Chapter Thirty-Two – Happily Ever After Tomorrow

Chapter Thirty-Two – Happily Ever After Tomorrow

“Marriage rates have been on a constant downturn for the past forty years. There was a mild uptick in the hyper-conservative push of the mid 2020s, but after that, rates continued to plummet.

It’s entirely possible that by the 2050s, marriage as an industry will have completely collapsed. I don’t see this as a good investment.”

–Wed-co Investors Meeting, 2048

***

There was something inexplicably comfortable about being in bed next to Lucy. Not fucking, just… laying there, with a few pillows stuffed behind me so that I was partially sitting up, blanket up to my armpits and attention on screens that my Augs were projecting before me.

Lucy was just close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off of her. She was reading from a tablet that was resting length-wise on that little pinch of tummy she had that I loved to fondle.

Resting the way she was, with her neck all bent, and her chin doubled by the weird posture, with her hair tucked into this ugly-ass beige bonnet thing that kept it from being all flat when she woke up… she was pretty.

“Is there something on my face?” Lucy asked without really looking away from her screen.

“Nah,” I muttered. It was enough to deflect her for now.

Shy had left almost as soon as I got home, but she promised that we’d go visit Gros Baton together the day after tomorrow, so I’d at least have some company for that.

Nya, in the meantime, was resting on one of the couches when I arrived. Lucy had tucked her in with a few blankets and told the kittens to shut the fuck up and let her sleep. Nya slept curled up in a small ball, and seemed to have the habit of biting the end of her tail as she slept.

It might have been cute if she wasn’t a full grown woman.

I’d have to figure out what to do with her in the morning. She couldn’t just come to every one of my classes, right? Besides, I had the next day off from school, so after dropping Lucy off, I had planned on getting into some trouble.

Not literally, but from the little bit of experience I had as a samurai already, and from all the rumours I’d heard about them that turned out to be true, I knew that samurai tended to get into…adventurous situations a lot.

So, the question was more about what kind of trouble I could get into and out of without disrupting the rest of my shit.

Or I could stay home, refuse to wear anything more complex than boxers and a t-shirt, and just chill and watch TV all day?

Tempting…

But no. There was, I guess, a sort of pressure to do stuff. I was given a lot of power, and just using it to sit back and do fuck-all wasn’t cool.

I was pretty sure that was what Deus Ex did, and she turned out to be a little devil gremlin, so I didn’t want to go down that path.

I wasn’t a hero-worshipper. I guess at some point early on I figured out that if I didn’t bootstrap myself out of the shithole, no one was gonna do it for it. There was a minimum that people would do to help each other, and that minimum was often also the maximum. It isn’t profitable to help others.

When I lost my parents and my arm and the one eye… yeah, that was a good moment to wake up to learn that shit wasn’t fair, that the world wasn’t a nice place, and that I had to focus on getting mine.

Lucy changed that a lot. She’d opened me up, been kind without needing to, but… yeah, Lucy never hid that she loved me because she could use me, and I loved her because I needed her in turn, and I guess at some point the whole ‘we do things because we’re selfish’ thing fell apart between us.

Real fairy-tale shit.

Or as close to it as someone could get.

“Wanna get married?” I asked.

“Sure,” Lucy said.