A man that lie with mankind, as with womankind, is fine. A woman that lie with womankind is finer.
Neon Leviticus 18:22 (Unified Standard Edition)
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"I smell like fish!" Hitomi complained as Sakura dragged her down the hallway towards the women's restroom.
What followed was an attempt to shampoo Hitomi's hair with squirtable handsoap from the sink that smelled like fake oranges, and getting Hitomi's shirt collar soaked despite Sakura's attempt at stuffing the rim with paper towels.
Argh.
Hitomi clipped her barettes back in and sighed theatrically, sniffing a few times, and making a scowl with her face.
"Now I smell like fish served in orange sauce, ewwrgh."
Sakura was very apologetic, and tried repeatedly to make it up to Hitomi as they made their way back to their temporary quarters.
Eventually Hitomi had settled in with her laptop, the soft glow lighting her face, as she wrote emails and caught up on the news in the world. She searched around for what Mrs. Smith had told her was happening with Utah, but couldn't find anything.
"That's weird," she mused out loud.
"What?" said Sakura, who was busy texting away on her phone.
"Lot's and lot's of news, lots of articles about the U.N. thing and all the fighting, but I don't see anything about Utah."
"Utah?"
"Yeah, my host mom told me, like, ALL the Mormons are supposed to go to Utah, I thought it would be in the news."
Sakura put down her phone, thinking about it, "Wow, that's... that's a lot of people, right?"
Hitomi nodded, "Mr. Smith said there were 13 million of them worldwide. Something like that, I think."
A look of concern passed over Sakura's face as she digested that little tidbit. "13 million? I had no idea!"
"Yeah, crazy. Well, still, lots of speeches on the net right now - the new President is going to give a speech tomorrow," Hitomi said, thinking of America's new leadership.
"Oh? What about our Prime Minister?" Sakura wondered about home.
"Hmmm, nothing yet, but one of the guards told me that the first wave of JSDF soldiers should be here late tonight or in the early morning, so that's good, right?"
"For sure!" Sakura agreed. She was sitting on her couch in what passed for pajamas, texting again into her phone. A gold chain dipped down under her night shirt to a small piece of jewelry that Hitomi couldn't quite see. Hitomi envied her cleavage a bit. Maybe a lot.
"That's a nice necklace," she complimented Sakura, whose face was locked in an impassive mask as she worked on her phone.
The older girl looked up and smiled softly, holding a hand over it protectively over her shirt, "Yes, it's very precious to me. It reminds me of my family," she said.
"Oh, it's a locket? Can I see?" Hitomi quickly padded over from her position on the floor and looked up at the surprised face of Sakura.
"It's uh, personal, um, sorry," she said, looking down at Hitomi's curious face, which had fallen briefly and then picked back up as she scooted back.
"No worries! Totally fine!"
Sakura seemed to be thinking about something: "Hey, Hitomi, you want to stargaze?"
It was 9:30PM and not lights out yet in the embassy, but was pretty dark.
"Will we be able to see anything?" Hitomi wondered.
They made their way into the back courtyard, which was actually very, very spacious, and found themselves a nice spot on the carefully trimmed grass. Both of them laid back and looked into the night sky, which, perhaps because of the all the problems in the city, was decently visible.
The light pollution of D.C. had been dimmed by rolling power outages, and thankfully a lot of the smoke from various small fires around the city had dissipated over the last day and a half. They had heard that the plane crash from the other day was caused when the pilot went into cardiac arrest during final approach to Reagan airport, and the co-pilor hadn't been able to take control back for some reason.
That particular column of smoke had lasted for some time, and Hitomi could only imagine similar scenes had played out around the world.
But the stars, the stars were beautiful. And the moon! Wow! It was huge!
"I wonder what Mr. Bunny is making up there tonight?" she said, looking up into the dark craters that looked liked they made rabbit ears.
"Probably making rice cakes," Sakura said without thinking about it.
Hitomi fwapped her with her right arm, laughing, "Mochi! My mom always said he was making mochi!" And sure enough Hitomi had grown up loving the Bunny-brand of mochi, that delightfully sticky sweet rice treat, her mother would buy from the store. She smiled at the happy memory.
