"Nene?"
The ship was constructed in the Second Concordat, with all the grandiosity of the era. It is large enough to house dynasties, convey armies. It has entire suites of chambers constructed for single purposes lost to time. It has concert halls silent for tens of generations, arenas for sporting events no longer practised, firing ranges for obsolete kinds of weaponry. The mech company use not a hundredth of it, not with all their people and equipment and the shipself's indulgent permission to spread out as they wish.
It's not difficult to be alone. At least, not if people don't insist on finding you.
"Nene?"
Nene rode a conveyance-servo to one of the limits of their range, a big iris pressure door sealing off one of the ship's infrastructural spaces from the passenger halls. The shipself doesn't mind her wanderings; it opened for her, and she took a spiralling hike up a columnar hole that stretches from near the ship's skin to deep in its core. Wind whistles constantly up the vast shaft; the way is tangled with biosupport vegetation, varieties with wicked thorns to passively deter sneaking and snooping. Servos, ranging from fingernail-sized grasshoppering to ponderous mech-sized sloth-clambering, went about their business with no attention to her.
A good distance up, a steaming waterfall of coolant water jets from the output of some internal system, crashing through a series of shelves and ponds to humidify the air and help maintain the support plants before being suction-drained away for further use. It is a private spot, where Nene goes to sit beneath a hot torrent and not think. And now a voice echoes faintly up to disturb her, which is making that very difficult.
The voice says something else, quieter, which Nene only catches fragments of; "Ship, are you sure—"
I came here to be alone, Nene chirps the shipself, scattering sad mojigrams in the subline.
But Two Marks was very sad, the shipself chirps back, and Nene sighs and closes her eyes, and that's how Two Marks finds her when the accountant struggles up the last stretch, wriggling through the clawing stalks and angular machines: sitting in a steaming pool, head back, falling water breaking foamily over her hair.
"Nene," Two Marks says softly, from the shore.
"Aran," Nene says, and hears how sad she sounds, and wishes she didn't.
"Are you all right?"
"I am fine," Nene says, because if there is one thing Six Azimuth Falling Nene Red Bat knows, it is how to be fine.
Two Marks pauses for a long time. "I don't think that's true, Nene," she says gently.
"It could be," Nene says. "Wouldn't that be much easier?"
"Nene," Two Marks says, and her stricken tone makes Nene reluctantly drag her eyes open, and slip off her perch of textured deck-metal, launching into a smooth, shallow dive; a last, weightless respite, with only the thunder-thrum of the continually impacting cataract in her ears. She surfaces to startled eyes and clutching hands; "Nene! I thought you were going to—"
A swift glance at the edge, the endless hole, below the rim of which the water is reclaimed.
"No," Nene says, "no, Aran," and presses wet hands to the accountant's cheeks. "And even if, by some accident — the ship wouldn't allow it."
Two Marks tangles her hands in Nene's hair and shudders out a sigh.
"You are not all right," Nene says in a low voice. "And it is my fault."
"How can I be all right when you're not?" Two Marks says plaintively. "Nene—"
Nene climbs out of the water, and the accountant blushes and stutters; Nene sighs and fetches a comb from her neatly folded cockpit sarong, steps to the boundless rim of the shaft, and sits with her feet dangling in the wind. She pulls together a twist of hair, squeezes it out over the drop; lets it unwind, and begins to comb it.
"Aran," she says, and stops, and starts: "Aran, I was born to a house, you understand? I was born to power. And my house hurt me, and I left it, but I don't pretend that makes me any better. It is easy, it is so easy to use people; you have no idea. You have no idea, because you are good." She points her toes, watches the dripping water fall endlessly with every stroke of the comb. "If I don't stop myself—"
"Nene," Two Marks says, in a little, strained voice, and Nene looks over her shoulder. "I am— I am afraid of the edge."
Nene immediately slithers back from it, coming to wind her arms damply around Two Marks's waist, ducking her head to fit under the accountant's chin. "I'm sorry," she says. "I didn't mean—"
"I know," Two Marks says, "I know, I know," holding her tight. "You wouldn't do anything to hurt me on purpose."
