Chapter CLXXI: Double Feature
Shakespeare’s punishment wound up being several different things all bound up together. Firstly, he had to clean up the mess left behind by his self-delivering chocolates, using nothing more than a mop, a bucket, and his own physical strength. Secondly, he was on two weeks’ probation, wherein he was not allowed to eat meals on Servant meal days, write anything down except for the purposes of communicating with someone else in the facility, or attend movie night with the rest of us. He also had to write letters of apology to all of those affected by his antics, with the caveat that his probation would be extended if he didn’t finish them before it was scheduled to end.
It was even reinforced by Command Spell, just to show exactly how serious Marie was about all of it. Ritsuka, who might normally have spoken up and made a case for being kinder, gentler, and more understanding, went along with it without any protest.
Someone else might have called Shakespeare’s punishment a little excessive, but anyone who understood what had happened should have come away with the truth of the matter: Marie was making an example out of him. There were plenty of allowances being made for the various personalities in the facility — it was half the reason Da Vinci had even gone so far as to focus any attention on getting the simulator back up and running in full — and she was perfectly willing to accommodate the needs and desires of our staff and Servants, as and when it was feasible.
Like Nero’s weekly trips to Rome for a bath, or the fact that she was allowing Da Vinci to build a Roman bath inside the facility just for Nero’s sake, or the fact that everyone was basically allowed to do whatever they wanted with their room as long as they didn’t break anything that would be harder to replace, like the plumbing or the wiring.
There were limits to those allowances, however. Bickering and solving disputes in the simulator were one thing, because it was just unreasonable to expect everyone to get along all of the time without any friction, but playing cruel pranks for your own amusement or abusing those privileges would have consequences, and Marie wasn’t afraid to dole them out if she had to.
If I was honest, I would have expected Jeanne Alter or Mordred to be the first ones to really act out. The fact it was Shakespeare instead was a bit of a surprise.
Naturally, he didn’t accept his punishment with any particular grace. It was Shakespeare; of course he was melodramatic about it, spouting nonsense that sounded like it came straight out of one of his plays. Anyone listening might have been forgiven for thinking he was Mercutio, lamenting the tragedy of his own early death and cursing his misfortune.
He still obeyed. I think he understood just how big of a misstep he’d made, no matter what his motivation might have been at the end of the day, and just how easily his head could have been on the literal chopping block instead of the metaphorical one. The fact that most of the other Servants had been kind of annoyed by the whole episode — with a few notable exceptions, like Bellamy, who looked like he wanted to say something but didn’t dare, and Jeanne Alter, who didn’t seem to know whether she was supposed to be angry or not — didn’t help his case at all.
Either way, he might not have taken his punishment without complaint, but he did take it, and it seemed to stick well enough. Once the whole thing passed and the miniature crisis was resolved, things went essentially back to normal.
Mostly. If Ritsuka and Mash had been hovering around each other before, then having Mash’s feelings all but broadcasted through the whole cafeteria had only made it worse. It didn’t seem to affect their ability to perform together, not as our skirmishes in the simulator proved, but when they were together in a room with nothing else to distract them, there was a sort of…gravity between them. Like a pair of stars being slowly pulled into each other’s orbit, never quite making it far enough in to actually collide together.
If it impacted their ability to work together, then I would have stepped in and forced them to air everything and resolve it all. Since it hadn’t yet gotten to that point, however, I felt weird about the idea of interfering in their…whatever it was that was really going on between them.
Even Rika seemed uncertain how to navigate around this new dynamic of theirs, because she hadn’t teased them about it at all. That was probably a good thing; I think Mash’s face might actually have combusted if she did.
It honestly would have been easier if they had decided they both liked each other and started making out. Maybe not less awkward, because I didn’t need to live in a world where they were late to team meetings or behind schedule because they lost track of time sucking each other’s tonsils out, but I would have had a better idea of how to handle them.
In any case, the chaos and nonsense that had come with Valentine’s Day left with Valentine’s Day, and February slowly started to slip away. Every day, I waited for word on what would be waiting for us in the next Singularity and dreaded the possibility that it really might be Brockton Bay and Earth Bet.
Talking to Marie had helped at least some. But the not knowing was still the worst part of it. The speculation. The uncertainty. Not knowing what I was going to find when we Rayshifted and whether anything more than the desolate remains of Scion’s rampage would greet me.
