Kantai Collection was developed by Kadokawa Games. I feel like I should add some kind of warning here, but for what I'm not actually sure.
She went down seventy years ago, but she is still there.
The knowledge comes to her in pieces, the way understanding comes through dreams. Something has woken before her, something angry and wrong and far too familiar. She can feel it moving through the currents and the waves, waiting, waiting, waiting—for what?
And then the first ships sink.
They are civilian ships first, cargo and container and passenger (and passenger are the worst), but then come the warships, all kinds, all countries', the ocean swallowing the pieces. And they are screaming, and she is screaming, but a ship can't scream, especially one dead and asleep.
But she can hear the call, too. She is not the only one who understands. They are calling her back—they are calling all of them back—and she is not the first to rise (and she feels that happen too, the new victories, the abyssal ships falling back), but then it happens at long last—and she is real.
Legs. Arms. A body, deceptively flesh and blood.
She opens her eyes.
"I'm Inazuma," she says. "Pleased to meet you."
And her Admiral—
Her Admiral is a boy in a ratty T-shirt.
"What the christ," he says, and this is when Inazuma realizes that something has gone wrong.
The boy's name is Abraham Kwon, and he is not an Admiral, and he is not even Japanese. He knows nothing of abominations from the deep preying on vessels the ocean over, or the souls of long-sunk warships that have been called up to fight them.
His ignorance is worrying. And then the news on the laptop screen fails to match with what Inazuma knows of the world, and his ignorance is worrying in another sense.
"Maybe 'abyssal warship'?" she says, peering around his shoulder.
"We already tried that," Abraham Kwon says, but enters it in anyway. "See? Just tabletop games and deep-sea exploration."
She can't read English, but she can read numbers, and the years attached to the web pages are too recent for her peace of mind. "Maybe...maybe you need to search in Japanese," she says.
The look Kwon gives her makes her want to fall back. But then he turns back to the screen, grumbling, pulling up windows and menus—
"Fine," he says. "What's the term?"
She tries "shinkaiseikan". She tries "kanmusu". She tries "Hibiki" and "Akatsuki" and even "Verniy", but it isn't until "Ikazuchi" comes back with nothing but encyclopedia articles and martial arts classes that she sinks to her knees and begins to shake.
She doesn't understand.
This is the new normal:
Kwon makes breakfast, pastries from the toaster if he is hurrying and banana pancakes if he is not. (None of his meals are Japanese.) He leaves for university, because he is in university, too young to ever have achieved admiralty, and Inazuma is left alone in the house.
("You didn't ask to be summoned here," said Kwon, after the first sleepless night. "I'm not going to throw you out." And Inazuma appreciates his generosity, oh, she does, but she wishes with all her heart she didn't have to.)
And then Inazuma has nothing to do.
It will be hours until Kwon returns, and Inazuma fills in the hours the best she can. There are counters to wipe of dust. There is laundry to be carried to the laundromat down the street, while passersby watch her from the corners of their eyes and wonder about her school uniform.
(Kwon has a sister, and his sister has old clothes, but she cannot feel comfortable in them.)
There is a radio to listen to, music and news. There are books to read, children's books with large letters borrowed from the library, side by side with an English-Japanese dictionary.
(There's no language ships speak over any other, but it was always Japanese written on her hull.)
And there are bedsheets, but the bedsheets are straight. Neither of them sleep in the bed anymore.
(Not since the second sleepless night, when Inazuma decided that there were limits to generosity and told Kwon so, voice pitching in moral desperation.)
("I'll be fine," said Kwon. "I've got spare blankets. I'll fold them over and sleep on the floor.")
("I can't take your bed! You're already letting me stay here! That's just...")
("I'm not going to sleep in the bed while you're sleeping on the floor, so if you're not going to take the bed, I guess neither of us are," Kwon said, and that was the lock of both of them into an uncomfortable, futonless stalemale.)
And eventually, the hours are used up. And then Kwon returns, and it is dinner, and then bed, and then another depthless day for Inzauma to fill, thimble cup after thimble cup of sand into the ocean.
She does not go on expeditions. There are no expeditions to go on.
She does not fight abyssal vessels. There are no abyssal vessels to fight.
Her armament gathers dust in the corner of Kwon's bedroom. Sometimes, when the house is too quiet, she puts it around her and stands in the center of the room, away from the window, back straight as she can manage, waiting for the alarm that never comes.
(Isn't that what you wanted? comes the question, and she thinks: I'm being selfish, only—)
(Not like this.)
Kwon is kind in other ways, too, kind enough to not ask questions, kind enough to tow Inazuma and her equipment west to the coast (Nissan, Inazuma reads) and drive up and down and up again until Inazuma sees it—an empty stretch of beach, eaten away almost completely by the midnight tides.
And then she is standing, shoes off, lingering at the ocean's edge.
