Work Text:
“Hey Heero, take a look at this. The radar picked up something,” Duo said, gesturing to his screen as his copilot entered the cockpit.
Heero frowned. “Something? Can’t you be a little more specific?”
“Something fast.” At Heero’s answering glare, he said, “Oh, c’mon. It’s been three days and the most interesting thing we’ve seen in the asteroid belt so far is—let me check my notes—oh, right: an asteroid that was a little more rich in iron than we thought. This is the most boring mission I've ever been on. Quatre owes me big time. So gimme a break and let me milk this irregularity in our grind for all it’s worth, will ya?”
Heero didn’t even bother answering—not that Duo expected him to. Duo crossed his legs over the dashboard and leaned backwards, playing with his braid. He watched his friend read the information listed on the screen, his smile widening as Heero’s frown deepened with each line.
Distance: 4.49 10-5 ua (in diminution - target locked)
Diameter: not evaluable
Mass: not evaluable
Velocity: 13.25 km/s
Temperature: 310.15 °K
Output: 3140 J
Luminance: 105 cd.m−2
Signal: detected
Lifeform: inconclusive
“Interesting, uh?”
“I suppose that’s why you’re following it, instead of our planned itinerary.”
“Give the man a prize! Oh, wait, I have it right here,” Duo said while throwing Heero a chocolate candy bar.
He caught it without even looking, much to Duo’s amusement. “Pretty sure that wasn’t on the ship’s food stock.”
“You know me. I always come prepared.”
“With junk food.”
“That’s still food. I’d love to have something fresh to share with you, Heero-dear, but I’ve smuggled those weeks ago—before we got stuck a whole month on C1564 for that stupid case—and apples don’t last that long. Not even pineapples.”
Heero didn’t react to that last joke. He wasn’t listening to him anymore. His gaze had shifted to the ship's main screens, and he was sitting down in the copilot’s chair.
“Heero?”
“It's coming towards us.”
“Amazing! Finally, some action.”
They pushed the explorer ship a little faster until they could get a visual. A very confusing visual.
“The fuck is this?”
“Mm,” Heero said, which meant it was an accurate assessment, as far as Heero was concerned (at least that’s how Duo chose to translate it, anyway).
It was no wonder the ship’s computer had trouble determining a mass or a diameter. The thing seemed to be there and not there at the same time, appearing and disappearing from the screen while still maintaining its curved trajectory.
And when it was there, it looked like two giant purple wheels on top of each other, leaving a blue-green-gold trail that distorted light around it.
It looked like a ship, or at least something artificial. A design they never saw before, even in Oz prototypes.
It didn’t seem to be aware of their presence, either.
Without a word, they maneuvered the ship until they were just behind the trail of the mysterious engine, shadowing its moves.
Or at least trying to.
“You used to be faster,” Heero commented, compensating with the additional engines for each move Duo made to follow the alien ship as close as he could.
“I wasn’t driving a fucking truck back then! This thing is climbing so fast…” Duo said, his fingers cramping around the controls. “Feels like we're running in circles, though.”
“Not exactly. It seems like we’re circling around a sphere.”
Duo glanced at the pattern on Heero's screen. It did look like they were dancing on the surface of a sphere. Some kind of fancy dance for officials. Three-quarters of a circle, then a whirl, and three-quarters of a circle in the opposite direction, turn and turn again.
Duo looked back to the monitor just in time to get blinded by the bright light springing from the middle of the virtual sphere.
He heard Heero curse, felt the sudden acceleration of their ship towards the light… and then everything disappeared.
...
...
When Duo opened his eyes again, his first thoughts were that space used to be a lot darker. He was floating in zero gravity, but everything around him was light blue and white instead of being black.
It was also cold. Which was weird, because feeling the cold of space usually meant you were dying in space.
Then Duo felt his lungs burn. It suddenly dawned on him he couldn’t breathe.
It wasn’t space. He was underwater. What the hell?
Just as he started panicking, trying to remember everything he knew about swimming while not having any idea where the water’s surface could be, a muscular arm curled around his waist, hauling him out of the water.
