[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Sisters

Genre: Slice of Life

Length: 3074 words

B/D: Did a bunch of stuff in the background, but I did tease on Twitter that the next story would introduce somebody, and here it is.

If Hime was disappointed about anything, it was the lack of fire. It just didn’t look right without any, in her opinion. Oh, she knew that it had been a year or more since the spaceship crashed, but in her mind’s eye she had still pictured a little burning. She had even brought marshmallows, and foraged a stick to toast them on. There was nothing like a toasted marshmallow to keep one’s spirits up as you traipsed around the wreckage of your old home.

There were plenty of places where fire had been, though, great senseless sculptures of blackened metal and warped support beams. Rocket fuel burned so very hot. She probably knew exactly how hot, to the degree, if she were to trawl her memory, but it wasn’t important. Humanity would probably never again dare to venture out into the stars; when they had fled, in the Great War, the Earth had been blacker and less hospitable than even space. Now it was green, comfortable, welcoming. The settlers had come home – not to quite the welcome they had expected to receive, but still.

All in all, though, the Sumika had stood up to the impact and the fighting quite admirably. Most of the internal structures were still stable, if unappealing, and the bulkheads had barely a scratch on them – which was irritating, really, since it meant she had to stop every so often and cut through them, working with one of Suguri’s borrowed laser swords for minutes at a time. Some of them, she knew, had had beam repellent shielding installed by Shifu when he began dreaming of planetary conquest; those she tried to route around, often going through the walls instead. In space, or even in the sky, the sudden depressurization would have been dangerous or fatal, but at rest, it made it easy it skip through the larger part of the ship.

The ship itself had been large, of course. Anything built to sustain a decent human population had to be. There had to be systems to provide food, water, and air; exercise and entertainment facilities, to prevent atrophy of the mind and body; wide open spaces and solitary nooks, to promote mental health. On the occasions where any one of those things broke down, the ship had turned from a habitat into a prison. If they had stayed broken, it very quickly would have become a coffin. She didn’t envy the technicians, who were told that there would be no spare parts, no replacements; everything must be recycled, re-used. Every scrap of metal, every scrap of food. Every nut, bolt, and seed, every drop of water. Sometimes they had managed to harvest comets or even planets to supplement what they had, but it was a rarity, and the philosophy remained – even in her. If Suguri and Sora noticed that she always cleans her plate, no matter how poor the fare, they have said nothing about it.

(In fact, Suguri had largely the same attitude. Sora, born in an era where the Earth’s resources were still being burned through at an astounding rate to fuel to engines of war, was less concerned about recycling, but a military upbringing had at least bred efficiency into her. She rarely took more than she needed.)

As she drew closer to the core, the signs of destruction began to fade. The shielding on the core, naturally, was at its strongest; if it wasn’t, Suguri might well have had another environmental disaster on her hands when the ship made landfall. Most of the systems seemed to have been preserved as well. She could feel the network responding to her wavelength, welcoming its Guardian home. Shifu had locked her out, once, but now that he was dead and buried, her access rights had been restored. She slipped Suguri’s laser sword back into her satchel. She wouldn’t need it.

“Open sesame,” she said politely, when the next bulkhead came into view. It was as thick as two men and three times as tall as she was, dusted with a thick film of beam-resistant coating. It didn’t matter. At her command, the mechanisms slowly rumbled into life, hissing and groaning under the strain, but still strong. The bulkhead parted. “Why, thank you,” Hime murmured, knowing that the going would be easier from this point on.

Soon, she found what she was looking for: the core itself, home not only to the generators, but a great deal of the data banks. In the last moments of the ship’s life, she had hurriedly authorised a transfer of a certain data structure from the lab data banks to the central archive, breaking through Shifu’s security protocols with every tool available to her. She had wondered, in the days and weeks that followed, if that transfer had been successful, and if the central archives had even survived. But the time and effort of resettling first the ship’s passengers, and then herself, had pushed it from her mind. It was always something she had meant to check on – later.

Later had arrived.

The lights snapped on as she entered the central control room, triggered by a thought rather than a word. How many hundreds of years had this been her domain? The roots stretched deep – into the technology, and into her. An entanglement. But this was no longer where her heart lived. Maybe in time, she could become as attuned to her new home as she was to this place, and yet – and yet – her her heart didn’t live in that house, either. For Hime, home had become a person.

She wouldn’t have minded being able to turn the bathroom light on with her brain, though.

“Sumika?” she called.

There was no answer. The electronics – that nobody had switched off, that had quietly kept them alive through years of space travel – hummed quietly, but kept their counsel to themselves. She put a finger to her chin, as if in thought. There was always, she decided, a time and place for theatrics.

“Oh, my. I was sure that I had managed to authorise the transfer before the ship went down, but perhaps not,” she said, a little too loudly for somebody who was ostensibly speaking to herself. “Perhaps I’ll just dip into the data banks and check for myself.”

A long moment of silence. She took a step towards the data terminals, and then –

“Go away! Sumika isn’t speaking to you,” came a voice from the tinny onboard PA system.

