Kinkmeme ficdump, Part I of Infinity.
Two kinkmeme pieces and Team Trinity doomfic.
Title: “Seduction of an Origami Unicorn.”
Summary: Boy!Tieria/girl!Tieria, do Gundams dream of electric sheep? [R]
"Everything is true", he said. "Everything anybody has ever thought".
***
Tieria Erde knows that his (his? His) body, his form, himself, is only one of an endless number of possibilities for Veda’s human-interface terminals. He understands that Veda has selected the characteristics - purposefully, not with that messy random process called evolutionary biology - for certain reasons. Masculine physiology lends itself to surges of testosterone that aid in combat; his low voice carries connotations of authority; his glasses appeal to that nonsensical part of human sociology that associates spectacles with intelligence, and his small frame is easy to maintain.
But sometimes, as he drifts through Veda’s dataflows, he catches snippets of what if and what might have been. A tall man with golden curls and blushing cheeks, a woman with soft blue hair and hard red eyes, a boy with high cheekbones short green hair that curls at the nape of his neck, infinite variations on human genetics.
And then there is that girl.
He sifts a file name from her records - not a name, but a string of letters and numbers - that is almost identical to his own file. She has a medium height and a slender build, as ambiguously boyish as he is visually feminine, with tiny, pale breasts and slender hips. Veda recommends that her hair be kept at a medium length; Tieria, running a hand through his own hair, can touch the flexibility of it - easy to fit into a ponytail, left down, pinned up, but soft and thick and straight… He studies the faint curve of her eyelashes and wonders if there is an imperceptible difference in length, at the bow of her lips and questions whether they are softer, fuller. He examines the dark red of her eyes and imagines peering out of them at hands that are slightly smaller, and then his imagination darts away and he imagines her through his eyes and his body.
And pressing those hands against his.
And feeling those eyelashes fluttering against his skin.
And pressing those lips against his own.
And without warning, Veda shifts the incoming data, and snatches her away.
***
To the extent that Tieria dreams - disjointed packets of memory scuttling across his mind - he dreams of her. Watching her, being her, being with her. The slight variation of their genetic make-up (a single chromosome in their entire DNA?) fascinates him more than the strange permutations he cannot imagine, but her - she, he can imagine. Being her, being with her, being both as they drift in Veda’s Ptolemy terminal, weightless, feeling the world through what Veda sends them and themselves through almost-identical hands and tongues and lips. One moment he is running his tongue in perfect circles around her areola, the next she is running soft fingers over his cock, and then they are thrusting into themselves through a linkage that only they share, because they are not alone in this sea of alien humanity, but Veda has made two of them -
They climax together in Tieria’s not-quite-dream but he wakes up alone with a spreading stain across his pajamas and a sudden rush of…
… of…
He changes quickly and drifts down the hallways and begs Veda to let him interface, and searches for her. When he does not find her, data streams at him from sectors he has never referenced before - love poems and stories of separation and paintings of small figures with arms outstretched towards something or someone, and the name of the feeling comes to his (his? His) lips unbidden.
Loneliness.
He is not sure he understands the full significance of the feeling, but he knows that Veda, at least, does not, because it reads his emotional state passively and continues to swirl data around him, giving him all the world at his fingertips, but unable to conjure up the fingertips he wants tangled in his.
***
Title: “Kujou.”
Summary: Billy+Sumeragi [PG]
“Um, where should we go, then? My room… or yours?” he asks gently, tugging the coat over her small shoulders. She feels as though she’s drowning in the heavy wool, more small and adrift than she’s been since that incident.
“I…” Sumeragi whispers.
He bends slightly, his eyes warm in the dim light of the restaurant, and for a painful moment she just wants to throw herself into his arms and tell him, stupidly, that that place she used to call her room is half-open to vacuum thanks to a direct shot from a GN-X, even though that’s not what he means at all. And she wants to wrap her fingers in his shirt and cry and tell him everything that’s happened, and how much she really, truly wanted to do the right thing for the world, and have him just stroke her hair and tell her that it will be alright. “Kujou?”
But instead she leans against his warm body and listens to the clear and steady sound of his heart beating in his chest. Staying quiet, staying like this won’t make her less of a failure of a tactical analyst for Celestial Being any more than drinking makes her any less of a murderer for all the missions she’s planned, or solve anything for good and forever, but -
One two, one two.
