Memorabilia

[secretsnavi]

Pallette dropped her bag on the bed. A few days later and several trips into town and she still had itchy fingers. Her hooded jacket followed and she half-heartedly pulled a video disc out of the shopping bag. Light but she was bored. She wanted to work, but the unit was still being stubborn. They were glad she was getting out, they were happy

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[evolved_trigger]

Axl stopped in the hall outside Pallette's door. He'd meant to see how she was doing earlier, but that had been before he'd been put on extra duty shifts to deal with the rookies, and he really hadn't had the time to stop by.

Well, better late than never. He knocked on the door and waited for an answer.

[secretsnavi]

Pallette was reaching for the old quilt on top when she heard someone knocking.

She turned her head towards the door. "It's open," she called.

[evolved_trigger]

Axl opened the door and took a couple steps into Pallette's room. "Hey, am I interrupting or anything?"

The fact that the door was open probably meant that he wasn't, but Axl was quite capable of being polite - only when he felt like it, and usually only to people he actually liked, of course.

[secretsnavi]

Pallette grinned at him, turned back to the chest. "No, I'm just being idle, like I have for the past few days." She smirked to let Axl know that while she might have been serious, she wasn't angry about it.

"I decided to look at my... old..." she trailed off as her hand found a slim disc case, and pulled it out, staring at the official seals. This was the disc she'd been given during the funeral- the robotics seal gleamed at her from the cover.

[secretsnavi]

The screen went black once again. Pallette had one hand at her mouth. It shook slightly as she reached forward and ejected the disc. She toyed with it, splaying small fingers over the disc, her hand span not wide enough to hold it around the edge.

"...They told me that they wanted nothing more to do with me," she murmured, "now... more than thirty years later-" Pallette flinched and looked down as the disc snapped in her clutching hand, a line of coolant slid over her synthflesh. One jagged edge of the disc had torn a gash in her skin.

[evolved_trigger]

To hell with them, Axl thought, his thoughts going back to his own "family." In her place, he would've told them to fuck off and stop trying to rebuild bridges they'd burned ages ago.

But Axl wasn't Pallette, and Axl was well aware of how good he was at holding grudges. Pallette, on the other hand...

He looked at her again, his gaze dropping to the pieces of the disc in her hand, and reached over to take them from her.

[secretsnavi]

She didn't really notice. Shock cushioned Pallette as Axl cleared the disc fragments from her hand and auto repair sealed the wound. It was going to hurt, she realized, when she started to feel something about this situation.

Pallette held her hand curled loosely in the air, watching as the skin sealed. "They're doing it again..." she whispered. The small navigator shuffled backward and sat when she hit the bed. "Remember what I was like when you first joined the Hunters, Axl?" she muttered. She laughed, sharply bitter.

"I didn't want to be around anyone because it hurt too much... after they... but Gen wouldn't stop coming to talk to me, and Basil, and you.... I forgot about them to make it stop hurting.

"Now Dr. Arroway, and that," she waved her now uninjured hand at the bits of disc he was holding, "that, thing."

[evolved_trigger]

Axl carefully set the fragments of the disc on her desk. "Yeah, I remember...but that was then. This is now."

It was something of a misconception about Axl that he was completely lacking in maturity - in reality, it wasn't so much that he was incapable of mature behavior, but rather that he rarely saw the need to bother. Right now, however, he could tell that he was going to have to be careful about handling the situation. The last thing he wanted was to make Pallette feel worse.

He sat beside her on the bed and gave her a serious look. "So you forgot about them. But they're not going to let you forget. How do you feel about them now?"