Author's Notes: This is, what will eventually be, a collection of pretentious one-shots based almost entirely on OCs, 'cause everyone loves those! Who the hell wants to read about all those boring canon characters, amirite? Most of these are just ideas that cropped up while writing Inheritance, so they'll kind of hang around the same setting. I just couldn't find a spot to cram them into the main story. Prior reading of Inheritance not necessary.
Narrative point-of-view and tenses will change from story to story.
The Case of Yoshiya Satsuma
The dream always starts with fire.
It's a pleasure watching them burn. Euphoric and entirely too addictive.
I'm God here. I'm terrible, cleansing power. For once in my life – I have control.
My finger presses harder on the trigger, as if that will lend more power to the wet stream of flame spitting from the nozzle in my hands. I sway, painting a picture with the flailing tar-burnt flesh of my enemy.
Enemy.
Enemy.
Enemy.
The dream changes. Becomes vivid, focused. Third Platoon is hunkered outside Terminal 07. Direct access to A-levels. GeoFront facilities. Perimeter checkpoints never knew what hit 'em.
The C4 stuck to the door rapidly decomposes, releasing nitrogen and carbon oxides into an explosive velocity expanding eight-thousand meters per second. It reverberates through bone and muscle, our headsets dampening the ear-shattering thunder of the blast that packs the door in.
We're rewarded with muffled screams, anguished cries of the confused and dying. Pins are pulled, flashbangs throw in. Time aches, one breath, then two. Thunderclaps inside – more screams. I move, right in after Ishikawa, his rifle swiveling to the left. He lights up something dark and human shaped. A body drops. More bullets punch into sinew, throwing blood and flecks of cartilage across the walls, matching the red fig-leaf decorating the bulkheads.
There are no orders for surrender. No demands for weapons to be dropped.
We storm down NERV's bright halls, painting them with splashes of red. More doors blow in, a few sub machine guns blaring in response. They're nothing compared to the swift, precise killing power of the Platoon's Koch G11 rifles. But my weapon – mine is different. As old and terrible as the muddy, sloppy battles of the Second World War. It makes a different kind of mess – spouting flame ignited fuel in a 40 meter arc. It doesn't have the same range or bite as my old kit, but it burns all the same.
The napalm I don't use anymore. Just the scent of it has me setting foot in Jambi again, that sprawling village tucked away at the base of Mount Kerinci, the battlegear and nozzle somehow heavier with each step I take. The jungles burn around me, a fire of my own making, lung-choking smokes fogging the air while dirt sizzles at my feet – as though the earth is made of brimstone. I've brought hell to reality.
Exterminate with extreme prejudice.
I never got to see any of the villagers that called it home. There was nothing but the fire and maybe screams I tried to pass off as low flying jets.
This time, there's no escaping how close I am now to this new enemy – to the frightened faces on the other end of my nozzle. A girl who couldn't be older than nineteen, freckles on her cheeks, golden brown hair. A man in his late forties, deep-set laugh lines and kind brown eyes.
My fire twists and blackens their skin. They thrash and howl as every bit of muscle and tissue is flayed to a crisp.
They're not people. Just like those terror cells in Jambi, even if we didn't find a single weapons cache in what was left of that village afterwards. It doesn't matter. You can't go into combat and see people. They're targets. If you think of them as anything but the enemy, your guard drops – your emotions fog over your judgment. You get sloppy, and that gets you and your buddies killed. All of your instincts are on overdrive – all those heightened senses they screamed into you at boot. There's red work to be done.
Exterminate with extreme prejudice.
I walk past smoking heaps, a shot or two ringing out behind me as Ishikawa puts those still twitching out of their misery. He shoots the ones that aren't moving too. Methodically, mechanically, we move to the next room, the next floor, the next wash of death. It doesn't register. Doesn't process beyond target acquisition and kill confirmation. Here and now – I'm not human. My mind won't let me be. It sees the brutality of my work and it closes off, else it might break. Because to be human is to be weak. To be weak in war is to die. I feel my heart, how desperately it wants to explode from the pumping adrenaline. I'm alive, but I feel hollow. A walking tank. An empty shell primed for kill. Without empathy to guide my thought and step, another, much darker part of me is allowed to revel in that feeling. To take a twisted sort of glee in how life is so easily spent at my hands.
The dream fractures with a hundred voices shrieking as one. The tide comes, a cleansing flood. It spills into the halls, that thick, soupy red. We run – up, higher up, onto the stairs. Some of us don't make it. Ishikawa trips, a belt buckle snagging on a twisted piece of rebar. The red tide that might as well have been of our own making starts to consume him. I reach for his outstretched hand, tugging onto his arm. The propane tanks on my back are too heavy. He'll pull me down with him at this rate.
