Shining days, burning bright
After burns had been drenched, breakfast consumed, and nightmares forgotten, the twelve of them settled down on the beach (on towels) to discuss what they should do for the first day of their spring break.
“I want to go swimming!” Mikoto announced, beginning the forum on a positive note. She stood up and tried to make for the ocean before anybody could agree or disagree, but Natsuki, moving with a speed born from years of paranoia, stuck her foot out into the younger girl’s path, tripping her. Mikoto practically flew to the ground, but managed to catch herself before she got a faceful of sand. She tried again to make for water, only to find Natsuki’s firm grip on her ankle preventing her from going anywhere but down.
“You’ve just eaten breakfast,” Natsuki said levelly. “If you go swimming now, you’ll drown and I won’t save you.”
Mikoto made a face and crawled back to her towel. Mai smiled at the girl. “Don’t worry, Mikoto. We’ll have plenty of time to go swimming after you’ve had time to digest your food. We could even go swimming before lunch.”
“Good idea, Mai.” Mikoto considered. “I want lunch.”
“You just ate breakfast, stupid!” Shiho shouted from her position around Tate’s arm. “How can you want lunch already?”
“Shiho!” Tate chided, feeling very much like a parent at that moment. He was certainly as embarrassed as one, as the group dissolved into complete silence, staring at the two of them.
“I’m just saying,” Shiho said as though it was an excuse, unaware of the awkwardness rapidly enveloping the twelve of them.
“Well, don’t just say.”
In recent weeks, Shiho had started to drop her cute-girl routine around the twelve of them. Maybe it was because they were all aware of her real disposition and she knew that she wasn’t fooling anyone anymore, or maybe she was just becoming more comfortable around them, but in any case, it was so sudden that the group hadn’t really learned to cope with it yet when she snapped at them.
Just like an embarrassed parent, Mai told herself firmly, trying to pretend that the prospect didn’t bother her.Still, she couldn’t help staring at them with a little bit of jealousy. The rest of the group found other places to look—at each other, at the sea, at a small crab that suddenly looked delicious when Mikoto thought about the miso broth that she had just consumed. Some broke off into polite conversation to mask the bickering that was beginning to envelop Shiho and Tate, the bickering that had been more common lately.
Natsuki and Shizuru were seated next to each other, Shizuru talking quietly at Natsuki, who was barely looking at her, pretending she didn’t desperately need sleep the way she did. Pretending, maybe, that she wasn’t thinking with more than a little bit of…Natsuki might have been able to call it fear if nobody had ever tried to kill her before…not wholly pleasant anxiety about the dream that had rendered her completely sleepless. In any case, Shizuru didn’t seem to mind. She had a small, completely benign grin on her face, and she was speaking animatedly, in a pleasant voice, which Natsuki could only half-focus on.
“…would be wonderful to go into the little town that we passed on the way here. I saw several arcades, and more than one little karaoke bar. I’m sure Mai would enjoy that very much; perhaps you might even have a good time, Natsuki.”
Natsuki remained as she was, struggling to stay awake, to avoid embarrassing herself in front of everybody by collapsing; struggling to avoid dreaming again. She was starting to realize that the dream was fundamentally frightening her in ways she hadn’t felt
wind blows and the captain of the kendo team
frightened in a long time.
Coming from anybody else, Shizuru’s constant conversation with what may as well have been a brick wall might have seemed a little pathetic. In her case, however, she simply sounded as though she was speaking to a close friend on the phone. “Also, I noticed a couple of fancy lingerie shops there, and I’m sure that you would love to shop in them with me, to undress in the booth with me, to not even bother seeing how well the lingerie fit you because we never bothered trying them on in the first place my Natsuki would enjoy the chance to rebuild your collection.”
Natsuki’s attention did a little jump-to. “What?”
Shizuru looked a little surprised. “I’m sorry, did I embarrass you? I forgot that you were private about your collection.” She lowered her head a little.
Natsuki was, but at the moment, that was the last thing that concerned her. “No, before that. What did you say before that? Or…” she struggled for a moment. “Or in between it.” Her pulse jackhammered in her chest, and she realized that she was having some trouble breathing.
“In bet…what?” Shizuru looked confused. “Are you feeling alright, Natsuki?”
“Fine.” Natsuki dropped her gaze, her pulse dropping back to a normal rate. Did she actually say that? She looked around. Mai was still staring at Tate, who was still arguing with Shiho; Aoi and Chie were talking in low tones about something or other; Reito was looking at Mai, very much like Mai was looking at Tate. Mikoto was chasing after a crayfish. Kazuya and Akane were cuddling, practically wiggling with glee. Midori looked a little annoyed, but only because she seemed to want to speak. None of them were staring at Shizuru with the kind of shocked looks she would have attracted by declaring her intent to strip Natsuki down in a dressing room and fuck her blind.
