AN: Thanks Apo350, G66XD66, Shamaru009 and Latios381 for the reviews :) I love you lovelies. I'll try to update as quick as I can, I promise! And I will not let this story fizzle out; I actually know what to write and how it's going to end...unlike my other fics o.0" Oh, and I apologise in advance if your favourite characters turn out to be dead. But everything and everyone will be explained eventually. But, hey- Spoilers ;) (I wonder how many doctor who fans who are reading this now want to kill me?) An invisible cookie to whoever gets the Mass Effect 2 reference! A smaller invisible cookie to all those who don't.

Please do review :3


Fuyuki and Natsumi were sitting on the couch, the television playing quietly but no one was really paying it any attention. Natsumi was drinking a mug of hot chocolate and Fuyuki had a copy of 'Occult Today' in his hands. He looked around the living room, frowning. Something was definitely off. The air was a bit hazy, sounds were a bit fuzzy...And when he looked at Natsumi, he knew that she was dead. Even though she was there, she wasn't supposed to be. And in real life, dead people are dead, which lead Fuyuki to the conclusion that this wasn't real life.

"So...this is a 'dream dream', not just a memory?"

"Yeah, it's a 'dream dream'," Natsumi grinned, finding her brother's utterly confused expression rather funny.

"Thank god..." he sighed, relieved. "I've been having too many 'memory dreams' lately..."

"Yeah, sorry about those..." Natsumi grimaced and avoided his gaze, as if what happened and how it hounded him were her fault.

"Don't be!" he shouted, "It wasn't your fault- it was because of that green alien! He's the reason I'm having nightmares; the reason you're dead!"

"Calm down..." she put her hand on his shoulder, trying to soothe him. "The nightmares will go away..."

"But that...you still won't be here, will you? It won't...My life won't be fixed just because I can get a nice night's sleep. H-how, Nee-chan...? What do I have to do to fix it?"

Natsumi looked into her brother's eyes for a long time. Her stare was serious and hard and then finally she spoke quietly, "I think you already know."

Suddenly, there was a thunderous noise ripping through the air. Pain flared in Fuyuki's ears and head as the noise grew louder and louder and the living room fizzled away, taking his sister with it.

Fuyuki groaned as an alarm rang out through the Sleeping Quarters. He laid on his stomach since it was awkward and painful to sleep on his back, kept his face in his pillow, listening to everyone else groaning in dismay at being woken, getting out of beds and their general movement. Last night, he was certain that he wouldn't be able to get a wink of sleep; being in a communal bedroom, having to listen to other's snoring or soft crying and suffering from a hole in his back was not how he usually fell asleep. But the moment his body settled into the slightly lumpy mattress and his head fell onto the thin pillow, it was nighty-night.

"The morning alarm goes off at seven..." He heard Momoka's sleepy voice explaining from her bed, "You don't have to actually get up, unless you want to go use the bathroom while there's still hot water...Even then you can just go back to bed. Some people just sleep all day long; Katazuchi-san doesn't mind..."

"Well, what else is there to do?" Fuyuki was about to ask, but his mouth was still smooshed into the pillow. He finally opened his eyes to see Momoka, already up and making her bed. "She must not be used to making her own bed," he mused silently, "she's not very good at it." Her long blue hair was kind of a mess and her nightdress was just as fancy as her other clothes. She looked over to him and smiled timidly. "G-good morning."

"Morning Nishizawa-san-" He tried to get up- but then a huge throb of pain attacked from his gunshot wound again, paralysing him in a second. He hissed through gritted teeth and squeezed his eyes shut from the pain.

"H-Hinata-kun?" Momoka's voice was worried and scared and he felt her presence come closer to his bed. "Are you alright?"

"Nrgh...Could you get me my painkillers please?" he groaned. "They're in my locker..."

"Y-yes-!" He saw her dart to the foot of his bed and throw open the lid of his foot locker. After a second of rummaging, she darted back to his side, holding the bottle up to him. "H-here you are..."

"Thanks." He took the bottle and crunched up two pills, grimacing at the ugly taste. He laid perfectly still for a moment as the little pills travelled down to the hole in his back and made it feel all better.

