Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Rosyth, Scotland, 1918

Maintenance. 

The word left a bad taste in New Zealand’s mouth. For the first time in two years, for the first time since they’d lost Indefatigable, Queen Mary and Invincible at Jutland, the Royal Battlecruisers had been headed out to fight. Oz, the Cats, the Is, even the newcomers Repulse and Renown (who, as far as the veterans were concerned, still had wet paint): all of them were putting out to sea. Ironblood had finally decided to stop hiding behind their mines, subs and coastal guns and fight like the warriors they claimed to be, and Her Majesty had taken the opportunity to command her subjects that they finally teach their foes across the North Sea true respect for the nation that was rightful masters of the waves. 

And so where was New Zealand? Where was she who had fired more shells than anyone else at Jutland, who had carried the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron’s flag at the same, who was (if one was superstitious) supernaturally protected by her lucky piupiu and hei-tiki to the point that one of the largest battles in naval history had only seen her take one hit, who by any logic should have very much been smack in the middle of the battle line as the Royal Battlecruisers sailed off to avenge their fallen sisters-in-arms?

She was pacing back and forth on the docks, desperately trying to keep herself from going out of her mind as she waited for news. Some problem with her boilers had cost her two or three knots worth of speed, and if she couldn’t keep up with the rest of the Knights it would make her a liability in battle. Oz hadn’t teased her too badly about it, and Lion had had the decency to be sympathetic when she’d ordered her to stay behind, but still, to call it merely frustrating would have been an understatement the size of her (now stuck in drydock) hull.

New Zealand’s first impulse had been to use the time to train, but with her ship undergoing repair and thus her rigging unformable, her usual regimen of gun and maneuver exercises had had to be replaced with more mundane, and less mentally engaging, activities. She’d run laps around the base. She’d gone to the gymnasium and weight lifted. She’d read half-a-dozen different tactics textbooks, cover to cover. She’d mopped her deck up. She’d reviewed and memorized every logistics report they’d let her get her hands on. All that and more: anything and everything that the Battlecruiser could come up with to kill time until the others got back.

And more importantly, to distract herself from her worries. Whenever her mind wasn’t focused on something (which, given the dearth of mentally stimulating things for her to do, happened quite often), New Zealand’s thoughts would turn out to sea, to where her sisters-in-arms were fighting for the glory of the Royal Navy (and equally if not more importantly, for their lives). She couldn’t help it: they were all her lifelong friends except for Oz, who was her sister, and she wasn’t out there to help them. The Battlecruiser knew that the others were all more than capable of taking care of themselves, but the blind luck of the battlefield didn’t care about how skilled or trained you were: when the shells started flying you were playing dice with Fate, nothing else but, and when you played dice with Fate it was only a matter of time until your number came up. 

That was exactly what had happened to Indy, Vin and Mary: Ironblood had gotten off three lucky shots at Jutland, and those three lucky shots had sent three Royal Knights, some of the best Royal Knights that there were, to the bottom of the North Sea. It hadn’t been purely Fate’s fault, either: the boffins had said it was some fatal flaw in the design of their turret armor. Said flaw had been fixed on the rest of the Royal Battlecruisers (well, the boffins said it had been fixed), but still, it wasn’t like that was the sort of thing that could just be tested out on the firing range. Whether or not the modifications held up in an actual battle would be anyone’s guess. And if they didn’t hold up, well...

That thought specifically was the one that the Maori warrior had spent the past day and a half trying to keep out of her mind. She hadn’t been doing a very good job of it: since the rest of the Battlecruisers had left the previous morning, New Zealand had managed to cycle through a couple dozen or so different activities in her efforts to not let herself go insane with worry, none of which had managed to distract her for any more than about half an hour. Not even hunger could make her mind switch tracks, what little food she’d ingested not being sustenance she’d seeked out for herself but rather things that had been given to her (read: forced into her hands) by a few of the other shipgirls stuck on base.

So it had gone for an entire day: from the Battlecruisers’ departure until long after nightfall, the usual Flagship of the Second Battlecruiser Squadron had been nervously darting between whatever different tasks she could find (to the annoyance of many others around the port), her eyes constantly flickering towards the east, a constant nervous energy emanating from her entire body. Darkness barely changed that: she’d practically had to have been dragged back into the dorms, and sleep would prove as elusive for New Zealand as distraction had, what little, fitful rest she managed to get plagued by half-remembered nightmares that left the Maori Warrior in a cold sweat when she woke. 

The next morning, now knowing full well that she was too distracted to actually be productive doing anything else, New Zealand had wound up simply pacing around along the base’s docks, waiting for news. She’d been there since before the sun had come up, and now the dim early morning rays shone down upon a restless wait indeed: the Battlecruiser strode back and forth beside her drydocked hull, looking for all the world like a hungry hunting dog denied her prey, her patience long since expired.

New Zealand’s Wisdom Cube was emitting a constant low hum as it continuously operated her ship’s wireless, scanning the airwaves for anything coming over a Royal Navy frequency; on occasion (an occasion that became all the more frequent the longer she went without news), she would fire off a message to the Destroyers of the morning picket patrols and the coastwatchers along the shore to ask them if they’d seen or heard anything, anything at all that might indicate how the battle had gone. 

The consistent response was that no one had any news, and that they’d tell her when they did. Logically, rationally, New Zealand accepted that response, accepted that all she could do was keep waiting. You wouldn't have known it by looking at her. The longer and longer and longer the Maori Warrior went without information the more agitated she became: her pacing became quicker, her steps heavier; her face had scrunched up into a scowl, brow tight and teeth grit together; she wrung her hands ceaselessly, like she was constantly squeezing an imaginary stress ball; and always, always, she was turning to towards the east, tilting her head as if she could hear the gunfire, as if she could see the gun flashes, past the horizon.

They should have been back by now...after Jutland, this is about when we started getting back the next morning. So where are they?

The more that the sun peeked over the horizon, the more that thoughts like that crossed the Battlecruiser’s mind. Every minute or two, New Zealand would find herself yet again casting her gaze out at the eastern horizon, her eyes narrowing and muscles tensing up whenever a large enough cloud rolled into view: the billowing masses drifting in from over the North Sea looked all too much like smoke rising from a warship’s funnel (or a warship’s burning wreck), especially to an eye that was desperately on the lookout for something, anything that might be a sign of what had happened or was happening to the Royal Battlecruiser Squadrons.

She didn’t have to wait forever: finally, after something on the order of 24 hours of tearing her hair out waiting, a buzzing in the Battlecruiser’s Wisdom Cube told her that one of the people she’d been pestering was finally getting around to returning her calls. The Maori Warrior clicked on her receiver, taking in a deep, anticipatory breath as she did so, happy to finally have some kind of news, subtly terrified of what kind of news it would be.

“This is New Zealand. What have you got for me?”

“Not much,” came the voice of the Destroyer shipgirl on the other end of the transmission (Onslow, the Battlecruiser thought her name was). “But it’s definitely something. We’re picking up a transmission, and it’s coming in on our frequencies. Problem is, it’s scrambled to hell and gone and I can’t make heads or tails of it. Relaying to you now.”

There was a sharp burst of static in New Zealand’s ear as Onslow retransmitted the broadcast she’d picked up. The Destroyer hadn’t been lying when she’d said that it was scrambled: the sound of static hissing only became louder, it’s snaps and crackles more staccato, as the Battlecruiser listened. There were words mixed in with fizzling and buzzing, but they were mixed in deep, and New Zealand had to strain her ears to try and hone in on them. 

“Can you do anything to clear it up?” the Maori Warrior asked, a hint of apprehension leaking into her voice.

“I’m trying, but…” New Zealand could practically hear the other shipgirl shaking her head. “We can't even really tell where it’s coming from, or whether its a live broadcast or a recording. Whatever’s cutting it up, its almost certainly on the other end. Jamming, damaged transmitter...nothing I could fix from here.”

The Battlecruiser felt herself grimace at that, and she redoubled her efforts to pick up the message on the other side of the static. Even with her full focus on the task, New Zealand could still barely discern what words there were buried within the white noise, and what she could hear was hardly reducing her anxiety: the Maori Warrior’s grimace only deepened with every word she managed to pick out of the ether, her muscles tightening and a knot forming in her stomach with each passing second.

When her ears had finally zeroed in on the message hidden behind the static, what she heard sent an icy dagger into her heart. 

“*bzzzt**bz-zzt**bz- TH-THI - zt** cackle**ca- C-CRUI- crackle**crackle**hssss- OH-OH GOD! -sssnap**snap**snap**bz-bzbzzzzz- GOD, THEY’RE A- zzzttt**zzt-zzt-zzzz- GOD, HELP M- zztt**crackle*cra- GOD PLEA -cle**snap*”

New Zealand’s grimace twisted into a look of furious determination. What she had heard was enough for her to know that her sisters-in-arms were in deep, deep trouble. Instinctively, she clenched up, trying to summon her rigging right then and there, and her righteous anger only blazed all the hotter when her Wisdom Cube informed her that her combat gear was impossible to manifest from her drydocked hull. A frustrated, enraged roar slipped past the Maori Warrior’s lips, and she took off running, the Battlecruiser starting to bark orders over her wireless as she did so.

“Onslow, find out where that transmission’s coming from, now! I need a heading!”

“Ma’am, isn’t your ship in drydock? How ar-”

“That’s my problem, just get me a fucking location! I want to know where that message is coming fucking yesterday, do you hear me?!”

“Aye, ma’am! Should we wait for you, or-”

“No, the moment you have a heading you follow it straight to the source! Don’t wait for me, I’ll catch up, just get me the fucking location, got it?! ”

“Yes ma’am!”

Over the course of the brief conversation, New Zealand had accelerated into a dead sprint, all of the nervous energy she’d built up through the 24 hours flooding into the muscles into her legs now that it had suddenly been given a distinct purpose to fulfill. The Battlecruiser darted for her target like a hound that had smelled blood: her own ship might have been out of commission, but by no means was she going to let that stop her from heading out to answer the plea she’d heard, and she tore her way down the docks, headed out of the repair yard and towards where the lighter vessels were moored.

There. Nestled away in a quiet corner of the port were the Motor Launches, the tiny little (relatively speaking: they were still over 80 feet long and weighed upwards of 30 tons) motorboats that were usually only used for transit across the harbor or so that human officers could observe shipgirl exercises up close. But in a pinch they were seaworthy: going back to the Siren Wars they’d been used for everything from covering up gaps in the defense patrols to carrying out recon missions that weren’t worth sending out full size ships for to (most pertinently) supplementing rescue operations. 

If that transmission could be picked up by the picket patrols, even as garbled as it was, it’s point of origin was almost certainly within range of what the Yanks called a Submarine Chaser. That’s what New Zealand hoped and prayed for anyways, as she took a flying leap off of the docks and onto the deck of the nearest Launch, her Wisdom Cube buzzing as she ordered it to start synchronizing with the small boat’s systems.

That wasn’t the sort of thing that the alien device was normally called upon to do, but it was certainly within its abilities: Wisdom Cube technology had been derived from the Sirens after all, the former inheriting a good deal of their abilities from the latter in some form or another, and single upper-level humanoid Sirens had always been able to control massive fleets of mass-produced ships with themselves being the only ‘crewmember’ present. 

No shipgirl had ever managed something on that scale (controlling even two full sized warships was widely regarded as impossible, the experiments into the subject seeming to indicate that handling more than their just own ship and/or rigging simply gave a shipgirl too much information for their mind to handle), but being able to control a few small boats in addition to their own hull was a trick that most veteran shipgirls eventually got down pat. You couldn’t form rigging out of them, and trying to fight with them was like trying to fight with your mind split three or four different ways, but every once in a while the technique proved useful. 

Like, for instance, if you needed to carry out a rescue mission while your hull was stuck in drydock. A string of status reports manifested themselves in New Zealand’s mind as her Wisdom Cube placed the Launch under her control: the level of synchronization was nowhere near what she would have had with her own hull, of course (her Cube was still fully synced to the New Zealand , and it was only because the Indefatigable -class Battlecruiser was in drydock that she was able to synchronization with the Launch above 65%), but she could get the boat moving and get it where it needed to go. That would be enough. It would have to be enough.

A blue-white glow bathed the dock as the Launch got underway, lines untying themselves and stowing themselves on the deck, New Zealand taking up position at the little boat’s helm. She wasn’t even clear of the pier before she’d thrown the throttle open as far as it would go, the Launch’s wake washing up over the dock behind it as the small boat dashed into the harbor, it’s nose already turning towards the eastern horizon.

The next few hours were a blur. The Maori Warrior had a deathgrip on the wheel in front of her, dead silent as she steered the Launch further out over the horizon excepting her short, curt responses whenever Onslow sent her an update on the ominous transmission’s estimated point of origin. Said Destroyer and her patrol were proceeding with some level of caution, despite New Zealand’s all-but orders to proceed at full speed: stumbling blindly towards a sporadic, garbled radio transmission, even if said transmission was a distress call, seemed like it was probably a good way to get ambushed. 

Onslow wouldn’t have put it past the Ironblood to use a few crippled Royal Navy stragglers as bait for a dastardly trap: the entire North Sea was a U-Boat hunting ground, after all, and on top of that the whole damn Hochseeflotte was out in force. God knew that a handful of Destroyers would be easy pickings if they ran into a wolfpack or a Battle Squadron, and so the Destroyer Patrol moved slowly, scanning just as much for signs of U-Boats as for signs of the transmission’s point of origin, figuring that getting themselves into trouble trying to help someone else wouldn’t exactly be very productive.

New Zealand didn’t have such worries. Actually, she did have such worries, but they were buried deep beneath a primal need to find out what had happened to her fellow warriors, and indeed the Battlecruiser actually outpacing Onslow’s Destroyers in her rush to reach the signal. The little boat was rated for 19 knots: the Maori Warrior was pushing it well over 20, and doing her damndest to squeeze even more speed out of her interim hull, her Wisdom Cube emitting a high pitched whirr as it forced the Launch’s systems into overdrive. 

All sorts of warnings and alerts related to the Launch’s engines were popping up in New Zealand’s mind, telling her that such-and-such part was at risk of overheating, so-and-so piece was in danger of snapping. Indeed, if not for the Battlecruiser’s Wisdom Cube constantly holding it together, the little boat’s engines would have long ago burned out, if not outright fallen apart and/or exploded. Even with the help of the alien device smoke was rising out of the engine compartment, as were all sorts of noises that an engine shouldn’t have been making, all of which the Maori Warrior completely ignored: she had bigger fears on her mind. 

For now, the boat held together, and New Zealand kept up her mad dash into the North Sea. What she actually planned on doing when she reached wherever it was the transmission originated was...something she hadn’t actually figured out yet. All the Maori Warrior knew was that she’d go absolutely insane if she didn’t find out what had happened for such a dire-sounding broadcast to be sent out by who was almost certainly one of her comrades, and that she sure as hell wasn’t going to wait for someone else to find out for her. Logic and reason be damned, those were her sisters, and she was going to find a way to help them, or at least be there for them. What she was hoping to accomplish upon reaching the scene with a practically unarmed Motor Launch and no ability to manifest rigging...well, rational thought wasn’t exactly her specialty at the moment.

According to Onslow, the broadcast was coming from somewhere to the northeast, and that’s the heading the Battlecruiser-temporarily-turned-Motor-Launch took, eyes constantly scanning the horizon for the slightest sign of anything out of the ordinary, ears tuned to the wireless for any hint of activity. The transmission she’d been chasing after continued to wildly fluctuate, growing strong one moment and almost fading to nothing the next: the inauspicious words that had driven New Zealand into her renzy had by now vanished entirely, now replaced with a simple, endlessly repeating string of tones that twisted the Maori Warrior’s gut into a pretzel:

*beep-beep-beep**beeeeep-beeeeep-beeeeep**beep-beep-beep*

*beep-beep-beep**beeeeep-beeeeep-beeeeep**beep-beep-beep*

*beep-beep-beep**beeeeep-beeeeep-beeeeep**beep-beep-beep*

*beep-beep-beep**beeeeep-beeeeep-beeeeep**beep-beep-beep*

That was all the motivation New Zealand needed to keep plunging ahead, her little boat skipping across the roughening waves, smoke and even fire spurting from its engine held together by alien powers, spit and prayers, Wisdom Cube sending an endless stream of messages that amounted to ‘Warning: [Critical Part] is about to fail. Please stop before it does.’ None of that convinced the Maori Warrior to even consider slowing down, and if anything the Launch continued to accelerate, continued to speed across the sea towards the ominous distress call.  And eventually, the Battlecruiser’s determination was rewarded. 

In truth, though, ‘rewarded’ wasn’t anything close to the right word. ‘Rewarded’ would imply that what New Zealand wound up discovering in her hunt to find the source of the broadcast was a good thing, when the reality was that what she found was just about the exact opposite. From the first moment that the Battlecruiser saw a hint of her ‘reward’, she knew it was something that she was going to bitterly hate, for the first thing that New Zealand saw when she finally began to close in on distress call’s point of origin was a vast black blot against the horizon, a thick, oily, patch of pitch darkness painted against the eastern sky, too dark and ashen to be a stormcloud.

The Launch’s engines groaned and creaked even louder in protest as the Maori Warrior forced them into one final mad push, her Wisdom Cube whining and filling her mind with even more warnings and alerts as it tried to keep the overheated, overworked machinery functioning. Sounding like it was about three seconds away from turning itself into dust and shrapnel, the little boat pounded onwards towards the black cloud, its operator holding its helm so tightly that the wood of the wheel was starting to splinter in her grasp. 

The closer she got, the worse the sight before her became: New Zealand’s teeth ground against each other until she could almost feel their enamel cracking as she started to take in the scene, her eyes widening in increasing horror. There were two Capital Ships in front of her, both Royal Navy Battlecruisers, both sitting dead in the water. The Maori Warrior thought that they were the Renown s, and at a glance she could tell two things: that they’d both been through the fight of their young lives, and that they hadn’t come out on top of said fight. 

The nearer of the two vessels bore clear signs of battle damage: dark, inky smoke rose from several different spots along its deck and superstructure, while visible flames flickered from the same points, burning angrily among metal that had been blasted and bent out of shape, and the whole ship had developed a noticeable list to port. But it was the further of the pair that looked like it had come straight out of New Zealand’s nightmares, that made her try and push the Launch even further beyond its already broken limits, that made her heart pound in her chest and a cold sweat chill her to the bone.

The more distant vessel made the other look like it was newly launched, fresh coat of paint and all: whereas the first ship had at most a dozen places where fires still burned and from where choking black smoke rose, the whole of the second ship was awash with fire, bright reds and oranges and yellows engulfing it from stem to stern as innumerable pitch-black fingers of smoke streamed skywards, melding together into a single, billowing mass that expanded upwards and outwards in all directions like the ash cloud above an erupting volcano. 

Through the smoke and the flames, New Zealand could make out what might have been more accurately described as a floating wreck than as a warship, a burned and broken hulk of torn and twisted metal that was hardly recognizable as the Renown -class Battlecruiser it had been a mere day previously. The ship’s silhouette looked like a wooden model might have looked like after falling victim to a child’s temper tantrum: everything, everything , was knocked out of place, was smashed to pieces, was outright torn apart. 

Nothing of the ship had been spared. Massive, yawning holes had been ripped into the ship’s hull, gaping chasms through which seawater was flooding in and smoke and fire were flooding out. The guns on ‘A’ and ‘Y’ Turrets were wildly askew, pointing in completely different directions, while more flames and ash pewed skywards through cracks and holes in the turret housing; ‘B’ Turret was gone entirely, another even larger cauldron of flame all that remained in its place. The bridge looked like a mountain-sized hammer had been taken to it, the entire structure caved in and angrily burning.

The rest of the superstructure, somehow, looked even worse. The Battlecruiser looked for all the world as if it had been picked up out of the water and then slammed into the ground upside down, the upper decks were so badly wrecked. The whole of the superstructure had been maimed beyond any hope of recognition, turned into nothing more than fiery scrap metal, shot full of holes and blasted apart. 

Both smokestacks and both masts had crumpled and collapsed down onto the blazing deck, their mangled remains mixing with the shattered, shredded remains of secondary turrets and armor plate and the mangled remains of the superstructure to form a tangled, twisted mass of blasted, burning metal that New Zealand would never have been able to identify as having once been the Battlecruiser’s upper decks. 

The only portion of the ship that wasn’t erupting with flames was the stern, and that was only because most of the stern was awash, waves breaking over that lower lying portion of the deck. Indeed the whole vessel was riding alarmingly low in the water, like a half-dead man struggling to keep himself afloat atop a tiny piece of wreckage: hell, it almost looked like the tow lines strung between the burning mass of smashed metal and the other, still mostly recognizable Battlecruiser were the only things holding the wrecked hulk up above the waves, those half-dozen or so cables somehow, someway keeping afloat a ship that by all appearances should have long since sunk. 

“This is New Zealand to Royal Battlecruisers, can you hear me?! I repeat, can any Royal Battlecruisers hear me?!!!” The Flagship of the Second Squadron’s voice was wild as she sent the hail, her Launch already starting to close in on the relatively intact of the two ships. She hoped against all hope that her eyes were lying to her her, her mind desperately grasping at any and all straws that it could to hold off the inevitable realization of what had happened, trying to trick herself into somehow believing that the vessels before her weren’t the Renowns and believe that the conspicuous absence of the any of the other Knights was by some unknowable means because of any other reason but the obvious one. 

Static was her only answer, and New Zealand screamed as she nearly put her fist through the helm in front of her. She roared into her transmitter again, rage born of fear painting her voice. “ This is New Zealand, any Royal Knights that can hear me FUCKING RESPOND, NOW! Oz, Lion, anyone, FUCKING ANSWER ME! PLEASE! ”

The Maori Warrior paused, panting, listening for an answer. The wheel cracked in her deathgrip, and her every muscle was pulled taut, waiting to spring into action. Silence hung in the air for a long moment, an almost too long moment, but then…

“...Zealand?” The voice that came from her receiver was weak, exhausted. Wounded. It took a second for New Zealand to place who it was. She thought that it was Repulse, but Repulse (and her voice) had always been eager and energetic, verging on hyperactive: the tone of whoever was speaking was too drained, too worn down for the older Battlecruiser to immediately recognize it as the cheerful, excitable young Knight’s.

“Repulse, is that you?! Report, what’s your status, where are you?!” The words came out in a rush, the Maori Warrior’s eyes scanning over the ship and wreck in front of her, looking for signs of life. Her Wisdom Cube hummed as she prepared the mooring lines, the Battlecruiser dashing out to the tip of the little boat’s bow and readying herself to jump off and search for the other shipgirl. 

“I…I’m…I’m…” Repulse stammered and stuttered, unable to get her words out. The younger Battlecruiser sounded like Princess Royal had two years before, after getting a front row seat to Indy, Vin and Mary’s sinkings at Jutland (and almost joining them herself): she sounded a million miles away, even over the wireless, a dazed, detached quality to her voice. 

Shock. She’s in shock. That’s not good. New Zealand grimaced deeply, hands clenching into fists around the Launch’s forward rail. She needed to find the younger shipgirl, now. Barely holding back her own panic, the older Battlecruiser clicked her transmitter on again.

“Repulse. I need you to listen to me.” The Maori Warrior spoke as slowly and calmly as she could, which wasn’t particularly slowly or calmly, but she managed to keep her words intelligible. “I’m coming to help you. Where are you, right now?”

“I...I-I’m on…on my ship,” the young Knight answered, still very much sounding like her mind wasn’t all there. 

“Okay,” responded New Zealand, redoubling her efforts to pick out any traces of the living from the vessels in front of her, pushing the little boat’s engines even further into the red. “Where on your ship? Look up and tell me what you see, alright?”

“O-okay…okay…” Repulse muttered, her words barely above a whisper. “Okay…turrets…I-I s-see…see turrets…”

“Okay, so you’re by the turrets.” The older Battlecruiser nodded to herself. That was something that she could work with: considering that most of the blazing hulk’s turrets were practically unrecognizable, that would mean logically that Repulse was on the ship that was ‘merely’ damaged. 

“Okay, stay put, I’m coming to you.” There was no answer from the other side, just shallow, labored breathing. New Zealand put action to her words, steering the Launch towards the nearer of the vessels; if she could have made it accelerate any more than she already had, she would have done that too. 

