This is How It Is Not

This is how it is not.

You can forget.

Whole minutes, hours, sometimes almost the whole day, you can forget.

Things are very much as they used to be, after all.  Your quarters with the gaily colored blanket knit your mother's youngest brother knit for you when you first left home spread carefully over the bed, your office with all the books you've been meaning to read for about two years now on the shelves and the familiar copy of Iuenan's famous holo of the Salaajo dancer on the wall, the hangar with the perpetual faint tang of machine oil and freeze-burned metal, the mess with bowls of apples on every table ...

Things are so very much as they used to be, you can forget that they aren't how they used to be, won't ever be how they used to be, not ever again.

You even look the same, no suddenly grey hair or new lines showing in the mirror.  No dark shadows beneath your eyes telling the world of nightmares, because you're a professional and you're not about to ignore what you know is best practice.  Exercise, healthy food, meditation, plenty of water, sometimes pills, mild ones only, when absolutely necessary, scrupulously logged with two of your colleagues from Pilot Roth's medical staff.  Your eyes are bright, your skin clear, your clothes no tighter or looser than they were a year ago.

You look perfectly healthy, in the mirror, so perfectly healthy that you can forget that you aren't perfectly healthy, won't ever be perfectly healthy, not ever again.

This is how it is not.

You do your job as well as you used to, listen and question and follow the thread of the half-hinted revelation, offer a glass of water or a box of tissues when they're needed but not when they'd break the flow words from the patient sitting across from you. You ask how they feel about what they've told you, offer patience and kindness and at just the right moment the gentle nudge that steers them towards why they're really there. Never judging, never shocked, you're the calm face that makes it possible to put words around what's unspeakable, giving them the confidence that whatever it is that gnaws away at their heart in the darkest hours of the night, it can be faced and tamed and brought to heel. They don't know that it's a lie, and so for them it isn't one.

You lie so well that for hours at a time you can forget that you know the truth now: that some beasts can never be defeated and some dark hours never end.

This is how it is not.

You can let a door close behind you without running through a calming exercise to keep your shrieking nerves from flooding your system with enough adrenaline to drop you hard into dark so black I can't tell if my eyes are open and someone screaming and they can't, they can't, they can't do this, it's a mistake, a mistake ...

You can glance casually around a room without bracing yourself in case you see a slightly-above average height man with a stocky build and light brown hair, a man just close enough to memory for your treacherous subconscious to do the rest and put you on my back and the hangar floor is cold and the weight of him is making it hard to breathe and there's nowhere that I still belong to myself now, not a single place, not even inside myself ...

You can go out without double checking the watch with the alarm that lets you know when you have to be back to take the needle from the box and stick it into the vein in your forearm, the vein pocked and pitted now with the only external marks of the constant battle between the poison and the nanites in your blood.

This is how it is not.

You can unwrap the neat package of words you've put around what happened and how you feel about it, the shiny coating that proves to the colleagues whose patient you are just how well you're dealing with what happened, how professional you've been, how much insight you have into your own case.

You don't find yourself kneeling on the shower floor with the warm water sluicing tears and snot from your face, sobbing Mumma, mumma until your throat is so sore and swollen a wave of panic breaks over you the vitoxin, the nanites have stopped working ...

You don't wake to sodden, stinking sheets, and sneak out to haul them to the 'cycler yourself so the ensign assigned to linen duty on your floor won't know that the crew's psychologist wets her bed every night.

This is how it is not.

You can see a way for you to live through this, imagine a future, not necessarily a good one but some sort of future, at least, with you in it.

This is how it is not.

You can forget.

Impossible Situations

You did your job.


Right, left, right-right, the heavy dummy jerking and rocking with each blow despite the weights at its base.

You were in an impossible situation.


Elbow, knee, fist. Left hook, right jab, right again and a kick.  Sweat burned her eyes, her breath coming short and fast as she pushed past her implants' ability to compensate, a blur of movement an untrained eye would have trouble tracking.  Hell, even a trained, unaugmented one.


Helmi is very well trained and she's packed full up to her back teeth with some of the best wiring money can buy.

All of it so there'll never be a situation that's impossible when it comes to Pilot's safety.

No matter what Pilot's sister says.


