Akira grimaced as she swung down from the tree and landed on the bear’s back, crushing its delicate spine with a sickening crunch. As she landed, she bent her knees to absorb the impact, though it wasn’t really necessary; the layer of fur and fat that violently collapsed on itself, shedding blood in a hundred places as the bear gave off a last, dying roar was sufficient.
As she wiped a layer of blood off her brow, shielded in part by the black cloth of her hood, Akira thought, parts of this chapter may be considered violent or cruel.
Just call my name / you’ll be okay / your scream is burning through my veins
Sooner or later / you’re going to hate it / go ahead and throw your life away
Sooner or Later
It could have been said that Natsuki Kuga had a hard time coping with certain aspects of life that most people found relatively routine. For example, indecision; a feeling that most people have acquainted themselves with at one point or another, the feeling of being pulled one way by all points of logic but entirely another way by that little voice in the back of your head that says precisely the opposite of what reason tells you, and speaking so convincingly that you can’t bring yourself to disregard it. No, you don’t really need to eat anything right now, because you’re not really in the mood for chicken. Go on, take the last candy. Nobody will miss it, least of all, the person whose name is on it. No, you should argue with him. He’s an asshole.
Natsuki had a hard time dealing with indecision. Most of the choices she had been presented in her life had been relatively simple: Avenge her mother’s death or feel regret for the rest of her life. Kill or die. Fight or fall back.
The really hard decisions always had something to do with the only person who had ever put turbulence into her life: Shizuru Fujino. These were the questions that had no immediate answer to her, because she wasn’t really even certain what the choices were. What did she want from Shizuru? That depended on what Shizuru wanted from her. What did Shizuru mean to her? That depended on who was asking, and on what day of the astrological calendar they asked on.
These questions had no simple solution in Natsuki’s mind, but there was one fairly straightforward fix that she had learned of not long ago to prevent them from overwhelming her consciousness whenever they got too pushy, demanding an answer now damnit: To push them aside with all her might, and focus on whatever else was around her.
When she thought about it very closely, there was only one really difficult Shizuru-related decision that she had ever made easily. In Goza, when Shizuru had been kidnapped, the choice had been simple to her: Shizuru had been kidnapped, so Natsuki had to put her own life on the line to rescue her. Fight or flee? Fight. It was usually fight.
Not this time, though. This time, there was no fight. There was no easy fix, and there was no pushing it aside.
Because Shizuru had touched her. And more than that, she had kissed her.
And Natsuki wasn’t sure whether she wanted that or not. She had never thought seriously on the matter, simply because she had spent most of that time forcing the thoughts from her head, rather than addressing them.
Because when she didn’t, this was what happened.
Blank stare. Inability to respond coherently. If anybody had tried to attack her, they’d have found her reflexes sluggish, at best.
In short, nearly useless. In her own mind, anyway.
In the end, it all boiled down to the fact that she was most comfortable when she was fighting, and that when she wasn’t, she didn’t know quite what to do with herself. Violence was a drug (see A/N below)—she knew that better than anybody else at that camp, except for possibly Minoru. You could use it to replace parts of your life, but once you got hooked on it, you didn’t know how to live without it, and it required many years of rehabilitation to break yourself of the habit, though you never really dropped it altogether.
Maybe that was why the first gunshot that echoed through the forest, over the lake, and into the ears of everybody in the camp was so effective at waking her up: It was like getting her fix; once she got it, she could more or less function again.
The gunshot, a booming, resounding crack, turned the heads of everybody at the camp, as loud, unexpected noises are wont to do. It echoed off of the lake so that it seemed to come from everywhere at once, but even so, everybody’s head turned to precisely the same point in the woods.
Everybody’s but Natsuki’s. Natsuki didn’t need to look uselessly at an unrevealing line of trees to know that sound; it was a sound she had heard plenty of times before. Just never quite this big. She had no idea what kind of gun had just fired, but she was guessing it wasn’t legal in any country, let alone in Japan, where she could be arrested just for being seen near her pistol.
Her pistol, currently inside the cabin, resting comfortably and safely inside her bag.
Inside the cabin.
With Shizuru.
