primum nil nocere
This isn't a grudge, because that's not the kind of woman Mira ever was. She isn't upset. She was, once, but she's got a lot to feel good about.
She loves her job and her students are sweet, and her strong sense of duty carries her when she fights. There is a world around her she's vowed to protect, corners of the globe she's never seen that rely on her to continue. Moping simply has no room on her agenda when she's got so much to do.
And she isn't one to mope, regardless, her laughter still laissez-faire currency when she's in Sid's company.
It's just a shame. That's all.
Sid Barrett is a worthy meister: he's smart and swift despite his size. Mira knows herself to be quite the weapon, so she isn't settling when she accompanies him on patrols. She is achieving.
He's a considerate meister, too, which is always something to be valued – he might not have the medical training she does, but whenever an opponent lands a blow that goes too deep, he obeys when she tells him how to patch her up. He isn't clumsy, incapable; he's a professional.
That's something Mira admires and it doesn't matter if he's dead.
Only once, when he still knew the pleasure of breathing, did she ever fear for his life. They'd been sent to face a group armed with guns and a vendetta against the Academy, former students who never amounted to much and seemed intent on continuing with what they knew.
Sid braved a hailstorm of their bullets like a courageous idiot – and that's what he is, she supposes. One sliced open his cheek, but they made it out alive.
Blood never upset Mira much: she would be a dreadful nurse if it did. It's the sight of Sid's blood that made her stomach churn and fear implode, but there's no blood in him anymore.
Embalming fluid carves cold rivers beneath his skin.
It's surreal, sometimes, to be eating with him at lunch while remembering the time she attended his funeral. That's an occasion they don't talk about, at least.
He doesn't really need the food, but he'd never make her eat alone – her considerate and worthy meister. Soup slides down his dry gullet to a stomach padded with tissue cultures, and if it wasn't for the colour of his skin he'd very nearly look functional.
Their meals together are pleasant, but the food at his funeral sucked. She hadn't been expecting anything gourmet at a gathering like that, but it wasn't the finest the Academy could buy and everyone knew it. Still, Mira managed to bite her tongue even though it was disgraceful, for one of the school's finest teachers to be sent off without ceremony.
It was her own fault, always wanting the best for him. Death by pointy paperweight isn't the most impressive way to go for a man who's brought down demons, and though she was glad she hadn't led him to a grander death, her chest tightened and ached with every moment she had to spend listening to the insufferable preacher.
That man spoke like he knew Sid, like he could describe how it felt to catch him when he collapsed with exhaustion in the middle of a warzone. How it felt to fit snugly into his fist while it propelled forward to kill a man.
Mira did, of course; she wasn't asked to give a reading.
She knows why, now. She knows Sid hadn't been in the coffin when they lowered it down. He'd been on the other side of the city strapped to an operating table, and the Academy was willing to throw a fake funeral to ward off the unsuspecting public if the grand Professor Stein proved incapable of raising the dead after all – but they'd believed in him so much that they hadn't really paid out for Sid's temporary 'burial'.
Stein is their golden boy, that's a given. Do-no-wrong despite the screw through his head, and it hurt, to be told that the scientist she'd worked under had kept it a secret from even her. She'd never thought of him as a close friend, but she'd expected more.
She'd expected, at least, to be spared the indignity of collapsing at an empty graveside with the assumption it was full. Full of Sid and their secrets and the love she'd never felt the need to announce.
Mira doesn't love him anymore.
Here's the thing: he moves like he used to, talks the same way – but his soul's not the same. Even Stein can't remedy that in a petri dish.
Sid must feel it, too, a remnant swaying on the borderline. She'd been a sea of knowing smiles and she'd wrapped herself in bandages to make him feel better, understood, but no matter how much of a pragmatist she is about their set-up, he's still dead.
He doesn't want to talk about it. That's the kind of man he was.
Every moment spent with him is a blessing, even so, and he's Mira's friend, confidant, eternal partner in the business of conflict – but what they had, who Sid was, are things that have a place in time where they're meant to stay.
Those bandages get damn warm in summer.
The dead scream through the murk of celestial static – that's the mind Stein has. He's painfully aware of every life he's taken, what it means and what it makes him, but when life's already been extinguished he feels entitled not to care.
Mira doesn't beg. She suggests, she presents her case.
But she'd pleaded with Stein that day, when the Academy finally deigned to let her know what they were planning to do. They couldn't tell her before, couldn't tell anyone, but it felt only right that she should be the first informed about her meister's impending return from the other side.
He won't be the same.
Everything's fucked because she knew it even then, unsure if her voice was audible or if she was on the verge of screaming – she'd never heard her pulse so clearly as she did during that conversation, throbbing in her ears like an alarm submerged by water. Sid would never hear his pulse again, but that, that would be for the best.
Stein hadn't understood, though on some level she hadn't expected him to. It was his bored bewilderment that left her cold, the grandiose pretence he was intent on working under: bringing Sid back was something altruistic. His life was cut tragically short and he'd be grateful, truly, once the experiment was complete, so it was surely only a matter of time before Mira would see the necessity of such a procedure.
He is your meister.
He is your friend.
Is, is, was. He was dead.
Past the opportunity for some freakish feat of surgery, Stein didn't give a damn about Sid's tragically early demise, and Mira had torn the palm of her hand into ribbons by restraining her fists for too long.
He isn't anything.
She remembers Sid suspended in time, on the back of one moment alone. His name is entwined with the scent of a polluted midday city.
They'd been walking through industrial streets on an assignment she can't quite recall – but what she does remember is Sid insisting on pausing to duet with a busker. It's my jam; that was his justification. It was stupid and it only made her smile, but it's the spontaneous nonsense of life that makes up living.
Mira sees it: she sees Sid unable to pull things like that any longer, because that was the man he was, not the man he is. Stein will never know what he's done.
The affair comes down to this.
Only Stein knows, knows something even Sid doesn't, something Sid never will. He knows about the flutter in her heart that started when Sid was hers, hurt when Sid was gone, died when a version of Sid came back. She'd made a point of pleading and told him about how she wanted to remember her partner, how she'd prefer it, that sometimes death was the kindest thing for a man with an uncertain future of not-quite-life.
He was my meister.
He was my friend.
But he was my everything.
If Stein knew what love is, he'd have put his plans to bed and kept his scalpel clean for the next cadaver to come his way. If Stein had any love in him at all, he wouldn't want to decide Sid's fate when even the Gods couldn't control it. Ripples into tidal waves.
She pities him; Franken is her friend too, and that was the slickest kind of hurt he could cause her, intentional pain without any of the malice. She knows he really doesn't get it. He stands before her, now, a broken man, and that's punishment enough without her hating him too.
Marie is a nice girl, but that doesn't negate how foolish she is to go with him. When Mira thinks of the light in Sid's eyes lost to a chemical glaze, when she touches his skin to find it cold – this is no labour of love, no step towards scientific progress. There's no love in a man who won't let his friends stay dead.
Stein pulls away from them, then Marie goes too. Mira watches them depart until she can't see them, and Sid takes her hand while they stand beside the empty grave she'd once mourned at.
Sid's skin is so cold. She smiles at him.
It's a shame.
-x-