Archive of Our Own

The Night of Bitter Dreams

It was supposed to be Gento’s day off.

One day off a month, to spend with his family, and somehow it never seems to happen.

All right, so he’s been interrupted twice. That’s… not horrible, for a year’s worth of work. But it’s twice more than he likes having to explain to Satoko.

Having to explain to Jun.

Not that Jun is with them right now. Jun seems to be doing a better job of making friends lately, which Gento is grateful for. He wishes he could be there more to see those friends, but he also appreciated getting to sleep in for one day.

His gear is in his car, carefully stashed so that civilians won’t stumble on it, but readily available in the eventuality that this happens again. Gento knows that being prepared is the best way to stay alive.

“All right, I’m on my way.” Gento opens the line to Teruaki and the rest. “What’s the trouble?”

“That’s… a part of the problem.” Teruaki’s voice is more hesitant than normal. “We’re assuming it’s kaiju activity, but it could be something else.”

“What kind of something?” Gento draws a deep breath, trying to accept that the traffic between him and his team will not magically evaporate if he lets his pulse rate rise. Calm and steady until he can effect a difference. That’s how he got here, and that’s how he’s going to get everyone out the other side.

“It’s the children, sir.” Anri’s stressed voice cuts over Teruaki’s careful words. “There are at least two hundred children running down the street. They’re moving faster than they should be able to, and they’re… blinking in and out of existence.”

Emi picks up the explanation. “I think it’s related to what you’re having me examine, sir. I think it’s connected to Wave Two, or maybe the start of Wave Three, I’m not sure.”

“Ah.” Gento massages his temple, trying to put this together with everything else that’s happened, to form a picture that makes sense. “Kids being involved is bad. Do we have contact with the parents?”

“We don’t specifically, sir, but we’re getting interview transcripts from the brass.” Yasunobo must be at his computer, because Gento hears the clacking of a keyboard over their team connection. “The parents are understandably panicking, but there’s some consistency to their stories. The children were all napping prior to the abnormal behavior starting. They’re all heading to the same area—to what seems to be an abandoned school? I’ll send you the location.”

“Thank you.” Gento waits for the location to ping to him, and adjusts his trajectory accordingly. “I’ll meet MOPY there. Yasunobo, I want you to launch Earth Garon, but stay at least a half kilometer back from the school. We don’t want any accidental civilian casualties.”

A chorus of ‘wilco’ comes across the line, and Gento relaxes a little, trusting his team to do what’s needed.

***

His uniform and SkaRD badge gets him past the civilian cordon, where a combination of gawkers and desperate parents seethe against police and military personnel. Gento can’t blame them; if Jun were one of the children involved in the incident, he can’t guarantee he wouldn’t be doing everything in his power to circumvent any barricades and get his boy back.

Jun isn’t involved, though. He’s safe at home. Gento made sure to confirm that with Satoko, not wanting to find himself surprised by the gut-punch of his own child in danger.

Again.

Blazar’s coin warms in his pocket, and Gento places a hand over it. “I know, friend. I don’t want any children hurt. I’m just liable to be less rational when it’s my own.”

The burning fades, but Gento still gets a sense of… bemusement? Curiosity.

He’s able to read Blazar more and more clearly. Never so clearly as when they’re merged into one, sharing the strange blue-and-black space that seems to be Blazar’s… consciousness? Home?

Blazar’s best attempt at sharing himself with Gento.

Gento can’t get distracted by his strange companion, though. They have a job to do, and he’s going to do it well.

They have children to save, and in this, like in every other instance of we protect them that Gento has felt since Blazar first made him self known, they are in complete agreement.

Gento can see Earth Garon poised in the background, ready to move in if they find a target that the giant mech will be useful against. MOPY, confined to the same crowded streets that Gento had to traverse, hasn’t arrived yet.

Which means it’s time to do a little bit of reconnaissance.

Gento doesn’t pull a weapon, walking forward, following the sounds of laughing children.

Another child comes sprinting past him, and Gento reaches out instinctively, trying to catch the girl.

His fingers close on thin air, moving right through her body.

She doesn’t seem to notice him, darting like a minnow in water, first one way and then another, always heading towards the yawning open door and boarded-over windows of the school.

This doesn’t feel right.

This feels like a trap.

Gento’s eyes burn, and he blinks, raising a hand to his head.

His vision suddenly becomes far clearer than he thought it ever could be, zeroing in on the school—on the doorway that the girl runs into.

And on the creature that greets her.

The girl doesn’t scream. She holds out her arms, shouting grandmother , but the thing that reaches out to embrace her is not a grandmother. It is a monstrosity, something black and tentacled, hungry and horrific.

“There’s something drawing the kids here!” Gento starts running even as he transmits, giving his team the best information he can. “It’s waiting for them in the school. It’s—”

Folding around the girl, and she sinks to the ground. Not like a puppet with strings cut; like a lifeless doll, floppy, helpless, dropped by something that doesn’t know how a body is supposed to work.

“It’s taking something from the kids, I don’t know what.” Gento pulls his sidearm, being careful not to aim at himself or the child as he continues to run. “I’m going to see if I can help the one I see being attacked.”

“Captain Gento—” A concerned chorus echoes his rank and first name, understanding and fear and concern all mixing together.

“I’ll let you know what weapons work, and—” Gento stops, feeling as though he’s run into a brick wall.

His head hurts.

His sinuses feel like they’re filled with pool water, stinging and heavy.

Blazar pushes them up from where they’ve somehow ended up splayed on the ground, blue light filling Gento’s limbs.

They have a job to do.

“Sorry about that.” Gento knows that his abrupt lack of communication will have scared his team. “Some kind of force attack. Or psychic attack. Felt like I hit a brick wall.” All that Gento’s earpiece returns is static, but he continues to talk, hoping what he’s saying is getting through. “Be careful.”

The doorway is empty now, no sign of monster or girl.

