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“Is this finally real?”
The wreck of BALTEUS is smoldering on the Watchpoint’s roof, sparks and smoke like a miniature thunderstorm, the lot of it bathed with light from the rising sun. Raven’s voice is weak, almost drowned out by her heartbeat, combat stims in the slow process of being flushed from her system. Ayre wonders, for the briefest of milliseconds, if she can get away with feigning ignorance. The mercenary is slow to try the same approach twice and that trait has done wonders for her in the field. But using that against her here would be cruel.
Crueler, even, than what Ayre has already done.
“Define ‘real,’ Raven.” Ayre says, a coward to the bright, shining heart of her. A few more selfish moments without her partner hating her, that’s all she asks. “Were the stimuli your brain and nervous system receiving correctly interpreted, as in an arena simulation? Yes, but-”
“Ayre.” Raven’s voice is a delicate rasp, and Ayre brushes herself over the core’s internal cameras to see the mercenary glaring directly into one of the lenses. Fourth generation augmentation scarred her, cut away sinew and bone in favor of wire and metal, yet Ayre’s never seen anything so beautiful. The fire in Raven’s eyes that flickers against the scars of sleep deprivation calls to her. “You know. What I meant. Did that engagement happen?”
“It did. At last.” Ayre says, and forces herself to remain with the cameras. Raven’s earned that much. She deserves to have her grief and rage witnessed by the being who caused them both. But neither come in their heated waves. Ayre isn’t buffeted by them like she deserves. Instead, Raven slumps in her pilot’s chair, and cries. “Raven? Please, Raven, I know you likely wish to break Contact, and I’m prepared to-”
“No!” Raven screams, the word echoing in the core, and if Ayre had a physical form, the mercenary would be clutching it with a bone shattering grip. She starts to cough, arms wrapped around her torso for the lack, the sounds shrapnel jagged. Internal sensors pick up the presence of blood and Raven swipes her arm across her mouth. Her teeth are stained as she says “never alone again. Not you. Not me. Never.”
“Raven, I-” Ayre lets her words sink underneath the waves of Contact, painfully unsure now that her initial expectation is proven false. Raven wants to continue their partnership – she wants to remain tethered, wrapped around one another until their signals and impulses are indistinguishable as separate entities. An alloy of flesh and frequency, forever dancing between Raven’s bodies. “Whatever you want, Raven. However you choose to go from here, I’ll support you.”
“How.” Raven says, and her vitals have calmed enough that Ayre lets go of the worst of her panic. “How did it work?”
“Between your AC, what was left of the Watchpoint’s network, and the ambient Coral, I had processing power to spare.” Ayre says, pushing a wave of achievement through Contact, watching Raven’s pulse jump as a faint blush burns high on her cheeks. Ayre laughs, frail and light, says “I’m fairly adept at analyzing and manipulating systems, you know.”
“Was it true?”
“…” Ayre responds with an open, silent channel, because how does she explain this? How does she tell Raven that to be a Coral voice is to be enmeshed with the precipice between endless possibility and choice? She’d barely understood it herself, during the first simulated but no less frenetic year of Contact. There are still mysteries she hasn’t pulled apart, points where the strands of causation have tangled with the flow, faint ripples without maps to track them by.
“Ayre. Please.” Raven says, more of the ache, of the panic and pain Ayre helped her excavate from underneath augmentation and trauma. It hits her then, with all the force of an AC, that Raven is thinking of the fires she unleashed. Of their only goodbye atop the broad disc of the Closure Station.
“You chose what they built you to choose, Raven.” Ayre says, pulling herself completely into Raven’s augmentations. The Coral burn-in means it’s even easier than accessing a console. By the same token, it means the mercenary feels the liberty she just took. She ignores the question of morality – they’ll talk about it later, at length – and plays on Raven’s nervous system, doing her best to simulate an embrace around her shoulders. “But if I thought that was all you could be, I never would have given you that choice back.”
“I killed. Everyone.”
“Yet here we are.” Ayre says, ‘nudging’ the side of Raven’s head, a faint trail of Coral creating a path towards one of the core’s outer camera displays. Beyond the destruction of the surge, Rubicon still stands. The ever crumbling Grid is a shade to the sun that’s gotten brighter and brighter with every second they remain at the Watchpoint. Ayre pauses, says “621 followed her handler’s orders. Raven followed her conscience. The former could always become the latter. You only needed time.”
“Time.” Raven says, and there’s a hint of question in her voice, a curiosity that rarely appears outside of their deployments. Ayre is overcome by the instinct to flee, to hide, to yank herself away from her partner and return to the Coral flow. If Raven asks the question, she won’t be able to refuse her, and then she’ll discover how little Ayre actually knows. “There’s something wrong. With time, here.”
Not a question, then, nor a theory. A statement of fact from her clever Raven.