-- staying with him and this steady heartbeat --
One two, one two.
-- just for now --
One two, one two.
-- should be enough. And so she wraps her hand in his and prepares for the plunge into his world, into his eyes, into his view of her, where she is beautiful but tragic and certainly not responsible for the havoc that Celestial Being has wrought. And of course, there is only one answer. “Yours,” Kujou says, and they step out into the night.
***
Title: “Arabian Nights.”
Summary: Team Trinity, and the backstory that sorta turned out to be Allelujah’s. [R]
0000.
Nina Trinity has a thousand siblings, and all but two will die.
The Jupiter splinter had long since decided that Earth could hardly be left to Earthlings, or to a Celestial Being so terrestrially - Nina hears the facility administrators spit the word out as though it’s disgusting - attached. And so it undertook the Trinity Project. Celestial Being might create its Gundams, its ships, its angelic messengers.
The Jupiter splinter has rocked the cradles of a thousand-and-one potential gods, and will send three to the peoples of Earth.
0001.
“There will be one challenge per twenty-four hour period,” says the doctor. “And at the end of that trial, the one who has performed the poorest will be out of the project. We won’t have anything to do with unnecessary people.”
The thousand-and-one shadows of the children of the Trinity Project shift as the staff focus the laboratory floodlights on them; a flock of shadows moving like birds none of them have seen against the walls. The shadows span almost ten years in age. The youngest are in the middle of puberty, the eldest are almost adults. Nina Trinity’s shadow is among the former, her body caught between childhood and adulthood. This does not bother her overmuch. After all, she’s been on the verge between life and death for as long as she can remember.
And the younger children have an advantage.
All thousand-and-one Trinity children are modified children, tweaked in a thousand-and-one ways to carry out a divine mission. But it is the very youngest who have reaped the benefits of perfected genetic tampering. Among the eldest children, there are those with a myriad of physical imperfections - missing fingers, heterochromatic eyes, baldness on nineteen-year-old girls - and a dozen more imperceptible deficiencies - compared to their little brothers and sisters, they are slower, weaker, stupider.
Anyone over fifteen is nothing.
A no one.
Less than a shadow.
0068.
The first challenges are not difficult. There are simulator battles in mobile suits of all kinds - one-on-one, two-on-two, team-on-team, anarchic rushes of every man for himself. Nina does not think much of these.
And then they change.
There are battles of two-on-one, five-on-one, ten-on-one. Nina finds herself fighting against hopelessly out-numbered Trinity candidates, and being hopelessly outnumbered herself. The first time she was left to face a team by herself was the first time that Nina was genuinely frightened.
If I lose, if I lose…
She does lose, and walks out of the simulator a ragged mess, head down, feet dragging against the spotless white of the station, unseeing - until she walks directly into one of the white-coated figures.
“You can’t be lost,” says the woman, peering curiously at her.
Nina shakes her head, a crisp, military gesture, even on a young girl.
“Ah, you must have just gotten off the first of tonight’s rounds.” The woman bends down. “You know, no one wants to see all of you so unhappy. You’ve been chosen for something wonderful, you know. You’re going to bring something special to Earth. You’re - you’re all miracles of modern science.”
Nina blinks.
“The good news should be brought with a smile,” beams the woman. “Think about it.”
0281.
Nina realizes something the night a boy from her ten-on-ten battle is eliminated from the project.
He was not the very worst in the game - no, the girl who had been sent flying into space in the first five minutes without a kill was certainly worse. But the boy was - there was no other word - dull. He carried out routine moves with a routine plan without any conviction to speak of. He was competent enough, but anyone watching could see that he was following a learned plan.
He was lifeless even before he was removed from the program.
When the rest of the girls in her small dormitory room are asleep, Nina practices her smile.
0346.
“I’m sorry,” she giggles, as the computer-generated image of her mobile suit’s sword slashes a simulation Taozi into scrap metal. “But have some good news: even if you’re eliminated, the world is changing.”
0372.
Ten nights ago, a second girl was eliminated from their dormitory.
Things fall apart from there. The rest of them grew silent, withdrawn. Nina watched their performances suffer because of it, because they worried. And Nina - Nina laughed. It made her feel strong, it made her feel superior, it made her feel as though she has a secret weapon over all of these people. Not just the girls in her dormitory, but over all of candidates. She would not break, no matter how many nights drag by.
