An extremely late and silly rendition of a popular Christmas Carol, dedicated to crackedfishtank for the SMT Secret Santa event, essentially filler for the Naoto x Kanji drabble that may or may not come.
♪ Jingle bells, Kanji yells,
"GET BENT GET BENT GET BENT!"
Naoto dons a reindeer outfit,
Kanji nosebleeds!
HEY
♫ Jingle bells, Dream Bells,
Souji's cats ran away,
Oh what fun it is to fight
Around the TV World!
Hi there! I don't know if anyone cares but it has been a full week (more or less) since I was last on an actual computer, and right now I'm at a friend's house, using their internet. In case you need me for anything, just leave me a message and I'll get to it as soon as I can. I also apologise for the SMT secret Santa thing, I guess my present will be coming in a little later than expected. I will most likely getting the Internet back at home in three days (at least I hope so).
!New Fic! - SMT:Strange Journey - Man, Myth, and Father
This fic is for Chernoblog for SMT Secret Santa 2012! It is the first of two parts!
Man, Myth, and Father/Rated T/WIP/Gen/2,217+ words.
One night near the end of his strange journey, the protagonist meets with an ancient titan and begins to make a choice.
Ao3 Tags: SJ!Protagonist, Jimenez, Strike Team, Arthur, Zelenin, obedience, rebellion, decisions, execution, post-game epilogue, the only gore is the Commander, paternal and fraternal friendships, the middle path is froth with uncertainty, war novels
- - -
His service to the Red Sprite and humanity had earned him an office.
“But perhaps,” Arthur acknowledged via video-feed from a console mounted in the wall, “informal accolades are overdue. This space-related promotion came at Research Officer Irving’s suggestion, and I approved the assignment transfer.” A flickering LED enunciated each word. “However, I do not calculate that 53% more sizable quarters are comparable to the value of your person and skill set to this mission, Crewman Rhodes, but I find it an acceptable notation at this time.”
The room’s single, tubular window looked out onto the bleak, blurry landscape outside the Red Sprite. Spotlights moved through the darkness, floating over blackened ground tracked and scarred from the transport’s passage. A windstorm, constant and cold, torn peaks across the Schwarzwelt, twisting violent horizon and barren earth together, but the air lulled into stillness below the port-hole in the sky to the previous sectors.
“I have also arranged to have your record deployed to the U.N. committee on the Investigation team’s return,” Arthur went on, “so you may be correctly recognized and compensated for your actions.”
“It’s fine, Arthur.”
“Then, I will leave you to yourself now. At ease, Crewman Rhodes, and good day.”
“Thank you,” he said, and a screensaver blotted out the wall-console’s LCD screen. The room around him was little more than a bunker with metal on all sides, like many rooms onboard the Spite. Individual living quarters branched out in wings from a central common room and cafeteria with officer’s quarters set up above the rabble on a second half-floor, and those officer’s quarters sported ‘offices’.
This had been an officer’s room outfitted with a standard-issue bed braced against the wall, built-in shelving, and, most luxuriously, a desk, for official duties, with a personal computer terminal sleeping and steeped beneath a slot in its center. The overhead light flickered on with a touch, brightening up the dust filming its surface, and a tap on the desk itself brought up a monitor with a liquid hiss as a shifting spray of green light from the bottom of the panel projected a holographic keyboard. The machine, long unused, sought the internet as blindly as a lost soul and settled for Arthur’s internal network. He tested a few strokes idly, the ‘keys’ blinking into full light beneath his fingers.
This had been an officer’s room—once—now, it belonged to him. He swept the desk clean, and the dancing of the holographic keyboard stilled, the dust falling elsewhere, and ‘unpacked,’ rehoming his guns and his blades in new compartments as his Demonica sat, golden and grinning from the symmetry of its red eye windows and its filtration-aid breathing system, on the desk beside the idle computer and the neat, leather fold housing his e-reader. Other than these things, the room changed not at all, and he stood at his new locker, stripped half-way out of his suit—
—and a rapid and gentle metallic rapping interrupted him.
It didn’t come from the automatic door.
He paused and slid the arms of his suit back up over his shoulders, leaving the asymmetrical zipper hanging open down the front of the gray undershirt.
At his desk, the red eyes of the Demonica glowed, the screen within the helmet active and flashing ‘SUMMONS REQUEST’. The flashing words passed away, and ‘PLEASE CONFER EXECUTIVE APPROVAL’ scrolled through the red eye windows.
