Fanfic / Eternity

Before we're through with them,
I promise.

the Japanese language
I will protect Japan and its people from those who would seek to do them harm.

will be spoken only in Hell.
No one will hurt my new home and my new people in the way that my old nation and former countrymen were hurt on the seventh of December so many years back.

That is the promise I intend to keep.
That is the promise I intend to keep.

USS Enterprise.
JDS Yonaga.

Weigh anchor!

Eternity is a KanColle fanfic written by Sheo Darren, set in an alternate Earth, where the naval portion of World War II went a little differently. One of these small, but major changes occurred in 1945 when a raid on Kure by USS Enterprise and others managed to damage Yamato's engines, preventing her from participating in Operation Ten-Go, with Nagato taking her place. Despite the attempts to scuttle her, she was captured by the Americans, and General MacArthur took a liking to her.

Fast Forward to 1957, New York. Fleet Admiral Halsey was unable to secure support to retire Enterprise as a museum ship, and unwilling to see her scrapped, he contacted General MacArthur with a deal: He will help the General in convincing the Government to refit the aging Yamato and keep her on the more permanent basis, and in return the General will help him persuade the Japanese, who were looking to strengthen their Navy as the precaution against the communists, to buy Enterprise.

And thus Yamato was formally made part of United States Navy as USS Montana, while Enterprise joined the nascent Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force together with Halsey as an advisor. Enterprise in particular, now renamed Yonaga (Long Night), served Japan for so long that she earned the nickname "Eien", "Eternity".

Fast forward again to 2027, one year since the beginning of The Abyssal War, and Yonaga was one of the few who still hasn't appeared. But when she did, the shipgirl who answered the call was radically different from the one who fought in the Pacific War, to the mixed reactions on the both sides of the pond. And on top of that, Yonaga has her own issues to deal with.

The story can be found on SpaceBattles.com and Sufficient Velocity.

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This Fanfic contains examples of:

