2022-02-04: Futility

• Log: 2022-02-04- Futility
• Cast: Akane Shinjo, Anti
• Where: Tsutsujidai - Outside Akane's House
• OOC - IC Date: 0096-02-04 (2022-02-04)
• Summary: Anti returns home with the fruits of his labor. Akane has been informed he's returning.
• Content Warning: This log depicts two teenagers (simultaneously stanced as creator-creation and sibling-like) engineered into a pantomime of an incredibly dysfunctional home life.

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<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Today's Akane experience:

* Akane goes to Ryuutei to put the vague feeling that something is happening outside out of her mind.

* Akane encounters a Newtype in her space, shoves her entire foot in her mouth, and exits at a high speed after finding out that *apparently* people are getting here from Junius Seven's wreckage.

* Akane goes home on a bus that is weirdly crowded for once.

* Alexis informs Akane, already looking for an excuse to have a shitty mood, that Anti seems to have concluded that the best way to protect Akane's world was to go to the most heavily defended greater metropolitan area on the planet and attack its trains in a Death Army-type mobile weapon while proclaiming himself as Tsutsujidai's defender.

* Akane figures out that this wouldn't even work because even if people were getting there through Fujiyokidai Ward's train system, Junius Seven's wreckage would still exist.

It's the dead of night. It's raining. Akane grips her phone tightly, sitting just outside her room. She doesn't even really feel like she deserves the comfort of a familiar space right now -- and besides, she's waiting for Anti to come here, at this point.

She has sent Anti twelve 'Where are you?' texts, all of them while he was still outside her world, which means Anti gets, in practice, SEVERAL notifications rapidfire the second he gets back in.

<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.

It took Anti a while to get home.

For one thing, by the time he brought Death Knight back to the Treasure Robotics hold, the engineers keeping track of it were furious. They said it would take a long time, to reculture the DG Cells which remained in the machine so that they could repair the cauterising damage of those burning hands.

Anti was just LUCKY, they said, that the cockpit wasn't properly breached. There were enough inert DG Cells around Anti, anticipating a real pilot, that it was still possible to repair the Death Knight.

He got quite the lecture on how it was a special piece of technology, and if they wanted a lobotomised unit, they had ten in the back. He withstood it all, stoicly.

No one told him about this before he sortied, naturally -- and even now, all he really gets from the lecture is the idea that these cells are the source of Death Knight's increased power.

There's another lecture entirely, of course, for the REST of the damage. More holes than suit, the engineer said, with some unkind words for Anti's piloting capabilities. What sort of fool stands in front of GaoFighGar's full power? And that's leaving aside all the other damages!

... anyway, Anti endures it, because it would be suspicious if he went back to the trains too quickly.

Even when he does, they're delayed.

Because of the damage he did, obviously.

So, in the end...

His hands are scuffed and dirtied, as he pulls his phone out, faint red welts from hot wires. It's a stark reminder that he was fighting in this form, not in his natural state. It's striking that the only thing which really hurt him, in the end, was the Death Knight itself. It's...

It's a lot of messages. Anti experiences the feeling of his heart sinking into his stomach and leaping into his throat simultaneously. Perhaps that's normal. He's not human, after all, so his heart doesn't need to obey human laws.

He thumbs out a message of his own, close to midnight.

> On my way.

Three words, one message; he just replies to the last one. He scrolls back over the others; his lips tug down, a complicated sort of trepidation in his eyes.

He slips his phone into his pocket; he slips out of Tsutsujidai station.

His clothes are made for summer. The fabric is light, for all his sleeves are long; it breathes easily. Breathes water, now, droplets threading through those breezy stitches, sticking the veil to his skin, constant contact with dampness which plummets his temperature even in the balmy night. His hair is beraggled-flat, carrying the raindrops and his misfortune.

He comes to the gate of the house, and pauses.

"..." Anti says, an absence of a statement, as he looks up to Akane's door, the threshold of her comfort.

He is afraid.

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

He could've died, Akane thinks to herself. He could've been... worse-than-died. Can kaiju even become -- like those people, she saw on the news about Shibuya, when she was 13 or so? Does being an autointelligence kaiju matter?

Stupid. He's her prized creation. He's the one she wanted to exist -- desperately. If he's going to take such big risks, they ought to at least be smart risks and not pointless, stupid stupid *stupid* ones. So many awful things could have happened, and then she'd have no one to face the Vessels of Light.

And then she'd be alone, again, but for Alexis, except alone *against the world*, rather than in the perfect stillness of solitude.

She turns to face her home, once. She shifts position, breaking the line of sight between herself and the other homes on the street. She pounds the side of her house once. At first she'd written it off as the intercession of the Federation, and that little mobile unit, and the ZAFT girl. But is Anti the problem after all?

Her outburst is over by the time Anti arrives, though. When he arrives, she's walking over to the gate from the side of the house, expression flat, hair matted by the rain. Her glasses are so wet that it's a miracle she can see. Maybe she can't. Maybe she simply feels Anti's return.

Her hand grips her phone tightly. Her eyes narrow first -- then her mouth twists into a scowl.

She feels like either her phone is going to shatter or every blood vessel in her hand is going to get smashed against it from squeezing it. "... What were you thinking?" she asks.

There's no actual interest in the answer. The question is rhetorical. You can tell that it's rhetorical because Anti is allowed exactly five syllables before Akane solves all her problems at once in a single, smooth motion: With a phone hurled at his face.

<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.

Akane said she just wanted a quiet world, all fixed, all hers. There were problems, but she didn't need anyone else. She said she didn't need anyone else! But then she found someone else, anyway, and Renais wanted to take his task from him, the one task Akane wanted done more than anything done.

