Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who doesn’t listen to the voices
Akster is standing outside Rung's cabin when she opens the door, uniform parade-perfect, every hair just so, the dark smears under her eyes the only thing that's not polished to unimpeachable military standard. But she's not the one who goes under the PR cameras, just the voice in Rung's ear, Handler. And she was always like this, didn't do it for the publicity effort. An island, a haven from the chaos, the one thing untouched.
Rung smiles and waves her in, but Akster doesn't move.
"Do you remember the first time?" she says, and Rung's mind flashes through several things she could mean—
No. There's only one thing she means.
Six months into the Third Push. Rung's meds hadn't been in the supply chain for four of them, self-medding on combat stims; they told her to ignore it and let an orphanage burn. Tactical priorities. She'd been telling them for weeks she was hallucinating. She'd gripped the sticks hard enough to hurt, and loudly maintained, over and over, "I'm hearing voices, Handler, I'm hallucinating spurious orders, proceeding with rescue op—"
She'd expected a firing squad, honestly, and at that point it sounded like finally: a rest.
What she got was the whole thing caught by an embedded journalist, the comms logs leaked. She got held up as a hero against the indifferent brutality of Command. And so they did to her what they do to war heroes.
"I can't do another year of wargames with fake moral dilemmas for you to flip out at on-script and start ranting about ignoring the voices while you do the Saturday-morning-cartoon-obvious right thing, Rung," Akster says, leaden. "I fell in love with a pilot under the hammer, not an Army PR streamer with a gimmick. I'm transferring out."
Rung gropes for the steady support of the doorframe.
"Where—" she croaks, but there's only one transfer destination, really, no matter how massive and amorphous it is: The Front. "They're dying out there, Ak."
"Yes," Akster says. "They are," and Rung can't look her in the eye, clutches the doorframe with both hands while the tears well, in her comfortable priceless-PR-war-hero quarters, tens of thousands of klicks from the nearest genuine risk.
"I'm sorry," she whispers.
"Don't," Akster says. "Don't. I just need to be able to look myself in the eye."