六月十八日（水）

When I met with Harusame-onee-san and Shigure-onee-san, they were worried for me because they did not recall seeing me join them in our room that our developers had set aside for us to stay in during our stay here. Shigure-onee-san asked me where I was, so I took them over to the room I stayed in to show them.

Teitoku's room.

Yesterday night, after we spoke with Ritou-chan, I couldn't bear to go to sleep so soon with my sisters. So I stumbled down the corridor, paralyzed by grief, and I eventually ended up having to sit down and cry into my lap, with my knees against my forehead. It was then that Chuck-sensei found me and asked me what was wrong. I was too tired and saddened to really tell him, so he refrained from asking again.

He then told me that my Admiral was here. At first, I did not understand him. Takahashi-san? Why would he be here? I wasn't sure if I understood Chuck-sensei. So he clarified - not my current Admiral, my previous one.

Admiral Kevinson. The only man I would ever call "Teitoku".

He led me to the room in which he is now kept. I couldn't believe my eyes. He was actually there in person. I rushed to his side on his bed. Most of his body is still bandaged because of the severity of his wounds that he incurred during the attack on our base in Okinawa. Both of his legs gone, his right arm gone...all the terrible memories hit me all at once the moment I laid my eyes on his body. The shelling, the explosions, the debris falling from the ceiling, the blood, and all the screaming...the numbness I felt when I saw what happened to him...

Chuck-sensei explained to me that Seal Team Six had brought Teitoku's body here immediately after the day of the attack. Technically our developers were supported to transport the body back to Teitoku's family, but given his relationship with his parents and our developers' own personal problems with them as well, they'd kept his body here.

I asked Chuck-sensei what they were planning to do with Teitoku. Why not move him to a hospital where they could treat him better? Why keep him here?

Chuck-sensei had to tell me that Teitoku is still incredibly comatose - so much so that any ordinary hospital would have already recommended to simply "pull the plug" on him...or, in other words, let him die for real. Obviously I did not want that. In addition, Teitoku was someone Seal Team Six wanted to keep alive. Teitoku is the only person in the world who actually has any real expertise in leading ship girls as a competent Admiral because of the four months he served with us at Okinawa. And judging from the reports he compiled from those four months' worth of leadership, our developers determined that it was worth keeping him alive with the hopes that he would recover.

So I asked how exactly they were going to try to keep him alive. Chuck-sensei said that he couldn't talk about that - just having me know about the fact that Teitoku is still being kept here would get him in trouble with the others, so if possible I needed to keep this a secret between us. But Chuck-sensei guessed that he and his squadmates were going to try to use the Abyssal technology they were gathering from the captured Abyssals and reverse-engineer the tech to discover some useful medical techniques to help Teitoku recover. But Chuck-sensei emphasized that they were far from getting any tangible results - in fact, it could be years before they could find anything significant enough to report. For being so similar to us, apparently Abyssal program coding is that much different than ours - not even hacking will do the developers any good because their hacking tools do not understand Abyssal code language.

But he let me stay with Teitoku for the night. When I asked him why he would risk getting in trouble with the other developers for showing me Teitoku's body, he said that when they were transporting him here, there had been a few times when Teitoku was mouthing something in his coma. When Chuck-sensei decided to read what he was saying, Teitoku was mouthing the words "Samidare" and "Shigure".

"Maybe fate, but good that you two come here," Chuck-sensei said.

Fate? Is that what this is called nowadays? Fate?

Regardless, I fell asleep with him. Because his right arm is no more, I crawled over to the other side of his bed so that I could tuck my head underneath his left arm instead. Now that I think back on this, I feel so pathetic. To do such childish things...

So naturally I did not end up going back to my room because I did not want to leave Teitoku here by himself. And when I did, Shigure-onee-san and Harusame-onee-san found me, asking me where I had been.

Shigure was just as equally stunned to learn that Teitoku had been here the entire time after Okinawa. Harusame fell to her knees in numb shock. Naturally too, she did not know what had befallen our Admiral at the time of the attack on Okinawa. She did not know the wounds that he suffered, so as Shigure slowly sat down next to Teitoku's bandaged body, with her eyes glued to his calm face, Harusame stayed on the floor with her face in her hands. I could see tears dripping down onto the floor through the gaps in her fingers, but Harusame did not make a noise other than her breathing.

"Teitoku? Teitoku...it's me, Shigure," Shigure-onee-san tried to talk to Teitoku. She may have been talking to him in the wild hopes that he would miraculously wake up in response to her voice. "Please, Teitoku. I'm right here. Please, open your eyes. It's me, Shigure. I...I...we...we miss you. All of us do. You can't die like this. You can't die like this. You can't die, you can't, you can't..."

