It was completely dark, icy, and the fierce wind was bitterly cold.
A red flash briefly lit the trees and snow. Ambient materialized and dropped Brad face-first into a snowdrift, surprised that the man's first reaction wasn't to spring up out of it.
In fact, Brad was quite grateful for the distraction, almost as glad as he was to have been removed from Naomi's presence. Not because he wanted to be, but because he honestly wasn't sure what he'd been about to do. A compulsion to lash out?
He'd thankfully had the presence of mind to be alarmed and do something about it, but…
The sudden feeling he'd taken a chainsaw to his midsection, a feeling which now refused to let up, cancelled any further thought on the subject.
He screamed into the snow. It didn't help.
Ambient waited for Brad to stop, then dragged the man out of the snowdrift with a hindtalon. It turned him over and stared.
~The hell's wrong with yeh?~
"Fuck if I know." Brad hissed, trying to ball up.
Ambient didn't let him. It tilted its head, leaning weight onto its leg - and Brad - to keep him still.
~Stop. Look at me.~
The creature's tone and voice were unusually serious, and a bit disarming. For lack of better options, Brad did as asked. He looked up at the beast's emerald optics.
He was surprised by the sensation of pressure, distinctly different from the physical weight of Ambient pushing him into the snow. He recognized it, too: a fierce, immaterial grip on his bones that he'd experienced exactly twice before.
While he'd felt a hint of it when he'd first met Ambient, he'd never really-
Ambient abruptly broke eye contact and glared off into the pitch-black woods.
It stopped, it all stopped.
Brad inexplicably felt better after the odd pressure subsided. He relaxed into the snow, its biting cold holding no candle to anything he'd just experienced.
But realization quickly sank its fangs in. The pain, the panic, and the mindless need to lash out? They weren't his. They were Vega's, and probably One's. He was helplessly, hopelessly subject to whatever dross of theirs spilled his way, and there didn't seem to be a damn thing he could do about it.
His shoulder ached, as if to drive the point home.
The sway One held over him in the Mackaray Base had gotten to him much, much more than he'd let on. Or understood.
Dread took hold and became despair. The man stared blankly into the night sky, for far too long.
His glance eventually twitched to Ambient, who stood equally-still above him. Despite the dark, Brad could see the Organoid just fine. He silently watched the beast's optics shift and dim with thoughts it kept to itself.
As best it could, anyways. Brad could tell it was extremely upset, angry, or both.
Well. So was he.
Neither spoke.
Eventually, Brad became uncomfortable in the snow. He pushed to get up, and Ambient allowed it.
The two sat near-motionless in the night, their only companion the frigid air.
The Liger Zero kept trying to shepherd the other Blitz Team Zoids to an intact corner of the hangar. They didn't particularly understand this, and resisted in confusion. Tired and confused itself, it finally settled on standing in front of all of them, then turned to watch Zero bristle into the desert night.
Stoller simply stood watching, shocked into silence for a span. He managed to quickly shake it off and loped to Bit, kneeling beside the blonde just as Sara and Polta arrived.
Sara scanned the hangar to confirm what she already knew: Vega and One weren't there. Stoller nodded at her as she stopped beside him.
"You weren't kidding about the Organoids." He said bluntly as he checked Bit for injury.
"When have I ever exaggerated." The woman stated, voice just as blunt. Her face read ire, but her eyes read concern. "Vega's not here, is he."
"No." Stoller shot a wary glance towards Zero. "He and his Organoid vanished."
Sara sucked in a frustrated breath, while Polta picked at the ripped back of Stoller's coat with contempt.
The wiry man scoffed. "How did you manage this and still lose track of-"
"Shut up." Stoller jabbed an elbow, hard, behind Polta's knee. Polta yelped as his leg buckled, stumbling to put Sara between himself and Stoller. The woman cut Polta a scorching glance; now was not the time.
"What the hell's going on in here?!" Leon's commanding voice tore into the hangar with no hint of patience. The young Toros began to skim the scene but startled, noticing Bit; like a territorial animal he was at the group's figurative throats in seconds, forcing them all away. He quickly checked Bit over himself. "What happened?!
Stoller sighed at Leon, but showed his hands and backed off. "We're just as confused as you are. The Organoids got into a fight."
It couldn't keep up the teleportation.
A near-invisible gouge in the night sky reformed into an equally-hard-to-see Organoid.
One tried to maintain flight, but struggled against fierce winds. Snow and ice peppered its body as it folded its wings and dipped groundward. It had the rest of the thought in-mind: backwing, land, reorient.
In reality all it could do was land hard and collapse, splayed wings angrily beating the ground and throwing grit and snow everywhere.
