Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who loves getting that feeling when hanging off of a friendly Mech during a vertical evac
"Is she okay?"
"Yeah."
Caldera Blake Ember lies on her back on the deck plate, smiling at the ceiling, at the smudged halos around every light source, at the engine vibrations in the deck and the corresponding shimmering tingle in her skin.
"Yeah," Stepney repeats, standing somewhere over her, in resigned, guarded way. "She took a knock to the head a few years back, and they ended up putting some gelware in. She's a textbook example of what they're planning to call Environmental Stressor Integration Sequelae Syndrome. It's the Gs on the bugout; messes with the nanofluidics, or something."
"You sure she's okay? She hasn't, like...moved, since we landed."
"The way she tells it," Stepney tells the rookie, "until the gel restabilises, moving just doesn't feel like it matters enough to bother. She's having a great time in there; best feeling in the world."
"You want me to get a medic up here?"
"Not worth bothering them. Half an hour, tops, she'll get up like she hasn't been tripping balls." She can hear Stepney's weary smile: "Thanks, though."
When the rookie walks away, she concentrates very hard through the volitionless euphoria and the noodle-limbed relaxation and inches a hand across the deck until it finds Stepney's boot; strains to hook a fingertip through a loop of bootlace.
"You're the best feeling in the world," she whispers.
"And you're in one of those Martian polycule marriages that dumbfucks like me can't even talk to about the weather without a strategy guide, Blake," Stepney says, low enough it won't carry. "...Don't make us have the talk again."
It feels — just when she's like this, when the world is a warm bath of bliss — that it shouldn't be difficult. That it's all reconcilable, somehow, even when they've had to have the talk, Stepney's achingly gentle I'm from a mononormative culture and my protocols are one-to-one and I can't, like, five times now.
For another half an hour, tops.