Chapter 10: Broken

Tsugumi woke, cold despite the June weather. Her sheets had fallen to the side of the bed and the morning sun was bright. She was still clutching her phone.

That weakling... she thought as the events of the night before came back to her. Was he trying to play her or was he really that thick-headed? He had hurt someone, and it shouldn't have mattered whether the other person was drunk or not. Daryl should have walked away. He had to have known better.

I let him throw the first punch.

No, Daryl had known better. That was why he had made sure he was not the first to attack, so that if anyone had seen the start of the fight he could claim self-defense. He might have been spoiling to hit someone, but he hadn't been without his wits. That made the whole thing... scarier.

Tsugumi got up and looked stupidly at the phone in her hand, as though it shouldn't have been there. Maybe she shouldn't have hung up on him, but he had been pushing so hard, as if he didn't care what she heard, what he said, as if he wanted to test the limits of what he could get away with. She wondered if this was how he intended to give up on a friendship that had barely started.

She opened her phone and called up the police blotter online. Most of the night had been quiet. This was not a particularly dangerous neighborhood, but there was still something reported about midnight last night. A man had been found beaten in an alley and taken to a hospital. The details were light, all she knew was that he had sustained multiple injuries, and she thought of the things Daryl had said, how he had grinded the man's face into the pavement. And then he had the nerve to ask about how to clean off blood.

What kind of a response had he expected of her?

Tsugumi got dressed and brushed out her hair. She thought about how she had held his hand, how he had agreed to give friendship a try. He had seemed sincere. He hadn't liked being touched, but at the end of the night he had taken her hand on his own.

It didn't make sense. The boy who bought her lunch, who made her dinner, also beat a man so badly he got blood on his clothes.

She set her headband in her hair, careful to angle the ears just right, and sighed. Tsugumi could see Daryl's reaction with the knife again, the expression on his face before he realized what he had done. She hadn't said anything, but it was vicious, like there was no possible option but for him to fight. Maybe the drunk had touched him, and Daryl hadn't been able to stop himself. But then, he said he had enjoyed it.

With a groan she realized that making excuses for Daryl was only going to make her feel like she was running around in circles. The best thing would probably be to talk with him again, maybe after he had some time to calm down, and this time she would be ready. The stuff said he said last night had come out of nowhere, but now she was prepared, she knew what had happened. And maybe it wasn't as bad as it initially sounded.

Tsugumi dialed his number as she walked to the kitchen. A small pile of individually wrapped rolls and pastries sat on the table. The phone rang and rang as she pondered which one she should eat for breakfast and she settled on the pineapple bread.

Her call went to voicemail.

She supposed given the time he was probably on the way to work, maybe he was already there. Construction jobs started early, didn't they? He wouldn't want her to harass him like last time.

Tsugumi set him a text. Can I come over after you're done with work? We can talk.

There was no immediate reply, but she didn't expect one.

-GC-

By lunchtime Daryl still had not replied to her. She didn't like this feeling. It was not the first time he had taken so long, but most of the time she could chalk to it up his job. Today, even though he was working, she had the feeling that if he really wanted to, he could have found a moment during his break to send something to her. By not replying, he was essentially telling her "No."

"Can piloting an Endlave make someone crazy?" she asked.

Ayase looked at her from across her desk. Tsugumi had borrowed the seat of the person in front of her during lunch and turned the chair around to face her friend.

"Not any more than driving a car would," said Ayase. "It's just another vehicle."

Tsugumi fidgeted and set her bento on Ayase's desk. "But you don't drive it like a car. You have the neural link. Pilots can get hurt if their Endlaves are too damaged. We always worried about you."

"More than you should have." Ayase frowned and dug her chopsticks into a bento compartment full of soba noodles. "It does hurt when the Endlave gets damaged. The body thinks an arm, a leg, a chest, has been crushed when the connection to the mechanics of the Endlave is destroyed, but the nerves themselves are still there. The brain just gets tricked. That's why we can usually recover afterwards. The brain eventually realizes everything is okay. But just because your brain gets tricked doesn't mean you're going to go crazy in other ways. The worst is that the nerves shut down for real. That's where the danger is."

That was why Tsugumi had been so careful to bail out Ayase whenever her Endlave had been at risk of destruction. The body might be physically fine, but the brain could be convinced otherwise. It was sometimes possible for pilots to still function in horrifically maimed Endlaves, but recovering from such an ordeal was no guarantee. Pilots could die, and it was harder to replace a trained pilot than an Endlave.

That was the whole point behind the wireless link, so the pilot could operate from a physically remote location while the Endlave was the only one in immediate danger. If the Endlave risked destruction, the cardinal rule was to save the pilot.

"Are you worried about someone?" asked Ayase.

Tsugumi flushed. "What?!"

