[Gundam 00] Get Away
Title: Get Away
Fandom: Gundam 00
Pairing: Louise/Nena, references to Louise/Saji
Rating: Borderline NC-17
Wordcount: 4,345
Notes: This is kind of supposed to be a little crazy, considering the point of view and the canon point, but hopefully it should be readable all the same.
Summary: In the night, when Saji can't see, a ghost makes her way inside Louise's wounded mind.
Warnings: Dubious consent, sexual and non-sexual violence, mild bloodplay. Hatesex.
Louise is not yet well, and there are still things she doesn't tell Saji.
She knows that this is how conflict starts. He's told her enough times, quietly and earnestly, and every time she listens as if she were drowning and his words were air, but they fall into a crack somewhere in her brain. There are still gaps there, hidden places where the things the fighting did to her wait yet to be discovered.
She does not always tell. One of the things she never mentions is the other woman in her head. It might not be entirely accurate to call her a woman, at that. Louise is fairly sure that the woman in question is no older than Louise herself, and increasingly, as Saji and her own pain lay bare her wounds, Louise realizes that she is still only a girl. The other girl, then. She's in there, and she's plotting something.
It started much more blatantly, much more aggressively. Louise woke in the middle of the night, Saji still silent at her side, to the unmistakable feel of girlish hands at her throat. She knew because she'd felt it a few times before--the Innovades liked to play, especially Hilling--but this was different. There was a savage passion there that she never experienced before, save for from herself, in her moment of revenge. There were sharp nails on those fingers, and their owner wanted something from her. But no one else was there in the darkness, and eventually, it faded.
Yet that wasn't the last Louise saw, or rather felt, of the other girl. One night the ghost (Louise knew from early on, somehow, that she was a ghost) gave up on the clawing and the throttling and instead pried open Louise's mouth and climbed in, her nails still sharp the whole way.
She hasn't left. She's been in there since.
When Louise dreams, pieces of the other girl filter through her mind. She dreams of a Chinese girl she dislikes, but follows anyway; she dreams of violence. Of course, Louise has been dreaming of violence for a while now, but when it is her dream alone, it numbs and hardens her, and she is sometimes scared, sometimes bitterly grateful. These dreams of violence are not of her own revenge, yet they excite her.
She dreams of two young men, brothers no matter how improbable it seems to look at them, and she misses them painfully. It's puzzling, because she's never seen either one of them before. These dreams hurt. They bleed too easily into the familiar dreams of her mother and father with their arms around her, proud of her, welcoming her back. She used to be able to wake from them with only shaking, but since she destroyed that Gundam, she burrows under the covers when she wakes instead, incoherently shrieking her protest at the real world that pulls her back.
It frightens Saji. She's glad he's here for her, but sad that it frightens him.
Louise still dreams of her revenge--that tangle of triumph and terror, of things disintegrating just as they were supposed to get better. But the fear comes earlier and earlier in these dreams, when it shouldn't, and her perspective threatens to split. She tries and she tries to wake up before that happens, and most nights she succeeds. One night, she doesn't. And then she is both wielding the Regnant's claws and in the cockpit of that Gundam, and as much as she tries to resist the knowledge, she knows who the other girl is and why she's chosen to invade the head of Louise Halevy.
It's you, you're the one in here, get out, get out--
A coherent thought from the ghost, for the first time. Stupid stuck-up brat! Of course it's me. Who else would care enough? I won't--
Louise wakes up, and mercifully, she is only shaking this time. She manages to avoid waking Saji, which is good, because she has no idea what she would tell him. She cannot tell him this.
The next night, Louise sleeps only with trepidation. She doesn't want to feel the disintegration happening earlier and earlier in the memories of her moment of victory. She doesn't want the girl's hands at her throat again. Or does she? Perhaps killing her again is the way to fix all this, Saji would say it isn't and Louise knows he's right, but she still hopes against all hope it would be that easy.
But she sleeps, and she is rewarded in her dreams: there are no explosions from the wrong perspective, no memories of brothers to confuse an only child. Instead there is only light all around her. Something else is wrong, though, and it takes her a moment to understand it: she is dressed wrong. The cute and fashionable clothes she wore countless years ago on Saji's arm in Tokyo are on her again. They don't fight. She didn't grow any, but she has lost weight since then. Some of it she gained back in muscle, but that still reshaped the contours of her body. Her shirt is too loose at the collar and chest, too tight at the arms, and her skirt hangs on her awkwardly.
But her memory still calls them to her, still tries to summon the little girl who had everything. She hasn't forgotten. It seems silly, now that she sees it. Of course she can't return to that girl. Even if she wills away the muscle, regains the softer curves, there are scars. Louise looks to make sure: there is a seam along her left arm.
This lesson is one she can hear in between Saji's words. She cannot go back to the past, but the two of them can move forward and make a future together. She understands. But that understanding is swallowed up by the empty parts of her. She still wants to go home.
A part of her murmurs: Maybe the reason you aren't home yet is you didn't destroy her completely. She's still here. Destroy her again, and again, and as many times as it takes.
