In bits and pieces produced when destressing from crunchtime jitters. The usual.
---
Remember you are morta ...
... huh?
Wait, how did that go again?
---
No Reason
two: hiberna umbra
a Megaten Mishmash fic
by Griever
---
April 9th/10th, 2009
Iwatodai dorm rooftop
midnight
He skidded to a halt, one arm hanging limp at his side, the other steadying him against the concrete surface of the rooftop.
Then he was back in motion, driven by instinct to roll aside and out of the way as half-a-dozen slivers of sharp metal, wielded by grotesque parodies of limbs, skewed and slashed at the space his body had been occupying a moment ago.
Not all of them missed, though the worst he'd gotten from that was a shallow scratch several inches long.
That, and his uniform blazer now looked as if it had survived getting put through a combine harvester. Aside from the right sleeve, which was just gone ...
He supposed it was a blessing in disguise that he couldn't see what state his arm was in, or feel if, for that matter.
His attacker was _something_ that seemed to be made up entirely of arms coming from some sort of central mass, most of those holding one sort of blade or another and one waving around, of all things, an azure mask ... almost as if said mask was actually the thing's head, in fact, since the hand holding it insisted on keeping him within its field of vision. Or where he assumed the field of vision for something like that would be.
To make matters worse, the person who knew what this thing actually was - the name she'd called it told him fairly little, really, other than that - lay on the ground beside the rooftop access doorway, where she'd collapsed after this ... this _Shadow_ had thrown her against the wall.
From the way she wasn't moving, or even reacting, she was either unconscious or dead.
Add to that his arm, limp and apparently useless after he'd tried to use ... use _what_, exactly? Before she'd been incapacitated, Takeba had taken the silver device ... handgun? ... and put it to her head, intending to pull the trigger. He couldn't explain it, but it hadn't _looked_ like she was attempting to take the easy way out, and they'd as much said that it wasn't a weapon when he'd asked about it the night he'd first arrived.
'Why the hell did I do that?' He wondered, remembering picking the device up after it had been knocked from her grasp and putting it up to his own head, then pulling the trigger and ...
... the only thing he was _sure_ of was that it had blown up in his hand, and fortunately the blast had gone outwards.
He could have sword he'd heard something like the sound of shattering glass, and maybe it was the shock, but other than his arm, he felt ... energized. Almost irrationally giddy, in fact, and twitchy like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
The next thing he knew, the Shadow had leapt at him, blades first, and the world had blurred. Next thing he knew, he was looking at it recovering and was himself standing several meters away ...
The moon, it's face unnaturally large and colored by the baleful miasma that he could see everywhere around him, seemed to taunt him.
It was like a flash of lighting.
Suddenly, his nerves burned with a cold fire. Suddenly, it was as if the world were standing still.
Suddenly, everything around him was clear as day, instead of appearing only half-focused and somehow diffuse in the poor lighting.
And his mind was on fire.
He could smell it. See it. _Feel_ it.
Magatsuhi.
The creature struck again, and he evaded, knocking a blade that came close aside and lunging forward into the so-created opening in its defenses.
Familiar. This all felt so damnably familiar, when it had no right to. He absently noted that his right arm was mobile again, cocked back and then lashing out.
Arms interposed themselved between the blow and the main mass of the body, and with a screech - how the hell did it do that? It had no _mouth_, unless you counted the mask - the Shadow retreated for a moment.
One of its monochrome-black arms twitched where it lay, severed by the attack, and slowly dissolving into thin streamers of blackness that joined with the surrounding miasma.
On the stump that one of the mishappened limbs of his opponent ended in, something started to bubble and shift, then grow ...
"Oh no you don't!"
No way was he going to let it go and heal itself. His nerves flared again, and part of his mind that wasn't wholly on the matter at hand was amazed and taken aback when he saw black designs, outlined in pulsing blue-green, winding their way along his own arms.
Then he was in the air, and coming down through what seemed like a forest of blades, knocking some aside and ignoring others, as if knowing they wouldn't be enough to give him pause. With all his strength, and gathering all the Magatsuhi he could, he punched downwards.
It recoiled with almost feral motion, moving like a parody of some sort of giant spider, even as his fist continued past and downwards to strike into concrete.
