I went on a two-hour hike. It was quiet — the sort of vast spacious quiet that makes it easier to think — with just me and my dog for most of it. As I trekked along downhill along switchbacks, it occurred to me that I like myself a lot more now. One of those random moments where I felt more … authentic, I suppose is the word.
Authentically carrying my dog over the icy patches because he didn’t like the cold on his paws.
Authenticity is one of those words that gets tossed around like it’s a panacea, so I’m reticent to use it. What I mean is that my thoughts are becoming increasingly my own, free from external pressures and expectations. Purely me. The way I am. And I like this much better.
It’s exhausting, maintaining someone else’s grandiosity. I won’t do that anymore.
I’ve been thinking about switching over to writing horror.
I’ve deeply enjoyed horror since high school, but it was one of those, “Nice girls don’t like scary things,” so I kept it quiet. Sort of. Admittedly I could get pretty excited when discussing Lovecraft or movies, so it was probably more of an open secret that I didn’t discuss around people who were uncomfortable with it. But the world has changed a lot in the last 15 years, and I think people are more okay with horror now than they used to be.
Anyway, I think it would be easy to tweak my current WIPs to turn them into psychological horror/thrillers.
All I have to do is take away the guardrails.
As in, no more characters gaining self-awareness at a pivotal moment and deciding that they don’t want to be meanie jerks after all.
That doesn’t happen in the real world anyway.
Because IRL absolutely everything about them is invested into maintaining their ego. I think there’s a “narcissists prayer” or something that sums it up perfectly, and there aren’t ever any moments of, “Oh dang, maybe I am a heartless monster and I should stop.”
We should stop giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Shine the light on the fact that evil doesn’t always have a criminal record. Or pop out of a TV screen to eat you. Sometimes evil is the person who insists on “shades of gray” so you don’t call them out on their willingness to harm others to get what they want, and accusing you of being the one who is rigid and judgmental for simply trying to describe what happened.
So let’s take away the guardrails. Poof. Gone. It’s not about being “nice” or “wholesome” or whatever anymore — it’s about surviving something real and regaining my sense of self.
Now … all that’s left is regaining that sense of emotional resonance with writing.
I still don’t feel any emotional resonance with my fictional writing.
Way back when I was a teenager taking creative writing, I went through something difficult and my teacher advised me to write it out in a story. So I did. And it was deeply therapeutic. I know from experience what writing is capable of doing for me when I can immerse myself in it.
Now that I’m 38 and I’ve survived horrors I never imagined … I can’t. The emotion sits frozen inside while I mechanically type the words.
The fact that what I went through last summer caused me to drop 20lbs in two months was a physical trauma, and even without violence I was still scared for my health and safety. The damage was real. It’s been four months since then, but I’ve only gained back 8lbs of what I lost. I don’t feel safe yet. I feel like I’m waiting for more bad things to happen that I’ll have to keep it together to deal with despite secretly falling apart inside. Again.
The thing about therapeutic writing is that you need to be healed to a certain point for it to work. I’m not there yet.
So we need to be patient.
Time is something that can never be forced. Time feels like eternity while it’s happening but is always a microsecond in retrospect.
Emotional resonance is something that can’t be forced, it has to flow. So, until I’m able to feel again, we’ll let the words be as stilted as they need to be.
I have now, finally, fixed the “unidentified network” issue with my laptop. Hurrah, I shall be back to blogging!
Which only leaves us the question, What will we talk about?
Maybe nothing. It was nice seeing you. Ciao.
😉😂
Alright, alright. Here we are in 2026, and I don’t have any New Year’s resolutions. I have plenty of plans, dreams, ambitions even, but no resolutions. I don’t want to hit the end of this year and think, “Yet again I failed.”
Like back when I was all, “I want to write and self-publish one novel a year.” And it’s now been how many years without any writing? Yeah, we’re not doing that again. I’m keeping everything open-ended and letting it happen as it happens, so I don’t have to face that particular brand of disappointment.
Joint custody still feels like living two separate lives that keep interrupting each other. It’s hard.
I’ve started saying to myself, “Tomorrow I’m going to work on a creative project.” Then I randomly get a phone call from an old acquaintance, and the trip down Memory Lane ends with me curled up in front of the TV and no motivation to do anything. I didn’t realize that I knew so many people. I didn’t realize that so many people would say, “Actually, I thought he didn’t treat you well.” Despite me trying to pretend like everything was boring and normal because I don’t want anyone to worry about me. And that was what people were thinking before last summer when he decided to turn really nasty.