Duo tried to take a breath and regretted it instantly as the water came out. If he thought his lungs were burning before, they were nothing but pain now as he coughed out what felt like an entire ocean. It hurt too much to even scream.
“Stop wriggling,” said a well-known voice close to his ear. He couldn’t see anything, tears blurring his vision. For once, he obeyed an order without discussion, holding onto Heero’s body for dear life.
The water level lowered and soon Heero was walking, carrying Duo over his shoulder to keep his head above water.
As his coughing eased, and his vision cleared up, Duo tried to understand where he was. The water they were in was clear, reflecting bright sunlight coming through a light well over them. It looks like an underground freshwater lake. They reached the bank, a small band of white sand running under the cave walls. Heero sat him against the wall. The abrupt change in position made him cough his lungs out again.
“Are you alright?” Heero asked once Duo could catch his breath once more.
“Been bett—” he said, before cutting himself off as he saw a human figure behind Heero’s back, walking towards them. Heero whirled around, his hand already where his holster should be, fingers tensing up in the air.
It looked funny for a second before Duo realized exactly what was wrong with the picture: Heero was naked. In fact, they were both butt-naked. The only thing he was still wearing was his cross necklace.
His undignified yelp of surprise was fortunately drowned in another coughing fit.
The figure seemed to understand what menace Heero could represent, even in the buff and without weapons, and raised her hands in an appeasement gesture.
She looked young, more like a girl than a woman. She was wearing a long dress, made of white flowing material that wrapped around her neck and opened mid-thighs, and a large stole worn low on her elbows, flowing behind her. Both clothes hung down in the water, but she didn’t seem to mind. A white turban adorned with blue pearls covered her head. Underneath, long blond hair locks fell over a red jeweled necklace, reaching her shoulders.
Even if he had been wearing clothes, Duo would have felt underdressed.
The young girl said, “Wambu rin?”
The tone sounded interrogative, but the words didn’t remind them of any language they knew. Heero tried Standard, Japanese, Russian and English, and Duo added in the few words of Spanish, French, Arabic and Cantonese he learned in the last years, without success. The girl seemed equally puzzled and seemed to try different languages as well; they heard something that sounded perhaps like “Nii’ru’be’maa?”, then the shorter and more guttural “Rekert ska?”
They stopped, staring at each other. Heero relaxed a bit, estimating that the girl didn’t represent a threat.
The girl pointed at herself, saying, “Yun.” Her name. Or perhaps her title—there was no way to know for sure.
Heero and Duo did the same. Yun repeated their names, “Duo” coming out more like “Dyu-oh”, the sound obviously foreign to her tongue. It made Duo smile; Heero also tended to say his name that way.
The moment was broken as they heard voices reverberating in the cave. Heero tensed again, his gaze roaming the cave to find where the voices came from.
Yun bowed a fraction to them and then walked back into the water. They watched her reach the middle of the lake and step onto a stone platform in the middle of the cave. She stood near a tall broken statue, which seemed to represent a wing on a pillar, as two young girls entered the cave by a path directly opposite where Duo and Heero were.
They saw them bow, then stand, appearing to wait for some kind of instruction. An exchange between them and Yun followed, after which the newcomers bowed again and walked back out of the cave.
Their hostess, if they could call her that, seemed to be some kind of nobility. Maybe the place they were in was some kind of sacred lake and she was a nun? A priestess? A guardian, maybe?
Duo hoped that wasn’t the case. Good things rarely happened to people trespassing on sacred grounds.
Yun came back to them, this time carrying white clothes with her. She gave them to the pilots, with a “Ni tekara kanyo ikubin pen ten” which seemed quite a lengthy way to say, “Please put these on.”
Maybe there was something there about not polluting the divine waters with their impure bodies or something, but Yun didn’t seem hostile at all. Not even weirded out by their nakedness, in fact.
They thanked her with gestures as best as they could, then put the clothes on while she left them alone for a few minutes. They were simple pieces of fabric with a small hole in them for the head and two large ones for the arms; she gave them belts made of the same material to adjust the cloth around their waist. The fabric looked rough, but contrary to what they expected, it felt comfortable and warm.
