t think she’ll find anything too interesting, but another issue or two of the one she’s got will set her collection off to a flying start. She’s just getting into it when she feels a tug at her sleeve.

“Why don’t you read it, too?”

For a moment, she struggles to keep the smile on her face. She doesn’t want to say it, but the comic that Sora likes is the exact opposite of the ones she’s looking for. If the series has just started, it’s too easy to collect – just grab a subscription and pick it up. No challenge. Even if it’s genuinely light-hearted and funny, it’s not like she’s going to read it. It’s all going to get put in dust-jackets and filed away before the series ends and she sells it as a set. It’s a waste.

But, there is a certain look on the blonde girl’s face. A certain longing in her eyes. It says, Let’s share this together. She could just as easily take the comic home and read it with Hime. Maybe even with Suguri. But instead she’s picked Nath. She can’t say no to that.

“…Alright. Go get another copy,” she says, her resolve crumbling. Maybe she’ll just collect this aeroplane comic on the side. A bit of fun. “Make sure it’s in good condition.”

“Roger,” Sora says, and strolls back to the new releases. There’s a spring in her step that wasn’t there before. It’s probably just the magic of air conditioning, Nath tells herself. Nothing else it could be.

When they’ve paid they step out of the shop to a day that is still razor hot, an outdoor furnace. The can of apple juice in her pocket is already warm. She thinks, perhaps, she’ll take Sora to the milkshake shop and they can enjoy some ice-cold drinks together. Maybe she’ll take a leaf through her new comics as well. It can’t hurt.

“Nath, Nath. What flowers do you like?” Sora asks as they begin the walk. “Hime wants lilies. Suguri says I can grow anything, though.”

“Pick a flower you like best, then.”

“I don’t know which one I like best. What’s the best one?”

“I don’t know the best flower, but I know the best milkshake.”

“Is it rocky road?”

“That’s a secret.”

“Muuu. I’ll just get the same one you get.”

“Then I won’t order the best one. You can’t outsmart me that easily.”

“Mean.”

In the event, Sora still orders the same milkshake as Nath. In fact, she says gravely to the shopkeeper, they should just make Nath’s milkshake twice as big and give them both straws, so they don’t have to wash as many glasses. The order is taken before Nath can protest. Within twenty minutes they both have brain freeze, although only one of them is blushing – and they’re both read the first issue of the Blue Buzzard, cover to cover.

A/N: Just a silly little slice of life -- getting to know my incarnation of Nath a bit more, I guess. New headcanon: Sora is innocent and kind, but she is also the accidental nightmare of every shop clerk in existence.