The few minutes before the little boat reached the drifting Battlecruiser seemed to drag out forever. New Zealand found herself actually reading her Wisdom Cube’s stream of engine warning reports, if only to give herself something to focus on besides the fact that Repulse had sounded like she was bleeding out and to stop herself from speculating about why only these two ships were here. 

Finally, there came the jolt of the Launch bumping up against the Repulse ’s hull; a blue-white glow lit up the little boat as mooring lines unraveled themselves and snaked their way up the side of the Battlecruiser, lashing the two vessels together. The moment that the last line was secure, New Zealand was clambering up it, climbing as if there were rabid dogs nipping at her heels; in less time than it takes to tell, she’d hauled herself up onto the Repulse’s deck, her eyes darting around for any hint of the other shipgirl.

It didn’t take long to find the younger Knight. She was just where she’d said she’d be, huddled in the shadow of her ‘B’ Turret. Even at a glance, the brunette looked like hell: a half-dozen burn marks and bloody gashes immediately visible, uniform ripped to shreds, hair wildly askew. She was hunched protectively over another, smaller figure, and the two were completely surrounded by a puddle of reddish-black liquid, like a mixture of oil and blood. 

“Repulse!” New Zealand exclaimed, dashing forwards towards the other Battlecruiser, dripping with the sweat of fear, her stomach curdling, her mouth dry. The brunette looked up, and the look that the Maori Warrior saw in the other girl’s eyes made her stop short, her heart thumping out of her chest. 

The blue orbs that looked back at New Zealand were empty. They were vacant. They were dead . Repulse’s whole face, her whole body language, was like that: devoid of any sort of energy or emotion, like she was a machine that had been mostly shut down. It was a look that the older shipgirl had seen too many times after Jutland, the look of someone who had seen the reaper’s scythe at work and had a far too close brush with it themselves.

The young Knight slumped backwards slightly as she turned to meet the other Battlecruiser’s stunned gaze, the movement of her head having apparently thrown her balance off. She sagged like a sack of potatoes, or maybe a puppet whose strings had been cut, and New Zealand suddenly had a clear view of the smaller figure she’d been squatting over. Judging by their smaller stature, the Maori Warrior had initially guessed that it would have been a member of the escort screen, one of the Destroyer girls.

It was Renown. No wonder she looked so small, her fucking legs were gone , and so was her left arm, almost to the damn shoulder. Strips of cloth and rope had been tied around the stumps as improvised tourniquets, all of which had been stained dark red, and her whole head was painted the same color. The blonde was hardly breathing, taking raspy, half-choked breaths that grated against New Zealand’s ears, making gurgling noises that twisted the veteran’s guts into knots. And still the dark pool around her was growing, slowly spreading out across the deck.

The Maori Warrior clapped her hands over her mouth, half in shock and half to try and swallow down her gag reflex. The casualties at Jutland had died fast, and hadn’t left anything behind to bury. There had been other injuries the veteran shipgirl had seen, and bad ones, but this was…the Battlecruiser took a step back, bracing herself against the abruptly wobbling deck and trying to take stock of the situation. Repulse was in shock; Renown was halfway, more than halfway, to the grave; the others… Oh God, the others.

“Repulse, where are the others?” New Zealand’s voice was low, and her head was suddenly on a swivel, the older Battlecruiser looking around in all directions. Her eyes darted across the Repulse ’s deck and out at the horizon alike, searching for the rest of the Royal Knights. They couldn’t just…not be there. They couldn’t have just abandoned two badly wounded sisters-in-arms, not unless…

“Repulse! Where are the others?!” she snapped, stepping forwards, eyes still desperately looking for Oz, and Lion, and the Princess, and…she had to have missed them, somehow. She had to have missed them, they couldn’t be…

The brunette just sat there, her face still utterly blank. 

“ Repulse! The others, where are they?!” Now New Zealand was standing over the younger Battlecruiser, fear filling her mind to the point where she barely remembered to step around Renown’s mangled form instead of over it. She grabbed Repulse by the shoulders, giving her a sharp shake as she forced her to meet her eyes. 

“The others…?” the brunette mumbled, a light finally starting to flicker behind her hollow orbs. The older shipgirl nodded vigorously, hoping against all hope that Repulse would tell her that Oz and the rest were okay, that they were safe, that they’d just taken a different route for whatever reason and were happily on their way back to Rosyth. 

It was a hope that was dashed to pieces as New Zealand watched tears begin to form in Repulse’s eyes.

The younger shipirl’s body language suddenly shifted: gone was the desolate husk of a person, replaced by someone about to shatter into a million pieces. Repulse was sniffling and gagging and struggling to breathe, everything about her body language screaming pain agony God please make it stop : her whole body was quivering like a leaf, shaking and trembling and about to collapse against the deck. 

The brunette took in a long, shuddering breath in before she could finally speak, her eyes refusing to meet New Zealand’s as she choked out her words.

“T-the…the others…” she barely managed to whisper, her eyes completely filled with tears. “T-they…they’re all…” she shook her head, burying her face in her hands.

“T-they’re all gone,” Repulse moaned, her voice muffled but still clearly audible. “They’re all gone.”

The older Battlecruiser’s mind refused to process the statement. They…all of them?...they couldn’t just be… “ What the hell do you mean ‘THEY’RE GONE’?!” New Zealand roared, her nails burying themselves in the young Knight’s shoulders, the veteran roughly pulling the novice upwards until their faces were nearly pressed against each other. 

Tears were streaming freely down Repulse’s cheeks, an agonized wince on her face as she tried to turn away from the older shipgirl, unwilling (or perhaps) unable to look New Zealand in the eyes. Her whole body shook like a leaf, and she was outright bawling, ugly sobs falling from her mouth, but the Maori Warrior refused to let go, her grasp on the young Knight tightening, her fingers digging themselves deeper into the brunette’s flesh. 

“REPULSE! THE-WHAT DO YOU MEAN THEY’RE GONE?!!!” the older battlecruiser screamed again. This time she got a response: the young Knight looked up at her, pure, unadulterated anguish and grief filling the blue orbs to the brim. She shook her head weakly, jaw twitching as she tried to get words out around her whimpers and snivels.

“I-I…I… I’m sorry ,” she finally got out between the tears. The brunette fell forwards, utterly limp, against the other Battlercruiser, her heavy sobs wracking her whole body and New Zealand’s alike as she kept trying to speak. 

“Repulse…Repulse, no, Repulse no no no,” the Maori Warrior stammered, some part of her fully aware of what the young Knight was trying to tell her. She shook her head, pleadingly, desperately, but weakly, feebly, Repulse gestured to where Renown lay in a pile of ad hoc bandages and her own gore, and her next words ripped New Zealand’s heart straight out of her chest. 

“She’s the only one I could save.”

No. No no no no no. No no no no no no no no no… That single word echoed over and over and over again through New Zealand’s mind. She knew exactly what Repulse meant, but she refused to comprehend that…

“Nononononononononononononono…” the older Battlecruiser murmured to herself, stepping back and letting Repulse fall to the deck weeping. She kept shaking her head, trying desperately to deny reality as she stumbled away from the brunette, her vision going blurry, her head spinning. 

The only one she could save…that would mean. Lion. Princess Royal. Tiger. Inflexible. Indomitable. Australia. Australia, Australia, Oz, her own fucking sister, her own fucking sister that had been happily teasing her about her fucking boilers yesterday fucking morning , she was, they were all, every last fucking one of them

New Zealand screamed to the heavens, long, loud and furious.

They did not hear her. 

Chapter Text

“Please state your name for the record.”

“HMS Valiant, Queen Elizabeth -class Super Dreadnaught, Pennant Number 02.”

“Miss Valiant, you were present in the Skagerrak on the night of March 21st, 1918 as part of the Grand Fleet’s Fifth Battle Squadron, correct?”

“That is correct, yes.”

Valiant and the Admiral running the proceedings (who’s name Warspite hadn’t bothered to remember) prattled on, the latter asking the silver-blonde Super Dreadnaught a simple string of straightforward, unassuming questions. It was a formality at this point, one meant merely to further establish the mundane details of that damned night: over the course of the Inquiry’s earlier days what felt like half the Fleet had been repeatedly asked the same string of basic queries as the Admiralty tried to build a firm timeline of events for and undeniably verify the facts of what had happened going into and within the Skagerrak.

It may have all seemed somewhat redundant at this point, still asking the same questions several days into the Inquiry, but such thoroughness on the part of the investigators was not unexpected: the Royal Navy’s worst battlefield defeat since the Siren Wars (since the darkest days of the Siren Wars) had to be examined, and reexamined and reexamined again , from every conceivable angle. 

The sheer breadth of the Disaster necessitated it. Seven Battlecruisers sunk in a single night; the Flagship of the whole Grand Fleet lost with them; drydocks full to overflowing with mangled ships; hospitals flooded with injured Royal Knights; the Cruisers of the Maid Corps decimated; Destroyer casualties in the dozens; the blockade of Germany all but broken; the Ironblood propaganda machine boasting about it on every wireless frequency and with every newspaper they could access…

It was obvious to anyone and everyone that something had gone catastrophically wrong for the Grand Fleet on March 21st, 1918, and the investigation into what that something was was going to leave no stone unturned. The Admiralty was searching for anything, anything , for the smallest of discrepancies that might have unraveled the whole enigma, for the tiniest contradiction that might reveal so much as a hint as to what had gone so hellishly wrong. 

Engineers of all sorts were pouring over the damaged hulls in Scapa Flow and Rosyth, trying to piece together whatever physical evidence they could from the shell holes and shattered armor.. But while the Inquiry waited for the full damage analysis reports all they could do in the meantime was ask those who had been there the same questions over and over and over and over again, looking for the one shipgirl who might have noticed something out of place. 

Today, as they had been for several days now, the Inquiry was to be disappointed in its search for a smoking gun: Valiant’s answers were essentially the same as those given by the girls who had been questioned before her (in every way that mattered, at least). 

“Miss Valiant, what was the specific reason for the Grand Fleet sortieing that day?”

“We were headed out to counter the High Seas Fleet. Intelligence reported that they were preparing a major sortie of their own with the intention of either breaking out into our shipping lanes or otherwise breaking our blockade, neither of which we could allow to happen, of course.”

To Warspite herself, her class-mate’s questioning was little more than white noise. In part the former Knight-Commander of the Royal Navy simply had no need to listen to the interrogation: she was already fully aware of practically all of the information that was being recited, having both been there herself and having already heard it repeated a dozen times over over the course of the Inquiry. 

But that was only a very small part of the reason that the blonde was barely paying attention to the events around her. There was far more than simple redundancy keeping the eldest remaining Super Dreadnaught of the Royal Navy’s mind firmly fixed somewhere besides the Inquiry playing out around her, and that fact had been readily and painfully obvious to anyone who had so much as glanced her way over the course of the past few days. 

One might have expected that the shipgirl who was at least nominally running the entity of the Royal Navy would have been paying rapt attention to every word said, would have been taking note of every piece of testimony, maybe even would have been testifying herself. Instead…instead Warspite had spent most of the Inquiry blankly off into space, almost never saying even a single word, barely even reacting to the shifts in the world around her. Indeed, she’d hardly been paying any attention to any of the proceedings since the interrogations had started, a fact that caused an undertide of whispers to start up whenever she entered into the courtroom.

“At what time did the Fleet depart from Scapa Flow?” 

“The last of us had finished pulling up anchor by about 6 o’clock that morning, and we proceeded to make full steam eastwards. Our last sight of land was at some time around 7:30.”

It would have been typical for many of the Inquiry’s observers, composed of everything from other shipgirls to assorted reporters to a large portion of the Admiralty, to have been deemed such apparent disinterest to be deeply improper for the woman that was in theory the Royal Navy’s new Queen-to-be. That the Fleet’s de jure Acting Flagship was so far spending the majority of the most important event of her young command as if she were having an out-of-body experience would have been scandalous: there would have been whispers that the Heir to the Crown being bored in the middle of the Inquiry that would determine much of the Royal Navy’s future was outrageous, that her clear slacking in her duty was unacceptable, that she was obviously unready for the burdens of full command. There would have been rumors of other girls or the Admiralty maneuvering to place someone else on the Royal Navy’s throne. 

Rather than accusations of detachment and unconcern or speculation about plots to depose her, though, there were mostly whispers of pity. There was of course still plenty of gossip about the interim Flagship, but it had far less to do with how blasé and nonchalant Warspite was being in the middle of critically important events and more about how she looked for all the world like a kicked puppy that shouldn’t have had to be brought into the courtroom in the first place. People weren’t charging her with being apathetic or uncaring, they were shooting her sympathetic glances and quietly, sadly commenting about how utterly broken she looked. 

“Did the Fleet set out at full strength?”

“All shipgirls and their respective vessels were present and accounted for, yes.”

It wasn’t hard to see why: from the outside looking in, the eldest surviving member of the Queen Elizabeth -class of Super Dreadnaughts was a wreck. She looked frail, she looked like a piece of cracked glass that was just a few more (maybe only one more) taps away from shattering apart entirely. Even a completely untrained eye couldn’t have missed the signs that the woman before them had been pushed to (if not already well past) her breaking point. 

Anyone who had seen Warspite before the Disaster of the Skagerrak would have been stunned by the transformation that had occurred since. Indeed, simply seeing her face would have been shocking to anyone who hadn’t seen her since before the battle. Said face was gaunt, haggard, empty: her skin looked to be sagging straight off of her bones, in spots discoloring into an ugly pale yellow or breaking out into blemishes or pimples (none of which the blonde was even bothering trying to hide), as if it wasn’t receiving proper nutrition. 

Framing this face from above and to its sides was a wreath of unkept, uncombed hair, random strands twisting in all directions, split ends and stray locks dangling into the former Knight-Commander’s face (not that she seemed to notice, much less care, about them). More towards her face’s center were sunken, hollowed-out cheeks that seemed to have some kind of water stains running down them, ones that appeared to have been regularly added to; above those were the deep, dark bags below her eyes. 

Those violet orbs themselves were the worst part. Warspite’s eyes looked more like a pair of damaged glass ornaments than actual eyes. They weren’t even fully violet anymore: their whites had been stained red by what had to be night after night after night after night of falling tears; her irises had somehow faded from a deep violet to what looked more like a faded mauve, all vibrancy gone from them; her pupils were similarly bereft of any light. Warspite’s eyes were dark and dull. They were empty. They were dead. 

“Was the Fleet fully ready for combat? Was it adequately supplied?”

“Yes Sir. All ships were fully fueled and had been fully stocked with ammunition.”

Gone was the Heroine of Jutland, the untouchable head of the Royal Knights, replaced with a stumbling, zombified corpse who seemed to have no energy, no purpose, no direction. Every morning she would silently walk (silently shamble) to her seat, ignoring the piteous looks and eager camera flashes coming from the gallery, and every evening she would quietly stagger straight back out, brushing off any and all attempts to get her attention. In between she would simply sit slouched in her chair with her head bowed, her shoulders slumped and her eyes staring at nothing, her ears listening to nothing. She would be rigidly silent the whole while, not so much as a whisper escaping her lips, looking more like an ornamental statue left to decorate the courtroom than a key figure in the proceedings.

Such behavior of course bred even more whispers about what she must be feeling, about how broken she looked. Warspite was mute on the former, but had quite obviously ceased to give even the slightest of damns about the latter. Gone was the once constant care taken to keep up appearances, gone was any trace of makeup or hair brushing, gone was the impeccably maintained uniform, all once kept pristine in even the most desperate of conditions, all replaced with blemished skin and a bird’s nest for hair and a pile of frayed, dirty rags, bearing the wrinkles and creases of having been slept in for many a long, dark night, bearing the scorch marks and holes of battle damage left unrepaired. 

Gone too was the great broadsword that would have normally served as her badge of office. Bringing weapons into court would have been frowned upon to say the least, of course, but the former Knight-Commander wasn’t even carrying the blade’s scabbard or the harness thereof, and according to those within the Fleet she hadn’t worn any of them in some time, those symbols of the blonde’s position within the Royal Navy allegedly lying semi-forgotten in a dark corner in her bedroom. Any other emblem of the blonde’s rank or her battle honors were similarly missing, every officer's insignia and combat medal likely lying discarded in the same dark corner as her sword.

“What was the weather like when the Grand Fleet set out?”

“Nothing out of the ordinary. A bit rough, but not bad for the North Sea in early spring. Certainly not bad enough to hinder operations.” 

In theory, Warspite might have been wearing the Crown and carrying the Scepter instead, as would have been befitting her status as the senior shipgirl remaining in the line of succession. She wasn’t. Those particular pieces of Royal regalia that had been forged at the very height of the Siren Wars, that had won reputations as almost legendary symbols of the Royal Navy’s power, honor and glory, that had become almost irreplaceable cultural artifacts in and of themselves, were lost, lying somewhere on the bottom of the North Sea with their previous bearer. 

The matter of forging replacements had been discussed, but the former Knight-Commander had refused to be measured (or indeed give any input at all) for such actions, leaving the process quite dead in the water. In a similar vein, any sort of plans to actually coronate the senior remaining member of the Queen Elizabeth -class as Queen, to have her drop the ‘interim’ from all of her new official positions, had also been put on hold: in fact, the Fleet’s nominal head refused to even allow the matter to be spoken of in her presence. What would the point have been? It wasn’t as if Warspite would have been allowed within a hundred miles of the Throne once the Inquiry was over. 

“Thank you, Ms Valiant. Now, may we get serious for a moment?”

“Of course, Sir.”

By the smallest of margins, Warspite’s head tilted upwards, the blonde ever so slightly turning towards her class-mate and the Admiral interrogating her. Here came the only part of the proceedings that the former Knight-Commander actually had to care about. The small and generally passive part of her that had been paying attention to the Inquiry knew what would happen next. 

Her condemnation was about to begin.

“Ms Valiant, reading your CV, it is apparent that you were, in effect, third in command of the whole of the Grand Fleet that day. Is that correct?”

“Yes Sir, that is correct.”

“In that capacity, you would have been fully aware of any and all command decisions made, as well as the reasoning behind them, yes? And input in them?”

“Yes Sir.” 

As Steward of the Royal Navy, and having been third in the Battle Line at Skagerrak, Valiant was the most senior officer who had been present at the Disaster to yet take the stand. The silver-blonde was privy to far more critical information than any of the Destroyers and Light Cruisers who had served as the previous days’ witnesses: those girls had known the orders that they had received, but Valiant would be the first to testify among those who had been involved in giving said orders, who would know why they had been given and on who’s advice they had been given. The Admiralty’s obvious hope was that her testimony would almost certainly finally provide the smoking gun that they had been so desperately looking for, or at the very least point to where it could be found. 

And a smoking gun they would find. Warspite knew full well what her class-mate’s testimony would indicate, knew full well who it would implicate. The Steward had been in the wireless channel when the then-Knight-Commander had recommended to Her Majesty that they press on despite the gathering darkness, when Warspite had arrogantly dismissed the dangers of night combat and called for them to continue the battle, when her foolish pride had demanded that they settle accounts with the Ironblood right then and there.

When Warspite’s ill council had damned the Queen of the Royal Navy to her death. 

Valiant would be under oath to tell the truth, and she wasn’t much of a liar to begin with. It was quite clear what the result of her testimony would be: her elder sibling’s actions would become the central focus of the entire Inquiry, the blonde becoming the prime suspect in Her Majesty’s sinking. Such whispers already existed, of course: the death of the Queen had naturally caused certain suspicions to be cast towards she who’s sworn duty it had been to guard Her Majesty with her own life, and the accompanying crushing defeat on the battlefield had only further intensified the scrutiny towards Her Majesty’s most senior and trusted tactical advisor. 

But once the official record showed that such notions had a rather solid basis in reality, such whispers would become screams, become roars, become slogans chanted by mobs in the streets. It wasn’t as if the matter could simply be covered up, either: even with wartime censorship in full effect, the vague details of what had happened in the Skagerrak were already making the rounds all over Britain, courtesy of a mixture of the leaks (and the journalists that pursued them) that had been giving the whole military headaches since the war started, the simple impossibility to keep such secrets in a democratic society (even a constitutionally monarchical one), and the entire Ironblood press screaming its full head off to anyone that would listen (and so loudly that everyone else who didn’t want to listen didn’t have a choice in the matter) about how they had sent half the Grand Fleet to the bottom of the North Sea. 

As they had after Jutland, after the Somme, after Arras and after every other debacle in the whole of the God-forsaken war, the public were demanding answers, and the democratically-elected, beholden to its constituents government was obligated to give them said answers. And once they did, there would be hell to pay: it wasn’t a secret that most of Britain was looking for a scapegoat for Skagerrak, the press and people and politicians and Admiralty all eager to learn where they could or should be pointing their fingers.

Already, the atmosphere in the courtroom was growing more restless every day that the question of fault went unanswered. The Inquiry, officially, was still only a fact finding mission, but it already very much felt like a criminal trial, the gallery becoming increasingly choked with reporters (true, they were military ones, the more… energetic ones kept out courtesy of national security concerns, but they were still reporters nonetheless, and it was only a matter of time until their civilian counterparts got their hands on the full story) and the streets outside the Court becoming ever more full of crowds looking for answers.

And it wasn’t a secret that there plenty of those people in the gallery had both power and influence to throw around and  reasons to make sure that as much blame as possible fell on one person alone: other shipgirls who were ambitious or angry, Admirals looking to reform the Fleet or protect their careers, furious politicians looking for someone who wasn’t themselves to blame, journalists looking to make names for themselves and break their papers’ sales records...

The press would waste no time villainizing their newfound scapegoat; the rest of the Fleet would despise the woman who had led them to their worst defeat in decades; the Admiralty would look to dispose of their largest political and public relations liability; the whole of British society would shun she who had so totally failed them. Whoever the Inquiry decided was to blame for the Disaster of the Skagerrak would become a national pariah, the greatest shame in the Royal Isles.

Warspite knew all of that. She knew and she didn’t care, she knew and she couldn’t bring herself to give a single damn about it. The former Knight-Commander had already made peace with the fact that they would be right to condemn her: sleepless, nightmare-plagued night after sleepless, nightmare-plagued night after sleepless, nightmare-plagued night, nights the blonde had spent locking herself away in her room with only her demons and ghosts for company, had made sure of that. 

The eldest surviving Super Dreadnaught couldn’t deny what her conscience had spent weeks telling her, she couldn’t ignore what the phantoms that haunted her dreams had constantly been screaming at her. She knew full well who’s hands Elizabeth’s blood was on, and soon enough the whole rest of the world would know the same. She hardly thought that that latter fact mattered: many already suspected it anyways, from the press to the Admiralty to the rest of the Fleet, and while the lack of official proof had so far kept most of them respectfully quiet on the subject, once Valiant’s testimony had been submitted to the official record…

In all likeliness, the Inquiry would become a criminal court in all but name. But that hardly mattered: the evidence that her class-mate would soon provide would merely replace the already-grim speculation with even grimmer fact, simply turning the fatalistic view that large segments of society already held official. Hardly the largest of changes, given how much the name ‘Warspite’ was already being spoken in the more pessimistic circles.

The Court of Public Opinion had already opened session, and with its preliminary hearings already looking bad for the former Knight-Commander what would the real difference, if any, be once ominous supposition was replaced by ominous fact? And anyways, the blonde had already resigned herself to her fate: why not just get it done and over with? What could the Admiralty or the public throw at her that would possibly be worse than what Her Majesty’s wraith screamed at her every night?

Indeed, the inevitability of her denunciation and punishment was in fact oddly comforting: there was a sense of peace to it, knowing that the matter was essentially already settled and that there was no point in worrying herself about it. Here at last was a plan that Warspite knew would work: Valiant’s testimony would start the process of her condemnation, and within the next day or so her own would set it in stone. Once the Inquiry did give way to an actual Court Martial, the former Knight-Commander fully intended to enter a guilty plea to whatever charges she faced, and that would be that. A fool would be rightfully punished, the honor of the rest of the Royal Navy would be preserved, and justice would be done for Her Majesty. All would be as it should be.

