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Eri is supposed to turn thirteen today. She knows because she keeps count of three different dates, and her birthday is one of them — Suletta’s is the other (Suletta is five now; she doesn’t look much like Eri at all, and she doesn’t know whether to be pleased or annoyed), and the day she died is the third.
Mom told her, in clipped tones, that it was exceedingly morbid to keep track of her deathday when she first brought it up. Eri never saw the logic in that. It ties a nice little line between her and Suletta, birthday to deathday to birthday, a chain of events leading right down to now — to the girl in her cockpit watching cartoons.
Eri doesn’t age, but it’s nice to have a birthday regardless. She’s had eight real ones and five other ones, five days where Mom put Suletta in the cradle of her metal hands and said wish Aerial a happy birthday, sweetheart and Suletta babbled back in what used to be baby talk, and is now a blend of real, fumbling words. Today is the first day she’s ever left the two of them alone together while she works on one of Eri’s joints in her leg (so strange, to think of it as her leg and not something inanimate), which means Suletta is sitting with her for lack of anything better to do.
She doesn’t really know how to entertain her, so she swerved hard into what she liked when she was Suletta’s age, which is cartoons. They don’t make very good cartoons on Mercury. Mom had found others for her when she was little enough to watch them — stupid ones, in hindsight; she can’t imagine children got anything of value out of them. But Suletta seems to love them, and that’s what matters.
“Happy birthday,” she’s saying now, sort of meditatively. She’s figuring out how the words sound on her tongue, rounding out each vowel as it comes. It’s sweet. She was having problems with getting her b’s the right way round the other day, so she’s tracing out the letters in big loops in the air as she talks through the phonemes, rocking back and forth in Eri’s chair.
Eri can’t talk directly to her, but she’s had an awful lot of practice with figuring out how to communicate. She buzzes the controls appreciatively — flickering the lights on and off, shaking the plastic, that sort of thing — and Suletta bursts into wild giggles.
“Happy birthday!” she repeats. Eri flickers the lights again, picturing herself kneeling in the seat behind Suletta and ruffling her hair. She doesn’t know what she would look like as a thirteen year old, doesn’t know what a thirteen year old is supposed to look like in the first place, and she wants to find out so badly that it hurts in the way things used to hurt when she had a body.
They go back and forth like that for a little while. Suletta’s laughter gets louder and louder until she’s pitched back in the seat, stimming delightedly. She gives up on the happy birthday thing and switches over to I love you instead — “I love you! Love you, love you, love you,” so Eri switches tactics too. Mom has been tuning up the shock protection in the pilot chair, so she rocks the chair back and forth gently while Suletta giggles and scrambles around for something to hold onto.
She’s careful with her, because she knows how fragile five year olds tend to be. When Eri was five, she fractured her collarbone on Lfrith’s control deck, and Mom had fretted for weeks and weeks after it had healed. If she pitched her baby sister into the control deck — or worse, straight out of the open hatch — she’d never forgive herself, and she’d never hear the end of it, either. She feels every injury Suletta gains as a result of her like a knife blow to the chest.
The rocking lasts as long as it usually does — that is, right up until Mom notices all the noise and floats up to see what’s going on. Eri feels the Permet underneath her skin before she sees her and slows down, which of course makes Suletta giggle harder.
“Well, I’m glad some of us are having fun,” Mom says. The top of her helmet appears over the edge of the cockpit; Suletta jumps out of her seat and peers over the console to see her. “Is Aerial playing nicely?”
“Yes!” Suletta announces. “I’m saying happy birthday.”
Eri whirrs affirmatively. Suletta flinches a little; her ‘whirring affirmatively’ tends to sound an awful lot like the noises from machines she’s been taught to fear. Eri was taught the same thing when she was a baby, and now she spends a lot of time wondering if all those sounds she grew up with were more Permet ghosts trying to be heard.
Mom laughs. “That’s kind of you.”
Suletta’s eyes light up. For a moment, Eri allows herself to imagine a world where both of them get to live, and finds that she vastly prefers this one.
Suletta’s control is getting better every day. Eri helps her where she can — she’s nearly twenty, she supposes, so she has to be the big sister somehow — but most of the finer details are up to her, now. Mom has only just started letting her pilot (which does make her a little jealous, admittedly; she’s always wanted to know what it would be like to pilot a gundam properly, and no , that time when she was four doesn’t count), and only for short stretches of time, but she’s eager to learn.
She was hopeless when she first started out. Eri tries not to bring it up too much, since it feels mean, but she was hopeless. She’s been compensating for the result of her first proper flight around the base for months. Mom gave up on trying to hide the scratches until they had more money to work with. This wounded Eri’s pride a little bit, but Mercury doesn’t have many other mobile suits, so what is there to compare her to, really?
For Suletta’s twelfth birthday, Mom lets her work on Eri’s maintenance. She sits patiently in the hangar — which is starting to feel progressively colder and emptier when no one is there — and waits while Suletta patiently adjusts and re-adjusts her blade antenna, and it feels a little bit as though she is sitting at the foot of a bed while her baby sister braids her hair. Like in the cartoons.
She is learning to be patient when Suletta is involved. She’s only a baby, after all — older than Eri ever got to be, endlessly familiar with a human body in ways Eri never got to be — but still, she’s so young . And from up here she seems so small . Not insignificant; she could never be insignificant, not to Mom and certainly not to Eri. Just small. She’s still learning how to live.
“You know,” Suletta says, “I think your paint could use a touch up. Do you think Mom would let me help?”
Eri knows what she’s thinking of. For her tenth birthday Mom bought her a set of face paints from Earth, a gift from a business trip down to some of the companies she works with. She’s never had a chance to use them properly. They wouldn’t be perfect at all — they wouldn’t last long on her metal either; they’d almost certainly wear away the moment she went out into space — but they’d be something , and Suletta has been trying to get more into art recently.
And, she assumes, it would be a lot like playing dress-up with her baby sister. She’s wanted that ever since Mom told her she was creating a new version of her. Maybe this could count as helping her to live , too.
In the daydreams where she has a body and a mind that is as old as she should be, she kneels in front of Suletta on Aerial’s head and says, “That sounds like fun, but we should probably run that by Mom first. And, I mean, if she says no, you can always paint me.”