At the beginning of the investigation, a curious Pixie in his stock had often made requests to leave the program and ‘talk about mysteries’ night after night for as long as he would indulge her in private. (He had never had Jimenez’s gall.) And she held him firmly to the consequences of his ‘indulging.’
“Boss,” the pixie would ask in the after-mission darkness once ‘time’ had become only a courtesy Arthur maintained and he’d turned in for the ‘night’ from long ‘days’ in Antlia. “What does it mean to be a man?” And the questions would go on until she was satisfied enough to let him sleep, questions about technology, the ‘human world,’ math, his …his life (“Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Boss? Don’t human women like you?”), and jokes (“Maybe you’re just not funny enough? I love a guy with a sense of humor.”), and whatever else piqued the impish curiosity. But she had grown up since then, and the demon’s signature, a string of characters starting with ‘dfx$zWjx9ogiX-9W,’ did not belong to her or any of the demons she sired.
But he approved the request with a slide of his thumb through the ‘executive-override lock’ as the DSP coined it. The room flooded with eerie, erratic light and an old god formed from the shower of emerald pixels. The ancient titan towered over Rhodes, his narrow, sinewy body wrapped in a cloak that flowed like blood beneath his alpine-white beard, shadowed eyes, and hoary brows. In the shelter of his right hand and the thick folds of his cloak, he carried a starburst of holy, stolen fire.
Rhodes greeted him stiffly, “Sir.”
“Greetings to you,” Prometheus said in a voice like ash. “My thanks for granting me this audience. I have wanted to speak with you for some time.”
“About what, sir?”
“My own name is quite suitable,” Prometheus assured him. “May I address you by your given name, my son? I feel we will speak again yet, and we are comrades. So, let us be—cordial. ”
The endearment, however respectful, bristled him, but this was Prometheus, Prometheus who sat at the first shore, soaked in the foam and spray of the primordial ocean, as he shaped the original man from its clay.
‘Perhaps he earned it,’ Rhodes thought.
“That’s fine, my name is—”
“I know your name; since long ago, my children told of a magnificent sailor who bore your name, a sailor whose legendary ship cleft legendary waters,” and his dark eyes seemed to gleam, “Jason, and we have much to talk about.”
“I’m not familiar with that story,” Rhodes admitted as he offered his ‘comrade,’ his demon, a seat on his bedside, and Prometheus accepted it with a nod and sat, arranging cloak and fire-burst tenderly.
“Are you not?” he asked.
“I’m not,” Rhodes continued, shutting down the terminal and sitting neatly in the empty desk-chair. “It’s not the kind of thing I like to read—typically.”
“Tell me then, where does a young man of your age keep his books?”
“I’m thirty-three.” Rhodes grinned, subdued and small, and handed the tablet over from its place on the desk. Prometheus took it from him gingerly and lifted the leather case open, the e-reader coming alive at his tap on the screen.
“Oh?” He touched experimentally with a long, thin finger, the device unlocking slowly as he navigated the apps and documents, icons flying by. “Younger than I thought.”
Rhodes might have flinched, and Prometheus moved through his library, idling at particular covers and certain titles, glimpsing in at the first handful of paragraphs for a lucky selection, and opening curious menus and applications as serendipity struck him.
“Indeed, perhaps not a reader of grand travels,” Prometheus observed as he paused in his ‘reading,’ “but ah, this book must be dear to you. According to these—‘reading statistics,’” he quoted thickly, “you’ve read All Quiet on the Western Front four times—and simply that since your ship came to these lands. Why that one, if I may?” And then he stopped. “And not…Rainbow Six by a Tom Clancy? That looks like a tale about soldiers as well.”
“Well. Uh,” Rhodes said, perhaps for the first time in a long time in his life, “Rainbow Six is—it’s ridiculous. It’s inaccurate; it barely makes any sense—I liked Hunt for Red October, very much, but Rainbow Six disappointed—”
“But that is Clancy,” Prometheus reminded him. “What of Western Front?”
Rhodes shifted on his chair, propping his elbows on his knees and folding his hands over his mouth. He dropped one hand down into his lap, faltering, explanations drying out on his lips.
“I can’t tell you,” he said after a long pause. “I don’t know why I read Western Front. It’s—well-written.” And the words fell so empty and wilted from him, incomplete, inadequate, insulting.
“Always a lofty compliment to any poet.”
“Yes,” Rhodes said, his throat seemed to quiver. An intensity of unnamable, changing emotion curled at the base of his brain. He sat up and straightened his spine, the turmoil at the bottom of his mind locking into silence. “Now, why did you want to talk to me? Do you have questions too?”