On top of that, we had gone through the other five Singularities in less than five months as an average, and now two more had already passed and we didn’t even know what to expect of the next one, not a time period, not a location, nothing at all aside from the vague nonsense Solomon had tossed in my face at the end of London. A whole other year had seemed like such a long time back when we were getting ready to deploy there, and yet now it seemed to be slipping away from us without much progress at all.
Forgetting entirely about the next Singularity’s contents and what we would face there, it worried me that we were taking so long to find out what to expect. The time between deployments seemed to grow longer between each one, and where we had gone into Orléans only a couple of weeks after Fuyuki — just long enough to get back on our feet after the Sabotage — now the stretch between London and America seemed interminable.
After the American Singularity, there would be just two more for us to face. Two more, and we could reverse the Incineration and save the world. But if Flauros was to be believed, we only had until December 31st, until the first stroke of midnight on the last day of the year, and if it took us anywhere near this long to find and prepare for those last two Singularities, that might not be enough time to do it all.
I didn’t see any reason for him to lie, not right then. He’d been certain of his victory, and the only purpose it would have served would be to make us hurry where we should wait and take our time. When it was taking this long just to pin down the time and place of each Singularity to deploy into, what would be the point?
“Now!” shouted Ritsuka. “Jeanne Alter! Your Noble Phantasm!”
A miasma of dark energy surged to life around Jeanne Alter, and it sparked into hellish crimson flames that, even in a simulation, were so hot I could feel them even from where I stood. Jeanne Alter lifted her sword, pointed it tip-first at Altera, and with a vicious grin, announced, “La Grondement du Haine!”
At a point beneath the blade, the flames surrounding her gathered, and then they lashed out in a line and slithered across the empty plateau like a snake. Altera made a valiant attempt at dodging and avoiding it, but it swerved and curved to follow her, tracking her unerringly like a heat-seeking missile.
There had to be a distance limitation or something, some point at which the magical energy required to keep it going would either dissipate or become so costly that Jeanne Alter couldn’t maintain it, but we hadn’t found it yet. Mostly because the majority of the opponents we faced were close range fighters who were inside that range and therefore vulnerable, but at some point, we should test it — once Da Vinci got the simulator set up to accurately track and simulate magical energy usage.
Despite her best attempts, Altera couldn’t dodge forever, and the AI wasn’t quite smart enough to think of simply getting too far away for the flames to follow. Eventually, a mistimed landing caught her, and the fire split to encircle her in pillars of blazing flame. They twisted and turned and spun, and we all had a single moment, a split second, to see the first stake as it thrust up and through her foot before the walls closed in.
Altera did not scream. Neither had Jeanne Alter, but the Jeanne Alter we’d faced was the one currently standing in front of Ritsuka and not a simulated version; she had cursed at us instead, cussing up a storm about cheap shots and sucker punches. Whether the real Altera would have screamed, I wasn’t sure, but I was thinking she wouldn’t. She hadn’t, after all, when Gáe Bolg stabbed her through the heart, no matter how painful it must have been.
When the flames cleared, there was no sign of Altera. I hadn’t been sure if the version we fought could have survived Jeanne Alter’s Noble Phantasm, even with the Grail healing her wounds, so I’d erred on the side of caution and decided no.
“That was the bitch you faced in Rome?” Jeanne Alter asked, lip curling. “She wasn’t so tough.”
“That was a bit easier than I remember it being,” Ritsuka agreed. He looked over at me. “Senpai?”
“I didn’t take it easy on you, if that’s what you’re asking,” I told him. “But the AI can only mimic her based upon what data Chaldea collected during our battle, so there are limits to how creative she can be and how skillfully she uses what she has.”
All we could do while we waited was train, prepare, and relax so that we didn’t stress ourselves out too much. Going back and fighting the enemies that had given us so much trouble before seemed like a worthwhile way of teaching the twins how to think on their feet a little faster and coordinate better with the Servants in our roster.
From next to me, Marie added, “She would have been more faithfully replicated if we had a fuller scan of her Saint Graph, but seeing as she was never registered as a Servant of Chaldea and therefore never completely recorded by the FATE System, this is the best you can expect.”