“Do you have any idea where we are?” Duo asked.
“No. I don’t know what happened. Perhaps we somehow got back to Earth, but… the ship is gone, everything is gone.”
Duo looked at Heero, who was sitting on the sand, looking dejected. He was curled up on himself, arms locked around his legs. His messy chocolate-brown hair was still wet, flattened against his face.
He reminded Duo of a puppy left behind in the rain, not that he would ever tell him that. Duo liked his head where it was.
He crouched down next to Heero. “Hey buddy, wherever we are, the air is breathable, the water isn’t acidic, and no one has tried to kill us so far. I’d rank it three out of five stars at least.”
“Do you even realize what situation we’re in?”
Duo shrugged and ran his hand through his hair. The movement made his soaked braid hit his cloth with a splash, and he moved it out of the way with a sigh. It would be a pain to dry all right. “We’re still alive, Heero. We don’t have chains on our feet. That got to count for something.”
Heero looked up at him, something unreadable in his eyes, but said nothing.
They both stood up as the girl returned. She stopped, saying “Tana,” while gesturing to them to come over. Duo made a mental note of that word—something easily translatable.
They walked up to her, and they crossed the lake, the water never coming higher than their waist.
“How did I almost drown in this?” Duo muttered.
To Duo’s surprise, Heero actually bothered to reply. “Panic.”
“I didn’t panic! I’m sure the water is a hell of a lot deeper on the other side!”
“Sure,” Heero said, a hint of a smirk on his lips.
Duo pretended to get mad, only for that smirk to widen. Score one for Duo Maxwell, he thought. Heero was no longer in his brooding mood.
They reached the bank as a young brown-haired girl arrived running, carrying a basket. She left it at their feet with a “Ni keyon piyun pu ni gapo pu pigan pen ni pegin kisuken,” and disappeared as fast as she came.
Goodness. Other than noticing that this language had a lot of n sounds, they would not get fluent any time soon.
The basket, which Duo grabbed with an encouraging gesture from their hostess, contained fruits—none of them recognizable—as well as what looked like biscuits and dumplings. Duo took one.
“Mmm… tastes like cheese. With something sweet... fruity? I can’t tell, but it’s good. What do you want, Heero?”
Heero stared at him. “You're way too trusting. They could be poisonous.”
“I’m pretty sure if she wanted to kill us, she would have called for soldiers, not a girl with a food basket.”
“You don’t even know what’s in there.”
Duo shrugged. “Had a lot worse as a kid. And back then, I really didn’t want to know what was inside the dumplings. Seriously, Heero, take something. You’ll feel better with food in your stomach.”
“I’d rather not,” Heero said, his eyes avoiding Duo to focus on the path. They were coming near the way out.
Duo rolled his eyes and picked a fruit that looked like a green persimmon. “Suit yourself.”
They stopped at the edge of the cave entrance, taking their time to study the landscape. They seemed to be in a mountainous region, the path to the cave zigzagging down to a valley. Behind it, they saw other valleys, with little villages here and there. In the distance, they saw the sea, and what looked like a city with white buildings on the shore.
“Hey look, they have a train track,” Duo said.
Heero opened his mouth to say something, but they both froze as a shadow passed over them. They looked up, only to see the thing they were chasing in space.
From up close, the two wheels they had seen appeared to be engines. In the front of the strange ship, they saw two cockpits, one above the other, separated by a bright green light. Even though they looked nothing alike, it reminded Duo of the Gundams—the cockpits looked barely big enough for a kid.
“Simoun,” Yun said, following their gazes. There was a note of reverence in her voice.
They watched for a few seconds in silence, as the Simoun disappeared into the sky, followed by two others in what they identified as a military formation.
They didn’t miss the firearms fitted under the hood, either. The fruit that had tasted sweet in Duo’s mouth turned sour.
“See, Heero, I think we’ll do just fine here,” Duo said, his voice bitter.
This world might be alien to them, but some things never changed.