“Questions? Amusing, but no. Can you think of nothing that would I bring me here?”
“I can’t think,” Rhodes said rigidly, “of what I do that would concern you—”
“My boy,” Prometheus started, his voice heartful and soft, “we, your comrades, are aware of your dilemma—if not its particulars. When your mind is troubled, our cohesion wavers. A coming decision, great and cleaving, disturbs you. I want to know of it.”
“I said that doesn’t concern you—”
“But it concerns you.”
“It concerning me does not mean it’s public—”
“Then, you intend to enact this decision alone? On your own power? Not to imply that you are not formidable.”
“The decision concerns demons,” Rhodes relented. “I want to keep—objective—”
“Why so?”
“Because—” The knot of tightly wound emotion budded at the base of his skull again, a rush of harried sensitivity, fast and nearly unchecked. ‘I’m annoyed,’ Rhodes realized. “Because,” he started again, his voice steady and his mind restrained, “I want to make the best choice.”
“Is there such a choice?” Prometheus asked. “You are very capable and clear-sighted; I find it unusual that you would struggle with issues of judgment.”
“I haven’t see the right choice yet—”
“Perhaps it is not there to see,” Prometheus said. “Tell me your choices, and I promise I will protect your objectivity—always—in these matters related to demons. I have sacrificed such for humanity before.”
A wind howled along the Red Sprite’s port-side, and fog clouded the window as one of the Schwarzwelt’s ‘blizzards’ kicked up. In the icy outskirts at the edges of the sectors, storms formed in churning circles that turned slowly for hours and hours until the ‘snow’ deployed, sheets of sooty, icy composite whistled through the no-man’s land, destroying what visibility remained in the sunless valley, but the ash fell lightly, defying all physics, and floated over ship and rock alike only as heavily as dust, shrouding the shoulders of the mountains ridging up around the mouth of Grus. It stroked the window like wingtips as the motes gathered in the bottom of the sill.
Rhodes thought of eagles at the faint whisper of the ashy snow sweeping the glass, eagles drifting over frosty mountaintops above the clouds and sun-fall with talons and beaks dipped in old blood, and Prometheus bound in unbreakable chains on the peak below on a boulder stained with immortal blood and blotched with the eaten shreds of immortal liver—an eternal torment in exchange for the welfare of man.
“A Grendel in the Sanctuary is holding information required for the mission,” Rhodes said, the mental image clearing in a blink. “He and his kind suffered tremendously inside the Lightning’s base at the hands of its crew, and he will release that information if retribution is brought against his tormentors.”
“So, you will execute these other human men?”
Rhodes’s mouth twitched, his eyes darted, and he swallowed, a sweat clinging down his back and shoulders.
“That’s one option. The information can also be taken forcibly from the demons. Zelenin offered to bring angels against them, but I’m capable of neutralizing Grendel myself.”
“Then what stops you? Why not slay the beast and be done with debating?”
The pause was excruciating, the room reduced to its mechanical noises in the silence, the half-life murmurs of the Red Sprite’s engines, the moaning of the storm, and the bodiless voices of its crew shuffling through its steel corridors.
“I want to make the best choice,” Rhodes said at last.
“Your hesitation is not unwise,” Prometheus told him. “But all you have are meager, ruinous ‘choices,’ if even worthy of the name. To execute the Lightning’s crew is to murder your own, but to spare them would deny the wronged and abused their justice, and the angels—”
“The angels will slaughter them,” Rhodes finished, and suddenly, his voice tinged with cynical vinegar, low and bitter, “slaughter them, and anoint Jack’s squad. As if—” He found himself chuckling.
Prometheus rose, his cloak a crimson waterfall pooling without a sound on the floor panels, and his hand fell heavily on Rhodes’ shoulder.
“There will be no best choice, only what you are willing to follow,” he said. “You have time to choose, and take it, but during that time, might I advise you read a new book?”
He broke Rhodes’s stare with his own e-reader as Prometheus pressed it against his chest, and Rhodes took it from him slowly, clumsy and unfamiliar with the tablet. THE ARGONAUTICA by Apollonius Rhodius printed down his screen, a prim, orderly English translation reading aside lines of parallel Greek, and Prometheus smiled at him.
Another Secret Santa, this time for epsilon-ursae-majoris. I tried but I couldn't draw Alioth. I'm so sorry! >_< I drew Hariti instead. I hope you like your present anyway! :__D