That clear vision of the future had allowed for Warspite to focus what little willpower she was able to muster over the past few weeks on her more personal matters. It had been almost liberating, actually, spending the last few weeks mostly tying up her own loose ends, not having to try and pretend that she was somehow worthy of even continuing on, much less inheriting the Crown. She’d made especially sure to make arrangements for the ascension of a much more worthy candidate for the Throne. Speaking of whom…

“Miss Valiant, there’s no point beating around the bush,” the Admiral said sternly, his bullish face hardening. He drew himself up in his seat, his presence looming ominously over the Steward of the Royal Navy. “Given your command position, you are in a position to give us an answer.”

The Admiral leaned forwards, his eyes narrowing, his frown deepening. “Miss Valiant, is there any action taken by a member of the Royal Navy, any order given or decision made, that you would consider to be a key contributing factor to the losses suffered in the Skagerrak?”

For half a moment, Valiant flashed a vaguely apologetic look towards her class-mate, her eyes silently asking for approval before she proceeded. Warspite felt herself take in a deep breath. Here it was. They had discussed this. Very briefly. Once or twice. And the blonde didn’t actually quite remember exactly what either of them had said, but she was decently sure that she had told Valiant the vague outlines of her plan not to fight the Inquiry’s inevitable results, and if the silver-blonde had protested that order (that vague suggestion) then she hadn’t put any sort of vigor behind it. 

It wasn’t as if Valiant wouldn’t have had plenty of chances to lodge such a protest: she’d been practically glued to Warspite’s side since Skagerrak. If not for the silver-blonde, it was quite unlikely that the former Knight-Commander would have even been able to get out of the bed each morning, much less have actually been present at the Inquiry. Ever since the Disaster, every day for the elder class-mate had begun with the younger inviting herself into her room and dragging the blonde out of her covers, forcing her to get dressed and generally making her at least partially presentable (as she herself had stayed, the Steward having made sure to keep her hair done and her uniform pressed and her makeup on: even with all the obvious signs that she had suffered injuries of her own, she still looked like the picture of nobility).

The rest of the day would usually go in much the same way: Warspite might have been the de jure Acting Flagship of the Royal Navy, but in truth it was Valiant who was doing the far majority of the work of actually holding the Fleet together. It was Valiant that had actually done the sad duty of recording the fallen as ‘Killed in Action’ in the official records, it was Valiant who had filled out the requisition forms for all the innumerable replacement parts that would be required to get the Fleet back into fighting shape, it was Valiant that had reorganized those girls who were still combat capable into something resembling a functional navy, who had written the preliminary after action report on the Battle and handed it in to the Admiralty, who had been keeping the rabid jackals known as the British Press from breaking into the bases and pestering any who moved for interviews, who had made sure that her class-mate had been eating enough to keep herself alive, who had been visiting the wounded in Hospital…

Warspite, meanwhile, had done little more than sign the completed papers that her class-mate had presented to her, only very rarely ever giving the documents any more than the briefest of once-overs. Past of the blonde felt vaguely ashamed of letting so much responsibility fall onto the Steward, but it wasn’t as if she were good for anything more than being a rubber stamp anymore anyways.

And it wasn’t as if Valiant were complaining about it, either: the silver-blonde had raised not a single word of protest about the veritable mountain work that her nominal superior was leaving for her. She’d never voiced disapproval of elder Super Dreadnaught’s pathetic state, or insisted that the blonde at least try to clean herself up, or tried to force the nominal Flagship to do any of the duties that were still officially hers.

Or objected to Warspite’s plans for the future. Valiantly had only silently and solemnly done both her own and her superior’s duties, and considering the both circumstances and the de jure Acting Flagship’s unwillingness (inability) to do much of anything to help, the silver-blonde had done remarkably well. Supplies continued to be requisitioned, repair work was being done, injuries were being treated…services were being held for the dead…

It was impossible to deny that the Royal Navy had been beaten, and beaten badly, in the Skagerrak, but so far the Steward had managed to keep it from breaking apart entirely. At the very least she was doing a better job as the Fleet’s de facto Flagship than Warspite was doing as the theoretical actual one, a fact that only reinforced the blonde’s increasingly strong conviction that it would be for the best of everyone if she simply let herself fade away into the annals of history. 

Once the woman who had led them to catastrophic defeat was out of the way, the Fleet would be free to start moving forwards with the guidance of the shipgirl who had in effect been running things since Skagerrak, free to start healing under the watch of a far more capable leader than their disgraced former Knight-Commander. Valiant would make a good Queen. Warspite was sure of it. Certainly a better one than she herself would have been. 

And there was no way that Valiant herself would disagree: her personal ambitions to become a Flagship (if not the Flagship) of the Royal Navy were quite well known within the Fleet’s upper echelons, even if her (lack of) actual abilities at intrigue and scheming were more of an inside joke among her peers than anything else. The silver-blonde had always harbored a desire to prove herself worthy of the Crown, and now here would be her chance: if the Steward had changed her mind on that matter since Skagerrak she certainly hadn’t said anything about it, and as far as the former Knight-Commander was concerned, her class-mate’s silent diligence amounted to implicit approval of the plan to pass her the Throne. 

And so, when Valiant wordlessly asked for permission to tell the Court (and eventually all of Britain, and all of the world) the truth of what had happened that night, had looked over to her class-mate with the words ‘ I’m sorry for what comes next’ written across her features, Warspite had only silently, slowly nodded. It had to be done. It was time, past time, for the former Knight-Commander to face her fate. 

And the Steward apparently agreed. Almost imperceptibly, with a movement that could have easily been confused with the silver-blonde simply shifting her weight for a moment, Valiant nodded back. It clearly wasn’t easy for her, the younger shipgirl biting her lip as an indiscernible glint flashed through her eyes, a shiver seeming to pass through her whole body. Her orbs hovered on to her class-mate for a long second, deep red meeting dull violet for the briefest of moments, but then she turned fully towards the Admiral, posture solidifying and spine straightening as she began to speak. 

“Yes, Sir. There is.” There was no waver in her voice. No doubt, no hesitation. Warspite almost breathed a sigh of relief as her class-mate went along with the plan, her last fear (that of bringing the Royal Navy’s promising future Queen down with her) evaporating. Finally, it would all end. The charade of her being in charge of the Royal Navy was about to come to an end, the charade that she even still deserved to be a part of it would come to an end, the charade that the world didn’t know who was to blame for Her Majesty’s sinking would end. 

They would all finally be able to move forwards. Warspite would be able to assuage her guilt with the knowledge that she was rightfully receiving her just deserts. Elizabeth would be able to rest in peace, knowing her killer had been brought to justice. And Valiant, diligent, unbroken Valiant, who already looked so poised and regal up there on the witness stand (even with her right arm in a sling and numerous other bandages visible across her body) would be able to detach herself from the former Knight-Commander’s legacy of failure, would be free to lead the Royal Navy back out of the pit of despair that Skagerrak had plunged it into. 

“If there is anyone in the Royal Navy to blame for this… disaster, ” the silver-blonde shipgirl said, standing tall and unbowed, her expression cold and stony, her voice confident and condemnatory and allowing for no compromise. For perhaps half a second she paused, the Steward taking the moment to let her gaze dart around the room, the younger Super Dreadnaught making sure that the whole room was paying attention to her before she finally spoke on, before she completed her testimony with the words that would change everything.

“Anyone at all,” Valiant said, stalling for another half-second, visibly stiffening as she steeled herself for what she was about to do, what her statement would unleash. For the smallest of moments she closed her eyes, taking in a steadying breath. Then she opened them, and named the culprit of the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth of the Royal Navy. 

“It is Lion and her Battlecruisers, for leaving us almost completely blind.”

Wait. What? Those words flashed through Warspite’s mind as the blonde looked over at her class-mate in something close to shock, her eyes sharpening for what must have been the first time since the battle as she focused in on the Steward. What was that that Valiant had just said? A similar stir went through the entire courtroom, and suddenly the whole room was buzzing like a kicked hornet’s nest. 

From wall to wall and back again, all the what seemed like dozens and dozens and dozens of people who were there to witness the Inquiry began to whisper, the silver-blonde Super Dreadnaught’s blunt declaration having fully caught their attention. A speculative hum filled the whole courtroom, the same questions beginning to slip from every set of lips: The Battlecruisers? Lion? What did she just say about them?  

Warspite’s gaze flickered over to the gallery as the murmurs began to fill her now-attentive ears. The courtroom’s occupants (God, how many of them were there? Now that she was actually bothering to take notice, the blonde was rapidly realizing that the room was filled almost to its rafters, Admirals and journalists and shipgirls and lawyers and clerks and witnesses all packed in almost like sardines, a good number of whom wielded considerable amounts of power and influence) looked just as interested as they sounded: every head in the crowd had turned towards the witness stand as dozens, maybe of hundreds of people leaned a bit forwards in their seats in anticipation, the expressions on all of their faces shifting into ones of intrigue.

“Please elaborate,” said the presiding Admiral, a quirked eyebrow breaking through his stony expression. Warspite watched as well over half the courtroom wordlessly made the same request with varying degrees of subtlety, hand gestures and nods and shrugs ranging from the short and curt to the lengthy and energetic adding a wave of visible motion to the tide of whispers that made sure that anyone who couldn’t hear the change in atmosphere in the room would be able to outright see it.  

No one was shifting more than the journalists, of course. The particular batch that had been actually been allowed into the courtroom may have bore official titles like ‘Military Recorder’, may have been more honorable than the hyenas that peddled their wares on every street corner and had no qualms whatsoever about stretching the word ‘truth’ far past what should have been possible, but they were still journalists at heart (indeed, most of them were ultimately little more than civilian reporters who had been thrown into uniform), and their base instincts remained the same. 

The journalists in the courtroom may have nominally been military men, but they knew a juicy story when one was thrown in front of them, and reacted accordingly. Valiant might as well have thrown a raw steak in front of a pack of hungry dogs: Warspite watched as the jackals scrambled to be the first to the carcass (the first to get the scoop), their claws and teeth (notepads and cameras) coming out in the time that it took the blonde to blink, eyes zeroing in on her class-mate and pens already starting to scribble across paper and photographers shifting to get good angles. 

After days of eating scraps, days of nothing but testimony about the weather and the Fleet’s schedules and combat reports from the fringes of the fight, the jackals were hungry indeed, and it was a hunger made all the more intense by the quality of the meat that had just been put before them. The Battlecruisers were a new angle. They had hardly come up at all in the Inquiry’s earlier days, mainly by virtue of none of them being around to testify: only two of nine Capital Ships had come back from the Skagerrak, one of whom was comatose, and without them any insight into who among them had made what decisions and why would be hardly more than blind speculation. 

Apparently Valiant wanted to do some speculating. The silver-blonde shot another apologetic glance at Warspite before she began to speak again; if she saw her class-mate mouthing ‘what are you doing?’ back to her, she ignored it. Instead her gaze turned towards the gallery, towards all the slobbering jackals preparing to pounce on the raw, bloody meat she was offering them, the Steward making sure that they were all paying attention she went on. 

“Sir…as you likely know, when we, and by ‘we’ I mean the Dreadnaughts of the Battle Squadrons, you understand, sailed out that day, we were reliant on the Battlecruiser Squadrons to be our reconnaissance, almost entirely,” the silver-blonde started, a flicker of satisfaction crossing her face as she noted that the gallery’s reporters were already starting to feverishly scribble down what she was saying. She continued, slowly and carefully, making sure that she picked the right words (and that the crowd heard them the right way). “That is the Royal Navy’s standard operating doctrine, and it has been for years.”

“We needed them to be our eyes. Their reconnaissance was what would tell us… everything , basically: where the Ironblood were, where they were headed, how strong their forces were. And without that information…” Valiant shrugged, her expression hardening, her mouth twisting slightly into a grimace. “We might as well have tried fighting the battle blindfolded.” 

The silver-blonde leaned forwards, cold fury in her eyes, her gaze again flickering around the courtroom and making sure that everyone there was listening. Once she’d made sure that all eyes were on her, that every ear was waiting on her words, she dropped her next bombshell. 

“When the High Seas Fleet engaged us late that afternoon, we had not heard from Lion or anyone in her command for…three, maybe four hours.” 

The undercurrent of whispers in the courtroom seemed to instantly double in intensity, the quiet murmurs growing into a soft, constant hum. Warspite’s eyes darted around the room as the sounds of notepads being scribbled on and of cameras clicking sped up, the blonde watching as the whole crowed fixed itself on her class-mate, suddenly eager to hear what she would say next, as men scooted forwards on their benches and chairs and turned themselves to fully face the witness stand. 

The presiding Admiral did a better job of hiding his emotion than most, but one could still clearly see that Valiant’s implied accusation had piqued his curiosity. As was his duty as head of the Inquiry, the Admiral began to press the line of questioning that the Steward had offered to him, the man leaning forwards slightly in his chair as he presented his next question. “Do you have any knowledge as to why contact had been lost with the Battlecruiser Squadrons?”

“Not specifically, no,” Valiant admitted, her shoulders slumping slightly in resignation. But she pressed on regardless, refusing to lose her momentum. “However, I do know that it could not have been a simple maintenance problem: the entire force had undergone inspection for any such issues only…a week, maybe two weeks earlier. And I doubt that any undetected issues would have affected all of them.”

“I will say, however,” the silver-blonde continued before the angle could be dropped, “that Lion hardly seemed to be worried about staying in contact with us to begin with.”

Again the murmurs intensified, again the whispers grew louder. Warspite felt a twist in her gut as her class-mate’s plan became clear. The Steward was trying to scapegoat Lion and her Battlecruisers. Why she was trying to deflect the Disaster’s blame away from the disgraced former Knight-Commander the blonde couldn’t comprehend (why would she try and protect such a failure? Why would she risk her own chance at the Crown), but that hardly mattered. 

What mattered was that it was already starting to work: the reporters, sensing a scandal about to break, were madly jotting down every word out of the silver-blonde’s mouth, while their photographer counterparts were already taking pictures nonstop. God, by tomorrow morning Valiant’s words (which were already quite inflammatory, and Warspite suspect that they were only going to become more so) were going to be plastered across the front page of every paper in Britain.  

And that wouldn’t be good for anyone. Instead of the Warspite simply receiving her punishment and being allowed to quietly fade from memory, there would be a circus, a street brawl. The Inquiry would become a long, drawn-out fiasco: there would have to be weeks, maybe months of testimony and counter-testimony, and then the press and society and the Admiralty and the Fleet would all start taking sides, a distraction and division that the country would ill be able to afford with the war with Ironblood still raging. 

Half the Royal Navy would be trying to drag the other half through the mud, with the papers and the politicians and the public all egging them on; what little was left of the Fleet’s cohesion would be shattered. It would be a disaster to rival the Skagerrak. But no one else seemed to realize this: Warspite could only watch, the knot in her gut tightening, as the whole courtroom eagerly waited with bated breath for Valiant to throw even more accusations at shipgirls too dead to defend themselves. 

“You believe that Lion’s inability to stay in contact was a personal failure rather than a technical one?” the presiding Admiral asked, his voice still stern but with a small (but increasing) hint of eagerness to it, the man all too happy to finally have a lead to follow. The silver-blonde nodded vigorously, the smallest traces of happiness and relief visible in her expression as the Inquiry head picked up on where she was leading him. 

“Yes Sir, I do,” the Steward responded, her face darkening; the whispers and murmurs and scratching of pens and clicking of cameras doubled in volume again. The Admiral nodded, then went on. “What cause do you have to believe this?”

“Sir, Lion’s actions all day that day were… aggressive ,” Valiant continued, just barely stopping herself from using a much more derogatory term. She did not, however, manage to stop her opinion of the fallen Battlecruiser from leaking into her tone, the silver-blonde’s voice gaining a distinctly hard edge as she went on. “She and her command departed the Firth of Forth by…I don’t even know, we didn’t even hear anything from them until they had already raised anchor. They must have left at around…3 or 4 o’clock that morning. By the time we were leaving Scapa Flow, they would have been…God, I don’t even know how far out in front of us.”

“Miss Valiant, with the High Seas Fleet moving into the North Sea, as you yourself have testified was the case, was such a rapid deployment not to have been expected?” the Admiral questioned. Valiant responded with a nod, but the look on her face didn’t lighten in the least as she went on. 

“Yes Sir. A rapid deployment by the Battlecruiser Squadrons would have been the proper response to the High Seas Fleet’s movements, but only if said deployment was properly coordinated with us, the Dreadnaughts,” the silver-blonde specified, her expression tightening a bit further, her brow starting to furrow. “Yes, Lion’s actions were in line with the standing plans our Fleet developed after Jutland: she and her command were meant to rapidly respond to the High Seas Fleet sortieing in strength, as they were doing.”

“But those same plans also demanded that Battlecruiser and Dreadnaught actions be extremely closely coordinated,” Valiant continued, the murmurs and clicking cameras and scratching on notepads around her getting louder with each word. “And Lion either failed to remember that part of the plan, or outright disregarded it: her actions that day, and those of her entire command, were in no way properly coordinated with the Battle Fleet.” 

More (and louder) whispers, more pictures taken, more notes jotted down. The silver-blonde did a very good job of pretending she wasn’t paying attention to the slowly increasing commotion in the crowd, looking for all the world to be the epitome of cold professionalism, her back straight, posture rigid and head held high. But Warspite saw her stolen glances at the gallery, caught the Steward’s repeatedly making sure that she had the press eating out of the palm of her hand. 

If Valiant saw her class-mate again silently asking her what the hell she thought she was doing, she again gave no sign of it. Nor did anyone else in the courtroom, all eyes on the witness stand as the presiding Admiral again asked for clarification. “In which ways did Lion and her forces fail to coordinate with yours?” 

“By completely failing to meaningfully communicate with us, Sir,” the silver-blonde replied, having to raise her voice above the new wave of commotion her words unleashed. Warspite again silently tried to signal her, to ask what she was trying to accomplish, but again the Steward pointedly ignored her as she pressed ahead. “And by deploying far too rapidly as a result.”

“Lion’s first message to us that morning was that she had pulled up anchor and was setting out,” Valiant went on, her posture tightening further, her face growing darker. “This was perhaps…an hour, maybe? After we had even fully confirmed that the High Seas Fleet was out of port. Most of us in Scapa Flow hadn’t even fully raised steam yet; Her Majesty was still speaking to her advisors about whether or not the conditions were right for a full-scale engagement, or if the Ironblood were just bluffing. When she heard that Lion had sortied was when she made her decision; she practically had the choice made for her.”

“By the time that we were in the North Sea, the Battlecruisers had a significant head start on us, and were isolated far out in front of us,” Valiant went on, her tone blunt and factual, a harsh look in her eyes. “Communication from them remained intermittent at best before it finally cut out entirely around 2 or 3 o’clock that afternoon. It was only later that we learned they had been engaged long before we had been in any position to support them.”

“Do you have any idea as to why the Battlecruisers were so quick to sortie, or why they didn’t wait for the Dreadnaughts to be in a better position to support them?” the presiding Admiral inquired, raising his own voice above the ever-growing hum coming from the gallery, the murmurs and cameras and scribbling pens. Valiant again shot the briefest of glances around the packed courtroom, once more making sure that the whole crowd was paying attention to her. 

Again assured that they were by the sea of faces eager for her to tell her more, the silver-blonde again sent shockwaves through the whole room (through the whole of Britain, the whole of the world) with her next declaration.

“They were glory hunting, Sir,” Valiant bluntly declared, her tone deadpan and condemnatory and tainted with restrained but undeniable bitter rage.

The whispers didn’t increase this time: they exploded. The low hum instantly became a hundred voices trying to speak at once, mixed with the clicking of dozens of cameras, with the scratching noises of even more pens and the tearing of paper and even a few shocked gasps (and one sound that Warspite thought sounded like a foot being stomped in a very loud, barely contained rage). 

“Order! Order in this court!” barked the presiding Admiral, banging his gavel above the noise. It took a minute or two, but he managed to reassert control over the courtroom, the din quieting down enough for the Inquiry to resume. Before it did, Warspite finally managed to get her class-mate’s attention for a moment, the blonde using her eyes to silently ask the Steward what she was trying to do. The only thing she got in response was a sharp look that said ‘don’t worry, I have this under control’. 

Judging by how the whole courtroom continued to buzz like a hornet’s nest, Warspite didn’t agree with that assertion, but the Admiral spoke again before she could press the point. “Miss Valiant, that is quite the accusation,” came his voice, its tone matching the stern yet somewhat open-minded expression on his face. 

“Sir, what other explanation is there?” Valiant cut in, the edge in her tone sharpening. For a few seconds, shocked silence reigned across the courtroom, even the reporters falling still for half a moment at the sheer bluntness of the silver-blonde’s declaration. 

For that same half a moment, a flash of doubt crossed the Steward’s face, as if Valiant were only in that instant realized how far she was pushing the matter. But now, with every set of eyes upon her, with so many words already out of her mouth, she (and everyone else in the courtroom) knew there was no turning back. She’d made the claim: now she had to provide the evidence. And after taking in a deep breath, Valiant began to do just that. 

“Sir, Lion had to have known that a lack of reconnaissance would be crippling to us, as would putting too much distance between herself and her Battlecruisers and us in the main body,” the silver-blonde began, her voice tight and her posture tighter, breathing heavily as she aligned her thoughts and carefully put them into words. “That’s exactly what got us into trouble at Jutland, and every combat exercise and planning meeting since, almost all of which included her , were meant to make sure that we wouldn’t repeat those exact mistakes.”

“She was supposed to know that in any large-scale engagement her duty was going to be to act as our reconnaissance, she was supposed to know that that was exactly what she and her entire command was designed and built specifically to do,” the Super Dreadnaught continued, her voice starting to raise again, her whole body beginning to clench. “And after Jutland, she should have known that she didn’t have the armor to fight Ironblood Dreadnaughts, or even Battlecruisers, in a head-to-head battle: she knew that she needed to stay close enough to us, and communicate consistently enough with us, that we would be able to adequately support her if she encountered Capital Ships.”

“Instead, where was she? Where were any of them ?” Valiant asked rhetorically, her eyes narrowing, her teeth grinding together, pure venom starting to seep into her voice. “ Three hours and a hundred miles at least out in front of us ! Isolated, vulnerable and not doing their damn jobs ! ”

“We didn’t know the enemy’s strength, we didn’t know their position, we didn’t know their course, we didn’t know anything ! Because our reconnaissance decided that it was more important to go off and try avenging their losses at Jutland! ” The silver-blonde’s face had begun to redden, and she had started to gesture wildly with her good arm as her testimony turned into a rant. As if her energy was flowing into them, the crowd was coming alive as well, the whispers and murmurs and sounds of reporters gathering notes and pictures coming back thrice as strong. “ They decided to charge off by themselves, barely even telling us where they were or what they were planning, not trying to coordinate with us or even talk to us, not waiting for us to support them, and they damned us all in the process !”

“With no reconnaissance, how the hell were we supposed to fight the battle?!” Valiant was only barely keeping herself from outright screeching; her eyes had gone wide and wild, her teeth gnashing together as she looked around the room for an answer. The stunned looks she was getting from every direction, especially from her own class-mate, wasn’t the one she was looking for, but that only made her re-ask the question. “ How the hell were we supposed to know how to deploy our forces, how the hell were we supposed to know which course to take, at what speed we could safely move, what we could expect when we found the enemy, how ? ” 

“How?” the silver-blonde repeated, shaking her head, her voice suddenly much smaller. She paused then for a long moment, struggling to regain her composure. For those few precious seconds, her heavy breathing rose above the somewhat quieter din of the courtroom, no one quite sure how to react to her outburst. Warspite’s eyes scanned the room, gauging the crowd’s reaction. It was a mixed bag: some faces were thoughtful, others looked stunned, still others were looking on in disapproval. 

The journalists, of course, were still scratching away at their notepads and fiddling with their cameras. The former Knight-Commander could only grimace at the sight: even if the reporters didn’t take their usual liberties with her class-mate’s words, God only knew the story they would put out to the public. The people’s trust in the government was waning with every day, every hour, that the war dragged on and the bodies piled up. There were already anti-war whispers all over the country, rumors of planned strikes and protests. A scandal like the one Valiant’s words were about to unleash was the last thing that Britain needed. 

