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scriveynerTitle: Destination Unknown [4]
Fandom: Samurai Flamenco
AU: Mecha
Characters/Pairing: Gotou/Masayoshi, Beyond
Rating: NSFW/E
Length: 5753
Summary: What have you done?
What have you done?
His voice a memory, rising to a crescendo, a fever-pitch, betrayal and hatred hand-in-hand, eye-to-eye and still he would not touch him, would not strike him, would not silence that voice, that voice -
What have you done . . . .
#
Gotou was on his feet and he was not sure why, or how - it felt like someone, something had grabbed him with a hook somewhere just under his ribcage and yanked him through a hole much too small for his body. Everything was scrambled upside-down and backwards, he felt like a washing machine spin cycle had spat him out too early. Gotou staggered forward and caught himself, one hand on the wall, before he vomited bile onto the grimy tile floor, heaving until he had nothing else left to purge. He coughed and dragged the back of his hand across his mouth, forcing deep breaths - inhale, exhale, repeat - until the nausea passed.
What had just happened? One moment he was sitting next to Masayoshi, and the next he was - where was he? Where was Masayoshi?
Alarmed, Gotou straightened and as he moved to turn around, he heard a shuffle behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and his heart rate at least reduced somewhat, as Masayoshi was sitting on the floor behind him, upright, his eyes wide and blank. “Masayoshi!” Gotou said, unable to suppress the urgency.
“Whoa,” Masayoshi said, and blinked his eyes back to normal. Gotou exhaled again, swallowed against the dry bile taste in his mouth, and wet his lips. Masayoshi got to his feet, a little wobbly but unlike Gotou he managed to keep his lunch down. “Any idea where we are?” Gotou asked instead, looking around again. When he glanced back to Masayoshi, Masayoshi was patting the top of his head and his side, looking down. “What are you doing?”
“It feels like the top of my head came off,” Masayoshi complained, and then scratched his fingers into his hair, spotting the small pile of vomit by Gotou’s feet and wrinkling his nose. “Ugh, you should clean that up.”
“I’ll get right on that,” Gotou said dryly, with no intention of following through. He stepped away from the wall - the hallway that they were in was not particularly large, with a sweeping, curved ceiling. Gotou craned his neck, following the lines of the architecture - and looked down the hallway. In the handful of minutes they had been here so far, there was no alarms or alerts to their presence. “Seems like a military base of some kind,” he said. Masayoshi touched the lines of color that cut through the plain, dirty white decoration of the wall. “You recognize it?” Gotou asked him.
“It’s similar to the design of the Flamengers’ base,” Masayoshi said. “Color scheme’s wrong, though.” The lights in the hallway were dim, but each end of the hallway bisected, both going left and right, and there were no direction marking to be had, or doors in this offshoot that they had arrived in. Masayoshi rubbed grime off the wall with the palm of his hand, and then wiped his hand on the bottom of his short-sleeved hooded jacket, leaving a streak of dark soot behind. “Come on,” Masayoshi said, and headed determinedly in one direction.
The other-Masayoshi was not with them. The other-Masayoshi, with the squid tentacle for a tail, with the same blue-grey eyes and tawny hair but with a voice that was just different enough to send a chill down Gotou’s spine. The other-Masayoshi. Gotou remembered the photo now, the one that played on the news incessantly when the Prime Minister was trying discredit the Flamengers, trying to track down Masayoshi, “evidence” that Masayoshi was conspiring against the government was nothing more than a grainy photograph of what appeared to be Masayoshi talking to himself, dressed in a trenchcoat. “What do you know about him?” Gotou asked as they walked, watching the back of Masayoshi’s head. Masayoshi was looking around constantly, at each wall and ahead, always moving, always watching. “The other you.”
“He lost,” Masayoshi said. “He lost … his way, his path, I don’t know but he lost against From Beyond and they made him into … that.” He shook his head and looked back over his shoulder at Gotou. Gotou did not know what he expected to see from Masayoshi - fear, possibly; pity, maybe - but not the hard, cold look he got in return. “I can’t falter,” Masayoshi said. “I won’t become that.”
They came to the junction at the end of another hallway. It split off in two directions, right or left, but this one had a few doors inset into the slope of its walls, peppering the surface all the way down until the hallway curved out of sight. Masayoshi put one hand on the wall and considered for a moment, before turning decisively left. After a moment, Gotou followed.
#
The base was, for all appearances, abandoned.
Masayoshi stood in the command center, hands on his hips. There was actual damage here - smoke damage that reached into the corridor behind. Several of the consoles and the largest screens were nothing but burned-out husks of technology. Only a handful of overhead lights flickered to life in the command center came on when he and Gotou had pried the usually-automated doors open; most of the light spilled from beyond the doors. The damage was old, dust lay on what small bits remained unscathed. Gotou crouched over an intact console pushing buttons with no real sense of purpose, as the power to all the devices seemed completely dead.
Snow blew past the heavy reinforced windows. It was dark outside; dark from the storm, not dark as night but still gray and heavy like a shroud. There was a sharp retort as Gotou kicked the console. “Piece of shit,” he called out gruffly. “Any other ideas?”
“This isn’t a Flamengers’ base,” Masayoshi said. He had been mostly certain of the fact already, but the layout of the command center cemented that. It had a similar feel but it was different enough that he immediately felt ill at ease. “I have no idea where we are.” His first thought had been to check his cell phone - this was Earth, after all, just a different time-line - but it showed no connection to a carrier. He could not use his GPS without a connection. Masayoshi was completely baffled at where to go from here.
“Obviously the base has a power source,” Gotou walked across the room, and kicked an old rolling chair out of the way, his hands shoved in his pockets. The noise of the chair skittering across concrete and bouncing against another row of consoles was extraordinarily loud in the unnatural quiet of the command center. “Otherwise we’d be completely in the dark. There’s got to be a computer in here somewhere that hasn’t been destroyed that’s wired to the backup generator.”
Masayoshi had a sinking feeling that maybe this had all been an elaborate trap by Beyond Flamenco - if he was even called that anymore, with From Beyond defeated and destroyed. Why drop him - why drop them both in an abandoned base in the middle of a snowstorm? He had made the wrong decision, Gotou had been right to caution him not to listen; even if From Beyond was no longer using him as an interface, something else could have been….
What if coming here had put their home at risk?
There was another loud bang, startling Masayoshi out of reverie - Gotou had kicked another console. “Stop doing that, you’re gonna hurt yourself,” Masayoshi yelled at him, and Gotou limped around a little and swore mostly under his breath. “You’re not going to fix anything kicking things.”
