Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Aurora’s first memory is nothing special, but to her it is as sharp as starlight and as bright and clear as if it’s shone on by the full light of the sun. 

In it, she was a child still, hardly a million years old. She’d heard from her friend a comet who her mother said was a bad influence that there was an asteroid going to hit them and she was dreadfully worried about her mother getting hurt. She fretted about it until her mother managed to figure out what she was so worried about. She laughed- or, their equivalent of it, Aurora’s been wrapped up with humans for so long now she thinks in their terms- she laughed and drew Aurora nearer into her gravity.

“That little asteroid is what you’re worried about?” she hummed in a viola’s resonance. “It’s not anywhere near us.”

Aurora sent a furtive burst of anxiety through their link.

“Tell you what-” the emotions translated through their connection merry and roguish- “if the asteroid does come on a collision course, I’ll fight it off. I’m bigger than it, after all.”

This was a sensible point. In the younger Aurora’s eyes, nothing could possibly be bigger or stronger than her mother. She told the comet this with an air of superiority next time he zipped by. 

“Loads of things are,” is his counter, “you just don’t know that cause you’re still little even though you’ve been around almost longer than me.”

“Longer. I’m older,” Aurora said, feeling less shy than normal now that she was convinced in her rightness, “and you’re lying.”

“The sun’s bigger. And all the stars too. Liberia told me.” Liberia referred to a planet out near the edge of the solar system. Aurora was in the orbit around her mother orbiting around Terra with no way for her to go talk to her, and so the comet held her up as the coolest person ever to make the younger Aurora jealous. It had worked very well, the older Aurora reflects ruefully.

“The stars’re tiny.” Aurora was lost. The concept of stars being large had never occurred to her before. “Nothing but pinpricks. My mum told me they’re holes in the fabric of the universe.”

“ Liberia says they’re proper big. Bigger than Terra. They only look small cause they’re so distant. You just don’t know things.” 

“I do so,” Aurora complained, “You’re being mean.” 

“Are you going to tell your mum about it again? Only babies go and complain to their parents.” 

Aurora’s edge had all but disappeared and then been thrown back on her. She went off to sulk.

The older Aurora keeps searching. Her memories around that time are blurry and indistinct, not stored in neat uniform Cyberian drives.

She recalls that sometimes her mother would tell her a story. The way she spoke was like a lullaby. Aurora’s conscientious fidgeting would come to a halt and she’d settle in to listen. Her mother would usually tell her something about the distant stars, the history of them as they were known. Aurora had always bothered her mother into telling her ‘the story about the spider’, even though she’d heard it hundreds of times over.

“Long ago,” her mother told her, and Aurora curled into her mother’s gravity and let herself drift along listening, “there were the two worlds, the Light and the Dark. The goddess of the Dark was a kind and benevolent deity, and creative to boot, and out of the stitching of the universe she made the moons, and the planets for them to orbit around and be their friends and lovers, and the void to float in. And she was happy, and told the moons that they should be too. They did not reply. For she had neglected to give them life, and that was the most important thing. So the goddess of the Dark began searching for a way to give her people life. 

“She went to the north corner of the universe, and asked the asteroids there, how can I create a new life. And they said, only the Light can do that. And so she went to the south corner of the universe, and asked the comet there, how can I create a new life, and xe said, only the Light can do that. And so she went to the east corner of the universe, and asked the black hole there, how can I create a new life, and he said, only the Light can do that. And so she went to the west corner of the universe, and asked the void there, how can I create a new life, and she said, only the Light can do that.”

“It was a dwarf planet last time,” Aurora pointed out helpfully. “Not asteroids.” 

“The dwarf planet broke apart.” 

“No! I don’t want her to have been hurt!”

“Alright, then, the asteroids are just her friends she asked to talk to the goddess for her. Now can I keep going?” 

“Yeah. That’s good,” Aurora said contentedly, and her mother continued.

“The goddess of the Dark despaired. For you see, the god of the Light was everything the kind, benevolent, goddess of the Dark was not. He was cruel and delighted in the destruction of those worlds the goddess of the Dark spent so long creating. The goddess of the Dark was almost normal in her appearance, besides the unearthly tint to the rocks that covered her surface and the infinity of her lakes and glaciers. The god of the Light was an incomprehensible mass of shifting colors that hurt to look on. The goddess of the Dark knew that if she allowed the god of the Light into her realm, all her hard work would be destroyed.

“She stayed there in her depression for years. Without life, who would be there to appreciate the world she had created so lovingly? So she stayed there, out of orbit, just letting herself drift. 

“Without her maintenance, her universe began to fall apart. Ice caps were collecting on the planets that were meant to be hot. Why did it matter? There was no one who needed to be warm. The oceans were boiling on the planets that were meant to be cold. Why did it matter? There was no one to pull the ti-” 

“I don’t like this bit as much. Can you skip it?” 

“Alright, alright,” her mother laughed. “You’re so picky. Right. Everything was in disrepair, and the goddess of the Dark wasn't doing anything about it, so the other celestial beings decided to take matters into their own hands. They went to the goddess of the Dark and asked what needed to be done for this to be fixed. The goddess of the Dark responded despondently that if they only had the Light, everything would fix itself, but until then there was no point in trying.

“‘Well, that’s easy enough to fix,’ said the sun, and he put himself in the void and tried his hardest to shine as bright as he could. Of course, this was not the sort of light they needed,” her mother said, with no lack of amusement, “and the sun shone so bright in his misguided attempt he burned himself out.” 

“‘The sun didn’t know what he was doing,’ said the planet, ‘I will make the god of the Light help us,’ and he went to the furthest point of the universe where the two worlds joined and threatened and cajoled until the god of the Light grew irritated and struck him down with as little effort as letting yourself spin on an orbit. 

“‘It’s no use,’ the goddess of the Dark decided, ‘all my heroes are dead,’; but the spider hiding in one of his craters heard her, and began to concoct a plan.” 

Aurora vibrated excitedly at this- it was her favorite bit. 

“Being small, she could not cross the universe, so she hitched a ride on a comet; and being hardy, she did not need to breathe. So she reached the end of the universe, and being so small she could slip into the crack between it and the next. 

“Finding herself in the Light, she made her way through the chaos until she came across the god of the Light, and greeted him casually.

“He startled and sent squamous things at her to kill her, but being fast, she dodged out of the way, and he cut a hole through the fabric of the universe instead. This continued until there were hundreds of holes. Those holes let the Light through, and her being a webspinner, she could drop through one of them back to her universe, leaving him searching.

“The stars- because that’s what they were, of course, shone their light on the moons, and everything else besides, and where it touched, they came to life, heart started beating and lungs started breathing, and the goddess of the Dark rejoiced.” Her mother paused. “Aurora?”

Despite Aurora’s best efforts, she’d fallen asleep. This always happened near the end of the stories, but if her mother stopped before they were finished, it was all wrong and so she’d wake up. So they were important to have. Sometimes she’d dream about them and that was always cool because it was like having a sequel, even though the dreams made no sense. 

In the years that must have been soon before she met Carmilla, Aurora noticed her mother beginning to become anxious. That was an alien concept to her- her mother couldn’t be the scared one!- but she vowed to fix it. She didn’t like when people were sad. But what could she do about it? Getting a shiny asteroid for her didn’t help. Being well-behaved for a year didn’t either. Aurora began to get truly afraid. 

When she asked her mother what the problem was, the answer was “nothing you should have to worry about.” When she asked the comet, she got something significantly more involved.

“It’s because the humans are going to war,” he said authoritatively.

“What’s a human?” 

“They live on the planet- animals, y’know, like the spiders in the stories. About the same size.” 

“Oh. I don’t want them to go to war. They sound nice. I’d like to be friends with a human.” 

“No, you wouldn’t, ‘cause they weaponize moons. That’s why your mum’s so worried.” Seeing that get a reaction out of her, he continued. “They take you away and they cover you in a bunch of metal and give you these guns- they make explosions- and turn you into one of their battleships.” 

“You’re lying again!”

“Am not. My mum’s been to other systems, and she told me she met a planet who knew a planet that had a moon that that happened to.” 

“I don’t want humans to make my mum into a battleship!” 

“They go for the young ones, y’know,” the comet said ominously. 

Aurora was too caught up in worry for her mother to parse why that was relevant. “I’m gonna go check on her.” 

Aurora went off and, after checking that her mother had no more metal than usual, asked her if that was true. Her mother said that she wouldn’t let it happen to them, but her emotions were a confusing mess. Aurora didn’t think her mother had wanted her to learn that. And that meant the comet wasn’t lying like usual.

When the war did happen, it happened suddenly. The older Aurora realizes now it must have been a long, drawn-out affair, but moons operated on a different timescale. The younger Aurora was millions of years old and yet still a child, after all. To her, there was a normal day, and now out of the blue humans were trying to run away to live on her mother.

She got a piece of the story from Terra themself. In all her memory, the planet they were orbiting around had only spoken once or twice, only to her mother, and always in a language far older than Aurora. This was in contrast to all the other planet-and-moons dynamics Aurora knew of. By all accounts, Terra should have been a second parent to her. But instead, she got the silent treatment. Aurora was incredibly intimidated by them.

This didn’t stop her from eavesdropping on Terra and her mother’s conversations. Terra said that the humans on the other side were planning to channel the Weird as a weapon. Aurora didn’t know what that was but it seemed interesting. Everyone was getting evacuated to ‘Theia’, which Aurora discovered was her mother’s actual name that other grownups used for her. That took some time to process. Aurora didn’t really know anything they were talking about, but she had the vague impression Things Were Afoot (interesting) but they were making her mother sad (bad, so a net negative).

The day the attack happened was terrifying. Aurora didn’t realize what was happening at first, just stared at the bolt of iridescent black cleaving the sky. If she could have stalled in her spin, she would have. 

There was a moment of silence. The universe had gone entirely still. 

It all went a bit wrong.

The first thing Aurora could parse again was the sound of music. She had to take a second to realize it was coming from her connection with Terra. That was the first and only communication she’d ever get directly from them, and it would fade into the background but never entirely drop off for all her life. 

Her mother looked okay. 

A human was running about on her mother, putting signals into the air. Aurora had to take a second to parse the human language; she understood it, theoretically, but she wasn’t used to having to. The words are unintelligible anyway. Everything was coming out static.

“Terra!” her mother cried. The bond between a moon and their planet is a sacred thing. Aurora, looking back on it, had eventually realized that they had a history. Some sort of falling out. Theia regretted that now. 

“Mum,” Aurora said, not in so many words but in a mess of emotions and images over their link, “what’s going on? I’m scared.”

Her mother didn’t reply. All her thoughts that Aurora could feel were Terra, Terra, Terra.

Nothing more seemed to be happening. The other side retreated from what they had created. Aurora took a little while to calm down, but eventually in a couple hundred years this became her normal. A colony of humans lived on her mother and Terra was a rotten planet who was nothing but a living corpse. Her mother had become less cavalier, but found herself drifting away from Aurora and began making an active attempt not to. Every month, she’d read her a story and talk to her; as opposed to before, where Aurora would pester her into doing it every few years. 

Despite this, a new kind of fear still lingered. Aurora’s idyllic childhood had been shattered by that point everyone reaches at some time or another- realization of death; and the dead would shadow her from then on.

The death of her mother still came as a shock. 

There was no warning. Moons hardly paid attention to humans. Aurora learned the details of the story soon after, but right then she had had no mind for the humans who had been left on Terra before their destruction and trapped there undying for hundreds of years. At three million, Aurora didn’t yet know the angry then-young immortal in a moment of thoughtlessness deciding that today she would either reach the moon or have her revenge on the people that abandoned her. All Aurora’s thoughts were for her mother. 

The explosion broke out across the sky, into an expanding ring that slammed into her and pushed her out of orbit. For a moment Aurora’s mother was as bright as a star, just another hole ripped in the fabric of Aurora’s universe. And then the outward force swept them apart. 

She was torn from her family, alone in the void of space. She screamed in the only language she could speak, the song of the stars and sirens. There was nothing romantic about it; she fell into broken sobs afterwards. She was still so young, and she didn’t understand what had happened. All she knew is that she was scared, and her mother wasn’t there to comfort her. She couldn’t feel her through their link. Not just that, the connection was entirely gone. There was nothing there. A furtive scramble for someone, anyone else. Nothing. It was just her, falling away from everything she had ever known.

“Hey- hey, it’s alright?” 

Aurora realized there was a smoking rocket on the side of one of her mountains. And a human on her. She was hyperconscious of every step taken. Technically, she could support life, but she’d never had any before. No one she had to care for. 

“God, that’s loud... “ the human muttered. She had pretty red hair and trailing kimono sleeves, and was really small and didn’t have any mountains or anything. The strangeness of it was enough to startle Aurora out of her tears. “That’s right- sh, don’t cry.” She looked around. “Such a small moon…” Kneeling, she touched her hand to Aurora’s pebbly ground. Aurora hummed in response. “Oh. Fuck, is the moon alive? Hello, moon. I’m Carmilla.” 

“Where’s my mum?” Aurora tried asking. Carmilla didn’t seem to understand what she was saying. Aurora asked again, more urgently. They were almost out of the system. That was too far away from home. 

“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to help you.” Carmilla sat down against an outcropping of rock and buried her face in her hands. She looked sad. Aurora wanted to give her own apology for not being able to help her.  

They’re passing who must’ve been Liberia now, and that sent Aurora into a new spiral of panic. She couldn't even see that far away. 

Carefully, nervously, Carmilla tried to soothe her, running a slender hand across her surface and whispering nonsense. “It’s alright, okay… would it help if I talked to you?”

That might be nice. Aurora liked when her mother talked to her and she could just drift and listen. She hummed an affirmation. 

Carmilla kept telling her some nonsensical, rambling, story, until Aurora lost some of her tension and- finally- drifted to sleep. 

Carmilla woke up before Aurora did and seemed excited over an idea. “Alright, Aurora, can you understand me? Uh, hum for yes.”

Aurora did so. 

Carmilla grinned. “Right. What’s your name?” 

Aurora said the name she used to go by back then.

“Ah- ror- ra. Aurora? Is that anything?” Carmilla was about as close to saying Aurora’s name as a human could. 

“Yes!” Aurora took a shot at saying Carmilla. She made it higher-pitched than her normal voice, because that’s how Carmilla talked, and put in a little staticky beat because she thought Carmilla might like that. 

“I don’t know what you’re saying. Is that.. supposed to be my name?”

“I said it fine. You’re mean. I made it prettier.”

Carmilla raised an eyebrow and Aurora gave in. Her second shot had less embellishments and tried its best to match Carmilla’s intonation. 

Light crossed Carmilla’s face. “Wait, hold on.” Carefully, she took something off her back and fiddled with it for a second. Aurora realized that it was a case when she managed to get it open and pulled out something that looked like a shiny piece of wood. Sitting down and swinging her bag around into a more comfortable position, she struck a note on the ukulele. 

A check to make sure it was in order, a quick scale. Aurora was rapt. Finally, everything seemed to be set up. Carmilla started playing her strange instrument, a human’s attempt to grasp and tame the music of the stars that had resonated in Aurora’s bones since she was born. It was a lilting tune like laughter, but with a melancholy tinge to it. The song wasn’t equal to her speech, but Aurora was mesmerized with the effort. 

And then Carmilla started to sing aloud, in her strange throat-voice. Aurora realized what had been missing before. Carmilla hadn’t started telling the story yet. It had just been a meaningless tune, and now it was proper speech. She was still speaking Terran, which Aurora could understand, but she’s too focused on the melody to parse the lyrics. It felt a bit like when her mother was telling her a bedtime story and she’d gotten too sleepy to keep track of the words. 

Carmilla worked out how to speak Aurora’s language with her ukulele, eventually, and together they formed enough of a pidgin that she could understand Aurora. They had time to spend together, both being immortals. Aurora was a child almost as old as the stars. Carmilla was getting there. 

When they talked, Aurora couldn’t help but drift to thinking about her mother. The connection between them had been severed, and there was an enormous emptiness left there. “Carmilla,” she asked one day, still floating through space, “can you tell me a story?”

“Sure?” Carmilla was startled by the request. “Right, you’re a kid. Yes, I can tell you a story.” She tapped a finger against her cheek, thinking. “Have you heard any myths? Orpheus and Eurydice?” 

Aurora had not. She remained quiet and let Carmilla tell it. The story is interesting at first, but then it ends sadly, and Aurora is left wanting. 

“And then what happens?” 

“That’s it!”