• Alternate History: In addition to the main For Want Of A Nail of Yamato getting too damaged for Ten-Go, there are a few changes not related to that:
  • Directly inspired by Indestructible Spirit, Kongou stayed in UK as HMS Indestructible, and Hiei became the lead ship of the Hiei-class battlecruisers. The Japanese later decided that they did in fact need a fourth battlecruiser, and so built Kongou as the fourth Hiei-class battlecruiser, something the shipgirl does not appreciate.
  • Ryoichi Togo survived the Pacific War, continuing the Togo family, with his great granddaughter Hina eventually rising to the rank of Admiral. ^note In the original timeline, he died when heavy cruiser Maya was sunk.
  • Hood and Bismarck switched sides-by-capture and survived the War. They remained in the service of their captors as the sign of European solidarity and were later retired as museum ships.
  • Yukikaze avoided her historical scrapping and was returned to Japan in the '70s.
  • Shigure survived the torpedo attack that killed her in the original timeline, and was captured after being abandoned at Singapore and served first as HMS Drizzle and then as RSS Drizzle.
• All Germans Are Nazis: Averted; Bismarck helps Hood get over her mental breakdown over her perceived nazification by telling her that her Admiral is a jew, that not all germans are nazis and that being a german doesn't make her evil.
• The Atoner: Yonaga sees herself serving the Japanese as making amends for her extremely violent past.
• The Bait: During the Pacific War, knowing that keeping the damaged, post-Ten-Go Nagato as a war trophy will anger the Japanese, the Americans used her as a kamikaze bait. Despite orders to let the suicide bombers do as they wish, William D. Porter's captain ordered his crew to shoot them down, resulting in friendship between the two as shipgirls.
  • In story, this is justified as protecting the caretaker/prize crew aboard Nagato as they were unable to abandon ship on time.
  • As Montana was serving in the US Navy in the 60s, she served on the gunline during the Vietnam War, conducting naval bombardment missions. Her effectiveness in the role leads to New Jersey being recommissioned earlier and spending an additional tour on the gunline ^note OTL, New Jersey was reactivated in 1968 and spent a single tour of duty in Vietnam in 1969, and was decommissioned after her sole Vietnam cruise.
• The Beastmaster: Similar to the idea in Kant-O-Celle Quest, squadrons of ships lighter than destroyers come back as a Shipgirl whose rigging is a pack of familiar animals, usually but not limited to dogs. Minesweeper Shipgirls also have animal familiars that aid them in their duties.
• Berserk Button: Do not insult Halsey in front of Yonaga.
• Big Bad: The Arpeggio of Blue Steel inspired Pacific and Atlantic Codes, the AI(-like being)s who cordinate all abyssals.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Shipgirls, right at the beginning of The Abyssal War.
• Broken Ace: With her sisters and many of her friends dead, living friends driven away by herself, and having driven the Japanese into ground more than strictly necessary, Enterprise was this at the end of the Pacific War.
• Broken Pedestal: Hiryuu is very conflicted about the Older and Wiser, but - from her point of view - very passive Yonaga who is very unlike Enterprise against whom she fought and lost, and looked up to.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: The Hiryuu vs Enterprise during the Battle of Midway. For the former, it was the day everything went to hell and culminated in her being sunk by Enterprise, and her personality as a shipgirl is largely defined by this experience. For the latter, Hiryuu was just another mark on her killboard, and not even her wounding Yorktown compared to I-168 (Imuya) sinking her, putting the submarine in Big E's shitlist way, way above Hiryuu.
• Converse with the Unconscious: What everybody tried to do with Enterprise to wake her up, from the loaned US destroyers to her own sisters. Hiryuu even arranged that a reunion of all Kidou Butai carriers to be on her steel hull in hopes that it will bring out some kind of reaction, but no luck.
  • New Jersey and other shipgirls spend almost two years doing this with Montana, to no avail.
• Cool Big Sis: New Jersey, and was the first to reach out to Yamato despite being enemies just a few months ago.
• The Corruption: The Abyssals "convert" the sunken steel hulls of the ships into themselves, and there are a lot of those on the seabed. There are two main types:
  • The Original Hulls, which are the abyssified ships that were in good enough condition to sail as it is. Early in the War they comprised the majority of Abyssals, before casualties, the spreading of Replica Hulls, and their newfound resistance and effectiveness against shipgirls relegated them to Commander roles.
  • The Replica Hulls are built from scratch, sometimes from several hulls that are too damaged to become Original Hulls, and are tougher, faster and have more weapons than them, but do not possess any innate advantages over the shipgirls like the OHs.
    • The smallest type of RH, the Gunboat Abyssals based on the The Shark/Orca/Whale-like destroyer mooks from the game, came with the renewed Abyssal offensive and are theorized to be the Abyssals' failed attempt to replicate shipgirls.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Yonaga sees her time as Enterprise as something which she has to surpass for the benefit of herself and others.
• Death Is Cheap: Sunk Shipgirls can be resummoned, at the cost of becoming weaker (story-equivalent of being reset to level 1).
• Divided We Fall: For the most part, Allied and Axis shipgirls do not work well with each other, if at all, along with other conflicts such as French and Italian shipgirls not liking their British and German counterparts respectively due to scorched earth operations enacted upon them when they surrendered during WW2. One of the few exceptions to this are Arizona, the Battleship Row martyr who forgiven her attackers, Bismarck and Hood, who were on the both sides of the war, and the post-WW2 Cold Warriors.
• During the War: When the story starts, the Abyssal War has been going for nearly a year and a half.
