Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Magical-Girls — Magical Musician Who Can’t Stop Singing
“Challenged a deviless to a fiddle contest,” Comrade Pink Anarcana says wearily. “She got real mad about it, real sore loser, started yelling about curses and do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! and I dunno. I think the curse landed better than whatever the fuck that was supposed to be. We had to give Purple morphine to stop her tearing her throat up, singing.”
Comrade Purple Anarcana lies unconscious on a paramedic stretcher, in the alley behind a sketchy tattoo parlour. Her blood-smeared lips are still faintly moving.
“I don’t know what you think I can do about it,” says the frizzy-haired black-clad piercer, wearily, turning a lighter over and over in her hands.
“Yeah,” Comrade Enforced Naming Conventions Are Patriarchal Anarcana says, arms folded across her nonetheless bright blue colour-coded chest. “Fuck this useless asshole, Pink, let’s go.”
“Please,” Pink says. “Come on. It’s Janda. You’d burn the fucking universe for Janda—”
“Yeah. Tried, didn’t I?” She sparks the lighter once, twice, desultorily. “I don’t do this any more, Pink.”
“Green—”
The other woman cuts her off, lighter jabbed at her face like a threat. “I will fucking make you leave,” she says coldly. “Don’t fucking call me that. I don’t do this.”
Pink stares are her helplessly. “I don’t know what to do,” she says, voice cracking. “Nothing works. She can’t stay like this, but when she’s awake she’s singing herself to death. You were always — ” and she stops and swallows and squares her shoulders — “you were always the best at this stuff. We needed you. We still — just for Janda. Please. Just for Janda. No transformation, no asking you to rejoin, no redemption arc. Just, please, help Janda.”
“That’s not how any of this fucking works, Matty, and you know it.” Their old teammate’s shoulders slump. “You’re fucking in or you’re fucking out. Don’t try to sell me some one last job bullshit.”
Pink takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says quietly, then louder, “okay, you know what, fine, fuck you,” and snatches the lighter. “Yeah, I’m telling you to put the little green hotpants back on and stop sulking and fucking help! You’re not out! You’ll never be out, because you can’t fucking let go, not because I can’t! Now do something before I slap the shit out of you—”
She drops the lighter, hot and smoking.
“Leave,” Green growls.
“This how your story ends?” Pink says, touching her scorched fingertips together, wincing. “Just when I thought I was out, they asked me to save the life of the woman I lo—”
“Shut your fucking mouth.”
“So I said fuck it, she can die, I like sulking too much—”
“I will set fire to your bones inside you, Pink.”
“No you won’t,” Pink says. “You don’t even have the nerve to wear the colour—”
Green fire boils up the alley’s brickwork.
”…Oh,” Pink says softly.
“Yeah,” Green says, bleak and furious, and blood drips audibly off her emerald costume. “No redemption arc. This doesn’t come out. It doesn’t dry. It just — fuck you, Pink; leave.”
Pink inhales, and reaches for the stretcher’s handles.
“Leave Janda. I’ll fucking do it, whatever I even can. Just — fuck off,” and Pink raises her hands in concession, backs away.
“Lot of fucking blood,” Comrade Enforced Naming Conventions Are Patriarchal Anarcana says a block or so away, acidic. “Never drying? What, that’s magically symbolic, yeah? Indelible crimes? Who’d she fucking murder?”
“Kid,” Pink says tiredly, “learn to use your eyes. Blood spatter. What kind of injury do you fucking think that was?”
“I don’t fucking know.” The recruit scowls. “Wasn’t any spatter, not really—”
“Yeah,” Pink says. “Magically symbolic,” and she viciously kicks a piece of windblown trash across the street. “It’s still bleeding because the stupid bitch isn’t done pulling her own heart out. Fucking Janda and her fucking fairytale princess bullshit.”