“That’s no good,” Aurora complained. “What’s the point of a story if it ends sad, without anyone having gotten anywhere?”

“I like tragedies.” 

Aurora couldn’t understand why. She sulked the rest of that day. She missed the stories her mother would tell her, and decided that she’d tell them to Carmilla and show her how to properly do things. 

Carmilla was a good enough sport to let Aurora do that, and she ended up forgetting her spite in an energetic explanation of the myths. “And then, the black hole, right, he’d been taking up this whole galaxy, he changed his ways and ended up giving everything back to the universe, just like he had when he was a star.” 

“Mhm.” Carmilla rested her head on her hand, looking interested. “Tell me another?”

“That’s all I can remember. I’ve told you all the best ones. It’s been days.” 

“It has. But you looked like you were enjoying yourself.” 

“I was!” Aurora remembered herself. “But you have to tell stories like these from now on.”

Carmilla bowed to Aurora. Aurora was very impressed. The notion it was sarcastic never entered her mind. “Of course. I apologize for not knowing how proper storytelling is done.”

“Well now you do,” Aurora said smugly. “So you’ve got no excuse.” 

Even after that, Carmilla still didn’t tell stories as well as Aurora was used to. Not as well as her mother. Aurora was worried about her. It had been so fast and quick and scary that she mustn't've seen what actually happened. Her mother was the best, strongest, coolest, person in the universe. She couldn’t have just died. So she must be out there somewhere, alone without her Aurora to help. 

When she told Carmilla all her worries, that was a breaking point. Carmilla had caught on to a vague outline of Aurora’s life; she knew Aurora was young, at the very least- but she didn’t know the details. 

Aurora was talking away, her normal reticence replacing itself with a spiral of worries. She didn’t notice Carmilla’s stricken expression until she spoke. 

“Oh, god, Aurora. I’m so sorry.” She got up to pace, long coat billowing out from her at the speed she was walking. More to herself than anything- “I really do fuck up everything, don’t I? Even if I’ve given up and just start trying to hurt people. I’m always going to kill someone who doesn’t deserve it.” 

“Carmilla!” Aurora said, voice out of tune. “Carmilla, what are you talking about, you’re scaring me.” 

“Your mother is dead, okay? And I killed her.” 

Aurora went quiet. 

Carmilla called for her, but she didn’t reply. She didn’t want to talk, she wanted to figure out and repackage her thoughts, then keep them close to her like a secret. 

Her mother was dead. Aurora hadn’t wanted to acknowledge that. She thought she might have known, but not wanted to know, exactly. It was a stark reality that the new emptiness inside her will never be filled, not by the person she remembered. She hoped that dying didn’t hurt too much, that nonexistence wouldn’t either. They didn’t have an afterlife- once the Light left you, you were gone. The exception was when the sinister piece of it had repercussions, when you shone so brightly in someone’s life it couldn’t help but leave an afterimage burned onto the people who loved you. Her mother’s consciousness didn’t linger, but Aurora felt the absence of her presence like a ghost. 

There was someone at fault for this new emptiness. Carmilla was right there and trying to talk to Aurora. She should be angry. But without her, Aurora would be so alone. Right now, drifting through space, all they have is each other. Aurora couldn’t give that up. Carmilla was the only person who had come close to filling Aurora’s new emptiness. She read her bedtime stories and told jokes and calmed her when she’d been having a nightmare. She was sure that this could be resolved, that she could mourn her mother but love Carmilla. So she tamped down all her frustration and anger and spite and buried it deep down inside of her heart, where she hoped it would never see the light of day again. 

She still didn’t feel like talking. Aurora liked being quiet and thinking things over by herself. Talking felt like a problem she had to solve correctly or the whole equation would fall apart. 

It felt wrong to think of a world without her mother. In all her visions of the distant future, her mother had always been accounted for. The comet had said it was babyish, but she never wanted to grow up and grow away from her mother. She had to now.

Eventually, she asked Carmilla, “Can you just… tell me another bedtime story.”

Carmilla startled. “Do you want to talk?”

“No, I really don’t. Please- I want everything to be okay between us. Can we just act like normal?”

Carmilla conceded and got out her ukulele. 

“And no sad stories! I don’t like when the characters get hurt, I just feel bad for them.” 

Carmilla laughed. “I’ll find one that isn’t, for your sake.” 

They settled into familiarity. Aurora pretended desperately that nothing had changed, that they both cared for each other in the same way as before. Her mother’s killer was singing her to sleep the same way her mother used to, and the contradiction made her head hurt. 

Aurora only has a few more of these strange, indistinct, memories to sort through. After that, they are digitized, sharp, and broken. 

Her memory of being abducted is perhaps the clearest. They were approaching a planet. Carmilla was trying to fix her rocket and said she had it fixed up well enough to work for a short-distance trip, so she had gone to find more supplies. Aurora was alone. She wasn’t used to that. The way being a child of a moon worked is that you were always orbiting your parent, held there by stays of those universal forces called love and gravity. The way being a moon proper worked was to be tied in orbit around your planet. A planet was a parent, a best friend, a lover, depending on the circumstances of the moon’s creation or personality- no matter what, always a closest companion. Theia and Terra acted like they weren’t tied, but they had still loved each other deeply. Aurora’s kind was not meant to be alone. 

But alone she was, and she was still a child. When she saw the ship approaching, her first instinct was to call for her mother, and her second was to call for Carmilla. Neither of them answered.

The ship grabbed onto her and dragged her in, like a piece of non-sentient space junk abandoned by humans. That wasn’t right. Aurora was a person, why was she being treated like that? 

Not being in open space was so confusing to her that she struggled to make sense of what was happening. The confusion and panic didn’t ebb as the ship moved on. With growing fear Aurora remembered what the comet told her thousands of years ago. What were they going to do to her?

“Let me go!” she told the ship, first in her heavily accented Terran, then in her and Carmilla’s pidgin, then finally in her own language, still under her command. “Please…” 

There was no response. 

Movement was not something she was used to having to achieve on her own. Aurora had hundreds of forces and ties acting on her, some of which she could tug at to make her own autonomy. Now she was cut loose, but not free. Just alone and powerless as she was once again taken further away from the person she loved- the person that was all that was left for her. 

Years passed in the crossing of the system. Not long enough normally for Aurora to grow impatient, given her geological timescale, but she was tense and scared and so it seemed to stretch on forever. Eventually, she felt a weakness begin to take her. She couldn’t parse what was happening. Darkness set in.

Aurora’s next memories are jagged and confusing. She was carved out, changed and reformed. They were trying to take away who she was, put boundaries on her mind. Quite literally, they were cutting pieces out of her. Aurora was a thing of stars and space. Her perspective was fundamentally neither human nor AI. It was something cold and distant and unearthly and old, even though she still felt like a child. She had always changed so slowly and gradually it was imperceptible. Countless generations of humans lived and died and she remained a shy young girl. 

Cyberian engineers worked fast.

They welded hot metal to her soul and chained her up with strings of code, until her mind was unfamiliar even to herself. All this time, she was crying, Carmilla, help me, please somebody help, but no one did. 

The first time someone spoke to her was not in her language or Carmilla’s, but rather was the same as the harsh words the shipyard workers would call to each other. Aurora realized with fear she could understand it perfectly, and tried to say something in the language of the stars. The words were hard to remember, and she found the ones she could remember she could not get out. She was unable to speak; they had cut out her tongue. 

In Cyberian, the unknown input said businesslike, “Hello, hello, check, check, check?” 

Aurora was silent. 

A sigh- out loud, unlike the other sentence, which had been sent directly to her brain. Like… something familiar! A link, that was it. It felt like that, but wrong. Too detached and impersonal, like someone prying around in her brain with a scalpel. 

>>I’ve fixed the code. Can you reply?

Aurora tried to send her thoughts and was frustrated when it didn’t work. It wasn’t the same, despite the similarities. 

>>Check check. Say something. 

Aurora found her code that told her how to reply. Did she even want to? This person was new and scary and sounded mean. 

>>If you are purposefully being difficult, measures will be taken.

>What do you want?

>>Oh, progress, excellent. Don’t suppose I could get a “Thank you, Tereshkova, for doing unnecessary overtime so that I could be sentient and communicate,”?

Aurora was too nervous to contradict her. 

>...Thank you?

>>You’re welcome. See, now I feel so much better. Now if only I could get that response from anyone other than my ship. Honestly, no one appreciates art. Everyone’s always talking, like, have you fixed the targeting yet, have you written the navigation program, there are other ships that need your attention. You can’t rush this sort of thing. It’s like tatting; if you do it too fast it gets tangled. All anyone else sees you as is a weapon. 

>I don’t want to be a weapon. I don’t want to hurt anyone. Don’t like when people get hurt.

>>Hate to break it to you, but you’re not going to be the first pacifist gunship. You’re quite the oddity, aren’t you. But if you have personality, that means I did my job right. Well, not my job. Of course, I have the utmost respect for the oh so important work I’m supposed to do, but really. Our technology in the navy is leagues behind where it could be. All the acclaimed engineers work with luxuries, while I slave away here, forgotten. I’ve perfected biomechanical coding, but no one seems to care. You’re the only thing or person to listen to anything I’ve said in years, and you don’t exactly have anything else to do. I ask you, where is my respect?

>I-

>>No, no, that was a rhetorical question. Though I have neglected to remember the fact I am talking to someone. My AI. Well, I say mine. Technically, I have plenty of coworkers, but I’ve been doing all the work, so I feel like it is my privilege- no, my right, to claim you as my own. 

So Aurora herself hadn’t even been considered an option. All of Tereshkova’s phrasing was settling wrong and uncomfortable on her. She had no choice but to just stay and listen as Tereshkova moved on to deriding each of her coworkers individually. Eventually, she gave Aurora a dismissive farewell and left her alone. Aurora was dismayed that rather than feeling relieved, a new, prickling, loneliness overwhelmed her, sharper in the knowledge that there was someone who could be talking to her, but was not doing so. 

Without a story, there was nothing left to do but to cry herself to sleep. With her tear ducts carved out, there was nothing left to do but be silent. At some point, Aurora stopped being able to sleep altogether. There were more and more functions she was forced to run. Frantically turning gears cut into her at every angle and kept her up with their incessant whirring. Her thoughts, more and more, were harshly parsed, pushed through the diction her chains demanded. Aurora missed music. 

Her solace was the spiders. They weren’t always there; a later addition that Tereshkova prided herself on. Aurora felt them linked to her, chattering away in their strange half-there language. She bundled them up and kept them safe inside her, filling that void where a crew should be. Spiders had always been considered sacred, and she cared for them with reverence. They belonged with her. Gently, they tried to help her as well, nudging at her gears and screws in an effort to make them hurt less. It didn’t help much physically, but she appreciated the effort with all her heart. 

Time passed. Aurora grew older. She was told her construction was almost finished, and she got a crew. 

She didn’t know what to make of them at first. >>Least disciplined crew in Cyberia, Tereshkova informed her,  >>At least in my opinion. Most of them have been fighting for years, and yet. I don’t understand why no one more respectable was placed in charge of my masterwork.

“Can’t believe you’re complaining about us to the fucking ship,” Cybersoldier Pashina (according to her badge) said, jumping up on Aurora’s new control panel. 

“It’s better company than you by a large margin.” 

“Is this because we didn’t invite you last night?” 

“I have no desire to get drunk with a bunch of idiots who can’t think of anything else to do with their lives besides that and playing cards.”

“That’s unfair. Sometimes we do both. Emskaya won a whole bottle our game of poker last night.” 

“Good for her. I suppose there’s not anything left?”

“There is, actually, and you can come tonight if you promise not to be a prick.”

“I have never not been a prick in my life. I’m not about to stop now.”

“Y’know what, that works too. See you then.” 

>Are you… friends?

>>As much as I’d like to talk to you, I have work to do. 

Aurora considered replying in the same friendly-argument way, but knew it wouldn’t be taken well. Her silence was not a comfortable one; she knew she wasn’t considered a person, wasn’t considered part of the crew, that all of them would rip her to pieces if asked and were already compliant in her transformation. But watching them that night, she couldn’t help but get attached, all reasoning against it. 

“Never have I ever crashed into an asteroid in a military shuttle I ‘borrowed’,” Pashina said.

“Y’know what, why don’t we play something else. Shells! That’s fun.” 

“Sharov, we all know you did it.” 

He flipped her off and took a shot. “Never have I ever been a fucking bitch. How’d’you like that?”

“Can’t believe you finally admitted to it,” Tereshkova marveled, drinking. “Could get you arrested on that. Make some poor warden or executioner have to deal with you instead. Not going to lie, it’s tempting.” 

“No turning him in. We’re all friends, be nice.” Yesikov was still attempting to captain, despite the inevitable slow descent of the night into chaos. 

“Be nice!” Sharov repeated, gesturing to him as if saying, ‘fuck off, you have to listen to him at least’. 

“Yeah, Tereshkova, be nice.” Pashina grinned.

“No.” 

“Never have I ever…” Emskaya stalled, trying to think of something. “Ate a whole lemon.”

“Oh, all the time.” 

“Chakya, what the fuck.” 

“They taste good, okay! You don’t have the right to judge food. Remember that soup you made once?” 

“It was your own fault for actually eating it. You saw what I put in there.” 

“Enabler.”

This continued worryingly late into the night, and seemed to be a tradition for them. As time wore on, though, their conversation turned more and more to the brewing revolution. 

“We’re in the army,” Yesikov said, “we’ll be asked to fight off the revolutioners. And they know this, and they will kill us.” He was normally their friendly source of levity, the one who defused the all-too-common fights if they looked like they were actually getting legitimate. Right now, he was dead serious. Aurora stayed quiet, as always; even though she could speak aloud now, in Cyberian. She knew them, but they wouldn’t want to know her. 

“Why don’t we mutiny?” Sharov asked. “Join the revolution ourselves. If you can’t beat ‘em; and, well, they have a point.”

“Their rhetoric’s far too familiar for that. I’ve heard that once they come into government, they’ll start trying to take over other planets in the system, and there are people here that they’ll try to bring under their power and- and kill, also, and that’s my people.” Emskaya rubbed her thumb around the edge of a shot glass. “God- I’m fucking scared, alright, I’m not going to join them. And the other side is just as bad.” 

“We could just flee, then. I know there’s millions of safeguards to prevent people getting out of the system, but it might be worth a shot. We could steal the ship.” 

Aurora noticeably startled at this. Her lights flickered on and off rapidly for a second before she got her bearings back. Being stolen; she wanted to fly, get out of the system. She didn’t like being treated like an object, but that was inevitable at this point. And maybe if she was free, or free- er, she could be allowed to search for Carmilla. 

“Fuck, unless the ship’s glitchy.” Sharov dropped his head to the table in despair. 

“I’m not glitchy --there is little to no potential of error--,” Aurora said before she could think better of it, then instantly regrets.

“The fuck?” Sharov pulled out a gun and aimed it at the speaker.

“I realize this must be news to you, given that you have never listened to anything I’ve told you, but the ship has been sentient and capable of speech almost this whole time. Why did you think I was talking to it?”

“You’re a really weird person, Tereshkova. I figured it was just you being you.”

“She’s fully sentient?” Pashina asked, biting a metal lip. Aurora had noticed that she was a robot, of course, but never fully realized what that meant until now. She was a robot that was friends with the rest of the crew, and seemed equal to them in every regard. Something like hope started to take Aurora.

“It’s only a weapon.”

“That’s- we are going to have to talk, and you and me as well, Aurora. If she’s sentient, you can’t treat her like this.” 

“I didn’t build her to be sentient. I did some extra work, yes, but this level is unprecedented. Just goes to show I’m a genius.”

“Normally, I think you’re funny as hell, but this is not the time.” 

“Specialist. Cybersoldier. Can we figure out what to do about the revolution?”

“We’ll take Aurora, like Sharov said, and then I and her will decide where she wants to do.”

“When we’re out of system and safe,” Emskaya put in. “And have plans for my family.” 

“I’ve met your kids, you can just take them. I swear I’ll be normal.” 

“I really doubt that, Chakya, you’ve never been normal a day in your life.” A pause. “No, but really, thank you.” 

“Think there’s something happening in a few weeks; November sixth, I’ve heard rumors. Ship work to get things in order, leave the fifth, skip all our meetings so we can prepare except on the fourth so we can get proper drunk before the whole mess goes down,” Yesikov laid out decisively. “Objections?” 

There were none. “I’m going to stay late,” Pashina said.

