Chapter 62: Four Points!

Yeoman Gale lazily chewed on her sandwich, letting the carefully balanced spices play out their delicious symphony on her taste buds. It wasn't often that she got to eat food this good, so she was going to enjoy every last bite. Unlike, it seems, some people.

The destroyer-girls had hurriedly inhaled their meals, as destroyer-girls are wont to do, and bustled off to the arcade machines set up in the back corner. Wash was eating her usual demure calm. Ever so often, she'd dab at her cheeks—or, to Gale's chagrin, her chest—when a rouge drop of sauce escaped her bun. But for the most part, the battleship ate in silence.

Frisco, however, had no such grace. The lanky heavy cruiser scarfed down her food like a starving woman. She hunkered over her plate like a wolf, her elbows resting against the table and her face perpetually buried in a burger. She only stopped her ravenous feast long enough to take a quick sip of her drink before launching back into her meal.

And of course, the half-dozen burgers she'd gulped down didn't have the slightest impact on her waistline. Normally, Gale might have felt a little annoyed at that.

But not this time. Compared to the boisterous Fletcher and Wash's… Womanly-ness, the cruiser looked lean and almost underfed. And that wasn't all. Frisco's cropped crackerjack top showed off a stomach criss-crossed with more scar tissue than skin. Yet more scars peeked out of her short-sleeved shirt and ran up her neck like welding beads.

Gale wasn't sure how long she'd been staring when Frisco finally broke the monotony of her own gluttony. "So," the cruiser somehow managed to sneak a word past the blockade of hamburger filling her mouth. "Imma make a wild guess here," the cruiser gulped down the last few bites of burger that were still hanging out in her puffed-out cheeks, "You need me to turn some Cthulhu wannabe into sushi, right?"

Gale almost dropped her phone. "Wha- what?"

"Sushi." Frisco made a circle with her thumb and forefinger and held it in front of her hazel eye. "Like… raw fish and rice wrapped in seaweed." The cruiser shrugged, "It's… cultural. And stuff."

"No, I- I know what Sushi is," said Gale. "I just…"

"Is it the Cthulhu thing then?" Frisco slouched back in her chair. "It's this… big-"

"No, I know who he is too," said Gale. "I'm… I didn't…" She shook her head with a resigned sigh. Just when she thought she was getting a handle on this whole ship girl thing, "I didn't tell you anything."

"Oh, you didn't," Frisco took a long sip of her milkshake, her slender ebony eyebrows bouncing just so. "Everything else did."

"What?"

"Okay," Frisco straighted up in her seat. Her eyes glimmered as a smile crept up her face. "We're at war. Otherwise you wouldn't have even summoned me. And the fact that nobody's batting an eye at a heavy cruiser walking around in this-" she glanced down at her scarred-over body, "Rather fetching body tells me that A-"

Frisco held up one finger, "there's something supernatural going on, and B:" she counted off another, "Whatever it is happens so often that nobody's really surprised anymore."

The cruiser smirked as she threw her arms up to rest along the back of the booth bench. "Annnnd, given that there's not a fleet on earth that could make the United States Navy so desperate for hulls they're calling up old treaty cruisers, some kinda demon from the abyss seems like the most reasonable option."

Gale blinked while her mind caught up with the cruiser's logic. It was… actually pretty sound. "Yeah, actually," she shrugged, "That's about it."

"You're very insightful, Frisco." Wash aimed a tender smile at the heavy cruiser.

"Ah," Frisco waved off the praise with a swish of her gloved hand, "It comes with the territory."

"It… does?" Gale blinked.

"Well… yeah," Frisco nodded to herself. "I'm a cruiser, we're the eyes and ears of the fleet. Or… at least we were before all that fancy spy stuff."

"We're glad to have you," Wash slipped one arm around Frisco's slender shoulders and pulled her into a hug. Frisco's cheeks blushed a brilliant scarlet as her bare arm collided with the battleship's sweater-covered chest.

"Ah-" the corner of the cruiser's mouth quivered between the smile she wanted to show and the gruff scowl her persona demanded. "Ah… um… okay."

Gale smiled. It was nice to see someone else suffer for once. She shot Frisco a quick glance over the top of her phone, then slowly made a show of logging out and slipping it back into her pocket.

Frisco glared daggers at Gale.

"Hey, Frisco?" Gale idly waved a toothpick though the air, "I thought you survived the war."

"I did," Frisco glanced down at the scars criss-crossing her bare midriff, "Well, most of me anyways."

"Then…" Gale bit the corner of her lip. She was treading on ground she'd rather forget. But somethings just had to be addressed. "You, uh… you know we closed those camps down, right?"

"Yeah," Frisco's face hardened for a moment, her cheekbones turning to forged steel as her muscles twitched reflexively. "Yeah, I know."

"Then…" Gale tapped her fingers against the thigh of her jeans. "Then why- why'd you think we'd stick you in one?"

"I'm not a battleship," said Frisco.

Wash nodded sagely.

Gale blinked. "I'm sorry, but… what?"

"I'm not a battleship," Frisco pointed to her own lanky, sinewy build. "I don't have the belt for a stand-up knock-down fight. I'm supposed to run from anything I can't bully."

"Oh," Gale winced as she made the connection. "Oh, shit… so when you showed up-"

"I was backed into a corner, yeah," said Frisco. For a long second, she just stared into the distance at a point somewhere behind Gale's half-finished diet coke. "Yeah," the cruiser took in a shallow breath. "Look, I'll raise hell if you need me. Wherever you need me," Frisco shot Gale a pleading stare, "But even I get scared too sometimes."

Gale didn't know what to say. She'd never met a ship girl who was afraid before, or at least admitted she was afraid. Wash and Jersey seemed to relish the danger of battle, and none of the destroyers she knew showed the slightest pause before hurling themselves into the jaws of the enemy.

"We all do," said Wash. The battleship tugged her sweater smooth and shook a loose bit of russet-brown hair out of her eyes. "In our own way."

"Really?" Gale shot Wash a look that would have been incredulous if the battleship's way of speaking hadn't been so damn disarming.

"I'm a battleship," said Wash. "When I stand in the line of battle, I know there is a risk." She steeped her fingers, her gaze going distant as she gathered her thoughts. "But it's what I'm built for. If I die on the line, I die knowing I've made my country proud. I die with my duty fulfilled."

Gale glanced over to where Kidd and Bannie had resumed their sword fight with Dee as their well-intentioned but ultimately useless referee. "What about-"

"The destroyers?" Frisco scratched at the scars covering her stomach, "Their crews called them 'tin cans'. They lived by the mantra 'live fast, die young, take many with you'."

"Every engagement is a risk for those girls," said Wash. "But there's also no room for hesitation. If they commit to an attack they can't hold anything back."

"And then," Frisco nodded at where Bannie was sitting on Dee's shoulders while Kidd tried to rope a waitress into her little fencing war. "They try and get as much living in while they've got the chance."

"Wow," Gale pursed her lips. "That's uh… that's pretty deep."

It was at that very second that Dee tripped over seemingly nothing, sending herself and Bannie flying through the air to land in a puddle at Kidd's feet.

"Four points!" Kidd thrust her hands in the air with a brilliant smile.

Gale slumped her shoulders with a quiet "dangit."