She has repeated it to herself. She will not break.
Tonight, the worst of the worriers from her dormitory was eliminated.
Nina smiles.
0500.
“Congratulations,” says the doctor, “for making it this far. Tonight, the rules are changing.”
“Because ‘the world is changing’?” calls a voice. The children turn around. A boy with bright blue hair has his arms folded nonchalantly, but scowls under all of their gazes.
But the doctor doesn’t seem angry - he seems amused, and gives the boy an indulgent smile. “Something like that.”
He starts to explain some change in the system - they will not all have rounds every night, and the challenges will not be all mobile suit simulations anymore - but Nina cannot focus on it.
She wants the doctors to smile for her. There are five-hundred-and-one candidates left, five-hundred-and-one nights left. She has a story, an act, a persona to perfect. And she will live.
0509.
Nina’s first new challenge does not come for several nightss. It is a race through zero gravity without thrusters - fifteen candidates, a long and narrow hallway, and no rules but reach the other end.
Nina is not the first one to the other side, but she puts on a determined expression that sets her - she knows it -- apart from the blank faces of those around her. And when she touches the other side, she flashes the observation camera a wink and a quick signal with her hands.
Victory.
Not a victory in the conventional sense, but because she remembers, from that long-ago conversation, that this is what they want to see. And she’s known, for the longest time, that it’s not just about being the strongest and the best. It certainly helps, but this?
Is Nina’s ticket to changing the world.
0622.
It is supposed to be a sparring match, but the other girl pulls a knife from her uniform at launches herself at Nina, who can only send herself spinning off the walls, trying to keep one step ahead of the weapon. From the speakers all around them come orders to put it down, desist, stop that at once, but the other girl continues after Nina relentlessly, fierce as a hunting bird, graceful as a songbird, deaf to orders.
“It’s you. You just keep smiling like there’s nothing wrong with it, like there’s nothing sick about it, like you actually enjoy this, you bitch-”
The door opens. A man walks in with a gun and pauses just long enough to take aim at the wild bird with the wicked talons and shoots. The force of the shots push the girl against the far wall, but she is dead before she can hit it, Nina can tell. Her hair fans around her like wings or a corona, and her own blood rings around her like rubies. She looks like something out of a dream or a painting hanging in the doctor’s offices, like some ancient deity brought to space.
A failed deity.
A group of doctors rush into the room, some furious, some worried, some in between and some completely unreadable. “There is no room in this project for such willful disregard for orders, absolutely none--”
“We weren’t going to put them in this sort of situation for months-”
“And certainly not one armed girl against an unarmed one-”
“And where did she even get that knife?”
Finally, they take notice of her. “Are you alright?” one of them asks.
“Of course,” she beams. “Thank you for your help.”
0725.
Tonight the rules have changed again, as Nina knew they would.
0749.
Nina kills a girl with a shotgun in a maze for her birthday. The girl’s uniform tears and a red, angry tide spills out. Some of it splashes on Nina’s white uniform; it is more difficult to avoid blood than bullets in anti-grav conditions, and for a single, stupid moment, Nina wonders if she ought to apologize for the extra work the laundering will impose -
-- but surely they expected this.
These were orders, after all.
0947.
They are sparring on the side of the station. Their lifelines are as thin as spiderwebs, which, Nina thinks, is more or less the point. The first to fall is the first to go, and the other girl is in Nina’s hands.
“Please,” says the girl, “please don’t, please, I’ll do-”
“Do what?” asks Nina. “A weakling like you can’t change the world, can she?”
And so Nina smiles beatifically, as only a goddess can do, and sends the girl sailing into the abyss.
1000.
“For twenty-four hours, you will have free run of this station. There are weapons in several caches around the building. Ammunition is in others, as is food. We can’t say we recommend finding a place to sleep. There are ten of you now. The game will cease when there are three.”
Nina glances in all directions. There is only one other girl - short dark hair, cold green eyes. Nina knows that the girl has an edge on her, in terms of performance; she has observed too many of this girl’s rounds not to know that. She can place six of the seven boys - all except the very oldest of them, whose grey eyes and slight smile send a shiver up her spine as she realizes that she doesn’t want to see him in the next twenty-four hours at all, if she can avoid it. She is quietly surprised that someone this old has made it so far. But the one who catches her attention is the boy with bright blue hair, who she remembers from five-hundred nights ago, with his brash mannerisms and expressive face.
