(Starting here to the end of the First Encounter - First Chapter (about 5:30 in))
Summary:
Kou is much younger (mid-twenties) is running through some jungle terrain with armed men in similar uniforms, clearly trying to respond to an ambush that caught them off guard. The men attacking them seem to both appear from no where -- popping out of trees and the brush unexpectedly -- and have vastly superior firepower.
Kou tries to give them direction but as he runs one man after another is picked off until he is the only one left, laughing a bit broken and hysteric at his utter loss. He has fallen to his knees from injuries, his hands are hidden in the brush.
A large intimidatingly awesome dude approaches, asking him in Spanish if he speaks English, then going on to tell him to drop his weapons and show his hands.
Kou: Afraid I... Man: Speak up! Kou: Afraid I can't lift my hands. Man: Don't be stupid, commander. Your men are all dead. Kou: I-..I came here from Japan. Man: Hm? Kou: I chose to come here! B-Because my place, my place is on the battlefield! Man: [dismissive] Alright, alright, now show me your hands. Kou: [a couple of deep breaths] Be my kaishaku, please. Man: Kaishaku? Kou: Seppuku... hara-kiri. I'm a samurai, I disembowel myself. When I do, you cut off my head, that's being a kaishaku. Kou: From behind, it's all one cut from below the medulla. Kou: Just stop before you cut all the way through. That way my head stays attached. I don't want it left for the birds. Kou: [Challenging] Can't handle that?! Man: [Calmly] Machete [on one of his men hands him a machete with a "Here you go, boss!" and begins to approach Kou]
Kou: [While they are distracted, Kou grins darkly and mutters:] Don't worry, it'll all be over soon. Good bye--! [and whips out a grenade he was hiding, pulling the lynch pin and preparing to take down the enemy commander along with himself]
Someone shouts 'grenade', and at the same time the enemy commander moves like a viper, crossing the couple of feet between him and Kou and almost calmly grabbing his hand, holding the grenade in both of their hands and not allowing the lever to release.
Kou struggles to get his hand free but the man is stronger than him and not injured, and soon Kou is pulled back against the man's chest, the grenade still held in their hands while the man's other arm starts choking the air out of him.
Man: Last ditch kamikaze, huh? Kou: [despite clearly losing this fight, just looks livid and struggles to make declarations while running out of oxygen] I'll.... we'll never lose again! The Japanese will never lose again! We'll do.. whatever it takes! But we'll... never be beaten again! Ne...ver....
[the screen darkens as Kou apparently loses consciousness from being choked out]
Kou, about ten years old and in ratty shoes where the soles flap out when he runs, chases two American sailors down a Japanese street. The decor and aesthetics are such that one could place this is roughly 1940s Japan, if you're familiar enough with the period.
The sailors complement him on his English, calling him a 'hafu', which Kou clearly takes as an insult but swallows it down, and asks them to look at a picture of a man, an American soldier. They say they haven't seen him and ask what this is about, and Kou tells them the man is his father.
One of the sailors gets a bit cruel and mocks him, asking him why he thinks this soldier would want to see him. He would have a real family back home, an American wife and kids. Kou declares that he is American, but the sailor says he doesn't sound like one. Kou gets defensive and explains that his father had been good to his mother, had taken care of her, he was different.
The cruel sailor smirks and says of course he's 'taken care of her', that his father wasn't going to want to acknowledge him, his mother is a whore.
Then men turn to leave as Kou's face goes completely rigid with rage, but he still takes the time to carefully fold up the picture of his father and put it away, before barreling into the back of the grown sailor who had called his mother a whore. He pins the man face first to the street and repeatedly punches him in the side of the head as hard as he can until the other sailor pulls him off completely lifting him off the ground.
“Ahaha! Hey - this one’s scrappy.”
“He’s a fucking savage, is what he is!”
“You’ve got to admit, Phil, you deserved that.”
The sailor who pulled Kou off Phil drops him, and Phil picks Kou up by the front of his shirt and punches him solidly across the mouth before dropping him to the street again. Kou looks still more angry than dazed and struggles to his feet again, wiping blood off his face as the sailors leave again.
