#totally100%emotionallystable

[combatdrillcucknomancer55]

Just me writing my Lancer characters last moments

He was a bioengineered clone with a 10 year lifespan. He's 5.

I am on fire. Molten slag sloughs off my mechs frame. I called it Day Of The Dead because it was the name of my favourite holiday. A festival to celebrate the return of those long past, not as poltergeists or hauntings or terrible things with a grudge, but family, friends. So long as memory would hold the idea that I would be able to come back and drink and sing and dance... And now it seems I am the one returning to them. The alarms roar through the speakers, warning lights flash through the melted displays as sweat builds between the rubber seals of me and the interface. Through heat-warped technicolor vision, Heavens Fall delivers a final devastating blow to my mech.

Total Structural Failure, my HuD reads, Core Criticality Security Procedures commencing.

Heavens Fall is bad, close to me in fucked up beyond repair but not quite there. I turn to Wasp, a cloud of drones breaking apart like clouds on a hot day. He'll be next. Monarch fires rockets from the river bank, she'll be right, she always is. But here and now as I sit bathed in a casket of fire, this is a choice only I can make. I will free Mary Hill. I rip out the safety module, sparks racing over my fist.

Core Reactor Critical Failure Imminent.

I turn on my comms to my fellow pilots, do they even know I think of them as family? It's a little too late for heartfelt confessions. "I'm not making it out of this guys. I can't control what you'll do or even if it's possible. But give her a chance, give her a choice, give her kindness."

My comms crackle to life, their voices lost in the static. I think Wasp is shouting my name... The counter ticks down, red pouring out from the bar like blood draining from a corpse.

I don't hear, or feel, or even see how I end. I simply cease. My whole vat-grown self, the cells and atoms and particles assembled together by algothrims and viral nanomachines, returned to white noise.

All I think of, before the wet electric chemistry in my brain gets atomised, is that night with Sarah. The night before everything went so wrong. Where she showed me the stars and I told her that under the choked skies Io, that gas giant with methane seas we found constellations in each other. I see those same stars in her eyes, I think she punches me when I see her again.

I-