“Rules?” asks the green-eyed girl.
“There are none,” says the doctor. The boy with the steely grey eyes smiles more - almost imperceptibly more. “You have fifteen minutes before the weapons stores are unlocked. I do suggest that you disperse yourselves.”
“Yessir!” say one or two of the candidates, but they leave the room as quickly as they can, dividing at every corridor, away from each other - all except Nina, who follows the boy with the bright blue hair.
He notices several minutes into it that she has not left him after several corridors, and wheels around. “What do you want?” he asks, glaring.
His pout is so exaggerated that she can’t help but laugh - because he’s genuinely funny or because she’s conditioned to it now, oh god and-or all the doctors on the project help her, she doesn’t know which it is. “I’m Nina,” she says. “And you know… I thought it might be helpful to work together.”
“Heh! Like the rules would let us do something like that-”
“ ‘The rules are changing,’” she offers brightly. “Besides, there are three spots left, so two of us together is fine!”
He considers this. “And how do I know you won’t turn around and knife me?”
This is, she realizes, the final moment in her long transformation. She pushes off the wall and kisses him hard on the lips; they’re both old enough now that he kisses her back, and she smiles when she pulls away. “That’s why.”
He nods, and takes her hand. “I’m almost sure there’s a few guns outside Epsilon-22, and some ammunition outside the sixth dorm. There’s secret cupboards about the right sizes, anyway.”
“Mm. Thank you, ah…”
“Michael.”
She nods. “I’m Nina. Pleased to meet you!”
“So… why me, Nina?”
“Mm… You’re a real good looking kind of guy! And the doctors like you!”
He puffs up a little and smiles. “That’s right! I’m very best!” And his hand tightens a little around hers, warm and - and brotherly, she thinks.
And so they drift together through the longest night of their lives.
Nina catches a knife in the arm; Michael chokes the other boy to death, a messy process because the other boy is trying to strangle him back, but Michael has just enough muscle advantage to pull it off. Michael is caught in the leg with a gunshot wound; Nina lodges a bullet from a beat-up handgun directly between the boy’s eyes and watches him hit the deck plates with a dull thud. They steal his gun and his knife and use his uniform to staunch Michael’s wound. The green-eyed girl hacks off a tuft of Nina’s hair before Michael slits her throat.
And then they meet the boy with the cold grey eyes.
1001.
He points a gun at Nina before either of them can aim their weapons. Nina is out of ammunition, in any case; Michael only has a bullet or two.
“Congratulations,” says the boy.
“What are you talking about, bastard?” shouts Michael, shaking with rage.
“I said ‘congratulations,’” he repeats. “We’re the last three people on this station.”
“We - we won?” asks Michael.
“That’s correct.”
“Wait,” says Nina. “The last three people on the station-”
“I killed them,” says the boy coolly. “The doctors, the directors, the guards, the staff. I won’t have anything to do with unnecessary people.”
“Cool,” says Michael, breathlessly. “But - what do we do now, big bro?”
“ ‘Big bro’?” He arches a delicate, dark eyebrow.
“Well, you are…”
“I’m Johann Trinity. You’re Michael and Nina Trinity.”
“You already know our names? That’s so awesome, big bro!”
Trinity. Nina Trinity. She’s never thought of herself like this before, never as anything but “Nina.” But she’s earned the name, hasn’t she? She and the real Trinity children. The rest were misfits, flukes, unworthy - these are her true siblings. “How did you find out, brother?”
He smiles. “Come on out, Haro.”
A large purple sphere bounces up and down the hallway toward them. “Pilots, pilots!” it squawks.
“This is Haro,” he says. “It contains all of our instructions - instructions which don’t involve anyone else on this ship. We’ll take a shuttle to another construction colony and pick up our ship mobile suits, then wait. It may be some time until we’re needed.”
“Until it’s time for action!”
“Until it’s time to go to work,” says Nina, and it doesn’t even take a conscious effort to be happy about it, to flash a grin.
Finally.
the very first day.
Nina Trinity had a thousand siblings, and all but two are dead.
