Friday, February 21st, 2014.

I called it. I woke up feeling utterly horrible, to put it lightly. Light-headed, feeling both hot and cold at the same time, and wheezing, not to mention runny nose and bloody coughs from my lungs that took shots. Every time I cough, it feels like someone's pushing a knife deeper into my gunshot wounds, which makes sense since they eventually reopened earlier today, but I'll get to that later. I put on my heavy naval officer's coat that hung in my closet, since it's a bit too heavy for daily use but perfect to wear when just sitting around and not moving much and climbed back in bed.

I asked Fubuki, who came into my bedroom to see if I was doing okay, to go fetch Akashi for me, telling her that I was sick today. I'm guessing that because I've lost a lot of blood from my wounds, my immune system, which normally is pretty damn strong since I rarely ever get sick, got weakened to the point where a simple cough can turn into a fever or a cold or whatever I'm suffering right now. Akashi took my temperature, which turned out to be around forty degrees Celsius, or 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Akashi told me that this time, I couldn't afford to get out of bed, which I agreed to and stayed in bed for today. I can get pretty stubborn, but when it comes to getting sick, I feel like it's just better to stay in bed and rest so that the sickness goes away quicker. Unless, of course, there's work that absolutely needs to get done.

Fubuki brought me my breakfast soon after I woke up. Ooyodo brought me my paperwork so I could work on them from bed. I basically spent the entirety of today sitting in my bed with a scarf I brought along with me from home wrapped around my neck and mouth, working on paperwork and reviewing vital mission information in order to hammer out future mission details. Fubuki offered to feed me my breakfast of chicken soup, fresh white rice, and warm lemon tea. An odd fusion of Western and Oriental breakfast cuisine, but I don't mind. Food is food - doesn't matter if they're halfway across the world from each other. I let her feed me, since my arms admittedly felt really, really heavy. Probably because I was sick.

While she was feeding me breakfast, Fubuki asked me why I was still insisting on working. Wasn't I feeling pain? Wasn't I feeling tired? I mean, getting shot three times must really be a bad thing for me, right? Shouldn't I just focus on resting and think about working once I was back to full health and recovered completely? It's not like I could take a bath in the docks and expect to be repaired in a matter of hours like the rest of the ship girls. Wasn't I just eventually working myself to death?

Normally, I'd defend myself. I wanted to tell Fubuki my reasoning behind continuing to work despite my wounds. I wanted to tell her about my experiences so far in the military, my personal doctrine as a soldier that contradicts my feelings towards being a soldier.

But sometimes, you have to recognize the times when you simply don't need to waste your time and energy defending yourself because you feel like you have something to prove.

So instead, I just told Fubuki, real simply, that no military force, no military base could be expected to operate and function properly without a commander. The world doesn't have time for excuses, no matter how grave or legitimate.

Fubuki still tried to persuade me otherwise for a good thirty minutes, all the while feeding me breakfast, but I just sat through all of it without saying a word. I was too tired to say anything back to her. I sometimes surprise myself with how much patience I can show - I don't normally consider myself someone who's got a ton of patience. I guess you could just say that I was too tired to care.

As soon as I finished breakfast with Fubuki's help, I picked back up the stack of papers on my covers and my pen to get back to work again. Fubuki actually got pretty angry, which surprised me, since I've never heard her sound that angry before. I could tell she was quite mad, probably because by going back to work, I was basically telling Fubuki that I had completely disregarded what she was saying the entire time. She said she wouldn't feed me again if I kept being stubborn and kept working despite my condition.

So I just put my hand on Fubuki's head and said sorry for making Fubuki's words all go to waste. I thanked her for having to put up with me with the trouble I was making her go through with me being injured and sick at the same time. I told her that while I was honored to have received the privilege of getting spoon-fed by Fubuki, I'd have to suffer the loss of it. A simple guy like me, who's used to grubbing out on weeks-old MRE's and sleeping out in the rain with nothing but my officer's cap as a blanket, didn't deserve such a luxury anyway.

Fubuki was silent right after I took off my hand from her head to focus back on my work. She sat next to me by my bed for about an hour before finally getting up and heading back. She didn't say a word that entire time.

I felt complicated when she left. I don't know whether she was still angry with me or if she was suddenly feeling really guilty because of what I'd said. My intention wasn't to guilt-trip her, just saying what was on my mind. Whichever the case, I suddenly felt really, really lonely in my room. Without hearing Fubuki's silent breathing next to me to indicate that there was a fellow human being at my side in case something went wrong. It wasn't a pleasant feeling at all, that's for sure.

I'll just slip this in here before I forget: unlike yesterday, my mind wasn't feeling hazy or making me feel like I was nauseated the entire time, but I did feel like I was just completely out of energy all the time. I guess being sick at least gave me the luxury of not having to feel like I was about to slip into unconsciousness at any given moment, which kinda doesn't make sense, if you think about it. But that's how I felt today.

