Pride is a problem, of course.
Mainbrace is being a pillar of civic responsibility and handing out free bottles of water, and wishing she'd stayed home. It's hot, and there are probably awful things happening somewhere while she's pinned down doing this PR shit. She's been dutifully pressured into have the right flag pins stuck on her, and women are — flirting maybe? She's not good at telling. So now she's flushed and flustered on top of everything.
It's a relief when she finds herself handing a refrigerated bottle to Nocebo, even Nocebo in a sundress and giving her a long, inscrutable look through big sunglasses, because at least Nocebo's only a villain.
"You look hassled," Nocebo says.
"Supposed to be two of us," Mainbrace says, "but Kyle took off to grind on drag queens," and flushes anew when her stomach rumbles audibly at the scent of the foil-wrapped burritos that Nocebo's carrying. "Sorry," she says. "He was supposed to cover my break, like, three hours ago—"
Nocebo pauses, then holds out a burrito.
"Really?" Mainbrace says, gingerly taking it. "If you're sure."
"Most people," Nocebo says in a low voice, leaning her hip on the stall and crossing her legs, watching Mainbrace unwrap and bite into it, "would think twice about eating that."
Mainbrace rolls her eyes, chews and swallows, takes her time licking a stray runnel of salsa off her fingers. "Everything you do is idiopathic," she says dismissively, takes another bite, moans appreciatively. "Where'd you get this? It's good."
Nocebo just looks at her, eyebrows high.
"What?" Mainbrace flashes a razor-thin smile. "Big word, for a dumb thug whose power is basically biceps?"
"I didn't know you people knew that for sure," Nocebo demurs.
"Well." Mainbrace relishes another bite. "I can't exactly tell them that you just confirmed it, can I?"
Nocebo exhales wordlessly, staring the whole time Mainbrace finishes eating, chews her lip, is interrupted by one of the other local costumes crashing up.
"Brace!" he says, running with sweat and glitter. "Oh hey! Brace, this is—"
"I've met Nance," Mainbrace says, with unutterable confidence, like she's ever had that name in her mouth.
How dare. How dare Mainbrace be able to lie that smoothly. Nocebo uncrosses and recrosses her legs.
"No you haven't," Kyle says in some kind of outrage. "You're too fucking square."
"My lunch break was three hours ago," Mainbrace says, smug and airy, finishes wiping her hands on a paper napkin and dropping it into the bin behind the stall. "See you later, Kyle."
"Hey wait—"
Nocebo has to tuck her hand into Mainbrace's strutting elbow after that, doesn't she?
"Mainbrace ditched me!"
"Kyle ran off to play hooky and didn't come back until three hours after my lunch break," Mainbrace counters.
Kyle is covered in wicked sunburn from yesterday, and he's trying to spread his misery around.
"I was doing community outreach," he says sulkily.
"Outreach and reacharound are two different words, Kyle," Mainbrace says, and their station senior, Kentarch, who is extremely beige and nearly retired and extremely straight, noisily straightens a stack of paperwork.
"Extremely disappointed in both of you," he recites boredly. "No more out of either of you, thanks."
"She took off with someone and never came back!" Kyle complains.
"I'd been telling her you'd held up my break for three hours and she gave me a burrito out of pity," Mainbrace says. "I only bought her another one to replace it. And then didn't come back. What, you thought I got laid?"
Kentarch rummages in his desk drawer and ostentatiously puts on noise-cancelling headphones.
"Well, that figures," Kyle snorts, flouncing away to annoy someone else.
Mainbrace woke up in her bed this morning well-exercised, hoarse-throated, and alone, which — she spent a couple of minutes breathing through, and decided she'd expected, she must have expected it, and then froze in front of the mirror for she's not sure how long, feeling A Lot.
She wanted — she wanted to say things. To Nocebo. She wanted—
Mainbrace doesn't bruise. She doesn't papercut. Which is to say, sure, she can, but her durability pushes all her capacity for injury up the scale, compresses it at the serious end. There isn't much that will bruise her unless it's also shattering bones. She's not used to—
Nocebo sure had been an experience, but it's not until Mainbrace is looking at bruises in the mirror that it felt life-changing.
After Mainbrace woke up — very sensibly, for both of them; defensibly; praiseworthily, even — alone.
"Yeah," she says steadily, not looking after Kyle. "Figures."