A moment later, she began to register the world again, her indecision shattered by the reintroduction of violence into her life. The first thing she heard was, strangely enough, Yuuichi: “Where’s Shiho?” he was asking everybody. She turned her head briefly towards him, and then turned away, regretting it: She hadn’t seen a man with so ashen a face since…
Since a long time ago.
She didn’t ponder it further. It bothered her, but what really bothered her was the look on Mai’s face, next to her. Mai, Natsuki knew, lost no sleep over Shiho by herself—not over the halfway-psychotic girl who had very nearly separated her and Yuuichi on more than one occasion, on quite possibly a permanent basis. Mai was a kind, forgiving person, but kindness only went so far, and typically nowhere near far enough to catch a glimpse of where jealousy ended. Mai’s concern for Shiho had, in Natsuki’s opinion, a more pragmatic root: Yuuichi still cared very deeply for the misguided little girl, and if she was Tate’s concern, then she was, at some level, Mai’s concern as well.
What bothered her was really Mai’s face.
Torn. One side hurting for Yuuichi, the other for herself; staring halfway between Yuuichi’s head and the sunset, with a concerned expression that gave way to hurt eyes, one hand supportively on Yuuichi’s shoulder, the other pulled tightly to her stomach.
Torn.
Natsuki’s instinct, therefore, pulled her towards her gun, and towards battle. Towards her inevitable route of sacrificing her safety for the sometimes dim hope of securing somebody else’s; but there was still that one thing standing between her and her gun; the same thing that stood between her and the rest of the world:
Shizuru. Just the thought of her niggled at Natstuki, rooting her feet to the spot. It would have been easier for Natsuki to shoot her way through a dozen First District soldiers than to walk in there now, to get her gun and do what was necessary. Hell, given the choice, she probably would have opted to take the soldiers bare-handed.
She was also absolutely certain that this information, vital intelligence if ever it existed, could never fall into Shizuru’s hands, for fear of her swift, harsh
Kiyohime.
retribution
One word should never be able to cause so very much destruction.
Another gunshot. The first she might have been able to explain away as a firecracker, but this one was closer, and punctuated by a sharp, short noise--the unmistakable sound of a human in mortal pain, pleading in a single, unintelligible syllable, for help.
No. There’s another word.
Natsuki shook her head. No point in thinking about it. Really, that was when she did her best work anyway, was when she didn’t bother to think about it. Somewhere deep down inside of her, she had the feeling that this was true of most of the human race.
She gritted her teeth, both figuratively and literally, and started off for the cabin, where that one word awaited her.
The only reason he wasn’t already dead was that they weren’t shooting at him yet. They were shooting at the animals that were more afraid of humans than humans were of them: The bears.
The Japanese brown bear was a fairly large creature; though nowhere near as large as its Alaskan and Canadian cousins, its weight could still top 500 pounds, and it could still rip the head off of a normal human being, gun or no. They weren’t dangerous creatures by nature—that is, they didn’t actively seek to rip anything off of anybody without provocation, usually involving their young. None of the men up in the trees ever really figured out why it was that the bears attacked them, and even if they had an inkling, they never would have suspected that it had to do with something they couldn’t control: Their scent.
They smelled, from their perches up in the trees, harnessed to the thick trunks and buckled down to fire their big, 50 caliber sniper rifles, a little bit like a baby brown bear. But to the bears down below, they looked like big, angry people. Natural assumption: They were hiding the cubs under their shirts.
In fact, they were, to an extent. They all wore identical black undershirts, so that they could identify themselves if need be. All of these black undershirts had been shipped to them in a box made of unimpressive brown cardboard, and all of them had, for about fifteen minutes, fallen into the hands of somebody who supposedly worked for the man with the hoarse voice, but who nobody could ever quite match a name to.
All of them smelled exactly like bear cub. So when, high above them, on the very tops of the trees, Akira squeezed the bear cub just enough to make it squeal—an adorable sound, really; like a stuffed animal—the bears on the ground—usually unseen, foraging or sleeping—reacted as any concerned parents would when they heard their missing child shrill: They started ascending the trees, quickly, preparing to rip the heads off of whoever it was that had their babies.
And the arms, and the legs, and whatever else was necessary.
The bears really weren’t afraid of them. Minoru got the impression that maybe the old saw was nothing but a myth, and a malicious one, at that.