[This memory features Kou in his college years. He's at what appears to be a casino with a girl around his age, he's flirting with her by his side while not appearing to pay much attention to the blackjack he's playing, but somehow he keeps winning.
This is going fine but gradually things start to appear more tense, the girl doesn't appear to notice that more employees of the casino are gathering around, instead explaining quite excitedly about how fantastic it is that Kou keeps winning.
Kou however does notice, and makes a point to play up how he is going to win big on the next hand -- only to lose! The girl is disappointed for him, but the tension breaks and the gathering employees return to their other work. Kou is frustrated and disappointed but ~manfully bears it~, telling the girl he still has plenty to get her that lingerie, and maybe they should switch to playing some games back in their hotel room instead.]
NOTES:
-This was taking place in the UK, everyone has a British accent, where as Kou has an American one (notably NOT a japanese accent).
-Kou is a little too flamboyant and it's not tooo hard to suspect him of counting cards. He seems to be disgustingly good at it, but he wants to show off a little too much.
-He remembers not actually caring about the girl, though thinking she was super hot and very energetic in the sack
[Kou appears to be about 12 or 13 in this memory. He's at a small tourist shop in Japan, the type of place that sells paraphernalia geared somewhere towards Amerikajin or people who want shit from America. There is a record playing Elvis Presley in the background, and the store is quiet. Kou is picking at what appears to be a fairly tattered, partially out of tune guitar, listening attentively to the music and trying to teach himself the chords by ear.
He is not a natural at this. But he seems to be enjoying the project. in the background there's a picture of a slick american pilot wearing aviators, much like the ones Kou will one day acquire.]
Kou is in his mid fourties, only a few years younger than he is now. He sits in a small office with a simple wooden desk and office chair, going through paper work. The office is stuffed with cabinets and piled papers and a coat rack and looks a bit like what one might expect from a teacher's office, except for a militant starkness to it.
His arm and leg are already gone and he is going through a stack of papers one handed, signing his name on documents. He wears a pair of aviator sunglasses even though his office isn't even particularly brightly lit. There is an already opened whisky bottle on his desk and two shot glasses nearby.
A young man, early twenties and clearly a soldier, in dirty fatigues enters and Kou gesture at him to sit until he's finished his stack of papers to sign.
When he's done, he invites and then cajoles the young soldier into a drink, and though the soldier seems a bit unsure about his superior officer inviting him to drink while still on duty, he eventually agrees. And they go through a few more shots with Kou telling the kid he needs to relax a little and the kid getting more relaxed and thus more sassily up tight.
“Jesus christ, you’re unbelievable,” Kou says. He hits his glass against the table. “David,” he begins, a bit more seriously this time. ““Join me in a thought experiment, would you? Let’s say... you’re sent into the field. Your Mission Operator betrays you. You’re alone and cannot secure reciprocal communication with your Commanding Officer. The balance of some small Banana Republic’s economic obligation to the United States hangs in the balance. What do you do?”
“You know what I’d do. Wasn’t that the point of today's exercise?”
“Partially. The reason I singled you out is that every other recruit in that field hesitated for a moment. Even those who acted quickly had a single half-second of doubt where they questioned themselves over whose orders to follow. You were the only one who forged ahead - without a single look back - and put a gun to my head. Without waiting for clarification. Without even waiting ten minutes for backup.”
“Do you think I made the wrong call?”
“Of course not; chain of command is everything. If we abandoned that one philosophy in the military, it’d be absolute chaos. I’m curious why you didn’t hesitate.”
[The soldier thinks about this quietly while observing his shot glass.]
“I’m… very good at following orders without thinking." He pours himself a fourth shot.
“Without thinking?”
“Yeah.”
“That simple?”
“Yup.”
“Okay. Let’s approach this from another angle.” Kou tips the whiskey into his glass for the fourth time. For David, it’s the fifth. Kou holds his shot up and says ‘cheers’, wiggling it impatiently until David humours him and clinks their glasses together.
