by Ariana Aislinn
Chapter 1
Disclaimer: The anime Brigadoon is the property of Bandai and Sunrise. All characters are used only for fun and not for profit.
Author's Note: This is a sort of "fill in the blanks" story. It's a rewriting of episode 17 that follows the plot exactly as it is in the anime, but it has a lot of added material—a look at Marin's thoughts, scenes we don't see in the anime, her reactions to things, etc. There are pretty major spoilers here, so if you haven't see as far as episode 17, be warned. I really enjoyed writing this; I hope you enjoy reading it as much. And yes, I do have at least one other Brigadoon story in the works that I haven't yet posted; I'm waiting for my beta reader to get back to me. I may write more Brigadoon fanfics in the future, maybe after I finally get a hold of the 6th DVD and finish the series. ^_^
Marin shivered, wrapping her makeshift cloak of ragged brown canvas more tightly around herself. So much of Submaton Color had been quite warm, and the wraparound dress she'd made from a large leaf had been perfectly adequate there…but here, in the cold onset of a Tokyo winter, a flimsy leaf, a few old newspapers wrapped around her legs, and a dirty canvas tarp weren't nearly enough. What month had it been when she left, anyway? And just how long had she been in Submaton Color?
No use thinking about it, though; she wasn't there anymore, and dwelling on it would only remind her of what she no longer had. Not only were the languidly paradisiacal days in that parallel world gone, but she had returned home to find the tenement burned and all her friends and family gone, as well.
This won't do at all! Marin shook her head. She had to concentrate on what came next, not all the things that were troubling her. She smiled weakly, glancing out at the snowflakes that had just begun to fall. "I never thought I'd be sleeping under a bridge," she said aloud. "Well…it's cold, but I'll be warm enough to get some rest. And then maybe I can find out what happened to the tenement, and where everyone has gone…eh?" She cocked her head, listening. She thought she'd heard something, perhaps footsteps on the grass nearby, but they'd stopped now.
Something tickled in the back of her mind, perhaps some sort of intuition warning her, and she rolled out of the way just as a glinting knife stabbed down, right where her head had been. Marin rolled into a crouch, looking up with wide eyes to see a vaguely familiar face. It was the woman who had attacked her after the World Expo. She seemed to have fared no better than Marin; the woman's skin was pallid and gray, her hair stringy and dirty, her dress in tatters, and her feet bare. She looked much the same as the first time Marin had seen her—certainly no better.
"So, you're back! You thought you could escape and leave the rest of us to die. But it didn't work, did it? You went to stop all this…but you didn't. All this happened because of you, and you're the one who should have stopped it—and you didn't!" The woman lunged, panting hysterically as she lashed out at Marin with the knife.
"I tried!" Marin dodged clumsily, stumbling and almost falling. She wanted to explain, but fear slowed her thinking so she could not figure out what to say, or how to say it. How could she explain that everything that had happened up till now was all a mistake? This woman had originally attacked Marin because her own daughter had died in the fiasco at the Expo, when monomakia, the great biological monsters of the other world, had come to try to kill Marin. The woman blamed the girl for her daughter's death. And who was to say she was wrong, really? After all, if Marin had never gone to the Expo, the monomakia would not have come, and the other little girl, little Kaori, would not have died.
On the other hand…what could Marin have done? She had never asked the monomakia to chase her, and she had done what little she could to try to stop the destruction. She had actually gone so far as to journey to Brigadoon, the mysterious, golden maze of another world that had appeared so many months before, washed in rippling rainbows and phasing in and out of visibility in the blue spring sky. That was the world from which the monomakia had come, and when representatives from the United States had asked her to board the Apollo 11 flight to try to reach Brigadoon, she had agreed. Since the strange, biological/mechanical monsters were after her, perhaps she could serve as an ambassador and somehow find out what they wanted.
But it had all gone wrong. The mission was a complete failure, and Marin had not turned out to be the one the monomakia had wanted after all. It was all some colossal, ironic mistake, and Marin was just an all-too-ordinary, thirteen-year-old girl.
But how could she explain that to this woman who was trying to kill her, blaming her for all the death and destruction caused by the monomakia and the threatening proximity of that strange world in the sky? Breathing heavily now, Marin continued to try to dodge. The knife came down again, and she stumbled backwards, falling on the grass. Snapping her hands out in a panic, she barely managed to grasp the handle of the knife, holding it back with her meager strength.
"I didn't know you'd gone, at first." The woman almost grinned, her eyes crazed and frightening. "I've been waiting for you. I set fire to your house—but you weren't there! Now you're back, and you'll pay for what happened to my Kaori!"Marin gasped for breath. "It was you that burned down the tenement? Where is everyone that was there? What happened to them?!"
