FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"Got a little soul

The world is a cold, cold place to be

Want a little warmth

But who's going to save a little warmth for me...?" (Vampire Weekend, Unbelievers)

"Hey, Fran...?"

Fran's best friend's voice had sounded shaky on the other end of the line, like a flickering image through a watery surface.

"It's me." The jackal had already been worried then.

"I'm... I think I'm down to like, about, I don't know, what? 17%?"

Fran's countenance had darkened. "You mean Will-To-Lives."

The jackal's best friend had nodded on the other end of the line, even though she'd known that Fran couldn't see her.

"The screen around me is flashing red..." Their video game metaphors had taken on a dark edge when shit went sour. "Fran, Fran I think I hear that beeping sound..." It had been a twisted testament to their closeness that it would've just felt natural for them to maintain them even then. "Fran, I don't remember last time I saved..."

***

"When she is back, she'll have a lot of glass to pick out of sand underwater, lemme tell you," Tricorn said understatedly.

"So no one else Cleaned Plesioscope yet?"

The triceratops shook her head. "No, they're leaving that pleasure for Siren, whenever she'll be back," Tricorn rolled her eyes.

"That's too bad, can you let me know when she'll be put back together too?" Ghost lit up.

"What can she tell you Siren can't?"

The mantis inhaled. "I'm not sure." She slowly exhaled. "Might have her own take on it." A cloud of smoke formed between the insect and dinosaur, as if on cue. "See if their stories match." May as well get it straight from the horse's mouth. "People will surprise you sometimes."

***

"BLEEAARRRGH!"

Cuckoon seemed less surprised to see Fran throw up that time. "Up and at 'em, sunshine!" She even got out of the way a little faster, the jackal thought she noticed.

"BLEEAARRRGH!" Coming back from the dead didn't seem to be getting any easier.

"You're alright, you're alright!" The cuckoo bird patted Fran on the back, just like the previous time.

"BLEEAARRRGH!" At least it looked like she was only going to throw up three times this time.

"There you go," Cuckoon smiled. "Good as new." The jackal took the hug the cuckoo bird offered, gratefully.

"Oh, you again," Cactus observed. "I thought I told you to be more careful."

Fran groaned. "You did." The camel didn't sound any warmer this time around either. "Where's Jackie?" the jackal asked.

"Did she die?" Cuckoon furrowed her brow.

"I don't think so," Cactus shook her head. "We don't seem to have her."

"Where... Where is Jackie... then?"

***

"You still want someone to be there for you, on some level, you know?" Fran's roommate may have been ace, but she hadn't been aromantic.

"On any level, yeah." The jackal may have been aromantic herself, but she could still relate to the concept, in a wider sense.

"When I was a kid, I used to think people should always follow their dreams and not care about money a lot." Fran's roommate had changed a lot over the years.

"And you extended that to relationships?"

The jackal's roommate had nodded. "It just seemed idealistic to me at the time," she'd remembered. "I didn't really get how classist it was," she'd shaken her head. "I mean, when you're a kid, you don't really get how of course you have to share costs with someone to exist in the world." There were a lot of things you didn't get when you were a kid. "The question becomes, who are you gonna choose to do that with?" Things life only taught you as it happened to you. "Whose company do you want to share your time and space with for the rest of your life as you both try to survive in the world around us the way it is? You're helping that person to live, on some very basic level. If that's not a strong gesture of emotion, what is...?"

Fran's pets had loved her because she'd brought them the food that had kept them alive. She'd brought them the food that had kept them alive because she'd loved them. And their presence in her life had kept her alive in a wider sense. The gift of life was a powerful thing.

***

"She's been missing since all the others were revived, you know that, right?"

Orchid nodded. "Speaker?" The mantis didn't like this. "Yeah." Robber's memory erased, Corsair faking her death, Speaker vanishing off the face of the world. "What about her?" What it all added up to was that someone was trying very hard to hide something, whatever it was. "You find her?" the Tracker asked.

Collider winced. "Some of her."

***

There was no trace of Jackie anywhere.

Fran had asked herself how weird it'd be for her to be on her own for a while when the roach would die as such. She'd never even considered the possibility that Jackie would simply disappear even though she'd still been alive without giving her an explanation. Based on everything that the jackal had experienced of the roach's personality since they'd first met, it'd never seemed to be the kind of thing that Jackie would've ever been able to do to her, under any set of circumstances at all. She'd talked so much about how much partners mattered, about how important they were, about what partners meant to each other in general and what the two of them owed each other in particular. Surely she'd never have been capable of abandoning her.

