This thing has been sitting on my hard drive for a while now while I tinker with the rest of it. It's fully developed, with all the relationships and interactions therein covered, and trust me -- we've hammered this thing into the ground. It will be as believable and realistic as any crossover can be. It's going to be a big, living, breathing thing when it's finished. It's eaten my soul. And the souls of a few friends as well. Erin-neesama and I nearly drowned in it, and heaven knows TJ and the Jess clung to it like the last lifeboat off the Titanic...
You knew that someday, somebody would crossover Megami Kouhosei and Gundam Wing, didn't you?
Well, that day is today.
I'm just glad it's me. ^_^
CRASH
[Into Me]
by Kay Willow
Prologue
He walked down an interminable, empty metal corridor, and he tried to remember who he was. No names came to his mind, no helpful clues that would enable him to determine any of the details of his existence. He'd performed his morning ablutions by rote, and the face in the mirror had been vaguely familiar -- he remembered having blonde hair and blue-green eyes, but when had he gotten so tired? and wasn't he older than this? -- but even so he hadn't been able to put a name to himself.
Then he was simply standing in a room filled with computer boards and wide-screen monitors, the former being worked by a handful of young women, the latter displaying several enormous mecha. They, like himself, were familiar, but upon closer examination there was something glaringly wrong about them that ruined the impression.
Aside from the mechanics, four people clad mostly in white uniforms of military design stood in the center of the room, talking in low voices. A boy to the side with straight, even brown hair and haunted brown eyes; a loud, laughing boy with a bandana wrapped playfully around his forehead; a third boy with spiked green hair and earrings, wearing a vaguely sour expression; and a young woman of extraordinary beauty and even more extraordinary serenity, the only one not in the uniform. Upon his entrance, they turned to face him.
"You're late," commented the beautiful girl with easy inflection. She was shorter than the others, but somehow dominated them all with sheer presence. Although dressed in nothing more than a glorified bathing suit, it seemed to him that she was easily the most important person present.
He found himself saying, "I'm sorry, Teela-san. It won't happen again."
The girl, Teela, nodded once and turned her attention to the monitors. "Then consider yourself forgiven."
One of the men, the one with the bandana doing nothing to restrain his wild multicolored hair, complained good-naturedly, "We should have all slept in, since First is in such a good mood! I could've used another hour or two..." He yawned his way through the last few words. The girl at the computer station nearest them, wearing a uniform of creams and reds and browns and an emblem that matched the one emblazoned on the breast of his coat, kicked him in the shin.
The tall man with the earrings commented dryly, "And a meal would've been nice too, naa, Rio?"
"Really, Garu, how can you even say something like that? When WOULDN'T a meal be nice?!"
The fourth watched them silently; he seemed to fade into the background with his nondescript appearance and blank expression, and his only distinguishing feature seemed to be his eyes, deep and shadowed.
Although nobody addressed the fourth, somehow he knew that the other
boy's name was Yu.
Teela spoke again, cool and distant, "You can eat when we return. This
is important."
"But they're all the way out in the Far Reaches," Rio stated plaintively, and yawned again. "Why bother? There's not many people left in the Far Reaches, and they're no threat to Zion yet--"
"The more a Victim destroys, the stronger it becomes," she reminded him. "These are only D-Type now. What if they're F-Type when they reach us?"
Rio looked queasy. "Well, fighting even ONE Type F sucks. Maybe we can go get them tomorrow instead! Tomorrow afternoon. After lunch."
"We'll go and get them now." Teela turned on her heel and headed for the exit. "Please, all of you be ready to depart in ten minutes. We don't have much time before a colony is put in a potentially dangerous situation."
As she passed him, she seemed to smile faintly. "Make yourself ready," she murmured. "Erts."
Then he was in the middle of battle, in what he instinctively recognized as a cockpit although it bore no resemblance to any cockpit he'd ever seen before, and someone was shouting from above him, "Reneighd Klein, the reading! What are the Victim doing?! Come on, Erts, give us a hand here!"
