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The Cascade is a good ship, not to get anything wrong there; the crew is even better, and you don’t just say that because they’re like an extended clade to you. Still, no matter how good all of you are, the Outer Reaches is a dangerous place to be, and your profession only makes it moreso.
Something you’re intimately aware of right now, watching Kanaya and others working in the medbay. Of course, this isn’t your first raid, the first time the crew has lost people; the first time a raid has gone completely rumblespheres-up. This is probably the first time you’ve all come so close to dying though, all at once, and your ears were too full of gunfire for you to hear the voices properly and pick out who was who- all you could tell was that there were a lot of voices.
You’re still shaking now that it’s over, now that you’re (almost all) safely back in the Cascade. This was probably the worst a raid has ever gone for you guys.
This is definitely the worst it’s gone for you personally. Expecting it doesn’t make it hurt less.
“There was just too much damage for a rustblood to take.” Kanaya says, as if explaining it will make it any better. You can hear her clearly across the medbay. You know she did her best.
They drape cloth over Aradia’s face, and you’ll be let your goodbyes before her body and the others are taken to the incinerator.
Equius of all people approaches you when it’s done. You don’t have the energy to tell him to fuck off, still too lost in the memory of watching her body showered in fond little paper notes as it slides into the flames. He stands beside you until you finally look up at him.
He coughs into his non-robotic fist. You can’t see his eyes through his goggles. “This must be difficult for you.”
“No shit.” You respond. He bristles, but goes on.
“Your moirail would not want you to languish.” He says, and you give him a hollow laugh.
“Who’s languishing?” You bare all your teeth. “I’m grieving, you insensitive bonebulge.”
He curls his lip back, and you’re reminded of a nickering hoofbeast. It’s funny, but everything’s funny in a really morbid way right just now. “I’m trying to offer sympathy.”
You growl instead this time. “Don’t you already have a moirail?”
“This isn’t a come-on, Captor.” He stalks closer, and you’re reminded instead of when you two were kismeses. God that was ill-advised, you don’t want to do anything regrettable with him either; you wish Kanaya had stayed but she’s busy tending to the injured and dying in the medbay still. He stops in front of you instead, breathing hard. You can see his eyebrows furrowed over his goggles. “I have a wonderful moirail that suits me perfectly, serendipitously even, but… this is a loss for myself as well. This was a loss for all of us.”
You look down and realize your fists are clenched; you’re on the verge of tears and he needs to get away from you as soon as possible before you do something you really shouldn’t. He looks down on you and you glare up, fighting back every sign that you want to break down. He sighs and shakes his head, shoulders relaxing.
“I made something for this occasion.” He says. It’s your turn to furrow your brows, and you look into the glassy panes of his goggles, trying to gauge what he’s about. You don’t quite get it before he turns around, gesturing for you to follow.
Sparks pop between your horns, but despite your misery, you find your feet plodding one after the other behind him. You ought to find Karkat or Dave, or both; help each other deal with what happened. You’re pretty sure they felt the loss, they were her friends too.
Your rumination is interrupted by a hand in front of your face. “We’re here.”
“Here” is his workshop. You know it’s his and not Dirk’s because Dirk doesn’t throw his tools at the walls as hard, though he does have better aim. Equius leads you to a dark corner of the block, past piles of machinery in various states of repair and ruin, past the corpselike chassis of unfinished or broken robots. It looks almost like a less lively version of the medbay, with the sting of rubbing alcohol replaced by the bitter tang of machine oil. For a moment, even past your grief, you feel a slight tingle of unease run up your spine, telling you to back out even if you know you’re more than capable of defending yourself.
You shake off the feeling as Equius rounds the corner and then the both of you are standing in front of a ghostly figure draped in a tarp. You raise an eyebrow.
“One of your robots?” You ask. He doesn’t acknowledge you, merely pulls off the tarp.
At first you think you’re looking at a bush of steel wool arranged on a stand. There’s so much of it that it nearly obscures this thing’s silhouette. When you start to focus on the bits of light and shadow properly, though, you register the familiar arches of high eyebrows and spiral horns, the delicate curve of familiar lips, nose, chin.
It’s Aradia’s ghost rendered in steel. You’re convinced of as much when you look into the mirror-polish gleam of dead red eyes. You take in bits of it at a time, the smoothly-hammered finish of her metal face so detailed that it seems obsessive, the care taken to etch even the sign on her dress in what appears to be chainmail.
You’re shaking all the way up to the tips of your horns and you don’t understand why. Your voice is a hiss like steam from a cracked pipe when you finally speak. “Are you trying to replace her with a fucking robot?”
“No.” His voice echoes all gravelly and somber. You see a downward twitch in the corner of his lip, but nothing more. “This is merely to ease the sting. This ‘fucking robot’, as you so dared to put it, this work of mine that I’ve been putting blood and sweat into for the past sweep after she said that she knew she was going to die-“
You flinch, and crackle, because that was a private conversation you had with her, how could he possibly know about that-
“-this, Captor, was a request of hers.”
Well that explains that. You know she has her own life to lead but you wish she didn’t keep this from you. It feels like looking at her body on the gurney again, except without the burns, and propped up on her feet.
You sigh, and Equius flips a switch on the robot’s back. The emptiness of its eyes brightens almost to the same luminous red as Karkat’s as the machine comes to life.
Equius turns to you. “I don’t know what she thought to achieve with this, especially since she told me to leave its personality programming blank, but perhaps she thought to leave that honour to you. You did, after all, know her best.”
He leaves you to ponder Aradia’s reasons, because he has to fix up the hull where it was damaged in the raid. Technically, you should be in the helmsblock, leading the ship towards the nearest station, but you find yourself transfixed by the strange figure before you.
You could swear it smiles just like her. You could swear, aside from being as unyielding as your own touch, it strokes your cheek the same way she would.
“I’m sorry, Sollux.” It says, which should be impossible because you check through your palmtop and there’s nothing in its programming that should allow it to know what those words mean, there’s nothing in its programming but basic movement functions. “I should have told you I’d be coming back.”
You don’t know what game Equius is playing, but it makes you cry and hug the robot, bury your face in its metal shoulder while it strokes your back. It- she- whispers sweetly in your ear while you shudder and sniffle in silence, and you’re not sure why you’re crying, whether out of grief or relief, whether you think this is really her or whether you’re just angry at Equius for making something so much like her and yet not.
You stop crying soon enough, you never were good at crying. You’re still shivering, and you know either Karkat or Dave or Kanaya will be looking for you soon but you don’t want to move, you can bring yourself to pull away yet and at any rate, the steel arms around your shoulders won’t let you.
“I’m so sorry, Sollux.” She says, running her fingers over the ports on the back of your neck. “But it’s okay. Everything will be okay.”