AN
So, for those of you who care, I've compiled a list of changes and differences between this fic's universe and the canon. This is mainly to clear up confusion, so if you aren't confused or simply don't give a crap, move along please.
1. Nearly every major event in the story has been pushed or pulled back/forward in time in all sorts of directions. Hence a 1978 start date and only just NOW is Alternative I being put into motion. This is mainly to carve myself a nice large chunk of timeline to play with. You can still expect to see most events put into play, except barring maybe some of the Alternative and Unlimited bits that would likely be nullified by events to come, like the Coup d'etat.
2. Regarding Takeru, his personality may seem slightly different. All in all, he is pretty much himself, except he's got a lot more mental fortitude, doesn't freak out much, and is damned hard to tease. So, pretty much the way he was after he went back to the Extra dimension and got Marimo killed.
3. For seemingly no good reason, the majority of the military rankings of characters like Isumi and Hayase have been pushed down a notch. Isumi is a 1st Lieutenant now. Don't know why I did this, honestly, but what's done is done and I can't take back what I've written.
4. Regarding this universe in general, it can pretty much just be called, Extra if it got invaded by BETA. This means that Sumika is around and Yuuko used to be a schoolteacher before she was a miitary scientist. Other changes too, like Marimo not yet being an instructor MIGHT be put into place, but it could potentially fuck up the continuity.
Anyway, that's it. Hope that clears stuff up, and if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to send a PM, ot better yet, drop a review.
Sumika stared absently at the black monitor, her mind stuck in a state of shock. Thoughts, a whole flurry of them, coursed through her mind in one raging maelstrom.
Takeru-chan, why aren't you saying anything? This is all a joke, right? You're not really dead, right? Hey, Takeru-chan, say something. You wouldn't leave me, right? You said you'd never leave me, that we'd be together forever! Takeru-chan!
Without even noticing it, she began to sob. The cries came from deep down, in her chest and stomach, the guttural moans of pain and anguish. Sumika reeled, her vision blurring in and out between waves of tears. Tears, once again, were streaming down her face in ceaseless streams. Long and miserably, she cried her heart out. Even as her father looked her in the eye and asked- no, commanded- her to calm down, she continued to cry. Every other voice, her aunts, her fathers, her cousins, was drowned out by her own emotions.
"Takeru-chan...!" She drew her voice out in long, uneven gasps. "Takeru-chan!" Oblivious to the world, she let her misery out to the world. And for a long time she continued to do so. Her voice didn't weaken and her sobs didn't end; it seemed as if she'd go on forever.
But she didn't. And, when the last fraying thread of sanity snapped, her choked cries turned to a roar of anger and desperation. The change occurred as quickly and suddenly as a lightning flash, too quickly to see and certainly too quickly to stop.
She leveled her gaze, red-hot and hateful, onto the man that was holding her shoulders and begging her to calm down. Her father.
"You bastard!" Sumika screamed, and exploded into action, jumping from her chair and slamming into her father's chest.
The sudden tackle caught him off guard, and he fell back onto the hardened super-carbon floor, slamming his head hard against a wall in the process. Before he could even register what had happened, his daughter was straddling him at the chest and raining blows down on his head and shoulders.
"Why did Takeru-chan have to die?!" She screamed. "You were supposed to protect us! You're my father! Why didn't you fight instead of him?!"
Sumika's relatives only stared at the scene in shock, each of them wanting to move but stuck in a fear-induced paralysis. "I loved him! I loved Takeru-chan so much! And now he's dead, dead because you couldn't protect him!"
Pounding her fists harder and harder into his face, Sumika gave absolutely no respite; not for herself and certainly not for her father. Even as her fingernails cut bloody crescents into her palms and her fingers began to strain from the repeated impact, she refused to stop.
Her father did not fight back. Instead, he shed tears of his own, and as the torrential rain of blows pulverized his face, he didn't turn away or shield himself. Chanting 'I'm sorry' over and over again, he could only cry as the guilt bit into his heart. After all, Takeru had been like a son to him. And if not a son, then the only man who he would have considered worthy of his daughter. Losing him hurt, badly, no matter how much he tried to disguise it.
