"Human"

(or the story formerly known as "I Was Born a Human Once")

7/21/16: just decided to change the title to "Human" for the sake of brevity.

Author's Note: Hello and welcome to my Metroid Fanfiction!

First off, I just want to let the readers know, this story takes place a few months after Super Metroid. I've incorporated some of the ideas from Metroid Other M, but in general, I've decided to ignore that game's existence. It just doesn't sync up with my ideas about the characters and the universe. I'm an old Metroid Fangirl from the 2-D sidescroller days, so most of my interpretations of Samus and Adam are based on my impressions of them in Metroid Fusion. The Primes games are cannon for purposes of this story, although you'll note I play kind of fast and loose with cannon in general. Just taking a creative license. For instance, I used the general story of the manga, but I didn't keep a lot of the details.

Chapter 1: The General and the Mercenary

"You've seriously never been to Earth before?" The General stared at the woman beside him and repeated himself for what must have been the fifth time that evening. He acted as though it was completely unheard of for a human to have never visited humanity's Mother Planet.

The woman stared back at him, wordlessly. She was a slender but muscular blonde with a pensive look in her feral eyes. Her companion had been questioning her on the same subject matter so relentlessly that she was starting to get annoyed. While she knew humans had originally come from Earth and that she was, at least somewhat, human, it had never occurred to her before that she might have been missing something by staying out in space and other Outer Planets. She was certain she had met other humans before who had never visited Earth, particularly those that had been born on the Colonies as she had been.

She sat back in her seat, her lips pursed in thought as her intense blue eyes stared at the back of the seat in front of her. She and the General were on a commercial spacecraft along with several dozen other passengers all crammed into rows of four that were bisected by a thin aisle. She sat in the innermost seat, beside the window and gazed out as the craft began its descent into Earth's atmosphere.

"I'm sorry, Samus," he continued, ignoring his companion's silence. Samus's wordless responses were usually indicative that there was something pressing on her mind, and right now he could tell she was in one of those moods. He knew his companion hated commercial spacecraft or mass transit of any kind, but she had elected to leave her ship back at the Federation base in favor of a lower profile form of travel.

The two must have looked strange traveling together. Samus was an unusually tall and muscular woman in her thirties. She had long blonde hair that fell midway down her back, and she wore a black leather jacket, an old pair of blue jeans, and a pair of clean but unremarkable combat boots. She wore no makeup or other accessories, and she had a hyper-vigilant air about her that was enough to set those around her on edge. There were several vein-like dark lines around her right eye that were nearly invisible unless one knew to look for them, scars of an old infection.

The man beside her, General Adam Malkovich, looked to be about twenty years her senior, and his coal-black hair was streaked unevenly with gray. The deep set lines in his face showed little evidence of ever having smiled, and his gray eyes always made him seem to be preoccupied with thoughts thousands of miles away. However, like Samus, he also possessed a hyper-vigilance rarely seen in civilians. He wore a simple gray trench coat and lacked any distinguishing visual features. And that was how he liked it.

They sat in silence for the better part of ten minutes before the blonde woman finally spoke.

"I was born on a Colony of Earth. Most of the residents lived their entire lives on that planet." She did not even bother to look back at her companion, and she spoke in a firm monotone as though reciting rote facts. "Besides, don't pretend like you don't know why I've avoided Earth the past fifteen years."

Adam glanced over to her and studied her reflection in the window. She seemed intently focused on what was going on outside the ship. He knew bits and pieces about her life, having known her for nearly seventeen years, but did not know as much as he would have liked to. Still, he was certain he knew more than anyone at the Federation knew. He knew she had been the only survivor of the massacre on Earth Colony K-2L, but did not know what had happened to her in the years after that. He knew she possessed alien technology in the form of her powersuit, and he knew she had once served under him in the Galactic Federation Army before he had expedited her discharge after an unforeseen complication. She had disappeared for a while only to reappear as an infamously powerful bounty hunter. In recent years, she had made a living taking private military contracts for the Galactic Federation government, despite the objections of many who condemned the use of mercenaries as dependence on dangerous outsiders.

He sighed audibly as he turned his head away from her. She looked as human as he did, but he and several others high in command knew that she was some form of hybrid. Her military records stated as much, but no blood or genetic test had ever been able to determine exactly what sort of creature she was, giving her a label of "Class Delta Semi-Human", which meant "unknown species of unknown origin."

For a galactic alliance built of over a dozen different races, all native to different planets, they were still incredibly hostile to anyone they considered an "alien". And Samus's unknowable genotype put her solidly into the category of "alien", even if no one would say it outright. It had never bothered Adam that she was an alien, but the day she left the military had brought much rejoicing amongst the higher ups.

"Adam." Samus had turned to look at him now, her face unreadable, as usual. "Look at the lights down there. I think it's the city."

Adam glanced over her and out the ship's window. Indeed, they were fairly close to Earth now, and the pilot had turned on the fasten seatbelt sign. Below them were thousands of lights, some in thick clusters and some in bright veins, mostly golden specs on a sea of blackness, but with a red glow winking in and out of existence every now and then. They really were quite lovely, and he wondered how many times he had flown to Earth and ignored the bright patterns in his haste.

"If Earth is really the birthplace of humanity," Samus began, "I'm glad I got to see it like this first. It's so random, the way all of those lights are down there, but it's strangely beautiful at the same time."

It was a very odd thing for Samus to say, Adam mused to himself as he stared at the bounty hunter. She was not normally one to comment on aesthetics or get sentimental over any of the planets she visited. He wondered if there was more to this trip than just the mission or if his talk of being human was starting to get to her.

