Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who you can’t stop being nice to you, because they can’t push through it all any other way
The day they give Lifer's face back, she strides up behind Megan in the mess and wordlessly dangles the shades over her shoulder. Megan twists round in her seat to look up at her, at a shiny black reflection of herself.
Lifer is still wearing Megan's baseball cap.
"No more soup, then," Megan says, feeling like she's trying to solve simultaneous equations and failing.
If Lifer was going to give the hat back, she'd just have impassively shoved it at her. If Megan asks for the hat back, Lifer will methodically seize on it as evidence she can dictate to Megan how friendship works, that Megan will acquiesce to a model of fleeting transactional altruism. If she doesn't, Lifer's going to beat her round the head with it later to get her to acquiesce.
"No," Lifer acknowledges, and doesn't move, because she wants a reaction.
Megan looks at her, and darts a glance at an empty chair near her, next to Hopalong, as if she's contemplating offering do you want to—?
Lifer hustles back to her usual spot, inscrutably, like she just happened to time out whatever limit for social interaction she has.
"She's fucking with you," Joystick says round a mouthful of beans. "She's totally fucking with you."
"What do you want me to do about it?" Megan points out reasonably.
Megan has her annual med checkup, and while she's in there, the ship's shrink just happens to drop by for some totally legitimate doctor reason, and just happens to try to strike up a conversation.
"This isn't school," Megan tells him firmly. "You can't order me to sit next to the problem kid and be a good influence."
"No need for hostility," the shrink says, trying to shrug it off with laughter. "Listen, we all know that's not how friendships form in adults—"
"It's not how friendships form in kids," Megan says. "You'd just have more authority to order me if I was six."
The knock on the cabin door is crisp and regular, and Caro gives her a wild-eyed look. "Is your robot hookup gonna turn up here on the regular?" she hisses.
"Oh fuck off," Megan tells her, and opens the hatch to find Lifer leaning, almost like someone who's winded; an arm braced either side of the doorway, featureless face inclined downwards.
"You told the shrink you're not my friend," Lifer says, and waits, and Megan folds her arms.
"Yeah," she says, and waits for Lifer to straighten up and turn to simply walk off. "I don't rat my friends out," she adds sweetly to Lifer's back, and Lifer turns her head sharply enough for her cervical root servos to audibly whine.
"Funny," Lifer says distinctly.
"That's devastatingly sarcastic," Megan tells her, smiling, and Lifer turns all of the way back round to her and raises her voice.
"Want to know about robot hookups?" she says loudly, past Megan. "Can't fuck without my face on. Only humans who want to fuck with the face on are greasy rebuild fetishists."
Megan's not sure whether to laugh. "That's rough," she says, sugaring on the sympathy.
"Rough?" Lifer tilts her head, just a little, the way anyone else might, and Megan knows how entirely calculated it is. "You have no idea." She flexes her hands. "Sex joke," she adds inflectionlessly. "Ha ha," and this time she does leave.
"Make the evil sex robot not come back," Caro demands, when Megan closes the door, and Megan can only shrug helplessly.
"I do not control the evil sex robot," she says, and just saying it makes her crack up.
Lifer comes and finds her when she's in the gym. The cyborg waits until Megan pauses for a breather, then leans against the wall, letting her shoulder fall against the metal with a solid, unignorable mechanical thud.
"Yeah, I can see you lurking," Megan says, uncapping her water.
"Hurt your feelings," Lifer says, and Megan could almost swear that if she could see under Lifer's face, she'd be frowning at her. "Hurt. Your. Feelings."
(She's still wearing Megan's hat.)
"I know," Megan tells her, just a bluntly. "What? I know," and Lifer just stands there, like she doesn't have an answer prepped for that.
Megan tosses her hands up in a brief, limp whatcha gonna do gesture.
"Suck it up," she says.