What’s Waiting Beyond (2/7)

[bottan]

Title: What’s Waiting Beyond (2/7)
Chapters: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [epilogue]
Pairings: KuroFai, SyaoSaku
Word count for this chapter: 4,295
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: violence, gore, depicted death, elements from horror stories, stupid silliness, semi-coherent rambling on technology I barely understand
Summary: On one of his missions, Kurogane meets a strange woman at a devastated space station. The nightmares from his past return. And he somehow won't get rid of that particular idiot blabbering at him about dragons.
Author’s Note: This is a remix of the highly recommended Catch A Dragon By The Tail by reikah. I stole her dragons put them into space. Because this is fanfic. :Db (I'm really not doing the fic justice, I'm very much reccing the original.)

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__CHAPTER TWO__

 
At first he had thought that the darkness of space itself was tearing its way into Suwa torus,^[2] a bulging mass that poured out of the breaking sky. He was barely aware of the people around him shouting and running.  He stood petrified, the wooden practice sword useless his hands as he stared up at the thing. And then, the black beast unfurled its wings, so giant that they reached from one side of the torus to the other, and swiped down on the village. Youou finally screamed as he felt the whirlwind lift rip his feet from the ground. His mother gripped for him, pulling him up on the porch and into the house in the last moment. She closed the door behind himself with a crash and they stumbled across the living room, fighting against the storm. His mother ripped open the ancient wood closet and pushed one of the orange emergency suits at him. Youou couldn’t breathe and his hands were fumbling with the straps in panic and he was still only half inside it when his mother had finished dressing. Her hands were steady and firm as she helped him inside.
 
His legs stiff in the ill-fitting, airtight suit, he stumbled behind his mother and across the destroyed mess of their house.
 
“Where’s dad?” he had asked her. She had just silently shook his head. It hit him as odd that she wouldn’t answer, but before he could ask anything else, she pulled up the tatami mats in the bed room and pushed him down the shaft that opened beyond. She didn’t scream or talk, just smiled a thin, open-lipped smile, but her gestures were clear enough, and he clambered down the ladder. He knew she would follow him. He knew she wouldn’t leave him alone. He was just going down first, down and down and down, the endless tunnel through the outer mantel of the torus. Suwa torus was shaking, vibrating with the engines that were hidden inside the walls and reverberating with crashes that probably meant nothing. Youou couldn’t help thinking that it was the black horror overhead, wreaking havoc on his home town.
 
He reached Hien after what seemed to be forever. The tiny ship was lying dormant, obedient in its small chamber, waiting for him to drop onto its hatch and pull it open. And once he was inside, he pulled off the helmet and waited. The air smelled warm and like steel and his breath was so loud in the silence. He tried to stop his hands from shaking. The windows of the ship showed nothing but the colorless, vibrating metal of the tiny room he was trapped in. He had always dreamt of flying Hien with his father, going out to visit other habitats, but now that he was inside and for the very first time ready to take flight, he felt like It was so narrow that he couldn’t breathe.
 
When the radio connection finally crackled and blinked, he almost fell over his own feet in his haste to activate the speakers.
 
“Hien, 206b,” he shouted, remembering words he had whispered to himself in his sleep a thousand times. “Youou, son of Kurogane, speaking.”
 
“Youou! The Gods be thanked, you’re there!”
 
“Dad!” Youou could have cried. Instead his hands curled firmer around the edge of the pilot’s seat and asked what he needed to know. “Dad, is Mom with you? She never came down the shaft!”
 
“Listen, your Mom is fine, we’re going to take the freighter out. You’ll need to fly Hien out on your own,“ the connection had frizzled and died for a moment, and Youou panicked. The world was fraying at the edges and the steadying, calming voice of his father was all he had left in the darkness.
 
“Dad? Dad, are you there? Why didn’t Mom come down here, the freighters are all across Suwa!” only static crackles answered him. “Dad!” he called, and as though it had heard him, the radio came back online.
 
“-ou? Can you hear-” Crack. “-the coordinates for New Tokyo. Did you hear that? HIen answers to your thoughts, just go through the control panel, you’ll find the coordinates for New Tokyo.”
 
“I got them,” he said, and his voice shook as bad as his hands as they touched the flurry of lights on the screen that moved according to his. The name of the capital was steadily floating amidst them, even as he was afraid and lost.
 
“Good, Youou! Trust the ship, it will get you-“ Crack.
 
“How will I find you at New Tokyo?” Youou cried.
 