“No, but it makes me feel better,” Gotou muttered.
With no computer access they could not pull up a blueprint of the base. “Maybe there’s still a working vehicle in the launching bay,” Masayoshi suggested. “We can take one of those, figure out where we are, and find out what’s going on.”
And hope to god that they were just somewhere in the middle of a brutal winter, and not located somewhere in the middle of Antarctica.
Gotou grabbed the railing that Masayoshi was standing behind, and hoisted himself up and over it, ignoring the stairs at the other end of the platform. “It’s as good a plan as any,” he grunted. “Do you know how to get to the launching bay?”
“Not exactly,” Masayoshi admitted.
“Guess we better start walking, then.” Gotou headed for the pried-open blast doors with purpose, and only stopped when Masayoshi did not immediately follow him. “’yoshi?”
Masayoshi was still staring out the window, at the swirling snow. There was a heavy chill to the base, he could feel it settling into his skin now. They weren’t exactly dressed for this weather. What if there were no working vehicles, no communications - what if they were stuck here? He could have doomed them both. Masayoshi shook his head once and narrowed his eyes. He was the hero. There was always a way out.
Gotou’s hand on his shoulder startled him. “Masayoshi,” Gotou said quietly, as if he could read the thoughts chasing in a circle around Masayoshi’s mind.
“Let’s find the launch bay,” Masayoshi said, and Gotou squeezed his shoulder.
#
Masayoshi spun himself in the computer chair, his legs flung out and his tail flopping behind him. The room was dimly lit, primarily by the large computer screens running and processing data in the background. He had never really cared for the screens, he preferred the 3D interfaces that were far more common now, but some people were still very attached to the technology that they had grown up with.
“Would you please stop doing that, it’s very distracting.” Midorikawa Hekiru was seated at a brightly-lit workstation, his long hair pulled back from his face. He glanced up, over his glasses and frowned disapprovingly at Masayoshi, who let the chair spin itself out before flopping his feet flat on the ground. Midorikawa looked back down at the dismantled device and turned over a burnt component with a pair of forceps. “And you don’t know where they went?”
“I told you that already.” Masayoshi slumped back in his chair, arms crossed like a petulant toddler. “The piece of crap shorted out and I ended up going face-first into a wall.” He kicked his legs and stared at the ceiling, before he sighed out a long breath. If he had well and truly lost them, then … everything was over, wasn’t it? “You should have warned me that it wasn’t powerful enough to carry a load of three people.”
“Mm,” Midorikawa flipped a few pieces of circuitry and held a piece below a magnifying glass. “It was never meant to be used to pull people the the fabric of dimensional space. If you had bothered to ask instead of just absconding with the device, I would have told you that there was a ninety-four percent risk of failure.”
Masayoshi tilted his head to the side. “Yeah, and if I’d bothered to ask, you would have stopped me anyway.”
“Most likely.” He moved the magnifying glass and sighed, before replacing the piece of circuitry on the clean white cloth he had spread over the workstation. “I believe I can repair the device back to a working capacity for transportation; but without Harazuka-sensei’s help, I don’t know if it will ever achieve a full matter load again.” Midorikawa raised his head and glared across the room at Masayoshi. There was something resembling venom in his voice - old, worn-out, like he did not know quite how to forget how much he loathed Masayoshi. “Don’t forget the only reason I’m helping you is because Harazuka-sensei still thought you trustworthy,” he added.
Masayoshi had learned to let that disgust roll off of him months ago - he would have nothing but hate and contempt, and he was okay with that. It gave people a commonality, after all, to loathe him. “You do remember that this whole thing is about saving the world, right?”
“Sometimes I wonder if this world is worth saving, any longer,” Midorikawa said softly, and pushed his glasses up his nose.
#
Well, they had not found the lifts yet, but they had managed to locate the officer’s mess. Gotou opened the huge walk-in freezer, sleeve drawn over his nose as a preemptive measure. Fortunately the electricity had not been cut off to the mess, and he was not immediately slain in his shoes by the noxious odor of food-rot. Masayoshi had lingered behind him, far too chicken to open the door himself. “It’s still on,” Gotou said unnecessarily - the light had flickered on inside to reveal mostly empty shelves, and a few damp boxes near the back of the freezer. “And it’s empty,” he said with a sigh.
“They didn’t leave much behind,” Masayoshi said. He had found a box of instant ramen, dusty and who-knew-how-old hiding on a top shelf in the larder, and it looked like they were going to be eating instant ramen for the foreseeable future. He had survived off worse in his days at the academy. “I just thought there would be more.”
“Me too,” Gotou said. He closed the freezer door with a firm click. “At least there’s water and electricity.”
“And ramen,” Masayoshi added.
“And ramen,” Gotou agreed.
They had been wandering the base for what felt like hours, up and down stairs, peering in abandoned rooms and prying open automatic doors that didn’t seem to want to cooperate. The mess had been sitting open, lights brighter than the dim hallway, and chairs scattered around long tables that reached from one end of the room to the other. The room was cavernous and echoed as they walked around it - like every room they’d seen so far there was evidence of a battle; streaks of black burns decorated the walls, high near the ceiling and the chairs were kicked around overturned tables. “I wonder what happened,” Masayoshi said, dragging chairs into the kitchen to sit at one of the metal tables instead of out in the open, while Gotou boiled the water on a still working stove.
“I don’t really want to know,” Gotou said, and that was that.
Masayoshi found them chopsticks somewhere, and they ate their noodles in silence, until Gotou observed that it felt like being in the world’s lamest horror movie, and Masayoshi paled, and hit him in the arm. “Don’t say that,” he hissed, as if there was anyone else in the world who could overhear them at the moment.
“I’d take zombies and monsters over the unearthly silence,” Gotou said, and shifted in his seat so he could knock a pan over with a foot. Masayoshi shot off his chair and into position, chopsticks clutched defensively in his hand, and Gotou leaned forward and laughed, smacking the metal top of the table so hard it reverberated.
“That was really mean!”
“I know,” Gotou wiped his eye with a thumb and chuckled. “I know, I’m sorry.” Masayoshi relaxed his fight-or-flight pose, but still held both his chopsticks in one hand, but pointed them threateningly at Gotou.
“If you do that again,” he said.
“I won’t, come sit down and finish your ramen,” Gotou said, and as he spoke, a pan clattered from a rack behind him. Masayoshi and Gotou both froze, eyes wide. The noise was followed by the skittering sound of something disappearing into the recesses of the shelving unit against the wall. Very calmly, Gotou picked up both of their cups of ramen, and with as much dignity as they could muster, they relocated to the very large and open mess.
