I know Cleveland does drums, not guitar, but let me have this. Also, if my hints didn't make it clear, the character referred to Qu'Appelle is Azur Lane's Foxhound, but using her Canadian Navy name. I know she was built in a British yard, but liberties were taken. I also utilized one OC ship in a minor role.

Come down with your rifles! Let grey wolf and fox,

Howl on in the shade of their primitive rocks,

Let the bear feed securely from pigpen and stall;

Here's two-legged game for your powder and ball!

...

Bark the war dogs of Britain aloud on the lake-

Let 'em come; what they can they are welcome to take.

Her name came from one of the capitals of the seven states of the Commonwealth of New England. She was Montpelier, and her duty was… an odd sort of thing.

Vermont was the home of the Green Mountain Boys, the nation that had fought alongside America before becoming number fourteen. Republicanism then, and republicanism now, while the civil war still raged. Our rule is the law, and the law is our own…

Except that the law wasn't their own, at least not fully. Canada had her hooks deep in the provisional government, and Montpelier herself was the result of Anglo-American cooperation, both in technology and economically. No Syndicalist steel in her hull, that was certain.

The whistle of a kettle snapped her out of her reverie, and she got to making some tea. If she was eating alone, she probably would have gone for coffee, but… well, while she had a lot of issues with Canada, the company wasn't awful.

(The Canadians and the New England Navy girls were her family, more than various half-sisters who all sprung from the Brooklyn class, each slightly different according to the needs of the regimes making them. She was, from what she heard, quite similar to the Syndicalist Cleveland, or the Federal Denver, but the latter was a distant stranger, the former a foe.)

The tea was for a motley little crew who would be switching in for convoy interdiction, to keep the pressure on the Syndicalists. They all needed to be ready, prepared, and alert…

And Qu'Appelle was snoring. It wasn't that surprising- it was an expected pattern of behavior- but it never stopped being exasperating. Montpelier distributed tea, before turning to Qu. She had probably burnt herself out last night. Reaching out, she laid a hand on the destroyer's orange hair and ruffled it a bit to wake her. You just had to reach around the mechanical horns on her head.

"Oh," Qu'Appelle sighed, still half asleep, "You know how to treat a girl…" Gross. Montpelier shook her a bit harder, and she woke up. "Oh, good morning, Monty. Thanks for the tea." Despite saying that, she didn't reach it, instead adjusting her head's position on her arms.

"I won't wake you up again," Montpelier warned, before pausing to think. She would be honest and say she didn't think too highly of Qu'Appelle's taste, but the girl liked what she liked… "If you sleep any later, your Army boy won't have time to see you off."

She shot to her feet, took the tea in a single searing gulp, and dashed away.

"His name is Martin, Monty." Case- Mahan class, Boston gal, fellow New Englander- frowned at her.

"I know that. I just don't respect him enough to bother."

Eskimo spat out her tea.

"I know you're protective of Que," Case said, "But you should really stop treating her boyfriends like shit."

"Why would I, when they are bad? Remember that Walsh fellow? He treated her like a dog!"

Eskimo giggled. "I thought she liked that sort of thing."

"They're all just after her enlarged design," Montpelier grumbled. Seeing the smirk growing on Eskimo's face and knowing exactly the sort of jokes she was going to make, Montpelier frowned. "Don't say anything. Just… drink your tea."

You could usually find her by the brutal destruction of any scout planes in the area. Well, it gave you a very rough idea of where she was- the lack of scout planes meant they usually lacked specifics. It was all the result of that legendary anti-air cruiser, the bane of the escort carrier, the Knight of Labor herself: Cleveland.

Well, it seemed like there would be very little work for the anti-air guns today, considering the low-hanging clouds that darkened the sky and assaulted them with rain. It was hard to see your hand in front of your face, much less a plane up there. It was the sort of weather that a particularly brave blockade runner might try to exploit, and the last thing they needed was the Syndicalists getting more tanks. (Or food…)

So now they groped around in the dark, attempting to intercept convoys in the dark. Qu'Appelle took the lead; despite her terrible taste in men, she had a nose like you wouldn't believe, enough to pick out a convoy by smell. "I've got something! Northwest."

"Onwards!" Montpelier led them into the fray. Or, she tried to, considering that Qu'Appelle had three knots on her. At least it was hard to lose track of her, with that massive rigging behind her, smokestacks leaving trails behind her, caught up in a wind that grew mightier and mightier by the moment, howling in the ear.

Montpelier didn't realize something was up until she saw Qu'Appelle's rigging moving, a series of splashes as she sent torpedos scything through the water. With a hand signal, Montpelier sent Eskimo to the left while she curved around Qu's right, searching for some hint of their foe…

She burst over the crest of a wave, golden hair like a comet's tail behind her head, behind eyes as red as a syndicalist war banner. Montpelier got a vague impression of a brown skirt and red vest before the guns turned and fired, belching smoke as she desperately veered to avoid them.

It was almost like a dance, except the uniform wooden floor of a base's dance hall was replaced by the roughness of the sea. That was probably a good thing, considering you didn't need cover in a dance hall; Montpelier and the ship spun and wove, sending sprays of fire at each other when they crested the waves, desperately attempting to predict each other's moves.