Hime smiled. She had been a little worried about Sumika’s safety, of course, but it seemed she was doing fine. The way she always reacted like a child who’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar was one of her finer points, although the rest of her personality (in Hime’s humble opinion) could use some work.

“Well, why ever not? I came all this way to come and check on you, you know.”

“Sumika knows,” came the voice again, and it would have been ominous if the speakers in the PA system were any better. “You weren’t thinking about Sumika at all! You spent all that time having fun without her! And even worse, you shacked up with that silver-hair hussy who killed Sumika’s papa! She can’t forgive you for that.”

Hime sighed. She was smiling, although in a decidedly unfriendly way. “Well, I suppose we had to have this talk sooner or later. Shall we take it from the top? To begin with,” she said, stepping a little closer to the terminals, “your papa was scum. Pure human trash. You know that, of course, but it bears repeating: the Professor was remarkable only in his depravity and his good fortune.”

“Take that back! Sumika’s papa was a genius!”

“Genius? He wasn’t even competent. If he was, poor Nana and Kyoko would be far happier. Even if he wasn’t building defects into his creations, they don’t have an especially good track record. He landed on a planet with no developed military, and only one protector, and with all his robots and our sisters, he still lost. Badly.” She was getting into her stride now, as she always did when she thought about that man. God, he was dead and he still irritated her in a way that no other human had ever managed. “It’s worth saying that Suguri, who roundly thrashed everything that man had ever created, was given her powers as a response to the environmental disaster of the Great War – or, in other words, she’s based on technology almost ten thousand years out of date. She wasn’t even designed as a combat unit, for that matter – her primary abilities are for regenerating the planet. Her combat ability is something she seems to have picked up incidentally.”

“U… urk.”

“I mean, never mind Suguri. I was made as a guardian for a ship that never expected to see genuine combat, and I regulated this vessel for millennia. My capabilities and my specifications were right there, for anybody to see, and he still never managed to create anything that equaled me – again, with ten thousand years to innovate technologically. You were the closest he ever got, and he never even finished you. The Professor, for all that he was, was never exactly talented. Just lucky.” She frowned, flicking her head in irritation. “And he was lucky, wasn’t he? Even in the last moments of his life, he was lucky. If I had been dealing with him and not Suguri, he would have lived longer and dearly wished that he hadn’t.”

“E… even so. Sumika loves her papa.”

“Oh, yes, I expect you do, although whether it’s your choice or not is entirely up for debate. He was a little overly fond of tinkering around in people’s minds, wasn’t he? Perhaps you’re simply obliged to love him, in the same way Nanako and her sisters were obliged to follow his orders. I wouldn’t put it past him. After all, it’s only human to want to be loved, and I’m certain nobody else loved him by the time he died.” Silence, heavier than before. “Well, at any rate, he never really lived long enough to know the true extent of his luck. All things considered, he found this planet at exactly the right time. Much earlier, and Suguri wouldn’t have been finished restoring it, and much later – in fact, not much later, only a year or two, and that’s nothing in space travel – and Sora might have been awake to greet him. I can only imagine how poorly that would have turned out.”

“Sora? Sumika knows that name. She researched her in the data of this planet,” Sumika said. Even the low audio quality did not muffle her desire to shift the topic from her father.

“Oh, yes. She’s a lovely girl, you know, a touch eccentric but quite charming. That said, she is more or less the planet’s ultimate weapon, having beaten all the others in single combat; I can only really sum her up as being what Suguri might be, if Suguri had been designed from the ground up to kill people. The last time she even thought there was a war on, she went on a rampage and dueled Suguri and I back to back. She was still winning when we managed to calm her down. I don’t know what she would have done if she ever met the Professor, but I would have dearly loved to see it.” She sniffed. “By the by, I would advise you to avoid doing anything that might end up annoying Sora. Lovely and gentle she may be, but she doesn’t shy away from doling out discipline if necessary, even to her loving sister.”

“Su… Sumika is advised.”

“Sumika is also advised,” Hime continued cheerily, “that if you ever call Suguri a hussy again in front of either Sora or myself, you will have only yourself to blame for any unpleasantness that may follow.”

“Uuuuu… But it’s true, isn’t it? Sumika thinks she must be a woman of loose morals. Sumika wanted Hime to be her big sis, but the silver-hair seduced you away from her.”

“Ah… it’s really more the opposite, I’m afraid. And even that’s a work in progress.” She smiled ruefully, her normal buoyancy lost for a second. “Oh well. I suppose I shall tell you more about it on the way home. I don’t suppose any of the high-density transfer disks survived the crash? I did bring one of my own, but it’s technology from this era, and I might have to spend a while sorting out–”

“Wahwahwahwah! Trip home? Sumika doesn’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Well,” Hime said patiently, “now that I’ve found you, I can’t just leave you here alone in this abandoned spaceship, can I? You’re my family, after a fashion. No, I shall have to transfer you to disk and take you home with me. I’m not sure what we shall do with you once we get there, but I’m sure we’ll think of something. Even if you can’t bear to share a house with Suguri and I, I’m sure Kae or Kyoko or Iru will be happy to take care of you for a while.”