“In this scenario, you’re alone in the field, no backup, no on-site support personnel, just you and your radio, alone in the dark. You’re aiming for Alpha Team, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well - that’s how Alpha Team operates, much like the defunct CIA F.O.X. unit that FOXHOUND was based on. One man infiltration operations aren’t just about physical and mental acumen - of which you’ve got plenty. They’re also about personal judgement. When you’re in the field on a mission like this, you might be thousands of miles away from the person who calls your shots. You might as well be on a different planet than them. Any number of things could go wrong. Aerial noise could permanently jam your communication, you could lose your radio, you could be captured by the enemy. Dependence on the chain of command when you’re deep inside enemy territory is a fragile, tenuous thing.”
“You got a point here, Master, or are you just gonna ramble on all night?”
Kou’s eyebrows shoot up towards his hairline and he chuckles, impressed rather than annoyed. He leans forward and makes a great show of peering at the half-empty bottle of whiskey. “Amazing. And it only took a third of a quart of hard liquor for you to loosen up.”
“I shouldn't have-”
“Don’t apologize. Shit, you nearly cracked a grin. This is a historic moment. C’mon, let’s have another.”
They have another shot, Kou is getting quite drunk and a little liquor spills down the side of his chin. He wipes it up.
“I’d say it’s just me showing my age, but the Boss always said that I have a bad habit of never being able to shut my damn mouth. Says I love the sound of my voice too much.”
“You mean Big Boss?”
“Yeah. Who the hell else would I mean? He uh,” Kou gets distracted in some drunken thought, smiling, and loses the train of the conversation.
After a minute, David clears his throat.
“Master?”
Kou rocks back in his spinning chair. “David?”
“You were saying?”
“Ah - right. What I’m trying to say is that today’s exercise was meant to be an examination of your personal judgement up against the chain of command. It was not meant to be a pass/loss trial to see who follows orders best.”
“And I failed to show good judgement?”
“I wouldn’t come down that hard. No one involved in the exercise really succeeded on that front. And that’s fine - you weren’t prepared. And in the real world, no one is prepared for an outcome like their immediate superior betraying them. But it’s not unheard of. But let’s extrapolate those orders a bit. Say you’re told to bring the target in at all costs, but your communications cut out before you can receive clarification on what sort of state you’re supposed to bring them back in. You have no idea what kind of information they could have.”
“I bring them in alive for questioning.”
“They fight back.”
“I… take them in alive.”
“It’s not always that easy. He won’t be taken alive."
"Tough for him. I take him in alive."
"He fights back. Hard. Your life is in danger. He does something risky - this is a man with everything to lose. You fumble, like you did today, and now he’s got the advantage. But he’s not like me, and this isn't a training exercise - that advantage means a bullet in his head or a bullet in yours. You’re looking into the eyes of someone you trust. You know that they might pull the trigger before you do. In fact, they probably will.”
“Are we,” David asks quietly, “talking about Operation: Snake Eater?”
Kou’s countenance turns serious and he reaches for the bottle again. “Not specifically,” he says. “Not in so many words. But it’s a good illustration of how what we believe to be the ‘Truth’ as told to us by our superiors is defined only by who is giving the orders, and who is hearing them. ‘Enemy’ and ‘ally’ are arbitrary definitions that can change in a flash on the battlefield. These are things you’d do well to think about, David. They’re not things that your superiors can decide for you.”
The kid seems to suspect something is up, and pins Kou with an intense stare (that he doesn't seem to notice).
"Master Miller. You aren’t going to have this conversation with anyone else, are you?”
Kou seems to try to play this off as he doesn't quite hear the soldier, but when forced to acknowledge the question he looks a little abashed.
“Ah… no, no. I didn’t plan on it.”
“Why single me out?”
“Are you worried that I’ve singled you out unfairly?”
“The opposite, actually. I’m worried that you’re giving me an unfair hand up. I’m not the only recruit on base applying for Alpha Team.”
“No, you aren’t.” Kou’s silent for a moment, thoughtfully drums his fingers on the arm of his chair, then sighs, defeated.
