Cohost writing prompt: @make-up-a-starship-pilot — Starship pilot who is willing to give this “telling the truth” thing a fair go
Another shitty sleepless night, before another thankless guerilla op. The mechanics are working through, fuelling and checking and doing the last-minute jury-rigged repairs on the squadron of Switchblade escorts, the dropships, the payload-converted erstwhile-freighter light bombers.
The air is oppressively hot and laced with the smells of metal and oil. You should be sleeping. And — as you amble blearily into the alcove joking referred to as the mess and rummage in the cooler for an uncaffeinated drink below skin temperature and find Irma coiled on the sagging couch, poking at what might be tomorrow's briefings, but is probably a sudoku or smut — so should she.
"Ready for the morning, hotshot?" you croak tiredly. "Gonna need the galaxy's best pilot fit and rested, you know."
She doesn't look up from her paperscreen. She doesn't curl her fucking annoying grin. She snorts, instead, a harsh dismissal you don't remember ever hearing, and it stops you, had clenching around the sweating plastic bottle in your hand.
"Irma?" you says uncertainly, and she tosses the screen onto the floor with a flimsy clatter and finally looks at you.
"Fifth best. On this base. On a good day," she says flatly, and it looks like she hasn't slept for a lot longer than tonight.
"Hey," you say, and run your hand uneasily through your raggedly cropped hair. "Is that any way to talk about the only flygirl here who can thread a Masshawk through the Lionhead Eye?"
"Have you ever actually seen me do that," she says, mouth a viciously thin line. "Have you ever seen me do half the shit I say?"
"Irma—"
This life, the relentless losses and all-too-few wins, grinds down morale. It breaks peoples' nerve. But you don't know what to say to Irma, to bolster her; you don't really know what goes on behind the swagger and the glittering eyes, the relentless self-belief. You've leaned on her for years, for much longer than all this. If she falters—
"No," she says, hard. "Don't Irma me. I talk shit all the time and you let me and it's not enough to survive this. I've been on borrowed time since our first fucking sortie with these guys, I'm barely good enough to pull my weight out there. When we're all flying so close to the wire that we can only pull out the wins that the worst pilot in the air can bring home, that's me. I'm fucking us. I'm fucking everyone. And it's going to see more than just me go down burning."
"That's not—" don't say it's not true; she's already in some kind of mood, she'll get so angry— "that's not how any of this works, Irm."
She looks at you with mean, glittering eyes, and says nothing.
"You don't have to stay." There are a million things she could be doing, instead of piloting broken-down barely-ships for an insurrection that's barely more than a glorified campaign of nuisance against the regime. Things where she could be eating better, making money, sleeping through the night. You asked her to get you here so that you could join up, never more than that.
She closes her eyes and slumps tiredly in on herself, with a long escape of breath. When she opens her eyes again, she just looks bottomlessly sad.
(And she looked at you that way, sometimes, even before all this. If you admit it.)
"I have a great belief in the transformative potential of the politics of violent resistance," she lies, and hauls herself off the couch. "Go the fuck to bed."