Minoru could assemble his rifle straight out of his backpack in less than two minutes on his worst day in the field, but today was significantly worse than his worst day on the field. He was stressed, he was directly under enemy fire in the middle of what may as well have been an open field, his hand still ached when he formed a fist, and he had a little girl in his charge. A crying little girl, huddled up against a tree. He practically dumped the contents of the pack onto the ground, but in a moment of clarity, reached out with his bad hand and allowed the packet of pins to fall into his open palm. A tremor of pain shook his hand slightly as he caught it, but he didn’t drop it, so he figured it was all right.
You should have gotten to cover first, jackass.
Now he was sitting in what may as well have been an open field trying desperately to assemble a rifle broken into four pieces that he should probably clean before he fired.
Not that he had enough time for something like that. He would have to rely on Akira and her bunch—don’t worry, buddy, we have ninja covering us, would have been enough to make Minoru seek higher ground and a spotter that wasn’t batshit insane—to keep them alive.
Minoru dropped to one knee and quickly counted the parts to his rifle. His brain was still halfway in panic mode—the promise of ninja cover did little to soothe that—so he didn’t quite have the acuity to take stock of what he had, but his rifle only had four pieces.
And a scope.
Where the hell is your scope?
Minoru’s mind was a grassy field, and a powerful river called panic was rapidly eroding it away. Or maybe it was named insanity.
You’d have to be nuts to do this job anyway.
Say your lesson
His “lesson” was an old rhythmic phrase, the kind of thing you might sing in a first grade classroom. He didn’t remember who had taught it to him, but it was calming. It focused his mind, the steady, dull rhythm lulling his frantic mind gently into calmness, readiness. He grabbed the butt-piece of his gun, slid it between his legs, and with his good hand, picked up the bolt-piece.
“The bolt takes stock of the butt of the gun, the trigger guarded still,” he said quietly, stressing the iambs of the lesson as he quickly forced the bolt action, a long, thin tube that housed the firing mechanism, into the rear half of the weapon, and then connected the trigger mechanism and eased it into the trigger guard. “The barrel must go on quite straight, now or you never will.” He slid the front half of the gun, primarily the long, silenced barrel, onto the bolt, and then opened his baggie full of pins into his bad hand. Each one thudded onto his hand like a needle, but he didn’t drop any of them, and a moment later, he was reaching into his bag for a clip of ammunition, which he slammed home without any caution at all.
He was starting to get better, but a second too late; everybody around him, all of the men and women positioned so obviously and unscrupulously in the trees, either hung from their harnesses and dripped blood to the ground, or lay on the ground, being devoured by the bears, to whom Akira had returned the cub at some point.
Shiho was also looking up, staring straight at the nearest corpse, some poor bastard who had been half-eaten by a bear. All that remained of him now was his torso, still strapped grotesquely to the harness like some unfortunate marionette who’d fallen victim to its puppeteer’s drunken rages once too often. His guts lay in a red, lumpy pile at the foot of the tree, and there was a bear just beginning to sniff at it delicately, deciding whether or not it was worth eating.
Minoru knew what Shiho was going through. It was the same thing he’d gone through the first time he’d seen a dead man—a kind of morbid revulsion, fed by a grotesque fascination with the corpse which turned paler by the second, with its lifelessness. She was staring at it, wondering if it was going to move again. A lot of people had trouble comprehending death at this level, young or not. He didn’t blame her.
But he did know they needed to get moving. This was possibly the luckiest day of his life—and everybody else’s unluckiest—but he didn’t think for a second that anybody, even rookies like these had obviously been, would let him sit around in the open, panicking and trying to assemble his gun from scratch on the ground.
His very dirty gun. He wondered if he should chance cleaning it, or chance firing it later, but he knew in an instant that it would be better to move, now, while nobody could see him.
He grabbed Shiho’s hand, and it seemed to jolt her out of her trance-like state. “Come on,” he grunted. “It’s not going to move, and we have to go.”
She stared blankly, straight at him for a second, and he wondered what was going through her head—was she startled that he had touched her all of a sudden? He knew that junior high girls had freaked out and cried pervert! for less than that. Or was she not seeing him at all? Was she still, in her mind, staring at that corpse, still waiting for it to move? A lot of people had that problem, too.
It didn’t matter. If he didn’t move soon, she wouldn’t be staring at anybody at all. These, he knew without much thought, were Scratch-ass’s people, and Scratch-ass had money.