Lingering longer.
It's the same ocean—she knows this. But it's a different world, and she doesn't know if this ocean will take her, and she doesn't know what she'll do if it doesn't. She closes her eyes and thinks of Osaka. Takes a deep breath, still remembering, and steps forward.
And then she is afloat, the tides turning beneath her feet like they always did until the end, and maybe it sounds like a sob but it's laughter, all the same.
It's like home.
The thought passes through her and leaves her ashamed. It should be Japan she calls home, she knows, not this lonely patch of waves more than eight thousand kilometers away. But she is a ship, and this ocean was always her element, even if she is on the other side of it now. She skims out, farther from the shoreline, and suddenly she is practicing maneuvers like she never stopped. Here, and her torpedoes are at the ready. Here, and her anti-aircraft guns are a carrier's first defense. She draws a straight line into the horizon, breaks it suddenly to confuse enemy submarines, turns over her shoulder smiling to meet Ikazuchi's eyes—
Remembers that Ikazuchi is not here. Remembers that nobody is here. Feels a fist squeeze a heart she didn't have a month ago and looks out over the water again.
From here, it looks as if it goes forever.
"Hey!"
She starts—bobs, as she spins around. Some late-night stroller? Her secret is out, and she's almost happy for it—but it is only Kwon, standing where she stood herself, his hand half-raised in greeting.
She goes to meet him, because there isn't any reason not to. "I'm sorry," she says, once she's close enough to talk over the waves. "I'm keeping you up this late."
"Forget it," Kwon says. And then he looks down—at his waterlogged sneakers, at Inazuma's bare feet, kissing the water's surface.
"Christ," he says. "That's a neat trick."
Inzauma smiles again. This one reaches her eyes, too, but only just. "Well...I'm a ship, after all."
"I guess that's what that means," Kwon says.
And he begins to wade into the surf.
The sight is so surreal that Inazuma doesn't understand it, not until he's trudging past her. "Wait—what are you doing?" she stammers.
"I want to see what you see out there."
"You can't!" Because he's not a ship. "I mean—it's high tide right now! It's dangerous!"
Kwon looks at her. She can see him turning the words over. And then he reaches out to her and takes her hand, as if taking the hand of a ship is the most reasonable thing in the world to do.
(Isn't it?)
(Wasn't it?)
"You're going to have to pull me up if I get swept under," he says, and he is no Admiral, and these are not orders, but surely she can be kind, too?
It's not the same, of course, not at all. He's not a ship, and she can't do more tethered to him than keep slow and to the shallows. But there is something comfortable about the weight of somebody at her side again.
(And there is a moment, just a moment, when the spray finds his face and he gasps, shocked and indignant at once, and the laughter bubbles out of her and in that moment she is somewhere else, and he is there too, not human anymore but someone she has always known but never met, but it is a desperate, foolish moment that makes no sense and in any case it passes.)
"Did you see?" Inazuma asks, quietly. "What you wanted to see."
She is in the back of Kwon's car, twenty minutes toward the house again. The world is throws of streetlight orange and harsh shadow, passing over their seats, their bodies, their faces.
"No," says Kwon.
He is soaked to the bone.
And then time passes. Years pass. Kwon is nineteen. Kwon is twenty. Kwon is twenty-two, and Inazuma must be older, too, because Inazuma is taller, Inazuma is sitting in a crowd as the summer sun beats her dry, Inazuma is watching Kwon in a black robe walk left to right until a man shakes his hand and then allows him to walk left to right again.
"You didn't have to come," Kwon says afterward, and then, belatedly: "Thanks."
"It wasn't any trouble," Inazuma says, and watches Kwon divest himself of ceremony. The cap makes it to the wall, but the robe flutters, settling over the futon in the center of the room.
The futon is double-sized, because Kwon has a spine, and she has had one, too, for four years now, and because Kwon is kind and Kwon is stubborn and as she looks at the futon and the robe lying dead across it she realizes she will probably marry him, someday. She has no identity on paper and the friends she has think she is second-generation at most and she will probably marry him.
She doesn't love him, and he doesn't love her, and he has never touched her or tried but the days stretch out ahead of her and there is nowhere else to go.
"I'm going to make dinner," says Kwon. "Chicken?"
"Chicken is fine," says Inazuma.
Kwon leaves the room.
There is a new book in the bookshelf, bought with the spending money paid her under the table. She picks it out and sits on the edge of the bed to read quietly until dinner is ready.
Sunlight paints a glare over page one.
Inazuma looks out the window—and then up, into the deep, blinding blue. There are no clouds. There are no abyssal vessels. There are no ships that are also women, or the need of them. There is no Ikazuchi. Only today and the time to spend in it, and the time to spend tomorrow's, and the day after that and the day after that, peaceful day after peaceful day after peaceful—