Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who is woven from handspun yarn
Benny strolls by the A-Wing pilots' ready room in time to catch Delta Flight on rotation, where Riz is doing a dramatic recital of her latest brush with near-death. Irrepressible; including by a dressing-down from her squadron leader for ridiculously reckless seat-of-the-pants flying.
"Hey, it's everybody's favourite approach traffic controller!" Riz breaks off to twinkle a grin at her. Fighter ace, ladykiller, hellbent on getting herself exploded; an entire cliché cocktail. "Stopping for coffee, Traffic?" She waggles an eyebrow.
"Not today," Benny says, smiling back, and digs in her cardigan pocket. "Just dropping this off for you. Special disciplinary measure."
Riz's face falls. "But I already got reamed for—" and then she stops dead and looks at what Benny's holding out.
"Is that me?" she says, looking at the little crochet pilot.
"No," Benny says. "You're a big, tough, brave and definitely indestructible fighter pilot. This is Soft Riz. She's your cockpit ride-along from now on."
The other pilots are already visibly spooling up to give her so much shit. Riz gingerly takes Soft Riz, examining the woollen hair and the tiny flight suit made from scrap fabric.
"Soft Riz is small and easily injured," Benny says. "We'll be checking in on her status after your sorties; you wouldn't want to get her hurt with one of your stunts, would you."
Riz turns Soft Riz over and over in her hands, then carefully tucks the tiny pilot into her flight suit. "This feels very unfair," she says, in a weirdly subdued way, avoiding Benny's eyes.
"That's what I keep hearing from the fire control crews when they know your bird's coming in," Benny tells her sweetly.
"I hear I have traffic control to thank for turning Riz into a team player," says A-Wing's squadron leader, loitering in the control deck doorway. Below, on the flight deck, Riz is pausing while climbing out of her cockpit, to pointedly brandish Soft Riz at the flight deck overlook windows.
"I heard it's her new co-pilot's influence," the senior Traffic on duty says, with a straight face, and the squadron leader laughs and heads off to debrief her pilots.
"Heads up, Benny," one of her control deck colleagues says exhaustedly, stumbling into the mess hall. "Radio chatter says the supply run's been jumped by Fief hunter-killers on the return leg. Taking heavy fire and coming in hot."
Benny's stomach clenches, but she can't — well, she just can't. "They'll be back in before I'm on rotation," she manages to say, in a reasonably normal voice; just another day, just another escort run, just another job to do. A-Delta? Just another flight. Riz?
Benny's just another pining pilot groupie. She's going to be normal about this. She's going to be so normal.
They have to divert two of A-Delta's mechs to the crashdown bays, Fuengirola because she's too shot up to deploy landing gear, and Persephone—
It takes seven hours for the fire control crews to clear Persephone off the pad, and they have to cut Riz out of the cockpit. A-Wing's squadron leader comes and finds Benny where she's very determinedly being extremely normal.
"Hey, Traffic."
"Sir," Benny says.
"Fire control spent the last hour telling me that 'Seph came in with a burning oxygen leak, and if Riz had jostled the throttle even once the whole way back it would have turned the entire bird into a high-yield incendiary warhead." She kindly ignores Benny stifling a sniffle behind her hand. "She talked herself the whole way through that landing, going it's okay, Soft Riz, we're gonna put her down gentle."
Benny makes some kind of a noise behind her hand, and the squadron leader gives her a pat on the shoulder. "Traffic, she's fine. Sickbay sedated her just to stop her being an asshole, but I've told the nurses to let you know when she's up."
Benny makes a noise that's something like, "Thanks."
"Hi," Riz says, sitting in one of the sickbay beds, voice raspy from smoke.
"Hi," Benny says, hands firmly laced together in front of her, and there's a bit of a silence.
"I tried really hard," Riz says eventually, looking down at her hands. "But — I'm sorry. Soft Riz bought it. Cockpit caught fire ten minutes out from crashdown, and she, uh." Riz fiddles with the edge of one of her many burn dressings, on the palm of one hand. "She was flammable."
Her voice is quiet and, again, subdued. Benny's never seen her look so unconfident, and she aches. "She had the most important orders in that cockpit," she says, "and she followed them all the way."
"Yeah?" Riz looks up at her through her lashes.
"Kept her copilot alive."
Riz gives her an uncertain smile. "When I saw she was burning, I tried to — " she holds the injured hand out a bit. "It was too late, but I could see there was something inside her stuffing—"
Ah.
A small red heart-shaped bead. It had seemed harmlessly sentimental when she'd made Soft Riz.
"Turns out it was already molten and trying to save it was a bad idea," Riz says. "But they tell me I wouldn't let go until they sedated me."
She should find a gold sequin, Benny thinks lightheadedly, looking at the bulkhead. So that the next Soft Riz, when she's finished, can rightfully wear a medal on her chest; conflagration in the line of duty is clearly above and beyond.