“Well, you caught me. I try not to play favourites, but it doesn’t always work. I worry about you, David. You have a lot of qualities that say you’re made for this job. I try to imagine you doing some white collar gig and it seems wrong, you know? But you’ve also got a lot of qualities that tell me that when something finally does hit you - and it always does, in this line of work - it’s gonna hit you like a train going four hundred kilometres an hour. Ah, sorry -” Miller taps his temple. “Two hundred and fourty eight point five miles. I always forget.”
“Master, I-” the soldier appears stunned and uncertain in the face of this honesty, unsure of how to respond. He flounders for a moment and before he comes up with a response, Kou drunkenly tries to stagger to his feet, but fails, unable to maintain his balance on his prosthetic well enough while drunk.
He shoots David a flustered look. “Heh, that’s what I get, trying to keep up with you at my age. Could you, ah, get the door for me?”
The soldier gets the door and Kou makes it to his feet on the second attempt.
“It’s getting late. Sun’s gone down. I should let you go. You’ve got work to do tonight, after all.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, we’re back to ‘Sir’ again.” Kou sighs. “Well! I tried.” Standing up, he seems drunker. There's a sway to his steps that suggests he'd started in on the whiskey even before David arrived.
As Kou is leaving, his canes slips out from under him and he starts to fall face first into the doorframe, but the soldier is there to catch him. The door swings closed and they end up in the dark office with the soldier holding Kou pressed up against his chest. It looks undeniably lurid and it becomes obvious the young soldier has been struggling with some kind of attraction this whole conversation. And Kou certainly doesn't seem to mind.
“Interesting. For someone so quick to violence on the field, you’re surprisingly gentle.”
It's definitely a bit flirtatious.
David pushes Kou away and sets both hands on the man’s shoulders. “Doing okay there, Master?”
Kou raises his hand to rub beneath his sunglasses.
“I haven’t drunk in a while. Should have been more careful. You recruits are brutal in more ways than one.” He rolls his shoulders out from under David’s hands and shoots him a lopsided grin. “I’m fine now, David,” he says.
Before they go their separate ways in the hall, Miller turns back and says: “Hey - don’t forget what we talked about today.”
David cracks a cocksure grin. “Do I still have to write the essay?”
“Don’t think that I’ve gone soft on you, soldier. I expect it on my desk at 5AM sharp, along with everyone else’s.”
“Typical.”
Kou laughs. “You’re a good kid," he says, then he ambles down the hall, humming to himself off tune.
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Memory 1
Summary:
Kou is much younger (mid-twenties) is running through some jungle terrain with armed men in similar uniforms, clearly trying to respond to an ambush that caught them off guard. The men attacking them seem to both appear from no where -- popping out of trees and the brush unexpectedly -- and have vastly superior firepower.
Kou tries to give them direction but as he runs one man after another is picked off until he is the only one left, laughing a bit broken and hysteric at his utter loss. He has fallen to his knees from injuries, his hands are hidden in the brush.
A large intimidatingly awesome dude approaches, asking him in Spanish if he speaks English, then going on to tell him to drop his weapons and show his hands.
Kou: Afraid I...
Man: Speak up!
Kou: Afraid I can't lift my hands.
Man: Don't be stupid, commander. Your men are all dead.
Kou: I-..I came here from Japan.
Man: Hm?
Kou: I chose to come here! B-Because my place, my place is on the battlefield!
Man: [dismissive] Alright, alright, now show me your hands.
Kou: [a couple of deep breaths] Be my kaishaku, please.
Man: Kaishaku?
Kou: Seppuku... hara-kiri. I'm a samurai, I disembowel myself. When I do, you cut off my head, that's being a kaishaku.
Kou: From behind, it's all one cut from below the medulla.
Kou: Just stop before you cut all the way through. That way my head stays attached. I don't want it left for the birds.
Kou: [Challenging] Can't handle that?!
Man: [Calmly] Machete [on one of his men hands him a machete with a "Here you go, boss!" and begins to approach Kou]
Kou: [While they are distracted, Kou grins darkly and mutters:] Don't worry, it'll all be over soon. Good bye--! [and whips out a grenade he was hiding, pulling the lynch pin and preparing to take down the enemy commander along with himself]
Someone shouts 'grenade', and at the same time the enemy commander moves like a viper, crossing the couple of feet between him and Kou and almost calmly grabbing his hand, holding the grenade in both of their hands and not allowing the lever to release.
