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The breaks are the worst part of it.
Natsuno hadn’t expected that going in, but the more she rests, the more she thinks she should have. This is familiar, after all. It’s like an endurance run. Finding a manageable pace, both physical and mental. A breath pattern, a rhythm. Keeping yourself moving with consistency—not wild sprints and trudging pauses. Walking only makes it harder to run again. Battle is all about momentum.
(Would BJ have needed to do this, if he’d been able to pilot his own Sentinel? He’d clearly had a mind, but did he have a brain? Maybe the risk of overload is a human weakness. She wishes she could ask.)
On the battlefield there’s no room for these thoughts. But when she steps outside of it for a moment, the pause—the silence—lets all the doubt come crashing back in. The hunger, the tired weight, the risk, the terror. Natsuno chews on the inside of her cheek. In a few minutes she’s going to have to get back in and figure out how to push it all back again, enough to keep herself alive.
Natsuno tucks her feet up under her on a bus stop bench. Familiar as it is, in this context it’s a bleak thought. The sort of thing you might hear from a jumpy old man who’d gone to war.
She looks back between the buildings, toward the distant hum of a railgun.
(Had Miura still been alive, in her time? Before everything? Like Granny Tamao had been? It makes her smile a little to imagine him retired, serenely stubborn in that old-man sort of way—even if a little jumpy. A father, perhaps. A grandfather. Content.)
(If he no longer lived in her neighborhood, then maybe he’d gone to see the world. Visited new places, learned new things, settled somewhere greater than Ashitaba City. Sent letters home to his old friend, and the little girl next door had never known of him—never needed to.)
(But—the way he is, in the time he’d lived in, Natsuno thinks it’s likelier he’d died young.)
She glances back up at BJ’s Sentinel, towering in the middle of the street. Miura’s not going to die young now. No more of them are. Just a few more hours, and it should all be over. They can hang on. She knows they can. Or—she knows she should know it, that she will again when she finds her stride.
The roar of engines has gotten closer now, and then wind whips up under her, fluttering her jacket. A Sentinel landing nearby. Instinct gives her a brief moment of panic that the fight’s made it over here, but she can calm that down easy enough: she knows who it’s going to be. As the dust settles, she can see the figure out front.
“Nat-chan!”
Yuki’s been finding the operating limit just as frustrating, but not in quite the same way. Her issue with the breaks doesn’t seem to be anything more than annoyance. She doesn’t have a problem building her momentum again, switching on that soldier’s focus. Maybe for her it’s always on.
She’d raised hell the first time, having to hide and rest while Natsuno was still operational. Since then she’s tried to synchronize their off time. Make sure they don’t have to go in without each other—or that Natsuno doesn’t have to go in without her. Yuki’s been trying to protect her.
(She always has.)
(Across time and space, she always has.)
Natsuno leans out of the bus stop and waves back. Yuki climbs straight over from the street.
“Hey,” she says, with a half-forced smile.
Natsuno smiles weakly back. “Hey.”
Yuki sits down beside her. She opens the flap of her schoolbag, but then she pauses.
“You got your comms off, right?”
Even as a kid Yuki had always liked her privacy. It had made Natsuno wonder, these last few years, if she knew the kind of stories that were getting back to her old friend’s school. If she knew she’d gotten famous enough that hiding was barely worth it.
“Mm-hm,” she says.
Yuki chuckles a little, leaning more easily against the back of the bus stop. “Thanks, Ogata.”
Natsuno grins faintly.
"I mean, not that I’m gonna—whatever. You still like this stuff?”
Yuki reaches into her bag and holds up a juice box. Hey-C.
It’s nothing substantial, but God, it’s something. Natsuno would have taken anything. “Totally, yeah.”
There’s a little triumph in the glint of Yuki’s eyes as she hands the box over, even if she’s trying to hide it. “It’s nothing. I mean, I’ve been carrying that around for a while, so it’s probably kinda warm.”
“What, all this time?”
“Just since a couple breaks ago.” She reaches out through the broken slats and bangs on her Sentinel’s leg. “Got outta this thing next to a busted vending machine. Figured we might want some later, so.”
