#me patting walter like “this guy can hold so much messed up and complicated trauma!”

[kivaember]

woe, ftm walter be upon ye (yes this is actually canon to apv btw)

Somedays, Carla had to laugh at how far she'd fallen.

Well-respected Institute scientist, lauded for her efforts in the C-weapon project and incorporating Coral into AI neural networks... reduced to a penniless scrapper in the underbelly of one of Ganymede's colonies, barely making ends meet because of the UEG's broken form of capitalism.

It was intentional to an extent, though. If it had just been her, riding the massive wave of Rubiconian refugees after the Fires had slagged their planet to smouldering ash, she would've thrust her hand up high and declared her credentials at the immigration office. The UEG had hoovered up every single scientist or technician it could get its greedy little paws on in the aftermath, and from what Carla had seen they were living it large right now. A luxurious little corporate cage as they regurgitated all of Rubicon's little technological miracles for the UEG to warp and manipulate.

She hoped they choked on their feed, honestly, but she was self-aware enough to know that would've been her too, if she'd been alone. But she wasn't.

"Hey, Walter! It's time to close up shop!"

Her voice rang across their large, open garage, cluttered with broken down machinery and mechs alike, a literal maze of trip hazards and health violations that would've gotten her shutdown if this was on the surface. But it wasn't. No one gave a shit what anyone did down here in the slums, so long as their little worker bees kept on working, kept on producing... and didn't, gasp, form unions.

Carla was a one-man show, though- okay, technically three, if you counted Walter and Chatty, but she was wisely keeping away from that business. All power to the people and all that, fuck the bourgeois, eat the rich, etc, etc, but Carla had a purpose she was gunning for, and social liberation didn't come under that. So, for now, it was just her and Walter, working in a deathtrap of a scrapper garage, with Chatty sitting quietly in the background pretending to be dumb security system rather than a fully fledged AI (that can and has ran circles around the security AIs on Ganymede - lots of dirty laundry in many people's drawers on this moon).

A groaning, screeching rattle echoed through the garage, signifying the shutter doors being closed. Carla pushed herself up from where she'd been squatting over a dismembered construction mech arm, trying to extract the intact gyroscopes inside. These things sold pretty sell second hand... or third... or fourth... well, you got the idea.

"Oof, all this bending over is ruining my back..." she grumbled, pressing her oil-stained hands against her lower back and applying pressure, feeling how tight and knotted it was. "I feel old as shit."

"You are old as shit."

Carla scoffed and turned to see Walter lurking in the shadows like the anti-social freak that he was. His brown hair was a little flyaway than usual, darkened from where he'd accidentally rubbed oil into it from his hands, and his mechanic jumpsuit was partially unzipped, his pale skin faintly flushed from exertion and damp with sweat.

He was a lot more modest about the unzipping, though. Carla had whacked hers down all the way to the midriff, because this shitty garage got hot no matter how much she tried finangling some kind of air conditioning down here. The air was too full of smog and other pollutants that trapped heat and discouraged the human way of cooling down via sweat evaporation. It was a torturous existence... and made Carla and Walter walk around like they were auditioning for some kind of "Mechanics Gone Wild!" calendar.

"Hey, you shouldn't be backtalking your boss like that!" Carla mock-scolded, planting her hands on her hips. "What if I decided to dock your pay?"

"Well, you'd have to pay me first," Walter said flatly, pinching the front of his jumpsuit and flapping it slightly to cool himself down. "I'm working here for free, remember?"

"Oh yeah. That's true," Carla hummed, cupping her jaw thoughtfully. "Well! Carry on, then! Can't control you if I'm not in charge of your pay, haha!"

Walter rolled his eyes, forever unimpressed with her cavalier attitude and jokes, despite her best attempts. He was too much like his father sometimes, though Carla knew better than to say that. Walter had more daddy issues than an entire soap opera cast combined, and the one time she'd made a comment about how Walter was looking more like his father now that he was a little older and.... brrrrr! The dark side of the moon had been tropical in comparison!

this kid, she thought exasperatedly, he needs to loosen up...

"Got any plans tonight?" she asked as they made their way to the rear of the garage, where they both lived out of. It wasn't anything impressive compared to their immaculate lodgings on the Xylem in another lifetime, but compared to the rest of the gutter rats around here, they were living it up large. Two bedrooms for privacy and their own kitchen and bathroom with functioning plumbing? They were like royalty! Royal rats, the pair of them, hah.

"None," Walter replied. "Why, do you need me for something?"

"Yeah, as a chaperone," Carla teased, nudging him with her elbow. "We should hit up the bars. You're an adult now, you should be living it large before we've gotta focus on the job."

Walter's expression said he'd rather belly crawl over barbed wire.

"I'd rather belly crawl over barbed wire," he said.

"Aw, c'mon! Stop being a Debbie Downer." Carla nudged him with her elbow, and weaved out of the way when he tried to nudge her back. "You're really going to leave me hanging? Leave your old as shit guardian to wander the bars alone... defenceless... helpless against any ne'er-do-wells-"

Walter snorted. "You're anything but helpless. If anything I should be protecting the local population from you, cougar."

"Cougar! Well, you're right. I do like my men young and cute," Carla teased with a wink, just to see his reaction. Which was....!!! Nothing. Guy didn't even flinch.

"Right. So, I'd just cramp your cougar style," Walter said simply. "Being a cute young man and all. They'd all think you're taken... or asking for a threesome. I wouldn't want to ruin your night like that."

"Hm." Carla was reluctantly amused. "You've gotten very sassy, Walter."

"That's your fault."