He could feel his consciousness slipping as he was barraged by pain. Vision graying out in between waves of dizziness, he found himself with neither a will to hold on nor the strength to do so. Just after he slipped under, a pair of arms wrapped around Sumika's chest and tried to pull her off. Like a crazed animal, she turned and lashed out at the person, catching her aunt full in the face with a punch. Sumika could feel the ligaments in her hand cracking from the impact, could feel the pain coursing up her nerves.
Suddenly, just as she linked her hands into a hammerhead shape over her unconscious Father's helpless skull, another alarm rang out over the speakers. There were no red lights to accompany them, of course, but the blaring sound was more than enough to distract Sumika.
"Intruders have been detected in the hangar bay. Friendly IFF not detected; assumed hostiles." The female, monotone voice of the automated warning system politely informed her.
First was confusion, and then anger. Why are there others? Do they know something about Takeru-chan? Did they kill Takeru-chan?!
She got to her feet, and as she did, everyone else backed away from her in obvious fear. Not caring in the slightest, she walked to the heavy blast doors that led out of the panic room. With the mechanical precision of an automaton, she slid her access card into the slot and walked out into the hallway. In doing so, she stepped over the shredded remains of the various BETA that had tried to gain access to the room and met instead with the 7.62 auto-cannons.
"Takeru-chan..." She muttered under her breath, walking brokenly down the hallway. "Find the people who killed Takeru-chan... and kill them... find them... kill them..." At that moment, had anyone been around to do so, they would have looked into Sumika's eyes and found two empty pits, devoid of light or sanity.
An indeterminate amount of time later, she found herself in the complex's armory. Kagami Sumika had never held a gun in her life, and had only seen the most rudimentary depictions of them in her books. All the same, when she grabbed the machine gun on the rack, it was as if it was totally natural to her. She pulled back the bolt and hefted it up to her chest, obviously struggling with the weight. Still, when she walked back into the hallway, she looked completely lethal, in spite of the schoolgirl skirt.
Within moments, she could hear the sound of footsteps. They were so close, so very, very close. Whoever the intruders were, they were coming, and they were coming fast.
They killed Takeru-chan, and now they're gonna try to kill me too. I won't let them... I'll kill them first. I'll shoot them, and then I'll shoot myself, and then I can be with Takeru-chan forever...
In the next instant, 1st Lieutenant Isumi and 2nd Lieutenant Misae rounded the corner.
The ruins of the gray Shiranui were still extremely hot to the touch, scorched by friction and flame. However, when Mitsuki reached the hatch, she did not hesitate in the slightest to grab the latch with both hands. She pulled with as much strength as she could muster, even as the material on her armored suit began to blacken from the heat, and forced the heavy steel door open. Time was of the essence, and it didn't take a genius to understand that the longer one was left in a crashed TSF, the less likely the pilot was to survive.
When the cockpit door came down in a mess of broken shrapnel, she charged into the smoldering ruins and grabbed the pilot's body- which she could only barely see through the darkness- and hauled him out as quickly as humanly possible. It was hot inside the wreck, unbearably so, and standing inside it for even those paltry few seconds was enough to make her break into sweat.
With both hands locked under the pilot's arms, she dragged him out and pulled him into the cold November air. What she saw was surprising, on many levels.
The pilot looked young, very young, barely eighteen at most. And while that was par for the course nowadays, the skills Mitsuki had seen on display just a few minutes ago should not have been possible for someone who looked to barely out of Basic. The same went for his body; the level of physical training he possessed was far and away above that of a recruit. He was also unarmored. No suit, no stabilization gyros, not even a safety harness. Just a pair of white nondescript boxer shorts and t-shirt. How exactly he had managed to hold on to his stomach for so long was beyond her.
"What the hell are you made of?" She asked, not an ounce of humor in her voice.
Mitsuki stepped back for a moment and ran a hand through her hair, feeling more confused than anything. At the moment, she didn't have the slightest idea on what to do. She considered calling Isumi for further orders, but eventually decided against it. Moving the pilot was probably probably dangerous considering his condition, so she opted to sit tight. Besides, she couldn't see or hear any BETA in the immediate vicinity, so she would probably be fine.