The light solidifies across from her. It's that other girl, clad in a flight suit. The murmur is just loud enough to overwhelm what little scraps of sense Louise still has, and she flings herself at the girl, hands outstretched to strike. She has the advantage over her nemesis once again. The artificial arm can hit and strangle much better than natural hands. So she hits, and she clutches at the girl's vulnerable throat just above the collar of the flight suit. She screams as she does so, and in moments her screams have turned to words. She wants to say all those things she never got to tell her nemesis when the emptiness of space separated them.
That emptiness, it was fitting in some ways. After all, it was from far above in the sky that her enemy wiped out her family and everything kind and familiar in her life. Louise has never seen her face until now. It was easier that way: destroying this girl was just a goal to be accomplished, a button to be pushed that, when she finally could do it, would make everything better. Here it's different: the person beneath her hands, as she settles them around her throat, is still the enemy, is still the person who destroyed her world, that's the same, but she's also a girl and a human being. Her skin feels soft on Louise's right hand, and her left hand registers the furious beat of her pulse and transmits the information back to Louise's brain.
In any other place but this strange lightscape inside her mind (their minds?), Louise would have long crushed the other girl's throat by now and ended this. She would be celebrating her victory. Maybe now she could finally join her mother and father in the light, like she couldn't quite bring herself to tell Saji she really wanted (but he knew, of course he knew, she could see it in the way he looked at her sometimes, and the only reason she could tolerate it was that he was the only one who could look at her like that without pity in his eyes).
But here she slipped forward, her hands seeming to melt into her enemy's flesh, and strange thoughts flashed through her mind:
--those young men who were supposed to be her brothers, though she'd never had any--
--kill him, kill him and live on for Johann and Michael and me, never needing anyone else now that they're gone forever--
The thought is both familiar and alien. Louise understands that urge to kill, and worse yet, she knows where it comes from. That sudden feeling of the sky fracturing as one's world falls apart, and the knowledge that slowly but surely trickles into one's mind in the aftermath. The only way to put a world back together, to piece back together a shattered family, is to destroy the one who destroyed it. Her enemy once had the same goal as her.
In that hateful shock, Louise loosens her grip on her enemy's throat. The girl reacts immediately. She rears up, fist flying, but just as it nears Louise's face, it opens. Nails rake across her cheek, opening stripes of blood. She's damaged again. Louise lets go entirely, stumbling back.
"It's useless," the girl finally says, glaring. She has bright gold eyes, even more unnatural than her too-bright red hair. Louise senses then, as she finally calms a little, that this girl is something like her. Modified. Not entirely human. Better for battle than for love. "I'm already dead." She tosses that hair a little. "What did you think you could do to me? I'm already dead and it's all your fault. At least this time I managed to leave a mark on you."
Louise glares, unable to believe what she's hearing. She holds up her left arm. "You already left a mark on me," she says. "You already killed me, too."
"Don't be so dramatic," says the girl. "That didn't count. I didn't even see you. I was just bored, and my finger slipped."
Louise staggers back. She feels sick, and she can't pinpoint why. That didn't count. I didn't even see you. "Why are you still here? I finally killed you. You should be gone. Take all this with you." She gestures, and somehow she knows that the girl will understand what she means. The debris, the rubble, it's strewn all over her brain, still smoking and throwing dust up into the air. The cracks, too; this girl can take those and leave her with a mind intact once more.
"Why would I take anything from someone who doesn't even know my name?" The girl draws herself up. "It's--"
"No!" Louise moves suddenly, hurling herself at her enemy again. "No! You shouldn't tell me your name. You--"
The girl shoves her aside, and Louise goes tumbling. "It's Nena, you idiot," she says. "Nena Trinity."
Knowing how her enemy felt was bad enough; now Louise knows who she is, too. She goes to her knees, clutching at her head. "Why? Why?"
"Because you should know!" Nena stands over her, glaring down. "You're the only one I can get to now. The only one! I tried getting into Setsuna's head. I wanted him first! But there wasn't anything I could hold onto in his brain. Just light and understanding. I hated it. My fingers slipped off when I tried, and he never even felt me there. I didn't want to come to you. You're nobody I care about. But the path was there, because you're the one who killed me. And all the cracks were there in your brain for me to hold onto."
"You should take them and go," Louise says.
"I won't," Nena says. "I won't let you forget me like everyone else has. I wanted to live," she adds. "I'm going to make you keep me alive somewhere. Think of it as an honor. Even if you don't deserve it." She kneels down to look at Louise. "I'm going to touch you until you know everything about me," she says. "And you can't forget any of it."
"I won't let you," Louise begins. She wants to say, selfishly, Saji will protect me, because the little girl who would have said that is still somewhere in her, slowly drowning in her soul, but she knows better now. It isn't right to make Saji protect her from her own demons. She has to fight them off herself.
