Chương 256: 103. Helplessness Under War 3

The steakhouse door swung open and the night air hit us straight on. The street outside the port was even busier than before. Overhead, the elevated transit lines glowed like a metal spine strung across the city. Neon signs kept firing up further out, and the shopping street looked like every ship in the harbor had emptied out at once — full of people fresh off leave, fresh off shift, fresh off deciding tonight was a good night to forget their lives for a few hours.

Maki and I walked side by side, change and receipt in my hand, carrying a strange, faint lightness. Not floating-on-air happy. More like someone who'd been pressed flat by regulations for far too long, briefly allowed to take up more than two dimensions again.

"So," I said, eyeing the brightly lit building ahead, my tone as careful as if I were identifying a hostile vessel, "the department store you mentioned — is that the thing glowing brighter than the Yukikaze's secondary battery?" Maki followed my line of sight. It was a fairly obnoxious building. A full glass façade throwing the port lights back at the street. A massive discount banner over the entrance. Two holographic hostesses cycling a too-sweet welcome in standard Federal on a loop.

If we weren't close enough to Hohenzollern Fortress that the steakhouse took Imperial marks, I'd have genuinely believed I'd wandered into a normal shopping district in some peaceful backwater.

"Yes," Maki said.

"Do people on the front lines always try this hard, aesthetically?"

"It's called market competition."

"I thought it was called proving you're still alive inside the blast radius." Maki glanced at me.

"That's actually not a bad line." Not a compliment. But out of Maki, that level of acknowledgment was close enough to a medal. The moment we stepped through the doors, cold air and fragrance hit us both at once. I nearly stood at attention. Not out of manners. Out of sheer respect — clean, cool air, no oil, no scorched metal, no NCO suddenly barking your name from behind. For someone who'd spent this long breathing warship recyclers, that qualified as a genuine civilizational miracle.

The ground floor was cosmetics and jewelry. The lighting was aggressively bright. Every counter girl had a perfect smile, the kind that belonged to people whose lives had never once included an FTL insertion, live-round loading, or the specific low-grade horror of knowing one wrong button press kills four hundred and fifty people at once. I couldn't help staring a beat too long.

"What?" Maki asked.

"Nothing," I said, honestly.

"Just confirming people who don't have to wear a uniform every day actually exist."

"They do."

"Must be nice."

"You have three days to get a proper look."

"You sound like you're bringing your country cousin into the big city."

"Aren't I?"

"... Maki. You say things that are genuinely hurtful sometimes."

"I'm just being accurate."

"I've noticed." She didn't bother answering, and led me straight onto the escalator like she already knew the layout by heart. Second floor: daily necessities. Rows of toothbrushes, towels, face wash, shampoo, body wash, hand cream, hygiene products, travel bottles, slippers, storage bags — all arranged with a neatness bordering on pathological. Looking at it, I felt a strange kind of vertigo. Warship resupply never looked like this. On the ship, what you got was: be glad it's there, use it.

Here, what you faced was: which one do you want. The gap between those two things carried some genuinely decisive implications for the human spirit.

"Basics first," Maki said. Her tone was exactly like someone issuing an engineering work order. If the background hadn't been soft lighting and discount tags, I might have answered understood on pure reflex.

"Hold on." I picked up a towel, checked the price, put it back, grabbed another.

"Are there really this many categories for something like this?"

"There are."

"Antibacterial, quick-dry, soft cotton, ultra-soft, long-fiber, hypoallergenic—" I glared at the shelf tags.

"It's a piece of cloth you wipe your face with." Maki pulled a dark gray one off the rack and dropped it straight into the basket.

"To you, it's cloth. To your skin, it isn't." I turned to look at her.

"Are we having a conversation about towel human rights now?"

"I'm keeping you from going back to that thing on the ship that's nearly lost its original color." I froze completely.

"... How do you know about that?"

"I've seen it."

"When?" Maki stayed perfectly calm.

"You forgot?" I shut up. Because I hadn't. That was exactly the problem. Some memories, once they surface, make your ears do things you can't control. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. I cleared my throat and forced the conversation back toward toiletries by sheer will.

"What about these?" I held up two shampoo bottles that looked nearly identical.

