Chasm
By Rhino7
Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts, its characters or storyline. This story is mine, as are McCallister, Banks, and Lolly. Language warning: Banks is one of Cid's interns and as such has a bit of a mouth. I'm trying to claw my way out of the fluff vortex that I've been trapped in lately, and this is a story idea that I've had for a while now. This story will consist of three parts. Sorry if I'm a little rusty. It's been a while since I've written proper action suspense. Enjoy!
..:-X-:..
Part One
Oblivion was slow to release its hold on Leon, but when it did, it did so violently.
"Wake up!" A woman was screaming.
The ground underneath him was trembling, and jagged edges of the floor were pushing up at his back at awkward angles. Every inch of his body hurt, but his senses were just foggy and disjointed enough not to fully register pain. He was trapped in that strange mental purgatory between unaware and aware.
"Come on. Wake up." The woman's voice pushed through the fog, along with a pair of hands on his shoulders, jostling him slightly.
The pain overpowered the fog then, and it felt like fire had erupted under his ribcage on his left side. He hissed and forced his eyes open. The world was a swirl of dark colors overhead, and just at the edge of his vision, the blurry figure of a woman was leaning over him. He could only make out the green of her shirt and brown hair tumbling over her shoulders. He felt one of her hands prod at what was probably a very significant wound under his ribs.
"Cura." She muttered.
Warmth spread from the hand and blossomed over his torso, closing the wound and mending the skin and whatever else he had torn up in the fall. Because he had fallen, hadn't he? That sounded right. Why was he so disoriented?
"We have to go." A man's voice cut in at his periphery. "NOW."
"We can't just leave him here like this—" She was arguing.
The after-effect of the healing spell left Leon feeling hazy, and he started to slip back under the blanket of oblivion.
"I'll—" The man started. "…He'll be fine. Trust me."
Questions rained down on Leon, and he stopped himself from passing out again. Who were these people? Where was he? Where was the rest of his…squad? Yes, because he had been running a mission with a squad…So how did…When did…
The broken floor under his body jerked abruptly, and he gasped involuntarily. He opened his eyes and willed his vision to focus. The woman at his side was tugging something out of her belt. Withdrawing the object, she pushed it into one of his limp hands and then she was standing and backing away quickly.
"It's falling apart." The man was saying. "Give them the go-ahead."
Leon felt the floor jerk violently a second time, and he used the momentum of the movement overcome his inertia, rolling onto his side. Adrenaline was pumping into his limbs at that point, so he was able to push past the fog and the dull aches in his joints to push himself up to his knees. He just caught a glimpse of two receding backs as the two mystery strangers sprinted across the cracking concrete floor of the massive room. They darted through a door and disappeared.
He tried to get his bearings, but the floor and the walls around him were shaking and jarring, threatening to send him back to his face. Beams were falling from the ceiling. The floor was buckling and breaking apart. Naked wires had broken loose and were spraying sparks into the musty air. The only lights in the room were dull and flickering, revealing him to be in a cavernous chamber, surrounded by what looked like the hulking masses of Gummi Ships: a hangar.
Then, just as abruptly as the shaking started, everything stopped, and he ended up on all fours to try and maintain his balance. He failed.
Earlier…
Leon had never liked space missions. There was something disquieting about the utter stillness and silence. He was rarely one to complain about being alone, but there was a distinct difference between being alone and being isolated. It was where he and Cid primarily differed in their opinion of space travel. To Leon, it was a void, an empty, barren nothingness that took and took and scarcely gave anything back. To Cid, it was an endless expanse of unchartered territory, just teeming with adventure and demanding to be explored.
Yet, here Leon was, instead of Cid, inside the Gummi Ship with three other soldiers as they flew toward their target. Cid's most notorious recruit, Major Valerie Banks, was piloting the ship. Leon had run an extended mission with the woman before, so he was accustomed to her caustic manner and foul mouth, but it was entertaining to watch the other two soldiers react to her language and acidic tone: she was one of Cid's, wasn't that to be expected? Her dark hair was tied up in a sloppy knot at the back of her head, the rest of her slim build hidden under the bulky space suit.