Ooyodo, my secretary ship girl, brought in my lunch for me when lunchtime rolled around. By that time, I'd completed the paperwork and made some more tweaks to my mission details and was resting a bit in bed with my headphones and iPod. She asked me if I had the appetite to eat lunch, because people typically lose their appetite whenever they fall sick. Looks like Ooyodo's done her research on how to take care of people who're wounded and sick. She could be a good field medic. I told her that while I didn't have the appetite, I needed to force myself to eat if I was planning on healing as fast as possible. She asked me if I was really planning on having the fleet sortie, to which I said yes. I told her that while I understood the girls were really concerned with my vulnerable and weakened state, that was no excuse for the fleet not to serve their purpose. I couldn't call myself a commander if the unit I was supposed to command does nothing but sit around at base for whatever reason, not actually attacking the enemy or doing anything externally productive.

So after I finished what I could of my lunch, Ooyodo took it back for me and brought the girls I asked her to bring to my room: Takao (whom I made flagship for today's mission for a specific reason I'll get into shortly), the two other heavy cruisers, the carriers, and the battleships. Some of them had never ventured into the wing of the base where my bedroom was located, and they were quite surprised to find that my room was extremely barebones, with no fancy luxuries except for my desktop computer, my military academy saber, and my ceremonial graduation uniform from my graduation from Hargraves.

Takao asked me why I was sending all of them on sortie. Wasn't it a better idea to at least keep some of the girls here so that more guys like the guys from the other day wouldn't just walk up into my room and shoot me right my bed? I said that I'd already made up my mind: the entire fleet was to sortie. I wasn't about to risk any of my own ship girls sinking or dying just because of the fact that I'd kept a few of the girls back at base to protect my own sorry ass.

Hiei yelled at me, which was pretty surprising, since we've never really talked before. She demanded to know why I was trying to act like such a hero, constantly disregarding my own health and trying to make myself seem like such a tragic hero trying to protect them. She said that they didn't need protecting, that they were much tougher than humans like me. She resented what I was doing, that I was being stupid and stubborn instead of just quietly sitting in bed trying to focus all of my energy to recovering. After all, Hiei said, an Admiral should command his fleet from his desk, not from his bed.

Kirishima tried to shut her up while she was talking, but Hiei didn't let her. She only shut herself up once she'd said everything she wanted to say. So I put down my folder that holds my mission detail papers and info and asked Hiei to come forward to face me. I think it was at this point when Hiei realized that she might've pissed me off, 'cause she made this little "Hiieeeeee" yelp as she nervously came up to face me.

I asked her if she genuinely thought that I was trying to make myself look like a tragic hero in front of them to gain their favor. She didn't answer at first, so I repeated myself. I repeated myself three times before Hiei finally responded, mumbling "yes" to me. Looks like again, three's the magic number. So I asked the rest of the girls in my office if they concurred with Hiei. No one answered. I don't think they had the courage to answer, to speak their minds. I didn't press the issue, though. So instead, I said this.

I told the girls that if they thought I wasn't fit to be their Commander at the moment, they could leave my office and not sortie. They could continue sitting round at base, keep training and do whatever else they thought was necessary, while the Abyssals are out at sea doing whatever the fuck they usually do. If they thought that I ought to concentrate on recovering first and foremost, they could leave right now.

No one left. Again, I think it's more because no one had the courage to voice dissent and leave.

If this were America, the dissenters would've gladly left.

Then I said if no one was going to leave, everyone was agreeing to sortie today. But before I divulged the mission info, I called out Hiei first.

I told Hiei that she was entitled to her own opinions, and that I was not going to persecute her because of it, even if I might disagree with it. I responded to each of her points: I said that I knew a lot of ways to give them a much more convincing image of a "tragic hero". I assured her that I was a better actor than I looked: if I really wanted to be a tragic hero figure, there would be a lot of much more effective things I could be doing to sell that image a lot better. I have my classmates back in high school, Hargraves, and some of my military superiors from when I first joined the military to thank for that.

As for the fact that they didn't need protecting, I said that I'd rather be accused of protecting the girls too much than being accused of a cold murderer by simply throwing them into the naval meat grinder. I reminded Hiei of what I had to deal with when Ooi and Imuya died the first time. By this point, the entire base knows about the sour relationship that's going on between me and Kitakami, so I reminded Hiei that I wanted to prevent having another relationship like that with anyone else here at base for any of the same reasons at all costs. In addition, I said that it was hard for me to differentiate the ship girls from just normal girls. Sure, they might be invulnerable to things that are normally dangerous to humans, like bullets or stuff like that. But that didn't matter when every single sortie I was going to send them on, there was always going to be a chance that any number of the girls could come back with heavy wounds or dead - or not come back at all. In that sense, knowing this, the ship girls, to me, were no different than my own soldiers. The only difference here is that the girls can just survive for longer. It does not mean that they cannot die like normal soldiers.

