Mech Pilot who just sat down next to you after singing that really sad song at Karaoke night.
They have a few days between jobs. Sharpe stumbles out of plain stone-coloured high thread count sheets, and tucks them right up beneath Rika's still-sleeping chin. She showers and sits cross-legged on Rika's boxy designer couch with a bowl of cereal, watching offworld news, then volunteers herself to go to the quarterly meeting with their accountant. Rika doesn't let herself sleep in often enough.
It's routine, but there are new reporting requirements for contractors to go over, and they slog through a bunch of minutiae about filing categories and which documents they should attach to what. It takes hours; it's exhausting.
She grabs a burrito from a stall on the way back through town. She should swing by her unit, she supposes, check for mail; but checks on Rika's location instead, scrunching a frown at it. It seems early for Rika to hit a bar, which makes it practically not an excuse at all; what if she needed checking on, for whatever reason?
The place, when she finds it, is nearly enough to make her change her mind. Karaoke; there are only so many tone-deaf manglings of nostalgia-ennobled novelty pop songs anyone should have to sit through in a life. But she wouldn't have imagined Rika here, either, and that gets her through the door.
She can't see her, but they have a system that's served them well; if in doubt, Sharpe simply sits somewhere and is tall, and Rika inevitably finds her. So Sharpe sits, and orders cranberry juice.
"You sure you don't want anything stronger, buddy?" the bartender grouses. "Sad Lady's up next, you'll want a beer to cry into."
"Sad Lady?"
"Ain't been in before?" The guy jerks his thumb in the direction of the stage. "She comes in, and first block she can find that nobody's queued up in, twenty solid minutes of the most miserable shit in the library. If you're thinking of singing, buddy, my advice is: you don't wanna go after that. Nobody ever does."
"Thanks," Sharpe says, tilting her glass. She'd rather pull her own teeth.
And then Rika's on the stage in a long skirt and a white cashmere sweater, with her hair pulled back in a simple tie. She takes the mic without any fuss and opens her mouth, and then she stabs everyone in the place right through the chest.
"You want that beer?" the bartender says, in the moments between one song and the next, and it feels sacrilegious for any other voice to exist. She shakes her head numbly, and signs whiskey.
An eternity later, Rika puts the mic down and steps off the stage, and Sharpe has to re-learn how to breathe, which she's still struggling with when Rika slides onto the barstool next to her, face unreadable.
"I thought you'd rather blow your eardrums than come in a karaoke bar," she says, and Sharpe very dimly recalls saying something like that, on a drunken shore leave back in her scout mech days.
"Just got here," she lies, and Rika looks at the drink in front of her, and arches a brow.
"I thought you're a mech pilot, not a torch singer," Sharpe says, by way of admitting the point. It comes out much less smooth than she'd like it to, and Rika shrugs, reaches over, picks up what's left of Sharpe's whiskey, and slugs it back in one before sliding to her feet.
"Your place?" she says, in a light, careless way that tells Sharpe the conversation is Over.
