33. Belief
Itsuki Koizumi, official second-in-command and yes-man of the SOS Brigade, was, at the age of seventeen, quite possibly the esper Organisation's most accomplished operative.
He had participated in nine successful covert operations ranging from kidnapping to assassination, four against beings not entirely or even remotely human, and logged over five hundred hours of combat (average battle duration: ten minutes) against the bizarre creatures inadvertently brought forth by Haruhi Suzumiya's overactive imagination. He spoke thirteen languages, had legal citizenship in six countries, and was trained to an academic level of expertise in the customs and social mores of five more. He could recite the works of several dozen philosophers and theologists by heart (professed favourites: Nietzsche and Sartre, causing his handlers no end of worry), and possessed advanced qualifications in karate, aikido, and silat, not to mention in the use of approximately sixty different kinds of firearm, some of which would not be invented for the next thirty years. Finally, he could correctly perform over three hundred interrogation techniques of varying legality, including a deeply unpleasant little number involving a teapot, a slice of lemon, two jump-leads, and absolutely nothing else that had been partially responsible for the Organisation's discovery of the extradimensional infiltrators in its midst.
He had not possessed what would generally be termed an 'ordinary childhood' since he was two-and-a-quarter years old.
All these factors combined provided more than enough explanation for his eventual placement as the point-man on the Suzumiya detail. None of them, however, explained why he had volunteered in the first place.
The truth was, Itsuki believed in magic. Not the simple, functional, and oh-so-limited forms of magic he saw every day, the magic that allowed him to soar through the skies as a being of living flame in the strange pocket-dimensions of closed space, and muster the occasional, barely-visible glow around his fingertips in the grey mundanity of the real world. He believed in the magic of handsome princes, beautiful princesses, and wise and ancient spirits. He believed in the wild, untamed magic that could change a man's form at will, or cage his soul in bars of air and light and love. In short, he believed in fairy-tales, and all the things associated in them, even as his profession sculpted him into a machine of charm, intelligence, and carefully-applied bloodshed.
Whenever he found or was allowed a moment of spare time, he would immediately dive deep within the hoard of books he had borrowed, stolen, or bought with someone else's money, escaping to other worlds in a manner rather more figurative than was usual for an esper-in-training. The eclectic means of acquisition naturally resulted in similarly eclectic reading patterns – everything from the ancient adapted myths of the Metamorphoses and Zi Bu Yu to post-industrial morality tales and the forerunners of the many-formed fantasy genre. All had been devoured with the same terrifying speed, before being squirreled away like some fantastical dragon's treasure.
One of his most bountiful sources of fresh stories had in fact been one of his handlers, providing his first demonstration of just how little could be hidden from the Organisation's operatives. The handler in question was a friendly, intelligent, and remarkably literate young man, and so it was only to be expected that he was directly (if accidentally) responsible for the adolescent Koizumi noticing that he was attracted to those of his own sex, three years after the Organisation's analysts had picked up on it.
There were a lot of factors leading to the incident that made the book donations stop. Teenage hormones and teenage awkwardness were the most obvious, accompanied by a dearth of genuine, human affection from any other source and the innumerable other, little things that separated an Organisation adoptee from an ordinary child of any sexuality. Itsuki had little use for Freudian psychology beyond its capacity for weirding out one's audience when injected into one's daily fauxlosophic monologues, but the textbook example of an Oedipus/Electra complex he'd somehow managed to run straight into did make him wonder sometimes.
Whatever the case, he could remember what happened with perfect clarity... which was odd, since he saw little use in the memory other than fodder for the occasional bit of casual self-deprecation. "When I was fourteen, I tried to seduce one of my surrogate parents" was such a magnificent conversation-stopper, after all.
He had never tried it on Kyon, though. Sometimes, that look of fascinated horror he was so good at provoking in people wasn't nearly as fun as it usually was.
