Pain came and went, carved its way through the body of time like the cruel blade of a dull knife. Moments of shrieking and screaming passed into the night, the broken ripping and bleeding of soul that came with the knowledge that half her being was gone, cruelly hacked free and ripped away. Her life, her mind, her body, her entire reason for living...
Gone.
And it had been the Coralate that had taken it all from her.
Somewhere in the hazy, dull and broken fragments of night, she found a pair of scissors tucked into a drawer, sandwiched between a pair of old, stressed denim civilian jeans and the black leather riding jacket she didn’t wear anymore. In the stillness, the hesitant return of memories that drifted back from a happier time, she ran one hand slowly across the old German flag and the old name Deutschland emblazoned across the thick leather of the jacket, absorbed the difference in texture like a blind man, eyes staring distantly, vacantly off into some other place, some other time. An old pair of sunglasses rattled somewhere near the bottom of the drawer as she pushed it closed.
Fifteen minutes later, she stood up suddenly from a crouch and stared blankly at the razor edged blades of the scissors in her hand. Years ago, she’d slipped them between the jacket and jeans in the midst of some strange mood, left them there as a reminder of a part of her past she felt like she’d lost, left behind somewhere along the way to becoming a woman, a partner, an LC. Now, even those feelings felt distant, lost– only the scissors remained, and even they retained little memory of how she had felt in those days, who she had been, what she had cared about. Within her mind, there was only Izzy, a black, immovable and featureless cloud that hung like a corpse over everything, blotting out all emotion, all thought and function of mind with images of her face in the throes of death, her final, broken words...
I’ll miss you.
Tessa closed her eyes, fought the demons which threatened to rise within her again, fist squeezing against the scissors’ unyielding steel– but still the pain grew, fired itself and rose above everything until all that was left to do was scream, was bear teeth and cry out against the bladed edges of the shard of agony lodged within her tortured heart. It should have been me! She screamed. God, why wasn’t it me!?
Turning sharply away from the drawer, she stumbled back into the main room of the quarters she had shared with Izzy, scissors held loosely in one weak hand. Eyes squeezed against tears again, hands tightening into fists, screams dying on choking sobs, broken noises. Every step was a blind fumbling, a struggle waged and lost against the darkness, the pain of loss. In the haze, she stumbled over a stack of Izzy’s books, reached out in a vain attempt to catch herself, caught and then slammed sideways against a shelf Izzy had filled with more books, priceless books, copies of things that were hard to find in digital anymore, but the shelf didn’t hold, wouldn’t support her as she fell, and left her trying to shield herself instead, crying out and bleeding into the carpet under the hail of falling novels that landed in heaps all around her, dusty, filling her senses with the smell of her lover. Eyes opened reluctantly, saw the open pages of a book Izzy had set aside unfinished, a book that still bore the creasing of archaic pages, the marks that were Izzy’s way of tracking her progress through a novel. All around her, bits of Izzy assailed her senses– fragments, remnants that could not be ignored, scraps of a life that hung like a layer over everything, on everything, in everything. For a moment, the smells, the sensations, the memories became too much, became stifling. Tessa gasped, coughed, choked, dropped onto hands and knees, mouth working for air, drawing in more and more of her lover, words, name pounding over and over in her brain. Izzy. Izzy. Izzy!
“I have to...” Tessa panted, tried to swallow, choked and retched instead. Fists dug into carpet, one hand squeezing violently against the scissors. “The smell... I can’t...” Eyes closed against the rising pain, forced tears from between lids, lips skinning away from bared teeth.
“I have to get rid of it! I have to get away from it!” She cried out suddenly. “The smell! Oh god! Izzy! Izzy!”
Time passed in a merciful haze again. Somewhere along the way, she had shed her clothes, and memories of hurling books and shelving into a corner haunted her in the darkness. Curled into a ball in the farthest end of the shower from the head, she found a fragment of the peace she sought, slept the drizzled and shivering sleep of the tortured, the broken slivers of images, dreams and memories slowly shredding her out of each sparse, short moment of tired, blank solace. One tight fist held the pair of scissors against her chest, held it like a blade poised between her breasts, wet steel cold, flat against skin and bone. How much time passed there, she didn’t know, couldn’t know. Crying softly and unable to sleep anymore, she stood, walked to the wall and collapsed forward against it, wet skin shivering, clinging brokenly to synthplast tile. Another indeterminable gulf of time passed before she pushed away again, fumbled with the dials that silenced the shower.
Eyes blinked numbly in the light of her quarters as she made her way to the bathroom mirror, toweled off the condensation that clung to it like a sheet of water. In the sudden clarity of her reflection, her eyes found the cool cobalt stare of another Tessa, a Tessa who looked haggard and distant, broken, her gaze almost dead, almost corpselike. In the back of her mind, something came alive, urged her into action, and with all the careful patience of a ritual, she gently dried herself, dropped the towel and stood staring blankly at her naked reflection in the mirror again. Somehow, one hand found a brush, left the pair of scissors in its place. Moving with that same slow sense of patience, she gently worked over every inch of her long, midnight hair, brushing it carefully and completely into a sleek silkiness. Beside the sink, the scissors beckoned, glinted with a tiny reflection of some unseen light. In a way, they reminded her of the blade-like appendages of the Cygnan that had stabbed her, that had called to life those orbs of deadly chrome, those slivers of vicious, living metal that had ripped so mercilessly through Izzy, eviscerating organs and tissues, reducing her to a bloody pulp, a lifeless husk that could only breathe the words I’ll miss you.
And then, without any sense of warning, Tessa stopped. Staring down at the scissors, something snapped, something in the way the steel caught the light, made it look viscous, liquid, chrome. Eyes rose to meet hers in the mirror, brush stalling in her hair, hanging in a river of silken midnight– she only felt it when the mirror cracked, shattered under the force of the fist that darted out to slam against it, blood welling across knuckles and shards of reflected skin, reflected midnight. The brush clattered across the floor, abandoned, and in the next instant, she had the scissors in her hands again, held in her fist like a knife, poised on the edge of an action her heart cried out for, her soul wanted, needed. Shards of crimson-stained chrome flashed back at her from the depths of the broken mirror, seemed to urge her on, bloodthirsty, eager. Do it. End it all. End it. End it!
She cried out as she raised the scissors, muscles tensing in a breath of hesitation, and then the blade came down, swept in on a vicious arc that flashed in the shattered glass, flashed with the colors of spilled blood even before she buried it into the ruins of the cruel mirror, twisted the blades like a pair of knives jutting from the chest of some Coralate soldier, that Coralate soldier, that damned blueskin. Glass clicked against steel, chittered as hands fell away from cold, bloodsmeared handles.
“No.” She said suddenly. “I won’t.” Then quieter, “I won’t.”
Somehow, she fell asleep curled into a ball of cold, bare skin beside the bed she’d shared with Izzy for as long as she could remember. Old blood clung to her cheek in a sticky crust, stiffened her wounded knuckles, stuck here and there in her hair. Sprawling out across the floor on her chest, she stared at the opposite wall, saw the subtle glow of a message waiting on the monitor of her console. Blinking tiredly, she picked herself up, stood swaying for a moment, then pushed herself forward, catching herself on the back of a chair before sitting down and triggering the playback.
Wake for Davidson, Harley and Copperfield, Izandra at eleven hundred hours.
A glance at the clock told her it was still somewhere in the morning, a little over an hour before the send off, the final farewell. Fresh tears pulled at Tessa’s eyes, lips parting as she drew in a long, shaky breath.
For the first time in years, she had lost two pilots.
For the first time in years, she was suffering through it alone.
