Faith

I slammed my tiny fist against the button as the fight started, and Olivia did the same. She’d always been the one to do that when she was on my team. When she was my…

I’d first met Olivia when she transferred to my school our sophomore year. She’d been under the impression she was the only girl in the engineering program, and I’d sort of agreed with her at the time, albeit only half-heartedly. I was never really sure what she saw in me- the first time we met, I was late for class and rushed in with my hair a matted mess of bedhead and my baggy sweatpants practically falling off and the bags under my eyes staging a protracted police action against the rest of my face. She’d been sitting there in that white marble room at one of those annoying, uncomfortable swivel-chair desks, nursing a pink drink while the professor berated me for being tardy on the first day of class. 

The only free chair had been the one next to her, so I sat down while mumbling that I’d overslept. When class was over, she turned to me and asked what the real reason was that I’d been late on the first day. 

“It’s… It’s lame,” I’d said. 

“Pfft, I’ll be the judge of that,” she’d said. “Trust me, I’m a connoisseur of lame.”

“Well then you and I will get along swimmingly.”

“Mayhaps, haps-may. Now c’mon, tell me.”

I’d reached into my backpack and retrieved my notebook and showed her my preliminary designs for what became the Dai Gurren. As the stars lit up in those big brown eyes, my heart flared inside my chest and intelligent thought was drowned out by lustful, infatuated static. 

She’s asked to help me with it on the spot. She seemed surprised when I’d said yes. 

I asked her out on a date a week later, and I was definitely surprised when she said yes. 

Olivia’s new robot, the Tooth Fairy, was a massive apparatus of rebar and plastic on two wheels, all painted sleek white, with a long, single blade spinning vertically down the middle. Had to be careful about that thing- the drills on Dai Gurren were precision instruments, better suited to dealing with flippers and percussive weapons than spinners. But the problem every spinner had, at least in my experience, was that they needed time to achieve maximum velocity. 

Dai Gurren had no such problem. 

I’d promised myself I’d remain stoic and steely the entire fight. I’d worn a black gown that night, like I was dressed for a funeral. Zeke had even traded in the tux for an all-black suit and tie. No frills, no theatrics, no making a show of ourselves. This was all awkward enough as-is without any of us adding to it. 

And yet I found myself screaming as I had Dai Gurren careen towards the enemy bot at full speed. 

Tooth Fairy swerved out of the way at the last second, forcing me to pump the breaks and reverse before I went crashing into the rotating screws. I narrowly avoided that fate, only for Tooth Fairy to take me from behind before I could reroute. Sparks jetted out DG and decorated the arena while my bot was forced up into the screws and whittled away at. Finally, I managed to slide out of her terrible grasp and get on the run, but she was relentless in her pursuit. 

“I think it’s time, Faith,” Zeke said, his smooth, dulcet tones helping calm me down by a small measure. I needed to stay calm, needed to focus, or I WOULD lose this fight. 

“Good idea,” I said. We’d installed a backup weapon, a retractactable knife that came out the left hand side and swung backwards in a slicing motion. It wouldn’t do much good against all that rebar when TF had us pinned, but at the proper angle we could navigate it past the defenses and trip up the vertical spinner. 

I wonder how Calloway… How Kate would feel, if she knew we’d gotten the idea from her- a simple blade to puncture an opponent’s weapon unexpectedly. Crude, but effective… Like her, I suppose. 

I turned DG left, left, left around the slots where the kill-saws would rise in the last minute of the duel, then let myself ease up on the controls. Had to be precise about this, or the blade would do nothing more than dent the rebar. 

“Now,” I uttered, and Zeke slammed the button on his control pad. From the left hand side emerged the switchblade, not even hidden (the announcers had even mentioned the thing going into the fight) so much as downplayed compared to the rest of the busy design. 

Olivia took her hands off her controls, and her bot stopped while our’s kept moving, and the arc of the blade missed by a full inch. 

She resumed her assault, and the vertical spinner sliced up the mechanical limb that propelled the switchblade clean off. 

I let out a tiny gasp as my eyes went wide and my jaw dropped and my heartbeat thundered inside my chest. TF’s spinner had achieved maximum velocity. 