The room had been wholly nondescript – another cheap hotel serving as a front company for the Organisation. He'd been sitting on the bed when the door opened, picking dried blood from under his fingernails as he slowly came down from the high of the last mission. There hadn't been a moment of thought or consideration to it – he'd simply rushed over and embraced the older man, standing on tip-toes to give him a kiss that was nervous and enthusiastic in equal measure.
The operative's hand had been gentle but firm as he pushed Itsuki away, and his smile had been more tired and sad than anything else when he placed his latest offering, a collection of works by a Danish author named Hans Christian Andersen, on the table beside the door. The young esper could still see the book's glossy cover in his mind's eye, its pastel shades faintly reflecting the hotel-room lights. His benefactor did not say a single word as he turned around and exited the room, and Itsuki never saw him again.
Later, when he actually read that last book, he wondered if his handler had been trying to tell him something beforehand. The stories of failure and heartbreak, where life went on as the magic died, could easily be seen as a subtle suggestion to put aside childish things and face the real world – whatever that happened to be.
It had not worked. Two years later, he had been deployed to North High School, was near-literally headhunted by a hyperactive teenage deity, and had promptly found himself up to his eyeballs in exactly the sort of supernatural weirdness that he craved. It didn't matter that his job was to prevent the aforementioned weirdness from getting dangerously out of hand – he was at the heart of the universe now, the birthplace of miracles. He had travelled through time and space, fought incomprehensible beings, and almost witnessed the end of everything, with only an enigmatic alien computer, a shy, sweetly ineffectual time-traveller, and a smartmouthed, unpowered student to watch his proverbial back, and he had loved every moment... apart from the business with the recursive time loop and the overdue homework. No job was perfect, after all.
Then Kyon had disappeared and been replaced, and everything went straight to hell.
They had never seen it coming – in fact, he still had no idea beyond a general timeframe about when the switch had taken place. The clues had all been there, but hidden under so much of the white noise the SOS Brigade usually experienced that they were only visible in hindsight. The surprise Canada trip had been odd, but not that far outside the norm, and the relative quietness of the next couple of weeks had helped allay any lingering suspicions. Likewise, the developments in Kyon and Haruhi's relationship had been neither unexpected nor unwelcome (even if he'd had to repeat the last bit to himself a couple of times before he entirely believed it), and if the latter had been a little more subdued than usual... well, that just meant less work for the rest of them. Not that Itsuki particularly objected to that work, but it was only polite to take everyone else's feelings into consideration. It was only after nineteen esper cells and a still-unknown number of time-travellers had vanished in a single night that they had realised something might be wrong, and by then, it was far too late.
That was how the human supernatural community had learned about it, anyway. Itsuki was not privy to the inner workings of the Integrated Data Entity's alien mind, but he would have placed a considerable amount of money on the god-computer knowing beforehand. Probably thought it would make an interesting natural experiment, he mused bitterly.
Whilst his semi-voluntary escape from his home universe had resulted in a significantly decreased chance of getting his upper torso bitten off by a Chaos infiltrator disguised as a waiter (an experience he suspected he would be reliving for years to come), being the sole representative of his civilisation in another dimension had not been much fun either – particularly once the TSAB reluctantly decided that the dimensional space around the Suzumiyaverse was now too treacherous for them to continue sending aid. He remembered lobbying frantically to obtain support for Yuki Nagato's madcap scheme for a last-ditch blockade run. He remembered staying awake throughout the night of the relief force's departure, hoping against hope that his own contributions of vague local knowledge and second-hand threat assessment might somehow prove useful. Most of all, though, he remembered the sight that had greeted him upon their return.
Though one hundred and fifty thousand people was a pathetic amount when considered as a percentage of an entire planet's population, it became a whole lot more significant when you were trying to ferry them all down to the surface in as little time as possible via the largest spaceport you could requisition, especially when half the new arrivals (and a fair measure of their rescuers) were in need of urgent medical assistance. Battered, scarred warships were stacked above the landing field, dipping up and down to deposit their living cargo with almost balletic grace, a small city's worth of refugees being herded (or, in some cases, carried) towards the staging areas and the officials assigned to process them.
