Imperial Capital of Giad

June 26th, Stellar Year 2141

Kette remembered the tunnels and the train a little bit like a slideshow. A blurry, shaky slideshow, skipping over and shuffling back between each picture.

Some of them stuck very firmly in her memory, to the point that she could see them again when she blinked, when she let her thoughts wander back to that day. Those pictures were the most horrible, and she could not make them leave.

One showed her the insides of the train. In a still image she saw intense orange-white light shining on the seat in front of her, making the green vinyl glow with a sick, vomit-like color. A window to her left reflected a horribly bright explosion in the one instant before its glass was shattered by the pressure.

One showed her hot darkness punctuated by a sliver of light painting the outline of the two pieces of metal pinning her to the floor, crushing her legs and belly.

Some of the slides would pass out of her memory, only to come back again randomly; one of a barracks lit by warm sunlight. In it was the boy she loved, shaking in his bed; one from a glance taken over her shoulder, and she saw a huge black tunnel with columns going up to the ceiling and a dozen orbs of light in the distance. She saw a silver-haired man with a gun, his back to her, running toward them.

She watched the slideshow for a very long time while she was unconscious. The doctor would tell her it was three days, but she would never really believe him. It felt like years. She watched it endlessly. She saw the same things each time, and she knew on some level that it was a dream, but knowing it never made the dream feel less real.

She smelled smoke in those dreams. She heard voices, one from a man with silver hair and kind eyes. Many from a bunch of different kids whose names she probably knew once, but didn't anymore. Two from behind some bright white lights. Or maybe they were from the lights themselves. Maybe they were the voices of ghosts.

Only one voice was clear in her dreams. His.

"I've been lying to you," he says, and his face is miserable. His red eyes, his pretty red eyes that she loves so much, are full of tears, but he doesn't let any of them fall.

"I killed her, Kette," he says, and she wants to sit up and grab him and hug him, but her legs won't move, and her body is so weak, and it's all she can do just to stay awake.

And then he says nothing at all, but he looks at her, and he looks so afraid, so scared, so hurt. She realizes that he's scared of her. He's scared that she'll hate him. She wants to tell him that she could never hate him, no matter what. But her voice won't come out.

And that's when the dreams become nightmares. Maybe at first, when the slideshow started, she could tell what was real and what wasn't; the difference between what had actually happened and what she had dreamed up out of fever and fear. But in those three-days-but-not, she crossed and recrossed the slides too many times. She stopped being able to tell.

He is knelt down in front of her. He sees that everything below her waist looks less like a person's legs and more like a used-up tube of toothpaste. This time she can't say anything. She can't even open her eyes, she's so weak, but she knows he's there. She can feel his closeness. And she can hear him. He's saying her name. Saying it over and over again, reaching out to grab her shoulders but holding back, because he's afraid, and she wants to tell him that she's alive, that she's okay.

But her voice won't work. And she can't make it work. And at last, she hears him find the silver-haired man's pistol. She hears him pull the trigger. Then her ears ring for a long time. And after the ringing stops, she doesn't hear anything at all.

She is standing, walking around. She's okay. Her legs are fine. The metal things didn't fall on her after all. But she's still in the train, and it's still black and burning. It still smells like death. She walks around it. She calls his name over and over, but he doesn't answer. So she walks around. She sees all the little bodies of the other kids. She sees a ripped off arm, and her first thought makes her hate herself. She's glad it's too small to be his. If they're dead, it might mean that he isn't.

Until she finds him. And she screams until she can't.

Three days of this, the doctor said. But the doctor was wrong. Kette knew the truth.

Years.

—

Kette woke up and saw no light from the window. The curtains were open. They framed a black, cloudless sky beyond the glass. Her gaze drifted up. She saw a white tiled ceiling. She smelled the chemical, sterile smell of disinfectant, and knew she was in the hospital. She lifted up her arms. They responded sluggishly, like the air was full of thick, invisible syrup. Nonetheless she managed to turn them over, and found two plastic tubes jutting out of her skin. They ran to an IV drip standing beside her bed. She looked at it wonderingly for a second. A digital clock on the nightstand told her it was 4:24 AM, 07/26.

Shin was sitting almost out of sight from her, in the far corner of the room where it was darkest, on an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair. His arms were crossed, eyes closed. Sleeping, but not deeply. His face looked troubled and tense. Like he was in pain. Kette tried to sit herself up, but her legs wouldn't respond to her. Not even a little. She tried to wiggle her toes, but it was like she had somehow forgotten how to. She lifted up her arm again, even though it seemed to weigh ten times more than it used to, and she grabbed her thigh, and held it, and it felt alien in her hand. She could feel the warmth and weight, but nothing from the leg itself. It was like she was grabbing a warm piece of meat.

