As I write this, it seems increasingly that I will have no space left to finish off my scene with Shizuru and Natsuki this time, because while I have been putting this off for far too long, (and I apologize), I have been putting Mai and Yuuichi off for even longer; I will make every effort to write a shorter chapter and have it out by tomorrow featuring only Shizuru and Natsuki. Be on the 'lert, folks, cause it's going up roughly six to eight hours from now.
Finally, for those of you who think that Akane and Kazuya have vanished, they haven’t. I’ll probably be giving them a larger part in later chapters.
Thanks for bearing with me!
Stare in wonder / who’s here to bring you down / find your martyr / I’m sure you made the crown / so light a fire under my bones so when / I die for you at least / I’ll die alone
It ain’t nothing for me to end up like this.
Heroes
Reito was the only one of the three that had gotten out of the van that had to give the corpses a wide berth, and he wasn’t happy about this. Akira and Midori, it seemed, were a lot more used to dead bodies than he was, and for some reason, he seemed to take this as a kind of subtle blow to his masculinity.
Not that he would ever admit it in public, of course.
As a result of his stomach requesting, very forcefully, that he stay at least ten meters away from the nearest corpse at all times, it took him several seconds of sprinting to catch up with Midori and Akira, who were making relatively good time in reaching Mai and the others. Midori didn’t even look at him when he did, and Akira gave him only the barest of nods. Reito took it in stride as well as he could, but he felt a sort of deliberate insolence coming off of Akira at that point, and he felt the first glimmers of annoyance, even anger, floating up to the top of his head. What the hell is their problem?
When they were close enough to be heard speaking at a tone of relatively normal pitch, Midori called out Mai’s name; the girl turned, and stopped when she recognized who was speaking. It took her a moment, and though her expression seemed a bit…vacant, Reito thought, it wasn’t anywhere near of the caliber of the utterly blank expression on her face at the beach.
That award, Reito frowned, looking at the rest of them, who stopped and turned when Mai did, goes to Chie.
Chie looked like shit. Reito felt that it was important to note this, for some reason. Maybe because it was the first time he had ever seen her looking like this.
Akira, Reito, and Midori caught up to them, and there was silence powerful enough to pop an eardrum for a moment; they were, by now, far away from the storefront, and the dim, omnipresent hum of a curiously envigorated townsfolk was long out of earshot.
Midori most of all seemed to be having trouble speaking, so Reito said, “Are you guys okay?” This, obviously, was not the question that any of the other two with him wanted to ask, but he understood very well that those questions should be left until some other time.
Mai was the first to nod. “We’re alright; Chie has a burn on her back, but we’re going to tend to it when we get to the van.”
Reito was too perceptive to believe that, and he made it clear on his face, but he didn’t argue outright. “The van isn’t parked where we left it; Natsuki has it right now.”
“Natsuki can drive?”
“Yes. She can drive very fast.”
She didn’t ask why Natsuki had the van.
“What do we do, then?”
Silence. Reito thought hard; they couldn’t wait around for too much longer; something gave him a nagging feeling that they needed to get back to the cabin as soon as possible. On the other hand, he understood based on the look that he’d seen on Natsuki’s face earlier that it wasn’t possible to call her, either. That calling her might result in her death.
He chanced a look at Midori; the girl was staring at the ground, not saying anything; her face looked…depressed. In a way that she hadn’t ever really looked before; she looked almost hopeless. When he looked back, the rest of the group quickly looked away from Midori as well; they’d all been staring at her at the same time he had been. Waiting for some kind of answer from her.
And she didn’t notice.
More of that good old-fashioned Genuine Human Concern flooded into Reito’s head. Midori is usually the one to “voluntarily” demand leadership; the one who really gives us a direction. What the hell is up with her?
“Midori,” Reito said quietly. “What do you think we should do?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Midori snapped, and Reito jumped; he hadn’t been expecting that measure of (relatively violent) lucidity from her. “I’m just as lost as you guys, okay?”
Reito allowed the silence to last for all of five seconds, and then sighed. “I guess we should just wait here. More than likely, Natsuki will be back soon.”
“Unless she got killed,” Midori murmured, and Mai and Aoi gasped. The two of them began to sputter individually, as though they were caught up in some kind of race to see who could express the most coherent disbelief the quickest.