Gento approaches it carefully, thumbing the safety off his sidearm. It’s a risk; he’ll have to make absolutely sure before he pulls the trigger that no children are in the line of fire. But if he can end this with one well-placed shot, then he’ll do it.

They’ll do it.

He still feels Blazar pushing against his skin, wary, angry, assertive. He will not allow harm to come to anyone, let alone children. He wants them to move faster, to be stronger than Gento will ever be able to be inside a fragile human skin.

He’ll have to content himself with Gento, though, and Gento’s body, and the fact that Gento intends to walk out of this in one piece.

Or mostly one piece.

Provided he doesn’t need to sacrifice himself to save a child.

A sense of understanding floods him, and it feels almost like he’s being held in a giant glowing hand, sheltered, protected.

But he is the one currently protecting Blazar, allowing him to exist on this planet. In this universe, possibly, though there is still so much they need to learn about what happened during V99.

Gento slides through the door, swinging his gun up to cover one corner while he inserts his body into another. He makes sure to keep his back to a wall as he makes his slow, careful way down the hall, following the sounds of children laughing.

They’re gathered in an auditorium. The kids sit in pristine rows, though they kick their feet and whisper to one another, as children always do when gathered. Gento searches the sea of faces, looking for anything that doesn’t belong. Looking for the girl who collapsed, or the monster that took her.

“Dad?”

He starts, far too much of a reaction for someone who’s been doing this job for as long as he has. “Jun?” His son’s name trembles slightly.

Jun waves, then turns back to the stage.

“Jun, come here.” Gento gestures for his son to come stand next to him. “It’s dangerous here. I need to get you and the rest of these kids out of here.”

Jun casts him a withering glance, and once more turns his attention back to the stage.

Gento hesitates, and then launches himself forward, clearing the space between the wall and the back rows of chairs where Jun sits in less than a second. His hand manages to clamp tightly onto Jun’s shoulder. “Jun, we have to—”

And Jun turns to look at him, but it is not right. The face is his son’s, but the right side of the boy’s head is gone, a bullet hole driving through the eye and out the back of the head, leaving the skull a ruin.

Gento jerks back, holding a scream inside his chest by sheer force of will.

No.

This isn’t happening.

This can’t be happening. Jun is home, with his mother, and they are both safe.

“I know you didn’t want to shoot me, Daddy. I know it was an accident.” Jun smiles as he turns, looking over the back of the chair. “I forgive you, but I still need to watch what Gil-sama says.”

“Gil… sama?” Gento runs his tongue over too-dry lips and turns his eyes to the stage.

A young woman in a prim black skirt and a blue blouse walks out onto the stage. “Greetings, students! Thank you so much for attending. And we have a special guest, I see. Mr Hiruma Gento, correct?”

Gento squints as light erupts in front of him, blinding, piercing right through his eyes and into his brain, where a dull throb begins. A spotlight, he reassures himself. Just a spotlight, and he manages to squint against the glare and keep track of the woman.

Blazar is less certain it’s just a spotlight, a roiling, uncomfortable mass of feral emotion twisting inside Gento’s chest . Gento feels his hand reaching for Blazar’s coin and just manages to stop himself. Instead he quietly says, “Contact initiated with the enemy.” More loudly he says, “These kids shouldn’t be here.”

The woman laughs. “Oh, but they should be! They answered my call. Didn’t you, children?”

“Yes, Gil-sama,” the collected mass of children answers.

Would it be better or worse if they were completely in synch with one another? Better, because then he could say that they’re all being controlled; worse, because then it wouldn’t seem like they were simply here because they wanted to be.

Then Gento wouldn’t feel like the weirdo with the gun at a middle school open house.

Gil smiles, and her teeth are very white and perfectly straight. “You’re here at the behest of SKaRD, yes, Himura-san?”

“Children, if you could start an orderly evacuation…” Gento trails off as the child who cannot be Jun but looks exactly like Jun turns to look at him.

Taking a risk, Gento squeezes his eyes shut. He will see what is truly there. He will not let himself be tricked.

Opening his eyes, he gives a little shriek and stumbles back from Gil-sama’s too-close face.

He should shoot her. It’s the perfect opportunity. But he doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not, and he cannot risk shooting a child.

(He cannot get Jun’s too-mature voice saying I forgive you out of his head, just like he will forever remember I understand . He doesn’t want Jun to be angry at him for his work, but it feels… wrong, that Jun tries to comfort him instead of the other way around.)

Gil-sama smiles, and her hand reaches up, touching Gento’s face with a feather-soft caress. “You’re exactly what I wanted, aren’t you? The one I’m supposed to tame. Gento Hiruma… and Blazar.”

Blazar does not appreciate being seen and discussed in this way. Gento’s fingers close around his coin, and he moves to insert it into the device that always appears on his left arm—

Only to have his hand captured by Gil. The woman stares at the coin, and suddenly there is no woman.

There is only darkness, and the void, and a bright burning blue light that promises Gento that despite this—despite anything they might see—they are going to make it through.

***

“ Captain!” Emi presses the earpiece a little bit harder against her skull, as though that will make Gento start responding to them instead of to whatever impossibilities he’s seeing in the school. “Captain, your son isn’t there. Please…”

“These kids shouldn’t be here,” Gento says to an unknown contact, and it’s impossible to tell if he’s seeing real children or a hallucination, because he won’t respond to them.

Can’t respond to them, Emi knows, but it’s still terrifying and frustrating at the same time.

Teruaki slams down the phone that allows them to communicate with the brass. “We’re to stand down and continue monitoring. Don’t let Earth Garon get any closer. They’re afraid we’re going to kill kids and make this a PR disaster.”

“Because that’s something we’ve done before!” Yasunobu’s growl of frustration is a welcome change from Gento’s one-sided conversation on the comms.

Glancing around MOPY, Emi meets eyes with Anri. The other woman trembles slightly, her breathing just a little too fast. “Captain… we have to help him. I don’t care what the higher-ups say. ”

Which is true, of course, and Emi should have realized it. If Gento’s not responding to them—

And then he screams.

