Perihelion

An unusually clear and star-scored night rapidly overtook the evening view outside the ops room windows of the MBV Elmo. The Commander internally chafed at what was meant to be a short amount of work now dragging on for far too long. It was the typical nonsense that would crop up occasionally while undertaking jobs, but something about the circumstances of these most recent issues had particularly set him off. Maybe it was because they all happened too closely together. Maybe it was the last straw in a slow line of things piling up. Maybe he just didn’t sleep well enough earlier. Whatever the reason, he found his patience increasingly short and temper flaring more than usual. Keys on the terminal were pressed with more force, finger presses on the screen were both quick and sloppy. Frustrated sighs and grunts that he would only make outside the presence of others all displayed the hallmarks of an especially stressed time.

Unbeknown to the Commander amid his aggravated focus was the sound of the ops room door opening and in its entrance standing a sleek figured tactical doll once associated with him years ago at Griffin and Kryuger designated by her imprinted weapon, AK Alfa. Now operating under the self-designated name of Tololo, the long grey haired doll’s perceptiveness quickly took notice of both the Commander’s frustrations and his own lack of notice of her. This curious set of circumstances led her to delay announcing her presence and opt to observe the Commander with her typical inscrutable gaze from the now pooling shadows of the large room’s entryway under the contrast of the overhead lights to the night.

For 87.4 seconds Tololo cross referenced her current observations of the Commander with now much older data of her time at Griffin to come to the immediate conclusion that the Commander was indeed quite upset, and much more than usual.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck fuck.” The Commander muttered curses that unintelligibly blended together while aggressively tapping several screens and pressing keypad inputs before placing his hands over his face in an overtly exasperated manner. “These fucking people.” That statement was quite clear and understandable.

While frustration and exasperation at daily work was in no short supply among Tololo’s memory bank’s of the Commander, such quick and casual obscenities were new. Even while observing him at his most stressed at Griffin did the Commander never once seem to crack in such a vulgar way at work, at least not openly.

A heavy sigh into the palms covering his face was the last thing she heard before the cessation of all other noise and action from the Commander for several long moments. Through the interlocked fingers sliding across his face, Tololo could distinguish one final utterance: “Why am I even doing this?”

While it may have been just a careless utterance from a frustrated moment that ultimately meant nothing, deep within Tololo resonated a strong sense of fear and even strangely of relatedness. To see someone she had come to admire so heavily be so distressed was concerning enough but the question had also inadvertently surfaced uncomfortable memories of her own. Her once idle musings from an observational effort to collect more data had shifted into a focused calculus.

Distinct steps in tandem with the pneumatic closing hiss of the now long opened ops room door finally interrupted the Commander’s ruminating. He quickly turned while scrambling to shuffle aside his present worries and address the doll now approaching him.

“Tololo, what are you doing here? It’s getting quite late now,” the Commander said, regaining his composure.

“Tonight is the date you agreed to witness the peak time of a meteor shower with me. I hope that isn’t an issue.” Her reply was measured and perfunctory, as if the answer did not matter. The Commander knew that was anything but the case.

“Right…” The Commander quickly glanced to his side at the time and date listed on one of the monitors he was just recently berating to confirm this and reorganized his thoughts. “That is tonight, isn’t it? It won’t be an issue. Just give me a little more time to be done here,” he stated furtively to keep things moving along and hide his previous frustrations already well known to the doll before him.

“Mmm.” A quick and affirmative sound was all the Commander had received in response, almost passing his notice entirely even. The Commander turned and tried to engross himself back into his remaining tasks to alleviate the burden of needing to keep another in mind as well.

Finding herself actually rather relieved to be able to slip back into an observer once again, Tololo leaned against a railing placed in the outer area of the ops room and continued to gather observational data from this newest set of parameters. While measurable sensory output would seem to indicate much the same level of stress, there is a marked decrease in outward gesticulations of it. She cross referenced peak values to previously registered entries, generated eight graphs simultaneously of several relevant variables to time, and consulted known human psychological literature she had accessed within the last decade. The conclusion surmised from this information on the Commander’s cumulative stress levels was concerning to her.

Tololo frowned. A myriad of conditional questions arose, ranging from the greater factors contributing to the Commander’s state to even her own part possibly added in it. Surely some of her own selfish requests must have been a contributing if relatively insignificant factor to this state. Her most recent memories involving the Commander and his own words immediately poured doubt over her rising guilt within her but at the same time could not quell it entirely.

“Something on your mind?” The Commander’s voice instantly cut through Tololo’s thinking and only then did she notice that he had turned his attention back as her worries were gradually losing orbit of her initial hypothesizing.