Then the Magatsuhi, burning along the limb's surface ... ignited.
That was the only word he could imagine to describe it at the moment, as the air around him shimmered in something akin to heat haze which expanded almost explosively.
It was a diffuse and unfocused wave, but for all that, it was most certainly very much real and physical a phenomenon, the leading edge of the expanding area striking against the creature and knocking it back, off balance ...
There was no thought involved when he leapt straight into the forest of limbs again, though this time their flailing was chaotic and uncoordinated.
Momentum carried them onwards, since it appeared that while the Shadow was large in sheer volume of space that it took up, it was also quite a bit lighter than he'd thought it would be.
So much the better.
The edge of the rooftop disappeared from beneath his feet, and gravity took over ...
'Oh, look ... I can see my room from here,' the thought came unbidden as the wall of the dormitory building went past, windows and all, and the cold, hard pavement kept coming with all the more velocity.
With a yank, the changed his leverage, digging his fingers into the flesh of one of the limbs and bracing his legs against the main body.
He raised his right arm, letting the Magutsuhi collect there ...
Impact.
He drove the fist downwards, just as the jarring, leg-breaking impact came up from the soles of his feet, not softened at all by the intervening mass of Shadow.
His hand tore through the Shadow, then into the pavement below, before the energy it had been once again sheathed in was released.
***
April 10th, 2009
0015 hours
He'd left it behind in what he knew were its death throes, and that was that.
Or so he could recall. It was more of a daze that he'd found himself in than anything else, and that was without adding the sudden influx of memories to the mix.
As it was, part of him still had trouble with the fact that he'd not only gone hand-to-hand with something out of a horror novel, but hadn't needed to be carted off after plummeting several stories and landing on pavement. Either in a pine box or an ambulance, with most of the bones in his body broken.
Arisato Minato, in spite of the realization of what he was, or perhaps because of it, was one very confused young man. Kashima Naoki was simply getting used to occupying quarters again.
He'd recovered more than superficial awareness of his surroundings some time later - how much, he couldn't say, as his watch, and the better part of both shirt and jacket, were no longer with him.
'I liked that watch, damnit,' crossed his mind. 'Oh, hell ... my MP3 player. I just murdered my MP3 player ... two years of trying to cobble together a playlist, down the drain.'
Then he realized that he was, for all intents and purposes, half naked. It wasn't that he was cold. No, he could feel the chill of early spring air, but he himself wasn't really affected.
He greeted the realization that he could likely no longer feel that particular discomfort with mixed emotions, much as he had the first time. Or, much as Naoki had when it had happened to him, during a particularly nasty windstorm that left frost on the ground as well as on the ends of his hair.
Much more urgent was the concern about looking like he'd just had a nasty encounter with a demented lawnmower while ... well, this had to be Moonlight Bridge, and boy did _that_ bring up some uncomfortable memories.
His ... or rather, Minato's parents had died here a decade ago, in a car-crash.
He couldn't really remember that night clearly - it was all pain, and fire, and a deafening sound of metal being bent out of shape - but then, that was one experience he didn't necessarily want to remember very well.
Still, he momentarily had more pressing concerns, beyond memories of one life or another - ones that had to do with the fact that this wasn't a demon-infested post apocalyptic landscape, but a city full of living, breathing, easily offended people.
Joy.
Well, at least it was pretty late.
'Not many people out at this hour ...'
"Hey, you there! Yeah, you! The hell do you think you're doing here, ya hobo!"
He looked over his shoulder.
Five of them, which made a grand total of something like twenty chips on their shoulders, one swaying a bit. Drunk.
"What're you, deaf! Kyouchi-sama is talking to you, pretty-boy!"
One of them grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him around.
'Oh, you must to be joking.'
"Pff ... Kyouchi-aniki, looks like it's one of them Apathy Syndrome losers," the one who'd grabbed him said, looking over back towards the rest of the group.
Minato really couldn't stop the snicker.
"Wha ... hey, no, no he's not. Looks like we've got ourselves a joker here," the punk shoved him. To no effect but to bring himself off balance and stumble back.
