Saturday, March 29th, 2014.
Houshou found my bloody uniform that I put in the laundry basket. She confronted me just before I headed into the mess hall, demanding to know what had happened. So I had to disclose what happened with me and Shigure last evening to her, under the pledge that Houshou did not dare tell another soul. In order to provide the context for that incident, I also told Houshou about the rocky relationship that Shigure and I had, and how it was affecting her ship sisters Yuudachi and Samidare.
Houshou was certainly very concerned, to say the least. For one, she asked me how I could handle the fact that one of my own ship girls had just tried to kill me so well, to which I responded that I'd dealt with insubordination before in various ways. Besides, that wasn't my first waltz with death either. Houshou advised me that perhaps I should send Shigure back to the mainland to have her checked, to see if she was truly fit for military service, but I rejected that notion, saying that I preferred leaving my ship girls in the hands of the more capable Seal Team Six. We just need to hope that they're able to get enough resources soon to perform the necessary surgeries to fix Shigure straight.
"Please be careful. I fear that your own ship girls will be the end of you above all else," she told me.
No shit, Sherlock.
Since it's the weekend, I didn't send the fleet out to sortie, but I did have them train a few hours in the morning without augmentations to keep them on their toes. Takao reported that Shigure was absent from training, which I took note of and searched the base while the rest of the fleet was training.
I found her hiding in one of the dark corners of the storage sheds, where various weapons design prototypes that Akashi's been developing and producing recently in her spare time are stored.
Shigure was in a completely shitty state. She was a wreck - her arms were drenched with blood, and her wrists were just mangled masses of ripped and torn skin and blood vessels. When she saw that I'd found her, Shigure cowered even more in the corner and kept whispering,
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry - "
Over and over. Every now and then she slipped in a "I have failed, I'm sorry, please forgive me" in there.
My gut told me that there was a solid chance that if I approached Shigure now, she might just rip my head off. I'm not even saying that as a joke, if Shigure could attempt to rip my heart out, she can just as well tear my head off in the same manner too.
But I went to her anyway, because fuck it. Luckily, she'd returned to enough of herself that she didn't make any threatening moves onto me when I approached, so I slowly knelt behind her. Here was this teenage girl who had monstrous powers she clearly didn't want and couldn't control and was shutting herself away as best she could to hide it from the rest of the world because she couldn't hide it from the one person she wanted to hide it the most from, which was herself. Just like your average eroge/harem anime protagonist, I couldn't just leave her alone. Except, unlike other eroge/harem anime protagonists, I've already done what I could for her, and it seems like I've gotta wade out even further into this abyss of a girl's depression and nightmares.
As I put my arms around Shigure's chest slowly, making sure that she wasn't about to spin around again and really thrust out my heart right out of my chest this time around, the lyrics from Linkin Park's "The Messenger" were playing back in my head.
Shigure's voice was hoarse, like she'd been muttering desperately depressing shit all throughout the night. She begged me to go away. She couldn't control herself anymore. She'd thought that with my reassurance and her ship sisters' support, she had conquered whatever inner demon she had growing within her. She said that she was totally wrong, that every time she went off to sortie, every time she fired a gun and smelled the gunpowder in the air mixing with the ocean breeze and the sea salt, every time she she saw an Abyssal enemy or saw any of her comrades receive damage in a fight, every time she smelled or tasted blood of any kind, she would lose herself in a mind-jarring lust for death, for the nauseating thrill of war and the gut-wrenching thrill of the fight, and for even more blood. Shigure whispered to me that she'd gotten to a point where she felt like she was becoming an in-real-life vampire, that she was beginning to feel as though she couldn't keep calm unless she saw blood, and that's why her arms and wrists were mangled, because she'd been literally scratching at them, clawing them open, even sucking her own blood straight from her broken blood vessels.
Shigure declared that she'd become a monster. She asked me in the calmest voice she could muster (even then, her voice was quivering too much for her not to stutter) to scrap her as soon as possible. There was no way someone - no, something like her could stay here. She had already become a detriment to this naval base. After all, she nearly killed her own Admiral just the previous night.
I keep saying this, but as a soldier and a military officer, I've seen some shit. Some really horrible shit. I've also heard lots of bad shit. I've dealt with soldiers, veterans who have returned from the "war against terrorism" with all sorts of cases of PTSD. If Shigure were to join them and I had to measure Shigure's distress on a PTSD measurement scale, if such a thing even exists, I'd say Shigure is without a doubt on the more extreme end of the spectrum. She's not the craziest I've seen this spiral down to, but Shigure was at the point where any normal, mentally healthy human being would want to have nothing to do with Shigure from the way she was acting earlier today.
