<div class="floatleft">(https://i.imgur.com/RK9d9kH.jpg)</div><strong>Name:</strong><em>Evie Connors</em><br/><strong>Date | Location:</strong><em>Sunny Afternoon  | Japan, Ishikawa Estate, The Nursery</em><br/><strong>Wearing | Carrying:</strong><em>Casual clothes, hidden knife</em><br/><strong>Tagging:</strong><em>Mai Ishikawa</em><br/><strong>Notes:</strong><em>Takes place 19 years ago and includes backstory going back farther</em><br/><strong>Warnings:</strong><em>Mentions of domestic abuse; scenes from war.</em><hr/><br/>The little girl apologizes for asking Evie if it hurt.<br/><br/><em>Beside her, Kellers is laughing, the smoking bodies of the Holdouts littering the bunker they’d just taken against all odds. “Didn’t think we’d do it either, did you? Holy shit, holy shit,” Kellers laughs. Evie feels it too, the rising elation—the bunker’s cleared. A stupid order, they should have blown it open with a tank, but their CO was angling for a promotion, he thought there’d be intel inside the tank might destroy.<br/><br/>Next thing she knows there’s a flash of light. Someone would tell her later, the CO didn’t relay his order up the chain and their tank blew open the bunker anyway. Friendly fire. Evie’s next memory is lying in the wreckage, hours later, after the Holdouts pushed back their forces; Keller’s a memory, so are her legs and most of her arm. She didn’t feel it, the moment the shell hit the bunker.<br/><br/>But she felt the rain starting to beat down on her; felt the pain blossom over the next few hours. She had no idea if the Army would be back, and when.</em><br/><br/>“It’s okay, you can always ask questions,” Evie says. “It hurt, but I’ve had worse.” She glances at Mai with some meaning.<br/><br/>Evie absorbs what Mai is intimating, allowing a parting pat to the top of Naomi’s head with the mechanical hand. The familiar gesture earns a look of disdain from Chisato, and soon they’re wending through the east wing, first into Mai’s room—smaller, more austere than their homes had been in New Vegas. Beyond that, her wardrobe. Mai seals it, back to the door, and then the real Mai comes out.<br/><br/><strong>"BAKA! What are you doing here? You are supposed to be safe in America. Now you are here in grave danger for what? Leave now! Say you changed your mind...Go...I cannot lose...Go!!"</strong><br/><br/>Evie has the temerity to grin at her. Mai’s much shorter—Evie's parents gene-modded her, which is how she got so tall that when she comes close, hands on Mai’s hips, her body pressed into hers, Mai’s over a head shorter. With the warm skin still on the pads of her synthetic hand’s fingers, she strokes Mai’s cheek. “Shut up and kiss me, Mai.”<br/><br/>She wraps her hand around Mai’s head and seizes her mouth, claims it. It’s all she’s wanted for almost four years, it’s what all this has come to. She’s not sure she was thinking about running off to Japan to be a bodyguard when she joined the military, but she always knew Mai would be with dangerous men, that the only way to get her was to become even more dangerous.<br/><br/>Now she is, and she reaches down, lifting Mai up, hands beneath her thighs, pinning her back to the doorframe.