"Question."
"Yes?"
"Why am I still looking for more candidates when you already made a final decision?"
"An excellent question. In case our first choice falters or fails or goes on strike, it's always good to have an alternate. I would've thought you'd come to this conclusion as well."
"I would've thought so too, but the whole 'one in the whole world' thing threw me for a loop. Either we find the one in eight billion or we don't. And if we don't, we're doomed. According to simple statistics, we are more likely to be collectively boned as species than not."
"Do you know how the lottery works?"
"Spare me from the terror of your inane allegories."
"Shush, bear with me for just a moment. Let's say each person on the planet has a unique set of numbers. A computer gives us a string, and we look for the person with the matching numbers."
"I don't see how this is any different than finding a straw in a stack of needles."
"Well, the thing is, in a lottery the person with the matching numbers is overjoyed. They come forward instantly. This is similar. The person with the matching aptitudes is much more easily found than from all the others."
"And what if this person is not in the academy at all? What if it's a twelve-year-old shepard in Peru with four fingers on her left hand?"
"Then it'd be impossible for us to bring her to speed. Cramming everything in her head would be inconceivable with our current time deadlines. It'd have to be someone with at least some military background."
"Have you considered that she has an IQ of sub-200 and can easily ingest whatever nonsense you want to inject into this hypothetical person's head? If that's the case, then we've been looking in the wrong needle stack altogether."
"If that's the case, then I hope you've enjoyed living a fulfilling life. We're all doomed."
"Please be serious for once."
"Alright, alright. If the person we're looking for is actually a savant living in a indigenous tribe in the Amazon, there's no way we can actually seek them out. Our budget, while immense, does not have the capability to test the entire world."
"But —"
"But nothing. We're limited as is. Besides, we have to share our budget with other world-threatening events."
"Such as?"
"Global warming. AI takeovers. Superviruses. And other threats which guarantee your insomnia."
"Excellent. I've never been more certain of my fate than in my thirty-odd years of being alive. I should've just been a doctor like my mom told me to."
—
It went without saying that the commander felt completely out of place, within the halls of the Sakura Empire dorms, and where every person in the room was a sibling save for himself. He wondered if this was how it felt to be at an away game, or even just visiting the in-laws. He couldn't say for sure, because he never was interested in sports or had a relationship which warranted a visit with the "dreaded" in-laws.
But one thing was certain: Akagi and Kaga were both looking his way with poorly-concealed glares of disdain. If looks could kill, he would be a smear of red against the opposite wall. His saving grace was the fact that he was the commander, and that Amagi was right behind him.
There was dead, oppressive silence in the room. He rubbed his hands together, to burn off the tension in his shoulders. He began with a tentative, "I'd like to start by —"
Kaga immediately jumped in, "Quiet. We have no use for any of your —" Amagi coughed, and Kaga fell silent.
The commander scratched his head. "Well, all I wanted to say was that I was sorry for roughly pushing you, Akagi, away like that. It was uncalled for. And I wanted to apologize for making a scene in the canteen. Both were unnecessary overreactions from me which only served to escalate the situation." He tilted his head slightly, unable to make eye contact.
He honestly expected to be rebuffed from both of them. They'd part ways, and he and the First Air Carrier Division would never be able to look at each other again. But he'd have this load off his chest, and he could rest easy.
Instead, he heard a sob. Akagi was crying. Kaga was doing her best to comfort her. And Amagi was just watching, letting this all play out. She looked concerned, but she made no attempt to rise from her spot next to him to comfort her little sister. And he was completely at a loss of words.
So all he could do was wait for her crying to subside. There was nothing he could do in his position. Why was this so difficult? Why couldn't he just clear his conscience? Why did Akagi make this so difficult for him?
Akagi made some noise that sounded like words, but was too garbled up with tears and fervor for them to be understood by anyone in the room.
"What was that, Akagi?" Kaga asked carefully, wiping away some of the tears and mucus from her sister's face with her sleeve.
Akagi sniffed, her voice heavy and thick. "I know — I know you won't ever return my affections, Commander… So why can't I get over it? What is this aching in my heart, which still burns with desire? Why does it intensify whenever you're near? It hurts."
Perhaps if he was a man of great compassion, he would've offered an embrace and a shoulder to cry on. But this display of genuine emotion, truthfulness, and hurt confused him greatly. None of his years studying and engaging in pseudo-intellectual hobbies could explain why anyone would continue to confess her undying devotion to someone after being so coldly turned away. It didn't make sense at all in his head. So that was why he did nothing but look down, unable to respond.
"Why aren't you saying anything?!" Kaga shrieked, her arms still in a protective embrace around her sister. Akagi's brief clarity had faltered, and she went back to her heavy tears and sobbing.
But he, like Akagi, was speechless. Despite the fact that both carriers had put him in uncomfortable situations, he didn't hold it too much against them. He'd done much worse to others, after all. Abusing other people's kindness and hospitality. But he's never learned how to console someone after heartbreak. He never had the courage to ask anyone out, so he never got his heart broken before. So what was he supposed to do?
Ah, there it was. Everything came back to his problems eventually. It was all about him, him, him.
It was really pathetic. He'd waltzed in here expecting everyone to hate him, but instead, they had a modicum of trust and respect for him. And that fact alone destroyed him. He came to brush off the chip on his shoulder, but he was blind to the fact that he was dumping boulders of ambivalence on the First Carrier Division. They could've made him leave. They could've chosen to ignore him. But they listened to his piece because he was their Commander.
