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Akiko is used to being surrounded by bleeding bodies, people who have lost limbs, people on the verge of death. That's what her skill is all about and that's what her work is based on: people come to her in a state where anyone else would lose hope of salvation, but she can save them without even having to try very hard. Yes, repeating the process over and over again is exhausting, but it's nothing she can't deal with. Really.
(She's eleven, but she's trying to convince herself that she can be self-sufficient. Or something like that. She likes to save people, and here she can do that. It's no big deal. She has a lifetime ahead of her to make up for the sleepless nights she loses when part of the battalion arrives badly wounded and she must rush to save them before it's too late.
The soldiers have started calling her Angel and she, while she doesn't feel that nickname is a huge deal, is grateful to be able to be of help).
The blood doesn't impress her. Not anymore. Neither does the sight of bones, organs or open wounds.
Despite that, she can't say she's not surprised when Mori tells her he needs her help and, upon coming, she doesn't find a soldier.
In front of her, covered in blood, lies a child.
She shouldn't be so surprised—she's not much older. But she has an ability. It's useful. This child...
His hair is golden and he wears it quite long. Maybe the same length as her. His breathing is labored and he shivers, sweating from what she already recognizes as a consequence of blood loss. His glasses are dirty.
“We need him alive,” Mori says, giving her shoulder a squeeze.
She shakes out of his grip, frowning, and approaches the boy on the gurney. She doesn't stop to inspect his wounds. Thou Shalt not Die activates as fluidly as ever, sending out a flock of butterflies made of light. In an instant, the boy is as good as new. He opens his eyes slowly, blinks and straightens up, touching the areas where she assumes his wounds were. He looks at her with raised eyebrows, eyes wide open.
Akiko can't help but lift her chin a little. She puts her hands on her hips, as she always does when she manages to surprise someone with her gift.
“Just like new,” she says, turning to look at Mori. He makes her feel a little uncomfortable, but she tries not to show it. “What could you need a child for, anyway?”
Mori lets out a laugh and ruffles her hair. She swats at him, taking a step away, and her brow furrows again. Before she can complain, the child says:
“I am not a child.”
Yosano looks at him and scoffs, rolling her eyes.
“You are.”
“You are a child.”
“But you've seen what I can do. You should be grateful.”
He blinks. He takes off his glasses and seems to want to wipe them on his shirt, but his clothes are covered in blood, so he changes his mind and hooks them on the collar of his shirt instead.
“Thank you,” he mumbles through his teeth.
She snorts, jaded. She's about to ask what he's doing there, how he ended up so wounded, but a man—a general, she thinks, using what little Mori taught her to differentiate ranks— arrives and approaches the boy, running a hand over his shoulders.
He tenses barely perceptibly. Mori imitates the general, hugging Yosano by the shoulders, and pulls her closer to him.
“We must go to the rest of the patients.”
Yosano grimaces, but nods. As Mori leads her in one direction and the general leads the boy in another, Yosano half-turns and says:
“Akiko Yosano! Don't forget that name!”
The boy looks over his shoulder at her. They exchange glances for a second before she turns and takes several steps forward just to get away from Mori.
“Why do they have a child?” she asks again, crossing her arms. Mori laughs softly, in that way she hates. She doesn't even make an effort to hide her disgusted grimace.
“You're not the only one with an useful ability, Yosano.” That's all the explanation he gives about it, but before she can ask more, he adds, “They were transferring him and suffered an attack, but now they'll put him to work.”
She doesn't question his statement, but she can't deny that she's a little curious about the ability that made them decide to bring him here. She could ask Mori, but before she can do so they reach the room where the rest of the wounded soldiers are resting and she has to get to work. A brief conversation with one of the soldiers makes her momentarily forget about the blond boy.
Akiko is eating lunch when she sees him again. Mori isn't with her, for a change, because he had business elsewhere—so no one tries to stop her when she sneaks up until she can get close to him.
“Boy!” she calls out to him, waving a hand in greeting as he raises his head.