• Evil Evolves: The Abyssals constantly improve their means to wage war, and their main experimental ship to test out the new toys is, to Kaga's rage, the Original Hull of Tosa, [Vengeful Sacrifice].
• Evil Knockoff: The Gunboats abyssals are the Abyssals' attempt to create their own Shipgirls, but since they did not have Shipgirls' Sparkly Magic Bullshit™ on their side and have to obey the laws of physics, the end result is merely a fast horde mook.
• Evil Twin: The Original Hull Abyssals, who are specifically resistant to Shipgirls' firepower, and their presence weaken the shipgirls that are based off them.
• Fee Fi Faux Pas: Hiei and to much lesser extent Kirishima tend to have their tongues slip and call their little sister Kongou as their elder sister, much to Kongou's ire. Made worse that Hiei did this during their first meeting. Haruna is the only one that has avoided doing it so far.
• Flaunting Your Fleets: Shipgirls sortieing in chapter 1, intentionally made showy as a morale booster for civilians.
• Fire-Forged Friends: Such is the unlikely friendship between Nagato and Willie Dee.
• Force Feeding: In one of original snippets, Jun'you diffuses the tension between Hiryuu and Yonaga (caused by the former pressing the latter's Berserk Button) by shoving down a vodka-grade drink down the fluffy dragon's throat, making her too mellow to cause further trouble.
• For Want Of A Nail: In Real Life, Yamato weathered the Kure raid relatively unscathed. In Eternity, the same raid damaged her engines, leading to all the changes described above.
  • To elaborate: Not taking part in Ten-Go led to Yamato being captured when US Marines secured Kure, leading to General MacArthur deciding to keep her as a war trophy and to hold the surrender ceremony on her deck as a further humiliation to the Japanese. He then kept her as a war prize in Tokyo, and in the 50s used his influence to have her crewed by American and Japanese sailors, where she participated in shore bombardment duties in the Korean War, alongside USS Iowa and USS New Jersey. This leads to:
  • 1957: Fleet Admiral Halsey calls MacArthur to offer a quid pro quo: MacArthur wants to keep Yamato as an American war prize, Halsey wants to keep Enterprise from being scrapped. Halsey lends his support to MacArthur's efforts to retain Yamato in US service, in exchange for MacArthur convincing the nascent JMSDF to purchase Enterprise as their flagship. Both ships receive refits and serve for decades with their new navies.
  • This also eventually leads to Halsey spending his last years in Japan as an advisor to the JMSDF, as well as (indirectly) a revision of Article 9 in the 70s.
  • USS William D. Porter is not destroyed by a kamikaze attack, but instead fights off a massive kamikaze raid to protect Nagato, and is eventually sunk alongside Nagato during the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests.
  • JDS Hyuga and Ise are commissioned in the 80s, and are built as CVA-01 style aircraft carriers as a joint Anglo-Japanese project, as opposed to being flattop helicopter destroyers.
  • Yahagi is now a Mini-Nagato instead of Mini-Yamato.
  • Space Battleship Yamato is now Space Battleship Nagato, which Nagato dislikes because of the absence of her Ten-Go comrades, fellow Crossroaders and most importantly Willie due to The Law of Conservation of Detail. To her pleasant surprise, the 2199 version rectifies this.
• Game of Chicken: In furious desperation, the United States's Captain decided to ram the Abyssified Titanic head on, and the two ships ended grinding against each other, with Titanic coming out worse than US.
• Ghost Ship: Years before the War started, the Abyssals were testing the waters. This in turn resulted in many Ghost Ship sightings and rumors, one of which nearly started World War III with the abyssified USS America swimming in Russian waters.
• Going Native:
  • Enterprise/Yonaga and Yamato/Montana are the biggest examples of this, though it's more pronounced with Montana, who no longer considers herself Yamato, and considers herself to be an American battleship.
  My name is USS Montana. Battleship, United States Navy. Hull number BB-72.
  • In a lesser example, there are the many destroyers and frigates of the Military Assistance Program, particularly the American ships who became the first ships of the JMSDF - USS Heywood L. Evans introduces herself as JDS Ariake.
  • The Acht/Yuu "Scandal" in the backstory, where the IJN and Kriegsmarine exchanged I-8 (Hachi) and U-511 (Eu) subs for international temawork training. Stoic Eu became energetic Ro-500, and energetic Hachi became Acht, a stoic bookworm.
• Headbutting Heroes: Hiroshi Goto and Hina Togo, Admirals of Yokosuka and Kure districts respectively, share a strong mutual dislike, due to being near polar opposites. Goto is the half-american son of a shopkeeper who enlisted out of high school, became a mustang officer and worked long and hard to achieve his command, and was only promoted due to a lack of qualified flag officer candidates. Hina meanwhile is a descendant of Heihachiro Togo, the Nelson of the East, who was groomed for a naval career, has the midas touch, has had a fast and steady rise through the ranks, and was already a shoo-in for Admiral. Goto is jealous of Togo being a pampered ace who never had to lift a finger (which is not true), and Hina resents Hiroshi for successfully fighting the enemy while she looked like she had been kept out of combat for her own safety and/or abandoned her crew (which is also not true).
• The Heart: Jun'you, taking over the Team Big Sister role that usually goes to Kongou in fics (who in Eternity is in England as Indestructible, and Hiei-class Kongou is not suited for the role).
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: The 1st of January, 2026, the day the Abyssal War started, is known as The Black New Year.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Jun'you is one of the few who fought Enterprise and lived to tell about it, and the experience made her a heavy drunkard.
• In-Series Nickname: Eien (Eternity) for Yonaga.
• In Spite of a Nail: Budget shock from JDS Amatsukaze still kills the JMSDF's CVH-B helicopter carrier in the 60s.