In the reality where she doesn’t, she imagines flexing her arm until her hand can come up and tilt side to side, and settles for speaking through the slow electric hum of the cockpit instead. She can’t say many words that Suletta understands — not yet, anyway — but she manages a maybe , just loud enough to be heard from up on top of her head; a slow lilting hum of electronics and groaning metal.
Suletta laughs. Mom says she laughs like Eri did when she was little. “Yeah, I’ll ask.”
Eri has only ever really been to two places in her life, and she liked both of them well enough. She hates Asticassia, although that might have more to do with the people than the actual place.
Suletta is wonderful, of course. Suletta couldn’t put a foot wrong if she tried. It’s some of the boys that are the problem — not the mechanics (they’re fun, they talk to Eri like Suletta does and it makes her feel included) but Miorine’s friends. Friends? Acquaintances. The ones who keep trying to marry her.
Elan is the first one to try something with her. He’s curious, of course; it’s only natural, especially when she and Suletta keep beating the shit out of his stupid committee friends. Suletta gives him time alone with her, because she is far too kind for her own good, and Eri takes the opportunity to scare him a little. She imposes her presence upon him from the moment he connects to her systems, bears down and down and down until the weight is crushing him, piercing through the data storm. Whether he notices her or not is of no consequence, not really. He has enough despair on his own.
He sees her later, when he tries to fight Suletta out in proper space. He sees her because there’s something different about him, different in all the wrong ways; he sees her spinning around him in the GUND-bits, sees her flickering in and out through metal and hissing wires. Eri shouldn’t delight in it, but she does. Mom would be so mad at her if she found out.
He tries something with her later, too, but she doesn’t find out about it until Suletta comes home from the incubation thing. She crawls up into her cockpit at almost three in the morning, still in a red dress and heels, and tells her all about her day in a small, tired voice. And that’s when Eri decides that she thoroughly hates Elan and particularly likes Miorine.
“Mom didn’t tell me you were a gundam,” Suletta says, and she sounds too tired to be upset anymore. “I didn’t know that, I promise. I would never have taken you here if I knew. I hate putting you in danger. When Mr Elan said he wanted you in our duel —” Her voice cuts off. She pulls anxiously at the hem of her dress. “It doesn’t matter now. Ms Miorine saved both of us.”
She says her name with such awe . Gross.
And Guel, the first one Suletta beats the shit out of in a duel — he leaves her alone, mostly. He seems to regard her with a kind of detached awe. He likes Suletta; she can guess that much from the way she talks about him, with that awkward lilt to her voice that says I don’t really know what to do about this . Elan likes Suletta too, or pretends to, and Suletta humours him because he was kind to her when they first met and that counts for something.
Still, she can’t bring herself to particularly care about Guel, given what Suletta tells her about his history with Miorine. He seems to skulk around campus like a weird, over-the-top shadow, pressing himself into all the little gaps where Suletta isn’t, but at least he takes his defeats with grace.
Eri reviews everything she knows about the people most likely to challenge Suletta for Miorine’s hand before every duel. The boys at Earth House keep recordings of all their past duels, too, so Suletta can study their fighting styles — and this is what she’s doing now, sitting in her cockpit with Miorine practically in her lap as they skim through old recordings of Guel’s past battles.
They’ve been working their way through his catalogue for the past week or so. I have to be prepared, Suletta said the first time, determined in that way she only gets when Miorine is involved, or I’ll lose to him. And I really, really don’t want to lose to Guel.
At that, Miorine had laughed. You think he has the balls to challenge you again? He’s lost everything.
It wouldn’t take him much to gain it back, though, Suletta said thoughtfully — and this is what she’s saying again now, pointing to the schematics of his mobile suit with one hand. The other is currently preoccupied with stroking Miorine’s hair. Gross. “Look at all that firepower. He doesn’t even have to be clever with it — he just has to strike first.”
“How very Jeturk,” Miorine says sleepily.
Weirdo, Eri thinks.
“Most of these old duels have been won like that,” she taps her finger against the screen, almost meditative. “Just — you know, overpowering the enemy with brute force. He usually hits first, tries to push the opposition downwards or knock them over, that kind of thing.
“Elan is smarter about it, mostly ‘cause he can get up high. His suit is built with flight in mind.”
“Mhm,” Miorine says, tucking her head onto Suletta’s shoulder. “He’s kind of like a ferret, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know what that is,” Suletta says candidly. “Do they fly?”
“No, but they’re slippery. Or so I’ve heard.”
She laughs — it’s really more of a giggle — and leans into Miorine, caught somewhere between shy and focused. Eri contemplates rocking the chair forward and pitching them both out of the cockpit. “Yeah, that’s how he fights. Very, very slippery.”
“Slippery,” Miorine agrees. She sounds like she’s on the verge of passing out, right here in the cockpit. “You’re faster than him, though.”
“I don’t need to be faster, really,” Suletta hums. “I’m alright as long as I can back him into a corner, I think. Exploit his weak spots, that sort of thing. I can use Aerial’s GUND-bits to pin him down.”
“More of a weasel, then.”
“What’s the difference?”
She yawns. “Dunno.”
Suletta is silent for a moment, looking up through the open hatch of the cockpit, through the parted doors of Earth House’s hangar, up into the simulated stars overhead. When she talks again, her voice is soft, full of the kind of wonder that comes with thinking about the future. “We’ll have to find out on Earth, I guess.”
“We will,” Miorine says. I can’t wait, she doesn’t. Eri hears it lingering on her tongue anyway.
She tunes herself out from their weird half-flirting by turning all of her attention to the duel on her screen. Guel is beating the shit out of a Spacian teenager she doesn’t know the name of, and the only reason the battle has gone on this long is because he’s been relentlessly showboating the entire time. She imagines the blade of his suit’s axe slamming into her waist and recoils a little at the thought. If he got the right angle he’d cleave straight through her, and then where would she be?
Well, it doesn’t matter. Suletta wouldn’t let that happen. And even if it did, she’d fix her. Her and Mom would fix her. The Earth House engineers might even help.
Eri grits imaginary teeth against the imaginary feeling of metal tearing, the sound of her body breaking and rending and shredding itself into nothing. It will not happen, and even if it does, everything will be okay.
“Well, I’ll probably beat him,” Suletta says into Miorine’s hair. “It won’t be too hard. No matter what he does.”
Miorine tucks her face into the crook of her neck. The thought of tipping them both out of the cockpit is getting a little more tempting with every passing second. “Good.”