Yup, and she was proud of it. Walter had been such a humourless little thing as a child - through no fault of his own, admittedly. Growing up in the Xylem had been a lonely, neglectful existence, and being uprooted from that to flee to a colony that viewed him as nothing but an unwanted mouth to feed just compounded whatever fucked up issues that childhood of neglect had lain the foundations for. It made sense that whatever sense of humour Carla tried to impart in him turned all warped and twisted and a little mean.

But! Humour was humour! When things got bad, all you had to do was laugh! Walter wasn't the laughing type, but she'd take this! Better than nothing!

"Well, you're coming out anyway," she said. "No ifs or buts! You've just been rotting away in your room, brooding about pointless crap. Just come out and have a few drinks. Unwind a little."

"No."

"I'll have Chatty recite all the poetry I wrote since we left-"

"Okay, just a few drinks," Walter immediately u-turned.

Hah. Gottem.

-

If growing up with Carla taught Walter one thing, it was learning how to pick his battles.

He wasn't a drinker, and the bars down in the slums were as seedy as you'd expected: the alcohol was moonshine or contrabrand, drugs were commonly traded in the background, and there was always a risk of the Ganymede Guards crashing the party to arrest a few people for encouraging socialist gatherings. Walter just didn't see the point in getting involved in that crap, but Carla always was seduced by dangerous or ill-advised things.

She also had a short attention span. As they stood at the bar, knocking back the probably toxic swill being sold, Carla eventually got pulled away by some people she knew in the scrapping business, her obnoxiously loud laughter audible even over the ambient chatter.

Walter took that as his cue to finish his drink and leave.

Broken glass crunched under his boots as he stepped out into the street, burying his hands into the pockets of his mechanic jumpsuit. The air was smoggy and thick with a wet, unpleasant smell, making him feel like he was in a rancid sauna, and he unzipped his jumpsuit that little bit more, fanning himself.

He couldn't wait to leave this place.

From the moment he had stepped foot on this damned moon, he had despised every inch of it. The Xylem had been cold and loveless, yes, but the air hadn't stank of exhaust, it wasn't constantly hot and humid, with changing seasons and weather, he could see the sky and watch the birds fly, his hands would only have the callouses from holding a pen, rather than being rough and worn like leather from constant handling of scrapping tools and sticky oil. Walter's life would be very different, if his father hadn't ruined everything.

He stopped in front of the door to his and Carla's living quarters in the garage, digging out the key from his pocket and slotting it in. When he stepped inside, he was greeted with Chatty saying: "Welcome back, kid. Is the Chief still out?"

"Yeah." Walter kicked the door shut behind him. "Talking shop with some people."

"Understood."

And that was that. Despite the name Chatty was pretty quiet, which was why he and Walter got along well. He headed up the narrow staircase to his room, which was sandwiched between Carla's room and the bathroom, and just wide enough to slot a single-man bed in there with enough room for him to actually get in and out of it.

Walter felt grimy as hell, so he shed his boots and jumpsuit entirely, tossing the soiled clothing onto the floor before walking, completely naked, to the bathroom, yanking the cord to turn the light on. As he shut the door behind him, he looked at the cracked mirror Carla had broken when bolting onto the wall. She'd laughed that her luck was already so bad that this should cancel it out.

His reflection was uncomfortably familiar.

As a child, he'd been told often that he looked a lot like his mother. Standard biases, of course: for a considerable chunk of his childhood, he'd stayed as his assigned sex, a quiet little daughter that was easily forgotten about by most people. The moment he'd stepped out of that easily assigned box, became a son hungry for attention instead of the quiet daughter, people immediately switched to well, he's looking a lot like his father nowadays, isn't he?

Truth was, Walter had looked like both of them. He had his mother's bone structure, but his father's eyes, and his hair was a combination of them both: slightly wavy where his mother's was curly and his father's completely straight. He hadn't really put much stock into his appearance back then, anyways. He'd been ten. He just wanted people to call him Walter. What did it matter who he looked more like at the time?

Now, though, he looked in the mirror and saw his father.

What lingering remnants of his mother were easily overlooked by the sharp line of his jaw and the shape of his eyes, his hair cropped short enough that it was hard to see the slight waviness. He lowered his gaze, to his body which was well-toned with muscle from years of hauling heavy machinery and scrap, his shoulders broad and his trunk solid enough that it partially hid the slight curve of his hips. Didn't do anything to hide his breasts, but he already had a plan for those, if this Furlong Dynamics pilot recruitment programme worked out.

It was strange, though. The more he carved away the parts that were like his mother, the more his father shone through, and the more complicated Walter felt about the whole thing. He hated his father, despised him from the very depths of his soul, regretted every day his failed attempt to kill him before everything went completely pear-shaped... and now he was even tainting this, having Walter's stomach clench and his face tighten at his reflection, at the ghost of his father hidden in there.

He wasn't the same as him, though... he was going to put to rights what Dr Kohler had done wrong. He'd make it so he could look himself at the mirror without wanting to flinch... either because he'd succeed in destroying the Coral for good, or because he'd die in the process. Either or.

"Kid. You've been staring at the mirror for five minutes."

"I'm fine," Walter said, anticipating Chatty's follow up question. He turned away and turned on the shower, watching as the metallic smelling water spluttered out of the showerhead sluggishly. "Just thinking."

"Hm."

Chatty left it there, and Walter neatly compartmentalised his complicated feelings and stuffed them under the figurative bed. It was a pointless thing to brood about, didn't contribute at all towards his mission. Being Walter was a selfish self-indulgence anyways, the one thing he allowed himself, despite the looming pressure of the trials to come.

What did it matter who he looked liked? That legacy was going to be buried, one way or another.