Kou struggles to get his hand free but the man is stronger than him and not injured, and soon Kou is pulled back against the man's chest, the grenade still held in their hands while the man's other arm starts choking the air out of him.
Man: Last ditch kamikaze, huh?
Kou: [despite clearly losing this fight, just looks livid and struggles to make declarations while running out of oxygen] I'll.... we'll never lose again! The Japanese will never lose again! We'll do.. whatever it takes! But we'll... never be beaten again! Ne...ver....
[the screen darkens as Kou apparently loses consciousness from being choked out]
Memory 2
Kou, about ten years old and in ratty shoes where the soles flap out when he runs, chases two American sailors down a Japanese street. The decor and aesthetics are such that one could place this is roughly 1940s Japan, if you're familiar enough with the period.
The sailors complement him on his English, calling him a 'hafu', which Kou clearly takes as an insult but swallows it down, and asks them to look at a picture of a man, an American soldier. They say they haven't seen him and ask what this is about, and Kou tells them the man is his father.
One of the sailors gets a bit cruel and mocks him, asking him why he thinks this soldier would want to see him. He would have a real family back home, an American wife and kids. Kou declares that he is American, but the sailor says he doesn't sound like one. Kou gets defensive and explains that his father had been good to his mother, had taken care of her, he was different.
The cruel sailor smirks and says of course he's 'taken care of her', that his father wasn't going to want to acknowledge him, his mother is a whore.
Then men turn to leave as Kou's face goes completely rigid with rage, but he still takes the time to carefully fold up the picture of his father and put it away, before barreling into the back of the grown sailor who had called his mother a whore. He pins the man face first to the street and repeatedly punches him in the side of the head as hard as he can until the other sailor pulls him off completely lifting him off the ground.
“Ahaha! Hey - this one’s scrappy.”
“He’s a fucking savage, is what he is!”
“You’ve got to admit, Phil, you deserved that.”
The sailor who pulled Kou off Phil drops him, and Phil picks Kou up by the front of his shirt and punches him solidly across the mouth before dropping him to the street again. Kou looks still more angry than dazed and struggles to his feet again, wiping blood off his face as the sailors leave again.
Memory 3
This is going fine but gradually things start to appear more tense, the girl doesn't appear to notice that more employees of the casino are gathering around, instead explaining quite excitedly about how fantastic it is that Kou keeps winning.
Kou however does notice, and makes a point to play up how he is going to win big on the next hand -- only to lose! The girl is disappointed for him, but the tension breaks and the gathering employees return to their other work. Kou is frustrated and disappointed but ~manfully bears it~, telling the girl he still has plenty to get her that lingerie, and maybe they should switch to playing some games back in their hotel room instead.]
NOTES:
-This was taking place in the UK, everyone has a British accent, where as Kou has an American one (notably NOT a japanese accent).
-Kou is a little too flamboyant and it's not tooo hard to suspect him of counting cards. He seems to be disgustingly good at it, but he wants to show off a little too much.
-He remembers not actually caring about the girl, though thinking she was super hot and very energetic in the sack
-He's very good with numbers
Memory 4
He is not a natural at this. But he seems to be enjoying the project. in the background there's a picture of a slick american pilot wearing aviators, much like the ones Kou will one day acquire.]
Memory ?
Summarized below:]
Kou is in his mid fourties, only a few years younger than he is now. He sits in a small office with a simple wooden desk and office chair, going through paper work. The office is stuffed with cabinets and piled papers and a coat rack and looks a bit like what one might expect from a teacher's office, except for a militant starkness to it.
His arm and leg are already gone and he is going through a stack of papers one handed, signing his name on documents. He wears a pair of aviator sunglasses even though his office isn't even particularly brightly lit. There is an already opened whisky bottle on his desk and two shot glasses nearby.
A young man, early twenties and clearly a soldier, in dirty fatigues enters and Kou gesture at him to sit until he's finished his stack of papers to sign.