If Reito didn’t have such strong control over his facial expression, he would have been scowling at that point; instead, he simply said, “Okay. Then we wait here for ten minutes, and then we go after her,” quickly enough to cut off Aoi and Mai. He gave them a look to drill the point home, and they shut up. It was probable that this was the rudest thing he’d done all day, though he wasn’t sure at this point that it would be the rudest thing he would do all day.
“And get ourselves killed too.”
A few eyes were wide and only getting wider; Reito could see his snapping point, and it wasn’t terribly far from where they were now. “Excuse us,” he said to the group, and then to Midori, “Come here for a moment, would you?”
She shrugged like a sullen teenager, and Reito led her off about five meters from the group, all of whom were staring at them. Reito was well aware of this, so he turned his back to them and murmured to Midori, who was standing with slumped shoulders, “Would you like to tell me what the problem is, Midori?” He said it as diplomatically as he could; which was saying a hell of a lot.
“No,” she said immediately. “I don’t, Reito, and I’d appreciate you stepping off right now.”
“That’s fine,” he said, “but if you’re not going to talk about your problem, it would help out a lot if you would stop drawing so much attention to it.” Like a little fucking third grader throwing a temper tantrum. Reito was a very diplomatic sort. “I’m well aware that I’m not suited to the task of directing a group in a crisis which involves a potentially large amount of violence, but I’m also well-aware that you are. And if you’re not going to do anything about it, then please at least stop making waves for the rest of us.”
Midori said nothing.
“Aoi and Chie are hurting. Really, really bad; I think they were right there when all those people died, and if they’re not messed up over it now, they will be soon, okay? I don’t know what exactly has come over to put you in this bad of a mood, but I’d ask,” he said the next part very, very politely: “Please. Deal with it on your own time. Right now, other people need your help.”
She stared straight at him, and Reito thought privately that he had never seen quite so much quiet desperation thinly veiled by a sort of forced hatred before.
“Please,” he said quietly. “I’m at a loss, too.” He put his hand on her shoulder, and she shook it off, muttering, “Don’t touch me.”
At least she’s not shouting this time around. He grinned at her as best he could. “Sorry.”
She shook her head and turned away from him, walked back towards the group.
Very, very privately, in the utmost, buried recesses in his mind, the misogynist in Reito’s brain wondered quietly, I wonder if she’s on her period.
Something else in Reito’s head told him, firmly but fairly, in the manner of a pacifistic interrogator with a thumbscrew in his back pocket and a smile on his face, that if he ever said something like that out loud, his death would be as slow and as painful as any that this world had ever seen. What really convinced him was when that part of his head told him, almost offhand, “She’d start with your balls and work her way from there.”
He winced a little and started to follow her.
Midori was already talking when he got back, her voice more controlled than he’d ever heard it before. This, he knew, was normal; when people need to control themselves, to hide their secret desire to explode and destroy half of a city in one massive fireball, they tend to overdo it and give themselves away in the utter passiveness of their face.
“—here with Aoi and Chie; I can’t imagine you guys are in the best way right now yourselves,” she said. Mai and Yuuichi gave each other strange looks, and Shiho gave a harrumph, privately wondering why she had to stay here with her, just because some storefront had exploded or something. “I heard that,” Midori snapped at Shiho. “If you don’t like it, you’re free to go ask one of these nice folks if you can borrow their car because you don’t want to stick around.” She pointed at the small mob of townies, a few of whom were now crying as they recognized their loved ones by their marvelously-intact feet.
Maybe she isn’t covering quite as well as I’d thought.
Yuuichi and Shiho positively gaped at Midori, as did Mai. Mai, however, was doing so with a small, barely-perceivable measure of satisfaction.
“Reito, you stick around too; Akira and I are going to go looking for Natsuki over by where he said they were; she says that she’s got at least one person watching us right now, so we should be pretty well safe as long as we’re cautious.”
Midori sighed irritably, then thought, I thought we weren’t thinking about that. I thought we weren’t letting that ruin our mood.
We weren’t, until that fucking bitch went and rubbed it in my face.
That bitch you’re going out to check up on, you mean?
Yeah. That one.
Somehow, this seemed to pacify the little argumentative niggle in Midori’s head. That little niggle of depression morphed into rage for the supposed purpose of releasing it.
Before, Midori had had only one real response to depression: She went very nearly catatonic for anywhere from a week to a month; barely eating or sleeping, staring at the television for as long as it took to forget about the really, really big shit.