“Not quite. Some things are simply more malleable than humans normally allow for.” Ayre says, willing even a single iota of confidence into her voice. Raven snorts and she continues, “the important part, Raven, is that while all of it was true, none of it has to be real. You – we can be better, now.”
“I will.” Raven says, and Ayre can feel how her partner forces the words to be steady and strong, absent of her usual shortness of breath. It tears at what remains of her lungs, hot stripes that make Ayre gasp from the sensation. She’s unaccustomed to the harsher edges of biological physical sensation, to the stark difference between it and the core’s sensors relaying reactor temperature and structural integrity. Raven closes her eyes and opens one of her hands, laying it palm up on her leg. Then, “Take it.”
Ayre flickers across nerves while another Coral trail threads its way between Raven’s fingers, crisscrossing under her hand and back up again until it looks like a system of tangled wire. It’s a dramatic flourish, completely unnecessary with how totally she’s integrated with Raven’s body. But it it feels important. It feels like a bridge, like a prayer and an apology and an oath. Ayre clears her nonexistent throat, and says “I’m with you, Raven.”
“No leash. No secrets.” Raven says, using her free hand to shut off one of the core’s interfaces, making a set of mirrors out of blank displays. She stares into it, the Coral in her eyes – Ayre, in her eyes – reflecting back and creating a sinister twin of her handsome features. Raven blinks, her brow going from tense to unfurrowed, and Ayre realizes her mistake; the blend and bleed of their thoughts that slipped past her notice. Before she can pull away in embarrassment, Raven presses a fist to her chest and says “But you lead. And I’ll follow.”
“...Raven.” Ayre says, and the way her voice quavers, the way Raven’s pale cheeks flush, the veritable song of Contact between them – it’s enough to make her send another trail of Coral up the scar of the mercenary’s throat, to the corners of her jawline as she stimulates more and more of her partner’s too long neglected pleasure centers –
Ayre thinks – in the space between seconds, the gaps that exist between Raven’s wheezing gasps and her own startled moans – and the images are fragments, hot shrapnel ejected from the explosions ripping through her consciousness: Raven, beautiful, shaking in the pilot’s chair. The AC, internal core lights dimming. Raven, again, keening like a missile lock, Coral tracing her lips, her teeth, her tongue . Ayre’s own self, buzzing and spiking in the flow, making her yelp in Raven’s ears.
Their Contact erupts in molten satisfaction and Ayre is blown apart; made into pulsing fireworks that match Raven’s machine gun quick heartbeat. Her partner wails and Ayre is brutally aware of how her waveform contorts to mirror the oscillation. She’s kept prisoner in Raven’s augmentations by the paralyzing force of input, overlaid onto her by the pleasure she greedily poured down their shared throat. In the throes of an orgasm her partner didn’t realize she was still capable of, they meld together into a single, concussive force.
Their AC shakes as the generator vents excess heat that isn’t there, and Ayre can’t stop themselves from laughing, breathless and boneless in the pilot’s chair. Sensations pass back and forth between their respective forms, pleasure like a live wire, wild in its path of destruction. Not even combat can hold them in this tension, strung between the twin points of overwhelmed and starved. Raven keeps begging themselves for more and Ayre gives it freely. Their mewling echoes in the core, in every undulating curve of Contact, bouncing and redoubling.
Ayre can’t tell how long it takes to return from they to I. It’s as if she’s being born from the Coral flow anew, gifted existence and feeling without form. Except – Ayre wraps herself around Raven’s shoulders again, stifling a giggle when it makes her partner shiver in the grips of an aftershock. Trepidation smothers the good humor as she says “was that – did I overstep, Raven?”
“You lead. And I’ll follow.” Raven says, quiet enough that it barely carries above the core’s ambient soundscape. Ayre hears them perfectly regardless. The world where she can’t is far, far behind them, and no matter what happens now, there is no force on Rubicon that could keep them apart. Raven sighs, breath rattling in her lungs, and says “Walter. Is probably worried.”
“ Yes. It’s been, several hours since the explosion . ” Ayre says, trying to remember how quickly they returned to base the last time and if the handler cared one way or another. He’s become softer with the mercenary over time, one of many consequences she hadn’t expected and still shoulders for Raven’s sake. Her partner is smiling at the blank displays, knowing at least part of Ayre will be looking, and it spreads love like fire through Contact. “ We, have some time to ourselves left, if you’re willing, Raven.”
It’s not exactly a lie. If Ayre was any other operator, she’d be telling Raven about the incoming radar signatures – PCA reinforcements sent to check the comms blackout, and won’t that be a surprise – and advising they leave immediately. But she is what she is, and there are still a few lingering strands of possibility within her reach. Not enough for another iteration, but, enough to linger in this tableau. Enough to appreciate her partner’s gorgeous desperation. They both deserve that much before being swept up in the flow of a twice lost war.
So when Raven whimpers, eyes alight with anticipation, it’s all the permission Ayre needs.