“Oh, Yosano...” he murmurs. He has deep circles under his eyes and his plate of food is full, even though he keeps moving his silverware.
Yosano rests both hands on his hips and tilts his head in a gesture meant to mimic an adult.
“You look awful.”
He frowns, but doesn't seem in the mood to argue. Perhaps it has something to do with his obvious exhaustion. Instead of responding, he looks down at his plate and continues to play with his food. A yawn escapes him. Despite everything, his golden hair is perfectly combed and falls to the sides of his face, long down to his chin.
“What have you been doing, that you're so tired?” she asks.
It's not like she slept too much the night before. She's not too fussy when it comes to sleep-just having something to lay her head on is usually enough. What she does struggle with is going back to sleep when she's already awake, and her sleep was interrupted by an attack.
Soldiers have started coming to her more often. They don't thank her as much as they used to, and she no longer feels the warmth of pride inside her.
She wants the war to end.
Mori says that, having her, the war will not end soon.
The child does not respond immediately.
“Are you a child genius or something? Do they make you plan strategies?” she insists, sitting down next to him. He looks up with a confused expression adorning his face. “You look like one. The glasses...”
“I can't see without them, but that doesn't mean I'm gifted.”
Akiko laughs. They are sitting on the floor in a corner of the common area, so she pulls her legs up to her chest and rests her head on her knees.
“Then what is it?”
The boy grimaces a little.
“I can show you,” he proposes in a soft voice.
He reaches into his brown coat and pulls out a small notebook and pencil from his inside pocket. Akiko is tempted to say that writing is not a skill, she knows how to do it, but chooses to remain silent just to see where he is going with this.
He opens the notebook and sighs. He turns a little so that his body covers what he writes no matter how much Akiko stretches to peek. He tears off the sheet and closes his eyes for a second.
The sheet glows with a yellow light and transforms into a small flower-shaped hairpin. It's a blue flower with golden accents.
Yosano blinks.
“Do you make flowers?” she asks.
He smiles a little, opening his eyes.
“Munitions,” he murmurs. He carefully rests the flower on one of his legs, covered by worn beige pants, and puts away the notebook and pencil. “I can turn the sheet of paper into anything I write, as long as it's smaller than the paper. Sometimes I also make grenades.”
Yosano looks at the flower resting on the boy's leg as he sets his untouched plate aside. It's a nice ability, she thinks, even if it only matters here to create weaponry.
(She's too small to comprehend it, but someday she will understand what this means: she saves the soldiers, he gives them what they need to attack. They are life and death in the form of two small children.
Having them both, the war would drag on indefinitely).
“It's for you,” says the boy, taking the hairpin again to extend it in her direction. “It's not as amazing as saving my life, but...”
She feels her cheeks burn. She takes the hairpin between her fingers, caressing the blue petals, and smiles slightly.
“It's definitely not,” she says, nodding, and puts the hairpin on the left side of her head. “But it's pretty. Thank you...”
“Doppo Kunikida,” he introduces himself.
“Kunikida. It's good to know your name.”
Kunikida gives a shy smile. When he lowers his head, his bangs cover his eyes. Before the two can even think about how to continue the conversation, the general approaches them. He gives Yosano only a sidelong glance, a certain contemptuous air coloring his expression, but soon all his attention is focused on the boy.
“You should get back to work,” he says. As Kunikida picks up his plate to go throw away the food, the man looks back at Yosano. You should be looking for Dr. Mori. This is no time to pretend to be friends.
Akiko decides not to say anything more for Kunikida's sake than for her own, and just watches them leave.
As she watches him walk away, one of her hands goes to the small brooch that adorns her hair. She strokes it with her fingertips and sighs, jumping to her feet. Completely ignoring what the general has said, she can't help but wish that the time will soon come when they will see each other again.
Akiko can no longer fall asleep even on nights when she is not forced out of her mattress.
