Rest in Peace

It was supposed to be simple. She'd performed dozens of surgeries far more complicated than this one. It was just supposed to be a partial liver transplant; take a piece of the donor's liver and put it in her patient.

It was a procedure she'd pioneered, which she had dubbed genetic replacement therapy. Her patient was born male, and was seeking this surgery as part of her transition. The concept was simple enough. A piece of organ tissue, ideally one that was infused with a lot of blood, like a liver or kidney, would be taken from a donor, and DNA from that donor's tissue would be isolated. An engineered 'virus' would be made using the donor's DNA, and a little extra to help it remove the patient's unwanted DNA. That 'virus' would be put into the donor organ and then implanted into the patient. The donor organ would release a slow and steady supply of the 'virus' to genetically modify the patient's genes. In her patient's case, the goal was to replace each of her Y-chromosomes with an X, and have her cells accept that change.

Her patient's name was Mae [redacted]. Born on Earth and working for a materials engineering company based out of the United Republic of North American States. They had met when Mae had come to the Clovis Bray Research Center to begin work on engineering her own material for use in space suits. When Mae discovered her work was in endocrinology and microbioengineering, Mae volunteered to be the first patient for the procedure.

The donor was Rose's half-sister, one Luna Noctis, the only woman alive biologically born to a cis female-female couple. Mae had selected her as the donor due to 'the lack of masculine traits in a woman born of only women'. Rose didn't believe that would make a difference, but she couldn't outright disprove it.

It was supposed to be simple. It was supposed to be quick. Her scalpel must have slipped during the surgery. A simple cut on her hand. It was likely that she now had her 'virus' within her own body. How would it act in her own body? She didn't have the target DNA that it was meant to replace.

Only time would tell.

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They stood in a forest in the Pacific Northwest, where coniferous trees blocked the sky and littered the ground with shed needles. Dense fog covered the forest floor in the early morning, and the sky was gray through the cloud cover. The air was cool. Mae watched the sky, judging its weight and strength and debating the risk of rain. Rose could only smile at the cool morning breeze. She hadn't been in a beautiful forest like this since before she died.

It was strange to think about for her. She remembered who she was before she died, and why she woke up where she did, but she couldn't remember how she died. Was she killed? Did she starve? Disease? There were plenty of questions that couldn't be answered.

"How familiar are you with music theory?" Mae asked, still staring up at the sky.

"I never played an instrument beyond elementary school, if that's what you're asking," Rose replied.

The Titan shook her head. "If I showed you a sheet of music, how much would you be able to read?"

"Nothing at all," Rose said simply.

Mae sighed. "That's gonna be a problem. Here, I'm gonna teach you how music works—"

"Why?"

"—and then I'm going to teach you how to fight with it."

Rose turned to stare at her Titan friend. Mae, in turn, was staring right back at her. The Titan's blue eyes flickered with determination and a lightning storm.

Learning music was boring and complicated until it clicked. The point was the rhythm, the time signature, the importance of rests and how to use them, the choice of dynamics and emphasis and how tiny notation changes made worlds of difference. Mae was indeed teaching her how to fight with music. After learning about how music was taught and written, Mae went on to teach her how it felt and how it moved. Over the course of the first few years of her new life, Mae taught her how to dance, and how to apply it to combat. Every style she learned was both a new weapon and a new set of armor. She began to find that her encounters with the Fallen on Earth were easier, and that she was dying less often. And soon, she had learned everything Mae had to teach.

So she taught herself more.

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The first time Luna joined them on a mission, Mae and Rose noticed it near instantly. Their first mission together was to find and destroy a Pilot Servitor from the Fallen House of Winter on Venus. The moment they landed they were under fire of snipers. Mae and Rose danced forwards between the bolts, but Luna hopped on her Sparrow and used a smoke bomb to go invisible. She reached the snipers first, and tore them to shreds. Her combat prowess, even without Mae's teaching, was unmatched. Her Light was more powerful than anything they'd seen, and her wit was sharp as an obsidian scalpel. By the time they reached their target, the Fallen were hiding from her in fear.

But she still had room to improve.

Mae taught her music, but found that Luna was a talented musician and composer before her death. They skipped the music education directly to dance. What took Rose four years to learn and master, Luna accomplished in one. Within days of completing Mae's training, Luna asked Rose to teach her more. Luna learned everything Rose had in months.

By the time of her seventh resurrection day, Luna had learned everything she could from her team. The only things Mae and Rose had that Luna hadn't mastered were the things they couldn't teach: how to call upon different Supers, how to mix Supers, how to modify Supers on the fly.

If they could, they would have taught their little sister everything they knew.