“Suletta’s sick,” Miorine says by way of greeting.
Eri, significantly dazed by this information, lets her open her cockpit and climb inside without hesitation.
She hasn’t been sick in seventeen years. She almost forgot it’s a thing that just happens to people. It’s weird; she doesn’t remember Suletta ever getting sick when she was little, either — Mom must have kept her away from the hangar whenever she was ill.
The last time Eri was sick, she died.
They sit in silence for a little while. Miorine pokes idly at Eri’s controls until the rest of her comes online and mutters, “I promised I’d tell you about her day. So that’s what I’m doing.”
Another moment passes. When it becomes clear Eri isn’t going to respond, she adds, “She really loves you. You’re like her big sister.” A small smile turns up the corners of her mouth. “I don’t know what she sees in you. But it’s for her, so. I’m here.”
And then, quietly, “I’m in love with her.”
Eri sits quietly and listens. It doesn’t sound like Miorine has ever said that to anyone out loud before. She’d be honoured if it wasn’t a little bit gross.
Her hands settle on the controls, tapping gently. “Sorry for — stealing you, I guess, by the way. And not knowing how to pilot. At all.”
She doesn’t, and it’s abysmal. Eri has tried very hard not to hold it against her. Not everyone can be a pilot, after all.
“I — said I’d tell you about Suletta’s day, didn’t I?” Miorine laughs to herself. “I’m talking to a big robot. Whatever, doesn’t matter. Well, she got up early — far too early, honestly; I don’t know what’s going on in her head — and came down to walk me to class. Despite feeling awful, obviously. She said Nika told her to stay inside, but she wanted to see me.”
That sounds like her. Eri pictures herself, grown up, gently turning Suletta around and walking her back to her room in Earth House. She pictures making her food — she’s never made food before, not even as a kid; Mom always kept her away from the kitchen — and bringing it to her bed; she pictures being a good big sister — but Miorine is still talking.
“She did, um. Basic tech class, I forget what it’s called. It’s mandatory. We sat together and she wrote me notes when she wasn’t paying attention. She was doing prep for it last night. I think it went well. She likes the teacher. Then piloting, obviously. That’s daily. She hates the training suits they have, you know? They’re harder to control. She says she likes how smoothly you run.
“And then lunch. She — well, to be honest, I was feeling like shit at lunch, so I said I was going to eat in my room. She brought me food.” She laughs again. “She didn’t need to do that. It was kind of her. Then — I knew she was sick because she finished eating and passed out. I thought she was just tired.”
Eri questions, briefly, why she didn’t just check her diagnostics, and then remembers that most humans can’t do that. Still, she thinks she’s allowed to be a little annoyed.
Miorine runs a hand absently through her hair, brushing her bangs back into place. “I let her rest for a little bit. And then — well, all the lights were off in my room, so I checked the tomatoes and then I just sort of sat down and slept too. For about three hours. We both missed our first hour of afternoon classes.
“I woke up because the timer for the plants in the greenhouse went off, so we got up and went over to check in on them. Suletta said she was feeling bad, so we sat on the steps outside for a while and kind of — waited for her temperature to regulate, I guess? It didn’t work, so I went in and did my checks, and then we hung around outside for a while and talked.”
She hesitates, here, and starts to dig through her pockets. The Asticassia uniform has a lot of them, Eri has discovered. “She — was writing me notes the whole day. I’ve been keeping all of them for… I don’t know, a wedding present? Something. She puts a lot of thought into them, even when we’re just sitting in classes doing nothing.”
She starts setting paper down on the first flat surface she happens to find, which turns out to be the dock for Suletta’s notebook. And there’s a lot of it, more than Eri thinks Suletta could reasonably write in a few hours.
“I love her,” Miorine says again, soft. “She’s the kindest person I’ve ever met.”
I hope your day is as wonderful as the sunshine, Eri reads. I’m looking forward to spending every one of mine with you. I hope the sky on Earth is as beautiful as it is here; I think I’d like to go stargazing with you.
“I don’t think she knows just how much of a romantic she really is,” Miorine adds, as though she can feel Eri watching. She imagines herself leaning over her shoulder in the cockpit, hand pressed against her forearm, reading the notes to herself as Miorine talks. She imagines herself adjusting the collar of Suletta’s uniform in the mornings, saying go get her to her as she leaves to walk Miorine to class.
It would be good, she thinks. It would be wonderful. She kind of wants to shake Suletta by the shoulders right now and tell her, can’t you see how into you she is?
“Anyway, I left her in my room. She’s asleep now. Or maybe watching something, I don’t know. If her fever persists into tomorrow I’ll take her to the doctor.”
Eri snaps back to the conversation at hand. That’s good, she thinks; it’s good that Miorine cares so much. Even if some small part of her is more than a little jealous.
“Oh,” she adds, “I found out — Guel got disowned, or something. He’s been kicked out of Jeturk.” She laughs, and Eri doesn’t hear her laugh very often, but she sounds genuinely delighted. “I’m sure that was Suletta’s doing, somehow. She’s been behind every good thing that’s happened at this place.”
Oh, that’s just sad . Sweet and kind of funny, but really, really sad. She wonders, perhaps redundantly, if Suletta knows how happy she makes Miorine.
She stays in the cockpit a little longer. Eri listens to her talk, mostly because she doesn’t actually have much of a choice in the matter, but also because she gets the feeling that not many people have offered to listen to her before.
(She’s getting better at talking. It feels a little bit like being a child again, rounding out the sounds in her mouth, on her lips. She buzzes through her own circuits with a new kind of purpose, feeling out the sounds her speakers make if she manipulates them right, running her hands along the walls of her cockpit.
“You sound like a dolphin,” Suletta says to her one day, replacing the panelling on her shoulder. “Miorine showed them to me once.”
Her voice grows soft, fond. It always does when she’s talking about Miorine. Gross , Eri says. Well, not really — there’s not enough ; she doesn’t know how much more it will take — but Suletta has always been a good interpreter.
She laughs. “It’s not gross! Mom thinks it’s cute that she wants to show me things. We’re going to live on Earth one day, anyway. I want to know what it’s like.”
Gross, Eri repeats. She can’t do more than two or three words at a time, in a kind of awkward whistle/Morse code combination. It makes for a very one-sided conversation, but both Mom and Suletta have been patient with her. Even if Suletta doesn’t entirely know what’s going on. It’s not entirely speech, but it’s something.)
