Marce had been quietly — namely not talking to himself or anyone else, including his patients — when he had been interrupted by a knock at the door of the room he was in. Ensign Inaho Kaizuka's room.
"Nurse Marce." A voice, unfamiliar to him, spoke. It was gruff and reminded him a lot of a soldier. And when he turned to look at the owner of the voice, he was unsurprised to find out that it was a soldier. A man older than him, who was wearing combat fatigues, who had a stern look about him, but was flanked by another soldier, one holding a tablet and with a concerned look about him, which Marce figured had something to do with the fact that they were entering a room with a young man who probably could've been the age of the second soldier's own child. "We're with the UFE—"
"I know who you're from." Marce thought about scowling but kept it to himself. "Why are you here?"
There was a soft clattering behind the soldiers, who both turned to look at the source of the noise. "Who the hell are you guys?!" The source of the clattering blurted. It was the retired-Lieutenant Marito Koichiro.
"I'm Sergeant Watanabe, this is Corporal Smith." The first soldier responds, annoyed, "We're from the UFE."
"I take it you're both here on orders?" Marce asked, as calmly as he could. Doing his best to keep in the little bit of displeasure that was welling in his chest.
"Yes, we are." Watanabe responded. "And we have orders for you."
"For me?"
"For him?" Marito asked, looking from behind Corporal Smith, towards Marce. "Are you military?"
"In a… Manner of speaking? I'm military enough that when I'm handed orders, I need to follow them." Marce sighed, not being entirely sure how to respond. "What're the orders?" He asked Watanabe.
Watanabe motioned towards Smith, who stepped forward, holding the tablet out towards Marce, who took it. "You're being reassigned, as are some of your military patients, including this one." Watanabe motioned at the motionless Inaho, who didn't react — because how would he? "Ensign Kaizuka is being moved."
"To where?" Marce asked, and Marito blinked quietly behind the two soldiers.
"The Deucalion II."
"When did the Deucalion come back into service?" Marito asked. The Deucalion was the ship that both Marito, and the Ensign Kaizuka had served on, prior to the assault on UFE HQ in Russia. It had been critically damaged, and somehow salvaged and recovered from its jack-knifed position in the hull of the Landing Castle.
"It's not yet, it's still in port in low-earth orbit." Watanabe responds and gives a look in Marito's direction. "It will be departing port within the next week or so."
"Why are patients being moved to it? It's a warship, no?"
"It's been refitted as a hospital ship. Luna-2, and other hospital stations aren't deemed to be secure in the case that a shooting war starts again."
Marce, for all the good it did him, had to bite his tongue to prevent an outburst on someone who obviously wasn't the one who had made the decision, or the determination that the station wasn't safe, but it still made him upset to hear the words at all. "When was this decision made?"
"It was made yesterday, and before you ask — it was the Armistice Council that made this decision." Smith responds this time.
"Is there really that much of a risk of a shooting war breaking out again?"
Marito snorts, "C'mon Marce, you're not that naive. They did it before, they'll do it again."
"I mean before the Armistice expires, right?"
Marce looks at Watanabe and Smith, the obvious experts, but Marito is the one who answers. "If we piss them off enough, they might not care. But it's not like they'll fight the same way. It'll be largely a space battle."
"So that's why—"
"You're being ordered to move, Nurse. Yes." Watanabe was obviously getting frustrated with Marce's entire response to the ordeal. Although, who could blame him? Suddenly two new faces from the military barge in on one of his patient's rooms and tell him that both he and the patient are immediately being transferred off of station.
Marce blinks at the pair of soldiers, and then at Marito, who gives a look back; something that aligns with the confusion internal to Marce, and how he feels at the current situation that he's now in.
"Well, regardless. I need to check with my supervisor. And there's paperwork to be done before I can start preparing to move this soldier. His situation is precarious, but paradoxically stable. I would appreciate it if you two weren't hovering over me while I get things in place."
"Understood, but we'll be on station regardless. You're not the only one who we're informing of the orders."
"I understand. Thank you." Marce gives a look to both of the soldiers, Watanabe nods, and turns to leave. Marito gives enough space for the two men to walk through the doorway, and then re-enters the room himself, not saying anything for the few moments it takes for the soldiers to clear out of earshot.
"When the hell did you become military?" Marito asks, calmly, but with a hint of curiosity behind his voice.