“Not really. Nothing to worry about,” the doll replied in her naturally impassive way. “I’ll get things set up on the roof then.”

Not waiting for a response, Tololo turned heel and absconded from the situation before either she or the Commander could say something else. The Commander watched her disappear behind the closing door of the ops room and could once again only guess at what she was really thinking.

Roughly one hour later, an auxiliary hatch opened onto the roof of the MBV Elmo and the Commander climbed his way out of it. After carefully resealing it he finally turned his vision towards his surroundings. A green zone border wall to their north was within a close enough range that protective equipment wouldn’t be required for such a venture. About 10 meters away along the roof’s surface it looked like Tololo had already finished precisely what she had said when leaving earlier. A relatively simple patterned star blanket was laid down as a helpful barrier to the Elmo’s otherwise unwelcoming metal exterior with her sitting one side of it. Several other objects including a few pillows, a case of beer likely obtained at their most recent supply stop, and a camera also sat around her. She was in the process of raising the camera up to take several images of the sky where he could now see a streak of light from the meteor shower already skimming across the surprisingly clear night sky. Upon inspecting the resulting images a slight smile crept into the edges of her mouth, clearly satisfied with the results. She turned her attention towards the figure now approaching her and maintained that smile at him.

“Commander!” her tone had shifted to that one she gets into when particularly excited about a subject, “this is an unbelievably fortunate night.”

“Oh really?” the Commander asked genuinely as he occupied the open spot next to her on the blanket and waited for the inevitable excitedly spoken follow up.

“Mmm. As the meteorological reports predicted for the area the skies are clear of any weather fronts and with our proximity to the green zone the collapse radiation is lower than normal.” She wasn’t wrong. Between the collapse storms and its related effects further in the yellow zone an almost completely clear night like this was indeed a rarity. Tololo’s stimulated and unusually hastened speaking continued. “The timing for the peak of the Perseids should be just around now, and the radiant point should give us a near optimal viewing at this time and location. Truthfully, there is little that can make it better.” She sat with her knees to her chest, fidgeting her resting arms on them while speaking and occasionally switching between the opened beer she was nursing and her camera to take photos. She continued her exposition into the specifics of this year’s remaining meteor showers and other possible ones that they might be able to view in the future based on the Elmo’s current route.

The Commander relaxed himself in the wake of listening to her now slightly too technical speak for him and followed along as best as he could in between sips of his own beer procured from the case. Both were a good remedy to his recent frustrations, and he was glad to just be an audience to the more energetic and sociable side of the usually quiet doll next to him. He watched the sky’s show unfold with a rapt interest as the streaks of celestial bodies made brilliantly long straight and obtuse arcs across the full view of the firmament. In the far distance somewhere along the snaking purification wall of slowly moving flood lights the blaring horn of an intercontinental railway train pierced through the night and ambient rumble of the Elmo’s engines. A light gust of wind suddenly picks up across the pair blowing loose strands of hair and clothes while bringing along with it all a combined sensation that all at the same time was inexplicably nostalgic, serene, and painful. His thoughts began to eventually wander off as he subsumed himself to this complex state and laid back slightly onto his elbows.

Tololo had finally picked up on the Commander’s dwindling attention amid her astronomical musings and stopped speaking. Having now been brought out of the warm buzz of her own thoughts she recalled what she had witnessed earlier and a twinge of guilt suddenly jolted her over consideration of her own selfishness again. She knew the Commander would immediately disagree if she voiced such concerns though. She decided to sit back as well, mimicking the Commander’s pose. Her thought processing was now split between both her beloved night sky and her earlier concerns regarding the Commander. She theorized over what could possibly alleviate an ailment that she herself had no clear definition to yet. Through the course of sorting her lack of answers to this question an odd but ultimately agreeable plan finally appeared.

“Commander?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you have a favorite constellation?”

“I’ll be honest it’s not something I’ve really ever thought about myself.”

“Would you ever take the opportunity to go out into the universe if given the chance?”

He chuckled. “I’ve got more than enough problems down here to worry about for now.”

She recalculated. “I hope those problems aren’t troubling you too greatly?”

A brief pause. “No, just the usual headaches of this kind of work,” he diplomatically responded with the best half-truth he could.

“Not like having to deal with a few hundred more back at Griffin?”

The Commander spontaneously cracked up in a cackling, hearty laugh so much so that he began to curl up a bit in response to the doll’s joke while thinking that maybe she gets more than she lets on. “Nothing quite like that, I’m sure.”

Not a word of the doll’s question was meant to be funny. She watched his jovial reaction with a perplexed expression as her internal calculus churned once again.

