Roxanne's mother takes them rollerskating for Roxanne's birthday.

Syx has to make a few last-minute adjustments to the feet of Minion's new robot body to get them to fit into a pair of skates. Roxanne's mother's smile goes a little frozen when Syx pulls a tiny welding torch from his pocket int he middle of the carpeted area of the roller rink, but before she can do more than begin to have a conniption fit, Syx has finished and turned the torch back off.

She still insists on taking the torch away from him, of course. Syx hands it over to her reluctantly.

"You'll be careful with it, won't you?" he asks, looking concerned, and Roxanne honestly can't tell if he's worried her mother is going to injure herself with he torch, or if he's worried that she's going to damage the torch somehow.

Wanting to head off a scene, Roxanne drags Syx out onto the floor, Minion following.

Syx is terrible at rollerskating for about five minutes, falling repeatedly, clutching at Minion–who isn't bad at rollerskating, especially for a fish in a robot suit–at Roxanne, at the railing.

After five minutes, though, Syx seems suddenly to get the hang of it.

In his own way.

"Oh, what fun!" Syx exclaims, skating around Roxanne in an uneven circle, shaky and uncontrolled and yet somehow still upright. He spins suddenly, turning around to skate backwards.

"How are you doing that?" Roxanne asks, torn between exasperation and laughter. "If I tried that, I'd fall for sure!"

"Wheeeeeels!" Syx crows, turning again, arms windmilling. "Shoes with wheeeels! I want to wear the shoes with the wheels all of the time!"

Roxanne laughs. Minion executes a wobbly turn of his own, overbalances, and topples to the floor. Syx snatches Roxanne's hand, pulling her out of the way of Minion's fall just in time, but the move throws Roxanne even more off balance and they both go down, too.

"We'll go bike riding sometime," Roxanne says, untangling herself from Syx. "You'll like that, too."

Syx's face lights up even more.

"I'm good at bikes!" he says. "I built a laser-gun tricycle once!"

Roxanne's mother, who has come near to the partition between the rink and the carpeted floor where the parents sit, overhears this last bit and looks, once again, a little appalled.

"Oooh, they're playing music now!" Syx says happily. "Is there going to be dancing?"

"Kinda," Roxanne says. "It's the hokey-pokey."

"What's that?"

"You've never–? Okay, come on, I'll show you."

Syx thrusts a small package wrapped in newspaper, string, and entirely too much tape at Roxanne with an ecstatic grin. Minion hands her a slightly larger package, squashy and much more neatly wrapped.

"Go on!" Syx says, looking so excited that it might be his birthday, instead of Roxanne's. "Open it!"

Roxanne opens Minion's present first, partly to tease Syx, who looks ready to jump out of his seat in impatience, and partly because she wants to save whatever Syx has gotten her to the end.

She tears the newspaper off of Minion's gift; it's some sort of white clothing. She unfolds it and holds it up to look at it.

It's a white dress–a Princess Leia costume, she realizes, obviously handmade.

"Do you like it?" Minion asks nervously. "I've never had hands before, and Sir thought sewing would be good for building manual dexterity, and it goes with Sir's–"

Syx kicks him underneath the table.

"You sewed this?" Roxanne asks in flabbergasted amazement.

"Yes?" Minion says, flitting uncertainly from one side of the glass headpiece of his suit to the other.

"It's perfect," Roxanne says firmly, and hugs Minion.

"Mine, now!" Syx says, impatience in his voice.

"Okay, okay," Roxanne laughs, and picks his gift up.

Opening it proves to be a bit difficult due to the sheer amount of tape Syx has used, but Roxanne does, at last, succeed in tearing off the paper. Inside the package is–

"Syx," Roxanne says in a hushed, almost reverent tone, "did you make me a lightsaber?"

"Yes," says Syx, watching her face and grinning. "And I made myself one as well, so we can have epic battles!"

"You mean it works?" Roxanne's mother looks ready to faint. "It cuts things? Like a sword? And burns things? I really don't think–"

"Oh, no!" Syx says, catching Roxanne's look of dismay. "They don't, um, cut things! Or burn them! It just lights up in a solid beam!"