Even those who could walk usually had something wrong with them. Some were hunched in on themselves, trying to hide the mutilations, missing limbs, and bizarre mutations that were the all-too-common legacy of exposure to a hostile, Chaos-tainted environment. Others were hypersensitive to their surroundings, jumping at the slightest unexpected movement and regarding the wide open space they were in with abject terror. Yet others stared around vacuously, their gait sluggish and tentative, their eyes uncomprehending. Director Sheng, their nominal leader, had told him later that those last ones had simply experienced a 'general system error' (his words), their minds outright refusing to accept a world where the sky was clear, the landscape was pristine, and every little thing in visual range was not a potential threat.
"But it was only three weeks since we left!" Itsuki had exclaimed, aghast. "How did you all get hit so hard so fast?"
"Weeks? It was weeks to you?"
That was how they had discovered Chaos's time-distortion capabilities, an invaluable tactical asset that the Entity had, again, failed to inform them of. What a surprise.
He had never really integrated with the other Suzumiyaverse evacuees. They stood apart, united by shared experience he could not even begin to guess at. Sometimes, he wondered if they resented him, the one who had deserted them before the battle truly began, but he never asked. It wasn't a question he really wanted an answer to.
The work he had taken on after the evacuation had been a self-imposed obligation, a way to pass the time, keep his sanity, and muster some sort of apology whether its recipients wanted it or not. Much of it was secretarial, greasing the wheels of the makeshift government-in-exile his compatriots had assembled, but more important was the liaison work with the Bureau. One way or another, he had ended up as the human face of the Suzumiyaverse, and he was fully prepared to exploit this for everything it was worth.
After the disembarkation, their benefactors had assigned them to the edge of the steadily-expanding refugee district south of Mid-Childa's capital, Clanagan. The district was crowded, messy, and under-supplied, but this was not due to deliberate, malicious marginalisation so much as opportunity costs. The Bureau had said they wanted to get their newest guests a proper home as soon as possible, and given all that he had seen and helped them do, he was inclined to believe them. It was just that when you were trying to juggle an interdimensional war effort, two million (and counting) Federation-space asylum-seekers whose wellbeing was an explicit condition of co-operation from that universe's representatives, and a motley handful of dispossessed time-travellers who couldn't time-travel and espers who couldn't esp, it was fairly obvious which would be assigned the least priority.
Thanks largely to Itsuki's efforts, though, progress had been made. In fact, he'd been part of the inspection team Director Sheng had assembled to check out the housing developments on the eastern continent a few days before Chaos attacked the planet, and had found it entirely to his liking. When combined with the famous Bureau rehabilitation scheme to complement their few, horribly overworked therapists, he had felt he had reason to be confident about the exiles' future even were the restoration of their universe to take longer than expected.
Even the invasion of Mid-Childa had not knocked them back as far as might have been expected. When the portals started opening in the streets and daemons soared across the sky, the enclave's inhabitants had been faster to react than even the Bureau combat mages, swinging into action with grim resignation and lethal competence. It was as if they had been expecting something like that to happen – hardly surprising, when one considered what they'd been through. Battered yet functional weapons had seemingly appeared out of nowhere as espers rocketed skywards and time-travellers vanished into parallel planes, almost too quickly for even Itsuki, for all his training, to keep up. Though it was true that they had been amongst the worst-hit districts, as well as the last to receive aid, this was more a testament to the ferocity of their resistance than anything else.
No, it was not the invasion that had truly broken them. It was what came after.
The cleansing of their universe should have been a moment of joy, of triumph, and for a short time, it was. The survivors' lingering antagonism towards the Integrated Data Entity nearly vanished overnight, the god-computer's procrastination conveniently forgotten. Everyone had had a long, hard, journey, and more than anything, they just wanted to go home. Then, of course, they had heard the rest of the story.
