#i feel really bad that my first fic for a VN isn't romantic

[risualto]

Ashes, Ashes

Title: Ashes, Ashes Summary: If no one is watching, if no one is here, then there is absolutely nothing stopping her from breaking.  There’s nothing stopping her from smashing through the metal-puppet-framework she has built to hold herself up.  The gestalt of ugliness inside of her that she has kept at bay with gauzy calm is gnawing, writhing under her skin, and she cannot think of a single reason in the System not to let it eat her alive until her soul itself is so ugly that Cursa would shy away from it. (A Traveler who is usually Strong knows she is Emotional underneath it all, but she can’t let herself feel.) Warnings: mild body horror, blood mentions, canonical minor character death Notes: Hey, so, I finally decided to play Andromeda Six, and it was definitely a good time.  I was a little sad that I haven’t been able to control my Traveler’s reactions to what happens to them as much as I wanted, though I understand why the A6 writing team made the decisions they did given Traveler’s past.  So I figured the best way to deal with it is to just write about it because if it’s fanfiction, I can do what I want.  So, here’s a little moment between my first traveler, Yumeha, and Cal, with whom she wants to be friends.  Yu isn’t romancing Cal in this run, though.

Also here on AO3.

She hates this room. It’s cold and bare and quiet, save for the humming of the ship that still drills into her head like a swarm of insects.  The lack of comfort—or rather, the difference between this and silk sheets, personal heaters, guards and servants at her beck and call, art pieces so expensive they could pay for a small fleet—isn’t what gets to her.  Sometimes she misses having a well-balanced mattress, but…

No, it’s not the lack of luxury.  It’s the lack of anything.

Except the music box that sits cradled between her pillow and the window, staring out into the endless expanse of space that feels so impossibly vast that Yumeha can’t help but feel small. And that’s certainly no help when all she can think about is how alone she is, how insignificant her feelings are.

Even knowing that someone was standing outside the door, waiting for her to slip up and cause a problem to report, would have been better than this, she thinks, because if no one is watching, if no one is here, then there is absolutely nothing stopping her from breaking.  There’s nothing stopping her from smashing through the metal-puppet-framework she has built to hold herself up.  The gestalt of ugliness inside of her that she has kept at bay with gauzy calm is gnawing, writhing under her skin, and she cannot think of a single reason in the System not to let it eat her alive until her soul itself is so ugly that Cursa would shy away from it.

She puts a hand on her chest and presses down.  The heel of her palm digs into its center, bearing down on that spot that makes her throat shiver in response.  She thinks Ryona has told her the name of it, something with an s, but she can’t remember.

There’s a knock at the door, and Yumeha sits up with a gasp as though being awoken from a nightmare.  For a brief few seconds, she thinks that this might be what she needs, someone to keep the joints locked together so no one sees when oil spills from her like blood spilled from her sister’s throat—

The moment is short-lived when she opens the door and sees the Captain standing there, staring imperiously down his nose at her.  It reminds her of her older brothers, a little, and it is not comforting.

“Stowaway,” Calderon starts. His voice is light, a nickname instead of something disparaging. Yumeha pulls away from the door like it burned her.

Keeping herself in control in front of him should be easy, she thinks.  He, aside from June, is probably the one who has the most reason to hate her, but Calderon’s heart is not as open.  She does not feel like being better is enough for him sometimes.  And that makes it so, so hard.

The door remained open, even as she stepped back and turned away, and she hears Calderon step inside. He doesn’t close it behind him.  “Is this a bad time?” he asks.  She thinks he might be mocking her, though, until he adds, a little awkwardly, “Ryona said you probably weren’t asleep yet, so I just wanted to discuss how we’ll hide your identity at our destination.”

Yumeha can’t help it. She laughs.  It’s a single sound, and it’s wet, and it’s toxic, and it sounds to her like that one time one of the bells in the city broke when struck. She doesn’t know what face she makes when it happens, but she can feel it pulling at her skin like cloth about to rip, and she claps a hand over her mouth so hard it makes her teeth hurt.

“Are you alright?” Calderon asks.

She says nothing.  She doesn’t know if it’s because she can’t or because they both know he wouldn’t believe her if she said yes.