The situation on the battlefield has worsened. She knows this because the rate at which she has to heal the soldiers is increasing, because she has to heal groups so numerous that she can then barely stand upright.
She knows this because the soldiers hate her, and she, with what little she understands of war and life, thinks she can understand why.
(In a normal situation, they might have gone home long ago.
With her present, the war is stretched to infinity.
There is only so much healing she can do before she rips their souls out completely, before it becomes a method of torture).
She doesn't want to have to heal anyone else. She sees soldiers die who could have been saved, she sees each of the survivors go mad as they watch their death come only to be perfectly fine an instant later, which means returning to the battlefield. She sees her ability become a curse for each of the people she intended to help.
She no longer wants to save.
Oh, but Mori...
Mori.
The blood no longer impresses her. The soldiers' anger and Mori's frivolous expression are the things that keep her awake. The dead can't hurt her; they can.
She wanders through the empty corridors. The soldiers are following a plan of attack. The rest of the people will be gathered elsewhere. She doesn't know or care. The shadows in the darkness of the room where she sleeps transmute into terrifying beings, and she fears she is beginning to be afraid of the dark. She's already eleven years old. She should be worried about other things, about real dangers. She knows a lot about real dangers, about palpable risks. The soldiers are armed, and very few retain the appreciation they used to feel for her.
Her footsteps echo down the hall. She brings a hand to her hair, where she holds her pin, and exhales slowly. She tries to relax.
Then she sees a figure kneeling in the hallway.
She frowns, creeping closer. Only when she is barely a few steps away does she manage to make out the figure as Kunikida, who is hugging himself, sinking down as if he wants to curl into a ball and disappear.
Akiko blinks.
"Kunikida?" she asks in a whisper.
He raises his head suddenly. His glasses are missing and his eyes are swollen, full of tears. He trembles lightly. He shrinks back even further, cornering himself against the wall, and when he opens his mouth to say something a sob escapes him.
Yosano throws herself on her knees beside him at once, watching him closely, seeking to discover what the problem is with him, how she can help. Doppo's sobs are loud, echoing in the absolute silence of the place, and she feels as if they are tearing at her chest.
"What's wrong?" she asks in desperation. "What's wrong?"
"I can't—I can't..."
He gasps, unable to breathe normally between sobs, and raises both hands to show them to Yosano. They keep shaking in a completely evident way, and he clenches his fists in an attempt to stop it, which proves to be in vain. He hyperventilates in an effort to catch his breath, which only results in more sobs.
Yosano raises his hands, but doesn't know where to put them. She wishes she had real knowledge of medicine, knew something that could help him, but she doesn't know, doesn't know, doesn't know, doesn't know.
(She's eleven years old. That she carries the weight of the lives of hundreds of soldiers does not erase that fact: she's barely eleven years old. She doesn't have answers to everything, she doesn't have magic solutions. She can't always save everyone based on useful skill and good intentions).
"The general is going to kill me," Doppo sobs with such palpable despair that Akiko fears he's telling the truth, that it's not just an exaggeration brought on by a childish mind that faces despair and death constantly.
"Try to breathe," she says, deciding to take his hands in her own. "Pay attention. Breathe like this."
Saying that, she inhales deeply. Doppo tries to imitate her, finding some difficulty because of her sobs, which don't stop. She exhales slowly through her mouth and he imitates her.
Several minutes pass like this, just breathing, before Doppo manages to calm down a little. When he does, he sniffles his nose and clings to the other's hands. The boy's hands don't stop shaking.
"Thank you," he whispers.
She doesn't respond. She can't help thinking that she wishes she could do more.
She doesn't usually ask Mori for things.
She hates doing it, actually. She prefers not to talk to him at all, when she can avoid it, and to be her more rebellious and cruel version when she can't. He seems to find it charming, which only makes her feel worse, but that's another matter.
However, when she and Mori are having breakfast together the next morning, she looks at him with an expression of total assurance and says: “I need you to talk to the general who's in charge of Kunikida.”
He looks at her, blinking, as if he has just remembered that she's there.