He takes the lightsaber from Roxanne and flicks it on. It flares to life in a bright blue beam. Roxanne gasps in delight. Syx grabs the blue beam, wrapping his fingers around it.

"See?" he says to Roxanne's mother, who is clutching the edge of the table so hard Roxanne is surprised the formica isn't cracked. "Totally safe!" Syx turns the lightsaber back off and hands it to Roxanne again. "Nothing to worry about! Go on," he adds to Roxanne, "give it a try!"

Roxanne stands and turns on her lightsaber.

Her mother continues to grip the table but doesn't try to take the lightsaber away from Roxanne, so Roxanne counts that as a win, especially since lightsaber.

"There's totally a setting for making it cut and burn things, isn't there?" Roxanne asks Syx later, when they're out on the skate floor again and there's no risk of her mother overhearing.

"Of course there's a setting for that," Syx says. "Athen-ti-city is important!"

"Authenticity," Roxanne says.

"Authenticity," Syx repeats, "is important. And so are lightsabers."

"We're watching the movies when you spend the night at my dad's house," Roxanne tells him.

"Minion and I already have our costumes ready," Syx assures her.

Syx and Minion's costumes turn out to be a Darth Vader suit with a modified helmet for Syx and a functional R2D2 robot body for Minion. Syx has even programmed Minion's body to make R2D2 sounds. Roxanne sort of makes a delighted shrieking sound over that.

Her dad orders pizza and Roxanne, Syx, and Minion sit in the living room and eat. Her dad starts to join them, but the phone rings in the kitchen before he's even sitting down.

"Hey, kiddo," he says, poking his head back into the living room, "I'm really sorry, but I gotta head into work. Shouldn't take too long, but you kids are doing all right anyway, aren't you?"

"Oh," says Roxanne, disappointed but unsurprised. She knew what was coming as soon as the phone rang, really. "Yeah, sure."

After he leaves, Roxanne picks disconsolately at her pizza. Her dad doesn't really like Star Wars, she knows, but–

"What's wrong?" Syx asks. "Is it–your dad said he'd be back soon."

"He always says that," Roxanne sighs. "He never is."

"Oh," says Syx.

There is a long silence.

"So," Syx says, putting down his pizza, "do you want me to show you the other settings on your lightsaber now?"

"Yes," Roxanne says, shoving her pizza aside, "and then can we have a lightsaber battle?"

Syx rubs his hands together in gleeful anticipation and brings out his own lightsaber.

(They only end up setting the couch a little bit on fire. It's hardly noticeable at all after Minion tastefully rearranges the throw pillows.)

When they put the movie in the VCR, Syx is vibrating with excitement. He hums along with the opening music and the Imperial March and quotes all of Darth Vader's lines. (Roxanne laughs and plays along, saying Princess Leia's lines.)

But he gets quiet around the time that Luke and Obi Wan get on the Millennium Falcon. At first, Roxanne isn't sure why, until–

"No! Alderaan is peaceful; we have no weapons; you can't possibly–"

Oh.

Roxanne glances over at Syx, who is pale, clutching the arm of the couch, pressed back into he cushions. Minion is watching Syx, a distressed expression on his face as he swims around in the glass headpiece of the robot suit, but Syx's eyes are fixed on the television screen.

The Death Star fires.

Syx flinches.

"Syx," Roxanne whispers, edging closer, "are you–you don't have to watch–we don't have to watch this. I can put on something else."

"No," Syx says. "It's all–all right; I'm all right; I'll be all right in a minute."

Roxanne moves down the couch so that they're sitting pressed side to side and takes his hand. He clutches at her fighters, grip a bit too hard.

"…as though millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened."

Syx takes a shuddery breath and turns his head, burying his face against Roxanne's shoulder. Minion wheels over to the other side of the couch and Syx places a hand atop the dome of Minion's headpiece.

Roxanne doesn't know what to say, doesn't know the words that will make something like this okay. She thinks that maybe there are no words to make something like this okay, and it is a thought that fills her with dismay, that there are problems too big to be fixed with words, problems too big to be fixed at all.

