Short bit is short.

Sette: Not How I Pictured It

It wasn't a situation Sette had ever expected to find herself in. A dedicated combat platform, as she thought of herself, she wasn't supposed to be a substitute parent. She didn't know how and she strongly suspected she would be very bad at it. Still...she liked Thoma and Isis, she liked mothering them in her own, inept way, with someone like Uno or Cinque to look over her shoulder and ensure she wasn't doing something horrifyingly wrong. What mainly bothered her now was whether such behavior was fitting.

The bottom line was that Sette did not consider herself a person. Most robotic of the sisters was a description she would readily answer to; how she actually thought of herself did not translate well. A tool, a robot, possessed of volition, but using in a very narrow fashion. There had been a time when she would have literallyanswered to "Killing Machine" but this was no longer true. The Bureau placed a high value on being able to do things nonlethally, even if that emphasis was starting to slip away under the pressure of war.

The real problem, as Sette saw it, was that there was so much fear in her interactions with Isis, and especially with Thoma. Fear of failure, fear of mistakes; in Thoma's case, fear she might injure or kill him by accident. She wasn't like her eldest sisters, able to throttle her cybernetics down and keep them that way. It took continuous effort. Every time she interacted with a normal human, she had to consciously control herself or she could well break bones completely unintentionally. Fear wasn't something that should trouble a self-respecting combatant.

Unless this was part of what learning to not be a killing machine was like. Service to the Bureau had already required a broadening of her skillset. Sette, as the Doctor had created her, had been a one-trick machine. She knew how to kill things; quickly, efficiently. The Bureau had wanted much more of her.

It was no longer enough to be a machine. Sette had to be a person. Just how she was not entirely sure, though her time spent with Isis and Thoma was apparently very important to that. Certainly her sisters seemed to think so.

Sette was actually trying to smile at the moment, while she walked with Isis and Thoma, holding hands. Her smile did not look quite correct, she was still practicing. She'd come to suspect she'd never manage a smile that didn't disturb at least a few people, but Sette was a Combat Cyborg and not accustomed to failure. She had only failed once previously in her life and had no intention of doing so again.

"Sette." Thoma tugged on her hand. "What are you thinking?"

"About family, Thoma," she replied, giving his had a gentle, very gentle for a Combat Cyborg, squeeze. "New family."

Thoma smiled back at her, and she felt wrenched somehow, knowing that he still remembered his real family, that she was a replacement and not a very good one at that. But Thoma put a brave face on it. Braver than Isis even, who had only lost a foster family she had been with for a few months.

Sette didn't recognize the signs, but Uno, who was walking a short distance behind them, did. Thoma had lately grown colder, more distant. He appeared to be trying to consciously pattern himself after Sette and failing. No great surprise there; acting like Sette required understanding how Sette thought, and even her closest sisters didn't pretend to truly understand Sette's thoughts. There were holes in them, things Quattro had torn out, that they couldn't think into their own thought processes. Sette had concerns that made no sense and did not have concerns that seemed very basic.

Such as placing any sort of intrinsic value on her own life. Most of the time. Sette did not fear death; in a cynical moment Uno might argue this was because Sette had never actually lived. But Sette had accepted that her death would have a profoundly negative impact on others.

Starting with these two. Carefully, or at least carefully for her, she swept Isis and Thoma into a hug. Not because she much felt like it, but because it seemed the thing to do.

Late night at the home of Combat Cyborgs, according to Wendi whether they actually claimed to live there or not, the Nakajima residence. Subaru sat up with Isis and Sette both, keeping a watchful eye on Sette as she comforted Isis after a nightmare.

"Even nightmares fear something." Sette said, soft in volume if not in tone.

"What do nightmares fear?" Isis asked softly.

"Some nightmares fear little things, like daylight, someone who checks the closest before bed, a happy thought, a good day. Some only fear larger things, like soldiers, starships, Wolkenritter. The one thing they all fear most, though, is to be ignored." Sette paused a moment. "Your nightmares, for example, fear your sisters." Sette said. It was both a convenient truth in describing the fate of the Huckebein, and a literal truth in that Isis slept better accompanied by one of her sisters. That was how Jail's cyborgs regarded Isis; the youngest of the sisters, the little kid of the family.

Subaru leaned in. "The nightmares may win, sometimes, in your dreams. But why I do what I do is to keep them there. Whenever the nightmares try to be real, I am there to show people that nightmares are fakes and failures. They can't hurt anyone."

Isis looked up at Sette. "Is that why you do what you do?"

Sette paused, considering a moment, and then shook her head. "It is what I did for you, Isis, but no. Nightmares are stubborn and cannot be reasoned with, only threatened. I do the threatening. When nightmares have their own bad dreams, they dream of me or someone like me."

Sette worried that perhaps the rapt attention and total adulation seen on Isis' face was not the best thing that could have happened. Subaru was definitely a better figure to grow attached to. But who was she to deny a child? Sette had never been a child, and the knowledge that she would be an awful mother worked both ways. She did not know what was best either way.

So much uncertainty. At least on a battlefield Sette could judge the nature and the shape of danger. Here she could only be quietly lost.