• It's All My Fault: Inazuma blames herself for sinking Miyuki before WWII, made worse because the shipgirls that were not present during WWII cannot be summoned, and made even more worse is that there is an Abyssal Original Hull codenamed [Ferocious Mako] made of her remains roaming about, who Inazuma thinks is actually Miyuki who came back to sink her.
• Like a Duck Takes to Water: Yamato saw a lot more action as Montana, since US had the resources to deploy her.
• Love at First Punch: How everyone sees Hiryuu's fascination with Enterprise, to her annoyance, as she sees this as more of Defeat Means Respect, though she isn't entirely honest with herself.
• Mighty Glacier: Installation type Kanmusu Iou-tou-san, better known as "Miss Iwo" among Americans, is bound to her namesake Island. She can go around in it, but not leave it.
• The Mirror Shows Your True Self: When Yonaga looks at the mirror at the beginning of chapter 1, she sees her past self as a vengeful Enterprise twisted to look like Wo-class.
• Mission Briefing: Given by Admiral Togo in chapter 1.
• A Mother To Her Girls: Rear Admiral Hina Togo, the descendant of Gensui Heihachiro "Nelson of the East" Togo.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Notable Abyssals get codenames like [Azure Death], [Long Gate Monster] and [Winged Destruction].
• Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You: Inazuma seeks out Ferocious Mako so that the latter will kill her and leave Sasebo alone as her revenge is satisfied (or so she believes). Inazuma also believes she deserves to die for ramming Miyuki in 1934.
• Rainbow Speak: Many of the lines are colored blue or red, a few times just to differentiate the speakers, but most of the time it is used to show the mood or feelings regarding the described subject. In Yonaga's/Enterprise's case in particular, when she really hates something to the point of almost regressing to her old Pacific War-self, the red lines look corrupted via the Zalgo font.
• Refusal of the Call: When initially called to in the beginning of Abyssal War in 2026, Yonaga refuses, partly to allow the reborn Imperial shipgirls to prove and redeem themselves, and partly out of fear that she will regress to her murderous Pacific War-self and kill them all. Similarly, Montana is also still asleep by the start of the story.
• The Rival: Hiryuu sees Enterprise as this, partly out of admiration, partly out of desire for closure to the events of Midway.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Enterprise's default emotional state during the Pacific War, which estranged her with basically everyone else at the time, something which she greatly regrets.
• Science Cannot Comprehend Phlebotinum: The Abyssals cannot comprehend anything magical or spiritual, for example while they know that the Original Hulls weakens the Ship Girls based on them, they have no idea why, nor they are aware of the Sirens that are chained to the pre-WW2 Original Hulls.
• Soldier vs. Warrior: Hiryuu's (Warrior) conflict with Yonaga (Soldier) has overtones of this, though it also comes from what Hiryuu sees as Enterprise demeaning herself.
• Soul Fragment: The tiny part of Shipgirls' souls remains in their steel hulls, which is what gives the Original Hull-class abyssals their anti-shipgirls properties. Unfortunately for ships that did not make it to WW2, their entire souls are chained to the hull when abyssified, and these "Sirens" are more likely to be hostile to their former enemies.
• Starter Equipment: The Five Starter Destroyers were one of the first to awaken, and thus are among the most experienced of the shipgirls. They form an elite group simply known as The First Five.
• Stockholm Syndrome: Hood when serving under Germany. Being treated with much better care and maintenance than what the British gave and receiving an overhaul that she needed for decades certainly helped.
• Stuck in Their Shadow: Kongou; No, not that one, as like in Indestructible Spirit the ship that was to be IJN Kongou stayed in England due to politics, becoming HMS Indestructible. The Kongou in question is the fourth Hiei class battlecruiser that was built after the Japanese decided that they really needed a fourth one. The Hiei sisters love her, but for them Indestructible is the real Kongou. This, coupled with her taking Haruna's place as a sole "survivor" of the war, left Kongou jr. an emotional wreck.
• Student–Master Team: Due to manpower shortages and the general inexperience of late war shipgirls, the IJN Carrier teams consists of two shipgrils: a veteran carrier and a rookie carrier, with the former training the latter until deemed combat-ready on her own.
  • Montana tries to be the Master during the Vietnam war, but New Jersey isn't having any of it.
• Superpowered Evil Side: WOEnterprise, Yonaga's cooped-up bloodlust and hatred.
• That Came Out Wrong: When comforting Hood who was worried about fighting with her former friends, Bismarck said that she will make them take their focus from Hood and transfer it on herself by flaunting her victory over Hood...in a way that makes Hood's boilers overheat, to Bismarck's confusion:
  Bismarck: Engländer! Hood is my war prize! I conquered her in a sizzling entanglement where my shells pierced her belt and seared her entire body! I placed my crew aboard her humiliated hull and took her with me to occupied France, where we lay together as our wounds healed! Now she belongs to me and obeys my every whimsy! You wish to take her back? Come at me!
• Together in Death: Nagato's and Willie D's final fate as steel ships at Operation Crossroads. And then the Abyssals raised the sunken ships as Original Hulls [Long Gate Monster] and [Willful Defender], who in twisted irony are never seen operating separately.
• Trap Is the Only Option: With the Abyssals purposely missing their shots and harrying them towards the icefields, the Captain of the ocean liner United States realized that there was most likely a trap waiting there, but with no other viable option he ordered to proceed.
• 20 Minutes into the Future: The story takes place in 2027, a year after the Abyssals appeared in 2026.
• We Used to Be Friends: HMS Campbell's attitude towards Hood after the latter sunk Worcester while under German flag back during the War.
• Worthy Opponent: How Hiryuu views Enterprise.

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Woe is me
Woe is me...

WO...