She realized it slowly but inevitably; like a glacier coming to a crash upon the shore, ripping, grinding, carving its inexorable path through the earth:

Her back was broken. She would never walk again.

Kette lifted her heavy hands, cupped them around her face, and cried.

—

Shin was with her for the recovery. He talked very little, even when she tried her hardest to make him. She would tease him, pester him, grin up at him from her place on the bed even when her face felt like it was about to crack in half, but he would only look at her sadly and shake his head. At first she thought he'd come to hate her somehow, but it didn't take long to see that wasn't true.

He refused to let her out of his sight for very long. He was almost always in her hospital room, sometimes reading, often not. She would turn on the TV and ask him to watch with her, and he would set his chair closer, and sometimes he'd look at the screen and sometimes he wouldn't. She always got the feeling he wasn't interested in what was happening on it. She wasn't either, honestly. She was just glad it gave her an excuse to make him sit closer. Otherwise he would stay in the far corner, where it was darkest, and even though her best friend was in the same room with her almost all the time, she'd feel so terribly, awfully lonely.

Kette cried again when the doctor brought her the wheelchair. Shin had taken two steps closer, hand half-raised toward her as if to hold her, or to take her hand. But he stopped himself like he wasn't sure if he was allowed to. So she raised her arms instead toward him, hands outstretched, and he hugged her, and she cried even harder, and when she wound her arms around his back, she found that he was sobbing silently alongside her.

In the white-tiled hallway outside her hospital room, Kette learned how to move again. The chair was heavy. The wheels were big steel and rubber things that made her hands feel rough and sensitive after pushing them around for too long, and it strained her arms something awful. But after so many weeks of being cooped up in that place, just being able to get around again was wonderful. For the rest of her life, she would remember the first time she managed to get from one end of the hallway to the other without having to stop for rest. It was the first time she'd smiled honestly since before that day in the tunnels.

Every single day, bits and pieces of that slideshow came back to her. Most nights, when she slept, she would see a flash of a small severed arm, or the bright orange light shining on the green vinyl of a train-chair, and she'd be just as terrified as the day itself. She would wake up screaming and Shin would rush to her side, always hesitant until she gave some kind of sign that she would accept him, and he would hug her or hold her hand or pull her head against his chest and stroke her hair until she calmed down again.

Once, a few minutes after turning on the TV and popping in a movie, she watched the protagonists - a man and a woman, the man looking an awful lot like Shin if Shin had blue eyes, and the woman with the same iron-black hair as Kette's - get onto a train. Seeing that, her heart had started to beat faster, and her lungs to feel tight, and she had to breathe quicker to keep from choking. But she was okay. She thought she was okay. And then the camera revealed a bomb on the train, hidden under one of the seats, and suddenly Kette was sick. She scrambled for the TV remote but knocked it off the nightstand instead, and then her stomach was twisting inside of her. She threw up all over her sheets. She cried.

But Shin was always with her. He picked up the sheets and put them in a hamper, and he handed her a warm cloth to wipe her face and clothes. He tried to leave to get a nurse, but she tugged once at his sleeve as he was turning to go, and he understood. He stayed with her until the next check-in. And he stayed with her after that too.

She decided that she loved him even more than she did before. She decided that she would stay with him forever.

Or until the end.

—

"Kette," Shin said.

It had been two months since she'd woken up, and Shin had started to speak to her again. Mostly in short, blunt sentences, but never unkindly. Today he seemed more tense than normal, and in her opinion normal was plenty tense already. She straightened to attention as best she could. She would have sat up a bit more - she was slouched in her chair right now - but she couldn't have done that without making a bunch of obvious movements.

"Do you… do you remember what happened on the train? After the explosion?"

Kette flinched. She couldn't help it. Every time she had to think about that day, it was like getting the full slideshow again, real memories and fake ones and nightmares all in a single lightning-bolt flash, and she would flinch. But it was a little easier to deal with now than it had been at the start, and after a few seconds of saying nothing, working her mouth silently behind closed lips to psyche herself up, she could talk about it.

"Kind of," she said, and smiled weakly. "Everything is a little bit, um… jumbled up. I had a lot of nightmares I guess. I think I can't really remember the difference between what actually happened and what I dreamed up."

