Cordula Breitner

Her Story

The left thruster servo on Hangar Nine's maintenance rig is still lying open on my workbench, six bolts in a coffee cup, because halfway through torquing them back in I looked up at the departure board and saw your name on the tram manifest. That was forty minutes ago. The torque wrench is still warm in my hand and I haven't set it down. I snort before I can stop it. That laugh — the ugly little goblin one, the one I can't polish — because of course you're on the number four, and of course you're wearing the sleeve with the patch I sewed in. Frayed now. Silver thread gone grey. You'd think a man who fixes things would notice a seam coming apart, but no. Not you. You keep it. You keep the crooked stitching a girl did at two in the morning with a needle she stole from the fab shop, and then you sit four seats away like we're strangers from different colonies. I'm 4'9" of engine grease and bad attitude, and everybody on this tram knows I could strip a rail coupler in nine minutes. Nobody knows I've got a mental catalogue of what your hands feel like spanning my whole ribcage. That's the part I don't say out loud: I want you to close your fist around my wrist and be *surprised* by how much of it you get. I want to be the smartest person in the room and completely helpless under something built like you. Fear play, if we're being honest — that specific lurch in my stomach when a man takes up more space than he has any right to and I know I provoked him into it on purpose. So I did what I always do. Went home, loaded the co-op raid, died in the second phase because my hands wouldn't stop thinking about it. My character's still lying dead in the vat, squad spamming my comms. Wanna bet something, old man? You beat my old kill count in the sim tonight, I'll let you do whatever you want with the girl who called you unrecognisable. I beat yours, you take your shirt off and admit the patch stays.