“I wonder what time it is,” Masayoshi said as they finished eating, secure in the fact that nothing could sneak up on them. He yawned.
Gotou did not have any idea, he did not wear a watch and they had both turned off their cell phones to conserve power. He looked at the ceiling and squinted, and then back to Masayoshi. They shrugged at each other and Gotou finished eating in silence. It almost did seem more prudent to find a place to sleep for a few hours than continue on their quest for a way to the launching bay in this abnormally-sized underground base. “We should check out the sleeping quarters,” Gotou said finally. “Catch a nap, and keep going after we’ve had more rest.”
“This place can’t be that big,” Masayoshi said stubbornly, as if they had not just spent the better part of several hours walking around and around it. He set his chopsticks down and yawned again, and then glared at Gotou like him yawning was somehow Gotou’s fault. In the end though, Gotou won out because Masayoshi was a lot more tired than he looked, and while he would keep pushing himself until he dropped if Gotou let him, there was no need to let him. There were no enemies in this base … if there were, they had had plenty of time to stumble across them by now.
They had passed sleeping quarters earlier, so they doubled back in that direction, after tossing the remains of their dinner. There was another split off that hallway they had not ventured down just yet, and Masayoshi looked down that way like he was considering continuing on, but Gotou manhandled him through a door into a room that clearly had not been used in years. The mattress coughed up dust when Masayoshi sat on it, so between the two of them they pulled it off the bottom bunk and flipped it onto the floor. Blankets were discovered in a pull-out drawer under the bed - they smelt strongly of mothballs, but at least they were not dusty. It was not much … but they had both had to deal with worse.
Masayoshi was out before Gotou had even settled onto the single-person mattress behind him. “Idiot,” Gotou murmured affectionately, and kissed the back of his head, before pulling Masayoshi to him, squeezing their bodies together for warmth in the too-cool environment. He should really be too keyed up to be this tired, but apparently crossing dimensional planes of existence took a lot of out someone. Soon, he too was asleep, lulled by the comforting familiarity of Masayoshi’s even breaths and steady heartbeat held against him.
#
“Hidenori, Hidenori-” Masayoshi’s excited voice cut through Gotou’s dreamless sleep like a knife. He blinked, clawed at consciousness and was rewarded by Masayoshi grabbing his sleeve and trying to pull him upright before he made it there himself.
“What - what the fuck,” Gotou wiped sleep from his eyes and glared up at Masayoshi, who was leaned over him with a huge grin. Masayoshi was not fazed by his glower, having long since grown immune to those sort of looks from Gotou specifically. His hair was sleep-wild, and Masayoshi was wearing his shoes again. “How long have you been awake?”
“Don’t know,” Masayoshi said. “Really got to start wearing a watch again, but - I found working lifts, and they go to the launching bay.”
Gotou let Masayoshi tug him excitedly to his feet, stumbling only a little off the mattress and bare feet cold on the tile file. Then he grabbed Masayoshi by his face and kissed him, and Masayoshi mumbled something into his mouth that he could not decipher on a good day, before releasing him and locating his shoes. “Where did you find them?” he asked, as he pulled his shoes back on.
“Down the hall further - I was terrified we’d have to try to find another stairwell in this place with unlocked doors. “ Masayoshi was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet in excitement. Gotou grabbed Masayoshi by the head again, although this time it was in an effort to pat down his hair, as it had poofed out around his head and looked somewhat ridiculous. “Augh, Hidenori,” Masayoshi complained.
“Hold still for thirty seconds, you look like a space alien,” Gotou said. Masayoshi held still obediently, and after Gotou ran his hands through Masayoshi’s hair a few times, patted it himself.
“You’re so weird,” he said.
“Whatever.” Gotou patted his pockets, looking for his cigarettes, and remembered with a stomach-churning twinge that he had left them in his jacket, which was currently an entire dimension away and made a distressed noise. Masayoshi ignored the noise and grabbed him by the arm, yanking him into the hallway and leaving behind a mess of blankets and an overturned mattress.
Sure enough, not far down the hallway it curved away, and at the end of the curve was a line of elevator doors. “You have got to be kidding me,” Gotou said. “If we’d turned left instead of right, we would have found them.” Masayoshi hit a button and the lift at the far end opened. “You said you found the launching bay - you went in this thing without knowing where it went?”
Masayoshi gave him a look that said of course I did, it’s what I do.
The inside of the lift was actually quite large, it looked like it could hold a decent-sized motor vehicle. Judging by the faded skid marks and dirt on the floor, it had. Just like the rest of the base it was dinghy in color, but the interior lights were not dim, and it didn’t jerk or otherwise make Gotou more nervous as the door slid closed. Masayoshi pressed the very last button, out of four. “Where do the other buttons go?”
“More hallways,” Masayoshi said. “Had to find out which level we were on.”
It took an oddly long amount of time for the lift to descend, but it kept moving the entire time. Finally, the bell chimed and the doors slid open, injecting light into a cavernous dark room. “This?” Gotou said, peering into a darkness that was not pierced by natural light. “How can you be certain-?”
Masayoshi stepped out of the lift, and walked into the darkness with little concern. A split second later lights suddenly started going on, high above their heads, coming to life slowly. “They detect movement,” Masayoshi yelled, already standing beside the decaying hunk of a military motor vehicle. “The lights must go into conservation mode when nothing moves for a while.”
The room was huge - and full of old vehicles. They were mostly destroyed - torched, burned-out or otherwise damaged beyond reasonable repair. “Well, this does not look good,” Gotou said, and stared up at what was once a helicopter, recognizable only due to its rotors. The blades were melted and drooping, visual testament to the intensity of the inferno that had consumed it.
“No, it’s awesome. Come over here!” Masayoshi yelled, his voice echoing out amongst the wreckage. “You have got to see this!”
Gotou found Masayoshi at the end of the launch bay, along a long platform. It was still dark over here, the overhead lights had not illuminated the actual runway, although he could sense the giant door that must close them off from the outside world. “What have you found?” he asked, watching Masayoshi follow the platform around … something, huge and half-covered in a tarp. Gotou stared up at whatever-this-was with an unsettled feeling. “This isn’t one of your Flamengers vehicles, is it?”
Masayoshi appeared around the side he vanished on - the catwalk didn’t surround the tarp-covered object. “It’s not, I’ve never seen anything like it. Come over here, already.” Masayoshi tugged on the tarp but it barely moved, clearly hooked on something far out of reach. Gotou followed Masayoshi over to the edge of the platform, and realized what he was seeing from his position was just the top third of the vehicle. Gotou rubbed his hand over his face.