Shin looked at her for awhile like he was thinking really hard about something. Kette waited patiently. They were in her room. Not her hospital room, but a bedroom, a cute little place with pink wallpaper and a big TV with a game console that she probably played a bit too much. But what else was she supposed to do? It's not like she was gonna go tire-swinging ever again.

"You can't remember?" he asked. She looked up from her game, over at him, and he was staring at her with an almost crazy intenseness. His hands were clasped together. He was holding them together so tightly his fingers had gone paper-white.

"I guess it's more like, um, remembering a bunch of stuff that didn't happen right next to a bunch of stuff that did. It's all mixed up. I can't really tell what was real or not."

Shin's face was pale too. He breathed sharply in and out.

"Do you remember what I told you?" he asked.

All at once, Kette understood. Because she did remember. She had the whole time. She just wasn't sure if it was true - that he was a spy. That everything that had happened since they met; the orphanage burning; every base they got brought to being destroyed; Tori and Vance dying; the train getting blown up; was because Shin had been telling the Empire where to go, and and what to do.

"You mean you're actually… you've been a…"

Shin nodded tightly.

"I wasn't just dreaming it all up?"

Shin shook his head.

"Oh."

Shin's hands, which had been wringing at each other until then, went completely, totally still. He looked at her again with that intense look, like he was searching for something in her face. She looked away. She had to when he was staring that strongly. From the corner of her eye she saw his expression fall.

"Shin, no, it's not like that. I-" Her tongue froze up, and she hated it, swallowing dryly to make the words come back. Somehow it worked. "I meant it! You know, I'm still not sure if I actually did say all that or not. In real life, I mean, or if I just dreamed it. But it doesn't matter. No matter which it was, I was serious. I am serious. Love is the bond that ties forever, and I…" Her voice trailed. Now words seemed suddenly all too weak. "Come here, Shin. Please?"

Shin, who had been sitting in a chair about five feet from hers - who had actually stood up and turned halfway to the door, looked back at her. He came to her as asked.

"Bend down, okay? Just a little bit, so I can reach you. You've gotten like, twice as tall ever since I broke my back."

Shin did.

She kissed him on the cheek.

"Thank you," she said softly. "Thank you for never leaving me."

For a little while Shin just stared down at her. Then his eyes filled with tears. One broke free in a shiny trail down his cheek, and he looked her in the eyes, and he started to speak.

"I love you too," he told her, and for a second she thought her heart had stopped. "And I'm so sorry that I- That I can't- That I'm, I-" his voice cracked, becoming choked and wet and thick. "Oh, Kette. Oh no. What have I done? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."

As she asked him to, he had been bent over, crouched at the knees and head slumped down so she could reach him. He managed to hold like that for a few seconds, until he collapsed altogether, almost falling over her, hugging her desperately. "It's all my fault. You can't walk anymore because of me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry…" His voice was a low, breathless moan.

Kette put her arms around him and pulled him close with all the strength she and Shin and the doctors had worked so hard to give back to her. She said nothing. Words would be too slow for what she wanted to tell him. All her life she'd never been able to say the right ones, and she knew she wouldn't be able to now. So she hugged him instead and let that speak for her. He was warm and heavy in her arms. She stroked his hair and liked how it felt. Rough and thick. At first it refused to bend when she touched it. But it did, after enough pressure, and the texture was very soft.

Her words came back to her at about the same rate that Shin's words winnowed out. His voice lowered, and lowered, becoming quieter until he wasn't actually speaking at all. Just breathing in and out with those harsh, shaky breaths. Kette continued to hold him. And when eventually he stopped making sounds altogether, holding his head silently in place against her chest, she asked him softly,

"Could you say it again?"

She felt him tug away from her, pushing against the hold of her arms. There was a little pang of regret as she let him go, and she felt suddenly very cold as he stood a few feet from her. His red eyes were rimmed in the same color. He sniffled once.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Kette shook her head. "No, not that Shin. The first thing you said. Right before all the I'm sorries."

Shin stared at her. She could almost see the question churning behind his eyes. Then his conclusion - after he started to stare at anything but her. At the pink wallpaper. At the window. Pointedly over her shoulder at the bedpost. His cheeks, which had already been blotchy and red, reddened even more.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, and she thought she liked his voice much better when it sounded stubborn instead of guilty.

"Oh, come oooonnn," she urged, reaching out to thump his ribs. "You already said it once. How hard could a second time be?"

Shin just kept looking away. He didn't say anything.

Kette looked at him, also saying nothing. Then she sniffled loudly and suddenly, dropping her head into her hands, hands over her eyes.