She opens her bag and tilts it toward Natsuno. There’s four more boxes inside.
“’Course, I dunno where all this goes when we’re fuckin’ naked in there,” she mutters. “Might stay cold, for all I know.”
Natsuno stares down into the bag, and then back up at her best friend.
Everything BJ had shown them is in her face again. Every word Yuki says, every move she makes, it’s clearer and clearer. Her stomach twists. Part of her wishes Yuki had been there with her to see it—but that’s just cowardice. She just wishes it wasn’t up to her now to say.
To say, or not to.
She’s never been good at hiding her feelings, and certainly not around her best friend. Not even all the years they spent apart seem to have made it any easier. “Hey,” Yuki asks, softly lowering her voice, leaning closer to speak clearly over the distant battle. “You doing okay, Nat-chan?”
Keeping something like this from Yuki feels…unfair. It is unfair. If Yuki had found out any massive perspective-shifting information about her and didn’t say, she’d be hurt as all hell. And Yuki probably wouldn’t even care about this mother stuff anyway, would she? She’d take it about as seriously as anything else Natsuno believed but couldn’t prove—respect what it meant to her, but not believe it.
But it’s still too difficult to take the chance. Natsuno doesn’t want to make her look at their friendship through this lens that she sees it through herself now. And even if Yuki wouldn’t…she doesn’t want her to have to know that Natsuno is.
It’s not her fault. Yuki had always been protective—her behavior hasn’t changed at all. It’s only Natsuno’s point of view that has. She can’t ruin this for her. Not when their friendship’s still so new again, when they'd both missed it so much for so long. When they’ve all got more important things to focus on.
“Yeah,” she says. “I’m okay.”
Yuki knows her well enough not to believe her, but there’s enough going on right now that not being okay is fair enough. She grimaces sympathetically, and then she takes a juice box for herself and rips off the straw.
They crumple up the plastic and stuff it in their pockets—even when the ground is littered with debris, it still feels wrong to add to it. Staring at what had been the sidewalk, Natsuno stabs her straw in and sips her juice in silence.
It was like this in Sector 3. Rubble all over the place, broken glass, garbage fluttering over the ground in the wind.
(Is everyone alright there? Are there still roaming androids? Would her brothers get too close, with no idea how dangerous they were? Could her parents defend themselves, if they needed to, with no idea where they were or why?)
(At the time, shifting all those people had sounded impressive. It had taken time to realize that they’d been sent to the same place she nearly died. Was it any safer now? Strength in numbers, maybe? Are they organizing? Prioritizing? Surviving?)
(There’s nothing she can do about it now but keep fighting. End this, and they’ll get everyone back.)
The juice is warm, but it’s refreshing anyhow. She hasn’t had one of these in a while. Natsuno turns the flavor over on her tongue. It’s kind of strange to think that in Yuki’s head she’s still ten or eleven, eating after-school snacks and watching cartoons. Though—she supposes she hasn’t really changed much in that respect. A lot of people consider her interests childish, friends among them. At least for Yuki it’s memory more than judgment.
Natsuno feels more mature, but there’s no real way she’d know. Maybe she just got tall, and that’s it.
Yuki doesn’t seem to have changed much either. Or—she hadn’t seemed to have. She'd been the same old Yuki-chan, just as tough. Just as secretive. Surely what she’d been through had shaped her, but she was good at locking it down. Being the girl Natsuno knew. The girl she expected.
Yuki was good at it—but there had been one thing today that Natsuno didn’t expect. She looks over at Yuki for a few seconds, watching her sip her juice, and then she can’t resist asking.
“Hey.” She says it with a careful, teasing lilt, but she’s serious. “You really gonna go out with Amiguchi-kun?”
Yuki grimaces. “Ugh. Don’t remind me.”
Natsuno keeps watching her.
Yuki doesn’t elaborate.
“I didn’t know you guys even knew each other,” says Natsuno, nudging.
“I mean—we don’t, really,” mumbles Yuki. “I ran into him on the street once and now he’s obsessed with me.”