A back and forth dialogue was gradually established between the human and doll. Odd questions would be pitched the human’s way and largely unilluminating or evasive responses would be thrown back. Some questions that brought up positive memories would give sudden realizations reminiscing about them that would elicit a genuine laugh or shaking of the head in response. Both the case of beer between them and night itself began to recede down to its last with an unusually lively if somewhat awkward conversation.

After some time the two stargazers were both lying fully on their backs next to each other, having settled into a recent silence between them. Both were largely satisfied with this result as they wordlessly continued watching the now near continuous seams of light arcing over the sky. Infinite unreachable horizons stretched out above them with tempting beacons calling to ports unknown. While overwhelming for some, it was an oddly comforting feeling to Tololo just knowing that so many other possibilities and existences might continue on no matter what happens here on their own pale blue dot in the void’s gluttonous expanse. However with her thoughts now grounded to the surface once again that anxious feeling which prompted the whole ordeal in her digimind still lingered.

“What do you think of the sky and stars above you right now? What’s in your mind while seeing it?” The sudden question was softly spoken even for her.

The Commander was prepared to provide another pacifying answer but paused. He had returned his attention to the spectacle above him with a new focus and was forced into stillness by what it brought to his mind. His now somewhat intoxicated state left him in a sudden mental lurch, pondering with an involuntary grimace and silence upon him that was surely noticed by the doll next to him. Realizing this, he gave his answer:

“They make me think of things like rockets being fired, the tail of a missile’s exhaust arcing in the shape of gravity’s rainbow, tracer rounds of guns firing over a battlefield.” He answered honestly but provided nothing further.

Tololo’s anxiety now remained thoroughly unabated.

“You aren’t worrying about such things now are you?” It was a distinctly sharp and direct question.

“No-no of course not,” the Commander responded hesitantly, offset by her sudden shift in demeanor. “It’s just us here and the sky right now.”

She shifted her vision away from Commander’s view. A burst of cross referential data of lives and deaths in the past led her to believe such an admission correlated predominantly with what must have been an arduous experience for a human at G&K. Such difficult trials and not one backup should the worst come to pass. She recalls the missions they undertook where mortal danger was a guarantee and yet not one flinch or hesitation ever came from him through all of it. There must have been an impetus to it all that she still perhaps has yet to fully grasp. This made the account suddenly much more intimate to herself as she recalled her own rocky path through her years there and since.

A simple but important question then became obvious to her.

“Commander, why are you here doing all of this?”

Not why they were here, not why we were here, why was he here? Why was he here? It’s been such a long time now in his exile that he genuinely had to think about the answer again. All the grief, all the turmoil, all the isolation should be more than any one person could ever take, yet here he was. Refocusing himself and thinking deep within he knew why, yet that reason was one he did not know if he could speak truthfully.

“Sometimes you just find yourself inherently attached to a certain duty, even if you didn’t realize or want it at first.”

Despite the vagueness of the response, Tololo was immediately enraptured with it. Her thoughts now replayed a memory of the past in her last mission with squad Grizzly. She remembered a shootout and the face of a dead domestic doll shot down attempting to defend humans. She remembered how deeply that blank expression shook her and the vow she took to herself that she wouldn’t let others she cared for end up like that. She visibly frowned in grim sympathy and looked back over to the Commander. She brought her hand to her chest and lightly clenched a fist, still ultimately unsettled with the worries plaguing her and asked a final question.

“Do you fear the future, Commander?” It was an abrupt, heavily loaded question.

There was no response for a time. She began to wonder if he would even answer.

A sigh.

“I don’t quite think it’s the future itself I fear now. Ever since leaving Griffin I think what I feared was where everyone else’s place would land in it. Those with power will always exert force over those who don’t have it. Order will always be pitched against what it perceives as chaos, just or not. Sacrifices are made to keep ideas and existence itself alive. That’s the unfortunate nature of survival.” The Commander trailed off, reconsidering whether or not this tangential rambling even had merit to the point he was trying to get to. Not wanting to end that line of thinking so openly, he gathered his thoughts to follow up on. “I thought that—I thought with everything that had happened, leaving was the best solution to ensure a good place for you all and to try and keep you from being the ones that power would be exerted on.”

The uncharacteristically prodding and questioning Tololo had no response. Somewhere deep within her neural could a litany of overlapping yet distinct experiences boiled over into a disquieting mix that culminated in a noise that resembled at once both a cough and throat clearing. The Commander didn’t seem to notice at all. Forming and disappearing spears of light continued to be thrown across the sky at various intervals as time melted down once again. A camera rattled nervously in her hands as she found herself increasingly unsteady to capture it. She recalls only one other time when this occurred.

