Tuesday, April 8th, 2014.
Still having trouble breathing; hurts whenever I breathe in too long or too fast. That's kind of what I get for being a fuckin' dumbass, though.
As soon as I woke up, the usual gang barged into my room. Well, more like I got woken up by them kicking my door open. And by "usual gang", I mean the girls who like me the most. Samidare, Yuudachi, Shigure, and Ooyodo kicked open my door to bring me fresh bandages and my breakfast. Surprisingly, Amagi, Harusame, and Taigei, three of the new ship girls, came along too, and Akagi followed in simply because she was here for Amagi.
As they were redressing my bullet wound, Samidare gave me a real scolding. At the time, I was just a bit stunned; I'd gotten so friendly and used to a nice, docile, and sweet Samidare that I'd long since dropped my guard around her, so having her yell at me like that was a real wake-up call. Now that I can sit here and write this journal and think about why she scolded me like that and think about what she said, she and the others are right.
Samidare told me that what I did yesterday was just so stupid in so many respects that it was hard to know where to start. One does not simply hand an extremely distraught person a gun and tell him or her to shoot oneself. She didn't know if I was truly trying to make amends for something I wasn't directly responsible for, or if I was just trying to act all tough and mighty in front of the new ship girls, or if I was gambling that Hayashimo wouldn't take the shot, but she told me that I was extremely lucky that I didn't end up with a worse injury, perhaps even a debilitating one. After all, Hayashimo's bullet nearly severed my spine and could've left me a paraplegic. She demanded to know what I was even thinking yesterday, and that she should've had this talk with me yesterday but didn't since she wanted me to recover at least somewhat before she started chewing me out.
Since I was still groggy, I just said that I meant what I said: that if Hayashimo thought that I was Kiyoshimo's murderer, then she had a chance to avenge her. Simple as that. I said that I understood what Hayashimo felt and what was going through her mind at that point in time, so I decided to give her a chance to end it all. It wasn't a matter of personal bravery or courage or just trying to see how big my dick was, it was a straight-up decision involving Hayashimo and Hayashimo only.
Samidare still slapped me anyway. By that point, she was so angry with me that she couldn't help but cry. This's the angriest I've ever seen Samidare get by a large margin.
"There's a right way and a wrong way to take responsibility!" she yelled at me. "What you did yesterday was the wrong way!"
It was at this point that Samidare couldn't bring herself to talk anymore and just started bawling into my arm, so Shigure took over for her.
"I'm very disappointed in you, Admiral," Shigure said.
As if Samidare's tirade wasn't enough, Shigure picked up where Samidare left off and said that death should never be a solution to a situation like yesterday's. She said that of everyone here, she'd know that the best. She pointed out that perhaps the only reason why Hayashimo didn't just kill me outright was because she just didn't know how to shoot a handgun like mine properly, not because she had second thoughts about taking my life.
Ooyodo, too, pointed out kindly that destroyers were not to be trifled with, and that I was still exhibiting some of my bad habits of being a normal Navy officer. Ship girls weren't normal soldiers. At the very core of their existences, if you strip away all the extenuating circumstances and aspects about them, ship girls are merely teenage girls or young women with big guns. And if a ship girl, especially a destroyer like Hayashimo, was under extreme duress, she would just make decisions that any normal teenage girl going through puberty would make - probably bad ones.
But perhaps what hit me the hardest at the end of all that was when Samidare told me after she'd calmed down somewhat:
"Why do you think that you should've died a long time ago? Don't think of things that way! You survived everything up until now so that you could be here for us! Don't think of this as a stupid bonus! That makes it sound like you being here doesn't mean anything in particular!"
So yeah...the feels punched me harder than that bullet Hayashimo shot me with.
Taigei finally saved me, somehow able to convince the destroyers to calm down and give me some breathing space, and that my breakfast was getting cold from them slapping me around with their rebuking words.
So I gave my destroyers a group hug. I said that I was sorry, and that I wouldn't do something so obviously dumb like that again before I really did end up giving myself an injury I didn't need. I admitted that it'd been a long time since someone cared about me enough to give me a good slap back to reality and get my head outta my own self-righteous mentality. That was my own counterpunch of feels to the destroyers' guts, 'cause the destroyers suddenly dropped their disapproving looks and started feeling real guilty. Shigure's hair flap things were pressed flat downwards against her head, for one.
Just feels, feels, feels all around. Feels bad, man.
At breakfast, when it was beginning to seem like most of the girls were finishing their meals, I called their attention and asked them to put what happened yesterday behind. I told them that I didn't want to jeopardize the integrity of the fleet just because of the actions of one particular ship girl, and I asked them not to judge Hayashimo on account of her actions. I wanted to rely on their cooperation, not to give orders to specifically prevent the girls from treating Hayashimo any worse.
Then, Naganami stood up and yelled back:
"Hayashimo was a creep anyway! It's her own fault that she can't handle people dying! No one honestly cares if she gets scrapped! Just go ahead and scrap her already, nobody likes her!"
If that doesn't tell me a lot about what Hayashimo was thought of before she was deployed here to Okinawa, I don't know what else does.
