It was wrong. It hadn't happened like this. Or had it?
It felt like she was frozen in place, standing in the doorway that divided the lighthouse's safety and the world of death that awaited if she took that last step forward.
The doorway? How could she be standing in the doorway? It had been her one directive never to open that door. But it was open. Had she opened it? She must have, because just in front of her was the open air, waves lapping against the bottom of the concrete steps as if tempting anybody in the doorway to step into the icy water.
Maybe it had all been a bad dream - she'd fallen asleep. What felt like years was just a warped passage of time. Kavkaz was still alive. And she would have yelled at her if she'd caught her asleep and vulnerable.
She could see Kavkaz a short distance away, on the water with her riggings deployed and looking at something Kaganovich couldn't see from her position at the doorway.
Wait, had she caught her asleep? Did she open the door and almost rush out because her sleep-addled mind was only thinking of apologizing to Kavkaz after she pounded on the door and risked calling out?
No, that explanation felt wrong. But Kavkaz was right there. If she could just make her body obey…!
As Kaganovich watched, still struggling to move so much as the gaze she had locked towards the still-unaware Kavkaz, a second figure walked into her range of vision - somebody that had been visible to Kavkaz from the start, and explained her worried expression. Both Kavkaz and Kaganovich could recognize her immediately.
It was Molotov. The last shipgirl the other two had seen before being trapped in the Mirror Sea, and the first they had seen in weeks, if not months, other than each other. Kaganovich's sister, and Kavkaz's comrade.
But there were no expressions of relief from Molotov that they were alright, no promises to help them escape, not even so much as a simple greeting after seeing Kavkaz or Kaganovich for the first time in a while. Instead, her gaze was downcast towards her feet, her long white hair hanging in front of her head and obscuring her face. It was what was in Molotov's hand that warranted Kavkaz's cautious pose, her hands held just in front of her chest in an attempt at a calming gesture.
A black sword, its blade enveloped in a translucent black mist, with red veins pulsing across the blade. It was less like Molotov holding a weapon and more like her having brought a malicious living creature into their presence, scheming and alive.
"M-Molotov?" Kavkaz managed, with Kaganovich still being unable to move and her voice blocked inside her throat to call out to either of them. "We can get into why you're here later, but are you alright? What's with that sword? Where did you even get it?"
Molotov didn't make any movement that suggested cognizance to what Kavkaz had said, or any comment to how unfitting fear and nervousness was to hear in Kavkaz's voice in almost any other scenario.
"...so you were still alive," came an unprompted response, with the slightest tightening of her knuckles on the hilt of the sword, the black mist around the blade starting to creep over Molotov's fingers.
Kavkaz took a step back, her face filled with worry and shock, and Molotov responded by taking a step of precisely equal distance forward, maintaining the distance between them.
"We tried our best to stay alive, yeah," Kavkaz said. "We were waiting for somebody to come. Was it supposed to be you?"
Again, no response or movement came from Molotov, but just one word, rasped out of her throat like a curse to be targeted at those she spoke it to. "Unacceptable."
The sword's angle slowly raised itself from hanging downwards as Molotov said her next words. "Do you know why I brought you here? Why I left you two here?"
Kavkaz shook her head, confusion and indecision still filling her face and preventing a response any more comprehensive than that.
"I LEFT YOU TWO HERE TO DIE!" Molotov bellowed, her other hand reaching for the hilt of the sword for a two-handed grip, the black fog now thicker than ever, almost obscuring the entire blade.
At that moment, Kaganovich felt the blockage in her throat free itself, even if she couldn't move herself from the doorway in any other way. "Kavkaz, watch out!"
The eyes of the recipient of the shout suddenly focused, pushing aside the confusion regarding her comrade's hostile behavior towards her. Digging her heels into the water, she turned and pushed off, her well-honed instincts kicking in to create as much distance between danger as possible.
But Molotov seemed to be in no hurry to raise her sword, and as she crouched slightly like a sprinter about to start a race, a sense of doom washed over Kaganovich.
Kavkaz was already running, a non-insignificant distance having been made between her and Molotov, yet in an instant Molotov had somehow done the same process that took Kavkaz a split second to do, matching and surpassing it instantaneously.
The water where Molotov had been standing was a mere circular ripple, and she closed the distance to the shipgirl that had turned her back and ran from her, the fog-encased blade driving itself into Kavkaz's back and pushing straight out the other side, the momentum of Molotov's movement forcing the fleeing Kavkaz onto the ground.
A scream exploded from Kavkaz's lips, Kaganovich unable to cover her ears as the primal sound rocked through her consciousness.
Molotov hadn't arrived to rescue them. She had appeared to finish the job. She had left them here to die, and for the crime of attempting to survive, it would have been better for both of them to have fallen prey to Siren gunfire.
Blood exploded from the front and instantly mixed with the seawater as Kavkaz crumpled, darkening the already-shadowy seawater. The black fog on the blade seemed to go in the reverse direction of the dripping blood, following the blade upwards or downwards to enter the impaled Kavkaz.