Haruhi's powers had not, strictly speaking, failed. Chaos was gone, and unlikely to come back any time soon. Unfortunately, the same applied to quite a lot of other things. Entire planets, systems, and even galaxies had vanished, hundreds of races lost to eternity. The Earth's population had been quartered, its inhabitants walking amongst and interacting with faded, incomplete shadows that had once been vibrant, living people and places. The scouts sent back spoke of towns like abandoned film sets, their buildings looking real and concrete until viewed from a certain angle as their citizens drifted aimlessly or looped their behaviour patterns over and over. Worst of all, though, was the fact that this new, stunted reality was all its people knew, save the odd, flickering dream of that strange, foreign country called the past. Even those friends and loved ones who came back might as well have been dead to the refugees for all the relation they bore to the men, women, and children they had known. Itsuki himself had tried to contact those few members of the Organisation he considered to be friends, and found nobody matching their description.
Suicides in the enclave had quintupled overnight. The Entity had refused to make any efforts to fix the mess it had created, stating through its Interfaces that all mission objectives had been reached, and that further tampering in an unstable environment such as the Suzumiyaverse in its current state would most likely prove counterproductive. After twelve particularly angry and stupid refugees had been disintegrated at the molecular level whilst attempting to assault a Humanoid Interface, the Bureau had been forced to step in.
Though things had calmed down a little since then, the ruined streets were still worryingly quiet as he picked his way through them. Solid-shot weaponry was not welcome on Mid-Childa, but he had developed the habit of carrying a small automatic pistol on his person anyway. Two attempted muggings in one day had been quite enough.
A multi-storey apartment building loomed up ahead, the words 'GOVERNMENT HOUSE' mockingly spray-painted across its cracked facade. The doors slid open jerkily as he walked in, and the receptionist gave him a forced, robotic smile. Itsuki knew from past experience that the expression was more genuine than it looked – Benjamin Peretz had never quite recovered from the nerve damage inflicted by a Siren of Mislaato's tender ministrations, which was one of the reasons he was stuck with an undemanding desk-job.
"Morning, Ben," the teenager greeted him, widening his own, more permanent smile in response. "What's that on the desk?"
The indicated object was a gigantic rifle (though 'cannon' might have been an equally accurate descriptor) that, lying on its side, managed to hide every part of the short receptionist below the chin. It was a sleek, almost organic-looking affair, made of a curious bluish metal that caught the light in strange and troubling ways.
"Oh, that? Belongs to the director's visitor. Left it here for security reasons. Speaking of, they wanted you for the meeting. Door's over there – you arrived just in time."
Itsuki shot him a quizzical glance, but the receptionist was already buried deep in his paperwork once more, his shock of spiky black hair bobbing in and out of view behind the massive gun. Eventually, he gave up, shrugged, and walked into the study.
Since the only desk or desk-like structure in the building that had survived the invasion was reserved for Peretz due to his health, the government-in-exile's leader had had to make do with strategically-applied cardboard boxes. These also served as chairs for guests, though one of the two visitors currently present was using the director's dilapidated armchair instead, in a display of typical Sheng chivalry.
One of the guests was quite obviously the owner of the gun, a big, heavily-scarred man in oddly insectoid armour of the same tinted metal. Itsuki could see that he wasn't an evacuee, though he couldn't have said why without reverting to the sort of rubbish about 'auras' and the like that he generally used to annoy his acquaintances. Suzumiyaverse refugees had one particular feel to them, and everyone else had another. It was as simple (and retroactively disturbing) as that, really.
The other guest, who was shifting her weight nervously to avoid being engulfed by the armchair, was Mikuru Asahina.