“Sir, with Lion and her command not talking to us, we were waiting to be ambushed, and that’s exactly what happened.” Valiant though, having apparently regained her composure before anyone else in the room, didn’t seem to care what Britain needed. God alone knew what her plan was, but the silver-blonde was still talking, still adding more fuel to the fire. “Lion knew her damn job. The Battlecruisers all knew their damn jobs, but instead of doing them they decided to all go and get themselves blown up , an-”

“YOU LYING FUCKING BITCH!!!”

It had taken a significant portion of Warspite’s discipline to stay in her seat and stay quiet instead of marching straight up to the witness stand, grabbing Valiant by the ear and demanding to know exactly what her class-mate was trying to do. Apparently, someone in the gallery lacked Warspite’s self-control. The sudden exclamation caught the whole room’s attention, journalists, officers and everyone else in the chamber who a moment before had been utterly fixated on Valiant now turning towards its point of origin. But before anyone could find the source of (much less react to) the outburst, the commotion exponentially increased as a dozen grown adult men and even a few shipgirls were suddenly and unceremoniously dumped onto the wooden floor, shouting with surprise as the bench they’d been sitting on was abruptly kicked over from underneath them.

“YOU BITCH! YOU LYING BITCH!!!” A half-second later and the reason that an entire row’s worth of observers had suddenly been sent sprawling to the ground had made itself obvious. The source of the repeated, infuriated epithets was none other Repulse. Repulse, who had her own assortment of bandages wrapped around various cuts, bruises and other wounds. Repulse, the only Battlecruiser to make it home from the Skagerrak under her own power, and one of only two that had made it back at all. Repulse, who (it was reported) had been nearly catatonic with shock when New Zealand had found her in the aftermath of the battle. Repulse, the only Battlecruiser that had sortied out that day who was not now lying in either a hospital bed or at the bottom of the sea.

Repulse, who had shot to her feet with such force that the bench she’d been sitting on a moment before had been thrown over onto the ground behind her. Repulse, who was now pointing an enraged, accusing finger at Valiant as she continued to scream obscenities. Repulse, who looked absolutely furious, an utterly feral look of primal rage painted across her rapidly reddening face, her eyes bloodshot, her teeth bared like fangs.

“YOU UTTER FUCKING BITCH!!!”

Repulse, who, it was readily apparent, was not in the least pleased with what Valiant had been saying about her fallen sisters-in-arms.

The dozen grown men and a handful of shipgirls who had suddenly found themselves becoming acquainted with the ground were now forced to either press themselves into it or throw themselves out of the way as Repulse roughly lifted up the bench that she had been sitting on, jerking it around as she tried to secure her grasp on the bulky wooden mass. The action resulted in more than one poor soul that had been slow to react to what was happening being smacked upside the head by the bench’s wildly swinging mass, sharp thwack! s mingling with the cries of surprise and pain and making sure that everyone in the room had taken notice of the commotion and would see what happened next. 

The whole chamber watched in utter shock as the Battlecruiser hefted her improvised weapon up above her head and, with an animalistic roar , with a bellow that would have been worthy of a charging mother grizzly bear, flat-out hurled the entire bench straight at Valiant’s head. The silver-blonde’s combat instincts just barely allowed her to react in time, the Super Dreadnaught dropping into cover behind the podium a split second before the wooden bench would have smashed against her face; it smashed against the wall behind her instead, shattering apart with a resounding crack!, sending splinters and shards of wood flying in all directions.

For the briefest of moments, it was as if time had been stopped, the sheer shock of the display stunned the whole court into silence: every head in the room turned towards Repulse with mouths agape and eyes wide, everyone waiting for what would happen next.

Then, a fraction of a second later, everything exploded into pandemonium. Repulse roared again, leaping forwards and grabbing another bench, unceremoniously tipping it over and its occupants off onto the floor. There were more thwack! s and cries of pain from the poor souls in her way as the brunette again roughly hefted her improvised weapon up above her head and prepared to chuck it at Valiant, the Battlecruiser still screaming various threats and obscenities the whole time in a tone of burning, unstoppable rage. “ YOU GODDAMNED FUCKING BITCH! YOU GOD FUCKING- ”  

Meanwhile the whole crowd surged, a mass of humanity trying to move in every direction at once, some trying to step forwards and somehow stop Repulse, others throwing themselves back to get out of her way, still others simply frozen in shock. Shouts and cries and orders went up from every corner of the room, adding to the madness, but none of the bellows were louder than than those of the enraged Battlecruiser, who’s screams were rapidly devolving into animalistic screeching as she took aim at the shipgirl who had just finished repeatedly accused her fallen friends, mentors and sisters-in-arms of negligence, incompetence and total failure. “YOU-! GAAAAHHHHH!!!” 

Warspite was one of the ones trying to reach and stop Repulse, the eldest surviving Queen Elizabeth -class shipgirl leaping to her feet and trying to force her way through the chaos towards the rogue Battlecruiser. It was hard going: the press of the shifting mass of several dozen full-grown men and a handful of other shipgirls buffeted the Super Dreadnaught in all directions, and Warspite was forced to hold back from using her full strength for fear of seriously injuring (or even killing) someone in the crowd if she simply tried to ram her way through. 

Repulse, on the other hand, had no such qualms; indeed, she was already very actively trying to seriously injure or kill someone. The second bench was sent soaring through the air at Valiant, this one plowing straight into the podium itself, target and projectile alike smashing apart into an omnidirectional spray of chips and fragments;  Valiant herself dove to the left a split-second before the impact, again just barely managing to keep herself from harm. 

But now that her target’s cover was gone, Repulse had a clear shot at the silver-blonde, and she wasn’t about to miss a third time in a row. Changing tactics to try and guarantee that her next attack would hit, the brunette flat-out charged the witness stand, murder in her eyes: she barreled her way through those that dared to stand in her way, hurdling over the small guard railing and sprinted straight at Valiant, screaming like a banshee the whole way.  

Warspite swore as she tried to abruptly change course and cut off Repulse’s attack, still fighting against the tides of the crowd, the urge to simply start hurling people out of her way with her full strength becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. She swore again, much louder, as she watched the brunette tear across the floor far faster than she’d anticipated, Repulse making good of the fact that she had been purpose-built to be the fastest capital ship in the world.  

For the briefest of moments, Warspite stood in the cold waters of the Skagerrak instead of a London military courtroom. It was the roar of canons and shells ringing in her ears instead of the cries of stunned observers, it was Saschen of Ironblood that Warspite was desperately trying to intercept instead of a furious Repulse, it was her other, older class-mate that she was trying to protect instead of Valiant. 

A knot twisted in the former Knight-Commander’s gut, and instantly Warspite allowed her powers as a shipgirl to begin truly flowing through her, preparing to brute-force her way through the writhing mass of humanity between herself and the rogue Battlecruiser, the probability of seriously hurting the normal humans around her in doing so be damned. She grabbed instinctively for her sword, her fists clenching as she tried to prepare her rigging to fire. 

The absence of either of those objects, fortunately, abruptly snapped the blonde back to reality before she lost herself fully in her memories, Warspite briefly freezing as she tried to regain her bearings, tried to remember where she was. Even more fortunately, the sudden surge of memories that had frozen the former Knight-Commander didn’t seem to have frozen her other class-mates. It was Barham that had the clearest path of intercept: the shipgirl that bore Royal Navy Pennant Number 04 hurled herself into Repulse’s path, hitting the charging Battlecruiser with a textbook flying clothesline to the chest that swept the brunette clean off her feet and sent her crashing into the floor. 

Snarling like a wild dog, the Battlecruiser tried to scurry back to her feet, but before she could rise Malaya was there, throwing herself atop the rogue shipgirl and pinning her to the ground (or at least trying to pin her; Repulse was not making things easy for the Super Dreadnaught, punching and kicking and hurling insults at the youngest of the Queen Elizabeth -class, trying to throw her off and resume her assault on Valiant).

A second later and Barham had dogpiled on, she and Malaya working together to try and restrain the thrashing Battlecruiser. But pinning down Repulse did absolutely nothing to calm the chaos that had consumed the courtroom. Nor did the presiding Admiral’s repeated banging of his gavel and cries for order, which were almost completely drowned out by the various groans, shouts and comments of the crowd, the clicking of dozens of photographer’s cameras, and (still louder than everything else) Repulse’s continued screeching, the irate brunette’s murderous threats and furious demands to be released managing to rise above the rest of the din, carried across the whole room by a heartbroken, homicidal rage that could be felt in her voice almost as much as it could be heard. 

Warspite ignored all of this, instead darting to where the witness’ podium had once stood. “Valiant! Are you alright?!” the blonde blurted as she slid in next to her sprawled-out class-mate. 

Valiant didn’t seem to hear her, the silver-blonde’s full attention fixed on the still-wildly thrashing Battlecruiser that had just tried to split her skull open, and who would have still very much been trying to split her skull open without the continued intervention of Barham and Malaya. Her eyes were wide, shock, fear and rage mixing and mingling within her red orbs as they scanned across the room for somewhere to take cover in case Repulse broke free.

“Valiant!” Warspite repeated, grabbing hold of her class-mate and trying to start checking her for injuries. The silver-blonde instinctively flinched away from her, her breathing hard and sharp, her muscles tense as she braced herself against any more attacks from the rabidly enraged brunette who was putting up a frighteningly good fight against a pair of Super Dreadnaughts. 

“ Do you see?!” Valiant screeched, apparently still not noticing her class-mate. She raised her good hand, pointing a finger trembling with a mixture of fear, rage and accusation at where Repulse, Barham and Malaya were locked in a still-unfolding melee at the center of the room. “Do you see what we had to deal with?!” 

Warspite’s face darkened at that remark, abruptly reminded of her own concerns with Valiant’s remarks. Her eyes narrowed, the blonde casting a quick series of glances around the room, scanning for anyone that might have heard her class-mate’s pointed declaration. No one seemed to have noticed, the ongoing brawl between Repulse, Barham and Malaya still drawing the whole room’s attention, every eye, camera and ounce of focus fixed firmly on the trio of grappling shipgirls. 

And they weren’t going to notice. Before Valiant could do any more damage (or worse, Repulse broke free), Warspite grabbed her by the arm and dragged her through the room’s back door, leaving the calamity in the court behind (if not said calamity’s noise, which reverberated through the doors and down the hallways behind the Super Dreadnaught pair, Repulse’s demented cursing especially remaining very much audible). 

Once the former Knight-Commander had put enough distance between herself and any prying ears (or rather, once she’d both gone as far as her rapidly evaporating patience would let her and could no longer hear the maniacal stream of threats coming from a certain furious Battlecruiser), Warspite finally released her class-mate, spinning the silver-blonde roughly around to face her, the older shipgirl’s own expression for the moment remaining cold and unreadable. 

“Okay. First off,“  the blonde breathed, her eyes scanning over her class-mate for signs of serious injury. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Valiant responded, nodding weakly. “Shoulder’s sore, but it’s been like that since Skagerrak, I don’t think its reinjured.”

“Okay, good. Good good good good good,” Warspite murmured. There was another brief pause as the former Knight-Commander took another deep breath, organizing her thoughts. And then, without warning, the eldest surviving member of the Queen Elizabeth -class shoved her class-mate hard against the hallway’s wall, an angry snarl slipping past her lips as she did so.

“What the hell was that, Valiant?” the blonde barked, a fire starting to burn in her eyes. 

It took only a fraction of a second for the younger shipgirl to recover from both Warspite’s throw and sudden shift in demeanor, Valiant’s only sign of distress a pained grimace that briefly flashed across her face, the younger shipgirl briefly clutching at her injured shoulder before she regained her footing and turned to face her class-mate. A look of surprise crossed the silver-blonde’s face for a split second as she started to massage her sling-bound arm, a look that was replaced by a mirror of the former Knight-Commander’s angry glare another fraction of a second later. 

The silver-haired Super Dreadnaught furrowed her brow and clenched her fists and wordlessly dared the other shipgirl to take issue with her actions, red eyes meeting violet without so much as wavering. It was a challenge that Warspite unhesitantly accepted, her class-mate’s blatant show of disobedience hardly endearing her to the elder shipgirl. 

“Are you trying to turn this into a circus?.” The blonde was growling more than she was speaking, her voice low and tight. “You know what the press is going to do with what you just said: it’s going to tear the Fleet apart,” she went on, taking a heavy, deliberate step forwards and trying to press Valiant backwards into the wall. “So tell me: what the hell did you think that you were doing?”

Again there was no answer: aside from biting down on the corner of her lip, Valiant only continued to stand there and silently, defiantly fume, and that wasn’t the reaction the older Super Dreadnaught had wanted.

“ Well ?!” Warspite emphasized her exclamation by once again outright shoving her class-mate up against the wall behind her. By coincidence or not, the silver-haired shipgirl hit the wall with her injured shoulder first, a fact that elicited a small grunt of pain from the younger Super Dreadnaught, her free hand shooting upwards to clutch at the damaged joint.

This time, Warspite got an actual response: in an instant the younger Super Dreadnaught’s eyes narrowed, her spine straightened up and her lips twisted into a snarl of their own. “The press? The press? ” Valiant seethed, standing as tall and proud as she could, puffing her chest out and trying to drive her class-mate back out of her personal space by sheer force of will, fixing a sharp, fiery stare on the blonde. “Warspite, you know full well that this isn’t about the damn press! ”

“What did I think I was doing?! I was trying to stop you from throwing yourself on your sword, that’s what! ” The silver blonde pointed back the way they had come, the index finger of her free hand jutting harshly and rigidly back at the courtroom, and with every syllable her voice rose further in volume and fury. “Did you honestly think that I was just going to stand aside while you went off to take all the blame for what happened? That I was going to let you be condemned as an incompetent failure and be a target for every Repulse in the world?! ”

“ No! I wasn’t, never! ” The younger Super Dreadnaught roared out, giving Warspite a shove of her own as she stepped away from the wall, fire in her eyes. “ I am not letting you be thought of like that, I’m not letting you be condemned for this! ”  

Warspite, ever so briefly, was driven back by the attack, taken somewhat off-guard by both the shift in subject and the amount of strength that the silver-blonde had managed to pack into her one usable arm. But only briefly: an instant later and the former Knight-Commander was digging in her heels, refusing to budge any more than her class-mate had. “ So you decided to make up a damn scandal?! ” the blonde screamed right back as she took a step forwards herself, and now the two shipgirls’ foreheads were butting against each other, their faces so close they could feel the heat from each others’ breaths. “ You decided to try and scapegoat Lion instead?!”

“ Instead of what?! ” Valiant retorted, her voice still rising in both volume and emotion, her free hand gesturing wildly, an accusing finger poking attached to a balled fist poking out from her sling. “ Instead of just to stepping back and letting you take all the blame? You want me to do NOTHING while they drag your name through the mud, you want me to just let them THROW BENCHES AT YOUR HEAD?!”

If Valiant thought that she could intimidate her class-mate, she was sorely mistaken: the older Super Dreadnaught’s held her ground without giving up so much as a fraction of an inch, and Warspite didn’t even flinch as the silver-blonde’s ranting exclamations buffeted against her face and blew her hair in all directions. Indeed, the only thing she accomplished was to make the older shipgirl raise her voice yet further, the blonde now yelling so loudly that Valiant thought she could feel her teeth rattling inside of her skull.

“Instead of having Repulse try to BASH YOUR SKULL IN?!  INSTEAD OF SETTING US AGAINST ANYONE WHO TAKES ISSUE WITH YOUR LITTLE STUNT OF BLAMING THE DEAD?! YES! YES YOU ARE!” roared the former Knight-Commander, emphasizing the exclamation by further pushing her face into the younger shipgirl’s, forcing the silver-blonde to look her dead in the eye. But yet again, the younger shipgirl refused to give ground, instantly firing back a scathing retort of her own.

“BETTER ME THAN YOU, WARSPITE!” Valiant furiously retorted, choosing to remain stubborn, her gaze not so much as wavering as Warspite’s glare bored holes straight through her. “BETTER A DIVIDED FLEET THAN YOU BEING MADE A PARIAH!”

“NO! NO IT ISN’T!” If the class-mates had been just a few fractions of an inch closer to each other as Warspite bellowed out her own retort, the former Knight-Commander likely would have bit Valiant’s nose clean off. Attempting to reinforce her volume with her authority, the blonde finally resorted to pulling her rank out, trying to turn her demands into commands. “AS YOUR QUEEN, I AM ORDERING YOU TO RECANT YOUR TESTIMONY AND TO BE SILENT WHEN I GIVE MINE!”  

“QUEEN?! HAH! YOU WON’T EVEN LET THEM PUT A CROWN ON YOU! ELIZABETH WOU-” Valiant was going to say more, but before she could she found that she’d suddenly been shoved roughly backwards, far harder than before: the silver-blonde was smashed against the wall behind her so hard she cracked it, and she could feel what seemed to be a wild dog’s claws digging into her chest and shoulders.

“DON’T YOU DARE BRING HER NAME INTO THIS!!!” Warspite shrieked as she pinned her class-mate to the wall, her rage reaching the point that droplets of froth were flying from her mouth as if she were a wild dog. She knew full well that wherever Elizabeth was, she’d been looking down on her actions in shame since Skagerrak; she didn’t need Valiant to remind her of that fact. “DON’T YOU DARE INVOKE HER NAME AGAINST ME!!!”  

“WHAT DO YOU THINK THAT I’M TRYING TO STOP THEM FROM DOING?!” Yet again the silver-blonde responded in kind to her class-mate’s furious screaming, even as she winced in pain as Warspite’s fingernails pushed deeper and deeper into her injured shoulder. Valiant angrily wiped her class-mate’s spittle from her face (a surprisingly hard task given that said face was trying to push its way straight through Warspite’s) at the same time slipping her free arm loose and using it to continue angrily pointing back towards the courtroom, back towards the Armchair Admirals and ‘Journalists’ more concerned with selling papers than the truth. “THEY ALL WANT SOMEONE TO BLAME, AND I’M NOT GOING TO LET IT BE HER! 

“WELL, GOOD! BECAUSE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO LET IT BE ME!!!  I- ” Warspite would have continued, but before she could there was suddenly a stinging impact against her right cheek. The blow was a hard one, enough to actually knock the shipgirl off balance, and for the briefest of moments the former Knight-Commander felt hellfire against her skin, felt shrapnel clanging off her rigging and the cold waters of the Skagerrak beneath her feet; in a flash, she’d dropped backwards and down into a combat stance, arms raised to guard and eyes desperately scanning for the attack’s point of origin.

The only possible source for the strike that she could see, though, was Valiant. The silver-blonde stood before her with an utterly furious look on her face; the younger Super Dreadnaught’s whole body was quivering with barely restrained rage, and when Warspite caught sight of her outstretched, shaking hand, the blonde realized that hat Valiant had just slapped her across the face. 

“You. God. Damned ,” the silver-blonde took in a harsh, seething breath with every word, and and she strode forwards with the force of a hurricane; Warspite had never seen her class-mate so furious outside of battle, and even then only once: at Skagerrak, after Elizabeth had…

“ Stupid .” Valiant emphasized the word with a harsh shove of her own, burying both of her hands in the other Super Dreadnaught’s chest and trying to drive her back into the far wall, a wince that had nothing to do with the sudden strain placed on her injured shoulder spreading rapidly across her face. 

“ FOOLISH.” Warspite, braced in a combat stance, hadn’t budged; Valiant only saw that as a reason to try hitting her harder. The younger Super Dreadnought sent another rough shove into the older’s chest, and the blonde was forced to take a half step back under the weight of her class-mate’s sudden assault.

“ IDIOT!!!” A third attempt at trying to drive Warspite back into the wall; this time, though, the blonde was ready. A quick sidestep, a hard counter-blow to the back, exploiting her opponent’s momentum: it was one of the first combat moves that Warspite had ever learned, and she had learned it well. Valiant, suddenly both deprived of her target and moving faster than her body thought it should be moving, was sent almost flying , the younger shipgirl careening forwards out of control before crashing hard against the hallway’s far wall.  

For a long moment after that, there was only dead silence in the corridor, aside from the hard, nearly panting breathing of the class-mates, Valiant grunting as she once again massaged her injured shoulder, Warspite trying to get her emotions back under control. The blonde felt a feeling of shame briefly welling up inside of her at her actions (especially as she watched a pained grimace blossom across the younger shipgirl’s face as she looked down in annoyance at her sling-bound arm), but the blonde didn’t need to put too much effort into driving it back down. The former Knight-Commander had a duty to perform, a cross to bear, and she wasn’t going to let anyone else do the job for her, not even her second-closest class-mate.

Valiant, it seemed, didn’t understand that. It wasn’t long before the silver-blonde had regained her bearings, hurriedly resetting her sling, staggering back to her feet and, most disappointingly to the blonde, resuming a combat stance. Again the class-mates stared each other down, both daring the other to try another attack, Valiant moving only to occasionally tenderly probe at her injured shoulder, Warspite barely moving at all. . 

The standoff was broken only when the younger shipgirl reached up to probe the corner of her mouth, her expression of barely-restrained fury deepening as she glanced down to see her fingertips tinged red with blood from her split lip.  The former Knight-Commander tensed at the shift in the silver-blonde’s countenance, but in the smallest of blessings it seemed that the silver-blonde had decided to move back to verbal assaults instead of trying physical ones again. 

“Warspite, what are you trying to accomplish? ” Valiant’s tone had changed, away from one of rage and into one of confusion mixed with pleading. The blonde didn’t consciously respond, but her expression tightened, as did the rest of her body. Valiant’s countenance did the same, and a moment later the silver-blonde was pressing on, demanding an explanation for her class-mate’s plan. 

“What does your taking all the blame, by yourself , do, besides just make you a target ?! You just want to throw yourself to the wolves, and…what, you don’t want to risk someone like Repulse coming after me instead?!” The silver-blonde shook her head, a begging look in her eyes as she wailed on. “Why won’t you let me just put the blame where it belongs?!”

“Valiant…” Warspite breathed, shaking her own head. Why didn’t the younger shipgirl understand? The blonde searched for the right words to get the message through, to make her class-mate accept her decision. 

For her part, Valiant had shifted out of her combat stance, and now her hands were now clasped together in supplication in front of her, as if she were in prayer. “Why are you insisting on this, Warspite?” Her voice had gone soft, her tone now begging instead of accusative. “Why on earth don’t you even want to try fighting this? It can’t be about the press, it can’t be about holding the Fle-”

“Because there isn’t a point in fighting this,” Warspite interrupted, her tone cold. “There’s no point in trying to shift the blame: what happened in the Skagerrak was due to my failings. I wa-”

“Damn it, Warspite,” Valiant cut in before her class-mate could continue, her voice raising again. “ You are not the one who caused this! Lion-”

“Wasn’t there during the night battle,” the blonde responded, her voice as cold and dark as the waters of the Skagerrak. “I was, and I was supposed to guard Her Majesty with my life, and-”

“ Warspite , so was I ! ” the silver-blonde shot back before her class-mate could finish, her thumb jutting into her own chest as her whole body began shuddering with something besides rage. “ I failed her that night too! Just as badly as you did! I- ”

“ NO! NO, YOU DIDN’T, VALIANT!!!” The older Super Dreadnaught shot back, her teeth grinding together as she practically spat the words out. The blonde had suddenly shot forwards in the same instant, and Valiant was once more driven back into the wall behind her, the blonde again pinning her against it. “I-”

Warspite stepped back and took a deep breath, forcing herself to hold in the rest of the outburst. Judging by the look of worry-born anger that had crept back onto Valiant’s face, more yelling wasn’t going to get the former Knight-Commander's point across, and nor was repeatedly shoving her into walls and reaggravating her shoulder injury. For a long moment, the blonde simply stood with her hands pulling at her hair, head turning in all directions as she tried to get her thoughts in order and her composure rebuilt. 

Her class-mate, for her part, simply fixed her with a hard, cold stare, silently demanding that Warspite explain her exclamation. And after another long, deep breath to calm herself, the older Super Dreadnaught slowly began to do just that.

“It was my fault,” Warspite started, in a voice barely above a whisper. She tried to keep her emotion out of her tone, intending that the phrase come out as nothing more or less than a simple statement of fact, but there was still a clear quiver in the blonde’s voice as she spoke. 