He thought... if he could stop the intruders, he could...

... he wanted to make her happy.

He wanted her to be happy with him, too.

Anti knows how he feels, all on the inside, all sick and twisted from the worry of what will happen now she's not. But he can see that scowl, the damp, the misery of open rain. She's not happy.

He gets five syllables. He doesn't realise that's the time limit, because it cuts off, just like this.

"I was destroying th --"

It's something that both hurts and doesn't. Anti is a kaiju, tough and vicious even in this tiny mimicry of an existence. But a phone thrown by God has a certain velocity; though he doesn't flinch or stagger, there's a clear red mark, right in the middle of his forehead. For all his speed, he doesn't move away.

Just as he said, she's impatient.

... there's nothing he can do but let her vent those frustrations, since he failed her, after all. He's not going to crash the car just because Akane is angry at him; she has a good reason. It's not like he can understand those feelings, since he's a kaiju, but he knows she's important.

His head angles down; his soaked bangs hang, a veil over his face. But he never stops looking to her. He never stops being attentive.

He never finishes his sentence, either.

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Akane stands there in the rain. She never bothers to take off her glasses.

She wants, so desperately, for him to do better. Neither of them are happy like this. She's responsible for Anti, as her creation -- and he can't be a kaiju that eats breakfast with her if he never gives her a reason to reward him. That's how things work, right? If you perform well, if you take care of the things you're supposed to, if you just do what you're told and --

-- well. Anti isn't doing any of those things, to be sure. And being so territorial is making it even harder on Alexis to clean up the messes both of them are making. Being so obsessed with specifically taking out Gridman is getting in the way of *everything*. Didn't Alexis mention he was getting territorial with *Renais*, too? That's going to be a mess. If he pushes too much, he's going to screw up the one nice thing she kind of wants to do before she shuts herself in her room forever and waits. *Obviously* the King of Braves can't actually do a damned thing about it. It has to be her. Everything has to be her.

Akane's head slumps forward just slightly. After her full-speed throw, she slowly pulls herself back into a more neutral stance. His mess is her mess now, because it can't be Alexis's mess, because *her* mess is Alexis's mess. He's always so good to her, so she owes it to *him* to at least take care of the messes she asked for, right?

Her obscured gaze rests on Anti for a long time. She wants to tell him to just figure it out himself, to find his own way to untangle this miserable, stupid chain of problems. But he doesn't know any better. She probably shouldn't have thrown the phone at him. ... but she's committed now. Besides -- hopefully he'll learn from it.

"... that whole thing was pointless. Junius Seven leaks in here, too. ... to close the psychic rupture, we have to defeat Vessels of Light. Like Gridman." Alexis's words, rapidfire. Nothing more than that -- just the assertions he made, relayed through the quiet, angry hiss of God's megaphone to the only one listening. But that's all she gives. It already feels like too much. She gave him intelligence in the hopes that he could figure this garbage out on his own.

Turning on her heel, she sulks back to her door.

<Pose Tracker> Anti has posed.

He thought, so desperately, that he could do better. Akane was relying on him, and she was bothered, by all these people coming in. She was bothered... so the obvious solution is to stop them coming, right?

It's not that she told him, exactly. She told him how much she didn't like thinking about the outside world, and she told him how troublesome those intruders were. He drew his own conclusions from that.

He's supposed to protect her happiness. He's supposed to protect her world.

But he's a kaiju, so all he can do in service of those goals is destroy.

Maybe he didn't need more than five syllables after all.

Hidden face to hidden face, he watches her. He doesn't look away. Waiting for her will.

Anti doesn't mention who led him to Death Knight. Akane is the one who told him to ask Alexis for help if there was something he couldn't do out there; surely she knows he asked.

He's learning a lot of things from this, but... less than Akane might think, given what he already knew.

Junius Seven, though...

She's angry. She's angry at Anti. He should have killed Gridman, before trying to fix everything else. But... Gridman wasn't here. Gridman hasn't appeared, so Anti couldn't transform, either.

He can't ask her for those orders now. Not only because she's angry, but because she's too angry to even face him.

She turns to her door. He doesn't move, standing by the gate, watching her. The rain pours down, paints him a drowned cat.

He knows he can't come inside.

That doesn't mean he'll leave.

<Pose Tracker> Akane Shinjo has posed.

Akane doesn't dry off. She doesn't even take off her hoodie. She just crumples into her garbage, once she gets back into her room. It's only after about two minutes of lying there, motionless and angry, that she notices her monitor is on. Alexis. Of course.

He speaks as he notices her moving from the floor to her desk. "Did everything go well with young Anti? He's trying his best for you, of course." Alexis pretends to have seen nothing of what just transpired. "You can't expect him to understand the situation the way we do, after all. He *is* just a kaiju."

Akane slumps into her chair. She doesn't even acknowledge the question, or the statements following it. She knows exactly what they all mean and what all the answers are and if Alexis wants to hear damn thing number one about it he can crumple into a pile of bones waiting for her to say something, for all she cares.

Instead, she says, "... Make this stupid problem someone else's problem. And give me something to deal with it that isn't another one of my kaiju." She's not in a mood for playing around. "From now on, *my* kaiju are for solving *my* world's problems. Since apparently they can't do anything else right."

"... As you wish, Akane-kun," Alexis says. The monitor winks out.

Akane slides bonelessly out of her seat. Sleep does not come for her. She looks over at her bag.

... in the end, maybe a Lord Monster's problems need to be solved by a Lord Monster.