"This is Major Valerie Banks," She was speaking into the transmitter. "of the Allied Republic of Kingdom Hearts. You have not been authorized to orbit this planet. Identify yourselves or we will be forced to take action."
Standing in the doorway to the cockpit, Leon looked past her, through the windshield of the ship. The unidentified spacecraft loomed ominously ahead of them, getting larger as they drew closer. The vessel was a sight to behold: easily twice the length and capacity of any transport carrier that the Alliance used. It bore no insignia, Allied or otherwise, and there were signs of battle damage on its starboard side. Preliminary scans had revealed literal tons of weapons, missiles, bombs, and artillery on board the ship, but the hull was too dense to scan for signs of life. All attempts to establish communication had failed. The mysterious vessel's crew was either gone or ignoring them. He figured it was the former, considering that, since the fall of Organization XIII, the inhabitants of The World That Never Was had become, for lack of a better word, xenophobic. There had been incidences recently of the Allied base on the world shooting down any unidentified ships that entered the planet's atmosphere without clearance.
Banks clicked off the transmitted. "Little shits won't answer." She cast a look through the windshield. "Look at the size of this fucker." She murmured.
He just grunted and heard some scuffling in the hold of the ship behind him. He left Banks to let her align their Gummi with the undamaged port side in order to dock, and he stepped back into the hold. His right hand soldier, Private Tabaeus McCallister, was already in her space suit, sans the helmet, arms folded and lips pursed to a thin line as she stared through the port hole to the nameless, derelict ship. The scuffling noises had been coming from Leon's newest recruit, an uppity young man named Chris Lolly, who was acting like he'd never seen a zipper before as he tried to wrangle into the suit.
"Are you having issues, private?" Leon addressed the fumbling man.
Lolly straightened abruptly, wide eyed and looking excitable. "Just nerves, sir." He said, smiling anxiously before immediately forcing his lips flat like McCallister's. "Sorry, sir."
Leon caught McCallister looking at Lolly with a deadpan expression. She had made her opinion of the enthusiastic young man clear to Leon, but she hadn't spoken a word of it since he had decided to accept Lolly into the program. To her, Leon's acceptance was the final word; she wouldn't contest with him verbally after that. Though that didn't stop her from looking peeved that Lolly had managed to grab a slot on this mission.
"Six hours." Leon said, getting their attention. "The base on The World That Never Was has given us six hours to board this ship and figure out what the situation is before they take action. It's likely that it's been abandoned, but we're taking precautions regardless."
"Me and Major Banks are to find the Flight Deck." Lolly rambled, trying to prove that he knew what he was doing after the zipper fiasco. "Assess the flight capability of the ship and access the historical logs to find out all we can about the ship's origins, while you and Private McCallister investigate the other levels."
Across the hold, McCallister took up her M15 assault rifle and checked her twin side holsters, where she had sheathed two handguns. She looked pointedly unimpressed with Lolly's kiss-assing. Leon stifled an amused snort.
"Moving into position." Banks called. "Preparing to dock. Get your shit together."
Leon took up his Gunblade and reluctantly climbed into his own space suit. The three of them finished securing their gear and making sure the suits were functional as Banks docked their Gummi with the carrier vessel. There was no telling in what state the life support systems on board would be; they would carry six hours' worth of oxygen with them just in case. McCallister eventually gave an indignant huff and helped Lolly secure his suit.
There was some slight jostling as the stabilizing brackets extended from the body of the Gummi, latching onto the exterior of the mysterious ship and accessing the exterior door to the carrier. With a hiss and a pop, the Gummi stilled, safely attached to the carrier.
Banks stepped out of the cockpit, latching her helmet onto the neck of her suit. "All yours, Commander."
Leon exchanged a look with McCallister, who stepped away from the fidgeting Lolly and lifted her rifle with a terse nod.