When he's done, he invites and then cajoles the young soldier into a drink, and though the soldier seems a bit unsure about his superior officer inviting him to drink while still on duty, he eventually agrees. And they go through a few more shots with Kou telling the kid he needs to relax a little and the kid getting more relaxed and thus more sassily up tight.
“Jesus christ, you’re unbelievable,” Kou says. He hits his glass against the table. “
David,” he begins, a bit more seriously this time. ““Join me in a thought experiment, would you? Let’s say... you’re sent into the field. Your Mission Operator betrays you. You’re alone and cannot secure reciprocal communication with your Commanding Officer. The balance of some small Banana Republic’s economic obligation to the United States hangs in the balance. What do you do?”“You know what I’d do. Wasn’t that the point of today's exercise?”
“Partially. The reason I singled you out is that every other recruit in that field hesitated for a moment. Even those who acted quickly had a single half-second of doubt where they questioned themselves over whose orders to follow. You were the only one who forged ahead - without a single look back - and put a gun to my head. Without waiting for clarification. Without even waiting ten minutes for backup.”
“Do you think I made the wrong call?”
“Of course not; chain of command is everything. If we abandoned that one philosophy in the military, it’d be absolute chaos. I’m curious why you didn’t hesitate.”
[The soldier thinks about this quietly while observing his shot glass.]
“I’m… very good at following orders without thinking." He pours himself a fourth shot.
“Without thinking?”
“Yeah.”
“That simple?”
“Yup.”
“Okay. Let’s approach this from another angle.” Kou tips the whiskey into his glass for the fourth time. For David, it’s the fifth. Kou holds his shot up and says ‘cheers’, wiggling it impatiently until
Davidhumours him and clinks their glasses together.“In this scenario, you’re alone in the field, no backup, no on-site support personnel, just you and your radio, alone in the dark. You’re aiming for Alpha Team, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well - that’s how Alpha Team operates, much like the defunct CIA F.O.X. unit that FOXHOUND was based on. One man infiltration operations aren’t just about physical and mental acumen - of which you’ve got plenty. They’re also about personal judgement. When you’re in the field on a mission like this, you might be thousands of miles away from the person who calls your shots. You might as well be on a different planet than them. Any number of things could go wrong. Aerial noise could permanently jam your communication, you could lose your radio, you could be captured by the enemy. Dependence on the chain of command when you’re deep inside enemy territory is a fragile, tenuous thing.”
“You got a point here, Master, or are you just gonna ramble on all night?”
Kou’s eyebrows shoot up towards his hairline and he chuckles, impressed rather than annoyed. He leans forward and makes a great show of peering at the half-empty bottle of whiskey. “Amazing. And it only took a third of a quart of hard liquor for you to loosen up.”
“I shouldn't have-”
“Don’t apologize. Shit, you nearly cracked a grin. This is a historic moment. C’mon, let’s have another.”
They have another shot, Kou is getting quite drunk and a little liquor spills down the side of his chin. He wipes it up.
“I’d say it’s just me showing my age, but the Boss always said that I have a bad habit of never being able to shut my damn mouth. Says I love the sound of my voice too much.”
“You mean Big Boss?”
“Yeah. Who the hell else would I mean? He uh,” Kou gets distracted in some drunken thought, smiling, and loses the train of the conversation.
After a minute,
Davidclears his throat.“Master?”
Kou rocks back in his spinning chair. “David?”
“You were saying?”
“Ah - right. What I’m trying to say is that today’s exercise was meant to be an examination of your personal judgement up against the chain of command. It was not meant to be a pass/loss trial to see who follows orders best.”
“And I failed to show good judgement?”
“I wouldn’t come down that hard. No one involved in the exercise really succeeded on that front. And that’s fine - you weren’t prepared. And in the real world, no one is prepared for an outcome like their immediate superior betraying them. But it’s not unheard of. But let’s extrapolate those orders a bit. Say you’re told to bring the target in at all costs, but your communications cut out before you can receive clarification on what sort of state you’re supposed to bring them back in. You have no idea what kind of information they could have.”
“I bring them in alive for questioning.”
“They fight back.”
“I… take them in alive.”