Something strange happens.
Suletta crawls into her cockpit at near-midnight, fingers trembling on the controls, and curls herself into a ball into the seat with her hands performing routine checks like she’s functioning on autopilot. There are tears forming in the corners of her eyes and collecting on her nose.
Eri imagines herself an adult again, imagines herself kneeling in front of Suletta and cupping her head in her hands, brushing away her tears and asking what’s going on, buddy? But she can’t, because she’s not really here, is she?
She does what she’s always done instead: heats up the pilot seat until it’s comfortably warm, switches on an old cartoon Suletta loves, and lets her exist.
“Thanks,” Suletta manages eventually, voice shaking. “I don’t — I don’t wanna talk about it. I’m being dumb.”
Eri waits patiently. She could say a million things — it’s not dumb and you’re allowed to have feelings, even if they are dumb and tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it — but it’s always been easier to help her by letting her talk first.
“I just — I’m not —” she makes a small, desperate sound. “Am I really useless?”
Oh.
The adult version of herself in her mind’s eye falters. Eri falters too, because what is she supposed to say to that? What can she do? No , she tells her, and firmer, not useless , and she doesn’t know if Suletta hears her at all.
She falls asleep there. Two of the kids from Earth House come by looking for her and leave when they spot her, curled up and safe in the pilot seat. Eri keeps the heating running until she wakes up, keeps the heating running even when the engineers come to load her onto the cargo ship for repairs. The sound of her quiet sobbing stays with her, echoes round the cockpit long after she leaves.
Is she supposed to feel bad about it?
There doesn’t seem to be much to feel bad about. Mom told her, and she knows she told Suletta too. They did the right thing. She knows they did the right thing. Is she supposed to feel bad about it?
Miorine seems to think so. She won’t look Suletta in the eye, not even when the reinforcements arrive. Eri can hear the sound of her ragged breathing from here, over the voices of people checking her and Suletta for injuries, the voices of people coming to take the man who killed Dad away.
(And that is him, isn’t it? It’s him. She isn’t responsible for the shrapnel sticking out of her back, but she wishes she was. She isn’t afraid to do the right thing twice. Even if Suletta doesn’t know.)
Miorine doesn’t talk to Suletta at all. Not on the way back to Asticassia, not when they arrive back at Earth House. Eri knows this because Suletta tells her, soft and confused, and shows her the messages she received after that say Miorine is leaving: I have to fix the mess my father left behind. I’ll be away for a while. Look after yourself.
“I miss her,” she says quietly, “I don’t know what I did wrong.”
Eri doesn’t know how to respond to that.
The first words Eri says in the seventeen years since she’s been technically dead are “I’m sorry.”
She’s imagined what it would be like to talk to Suletta far more than she’d admit to anyone. She’s been thinking about it since the day Mom put her in the fucking robot, since the day Suletta was born — made. When she was ten she thought about reaching out and touching her with Aerial’s huge, unwieldy hands, brushing her fingers through her hair and saying You’re just like me, you know?
Still, this is Mom’s plan. Mom’s and Miorine’s. Suletta has played her part, and now it’s over.
Feeling buzzingly, awfully alive for the first time in almost two decades, Eri crouches around her little sister and says I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry until someone comes to take her away.
Thinking about it later, she wishes she’d thanked her.
(Mom talks to her like Suletta did. The only difference is that she seems to expect a response. She keeps pausing inbetween sentences, waiting for the long low hum of Eri’s internal systems to contribute something , even if it’s just meaningless babble.
It’s — strange, but not entirely unwelcome. It feels nice to be treated as a conversation partner; it reminds her in some ways of being little again, of Mom kneeling in front of her and getting her to name colours and sounds and shapes. It’s just a different language now, is all.)
They fly low over the station, so close she could reach out and skim her fingers along the metal surface. No one out here could hear the sound, she thinks; inside there’d probably be panic, fear of another terrorist attack or something similar, but out here, the noise would stop dead, become nothing.
“I’ve missed flying with you,” Mom says idly. She holds the controls weirdly, like she’s expecting them to feel different — and it makes sense, Eri supposes; she must have upgraded them from Lfrith’s old model a thousand times over. “You’ve been practising helping Suletta, haven’t you?”
Practising is a strong word. They work together, fight together so often that she sometimes forgets where Suletta ends and she begins. She’s used to feeling the data storm flow through the two of them like two points in a circuit, used to pressing up close to Suletta’s flesh and nerves like circuitry. And besides, Suletta is the pilot; she’s just the machine.
“Yes,” Eri says, instead of — all that. She imagines herself sitting in Mom’s lap, just like she used to when she was small and human and alive — imagines Mom’s hands coming up to idly pet her hair, calling her my love , my darling . “She’s very good.”
“I know,” Mom hums. “I saw. I’ve been watching her duels when they’ve been broadcast.” She pauses to adjust their trajectory. It must not come naturally to her anymore. Is piloting a skill you ever really forget? “The two of you have been doing wonderfully.”
“I know we have,” she says, more than a little proud.
Mom laughs at that, easing them through the gates into the hangar’s airlock. She isn’t wearing her spacesuit’s helmet anymore; her hair floats in the low gravity, drifting away from her face. Eri is starting to understand why Suletta calls her a magician so often. “All your training will come in handy, I think. How does she feel now?”
She means Aerial, the other half of her soul and everything it encompasses. “She feels like she always did,” Eri says truthfully, “like me. Just — more me. I feel like I fit inside her now.”
“You always fit,” Mom says. She told her the same thing years ago — stories about the first time the two of them flew in Lfrith, the night the world ended. “It just took a little while for you to notice.”
They dance between considering Eri and Aerial one and the same, or parts of each other. They’ve been doing it for years. Suletta, though — Suletta never knew any different. She doesn’t know if it’s comforting or disconcerting. She wishes she did.
(She misses her little sister.
Mom tells her it won’t be long until they’re reunited. Mom tells her it won’t be long until she’ll get to grow up with her, the way Eri has always wanted.
Still — she’s gentle with the controls, but rusty. Her grip is too tight. She doesn’t have the reflexive ease Suletta does, the familiarity. She doesn’t understand the drift, the weight of the machine in space.
She understands why they have to do this alone, but G-d , she wishes Suletta could be with her instead.)