She stretched her arms high into the air, yawning tiredly. The pilot she recovered was lying on the ground a few feet away. Propped up so he wouldn't puke and choke to death in his sleep.
Mitsuki cast a sidelong glance at the man, or perhaps boy considering how young he looked, and noted how disturbingly worn his expression looked. It was as if he was a five-year veteran stuck in an eighteen-year old's body.
"Hope you wake up soon, Pilot-san. I've got a lot to ask you about."
Mitsuki shrugged her tensed shoulders and hopped onto her TSF's arm, scaling the worn metal and entering through the cockpit's open hatch. She retrieved a handgun, a piddly nine-millimeter, and climbed back out onto the shoulder, hoping for an uneventful wait.
With her ears on the wind and her eyes on the ground, Mitsuki waited. And for as long as she sat idly by, she never once let her thoughts drift onto anything other than her mission.
(line break?)
Takeru awoke a short few minutes later, his body battered and his mind shaken. A hand twitched, and it took him some time to understand that yes, it was his hand, and that yes, he was alive after all. He was surprised by it at first, the sensation of cold air prickling at his skin, but as his reeling psyche calmed down, so did he.
Then, with all the sudden shock and power of a gunshot, stomach bile came roaring up his throat. He managed to stand, or at the very least got to his knees, before spewing out a flood of intermixed liquid. Some of it was clear, but most of it was an alarmingly bright shade of crimson. He wasn't aware of how long he retched, nor was he consciously aware of the burning sensation in his throat and nostrils. At that moment, he felt disturbingly separated from his own body.
He felt himself on the verge of passing out again, but with all the internal strength he could muster, Takeru railed against the gray wave. And somehow, as he wiped away the blood on his chin, he realized for the second time that he hadn't died. Takeru got to his feet, pushing himself off the dirt with his two burnt hands, and gasped in a deep breath of sweet, open air. Air that didn't taste like rusty iron and silicon.
There was a wonderful sense of triumph as he did so. Triumph over the BETA, triumph over death, hell, triumph over himself. That alone was worth celebrating.
"I'm alive! Haha, I'm alive dammit!" He cheered to no one in particular as a peculiar urge to pump his fists in the air overcame him.
He wiped away the last of the blood on his face and neck and took a look at his surroundings. His eyes came to rest on the figure of a blue-haired woman, sitting nonchalantly on the shoulder of a military-grade Shiranui. Takeru's gaze met hers and he nodded, just once, in gratitude.
"I don't suppose you're the one who saved me?" He asked, already knowing the answer.
The woman smiled down on him, and with a dexterous flourish, she threw herself off the mech's shoulder, grabbed onto the chest-plate, and climbed down to the ground.
"You've got that right." She said as she approached him. "Hayase Mitsuki, 2nd Lieutenant Eishi." Mitsuki held out her hand, despite his being covered in blood.
Takeru took it, held tight, and shook. "Shirogane Takeru. I'm, uh, just a civilian."
She smiled wryly at that. "For a civilian, you handle yourself pretty damn well in a TSF." She remarked. "I don't suppose you care to tell me how you learned to do all that? Or where you got that Shiranui from?"
"You saw everything?" He asked, genuinely surprised as he looked back at the TSF's smoldering ruin.
"Hell yeah I did!" Mitsuki exclaimed excitedly. "And I swear, if you don't tell me exactly how you pulled off those maneuvers- I mean seriously, how the hell do you slide under Grapplers- I'm going to, um... Well, I don't know what I'll do, but you can be damn sure it'll hurt."
Takeru chuckled, not because the joke was funny, but because it simply felt good to laugh. "I'm shaking in my boots, Mitsuki-" He cut himself off. "Oh shit, I'm supposed to address you military types by rank, aren't I?"
She waved her hand flippantly. "Yeah, technically you are, but really, only the stuck-up pricks and the super important ones really care. Just call me Mitsuki."
"Okay then, but call me Takeru in return."
"Sure, sure." She stretched her arms over her head. "Now, I believe you owe me a couple explanations. First and foremost, how exactly did you get hold of a fully-functional TSF?"
Takeru bit his lip, hoped that telling her wouldn't bring any negative consequences for Sumika, and pointed to the mountain in the distance. "There's a huge underground complex over there. My friend and her family, and me too of course, were using it as a shelter to try and wait out this war. The BETA found us, no surprise there, and forced me to break out the only TSF stationed there."
