19-Aug-2000
Legal stuff: None of these characters are mine. Gundam Wing belongs to Bandai, Sunrise, and Sotsu Agency, among others--Xenogears belongs to Squaresoft. For time-wasting purposes only and not for profit, so don't sue, 'kay?
Warnings: slight AU, X-over, shonen-ai, language, violence. All the good stuff! *grin*
(2 A.D.*, Buried relic ship under the Ice Fields.)
"Gundams? What the heck is a Gundam?" Fei raked a hand through his tied-back brown hair as he stared at Citan in confusion.
Citan tapped his foot consideringly. "I'm pretty sure it's what these people called Gears--though I'm not sure how similar they are to ours, technologically speaking."
"How do you know this, Citan?" asked Sigurd quietly as he moved closer. "I thought you didn't understand the language."
"I still don't understand most of it, I'm afraid--the files I opened in the system seemed to be of a highly technical nature. But the word 'Gundam' kept reappearing over and over, accompanied by Gear schematics. It seems to be the logical assumption, at least for now." He turned back to the console, crossing his arms as he contemplated the mysteries still locked inside. "And the language is not completely foreign to us, thank the stars; I had a point of reference. It's remarkably similar to Old High Solarian--the language one used when speaking with Emperor Cain or the Gazel Ministry. They were more comfortable with it than any of the modern tongues--it was probably the language used by the first humans on the planet." Citan shrugged his shoulders dismissively, treating the deciphering of a four-millenia dead language as a passing achievement.
Fei was not inclined to be so casual about it. "That's. . .amazing, Doc." Following the green-clad form of his mentor, he reexamined the containers and their macabre contents. "Didja find anything about who these people were? Am I right? Were they the pilots?"
Citan took off his glasses and absentmindedly polished them on his sleeve, looking at the dusted-off units with a puzzled frown. "I'm afraid I don't know, Fei--I wasn't able to get that much information. The written symbols used by this computer system are much harder to decipher than the spoken forms would be. However, considering there are no other bodies here, it would seem to make sense."
A hand trailing gently over the dusty surfaces, Sigurd stepped forward and looked down at the still, unmoving forms inside consideringly. His voice was hushed and nearly imperceptible in the echoing, cavernous room.
"They're so well preserved, it's hard to believe they've been dead for so long. They're barely more than children, Citan."
Fei opened his mouth to protest the implication that anyone his age would be considered a child, only to shut it in a belated show of respect as Sigurd's oddly meditative words continued.
"We've seen no other bodies, no sign of any crew--just these five. We'll probably never know why they were here, or why they died--and the truly sad thing is that they were human. They were the same as we are--and they died here alone, with no one left to remember that they ever existed." Sigurd's unpatched eye raised, pinning his two companions with an intense, sorrowful gaze, even as he whispered, "I wonder--in the end, will this be our fate as well?"
His dark head bowed respectfully, Citan said nothing in reply. Sigurd's words merely echoed his own fears; and he had long since run out of reassurances.
Fei watched the quiet, stern face of the black-haired boy lying silent in his transparent enclosure; silenced by a roil of emotion and a surging tide of half-remembered memories from previous lifetimes. Lifetimes of living, of dying; of war and death and madness and love--memories of trying, again and again, to survive on a planet that seemed designed to end civilization, not cradle it. He closed his eyes, shutting away the stranger's still face in an effort to rein in the despairing spiral of his thoughts--only to nearly jump out of his skin in startlement at the quiet *bleep* of Sigurd's communicator.
Sigurd visibly shook himself out of his melancholy ponderings, and detached the small device from his waist. Sweeping errant strands of silver hair back out of his face, he flipped it open. "Yes?"
"Hey, Sigurd! Having fun playing tunnel rat?" Bart's cheery voice crackled over the small radio, incongruous among their dark and decayed surroundings. Sigurd sighed.
"It's been. . .interesting, to say the least. Bart--why are you breaking radio silence?"
"Hey, I did it for a good reason!" Bart's voice was mildly defensive at the implied reprimand. "Just thought you guys might wanna know that there's a Gear force headed your way, and a large one too. Looks like they're out of Neo-Kislev, and you know what *that* means, Siggy!" Fei grinned at Sigurd's involuntary wince at the nickname. Bart continued on without pausing for breath. "General Nicklay, that's what. So unless you guys want an entire troop of Gears pounding that cave down around your heads, I'd recommend you pick up and clear out of there. The Yggdrasil's standing by--but I don't think we've got enough Gears to go head to head with that asshole and win."
A faint voice chided in the background ". . .master. . language. . ."--only to receive a muttered "yeah, yeah, Maison. . ." in response.
Sigurd frowned in consideration. "Hold on a minute, Bart." He turned to Citan and Fei. "You heard. What are our options? Especially with all of this. . .?" giving an encompassing wave at the dust-filled room surrounding them.
Fei looked around them. "How much time do we have, Bart?"