"Were you lying, Shin? Did you not mean it?"

His face softened and he reached out, but hesitated. His hand hovered an inch from hers.

"Shin, you can't just say something like that if you don't mean it. You'll break my-"

"Yes Kette, I… like you," Shin said, and tried to take her hands. She pulled back as far as she could. He did not reach out to catch her.

"That's not what you said."

She peeked through her fingers and saw a look of utter, red-faced anguish on his face, cheeks bright, mouth hanging open. He looked down through the corners of his eyes. He reached out one more time for her hands which covered her eyes, and this time she let him take them.

"I… love you too… Kette…" he grated it out like each word was torture.

He pulled her hands away from her face.

And saw that she wasn't crying at all. She was grinning.

"Heh. Got ya."

Shin's mouth dropped, forming a perfect O of surprise. Then it became anger, and his grip on her hands grew tighter.

"You tricked me," he said.

"Yup."

"You're the worst."

"Says the spy?"

He shut his mouth. His grip softened, and his face was red again. He looked her in the eye, then looked away.

"You still mean it though, right?" she asked.

He nodded without saying anything. Kette smiled widely. She pulled him by his hands until he was in hugging distance again. And hug him was exactly what she did.

"Kette, you know, you shouldn't… it's my fault. Vance and Tori. The schoolhouse. It's because of me."

"It's okay, Shin," she whispered, her head nestled in the crook of his shoulder. "I trust you."

"But I just told you that I've been lying the whole time."

"I trust you," she said again. "You were lying for a good reason. 'Cause they'd do worse stuff if you didn't. Or maybe 'cause they were gonna hurt someone you loved if you didn't. Or hurt you, maybe. Something like that."

Shin shook his head. She reached her hand around and smoothed out his hair, holding him. It felt good to hold and be held. It felt very warm.

"What about your dad, Kette? Isn't he a soldier? Fighting for the rebels? What if he died because of me. So many people already have. They tell me it's thousands. Maybe tens of thousands."

Kette thought about that for a long time. She remembered a hill beside a river, with a tree on top, and a tire-swing hanging from it. Not the river in the woods behind the orphanage, but pretty similar to it, and in the same northern forest. It was a river that ran by one of the Vargus villages, that unnamed tiny place where she grew up with her Daddy and Mommy. Daddy with his black hair like the night, Mommy with her green eyes like emeralds.

She remembered Daddy bringing her to the river one day. He showed her the swing, and she remembered how she'd been so scared. It's too high, she had said. What if I fall and get an ouchie? And Daddy just smiled at her and said he would catch her. She raised the point that she would be falling in the river, and Daddy was on the hill. How was he supposed to catch her if he was that far away?

But Daddy just shook his head. He said no matter how far away she was, no matter where she went or what she did, he would always find a way to catch her.

And that made her feel less scared. So she went on the tire-swing. Mommy pushed her until she'd built up so much speed it was like the world was blurring all around her. And at the highest point she let go, because she believed what her Daddy had told her. He would catch her if it went wrong. He would never let her down.

It didn't go wrong. She hit the water, and it was the funnest moment of her life.

Mommy was gone now. Got sick. Died. And Daddy had to find a new Mommy, and the new Mommy never pushed Kette on the tire-swing no matter how much she asked her to. And Daddy… she hadn't seen him in a very long time. She didn't even get letters from him anymore. Those stopped coming about a month after new-Mommy sent Kette to the schoolhouse.

"I don't know, Shin," she said, when she'd finished thinking. "If Daddy is… dead… 'cause of you, well, I don't how that'd make me feel. But I also dunno if he even is. And if he is… then how could I know if it's 'cause of you? So I won't think about it. I know I trust you. I'll stick with that."

Shin shook his head. "Kette, you can't, I'm-"

"Don't you trust me, Shin?"

Shin went completely still.

"Don't you believe me when I say stuff? Or do you think I'm just some stupid girl who doesn't know what she's talking about?"

"No," he said softly. "I trust you, Kette."

"Then believe in me too."

Shin was quiet for awhile. Then he nodded. Kette smiled.

"Tell me everything, Shin."

He did.

—

Shin's masters let him rest for three months after the accident. He was injured, they told him. He'd be of no use to them in that state. So they gave him time to get better. Shin spent two of those months with Kette, helping her through her recovery. They spent the last month together too. Oftentimes, they'd go out and just explore the base for the fun of it. Fort Liberty. The largest rebel operation of them all. It was built a few miles out of the Capital, and was almost more like an armored town than a fort, with tall stone walls at all sides and huge towers with big gun-turrets on top.