Mitsuki nodded, now looking completely serious. "Sure, but that doesn't explain why the Shiranui was there in the first place."
He shrugged. "I don't know a damn thing. Sumika's parents are rich, and I think they might have a couple military connections, but I'm not sure if that's enough to get them a TSF." Takeru paused. "But in any case, I'm glad it was there. Wouldn't have been able to drive the BETA off if it wasn't."
"Hm. I see." She looked back to her own mech. "Well, in any case, we'll find out soon enough. Isumi and Misae are headed there right now."
"Are those your comrades?"
Mitsuki nodded.
Takeru blanched just the slightest bit. "Hey, uh, you guys are UN forces, right? Not mercenaries or privateers or something?"
She frowned. "Yeah, we're with the UN. What else would we be?"
"Just checking. During our first few months down there, we had a few guys trying to get inside. Except, instead of the door, they used high explosives."
"Well, you don't have to worry about that anymore. Pretty much all the mercenary companies have been either integrated into the military or wiped out."
Takeru's expression grew impassive. "I see. Well, in any case, why don't we get back to my compound. You probably need to rendezvous with your squad and I need to see my friend before she gets too depressed or something."
"True, very true, but are you sure you'll be okay? You just spent twenty-five minutes inside a TSF without a suit; you sure you wanna get back in?"
Takeru shrugged. "I'd rather get back in the cockpit than walk for three hours. Sumika probably thinks I'm dead right now, so the sooner I get back to her the better."
Mitsuki nodded. "Alright, sure. Hope you don't mind sharing a seat; it's kinda cramped in there."
"Not a problem." Takeru said cheerfully. "Now let's get this show on the road!"
Mitsuki climbed up into the cockpit, leading the still-weakened Takeru by the hand. She took her seat and grabbed onto the controls with one hand, patting the spot in front of her lap with the other. When he blushed ever so slightly, she laughed.
"What, never sat on a girl's lap before?"
Takeru rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "Uh, well, no. Guess I haven't."
She grinned at him. "Well there's a first time for everything. Now hurry up and sit, lap-virgin."
"Do you really have to say virgin?"
"Ooh, is that a sore point for you, Virgin-san?"
He groaned. "This is gonna be a long ride, isn't it?"
"You're damn right it is. And you're going to enjoy every moment of it. I happen to be quite a pleasant individual, or so I've heard." Mitsuki bragged jokingly.
Takeru settled in, feeling more than a little uncomfortable. "Not sure whose been telling you that, but I'd say you're anything but."
Mitsuki thumped him on the head. "Ah, so cruel~" The doors came to a close, locking them in soundless darkness. "Shouldn't you be a lot nicer to pretty ladies?"
The lights came on. The engine roared to life.
"Lady? Where's this lady you speak of?" Takeru asked.
She hit him again, lightly. "Idiot."
In turn, Takeru elbowed her in the stomach, despite the fact that she was wearing an armored suit. "Hey, be nicer to me. I'm injured." He protested, forcing his voice to an annoyingly high pitch.
"You're a man, you can take it." As if to prove her point, she took an arm off the right handle to karate-chop the top of his head.
Takeru chuckled at that, thinking of how he treated Sumika the same way. "Y'know, if you weren't already in love, I might think you were coming onto me."
Mitsuki froze up, and in doing so, brought her TSF to a jarring halt as well.
"Hey!" Takeru protested, the sudden stop nearly throwing him off the seat.
"H-how did you know?!" She asked suddenly, and if Takeru could turn around in the tight confines of the TSF, he was sure he would have seen a furious blush on her face.
"Idiot~" He intoned. "You've got a picture of him mounted right above the camera display. And you used a heart-shaped sticker to do it; I've never seen a more obvious sign in my life."
"T-that could just be a coincidence!" Mitsuki protested.
Takeru laughed. "Could have been, sure, but judging by your reaction, I just hit the nail right on the head, didn't I?"
A sound that seemed suspiciously similar to a growl escaped the woman's throat. Takeru only laughed harder.
"Tell. No one." She growled.
"You got it, Mitsuki."
