Okay, sure, once she’d designed the aircraft, someone else had put the guns in, but it didn’t change that it was her ship, her design, her engineering.

If she was one to swear, she’d swear up a storm of disbelief at her own ignorance.

So death has been a big part of her life, from her childhood, to her teens, to her adulthood, where her mortality stares her in the face, and one morning she wakes up acutely aware that she’s now older than her sister.

Reine asks her if she’s okay when she goes down to breakfast in the morning.

‘Yeah,’ Shera sighs, sitting at the table as Reine potters about with the kettle and a bag of oats, ‘yeah, I think so. I didn’t sleep too well.’

Reine rests a hand on the girl’s head for a moment, and then chucks her chin and goes to make her a cup of tea. Shera stays sat at the table, fiddling with her fingers and staring at the wall, and flinches when Reine places the mug down in front of her.

She’s still all out of sorts when the Captain comes banging in, door swinging on its hinges and his presence too loud in the still quietness of her contemplation. Reine manages to catch him before his baritone breaks the last vestiges of her composure, and drags him aside. Shera cannot hear what they say, but their whispers are harried, confused, concerned.

‘The fuck does that mean?’ the Captain bursts out, and she can imagine him shaking his head.

His boots thud, thud, thud on the floorboards, and the chair creaks when he throws himself into it.

‘Here, four-eyes,’ he says, and shoves a blueprint at her. ‘Take a look at this, I made some improvements.’

She looks at it, and frowns over the calculations, pulling a pen from her ponytail, where pens just seem to migrate, and picks apart his sums. Reine sets a bowl of oats down in front of them both, and Shera half-heartedly spoons it into her mouth as she scribbles with the other hand.

‘I didn’t think they were that off,’ the Captain says, and Shera shrugs one shoulder.

‘Just checking,’ she replies, and when she’s done, she shoves them back across the table.

One side of the blueprint has shifted little more than a millimetre. It will make all the difference. The Captain examines her version of the sums as he eats his bowl of oats, and hums around a mouthful.

‘Thanks,’ he says, ‘didn’t carry the one.’

She offers him a smile, bleak and without humour, and he frowns at her.

‘What’s eating you?’ he asks, ‘pretty sure you’re meant to eat your breakfast, not the other way around.’

It doesn’t get the reaction he was obviously hoping for. She shrugs. He frowns some more, looks back at his bowl.

‘Listen,’ he says, ‘if you want to go home.’

‘No,’ she interrupts. ‘No, it’s fine. I don’t need to go home. I just. I slept badly.’

He studies her face, and she’d blush, on any other day. He never really looks at her, and on any other day, she’d be fighting the urge to fuss with her hair, her glasses, try to make herself pretty under his scrutiny, to pass some kind of test she can’t identify. She wants to be pretty for him, to get his attention, to be viable. But today is not that day, and she doesn’t care. She’s older than her sister, and no matter what, said sister will never be able to meet any partner she has, anyone she might bring home, or to her house, or whatever. She’ll never be able to get her sister’s opinion. So it doesn’t matter.

The Captain leaves her to it after he’s finished his breakfast, unable to work out what it is that’s wrong, and thereby, how to ignore it until it goes away. Shera herself cannot really tell him what’s wrong, because how do you put the nihilistic realisation that you don’t care for your own mortality into words he’d understand?

Reine tiptoes around her for the rest of the morning, so Shera abandons her tea – which will only cause more concern – and goes to get herself ready for the day.

In a few days, the awareness of her mortality will pass, at least the sharpness of it will dull, and she’ll be herself again. But for now, she wallows in it, she revels in the emptiness it leaves her with, and that is too positive a spin, but she’s trying her hardest. She knows she’s wallowing, but she finds it hard to care, and harder still to change the pattern. The Captain, to his credit, does not pussyfoot about; he’s as loud and as brash as ever, insulting her work and calling her names, and she appreciates that he doesn’t know how to change to make her better, so he just sticks with what he knows and hopes it’s enough.