After
that
not thinking about that
though, it hadn’t gone away. She had spent a full month doing what she did second-
third- but you don’t get that anymore
best, and it didn’t help. Eventually, Youko had discovered her. She had given her, out of respect, a four-week grace period to do her thing, but after that, she had said, it was time to start healing.
But she didn’t. Not even close; this was depression as Midori had never felt before. A kind of mind-numbing, all-consuming feeling that sapped everything she had.
Her “recovery” was essentially based around something that Youko had said almost in passing: Anger and sadness are almost exactly the same. The only difference is how you deal with them.
“And what about you?” Mai asked. “Are you going to be okay in…that kind of situation?”
Midori had taken to working out as hard as she could; running, swimming, anything she could find. She was fairly lousy at fighting; she had taken to kickboxing in whatever free time her workout schedule afforded her, mostly with a bag. The bag won more often than not, but it was still what she needed. Mostly, she won on the days where her depression was worse than usual.
Today, she supposed, was one of those days. All because of a little side comment, just like with Youko.
But that’s just how it is.
“I’ll be fine.”
Mai nodded seriously. She didn’t want to argue, but more than that, she saw something in Midori’s eyes that she’d never seen before. Something that well and truly scared the piss out of her.
Mikoto murmured something from her side, and Mai thumped her on the top of the head lightly, hearing the girl say something that sounded a lot like hungry. “Later,” she murmured.
Midori started off after that, and Akira followed. Neither said anything. They jogged like that for a few minutes, down an alley and onto the street where Natsuki had parked.
They spotted the van quickly enough: It was the only conversion van on the street tilted up at a thirty degree angle, and they left their jog off there, started walking as casually as they could considering that Akira was still halfway dressed like a Ninja. People on lookout always locked onto hurried movements before they locked onto casual ones, and both knew this for their own private reasons.
Strangely, it was Akira who broke the silence. “I know it’s not my business,” she said quietly, “but you should probably tell somebody about what’s bothering you eventually.” Her tone of voice made it pretty clear that she had absolutely no desire to be “someone.” Akira had never made a point of getting involved in people’s personal problems, having ignored most of her own for the vast majority of her life.
“And why, exactly, is that?” Midori said, annoyed.
“Because eventually you’re going to make somebody angry beyond the point where they’ll forgive you. And I have a feeling that in spite of how you are right now, you’d wind up regretting it. Dying without regrets is important,” she said this last part sagely, in a morbid sort of way.
“What the hell do you know about dying?” Midori said, bitterly. She regretted it almost the instant she said it.
Akira moved so fast that it was barely possible to track her; with the kind of grace she usually reserved only for killing people, Akira rounded on Midori, stepped in front of her, hopped up a little and slapped her. The impact was sharp, painful, and it twisted Midori’s head a little; Akira was a strong girl.
“I have seen more of my friends die than you would care to imagine,” Akira murmured. “I get past it, because if I didn’t, then I may as well be dead myself.” She paused for a moment, and then her voice turned at least halfway to venom. “Am I being clear?”
Midori looked straight at Akira, and her eyes began to water; her face turned ashen, and that little piece that Akira had been missing snapped into place.
Reito knew this already, of course, though he didn’t take it as an insult that Yuuichi had felt it necessary to remind him; (a guy that he knew only as “the professor” with whom he was only vaguely familiar, but whose reputation in his field far was far-reaching, and who Midori was, last he’d checked, completely snookered over) and it presented a whole knew set of thoughts and conclusions to his brain, none of which seemed any more feasible, nor any less, than the others.
One of them stood out in his head, brought on by the woman’s reaction to Natsuki’s question, if it were the professor were in danger, wouldn’t you do the same thing? But he dismissed it pretty readily: If he were a short old man and a spunky, beautiful, very well…-possessed…young woman like Midori was suddenly all over him, he wouldn’t give it up for all the gold in a rich man’s teeth.
And yet, it was this singular impression that was the only one that really stuck in his head, even after his dismissal. Quite simply, Midori was acting like a woman scorned, and scorned harshly. It created kind of a paradox in his mind that his male-ness wouldn’t quite allow him to get over.
And it was this singular impression that came flooding back into the top of his head as he rounded the corner out of the alley and saw Midori bury her face in her hands and cry. Her beautiful red hair settled a moment later over her hands, over her back, over her shoulders, and her whole body shook with a kind of silent misery that tugged at Reito in a lot of different ways. Akira was there, looking more awkward than anything. The tall girl patted her on the shoulder as best she could, and in a moment, she spotted Reito, who could only stand staring, completely shocked.
