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He couldn't let it go.
It was a casual snapshot that Ishikawa or one of his techs had doctored up for the undercover mission, with the figures of Batou, Major Kusanagi in civilian clothes, and a little boy composited from their features. They had been posed into the perfect simulacrum of smiling domestic bliss, serving to add credibility to Batou's cover story that he was just an average, friendly family man. All a lie, naturally, but hell if it wasn't a cute picture.
When the case was over, he should have tossed it out with the rest of the identity. He should have let it go. Instead, Batou tucked the snapshot in the back of his wallet with his old cyber-maintenance receipts and ticket stubs. And he had all but forgotten it was there, a year later in the Section 9 locker room, when it slipped free and spiraled to the floor as he was thumbing through the billfold.
And because his luck was just that good, it landed at Major Motoko Kusanagi's feet, incriminating side up.
"What do we have here?" For a moment, Batou had the crazy urge to snatch it out of her hand before she could get a better look, but from the steadily widening smile on her face, it was clear the damage was already done.
He should have confessed then and there, but Batou had to make some attempt to salvage his dignity. "What is it?" He kept a straight face as the Major turned the picture over so he could see. "Oh that? It's just an old prop from the Zaitsev case. You remember the undercover operation, right? This was Ishikawa's idea of a joke, I guess." Part of him wanted to point out that casting her as his wife had been the logical choice, as the Major was the only female member of Section 9 with the necessary combat training to intervene in an emergency.
The Major didn't answer him immediately, but gave Batou a curious, lingering look before she handed the photo back to him. "It's nice to know that you can still surprise me. I really have no objections to your keeping it, but don't get carried away."
And her eyes hardened slightly, they way they did sometimes when she looked at Togusa's kids or at civilians whose lives she'd just saved from certain death.
"Batou." The Major nodded as she walked past him, toward the exit.
She saw right through him, as usual. He stuffed the photograph back into his wallet, accidentally creasing one of the edges in his haste. "Major."
---
A cell of extremist reactionaries who called themselves the Soldiers of Raha attacked the Ministry of Finance without warning, and Section 9 was deployed to contain the situation. Because of the nature of the weaponry at the enemy's disposal, the Tachikoma could only operate at a distance, leaving the human and cyborg members of the team to largely fend for themselves.
The situation was grim, as they breached the building's perimeter, thermo-optical camouflage armor rendering them almost invisible. There were hundreds dead, almost all civilian employees who had come to work expecting nothing more than another dull Tuesday afternoon, only to fall victim to indiscriminate slaughter. From the latest intelligence, the perpetrators had turned against each other after taking the Ministry building, resulting in a breakdown of their command structure. The sound of gunshots was still coming from all directions.
Unfazed, the Major led the way into the chaos, silently issuing commands through their cyberbrain links. With so much ground to cover, they split up and went to work, systematically targeting and eliminating hostile combatants.
Batou took the third floor of the right wing, which was mostly offices that all had to be methodically searched. He found a dozen men guarding a makeshift armory in a conference room, and picked them off one by one. The last one went down, but didn't stay down. Too late, Batou saw the pin in his hands.
A grenade.
Batou turned and bolted from the room as fast as he could, but he didn't clear the blast zone in time. The explosion threw him several yards, and it was only the body armor on his back and the cyborg components under his hide that kept him in one piece.
When he could breathe again, Batou dragged himself away from the burning debris and behind a section of half-demolished plaster wall to assess the damage. His cyberbrain communication channels were down, but otherwise the injuries weren't severe. The armor and gear had suffered the worst of it. All the thermo-optics were dead and everything in Batou's pack had been fried or scattered or both. It was a good thing there hadn't been much in his wallet.
Except -
He was almost afraid to look, but there it was. The photograph lay a few feet away, no longer a perfect white-bordered rectangle, but a curl of yellowed plastic warped and blistered by the flames. The figures of Motoko Kusanagi and the boy – soft-eyed things that didn't belong in this world – were blackened beyond recognition. Only Batou's own grinning face was visible, the lone survivor. He picked up the remains of the snapshot, balled it up in fist, and lobbed it back into the flames.
The others were waiting for him.
---
A few days later another photo appeared on Batou's desk, tossed on top of a pile of paperwork in his inbox. He looked up into the Major's cold, lovely face. "I brought you a replacement."
She didn't say how she knew, and Batou knew better than to question after her methods.
He picked up the photograph. Once again he and the Major were playing husband and wife, father and mother. This time they were at the seaside and the kid in Batou's arms was a little girl. It was a nice shot, but the kid didn't look much like either of them. And then he realized, looking closer, that she wasn't a composite. He'd seen her face before, glimpsed it for a few seconds in redacted paper files on the way to the shredder.
The girl had been one of the earliest to receive a full prosthetic body, so young at the time that you had to wonder how much she remembered about life as a red-blooded human being. Or did the grown-up woman consider her old self another illusory dream?
"Thanks." He looked up again, but the Major was already gone.