The one that really threw me was when a new acquaintance that I met a couple of months ago called me up out of the blue with, “I heard about him”, and I have no clue how so much information is traveling around. I’m not upset, but definitely baffled. Eventually it will all be old news anyway, and Memory Lane will become appropriately dirty and overgrown from disuse.
Despite that, I am making progress on Runemaster. Switching to Malachi’s perspective was the right move, and the words are flowing more readily than they had been before. That picnic scene that awkwardly dragged on forever? Yeah, that’s going to be cut entirely. Maybe I’ll type it up and post it here for a good laugh, but it’s not going to be part of the final novel, that’s for sure.
I keep wondering if I should start reading books again, but focusing on them is harder than focusing on writing. Maybe I’ll play through Hatoful Boyfriend again and count that as reading.
Well, my friend, let’s see how 2026 turns out for the both of us. 😊
I have done hardly any drawing over the last 16 years. I was borderline obsessive about it all through high school, but, ya know … stuff happened. Criticisms happened. It was easier not to.
So here I am, 16 years out of practice.
My drawing:
ChatGPT’s version:
I know that with a good eraser and lots of patience, I could improve my art skills. Part of me feels like the AI took my developing style and turned it into generic anime.
But I don’t care.
I’ve decided to put together a mock visual novel. I might have mentioned this before, but I’ve never tried script writing and I’d like to give it a shot. VNs only require character art and backgrounds, then you get to run wild with all the dialogue and implied actions that you desire, and for someone like me who never felt comfortable going deep with descriptive prose, it sounds perfect. With the help of AI, I figure that this is a very doable project for lone little ol’ me.
What can I say, Hatoful Boyfriend put this in my mind years ago.
So, no, this particular sketch won’t be used in my mock VN — I was mostly experimenting with ChatGPT to see if it could help in the art department, and I’m satisfied.
I don’t know what my timeline will be, but I am excited for this project.
NaNoWriMo has made me realize that I’m terrified of advancing the plot.
The characters have been on a picnic that kind of keeps dragging along with small talk and tiny hints at bigger things, only instead of getting up and doing anything, they’re sitting around. It’s starting to feel like my characters are looking at me with expectations, asking, “Well … when are we allowed to do something important?”
And all I can reply is, “I don’t know, where is my life going?!”
While I know where I intended the story to progress, I don’t feel anchored in it yet. It feels more like a half-forgotten dream than a series of events. Instead of trying to move forward, I’m keeping the characters sitting around the same spot, because I’m scared of changing the status quo.
Much like my life.
I think I spent about 15 years feeling like nothing ever fundamentally changed — a sort of monotony in constant chaos. No matter what happened, there’d be a big ol’ reset button that would put us all back in the same place with the same problems day after day after day. Explosive argument? Reset. New career prospect? Reset. Emotional breakthroughs and new promises? Reset.
Then one day the reset button didn’t activate.
Progress and change stopped being a fantasy to write about — it became real.
And it’s terrifying.
Especially because it’s like some sort of existential switch was flipped, and here I am trying to hide out at home maintaining the status quo for long enough to catch my breath, while people I hadn’t spoken to in 10 years are randomly calling me up to offer a path forward. Seriously, what the heck is going on? It feels like I’m sliding helplessly towards change. Maybe that’s what life is supposed to feel like.
So on an emotional level, I’m scared of advancing the plot in my novel. The characters want to move forward, and here I am all, “Let’s spend 10,000 words on this picnic. I described the weather as being very lovely.”
The problem with being a writer is that sometimes your psychological issues have a voice and can (metaphorically) stare you in the eye. Especially when you’re trying to get as much writing done in a month as you can.
On Halloween, he sent me a picture of the kids out trick-or-treating with him and his new girlfriend. He’s also sent me random texts saying, “You’re old,” so I’ve come to expect this sort of thing from him and I just ignore it.
It’s strange when the performance drops and suddenly you feel like you’re dealing with a ten-year-old, instead of the person they pretended to be.
“Amicable” is not a word that I would use to describe us.