The woman grinned, pressing the knife closer. "Who cares? Maybe they're all dead! Everyone is dead, but you're alive, and it's all your fault!"
Marin bit back a sob. "What do you expect me to do?"
"Die!!" She lunged again.
Just then a low hum filled the air, and both Marin and her attacker looked up, their struggle momentarily halted. Concentric circles rippled in the gray, clouded sky, as on the surface of a still pond. They both threw themselves aside, then scrambled to their feet and ran. Months may have passed since Marin had left her world for Brigadoon, but she remembered what that signaled.
Seconds later, muddy earth and rubble poured from the sky like sand from an hourglass, rushing down to bury the spot where Marin and the woman had been grappling with each other. Marin ran with her head down, trying to outdistance it, but the edge of the falling mass caught her. Dirt and pebbles pelted her, stinging her bare arms. She coughed as she breathed in the dust that surrounded her, stumbling. And then something hit her—she wasn't sure what, but possibly a large piece of stone. Pain exploded in her head, and bright lights flashed in front of her eyes. She sprawled on her hands and knees, blinking dizzily.
There was no time to recover, however. Marin could hear her attacker's shouts, and she knew the woman had gotten clear of the falling rock and earth. Forcing herself to her feet, Marin shook her head in an effort to clear it and stumbled off in a limping run, panting and bordering on panic.
The woman's shouts grew fainter, and after she had run several blocks, Marin slowed, gulping in breaths of air and choking back sobs of fear. She swallowed hard, trying to calm herself as she walked. She'd escaped her attacker and the mutual collapse, and she was safe, for the moment.
Safe—nothing in Tokyo was safe anymore. She'd come home from Brigadoon and the side trip to Submaton Color confused, unsure of what role she had to play in all this or whether she really mattered or could do anything to help at all. The only thing she'd wanted was to go home to her family, all the residents of the tenement…but no one was there. Somewhere inside of her was a place that feared they were all dead, perhaps killed in the fire, or in the mutual collapse. What would she do if they were gone? She choked back another sob. None of them were her blood relatives, but they might as well be, for she loved them as if they were. Uncle Tadashi, Jun, Uncle Onando, Grandpa Shuta, Mike, and the three aunties who ran the candy shop…all of them were very nearly as much her family as Grandpa Gen and Grandma Moto had been.
The pain of losing her beloved grandparents was all too fresh. Grandma Moto had died quietly and peacefully, just after that fateful day at the Expo, when the danger was past and Marin had thought they were safe. Grandpa Gen had died only the year before, and although she knew that her grandparents had been old, it was not fair to have to lose both of them in so short a time. And now the rest of her adopted family was gone, as well. It did not matter that she was not even a blood relative of Grandpa Gen and Grandma Moto. Left on the doorstep of the tenement as a baby, she'd been raised by the elderly, childless couple, but the rest of the residents had done almost as much. She couldn't bear the thought of losing them, too.
As she walked listlessly down the street, Marin looked at the devastation around her. The mutual collapse had apparently been happening with increasing frequency. She could hear a low rumble off in the distance that suggested another rush of falling rubble had begun elsewhere in the city…perhaps more than one. Looking up, she could see two pillars of falling earth rushing down there on the horizon, beyond the buildings. There might be even more that she couldn't see.
Mutual collapse was the term scientists had adopted to describe what was happening, although they had a difficult time explaining it. The close proximity of the other world, Brigadoon, was causing instability, and the two worlds were exchanging matter and collapsing in on each other. The sky would open up at random intervals, and debris would come crashing down, or the land would break into pieces and fly upwards toward Brigadoon. The constant exchange was destructive for both worlds—Marin had seen the craters and mounds of rubble in Brigadoon, too.
She plodded on, her thoughts rambling aimlessly as much as her feet did. She had no real destination in mind, and she stared blankly into the gloomy grayness, her green eyes shadowed and unfocused. There was nowhere for her to go, really…after discovering the destroyed tenement building, she'd heard an evacuation announcement that had directed her to the junior high, but although she had seen familiar faces there, none of them were friendly. Too many of her old classmates blamed her for all that had happened, or simply didn't care. Not welcome at the shelter and having no home of her own anymore, there wasn't anywhere for her to go—that was why she had settled down to rest under the bridge in the first place.
