Mech Pilot who has to enter the invoices for their own repairs.

Their latest client has been taking some heat from a local mechster gang, street punks in gangly turbo dragster powersuits. A simple escort from A to B went hot in a road tunnel, three in the opposite lane hopping the central barrier and boosting hard, head-on. Rika unloading on them from the back of the convoy, downing one mech, forcing the second to swerve hard around them, breaking off and burning hard away.

Sharpe's suit couldn't track fast enough to shoot at the other; a split-second judgement call and she twitched the steering, interposed between attacker and target, saw the illegal launcher's muzzle coming up point-blank and just reacted.

They wouldn't have got a grenade off anyway before colliding head-on with Sharpe, there wasn't time. They build combat powersuits tough, but hers would have been a writeoff, and the dragster smashed flat like a tinfoil sculpture.

That would have been much easier to explain to their insurance company than the massive systems damage from Sharpe's twitch reflexes shooting an arm out to catch the swinging muzzle and judo-throwing the dragster right over the client's limo into the tunnel wall. The powersuit definitely wasn't built for that.

It made the news.

Sharpe has dutifully taken her painkillers and is slumped back against a pile of pillows in her bed, copying details from the damage report their mechanic's produced into their insurer's paperwork. There's a lot of it, and once it's done, they'll probably have to wait months for the claims team to decide whether it's a writeoff or merely very expensively trashed.

They have a ton of new client enquiries, though Sharpe's collarbone puts her out of action and it'll probably all dry up by the time they're not at 50% personnel.

Sharpe mostly feels really stupid. Stupid and guilty, for Rika's chalk-white stumbling shock while they'd been crowbarring Sharpe out and getting her checked over by a first responder. Rika's been sweet about it, hasn't chewed her ass out for the expense or the risk or any of it.

She glances through her lashes, just enough angle through the open door to where Rika is making herself a pot of green tea in the underused joke of a kitchen area in Sharpe's unit, and stops chewing the end of her pen when Rika walks in with pot and cup on a tray, with a glass of juice for Sharpe.

"You good?" Sharpe says.

"Fine." Rika looks exhausted. "Had to go over our statements again, for the Organised Crime team's arms smuggling taskforce. Be grateful I got you out of it." She sets the tray down on the bedside table, moves enough scattered insurance paperwork to sit, and sighs.

"I am, you're the best." The meds are wearing off, and her eyes are beginning to blur and water from too long staring at endless reams of bad handwriting. Sharpe sighs too, and puts the forms aside. "Rika?"

"Mhm?"

She spends a little too long staring at her hands, and Rika shuffles herself around on the bed to lie on her side, facing Sharpe, head propped up a little on her arm. "What are you thinking?" Rika says.

Sharpe reaches out her good arm and strokes Rika's hair, watching her eyes droop shut.

"I'm thinking it's an hour's drive over to the next prefecture," she says, and Rika opens her eyes again.

"Why do we want to do that?" she says.

"They've got that tourist trap," Sharpe says vaguely. "You know. With the celebrity impersonators."

"...Why do we want to do that?"

Sharpe transfers her gaze to the wall opposite. "Same day marriage license," she says, and nearly manages to keep it nonchalant, only getting choked up a little on the last word.

Rika's hand cautiously sneaks out and lightly touches her knee. "Thought you might be getting restless soon," she says, equally trying for nonchalant.

"I've got form," Sharpe acknowledges. "Are you set on this planet in particular? If I start to feel locked in here, I can tell you. If you'll come with."

"Look at me," Rika says. "MJ Sharpe, are you seriously asking—"

"I am so serious," Sharpe promises, and bites her lip hard as Rika's tears spill.

"Yes," Rika says. "But scare me like again, and you're buying a couch so I can make you sleep on it."

"You already have a couch at yours," Sharpe says, and then, quietly, "thank you," and Rika gets up to very carefully kiss her.