“It’s a mecha,” he said, in that calm, just-accept-the-insanity-because-it-isn’t-going-away voice. “It’s a goddamned mecha, isn’t it?”
“Looks like it,” Masayoshi said. “There are two others just like it, but they’re busted up and half destroyed. This one look like it’s intact though.” Masayoshi already had the hatch open, and Gotou just stood there.
“You’re not getting in it.”
Masayoshi shrugged. “I want to see if it works. We can use it to get out of here, because it doesn’t look like anything else is going anywhere.”
The light came on above them suddenly, causing them both to jump. Huge lights slowly ignited, lighting down the length of the runway, and Gotou turned away from the lights to glare at Masayoshi but he had already disappeared inside the machine.
#
Masayoshi settled himself into the pilot’s seat and squinted. It was dark inside the mecha, and the air inside was musty and stale. Who knew how long it was sitting here, in the dark, waiting for him? He reached his arms out - the displays, dark but reflecting light from the open hatch, were more than an arm’s span away, but there really was not a whole lot of room in the cockpit. He did not know if they both would fit in here, and even if this thing did power up, but he was definitely not going anywhere without Gotou.
He leaned back out the open hatch - Gotou had walked down the catwalk, looking at the other destroyed machines. Masayoshi had stared at them earlier, fascinated by the damage. One, a dark gold color, was missing half its left side, the cockpit cracked open. The other, a deep violet, was missing its lower half, wires and structural metal bits hanging down like bits of exposed viscera. “I’m shutting the hatch,” Masayoshi called down to Gotou. “Just seeing if this thing will start up!”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Gotou yelled back at him. Masayoshi grabbed the interior hand on the hatch and pulled it closed, shutting himself in the darkness with a final, terrifying click.
Thirty seconds later, a screen on his right-hand side let green in the shape of a hand. Masayoshi placed his hand on it, watched as it scanned and went dark again. If it was biometrically linked to a pilot, they were going to be out of luck.
All of the screens in the cockpit came online at once. He could see almost the entire launch back, the screens were seamless, on every side to his left and right - if he twisted in his seat he could see behind him, to the edge of the seat - and even above, the screens seamlessly flowed onto the ceiling as well. It was like he was suspended in the air, in the launching bay - it was really, really cool.
There were overlays lighting up on the HUD - threat assessments on the ruined vehicles (0%), a straight-line dotted path indicating the blast doors he would use to exit - fuel and weapons statuses, and more besides. The lower portion of the primary screen, where he had placed his hand, a message blinked in bold verdant letters.
Identified: Hazama Masayoshi
Accept: Y/N?
He blinked. Oh good, Gotou was going to be thrilled about this development. But it meant that, whatever these vehicles were, this one at least was coded to work with him. Masayoshi hit the confirmation button, and he felt the entire suit shake as the engines slowly came to life. Gotou, on the catwalk outside, yelled something, hands around his mouth, but there didn’t appear to be an audio feed so Masayoshi found the emergency hatch release.
“What the hell are you doing?!” Gotou yelled at him. The tarp was blasted half off the machine by the warming engines, revealing a familiar, dark red finish. Masayoshi grinned at that, it was as apropos as anything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
“We’re getting out of here, come on,” Masayoshi yelled back at him, over the mounting roar.
“You are not seriously going to fly that thing!”
“Hey, it can’t be that much different than Flamen Robo,” Masayoshi said. “Get in here, I’m not leaving you behind!”
Gotou hesitated in the hatch - there was barely enough room for the pilot in the cockpit, it was not exactly a passenger vehicle. “I am not sitting on your lap.”
“You’re not, I’m sitting on yours - I can’t fly this thing around you.” Masayoshi hit a few switches above his head, and heard the change in the boosters igniting. It was not that much like Flamen Robo, because that was a team effort - but Gotou did not need to know that.
After a few moments of shuffle, move - don’t sit right there, oh my god, shift your weight - elbows, watch your elbow - Masayoshi only hit his head on the inside of the cockpit once, and managed to get the hatch closed and sealed. “Does this thing have a seatbelt?” Gotou said into Masayoshi’s back, arms wrapped around his stomach to keep Masayoshi on his lap.
The main controls were just a bit far back for comfortable use, but it was not like he was going to make a habit out of piloting this thing from Gotou’s lap. Masayoshi shifted and reached back for a toggle, but then froze. “Hidenori.”
“You’re shifting all over my lap, I’m sorry,” Gotou said into his back.
“Think about something else!”
“Your ass is literally pressed against my cock right now, I can’t think of anything else!”
Masayoshi elbowed Gotou, who squawked and pinched his side. That induced wriggling, but there really was no room to get away in the cockpit. Masayoshi’s flailing hand smacked a switch back to the side, and suddenly the control panels changed.
Initiating… scrolled across the screen, ellipses blinking slowly as it loaded.
“Initiating what?” Gotou tried to push Masayoshi’s head down to see what the display screen read.
“What button did you make me hit?” Masayoshi twisted his head away, looking back over his shoulder at a row of identical toggles.
“I didn’t make you hit anything!” Gotou said indignantly, as Masayoshi flipped a few toggles in vain. They both heard the earth-shaking rumble of the blast door at the end of the runaway open. “Shit.”
“No, we want to leave anyway,” Masayoshi said, distracted. “That just saves us trying to figure out how to open them-”
“Under our own volition!”
“Would you let me work?” Masayoshi intentionally squirmed on his lap and Gotou grabbed his waist with both hands and ground up against him, momentarily distracted.
The computer beeped, drawing both their attention to the display screen.
Initiation sequence activated for launch. Return beacon detected - operating. Manual override disabled. Launch in T-minus ten seconds…
“What the hell does that even mean, return beacon?” Gotou asked. The rockets roared to live and the entire vehicle moved forward of its own volition, giant lumbering steps away from the catwalk and headed toward the runway. “Masayoshi!”
“I’m not doing it!” Masayoshi yanked on the control and tried to bring the axis even but the machine moved forward regardless. “It must be some kind of return protocol, I don’t know how to abort it!”
The tarp covering the unit was completely blown off by the gale of wind and snow that blasted through the open launch bay doors. Masayoshi saw it go out of the corner of his eye - but then the boosters ignited completely and he was slammed back into Gotou, who held him with an iron grip as the mecha shot out of the launching bay and into the bleak winter storm.
