Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who wants to put a mask on their rival's face
You wake up in sickbay feeling like a bloated corpse, and Little Miss Perfect is sitting alongside your cot, booted feet up on the bedside unit. In a moment so on point it verges on self-parody, she's reading the Model IV maintenance manual.
You wonder blearily, for a second, if you're having a nightmare; but you've never had one that so realistically captured simultaneously feeling dehydrated to the point of itchy-eyed pain, and desperately needing to pee.
"You're awake," she says, soft and weird and crinkled around the eyes, closing the book and putting it down on the bed, next to your feet.
"Jury's out," you rasp. "Th' fuck happened? Musta done something really fucked-up stupid."
She glances over at the nurse's station at the end of the room, where there is currently no nurse. "What do you remember?"
"Dunno." You think. "Hazy. Mess hall? Going to sleep? Normal fuckin' — hey what day is it."
"What day do you remember it being?"
Oh, that's fucking alarming. "I d— Thursday?"
"Right." She smoothes her uniform so she doesn't have to look at you. "It's late Sunday."
"Oh shit." Friday, it swims to you, was the day: your class was switching from software mech sims to the ones that use a real cockpit pod. "Oh shit what did I do. I did something. Why else would you be here no offense shit I'm gonna get discharged and die—"
She drops a hand on your blanketed knee. "Um," she says.
Um is, horrifyingly, not no you didn't, which means yes you did, but even worse than that—
"You know there are two cockpit buffer fluid formulations, because some people have a reaction to Formula A?"
A continuous noise starts, somewhere in a deep pit inside you, worming its way through you like a brutally nosing parasite, sawtoothing out of your throat. You can't look at her. You can't not look at her.
"It's fine," she says hastily, and you shake your head, because if it was fine she wouldn't be here.
"You don't remember anything?"
Shake, shake.
"You turned up in my quarters in the middle of Friday night, delirious and...swollen up like a walking beesting."
In her— oh god oh fuck oh no.
"And you tried to glue a clown mask on my face."
...What.
That's bizarre enough that the noise stops coming out of you. No, what the fuck, actually. What.
"So, you know, delirious, inflammation; you were in here on a drip from Friday night, they only took it out an hour ago."
"Delirious," you say slowly. What a horrible, horrible, foreboding word, and she looks at you with clear brown eyes, not a trace of judgement or mockery or ill-will, and oh fuck oh no you definitely said things that are bad.
"You said you need to hide my face so you could concentrate," she says. "You called it 'haunting'."
Oh nooooooo.
She looks at you. You look at her.
"If this was a conversation I wanted to ever have with you," you say, cracked and weary, "we've been training together for, what, a year?" She tries to say something, and you interrupt. "No, no, yeah, that's rather fucking moot now, but I didn't want to. And right now I'm — this is a vulnerable position, where we're not on an equal footing to leave the conversation."
She opens her mouth again, checks herself, sits with it. Nods, takes her hand off your knee in a measured, casual way. "That's — yes," she says softly. "For the record, I would like a conversation, when you're ready."
"Noted."
She nods, eyes sliding off you, giving the bedside bulkhead a tiny thoughtful frown. "Nothing you said is on the official record," she adds quietly. "Just — that you weren't acting in your right mind."
"Okay." Okay. "Thanks."
She twitches the corner of her mouth, like she — like she wasn't expecting this to go like this, at all. She stands up, pauses. "Competing with you makes me better," she says finally. "If you don't get out of that bed and get along with Formula B, I'm — it's going to fuck me up. So. Get well soon?"
You have sweated blood all year to come what feels like, even when it isn't actually, distant second.
"Roger that," you say, give her a sloppy salute, and watch her leave sickbay with her brisk, neat walk.
After another hour of wallowing abjectly while staring at the ceiling, you get bored enough to crack her forgotten mech service manual, which is how you discover Little Miss Perfect has slapped its covers round the filthiest imaginable glossy porn anthology of custom...accessorised...droids and mechs railing seven hells out of pretty girls.
Some pages have dogears.
Oh no. Oh, shit, noooooo, you did not need new kinks to go with this—
You hide it under your pillow. For, y'know, so you can give it back when you talk. Obviously.
Shit.