Can’t get enough of that scene of Robron on the farm. Two legacy characters from two legacy families mapping out their future together while reclaiming their past.
This was the culmination of six years of waiting. For them and for us.
To finally see them sat there with so much love and hope and happiness in their hearts after everything, in spite of everything, makes me inconsolable actually.
They’re together and they’ve made it and their life is theirs to rebuild again.
I was a good hound. Obedient. Empty. I did what I was told and I never ever asked why. I saw what happened to the ones who did.
By the time training ended, whatever I had been before was gone. They left nothing but quiet where a healthy mind had been. A heart that once pulsed with life reduced to merely pumping blood.
If there was a path back, the augmentation erased it. After that, I couldn't even look at myself.
Ordinary mirrors became gateways to unreality with an uncanny creature inside. It stared with its awful eyes and paced like a wild thing. The hideous click-click-click of its fingers on carapaced arms and the ghost-feel of its steel feet on the padded floor and its incessant picking at the metal in the holes of its fleshy torso and the way I CAN'T LOOK AWAY and the MIRROR won't BREAK it WON'T BREAK even as we BOTH pit ourselves against it and SOMETHING WET smears across our FACE and our LAUGHTER is the CRY of a MOTH in a BELL JAR-
...
The adjustment period was... difficult. I went into it believing I had been made a perfectly empty vessel, and I was wrong. They knew I would realise I was wrong. They were counting on it.
I took what I found there and I dropped it into the hole they had made. A human entered that cell, and a hound left. I was what they had made me, and nothing more.
They took my old body, and they gave me a new one. One that fit. One three stories tall and built to kill things even bigger. My role was decided.
I don't know how many mechs I took out. There's a file somewhere with the exact number but I don't have the clearance. I was good at it though. I know because I'm still alive, and I think that maybe I should've been worse.
The war is over now. There's nothing- look at me. LOOK at ME! There's nothing left for you to save. They gave me a new body and they took it away. I forget to blink, because I forget I have eyes. I trip because my legs are the wrong length. Nobody knows what my name was before and my original psych evals got bombed.
You can't put me back together, I am a puzzle with no box and you only have half of the pieces.
Do you know what they do to the hound who catches the fox? They put it down.
So put me down.
I don't want to be made into something that I'm not. Not again.
Just put me down. Make it stop. Maybe in my last moments, I'll remember what I looked like.
- excerpt from a recording of the sixth month review of former pilot, "Viscacha".
The patient has shown a steady increase in oratory capacity and general awareness since admission which is a promising sign. However, this is accompanied by the anomalies common to pilots of her cohort, including extreme depression and depersonalisation.
When the patient figures out she doesn't have to do what we say she will likely attempt self-deletion.
Recommend maintaining current modes of care until signs of personal agency emerge. Recommend increasing risk assessment of self harm from moderate to severe.
Likelihood of full recovery is low, but in time she may be able to re-enter the workforce.
-Dr. Green
(Addendum: Hey looks like I picked some misinformation somewhere about successful hunting hounds being put down. It is false. Honestly I probably picked it up from PETA propaganda or something.)
thinking of the day when i finally have my sealskin back. Will I leave forever? Will i stay?
i’m not a stranger to loss. Though it may not be the same as losing another human, i’ve dealt with much loss of my animals over the years. I know when their time is up and i know when i cannot keep them any longer. Sometimes i resent it, how the lives i hold in my grasp always slip away in the end. My mother says they know when they’re safe. Maybe she’s right. When i sit with them and watch them, and i know that they’ll be gone soon, i don’t try to fight it. I tell them it’s okay. They’re allowed to go. I won’t keep them here. They’ll be okay.
leopard seals are solitary. Humans, for the most part, are not. These feelings are conflicting when you’re both. I want the loneliness, i want the absence of other voices.
and yet i fear i cannot have that, not because i’ll be unable to ever leave, but because my own humanity will prevent me from leaving. I love my friends, i love my family. I’ve grown up with them and i’ve laughed and i’ve cried and i’ve lost and i’ve loved. When i get my sealskin, will i have the strength to leave that all behind? It may not be for forever, but the sea is wild and dangerous and life can be swallowed up by the depths in an instant.
i’m no stranger to loss, yes, but someday i’ll have to choose between two everythings—my home on land, with everything that i’ve ever known, or my home in the sea, with everything i long to know.
i’m afraid of the day this decision will have to be made, because i’ve always been terribly indecisive.
Oml my mother treats me like I'm a fucking infant im tired of this- im responsible for fucking everything around here, I keep everything running smoothly, with no help from my mother, but noooooo I'm not allowed to be home alone, nooooo I'm not allowed to walk through town even in daylight, I'm not allowed to do ANYTHING cause my mother just can't trust me- I'm constantly infantilized and it makes me want to kill myself, I don't do all this work to be mature, eloquent, responsible, just to be treated like a helpless child
The only thing then that kept her from writing constantly was the nervous recognition that she'd miss the things other people were doing and become even more separated from life than she already felt herself to be. To stay so much in the world of writing she would not learn about the world, and she had a lot to learn. How could she write without learning how to live.