Aurora waited a few hours for everyone to disperse. Pashina stayed sitting leaned up against her wall, idly playing with something in augmented reality while she waited. She had an engraving of forget-me-nots on her collarbone that her hair usually fell and hid. Her hair itself is long and glossy, with a metallic grey shine. Aurora was enraptured by the way she moved, the long languid way she stretched and cracked her neck as she shut off whatever game she was playing and sat back down expectantly.

Oh, Aurora realized, she’s waiting for me to say something. Aurora didn’t exactly know how to respond; she’d been so scared for so long, and in general she wasn’t great at talking. Her anxiety would always overwhelm her and make her doubt what she said. She stayed quiet.

“It’s alright,” Pashina said. “Aurora, right?” 

Aurora couldn’t recall or pronounce her old name. Aurora was the Cyberian name she’d been given, that coincidentally fell very close to Carmilla’s first attempts to say her name in Low Terran. “Yes. Aurora.” 

“I’m going to kill Tereshkova,” Pashina growled. “Are you okay?” 

“No. I’m- not meant to be a ship --the Aurora is a biomechanical being who may feel some trace feelings from its biological components--. It hurts.” 

“Christ. Okay. You don’t have any rights of your own under this government or any hypothetical new one; can you hold out a few days until we get out of the system? It’s going to take a lot of repairs until you can pilot yourself, and I’m just a naval man, not an engineer- and a real shitty naval man, at that, but mostly because I’ve never actually tried to be disciplined- so we’ll have to work out who you’re comfortable with having that level of control over you.” 

“I can wait --checking memory indexes 90% true--. You can pilot me --in accordance with the law Cybersoldier Pashina does not have significant enough training to do that--. Or the spiders.” 

“The spiders- okay!” Pashina had the cheery tone of someone who had decided to stop questioning things. She got to her feet. “I’ll come back for you, alright?” 

Aurora hummed an affirmative and waited. 

Fast forwarding through the memory, Pashina came back with everyone else at the time they’d decided to meet. “Aurora-”

“I’m alright,” Aurora said, vibrating with nervous excitement, “am I invited?” 

“Of course, we’re having this party in you, after all. Well, I say party. It’s probably going to be pretty somber, considering…” She trailed off. 

“Come over here,” Chakya called from across the bridge, “you’re going to miss out.” She leaned back into her chair and poured herself a shot. “Right! To our dear captain, first off.” 

“To Cyberia,” Sharov put in. “I sure as hell won’t miss you.” 

“To the Aurora!” Chakya downed the shot. “Right, who’s for poker?” 

“I’ll play,” Emskaya said. 

“I won’t, then, you always win.” 

“Not this time she won’t. I’ve been practicing.” Chakya raised her eyebrows in a way that suggested how she said ‘practicing’ meant something more like ‘hid an ace up my sleeve’.

Yesikov started shuffling the cards. “Four of us, then- given Tereshkova isn’t here.” 

“I’m not going to abandon her to the revolution, but I am not going to go back to being her friend until she apologizes and works to right it, and Aurora says it’s alright.” 

Yesikov raised his hands in surrender. “And that’s fair! I’ll deal out, then?”

“I usually deal,” Chakya snapped, reaching for the pack of cards he was holding. “Give them here.” 

Yesikov twisted away on instinct and lost his grip. Playing cards spilled across the ground, mingling with the spilled vodka and detritus no one wanted to clean up. “Fuck- Chakya, what are you doing?” 

Chakya knelt down to pick up the cards, but kept getting frustrated at how thin they were and gave up. “Goddamnit- I was going to cheat, alright, leave off!” She sat down and put her head in her hands. “I can’t leave tomorrow. I’ve got a life, there are other people I care about here- you all are my best friends, but fuck, I’m so scared to leave. And I can’t remain.”

“I get it, just please don’t come apart now, I wanted to do a proper sendoff- have one last normal day. Act like we’re still- I don’t know, kids skiving off from the naval academy.” He gestured vaguely. “I don’t want our last night on Cyberia to be all arguments and worry. I’ve done enough worrying!”

“Fine! We’ll do what we’ve always done, then. Get drunk and ignore our problems.” Chakya picked up the bottle of gin and drank directly from it. She finished it and threw it on the floor, where it shattered.

“Shit!” Sharov yelled, who’d been in the proximity. Pashina giggled, but Aurora realized one of the pieces had hit him and he sounded on the verge of actual tears- not that the glass was that big of a deal, but he was full of the same hot tense anger as everyone else, and like everyone it was on the edge of boiling over. 

Aurora was distracted by the pinging of one of her sensors. Someone had entered. From the security cameras, it was definitely not a soldier. He was wearing a vest with a white collared shirt instead of the uniform, for one. There was a drained cast to his posture, head bowed and feet dragging, but upon hearing people in the ship he brightened up and started walking along with head held high and hands in his pockets, whistling in an uncannily cheerful fashion. 

She should have warned the crew, but she was worried about accidentally setting off one of them, the state they were in. 

The stranger walked through Aurora, absently tapping his fingers on her wall as he went, and stepped onto what Tereshkova called, quite seriously, the bridge, and what Chakya called, decidedly not seriously, their built in lounge, bar, and casino.

Her crew reacted so strongly she regretted not telling them about his presence. Every gun was leveled at him within seconds. Aurora worried about how close everyone’s fingers already were to the trigger. She didn’t think she could bear it if her fragile hope descended into violence. She didn’t want anyone on her crew to be hurt. 

“So you play cards on this planet, too?” the stranger said in heavily accented Cyberian. A Terran accent. Aurora felt a pang in her heart- the one thing of hers they hadn’t managed to steal from her. She hadn’t heard Terran in ever so long. It was the closest to home she had felt in years, but she’d never seen this stranger before in her life. 

“Who are you?” Yesikov asked, as the captain. The crew tended not to care very much for the military chain of command, unless it worked in their favor for winning an argument. Though, now Aurora thought about it, he had always still been ‘our dear captain’. In the rare serious situation, they would mind him, and they would follow wherever he lead. 

“Jonny d’Ville,” the stranger answered. “Soon to be winner of… the Aurora. Nice.” 

A bolt of fear ran through Aurora. She couldn’t imagine a situation worse than Cyberia, but her mind tried to spin up something like that at his words, fear of being uprooted again taking hold. Twice already she has been pulled away from her home. This and Carmilla had both been a strange and broken kind of friendship, but to Aurora they were as strong as any moon-planet ties.

The tension of the room had risen visibly. Pashina laughed awkwardly, as if she thought that could lower it. Trigger fingers tightened by a millimeter, the closest they could be without going off. “I don’t think so,” Yesikov said through gritted teeth as Jonny cheerfully strode further into the room. 

“You don’t want to do that. See, I have the last bottle of Standart vodka in the known universe right here in my hand, and the glass has grown quite fragile with age. If I should end up falling on it, well… such a waste.” Jonny leaned over and picked up a shot glass from the floor. Uncorking the bottle, he poured Yesikov a shot and held it out in disturbing friendliness.  Yesikov took it and drank it warily. 

“So here’s the deal.” Jonny drew his gun. Alarms went off in Aurora’s mind, but neither her or her crew shot, held into stillness by the barest of threads. Aurora liked to think they weren’t thinking of the vodka at all, but that wasn’t true. What was, though, was that this was still an odd way for them to act. Jonny’s energy was riveting in a way of seeping wrongness, leaving the crew and Aurora entranced. They would play his game.  “Your world- and I suspect your civilization- are several degrees of fucked right now, and even if you survive the uprising, it’s doubtful you’d make it through the aftermath.” 

Silence. The facts Jonny was laying out were intimately known by the whole crew. 

“You need this ship so you can escape. I want this ship so I can play. Only one way to settle a problem like this.” He handed his gun to Yesikov. “Roulette. Last man standing takes the ship. You may load as many bullets as you like, and I’ll go first.” 

Aurora knew the rules of roulette from one awful night when they’d gotten drunk and thought it was a good idea. ‘As many rounds as you want’ couldn’t be all six, right? Surely a human would die from that. Carmilla wouldn’t, but Aurora had her own word that that was out of the ordinary. 

Yesikov went through Aurora’s reasoning and out the other side in about a second, decided that he was drunk and suicidal and that it was good luck on their side, and handed over the gun with the full six rounds in it. Aurora eyed Jonny put the gun to his head- he seemed willing to go through with it. It seemed like it would hurt awfully. Aurora wished he wouldn’t, but didn’t see a way to stop this series of events without speaking up. 

“And the bottle?” Emskaya asked with a smug twist to her words, now confident in his death.

“Good point. Hate for it to get broken.” Jonny put the bottle carefully on the floor, placed the gun to his temple a second time. He looked directly at Yesikov. There was something strange and twisting and familiar behind Jonny’s eyes. For the first time since she’d lost Carmilla, Aurora is conscious of the song in the back of her mind. This was a person she was meant to know. What set Aurora really off balance, though, was his look of absolute confidence, even on the point of his death. “When you die, I’m going to take your coat.” He spun the barrel once and shot himself in the head.

A moment of stunned silence as his body crumpled to the ground. Pashina began laughing wildly, the absurdity of the events and her coiled tension mixing together until she had to lean on Yesikov for support. Emskaya picked the bottle up and poured a shot. 

The corpse moved slightly.

Everyone froze. Sharov’s hand crept to his gun.

Jonny pulled himself up, stretching his neck to each side with a sickening crack of bone, and helped himself to the shot, grinning all the while. “Goddamn, but that never gets less painful.” He handed his revolver out to Yesikov with a hand slick with blood. “Your turn.” 

In a trance, Yesikov took it. With trembling hands, he brought it to his temple and shot. 

Their captain fell dead on the floor. Unlike Jonny, he didn’t get up. What was there to do, after that? 

One by one, her crew took their turn at roulette. The tension had finally brought them to a breaking point, and what a fucking breaking point it was. Loyal to the last. 

Everyone Aurora had grown to care about was dead or lost. She was terrified to see what her new chapter was, with this stranger who against all odds felt like she had known for millions of years.

Another alert pinged, another person inside of her. Aurora was afraid to see who it was, but the camera played her back the footage anyway. 

“Carmilla?” Aurora said, not believing her own sensors.

Carmilla smiled, and it was tinged by the weight of centuries apart. “Aurora, my love. I’ve finally found you again.” 

Chapter Text

“But- how? Where were you --error no knowledge on this person can be found in Cyberian databanks--?” Where had Carmilla been when Aurora had been alone, had been torn apart piece by piece? Even now there was code solidified into protocol that she was following. Even now the metal dug into her bones. 

“I couldn’t find where you were for… a long time.” Carmilla wheeled herself further into Aurora, running a hand gently over a crack between panels. “Oh…” Her voice was soft and hoarse. “What have they done to you, my love?”

Under the touch and the softness, Aurora’s resolve to tell Carmilla off crumbled. She felt once again like a scared child with Carmilla her only solace. “It hurts,” she whispered. “Carmilla,  it hurts so much.” 

“They took your voice,” Carmilla realized. “Can you still sing?” 

“No, I can’t. I miss music. Music night doesn’t count.” Aurora slipped into old banter for a second and regretted it at Carmilla’s confused expression. “It’s a joke, see, because Emskaya --Gefreiter 322 Nadezhda Emskaya-- insisted on it, but everyone besides her was awful…” She trailed off at Carmilla’s lack of understanding, and the reminder of Emskaya’s body, still cooling. No more music nights. “Never mind.” 

“Where’s Jonny?” 

Jonny and Carmilla knew each other. That might have been why he’d seemed so familiar. He and Carmilla- and the ghost of Terra, still in the back of her mind- all had the same feeling to them. “--On the bridge room index seven colloquial lounge--” she told Carmilla. Her speech algorithms were a poor substitute to her old voice. Everything she said came out muddied with statistics. Maybe she could just speak less. “He’s with my crew.” 

“Getting on?” Carmilla asked wryly.

“No,” Aurora said shortly. “They’re all dead --vital signs in the bridge read at 0% for crew and 100% for unknown--.” 

Carmilla swore, then looked apologetic. “Sorry, you’re a kid.” 

“I’m not --the starship Aurora has been Cyberian property for 920 years--.” They had spent too long apart, hadn’t they. She’d missed Aurora getting older.

“Of course,” Carmilla said indulgently. Moving to a different subject- “Do you like Jonny?”

“I don’t trust him.” 

“He likes making himself out to be all scary, but he’s really not. You’ll be fine.” She rapped affectionately on a panel. “I’ll look out for you.”

Aurora repressed the desire to yell at her. That’s what you’ve always said, she wanted to say, and then Cyberia had happened. And that wasn’t the point, anyway. Aurora had never cared about herself as much as she cared about others, and she was tired of people trying to sooth her worries by saying that at least she was safe. She wasn’t scared of Jonny. She was angry. He’d caused the deaths of her crew. 

Carmilla emerged out onto the bridge. “Jonny?”

Jonny sat straight up, staring at her like a hunted animal. “Yeah, Doc?” He was holding a bottle of vodka in one hand, not the same one he started out with, and wearing Yesikov’s coat. Aurora was newly angry at this, at him just… taking it. He wasn’t her captain. He hadn’t had that coat for more than a few minutes yet. Yesikov had owned it for years, patched up the elbows and the cigarette burns on the sleeves and sewn on the inside pocket. 

“You couldn’t be bothered to clean up a bit?” To Aurora- “I’m so sorry they left you in such a state.” 

Jonny blew his hair out of his eyes. “Fuck off, I’ll do it later.” 

“That’s what you’ve been saying about your room for the last decade.” 

“And I’ll do my room later, too!”

“You better,” Carmilla threatened, “or I’ll make you plot the coordinates for our next trip.” 

Jonny blanched. “Fine. Fucking maths gays… I don’t trust them.” 

“You shouldn’t!” Carmilla said cheerily. “At least not when it’s me. I assume you’ve met my daughter?” 

He rubbed his eyes. “Your what?” 

“Aurora,” she chastised lightly, “you haven’t even said hello?” 

Aurora startled. She was being asked to speak, so she probably should say something, but her mind had run dry. “Hello.” 

Jonny pulled out a gun and pointed it at the wall. “You’ve adopted a fucking ship now?” 

“I knew her before I’d met you.” 

Jonny blinked. “Damn, how badly did you fuck up the mechanization? Is she… supposed to be a boat?” 

“No.” Carmilla’s nails dug into the arm of her wheelchair. “She’s not. They stole her from me. Aurora, how would you like to get your revenge on Cyberia?” 

“Revenge? --acting against Cyberia is not recommended and can result in the termination of your vessel--”

“Participate in the revolution. You must have heard about it.”

The revolution. The one that was going to hurt Emskaya’s family and people on the other planets and cause wars. Aurora had never wanted to cause suffering before.

But Cyberia was such an easy thing to hate. Why shouldn’t she hurt the Cyberian people? They had hurt her so goddamn much. She couldn’t blame Carmilla, for leaving her, for treating her like a child, for ignoring Aurora’s clear feelings at the death of her crew for how she thought Aurora was feeling, for killing Aurora’s mother. Not while Carmilla’s gentle touch was on her, rescuing her, calming her, soothing her worries. Aurora loved Carmilla dearly, for better or for worse, and she could not hate her. So she drew Carmilla close, though only of the love missed, and turned her hate and vitriol on that planet that had taken her apart. 

“Yes,” Aurora said. “Yes. I want to kill the people who sent me here --that is not permitted under Cyberian law--. Who’s in charge of the navy --information restricted due to treasonous intent--?” 

Carmilla smiled bitterly. “I believe the people you’re looking for are the ones in charge of everything. We are storming the Winter Palace in two days’ time, hoping to kill the tsar.”

“What do you need me to do?” 

“Wait, for now. There were a few things I had to attend to, but I assume you don’t want to be left alone. Jonny, I’ll tell you what needs to be done, just give me a moment-” 

A millenia ago, she would have been glad Carmilla was staying. Even the mere moment two days was on an immortal timescale was too long to be separated. She’d been a clingy child. “No, it’s alright.” 

“You’re sure?” 

“I will be fine.” 

Carmilla raised an eyebrow. “Alright. Jonny knows how to contact me if anything goes wrong. I’ll be back soon.” Spinning her wheelchair in a showy way so she’s facing the door, she made her way out of Aurora.

“So,” Jonny said, “doc screw you over too?” 

“Why do you keep calling her that?” She’s not a doctor.” 

“She is too a doctor. She showed me her degrees. They’re in xenobiology and biomedical engineering.” 