“War-” the silver-blonde began to respond, her eyes widening slightly and reaching her free hand towards her class-mate, but the former Knight-Commander spoke again before more than half a word had made it past the younger shipgirl’s lips.

“No, Valiant, it was my fault.” Warspite reiterated, a slight edge returning to her voice. She waved away Valiant’s outstretched hand and fixed her eyes on her class-mate’s, silently daring her to (or maybe pleading with her not to) try interrupting again, and the former Knight-Commander spoke on before she could. “It was my fault, more than anyone else’s.” 

“I was the one who told her to fight the night battle.” The words began to practically fall out of Warspite’s mouth, as if the damn inside her holding back all her guilt and grief and self-loathing was starting to break. The quiver in the blonde’s voice was growing with every word, and she’d started to feel something pricking at the corners of her eyes, a strange tension in her muscles. “I was the one who told her to stay in contact, I was the one that said they’d have no torpedoes left, I was the one who thought we’d trained enough for night fighting, I wa-”

Warspite stopped, looking away and drawing in a deep, sharp breath, her head back in her hands. Her last few words had come out in a rush, and now the blonde was suddenly panting for air, taking shuddering, halting gasps that had nothing to do with a lack of breath. Her shoulders shook, her knees trembled; her vision had gone blurry, and when she blinked in an attempt to clear it she began to feel droplets of moisture forming at the corners of her eyes.

For a long moment silence again reigned in the corridor, aside from Warspite’s shuddering breaths. For her part, any trace of anger had vanished from Valiant’s face, her expression shifting into one of total sympathy. Again she reached out her hand, but this time the blonde didn’t shake her away. Indeed, the former Knight-Commander barely seemed to notice her class-mate’s presence anymore, looking a matter of seconds away from her knees giving way and her whole body crumbling to the ground.

“Warspite…” Valiant whispered, unsure of what to say. Her outstretched hand came to rest on her class-mate’s shoulder, an action that seemed to briefly bring the blonde back to reality. For half a moment, Warspite looked up at the silver-blonde with eyes full of grief and pain, her wavering blue orbs silently pleading for help. But then the older shipgirl blinked once, and her expression hardened once more. 

“She trusted me, and I was wrong.” Warspite’s voice, though, was still shaking as she forced herself to straighten back up to her full height, drawing herself into what was supposed to be a calm and dignified stance. “It was my. Fault,” she finished, trying to emphasize the last two words in a way that turned them into blunt statements of fact, trying to force the emotion back out of her voice.

She didn’t succeed: Valiant knew how to read people, especially those that she had served and lived besides for years. The silver-blonde knew what eyes flickering in all directions and fast, shallow breathing and hands wringing together and pulling at hair and trembling like leaves meant: she knew a lie when she heard one, even if the one doing lying thought that they were telling the truth. And watching her closest remaining class-mate lie to herself, watching her suffer for the sake of that lie…

“Warspite, you’re not the one who killed her.” Valiant’s voice was soft, and carried a quiver of its own. At the same time as she spoke, the younger shipgirl fixed her class-mate with a gentle, yet assertive, stare, shaking her head as she took Warspite by the shoulder. The blonde flinched at the touch, prompting the younger shipgirl to give her a reassuring squeeze, a comforting action that she tried to reinforce with comforting words. “Lion left us blind, the Ironblood-”

“None of that matters,” the former Knight-Commander cut in again, her voice very much sounding like she was trying to speak around a lump in her throat. She turned away from her class-mate, staring off into the distance at something that only she could see. The blonde let out a slow, raspy breath, her face falling back into her hands, the trembling in her shoulders that she’d so briefly suppressed redoubling. “Even with all of that, even with everything else that went wrong…”

Warspite paused, lifting her head towards the sky, her violet orbs shimmering as they looked past the hallway’s ceiling and towards the heavens beyond. Valiant found herself doing the same, the younger shipgirl’s eyes briefly turning upwards towards where she hoped, she prayed, the Name Ship of the Queen Elizabeth -class now resided in peace and comfort. Idly, the silver-blonde wondered what that shipgirl thought of them now: her two oldest, closest friends and class-mates, at each other’s throats over how to properly protect her legacy.

Valiant bit her lip once more at that thought: Elizabeth probably had her head buried in her hands in embarrassment, if not outright disgust, at how they were acting. And evidently, Warspite was of the same belief: after a long moment of staring through the ceiling, the former Knight-Commander suddenly flinched as if struck, her head turning and burying itself in her shoulder and her hands rising to hide her face as if she were turning in shame away from the scowling visage of her lost liege. 

The blonde took in a sharp, ragged breath, sounding for all the world like she was choking on something, something in heart rather than her throat. Then, a second later, she took in another, still audibly struggling. Then she took a third, and a fourth, and a fifth and a sixth and seventh, each one louder, faster, less controlled than the last, and with every quivering, shuddering inhale and exhale Warspite’s shoulders trembled all the more, her knees knocked together a little harder, her whole torso slumped a bit more towards the ground. 

Before she could fall, Valiant pulled her into a close, supporting embrace, the silver-blonde wrapping her good arm around her class-mate as tightly as she dared to. For a wonder, Warspite didn’t resist; indeed, the older shipgirl practically toppled into the younger’s arms, the full weight of her whole body slumping against her class-mate’s all at once, her head coming to rest on Valiant’s shoulder. The sudden display of vulnerability caught the silver-blonde off guard, but the younger shipgirl wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, and her only response was to simply tighten her grasp on her class-mate, even as tears of her own began to form in her eyes.

For a long moment, the two eldest surviving members of the Queen Elizabeth -class of Super Dreadnaughts simply stood there holding each other, the younger’s free arm wrapped as tight as could be around the older, as if the silver-blonde were trying to stop the former Knight-Commander from flying to pieces. Her efforts didn’t seem to be working: with every shuddering breath, Warspite’s shaking became worse; more of her weight became slumped against Valiant, her knees suddenly unable to hold her up; the hiccuping and blubbering noises coming out of her mouth became louder and less controlled.  

“Even with everything else, it shouldn’t have mattered .” When she finally spoke, Warspite barely managed to get the words out, the blonde’s whole body trembling as she desperately tried to choke back full-blown sobs. Valiant, too, was quivering by now, and not simply because of the constant, unending shaking of the shipgirl in her embrace. The silver-blonde couldn’t bring herself to reply, her only response being the even further tightening of her hug as she listened to her class-mate’s anguished declarations.

“ God, it shouldn’t have mattered ,” Warspite wailed, burying her face in Valiant’s shoulder, not even trying to hold herself up anymore. Distantly, the younger shipgirl felt herself beginning to wilt towards the ground, the combination of her class-mate’s weight and her own unexpected feeling of weakness leaving her suddenly unable to keep standing tall, the silver-blonde staggering slightly as Warspite practically buried herself in Valiant’s arms.

“She still could have…could have… should have…” The former Knight-Commander’s lamentations continued unabated as the pair of class-mates crumpled towards the floor, her ragged breaths becoming ever more indistinguishable from simply being uncontrolled sobs. Warspite was finally returning Valiant’s embrace, and the silver-blonde now found herself in an absolute death grip, the older shipgirl’s fingernails digging deep into her flesh, the younger’s injured shoulder beginning to throb and ache. 

Not that the younger Super Dreadnaught cared in the slightest as she returned an embrace just as tight. By now the class-mates were both on their knees, clutching on to each other for dear life just to stop themselves from toppling over to the ground completely. Tears were falling freely from both of their eyes, and they both trembled and shook like leaves caught in a cold autumn wind, leaves that were one more stiff breeze away from falling from the branches and tumbling dead to the earth. 

“Warspite, it’s not your fault,” Valiant managed to choke out, just barely, even further tightening her grasp on her class-mate. Warspite’s shaking didn’t even slow down: indeed, the silver-blonde could feel the former Knight-Commander bitterly shaking her head against her shoulder, spikes of pain shooting from the younger shipgirl’s injured joint as the older vigorously denied the declaration of innocence.

“No, it’s not your fault!” The younger shipgirl repeated, somehow finding the strength to squeeze her class-mate even harder. “Do you hear me, it’s not your fault!” she begged, wailing, broken sobs wracking her entire body.

Warspite simply shook her head again. “No,” she murmured, sounding as if something inside of her was utterly, completely broken. “No, no, no, it wa- ”

“ Warspite!” Valiant screamed, shaking her class-mate like she would an uncooperative household appliance. She grabbed the older shipgirl around the collar with her right hand, ignoring another stab of pain from her shoulder, her fingers digging in like talons as her other hand reared back to slap sense back into obviously delusional blonde. “How can you possibly-?!”

The look on Warspite’s face made the silver-blonde suddenly stop short. It was her eyes: the elder Super Dreadnaught’s violet orbs looked like broken mirrors, like something deep behind them had been irrevocably, irreparably shattered, like they’d been witness to something that would haunt their owner for the rest of their lives, if not the rest of eternity. The blonde stared straight through Valiant’s body, her orbs focused on something only she could see, something that had destroyed her entirely.

“I was right there,” Warspite whispered, her eyes seeing the mists and smoke and flames of the Skagerrak instead of the shipgirl before her. “I was right there, Valiant.” 

The blonde raised a trembling hand, pointing towards the ghosts that haunted her mind’s eye, fingers flexing and grasping as if they were trying to reach backwards through time itself and make something right. “When Saschen closed in, I was right. Damn . There, ” the former Knight-Commander went on, her voice contorting with anger as she spat the words out, her face twisting into a furious sneer. “It was barely a thousand yards, I had a full volley loaded and ready, I had my sword, hell I could have pulled out my hull and just bloody rammed her.”

For half a moment, the older shipgirl looked ready to tear something apart with her bare hands, her whole body shaking with rage and murderous fury filling her eyes, so much so that Valiant found herself sprawling backwards away from her class-mate in terror at the sight. But then, just as quickly as it had come, the look of hatred and rage that had overtaken Warspite’s expression melted away, replaced by one of hopeless despair and endless guilt. The former Knight-Commander’s face contorted again as she desperately tried to blink back her tears, the blonde once again turning in shame away from the scene in her mind's eye, physically flinching at the sight burned into her memory.

“But I froze. I hesitated. I was worried about the God damned crossfire, and by the time I moved…” Warspite buried her face in her hands, and like a puppet that’s strings had been cut she slumped, toppling face first towards the floor, howling all the way. “I could have…I should have…I should have-! ”

“Warspite!” Valiant barely managed to stop her from hitting the ground, throwing herself forwards and catching her class-mate in the strongest, tightest, most empathetic embrace that she could muster. She clutched onto Warspite as if she were afraid that if she let go the blonde would vanish into thin air, both arms thrown around the former Knight-Commander (the stabbing pain in her shoulder be damned), sobbing just as hard onto the older shipgirl’s shoulder as the older shipgirl sobbed onto hers. She rocked her class-mate softly back and forth, instinctively rubbing soothing circles into her back, all the while repeating, sobbing the same mantra. “It wasn’t your fault! It wasn’t your fault! IT WASN’T YOUR FAULT!!!”

But Valiant’s best nearly wasn’t enough to keep Warspite from breaking: the former Knight-Commander knew full well that the shipgirl she so desperately needed to feel the arms of around her would never embrace her again. She refused to listen to her class-mate’s desperate reassurances, shaking her head over and over and over again as her tears fell like rain. The older shipgirl otherwise only slumped limply in the younger’s grasp, the blonde both unable and utterly unwilling to muster up the smallest trace of strength. 

Warspite felt like she should simply lie down and never get back up, like she should simply crawl into some dark, damp hole and be forgotten forever; she settled for sinking further and further and further down into Valiant’s grasp, curling up within her class-mate’s embrace as her pitiful, heart-wrenching sobs faded into pained whimpering, her broken trembling gradually slowing as her body simply ran out of the energy to keep shuddering. All the while the silver-blonde recited the same four words, futilely trying to get the former Knight-Commander to accept them as truth. “It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault…”

God, how Warspite wished she could believe that. But there was a reason that it was Valiant who was trying so hard to comfort her. There was a reason that, try as she might, the younger shipgirl’s hug felt ever so slightly… off , and it wasn’t just because of her class-mate’s injured arm. It was because no matter what comfort the silver-blonde could give her, she was, at the moment (and through no fault of her own) a frankly pathetic substitute for the Name Ship of their class. 

Valiant’s embrace was not Elizabeth’s; her words were not Elizabeth’s; she was not Elizabeth, and she never would be, and Elizabeth would never be there again, she would never talk to her again or have a tea party with her or hear her throwing a tantrum or see her smile or hear her laugh or-

Neither class-mate was sure how long they stayed like that for. For what might have been a few minutes or a few hours, the eldest surviving members of the Queen Elizabeth -class did nothing but weep in each other’s arms, every ounce of pent up grief, anger and heartbreak flowing out of them at once like water through broken dams. There were no words, no outbursts, nothing but and endless torrent of hot, wet tears and tightening hugs, for that was all that they could do.

Eventually, though, there were simply no tears left for them to cry. When they reached that point, after however long they had spent bawling their eyes out and wrapping ever-tightening hugs around each other and shaking and shuddering and simply grieving , the pair just lay there on their backs, utterly exhausted in both body and spirit, weakly trying (and failing) to pull themselves back together. The corridor fell silent aside from their panting breaths, both class-mates losing themselves in thought, wondering what they would do now.

Wondering what they could do now, with Elizabeth gone.

“I should have been better. I needed to be better, and I wasn’t.” Warspite’s statement came unprompted, after those in heaven alone knew how long they’d been lying there. Vaguely, Valiant looked over at her class-mate, catching sight of the older shipgirl haltingly and hesitantly pulling herself back into an upright sitting position, still breathing hard, still quite clearly dealing with aches and pains that went far deeper than her muscles or bones. 

For another long moment, Warspite simply sat there, her eyes on the floor, her whole body slumped with both physical and emotional fatigue. Her head remained buried in her hands, which still occasionally shook and spasmed, wringing and flexing as they rubbed at her eyes and clutched at her hair. Still in a haze of her own, Valiant reached a hand out towards her class-mate, unsure whether or not to embrace the blonde again, unable to figure out which words to say.

Warspite did know what words she wanted to say. The blonde looked up at her class-mate, even as her hands fell down to brace her against the floor, even as her whole body continued to quiver and shake. She took a long, deep breath before speaking, trying to return some measure of composure to her voice, but her words still sounded hollowed out (if not outright empty) as she said them. “ I am taking responsibility for my failures.” She fixed her class-mate with a broken, haunted stare, imploring desperately that Valiant not retort.“I am not going to run from this. I am not going to hide from it. And you are not going to stop me.” 

The blonde rose, slowly and unsteadily, to her feet, trying to look fierce and in control. But her expression was one of pleading and begging, not of command, as she gave her orders. “You are not going to make Lion or Repulse a scapegoat, or try to take my place, or any other hairbrained scheme to ‘protect me’.” Warspite rose to what was meant to be her full height (she was wobbling to and fro, head bowed and shoulders slumped, ready to fall back down if a stiff breeze hit her), looking down on her class-mate with what was supposed to be a cold, hard stare (it was soft and ready to shatter back apart, silently begging her class-mate to accept her decision). 

“Is that understood?” The words were supposed to come in a tone that allowed for no compromise, no disobedience. They were supposed to be the orders of a Queen. But they were instead the plea of a battered, broken old soldier who barely had the strength to carry on, an old soldier who’s knees were knocking together, who couldn’t even make herself stand straight up, who had visible tear stains marking both cheeks, who spoke in a voice that was still cracked and frayed around the edges and was begging for help, not obedience.

“No.” But even if Warspite had stood before her as a noble Queen, spine straight and head held high, even if her words had been spoken with the confidence and authority of royalty, even if charisma and command had been oozing out of every pore of her body, Valiant wouldn’t have listened. She was already shaking her head even before the blonde had finished speaking, the younger shipgirl’s fists suddenly clenching as she herself back upright, the silver-blonde clambering to her feet as she worked to realign the sling around her right arm.

“No, it isn’t. It isn’t understood.” With a small grunt, Valiant rose to her own full height, her expression shifting into one of determination. Warspite’s dark, deepening frown and tightening body language did nothing to deter her, and Valiant spoke on before her class-mate could protest against her defiance. 

“What, you couldn’t die for her at Skagerrak, so you’ll do it now, huh?” the silver-blonde seethed, a bitter chuckle slipping past her lips. “Because you’re apparently the only one of us who failed her, you deserve to take all the punishment, is that it?”

“Yes, Valiant. Yes it is.” Resignation reigned in Warspite’s voice, the blonde shaking her head in exhaustion. “I’m-”

“You’re an idiot, Warspite.” Valiant interrupted, the slight sneer in her voice becoming far more pronounced. “A damned fool. You-”

“ Are paying the price of my own mistakes.” The blonde reiterated, her expression shifting into one of frustration. “How many times do I have to say it, I-”

“You can say it as many times as you want, it doesn't make it true!” The younger shipgirl cut in again. “How many times do I have to say it? Doing this? Taking all this blame for yourself? It accomplishes nothing! ” 

“Va-” “ No, Warspite, ” the silver-blonde went on before her class-mate could repeat her argument again. “ No. ” A hardened look of resolve had managed to come across Valiant’s face, despite the tear stains on her cheeks and the tremble in her lip and how messy her hair had become. The silver-blonde stood tall, her spine straightening out, some semblance of composure and dignity returning to her body.

“I could have saved her too, you know,” the younger shipgirl said, her voice quivering but resolute. Valiant shook her head before casting her gaze off to one side, her red orbs looking back into that dark night in the Skagerrak,. “I was right behind you, remember? I saw Saschen too, I had a shot on her too. But I was too worried about Baden and Bayern, too worried about protecting myself, and-”

The silver-blonde took a deep, shuddering breath, shaking her head. She turned back towards her class-mate, her eyes glistening once more. “ Damn it, Warspite!” she blurted as she ran her hands through her hair, trying to put her thoughts in order. “I-” For a moment, the silver-blonde buried her hands in her face, searching for the right words. 

Warspite seized the opportunity to try and take back control of the argument, the blonde drawing in a deep breath and trying, once again, to get her point across to her class-mate.

“Valiant, you had a chance. I had the chance,” the older shipgirl said with a sad, resigned shake of her head. “The best chance. The last chance. And I missed it. My failure was far larger than yours, far larger than anyone’s! I-”

“ I need to take responsibility, I need to be punished, I need to be made to suffer,” Valiant cut in, her tone a mocking imitation of Warspite’s. “Yes, I heard you the first dozen times, and you’re still wrong! ” 

The brief outburst was barely out of the silver-blonde’s lips before she wilted slightly, slumping as she tried to catch her breath. Warspite, too, found herself too drained, too exhausted by her earlier breakdown to muster up any real anger or energy into her retort, but there remained a distinct edge to her voice as she responded, a dangerous glint in her eyes as she glared at her class-mate.

“Alright then, Valiant. What do you think? What’s your plan, besides convincing Repulse to try and crack your head open?” the blonde seethed, taking a half-step towards the younger shipgirl, her eyes narrowing. “Because all I see you trying to do is blame the dead.”

“Don’t make this about me, Warspite,” the silver-blonde retorted with a grimace, pulling herself briefly to her full height, her eyes narrowing.

“And why not?” the older shipgirl responded, a short and bitter chuckle slipping past her lips. “You think I’m being a fool about this? You think I’m misplacing the blame? Hah!” Warspite took another small, almost stumbling step towards her class-mate, an accusative look on her face. “At least I’m not trying to condemn those that are too dead to defend themselves!”

“And Lion doesn’t deserve blame?” Valiant fired back, taking a half-step forwards of her own. “I meant every word that I said on that stand, Warspite, and I don’t think that a single one of them was a lie.”

“Where was she? Where were any of them?” The silver-blonde continued, still breathing heavily, still bent over from exhaustion. “ She left us blind , Warspite ! How were we supposed to fight like that?”

“I remember fighting very well,” the former Knight-Commander shot back, her expression continuing to darken. “We outnumbered them. We outgunned them. We were holding our own until dark, until…” Warspite trailed off, letting the rest of her sentence go unspoken. Until I failed us. Until I failed her , she finished to herself. 

Valiant, though, was more than able to fill the words in for herself, and her lips twisted into an angry scowl, the silver-blonde practically spitting her response. “God damn it, again?! It wasn’t your fault, Warspite! ”  

The younger shipgirl looked like she wanted to continue, but before she could the exhaustion from her earlier collapse caught back up with her, the silver-blonde bending over with her hands on her knees, panting to catch her breath. Warspite bit her lip rather than responding, the fatigue in her own muscles continuing to hold her back from any sort of outburst of her own. Instead the blonde used the brief pause to gather her thoughts, taking a deep breath and working out her words before she replied.

“Valiant…” the former Knight-Commander breathed, picking each word with care. “You asked me why I was so insistent about this. I…” Warspite shook her head. “Why are you so insistent about stopping me from taking responsibility? What’s at stake here? My reputation? A few lines in a history book?”

“They’re not going to kill me for this,” the blonde continued, gingerly stepping forwards, her hands raised in a placcating manner. “Might de-rig me, might send my hull to a scrapyard, might put me in a prison cell or stick me at desk for eternity or send me out to some nowhere out in the colonies, but I’m not going to die . So why are you fighting this like it’s life and death?”

“Because it is life and death,” Valiant responded instantly, the silver-blonde ruefully shaking her head. Taking a deep breath of her own, the younger shipgirl stepped forwards, laying her good hand on Warspite’s shoulder and fixing her class-mate with a saddened stare, red orbs meeting violet as she went on. 

“It’s life and death because you’re tearing yourself apart about this, Warspite.” Valiant’s lips quivered as she spoke, the younger shipgirls’ grip on her classmate’s shoulder suddenly tightening. “It’s life and death because you’re letting the pain that you’re in torture you, day in and day out and you’re doing nothing to stop it. It’s life and death because you’ve been telling yourself over and over again that you deserve it and so you just try to suffer in silence, and it is tearing my heart out to watch you do it to yourself .”

“Do you think I haven’t seen it?” An edge of anger seeped into the silver-blonde’s voice as she went on, the younger shipgirl starting to push the older back towards the wall behind her. “Do you think that I don’t see you burying yourself in paperwork every day, working until dawn so you don’t have to see her in your sleep? That I don’t notice when you freeze up whenever something reminds you of her, that you had the Maids remove all her portraits so that she’s not watching you all day, that you never use the tea set you used to share, that you haven’t even set foot in her room?”

“And do you think I don’t know why you're doing it? That I don’t know what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling? ” Valiant continued, her voice slowly raising, her posture slowly straightening out, a fire beginning to burn behind her eyes. “ I feel it too, Warspite! You’re not the only one who blames themselves! ” she spelled out, plain as day. 

“I see her in my nightmares too! I see that damned spear through her gut, I hear her choking on her own blood, every God Damned night!” the silver-blonde shrieked, new tears somehow welling up from her emptied out ducts. “And during the day, it’s like her ghost is haunting me! I keep expecting to see her, everywhere I go: the throne room, the offices, the gardens, everywhere! I keep waiting to hear her voice, I just want to hear her voice BUT I NEVER FUCKING DO!!!” 

Valiant slumped once more as her brief surge of energy wore off, the silver-blonde stumbling a half-step backwards away from her class-mate, just barely managing to catch herself before she toppled back to the ground. For a long moment, the younger shipgirl simply stood hunched over with her hands on her knees, taking in a few deep, panting breaths and collecting her thoughts. Then a broken, hollow chuckle slipped past her lips, and Valiant looked back up at her class-mate, an ironic half-smile on her lips. 

“Does that sound familiar? Does it sound like what your days are like?” The silver-blonde pulled herself back upright, again taking in a deep breath as she tried (and mostly failed) to stand tall before the older shipgirl. “Warspite, this guilt you’re feeling? This shame, this pain? You’re not the only one who feels it.”

