Title: see you in the city
Fandom: Transistor
Pairing: Red/Transistor, unrequited Red/Sybil
Categories/Genres: Post-Canon, Romance, Established Relationship, Angst
Length: Medium (4727 words)
Warnings: References to prior character death and suicide

Author on LJ: N/A
Author Website: ashkatom

Summary:

Country life stales quickly. Blue cares too much to let her fade with it.

Review:

Yet another small fandom rec. :)

For those of you not in the know, Transistor is a video game about a mute woman named Red who... travels through the city of Cloudbank killing things with her talking sword. Yeah, it's... hard to explain without giving the plot away, but if you get a chance you should definitely buy it. This game is beautiful, bittersweet ambrosia for the eyes and ears.

see you in the city reads like a sequel, or perhaps more like a continuation of the story after the golden glow of happily ever after wears off. It incorporates the game's Recursion mode, (the New Game+ where the player begins the story again with all the skills that they finished their previous playthrough with), but with a twist that brings Red back to the world she chose to leave behind.

I dearly love the melancholy of this piece, the palpable love between Red and her lover and also the sadness of their failed happy ending that pushes them to give up the idyllic for the real. I also love the little pieces of dialogue where ashkatom fleshes out characters who are only ever perceived in the canon through snips and snatches of biographical information. Most of all, I love the ending, which was, in its own way, more complete than that of the game.

see you in the city