Before you begin, I'd like to mention that this is all in good fun (I liked Other M! honest! not at all the plot, but...) and I mean no offense to anyone or anything anywhere. In addition, I would like to state that

Claimer: THE ENTIRE METROID UNIVERSE BELONGS TO ME. SO THERE.

Enjoy, and please be so kind as to share your thoughts in a review!

Galactic Federation Army helmets are built tough.

When Samus's ship crashed following the hostile X Parasite takeover, the headgear was borne on a wave of forceful air and slung to the stars, where it drifted peacefully and without incident like the majority of all cosmic objects. Space is, of course, largely empty, and the odds of the helm ever finding anything but the twinklings of distant stars reflected in its visor were slim, but one day it did indeed cross paths with another spacefairing body. The body in question was an unremarkable space freighter, the incompetent pilot of which had just—after an inordinate amount of time being carried further and further into nowhere by the thrusters—managed to get his warp drives online. So it was that the helmet was caught in the ship's warp field and transported somewhere new.

Somewhere turned out to be an inhabited planet called Norion; specifically, an inhabited planet called Norion's atmosphere. The headwear began a violent journey earthward, flames flaring up around it as it became the galaxy's first shooting helmet. Its apparent target was a large Galactic Federation military complex, toward which the freighter was heading to either pick up or unload supplies (in all likelihood, the pilot himself didn't know). As it was, the helmet landed momentarily on the roof of one of the sprawling complex's many buildings, bounced and spun wildly, tumbled from the roof's ledge, and finally dropped an additional ten meters to land near a Federation Marine who had just returned from a shift of the unfortunate duty of scrubbing Zoomer guts from the base generators' pistons—why did those stupid things keep crawling in there to a painful and messy death?—and was not in a good mood. He jumped, understandably, as the polymer shell crashed down at his feet, and immediately he whirled to glare up at the roof in search of one of his Marine buddies, who he was sure had just lobbed the unlikely missile at him. But his search proved futile, and he returned his attention to the helmet itself. From a single glance it looked like standard-issue gear that might have been worn by unarmored personnel such as technicians aboard any GF vessel, albeit in a decidedly non-standard-issue color, but looking closer the Marine noticed some odd features. The visor was the wrong shape; far too angular, and it looked like its release worked differently than the helmets he was used to seeing. As for the large '07', well...

He might have thought that perhaps one of the base researchers, frustrated from the usual woes of base researchers (such as terrible coffee and a lack of ridiculous government grants), had gone berserk and thrown a prototype off the roof or out the window, but he wasn't anywhere near the research sector, and besides, the helmet looked a little too battle-damaged to be brand-new. And so the Marine, blissfully unaware of the conflicts that arise when an unnecessary alternate universe is introduced after the fact, brought the helmet to an officer, who sent it to the science department with a note attached that consisted of two jagged question marks, and the head researcher, who identified what seemed to be Galactic Federation serial numbers on the helm but could not match them to anything anywhere, ordered it to be sent to an even bigger Federation base on some other planet. One scheduling error later, the helmet was in a crate, sandwiched between two large drills, on its way to a mining expedition on the world of Tallon IV.

When the crew discovered the helmet, they left it sitting in the ship to take back with them when they left, but it seemed destiny had other plans. During the miners' lunch break—who are they kidding? they set their own schedules; it's lunch break 98% of the time—a Space Pirate raiding party, having apparently not gotten the memo that the Space Pirates had been destroyed and all raiding parties were therefore defunct, proceeded to raid the mining site with great gusto. This raid was largely unsuccessful, partly because the Pirates were of the sort that had likely caused notices like "Metroid are not pets. Do not use Metroids for target practice" to be posted around their former outpost on Tallon IV, and partly because there wasn't anything of value to steal. They did succeed in making off with the ship, however (the mining crew had enough alcohol on site to facilitate 'let's shoot those damned annoying bats all over the place; goddamn the bastards' games until a rescue party arrived), with the helmet still inside. They piloted the craft to Zebes, with much arguing over the correct route along the way; expecting as they arrived to find a headquarters that had probably, hell, even tripled in size since they had last seen it, they were instead met with the charred ruins of what, if you kind of squinted, could vaguely be made out to have once been a fortress. Needless to say, the Pirates' frustrations were not expressed constructively.

Somewhere in between Pirate 1 performing a spectacular flying kick on Pirate 4 and Pirate 6 attempting to bite off Pirate 8's foot—or maybe it was between Pirate 3 insulting Pirate 2's mother and Pirate 4 performing a spectacular flying kick on Pirate 1—the helmet was knocked from the ship and rolled into a nearby crevasse. It fell deep into the heart of planet Zebes, ricocheting off a rock wall here and there, and ultimately landed in a charming lava pool (wait—the armor can withstand lava? ohmygod ohmygod KG lived!) and floating along in a lava tributary for a while. When the lava stream sharply morphed into a lava-fall, the headwear may have at last reached its final resting place at the rocky bottom of a dormant volcano shaft had its path not been intercepted by a another object which, at first glance, appeared to be a croissant with eyes.