“But you are the only one who’s burying themselves in it, ” Valiant seethed, looking her class-mate dead in the eye, her expression tightening. “You’re the only one who’s just holding it in while it eats you alive from the inside out , and you’re making us do nothing while we watch it happen! We can all see how much you’re hurting, but you’re too busy wallowing in your own self-pity to let us try and help you! ”

“That’s why I don’t want you taking the blame for what happened in the Skagerrak. Because I can’t stand to watch you suffer like this. ”  Valiant was shuddering as she spoke, the silver-blonde stepping forwards to clasp Warspite’s hands in her own, her red orbs glistening once again. “ “It is ripping me apart that you won’t let me help you. It is torture watching you beat yourself up again and again and again and again and again and again, and now …and now you want to make it even worse for yourself! You want to be tormented even more! ”

“Because that’s what will happen if the Inquiry decides that you’re to blame, you know!” Warspite winced slightly as the silver-blonde tightened her grasp on her hands, the older shipgirl forced to take a step back as her class-mate drove forwards. Valiant pushed the former Knight-Commander back towards the wall with the strength of righteous fury, Warspite suddenly unable to find the will or energy to resist, and in less time it takes to tell the blonde found herself suddenly pushed back up against the wall behind her. “Instead of just you telling yourself that you deserve all the pain that you’re feeling, it will be the whole damned world shouting it from the rooftops! It will be every paper, every politician, every armchair admiral and high-society wannabe, everyone in the Empire will be saying what a horrible failure you are!”

“And you’ll let yourself believe them, Warspite!” Valiant emphasized that final point by pushing the former Knight-Commander back into the wall so hard that the wall behind her began to splinter and crack. The silver-blonde was blinking rapidly, her bloodshot eyes desperately trying to muster up tears from dried-out wells, and her teeth grit together as she screamed into her class-mate’s face. “You’ll think that because they’re all saying it, that every last lie that you’ve been telling yourself is true! AND YOU’LL NEVER LET YOURSELF STOP BELIEVING IT !!!”

With a final hard shove, the silver-blonde finished her tirade. For a moment she simply stood in front of her class-mate, daring the older shipgirl to respond, but before Warspite could say anything Valiant was suddenly staggering backwards, slumping towards the ground in exhaustion. The former Knight-Commander stepped forwards and instinctively caught her before she could outright fall, both Super Dreadnaughts stumbling slightly as they tried to secure their footing. For a minute or two, the pair simply stood like that, both trying to catch their breaths, the younger hoping that her words had had some sort of impact, the elder working out just what that impact would be.

“If I step away, if I just let you accept all the blame, the whole world will be telling you that you’re a dog that needs putting down ,” Valiant breathed as she leaned into her class-mate’s embrace, the voice barely above a whisper. “And from what I can see, you’re just going to accept that. You’re going to believe it. And when you do…”

The silver-blonde shook her head as she pulled back from her class-mate, a hard yet pleading look on her face. “Warspite, you’re barely, no, you’re not holding yourself together right now. You’re broken, you’re in pieces! ” She lifted her hands to the former Knight-Commander’s cheeks, forcing violet orbs to look straight into red. “And if I let them validate every disgusting lie about you, especially the ones that you’re telling yourself… there won’t be any way to put you back together! ” 

“You’ll be broken beyond repair. You’ll be a shell. A ghost, a shadow. You might still be alive but you’ll never never let yourself live , you’ll never let yourself heal, you’ll never let yourself smile or laugh again…” Valiant stopped short, tightening her grip on Warspite’s face, red eyes looking even deeper into violet. “And you’ll never let anyone forgive you, and you’ll never forgive yourself, and…”

“And you’ll be as good as dead.” As she finished, Valiant scanned her class-mate for any sign that her words were sinking in. Warspite’s expression was one of internal conflict, genuine surprise and indignant annoyance and righteous rage and deep sorrow and cold rationality and maybe ( maybe ) the teeniest, tiniest spark of hope all flashing across her face, the different emotions struggling against each other as the former Knight-Commander took the younger shipgirl’s words into consideration. 

Taking a deep breath, Valiant stepped back, leaving her class-mate the room to make a decision herself but still very much trying to give the blonde a nudge in the right direction. “Maybe you’re right,” the silver-blonde said with a shrug, shaking her head. “Maybe this is all your fault. Maybe you deserve to take every little bit of blame, or maybe I’m just being selfish, wanting to try and help you, but you know what?”

“ I don’t care. ” The younger shipgirl growled, looking Warspite dead in the eye, her gaze boring straight through the blonde’s skull and out the other side. “I am not going to let those hounds come after you. I am not going to let you destroy yourself, or let you lie down and be destroyed, I’m not going to let it happen.” And then, with a deep breath, the silver-blonde straightened up, pulling herself into a regal pose that would have been fit for a Queen as she gave her final declaration. 

“I am not going to lose another sister.”  

Warspite felt herself freeze, the blonde taken aback by her class-mate’s, no, her sibling’s , blunt decree. It was rare indeed for the shipgirls of the Queen Elizabeth -class to use the s-word. The strange (to an outsider) pseudo-monarchy of the Royal Navy had inherited more than just the hierarchical structure, sense of decorum, influence and authority of its human counterpart: they had also (for better or worse) inherited the rigid system of social rules that strictly defined and dictated both the different statuses and standings that one of Their Majesty’s subjects could possess and that were especially clear as to how the relationships between those of differents ranks were meant to function. 

Paramount among these statutes were those that spoke of the distance that was to be maintained between the Monarch and their subjects, in any and all locations and in any and all circumstances. For to bear the Crown was not simply to do a job or take up a role or to simply act as something: it was to inherently be something, to be something above and beyond any and all others in the nation, to be touched by fate itself. To be the King or the Queen was to be different, to be separate, to be lifted up above the rest; it was to be the nation’s pride and strength and image incarnate, and to be so in many ways to an even greater extent than even a shipgirl (a being literally manifested from the nation’s ideals, wills and desires) could be.

But in doing that, a wide, unavoidable gap was created between liege and subject, a gap that never went away, that could never go away. At all times, in all places, and to all of her subjects, the Queen was to be the Queen , and she was to always be treated as such: she was always to be revered and respected, she was always to be protected without fear, always served without ceasing and always obeyed without hesitation, never mind whether you were in public or in private, never mind how long you might have been in her service, never mind how much you might have been through together.

The Queen didn’t even stop being the Queen at any point or to anyone, regardless of how close that anyone might be to them (biologically or otherwise). Not even to a sibling was she to be anything but Her Majesty: even if you shared the same blood (or in a shipgirl’s case, the same hull design), they were always to be your liege first and anything else second. And when one sibling was Her Majesty and the other was simply another Royal subject (which, even as another member of the royal family, said sibling would still ultimately be), that meant that quite a number of things that would have been completely normal in a regular relationship between a pair of siblings quite suddenly became massive taboos.

Siblings could bicker and squabble over the smallest details; a subject was never meant to disagree with their Queen’s command. Siblings could leave odd jobs or chores for the other to do; a subject would never leave such tasks to their Queen, loathe as they were meant to be to give Her Majesty the slightest of inconveniences. Siblings could have rivalries, and in said rivalries the younger or otherwise ‘lesser’ could outdo the other and no one would think anything of it; the Queen being outshone in any way, shape or form by one of her own subjects would be unimaginable. Siblings were meant, at some level, to be treated and thought of as equals; even if she was your sister, a subject was duty-bound and oath-sworn to never to act as if the Queen were anything besides your superior in near every way. It was a simple, immutable fact: to treat Her Majesty as merely ‘my sister’, or even to just think of them as such, would be unthinkable, impossible, unacceptable.

Such a master-and-servant dynamic would, of course, be extremely unhealthy for a set of siblings to have, likely breeding rampant jealousy and ambition, inferiority and superiority complexes, wildly unpredictable identity crises and, in the extreme cases (such as those where such a family, say, were the Royal family and held huge amounts of prestige, power and influence), coup plots and civil wars, as had happened numerous times throughout world history, (British history included). 

But the entire, centuries old, entrenched in the very fabric of society hierarchical order and all its various little quirks, rules and expectations couldn’t simply be thrown out and replaced (as was proved by the numerous failed attempts to do exactly that), and so for generations the English and later British monarchy had simply had to find ways to keep the worst of the system’s inbuilt tendencies towards imbalance in check, to keep the younger sons of Kings distracted from thoughts of how unfair it all could be and to keep the Kings themselves from abusing the privileges that their responsibilities had earned them. 

It was a mission that they had never quite managed to complete, and the Royal Navy, when Wisdom Cubes had emerged and the first British shipgirls had been manifested, had found themselves having to deal with the same problems that the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha did. Led by the wills, ideals and desires that had brought them into existence, the Royal Navy’s shipgirls had rapidly organized themselves into a pseudo-monarchy that had quite resembled that of their human superiors, and therefore had many of the same issues that British monarchs had had since the times of Alfred the Great and beyond.

The issues had been relatively subdued whenever a particularly unique or otherwise blatantly superior shipgirl had been in position to be appointed as Flagship, a la old Dreadnaught herself, but in the times when the Admiralty had to choose from a whole slew of girls who had no real substantial material differences (or, in the cases where the candidates were all from the same ship class, flat out had no physical differences at all in their hulls aside from their assigned Pennant Numbers and whatever small quirks their equipment happened to develop), the relations between the relevant shipgirls could quite rapidly become rather… eccentric.

Over the course of the emergence of Wisdom Cubes and shipgirls, the Siren Wars and the massive shifts in global geopolitics that had resulted from such matters, the Admiralty had accumulated several decades worth of experience in dealing with the sibling rivalries of superhuman living weapons systems who’s personalities, emotions and ambitions were often significantly amplified and unpredictably twisted via the bizarre and mysterious whims of the alien Wisdom Cubes used to create them; those several decades amounted to a rather notable number of near-mythical incidents that had never been revealed to the public and were spoken of only in hushed whispers when they were spoken of at all, as various relationship issues had constantly and rather worryingly repeatedly recurred in the upper echelons of the Royal Navy’s shipgirl hierarchy and resulted in some rather spectacular (and rather deeply classified) displays of sibling rivalry.

By the time that the Queen Elizabeth-class had come into service, the human superiors of His Majesty’s shipgirls had become quite frankly rather tired of dealing with such shenanigans, especially after the extremely rapid post-Siren Wars rebuild and following buildup of the world’s navies (along with all the accompanying extremely rapid technical advances that had been made in the same era) had led to various flagship’s ‘reigns’ become shorter and shorter: the passing of the Crown thrice in a period of barely four years just before the Weltkrieg broke out (from Colossus to Orion to King George V to Iron Duke) in particular had bred some rather nasty spats between all four of the briefly ruling Queens, none of whom had really thought that their successor was superior enough to themselves to justify the transition (and that was if they even were able to consider the idea that their successors were superior to them at all).  

And that was to say nothing of the other oddities that had cropped up with their sisters, who had either been extremely eager to throw their support behind their elder siblings or had had rather nasty rivalries of their own with said siblings, which had of course only further added to the list of things that the Admiralty hadn’t wanted to deal with anymore (not that the Admiralty itself had been anything close to innocent: the human commanders of the Royal Navy’s shipgirls had all had their own favorites and factions and made their own maneuvers to help stoke the fire). 

But seeing as trying to remove or even simply reform the hierarchy that the shipgirls had built for themselves might have 1): potentially sparked a mutiny, given how ferociously shipgirls were known to guard their autonomy against perceived attempts to remove their individuality and treat them as mere weapons with no say in their own use, and 2): might have been impossible anyways, given that the girls’ tendency towards said hierarchy had been imparted into them by their Wisdom Cubes and might not have been suppressible short of some extremely experimental and rather ethically questionable procedures, the human leadership of Great Britain had been forced to try more indirect methods to keep their navy’s Royal Court from looking like something out of the War of the Roses. 

And so when the need for a new class of Super Dreadnaught had become clear, the Admiralty had gone out of their way to try and nip any potential for any sorts of sibling rivalry problems to develop in the Queen Elizabeth -class in the bud by way of trying to make sure the shipgirls of the Royal Navy stopped thinking in terms of familial, pseudo-dynastic rivalries and think instead in terms of impartial, professional rank. And the best way that they could think of to do that was to make sure that none of the new shipgirls ever actually quite thought of each other as siblings.

From practically the day that they had been laid down (and almost constantly after their humanoid forms had been manifested) it had been quite clear to the rest of the Fleet that the new class’s Name Ship would one day ascend to become the Queen of Royal Navy as Flagship of the Grand Fleet itself (although not immediately: at the time Iron Duke had still been a more than capable Flagship, and it was thought that plunging the internal politics of the Royal Navy into turmoil with the clouds of war starting to loom on the horizon would be a monumentally bad idea), and it had been made quite clear that all of the Fleet’s shipgirls, and to her sisters especially, that they all were to accept that fact and condition themselves accordingly. 

Being newly manifested, the other Queen Elizabeth s were the easiest to teach to accept that particular point, and indeed by the time that her training was done Warspite was never quite able to think of her sisters as being just ‘her sisters’ anymore. It had started with her eldest class-mate, of course: from the very day that she had come into being, the second eldest of the Super Dreadnaughts had been told and trained to treat the eldest as her soon-to-be liege and rightful superior instead of as a sibling. 

Even long before Elizabth’s coronation, dozens (if not hundreds) of little details were being drilled into the heads of Warspite, Valiant, Barham and Malaya about how they were supposed to act around and treat the Name Ship of their class: how they should speak to her (formally, and with official titles; never by name, and certainly never by something as familiar as a nickname ), where they should all stand when they were in the Royal Court together (everyone else must stand behind Elizabeth), to how they were supposed to eat together (do not so much as touch the food until Elizabeth had started), what order they were supposed to use the baths in (Elizabeth first, of course), when they were meant to wake up in the mornings (everyone else up before Elizabeth, so as to guard her while she was being prepared for the day) and so on. 

While doing all that for just an eldest sister would have been utter insanity, doing it for Her Majesty was nothing less than a necessity. And each of the class-mates’ own specialized training had further reinforced that point: Elizabeth had very rarely trained with the others, being directly tutored by Iron Duke and the other former Flagships in the finer points of bearing the Crown instead of joining with Warspite and Barham’s induction into the Knighthood or Valiant and Malaya’s preparations to join the Administrative and Diplomatic Corps respectively, the beginnings of a separation that would only deepen into a full-blown and ever-widening gulf between the siblings with time.

On the part of the younger members of the Queen Elizabeth -class, their personal training courses had always had some focus on the idea of duty to Her Majesty and the nation (in that order) in one way or another: Warspite and Barham had been taught of the importance of laying down their lives for the class’s Name Ship if the need ever arose and of the horrible shame that would befall them if they should ever allow Elizabeth to come to harm, while Valiant and Malaya’s education had constantly reminded them that they would be representing Her Majesty’s will (not their own) in their duties and that their roles would ultimately be strictly advisory.

By the time that their shaping into Knights and Stewards and Diplomats had been finished, the idea that their entire reason for existence was service to Crown and Country had been well and truly drilled into the heads of the four younger Super Dreadnaughts, as had the idea that their class’s Name Ship was going to become the aforementioned Crown itself someday. That they were to be dutiful servants instead of leaders themselves, eternally and rightfully subordinate to the Queen (who’s familial relation to the rest of them was going to become utterly irrelevant, so much more important was the fact that the eldest among them was going to sit on the Throne than the fact that they shared a hull design), had become a given, never to be disputed. 

Elizabeth herself had done much to confirm the matter: while her own tutelage under Iron Duke and the others had remained as of yet remained incomplete by the time her class-mates had finished their own training, it had still already began to become quite clear that she had gone from ‘just’ the first of the nation’s true Super Dreadnaughts to starting to become a full-fledged Queen-in-the-making.

Even then, after mere months of preparation, Elizabeth had already begun to develop the traits that would come to define her once the time came for her to take the Crown: the authority to command, the charisma to inspire, the elegance to rise above the petty matters of mere subjects, the confidence to act on it all…all things that made her very much stand out from the rest of the Queen Elizabeth -class, and all things that all practically radiated off of her whenever she entered a room, making sure that no one around her ever could quite forget what she was destined to be. 

Her fellow Super Dreadnaught shipgirls included. Thinking of the Queen-to-be Elizabeth (who would be spending a significant portion of the rest of all their lives giving them orders, who they had all been trained to wait on the every word of, who was already starting to step into her role as their liege) as a sibling, and therefore an implicit equal, would have driven Warspite and the rest of the Super Dreadnaughts to madness, be it by their own negative self-comparisons to her, their envy of her increased status or simple confusion on how to balance dealing with their eldest sister and dealing with their Queen when those two fundamentally separate terms referred to the exact same person. . 

And they would have all been driven even more insane if they had to put up with all of the Name Ship of the Queen Elizabeth -class’s more… unpolished traits as if they were simply a set of five sisters instead of a liege and four of her subjects.. Elizabeth herself wasn’t exactly helping to allay her class-mates’ view that she had been singled out from and raised up above the rest of them: the eldest of the Super Dreadnaughts was very aware of what she was meant to one day become, and despite the best efforts of her tutors and the Admiralty, that knowledge had bred within her some less-than-desirable attributes. 

It had rapidly started to become obvious that the Queen-to-be still had a few more steps to take before she was truly ready for the Throne: while Elizabeth had grasped how to hold herself and appear as royalty (at least in public) remarkably quickly, anyone who saw more of her than what the official functions wanted to show of her would rapidly find that if there was one portion of her training that she was lagging behind in, it was in the shaping of her temperament. 

With most of the actual job of running the Royal Navy being done by the still-enthroned Iron Duke and the other older Battleships, the eldest Super Dreadnaught had been relatively free from any actually meaningful responsibilities…while still retaining a good number of the privileges that the succession plan reserved for her. People with years, with decades of life experience would have struggled to retain their humility and grace under such circumstances, living a life that was largely one of leisure while a significant portion of those around them treated them like royalty: chronologically speaking, Elizabeth hadn’t even turned two yet. 

Her mentors did their best to steer her away from the pitfalls before her, but the humans were far more focused on the technical aspects of her training (knowing full well after a couple generations worth of interactions and relationships that, despite being the shipgirls’ creators, couldn’t quite connect with them in the same way that another shipgirl would: it just wasn’t quite possible to teach things to someone that at some level simply fundamentally and inherently thought about things ever so slightly different from how you did), and most of the shipgirls among them of which were no more than five themselves (and they were hardly the humblest people in the world anyways). 

Her development of her sense of tact thus stunted, it didn’t take long for some of the girls to begin whispering behind the Queen-to-be’s back, for gossip to start flying that the future Flagship was developing into something of an entitled brat. Elizabeth’s predecessors had had their own (and often quite similar) flaws, of course, but they had all also had their various rivals to threaten their hold on the Throne and to keep them sharp and to make sure that they were constantly mindful of cultivating support among their fellow shipgirls, a fact which had made sure that all of them had at least tried to maintain a very strong sense of social delicacy.

As no one besides her own class-mates could mount a serious challenge to the Super Dreadnaught’s place as the future Flagship (seeing as Elizabeth’s primary claim to the Throne lay in the simple, immutable fact that she was the Name Ship of the Royal Navy’s most powerful available class of warships: aside from her own fellow members of the Queen Elizabeth -class, the only conceivable challengers to her birthright were the Iron Duke s, girls that she outweighed by around 7000 tons, could outrun by nearly three knots, had an inch of armor on and an inch-and-a-half of gun caliber; her personality could only drag her down so far) the eldest Super Dreadnaught was left free to act however she damn well pleased with relative impunity. 

And so she had: Elizabeth had gained an unfortunate tendency to treat those that would one day be her servants like, well, servants , even if their rank was nowhere near so lowly. She spoke to everyone (no matter where they fell in the chain of command) as if she had already been coronated, acting as though even her senior advisors and mentors were mere subjects for her to order around. While she at least had the social adeptness to (usually) remain cordial and respectful of her soon-to-be subjects, she had still always very clearly considered them to be subjects : she expected for them to follow wherever she led, for them to obey whenever she ordered, and for them to never question why that was the way things were.

And while it was technically within her rights to do so as the heir to the Royal Navy’s Throne (and indeed, various Royal Navy records could easily be found that showed that certain previous Flagships had treated their subordinates far worse), it didn’t exactly endear her to those that would spend the foreseeable future serving under her (especially by those whose own class-mates had once held the Throne themselves and who still retained a decent amount of influence within the Fleet; such girls were not happy in the least  with finding themselves suddenly being treated like commoners by this upstart who still had wet paint). 

This behavior was most obvious to those that were increasingly nominally her sisters, who were by then spending most of their waking hours around her in some capacity or another, and it did much to accentuate just how different Queen Elizabeth was going to be from Warspite, Valiant, Barham and Malaya. None of them would say that she treated them badly of course (and not simply out of loyalty or a sense of duty, either: despite her unfortunately somewhat common bouts of immaturity, her all-too-frequent tendencies towards selfishness, and her general proclivity to make the gap between herself and others wider than it strictly speaking was supposed to be, to say that the future Flagship outright disrespected or neglected her soon-to-be subjects would have been an flat out lie): in fact, she treated them as her most loyal and trusted servants. 

But she didn’t treat them as her sisters. Nowhere close, and they all knew it, no matter how much they all may have wished otherwise. While it could be argued that Elizabeth’s treatment of her nascent inner circle was perhaps even overly familiar and informal behavior for a Queen to employ towards her subjects (especially towards those who she was meant to be strictly professional with and unbiased towards, gossiped certain malcontents that were unhappy with how the Crown had passed them by), while Elizabeth respected them, while she listened to their advice, while she would even (try to) rein in the worst of her excesses whenever one of them decided it was necessary to tell her she had gone over a line, to call the rest of the Queen Elizabeth -class ‘Her Majesty’s siblings’ would have been to vastly misinterpret the dynamic that was actually developing within the group. 

Warspite, Valiant, Barham and Malaya were the best Knights, Advisors and Diplomats that Queen Elizabeth had at her disposal, but that was (both in theory and usually in practice) all that they were to her, it was all that they were supposed to be to her. And all five of them very much acted like it: when Her Majesty spoke to her fellow Super Dreadnaughts, it was in a tone no different than the one she used to speak to the Royal Maids; when the four younger shipgirls spoke back, they always answered with ‘Your Majesty’, never ‘Elizabeth’. When the Queen commanded, she expected to be obeyed without question; when the other Super Dreadnaughts gave her their advice, they knew full well that they could be dismissed with a gesture. When the Flagship of the Royal Navy went anywhere, she was undoubtedly going to be the center of attention; if any of her class-mates ever threatened to outshine her, they were quietly expected to help their Name Ship back into her rightful place at center stage and then step back into the background without drawing any attention to themselves. 

It would have hurt the younger Queen Elizabeth s like hell to have their oldest sister treat them like that, to have to wait on their sibling every waking minute of their lives, to always be forced into her shadow. Fortunately, their oldest sister wasn’t treating them like that: their liege was treating them like that, which was more-or-less expected, perfectly normal, and not a cause for worry (according to what everyone else said, anyways). Her Majesty treated her Knight-Commander, Steward, Sergeant-at-Arms and Chancellor with all the dignity and honor that their positions were owed, if not more, and that was enough (at least,that’s what Warspite had always told herself). 

It had to be enough: the Queen had a duty to be impartial towards her subjects, and even back then whispers had swirled about how the Royal Navy’s heir played favorites and that nepotism would prove to be the foundation of her Court in the future. Those were accusations that had been leveled against every Flagship since the secrets of the Wisdom Cubes had first started to be unlocked (and against every ruling monarch in Britain for as long as there’d been a Britain), but as a young, as-of-yet-unproven shipgirl still trying to establish her position atop the Royal Navy’s hierarchy, they were still accusations that had to be fought tooth and nail. 

And that meant Elizabeth distancing herself even further from the other Super Dreadnaughts and making sure to treat her most trusted servants as nothing more than exactly that. And that meant that the distances between the class-mates had widened even more: as the Queen-to-be had taken ever further steps towards the Throne, as she had gradually taken up ever-more burdens, duties and responsibilities, she had of course started to drift more and more towards simply being, well, ‘The Queen’ . She became more of the symbol, more of the walking incarnation of both centuries of Royal Navy tradition and centuries more of Britain’s ideals, than she was a person, ‘Elizabeth’ becoming someone who slowly vanished ever further into the shadow of The Flagship-to-be of the Grand Fleet. 

