Chapter Text
Elster winces once again at the sharp pneumatic hiss as the cryogenics bay door shoots open.
Warm but dim light fills the room, spilling from a harsh fluorescent lamp in the ceiling attenuated by a dozen diffuser panels she'd scrounged up from other lights around the ship a lifetime ago, when Ariane sullenly mumbled that it was too bright to sleep following her interment in the cryopod.
Said pod stands open, revealing its resting occupant sitting barely upright in the reddened cryogenic buffer. The fluid had been clear, once, back when it was still used as intended. When the aches and sores of Ariane's radiation sickness became too intense for her to sleep in her own bed, Elster had near-manically searched for another arrangement and come to the conclusion that the only option was to set her wife in the closest thing the Penrose had to a bathtub. In time, Ariane's weeping, peeling wounds had tinted the thankfully-antiseptic solution a thin crimson.
She takes a trepidant step into the room, her hoof clicking faintly on the metal floor panels. When Ariane fails to stir she continues on her path, silently lowering herself to her knees in the corner between the cryopod and its control terminal.
Elster pauses for a moment, taking in her lover's dying face. Ariane's skin, once so corpse-pale she resembled a wraith in the Penrose's artificial night, is now dyed a sickly orange from a mix of organ failure-induced jaundice and the pink flush of fresh radiation burns.
Even like this, she's beautiful.
With a kiss pressed just faintly to her forehead, the dreamer blinks sleep from her eyes and shifts in her watery casket.
"Elster," she rasps.
The resolve rigorously mustered by the Replika since her re-awakening in the red desert crumbles in an instant. Tears gather in her remaining eye.
"...I can't do it."
"You have to do it." Ariane's voice, shuddering and wispy as it is, is firm. The look in her eyes, uncompromising. "It's time for this to end. Please."
She raises one hand from where it rests below the surface, bandaged and necrotic, and meets Elster's own with a reassuring squeeze. Her carmine eyeliner, still near-perfect after all these cycles, highlights the wrinkles her pleading expression forms in the corners of her eyes.
Elster seems to draw in on herself, somehow looking almost small beneath her armor, then releases a shallow sigh.
She could never bring herself to fulfill the promise upon an Ariane who couldn't remember it. If she didn't do it now, she might not have another chance.
Oxidant drips and mingles with blood as she rises to her hooves, bracing her knees against the pod's cold metal side, and leans over it as though to embrace her love.
Plasticized metal hands meet bare throat. Her partner's pulse is so faint, it barely registers on her tactile sensors. She presses firmly, a thumb over each carotid artery, exactly as Ariane directed her to before the start of this nightmare.
"Asphyxiation is painful," she'd concluded, following a stint digging through the ship's medical archives. "Cerebral hypoxia is not. Apparently something to do with lungs being sensitive to CO2. If you press in the right spots, block the blood flow instead of my breathing, it'll be just like falling asleep."
True to her word, Ariane shows no sign of pain as she lovingly meets her magpie's gaze. A minute passes, then two, as her blood-red eyes defocus and glaze over. On the way to the third, they drift closed for the final time.
Hot streaks trace down Elster's face, mirroring but not matching the crimson flow of oxidant streaming from behind her shattered ocular unit as she dutifully takes the life of the most important person in her own.
In time Ariane's breathing slows, then stops. Her pulse, battling to push past Elster's fingers, fades. She maintains pressure for some time longer, counting down until she's sure her promise cannot be undone.
When the time comes, Elster kneels once again, planting another kiss on her lover's head.
As she stands to leave, her own body - the components that have borne her through the nightmare once again - finally gives out. Locomotion systems cut off, dropping her to the floor with a cacophonous bang and leaving her stranded on the floor of the cryogenics bay.
Despite that, her artificial heart soars.
It's finally over.