2022-11-13: I Ate What I Was Fed
- Cutscene: I Ate What I Was Fed
- Cast: Ennil El
- Where: The Dead Ends of Axis Zeon
- Date: 0096-11-13
- Summary: Ennil El leaves home behind.
The facility is dreadfully cold. The thick jacket hanging off her shoulders is not nearly enough. The air is stale and only beginning to stretch itself out to fill a dry, forgotten tomb, much less fill her lungs.
The Aura of Dawn allows her to stand here, in this dead place, but it is not in the habit of providing comfort, no matter how hard she clings it around herself like a blanket.
The hangars are mostly empty. Only the desperate would have any reason to come back to places like this, but there is no shortage of desperate soldiers in the world. And the most obvious prizes would have already been taken. Mostly skeletons remain, machines whose hearts have long since guttered to an end.
Ennil El touches an affectionate hand to the towering leg of a fellow monster, palm coming away smeared with grime and grease that makes her smile. She has a lot of work to do.
--
Ennil El is becoming thirteen. Her gangly limbs promise a future full of growth, one which the rest of her simply hasn't caught up with. A bright white smile glimmers over the deep blue curve of metallic plating, her hands plunged into the guts of the machine, thrumming as she slowly peels away a bent component lodged in the mechanism. She has been feeding herself for four years and has as much as anyone she knows on Earth, which isn't much.
The young man who has joined their camp tonight is not like that. His blue uniform with its gold trim is worn crisply, not with the aged desperation of the old soldiers she watches drink around a fire. His face is still smooth, and he can hardly be older than her - but there is more pride in him than in men three times his age who pat her hair and find excuses to make sure she eats even when they do not. If she was old enough or young enough not to be embarassed by childhood, she would see a storybook prince.
And he sees her. He's not obvious about it, the way boys have been before. In fact, he hardly looks at her when she's walking around the camp, in the too-big jacket that serves as her all-weather gear and hung over her knees until just this year. But sometimes she'll look up while her hands are busy in the body of a mobile suit, and lock her blue eyes with his own, and he smiles in a certain way, and Ennil has to recount her steps.
--
So much of this work is improvisation. There are no factories that make these machines anymore. She can't order another arm precision made, she can't demand just the right connectors. The Doven Wolf is a lost art.
But if you understand what the part does, instead of just what it is, if you see the way the shapes come together, you can make do. Sure, a Dreissen isn't a Gaza, isn't a Zaku III. But if you know how to coax the software, they can all see through the same eyes, bend around the same joints.
There are, however, some places where only the original will do. Her new machine will be a hungry beast, and it needs a fire in its belly to match. The architecture is there, the shell of Minovsky's cage, but the heart has long since cooled. Ennil closes her eyes, touches her hand to the dead machine, and gives it a bit of herself. Where there was once nuclear fire...
Now there will be light.
--
He tells her he is going to space. Ennil El has never been to space. The Earth was large and frightful enough. But he promises her that if she comes with him, she will come home someday to see the Earth anew. Changed by justice, by victory.
And all she has to do is what she already does. Just put her hands and mind to work on the machines that she loves. Build new things, powerful things, that he can be the first one to show her. Vengeance without blood. Victory without loss.
She can do it. And all he wants to know is - can she do it for him? Not for the war, not for "Zeon". For him.
Of course.
--
It isn't really a Doven Wolf. It's mostly a Doven Wolf. It has the skin and the bones and most of the internals. The rest of it is her, filling in the gaps. Reinforcing limbs built from components stripped bare by age and picked at by Vultures. It hums and glows and casts frightful shadows in the flickering gloom of overtaxed hangar lights.
She strokes the beast's side, and the cockpit yawns wide. She steps onto the platform with practiced ease, slides back into the seat, and lets the maw close around her.
Now, once again, Ennil El is hunting.
--
The roar and squeal of hangar tools goes quiet. The air hangs with ivory notes instead.
Glemy Toto no longer finds the time to meet her eyes with his. When she stares at him and searches her reflection, she is too distant to see clearly. Glemy Toto is looking beyond her.
The machines she builds are fierce and proud. They sink their teeth into Glemy's tools and his enemies alike. She does good work. She does needed work.
She tells herself that Glemy Toto needs her.
When Leina is sad, she helps her find places to hide. She does things to make her smile. She hugs the younger girl close sometimes, and praises her strength, head hung low.
When she looks up and sees her own blue eyes reflected... does she also see Glemy?