Mitsuki fell silent for a time, keeping her eyes focused on the camera. But as she passed over the remains of the BETA Takeru had dispatched earlier, she whistled appreciatively. The entire battlefield was a mess of blood and corpses, casings and shells. Bodies told stories all on their own, stories of successfully pulled flanks, of bravado-fueled kamikaze charges, of acrobatic side-strafes and dodges.
"Seeing it from a distance is one thing, but jeez, there's gotta be at least a hundred bodies here."
Takeru waved it off. "Be careful about praising me; too much and you're gonna make my ego pop."
Mitsuki ruffled his hair, much like an older sister would. "Hey, modesty's one thing, but it takes a lotta balls and a lotta skill to kill so many of these things solo. Have some pride."
"Didn't some religious guy once say pride goes before a fall?"
"Ah, sure, if you're a dick about it. But being proud of what you're capable of and being a jackass are two very different things." The TSF glided over the battlefield with ease, and quickly came to the open jaw of the hangar bay. "Alright, looks like we made it. Your insides holding up alright?"
Honestly, Takeru's guts were putting up a much harder fight than he would have liked. All the same, he responded favorably. "Never better. Let's dismount as soon as possible, I need to see Sumika."
The woman grinned knowingly down at him. "You've mentioned her name a lot." She remarked. Then, leaning in close, she whispered in his ear. "You fucking her?"
To her chagrin, Takeru wasn't flustered in the slightest. It was as if he'd been asked this question before; several times, in fact. "'Course not. Sumika's like a sister to me."
Mitsuki pouted. "Aw, you're not as cute when you're not blushing."
"Sorry to disappoint." The TSF came to a stop in the hangar's ground floor, standing flush with two other inactive mechs.
Takeru and Mitsuki opened up the cockpit door. Mitsuki left first, more familiar with dismounting the machine than him, and was careful to guide him down by hand. When they stepped onto solid ground, Takeru breathed a sigh of relief.
"Ah, thank god. And thank you too, Mitsuki. Now c'mon, we should probably get going." Takeru said, moving slowly to calm his turbulent insides.
"Okay. I'll be right behind you, then, Takeru."
Takeru used his clearance card, thankful that he still held onto it through the fight, and opened up the elevator that led to the main platform above.
"Ladies first." He said, pretending to hold the elevator's doors open.
"My my, aren't you a gentleman." Daintily, in imitation of a sheltered Ojou-sama, she walked into the beautifully decorated lift. Once inside, however, the act gave way to genuine amazement as she stared at the carved wooden walls. "Y'know, when you said you lived in a huge underground complex, I wasn't expecting something so... ritzy."
Takeru smiled, almost wistfully. "This is a shelter, y'know. And since Sumika's family is rich, it makes sense that they'd shill out the big bucks to make their underground complex look pretty."
The doors closed, and the elevator begin to make its way up.
"Even so, this is just... I guess I'm just not used to it, yet."
Takeru nodded. "Yeah, neither am I. I've been here for five months now, and I still don't like it much."
Mitsuki's eyes widened the slightest bit. "Why not? Isn't it beautiful?"
"Maybe so, but..." His voice trailed. "It makes me feel like I'm hiding from the truth. And I know that hiding is literally all I've been doing down here, but all the same, I don't like that feeling. I know that behind the hand-carved wood is ugly concrete; I know that behind this crafted facade is a bloody war." He said, laying his thoughts bare.
Mitsuki ran a hand over the carvings. "I think I can understand. I mean, well..." She fell silent. "No, I totally understand. I can't say I'd be able to withstand months of being caged, no matter how pretty the cage happened to be."
Takeru looked back at her, surprised. "Really? I think you're the first person to agree with me on this."
She smiled knowingly. "You said your friend's parents are rich, right? I guess rich means sheltered, too, and when you've been living like that all your life, you're not going to want to change."
Takeru shook his head in agreement."Just like us, then. If they've lived their whole lives on the inside, then we've lived our lives on the outside. It's just unnatural to want anything different."
Mitsuki hummed. "Yeah, that's it."