But Nena doesn't give her the chance. She grabs Louise's shoulders and pushes her back. She's very close now; her heat radiates out to Louise like a fire unchecked. Nena moves in more, and now that her face is close, Louise sees that she is the sort of girl that Louise once wished she could be, in her looks. Freckles to make her cute; exotic eyes to draw the boys; lush red lips, smiling now with a little cruelty and a lot of excitement. Louise could have thrilled all the boys if she'd ever looked like that. Of course she knows she was cute herself (that was one of the first things she tried to destroy about her old self), but if she'd looked like that, she could have teased all the boys and then gone bouncing back to Saji while watching him flail.
Nena stretches out over Louise. It feels dangerous now, like their bodies could merge, and Louise wouldn't be able to think of her as the enemy anymore. Nena almost confirms her fears: she leans forward and presses her cheek against Louise's bloodied one, rubbing and nuzzling her until the blood smears over both their faces. "I like you better scratched up and broken," she purrs. "I like you so much better. I see what you were like before, in your mind. That girl was so boring! Why don't you like it better this way?"
"That girl was happy," Louise whispers. "She had her family."
Nena stops wiggling on top of her, then sits up, now straddling her. "That was rude! You shouldn't have brought that up. I had my family once too!"
"I know," Louise says. "I saw them in your mind."
"Good!" Nena's eyes are full of hate, but there's just the faintest hint of tears in them too, Louise is a little horrified to see. "Someone who's alive should remember Johann and Michael and me! We were the best family in the world." Now it's not just hate in her eyes, it's love too; that's the worst part.
"I want to forget them," Louise says, but she can't bring herself to lift her arms and attack Nena anymore. She knows her name now. It's not the same. This is her enemy, her destroyer, and a scared and angry girl who lost everything, just like her. Hurting her more won't fix anything. She'll still be left with the hate and the hurt.
"I won't let you," Nena says. "I'm going to give you all of me, so I'm still alive in you. I don't care whether you want me. I'll make you take me. Why did you think I was here?"
"I didn't think about why," Louise says. It seems obvious, was obvious from the moment Nena crawled into her brain. She's part of the dark places in Louise's head, and Louise has to try not to think about those places, not to think with them, anymore. But they keep pulling her back. Right now, it's easy for them to do so, with Nena's hands on her shoulders pressing her down into the darkness that waits below the light.
"This is why," Nena says, and then she kisses Louise. It's not a kiss like Saji used to give her--adorably nervous, afraid of being reprimanded at any second, but hopeful and a little bit excited--or a kiss like Saji gives her now--hesitant, gentle, like he's afraid she'll break, even though she's already broken. Nena bites, and Louise can taste blood. There would never be blood if it were Saji kissing her.
Something stirs inside Louise, though. It's appropriate--appropriate that she should bleed this time.
Nena pulls back from her, making a disgusted face. "You should respond more! No wonder your boyfriend is so boring--you'll never get anyone interesting so long as you kiss like that."
That's enough to make Louise fight back. She lashes out with her left arm (the one that isn't hers) and throws Nena off her. "Don't say that! Don't say anything bad about Saji!" Anything else she could say sticks in her throat. She cannot express all the things she should express about Saji. She hurls herself against Nena, grabbing her by the thought again.
Nena grins back at her. "Why not? You can't do anything more to me."
Louise steels herself. "I could say something about your brothers."
Nena's grin is gone. "You wouldn't dare," she says. "Killing me is bad enough. Don't touch them."
"Then you shouldn't have touched my family," Louise says, and she strikes Nena again with the artificial arm. It's satisfying, so much more satisfying than ripping her to shreds with the Regnant. That brought her nothing; it only widened the fractures in her mind until they gaped wide. Now Louise feels, for a moment, like she can patch them up again without the guilt-inducing warmth of Saji's words. Blood and anger will work just as well.
But she knows they won't, she should know that by now. She pins Nena in midair, left hand pressed against her thought, right hand on her chest, and she wonders if there's anything more she can take from this girl to fix herself. She doesn't stop to think--instead, she kisses Nena again, this time of her own will. Nena kisses back, and Louise bites her this time. Nena tenses against her, and then she digs her nails into Louise's good arm, hard enough to draw blood.
That's when Louise understands what Nena can do for her. She opens her mouth a little against the other woman's, lets her own blood trickle faintly into Nena's mouth. There can't possibly be a better person to take all of Louise's hate, all of her pain and anger. It'll flow out of her like a poison and stay in Nena. Then Louise can be whole again. The cracks will seal up, and once again she can laugh on Saji's arm. Maybe the seam on her arm will even be invisible. She can wear long sleeves; that will help.
Louise grasps Nena by the hips, feeling the curve of her, envying her figure a little even now. The flight suit is gone, she realizes with a start; only thin fabric separates her from Nena.
"Looks like you changed your mind about me," Nena says. "Louise."