Fandom: Samurai Flamenco
AU: Mecha
Characters/Pairing: Gotou/Masayoshi, Beyond
Rating: NSFW/E
Length: 5753
Summary: What have you done?
What have you done?
His voice a memory, rising to a crescendo, a fever-pitch, betrayal and hatred hand-in-hand, eye-to-eye and still he would not touch him, would not strike him, would not silence that voice, that voice -
What have you done . . . .
Gotou was on his feet and he was not sure why, or how - it felt like someone, something had grabbed him with a hook somewhere just under his ribcage and yanked him through a hole much too small for his body. Everything was scrambled upside-down and backwards, he felt like a washing machine spin cycle had spat him out too early. Gotou staggered forward and caught himself, one hand on the wall, before he vomited bile onto the grimy tile floor, heaving until he had nothing else left to purge. He coughed and dragged the back of his hand across his mouth, forcing deep breaths - inhale, exhale, repeat - until the nausea passed.
What had just happened? One moment he was sitting next to Masayoshi, and the next he was - where was he? Where was Masayoshi?
Alarmed, Gotou straightened and as he moved to turn around, he heard a shuffle behind him. He glanced over his shoulder and his heart rate at least reduced somewhat, as Masayoshi was sitting on the floor behind him, upright, his eyes wide and blank. “Masayoshi!” Gotou said, unable to suppress the urgency.
“Whoa,” Masayoshi said, and blinked his eyes back to normal. Gotou exhaled again, swallowed against the dry bile taste in his mouth, and wet his lips. Masayoshi got to his feet, a little wobbly but unlike Gotou he managed to keep his lunch down. “Any idea where we are?” Gotou asked instead, looking around again. When he glanced back to Masayoshi, Masayoshi was patting the top of his head and his side, looking down. “What are you doing?”
“It feels like the top of my head came off,” Masayoshi complained, and then scratched his fingers into his hair, spotting the small pile of vomit by Gotou’s feet and wrinkling his nose. “Ugh, you should clean that up.”
“I’ll get right on that,” Gotou said dryly, with no intention of following through. He stepped away from the wall - the hallway that they were in was not particularly large, with a sweeping, curved ceiling. Gotou craned his neck, following the lines of the architecture - and looked down the hallway. In the handful of minutes they had been here so far, there was no alarms or alerts to their presence. “Seems like a military base of some kind,” he said. Masayoshi touched the lines of color that cut through the plain, dirty white decoration of the wall. “You recognize it?” Gotou asked him.
“It’s similar to the design of the Flamengers’ base,” Masayoshi said. “Color scheme’s wrong, though.” The lights in the hallway were dim, but each end of the hallway bisected, both going left and right, and there were no direction marking to be had, or doors in this offshoot that they had arrived in. Masayoshi rubbed grime off the wall with the palm of his hand, and then wiped his hand on the bottom of his short-sleeved hooded jacket, leaving a streak of dark soot behind. “Come on,” Masayoshi said, and headed determinedly in one direction.
The other-Masayoshi was not with them. The other-Masayoshi, with the squid tentacle for a tail, with the same blue-grey eyes and tawny hair but with a voice that was just different enough to send a chill down Gotou’s spine. The other-Masayoshi. Gotou remembered the photo now, the one that played on the news incessantly when the Prime Minister was trying discredit the Flamengers, trying to track down Masayoshi, “evidence” that Masayoshi was conspiring against the government was nothing more than a grainy photograph of what appeared to be Masayoshi talking to himself, dressed in a trenchcoat. “What do you know about him?” Gotou asked as they walked, watching the back of Masayoshi’s head. Masayoshi was looking around constantly, at each wall and ahead, always moving, always watching. “The other you.”
“He lost,” Masayoshi said. “He lost … his way, his path, I don’t know but he lost against From Beyond and they made him into … that.” He shook his head and looked back over his shoulder at Gotou. Gotou did not know what he expected to see from Masayoshi - fear, possibly; pity, maybe - but not the hard, cold look he got in return. “I can’t falter,” Masayoshi said. “I won’t become that.”
They came to the junction at the end of another hallway. It split off in two directions, right or left, but this one had a few doors inset into the slope of its walls, peppering the surface all the way down until the hallway curved out of sight. Masayoshi put one hand on the wall and considered for a moment, before turning decisively left. After a moment, Gotou followed.
The base was, for all appearances, abandoned.
Masayoshi stood in the command center, hands on his hips. There was actual damage here - smoke damage that reached into the corridor behind. Several of the consoles and the largest screens were nothing but burned-out husks of technology. Only a handful of overhead lights flickered to life in the command center came on when he and Gotou had pried the usually-automated doors open; most of the light spilled from beyond the doors. The damage was old, dust lay on what small bits remained unscathed. Gotou crouched over an intact console pushing buttons with no real sense of purpose, as the power to all the devices seemed completely dead.
Snow blew past the heavy reinforced windows. It was dark outside; dark from the storm, not dark as night but still gray and heavy like a shroud. There was a sharp retort as Gotou kicked the console. “Piece of shit,” he called out gruffly. “Any other ideas?”
“This isn’t a Flamengers’ base,” Masayoshi said. He had been mostly certain of the fact already, but the layout of the command center cemented that. It had a similar feel but it was different enough that he immediately felt ill at ease. “I have no idea where we are.” His first thought had been to check his cell phone - this was Earth, after all, just a different time-line - but it showed no connection to a carrier. He could not use his GPS without a connection. Masayoshi was completely baffled at where to go from here.
“Obviously the base has a power source,” Gotou walked across the room, and kicked an old rolling chair out of the way, his hands shoved in his pockets. The noise of the chair skittering across concrete and bouncing against another row of consoles was extraordinarily loud in the unnatural quiet of the command center. “Otherwise we’d be completely in the dark. There’s got to be a computer in here somewhere that hasn’t been destroyed that’s wired to the backup generator.”
Masayoshi had a sinking feeling that maybe this had all been an elaborate trap by Beyond Flamenco - if he was even called that anymore, with From Beyond defeated and destroyed. Why drop him - why drop them both in an abandoned base in the middle of a snowstorm? He had made the wrong decision, Gotou had been right to caution him not to listen; even if From Beyond was no longer using him as an interface, something else could have been….
What if coming here had put their home at risk?
There was another loud bang, startling Masayoshi out of reverie - Gotou had kicked another console. “Stop doing that, you’re gonna hurt yourself,” Masayoshi yelled at him, and Gotou limped around a little and swore mostly under his breath. “You’re not going to fix anything kicking things.”