It’s such a visceral sound. Emi has heard people scream before—no member of SKaRD has been spared the experience, and Emi was familiar with the sounds of trauma and heartbreak long before she joined this little team.

This is the sound of someone in agony, either physical or emotional.

What could make someone like the captain scream like that?

She’s out of MOPY and running towards the school before she decides she’s going to act.

They can’t just leave him. Out of all of them, Gento is the most important. He stands between them and the people who don’t want them to succeed. He cares about the survival of his men and the success of his missions more than he cares about the tender feelings of the brass and the politicians who pay them.

He’s a good man, and he’s been willing to go out on a limb for her multiple times, and she can’t let him be hurt and do nothing.

She can’t lose another good man to stupidity, not without doing everything in her power to help.

Emi’s foot comes down, and she’s falling.

Down a crater that cannot be here, a hundred-meter cliff face, and it’s only by flinging herself to the ground and twisting that she manages to catch the rim of the impossible hole.

She grunts, hauling herself back onto solid ground. As soon as she has both feet under her, she frees her pistol and assumes a ready stance.

She is not where she should be.

Emi’s breath catches in her throat as she takes in her alien surroundings. She’s in… a city? The remnants of a city, she thinks. But not a city on Earth—not the familiar sight of Tokyo or New York or London’s skyline devastated by an alien attack or natural disaster. This world has soil that seems to glow a soft yellow-green, and purple plants, and architecture that soared in strange crystalline networks once upon a time.

They’re all broken.

Kneeling in the middle of the rubble is a familiar figure, and Emi hurries towards it.

“Blazar!” She calls the code name, and then hesitates—does Blazar know that’s what they call him? They’ve projected it through Earth Garon’s speakers, but does that mean he understand that Blazar refers to him?

Being careful not to stumble on any additional craters, Emi picks her meticulous way towards the kneeling giant.

Blazar holds a hand to his right arm. Golden light trickles from between his fingers like sparkling blood, and his head bows low, his chin resting against his chest.

“Blazar?” Emi tries screaming his name as loudly as she can, but he still doesn’t respond.

Reaching out, Emi brushes her fingers tentatively across Blazar’s enormous knee.

With a strange little yelp, Blazar pulls back, causing everything that hasn’t already been destroyed to shake and shudder. Opening his mouth, he speaks in Gento’s voice. “We failed. We tried to protect them, and we failed.”

Emi gives her head a shake. Is she the one hallucinating here, or is Gento? Is it a shared hallucination? Lifting a hand to her earpiece, Emi presses it against her skin. “Emi here. Suggestions on wh at I should do ?”

There’s nothing but static from the other end of the line.

Which… of course there’s not. The captain hadn’t seemed to hear them, right? What would make her any different?

But the team heard him. She can still give them information, especially because she can feel this place becoming… more real . If she weren’t pressing the earpiece into her ear, she’s not sure she would remember it was there—not sure she’d be able to do anything but stare up into Blazar’s alien but still almost-human face.

“We failed.” The beautiful crystalline structures that are standing start to tremble as Blazar repeats the words.

The world starts to tremble, Blazar’s grief reaching out, a shiver that he shares with everything around him.

Emi cannot be a part of that grief. She forces herself to start talking—to remember who she’s talking to. “We’re on an alien planet. It’s beautiful. It was—was more beautiful, I think, before something destroyed it. An enemy attack?” Emi stares up at Blazar, his strange skin burning hot under her right hand while her left continues to hold the lifeline to her team. “Blazar is grieving, or—or the captain is grieving? It looks like Blazar, but he speaks with the captain’s voice, but it might all be…”

She can’t bring herself to say it’s not real, because it is. There is nothing more real in the world than this grief.

This guilt.

It’s never enough. No matter how good they are, no matter how carefully they try to make decisions, it doesn’t matter. There always comes a point when things fall apart.

Blazar lifts his hand, and the golden light that is his blood falls faster.

Pools in a puddle on the ground, and in the center of that puddle Gento’s body emerges.

Still.

So very still, and Emi gasps out his name, running through the burning heat of the falling plasma to kneel at his side.

But it’s not him, is it? He’s a good man, and she cares about him, just like she cares about all of her team, but there is always a wall between her and the others.

Always knowledge of what she is, and what she has done, and what she will do.

All for the man who lies prone in front of her.

“Daddy.” Emi’s hand trembles as she reaches for his face. His eyes are open, staring blankly upward—the death-mask glaze she’s seen on too many faces. The expression she’s been desperately afraid she would see on his face, if she ever managed to find him.

He’s gone.

She’s been chasing his ghost for years, but he’s gone. She’s risking other people—risking the team that loves her and cares about her, no matter her past or her proclivities—for a ghost that never cared about her even when she loved him with all her heart.

“Daddy, I’m sorry. I tried.” Emi’s hands move to his chest, bury themselves in the fabric of his suit, pushing uselessly at the stiff body contained in the clothes that never quite fit him right. The only thing that ever seemed to make him perfectly at ease was his science, and Emi lost those notebooks.

No, Emi gave them to the enemy. Unwittingly, but still—is her failure the reason he’s here?

The reason she’s truly an orphan now, which is even more terrible than not knowing? She thought it wouldn’t be—thought there would be at least a sense of relief in knowing that it’s over. That she has answers, at least. But there isn’t any relief. There’s just a deeper grief, drilling down through her core.

“Oh, yes.” Arms wrap around her, and they feel like her mother’s, but the voice is not… right. The voice echoes strangely, and doesn’t quite enunciate the words properly, but Emi can’t bring herself to care. Can’t make herself rip free of those arms. “It hurts, doesn’t it? Your nightmare, made true. So very terrible, my little girl. So very—nyaargh!”

Emi jerks, rolling away from the arms that hold her as an inhuman screech breaks the world.

