Mirabelle was laying on her cot in her quarters, waiting for sleep to come. Tomorrow they would arrive in orbit outside of Baldwin's Fall, and they would have their fun.

They had both agreed that if he surrendered they would take him alive. Buster's estranged father was a high up in a mercenary org and had pumped a considerable amount of bonus money into the live bounty. It would be best for the traitor and terrorist to be taken in, to be put on trial and made an example of; the pseudonet was buzzing with more and more anger that this mass murderer hadn't been brought to justice and could still be alive plotting his next attack. There was a lot of anger about how Nakuna was handling the galaxy these days, and they needed a win to relieve some of that pressure.

But she hoped he refused. She had felt humiliated and ashamed when he refused to let her burn him. It was all she had ever wanted, and she had been so sure that if he didn't agree then she could change him. Convince him to love fire as much as she did. Instead he got mad at her for not bringing it up before they got married, and then every time she had a bad day and wound up burning something he gave her this look of disappointment. A look of judgment that made her want to claw his eyes out just so he could never make it again.

So much of the despair of leaving Buster had been the feeling that she had wasted her 20s. That instead of going out and seeing the world and building a life for herself, she had been spending her best days in someone else's apartment. That since he worked and she didn't, he expected her to do the chores instead of splitting the house work equally. No wonder she never got any art done, never made any headway on translating her scripts from her head to the page, when she had to do dishes and fold laundry.

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The few times she had tried to get a job of her own, they never lasted more than a few days. Buster was happy to help her at first, making calls and asking peers for letters of recommendation, but after she kept walking off the job and refusing to talk about it he quietly stopped helping. She didn't need to work, Buster made enough to comfortably support both of them. So eventually she stopped trying and focused on what really mattered: her art.

Except, how many years now had it been since she finished anything? She had hoped that leaving Buster Harkness would be a great uncorking and the concepts and narratives would flow freely. Now it had been a year since the breakup and she couldn't even remember the last time she had put a pencil to paper, or opened up a word processor for anything more than a grocery list.

Maybe she wasn't an artist after all. She definitely wasn't a businesswoman or a worker. She wasn't a wife anymore, and for now she was only interested in herself. What was she?

I guess I'm a Freelancer now. The corners of her beak turned up in a small smile.