Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It begins when Marina is fifteen.

The Soulmate Swap is normal for about half the population. It’s supposed to start at puberty, but Marina’s is a little late, which is why she wasn’t expecting it. One second, she’s standing in front of her class of new recruits, some with four years on her, and the next she blinks and she’s standing with her bare feet in the wet sand. Water swirls around her legs, and all she can see is the dark gray sea, rolling with excited waves, as it reaches toward the horizon and meets the bright blue sky. The air is clear and moving around her, which is wrong—

She holds up a hand to feel the air and jolts. Pale, blocky fingers with bitten down nails, tiny palm—not hers.

Not her hand.

She whirls around, kicking up water. She’s in the ocean. On the surface. Under the— She looks up and nearly hisses at the brightness that sears her eyes closed. Against her eyelids, she can still see it, branded on her corneas, and her eyes begin to water as she blinks hard to clear it.

Yeah, that’s the sun. And that’s the sky and that moving air is the wind and she can smell salt and hear—

Yelling—joyous yelling. Two small children rush past her, pushing each other into the water. They’re unbalanced and awkward on their newly formed limbs, with bright red splotches on their new, pale skin, and they tumble into the water, squealing and crying.

A high-pitched voice yells after them. Marina looks up, and up again, to see a middle-aged woman charging toward her. Marina is short, far shorter than she is in the body she left behind in the domes, and she only manages to step aside out of instinct alone. The woman sloshes into the water, skirt trailing, and drags both children up with one in each arm, scolding them.

Marina can’t understand a word she’s saying.

But, more pressing, Marina realizes with a drop of dread, the woman isn’t an Octoling. Her tentacles are too many and shaped wrong, round on the bottom, suckers turned inward, and her mask is dark around her eyes, connected in the middle. Numb, Marina’s strange little hand comes up to find the end of her own tentacles. They’re shoulder length, curved at the bottom, fatty and heavy, and, there it is: sucker round and curled in toward her face.

Marina swapped with an Inkling.

As soon as the thought strikes, she falls forward into the sand, hands digging into the grains. This can’t be happening. They told her it’d missed her and she’d been glad. No soulmate meant no distractions, meant she was destined for officer training and rank climbing; she’d dedicated herself to her studies and gave up her beloved music classes so she could prove that she deserved to be assigned to the Flooder design team, that she could design the Great Octoweapons that would one day free her people from the domes.

But now? Her soulmate is an Inkling.

Marina closes her eyes, feeling nauseous, and when she opens them again, she’s back. On the floor of the classroom, hands curled into themselves, breathing hard through her mouth. There are at least ten pairs of feet around her and one hand on her back, rubbing in gentle, rhythmic circles.

“Report to medical,” comes the command from somewhere above her. The head instructor. Marina looks up in time to see her framed in the doorway, staring down at her with more angry judgement than Marina’s ever seen on her usually metered face. She shakes her head, scoffs quietly to herself, and turns. The sound of her heels echoes loud and long behind her, and Marina has never felt smaller.

“What did medical say?” Acht asks as they walk around the perimeter of Slimeskin Garrison. It’s near sunset and the panels are turning a burnt umber as the balls of light they call the sun begin to dim. For a moment, Marina almost misses the actual sun. It was warmer than she expected.

“Cleared for duty,” Marina sighs, staring down at her feet as the answers. “They said that I was too valuable to kick back into the civilian sector, especially because I don’t know who it is.”

“Uh huh.” Acht doesn’t sound convinced. “Where’d you go, really? I don’t believe your bullshit story about some random quarters in anywhere dome.”

“It’s what happened.” Marina tries to keep the tightness of the lie out of her voice. She’s never been good at lying, especially to Acht, who seems to know exactly how to see through everyone.

“And why hasn’t your soulmate reported her experience?”

“I assume she doesn’t want to lose her position any more than I do.”

“Uh huh,” Acht grunts again, pausing to lean back against the railing separating them from the sheer drop off into the abyss. Rumor has it the humans dug the pits as prisons, places to toss castoff rulebreakers, and some recruits swear that they can hear the otherworldly screaming of their long-dead ancestors at night.

Marina doesn’t put much stock in rumors or folk tales, but she’s starting to believe in some twisted karma. Someone somewhere is laughing at her and her Inkling soulmate.

“Why did she look down at your hands and babble something in Inkling, then?” Acht continues.

For a second, Marina doesn’t process that. She keeps walking, but, with each step she takes past Acht, it slowly sinks in, like a knife forced through dense muscle.

Marina’s stomach bottoms out. She turns to find Acht still leaning on the railing, staring at her passively, unimpressed as always. They even raise an eyebrow in the face of her incredulous fear.

She can’t lie to them. It’s a sick realization. She doesn’t want to lie to them; she needs to tell someone.

But she can’t risk it.

“No one heard her say anything,” Marina hedges, instead of blurting it all out. That’s what they told her at her debrief in medical. Whoever ended up in Marina’s body didn’t say anything, just panicked and whirled around, which is pretty normal during the first swap. They had no idea who she was and were hoping that Marina would give them a clue; when she couldn’t, they decided to keep her where she was until her soulmate revealed herself. Who it is will determine Marina’s fate, if she’s still viable as an engineer with the possibility of coupling in five years, and Marina had breathed out a soft, steady sigh of relief.

She’d been able to salvage it. Her Inkling soulmate would never reveal herself, and so long as Marina could keep it vague, while still lying to her superiors about her fake Octoling soulmate, she could stay the course and climb the ranks like she’d dreamed.

“I heard her.” Acht picks at a cuticle, disinterested. “Everyone else was yelling about you swapping—but I heard her. She looked down at your hands, said something in Inkling, whirled around, saw the trigonometry on the board, and panicked even more. Whoever she is, she doesn’t like math, so she’s got that going for her at least.”

Acht’s disinterest is what cinches it as more than a guess. If there’s one thing Marina can count on, it’s Acht pretending not to care when they actually really care a lot. They’re a few years older than Marina and have been a steadfast and loyal friend, despite their differing opinions on how hard one should work to climb the ranks, and Marina really should’ve foreseen this; Acht sees everything, especially the stuff Marina wants to keep hidden.

“You can’t tell anyone,” Marina insists.

“Duh,” Acht scoffs. “I don’t wanna see your ass shipped off for fraternizing with the enemy. Where’d you go?”

Marina falls back to lean on the railing next to Acht, covering her face. “The beach.”

“The beach— Like, the beach-beach? With the ocean and the sand and the—”

“The sun. Yeah.” Marina drags her hands down her face. “They were playing in the water. I was short. My tentacles were wrong. That’s all I remember.”

“Wow. What are you gonna do?”

Marina leans back, craning up to stare up at the LED panels that pass for sky. One of them is out, a dark black void in the middle of the simulated sunset. “Nothing?” she says to the panel.

“Nothing.” Acht snorts. “You could leave.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But you could. There’s someone up there who will help you.”

“I don’t need help.”

“Marina...” Acht groans and shakes their head. That’s the problem with them. They’re a slacker and they don’t like the army, but they don’t know what else to do. There’s comfort to be found in the military, bunks and three meals, and their smarts could land them in a high-ranking position if they just applied themself.

It doesn’t agree with them though—fighting a fight they don’t believe in, pretending to care—so they’ll just sit comfortably at the bottom, always watching, always waiting.

“You have more options than any of us could dream of,” Acht continues. “Just think about it.”

But that’s the other thing: Acht is more intuitive than any of Marina’s classmates or students. All that watching made them good at reading people, at understanding nuances that Marina misses.

“I’ll think about it,” Marina promises.

+1 year

She doesn’t. Think about it that is. As soon as she gets back into the swing of things, Marina doesn’t have time to think about it. She puts her head down and lands herself on the Wasabi Supply Unit in spite of the angry, red mark on her record. Her soulmate never reveals herself, and, eventually, everyone stops whispering about it after she leaves a room.

She doesn’t think about it. She certainly doesn’t lay in her bunk, trying to remember the sensation of the sun on her skin, or the sound of the waves as they rolled past her stubby ankles; she absolutely doesn’t try to categorize the short memory, tearing it apart into pieces to analyze every last moment of it, doesn’t try to remember what details she can of her soulmate, the puny inkling that she’ll never meet—and she most definitely doesn’t feel her heart pang when she thinks that.

She doesn’t think about it until she has to, anyway.

The second time it happens, Marina is on her feet in the middle of the crowd, screaming her guts out, as a small inkling fights for their life against DJ Octavio.

The song that opens her mind is fast and poppy, staccato in a way that makes her bounce like she’s never moved before. She pushes her goggles up, throws her hands up, and yells, free and true.

I have to leave, comes the most dangerous thought of her life.

She closes her eyes and breathes once, fortifying, before fisting her hands into tight balls and turning her back on the battle.

It’s only as she’s skirting around her fellows, her bunkmates and her classmates and her students, all the people who have accompanied her through her rapid ascent into the highest-ranking position anyone could ever achieve—all by sixteen—that she blinks and falters. Her foot lands hard and wrong, and, when she looks down, she realizes that her boots have been replaced with thick-soled sneakers.

A pair of pale, bare legs snakes up out of the platforms, and Marina barely has time to process that she switched before she’s pushed hard from behind and she’s sent stumbling forward, through the doors that are sliding open in front of her. She falls to the side, breathing hard, and holds her hands up, trying to gather as much information as she can. Small hands, nails chewed down into nothing, over-sized, green t-shirt with a strange, long icon on it. She thinks it’s some kind of food. Wrist band tight around her arm with strange, Inkling writing on it.

Someone yells next to her and she looks up to see something large and green rising up just beyond the concrete planters in front of her. She starts moving before she can stop herself, forgetting all about her quest to gather information about the body she’s found herself in, and rounds the planters, fingers trailing over the concrete. It’s a different texture than back in the domes. Higher quality.

And then, as she gets all the way around, she just manages to get a glimpse of it: Inkopolis, with its towering buildings and bright lights. There are two vehicles parked in the center of the street and the whole place is packed with teenagers in their bright shoes and even brighter tentacles. They’re all wearing either an identical shirt to Marina’s or a neon pink one, and they gather in groups, chattering away and laughing, loud and unconcerned, with the sky wide above them.

It makes something inside Marina ache.

She steps toward them and—

Marina lands hard back in her own body.

She’s still in the middle of the crowd. The orange-haired Inkling has shoved their way almost to the end of Octavio’s battle arena. There’s not much time left before it’s over.

Marina curls her hands into fists again, nods to herself, and pushes through the crowd.

She needs to see that city again.

+3 years

+Pearl Houzuki

+Off the Hook

+Ebb & Flow, Acid Hues, Muck Warfare, Color Pulse

+Inkopolis News

+Now or Never

+Falling in love

“So what seems to be the problem?”

Marina breathes out slowly and forces her hands to release from their death grip on the bench she’s seated on the edge of.

It’s not that she’s never been seen by a doctor before. It’s just, usually, she’s at Pearl’s house, sitting on the expensive couch or in the breakfast nook, with Pearl hovering in the next room (or pointedly outside to make it very clear that she's not eavesdropping—but still within screaming distance). Marina knows the Houzuki family doctor well, and that’s been a gift all in itself, considering how unfamiliar Marina used to be with these sorts of things, but there are certain... issues that she needs seeing to that she can’t bear to utter in that house, to the familiar face that referred her for glasses and coaxed her through the extensive vaccine regiment that she’d missed, growing up in the domes, especially with the possibility of Pearl accidentally overhearing.

Marina adores Pearl, probably more than she should, which is exactly why she’s here, really. And she knows, somewhere in the back of her mind, that Pearl would understand and be infinitely supportive in dealing with this, but Marina can’t do it to her. There are certain things she needs to face alone.

“Ms. Iida?” The doctor, an aged inkling with graying ends to her tentacles, leans forward to rest her elbows on her knees.

“Sorry,” Marina chuckles, breathing out slowly through her nose. “It’s just... It’s silly.”

“Not that silly, if you’re here. We had to close the whole office because of your visit.”

And that’s just making the whole thing worse, really. She’d called to make the appointment herself, leaning against the wall in a stairway in the studio, and mumbled quietly into the receiver because there was always the possibility of Pearl bursting in. When they heard her name, the receptionist on the other end squeaked and immediately transferred her to the office manager, who demanded to know exactly when she wanted to come in and promised to coordinate the visit so that Marina had the utmost privacy.

Marina, who hated causing a fuss, had gritted her way through the whole thing, up to and including the awkward time in the waiting room, standing across from the star struck receptionist. She’d been asked to sign an autograph.

“Ms. Iida... You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t serious. Is there something wrong with your relationship with Ms. Houzuki?”

“Pearl?” Marina jolts and feels her tentacles curl up a little at the ends. “This doesn’t involve Pearl...”

It hurts to say. She desperately wished it did involve Pearl.

The doctor sets her with a confused, askance glance. “What seems to be the problem, then?”

Marina takes a deep fortifying breath. “I haven’t swapped in over three years.”

The doctor blinks once, twice, and sits back in her seat. One leg crosses over the other, and the pen in her hand bounces off the clipboard resting in her lap.

“And you said this doesn’t involve Ms. Houzuki?”