Her father is gone.

Blazar is gone.

Captain Gento stands behind someone who wears her mother’s face but is not her mother, and he holds a glowing golden dagger that drips green blood. “You do not touch my team.”

Not-Mother smiles, and it is a terrible expression, full of derision and glee. “I don’t need to, not when I have you. Get out of here, brat.”

Emi tries to circle around, to get to the captain’s side—to face this threat alongside him.

Instead she finds herself falling, and yelps as her head connects hard with the solid form of the walkway leading up to the school.

Sitting up with a groan, Emi rubs at her sore scalp.

“Emi!”

Her name echoes in her ear, a repeated shout funneled through her receiver, Anri and Yasunobu and Teruaki.

And then it’s in her physical ears as well, Anri and Teruaki dropping down on either side of her.

“I’m all right.” Emi lets them help her to her feet anyway, feeling far weaker than she should after… what? “Did you hear everything I said?”

“We did.” Anri holds her a little bit tighter than she needs to, hugging as well as supporting Emi. “Oh, Emi, I’m so sorry.”

“Did you hear… anyone else?” Emi leans back against Anri, freeing Teruaki’s hands.

Anri and Teruaki share a look, and then they shake their heads.

Emi nods. “Right. Well, there was… something else that I was seeing. This shape-shifting thing, and I think maybe I also saw the captain? Or at least hallucinated, but he hurt—”

The first child stumbles out the doors of the school then.

She looks terrible. She’s clearly been crying, and she stumbles, barely keeping her feet under her. She’s followed by a boy who can’t be more than eight, and another who’s probably in his early teens.

More children stumble out of the door, some holding each other, some just walking gamely on despite their evident exhaustion.

Teruaki pulls his pistol from his side, and before anyone can order him otherwise, he’s running towards the school entrance.

He’s halfway there when he drops, a puppet with all his strings cut, falling senseless to the cold stone of the walkway.

***

The children start walking out, and they look as though they’ve been dragged through fifty layers of the Underworld. As though each step is agony, but staying where they were is a worse insult, and so they move.

Teruaki should wait. He should call in for backup. But he thinks he’s getting an idea of how this works, and he doesn’t know if they can wait.

Not if kids are being tortured right in front of them.

The psychic blow still takes him unaware, and for a moment he finds himself on the ground, blinking up at a blue sky. Emi had stumbled when she entered the entity’s range; Teruaki feels like he ran headfirst into a brick wall without trying to protect himself in the least.

“Ow.” He forces himself to sit up, and to start talking. Whether he can be heard by the others or not, the talking seemed to help Emi, and he doesn’t want to hurt any more than he has to in order to get this done. “That felt awful. Entered unknown kaiju’s psychic field. I think it’s kind of like Mogusion, though I’m not sure what the method of mental connection is. It made Emi see something terrible—something she feared—and it overrode her knowledge that it wasn’t real. So far I’m not seeing…”

But he is seeing something, isn’t he? He supposed to be seeing a school. Smooth brick buildings, the facades worn by time but still obvious. A slightly pockmarked path, but still a paved path.

Instead he’s on the side of a mountain.

The mountain, he knows, though he tries to keep a hold on his pistol and his earpiece, to keep himself linked to his team and to the present.

“I’m seeing my father’s farm. The village. But it’s…” It’s been devastated. Absolutely destroyed. The damage that had been done by the giant bugs had been bad; this is…

This is calculated desolation.

This is the loss of any hope of reconstruction.

This is someone scouring all the topsoil away, and leaving only devastated, irradiated waste behind.

How does he know it’s irradiated? Is it just because that is a horrible possibility to him, and thus this place is trying to make it real? To make a place that is supposed to grow food for all into a place that can sustain no life? That is toxic to life just by existing?

“My skin hurts. My face burns. I’m thinking about this place being radioactive even though there’s no reason to think so.” Teruaki walks forward, slowly, carefully, not wanting to trip or slam into an unseen barrier. “I know this isn’t real. I know it. And yet…”

He is not a man who cries. He is not a man who is prone to grand emotions period, not really. He gets happy and he gets sad, frustrated and exasperated and giddy, but he doesn’t do rage. He doesn’t do exultation.

He does his job. He loves his job. He doesn’t understand the people who just want to stay home—he really doesn’t understand how fascinated so many of his cohort a re with sex and romance and starting a family—but he wants to keep those people safe. He wants to make a world where they can do whatever they feel they need to do, and not have to worry about something erupting out of the ground or dropping down from space to kill them.

“You just wanted to run.” His father’s voice is rough, low, far wispier than Teruaki would have imagined it could get.

Teruaki spins, and nearly gags as an overwhelming stench of rot wafts towards him. His father stands not twenty feet away, eyes focused on the sky.

On the sunset that feels like a bloody wound on the horizon.

“You always wanted to run.” His father turns to him, and half the old man’s face is gone, his teeth and jawbone showing through on the right side; the left side of his face is a mass of horrid burns that ooze pus. “You always wanted to be away from here. To shirk the responsibilities a man has.”

“We talked about this.” Teruaki takes a step away from the monster that wears his father’s face. That his heart tells him is his father, and though he tries, though he grips his earpiece and listens for his team, he can’t shake the certainty that this is home. This is his father.

And he’s dying, disappointed in Teruaki’s decisions.

“I’m sorry.” Teruaki tries to explain, as he did a hundred times before, but he doesn’t have words. “I just don’t care about getting married. About having a relationship. About farming. It’s wonderful, but it’s not for me . I want to study kaiju. I want to protect people.”

His father walks towards him, a slow and terrible progression, and just as always, there’s no understanding in his eyes. “You left. You left, and you won’t come home.”

“I come home. I came home. For you.” Because he still wants his father’s approval, even though he tells himself over and over that he doesn’t need it. That his father doesn’t really need it; that they are both happy, even if his father grumbles still.

“You don’t care. If it doesn’t have a kaiju, you don’t care.” His father is close enough to touch, now.