Louise stabs an elbow into Nena's solar plexus and feels with some satisfaction the way the air rushes out of her. "Don't call me by name like that," she says. "Only Saji can do that. He's the only one who can say it right, anymore." She's revealing more and more about her mind and dreams, she realizes. She's showing Nena the cracks, pinpointing the places where rubble lies on the floor of her brain. But that's all right; it just means Nena can fill them up and take them away better. Louise waits for Nena's gasping to stop (even here in the light and dark of her dreams, they both breathe and bleed; they are too broken and almost-human for anything else). Then she grabs her by the neck, once more with the artificial hand, and holds her at arm's length.
But Nena's hands are still free. She reaches out and digs her fingers into the fabric of Louise's outfit and wrenches it apart. It scatters into the light, and Louise is naked. Even though the light comes from all around, there are shadows on her bare body, shadows every place she bruised during her pilot training, every place she scratched in agony when she couldn't reach her pills in time. It still feels wrong to show Nena these things, but it occurs to Louise that it's all right after all. Nena is the one who caused them all. Without her, Louise would still be full of light. Fury spills through her again, and she reaches out and rips away the plain white and orange outfit that Nena is wearing now.
Nena only grins and wriggles a little bit closer to her. She ducks her head, and then she's out of Louise's grip--somehow it loosened in the past few seconds, and Louise finds herself annoyed by the realization. "You're so injured," she says. "It makes me proud! I did all that, didn't I?"
"No," Louise lies, but the thought comes to her: it's not entirely a lie. Louise herself did some of it after the fact. But no, she doesn't want to think about that, so she grabs Nena and pulls her close. As she does, she catches a glimpse of the shadows on Nena. They are much more complete than Louise's; for a moment Louise thinks she can see them swallowing Nena up at the hips and waist, never letting her go. She's glad. Nena can take Louise's shadows away and barely notice the addition, this way.
Nena stops her, taking hold of her left arm and pressing it to her own breast. "I did this," she says. "It's pretty. You'll remember me every time you see it, won't you?"
Louise can't lie and say no to that. She only glares at Nena and struggles not to cry. Nena lets go of Louise's arm, wraps her legs around Louise's hips, and presses tight to her. Louise can feel her heart beating with excitement. That's wrong; she shouldn't be thinking of Nena with a heart. She should only think of the blood and the pain. She presses her bloodied cheek to Nena's, closing the gap between them more, blurring the boundaries. She doesn't want to talk anymore.
Nena pushes a little closer--impossibly; their bodies should be as close as they can get now, but the rules here are different--and Louise feels the two of them connect, feels a pulse of pleasure run through her. That would be fine--it just makes it easier for Louise to feel the darkness flowing out of her into Nena, leaving her clean once more. It's still a little scary, though. Nena thrusts herself harder against Louise, and Louise realizes that their bodies are not separate anymore. They are half-melted into each other, all entwined and inseparable. She has never been like this with Saji, not even in the normal way a man and a woman can be in the world outside of dreams. They have touched each other in places Louise's mother would be horrified to know about, and Louise has put her mouth in places both her parents would be shocked by, but they have not gone this far. In a sense, Nena has--
"I heard that!" Nena laughs with cruel delight, and little sparks of that feeling (and something else as well, something baser and more pleasurable) flow back through Louise. Worse yet, Nena seems to have decided she's not done talking. "I couldn't take Setsuna's virginity, but now it's enough that I've taken yours. Is that how you'll remember me? No, I don't think so. How will you remember me, Louise? Tell me!"
Louise can't lie at all to Nena anymore. They're too close, and with every time either one of them breathes, Louise is taken by ecstatic feelings she can't control. She's so close to release, a release that will take all the darkness away from her at last. She stops trying to hold back. "The one who destroyed my world," she whispers. "That's you. Why haven't I destroyed you enough in return? Why?"
Nena arches against her. "Ah! That's perfect." And yet she sounds strangely vulnerable. "Will you always remember me like that? As a destroyer who wanted to live at any cost. Not someone's tool."
Louise doesn't understand why Nena would even ask. Her mind has grown hazy with the pressure and raw feeling of Nena twined around her, the pleasure of their bodies rising and falling against and into each other. "Yes! Why do you even ask? You should know by now--" She can barely speak anymore. She digs her hands into Nena's back. For a moment, she feels like she might tear Nena open to pour out all her pain and grief and fury, but all she does is draw a little blood, and then all of that is flowing out of her anyway. She cries out again: she can't tell whether she's telling Nena yes, yes, again and again or if she's only crying incoherently. Suddenly exhausted, she lets go of Nena, wondering fleetingly if it's all gone now. Has she given the hurt away at last?
Nena starts to drift away from her. But she reaches out with one bloodied hand (there are bruises on her neck and smears of blood on her face) to stroke Louise's cheek. Louise wants to push her away--this is supposed to be over. Nena isn't allowed to leave a mark on her anymore. She did that so many years ago, in another lifetime, and--
"Thank you," Nena murmurs, and she smiles. Then she's fading, light piercing through her where the shadows were before, and Louise sees to her horror that there was never any space in Nena for her darkness. That's all still in her, and it always will be. The bloody marks left on her body, the seam on her arm: they will never go away.
When Louise wakes, she is only shaking, not screaming. It's a mercy. She still does not want to tell Saji any of this.
