“So now you’re running away from the problem? What kind of Maverick hunter does that?”
It was true, he was taunting her at this point. And it wasn’t right, but he wanted – needed to get this off of his chest. All he’d seen from Rebecca was either her attempting to be far too strict, or running when she’s scared. While he can understand fear, this was inexcusable.
He turned to face Rebecca as she was walking out, his arms crossed.
“You can walk away all you want, but it isn’t gonna change the fact that you’re a coward.”
She had paused on the way to the door to quietly speak in response.
“Then consider me a coward. Think whatever you want. You have a right to do so.”
She didn’t understand what seemed to be so damn bad about wanting to improve herself to help others. She just didn’t have the mental energy to bother with this right now, and Aerin acting like that simply decreased her energy.
Something twisted in her stomach area, but she had said what she had come here to say. If Aerin wanted to taunt her, then fine. He could think whatever he wanted, and he had a right to hate her right now.
After all, she had gotten him killed by being stupid enough to get captured. Every nightmare she had since then dug that right into her processor to the point where it was embedded. Aerin’s and Zero’s blood splattered everywhere, across her face it was everywhere get it off she was so stupid-
She left the room, shoes softly tapping down the hallway as she intended to get back to training.
Shadow smiled sadly as he watched her go. It was an unfair trick he was playing on her, as he had no intention of going after her.
As Rebecca took her time to get settled, the robot master waited to ensure that no one was watching before stepping back into one of his own shadow portals. It swallowed him up, taking him into the distorted realm that would lead him along the shortened path to the fortress that Kai (and Tomoe) lived in.
He wouldn’t find Rebecca… but she wouldn’t find him again, either.
It took a good fifteen minutes for Rebecca to stop being excited about getting tested by an actual ninja.
It took another fifteen minutes before she realized that he wasn’t coming to find her at all.
She jumped down from the shelf and peeked out from the closet, wondering what was going on.
The hallway was empty. There didn’t seem to be a single trace of Shadow anywhere.
It took her a good moment of staring before embarrassment burned in her cheeks, and then it turned into and anger before she stomped off to the VR room to blow off steam. He could have just told her to go away! He hadn’t needed to trick her!
She was so embarrassed that she had fallen for it too. That felt humiliating.
“That isn’t the easier skill to learn. Maintaining your silence while being able to focus on something else is a talent that even skilled soldiers often lack. Working on it is commendable.”
The mention of speed had him pausing to think, but he couldn’t really confirm or deny whether or not speed was useful. For himself, Shadow would never say he was fast, but he certainly had the ability to disappear when he needed to. Vanishing into the shadow realm was a far quicker way to ‘escape’ than anything else ever would be.
The conversation as a whole was beginning to wear on him, though. and Shadow could feel his smile becoming strained and forced. He had come here for– why had he even come to hunters, again? Because of Blues? Or… another reason…
He needed to get out.
“The real test now is if you think you can hide yourself well enough that I cannot find you.” The words slipped from his mouth easily as Shadow continued to smile blandly at the girl. “You have 30 seconds to get situated.” It was unsaid, but implied, that she should go elsewhere.
“Mhm. My goal right now is successfully multitasking at least once. Then I can start on trying it more than once.”
She didn’t want an easy path at all. She wanted to get better the hard way. Because she wanted to work hard to get better, not take some easy way out. And learning to multitask would be good for that.
Though what he had said next made her blink in surprise, she didn’t waste any time disappearing at a speed that would have left any human in the dust trying to keep up.
She even managed to disguise which direction she was going in, which was even better!
Rebecca had ended up hiding herself in a small-ish storage closet, tucked up on a top shelf with her signals dampened as far as they could go.
Was that seriously all she could think about? Granted, she was sort of thinking of his death. Aside from that, all of her focus was on herself. “It’s nice you wanna learn from your mistakes, but stop thinking about yourself.”
What were relaxed, open hands were now clenched fists upon his desk. Only after turning away from Rebecca.
“Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the apology. But quit throwing a pity party already.”
“I wasn’t thinking about myself. I was thinking of the people who could and did get hurt by me being stupid.”
It was clear enough to her that he hated her, or at the very least disliked her. Rebecca wanted nothing more than to get out of his way right now so he wouldn’t have to deal with her.
“I’ll get out of your way now, that’s all.”
She didn’t even have the mental energy to get irritated at the ‘pity party’ bit, She genuinely didn’t see how this could’ve been interpreted as a pity party, she wanted to improve herself so this never happened again, so no one else got hurt because of her stupidity ever again.
