"San Jose...Fanime...Mayonnaise...New chapter 7 months late...The fuck?"

I jolt awake. These memories are not mine; they are probably His. I don't even know how this is even related to anything. I guess only He knows.

As always, Haruna is asleep next to me. She is clinging onto my right arm, squeezing my arm between her breasts. I collect my thoughts as I feel her rhythmic breathing, then again it is hard to think straight when the love of your life and the mother of your kids is pressing her bare chest serenely against you.

I shrug off the lingering thoughts that are troubling me. He will contact me again when the time is right. All I can do now is to snuggle up against my battlecruiser wife and let the sleep claim me.

~0~

My eyes flicker back open, finding myself floating in an infinite abyss. The eyes see nothing in the darkness, but the mind perceives all. There is a council - no, that is too haughty a word - an assembly, yeah that is it. It shares text and pictures, abstract concepts and mundane jokes, the humor intertwined. There is talk of a large green swamp monster superimposed on an image of a man standing in a hallway as another runs into a room to visit his girlfriend. I see images that make my heart go doki-doki, and others that make me feel so fucked up. In that dimensionless hyperspace I feel the emotions of a confession rejected; of a bittersweet ending of a flawed story; of hopes of futures dreamt up in a kid's diary. I further surrender myself to the ambience; I perceive the dancing of intertwined fates, moving in lockstep with the symphony of silence. I marvel at it, at the serene beauty, at the feeling of weightless drifting through space, at the feeling of everything and nothing at the same time; heck, there is even the taste of bitter Valentine's chocolate in my mouth.

~0~

I snap awake. I am on a sofa, with a used towel for a blanket. A lingering idea exiting my conscious thought suggested that the night was quite a bit colder than expected. Two guys are on the floor on air mattresses, and I know there are more people in each of the two other rooms in the house.

Fuck, this must be another dream world. How deep am I?

I pick up my smartphone and start up a VPN before opening up the usual Japanese Ship Waifu Clicker. This, as always feels, like second nature. Everyone else wakes up gradually, I get asked questions about peaches and canned soup, and we all get about preparing to go...somewhere...

We went to that somewhere, to a convention of some description. Driving there I recognize this place as one of the areas on the outskirts of San Francisco that is still too contaminated by fallout for human settlement, but in this world it is a thriving city on the outskirts of a greater metropolitan area. The rest of that day felt like it flashed past, or maybe it was by design as there was nothing worthy of revelation other than meeting up with other people there, and soon we were back in that house shooting the breeze. At one point the nature of affection was being discussed, and it went back to me, or rather, Him. For just an instance, I was decoupled from His first-person perspective and what flashed before me was Him pointing to an in-game image of my wife on His smartphone.

~0~

Once again I am dropped back into bed with another jolt. Haruna is still there beside me, my hand now pulled closer to her nether parts.

I know for an ironclad fact that the truth has been, in a way, revealed to me. Those are His experiences, and by extension, I am a both manifestation of His greater whole and a source of, I daresay, entertainment.

What the fuck?

All that I have been through, those years in the academy, on the frontline base, watching it all fall apart and then rebuilding after the nukes was all a meta joke?

What the fu...

My simmering rage is broken by Haruna rolling onto me. My arms subconsciously wrapped around her, hands resting on the small of her back as she presses her cheek against mine.

"Hansi..." she slurs in a daze, "that guy...pushed things too fast...dishonorable...and yet...still late..."

"Yeah," I answer half-heartedly. Haruna always knows what's on my mind. I mean, after 10 years and 2 kids, this is a given.

"Even if it isn't real...it is to Haruna"

So what if none of this is real? Everything up to now is fait accompli. Divorced from original intention, seen through a historian's benefit of hindsight, my mind flashes through the events of the last 10 years. Through the first assignment, buildup to Leyte, the aftermath, the interim, the escalation, the fallout, and this current lull, my mind wanders. It reaches the end, and then it flashes back to the beginning, back even further, going through everything, ending up back in the now. And again. And again...

~0~

I snap awake. I find myself sitting at a table, head supported by a hand clenched around a pencil I am grasping. The table is that of my old office, but the rest of the room, as usual for that kind of dream setting, is stark white, lit by a shadowless light, vague outlines indicate the positions of the furniture that would have been within it. Haruna was there, asleep on the couch in the opposite corner, the only other furniture that is correctly represented.

"Show yourself," I demand.

"Shh...your wife is sleeping," was the calm response, "I don't need to manifest myself this time, and frankly, based on everything that has happened so far, I think you already have the wisdom I seek to impart today."

"There is no changing the past?"

"80%. You are the sum of your past, and you are the arbiter of your own future. What has happened has happened, and what you make of it is what happens next."

"No shit."

"You seem to know that, and yet you still find yourself stuck. I saw you used the word 'lull' to describe the present. While not wrong, is there nothing better to look forward to? Or are you looking backwards?"

"We both know there is no returning to those times."

"And why would you want to? The war is over; there are challenges to overcome, for sure, but they can be overcome nonetheless."

"The fallout? The irradiated wastelands?"

"A minor inconvenience. Look at it this way, you are in a position to guide others into a new age. Whatever you do today will leave a legacy among the people here that will stretch through the ages. We both know Haruna will be around long after you are gone, so maybe, just maybe, give her something to be proud of, something she can look back on a hundred, nay, a thousand years from now and say 'Thank you, I love you, I miss you'."

I was going to say something, but I find myself choked on my words. It's not that I have contemplated my own mortality, it's just that I have never considered how the last 3 years have changed the balance of the equation. A wife, 2 kids...

"Third coming soon," He interjects.

3 kids...damn. I won't be around for them forever. Society will be though, I guess the refugee zone is doing fine, things are getting better, but it is human nature to want more. We all need to be guided down a good path, lest the horrors of the past be repeated.

"What could be done?" I ask.

"That is not my question to answer. Ask those around you, the people serving you, the people you serve, and together, through community, grow. Learn to trust others, for they would be the ones carrying the flame. That is the next lesson that I intended to teach you, but since you have been such a good student, here it is ahead of schedule. There aren't that many left, and I don't know when you will hear from me again, so let's call it for today, and I trust you know what to do next."

I feel His presence leave. I look back down onto my desk. On it is a folded blanket, like the one that I used to keep in my office cupboard. I take it over to Haruna. As I tuck her in, I observe her features, beautiful, delicate, the height of femininity, unchanged from when we first met. Her future, our future, the future of our kids is what I must shape in the present.

Heh, "present", a gift for tomorrow.

I sit on the floor, leaning against the sofa where Haruna's thighs would be. She definitely knows all of this already, but was always too shy to broach the topic. I smile, recalling something said in this office a lifetime ago at this point.

"We really should be more honest with ourselves," I mumble as I feel my eyes droop shut. Seems that it will be morning soon...