“No, but it makes me feel better,” Gotou muttered.
With no computer access they could not pull up a blueprint of the base. “Maybe there’s still a working vehicle in the launching bay,” Masayoshi suggested. “We can take one of those, figure out where we are, and find out what’s going on.”
And hope to god that they were just somewhere in the middle of a brutal winter, and not located somewhere in the middle of Antarctica.
Gotou grabbed the railing that Masayoshi was standing behind, and hoisted himself up and over it, ignoring the stairs at the other end of the platform. “It’s as good a plan as any,” he grunted. “Do you know how to get to the launching bay?”
“Not exactly,” Masayoshi admitted.
“Guess we better start walking, then.” Gotou headed for the pried-open blast doors with purpose, and only stopped when Masayoshi did not immediately follow him. “’yoshi?”
Masayoshi was still staring out the window, at the swirling snow. There was a heavy chill to the base, he could feel it settling into his skin now. They weren’t exactly dressed for this weather. What if there were no working vehicles, no communications - what if they were stuck here? He could have doomed them both. Masayoshi shook his head once and narrowed his eyes. He was the hero. There was always a way out.
Gotou’s hand on his shoulder startled him. “Masayoshi,” Gotou said quietly, as if he could read the thoughts chasing in a circle around Masayoshi’s mind.
“Let’s find the launch bay,” Masayoshi said, and Gotou squeezed his shoulder.
Masayoshi spun himself in the computer chair, his legs flung out and his tail flopping behind him. The room was dimly lit, primarily by the large computer screens running and processing data in the background. He had never really cared for the screens, he preferred the 3D interfaces that were far more common now, but some people were still very attached to the technology that they had grown up with.
“Would you please stop doing that, it’s very distracting.” Midorikawa Hekiru was seated at a brightly-lit workstation, his long hair pulled back from his face. He glanced up, over his glasses and frowned disapprovingly at Masayoshi, who let the chair spin itself out before flopping his feet flat on the ground. Midorikawa looked back down at the dismantled device and turned over a burnt component with a pair of forceps. “And you don’t know where they went?”
“I told you that already.” Masayoshi slumped back in his chair, arms crossed like a petulant toddler. “The piece of crap shorted out and I ended up going face-first into a wall.” He kicked his legs and stared at the ceiling, before he sighed out a long breath. If he had well and truly lost them, then … everything was over, wasn’t it? “You should have warned me that it wasn’t powerful enough to carry a load of three people.”
“Mm,” Midorikawa flipped a few pieces of circuitry and held a piece below a magnifying glass. “It was never meant to be used to pull people the the fabric of dimensional space. If you had bothered to ask instead of just absconding with the device, I would have told you that there was a ninety-four percent risk of failure.”
Masayoshi tilted his head to the side. “Yeah, and if I’d bothered to ask, you would have stopped me anyway.”
“Most likely.” He moved the magnifying glass and sighed, before replacing the piece of circuitry on the clean white cloth he had spread over the workstation. “I believe I can repair the device back to a working capacity for transportation; but without Harazuka-sensei’s help, I don’t know if it will ever achieve a full matter load again.” Midorikawa raised his head and glared across the room at Masayoshi. There was something resembling venom in his voice - old, worn-out, like he did not know quite how to forget how much he loathed Masayoshi. “Don’t forget the only reason I’m helping you is because Harazuka-sensei still thought you trustworthy,” he added.
Masayoshi had learned to let that disgust roll off of him months ago - he would have nothing but hate and contempt, and he was okay with that. It gave people a commonality, after all, to loathe him. “You do remember that this whole thing is about saving the world, right?”
“Sometimes I wonder if this world is worth saving, any longer,” Midorikawa said softly, and pushed his glasses up his nose.
Well, they had not found the lifts yet, but they had managed to locate the officer’s mess. Gotou opened the huge walk-in freezer, sleeve drawn over his nose as a preemptive measure. Fortunately the electricity had not been cut off to the mess, and he was not immediately slain in his shoes by the noxious odor of food-rot. Masayoshi had lingered behind him, far too chicken to open the door himself. “It’s still on,” Gotou said unnecessarily - the light had flickered on inside to reveal mostly empty shelves, and a few damp boxes near the back of the freezer. “And it’s empty,” he said with a sigh.
“They didn’t leave much behind,” Masayoshi said. He had found a box of instant ramen, dusty and who-knew-how-old hiding on a top shelf in the larder, and it looked like they were going to be eating instant ramen for the foreseeable future. He had survived off worse in his days at the academy. “I just thought there would be more.”
“Me too,” Gotou said. He closed the freezer door with a firm click. “At least there’s water and electricity.”
“And ramen,” Masayoshi added.
“And ramen,” Gotou agreed.
They had been wandering the base for what felt like hours, up and down stairs, peering in abandoned rooms and prying open automatic doors that didn’t seem to want to cooperate. The mess had been sitting open, lights brighter than the dim hallway, and chairs scattered around long tables that reached from one end of the room to the other. The room was cavernous and echoed as they walked around it - like every room they’d seen so far there was evidence of a battle; streaks of black burns decorated the walls, high near the ceiling and the chairs were kicked around overturned tables. “I wonder what happened,” Masayoshi said, dragging chairs into the kitchen to sit at one of the metal tables instead of out in the open, while Gotou boiled the water on a still working stove.
“I don’t really want to know,” Gotou said, and that was that.
Masayoshi found them chopsticks somewhere, and they ate their noodles in silence, until Gotou observed that it felt like being in the world’s lamest horror movie, and Masayoshi paled, and hit him in the arm. “Don’t say that,” he hissed, as if there was anyone else in the world who could overhear them at the moment.
“I’d take zombies and monsters over the unearthly silence,” Gotou said, and shifted in his seat so he could knock a pan over with a foot. Masayoshi shot off his chair and into position, chopsticks clutched defensively in his hand, and Gotou leaned forward and laughed, smacking the metal top of the table so hard it reverberated.
“That was really mean!”
“I know,” Gotou wiped his eye with a thumb and chuckled. “I know, I’m sorry.” Masayoshi relaxed his fight-or-flight pose, but still held both his chopsticks in one hand, but pointed them threateningly at Gotou.
“If you do that again,” he said.
“I won’t, come sit down and finish your ramen,” Gotou said, and as he spoke, a pan clattered from a rack behind him. Masayoshi and Gotou both froze, eyes wide. The noise was followed by the skittering sound of something disappearing into the recesses of the shelving unit against the wall. Very calmly, Gotou picked up both of their cups of ramen, and with as much dignity as they could muster, they relocated to the very large and open mess.