It was only at this moment when Kaganovich's situation was slightly alleviated by her eyelids suddenly being freed to squeeze themselves shut, as if not seeing the event meant it wasn't happening.
But Kavkaz's initial scream had long since faded into an echo bouncing off the edges of the doorway, and Kaganovich dared a look a few minutes later, as the only sounds she could hear were very weak splashes of something hitting the water from a very low height.
Molotov was gone, with absolutely no evidence of her presence remaining except the blade still impaling Kavkaz. Despite the injury, Kavkaz had managed to push herself up somewhat with her elbows, the end of the blade visible coming out of her stomach. Her breathing was ragged, and her arms shook in exertion in keeping herself from simply collapsing onto the floor face-down.
Gritting her teeth, Kavkaz painstakingly reached her hand forward and dragged herself forward, having already covered a significant distance from where she fell. She was within a stone's throw of Kaganovich at the steps of the tower, and by this point, the blood gushing from her wound was almost indistinguishable due to the thick black fog of the blade starting to creep around her uniform and smothering it in translucent black.
Kaganovich could only stare in horror, not because her vocal chords had seized up again, but because she found it difficult to push her voice through the lump building in her throat.
Kavkaz reached her hand forward one last time, but her trembling opposite elbow slipped, causing her torso to almost crash flat against the surface of the water. Only by a quick transfer to her initially outreached hand was she able to stop that, despite a whimper of pain from somebody who was already under immense suffering slipping from her vocal chords.
"K-Kaganovich…" Kavkaz managed through a cough caused by the blood dribbling out of her mouth and down her chin.
"You…you have to scuttle me and get away from here," she said in between coughs, choking on her own blood. "The sword… wasn't normal, something's happening…to me and I don't…want to figure out what."
"I- No! Kavkaz, I can tow you back!" Kaganovich managed to push out, the words now tumbling out of her mouth. "I can't -!"
"I can't…let you die. Molotov left because…she's leaving me to do it. At least one of us…has to make it out…"
"I don't care!" Kaganovich fired back. "There has to be something we can do! We can both get out of this."
"THERE ISN'T!" Kavkaz roared, the action causing the blade to slip slightly downwards in her torso, which was followed by a pained grimace. This brief reprieve threatened to allow blood to choke her airways, so Kavkaz broke into a fit of coughs again, blood splattering on the water below her.
But instead of lowering her head to finish the process before continuing, Kavkaz dragged herself the last bit of distance to Kaganovich, feebly reaching out a hand towards a gun barrel in Kaganovich's riggings - riggings Kaganovich hadn't even realized she'd deployed.
Kavkaz's trembling and blood-slippery fingers wrapped themselves around the barrel as she levered the angle downwards to point at her temple.
"Just…shoot, Kaganovich," Kavkaz demanded, the weakness of her voice not hiding the determination of a finalized decision behind it. "You don't need to…aim, just shoot. Please prove…that you can do the right thing."
"Kavkaz…" came a non-committal response.
Despite only being able to repeatedly cough and choke in immediate response, Kavkaz managed to raise her head enough to lock eye contact with Kaganovich, her eyes clear in a brief moment of lucidity but clouded by budding tears.
"Please, Kaganovich, please." she begged in a voice barely above a whisper. "I don't…want to die in this way turning…into something I'm not. We've come this far, I…can't see you die by my own hands."
Kaganovich instinctively took a step back, words knotting themselves in her mouth and refusing to come out, causing Kavkaz's grip on the gun barrel to slip and for her hand to slap onto the surface of the water. Her torso went down with it, pushing the sword in the opposite direction and eliciting a feeble yelp of pain from Kavkaz due to the suddenness.
The blood flowing from Kavkaz's mouth was finally joined by repeated drops of a clear liquid, falling from a downward gaze that Kavkaz no longer had the strength to raise.
"Do I…mean so little to you, Kaganovich?" Kavkaz sobbed with what was left of her vocal chords. "How could you…abandon me to them like this?"
That was all she got out before her arms collapsed, pushing the sword still impaled in her torso upwards as she collapsed onto her stomach on the surface of the water.
No coughing on blood, no yelps of pain, no reaction whatsoever. The enormous pain that such a fall would have caused to Kavkaz fell on nerves that no longer had a place to report sensations or warning signals to. Her eyes merely dribbled out the last of their leftover tears from the impact, mixing them with the blood slowly staining the nearby water, draining via gravity from her wound and mouth. All the while, the black fog of the blade, with renewed strength, puffed into new wisps of translucent black around Kavkaz's pink braided hair and around her bloodied and haphazard uniform, slowly creeping up her form.
Kaganovich's breath quickened, almost sounding like sobs from an external perspective, but her feet refused to move from where she had stepped back from the doorway, away from Kavkaz and now, her corpse.