'Hmm ... well, never let it be said that I turned down taking the obvious solution to a problem.'
"What the _fuck_ are you smiling about, bozu?" The punk recovered quickly, whipping out a switchblade.
"Oh, nothing," Minato grinned openly. "_Nice_ jacket."
***
April 10th, 2009
Tatsumi Memorial Hospital
1000 hours
"W ... where?"
"Easy there. That was quite a bump you took."
She winced at the light filtering into the room, and the general coloration. It wasn't white - that would have been unbearable, really - nor was it particularly garish, but Takeba Yukari decided that hospital colors were never a good thing to wake up to regardless.
Especially not when her head felt as if someone had used in lieu of a football.
The voice wasn't helping either, despite the realization that the tone and volume were really well within norms. It still made her want to cover her ears. That would require that she moved her hands, though, which would make her shift around slightly, which would likely lead to her head moving as well ... and so she settled for merely wincing.
"Mitsuru-senpai ... please, not so loud," she managed.
"Sorry," the voice came from beside the bed, at a much more tolerable volume this time. "Like I said, you took quite a bump, Takeba. The doctors say it's only a minor concussion, but you'll be here for a day or two more for observation."
"Oh."
"Takeba, I'm sorry to have to ask your this right now, but do you remember what happened last night? Anything at all could be important."
"... no, I just ..." Yukari paused. "No. I remember going up to the roof with Arisato-san, then ... nothing."
"... short term memory loss is to be expected," Kirijo Mitsuru sighed to herself.
"Senpai? There was a Shadow, wasn't there ...? What's wrong? Did ... did something happen to Arisato-san?"
"That's just it, Takeba. Somehow, the Shadow was defeated, but of the how ... we have no idea ..."
"And Arisato-san?"
"... he's missing."
***
"So, how is she?" A familiar voice jerked Mitsuru out of her musings.
The red-haired high-school senior spun, startled, before realizing who'd spoken.
"As well as can be expected ..." she offered, collecting herself. "Not as well as we could have hoped. Whatever happened, she was unconscious throughout. How is your arm?"
Sanada Akihiko grimaced, gesturing at the sling his left arm was resting in with his right. "Well, at least I don't have to stay here ... they're making me wear this thing, though. It'll seriously cut into my training ..."
"Akihiko," Mitsuru sighed in exasperation. "Are you _trying_ to make me angry?"
"R ... relax," the pale-haired young man took a half-step back, gulping nervously. He'd known Kirijo Mitsuru for a long while, and as such knew better than to argue the point. "I know I'll need to take it easy already, no need to rub it in."
"Be that as it may, it appears that we're back where we started from," she closed her eyes, bringing her fingers to her temples and trying to rub some of the nervous tension that had accumulated away. It didn't seem like it was helping.
Possibly because she'd been on her feet for the better part of the last 24 hours, continuously.
"I think we should get back to the dorm ... we both need sleep, and there's nothing we can do at the moment anyway. We're already missing our morning classes, and Ikutsuki-san said he'd cover for us."
Mitsuru looked like she was about to object.
"Look, I'll give Kurosawa-san a call, maybe send him Arisato's picture, ask him to keep an eye out ... it's better than we can do on our own right now."
"... alright," the redhead aquiesced grudgingly, though perhaps it was more because she was nearly falling asleep on her feet than for any other reason.
Still, she couldn't help but feel as if she'd failed somehow.
That was was happening was her fault.
Ironically, though she didn't know it, her longtime friend's thoughts were along those exact same lines, only in reference to himself.
***
April 10th, 2009
Paulonia Mall
1013 hours
"Much better," he grinned to himself, examining his reflection in a storefront window. Some things, he could accept. Others ... well, that was a different story.
How he'd been able to live the past two years with hair that got into his eyes pretty much constantly, he had no idea. Nor did he have any desire to rediscover the debatable advantages, if any existed.
That, fortunately, had been easily remedied.
Not only was the jacket really nice - comfortable worn-in leather, in fact - but it had also contained a rather nice surprise in the form of a wallet.
Well, the wallet itself, he'd dropped somewhere along the way.
The money was another thing altogether.
'Bit cheap for a -please, please don't kill me- fee, but I'll take what I can get.'