Akira beckoned him over with a look of combined panic and well-disguised empathy, and Reito started walking as quickly as he could.
And all the while, Midori sobbed, quietly but still obviously, into her hands as her hair danced, a fiery wave in the middle of a tumultuous ocean, about her shoulder.
Reito reached the two of them and put a hand on her shoulder, a lot more supportively than Akira had been able to manage. “Midori.” She flinched but didn’t twist away this time.
“Well, good to see you’ve got this under control,” Akira said, speaking quickly. “I’ll be going now. You know, checking up on Kuga and all. Thanks for your help, Kanzaki!” Before Reito could utter even the first syllable of a protest, Akira was gone, vanishing with a speed borne of a Ninja scared witless for the first time by a potentially awkward situation. Reito shook his head.
He stayed silent for a moment after that, allowing Midori to simply cry. By herself.
As soon as that thought occurred to him, he put his arms around her, and this time, she tried to pull away.
But this time, something was different in his mind; before, he had always been relatively passive when it came to rejection, not that he’d had to deal with much of it in his life.
You were a villain once, Reito, he thought. However unwillingly, you were a villain, and you hurt all of these people, and you should be so, so thankful that they didn’t just walk away from you for it. Even if it wasn’t your fault. Hell, if it had been somebody else, you’d probably be scared witless of their shadow
And now you need to make it up to one of them, by being a bastard to her. A bastard and a hero. He thought privately that those two things had more in common than most people cared to admit.
He tightened his grip as she tried to shrug him off, refusing to let her go.
“Don’t touch me,” she whispered, and he shook his head.
“Nuh-uh.”
“Don’t touch me.” A little shakier this time. “Goddammit, get off of me, Reito. Don’t touch me.”
“No.” Then, more softly, “Why?”
“Don’t touch me.” She allowed him to pull her closer, though, in spite of this. She didn’t trust him, but she did. Maybe it was the sharp contrast between this gentle, kind, platonic (however much she didn’t want to admit it) touch and the icy gaze of the Obsidian Lord that had inhabited his body; as though Reito himself was the definition of good and evil; he’d possessed pure evil in his body, so now what could he have but good?
It made a lot of sense to her at that moment, and she relaxed in his arms, and let herself cry as she had before; in hushed, turbulent waves.
After a moment, she whispered, “When did you guys get my letter? The one that I sent with the picture of me and…” she paused for a moment, “and the Balagan ruins?”
“Right before spring break,” Reito said, a little confused. “Why?”
She chuckled bitterly. “That means that I sent that letter almost three months before it arrived. I guess you can’t trust the Israeli post office after all. He warned me about that.”
It clicked in his head a moment after that, and he turned her around to face him, his mind made up to…
To what?
Not now.
“Midori,” he said quietly. “I don’t know why that old man would leave you, but you still have a lon—”
Midori actually laughed at this, and he stopped, taken aback. Her laugh was long and painful; the kind of laugh Reito might have expected from somebody who’s just heard a funny joke at their father’s funeral.
“You stupid, stupid, stupid bastard,” Midori spat, now meeting his gaze; her eyes looked slightly unbalanced at that point; somebody who’s been pushed past their breaking point. “That man didn’t leave me. He would have never done that.”
Reito frowned, that little part of his head that made him smart in school broadcasting alarms all over the damn place. “What…then…” Something was sinking inside his stomach.
“The professor…funny how I still call him that, after all this time…after all we…”
“After all you what? What happened to him?”
Midori took a steadying breath, giving herself time, perhaps, to prepare for what she was going to say. She looked resigned, now, more than anything.
“He … the Professor died about a week after we took that picture. He wasn’t really old, but he wasn’t young either, and he had a bad heart. All the excitement in Israel, with the Ruins and the scavengers…just…it just took it out of him, and he had a heart attack in the middle of some fucking shit-creek desert halfway between Tel Aviv and god’s asshole.” Reito had never heard Midori so bitter, nor had he ever heard her so profane. He had also never heard her talk about herself in any way; maybe the three were related. “By the time I was able to find a place to call for help, he was dead.”
Dead… While Reito’s stomach was busy working its way into the corner of his ankle, Midori sniffed and wiped at her eyes, her throat working but her face calming.