Three things happen, after this:
Eri kills more people. Or, to be accurate, Mom and Miorine kill more people — Mom tells her that it isn't her fault, that they’re doing all of this for her sake, and Eri chooses to believe her. She is the vessel, after all; she’s the world to come.
Eri kills more people — this time, without Mom as the pilot, floating through so much Permet like a ghost. She remembers space, faintly, as being cold, but she doesn’t feel any of that now.
And lastly, Suletta comes for her. She knew this would happen, and Mom did too, even if she won’t admit it. Eri stands guard outside the space station and waits for her, and wonders if big sisters are supposed to do this part, too.
(Suletta is reaching for her. That’s something, at least. Eri isn’t sure she entirely deserves to be reached for — she is a ghost that Mom couldn’t let rest, after all — but she reaches back with all of the strength left in her rapidly dissolving hands, because Suletta deserves that much from her.)
And then she isn’t in Aerial at all, but outside of it, existing fuzzily in the Permet-blurred haze between the Calibarn and what used to be her body.
And then, rather embarrassingly, she loses consciousness.
When Eri wakes up again, she’s inside. Inside in that there are walls close around her, and that hasn’t happened since she was eight years old. Inside in that, if she had arms anymore, she could reach out and touch .
Ah, she thinks, somewhat illogically, I’m in the keychain.
It makes sense, to be honest. She remembers seeing it float out of Suletta’s hand after the Calibarn dissolved, remembers seeing her reach for it like she reached for Aerial’s decaying corpse.
“Hello?” she says experimentally. This is the first thing the heroes in the cartoons do when they wake up somewhere unfamiliar. It usually doesn’t work, but she doesn’t think that far ahead. There isn’t anything left of the robot in her.
No one answers her, obviously, because there’s no one to hear her in the first place. The room is not empty — she gathered that much from the sound of gentle crying and the slow beeping of medical machines — but her voice does not carry, and she is the only person who understands it.
She allows herself to revel in the joy of being alive for an inexplicable second time for a few moments longer, and then she listens.
The crying — she recognises the crying. That’s Miorine, the girl Suletta was supposed to marry, and that’s the same gentle, aching crying she heard when she turned all of Eri’s systems offline so she could break up with her.
It was annoying of her, but she was clearly going through a lot, so Eri has tried not to hold it against her. She knows just how much Mom can mess with people’s minds, make them do things they don’t want to. She knows — because she knows Suletta, and Suletta knows Miorine — that she would never hurt Suletta without a good reason. But she also knows exactly what Miorine’s crying sounds like, because she’d heard her sobbing in the hangar in the hours before Eri was due to be taken home by Mom, too. She cried a lot over those few days.
“Suletta,” she’s saying, “you know I’ll kill you if you die. With my own bare hands. You aren’t allowed to die, you moron. You have to marry me first. You promised. You promised . You — you went out there wearing the Holder colours. So we’re engaged. You’re my groom. You can’t die.”
Oh , Eri thinks, feeling a little sick. She can’t see very well from this angle, but she can just about catch the awkward, black-clad shape of Miorine’s shoulders, the outline of a body in a hospital bed, if she squints. Years of watching procedural dramas over Suletta’s shoulder have told her what is happening — her little sister is very, very sick, and Miorine is sitting on guard by her bedside. Possibly fending off Mom too, knowing her.
Her little sister is very, very sick. Her little sister is quite possibly dying, and she can’t do anything. She’s used to not being able to do anything; she’s been unable to do anything for years and years and years, but this time she needs to be able to do something, she needs to be sitting by Suletta’s side in that bed, she needs to be something other than the reason why she’s there in the first place, she needs to be a good big sister for the first time in her life, she needs —
“Oh,” Suletta’s voice says hoarsely.
Both Eri and Miorine jolt. The difference is that Eri does not move; cannot move — Miorine lurches backward in her seat with a small cry, dropping something that clatters and buzzes to the floor.
And now she’s crying again. She seems to cry a lot. “Are you — oh my G-d, Suletta? Can you hear me?”
Suletta’s voice rattles out again, worn down from what she can only assume to be months of disuse. “Yep,” she says, and then nothing more.
Miorine bursts into incoherent sobbing, pitching forward until Eri can’t see her anymore. “Suletta,” she’s saying, over and over again, “you fucking idiot . Oh my G-d, Suletta .”
“Hey,” Suletta says tiredly, “hey. No… no crying.”
She babbles out another string of half-sobbed words, presumably shut up and Suletta and you’re not dead , and then, “I’ll call a nurse, okay?”
“Mhm.”
“Are you feeling okay?”
“Tired.” She sucks in a deep, heaving breath. “Missed you.”
“I missed you too,” Miorine says wetly.
“Mhm. ‘m gonna… fall asleep now.”
A sobbing, aching laugh. “Okay. I’ll be here when you wake up.” Smaller, tighter, “Love you.”
“Love you too,” Suletta hums. She says it so quietly, almost without thinking. It’s funny, really — Eri could have told them both that months ago and saved them all this trouble. “I really, really love you. …’night.”
“Goodnight,” Miorine says. Her voice breaks.
Eri doesn’t see what happens next (doesn’t want to, really) but she can imagine Miorine leaning over Suletta’s bed to kiss her forehead as her eyes slip closed, imagine the way she looks at her because she’s seen it so many g-ddamn times before.
“ Gross ,” she says aloud, because she can.
In her seat, still crouched over Suletta on the bed, Miorine jolts to attention for the second time.
That’s weird. Eri says as much, squinting — or what passes for squinting as a keychain; she hasn’t really figured that out yet — to get a better view of her.
Miorine scoffs, which seems to be more of a reflex than anything. Then, aloud, “What the fuck .”
“Ohhh, you can hear me,” Eri realises. “Wait, how can you hear me?”
She lurches to her feet, turning around on the spot. Looking for her. Looking for her . “What the fuck,” she says again.
“Is that all you say? I’m on the table, dumbass.”
Miorine reaches for her earpiece, eyes blowing wide. “Oh, I’m going insane.”
“Debatably, yes,” Eri says, “but, I mean. I am in the keychain, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
Miorine stares over at her on the table for a moment, and then she starts frantically pacing the room. Reasonable, since it’s only just hit Eri that she’s in the keychain as well.
“... Ericht?” she says haltingly. “Ericht Samaya?”