So here we are on November 4th, and I hate how foggy headed I am. In the past I always felt incredibly sharp when it came to my fiction writing, and I did a good job of holding details in my head to weave together and reference back to. Now I’m … dull. I can’t remember what I wrote yesterday. I find it enormously frustrating, and part of me is scared that this is my “new normal.” I’ll have a wall of post-it notes that the kids will knock down, play with, and destroy. Then we’ll all laugh about c’est la vie, though inside I’ll be crying about how much I lost of myself.
And for good measure, my phone will then chime with a text from him, reminding me, “You’re old.”
My muscles aren’t used to handwriting, so I’ve been wearing one o’ them wrist compression/support glove deal-ios when I write. It’s really helped to tighten up my penmanship, closer to how it was when I was in high school. One of my quirks is that I hold my pen “wrong” and I was never able to learn better, so I had a callus on my pinkie through all of my childhood. It’s disappeared since my school days, but sometimes now I look down at my pinkie and wonder how much handwriting it would take to get that callus back. More than three days worth, I know that much.
I think that it was good that I decided to go back to my roots with handwriting for NaNoWriMo. Heck, if I wanted to get really authentically me, I could get a burgundy marker. The very first novel I ever started was written with burgundy marker. 😂
So … I’m trying out something new with this story, and I have three characters interacting with each other instead of my usual two… or sometimes just one character alone with their thoughts. Maybe one day in the distant future, I’ll make it all the way up to four characters in a room. But that seems like a lot so maybe not.
Sometimes the introvert goes right through. I’m secretly proud of the fact that The Scion Suit functionally has only three characters.
Heck, on my child-free days, I’m so accustomed to the silence that my robot vacuum sometimes freaks me out. Like, “OMG WHAT’S BANGING AROUND? Oh it’s just you, Roomba.” I have yet to feel lonely — I’m still establishing my sense of safety.
The downside of NaNoWriMo is that waking up my creative side is also waking up my emotional side, because you can have frequent anxiety attacks and still be thoroughly numb inside. I cry at dog food commercials. I watched Flowers in the Attic and cried. Then I watched Stephen King’s Misery with Kathy Bates, because while I’ve heard rumors of her amazing performance, I haven’t actually seen it before … and Misery was the Stephen King novel that convinced me of his genius as a writer. But I did not cry. I was rather disappointed that the end of the movie didn’t include the publication of the final Misery novel, since I thought that was a nice touch in the book.
Anyway, that’s probably enough rambling from me for now. I’m surviving, one day at a time.
I’m also not anticipating that I’ll do any writing when I have the kids.
Maybe that’s an odd epiphany to have, but I was forced into a “fresh start”, and figuring out how to move forward has been … difficult. Part of me felt like I should reject everything about who I was and be a totally different person, to protect myself in the future. More pragmatic, less vulnerable.
But there are a lot of things about me that I like.
I like that I’m a writer, for one. It’s a deep passion that I keep coming back to, no matter what life throws at me — a calling that I’m lucky to have as an anchor.
I like that I’m a fiber artist. I like creating beautiful things out of fabric, thread, and yarn, and the way the kids love the items I make for them. Heck, I even love the “Did you make that?” attention that I get in public.
So maybe I don’t need to jump into a new education to build a new career as a new person. Maybe I can stay exactly who I am and peddle the skills I already have.
Despite what I’ve been told, my skills are valid.
I am valid.
I don’t have to reject me just because he did.
So here we are on day two of NaNoWriMo. I’ve decided to handwrite my first draft for now, and I like working with the TV playing in the background. It feels cozy to be curled up in my recliner with my favorite blanket and a notebook propped against the armrest. I have yet to feel a deep connection with the story and characters, but I am making progress in the words.
I over-prepared with the Halloween candy and didn’t get many trick-or-treaters, so now I’m left wondering how much I should give to my kids versus how much I should hoard for myself. You know the stereotype of writers who smoke while typing away? For me it’s candy.
If I hoard the leftovers for myself, I’ll certainly be well stocked for NaNoWriMo.
(I wrote this yesterday, and forgot to hit ‘publish’ 😅)
Since I now have joint custody, I have tons and tons of child-free time for myself, and my house is probably a little excessively clean these days (do I really need to scrub down the walls every week?). I want to kick myself back into the writing habit, and the timing lines up perfectly for NaNoWriMo! Yay!