"Oh... right, of course," Sakura said, looking up at the rabbit, "Mochi. Mmmm..."
Hitomi turned her head towards her and saw Sakura playing with her locket, out in the open, but it was closed.
"You miss your family, don't you?"
"Well yes, of course," Sakura said, "Don't you?"
Hitomi thought about that. She loved her mom and dad, and her pesky little brother - he had saved her bacon a few times thanks to their "mutual doujin manga protection pact" - but she wasn't really worried about them. Was that wrong?
"I mean, I miss them, you know, but I'm not worried about them, they're safe, you know? Japan is probably one of the safest countries to be right now. Well, China and Korea too, probably. I mean, any of the industrialized Asian nations. None of us have all these crazy... beliefs, I mean, outside of the, you know, cults here and there."
"Yeah... Japan is safe..." Sakura said softly.
"Yeah! Japan is safe! Who cares if we don't have souls!" Hitomi raised her middle finger to the sky and yelled out, "Ya hear that?! Fuck your 'souls'! We don't need 'em, God! Or whatever you are!"
Sakura giggled at her blasphemous antics and raised her own middle finger to the sky, "Yeah, I poop on you! God!"
Hitomi almost died laughing. "Poop? Poop!?"
That was the best Sakura could come up with? "Poop?"
LOL.
Wait, no, ROFL.
Hitomi had already rolled around slightly, and she was on a floor (or grass, at least), and she was laughing, so: Rolling on the Floor Laughing. ROFL.
After their hysterical laughter died down a bit Sakura said, "I feel a little better now, thanks Hitomi."
They laid there for a minute, just sharing the peaceful moment. To Hitomi's surprise she felt Sakura's left hand brush her right hand, and, frozen, didn't stop her when, after not meeting any resistance, Sakura laced her fingers in hers.
It felt nice.
And they stayed like that, for a little while.
Then the sky exploded in a flash of bright red and orange, a burst of sound booming over the walls surrounding the expanse of grass and tearing at their clothes. The nearby trees that surrounded the property whipped back and forth.
They both screamed and jumped to their feet, turning towards the source of the explosion. A pillar of smoke was rising north of them, on the far side of the embassy itself. They couldn't see much because the building was blocking their vision, but they could hear other people screaming. Lights and alarms were going off.
They started running back towards the building, they really weren't very far away, but another crash sounded north-east of them and a plume of fire lit up the embassy's parking lot. Someone had just smashed the gate!
"Shit!" Hitomi said, grabbing Sakura's hand and pulling her back. They ran for the woods bordering the south side of the property as gunfire filled the air.
"Down here!" she urged the other girl on, pulling her down a slight embankment until they thudded against a chainlink fence set partially down from the top of the hill. The southern side of the embassy was on top of an underground parking garage, but they couldn't get over the iron railings further on below them, even if they managed to scramble under the chainlink fence.
Hitomi looked around for a replacement for Mr. Pipe.
"What are you doing?" whisper-yelled Sakura, wide-eyed, watching Hitomi scraping along the ground on her knees until at last she found herself a long stick. There was more gunfire, and the frequency was increasing. Above them they could hear the occasional whistle of a bullet zipping through the air, sometimes striking the fence or bark of the trees.
Then they hid, not really very well, but at least they were able to keep their heads down. They heard a megaphone start yelling to back off, talking to a group of rioters, saying they would open fire if they didn't clear the embassy grounds immediately.
But Hitomi knew the embassy wasn't equipped to handle heavy defense. Why would it be? It wasn't like the White House where they had snipers on the roof and hidden guys in the trees.
Was it?
The sound of automatic weapons fire filled the air over the potshots of the rifles or pistols the mob had been using. There were more screams and yelling. Hitomi looked to Sakura, expecting to see her being a panicky mess, but was surprised to see that she had that same, calm, collected demeanor she usually did. Like: all business.
People were running now and yelling, scattering. Hitomi could swear the voices were getting closer, and they sounded foreign. Not even English. Whatever language they spoke they were yelling it in panic as the Japanese soldiers guarding the embassy must've somehow turned the balance against them.