Fandom: Gundam 00
Pairing: Louise/Nena, references to Louise/Saji
Rating: Borderline NC-17
Wordcount: 4,345
Notes: This is kind of supposed to be a little crazy, considering the point of view and the canon point, but hopefully it should be readable all the same.
Summary: In the night, when Saji can't see, a ghost makes her way inside Louise's wounded mind.
Warnings: Dubious consent, sexual and non-sexual violence, mild bloodplay. Hatesex.
Louise is not yet well, and there are still things she doesn't tell Saji.
She knows that this is how conflict starts. He's told her enough times, quietly and earnestly, and every time she listens as if she were drowning and his words were air, but they fall into a crack somewhere in her brain. There are still gaps there, hidden places where the things the fighting did to her wait yet to be discovered.
She does not always tell. One of the things she never mentions is the other woman in her head. It might not be entirely accurate to call her a woman, at that. Louise is fairly sure that the woman in question is no older than Louise herself, and increasingly, as Saji and her own pain lay bare her wounds, Louise realizes that she is still only a girl. The other girl, then. She's in there, and she's plotting something.
It started much more blatantly, much more aggressively. Louise woke in the middle of the night, Saji still silent at her side, to the unmistakable feel of girlish hands at her throat. She knew because she'd felt it a few times before--the Innovades liked to play, especially Hilling--but this was different. There was a savage passion there that she never experienced before, save for from herself, in her moment of revenge. There were sharp nails on those fingers, and their owner wanted something from her. But no one else was there in the darkness, and eventually, it faded.
Yet that wasn't the last Louise saw, or rather felt, of the other girl. One night the ghost (Louise knew from early on, somehow, that she was a ghost) gave up on the clawing and the throttling and instead pried open Louise's mouth and climbed in, her nails still sharp the whole way.
She hasn't left. She's been in there since.
When Louise dreams, pieces of the other girl filter through her mind. She dreams of a Chinese girl she dislikes, but follows anyway; she dreams of violence. Of course, Louise has been dreaming of violence for a while now, but when it is her dream alone, it numbs and hardens her, and she is sometimes scared, sometimes bitterly grateful. These dreams of violence are not of her own revenge, yet they excite her.
She dreams of two young men, brothers no matter how improbable it seems to look at them, and she misses them painfully. It's puzzling, because she's never seen either one of them before. These dreams hurt. They bleed too easily into the familiar dreams of her mother and father with their arms around her, proud of her, welcoming her back. She used to be able to wake from them with only shaking, but since she destroyed that Gundam, she burrows under the covers when she wakes instead, incoherently shrieking her protest at the real world that pulls her back.
It frightens Saji. She's glad he's here for her, but sad that it frightens him.
Louise still dreams of her revenge--that tangle of triumph and terror, of things disintegrating just as they were supposed to get better. But the fear comes earlier and earlier in these dreams, when it shouldn't, and her perspective threatens to split. She tries and she tries to wake up before that happens, and most nights she succeeds. One night, she doesn't. And then she is both wielding the Regnant's claws and in the cockpit of that Gundam, and as much as she tries to resist the knowledge, she knows who the other girl is and why she's chosen to invade the head of Louise Halevy.
It's you, you're the one in here, get out, get out--
A coherent thought from the ghost, for the first time. Stupid stuck-up brat! Of course it's me. Who else would care enough? I won't--
Louise wakes up, and mercifully, she is only shaking this time. She manages to avoid waking Saji, which is good, because she has no idea what she would tell him. She cannot tell him this.
The next night, Louise sleeps only with trepidation. She doesn't want to feel the disintegration happening earlier and earlier in the memories of her moment of victory. She doesn't want the girl's hands at her throat again. Or does she? Perhaps killing her again is the way to fix all this, Saji would say it isn't and Louise knows he's right, but she still hopes against all hope it would be that easy.
But she sleeps, and she is rewarded in her dreams: there are no explosions from the wrong perspective, no memories of brothers to confuse an only child. Instead there is only light all around her. Something else is wrong, though, and it takes her a moment to understand it: she is dressed wrong. The cute and fashionable clothes she wore countless years ago on Saji's arm in Tokyo are on her again. They don't fight. She didn't grow any, but she has lost weight since then. Some of it she gained back in muscle, but that still reshaped the contours of her body. Her shirt is too loose at the collar and chest, too tight at the arms, and her skirt hangs on her awkwardly.
But her memory still calls them to her, still tries to summon the little girl who had everything. She hasn't forgotten. It seems silly, now that she sees it. Of course she can't return to that girl. Even if she wills away the muscle, regains the softer curves, there are scars. Louise looks to make sure: there is a seam along her left arm.
This lesson is one she can hear in between Saji's words. She cannot go back to the past, but the two of them can move forward and make a future together. She understands. But that understanding is swallowed up by the empty parts of her. She still wants to go home.
A part of her murmurs: Maybe the reason you aren't home yet is you didn't destroy her completely. She's still here. Destroy her again, and again, and as many times as it takes.
