[sasahar17]

Reposted from General Discussion thread... since I have no idea how come I was stupid enough to mix up the windows I was looking at.

Y'know, with all this talk about being nommed by giant monsters (in the General Thread), I just realized something about Muv Luv: Do You Remember Love

There's not enough people dying. Alas. I have always prided myself in balacing hope and despair, but i find without them horrible deaths my fanfic verse is too nice and cuddly.

I have to rectify that.

Apologies to all Ellen Aice fans. She's the Orbital Diver, so I picked her to be the one starring in my next snippet. She needs a bit more love around here, even if it is ejecting right into a horde of Tanks.

Spoilers: Ellen Aice Dies and has a Wake.

Spoiler for Aice Dies:

“Die Motherfucker! Motherfuckers! Die!”

2nd Lieutenant Ellen Aice roared as her Over-Eagle spat out 36mm rounds in every single direction, firing on full auto until their barrels ran red hot. The BETA were making a mad dash at her, and it was only the Over-Eagle’s incredible firepower that was keeping her alive.

“C’mon! C’mon, get it! Baby! C’mon!” Ellen screamed, her blood too high to do anything else but hold down the trigger.

The young Orbital Diver had been part of a very risky diversionary maneuver to buy some breathing room for the German Army, who were making a big push towards the Lyons Hive. She didn’t really understand the specifics, but Ellen knew enough to understand that she and her squadron mates would be dropped feet first into a swarm of at least fifty thousand hostiles with all intent to kill everything there that wasn’t human.

A tall order for eight Over-Eagles with no support.

While they had achieved their objectives, drawing the attention of almost double the number of BETA they had anticipated, her squadron’s exit strategy had gone to crap five seconds into their actual mission. They had been surrounded and then picked apart one after another, until it was just Ellen who remained.

“C’mon and get it Bitch! C’mon!”

Standing on a plateau with BETA of all shapes and sizes coming at her from all directions, Ellen knew she was going to die. However, it would be a good death. She had heard over the radio that her team had made it possible for the 44th Cerberus Battalion to breach the hive.

All that was left to do was to make her last stand.

The hopelessness of her situation didn’t matter. The dropping ammunition counter didn’t even register in her mind. All that mattered was taking out as many of the bastards as she could with her.

“C’mon! You bastards! C’mon, you too! Oh? You want some of this?! FUCK Y-”

That was when the floor inexplicably gave out from under her. Ellen’s Over-Eagle was standing right above one of the cavernous tunnels that had been dug as part of Lyon’s Hive, and it just so happened the raging battle caused a cave in. The Over-Eagle was plunged nearly fifty meters and then buried in the ground by the falling rock and debris, battering the machine over and over until its wrecked and warped frame was almost unrecognizable.

She would have had better chances of survival if the BETA had actually gotten to her.

If anyone had been around to see it, they would say that Ellen Aice had died.

-=-

“Have you heard? Ellen is dead.”

“I know,” Hibiki sighed, shaking his head sadly. “Those Orbital Divers really saved our bacon and we didn’t even know.”

“Yeah. I mean we Valkyrie Pilots are getting a lot of credit, but if it wasn’t for those guys we’d have been overwhelmed.” Yuzuka rested her head on the wooden table with a sigh. “It makes me feel bad since there’s all this talk about us getting medals and stuff when nobody is even looking in her direction.”
“It’s often the case with things such as this.”

Hibiki and Yuzuka hadn’t known Ellen for very long before the Operation Overlord II. The woman who had been sent by the Space Forces to evaluate the Over-Eagle for their purposes had hit off with Yuzuka and Hibiki quickly. Despite the differences in their professions, they’d been good friends.

And now she was dead, dying in battle protecting them.

It really stung to know that, especially since they hadn’t even known about it until after they’d returned to base as conquering heroes. While the rest of the world celebrated for humanity’s first honest to god victory over the BETA, Hibiki and Yuzuka took some time to morn their lost comrade.

“Ellen would give us hell if she ever saw us doing this you know.” Yuzuka smiled nostalgically at the thought. “Underage drinking without her? She’d throw a fit about being left out.”

“Well if she wants to complain, she can resurrect herself and tell us so.” Hibiki chuckled as poured two glasses, one for him and one for Yuzuka.