"I've already told you," he found himself saying tensely, "they're going to strike at the K-09 colony!"
"The K-series colonies just aren't lucky at all, are they?" another voice sounded, making the communication devices hovering above his temples glow faintly. "How many times do these guys get hit, no matter WHERE you put them?"
"Shields at thirty-seven percent," reported the first voice, which he could now dimly recognize as that of Rio. "We take a couple more blasts head-on like this and the shields are gonna go down like tin foil."
"What are our instructions, First?" came a resonant tenor that must've been Yu's.
Something blurred past him so fast that he couldn't even identify it, and then there was a bizarre shrieking -- not an audible shrieking, because they were in space and physical sound did not truly exist in space, but a sound that echoed inside his bones and heart and mind, a pained, hate-filled cry. He found himself echoing it, choked and hurting without knowing why.
"If I move from this position, the Victim will make a rush," Teela's comment returned, somehow numbing the suffering and making him shiver with delayed reaction. "Reneighd Klein. How many are left?"
He forced himself to concentrate without even knowing how he did it, broadening his consciousness and tuning into the omnipresent and unique sounds that were space, and THIS strange act, of all things, made sense. Except that amidst the soothing, peaceful emptiness that was a life in and of itself there were three foul stains, three places where the universe broke its silence and screamed in horror at the very presence of whatever-it-was...
"Three," he managed to say, shuddering. "There are three left."
"There's still THREE?! Eeva Leena, what are you DOING over there with the Number Four Cannon?!" Rio squawked. Fear and determination, and resignation and stubbornness...
"Shut UP, Agui Keimeia!" ...and fury and helplessness and a certain grim satisfaction...
There was a sudden convulsion, and another of those surreal, piercing shrieks; a shockwave raced over him, catching his Reneighd Klein in the blast. In what seemed like a fraction of a second he frantically keyed in a command, and then they were in the maelstrom. This time the cry of pain was from his own body, reeling back through the holographic panels of his computers and slamming into the metal wall, and he knew that SHE was in pain as well because he could feel her, because he was in sync with her, but he didn't know how to make her feel better because she didn't really WANT him to.
Yu reported, "Tellia-Kallisto: one down."
A thin crackling came from the communication devices, then was lost again, and Rio muttered something about still being out of range of GIS.
"There are two Victim left," Teela informed them. "We're going to use pattern 3A. Be in your places in ninety seconds."
"Ryoukai."
"YES! I LIKE it when we have a plan!"
"I read you, Ernn Laties."
The viewscreens before him showed the other four mecha twisting into formation, the blue one that he knew was Eeva Leena taking the fore, the orange Agui Keimeia behind him with the energy shield flaring outward, and the bloodred Tellia-Kallisto rocketing out of sight. He only watched them go, then withdrew without comment. His place in this was on the sidelines, keeping an eye on things without involvement.
Never, ever to be involved.
One of the creatures -- the source of the wrongness, the stains on the tapestry of space, the "Victim" -- slid into his field of vision. It was enormous, easily three times the size of his mecha, and reminded him of some sort of impossible jellyfish, propelling itself through the void of space and shrieking on a purely reactionary level.
Unwillingly, he reached out to touch its essence and was instantly repelled by its burning anger and desire to savage all life; but beneath that he saw its mind, and knew that it was planning to...
"Agui Keimeia, please shift the shields left; it will make a blow at the colony as it passes near," he said firmly, allowing his attention to focus on the other Victim. "The far Victim is headed directly for K-09; please engage, Ernn Laties."
"Thanks, Erts!" The dozens of charged capsules around the orange mecha condensed suddenly into a tight ball, then exploded outward again at Rio's quickly-inserted commands.
"Engaging now. Nobody disrupt the pattern, not even to chase down the Victim, until the gambit has ended. And keep your attention focused, Reneighd Klein; we'll need your input," Teela advised.
"Understood."
Then he was somewhere else again, collapsing from a relentless onslaught of nausea brought on by the pain of another, with screams echoing in his ears.