"Do you want me to find you some water?" Momoka offered, still looking extremely anxious.

"Nah, I'll wait until breakfast..." he replied, sitting up now that he actually could. "Um, there is breakfast, right?"

Momoka let out a short relieved sigh and smiled a little. "Y-yes...In the food hall. I'll show you where it is, i-if you want?"

He nodded and motioned for her to take the lead. He followed her through a few corridors, along with a few other people who had just gotten up. Like him, they had slept in the clothes they wore the previous day...and maybe the day before that too. A couple of people nodded to each other and pointed at him, some even flashing a welcoming smile that poorly camouflaged their obvious pity for the new boy who was found alone. After a short walk, they came to the food hall. Like the sleeping quarters, it was a long rectangular corridor but lined with tables and chairs instead of beds. At the back of the hall, there was the area where you picked up a plastic tray and were served with food. The room unfortunately reminded Fuyuki of cafeterias in American prison dramas on television. Pale walls, hard floors, not particularly appetizing food. Still; it was better than a plasma bullet and a ditch.

"The food has to be rationed, so there's not that much," Momoka told him as they queued with the other survivors. "Breakfast is served until nine o'clock, lunch is served from twelve o'clock to two o'clock and then dinner is from five o'clock to seven o'clock."

Fuyuki nodded to show he was listening.

"There's a bell that goes off to say when meals are being served and when they're finished, like at school."

School. Oddly enough, he had thought about school quite a bit during the invasion. Each day, he wondered what he would have been learning, who he would have talked to during the lunch break, if anyone would have come to Occult Club...He missed school. Strange really. He thought he should have been missing television or the internet or clean socks more than that old building he used to intensely dislike every Monday morning.

They had bowls of what looked like cereal (but Fuyuki had a sickly suspicion that it wasn't anything of the sort) and squat cartons of what appeared to be juice (again, Fuyuki's instinct somehow knew otherwise) put onto their trays and then they found themselves somewhere to sit.

"Itadakimas..." Momoka quietly murmured. Fuyuki felt his lips form the syllables, but wasn't sure that his voice carried the words from his throat. He didn't especially care either.

The whole affair felt incredibly surreal. Four days ago he was wandering in a wasteland, his stomach threatening mutiny, and today he was sitting in a cafeteria opposite a friendly (albeit extremely shy) girl. He just couldn't seem to put the pieces together. Perhaps it was because he only woke up in the Sanctum, instead of finding it himself like he had planned. Well, he didn't plan to find the Sanctum, exactly. He planned to find the Earth Resistance. During his wanderings in the ruins, he found a message scrawled onto a wall in spray paint.

"RESISTANCE IS NEVER FUTILE. IT'S NORTH."

It said. After what seemed to be an hour of staring at the message, he gleaned from it that he should go north. While walking north, he realized that the message was meant for those who wanted to fight back against the aliens, to resist the invasion. While he knew that the message was meant for older, taller, stronger people, it most certainly applied to him. It didn't just want to resist the invasion, he wanted to find the alien leading in and crush his skull into the earth and spit on his destroyed body and shout with glee that vengeance had been served.

"Hinata-kun...?"

"Huh?" He blinked, surprised at being so quickly yanked out of his dark thoughts.

"Are you alright?" Momoka's eyes flickered to his hand. His fingers were coiled tightly around the metal spoon, his knuckles blanched white and an indentation left in his skin from the edge of the spoon.

"Uh, yeah..." Something in the back of his brain was telling him to quickly find a new topic of conversation before the only person in the Sanctum he had found to talk to would think him insane and stay as far away from him as possible. "...Nishizawa-san, yesterday, you mentioned someone called Paul..." She looked down at her cereal, as if she knew what was going to be asked. He felt instantly guilty, but spoke anyway, "Can I ask who he is?"

"...Was," she corrected him as politely as possible. "He's, um...He's not..." She cleared her throat, looked up at him and began again looking a bit more together, "He was my bodyguard..."

He wanted to ask why and how she came to have a bodyguard, but didn't want to interrupt.