Marina bites her lip. “She’s not my soulmate, if that’s what you’re asking.”

The doctor’s eyebrows raise.

“I wish she was,” Marina continues, “but she’s not.”

“Have you discussed this with her?”

Marina shakes her head. It’s a rare thing, for her to feel frustrated, usually reserved for the times when Pearl makes too much noise during soundchecks, but she can feel the beginning of it now. This is what she’d been most afraid of, coming here: the specialist insisting that it’s Pearl.

“She’s never mentioned swapping,” Marina answers, short, to the point, trying to keep her voice level, “and she’s never swapped since I’ve known her.”

“How long has that been?”

“Three years.”

“And you haven’t swapped in that time either?”

Marina blows out a hard breath. “No.”

“Why have you ruled her out? I will admit, it’s not often that I get to see my patients interacting outside of my office, but your case seems textbook. All the signs are there—”

“I mentioned it to her once and she just... comforted me.”

And that’d probably been the worst day of Marina’s life, so far. Over six months ago, a cocktail party to celebrate something she can’t recall, dress a little too tight, with a collar that clung far too closely to her neck; one too many espresso martinis, while Pearl sipped on expensive wine and grimaced the whole way, tugging the top two buttons of her shirt open after the third glass, and maybe Marina warmed up a little too much, cheeks hot from the inside, giggling like a school girl as she and Pearl hid in a semi-circle booth and leaned their heads together to tell each other secrets. Marina isn’t sure who started it, but suddenly Pearl was slurring about how lonely she used to be before she met Marina and how much she wanted to keep her forever, and Marina, who knew all this of course, just snorted and said that there was no way Pearl would ever lose her—even if Marina figured out who her soulmate was.

Pearl pulled back, eyes reflecting the flickering candle on the table, and she did an awful job hiding her grimace. “You got one of those, huh?”

Marina wanted nothing more in that moment than to take it back, because it didn’t matter. She’d already fallen so hard for Pearl in the intervening years between the last swap, her climb to the surface, Pearl’s attentive guidance through those critical first few months, their meteoric rise up the music charts, the news gig, and their ever flourishing careers that there was no way Marina would ever abandon Pearl in favor of some other Inkling, no matter what the swap told her. Marina would rather saw off her own tentacles and eat them than turn her back on Pearl.

(And, Marina couldn’t imagine anyone else making her feel this good. Just leaning toward Pearl, feeling her breath on her skin, close enough to count the freckles across her nose, she felt like she was full of light, the bubbling fizz of sparkling water, and like she could float through life without a care—just because being in Pearl’s presence reinforced her, made her into something more than she ever could have been alone, and made her feel secure in ways that Marina would never be able to put words to. Marina had fallen fast and hard for her best friend, but she enjoyed every second of it. Like hell she was going to let someone else come in and ruin that.)

But Marina was too drunk to say all that. As soon as the words came, they evaporated into vapor, and she was left staring down at the face she wanted to wake up next to every morning with a lead tongue and a mind that felt far away. So, she just said, “Yeah, but ‘m with ya forever…”

Pearl smiled sadly at her and patted her shoulder. “Yeah. It’s okay, Rina.”

In the moment, Marina hadn’t really comprehended the devastated little furrow between Pearl’s eyes or the long, shaky breath she released when she thought Marina was distracted, but, the next morning, as Marina dredged up the memories from the sludge that existed of that night, head pounding, she remembered it all—including Pearl’s glaring refusal to offer anything about a soulmate of her own.

It’d been a supplication, like the blind, last second toss of a power clam before the whistle, to see if Pearl was the person Marina had swapped with all those years ago—and it’d sailed short of the goal and landed with a solid thud right on the ground.

“Ms. Iida…” the doctor sighs, drawing Marina out of her brief spiral. “It’s completely normal for swaps to slow down, especially if you’ve been in close proximity with your soulmate. How often were your swaps before you met Ms. Houzuki?”

Marina shifts uncomfortably, making the thin, protective sheet of paper under her crinkle. It's loud in the silence of the office. “Only twice. One year apart.”

“Late bloomer,” the doctor observes, scratching something down on her clipboard. “It’s hard to find a pattern with so few instances… Okay.” She nods to herself. “There are two options here: we wait and see when you swap again. It could be a few years. The longest observed time between swaps in bonded couples is twenty years, but I don’t think it’ll take that long considering your age. Or, if you’re uncomfortable with how long it’s been, I can prescribe you something that will force the swap.”

“Force it? But—”

“It’s a simple medication. Drink it and you’ll swap like normal. It’s your decision.”

Marina bites her lip and looks down at her lap. Is it that bad, falling in love with her best friend? She hasn’t swapped in years—maybe it won’t happen again. Maybe Marina’s freaking out for no reason. It seems a little intense to force the person on the other end to swap just because she’s anxious about falling for someone else… What if she figures out who it is? How will she handle that?

But, if she doesn’t… She’ll just be stuck like this. Wondering, pining, watching Pearl from afar and unable to act on her feelings.

“Okay,” she says, quietly, to the hands clasped tight in her lap. “I don’t have to take it right away, right?”

“It’s two bottles. Shelf life is about a year for both if you keep them refrigerated. You mix them together and take it within two hours.”

Marina takes in a deep, stabilizing breath and nods, unable to speak the words out loud.

“Okay. I’ll get those delivered for you, yeah?”

“Sure,” Marina whispers, and her hands tighten in her lap.

Chapter Text

Pearl was at the beach the first time it happened.

The Houzuki beach house wasn’t as big as the mansion, so she was out in the ocean to try to get away from everyone. She was deep in her emo phase, she’d spent the last week baking in her black wardrobe, and she was deeply lonely, despite sharing a bedroom with her closest-in-age cousin, a rising second year college student who was studying business, much to everyone’s delight. Mira was everything Pearl wasn’t: tall, with a smooth face that she pulled easily into soft smiles, polite, and, most of all, ready and primed to take over the family business with the help her younger brothers. Pearl, despite being the only child of the oldest Houzuki sibling, was assumed to be the slacked-off freeloader of the family. Charitably, they called her the creative spirit. 

At least, that was what she assumed. No one said it to her, but they also stopped trying to get her to sit in on contract negotiations and business calls. She wasn’t cc’d on emails anymore. Whatever. It suited her fine.

“Yeah, whatever,” Pearl snorted to herself as she kicked her shoes off and waded into the surf. Usually, she loved the chaos of these trips, where everyone who lived in the sprawling mansion was forced into close quarters. Pearl’s uncle liked to play Go with GamGam and Pearl’s father was trying out landscape painting again, much to her mother’s chagrin. The youngest of her cousins had finally managed proper legs, so he was a stormfront of a child, climbing anything he could while his brother egged him on. Mira was in the middle of at least six pulpy, mass-market romance novels, which she read out loud to Pearl late into the night so they could make fun of them together, like they used to as children. This was normal—but Pearl felt like she couldn’t quite connect, like there was a film between her and her family that only she knew was there.

Even now, her little cousins were playing in the sand while her aunt was seated next to them, stretched out with her face turned to the sun, while Pearl looked back at them. It wouldn’t be long until the boys got bored and charged out to meet Pearl, because usually she was the fun one who always threw them around the surf and pretended to be a shark. She didn’t know if she had it in her today.

Pearl groaned and walked a little further out. What was she doing, really? It was like she—

A wave slammed into her legs, nearly knocking her down, and she hopped back a few feet, struggling for purchase with her toes.

“Careful!” her aunt called back, high and chiming.

“Yeah, yeah,” she grumbled, and closed her eyes to turn her face toward the sky.

The wave sound disappeared. The yelling of her cousins evaporated.

Pearl opened her eyes, confused, and found herself looking up at a dark, gray ceiling.

“What the hell…” she muttered to herself and held a hand up to rub her head.

Except, that wasn’t her palm. Long fingers, warm, dark brown skin, nails long and dipped in a bright magenta. She stared down at it and flexed her fingers, watching closely as the digits curled inward toward the palm. Her stomach twisted in a sick little jolt.

Of course. Of fucking course.

That soulmate swap bullshit didn’t skip a generation, after all.

A quick pat to her person revealed a bared midriff and a leather skirt, which was normal enough, at least in Pearl’s circles, but a glance around the room found twenty pairs of eyes pinned on her with expectant smiles and nodding heads attached. A classroom of some sort—which was her worst nightmare, really. Could this get any worse?

Pearl whirled around, and the most complicated math she’d ever seen sat happily on the board.

“Oh, come on!” Pearl yelled, throwing her hands up.

That was about when the pandemonium started. Multiple voices rose, questioning, but Pearl couldn’t make out what anyone was saying. The squeal of chairs was loud, and suddenly she was surrounded by what she could only assume were her soulmate’s students. They spoke in a jumble of words that she couldn’t parse, and she clapped her hands over her ears, panicking. Why was everything so loud?

Pearl closed her eyes and sunk down, trying to will herself back into her body. This couldn’t be happening. There was no way. She was too fuckin’ old for this shit, well past the eleven, twelve, thirteen that sent most people hurtling through some freaky body snatching whatever the fuck.

It wasn’t fair.

Everything stopped. Pearl breathed in, hard, and focused down on the sensation of her own hands, sinking into the sand. She was on all fours, soaked through from the waves, but she was back.

“Pearl?” her aunt called. Pearl groaned and crawled toward shore, unable to form words.

“Pearl?” her aunt tried again. “Are you hurt?”

Pearl threw herself down in the dry sand, still heaving for breath. When she finally spoke, it came out as a groan. “I fuckin’…” She sucked in a solid, panicked gasp. “I swapped.”

“Oooooh!” her youngest cousin sang. “Pearl cussed!”

“What?” her aunt demanded. Pearl felt her kneel in the sand next to her.

“I have a soulmate,” Pearl grumbled. She shoved her sand-covered palms into her eyes.

Her aunt was quiet for a long, long time. And then: “I’ll get your mother.”

“Yeah,” Pearl sighed.

“How are you feeling?” Sirena Houzuki asked the next morning. She was a tall, solid woman, well-versed in everything Pearl struggled with (business, math, patience), but also lacked exactly where Pearl excelled (music, chatter, brute strength). Despite their different frames, Pearl was a close copy of her mother, with just a few of her father’s traits to round her out—mostly the nose and the height—and it wasn’t until that exact moment that Pearl found herself hating how similar they were.

Pearl’s parents were soulmates.

It was difficult, being the child of such a perfect union, especially when her future seemed so murky and unsure. It was said that the offspring of soulmates were flawless, golden children, destined to bloom into brilliance and talent, prosperity and success. Pearl had always resented it, especially being such a well-known child, considering the family’s wealth and business dealings, but she’d endured like always. There was always a part of her growing up that feared her pre-teen years and what felt like the inevitable swap that was awaiting her, how it would irreparably mark her as someone who couldn’t make it alone. After a lifetime of watching her parents swap every few years, she was prepared and dreading it.

When it didn’t happen, she’d sighed out of relief, while her parents sighed out of disappointment.

“Annoyed,” Pearl answered, honest, as she crunched into a piece of toast.

“Not excited?” Her mother pressed her hands to Pearl’s face, one across her forehead and the other against her cheek. “No fever. That’s good.”

Pearl shrugged.

“Still have no idea who it is?”

“Nah. I hope I never figure it out.”

“Pearl…” Sirena sighed. “I know you’re trying to figure yourself out right now, but don’t look at this like an obligation. It’s a gift. There’s someone out there who’s looking for you.”

Pearl rolled her eyes and pulled her head free of her mother’s hold. “Yeah. Whatever. I’m gonna go for a walk. Don’t wait for me for lunch.”

She hopped out of the chair and purposefully didn’t look back to see her mother’s expression as she slammed the door behind her.

+1 year

The second time was even more annoying because she was packed in on the train between who knew how many sweaty fifteen-year-old mouth-breathers. They were rumbling about the Squid Sisters, and Pearl was trying very hard to glare out the window and not make eye contact with any of them.

She was a little old for Splatfests, but the only way into the Plaza on nights like this was to either be over the age of twenty-five, work in a shop, or sign up for a team—so she’d haphazardly chosen hot dogs and squeezed onto the train. She wasn’t going to play; she didn’t feel like having her ass dragged out on full display on the seventh page of some slop mag—Loser Houzuki Heiress Kicked in the Teeth By Former Bandmates and Roasted By Team Marshmallows.

Yeah, no thanks.

No, Pearl was heading into the Plaza for one reason: her ex-drummer was here, and she needed to talk to him.

No hard feelings or anything, but he owed her a favor, considering it was his fault she was in this situation in the first place. Bandless, blackballed, listless, and alone, and she intended on making herself known.

So she curled her hands into fists and squared her shoulders as Deca Tower came into view. She wasn’t quite jonesing for a fight, but if it came to it, whatever. She could take him.

The doors slid open in front of her, and she took the first step toward her destiny.

And landed hard in a body that wasn’t hers.

A heeled foot pounded into the ground, and she felt the shock of it up her whole leg. The crowd around her pulsed with the music, yelling, screaming, piercing as they threw their hands up and cheered. Everyone was dressed identically, in all black leather, magenta tentacles that curled around ears, and was pushing strange goggles up onto their foreheads with awed expressions on their faces.

