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Almost all pilots fall apart in training. It's part of the objective of it, to smash their egos into beautiful, useless shards before melting them down into something new and useful. All those pesky pre-training memories, their original personality, beaten down and flattened into a fresh slate to make a new killing machine out of in the simulators.
Sometimes though, a pilot doesn't break that way. It's rare, but there are a handful who take to the training well, who need less beating to follow orders, who come out with their mind intact.
She's one of them. The only one in her squad - in fact, in the whole base. The others cling to their handler or mech like a lost child when they're off the battlefield, all quaking limbs and puppy dog eyes, desperately waiting for the moment they can plug back in for their next hit of combat stims and dopamine rewards. Not her though.
When she gets back to base, after recovering from the neural de-linking, she climbs out of the cockpit under her own power. She doesn't need someone else to clean her, and she's never found trying to sneak into her handler's bed at night. In briefings, she not only pays attention, she asks for clarification on mission-critical details.
And her handler hates it all.
A lone handler stands over the holo-map table, surrounded by her analysis support crew and a dozen telemetry feeds. Despite the chaos of the battlefield, the control room is largely quiet, the muffled sounds of combat feeds playing over one-ear headsets and quiet humming from the plethora of embedded computers punctuated by callouts and the handler's enthusiastic praise toward her squad.
On the table, a barrage of translucent blue missiles silently splash against an enemy bunker, and the handler contacts the pilot that fired them to shoot off a quick "Good girl" as the mech delivers a dopamine reward, her way of reinforcing the reward mechanism to make controlling the pilots outside their mechs easier.
She spots another unit in the squad bisecting an enemy mech with its pulse blade and radios to it, the words "Well done, hound," quietly slipping from her lips.
"Ma'am, I told you to stop calling me that. I have a name and a pilot ID number that both work perfectly fine for professional communications," comes an exasperated response over the line, causing the handler's face to pull back into a sneer.
"Pilot, I will call you whatever I deem appropriate. As we've been over, you belong to the military, and therefore me, as your CO, for the duration of your service."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever. Just drop the sexual harassment and I'll stop talking back." The mech's miniature counterpart spins around and gouges out the core module of a rushing enemy unit, as if to punctuate its pilot's demand.
Members of the support crew glance at the handler and each other as she mutes her side of the radio again, her knuckles white around the hand microphone.
Dear, your little 'outburst' earlier may not have been the brightest idea. Maintenance crew reports that your handler is waiting at our bay in the hangar.
The pilot groans at that report from her mech. Looking through its eyes as they approach base, she contemplates staying out longer just to avoid the coming confrontation.
That would simply make things worse. I recommend taking a head-on approach. If you would like, I can keep the core module sealed until you have recovered from disconnecting.
"Urgh, it's still weird that you can do that over the neural link. That would be good though, I don't want to deal with her while I'm still nauseous." The pilot pauses for a moment. "Do you think she figured out we asked for the reward systems to be tweaked down?"
Querying maintenance crew... no.
She lets out a relieved breath and begins maneuvering into the hangar. Once the mech is situated in the docking clamps, the cables wired into her back pop out with a series of clicks, sensory input and systems feedback from the mech going dizzyingly black with each thump of the thick wire bundles landing on the floor of the cockpit.
From outside comes the faint hydraulic hissing of the embarkment bridge extending, followed shortly by a series of clanging sounds. The pilot wobblily raises her head to look into the mech's sole internal camera, and its soothing voice comes over the wireless link alongside a low-quality video feed showing their handler on the bridge, flanked by a pair of technicians.
Take your time, love. I'll keep her out for now.
The pilot faintly registers the sound of the mech's voice coming through its external speakers, saying something about locked joints and pistons, as she clumsily shakes her limbs to get used to moving them again and tries to clear the spinning in her head from the disconnect.
Eventually, she pulls herself up from the pilot's cradle and the cockpit door thumps and whirs open to reveal her handler's disgruntled face, which quickly morphs into a facsimile of gentleness. Underneath it, the furrowed brow and half-smile betray her real feelings.
"Welcome back, my loyal dog," she says, reaching down to try to lift the pilot from the cockpit.
Ew. "Is that all you're here to say? I can walk on my own, so move. Or is this some kind of power play, trying to block me in here until I let you play out your weird petplay fantasy on me?"
The handler recoils. "You should be grateful that I'm even here to greet you!" she shrieks. "Not every dog has a handler so caring!"
The pilot steps up onto the bridge and roughly shoves her aside, striding across the bridge followed by a hail of obscenities. She breaks into a run just outside the hanger door, rushing out a checkpoint into the cool outside air of the base's grounds. In a minute she's past another checkpoint, into the on-base housing, slowing to a walk as she heads for the multiple-occupancy units.
Most of the pilots are assigned to special bunks near the hangar, but she has a special exception. It's a nice spot on base to live, since most of the units belong to non-combat personnel with families, and they're by and large nice neighbors.
Even if I can't read your thoughts over the wireless link, I can still see where you are, dear. You're supposed to be going for a debriefing.
"They can debrief me tomorrow, and you know pilots are only supposed to get those as a formality. They're more than happy to cancel them for the others."
The others can't respond to a yes or no question. You can.
"Tomorrow. I'm not dealing with my handler again today."
She jogs up the few stairs in front of one of the houses, pulls a key from a chain around her neck, and opens the door. Inside, the lights are already on. She walks past the living room into the kitchen and calls out a gentle "I'm home!" to the person asleep at the table, before laying a hand on her shoulder and gently shaking her awake.
She groggily opens her eyes and looks up, then all traces of exhaustion disappears as she bolts up excitedly and wraps her arms around the pilot.
"You're back!" she exclaims, holding her tight. "I didn't think you'd be done tonight!"
"Ah. Op went quick this time. It's good to be back, babe," the pilot replies, returning the hug and basking in the smell of her strawberry shampoo.
"Eugh. You smell like sweat and oil. Go take a shower, I'll throw something together for you to eat. If you don't want anything in particular I'm just going to heat up leftovers."
"Leftovers sound really good right now, honestly. You're the best, babe." The pilot releases her wife and heads off to to the bathroom, but pauses for a moment. She checks the indicator on her implants to make sure her mech will hear her, then takes a deep breath.
"I'm going to talk to the personnel office tomorrow, see if they can do something about my handler."