As the ground stopped quaking under him, Leon lifted his face again, taking in a sharp breath. The air smelled like metal and rot. He coughed and got his arms under him, lifting his upper half off the floor. The disorientation passed more quickly this time and he sat up, casting his eyes around.
Wait.
The cavernous hangar still surrounded him. The old, rusted Gummi Ships were still moored to the floor. But the floor…was solid, unbroken. There were no flying wires and sparks. There were no cracks in the concrete. No sounds of destruction, like the entire place was tearing itself apart. The two strangers were gone. Instead, the hangar yawned unnervingly around him.
Leon got up on his knees and felt something in his hand. He looked down and recognized the black steel of a standard issue Glock pistol in his fingers. It was loaded and only had a small scratch at the base of the magazine. He coughed again at the horrid smell. The visor of his helmet was broken, but luckily none of the glass had fallen in on him. The life support system was intact then, apparently. Swallowing hard, Leon undid the latches at the base of the helmet and removed it before wriggling out of the rest of the suit.
There was a splotch of blood across the stomach of the suit where he'd—Leon blinked at the material—been impaled. The blood soaked through the front and the back of the suit, and also through the white of his shirt on both sides. How had he survived that? The strange woman's healing spell had worked, however, as only the fading scar of newly mended skin remained. He glanced back at the floor where he'd awakened. There was a small pile of debris…busted wood and some piping, but nothing strong enough to push through a human torso.
It was a pile of junk in an otherwise pristine-but-dusty chamber. With a frown, Leon lifted his eyes from the debris and looked toward the ceiling. Sure enough, a jagged hole hung gaping in the concrete overhead. He must have fallen through the ceiling. But how? Why? Had there been an attack? Lowering his gaze to the debris again, he knelt down, rummaging through the ruined suit. His Gunblade was missing. He found the radio, but it was busted and useless. He grunted in exasperation and tossed it back into the pile.
The rancid odor in the hangar was getting harder to ignore, and Leon turned to face the larger side of the chamber. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he became aware that, while the concrete floor was unbroken, it was not clear as he had originally thought. There were lumps scattered on the concrete surface, indistinct from the debris except that the lumps weren't made of broken wood and piping.
They were bodies.
Leon recoiled and lifted an arm to cover the lower half of his face. There had to be at least a dozen bodies strewn across the hangar floor, all in varying states of decay. Some looked like they had been here for years, untouched. Some were nearly skeletons in torn clothes. Some in crew uniforms, some in civilian clothes. Others were still…fresh. Bile rose in the back of his throat, and Leon turned away from the sight.
The door leading out of the hangar was open.
Leon coughed a final time and made his way toward the open door. That had to have been where those two people had fled. None of this was making any sense. This ship had been completely abandoned: he distinctly remembered his squad confirming THAT much. The air was chilled around him, and his breath was visible as he exhaled. He needed information. He needed answers. He needed to find his squad and his Gunblade.
He reached the doorway and pulled himself through into a dimly lit hallway. A gag reflex made his shoulders buckle once, but nothing came up. Regaining himself, he straightened and looked each way down the corridor. Emergency lights were flickering along the middle of the ceiling. Blood was stained on the yellowing white walls and the uncovered piping near the ceiling. No more bodies, but the blood was dark and dry. It had been there a long time. There had been no blood or bodies when he and his squad had first boarded this ship. What was happening here?
Both directions of the corridor looked equally bleak, and there were no signs of the two strangers who had healed him. He stepped forward, keeping the Glock held low with both hands, squinting into the semi-darkness. If McCallister, Banks, and Lolly were still alive in this place, he had to find them.
The splattering of blood on the hallway walls suddenly converged as he stepped toward the opposite wall from the hangar door. It wasn't…splattered or randomly flung there. It looked…purposefully smeared onto the dusty wall. Leon grimaced and stepped closer, deciphering the smudges as words. Words written in blood on the wall of an abandoned space transport.
"Engine Room," it read, with a blackened bloody arrow pointing to his left.
Leon stared at it for a moment, a pit of dread growing in his chest.
"What…" His whispered.
