Is this a writing/drawing challenge for Sapphic September 2024, because I didn't see any, and my brain just waterfalled this all over a page?
It can be if you would like it to be.
No pressure, like, at all.
But if you do, maybe tag your works with Sapphtember so people can discover them?
Cohost Sapphic September 2024 writing prompt: 17 — Girls who give you fright
Someone fucks up their first live-fire wargame. It's not Gimbal. No, Gimbal is the schmuck carefully advancing on the objective when someone behind her panics and gets their brainlink wires crossed between locking onto a friendly to designate maintain-distance autofollow, and locking onto a target.
She doesn't think she's ever operated so close to textbook as the whited-out gap in her memory where she must have ejected, right before the core popped under point-blank friendly fire, close enough for the shockwave to roll the ejector seat like a cheap plastic die, right into the hillside.
She could tell you what the textbook says must have happened: the core detonation EMP'd her entire squadron, the shockwave tossed the nearest machines over like dolls, the exercise probably got halted — probably. If not, the entire shitshow called down the designated OPFOR to point, laugh, and poke what was left with sticks. She wouldn't know; she groggily woke up in the sickbay later on, and she's been there...a while, fuzzily in and out. Nobody tells her anything.
The sickbay beds have the same behind-the-ear interface spike as a cockpit, but without the headrest articulation; once the connector locks, Gimbal's pinned immovably to the bed by the skull, a specimen. She can't get up or turn over; can't do much. She suspects it's just so they can use the brainlink to suppress any pain, save on medication.
She jolts awake again in the night, to the rattle of the doorknob and a figure looming at the foot of the bed. Gimbal screams, flailing as much as she can.
"Shut up," her Handler hisses, just white eyes and teeth in the dark, and slams an ungentle hand over Gimbal's mouth.
Gimbal manages to only outright scream into the hand half a dozen more times before she cuts it back to long whimpers, goldfish-mouthing meaningless sounds of terror long before getting enough of a handle on her shit to actually mewl a stream of somewhat-comprehensible sorry sorry sorry.
"Shut! Up!" her Handler hisses. "Shut up before you have the orderlies in here, I'm not supposed to be here—"
Gimbal whites out under the terror that she's fucked up so bad her Handler's come to terminate her off the books. She only very faintly aware of her Handler snapping fingers in front of her face, and then her Handler is climbing onto the hospital bed, straddling her hips, looming over her face, teeth bared.
Gimbal's fucked up so bad that her Handler can't wait for them to shoot her, her Handler's going to wrap hands around Gimbal's throat in a sickbay bed in the middle of the night and throttle her—
"Everybody knows they make pilots," her Handler is saying in a unhinged whisper that Gimbal can't get enough of a grip to interpret the words of. "They make you this way, and everybody's got an opinion about that, but nobody asks whether they just find people like me walking the streets—"
Her Handler claws her hands through Gimbal's hair, tugging on her captive head.
"Stupid fucking kid shot you in the back and you went offline and infirmary networks are all airgapped in case you lot come back as some kind of novel fucking malware vector and all they'd tell me is under observation and I'm your ground support I know everything I need to know everything my brain hurts you don't go dark on me you don't fucking go dark on me—"
A hot bubble swells in Gimbal's chest, a dawning sense even before she consciously processes that her Handler isn't going to end her. Mad at her, but not going to end her.
It's the same kind of hot shame-relief as pissing yourself.
"Don't do it again," her Handler hisses, teeth against her cheekbone, and Gimbal babbles to desperately reassure her that Gimbal will never ever ever.
