A tool, and Aerial a scalpel.
A blade and its handle, to be used, and discarded after its usefulness.
These are things that Suletta Mercury isn't familiar with.
The nature of her own existence.
How is she to know? To know that care hovers just above her, beyond her reach, waiting to be reached out and grabbed, if only she could bridge that space and take a hold of those things.
There are machinations that she doesn't see, machinery that moves at the behest of someone else's whims. Controls that she will never have the ability to hold. Parts that move in their own ways, separate from their master. And Suletta is just a tool to be held by this machine.
A man screams a song from her notebook. She isn't listening, but still hears his words - singing about something that she doesn't quite understand, but the words resonate in their own way. To understand this betrayal is to understand the nature of her own existence, to understand the ways that she's been used – not loved in the ways that she's always thought of it.
Even to know that the machine that holds her, involves shattering what worldview she has. To understand all the different pieces in a way that only an outside observer could. To understand that the hope in her chest wasn't misplaced, only misunderstood. That the chaos around her remains even as her heart feels left in shambles, the pieces left behind in the dark cockpit of her sister.
She doesn't have a say in the matter. She never did.
A tool doesn't decide what it does, or how it's used. Only a fine blade does.
A misused blade will dull, crack or shatter.
Suletta Mercury doesn't have the privilege of being anything more than what someone holds in order to drive the blade that is Aerial. That she isn't anything more than the staff of a pike, or the hilt of a sword. Something to be held by a machine as it plunges the sharp edges of Aerial into whatever problem the unseen machinations need solving.
She doesn't know how these pieces come together, how her own existence is something that she has no control over anymore. And maybe never did at all. That the masks she was convinced were working, maybe never were.
But what use does a tool have for things such as friendship, or love?