But I'm not a normal human being. Soldiers, by definition, aren't normal human beings, if you think about it. Neither am I "mentally healthy", either. Mentally stable, yes, probably, but not mentally healthy. You cannot have a healthy mind if your job is specifically to send men and women known as soldiers to their deaths.
But this truth gives me an advantage in a situation like this. Only the crazy, only the afflicted can truly understand their fellow kind. Like apples and oranges, some things in life just don't mix. You had to be there, you had to be like them to know them.
Only monsters understand other monsters.
The freakiest thing was that by this point, Shigure had fallen completely silent after about five minutes of me just kneeling there hugging her. I felt something drip onto my arms, and Shigure was crying tears of blood.
At the time, I didn't understand what that meant. So I whispered to Shigure,
"As your Admiral, I refuse to leave you here in the dark. Until you decide to come out, I'll be here for as long as you need me to be."
Normally, I'd think to myself about how embarrassing that line must've been to say, but the cheesiness of lines is best ignored when someone's trying motherfuckin' tears of blood.
Then, Shigure fainted. That's when I knew something was going really wrong - ship girls don't faint.
I carried Shigure back to the medbay and literally bellowed for Akashi to get her ass to the place. She, Houshou, Ooyodo, Samidare, Yuudachi, and some of the other destroyers with whom they'd been hanging out with came bolting to the medbay, where I'd already put Shigure on one of the examination beds and prepared initial first aid.
Akashi discovered, to everyone's horror, that Shigure main processing unit (her brain) had subconsciously managed to auto-terminate all executable files and programs and induce a forced shut-down application. In other words, Shigure subconsciously flipped the switch of life in her brain off, and now her body was shutting down entirely, stopping all vital bodily functions. The tears of blood, Akashi said, was the key sign to Shigure's self-destruction, because the bloody tears are the result of the first casualty that occurs whenever ship girls decide to effectively commit suicide like Shigure did: they kill their consciousness first.
Akashi operated on Shigure directly in order to work quickly to prevent Shigure's brain from completing all necessary steps to finalize auto-termination. After about a frantic hour, Akashi finally let us back in again and announced that she'd barely managed to stop the auto-termination process, which was estimated to be about 82% completed already. Samidare, Yuudachi, and I asked Akashi if Shigure would be able to go back to normal, but Akashi was completely uncertain. She only knew the symptoms of things like this and how to stop them, but like many aspects of ship girls, Akashi knew nothing of any after-effects that might come about. In addition, Akashi mentioned that she could only halt the auto-terminated process. She didn't know if her fix was temporary or permanent, but what this means right now is that Shigure is still lying on that bed in the medbay in a sort of self-induced cyro-freeze state, in which her body is completely inactive, like a computer whose power button is broken and the power supply itself isn't working properly. Akashi also said that she'd attempted to go a bit further and see if she could induce some sort of restorative application to trigger in Shigure's main processing unit, but Shigure's brain literally refused to run any such programs, like it was hell-bent on carrying out its initial auto-termination program.
Shigure, right now, isn't going to wake up, but she isn't going to die either. But that's only for now...it's still a very real possibility that somehow, in some way, Shigure's brain will restart the auto-termination program. And because Akashi only managed to halt the process, not wipe it clean and erase it, it'll start from that 82% completed and go on until it's 100%.
Samidare and Yuudachi spent the rest of the day in the medbay. I spent a few hours with them there, bringing their dinner to them with Houshou's permission. Ritou-chan was still in my office, finishing Code Geass, so I gave her Girls Und Panzer to watch to distract her.
I sent an urgent email to Seal Team Six explaining the situation. I asked them what was going to happen to Shigure, and if there was any way to save her.
Even though I wasn't really in much of a mood to do anything else that night, Murakumo asked me to teach her how to play Makoto to beat Sazanami's Juri, so I obliged her and spent about two hours at Shinsengumi teaching her the basics of how to play a fighting game like Street Fighter. It seems that the girls have taken quite the liking to Street Fighter IV and have even organized a day-long tournament tomorrow for it on Sunday. Interesting, seeing that Ultra Street Fighter IV's about to be released with the next month over in Japanese arcades.
When I checked back to my office after that, to my relief, I saw a new email sitting in my inbox. Opening it, it read:
"Then it's about time we got serious. We'll be over right away - but when we come to take her, don't expect to have Shigure back any time soon. We've got some plans for her."
Plans, you say...why does that make me feel really worried?