What had they even been trying to accomplish?
A man flew over the gap the girls were hiding in, slamming into the chainlink fence. Another one followed shortly after and came down next to his buddy. They didn't say anything for a second, and then realized that Hitomi and Sakura were just inches away from them.
Oh shit.
He had a gun. It was aimed at Hitomi's chest.
"Say nothing!" he whispered fiercely, letting the gun play over Hitomi and Sakura's chests. The other one started scrabbling at the bottom of the chainlink fence. Hitomi held her stick behind her back.
The man with the gun was covered in soot and grime, and both of them were dressed in dark olive fatigues of some kind.
"Dig! Dig faster!" he turned and urged his friend.
"No, Salim, it's too deep! Where's your leatherman?!"
Salim, the one with the gun, didn't move the gun, and said, "Left pocket, feel for it - ah, yes, there," he said, as his unnamed partner began cutting links in the chainlink fence with the utility knife's plier attachment.
"You see the explosion?" he asked violently, itching his gun upwards to point over to the smoke, "Allah is great! The 'Islamic Center' is now rubble and ashes, it's blasphemy done! You will tell them!" he demanded, poking the gun at them.
Sakura kept her mouth shut, but Hitomi couldn't help herself, "But... aren't you...?"
The man spit, another link clinked open, cut in half, "Those Wahhabists betrayed us! We are the new State of God's Mercy On Man!"
She now understood that she ABSOLUTELY knew nothing and was an idiot for even trying. She could barely understand the jumble of words the man had said, and Sakura had just elbowed her to shut her up.
The other man interrupted any further thoughts: "Done! Let's go! Shoot one, leave the other to tell these Chinese dogs of our deed!"
Hitomi flickered when the man had said "Shoot one."
There was a her that fell backwards from behind Sakura, blood exploding from her mid-section where their assailants had shot her in the stomach to maximize the pain of her death - the bastards!
But Hitomi was, right now, spearing Salim through the eye with the stick she had been holding in her right hand, and had slapped the barrel to the left of Sakura and herself with her left hand. The other man had expected a gunshot, but only heard a gurgle instead.
Hitomi was leaning over Sakura, crushing her a bit, breathing heavily all of a sudden.
Salim fell backwards, the gun slipping out of his unresponsive hand, as the other fellow looked at them through the chainlink. His eyes were bright with fear underneath the fullness of the moon.
"What... the fuck..."
He never finished the thought, because Hitomi simply picked the gun up, stood up and away from Sakura, who dropped to the ground to cover her ears, and shot him mid-turn as he tried to run away down the rest of the embankment.
She pulled the trigger five times and hit him two or three of them, he was still so close.
Hitomi looked down, realizing that she wasn't... that last bit, that hadn't been her power, that had been her own initiative.
Oh, she felt faint, all of a sudden.
Sakura grabbed her, yelling, "Help! Help us!"
They heard footsteps running towards them, and two soldiers, far more heavily armed than the usual embassy staff, looked over the embankment to find the two women and two corpses. One immediately radioed it in.
"Civilians! Two, confirmed! Hostiles! Two down! Confirmed, two hostiles down!"
The other reached down to pull them up, asking if they were OK.
They were checked over quickly and then walked back towards the embassy as the rest of the soldiers went down to retrieve the bodies and secure the perimeter. There were soldiers everywhere, far more than what she had seen in the embassy, and she asked the man escorting her: "Excuse me sir, but where did all the soldiers come from? And what happened?"
"JSDF Advanced Detachment, ma'am, we were already in the city when the mosque got lit up. Pounded pavement and got here just after the gatecrashers." He pointed off to the side at the wreckage. There were more bodies arrayed around a burnt out SUV.
"Two got away from us, but not from you, it looks like," he dryly commented.
Sakura hugged Hitomi from the side as they walked inside.
"My. Hero."
Then playfully kissed Hitomi on the cheek.
Right in front of Mr. Yamada, who was standing inside the hallway, flanked by his usual guard, arms folded.
"Ms. Hisakawa, Ms. Tanaka, may I have a word?"