Quatre Raberba Winner jerked upright, shuddering convulsively.
"Quatre?" Trowa was kneeling next to his bed; Duo and Wufei hovered behind him, looking anxious, with Heero watching alertly in the background. What were they doing here? There were enough rooms on Peacemillion that they didn't have to share...
"You were shouting at the top of your lungs," Duo informed him with a surprised shake of his head. "Going on about how it was your fault and you weren't good enough and stuff... What WAS that?"
"I don't know," Quatre whispered, one hand unconsciously fisting in his nightshirt, above his heart. "It was... It was so REAL, but I was somebody else, and there were these aliens attacking the Earth, or something..."
"Aliens attacking the Earth?" Duo's lips twitched. Even Wufei looked like he was fighting the urge to smirk.
Quatre shook his head violently. "You don't understand! It was HORRIBLE! There was... there was..."
It all seemed so distant and silly now, in the bright lights of a Peacemillion break room, with his friends gathered around him in concern and the final battle looming in mere hours. He had the awful sensation that it hadn't been just a dream, that he couldn't possibly have made up a universe so detailed and then only experienced fragments of it while subconscious... But he couldn't explain any of it. Not who he'd been, and why he'd been so unhappy; not the war, and how sad it was that an existence of unending struggle had become accepted as life to those poor people; not the sheer terror inspired by those creatures...
"What do you need aliens for?" Duo was saying. "Don't we have enough trouble without going outside the human race? I mean..." He began ticking things off on his fingers. "OZ and the Romefeller Foundation and Project Meteor and White Fang and God only knows what's next... Can't we NOT bring aliens into this?"
"Forgive me..."
"And you're turning into WUFEI, too!" he continued energetically, ignoring it as the Chinese boy snapped to attention and glared at him. "'I'm not worthy' and 'It's all my fault' and 'Forgive me' and 'JUSTICE'--"
Duo's words were cut off as he dropped to the floor, narrowly avoiding a fist to the jaw, and scrambled out the door with a yelp as Wufei leapt at him again. Heero followed them with one last evaluating look.
Trowa stood and turned as if to leave also, but then asked softly, "Are you sure you're alright?"
Already, the dream was fading. He could deal with it now. Quatre smiled up at his friend, touched by the concern from him so soon after his recovery from the amnesia that Quatre himself had been responsible for. "I'll be fine. Thank you, Trowa."
With a solemn nod, the other boy shut off the light and left the room.
Quatre laid himself back down and relaxed, and within moments had drifted off again, this time without dreams.
Erts Virny Cocteau slowly opened his eyes to stare into the darkness. His memories had returned.
"It only works for a little while," he mused wistfully. "I can only live somebody else's reality for so long before they can no longer handle mine..."
He turned onto his side and curled up. "It's wrong, I know," he breathed to someone who could no longer hear him. "To want to be... anyone but me..."
There were good things about being himself, but they were few and far between and so many of them were gone now. An existence without undue responsibility, a position behind the front lines of the war, a brother who had tried to shelter him, a partner who had understood him... and a pair who had really cared about him.
All gone.
He smiled, bitter. "Anyone but me."
And when sleep overwhelmed him in spite of his determination to stay awake, the nightmares came again.
~tsuzuku...~
There is an explanation for everything. It will all make sense sooner or later. (Later.) This will get written eventually, but it might get written faster if I get encouragement. ^_^ I promise that it's not meaningless, and it is very well-planned. Pairings will include yaoi, yuri, and het couplings -- brace yourself; some of them will be quite weird. The Gundam Wing characters don't belong to me, and neither do the Megami Kouhosei characters, but I love them all anyway.
More to come.
--Kay Willow, fidgeting with a thousand things at once and with three
other finished MK fics still loitering on her desktop and a Zero/Erts creeping
up on her... no rest for the weary!
MK Info Site: http://flash.to/dualpotential/
Blog: http://kay_willow.livejournal.com/
Email: kay_willow@hotmail.com
Contact: (AIM) Savinsilk, (MSN) see email, (Yahoo) kay_willow