Notes:
Picks up at the end of GITS:Solid State Society. A lot of the dialogue in this chapter has been lifted from the end of Solid State Society, to contextualize their internal monologues and stay as true to the actual continuity of the film as possible. Think of this chapter as a novelization of the end of the movie.
I do not own Ghost in the Shell or any of its related properties.
Blackness. Silence. Emptiness.
Was she dead?
The last thing Major Motoko Kusanagi remembered were the words of the Puppeteer, mocking and cold even as they beckoned her to jettison this life for the alluring freedom of the vast, infinite expanse of the Net, and then that intense, all-consuming white light that had signaled brain death. Had he taken her down with him?
The blackness began to fade, though, giving way to flickering static. Somewhere close, a monitor beeped monotonously. Not dead. So then where was she? Between the beeps, she could hear something else, low and soothing. The gentle lapping of water, the distant call of seabirds. A beach? But why would she be on a beach? She was lying face down, that much she could tell, her high cheekbones pressed into the cool surface of what felt like a headrest. Her auditory and tactile processing systems were functioning properly, at least. She tried to move her head, to push herself up, but her body wouldn't respond, and still her vision was nothing but frustrating static.
"I can't see anything, somebody give me a status report!" Her vocal unit was working too, but her voice sounded foreign in her own ears. 'Frail', she thought, with panic clawing at its edges.
"Finally awake?" A familiar voice, deep and comforting, but echoing as if it were speaking to her across a great, cavernous void, responded from somewhere behind her.
"Batou? Are you there?" Her voice trembled unexpectedly as she called out to him. "What's happening?" She could hear his footsteps now, drawing closer and casting echoes off walls she couldn't see. "Where am I?"
"Oh right, shit, your eyes are still turned off... Hang on."
She could sense him beside her now, hear his fingers tapping away at a keyboard. The static fell away, and her eyes slowly focused in on smooth concrete crisscrossed with delicate wires.
"And one more for the motor functions..." More typing, and something in her cyberbrain clicked back into place.
The cyborg flexed her fingers, testing, before extending her arms to push herself up slightly, pausing to take in her surroundings. Her optical sensors were met with an impossibly tranquil scene: turquoise waves slowly crashing into white sands under a perfectly azure sky, framed by towering palm trees, gulls bobbing and diving slowly in the sea breeze high above. Besides the palms, it was an illusion, of course, cast onto the huge bay windows of Section 9's natatorium by tiny projectors embedded in the edges of the bulletproof glass, but it was her favorite one. Of course he had remembered.
She pushed herself the rest of the way up now, swinging her legs over the edge of the examination table, and carefully detached the cords that had been connecting her QRS ports to the cyberbrain maintenance monitor, which was washing out the edges of Batou's face in a soft blue light as he looked down at her, heavy brows furrowed ever so slightly.
"Glad you decided to rejoin us in the land of the living, Major." The skin around his pale, disk-like eyes crinkled as he grinned, the laughter in his voice an obvious attempt to mask his concern. He had lost his ponytail - cut, or singed off in a firefight maybe, one could never tell in their line of work - and the turtleneck-jacket combo he was sporting looked like he'd stolen it from Togusa's wardrobe, but the rakish smile was the same, as irritating and endearing as the day she'd met him. She didn't reply, instead attempting to stand, but her legs buckled beneath her and she lurched forward. Strong hands caught her, though, steadying her as they had countless times before.
"Easy there, killer. You just came out of a pretty nasty barrier maze - might want to take it slow." He placed one hand under her arm, supporting her weight as his other hand worked the controls to convert the table into a chair. She grumbled to herself, angry at her shell's apparent treachery, at her own helplessness, however temporary it might be. A quiet voice at the back of her mind, though, whispered gratitude for Batou's presence. Steady, loyal Batou. Always butting in when she wanted it least and needed it most.
