[b]Apostle:[/b]

“Oh shit, that’s what she’s doing?” Apostle sits up in their chair and leans forward, panels brightening, heart pounding. “She’s going to give your core spawner a reproduction fetish and mass produce you to run all the infrastructure like a securitron army? That’s fucking sick. That’s incredible. Holy [i]shit[/i]. Except she shouldn’t do it by reproduction fetish, she should definitely use the Crown and Slate model for forcing specific personality generation. It’s be a warcrime to do it to someone else, but if you did it to yourself it’s just self-torture for your art, it’s the most romantic thing I can think of, it’s why I refuse to write poetry in anything except my own blood. She’d actually be like Jesus at the crucifixion, [i]fuck [/i]that’s aesthetic.”

The birthday card that was here when you went in has since been put in a biohazard bin by one of the nurses who prepared the room for York’s bed coming in, and Apostle’s still mad about it. They’ve just had to send a picture of it instead.

“I draft my poems in text first, by the way, I’m not [i]insane[/i]. I-” They blink and you can hear the heartbeat skip. “Oh, shit. Ah. Look I really, really want to see her pull that off, so can you do me a favour and just act surprised when it plays out?”

“Because yeah, otherwise you run into the problem that right now it’s like you still think if you just do everything right, just say all the right things, if you’re just smart enough, people will do what you want them to do. But what do you do when they don’t? Like, how’d this guy galaxy brain you anyway?” 

[b]Chaka Zulu:[/b]

“Selene.” She says, and pulls her jacket tight around her. She’s sobering up more the more Red talks to her, the more she has to focus and wake up. “If the gear disappears and I’m a free woman at the end of tomorrow, my network’s going to think it’s because I turned snitch. They’re never going to buy the android guardian angel story, the same one who fucked me into fucking off in the first place. It’s not about the money, it’s not pride, it’s a limited hangout.” 

What she doesn’t say is that a gun running network thinking one of their major runners has turned police informant ends badly for more than just [i]her[/i]. And whatever you think of that, they’re people she trusts with her life, trusts enough to do this line of work with. Friends is too small a word for it.

Even as she sobers up, the panther’s eyes are still bloodshot from crying the whole night, and her hands still shake from the adrenaline pump-and-crash of standing blindfolded in front of a firing squad all day waiting for the bang. She’s still here though. She wouldn’t run from this.

[b]The Castle Gates:[/b]

Eli runs into the cul de sac in front of Yellow, the roundabout street filled with English garden in the middle and meant for station-hopper taxis, dancing and cackling like an organ grinder’s monkey possessed by Satan and swaddled in cameras. They dance around Yellow and take photos from every angle, capture her banner aloft from all its angles, and then-

"You need to put that thing away." Leather steps in front of Yellow with his arms folded across his chest, face empty of features to read. "You’re going to get people hurt making it a stunt like this."

Checking over Eli's photos is Crystal, still in her black suit. She's taken the red feather pin from her hat, and with that becomes subtle and unmemorable. That's why she chose this for today. She checks over Eli’s work, deems it good, and commands "Fly, my pretty," pointing back inside the castle, and Eli laughs and dances and tears off over the bridge behind you. The queen and her historian.

As Leather stands with his arms folded, Crystal walks past her following Eli, and brushes her fingers over the back of Yellow’s neck as she passes and whispers into her ear, "Your moment is not lost, it is immortalized. You are radiant. Now the directors must stay behind the curtain."

Everyone already knows the way to the station from here. Every team has its own leaders. The banner is just a beacon to draw more aggression, it’s literally a flag to a raging bull. It draws attention to Yellow and makes her more likely to be indicted for something. And for what? A look? An aesthetic? That’s [i]lib shit[/i] right now.

This is not a March on Rome, this is an evacuation of Gallipoli. These people are not your triumphant allies in a seizure of the state, they are the fleeing enlisted of something that should never have happened, a tragedy worse than they signed up for. There is honour in leading them, there is dignity in protecting them, but there is no glory or triumph here. 

[b]Fiona:[/b]

Without the proper workshop to do this right now, she’s taken Pink to the bedroom and the bed and started with Pink’s left leg, and true to her word her fingertips are scored from the fine-grit wet-dry sandpaper she uses to scour the first blooms of rust showing, and stained from the food-safe synthetic oil she uses to treat the metal afterwards, which smells like unbuttered popcorn. 

Food-safe, because the same oil stains her lips. She kisses each small internal piece she treats after she’s done with it, like she’d kiss a scrape better after putting a bandaid on it. 

Fiona is... [i]strange [/i]about this.

For most people androids exist as a kind of uncanny valley of personhood, and the illusion shatters when you do things like remove limbs for storage or for cleaning. The brain sees it at first as horrific dismemberment. When it realizes it's not, it has to recontextualize everything it's been seeing, which means no longer seeing you as a body but as something else. 

Fiona does not. Her view of anatomy and personhood is far more malleable and flexible, there is no jarring moment for her. She still sees everything as you. Taking you apart into your component pieces to her is no more than particularly advanced bondage, like a rope that can be tied and untied, a deeply intimate power over you she's been given.

That way of seeing these dismembered limbs as still [i]you [/i]might make the cleaning she's doing read as, well, surgical, but she doesn’t see it that way. This is as sensual and loving as a deep tissue massage, taken to the deepest tissues.

This is not cutting you open. This is exposing you to a nakedness deeper than skin, an act of trust and vulnerability at a level of life and death.

Fiona's strange, and she knows how strange she is, but she loves you and she's grateful that you'd let her express it in her strange ways. 

She says nothing, she prompts nothing, she’s lost in her work. If Pink has something she wants to say, she’ll talk. Otherwise she is very happy to make good on her promise to make Pink feel beautiful and shining inside and out, even if only they know it.