The light solidifies across from her. It's that other girl, clad in a flight suit. The murmur is just loud enough to overwhelm what little scraps of sense Louise still has, and she flings herself at the girl, hands outstretched to strike. She has the advantage over her nemesis once again. The artificial arm can hit and strangle much better than natural hands. So she hits, and she clutches at the girl's vulnerable throat just above the collar of the flight suit. She screams as she does so, and in moments her screams have turned to words. She wants to say all those things she never got to tell her nemesis when the emptiness of space separated them.
That emptiness, it was fitting in some ways. After all, it was from far above in the sky that her enemy wiped out her family and everything kind and familiar in her life. Louise has never seen her face until now. It was easier that way: destroying this girl was just a goal to be accomplished, a button to be pushed that, when she finally could do it, would make everything better. Here it's different: the person beneath her hands, as she settles them around her throat, is still the enemy, is still the person who destroyed her world, that's the same, but she's also a girl and a human being. Her skin feels soft on Louise's right hand, and her left hand registers the furious beat of her pulse and transmits the information back to Louise's brain.
In any other place but this strange lightscape inside her mind (their minds?), Louise would have long crushed the other girl's throat by now and ended this. She would be celebrating her victory. Maybe now she could finally join her mother and father in the light, like she couldn't quite bring herself to tell Saji she really wanted (but he knew, of course he knew, she could see it in the way he looked at her sometimes, and the only reason she could tolerate it was that he was the only one who could look at her like that without pity in his eyes).
But here she slipped forward, her hands seeming to melt into her enemy's flesh, and strange thoughts flashed through her mind:
--those young men who were supposed to be her brothers, though she'd never had any--
--kill him, kill him and live on for Johann and Michael and me, never needing anyone else now that they're gone forever--
The thought is both familiar and alien. Louise understands that urge to kill, and worse yet, she knows where it comes from. That sudden feeling of the sky fracturing as one's world falls apart, and the knowledge that slowly but surely trickles into one's mind in the aftermath. The only way to put a world back together, to piece back together a shattered family, is to destroy the one who destroyed it. Her enemy once had the same goal as her.
In that hateful shock, Louise loosens her grip on her enemy's throat. The girl reacts immediately. She rears up, fist flying, but just as it nears Louise's face, it opens. Nails rake across her cheek, opening stripes of blood. She's damaged again. Louise lets go entirely, stumbling back.
"It's useless," the girl finally says, glaring. She has bright gold eyes, even more unnatural than her too-bright red hair. Louise senses then, as she finally calms a little, that this girl is something like her. Modified. Not entirely human. Better for battle than for love. "I'm already dead." She tosses that hair a little. "What did you think you could do to me? I'm already dead and it's all your fault. At least this time I managed to leave a mark on you."
Louise glares, unable to believe what she's hearing. She holds up her left arm. "You already left a mark on me," she says. "You already killed me, too."
"Don't be so dramatic," says the girl. "That didn't count. I didn't even see you. I was just bored, and my finger slipped."
Louise staggers back. She feels sick, and she can't pinpoint why. That didn't count. I didn't even see you. "Why are you still here? I finally killed you. You should be gone. Take all this with you." She gestures, and somehow she knows that the girl will understand what she means. The debris, the rubble, it's strewn all over her brain, still smoking and throwing dust up into the air. The cracks, too; this girl can take those and leave her with a mind intact once more.
"Why would I take anything from someone who doesn't even know my name?" The girl draws herself up. "It's--"
"No!" Louise moves suddenly, hurling herself at her enemy again. "No! You shouldn't tell me your name. You--"
The girl shoves her aside, and Louise goes tumbling. "It's Nena, you idiot," she says. "Nena Trinity."
Knowing how her enemy felt was bad enough; now Louise knows who she is, too. She goes to her knees, clutching at her head. "Why? Why?"
"Because you should know!" Nena stands over her, glaring down. "You're the only one I can get to now. The only one! I tried getting into Setsuna's head. I wanted him first! But there wasn't anything I could hold onto in his brain. Just light and understanding. I hated it. My fingers slipped off when I tried, and he never even felt me there. I didn't want to come to you. You're nobody I care about. But the path was there, because you're the one who killed me. And all the cracks were there in your brain for me to hold onto."
"You should take them and go," Louise says.
"I won't," Nena says. "I won't let you forget me like everyone else has. I wanted to live," she adds. "I'm going to make you keep me alive somewhere. Think of it as an honor. Even if you don't deserve it." She kneels down to look at Louise. "I'm going to touch you until you know everything about me," she says. "And you can't forget any of it."
"I won't let you," Louise begins. She wants to say, selfishly, Saji will protect me, because the little girl who would have said that is still somewhere in her, slowly drowning in her soul, but she knows better now. It isn't right to make Saji protect her from her own demons. She has to fight them off herself.
