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“Isn’t it weird,” Kazumi asks, one night. “To be living the lives we thought we would?”
Sawa shifts, sitting up just a little against his chest. God, he’s ripped. Well, of course he is. Farmer.
“You deeply underestimate how much Nanba sucked,” she says.
“I mean, your cover was a reporter,” Kazumi points out. “That’s got to count for something.”
Sawa hmms. He has a point there. She like the investigative part of being a spy quite a bit. Also that it meant she could look however she wanted pretty damn often.
And she sometimes got to kick peoples’ asses.
Honestly she’s done all that in this New World, too. Except in a less perfectly trained body.
Funny. Kazumi has more muscles here from farm work. She has less from not being a child soldier all grown up.
(To be fair, so does Gentoku. He was so… normal , here. You know, before their memories returned.)
They’re all less scarred. Freeing, in a way. Disquieting, in others.
“I think I like this life better,” is what Sawa settles on saying out loud. She was better at being truthful here, just a little. Emphasis on “was”.
Too much swirls in from the old world to truly retain that ability.
“I think we all do,” Kazumi says. “I think that means we won.”
Sawa sighs, settling back close to him.
“Is there such a thing as winning,” she says. “In war? I don’t think so. I think it’s just another stage of the men at the top playing games with the rest.”
“But damn if we weren’t good players.”
“I’ll give it that,” Sawa says. “Kamen Rider. Defected spy.”
“Hey, you could actually help Sento ,” Kazumi says. “You’re ridiculously intelligent in there, and I’m a little terrified of it all.”
“Good,” Sawa says. “Be very afraid.”
Kazumi hmms.
“I used to dream about what life would be,” he says. “If things didn’t go so wrong. I don’t think it looked like this.”
“I didn’t,” Sawa replies. “Not ever. Life just was. I always knew how it was going to go. A spy for Nanba. Maybe a soldier of some sort when war started in earnest. My life went so wrong I didn’t realize.”
“Until Sento.”
“He does have that effect,” Sawa says. “Doesn’t he?”
She’d be screwed if she hadn’t met everyone.
Then again, they would have been screwed if she hadn’t met them , too. That’s the thing of it all, is so many people fought so hard for this new world, and they all know. Sawa was there for the other world, and a part of her is still scared.
Scared she isn’t really her. That a crushed up dead body on a consumed planet exists in another dimension. That this is all some strange fluke.
(How much worse must it have been for Sento and Banjou, when they woke up here? They must have secretly wondered if they failed and staunchly refused to tell the other.
But of course they didn’t fail. That would be far too cruel.)
“He does, at that,” Kazumi says. Sawa likes this. In both lives, of course, she has had sex. But it never really matched with people she genuinely trusted. Even fooling around with some of the other Nanba Children, they all knew their true loyalty wasn’t to each other.
(The part of her that grew up in a normal foster home or three still winces at that.)
But with Kazumi, and Gentoku (when he isn’t busy with StuffTM like tonight), it just kind of feels natural. Right.
It’s a weird sensation, but not in a bad way.
“Whatever life I should have had,” Sawa says. “It wouldn’t have a lot of the people I care about in it. But because of the lives I did, I’m right here. And I’m glad.”
She’s glad she lived both lives, she’s glad she remembers, and… she’s glad she’s here.
Kazumi hmms.
“You know what?” He says. “Me too.”