There's good enough, and not good enough, and a gap in between wide as the space between the stars, but no situation is impossible, if you're good enough, if you train hard enough, if you get it right.

Helmi got it wrong, there's no question of that.

Got herself good and dead, for one thing. Clear sign of a fuck-up.

Let Pilot get hurt. A little, Invelen had said. Before I realized.


The dummy jerks and dances, the casing beginning to split. Helmi hits it again, and again, leaving smears of blood despite the wraps over her knuckles. Her arms ache, her vision blurs, the bruises on her elbows and forearms and knees and shins are bad enough now for their dull warning ache to get past the pain suppression implant with each impact.

There's a limit, that's what Pilot's sister had said, making excuses Helmi didn't need made, offering forgiveness she hadn't asked for. There wasn't anything else you could have done.


But Helmi's not interested in forgiveness, and she's never been any better with limits than she is with excuses.  Not as a cadet, not in basic, not when Pilot's people hauled her off her crippled transport and the first face she saw as the marines snapped open their helmets was Sarge's.


You again, he'd said, even though they'd only met the once.

Me again.

Home Guard and Peace and Order, court-martial offence for either of them. Sergeant and Private on the same crew, same result. Lines that don't get crossed.

But Helmi and Sarge cross a lot of lines these days. After all, they live in a world where you come back to work two days after a bullet shatters your skull or a steel hand snaps your neck.  That's a pretty big fucking line, right there. 


Death used to be a limit.


Not any more.

Sarge forgave her for killing him. Helmi's still working on forgiving him for his forgiveness.

Not your fault, Alpassi, he'd said. Nothing you could have done.

But Helmi's not interested in excuses.

There's always something you can do.

If you try hard enough, work long enough. 


No situation is impossible.

Not even mine.

The Worst Of It: Two

You can hold onto pain, like it's a physical thing, curl yourself around it like the little sister you'd die to protect, if you want to.

Put your faith in it like the ancestors you don't have and the spirits you only pray to in foxholes.

Hold it close, so you can't feel shame or guilt past the fire of your cramping muscles, can't see the endless chain of sleepless nights ahead past the jangling colors spiraling across your field of vision, can't taste the copper coin of despair past the sour bile burning in your throat. Fill yourself with it until the hum of it in your veins drowns out everything else, until it coils through your body like smoke through a crematorium.

Amieta clung to the pain, clenched her fists on it until the servos whined and the joints grated in protest.

No more than I deserve.

There were voices, sometimes. Sometimes they were voices she knew. A woman's, soft and tender as the hands that smoothed her hair, that wiped her face. Ami? Can you hear me? Ami?

More often they were harsh, Amarr-accented, voices that went with blood and screaming and everyone dead, every single one of them but me.

The voice she thought she knew, her sister's voice, told her It isn't real, Ami, what you see, it isn't real. You're safe, with me, I'm here, Ami. Gentle fingers tried to prise open her fists, but flesh-and-blood was no match for Zainou's finest work. Cia gave up and wrapped her own hands around Amieta's, fingers tucked against the crook of rigid metal joints. I'm here, Ami. You're safe.

That might be true.

It might not be.

From moment to moment Amieta wasn't sure which of those was the worst of it.

The pain was true, the jagged edges of it in her gut, the burning cold that washed over her in waves, the hot ache in her bones.

The pain was real.

She wrapped herself in the pain like a blanket, drew it over her head and curled under it, fists clenched in its edges.

You can hold onto pain, like it's the most precious thing you have.

If you want to.

Drown yourself in it, let it wash away the knowledge that you've hurt the ones who love you, the fear you'll hurt them again, let the acid bath of it etch away the lies you told. You can let the pain eat away the shame.

And the reasons for it.

If you want to.

Even through the pain Amieta could feel Cia's hands curled around hers. She cracked an eyelid to see her sister's honey blonde head leaning on her arm, the edge of her face, one closed eye.

You can hold onto pain.

If you want to.

A new pain, different, signals firing from the machinery of her hands. Metal ground on metal, joints abused past tolerance.

The blonde head lifted. Cia blinked, eyes still cloudy with sleep. "Ami?"

Voice rusty with disuse, Amieta cleared her throat and then again, croaked, "I'm here."

Gritting her teeth against the pain, Amieta opened her hands.