Neither of them moves, and she’s still staring straight up at his face—never break eye contact with someone just because they’re taller, Yu, especially not a man who thinks it’s your job to fix his problems—as his expression grows more and more unsure. Finally, Yumeha shakes her head.

Calderon’s brows draw together, and his face softens in that way that it does around the crew sometimes. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” she says quickly, and the look on his face tells her what a monumentally stupid answer that was, even if it was a reflex.  “I mean, it’s nothing you—you want to see, Captain.  I just need a minute,” she says, the words spilling from her so fast that Aya would be proud.  “We can talk about the disguise, of course, but could you possibly come back in just a little while?”

Not that being alone will be any better, but if she has to break, she’ll need time to clean up the mess, too.

He ignores her and closes the door. “Yumeha, what is going on?”

“I—” hate this. The words don’t come.  She’s too smart for that.  But it still takes until her lungs start to burn for her to recognize and release the fist now clenched at her side, smoothing it over her sleep pants. She takes a deep breath and blinks slowly before she tries again.  “I just need a minute to collect my feelings,” she says.  It’s almost steady.

Calderon looks for a moment like he understands.  But he doesn’t leave.  Instead, he sits down in the desk chair and looks levelly in Yumeha’s direction.  His own face is like marble, like the way Nerissa taught Yumeha to be in difficult moments.  But unlike Yumeha, she doesn’t see any cracks in his expression.

“I’ve always thought,” he says slowly, quietly, though his voice isn’t exactly gentle, “that sometimes the mind can hide things from us that we’re better off not knowing.  We do it for other people all the time, hiding the harsh truths from people who can’t take knowing them.”

And all of a sudden, Yumeha is on fire.  The thing inside her doesn’t even feel like flesh anymore, but it is too alive to be metal, either; too solid to disappear and not solid enough to be held back by the puppet body.

“I’m not like this because I learned the truth about my family,” she says, “or even about Vexx.”

(She thinks about stopping there, but Calderon had plenty of chances to leave, plenty of chances to let Yumeha deal with this in a way that won’t drive him away forever, reveal her as another gilded monster.)

Even so, she doesn’t yell.

“There was a part of me that knew my father was terrible.  I knew something was wrong, but I could barely control my own life. I had no idea how to start helping anyone else, so I didn’t even try.  And I have to live with that every day,” she says.  Her cheeks burn.  “I have to live for fourteen people, and I didn’t even like some of them!  Now I have to live for Zovack, too, to stop him.  And if I do, then what?  How am I supposed to convince the whole system that the Peg’asi who deposed their liberator is the lesser of three evils, especially when I’m not?”

Something passes over Calderon’s face as she speaks.  Yumeha thinks it’s anger, or maybe disgust, or maybe she’s just seeing what she feels in herself, but it makes her stomach twist so uncomfortably that her next breath hurts.

“I can’t even be honest about how much I hate Zovack and his people,” she says, and it sounds choked.

“What—”

She cuts him off.  “How can I be upset that they tore up the roots of so much evil just because they also destroyed the one good thing that hadn’t had a chance to flourish?” she asks.  The fire has reached her eyes, but it’s only serving to make them wet as she remembers Nerissa, climbing through the bodies of their family to plead for mercy for the people.  She remembers her sister’s gentle hand in her hair, a melody on lonely nights, a whisper of wisdom instead of condescending silence.  Yumeha remembers all of it, and no one will ever care except her.

Her head aches, and she doesn’t know if it’s because of the tears or her thoughts or her hand, buried in her hair and tugging at her scalp.  She shuts her eyes and paces a few steps away.

“I know we were wrong,” she says.  “Nerissa might have had a chance to do better, but it was all so wrong that I can’t fault them for what happened, can I?  If only it was meaningless.  Maybe, just maybe—” (she’s walking back towards the desk now) “—if Zovack was a good man, I could have someday accepted that this was all worth it.  I don’t think I could ever forgive him entirely, but I could have understood.”

“Except nothing has changed!” cries Yumeha.  Calderon doesn’t look surprised that she’s raised her voice, and she should have known he expected this, but it still hurts to know she’s just proving him right.  “They all died for nothing!  The suffering hasn’t ended or even gotten better.  So—so I’m angry!  I’m furious. I’m hurting, and it’s making me hate all of them; some days I hate everybody.  And I know, I damn well know that if I give into these feelings, then that means I’m no better!  Just another monster with a crown, the same as the King, the same as Zovack, the same as I’ve always been.”