“Excuse me?”
“Doppo Kunikida. The ammunition boy. I need you to talk to the general about giving him a few days off.”
Mori smiles. She resists the urge to shrink back in her seat and clutches the chopsticks instead.
“Why would he do that?” he asks calmly, but unwilling to oblige his request.
“Because he won't be able to work properly if he doesn't rest. They need him strong and healthy, don't they? So they should let him get some rest. It's not like it's impossible to get ammunition without using his ability.”
She speaks quickly, afraid of losing her air of assurance in the middle of her speech if she pauses for breath.
Mori is silent for a moment, as if considering. The more the seconds pass, the more Yosano regrets bringing up the subject. It's in vain, she thinks, to try to make Mori understand. She doesn't think he cares too much about what happens to a child he doesn't even know.
He doesn't even care too much about what happens with Akiko, as long as her ability is still working.
“He's been working well. With a few complications, that's all. Nothing a little motivation won't fix,” Mori says, and she sinks back in her seat a little.
She doesn't stop to think before saying:
“I'll do whatever you want. I'll do anything. I'll work twice as hard. I'll behave.” After what seems like a second of consideration, she sighs: “Please.”
Mori smiles.
Akiko knows she's gotten away with it. She doesn't feel that way.
She starts working a lot more after that. Every minor injury is brought to her for resolution. The resentment of the soldiers grows. She spends three nights in a row without sleeping, and Mori only allows her to do so when exhaustion causes her to lose consciousness after making use of her ability.
But Doppo sleeps for a whole day, and the general does not use his ability again until he has regained sensibility in his hands. He doesn't look in better spirits, but he seems more rested, and Akiko has begun to learn that sometimes you have to make do with what you earn.
One day, Kunikida's hand doesn't work at all.
He can't work if he can't write, so Mori takes Akiko to him and orders her to heal him.
Akiko doesn't know if the same counts for Kunikida, but she knows that the soldiers might leave because of injuries that make it impossible for them to continue going out to the battlefield. Seeing Kunikida, unable to even hold a pencil, with messy golden hair and eyes red from lack of sleep, she has an unbearable desire to let him go home.
“I don't want to heal him,” she whispers.
Mori tilts his head.
“No?”
She denies again, clutching the skirt of her uniform.
“No.”
“Oh. I understand what you're doing. You make it hard for me, you know? It's hard to turn down a little girl's wish.”
She feels Mori's grip on her hair and, when he pulls her head back to make her look at him, he has the most terrifying look she's ever seen. It feels like her feet are nailed to the ground. A small grimace escapes her, but he crouches down to her level.
“However, you're different. Do it.”
Receiving no response, Mori sighs.
“You know what a samurai is, right? They died out because they couldn't adjust to battlefields with guns and cannons. Then, in the last war, the nation that transformed tanks from simple gun turrets to enemy-crushing monsters massacred their foes. On the sea, the side that didn't recognize that aircraft would take center lost.”
He lets his hair down and straightens up, standing in front of her. Akiko follows him with her eyes, clenching her fists tightly, feeling herself shaking from head to toe. Mori's voice is too loud, echoing in her mind, her head feels like it's going to explode.
“And now, special 'skills' are changing warfare. Your role is to make the military comprehend this change. Do it, or else our nation falls.”
Akiko watches him silently, unblinking, and the whole world spins, and she is the center. She's the center, all the hatred shoots in her direction, she's to blame for no one being able to return home and she's tired, she just wants it all to end, she just wants to get out of here.
Displaying a courage she didn't know she was still capable of showing, she frowns and, holding a hand to her chest, exclaims:
“No! I just want to save the lives in front of me!”
Mori watches her, not at all impressed, with the expression adults usually wear when they have to deal with an impertinent child. She stands her ground.
“Okay, then.”
That said, he draws his gun, aims it at Kunikida and shoots him.