“What?” Jeanne Alter demanded. “You’re saying this was easy mode? Fucking bullshit!”
“You have access to all of the non-classified records, the same as any other Servant!” Marie snapped back at her. “You can replay the battle any time you want and see exactly how powerful she was as an enemy!”
“Wait,” said Rika, “we can do that? For real, just pop in a recording of the fight and play it back like a movie?”
“Yes!” said Marie. “Didn’t you…” She stopped, grimaced, and dragged a hand down her face. “Ugh. No, of course you didn’t. We were in such a rush over Singularity F that the new inductees were never given the full orientation course, were they?”
The twins exchanged a look, and Rika said, “I mean, we were just pushed through a bunch of tests and thrown into a match in the simulator before we met Mash. That’s why we were falling asleep on you, Boss Lady.”
“Sorry,” Ritsuka said, nodding his agreement. “We never did apologize to you for that, Director. We didn’t mean to disrespect you.”
“Probably better that you didn’t,” Marie admitted grudgingly. “Me throwing you out…was probably the only reason you two weren’t there with the rest of the Master candidates when…”
When the bombs went off and all the rest of us were either killed or incapacitated. And then I would be carrying the weight of this entire venture on my shoulders alone. I was glad that I wasn’t, if only because I had a buffer between me and the more boisterous personalities, like Nero.
“It might not have gone the way we all wanted it to, but I’m glad that things happened the way they did,” Mash said. She gave the twins a smile. “After all, if Senpai hadn’t been there to find me in the Rayshift Chamber, I might not have survived long enough to form a contract with them and become a Demi-Servant.”
“Aw, shucks, Cinnabon!” said Rika, pretending to scuff her foot bashfully. Her smile gave her away.
“Ugh,” said Jeanne Alter. “And here I thought I was going to have one over on Super Bitch and the others.” She scoffed. “At least I don’t have egg on my face from trying to claim I soloed the big, bad Attila that everyone had trouble with before.”
“Mash has also undergone a…” What had Da Vinci called it? “Saint Graph Ascension since then.”
“I-I don’t think it made me that much stronger, Miss Taylor,” Mash demurred humbly. “A-and anyway, it’s not really a competition, is it? This was all about seeing how far we’ve come since we faced these enemies, so the only people we have to be better than are the ones who faced her the first time.”
“Well said, Mash,” Marie agreed.
In that regard… Well, yes, they had done better than when we first fought Altera. I wasn’t sure that was quite as high a bar to clear as it might have been otherwise, though. Not only because of the AI’s limitations, but also because it was an enemy we’d already faced and overcome, so there was nothing the simulation could have thrown at them that they didn’t already know about.
It was a frustrating problem. The AI could only mimic what we ourselves had seen, which meant there weren’t many ways for it to surprise us, and that would breed complacency. Skirmishes between our current roster really would be more worthwhile than going back and running through a gauntlet of our old enemies.
“Sure, sure, rainbows and unicorns, sugar, spice, and everything nice, friendship is the real magic,” Jeanne Alter drawled. “Are we loading up another simulation, or is this party done with?”
If Aífe was there with us, she probably would have given Jeanne Alter a slap to the back of the head.
I checked the time. “It’ll be dinnertime, soon,” I announced. “I think we can call it here for today. We’ll save Herakles and Caenis for another time.”
The twins let out twin sighs of relief.
“Not gonna lie, I’m not looking forward to that,” Rika admitted. “Herk and the Sea Urchin just had so much hax, it was super unfair.”
“Sea Urchin?” her brother asked her.
“Because she’s got a prickly personality?” Rika said. Ritsuka made a face, not entirely convinced by her logic, and while I could see where she was coming from, I wasn’t either. Rika wasn’t oblivious to it. “Look, I couldn’t come up with anything better, okay? We knew her for, like, five minutes, and when she wasn’t talking down to us, she was cussing up a storm.”
“Hey,” said Jeanne Alter, sounding annoyed, “just what are you trying to imply with that?”
To cut off the argument before it could really gather steam, I pulled the metaphorical plug on the simulation, and whatever Rika might have been about to say in response died before it could even make it out of her mouth. The Spanish plain we’d been standing on vanished around me in a blur of dissolving pixels and static, taking everyone else with it.