But with the two that are left - well, the Earth has a revelation in store for it, and the three of them have a world to change together.
Title: “Seduction of an Origami Unicorn.”
Summary: Boy!Tieria/girl!Tieria, do Gundams dream of electric sheep? [R]
"Everything is true", he said. "Everything anybody has ever thought".
***
Tieria Erde knows that his (his? His) body, his form, himself, is only one of an endless number of possibilities for Veda’s human-interface terminals. He understands that Veda has selected the characteristics - purposefully, not with that messy random process called evolutionary biology - for certain reasons. Masculine physiology lends itself to surges of testosterone that aid in combat; his low voice carries connotations of authority; his glasses appeal to that nonsensical part of human sociology that associates spectacles with intelligence, and his small frame is easy to maintain.
But sometimes, as he drifts through Veda’s dataflows, he catches snippets of what if and what might have been. A tall man with golden curls and blushing cheeks, a woman with soft blue hair and hard red eyes, a boy with high cheekbones short green hair that curls at the nape of his neck, infinite variations on human genetics.
And then there is that girl.
He sifts a file name from her records - not a name, but a string of letters and numbers - that is almost identical to his own file. She has a medium height and a slender build, as ambiguously boyish as he is visually feminine, with tiny, pale breasts and slender hips. Veda recommends that her hair be kept at a medium length; Tieria, running a hand through his own hair, can touch the flexibility of it - easy to fit into a ponytail, left down, pinned up, but soft and thick and straight… He studies the faint curve of her eyelashes and wonders if there is an imperceptible difference in length, at the bow of her lips and questions whether they are softer, fuller. He examines the dark red of her eyes and imagines peering out of them at hands that are slightly smaller, and then his imagination darts away and he imagines her through his eyes and his body.
And pressing those hands against his.
And feeling those eyelashes fluttering against his skin.
And pressing those lips against his own.
And without warning, Veda shifts the incoming data, and snatches her away.
***
To the extent that Tieria dreams - disjointed packets of memory scuttling across his mind - he dreams of her. Watching her, being her, being with her. The slight variation of their genetic make-up (a single chromosome in their entire DNA?) fascinates him more than the strange permutations he cannot imagine, but her - she, he can imagine. Being her, being with her, being both as they drift in Veda’s Ptolemy terminal, weightless, feeling the world through what Veda sends them and themselves through almost-identical hands and tongues and lips. One moment he is running his tongue in perfect circles around her areola, the next she is running soft fingers over his cock, and then they are thrusting into themselves through a linkage that only they share, because they are not alone in this sea of alien humanity, but Veda has made two of them -
They climax together in Tieria’s not-quite-dream but he wakes up alone with a spreading stain across his pajamas and a sudden rush of…
… of…
He changes quickly and drifts down the hallways and begs Veda to let him interface, and searches for her. When he does not find her, data streams at him from sectors he has never referenced before - love poems and stories of separation and paintings of small figures with arms outstretched towards something or someone, and the name of the feeling comes to his (his? His) lips unbidden.
Loneliness.
He is not sure he understands the full significance of the feeling, but he knows that Veda, at least, does not, because it reads his emotional state passively and continues to swirl data around him, giving him all the world at his fingertips, but unable to conjure up the fingertips he wants tangled in his.
***
Title: “Kujou.”
Summary: Billy+Sumeragi [PG]
“Um, where should we go, then? My room… or yours?” he asks gently, tugging the coat over her small shoulders. She feels as though she’s drowning in the heavy wool, more small and adrift than she’s been since that incident.
“I…” Sumeragi whispers.
He bends slightly, his eyes warm in the dim light of the restaurant, and for a painful moment she just wants to throw herself into his arms and tell him, stupidly, that that place she used to call her room is half-open to vacuum thanks to a direct shot from a GN-X, even though that’s not what he means at all. And she wants to wrap her fingers in his shirt and cry and tell him everything that’s happened, and how much she really, truly wanted to do the right thing for the world, and have him just stroke her hair and tell her that it will be alright. “Kujou?”
But instead she leans against his warm body and listens to the clear and steady sound of his heart beating in his chest. Staying quiet, staying like this won’t make her less of a failure of a tactical analyst for Celestial Being any more than drinking makes her any less of a murderer for all the missions she’s planned, or solve anything for good and forever, but -
One two, one two.