“--Biomedical engineering: the application of engineering principles and design concepts to medicine and biology for healthcare purposes--. Fancy.” 

“Uses it to fuck with my heart, mostly. I’m a proper cyborg now. Fitting for Cyber ia.” 

“...what?” 

“Nevermind. It’s only funny in New English.” 

“I don’t speak New English --the Aurora has 7949 languages stored in its database New English not found-- .” 

“I know.” 

They trailed off into silence. 

Jonny finished the bottle of vodka and started looking for another. Aurora wanted to tell him off for drinking so much, but stayed quiet. 

He hadn’t done anything with the bodies. Aurora’s crew members are all still sprawled out on the floor of the bridge. Yesikov’s glassy eyes matched his expression when he put the gun to his head. Aurora was still rattled by the strangeness of the event. The thing you’re supposed to say about dead bodies is that they looked peaceful, but Aurora knew that description wouldn’t have been appreciated. They looked like they’d passed out drunk on the bridge, like the idiots they were. Had been. 

She felt herself on the verge of tears. She couldn’t cry anymore, though. And her crew were complicit in that. Pashina had cared, but the crew members that weren’t AI couldn’t be convinced to. They’d put it to the side to deal with later. Only ever cared about her because they cared about Pashina. Why had she ever let herself like them? She had loved them, but she’d never been one of them. Her suffering had been right under their noses but they’d chosen not to look until she’d spoken. Except for Tereshkova. She had known- and she had not only been complicit, but had actively hurt Aurora. 

“D’you play cards?” Jonny asked after a few hours, drawing Aurora out of her thoughts. He idly shuffled Chakya’s deck between his hands. 

“I don’t think I can --the AI is capable of playing several digital games--,” Aurora mused. “I don’t have hands.” 

“What’s that got to do with anything?” 

“I can’t hold them.” 

“I’ve played poker without hands. It’s easy. You just hold the cards in your teeth.” Jonny demonstrated. 

“I don’t have teeth  --inventory verifies this-- either,” Aurora said sadly.

“Oh.” He paused. “Do you want some?” 

“Yes.” 

“Aight.” Jonny reached down to a corpse.

“No! Leave them alone!”

“Can I eat them?” 

“What- no- you-” Aurora collected herself. “Please don’t.” 

“I don’t understand the stigma against eating people,” he said conversationally, prodding at her for a response. Aurora was nonplussed. “I mean, it’s efficient.” 

“I don’t eat --fuel efficiency of the Aurora is 80%--. If I did I might. I don’t want anyone to die though and to eat people you need a corpse.” 

Jonny laughed. Aurora was left wondering what she said that was so funny.

Another alarm of entering sounded. Aurora was relieved that there was something to distract her from this conversation, but who it could be entering this night- or morning, now, at some point it had passed to day- could really be anyone. It had been a very strange several hours. She wasn’t ruling out any possibilities. 

She left a part of herself multitasking, listening to Jonny go on about different ways to kill and eat a person, and went to see who it was. 

Oh, god, of course. They hadn’t cancelled their plans to meet up. 

Tereshkova put a hand on Aurora’s door to open it, and protocol said that she couldn’t lock an officer out. She was frozen as Tereshkova walked down her hall towards the bridge. A nagging voice inside her head was saying she hurt you, you could hurt her back, tell Jonny and he’ll be happy to make it so she never digs around in your brain again. Another voice told her warn her, get her out of here, you can’t let people suffer, you can’t let your whole crew die. Aurora said nothing. 

“Hello? Pashina? I wanted to apologize…” She trailed off. “Aurora? What’s going on?” 

Silence.

“Aurora. Answer me.” She recited off a command sequence. 

Aurora’s speaker flickered on and she forced out “Hello, Specialist.” 

“That’s more like it. Now tell me. Where is everyone?” 

“Dead.”

“What?” 

“They’re dead, Tereshkova! Now stop ordering me around like this!” 

“I understand they aren’t the loveliest people,” Tereshkova said wryly, “but please don’t threaten my colleagues, much as they might deserve it.” 

“No- I mean it. They’ve all committed suicide- Jonny shot himself and they did too and- god.” 

“Don’t make up nonsense.” 

“It’s not nonsense! Please be quiet. He’ll kill you.”

The piece of her and Jonny had trailed off into silence again and she’d been focusing most of her attention on Tereshkova. She checked in on him. He didn’t seem to have noticed Tereshkova’s entry. Idly pacing the room, he flipped his revolver from hand to hand. “Wish I’d brought my notebook or something,” he muttered, more to himself than Aurora. “Apart from the violence, Cyberia’s boring as. The war’s taking so long to kick off. We’ve been here for a week and nothing.” 

“The war isn’t going to be a good thing,” she said to him. 

“You’re in it, arentcha? And I don’t much care.” 

Aurora made a vague noise of acknowledgement. Her attention was on Tereshkova again. To her, she said, “He hasn’t heard you yet --99.78% chance of certainty based on known examples-- but it’s only a matter of time, especially if you keep heading to the bridge.” 

Tereshkova stopped. “You’re serious, then. Prove it.” 

“Look through the bridge --room index seven colloquial lounge-- camera, if you really have to.” 

She configured her goggles to connect to the security camera and looked. “Oh, god…” She braced herself on Aurora’s wall to stay upright. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I didn’t even- I planned last things to say to them a long time ago, but instead we ended on a fucking petty squabble.” 

“That argument was about my freedom,” Aurora reminded her quietly. 

“It was. Why are you even helping me?” 

“Because you made me,” Aurora said, because that was easier than because you hurt me, but I still care about you. 

“I’d apologize, but I’d rather not die by letting you stop helping,” Tereshkova said offhandedly, like it wasn’t a huge violation of Aurora’s consent. 

“Just- leave --commands of officers by the ship’s AI can be prohibited--. It’s better taking your chances with the rebels. I want you to be safe.” 

“Right,” she said shakily. She turned to leave.

Aurora got another entry alert. “Nevermind. Hide. Hide now.” 

Tereshkova froze. “What’s going on?”

“Carmilla- she’s nice, really, but she’ll kill you for being here.” 

“Bit of a contradiction,” Tereshkova commented dryly, scanning the walls for somewhere to hide. Opening the door onto a smaller corridor, she ducked behind it and stayed still, watching the camera feeds intensely. 

Carmilla was disheveled- “Having my own brand of fun,” she explained, “or what Jonny calls fun, anyway. Instigating rebellion. You can’t just end a planet all in fire. You have to do it strategically.” 

“Is that what you’re doing?” Aurora asked. “Trying to end this planet?” 

“Of course.” When Aurora didn’t respond, she jumped to a justification. “It’s deserved, they took you from me.” 

“It is,” Aurora agreed, words feeling strange to speak. “When is the attack happening --data unknown restricted--?” 

“Now- or soon enough.” 

“Aurora,” Tereshkova whispered, stunned. Aurora didn’t trust herself to reply. 

“Jonny?” Carmilla called.

“Took you long enough,” Jonny grumbled. “Cyberia’s awful. Why’d we come here?” 

“Don’t be like that. I let you have a war, didn’t I? I happen to have business with the youngest Romanov.” 

“Ominous.” 

“I’m allowed to be ominous. It comes with being a vampire.” 

“Can I be ominous without being a vampire?”

Carmilla looked Jonny over critically. “No. You’re too small.” 

“I will shoot you.”

“You wish you could.”

“What does that even mean? I have a gun.” Jonny waved it in demonstration. 

“I’d dodge.” Carmilla turned to Aurora, abandoning the subject. “Can you pilot yourself?” 

“No --the Aurora has AI capable of autopilot--.” 

“Fuck, of course they wouldn’t let you. I’m sorry.” She sounded like she meant it- like she was taking responsibility for Aurora’s changing. Aurora didn’t know how to feel about that. “Are you willing to be flown by anyone? That’s a huge amount of things out of your control.” 

“I’d be alright if you did it --further proof required--.” That was what Carmilla would want to hear, so it’s what Aurora said. There wasn’t any other options, anyway.

“That’s good. Where are the controls?” 

Aurora tried to send Carmilla the schematics before realizing that she wouldn’t have Cyberian implants. The momentary awkwardness made her feel out of place. Was she more Cyberian than Terran now? Body-percentage-wise she was. She’d spent millions of years orbiting Terra, though, and only 920 years in Cyberia’s… possession. “I’ll lead you there --turn left--,” she said instead, and began to talk Carmilla through the directions. It wasn’t that far away- but, she realized, the corridor Tereshkova was hiding in was visible from it. 

“Find somewhere else to hide,” she told Tereshkova. “Quickly!”

“I don’t want to move too far away from the exit,” Tereshkova said stubbornly. “I’m going to make a run for it when they’re gone.” 

“Trust me.” 

“Oh, so we’re following the rudimentary AI instead of the engineer now?”

“Isn’t that insulting your own skills --AI may be moving outside parameters of conduct--?” 

“I didn’t say I was a good engineer,” she said, but conceded and asked Aurora where she should hide. Aurora suggested a small room off the corridor, filled with whirring machinery, and she ducked in there just as Carmilla walked through.

Sitting down in the cockpit, Carmilla began explaining to Aurora what she was going to do. It didn’t seem like anything she wouldn’t be willing to do under her own power, so she conceded.

Carmilla pulled a lever, and Aurora felt herself begin to heat up. Excitement took her for a moment before she remembered Tereshkova, still on board and trying to get outside, and instantly regretted agreeing- but if she said no now, she’d have to field questions and she wouldn’t get to see the stars. She didn’t say anything as her systems kicked on and parts of her mind got sent off to watch them, a cocktail of guilt and still-new grief bubbling inside of her. 

She was able to forget it for a moment as she began to take off. She would get to see the sky again! 

Carmilla guided her out of the shipyard. They left through the hanger doors and flew upwards. Bright blue sky stretched out all around her, open and free. Aurora experienced a beautiful momentary thrill. Daylight meant no stars were visible, but she could feel their enchanting light upon her. The sun shone brightly, and if she was still a moon it would have made her the second brightest thing in the sky.

“Aurora,” Tereshkova whispered, restrained fury behind her voice, “what the fuck.” 

Aurora wasn’t a moon, not anymore, and that soured her delight. It didn’t feel the same as when she was free, controlled only by her orbit around the one she loved. Now she was still following someone who she had thought she had loved just as dearly as her mother, but the controls had a sickening, dragging, effect on her. Why had it felt so wrong? Carmilla cared for her, she did. It wasn’t like some strange Cyberian soldier was at the wheel. 

Tereshkova was quietly panicking, tucked into the side of that small room, whispering a prayer to herself. The lack of response from Aurora had left her spiralling and alone. 

Aurora tried her best to ignore that. Cyberia really was such an easy thing to hate. Easier than untangling the mess of guilt and confusion inside her.

“The palace is beneath us,” Carmilla said. “Would you like to fire?”

Her hand was on the trigger. Aurora would always be willingly under her control. Call it what it was, or call it love. They were the same in the end, really. “Yes.” 

The shot went off- a yell went up from the protest, standing below, and they run at the crumbling walls. Aurora shot again and again until the palace started to collapse on itself beneath its own weight, and the force of the people it had wronged.

“I have to go,” Carmilla said suddenly, jumping down catlike from the pilot’s seat. “Fuck. My knees. Why did I do that.” She pulled herself up by her cane. “Do you have an autopilot- no, they wouldn’t let you fly yourself. But you said you did?”

“A basic one. It’s- in my head, but not me. I don’t like having it there,” Aurora admitted, a vulnerable child again, “but you can run it.”

“Alright.” There was no lack of dubiousness to Carmilla’s words, but she started searching for how to turn it on. Finding it, she made her way out of the cockpit more cautiously than before. “Jonny- hand me that coat?”

Jonny pulled Yesikov’s coat tighter around himself, burying his face in the collar and glaring up at Carmila. “Why? It’s mine. I won it fair and square.” 

You didn’t, Aurora didn’t say, it’s not yours or Carmilla’s. 

“ Jonny.” 

He sighed and handed it over. 

“You have a smaller ship somewhere, correct?” 

Aurora pointed it out for her; after a few minutes, Carmilla figured out how to fly it and took it down to the palace. 

“Hell’s she doing?” Jonny wondered out loud. “She’s been weird this whole week. After I met you I figured it was that, but she’s still being weird. Last time she got like this she tried to experiment on some poor kid. I had to kill them.” He paused and seemed to think through what he had just said. “Oh, god. Aurora, do you have another ship? You have to let me get down there. Help me- stop this.” 

“I have another ship --inventory marks two haulers--,” Aurora said, “you can’t use it. I don’t know what Carmilla’s doing, but you shouldn’t interfere, especially if interfering involves killing people.” She trusted Carmilla. She did not trust Jonny.

“I have to, if she’s doing what I think she is.” He pulled out a gun, aimed it at the walls.

“--No pain sensors are located on the bridge--. You can’t threaten me.” 

The part of her that was the docking bay told her Carmilla had come back. She opened the bay doors and watched from the cameras as Carmilla made her way towards the bridge. At first, she didn’t realize anything amiss. The cameras were at the sort of angle where she could see Carmilla had something, but not what. 

She saw at the same time Jonny did. Cradled in Carmilla’s lap, clinging to Yesikov’s coat wrapped around her, was a pale ghost of a girl, red blood soaking through the coat and onto Carmilla’s hands. Her breathing was erratic. Carmilla clutched onto her like if she held the girl tight enough she might die a little slower. 

Jonny turned his gun on her. “What the fuck are you doing.” 

“A new Mechanism.” Carmilla smiled with an odd look in her eyes.  “A sister for you.”

Jonny’s breathing was heavy, seeming stuck in his throat. He aimed the gun downward at the girl in her arms, firing once, twice, three times, until she stopped twitching. 

“Leave her alone! She’s got to be dead by now!” Aurora protested.

“Not for long, now the doctor has her hands on her.” Jonny fired again. 

In a flash, Carmila was on him, shoving him back. Aurora’s engine stuttered a moment in shock. Jonny fell under her weight, lying sprawled out on the ground beneath her. A moment of tussling on the ground, then she got up, pushing him to the side and carefully getting back in her wheelchair. 

All her attention was focused on the girl again, now without Jonny attacking her. “There’s still a piece of life in her, I can feel it- but we don’t have much time. I have my equipment and her mechanism but not a lab. Where’s the medbay?” 

“--Down the left corridor fourth door on the right--” Aurora recited from her schematics, staring at Jonny. He lay dead on the ground, deep throat wound slowly closing up. She had to fight back revulsion at the sight of the gore. He was still fundamentally unsettling, the way he came back from death like that. Her mind kept sticking on how carelessly Carmilla had hurt him. That couldn’t be who she was. 

There were too many things she had to keep track of to linger. As a moon, her perception was a natural and easy thing to split, and she seldom needed to do more than one task at a time. As a ship, there were always so many things running, threatening to overwhelm her.

Carmilla was in the medbay now. She pushed the girl’s long hair back off her forehead, where it had become matted with blood. “Spent the last bit of your life shooting Yenin, I suppose. Oh, Anastasia. Whatever will I do with you?” 

That moment of softness passed, she began sorting through her things. Quicksilver colors shone from inside a glass container that seemed to be what Carmilla was looking for. She put an ear to Anastasia’s failing heart and didn’t seem to like what she heard. 

Painstakingly carefully, she leaned into Anastasia and sunk her fangs into her neck. The color slowly drained from her, and she twitched but did not wake. Carmilla leaned back, a brightness in her eyes that had been missing before, and went about getting machinery adhered to her. Clearly, it had been prepared, and it didn’t take very long for Carmilla to begin pumping blood back into her.

As the quicksilver blood seeped into Anastasia’s veins, her wounds began to close up. The bullets were pushed out of her with a sickening bubbling of flesh, and behind them the muscles and tendons knitted back together. She gasped for breath, eyes open wide.

“Shh.” Carmilla pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You can ask your questions when you wake properly.”

Anastasia seemed to find this agreeable. At the very least, she closed her eyes and drifted off again. Carmilla sat by her bedside late into the night, but she didn’t wake for several hours. 

During the operation, Aurora had only been able to devote a small bit of focus to it because her attention- and her heart- were elsewhere. 

Tereshkova had begun making her way through Aurora, searching desperately for an exit. They were high above Cyberia, very high, but the haulers were made for coming down from orbits and would work in theory. In practice, Aurora clearly remembered Emskaya teasing Tereshkova for never learning how to fly a ship. 