"When Japan was attacked, he managed to keep me safe. He was taking me here, to the Sanctum. My family have- um, had- contacts to the military, so we had already been informed about this place. But...on the way here, we were attacked. N-not by the aliens, but by these dogs...W-wild dogs...Th-they, um..." Her lower lip began quivering and her eyes had welled up but still she continued, "...One of them bit Paul. I-it wasn't that serious to start with, b-but when we got here, little more than two weeks ago, he started to get ill. Th-the bite, it infected him with something, septicaemia or something, and he...he got really ill really quickly and then he..." She wiped away a teardrop from the corner of her eye with her fingertip. "...He died."

"I'm sorry, Nishizawa-san," Fuyuki said quietly, his voice slightly croaky. "What...What about your parents?"

"I...I don't know what's happened to them...My father was working in Scotland when the invasion hit and I think my mother was somewhere in East Europe... And no one knows what the situation is like over there, but if it's anything like this..."

He nodded grimly to show he understood. She quickly wiped away another couple of teardrops and sniffled a little. "But, um...I-if you don't mind me asking, what about your family, Hinata-kun?"

He folded his arms on the table and hunched over them. "My mom left for work in the morning, and then the aliens attacked in the afternoon. The bombing was really close to my house and the whole street caught fire. My sister and I escaped just before our house fell down on top of our heads and then one of the aliens found us. It killed my sister but I was able to run away."

"...Oh my goodness..." Momoka gasped, her eyes wide with shock. Fuyuki shuffled awkwardly in his seat. The story surprisingly wasn't that difficult to tell, but something about her reaction made him feel that the sheer callousness with which he told it made it even more horrible. But pouring his heart into descriptive reams would just make it harder for everyone. Everyone knew what the world was like now, everyone knew the type of loss that dominated each person's story, so thorough description wasn't really necessary.

"I'm...I'm so sorry, Hinata-kun..." Momoka struggled to say. "B-but...what about your father?"

Fuyuki opened his mouth, but a light -bump- on the back of his head interrupted him before he could speak. "Oh, sorry!" a cheery voice apologised. He looked behind him to see a girl, perhaps about his sister's age, with long dark hair in a pony tail and green eyes, carrying a big cardboard box.

"Oh, are you new around here?" the girl asked, getting a good look at him and smiling welcomingly.

"Yeah, I'm Fuyuki Hinata."

"I'm Koyuki Azumaya. It's nice to meet you, we ...um, we don't get many new faces around here."

"What's in the box, Koyuki-san?" Momoka asked.

"Condensed milk," Koyuki explained. "Apparently there've been some problems with some of the supplies of it, so Sergeant Katazuchi wants to check all the boxes."

"Oh, well, um, b-be more careful..." Momoka's voice was a low mutter, as if she couldn't believe she had the audacity to say what she was "...You hit Hinata-kun..."

"Sorry about that," the older girl apologised again, "I'd better be off. See you two around!" And then she was off, taking a little more care carrying that box.

"Koyuki-san's really nice," Momoka said, "and she's really good at gymnastics. She's not usually that clumsy either...She does a lot of little odd jobs for Katazuchi-san. I'm not sure when she got here; she just seemed to have...appeared one day..."

Fuyuki turned back to her and asked her something that had been bugging him since the first day he regained consciousness. "Nishizawa-san, why are people calling Katazuchi-san 'Sergeant'?"

"Um, because he is one..." she replied, as politely as possible. "This bunker belonged to the military, and Katazuchi-san is the highest ranked out of all the soldiers left here, that why he's in charge."

He leaned in a bit, becoming extremely interested, "Is he...Are the army planning any resistance movement? Like, fighting back against the aliens?"

She caught her breath, clammed up. Her voice became quieter and she didn't quite meet his eye, "I...I'm not sure if I'm supposed to say..."

"Nishizawa-san, please trust me. I won't tell anyone else if I'm not supposed to. Tell me," he leaned in, speaking in a hushed tone, "is the Sanctum the base of the Earth Resistance?"

Her eyes flitted around them, scanning the area anxiously before she felt safe enough to whisper. "It's one of them, yes..."

"And Katazuchi-san is in charge of it?"