And finally, if Hiei seriously thought that naval officers were supposed to command their fleets from their desks, then she and I were living in two completely different worlds. I told her that if I could, I would personally sail out with them to sea to coordinate their missions myself. I reminded Hiei that in my previous post, I was an aircraft carrier commander, the captain of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. George Washington, part of Carrier Strike Group 10. The girls were actually really surprised by this - that's when I realized that I've yet to really tell the fleet more about myself, since they barely know much about me other than the fact that I'm American. So while Hiei thought that the place of the Admiral was behind the desk, I told her that my place was supposed to be in the front lines, right near the action. I wasn't supposed to be groveling behind some lousy fucking desk twiddling my thumbs wondering if my troops were doing well out there on the battlefield. I wanted to be there with them, to see the battle unfold in real time so that I could give live updates to mission objectives and give specific orders to whoever I wanted to do what I could to sway the tide of the battle like I'd done while serving with CARSTRKGRU10 (the military shortening of Carrier Strike Group 10). The wounds I got on Monday might've been bad, but they couldn't hold a candle to the wounds I received while serving aboard the U.S.S. George Washington.

Basically, I told Hiei this: I wasn't trying to be a tragic hero, but at the same time, I'm not a zealous patriot. Instead, I told her that I had my own beliefs of what I needed to do, both as a soldier and as a commander of a military unit. If Hiei disagreed with anything that I stood for, then she had my sincere apology for failing to live up to the standards that she'd placed on me as an Admiral, and she had my permission to resign from active duty and return to the mainland. While I appreciated Hiei's concern for my health, I wasn't going to let anyone, not even the people I commanded, stop me from carrying out my duty.

(This is not a threat to scrap her, let's just be clear here.)

Besides, I'd already lived out my life. I remarked that even if I died of my wounds or of my sickness caused because of my wounds in the near future, I'd already served a soldier's life, and that I'd already had enough work done and seen enough death and destruction for a single human to handle. And it's not like I was here to make friends: if I was gone, someone else would be here shortly to take my place.

Now that I think about it, I probably shouldn't have made that last remark. That was just the bitter side of me lashing out quietly against those girls, who didn't deserve that. I don't even think Hiei deserved that. I guess I can safely say that I regret making that comment. Retrospect never feels good, does it...

So then I proceeded to give them today's mission details. Instead of assaulting Able District, I instead had them sortie to Baker District. Instead of being an archipelago, Baker District appears to be a mass of scattered floating platforms, but the satellite photos can't really give a good image to see what they are exactly. I issued the Observe and Pursue protocol, and their primary objective was to find out what these floating platforms are and why they're being used by the Abyssals.

When everyone was leaving my room, Yamato was the last to linger about. She quietly asked me to take it easy, that I didn't have to feel like I needed to do all of this. I simply gave her a small grin and told her that I didn't mind trying my best to restore the old Imperial Japanese Navy to its former glory again.

Today, Ooyodo and Akashi were supposed to sortie, since Akashi informed me that she'd finished making the custom loadouts for herself and Ooyodo, but the two of them stayed behind, which I allowed just for today since they were adamant on looking after me. I pointed out that Error could just take care of me, but they didn't trust Error. She just disappears randomly too often to be trustworthy of looking after me.

I checked my emails using my desktop computer after the fleet deployed, since walking to the office would be a pain in the ass. No emails that were out of the ordinary. Irako came into my room shortly after to graciously give me some more warm lemon tea. I'd been coughing up a storm that I'd held in while I was talking with the girls, giving them their sortie instructions, and Irako, obviously concerned, asked me if I was feeling any better. That's when I realized that all the coughing had reopened my gunshot wounds, and I was starting to bleed through my bandages wrapped around my body. I asked Irako to call Ooyodo and Akashi, which she did promptly, and Ooyodo helped Akashi replace my bloody bandages with fresh, clean ones after the bleeding settled down eventually.

Since there's nothing else for me to do at this point, I'm just gonna head to sleep again. It's only about 1530 hours - I've been spending the time since Akashi and Ooyodo replaced my bandages for me listening to some music and reading Glock, a historical novel about the Glock-17 handgun written by Paul M. Barrett. One of my subordinate lieutenants gave the book to me as a parting gift after we found out that I'd get transferred to command the new Moebius Four Platoon, so I decided that I may as well get started reading it. Might as well grab some quality sleep while I have the chance, especially when I'm not having a coughing fit and my bandages are fresh.

I hope the fleet comes back safe. Please, karma, don't fuck me for what I've said today.