Dynasty

viii. IRON HEART

viii.
IRON HEART

✶

"Nevertheless, everyone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else."
— Richard Siken, Details of the Woods

"You look like you've never been on a public transport shuttle before," Fallon said. She and Hiro sat on opposite sides of the shuttle, the back of their heads pressed against glass windows, and from where Fallon was seated, her best friend looked like a baby bird just born, just broken out of its fragile shell, swallowing up the world like the worms its mother would soon bring back to the nest. If her hair, dark and soft like down feathers, had been dishevelled, she would have played the part perfectly. She had the voice too, a sweet birdsong, when she wanted it to be. "Is it not up to Queen Hiro's standards?"

          "Krownest doesn't have queens, blondie." Hiro said, head shaking. "It's Countess Hiro, watch your tone." She stood and moved to sit beside Fallon, her footsteps silent and dance-delicate. "And I have been on a public transport shuttle before, thank you very much. I'm just used to the luxury of what can be commandeered from the Jedi hangar."

          "Someone's going to catch you someday, put you on probation."

          "Pessimist. Who could discipline this pretty face?" And just like that, in a nanosecond, Hiro's expression had changed, one mask traded for another, a slipcover pulled over her features like a second skin: she smiled, dazzlingly, her cheeks soft and pink, her teeth snow white.

There are some things lost in transformation, and there are some things that must remain. Becoming something else is an intricate, imperfect process, but in the same way that one drowns, that one submerged finds their own body working against them, compelling them to breathe, compelling them to flood their own lungs, survival comes first. Breathing comes first. Holes must be punched in the plastic bag you pull over your head, in the mask you paint like art across your features.

The holes in Hiro's mask were her eyes. Gaping wounds, they did not change. They did not match her smile.

Unease crawled beneath Fallon's skin, a colony of ants. She managed a laugh and shook her head. "Forget I said anything."

          "Thank you," Hiro said, and her smile disappeared. Just like that. A façade worn and discarded. "Did I interrupt something before?"

          "You're always interrupting something," Fallon laughed again. She could hear how hollow it was, how empty she sounded. Carefully, she worked feeling back into her words, like there was poison she'd swallowed and needed to regurgitate. It burnt her throat on the way back up. "I say that with love."

           "Would you rather I have stayed in the dark?" Hiro waved away Fallon's addition, Fallon's love, nonplussed. She took her blows straight on: she was either the exact definition of an interruption, jarring and brutal and biting, or she was nothing at all. (Nothing you could see, at least.) "You didn't notice me until I spoke. For all you know, I could've been there the whole time."

          "I choose to believe that you wouldn't intrude on a private conversation like that."

          "You choose wrong." Hiro looked down at her knuckles, tracing an old, winding scar with her gaze. "You always choose wrong. I don't understand all the fuss about him."

          "Who?" Fallon knew.

          "Golden boy. He's pretty, sure, but he looks very breakable."

          "Breakable?" Fallon drew her legs onto her seat, twisting around to look out the window. Coruscant faded beneath them, disappearing under a nebula of smog, a crosshatch of speeders and starships. "How can someone look breakable?"