Status: Revised. (07/15/10)
A/N: FFnet can't make up its mind about hyphens. I apologize for any confusion. I think I got most of them.
Disclaimer: The following contains characters and concepts that are NOT the property of the author. They are the intellectual property of Nintendo, HAL Laboratories and their associates. This work of fanfiction is NOT endorsed by the original creators and is NOT in any way meant to insult the original work. The author has received NO monetary benefit from this piece of shit.
Chase the Sun
Armor : 1
Sometime in the past:
Without her armor, Samus emerged from the treatment chamber - health almost restored - to the collapsed ruins of a morgue. Her chamber had been shoved into one of the slots which they used to store dead bodies. She climbed her way out, over broken rubble and pieces of the dead. Beyond the partly standing doorway, she found more corpses. The medical center was wrecked. Few walls were left standing. The bodies of the staff lay scattered throughout the grounds.
It had been one of the few places where she allowed herself to be treated. The disgraced doctor who ran the clinic operated without license. He had been an associate of Falcon's.
One or the other might have betrayed her to the Federation, but someone had kept the chamber locked and sealed during the firefight. Someone had set the unit to mask her heat signature, even as her metabolic rate hovered at the barest minimal. She would have been broadcasting as an unidentified deceased human female on most scanners.
By the time she'd woken up and pulled the escape lever, it was all over.
In the aftermath of a battle, the scene told the story. Samus, well versed in that language, read it easily. They had stormed the entrances and shot down targets where they stood. Doors and chambers were cut open with laser cannons. The damage to the building structure came afterwards, via explosives meant to cover their tracks, which had also burned many of corpses beyond recognition.
It wasn't the work of Space Pirates.
She knew two things: 1) The Feds had her suit; 2) they wouldn't be keeping it for long.
They hadn't stayed to secure the scene. This meant they didn't have permission from the local government to be there. They were acting out of their jurisdiction, and they knew it. Officially, they would deny ever coming here.
She found her ship in the exact same place where she'd hidden it, off the premises and underground. The security barriers hadn't been tampered with. Her own scanner told her than the Chozo-specific toxins had been cleared from her body. The damaged tissue was repairing itself.
A species scan glitched between human and unknown.
She was almost herself.
She wondered, briefly, if the soldier who'd thrown the poison bomb was still alive. He might have been a corpse by now, floating in a one-man escape pod, a coffin flying on autopilot.
The next question for her was: Which way?
She knew where they expected her to go. The heart of the Federation was at the center of galactic civilization: the Hub.
So she set out for the Frontier.
On those primitive worlds, they fought with spears and sabers, in places where industry and technology had not gained a solid foothold. It was there she would have to find a trainer.
Without her armor, she needed to learn to fight their way, without tech.
She found a school with a reputation, and the teacher accepted her gold without question.
Nights in the desert were cold, but Samus Aran acclimated quickly.
She buried her equipment - her gun, her ammunition, her comm unit, the keys to her ship - and she committed herself to the life of the Grounded, the life of one who had never set foot off the home planet.
She filled her days with physical conditioning. And when the other students talked, she listened without saying a word.
They were simple as a people. Space-faring society called them "primitives." But, as Aran found out, they knew things. They knew how to start fires. They knew how to find water, how to climb mountains, how to track quarry in the desert.
Most importantly, for Aran, they knew how to fight with bare knuckles and teeth, without guns, without machines, without armor.
The days were hot, but Samus Aran could adapt.
Weeks drained into months. They told time by the warmth of the wind as one season changed into the next. They watched the stars and charted the constellations. In a way, they were like those ancient astronomers Samus had known, who had first mapped the skies ages before man. In that way, they were like her first teachers.
Her body stopped hurting from the physical exertion. Her knuckles no longer bled as she struck padded bags and panels of wood.
Life seemed easier there, away from the Hub. But it couldn't last. Some things had a way of finding you, Aran knew this. If not the Space Pirates, then the Galactic Federation. The Pirates had been quiet lately. Even they had been forced deeper into hiding as the Federation stepped up its security across the systems.