As annoyed as Ellen Aice would have been at the fact her two friends were being so mopey over her demise, Hibiki knew grieving was for the living. The pair took one glass each and raised it high, sad memories about times long past echoing in their minds.

“To Ellen Aice, best damn Canadian pilot to ever live.”

-=-

“Sorry about Ellen Allice. I heard the two of you were friends,” Wilbert D. Collins said consolingly. It had been a while since Hibiki had seen Wilbert, the Marine officer had been one of the graduates that had been moved to the Pacific theatre with a few VTF-0(2)s, shortly completing their training. It had only been when Hibiki had paid a visit to Hawaii on related business that he ran into Wilbert.

“It’s okay, I’ve gotten over it,” Hibiki shrugged having long gotten over his grief.

“She saved lives y’know.” Wilbert sighed.

“She saved a lot of people,” Hibiki agreed, bitterly thinking about how none of the Orbital Divers who laid down their lives that day had been given the honors they rightfully deserved.

“Yeah, the when she dropped in with those Over-Eagles in Thailand two days ago, I thought it was a fucking miracle.” Wilbert nodded sadly. “Bought an entire Battalion of Marines time to withdraw, but never got out herself. Damn shame.”
Hibiki stared.

“Wil, uh… just so you you know, Ellen died in Overlord.” Hibiki corrected him. “Are you sure you didn’t confuse some other Orbital Diver with her?”

“No, I’m pretty sure. I spoke to her myself over the radio. Saw her face and everything, and got the name too. Ellen Aice, Space Forces Diver. Bob cut blonde hair matched with a ponytail, hot voice, and a pretty hot body. No way in hell am I forgetting someone like that!” Wilbert insisted truthfully. “She saved Lieutenant McManus from the Black Knives and one of my boys by detonating her own S-11 bomb. I don’t forget something like that.”

“That can’t be.” Hibiki scratched his head in confusion. “I dropped by the Space Forces hangar and saw what was left of her Over-Eagle after Overlord. She definitely died there.”

“Look, man. I have her name all over the AARs if you want to see-”

“Holy shit, Hibiki! I thought it was you!”

Ellen Aice cheerfully draped an arm over Hibiki’s shoulders after having successfully snuck up on the pair. “What are you doing all the way in Hawaii, dude? I was just about to head back to space!”

Hibiki and Wilbert stared.

Ellen was clothed in nothing more than a hospital gown and covered head to toe in bandages and a sporting a fine looking neck brace. However, this was definitely Ellen Aice, who was most definitely alive and breathing and standing right next to them…

“Guys? Why are you looking at me like you’ve seen a ghost?”

Hibiki finally manage to regain the presence of mind to speak again. “Ellen. Pardon me if I seem a little rude about this, but aren’t you supposed to be dead?”

“Well, I had a few close calls a couple of times but yeah I survived,” Ellen frowned and studied the two men carefully. This had to be a joke, right? “Don’t tell me you… you two think I’m dead? What?”

Hibiki and Wilbert traded disbelieving looks, than turned back to Ellen with serious faces.

“I saw what was left of your Over-Eagle after you got swallowed up by a cave in.” Hibiki said.

“I watched you blow yourself up.” Wilbert added.

“How the hell did you survive that?” The two men said in unison.

Ellen started at them with eyes the size of dinner plates, and realized they were completely serious. “The rescue teams had to cut me out of my wrecked Over-Eagle with blowtorches, and I survived the explosion by ejecting into a trench. The explosion threw me miles from where I went down, and I still got a bad case of whiplash.”

Another awkward silence followed as the trio processed this new set on information.

“You… you should probably go down to Personnel and let someone know you’re still alive,” Wilbert informed her stiffly. “I helped Major Zander fill out all the appropriate forms. Your own squadron thinks you bought the farm.”

“…Yeah. I’ll go do that.” Ellen nodded in a dazed manner, silently taking her leave and staggering off to verify with the paper pushes that she was still among the living.

Once she was gone, Hibiki and Wilbert look at each other, realized just how awkward the situation had become, and decided to go their separate ways.

“Well that was weird.” Hibiki muttered as he left. “Well, Yuzuka would be happy Ellen’s alive at least.”