"Well, Lady, it certainly is beautiful. I guess I'd never really looked before."

She seemed satisfied with his acknowledgement and turned to stare back out the window, off in her own world once more.

"Tell me one more time," he said, more to draw her back to the present than to get information. "Why are we doing this?"

Samus turned back to him and finally seemed to look directly at him and come out of her head and into the present. There was a haunted look in her eyes, but as she blinked a couple of times, it seemed to fade for a moment. When she spoke, this time, she seemed less automated.

"I received a message from a Mrs. Morrigan Sinclaire, some wealthy widow with a large estate. She wants to hire me for some private security work."

Adam shook his head. "Seems a little overkill to hire the galaxy's most powerful bounty hunter for personal security. Is she just looking for a bodyguard? Do you think there's some kind of actual threat or she's just the paranoid type?"

Samus shrugged. "I get a lot of people trying to contract me for private security. This one actually offered me twice my going rate and passed a rigorous credit check. I figure now that the war is over, what do I have to lose? Work's gonna be more scarce now, so I might as well take what I can get. I did some digging into her social media accounts and private life, but I couldn't find much on her. Seems like the standard rich, eccentric type, and that's all right with me. I could use a change from the sort of nasty missions I've been working lately." Then she added with an indifference most people might have found unnerving, "I read an interview with her from a news article though. A few members of her family have been murdered over the years. I guess she doesn't want to be next."

In some ways, this sort of behavior was typical for Samus. She was drawn to suffering, drawn to solitude. But he had a feeling there was more to this unusual choice than she let on. She had been behaving strangely since she had returned from her last mission, and he worried about her. A few months earlier, she had flown to some Space Pirate occupied planet called "Zebes" to retrieve a Metroid hatchling that had been stolen from the Ceres Station. The rescue mission had ultimately been a failure, but she had succeeded in blowing up the planet, thus annihilating the last Space Pirate stronghold and bringing an end to the Space Pirate War.

After blowing up an entire planet, private security work sounded ridiculous. Though she claimed it was because of the pay, Adam knew she didn't really need the money. Despite her status as an independent contractor, she made more than he did and had amassed a decent fortune from her last few missions. Despite that, she insisted on living like a pauper and keeping only her Hunter-Class gunships and a studio apartment in a rough neighborhood on one of the Outer Planets. He always thought she should spend a bit of the money to raise her standard of living and make herself a bit more comfortable, but he understood why she didn't.

This mission bothered him, though, and it bothered him how close-lipped she was being about it. Samus knew her way around a gun and every other tool of war anyone had ever dreamed up. During her time in the Army, she had saved his life and lives of his soldiers in battle myriad times. Since becoming a mercenary, she had survived countless battles, suicide missions, and whole intra-planetary wars, but she could be naïve in the affairs of humans. When he had heard what sort of mission she was accepting this time, and where it was, he had insisted upon accompanying her. The end of the Space Pirate War had brought a strong anti-mercenary political current, and Earth was not a hospitable world to anyone less than purely human.

She may have been nearly indomitable physically, but he knew she had a vulnerable side for those weaker than herself. It was as though she felt the need to save or protect the whole galaxy. He did not want anyone taking advantage of that part of her. There were those in the Federation who saw her as a nuisance and dangerously unstable variable, and he did not want any retaliation for her part in the war. She still had not seemed to recover mentally from whatever had happened on Zebes, and he wished she'd talk to him about it.

There was another reason he was heading to Earth with her, though, one he hoped she would never find out. Even when she had been under his command in the Army fifteen years ago, she had been known for having a nasty temper and being difficult to control. That aspect of her had more or less mellowed out with age and maturation though, and for many of the years the Federation had contracted with her, she had seemed like reasonable enough individual, and upon his recommendation, Chairman Keaton had contracted with her directly for some of the most dangerous missions in the war.

Since the destruction of Zebes and the end of the Space Pirate War, however, something had not been quite right with the mercenary. He knew her well enough to recognize the signs of what was wrong, but many of the other high government officials had been taken aback by her mannerisms since returning from Zebes and had refused to grant her a visa to come to Earth until he had volunteered to oversee her trip. The woman was a walking weapon who had blown up multiple planets over the course of career, and lately she had been having seemingly random episodes of flying into a rage at the drop of a hat. The humans higher up in the Federation were not about to let her visit one of their most protected planets alone if they thought she would become a danger to it.

But the General understood her to a certain extent, and he knew that the end of Space Pirate War had brought much rejoicing across the galaxy, but it had not been the easiest transition for Samus Aran, whose family had been killed roughly thirty years ago in one of the events leading up to the war and who had dedicated her entire life to fighting against the Pirates. Now that it was over, he supposed she felt that her life lacked purpose, and he wondered if she were coming to Earth at least in part to get reacquainted with her human roots.

As he regarded Samus sitting and quietly staring out the window, Adam wanted to say a million things to her just then, but found himself at a loss for words. He did not really know what was going through her mind, only that a part of her had never truly made it back from her final mission to Zebes, and even if the rest of the galaxy was moving on, he knew the Space Pirate War had never ended for her simply because she did not know how to live under any other circumstances.

At a loss for anything productive to say, he settled on simply breaking the silence. "Whatever this Morrigan's issue is, at least she finally gave you a reason to start acting like a real human and get yourself to Earth."

He didn't see Samus scowl at her reflection in the window.