"What's the difference?" Maki glanced at them.

"Left is oil-control. Right is repair."

"You know that too?"

"Common sense."

"Isn't your definition of common sense a little too broad?"

"You just live carelessly." I was about to argue back when a woman restocking a nearby shelf burst out laughing.

"Listen to her, sweetheart," she said, with the unhurried certainty of someone who'd clearly learned a thing or two about life.

"Anyone who helps you pick out stuff like this is either your big sister or your girlfriend. Either way — just go along with it." I nearly dropped the shampoo. Maki, expression unmoved, put the right-hand bottle back, took the left one, and held it out to me.

"Oil-control. This one suits you better." The woman's smile deepened, thick with implication.

"See? Told you."

"It's not—" The denial came out on pure reflex, and half a second later I realized any further explanation would only dig the hole deeper.

"We're not—""She's just shy," the woman finished for me, unprompted. I wanted to demonstrate spontaneous evaporation on the spot. Maki just said, flatly, "Thank you," dropped the shampoo into the basket, and turned down the next aisle. I stared at her back with exactly one thought in my head. This woman wasn't calm. This woman was bulletproof. The next twenty minutes were a complete education in what it means to have your life taken over by someone with an unreasonable level of domestic competence.

Toothbrushes — she picked two soft-bristle ones without asking my opinion. Toothpaste — she vetoed mine on the grounds the mint was too strong. Face wash — she treated my "as long as it gets the dirt off" like something a caveman would say. Slippers — one glance at my feet, straight into the basket, accurate as a fire-control solution. First-aid basics — she added stomach medicine, painkillers, bandages, and fever patches, thorough enough to gear up for a seven-day wilderness survival course.

I stood there watching the basket fill up and got the sudden, distinct impression that I wasn't shopping. I was undergoing corrective re-education in human civilization.

"Maki."

"Mm?"

"Are you just naturally good at looking after people?" She was still holding a pack of cotton hair ties. At that, her hand paused, just slightly, and she looked up at me.

"You're classifying yourself as a person?"

"... That's a little harsh."

"You're the one who made it sound like adopting a stray."

"Only because you'd already been acting like the shelter director." She looked at me for a few seconds. Eventually something that almost qualified as a smile crossed her eyes. Faint. Faint as a thin film of condensation on glass at night.

"If I am," she said, "you're the difficult kind."

"Me?"

"Stubborn. Bad habits. You economize in exactly the wrong places."

"That's called being frugal."

"That's called putting all your survival points into the wrong stat."

"The Academy should give me a medal."

"They'd send you to remedial life skills first." I was lining up a comeback when Maki's steps stopped dead. I nearly walked into her. I looked up, and my soul took three steps back on the spot. The sign ahead read: Women's Underwear & Loungewear The lettering wasn't large. Perfectly neat. Perfectly civilized. But landing in my eyes, it hit with roughly the same force as the bridge's main display suddenly flashing the word LIVE. I was quiet for two seconds.

"... Could we maybe hit a different floor first?" Maki looked at me.

"Why?"

"Because this is dangerous."

"Dangerous how?"

"That's the same as asking what's dangerous about loading live rounds. It shouldn't need spelling out." Maki's expression stayed exactly as steady as always.

"What you're missing is in here."

"I can buy it myself."

"You just picked the wrong towel."

"A towel and this are not the same category."

"To me, they're both daily necessities."

"Not to me!" I kept my voice down as I protested, fairly sure my ears were already red enough to double as a port warning light. Maki didn't argue. She just stepped inside, naturally, then looked back at me.

"Shimo."... Done for. Whenever she said it like that, my spine started losing structural integrity.

"Hurry up." She said it evenly, the way you'd call back a straggler. But I heard something else underneath it. Not an order. More like a tone that had already, as a matter of course, counted me in. That was harder to refuse than any command. So I gritted my teeth and followed. The section was quieter than I'd expected, the lighting softer than outside. Rows of clothing racks, drawer-style cabinets, loungewear and underwear folded into neat little stacks that looked, somehow, like a very gentle trap.