“Ask for Tomoyo, everyone knows her,” he had sounded rushed. “Repeat after me, Princess Tomoyo!”

“Princess Tomoyo,” his voice was clogged with tears.
 
“And now get out!” it was a shout. “Just hit the start button! Youou, I’m proud o-“ Crack.
 
And Youou pressed the button down, the ship sagged as the metal doors underneath opened, and then he was thrown from the torus. He pressed his hands against the freezing plastic of the cockpit, staring upwards as Suwa Torus was moving out of sight above him – he couldn’t even see the damage, nor the thing that had done it. His home was nothing more than a ring of white steel and plastic against the darkness of space, growing smaller and smaller. When Hien told him to sit down and fasten the seatbelts before entering hyperspace, the moon Suwa was orbiting around had shrunken to the size of a fingernail.
 
*****
 
Kurogane blamed all the talk on the dragons for the way he remembered his hometown, at night. He had never seen his parents again. Suwa had been destroyed entirely, the dragon that had attacked them had had enough power to simply shove the station out of its orbit and into the moon it was circling. Suwa burnt in its hostile-to-life atmosphere and crashed on its surface, strewn across kilometers of ground. It was not feeding, not following any purpose that Kurogane could see – it was simply destroying them.
 
Kurogane knew, today, that his mother probably hadn’t even been alive anymore when his father had contacted him. Something had been wrong with her suit. He remembered her lips turning blue even as she pushed at him, and the way she wouldn’t speak. His father himself probably never even expected to make it to the freighters.
 
They had saved him, and even today, images of it tore Kurogane from his sleep with tears in his eyes.
 
*****
 
After they had docked at New Tokyo Torus, Kurogane had dropped the woman off next to the closest hospital, even when he had the feeling that she wouldn’t enter it. He had avoided talking to her the last two days, and there was nothing left to say. After awkward goodbyes, he soon vanished into the dingy streets that were ravines between towering walls of dirty concrete, trying to put her off of his mind.
 
He dropped his report for Tomoyo at the castle gates and received his orders for his next mission, there. Lecourt outpost, in the part of the galaxy that was crawling with demons. He stashed the notes away, not entering the building to see the princess. He hadn’t seen her in a few months, and he barely visited her when he was in New Tokyo, anyway. Not that he was still angry that she hadn’t accepted his offer to become her bodyguard, after he finished learning under Souma. Greater things are waiting for you, she had told him back then. He was still waiting for anything great to happen to him, and the longer he waited, the less he wanted to see her. It was just that he felt he didn’t really belong there. And he didn’t really have anything he’d have needed to tell her face-to-face, anyway. He also had the feeling she would notice that his mind was going down a road it hadn’t taken for the last ten years. Finding whatever creature had destroyed Suwa is a hope- and useless endeavor, Souma had taught him, revenge is seldomly a cause worth pursuing.
 
Kurogane wasn’t even sure it was revenge, he sought, anymore. But, if nothing else, he needed to know why things had happened.
 
It was early noon and down from the solar mirrors above New Tokyo Torus light poured onto the orbital habitat, solid silver beams in the dusty atmosphere that rolled over the rooftops of towering buildings and into the dirty streets below. The markets were loud with the shouts of the vendors, clogged with the garish colors of the newest fashion, with people, humans and other species alike. The air was thick with the reek of fried fish, spices, and syrup, steel and rust and rot, sweat and grime. The markets of New Tokyo were said to offer you anything, if only you knew where to search, and what to pay. And possibly whom to ask in what language.
 
Kurogane found what he had searched for was wedged between The Songs of the Nibelungs and a worn tome on Winged Snakes from the 15^th century. He pulled it out in carefully, almost toppling over a row of miniature statues of various reptiles that decorated the rest of the stall.
 
Encyclopedia of Dragons. Classifications of an Alien Life Form. It was strange to hold a real book in his hands, so old that it might have been from the 22^nd century. It lay heavily in his hands, and the pages shifted against the soft spine like water – it was fragile and yellowed, smelled of dust and mold and was nothing like the indifferent string of data projected in midair that he had learned to identify as a “book.” It seemed… impractical. He leafed past the preamble skimmed the introduction.
 