It wasn't her fault It wasn't her fault it wasn't her fault.
There was nothing she could do. She couldn't shoot a comrade. She couldn't run and leave someone to her fate if she could stick around, not that she found herself able to move much in the first place.
She was right.
In a daze, Kaganovich's posture wavered, threatening to dump her onto the floor just a few feet from where Kavkaz had fallen. Having nothing to hold onto, the wavering did drop Kaganovich to her knees, lowering herself closer to the body floating on the surface of the water.
But as her eyesight focused in and out, she failed to notice the changes that were occurring a short distance in front of her.
She failed to see the body's fingers twitch. Failed to see it slowly slither itself upwards to a standing position, its legs in an awkward posture to support deadweight on top. Failed to see the blackened orbs that filled its eye sockets. Failed to see the sword that it had pulled out of its own torso and held in its hand. Failed to see the black mist everywhere, permeating every fiber of its being, the sword hungry to make more.
She only saw a shadow fall over her as the body of Krasny Kavkaz raised the sword in its hands with puppeteered arms, ready to fall downwards like a judgment from the skies, to pierce through Kaganovich's chest and run her through as thoroughly as Molotov had done to the body's sentience mere moments before.
Its jaw hung open, and its tongue didn't move, but one word could be heard.
"KAGANOVIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICH!"
Kaganovich gasped as she jerked awake, unable to move thanks to something keeping her pinned down despite her struggles. Her hands desperately patted around her chest, convinced she would find the gaping wound the sword had punctured in her, as her legs instinctively thrashed against the restraint.
Slowly, the panic faded, the images conjured by her mind dissipating until she could grasp reality again. Even with the realization it had all been a nightmare, it still felt as if a lead weight pressed on her chest and left her gasping for breath while her heart pounded in her chest as if trying to break free from the confines of her body. To her relief, though, she no longer was being held down.
Her eyes searched the darkness until she saw Jean Bart sitting beside her, worry reflecting in her eyes despite her otherwise passive demeanor. Kaganovich exhaled slowly, her breath shaky, before pushing herself to sit up. "Dammit. Did I wake you up?"
Jean Bart couldn't resist rolling her eyes at the question.
"At least ya didn't hit me this time," she grumbled. "It was Molotov again, wasn't it?"
It was a risky gambit, she knew, but she could correct Kaganovich's view of what had happened later. It wasn't hard to see the panic was still there beneath the surface, and pushing the wrong buttons would only transform that into rage again. She needed to come down on her own time and have the chance to separate the nightmares and reality from each other.
Kaganovich drew her knees up to her chest, resting her chin on top of them. "Krasny Kavkaz died because of her. We lost an experienced comrade and a good friend, and her killer didn't even have to lift a finger. I wish she'd just done it herself," she muttered. "'Oh, maybe she'd come back to save us when she could.' As if. My own sister and she's no better than all the other worthless ships out there that would abandon each other to save their own hides. And I was an idiot to think she wouldn't abandon me. Maybe it's me. Maybe there's some defect in me that makes everyone leave. Kalinin left for Ussuri Bay. Molotov sent me and Kavkaz into the damn Mirror Sea. Kavkaz left and never came back. You'll leave, too, someday."
Jean Bart snorted, holding a hand out to her. "Idiot. Get over here."
Kaganovich reluctantly took the offered hand, only giving some minor resistance when the battleship pulled her close. She allowed herself to be guided until she could lay her head on Jean Bart's chest, feeling her rest her chin on top of her head and run her fingers through her hair.
"I'm not gonna leave you. You know that, right?" Jean Bart asked, pausing to work out a knot in Kaganovich's snowy white hair. "You think you're the only one that's been left alone like that? I was abandoned by my sister, too. I watched a friend burn because I thought ditching our country to run to the palms of Royal Navy was a coward's way out. There wasn't a damn thing I could do for Primauguet, because my choice is what led to her death. But y'know what? You're the one who decides whether or not it eats at ya."
This time, it was Kaganovich's turn to scoff at her girlfriend, even as she shifted to lay closer against her. "Look at you being all philosophical. That's easier said than done, genius. I'm supposed to just stop having nightmares because you say so, huh? You got a resurrection device for shipgirls amongst the blankets?"
Jean Bart chuckled, shaking her head and abandoning her ministrations on Kaganovich's hair to instead just hug her close. "Quit bein' a smartass. What I mean is ya just need to trust that I'm not gonna go anywhere."
When Kaganovich remained silent, she sighed. "You don't have to trust me completely, alright? We'll start with one thing," she said, returning to stroking Kaganovich's hair. "I'll make you a promise for tonight. You go back to sleep, and I promise that no matter what happens, I'll still be here when you wake up."
"Mhm…"
Jean Bart couldn't tell if it was meant to be a reluctant agreement or if Kaganovich was already falling back asleep, but it didn't matter. She'd make that promise a thousand times over if she had to, because it was one she intended to keep.