Pearl turned to follow their eyes, forgetting all about identifying details about her soulmate, and pinned down exactly what had them so excited.

A small, orange speck, hands clutched tight to what Pearl guessed was a Splattershot, jumping and rolling, squidding and swimming as she fought against a giant mech. The music, when it finally got past the cotton of her ears, was familiar.

Staccato, poppy, pulsed like the beat of their hearts, overplayed—

“The Squid Sisters?” Pearl cried.

When she boomeranged back into her own body, she forgot all about her unpaid debt, the reason for her journey here. She blinked hard and realized that she was off the train and in front of the Plaza. The trucks were already in place, with their lighting rigs and speakers, but the Squid Sisters were wherever the hell they were—with Pearl’s soulmate.

“Ugh,” Pearl grumbled, turning on her heel. What was she doing, coming all the way out here to pick a fight? So what if she was broken up inside because Mira was growing ever closer to graduating and becoming the heir apparent of the Houzuki business empire? So what if Pearl’s smaller cousins were both going off to boarding school this year and it would just be her, the parents, and GamGam at the mansion? Just poor, good-for-nothing Pearl with her no-band, one-woman pity party of a life.

The only thing she had going for her was her stupid soulmate.

It was an evil little thought, but she hated the way her parents watched her, especially as the calendar rounded the one-year anniversary of her first swap, waiting for any signs of the mystery girl destined to complete her or whatever the fuck. It sucked, feeling like all she was good for was the person attached to her, a relationship that didn’t exist yet—not the music she worked herself raw for, not the band she dug pieces of herself out for, or the family that she wanted to impress and reassure that she was worth more than they thought, that she wasn’t just the transient, lost cousin full of lost potential.

“What the fuck ever.”

She needed to scream. She needed Mt. Nantai.

+3 months

+Marina Iida

+Ebb & Flow

“—does Marina think of your whole soulmate thing?” Mira asked over brunch that day. They were seated next to each other, like always, and Pearl was poking mindlessly at her eggs, buzzing because she and Marina just finished the first demo of new Ebb & Flow last night and she couldn’t wait to play it for everyone. Marina was across from her, sipping carefully at her miso soup with her hands tight around the cup. She grinned at Pearl when she caught her looking, clearly just as pleased as Pearl, and Pearl couldn’t help but smile back.

“Pearl?” Mira prompted.

“Huh?”

“What does Marina think of your soulmate thing?”

“Really?” Pearl asked, throwing her fork down. “Now?”

“Pearl!” Sirena admonished from the other end of the table. She was scrolling through something on a tablet, probably some stupid business report, and she handed it over to Pearl’s father as she pinned Pearl with a harsh glance.

“Mira keeps asking about my stupid soulmate,” Pearl accused, leveling her cousin with a hard point. “I thought we agreed to let it go.”

“I just wanted to know if Marina—” Mira begins.

“Leave Marina out of this!”

“She’s been living here for months. She’s part of this.”

“She doesn’t even know what we’re saying!”

It was true enough. Marina was watching the argument with wide eyes, looking back and forth between Mira and Pearl like they were liable to explode right in front of her, but she didn’t seem to have any actual idea what they were arguing about. She was getting better at Inkling in leaps and bounds, like a hurdler running at full speed toward the finish line, and Pearl knew that it wouldn’t be long until she would be talking circles around all of them—but, just now, she was watching Pearl with those big, green eyes of hers, reading her body language for any cues that she needed to act on, with no real recognition of the words being thrown around her.

“Leave her out of this,” Pearl ordered, poking Mira right in the chest. “You’re getting the company, like you always fuckin’ wanted. Leave Marina alone and don’t ever bring up my soulmate in front of her again, got it?”

They weren’t usually this antagonistic toward each other. In fact, when they were younger, Pearl considered Mira her closest confidant, the only other person in the world who understood what it was like to be a Houzuki heiress, to be groomed into a future that had been chosen for you before birth, but something about growing into adulthood and moving into their new bedrooms, away from each other and their parents in separate, dedicated wings of the mansion had thrown a wall down between them. It sucked.

“Fine.” Mira sniffed and looked back at her plate, admonished. Pearl blinked, surprised, because she expected more of a fight, but quickly fell back into her chair.

“Good,” she muttered, flat-footed and off-balance. “She doesn’t know, by the way.”

“I figured.” Mira snorted and Pearl felt a nudge against her shoulder. “Sorry.”

“Yeah.” Pearl nudged her back.

Across the table, Marina beamed at them.

+2 years

+Acid Hues, Muck Warfare, Color Pulse

+Inkopolis News

+Now or Never

It was Marie’s idea to go out for lunch. A passing of the torch, sharing pointers, whatever pretense they wanted to call it. Marina was excited, and she barely contained herself as they ordered mimosas and munched on finger sandwiches. Marie was perfectly cordial, if a little stiff and tense, especially as she kept checking her phone for what she claimed were texts from Callie, but the conversation was good. Pearl begrudgingly found herself enjoying Marie’s company as she picked her brain, and Marina was practically vibrating she was so excited.

Of course, Pearl had an ulterior motive in coming here, and her moment came as Marina excused herself to the bathroom. They watched her go, and Marie sat back in her seat, sighing.

“She’s cute,” Marie muttered, appraising. “Great singing voice too. You two—”

“Let’s cut the crap.” Pearl planted her fists on the table, sending the small plates rattling. “Where were you about six hours before the Hot Dogs vs. Marshmallows splatfest?”

“What?” Marie laughed, incredulous.

“Look, I’m gonna be square with you. I have a soulmate, and we swapped right before that splatfest. I was headed into the city, but she was in some underground arena. And you and that cousin of yours were singing. I could hear you.”

Marie’s face went incredibly pale, paler than Pearl had ever seen before. “You were there?”

“For like a minute, maybe. Where the hell were we? Where was she?”

“Octoling…” Marie whispered. Her voice was quietly awed, and her eyes slowly widened as she looked Pearl up and down. “Your soulmate is an Octoling.”

“An Octoling? Like… the guys who lost that war like a hundred years ago? Aren’t they all gone?”

Marie shook her head. “They’re still around. Closer than you think.” She glanced to the side and grimaced. “Marina’s coming back. Do you want to—”

Pearl glanced back, grimacing. Trust Marina to piss at the speed of light when one of her idols was waiting for her. “Tell me about that final splatfest, Marie!” Pearl cried as Marina pulled her chair back and slid back in, smiling in that cute, pleased way of hers. “How do we avoid getting pitted against each other like you two?”

Marie cast a long, hollow glance at Marina, seemingly taking her in fully for the first time. A soft smile slinked across her face, and she snorted to herself. “Unbelievable…”

Pearl had no idea what that meant, and Marina’s hand found Pearl’s under the table, for just a moment, so she could squeeze her fingers.

+1 year

+Falling in love

And maybe the worst part of the whole soulmate thing is that fact that Pearl can’t let herself fall in love properly.

It’s a quiet realization, one day in the studio. Marina grins at her over the table between broadcasts and asks her what she wants for lunch, waving her phone. Something jack knifes in Pearl’s chest and her breath leaves her in a rush—because Marina’s always been beautiful, sure, but there’s something about her, sitting there in her little shrug because it’s always cold in here, with her one tentacle wrapped around her arm, something about the question, the normalcy of it, the “I’m buying!” trilled from between her teeth with just the barest hint of her accent, that suddenly hits Pearl hard enough to knock her down. She sucks in a breath, hearts picking up speed.

How long has she had a crush on her best friend?

“Pearlie?” Marina asks, frowning, and Pearl has to force herself to be normal, to act like her whole world didn’t just fall down and bloom open at the same time.

“Uhhh,” she says, trying very hard to keep her voice level. “Whatever you want, Rina. I gotta— I gotta go to the bathroom!”

And, as she stares at herself in the mirror, watching her face in all its wide-open shock, leaning hard over the sink, trying to figure out when things changed, when Marina stopped being just her bandmate and became something more… It’s only then, with the epiphany sweet on her tongue that she remembers. Pearl blinks and she’s back in that arena, Calamari Inkantation in her ears, watching a battle that she doesn’t understand.

An Octoling, Marie told her. Closer than you think.

Not close enough, as far as Pearl is concerned. Marina is right there, close enough for Pearl to reach out and grab. Who gives a fuck about her soulmate?

She’s always hated it, anyway, a destiny she couldn’t control. She should get to decide what happens, who she ends up with. It doesn’t matter. What are the odds some random Octoling will show up from wherever they’re hiding just to find her?

“Fuck it,” Pearl says to her reflection, affirming, reassuring.

She tries, too, but she never can find the right moment to tell her. Maybe that’s why she takes a chance that night at the cocktail party—bolstered with the fire of a twenty-year-old wine burning in her stomach, Marina giggling into her neck with her tentacles curling around Pearl’s shoulders. Pearl leans toward her and tries to put it all out there, tries to explain how much Marina means to her and how much she wants to be by her side forever.

And, for a moment, everything is perfect, because Marina’s expression softens and her hand cups Pearl’s chin and Pearl wonders if she’s going to have to stop this before it starts because they’re both hammered and they shouldn’t kiss like this, not for the first time, not sloppily at some party packed with press and drunk off their asses—

“You’ll never ever lose me, Pearlie,” Marina says, and her hand falls. Her words bleed into each other, and she looks like she’s focusing really hard to make sure that she says them properly. “Even if I figure out who my soulmate is.”

It’s like lightning. The words lance painful-hot through her, and Pearl pulls back. Marina’s face twists, hurt, but Pearl can’t stop herself.

“You got one of those, huh?” she intones, flat.

Of fucking course.

It’s one thing for Pearl to write off her soulmate. She knows just how much she’s in love with Marina and can’t imagine ever developing the same feelings for anyone else, even the person supposedly made for her or whatever the fuck—but she can’t do that to Marina. She can’t climb into Marina’s life and complicate things like that, knowing that someday doing that might make Marina have to pick between some stranger and Pearl. She can’t imagine ever hurting Marina like that.

And selfishly, Pearl isn’t sure how she’ll handle getting everything she’s ever wanted just to have it ripped out from under her.

Marina pulls back, wounded and unhappy, eyes welling up with tears, and she opens her mouth to object, probably to tell Pearl that it didn’t matter who was on the other side of her body swaps—and Pearl shushes her with a soft finger across her lips.

“It’s okay, Rina. You’ll never lose me either, no matter what.”

That placates her and she dips forward to press her face into Pearl’s shoulder.

Chapter Text

+6 months

The bottles sit, abandoned but never forgotten, in the back of Marina’s fridge. She’s too busy, she tells herself, especially after she reads the labels, and there’s never the right time.

This medication in intended for those who have previously documented instances of the Soulmate Swap. Its purpose is to induce an instance of the Swap outside of the natural rhythm, either for purposes of resetting the internal clock or treating an abnormally long gap between Swaps. The intended effect is the transportation of one’s consciousness into the body of another and vice versa. Side effects include headaches, nausea, vomiting, abnormally long duration of the Swap, disorientation, and tremors. Do not take if…

She’d seen enough, fingers tightening with each side effect, and shoved the paper bag into the back of the fridge, telling herself that she’ll take it when there’s a break in their lives.

Then, almost a month after the courier dropped the bag on her doorstep, Pearl finds a radio somewhere in the Mt. Nantai wilderness and they’re pulled into an adventure that almost ends with the destruction of Marina’s whole world.

Agent Eight is a quiet thing, but Captain Cuttlefish is a loudmouth, so it’s easy for Marina to filter into the background, hacking away to help Eight when she needs it, while Pearl chants pep talks into the microphone. It doesn’t occur to Marina that his age would be an issue, so distracted by the sensation of Pearl’s bare leg pressing against her own, there on the couch in the mansion, and Eight’s eternal, silent struggle against an unknowable enemy, the push to find more stations and thangs, so she can maybe poke her head out into the light of the surface like Marina did all those years ago.

Maybe Marina took it personally, this young Octoling with no voice or memories, fighting for her place in the sun. And maybe she completely missed the signs that Cuttlefish had the capacity to ruin Marina’s life.

She slacked off. Passed out in her room in the mansion, unwilling to go home in case something happened, and Pearl kept tapping away at her phone on the couch, holding down the fort while Marina drooled into her pillow. When she wakes, rolls over, and scans through the missed messages, she has a moment as she hangs there, unable to comprehend the text, unable to make sense of the in-depth dossier that detailed Marina’s whole past, Pearl’s brash, protective declarations that it didn’t matter where Marina was from or what she was, where everything falls apart around her.

She doesn’t get out of bed. Maybe she’s afraid. Maybe she’s just spent, after so many long nights bent over her laptop. Maybe she’s hoping that she can will herself to her feet and float her way out the door, never to be seen again. But she doesn’t move as she messages the chat and receives Pearl’s blunt reassurances that nothing would ever come between them. It’s nice, to see it in black and white, but Marina can’t move because of the sense of impending doom that settles itself deep in her stomach.