The best way to fight her was to assume she would do whatever Montpelier did. If she would run parallel with the wave to give her heavier guns a moment longer to reload, that was what the enemy did. They would cut Montpelier off like they knew where she was going next, remarkable prediction after remarkable prediction…

Faintly, she heard an explosion in the distance, but she couldn't bring herself to care all that much, not when her world had narrowed down to a narrow circle of sea and her foe. Distant sounds of battle mattered far less than her guns falling silent alongside her enemy's, as they circled each other like a pair of duelists. A rivulet of blood curved down the chin, past a brilliant grin directed at Montpelier, while her own blood dripped into the water, quickly diffusing in the sea.

"Cleveland." She breathed.

"The Knight of Labor, at your service!" She bowed, like a knight in those chivalric romances the British were so fond of. "You must be Montpelier!"

"Yes." Montpelier couldn't help but stare. "You're beautiful." What was she saying?

Cleveland burst into laughter. "Well, you're a looker too, I guess!"

For a moment, they just stared at each other, sizing each other up as combatants and as something more as well. Wasn't it only natural, looking at the sister you could have had? It felt different than her friendship with Qu'Appelle, different from the grudging respect she had for her commanding officers.

As they both sprung into motion again, they had a shared thought in their minds:

I'm glad I got the chance to fight with you.

Cleveland beat a retreat after Eskimo and Qu'Appelle had finished off the convoy; while her Syndicalist doppelganger was certainly good, she wasn't quite up to dodging fire from three people (plus Qu'Appelle's chain-anchor thing, which she mainly used to trip… after landing a vicious, cutting blow across Cleveland's face). Montpelier could only watch as she sailed away, the bloodied red vanguard of the Syndicalist convoy escorts.

"You alright, Monty? She really got you." Qu'Appelle dabbed at her face with a handkerchief that came away livid red.

"I'm fine. She was just…" she sighed, not quite sure how to put the feeling into words.

"I didn't know you were into girls, Monty." Eskimo giggled.

"That's not it. She was like… she was like me."

"Your clothes will be red like hers if we don't stop that bleeding! Come on!"

Qu'Appelle led several violent intrusions into Montpellier's room after that, saying that she was getting 'weird about the whole' thing, like meeting your quasi-sister wasn't a totally normal thing to get weird about! Well, maybe it wasn't as remarkable to Qu'Appelle, considering that she had Saskatchewan, but it was pretty remarkable for Montpelier. Was Cleveland what she could have become if things had gone just a little differently? If the Syndicalists had executed an early northern offensive, could she have fought side by side with Cleveland?

Well, she supposed there was one thing she could learn from English comrades: speculating about what could have been did you absolutely nothing. Cleveland was her enemy, and that was simple fact. She really shouldn't have been turning her nose up at Qu'Appelle, but it… was hard not to get caught up in speculation. Not to mention that Qu's idea of a good time involved dragging her into dates, which were almost always a bad time for both parties.

Qu had managed to locate an American this time: a burly boy from Maine with callused hands. Montpelier's first impression was that he seemed like a bit of a brute, but she was surprised when he pulled out a guitar. It was a handsome thing of dark, varnished wood, and Montpelier found herself more interested in it than the man.

"May I…?" She asked. Glad to have not been shot down immediately, he let her have it, and her hands settled into place almost subconsciously.

"You've played before?" He asked.

"No, I don't think."

"Let me show you…" Of all her 'dates', this one lasted the longest. There was no second date, but Montpelier was quite grateful to the man for digging up her talent with the guitar.

(A few hundred miles away, Cleveland finished up a rendition of The Big Rock Candy Mountains and moved onto a guaranteed crowd-pleaser: Solidarity Forever.)

In another world, she could have been a model or something. The unique pink hair, the gorgeous smile, the legs… Lexington was a whole package. She could have been found in the walls of every barrack up and down the Pacific Coast.

But no one was quite crazy enough to make a pin-up model of the American Brutus. The long hair was kept in a no-nonsense bun, the outfit was a modest modification of the Pacific States women's auxiliary uniform, barring the occasional cape or cockade.

She talked down the Hawaiian fleet, brought them back into the fold without violence, and led them through the Canal. She traded blows with California and Tennessee, those dreadful sisters of Caribbean fame, and she had an almost mythical rivalry with Pennsylvania. Lexington was romantic in the sense of a magnificent ideal, beautiful as a flower and as revolutionary as her namesake battle.

And she was here, rallying support for true American democracy before the final push. If she had any strong feelings about cooperating with the Canadians, she hid them well. She did the fancy press meetings, got to see the King, took photographs with Warspite and Queen Elizabeth, but after all that… she took the time to visit the common shipgirls. Common shipgirls like Montpelier.

Lexington was a good conversationalist, the same charisma that made her a marvel in films making it almost impossible to look away in person. Maybe the care she displayed was some sort of display intended to heighten morale, but even the cynical Montpelier couldn't interpret it like that at the time, not when Lexington had noticed her guitar. (She bought one of her own, not wanting to depend on someone else's charity.)

"Do you know When Johnny Comes Marching Home?"

"Of course. Do you want me to…?"

"Play it just a touch slower than usual, please."

"Alright."

She began to strum, and after one quick one-through, Lexington gave an approving nod before starting to sing along. She sang like a big city starlet, or maybe like a bird, a sweet voice so mournful it nearly drove Montpelier to tears.

"While on the road to sweet Athy, hurroo, hurroo,

While on the road to sweet Athy, hurroo, hurroo,

While on the road to sweet Athy, a stick in the hand and a drop in the eye,

A doleful damsel I heard cry: Johnny I hardly knew ya!"

("They're rolling out the guns again hurroo, hurroo…

They're rolling out the guns again, by God they'll take our sons again…")

The Cleveland class are built so late, holy crap.