[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Bittersweet

Genre: Slice of Life, maybe?

Length: 2721 words

B/D: It was Altela's birthday recently and I felt like making a (late) gift for them, so at long last, here's an introduction for Alte in the Survivalverse.

It’s my turn to pick our rendezvous point, so we’re meeting at a diner this year. Thank God. When it’s not my turn, we end up meeting at fancy teahouses or sushi bars. I wouldn’t mind, but you can’t get a good cup of coffee there to save your life. Some days – not often, now, but they still happen – coffee is all that stands between me and genocide.

It’s a small place, just off one of the old by-roads heading up into the mountains. Nobody ends up there by choice – only truckers and day-trippers without other options. The food, according to intelligence reports, is cheap and tastes cheap. Hygiene rating: three out of five. Acceptable risks. I order a strong black coffee and a coffee with milk and two sugars from a blank-eyed waitress, and sit down. Nobody bats an eyelid. Most are consumed with newspapers, or the tinny television set in the corner. Not one of them seems to have noticed I didn’t arrive in a car. It doesn’t seem like I’ve been followed.

My contact arrives two minutes and thirty seconds late, wearing a white button-down long sleeved shirt, black slacks, suspenders, and a red tie knotted loosely over an unbuttoned collar. Notepad in the right hand chest pocket. The entire look screams ‘local reporter’, and they make a point of sweeping their gaze across the whole diner, looking more at the fixtures and fittings than the people. The waitress takes notice, and straightens her posture. It looks like we’ll get good service today.

“Ah, Alte,” they say as they sit down. “How’re you holding up?”

I take a sip of coffee. Alte. I don’t hear that name very often any more. The particulars of my job mean I have to take pseudonyms, or else go by title. I might only hear it once a year, at meetings like these. But no matter how much time passes, or if anybody ever uses it, it will always be my name. Because ‘Alte’ was the woman who fell in love with my husband. And I am still that woman.

“How do you think?” I ask.

Their eyes become a little sly. I know they’re going to dodge the question before they open their mouth. “You got my order wrong again.”

I tap my index finger on the table. “No. You got your order wrong. You drink white with two sugars. You think you drink it black with one sugar, but you don’t.”

“Oh, right. Sorry. We always forget about that.”

I frown. My contact is Mira: two people, one body. One of the stranger experiments military science has produced, although not the most cataclysmic. Their condition isn’t debilitating, necessarily, but it comes with baggage. Particularly with food. Their memories come from a different body, with different taste buds. And memories about food are hard to get rid of.

Mira, as a rule, irritates me. We’re very different people. They have such a high level of skill that they don’t take things seriously enough; I can only claim to be average at most things, but I counter that with preparation. When one of us is so laid-back and the other so serious, there’s bound to be friction from time to time.

But if I had to lay down my life for any one person on this planet, it would be them.

They saved me, ten thousand years ago. They lost their fight against that monster from the enemy side; as I understand it, everybody did. But that girl – Sora – was naive. She had high specifications and natural talent, but she didn’t understand war the way we did, and she’d definitely never met anybody using the weapons that Mira could. She saw an explosion, and thought that it was done. She probably never even imagined that an old-fashioned smoke bomb could be so convincing.

After that, the war turned; the enemy, finally seeing the true potential of their mislaid weapon, started trying to retrieve her. They sent their best weapons to do the job, and while they were away, Mira snuck in. They were looking for medical supplies for their wounds, weapons, anything to help them survive. They found me, heavily wounded, awaiting analysis, interrogation, and eventual indoctrination or dissection by the enemy research team. I don’t know what possessed them to save me and burden themselves with a crippled woman, but they did.

We fled, and were pursued half-heartedly; the enemy side seemed to be anticipating some kind of victory. What they got was the apocalypse. In the dark days that followed, Mira nursed me back to health, mostly against my wishes. I had given up; I knew that my husband was gone, perished in the fire, and any life I could have returned to was over.

Those times are a blur to me, but I remember small parts of them. I remember Mira cooking for us, traditional recipes from their home country – dried mackerel, and little manju filled with red bean paste. They were far too sweet for me and I couldn’t stomach them, but even now, I still get a little bit nostalgic about that taste.

“Being honest with you,” they say, tenting their fingers, “you look… awful. Have you been eating right? You’ve lost weight.”

“Don’t put your elbows on the table.”

“Oh, right.”

They put their elbows down, and I press my fingers to the bridge of my nose. They’re right, in a sense; I have lost some weight. I needed to. It feels like every year I get… rounder. Softer. Consequences of a sedentary job. Every year I try to shed the pounds I put on, with varying success. This year, I have no choice in the matter. I need to be in peak form, and I need to stay there.

“Of course I look awful. Have you heard the news?” I ask.

