the real pard was the wife we found along the way

Made for each other. Ha. If you had told a Mirabilis just landed and freshly shorn of her natural-born ears that there was anybody she'd been made for, her absolute last choice would have been Yelv.

Crass, is the word. Coarse like sand, and she certainly starts off her Miran journey with an outfit liable to attract and contract some, in all its much-too-sexy cracks and crevices. She Mimi doesn't mind this specifically, for the sake of it, except that, well, if her memories have all fallen out of her head, somehow, why should she be especially happy to be equally naked, physically?

Well. Anyway. Yelv.

Yelv is a man without reason, too tetchy for a Thornbox and with about as much true bravado as a Myuena Cactus - ready to wilt, to melt, to slip all to slimy resin.

No matter the hopeful, pleasant timbre of Eleonora's coy southern-sly questions, he's rude and inconsiderate. He snaps at her every chance he gets, even over minor details that any polite person would just do their best to brush off! Mirabilis may be stubborn and sassy, but one thing she's not is rude.

Yelv doesn't snap at Mimi, though. No, she snaps at him.

First, it's when he calls her pard - she's nobody's pard, thank you very much! And if she's going to be one, it's not going to be his. Obviously.

(Do you begin to see the pattern?)

Then, it's when he throws a Soul Voice that directs her to use the weapon she's already freaking holding - do you trust me to fight alongside you, or don't you?

(Maybe she doesn't trust him. Sigh.)

But the insult of all insults is when he throws the Soul Voice, calling for melee attacks, and then takes it himself - which, yeah, that makes sense, she'd probably be madder if it were the other way and he told her what to do without following the prescription himself, but does he have to Starfall Rondo her Starfall Rondo?

Mimi has no choice, it appears. Yelv has determined to stick on her like glue, and even when he seems put off and keeps to himself for a few days, it's Eleonora, their favorite ("favorite") secretary, that pins them neatly back together again like bugs on a board.

Extra entries in her journal make academic treatments of Yelv's various bad habits, like the tendency of a Doragaroo to leap toward the Drowning Ring and, well...

He bites his nails, until she gets after him to paint them. Why mimeosomes were programmed with chewable keratin, she doesn't know. He doesn't take care of his hair, until she offhandedly mentions that it might even look heroic, blowing in the wind...if it weren't so ratty and matted. He sometimes seemed to have no grasp whatsoever of normal human boundaries, physically or mentally.

Now, one thing's for sure: Yelv doesn't let people walk all over him. He accomplishes this feat of upright character, of course, by avoiding them wholesale. So, he's either way too confident that he'll be the one who gets the best of his precious "Mi" (eyeroll, eyeroll, eyeroll), or instead actually wanting her to get the best of him, to tell him what to do, to hit him over the head when he does something stupid, which is all the time, all the time, all the time.

Mimi won't be pushed around either, so she doesn't like playing along. Every "Eh, eh?", every shoulder bump, every cross of arms to make them a united front against the mission console, every time he turns around and acts like he has the right to keep her itinerary for her, or for the both of them, instead of the other way around...they all get her nerve up, and fast. Most days end with her screaming into a pillow and hoping that Lin won't hear (Tatsu soon learns to mind his own business).

But eventually, she does discover that it's...fun, pushing Yelv's buttons and watching his eyes bug out in bewilderment at how she drew a circle around him so goddamn easily. It's definitely fun proving to him, without a word (about what's she's proving, specifically, anyway), that her supposed "bossiness" born of being a smartass "know-it-all" is deserved, actually. Distinguished uniform, a-check. At the same time, if you wanna get messy, yeah, Mimi'll get messy - for the right reasons.

It's temporary, right? Soon enough Elma will have more important things for them all to do, and Yelv's optional ass will fade into the haze of training assignments and low-level grunts.

For one thing, her status as a J-Body has her wondering what predestined processes she's going to be used for. It would make sense that she'd be instrumented into the elite team tasked with defending NLA from the most key of all the Ganglion, going for the Lifehold hands-on, and overall doing things that no "ordinary" human could be trusted with, especially not if they had regular recollection tying them down. In other words, she's got to be at least as special as her sisters she travels with, right?

Yelv doesn't fade, though. He's actually shockingly patient - and all of Mimi's most meticulous notes about how he does all the things he does don't actually shed a lick of light onto why he does those things. Onto why he's...special, too.

Maybe he needs backup. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he needs a watchful eye. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe he needs to take a level in social skills.

Maybe he's already got Mimi for life, so he actually kinda just...doesn't.

But she needs to figure this out before they find the Lifehold - that's when it'll become obvious what she is, and how she got here. There's no way anyone besides Elma could be okay with that, once they know.

Mimi tries to get stern with herself, though: "It's all going to come out eventually. You have to stop trying to be so in control of things. You have to just let yourself see what comes."

Her ears went bye-bye. She rolled with it. Her own social skills and cultural knowledge lacked. She got up on it. She can be a little bit too pushy, at times. She's working on it.

Even if Yelv can't know, with enough time, he seems to suss it out, far more gently than Mi ever would've expected. It's something like a soft spot, and then again something more than that. It's something like patience, from a man who's never known an ounce of it in all his...natural-born? life, but then again...

And once she lets that "What the hell are you doing? You could have gotten us killed, dumbass!" morph into "What are you doing?! You could have gotten yourself killed, dummy!" there is no, no, no going back.

Just like there's no going back to Earth, and no going back into the black void of whatever their memories once were, looking for people that were never even there, lost in the fog.

Mirabilis starts to feel like maybe she understands Yelv in a way that transcends her scribbled notes and private judgements. Maybe it really was meant to be. Maybe it couldn't have ever been any other way.

No memories? No problem. Mira may be populated with more old, woven-together soldiers than young, bright-eyed amnesiacs, but there's at least one here who'll understand her.

Now, if only she could start to understand him.