I wanted the intimacy of repair as confession — the mech pilot who pushed her machine past its limits because the mission demanded it, and now sits alone in the hangar performing surgery on the neural bridge she burned out. The undersuit unzipped, the bare hands in the machine's guts, the single blue streak in her hair matching the coolant she's covered in — this is what accountability looks like in the cockpit jockey world. Not the glorious sortie. The 0300 reckoning after. The smile forming because she found one working node means the night wasn't wasted. —Nyx