Sweating hand slippery on the neck of a bottle of engine-deck moonshine, Bea inhales as if something in the air will help, and knocks the bottle gently against the hatch.
Maybe nobody's there. Maybe nobody heard, and she can just tell herself she knocked loud enough. Maybe—
Anna-Maria undogs the hatch and appears at the edge of it, a slice of tired face. Her eyes widen a little.
"You look like shit, Bitchless," she says. "Are you — when did you last sleep?"
Alea jacta est. "How long have I been avoiding you?" Bea says wearily.
Anna-Maria's fingers whiten on the edge of the hatch, like she's hanging onto it for moral support. She takes a few seconds, then swings the door wider, stepping back with all the grace of a good host. "Coming in?"
"You can hear it out here if you'd rather." And Bea means it; but there's also the fact that she can already tell the tiny cabin smells like the carefully-held luxury of decent soap. Like Anna-Maria. Her nerve is frayed already.
"Please come in, Bea," Anna-Maria rephrases, diction distinct and holding herself very still. As if Bea's something that'll bolt if she moves.
Well, Bea does feel like shipboard vermin right now.
There's more room in a senior pilot's cabin than in their mech cockpit, in the pedantic sense that a large wardrobe contains the luxury of more space than a small one. There's a pull-out desk — a low shelf, really, with a lower matching padded one, that presumably some kind of person could sit at and write a letter home, if their legs folded in an unusual way; but really, the place to sit is the bunk. They stand, tensely.
"You have been avoiding me," Anna-Maria says, when Bea can't quite manage to start, "and that hurts." She says it simply, without rancor. "Tell me what I did."
Bea digs a box out of her pocket instead, a padded tin with a snug-fitting cap that some delicate optical mech component came in, and weighs it in her hand. "You've seen my cockpit," she says thickly. "Yours has got family photos. That fucker Rami's got his bones. I've got — I keep this out of sight."
She holds it out until Anna-Maria takes it, then turns her face half away, expression screwed up, half-nodding when Anna-Maria hesitates over opening it.
"What's — oh." Metal glints in the Baronet's palm, as she skims the fingertips of her other hand over it. "This is a Tri-Delta?" and all Bea can do is half-nod again. "It doesn't surprise me that you're decorated," Anna-Maria adds slowly, "but I am surprised that I've never heard it. When—?"
"Pinned it on me just because I was still breathing after Civeen."
The tumblers are practically audible, smoothly clicking in that lawyer brain, and Anna-Maria starts as if to say something, and it's unbearable.
"People talk about what they're going to do when this is all over," Beas says, through her teeth. "I don't — there isn't anything for me to go back to. There isn't anyone. There isn't even anywhere left at Civeen. There's no interrupted life for me to pick up; the war's my entire life. I keep that in the mech so that when they scrape me out into a bag I'll have it with me when I earn it. I didn't expect to — "
Words give out, for a moment, like a faltering motor with bubbles in the fuel line.
"Firey mutual annihilation revenge," Anna-Maria says, almost too softly to hear, and Bea salutes her bitterly with the bottle.
"What did you do, van der Fabriek? You made me believe I might live through this."
"Bea—"
"We're not even from two different worlds, because I'm nothing from nothing. And you'll take your stupid Baronetcy and your stupid lovely smile and go back and pass the bar and write peace treaties or something—"
Anna-Maria quite firmly takes the bottle from her fingers, unscrews it, and takes an unhealthy slug of below-decks hooch.
"Ack," she says. "Fuck," and sits down on her bunk. "You know, Bea, I was only ever going to be a middling lawyer."
Bea snorts.
"No, really. Middling at everything. Not a bad student, but...no effort. No drive. You wouldn't have liked me." She makes as if to drink again, then thinks better of it. "When word about Civeen reached Civvie Street, we were — you know, young and angry and students. Lots of talk. Lots of somebody needs to do something! as if it were the first shot of the war and the Fleet weren't already — anyway. I looked around and realised that somebody could be me." She looks up at Bea and crooks her mouth wryly. "My parents thought someone must have influenced me, that's how few ideas of my own I'd ever had. When they realised that wasn't it, they all but said to my face that it was fine, then, I'd get a taste of basic training and drop right out again."
This time she does take another drink, then nearly gags.
"The only thing that kept me there was, you know, it was my first real independent idea, and I didn't want them to be right. Until they gave us the chance to try out for Flight Basic."
Bea can't help watching her face as she talks. That lovely smile dawns.
"After the war, I'm going to keep flying," Anna-Maria says, and there's a certain steel in it. "Anything they'll let me put my hands on, some ghastly ore scow if I have to." She pats the bunk next to her. "And I can't — I don't want to say anything that you can remember, in some later dark mood, as the poor little rich girl expecting to get what she wants because she wants it. But any sky I fly with you will be a happier one, Beata Sierpinski. For as long as you ever want."
Bea's strings are cut and the world is falling over. She haltingly sinks to sit beside Anna-Maria.
"I don't—" she says hoarsely, not even knowing what she means, and Anna-Maria knocks any remaining words out of her by gently wrapping the blanket around them both and coaxing her to lie down, legs tangled. Bea realises there are tears on her own cheeks.
"You're so tired," Anna-Maria croons, branding her face with butterfly kisses. "It's alright. You can rest, I've got you."
She is. She's so tired, and just realising it unlocks some deep knot that's been keeping her together for a long, long time; and she shudders, boneless and helpless, into the terrifying safety of Anna-Maria's arms.
(I thought I'd end up doing today's Make Up A Mech Pilot, then writing something like this scene as an epilogue to Bitchless Week. And then I saw today's, and how perfect it is — couldn't have asked for anything that would fit better!
Anyway. That's Callsign: Bitchless Week, folks.)