That impulse had been pure Naoki, as had the way he'd pretty much spent the whole night wandering around, enjoying.
It had taken him a while to realize just what it was that he was enjoying so much, though - the answer was rather obvious, in retrospect. After the Conception, within the infant creation that was the Vortex World ... Kagutsuchi had flared and dimmed, but even at its faintest had still been visible, obvious, and glaring.
He'd missed the night so _much_ it almost hurt to realize, and when he had, he'd laughed the longest, most joyful laugh he'd ever managed.
Warm food had been another thing that part of him had longed for ... and, he was going to damn well indulge it while he had the chance.
With a spring in his step, he started to follow his nose ... the food court had to be around here somewhere.
Now ...
... wait.
He was stopped dead in his tracks, slowly turning around to face another storefront. Blinking.
Some things about Arisato Minato, Kashima Naoki got along with fairly well. Others ... well, there was the hair thing, to name an example.
Starting at the window, he silently worked his jaw for a moment ...
Then he checked his 'acquired' wad of Yen, and grinned.
"Oh, hell yeah ... fortune has been kind to me today, that she has."
Last Naoki remembered, it had been 2003. He hadn't really given too much thought as to just what this meant ... until now.
It was the year two-thousand and nine ... he was standing in front of a video store ... he had money on him ... and there was a Ghost in the Shell: SAC and 2nd GIG bundle box-set calling out to him.
Life was good.
***
END hiberna umbra
***
---
For those in the know: Heat Wave. Divine Shot at point blank, with artistic license for execution. And no, I'm not really going to bother with maintaining the eight slot limit. I'll just throw in whatever I'll need for him to use, without any of the really ?berhax high level stuff.
In case you're wondering, I got 'hiberna umbra' from an english-to-latin translation thingy on the intrawebs. Supposed to mean 'winter's shade', or 'shade of winter', and is a reference to the driving motive of this particular chapter and the whole piece.
Besides, I really like the original Simon&Garfunkel version of 'A Hazy Shade of Winter', which may have something to do with it.
Anyone want to correct my babel!Latin, feel free.
-Griever
---
Remember you are morta ...
... huh?
Wait, how did that go again?
---
No Reason
two: hiberna umbra
a Megaten Mishmash fic
by Griever
---
April 9th/10th, 2009
Iwatodai dorm rooftop
midnight
He skidded to a halt, one arm hanging limp at his side, the other steadying him against the concrete surface of the rooftop.
Then he was back in motion, driven by instinct to roll aside and out of the way as half-a-dozen slivers of sharp metal, wielded by grotesque parodies of limbs, skewed and slashed at the space his body had been occupying a moment ago.
Not all of them missed, though the worst he'd gotten from that was a shallow scratch several inches long.
That, and his uniform blazer now looked as if it had survived getting put through a combine harvester. Aside from the right sleeve, which was just gone ...
He supposed it was a blessing in disguise that he couldn't see what state his arm was in, or feel if, for that matter.
His attacker was _something_ that seemed to be made up entirely of arms coming from some sort of central mass, most of those holding one sort of blade or another and one waving around, of all things, an azure mask ... almost as if said mask was actually the thing's head, in fact, since the hand holding it insisted on keeping him within its field of vision. Or where he assumed the field of vision for something like that would be.
To make matters worse, the person who knew what this thing actually was - the name she'd called it told him fairly little, really, other than that - lay on the ground beside the rooftop access doorway, where she'd collapsed after this ... this _Shadow_ had thrown her against the wall.
From the way she wasn't moving, or even reacting, she was either unconscious or dead.
Add to that his arm, limp and apparently useless after he'd tried to use ... use _what_, exactly? Before she'd been incapacitated, Takeba had taken the silver device ... handgun? ... and put it to her head, intending to pull the trigger. He couldn't explain it, but it hadn't _looked_ like she was attempting to take the easy way out, and they'd as much said that it wasn't a weapon when he'd asked about it the night he'd first arrived.
'Why the hell did I do that?' He wondered, remembering picking the device up after it had been knocked from her grasp and putting it up to his own head, then pulling the trigger and ...