Eri pictures herself scrunching up her nose, shaking her head. “Only Mom calls me Ericht. It’s just Eri.”
“Eri, then,” Miorine says. Her voice goes very, very small. “You’re here?”
“In Suletta’s keychain, yeah.” She wiggles experimentally. It achieves nothing. “I don’t get it either.”
She sucks in a deep, rattling breath. Eri allows herself to get caught up in the fantasy of what it would feel like to breathe again for a moment. “Does she — does she know?”
“I don’t see how she could,” she says, and — there; her body moves slightly when she uses it to talk. “But, I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with her. We’re the same person. Ish.”
“And you’re okay? You’re coping well?”
“What sort of question is that?”
Miorine throws up her hands and resumes her pacing. “I don’t fucking know. Are you? Do I have to explain to Prospera that her other daughter is a keychain now?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Do I have to talk to her?”
“Also yes,” Eri says blandly. She imagines herself kicking her legs up, putting her hands behind her head, and floating smugly at eye level with Miorine. It’s gratifying. “I mean, I can do most of it. Now that I’m capable of it.”
Miorine makes an impatient noise. “How can you even do that? What allows you to speak to me? Why are you in my earpiece?”
Eri imagines herself shrugging extravagantly, hands and everything. “Permet, right? Weird.”
“Weird,” she agrees, tapping her thumb against her chin. She recognises it from Miorine’s visits to Aerial’s cockpit; it’s her thinking face, her diplomatic planning face. It’s the mask she falls back on when she has to act civil around Mom.
(Is she supposed to think of Aerial and her as entirely separate beings now? That’s weird. That’s weirder than the Permet ghost thing, weirder than Suletta’s survival. She’s infinitely small, infinitely alive. None of it makes much sense.)
Day two.
Miorine comes back to watch Suletta sleep for another twelve hours with even more pronounced circles under her eyes. She takes one look at Eri, still on the table by the door, and opens her mouth to launch into what she’s sure is an extensively prepared monologue.
“I need to —”
“You need to sleep,” Eri interrupts. She’s been getting a lot better at the whole interrupting thing. She hadn’t had many opportunities to practise before.
Miorine, predictably, bridles a little bit. “I do not. What I need to do is sit here and make sure Suletta doesn’t —”
She cuts herself off this time. Her eyes fall down to her hands, curled up tight in her lap, and then fix back on Suletta again. She’s never been able to look away from her for very long, not as long as Eri’s known her. When she speaks again, it’s with a pointed kind of grief that she knows well, if only because she’s heard it a million times before, usually directed towards her. Or Dad, but they don’t talk about Dad.
“I need to stay here so I can keep an eye on Suletta,” she says finally. “If I let myself fall asleep I’ll miss something important, I’m sure of it.”
Oh, you’re sure of it, are you? is the response Eri would have gone with if she didn’t have just enough of a view of Miorine’s face to see the drying tear tracks on her cheeks. “Well, I’m literally incapable of sleeping,” she says instead, which seems safer. And also far nicer. Besides, she’ll take any chance she can get to get close to her (sick, possibly dying) sister. Maybe talk to her, if she wakes up. Maybe say she’s sorry. “I haven’t slept since — probably before you were born. I’ll watch her.”
Does dying count as sleeping?
It doesn’t matter.
Miorine braces her hands on her knees, watching the rise and fall of Suletta’s chest blearily. “I — suppose.”
“Oh, you suppose, do you?”
“Shut up. Do you promise you’ll send for me if anything changes? Anything at all.”
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to do that,” Eri says blandly.
“I know for a fact you can communicate with me because you’re doing it right now. Can you track the signal from my phone?”
“In my sleep.”
“You can’t sleep.”
“It’s an expression, loser,” she mutters. “I’ll call you if she gets up. Go.”
Miorine glances between her and Suletta again, then rises from her chair. She kisses the top of Suletta’s head once before she leaves. Eri would roll her eyes and look pointedly away if she was physically capable of doing so.
Then she goes, and it’s just the two of them again.
The silence stretches out into nothingness. That’s the strangest thing, and the newest one. Eri doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to it. She had all of Suletta at her fingertips, could talk to her whenever she wanted, and now they’re alone — alone like they’ve always been — and there’s no bridge between them, no gap she can cross.
Still, it’s the two of them, and that’s the oldest thing Eri knows how to rely on.
It’s always been the two of them, really. The robot — and now the Permet ghost — and the repli-child. It’s always been like this, Eri thinks; two halves of the same girl. Was she ever really whole again after she died? Did Suletta take part of her with her when she was made, the parts she couldn’t keep? Her body, her eyes, her voice — but no, she’s different; they’re different, they’re sisters —
Suletta stirs on the bed, groaning softly. Her eyes don’t open, but she’s awake now, if the Permet scars lighting up all along her body are anything to go by.
Eri watches her climb her way into consciousness and feels more than a little awkward. It’s whatever, really; it’s leagues better than watching her and Miorine try to have a conversation. Still, she wishes she could do something — even just reach out and place a hand on her shoulder, guiding her back into awareness.
“Hello,” she says, knowing full well that Suletta won’t be able to hear her, “you’re alright. You’re okay.”
No response, obviously. It was stupid to think she’d be able to hear her like this.
Oh, whatever, she’ll just have to get creative again.
Eri stretches a tendril of thought — and that’s what it is, really; all of the Permet networks in the world are practically at her fingertips now — out to the vanishing signal of Miorine’s phone and sends her a message. A human version of her, she imagines, would have been furiously messaging back and forth with her for hours now. She pictures herself hunched over at Suletta’s bedside, typing out platitude after platitude after the fifth time Miorine put her on watch, and can’t bring herself to push down the small thrill of delight it brings her.
she woke up like the moment u left lol but give it a minute b4 u come back in she’s disorientated as shit
actually no
go do whatever it is u need to do n ill handle her
ill let u know if she asks for u
WHAT THE FUCK
okay fine
but i’m not going to like it
tell her i miss her :(
ew gross
i cant exactly talk to her dumbass
but ill try if it makes u feel better
it really does
Well, now she has to.
Eri scans the room as best as she can, feeling for anything Permet-run with a speaker that she can use, and — there ; Suletta’s notebook, resting on her bedside table. It isn’t ideal, but it’ll work.