"I've always been military." Marce says, moving towards one of the computer screens showing a monitor of Inaho's vitals, and doing his best to continue his tasks that he'd originally come to this room to do, but had been interrupted by the soldiers. "Just not a medic like you'd expect."
"So, you've seen most of the fighting."
"I've seen the leftovers of it, Lieutenant." Marce reminds him, he's a nurse, not a soldier in the traditional sense. The type of nurse who had been trained in firearms and was familiar enough with the idea of a Terran Kataphract that it's not foreign but isn't exactly what he would pick as the type of weapon to ensure his survival if he needed it.
"Retired." Marito reminds him.
"It's sounding like you might not be retired for very long, if what those soldiers said is even remotely true." Marce points out. "There's nothing stopping the UFE from drafting you, especially given you have more military experience than most." Marce isn't wrong in that respect, Marito is part of a group of individuals who had not only survived the fighting for the First Earth-Mars War, but then had also experienced and survived thus far, the second War, living so long as to retire into the quiet of the armistice. "Besides, I'm being moved whether or not I like it, I'm a soldier enough that it matters."
She hadn't been brought back to her cell, as much as she had been practically dragged there, once she had been subdued enough by the soldiers who were in the stateroom with her and that treacherous bastard, Slaine Troyard. They had practically thrown her, stumbling as they did, back into her cell. And despite the fact that she had been practically silent the entire time she was half-dragged back to her cell. She had nothing to say to them, nothing to say for herself, and so she kept her tongue, lest one of the soldiers decide to silence her via rifle-butt.
So instead, she righted herself on her feet as they threw her back into her cell, and spun to face the soldiers, fire eyed as the door to her cell slid shut and locked itself with a hiss and a soft clunk.
The sound of the door's lock clunking into place was what really pissed her off, a sound that was so packed with meaning that it seemed to burst at the seams once it hit her ears. One that reminded her just how useless it was to try and resist this whole situation that she was in.
She swore again now that the door was closed. This time loudly, in hopes that the guards who were no doubt outside her cell door could hear her. She didn't know that she couldn't be heard outside the cell. But she swore anyways, just for good measure.
It was in that swearing, that the swell of pain in her shoulder came back, and she bit back even more swearing that would undoubtedly come from her mouth and throat if she let it. Not that it would do her any good now, hidden away in some cell in this landing castle; by herself and without much hope of getting some kind of painkillers to help numb the pain away. She cradles her arm, trying to take pressure off of her shoulder, trying to let whatever biological processes were in play, trying to repair itself, do their work. She wonders, idly, how much treatment she had been given, prior to waking up in the cell the first time; and whether or not it was Martian medicinal technology instead of something more holistic and Terran. But as the pain ebbs and flows from her shoulder, she can't help but wonder what truly makes Martians that much different than Terrans at all; thinking about her anger towards Slaine, something that had come from deep inside her stomach, and felt so familiar to her that she could almost quite place it as the same kind of anger that she could remember feeling at any given time during those days of fighting aboard the Deucalion. Before Inaho had to go and get himself shot, and before she had found herself throwing in with miscreants and daredevils who thought that they could take on the Empire alone, all the while never suspecting that there was a Martian among them at all.
She did swear, this time under her breath as she thought about her situation.
She paced the room only for a few minutes more, only deciding near the end of those few minutes that she should instead lay down again; the adrenaline from her body finally metabolizing and leaving her exhausted instead. She hated both of her options, either pace the cell, or lay back down where she had been retrieved from, at his whim.
This whole situation pissed her off to no end. To be held at the whims of a single man, a man who had his position purely because he had thrown away his binds to the Earth, to instead try and become as close to Martian as the Imperials tried to convince themselves they were.
Maybe that itself was the root cause of her anger. The fact that this man had taken so casually, the bind of his home planet, and thrown it away for something so intangible. An idealistic view that she could never share, one that felt so displaced from reality that it was impossible to reconcile with what the truth of the universe was. A similar ideology to that of the Princess. The same girl who Rayet had tried to kill aboard the Deucalion and failed. The same girl who was so willing to throw asides the bonds and bindings to her planet, that she was willing to stoop down to the level of the Terrans to try and make something that wasn't of the two planets natively. An anger at that in-betweenness that both Slaine, and the Princess held.