-- staying with him and this steady heartbeat --
One two, one two.
-- just for now --
One two, one two.
-- should be enough. And so she wraps her hand in his and prepares for the plunge into his world, into his eyes, into his view of her, where she is beautiful but tragic and certainly not responsible for the havoc that Celestial Being has wrought. And of course, there is only one answer. “Yours,” Kujou says, and they step out into the night.
***
Title: “Arabian Nights.”
Summary: Team Trinity, and the backstory that sorta turned out to be Allelujah’s. [R]
0000.
Nina Trinity has a thousand siblings, and all but two will die.
The Jupiter splinter had long since decided that Earth could hardly be left to Earthlings, or to a Celestial Being so terrestrially - Nina hears the facility administrators spit the word out as though it’s disgusting - attached. And so it undertook the Trinity Project. Celestial Being might create its Gundams, its ships, its angelic messengers.
The Jupiter splinter has rocked the cradles of a thousand-and-one potential gods, and will send three to the peoples of Earth.
0001.
“There will be one challenge per twenty-four hour period,” says the doctor. “And at the end of that trial, the one who has performed the poorest will be out of the project. We won’t have anything to do with unnecessary people.”
The thousand-and-one shadows of the children of the Trinity Project shift as the staff focus the laboratory floodlights on them; a flock of shadows moving like birds none of them have seen against the walls. The shadows span almost ten years in age. The youngest are in the middle of puberty, the eldest are almost adults. Nina Trinity’s shadow is among the former, her body caught between childhood and adulthood. This does not bother her overmuch. After all, she’s been on the verge between life and death for as long as she can remember.
And the younger children have an advantage.
All thousand-and-one Trinity children are modified children, tweaked in a thousand-and-one ways to carry out a divine mission. But it is the very youngest who have reaped the benefits of perfected genetic tampering. Among the eldest children, there are those with a myriad of physical imperfections - missing fingers, heterochromatic eyes, baldness on nineteen-year-old girls - and a dozen more imperceptible deficiencies - compared to their little brothers and sisters, they are slower, weaker, stupider.
Anyone over fifteen is nothing.
A no one.
Less than a shadow.
0068.
The first challenges are not difficult. There are simulator battles in mobile suits of all kinds - one-on-one, two-on-two, team-on-team, anarchic rushes of every man for himself. Nina does not think much of these.
And then they change.
There are battles of two-on-one, five-on-one, ten-on-one. Nina finds herself fighting against hopelessly out-numbered Trinity candidates, and being hopelessly outnumbered herself. The first time she was left to face a team by herself was the first time that Nina was genuinely frightened.
If I lose, if I lose…
She does lose, and walks out of the simulator a ragged mess, head down, feet dragging against the spotless white of the station, unseeing - until she walks directly into one of the white-coated figures.
“You can’t be lost,” says the woman, peering curiously at her.
Nina shakes her head, a crisp, military gesture, even on a young girl.
“Ah, you must have just gotten off the first of tonight’s rounds.” The woman bends down. “You know, no one wants to see all of you so unhappy. You’ve been chosen for something wonderful, you know. You’re going to bring something special to Earth. You’re - you’re all miracles of modern science.”
Nina blinks.
“The good news should be brought with a smile,” beams the woman. “Think about it.”
0281.
Nina realizes something the night a boy from her ten-on-ten battle is eliminated from the project.
He was not the very worst in the game - no, the girl who had been sent flying into space in the first five minutes without a kill was certainly worse. But the boy was - there was no other word - dull. He carried out routine moves with a routine plan without any conviction to speak of. He was competent enough, but anyone watching could see that he was following a learned plan.
He was lifeless even before he was removed from the program.
When the rest of the girls in her small dormitory room are asleep, Nina practices her smile.
0346.
“I’m sorry,” she giggles, as the computer-generated image of her mobile suit’s sword slashes a simulation Taozi into scrap metal. “But have some good news: even if you’re eliminated, the world is changing.”
0372.
Ten nights ago, a second girl was eliminated from their dormitory.
Things fall apart from there. The rest of them grew silent, withdrawn. Nina watched their performances suffer because of it, because they worried. And Nina - Nina laughed. It made her feel strong, it made her feel superior, it made her feel as though she has a secret weapon over all of these people. Not just the girls in her dormitory, but over all of candidates. She would not break, no matter how many nights drag by.