Suletta shifts again, jaw working weakly, like she’s trying to find the strength to open her eyes. Eri taps into the Permet signals from the notebook and repeats herself — “Hi, it’s me, you’re okay,” — until her eyelids flutter open.
“Wha,” she manages dizzily, “huh? Who —”
“Right here,” Eri says.
Suletta’s eyes flick to her notebook, open and switched on, and then to Eri on the seat by the bed. “Oh,” she says, once.
“Yeah. In the keychain.”
“Keychain,” she echoes, and then bursts into tears.
Eri likes to think she’s always been an expert on Suletta’s — everything, but that doesn’t diminish the fact that she still has no idea what to do when she cries. “Yeah, I’m in the keychain,” she says, keeping her voice low and stable, “the one you gave to Miorine, yeah? I’ve been in the keychain since all the gundams dissolved. Dissolved? Dissolved.”
Suletta’s voice shakes when she speaks. “How?”
“I dunno. Probably something to do with you, though.”
She reaches up to wipe at her face and her arms only get about a third of the way there, struggling to hold their weight up. “Ericht,” she says wetly, “ Eri .”
“That’s me,” Eri says, doing her best to sound gentle. She’s had a lot of practice with Mom. “How’re you feeling?”
Suletta sniffs. “Fine. Tired. …Slow, kinda?”
“Yeah, people can get like this when they wake up from comas,” she says, remembering the endless medical dramas Suletta was obsessed with when she was thirteen. “Pretty sure I’m supposed to call a nurse now, right?”
“Mhm,” Suletta says. “Mio, um. Mio said they — wanted to check in. On me.”
“They did a run-through earlier while she was in the room, but she got a bit — Miorine,” Eri explains, laughing slightly. “We think you’re gonna be okay, though.”
“I have to be. Gotta get married.”
“Gross.”
Suletta giggles, then winces. Her shoulders constrict a little; her fingers curl inward. “Hurts,” she says absently, and then, hissing through her teeth, “ hurts. Um. Call someone?”
ok suletta is asking 4 u
tl;dr is
she woke up n spoke 2 me
was in quite a bit of pain so i called the nurse
they upped her painkillers
shes a bit loopy
but shes asking 4 u
so im telling u
ur welcome
oh
thank you
i’m on my way
are u in a meeting rn
i told my dad to go fuck himself
i’m free now
i’m on my way
ETA about twelve minutes
will you tell her that?
ya
she keeps asking me wheres mio wheres mio
so
im telling her
do u know whats happening w mom btw
ik they put her in custody
and ik shes getting treatment
4 her legs
but thats it
i don’t know
i want to speak to you and suletta about that before
we decide on anything
she’s your mother and i know suletta wants her to be
part of our
thing
so it’s not really my decision to make
on the tram now
ok
yea im not sure either
idk what suletta wants 2 do
ill defer 2 her
i trust her judgement
idk im fuckin eight
you’re twenty-five
and also eight
idk lol
i think i might just b eri
dont ask sul abt it now bc shes so out of it
i wasn’t planning on it
i need to speak to a nurse about her treatment plan
while i’m there
yea ill grab some1
um
how freaked out will they b if
a keychain starts talking 2 them
very, probably
you know what, just put me on call
k
1 sec
It’s a bad day, one of her first in a while. Eri stays with her while Miorine rushes around badgering doctors, offers to listen to the near-incoherent rambling she lets out when she’s in an unusually high amount of pain. To be helpful, Miorine positions her so she’s facing Suletta on the bedside cabinet before she leaves.
Eri knows it’s a bad day because the first question out of her mouth is, “Do you think Dad would like me?”
“Ah,” she says meditatively.
Suletta makes a strangled noise, somewhere between a laugh and a sob. She’s never done a particularly good job at hiding the fact that she’s in pain. “Dad, um. Mom never told me about him.”
“He was kind,” Eri says, mostly to hide the fact that she wants to cry whenever she thinks about him. She doesn’t remember much of him anyway, even if she feels like she should. Maybe it all got lost when she died. “He would have loved you.”
“N-no, but — I’m not — I’m not supposed to exist. I’m not really his daughter, I’m not even you .”
“You kind of are,” Eri says — not helpful, Ericht — “and I’m kind of you. We’re the same. We have his, like, DNA in us. And I mean, Mom still thinks of you as her daughter, so. I don’t see why he wouldn’t.”
She coughs to disguise the fact that she’s crying, which doesn’t really work. “Eri, I’m not supposed to exist . Even — even Elan, he isn’t like me. I feel so awful for him, you know? He thought he was like me, but he was just — alone. At least I have you, and — and Miorine —”
She seems to realise that Miorine doesn’t entirely know at around the same time that Eri does. Her breath hitches in her lungs; her voice caves in on itself. Eri wishes she could shuffle closer to the bedside, but her body is so limited . It isn’t like before; there’s nothing to cradle Suletta with, and she can’t even pretend there’s a future where she’ll be able to hold her anymore.
“We’ll tell her,” she says, because there’s nothing else to do, “we’ll tell her. You and me.”
“But — but what if she doesn’t — she can’t —”
That doesn’t seem fair. If only Eri knew how to explain that.
Suletta takes another shuddering breath. One of her hands lifts itself an inch or so off the bed, clearly to try and cover her mouth, and halts before her elbow can bend too far. “G-d,” she says emphatically, “ fuck , I just wish I knew what to do.”
“Language,” Eri reprimands, which gets her to laugh. “I don’t think you have to know what to do. I think you just have to, like, live.”
Suletta has always fought very hard to live. A small smile catches at the corner of her mouth. The barest fraction of a smile, but a smile regardless. Eri counts this as a win.
“You know, for what it’s worth, I think you’re supposed to exist,” she adds. “I always wanted a little sister.”
Suletta makes another one of her choking sobbing sounds. Eri pictures herself crouched over her bed, sweeping her hair out of her eyes, and wonders if Permet ghosts can cry too. She’s never done it before. Maybe she can spend the next eternity figuring that out.
“I’ll, um. I’ll tell her. Next chance I get. I want to tell her, I want her to know. I — and if she doesn’t want to get married to me anymore, I’ll, um. I’ll understand.”
Eri imagines herself worrying her lower lip between her teeth. It’s been so long that she’s forgotten what the pull of skin feels like. “Yeah, tell her. But don’t act surprised when she’s still as into you as she’s always been.”
“... Into me?” she says hesitantly.