Itsuki had not seen much of the SOS Brigade's other remaining human since their escape, but then again, Asahina had a habit of fading into the background. Her natural lot in life, it appeared, was to be an aesthetically pleasing piece of furniture with all the assertiveness and effectiveness of a wet tea-towel. It would have been reasonable to assume that this was the role she had been trained for, but he'd been working alongside her for over a year, and nobody was that good an actor. Frankly, he had half-expected her to stick with her to stick with her catering job on board the Eventide whilst her superiors employed a more competent agent, but he was prepared to be proven wrong. There had to have been some reason she ended up babysitting a dormant god, after all.
This Asahina certainly seemed more alert and focused, though the overall impression of something small and fluffy about to get eaten had not entirely vanished. Whether this was to do with her or the chair, though, was open to interpretation.
Director Sheng rose from his own box and gave him a friendly nod as he entered. He was a balding, out-of-shape man on the wrong side of fifty, who had originally been a computer technician for a small esper faction operating out of Macau before their previous leader had been publicly flayed alive. Two months later, he had found himself in command of the entire Suzumiyaverse resistance movement on Earth, and it showed. He had a nervous tic in his left eyebrow, and an empty sleeve where his arm had been crudely amputated after it started to manifest the early symptoms of Warp-induced mutation. The rumours said that he had seen his entire family tortured to death in front of him, and that he had single-handedly killed the daemonic governor of Hong Kong and her legion of undying bodyguards with nothing but a fruit-knife. Itsuki believed both.
"Morning, Koizumi. Just the man I wanted to see. According to Major Ocampo here, our time-travelling buddies have decided to give us a little extra help with the whole Chaos business, and I figured that with your contacts in the Bureau, it'd be a good idea to have you listen in. Don't worry – they already gave you the go-ahead. Seems Miss Asahina here was quite impressed with your work."
Mikuru went bright pink and squeaked something unintelligible, but Itsuki was paying more attention to Major Ocampo – or, more specifically, the pair of very large knives attached to Major Ocampo's belt.
"Aren't your agents forbidden from carrying weapons?" he asked.
The major's grin lit up his otherwise brutish face in a decidedly pleasant manner. "Right. Who'd you think enforces that? Sorry we couldn't help you out that much – or, at least, our other selves couldn't help you out that much. Whatever. Class Four reality-warps are damned confusing. See, our biggest problem, as I'm sure you've heard, is paradoxes. Fry your own grandmother or something, and odds are you'll futz up the space-time continuum something fierce. Bad news for everyone, and then some. That's why we're extra-careful about deploying our agents to observe rather than intervene, give them routine mind-wipes before we send 'em back, and try to exploit pre-existing time loops and Schrödinger events – helps avoid time-stream pollution, and reduces the odds of us accidentally erasing ourselves or something similarly daft. Suppose it was also the reason those invaders didn't get a few regiments of us dropped on their heads prior to the Class Four, though I don't know why the higher-ups bothered. From what Miss Asahina here said, things got really messy near the end."
"So there's a way around paradoxes?" Itsuki surmised.
"Sure thing. Why'd you think I'm here? The precise hows and whys of it elude me, but parallel universes don't have enough of a causal link for someone from the future of one to create a paradox by messing in the past of another. Both logistics and dimensional physics mean that we can only get to whatever the 'current' time is in another universe, which I'm afraid rules out popping over to Chaos's home universe a few decades ago for an assassination-job, but we can certainly bring some considerable firepower to bear in the here-and-now."
"Like what?" Sheng asked, eyes intent.
"Well, I can't say that our spacefleet'd match up to anything anyone else is bringing to the table – still haven't figured out proper energy shields, for a start, and interdimensional travel's way out – but our ground-combat potential isn't to be sneezed at, and I'd rate our plasma technology above most of the weaponry on show except for the Bureau's magic and that Spiral voodoo. Which doesn't really count as technology, whatever their nutbag 'scientists' say, so go figure. Oh, and we might have a couple of other tricks up our sleeves as well. You esper-types were able to use your powers around those daemon-things, right?"
