DISCLAIMER: I don't own these characters, and neither does Ken Bates, thank god.
Lucy's attempt at climbing Mount Paranoia succeeded at first, then she let old fears take that away from her. How will she deal with the latest crisis, and will she ever reach her beloved Kohta in time before Nana does something daft?
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Lucy gently stirred in the king-size bed, her scarred body trying to adjust to the feel of the silken sheets. Trying to sleep off a grand banquet way beyond many a politician's pay she felt the sweat itch around her neck, especially around the crude copper necklace she was given to wear. She could hear nothing in the room but the low purr of the necklace's transponder in regular rhythm to her heartbeat, and for a second she wasn't sure that her heart was actually beating. No longer inhibited by that cumbersome metal plate she felt under her left breast and held a finger to the small scar under it to get a feel. The necklace still annoyed her but compared to everything else, it was worth it. At least she could still feel, period.
"Clever, isn't it?" - she knew that voice.
"What, the collar? … yes, I suppose it is."
"That's a fairly recent breakthrough we've been keeping under our hat until we can get the patent registered. Indeed your 'five year' prognosis may very well be misplaced, my young girl. I'll keep explanations as simple as possible-You creatures can change the hardness of your vectors by manipulating the frequency at which they vibrate, therefore by logic if a third-party source can directly fix that frequency it can make the vectors permanently sharp as the razors that shave my rock-hewn face or as hollow as the light that's shining on your gorgeous breasts right now."
"In other words, this thing is disabling my vectors." Lucy responded, dodging the remark. "To tell you the truth I hadn't had the will to test it."
"Correct. And what's best about the affair is that should we be able to miniaturize them they can be injected directly into a Diclonius and activated within minutes. This means that we no longer need to steal children for research here, and we also won't need to euthanise scores of others. They can live normal human lives should they so desire."
"At the cost of their instincts, I assume?"
"No. At the cost of the will to carry them out, should they overcome rational thought. Perhaps we've learned more from Number Seven than we've credited her for."
"Is she..."
"Not yet. All I ask of you is that you uphold your end of the bargain and mother my child, and we will let Nana keep her life and her mobility. Need I remind you…"
"No, you need not" Lucy replied with guilt. "I'm the reason she needs her vectors to support herself."
"Very well… let's get started, shall we?"
Director Kakuzawa took off his shirt and turned away from his prize momentarily to tend to an old gramophone on a table, putting on some inoffensive soul ballad at low volume. He snuffed the candles out at the same table, leaving the room in darkness spare the moonlight shining on the bed. He then spoke boldly-
"The moment of truth has arrived."
Lucy looked lower down at his body for one second, then back at his face.
"No, not that. You still have your black sense of humour, I see. No, I mean this-"
He produced a key-fob from his pants and pressed on the plastic button. The transponder on Lucy's collar beeped five times in rapid succession, then shut off completely.
"What is this?" She asked, confused.
"I'm not telling you to keep your word, I'm asking you. Deep down you're an honourable girl who looks after the few that treat you well, and I expect no less than such for a woman to teach our child."
Discarding his under-garments he climbed into position above Lucy in bed, never more ready in his entire life. She placed her arms around his neck.
"I won't disappoint you, Kakuzawa-sama. You'll be proud of my child… as you watch from the grave."
Her vectors crossed over her body then flung outwards with lethal speed.
-
Kisaragi looked from above, scarlet-faced.
Lucy swung wildly above, feverishly trying to claw her captor bloodily out of existence, and still-flailing she then opened her eyes.
She was in Kamakura bay, mid-to-late morning, at the bottom of the hill she'd just climbed, being watched by a stern deity from above.
"A dream… a goddamn dream! But… it was so real! He was going to… I feel sick… what are you looking at? Who are you? … … oh shitty death." Lucy held her palms to her eyeballs and groaned- "I whacked his fucking tea-lady."
"My name's Kisaragi. That's the second time you've done that, and it hurt a lot more the first time. How do you feel?"
"You're the first victim who's come back to look me in the face and I don't know what to say" Lucy replied, embarassed.
She looked down at her chest to find that the plate was still there, more or less in the same position. More worryingly she noticed the stain underneath.
"Curse you, Kaede. A friend of mine put that plate there and I was supposed to get that fixed instead of playing the heroine. Now he's dead and he's not here to see me like the misguided idiot I am, and I'm glad of it."
"Misguided?"