... the only thing he was _sure_ of was that it had blown up in his hand, and fortunately the blast had gone outwards.
He could have sword he'd heard something like the sound of shattering glass, and maybe it was the shock, but other than his arm, he felt ... energized. Almost irrationally giddy, in fact, and twitchy like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
The next thing he knew, the Shadow had leapt at him, blades first, and the world had blurred. Next thing he knew, he was looking at it recovering and was himself standing several meters away ...
The moon, it's face unnaturally large and colored by the baleful miasma that he could see everywhere around him, seemed to taunt him.
It was like a flash of lighting.
Suddenly, his nerves burned with a cold fire. Suddenly, it was as if the world were standing still.
Suddenly, everything around him was clear as day, instead of appearing only half-focused and somehow diffuse in the poor lighting.
And his mind was on fire.
He could smell it. See it. _Feel_ it.
Magatsuhi.
The creature struck again, and he evaded, knocking a blade that came close aside and lunging forward into the so-created opening in its defenses.
Familiar. This all felt so damnably familiar, when it had no right to. He absently noted that his right arm was mobile again, cocked back and then lashing out.
Arms interposed themselved between the blow and the main mass of the body, and with a screech - how the hell did it do that? It had no _mouth_, unless you counted the mask - the Shadow retreated for a moment.
One of its monochrome-black arms twitched where it lay, severed by the attack, and slowly dissolving into thin streamers of blackness that joined with the surrounding miasma.
On the stump that one of the mishappened limbs of his opponent ended in, something started to bubble and shift, then grow ...
"Oh no you don't!"
No way was he going to let it go and heal itself. His nerves flared again, and part of his mind that wasn't wholly on the matter at hand was amazed and taken aback when he saw black designs, outlined in pulsing blue-green, winding their way along his own arms.
Then he was in the air, and coming down through what seemed like a forest of blades, knocking some aside and ignoring others, as if knowing they wouldn't be enough to give him pause. With all his strength, and gathering all the Magatsuhi he could, he punched downwards.
It recoiled with almost feral motion, moving like a parody of some sort of giant spider, even as his fist continued past and downwards to strike into concrete.
Then the Magatsuhi, burning along the limb's surface ... ignited.
That was the only word he could imagine to describe it at the moment, as the air around him shimmered in something akin to heat haze which expanded almost explosively.
It was a diffuse and unfocused wave, but for all that, it was most certainly very much real and physical a phenomenon, the leading edge of the expanding area striking against the creature and knocking it back, off balance ...
There was no thought involved when he leapt straight into the forest of limbs again, though this time their flailing was chaotic and uncoordinated.
Momentum carried them onwards, since it appeared that while the Shadow was large in sheer volume of space that it took up, it was also quite a bit lighter than he'd thought it would be.
So much the better.
The edge of the rooftop disappeared from beneath his feet, and gravity took over ...
'Oh, look ... I can see my room from here,' the thought came unbidden as the wall of the dormitory building went past, windows and all, and the cold, hard pavement kept coming with all the more velocity.
With a yank, the changed his leverage, digging his fingers into the flesh of one of the limbs and bracing his legs against the main body.
He raised his right arm, letting the Magutsuhi collect there ...
Impact.
He drove the fist downwards, just as the jarring, leg-breaking impact came up from the soles of his feet, not softened at all by the intervening mass of Shadow.
His hand tore through the Shadow, then into the pavement below, before the energy it had been once again sheathed in was released.
***
April 10th, 2009
0015 hours
He'd left it behind in what he knew were its death throes, and that was that.
Or so he could recall. It was more of a daze that he'd found himself in than anything else, and that was without adding the sudden influx of memories to the mix.
As it was, part of him still had trouble with the fact that he'd not only gone hand-to-hand with something out of a horror novel, but hadn't needed to be carted off after plummeting several stories and landing on pavement. Either in a pine box or an ambulance, with most of the bones in his body broken.
Arisato Minato, in spite of the realization of what he was, or perhaps because of it, was one very confused young man. Kashima Naoki was simply getting used to occupying quarters again.
He'd recovered more than superficial awareness of his surroundings some time later - how much, he couldn't say, as his watch, and the better part of both shirt and jacket, were no longer with him.