She nodded.

"Right...Right..." Fuyuki contemplated what he was going to say next. Saying too much now might implicate Momoka, might get her dragged into some trouble he really didn't want to put her in. But if her family knew the location of a military bunker, and she had even these scraps of information about the Earth Resistance, she might know a lot more than other people around here, meaning he couldn't afford to isolate her. "Nishizawa-san...I'm planning on joining the Earth Resistance; I've got something they would really want to see."


"Giroro-kun, there you are!"

Giroro turned to see a rather concerned looking Pururu rushing into the communal kitchen, where he was hunched over his Type-G breakfast rations. "Have you seen Zeroro-kun anywhere? I haven't seen him since I got here."

His stomach twisted. He wondered when this was coming and prayed that it wouldn't...even though he knew Pururu would ask about him sooner or later. After all, they were childhood friends. "You, uh...You haven't read Zeroro's file, have you?" he said quietly. It was more of a statement than a question. If she had read his file, she wouldn't have asked that question.

Pururu shook her head and sat down at the table. Her eyes became more serious and a bit...frightened about what he was about to say. Giroro would have been too, if their roles were reversed. Some things were only written in a soldiers' file if they were incredibly honourable or horrendously bad.

"Uh, well..." he began, shuffling awkwardly in his seat. He shoved away the pot of rations; he'd lost his appetite. "...When we got to Pekopon...before the attack, we all went on separate preliminary excursions, just scouting the area, having a look around, you know...And, um, Zeroro just...He just didn't come back."

Pururu covered her mouth with her hand. "Oh...I-I suppose it's useless to ask whether or not you searched for him?"

His stomach gave another sickly writhe. "We couldn't delay the invasion anymore...Headquarters was getting antsy and if we told them we had lost a member of the platoon this early-"

"They would have taken the platoon off the invasion and you would have all gotten Black Spots on your files," Pururu finished.

"Yeah."

Pururu looked down and the room fell silent. After gulping nervously, she said, "B-but...we would know if something terrible happened, wouldn't we? I mean, we're his friends, we'd be able to sense if he died-"

"Zeroro is one of the best assassins that the army's got," Giroro cut straight through, "he's resourceful, intelligent and strong. Anything on Pekopon wouldn't be a match for him; we've no need to worry."

"...You sound like you've gotten use to saying that," Pururu noted.

"Every time I start thinking about him," Giroro admitted. "If I say it often enough, I'll eventually convince myself."

Pururu sighed deeply. "How could Keroro-kun let this happen, and then not tell me?"

"He's Keroro," Giroro scoffed.

"He was Zeroro-kun's friend too!" she protested on their leader's behalf.

"Yeah...Yeah, I guess your right...It's probably effected him more than we think."

After a quiet pause, Giroro stood up abruptly, almost tipping his chair backwards. "Have you seen Garuru?"

"I think he's in the ship's Main Battery," she replied.

Giroro stormed out, looking oddly determined. But after that moment's weakness where he, the strong and serious corporal, was outwardly worried about his friend, he felt he needed to look a little bit more...macho. After the red frog had left the room, and his footsteps could no longer be heard from the kitchen, Pururu rested her elbows on the table, buried her face in her hands and murmured silently. "Oh, Zeroro-kun..."


The Main Battery of the Keroro Platoon's ship was the core of it. All power for the whole ship (except for Sergeant Major Kururu's laboratory, which had its own personal generator for ambiguous reasons) was supplied by a huge green sphere of flickering, steaming, pure energy, which was suspended in mid-air in the centre of the room. A power source of which the Keron Army was quite happy with. A walkway made of non-conducting white plastic circled around the energy sphere, with a control panel standing on a short plinth parallel with the door. Lieutenant Garuru was at said control panel, until his brother walked in.

"Do you have a minute, Garuru?"

"Can it wait for a bit? I'm in the middle of some calibrations," he said over his shoulder, not taking his eyes from the screen. He knew full well that he was a workaholic, but in this line of work, you either were a workaholic or you were half-assing it. And the Lieutenant never half-assed anything.

"Uh...yeah, sure."

