((This is officially the new version of Skyline. I've made some alterations and fixes – for one thing, I somehow managed to misspell Kameda's name as Kamada, and as another I accomplished the entirely n00bish task of forgetting the manual transmission. Yeah, and I even drive one, so that's pretty inexcusable. Given that I'm going to write a companion fic and sequel to this thing, I thought it should be at least a little more presentable. Thanks to Crosswood, Eijentu, and even mountains from molehills, who didn't log in)).
Ok, I'm gonna try and explain this story a bit. I found that there aren't enough fics about what it was like before Haruka met Michiru. This one is her just learning to race on a real track. She's not quite old enough, but then again, she did get her license 'overseas'. Oh, remember that "Anthony" Kameda guy from episode 92 or something? Yeah, him. I'll explain more at the end of this, I don't want to ruin any of it.
Also, I've moved the timeframe up a little bit. I don't remember enough of the early 90s to write about that era's technology successfully. While mucking about online I discovered some of the first Sailor Moon S manga concept art, and lighted upon the original design for Sailor Uranus, drawn in 1993. That allowed me to go ahead and build a new timeline around that date, assuming she was born in February of that year (to make her an Aquarius per canon). Sorry if this alteration shocks and horrifies anyone.
A few sizes too large. It clings where it should be loose, and it bunches up where it ought to be tight, and after five minutes of fiddling and scrunching up her face and trying to fit her mane of hair under the helmet does she finally waddle out of the garage and mumble something to him, except he doesn't hear any of it because it's muffled behind the visor.
"Hey, don't complain." Crap, she wasn't complaining. "In a couple of years you'll have grown into it anyway." He reverses his baseball cap, briefly exposing a slash of silver-grey in his brown hair before the white and red hat again ensconces his head. "Complaining won't gain you any height."
She stops fiddling with the flame-retardant racing suit and goes after the helmet she wears, struggling out of its clammy embrace with an urge to clarify. "I wasn't complaining, Kameda-san. I was wondering when we start."
"We-e-ell…" he draws the word out long and slow; the sun silhouetting his face and the wind pulling on the hair peeping from under his cap until she can almost pretend he's an American cowboy, and the unlit cigarette in his mouth is a stalk of whatever weed cow-herders would chew on in those old, poorly-subtitled movies she would watch with her dad as a kid. "How about now?" Reverie breaks. He's good old crazy Kameda-san, and she's not-so-good young crazy her, and neither of them is a cowboy.
The wind catches her too-long hair and runs rough, playful fingers through it. She scowls inwardly, square jaw a little tighter, because judging from anime wind-swept hair is supposed graceful. Instead, the ash-blonde locks thrash around her face and stab into her eyes, and she turns into the breeze so it all flails backwards instead of flapping at her nose and around her ears. "Now's good. I mean, only if we're ready."
"I can't talk to you without the radio in that helmet, you're gonna have to wear it. Suzuka doesn't need an underage driver pulping her brains out because she won't." The cigarette slides over to the other side of his craggy lips.
Once more the bulky shell of plastic and foam bites down on her head with its chemical breath of new helmet smell. It's also too big, but not as much an offender as the suit, even if it does pull on her disorderly hair, and choke off all sound except the spit of static when the radio turns on.
"Why am I driving a Nissan?" She frowns at the ignominious silver car, all late-80's angles and ludicrously massive spoiler.
"Because it's my special Nissan. I'm not putting you in a Ferrari 512 on a track you've never lapped once." Liar, she's driven bits of it plenty of times, that's got to have added up to lap or two.
She turns back to the unimpressive car. "It's from '89. It's old." Immediately after her mouth says it she's embarrassed; she doesn't mean to accidentally insult her instructor, who certainly hails from a good few years before 1989. Stupid radio, he's heard it loud and clear.
He catches her mistake. "It's experienced, not old. Don't judge." That means two things if she lets it, and she's abruptly thankful for the blush-concealing properties of the Earth-sized racing helmet. Damn Teutonic genes; why can't she suppress the blush instead of metamorphosing into a tomato? Hastily, and with a little more force than necessary, she climbs into the 'special' Nissan and settles in. Immediately, her gripes melt away.
Why can the seat embrace her so comfortably, while the stupid uniform decides it disapproves of her long waist and shorter arms? She wonders if this is the sort of thing Momo means when she gripes about another freaking 'not right for me' boyfriend; that everybody's looking for the comfortable chair instead of the awful clingy all-size-fits-wrong outfit?
High school romance; she decides, as she inconspicuously squirms in the chair to adjust the insufferable crotch again where it's decided to ride up; is entirely overhyped. And that is why I drive race cars instead of texting members of the opposite sex 24/7. Perhaps, if she wants to feel profound, the suit is a metaphor for growing up, and the seat represents running away from ones' destiny. Yeah, that's a stretch. Too much listening to Takeshi Momo's existential rambling will do this to a person.
