The first time he'd said it was when they'd replaced the curtain divider to their apartment bedroom with an actual door. The angle and spacing had made it long, hard, frustrating work. But when they'd finally managed Cyrus had looked over with a wide, exhausted smile and said "you and me are unstoppable, right?"
And Daichi's heart had skipped a beat before he said "right".
Cyrus pulled it out again and again through the years whenever he felt his grip slipping. When he'd wanted Daichi to quit his hard-won job and come work for the fledgling Galactic. When they went to increasingly reckless lengths to get the lake trio. The nonsensical explanation for why Saturn had to stay behind and miss the creation of everything he'd thought that they had worked for.
"It's you and me," Cyrus said in the whisper that he'd now forcefully brought back into his life. "We're unstoppable, right?"
And Saturn had said "right".
After Cyrus left, he forced open the lock on the office door to read papers that he should have read months, years before.
The words had now changed, but he couldn't shake that the feeling was there and as powerful as ever.
Mars had said he was being sucked in, but if he were honest he'd probably just never left if all it took to get him sleepless were a few soft words.
And Cyrus wasn't right, either, in saying that it was all on him.
It was the two of them, as it'd always been.
And they were unstoppable.
Based on the questions he asked, Lysander was well adept at reading a schematic. But, based on the way that those questions were translated, the interpreter had no tech experience to speak of. It turned every conversation into a frustrating game of 20 questions as they tried to work around the middle man's deficiencies.
Productivity was dragged down to a crawl. As that was more on Lysander's head than theirs, none of the techs did more than they absolutely had to to help the process along.
When what should have been a quick conversation about ordering more parts went round for the third time, Lysander finally snapped. It started an ear splitting argument where one was ready to kill, and the other was desperate to calm things down.
The techs stopped to watch and the guards, likewise transfixed, allowed it. At least, they did until a man in a suit came into the room and everything went quiet.
None of the transplants knew who they were looking at. Saturn recognized the woman who'd 'recruited' him, and noted how she hung against the wall in a way that was supportive but absolutely deferential. The papers she'd clearly been discussing moments before were now hugged to her chest to not distract from the man's authority.
Saturn, along with the other new members, quickly figured it was safer to follow the older members in making themselves look busy.
"What seems to be the issue?" the man asked with a deceptively professional voice.
"Well, sir-" The translator was cut off by Lysander. He collected himself a moment before he said, "He says that this project is impossible if he can't even communicate with his crew because of this…" He paused to try and figure out a better phrasing.
Lysander slammed a hand on the table and motioned to the man in the suit.
"This expletive for brains translator," he finished painfully. He glanced quickly at the techs, as he could feel the snicker that they were repressing. "Sir, I was positioned because I know Kalosian. But there's so much technical language that-"
The man in the suit held up a hand. "I'll figure something out. In the meantime, why don't you head down to the training area for a while and cool off."
Lysander waited for the translation and nodded stiffly. He gave a fierce look to the translator who reluctantly followed behind him as he headed out of the room.
"Get back to work." The man in the suit ordered before he likewise left.
The tension in the room slowly sank to the lowest level it had been as the technicians found themselves alone with the guards.
Saturn took the opportunity for some quiet, and uneducated observers, to study over his schematic. He looked over the safeguards, one after another, and his pencil tapped as he thought.
"Do either of you know what the training area is?" Saturn asked as he took his seat with his tray.
"You don't?" Mars snickered.
"How was I supposed to?" Saturn asked defensively. "It's not like they gave me the grand tour."
"That's been my only placement," Jupiter said.
"Well…" Saturn busied himself setting up his chopsticks. "I've also been preoccupied."
"We've noticed," they both said.
Saturn gave an apologetic eye roll as they smirked.
"The bosses all have new captures," Jupiter explained. "They're being rushed through training to build enough 'rapoarte' to actually battle with them."
"It's target practice," Mars clarified, lightly. "And she's the punching bag."
"I just had another pokemon give up on me," she sighed. "They only take so many blasts to the face without being able to land a hit before they won't even try and dodge."
"What kind of pokemon can manage that?"
"I've never seen anything like them, but they're all huge," Jupiter said. "And strong."
"Legendaries?" Saturn asked.
Jupiter thought a moment before she nodded. "Yes. They might be."
"Great so… Alright. They have legendaries on top of a lot of bombs."
"And the main opposition is probably a brat, based on how recon is going," Mars said.
"Please tell me you're joking," he said.
"A brat or two and a bitter ex-employee." Mars shrugged. "Maybe a stoner, I don't know."
"Well." Jupiter shook her head and took a section of fish rougher than necessary. "Aren't those certainly odds."
"Thank you for coming."
Saturn didn't look over when he heard a familiar 'hm'. It probably would have gotten them both in trouble if he'd looked too eager.
"Just let me talk to the lead tech," Cyrus said. His tone made it very clear how much of a waste of his time this was.
"Sir…" the translator said, "That would be-"
"The most efficient option," he finished. "I have my own projects to handle, not just yours."
Saturn didn't have to turn around to see the look that Cyrus was giving. It dared the translator to try and add anything else, and far stronger people had crumbled under it.
"Of course, sir." He motioned to one of the guards to bring Saturn over.
Saturn rose as casually as he could. "It would be best if you came over to my station, sir. For visualization."
Cyrus wordlessly strode past the pair he'd come to help and took his spot beside Saturn. Lysander was clearly not a man used to being left to the sidelines, and he scowled accordingly. But he'd also learned enough about Cyrus since arriving at the base that he wasn't about to crowd in. He stood by the door and hid any awkwardness with irritability.
"We're needing more parts for section three," Saturn began.
The schematic he'd placed on top was not the bomb, but that of the detinator panel that he was currently working on. As he spoke, Saturn kept his finger on the portion for one of the safeguards.
It marked an unfortunately mandatory bottleneck between the interpretation of the inputs and the execution of the outputs.
And, as he elevated his speech to be as impossible to translate as he could make it, he slashed his nail across the point which gave that bottleneck its power.
Cyrus occasionally asked an equally technical question, but mostly he just followed the path with his eyes. And, as an unnecessarily complicated discussion of a routine parts order continued, he pieced together what he was being told.
He looked over and locked eyes with Saturn for as long of a moment as they could get away with.
Cyrus took the order forms and bowed over them to sign off on what needed to be done. He glanced up and smirked, and then was back to scowling at his paperwork so quickly that Saturn would have missed it if he'd blinked.
But he hadn't.
Saturn returned to his seat, and Cyrus walked back across the room. He handed Lysander the stack of order forms.
"I have it handled," he said. "And now I have training. Don't need me again tonight." Cyrus strode out of the room before he could be thanked.
It wasn't twenty minutes later when Saturn looked over and saw a notecard on top of his schematic.
You understand that, even if this works, there's a good chance we'll both die here.
Saturn wrote back Well, it's you and me. We're unstoppable, right? and tucked the card almost completely away.
The next time he turned around, the notecard was missing.
However he was doing this, Cyrus had taken the card with him. That was more than enough of a reply to have Saturn smiling (at least internally) the rest of the shift.