“I wonder what time it is,” Masayoshi said as they finished eating, secure in the fact that nothing could sneak up on them. He yawned.
Gotou did not have any idea, he did not wear a watch and they had both turned off their cell phones to conserve power. He looked at the ceiling and squinted, and then back to Masayoshi. They shrugged at each other and Gotou finished eating in silence. It almost did seem more prudent to find a place to sleep for a few hours than continue on their quest for a way to the launching bay in this abnormally-sized underground base. “We should check out the sleeping quarters,” Gotou said finally. “Catch a nap, and keep going after we’ve had more rest.”
“This place can’t be that big,” Masayoshi said stubbornly, as if they had not just spent the better part of several hours walking around and around it. He set his chopsticks down and yawned again, and then glared at Gotou like him yawning was somehow Gotou’s fault. In the end though, Gotou won out because Masayoshi was a lot more tired than he looked, and while he would keep pushing himself until he dropped if Gotou let him, there was no need to let him. There were no enemies in this base … if there were, they had had plenty of time to stumble across them by now.
They had passed sleeping quarters earlier, so they doubled back in that direction, after tossing the remains of their dinner. There was another split off that hallway they had not ventured down just yet, and Masayoshi looked down that way like he was considering continuing on, but Gotou manhandled him through a door into a room that clearly had not been used in years. The mattress coughed up dust when Masayoshi sat on it, so between the two of them they pulled it off the bottom bunk and flipped it onto the floor. Blankets were discovered in a pull-out drawer under the bed - they smelt strongly of mothballs, but at least they were not dusty. It was not much … but they had both had to deal with worse.
Masayoshi was out before Gotou had even settled onto the single-person mattress behind him. “Idiot,” Gotou murmured affectionately, and kissed the back of his head, before pulling Masayoshi to him, squeezing their bodies together for warmth in the too-cool environment. He should really be too keyed up to be this tired, but apparently crossing dimensional planes of existence took a lot of out someone. Soon, he too was asleep, lulled by the comforting familiarity of Masayoshi’s even breaths and steady heartbeat held against him.
“Hidenori, Hidenori-” Masayoshi’s excited voice cut through Gotou’s dreamless sleep like a knife. He blinked, clawed at consciousness and was rewarded by Masayoshi grabbing his sleeve and trying to pull him upright before he made it there himself.
“What - what the fuck,” Gotou wiped sleep from his eyes and glared up at Masayoshi, who was leaned over him with a huge grin. Masayoshi was not fazed by his glower, having long since grown immune to those sort of looks from Gotou specifically. His hair was sleep-wild, and Masayoshi was wearing his shoes again. “How long have you been awake?”
“Don’t know,” Masayoshi said. “Really got to start wearing a watch again, but - I found working lifts, and they go to the launching bay.”
Gotou let Masayoshi tug him excitedly to his feet, stumbling only a little off the mattress and bare feet cold on the tile file. Then he grabbed Masayoshi by his face and kissed him, and Masayoshi mumbled something into his mouth that he could not decipher on a good day, before releasing him and locating his shoes. “Where did you find them?” he asked, as he pulled his shoes back on.
“Down the hall further - I was terrified we’d have to try to find another stairwell in this place with unlocked doors. “ Masayoshi was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet in excitement. Gotou grabbed Masayoshi by the head again, although this time it was in an effort to pat down his hair, as it had poofed out around his head and looked somewhat ridiculous. “Augh, Hidenori,” Masayoshi complained.
“Hold still for thirty seconds, you look like a space alien,” Gotou said. Masayoshi held still obediently, and after Gotou ran his hands through Masayoshi’s hair a few times, patted it himself.
“You’re so weird,” he said.
“Whatever.” Gotou patted his pockets, looking for his cigarettes, and remembered with a stomach-churning twinge that he had left them in his jacket, which was currently an entire dimension away and made a distressed noise. Masayoshi ignored the noise and grabbed him by the arm, yanking him into the hallway and leaving behind a mess of blankets and an overturned mattress.
Sure enough, not far down the hallway it curved away, and at the end of the curve was a line of elevator doors. “You have got to be kidding me,” Gotou said. “If we’d turned left instead of right, we would have found them.” Masayoshi hit a button and the lift at the far end opened. “You said you found the launching bay - you went in this thing without knowing where it went?”
Masayoshi gave him a look that said of course I did, it’s what I do.
The inside of the lift was actually quite large, it looked like it could hold a decent-sized motor vehicle. Judging by the faded skid marks and dirt on the floor, it had. Just like the rest of the base it was dinghy in color, but the interior lights were not dim, and it didn’t jerk or otherwise make Gotou more nervous as the door slid closed. Masayoshi pressed the very last button, out of four. “Where do the other buttons go?”
“More hallways,” Masayoshi said. “Had to find out which level we were on.”
It took an oddly long amount of time for the lift to descend, but it kept moving the entire time. Finally, the bell chimed and the doors slid open, injecting light into a cavernous dark room. “This?” Gotou said, peering into a darkness that was not pierced by natural light. “How can you be certain-?”
Masayoshi stepped out of the lift, and walked into the darkness with little concern. A split second later lights suddenly started going on, high above their heads, coming to life slowly. “They detect movement,” Masayoshi yelled, already standing beside the decaying hunk of a military motor vehicle. “The lights must go into conservation mode when nothing moves for a while.”
The room was huge - and full of old vehicles. They were mostly destroyed - torched, burned-out or otherwise damaged beyond reasonable repair. “Well, this does not look good,” Gotou said, and stared up at what was once a helicopter, recognizable only due to its rotors. The blades were melted and drooping, visual testament to the intensity of the inferno that had consumed it.
“No, it’s awesome. Come over here!” Masayoshi yelled, his voice echoing out amongst the wreckage. “You have got to see this!”
Gotou found Masayoshi at the end of the launch bay, along a long platform. It was still dark over here, the overhead lights had not illuminated the actual runway, although he could sense the giant door that must close them off from the outside world. “What have you found?” he asked, watching Masayoshi follow the platform around … something, huge and half-covered in a tarp. Gotou stared up at whatever-this-was with an unsettled feeling. “This isn’t one of your Flamengers vehicles, is it?”
Masayoshi appeared around the side he vanished on - the catwalk didn’t surround the tarp-covered object. “It’s not, I’ve never seen anything like it. Come over here, already.” Masayoshi tugged on the tarp but it barely moved, clearly hooked on something far out of reach. Gotou followed Masayoshi over to the edge of the platform, and realized what he was seeing from his position was just the top third of the vehicle. Gotou rubbed his hand over his face.