 
0.1 Early Sightings of Dragons on Earth
 
Long before humans made first contact with sentient, alien life forms, sightings of dragons have been reported all over the planet earth. Legends reach from the early depiction of snake-lion hybrid creatures in Mesopotamia (4100 BC – 3000 BC) to the first interpretation of Dinosaur fossils through the science of paleontology in the early 19^th century. […] Today, as humans have long since been bereft of the assumption to be alone within the depth of space and having seen the strangest, most disfigured of creatures roam the universe, it doesn’t take much human imagination to make the leap from a mere fairy tale to the educated guess that we might have been visited by a life form from outer space centuries ago. […]
 
In Western mythology, dragons have often been depicted as bringers of doom, and the devil itself was said to have taken the form of a dragon in various places of the bible.
 

Snake-necked lions and lion-headed eagles, Mesopotamia, Uruk Period (4100 BC–3000 BC)

 
“They never really get the pictures right,” a sigh rose to his right. Kurogane twitched – in the bustling market place he hadn’t even realized that someone had been reading over his shoulder – and raised his eyes to meet another pair, untouched by the polite smile that was painted on the accompanying face. “And this reads slightly racist, implying that anyone not human was disfigured-“
 
“There’s more books right there, get your own,” Kurogane interrupted and turning to block the stranger’s sight at the text. He was leafing further, skimming the pages for anything helpful, and finally hit a chapter that promised to have exactly what he needed. Acid Spitters […] inhabit the galaxies of Dracunculi Minor. They are  one of the known space travelling species [that] has spread under the reign of the Storm Dragons. Kurogane barely suppressed a smirk.
 
A long tentacle slapped right on top of the passage that Kurogane had been reading and curled around the book possessively. It kept moving to find a hold around Kurogane’s wrist, lying there as a firm warning. He looked up with a scowl to meet the giant, utterly expressionless eye of the shop owner. It was an Octopoda, its big, red body sunken together on a high chair behind the stall – he assumed having eight long whips as arms helped when running a shop around these markets. He snapped the book shut forcefully so that the tentacle had to leap upwards to not be squished. It still didn’t budge from where it had lodged onto Kurogane’s arm, however, and he didn’t need to speak much of the Octopodian sign language to understand the wriggling motions of two more tentacles in mid-air.
 
This is no library. Buy it or put it back where you got it from.
 
The language that consisted of gestures performed in a simple rhythm had become popular for bargaining wherever sound wouldn’t reach, and was nowadays used in a simplified version under the name Mercantile. Not ‘speaking’ it made shopping as good as impossible, and everywhere up and down the streets you could people see gesture furiously for a piece of syrup-coated dough or a new cloak. The main reason you couldn’t cross a spacer market without stumbling over at least two brawls was most probably the non-native speakers that kept accidentally slapping their neighbor in the face.
 
Kurogane had never been one for learning languages and spartanly motioned, five quids.
 
The irritated flurry of an answer told him that he was obviously trying to put the giant octopus out of business. Twenty and I’m selling my family honor this way.
 
Twenty quids, the wrinkly back of my head, Kurogane motioned in broken Mercantile, six quids! What developed from that point on was a hectic discussion that involved most of the curses Kurogane had remembered in that language (and he was good at curses if nothing else). Kurogane could get a quarter filling of fucking force field fluid for twenty quids, he wasn’t going to spend it on a stained, useless bundle of paper.
 
“You’re not very good at this, are you,” a curious voice chimed in from the side. Kurogane turned around to glare at the pesky guy from earlier. “How about you let me try,” he offered with a charming smile, and before Kurogane could tell him to fuck off, he had shoved between the demon hunter and the counter. He almost immediately started to babble away in what appeared to be either fluent Mercantile or a rather complicated (and utterly ridiculous) kind of dance. The shop keeper’s eye twitched around to lock onto the writhing human next to Kurogane, following his movements blankly. And suddenly, a conversation was going on that was much too fast for Kurogane to follow on which included five of the Octopoda’s arms and at least one of the stranger’s legs. He took a moment to consider the man more carefully.
 
The guy looked like he had jumped straight out of one of the projections on human history, about the period when the first cars popped up, complete with bowler hat and the silver chain of a pocket watch that was fastened to the button holes of his vest. He also was almost sickly thin and his blond hair, which he had bundled in a low pony tail, had neither seen a comb nor a shower within two weeks. Kurogane stopped staring while the guy performed his acrobatics, and instead concentrated his sparse language skills on remembering the movements for, don’t listen to the numb-brained, four-legged creature, I don’t know it.
 
“He won’t go below ten,” the man sounded apologetic as he turned back to Kurogane, “but he told me that you also can have this here, if you go with the price!” He held up a small, silvery statue. He pressed its belly and a flame sprang up from its jaws. A cigarette lighter. Kurogane eyed him suspiciously.
 
