I know I haven't done a stellar job of preventing spoilers for Kaiser Lane plans before (see: Kongou chapters) but I'll say so here: spoilers for a potential Kaiser Lane development, still fresh in the discord channel.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Texel was over, and the British Expeditionary Force was left to choke.

It wasn't the total victory the Germans dreamed of – many a British ship limped home for repair – but something as tremendous as wiping out the British fleet had never been on the table. What Texel really did, in the strategic sense, was stop the flow of men and materiel to France as she suffered the Kaiserschlact.

Strategic implications that could destroy a nation weren't all, though. Neither Britain or Germany escaped the fight with all of their ships above the water.

In particular, only four Queen Elizabeth class ships returned from that fatal struggle….

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;

Warspite was the second eldest, tucked between Queen Elizabeth and Valiant when it came to launch order. While shipgirl relationships were inherently a bit different than human ones, it was quite reasonable to see Warspite as the middle child, lodged between the dominant, almost conservative Elizabeth and the ambitious Valiant.

(Technically speaking, Valiant was the true middle child, while Malaya was the baby of the bunch, at least if you judged by launch day. Commissioning added an extra layer of complexity, but even then, Warspite was second eldest, although Valiant moved down a peg.)

At times, Warspite might have seemed more world-wise and diplomatic than Elizabeth. Willing to settle for less than her siblings and to compromise with what little she already had… They were admirable traits. Crucial ones, honestly. She chased no glory for it, but Warspite kept the Fifth Battle Squadron running smoothly.

And then she wasn't there, just like that. Imagine… suddenly removing the mortar from a wall or more realistically, running a machine without lubricant. Things might stay as they were for a little while, especially without a serious disturbance, but the whole structure was more fragile than before, more likely to be ruined by a serious disturbance.

A serious disturbance like a strategic loss and a death in the family.

The four of them crept into their dining room and collapsed into their seats – without leaving their weapons near the door. (It was Warspite's habit, really.) One of the maids pushed through her own grief and injury – for the cruisers certainly hadn't escaped the fray without injury– to leave them some biscuits and tea, but both went untouched. Really, the girl could have scooped some ashes from the fireplace and dumped them on the porcelain; she would have received the same response.

None of them dared to breach the silence. It was like armor thicker than any ship afloat could bring to bear, but it came from absence, not presence. Elizabeth's eyes kept drifting to the spot, to the curls and curves carved into the dark wood. She had never noticed the detail work on this side before. The holes in the back of the chair almost seemed to glare at her…

Pulling her gaze away, she looked at her surviving sisters. Someone had to take responsibility. Somebody had to make sure the four of them wouldn't be joining Warspite for a long, long time.

"I believe… I believe we should go over the battle," Elizabeth said, suddenly realizing they didn't have paper. No pen, either. "Something like this… can't happen again."

"Now?" Malaya mumbled.

"Yes, now!" Elizabeth snapped. "Do you think the Germans will wait?"

Barham wilted in her seat, and a moment later Malaya stood up and made for the door.

"Stop!" Elizabeth proclaimed. Malaya ignored her. "That's an order!"

And it was only more shouting from there.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

Elizabeth wasn't a true sovereign. She had a sort of control in the navy, some mixture of her seniority and a personality that let her overshadow all the ships that came after her, but it wasn't really independent. She was under an admiralty and her commands could be superseded. Still, she was a leader to the British shipgirls, the one they turned to. The oldest, the most experienced…

She was not the first of them to perish, but Britain's first shipgirl was gone for good.

Despite her not-so-impressive size and her issues with authority, she left big shoes to fill. Even her death was a hard act to follow: it wasn't rapid, a single shell igniting the magazine and tearing the whole craft to ribbons. A warrior queen who charged into the fray and died there – it was a tragic echo of some bygone age. Her succession was something of that same bygone age too, in that it was a confusing mess.

If it was a simple matter of seniority, Warspite was the obvious choice. She was second eldest, wasn't she? Yes, but there was that obvious question: could she actually do the job? Warspite had spent most of her naval career following Lizzie's orders, at least when she wasn't busy putting up a vain resistance that was doomed to cave in eventually.

Maybe that was a good thing. If you were a British admiral worried about your ships flying off the handle, someone who couldn't bring herself to stand up to authority was good. Well, they'd make a good leader if they could actually become a respected leader… and if they decided to stay that way.

Admittedly, Warspite struggled at first. The years after Texel and the Peace with Honor weren't easy for anyone, especially the 'face' of the navy of a declining empire. Elizabeth died alongside the Pax Britannica, alongside Britain as a global policeman. Warspite couldn't be Elizabeth, but Valiant couldn't either.