Twilight seemed to be falling now, and the snow continued to fall, as well. Marin shivered, so numb with cold she barely felt it anymore, except as a dull, ever-present sensation at the back of her mind. Her rust-red hair hung in dirty tangles around her face, and she herself was covered in dirt and dust and icy snowflakes. Marin devoted little conscious thought to her discomfort, however, or to anything else, for that matter. She felt numb all over, except for a dull, gnawing ache that reminded her just how long it had been since she'd eaten anything. Not really thinking about it, she found her feet wandering down a side street in the general direction of a faint, golden-yellow light amidst the gray of dusk.
Marin stopped outside the building that shed the yellow glow. Sniffing the air, she peered inside and realized that it was a small bakery. It was not much of a bakery at the moment, however; two small, pitiful loaves of bread sat on a rack in front of the window, looking plain and lonely. At the counter, the baker argued vehemently with a potential customer. The man was desperate for food but had little money to buy the bread for his wife and family, and the baker refused to lower the price. Rationing had made it difficult for him to get the ingredients to make bread, and he couldn't afford to charge less, or he would starve, as well.
Marin barely heard the argument. Conscious thought faded even more, and the warm light of the bakery seemed to grow dim, the voices far off. The loaves of bread sat there, small but smelling so very good. Marin licked her lips and quietly stepped forward, reaching out for a plastic-wrapped loaf. She tucked it under the folds of her raggedy cloak, then turned, eyes still focused on nothing, and headed for the door.
A hand closed sharply on Marin's wrist, tightly enough to make her wince with pain. For a moment she panicked, thinking the crazed attacker from earlier had found her again…and then a hand reached out to grab the loaf of bread she had concealed, and she thought for a second that it was a thief as hungry as she was. But no, the hand placed the loaf back on the shelf. Marin looked up to see a familiar face—wavy pink hair cut to chin-length, maroon eyes, and a permanently sardonic expression, now scowling sternly. She struggled, suddenly indignant. "Let me go!"
The baker and his customer looked up, confused, as they watched the older girl drag the younger one roughly away by her arm. She stalked off down the street, her ever-present bokuto in one hand, the other clamped firmly on Marin's wrist.
Words spilled out of Marin's mouth, and she found herself trying to explain—possibly to herself as much as to the other girl. "Midori, it's not what you think! I was hungry, I was so starving, I had nowhere to go and I didn't know what to do and…"
Midori dragged Marin roughly behind a building and shoved her, so she stumbled and fell into a snowdrift. A booted foot planted itself on her back—not hard enough to really hurt, but it was definitely not a comfortable position. "What, so that makes it okay to steal?" The high school girl's voice was impossible to read; it sounded sarcastic and impassive as it always did. "Both of those men were starving too, in case you hadn't noticed. You think you're the only one? You think that makes it all okay?" Midori lifted her foot, reached down, and dragged Marin up by her arm.
Anger flared up suddenly, and Marin's weariness abated a little. "What do you know, Midori?! All I did, all I went through was for nothing, and now there's no one here! I'm alone and I'm tired, hungry, and scared! You don't know anything!" She began to beat her fists against Midori's chest. "So shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up!" Her voice faded into ragged, angry sobs as she continued to beat a continuous staccato. Finally she slowed, exhausted and spent. She realized that Midori was not retaliating in any way at all, despite her roughness. Knowing the older girl's temper and her usual stubborn refusal to take that kind of attitude from anyone, that was rather surprising. Marin looked up at her and saw Midori standing stock still, eyes closed and her mouth set in a thin line, simply taking the abuse. She opened her eyes and looked down as the rain of blows slowed and stopped, and suddenly she smiled the sardonic smile Marin knew so well. "Well, it can't have been all that bad, if you still have that much energy."
Marin blinked. "Midori-sempai…?"
Midori's smile softened, and she put her arms around Marin's shoulders. "Come on, I'll take you back to my house. Let's get you something to eat and some decent clothes. You've had a rough time of it, so many adventures…you even got to ride on Apollo, huh? Sorry, I hope I didn't hurt you much…I've been worried about you, kid. Anyway, come on. It's cold out here."
Marin choked back another sob, hugging Midori impulsively. After a moment she took a deep breath and tried to compose herself. She nodded quietly, standing up straight and following the older girl down the street. The anger had left her feeling drained, but it had taken some of the numbness with it. The possibility of a meal gave her strength, as well, and she hurried to match Midori's long strides. Midori slowed a little so Marin could keep up, and they walked in silence, the older girl warm in her long, gray skirt and sweater, with her wooden sword resting on her shoulder as it always did. Marin latched onto the familiarity of the image, the only thing she had seen since coming home that was the same as when she left.