The floor under his feet jerked suddenly, and he staggered, keeping his balance. The walls shuddered, and Leon felt a tingle ascend his spine. A strange, unpleasant energy permeated the air around him, ballooning through the hallway and moving past him. It felt like the entire ship groaned, with the echo of it originating down the hall on his left, from the "Engine Room." There was a reverberating sound like ripping paper, and a wave of dizziness swept over him. He grabbed onto a solid pipe hanging from the wall and closed his eyes, waiting for it to pass.
Leon took point, leading the other three off their small Gummi and into the exterior port of the unknown ship. The initial room that they entered was vacant. It was black as pitch and all four of them activated the night vision on their helmets, enabling them to see. Green light flooded Leon's vision through his space visor, giving an eerie glow to the state of disheveled emptiness in the room. McCallister stayed right at Leon's left elbow, her rifle aloft and alert. Major Banks followed behind, and Private Lolly brought up the rear…bumping into every piece of furniture and stepping on every creaky part of the floor as he went.
The four of them fanned out soundlessly, finding the room entirely abandoned: dusty and harboring no sign of people, fight, or evacuation. McCallister moved into the hallway first, covering the back side of the squad as Leon swept down the opposite end of the corridor, followed by Banks and Lolly. The hallway was like the first room: dusty and empty. This pattern was repeated in all the subsequent rooms that they broke into.
Once it was established that the ship had been abandoned, the squad split. Banks maneuvered past Leon, gun in hand, and nodded for Lolly to follow her. The two soldiers navigated down the hallway, turning a corner and disappearing. Their footsteps faded as they headed deeper into the ship, seeking the Flight Deck. Leon and McCallister backtracked to the original room where they'd boarded, taking the opposite direction until they found a set of stairs.
Descending to the lower levels of the ship, what they found was consistent with the upper decks: nothing, no crew, no bodies, no signs of struggle, no evidence of…anything. Just dust and a few displaced papers. There were small cabin rooms with residential furniture and simple bedding. There were supply closets and electrical rooms, none of which were online.
Leon and McCallister were both quiet as they walked shoulder to shoulder, picking their way through the hollow ship. Their foot falls were light, leaving prints in the dust, but echoing off steel walls. Leon became aware of the crushing silence in the ship. It carried with it that familiar sense of isolation that all space missions carried for him, despite the living and breathing soldier at his side. There was also a bone deep chill that penetrated the thickness of the space suit, pushing at his skin and pawing at him. He could feel perspiration beading on his forehead and he tried to swallow the anxiety.
He shifted his grip on the Gunblade, glancing sideways and meeting McCallister's eyes through the glass of her helmet. Her face was stony and she stared back at him. She could sense it too. Something was wrong with this ship. It wasn't that it was abandoned: phantom ships were rare in this part of the galaxy, but they did happen sometimes. It wasn't the silence or the stillness: that was just the nature of space. It was the very existence of this ship. His instincts were sending prickly signals under his skin, demanding that he get his squad off this vessel and damn the mission.
Something caught his attention at the edge of his vision. Wordlessly, Leon found himself and McCallister both snapping to face forward again, his Gunblade raised and her M15 aimed into the darkness. They had stopped walking and shifted their footing. There was an unshakeable dread settling in Leon's gut, but he couldn't place it.
The shadows at the end of the hall shifted.
The dizziness soon passed, and Leon straightened, lifting his head…only for a wave to crash over him again as he realized that the hallway had changed. The wall in front of him was blank, clear of the blood splatters and the bloody "Engine Room" writing and arrow. Leon stood and forced himself to breathe, crossing over to the wall abruptly and lifting his hand to it. There was no sign that the bloody marks had ever been there.
His brain scrambled for an explanation. This wasn't possible. Everything had been covered in blood. He had seen it with his own two eyes. He had hardly closed his eyes against the dizziness for a moment or two, not nearly enough time for that much blood to be cleared away…and for what purpose?