“Midori, I…”
You what? Midori thought bitterly. You want to comfort me? You feel bad? You’re…she thought about it like somebody else might think about vomiting, sorry? No. “Stay away from me, Reito,” she said quietly, after a moment, having regained control of herself. All the bitterness and profanity had retreated back into her eyes, where, Reito knew, it had been lurking all along. “Just…stay away. I don’t want your help. Any of it”
And with that, she turned and walked towards the van.
Aoi had long since given up trying to “snap her out of it,” as one might in a movie by slapping her or some other such nonsense; she was too much of a pacifist to actually try slapping her with any kind of force, and the traditional “shake and shout” methods seemed to have done nothing but make Aoi look funny in front of everybody. Which didn’t bother her, but still. Finally, defeated, the girl lapsed into simply holding Chie’s immobile form in one arm and her hand in another. If it hadn’t been so morbid, Mai thought very privately, it would have been kind of cute.
As for Yuuichi and Shiho, they were fighting again. Something about what Shiho’s problem was, why couldn’t she just try being nice for once, why won’t Yuuichi just accept her for who she was. Nothing that Mai hadn’t heard a thousand times up to this point.
And so, she busied herself with Mikoto. Sometimes she felt honestly bad about this, about using Mikoto to simply distract her, but rarely; and besides, the girl seemed as though she needed a little bit of attention right now.
“How are you feeling?” Mai asked Mikoto quietly. “You don’t look so good.”
“Fine,” Mikoto shrugged. She really didn’t look so good; she looked distressed, though not precisely upset over the whole thing. “Didn’t like seeing that.”
“Me either.” Mai shuddered a little. “It was all too—”
“Familiar.”
I wish you hadn’t said that.
“Yeah.”
There was silence between them for a moment, and Mikoto used the opportunity to take Mai’s hand in her own, an act which Mai accepted gratefully.
“Mai?”
“Mm?”
“Did Mai ever forgive me for that?”
Yuuichi stopped arguing for a second, let out a small, strangled cry. Shiho looked up at him, perplexed by his sudden, abrupt drop in hostility. Mai was immediately, vividly aware that Yuuichi was paying very, very close attention to her.
She also was vividly aware of how quickly her thoughts had turned against Mikoto when she’d seen the destruction, the carnage that had left Chie as she was.
And even past that, at the same time, she was aware of how easily Mikoto had …fixed her. Every time she had needed it.
She asks for absolutely nothing in return.
Now she is asking for something. That look on her face…it’s guilt. She feels that she’s hurt me somehow.
Mai nodded, slowly. “I do, Mikoto. I forgive you.” I do. Please, please, please don’t reject that.
If Mikoto had caught what Mai had meant by her change of tense, she didn’t let on. Instead, she grinned, and Mai grinned too in spite of herself.
“I didn’t mean to—” Mai started
“Mai didn’t mean to do anything, so she didn’t,” Mikoto cut her off.
“Big brother,” Shiho snapped, “stop staring.” She had a point—a moment after Mai had become aware of his attentions, Yuuichi had started starting at her with such unblinking attention that it seemed that he’d frozen into stone.
This time, Yuuichi didn’t argue. He just shook his head and turned so that he was looking at the ground. Damnit, Yuuichi, he thought, sometimes, you’re so carpet-bagged. Mai, as always, pretended not to notice, in spite of the fact that her ears were locked firmly enough onto Yuuichi to make a decent run at a security business.
Mikoto, however, made up her mind to do something she didn’t do very often, nor, truth be told, very well. She walked past Mai, past Yuuichi, to Shiho and stared at her pointedly for a moment.
“What?” Shiho said, a little taken aback.
“Why is Shiho so mean to her Ani-ue?” Mikoto asked, reaching her finger up to point at Shiho.
Shiho was positively flabbergasted. She had been doing what she had been doing for many, many years, and nobody had ever come even close to actually questioning her except Yuuichi. And he wasn’t really looking for answers. Just an end to the torment.
“N-none of your business!”
“Shiho should be nicer to your Ani-ue,” Mikoto said semi-confidently. “Otherwise…”
To say that Shiho didn’t want her to continue was an understatement. At this point, it seemed to her that whether the sky fell or stayed where it was, supported by invisible pillars previously thought indestructible rested solely on what Mikoto had to say next, and whether or not she said it at all.