Close enough that Teruaki can feel the brush of bones through rotting flesh as his father lifts a hand to drag abused knuckles against his cheek.

“I’m sorry.” Teruaki would bow, but he knows better than to take his eyes away from the monster in front of him. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry.” His father smiles, a rare and beautiful expression. “I forgive you. You’re giving me so much, after all. You’re—”

Someone barrels into his father, and Teruaki screams.

Except—his father is not his father anymore.

As the person rolls across the scoured ground, grappling with someone in a SKaRD uniform, the image… shifts. Flickers, falters, becomes someone female, and then something inhuman, and then settles into an image of his father, old but healthy.

Teruaki shifts his gaze to the other person, and his breath catches in his throat. It looks like Captain Gento, but he doesn’t move like the captain. The thing wearing Gento’s body is fast and feral and has eyes that glow a brilliant, blazing blue.

“Blazar.” Teruaki breathes out the name.

Gento-Blazar quirks his head, studying Teruaki for a moment before returning to trying to wrench an arm off the shapeshifting creature he’s fighting.

Teruaki draws a deep breath, and presses his earpiece. He doesn’t even hear static. Nothing.

Just him and Blazar.

Which he should tell the others. “I’m seeing the Captain, but I don’t think it’s real. It’s the Captain’s body, but the fighting style is all Blazar. It’s engaging with what must be a representative of the kaiju. I’m going to try to help. Don’t let me do anything stupid.”

Don’t let him shoot a child.

Don’t let him shoot a team-mate.

Don’t let him shoot anything but the monster.

The monster wearing his father’s eyes, and staring at him in bewilderment. “Son, please. I need—”

Teruaki doesn’t give himself more time to doubt. He aims, and pulls the trigger, and he drops, screaming, to his knees, the world exploding into agonizing sound around him.

***

Anri runs forward, Yasunobu’s voice loud in her earpiece as he begs her to be careful.

That would have stopped her, once. Someone higher ranked than her asking her not to do what she’s doing—it would have frozen her heart and her feet.

But after months with these people, Anri knows that she doesn’t have to listen. She can trust her own judgment, and more importantly, she can trust her team to trust her judgment.

“Prepare for more kids!” Anri skids to a halt by Teruaki’s prone form. Reaching out, she gently turns him so that he’s face up.

“Anri, please, be careful.” Emi’s voice comes across rougher and lower than usual. She should be at a hospital, but she hadn’t wanted to leave until the matter of the captain was settled, and none of them had the heart to make her go.

Not when this, like so many others, might be SKaRD’s last mission.

“I’m being careful.” Anri loosens Teruaki’s helmet so that she can push it back, allowing her easier access to his eyes. Blood trickles from his nose, and has matted the hair by his ears, but his breathing is steady and even. “Again, make sure they’re prepared for more—”

A ragged stream of children tumbles out of the building, and Anri pauses, letting them speak for themselves.

Gil-sama. That was the name they managed to pry from the mangled stories of the children who exited following Emi’s retrieval. Some entity that calls itself Gil-sama called them, and kept them, and then took their nightmares when it—maybe she—didn’t need them anymore.

“Help us.” A girl who looks to be in her early teens carries a smaller child, breaking off from the stream to move towards Anri and Teruaki.

Teruaki groans, raising a hand towards his head.

“Stay still,” Anri says, pressing his shoulders to the ground before turning her full attention to the children. “It’s all right. We’re here to help. There’s doctors ready to take care of you.”

The girl shakes her head. “You have to—there’s something in there. Something… something bad. It’s keeping a man—or maybe… I don’t know. But there’s someone in there fighting the monster, and he needs help. Please. We’re not strong enough. We’re trying, but it gets in your head, it makes your nightmares real, and it wants… it’s trying… I think it’s going to hurt him. Real bad. Please, don’t let it kill him. If it kills him, it’ll come for all of us again, it’ll take us—”

The girl hugs her charge close to her chest, her face red with terror and tears.

Anri wraps the child in a loose embrace. “Stay here. This is Teruaki. He helped get you out, but he’s hurt. Can you protect him until the doctors come get you?”

Emi’s voice cuts through on the team channel. “Anri, you don’t have to—”

“I do, though. You did; Teruaki did; I can’t not. Not if the Captain’s in there fighting for these kids. Not when it’s working, Emi. Don’t you see? Each time we beat it, the field of psychic influence contracts, and it returns some of the kids. We need to keep up the pressure. We need someone else to go in, and the Captain’s been working with all of us. I can handle this.”

“I know.” Emi pauses, and it’s very easy to picture her eyes—the sorrow there, far too much sorrow for her age. “I just wish you didn’t have to.”

“We all signed up to be heroes. It’s my turn.” Anri bends down by Teruaki, who’s staring blearily between her and the girl. “She’s going to take care of you, all right?” She doesn’t add and you take care of her; the girl clearly needs to feel like she has something to do, and Teruaki will understand.

“W-wilco.” He gives the tiniest nod, wincing as he does.

Yasunobu asks quietly, “Should I come in? I can leave Earth Garron on autopilot—”

“Not yet. Depending on what this Gil-sama turns out to be, we might need you right where you are. Deploying into psychic reaction zone.” Anri strides towards the door that has stopped releasing children. “I’ll keep broadcasting as long as I can; keep recording?”

“Wilco.” Emi’s voice is stronger now; hopefully she’s recovering from whatever this field does.

Hopefully they’ll all recover, though if Anri has to go down, at least she’ll go down fighting for something important.

She tries to borrow Emi’s confidence and Mizuho’s speed as she nears the building. She tries not to hesitate despite what she knows is coming.

It feels like walking right into an iron railing. Pain immediately blooms behind her eyes, and Anri cries out without meaning to.

The school is filled with insects.

Giant insects, at least twice as big as her.