A handful of other women browsed nearby — a mother and daughter, a pair of friends, even two girls about our age arguing over the color of a pajama set. In a scene this ordinary, this naturally, almost cruelly domestic, I was the only one who looked like an idiot who'd stumbled into hostile territory. Maki, meanwhile, wasn't remotely fazed. She scanned the room once, then pulled a few plain cotton undershirts and two sets of loungewear off the racks, as efficiently as if she were selecting cold-weather base layers.

"This. It should be comfortable on you."

"... Why does that sound exactly like you discussing combat boots?"

"Because fundamentally, it's the same thing."

"How is it the same thing."

"Both involve extended wear. Neither one is allowed to fail." I looked at the fabric in her hands, then at her face — which held not a trace of a joke — and realized the most frightening thing about her wasn't that she occasionally said things that made my pulse spike on purpose. It was that she never meant to, and somehow every completely ordinary sentence came out abnormal anyway.

"What about sizing." I tried, grasping at anything. Maki paused, her eyes settling on me. For one second, I genuinely considered turning and running.

"I have a rough idea," she said. I nearly choked on my own spit.

"You—""If you're not sure, go measure." She held one of the loungewear sets out to me, her voice perfectly level.

"Fitting rooms are over there." I stood there holding fabric that was, frankly, offensively soft, feeling like I'd just been shoved into a steam room that looked mild on the outside and ran nuclear-hot underneath.

"Maki."

"Mm?"

"You're really too much sometimes."

"I'm helping you."

"I know." And that was exactly why it was worse. If she'd been doing it on purpose to mess with me, I could've blown up righteously and felt fine about it. But she wasn't. She was genuinely, methodically filling in everything I'd need for the next three days — and in the process, with total naturalness, dragging every bad habit I'd been quietly making do with out into the light. That kind of care is deadlier than flirting. I gathered the clothes up and marched into the fitting room out of sheer willpower.

The second the curtain closed, I finally let myself mouth one silent curse at the empty air.... Fuck. The Federation had put me on warships, through combat sims, through FTL corridors — and I'd never been this rattled. A few minutes later, I came out in the loungewear. A simple cut — loose, soft, a deep blue-gray, no extra trim. It looked more like a person living a normal life than I did. Maki looked up. For a second she didn't say anything. Just looked.

Very brief — brief enough that anyone else in the room probably wouldn't have caught it. But somehow I could feel the air go a little thicker in that half-second. Then she looked away and said, flatly:"Looks good." That was worse than ten straight lines of her usual venom. I stood there, heat climbing from the back of my neck all the way to my ears, hands suddenly with nowhere to go.

"Shouldn't you give me three seconds' warning before saying something like that? Let me brace."

"Would it make a difference?"

"A huge one."

"I can't tell."

"That's because you're not wearing a heart monitor." That faint, nearly invisible trace of amusement crossed her eyes again.

"Do you need me to buy you one?"

"No thanks. My dignity's got enough on its plate already." By the time we left the section carrying two full bags, I felt like I'd been completely disassembled and reassembled by civilized society. Toiletries, loungewear, clean underwear, socks, a comb, a travel organizer set — things I hadn't even registered I was short on, and Maki had caught every single one. We stood at the top of the down escalator, and I looked at the bags and stayed quiet for a few seconds.

"Maki."

"Mm?"

"... Thank you." She didn't look at me, just watched the brightly lit lobby below.

"You don't need to."

"I'm saying it anyway." This time she turned her head.

"Then I'll take it."

"That sounded exactly like an officer signing off on a report."

"Because you're rarely this honest."

"I'm occasionally capable of gratitude."

"I know." She said it quietly. Then, very naturally, she took the heavier bag out of my hand. I blinked.

"I can carry it."

"That one's harder to hold."

"How do you even—""Observation." Observation. Again. She really did love using that one word to shut me down completely. The escalator carried us slowly down, the whole department store spreading out below — lights, voices, the background music, the port's night skyline further out. I stood beside her, bags in hand, and something oddly solid settled into place. Like these three days weren't just off the ship anymore. Like they'd actually started.

And, unfortunately — I was probably going to remember tonight for a long time. Not because of the steak. Not because of the department store. But because Maki Kushima had stood in the women's underwear section, expression completely blank, picked out loungewear for me, and then — right as I was about to combust — said, calmly: Looks good.... That kind of person is genuinely, completely cheating.