Marina lied to Pearl. Not directly, because Pearl never asked the most important question, but she never offered the truth either. She never, even at her most tipsy or vulnerable, leaned over and whispered I’m an Octoling. I grew up in the Octarian Military. Pearl never questioned, never guessed, just assumed that Marina was just like she was: a surface-born Inkling, maybe with a few strange differences, but Pearl was someone who shrugged things off as none of her business. Of course she bought Marina’s omissions. She trusted Marina so completely, and Marina took advantage of that.

She deserves whatever’s coming her way. Pearl may have defended her, but that’s Pearl. Her anger will come later, after the initial protective instincts wear off. It’s just a matter of time.

“Marina?”

Marina closes her eyes.

Pearl is reliable. That’s something Marina has always counted on. And that reliability means that she won’t let something that’s bothering her to sit for long—especially if it’s getting in the way of something important.

Pearl doesn’t knock, just cranes the door open enough to poke her head in. The hinges are well-oiled, silent, even if Pearl isn’t.

“I know you’re awake. Are you okay?”

Marina pulls the covers over her head.

“Aww fuck,” Pearl breathes, and Marina hears the door click shut. Pearl’s footsteps are hushed on the plush rug, and Marina feels the bed compress just a touch under her light weight. “Listen… You don’t have to say anything, okay? I just— I’m sorry.”

Marina pulls the blankets down, shocked, to find Pearl’s face turned toward her. Her cheeks are splotchy, bright pink, and her frown is deep. “What?” Marina demands.

“I’m sorry. It— I shouldn’t’ve found out that way. It sucked.”

Marina can’t say anything. The words leave her completely, so she just sits there, mouth slightly parted, chasing down whatever grasp of the moment she can get her hands around, and comes up with nothing.

“Y’know you could’a told me,” Pearl continues, hands curling into each other in her agitation. “I wouldn’t have… We’re— You’re Marina.”

She turns, pinning Marina with a long, desperate look. Her hand lands on Marina’s shoulder and she squeezes, tight, fingers hooking around the sheets still stretched over her body. “Y’know? You’re Marina. And I’m Pearl. Nothing else matters.”

Marina breathes out. She’s crying, she realizes, and she sits up and pulls Pearl into as tight a hug as they both can take.

“I’m sorry,” Marina whispers into Pearl’s neck. “I’m so sorry.”

And it occurs to her then, as Pearl hushes her, that this is it: the final confirmation. There’s no way Pearl is her soulmate. If she was, she would’ve seen Marina’s past twice, once in the classroom and once in the arena, and would’ve put it together the moment she read Cuttlefish’s dossier.

But she didn’t. Because she isn’t.

And Marina’s just going to have to deal with that.

+2 months

She doesn’t. Deal with it, that is.

She does what she does best: puts her head down and continues working. Splatfests come fast and fierce, along with the daily grind of the news and their multiple media appearances and concerts—and the constant obligation that is getting Eight situated in her new life on the surface. It’s all Marina can do to keep herself fed, watered, and well-slept. It’s a gift in disguise, the fact that she can’t contend with her broken hearts, even as she zones out in the shower or stares at herself in the mirror with the toothbrush stationary in her mouth. Thankfully, her sleep is dreamless.

Pearl, on the other hand, seems to be trying to make Marina’s life harder.

It’s not rare for her to be attentive. She’s the most observant person Marina’s ever met, but she tries to disguise it with the sheltered rich girl front. She reminds Marina a lot of Acht in some ways: sees everything with narrowed eyes, watching closely as people march through their lives, and seems to be able to see right through Marina at the most inopportune moments. It’s not fair, how easily she can read Marina—even if sometimes she doesn’t know what to do with everything she gets eyes on, but she sees it, and that’s enough to make anyone jumpy.

But, it’s gotten worse lately. It might just be residual guilt from learning Marina’s secret, but she’s become practically doting. Marina’s never without a drink these days, because Pearl’s constantly running to fetch her new bottles of her favorite juice or getting an intern to fill her bottle; food arrives at Marina’s doorstep right at dinner time with a note that just says :) – P. If Marina so much as yawns Pearl’s in her face asking if she needs a break.

It’s cute.

It’s also heartbreaking.

Marina isn’t sure how she’s going to get over this whole thing. When she swaps again, what’s she supposed to say to the person whose body she lands in? Worse yet, what if she swaps when she’s with Pearl? Just leaving the poor hapless Inkling to Pearl’s mercy with no way to intervene.

Marina tries not to think about it.

“I’m just saying,” Pearl says, mouth full of noodles. She waves her chopsticks for emphasis, sitting at Marina’s feet with her back against the bottom of the couch. “It just makes sense. You move back in here, less commute for the both of us. Win. Profit. Success!”

“Pearlie…” Marina sighs and digs around in her takeout container. There’s not much left to speak of, but she manages to find a small sugar snap pea to snag. “We’ve talked about this. I like my apartment.”

And it keeps me from doing something really stupid, she adds in her head.

“More than you like me?” Pearl looks up at her, fluttering her eyelids cutely, and even goes so far as to layer her hands under her chin, chopsticks and all.

Marina sighs.

“Eh? Eh?” Pearl pokes her in the leg, still grinning sunnily.

“…of course not,” Marina groans. “But that’s not the point—”

“What’s it gonna take to convince ya, Rina? Huh?” Pearl leans forward and props her arms up on Marina’s knees.

“I don’t want to impose—”

“S’not imposin’ if I invite ya, y’know.”

“I thought we agreed that me living alone was a good idea—”

“You agreed. I told ya you should do what you thought was best.”

“So you didn’t think it was a good idea?”

“Rina…” Pearl sighs and finally pulls herself up from the floor. The coffee table across from them is covered with scribbled on and scratched out sheet music, a sign of the tension that’s been living between them since the whole Octoling thing. Usually, ideas flow pretty easily in these brainstorming sessions, but this time it’s been a lot of useless back and forth, tense disagreements without resolutions. The first thing they agreed on all night was the break for food.

And now this, out of nowhere: Pearl asking Marina to move fully back into the room she kept at the mansion.

“Rina… I meant what I said, and I mean this shit now. It’s stupid for you to live on your own when we’re always spending all our free time together.”

It makes sense. Of course it does. But Marina can’t agree to it.

“Pearl, I just— I can’t—”

“Why not?”

Pearl’s face is slowly brightening with a vivid flush, a sure sign that she’s getting frustrated. It’s not often that Marina’s the reason for it, and it makes her uneasy. She’s been afraid of this: unable to give Pearl what she wants because of her stupid soulmate.

She really needs to figure out who it is. Maybe they won’t have any chemistry and Marina can ignore it.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway. Maybe she should just kiss Pearl already and figure it out afterward.

It’s a dangerous thought. But, as Pearl’s hands curl into fists and she springs to her feet to pace, unable to contain herself, it’s also a tempting one.

“Marina,” Pearl grumbles, and it’s so weird to hear her full name out of Pearl’s mouth that she feels something jolt deep in her stomach. “You know… I realized something while we were helping Eight. You stayin’ here that whole time… It was real nice. We had breakfast together and when we you went to bed I knew you weren’t driving home in the dark, and I don’t know. I liked it, okay? Didn’t you like it?”

Marina bites her lip and looks away. “Of course I liked it.”

“Don’t you want to keep liking it?”

“…I can’t,” Marina answers, half-hearted.

“Why?”

They’re going to keep going in circles like this. It’s never going to end, because they’re both stubborn and have good reasons for doubling down. Marina can feel the beginning of a headache, and she watches as Pearl’s frustrated flush spreads down her neck, past the stretched-out neckline of her sweatshirt.

“Because…” Marina sighs, covering her face.

There’s only one way to end this argument.

A moment of bravery. That’s all it is.

Damn the consequences.

“Why, Rina? Just tell me.”

“Because I want…” Marina forces herself to pull her hands down, to face Pearl down with the full force of her eyes. She owes her that much. “I want to kiss you… so much. All the time. And I can’t—”

Pearl freezes. Her flush deepens, past pink, to a bright red, and her mouth slowly pulls into a fierce grin. “Is that all?”

“Is that all?” Marina squeaks, an angry echo. “Wh—”

Pearl lands on the couch on her knees, and she leverages one hand into the back of the couch behind Marina’s head, leaning toward her. “That’s no big deal.”

“Of course it’s a big deal! What— How can you—”

Pearl’s eyes soften and she uses a gentle finger to shush Marina. “It’s okay, Rina… I’ve wanted to kiss you too… for months.”

“Oh…” Marina breathes. She hesitates, for half a moment, hot all the way through, numb with it at the same time, and feels the world slip out from under her. Pearl’s smile is soft and gentle, and she leans down further, giving Marina ample time to pull back, but Marina can’t convince herself to stop.

This kiss is soft and short, chaste, but their mouths fit together so nicely it makes something inside Marina crack open. For a brief moment, she flashes back to that first swap, with her feet in the ocean, staring down at the hands that were meant to hold her like this.

Not Pearl’s.

Marina pulls back, gasping, and practically falls to the ground as she scrambles backwards over the sofa’s armrest.

“Rina! What?” Pearl cries.

“Sorry!” Marina calls back. The panic is too much, the guilt even more so. Her eyes are already filling with terrified tears, and she almost falls flat on her face as she skids toward the front door. Her shoes are waiting there, and she stomps them on and throws the door open. The motorcycle is waiting for her there, because this was supposed to be a short visit.

“Rina!” Pearl’s voice breaks. Marina’s hearts break with it.

“I’ll call you later! I promise!” Marina slings her leg over her motorcycle.

She’s gone before either of them have a chance to convince her to stop.

It’s a short drive to her apartment. It takes two minutes to fish the pharmacy bag from the back of the fridge and mix the liquids together. It takes nearly two hours to drive up toward Mt. Nantai. The sun is setting behind the city, but that doesn’t matter.

When she stops, she has seven minutes left before the medication is no good. The kids like to call it a love potion, Marina remembers as she gives it a shake. It’s a cloudy white, thick and viscous.

It goes down easily. Bitter, but she barely tastes it.

Marina tosses the bottle, frustrated, out into the wilderness, slithers to the ground, and presses her face into her knees.

The swap takes one minute. Sixty excruciating seconds, where all Marina can think about is Pearl’s panicked, upset face, chasing her down the driveway.

The moment it happens, she squeezes her eyes shut. It’s a jolt this time, probably because of the medication, and the room she lands in is dead quiet. Too quiet. Artificially quiet.

She forces her eyes up, begrudgingly acknowledging that she needs to gather as much information as possible so she can put this whole damn thing to a rest. The sooner she figures out who it is, the sooner she can figure out what to do next.

Hands first. The same, small size. Nails painted black. Chipped on the ends. Silver rings. Pink, stretched out sleeves.

Familiar rings. One that Marina bought herself as a birthday present.

She breathes out, slow.

Stupid.

She’s so stupid.

Marina is in the studio. Her studio. Off the Hook’s studio. On the stool behind the drumkit, to be precise. She can see their logo through the semi-transparent mylar. Pearl’s favorite sticks are clutched tight in her hands.

There are tears on her face.

“She’s going to kill me,” Marina breathes. Pearl’s familiar voice comes out of her mouth. It sounds a little deeper in Pearl’s head than it does in Marina’s ears or in recordings.

On cue, Marina’s—Pearl’s—phone begins to vibrate. On autopilot, Marina fishes it out of the front pocket of Pearl’s hoodie. The screen is cracked, and her battery is sitting at a weak sixteen percent.

Marina’s own face flashes across the screen, a photo that Pearl took over a year ago of Marina asleep at her computer, drooling on a Pearl shaped pillow. Her own name sits at the top of the screen. She takes a deep, fortifying breath before sliding into the call.

“Hello?” she says in Pearl’s high pitch.

“Hey babes,” Marina’s voice says in return. It’s a little higher than she’s used to hearing in her head.

“Hi,” Marina says again, grasping, lost, maybe a little panicked. Her hearts are pounding and she feels like her stomach is currently lodging itself somewhere in the vicinity of her throat.

“Hey… This is awkward as hell and we gotta talk about it, but first: where the fuck am I? Did you drive all the way out to Mount Nantai? It’s almost dark, Rina!”

“Yeah. I did,” Marina sighs.

Pearl, in Marina’s body, is quiet for a long moment. Marina bites her (Pearl’s) lip and tightens her hold around the phone.

“You didn’t know,” Pearl says, quiet, with wonder and surprise thick in her voice. “That’s why you freaked.”

“I didn’t—” Marina cuts herself off and stands. Pearl’s body is at least a foot shorter than hers, and that almost trips her up, but she’s too shocked to let it stop her for long. She paces across the room, holding the phone tight to her face. “You knew we were soulmates?”

“Uhhh… Duh.”

Marina drops the phone.

Marina curses. It sounds natural coming out of Pearl’s mouth.

Chapter Text

+6 months

Pearl sits, anxious and miserable, across from Marina for months.

She doesn’t swap, and realizes, after checking the calendar her mother keeps for her, that she hasn’t swapped in over three years. That bothers her far less than the knot her organs have worked themselves into, slowly, as the days have passed. Marina seems unphased by their heart-to-heart—or maybe she just doesn’t remember it— and she puts her head down and keeps working, always watching Pearl for her cues, editing the instrumental tracks that they bounce back and forth, never quite catching Pearl’s eye when they’re alone together. Things slowly return to normal, and Pearl sits on her hands and tries very hard not to think about the dreams she has at night or the hole that’s slowly eating its way through her.