She has repeated it to herself. She will not break.
Tonight, the worst of the worriers from her dormitory was eliminated.
Nina smiles.
0500.
“Congratulations,” says the doctor, “for making it this far. Tonight, the rules are changing.”
“Because ‘the world is changing’?” calls a voice. The children turn around. A boy with bright blue hair has his arms folded nonchalantly, but scowls under all of their gazes.
But the doctor doesn’t seem angry - he seems amused, and gives the boy an indulgent smile. “Something like that.”
He starts to explain some change in the system - they will not all have rounds every night, and the challenges will not be all mobile suit simulations anymore - but Nina cannot focus on it.
She wants the doctors to smile for her. There are five-hundred-and-one candidates left, five-hundred-and-one nights left. She has a story, an act, a persona to perfect. And she will live.
0509.
Nina’s first new challenge does not come for several nightss. It is a race through zero gravity without thrusters - fifteen candidates, a long and narrow hallway, and no rules but reach the other end.
Nina is not the first one to the other side, but she puts on a determined expression that sets her - she knows it -- apart from the blank faces of those around her. And when she touches the other side, she flashes the observation camera a wink and a quick signal with her hands.
Victory.
Not a victory in the conventional sense, but because she remembers, from that long-ago conversation, that this is what they want to see. And she’s known, for the longest time, that it’s not just about being the strongest and the best. It certainly helps, but this?
Is Nina’s ticket to changing the world.
0622.
It is supposed to be a sparring match, but the other girl pulls a knife from her uniform at launches herself at Nina, who can only send herself spinning off the walls, trying to keep one step ahead of the weapon. From the speakers all around them come orders to put it down, desist, stop that at once, but the other girl continues after Nina relentlessly, fierce as a hunting bird, graceful as a songbird, deaf to orders.
“It’s you. You just keep smiling like there’s nothing wrong with it, like there’s nothing sick about it, like you actually enjoy this, you bitch-”
The door opens. A man walks in with a gun and pauses just long enough to take aim at the wild bird with the wicked talons and shoots. The force of the shots push the girl against the far wall, but she is dead before she can hit it, Nina can tell. Her hair fans around her like wings or a corona, and her own blood rings around her like rubies. She looks like something out of a dream or a painting hanging in the doctor’s offices, like some ancient deity brought to space.
A failed deity.
A group of doctors rush into the room, some furious, some worried, some in between and some completely unreadable. “There is no room in this project for such willful disregard for orders, absolutely none--”
“We weren’t going to put them in this sort of situation for months-”
“And certainly not one armed girl against an unarmed one-”
“And where did she even get that knife?”
Finally, they take notice of her. “Are you alright?” one of them asks.
“Of course,” she beams. “Thank you for your help.”
0725.
Tonight the rules have changed again, as Nina knew they would.
0749.
Nina kills a girl with a shotgun in a maze for her birthday. The girl’s uniform tears and a red, angry tide spills out. Some of it splashes on Nina’s white uniform; it is more difficult to avoid blood than bullets in anti-grav conditions, and for a single, stupid moment, Nina wonders if she ought to apologize for the extra work the laundering will impose -
-- but surely they expected this.
These were orders, after all.
0947.
They are sparring on the side of the station. Their lifelines are as thin as spiderwebs, which, Nina thinks, is more or less the point. The first to fall is the first to go, and the other girl is in Nina’s hands.
“Please,” says the girl, “please don’t, please, I’ll do-”
“Do what?” asks Nina. “A weakling like you can’t change the world, can she?”
And so Nina smiles beatifically, as only a goddess can do, and sends the girl sailing into the abyss.
1000.
“For twenty-four hours, you will have free run of this station. There are weapons in several caches around the building. Ammunition is in others, as is food. We can’t say we recommend finding a place to sleep. There are ten of you now. The game will cease when there are three.”
Nina glances in all directions. There is only one other girl - short dark hair, cold green eyes. Nina knows that the girl has an edge on her, in terms of performance; she has observed too many of this girl’s rounds not to know that. She can place six of the seven boys - all except the very oldest of them, whose grey eyes and slight smile send a shiver up her spine as she realizes that she doesn’t want to see him in the next twenty-four hours at all, if she can avoid it. She is quietly surprised that someone this old has made it so far. But the one who catches her attention is the boy with bright blue hair, who she remembers from five-hundred nights ago, with his brash mannerisms and expressive face.