"I haven't been in an Endlave in over a year, and I'm not likely to again now that there is no longer a need for Funeral Parlor. I mean, I'd like to go back to doing something like that, but..." Tsugumi understood. The wheelchair made things difficult. Not everyone would be as accommodating as Funeral Parlor to take a pilot who couldn't walk. "It's not a good idea for me to be stuck in the past anyway," said Ayase, "and I want to have something else that I can do as well as anyone."

"You're right," said Tsugumi. "I'm worried about someone. It's that pilot. The crazy one." But though she called him crazy, she found that difficult to accept. The word sounded empty, hollow, to her.

Two months ago she would have agreed. Two months ago she would not have thought twice if he told her he had beaten a drunk in an alley. But two months ago she didn't know he got homesick. Two months ago she didn't know how afraid he was of touching another human being. Two months ago she hadn't seen him smile.

"You saw him again?" said Ayase.

"A few times," said Tsugumi, reluctant to reveal more. "His name is Daryl Yan. I started talking with him. He's a little rude and obnoxious sometimes, but other times he's been civil, even nice. But then he got a little crazy last night... Nothing directed towards me," she added hastily, seeing Ayase's anger stir. "And I'm trying to figure out why he keeps swinging from being a nice person to talk to and this awful person I don't want to know."

Ayase sighed, and let the silence stew.

Finally she said, "Maybe you should just avoid him. I know that's hard when you go to the same store, but sometimes a person gets damaged after too much fighting and they're not the same anymore. I wouldn't be surprised if this Daryl Yan is somehow broken. You hear about it sometimes, the soldiers who come back from a war zone and then in the middle of the night, even though they're safe in bed, they wake up screaming and think they're under siege."

Tsugumi tried to picture that, and could not reconcile the image in her mind with the voice over the phone. Daryl had seemed aware of what had happened, and hardly distressed about what he described. He hadn't sounded like someone trapped in a hallucination he could not control.

"He didn't sound afraid or upset," said Tsugumi. "Just..."

"Crazy?" Ayase set down her chopsticks and looked Tsugumi in the eyes. "Like when we were attacking the GHQ headquarters?"

That monster who had blocked their way... That pilot with the psychotic laughter... had been Daryl.

"No, not quite like that..."

What's the best way to remove bloodstains from your clothes?

The candor with which he had asked, knowing it was another man's blood, a man who wouldn't have been bleeding if he hadn't fought with him... Why didn't Daryl make sense? Was he really broken? Did he just snap at times and there was no way to know which Daryl she would be speaking to?

"You should start on your lunch," said Ayase, "or the break will be over before you know it."

Tsugumi sighed loudly and opened her bento. Onigiri with tuna in the middle, and a side compartment of broccoli. "Aya, do you think it's possible to fix someone who's broken like that?"

"I don't know," said Ayase. "I guess that's what a psychologist is for, but I'm not sure every person is fixable. Besides, we don't really know what's wrong with him, or if anything is at all. Maybe Daryl Yan just has a horrible mean streak that surfaces every now and then and it has nothing to do with having been a soldier at all."

Tsugumi found that infinitely worse than the thought of Daryl being broken, that what he was, was simply normal. She chewed on her onigiri. Bites went in her mouth and her jaw moved, but the action was far too mechanical to be enjoyed.

"I can see your brain spinning," said Ayase. "People aren't programs. You can't just evaluate what's wrong with them and install a patch that will make everything better."

"I'm not silly enough to believe that," said Tsugumi, "but I can't help thinking there's a reason Daryl is the way he is, and if I just understood that, I would understand him. I told him I'd be his friend, and I think he needs one."

Ayase sighed and her shoulders sagged. "I'm not sure that's such a good idea, but I know you. If you said that, you meant it."

She had, hadn't she. Tsugumi's smile was hidden as she brought the rest of her onigiri to her mouth.

She didn't know what was wrong with Daryl, but if someone didn't tell him to stop being a maniac, then what would stop him from getting into another fight, maybe one where both he and the other person were hurt? Someone needed to talk some sense into him, and that someone should be a friend.

Tsugumi remembered Daryl's reaction with the knife though, and decided that she should probably bring Funell for help. She didn't think Daryl would consciously attack her, but if she happened to be wrong, she didn't want to be the one who was broken.

I probably shouldn't have done a mid-week update this week. I ended up cutting it close to the regular weekend update. But the reason was mostly because I took two days off from writing to finish outlining the rest of the story.

I already had 80% of Little Heart outlined, but the last 20% was just a muddle of ideas and notes, so what I did was organize it into chapters. I'm not sure that I mentioned this before, but the odd chapters are from Daryl's point of view and the evens are from Tsugumi's, so when I lay out the story I try to have the most important person for that particular scene be the POV character.

This has sometimes changed during the outlining process and as a result I've reshuffled events or added new scenes to make sure the right person lines up for the right scene. This is one reason I outline. It's much harder to do once the story is written, but I can flip things around in outline form before the posted story gets that far. For instance, the upcoming Chapter 11 was originally scheduled to be a Tsugumi chapter and the Chapter 10 that you just read did not exist!