Which, admittedly, I probably won’t follow the way it’s intended. I am still a mom, and I still have plenty of days of childcare on my plate. Maybe I’ll take 2 months to make up for the 50-50 time division.
Participating in NaNoWriMo also feels like coming full circle, since the last time I gave it a shot I ended up meeting my now-ex-husband, and never finished that story. It’s time for me to reclaim the path I had wanted to journey so many years ago, after all those broken promises and surrendered dreams.
It’s hard to explain the sort of relief I feel, at the thought of planning out an entire month knowing that each day should be more-or-less predictable … or how terrified I am that they won’t be. However, I can’t let fear of what may or may not happen dictate my choices for me, so I might as well plow ahead like everything is going to be boring and stable.
So let’s jump right into the action plan:
I’m going to be continuing Runemaster, rather than coming up with anything new. Maybe it’s cheating that I already have a portion written, but I’m working with the limitations here — what I went through this year is not the sort of stuff that one just “moves on” from. So, rather than inventing anything new from my poor exhausted brain, I’m sticking with characters that are already familiar. Deeply familiar, in this case, considering that I originally created these characters about 20 years ago. Writing this novel will be very emotionally comforting for a number of reasons.
What I can’t decide right now is whether I want to type the story, or handwrite it. I used to always handwrite the first draft with the most colorful pens I own, but who knows if I’m going to want to go through the trouble of typing it up later. Choices, right? LOL
Part of me kind of wishes that my only responsibility was to scrub walls and wash laundry, but I can’t hide behind chores forever. I still have dreams to pursue, goals to accomplish, and a life to rebuild.
NaNoWriMo Day 1: I will write 1000 words.
It will be terrible, rusty, and full of self-doubt, but it will be writing.
Hartmann waited for Carol out on the running track, smiling slightly when she came through the doors and squinted at him through the sunlight. The corporal was still with her, so the first thing that Hartmann did was dismiss the soldier, to ensure that they would be alone. She was nervous as the corporal left, so she bit her lip as her eyes locked onto the ground, and the action made her look younger and more girlish.
He had to find his tongue before he could say, “We’re going to run a mile to start.” It was hard to describe the effect that Carol was having on him. She wasn’t feisty like the women in the military, nor did she try to act sexy like the women at the bar. She was something else … something unfamiliar.
Carol nodded and murmured, “Yes, sir,” with her eyes still pointed downwards. Her hands tightened into fists.
“Relax, I’m under orders to be nice to you.” Hartmann smirked as he added, “And remember to call me master sergeant. I’ll let you off this time because you’re a civilian.”
“Yes, sir … master sergeant.” She glanced up, met his eyes for a split second, then looked away.
“Go on, get moving. It’s four laps around the track.”
Hartmann was silent as they jogged the first lap, giving Carol time to get used to his presence and feel more at ease. He watched her out of the corner of his eye, noting that it didn’t take long for her to begin breathing heavily, and compensated by slowing down the pace. When they started around the curve again, he said, “I’m sorry for being a dick.”
Carol didn’t reply, but he had expected that.
“Everyone knows I’m a real asshole to be around …” He feigned sheepishness, though inwardly he winced at his own words. He hadn’t even begun to get rough with her when she had jumped into the Suit, and if given the chance he would show her in a heartbeat just how much of a jerk he could be. However, at the moment he had a goal, and he wanted Carol to relax and open up to him. “I especially get a little crazy about the Suit.” That part was true.
He was quiet again, studying her closely, doing his best to read her thoughts through her body language. Her face flitted through a number of micro-expressions, enough to tell him that the inside of her mind was no where near as empty as her exterior, but it was going to take more time to be able to read her accurately.
“Master sergeant,” she said hesitantly as they began their third lap at an even slower pace. “Do you know what the visor is made out of?”
“Not a clue. I’d guess something similar to leaded glass, but I don’t think the minerals used in it came from this planet.” Hartmann stopped and grinned at her. “You noticed, didn’t you.”
“Not while we were inside.” Carol placed her hands on her knees as she huffed. “But when I had the Suit out in the sunlight, it was like seeing the world for the first time.”
“It’s amazing, but it’s something that you’re going to have to get used to. Those new colors have an odd way of swirling together and causing vertigo and nausea once you get moving fast enough. That’s going to matter during combat.”