Tololo turned her head once more to look at the Commander’s, whose mentally distant eyes reflected those same falling spears of light. Perhaps it was just an optical trick, but a reflection of a particularly quick and brightly tailed body from beyond this world seemed to reveal a distorted image of herself looking back at him. It was for but not even a second, likely insignificant, but all the same it completely overwhelmed her processing power.

Neither of their expressions had changed.

A left hand that was previously gloved had now lifted and gravitated towards another fully gloved right hand. For several seconds it established a hesitant orbit before softly landing upon its target. There was a momentary jolt of uncertain tensing in the other hand before the attention of a long glance over from the Commander allowed it settle it into a tentative submission. The Commander attempted to return his focus to the sky, but his isolated and once stalwartly built mental blocks now gradually eroded into the unavoidable feeling of the attached foreign hand now greedily pouring over the back of his own onto the palm and through his fingers. A rapid increase in temperature permeating cyclically into the doll’s extremities likely from an immediate displacement of an overheating core made it feel familiar and yet different from the touch of another human due to its exactly timed periodic pulsing.

A tightening internal force spilled from the ends of the Commander into his chest where it roiled tumultuously. It brought back both good and bad memories. The good memories of the bonds and attachments made with the dolls he previously commanded as well as the bad of regret for allowing himself to get too attached and largely failing in his promise to protect them. With so many previously commanded dolls now returning to him and sharing their stories ranging from complicated to downright harrowing he had to force a certain level of impassiveness over himself to not let loose those regrets on him again.

He wanted to pull away once more to protect himself but couldn’t find the capacity to do so. The cautious probing of her hand across the whole of his had settled into a rhythmic rub across the back of his hand that became gradually reassuring to him. The touch felt like one not being made out of any selfish motive or carnal desire but a sincere effort to bring a sense of peace to their melancholic musings under an indifferent sky. At that moment, the Commander felt he could trust this doll completely with his life. Should the Varjaegers, Paradeus, URNC or hell itself have the unfortunate sense to attack them now not a word would likely be spoken between them and their only communication would be muzzle flashes and brass landing on the roof.

Tololo’s own thoughts finally resurfaced into a semblance of clarity. Complex cognitive operations had been temporarily suspended in an effort to prevent overheating. A myriad of new thoughts also surfaced as well: things wished to be said in the past, discussed in the present, or conjectured about the future. In her digimind she sorted through and ultimately dismissed them to simply be products of idle daydreaming that selfishly battled for a chance to be let out underneath her still impassive face. Her eyes darted back again to the Commander whose own normally collected expression was beset upon by a trouble she couldn’t discern. Those idle thoughts were instantly suppressed once more by an overriding worry that the unrest she saw him in earlier was still consuming him in some way. Maybe it was just her own concerns projected onto him. She ceased the repeating hand movements over his and instead grasped it fully with an anguished disquiet, intensely desiring a way to somehow take that pain and inner conflict away from one she cared so much for. A splatter of tears began to form in the edges of her eyes as she concluded in her own thoughts that she truly couldn’t.

“Commander?” A now familiar question finally broke the silence.

“Yeah.” A somewhat raspy reply was returned at a level just above a whisper.

“May I hug you?”

The Commander instantly twisted over into an awkward position leaning on his arm to get a more direct look at her. “What’s this all about now?” he asked with a tone of incredulity creeping into his voice.

Tololo panicked, re-evaluating every instant within her recent memories looking for mistakes and wishing to withdraw from the entanglement entirely. Yet while pondering over her perceived faults she noticed that the Commander had not attempted to withdraw his hand that she still unconsciously gripped to. She balked in a discordant exhalation of breath and decided to just reciprocate the Commander’s previous frankness with her own after a few embarrassing seconds floundering over herself.

“I had observed you for a while earlier in the ops room when you hadn’t noticed. You were quite distraught and as a result I had become distraught. I’ve thought a lot of how things were in the past and how I would change my actions in the future. I thought that asking you questions like you’ve always done for me before would have helped.” It was a starkly straightforward if shakily delivered response from the internally sequestered doll the Commander had come to know. Her hand’s grip continued tightening over his to an almost painful degree in an attempt to retain her composure that relayed all the gravity it needed to accompany her words.

Like I’ve always done for you, huh? The Commander’s immediate response remained in his head and went unspoken. He wanted to bitterly laugh like he’d just been a part of a cruel joke if it weren’t so sincere. A strong and immediate feeling of something he couldn’t decide between pride and grief contorted his face at the thought.

The Commander relented back down, as he tends to do with dolls, and sighed once more.