A moment later, I came back to myself in the simulator room, and despite the fact that my mind told me I had spent the last couple hours standing, walking, or even running around our old battlefields, my body was stiff and sore from sitting around so motionlessly for that entire time. I had to roll my shoulders and stretch as I climbed out of the VR pod to relieve some of the tension.
I was going to take a nice, long bath before going to bed tonight. It might not be quite as good as the one in Rome, but Jackie and I could make do with the tiny tub in my room’s adjoined bathroom, because a shower just wasn’t going to cut it today.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
As though summoned by my thoughts of her, Jackie appeared at my side and greeted me with, “Welcome back, Mommy.”
“Hi, Jackie,” I greeted her in return, smiling a little. “Did you like watching our exercises?”
Jackie nodded. “It wasn’t as fun as being there ourselves, but we got to see some of the bad guys Mommy fought before. Some of them were pretty scary.”
“Trust me, kid,” El-Melloi II said like some kind of grizzled veteran, “that Altera was a lot more terrifying in person.”
“Although the trick we used to beat her was kind of silly in hindsight,” Arash added. He smiled. “Don’t you think? Shouting ‘Attila!’ at her from every angle sounds like something that should have failed miserably.”
“We were fortunate that it did not,” Siegfried agreed. “I’m only sorry that I couldn’t have been there myself to lend my aid, however paltry it might have been.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Lord Siegfried!” Bradamante insisted. “I’m certain you would have contributed greatly to the battle!”
“She was a most formidable foe! Mm-mm!” Nero said. “Any aid at all would have been welcome!”
“Hold on, back up a step,” Jeanne Alter butted in. “Did I just hear that bullshit right? You tripped up that Attila bitch by shouting her name at her?”
“Yeah, Arash is right, it does sound kind of silly now, doesn’t it?” said Ritsuka.
“It was because she wasn’t using the name Attila that I thought it might mean something if we did,” I reasoned. “We were low on options and trying to find something that would stick. It just turned out that the name Attila was traumatic for her, for whatever reason. She never had the chance to explain why.”
“Maybe when we see her again, Senpai can ask,” Rika said slyly.
I wasn’t sure I could imagine that. Would she even remember that was how we beat her in Rome? Would she hold a grudge? Without knowing how strongly that fight had impacted her, there was no way to say.
“You think we’ll see her again, Senpai?” Mash asked.
Rika shrugged. “Eh. I give it fifty-fifty. The Law of Narrative Conservation says she’s gotta show up at least one more time, doesn’t it?”
The Law of what?
“You’re making that up,” Jeanne Alter accused.
“Am not!” Rika defended herself immediately.
“I think what Senpai is talking about is Chekhov’s Gun.” Mash paused long enough to sigh. “But that’s something that only exists in fiction, so I’m not sure what that has to do with whether or not we’ll ever meet Altera again.”
Rika gave her an incredulous look. “We’re living lives out of a fantasy novel, Cinnabon. I’m not ruling anything out!”
As silly as she could get, there were times when I felt the exact same way. Not, of course, that our lives were run by narrative conventions or whatever, but that so much ridiculous stuff had happened that I didn’t know why I was ever surprised by anything anymore, because everything seemed possible at this point.
“Speaking of narratives and fantasies,” I began; it wasn’t the smoothest segue, “have you picked a movie for tonight, Rika? It’s your turn, isn’t it?”
Panic crossed Rika’s face. “Oh crap, I forgot all about that!”
“Say it ain’t so,” Ritsuka teased her. Jeanne Alter sniggered.
Rika ignored them and turned to me. “Senpai!” She pressed her hands together as though praying. “Uh, class dismissed?”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Sure. Just make sure you don’t skip dinner.”
“Blasphemy!” Rika chirped, and then grabbed Nero by the wrist and dragged her out of the room. “Come on, Best Buddy, we’ve gotta go find a movie to watch for later on tonight! Something amazing, something incredible, a real classic!”
“Of course!” Nero agreed, and she didn’t resist.
In their wake, Ritsuka let out a sigh. “I should probably go and make sure she picks something good instead of something incredibly niche. You coming, Mash?”
“O-oh!” Mash gave him a smile, cheeks tinged just the slightest bit pink. “Yes, of course, Senpai!”