“So, would you like to go to town with me?”
Shiho had actually stood up, and she was shouting something about a “conniving woman” at Tate, though Natsuki had a feeling that she was using much harsher language than that. She had a hard time noticing, staring at the palms of her hands, face beet-red.
And suddenly, a voice stopped them all. Bright, perky, unfazed by imaginary declarations or very real name-calling, and most of all, fully confident in herself, Midori stood up, fist clenched, and said, “That’s it! Lets all go to the town!”
They all stopped what they were doing and stared at her as though she had informed them that the grand Duke of Earl was actually residing in her sport coat back in the cabin and she had forgotten to let him out for water last night. Even Mikoto, who had finally captured the crayfish and was presently trying to find a way around its shell, stopped moving and looked, though she didn’t lose her grip on the poor thing in her hand. Only Mai remained doing what she had been doing.
“That town kicks ass!” Midori continued. “I don’t know if you guys noticed it, but it’s great! It’s got all sorts of shops, and restaurants, and…” she locked her gaze on Mai, who didn’t notice, “the world’s greatest…” a deep breath of anticipation arose. How could she have forgotten to let the duke out? “ka-ra-OKE!”
Mai didn’t look up, and suddenly the group’s attention was on her. This is her thing, dammit, Midori thought. What’s up with her?
In reality, Midori knew damned well what was up with her. She just wasn’t up to addressing it at the moment. She hadn’t had a drink in what felt like a couple billion years. Not since the professor…
She shook her head, and Mikoto was next to Mai in an instant. “Mai? Are you okay?”
What happened next was a blur for everybody around Mai and Mikoto:
Mai’s gaze lowers to the sand. A hint of a tear begins to work its way into her eye. She doesn’t blink. She seems to have gone catatonic for a moment.
Mikoto’s lips press against Mai’s ear, and she whispers something.
Mai’s eyes focus immediately, and she shakes her head, as though coming out of a daze. Maybe Tate catches on to what happened, and Chie, being the cleverest of the bunch with regards to the interactions between human beings, understands immediately, based on what she had been told about what transpired between Mikoto, Tate, and Mai only a few months before. And she had been told everything; not just about the drama that transpired, but about the cruel, bitter violence. About how close they had all come to dying.
Mai’s eyes meet Mikoto’s, and for a moment, they just stare at each other. In Mai’s eyes are all the thanks the world has to offer, and in Mikoto’s, a simple understanding. Then Mikoto grins and says, more to the rest of the group than to Mai, “Mai didn’t sleep well last night, did you? You must have nodded off.”
The rest have no idea how to take this, except as an explanation. Even if Mai hadn’t fallen asleep, she may have fallen into a half-awake state. Yes, they silently agreed, this would explain her temporarily odd behavior. Better that than to force the real issue into light right now, when none of them were really prepared to deal with it, least of all Mai. It sounded a lot more selfish than it actually was; Chie especially was really equipped to deal with anything, anytime, but she understood that for now, Mai needed to remain how she was. That was how she got through life.
“Well, then, it’s settled by a unanimous vote!” Midori grinned, shoving the energy back into the group’s face without really asking. Or voting. “Everybody go get something respectable to wear, or at least something that looks neat coming off,” she winked at Natsuki, of all people, who blushed a deep, deep red. (even Shizuru, who had seemed so confident in Natsuki’s imagination a moment ago, looked away, a little flush in her cheeks.) “We are going to town!”
They all stood and began going towards the beach house, everyone but Mai and Mikoto. In spite of their vicious fight a moment ago, Shiho automatically latched onto Tate’s arm, and the boy afforded Mai a glance that looked a lot like…
pity?
sympathy?
something deeper?
Tate looked away at Mai’s glance, which more or less instructed him to do so. It was the ancient female communiqué: We’ll talk later.
Then they vanished, and Mikoto put her arms around Mai, who sank into the younger girl for a minute.
“Are you okay?” Mikoto asked quietly.
“Yes. Thank you.” Mai’s voice was a little faint.
“Mai should sleep more.”
“I know.”
They sat there for a full minute like that, Mikoto holding Mai, Mai being held. Mikoto saying nothing, because she knew there was nothing to say. Because she knew that what had been consuming Mai towards the end had not been some petty angst over the boy that she would probably “officially” confess to in the next month.
Mai had been thinking about that, about before. About how close everyone that she loved had come to death. Permanent, final nothingness. Death left a stain on you once you had seen it, felt it, one that did not come off so easily as Mai had thought it would.