He looked to his left, down the corridor where the now-nonexistent sign had been pointing. With a swallow, he started walking in that direction. If he could find the stairs to head back up to the main level, where he had presumably fallen through the floor, he might be able to pick up on the trail and find McCallister or the other two. This ship wasn't stable, and something inexplicable was happening here. His squad wasn't equipped to handle this. Hell, he didn't even know what THIS was.
He passed through a set of pried-open security doors and found himself in a wider hallway with elevators on either side of him. Still no blood or bodies to see. No dust either. He found the doors to the stairwell and slipped past them, finding the metal stairs winding up and down in a tight column. He started to go up, cringing at how much noise the old stairs were making as he ascended.
A low, shuddering groan suddenly reverberated up the spine of the stairwell and Leon stilled, breathing slowly and straining his ears for the sound. The noise had no point of origin that he could pick up on; it seemed to be emanating from the walls of the ship itself. Like the ship was yawning or moaning in distress. Just as abruptly as it began, the groan stopped, leaving Leon in isolated stillness. He exhaled evenly and clenched his jaw, resuming his climb up the stairs.
He stepped off the next floor that the stairwell opened onto and found another room of elevators and emptiness. He started down the hallway and tried to re-orient himself. He would need to angle to his right to find the hole that he'd fallen through. He didn't recall investigating this part of the ship with McCallister, but every hallway looked the same anyway.
Leon had barely turned the first corner when a scream exploded through the hallway. A high-pitched, deafening shriek clawed across the steel walls, and the suddenness nearly sent Leon out of his skin. Instead, he lifted the Glock and swept around the corner, trying to locate the source of the screaming. It didn't sound human or even like an animal. It was just…noise.
But it was noise in a place that reeked of isolation and silence, so he had to find what was causing it. He picked up his pace to a cautious jog, sending his eyes around the corridors as he turned this way, then that way, and ran down the hallway before taking another turn. Eventually, he came around a final corner just as the screaming faded away, leaving his ears ringing and his pulse throbbing at the back of his skull.
The shadows at the end of the hall shuddered.
Leon blinked and lifted the gun. Had he just seen…Not again.
"McCallister." He called out.
His voice echoed through the hallway.
"Banks. Lolly." He yelled, creeping forward. "Can any of you hear me?"
The shadows at the edge of his vision shifted again, and he glared at them. He was exhausted and probably still concussed from his fall earlier. Now his imagination was running wild and that was never a good—
In a surreal sloughing movement, the shadow crawled over the pipes, dragging itself along the floor. Leon didn't move, keeping his gun trained on the shadow as it skirted around his boots before it bolted toward the end of the hall.
That was not his imagination.
Leon gave chase after it but only made it a few steps.
As if sensing that it was being followed, the shadow roared and rushed toward him, filling the entire hallway. The air temperature of the hallway seemed to drop and every molecule in the space felt suddenly electrified, making the hair on Leon's neck stand up. The disembodied shadow launched toward him like a subway in a very compact tunnel, and Leon lifted the gun, firing twice into the mass. The darkness might have been smoke for all the good the bullets did. As the shadow continued to barrel toward him, roaring like a freight train, Leon reacted on instinct.
He threw himself into the frame of the closest doorway, using his shoulder as a battering ram and gaining access to the room beyond. There was a rush of dizziness, and the floor and walls jerked and jostled around him as he did so. It was the same sensation that he had felt before, when everything inexplicably changed in the hallway.
Not again…
As Leon and McCallister stood, aiming their weapons at the shifting shadows, Private Lolly's voice came over the radio in their helmets. "We've reached the Flight Deck, sir. Banks thinks that she can re-open the circuits for the emergency backup system from here."
"Then do it." Leon hissed. "We're not alone down here."
"What? Huh? What do you mean not alone?" Lolly sounded trepid. "We did a scan for signs of life and came up with bupkiss."
Banks's voice interrupted him. "Gimme a fuckin' second. This tech is like nothing I've ever seen…"
The shadow at the end of the hallway shifted again, and Leon's grip tightened on the Gunblade.