They left, following after Rika and Nero, and once they were gone, Jeanne Alter scoffed. “Those two are so obvious, even I can see it.” She raised her hand in an irreverent wave. “I’m going to go kill some time until dinner. Give me a holler when it’s time to eat.”
She vanished into spirit form, and Marie’s mouth drew into a tight scowl, but she held her tongue — thinking, probably, that there was no point in scolding someone who probably wasn’t even still there. The skin of my prosthetic prickled as Jeanne Alter passed me by.
“Oh,” said Siegfried. “She’s gone. I was hoping we could spar together once or twice, but it seems like that won’t be happening.” He looked towards Arash next. “Lord Arash, if there’s nothing else competing for your time, could I trouble you…?”
Arash smiled a friendly smile. “Sure, I don’t see why not. Come to think of it, we’ve never had a chance to go toe to toe before, have we?”
Siegfried returned the smile. “We have not. Despite being an Archer, your skills with a blade are something to behold. I look forward to testing them against my own.”
“Would a threeway perhaps be out of the question?” Bradamante asked almost hesitantly.
El-Melloi II choked on his own spit. “Ph-phrasing, Bradamante. Please think of the phrasing.”
“The more, the merrier,” Arash said, ignoring the innuendo entirely. Bradamante smiled so broadly that it could have lit up the room.
El-Melloi II looked very much as though he was regretting all of his life choices, or maybe like he was praying to some god or another for deliverance. “I’m leaving,” he announced, and then without saying anything else or waiting for a response, he left. Off to play video games back in his room, I assumed, or maybe take a smoke break. It went both ways with him.
“Just remember not to overload the simulator!” Marie ordered the Servants.
The three of them offered acknowledgements of varying respectfulness, and then Arash went over to the console and started setting up the scenario. “Spanish plains?” he asked the others. “Mount Etna? I think London’s a little too crowded, so it’s probably better to pick a place where we have a lot of room to move around, but I’m not sure we want to just have flatland for as far as the eye can see.”
“Perhaps the Alps?” suggested Siegfried. “It’s been quite some time since last I saw my homeland. It might be nice to return there for our match.”
“I have no complaints!” Bradamante said.
Seeing that they had everything in hand, Marie left, and I took Jackie’s hand and led her out of the simulator room after Marie, heading off towards the library. There was a Dickens novel that I hadn’t finished reading to her yet; that was as worthwhile a way of spending the next hour and a half as any other, especially since Jackie seemed enamored with Oliver Twist. I think she enjoyed the fantasy of an orphan finding a family amongst the people who cared for the mother he never knew.
The parallels did not escape me either.
Sometimes, it still felt strange to have Jackie in my life. To read to her as my mother had read to me when I was a little girl, using the same books I had been raised on. To treat her like she really was my daughter who would one day grow up, go off to college, fall in love, and have kids of her own. To be her mother.
If you could see me now, Theo, would you hate me? Envy me? Curse me? Or would you smile and say you were happy for me?
I think he was one of the ones I dreaded having to face in a world after Scion. I wouldn’t shy from it, because I deserved whatever condemnation he might have for the whole Aster situation, but bonding with Jackie had given me just a glimpse of what sort of pain he must have experienced then, and I…I wasn’t sure if it would be worse or not if he did just forgive me for it.
When dinner rolled around, I marked our place in the book, set it aside, and together, with Aífe trailing behind us to obfuscate her own reading habits, Jackie and I made our way to the cafeteria, where several of our Servants were already waiting to partake in their weekly meal. With a thought, I reached down the line connecting me to Jeanne Alter and told her, Dinnertime.
Yeah, yeah, was her reply. If it was possible for mental voices to sound distracted, hers did. I’ll be there in a minute.
I wondered what she did with her free time, but decided against peeking through her eyes to look. As long as it didn’t endanger anyone, it really wasn’t any of my business, so there was no need to invade her privacy like that. I also didn’t relish the thought of catching her in the middle of some passionate, personal stress relief.
If that was what she was doing, I just hoped she washed her hands afterwards.
Jackie and I had already gone up to Emiya, gotten our trays and our meals, and we were halfway through dinner by the time the twins and Mash came through the door, only a few minutes behind Jeanne Alter. By that point, most of the other Servants who regularly ate were already there and eating, too, with the obvious exception of Shakespeare, who wouldn’t be allowed a meal again until next week, when his punishment was supposed to be over.
