The last time Akane held a chainsaw in her hands, she and Carlos had just managed to escape the pantry they were locked in at the Dcom facility. They opened the door to the freezer and… were greeted by Junpei’s frozen, dismembered head laying on a shelf, eyes wide and unseeing, frost layered atop pale blue skin and dark hair.
If she lets it happen (and she tries not to), she can still recall the terrifying realization she experienced with perfect acuity… No, “terrified” doesn’t even begin to describe how she felt. If you were to ask her then how she would describe the feeling, she would say it had felt like she was falling off the moon, like you’re floating, helplessly floating. Confused. Nothing is real but the darkness that surrounds you. But as time passes, you’d find yourself pulled in by the Earth’s gravity, and you’re still floating. Floating… And then you’re falling. You’re falling, burning, bewildered and screaming and there’s nothing you can do about it as you disintegrate into nothing.
But then those ashes reignited into a rage and sorrow that blazed like none other.
Those pieces of his corpse, strewn about the pantry, irreverently turned into parts of puzzles… Carlos had played rock-paper-scissors with one of Junpei’s hands, for God’s sake! Cold! Dead! Devoid of life…! How could she not feel terminally ill deep within her soul the very fraction of a second she knew?
The rest is something of a blur. She remembers taking a chainsaw that just so happened to oh so conveniently be there and the low rumble that emanated from it when she revved it up. She remembers the intense growl and the harsh vibrations that gnawed at her hands as it tore through the hardwood, finished with polyurethane, the same way her grief at the sight she had just witnessed tore through her heart. Afterwards, numb to the world, she finally allowed herself time to mourn, to try to make sense of this tragedy… In her efforts to do so, however, Carlos became an unfortunate scapegoat in her desperate mind.
The ultimate result was… undesirable. It went two different ways, both bloody and violent and adding to the body count.
… But that was all in a different timeline, one she is only connected to through the morphogenetic field, the memories stored within it so perfectly downloaded into her that she might as well have actually been there when it happened. Still, she doesn’t want to keep thinking about it. Every time she does, her heart thuds against the inside of her ribcage like it wants to escape the pain those fourth-dimensional memories incite. Even now, her cheeks are wet.
The whole point of this—the decision to make something with a chainsaw of all things—was an effort to work through some of that lingering trauma, to want to at least try to associate this machine with creation instead of destruction.
And so, with a deep, shaking intake of breath, she revs the chainsaw up, staring down the block of marble before her as though about to engage in a duel with her own mental and emotional baggage, and despite being relatively sure that you’re typically not supposed to use a regular chainsaw to carve into stone. If she remembers correctly, however, marble is relatively soft, about a 4 on the Mohs scale…
She begins anyway, despite her misgivings. The teeth bite into the marble and, again, she feels the vibrations gnaw into her hands—the skin, muscles, and bones. She’s not particularly convinced that she has the proper strength to actually carve the material in any meaningful way, but that’s not going to stop her from trying anyway.
“Not really!!!” she finally shouts in response to the clearly concerned bystander, loud enough to be heard over the roar of the dangerous implement she’s holding, while keeping her attention on the object in front of her, “But what better way to learn something like this than to dive into it head first?!”
He could have cried that, attempt to get this woman to halt her attempts to create with such a dangerous weapon. He had seen all too clearly before what became of men and women who used weapons they knew not how to use. Bullet holes in arms and legs, if they were lucky. The aftermath of bodies in explosions, people grabbing onto weaponry of soldiers mowing them down in an attempt to save their life, only to end multiple.
Innocent people were always the ones who made their way into war hospitals, and he knew both the bodily and mental harm that could do to someone.
He was one of them, once, after all.
Even if it was not an attempt to save his life - an accident, he had to say to himself, even though there was not a chance in the world that it was his fault they got stuck in that crash. An accident, he had to say, to rationalize to himself that it was okay he was the only one who survived - he still suffered an attack on the innocent.
This woman did not seem to be one who would harm others with the chainsaw - she was creating art, after all - but he knew the dangers that could come of this regardless. The way he stood off to the side, anxiously watching her hack away at the marble should attest to that enough.
But still, Yotsutsuji needed to say something. Something, that could help this woman not bring harm to herself or to others in creating her masterpiece, whatever that turned out to be.
“I-I wouldn’t say that’s the smartest idea, still-! You could injure yourself that way - maybe a chisel would be better?”
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