#balteus has taken down 2 of my headmates already but surely I'm different

[brumeraven]

🍂: We'd Been Called Angels || mech pilots, DID, burnout?, commoditization?, trauma?, balteus has taken down 2 of my headmates already but surely I'm different

We'd been called Angels, once. Seraphs, in the days when we'd been the last seal on the book of Revelation.

Then, we'd won. The world hadn't ended. But it also hadn't changed. Nature abhors a vacuum, and mankind couldn't live with itself without the threat of the Beasts.

Some I suppose had feared no one would know what to do with the Seraphs after the apocalypse. Not the cynics, though; they knew to fear instead that someone would know exactly what to do with them.

They'd been right.

We'd been called Angels, once. Now it was just SPs. Cheap, disposable things a quarter the size of the ones who'd saved everything.

nations were willing to sacrifice us to preserve their way of life from the Beasts. They'd been no less willing to throw us at each Other as well.

The discovery of Flux had made it easier to stomach. No more bad optics of mangled children pulled from the porcelain shards of wrecked control pods. The whole process was sterile now

Humane.

Routine.

Just a cheap S-Link inside the SP, the pilot's consciousness plucked out of the Stream at the moment of mission failure and tucked safely back in their body. No muss, no fuss, no dead children weighing on their consciousnesses.

And then there was the added benefit of years more field experience. We didn't die now, we learned, immortal weapons that sharpened themselves further with each deployment, valuable assets in the Cardinal Wars.

The body was safe somewhere they called home, curled up in a Boat. I was Adrift. Nowhere.

The Stream, as if it were some gentle thing. A misnomer.

I was nothing immersed in it, tossed about by currents, unfamiliar emotions and memories flowing and ebbing, stochastic and sudden.

"You know the drill. Again." Handler's voice pulled me under, down to some hellhole, ass-end of the continent. It could've been anywhere; the briefing seemed lifetimes ago.

"Bring them hell, 117." A call sign? An ID number? Or just the number of times I'd been sent to kill Him?

The sun was warm on my skin, and I stretched my six wingblades, feeling stiffness in their joints, as if this was the first time they'd been moved.

And then, there He was, a bare 100 meters away. Just a man. More than a man. That Man. The Fluxsaint I'd been sent to kill.

At the sight of Him, the Chorus raised their voices. Some snarled in rage, some sneered in defiance, some simply became Still or cried softly. And some few tried to snatch control away.

I pushed them all down, the countless others. I was still here, still alive, still fighting.

"You, again?" He sounded tired. Concerned, even. Closer now, only 20 meters, a fragile thing I could have stepped on. He loomed over me, Crook in one hand, stretching out the other as if to lay it gently upon my steel. "How many tries has it been? How many times have I hurt you?"

Metal groaned as my body moved in fits and jerks, and I realized I was sobbing in a body that could make no other sound.

Please tell me. I've lost count.

His touch was certain, tender, one thrust cleanly through the S-Link. He'd done this the same number of times, after all.

I'd been called Angel, once, I thought.

Now I was a disappointment. A memory of pain and failure. One more voice lost in the Stream, sobbing quietly in a distant corner of a metal body that strode again to a destruction it was allowed to forget.

~🍂