Garuru listened to Giroro's footsteps fade further away...and then suddenly race back into the room.

"No, actually, it- it can't wait-" Garuru turned around abruptly, surprised, no- shocked, at his brother's almost desperate, breathless tone, "-I...I really need to talk about something, and you're...you're the only one I can talk to about it."

Garuru switched the control panel off instantly; work was work, his little brother's distress was infinitely more important. In very few instances since graduating from the academy, had Giroro come to Garuru with that level of distress strangling his words, making him all the more perturbed.

"What is it, Giroro?" he asked seriously, folding his arms.

Giroro gulped nervously, opening and closing his mouth like a Pekoponian goldfish. He looked like all the words he had pent up inside him had scurried away from his mouth. Then he cleared his throat and began to explain, "I, uh...You know that Pekoponian I told you about yesterday, the one I...the one who had the Kero Ball?"

Garuru nodded, but remained silent. His brother would say what he had to; interruptions would just hinder him.

"The Pekoponian was...I shot him, and I know I'm a soldier- it's my job to shoot the enemy, but...He was just a kid, Garuru..."

The Lieutenant felt a tiny shiver of cold run through his blood.

"...He was just a kid, and I shot him. I-...I've shot plenty of enemies before in battle and- hell, you know me, sometimes I've enjoyed it- but that was in battle. They were shooting back at me, it was them or me, but this kid was running away from me and I-I still...shot...him..." Giroro's head fell into his hands.

Garuru considered what he was about to say very carefully. "Yesterday...You said that the Pekoponian was threatening you with the Kero Ball."

Giroro pulled his head from his palms swiftly, taking a quick, deep breath. His eyes looked a little- just a little- blurry. "He did, but after he pressed Flash Transport...then he started running away. I had a second to think about whether I was really going to pull the trigger or not and...Something in my head just went... 'Yeah, shoot him'." He paused, and licked his lips nervously. "That's the other thing...The Kero Ball, I...I did go to where he had...had fallen but I...He had fallen into this ditch and pulled this big mattress over him, trying to hide probably, but I, uh...I couldn't bring myself to search him. So, th-that's why I said it wasn't there because, in all honesty, I was too...I was just so...I didn't look for it."

"...What you're saying is; the Kero Ball might still be there?"

"Yeah."

Garuru thought through everything he had told him. "Alright. This is what we do about the Kero Ball situation," he began, gripping Giroro's shoulder reassuringly, "you and I will leave tomorrow morning with Private Second Class Tamama as he departs to investigate and destroy the located Pekoponian campsites. I will tell Sergeant Keroro that we are going to investigate some other possible sites, but we will be going to find the Kero Ball. We will simply 'happen' to find it, and the rest of the Platoon will not have to know why you didn't find it before."

Giroro nodded. "Yeah, um...Yeah that's a good plan."

"...This must've been eating you inside."

The little brother just nodded again. Garuru patted his shoulder and then it was back to business. "Go back to your post, Corporal. I'm sure you have work to attend to." The purple frog returned to the control panel and went on with his calibrating.

Just before he heard his brother's departing footsteps, he heard him say quietly, "Thanks Nii-san. I don't know what I would've done if you weren't here."


Fuyuki, with Momoka just behind him, rifled through the contents of his foot locker until he found his backpack. He tore it open, almost breaking the zipper in progress, and continued his search. "That's...That's an awful lot of candy..." Momoka whispered hungrily, her violet eyes fixed on a particular bar of chocolate. Fuyuki laughed at her expression, oddly amused by it, and secretly pushed the candy bar into her hand.

"Our secret supply," he whispered to her, half jokingly. Her cheeks suddenly flushed with red, her wide eyes flicking from him, to the chocolate in her hand. She nodded frantically and made a little squeaky noise he guessed was a thank-you. After sifting through more candy, he finally found what he was looking for. He pulled the device to the opening of the backpack, but didn't take it out. He didn't mind people in the sleeping quarters to know he had a store's supply of candy, but an alien weapon was a different matter.

"What is it?" Momoka asked.

"It's the weapon the alien used to kill my sister," he answered grimly. "And I'm going to use it to fight the aliens."