The radio crackled to life again. "Hey Fei--how's it going? Man, you get to do *all* the fun stuff! Oh--umm, current ETA for incoming Gears is about twenty-five minutes--they're landing on the beach right now."
Citan touched his sword lightly, thinking. "It's painful to admit, but. . .with that short amount of time, all we can do is destroy this place before anyone else can get to it. There's too much advanced technology here; in the wrong hands, the possibilities would be catastrophic. I can try to download what I can off of the active databank--but there's no way we can move the rest before they get here. And Bart's right--this is not a good place to be cornered in by Gears."
Sigurd nodded silently in agreement. "Fei, can Xenogears take care of the cave system once we're clear?"
The pony-tailed martial artist nodded. "Yeah, no problem." A small crease formed between his eyebrows as he mentally evaluated the amount of firepower necessary--and the utter destruction that would be the result. Picking up on his distress, Citan placed an inquiring hand on his shoulder.
"Fei?"
The younger man's shoulders slumped slightly. "It's just. . .it seems wrong, Doc. To just leave them here, I mean. It's like Sigurd said--they've been forgotten once already; and now, we're gonna blow up their ship and forget 'em again. They deserve a proper burial, at least. . . Something to honor whoever they were. You know?" He raised troubled brown eyes to the older man's face.
Citan gripped his shoulder in silent reassurance. "I understand; I feel the same way. Unfortunately, fate seems to dictate that we don't have the luxury of time for that. It's wrong and it shouldn't be this way but--I'm sorry, Fei. We don't have a choice." Fei nodded sorrowfully in response.
"Guess you're right, Doc. I'll start the reactivation sequences for Xenogears." He shut his eyes, feeling for the ever-present mental connection to the not-quite-alive Ether existence of his Gear. Sigurd suddenly spoke, breaking his concentration.
". .Hyuga? Is the relic's computer supposed to be doing that?"
"What?" Citan spun on his heel, and stared in startlement at the flurry of active data that was lighting up the ancient computer console. "What is it--?" He hurried over to the computer, Sigurd hard on his heels and squinted at the rapidly scrolling patterns of code. "I have no idea. ."
Sigurd hovered over his shoulder worriedly. ". . .do you think the Gear troop has activated some dormant defense systems?"
"I don't know!" Citan's frame was stiff with frustrated tension as he tried to get answers out of the unresponsive console. "The data is going by too fast for me to translate. . .wait a minute. . " His eyes widened as oddly familiar graphs and diagnostics began to fill the screen. ". . .oh, my. . ."
"Ummm. . .Doc?" Now it was Fei's turn to interrupt, his voice unnaturally calm. "Not to bother you or anything but. . .the boxes with the bodies? They're, um. . .doing something." Citan glanced over his shoulder--and froze in startlement. The previously quiescent containers had begun to fill with a foggy, gaseous substance, obscuring the forms inside. In a silent counterpoint, lights had begun to blink in sequence from their previously darkened panels at the foot of each container--tiny red lights that winked on and off, being replaced by green in a enigmatic pattern of their own.
Both of his friends watched uneasily as a horrified look of comprehension crossed Citan's ascetic features. He flicked his eyes back and forth between the console and and the containers several times, then slumped against a metal pillar and rubbed his eyes. "The scope of my idiocy frightens me sometimes. . .this is what I get for making assumptions based on minimal data," he muttered in disgust.
A calloused hand shook his shoulder. "What's goin' on, Doc?" asked Fei, confused. Citan straightened wearily, nudging his glasses back into place on the bridge of his nose.
"We've been terribly wrong in our assumptions." Almost against his will, his eyes turned back to the single live monitor and its now slowly-changing images--familiar blips of rususcitated, slowly-beating heartbeats; wavering line-graphs that monitored brain activity. Even with the evidence sitting there before him, it was hard to believe.
"They're not dead."
"What?!" Fei yelped. Sigurd stiffened.
Citan keyed in a few tentative commands, and watched in concentration as the confirming facts scrolled by. "I had been concentrating on the mechanical data stored here, thinking that would be more likely to be more immediately useful to us. I didn't even think to look for life-support or ship's crew data." His internal dismay was reflected in his voice. "But apparently we were wrong--these five *are* alive, though in some kind of stasis--and my meddling with the computer has apparently tripped the activation parameters for bringing them out of stasis. It's likely the program was set up in such a way that it couldn't be activated until outside input from a person told it that the conditions were suitable for reanimation."
Sigurd nodded his head slowly at Citan's logic--Fei stared uncomprehendingly. "Huh?"
The older man sighed. "The computer is programmed to wake them up once it knows there are other people around to take care of them."
"Oh."
The radio, held loosely and forgotten in one hand, crackled to life again.
"Hey, guys--I dunno what you're muttering about down there, but current ETA for Kislev Gears is about 20 minutes! If I were you, I'd move it," Bart announced.
"Shit!" Fei swore roughly. He looked to Citan in dismay and no small amount of panic. "We can't just leave them down here, Sigurd, Citan. It's one thing to talk about blowing the place up when they're already dead. But they're alive--or they're gonna be. We can't just leave 'em to die!"