Coherent thought became difficult as its desperation flourished. The beast roared into the night, enraged, disoriented - furious.
Vega lay curled inside the beast, his eyes shut tightly. Some of the cabling inside One held steady, keeping the child in place and making sure he wasn't jostled too much. But everything else inside the Organoid crawled and dragged across him - ravenous, questioning, and desperate.
This reminded Vega of something.
But every ounce of his concentration was on keeping himself distinct and in one piece. He felt the creature around him becoming a feral mess, its shrieks so piercing they rattled his teeth.
With a throat tightened by stress, Vega managed an, "Hey! It's okay! It's okay!"
But it wasn't okay. Through One's eyes he could see only pitch-black forest: nowhere he recognized, and all he could understand from One was that it hadn't quite made it to the Mackaray Base (and that made it even angrier.)
"We'll figure something out! Calm down!"
One swung harsh focus inward, all parts of its mind fixating on Vega. For a moment it calmed.
That moment passed quickly.
Vega was alive, and living things were food. It reflected to Vega that, while it didn't actually want to expulse him only to ingest him another, far more fatal way, that it was a nice thought. Might Vega consider it?
Vega very politely declined. His newfound ability to reliably tell himself apart from the creature was fortunate: he realized otherwise he would've been entirely too glad to let One devour him in service of a meal.
It was with a deep sinking feeling that Vega realized this was what he'd been missing in the first place. The ability - any ability - to assert, to distinguish himself, to make certain he wasn't accidentally sacrificed when things got out of hand. As One seemed to have known they would.
That's what this reminded Vega of. The Berserk Fury breaking down as it faced off with the Liger Zero.
Before it'd completely lost sense, One - the Berserk Fury - pushed Vega away, hard. Otherwise, it knew it would've drawn on him to finish the battle, and it'd known Vega likely wouldn't survive. It'd cost them their victory, but...
That's why the beast had demanded other pilots for the Berserk Fury to begin with.
This was no different, except the very nature of the beast - and its needs - had changed. What did anything else Zero had gone on about have to do with it?
One crushed in, beyond any threshold of conscious control. It pressured Vega - lovingly - to give himself up.
Inexplicably tempting as this was, Vega remained quite aware that faltering right now meant his life would be over. He didn't find that terrifying, just oddly inconvenient. Vega had never feared One and wasn't about to start.
It was One's distress itself that was freaking him out. Vega didn't know where they were, and realized with rising panic he had no idea how to tell the beast where to go. It'd always unilaterally made those choices before, or they'd done so as a unit… part and parcel of feeling indistinct.
"Cut it out! Listen to me! We can't really do anything together if I'm dead, understand?!"
It didn't understand, was the issue. It reflected that it could not die, ergo Vega would also never perish. It simply wouldn't allow for it.
Concepts that Vega had never really considered before gouged deep into his young psyche. Brief fascination made his concentration falter: he felt One take up the slack.
He really, really wished he had Bit's help right about now. Even Zero's. Though... very few things had ever struck true fear into the child, and Zero was now one of them.
Vega wasn't sure what had happened, or how, but he found himself unable to breathe. One's hold on him had simply become too tight. He grabbed the cables around his neck and shoulders, trying to pull them loose-
-and found himself sitting in the cockpit of the Berserk Fury.
This was confusing, to say the least. He looked around, eyes combing the controls.
Everything was fine. Everything seemed fine. Which was his first clue that everything wasn't fine at all.
When Vega spoke, it was in an uncertain tremble. Not out of fear, but nerves. "One. Hey. Buddy."
Still no speech. Just its tense and jagged presence.
"What's going on?"
The console. Look at the console. The notion arrived in tattered segments, as if screamed through static. The map.
The map. Vega brought up the readout for the map. The details of the Daigan Peninsula loaded, data crawling down the screen as requested.
Vega plunged deep into deja vu, feeling his adrenaline spike: the Royal Cup. This was during the Royal Cup, when they'd just learned where the finish line was. When One had decided going after the Liger was far more necessary than any silly game.
Vega's eyes flicked, struggling with the memory.
It was so real. He wanted it to be real.
Everything was fine at this point. He could've gone back home. Instead of trying to go after the Liger, he could've kept everything together. He could've stopped the ZBC and ZBGF from raiding the Backdraft HQ. He could have destroyed them completely. He could've had everything-
The map.
What about the map. He shook his head, focusing on it again.
A completely alien notion of space and time flickered in his mind. He didn't truly understand it, but he grasped the important part: how One understood the world, and where things were in it. How to relate concepts Vega understood to those One knew.
How to tell the creature where to go.
But his gloved hands quivered on the controls. The soft, powerful thrum of the Berserk Fury was even better than he remembered.
