Friday, March 21st, 2014.
The depression lingers.
I spent the majority of today helping Akashi perform reconstructive surgeries with Error, Mamiya, Irako, Houshou, and Ooyodo. No one talked much unless we had to. Just, nobody was in the mood.
Being in the military and being a guy who never really shows his emotions on his face, I got asked by Samidare while she was waiting for her surgery to reattach her right leg about how I was even able to take situations like this as calmly as I could. I just gave her a sad, empty smile and told her that there were many other ways to show emotion than showing it on my face. She asked me how I showed my emotions, but I told her I didn't want to say. I don't really feel like telling anyone that this journal is the one place where I quarantine the thoughts that run through my head and the emotions that run through my heart. I've been doing a good job keeping this journal a secret from the fleet, and to be honest, I don't really feel like letting anyone else know. It's like a dirty little secret, a secret everyone has and should never be revealed.
That, and working is my way of whittling the stress away. It sounds counterintuitive, but working keeps my mind focused on a task and takes my mind off whatever else could be bothering me. Yuudachi's death, but more importantly Kiyoshimo's death, among them. So I ditched morning paperwork and spent about nine hours in the medbay operating on the critically wounded destroyers and light cruisers because Akashi had to work without her right arm that got blown off yesterday from that airplane bomb. Thank God I worked as a field medic for the first six months of my army service, I legitimately thought that I'd never have to use that knowledge ever again. And thank God I assigned Akashi to equip the Mjolnir Cell Reinforcement, because if she didn't have that equipped, she might've suffered a lot worse than just a dismembered arm.
I did have to head out at 1100 hours to meet with the guys from Seal Team Six who came to pick up Yuudachi's and Kiyoshimo's bodies - or what's left of them. I gave Big a harsh glare when I laid my eyes on him this morning, and he knew why. He said that he didn't expect Kiyoshimo to be the kind of girl to have the big damn hero syndrome and nuke herself for the sake of the fleet, so he never bothered to explain the true nature of her augmentation. I told Big that there was enough secrecy and classified bullshit we all had to deal with, and that if he wasn't willing to explain everything truthfully with these gadgets that they've been providing us, the team would be better off not providing them at all. Big retorted that he and his team were perfectly fine with not providing us with free equipment that they were in no way obligated to provide us, and I countered back that if I could trade in all the work that they'd done for the platoon in exchange for Kiyoshimo's life - no, not even that, the restoration of Kiyoshimo's memories - I'd do it in a heartbeat. I told Big that if we wanted to get technical, the lack of complete knowledge of the Yamato Cannon was what killed Kiyoshimo, and no matter how you look at it, it's Seal Team Six's responsibility. I wasn't trying to point fingers to make the situation worse, but it's not like you can beat around the bush about that.
I also added, as a last word, that if Big didn't consider my fleet to be capable of putting the lives of others over their own just like normal humans can, he and the rest of the team should seriously reconsider what they've created.
But what pissed me off the most was the email I got from HQ after I was done with . Long story short, they said that they "weren't allowed to create duplicate warships" because it "broke JMSDF vessel naming conventions".
What a fucking load of bullshit. At least they could take the time to come up with a better excuse.
After eating an early dinner, I finally got around to doing today's paperwork and office bullcrap. HQ also sent me some more satellite image photos that showed that Sector B is now overflowing with Abyssal activity. It's like the other day's night op smacked a dormant beehive, and now the bees are out in full force, pissed off and ready to kill everything.
The losses weren't just limited to physical wounds - we lost a lot of augmentations in the fight. Kiso had to go with Seal Team Six because her Golden Eye got shot out and can only be repaired at Seal Team Six's labs back at the West Coast. Yuudachi lost her Overclock with her death, Hatsuharu lost her Targeting Jammer, Akashi naturally lost her Mjolnir Cell Reinforcement, Wakaba lost her Automated Reloader and Targeting Jammer Mk. II, Ooi lost her Targeting Jammer Mk. II, Murakumo lost her External Cloaking Field, Fubuki lost her Atalantian Reactor Booster, Akebono lost her Psionic Scrambler Mk. II, Yahagi lost her Silencer, Atago lost her Automated Reloader, and Yamato lost her Automated Reloader Mk. II. So on top of having to keep the fleet at base for extensive repairs, the fleet is now severely weakened. Talking to the girls, they admitted that they've been becoming too attached to their augmentations, and they were becoming more crutches than battle augmentations.
Needless to say, this fucking blows.
I spent some time after dinner at Shinsengumi with Yahagi and Yamato. Yamato was truly shaken by Kiyoshimo's death - being the graceful battleship girl that Kiyoshimo had always admired, she'd naturally spent a lot of time dealing with Kiyoshimo's shenanigans about how she wanted to be just like Yamato some day. Yahagi was doing her best to console Yamato, but it wasn't really working, so I sat with them for a while. Yamato wasn't in the mood to talk much, so Yahagi and I just talked sporadically about what future sortie plans and irrelevant battle strategy stuff. When I stood up to leave, Yamato told me that she appreciated me spending some time with her, and that she was sorry she didn't really want to talk to anyone at the moment. I told her that it was okay.