She falls to the bed, head buried in her hands even though she can’t keep a grip on her own face through the tears.  Her chest is twisted, her stomach roils, her hands are flushed red.  There is a body here called Yumeha, and the terror inside bleeds infinitely outward, a mess of flesh and oil and blood that is not hers.

“But I’m still so angry,” she breathes helplessly.  It doesn’t sound like any civilized race.

Even shifting her weight on the bed feels like sitting on broken glass.

There doesn’t seem to be any sound in the room at all besides her broken, glitching breaths.  She wonders if the passage past her teeth and into her lungs is the only thing left of her that looks like a living person.  She wonders if Calderon has gotten up and left, and she had been too self-absorbed to notice.

When Yumeha snaps her head up to check, there are blue eyes staring back at her.  They’re dark, so dark that it’s hard to tell if the Captain’s stare is blank or fathomless and full.

“You’re not a monster, Yumeha,” he says, and she thinks she’s dreaming.  Then, “Why haven’t you told anyone you felt this way?”

“How could I?” she asks. It feels more genuine than it has any right to be.

Calderon raises an eyebrow. “We’ve asked, haven’t we?  I know it’s the kind of thing Bash would say.  Aya, too, and I know you and Ryona are close, so forgive me if I find it impossible to believe she wouldn’t want to know.  As your doctor and otherwise,” he says, looking away slightly at the end.

It stings a little more to remember how she hasn’t spoken to the person she trusts the most, but Ryona already struggles with a darkness of her own.  Yumeha could never bring herself to add to it.  She can’t be responsible for more suffering than she already is.

Her silence must have been too much of an answer because Calderon reaches forward and puts a hand on her knee.  Yumeha flinches, startled, and when she looks down, she half-expects to see his hand covered in blood, veins turning black as she poisons him.

It’s a normal hand. It squeezes a little tighter.

“When you have power, the first step away from being a tyrant is knowing who that power can hurt,” he tells her.  It sounds a little similar to something her sister might have said once, but trying to reach for the memory is like plunging her hand into an engine.  Yumeha doesn’t think there’s enough left of her to pull anything back out.  “Not just what it can do for you, but what it does to everyone involved.  If I make a decision on this ship, there are seven other lives affected, and what is good for me might be something else for them. For you all.  That’s where King Fenris…went wrong.  He forgot there were lives in his hands because he was too busy trying to play the numbers to his own advantage.”

Yumeha doesn’t look up. She knows this.  If she took back the throne now, she’ll be the same.  Too young, too weak to carry the burden, too frightened and angry with the world to do anything but protect herself, no matter how much she wants to think otherwise.

He must know he’s not really getting through because Calderon shifts and ducks his head to try and catch her eye.  “If anger and grief made monsters, there’d be no people on the Andromeda Six,” he says.  “Don’t go thinking that you can treat your feelings differently from ours because you’re a Peg’asi.”

Nodding in reply feels like what Yumeha imagines it’s like learning to walk.  Doing anything with a body for the first time.  At first, she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, and when she does, it feels strange, like she could stumble at any moment.

“I won’t,” she says, sitting up straight.  Her spine pops audibly.  But a moment later, she deflates, because that’s not true.  She’s known that no one on the Andromeda Six had a happy or even normal past.  They’re all victims of tragedy, too, and she’s seen anger in Damon and Vexx and Ryona, grief in Aya and Bash and Calderon.  She sees both in June, and yet she’s never once considered giving up on him.

“I’m trying,” she corrects herself.

Calderon smiles.  “That’s step two,” he agrees.  Yumeha isn’t sure she can even stand on her own yet, but it helps a little, at least knowing there’s a path to walk when she figures it out.

#risuawrites #a6 stuff #oc: a6 yumeha #a6 calderon #andromeda 6 #i feel really bad that my first fic for a VN isn't romantic #if you're a fan of this pairing romantically #drop by my ask box #i take requests #tbh anyone can! #i'm still learning the a6 characters obviously but #i will write them #i destroyed my arm writing this over the past two days but it was worth it #i needed the practice to get back into longer stories lol