“Rules?” asks the green-eyed girl.
“There are none,” says the doctor. The boy with the steely grey eyes smiles more - almost imperceptibly more. “You have fifteen minutes before the weapons stores are unlocked. I do suggest that you disperse yourselves.”
“Yessir!” say one or two of the candidates, but they leave the room as quickly as they can, dividing at every corridor, away from each other - all except Nina, who follows the boy with the bright blue hair.
He notices several minutes into it that she has not left him after several corridors, and wheels around. “What do you want?” he asks, glaring.
His pout is so exaggerated that she can’t help but laugh - because he’s genuinely funny or because she’s conditioned to it now, oh god and-or all the doctors on the project help her, she doesn’t know which it is. “I’m Nina,” she says. “And you know… I thought it might be helpful to work together.”
“Heh! Like the rules would let us do something like that-”
“ ‘The rules are changing,’” she offers brightly. “Besides, there are three spots left, so two of us together is fine!”
He considers this. “And how do I know you won’t turn around and knife me?”
This is, she realizes, the final moment in her long transformation. She pushes off the wall and kisses him hard on the lips; they’re both old enough now that he kisses her back, and she smiles when she pulls away. “That’s why.”
He nods, and takes her hand. “I’m almost sure there’s a few guns outside Epsilon-22, and some ammunition outside the sixth dorm. There’s secret cupboards about the right sizes, anyway.”
“Mm. Thank you, ah…”
“Michael.”
She nods. “I’m Nina. Pleased to meet you!”
“So… why me, Nina?”
“Mm… You’re a real good looking kind of guy! And the doctors like you!”
He puffs up a little and smiles. “That’s right! I’m very best!” And his hand tightens a little around hers, warm and - and brotherly, she thinks.
And so they drift together through the longest night of their lives.
Nina catches a knife in the arm; Michael chokes the other boy to death, a messy process because the other boy is trying to strangle him back, but Michael has just enough muscle advantage to pull it off. Michael is caught in the leg with a gunshot wound; Nina lodges a bullet from a beat-up handgun directly between the boy’s eyes and watches him hit the deck plates with a dull thud. They steal his gun and his knife and use his uniform to staunch Michael’s wound. The green-eyed girl hacks off a tuft of Nina’s hair before Michael slits her throat.
And then they meet the boy with the cold grey eyes.
1001.
He points a gun at Nina before either of them can aim their weapons. Nina is out of ammunition, in any case; Michael only has a bullet or two.
“Congratulations,” says the boy.
“What are you talking about, bastard?” shouts Michael, shaking with rage.
“I said ‘congratulations,’” he repeats. “We’re the last three people on this station.”
“We - we won?” asks Michael.
“That’s correct.”
“Wait,” says Nina. “The last three people on the station-”
“I killed them,” says the boy coolly. “The doctors, the directors, the guards, the staff. I won’t have anything to do with unnecessary people.”
“Cool,” says Michael, breathlessly. “But - what do we do now, big bro?”
“ ‘Big bro’?” He arches a delicate, dark eyebrow.
“Well, you are…”
“I’m Johann Trinity. You’re Michael and Nina Trinity.”
“You already know our names? That’s so awesome, big bro!”
Trinity. Nina Trinity. She’s never thought of herself like this before, never as anything but “Nina.” But she’s earned the name, hasn’t she? She and the real Trinity children. The rest were misfits, flukes, unworthy - these are her true siblings. “How did you find out, brother?”
He smiles. “Come on out, Haro.”
A large purple sphere bounces up and down the hallway toward them. “Pilots, pilots!” it squawks.
“This is Haro,” he says. “It contains all of our instructions - instructions which don’t involve anyone else on this ship. We’ll take a shuttle to another construction colony and pick up our ship mobile suits, then wait. It may be some time until we’re needed.”
“Until it’s time for action!”
“Until it’s time to go to work,” says Nina, and it doesn’t even take a conscious effort to be happy about it, to flash a grin.
Finally.
the very first day.
Nina Trinity had a thousand siblings, and all but two are dead.
But with the two that are left - well, the Earth has a revelation in store for it, and the three of them have a world to change together.