-=-

“Sorry Yuzuka. But I have some bad news.” Yui Takamura had informed Yuzuka dourly just that morning. “I just got a report from the Space Forces. Your friend Ellen Aice… she was lost in the Budapest Hive assault two days ago. Her drop pop’s trajectory was wrong and she ended up sinking into the North Atlantic. We… couldn’t find the body. I’m sorry. I knew the two of you were close.”

Yuzuka had nodded and accepted this news with all the professionalism of a soldier. She had nodded her head, taken the news in stride and gone about her duties. Yuzuka had a job to do and there would be time to grieve later. The USS Enterprise was a fleet carrier after all, and with the war going on there was no time to be idle.

And then Ellen had wheeled herself into their hangar on a wheelchair with the biggest smile on her face and a bottle of booze in her lap.

“Howdy Yuzu! Nice carrier you have here! Man, I really thought I was a goner that time, but then the John Paul Jones fished me out of the drink! Am I lucky or what?” Ellen gave a small wave at her friend. “And look what I managed to bring with me, Johnny Walker Black Label Whiskey!”

Yuzuka stared.

Ellen stared back.

“Shouldn’t you… be dead?”

Faced with yet another friend thinking she’d kicked the bucket, Ellen did the only natural thing she could do: Drop her face into her hands and groan. “Not again.”

-=-

“Ha! Told you! I win the bet!”

“What’s this about a bet?”

Lilia Kjellberg paid no attention to Ilfriede’s victorious smirk when the very familiar looking Canadian hobbled up to them on crutches and an arm sling with a questioning glance. The hardened ex-NUNS Marine turned mercenary had gone unnaturally pale at the sight. In fact, she’d gone cationic.

“Just a little bet I had going with leatherneck here,” Ilfriede gave the unresponsive Lilia a friendly slap on the back to jolt the Half-Meltran to her senses.

Lilia on the other hand had more pressing concerns. Seizing Ellen by the shoulders, who was too shocked to respond to the taller girl’s sudden movement, Lila began screaming into Ellen’s face. “Yak Deculture! How the hell are you still breathing! I saw you eject into that horde of Tanks! Everyone did! People DIE in that kind of-HOW ARE YOU STILL HERE?”

“Well as it turned out I am pretty good with the Hardyman-exo… wait, I died? Again?” Ellen stared at Lilia with wide eyes the size of saucers. Lilia nodded. Then Ellen slowly turned her head towards Feulner, who was still grinning. “And you made a bet about whether I made it out?”

“Nope, the bet was whether you’d come back from the dead! You're Canadian. Wolverine's Canadian. Ergo, you will not die when killed!” Ilfriede chirped happily.

Ellen had no idea who this 'Wolverine' was but she had the distinct impression she was being made fun of.

“So, Lilia, where’s my money?”

Even though she’d escaped the jaws of certain death, again, Ilfriede’s flippant attitude towards her mortality made Ellen want to die on the spot out of sheer embarrassment.

-=-

“Okay, guys. This joke is getting old. Seriously, stop.”

"Don't look at us. We're not the ones doing it."

Ellen exhaled heavily. She had just stepped back into the Lyons Forward Operating Base recreation room when the entire room went silent. Seconds later, Seijyurou Makabe wordlessly handed her the obituary section of the newspaper.

Guess whose face was in the top right hand corner?

“For goodness sakes, I just got cleared for duty five days ago after that volcano incident!” Ellen huffed indignantly, unable to believe what was happening. The first time it was weird. The second time was annoying. The third time was just plain embarassing. The fourth... and the fifth...

Now? Now, It was getting old, very fast.

“Bernadette saw you get swallowed whole by that Carrier Class,” Helgarose von Falkenmeyer said from where she was sitting in a carefully measured voice. “Said Carrier Class then burrowed into the Earth, never to be seen again. I think we were well justified in thinking that you were as good as dead.”

“I blew it up from the inside!” Ellen protested.

Through sheer grit and determination Ellen had blasted her way out of the belly of the beast while it was still tunneling underground and dug her way back to the surface, a task which took eight hours. By the time she had limped back to base she had been in no shape to do anything but stumble back to her bunk and go to sleep for another ten hours straight.

Obviously, sometime during when she had been eaten whole and when she had walked into this room, someone went and declared her dead. And they’d been betting on it, given how a number of Ceberus pilots had sighed and handed over bills in varying denominations to Lieutenant Brigitte von Wästernach.

