vesser and tivea zol are corpus twins who start out absolutely hating each other.
it’s kind of a product of growing up in a hypercapitalist, hypercompetative society. plus the fact that they are twins kind of has their parents putting them in competition a lot. prove which of you will be more productive and profitable and we will dole out the Parental Affection. (not that the corpus are particularly affectionate to begin with but you know)
and it. ruins their relationship. maybe when they were very, very young they got along but then into their formative and then teen years, vesser and tivea hated each other other. and in some part that hate was manufactured by the society that they lived in. they didn’t see each other as peers and weren’t really given a chance to develop knowing they had each other’s backs. instead they were immediately isolated from one another and told “that one’s your enemy”. their parents would kind of constantly bring up one twin’s success around the other as if that would motivate that twin to do better. and in turn, seeking some kind of outlet for their respective loneliness, vesser turned to robotics and tivea turned to ships. seeking companionship in metal and circuitry.
when they’re in their 20’s, vesser (developing into the worst kind of person imaginable) signs some bad deals under his sisters name and gets her pretty much evicted from the family home and kicked out of the middle class corpus society that they had grown up in. vesser saddled his sister with unimaginable debt that she, alone and cast out, would probably never be able to pay back. would never be able to outpace the steadily climbing interest rates surrounding her debts. would never see a life outside of shitty work she was overqualified for. no prospects. he’d successfully taken out competition and was all the more lonely and miserable for it because the only person who could Get It was his sister.
so when tivea zol gets news that vesser has died in a grineer raid on a corpus prison, at first she’s confused. had no idea that he’d been in prison at all, really. then again, it isn’t like anyone really tells her anything. certainly not her family that she hasn’t spoken to for the greater part of a decade. certainly not anyone else who, for all intents and purposes, would love to see vesser imprisoned or worse just in general.
but she sits on it more. her brother is dead. the brother that she has hated for most of her life is dead. why does she feel so sad? she sulks around her work, waiting on news about a funeral she knows very few people will attend and thinks about her brother. the brother that she has thought about every day and has hated for every day for putting her down here, for making her family hate her, for making sure she could never climb up. and she misses him. she misses this concept of a person that could have been if their own social upbringing wasn’t Like this. she misses the type of person her brother could have been. the choices he could have made if he had maybe pulled himself further away from the corpus life. had maybe chosen instead to look inwards. and all of those maybes kind of coalesce in her grief.
when the funeral finally comes around and her parents invite her, it’s little more than a guided garage sale but there’s an empty coffin there. their parents sell off his robotics that he had spent so much time and effort on with little mind to their importance. no attention is paid towards the fact that vesser has tinkered and had loved and had stressed over these little personal projects. that these little projects loved him and now were being reassigned, reprogrammed with more “sensible” purposes. she doesn’t have the money to pick up any of them despite how cheaply their parents sell them for. all memory of her brother is carefully sold, wrapped up, shipped out, and cleaned away. every morning she wakes up and sees his face staring back at her, hauntingly, as if she thought she could ever get away. and she hates him and misses him and mourns him and rejects any comforting because vesser hurt a lot of people (her included) so she shouldn’t actually be sad about him being gone.
and when she sees him again during a steel meridian raid on a corpus dry dock she had taken work on, she immediately breaks his nose and hugs him