"What's the status of the life support system?" He demanded.
"Fully operational." Private Lolly reported. "We've got our helmets off and everything up here, sir. You're all clear."
"Looks like the ship's flight capabilities are fully intact." Banks rattled off. "I'm activating the emergency backup light system now."
Leon and McCallister kept their eyes forward, but fluidly lifted one hand to de-activate their night vision just as the emergency lights overhead kicked on. Light flooded the hallway, cutting into the darkness at the end of the corridor. In that split second, the shadows disappeared, banished by the sudden light.
"What did you mean, not alone?" Lolly asked again. "Did you find any survivors?"
"It's gone." Leon replied flatly, stepping forward and squinting. "Whatever it was, it wasn't a survivor. You said you scanned for life forms?"
"Yes, sir." Lolly rambled, "But we got nada. Banks is hacking into the logs now to try and find blueprints or notes by the captain."
McCallister moved past Leon, casting her eyes around the hallway and investigating a few of the closed doors. She ducked out of the rooms almost as quickly as she entered them, until she reached one near the end of the hallway. Leon followed her in when she didn't emerge, and the flickering lights of the backup system illuminated the armory.
Lolly was still talking, and Leon hissed, "Shut up, private."
Though the shelves and cabinets had been specifically designed to hold mounted weapons and artillery, the armory room was completely empty. Not a single magazine or weapon had been left behind. The dusty floor was disturbed and scuffed, recently touched, but the only item in the room that got any attention was a blood stained cloth that had been left on the floor.
McCallister squatted and picked up the cloth, turned it over a few times, and then tossed it back to the floor. Leon kept his Gunblade in his hands, stepping around the chamber and assessing that it was devoid of both weapons and people before making his way back to the soldier.
"Leonha—" Banks sudden cut over the radio.
"Banks?" Leon straightened.
"Holy ball sack!" Banks screamed. "Leonhart?!"
Static blasted over the radio, and both Leon and McCallister grimaced.
"Banks? Major Banks!" Leon barked into the radio. "Lolly! Respond, dammit."
The floor under their feet shuddered, and the empty shelves rattled around them with the movement. The static on the radio fell to silence, and neither Banks nor Lolly responded.
Leon swore and stepped back out into the hallway. The lights stayed on, and the quaking of the floor soon ceased.
"Banks. Lolly. What the Hell just happened?" He ordered into the radio.
Silence was his only reply.
As soon as the jostling stopped, Leon registered the quiet and looked around. He had sought shelter in an empty storage room. There were a few cardboard boxes and a set of folding chairs scattered about, nothing more. Forcing his breathing to calm, Leon waited until all noise and shifting in the hallway at his back had stopped, and then he turned and slowly pushed the door open again.
The hallway that greeted him was covered in filth, dust, and blood. The first thing that his eyes registered was a bloody arrow painted on the wall, aiming to his left. For a moment, Leon merely stared at the sign. It was back. How was that possible? The walls had been clean. First there had been blood and bodies, then all of it had disappeared with that shuddering energy surge that passed through the ship. Now, after another surge of…whatever that shaking had been…the mess was back.
What the actual Hell!?
Adrenaline-fueled sweat was pooling around his neck in earnest now, and he hated the utter confusion and lack of logic that was swimming over him. Before, the first arrow had been accompanied by the bloody writing of "Engine Room." This arrow had the same kind of hasty smear to it. It screamed suspicion at him, and the blackened state of the blood made his skin crawl, but he had no other leads.
Gritting his teeth, Leon turned left and inched his way down the hallway. More blood and grime followed, along with bits of trash and rusty material. It felt like hours had passed since he had regained consciousness in the hangar and like an otherworldly length of time had passed since they had embarked on this ship.
Was he hallucinating? If so, which was the illusion: the clean, empty hallway or the blood spattered one? If he and McCallister had been attacked, where was she? If the attack had been poisonous and he was delirious, where was she? Where was the rest of his squad? Everything seemed to be slurring together in his mind, and it was becoming more difficult to sort out the chronological order of events that had led to this moment.