An anger that she - just the same as those two - had a foot in both doors. An existence that she can barely tolerate. A type of gravity binding her to ancestral home, Earth; and a type of anger binding her to her paternal home; Mars. But at the same time, how could she be so sure that she ever existed as a Martian at all, when she had never set foot on Martian soil, never partook in Martian culture or society. An anger that she knew, even through listening to the stories of her Father and his compatriots about the existence of the grand Vers Empire, that was there because she had never and would never partake in.
Maybe even there, was some kind of distinction to be made — the difference between the Martians that she was all that fond of killing; and the Vers Imperials, those who were supposed to welcome her, her father, and his comrades back into their inner circles with open arms.
She winces at the idea of ever being able to return to something that someone would consider home. She never really knew what that feeling was like, never really knowing what it was like to have a place that she could really call home, maybe even the idyllic notion of having a person that she could call home. That pain feels more potent, more present in her body rather than the actual, literal bullet hole in her shoulder.
Something that both the Princess and this Count both shared — that idealism. That was what pissed her off to no end.
She sighed and tried her best to close her eyes against the low light of the cell; letting the feeling of the hard floor push against her skin and bones and trying her best to fluff her coat against that same floor, giving herself some kind of small creature comfort that she could give herself in this moment.
She wondered, again, now that the anger itself was starting to fade from her chest, and instead she filled her nose and lungs with the slightly cold air of the room; what Inaho would do. And that almost made the anger, but a different kind of anger, come back into her chest and stomach.
Just the mere thought of that man, the one who seemed to have no idealism in his body, just a practical mind, almost completely grounded in Terran logic and wartime experience as he'd fought his way across Japan, the Americas, Europe and Russia until they finally had made it to the seeming safety of the UFE's headquarters, had sent her back again into a type of anger that she didn't realize she harbored. One that was completely foreign, despite its similar flair to the anger that she felt towards the Princess and Slaine.
That stupid, pragmatic young man, who would probably never have been caught at all, compared to her own kind of idealism mounted atop some type of pragmatics that she couldn't quite articulate if she had been asked, whose existence still haunted her in some way that she couldn't quite articulate either. Yet, what she was still hung up on, was the idea of what would he do? When faced with the idealism of the Count, with the lingering tendrils of the Princess, what would he do? What could she even do, what without a Kataphract herself to challenge the might of the Vers Empire?
She remembers that time that he, even without his Kataphract, was able to jam open the slide of her stolen firearm, preventing her from shooting herself, a movement that felt nearly inhuman, yet was plenty of his own movements and desire to act.
What would he have done, when faced with the sole person possibly still responsible for the war that humanity had found itself in?
She doesn't find a satisfactory answer in her thoughts, even as the anger burns away from her chest, and instead comes about to a more rational, if not tiring, point of view. She wonders if she'll ever find a good answer; one that would be what he would do.
Instead, her mind conjures about something else that she thinks about lightly before it fades away in the tide of tiredness that overtakes her and brings her back into a sleep.
What the hell does it matter what he would do? It's not his life, she's not him. So, in that balanced state between sleep and awake; she dismisses the thoughts of Inaho Kaizuka, and instead occupies herself with other thoughts that overtake her as she falls further and further into sleep.
Slaine's hand, now treated with an Aldnoah-activated sealant and antiseptic, still hurt like no other. Granted, part of his brain knew and accepted that when he decided to, both out of equal parts instinct for survival and show of force, grab the knife that was plunging for his throat with his bare hand. He wanted to swear about it, but bit back the feelings inside his chest that made him want to swear. He knew that the pain would fade in at least an hour, but the problem was of course, waiting for that time at which his hand would stop hurting.
He didn't have much time to grouch. He thanked those medics who treated his hands and watched as the younger of the two; a young woman who looked like she might not be much older than he is, as she went into a slight shade of blush in the light of the room as he did. She obviously didn't expect to be thanked so casually by the lord of this castle.
He smiles to himself as he watches the pair of nurses leave the stateroom. The two guards exchanged an unseen look between one another, one that was only shared exclusively through the corner of their eyes.
He stands from the now cleaned table, where once food and drink had been scattered across its surface, intermingled with his own blood that had spilled down his hand and onto the table. And in the silence of the once-chaotic room, sighed to himself.