“It’s not always that easy. He won’t be taken alive."
"Tough for him. I take him in alive."
"He fights back. Hard. Your life is in danger. He does something risky - this is a man with everything to lose. You fumble, like you did today, and now he’s got the advantage. But he’s not like me, and this isn't a training exercise - that advantage means a bullet in his head or a bullet in yours. You’re looking into the eyes of someone you trust. You know that they might pull the trigger before you do. In fact, they probably will.”
“Are we,”
Davidasks quietly, “talking about Operation: Snake Eater?”Kou’s countenance turns serious and he reaches for the bottle again. “Not specifically,” he says. “Not in so many words. But it’s a good illustration of how what we believe to be the ‘Truth’ as told to us by our superiors is defined only by who is giving the orders, and who is hearing them. ‘Enemy’ and ‘ally’ are arbitrary definitions that can change in a flash on the battlefield. These are things you’d do well to think about, David. They’re not things that your superiors can decide for you.”
The kid seems to suspect something is up, and pins Kou with an intense stare (that he doesn't seem to notice).
"Master
Miller. You aren’t going to have this conversation with anyone else, are you?”Kou seems to try to play this off as he doesn't quite hear the soldier, but when forced to acknowledge the question he looks a little abashed.
“Ah… no, no. I didn’t plan on it.”
“Why single me out?”
“Are you worried that I’ve singled you out unfairly?”
“The opposite, actually. I’m worried that you’re giving me an unfair hand up. I’m not the only recruit on base applying for Alpha Team.”
“No, you aren’t.” Kou’s silent for a moment, thoughtfully drums his fingers on the arm of his chair, then sighs, defeated.
“Well, you caught me. I try not to play favourites, but it doesn’t always work. I worry about you, David. You have a lot of qualities that say you’re made for this job. I try to imagine you doing some white collar gig and it seems wrong, you know? But you’ve also got a lot of qualities that tell me that when something finally does hit you - and it always does, in this line of work - it’s gonna hit you like a train going four hundred kilometres an hour. Ah, sorry -” Miller taps his temple. “Two hundred and fourty eight point five miles. I always forget.”
“Master, I-” the soldier appears stunned and uncertain in the face of this honesty, unsure of how to respond. He flounders for a moment and before he comes up with a response, Kou drunkenly tries to stagger to his feet, but fails, unable to maintain his balance on his prosthetic well enough while drunk.
He shoots
Davida flustered look. “Heh, that’s what I get, trying to keep up with you at my age. Could you, ah, get the door for me?”The soldier gets the door and Kou makes it to his feet on the second attempt.
“It’s getting late. Sun’s gone down. I should let you go. You’ve got work to do tonight, after all.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Oh, we’re back to ‘Sir’ again.” Kou sighs. “Well! I tried.” Standing up, he seems drunker. There's a sway to his steps that suggests he'd started in on the whiskey even before
Davidarrived.As Kou is leaving, his canes slips out from under him and he starts to fall face first into the doorframe, but the soldier is there to catch him. The door swings closed and they end up in the dark office with the soldier holding Kou pressed up against his chest. It looks undeniably lurid and it becomes obvious the young soldier has been struggling with some kind of attraction this whole conversation. And Kou certainly doesn't seem to mind.
“Interesting. For someone so quick to violence on the field, you’re surprisingly gentle.”
It's definitely a bit flirtatious.
David pushes Kou away and sets both hands on the man’s shoulders.
“Doing okay there, Master?”
Kou raises his hand to rub beneath his sunglasses.
“I haven’t drunk in a while. Should have been more careful. You recruits are brutal in more ways than one.” He rolls his shoulders out from under
David’s hands and shoots him a lopsided grin. “I’m fine now,David,” he says.Before they go their separate ways in the hall, Miller turns back and says: “Hey - don’t forget what we talked about today.”
Davidcracks a cocksure grin. “Do I still have to write the essay?”“Don’t think that I’ve gone soft on you, soldier. I expect it on my desk at 5AM sharp, along with everyone else’s.”
“Typical.”
Kou laughs. “You’re a good kid," he says, then he ambles down the hall, humming to himself off tune.