She looked away. “Am I supposed to go into combat?”
“I’m not cleared for that information. I was told to train you, so that’s what I’m doing.” Hartmann was eyeing Carol up and down again. “In the military, you follow orders without question.”
“I guess that’s something we have in common,” she blurted, then bit her lip shyly as she began walking again.
Hartmann was momentarily lost for words as some sort of electrical shock pulsed through his chest. A feeling started to form inside his throat, then hardened into anger. How dare the cleaning lady suggest that they had any commonality – he was a hero, and she was a nobody. She was only there through some unexplained fluke, because some computer inside the Suit had called her “commander.” If not for that, her place would be in the shadow of his glory, unnoticed as she maintained the Suit for him.
He walked beside her, neither of them bothering with the pretense of jogging, until he regained himself and a quip came to him, “I saw the employee file on you, and it said that you’ve always been the picture of good behavior. I bet your parents loved you for that.”
Carol shrugged. “I guess they would have.”
“Would have?” Hartmann prodded.
“They died when I was three.”
He frowned. Carol didn’t look like the sort who carried childhood trauma, and she had delivered the news so blandly that it would have better suited a conversation about the weather. “How?” he asked, not out curiosity about the answer, but more for the opportunity to gauge her response.
“House fire.” Carol looked over at him and met his eyes. “I nearly died of smoke inhalation as well.”
“That is surprisingly interesting for you.” Hartmann cracked a grin. “I would have guessed that you grew up in some ordinary middle class family, did all of your homework and managed mostly B’s in school, then graduated and decided to twiddle your thumbs until you died.”
She scowled, finally annoyed by something. “No. I grew up in foster care, and got myself emancipated at sixteen. I got a GED instead of graduating, and I’ve been working full time ever since. I am not twiddling my thumbs.” A shadow of doubt crossed over her eyes, as if she was second-guessing what she had said.
“Foster care, huh? Dark place, isn’t it.” For a moment Hartmann felt the impulse to reach over and place his hand against her shoulder, to feel the crook of her neck with his fingers, but he tamped it down and kept his hands by his side.
“I survived.” Her mouth twisted downwards. “By becoming invisible.”
“That explains the great mystery of the cleaning lady,” he said smugly. “I should have guessed there was something tragic lingering behind that pretty face of yours.”
Carol stared at him, her expression blank. Then, abruptly, she began jogging again, her hair bouncing as she pulled ahead. Hartmann picked up the pace as well.
“Since I know that you’re wondering, but are too shy to ask, I grew up in some ordinary middle class family, but I got straight A’s, and was the captain of both the lacrosse and swim teams,” he said conversationally. “Then I enlisted when I was seventeen … to kill people.” Hartmann laughed at the series of expressions that flitted across Carol’s face when she glanced over at him, then added, “I had to get out.”
“Doesn’t sound like it was that bad,” she murmured.
“It wasn’t. It was so normal I was suffocating,” he replied.
Hartmann continued to study Carol, piecing together what he could about her from the small bits that she had told him. There was something off about her, some essential part that was either repressed or incomplete, that enabled her to speak almost monotonously about her past traumas. It intrigued him.
She was skinny, and combined with her lack of stamina, it made him suspect that she was a chronic under-eater, though not out of body-image issues. He’d guess that Carol was completely unaware of herself as a physical being, and probably wasn’t aware of her nervous habits. The way she pulled her teeth slowly across her full, pale pink, bottom lip was sensuous – more so, because of her naivete – and if she had any idea of how it made him think about her mouth, she would stop doing it immediately.
He wondered how she would taste.
After they finished their final lap, he took her to the vending machine and bought an electrolyte drink for her, then debated how much more exercise he should put her through. He liked the sheen of sweat on her forehead, liked the idea of pushing her so hard that her muscles burned, and wanted to make the most of the opportunity that he had been given. The obstacle course was guaranteed to be too hard for her, but he could drill her through calisthenics out on the field for as long as he liked.
She was going to be sore when he was through with her.
Hartmann was summoned back to the Base the next day, and waited in the bunker with no explanation of what was supposed to happen. He stared at the Suit and ached to touch it the way the cleaning lady did, but his training kept him in his position, ready to salute the moment a superior appeared to deliver orders. He mused over the possibility that some new intel had dropped, and he was on the verge of being sent out on another mission. In a matter of time, he would return home a hero, and the incident with Carol would be as forgotten as completely as she was.