“Why would you even do this?”
 
“Because I don’t encounter a handsome stranger in distress, every day?” the man lifted one lazy eyebrow. Kurogane gave him a thunderous look.
 
Eight, without the fire thing. Kurogane’s gestures resulted in an outbreak of erratic movement at the other side of the counter top and a small snicker to his left.
 
“He lets you know that you are the most shell-hoarding, sand-spitting land-dweller that has ever stuck its hectocotylus to an ancestor’s mantle cavity.”^[3]
 
“What?” Kurogane got the impression there was a jibe against his heritage somewhere in there.
 
“Just give him his ten quid, Mr. Impolitic.”
 
Kurogane fumed and muttered about who was the fucking impolitic one while he gestured, ten quid, and, deal sealed, and went fishing for the money. The coins were counted, exchanged for the book, and a tentacle told him, thank you for shopping, (squiggle, probably obscure insult, squiggle), please visit again. Kurogane huffed and put the book into his pouch. He threw the still sniggering man a glare, before turning his back on the scene and pushing back into the stream of people. He still needed to stock up on food supplies, and the booze kept running out-
 
“Mr. Scowl, you forgot your lighter,” the shout carried well over the din of voices.
 
“Keep it,” he barked facing straight ahead and pushing some idiot out of the way that had the gall to stand right where he was walking.
 
“What did you say?” the voice sounded a bit closer.
 
“I said, keep it! I don’t need a fucking lighter,” Kurogane shouted over his shoulder. When he turned back to the front, he jumped as the stranger’s face popped up directly before him.
 
“I can have it, you mean?” the grin was growing wider and it was almost as annoying as the way the man seemed to like stating the obvious.
 
“For fuck’s sake, just stop bothering me,” Kurogane growled and pushed past him.
 
“Aw, thank you!” he heard the man coo behind him. Coo. Over the noise of the markets, he managed to coo. Also, he seemed to be annoyingly hard to shake off, even as Kurogane paced as fast as he could. “I’ll accept it as a payment for my help. You’re much nicer than you look, Mr. Grumpy Face!”
 
Kurogane snapped around to growl right into his face, “Try ever calling me that again!”
 
“And much nicer than you sound, too,” the bastard hummed and Kurogane did his best not to punch him square on the nose. “Call you what? Mr. Grumpy Face, Mr. Scowl, Mr. Impolitic?”
 
“All of those.”
 
“Okay,” he sounded suspiciously agreeable.
 
“And stop following me,” Kurogane added, as he turned back around.
 
“Okay,” the answer came from right behind him. Which meant he was following him. Kurogane felt his urge to kill rise to socially unacceptable levels.
 
He wrestled his way around a group of tourists that seemed to consist entirely of shining, black proboscis and towards a stall that sold spacer food. This time, there was another human behind the counter. Disappointingly enough, Kurogane needed exactly one sentence of Standardized to find out that the cross-eyed idiot only spoke some absurd variation of Esperanto (as though that one hadn’t already been out-dated a two-thousand years ago). Which meant Octopus language. Again. Kurogane didn’t get why people didn’t learn their own, fucking language.
 
“You should really work on your Mercantile, you keep insulting people while buying things,” Probably no one would even realize it if he dumped the dead body into one of the garbage shafts.
 
“I told you to stop following me,” he growled.
 
“I’m not, I’m just moving into the same direction!” he gave back, draping over the counter next to him and very clearly having no business at this stall, at all. That was it. Kurogane grabbed him by neck of his vest and pulled him up to eye level.
 
“Listen, I don’t care who you are or who dropped you on the head as a child – either tell me what the fuck you want from me or leave me alone before I decide to wring your scrawny neck!”
 
“Someone had a bad day, it seems,” the idiot said with his hands lifted in a calming gesture, though he sounded as though he wanted to start laughing, again. “Fai Flowright, dracologist, pleased to meet you!” he sang and stuck his hand out in the direction of Kurogane’s stomach, as though not realizing that having both hands on his neck, Kurogane wouldn’t be able to shake it. “You can call me Fai!”
 
Kurogane stared at him. “What?”
 
“Foxtrot, Alfa, India, not very hard to remember.”
 
“Wha- no, you’re what?”
 
“A dracologist! It means that I’m studying dragons!” the man repeated happily.
 
“There’s no such thing as dracology,” Kurogane spat and let him go. The idiot stumbled shortly, before catching himself and smoothing the wrinkles out of his garments.
 