‘Elizabeth’ still poked through more than certain sections of polite society, the older Battleships or the Admiralty might have thought was acceptable, of course (there was simply too much to her personality for her to ever completely disappear into ‘Her Majesty’), but with what seemed to be entirety of the Royal Navy from the Admiralty on down doing what felt like all in their power to bring more and more of ‘The Queen’ out of the eldest of the Super Dreadnaughts, ‘Elizabeth’ had gradually become the oddity, the exception, the one that was meant to be ignored. 

That was a line of thought that was enforced by everything from societal expectation to direct orders from their human superiors to the written text of the Royal Navy’s Regulation Book, and it was a line of thought that the other Super Dreadnaughts had found themselves eventually falling in with. Their eldest sister and their liege were made to become almost separate entities entirely in their minds, with the latter becoming infinitely more important than the latter: their duties were to Her Majesty and to no one else, not even to the other shipgirl who occasionally showed up in her body and spoke in her voice, and that (at least to nearly everyone else around the quartet) was meant to be something as fundamental to them as two plus two equalling four.

Even if (when) their eldest sister did shine through from behind the well-maintained image of the Flagship-to-be of the Grand Fleet, they weren’t meant to acknowledge her appearance, but rather to try and get her back into her ‘proper’ form as ‘The Queen’. ‘Elizabeth’ (with her spells of childish immaturity, haughtiness and pettiness) merely appearing in Her Majesty’s place was improper (especially so in public, but at all other times as well), it was said by the other, older Battleships and the Regulations and the Admiralty and the public and the papers and the politicians, and for the Queen Elizabeth -class to worry about ‘Elizabeth’ more than they did (or even simply as much as they did) about Her Majesty would be outright scandalous.

And so Warspite, Valiant, Barham and Malaya never did concern themselves with ‘Elizabeth’ (or at least they claimed not to): it was only their interactions with Her Majesty that mattered, and to interact with Her Majesty required them to be Her Majesty’s servants, not Elizabeth’s siblings. The word ‘sister’ had rapidly fallen into disuse, the four younger Super Dreadnaughts conforming as fully as possible to their assigned and proper roles as the Knight-Commander, the Steward, the Sergeant-at-Arms and the Chancellor instead of the roles of the second, third, fourth and fifth sisters, just as the rest of the Fleet, the Admiralty and wider society all expected of them. 

That was their duty, and they did it well. The best defense against the gossiping and whispering that seemed to be coming from every side had rapidly proven to be to make sure that there was as little as humanly possible for the rumormongers to latch on to, to make sure to follow the protocols and rules as closely as as they could so that no one at all could scream from the rooftops about how ‘none of them were doing their jobs properly’. Her Majesty was the best at it, of course, the eldest of the Super Dreadnaughts day by day becoming closer and closer to being the Queen that the world expected her to be: her bouts of ‘Elizabeth-ness’ slowly became less and less frequent, and her interactions with those that shared her hull design day-by-day becoming more and more formal and in-line with what the Fleet, Admiralty and High Society said was proper.

And what could the Knight-Commander, Steward, Sergeant-at-Arms and Chancellor do but follow their liege’s example? Those ranks came with their own standards of propriety, and the rest of the Queen Elizabeth -class did not fall short of meeting them. With the clouds of war gathering on the horizon, the nation had needed to be sure that it’s Navy was headed by a strong, reliable and effective Royal Court, not a bickering gaggle of nepotistic sisters, and that is exactly what the Super Dreadnaughts had striven to give them: skilled, prepared professionals who wouldn’t let their own emotions or personal ties interfere with their duty. 

Which of course had meant even more distance put between the class-mates in the name of professionalism and respectability. The four younger Queen Elizabeth s were by then quite used to doing just that with regards to the eldest of them, and now, with ever-increasingly scrutiny being placed on both how effectively the class-mates accomplished the duties of their respective offices and how ‘properly’ the official, professional interactions between them were going, the way that the Super Dreadnaughts thought of their eldest sibling (as Her Majesty and nothing more, nothing less) had started to (to some extent) apply to all of them.

More and more, the Knight-Commander, the Steward, the Sergeant-at-Arms and the Chancellor had begun to (or perhaps had been made to) treat each other exclusively as the Knight-Commander, the Steward, the Sergeant-at-Arms and the Chancellor. The relationships between the younger four shipgirls were nowhere near as rigid as their relations with Her Majesty, but they were still rather heavily shaped by the same social protocols that had rendered them so separate from the Queen. 

Informality had effectively ceased to exist within the Queen Elizabeth -class, the five Super Dreadnaughts giving ever-more focus on doing their absolute best to carry out the duties of their respective posts (and on doing so in the right and proper manners), and worrying ever- less about anything that would have fallen into the sphere of being siblings instead of the sphere of mature professionals. More and more of the quartets’ interactions (for it was quite clear that they were not a quin tet, so separated had the eldest of them become) became colored by the lens of their responsibilities to the fleet, with even things as simple as talks over tea being increasingly dominated by official business, their chats becoming about fleet deployments and the latest diplomatic and political developments rather than mundane matters of family.

The War, when it had finally broken out, had completed the Super Dreadnaughts’ transition from siblings to class-mates: battlefields were no places to play favorites, not even, especially not, familial ones, not if you wanted to survive them (and to keep the loyalty and respect of your other subordinates). Merit, not family (not nepotism, the other Battleships and the Admiralty whispered) would win the war, and merit was what the Queen Elizabeth -class had wholly committed themselves to earning.  And they had earned it, at Gallipoli, at Jutland, in the conference rooms of London and in a hundred other places.

And they had earned it as class-mates, as dutiful, unemotional professionals, just as the rest of the Fleet (as the whole of the rest of Britain) had come to expect from them. Just as they had come to expect from each other and themselves. Just as they had been trained to do their whole lives, just as all the Regulations said it was supposed to be, just as had been drilled into their heads over and over and over and over and over again. 

Just as it always was. None of them had ever challenged it, none of them had ever doubted it, none of them had ever even questioned it: they were naught more than four dutiful servants obeying their Queen’s orders, and that fact was as immutable as the steel from which their hull armor was forged. The concept was so utterly ingrained in them, had been pounded into them so, so many times that not even Skagerrak, not even the fall of Queen Elizabeth herself , had been able to dislodge it. 

And yet Valiant had just smashed apart the entire concept with a single word. 

Warspite felt what seemed to be everything around her reel, the whole world seeming to tilt and spin for a moment as that simple, six letter word, sister, by some unknowable means found a chink in her emotional armor and caused every last barrier that the blonde had spent her whole life both consciously and unconsciously erecting to come crashing down in an instant. For the second time that day, a tidal wave of emotion washed over the former Knight-Commander, but this one was somehow, someway hitting her differently, was filling her heart with a different, deeper kind of guilt and shame.

And very quickly, the blonde was realizing exactly what that deeper guilt and shame was. Even mere minutes before, when she’d finally let her tears for Elizabeth fall, she’d still managed to force herself to mourn as a servant who had failed their liege, as a soldier that had failed in their duty. It had been painful in the extreme, but it had still been (in at least some small measure) an impersonal, professional pain: she’d still had a small handful of emotional barriers to dull the hurt.

But now…now Valiant had, with a single word, somehow broken the lock to the place in her heart where the former Knight-Commander so long locked away and buried all of the intimate, sisterly feelings she’d never truly allowed herself to have for her siblings. Such feelings had never, ever actually fully gone away, as was evidenced by everything from the number of meetings that had wound up running over schedule because of hours lost simply chatting and small-talking to the amount of letters that had moved between the quartet, far in excess of what had been necessary for merely official business: those emotions had been suppressed, certainly, and neglected and ignored and otherwise dodged in the name of maintaining professionalism, but they had most definitely still existed, had never been outright destroyed. 

And now all those feelings that Warspite had spent years pushing down and holding back were suddenly rising up in her heart, all of them at once, rising up past years upon years of training and military discipline and societal expectation and professional distance and washing them all away in a flood of emotion even greater than the one that had moments previously reduced the former Knight-Commander to a sobbing wreck on the floor. 

The blonde’s first breakdown had smashed holes in the walls she’d put around her heart: this one swept those walls away entirely. Suddenly gone were all the lenses that made her see the things as (and only as) the Knight-Commander, gone were all the dozens if not hundreds of little self-corrections she applied to her worldview to make sure that she saw things as was her professional duty to see them.

And with that, what seemed to be the whole world realigned itself in the blonde’s mind, a hundred (a thousand ) little things suddenly clicking into place and revealing to the former Knight-Commander exactly why her class-mate, no, her sister was so utterly insistent, so utterly desperate to try and defend her from being the one to take the blame for the Disaster of the Skagerrak. Why she was so ready to throw her fury at the fallen Battlecruisers, why she was so willing to risk Repulse’s rage, why she was so defiant of Warspite’s orders to step aside, why she was acting so completely irrationally and nonsensically.

It was because Valiant didn’t want to lose another sister. 

It was because she didn’t want to fail another sister. It wasn’t the stubborn obstinance of a know-it-all subordinate foolishly trying to refuse a direct order as Warspite had made herself think, it was the familial instinct of a sibling realizing that their beloved sister was getting themselves into trouble. No wonder that the silver-blonde so completely refused to listen to her sibling’s reasoning, no wonder that she was willing to get heavy oaken benches thrown at her head and have her own sister shove her injured-arm-first into hard, wooden walls: it was her heart, not her mind, that was demanding that the younger shipgirl protect the elder. 

The blonde took in a sharp breath, biting her lip in guilt as she looked upon her little sister with fresh eyes, the older sibling suddenly noticing all the little things that she had earlier dismissed and ignored in her (completely blind) pursuit of doing what she had thought was her duty: she saw, truly saw and understood the importance of, the tear stains on her sister’s cheeks, she saw how red her sister’s eyes had gone from the sheer number of tears that she had wept, she saw the way that her sister’s lip quivered and trembled with a deep fear, the kind of fear that only a protective sibling could possibly know, she saw how her sister’s whole body was shaking with the same terror, with the utter horror that the silver-blonde might soon lose another big sister.

And Warspite realized that it was because of her . It was because of exactly what Valiant had said: the blonde was so busy burying herself in her own shame, grief and guilt that she’d never noticed her own siblings trying to dig her out. It was because she had been so worried about being the dutiful Knight-Commander and ‘taking responsibility for her failures’ that she’d entirely forgotten that had also had a duty to be a good sister. And that realization, that epiphany of just how badly her attempts to throw herself on her sword were hurting her little sister, hit Warspite harder than a full salvo of 15-inch shells could have. 

And well, with her little sister standing in front of her with her eyes gleaming, there was only one thing that she could do.

“Valiant…” the eldest surviving Super Dreadnaught started after the awkward silence between the pair finally became too loud to ignore. Warspite wrung her hands, her eyes wandering in all directions as she struggled with emotions that she hadn’t ever quite let herself feel (that she hadn’t let herself feel at all since Skagerrak). She found herself floundering even more than when she had broken down and wept in Valiants arms: indeed, only the simple fact that she had already run out of tears to cry kept her standing now.

“I…I’m sorry,” she whispered in apology, shaking her head in a mixture of shame and frustration. “It’s just…”

“I…I just don’t know what else to do!” The former Knight-Commander’s voice cracked slightly as she raised her hands and shrugged in helplessness, blinking rapidly as she tried to moisten dried-out eyes with emptied-out tear ducts. She might have finally understood what her sister was telling her, but actually accepting it was rapidly proving to be a different matter, and Warspite clutched at her head, partially burying her face in her hands as her desire to finally accept her sibling’s comfort fought against the guilt, shame and grief that had been trying to drown her since Skagerrak.

“What else can I do, Valiant? How else can I make this right?” the blonde questioned in a tone halfway between desperation and despair, her indomitable sense of duty tearing her in two between her newly-renewed need to be a good sister and her lifelong obligation to be a good Knight. “We could blame Lion. We could blame Repulse, we could blame the Ironblood, we could blame anyone we wanted, but…how would that be right? What would that do, what would it be besides just making someone else the scapegoat?” The scapegoat for my mistakes , the darker part of the older sister silently added. 

“Making you the scapegoat would be no better, Warspite,” Valiant replied with a sad shake of her head, the silver-blonde taking a tentative step forwards, her good arm raised in a placating gesture.

“You say that, but...” The words slipped past the older sister’s lips before she could stop them, Warspite cringing slightly as she realized that she was about to make the exact same argument her sister had already shot down a dozen times. For whatever it was worth, this time the younger sibling simply shrugged with a shake of her head, the only sign of Valiant’s exasperation the small sigh of frustration that she let out as she took another step forwards.

“Yes, I do say that,” the silver-blonde answered with the smallest and lightest of chuckles, the corners of her mouth twitching an almost imperceptible amount upwards. “It’s like I said: maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m just selfish or stupid or both and I’m just being completely irrational.”

Valiant clasped Warspite’s hands in her own, a sad smile on her face as she looked her sibling in the eyes. “ I’m your sister. I damn well get to be completely irrational when it comes to taking care of you.”

For the briefest, shortest of moments, a look flashed across the blonde’s face that might have been one of happiness. But it disappeared as quickly as it had come, and Warspite’s expression was one of resignation as she gazed back at her sister. “Alright, alright, okay,” the older sibling breathed, shaking her head, biting down on the corner of her lip the whole while. 

“Okay, let’s…hypothetically say that I agree with you,” Warspite sighed, her eyes still full to the brim with melancholy as she met Valiant’s reddened orbs, still unable to bring herself to fully accept her sister’s stance despite her newfound understanding of it. “For the sake of argument, let’s say that…it was Lion’s, or the Ironblood’s fault, and that the Inquiry agrees with that. What do we do then?”

The younger sister frowned slightly, her body visibly deflating as the silver-blonde realized that she’d never actually thought about what she would do if she’d gotten that far.  “Well…I suppose that we would start trying to put things back together,” she replied, answering that particular question for herself for the first time. “We’d start trying to heal, I guess.”

“How?” the older sibling interjected before the younger could continue. She had begun to tremble again as she spoke, a raw edge of hurt creeping its way back into her voice. “Even without official blame, how do you think that we could put ourselves back together after…” Warspite shook her head, another sigh of frustration falling out of her mouth. “How could we possibly make this right? How could we make any of this right?”

“I don’t know,” Valiant admitted with a sad shrug and small shake of her head, a resigned sigh of her own slipping past her lips. “But at least we wouldn’t be making things more wrong .”

“Wouldn’t we?” the older sister sardonically replied, a dark look flashing across her face. This time the silver-blonde nearly rolled her eyes in response. 

“Warspite, I know that you think that it’s your duty to…‘make this right.’ To make sure that there’s justice for Elizabeth, I guess,” the younger sister responded, the barest trace of annoyance mingling with resignation in her tone. “I understand you, I do . I know the feeling, I want to do right by her too, she was my sister too! ” 

“But I’ll keep saying this as many times as I have to to get it through your damn skull: It’s not your duty to suffer .” Valiant declared, strongly poking Warspite’s chest with every word she said, repeatedly reemphasizing her point. “It’s not your duty to take the blame, or the punishment. That wouldn’t be justice. That wouldn’t be right. ” She shook her head again, a slight grimace coming to her lips. “If we want to do right by her, let’s put the blame where it actually belongs. ”

“I’m not talking about dodging the blame,” the blonde countered with another shake of her own head. For a moment, she wrung her hands through her hair, trying to put her thoughts into some kind of coherent order. “That’s…well, we’ve both had a lot to say about that, haven’t we?” 

Warspite’s tiny flicker of a grin and small half-chuckle prompted nothing more than a quirk of Valiant’s eyebrow. Certainly, they did nothing to relieve the tension in the corridor: the silver-blonde simply gazed expectantly back at her sister, awaiting the former Knight-Commander’s next argument. Biting the corner of her lip, Warspite took in a deep, centering breath, aligning her thoughts and deciding to turn the conversation towards some of her other misgivings in the hopes that she and Valiant might find common ground there instead.

“I’d be Queen, you know,” Warspite started, her words coming slowly and carefully, the blonde not quite sure where her train of thought was going yet. But it was quite unlikely that Valiant was going to let her just let the issue drop, and the silver-blonde had made it quite clear what she thought of her sister’s original argument, and so the former Knight-Commander forged ahead, even as a new surge of doubt welled up inside her.

“I’m the next eldest, I’m the most decorated and experienced, and the Revenge s were just built to up our numbers, not to be Flagships,” the older sibling went on, self-consciously starting to wrap her arms around herself. “I…I’m next in line for the Throne. I’m meant to be the one to inherit it, but…”

Yet another frustrated, resigned sigh slipped past Warspite’s lips, the blonde shrugging in hopelessness as she raised her hands in hapless defeat. “How am I supposed to stand where she stood, Valiant?” she lamented, her tone a pleading one. The younger sister’s brow scrunched in thought at the remark, the silver-blonde trying to work out her reply.

While she did, Warspite went on, a new torrent of concerns and doubts and fears starting to flow out of her mouth. “Look at me,” the former Knight-Commander said with a bitter half-chuckle, grabbing and presenting the hems of her unwashed, unkept uniform to her sister, holding up its soiled, frayed ends with her rough, dirty hands. “ I’m a wreck. You said it yourself, I’m broken! I can’t even hold myself together, how am I supposed to hold up the Crown?! ” 

“Warspite…” Valiant gently breathed, reaching out and once again placing a comforting hand on her sibling’s shoulder. Warspite’s response was only to let out another sad, bitter chuckle, a surprisingly bittersweet-looking smile flashing across her lips as the sibling who was much more worthy of inheriting the Throne tried to comfort her. 

“Look at you..” the older sister whispered, gazing at her sibling with a look that would have been best described as ‘saddened pride.’ The former Knight-Commander gently reached up and cupped the younger shipgirl’s chin in her hand, suddenly examining her even as Valiant’s expression shifted into one of startled confusion, the silver-blonde not quite sure where her sister was going with this.

“I”ve spent the last, what, half hour? Hour? Screaming my full head off at you, throwing you into walls, crying my eyes out to you…” Warspite remarked, a sad little smile forming on her lips. “And you’ve just…well, you sure as hell haven’t backed down, have you?”

“I just…” Valiant replied somewhat sheepishly, taken off guard by the sudden compliment, but Warspite went on before she could complete her thought.

“You’ve been what you’re, what we’re , supposed to be, Valiant,” the former Knight-Commander praised, reaching out on grasping her sister by the shoulders, her tone a bittersweet mixture of pride, admiration, envy and sadness. “You’ve taken everything I’ve thrown at you and just…shrugged it off…”

Now it was Valiant’s turn to let out a bitter half-chuckle. A tiny, sarcastic smirk pulled for a short instant at the corners of her lips, the silver-blonde reaching up to point out her tear-stained cheeks and reddened eyes. “You call this ‘shrugging it off’, Warspite?”

“You’ve done better than I have,” the former Knight-Commander corrected, her look of saddened pride on her face unchanged. “You’ve…well, let’s think about it for a second, shall we?”

Warspite raised up a hand and began counting her fingers, starting to list off what Valiant had done for her within the last hour or so. “You’ve stood your ground when I was came at you frothing at the mouth, you held me together when I broke down, you’ve comforted me, you’ve…” 

The blonde paused for a moment, looking for the right words. Unable to find the perfect ones, she simply went with the first that came to mind. “You’ve been a good sister, Valiant,” Warspite stated with a bit more than just a hint of pride in her voice as she again clasped her sibling by the shoulders, the ghost of a pleased smile on her face. “A good member of the Royal Family, too, an example of what, of who, we should be.” 

“Meanwhile, I’ve berated you, I’ve hit you, I’ve…” the former Knight-Commander snorted, shaking her head and stepping back, again shrugging in frustration. “Well…I haven’t exactly been my best, now have I? And I haven’t been for a long time, not since…well, you know…”

Warspite trailed off, again searching for the right words. Before she could find them, though, Valiant interrupted her, having apparently worked out where the blonde’s train of thought was headed. 

“And so you’re thinking that it might be better if you just step away, right? That I should take the Throne instead? Is that where you’re going with this?” the silver-blonde called out, her eyes narrowing. “Warspite, that’s just…”

Valiant paused for a moment as she realized that she was on the verge of falling straight back into the same circular argument she’d already had with her sibling what felt like a dozen times over. Taking in a deep, calming breath, the younger sister centered herself and attempted to realign her thoughts, trying to change up her tactics and find a position that she might get the former Knight-Commander to accept.

“Okay, Warspite…alright, first off, how would that help you ? ” the silver-blonde started, a look of utter exasperation briefly flickering across her face. “We both know that it’s not just doing the job that’s tearing you apart, that it’s not just sitting on the Throne that you’re worried about! Even without the Crown, you’d still be a mess!”

“Secondly…Do you seriously think that I can do it?” Valiant breathed with a subtle shake of her head, her voice shifting into one of saddened frustration. “Do you seriously think that I’m any more worthy of the Crown than you are?” 

A doubtful look crossed the blonde’s face as she held up her tattered uniform with its dirt marks and wrinkles and frayed seams with one hand and with the other gestured towards where the walls had been cracked by an angry former Knight-Commander hurling her little sister against them. Valiant’s only response was a solemn shake of her head, the silver-blonde letting another little sigh of frustration slip past her lips.

“That doesn’t make me any better, Warspite,” the younger sister retorted, her lips pursing slightly as she just barely managed to resist the urge to roll her eyes at her sister’s stubbornness. “If you think that I’m more worthy than you are, that I’m doing better than you, then…thank you, I guess. I guess I’m good at hiding it.”

Valiant took a half-step back, spreading her hands as she again shrugged in insecurity, again shaking her head in doubt. “Warspite, I’m not doing well either, ” she said simply and bluntly, a trace of frustration once more seeping into her voice. “ I can’t stand where she stood either. ” 

“It’s like I said, I failed her too,” the silver-blonde continued, and for the briefest of moments her red orbs saw a very different sight than that of her older sister standing exhausted before her, a sight of blazing hellfire and oily, black smoke and burning, sinking warships. “I could have stopped Sashen too, I could have spoken up when you two were discussing night fighting, I could have…done a dozen things differently, and maybe…. even just one of them could have been enough to save her.”

“And that haunts me. Just like it does you, Warspite,” the younger sister went on, blinking away her brief vision (and possibly, probably, blinking back something else as well). “I’ve said it before: she’s in my nightmares too, and…well, it hurts. And it hasn’t stopped, it hasn’t gotten any better, it…”

The silver-blonde paused for a moment, her eyes darting around the corridor as she tried to find the right words, tried to figure out exactly what she was actually feeling. It was a few seconds before Valiant resumed speaking, and when she did her tone had dropped down closer to that of a whisper, the younger sister speaking to herself as much as she was to the blonde.

“Warspite…I think that the only reason I’ve held myself together since… then… might be because I knew that you needed me to,” the silver-blonde intoned, her red orbs meeting her sister’s violet. “I’m…I’m just as broken as you are, I think, I’m just as much of a wreck, but…”

Yet another resigned sigh slipped past Valiant’s lips as her eyes scanned over Warspite’s form, noting all the little signs of how much pain the former Knight-Commander was in: her unkempt hair, her frayed and dirty uniform, the dark bags and tear stains below her eyes, the hollow deadness within those violet orbs, her slumped shoulders, her bowed head, the little sister’s resolve hardening as she noticed all the little things that had been breaking her heart since Skagerrak…

“But I saw you… burying yourself alive in grief and your work, and…I think…” Valiant went on, her tone as much one of introspection as it was one of explanation. “I think that I realized that you needed… someone . Someone that could take at least some of the weight off of your shoulders, and…I guess that I’ve been trying to be that person.” 

“Warspite…if you think that I’ve been holding myself together, then..what you need to realize is that I’ve been doing it for your sake, not because I’ve got it together, because I sure as hell don’t!” the silver-blonde explained, once more reaching out and offering her sister her hand. “I’m a mess, we both are! No one could have gone into the Skagerrak that night and come out in one piece, hell, I’ve seen the damage reports and let me tell you, no one did! Everyone has scars from that night, me, you, everyone!” 

“But…when I see yours , when I see how… broken you are, how much you’re hurting?” Again Valiant’s tone went soft, her red orbs glimmering slightly. “Somehow…mine stopped mattering. I knew that…you needed my help. Even if you didn’t realize it, even if you didn’t want it, even if…even if you hated it.”