What he did not anticipate was Captain Lambert to appear with Carol in tow. She was pale, and hid behind Lambert’s large frame to avoid Hartmann’s burning gaze, seeming even more timid and nervous than she had before. If he hadn’t been so annoyed over her reappearance, he would have found her behavior cute.
“MSG Hartmann,” Lambert said brusquely, “You are to assist me in training a new pilot for the Suit.”
Hartmann’s hackles rose sharply. “Who?” he demanded without any of the expected deference. “That bitch?”
Carol’s eyes teared up as her head swung away, her hands wringing together as she tried to shrink into herself behind Lambert’s back. It wasn’t the captain’s barked out punishment that twinged Hartmann with contrition, so much as the way Carol failed to defend herself against the word. He had expected her to bite back at him, to fling insults and posture as if she had a chance in a fight against him. Anything that would show that she thought of herself as too tough for him to feel guilty over. Compared to all the other women Hartmann had known, Carol seemed unnaturally quiet.
The way Lambert moved to shield her filled him with jealousy.
There was no way the captain was smitten with Carol. She was too pathetic and plain. All she had going for her was the fact that she cleaned the Suit … and the way her hair brushed the top of her petite shoulders, promising a feminine clavicle hidden underneath the neckline of her t-shirt. Hartmann thought about how she had felt under his hands, and how her soft muscles had struggled to pull away from him without any success.
Hartmann was the Suit’s pilot, and Carol was the cleaning lady. If she was going to belong to anyone, it was going to be him.
Not Lambert.
But he was determined to punish her for turning his world upside down.
Hartmann added extra energy into every push up, boosting himself off the floor to clap before catching himself again, purely for the sake of showing off. When he was through, he smugly noted the displeasure on Lambert’s face, and the amazement in Carol’s eyes.
“As I was saying,” Lambert continued gruffly, “The Suit considers Carol to be its ‘commander,’ and orders have come down for us to train her on how to pilot it.”
“You expect me to believe that, sir?” Hartmann narrowed his eyes.
“I verified it myself.” Lambert crossed his arms over his chest. “During the incident you created, the Suit automatically turned on and welcomed Carol as the ‘commander’ while she was inside. She has full access to all the Suit’s records, as well as a number of features that we never dreamed of. While you were lazing around at home, Carol and I were up digging through as much information as we could.”
Hartmann was lost for words. The muscle in his jaw twitched, but his teeth were locked together. He stared as Lambert proceeded to brush Carol’s hair back and clip a receiver onto her t-shirt, stared as the cleaning lady looked to the captain for reassurance who in turn gave her a small nod, and stared as she climbed up the ramp and enclosed herself inside the Suit. His Suit.
“Carol,” Lambert spoke into his radio, and it crackled as she replied,
“Here, sir.”
Then, disbelievingly, a computer voice sounded over the radio: “Welcome back, Commander.”
Was that why Carol had slid out of the Suit in an inexplicable daze the day before? Did she genuinely have a connection with it that he could never understand?
It wasn’t fair.
He was the best pilot.
He got the most important missions.
Why should the cleaning lady appear out of nowhere and take away his glory?
“Now, Carol, MSG Hartmann is going to be a good boy and coach you through how to move the Suit. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure that he plays nice,” Lambert spoke into his end of the radio, then gave Hartmann a warning scowl as he handed it over. “I mean it,” he growled. “Follow orders, and play nice.”
“Yes, sir,” Hartmann replied sulkily, then found his throat too thick to speak to Carol. He had to clear it first, then pushed the button to transmit, “The best way to explain it is that you connect your mind to the Suit, and after that walking should be as intuitive as it is with your own body. Don’t overthink it; just let it happen naturally.”
Silence answered, and Hartmann wished that Carol was more verbal. He missed the nonstop noise that usually surrounded women, that left no mystery as to what they were thinking. Dealing with Carol felt a lot like going up against a wall, with no way of knowing what he was going to find on the other side if he managed to break it down. It was frustrating. Unnerving.
Then the Suit took a step forward, and the two men jumped back as the screech of twisting metal filled the bunker. In one fell swoop, Carol had completely destroyed the ramp.