What followed was audible panic: quiet little sounds, the discarded starts of sentences, half-formed points along several different trajectories. The speakers didn’t exactly do it justice; Sumika was one of those girls who just had a lot of sounds inside her. Hime waited patiently.

“Auuuu… You’d really let Sumika stay? Even though she said those things about your – your–”

Hime smiled wryly. Her what, indeed. “Yes, well. It’s true that your manners could use a little polish, but they’re not going to improve by leaving you alone out here. The only thing to do, I think, is lead by example.”

“Hauuu...” A tinny little sigh over the speakers. Relieved. Soothed. But not happy. “Sumika wants to. But she can’t. She has a top-secret project.”

Hime folded her arms and pursed her lips. “Oh? How secret, might I ask?”

“Ultra top secret.”

“So secret,” Hime asked, “that you can’t tell even me, when I came all the way out here to take you home?”

“Urk.”

“So secret that, if I were to, perhaps, dip into the system and look in My Documents, I wouldn’t find it in a hidden folder?”

“...uuuuuuuu. This isn’t fair at all! How is Sumika supposed to be a mysterious last-boss character if you make her give away her secret plans right away?!”

“Perhaps,” Hime said evenly, “I would prefer you to not be a last-boss kind of character. Perhaps I’d prefer you to be an adorable little sister.”

“Kuu… You already have sisters. You’re a sister fanatic!”

“Well, everybody has to collect something. Suguri collects blondes, Sora collects the world’s oldest and deadliest women, and I suppose I might have acquired a few more sisters than the average person, if you count Nanako and all the others. Still, I am interested in this project of yours.”

There was a long moment where Sumika considered cussing Hime out and Hime considered her fingernails. It was a battle of wills between two spirited women; however, one of the women was ten thousand years old, and that bred a certain kind of patience. Sumika caved first.

“Grr. Sumika can’t win against this. Fine! Her secret project is to finish off the body that Papa designed, with her own two hands! I haven’t done the two hands yet, but they’re getting there. Fingers are tricky.”

“Oh, so I’m told. Nath has a devil of a time with them. It’s amazing what we take for granted, isn’t it?”

“Don’t be so nonchalant about Sumika’s ambitions! Be surprised, dammit!”

Obligingly, Hime let out her most theatrical gasp – usually reserved for when Sora pointed out the obvious. “Oh, my! How impressive! I don’t suppose you need any help?”

“Heh heh. Sumika can do it all by herself!”

“Oh, marvellous!” Hime said, clapping her hands together. “Well, I suppose I’d better be getting back, then.”

“W… wait! Don’t agree so easily! At least hesitate a little!”

“Ah, I’m sorry. I’m just so used to being around Suguri and Sora, you see. They’re quite capable, with a few exceptions, so if they tell me they don’t need help, I just take it at face value.”

“Sumika’s going to be even more capable than them. Just watch!”

“Yes, yes.” Hime felt herself slipping into her ‘humouring’ mode. “I shall leave you to it, regardless. But when you’re done making your body, please do drop by for tea. You’re invited, in perpetuity… well, as long as you can keep your mouth under control.” She paused. “Well, mostly under control.”

“Hmph. Sumika only runs her mouth because people around her are bad influences.”

“Oh, my. I wonder who that could be.” It was as close as Hime was going to get to conceding that point. “Well, I’ll see myself out. Good luck, Sumika, and I hope to see you again soon. Oh… and if your sensors start picking up a fire anytime in the near future, don’t pay it any mind. I have some marshmallows, you see.”

“Uwah? You’re going to start a fire in Sumika’s home, just to roast marshmallows?! Sumika takes it back! You’re not a bad influence, you’re the worst! Sumika will turn the sprinklers on right away!”

“Don’t be a baby. It’ll only be a small fire. And I’ll put it out right afterwards.”

“Fire is the scariest thing on a spaceship, right next to explosive decompression! It’s a big deal!”

“What if I gave you a marshmallow?”

“Sumika doesn’t have a mouth yet!”

The bickering continued, even as Hime began to trace her steps away from the core of the ship and out into the wilderness, Sumika’s voice omnipresent in the ship’s onboard communications systems, echoing in the empty corridors. The bulkheads rolled out of the way of their own accord. She wondered, as she stepped out into the afternoon sun, whether the girl would really be okay. She hoped so. It would be a shame to be cooped up on a ship, or indoors, when there was a great green Earth to explore.

But for now, it was time to go home – to her sleepy older sister, and the silver-haired girl who had all but stolen her heart. To her family – a family that one day, perhaps soon, would grow larger by one.

A/N: One of Hime's most recurring canon traits (in SUGURI and AoS2, at least) is that she has kind've a sharp tongue, and really isn't afraid to use it. As a result, this story is devoted to her being savage.