And that was where the trouble really started. Warspite bent to Elizabeth, sure, but she was also a competitive person. A proud one. She couldn't compete against dearly departed Elizabeth, but if Valiant thought she could boss Warspite around…

Elizabeth's shadow still seemed to hang over Warspite's life. What would Elizabeth do here? ( And is that the right choice? Some quiet part of her whispers.) There was a hole, and no one else quite managed to fill it. Not the admirals, not Valiant, not Malaya. No ship afloat could be Elizabeth, and that included Warspite.

Or maybe it wasn't just an Elizabeth-sized hole she was trying to fill. There was Elizabeth's spot, sure, but then there was the way Warspite and Valiant complimented her, the way Malaya worked towards the same goals in parallel…

Warspite couldn't have her own Warspite. Warspite had Barham helping her with the paperwork. She had Valiant and Malaya winning over the battlecruisers when they weren't busy discussing succession and redundant chains of command. (Elizabeth was great, but she could have planned better.) New ships were on the way, and they'd form the navy the empire needed now.

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Death seemed to smooth out rough edges, didn't it? Well, death did that to the dead. Instead of dealing with the real, complex person, you were dealing with memories. Suddenly, Malaya was their baby sister again. Not perfect, sure, but less argumentative in death. Just and kind and too caring – caring to her own end – but conveniently incapable of actually saying who she'd support in any argument.

Her last moments were unambiguous, at the very least. She died drawing fire. Was it deliberate? …. They weren't quite sure. Maybe it was easier to think of her as a martyr, to think that she died out there with purpose. A sacrifice born of love. The alternative was that she wanted to flee, but couldn't. That their baby sister had died out there, alone.

That thought made Warspite sick sometimes, but Texel had already taught her to face uncomfortable truths head on. Their comrades – Resolution, Curacoa, Centurion, Orion, even Haruna – had died for a white peace. Perhaps even less than a white peace. Japan had nicked a few bases from Germany, but Italy and France both caved in on themselves. The French Communes and Germany both were sending aid to the rebelling Irishmen…

(Perhaps Britain hadn't lost any territory, but their power seemed to shrink in comparison to these new threats. The continent-spanning Reichspakt, the communards who grew stronger as the workers suffered…)

Warspite didn't appreciate people lodging words in the mouth of her dead sister. She liked to think she knew her sister well enough to predict what she would say regarding some event, and while she figured some of her bias colored this, she knew Malaya.

"Malaya died for us! For the empire!" Elizabeth said.

True, perhaps, but knowing Malaya, the latter was an accidental consequence of the former, if the former was even intentional. Well, Warspite did think her sister was kind enough to lay down her life if push came to shove, but Warspite didn't doubt Malaya wanted to live. She wanted to see England, wanted to see her namesake… but she was smart enough to know when her sacrifice was necessary.

At least, that was Warspite's thought.

"Malaya didn't die for the Black and Tans!" Barham snapped back.

Certainly more true than what Elizabeth said. Malaya wasn't born quite early enough to remember the Easter Rising – none of them were – but Malaya seemed quite sad about the whole affair. Sad that things had reached such a point that a revolt was necessary, sure, but sad for Ireland in some greater sense.

Or so Warspite remembered.

Recently, Warspite had read… things the admiralty probably didn't want her reading. The broadsides and booklets her sailors passed to each other, in addition to all the rumors and murmurs she overheard.

She didn't think Malaya died for the empire. She didn't think Malaya died for Britain. She thought she died for the British, at least in part. And what was the difference between Britain and the British?

Well, Warspite considered herself British. Her sisters certainly did. Oh, she was sure the king and the admirals considered themselves all properly British as well… but they were invested in Britain. Britain the Great.

The power that still held more of the world's population in subjection than any other power – even the ascendant Germany – and sent those great masses into conflict while not even giving them nationhood. Malaya never got to see Malaya… or rather, she never got to see the Straits Settlements, the Unfederated Malay States, nor the Federated Malay states.

Would she have preferred to die for the Malays, a people she had never known? Warspite couldn't say. Probably not? But really, she wasn't trying to figure out what Malaya would do, was she?

(One of the pamphlets her crew had… it was by Connolly, wasn't it? The Irishman, the rebel. "The power whose rule in Ireland has made of Ireland a desert, and made the history of our race read like the records of a shambles, as she plans for the annihilation of another race appeals to our manhood to fight for her because of our sympathy for the suffering, and of our hatred of oppression."

Malaya abhorred oppression. That was a fact all her sisters would agree upon… and what was Warspite to do, knowing all that?)

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

She was the middle child, funnily enough. Warspite was the second eldest, and if anything like real laws of succession applied, she would follow up Elizabeth instead of Valiant. But that wasn't how it panned out, was it?

Valiant had always considered herself a rival to Elizabeth, in some sense. She jockeyed and strived in hopes of one day outshining Elizabeth, and at times she almost seemed to succeed. After Jutland, Valiant was the smiling, obedient (mostly) face of the Fifth Battle Squadron, eager to bear the responsibilities that her siblings couldn't bring themselves to shoulder.

