Your Heart
Fingertips, roaming from the top of her head where they bury in a thick cascade of hair and down over the contours, ridges, wrinkles, peaks and valleys of a face struggling to maintain its composure before coming to rest under her chin. Rinse and repeat. Her eyes are closed to provide an extra layer of the comforting blanket of darkness already wrapped around her in the empty bay of the hangar, sparse sounds of late-night work ring out on occasion but in here she is alone. She's been doing this ritual for minutes, hours, days, who cares, just keep self-soothing or it'll all fall apart.
Alone, yes, sort of. There is someone - no, something - staring down from directly in front of her, a huge metal frame some sixty feet tall and adorned with the tell tale signs of battle. scarring and scuffed decals and scorch marks and decorations both taken and rewarded from a long life of service, usefulness and appreciation given to this machine upon which a not insignificant number of people rely.
In reality the frame's eyes stare dead ahead but to her they are drilling down through the top of her skull, wrenching the bone apart to wriggle inside the fragile meat that accounts for her entire being. It was her job to pilot this feat of engineering, this totem to the achievements of her peers. She isn't the best pilot, not even aboard this ship - and there are plenty of those out there with far better even than the best here - but she clocks in to pull the levers, adjust dials and squeeze triggers, in truth it's all a haze to her, routine. The other pilots tell tales of their impressive feats after deployment but in her mind it's all just blank. All blank.
She chances a peek through her fingers, it's still staring, the pressure behind her eyes mounts.
"What the fuck are you looking at, huh?"
she sobs, the first tears laying the path for the many to follow,
"Look at you, cozied up down here, all tucked in and tended to, you can't even appreciate how many people have you as their first thought when they wake. There are teams of people who spend hours of their day preparing to take care of you when we return from a mission. I'm just fine at the end of it - not a scratch on me - because you are a perfectly designed walking fucking gift and they love you for it."
She balls her right hand into a fist and lets the fleshy outer part of it collide with the armored shell of the frame, leaning forward into it such that her weight held up by it, her head hanging low and her hair falling like drips of ink around the periphery of her vision. She whimpers,
"What do I get? A pat on the back? Good job, see you tomorrow? It's not enough, it's never been enough. The closest I get to what you have is hooking myself inside that chest cavity and serving my time as the cost paid for your miracles. If one day I were to throw myself from an airlock they would replace me in an hour on a slow day."
Her knees give out and she slumps forwards on to them, her forehead pressed against the metal of the foot of the grand machine, her right palm now pressed against the plating, the heat-mark spreading across it's cool surface. A shaky breath, exhalation.
"I'm sorry, It's not-...It's not your fault. I have a malfunction that nobody can fix, no engineers for this feeling. When I was being constructed I ended up on the wrong assembly line, you see, and - well - it seems even then I skipped a step or two along the way. Now I'm trapped in a frame that does not agree with me, nor I it."
Her shoulders shrug once and she sniffles, leaning back to wipe her face on the sleeve of her pilot suit, craning her head backwards to stare up at the metal giant. To meet it's gaze.
"So what's the solution? I am me and yet I desire nothing more than to be you. Is strapping myself in that chair and fighting through the haze until I breathe my last breath the closest I will get to correcting this cosmic mistake? Will you let me be your heart until the end?"
She pushes herself up to her feet and steps back from the frame, shoving both hands in her pockets,
"Yeah, I guess we'll find out, huh?"
Shoulders hunched, she turns to the hangar exit and takes the long hazy walk back to her bunk.