The elevator came to a halt, and the doors came sliding open. Takeru and Mitsuki stepped onto the platform, and the first thing they noticed were the corridor blast doors, chewed through by BETA jaws. Blood, that of the Warrior-class he'd crushed with the doors, fanned out in front of them in a wide arc.
"That's a lot of blood. Did you have to fight your way here?" Mitsuki asked as she crouched down to observe all the imprints left by the BETA footprints.
Takeru nodded. "Got into a melee with a Warrior-class, actually. Had to use the blast doors to crush it's head."
Mitsuki shuddered. "God, that must've been terrifying. I can't imagine fighting one of those things on foot."
"Yeah." Takeru agreed simply. "When that thing came charging at me, I came this close to just freezing up. Nearly pissed my shorts, too. But somehow, right before it ripped off my head, I decided I wanted to live after all and rolled out of the way."
"You're a brave one, Takeru. If nothing else, I'll give you that."
He shook his head. "I'm not brave. I just didn't want to die."
"Still..." She trailed off and shrugged her shoulders. "Anyway, we should get going. Like you said earlier, time is of the essence."
"Right." Takeru walked through the chewed blast doors, stepping over the Warrior's corpse, and walked back through the hallway. A peculiar feeling came over him as he surveyed all the damage the BETA had done. He'd collapsed the walls and ceiling to buy time, but it seemed that just minutes after he'd done so, they bit right through it. It was enough to make him shudder.
If I'd been just a little slower in opening that cockpit...
Suddenly, the roar of bullets and powder, impossibly loud in these enclosed hallways, broke Takeru from his observations.
"Gunfire! Are the BETA still in the base?!" Takeru shouted to himself. He turned to Mitsuki, who pulled her handgun from it's holster, and nodded to her. "Let's go!"
"Right behind you!"
Fifteen minutes earlier
The first thing Isumi noticed was the gun. The next thing was the girl's eyes, lifeless and dead, and how much insanity she could see in them.
"Run." Isumi barked as she grabbed Misae by the shoulder and shoved her back. "RUN DAMMIT!"
There wasn't even a pause before the bullets started flying with a deafening roar. The gunfire, loud and terrifying, was hardly mitigated by her suit's sound dampeners. Bullets began to fly, screaming toward them, but even as her nerves threatened to freeze in terror, Isumi refused to give in. Without missing a beat, she leaped into action, jumping in front of Misae and spreading her arms as wide as possible to cover as much as she possibly could.
Lead, a deadly storm of it, sprayed through nearly every inch of open air. When the first bullet hit her, punching hard and fast into her armored midsection, Isumi swore she could feel every muscle fiber, every strand of tissue, caving inward. Lances of pain, white hot and searing, bit into her nerves, and a spray of blood erupted from her mouth and splattered against the wall. She staggered back, away from the girl shooting at them, and suddenly found it hard to breathe.
Then, suddenly, they were running, both of them, back down the hallway they came from. The hail was all around them, surrounding them, and with every nanosecond that passed any one bullet could have ended their lives immediately. But somehow, as they passed back around the corner, both women found that they weren't dead yet.
The gunfire ceased for a moment as they moved out of sight. Almost immediately, a thick silence fell over the corridor.
Isumi leaned against the wall, breathing in shallow, rapid gasps. Her body was screaming, her head reeled, and with every moment that passed her conscious mind threatened to buckle on her. Her insides felt like stirred pudding; for every moment she was on her feet, she felt like retching up blood.
No amount of bullets could punch through an armored suit, but all the same, no one could walk away from two dozen rounds unscathed.
She shifted against the wall, steadying herself as she moved forward at a crawling pace. Blood flowed from her mouth and nose in rivulets, splattering messily onto the floor.
"1st Lieutenant, let me help you!" Before Isumi could even protest, Misae grabbed her by the arm and draped her around her shoulder.
The girl with the gun, a cute redheaded thing with a ribbon at her back, took slow, menacing steps toward them. Every sound made seemed elevated in the silent corridor; every breath the girl took, every casing that hit the ground, hell, even the minute creases of fabric made with every movement, all of it sounded insanely loud in the pervading silence.
An endless maze of wooden corridors yawned out ahead of them, confusing and intricate. Navigating them seemed like a fool's errand, and even as Misae chanted words of power to herself, she could feel her mind caving to the panic. Where did she turn? What paths led where? Where was she? How could she escape?