He’d have known who she was, Natsuno supposes. He’d run with Ogata’s crowd for a while, just when Yuki Takamiya was starting to make waves. But even so— “That’s really it?”
After listening to him all this time, she can’t help but feel Yuki’s purposefully underselling this. Yuki knows what she’s thinking. Her mouth twists awkwardly around her straw.
“Yeah. Well—I mean, there was just—one time he talked me into going—”
She stops, looking over into Natsuno’s face, an uncharacteristic…lostness in her expression.
“—It doesn’t matter now. It was one time.” Yuki looks away again and shrugs roughly. “I guess he read into it or whatever. Fuckin’ typical.”
(Natsuno stares. She couldn’t have… Had she?)
“Anyway, yeah. I dunno,” says Yuki. “He hasn’t left me alone ever since.”
Once more, Natsuno can’t help but think about the Yuki on BJ’s logs. A combative relationship with a man she didn’t seem to love. Frankly… Hearing that had been the most bizarre part of it all. Yuki as her mother made sense, in some deep, vital way she couldn’t explain, but Yuki having a child? With just anybody? Near-inconceivable.
Well—of course it was disorienting, Natsuno had said to herself then. This wasn’t the kind of thing childhood friends would know about each other. They’d never even talked about boys, never once. They’d never needed to. Of course it would be difficult now to picture Yuki as an adult woman with adult problems, making adult decisions.
She doesn’t know anything more about the Yuki from the future. It hadn’t even occurred to her to be concerned until now—but—now she can’t help but wonder if it’s a pattern. Is Yuki really so lonely as to settle for someone she’d do nothing but fight with? What if that’s a fundamental part of her? Or—a part of her, when she doesn’t have Natsuno to question it?
“…Do you want me to talk to him, Yuki-chan?”
She doesn’t know if he’d take her seriously. Natsuno can still remember Shu Amiguchi as a quiet kid, before he’d become whatever he’d become—boys seemed to be at risk of that sort of thing. But even if she barely knows him anymore…considering how seriously he seems to take Yuki’s opinions, Natsuno thinks being somebody he’s not interested in could only help.
“No, don’t.” Yuki shakes her head, pink-cheeked. “I got this under control, okay?”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
“…Okay.”
This doesn’t surprise Natsuno one bit. The defensive urge to solve every problem on her own had always been Yuki’s most frustrating trait. But maybe it’ll help just to have asked. That used to work sometimes.
Yuki sighs.
“Look, it’s not that serious.” She rolls her eyes. “It’s not like we’re gonna get married or nothin.’”
“You don’t have to go out with him either,” says Natsuno.
“Of course I don’t.”
“I mean, just because he keeps asking—"
“It’s not about that,” Yuki insists, sharply. “I know I don’t owe him anything. I’m not gonna go out with a guy just to make him quit bugging me.”
There’s a bitterness there, unspoken. You know me better than that, Nat-chan.
“You mean you really want to?”
“No, I… Look.” Yuki turns back, takes a deep breath and exhales heavily. “We’re all in this together. We can’t afford any of us giving up. And we all need something to keep going for, don’t we? We’re tired and we’re hungry and we’re barely hanging on, but it’s the people you love you’ve been hanging on for, right? Your family? Your friends?”
Natsuno swallows. Thinks of her little brothers, her parents, her classmates. Her life. She hadn’t even understood what her life was until now—what parts of it she couldn’t bear to lose.
“Yeah,” she says quietly. “I guess so.”
“And I dunno if this guy doesn’t have any fuckin' friends or what, but it sounds like for him, it’s me.”
Instead of her theoretical jumpy old veteran, this time Natsuno’s mind goes to his wife. The woman who’d married him the week he deployed, promised to be there to come home to. Given him a little photo to look to when all felt lost, to inspire him to keep going on.
“You’re just stringing him along, then?” she asks.
“I dunno,” mutters Yuki, jaw clenched. “If it helps, then whatever. Long as we get through this.”