"I killed you for the wrong reason and I regret it, Kisaragi-san. I expected Doctor Kurama to save my sweet friend Aiko from dying, something too much for him, and I blamed him badly for it. I was so angry I felt that I had to kill everyone close to him to make him feel as alone as I was. I remember the day I made that oath now and it sickens me to think of how far I would have gone to keep it, now that I know that none of those close to his heart could ever have so much spite as I. Certainly not you."
"Are you so sure?" Kisaragi boomed at her. Lucy stared at her victim in shock, fearing her scorn almost as much as Kohta's. She then felt Kisaragi's hand on her shoulder.
"I don't hate you, I pity you. If you can't see that you've still got everything to fight for then you're a bigger idiot than me. I know your friend's at the top of that hill waiting for you to save him, and I know you're all beat up now but you can't afford to stop believing that you can do this, 'cause if you do then Director Kakuzawa's already won."
"But I don't know what to do… I might never be a better person if I carry on like this."
"I think you will be, I've just seen what's in your heart."
"That's why I'm scared, not because I don't think I can stop if I start cutting again, because if I do then he'll hate himself more than he may hate me for taking his family from him. I don't want him going to hell because of me."
"I see… I'm not asking you to murder, I'm asking you to believe in yourself. I graduated from Tokyo University and I never so much as managed to hold a coffee mug straight in my life. Hell, I managed to carry your fat ass down that hill there and all the time I was afraid my legs would go to jelly again and I'd drop you."
"So what do you suggest?"
"Get up that hill, or you'll have to take your chances."
---
Inside the hour dozens of JSDF and Kakuzawa's sharpshooters had gathered by the foot of the graveyard, in rank and file facing away from the entrance. Moods were mixed in the camp- many were afraid of how the day may play out, others were indulging in good-natured banter about the bomb-that-wasn't in town and a small band of troopers were putting wagers on who would take Her out if the worst came to the worst. From a makeshift medical tent near the steps a soldier emerged in a neck-brace, dragging on his inhaler again. Walking past – and greeting – several of his fellows he made a tricky journey up the steps and into the yard itself en route to the Director. On reaching his destination he found his boss dragging on a cigar, watching over a dozing Kohta slumped by the foot of a headstone. He saluted Kakzuawa, who returned it and then shook Delta by the hand.
"Good to see you, soldier. I heard Seven gave you a rough time."
"My apologies, sir."
"No need. I guess you can only keep shoving that girl so much before she returns fire, huh?"
"It appears so, sir. Who might this young gentleman be, sir?"
"The object of Lucy's affection. I have orders for you, Solider Delta, if you feel up to the task."
"What are they, sir?"
"I believe it's Lucy's birthday soon enough, I must get her a present. I have a digital camera in my pocket. If this man does not awake inside 30 seconds, I want you to shove your member in his mouth and take a picture."
Kohta awoke with a start- he heard. The two laughed.
"Soldier Delta, you may take 48 hours leave. Can you walk to the Hospital or will you need a taxi?"
"I think I can manage, sir. Thank you very much, sir."
He saluted the Director, then departed from the scene with a brisk, confident walk.
"What happened to him?" Kohta asked, yawning.
"Number Seven shoved him into the bath back at your house so hard he cracked his neck in two places. He's lucky to be alive."
Kohta smiled. "Are you sure?"
Delta explained to his immediate superiors about the leave granted, exchanged salutes and handshakes and started to walk south close to the edge of some scrub on the east side of the road, not 100-percent sure that Lucy wouldn't take that route if she was on a rampage. Unable to twist his head he elected to stop moving and rotate his body clockwise-and-counter to check out the view to see if it was safe to proceed in front. He didn't see anything in front of him, but a rustle in the bushes not far behind caught his attention. Performing an about-turn he rolled his eyes around the area to find the source, and he saw a tell-tale piece of bone sticking out between two large growths of jasmine. He took another puff from his reliever, then reached for his radio.
The radio was snatched from his hands by an unseen force and shattered on the ground. His gun was cleft in two with alarming ease. Panicking, Delta started to mouth a yell but his throat was gripped underneath its brace from a good three metres behind the grass.
"Don't push your luck. On your way."
---
"So, what the hell was up with that bang? I can't see nothing destroyed." Bando asked.
"Lucy was being held up having something to eat by a bunch of baddies, so I charged into them and set off the bombs inside me again, and I think she got away." Mariko recapped.
"You've still got 'em, even though you got blown up last night?"
"Yup. Pretty useless though, I might fire one off for New Year's."
"Mariko, that's not a toy!" Hiromi scalded her, then took the cell-phone away and put it in her pocket. They looked around the place and saw people slowly coming outside to look at the (lack of) damage to the area and call their loved ones. Ambulance crews arrived to tend to the wounded Lucy left behind, fashionably arriving just after local news vans.