And then, the wind blew in cold from the mountains one day. A year had passed. She broke her seclusion to head into a local settlement for news.
Word had reached town that the Federation was increasing its presence on the Frontier. The Space Pirates had taken the heat for the massacre at the clinic.
She went back and dug up what she had buried.
There were protocols to be followed. Age-old rituals still governed the lives of these people. Those rules gave her an obligation to request permission before leaving, to ask for forgiveness, to keep the door open should she return, to say good-bye and part on good terms.
But, in the end, it wasn't her world, and it wasn't her culture. She had been born on a deep space colony. She'd been taught by old star-crawlers and world-jumpers, those who'd set out for distant planets long before human beings had learned the trick of flight. She came from a lineage of Spacers.
These people were Primitives, and she would never be one of them. She'd seen too much.
The sun was setting when she walked through the gates of the training grounds for the last time. And then, her ears registered an agile body landing softly behind her.
When she looked back, he was standing there, by the pillars, one hand on a hip, legs apart.
He said, "You are not the only one who has passed through these gates with a private agenda."
He paused briefly, as if awaiting a response. At her silence, he continued, "I just have one question."
The needle made a zipping sound as it shot past, grazing the front of her chest. She'd dodged it just barely.
He closed the distance between them before she could blink. His foot planted in the center of her chest. Samus took the hit and fell back into a roll. Her lungs struggled; the air had been forced out. But she was on her feet before the next kick came. It missed. He landed in front of her, and she struck out quickly, without thought. Her fist hit nothing but air.
She lept back, trying to put space between them. She saw the swing of his arm, and she stepped off to the side, expecting another needle. What she did not see, not at first, was the chain in his hand. She realized her error only when the weapon followed her path. It slammed into her back and wound around her torso. Then it jerked up and pulled her off her feet, spinning her into the air. She sailed high, away.
One of the pillars came flying at her - or rather she flew at it. She spun, kicked at it, came off of its surface, and began to fall.
Samus landed on her feet; a cloud of dust rose up around her.
She looked up at her teacher. He had landed one hit and one throw; Samus had landed none, but none of his attacks had taken her down either. They were even.
He pounced - a rapid two-step jump she'd seen numerous times in training.
It was then that she fired the gun she'd told herself she wouldn't use, not here.
The charge fizzled out into empty space. He had disappeared in a characteristic wisp of smoke.
Samus dashed forward. She knew him, and when she looked over her shoulder, he was coming down from above, over the spot she'd vacated, just like she knew he would. He spiked a kick into the ground.
She aimed the gun behind her, steadied against her arm, and shot him.
He took it full force. The stun power knocked him down, into the dust and sand. He lay there, unmoving except for the rise and fall of his chest.
She lowered her gun.
The sun had slipped below the horizon by now. In the compound behind them, lamps were being lit. The desert held its peace, and a chill wind began to blow.
He sat up. He folded his legs, knees outward, and crossed his ankles, lotus-position. Nonchalant, he reached into a secret pocket and withdrew a pipe. He summoned the flame with a gesture and a murmur. Then he pulled down the scarf from his face and placed the pipe in his mouth.
Against the torchlight, it was the first time Samus had ever seen her teacher's face.
"My question," he said, after a few puffs. "As a woman, you could control no small number of men to fight your battles for you. And yet, you choose this path. You fight like a man, more than any woman I've ever trained.
"What will you do when you meet your match among men? You may carry yourself like one, but you can't escape the truth. When you realize the limitations of your body, will you still try to be stronger than them?"
She holstered her gun. She had neither the words nor the time to tell him about it. History. It involved the life and death of a people - her people. It involved pain, genocide, slaughter and dark places on alien planets where the terrain shifted and spoke, where dead civilizations left their mark in ruins and cryptography. In her early childhood, what remained of that memory, she might have once known that thing which protected humans from their own curiosity, which stopped them from challenging the unknown. That thing they called fear.