And before long, Shigure too began to weep again.

I knew that Shigure's attempt to wake him was not going to work...because I myself had done the exact same thing the previous night. Teitoku is too heavily comatose. He cannot hear us, and he will not wake simply to the sounds of our voices begging him to do so. This is not a shoujo manga in which all ends are good, happy endings. Our own ending may be anything but happy, and seeing our own legless, armless Teitoku lying on his bed, bandaged and hooked up to an IV drip, is clear proof and a damning sign of an ending that none of us desire that very well may be our own.

I had already cried my fill the previous night. The dried stains on the light bedsheet underneath Teitoku's only remaining limb is evidence of this. I had cried enough yesterday - I had no tears to shed today. My body was so exhausted by all of my emotions pouring out of me that my main processing unit had to shut down my emotional cortex before my own rampant sadness began to deconstruct the very coding of my daily processes. Any more crying today, and I would have been in danger of severely malfunctioning as a direct result of my emotions. So I sat with Shigure-onee-san and I hugged her as she wept at Teitoku's side. But because Harusame was crying by herself silently at the side of Teitoku's bed, I sat down with her and hugged her too.

I may have shut down my emotions so that I would not be dictated by them, but emotions don't control whether or not your body feels good or feels bad. Physically seeing my sisters weep and suffer made me feel incredibly bad at the most basic levels of my psyche. If it is possible to feel sad without relying on emotions, then I achieved it earlier this morning.

Although I did not tell the rest of our developers about how Chuck-sensei had shown me Teitoku's room, we were discovered there anyway by Kane-sensei. At first, I thought all three of us, especially me, would be in dire trouble for discovering a room that we shouldn't have and began to beg Kane-sensei to let us stay just a little bit longer with Teitoku, but she waved me down and said not to worry. This man was our Admiral, after all. If we so cared about our Admiral enough to want to see him like this, then she wasn't going to deny us that wish.

Not one of us ate anything today. Instead, we spent the whole day with Teitoku in his room. We took care of him, switching out his IV bags, washing his face and skin with damp towels to keep him clean, and borrowing a pair of scissors to cut his hair that has grown much longer than is necessary and was giving him a rather unkempt look. Harusame even cut his fingernails on his left hand. She said that anything she could do for her Teitoku that she had abandoned and left to suffer like this would help her feel just a little bit better about herself, but it was clear to me that she wasn't feeling any better by doing these things. She still had that glazed, numbed look of pain on her face, and her eyes were deadly empty.

I suppose all of our eyes were. After all, we were sitting in front of the battered body of the young man who helped us grow as ship girls and had eventually come to treat his girls as though they were his own family, to the point where he was religiously celebrating our own birthdays with us. And for me and Shigure-onee-san specifically, he accepted our feelings and even allowed us to indulge in them. I do not know how it is usually supposed to be, but for me it was hard for me not to have a glazed, numb look on my own face. Otherwise, it would hurt too much.

Earlier tonight, Shigure informed me that should Teitoku not awake during our time here at this secret base, and should she herself not survive to see the day that Teitoku regained consciousness, she begged me to take good care of him. Because humans cannot just regrow knew limbs or have them reconstructed easily, most likely Teitoku would be a severely handicapped veteran with very limited capabilities to look after himself. And because Shigure-onee-san predicted that she, given her combat tendencies and dark record of having unstable, dangerous emotional patterns that bordered on suicidal, would most likely not live to see the day when she could meet Teitoku properly. If in such a case, she said, I needed to take care of him. I was Teitoku's girlfriend, after all. Shigure-onee-san herself did not want to steal him away from me.

I protested, saying that that wasn't how I wanted Shigure-onee-san to think of this either. She couldn't just throw herself away for my sake, just for the sake of making things "easy". I argued that in the case that Teitoku woke up again, we should both work and fight to stay alive until then. We could let him choose for himself which one of us was the one for him. Fortunately, Harusame-onee-san agreed with me. She said that Shigure-onee-san's method would only cause everyone more pain, and that we had felt enough pain now. So Shigure-onee-san relented.

"We should all take care of him together," Harusame-onee-san said, and we ended it at that.

I suppose the silver lining to all this is that I have been able to see Teitoku at least one more time. Even if it wasn't the way I wanted to meet him again...

I love you, Teitoku. I will always take care of you to the best of my ability.

五月雨