"Ohhh boy, 6 o'clock is going to be a riot tonight", Bando remarked. "More importantly, we're not finished. Lucy's still around somewhere and I've gotta find her just to see how she's holding up."
"Mommy, I've got an idea" Mariko spoke up, then whispered into her mother's ear. Hiromi nodded, smiling. Mariko then reached out with two pairs of vectors, one grabbing Bando's shoulders and the other to his waist.
"Just what do you think you're doing, you little…"
Hiromi cut him off, getting the gist. "You can be the scout party."
Bando, alarmed, was taken a good 34 feet in the air against his will, screaming- "I ain't good at heights, lemme down!"
"Can you see Lucy from up there?" Hiromi shouted. Bando, desperately trying not to blaspheme in front of a woman and child he composed himself and looked around.
"No, but I can make out a lot of military up near what looks like a graveyard."
"Where?"
"About a mile North."
"Go on ahead, see if she's there!" Hiromi replied.
"What?" Bando yelled back, then Hiromi nodded at Mariko- "Sorry in advance, Mister!" she chortled, then wildly flung the hapless solider towards the yard. He flew rather fast uttering his two favourite swearwords in between screams, and landed flat on his head a good few yards before the pack.
Getting to his feet and cradling his neck out of instinct he straightened himself up… and passed a soldier in a neck-brace running behind him in blind panic.
Bando smiled, then licked his lips. Unsure of how to hide himself he kept to the walls on the west side of the road, slowly pacing north. After a little while he found the heavily-guarded entranceway. A head-count revealed a good 40+ troopers with rifles, two tanks and six motorbikes.
"What, us? Subtle?" Bando thought to himself, and started to turn back south. He was interrupted by a very slight snoring noise in the grass opposite. His attention diverted, he crossed the road carefully and centred on the jasmine bushes to find a pleasant surprise sound asleep, face down in the mud. He gave her a gentle nudge, and she woke up with a gasp-
"Papa! Pa… You! What's going on?"
"A bunch of shit happened, I'm dead, Lucy's alive and now on your account I'm trying to help two half-baked reunions. Listen up, you know you heard a loud-ass bang earlier?"
"Yeah, what of it?"
"Encore in about two minutes. Wait for 'em to leave, get in the yard and wait for Lucy. Fall asleep and you ain't waking up, ever."
Bando dashed back down the road, leaving a sluggish Nana in his wake. On reaching the Kuramas again he stopped to compose himself, then approached Hiromi with his best puppy-dog eyes.
"Whoever you are, sir, please don't give me that look. It's a sign of impending bullshit."
"The purple-haired stumpy kid needs help crossing the road up there. I need your daughter and your phone."
"Where do ya want me?" Mariko asked before Hiromi could shape her mouth to say the letter N.
"Hmm… best go behind one of the shops, if people see you in the same place they won't buy it."
"Yes, sir!" she was already wheeling into position on the western road, but she stopped upon the body of a solider. Mariko yelled back- "Hey! I found a grenade, that'll give us some cover!"
"Um…Good idea!" Bando uttered, exasperated. Hiromi held up the phone in submission, wanting as little part of this as possible.
"I'm going to need a word with my husband about that girl. She sure as hell didn't learn that logic from me!"
"Don't knock it, with that mind she'd have made Major at the least!" Bando replied innocently, checking that the handset was working again. This time, the device was responsive. Fiddling with the controls to get the manual trigger, he called out again to Mariko.
"Ready?"
"Yeah!" the reply came.
Bando looked around the area just to make trebly-sure that nobody would be caught up with the genuine explosion caused by their 'cover story', especially around the building Mariko was hiding by.
"OK BABY, ON FIVE, PULL THE PIN. ONE… TWO… THREE… FOUR…"
---
Nana waited an eternity inside the jasmine, the scent having a pleasant but unwanted calming effect on her brain. Papa's insult and beating sharpened an edge to her that the man-with-the-plan had instilled in her when she escaped, and as much as she wanted nothing more to blunt it she needed the opposite, to avoid drifting away. But then again if she did fall asleep and miss what could become a stale running-joke in the next life, perhaps Lucy would find her by accident and she'd wake up in her own bed the following day and get little more than a cuckolding and miss out on breakfast. Or she'd pass out and snore so loudly that come the explosion she'd wake up with a gun in her face… or somewhere worse.
That notion was enough to stay her tiredness for just a little longer, and she changed mental focus onto Bando.