When they sat down at the table with us a few minutes later — Rika sinking into her chair with a relieved sigh — I asked her, “Did you get your movie picked out?”
“Yup!” she chirped. “It’s a double feature, and Jackie is definitely going to like the second one!”
“We will?” asked Jackie, completely guileless.
“For sure!” Rika put a finger to her lips and winked. “Although the first one might be a little scary, so make sure to stay close to your mama, okay? And keep it a secret! I want it to be a surprise!”
“Okay,” Jackie said simply, and then she went back to her food.
I turned an arched eyebrow Ritsuka’s way, expecting that he would offer some kind of explanation. He didn’t disappoint.
“They were shown together when they first aired in Japan,” he told me. “The second one…it’s usually meant to soften the blow from the first one’s ending.”
Didn’t that sound ominous? I hadn’t heard of anything like that before myself, so I had to assume it was either a Japanese thing that probably hadn’t made it to America on Earth Bet thanks to Leviathan’s attack or it was something that didn’t exist on Bet at all because of the divergences.
“Have you seen either of them before?” I asked Mash. In hindsight, it was probably a bit of a stupid question, because movie watching wouldn’t have been on Marisbury’s list of things necessary to the success of his Demi-Servant project and I wasn’t sure how much Romani had actually been able to sneak past him or how much Marisbury had even cared to stop Romani in the first place.
Mash shook her head. “I’ve never seen either movie before myself, but Senpai explained them to me, and they sounded interesting. I’m looking forward to it!”
Rika gave me a leer and let out a low chuckle. “I wanna see if I can get Senpai to shed a tear or two.”
Amusement bubbled up in my stomach, and I felt my lips curl up just the slightest. Did I really seem so unflappable that she would start crowing victory over misty eyes and a sniffle? Even after everything that had happened at the end of the last Singularity, when Solomon himself called me out for ‘getting soft?’
This girl could have such strange priorities, sometimes.
The rest of dinner was finished without incident. When Marie showed up, the twins asked her if she would be at the movie night tonight to watch their double feature with us and the Servants, but Marie begged off, citing her work and the importance of pinning down the details of the next Singularity as quickly as possible. No amount of pleading from Rika was enough to persuade her otherwise, and when Rika turned to me for help, I couldn’t bring myself to give it.
Much as I agreed that Marie needed to take time to herself and relax in-between all of her work, this time, I wanted answers too much to press the issue. The sooner we knew what we would be facing for sure, the sooner we could prepare for it, and the more time I had to brace myself for the demons I was going to have to lay to rest.
Sorry, Rika. Not this time.
After dinner, there was about an hour and a half to kill before movie night started, so I took Jackie to the gym and we took a long, slow, two-mile walk around the track to work off some of the delicious food we’d just gotten done eating. I needed it more than she did, of course, but as ever, Jackie seemed happy enough just to spend time with me, and we chatted about inanities as though we were normal people with normal lives taking a stroll through the park together.
When the time came, we made our way to the orientation room, where the twins, Mash, Emiya, and several other Servants had already gathered. As the twins and Emiya got the equipment set up and everything prepared, Jackie and I grabbed a large bucket of popcorn to share from Emiya’s makeshift ‘concession stand’ and found ourselves a pair of seats from which to watch the movies, settling in to wait.
Slowly, the rest of the moviegoers filtered in, until everyone who was going to be there was there, and Rika turned to address us all with a big grin.
“Hey, everyone!” she said. “We’re gonna do things a bit different tonight! This one’s a double feature, and the faint of heart better grab a tissue box to go with their popcorn, because the first one’s a tearjerker!”
“She’s not lying,” Emiya agreed, not looking up from what he was doing. “I’ll admit, I’m not sure it’ll land the same way in a crowd like this, but I saw this back when I was a kid, and, well…” He huffed a short, dry chuckle. “Let’s just say it hit closer to home than I thought it would.”
No one seemed to know what to make of that, and with her piece said, Rika grabbed a bucket of popcorn for herself and then found a seat of her own. When everything was set up, Emiya dimmed the lights and pressed play.