Oh, and what Naganami said also hit a really bad nerve with me. Little do the ship girls know, I was that guy back in high school, when I was a freshman. I was the guy that no one liked 'cause I didn't like talking to other people and always did things on my own, and because I attended a high school where the law of the land was to make friends and become as popular as possible, I, being the deviant, was shunned. A creep, a weirdo, a loner, any generic American insult for a shut-in was put on me like labels on grocery products.
I hadn't gotten that instantly pissed in a while, so I yelled Naganami back down. I was also that guy when I was her age (the age she looks, anyway), a Hayashimo kid of guy who was a loner and did things that made other people call me a creep. If she wanted me to go scrap Hayashimo, I'd gladly scrap her along with the rest of the fleet as well. I was about to drop the fucking hammer on Naganami a second time, but because of our little feels session earlier that morning, I stopped there. I ended it on the note that I intended to have every single member of this fleet a principal part of it, including a ship girl who could've taken my life, because my job was to command this fleet to end this war, not to send anyone to the scrapyard.
That last note helped cement my intentions within the fleet, since when I finally managed to convince Hayashimo to come out of her dorm room (the one Kiyoshimo used to live in, not surprisingly) to go do morning training with the fleet, the fleet treated her a lot better than they had yesterday. Of course, there're still a few ship girls who give Hayashimo the cold shoulder - Samidare, Shigure, Yuudachi in particular, and some of the newer ship girls like Naganami who've known Hayashimo from before. Takao informed me that they'd had some issues with Naganami intentionally screwing with Hayashimo during target practice and fleet combat maneuver exercises, but I said to keep it under control for now, and if it continued to persist, I'd speak with Naganami directly.
Because yesterday was supposed to be a sortie day, we were one day behind our preparations for Operation Rising Sun. This time, HQ's been giving me direct mission suggestions along with satellite image photos of potential mission AO's in Sector B for the fleet to hit. Yesterday, they wanted me to investigate Baker One again to figure out Hoppo's patrol routes, if she had any. Today, I was to send the fleet back down to Charlie District to take out at least 50% of the Abyssal carrier forces.
So I equipped our new augmentations onto the fleet and deployed them. But before they left, I pulled Naganami aside. I ordered her not to lay a hand on Hayashimo. She gave me the stinkeye look and accused me of having the hots for Hayashimo, but then I said that if Naganami was in Hayashimo's shoes, if I'd sent one of her own ship sisters to their deaths on a mission and Naganami reacted in a similar way, I'd do the same for her too. That shut Naganami up for good, though she still deployed real bitter and salty towards me. Understandable, but the road to making amends for my stupid mistake yesterday is going to be a bloody and salty one. I've already accepted that.
I napped for the rest of the day until the fleet came back, giving my body as much rest as possible for the gunshot wound from yesterday. Houshou, Irako, and Mamiya took really good care of me, bringing some light painkillers from yesterday's supply drop, delicious Hakata ramen, and hot green tea, and redressing my bandages. I'm glad we have them here at base.
The fleet came back with moderate damage suffered all around. Because the new ship girls were overall much weaker and much less experienced, I had the fleet assume a ring formation to protect the newcomers so that they could gain valuable combat experience without being prone to the heaviest damage.
Shigure's Kai 2, however, is what scares me now. Ooyodo's post-action mission report says that her firepower outguns Yamato's firepower without the Yamato Cannon. In addition, we also got a glimpse of what Shigure's "Standalone Protocol" is: Shigure was reported to have control over some sort of black aura. What is she now, some kind of character from Naruto or Bleach? Probably that converted Abyssal tech that Big mentioned. The report wasn't clear on how Shigure was using this power, but I don't have the heart to ask Shigure specifically what it's all about.
Taihou's launch day was also yesterday, the day they arrived here, so when the fleet returned, I made a quick chocolate cake for her with Mamiya's and Irako's help, who've gotten really good at baking Western-style treats and desserts. Matter of fact, I shouldn't say that I was the one who made it, I just gave them instructions and they did all the hard work. I apologized to Taihou, since I would've made the cake myself if Mamiya and Irako didn't insist on making the cake for me in light of my injury, but Taihou was nevertheless charmed by the fact that someone even remembered her launch day. She promised me that she would do everything she could to become the fleet's strongest carrier. The other carriers heard this, especially Souryuu and Akagi, and they immediately reacted to this, saying that they wouldn't lose to someone like Taihou while shoving spoonfuls of cake into their mouths, which was pretty hilarious. Taihou accused them of patronizing me with their ample "aircraft hangars", and declared that she would still improve rapidly to become an even better carrier than all of the other standard carriers, and soon the carriers all got into a heated debate about aircraft hangar size and relevance, plane capacities, personal strength, and yadda yadda yadda.
Hayashimo didn't say a word to me this entire day, by the way. I just hope she sees it in herself to open up to other people. Being someone like her in my own past, I won't have the arrogance to say that I know everything that she's thinking and feeling, but I can at least advise her that it's never good to suffer alone. I'll wait a bit, and then see if she's willing to put Kiyoshimo's death behind her.
But obviously that's much easier said than done.
Wait a minute, isn't Naganami part of the same ship class as both Hayashimo and Kiyoshimo?