It’s agony.

When she finds the radio and hears Cuttlefish’s voice on the other end, it’s a welcome distraction, especially when Marina jumps on board to help too. It’s fascinating, watching her fingers tap away at her keyboard while muttering to Eight in the language that Pearl’s only hears in snippets these days. Marina makes everything look so effortless, and, when she explains how she piggybacked off the radio’s signal and jumped into Kamaboco’s network from there, all in an excited, flushed rush, Pearl can’t help but fall for her even harder.

Maybe it’s her fault, then, when Cuttlefish blows the lid off the whole thing. Pearl isn’t sure if she could’ve stopped him, but she doesn’t try, does she? Just sits there, slouched so far into the couch that she’s liable to disappear into the space between the cushions, and reads, wide eyed. She reads again, and again, stomach dragging down with dread because this doesn’t feel right. Marina’s upstairs, doing who knows what, and Pearl’s here, prying into her whole past—a past that Marina clearly didn’t want to share.

It’s a barebones file, but Pearl can imagine that each line represents something major, a life experience that Marina clearly wanted left forgotten—but it also makes sense. So much painful sense, after years of sitting across from her in the recording studio, next to her at the keyboard, dancing around her at Splatfests—it all clicks into place, from her strange tentacles to the initial language barrier to the genius brain.

Marina is an Octoling.

Pearl holds her hands up. Nails chewed down, like always, much to hair and makeup’s chagrin, fingertips a pale, pale pink, sleeves pulled tight over her palms—the exact opposite of the hands that she swapped into. Those hands had long fingers, long nails in a bright, vivid magenta, skin a dark brown.

Marina’s hands.

“Your soulmate is an Octoling,” Pearl repeats to herself. She snorts. “Closer than you think. Good one, Marie.”

She lets her arms fall. They bounce off the cushions, and she can’t help but laugh at herself, incredulous.

It’s too easy, is the thing. She apologizes to Marina, and it’s so easy. By the time they save the world with Marina’s off the cuff plan, Off the Hook is back to normal. Needs must, Pearl figures, and, as they’re flying back to the city with three tagalongs, Pearl sits with her legs crossed in the seat, headset tight over her ears, and feels Marina’s arm cup around her shoulders.

“You were incredible,” Marina says into the microphone extended in front of her mouth, and her voice is staticky through the headset. She squeezes Pearl’s shoulder and reaches forward with the other arm to grab Pearl’s hand, soft fingers wrapping around her shorter ones, and Pearl can’t stop herself from looking down. Long, brown digits, teal nails. Smooth, blemish-free skin, a brain that could teach calculus or whatever the fuck was on that board during the first swap.

Pearl’s so stupid. She can’t believe she missed it.

“So were you,” Pearl says, trying very hard not to purr like a lovesick fool. The others don’t have headsets so they can’t hear anything, but Pearl doesn’t want to test her luck here.

It’s not lost on her, how quickly she’s changed her tune on the whole soulmate thing now that she’s sure that it’s Marina. She just doesn’t care. It’s a little pathetic, how much she doesn’t give a fuck that it was all correct; she’s in love with Marina, and there’s nothing standing between Pearl and getting exactly what she’s so desperate for. Not even fate can fuck this over for her, and she’ll never ever have to watch Marina pick between Pearl and someone else.

Marina grins at her and her eyes reflect the light of the setting sun outside. She raises Pearl’s hand up to her mouth and presses a kiss there, just for a second, before releasing it and turning to look out at the city out the window. She waves to get Eight’s attention and Pearl can’t help the smile that crawls across her face as she watches Eight’s eyes widen.

It reminds her so much of Marina, the first time Pearl brought her here.

What must it have been like, to leave everything she knew behind? To step into that city for the first time and crane up to see the tops of the buildings, the overwhelming noise of the hustle and bustle of a foreign language and busy people pressing past on the sidewalk? To trust Pearl so blindly to steer her in the right direction? To put her fragile fate in Pearl’s hands so readily, with just an unfinished demo on a banged-up cassette player as an insurance policy?

What must it have been like to do all that, knowing that her soulmate was somewhere up here, looking for her?

What must it be like, to realize that you found her over three years ago and never knew?

Marina glances back, smiling, bright and easy, with her beautifully rounded cheeks and big eyes, and Pearl can’t help the tears that prick her eyes.

It feels pretty damn good, actually.

+2 months

“I’m just sayin’,” Pearl says, leaning forward to place her takeout container on the coffee table in front of her. “It makes sense for you to move back in here.”

Marina blows a hard breath out of her mouth and glances over her shoulder, as if someone is liable to walk in on them. Weird impulse, but she’s always been like that, even though she knows that the mansion is split up into multiple wings, each dedicated to a sole occupant, family, or couple. Pearl’s wing has just been her for years, with its multitude of empty bedrooms, a recently renovated office, and central living room. Of course, there’s the shared living space in the center for the whole family, with the large windows, massive, expensive sitting room, and even larger kitchen and dining room. The family has brunch there every Sunday, just to catch up, because, despite living in the same house, they might as well be on different planets sometimes. Pearl hasn’t seen her mother outside of brunch since she told her that Marina was her soulmate.

(What a celebration that’d been: a happy yell, a tight hug, a demand to know when they’d finally swapped again. Pearl had to tell her that they hadn’t swapped yet actually, and she hadn’t dredged up the courage to talk to Marina about it yet, what with their increasingly busy lives (news broadcasts, Splatfests, Shifty Stations, prep for the rapidly approaching Final Fest, three new songs, and getting a whole Octoling situated on the surface, including lessons in language and basic surface living). She didn’t know how to start the conversation, especially since Marina was playing coy with her. It’s all Pearl can do to try to show how much she wants this to work by making sure that Marina stays fed and hydrated—and it’s a nice distraction, turning her intense feelings into caretaking instincts.)

The asking her to move back in thing is, she’s hoping, a possible opener for the whole conversation. Marina is easily flustered by Pearl’s attentiveness, but she has to know, right? They’ve been dancing around it for two months and Pearl is dying—

“I like my apartment, Pearlie,” Marina objects.

Pearl has to try very hard not to roll her eyes.

“Okay,” she huffs, “but it just makes sense—”

The argument is really annoying, too, because Marina just dances around the whole reason why—and Pearl really just wants to shake her and scream we’re soulmates!! Just move in already! but Marina isn’t biting. She just rolls her fingers together like she always does when she’s anxious, and Pearl feels like she could explode.

“Just tell me why, Rina! Don’t you— We’re—”

“Because—” Marina says, staring down at her lap. Her cheeks are turning a bright turquoise right before Pearl’s eyes. “Because I want… I want to kiss you… so much. All the time. And I—”

“Is that all?”

Maybe it’s too flippant, but Pearl can’t believe they’re having this conversation right now. Marina is— What? Panicked because she’s attracted to Pearl? Her soulmate?

What did they teach her in Octo land?

“Is that all?” Marina squeaks back, offended and shocked. “Pearlie, we can’t—

Before she knows what’s doing, Pearl finds herself moving across the room. She drops onto the couch on her knees, at equal height to Marina for once, and collects her face in her hands. “Why not? “It’s no big deal. I’ve wanted to kiss you for months.”

Marina’s eyes widen, but she doesn’t pull away. “Oh—” she breathes, right into Pearl’s mouth.

The kiss is far too short for Pearl’s taste, but she keeps it sweet for both of their sakes. She’ll never admit it, but her heart is swinging its way up her windpipe, making it hard to breathe, and her stomach is tipping itself over in her nervousness. It happens so quickly that Pearl doesn’t have time to dwell on how tense she is, how much she wants this to work, how much she wants this moment to be perfect and divine and—

Marina rips back, gasping, and, before Pearl can react, she tumbles over the back of the couch, throwing her hands up to cover her mouth.

“Rina!” Pearl cries, scrambling to follow her.

“Sorry! I— I can’t!”

“Wait!” Pearl skids across the perfectly waxed floor and nearly loses her footing. She catches herself on the wall, but Marina is already halfway out the door by the time she catches up.

“I’ll call you later! I promise!”

She’s gone before Pearl can stop her, but that doesn’t stop Pearl from running after her, bare feet pounding on the cobblestones of the driveway. Marina makes it to the gate before Pearl is a quarter of the way down the driveway though, and she’s left standing, alone, to watch her as she disappears around the corner.

The drums in the studio have seen abuse. From Pearl’s punk days, when she used to slam her feelings out on the snares, to the ragers after she found out she had a (then) unwanted soulmate, to this very moment. She bashes and kicks the pedal, slams the sticks down hard on the heads and cymbals, drawing out a cacophony of noise that barely manages to make her feel any better. After an hour, she’s sweaty and sore, but Marina isn’t answering her texts or picking up the phone, so all Pearl has is the drums and the intense tightness of her chest.

She’d fucked up somehow. Marina is her soulmate, and Pearl fucked it up. It’s amazing, how hard she managed to fumble this one—especially when she thought the touchdown was impossible to screw up. Soulmate plus soulmate. Pearl plus Marina. Applause. Happily ever after.

It never fuckin’ ends like that, does it?

At almost hour two, she finally gives in and cries.

As she crashes the cymbals, she can’t see anything through the tears, but that’s fine. She knows these drums; it’s Pearl who sits here during jam sessions, helping Marina complicate the drumline or guiding her through the rhythms of countermelodies. Marina on keyboard, Pearl on drums: the kind of thing dreams should be made of—but, right now, all Pearl can do is smash the sticks hard enough into the heads that she’s sure she’ll have to have the whole kit repaired.

She sucks in a hard breath and squeezes her eyes closed. It’s too much. Gotta fuckin’ fix it anyhow, don’t you Houzuki?

Yeah, she sure as hell does.

She hits the cymbals again. The reverberation of the crash hangs in the air for a long time.

The world tilts.

As she watches the cymbal vibrate, everything shifts to the side. Just a touch, but enough, and her stomach yanks. She yelps and falls forward into the drums, hands coming out to grab the rims, and feels her guts heave.

She almost throws up.

“What the fuck— Oh. Oh shit…”

When Pearl opens her eyes again, she’s outside.

On the ground. Face pressed into her knees. Eyes burning, face sticky, dark gray joggers soft under her nose.

When she lifts her head, she feels something wriggle against her ear.

Her fingers are long and the ends are teal.

“COME ON!” Pearl screams, as loud as she can. Normally, it would be loud enough to strip the leaves off the trees, but it’s Marina’s voice that comes out—still loud and raspy, ripping with the dread, but also rich and beautiful, somehow, at a normal, reasonable volume.

Pearl doesn’t give herself a chance to think. There’s no point. Of course they swapped after that disaster of an evening. When else would they? It’s the only thing that makes any fucking sense in Pearl’s meteor impact of a day.

Marina’s phone is in her pocket, charged to 80% because she’s a nerd like that, and it unlocks at the first glimpse of Marina’s face. Pearl easily finds her own contact and she presses the call button as fast as she can.

When Marina answers, Pearl hears her own voice, tinny and small, through the speaker. She sniffles into the microphone. “Hi Pearlie…”

“Hey babes.”

“Hi…”

“Sooo… Like, we gotta talk about it, obviously, and this is awkward as hell. But… Where am I?”

Marina sniffles again. “Mt. Nantai.”

“Mount—” Pearl cuts herself off. “Marina, it’s almost dark.”

“Yeah…”

Pearl isn’t sure what tips her off. It’s just like the epiphany about her crush: one moment she doesn’t know it, and the next she does. She breathes out, slowly, and presses her fingers into the corners of her eyes. “You didn’t know. That’s why you freaked.”

“I didn’t know… What?” Marina cuts herself off, and Pearl can just hear the short, high-pitched gasp as she figures it out. “You knew we were soulmates?”

Pearl’s so frustrated that she can’t help it when her answer comes out. “Uh… Yeah. Duh.”

Chapter Text

Marina never found herself more thankful for the Houzuki mansion’s size than she does that day.

At first, after Marina scoops up the phone again, they sit there listening to each other breathe. Pearl is surprisingly quiet, but being forcefully teleported into the body of her best friend is probably doing things to her. Marina, for her part, paces across the room.

Pearl is about a foot shorter than Marina, and the room looks weird from her perspective. The mixing console is far taller than Marina realized, with rolling chairs that Pearl has to leverage up and down. When she leans into the console while Marina’s recording, her feet dangle an inch or so off the ground, and the keyboard bench has always been a little too tall for her (her little hop to get up on it is the cutest thing in the world). Marina feels her brow furrow as she paces, appreciating for the first time how much of the room Pearl had allowed to cater to Marina’s height, despite the multiple remodels she’s designed over the years.

“Soooo,” Pearl says, still in Marina’s voice. “It’s been like five minutes.”

“It has?”

It sounds cranky in Pearl’s high voice, a little whiny. Marina blinks at herself and throws herself backwards onto the small sofa in the back of the studio. She lays Pearl’s thin arm over her eyes and swallows a groan.

“Yuuuup,” Pearl continues. She talks deep in Marina’s throat. “Man, everything’s so sing-songy with your voice.”