“Yeah, G-d. She likes you so much it’s actually disgusting.”
“And you think —”
Eri sighs, the kind of long-suffering sigh that means I’ve been third-wheeling you this entire time . “I know .”
“And Dad —”
“We can talk about Dad later,” Eri says decisively, feeling very much like a big sister, “‘cause you’re really not in a state to think about it.”
Suletta laughs, then coughs. “Yeah, no, I’m really not, am I?”
Something cooling and protective settles into the chest she doesn’t have. She got very good at ascribing feelings to places in her body when she was Aerial, and now she doesn’t really know where to place what. There’s nothing tying her to this form except for Suletta’s sentimentality; there’s no brain to wire to the porcelain, no chest to press the feeling into. Eri hums noncommittally, pictures her head tilting to the side as she thinks.
“Tell you what you can do, though,” she settles on, “think about what you want to say to Miorine. And all the creative threats against Mom’s life she’ll have when you’re done.”
She laughs again, coughs again. Eri regrets being so infinitely funny. “Maybe you can be in matching keychains.”
(Suletta does tell Miorine about it — eventually — and she does threaten to put Mom in a matching keychain after she hears the full thing. She also, rather embarrassingly, tells Suletta she thinks she’s wonderful and perfect and so on and makes one of her endless promises to marry her again. Eri pretends not to be there for that bit.)
They’re going to buy a little house in the countryside. Eri insists on being allowed to help with picking the location, much to Miorine’s annoyance and Suletta’s delight. They curl up on the couch in Earth House’s living space (Eri gets to sit on the coffee table, which she’s sure she won’t mind until they inevitably start making out) and scroll through house listing after house listing on Miorine’s tablet, reading the more interesting options out loud.
“There’s a little cottage down by the coast,” Miorine announces. “It’s close to both the school and the city, but not so close that we’d get traffic. One floor, if that’s —” She looks pointedly at Suletta, who shrugs.
“Climbing stairs is one of my recovery goals,” she says, “but I don’t know if I’d be able to do that — all the time, y’know? If we were living in a house with two floors we’d have to sleep on the bottom.”
Miorine flushes, presumably at the idea of sharing a bed with her fiance — stupid, Eri thinks, they’ve been sharing a bed since they met — and mumbles, “I’ll keep that in mind.” She tilts the screen of her notebook forward so Eri can see the listing she’s looking at. “Two bedrooms, so your mom could live with us if she wanted to. Study, nice-looking garden — room for a greenhouse, probably? — obscene amount of scenery —”
Suletta, peering over her shoulder, perks up. “We could see the ocean from there. I’ve never seen the ocean!”
“I have,” Eri says, which makes both of them look at her. “What? I have! Quinharbour is a harbour, isn’t it?”
Miorine flinches, which she feels bad about, and Suletta lights up, which she doesn’t. She slips a reassuring arm around Miorine’s shoulder, fingers curling and uncurling experimentally — Eri feels bad about that too — and pulls them both inward until they’re leaning against each other, blurring together.
“Maybe learning to swim could be part of my rehab,” she says.
“It could,” Miorine agrees, propping her head against Suletta’s shoulder. “I’ve never been to the ocean either.”
“It looks beautiful,” Suletta says. She’s looking down at the notebook in Miorine’s hands now, swiping idly through pictures of the view. “I wonder if it’d be the right climate to grow tomatoes, though.”
“We’d have to see.” Miorine leans further into her, wrapping her hands around Suletta’s arm. In a softer voice, she adds, “It’s the same colour as your eyes.”
Suletta squeaks. “Gross,” Eri announces.
“Must you?”
If only she had a tongue to stick out.
They tell Mom about Eri on the same day that they get properly engaged. She doesn’t have to be there for the engagement, but she does have to be there for the aftermath, for the bit where they find Mom in one of Asticassia’s private guest rooms and hold her little porcelain body up to the light and say, this is Eri. She lived.
“Oh,” Mom says wetly, and then “oh, Eri ,” and that’s about it.
Eri lets her hold her, perhaps unwisely, while Miorine and Suletta take turns giving their closest approximation of an explanation. She thinks Suletta might be crying. She doesn’t really get to see; Mom spends an awful lot of time holding her up to the light, turning her so she can see the eyes on the keychain flash when she speaks.
“So that’s, um. T-that’s why we waited until you were cleared to leave to tell you.”
Mom rests Eri on the arm of her wheelchair. She feels it rattle through her, a solid metallic clunk, and wonders for a moment if that’s typical for Permet ghosts. “That was good of you.”
Suletta swallows thickly. Eri can get a good look at her now; she hasn’t cried yet, but it’s a very close thing. “And — and now you’re. You’re on Earth again, so. Eri and I want you to be part of our family.”
Miorine makes a weird face. “Against my better judgement.”
Mom laughs. “I take it I’m invited to the wedding?”
“Against my better judgement,” Miorine says again, under her breath this time. Suletta elbows her gently.
“If you’re going to get married then I don’t want to be a keychain,” Eri adds indignantly. “Like, imagine showing up to your baby sister’s wedding and you’re two inches tall.”
“Well, I’m sure that can be arranged,” Mom says, and sounds a little too generous for her taste. “We have all the time in the world.”
Suletta and Miorine both soften visibly and exchange one of their sappy glances. Eri wishes, not for the first time, that she had the motor control to look away.
“I’m going to marry that woman,” Miorine announces.
“What? Let me see!”
She holds her phone higher. “Absolutely not.”
“That’s my little sister you’re drooling over,” Eri says ineffectually, wiggling about on the desk. “And — hey, you’re already engaged! Saying you’re gonna marry her is just an objective statement, dumbass!”
“Shut up,” Miorine says reflexively. She stands up and crosses the room so Eri definitely can’t see the screen of her notebook, and then she taps something out in response that has a lot of 3s in it.
“You have an emoji keyboard for a reason,” Eri points out.
“Shut up,” Miorine says again.
Eri waits patiently.
After a moment, “She’s decided she’s going to clean the entire kitchen because she can.”
“That’s dumb,” Eri says.
“It’s cute,” Miorine smiles. “She’s learning how to cook.”
“So are you.”
Miorine, who lived off instant ramen and tomato produce until Mom caved and started teaching her other recipes, huffs to herself. “I’m a fine cook, thank you.”
“I have no way of judging that because I cannot eat,” Eri says.