“I needed, I still need , to help you,” Valiant finished simply, with another small, resigned shrug. “And I guess that that’s what I’ve been trying to do, and…doing it’s helped me hold myself together, I think…”

“But if you aren’t there, then…” the silver-blonde trailed off, leaving the rest of her point unsaid. Both sisters knew full well what it was: If you break, then I’ll break too. I need you, maybe even more than you’ve needed me. Please, don’t leave this to me. Warspite swallowed down another surge of guilt as the realization of how much her little sister needed her made itself all the more known in her mind, her eyes briefly flickering away from meeting Valiant’s. 

The former Knight-Commander weighed her sibling's words carefully, flexing her fingers and uneasily shifting her weight as she thought on them. On the one hand, she was finally letting herself understand the silver-blonde, was finally letting herself think of Valiant as her equally heartbroken little sister instead of as a stubborn, blockheaded subordinate, and an increasingly large and vocal part of herself was demanding that she herself act as a sister in kind and do something to return all the kindness and concern that the silver-blonde had been showing her. 

On the other hand… “I’m just a soldier, Valiant,” Warspite whispered slowly, the fears and doubts and grief and self-loathing that had been eating her alive since Skagerrak still murmuring a constant stream of threats and insults and abuse at her from their place in the darkness of her mind. “It’s all I’ve ever been, and-”

“And I’m just a clerk, Warspite,” the younger sister cut in, interrupting before she had to listen to any more of her sibling’s despairing rants about how unworthy she was. “ Neither of us are ready for the Crown. Neither of us are her, and probably neither of us ever will be. We can’t possibly hope to replace her! How could we, how could anyone ?!”

Valiant paused for the briefest of moments, yet again helplessly shrugging and woefully shaking her head as for a split second, visions of their eldest sister danced through the minds of both surviving siblings. But when that briefest of moments had passed, the silver-blonde turned back towards her sister with a renewed look of determination in her red orbs, the younger sister looking dead into the eyes of the older as she forged ahead.

“But…maybe we don’t have to,” the silver-blonde went on, her voice softening.  “Neither of us are alone here, and maybe between the two of us, the four of us with Barham and Malaya…maybe that will be enough,” Valiant breathed as she gently clasped her sister’s shoulder with her good hand, a small, sad and yet somehow hopeful smile coming to her lips. “ None of us could make this right, Warspite. Not alone. But all of us together?”

“We wouldn’t be perfect, nowhere near. Probably still wouldn’t come anywhere close to matching her, but…” The little sister gave the older’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze, the tiny smile on her lips widening by the tiniest of fractions. “We’d be doing a hell of a lot better than we’re doing now, by ourselves. I can guarantee that.”

Again Warspite was slow to respond, the blonde once more carefully mulling over her little sister’s words. The good soldier and the good sibling within her were practically at war with each other, one screaming that she still had a duty to take responsibility for her failings and to accept the punishment she deserved for them, the other roaring back that she shouldn’t even be considering the idea of hurting her own little sister even more than she clearly already had. The former Knight-Commander bit her lip as searched almost desperately for some way to reconcile her two selves, her hands starting to wring together as she failed to find one.

“I don’t…” she whispered, Warspite’s hands raising up to clutch her head as her internal turmoil failed to resolve itself. “I don’t know, I…”  

“I don’t know anything either, Warspite,” said Valiant, taking a half-step forwards so that the two sisters were pressed right up against each other, the younger sibling letting as much warmth as she could pass from herself to the older. “I don’t know how this might end, I don’t know what the Inquiry will decide, I don’t know what we’ll do after it’s done.”

 “What I do know, and I know it without any doubt whatsoever, is that I. Am not. Going. To just let you keep hurting like this. ” Warspite suddenly felt herself being tugged forwards as her little sister pulled her into a tight embrace, the silver-blonde wrapping her good arm around her sibling as tightly as she could, a slight hiccup in her voice as she spelled out her point. “At least not alone. Whatever happens next, I am going to be there for you. ” The slightest, smallest of laughs escaped from Valiant’s mouth as she tightened her hug. “Whether you want me to be or not.”

Warspite answered with an equally tiny, equally quiet laugh at that last remark, her own hands raising to return her little sister’s hug. “You are far too stubborn for your own good. You know that, right?”

Valiant wore the ghost of a grin as she pulled back from the embrace, the corners of her mouth twitching a little bit upwards. “Hah. And who was it that taught me to be?”

The small smiles instantly disappeared from both sisters’ faces at that crack, both siblings suddenly remembering that it wasn’t Warspite’s stubbornness that Valiant had been emulating. Their expressions turned solemn as the sisters’ thoughts flashed back to the source of their woes, as visions of burning warships in the night and the screams of both wounded shipgirls and bursting shells slipped into their minds. 

“I wonder what she would think of all this?” Warspite breathed, voicing what both of them were thinking. Her red orbs flickering heavenward for a moment, and the blonde’s mind’s eye envisioned her lost liege, her lost sister , looking down on her in…shame? Pity? Anger? 

“I don’t know that either, Warspite,” came the voice of her (very-much-alive, standing right in front of her) little sister; it snapped the former Knight-Commander back to the present, where she found a solemn, and yet somehow hopeful-looking Valiant standing before her. “What I do know is that she wouldn’t want… this , for you,” the silver-blonde commented, gesturing vaguely towards all the little signs of her siblings’ pain and brokenness, from her knotted and matted hair and her bedraggled clothing to her clearly empty, unfilled stomach and sleepless, tear-reddened eyes. “I know that she doesn’t want you hurting like this.” 

“How can you be-” the blonde started, but yet again Valiant cut her off, knowing full well what her big sister’s pain and heartbreak wanted her to finish that sentence with: How can you be certain? How can you possibly think she doesn’t hate me now?

“We both know her better than that,” the silver-blonde preemptively refuted, her tone brooking no negotiation. “We both know that deep down she could never, ever make herself hate you. God, I don’t think that she could make herself hate anything, really, not even the Ironblood. But most especially not you.”

Both sisters paused again for a moment, the older taking a few deep, focusing breaths as she let the younger’s word’s sink in a bit. The blonde mulled her sibling’s declaration over, trying to resist the urge to simply reject it outright as she would have done in days (in hours, maybe even in minutes) past. That wasn’t an easy thing to do for the former Knight-Commander, despite Valiant’s repeated attempts to steer her in a new direction: the urge to continue on her path towards punishment was one that a not-insignificant part of Warspite’s mind (the same part that woke her up in the middle of the night with visions of Elizabeth cursing her failure as she sunk down into the deep, dark depths, the same part that continued to whisper to her that her sins were beyond forgiving) still wanted to simply give in to, as she had been trying do since before the Inquiry had started.

But another voice in her mind, one that had started to sound suspiciously like her little sister, was starting to loudly and insistently question that notion. It was reminding Warspite of things that her shame had made her forget, things like that fact that Elizabeth, for all her bouts of temper and petulance, was actually remarkably bad at being well and truly angry at anything. She was all-to-easily annoyed, ridiculously simple to rile up or otherwise frustrate, but from the top of her head the former Knight-Commander couldn’t recall anything that had imparted Her Majesty with a deep, true and/or lasting hatred of something. Elizabeth had many things that she didn’t like , but that she actually outright despised? No. 

So why would she ever really, truly, outright despise her own sister? Her most loyal Knight, her (dare Warspite think) her closest confidant? Could Warspite really make herself believe that even death itself had managed to turn Elizabeth cold and unforgiving? The part of the blonde’s mind that demanded she pay the price for her failures screamed that this wasn’t a simple matter of under-warming her tea or missaranging the throne room’s decorations, it roared out that Warspite had gotten her killed , that there was no way on earth or in Heaven above that Elizabeth could ever, ever, now think of her as anything besides her killer (or at the very least the prime accomplice thereof).

The other part of the former Knight-Commander, though, continued to echo the thoughts of her little sister. She wouldn't want this for you. It was such a simple statement, yet…could it possibly be true? Could Elizabeth, whom she had failed so badly, so utterly, to completely …somehow not want her to suffer her shortcomings? How could someone, could anyone , in any way, shape or form, forgive the one who had steered them towards their death?

Would Warspite have blamed Elizabeth if the Queen’s orders had led, however directly or indirectly, to the sinking of the Knight-Commander?

Warspite knew the answer to that question, of course: she never, ever would have blamed Her Majesty, blamed her sister , if the day had come when she had had to lay down her life in the name of the Crown. If she had had to die in Elizabeth’s place…well, Valiant was being quite adamant about pointing out what not dying in Elizabeth’s place had done to the blonde: whatever she would have thought about Elizabeth in the aftermath of her own death, the former Knight-Commander seriously doubted that it would have been worse (or even simply as bad) as the things she was thinking about herself in the aftermath of her own survival. 

Did she seriously think that Elizabeth thought all that much differently than herself? Again the dark, broken, hopeless parts of Warspite’s mind ranted and raved about how of course Elizabeth would have seen things differently, that of course  a soldier giving their life in the line of duty was absolutely nothing like a Queen dying because of the ill advice of their most trusted servant, that of course Elizabeth would have had far more reason to blame Warspite for her own death than Warspite would have ever had to blame Elizabeth if she had ever been sunk, and yet…

“You know what I think, Warspite?” 

The blonde in question blinked as she was pulled back out of her own thoughts, her violet orbs sharpening as they focused back in on the shipgirl holding her in a loose embrace. Valiant’s sad little smile had returned, and there was a wistful gleam in her eyes as she went on.

“I think that she’s throwing one of her tantrums right now.” The little sister’s voice was a bittersweet mixture of joyous reminiscence and sorrowful grief, and the gleam in her red orbs turned into a glistening as Valiant’s dried-out tear ducts summoned up fresh moisture. “At how stupid we’re being, I mean. She’s screaming her head off at us that we’re both being absolute fools .”

“Oh God , yes,” Warspite replied, a genuine grin of her own flashing across her face even as new tears began to form in her own eyes, something resembling an almost childish giggle seeping into her voice and poking through her tone of grief and worry. “She’s trying to order the Angels themselves to come down here and tell us off, isn’t she?”

“More like she’s trying to give orders to God Himself,” Valiant corrected, her little smile widening as she blinked back her renewed tears. “She’s stormed into His throne room and she’s trying to get Him to smite us.” 

That got a real, actual laugh out of Warspite, her first one in she couldn’t even remember how long. “Or she’s trying to become a ghost so she can come back and whip us into shape herself,” responded the blonde, her own little bittersweet grin breaking into something resembling a true smile. “God, that would be just what she would do, wouldn’t it?”

“It would be, it certainly would be,” laughed, truly laughed, the little sister, even as the new tears started rolling down her cheeks. “She’d come storming down here and just tell us what for, wouldn’t she?”

“She’d drag us by the ears to the Maids so they could make us presentable,” joked the blonde, outright giggling as she pictured the absurd scene of a ghostly Elizabeth making sure that her sisters were properly dressed and had had their hair and makeup done, the former Knight-Commander ignoring the hot wetness that had began streaming down her face. “Put us both on Maid duty for a month or two as punishment, too.”

“We’d have to source up the entity of Headquarters while we were at it. Bring all the art and decorations back out, dust everything off…” Valiant laughed back, her smile wide, her eyes wet. “She’d be right over our shoulders the whole time, telling us how to do it all properly.”

“And God , she’d go mad if we made a mess of it…” Warspite’s words trailed off, the short outburst of laughter that had briefly echoed down the corridor gradually fading away as both sisters’ thoughts turned towards better times. Ghosts of smiles flashed across the siblings’ faces as they remembered how their eldest sister would launch the most childish tirades about the most mundane and ridiculous of things (a trait of Her Majesty’s that the rest of the Queen Elizabeth -class had always secretly found rather amusing and even somewhat endearing, no matter how much the Fleet’s senior shipgirls had said it was improper and embarrassing). 

Memories of those moments, along with dozens of others, flooded back into the sisters’ minds. Memories of tea parties in the Royal Gardens gone slightly awry, members of the Maid Corps scurrying to and fro in all directions as they tried to placate their liege-to-be. Memories of staying up until the earliest hours of the morning pouring over books on everything from battle tactics to dinner etiquette, staying awake purely on black tea and sheer willpower. Memories of them all making idle chatter as they unwound after a long, hard day of work, all the walls raised between them seeming to fade away for just a little while. 

Memories of the young Queen-to-be scheming to find some other poor soul to take over all her paperwork duties, of her (trying to) boss around Dreadnaughts twice her age and who stood a whole head taller than her, of her enforcing a vision of elegance and beauty in all that the Royal Navy did, large or small. Of her smile, of her laugh, of her confused, panicked stammering when she was caught off guard, of her irrational fear of ghosts, of the exact proper way to prepare her tea, of how to properly draw her bath, of her favorite dishes.  

They were memories of a sister. Of a confidant and friend. Of an occasionally immature woman who had still been quite young, of a skilled battlefield tactician, a charismatic and inspiring Flagship, of an elegant Queen, of someone childish and selfish and wise and charitable and arrogant and noble and a million other little things in between. Someone uniquely gifted, someone indescribable, someone sorely and desperately missed. 

And someone, just as Valiant had said, who never would have wished the smallest speck of pain upon her little sisters. Not for any reason.

“We really are making a mess of it, aren’t we?” Warspite sighed, her head and shoulders drooping in resignation as she reached that conclusion. Elizabeth had been many things, wonderful and questionable alike, but she had never, ever been vengeful. She never would have blamed her siblings for her death: indeed, if she could see them now, tearing themselves apart in despair as they blamed themselves for her fall…in all honesty, the former Knight-Commander could actually see her being angrier with them over that than with her death.

“That we have,” Valiant answered quietly, her own gaze dropping towards the floor, clear signs of guilt slipping into her expression. The silver-blonde bit her lip for a moment, taking in a sharp breath before pulling her sister into one last tight, loving embrace, the younger sibling pressing her forehead against the older’s as she pulled the blonde deeper into her hug. “But I want to believe…no, I have to believe…that we can still clean it up. Together. I don’t know how , or how long it will take, but…I think we need to try. Don’t you?”

One last time, Warspite fell silent in thought, the sister and soldier within her making their final arguments. Back and forth they went, constantly screaming at both each other and at the blonde that they were trying to sway to their side alike. Guilt, hope, fear, resolve and frustration all surged and ebbed and flowed within the former Knight-Commander as the debate raged within her, Warspite chewing the inside of her cheek and her fingers clasping at empty air as she uncertainly returned her little sister’s hug.

The crux of her internal debate hadn’t changed in the slightest: the Knight who had failed her Liege stood as indomitable as ever, ranting on and on about how Valiant’s had no right or authority to wipe away the stain of Warspite’s failure, that listening to the silver-blonde and letting the blame for the Disaster pass her by would be nothing more than bold-faced cowardice, that her sin would remain forever unabsolved unless she faced her punishment for it. 

The Sibling who wanted to cling on to her little sister bellowed back that to continue to make Valiant (and Barham, and Malaya) watch as she was torn apart from both within and without alike was simply needlessly adding to her list of failures, that the right way to atone for her sins against one sister was most certainly not to leave the rest to suffer by themselves, that even though she had lost one sibling she still had obligations and responsibilities to her other three to uphold. 

Warspite’s mind’s eye was filled with a dozen, a hundred, a thousand different interwoven, intersecting visions as she tried to come to a decision, both halves of her bitterly divided conscience trying to summon up some memory or another that might convince her to choose their side. All of the snippets and illusions were of her slain sister, her fallen liege: Elizabeth smiling and laughing at a tea party. Elizabeth firing off shells and screaming orders in the Skagerrak. Elizabeth leading the preparations for a banquet feast. Elizabeth making agonized, inhuman choking sounds as Saschen pushed that God damned spear further through her chest. Elizabeth throwing a tantrum after being served improperly prepared tea. Elizabeth slipping below the black, burning waves. Elizabeth encouraging her. Elizabeth cursing her. Elizabeth wishing her the best. Elizabeth wishing her damnation. 

Elizabeth, who not even death could end her loyalty to. But then she blinked and she saw with her own, real, physical eyes, Valiant. Valiant who was standing right in front of her, a silent plea in her red, tear-filled orbs. Valiant who bore the unmistakable signs of a hundred sleepless, nightmare-filled nights and just as many skipped meals. Valiant who was suffering just as she was. Valiant who was just as much her sister as Elizabeth was. Valiant, to whom she owed a no less intensive loyalty than the one she owed to Elizabeth (even if it was a loyalty of a somewhat different form).

And so Warspite’s choice was made. 

“Alright. Alright, let’s…” the blonde started, her words slow and cautious. It wasn’t Elizabeth who needed her now. Elizabeth…was past helping, a fact that would almost certainly haunt the blonde for the rest of her life. But Valiant wasn’t. Broken, suffering Valiant could still be helped. Grieving, pleading Valiant stood before her, desperately reaching out to her and begging to be helped, begging to let her help. And all that her little sister had been screaming at her for the past however long was right , as much as Warspite was struggling to make herself accept it: throwing herself onto her sword (even if she did so in a way that would be far more symbolic than literal) would accomplish nothing but to tear her away from her other, surviving siblings, be it by reassignment to God knew where, transformation into a social pariah, imprisonment, or simple psychological self destruction. 

And suddenly (or maybe not so suddenly, given how much screaming and shoving Valiant had had to do), the former Knight-Commander couldn’t bring herself to do that to her siblings. She couldn’t deny the pleas of the hurting, heartbroken shipgirl who had her wrapped in a tight, loving embrace. She couldn’t turn away the little sister who had been hammering endlessly away against every emotional barrier that the blonde had tried to put up. She couldn’t refuse the helping hand that had been so desperately thrust out to her.

She couldn’t abandon her little sister.

Warspite took in a long, slow, deep breath, closing her eyes as she put her thoughts in order for the last time. It wasn’t as simple as just saying that she agreed, of course: fear, doubt, grief and pain still raged within the former Knight-Commander; the broken old soldier inside her was still screamed that she was a coward running away from her duty; she had no idea whatsoever what her plan would be going forwards or where she would even start even if the Inquiry acquitted her, but…Valiant had a point: she at least had to start trying . 

“Let’s talk to Barham and Malaya, before we decide anything,” Warspite said softly, gently clasping her little sister’s shoulders as she bit down on the corner of her lip.  “They’re our sisters too. If we’re going to make a plan, they deserve to have a say in it.” 

It was a non-answer. A stalling tactic. It was the lone, tiny concession that the blonde’s guilt-ridden, self-loathing conscience would let her give: open the door to further discussion at a later time, and with the whole family present. A hint of disappointment danced across Valiant’s face as she processed it, but the younger sibling knew full well that an hour earlier she wouldn’t have even gotten that . Warspite wasn’t giving her much to work with, but it was something , at least, some small step in the right direction. And after everything since Skagerrak, after all the shouting and shoving and arguing and pleading, the silver-blonde would take whatever she could get.

“So they do,” Valiant replied with a slow nod, her small, sad smile spreading a fraction or two as she accepted her minute, but critical, victory. The former Knight-Commander was willing to at  least try and talk to her and the others; she could (hopefully) work with that. “Thank you, Warspite,” she added, reaching up and giving her sister’s shoulders a reciprocal comforting squeeze. 

For a minute or two, the siblings simply stood there in awkward silence, neither quite sure what to do or fully ready to start down the long and winding road before them. Memories of a fallen sister and questions of an uncertain future alike flashed through the minds of both sisters, and it took them both one last long, quiet moment of introspection to muster up the strength to at least momentarily seal away the former and steel themselves to face the latter.

It wasn’t easy, of course: one argument and a few monologues wasn’t enough to undo everything that had been done. It was barely enough to even start. But barely enough was still enough. A start was still a start. A first step was still a first step, even if that step was just to start walking out of one’s partial hiding place in a random back hallway. And so slowly, awkwardly, hesitantly, doubtfully…

“Right…so…we should probably go talk to Barham and Malaya then, yes?” Valiant started, pointing vaguely back the way that the sisters, pivoting slightly as she took a little half-step back in the direction that the sisters had first come from. Without a word, Warspite nodded, gesturing for the silver-blonde to lead on. With a small, curt nod of her own in response, the younger sister turned on her heel and started heading back towards the courtroom. 

She didn’t make it particularly far before she glanced over her shoulder to confirm that the former Knight-Commander was following. That took a second or two for Warspite to do: briefly the silver-blonde’s glance caught sight of her sibling still rooted in place, the older sister casting her gaze upwards towards the heavens, an unknown plea (For strength? For mercy? For forgiveness?) on her silently moving lips as her hands wrung together and her weight shifted unsteadily from foot to foot. 

Then, finally, Warspite took a step forward. It was slow, it was cautious, it was hesitant, it was small, but it was there. The next was just as small, as was the one after that, but the former Knight-Commander was moving, and moving in the right direction. A bit awkwardly,Valiant reached back a hand. Warspite, just as awkwardly, took it. And then one step at a time, one foot in front of the other, the sisters slowly but steadily made their way back down the corridor, supporting each other the whole way. 

There was only silence around them: neither sibling had anything more to add to what they had already said, and both of them were already turning their thoughts inwards, towards what they would have to say to Barham and Malaya and/or their various other concerns about the imminent future. There was no background noise either: it seemed that the commotion back in the courtroom finally seemed to have come to an end. 

But thinking of Barham, Malaya and the commotion back in the courtroom brought another concern back to the forefronts’ of the sisters’ minds…

“What about Repulse?” Warspite frowned as the question slipped past her lips, the blonde grimacing as she recalled the scene she’d dragged Valiant away from, remembering the sight of her younger siblings engaged in a flat-out brawl with a rogue Battlecruiser. 

Valiant glanced over at her sister, brow furrowed, an uncertain frown of her own mirroring her sibling’s. Her brow scrunched further as the former Knight-Commander’s question made the rounds through the silver-blonde’s mind, her frown deepening as she weighed that particular matter. Doubtless there would be more than just one traumatized shipgirl that had more than their fair share’s worth of criticism, anger and hatred to dispense regarding the Disaster of the Skagerrak. It wouldn’t be just their own demons that the sisters would soon have to start facing.

Even if they did manage to get a full acquittal, it would be the height of foolishness to believe that there wouldn’t still be those who would want their heads on pikes and their names in the mud. The press, of course, would still be looking for a scapegoat to villainize, while the looming leadership change in the Fleet would probably set off a new round of power struggles between the different ship classes (a scenario that would also likely play out in the Admiralty). God knew what the public would think of everything, and the Ironblood had already put out a small mountain’s worth of propaganda just to add fuel to the fire, and what about-

“We’ll deal with Repulse…when the time comes,” the silver-blonde replied with a shake of her head, stopping that train of thought dead before it could drive her straight into madness. “For now…let’s just take this one thing at a time. Start with talking to Barham and Malaya, then…I guess we’ll just see where things go from there. If we try to face everything at once, we’ll be buried alive.”

That last point was true enough. Already Warspite could feel a looming weight beginning to press down against her as the hurting, broken, guilt-plagued part of her mind began to supply her with a new torrent of doubts and fears and ugly what-ifs, dozens of little whispers already starting to build back into being screams: how would she deal with the press? Would there be challenges to her Throne? How many more Repulses were there in the Fleet, hell, in the whole of Britain? What would she-

With a grimace, the blonde shook her head, forcing herself to seal those thoughts away for the moment. Once again, her little sister was right: the future would have to be handled one step at a time. She had to actually make it back out of the corridor and to the courtroom before she even started trying to face any of the questions and uncertainties and challenges that were strewn before her. Even that would still be a challenge, but, the blonde thought, with Valiant helping to keep her steady it might just be a manageable one.

And so the former Knight-Commander of the Royal Navy, and the presumptive heir to its Throne, continued to put one foot in front of the other, to take one step at a time back the way that she’d come. And she did so with, for the first time in a very long time, some small spark of hope in her heart. It was a tiny little thing, hemmed in and flickering constantly, but it was there. It was a spark rekindled by her little sister, a miniscule flame kept alive by the promise that all of her surviving siblings would be there to help protect it. A thousand different things were already constantly threatening to extinguish it, but as she clutched to her little sister, Warspite somehow felt that she might just manage to keep that little fire alive.

Or at the very least, she could take comfort in the thought that whatever happened next, it couldn’t be any worse than what had happened in the Skagerrak.