“Of course there is, I am studying it, after all,” he said. Kurogane groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose. He took a deep breath.
 
“So, what do you want from me, dumbass?” he asked.
 
“I think you’re going to go and find a dragon,” he said. “And I’m going to come with you.” Kurogane narrowed his eyes at him.
 
“I don’t think so,” he replied darkly.
 
“You won’t even know that I’m there!” the ‘scientist’ told him eagerly.
 
“I doubt that, too,” Kurogane gave back with annoyance. He swiped the package with the bundled-up food out of the shop owner’s hands. Taking the chatterbox with him on a long trip through space confined to a small ship seemed to be the most harebrained, idiotic thing anyone would do. “No deal.”
 
“But I can help you!” the man scuttled after him as he pressed back into the masses. “You never denied you were going to search a dragon – I know how to find one!”
 
“So get your own ship,” Kurogane replied and made for one of the alleyways, adjusting the heavy box of food under his arm. The narrow streets that led away from the markets were dirty and dark and stank of the garbage slots that stuck out of the ground. He had to climb over a giant slug-like creature that was snoring loudly, sleeping off the alcohol, probably.
 
“But you’re going, anyway,” Foxtrot-Alpha-India clambered after him. “Do you even know how to fight a dragon?”
 
Kurogane swirled around on the spot, facing the man so suddenly that he bumped into his chest. “This. And I mean all of this. Is none of your business,” Kurogane growled dangerously down at the round bowler hat.
 
“I could make it mine,” the man looked up from beyond, suggestive lilt to his smile, eyes heavy with lashes, and his hair tickling Kurogane’s neck where it brushed against naked skin. His hat shifted and almost fell. Suddenly, the alleyway seemed too narrow, the other man too close, the air too stifling. Kurogane stepped back fast enough to bump into the wall behind him.
 
“Can’t you take a hint, goddammit?” he asked with growing exasperation. “I don’t want you along, I don’t care for what you’re doing, I’m not interested in dragons!”
 
“Now, at least one of those was a lie,” the other said thoughtfully. “Let me show you something,” he pulled the silver watch from the pocket of his vest and flipped the lid open and thrust it into his direction. “You see this?”
 
Kurogane lowered his eyes at the round glass orb in Fai’s hands. “It’s a magnetic compass,” he deadpanned. “In space.”
 
“Nooo, it’s not a compass, and it’s only somewhat magnetic,” he waved a hand. “It’s a dracometer! It is honed onto the radiation that dragons leave behind during superluminal travel – here, like this,” he pressed a button to the side of the orb to release the needle, and let it whir around wildly – and came to a stop to point directly at the scientist himself. Kurogane raised an eyebrow and Fai laughed blithely, “Oops, that’s a bug, it likes me too much – picky little thing. Still working on that. Wait a moment,” he shook the ‘watch’ to no avail and then smashed it hard against a wall. The needle started to swirl again, and as it stopped this time, its tip came to a quivering halt in Kurogane’s direction.
 
“Aha!” Fai exclaimed. “I can tell that you recently have met a dragon!”
 
“You’re wrong, dumbass,” Kurogane growled, wondering what he was even still doing here.
 
“Huh, maybe you didn’t realize,” Fai eyed at him critically. “Dragons can be sneaky.”
 
“Right, because giant space lizards tend to be sneaky,” Kurogane said.
 
“You have no idea,” a lazy smile spread on his face – and froze. Kurogane looked down at the compass in his hands – the needle had quivered and was moving, slowly, away from Kurogane, as though following something. Kurogane swirled around, trying to see in the twilight behind. The man before him seemed to see something that he didn’t, because his breath hitched.
 
“I will find you, later,” the scientist said with a plastic smile and then he pushed past him, glance swiveling to his watch and back forward while he ran between the high blocks of concrete.
 
Kurogane looked after him as he vanished around a corner, slowly shaking his head. There were nut-jobs all over New Tokyo, but this one had been a special case. He seemed to attract them lately, though, nut-jobs that kept blabbering at him about dragons. He tried to remember his list.
 
Alcohol. Right. Alcohol was what he still needed to get. Besides, he really needed a drink.
 
 
 
[2] Stanford torus – a form of a human space habitat. A donut-shaped ring that rotates around a middle piece in order to produce artificial gravity. 1.8 km in diameter it has to rotate once per minute to provide about 1g. At that size, it can provide living to about 10,000 persons. Go for pictures [here], [here], and [here].
 
[3] The Octopda’s curse unsurprisingly translates to, “stupid motherfucker.”