The boy screams, writhing, and Akiko can't move, she can't manage to react immediately, she just watches, watches as if in slow motion the way he starts bleeding from a wound in his abdomen, right in a vital area, she knows it, she knows it because she has learned, but she can't move, she can't take her eyes off his wound, she can't stop hearing his screams as if they were inside her head.
He barely stays conscious. The general, always standing by his side but never avoiding anything, holds his hand and talks to him, trying to keep him awake, but he watches him through his eyelashes, eyes narrowed, skin pale. He is too small. The very pain could make him lose consciousness.
Akiko crouches down beside him and rests a hand on his wound, as if to stop the bleeding. When he groans, she apologizes softly, feeling her heart pounding in her chest. Desperation clouds her mind and she fails to think clearly until Mori pulls her and gives her a direct order: heal him.
So she does.
She does it, knowing that this is just what Mori wants, and knowing that no one will be able to leave the battlefield while she is still there.
Doppo is translated and sleeps for a while after that. She doesn't leave his side, doesn't wash his blood from her hands. She sits by the gurney and watches him sleep with tear-filled eyes, feeling things she can't put a name to. Her chest tightens and her stomach is in knots and, in general, she feels that all this is more than she can bear, as if the weight of all she has done might crush her.
But when Doppo opens his eyes and their gazes meet, he smiles a weak smile.
“Hi,” he whispers.
She manages to muster the strength to smile back.
“Hello,” she replies in a trembling voice, and hides her face in her hands. She wants to cry, but she can't.
Doppo stretches out a hand and rests it on her head, stroking her hair.
“What's wrong?” he asks, but he doesn't sound confused. Maybe he understands. Maybe not, considering he's eight years old and understands less about the world than she does. He's a child.
“I want all this to be over.”
Doppo inhales and exhales slowly.
“I've thought of something.”
When she looks at him, he looks back at her. Her eyes lack luster. His gaze does not look like that of a child.
(When Doppo proposes to bomb the base to make it sink, Akiko accepts.
Neither of them intended to get out of there alive, but they were caught while trying to do so, which led to them subsequently being locked up in different isolation facilities. Akiko spends three years without uttering a word, and although she will not remember it in adulthood, in her mind always dances the same name. Doppo Kunikida.)
Mori finds Akiko three years after her imprisonment with the intention of using her ability again.
Fukuzawa, a man Akiko won't begin to know until a little later, shows up with the intention of preventing that from happening, which ends in a fight between the two.
While they fight, someone puts Akiko in a wheelchair and takes her out of the room where she was locked up for all that time.
The boy is Ranpo Edogawa, a young, talkative and cocky boy, who assures Akiko of one thing: she deserves to live, even with what she has done. He offers her a place in the world, a place where she won't have to use her ability if she doesn't want to, he promises her the possibility of a better life.
He hands her the flower hairpin that Doppo once made for her, so long ago. She feels her eyes filling with tears. Ranpo knows many things, so she cannot restrain herself from saying:
“Kunikida. Do you know...?”
“Way ahead of you,” he says, proud to be able to expose his greatness once again. “You'll see.”
And Akiko doesn't understand what he means until, a few hours later, after Fukuzawa has gotten her new clothes and she has put the hairpin back in her hair, they go to the offices of the newly founded Armed Detective Agency.
Sitting behind a desk, hair tied in a small ponytail, glasses on the end of his nose and head buried in a novel, is Doppo Kunikida.
When he hears them coming he stands up, and his gaze lights up as soon as it crosses Akiko's. Time has passed, he has grown so much that he is now a little taller than she is, and when she extends her arms to invite him into a hug, he doesn't hesitate to wrap his arms around her waist, clinging to her body.
“I thought I'd never see you again,” she says in a whisper.
He doesn't respond, but tightens his embrace, and she manages a faint smile.
(Things don't get better for them right away, but Akiko finds herself surrounded by worthwhile people for the first time in years, and when she hears Ranpo's laughter accompanied by the sight of Doppo's smile together for the first time, she feels the flame of hope igniting inside her.
For now, that's enough).