Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who you can't fix 'coz they ain't broken!
Megan gets to know the shop crowd, Tim with the gauges and Josie and Dinosaur Dave and RJ, and a surrounding halo of broke musicians, artists, students, and bums.
Lifer does piercings, these days. ("Selectively injure people for money.")
Word of mouth, people who know people who know there are job openings, and Megan finds herself training on the big dockside cargo walkers, swivel-waisted high-tonnage industrial mechs that lift and rack cargo containers by the dozen like they're missiles in a pod.
It's slow, tough, precise, skilled work. Vastly different from combat mechs; and at the same time, weirdly the same. She waltzes through the light lifter cert, the ponderous but manoeuvrable one- and two-container walkers, and steadily racks up hours towards heavy cert.
"You miss it?" she asks Lifer, a little hesitant, nursing a drink in a beer garden near the tattoo parlour, while the civilians — while her new friends, she diligently corrects herself — drink and smoke and chatter and make out in whatever inadvisable combinations.
Lifer screws a 3D-printed adapter into her throat, snaps a bottle of mineral water into it, and squeezes some hydration into herself. It's not medically approved, but there are like two entire suppliers, groundside, for the official hydro bulbs that match her ports, and the markup on them is a fucking crime. Lifer takes care of herself, cleans her ports diligently, keeps an eye out for any sign of inflammation.
"Yes," Lifer says, and telegraphs a shrug. "Was good at it. Civvie street less forgiving about psych."
Megan runs her thumbnail up the edge of her beer bottle's label, and doesn't say I told you you should have cooperated more.
"Wouldn't have helped," Lifer says anyway.
"No. I know." It's not fair. They both know it's not fair.
"How come you're friends with Lifer?" Josie says, when Megan's waiting for them to close up one evening.
"Not my friend," Megan deadpans, in exact time with Lifer saying "Not her friend."
Josie looks between them, and Megan gives her a feral mech-pilot grin.
Later on, she pauses in the deep shadow of a doorway, sent to round up smoking stragglers so they can move on to a club — Lifer's probaby going to split at that point, and Megan too, she thinks. She feels incredibly older than Lifer's colleagues, even if in raw years there's not that much between them. She's tired. Sometimes she half envies Lifer her face.
Josie's huddled up near Lifer, outside, talking. Lifer, of course, doesn't smoke.
"You're a fuckboi," Lifer says, with Lifer's ruthless lack of tone, subtlety, or volume modulation. Not loud, but not compensating for the quiet night air, either. "Used to easy pickings. Drunk students. Sexy experiments."
"Jesus, say what you mean, why don't you," Josie says, wide-eyed and rocked back on her heels and wrapped around herself defensively.
"Not a girl," Lifer says. "A woman. She'll melt your face off."
"Is this — is this a shovel talk?" Josie sounds half-incredulous.
"Take care of herself," Lifer says, and swivels on her heel; Megan drops back a few quick, quiet steps, doesn't bother with any pretense that she's just arriving at the door when Lifer comes in.
"Sounded kinda like a shovel talk," Megan says.
"Not your friend," Lifer says.
"Lifer," Megan says, and pauses, hands in her pockets. "Look, I can't see that going anywhere, but if — she asks — I can just turn her down. I don't wanna screw up your gig for you."
Lifer gives her a long stare.
"Not going to screw up my job," she says, and leaves.
Megan and Josie go on exactly two, awkward, dates, and then have an irregular string of easy, low-pressure hookups.
"Change your callsign to Cougar," Lifer says, chalking her pool cue.
"Maybe you should try getting laid," Megan fires back. All the angles on the table are lousy, but Lifer's going to methodically demolish it the second Megan makes a mistake. That's how it always goes.
"Get laid every weekend since I moved here," Lifer says, and Megan immediately fucks up her stroke. "Pay a professional. Used to rebuilds. Very good. Never have to take my face off."
Megan leans on her cue, grip tight around it, watching Lifer matter-of-factly line up shot after shot after shot. She feels — she doesn't know, off balance.
"I don't wanna sound," she says, wets her lips, "you know. Sex work, it's real work. It's fine. You do you. But you — could find someone, if you wanted to?"
Lifer finishes sinking everything. "Spent too long being the evil sex robot whisperer, Megan," she says.
"I mean it."
"Know you do." The blank black face tilts, watching her for a second.
"You're difficult, sure," Megan persists. "But show me who's not."
Lifer racks up the next game and doesn't say anything.
When Megan turns up red-eyed and stiff-shouldered, Lifer instantly turns away from her, marches into the back, and hauls Josie off a chair by the hand, shrieking in pained surprise.
"Lied," she's saying matter-of-factly, when Megan lunges into the room after her. "Break your fucking thumbs."
"Lifer!" Megan bellows, big and mean and pitched to get through to meatheads. "Let her go and step away! I will put you on the deck—"
Lifer lets go of her and puts her hands where Megan can see them.
"The fuck do you think you're doing." Megan shoves her, not gently, and Lifer takes it, keeping her hands up at shoulder level, but not looking at Megan; face pointed unwaveringly at Josie.
"Hurt your feelings," Lifer says.
"My landlord sold the building and I'm gonna be homeless in thirty days," Megan snarls. "The hell made you jump straight to — you like these people."
"Not their friend," Lifer says.
"Not mine either!"
"Different," Lifer says.
"Are you a crazy robot," Josie says, high-pitched and shocky, and Megan ought to — ought to — but what she does is round on her like an enraged drill sergeant.
"Lifer took a penny-sized blob of molten cockpit spall through the side of her skull, fast enough to punch clean out the other side," she barks. "Lived long enough for them to fill her head back in with gel and relearn to walk and talk and dress herself, before I ever met her, and got back in the cockpit and flew like she was born in the fucking sky. Toughest fucker I have ever met. She wants to call herself an evil robot, she can do what she likes. You fucking don't."
Into the dead silence, Lifer eventually says, looking away from either of them, "Got a couch. Bunk while you're looking."
"You're still an asshole," Megan says, a takes a fistful of the back of Lifer's shirt to turn her towards the entrance. "You are gonna be back here tomorrow, and you are gonna say you're sorry," and Lifer...doesn't say No.
They end up at Lifer's place, which Megan hasn't seen so much as a hint of before, with a crate of beers and a heavy thunderstorm silence.
"What the fuck, Lifer," Megan says gruffly, looking up the door of a townhouse. Megan has been renting a room, and barely affording that.
"Inherited it," Lifer says, unlocks the door, points out kitchen, bathroom, living room. "Lied," she adds. "Entire guest bedroom."
"I can't—"
"Be angry at me for being an asshole. Be an asshole about this. Pick one."
"Well," Megan concedes, "I'm not done being angry," and slides down on the actual couch in Lifer's living room with a beer, and looks the other way when Lifer sits in an armchair and peels off her face to take a beer of her own. "Are you even allowed to drink?"
"Not my doctor," Lifer says, which Megan acknowledges with a grunt.
"Seriously," she says, after a while. "What the fuck was that?"
"Not your friend," Lifer says. "Friend is human connection. Not one of you. Aftermarket brain doesn't do things right, doesn't do right things." She takes a sip of beer. "Still does things."
"Lied," Megan translates, "about being friends, because you do neurodivergent friendship. What a surprise to me, because I am so incredibly stupid and never thought of that, Lifer."