She hadn’t locked herself in her room to cry and sulk with her violin like when Papa died. She actively wanted to improve herself.
She got to her feet again and started towards the door, intending to leave and get out of his way.
To think that Rebecca had wanted to talk after all of this time was a shock. She hadn’t come to see him while he was stuck in the med bay, or even left a message. So why did she want to talk now?
Well, may as well see what she wants.
“Yeah, come in. You can sit on my bed.” He motioned for her to do so. When she eventually did, and closed the door behind her, Aerin took a seat back at his desk.
“What’s on your mind? You look pretty bummed out.”
She quietly sat down on the bed, not making eye contact with Aerin before she spoke.
“I’m sorry for being stupid enough to get captured. You got killed and that’s my fault.”
“I started training again as soon as I got cleared, so I won’t be that stupid ever again.”
And that was it. If he hated her after this, she was fine with that. She was completely prepared to leave if he told her to get out.
Rebecca knocked on Aerin’s door, waiting for her brother to answer it. She was fully expecting him to hate her, honestly. She had gotten him killed, after all. It had been her stupid fault.
When Aerin eventually answered his door, she spoke up, her voice a bit hoarse from disuse.
“Can we talk? It’s important.”
She wasn’t expecting anything right now. In fact, she was pretty sure Aerin already hated her and probably would not want to talk to her at all. Rebecca felt she’d be better off training right now, but Zero had said she’d be suspended until she did this.
“I-I was intending to at some point- Y-Yes Papa, I will.”
That is, if Aerin didn’t hate her for getting him killed, of course. Rebecca felt it was well within his rights to hate her for being stupid enough to get captured though.
She had long learned it was pointless to protest this though. She’d go get this over with quick and easy.
“H-He’s in engineering, I’m guessing? Or his room?”
Zero didn’t doubt her, but he also wasn’t dumb enough to outright believe her. Rebecca looked far too stressed out for that to be the case. There was more going on here and he was fairly confident that he could guess just what the other bits were.
“Sure, right.” Stepping inside, he reached out to idly snag a knickknack off her dresser. Nothing fragile or important, just something that he could hold instead of flailing his arms around uselessly. “Is training what they call ‘avoiding your dad’ these days? Cause I’ve definitely noticed that since, y’know.”
A beat before Zero looked up, gazing at Rebecca as he forced himself to say words that even he didn’t want to hear out loud. “Aerin’s core was shot through and I was left at the hands of Kai.”
“I wasn’t avoiding you, Papa.”
Which was the truth, that was her genuine reason for being so busy all the time. At what Zero said last though, that made a flinch go through her, and she lowered her head, her bangs shading her eyes.
“I wasn’t good enough. I was stupid enough to get captured. So I want to get better so it doesn’t happen again.”
She acknowledged that she had been stupid a while ago. Now all she wanted to do was make sure she wouldn’t be stupid in the future.
Too much time had passed since the incident and any… talk between the two. Zero had been busy dealing with the repairs and partial reconstruction to his body, and Rebecca had been-
…
That was the issue, really. He didn’t know.
The fact that she was avoiding him had been easy enough to pick up on, though, which was why he found himself wrapping his knuckles gently against her closed door. “Rebecca? Can we talk?”
There was a muffled clang behind the door as well as muffled, vehement swearing. Before more muffled swearing and steps towards the door. The door slid open to reveal a bedraggled Rebecca, blinking in a bit of surprise.
“Papa? I was just about to head back to training. Sure, we can talk.”
There were dark marks under her eyes, and her hair had grown just a little bit. It was tied up tight in a low tail, with her bangs and top of her hair in disarray.
She did back up though to give Zero room to come into her room though, going over to sit on her bed..
Zach smiled softly at that, and shifting as he did to move into a squatting position. It put him closer to eye level with her – she had to be what, seven? eight? only, and it made it feel more like a conversation now that he wasn’t towering over her.
“So what’s he like normally then? Is he… not a happy person?”
He was being nosy. He was prying. Rebecca had every right to refuse to answer. But… Zach was curious. What she said implied a change in his behavior, that he had made a difference, and that just couldn’t be true. He was just a bitter ex-soldier dealing with PTSD. Hardly anything about that would result in a person that could make someone else happy.
“He’s tried to be happy a lot in the past, but I could tell he wasn’t. His happy faces looked like ouches.”
“That all changed when he met you though. His happy faces don’t look like ouches anymore.”
She stumbled over her words a lot, she had only really learned to talk somewhat properly recently, still absently using her hands to gesture and sign as she talked. But she looked at the tile floor, fiddling with the hem of her dress before looking back at the other.
Back in the Game 
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