Fear of strangeness and the dark and the inexplicable. Fear of the vacuum, that emptiness that went on and on beyond you, without you. The fear that claimed more colonies than disaster or starvation or Space Pirates. Even as a child, she remembered those who failed to adjust, those who couldn't adapt. They ran in fear from things that no one else saw, and they had to be kept in small rooms where they couldn't hurt themselves. Eventually they would break out and run themselves off of a cliff, or into a pit, or into the turbines of a power generator.
That primal safety net was gone now from within her. It had been replaced by something else. There was no word for this new thing, not out of the human languages that she knew.
There was no Hylian word for it either.
Instead, she told him the blatant truth:
"It's not a matter of strength.
"It's a matter of effectiveness."
The torchlight danced across his face. He regarded her with neither reproach nor sympathy.
Shifting light and shadows drew her attention to the gates. There, a crowd of students had gathered with lanterns.
Their teacher pulled the pipe from his mouth and rose to his feet.
Samus made a fist and held it over her heart. She bowed to him in the traditional manner.
He did the same, his forearm cutting diagonally across his chest, over the scarf and Sheikah eye.
x x x
The wolf napped on Dave's sleeping shelf, as if it owned the damn place. The tense discussion ensuing in tight quarters didn't cause it to stir.
"The plan," he said.
"Your freedom," she answered.
"What?"
"In exchange for my Suit."
"I don't know anything about it."
Samus Aran didn't fill a room with her presence. Instead, she was exactly the inverse of that, standing casually against the wall across from him. Looking at her was like looking out the viewing portal of a deep space craft hurtling through the infinite vacuum between planets. You fell into it, and the fall didn't end until your survival instincts kicked in and forced you to pull back to a safe place.
Dave figured that now was probably a good time to get off the drugs.
She leaned forward just then, toward him, and he had a fist ready, even though the apartment hadn't been built for three people, much less a slug-fest. But then elf-girl was there, suddenly, in between them, an open palm out on either side, pressed firmly up against the both of them.
They both recoiled from her touch.
"Please," she said. "No violence. We've already drawn attention."
"That wasn't my fault," he pointed out.
"I spoke with the gardener," the girl continued. "He will help us avoid exposure. But he requires some assistance from us."
Aran was still staring him down - a tall woman, an impressive build, pale hair tied up, blue eyes electric. He hadn't gotten a good look before. The Federation officers had some grainy footage that they weren't sure about.
There'd been talk that she wasn't human.
Dave didn't like being this close to her, wanted to put a safe distance between them. But he had nowhere to go. This confined space - cut into the concrete bones of a world where rain fell for every day of the year except for one - was all the freedom they would give him. The Feds were the law; they wanted peace. But he didn't care about their cause. He just needed to be of use, even if he didn't like it.
The young lieutenant who worked with him as a part of the task force on the Metroid Hunter had been a tight-lipped, by-the-books lady who took a while to warm up to him. Sometimes now, she let her guard down. She'd even come here once to see him.
That wasn't enough to count as a life. But without the work they gave him, without the medical support that came with it, he had nothing. He'd been severed from everything else he'd known.
Now it was a choice between the rented coffin, the insta-cook meals, the endless sound of rain, and the solace that came in pink and green tablets - and the Metroid Hunter. Walking death and genocide and this little airy-fairy girl who talked to plants and dogs.
She'd healed him though, and he wasn't in pain anymore. Future tech was all magic to him.
He leaned back against the cold wall and drew out the cigarettes from his front pocket. He ejected one from the metal case, took it between his lips, and turned the box around to click the lighter on the other side.
These were his choices.
He took a slow drag.
An hour and a couple pills later, he was holding up a piece of the greenhouse wall while Samus sealed it to the rest of the building.
Someone was talking behind him, but everything was bright and soft-looking, and he didn't care what happened at this point. The rain still fell, through the one half of the roof they hadn't repaired yet, and it was cold and calming, and the world was a fucking wonderful place.
They managed to patch most of the damage with bio-space plastic. He didn't like the way Samus held the nail gun, but the fuzzy edges of the leaves on all the plants kept him preoccupied.
The longer he stared, the more it looked like the flowers had teeth.
"Beautiful, aren't they?" elf-girl said.
