Archive of Our Own ^beta

The accident.

That’s all they call it these days. “The accident.” No details, no description, just two words that sum up the most traumatic time of KB’s life. It’s efficient, in a way. If people don’t know already, they usually don’t ask. And, well, if they do? They know not to.

It was dark. They were racing side-by-side, the two of them, neck-and-neck through the dimly lit streets, muffled engines screaming past houses and over sidewalk-edges and barriers. The safety droids couldn’t catch them. It was freeing, incredible bliss.

Until it wasn’t.

KB can barely remember the feeling of the wind rushing past her ears. Her hair was long until it couldn’t be anymore, and back then, she tied it up in a sensible ponytail or left it loose once in a blue moon, letting it stream back past her head, unminding when it buffeted her in the face as she turned. That feeling, it’s almost indescribable, of cool, night-scented air brushing past her forehead and her cheeks and whistling in her ears.

She misses it. Out of everything she can’t do the same anymore, she misses racing like that.

Right, the accident. It was dark, almost too dark, but that had never stopped them before. They were almost shoulder-to-shoulder, handlebars kissing here and there as they pulled up close to whisper-shout encouragement or try to speed ahead of one another.

It was dark. They were close. The wind was on her face.

This is where KB’s memory stops, but another young girl remembers the whole thing quite clearly.

I didn’t mean for it to happen.

The accident. I didn’t mean for it to happen.

It was dark. We probably shouldn’t have been racing, but were we ever supposed to, really? But dark—I guess I knew it then, but I know it now—dark is dangerous. In the dark, you don’t see things. In the dark, you almost get your best friend killed.

KB hit a rock that shouldn’t have been there. I couldn’t stop fast enough and I hit her. She got thrown; really thrown, really far. So did I, but nothing compared to how high and how far she went, how hard she hit the ground and what happened because of it.

I got up. She didn’t. I tried to make it to her but couldn’t, and I still had my comm on me, so I sat down where I was and called and waited.

For the first time ever, I was the one who called the safety droids. Med services came. They took us both away in their fancy, medical-outfitted speeders, but it took them so much longer to load her than me. I should have known it was bad when they were putting the thing around her neck and strapping her to a board. I didn’t. I didn’t then, but I know now.

I got scrapes. She broke her neck.

Fern gets teary here and can’t continue. Her mom, Fara, takes over.

This is why they aren’t supposed to race speeders.

We don’t enforce the rules to make their lives miserable. We do it to prevent this, to prevent what happened to that poor little girl.

I knew Fern raced during the day. I pretended I didn’t, but I knew. She kept good grades, she stayed top of her class, and it was almost like…like it was an unspoken agreement, that I would ignore her little races if she kept doing well in school. I should have known she was out there at night. I should have known she was out there, but I didn’t, and it’s something I have to live with.

As soon as Fern was out of the medcenter, she went straight to fixing her bike. As soon as KB could stand and walk again, she was back to working on it, too. I know they never stopped racing. KB’s parents know they didn’t stop, but none of us can bring ourselves to bar them from doing it, to keep them inside forever when all they want to do is ride. They have agreed to keep their speed moderate and not fast. We lock the bikes up at night. What happened to KB can’t happen again.

It can’t happen again.

This is all Fara has to say. From here, we go to Maree and Garree, KB’s parents.

How do you begin to talk about something like this?

To start: Yes, we let her race. It sounds absurd, knowing how her injury happened, but we have our reasons. We give her the tools to keep herself safe, we make sure she knows how to do all of her maintenance that she can, and we can see the status of her augs at any time. We know if she’s okay or if she isn’t breathing, and that means we can get help to her if something goes wrong. It helps.

We could stop her, yes, but once you spend months and months watching a child painstakingly relearn to walk because her spinal cord was damaged and half of her brain is now cybernetic…when all she wants to do is feel the wind in her face, you set ground rules and you step back. We can’t tell her no. She learned the consequences in the worst way possible.

Somehow, she still wants to race. And we don’t want to take that away from her.

Fern knows what to do in case KB’s augs malfunction, she’s a good friend. For the first month, KB was on a ventilator. Her spinal cord was injured so high that she lost almost all movement except for a little in her neck and face. That meant she couldn’t breathe on her own, and while she learned to work with the technology and the settings were adjusted point by point, she had a tube in her mouth and then one surgically placed in her neck. That’s gone now, but she had it for a long time.

Breathing is the spottiest thing controlled by the augments and the most likely to go bad. Fern knows how to ventilate KB in an emergency, how to give her breaths with a special kind of bag and mask in the time it takes med services to arrive. It’s happened before while they’re out racing. There’s always a backpack between them with the supplies needed to keep KB breathing until help comes. KB still doesn’t want to stop.

Fern is a really, truly good friend. KB has never blamed her for what happened that night.

She’s a good friend. She really is.

Maree and Garee look to each other as they repeat the last refrain once more, a whispered reassurance meant only for their ears.

That’s it. One moment is all it takes. One moment to fundamentally change so many lives by so much.

Maree and Garree will never again sleep deeply at night, always listening for the emergency alert of KB’s life monitor. Fern will never be rid of the guilt that lives deep in her chest, no matter how far she tries to push it down. Fara will never live without the regret of not knowing the things that happened while she slept.

KB will never walk unassisted again.

One second. One moment. A life forever changed.