The screen came to life, and a moment later, displayed the customary screen cards crediting the studio and publisher who had produced the film — if I was reading that right, this had been made back in 1988, which meant it was older than I’d thought it would be. When those went away and the movie began, it opened up on a shot of the face and torso of a young, teenage boy, dressed in an old military uniform that looked a size or two too large for his frame and drawn in soft creams, beiges, and tans. A voice that had to be his began narrating, setting the stage of a Japan amidst the final days of World War II.
My first instinct was to roll my eyes, because of course Rika chose an animated movie, that should have been her obvious choice. It quickly became clear, however, that even if the movie was animated like a Disney film, it was definitely not aimed at children, or at least not solely, and it wasn’t one of those mindless action shows people like Greg Veder had been into, even if the protagonist happened to be a teenage boy.
No. It was ninety minutes of tragedy, depicting the consequences of war on a civilian populace, the consequences of neglect, pride, and nationalism, and probably most damning of all, the utter lack of care a society could have for those most vulnerable. As I watched, a young, teenage boy, not even really old enough to care for himself, struggled to care for his younger sister, struggled to find something to cling onto amidst upheaval and uncertainty, and struggled against the harsh realities of his situation.
If Rika had known my past better than she did, I might have thought she had chosen this movie deliberately to draw parallels with my own life, because there were a number of them, none of them particularly comfortable. It was all too easy to substitute the burnt out husks of those wooden huts with the skeletal shells of concrete, steel, and shattered glass left behind in the wake of Leviathan, the young boy and girl with Aidan or any of the other orphans I had never given enough time to back then, the unsympathetic aunt with those desperate, starving people I had done my best to provide for.
And the film did not shy away from showing the inevitabilities of those circumstances, because without a government willing and able to rescue them, without a caretaker who could provide for them, and without someone like me — like Skitter the warlord — to come in and fill in the holes in their support structure, there weren’t many good outcomes. The reality of a situation like that was the one that made it onto the screen.
They died.
First, the girl, who had gotten so hungry and so desperate that she started eating rocks, and then, eventually, the boy, too, alone in a crowded train station, body and spirit both so withered that he just gave up. The only caveat the movie gave was their spirits meeting afterwards, sitting together on a hillside and overlooking a sprawling modern cityscape.
Something glittered in the corner of my eye, and when I reached up —
Oh.
I guess you do win this one, Rika.
“Always gets me,” Rika said wetly, paying me no attention at all. Mash, next to her, sniffled loudly, clutching at a wad of tissues. Even Ritsuka wasn’t dry-eyed.
For a moment, as the credits rolled, the entire room was silent but for the accompanying music. Jackie had said nothing the entire film, but her hand held one of mine in a grip so tight and firm that I might have needed a crowbar to even begin prying her off. When I looked down at her, she was staring intently at the screen, face blank, eyes unblinking, and it took me a second to realize, trembling.
I gave her hand a squeeze, and as though that was a pressure valve, the tension seethed out of her body like steam until she was sitting limply in her chair, still staring at the screen. I could only imagine the sorts of parallels she had to be drawing to her own life, the traumas that must have been playing out behind her eyes.
And then the screen turned deep, vivid blue, and an upbeat pipe of some kind started playing as a vague blob creature with a single, googly eye and two rabbit-like ears protruding from his head marched from one side to the other. As he went, little white dots dropped behind him, blooming into more of the same creature. They morphed and contorted in time with the music, briefly taking the shape of what I vaguely recognized as Japanese characters.
The image turned abruptly orange, with cartoony logs, cinderblocks, rocks, and all sorts of random things bobbing from spiderwebs that suspended them from the top and bottom of the page. A title card declared, ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ in blocky, rounded lettering.
“Hey, let’s go! Hey, let’s go!” a woman’s voice sang, the complete opposite of the previous movie’s ending. “I’m happy as can be!”
I forced myself to relax into my seat and let my brain turn off, absently rubbing soothing lines on the backs of Jackie’s knuckles. On the screen, a little girl in a pink dress and a sunhat marched from one side to the other, followed by an enormous caterpillar, then a grasshopper, and every time the girl reappeared, something new trailed after her.
This was more what I expected from an animated movie chosen by Rika. It might wind up cutesy and silly and maybe a little ridiculous.
But right then? I think I needed cutesy, silly, and ridiculous. And if Jackie climbed into my lap a few minutes in, burying herself in my arms, no one made any comments about it.