Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who asks if we can bond over something other than generational trauma
"You need to get out more, Sarge."
"Sure thing, Rosemary."
They hadn't known each other in the war. They only met years later, in this dismal block of Fleet veterans' housing. They aren't even friends, really, their doors are just opposite sides of the corridor and they nod to each other in passing, hold the lift when they can see each other coming, that kind of thing.
Being called Sarge is, tragically, the closest thing to feeling at home she's had in years.
Groceries go in the kitchen, and then she sits on the couch. Everything is grey. Everything's been grey for a long time, and life has shrunk and shrunk until it's these four walls.
On bad nights she has to sit inside the wardrobe until even this stops feeling too big to handle. She should get out more. But even turning on the TV and seeing more than this feels too much.
There's a knock at the door, and she reflexively glances at the calendar. Tuesday; probably Plumstead, with his headful of shrapnel, who can't remember which unit is his or how to find out, knocking until he finds someone home who can take him upstairs and point him at the correct door. "Just a minute," she calls, and goes to answer.
It's not Plumstead.
"I need you to do me a favour, Sarge," Rosemary says.
She blinks at her owlishly. They don't even really know each other. "Okay?"
"Excellent! I'll wait while you grab a jacket."
Bewildered, she meekly acquiesces; picks up keys and jacket and follows her neighbour out, and they spend the evening at a local arts centre, setting out chairs and stringing fairy lights, ready for a poetry recital by schoolchildren the following day.
"My friend Zeta usually comes along with me, but she's offplanet for a family thing and forgot to let me know," Rosemary explains airily, and really, does it need anything more?
They stop for a pot of tea on the way home, and she sleeps exhaustedly.
"Hello, Sarge! Zeta's still not back and we're supposed to be doing a thing tonight."
She blinks at Rosemary several times. Outdoors? For something unfamiliar? Twice? Twice in a week?
"I'm in the middle of...." she says weakly, trailing off in a nonspecific sort of apologetic way.
"Are you?" Rosemary says, gaze steady, very kindly.
She's been watching the laundry in the machine go around and around. She finds herself tugging a jacket on, because it's easier than explaining why she can't.
They go down to the Speedway, where crowds of teenagers seem to be working on and showing off dragster mechs, the most chopped-up, over-engined, customised roadsuits she's ever seen, all chrome and immaculate paint and accent lights. They don hi-viz "Volunteer Safety Marshal" tabards and wander around, telling people not to be obviously silly. It's teenagers with heavy machinery; telling them is futile and full-time.
"You're much better at yelling than Zeta is," Rosemary says over tea, on the way home, grinning.
She stands in for Zeta at book club and community litter-picking and a taster session for a pottery class and a bake sale for the local nursery school and making placards then waving them outside city hall about district re-zoning, and board games night at the library and a sponsored fundraising walk and two different art shows at the arts centre.
She sleeps like the exhausted dead.
After three weeks she goes out of the building to go to the shops, and has to flee back inside, shaking and hyperventilating. Rosemary opens her door and immediately steers her to the sofa with a blanket round her, checks in a calm no-nonsense way whether she has heart problems or otherwise needs a doctor, and presses a mug of hot chocolate into her hands.
"The sky's blue," she eventually manages to say, but can't explain it any better.
Rosemary doesn't ask her to.
"How do you do it, Rosemary?" she asks somewhat later, when she's nearly managed to stop shivering; and for the first time she sees Rosemary's smile slip, and she just looks tired.
"You get out more," Rosemary says quietly.