Who was now handing it back out again since as it turned out, the bet was still ongoing.

“You should probably go let someone know that you’re still alive.” Seijyurou noted.

“Right, yeah. Going to let the brass know Ellen Aice is alive. Again.” Ellen mumbled, spinning on her heel and walking back out the door… right into a small Frenchwoman who tumbled to the floor.

“SACRE BLEU! UN FANTOME!” Said Frenchwoman screamed, scurrying away on all four in stark terror.

“Oh, this is getting so embarrassing.”

Well, at least this was better than actually being dead, right?

-=-

“To Ellen Aice, best damn Over-Eagle pilot to ever live.”

“To Ellen Aice.”

It had been fifteen months and not insignificant number of misreported deaths later since her first ‘demise’ at Lyons when the long awaited wake for Ellen Aice was finally held. It had taken a picture of Ellen’s body, bleeding out from a knifewound to the chest, to finally convince pretty much every one of her friends that Ellen had finally died. For real.

Even then they had waited a week in case she’d pop out somewhere, just to they wouldn't embarass themselves.

When she didn’t, they finally decided to hold the wake.

“Damn, I thought for sure that girl was immortal.” Yuuya sighed. “Do you remember the number of times her death was misreported?”

“I was standing right next to her when CNN did the biography of her dying to save the President. Boy was that a real laugh,” Wilfred agreed with him sadly. “I just can’t believe she’s really gone.”

This time they were sure she was dead.

Ellen had gone up against an Allegiance agent who had stolen a Space Forces F-23A Black Widow II, in an F-15E-OT Over-Eagle no less, and had dueled the terrorist from the space station all the way onto the Earth’s surface. It was an epic battle involving zero gravity combat, re-entry, a dogfight during said re-entry, a crash-landing right into downtown Manhattan, and finishing in no holds barred knife fight in hand to hand combat outside of their ruined TSFs. Ellen had won, but had succumbed to her injuries afterword.

A death fitting for a survivor and a member of the Orbital Diver's elite such as her.

“A knife fight. Hell of a way to go, huh?” Hibiki couldn’t help but shake his head at the thought. “I always knew that girl was a fighter.”

“Ellen-san was really something else.” Yuzuka agreed wholeheartedly.

“That must have been how she’d survived all those situations. An utter, complete, refusal to just lie down and die,” Lilia Kjellburg said respectfully. “To be honest I still can’t believe it even after I saw the pictures.”

“Our personnel guy loved and hated Ellen,” mused Otto Zander, Ellen's former superior and friend, thoughtfully. “He had the hots for her, but he also hated how she kept giving him more paperwork to do. He actually got so fed up, he just pre-filled all her paperwork for reinstatement and kept multiple copies. 'Kept saying how just as he finished submitting the paperwork, Ellen would show up and smile at him, and he’d have to do it all over again.”

“Tell me about it,” Hibiki laughed. “I can almost believe she’ll just walk right in through those doors-”

“Hey guys! How’s it hanging? I heard all of you had gone to a bar near the hospital so I decided to drop in!”

Naturally, all activity in the said bar came to a screeching halt.

One very much alive and somewhat healthy Ellen Aice greeted cheerily as she strode in to the bar.

“Wow, it really IS the whole gang! Anybody willing to buy a girl a drink? Man, I just woke up from the coma and I am so goddamn sober... why are you all staring at me like that?”

-=-

Muv Luv: Do You Remember Luv
-Greatly Exaggerated-

-=-

“Blaze, about your friend Aice…”

“Hold that thought.” Hibiki Tatsunami reached over to the phone on his desk, punched in a number, put the speaker on and waited for a few moments for it to be picked up.

“Ellen Aice, immortal TSF pilot and total sex-goddess, speaking! ‘Sup Blaze?”

“Hey Ellen. Quick question: By any chance have you taken part in any drops lately?”

There was a short awkward silence.

“…let me guess. People are saying I died again, right?” Ellen sighed wearily over the line. “Again? Goddamn it. I need to fix this. Thanks for the heads up. Later Blaze.”

Ellen hung up.

“You were saying something, Focker?”

“…never mind.”

-=-

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated" - Mark Twain

So! Apologies on the lateness of Valkyries Part 2. It'll be done whenever it's done.