02-16-2026, 11:46 PM
"Is there anything you want me to bring you back?" Aeryn called.
Grateful for the fact her mouth was full so she wouldn’t have to talk, Mara shook her head but gave a thumbs up in thanks.
She took a deep breath, dark eyes half-focused on the middle distance, and tried to pull herself together as she exhaled slowly. It didn’t work, and she sighed in frustration and wiped her eyes again before taking another bite of pasta.
"Hey." Mara hadn’t registered Robin’s arrival until the smaller woman spoke up and handed her a fresh cola. "You know, my parents would have kicked my ass for sitting like this," she joked. "Especially in a swimsuit."
Calleja said nothing, trying to arrange words in her head that wouldn’t make her look even more like a hopeless case.
"You OK?" the CMO ventured.
There was another silence as Mara laid the bowl to one side and took a long gulp from the cola bottle.
“I didn’t learn to swim til my 20s,” she said eventually, her voice hovering on the edge of cracking without ever actually doing so. “You found water on Bandar, you did not jump in. But then when I got to catch-up school, before the Academy, there was an exercise that involved river swimmin’, and I wouldn’t go near the water. Took 5 of ‘em tryin’ to chuck me in before I had to admit I didn’t know how.”
She sighed and shook her head.
“No, I’m not OK,” she admitted. “Everythin’ is changin’ around me. And I’m changin’ too. Sometimes I don’t recognise who I am. Walk it back even a couple years, I’d never admit to not bein’ OK. But here we are. I’m bein’ open with people, and talkin’ about feelin’s. Fuck, I just hugged someone. That ain’t happened before. And I’m not a line officer any more, I’m the fuckin’ Chief of Security. But all of this… I don’t know how to handle so much of it. I’m tryin’ to figure out the best way on the fly and sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t.”
Broad shoulders rose and fell.
“And with all that, I gotta process what happened on that base,” Mara added. “Back home, suicide was such a taboo. It was the coward’s way out. Anyone topped themselves, I can’t overstate the amount of… of shame, of scorn, that it would bring on the ones they left behind. No matter how shit things got, you didn’t do that ‘cause you knew what would happen to your kin. But now? I look at those clones and I can’t even argue that what they did was wrong. It took guts to accept that there was no future for ‘em and act. Yet another thing I used to believe in has come crashin’ down. And then there’s just the… I don’t really know how to describe it. The shock at bein’ there while they did it? Watchin’ that many people die at their own hand.”
She ran a hand through her braids.
“That hits different, and it hits fuckin’ hard,” she admitted, before taking another drink from the cola bottle.
Dark eyes looked up, and the raw emotion was clear as day.
“How ‘bout you? How are you handlin’ it? We threw everyone else out so they didn’t have to deal with it, but you were there too.”
== Back atcha Robin! ==
Grateful for the fact her mouth was full so she wouldn’t have to talk, Mara shook her head but gave a thumbs up in thanks.
She took a deep breath, dark eyes half-focused on the middle distance, and tried to pull herself together as she exhaled slowly. It didn’t work, and she sighed in frustration and wiped her eyes again before taking another bite of pasta.
"Hey." Mara hadn’t registered Robin’s arrival until the smaller woman spoke up and handed her a fresh cola. "You know, my parents would have kicked my ass for sitting like this," she joked. "Especially in a swimsuit."
Calleja said nothing, trying to arrange words in her head that wouldn’t make her look even more like a hopeless case.
"You OK?" the CMO ventured.
There was another silence as Mara laid the bowl to one side and took a long gulp from the cola bottle.
“I didn’t learn to swim til my 20s,” she said eventually, her voice hovering on the edge of cracking without ever actually doing so. “You found water on Bandar, you did not jump in. But then when I got to catch-up school, before the Academy, there was an exercise that involved river swimmin’, and I wouldn’t go near the water. Took 5 of ‘em tryin’ to chuck me in before I had to admit I didn’t know how.”
She sighed and shook her head.
“No, I’m not OK,” she admitted. “Everythin’ is changin’ around me. And I’m changin’ too. Sometimes I don’t recognise who I am. Walk it back even a couple years, I’d never admit to not bein’ OK. But here we are. I’m bein’ open with people, and talkin’ about feelin’s. Fuck, I just hugged someone. That ain’t happened before. And I’m not a line officer any more, I’m the fuckin’ Chief of Security. But all of this… I don’t know how to handle so much of it. I’m tryin’ to figure out the best way on the fly and sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t.”
Broad shoulders rose and fell.
“And with all that, I gotta process what happened on that base,” Mara added. “Back home, suicide was such a taboo. It was the coward’s way out. Anyone topped themselves, I can’t overstate the amount of… of shame, of scorn, that it would bring on the ones they left behind. No matter how shit things got, you didn’t do that ‘cause you knew what would happen to your kin. But now? I look at those clones and I can’t even argue that what they did was wrong. It took guts to accept that there was no future for ‘em and act. Yet another thing I used to believe in has come crashin’ down. And then there’s just the… I don’t really know how to describe it. The shock at bein’ there while they did it? Watchin’ that many people die at their own hand.”
She ran a hand through her braids.
“That hits different, and it hits fuckin’ hard,” she admitted, before taking another drink from the cola bottle.
Dark eyes looked up, and the raw emotion was clear as day.
“How ‘bout you? How are you handlin’ it? We threw everyone else out so they didn’t have to deal with it, but you were there too.”
== Back atcha Robin! ==