Day 1, Tears. Liana is not a Cross, but once she stopped crying, she fought alongside them.
All the good things belong to MonolithSoft.
It took a long time before Liana stopped crying. Every morning, waking up without Angelo in her arms, she ignored the tears as she made her way through her daily morning routine. Breakfast, professional attire, emails, preparing for the grind of human resources, all accompanied by a soft sob and blurred vision. Before her first face-to-face meeting she would scrub her cheeks dry. They stayed that way until she sank into her pillow at night. Then she would cry herself to sleep.
That was Liana after the ship had crashed onto Mira: a curvy woman with hair tugged back carelessly, grey along the edges, dark brown skin without makeup, although her eyes were rimmed with blue. Mimeosome circulatory fluid was the color of a summer morning, pale and gentle, and crying had tinged her eyes sapphire.
She assigned tasks, noted losses for compensation purposes, approved payments for new weapon tests. Elsewhere soldiers tracked into the unknown, hunting for the repository of their shipmates. She tried not to think how far away her husband might be. She read the provisional plans Sakuraba developed for who would be revived first. She knew Angelo wouldn't be in the first wave, or the second. She gave up predicting how long it would be when she realized the answer might be: never.
The morning when the tower countdown slipped out of green and flashed amber, Liana made a decision. They weren't going to research their way into survival. She turned in her resignation to Sakuraba Industries that afternoon, but first she went shopping. Using her 10% employee discount, she bought the best Sakurba offered in melee and ranged weapons, as well as a full set of their heaviest armor. It took all her savings, hers and Angelo's. She drained their joint account, but what was the point of saving for the future if they didn't make it to the next month?
BLADE wanted her to join the Mediators or maybe Outfitters, building off of her experience with Sakuraba, but Liana was insistent. She wanted something out in the field, something that would help her find Angelo with her own hands. She bounced around divisions, sometimes hauling home junk with the Reclaimers or tracking clues with the Pathfinders. She never turned up her nose at clearing a road with the Interceptors, a grind but necessary.
Then she lucked into a Harrier mission. It was terrifying, fighting a mechanical monster as tall as BLADE Tower, and brutal. At the end of the battle, she realized she'd cracked a molar from clenching her jaw, but they had been victorious. An entire sector of Sylvalum was open for exploration, a sector that might just hold the key to finding the Lifehold, with Angelo inside it.
She cried the entire way home, not from pain, but from an exhaustion of her soul. She had found her division, and she would pour her skills into this job, even if it destroyed her from the inside, until she got what she wanted.
a/n: I'm bouncing between prompts, either Writer's Write or Angstober. If you have a suggestion/dare, drop me a note.
Next up: Rabbit?