She likes this seat.
"You're just going for the first turn. Don't hit the esses yet."
Playful frown, though the frustration is real and the radio is too loud, but that's to compensate for engine noise. "You've got me in the lowest horsepower car yet, and you don't trust me past the first stretch I did here."
"This isn't about trusting you, it's about trusting me. Just go, alright?"
She does go, and she almost shrieks, first with surprise and then with heart-thumping delight when the innocent Skyline literally leaps away from the line. It's a shameless burnout, which Kameda will gripe at her for, but right now she's busy wondering what the hell has he done with this car and oh crap this is amazing hey that turn's coming up pretty fast and flailing at the clutch and gearshift and hitting the brakes too late and too hard and fishtailing out into the sand past the second bit of the turn. "I get it now," she laughs into her radio once the car stops, and he's laughing too because she hasn't hurt herself and is obviously delighted with his not-so-innocent '89 Nissan Skyline. "Wow, what a rush. What did you do to this poor car?"
"I told you, it's my special Nissan. 436 hp, my son helped me with it. Come on back here to the line and we'll try that again. Be more careful this time, alright?"
"Yes, sir."
Kameda's grinning, she can hear it in his tone. "Want to run a full lap today?"
She doesn't manage the lap to her mentor's satisfaction that day, nor the two days after; the car bears almost twice the horsepower of the vehicles she's previously worked with, and the situation essentially forces her to learn the track all over again, redrawing her mental race line. Crap. Not even a full day until it's time to cram onto a crowded train back to Tokyo and a mostly-empty house and entrance exams to a different high school with a better track program.
"Ok, you're still over-zealous to go wide open on Dunlop after the esses. We've only got another couple of hours until Honda next door kicks us out for some students, so let's get cracking. Three minutes max for the lap, remember? And you'll need at least fifteen seconds after the Casino Triangle to navigate that curve unless you plan on going all Fast and the Furious III on me. I'd run a pace car with you, but nobody needs to know your age to drive it themselves and I can't get myself injured on the track and not be able to get to you if you're hurt. So just be careful."
She takes a few minutes to calm the butterflies, but they're butterflies of anticipation and not of dread, so they quiet easily enough. Ok.
No burnout this time, just a smooth, vicious acceleration punctuated by the swing of the clutch and the silent thumps of the stick. She envisions the car melding to the track, fixing to a single line; the wheel merging with her arms. The Dunlop curve passes her, she never drops below 70 (well, 68 just at the deceptive part she gets over-confident on sometimes), and skims course edges smoothly in the S-shaped series of gentle curves. No funny business today; the car controls like butter now that she has a handle on its eagerness. She's flying. Briefly, she wishes it was a convertible, and that her helmet was off. In lieu of this, she imagines the snapping wind wrenching the breath from her lungs and beating her face into a grin even more drunkenly delighted than the one she's wearing now.
Here's the world-renown racer ripping into the hairpin. Daydreaming relaxes her. This isn't the type of daydreaming that causes one to stare out the window for inordinate amounts of time to watch birds; this is the kind of blurry focus that narrows things down, makes them understandable. Goodbye, stupid hairpin turn, that's the last time you mess this up.
Here comes her favorite bit. Gentle Spoon Curve stretches out from her, she floors the accelerator without (much) hesitation. As long as she doesn't oversteer…
And she doesn't. Almost, her eyes close. Almost, time stops, because she's hit the straightaway and hasn't messed up once, and Kameda-san hasn't told her to stop because she's never going to make the lap in under 3:00. This means she'll make it, but at the last minute that nasty W-shaped jag in the road, Casino, nearly throws her off; she breaks too soon and too hard, flying across the curbing and executing an impressive-looking failure of racing proficiency as tires plow up grass in a long arc before she lurches to a stop and restrains herself from muttering untoward things into the microphone.
"And whose fault is this?"
Deep breath in. "Yes, sir. I'm coming right back."
She has to continue the way she was going, and she comes up to the line without completing the lap yet again, which is disgraceful. Kameda checks the tires, checks under the hood, makes her get out and probes at the accelerator and brake and clutch, and climbs out again after knocking his head on the door frame as he exits. "Be gentle," he advises softly. She's not sure if he means her, or is jokingly speaking to his car. He's got a blue-green cap today, advertising 'KAMEDA MOTORS', the shop he runs back in Tokyo with his son, who she hasn't met because he's a handful of years older than her and apparently only fixes cars; doesn't race them.