"Don't let me go. Don't fucking let me go!" he screams. The tide touches my feet, hungry and trembling with anticipation.
I can't.
I can't hold on to you.
So I let go, his gloved fingers brushing mine one last time before they disappear. Ishikawa doesn't get to cry out as he's sucked under, not a trace of him left. I run and I don't look back. Command pings alternate routes, armored defenses that need punching through to breach NERV's steel anthill. Two entire companies drowned in bakelite, just like that. Nothing stirs in my heart now. No twinge of remorse or flicker of pity swept away by the adrenaline. There's only more fuel to my fire. Hatred now.
They scream and beg for mercy and I have none to give.
Exterminate with extreme prejudice.
Then there's a girl standing amidst the black, smoking corpses. Terror. So complete and full it locks my legs stiff while my brain shouts at me to run. Instead I can only tremble, so much I can barely keep hold of the flamethrower. I know this girl, her eyes and her hair and her cheeks – skin bronze like her mother's. Her small feet make ripples in the shallow spills of blood beneath her, hands clasped behind her back as she sways with her head quirked. It's as though this world doesn't exist. All she sees is her daddy holding a flamethrower to her. Yet she isn't afraid of me. Doesn't beg or plead like the others.
You know what you have to do.
No. I can't.
But there's red work to be done. Even if it is my little girl. My little girl. I'm still trembling, still fighting against that wretched urge to pull the trigger. The other Yoshiya born out in the fires of Jambi slides into every pore, every thought, making me that unfeeling thing again, trained to do one task exceedingly well.
I'm not strong enough without him.
You know what you have to do.
I pull the trigger and she becomes wreathed in flame. It dances over her skin – hair the very first thing to go, clothes flitting to ash that melds with her boiling flesh, which peels in slow, stretching rings.
You know what you have to do.
I keep my hold on the trigger. She doesn't scream. Her big amber eyes stare right into mine and she smiles, soon falling away to nothing more than cinders. Those other corpses begin to move, take on new life. Their lips part wide to reveal rows of white teeth, some chipped or missing from bullets and fire. Half of one's face sags, skin clinging desperately to bone. The skull of another has been spattered to bits, left eyeball hanging from its socket. They stare at me, pondering my fate. They judge me with their mocking smiles. This is what you are, they say. You are sorrow. Your are destruction.
Betrayer.
Killer.
Monster.
And then it happens.
The world ends. I have that quiet moment to realize that I'm not a god. That control has never been in my grasp. In the end I'm still nothing. For the briefest of moments I'm allowed to unravel. Until another girl stands before me. This one I don't know, but she welcomes me with open arms, as if our bond is older and deeper than the Earth itself.
Death.
She's come for me.
Sweet death.
I don't scream when I wake up.
I've gotten good at that. Once bit my tongue so hard we had to spend that morning in the hospital. My side of the bed is soaked. The sweat pads beneath me weren't enough tonight. Everything is sticky and wet, but the air is cool. Not quite cool enough.
Priscilla is still asleep beside me. Good. That's good. That means I wasn't thrashing about all night. She still has a yellow welt from when I thwacked her in the cheek last week. The bed creaks as I climb out. Light peaks in through the windows, pale blue light, early morning still. A tremble shakes me and the smoke still fills my lungs. The fire. Singed flesh.
I stop in front of a plain white door, trying to calm my nerves and let the thundering adrenaline of battle and the stink of fear ebb away. It doesn't work. There's only one thing that really calms me anymore. Big purple letters on the door spell out NINA.
I enter my little angel's room, all fluffy and pink. She grumbles as I climb into bed next to her, one of my arms hugging her close to me. She doesn't feel hot and her skin isn't melting. I didn't notice any corpses out in the hall either. Good. Not a dream.
"Daddy?" she mumbles.
I answer by letting my fingers slide over her cheek and into her hair. She makes a tired noise, shifting as one of her small hands starts rubbing at her eyes.
She yawns and asks. "Did you have a bad dream?"
"No, princess."
"I did... there was lots of fire."
"It's gone now."
She groans something, trying to curl up into a ball against me. "I don't like fire."
"You're safe now. They dropped your daddy in a vat of fire repellent when he was born. Fire doesn't hurt him, so you're safe."
She giggles, her fingers playing with mine, like she used to when she was a baby. She probably doesn't remember that though. Babies are lucky like that. They don't remember much. Her smooth fingertips explore the calloused ridges of my palm, tracing the deeper lines – weaving in and out of the one that curves around my thumb. The life line.
"What are you scared of, Daddy?" she asks, more thoughtful than a nine year old girl has any right to be. I see the other Nina then. The one from my dream. I see her smiling while flames eat her alive.
"Snakes and spiders," I say, tickling her neck.
I can't ever tell her what truly frightens me.