Questions without answers bombarded her mind, and in that moment, Misae could have begged for the girl to open fire once more, if only to drown out her traitorous thoughts with gunfire. She turned down the right, walking down another nearly identical hallway. The girl's footfalls were right behind them, taunting her, testing her. To make things worse, the 1st Lieutenant seemed to be growing heavier and heavier.
"Hey, hey, Isumi, don't fall asleep on me." Misae pleaded, trying to keep her voice as low as possible.
"'S okay, I'll be a'rite." Isumi muttered, her voice slurring. "Jus' getting har' ta walk is all."
"I'm sorry, I know you took those bullets for me, but you have to move faster. If we slow down too much, she's gonna catch us." Misae told her, whispering furiously.
"I know..." Isumi breathed. "I'll try."
Isumi, arm still draped around her subordinate's shoulder, steadied herself and pushed ahead, struggling with every step. There was pain in every movement, Misae could see, but she staggered forward all the same.
"Yeah, that's it. We just need to get back to the hangar..."
If I can find it, that is. She thought.
Misae knew that the longer the hallway, the more likely they were to get spotted. She had to turn down another path, and soon too, before the girl caught up to them. She looked frantically around, hoping for a convenient turning point among the rows and rows of identical doors.
There were none.
"Damn." Misae cursed. "Looks like we've got no choice, Isumi. We're going to have to try and hide in one of these rooms."
Misae wrapped her hand around the doorknob nearest to her right and turned it experimentally. Thankfully, it gave with ease.
"Not locked." She said. "Good, looks like we're in business."
Misae pulled the door open, revealing the inside to be a large, empty room stacked with boxes. An empty bedroom, it seemed. The 2nd Lieutenant pushed Isumi into the darkness first. She looked back over her shoulder, much like a paranoid doe would, and made sure the girl hadn't seen them. Safety ascertained, she stepped into the room and closed the door behind her.
Immediately, she helped Isumi get behind the pile of cardboard boxes, hoping that it would provide suitable cover, and stashed herself into the corner farthest from the entrance. Laying low, on her stomach, she kept her eyes locked firmly on the stream of light coming from just under the paneled door.
Time passed. As to how much exactly, Misae wasn't certain; in the midst of that silent darkness, where her heartbeat was irregular and violent, she'd had no grasp on the seconds or minutes. But eventually, after that indeterminate length, a pair of small feet stepped in front of the door, creating two spots of darkness in that ray of lamplight.
Misae's chest exploded with anxiety, her lungs contracting on themselves, her throat suddenly clogged with absolutely nothing. Sweat rolled down her face and head, disappearing into the minute micro-pores of her armored suit. Her heart was pounding in her ears, more blaringly loud to her at that moment than it had ever been.
Go away go away go away She screamed internally, desperation rising like bile in her throat.
The doorknob twisted, turned, back and forth in place, as if to mock her. Misae squeezed her eyes shut and drowned out the world, trying hard not to think about what would happen if the knob turned fully.
But eventually, the twisting stopped and the metallic scratching of metal-on-metal ceased. The two small feet stood in the doorway for a second longer, before walking away. A flurry of feelings filled Misae at that moment: surprise, gratitude, but most of all, relief. She resisted the impulse to release all the air she didn't know she'd been holding.
Misae counted to sixty, got to her feet, and went to the door. Checking under the panels one last time, she turned the handle. After stepping through the door, she squeezed her eyes shut as she let her eyes adjust to the sudden brightness. For the second time, she felt incredibly glad to be alive. Incredibly glad to have made it.
And when she opened her eyes again, she realized she was staring directly into the dead-black gaze of the redheaded girl.
"You killed Takeru-chan." She said bluntly.
And pulled back the trigger.
AN
Yay! Cliffhanger! Everybody loves cliffhangers, right? Right...?
Anyway, if you're wondering, I'm trying to do this thing where I delay my chapter releases by one, so whenever I put something out, be assured that the next bit is already done. This is partly so I can have insurance if I get sick or injured or suffer a Block, but mostly so I can go back and edit/revise bits of the previous chapter at leisure.
Responses to anonymous reviews will go down here from now on.