I slammed the speed controls, trying to put as much distance between our bots as possible, but she just kept coming. I headed for the hammer, the whack-a-mole device situated in the far-right corner, hoping to lure her into it and then pivot out of the way, but I was too slow as she barreled into me and took another chunk of DG, then fled as the hammer came crashing down and shattered DG’s drills. 

“NO!” I screamed. I drove us out of the way of the hammer just in time for her to crash into us weapon-first again, carving a hideous vertical gash into DG’s faceplate. 

Smoke plumed out of DG alongside the sparks. I tried to reroute us, but the wheels were slowing down. Dammit- she must have gotten some of our wiring. Our wheels were barely spinning, and TF loomed in front of us with her damn rotating guillotine. 

The announcers were shouting something, but I’d tuned it out. 

All I could think about was when Olivia dumped me, she’d completely ghosted me. I’d tried calling her the next day, but it became clear she’d blocked me right away. Email netted a similar result, and when I’d sent Zeke to go to her apartment on my behalf, he’d come back within a half hour stating that Olivia had threatened to call the cops if he didn’t leave. 

So that had been that. 

I hadn’t actually spoken a word to her since she’d left me. 

Sorrow and fury competed for space inside my heart as her bot crashed into mine and crippled it, ripping its metal shell apart and leaving a smoking heap where once stood a mighty machine. She drove circles around us while Marty Weston screamed, “HOLY MOLY! WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT! THE REIGNING CHAMPIONS HAVE BEEN HANDED THEIR FIRST DEFEAT OF THE SEASON BY THEIR FORMER TEAMMATE! OH THE IRONY! OH THE HUMANITY! WHAT AN ABSOLUTELY BRUTAL DISPLAY! AND FAITH WATANABE IS BACK TO BEING SPEECHLESS.” 

I kept trying to say something, kept trying to move. Eventually, Zeke put a hand on my shoulder and I had to stop myself from sobbing into his chest again- it would look bad if I did that on camera, I knew it would. I’d just be throwing a hissy-fit that I’d lost, same as Kate always did, and I… 

I didn’t wanna be like her.

Guilt slashed across my chest as I thought that, but there it was. Especially if it turned out she and I had a lot more in common than I’d initially believed. 

I looked over at Olivia, and I remembered the first time we’d gotten Dai Gurren up and running- it had been a Friday night, and like the idiot I was, I’d suggested working on our robot together as a date night. Zeke had been busy with his own date, some girl who’d turned out to have stood him up and left him stranded at an Italian restaurant for two hours, so Olivia and I had the workshop all to ourselves. 

She’d had her hair up, like she did tonight, and she wore a green t-shirt and jeans, like she was wearing tonight. She kept her hands on the control panel as the wheels started spinning, and a smile erupted on her face as DG finally began to move around. 

“IT’S ALIVE,” she’d screamed, “IT’S ALIVE,” while dancing around and looking me in the face. “It’s alive. It’s our baby and it’s alive.”

That was when she’d kissed me. It wasn’t the first time, but the kind of forceful passion and awkward glee as our lips met felt like our first kiss all over again. 

This time, she stared me dead in the eyes from across the way, her face blank and unreadable. She walked away, and I stared at her until Zeke was forced to usher me out of the box and towards the post-fight interview. 

To say it was uncomfortable would be an understatement. Zeke and I stood to the left of Marty Weston while he interviewed Olivia and her team, and Olivia was the picture of professionalism. She said nothing about me, nothing about our history, simply talked about the design of her bot and what she’d done to prepare to fight DG. 

That was the thing- she didn’t mention Zeke or I by name at any point. 

By the time she was done, I was barely present. Felt like my heart was lodged in my throat, barely beating as it obstructed any words from making it out. Zeke handled the questions in the interview, and I barely heard a word he was saying. 

I barely heard anything at all. 

It was like I didn’t even exist. To her, to myself, to anyone else. 

I didn’t say anything, do anything, feel anything. 

Until I felt Zeke’s arm around my shoulder again as he led me back into the pits. The tears in my eyes blotted everything out, but I noticed a second set of arms wrapped around me. Tall, but not as tall as Zeke. Slender and smooth and delicate, save for the rough hands that squeezed my mid-back. 

It was Kate. She held me up while Zeke hugged the both of us, and I let myself cry, not sure who’s chest it was I was sobbing into.

The weirdest part was, at that moment, I didn’t care. I was just happy there were both there with me, there for me.