Heads and tails. The coin danced between her knuckles, trundled across the table, slapped in to her waiting palm. Heads and tails. A woman that looked like she'd stepped out of some ancient romance novel tumbled to the floor with a dull thump, dress pooling around her, rippling, her head poking up from the centre like a gopher in a cheap carnival game. Sparks rolled the coin again, barely paying attention. Heads and tails.
She couldn't have said anything differently, could she? Something to earn Axel's forgiveness, something to keep him from sweeping from the room, expression dark as the head of a thunderstorm, angry red imprint of Freya's hand still burning on his cheek, leaving Alex and Sparks staring dumbly after him like unstrung marionettes. What was she meant to have done? She swiped the coin from where it had fallen beneath the tail and tried to think of drones, but the idea somehow lacked the same magnetism it had a few short minutes ago.
Heads and tails. Freya lunged across the table, looped her fingers under the walking romance novel's collar, pulling her to the delicate pointed toes of her shoes. Sparks just sat and watched, shrunk back a little, the once-Rogue basking in the terrible familiarity of it. So, this was the Widerstand now, was it? How quickly we've skitted from Erich's soft words to slaps and intimidation in the bar. Sparks wondered what the old Oberst would have thought of those who had stepped into his place.
She didn't have to wonder long.
Erich would have stopped her. Wouldn't have stood for violence - violence! - towards any member of the movement, much less a new one. He would have stepped up, dragged Freya away with some new and daring rhetoric, bound the pair's ideologies together and pointed them at the military. It wasn't hard, it wasn't complex. Nothing like the puzzles of orbital mechanics she dealt with day to day. It was, simply, the right thing.
But Sparks was not Erich. The stars knew she was no commander, no leader of soldiers. The rogues had educated her on that point quite thoroughly, thank you very much. In all honesty, she wasn't sure how much of a revolutionary she was. The whole thing felt rather too much like trying to squeeze into someone else's clothing and - try as she might - there were still parts that pinched.
So she simply sat and watched, flipped her coin, and gave the pair no reason to so much as notice her. After all, she was not Erich.
Heads and tails.
"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."
- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.