The Ripper, deciding it didn't mind the presence of its new passenger—you know, as much as a Ripper ever decided anything—continued on its way, floating in an ostensibly infinite straight line. And so the helmet was carried atop the creature's carapace out of fiery Norfair and through the swamps of Maridia, among the stalagmites of Crateria and past the decrepit Chozo Ruins, over the acid pools of Brinstar and finally to the stronghold doors of Tourian. Here at last the Ripper changed direction, heading exactly the way it had come (this particular croissant, having had the good fortune not to cross paths with any emotionally unstable somersaulting bounty hunters, had in fact been traveling that same path since not long after the very formation of Zebes), but the helmet tumbled from its back as it reversed its course. There it lay in a silence that was almost contemplative (okay, not really) for some time until, again against all odds, it was stumbled upon, this time by a Galactic Federation exploration team poking around for...well, anything. Technology, plant or animal specimens, Pirate records. Maybe some really cool rocks. This team had recently been exploring SR388, but after their guide had appeared to be eaten alive by giant flying globs of yellow jam (they didn't stick around to see how that turned out), they had decided to go explore a less dangerous planet. And—jackpot? They'd heard from the base on Norion about some strange helmet turning up out of nowhere, apparently manufactured by the GF but a complete mystery in all other regards, and here was another one! In the ruins of the Space Pirate headquarters, no less! Being completely out of the loop (though not quite comparable to the Space Pirate raiding party), the team decided to return to the BSL space station, out of which they had been operating, and deliver the helmet to the scientists there, to see what they could get out of it—after all, they could stand to take a break from messing around with those monkey- and ostrich-things. And that is what they did.

In fact, that was the last thing they did. Moments after stepping from their ship into the BSL docking bay, they were eaten alive by giant flying blobs of yellow, blue, green, and red jam (or is that jelly?). The helmet was automatically unloaded from their cargo hold and bundled off to the random-objects-that-we'll-get-around-to-someday holding area, joining among other things a giant green scaly arm with two pointy claws at one end, a journal marked Y. S. which appeared to have been written in crayon, and a data disk which bore the label "Metroid Dread." It wasn't long, however, before a stray X Parasite blorped its way through the wall and approached the jumble of miscellaneous things. The creature lingered momentarily on the green arm but ultimately moved past it and to the helmet, and then it blorped its way inside. A minute later, it blorped its way out and gradually morphed (with gratuitous blorping) and shifted and changed until it was an exact replica of the headgear. Immediately, in swooped a mechanical arm that latched onto the mimicked helmet and whisked it back into the cargo bay; the logic being that, especially since it was in the things-we-don't-get-paid-preposterous-amounts-of-money-to-look-at bin, a duplicate item was not really needed. It was at this moment that a very ugly and very angry Omega Metroid, recently free from the confines of a giant, foreshadowing plot-egg, stomped its way into the docking area, fixin' for a fight. Finding none, the beast threw something of a tantrum and began disemboweling the uglier of the two ships present (not that the purple one was much of a looker), utterly decimating the vessel until nothing remained but a twisted heap of burning metal, and then eating that heap until nothing remained whatsoever. Upon entering the bay, the robot arm decided to deposit the not-helmet in the one ship available—the violet-hued one which, despite having been thrown together by unqualified Federation temps, still resembled the helmet of Samus Aran.

Said Samus Aran herself entered the docking bay at this point, and, following her ignominious defeat by a single swipe of the Omega Metroid's claws, a veritable drama of glowing blob-turned-bounty hunter impersonator vs. cute green jellyfish-turned-this thing has way too many suckers began to play out. When the metaphorical dust settled, all parties involved were surprised to learn that the BSL station was on a collision course with the planet it had until recently been orbiting, SR388, in some misguided attempt to destroy both station and planet, or something. Samus hopped aboard her ship and sped away, leaving the real helmet sitting forlornly among the discarded, unwanted leftovers of the universe. And when BSL struck the surface of SR388 and its nuclear core exploded, the helmet was crushed, flattened, scorched, melted, vaporized, and erased entirely from existence.

And it didn't matter, because it was just a stupid helmet, and it was not worth anything.

However, Samus, easily the only person who did think it was worth something, was content. As far as she knew, the helmet was safe and sound by her bedside table, and as welcoming as ever of her gut-spilling monologues in its general direction. She never noticed how it would occasionally flex slightly of its own accord, as if in annoyance, or even turn up not quite exactly where she left it. The helmet, as far as she knew, was doing nothing out of the ordinary (that is, doing anything at all).

When it reality it was watching.

Biding its time.

Waiting.

Waiting…

A/N: The end doesn't actually require any suspension of disbelief, because in Other M canon Samus is a moron. The moral of the story is, being overly sentimental and doing things like going and getting a mass-produced and generic helmet from a space station that's scheduled for destruction will get you eaten by X Parasites. This moral is of course completely inapplicable to everyday life, but hey, it needed saying somewhere.

Hope you liked it!