They don’t have even a modicum of proper body plan to them. They’re all long, spindly limbs and grasping probosci and oozing bodily fluids. One launches at her, and she screams, dodging to the side, pressing her back to the oozing slime that covers the school wall.

She can’t hear the others.

They’re there, she reminds herself. They’re listening to her, and she needs to keep talking to them. “I walked into the school, and there are… bugs. So many bugs. Just… everywhere. Covering every surface. I want to be sick. I can feel—there’s slime—” Pure instinctual terror tries to rise, and she forces it down. “This isn’t real. I know this isn’t real. I’m here to look for the Captain, and this is just… a distraction.”

One of the bugs reaches for her, the first to actually try to engage. Emi pulls her gun, and shoots the creature dead center.

There’s a keening screech, which dissolves into a child’s terrified sobbing.

Anri drops the gun, letting it fall from numb fingers. She didn’t—she couldn’t have—

Blue light burns through her vision, and she sees Blazar, but… small. Just human sized, and standing in front of a child who can’t be more than ten years old. He looks at her, his blue eyes shining brightly and Anri can see that there are no insects in the school. There’s just her, and the hallucination that must be Blazar, and the child.

Except… can she trust this? If she’s seeing one thing that can’t be true—

“I shot. At something. And now…” Anri grasps hard at the lifeline between her and the team. “I’m seeing Blazar, but a small Blazar?”

“It’s me, Anri.” The captain’s voice comes from Blazar’s body. “Keep focusing. You’re almost through the attack. You can make it.”

“Captain!” Anri takes a step towards him before thinking better of it. “Blazar claims to be the Captain. He—sir, if it’s really you—”

Blazar buries his head in his hands, grunting in pain, and something appears behind him.

It’s not human, but it’s pretending to be. It’s trying to wear a human woman’s appearance, but monstrous shapes keep sliding out of the disguise. Her hands grab Blazar, and she scowls between him and Anri and the child. “You are all so much trouble. Why can’t you just let me finish my mission? It didn’t have to be like this. I could have made a nice little prison, and we could all have been satisfied until the end. But no, you have to keep fighting—fine. If you want the children so much, take them. But you will not get my prey. You can’t. They’ll kill me if I don’t succeed.”

And between one breath and the next, Anri is alone in an echoing, crumbling school corridor with the child that she almost shot.

“Anri! Anri, what’s happening?” Emi’s frantic voice echoes in her ear.

“Exiting with another child now.” Anri sniffles, and tastes blood in the back of her throat—feels it trickling down her face and into her hair. “Don’t send anyone else in yet.”

There’s a moment’s pause, and then a quiet chorus of, “Wilco.”

They can’t afford to be careless, not when they’ve already managed to rescue most if not all of the hostages.

Not when one of the last remaining hostages is one they don’t want to risk.

Not when there’s something more going on here, at least if the monster is telling the truth.

Putting a hand on the child’s shoulder, Anri makes her wobbling way out of the building and back towards MOPY.

They’ll figure out what to do together, and pray that the brass gives them time enough to implement it before rushing in and ruining everything.

***

“For something that feeds off of people, you don’t actually understand us all that well, do you?” Gento runs a hand across his face, though he knows it will do little but smear the blood around.

That’s all right. There’s a good chance one of his transformations into Blazar will burn it away. Whatever else these attacks might be doing, they seem to be making it easier for Blazar to step into Gento’s skin. Whether that’s a good thing or not will have to wait until they’re done, but for now… for now it’s comforting to have someone else there.

To be able to say, when Gil throws Blazar’s nightmares at them, No, not true.

To have Blazar there to do the same, when the nightmares are strictly Gento’s.

Unfortunately they have started to share nightmares, and Gil seems to understand that. If not for his team—his wonderful, beautiful team—making repeated and aggressive forays that forced Gil’s attention off of them, Gento doesn’t know if they’d still be standing.

Are there more people trapped in here with them? Gento doesn’t think so. He thinks that the child Anri almost shot—and his heart had stopped for a moment, before Blazar took the shot in the boy’s place—was the one that Gil had dressed up as Jun. But he is not Jun, and he’s safe with Anri.

Which means that Anri is not dead in front of him, no matter how real the image that he’s seeing feels. He can smell the blood and rot in the air; he can feel the gravel under his feet; but it’s not true.

They’re in a school. Blazar still can’t talk to him, but they’ve developed a sort of imagery short-hand, and Gento recognizes the infrared image that Blazar shows him as a school auditorium.

They’re with Gil, in the heart of her power. She’s trying to make them stop. Trying to make them collapse, to make them feed her their pain; but she doesn’t deserve it.

He has buried people before. He has had to walk up to the doors of widows and widowers and tell them that their worst nightmare has come true.

He will not be doing it for this team.

But then the image shifts, and it is not his team who’s dead. It’s Gento’s own body, lying splayed out in the center of the auditorium. Blood flows in a river from his mouth, his nose, his eyes, his ears, making a lake under his head. His eyes stare blankly up, and Gento doesn’t need to kneel down and feel for a pulse to know he won’t find one.

“A pity, isn’t it?” Gil’s silky voice comes from behind him. “Human bodies just aren’t as strong as Ultra bodies, are they? And you know what will come next.”

Emi and Teruaki go. They’re in their dress uniforms, hats held under left arms as they ring the bell and wait for Satoko to let them in.

She knows as soon as she opens the door. She has imagined this before, he’s sure; she has seen it often enough when it happens to other people. This is why she insists he stay off the front line, and if he had… but that decision is long in the past.

If he could have stayed off the front line, he wouldn’t be himself, after all. Surely she knew that when she married him. Surely that means his lies are not cruel, merely… necessary.

“She’ll wonder, won’t she?”

Gento—Blazar—they both try to turn, to grab Gil, but there is nothing there. Just that infuriating disembodied voice, and a shift in the image.

Satoko sits silently on the couch. A photo album is open in front of her, but she’s not looking at it. She’s staring straight ahead, hugging herself, listening to the quiet sounds of Jun crying what he likely thinks are silent tears.

