Despite their injuries, Noir kept moving for some time after they’d left the Manor. They had briefly considered staying in the nearby town of Noir loyalists, but that was abandoned; for these people, like almost everyone else, expected that only two women would emerge from the ceremony, not three. There was no telling how they would react to a Noir that didn’t meet their expectations, and the trio simply couldn’t risk any more surprises. Indeed, they only stayed long enough for Mireille to retrieve the car she’d rented and fill it with (siphoned) gasoline — the mobility it could provide would prove immeasurable in the next few hours.
As she was the only one with a license, it was Mireille who drove the small vehicle west along the Franco-Spanish border, sticking primarily to little-used back roads, and more than once nearly getting lost in the night’s darkness. Finally, she pulled off onto a small dirt road that lead into a grove of trees, hoping that they would provide adequate cover.
“We’ll spend the night here. I think there’s some blankets in the trunk.” Once the blankets had been extracted and injuries had been tended to, Noir settled down to sleep — in shifts, of course. Kirika took the first four-hour shift, followed by Chloe. Mireille planned on beginning the drive again during her shift; with any luck, they’d be able to reach Andorra by noon.
Mireille woke up early — she’d never been the type who’d needed a lot of sleep to begin with, and she never slept very deeply when she knew her well-being was threatened (one of the many habits she’d picked up in her unique line of work). A glance at her watch told her it was 5:23, presumably in the morning.
“You’re up,” came a voice from the passenger seat.
“Chloe — you switched places with Kirika.” It had been originally agreed to let Chloe lie down in the back seat, due to her wound — while it wasn’t that much more severe when compared to Mireille’s, the Corsican had figured that Chloe’s relative inexperience with injuries might have meant that her body and mind would need more rest to properly regenerate itself.
“Quite frankly, I think she needs it more,” Chloe responded. “She’s been through a lot of stress in the last twenty-four hours. Her world was just turned upside down.”
“So was yours.”
“Yes, I suppose it was.”
There was a long silence — though it couldn’t really be described as awkward. Neither Chloe nor Mireille felt any particular need to say something, that’s all. Mireille glance back at the sleeping Japanese girl before breaking the silence. “She’s going to want the two of us to be friends, you know,” the blonde remarked.
Chloe sighed. “I know.”
“And I’ll be honest; right now, I find myself actually wanting to be your friend.”
“Likewise — at the very least, it would make this easier to handle.”
Mireille gave her colleague a resigned smile. “But that’s not going to happen, is it?”
“No. Not for a while, anyway.”
“You still resent having to kill Althena?”
“Yes… and no.”
“Excuse me?”
“I… I do wish we hadn’t killed her, and I’m still not certain it was necessary, but….” Chloe trailed off, leaving the small vehicle in silence once again.
This silence lasted so long, that Mireille began to suspect that Chloe had gone to sleep. “Chloe? Are you awake?”
To her surprise, the response was not a snore but a sniffle. “Y-yes….”
“Are you… are you crying?”
“Maybe.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? You made me kill Althena, that’s what’s wrong! And I… I let you do it!”
“Shhh,” warned Mireille. “Keep your voice down, or you’ll wake up Kirika.”
“Sorry. I just… I just don’t understand…”
The Corsican sighed. “You and me both.”
“She was… she raised me. She was like a mother to me. And I killed her. I didn’t want to…”
“But that was what Noir decided—”
“Then why couldn’t I have just stood aside? Or gone off after Borne and Marennes while you and Kirika killed her? You were the ones who wanted to do it.”
“I don’t know — I’ve already told you that I don’t know a lot about Noir, and I don’t know how I know most of what I do know, if that makes any sense.”
“It doesn’t.”
Mireille paused. “Look, I don’t want to try and tell you to put this behind you, because you obviously cared about her. Of course, whether or not it’s the result of years of brainwashing is debatable—”
“You’re not helping.”
“Sorry. But my point is, she apparently had been planning on giving me control of Noir for a while now. I have no idea why she wanted me to hate her so much, but she certainly went out of her way to make sure that that was the case.”