He makes, then, in the moment after his sigh; a decision to make a visit that he wasn't sure that he wanted to make tonight, at least. He was sure that he would make the decision at some point in the near future, but not necessarily in the exact moment following meeting the daughter of the assassin who had tried to, and in essence, had started this entire war; the daughter of the person who had irreparably changed the course of his life. He scowled, and wordlessly left the room, the two soldiers following him as he leaves the stateroom, and then through the labyrinth of halls that make up the inside of the Landing Castle. He knows where he needs to go, who he needs to meet with, but doesn't communicate this to his escorts.
Part of him, as he walks, wonders why he needs to be escorted at all in his own castle, but he doesn't dismiss the soldiers either; letting them do their duty as best they can.
They dismiss themselves, however, when he turns to enter an unmarked hallway, one that he knows he will be left alone in. They are instructed to never follow him into this hallway, and most certainly never following him into any of the chambers in this hallway. And he appreciates their attentiveness to the point of at least recognizing when their instructions supersede their sense of duty to their Count.
Within a selected chamber of the hallway, Slaine stands, and is nearly face-to-face with the suspended form of the Princess. He stands, just a few inches away from the glass of the Princess' suspension tube, watching her as she floats within the Aldnoah-activated healing fluid, and takes steady, machined breaths through the breathing apparatus attached to her face. Beneath which, Slaine misses the smile of the Princess' lips as she would smile, thinking or discussing the planet beneath both of their feet.
"Did you ever wonder who it was who tried to kill you?" Slaine asks, breaking the customary silence of the chamber, not even punctuated by the sound of cleverly tucked-away monitoring machines keeping track of her heart rate.
There is no response, no sound of machines to answer his question, even if their answer would be meaningless anyways. He wishes, now, and as he always has, that the Princess could respond to his rare queries.
Surprising himself, he releases a near-sob of a sigh, as he watches the suspended form of the Princess. Her helpless form, held in a technologically enhanced fluid that neither of them truly could nor would ever understand. The idea that she had been shot, not once but twice; being put down to the deck of the Landing Castle by Saazbaum. Saazbaum, who didn't live for very long after Slaine took his own sidearm and emptied all but one bullet into Saazbaum's chest. Despite having been the one to kill Saazbaum for his treachery — first of arranging and plunging the worlds of Earth and Mars into war, and second for bringing any harm to the Princess at all, even if that first treachery didn't bring her any harm at all.
He resented this situation, beyond what words that he could express in the moment.
He nearly found himself resenting the Princess for ever wanting to set foot on Earth at all, the simple, nearsighted logic of it all being that if she had never come to Earth, harm never would have beset her. That she would've been safe on Vers, far away from ever finding harm among the Terrans, far from ever finding harm from her own countrymen. She could've lived a life far detached from the sorrows that universe could and had wrought upon her, and in that of itself, would've been a mercy both on her, and his own heart.
But he dismissed those thoughts. He knew very dearly that the Princess had wanted nothing more than to find peace with her kin on Earth, to find that common ground between the two countries, should it possibly exist, and bring about an era of peace for both planets. She would never have been satisfied with just living her life in an ivory tower, away from the troubles of Earth and Mars.
Maybe, in that respect, she was always destined to become a sacrifice on the altar of Saazbaum's desire for revenge on the Imperial Family, the ones who had stoked the Orbital Knights into their frenzy 17 years ago in the First Earth-Mars War, and the event that precipitated Saazbaum's revenge on the family. For that, it was only a mercy that she hadn't been slain so casually by a missile strike, or lucky Orbital Knight; that she was perhaps even lucky that she had survived as long as she had hiding among the Terrans. Even those who had, if the reports from the Terran Armistice Delegation were to be believed, knew who she was, and decided to protect her anyways.
Orange. The pilot of the orange Terran Kataphract who had fought so hard to protect her, even against Slaine himself. There was no doubt about that now, but there was still a hole in his own heart, having been faced with the final thing, the final person standing between Slaine, and protecting his Princess himself.
Slaine remembers all too well the hollow feeling in his chest as he had chambered a fresh round into the chamber of his sidearm and leveled the sights of the pistol at the Orange Devil, the young man, who hadn't been that much older, if at all than Slaine himself. There was a hollow feeling in his chest, something that there was some kind of respect for the young man, who despite having been injured himself; and practically trying to crawl his way to the Princess to try and do something resembling protecting her.
The silence after that final round rang through the chamber that day, was something that still haunted Slaine to this day. He wasn't entirely sure now he made the right decision to kill Orange in that moment. But there was still the indisputable proof; there was nothing more that stood in the way of Slaine protecting her Princess.
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