“Pearlie... Can we focus, please?”

“What’s there to focus on? You’re me, I’m you. I’m wherever the fuck you ran off to. Why’d you leave, anyway?”

“Do we have to talk about this now?”

“Yeah, I think we do. Why didn’t you talk to me?”

Marina blows out a hard breath. In her hand, Pearl’s phone pings and vibrates, and she holds it out. A low battery warning flashes across the screen and she groans as she presses it back against her face. “Your phone is dying.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever. You can’t wiggle out of this one, Rina. Just answer the question.”

“I mean it, Pearlie,” Marina whines. “I wouldn’t lie to you…”

She wouldn’t—but the last thing she wants to do is explain to Pearl that she ran away because she felt like she was cheating on someone she’d never met. She can already imagine it, Pearl’s long, judging silence, the sound of her sucking in a short breath, the vulgar are you shitting me, Rina?, maybe even a peal of laughter as Marina’s inability to connect the dots lands thuddingly between them. Pearl is rarely judgmental, especially when it comes to Marina, and never cruel, but she can be blunt when surprised—and Marina isn’t sure if she can take hearing Pearl’s incredulous disbelief in her own voice.

It’s just adding insult to injury, the fact that Marina’s been so panicked over falling for Pearl, and now, when she should be celebrating and blushing and giggly and happy, all she can do is panic and dread. They’re going to have to talk about it eventually, after they swap back and Marina rides back here in the dark—but she’s counting on the two-hour drive to clear her head.

“Sorry,” Pearl grumbles. “Charger’s upstairs. You know where.”

Marina nods, realizes Pearl can’t see that, and mumbles an affirmative into the phone. She steals out the door and slinks down the dark hallways, whispers up the stairs with the phone still pressed to her face, just in case. It’s unnecessary, considering how isolated Pearl can be in her section of the house, especially at this time of night, but Marina can’t help but stick close to the shadows. The mansion is split into multiple wings, each with a main sitting room, multiple bedrooms, offices, and bathrooms, a “small” kitchen, and dining room; Pearl’s section of the basement includes the recording studio and the workshop that Marina hasn’t quite been able to let go, despite moving out over a year ago, and there’s never anyone in these halls except Pearl, Marina, and the staff.

Pearl’s body is light on its feet, compact and low to the ground, springy, especially compared to Marina’s tall, lithe form. She skitters down the hall like a bug hiding from the light, hunched low, and Pearl’s body makes it easy to move quickly, despite her short legs. As she passes a long mirror hanging in the hallway, Marina tries not to look, but she can’t help but glance over as she darts past, and yep—that’s Pearl, in all her under five-foot glory, still dressed in her oversized sweats and baggy sweatshirt from earlier, tentacles pulled back from her face. Marina presses herself into the wall, trying to stay calm, even as Pearl coughs into the phone’s speaker and Marina is treated to the sound of her own voice peaking the microphone.

She looks down at her hands. The nails aren’t bitten down anymore, but the black paint is chipped on the ends. There’s a freckle in the middle of the back of her hand that Marina never noticed during past swaps, the very same she’s run her fingers over multiple times in the intervening years. Their fingers slot together perfectly; Marina knows it from years of Pearl taking her by the hand and guiding her through the city, the countless times she’s grabbed Marina’s hand to calm her down, using her thumbs to press hard into the soft pads of her palms in order to ground Marina back down into the present, the moments when they’re alone and Pearl reached over to nudge her, the twist of her fingers, the squeeze, just because she can.

Marina is intensely familiar with these hands.

It’s a comfort, despite the circumstances. All that worry, and Marina’s soulmate is the person she knows best in the whole world.

It’s this small revelation that carries her on the rest of her quest. Marina knows this section of the house better than the garrison where she grew up, so it’s really no problem to get up to Pearl’s bedroom. As she presses the door closed behind her and flips on the light, she turns to find the messy bedroom and ignores the cast-off clothes, the piles of sheet music, the overflowing garbage full of takeout containers, the forgotten drinking glasses, and instead books it right for the bed, where Pearl’s charger’s cord is snaking out from behind the nightstand.

“Got it,” Marina mutters, and sits carefully on the bed.

“Sick,” Pearl answers, distracted. “It’s been ten minutes, by the way.”

Marina flinches. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s never been this long. Should we be worried?”

“Dunno.” Pearl blows out a hard breath. “How do you drive this motorcycle, by the way? No reason.”

Marina pulls the phone away from her face, incredulous. “Pearlie, you can’t—”

“Well, someone stranded me here in her body! I’m sitting against a tree, Rina. There’s bugs and shit.”

Marina flinches again. “Once we switch back, you’ll—”

“What if we don’t, huh? Usually it only lasts a minute—”

“You can’t ride the bike, Pearlie. Please be serious—”

“I am serious. You’ve gotta have muscle memory in this body, right? Man, your head is heavy. How do you deal with these tentacles?”

“Muscle memory won’t let you ride the motorcycle. It requires more than just—”

“Well then, I guess you gotta come get me then, huh?”

“What?” Marina demands. She shoots to her feet but can’t pace like she wants because the phone is tethered to the wall, so she settles for bouncing from foot to foot. “You want me to—”

“In my phone, find the contact for my driver. He’s probably already asleep so his wife isn’t gonna be happy, but it beats being stranded out here—”

Marina’s hand tightens around the phone again. Pearl’s fingers are shorter than hers, so her grip feels off. “Isn’t there someone else I can call? I don’t want to wake him up—”

“Not really? I guess you could—”

“I’ll drive,” Marina says, quick. It occurs to her in a rush, but now that it has, she can’t stop herself. She can drive every single one of the cars in the Houzuki garage and she knows Pearl’s code to get in. It’d be so simple—

“Okay…” Pearl says, dubious. “Keys should be in the garage in the locked cabinet. But, wait… What if we—”

“I’ll call you back once I’m on the road,” Marina rushes out, cutting off any possible moments of clarity or common sense that Pearl could push on her. The last thing Marina wants is to get anyone else involved with this mess. This needs to stay a secret between the two of them for as long as possible, as far as she’s concerned.

“Wait, Rina—!” Pearl cries, only to be cut off as Marina hangs up. She doesn’t give herself a chance to second guess anything and darts for the door.

She almost makes it too. Pearl’s shoes are kept in the genkan closest to the garages, which means that Marina has to traverse through the main living space that the family shares, including the massive living room with its central fireplace and overstuffed furniture. It’s late enough that no one should be up though, and Marina is in a hurry, so she rushes through without much care, pounding Pearl’s bare feet on the hard, polished floors.

“Pearl?”

Marina almost curses. Then she realizes that Pearl would curse, so she sucks in a harsh breath and curses anyway. Mira Houzuki’s face peers at her over the back of the nearest sofa, pale in the light from her laptop. Pearl’s eldest cousin, who, until last year, Pearl seemed to be tense around. Over the years, Pearl revealed small details about their relationship, something about how, until Off the Hook hit it big, the strain was because Mira seemed to have her life together, while Pearl was left standing behind her with empty, reaching hands and searching eyes. That all changed once Off the Hook landed the news job and Pearl was gone for gigs and concerts more often than she was home, finally with a purpose and a goal.

To Marina, Mira always seemed like an overstrung, stressed-out college student-turned-business woman. She was going to inherit the bulk of the work, when it came to maintaining the Houzuki business empire, while Pearl was set to continue living in her section of the house with her ever-growing allowance and her super star career. The dynamic had shifted during the last few years, loudly enough that even Marina noticed it, but Mira never seemed to resent Pearl for her recent slew of successes. If anything, she seemed quietly pleased.

“Hi, Mira,” Marina says, trying as hard as she can to sound Pearl-cranky. It’s still too early to pretend that she was asleep, considering Pearl’s weird schedule, but she does get testy after a certain hour, especially with her family.

“Where are you going? I thought you and Marina had a date tonight.”

Marina’s heart pangs a little at that. A date—

“Sorry, sorry,” Mira continues, taking Marina’s hesitation for annoyance. “Not a date, but, y’know… Whatever the hell it is you do.”

“Right…” Marina says, edging toward the door. “I kind of have to be somewhere, so…” Marina suppresses a flinch as she fails to turn her proper Inkling into something more informal, more Pearl-like. Kinda, gotta… she tells herself.

She needs to get out of here.

“Is Marina still here?”

“Nope! I’m actually going to meet her. Long story. You know how it is!”

“Is she okay? I thought she—”

“She’s fine! Soooooo…” Marina cringes. “Fucking fine…” Marina winces again. She hit the hard G. She’s so screwed— “I gotta get… gone? Yeah. I’ll see ya later, Mira! Love ya!”

Marina turns to run away. She’s not proud of it, but Pearl is out on the side of the road all alone with nothing but Marina’s phone to keep her occupied, and it’s supposed to get cold tonight. She can’t play around trying to lose Pearl’s cousin.

“Okay, what the hell is going on?” Mira demands, and Marina doesn’t dare look back, even though she knows that she’s being followed.

Marina doesn’t answer, just slides into the genkan and drags Pearl’s sneakers out of the shoe cabinet. She shoves her feet in, thankful that Pearl never bothers to untie anything, and it barely takes two seconds for her to yank the tongues straight and the backs tall before she’s reaching for the door.

Except, a tall form steps in front of her. Mira blocks the door, hands on her hips, still dressed in her business casual with everything untucked and mussed. Her tentacles are long, a similar light gradient to Pearl’s except leaning all the way into the pale yellow that categorizes the family, and she has the same mole, higher on her cheek than Pearl’s, and similar enough gold eyes that Marina can’t help but feel a wrong-footed and like a trespasser. Mira thinks she’s talking to Pearl, with her similar features, the person she’s grown up with, and Marina is lying to her—

Still, there’s no time to dwell on that. Pearl’s phone vibrates in her pocket, no doubt Pearl getting antsy about the long silence, and Marina needs to get in a car and back on the phone to keep Pearl from doing something drastic. “Excuse me,” Marina rushes out, and tries to push past Mira. Her hand just grazes the doorknob before Mira gets between her and freedom again.

“No way, Pearl. What the hell’s wrong with you? Excuse me? And you never tell me you love me.”

“She doesn’t?” Marina squeaks, and then claps a hand over her mouth. Her eyes widen and she bites down hard on the impulse to turn and run. It’s just that Marina can’t believe it. Pearl is so open and free with her affection. There’s no way—

Mira’s face shuts down and she crosses her arms. “Oh, no way. You’re not doing that fake swapping bullshit again. Just tell me the truth.”

“Fake… What?”

“Pearl…” Mira squeezes the bridge of her nose, and, for the first time, Marina realizes just how tired she looks. “For once, just talk to me, please? I thought we reached some kind of agreement, but you’re still so…” She squeezes her hands together, like she’s strangling an invisible foe, and Marina takes a small, careful step back. “I know that you hate this whole soulmate thing, but you can’t keep hiding behind it when you want to get out of something.”

“She what?” Marina squeaks, horrified. “She hates having a soulmate?”

Mira opens her mouth to argue again, but then something seems to hit her, and her jaw snaps closed hard enough that Marina hears her teeth collide. Her eyes narrow and she leans toward Marina, squinting, and latches hard onto Marina’s arms. She stares deep into Marina’s eyes.

Marina quickly glances away.

“Oh…” Mira gasps, releasing her so she can fall back a few steps. “Oh no. I’m so sorry. You really did swap this time. I’m such an ass.”

Marina’s hearts drop, all the way into the pit of her stomach, and she shifts, nervous, from one foot to the other. The phone in her pocket vibrates again, loud and angry.

“Yeah…” Marina finally manages, lost. There goes her whole let’s keep it a secret for a while plan, but it’s just Mira. It could be way worse—

“Mira Houzuki,” Mira says, holding out a hand for Marina to shake. “Pearl’s cousin. I— I know this must be a shock, but yeah… Your soulmate is Pearl Houzuki… Y’know, heiress, pop star…”

“Yeah…” Marina repeats, numb. Belatedly, she grabs Mira’s hand in return and lets her pump the handshake up and down three times. “I, uh. Yeah. A shock. Yeah.”

Mira squints at her. Marina can’t really compute all of this, but she’s still hung up on two conversation beats ago, stuck on Pearl hates having a soulmate.

Marina wants to cry. It’s not surprising, considering Pearl’s whole personality, but it feels like Marina’s guts have been gouged out, like she can’t breathe—but she doesn’t have time to break down right now. Pearl still needs her, and it’s not worth freaking out over until they can talk anyway.

But, Marina can’t help the way her chest is aching, way deep inside, in the place that has roots all the way down into her core.

“I need to go…” Marina says, and finally manages to push around Mira. The door falls open under her hand, and she slips across the walk to the nearest garage. It’s a decent distance, but Marina eats it up with Pearl’s quick, short stride.

“Wait!” Mira calls after her.

Marina doesn’t. Her eyes are stinging now, as the stress of the last twenty minutes and the horrifying fact that Mira just laid at her feet slam into her, but it only takes two tries to key Pearl’s code into the garage door.

“Wait!”

Before she can get the door open, Mira grabs her shoulder. Marina tries to shake herself free, but Mira foresees that and snatches up her arm next.

