#ayre621

[manicsystemic]

Transfem621 that can see Ayre's red spindley network course through her arms when they synchronize closely. That can see red sinewaves take over her HUD displays and cybereye output while communicating. That can feel electrical humming from the AC feedback when Ayre is autopiloting the mech homeward. That can feel irregular clicking noises in the back of her skull while Ayre pipes through the ACs systems to hack something for her.

She can feel Ayre's frequency humming in her head when they're together, Ayre pinging about a missile coming in from the left, a new hostile on the right, and it leaves a hollow ringing tinnitus feeling in her head when she has to leave the AC to get food in her. Like a gaping hole that is empty.

Walter notices she's spending all of her break time in the AC now, and tries to remind her to go on walks even if she has to use prosthetics in order to walk outside of the armored core, its still healthy exercise. She tries to slink back into the cockpit whenever he's not watching.

She doesn't know if Ayre is a waveform parasite trying to find a way to bond with her body permenantly, if Ayre is a genuine lonely loving soul trying to seek out her companionship, or if Ayre is a natural phenomenon that doesn't adhere to human ideas of intelligence, and the voice and actions are just her brain rationalizing it as such, and at this point she doesn't care. It's more worth believing in than the reality she was living in day-to-day.

She never got to enjoy her body after transition, being a mercenary is dangerous, but the only way to get stuff like healthcare, clean showers and a bed, three meals a day easily, considering the poverty she came from, she got bullet wounds, electric burns and shrapnel shards, the limbs you'd normally have to augment to pilot an AC got amputated and sold years ago. The world didn't like her body anyway, said it was weird, a mockery, a fetish, perverted, a joke, but without it she felt wrong. And now most of it is gone anyway, to battles and augments, but at least the small boobs got to stay.

But Ayre... makes her feel whole again. Ayre sees her beyond the surgery scars. The nutrient and cybernetic ports. Beyond the stigma. She sees inside. And she doesn't leave her side. So whatever strange and different world lies beyond the convergence... if it means being with her even closer, forever... it doesn't matter what happens to the rest of the world. She'll be there.