Mai Tokiha was a strong girl; very strong. But what she had gone through had left a piece of itself on her, and it didn’t come off quite so easily as she would have liked.
Mai had been staring at Tate, and she had been watching him die again.
Mikoto knew this because she herself had killed him.
“Smiling Mai is the best Mai there is. Mai should smile,” Mikoto said for the second time that day, “because they’re all alive.”
“I know,” Mai whispered, and Mikoto braced for the final wave of pain, the hardest for Mai. This was not a new occurrence, and though it certainly wasn’t common for Mai to break down like this, it had happened before, and it had always been around Mikoto. In some far-off part of her brain, the girl knew that her presence wasn’t always welcome in Mai’s mind, but this was a thought buried deep enough not to trouble her. “Sometimes, I just…I’m scared.” I think about that ever-present what-if; like after you narrowly miss running face-first into somebody. Only this one doesn’t go away.
This one won’t ever go away.
“It will, Mai,” Mikoto whispered, and Mai, unaware that she had actually said that out loud, and not really aware of how Mikoto had responded, gave a single, lone sob. Mikoto squeezed her again, and, after a moment, Mai stood up. There were no tears on her face.
Mikoto looked up at Mai; looked up at the woman she loved so dearly that it sometimes pervaded all sense of being for her, and in a moment of clarity, Mai thanked somebody, anybody that Mikoto was still young enough not to associate that kind of love with being used so hurtfully as she had been.
“Lets go to town, Mai,” Mikoto grinned. “You can get some things to cook.”
“I think I’ll do that,” Mai said. She sounded better already. Things like this, Mikoto knew, came and went. She had her own spasms, though she would never tell Mai, not in a million years. It didn’t usually matter anyway; they came at night, and she slept with Mai, and that was all the comfort she really needed.
Chie knew a lot of things: She knew why a dormitory had suddenly exploded in a massive fireball last semester; she knew why students began to go missing towards the end of that semester and why they reappeared at the end; she knew where Kazuya and Akane had been since the middle of that semester (and she knew where they were now, though she could have done without—she had seen them sneaking off to the back of the cabin while everybody else went to change); she knew why the moon had become, for a short time, a thing of exquisite ugliness, a massive orb hanging so near to the earth it seemed it would land on Tokyo, with what looked like pink mold growing off of it.
But her curiosity nagged at her about these two. She didn’t know what they had that the rest of the ex-HiME didn’t.
“Chie,” Aoi’s voice, more than a little hurried, came from the edge of her peripheral vision, “are you going in or out of the bathroom?”
“That all depends on where you’re going, sweet thing,” Chie said automatically, grinning a little impishly as Aoi danced in front of her, every part of the poor girl’s being silently screaming at Chie to MOVE I HAVE TO PEE!
“In!”
Chie paused to consider, and then shrugged. “I guess it can’t be helped if you don’t want me watching you, then. I have to keep an eye on those deadly baby-feeders of yours, after all. If they were to get loose in the building, who knows what kind of hell they could raise?”
“Chie!” Aoi went a little redder than was necessary.
“Fine, fine.” Chie moved, and if she looked closely, she was even able to see Aoi as she zipped past her and slammed the door shut. From her vantage point, Chie knocked on the door. “That miso you gulped getting to you, is it?”
There was no answer, but Aoi giggled a little. Honestly, Chie thought. I’m so mean to that girl sometimes, and she puts up with it so gracefully.
A little voice inside Chie told her that Aoi secretly loved it. It was the same voice that usually led her to interesting pieces of gossip back at Fuka Gakuen. She referred to that voice as trouble.
Mai and Mikoto walked up the stairs next to each other, shed their sandals, and walked past her into the bedroom where the girls were changing. On her way by, Chie caught a look from Mai that she couldn’t interpret fully, but that flicked at her heart a little bit the way a third grader had once flicked at the back of her head: Painfully.
“Mai,” Chie said, and the girl stopped. Mikoto did too, and Mai gave her a shrug. Mikoto continued into the bedroom.
“I’m sorry about before,” Mai said, averting her eyes from Chie’s.
“Screw that,” Chie said quietly. “That thing that’s been eating at you is what I’m concerned about.”
Mai shrugged, and Chie pulled her aside as the door opened and Aoi exited, giving Chie a look that was both reproachful and a little amused. Chie shook her head, and Aoi nodded, kept walking.
“I’m serious,” Chie said. “I don’t know what I can do to force you to forget about what didn’t happen, but—”
“But it did happen,” Mai said. “The rest was just luck.”