Now, the pretender was dead. Elizabeth stood… not alone, necessarily. She had many talented people under her, but they were just that. Under her. Despite the rumors, she wasn't glad about the casualties at Texel… they just happened to be very fortunate for her, in that they removed or crippled most every serious rival to leadership of the British shipgirls. She was sure that new rivals would come along with those new ships – stronger, faster, better – but she'd be entrenched by that point.

There were funerals. Elizabeth fought to make sure all her comrades received that dignity, even if a fair number of them weren't present for burial. Valiant was…

She wasn't sure which was worse: the caskets that yawned, eerily empty, or the ones closed to hide… She was fine. Elizabeth was fine. Whole of body and not feeding crabs in a metal coffin somewhere–

Her duty was to Britain, of course, but this duty was best fulfilled by keeping shipgirls alive and strong. They were the force multiplier that would win the future, the power that would let them protect their sea lanes despite everything falling to pieces. (They had to be.) That duty to Britain superseded loyalty to officers or even to politicians, should worse come to worse, not that she would sabotage her own politics by saying it out loud.

Speaking of sabotage… there was the matter of France, northern Italy, and the communards. It was evident – blindingly obvious, really – that socialists and their ilk had lost the war for France and Italy, and they would do the same to Britain if they got the chance. Hell, the very word sabotage found its origins in organized labor. The whole country seethed with them, and even her own carefully policed ship wasn't free from the problem.

The thought of disorder among the ranks was enough to make her blood chill… and rather paradoxically, it was also enough to make her blood boil. They were… alone. Indescribably, terribly alone. Shipgirls were of an exceptionally rare breed, and while a fair share of them were British… they were still tiny.

They were up against the whole wide world, and they wanted to divide their camp? If they couldn't act together, if they couldn't act decisively… then they were lost. A ship in a stormy sea needed a good helmsman and an able crew, all working together, and the buffets of this century showed no sign of stopping.

At the very least, she had Warspite by her side. The two of them would put their house in order and then… everything would be fine.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Barham sat tidily between Malaya and the rest of her sisters, if you were reckoning by launch date. Barham trumped both her and Valiant if you counted commissioning, but Barham had never been one for silly contests like that…

And when she was gone, it was as if a gulf had opened up between Malaya and her sisters. Well, there had always been a gulf, for obvious reasons, but Barham's death and their 'discussions' afterward had widened the gap further.

It was at the funeral. Royal Oak and Revenge were both crying terribly, Monarch had the look of someone plunging into an existential crisis – Malaya would know – and the four surviving Queen Elizabeth sisters stood around a painfully empty casket. Malaya would admit that she was the first one to start crying.

Warspite laid a gloved hand on her shoulder, her fingers tracing a little circle. While the funeral was dressy, she had chosen to wear her usual gloves, ones so thick she couldn't even feel her sister's warmth through the leather. The tears were coming faster now.

… The casket was way too big, wasn't it? Yes, it was. It might have been fitting for a grown person, but Barham wasn't. They didn't have the body to prove it, but Malaya knew. This tremendous construction of dark wood and red cloth held nothing. Nothing.

(Barham had never even liked red. She had always preferred blues. Most obvious were the deep, rich naval blues that she wore in hopes of looking a bit more sophisticated… but she liked lighter shades, too. She was too moderate to get her hands on one during rationing, but liked the idea of a pastel blue dress, maybe cornflower if she was feeling bold.)

Elizabeth went to the head of the casket – well, she went to the side with the pillow, there was no head here – and started on some sort of speech. Malaya didn't catch the first part, but she tuned back in somewhere around "final sacrifice." For what it was worth, it sounded like Elizabeth was struggling to force the words out.

"Barham… followed orders until the end. She, her crew, and her officers were… the epitome of the Royal Navy's ideals… she was brave… terribly brave…"

"She shouldn't have had to be," Malaya said. Louder than she expected…

"What?" Elizabeth asked, sounding rather snappish.

"She shouldn't have had to charge in like that. She was brave… but she only had to be brave because the admirals were stupid."

"Malaya!"

"Am I wrong? Wasn't it an ill-advised night battle?"

"It was, b–"

"It was!" Malay shot back, the fact that they were in the middle of a funeral leaving her mind. Maybe she should have practiced discretion. Maybe she should have pulled out of a situation that only seemed to have negative outcomes.

But do you know who didn't do those things in a situation more serious than a funeral? Hell, they could have done those things and prevented the funeral.

I was almost going to make Liz say "That's an order! Your queen's orders!" in the first one but that felt a bit too on the nose lmao.

My original epigraph was this: "All happy families are alike; Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." But I changed it to better fit the Yeats Second Coming motif. Honestly, I do think there's one really obvious choice among this number, but I wanted to explore several ideas. Maybe one day something similar for whichever Kongou sister draws the short stick?