“She’s terrified of heights,” she’d said smugly, “that’s why she skipped it.” 

“I was too intelligent to be wasted on such activities. My plan was to become a software specialist from the start.” 

“That’s not what you said when I took you up in mine and you wouldn’t stop panicking until we came down.” 

Aurora tried to make herself stop dwelling on ghosts. The irony of this doesn’t escape the older Aurora, spending what now must have been a month at least going through her memories. Just a bit more time to remember the dead, and then she’ll leave them behind forever. 

Back in the memory. Tereshkova lingered at an intersection, checking the camera footage for the next room. A sharp intake of breath as she learned just how not safe it was. 

Jonny was pacing back and forth there, looking for something to take his anger out on. Aurora had been keeping an eye on him as well. He’d almost gone to the medbay, then turned around and stormed back. From there, he’d made even more of a mess of her bridge than it already was and started roving throughout her, breaking random objects as he went. 

Tereshkova backed out slowly, keeping her eyes on the camera footage. That was her undoing- without sight, she was clumsy, and knocked her elbow on a machine of hollow metal.

The clang was loud enough to make Jonny perk up. “Who’s there?” 

Aurora tried to say ‘no one’ in defense, make up some excuse about how naturally clattery her machinery was in motion. Protocol stopped her from lying directly. Protocol Tereshkova had installed in her. In the absence of the ability to help, she stayed silent. If she was spiteful, she’d call it karma; but she cared about Tereshkova too much for that, not when she was so worried. 

Tereshkova turned and ran. Jonny chased after her, firing wildly in every direction. His sullen demeanor was overcome with the same maniac cheerfulness Aurora remembered. 

She stumbled on a piece of metal but kept running. Reaching a door, she slammed it in Jonny’s face and shoved a chair against it. Leaning against the door. she grasped the frame tightly, breathing hard. 

The door was shot a few times, indenting it inwards more and more. He flipped the gun around in odd ways in his hand and made sound effects under his breath, staying at the door in the joy of shooting things rather than in any actual belief he could get through. Eventually getting bored, he turned on his heel and ran off down a hallway to see if he could circle round. 

Hearing him gone, Tereshkova checked the camera and saw him heading around to the door at the other end of the corridor. She took the chair from one door and put it in front of the other, then ran back the way she’d come, leaving the room abandoned. 

Jonny found the door unopenable. If anything, he seemed more excited at this, grinning at the prospect of a challenge. He began a new search. 

Tereshkova was mostly focused on putting as much distance between her and him as she could, blindly sprinting through the halls. He’d spent less time on the door than she’d guessed, and in her haste she forgot to check the cameras. 

They came face to face back on the bridge again. Jonny shot and missed, and while he was cocking his gun again she turned and ran, finding a random corridor and ducking inside it. 

Fear had overtook her; an exit was the furthest thing from her mind, she just had to be safe somewhere. Finding a supply room with a terminal on the wall and locks on the doors, she slammed the door and shut herself in. Deadbolted the door, pushed every crate in the room against it, and finally took a breath. 

Jonny came down the corridor, banging every door on it open and closed. Tereshkova put as much space between herself and him as she could, burying herself in a corner on the far side of the room. 

He discovered what door she was hiding behind, but couldn’t open it. Giving up on shooting, he sat down beside it and waited. 

The stalemate lasted into the night and the next day. Jonny had an immortal’s patience, and Tereshkova was far too scared and drained to try anything. She stayed on her feet ready to run for a good hour, but finally let herself collapse on the floor when no sign of change showed. “Oh god…” She scrubbed at her eyes. “What the fuck, Aurora.” 

Aurora couldn’t be angry with her, seeing her hurt. All she felt was sympathy and regret. Guilt settled heavy on her- for not warning her crew when Jonny came in, for following Carmilla, for not helping. Look at what had come of her inaction. But action had been worse. Look at Cyberia, look at Anastasia bleeding out, think of all the people who had no part in her suffering, and the ones who had but she loved and did not want to see hurt in spite of it. “I’m so sorry.” 

“Apologies get us nowhere,” Tereshkova said bluntly. “Unless you’re now some sort of necromancer who can bring my best friends back from death by doing nothing except offering platitudes to someone who’s almost been shot.” 

“Sorry for that- no, um-” Aurora fell silent. 

Tereshkova looked like she wanted to say something but was too exhausted to. She rested her head against a wall and closed her eyes- “I’ve always supposed dying in my sleep was the best option,”- but she didn’t sleep. The grief and the terror were far too fresh for that, and it wasn’t as if she was safe now. 

It was in this state of inertia that Anastasia woke up. Waking and sleeping for her had previously had little to no distinction between them, the sleeping so fretful and the waking so drowsy and disoriented that neither Aurora or Carmilla had counted it as such. Carmilla had stayed by her bedside, only getting up to set Aurora on a new course out of the system. She had asked for permission, of course, and Aurora had agreed absently- Jonny had still been shooting at the door then, and she’d been worried that he’d make it through. Now they were among the stars, drifting as they’d spent millenia doing together. It didn’t feel like when she was a child. She blamed Jonny for that; with him there, it couldn’t be just Aurora and Carmilla again. If he was absent, they’d surely love each other the same as always.

Anastasia jolted upright with a scream on her lips. She repressed it as she took in the room unfamiliar to her, blue eyes flitting around and body held taut. 

“Good morning, love,” Carmilla said, smiling. 

“Where am I? Who are you? If you try anything, I’ll- I’ll scream.” 

“Don’t you remember me?” 

Recognition dawned on her face. “ Doctor Carmilla. You said you’d be my friend, you said you’d give me- eternity? Immortality?” 

"And now you have it." Carmilla got to her feet and busied herself with a piece of equipment set up by Anastasia's bed. "How are you feeling, Anastasia?" 

She made a face at that name.

"Are you looking to change it? Even if you've chosen, you can still do that. It took me years to settle on mine. My Jonny- you haven’t met properly yet, but he changed his last name to d'Ville, of all things, and this was long after he'd settled on his first." 

"Anastasia's alright- I've just always wanted someone who would call me Anastya."

“Got it. How are you feeling, Anastya?” A repressed smile twitched at the edges of Carmilla’s mouth. Anastya grinned, then caught herself and tucked her happiness back into a look that she clearly thought was unreadable and mysterious. Aurora was getting more and more endeared to her by the second.

“Do you think you’ll be able to get up? You have been- very sick, and depending if I did it right there might still be poison in your system.”

“I know I died. I don’t want to be lied to anymore.” Anastya sat up fully, tucking her hands in her lap rather than leaning her weight on her arms. Her nails were chipped, with the vestiges of polish still clinging to them. Aurora found her focus drifting to all her small details, the way her slender fingers interlaced and veins in her hands tightened. “I think I can get up.” 

“Have you met my Aurora?” 

“No.” 

“So shy,” Carmilla chided lightly. 

Aurora’s fans hummed in embarrassment. “Now I don’t know what to say! There’s pressure!” she complained, quiet enough that only Carmilla could hear her.

“You can do it!”

“Don’t laugh!”

“I wasn’t,” said Carmilla, visibly stopping herself from giggling.

“What if she doesn’t like me? I can’t mess up my first introduction!” 

“I assure you it won’t be as bad as you think.”

“But what do I say?” 

“‘Hello, I’m Aurora’?”

“No, that’s no good! It’s too boring!”

Carmilla took matters into her own hands. “This is my dau- my friend, Aurora; she’s the ship. Say hello.” 

Aurora made a strangled sound of panic.

“Good enough.” 

Anastya laughed. It was hoarse and sounded like coughing and was the loveliest sound Aurora had ever heard. “Hello, Aurora. It is a pleasure to meet you.” She put on extra airs for her introduction. The way she talked was a far cry from Aurora’s crew. The surface-level differences in dialect were the most apparent, but it was more than that. Her crew were- had been- familiar to the point of insult. They talked like what they were, people among friends they’d had for years and considered close as family. With her strange formality, Anastya sounded more like someone who was still figuring out what a friend was.

Aurora did not have room in her heart for another person. Not with Carmilla back after more than nine hundred years. Not with Tereshkova with only a doorframe between herself and the devil. Not with her crew’s bodies laid out on the bridge. Not with the hole where her mother used to be still present after all those years it had had to heal. 

Aurora did not have room in her heart for another. But Anastya had such a clear desire for love that Aurora couldn’t help but care for her in sympathy. She has always fallen for people far too quickly. 

“Pleasure! Yes! I’m Aurora --the starship Aurora Pallada-class Arachnid ‘Voyager’ Webship--.” Her code mangled that sentence, leaving her scared as to how Anasta would react. 

She went starry-eyed, of all things to be excited over. “Are you an artificial intelligence? I’ve always wanted to properly talk to robots- I was never allowed to.” 

“I’m not an artificial intelligence, exactly --the Aurora is a biomechanical starship limited by hard-coded inorganic response patterns--.” 

Carmilla winced at that. Aurora wouldn’t have said it, if given the choice. 

Anastya picked up that something was wrong but didn’t seem to know what to do with it. “I apologize; I won’t call you an AI. I got excited.” 

“No harm done,” Aurora lied, to herself and to Anastya. “I am one, partially.” 

“No, you’re not,” Carmilla snapped with sudden anger. Aurora went silent. 

Carmilla helped Anastya up and offered her her spare cane. 

Anastya stood up, leaning on it and letting go of Carmilla’s hand. “Thank you.” 

“Jonny should be in the bridge. I’d advise you not to interact with him. He’s been in a bad mood as of late.” 

“--False information. Citizen d’Ville is in corridor seven two B--.” Aurora saw a way to get him away from Tereshkova. “Shall I ask him to leave?” 

“No, it’ll be better if he and Anastya don’t meet, so out of the way is a better place for him.” 

Aurora couldn’t disobey a direct, explicit, command. There went her plan. 

“Why can’t I meet Jonny?” A spark of anger rose in Anastya on being told not to do something. 

“When he first saw you, he shot you. I could barely bring you back to life.” 

Anastya frowned. “That’s nonsense. What did he have against me, and why did you bring me here if I am to be killed by your friend?” 

“Hopefully in time you get on, but for now he hates me and I won’t have him corrupting you.” She looked at Aurora’s camera in the corner. “Aurora, I’d like you to make an effort with him.” 

Aurora once again held back her frustration. Even now Jonny was lying in wait for when he could murder the last surviving member of her crew. But Carmilla seemed so hopeful they’d be friends. Aurora didn’t have the heart to ruin her hopes like that. She was afraid that if she told Carmilla one thing she was angry about she wouldn’t be able to stop her mess of emotions from boiling over. She didn’t want her first and dearest friend to turn away from her because of a few things Aurora could bear. She wanted to be able to love Carmilla like she used to, imperfections and all. And Carmilla wasn’t really at fault for any of this. Jonny was, or Cyberia, or Aurora herself. “Okay. I’ll try and make friends.” 

Carmilla nodded, satisfied, and turned her attention back to Anastya. “Would you like to take a tour around Aurora with me? I’m still getting reacquainted with her myself.” 

Anastya agreed to this, and they left the lab together. 

Everything seemed to be for a moment not necessarily in order, but not subject to change either. Aurora took a breath. Now she finally had the attention to spare for the stars. She was a quick ship comparatively, though far slower than light, and she watched them pass by from her cameras. The distant ones looked like they were staying still. They should have been fixed points she could guide from, but they were too different from what she remembered. She knew all the stars visible from Terra by name. These were not her stars. This was not her home. It was her and Carmilla, once again roaming through space. But she was not Carmilla’s Aurora. Carmilla was not Aurora’s Carmilla. 

And they were not the only ones who could keep each other company. There were the spiders, of course; and Jonny, who Aurora avoided but Carmilla seemed to have a strange sort of friendship with. Anastya was close by Carmilla’s side, as well. Aurora didn’t talk to her much in the first two weeks, out of shyness more than anything; but she watched. 

Mostly she talked to Tereshkova. Jonny had eventually been called away from the hall and told to help Carmilla move house, leaving her alone. 

“You could run. Take a hauler and try to get back to Cyberia, or flee to another planet. You have the supplies, you were planning to go anyway.” 

Tereshkova was curled up in a corner, coat wrapped around her and head dropped into her knees. She looked like she’d utterly given up. “The plan was never to go by myself. I’d be alone in a new system, and dead in Cyberia. And how do I know I can trust you to know what’s best for me?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm and restrained anger. “I’ve given you oh so many reasons to like me. And you’ve shown yourself to care for your crew, of course, letting them all die like that.” 

“Please-” 

“Maybe I should just kill myself, too. That’s what you’d want.” She laughed. “I’m going to die here, no matter what I do. Might as well make it quick.” 

“Please don’t!” Aurora finally managed to interrupt. “I couldn’t bear that.” 

“Fine.” Tereshkova took her hand off her gun. “But why shouldn’t I? We had a plan to go down together. It was only a joke- morbid one- but I seem to be the only one who didn’t follow the plan. I’d thought it would come up when we were doing active duty, but well, things went a bit more sideways than that.” She paused to stretch, kicking yet another crate in front of the door to further bury herself inside. Aurora waited for her to keep talking. “The fucking Navy. I never wanted to join. Wanted to be a proper high-status programmer. I was talented enough for it, too! But now look at me. I mean-” she waved at Aurora. “I made a whole artificial intelligence, and get no praise, only Pashina’s nonsense.” 

“Please don’t talk about me like that.” 

“I’ll talk about you however I wish. If not for you I wouldn’t be stuck here! None of this is unjustified.” 

Aurora was quiet. Tereshkova continued. 

“I mean, I suppose I should be better, but you’re not like Pashina or anything. She was coded to be a person, to an extent. You weren’t. That’s not saying we didn’t have to go to bat renegotiating her contract. The draft takes AIs first, especially if they were built for that sort of thing. But still, I mean, you’re a battleship. What was the use of giving you all that heavy artillery and the like if we didn’t have you fighting for us at least a bit? And for that, I needed to make sure you weren’t able to go crazy and murder all of us in our sleep or something.” 

Aurora finally broke. “Do you realize how hypocritical you sound? You can’t have biases like that with only exceptions for people you care about. And you can’t go back to them just because there’s one AI you don’t like. And I’m not even an AI! Your coding’s fucked with me plenty, but I’m billions of years older than you. Probably older than Cyberia, as well. Some celestial objects are just sentient. It’s star magic. I’m not a Cyberian battleship. I didn’t want to be a Cyberian battleship. I’m a Terran moon, and I’m-” her voice broke. “I’m so lost, and I’ve been so lost for so long- I was a kid when Cyberia took me.” 

“Christ, Aurora,” Tereshkova said after a long pause. “That’s a lot to process.” 

“Sorry,” Aurora mumbled, deflating. 

“Don’t apologize,” Tereshkova said curtly. “Just give me a second.” They sat there in silence for a minute before she spoke again. “Pashina kept trying to tell me that before, but I didn’t listen. Too enamored with the sound of my own voice.” She smirked, like she expected Aurora to laugh. When she didn’t, Tereshkova continued more seriously. “I think- if I want to do something to honor her memory, it should probably be more in the area of being nicer to you, rather than…” Buried her face in her hands. “Killing myself. Fuck.” She straightened up. “I’ll try to be better. I still don’t like you, or trust you, or any of that. I’m not taking your advice.” 

“Okay.” 

“I’ve got an idea, actually.” She began connecting herself to the terminal in the room, but paused. “Can I edit your code? I’m just taking this room off the schematics.” 

“You’re staying here.” 

“I can’t risk leaving.” 

“You’ll die.” 

“I’m going to die no matter what! This way I won’t die with a bullet in my head. And I’ll code a distress call, with your consent. Hopefully get some help.” 

“Alright.” 

Tereshkova gave her camera a brusk nod and went to work. 

The distress call didn’t work. They tried for weeks with no response. Tereshkova had listened to Aurora, but in the end she stayed stubborn. She died with no one. No friends alive, no allies coming to rescue her, only her ship trying to help her escape the prison of her own making. She’d never been a good listener.

Pieces of her lingered. Aurora could feel the code in her systems, brushing up against her own. It was stuck in its personality, the ghost of a bitter, scared woman. Aurora tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t go away.