Vega didn't want to leave it, and all it represented, behind. He wanted it to be real.
If he told One to go anywhere, this would all be gone again. The compressed anguish of everything that had happened after this point loomed like a waiting executioner.
He closed his eyes and dropped his head back onto the seat.
Unbidden, he recalled his blind panic as the Berserk Fury had turned towards him, Sara, and the Backdraft group trying to set up comm equipment. He wasn't scared of being hurt, no - but One's disinterest in Sara had forced Vega to confront an impending reality of a life without her.
And it wasn't one he'd wanted. He'd very literally dragged her out of harm's way.
It'd made him feel embarrassed, angry… but relieved.
He had his disagreements with his mother. And while he'd growled to himself many a time he'd be better off without her, his actions spoke louder than his pouting ever could.
He'd spent his whole life relishing in the power she imbued him with from a young age. But he did resent the way she'd spent that same time perched an impersonal distance off, watching him unblinkingly. Assessing him. Judging him.
Perfection and performance always got her attention. So he tackled everything with his all - at first just hoping she'd occasionally look down and acknowledge him.
It didn't work. It never did.
Discouragement never had a chance to settle in, however: his skill and reputation had become a reward in and of itself. He didn't need Sara's approval. He had the entire Backdraft Organization's rapt attention.
He'd grown fiercely in Sara's watchful shadow, with every expectation Backdraft was not only his, but his birthright. He was destined for great and greater things.
But for that, he needed to live.
He let go of the controls.
Toros arrived in the hangar last, bleary-eyed but wide awake. He did what one would expect a team leader to do: took unflinching charge of the situation. Not that anyone was used to seeing Steve taking charge this way.
After making sure Bit wasn't in any danger, he had Jaime help him move the blonde from the floor to a cot. Steve then spent several moments accessing a terminal in the hangar, becoming the first to take true stock of what'd gone on. His eyes flicked as he took in security feeds and scanner readings.
He stood in the unusual silence for several moments, before glancing at Sara. She met his gaze impatiently.
Leon. The younger Toros had taken to pinning Polta, Stoller, and Sara in place with his eyes - and none seemed willing to challenge him.
Sara cleared her throat.
"Leon, stop it." Steve said.
"Steve-"
"They didn't do anything."
Steve then looked towards the Liger Zero, keeping his distance, watching it pace back and forth in front of the other Zoids. The outer layers of the white Liger's belly plating hung open, swinging gently as the machine moved. Probably damaged latches.
Steve glanced at Zero.
He was awestruck as ever by the beast's size and presence, but its current posture was unmistakably hostile. Caution now shaded the man's regard: the entire scene an unsettling reminder they all had no real idea what they were dealing with.
Steve also registered Vega's absence, and looked back towards Sara. Once Leon had begrudgingly moved, Sara started towards Zero.
Though the beast hadn't moved, Sara knew it was aware of her approach. It reflected a strong sense of contempt.
"Where did they go?" She demanded.
Zero said nothing.
"Don't ignore me."
Zero did exactly that.
Sara bunched her fists and stood firm, glaring at the side of Zero's head.
At length it barely shifted an optic toward her.
~Your hubris appalls me. Begone.~
"Not until-"
In an impatient instant Zero did turn its attention to her: all of it.
Sara found herself cornered in her own mind, perceptions of all else driven away. The effortless crush was unlike anything she'd ever experienced - One had similarly seized her attention before, but not this hard.
This was borderline painful. She tried to pull away.
Zero didn't allow it, impassively holding her in place.
~I do not know where they went, and for that, you should be glad. If I did, they would be dead.~
It harshly sifted through Sara's thoughts. She knew nothing of where Vega might have gone. Zero realized quickly she didn't even know where he'd been , or anything about the child taking One to feast on the hapless Mackaray Zoids.
It paused, however, dragging across a particular recollection that made Sara wince.
Zero delved into it.
A woman of many thoughts and relatively few words, Sara took private delight in quietly approaching Alteil, knowing full well that she had the authority to take his newfound Zoid away.
She'd been watching him toil for years after his projects, most leading to dead ends or disused facilities long-emptied. But this one? This old Imperial Zoid? It was right where his documents said it'd be. Something so rare, unique, and useful certainly belonged to her son.
Not to Alteil's useless dawdling, and obsession with the past.
Sara looked down at Vega, who'd been walking beside her. "So?"
A small grin twitched across the child's face. "Doesn't look too bad to me."
She'd come to regret that moment. Only much later did Sara understand what had happened, what she'd done. Thinking nothing of the Zoid itself, she was well aware she'd used Vega as a pawn for the single play of pissing Alteil off.