When I went to the kitchens to grab some Ramune (I didn't feel like going back to Shinsengumi and being all awkward around Yamato again), I saw Atago and Takao sitting alone together at one of the tables. I asked them what was up, and Atago explained to me (though with some resistance from Takao) that during yesterday's battle, Akebono had pulled a bit of a Kiyoshimo by scrambling two Abyssal heavy cruisers who were ganging up on Takao and diverting attention away from Takao. Given the situation at that moment, had Akebono not intervened, Takao may have joined the list of critically wounded ship girls, and Akebono only ended up with heavy damage and the loss of her augmentation. So now, Takao doesn't know how to approach Akebono now, given those two's relationship. She'd tried to tell Akebono thanks for saving her after the fleet returned to base, but apparently Akebono just glared at Takao and told her to leave her alone, no profanity used, which is quite rare for Akebono to do to begin with. I suppose even a brat like Akebono can have a silver lining. I told Takao to lay off Akebono for a while, that I would go talk to her. In the meanwhile, I told Takao to calm down on the scoldings that she'd usually give Akebono. Maintaining fleet discipline was great, sure, but I reminded Takao that this was an unorthodox military task force through and through, and as I myself had learned from trying be Mr. Drill Sergeant on the starter girls, orthodox military discipline does not and will not apply perfectly to a fleet full of teenage ship girls.
And then finally, when I returned to my room just about an hour ago, I walked into my room and closed the door behind me. As I was taking off my Commander's uniform jacket to hang it up, I heard my room door lock behind me, and when I turned around, I saw Shigure lock the door and cross the room in three strides and grab my neck. She'd been waiting for me to retire to my room for the night inside the bathroom, and as soon as I came inside, she locked the room so that I couldn't escape as easily. Being the powerful night battle expert that she's proven herself to be, she lifted me off the ground with a single hand. Keep in mind that I'm actually pretty tall - I match Kirishima's height, and only Yamato is taller than me, so if you put that in perspective, the fact that Shigure was able to lift me off my feet is actually impressive, regardless of her ship girl strength.
She was in the denial phase of her grief, because as soon as she grabbed me and lifted me up, she demanded to know why I'd sent them on a mission like that. She asked me why I had to send them all on a mission in which Yuudachi had to die. She accused me of being a terrible Admiral (which I don't completely disagree with), but by the time she got that far, she couldn't control her own emotions and started to break down right in front of me, so her voice went from being a low hiss to a whimpering, broken cry. She threw me onto my bed and caused me to bang my head against the wall, and she fell to her knees on the spot and put her face in her hands, crying again. I'd seen her eyes when she was holding me up, and they were bloodshot red. She'd been spending the past however many hours since she'd come back just bawling her eyes out somewhere by herself.
"Give her back! Give me my sister back...!" she just get repeating.
I told Shigure quietly that Yuudachi would be back soon, repaired and good to go. It wasn't like she was dead for good, like Kiyoshimo was.
But Shigure told me that I didn't understand anything. I wasn't there at Vella Gulf, nor was I there at Surigao Strait. I didn't know what it felt like to know that out of all the ships that were destroyed all the major battles she'd been in except the last one, Shigure was the only one to get out of them unscathed or alive. She'd thought, she'd hoped that for once, in this life, she would be the one to die or be sunk first before anyone else, at least before Yuudachi did. But like a cruel joke, Shigure was denied even that. She couldn't even ask for a death wish even if she tried, and because Yukikaze wasn't here as part of my fleet yet, there really no way for her to die.
I told her that she was incorrect. I don' delve into my own past with the girls a lot, but for Shigure, I made an exception.
Two years ago, when I was still part of the Army, I was in the 9th Ranger Regiment, callsign Ratchet. I was part of a 12-man advance recon squad operating in Afghanistan and Iran. Our official task was to maintain border relations and detain possible insurgents. However, our real task was to investigate a case that involved a particular group of high-value targets, many of whom would later go on to form today's ISIS. That was when my role was reassigned from a field medic to a squad marksman. As soon as we found a lead, we requested permission to get flown into the mountains in northeast Afghanistan, about a hundred and fifty kilometers north of Mehtar Lam. It was a night op - the plan was to go in, storm a safehouse we had the coordinates to, arrest our HVTs, and extract them back to base.
We didn't anticipate our mission to be stopped dead short before it even began. As soon as we entered the mountain range, our chopper got shot out of the air by no less than seven Misagh-1 Iranian SAM missiles, and our chopper's flares couldn't deter them all. We crashed about fifty kilos northwest of Charikar. My entire squad was killed in the chopper crash or died soon afterwards, with me as the sole exception, and the worst I suffered was some bleeding from my head where I hit it against my helmet when we crashed. Some of my buddies survived the landing, but despite my training as a field medic, they didn't last long afterwards, and I knew that hostiles would've most likely surrounded the crash site to investigate it. So I destroyed all sensitive data, took everyone's dogtags, stocked as much as I could on supplies and ammo, and trekked my way back to Hotel Five, my squad's base of operations in Herat, northwestern Afghanistan. Why it had to be me, a stone-faced twenty-one year old kid who nowhere near the combat experience as any of my other squadmates, who survived that crash, I'll never know or even understand. Literally every single other person on my squad was more qualified to survive than me, but here I am.
It's not a glorious story, nor is it a heroic one. And it's definitely not a wartime memory that I wear proudly on my chest as a medal or something, even though I did win the Army's Distinguished Service Cross for returning back to base safely after about three and a half weeks. But I told Shigure that while I wouldn't know what she's felt in the distant past, it wasn't entirely accurate to claim that I knew nothing of her pain.
I told her that the only reason why I didn't go around looking for Shigure yesterday was because Houshou had advised me not to, and this caused me to believe that Shigure was the kind of girl who was strong enough to be able to pick herself up no matter what and didn't need comforting. But I added that if she felt like she needed someone to comfort her and help her get over this, I told her to sit next to me on my bed.
Shigure didn't take my offer, but she just sat there on the floor, crying quietly to herself. If you have any shred of social awareness, you'd know that Shigure's the kind of girl who, deep down, wants someone to help her feel better but is ashamed of feeling that way. So I stayed with her and sat with her on the floor with my arm around her shoulder for about three hours into the night.
But would Shigure even feel better when Yuudachi comes back?