'I liked that watch, damnit,' crossed his mind. 'Oh, hell ... my MP3 player. I just murdered my MP3 player ... two years of trying to cobble together a playlist, down the drain.'
Then he realized that he was, for all intents and purposes, half naked. It wasn't that he was cold. No, he could feel the chill of early spring air, but he himself wasn't really affected.
He greeted the realization that he could likely no longer feel that particular discomfort with mixed emotions, much as he had the first time. Or, much as Naoki had when it had happened to him, during a particularly nasty windstorm that left frost on the ground as well as on the ends of his hair.
Much more urgent was the concern about looking like he'd just had a nasty encounter with a demented lawnmower while ... well, this had to be Moonlight Bridge, and boy did _that_ bring up some uncomfortable memories.
His ... or rather, Minato's parents had died here a decade ago, in a car-crash.
He couldn't really remember that night clearly - it was all pain, and fire, and a deafening sound of metal being bent out of shape - but then, that was one experience he didn't necessarily want to remember very well.
Still, he momentarily had more pressing concerns, beyond memories of one life or another - ones that had to do with the fact that this wasn't a demon-infested post apocalyptic landscape, but a city full of living, breathing, easily offended people.
Joy.
Well, at least it was pretty late.
'Not many people out at this hour ...'
"Hey, you there! Yeah, you! The hell do you think you're doing here, ya hobo!"
He looked over his shoulder.
Five of them, which made a grand total of something like twenty chips on their shoulders, one swaying a bit. Drunk.
"What're you, deaf! Kyouchi-sama is talking to you, pretty-boy!"
One of them grabbed him by the shoulder, spinning him around.
'Oh, you must to be joking.'
"Pff ... Kyouchi-aniki, looks like it's one of them Apathy Syndrome losers," the one who'd grabbed him said, looking over back towards the rest of the group.
Minato really couldn't stop the snicker.
"Wha ... hey, no, no he's not. Looks like we've got ourselves a joker here," the punk shoved him. To no effect but to bring himself off balance and stumble back.
'Hmm ... well, never let it be said that I turned down taking the obvious solution to a problem.'
"What the _fuck_ are you smiling about, bozu?" The punk recovered quickly, whipping out a switchblade.
"Oh, nothing," Minato grinned openly. "_Nice_ jacket."
***
April 10th, 2009
Tatsumi Memorial Hospital
1000 hours
"W ... where?"
"Easy there. That was quite a bump you took."
She winced at the light filtering into the room, and the general coloration. It wasn't white - that would have been unbearable, really - nor was it particularly garish, but Takeba Yukari decided that hospital colors were never a good thing to wake up to regardless.
Especially not when her head felt as if someone had used in lieu of a football.
The voice wasn't helping either, despite the realization that the tone and volume were really well within norms. It still made her want to cover her ears. That would require that she moved her hands, though, which would make her shift around slightly, which would likely lead to her head moving as well ... and so she settled for merely wincing.
"Mitsuru-senpai ... please, not so loud," she managed.
"Sorry," the voice came from beside the bed, at a much more tolerable volume this time. "Like I said, you took quite a bump, Takeba. The doctors say it's only a minor concussion, but you'll be here for a day or two more for observation."
"Oh."
"Takeba, I'm sorry to have to ask your this right now, but do you remember what happened last night? Anything at all could be important."
"... no, I just ..." Yukari paused. "No. I remember going up to the roof with Arisato-san, then ... nothing."
"... short term memory loss is to be expected," Kirijo Mitsuru sighed to herself.
"Senpai? There was a Shadow, wasn't there ...? What's wrong? Did ... did something happen to Arisato-san?"
"That's just it, Takeba. Somehow, the Shadow was defeated, but of the how ... we have no idea ..."
"And Arisato-san?"
"... he's missing."
***
"So, how is she?" A familiar voice jerked Mitsuru out of her musings.
The red-haired high-school senior spun, startled, before realizing who'd spoken.
"As well as can be expected ..." she offered, collecting herself. "Not as well as we could have hoped. Whatever happened, she was unconscious throughout. How is your arm?"
