SAO - Nekomata

prowlingthunder:

Sachi/Kirito [for Valentina-Moon]

She slept for a year. Easy, the hospital bed as soft and comfortable as her mother’s womb.

Everyone had been surprised when she had woken up; her parents had been there when it had happened, her mother’s makeup smudged, her father’s face buried in her shoulder. There had been two– no, three nurses, and a doctor in a long white coat.

No one had been more surprised than she had, You Died still burned into her retina, pain receptors still screaming. His anguish permeated the room even though he was gone, even though she was dead.

She remembered– smiling, weakly, trying to reassure the doctor and her parents. But mostly she remembered dying, her spear falling from nerveless fingers. She hadn’t even been able to remember what had killed her, exactly, not the name or the stats or.. any of it. But she remembered him.

All her questions about the Black Cats are deflected, except by a government investigator who queries her about the game. She’s the first person to wake up, and no one knows why. None of her friends made it. They were the only ones who died that day.

They let her out of the hospital a few weeks later. She takes the NerveGear with her, although she hides it in the closet for nearly a month; it will be therapeutic to dismantle it eventually. Her fine motor skills are… as much of a lost cause as walking unassisted, but she tries. Muscle atrophy has eaten away much of her strength, and though her body remembers the actions, only time and persistence can return them. She has physical therapy to help, but her nerves are shot and she remembers– You Died.

There are websites with lists of the dead. The toll increases by the day, but they’re all real-life names, and his isn’t on it. The internet is flooded with pictures of them, memorials; schools and businesses have walls of the dead or the comatose, posted by family, friends, coworkers. She remembers his face, soft smiles and gentle amusement, the way his expression hardened when going into battle; but she doesn’t find him anywhere.

It hurts to look. She finds people she went to school with, people her parents worked with, sleeping dead dead sleeping, and she grieves, but she doesn’t find him. He isn’t to be found.

He’s alive, she thinks, and it’s a mantra she holds close, even as she lights incense for her friends. He’s alive. He made it out.

She does not attend school that year. It’s too hard to focus. Every dropped pencil is her perception alerting her to a monster in the rooms, every rainy day her muscles scream in agony, and everyone knows her face was on the wall. A binder is not a shield which can protect her, and her walking cane is not a spear to be used in her defense. It feels wrong to attend when so many others are still trapped.

She finds NerveGear schematics on the internet instead and picks apart her own. She was a member of the Computer Club, and she had earned that honestly. She knows well any machine she can get her fingers into, and it takes time and she almost misses it, but after several months of splaying the machine across her desk and her floor and parts of her bed, she knows what happened.

You Died. No, she didn’t.

She calls up the investigator and invites him to meet her at the park, wraps up the piece in question in an anti-static bag. She is… reluctant to hand it over. But she knows she is never going to wear the NerveGear again, the idea of it makes her hands shake too badly, and if there is something they can make of it… well. Maybe they can.

There was a manufacturing flaw. The odds of it are… astronomical, with modern machine lines, she’s not as good with numbers as she’d like to be. One in several trillion, maybe.

You Died. She had. She woke up. It was a fluke.

Almost everyone wakes up a few months later. There are a few hundred who do not, and like her, no one is sure why. But some wake up. The announcement is huge. The investigator calls to tell her in person before it hits the news, because soon there may be no way he can protect her from the sharks that are reporters, but he will try. She is not ready for those; not yet.

Those who do not wake up are flown to a federal hospital at the expense of the government. A few months later, they wake up as well, and once more, no one knows why.

She peruses the internet. He’s still not there. She holds her mantra close, but like a wind-torn banner the hope is beginning to fray.

The beginning of the new school year sees her transferred to the SAO Survivors School; because SSS and SAOSS make interesting banners and school logos, she guesses. She isn’t sure she wants to go to school, even now, but with physical therapy and plenty of medication, her strength and her nerves are settled enough that she can walk unassisted and her limbs actually obey her.

She still knows his face, so she’ll go.

The first day is a mess. There are too many people to keep the reporters away from everyone, even if they’re not allowed on school grounds, and not everyone takes kindly to being crowded. She witnesses three pushy newsmen thrown over shoulders in the first twenty minutes, and no few of them are still using canes. She holds her own firmly, ready to throw it up and defend herself, but right here, right now, she’s just another survivor, and they’ll take anyone they can get. The last group to wake up isn’t even here; the prognosis is that they’ll be joining mid-term.

First period after lunch is group therapy sessions, which is not mandatory, but come highly recommended, and adults who survived are invited to join. She picks a smaller group to insert herself in. The therapist is there to listen, mostly, and he’s large and broadly built, and probably there to prevent a fight. Using in-game names is heavily discouraged, but she’s had a year already to get out of the habit of introducing herself that way. She takes that step and leaps across the bridge like her Acrobatics skill became a top of the line reason to start the session.

It’s easier to remember the good things. She’s actually in the middle of recounting their first dungeon crawl with him when the door opens. Of all the things she could have forgotten, his face could never be one of them; it flushes white as a sheet when he sees her, so quick her knee-jerk reflex is to step for him, even though the therapist is already there, holding him up, holding him steady.

Kirito. He made it. He got out. She loops him in a hug on instinct, half-crushes him between her and the therapist. She might be crying, but it’s a small matter, and if she is it will be a relief. He curls his arms around her awkwardly, and she can feel how painfully shaky he is. Shock and disbelief, lanced grief, left to bleed again. But she cannot let him go.

“You can’t be.. Sachi?” His voice is steady, but low and raw.

Her own shakes like an infant’s rattle, relieved but broken all at the same time. “Yeah. I’m here.”