“You lied, about something so very important. What else has been a lie?”

A touch on his shoulder, and Gento turns, but there’s no one there again.

Just a new room, and Jun, huddled in bed, the blankets over his head.

“You will leave the boy fatherless. He already is, practically; he sees you once a month, and then you’re usually so tired you might as well not be there. But for Blazar, you will sacrifice even that little bit of raising him. For an alien that doesn’t understand you. That doesn’t care for you.”

Warmth rushes over his skin, and Gento closes his eyes, though it doesn’t make the images disappear. How can it, when they’re in his head?

He sees himself, during the incident that first drew Blazar’s attention. Reaching for someone; trying to save them.

That is the core of their connection, and no matter what else he doubts, he will not doubt that. If Blazar hurts him, it will not be intentional, and it will be in an effort to save others.

“But Blazar thinks of so many other creatures as worthy of being saved, doesn’t he?” Gil’s silky voice whispers in both his ears, a surround-sound that he can’t escape.

Gento’s body moves, Blazar lunging for their tormentor even though it’s useless.

Even though it frightens Gento, though he tries not to let it. Given that Blazar can only interact with the world through Gento, the alien creature has been remarkably kind about how infrequently he has Gento do things that are against his will, but it’s still terrifying when Gento finds himself taking action without meaning to.

“This is all your fault, you know.” Gil’s words aren’t for Gento anymore, but for Blazar—for that shining blue light that Gento has begun to associate with safety and comfort. “If you didn’t choose him, this would have been over long ago. He never would have had to go through this.”

Blazar has been fighting for long enough that this barb only lightly scratches. Gento might not be going through this without him, but there’s a good chance Gento and his team would all be dead, and that nightmare is a shared one that both of them would do anything to prevent.

“Just stop fighting, and we can all rest for a while.” Gil’s hand gently touches the back of his neck, and Gento collapses to his knees, choking on his own blood.

Blue light fills him, and they are on their feet again, they are trying to find their enemy, but how long can they do this?

How long can Gil keep doing this?

He has to make sure he stays up longer than she does. That they stay up longer than she does; he’s not fighting this fight alone, after all.

But Blazar is also starting to tire. He does better in the open, in the light, and they have been wandering nothing but dark tunnels for what feels like hours.

“Rest for a while, and I will rest, too.” Gil’s voice gentles. “We don’t have to be enemies, any of us. We just have to stay out of the way. That’s all I’ve been ordered to do. Keep you out of the way. If we all just settle down into pleasant dreams…”

“Then you’ll find a way to kill us.” Gento’s teeth chatter together, and he swallows, running his hands up and down his arms. “No, thank you.”

“Be reasonable.” Her voice shifts, becoming an amalgamation of so many commanding officers. “Just be reasonable, and it will all work out.”

And it will. If he just doesn’t care about the people under him… if he just follows orders, and blames subordinates for any failures… if he does what those of higher rank do…

Blazar carefully, gently, raises just Gento’s right hand to touch his temple.

Gento laughs, a choked but real sound. “Yeah. I know. We wouldn’t be us if we just took the easy way out, huh? Everyone gets out or it wasn’t a successful mission.”

He still sits down, though. He doesn’t have a choice. He’s tired, and cold, and he simply can’t keep walking.

Blazar tries to help. Tries to be a warm fire, burning around him, and it at least keeps them conscious, but the human body can only withstand so much, and Blazar needs light.

Gil doesn’t try to talk to them again. She just hums, a gentle little lullaby—a lullaby he sang to Jun. It shouldn’t work, but it brings to mind too many late nights in early fatherhood, dozing while Jun wriggled restlessly against him, and all he has to do is close his eyes…

There’s a grating, grinding sound, and light pierces down. It stabs through his eyes, twin blades of agony burying themselves in his brain, but the power that comes with the light is all he needs.

Except—no.

He can’t.

He’s visible. He can’t transform into Blazar here. He has to—

Figure out what the hell is going on as Earth Garron’s hand dips into the ruined auditorium, offering him a flat palm to crawl onto.

Gento does, trying to figure out who’s piloting the giant robot. He still hasn’t made a decision when he’s deposited outside the school—by a little copse of trees, on the opposite side of the building from where his brief airborne glimpse shows him MOPY and the GGF command center.

The perfect place to transform into Blazar.

Which he’ll do as soon as the world stops spinning around him.

For just a moment, he lowers his head and trusts his team to keep things under control while he figures out which way is up.

***

Yasunobu makes sure the captain is safe before turning with a snarl to the monster that had been looming over him.

She looked… sort of like a woman. A woman whose image flickered and jittered, moving unnaturally around Gento after Yasunobu ripped the roof off the auditorium.

“Visual confirmation: all hostages removed from the vicinity. The captain was the last one.” Yasunobu has to make sure to keep audio contact with the team, just in case. “Target is spotted. She looks to be—” Yasunobu cuts off as the target screams.

A sound which becomes the roar of a kaiju as something in the air… rips. The flickering image of the woman pushes upward, outward, the tip of a glowing squid-shaped head. Two fins to either side, or perhaps wings? They’re beautiful, arching structures; an enormous body; two arms; two legs. A full-ass kaiju, and all of a sudden the perimeter that was set up around the school doesn’t seem big enough.

Assuming he’s really seeing what he’s seeing. “SKaRD, are the rest of you seeing what I’m seeing?”

“Wilco, Earth Garron.” Teruaki sounds grim. “We have visual contact on a kaiju at least thirty meters tall in the ruins of the school. Engage at discretion.”

“Earthy…” Yasunobu bites his bottom lip. “Can we take it at a sixty-eight degree angle, try to drive it away from everybody?”

“Preparing thrusters,” Earth Garron says.

Yasunobu quickly prepares the appropriate angle, and then they’re charging at the kaiju. They manage to ram the creature exactly as he’d intended, dragging her away from any potential targets.