“Wait… Please. I can’t let you just run off with Pearl’s body.”

Marina groans and kicks the door open. The closest garage to the house has the everyday cars in it, and Marina easily spies the large SUV that Pearl likes when she’s trying to be subtle. She tries to pull forward, but Mira is taller than her, with more leverage, and she hooks an arm around Marina’s chest and pulls her back.

“How do you know the code to the garage?” Mira demands, turning Marina-in-Pearl’s body around forcefully. “How did you know my name in the living room? Who are you?”

The phone is ringing again. Marina groans and shoves her hands into Mira’s chest, just hard enough to make her let go. “Marina,” she answers, and yanks her arm free. “It’s me, Mira. Marina.”

“Marina?” Mira gasps. “Like…?” She flings her arms out in front of her, in a close approximation of Off the Hook’s signature pose.

“Yeah. That Marina. I have to go get Pearl. She’s stranded on the side of the road at Mt. Nantai—”

“Holy fuck.” Mira scrambles after her, dogging close to her heels. “That’s— Marina! That’s! That’s crazy! Pearl must be ecstatic!”

Marina doesn’t answer, just yanks the cabinet with the keys open and easily snatches up the set she needs. She clicks the button and the headlights flash at her, reassuring and steadfast.

“Wait… You can’t drive like that!”

Marina grits her teeth and yanks open the driver’s side door.

“Pearl— Marina. What if you swap back while you’re driving? You can’t—”

“I have to go get her!” Marina cries, completely overwhelmed and panicked. It’s too much. She can’t take it. Pearl hates having a soulmate, she must be ecstatic that it’s Marina, Pearl keeps calling, Mira won’t leave her alone, she’s never driven a car this big, and Pearl won’t stop calling. “We’ve been stuck like this for twenty minutes already so something’s wrong and she can’t ride my bike, so she’s just stuck out there on the side of the road in my body and it’s my fault and I have to go get her!”

Mira, to her credit, doesn’t flinch. “Let me drive.”

“What?”

Mira carefully pries Marina’s fingers off the door, one at a time. “C’mon, Marina. Let me drive. You relax and I’ll get you to your Pearlie, okay?”

The fight leaves Marina in an instant. She can only watch, numb, as Mira carefully extracts the keys from her tight fingers. “Okay…” she whispers.

“Okay? Good. C’mon. Get in. Let’s go get her.”

Chapter Text

Marina has too many games on her phone. It’s overwhelming, how often it pings in Pearl’s hand, so she just mutes the whole thing and prays that she’ll notice when Marina finally gets around to calling her back. Instead, after receiving a terse text from her own name (ON MY WAY!!! DO NOT RIDE THE MOTORCYCLE! I MEAN IT PEARLIE), she amuses herself by flipping through Marina’s photos. It’s a lot of Pearl’s own face, plates of food that Marina called cute, heavy machinery from Piranha Pit, Port Mackerel, and Sturgeon Shipyard that she called adorable, selfies with Pearl and the excavators, Marina’s arm long above them, both of them cheesing it for the camera, Marina as giddy as can be, and snapshots of complex wiring in various stages of deconstruction.

That eats up fifteen minutes. Pearl scrolls around Slug Atsume for fifteen more, impressed despite herself at Marina’s near perfect collection of sea slugs, before she remembers that Marina has a tuner downloaded onto this thing. She slips it open and loses an hour singing into it with Marina’s voice. Pearl has always had perfect pitch, so it’s easy for her to climb up and down the scale, but it feels different in Marina’s throat. Her registers are a little lower, the bridge in a different spot, and her upper register isn’t as whistley as Pearl’s. Her chest vibrates the same, but Pearl can dig a little lower than in her own body and she revels in the sensation of it, the hum in her throat. It makes her want to work on her own range again.

(What she’s not thinking about: how annoyed she is being stuck like this, how irritated she is about Marina’s behavior back at the house, how cold she’s getting, how heavy Marina’s head is, how she’s starting to feel itchy in a way that’s unfamiliar, a sort of buzzy, anxious hum that coats her skin and makes her want to pace and move her arms, how worried she is about Marina’s reaction to kissing her—)

It takes an hour and a half for Marina to show up. She texts Pearl periodically with updates on her progress, but otherwise things are quiet. It’s probably a good thing because, despite herself, Pearl is annoyed and irritated and desperate to get to the bottom of whatever the fuck happened back at the mansion. Even as she sings runs into the blank wilderness of the mountain, a familiar exercise that just reminds her how much things have changed, she worries herself in circles. Marina was into it; she ran; she didn’t know, but she’d been flirting back—

What a fuckin’ disaster.

It’s past dark by the time the familiar sight of the SUV crunches up the road.

Pearl raises her arm against the glare of the headlights and doesn’t move until the passenger door pops open. The windows are tinted black so she can’t see inside, but it figures that Marina got the driver after all. She’s smart enough to have realized that it was too dangerous to drive on her own, and it explains why she refused to pick up the phone when Pearl called.

Marina rounds the back of the car and Pearl sucks in a sharp breath. Yup, that’s her all right. Pearl Houzuki in all her four-foot-ten-inch glory, still dressed in her stretched-out sweatshirt and matching pants. Her face is weird, twisted into an expression of pure concern, all the way up into her eyebrows, which are pulled down into Marina’s characteristic worried U’s, cheeks splotchy with an upset flush, and Marina has her hands twisting together, fingers laced in a tight ball.

It’s fuckin’ weird, to be looking at herself full on—even weirder because it’s clearly Marina from the mannerisms and expressions—and she feels something deep inside her shift uncomfortably. She’s used to seeing herself at an equal level in the mirror or in photos, but seeing her face in three dimensions, lit from the side by the headlights of the car, as it comes toward her is wrong, so deeply strange and odd that she almost doesn’t recognize herself the closer she gets.

Marina is looking at the ground as she approaches, probably anticipating the same reaction because she’s smart. “Are you okay?” she asks—and Pearl is hit with the full force of her own voice, nasally because Marina was probably crying, high as a bell and worried. Is her voice really that high pitched?

“Fine,” Pearl sniffs. It comes out of Marina’s mouth clipped but musical because that’s just how she is. The few times they’ve argued, Pearl’s always found something pleasant in Marina’s voice—even when she’s cursing her out in Octo language or whatever—so it’s no surprise that even now, with Pearl at the helm, she doesn’t sound as precisely irritable as Pearl feels.

Marina holds Pearl’s pale hand out to help her up. Her rings flash in the light, and Pearl sighs and grasps her own palm tight with Marina’s long fingers. Marina pulls her up, despite Pearl’s superior height, and Pearl feels herself rise, higher than expected, until she’s towering over her own body and looking down at the top of her own head.

“Fuck, that’s trippy,” she mutters.

That makes Marina look up, and Pearl watches her own face widen in real time as Marina finally takes in her own body from the outside. She stumbles back, hands rising to cover her mouth, and cranes her head all the way back up look up at her own face.

She says something deep and guttural that Pearl doesn’t understand. Pearl is pretty sure it’s a curse, and she can’t help the chiming laugh that escapes her chest.

“Whoa… Who knew my throat could make that noise…”

Marina squeaks and claps her hands even tighter around Pearl’s mouth. “Sorry, Pearlie!”

Pearl laughs again. She can’t stay mad at Marina; it’s her fatal flaw, and she knows, somewhere in the back of her head, that it’ll all work out. Eventually. Hopefully.

That’s what she has to tell herself, anyway.

“Chill. Way worse shit has come out of my mouth than whatever that was—trust. Can we get goin’? I’m freezing your perky little ass off here.”

Marina’s—Pearl’s—cheeks pink a little more, much to Pearl’s delight, and she grumbles in true Pearl fashion and crosses her arms. “Fine. Glad you’re okay—and that you didn’t try to ride the bike.”

“Tempted. I was so tempted,” Pearl teases as she moves toward the car. She almost pulls open the back door, but then she remembers Marina’s long legs and swerves to the front. “You good if I take shotgun?”

Marina waves her hand and turns toward the motorcycle. It’s parked on the shoulder, leaning hard on its side stand with Marina’s large helmet hanging from the handlebar, and Pearl watches her yank open the small back storage there. She digs out the smaller helmet that Pearl wears when she’s riding in the sidecar or clenched tight to Marina’s back and pulls it on over her head.

“Whoa, whoa,” Pearl barks as Marina hops up onto the bike. “You’re not gonna— You told me I’m too short to reach the pegs!”

Marina grimaces at her and leans forward on her tiptoes to kick the side stand back and balance the bike. She presses a few buttons and the engine kicks on. “Sorry, Pearlie. I didn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

“So, what? You’re gonna ride back on the bike and I’m alone in the car? We need to talk—”

“You’re bitching already? New record.” a new voice asks, and Pearl feels her stomach drop open.

There’s no fucking way in the whole damn world she just heard what she thought she heard.

Pearl turns, dread pooling in her stomach, to see a grinning, pale face framed in the car’s window. She’s leaning forward on her elbow, underlit strangely by the dashboard lights, and Pearl swallows the hard curse that threatens to bubble up her throat.

“Hey Pearl.” Mira grins at her and flicks her a small, two fingered salute. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“You got Mira to drive you?” Pearl demands, rounding back on Marina. “I thought—”

“Relax,” Mira cuts in. “Marina was freaking out at home, so I offered to help her. Get in, before someone drives by and recognizes you.”

Pearls sends Marina a long, beseeching glance, but the helmet obscures her features. She waves, small and meek, and Pearl sighs, wondering just how unlucky she has to be, to have to deal with the constant onslaught of bullshit. They just saved the world like two months ago! Shouldn’t that have awarded her at least a year of nothing?

It’s a long way around the car, and she folds Marina’s long limbs into the seat with care. Mira waits until she clicks her seatbelt and leans out the window to wave Marina on; the motorcycle with Pearl’s small form leaning forward on it roars around them and into the opposite lane, and Mira quickly follows her.

“I can’t believe this,” Pearl grumbles as she leans Marina’s heavy head backwards against the seat. “She ditched me. Stole my body and ditched me.”

Mira sighs and reaches forward to punch the volume knob on the radio. The local pop station crackles to life, and Pearl’s voice chants at them from the speakers.

“Second time today she’s ditched me.”

“Take it easy on her.” Mira taps one of the preprogrammed buttons and the station flips to a commercial about bunion cream. “C’mon...”

Pearl rolls her eyes and reaches for her phone, which is programmed to play over the speakers in every car the Houzuki family collectively owns, but her hand fists around the vaguely familiar shape of Marina’s and she groans again.

“And she didn’t give me my phone back!” Pearl grumbles, leaning forward to click through the Bluetooth options. Usually, she has to bend nearly double after pushing the seat all the way forward to reach the radio, but this time she barely has to lean at all.

Mira doesn’t answer, just follows close behind Marina. The headlights throw Pearl’s body into sharp relief, and Pearl hesitates in the middle of the Connect a new device screen to admire the view.

“I always knew I'd look hot as fuck on that bike.”

“I don’t know how Marina puts up with you. Do you ever shut up?”

“What? Are you see what I’m seeing? Look at that!” Pearl waves her hand at her own back, curved nicely toward the handlebars, the round shape of her own ass.

“All I see is a pipsqueak trying to look cool. The only reason you look that good is because Marina’s in control.”

“Oof, mine own family...” Pearl wheezes, and then gets distracted connecting Marina’s phone. Eventually, she manages to navigate over to her music library and is assaulted with every single song known to Inkling and Octoling kind, all sorted in nice little folders and subfolders. “ABXY it is,” she decides, far too lazy to scroll any further down the alphabetical list.

They ride in quiet for a bit. Marina uses her turn signal, despite that fact that there’s no one else on the road, and Pearl has a single moment to worry over her own street cred before Mira breaks the silence.

“She was really freaking out, you know. What happened?”

Pearl closes her eyes. What happened, indeed. “We had a... disagreement.”

“You and Marina?”

“It happens!”

She’s starting to get used to hearing Marina’s voice when she talks. It makes her stomach clench a little.

What if they’re stuck like this?

It’s the first time Pearl’s allowed herself to think that, and Marina’s body is already starting to sweat. Not good. She knows how Marina gets when she’s overly stressed. She needs to keep it locked down.

“How’d you get roped into all this, anyway?” Pearl cuts in, hoping to distract herself.

“Well, she tried acting like you, but she told me she loved me.”

Pearl winces.

“And then I was like Pearl stop pretending to be swapped again and I grabbed her and forced her to look at me and she glanced away. Your obstinate ass would always glare back.”

“Mm,” Pearl hums back, lips thinning. “She’s never been great at acting.”

Mira shrugs. “She’s genuine. There’s worse things.”

Pearl doesn’t answer, just looks out the window. Of course, that was a mischaracterization of Marina anyway. She’s not good at acting when she knows she needs to, but she hid her Octoling secret for years—and she’d hidden the fact that she had a soulmate too.

Or maybe Pearl just didn’t pay as much attention as she was supposed to.

There was a point, before that cocktail party where everything fell apart, where Pearl thought she knew Marina all the way through. She was a simple person: bubbly, genuine, silly, cute, focused, diligent—a once-upon-a-time kid that Pearl needed to mentor turned into a flourishing successful musician who could give as good as she got. They were equals with such breathless ease that Pearl had started to take it for granted. Marina was her better half in most things; that was how it was.