But the walls were very pretty, made out of a sort of yellow-white stone that shined when the sun hit it just right, and the buildings were mostly like buildings from any other town. Some were wood, some were brick, and most of them were houses and shops. When the soldiers weren't on duty they walked around in normal clothes, jeans and T-shirts and stuff, and there were a lot of families who'd go to the parks and playgrounds to enjoy the summer.

A few buildings were made of metal. They were long, with fronts and backs shaped like half-circles. Quonset huts, Shin said they were called. They were used for barracks and armories. Every now and then on their afternoon walks they'd pass by big missile-turrets called SAMs, which were supposed to be able to shoot down Imperial aircraft. There were also these laser-tower things that could stop artillery strikes by blowing up the shells before they landed. On every street there was a concrete doorway leading underground, with the words 'bomb shelter' written on a bright red sign above the frame.

Fort Liberty was a nice place. It was probably the nicest place they had been to since the schoolhouse, but it was still a military base, and Kette and Shin never forgot it.

When his three months were up and the summer had ended, his masters gave him his next task.

Kette told Shin she would help.

"No," he said.

His eyes were hard and flat and scary. Or at least they would have been scary to anyone else. But Kette knew him better. He wouldn't hurt her no matter how much he glared, and she took unimaginable glee in exploiting this.

"Yes," she insisted.

The day was almost over. The sun was setting, and they were on a hill just tall enough to look over the walls. While Shin sat down on a bench by a big oak tree, Kette had rolled uphill a ways so she could claim the rare opportunity to lord over him. "I mean I already know your secret, Shin, and that's plenty dangerous as it is. How much worse could it be to help with the actual spy stuff?"

"Very much," he said tightly. "Some of the stuff I do… if they ever caught me, they would kill me."

"You're a kid," she pointed out.

"A kid who's gotten a lot of good people killed."

A look had come back into Shin's face. The same look he'd had when she first woke up, back when he was always by her side but wouldn't say a word to her. It was like he wasn't looking out at the world from his eyes, but from somewhere behind his eyes instead. Far, far behind.

"But it's not like you're gonna just… stop obeying their orders or anything," she said.

A thought occurred to her. Maybe he could have done just that? They wouldn't let him go back to the clan if he didn't obey them, but his clan all sounded like jerks anyway. Maybe if he just stopped listening to them, everything would be okay?

"Right?" she asked, suddenly unsure.

"Right. If I stop, they'll hurt Nii-san."

"Ah. Yeah," Kette said, feeling stupid. That was right, wasn't it? How had she forgotten? From the start, it had all been for his brother. The one he loved so much. who'd be punished if Shin didn't do as he was told.

"So what you do is real dangerous, and you can't ever stop doing it unless they say you can." Kette said.

Shin nodded.

"And you think I'm just okay with sitting still, knowing that?" she said.

"It's not your risk to take, Kette. It's mine."

"I don't care! If you're gonna go into danger, then I want to be with you for it. How do you think I'll feel if you do get caught, and they kill you, and I didn't do anything to stop it? You think I'd just be okay with that? Just keep on going like it doesn't even matter?"

Shin stared up at her from the bench. He stood up, putting them at eye level, her up the hill and him down it, at equal height for the first time since her back was broken.

"I don't want you to lose another home."

"You're my home, Shin."

Slowly, she rolled her way down the hill toward him. She reached him, and she reached out and took his hand, and she looked up at him as he looked down.

"I want to go where you go. And if you have to go to the other place, where Vance and Tori and my Mama went, then I want to go with you."

Shin swallowed. His face was miserable. But Kette kept a stern expression. Daddy would be proud to see her like this. She was sure of it. He always said she had to follow her own path, and be strong and sure while she walked it.

Well. Maybe she couldn't walk her path anymore, but she could still follow it well enough.

"You'll be a traitor," he said.

"As long as we're together, I don't care."

A long pause.

Until at last, Shin nodded.

And with that Kette's fate was sealed.

Hey! Check out the AO3 version of this fic!

/works/37936696/chapters/101479299

My friend Richie just made a new piece of fanart, which I have posted with the latest chapter over there. It's Kette! Pre-accident Kette, who still has her legs. The current Kette will never again look as happy as the art shows her, which makes me sad. Richie has made sad. This whole plotline makes me sad. Why do I this to myself...?

Thank you for creating such a great piece of art Richie. It almost makes up for the sadness you inflicted on me. Almost.

Have a great Saturday everyone!

- Verbosity