“Sure.” He found himself suddenly struggling to find any sophistication to his words.

The Commander began sitting back up again only to have a weight next to him shift faster. In an instant a pair of arms were pincered around his back and a body pressed into his chest that, despite the quickness of the action, gently laid him back down to where he was. For an indiscernible amount of time he merely laid flat, arms to his side, and half the length of a doll’s body and long grey hair draped across him with a face buried into his chest and shoulder. His mind had emptied entirely. Maybe at that moment he really didn’t want to say or do anything.

The doll, now laying partially on top of the Commander, had a neural cloud flaring with feelings of both panic and regret at once for such an overt action. At the same time though she’d never dare wrest herself free from such a state now. The warring calculations within her on what to do seized her into a near death grip to the Commander. Overcome once again with the seriousness and perceived transgression of an already consented to action she worriedly formed her next words.

“Commander.” Her voice ended the silence once again enveloping them. The glow of orange eyes surfaced like dawn from the bottom of his vision. “Whatever there is in your future path—our future—whatever stands in that path’s way, please never give into the despair and cynicism it brings.” Her voice quivered but steadily regained its candor. “Too many stories today are being told by those whose hearts have run colder than the void. Too many innocent lives are callously cut short in dangerous pursuits. Too many sacrifices are being made to uncertain futures.”

Another wave of heat radiated from a core that, now laying on top of him, spread evenly over him like an oddly comforting blanket. The words of someone so familiar but now suddenly so alien vibrated through his chest to head as she spoke.

“I like to believe I know and understand why you made the decisions you did then all those years ago. You’re a deeply scarred person who's been through so much turmoil that, in a strange way now, I’m glad to have been a part of now with you. You’ve shown that despite all the years, suffering, setbacks, you’ve never let hatred completely consume your heart.”

The Commander began to feel another unfortunately familiar weight upon him–an old weight–not of any tangible object, but the weight of expectations and beliefs of others set upon him. He wordlessly mouthed several responses in protest but to no avail.

“You kept the frivolous desires, thoughts, and memories of those you never had a real obligation to do so for alive and with no selfish reasons. You made a difficult choice that you thought would protect everyone,” the doll momentarily paused at this, wondering if she also meant those words for herself, “even though others would not have seen it that way at the time. Our parting, the breakup of Griffin, forced or not, would have eventually happened at some point. But in that inevitable separation you ensured that we found ourselves to be able to truly be new in our own names and lives—names and lives with real meaning to each of us that wouldn’t have been found otherwise if we never were allowed those memories.”

“No, I-” I don’t want that kind of weight put on me, the Commander’s unfinished thought lay tangled in his mouth.

Tololo raised her head up. Her watering eyes, now verging fully on tears, betrayed the two orange suns which burned with an intensity and determination the Commander could barely feign to look at as much as the sun itself. “No matter what the future brings, where the path leads, we won’t let those people—those memories—mean nothing, to disappear into nothing. We won’t let any more senseless tragedies be set upon them. We’ll all follow you to any bitter end to achieve this.” A miniature solar flare of incandescent light momentarily flashed through her eyes. “We’ll be a real starlit beacon guiding those that need it through the darkness of night. We’ll protect them all.”

The sincerity of each word struck through the Commander one after another, piercing him more easily than any blade or projectile could. When spoken to him, he didn’t hear the musings of a predetermined optimism but the forged alloy of experiences manifested into a real belief. He forcefully shut his eyes to shield himself from the seemingly unshakable passion that overshadowed the shame, adversity, and regret over his own past. His arms, until now still limply laying at his side, finally curled up in a reciprocal embrace that clung to the doll clinging to him in an act just shy of desperation as he stroked his hand down the flowing strands of synthetic grey hair draping over him. More words of apology and excuse continued to rise and choke within his chest and throat, unable to escape. Such words though, he concluded, would likely be unnecessary to someone who has already managed to reach so deeply out to him with such an undeserved understanding.

The Commander reopened his eyes. A pale haze brightened the sky ever so visibly to signal the coming day’s first light that was manifesting all around them. The long tails of celestial debris in their peak density continued to fall indifferently far above everything along the expanse of dawn’s inevitable approach. A phantasmagoria of connections and sensations overwhelmed his senses and ability to process them. A tear and then several more of his own came down the side of his face as he gritted his teeth in the still ensuing embrace with the enigmatic being that was currently such an intense source and balm to the sublimely conflicted thoughts and feelings consuming his soul.

Attempting to drum up even half the conviction of the same declaration's previous bearer, the Commander responded with the only words he could muster:

“Yeah. We’ll protect them all.”