God, why was he so selfish? Not once had he considered what they were feeling. And that epiphany burned him inside.
And this wasn't something he couldn't easily apologize for. What was he supposed to say? "Sorry, I came in to clear my mind without any regard to how you were feeling. Can I get back to you on that one?"
So this was what he was doing to other people. He thought about all the people he took advantage by never considering how they felt. And he mentally paused at Z23.
Then he knew that he couldn't let things stand here. There had to be something he could do. But he didn't know what to say. Akagi was still sobbing quietly. Kaga was still glaring at him, but must've realized that he was at a loss of words, and didn't press it further.
And he was doing nothing but staring at the ground, thinking. His mind, usually bustling with all sorts of ideas, was dead silent. Looking for something, anything, his mouth jumped at the first idea instead, courtesy of Laffey so long ago.
"Do you… do you want to be friends instead?"
—
"Shikikan, I didn't take you for that kind of person," Amagi duly noted.
The commander was physically incapable of doing anything more than cover his face with his hands and cap, let alone look at Amagi while they walked away from the Sakura Empire dorms.
He had instantly regretted it the second the words fell away from his lips. Kaga looked incredulous. Akagi was confused. Amagi's mouth gaped, and only remembered to put a hand to hide it a second later. And he wanted nothing more than to drill a hole down to the center of the earth, the only place where the temperature felt the same as on his face.
But then Amagi had stepped in, saying things which were blocked out by his horror, fight-or-flight response, and pounding heartbeat. And then Amagi gently pulled him to his feet, and they left the stifling building, where reality finally crashed upon his skull.
"Commander, would you like to rest here?"
It was the same bench as the one Amagi had suggested on the way there. He saw no reason to decline this time, and they sat. He almost instinctively almost started to hug himself to ward away some of the shame he felt, but settled on putting his hands on his knees instead.
There they sat, in silence, on the border of the normal beach environment and the carefully sculpted Sakura-esque imitation. The gentle breeze and ambient sounds, along with Amagi's soft humming, slowly brought his charged state back to a cool rational state. Or as much as he possibly could for the rest of today.
"You know, commander, I thought that I finally had an equal with you. Someone to compare strategy with. But it turns out I've found another lost person," Amagi lightly said.
The commander finally looked up for the ground and saw that she wasn't making eye contact with him either, but rather looking out towards the ocean's horizon.
She continued, "I had high hopes that you'd be able to shake Akagi into reality. She's always been like that. Obsessive, tying all of her identity into another person… it's not the Akagi I once knew."
"Aren't you her big sister?" he asked, quietly.
"I am. But as much as I want to, I cannot watch over her forever. I won't always be there to whisper reassurances into her ear whenever she comes home, crying, because she had her heart broken when her suitor finally gets fed up with her possessiveness."
"So this happened before?"
"Yes. And then she has to rebuild her entire identity, because she gave everything she had and there was nothing left for her to call her own. My mistake was that I thought you were much more capable with people and could do something without exacerbating the situation."
He reddened, and looked away. So that's why Amagi went out of her way to find him. And he utterly failed because he couldn't see anything further than the tip of his nose.
Amagi sighed. "Well, I suppose that's all in the past, now. Your suggestion, while quite similar to a few destroyers I know, might do her some good. If she manages to find some sort of relationship that isn't either pure puppy devotion or murderous, perhaps she could interact with others in a diplomatic manner."
The words, again, fell out of his mouth before he had filtered it. "I didn't think you were this kind of person."
But rather reacting with another low blow or walk off, she just sighed. "I'm just tired. And afraid. I'm afraid that Akagi will one day look for someone to help her after she breaks her heart one more time and there's no one to help her. And she would destroy herself. I don't really like to resort to conniving maneuvers, but I was at my wits' end. I hope you don't blame me for that."
So that was the family so far. Akagi, Kaga, Amagi. There might be more, but they were close-knit and looked out for each other no matter what happened. Akagi got hurt, so Kaga and Amagi jumped to help, in their own ways. He wondered if that was the norm across all families.
Finally she turned to face him directly. "In any case, you should expect to see Akagi in your office starting from tomorrow, as your secretary."
His throat constricted, as if he suddenly developed an acute peanut allergy in a M&M factory. "What?" he managed to croak.
Amagi got up from the bench and unfurled her little paper umbrella. "You were the one who gave the suggestion of being friends. I remedied that while you were having a mental breakdown to mean having a secretary."
She stood up and began to leave back in the direction of the Sakura Empire area, while he was trying to process this information. Only after twenty paces or so did it finally connect in his head. He shot up from his seat. "Amagi — !"
"Oh!" She turned around. "Please don't forget to invite me whenever there's a battle. I'd be more than happy to watch you at your best. I can learn a lot under your tutelage." She smiled softly, coughed once, and turned back on her merry way, out of earshot.
The commander could do nothing but collapse back on the bench. Somewhere, someone in the sky or someone who was monitoring his every move was laughing. And he didn't see the funny side of it. Was it supposed to be this hard to command?
But what pervaded his mind was Amagi's backward glance. Despite her sickly paleness of her skin as well as the lanky thinness of weakness in her limbs, her eyes were glimmering with an energy which he had never seen in his own eyes in front of the mirror. Perhaps he could've attributed it to the trick of the light as the sun began to hide under the ocean horizon and turn the sky a warm orange, but then he'd be lying to himself. Amagi was genuinely looking forward to the near future. He couldn't remember the last time he felt that.
Eventually, he forcefully got up and began to hobble back to his own office. There was work to drown himself in so he could forget.
—