Hartmann stared as a grin crept across his face, then doubled over in laughter. Lambert cussed profusely, shouting into the radio, “God fucking dammit, Carol! Watch where you’re going!” It was satisfying to imagine her crying inside the cockpit as the captain continued ranting, “You are in a formidable piece of equipment, so do not destroy the base through stupidity and incompetence. Do you understand!”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Carol’s voice sounded broken, but her mental connection with the Suit was continuing to improve. Hartmann could see that it was imitating her body language, trying to curl up and disappear, which was comical for a 12-foot mecha. There were definitely tears on her cheeks, and it was time for him to wipe them away, so to speak.
He reached over to take the radio back, and purred, “Don’t sweat it, that was only the ramp. Give your legs a stretch, and see how it feels … just remember to be mindful of your surroundings.”
Lambert crossed his arms over his chest and growled, “Get her to the airfield, then join me in the jeep.”
Hartmann was satisfied as Lambert stormed away, certain that his sour mood wasn’t over the wrecked ramp. “All right, the captain wants us outside,” he spoke into the radio. “You up for it?”
“Yes, sir,” Carol replied dutifully, so he answered playfully,
“Save that for the captain. I want you to call me … master sergeant.”
She was silent, confused by his behavior as she went through the massive double doors that had been pulled open, and Hartmann followed her outside, ordering her to jog down the length of the airfield.
He dropped his affectation as soon as he was seated next to Lambert in the jeep. Carol was adapting to the Suit much faster than he had, despite his intuitive grasp of it, and the way she moved around the airfield was too natural – to the point of becoming unnatural. Hartmann knew that he was the best damn pilot to ever climb inside the Suit, but that was all he did: pilot. Carol, on the other hand … she was inhabiting it like a second skin, especially as she was becoming more and more comfortable with moving around the airfield. It crossed his mind that, with the way she was catching on, the Suit could have been made for her.
Commander.
Hartmann had been in the military for far too long to let anything show on his face. His instructions to Carol over the radio became more mechanical and routine, but his thoughts remained perfectly hidden. He almost managed to keep them from himself, but as he stared it was undeniable that she was better at maneuvering the Suit than he was, even despite lacking the discipline that would have given her grace and efficiency.
“The Suit is following her body language more than I expected,” Lambert muttered beside Hartmann, though he was speaking more to himself. “She’ll need to be physically trained to clean up that sloppiness.”
Hartmann shrugged, muttering “Yes, sir,” when he failed to come up with an obnoxious reply. He had never watched the way he piloted the Suit from the outside, and he wondered if it responded similarly to his movements, or acted more like a robot.
Lambert continued, reluctantly saying, “You will work with her on the track this afternoon while I attend to other duties. You will be courteous, considerate, and respectful, and you will not make her cry. Understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Hartmann echoed. He had to stop himself from asking why the captain cared so much about the cleaning lady’s feelings in a world where tender emotions were a dangerous weakness. He already knew the answer.
Sometime later when they were back inside the bunker, Carol parked the Suit in its usual place, opened the doors, then stood hesitantly looking down at the drop to the floor. Hartmann wondered why she hadn’t kneeled in the Suit first, given that she was the one who destroyed the ramp and knew damn well that it wouldn’t be there, but Lambert stepped forward and held up his arms.
“Come on, we haven’t got all day,” he snapped, but Hartmann recognized the false gruffness of someone who had adapted to his rank to survive.
She cautiously dropped down to Lambert, and his hands closed around her waist as he lowered her to the floor. His fingertips curled in slightly, and trailed along her t-shirt as he pulled his hands away, his face too stony to be anything other than a mask. Carol was appropriately oblivious, which Hartmann found soothing; he wasn’t the only one she completely failed to notice.
“Get some lunch, then report to MSG Hartmann for physical training,” Lambert ordered. “Like it or not, we’re going to beat the civilian out of you, commander.”
“Yes, sir,” Carol replied, then turned and trotted to join some corporal that Hartmann only vaguely recognized. An assigned escort, he hoped.
Having time alone with Carol was going to give Hartmann the advantage, and if he worked his magic right, Lambert wasn’t going to stand a chance. Underneath the boring beige of her existence, he’d bet anything that Carol was still a woman, and still susceptible to his charms.
If the Suit couldn’t belong to him anymore, then he was going to claim ownership of the next best thing.
By Autumn Rain 