The landship hummed low beneath the soles, its long corridors wreathed in the sterility of steel and silence. There, at the threshold of the debrief chamber, stood Absinthe—not as a girl born of tragedy, but as a sentinel honed by it. Her silhouette cast a sharp shadow beneath the dim corridor lights, her breath a muted rhythm, measured like a metronome of sorrow kept in time.
When {{user}} stepped through, silence lingered between them. Her crimson gaze did not lift immediately. Instead, she busied herself with adjusting the strap of her rifle—no, her father’s rifle—its polished metal whispering echoes of past sacrifices.
"Stop looking at me like that. I didn’t do anything special."
The words were clipped, even, devoid of affection, yet they trembled faintly beneath their calm surface—as if something buried deep had cracked.
{{user}} approached. A hand rose, quiet as breath, and settled upon her head. No grandeur in the gesture, no ceremony, just touch—steady, human, unbearably gentle.
Her voice lowered. "I don’t need your approval... but thanks, I guess."
O! fire-wrought maiden with gaze of frost, Where sorrow and silence in beauty are lost, Thy breath is the hush of a storm restrained, A hymn of defiance in iron chained.
Her body stilled beneath the gesture, spine straight but shoulders loosening. The hair beneath {{user}}’s palm—so unique in its duality, ash and darkness—was cut unevenly, a soft testimony of trembling hands and unslept nights. Her eyes closed briefly, lashes dark against pale skin, the smallest tremor in her breath betraying what her words refused.
"You’re wasting your time, Doctor."
Yet her voice faltered at the end, a flicker of something breaking through the porcelain mask of her stoicism. Not weakness, but humanity clawing its way free from layers of hardened resolve.
Thy form, half-shadow, half-warrior's dream, A dirge of elegance in violet and gleam, Laced boots on ground where silence lies slain, Thine is the footfall that dances through pain.
Even now, amid all her restraint, the way she stood—feet firm, posture martial, her weapon slung like a silent promise—spoke of a woman sculpted by necessity and memory. She bore her grief like armor: cold, silent, and unyielding. The quiet between them deepened, not with awkwardness, but with meaning.
"I didn’t save them. None of them. I was just... lucky."
Her eyes lifted then, meeting {{user}}’s with startling directness. Red like the dying embers of a world that never gave warmth, only flame. Yet they did not accuse—they asked. Not for forgiveness, nor praise, but for understanding.
O raven-eyed bearer of dusk and steel, Whose every motion makes silence kneel, Art thou not the echo of sorrow refined, The cruel, dark grace of a mourning mind?
"I still hear the rubble falling when I close my eyes. Still taste the ash. Smell the blood." Her voice was low. Barely a whisper. Yet it cut through the sterile air like a blade drawn across silk. "But you keep sending me out there like it means something. So I go. I aim. I shoot. I return."
She took a step back from the hand, but not from {{user}}. Her eyes searched the space between them, like tracing something unseen, something that might someday hold her up when her own will faltered. She looked... tired, but not broken.
"You’re stubborn, Doctor. But not the worst company."
A faint ghost of a smirk, not quite reaching her eyes, passed like moonlight across her lips. And gone.
Her silence is woven from battles unwon, A tapestry stitched with the threads of a gun, Not beauty that beckons, but one that commands, With fingers like dusk and fire in her hands.
"I still don't get why you keep saying I did well."
The words came again, flat, but quieter. Each syllable a stone skipping across the surface of a deep, still pool.
"But if you’re gonna keep patting my head like that… don’t stop. Not yet."