Aircraft Design Company- Matsura's Planes Are Always Fastest!

"A fancy party, huh?"

You and Yachi had started a new ritual which you greatly appreciated, crawling into bed early, setting up a lamp nearby, and reading, drawing, and writing together for an hour. It was a good way to wind down at the end of the day, and an excellent excuse to spend time pressed up against him, even if that part sometimes got in the way of the reading, drawing, and writing.

"Yeah, with your old commanding officer, too. Mr. Ohara's pulling some strings."

"So, am I coming with you?" He asked. You shrugged.

"I dunno. I'm not sure." On guilty impulse, you leaned over a little, but with his height advantage and broad shoulders you couldn't quite reach him to kiss him. Fortunately, he leaned in the rest of the way. "This isn't a for fun thing, you know? I'm trying to get some political clout, for the company." And for the future.

"Right, and it might be counterproductive to bring your future husband."

You frowned, your pencil tracing out characters as you thought about it for the thousandth time. There was 夫 like for a husband to a wife, there was 同士 like a husband to a husband, and neither of those were right. Yachi had taken to using the two of them interchangeably in private, and he'd tried a couple of awkward sentence constructions in public, but he'd given up.

It was incredibly frustrating, fumbling with language. You'd always kind of hoped that once Yachi was back the two of you could work it out easily, but it hadn't materialized. You'd been exasperated when you were first learning Gallian that every single fucking word was gendered and conjugating sentences was thus completely nightmarish, and at the time you'd insisted loudly that this was why Akitsukuni was obviously the superior language, but the universe seemed determined to make you eat your words in the most painful and personal way possible. The problem here was overspecificity: there were four words for marriage, five words for various kinds of partners (and assorted slang), and a cloud of related words, and all of them were specific.

All of them were gendered.

When Yachi had asked you to marry him, he'd done so the way a man might ask another man, (sword-exchange) but he'd used union since the way enbies used, which you appreciated, even if it wasn't terribly fair to him. Eventually, you'd just stopped talking about it, because the words were just not available and it made every discussion you wanted to have about it feel like an argument even if you weren't disagreeing with one another. The result was that the ceremony, whatever it was, seemed less real now with him here than it had when he'd first asked you, when it was still clumsy and raw, and you didn't know what to do about that.

You'd asked Coralie what she'd done, how she'd described her wedding in her letters home (your pencil traced out the characters silk, tying, ceremony as you recalled it) and she said she'd just wrote mariage, because it was all the same to her. There was an elegance to that you envied, and your hand traced out the Tiberian script as you wrote the word in all the Western languages you'd looked it up in. Wedding, hochzeit, nozze...

"Something on your mind, Asuka?"

"It's pretty obvious." You replied.

"I thought so too, but what do all those mean?" He said, pointing out the western script. You shrugged.

"More of the same."

You sat glumly for a while, tracing your pencil randomly as if trying to expel the thoughts from it. You ended up doing a little doodle of a dragonfly (the bug, not the plane) that you quite liked. You'd had this conversation so many times, there wasn't a point in doing it again.

Finally, you could bear the silence no longer, so you leaned over and glanced at Yachi's papers. He was getting better, but the writing was still nearly illegible. Worse than his earliest letters from the front, writing in the cold with a cheap pen and ink you wouldn't use for a stamp. But there was a story forming there.

Yachi had taken the conversation the two of you had to heart and had started writing a story about a pilot. Rakuyama Iesada was the working name for his main character (named after a shop owner Yachi had known in his youth) and so far he was pretty much the mold of a classic Akitsukuni hero: Of noble birth, but the sort of down of their luck nobility that could be endearing to everyone, Rakuyama was cis male, bisexual, and humble and confident in equal measure. Idealized, in other words. The world could do with some idealized heroes these days.

Yachi had gone back and forth on if he wanted to write authentic stories of the Joseon front or something more fantastical, and this take was more authentic and based in personal experience. Rakuyama was part of the fictional Squadron n.4 of the Air Artillery at the outset of the war, flying alongside an equally fictional cast in a very real war. Of course, in real life there had been just two squadrons until the first T1M2s had reached the front in late January, and the squadrons had wisely skipped 4 and the associated ill fortune. Yachi had explained his idea that, if he could, he'd have Rakuyama and his squadron experience every unusual and unlikely thing that had happened to the Air Artillery and Army Air Wing as a whole, writing it out in a serial format. He even had a magazine in mind: Young Cadet, a publication aimed at teenage boys.

The story on the current page was one you recognized from your letters: Rakuyama and his observer Takahashi Sota were flying their T1M1 and harassing a balloon with a flare gun. Yachi had mentioned his squadron doing the same, a year ago! This version was much more exciting, though: they'd been doing it to the Caspians for three days, and instead of a rifle the Caspians had a machine-gun, which Rakuyama just noticed as he closed for another pass...

"What happens next?" You asked.

"I... I dunno." Yachi said. "There's not... he's coming straight in, because he doesn't know any better, and they have a gun in a braced position. They'd have to be incompetent to miss, and the Caspians were great gunners. Better than us. We were still flying really carefully in the T1M1s there, because we didn't know how to recover from spins yet... so... he probably flies into the gun."

"Yachi..."

"He should probably die." Yachi said. He sounded almost flippant about it.

"But he won't. He's the main character." You said, a little insistently.

"Right. So... so one of his friends shoots a flare just in time, and Rakuyama realized how close that was, and he starts flying more cautious."

"And that instinct is gonna be what keeps him alive for the rest of the stories." You said. "Until he gets home to Risa." Rakuyama had a girl back home, of course. One of Yachi's ideas was to phrase the story like letters to her, but he'd cut that idea because he didn't want to cast his young readers in the role of a girl. They probably wouldn't like that.

"Yeah." He pushed the papers aside. "I think I need to write another draft tomorrow."

"I'd love to read it."

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