They just... worked. They meshed like the well-built cogs of a clock, and Pearl could guess what Marina was going to say before she said it most of the time, save those delightful times when she surprised Pearl with a wicked sense of humor or an eye that caught everything Pearl missed.

But then, disaster: Marina had a soulmate, and Pearl had no goddamn idea.

Things turned awkward after that, at least for Pearl. Sure, Marina acted like nothing changed, but it was the way that she avoided making direct eye contact that should’ve sent up red flags.

The Octoling thing felt small compared to the rest, really. If anything, it gave their relationship a new footing, replaced some of the awkwardness with the old ease, especially after Pearl realized that Marina was her soulmate. Marina relaxing was probably the result of having her biggest secret cleared, but, at the time, Pearl had assumed that Marina had figured out the soulmate thing too.

She’d been an idiot. She read Marina completely wrong.

Maybe she doesn’t know Marina as well as she thinks she does.

It hurts to think, especially as she leans Marina’s heavy head with its limp, exhausted tentacles against the window. Here she is, seated firmly in the body she’s been daydreaming about for months, and she’s starting to think that she doesn’t know the woman who it belongs to. These same hands have held her face softly between them, compressed the keys of the keyboard as they composed the songs that would change both their lives, run down Pearl’s back while watching a movie, cradled her from behind on the rare occasions that they’ve shared a bed. These hands and this body have accompanied Pearl through the most important years of her life, and she’s terrified that she’s going to look down and realize that she doesn’t really know them at all.

“Bathroom break,” Mira says, drawing Pearl out of her death spiral. They’re parked in front of a roadside gas station, and Pearl didn’t even realize they stopped.

“M’fine,” Pearl grumbles, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Get out and stretch your legs. It’s been an hour.”

“Said M’fine.”

“Okay. Get out and stretch Marina’s legs, then.”

Pearl sends her cousin an acid glare.

“You have joint custody over two bodies. Deal with it, pipsqueak. Look, Marina’s waiting for you.”

Marina’s standing on the sidewalk with Pearl’s hood pulled tight around her head. It’s squashing Pearl’s lifeless tentacles against the sides of her head, making her look pinched and stressed.

Pearl glares at Mira again before yanking at the door handle.

“Catch!” Mira calls, and Pearl barely has time to turn to snatch the hoodie that flies at her head. She grumbles as she yanks it on, pulls the hood over Marina’s head, and shoves her hands into the pockets.

“Hi,” Marina says, quiet, when Pearl walks up.

“Hey.”

It’s awkward. Of fucking course it is. Pearl is looking down at herself. Her own face is all screwed up and pinched and bright red. Marina is losing her shit and barely holding it together in there.

“You good?” Pearl asks. It’s inadequate and stupid to ask, but she can’t help it.

“Are you?” Marina shoots back.

“Not really.”

Marina sighs. “Yeah.”

“We will be though, right?”

Marina pauses. Bites her lip. Pearl’s teeth are white in the awful incandescents that wash across the parking lot.

“I hope so.”

It’s not a no.

Pearl’s chest decompresses.

“Yeah. We’ll— It’s— Yeah.”

Back at the mansion, Marina sits in the middle of Pearl’s bed with her legs pulled into her body. Pearl’s never seen her look so small—and it’s not because she’s currently in a body over a foot shorter than normal. Her shoulders are tight, face hidden in her knees, trembling slightly as Pearl seats herself carefully on the other end of the bed.

The drive back had been uneventful. Other than Pearl muttering a “Thanks for helping Marina earlier,” which Mira graciously accepted without her traditional snark, there wasn’t a word shared in the car. Marina led them back quickly, taking turns sharp once they got back onto the familiar roads leading up the mansion. Mira had bid them goodnight in the living room, hesitating when Marina hugged her in thanks. As she watched them separate, Pearl couldn’t help but wonder when the last time she hugged her cousin was.

As they climbed the stairs up to Pearl’s rooms, Pearl had assumed that Marina was going to disappear into hers, but she’d merely followed Pearl in here, sat on the bed, and proceeded to curl up in that tiny ball while Pearl asked a member of staff to bring them some water.

“Hey,” Pearl calls, rolling a glass bottle across the bed toward her. It bumps into her foot and comes to a rest. “Drink that, will ya? I know my throat is probably raw as hell.”

Marina sniffles but does as she’s bid. She’s not crying, but Pearl figures she’s probably all cried out for the night. Honestly, probably all cried out for the next year.

“I’m sorry,” Marina begins once she’s swallowed a couple glugs of water.

“We don’t have to talk now.” Pearl fists her hand around the lid of the bottle and cracks it open. “It’s late.”

“It’s my fault,” Marina continues. She peers up at Pearl with Pearl’s own golden eyes, wide and watery. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the same effect as with her own body. Pearl’s seen her own face bruised and bloodied; if anything, the puppy dog schtick is just uncanny.

Pearl sighs and puts the bottle aside. “It takes two to end up in a mess this fucking bad, Rina.”

“I took a love potion.”

Pearl opens her mouth to shush her, but then she processes what Marina said. It takes a second to sink in.

When it lands, it’s like an icy knife, sunk directly into Pearl’s chest. “What?”

“I got the prescription a while ago.” Marina sniffles again and her voice thickens as, impossibly, she begins to cry again. “I just— I panicked. I’m sorry.”

Pearl feels the world slip out under her for a second. She fists her hands in the blankets. Breathe. Don’t forget to breathe. “So, instead of talking to me, you— You went and tried to find your soulmate? Rina—”

“Not like that!” Marina raises her voice, Pearl’s voice, and Pearl flinches back. Shrill, piercing, ow.

“Like what then, Marina? Like what?”

Marina winces at her full name. It’s not often that Pearl bothers with both syllables, and each one lands like a condemnation. “I was confused!”

“Confused? You know how to fix that, don’t you? Oh Pearlie, I can’t kiss you. I’m not interested in you like that.”

It’s a lot easier to do a Marina impression with Marina’s voice. If she wasn’t so wounded, Pearl would delight in it.

Marina’s head whips up. Her golden eyes narrow, and that’s an expression Pearl’s used to seeing in the mirror. She’s pissed. Good. That makes two of them.

(And it’s easy, arguing with herself, like she’s done so many times at two in the morning in the bathroom, after she’s gone and blown up her life again. This is just par for the course; the fact that Marina’s in said body is the only thing keeping her grounded.)

“What the hell are you talking about, Pearl Houzuki?” Marina demands. “I’m the one who said I wanted to kiss you all the time, remember?”

“Then why the fuck did you run off into the arms of your soulmate?”

“Because!” Marina throws her arms and legs out in an explosive move. “Because I want you so bad it’s tearing me to pieces!” She curses hard in Octarian. “But I had a soulmate that could ruin everything! I wanted to figure out who it was so I could decide what to do—”

“After you kissed me and ran away—”

“Because I was confused!”

“That’s bullshit, Rina. Bullshit. You coulda—”

“Pearlie—” Marina gasps. She turns and puts her feet on the floor, back to Pearl, like she’s going to run, but just doubles over with her head in her hands. “Stop. Just stop.”

“Why? So you can run again? C’mon, Rina—”

“Stop!”

The lightbulbs above their heads burst.

At the same time, the scream punches Pearl in the chest. Marina is facing away, face practically in her knees, but Pearl still feels it all the way in her kidneys.

They’re plunged into darkness. Pearl, knocked out of her seethe, falls back. Her ears are ringing, she realizes, and her breath is loud in her ears.

“Shit,” Marina whimpers, just loud enough for Pearl to hear. It’s muffled but she still makes it out. The bed dips, and suddenly Marina is there, running her hands over Pearl’s face, searching for her ears. No tell-tale blood leaks from inside, so her eardrums are probably intact.

For a moment, a sick little voice whispers that Marina is probably just worried about her own hearing, but then Marina’s hands cradle her face, and she leans close to her ear. “I’m so so sorry, Pearlie— Please tell me you’re okay...” There’s a small hitch to her voice.

“M’good,” Pearl slurs. Her brain feels like someone scrambled it with a fork. “M’sorry.”

Marina pulls back. Pearl can’t see her face in the dark, but a hand to her expression reveals furrowed, confused eyebrows and a frown.

“Shouldn’t’a pushed you like that,” Pearl breathes, using Marina’s large hand to cradle her own face. The world is spinning, and her ears are ringing, and she can’t remember why she was so angry. What’s the point? She made Marina upset enough that she lost her temper. Her calm, patient, soft Rina. That’s unacceptable. “I know you weren’t try’na hurt me when you ran. You were jus’ scared. I should’a let you explain.”

Marina sighs as she leans back down toward her ear. Pearl can feel the vibrations of it on her chest. “I’m sorry. I forgot about your— I should’ve remembered.”

Pearl doesn’t answer, just turns her face into Marina’s neck. It’s her own neck, but it’s nice to have Marina close, no matter what body she’s in. “Stupid thing to argue about. You’re my soulmate. Who gives a shit if you took a love potion?”

Marina sighs again. “I shouldn’t have run. I should’ve explained. We wouldn’t be in this situation if I had.”

“Sshh.” Pearl laces their fingers together, delighting in the fact that, for the first time, she can hold Marina’s hand completely with her fingers wrapped all the way around. “Mm, I could get used to this.”

Marina chuckles. It’s a Marina brand chuckle, low in the throat and musical—and it sounds silly coming out of Pearl’s mouth, but it’s nice to hear anyway. “Are you okay? How’s your hearing?”

“You mean your hearing?” Pearl scrunches her nose as she considers. “It’s coming back already. Good thing you were facing the wall. Coulda been a lot worse.”

Marina makes a small, terrified noise, and Pearl presses her hand to the back of her head, trying to soothe her.

They lay like that for a few minutes, coming down from the adrenaline rush of the argument. They need to figure out what to do next, but that will come later. For now, Pearl could sleep like this, and Marina doesn’t seem far behind. She’s already relaxing, pressing her small face into Pearl’s shoulder.

“Hey,” Pearl mutters, “do you really want me that bad? Because you coulda just asked—”

Marina scoffs and pinches Pearl in the side, in exactly the spot that she knows is her most ticklish. Pearl yelps and tries to squiggle away. “Hey! Hey! No fair! You know all of your tickle spots!”

“Exactly,” Marina hisses.

“Pearl?” a loud voice calls from outside. The doorknob jiggles erratically. Her mother. “Are you okay? We heard you yell.”

“The whole world heard you yell,” Pearl’s aunt adds.

“I tried to stop them,” Mira’s calls next, just on this side of panicked.

Pearl and Marina look at each other. Pearl can just see her swallow heavily in the blue glow coming from the alarm clock.

“Open the door, Pearl,” Sirena pleads. “We just want to make sure you’re okay.”

Pearl groans. “We’re okay,” she calls, but she knows it’s fruitless. Marina’s voice comes out of her mouth, which will never satisfy her worried mother.

“Marina? Please open the door, sweetheart. Are you hurt?”

Pearl closes her eyes. It hurts, to hear worry about Marina’s safety levied in her direction, but she gets it. Marina’s yell had been loud enough to shatter the thin glass in the bulbs; if she’d been facing Pearl, they would be having a very different conversation right now.

“Just open it,” Pearl groans as she flaps a hand worthlessly toward the door. Her brain still feels a little jelly, her legs likewise blasted into goo, and they’re gonna wanna see Pearl’s face anyway.

Marina slides off the bed, pulling Pearl’s large hoodie down around her middle nervously. “What should I tell them?” she whispers as she edges toward the door.

Pearl considers it for a second. The two of them in her room this late isn’t that weird, but Mira’s already been trying to run interference, which has undoubtedly tipped them off that there’s something up. There’s no way Marina will be able to keep it from Sirena anyway. Pearl’s not sure she could pull one over her mother right now.

“The truth, I guess.”

Marina nods, swallows, and pulls the door open. Light floods the room from the hall, momentarily blinding Pearl, and then she sees them there: her mother, aunt, and Mira, standing in a perfect, blonde line—and Marina, wrong footed in Pearl’s body with her pink hair and twitching fingers.

“Hi Mrs. Houzuki,” Marina says.

Pearl can’t help it: she snorts. Mira’s mouth drops open, shocked at how easily they’ve given up the game, and the snort turns into a full-blown ugly laugh. It’s completely un-Marina-like, but Pearl desperately needs it.

“What did you just call me?” Sirena asks, clearly taking Marina’s respect for disrespect. (She’s been part of this family long enough to have first name rights with Pearl’s mom, a fact that Sirena has pressed with her before, but Marina is unshakeable.)

“Hi Mom,” Pearl interrupts, before her mother can wind herself up too much. Four pairs of eyes slide over to her, where she’s laid out sideways on the bed, Marina’s body stretched long and exhausted. She sends them a two-finger salute. “I’m okay, by the way, since you were so worried about Marina earlier.”

Sirena’s eyes jump between Pearl, on the bed, and Marina, barefoot in Pearl’s body near the door. “Oh,” she breathes.

For some reason, that just makes Pearl laugh harder.