"I agree," put in Sigurd, narrow-eyed and determined. "And leaving them for Kislev would be just as bad. These people are innocent--we can't let them get caught up in Nicklay's little bid for power."
Fei shifted from foot to foot uneasily at the thought, his hands clenched in agitation.
Citan raked his hands through his rumpled, tied-back black hair in frustration. "I agree with you both, really I do--but if we stay, it's likely we'll end up doing nothing but dying with them. What little I can decipher of the computer system seems to indicate that this reanimation process will take at least another forty-eight minutes, and if we try to move them early, it's entirely likely that will kill them just as surely as a Gear would. I'm afraid we're rapidly running out of options."
"Maybe so, but you're forgetting one, I think." Citan stiffened at the new, harsher tone in Fei's voice. He turned around slowly. The periphery of his vision noted that Sigurd had taken an involuntary step back, shoulders stiff with tension. However, Fei held his focus--a tensely poised Fei, with an icily-fierce red glint in his eyes.
Citan kept his voice deliberately calm.
"Fei, what are you thinking?" Watching his young friend, he uneasily noted a new intensity in the muscular frame--and that the long brown hair seemed oddly tinted, reddish highlights glinting in the dim emergency lights of the ancient ship.
Fei's gaze had turned inward, looking at something his companions couldn't see. Something dark. The normally-cheerful teenager's voice had turned quiet, confident--and deadly. "That's easy, Doc. I'm thinking of the same option we've always had. We fight--and we kill the bastards before they kill us." Turning precisely on his heel, he darted out the door before either of his companions could react.
"Fei!"
"Damn. ." Sigurd breathed out uneasily. "Was that. . ."
"Id?" Citan shook his head. "I don't believe so--not entirely. However, I'm unsure how much of Fei's personality has reintegrated. There's no way of knowing how far he'll take this." He stared at the now-empty doorway bitterly, praying he was correct. If he was wrong, and Fei's genocidal Id personality had taken over Fei's fractured psyche, they were *all* in danger. Id was a destroyer, pure and simple. It was entirely likely that it would do as Fei had said, and take out the Neo-Kislev Gears--but Id was just as apt to annihilate Fei's allies as well as his foes. However, it was also possible that this was simply the reaction of an angry and slightly panicked Fei. There was simply no way to be sure. Citan gritted his teeth in frustration. It seemed as if Fate had conspired to use this entire situation in order to teach him exactly how much he *didn't* know. He was developing a severe dislike of the feeling.
Sigurd snapped out of his reverie and lifted the radio. "Bart, did you catch that?"
"'Fraid not, Siggy," Bart's tinny, radio-thinned voice crackled back in reply. "Only bits and pieces. What's going on?"
"Fei's on his way up to the surface--he's going to take on the Neo-Kislev forces with Xenogears. If you can, Bart, back him up, but don't get in his way. He's. . .a bit upset."
"Whoa! Whatever happened to the running away option? And what happened to put a bug up Fei's butt?"
Sigurd grimaced internally. He should have known Bart would want explanations. "The situation has changed, Bart. We have--" he searched in vain for an appropriate word. "--survivors--down here. Running away is *not* an option."
"Holyyy--" The radio went silent for a minute--then crackled back on. "--you're sure?"
"Citan seems to be--and Fei's prepared to fight the Kislev Gears off to save them."
Another long pause. "Yeah, he would be, wouldn't he? Okay, Siggy--we'll suit up in the Gears and back Fei's move. But you'd better be ready, 'cause once we've kicked some Kislev butt, I'm comin' down there to see this for myself!" Even through the static of the radio, Bart's voice was gleefully anticipatory at the prospect of a fight.
"Noted," replied Sigurd. "Be careful. . .little brother."
"Aren't I always?" was the cheeky reply. "See ya in a few! Yggdrasil out."
Sigurd flipped the radio closed, reattaching it to his waist. "What now, Hyuga?" he asked mildly, looking over at the form of his friend tapping away at the computer console.
Citan brushed a stray lock of hair out of his eyes and looked up. "I'm going to need your help, Sigurd. There's no telling what kind of condition they will be in when the process is complete--and the computer program seems to be running under the expectation that a full medical team is standing by to aid in the resuscitation. I have no idea what's expected of us--but these young men are going to need help." He drummed his fingers against the top of the console, thinking. "There's no way the appropriate medical supplies would have survived this long in here--quite frankly, it's a miracle the machinery did. However, that's neither here nor there. We're going to need the emergency medical kits out of our Gears, plus the blankets and survival packs. Those are scanty tools at best, but it's what we have to work with."
"Right." Sigurd grabbed a lantern and jogged out the door, ducking and weaving lithely through the debris-filled hallways of the ancient ship. Citan turned back to his work, shaking his head in disbelief at the situation.
"I can't believe we're actually trying to do this..."
End Part Four
(:./hope/dream4)