"No," Nene agrees with her whole heart, and Two Marks lifts Nene's chin with a brush of her thumb, bends her head to Nene's ear.
"Aha," she murmurs smugly, and Nene is dizzy for a second with it, with her.
"No," she says. "That's. It's not the same. Aran, lovely."
"You'd never hurt me and you know it," Two Marks says triumphantly, hot and soft, right by her ear.
Nene makes a noise of frustrated inability to refute it, buries her face in Two Marks's shoulder, and after a moment of aggrieved intimacy, bites her a little, making Two Marks sigh and wriggle and run nails down her back.
"Nene," she says. "Talk to me."
"I," Nene says into Two Marks's shirt, then presses closer. "...To explain your weakness is to be accurately exploited."
"What was that voice," Two Marks mutters against her hair. "Is that what your mother sounds like?"
"Oh, no," Nene says. "No. Worse. That's Grandmother Dragon-Dragon. She is — well, only metaphorical Grandmother. Head of the house."
Two Marks strokes her nails up and down Nene's drying back, and Nene shivers. "This is the most I've ever heard you say about your family," she says.
"Yes," Nene says, closing her eyes even though Two Marks can't see them.
"Hm," and Two Marks slides her arms around Nene and holds her tight, so Nene remembers an accountant with no friends on board asking if they can eat lunch together, and tries to be as brave.
"You said this was greedy of you," she murmurs. "You don't know, Aran, you don't know. I want— I want—"
"What do you want?"
"What every high Apparat wants," Nene says wretchedly. "To remake my universe with myself at the centre."
"That's not what you want," Two Marks sighs. "Nene...."
"I'm not brave like you," Nene mutters against her shirt.
"You walked out of a high house for all this," Two Marks says, and Nene twists a fist into the fabric of her shirt and inhales long and slow and steadying.
"That," she says, "was not from bravery."
They let it sit there for a while. "If you say so," Two Marks says eventually, very kindly, and tucks a damp lock of hair behind Nene's ear.
"I want to be the centre of my universe," Nene says. "I do. I want to be the centre of yours and Hren's. I want to wake up between the two of you. I want— I want— I want to be—" and she is trying, she is trying so hard to be brave that it's squeezing tears out of the corners of her eyes onto Two Marks's shoulder. "I want to be loved," she says, almost breathless, almost wailing, and Two Marks gently turns her face up in both of her hands, frowning.
"Are you not?" she says softly.
"Well, even I can be, apparently," Nene says, unable to stop now she's started. "...for four years."
Two Marks looks into her eyes, blinking back sudden tears, and says something violently rude under her breath.
"We are going to talk to Hren," she says. "We are going to sit you down, and I am going to tell you I love you, and she is going to tell you she loves you, and we are going to keep saying it until you feel loved. I don't care if it takes five years. I don't care if it takes fifty."
Nene hides her face back in Two Mark's shoulder, where it feels much safer.
"One Peninsular officer to another, Zo-Seven," Hosch-Twelve says to Hren in a quiet moment, after the promotion ceremony has broken up into drinking and people are sliding away to amuse themselves with each other, "you know you should be watching your back, right?"
Hren wrinkles her brow. "I don't know what you mean," she says, though that's not quite true.
"Your women," Hosch-Twelve says bluntly. "Both Apparat, aren't they. And Redbat's high Apparat." She wiggles her hand in a way that connotes the instability of situations, the unreliability of people.
"A lawyer," Hren says noncommitally.
"Ship's sake, Zo-Seven, Paramanuensis doesn't mean lawyer," Hosch-Twelve snorts. "It means above the law. She's high Apparat, shipling."
Hren would very much like to not be in this conversation.
"So," she says, shrugging tensely.
"They take, Zo-Seven, they take like pirates."
Hren licks her teeth. "If you," she says, voice wavering a little, "have any complaint about Pilot Redbat's conduct as a member of the company, the Captain—"
"Oh, befucked, Zo-Seven." Hosch-Twelve scowls. "You know I don't."
"Then," Hren says, "befucked yourself. If you have any other kind of problem with my women, kindly take it up with the hole you shit from," and she flees with as much dignity as she can muster, and locks herself in the nearest head to throw up miserably from stress.