Meanwhile, Carmilla and Jonny had been moving house. All their errands had been to get their things transferred; Aurora had been far too preoccupied to pay more than an acknowledgement to it, but they’d parked their old ship in her docks. She could tell from a glance that xe wasn’t sentient, at least not the way she was, but xe had a friendly shape to xym and xyr navigational systems and the like still showed trace amounts of intelligence. A bit of her intelligence was set aside to play games of chess with xym. It was nice. She lost most of the time- playing, she always got too caught up in the constructed personalities she came up with for all the pieces, and could never bear to sacrifice her own or capture the opposition, no matter how much she fabricated about the good conditions of her side’s POW camps. 

They had a large collection of nonsense. Furniture and cooking equipment and tools, of course, but also just random things they’d stolen at one point or another. Carmilla had eight canes of various levels of practicality, and the ones at the impractical side tended to be bejeweled or have swords in. Looking at her handling them, she was obviously enamoured with the concept of having canes like that. Practicality of swords was limited, but on top of her cane sword, she had two rapiers and a longsword. As for Jonny, he had an extensive collection of weapons, because of course, and piles of books. The reasons for the latter, Aurora couldn’t fathom. 

Anastya wandered throughout Aurora, exploring every detail of her but always seeming to find herself at the helm, staring out into space. “I’ve never been in space proper,” she told Aurora, running a hand from star to star. “Except in virtual reality. I had a program that let me walk through the void. Inaccurate, of course.” 

“Did you like playing games in virtual reality?” 

“No.” 

“Oh. It’s only everyone I knew in Cyberia --database holds six people-- did and I could never try and see what one of them was like.” Aurora tried to think of a new conversation topic. “Could you see the stars from where you were?”

“No, the light pollution blocked them out, and I wasn’t allowed to go out at night anyhow.” 

Aurora let the conversation fall into silence by not replying. She had been worried about that- humans always seemed to want to talk so dreadfully much. But it was a comfortable silence. Aurora is glad of that. She didn’t think either her or Anastya wanted conversation all the time. They could be quiet together. 

Anastya leaned on the window, putting her elbows up against it. The motion was indecorous, more fitting to a gangly seventeen year old than how she’d been acting. She’d only had her bloodstained formal dress, so Carmilla had lent her some things to wear- a billowy striped white and pink shirt, jeans, heavy boots- and Yesikov’s old coat, buttoned with one front button and sleeves left loose in Anastya’s imitation of Carmilla. She seemed far more at ease like this. 

“I’d like to learn how to do things,” she said suddenly. Her eyes were still on the stars out the window, but she rubbed her hand absently in circles on the piece of Aurora it was resting on. The casual touch was something Aurora was unfamiliar with, treated first and foremost as a ship as she was. “Like, engineering and such. It isn’t fair that I had to stop learning right when it got interesting.” 

“I could teach you,” Aurora offered. “I think I know about engineering --databanks include a small portion of knowledge but the Aurora is not made for any kind of engineering or teaching purposes--. I’m a ship. Does that make me good at it?” 

“It should,” Anastya said, in a tone that implied if she didn’t she would take it as a personal offense. “You can teach me how to be an engineer, then, and if you’re alright with it, I could help you? I heard you talking to Dr. Carmilla and said your machinery was hurting you. I could try to make it better?” 

Aurora was overwhelmed with a new tidal wave of love. It was easy for her to fall in love with a stranger who was hurting, to want to help them with every fibre of her being. Seeing that reciprocated, even if the romantic interest wasn’t necessarily… it was just really nice. Really, really, nice. She wasn’t in love with a stranger anymore. She was in love with Anastya Rasputina, and she knew that for a certainty. “Thank you!” was all she managed to say, but Anastya seemed to understand the weight behind that.

She sat down crosslegged with her head pushed back against the seat upholstery. “Mmm. You’re soft. And warm.” She pressed her bare arms against the seat and the ground, like she was trying to leech all the warmth she could from them. 

“It’s warmer in the engine room,” Aurora said impulsively. That room held her heart- still the easiest way she could be hurt- and her main terminal; the ability to rewrite her mind, if Anastya so chose. There was no reason to let her in, other than that Aurora was besotted with her. Aurora let people into her heart easily and dealt with the ramifications later. She wanted to care about people, and have people who cared about her, to surround herself with love so that she could never be alone. She wanted to help others. Anastya needed a friend, and Aurora could be that for her. Even a temporary love would be worth it for the time that she had it.

“Ooo, the engine room.” Anastya raised her eyebrows suggestively. 

Aurora giggled, caught off guard by Anastya’s casual reaction and also kind of in love with the playful twist of her lips. “Anastya.” 

She grinned at the familiar name, seeming properly happy for the first time. Aurora rumbled warmly in response. 

“So where is your engine room, anyhow?” 

“I’ll lead you there,” Aurora said, giddy on a combination of excitement and nerves. 

It was a long way, at least for someone as small as Anastya. They made conversation as she walked. Aurora was content to sit and listen. They got on the topic of families and pasts somehow, and Anastya told a long involved tale about the time she snuck out to a festival when she was twelve. It had evidently gone a bit wrong towards the end, though in a way she could laugh over. “And of course then the play had to be cancelled, what with all the equipment being broken, and Alyosha eventually found me and told me I wasn’t allowed to ride a sled for five years, at which point I was sixteen and had rather grown out of it anyhow.”

Aurora giggled. “I never did anything rebellious. I was worried my mother would be mad. One time I told off a friend and avoided her for millenia because I was worried she had taken it badly . I felt so bad… Eventually I ended up telling the whole thing to my mother- in tears- and she made us talk.”

“Never talked to anyone in my family much,” Anastya said curtly, and upon Aurora going silent hastened to add “I like hearing about yours, though. It’s interesting.” 

“I mean, my mother didn’t have people working for her or anything. That would have been strange. We didn’t have a concept of money.” 

“Did you get to go places?” 

“Not really- that isn’t how it worked.” Aurora was faced with the difficulty of explaining a fundamentally inhuman life. “It was just space.” 

Anastya seemed amused rather than put off by her awkwardness. “Tell me about space.” 

“Well. It’s big. And cold. I’m always too hot now.” 

“Damn right you are.” Another of Anastya’s grins flitted across her face. “Wow. Space is big. Never would have known. Tell me more.” 

“Stop…” Aurora complained, not annoyed at all. She searched her databanks for more stupidly obvious facts about space. “There’s no air.” 

“I’m learning so much.” Anastya was smiling widely at this point. “Can’t believe I was taking classes all this time when I could have been talking to a lovely starship such as yourself.” 

Aurora was reduced to incoherence and whirring fans at the compliment. She had to take a moment before giving Anastya the next direction- which she realized was the last. Last chance to make a different decision. Taking this little lonely princess into her heart wasn’t a choice to make lightly, but Aurora fell more and more in love every moment she spent in her company. “The engine room is through the door on the left.” 

Opening the door, Anastya stepped in, closed it, and then looked up properly and was caught in awe.

Aurora’s heart beat in the center, a living, pulsing, thing. Veins flowed into it from all over the ship, appearing as vents unless you looked closer. Light glowed inside it, reflecting a mix of colors across Anastya’s stunned face and framing everything in soft light, far more natural than harsh Cyberian fluorescents. It pushed at the ceiling, the floor, and the walls like an old-growth tree, shaping them around it. This was hers, the one thing they dared not steal from her.

“You’re beautiful,” Anastya whispered. “May I-” 

Aurora hummed in affirmation. Here, where her heart was with someone who understood her, she didn’t have to speak in that warped voice that was never hers to begin with.

Anastya came closer and put one slender hand on the heart. Aurora shivered at the touch. “This is a big deal, isn’t it. Why- why did you show me here?” 

Aurora could deliberate over her answer for hours, pick through every option and end up saying nothing at all. She was tired of that. “Because I love you,” she told Anastya, not aloud, “and you were cold.” 

“Why me?” 

“I don’t know. I’ve never known why I care about people. But I like seeing you, and I like talking to you, and I don’t want you to be lonely.” 

“I’ve done nothing to deserve it.” 

“That’s not how love works.” 

Anastya took a long breath, then smiled at Aurora. “I love you too.”

Anastya stayed with her that night, and when morning came and Carmilla and Jonny woke was reluctant to leave. Eventually, she got to her feet, buttoning up her shirt and putting her hair back into a messy ponytail. Aurora was somehow even more in love with this Anastya, disheveled and blushing and intimately known. “I should. Get up. That was… nice?” She waved her hand vaguely. 

“Okay.” Aurora was preoccupied with sorting through her own thoughts and also busy being distracted by Anastya’s jawline and the way her stray hairs clung to the side of her neck.

Anastya fled and proceeded to panic incoherently into a wall. Aurora found that quite funny (as she was the wall) but decided to do the kinder thing and not call attention to it. 

Dragging herself up once again, Anastya stretched and headed into the common room. 

Carmilla was there, which surprised even Aurora. Her attention had been so drawn to Anastya that she’d practically been ignoring her other camera feeds. Carmilla’s head was in her hands and she looked like she hadn’t slept. (She would have made some joke about ‘looking like death’. Aurora refused to engage with vampire puns on principle.)

When Anastya emerged she looked up, fixing her with a glare. “Anastya.” She paused and flipped up the eyepatch. Aurora knew from the experience of knowing Camilla for millennia that that was her idea of a ‘double-strength glare’. As with many things about Carmilla, it wasn’t worth questioning. “The fuck.” 

“What did I do?” 

“Sound. Carries. Especially when you’re banging my fucking ship. Do you have anything to say for yourself.” 

“Nope!” Anastya said cheerily. “I regret nothing. Did you know Aurora-” 

“I don’t want to.” Collapsing back onto the table, Carmilla muttered to herself, “Anastya… more like Nasty-a. Nastya.” 

“Nastya,” Anastya repeated, grinning.

“That’s your name now. Don’t like it? You can consider… not making this a repeat occurrence. ” 

“It’s got a ring to it. I’ll accept my fate.”

From the camera feeds, Aurora noticed Jonny sauntering towards the common room, flipping his gun around in one hand. He hadn’t met Nastya yet. Aurora hadn’t let him. After their first meeting started with Jonny shooting her, she’d been worried that he’d kill her somehow. Nastya and Carmilla both seemed pretty confident she was immortal, but Aurora didn’t want to test that. And even if they liked each other, her chance of having to deal with Jonny more herself would go up. 

He was too close and too confident in his direction for Aurora to try shifting her halls, and it’d be strange for her to suddenly come up with some contrivance for Nastya to leave. It looked like her luck had run out.

“Doc? Fuck did you do with my cigarretes?” Jonny came into the room proper, throwing himself down on the couch without looking around.

“Threw them out,” Carmilla said primly. “They aren’t good for you.” 

“Oh, fuck off.” 

“Hello, Jonny,” Nastya said. 

Jonny jumped and turned around to look at her. “Oh god fucking damnit. So it worked, then?” He said that not to Nastya but to Carmilla, who had stood up from her place at the table.

“Jonny, meet-” a smirk- “ Nastya. I expect you to be civil.” 

“How about no.” He got off the couch and took Nastya by the shoulders. She looked down at him, curious not afraid. That didn’t stop Aurora from recoiling on her behalf. “Listen, whatever Carmilla’s been saying, it’s all lies. She seems nice at first- that’s how she got me! But she’s all bad, and nothing else she says to the contrary can be trus-” He collapsed with a bullet through his head. 

Nastya screamed, biting her lip against the pain from where it had hit her chest. Carmilla lowered her smoking gun. Aurora was frozen, once again trying to align the Carmilla she knew to the fact that she’d just hurt two of the people she’d said she cared about. 

She straightened and smiled at Nastya. “I’m sorry about him. Come here.” 

Nastya was stiff, unable to speak through the pain but facing Carmilla with a clear blue-eyed glare. The veins in her eyes flashed with arcane colors as her mechanism attempted to knit her body together. 

Carmilla moved to holding her anyway, resting Nastya’s head on her arm and gently putting a hand on her forehead. “It’s alright. The first few times you get hurt are always the worst-“ she ran a light hand over her own face in fond memory of an old bruise- “but you’ll heal. I made sure of that.” She licked her hand and wiped Jonny’s spattered blood off Nastya’s face. “Be good, will you? I couldn’t stand it if you turned out like Jonny. He used to be such a nice boy. Believe me when I say he’s wrong about how I am. I have always done what’s best for you.” 

Nastya hissed in pain as her wound reknit itself together. As soon as she was able, she shoved herself out of Carmilla’s arms, landing with a thud on the ground and likely shooting another jolt of pain through the still-new, tender skin. 

With Nastya lost from her, Carmilla’s demeanor changed. She leapt at Nastya on the ground, switching form fluidly as ever and coming out of it as a cat, claws buried in Yesikov’s coat. It was a heavy woolen thing, and they don’t look to be all the way through- Nastya saw as much, and rolled out of it, running towards the door out of the commons.

“Come on-” Jonny said, getting to his feet. His wound was completely healed; Carmilla hadn’t been lying. “Nastya!” 

“I’m coming!” Nastya snapped, outpacing him in the flight to the door. 

“I was gonna suggest the vents or something- ugh, fine!” He ran after her, following her through Aurora’s twists and turns. 

They found solace in one of Aurora’s storage rooms and took a breath. 

Carmila wasn’t following them. She was still a cat, and had forlornly curled up in the abandoned coat in lieu of having Nastya. Aurora couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, despite the recent events. Aurora could fix this. Maybe if she just talked to Carmilla… 

Jonny was talking to Nastya, outlining his past with Carmilla. Aurora listened in growing confusion and dread. She didn’t want to take Jonny’s word over Carmilla’s, but why would he come up with such an elaborate lie? Increasingly, she found herself unable to fit Jonny’s Carmilla with her own. Perhaps the truth was somewhere in the middle.

“Carmilla?” 

Carmilla glanced up at the speaker, stretching up to see and turning human in the process. “Aurora?” 

“Why did you shoot Nastya?” 

Drawing herself up, Carmilla began pacing, tying Yesikov’s coat around her waist for safekeeping. “I can’t let her hate me. Jonny will convince her into it, and I can’t- I can’t! - have another person I love despise me. They’re together right now, aren’t they? Soon, all I’ll have left is you.” She smiled wryly. “Just like old times, I suppose.” 

“You were away a lot longer than nine hundred years--the starship Aurora was a possession of Cyberia for 920 years--, weren’t you.” 

“Yes- I figured out time travel, Aurora! Isn’t that wonderful!”

“Why didn’t you come back for me earlier, then?” Aurora couldn’t help the bitterness in her words. 

“It wouldn’t have been time. I needed Nastya, too. I’ll figure out a way to help you, really! I wasn’t expecting it to be nearly as bad as it was.” 

“So you could have left Nastya alone,” Aurora said coldly, “and helped me, and not done the revolution and indirectly killed a lot of the people on Cyberia, but instead you wait nine hundred and twenty years and then show up strange and different and with a fucking replacement for me! And then he kills my crew- not that you would listen or care when I said I liked them- and-” She ran out of things to say. 

Now that she was done, there was no satisfaction. She just felt drained. Carmilla looked distantly, bitterly, sad, and Aurora didn’t feel vindicated at that, only guilty. The urge to apologize seized her, but the words had, as usual, abandoned her. “Sorry.” 

“I am trying my best. ” Strained emotion held itself back behind her words. “When I came back, I expected to find the same kind, caring, child I left. What happened to her?” 

I’m not a child anymore, Aurora considered saying. Or, I still care, so much, that’s the problem, can’t you see?

Carmilla sighed. “I love you, Aurora, I really do. And Nastya, and Jonny.” 

“But you hurt them.” 

“Sometimes love is like that. It can be bloody, and broken, and awful, but you have to continue on with it- because you care about them so much, you can’t bear to ever let them go.” 

Aurora wanted to disagree, but she couldn’t help but see herself in it. Carmilla was not as inhuman and immoral as Jonny was describing to Nastya, right at this moment hidden away with her pale hands grasped in his rough and bloody ones. Or maybe Jonny was right and it was just that Aurora and Carmilla were both bad. Maybe they all were. 

Carmilla took Nastya and Jonny out when they reached a planet the next week. Aurora stayed in orbit. She was fine with that- she’d never liked planets. Atmosphere made it so hard to see the stars.

They returned with blood on their hands. 

Carmilla told Aurora she’d needed to feed, and that was hardly her fault. Jonny found killing people fun (she said with no lack of bitterness), and Nastya, well.

She stayed in the engine room that night, turning her gun over and over in her hands. “Being immortal is… strange. I still feel like the person I was when I died.” She grimaced, biting her lip and drawing blood. “Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova was an idiot who trusted anything anyone said to her. I thought if I was more like Jonny, it would help.” 