Engine Room.
He read the words before he comprehended them.
Leon stood before a set of double doors, the title slate above the doors reading "Engine Room." The doors were closed, and a thick set of chain links were bolted through the handles, barring entrance. They were rusted and rigid though, untouched for years, probably decades. He grasped the chains with one hand, jingling them slightly. The rust slid against itself and some of it peeled away, drifting down to the floor. The integrity of the chain was weak, but it was still too strong to break by hand.
Why the engine room? Why had someone left arrows directing him this way? Why had he followed them? The curiosity clawed at him, and he felt a sudden need to erect some kind of purpose to this. He needed to get some grasp of what was going on and why this was happening. He stood against one of the doors, holding the Glock's barrel against the chain, away from his body. He pulled the trigger, and the gun report echoed up and down the hallway.
The noise would either alert his squad to his location, or it would alert that…shadow or whatever thing he had seen earlier. Either way, he was going to have to make this fast. The chain shattered at the impact point, and Leon tugged the chain through the handles, freeing the door.
He kicked open one of the doors. When no attacks were flung through, he slipped inside and faced the engine room. The chamber was smaller than the hangar, but it was still much larger than he had anticipated. The ceiling was low, but the length and width of the room seemed to stretch across entire soccer fields. Keeping the Glock aimed at the floor, he snuck forward, scanning his surroundings.
The walls were almost entirely comprised of computer monitors, buttons, levers, and control panels. A few of them were lit and appeared to be online. Data streamed in rapidly paced matrices down a select few number of monitors. Piles of stuff were lumped further into the room, near where a steel set of bars blocked one from going farther. The piles looked like bags, like gear and supplies. Whatever lay beyond the steel bars was lying lower than the rest of the room, as he couldn't see the floor. Light was emanating up from it. Keeping his senses on alert, he crept forward, nearing the bars.
The massive room appeared to be empty and quiet, aside from the hum of the lights and the control panel…along with an eerie, underlying hiss that was coming from behind the set of bars. He had almost reached the bars when movement jarred out of the silence behind him.
Leon started to turn, but something hard and blunt slammed across his shoulders, sending him face-first into the set of bars. There was a grunt behind him, and Leon vaguely glanced down, seeing a deep crevasse of blue light, bubbling up from what looked like ten vertical stories of a hollowed out column. The energy source that was powering the ship.
Why did it look like a…
Then the rest of his mind caught up, and he shoved backward, throwing off his attacker. He spun and leveled the handgun, firing in the direction of the body. The person had dropped, however, and swung one leg out, taking his knees out from under him. Leon hit the floor but rolled hard, taking his momentum and coming back up in a squat.
His attacker had a sword, long and with a broad width to it. The handle was crooked slightly and in the dim lighting of the room—not to mention the after-flash affect that the light of the energy source had on his eyes—it was difficult to recognize his attacker immediately. But he did recognize his Gunblade in the attacker's hands.
They stalemated like that: he with the Glock aimed at the attacker, and the attacker holding the Gunblade expertly in his direction.
Then his eyes adjusted. He knew that combat stance anywhere.
"McCallister?" He kept the handgun level, but skewed it slightly so that it wasn't aiming directly at his soldier's head.
Private McCallister didn't move, still holding the Gunblade aloft with both hands, her feet set. She too had discarded her space suit, leaving her only in her sleeveless green shirt and fatigue pants. Her clothes were burned and torn in a few places. Her normally tight ponytail had been jostled loose, sending frazzled flyaway hair down over her face. She was covered in dirt and blood, and there was sweat running in literal streams down her body.
"McCallister, it's me." Leon didn't like the wild, cold look in her eyes, even as she was staring directly at him. "Stand down, soldier. What happened here?" He took a step forward.
She took a menacing step toward him, Gunblade raised firmly in her hands, looking fully ready and able to drop him where he stood.
"Don't you fucking move." She hissed.
..:-X-:..
A/N: Constructive feedback is always welcome and appreciated!