“Otherwise, what will you do when Mai and he—”
Shiho was fast. She was, in fact, very fast for such a small girl, but Mikoto was far, far faster, and she had been used to acting reflexively all her life. Shiho’s arm rocketed out to slap some sense into this obviously delusional girl
has to be delusional Big Brother would never go off with that
slut
awful woman
and before it crossed even half of the distance, Mikoto’s own arm reached out and grabbed it, held it there. Something yelped behind her, said something that sounded remarkably like chie, but she ignored it.
“Shiho should be happy to have your Ani-ue around at all. And Shiho should want your Ani-ue to smile, not be sad.”
Shiho was ready to do a million things at this point. She was ready to scream, to cry, to fight; to deny everything Mikoto had said out loud and in her head. She was ready to duel Mai to the death over her, HER, big brother! HERS! Mine! He takes care of me and I take care of him. She does NOTHING. Just sings him stupid fucking songs in the middle of the night. If Mai had known that Shiho knew about this…but she didn’t. Her face twisted into a horrible mask of rage and hurt, and she prepared her own defense. Something. Anything.
What, though?
You don’t know a thing about this girl. About either of them.
“You don’t know anything!”
You act so cruelly sometimes. Why?
“Why are you acting so…why are you...being so cruel?”
Are you just afraid?
“Let me go! What the hell are you afraid of?”
Why doesn’t Mai fucking stand up for herself?
“Why…”
She felt her legs weaken, all of the energy in her simply fade to black. In another moment, maybe she would have collapsed. Maybe.
Instead, she heard a small, electronic click-beep from behind Mai, who whirled around, to find Chie standing there, lucid, with a shit-eating grin on her face, her camera-phone taking in everything that was going on.
Mai was dumbstruck. Completely. “Chi…e…?” was about all she could get out. Yuuichi doubted he could have gotten much more out of his own suddenly-busted trap. Aoi was fairly well latched onto the girl, who shrugged impishly. “It was a good opportunity.” (A/N: Don’t believe me? See Author’s notes at the end of the passage to see how a psychology class can come in handy when writing a book –Veg)
“You were…”
She shrugged. “Had trouble focusing after that”
fire gouts from the window
people die without knowing what killed them utter agony
“…thing. Happened. I’m really not quite sure what I missed, but I knew I didn’t want to miss this.” She gave Mai a wink that said, you owe me. Mai missed it.
“Chi…e?”
Chie shrugged. “Honestly. Some people.” She turned to Aoi. “You okay there, girl?”
For a moment, Aoi could only gape along with Mikoto and the rest. Then the moment passed, and construction began on the largest grin in Goza’s colorful history, right here on the scenic face of Aoi Senou. She let it expand for a moment, and then threw herself at Chie, who took the brunt of the girl with a woof! grinning as she did. “No, Aoi!” she screamed in mock-embarassment. “I’m not that kind of girl! You have to ask me out to dinner first!”
And then, to everybody’s complete shock, even hers, Aoi planted a great big kiss straight on Chie’s mouth. Who, once again, took it with a noise, though it wasn’t a woof. It certainly wasn’t terribly romantic, though, either. It lasted for a solid five seconds, during which nobody moved at all; the exception to this being, of course, Chie, who allowed the kiss to become a little bit more than a pop on the mouth. A little.
Finally, Chie broke it and laughed. “I told you, I’m not that kind of girl, you little hoochie!” She took the moment to grab Aoi by the sides—her weak spot—and drop the girl to her knees, effectively proving that using your Powers for Evil was really quite fun sometimes. She went to her knees after her, and as she did, she looked up at Mai. She had to practically shout over Aoi’s screams of laughter and torment, but she managed to get the point across.
“Where are Akane and Kazuya? Haven’t they finished screwing yet? I know I, for one, am ready for some of the world’s greatest KA-RA-OKE!”
Normally, this would have affected Mai. Clearly, she hadn’t recovered from her own mild shock yet:
“Chi…e?”
True catatonia is remarkably hard to come by, and is usually a result of immense stress on an already unbalanced mind. I gotta say, Chie isn’t really terribly unbalanced, at all. I think that seeing a bunch of people die like that might stun her, put her into some shock, but that this would be as much a defense mechanism as anything. Like throwing your arms over your head to protect yourself; you’re temporarily more or less immobile on your top half, but you’re safe. Just so, if somebody seems temporarily catatonic, it may just be a temporary thing while the brain works to block out what it has just witnessed; P implies Q and not-Q implies not-P, so QED.
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