“You think she orchestrated her own death? Why would she do that?”
“Who knows? Maybe the Grand Retour requires the death of the person who instigates it, and she wanted to make sure I made the right choice. Maybe she wanted to make sure that I would be impartial towards Soldats. Or maybe she really was crazy. Whatever her reason, she wanted this. It’s the only explanation I can think of — if she hadn’t wanted things to turn out this way, she probably could have gotten out of it. I mean, did she even put up any resistance when you and Kirika went after her?”
“No…”
“Well, seeing as she likely did everything in the name of our best interests, I can only conclude that she felt this had to happen in order for us to fulfill our destiny.”
“And just how are we supposed to do that?”
“Well, what did Althena want us to do?”
“Since when do you care about what she thinks?”
“Just because I didn’t agree with her doesn’t mean I don’t care. The fact of the matter is that I have no idea how to go about doing this — at the very least, her plans could be a sort of starting point.”
“I… I don’t know.”
“She never told you?”
“I never asked.”
Mireille wasn’t exactly surprised by this revelation. “No hints?”
“I thought she would just tell Kirika and me what to do, and we’d go do it. It wasn’t supposed to get any more complex than that.”
“Ah.” Mireille was beginning to get a sense of Chloe’s resentment. The previous morning, she thought she’d be led by a knowledgeable woman who was confident in what she (and, by extension, Noir) needed to accomplish. Now her de facto leader was a woman who was skeptical of the entire institution of Noir, someone who questioned whether it even deserved to exist, someone who’d openly admitted that she had no idea what she was doing or supposed to do. Chloe’s confidence in her situation must have taken a sharp plunge when she’d stuck her sword into Althena’s flesh. Mireille looked over and saw the young woman looking at her intently, clearly desiring a more lucid response than the monosyllabic noise she’d received.
“Well, I do know that there’s suffering in the world — and we’re uniquely equipped to do something about it, if Althena was right. I guess there are two questions to answer: just what should we do, and how should we do it?”
“That’s easy. We should rid the world of Darkness, and we do it by destroying its agents.”
“You really think it’s that simple?”
“No. But we’re Noir. We have the authority to do that.”
“Authority? From who? Soldats?”
“From ourselves.”
“And what if we become corrupted?”
“We won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re Noir.”
Mireille raised an eyebrow. “So you’ve accepted that I’m a part of Noir, then?”
“Just because I don’t like a situation doesn’t mean I’ll pretend it doesn’t exist.”
“The way you’re pretending we can’t be corrupted?”
“I’m not pretending. It’s true. Noir can’t be bothered by the trauma of a conscience, ergo, they are always right.”
“Sounds like flimsy reasoning to me.”
“Not all reasoning is intellectual.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
Mireille would have tried to press Chloe further, but the girl was clearly tired, and was obviously not going to budge. “I suppose we’ll have to work together to figure this out.”
Chloe snorted. “How can we possibly do that? We don’t agree on anything — we don’t even like each other! Face it, the only thing the two of us have in common is Kirika.”
“True, but at least we have something in common.”
“Kirika?”
“She cares about you, and she cares about me, and not in the forced, we’re-in-Noir-so-we-don’t-have-a-choice way that we feel about each other, either. It’s a start, at the very least.”
“That’s true,” Chloe admitted. She stopped as she noticed the young woman in the backseat beginning to stir. After she was confident that Kirika wasn’t about to wake, she asked, “You really think she’ll be able to hold Noir together?”
Mireille paused for a moment before answering: “She has to. Now, why don’t you try to get some sleep? If anything’s going to clear your head, that should do it.”
Read the comments on this episode
See other episodes by Kwakerjak
(Posted Mon, 25 Dec 2006 03:08)
Questions? Problems? Suggestions?
Send a mail to addventure@bast-enterprises.de
or use the contact form.
らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
All other series and their characters are © by their respective creators or owners. No claims of ownership of these characters are implied by the authors of this Addventure, or should be inferred.
The Anime Addventure is a non-profit site.