She soothed the dirt in a broken pot - held together by tape - housing a small shrub. Dave could have sworn the plant was smiling.
Next to him, something beeped in agreement. The small robotic gardener who tended the grounds rolled past him.
"Is this good enough?" the girl asked.
The robot's head panned 360 degrees. Then it tilted its head to the side in an imitation of human expression. Its eye shutters closed and opened. It beeped a few times.
"I'm glad to hear it," the girl answered.
Dave was glad he hadn't thrown away the pills.
"Samus." The girl spoke the name with familiarity.
The bounty hunter sealed the final edge of a wall patch before she turned around.
"Does your ship have room for a few extra boarders?"
"No." Aran's eyes narrowed. "We've wasted enough time here already."
"As a favor, please. They won't take up a lot of room." The girl held up a potted flower and parted the leaves.
It took a second for Dave to realize what he was seeing.
"WHAT THE - "
They were tiny people-things, bright and multicolored.
The girl let one of them climb into her palm and held it up.
Even Samus was staring hard.
It looked like a little man in a bubble helmet.
"He's a stranded traveler," she said. "Much like you." She was talking to Dave.
Dave turned to Aran. "Right now," he told her, "you're the only thing in this room that makes any goddamn sense."
x x x
Roy fell, in the dark. Sand scraped his skin. Blood, that familiar taste, rose in his mouth. His chest was stinging.
He tried to push off the ground. Somehow, his hand missed.
Groaning, he rolled onto his back. With his left arm, he felt for his right. He grasped at air and dirt until he found it.
His hand closed over a wound-warm, slippery, sticky. There was nothing else.
He screamed. The tears spilled over onto his face.
Behind him, footsteps pounded on the ground. Someone was coming. He rolled over, surged to his feet, and took a blind leap into the ravine. The landing was harder than he'd anticipated. He lost his footing and tumbled down.
A beam of light swept overhead in jerky motions. His opponent couldn't see in the dark without that lamp. If Roy had broken that lamp, he would have won the duel. It would have been easy. Break it. Break it. And then Roy would have gotten him. Simple.
So bloody simple he had fucked it up.
Marth would -
Would laugh at him. Attack weaknesses, he'd said, years ago. You won't win a fight trying to do it your way. Read the situation. Adapt. Idiot. Before you get -
Fucked.
He laughed and cried in the same breath. This wasn't the fucking plan. This wasn't-
The sole of a shoe pressed down on his throat.
He swallowed blood.
Over him, the outline of a face - a man he didn't know. It was older, washed out, almost not there.
The light flickered on suddenly and turned the whole world blindingly white.
Roy froze in place, his vision lost.
"You're just a child." The voice was calm, intelligent and rough around the edges.
"F-f-f-fu - " The words wouldn't leave Roy's throat.
"Do you know who I am?"
Squirming, Roy tried to force out a syllable of speech. It merely gurgled in the back of his mouth.
The man didn't answer. But the light may have panned to the side. The whiteness seemed to shift slightly. Roy still couldn't see.
Steel - cold, solid - traced down what remained of the swordsman's right arm.
"I see now. There's no penalty for this, you know. It wouldn't be a crime for me to kill you."
"Fuck you, asshole." The words finally came together.
Roy's assailant let out bitter laughter.
Then the pressure came off of his throat. The whiteness pulled away. The footsteps retreated.
He was gone, but his image remained, burned into Roy's eyes by the light.
Alone, curled up like a crushed insect on the ground, Roy was finally able to put everything together.
Those were wooden sandals.
The blade must have been specialized steel, strong but flexible, and single-edged. The man had wielded it with two hands for the most part. By the way it had clashed against Roy's sword, he would guess: a high carbon, low carbon blend.
Black sand steel. Had to be.
Tamahagane.
Roy sucked in a breath, his chest straining, and shouted an obscenity to the ground. Dirt and sand crept into his mouth. He pushed himself up with the one arm he had left.
And then he began to crawl.
He had to. Had to get out of this place.
He had to get back to Marth before Samurai Goroh did.