"Dear dead-guy, I hope you realise that there's a chance that Lucy is taking this route as well, and I hope your tone didn't infer that I hadn't really thought my plan through…"
BANG.
"…no point in finishing that sentence now. Yours, Nana."
The pack sprang into action- mounting their bikes, piling into the pair of tanks and forming columns on a split-second notice, the sleeping dragon in front of the cemetery roared into life and flew south down the road with little prompt from Kakuzawa offered. Nana made out the words "You fucking clowns!" from a radio somewhere inside the dust cloud, but it was too little and too late. After propping her eyelids open with vectors Nana counted the depleted few that had remained behind- a few troops injured from the fight at the beach around the medical tent and nobody else. With all thought of stealth abandoned Nana leaped like a gazelle from the bush, ran four-legged up the steps and into the bushes of the graveyard.
Taking her time to scour the area, Nana slowly moved up behind headstones she recognized from her fight against Lucy a few weeks prior. She could almost taste it.
Kohta beheld Kakuzawa incandescent with rage, literally hopping mad and chewing at his expensive clothing.
"I see what this is, Lucy, you cunt… set something off in the south, circle in from the north and snatch my dream away from me, well that's what you think… goddamn bitch." He stubbed out his cigar on the ground, loaded his magnum and addressed Kohta-
"Move one inch. I dare you."
Kakuzawa marched down the file Nana was hiding opposite and jumped down the steps next to the med-tent. He grabbed a soldier with his leg in splints and propped him in the middle of the road with his rifle.
"If so much as a dog starts sniffing down here, cap it! Come on you lazy fuckers, get moving, block the road facing north!" He marched back up the steps without bothering to check if the infirm had complied with his ludicrous order.
He arrived back at the yard to find Kohta gone. Face and eyes reddening by the second he discarded his jacket near Hiromi's grave and closed his eyes, mumbling to himself-
"Alright, fuck the plan. She's toast, he's toast, they're all goddamn toast. I'm going to shoot that whore in the neck and fuck her asshole while she's choking from the bullet, and she gets to die with spunk and shit in her eyes, yes oh yes oh yes…"
"That's funny. Something about you told me you preferred Isaac Hayes."
He opened his eyes, and the prize stood next to Kohta a few feet in front.
"Director Kakuzawa, I assume. We meet at last. You know it's awfully important for the parents of a new generation of Diclonii to start off on the right foot, so I'd just like to say I wouldn't do you if my species depended on it."
"You didn't seriously think that, did you? I merely wanted you because you'd been so much trouble to us, but now I've decided you're not worth hundreds of innocent lives anymore, so unless you use your vectors on me I'm going to kill both of you pricks and find somebody else."
"Kohta, we're going home."
She turned to move away and Kakuzawa aimed right at Lucy's heart, pulling the trigger. She yelled and collapsed a few metres behind Kohta in a heap. Kohta ran back to tend to her.
"Kohta, I'm fine, just get outta here. I don't want you to see this."
"DON'T MOVE, YOU SHIT!" Kakuzawa barked. "That's it, isn't it? She can't bear you to see her murder again, like when she murdered your sister and your father in cold blood. So if she thinks that you're not there she can slice away."
"Don't listen to him, Kohta! I haven't used them since I left you last night!"
"Oh come on, boy, use your head. Why do you think she came through the back way? So that you didn't have to hear the tortured screams from the front of the cemetery! NOTHING has changed about her, boy."
Kohta looked at him and her over again, then slumped his head. Lucy burst out in tears.
"Fine!" Kakuzawa yelled. "If you won't make up your mind, I'll make up hers."
He moved forward a few feet and aimed the gun at Kohta's head. Old Lucy's prediction proved itself correct.
"Kill me or he dies. You have until three." He said. "ONE…"
"I can't… I just can't." Lucy pained. "I made a promise to you."
"TWO…"
"I'm sorry, Kohta… I'm so sorry…."
"THREE."
Kakuzawa's finger caressed the trigger, pulling it back half a milimetre. His forearm was sliced clean off, and the limb fell forward onto the ground. Kakuzawa cried out and fell to his knees. Kohta gripped Lucy and clinged onto her as if death would strike if they parted.
"I undertand, Lucy. I really do understand. You had to do it, you just.."
"Kohta… He was out of my range."
"Huh?"
"I didn't do it, he's four metres away."
They looked upon Kakuzawa writhing on the floor, clutching his bloodied stump. They then saw the culprit floating behind him, and Kakuzawa followed their gaze over his shoulder.
"Mister Director, we meet at last."
NEXT: Be careful, this road has two-way traffic.