Fran may have lived in the System for too long by that point, she couldn't help telling herself, because, in some ways, it was worse to her that the roach be alive than dead by then. The jackal couldn't make sense of Jackie being alive and gone with no timetable for her return. At least, the roach being dead would've made sense, and Fran would've had a ballpark figure of when Jackie would be brought back. The jackal would've known that her partner was being kept away from her by forces beyond her control from which she'd eventually be freed to return. This situation posited the far more unpleasant possibility that the roach had left her on purpose, for unknown reasons, and that she may never come back for her at all, for all Fran knew.

Was it something she'd said...?

***

"She said she'd meet me in this alley in the middle of the night," Fran's best friend had admitted. "Don't judge me right?" The jackal had shaken her head on the other end of the line, even though she'd known that her best friend couldn't see her.

"What'd she do?" It hadn't been the first time Fran's best friend had disappeared for such midnight adventures for a couple of hours, they'd expected it by then. It'd been how she'd lived.

"I don't know, she never showed up!" This hadn't been what any of them had expected though, it'd sounded like.

"She stood you up?" The jackal hadn't needed to have shared her best friend's experiences to be indignant on her behalf.

"It's not just that," she'd explained. "I got mugged!"

Had Fran heard that right? "WHAT?" It'd sounded like she had.

"I'm waiting around in an alley at night for like an hour!" The jackal's best friend had almost laughed mirthlessly at her own foolishness. "I kept hoping she'd show up." To hide her harmless crime, she'd had to go where the harmful crimes had been. "It's an alley!" She'd shrugged. "I don't know what I expected." How foolish it'd been to believe she'd deserved any joy out of life at all, she'd scolded herself.

"Where are you?" Fran's only concern had been her best friend's well-being at that point. "We'll find you!"

***

"Where's the rest of her?" Ghost had been lucky that her android body had already been built in a way that meant that, not only did she not need to breathe underwater, she could also withstand considerable water pressure without damage to her systems.

"Wouldn't you like to know." Not that the mantis would've thought of the set of circumstances that had led to her being the one to interrogate Siren at that point as lucky as such, mind you.

"This isn't a game, Siren." The Tracker's systems also allowed her to connect directly with the speaking interface in the blue jay's diving suit, allowing them to talk underwater.

"That's my line, tin can." Bubbles slowly rose from the ocean depths to the surface far over their heads as they spoke.

"You stole her sonic beak system?" Large aquatic plants gently wavered in the ebbing current around them, indifferent to their plight. "You ripped it out of her and used it to attack a Jamboree, of all places?" Ghost had been disappointed by Siren's behavior a lot over the millenia, but this really took the cake. "Siren, Tilly's needles were ripped out and stolen by a serial killer." A flashlight fish working as the blue jay's Enforcer kept its light firmly on her as she worked. "Do you have any idea how bad this looks for you?" The mantis wouldn't have put it past her, to be honest, but she was still giving Siren one last chance to turn herself in to lessen her sentence, as she saw it.

"You have no idea what you're talking about," the blue jay spouted with a confidence that belied her situation. "Everything I did, I did for the good of the Commission," she persisted. "You'd understand that if you really knew what was going on." The Tracker was running out of patience for this by that point. "You have no idea how deep this goes." She had some idea.

"Why don't you tell me what's going on, Siren?" Siren paused her work.

"Or you'll what?" The blue jay covered her face from Searchlight's beam, which she shone in the bird's eyes. "Fine," she grumbled, resuming her work. "There's a lot more than too many Renegades afoot, Ghost," Siren warned her. "A lot more."

Ghost furrowed her brow. "What do you mean?" Something didn't add up. "What could be worse than Renegades?"

The blue jay frowned. "Ghost, I'm part of a special task force to take down the largest group of Renegades to have ever teamed up in the entire history of the System," she said with the utmost seriousness.

"No you're not." But the bird seemed undeterred.

"They don't call themselves Renegades, they say they're something more than that and," she added darkly, "their very existence is a threat to everything the Commission stands for." This would've been a good time to light up if she hadn't been underwater, the mantis thought.

"What do they call themselves?" Siren pretended not to have heard her. "You know, Tricorn was right." That got the blue jay's attention. "That sure is a lot of glass..." The Tracker clucked her tongue.

***

The System had more than its fair share of fates worse than death.

It occurred to Fran just because Jackie wasn't dead didn't mean she'd left intentionally, or even that she was safe. The roach had been kidnapped to be kept alive and exploited literally minutes after the two of them had first met, after all. It had only been through a fluke that they'd gotten out of it, but by definition that wasn't going to happen every time, especially without a partner around to help you out of it this time. There were any number of ways in which Jackie could've been suffering through no fault of her own while she'd been gone but alive, waiting desperately for the jackal to find her and to pull her out of it. The thought of it made Fran just as eager to find the roach as her previous concern had, but she still had no idea where to start.