The kaiju roars, and Yasunobu hears a voice in his head. “You should have just let Gilanbo solve your problem for you! It would have been so much easier. Instead, you have to fight and—”

Yasunobu is ready to fight. He’s ready to launch missiles, to use weapons, to do whatever’s needed to keep this monster from causing more trouble.

But he doesn’t get the opportunity to. Blazar appears behind her, sword in hand, and cleaves the monster in two.

Yasunobu stares at Blazar. Blazar’s blue light seems… muted, somehow. Less exuberant. And he doesn’t even try to jump or hoot. He just raises his sword in a brief salute, and is gone.

Leaving Yasunobu and the crew to handle the clean-up, including making sure their captain is going to be all right.

***

Gento wakes in a medical center.

He can tell before he even opens his eyes. There’s a certain smell, plus the sounds of monitors, and the feel of frequently-cleaned sheets against his skin. He manages not to groan as he cracks his eyes open, trying to decide where he is and what’s going on.

His team is in the hospital room with him. Anri, Emi, and Teruaki are all in medical gowns; Yasunobu is the only one in uniform. They’re arranged around a table, playing some kind of card game.

“Room for another?” Gento levers himself into a sitting position as he asks the question, a motion that’s almost unsuccessful as pain blossoms bright through his whole head.

“Careful!” Emi is at his side in a moment, not sparing a thought to her dignity as the hospital gown flutters around her. “Gilanbo’s attacks caused noticeable cerebral and amygdala damage, and you were in the contact range the longest.”

“Gilanbo. That’s… the kaiju?” Gento squints, trying to remember the few minutes between changing into Blazar and collapsing into blessed unconsciousness.

“It was the kaiju.” Yasunobu straightens, clearly proud of himself. “Blazar and I took care of it.”

“How are you feeling?” Anri asks the question gently, moving to stand on the opposite side of the bed from Emi.

“Like I got my head stuck in a kaiju’s vice.” Gento manages a smile. “But proud of you all. I’m sorry I stumbled in unprepared. You deserved better.”

“You did just fine.” Anri’s hands ball into fists. “I was the one who made a mistake. If not for you—or maybe Blazar, I couldn’t tell, everything was such a mess—I would have—I could have—” Tears stand out in Anri’s eyes.

Teruaki reaches out, putting a hand on her shoulder. “I could have been the one to do that just as easily as you. I even thought, when I pulled my weapon, that I might be shooting at a kid, that I couldn’t trust what I was seeing, and I did it anyway.”

Gento runs his eyes over his team—his tired, clearly-hurting team. “Were there any casualties?”

The question hangs in the air, and for a terrible moment he thinks they’re going to say yes. That will make all of this so much harder.

But then Emi says, “No, sir. All children were retrieved without significant physical injury. There’s going to be a lot of trauma therapy for a few of them, but they’re alive.”

Gento allows a relieved smile to slide into place. “Then we won. We’ll have a debrief where we talk about other possible courses of action, but for now, let’s just work on healing and being glad we managed this as well as we did.”

There’s a general sense of relaxation, broken by Emi asking, “Sir… if we could just talk about one more thing…”

Gento smiles at the young woman. “Yes?”

“Blazar. Was he—I would say it was just a hallucination, but then he was there at the end…”

Hopefully Blazar’s coin is still with Gento’s uniform. It doesn’t really matter if it is or it isn’t, though, because Gento can still feel Blazar burning inside him, a banked fire ready to spring into action when he’s needed. “Blazar was the first life-form targeted by Gilanbo. I think Gilanbo was using the energy from human nightmares to try to keep Blazar trapped. Possibly… at the behest of someone or something else.”

Emi straightens a little bit, easily picking up the subtext that he’s putting down.

Yasunobu’s hands clench into fists. “I’m glad we were able to help. I know I didn’t suffer like the rest of you did, but that thing… what it did…”

Anri claps Yasunobu on the arm. “You did the most important thing. You helped Blazar put down Gilanbo.”

“Besides.” Teruaki grins. “It’s probably best not all of us end up with brain damage at the same time.”

Anri’s smile is a little less broad than Teruaki’s, but far more than she would have shown them when the team first came together. “Though I suppose you’ve probably got the most brains to spare out of all of us, huh, Yasunobu?”

Yasunobu blushes and splutters, and Gento allows himself to collapse back down onto the bed. He doesn’t mean to sleep again, but he—they—are both still exhausted, and before he knows quite what’s happening, his eyes have closed, and they drift into the blue stars with the sounds of their team as a comforting background lullaby.

***

Jun runs to meet him as soon as he knocks on the door. “Dad! I’m glad you’re all right.”

“Nothing too serious.” Gento ruffles his son’s hair. “And hey, it means I get a few extra days off with you.”

Satoko watches him, clearly less trusting than Jun.

Gento can’t blame her, and he feels a little pang of guilt again for the lies he’s told.

He can’t trust her with the whole truth, though. He can’t trust anyone, not when Blazar’s very existence could be at stake.

Jun hugs him, and Gento picks his son up, holding the boy close. His eyes burn, just for a moment, and he knows that Blazar is watching this, too.

Does he see something worth protecting? Something worth killing for, and lying for, and doing anything that’s necessary to keep safe?

He must, because if he didn’t, surely he wouldn’t still be with Gento.

Satoko places a hand on his arm, and leans her head against him. “Welcome home.”

Pressing a kiss to the top of her head, Gento murmurs, “It’s good to be home.”

They’re words that have never been truer, and he hopes he’ll get to say them a thousand more times.

And maybe, one day, he’ll be able to explain to his family—to his team—to everyone exactly what Blazar is.

To explain to everyone that Gento tried to save someone, and Blazar recognized that desire, and decided to help him save more people.

Until then, though, at least they’ve both got plenty of people to protect—plenty of people to love, because that’s the reason they both protect, and Gento can think of nothing more precious or important in all the world.