Sanada Akihiko grimaced, gesturing at the sling his left arm was resting in with his right. "Well, at least I don't have to stay here ... they're making me wear this thing, though. It'll seriously cut into my training ..."
"Akihiko," Mitsuru sighed in exasperation. "Are you _trying_ to make me angry?"
"R ... relax," the pale-haired young man took a half-step back, gulping nervously. He'd known Kirijo Mitsuru for a long while, and as such knew better than to argue the point. "I know I'll need to take it easy already, no need to rub it in."
"Be that as it may, it appears that we're back where we started from," she closed her eyes, bringing her fingers to her temples and trying to rub some of the nervous tension that had accumulated away. It didn't seem like it was helping.
Possibly because she'd been on her feet for the better part of the last 24 hours, continuously.
"I think we should get back to the dorm ... we both need sleep, and there's nothing we can do at the moment anyway. We're already missing our morning classes, and Ikutsuki-san said he'd cover for us."
Mitsuru looked like she was about to object.
"Look, I'll give Kurosawa-san a call, maybe send him Arisato's picture, ask him to keep an eye out ... it's better than we can do on our own right now."
"... alright," the redhead aquiesced grudgingly, though perhaps it was more because she was nearly falling asleep on her feet than for any other reason.
Still, she couldn't help but feel as if she'd failed somehow.
That was was happening was her fault.
Ironically, though she didn't know it, her longtime friend's thoughts were along those exact same lines, only in reference to himself.
***
April 10th, 2009
Paulonia Mall
1013 hours
"Much better," he grinned to himself, examining his reflection in a storefront window. Some things, he could accept. Others ... well, that was a different story.
How he'd been able to live the past two years with hair that got into his eyes pretty much constantly, he had no idea. Nor did he have any desire to rediscover the debatable advantages, if any existed.
That, fortunately, had been easily remedied.
Not only was the jacket really nice - comfortable worn-in leather, in fact - but it had also contained a rather nice surprise in the form of a wallet.
Well, the wallet itself, he'd dropped somewhere along the way.
The money was another thing altogether.
'Bit cheap for a -please, please don't kill me- fee, but I'll take what I can get.'
That impulse had been pure Naoki, as had the way he'd pretty much spent the whole night wandering around, enjoying.
It had taken him a while to realize just what it was that he was enjoying so much, though - the answer was rather obvious, in retrospect. After the Conception, within the infant creation that was the Vortex World ... Kagutsuchi had flared and dimmed, but even at its faintest had still been visible, obvious, and glaring.
He'd missed the night so _much_ it almost hurt to realize, and when he had, he'd laughed the longest, most joyful laugh he'd ever managed.
Warm food had been another thing that part of him had longed for ... and, he was going to damn well indulge it while he had the chance.
With a spring in his step, he started to follow his nose ... the food court had to be around here somewhere.
Now ...
... wait.
He was stopped dead in his tracks, slowly turning around to face another storefront. Blinking.
Some things about Arisato Minato, Kashima Naoki got along with fairly well. Others ... well, there was the hair thing, to name an example.
Starting at the window, he silently worked his jaw for a moment ...
Then he checked his 'acquired' wad of Yen, and grinned.
"Oh, hell yeah ... fortune has been kind to me today, that she has."
Last Naoki remembered, it had been 2003. He hadn't really given too much thought as to just what this meant ... until now.
It was the year two-thousand and nine ... he was standing in front of a video store ... he had money on him ... and there was a Ghost in the Shell: SAC and 2nd GIG bundle box-set calling out to him.
Life was good.
***
END hiberna umbra
***
---
For those in the know: Heat Wave. Divine Shot at point blank, with artistic license for execution. And no, I'm not really going to bother with maintaining the eight slot limit. I'll just throw in whatever I'll need for him to use, without any of the really ?berhax high level stuff.
In case you're wondering, I got 'hiberna umbra' from an english-to-latin translation thingy on the intrawebs. Supposed to mean 'winter's shade', or 'shade of winter', and is a reference to the driving motive of this particular chapter and the whole piece.
Besides, I really like the original Simon&Garfunkel version of 'A Hazy Shade of Winter', which may have something to do with it.
Anyone want to correct my babel!Latin, feel free.
-Griever