She’ll die for him, this she knows in that moment, as he looks at her over dinner and judges a poorly timed joke before making it anyway. She’ll die for him, because he has a dream, he has something that he’s found to make him feel alive, and he’s holding on with both hands, and he’s not going to let go of that, and Shera envies it. She envies it, and she knows that he’ll probably die in pursuit of it. If he doesn’t, she will. She’s fine with that. It’s just the way these things are, and she’s okay with it.  

So you have John and Reine Wright, who are like, de facto parents of the whole town, because someone has to be, and they’re old enough to be Cid’s parents. Reine is Winona Ryder in my head, and John is a like, not scowly Kratos lol. They’re childhood sweethearts from Kalm, and before John was drafted for the war, he worked in the mythril mines to try and earn enough to marry Reine properly. They ended up eloping, because of course they did. Reine had a really difficult birth that made it really clear that their own babies were not on the cards, so they adopted Cid on sight.

Livas is Cid’s second-in-command, even though there isn’t really a structure to Rocket Town. He’s the closest in skills as a pilot to the golden boy, but he’s still miles off. He’s also a bigger jackass, and is here for a good time not a long time. If there’s mischief, he’ll be involved or instigating it. He’s married to Ana, who has a dog that is the town’s dog really, but it also eats your socks if you leave them on the line because it’s a monster. They don’t tend to argue, but when they do, the entire town knows about it. About the only time they really argue is after the launch, because Shera goes to Ana for help with her shoulder, and Ana keeps it from everyone else, because like, it’s not their business.

Isak is Shera’s secondary love interest. He’s absolutely besotted with Shera, and considering he’s about their age, he’s totally eligible. Because Shera is young, dumb and in denial, she figures that if Cid isn’t going to ask her on a date, she might as well take someone else up on the offer. The argument it causes between her and Cid when he finally manages to actually talk to her instead of ignoring her like a petulant baby child is so bad that she leaves for 10 days and everyone is convinced she’s not coming back. Especially Cid, who shows his ass from the moment she leaves and is so intolerable it’s a wonder Livas doesn’t lock them in a cupboard the moment she’s back on site.

There’s a few other characters like Hawke and Grier, but they’re mostly one-note background characters to fill a role in a story.

Uh, space kids, okay. Headcanons.

Cid used to be a pretty heavy drinker when he actually drank, but he tried to avoid it as much as he could, because he’s a jackass sober. The last time he got drunk was at a party where someone tried to look up Shera’s skirt and he ended up getting glassed, and that is 100% a story i will write, because the idea someone managed to smash a pint glass over his head and live is a story that needs to be told. He gave up drinking there and there and hasn’t touched it since. Smoking is his next goal, but it’s too heavy a crutch at the moment. Compartmentalisation is a bigger problem tbf, so he needs to sort that out. But that means actually dealing with his emotions and his backlog of repressed feelings, so he might as well suffer. 

Shera is very clumsy, and how she’s not broken a bone is anyone’s guess. She got burnt during the rocket launch, and she let Reine take care of the burn on her palm, but she hid the burn on her shoulder from her, which led to her going to Ana, who dealt with it, and boy howdy wasn’t that a stink!!! Reine and Cid went postal after they found out, and honestly how the town’s still standing is a miracle.

Cid's FC is Charlie Hunnam. Shera is Emmy Rossum and she rocks shorts and oversized t-shirts. I can’t pinpoint an accent for her, but Cid is 100% a Yorkshireman. Pretty much everyone is also bilingual, becuase there’s no way the planet is just one language. Cid’s dad tried to raise him to be all eloquent and well-spoken, but the moment he died, his mother got in there with the native tongue and for all Cid yells fuck, occasionally a native swear will work its way through, and the idea that it’s Finnish appeals to me just because ‘perkele’ is such a raw emotion i cannot even begin.

Whenever Cid goes anywhere, even before-game, he buys Shera some silly little trinket. He’s not quite a fridge magnet kind of guy, but he comes home with tea towels and scarves and thick socks and random shit that he doesn’t even remember buying. Who buys their not girlfriend a ring that looks like a cluster of stars? Who does that wild thing? And who hides said ring in their sock drawer until he’s terrified the worlds about to end and then spends three whole ass hours sat there staring at it trying to pluck up the courage to ask her to marry him because if the world’s gonna end might as well go out swinging?