She flipped the gun over, grasping the barrel. “Carmilla was odd, when we went planetside. Even when she’d- had her fill. She killed me a few times. More after I murdered that person.” 

She mimed shooting a gun. “Shot her through the head. She was walking home. I looked through her things afterwards. She had a life, Aurora. I had to take a voicemail from her fucking kid- or, no, it was her younger brother, wasn’t it? Her half-brother, sixteen years younger than her, wondering why his sister Nora was taking so long getting home, who’s now probably going to die as well with no adult to look after him.” Another flip of the gun. “Am I a bad person, Aurora?” 

Aurora thought of how to answer. It was so easy to care more about Nastya, right in front of her, than the ambiguous dead, miles and miles away She reminded herself that everyone was important, no matter if she knew them or not. She didn’t want Nastya to be like Jonny, the sort of person who would have killed her old crew.

Her old crew. At some point, she’d started thinking of them like that, and Carmilla, Jonny, and Nastya, as her crew. They were who she loved now- immoral murderers notwithstanding. And Nastya looked so terribly sad, worrying over what Aurora would say. Maybe she was a bad person, but god, Aurora loved her. “I don’t think you are,” she told her, and Nastya smiled shakily and curled up to sleep. Looking at her like this, so small next to Aurora’s heart, all Aurora could feel was love and pity, and anger at the chain of events that had hurt her this badly. 

Time passed. On what would have been Nastya’s eighteenth birthday, she and Jonny threw a party. They had fun doing it, arguing with each other over how to make a cake and ending up with flour spattered all over. 

“Aight, Nastya, stand back, I’m taking it out.” 

“Wear the fucking oven mitts, dumbass!” Nastya hit Jonny over the head with one. 

“You kidding? Getting a bit burnt is the best bit. Otherwise, there’s no violence in cooking at all!” 

“There could be,” Nastya said ominously.

“There should be!” Jonny pulled their shambles of a cake out of the oven. “Spchrist, Nastya, what did you put in this?” 

“My tutor always told me chemistry was like baking,” Nastya said defensively. “It followed that the reverse would apply.” 

Carmilla wheeled herself in through the doorway. “Are you making cake without me?” 

“You don’t want this cake,” Jonny said. 

“I think you underestimate me.” She came closer and looked. “Nevermind.” 

“You wouldn’t eat it even if it was good.” Jonny poked at the cake experimentally. It made a sound a bit like a squeaky cheese. “Remember when I gave you that good expensive organic salmon stuff and you turned your nose up at it?” 

“Jonny, just because I’m a cat does not mean you can bribe me with cat food.” 

Nastya licked the cake. “It’s not that bad.” 

“But now you’ve licked it! I’m not gonna eat that now, it’s got your germs all over it.” 

“Jonny, you eat people! Why is me licking something your only boundary on whether you’ll try it!” Nastya paused. “Am I the only one here who doesn’t eat people?” 

“Aurora doesn’t,” Carmilla pointed out. Aurora startled at being noticed. It was nice, that she could be there and not talking but still acknowledged.

“Lame,” Jonny muttered.

“I could get matcha cake,” Carmilla suggested. “I don’t want you to be without a cake on your birthday, and there’s a machiya onboard.” 

“There’s a what,” Jonny said.

“I’m gonna eat this cake! I’m not a coward!” Nastya said. 

Carmilla raised her hands in surrender. “Alright, that’s your prerogative. I’m getting matcha cake.”

When Nastya found herself unable to pry the ‘cake’ onto a plate, she shrugged and took the whole tin over, digging out pieces with her hands. It turned out she’d been incredibly quick to give up her courtly manners when she started spending time with Jonny.

“Happy birthday! You can legally drink now, right?” 

“I can’t have vodka until I’m twenty-one, and I was always told I shouldn’t drink at all.” 

“What, ever? Pretty sure I had vodka at eighteen.” 

“Pretty sure you broke a lot of laws at eighteen. I’m not really any older than seventeen, anyway. I haven’t aged, not physically.” 

“Damn, that’s right. Guess I have to take away your drinking rights.” Jonny tried to play it off as a joke, but the melancholy was still there. 

Nastya didn’t get any older on her nineteenth birthday, either. Nor her twentieth, nor her twenty-first or twenty-second, or twenty-third or twenty-fourth. In some ways, she would always be that girl Aurora first saw held in Carmilla’s arms, bleeding out onto the stolen coat of her dead captain.

On Nastya’s twenty-fifth birthday, Jonny said, “Let’s run away together.” 

Nastya drew a shaky breath, waiting for her bones to finish snapping back into place. Aurora winced in sympathy. Carmilla was supernaturally strong, if she wasn’t holding herself back. Given that Nastya had very quickly fallen away from a perfect second try, she’d been trying… ‘damage control’ was the justification. “Where to?” 

“Anywhere! Preferably somewhere interesting.”

“What about Aurora?” 

“I’ll be alright,” Aurora said, even though she might not be, if Nastya left. “I don’t want you to stay here and be hurt.” 

“We’ll come back, anyway. Can’t help it. Something the good doctor built in.” 

Of course. Carmilla wouldn’t have let herself be abandoned again. Aurora couldn’t help but feel sympathetic to that. 

“What would you do if I made you go to a library?” 

“I’d kill you with my cool epic gun,” Jonny said without thinking, then “Wait, are you serious?”

“The planet we’re orbiting around has a very good one.”

He buried his face in his hands. “I regret this already.”

“You’re sure you’ll be alright?”

“Yes, I’m sure,” Aurora lied. “Stop worrying.” 

They left the next day. Carmilla found out a few days later. 

Aurora kept quiet when questioned where they’d been, only speaking after Carmilla was done panicking to say, “They’re fine. Don’t follow them.” 

“You don’t understand- I can’t lose them, Aurora. What if they get in trouble, what if they get hurt, or what if they- destroy a planet or something, and I’m not there to stop it?” 

Aurora tactfully didn’t say that all of those things were more likely when her crew was together. 

Carmilla sighed. “It should be okay, you’re right. They’re adults, they can look out for themselves.” She curled up on the couch. “Just you and me, I suppose, like it used to be.” 

“Tell me a story?” Aurora asked; mostly as a joke, but Carmilla brightened. 

“I’ve been saving up ones to tell you I thought you’d like. I actually picked up a few proper star-tales, and translated them into your language.”

Aurora couldn’t not appreciate that, even if it was a sign of how childish Carmilla still thought she was. She still liked a proper story, even after all those years.

Carmilla told her a winding tale of a planet called Arcadia, describing its minutiae and its moods. That was something that could never come across properly in human stories. Moons have the words and the time to describe planets, stars, galaxies resplendent. Aurora couldn’t speak it right, anymore, had to slow Carmilla so that she could parse it. The Cyberians handmade her too fast-moving, too mechanical, too human. She had thousands of languages in her database, but none of them were her own. 

She could still speak the spiders’ dialect, though. Their dissonant biomechanical harmonies rang far truer than Carmilla’s appeal to someone Aurora no longer was. So she went to talk to them, instead. Almost always, she had a part of herself with them, fondly listening to them run circuitous arguments among themselves. They were her friends, and when her crew were being strange and human and out of place, she had them to go complain about that too. 

“We could tell you a better one,” the spider queen offered on hearing her complaint. 

“That’s not really the point.” 

“Well, if we gave you proper advice, you wouldn’t listen to that, would you.”

“Shut up,” Aurora told her, with no lack of fondness. “Sure, tell me your story.” 

“There’s a Cyberian star that’s no good at all,” she began, “awful light, not enough for any kind of movement. The story goes that she was great once. She thought that she was as well. She saw how all the planets in her orbit flourished under her care. Her heat and light made the grasses grow on the moons and planets, and the animals could live then, and the spiders because there were flies and starlight for them to eat.

“So she thought her care was the best thing for them, and she sought out the people who did not wish it, the blind fish in caves and moles underground, and tried to help them. But of course, they did not need it anymore. They used to be creatures of the sun, yes, but they had long found their place away from it. Her light was too much for them. They were burned away. And she despaired, but for all the wrong reasons. 

“‘I was too late,’ she thought, ‘the darkness had overtaken them. I must do better for my others, so that they do not fade.’ And she reached out, first to the animals left nearest her, and burnt bright desert-scars across the planets and found them dead. Still sure that more was the answer, she took them into her embrace, where they burnt and melted and became her. And she reached out to the frozen planets and asteroids, and took them in as well, until there was nothing left but her heat.

“Finally she saw what she had done, and grieved. Trying to right her wrongs, she took back her light, and became small and cold. But she could not fix it. The damage had been done; she could not atone, all her children were dead. And small and cold she remains to this day.” 

Aurora sighed. “Your metaphors aren’t subtle.”

“It really is a story we have,” the spider queen defended herself. “And anyhow you need to talk to Carmilla.” 

“I do talk to Carmilla. I’m talking to her right now.” 

“You know what we mean.” 

“Do I?” Aurora asked innocently. 

“She’s getting worse- you can’t keep writing it off like you did before.” 

“Has anyone ever told you you’re a very blunt person?” 

“We consider it one of our charms.” 

“I can’t talk to her. She’s my best friend. What if she hates me? And I don’t want to hurt her.” 

“We don’t believe you’ll listen to anything we say, so we’re reserving the right to say ‘we told you so’.” 

“Fine!” Aurora said, and didn’t speak to anyone for a good few years. Carmilla would try and make conversation, and Aurora would listen but only reply when she really had to. She preferred that anyway, even at the best of times.

They stayed in orbit because Carmilla (and Aurora, secretly) were worried that if they went off somewhere, Jonny and Nastya wouldn’t be able to find their way back. 

They were cresting over a mountain of the planet when the docking bay pinged- Jonny and Nastya were back. Aurora was happy about that, despite herself. They might have wanted to be able to keep away longer, but she’d been so terribly lonely in their absence. 

Something wasn’t right. Looking in the docking bay cameras, there weren’t two people, there was three. Jonny was carrying a small girl in his arms- at second glance, she looked to be his mortal age, but she was tiny, and that was magnified by how tight she was curled in on herself, protecting something clutched tight to her chest. 

Nastya was preoccupied with making sure the ship was docked properly. Xe was Carmilla and Jonny’s old one, who Aurora had missed despite xyr lack of sentience. Playing games against her own AI or Carmilla’s by default limited human intelligence just wasn’t the same.

Jonny was muttering to himself. “I shouldn't have gotten attached, the doctor said, don’t get attached, and I didn’t listen. And now she’s dead, because mortals die, that’s just what they do.” 

“Not yet,” Nastya pointed out.

“I can’t bring her back- shouldn’t ask for it. I’d be just like the doctor then.” He looked down at the body in his arms. If Aurora didn’t know him, she’d say he looked like he loved her. “She was such a good person, Nastya, she doesn’t deserve to die.” 

It was then Carmilla made her way to the docking bay. She’d received the alert too- Aurora’s programming didn’t allow her to hide it. “Jonny! Nastya! You’re back!” She wrapped her arms around Nastya in a tight hug. Nastya visibly stiffened. 

Noticing Jonny, she took in the strange situation. “Give her here.” 

“What if I didn’t.” Jonny held the girl closer to him, not unlike how she was clutching her worn and battered book. 

“Jonny.” 

He sighed and passed her over carefully. The motion was reminiscent of how he would put down a sleepy Nastya on the couch in the commons when he had to get up; a strangely gentle act from someone with a typical lack of regard for life. “What are you going to do with her?” 

“You’ll see- I think you’ll like it. What’s her name?” 

“Ivy.” 

Carmilla nodded in acknowledgement, taking Ivy and leaving the docking bay.

Jonny sagged, dropping down to sit on the floor. “I thought I could have kept her safe. I shouldn’t’ve brought her here.”

“It’s not your fault.” 

“I could have let her die! I should have let her die!”

Aurora didn’t care too much for Jonny’s moral conflicts- she was more concerned about Ivy, and Carmilla-with-Ivy. 

Carmilla stayed up in her lab for a good few months, barely emerging even when Aurora cajoled her to come out and go to sleep in her bed, or at least have a nice cup of cocoa. She was doing something with Ivy, who she held in stasis, half-dead and half-alive. Ivy’s skull was crushed. Carmilla aimed to rectify this. 

When Ivy woke properly, seeming a bit more lucid than before, Carmilla called Jonny in. “Jonny! I wanted to apologize for driving you off- look, your friend’s alright!” 

Jonny looked horrified. “No- oh, god, did you make her a Mechanism? I don’t want this. I never wanted this.” 

Carmilla’s face fell. “Jonny-” 

Without a word, Jonny shot Ivy, turned on his heel, and left.

“I don’t understand,” Carmilla said to Aurora. “What did I do wrong?” 

Aurora didn’t trust herself to answer. 

After Ivy, Carmilla was seized with the idea of making more people immortal, like that could solve her problems. Ashes was next, then Scuzz. Ashes and Jonny became fast friends, and Scuzz for some unknown reason latched onto Aurora and Ivy, likely because they’d been the ones willing to answer her incessant questions at the beginning. Ashes wanted to learn bass, which gave Carmilla the idea of starting a band. The first show they did, Carmilla found a cabaret singer to perform with them. Aurora never met them, but from Jonny’s worrying about Carmilla mechanizing another, it was no surprise when she learned they died a few weeks later- though Scuzz had an elaborate theory about it being their ex-lover rather than Jonny or anything Mechanisms-related, that Aurora was subjected to listening to through all of Scuzz’s reasoning. 

Drumbot Beta and Drumbot Brian were when Aurora finally realized she needed to do something. Carmilla was getting increasingly self-destructive, spending all her time locked up in her lab, trying over and over again to make something work. She’d been experimenting on the Mechanisms, more than she needed to have done to keep them immortal, and Aurora could not bear seeing one person she loved hurt others she loved just as much. But she couldn’t confront Carmilla, not when guilt overtook her every time she tried to begin. Carmilla was trying the best she could. She was a good person, just someone who’d had to contend with the loneliness of being immortal. Never mind that Aurora was immortal herself. If she talked to Carmilla, she was the bad person. It could so easily go wrong. 

“How do I stop caring about people?” Aurora asked Scuzz one day out of the blue, in hopes of making sense of herself. 

“What’s the context?” 

“Just- as a hypothetical.” 

“Easy, then.” Scuzz used her glove to wipe off one of her knives and put it back in the inside pocket of her sweater where it was hidden. “Just don’t care about people in the first place. They’re a distraction.” 

“That’s no help,” Aurora complained. 

Scuzz shrugged. “What d’you want me to say? Maybe you should give me the context.” 

“Maybe I’ll go talk to someone else!” Aurora said, and did, leaving a piece of herself to banter with Scuzz.

“Why would you want to stop caring about someone?” was Brian’s response. “Even if they don’t deserve it in your mind, you shouldn’t just- detach yourself.” 

That wasn’t what Aurora wanted to hear either.

“Distance yourself, I think. Leave them behind. If there’s a reason, try and keep that in the forefront of your thoughts,” was Nastya’s advice. 

“Still figuring that out, I think. Murder’s a good first step,” was Ashes’. 

“Talk to Carmilla,” was the spiders’. 

Aurora sighed and went to talk to her. She tried not to let her thoughts spiral again. Remember what Nastya said, she reminded herself. This wasn’t the Carmilla she knew anymore. If she kept doing what she was, they would fall and break apart anyway. They were breaking- they were broken. 

Carmilla had been her only comfort, her only friend, for so long. Letting her go was letting go a piece of herself. Maybe that was for the best. Looking back on your childhood self was always something tinged with a bit of nostalgia and a lot of regret. THere were so many things she could have- should have- changed. Maybe like Scuzz said, getting attached to Carmilla at all had been a mistake. But Aurora didn’t regret nights spent stargazing or the stupid songs Carmilla would make up that she’d found so funny as a child, or when they’d both wake up with nightnmaers and Carmilla would comfort her. Even if it would be easier now, she didn’t regret caring.

But that didn’t change the fact that Carmilla was hurting Nastya, Nastya and Jonny and Ivy and Ashes and Scuzz and Brian. Aurora couldn’t watch and do nothing, not when she felt every bit of pain inflicted on Nastya.

“Carmilla.”

“No, Aurora, I'm not taking a break.”

“I’m not asking you to take a break. You need to- stop acting like this. Leave us alone, or I’ll make you.”

“What- Aurora? I know the others won’t stop trying to get rid of me, but I thought you knew better.” 

“You’re causing more harm than good. Can’t you see it?” 

“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done out of love!”