“It’s a mecha,” he said, in that calm, just-accept-the-insanity-because-it-isn’t-going-away voice. “It’s a goddamned mecha, isn’t it?”
“Looks like it,” Masayoshi said. “There are two others just like it, but they’re busted up and half destroyed. This one look like it’s intact though.” Masayoshi already had the hatch open, and Gotou just stood there.
“You’re not getting in it.”
Masayoshi shrugged. “I want to see if it works. We can use it to get out of here, because it doesn’t look like anything else is going anywhere.”
The light came on above them suddenly, causing them both to jump. Huge lights slowly ignited, lighting down the length of the runway, and Gotou turned away from the lights to glare at Masayoshi but he had already disappeared inside the machine.
Masayoshi settled himself into the pilot’s seat and squinted. It was dark inside the mecha, and the air inside was musty and stale. Who knew how long it was sitting here, in the dark, waiting for him? He reached his arms out - the displays, dark but reflecting light from the open hatch, were more than an arm’s span away, but there really was not a whole lot of room in the cockpit. He did not know if they both would fit in here, and even if this thing did power up, but he was definitely not going anywhere without Gotou.
He leaned back out the open hatch - Gotou had walked down the catwalk, looking at the other destroyed machines. Masayoshi had stared at them earlier, fascinated by the damage. One, a dark gold color, was missing half its left side, the cockpit cracked open. The other, a deep violet, was missing its lower half, wires and structural metal bits hanging down like bits of exposed viscera. “I’m shutting the hatch,” Masayoshi called down to Gotou. “Just seeing if this thing will start up!”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Gotou yelled back at him. Masayoshi grabbed the interior hand on the hatch and pulled it closed, shutting himself in the darkness with a final, terrifying click.
Thirty seconds later, a screen on his right-hand side let green in the shape of a hand. Masayoshi placed his hand on it, watched as it scanned and went dark again. If it was biometrically linked to a pilot, they were going to be out of luck.
All of the screens in the cockpit came online at once. He could see almost the entire launch back, the screens were seamless, on every side to his left and right - if he twisted in his seat he could see behind him, to the edge of the seat - and even above, the screens seamlessly flowed onto the ceiling as well. It was like he was suspended in the air, in the launching bay - it was really, really cool.
There were overlays lighting up on the HUD - threat assessments on the ruined vehicles (0%), a straight-line dotted path indicating the blast doors he would use to exit - fuel and weapons statuses, and more besides. The lower portion of the primary screen, where he had placed his hand, a message blinked in bold verdant letters.
Identified: Hazama Masayoshi
Accept: Y/N?
He blinked. Oh good, Gotou was going to be thrilled about this development. But it meant that, whatever these vehicles were, this one at least was coded to work with him. Masayoshi hit the confirmation button, and he felt the entire suit shake as the engines slowly came to life. Gotou, on the catwalk outside, yelled something, hands around his mouth, but there didn’t appear to be an audio feed so Masayoshi found the emergency hatch release.
“What the hell are you doing?!” Gotou yelled at him. The tarp was blasted half off the machine by the warming engines, revealing a familiar, dark red finish. Masayoshi grinned at that, it was as apropos as anything else that had happened in the last twenty-four hours.
“We’re getting out of here, come on,” Masayoshi yelled back at him, over the mounting roar.
“You are not seriously going to fly that thing!”
“Hey, it can’t be that much different than Flamen Robo,” Masayoshi said. “Get in here, I’m not leaving you behind!”
Gotou hesitated in the hatch - there was barely enough room for the pilot in the cockpit, it was not exactly a passenger vehicle. “I am not sitting on your lap.”
“You’re not, I’m sitting on yours - I can’t fly this thing around you.” Masayoshi hit a few switches above his head, and heard the change in the boosters igniting. It was not that much like Flamen Robo, because that was a team effort - but Gotou did not need to know that.
After a few moments of shuffle, move - don’t sit right there, oh my god, shift your weight - elbows, watch your elbow - Masayoshi only hit his head on the inside of the cockpit once, and managed to get the hatch closed and sealed. “Does this thing have a seatbelt?” Gotou said into Masayoshi’s back, arms wrapped around his stomach to keep Masayoshi on his lap.
The main controls were just a bit far back for comfortable use, but it was not like he was going to make a habit out of piloting this thing from Gotou’s lap. Masayoshi shifted and reached back for a toggle, but then froze. “Hidenori.”
“You’re shifting all over my lap, I’m sorry,” Gotou said into his back.
“Think about something else!”
“Your ass is literally pressed against my cock right now, I can’t think of anything else!”
Masayoshi elbowed Gotou, who squawked and pinched his side. That induced wriggling, but there really was no room to get away in the cockpit. Masayoshi’s flailing hand smacked a switch back to the side, and suddenly the control panels changed.
Initiating… scrolled across the screen, ellipses blinking slowly as it loaded.
“Initiating what?” Gotou tried to push Masayoshi’s head down to see what the display screen read.
“What button did you make me hit?” Masayoshi twisted his head away, looking back over his shoulder at a row of identical toggles.
“I didn’t make you hit anything!” Gotou said indignantly, as Masayoshi flipped a few toggles in vain. They both heard the earth-shaking rumble of the blast door at the end of the runaway open. “Shit.”
“No, we want to leave anyway,” Masayoshi said, distracted. “That just saves us trying to figure out how to open them-”
“Under our own volition!”
“Would you let me work?” Masayoshi intentionally squirmed on his lap and Gotou grabbed his waist with both hands and ground up against him, momentarily distracted.
The computer beeped, drawing both their attention to the display screen.
Initiation sequence activated for launch. Return beacon detected - operating. Manual override disabled. Launch in T-minus ten seconds…
“What the hell does that even mean, return beacon?” Gotou asked. The rockets roared to live and the entire vehicle moved forward of its own volition, giant lumbering steps away from the catwalk and headed toward the runway. “Masayoshi!”
“I’m not doing it!” Masayoshi yanked on the control and tried to bring the axis even but the machine moved forward regardless. “It must be some kind of return protocol, I don’t know how to abort it!”
The tarp covering the unit was completely blown off by the gale of wind and snow that blasted through the open launch bay doors. Masayoshi saw it go out of the corner of his eye - but then the boosters ignited completely and he was slammed back into Gotou, who held him with an iron grip as the mecha shot out of the launching bay and into the bleak winter storm.