And people with money were rarely to be denied, in his experience.
He squeezed Shiho’s hand, and said, “Come on. You don’t want to end up like them, take my word on that,” and then reached down with his bad hand, slid his backpack around his wrist, and took off deeper into the forest, looking for some kind of cover, some good rock formation or group of downed trees that would provide him cover so that he could use his blanket.
He did his best to ignore the nagging question:
And then what?
Therefore, when Natsuki entered the cabin, quietly but quickly, allowing herself to let the door slam shut only by telling herself forcefully that stealth was not an issue but speed was, and heard no response, no call of, who is it? or request for privacy, but only the dull, giddy sound of friends talking, even gravely, she was immediately nervous.
She slipped her shoes off at the door without thinking about it, but grimaced as soon as she did—the cabin floors creaked, but worse than that was the shuffling sound her socks made as she walked, even on the balls of her feet (the best way to walk quietly, she’d found) along the grainy wood.
The entryway was dark and a little humid, the light of the day having escaped it as it retreated below the horizon but the heat still holding out a little longer. The wood on the walls seemed to jump out at her a little more than usual—faces made from the lines in the wooded boards seemed to call to her, or curse at her, or perhaps even warn her of something much more sinister than they which waited for her in the next room.
She nodded at them as if to say, I already know.
The door to the women’s room was shut, but there was a small light that flickered and swung at chest height behind the paper door, and from it, Natsuki could just barely make out a female form; seated but still obviously fairly tall, slender, and curved exactly where it needed to be. Without wanting to, Natsuki found herself taking it in, long hair to slender toe, several times. Each time, she felt something deep down inside of her and low, swell and burn a little.
Is this what hunger is like?
The form stood, and the light began to swing back and forth, so that at one apex of each swing all shadow vanished and Natsuki stared, for just a moment, at a sheet of paper instead of
hunger
a woman.
Back and forth. Back and forth. The woman’s form seemed to travel along the paper, following the swing of the light, until it vanished and then, a second later, began to travel back towards Natsuki, a maiden torn between her life and her lover.
Or maybe a warrior torn between life and death.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Her slender body never moved except back and forth, and Natsuki felt herself imagining those curves, carved out of flesh rather than paper, and how they
felt.
back and
And then, it wasn’t one form which traveled towards Natsuki, but two; the maiden and her father, perhaps, vengeful and protective all at once. Or maybe it was death, finally come for the warrior.
Natsuki’s eyes widened and she almost cried out right there, but the smarter half of her mind silenced her.
Gun.
Maybe not that much smarter. She reached for her side, where her gun should have been, and found nothing
forth
but the cloth of her jeans. She cursed herself a fool and an ass.
Back and…
The woman was alone in the room again. Had Natsuki imagined that? Imagined some huge masculine form behind her
hunger
friend, come to kill her like somebody was going to kill whoever was in the forest?
The forest.
She didn’t have any more time to waste. She swallowed her pride, mastered her shaking hands, and tried really really hard to ignore her
hunger
fear, and then she reached out, trying not to see the faces in the walls, all screaming at her, no, don’t do it, find another way! and opened the door.
She noticed two things about the room immediately. The first was Shizuru. She was
beautiful
hunger
staring straight at her in a queer mix of alarm and pleasure, and she was naked. Her skin was
as smooth as i imagined
pale and just slightly orange in the dim light of the lantern, and her slender body was not in the slightest curved away from Natsuki as a woman might naturally do if invaded in such a state.
The second thing she noticed was the man standing behind Shizuru. He had a knife, and he was also staring straight at Natsuki. He didn’t dare move.
Natsuki had not the slightest idea whether Shizuru knew of his presence. She also didn’t dare move.
Shizuru herself…
Perhaps she simply didn’t dare move, for fear that all of this was a dream. Perhaps she knew the man was behind her, and was paralyzed with fear.
Either way, for a minute, the room was the only place in Goza that night that possessed any sort of peace. The bombs which were beginning to erupt in the city that night made sure of that.
A/N: It seems that Mai has kind of taken a back seat of late. I plan on trying to reintroduce her in the next chapter, to focus on her more, but I do seem to have a few more important things to focus on right now. Sorry to all of you Mai fans out there for her long absence.
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