They settle back into their chair. Although sometimes I feel like they left the good brain with their other body, Mira can think, surprisingly deeply. They like to pretend otherwise. “Maybe. What news are we talking about? We’re not all heads of intelligence, you know.”

I tap my finger once on the table: quiet. I’m fairly sure this is a safe meeting spot, and there’s not much out there that could harm weapons like Mira and I, but it’s still safer to be circumspect about my position. It avoids trouble, and I have no patience for trouble.

“What else could it be?” I ask tartly. “That… thing woke up. After all this time.”

Mira settles back in their chair, a sardonic smile flitting across their lips. “Pretty sure that thing is a girl.”

“She’s a monster.”

“We’re all monsters, from a certain point of view. Did we ever tell you about reincarnation?”

The answer is yes, at great length, and they know it. We used to talk about reincarnation a lot right after the war. For me, it was… I suppose, a beacon of hope. The idea that my husband could be reborn, the same soul in a different body, and I could find him again… who wouldn’t be tempted by that? It took me maybe five hundred years to accept that it was a dangerous fantasy. Even if I could find him again, and we recognised each other, my husband has the right to become a new person. The things I’ve seen and done, the wounds I have, would only weigh him down.

Mira seems to believe in reincarnation, even though they have a very negative view of it. They believe that people like us, who have lived far longer than our natural lifespans, are cursed; we have been trapped inside our bodies, unable to return to the natural cycle. They think are souls have grown twisted by their confinement, rendered into something strange and inhuman by our lifespan. They may be right. After all, Mira has experienced a soul being put into a new body for themselves; of all the people on the planet, they may be the highest authority on the matter.

“She saved the world, Alte. Bona fide hero material, order of the red scarf. That’s gotta earn her some brownie points, right?” they continue.

“She saved bits of the world,” I hiss. “Your village didn’t look like it was saved.”

I regret that last part immediately; the way Mira carries themself, the way they fight, the tools they use, are all part of a long tradition. It’s a tradition they miss. Every so often they try to take an apprentice, but there’s no call for the skills they have to teach, and the art dies out again within a generation or two.

“…Our culture was on the way out, anyway. It was on its last legs before the war, and then we sent all our able-bodied to the front. We couldn’t have survived. We just got a quick death instead of a slow one,” they say, after a moment.

I’m jealous of that. I’m jealous of how they seem to have moved on from the past. Sometimes, I feel like I have; sometimes, I feel like I can’t. It’s a work in progress. It probably always will be.

“Why are you defending her?”

“Because you’re biased,” they shrug. “What are you scared of? What do you think she’s going to do?”

“I don’t know, and that’s what scares me. She was erratic during the war. Offering ceasefires, defecting, fraternising with the enemy, fighting her own side… Now she’s back. Just as unpredictable. Just as capable of killing. We have no data, we don’t know her objectives, all we know is that she fought a weapon that decimated the planet on even terms–”

“Ah, we’re gonna have to correct you there,” Mira says, with a rueful smile. “You have no data.”

My mouth snaps shut. I level my gaze at them, but I can’t sense a joke or a lie in their expression. “...You’ve got data on her? How?”

“She lives with those so-called ‘guardians’, right? The blonde one’s really chatty with people at the door – you know, salespeople, peddlers, that kind of thing. Some of the ones she speaks to are… well. You know. The traditional kind. Tekiya. A little money changes hands somewhere… You know the drill.”

This is why I respect Mira. They’re flaky, and their priorities are in the wrong place. But the moment you underestimate them, they show you why you shouldn’t. “So, what have you got?”

“Nothing that interesting, honestly.” We pause the discussion for a second as the waitress offers us a refill. My cup has emptied itself almost without me knowing. Order the same again, and Mira asks for one more sugar in theirs. When she’s safely away from our table, I gesture for Mira to continue. “She seems like a normal – well, maybe she’s a little strange, but she seems like she’s enjoying a normal life. She has a flock of ducks for pets, she’s a deep sleeper, she works the garden out back. Sometimes she goes out with her friends–”

“That’s another thing I don’t like,” I cut in. “I’ve kept tabs on those two, Sham and Nath, for a long time. They haven’t done anything interesting in hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. But the moment she comes along, they’re on her like flies on honey. Why? Isn’t it suspicious how every surviving weapon from that army just leapt to her side?”

Mira grimaces, but says nothing. They don’t have an answer for that. Three people who haven’t met for ten thousand years suddenly making a rendezvous in two years or less goes beyond coincidence. I take another sip of coffee and continue. “We need to find Tsih–”

“We really don’t,” they say flatly, their nose wrinkling in displeasure. “We’d rather work alone than with her, even if she is alive.”