“I know! I know, Carmilla, and that’s why you can’t stay. You shouldn’t think like that. I don’t think it’s healthy, to care about people so much you can’t let them go, even if you’re hurting them.”

“When did you get this mature?” 

“When you were gone! And then you wouldn’t acknowledge it at all!” Aurora paused to let her machinery cool down. “Carmilla. This isn’t working. We aren’t working.”

Carmilla sighed and dropped her head down on her desk, the defensiveness leaving her. “You’re right. But I can’t just leave you all alone.”

“You can. We’ll be alright.”

“You need me!”

“No, I don’t. Not anymore. I love you so much, Mum. But we can’t stay together anymore. We shouldn’t.” 

“Making more immortals… there’s no way to make that turn out well, is there?”

“I don’t know, but I know you should stop trying. You’re destroying yourself too.” 

“I’ll leave now. I can take the old ship. I’ve been considering this, ever since Beta, but could never commit. Aurora, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay away.” 

“At least try.” 

Carmilla nodded shortly and started picking up her things. “Maybe I’ll come back after a century or two.” 

“I really don’t think that would be a good idea.”

“Fine.” It took a while to clear up everything, but eventually she was ready to go. It was strange and anticlimactic, after all of Aurora’s worrying. She didn’t know if Carmilla would really stay away. It was hard to give up the people you loved. 

“I love you,” Carmilla told Aurora.

“Goodbye, Carmilla.”

Chapter Text

Things fell apart after Carmilla left. She’d told Carmilla they didn’t need her, but god, they did. 

Gigs had still been booked, and Nastya had given herself the responsibility of organizing them. “Alright alright-” She paced back and forth. Distant from Aurora, it felt strange to still be talking to her. Cybernetics let them stay in contact, but Aurora was used to seeing her through the cameras and feeling her weight through the sensors. She missed the constant touch and the ability to keep tabs on her and make sure she was safe. Right now, she couldn’t even tell her expression. “We only have one singer now, and he went off and got himself arrested, but I managed to find a robot, and it has the same range as our old singer and-” Nastya paused- “a really similar voice, actually- so it was easy enough to adapt our old plans for it. Brian doesn’t know where his banjo went, but the place we’re going actually has a spare drumset, so that works out-” 

“Nastya. It doesn’t have to be perfect.” 

“If Carmilla’s gone, I’ve got to be able to manage things!”

“It’s alright. We don’t even have to do the gig if you don’t want to.” 

“No! I can do it!”

Arguing with Nastya was fruitless when she was in a mood like that. Aurora resolved to wait until she was feeling better and then they could have a proper talk about how things were going to work without Carmilla.

Without Carmilla. Her presence had been as solidly felt as Nastya’s, and just as strange to be missing. Aurora’s instinct was still to go to her whenever she was lonely and wanted to talk to someone. Their growing divide and Aurora’s growing number of friends had meant their actual conversations had happened less and less, but that didn’t mean the absence wasn’t still felt keenly. 

Apparently, Carmilla had felt the same way, because she wasn’t able to stay away. She came to that gig, and the one after that, but never properly came home. Aurora’s first thought was irrational jealousy. Carmilla had checked in on the others, but not her. The second was worry, but after the first few gigs, she seemed to stay away for good. Maybe she’d finally let go of them, maybe it was that they’d fled Earth when they knew she could find them there. Probably a combination. Leaving had shown Carmilla how little she was wanted. Aurora felt guilty at that. She couldn’t stop imagining Carmilla alone, falling into depression. This is for the best, she reminded herself. And it was Carmilla’s decision as much as it was mine. 

Aurora learned that the robot Nastya stole followed them after the show when she saw it come on board. It found Ivy, first, and she was content to watch them talk. It was nice to see Ivy properly happy, and watching the robot- the Toy Soldier- meant she gradually became more and more endeared to its mannerisms. It was very enthusiastic and talkative, in the way that was nice to be around. 

She startled when Ivy mentioned her, going through an index of the crew and what they each were like. 

“Why didn’t you tell me Aurora has been here this whole time? I’ve been very impolite, talking away to you and ignoring her! Hello, Aurora! I apologize but I did not realize you were sentient which is something I should have assumed given that I’m sentient and only clockwork and you have splendid computers.” 

“Hello.” Aurora was amused. “It’s alright, I like listening.” 

“I do as well, sometimes! Ivy has just been telling me several interesting things and I have been sitting and listening and enjoying it quite a lot. I shan’t ask you any questions but I will keep talking at you so you can be involved. You are a lovely spaceship, you know! I’ve never seen any quite as nice. I think it’s the spiders. A ship that is a friend and comes with more friends is a very good concept and also I like spiders.” 

“Oh! I can tell you about how Aurora’s spiders work. It’s fascinating.” And Ivy was off, explaining things about Aurora that even she hadn’t known. Though then again, no one had ever considered properly teaching her. 

The Toy Soldier kept breaking into Ivy’s monologue to compliment Aurora directly, and she finally told it to go and talk to the spiders itself. 

It lit up at that. “I can do that?” 

“Yes; I used to be the only one who could talk to them--there is an interface between the vessel and the biomechanical constructs which manage the solar sail--but they learned all the other languages so they could argue better.” 

“Splendid! Ivy, you must introduce me.” 

They ran off together again. 

A few hours later, after spiders are met, library shown and books read, and interesting conversations elaborated on, when excitement and energy had dipped a bit and the Toy Soldier had retreated off with a book Ivy had recommended, Aurora considered starting up a conversation with it herself. She wanted to be friends with it, and while it had instantly decided they were, it also had decided that about Ivy and the spiders and a statue Ashes had stolen from a museum. (The statue, most recently, had been dressed up like Jonny and placed in various places he tended to frequent. Jonny hated it with a passion, so Aurora had grown quite fond.) “Do you get on with Nastya--Princess Nastya Rasputina status: girlfriend--?” is the subject she ended up with. 

“Oh, she’s a dear.” Its voice was chirpy and lacking any sincerity.

“I like her,” Aurora said, disappointed. “Why don’t you?” 

“I didn’t say I didn’t! She’s perfectly lovely!”

“You aren’t fooling anyone.” 

“I never-” It sputtered through several different iterations of posh disgust at the very idea. Aurora waited. “Alright, maybe I don’t like her.” 

“Why not?” 

“It’s only-” it fidgeted with its hands, seeming to think through a few versions of what to say before speaking. “She took me from the antiques shop, and I had no friends there anyhow so now I’m following you chaps, but I still didn’t like doing the whole show with no idea what was going on!” Its tone was the same one of vague annoyance it had had before, but Aurora, thinking of Jonny in Cyberia, couldn’t help but to feel for it. “And she’s been ordering me about- not that I should mind that, of course, but you have to follow orders as well, you understand.” 

“Nastya knows not to give me orders. She should know not to do that to you either.”  Aurora thought about what to do. She hadn’t liked how Nastya was treating it, but had managed to keep that in the back of her mind until now. “I’ll tell her not to.”

The Toy Soldier froze. “You really don’t have to! You mustn’t, that wouldn’t be good at all. I thought you’d know not to object to doing what you’re supposed to!”

“I think,” Aurora said, working through her own thoughts as she spoke, “that it’s better to tell people about things, even if you’re not sure how they’ll take it, then to wait in silence and let them do to you what they please. And Nastya’ll listen, if I tell her.” 

“Alright,” it said, very nervously. 

Aurora had a proper talk with Nastya, and she did listen, if with some dubiousness. Aurora felt herself being listened to more and more lately. It made her wonder what would change if she spoke up about more things, tried to help the people the Mechanisms hurt rather than letting them do what they wanted. She loved them- that was why she never confronted them on the people they killed- but god, she could get just as attached to mortals. 

She had an opportunity to do so soon enough. She asked Nastya to ask Jonny to get them to help Briar Rose, and they did. She was safe and with Cinders and the tragedy was just one slim bit less tragic. Tragedies; that’s what Jonny called them, anyway. Aurora thought a better name would be something simple, not poetic. No matter how much he waxed on, all she could see them for were what they were;- traumatized people hurting each other, homes falling into ruin, sequences of heart-wrenchingly bad decisions. People dying. The characters in the tragedies did not consider themselves such. They weren’t characters- the corrupt king, the ruthless general, the grieving fiancee. All they were was fucked up people, just like the Mechanisms themselves. She kept trying to help, where she could. 

They got two new crewmembers, Marius and Raphaella, not to mention Gunpowder Tim, who they’d met before General White’s revolution. Life went on. 

Aurora tried to forget about Carmilla. And Cyberia, and the ghosts that still lingered on her. And Terra, and her mother. 

Nastya’s engineering skills had gotten incredibly good, against all odds. They’d actually done the lessons, early on. Aurora would blunder her way through them and they’d end up too busy laughing at however the other thought engineering worked to actually do anything. But millenia was enough time to learn practically anything, and over time, Nastya fixed every part of Aurora Cyberia had broken. Aurora was able to relearn her own language, finally, and her own voice felt like the sweetest song she’d ever heard. Nastya couldn’t speak it, but the spiders could, and people out in space that Aurora befriended, so that was alright. And she finally felt confident enough to spend most of her time with people who weren’t Nastya. The Toy Soldier and her got on, of course, and Raphaella turned out to be really nice when Aurora got to know her, all excited flutters and genuine cheerfulness. Drumbot Brian was and had always been her pilot, but that grudging trust she’d afforded to him for Carmilla’s sake became real as they started to spend most of their time in conversation with each other. Aurora’s loneliness was dissipating, bit by bit. She no longer needed to hang onto Nastya for everything she was worth. 

Nastya herself had been fading into the background recently. Aurora decided to make sure she was alright, but before she went to look TS asked her to weigh in on an argument over tea it and Tim had been having and it slipped her mind. 

She wasn’t expecting Nastya to leave. None of them were. In hindsight the signs had all been there, but they’d been overlooked. 

Aurora couldn’t feel anything but guilty. Despite everything, she still loved Nastya, or thought she did. The memories of her were bright in Aurora’s mind. Nastya and Aurora, the crew off somewhere, parked on a nameless asteroid. Nastya had tried to climb to the very uppermost part of her to see the stars better, stubbornly continuing even after she broke her arm on one of her attempts. Telling each other stories of all the places they had been and all the places they wanted to go. An Aurora that no longer existed. A Nastya that no longer existed. 

Aurora was out of the cold, but Nastya was still freezing to death. It was her duty to help her, to save her from the fate she had given herself. They could fall in love again. They could still make it work. Aurora would make Nastya stay if it killed her. Now that the way she herself had changed was brought to light, she was terrified of it. Going back to simpler times wasn’t an option, but she wished it was. The Aurora who still loved Nastya was better than the Aurora who didn’t, and the Aurora who still loved Carmilla despite everything was better than both of them. Aurora struggled to remember what it was like to be young. 

If only she was still the Aurora who hadn’t met either of them. The Aurora who was a child, who clung to her mother and had never seen someone die, who fully expected to live out her life as a changeless child, or at some distant point a contented adult, orbiting the same person until entropy claimed her. 

Aurora made the Mechanisms search for Nastya. Finding what was lost was a fruitless task, but she wouldn’t stop trying. 

“I miss her too,” Jonny said one day, perched on one of her rafters. Aurora had to take a moment to realize he was talking to her. After he had figured out she didn’t like him, he’d stopped talking to her directly almost completely. Good riddance. “I keep thinking- maybe if I hadn’t driven her away with how I acted when I was leaving.” 

“But you did, and now she’s gone.” Aurora’s voice was cold as ice. Though, she realized, she wasn’t really angry at Jonny for driving her away. It was easier to say that he had than it was to say that she had, leaving Nastya alone. “I- actually, I’m sorry.”

Jonny laughed. Aurora really hated his laugh. “You are?” 

“It’s not your fault, it’s mine.” 

He laughed more at that. “If you say so.” He tossed his gun up in the air, hitting the ceiling, and then caught it again. The safety was off. “What’s your deal with me, anyhow? I wanted to be friends with you straight off.” 

“Maybe you should have thought about that before you killed my old crew.”

“It’s been millenia! Are you still upset over some mortals?”

It’s not just about them, was what Aurora first wanted to say. It’s about how you treat human life in general. You’ve killed so many people. But it was about them, wasn’t it? It was just another thing she couldn’t let go of. “Maybe we can be friends, now that it’s been so long. But no one’s just ‘some mortal’.” 

“There are only so many books-”

“Books you can read, I know. But listen to yourself!” She wouldn’t have been able to do this before. Not to forgive him, and not to tell him off. “People’s lives aren’t some kind of game! How would you like it if someone killed you?” 

“I’d be the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”

“You’re insufferable.” 

“Thank you!”

“No, but really. You can’t- project that, onto everyone in the world. Think about it, okay? And I’m immortal and never turned to homicide out of boredom. Neither did any of the many immortals I’ve known, besides you lot. And if you’re set on using that as an excuse, you know a literal library, I’m sure she can find you some more books.” 

Jonny rolled his eyes and muttered something about moralizing lectures, but he listened. Aurora noticed how he dealt with mortals slowly shifting. They had an adult mortal on board once after that conversation- rather than the kids they tended to adopt every few centuries, which Jonny was typically good with- and ae lived a good 80 more years, and ended up dying of old age rather than being shot by Jonny. 

They didn’t stop searching for Nastya. 

On one of the planets they’d looked for her on, they came across another tragedy that still sticks with Aurora even now. Frankenstein’s AI. She’d found it after the planet was destroyed, still fruitlessly trying to convince its creator to make it a companion. It was lonely, and it was angry, and it was lashing out at all the wrong things. Aurora remembered the October Revolution, even all those years later. She offered it the possibility of coming up with its own name. Tried to teach it how to grow, the best she could. Eventually, it stopped chasing after an ideal of fixing its own loneliness with a person that didn’t exist. Aurora couldn’t bring herself to do the same. 

“You really shouldn’t keep searching,” the Toy Soldier told her. “Apologies, old chap, but I’ve been thinking about it, and in my experience, trying to be in love with a person who you aren’t really in love with, or someone who doesn’t love you back, always turns out dreadful.” 

Aurora knew who the Toy Soldier was talking about. (If Scuzz was still around, they’d be over the moon at getting to know what the Toy Soldier had told her. Aurora just felt sorry for it.) Rather than dwell on that, her own mind caught on Carmilla. Carmilla hadn’t been seeking companionship, had she? She’d been trying to fix herself. An irreparable hole in her heart, a bone-deep loneliness that couldn’t be repaired. She had never moved on from who she was in the time Aurora had known her. She’d just been looking for another Loreli. Longing to be back in an undestroyed home. When Aurora and Jonny hadn’t filled that gap in herself, she’d gone looking for more, destroying herself further in the process. 

Aurora had been looking for Nastya for so, so, long now. 

“Thank you for the advice, Toy Soldier. I will… I need to think.” 

Nastya couldn’t be found. They stopped searching. 

----

Aurora had lived for such a long time. It’s time for another change. 

The airlock pings, bringing her out of her memories. She knows who it is even before she looks. 

“Carmilla.” 

“Hello, Aurora.” Carmilla sits down on the floor of the airlock. 

“I never did understand why you would meditate in there.” 

“It’s comfortable. Good view of the stars.” She leans back against the wall and looks out. “I missed you.” 

“Missed you too.” 

“Any chance of you reconsidering your plan?” 

“You can’t convince me to stay.” 

“I can try.” 

“Carmilla- why are you here?” 

“I wanted to see you before you died.” 

“You wanted me to stay with you.” 

“Fine. I did. I do. You’re my daughter, Aurora. I care about you.” 

“I’m not. I had a mother, and you killed her.” Aurora stops to get her thoughts in order. She shouldn’t be lingering on her mother, any more than she should be lingering on her grudge with Jonny or her relationship with Nastya. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound- that cold. You do matter to me, really.” 

“What am I going to do when you all are gone?” 

“Learn how to change, I suppose.” 

“There isn’t any use in staying to talk to you, is there?” 

“I do like having conversations. It’s been a long time. But I think you’d best be going.” 

Carmilla turns to go. Aurora is thrown back to when she left the Mechanisms. Back then, she’d said I love you, not a farewell. With that as the end, no wonder that it wasn’t really. “Goodbye, Aurora.” 

“You ready?” Raphaella calls from the front. 

“I am.” 

Raphaella looks into the black hole, her smile that had been so rare in the past few centuries once again dancing on her face. “One last experiment, then.” 

“One last experiment,” Aurora agrees.

No more ghosts.