"To an extent, yes," the director agreed. "Our own specialists believe that they generate an aura of unreality, making the laws of physics more pliable in their presence. Normally, we can't do much in the real world when compared with the closed-space bubbles Suzumiya generated in our own universe, but with this 'Warp-energy' Chaos uses, I suspect we could boost our abilities even beyond that. Given the ghastly things it does to the minds and bodies of those exposed to it" – he indicated his missing arm – "I don't think we'll be exploring it too deeply, but it should certainly give us an edge against them."
"Right – same for us. According to the logs from our agents' TPDD devices, that same energy can actually negate paradoxes for short jumps. Now, by 'short', I mean really short – couple of seconds at best if you're facing down even a relatively big swarm – but you have to admit, being able to dodge an attack by ducking into a different time-plane is pretty damned useful." Ocampo's eyes flashed. "Until Miss Asahina briefed us, we had no idea that something like the world before could even exist... but that didn't stop us from seeing it. We saw it every time we closed our eyes – a bright, verdant land full of life and colour, far more real than the pale reflection we lived in – and I will regret that I was not there to see its fall until my dying day. These so-called gods turned our greatest asset against us, and used it to destroy and pervert everything we held dear. Frankly, I find the notion of returning the favour decidedly appealing."
Looking out at the ruined cityscape through the broken window, Itsuki could not say that he disagreed. There were some types of magic that even he did not believe should be allowed to exist, and some dark miracles that should never see the dawn.
His ever-present smile did not waver, but his hands glowed dimly as they clenched into fists at his side, whilst his eyes reflected the light of burning pages as exotic tales and fantastical illustrations crumbled into dust and ashes.
Evening had arrived, Mid-Childa's dozen moons standing out like pinpoints against the darkening sky. Itsuki walked through the smashed-in doorway of his small apartment, and let his smile vanish for the first time that day, massaging his aching cheek muscles as he did so. Now that he was alone, it served no purpose.
The desktop computer lit up as he approached, its rudimentary AI registering his presence. The device had been a gift from Bureau Intelligence – mostly electronic to aid use by non-mages, but fitted with a wide selection of technosorcerous gizmos like the AI to make his life easier, as well as, presumably, more bugs than an Osaka hostel if they followed remotely similar protocols to the Organisation. Someone had tried to steal it during the post-invasion looting, and the best that could be said was that they had found most of her. Eventually.
He sat down in front of it, and started typing up a report on time-traveller capabilities addressed to Mid-Childan Naval Command... whilst simultaneously employing a pad of paper next to the computer to write a far more detailed report on the exact same thing, this time addressed to Director Sheng. Old habits died hard.
Major Ocampo had left halfway through the morning, citing pressing appointments elsewhere, and had asked them to direct any further questions to Mikuru. Apparently, she had had several of her mental-restriction locks removed, whatever that meant – the only answer he'd got when he asked was a simultaneous, monotone 'that's classified' from both of them. Whatever the case, she had proven helpful and informative, if still terminally shy and disinclined to talk to anyone except Itsuki. Again, he didn't know why this was, but supposed that it was something to do with their shared experience on the Suzumiya detail... unless the fact that her other interrogator was one of the few survivors of Ho Chi Minh City, mutated into a nine-foot-tall skeletal monstrosity with far too many eyes, had something to do with it. The government-in-exile were doing an excellent job with what they had, but they really needed to work on their people skills.
There was the faint rustle of a book closing behind him, and he spun round, automatic pistol already in his hand.
Yuki Nagato was sitting on the settee, the elderly, battered Hans Christian Andersen anthology in her hand. He slowly lowered the gun, the reddish stains that had been the sole remains of those twelve refugees appearing in his mind's eye with horrible clarity, and adopted the relaxed, friendly smile that implied that he had mysterious, hideously powerful aliens appear in his sitting room and rifle through his bookshelves all the time. Letting one of them see me lose my composure – stupidstupidSTUPID...