She doesn't know what to say, so she doesn't say anything, just sits beside Syx and lets him hold her hand too tightly.

"Sorry," Syx says after a few minutes. His voice is a little shaky around the edges, but other than that, he sounds almost normal again. "That happens every time. It's not that I don't like the movie! I do; I just–that happens every time I watch that part."

"We'll fast-forward through that part next time," Roxanne says.

"But it's Star Wars," Syx says. "And I should be able to watch–"

"No," Roxanne says firmly. "We're fast-forwarding it from now on."

"But–"

"Would you want to let me watch something," Roxanne asks, "that made me that upset?"

Syx is silent for a moment.

"No," he says.

"Good," Roxanne says, "then it's settled. Now, shh! It's almost time for Princess Leia to come on again!"

They watch all of A New Hope and all of Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and, sure enough, Roxanne's dad never comes back. But Syx and Minion are there with her, and they watch the Jetsons after they finish Star Wars, and Roxanne finds that she doesn't mind her dad's absence quite so much as she did last year.

They fall asleep to the Jetsons, or, rather, Roxanne and Minion fall asleep. Syx apparently functions on a different sleep cycle, and only needs about four hours a night, as he explains when he wakes Roxanne up at five in the morning to tell her about this amazing idea he's had–

"–robot dogs! Flying robot dogs that–Roxanne, are you listening?"

"No," Roxanne moans, throwing her pillow at him. "I'm sleeping. Go make breakfast or something if you're so awake."

"Minion says I'm not allowed to cook," Syx says. "Ever since the Popcorn-Laser Incident, he–"

"We have poptarts," Roxanne says, yawning and stealing her pillow back from him. "I'm sure it'll be fine."

"I've made a horrible mistake," Syx moans, covering his face with his hands.

Roxanne gapes at the smoking, charred ruin of what used to be her father's toaster in shock.

"It was a poptart," she says numbly. "How–how did you–it was just a poptart!"

"In retrospect," Syx says, voice slightly muffled by his hands, "I'd say cutting off the crusts before putting the poptart in the toaster was definitely a bad idea."

"You cut the crust off before you put the poptart in the toaster?" Roxanne asks, appalled.

"I don't like crust! And I thought it would heat the filling more efficiently that way!"

"I'd say it heated pretty efficiently!" Roxanne says. "It looks like it was on fire!"

"It was," Syx says, "I smothered it with a dishtowel." He hands her the blackened dishtowel. It has a hole burned in the middle of it.

"This is why you're not allowed to cook, Sir," Minion says with a sigh.

"Maybe your dad won't notice?" Syx says with desperate hope.

Roxanne looks at the thing that used to be a toaster. She looks at Syx's face. She looks back at the remains of the toaster.

"I'm pretty sure he's going to notice," she says.

Syx's shoulders slump, and then he looks up again, an expression of slightly manic determination on his face.

"I can fix it," he says.

Syx winds up repurposing several parts from Minion's R2D2 suit, including the vocalizer, in his quest to reanimate the toaster, and, by the time Roxanne's dad comes back home three hours later, the toaster has somehow ended up as a slightly sentient robot capable of independent movement and a wide range of electronic noises.

"This is Mr. Toasty," Roxanne says, holding up the horrifying frankentoaster and stroking its shiny metal sides.

Mr. Toasty makes a whirring noise of approval.

"Oh," Roxanne's dad says.

"This-was-a-very-enjoyable-experience!" Syx says in a rush after Minion nudges him pointedly. "Thank-you-very-much-for-having-us!" he adds, voice a little too loud.

Mr. Toasty gives a screech of enthusiasm.

Roxanne bites her lip to keep from grinning.

The Safe If We Stand Close Together Series will continue! The next story will be entitled Safe If We Stand Close Together: Safety Instructions Not Included.

If you want to see the art for Safe If We Stand Close Together: Happy Returns, go to setepenre-set. tumblr post/ 140794261264/ art-for-happy-returns? is_related_post =1 (you'll have to remove the spaces when you copy and paste it into your browser since ffn doesn't like links).

Thank you for reading!