But Nena doesn't give her the chance. She grabs Louise's shoulders and pushes her back. She's very close now; her heat radiates out to Louise like a fire unchecked. Nena moves in more, and now that her face is close, Louise sees that she is the sort of girl that Louise once wished she could be, in her looks. Freckles to make her cute; exotic eyes to draw the boys; lush red lips, smiling now with a little cruelty and a lot of excitement. Louise could have thrilled all the boys if she'd ever looked like that. Of course she knows she was cute herself (that was one of the first things she tried to destroy about her old self), but if she'd looked like that, she could have teased all the boys and then gone bouncing back to Saji while watching him flail.
Nena stretches out over Louise. It feels dangerous now, like their bodies could merge, and Louise wouldn't be able to think of her as the enemy anymore. Nena almost confirms her fears: she leans forward and presses her cheek against Louise's bloodied one, rubbing and nuzzling her until the blood smears over both their faces. "I like you better scratched up and broken," she purrs. "I like you so much better. I see what you were like before, in your mind. That girl was so boring! Why don't you like it better this way?"
"That girl was happy," Louise whispers. "She had her family."
Nena stops wiggling on top of her, then sits up, now straddling her. "That was rude! You shouldn't have brought that up. I had my family once too!"
"I know," Louise says. "I saw them in your mind."
"Good!" Nena's eyes are full of hate, but there's just the faintest hint of tears in them too, Louise is a little horrified to see. "Someone who's alive should remember Johann and Michael and me! We were the best family in the world." Now it's not just hate in her eyes, it's love too; that's the worst part.
"I want to forget them," Louise says, but she can't bring herself to lift her arms and attack Nena anymore. She knows her name now. It's not the same. This is her enemy, her destroyer, and a scared and angry girl who lost everything, just like her. Hurting her more won't fix anything. She'll still be left with the hate and the hurt.
"I won't let you," Nena says. "I'm going to give you all of me, so I'm still alive in you. I don't care whether you want me. I'll make you take me. Why did you think I was here?"
"I didn't think about why," Louise says. It seems obvious, was obvious from the moment Nena crawled into her brain. She's part of the dark places in Louise's head, and Louise has to try not to think about those places, not to think with them, anymore. But they keep pulling her back. Right now, it's easy for them to do so, with Nena's hands on her shoulders pressing her down into the darkness that waits below the light.
"This is why," Nena says, and then she kisses Louise. It's not a kiss like Saji used to give her--adorably nervous, afraid of being reprimanded at any second, but hopeful and a little bit excited--or a kiss like Saji gives her now--hesitant, gentle, like he's afraid she'll break, even though she's already broken. Nena bites, and Louise can taste blood. There would never be blood if it were Saji kissing her.
Something stirs inside Louise, though. It's appropriate--appropriate that she should bleed this time.
Nena pulls back from her, making a disgusted face. "You should respond more! No wonder your boyfriend is so boring--you'll never get anyone interesting so long as you kiss like that."
That's enough to make Louise fight back. She lashes out with her left arm (the one that isn't hers) and throws Nena off her. "Don't say that! Don't say anything bad about Saji!" Anything else she could say sticks in her throat. She cannot express all the things she should express about Saji. She hurls herself against Nena, grabbing her by the thought again.
Nena grins back at her. "Why not? You can't do anything more to me."
Louise steels herself. "I could say something about your brothers."
Nena's grin is gone. "You wouldn't dare," she says. "Killing me is bad enough. Don't touch them."
"Then you shouldn't have touched my family," Louise says, and she strikes Nena again with the artificial arm. It's satisfying, so much more satisfying than ripping her to shreds with the Regnant. That brought her nothing; it only widened the fractures in her mind until they gaped wide. Now Louise feels, for a moment, like she can patch them up again without the guilt-inducing warmth of Saji's words. Blood and anger will work just as well.
But she knows they won't, she should know that by now. She pins Nena in midair, left hand pressed against her thought, right hand on her chest, and she wonders if there's anything more she can take from this girl to fix herself. She doesn't stop to think--instead, she kisses Nena again, this time of her own will. Nena kisses back, and Louise bites her this time. Nena tenses against her, and then she digs her nails into Louise's good arm, hard enough to draw blood.
That's when Louise understands what Nena can do for her. She opens her mouth a little against the other woman's, lets her own blood trickle faintly into Nena's mouth. There can't possibly be a better person to take all of Louise's hate, all of her pain and anger. It'll flow out of her like a poison and stay in Nena. Then Louise can be whole again. The cracks will seal up, and once again she can laugh on Saji's arm. Maybe the seam on her arm will even be invisible. She can wear long sleeves; that will help.
Louise grasps Nena by the hips, feeling the curve of her, envying her figure a little even now. The flight suit is gone, she realizes with a start; only thin fabric separates her from Nena.
"Looks like you changed your mind about me," Nena says. "Louise."
Louise stabs an elbow into Nena's solar plexus and feels with some satisfaction the way the air rushes out of her. "Don't call me by name like that," she says. "Only Saji can do that. He's the only one who can say it right, anymore." She's revealing more and more about her mind and dreams, she realizes. She's showing Nena the cracks, pinpointing the places where rubble lies on the floor of her brain. But that's all right; it just means Nena can fill them up and take them away better. Louise waits for Nena's gasping to stop (even here in the light and dark of her dreams, they both breathe and bleed; they are too broken and almost-human for anything else). Then she grabs her by the neck, once more with the artificial hand, and holds her at arm's length.