Yet by doing so, she'd played right into Alteil's hand. And sent her only child straight into a snare.
For something so petty. So ridiculous.
And it had ultimately hamstrung Backdraft, ruined years of planning, and almost cost her Vega's life.
And could yet still. Zero perceived the edges of a much broader concern - and Sara bristled, furious, lashing out at the Organoid in-mind.
"GET AWAY FROM ME-"
A hand caught her arm. She found herself staring at Bit; he looked shocked.
"That's what happened? That's what started this?"
Sara's expression fell. There wasn't anywhere to go, or anything to hide behind. The twinge of fear Bit saw in her eyes quickly found itself replaced by a redoubled rage. Sara lashed out at Bit instead-
Zero ended the mental space abruptly. This left Sara staring up into the beast's blazing orange optics, and feeling the heat of its deep exhale.
~Just because the world is a cruel place does not mean you may take that cruelty out on others.~
Sara dropped her eyes, unwilling to look at Zero any longer.
~Be thankful that I lack One's predilections.~
At length Zero relinquished its grip on Sara's mind and pushed her away.
In reality, she stumbled backwards, kept from falling by Steve who'd rushed to catch her. A brief spike of resentment cooled quickly; her head hurt, and he wasn't a threat. Like obsequious dogs Polta and Stoller arrowed close as well, though everyone froze when Zero turned its head to look at them.
They weren't interesting.
Zero rumbled, gathered its haunches, and leapt into the hangar, blazing sharp white as it instantly covered the distance separating it from Bit. It sprawled its undersides, seized the blonde with its cabling, leapt again and vanished.
Bit didn't know and really didn't care where he actually was. What he'd come to recognize as Zero's serene mental space was a lovely place to be. He wished it'd let him stay here more, instead of only permitting the occasional brush or glimpse, but-
Reality and consciousness came back, cold and hard.
Well, not quite hard. Zero released Bit onto the bunk in his quarters, the mattress squeaking with the sudden bounce of weight. Even his familiar bed was unpleasant in contrast to what he'd left blonde groaned and sat up, rubbing his aching neck.
Zero settled to its haunches like a large bird, as the ceiling wasn't really tall enough for it to comfortably stand. It curled its tail around its talons, ultimately occupying most of the small room's floor.
Bit glanced. Immediately, he recalled things that Zero had done, that he himself hadn't been conscious for.
Zero's perception of Vega was grotesque, to say the least. The beast couldn't seem to help but picture the scent of One as ruin. Any level of scrutiny revealed One twined into every inch of Vega, like a quivering mass of pests just under his skin.
Bit somehow understood this was his own mind trying to parse senses he didn't have. Reality wasn't so terrifying.
Or perhaps it was.
Bit then saw One go for him.
He felt as if the floor dropped out beneath him, felt as if he'd leapt into space. Felt searing heat, biting cold. Felt every nerve in his body scream something different, joining a maddening cacophony that-
The recollection stopped.
Bit was left simply staring into Zero's softly-glowing optics, the brightest thing in the dim room.
The half-wings on Zero's back twitched. Flaring gently, folding uncertainly.
Bit didn't know why, but he couldn't keep tears from brimming in his eyes, couldn't stop his throat from tightening with upset. Couldn't deal with how raw and exposed and vulnerable and scared he suddenly felt.
The recollection hadn't stopped. It'd ended, violently. The difference between simply pressing a button and brutally tearing media out of a machine.
~Are you all right?~
Bit drew an arm across his face, chest heavy and aching as if with grief. Why? He wasn't injured, Zero wasn't gone. Everything seemed reasonably okay. He wasn't sure what had happened to Vega… but frankly, was preoccupied with himself at the moment.
"I don't- what did you do?!"
~I did not think Vega would stop One.~ Zero turned its head and gaze away slightly. ~I was afraid.~
Bit just stared.
~And I lost my temper.~ Zero said simply, as if that sufficed.
"Bud…"
~I did not trust myself. I had to push you away. Just for a moment.~ Its optics shifted back to Bit. ~I will not allow you to be harmed.~
It said nothing else.
Bit listened for more, but heard nothing beyond the sound of his own pulse ringing in his ears. His chest ached badly.
"Zero… you and Liger are the best thing that's ever happened to me. I trust you. But please," His voice trembled with intensity. "Don't ever do that again."
Zero stood slightly and stepped closer, dipping its snout toward Bit. Its tongue flashed out, gently grooming the side of the young man's neck. The edge of one the blades on its snout gleamed, the metal slipping harmlessly, perfectly across Bit's face and cheek.
The ache quietly faded. Bit closed his eyes and leaned close.