“And it can never happen again,” Chie smiled, putting one cool hand on Mai’s cheek and raising it so that their eyes met. “I don’t know all the details of what happened to you guys, but I do know that it’s over.”
Mai didn’t say anything, but it was clear she was biting her tongue. She was in a pretty bad way, Chie thought. “Listen. I know it’s hard, but try and have a good time on this trip, okay? If you can’t forget about it, try at least talking to Tate instead of staring at him like he’s dead. I think that will serve as a healthy reminder that he’s not.”
What do you know? Mai thought bitterly. You weren’t there. You didn’t see it. You didn’t watch him—
“And if you keep staring at the ground like that, you might as well just lie down on it and die. I can help you do that if you want. Just pull the trigger and I’ll talk to you any time you need it, but I think there’s somebody else you need to talk to, and soon. Stop pussyfooting around, if you know what I mean.”
Mai looked up, eyes widening in alarm. “What did you say?”
Chie blinked. “What?”
“No,” Mai shook her head. “It’s nothing.” That can’t have been real.
But the shock of it had snapped her out of her stupor. It had to; for a second there, she had seen a very real image of Chie doing exactly what she had said she would do. Her adrenaline alone had forced her out of that trance; that fight or flight instinct that had suddenly screamed at her to run, run, run dammit! She
just pull the trigger and…
shook her head. “Sorry. I’m better now.”
Chie grinned. “You just stay that way. If you’re not, just come talk to old Aunt Chie and I’ll perk you right up. Maybe I can even impose on Midori for some of her better booze. A real girls night out, if you know what I mean.”
Mai had a feeling that what she knew Chie meant was a great deal more perverted than what Chie had intended when she said it.
Mai grinned at her anyway, feeling the girl’s sincerity press down on her heart in the best way. “So, when are we going to town?”
Chie looked at Mai in her swimsuit, which exposed a great deal more than a modest girl like Mai would normally want to show a stranger. She expected Mai had bought it with Tate in mind. “If you want to show half the town your tits, then right now; I certainly won’t mind, and I’m sure they won’t, eith—” But Mai had already gone beet-red, having previously forgotten about her current manner of dress, and bolted for the bedroom.
Chie grinned at the retreating girl’s back for a moment, and then went out in search of Aoi, and maybe a few incriminating photographs of Kazuya and Akane to pester them with.
All they were doing was changing; it seemed like the orange-haired one with the big breasts was angsting over some guy or another (he rolled his eyes, having been and gone from his angsty lone-sniper days), and the girl who was so shitheeled over the skinny guy was in back making out with him. Was this really what he was getting paid to do? And why wasn’t his target doing anything interesting, like shouting inspirational, if radical, speeches at a bunch of bright-eyed soldiers, or killing fifty men with five shots, or something that was actually worth his fucking time?
Okay, so he got cabin fever sometimes. It didn’t make him a bad sniper.
Something else about the whole thing was making him antsy. That was the problem. A palpable sense of wrong-ness about the whole thing. He was sure that at least one of the girls—the one with the long, purple hair who always seemed to have another one fawning over her (kids these days, an old homophobe thought)—had caught onto it too. He was also almost certain it had something to do with what he was doing, which meant trouble.
A few minutes later, they all began to pile into the van, and it occurred to Minoru that this facilitated a new part of his assignment. He picked up the two-way radio that connected him to scratch-ass, and after a moment’s hesitation, clicked the button. “Boss, they’re leaving.”
“I know.”
You know? Then what the fuck am I here for? Minoru was suddenly angry.
“Orders?”
“Follow them, of course. They’ll be heading into the town.”
Follow…what? “On foot?”
“Of course on foot. Make sure nobody sees your rifle. Your partner will remain here and observe the premises. The town is less than a quarter-mile away from your current position, and it is small enough that they should stand out.”
Minoru sighed with the button depressed so that the bastard couldn’t hear him, but he got the strangest feeling he could anyway.
He pressed the button again. “Roger that. Moving on foot.”
The prospect of trekking any length again in this heat didn’t appeal to him at all. The fact that he would look like a complete jackass in his hiking attire didn’t sweeten the deal, either.
“You hear that, good buddy?” he said into his other radio, the one linking him to his partner. “I’ll be leaving you here by yourself for a while.”
“Roger that.” Flat, uncaring.
“Make sure you don’t die of boredom or anything. I wouldn’t want that creepy bastard after me.”
“Roger that.” Flat, uncaring.
God, how boring.
He supposed this was what real criminals felt like when they found what they considered to be the perfect crime.
But then again, he wasn’t even close to being a criminal. Not in his mind, anyway.
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