But Nena's hands are still free. She reaches out and digs her fingers into the fabric of Louise's outfit and wrenches it apart. It scatters into the light, and Louise is naked. Even though the light comes from all around, there are shadows on her bare body, shadows every place she bruised during her pilot training, every place she scratched in agony when she couldn't reach her pills in time. It still feels wrong to show Nena these things, but it occurs to Louise that it's all right after all. Nena is the one who caused them all. Without her, Louise would still be full of light. Fury spills through her again, and she reaches out and rips away the plain white and orange outfit that Nena is wearing now.
Nena only grins and wriggles a little bit closer to her. She ducks her head, and then she's out of Louise's grip--somehow it loosened in the past few seconds, and Louise finds herself annoyed by the realization. "You're so injured," she says. "It makes me proud! I did all that, didn't I?"
"No," Louise lies, but the thought comes to her: it's not entirely a lie. Louise herself did some of it after the fact. But no, she doesn't want to think about that, so she grabs Nena and pulls her close. As she does, she catches a glimpse of the shadows on Nena. They are much more complete than Louise's; for a moment Louise thinks she can see them swallowing Nena up at the hips and waist, never letting her go. She's glad. Nena can take Louise's shadows away and barely notice the addition, this way.
Nena stops her, taking hold of her left arm and pressing it to her own breast. "I did this," she says. "It's pretty. You'll remember me every time you see it, won't you?"
Louise can't lie and say no to that. She only glares at Nena and struggles not to cry. Nena lets go of Louise's arm, wraps her legs around Louise's hips, and presses tight to her. Louise can feel her heart beating with excitement. That's wrong; she shouldn't be thinking of Nena with a heart. She should only think of the blood and the pain. She presses her bloodied cheek to Nena's, closing the gap between them more, blurring the boundaries. She doesn't want to talk anymore.
Nena pushes a little closer--impossibly; their bodies should be as close as they can get now, but the rules here are different--and Louise feels the two of them connect, feels a pulse of pleasure run through her. That would be fine--it just makes it easier for Louise to feel the darkness flowing out of her into Nena, leaving her clean once more. It's still a little scary, though. Nena thrusts herself harder against Louise, and Louise realizes that their bodies are not separate anymore. They are half-melted into each other, all entwined and inseparable. She has never been like this with Saji, not even in the normal way a man and a woman can be in the world outside of dreams. They have touched each other in places Louise's mother would be horrified to know about, and Louise has put her mouth in places both her parents would be shocked by, but they have not gone this far. In a sense, Nena has--
"I heard that!" Nena laughs with cruel delight, and little sparks of that feeling (and something else as well, something baser and more pleasurable) flow back through Louise. Worse yet, Nena seems to have decided she's not done talking. "I couldn't take Setsuna's virginity, but now it's enough that I've taken yours. Is that how you'll remember me? No, I don't think so. How will you remember me, Louise? Tell me!"
Louise can't lie at all to Nena anymore. They're too close, and with every time either one of them breathes, Louise is taken by ecstatic feelings she can't control. She's so close to release, a release that will take all the darkness away from her at last. She stops trying to hold back. "The one who destroyed my world," she whispers. "That's you. Why haven't I destroyed you enough in return? Why?"
Nena arches against her. "Ah! That's perfect." And yet she sounds strangely vulnerable. "Will you always remember me like that? As a destroyer who wanted to live at any cost. Not someone's tool."
Louise doesn't understand why Nena would even ask. Her mind has grown hazy with the pressure and raw feeling of Nena twined around her, the pleasure of their bodies rising and falling against and into each other. "Yes! Why do you even ask? You should know by now--" She can barely speak anymore. She digs her hands into Nena's back. For a moment, she feels like she might tear Nena open to pour out all her pain and grief and fury, but all she does is draw a little blood, and then all of that is flowing out of her anyway. She cries out again: she can't tell whether she's telling Nena yes, yes, again and again or if she's only crying incoherently. Suddenly exhausted, she lets go of Nena, wondering fleetingly if it's all gone now. Has she given the hurt away at last?
Nena starts to drift away from her. But she reaches out with one bloodied hand (there are bruises on her neck and smears of blood on her face) to stroke Louise's cheek. Louise wants to push her away--this is supposed to be over. Nena isn't allowed to leave a mark on her anymore. She did that so many years ago, in another lifetime, and--
"Thank you," Nena murmurs, and she smiles. Then she's fading, light piercing through her where the shadows were before, and Louise sees to her horror that there was never any space in Nena for her darkness. That's all still in her, and it always will be. The bloody marks left on her body, the seam on her arm: they will never go away.
When Louise wakes, she is only shaking, not screaming. It's a mercy. She still does not want to tell Saji any of this.