Chapter Text
There was once a girl who lived in a house made of glass. The sunlight poured soft and luminescent and caught in her rose-stained glass hair. She reflected all the light in the world and it passed through her as her constant companion.
Everything she had was made of glass, tinted and dyed so the sparkling refractions cast rosaries of colour over her dirt floor.
One day she awoke to a fire. It melted her in place. Glass turned molten in a flood of dressers and coatracks turned transparent twisted lumps. She screamed but her glass lungs made no sound. Her voiceless voice melted out of her throat and she died, warped and askew.
People would come from near and far to see the modern art display that was her house, now an abstract monument to the fire that destroyed it. The wind would bounce off the misbegotten glass house and create a curious lilting melody.
A young child once sang a song to this tuneless tune. It went like this:
“Oh the wind rises
And the sun falls
The sky is filled with falling stars”
-
“Why do we do this again?” Kyoko asked Sayaka, voice crackling through their comms uplink.
“Because we get paid and because it's fun,” Sayaka said in response.
“So fun.”
Kyoko dragged a lump of melted steel carbon tubing out of the wreckage of the failed escape pod launch bay.
As the metal floated in front of her spacer suit’s six exoskeleton arms, all controlled by thought extension implants, she briefly looked over at the pod’s resident a young woman whose eyes and head were distended from unintentional exposure to a zero air environment, before returning to dismantling the suit for it's boron metals and iodine gas tanks.
“This is the third one this week,” Kyoko said.
“Yeah,” Sayaka replied.
“If this keeps happening support for the United Front is going to drop,” Kyoko replied. “Why keep fighting a war when it’s gonna mean a bunch of dead civvies?”
Sayaka didn't say anything. Instead she looked out at the stars, hugging herself inside her suit.
While Kyouko continued talking to herself, Sayaka activated a transmitter signalling the core resistance member she was working with to their location. The device’s red light, facing inwards inside her exoskeleton, flashed with increasing urgency as if it was the tempo to some song that ended rushed and frantic and seeking resolution.
“Hey Kyoko,” Sayaka whispered. “I love you.”
Kyoko didn't hear her, instead continuing to dismantle the wreckage of something that didn't work the way it was supposed to.
-
The small personnel carrier cut its engines, drifting through the void towards the pair of multi-armed space-suitted disaster scavengers.
“Who is that?” Kyoko asked.
Sayaka stayed silent even as their eye implants overlaid identifying text. Core resistance short-range travel vessel.
“Fuck, what the hell are Resistance doing all the way out here?” Kyoko continued, already activating thrusters towards their small junker.
“Kyoko I need you to know that I love you so much and that what’s going to happen next is something that’s needed to happen for a long time,” Sayaka said.
She grabbed at Kyoko with her extra exo-skeleton arms and activated equal thrust in the opposite direction, locking them in a struggling stasis adrift among the wreck of incomplete escapes. The resistance ship hailed Sayaka with a comms request, even as Kyoko shouted “What the hell are you doing! They’re going to get us!”
Sayaka accepted the comms request. “I’m here and I’ve removed the evidence, pull us both in.”
A curt voice replied. “Affirmative. You said you would be alone.”
That had been her plan, to act as if she was abducted by the Core when Sayaka had been planning the sabotage in the stealth ship she had trailing her and Kyoko’s shared junker, on the nights Kyoko had fallen asleep before her. But somehow, in this last tense moment she realized she couldn’t let go of her girlfriend that easily and now found herself clinging on.
Red hair in the crowd. Waking up to her face snoring beside her. Holding hands on their first date at an Italian restaurant, because of course it had to be food-related with Kyoko. Letting go had seemed easier in her head.
“Trust me Kyoko,” Sayaka said. “I’ll figure this out.”
The Core Resistance ship’s gravity field activated pulling the two from the night sky into the dark.