"Good evening, Miss Nagato. How may I help you?"
Her voice was as flat and devoid of inflection as ever. "At 15:39 Mid-Childan time, the Data Integration Thought Entity released all known data on the unit who brought about its home universe's readjustment. In addition, it has removed all support and privileges granted to me as a Type Seven Humanoid Interface."
There were many adjectives that could be used to describe Itsuki Koizumi, but 'slow' was not one of them. Oh.
"So why are you here?" he asked, playing for time as his brain struggled to keep up.
Nagato blinked slowly, the closest thing to surprise he had ever seen from her. "Curious. That data is... unavailable to me. If it presents an inconvenience, I will depart."
Silence fell, and Itsuki's mind raced. He had not known what he would do when confronted with the creature that destroyed their universe. Would he attack it like those poor, foolish civilians had? Would he scream at it, demanding an explanation for its actions? Would he simply ignore it, treating it with the same dispassionate disdain with which it had snuffed out trillions of living beings? He did not have the slightest idea.
And all this time, it had been Yuki Nagato. Nagato, who had protected the SOS Brigade more times than he cared to remember. Nagato, who had gone against her own creator to save tens of thousands of people she never knew. Nagato, whose people had cast her out to cover their own political backsides. What if the rewrite had... not been so dispassionate? What if she hadn't known what would go wrong? What if she had seen it as the only option available? He didn't have an answer – he had not been there, after all.
"Look, will you stop staring at me like that?" he snapped.
Her gaze dipped downwards. "I apologise. This is an inconvenience. I will leave-"
"Wait."
The word had come out on instinct, before he had time to muster the thoughts behind it. What he said next was rather more considered... but not by much.
"That settee folds out into a bed. You do use beds, right?"
Those depthless grey eyes were boring into him again, and he squirmed beneath their scrutiny. "Why?"
There were a hundred different answers he could give, but in the end, he chose the honest one. "You're Brigade."
"The social unit designated as the 'SOS Brigade' is little more than a fiction intended to allow the representatives of various organisations to safely supervise the activities of Haruhi Suzumiya. It holds no inherent value."
"Used to be. Not any more. You know why." He was still smiling, but for the first time in weeks, it actually felt genuine. "Don't worry – you'll find him. And when you do, I don't think the people who took him are going to know what hit them."
It was a while before Nagato replied, and when she did, her voice was almost inaudible. "I... believe that to be a task appropriate to the entirety of the SOS Brigade."
There was no mistaking it – the smile was definitely genuine. "I'll hold you to that. Coffee?"
Magic had betrayed him. It had destroyed his world, and turned everything he knew and cared about into a shallow, warped parody of itself. Nevertheless, there were some smaller, more mundane aspects of it that he still believed in. The magic that had turned an anarchic, disparate collection of oddballs into something resembling a family. The magic that let him feel safe in the middle of the apocalypse itself, all because one unpowered and thoroughly ordinary person was at his side. The magic that let him keep fighting when all around him was dead and gone, when all the forces of a distant, nightmare universe were arrayed against him. He did not know whether it was love, respect, or even simple faith, but he knew its cause, and he intended to bring him back.
It was as simple as that.
Author's Notes: HELLO, BOYS, I'M BAAA-ACK!
Ahem. 'Scuse me. Anyway, you lucky people have an extra two chapters to chew on, with more coming soonish. Can't promise a regular schedule again yet, but suffice it to say that the story has not been forgotten.
I'm inclined to agree with Itsuki that Freudian psychology is mostly a crock, but it's fun and easy to write about, and no crossover featuring Neon Genesis Evangelion in a major capacity would be complete without it. So it goes, eh?
Whatever the case, it's certainly true that of the dozens upon dozens of named characters in this beastie, the ones who are sane, stable, and well-adjusted could be counted on the fingers of both hands... at best. Do I intend to rectify this imbalance any time soon? Hell, no.