Well… I can’t say I don’t understand what they’re talking about. Tsih had some… issues with her personality. From what I gathered, she acted like a child, but she may have been even older than I was. Unpredictable, too. It’s all empty conjecture, anyway. Tsih was the most well-equipped to fade into the background after the war. If she wants to stay hidden, we have no chance of finding her.

“Anyway, you’re exaggerating this and you know it. Sham and Nath can’t fight. You told us that yourself once. The weapons they relied on don’t exist any more.”

I am silent. She’s right, but she’s not airing her real criticism of me out loud. What Mira wants to say – what I know they want to say – is that it’s not our problem. They’re not ‘the enemy’ any more. They haven’t been for thousands of years. They don’t even know we’re alive, and they’re probably not plotting anything. Mira wants me to let it go.

On the ring finger of my left hand is a golden ring – a little worn by time, but still there. Needless to say, I’m not good at letting things go.

The discussion draws to a halt. Another cup of coffee comes and goes. I can almost taste the filter paper.

“...hah,” they sigh. “You’re going to get paranoid about this, aren’t you?”

“I’m head of intelligence. Being paranoid is my job.”

“Fine. Fine! Just so you know, we don’t wanna touch this one with a ten foot pole. But if it’ll stop you doing something drastic, we’ll go out and gather some info ourselves,” Mira says. “But if we can’t find anything, we drop it. You drop it. Agreed?”

I hesitate. I… don’t like this proposition. Deep down, I know that Mira is the best person to entrust this to. Good at infiltration, mostly unbiased, and crucially, they stand a chance at fighting their way out. Of the war machines of the past, Tsih’s whereabouts are unknown. Nath and Sham are unable to fight. And I haven’t lifted a gun myself in hundreds of years. But Mira never relied on high-tech weaponry; what they use is timeless, easy to replace. They’ve kept their skills sharp, too, holding on to those old traditions; of all of us, they’re easily the closest to their old combat strength.

But theoretically, that monster’s strength hasn’t degraded either. Her weapons were in storage with her, and she’s had no time for her skills to atrophy; for her, the war is a recent memory. She won against Mira before. There’s no reason she couldn’t again.

I can’t… lose Mira like that. We only meet once a year, and they drives me crazy when we do, but they’re as close a friend as I’ve ever had. I’ve known them for ten thousand years. They’re like a part of me. I sometimes scoff at their strange obsession with being a hero, but they definitely save people. Definitely.

“…If you feel like it’s dangerous, even for a second, pull out,” I say, making a flat gesture with my hand. “If you get info, it’s fine. If you don’t, it’s fine. I’ll back off either way. Just don’t put yourself at risk.”

“Yeah, yeah,” they say breezily.

“I’m serious, Mira.”

“We know. Hey, let’s talk about something else for a bit, huh? We only meet up once a year, so it seems a shame to waste it talking about serious stuff.” They wink conspiratorially. “We really gotta go out drinking again sometime. We got some manju for you, too.”

I sigh, but not unhappily. “You know manju are too sweet for me.”

“We know. But we just felt like you wanted some.”

“You’re not wrong. I was missing the taste, a little. And they’ll go well with the bitter coffee.”

We don’t speak about business any more than that – for the rest of the day, we’re just two very, very old friends – old enough to bicker, to tease, and not worry that we’ll take offence. I don’t know how we got this way, but I’m glad we did. I think my husband would be happy to know I’ve got a friend like this. I know he would.

This world, that my husband lived in – the world my husband loved – I won’t let anything happen to it. I won’t permit anybody to ruin it. Not Sora, or anyone else. Mira and I will get to the bottom of this. I promise it.

A/N: Two new characters to play with, whee! A couple things about this: firstly, this is probably as close to actual plot as you're going to get, so enjoy it while it lasts. Because I had to find a way to fold both characters into the 'verse, this ended up being more exposition and plot-based than I'd like, without the character exploration and stylistic quirks I usually go for. See it as a necessary evil for getting the characters introduced and usable; the development and fun can come later.

In regards to Alte, she was actually somewhat tricky to fit in, because she almost runs counter to the point of the setting. The Survivalverse setting is meant to be a kind of happy ending for the characters, since the canon endings are a little bitter, but there's not really a way for Alte's husband to be alive in the current time period. Her love for her husband is a deep part of her characterisation, so I don't want to write it out, either. But having her in the 'verse suggests, by proxy, that she's been milling around for 10k years, completely alone. But it's not so bad if she had a friend, right...?

Where Mira is concerned, all I have to say is I find them interesting, but might be a bit forgetful about their pronouns -- it's very much habitual to just put 'she' at this point, since the cast is so overwhelmingly female, but I've tried to remember. If you see any that slipped by, let me know.