Resuming her mental beratement of her prosthetic body, she sunk into the soft facsimile leather, her face falling toward the artificial paradise in the windows. As her eyes drifted over the waterline to her own reflection, she was suddenly very conscious of Batou still standing over her, and of how uncharacteristically vulnerable she felt, though she couldn't explain why. She pulled the small orange towel that had been draped over one arm of the chair into her lap, fingers tugging agitatedly at a loose thread dangling from the hem, grasping for control of something, anything. As if sensing her unease, he stepped away, and broke the uncomfortable silence.
"I don't know about you, but I could use a drink." He gave her a backward grin as he strode to the bar at the far end of the pool. "You had us all pretty worried back there, you know?" his voice was slightly muffled as he reached over the bar to retrieve two cans from the mini-fridge beneath, but she could still detect a tint of lingering concern as he continued, "Almost thought you'd gone full white-out with that Puppeteer bastard."
Batou watched Motoko closely as he relayed what had transpired after she had lost consciousness. It was as much out of a professional need to study her reactions as it was a selfish desire to take in how beautiful, and yet how inexplicably fragile, she looked in the light of the fake tropical sun. As they discussed what their respective investigations had uncovered and his own conclusions about the identity of the Puppeteer, and how the Tachikomas claimed to have lost the memory of her final conversation with the mysterious hacker, her face betrayed her exhaustion, from the disastrous dive, but also from something else he couldn't put his finger on.
She had never been quite the same after Dejima, after Kuze, that son of a bitch. Even before she had disappeared on that bright spring morning two years ago, he had seen something stirring just beneath her meticulously stoic surface, tugging her away from Section 9, away from him and whatever tentative... thing they might have had. When she left, it had taken everyone but him as a surprise, and yet he had waited, patiently, hoping, but never expecting her to return, covering her tracks where he could, praying for even a glimpse of her face, a whisper over their private comm, anything. Now she was back, and something different was stirring up storm clouds in her expression that he didn't understand yet. And so he studied her over the rim of his beer can, trying to parse out what this new thing was.
"Batou? Did you listen in at all to that conversation?" She must have realized that he was staring, because she met his eyes with a familiar, subtly inquisitive look.
"A little," he admitted, smiling guiltily. "But I guess that doesn't really matter now, does it?" It really didn't, as far he was concerned.
She gave him a funny look, but said nothing for a moment before changing the subject, her voice still sounding unbearably fatigued. "It's the strangest thing, Batou. What have I been feeling so jaded and disillusioned about? What do you think I was searching for as I was wandering around the Net?" She stood, steady this time, and strode to the window, arms crossed over her stomach. The tropical illusion dropped away, plunging the room into partial darkness and revealing the neon lights of Niihama far below, its light pollution casting an unnatural shade of mauve against the night sky. It was a rhetorical question, because she didn't wait for him to respond. "A friend? The truth? Or a certain special someone, maybe?" Her voice cracked and faded on those last words, her gaze turning skyward.
Batou said nothing, but the thin aluminum of his beer can buckled beneath his fingertips as his grip tightened reflexively. What did she mean by that? A cynical, bitter voice spat the name Kuze, but another voice, the one that had kept him scanning the Net for her late into the night, month after month, never losing hope, whispered 'maybe she means you.' He couldn't decide which voice to trust. Maybe neither.
"Perhaps I just wanted to blame this organization or even the system for my own sense of helplessness." There was a tremor in her voice that made his heart catch in his throat and he set down set his beer.
"Heh, what's gotten into you? You turning all meek and modest on me?" His Ranger-issue eye implants could spot a target camouflaged in the thickest jungle from 20 clicks, but they couldn't see whatever it was that had caused his Major's voice to waver like that of a lost child. "Did you get whatever it was out of your system?" He asked, trying to keep his tone jovial as he closed the gap between them in a few hesitant strides. She said nothing, but glanced up at him with a look that suggested perhaps she had. His sigh betrayed a bit too much relief, so he tried to recover by continuing in a gently ribbing tone, "Ok, so what are you gonna do now? Plan on keeping up that 'picking the cases you work on based on your gut feeling about 'em' routine of yours?"