Natsuno never knew that much about Amiguchi. But she knows he’s an only child. His family distant, probably—she’d never seen anyone show up at school, even on parents’s days. He isn’t like her: part of a lovingly nosy family in too small a house, so many people he loves now in his hands. Fighting out of fear more than anger. He's…
He's probably more like Yuki.
“…What about for you?” Natsuno asks. Can’t stop herself asking. “What are you hanging on for?”
Yuki pauses. She turns just a little, looks back at her for a second from the corner of her eye, and then away back down at her shoes.
Natsuno swallows.
(Why, then? she wants to ask her. If that’s how you feel, then why did you stop writing back? Why did you leave me alone? Why did you run away, when you knew I’d have been there for you no matter what?)
(She wants to ask, but she knows the answer. She knows Yuki wouldn’t dare give it to her. She doesn’t think she could stand to hear it.)
There's silence for a little while. Between them, at least. Somewhere behind them a missile hits the ground.
“This Amiguchi thing doesn’t matter,” says Yuki. She picks uncomfortably at one cuticle. “I’ll deal with him.”
“Okay.”
And she snorts. “Let me know if you want me to knock some sense into your little soldier boy, though.”
“What—Miura-kun?”
Natsuno’s stomach flutters a little, at the thought that somebody else can see it. He’s no Amiguchi, after all—she hadn’t even been sure herself that there was anything to see.
“Yeah, that guy,” Yuki mutters. “I don’t like the way he talks to you.”
“What’s wrong with the way he talks to me?”
“He’s just so—” She opens her mouth and then closes it again, stymied for a second. “He’s too old-fashioned,” she says eventually. “Always fussing over you. He treats you like you can’t take care of yourself.”
Natsuno can’t stop a laugh from slipping out. It might have been a fair criticism, if it hadn’t come from Yuki Takamiya.
Yuki bristles defensively. “That’s funny?”
“You don’t need to worry,” says Natsuno. “I know it’s not that he looks down on me or anything. He just cares a lot, Yuki-chan. That’s all.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Yeah, he does. Just like you do.”
Yuki stops. She presses her lips together, and she sighs, face flushed.
Natsuno looks down at her juice box. “It doesn’t bother me,” she says, turning it over in her hand. “It’s nice sometimes. To know somebody’s looking out for you.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says.
(I kind of missed it, she wants to say. But she doesn’t want to bring it up. Not now.)
They sit there, shoulder to shoulder, for another minute or two. Silently working down to that last rattling slurp of juice. Natsuno first, then Yuki.
She flattens the box in her hand. “Your head feeling any better?” she asks.
“Yeah,” says Natsuno. “Less throbby.”
The headaches don’t go away completely anymore, but it’s easy enough to tell when they’re back to baseline. Yuki sighs, and then she stands. “Can’t wait to never get in this fucking thing again.”
“Not long left now.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
She takes Natsuno’s juice box, but the nearest trash can’s been ripped from the sidewalk. She just tuts and stuffs the empty cartons in her bag. Natsuno gets up beside her, stretches. They stand there for a second and watch a flying Sentinel descend into a horde of Deimos in the distance.
The cloud of missiles goes off like fireworks.
“…Okay,” mumbles Yuki. “Gotta go babysit that idiot, I guess.”
Mechs were never her area of expertise, but Natsuno’s still more equipped to differentiate them than Yuki is. “I think that’s Gouto-senpai, actually.”
“Yeah?” Yuki snorts. “Him too.”
Softly, Natsuno laughs.
Yuki's lips twitch with amusement, and then she lifts her hand to her chest.
“Yuki-chan, wait—"
But Natsuno grabs it and holds her back. She wraps her fingers around Yuki’s hand, squeezes their sticky palms together as tight as she can for a few seconds. Smiles.
(Something to hang on for. If it helps. As long as they get through this.)
For a second Yuki tenses in surprise, but then she returns the squeeze with a brief, awkward exhale and a crooked grin.
(It helps. It always does—always did. Through time and space, it always did.)
(Always will, with any luck.)
Natsuno watches Yuki step back and sweep her fingers across her collarbone. She holds her fond gaze until it’s glowing and gone.