The correct braking point lodged in her mind, she starts again. This time she makes it, but a disgustingly close lap time of 3:02.593 has her cursing a slight mistake in which she held the accelerator too long. A third attempt nets a bad mistake on that hateful right-angle Degner and a time he doesn't bother even to read to her because it's so crap.
Remember the flying. It's like running track. Running running running…
3:00.238. A fifth of a second. A fifth. Of. A. Second. Naturally, this doesn't count as an under-three-minutes lap time.
She finds this distasteful, and tells Kameda-san so, and he retorts that maybe she should go study for exams and he'll help her pack up and see her next school break, how about that?
This is even more distasteful, so she climbs back in and breathes deeply.
There's somebody in the bleachers, watching her, but the sun is behind them and they're a small figure all hunched up over something. Probably just an early student from the Honda driving school next door, reading over their manual. It won't do to underperform, she has an audience now.
Burnout. God, Kameda will kill her, but there's something about the willingness of the vehicle to spring forward, like a horse kept too long behind the starting gates. This is how the sport evolved. I'm riding a steel horse with a dragon inside it. And oh heavens but she's flying. Partway to the hairpin—and in between shifting gears—she begins to laugh, not a helpless laugh that makes her voice crack and jump two octaves higher the way it was when she was eight, but a rough laugh in her own husky voice that's more profane than anything else she's said all day.
Eat this, you persnickety sharp turn and you awful clingy suit and you wonderful-but-oh-so-nitpicky Kameda-san.
Seventeen seconds at Casino Triangle, and she nearly makes the same mistake but catches herself just in time. How many precious hundredths of a second peeled away just then? She holds her breath without really noticing, and floors it. Everything blurs over, the butterflies perform a ritual dance, her teeth set, her eyes narrow; her grip is too trained in its 10/2 position to white-knuckle but her right pinkie quivers. All she can smell is helmet and dust and hear Kameda hold his breath, too.
2:59.789. It's enough, and she jumps out and hugs him, and they both finally exhale and he holds her out at arms' length to look at her and just smile. "Here's the famous racer, Tenoh Haruka, appearing magnificently." He hugs her again, but she's stopped looking at him for a moment because that student with the manual is closer now, and it seems to be a girl.
She's clutching a sketchpad to her chest—not a manual after all—and it's windy again so her hair is flying sideways, except she makes it look graceful with her elegant dark curls. And Haruka fights her way out of the helmet (ugh, she really needs to cut her hair) only to look up and see the girl who probably isn't a student neatly picking her way out between the bleachers and disappearing. Something tightens bizarrely in the racer's stomach.
But there's victory to be celebrated, so she hands her helmet to Kameda-san and says yes, I would really really like to go get a soda, thanks-so-much-for-everything-you're-the-best-godfather-ever-in-the-history-of-the-universe.
It's only when she dozes off in the train, hours later, helmet-as-a-souvenir securely on her lap, that she dreams.
She dreams of the sea thundering, and the wind roaring, and everything falling away, and she's standing with somebody she can't quite recognize on the precipice of the end.
She dreams of the world shaking, but when she jerks upright, it's only the shudder of the late train pulling into the station.
Word Count: 2316
Ok, so now to properly explain. This Kameda is Anthony's dad. As Haruka doesn't have much of a family, I imagine her dad is absent from the scene and her mother is away a lot, so Kameda is like her godfather in a way, and lives down in Suzuka with his wife when he's not running Kameda Motors with Anthony back in Tokyo. There's a race course down there in Suzuka, which you can look up on Wikipedia for an idea of what the track looks like (complete with a fancy illustration and stuff).
This is all before Haruka cuts her hair and discovers her preference and starts being the Haruka we all know and love, so she's a bit different. I tried to convey her with the same sort of stubborn spunk she has when she's older, though. As for how the heck Michiru got down there…well, my companion fic to this, "She Doesn't Look A Thing Like Jesus", should be finished soon, and it will explain.
Also, because a reviewer was confused, Haruka is 15 during this fic. I find it highly unlikely that anybody would be a famous F1 racer at age 16, anime logic or no. I envision Usagi and crew at age 14 in SM and SMR, 15 in SMS through SMSS, and 16 in StarS. Haruka and Michiru are 17 when they meet, 18 in SMS, and 19 or 20 in Stars (to make their parenthood feasible). In my personal view of things, they don't really couple up until after the Marine Cathedral incident. Setsuna is ageless, Hotaru I like to think of as 11 in S (instead of 13…that's just too old to be paling around with 9-year-old Chibiusa). Hope that clears things up. Thanks once more to Eijentu, for reminding me that not everybody is privy to the inner workings of Mix's mind ;)
I had fun writing this, and if you had fun reading it there's this random button thing right down there, I'd like to know what you think.