There was a cold-blooded perma-killer on the loose, and Citizens were vanishing left and right.

If the jackal took too long to figure out where Jackie was, there was a risk it'd be the roach who'd think that Fran had been the one who'd abandoned her, and the thought of it made her heart sink. She was so dismayed at the thought of having lost Jackie for good. Surely the roach would've felt the same way about losing the jackal again herself, just as Jackie had admitted that she'd felt after the last time that Fran had died saving her life...?

She'd find her, somehow.

***

[?Everybody's looking for something,

I traveled the world and the seven seas...?]

"Way back in one of my queer politics classes they made us read about this brothel in the Netherlands." Fran's roommate and she had both been ace. "I don't remember if I told you about it?" The jackal had been pretty sure that she'd have remembered something like that. "They never paid a dime for cleaning, they didn't."

Fran had tilted her head. "How come?" Her roommate had grinned.

"You know how some people have, like, a fetish for cleaning, like, it's a thing they're into, right?" The jackal had caught on.

"They had clients like that come clean for them for free?"

There had been a glint in her roommate's eye, but it hadn't been mockery. "It sounds hilarious, I mean it kinda is, but really, all of society should work like that, shouldn't it?"

Fran had grinned back. "My mom always told me, find a job you love, and you'll never work a day in your life."

***

"So you haven't heard from her either?"

Orchid saw Fran shake her head on her communicator screen. "I was hoping you might've!" The jackal had been going through her list of Citizens that she'd met since she'd started living in the System to ask them if they'd seen or heard of Jackie one by one.

"We haven't heard from her since the Jamboree attack." This was not an encouraging prospect.

"That was the last time I saw her too." None of the Citizens that Fran had talked to in the interim had seen or heard of the roach since then either. "I was starting to think she might have been off somewhere investigating for you two, as a matter of fact." If there was a situation in which Jackie could get clues about the investigation for which the mantises had asked for their help in which the jackal would've been a liability, it could've made sense for the roach to leave her behind without being able to explain why at the time, Fran had tried to tell herself.

"Not as far as we know, no," the Tracker shook her head. "Doesn't mean she's not, though," she shrugged. "She could be compartmentalizing it from us too, for all we know." Even after all this time in the System, Jackie still found a way to do things that they'd find completely unpredictable to this day.

"I hope that's all it is," the jackal sighed. She had never existed in the System on her own for any extended period of time before, and she was finding it harder to get used to than she expected she would, especially with the anxiety of not knowing what would happen with the roach weighing on her all the time.

"So do we."

Fran tilted her head. "What do you mean?" Did they know something she didn't?

"Did Jackie ever tell you the story of how she traded something for those knitting needles she got from Tilly that time?"

The jackal scanned her mind for it, but nothing came to mind. "I don't think so, no, why?" What had they wanted to hear?

"Her needles were forcibly ripped out," Orchid answered, "and we think the killer did it."

***

"She told me she feels like a hedgehog one time," Fran had told her roommate.

"Like she's got needles on her back, you mean?"

The jackal had nodded. "Like everyone who gets close to her gets hurt," she'd explained.

"So she's afraid to let people get close." Fran's roommate had been driving them around at night, looking for her best friend after her desperate phone call.

"After we get her, she..." The jackal struggled to even talk about it. "She said she was really hurt and lonely, and she knew I'm ace and didn't want to push me and didn't want more but like..." It'd been hard enough for people to talk about this kind of thing who weren't ace. "She asked if we could snuggle overnight. Just, platonically, she meant. But, like, sharing the bed, maybe sleeping, maybe staying awake talking. She said she'd been in a lot of alleys, and it's nice, it's fun, and she likes it, but like..." Fran's roommate had nodded in understanding, encouraging her to continue. "She said it'd be nice to be able to spend a night with someone, even just like that. She said it'd help her feel... safe? She said she wouldn't be hurt if I said no."

"Have you ever done that?"

"No, you?" The jackal's roommate had shaken her head. "Ever wanted to?"

"I was in a relationship with this other ace girl who wanted to one time," she'd replied. "I panicked and said I didn't feel up to it, and now we're broken up so I feel shitty about it, but we were probably gonna break up anyway," she'd shrugged. "You?"

"Not before," Fran had admitted. "I said yes this time, though."

The jackal's roommate had raised her eyebrows. "Oh, really?" Fran's touch aversion had been a secret to no one.

"Just this once, yeah," she'd nodded. "I was just so scared of losing her, I wanted her to have something to look forward to, something to cling to, you know?" The jackal's roommate had understood all too well.

"Don't worry, we'll find her," she'd assured Fran.

"I told her we'd find her..."

And they did.