I pulled this prompt from a list I found from THE GIFTENING 2017. A BIT LATE PERHAPS BUT HEY I COMPLETED A THING. Now posting, as ordered.
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docholligay said: January 11th 2018, 7:18:00 pm Mina, I hope they serve beer in hell
It was the unknown that Minako loved best. You could plan and counterplan, have contingencies A through Omega, and more often than not, somewhere in there you’d have found the how-to guide to kicking this thing’s ass. The bad guy got a dose of Senshi wrath, the planet kept turning, and all her girls went home relatively intact. Which was the whole point, right?
If you liked boring.
Minako fucking hated boring.
Easy, uncomplicated victory just got so damned DULL. These big bosses with their big plans made out of cellophane. Poke a hole in the right place and the whole thing tore apart. It made Minako feel cheap, and not in the fun way.
Not that she didn’t want to win (she always won) and not that she wanted anyone to get hurt (more than kept them humble), just, would it kill her to get a challenge now and then?
The laugh -- one part amused, two parts bitter, the perfect irony cocktail -- bubbled out of her. Something fresh and warm trickled down her chin and she let it. War paint, she thought. A funeral mask, she added. It’s blood, stop being so dramatic, she concluded.
“‘s so fuckin’ funny?”
The voice was weak, weaker than she thought it could ever be, and it shot ice through Minako. “Just thinking about word choice.”
Looking would be bad. Waiting wouldn’t make it better.
Minako’s teeth ground with the strain. Things that shouldn’t crunch most definitely were crunching. Tears pricked at her eyes, and the urge to give up blossomed, alien and powerful. Don’t you dare, you owe it to her, don’t you fucking dare. Finally, breath shallow and catching, her head reached the point where she could let go. Gravity did the rest, and her cheek flopped into the frost-kissed grass. Starlight and rubble had filled her vision, and that at least felt appropriately cinematic. This? This was insulting.
“You look like shit.”
She’d have thought the twisted wreckage of Haruka’s body would be the worst of it. It looked as though her spine had a violent argument with itself and tried to storm out in opposite directions. Her arms were snapped and bent in objectively more angles than should be possible. Haruka’s legs were somehow even worse, their otherwise hilarious length simply providing more real estate to fuck up. It wasn’t a body, it was a gross caricature of human by someone who had only heard about them.
She’d have thought that would be the worst. She was wrong.
Had Minako been asked, she would have said there was no way she’d ever not recognize Haruka. Her face was a big, dumb, loveable, infuriating, gentle, lump of blonde disaster, and Minako had stared at it nearly as much as she had her own. Over pizza and hot wings, in late-night drunken conversation, when challenging to one more round of Super Smash Brothers.
That face had vanished, lost to her in a crushed smear of deep crimson. Best friend, or pound of ground round? What do you folks at home think?
And her eyes. They were an oil slick of purples and blacks, swollen and bulging in their sockets. Indecision was a rare feeling for Minako, but then, she’d never before thought to ask herself if she’d trade Haruka seeing her own twisted body for a moment of selfish connection and comfort.
Haruka’s chuckle was a thin rattling wheeze. How many times had Minako heard that noise? How many times had she been the one that caused it? Standing over this monster or that abomination, shaking her head at the parting curses of another downed enemy with a grand inferior plan. Victory lived in that sound.
Life was not shy about handing out the lessons today.
“Left powder … in other fuku.”
“I can’t take you anywhere.”
If Haruka had a comeback, it never crawled its way through the ruins of her throat. They lay there, side by twisted side. Minako strained to hear anything, pushing desperately at the fingers of muddy darkness that kept plunging into her brain to drag her away.
There was nothing. No sounds of battle, no power cries, no overconfident gloating from an ugly pile of shit who would get to learn the hard way, same as they did, that no battle with the Senshi was ever truly over.
Nothing but the shallow rasp at her shoulder, and the slowing heartbeat in her ears.
“...think…”
MInako blinked heavily, willed herself to focus. Haruka’s tongue (shredded it must hurt so much) darted out to moisten her lips (what lips oh god) and Minako sensed more than saw Haruka steeling herself to try again.
“Think … others …?”
It was all she could manage, but it was enough. Minako’s mind, even now as it was beginning to dim, skated on lightning. She considered a dozen responses, from shaded truth to outright lies, and weighed the merits of each before even Normal Haruka would have expected an answer. But in the end, there was really only one way Minako could go.
“Dunno, bud. I hope so.”
Minako’s voice was slurring now, even to her own ears. She wasn’t sure if Haruka understood, but thought she heard a noise of agreement, and clung to the affirmation with surprising force.
“Also hope they serve beer in hell.” Minako fought muscles that refused to respond and managed a smile. Haruka wouldn’t see it, but maybe she’d hear it, and that wasn’t nothing.
Nothing was also her response.
“Haruka? I said …”
But it didn’t really matter anymore.
Swallowing hard, Minako tried one more time to hear something, to get some sense of what they’d leave behind.
There was nothing.
God, she really did need that beer.
The relief that washed over Minako as she allowed her eyes to close was unlike any she’d ever known. “Save me a seat,” she croaked to nobody in the still, silent air. “First round’s on me.”