"Maybe I'm finished with that too. When I'm operating under restrictions, I definitely feel constrained by them..." Her arms tightened slightly, her voice carrying a hint of some hidden meaning as she continued, "but without constraints it doesn't feel like my actions are accomplishing anything. I'm right back to where I started from."
"What's that supposed to mean? Is that your way of saying you're coming back to Section 9?" The little hopeful voice urged him on as he shifted to stand a little closer, cautiously, afraid the closeness might scare her away again, this time to never come back. To his surprise and relief, she let out a breathy chuckle.
"What about Togusa? Wouldn't I get in the way of his development?" There was a hint of that playful sarcasm that he remembered, replacing the dreadful weariness that had permeated her voice all night.
"Well if that prevents him from growing, then he wasn't gonna go any further anyway." Slowly, warily, he swung his arm up and around her, pausing for the briefest moment over her lower back but deciding quickly against it, and laid his hand on her shoulder instead. "I wouldn't sweat it if I were you."
"Perhaps you're right..." Her voice was lighter now, as if something had been lifted. He smiled, and allowed his thumb to trace a gentle caress across her soft skin.
Before, Motoko might have shrugged off his gesture, seen it as overprotectiveness, an unbidden intrusion into the high-walled garden of her independence that she had spent so many years carefully building. But right now, Batou's firm grip on her shoulder felt like an anchor in a storm, tethering her to this moment, this reality. She let herself lean against his solid frame, her ennui crumbling into the security and sureness of his touch. He must have received her unspoken invitation, because she felt him move behind her, his arms wrapping themselves around her athletic shoulders and narrow waist so that she was soon enveloped, her back pressed against his broad torso, his cheek pressed against the crown of her amethyst hair. Her mind wandered back to another time, in another place, the last time she had allowed him to hold her like this, after he nearly died for a sentimental trinket, on a night that he had believed might be their last. She had missed him, though she would never admit it aloud. A wistful smile tugged at the corners of her lips.
It quickly waned, though, as her memories drifting forward to the morning after that night, to his anguished voice hoarsely screaming her name as he stared helplessly down at her shattered body, its artificial blood staining the tarmac a brilliant, cruel shade of crimson. She never told him that she had been watching the security feed that morning from an undisclosed location, never told him how she had listened to his heart wrenching sobs and stoically buried any remorse over her deception under a heavy blanket of resolve in her plan to keep them both alive. The slideshow of memories skipped ahead again, this time to the cold, cramped hole on Dejima where she had been trapped with Kuze, where they had discovered their shared past and made their last-ditch attempt to upload the ghosts of millions of refugees on to the Net before they could be snuffed out by a seemingly-inevitable nuclear holocaust. She could still hear the sound of cement cracking and shattering, of her own name again escaping as a desperate cry from Batou's lips as he had thrust that massive cross of steel into the rubble to free her. 'My cross,' she thought, taken up without hesitation, against her orders. The vivid image of the pained and painful look on his face when he had found them, frozen in a furtive farewell embrace, surfaced now. With it came a pang of remorse over how she had never been able to explain what had really happened because it would have meant admitting things much more dangerous, including the thing she had half-revealed to Kuze when he had asked if she had anyone she could really open up to...
"I missed you, you know," Batou whispered, interrupting her musings, sincerity concealed beneath his joking tone.
Guilt coiled like a viper in the pit of her stomach, and she knew she couldn't let this continue. She sighed, and brought her own hands up to clasp his, giving the faintest squeeze before gently pulling herself out of his embrace. "Batou. I think I'd like to go home now." The viper coiled tighter as the next words left her mouth. "Give me a ride?"
"Yeah, sure." There was a tinge of hurt in his voice, but it passed, replaced by gruff annoyance. "Hey, do you still have my keys?"
"Check your pocket," she responded, already heading toward the elevator, grateful he couldn't see her expression.