It was the place he would choose to fight, to die. They were all going to die anyhow. He would go out fighting though. Even though he chose this, he would continue to fight. Fight and fight.
I'll continue to fight. I'll fight longer than anyone. I'll fight longer than Relena Peacecraft of the Sank Kingdom.
Then, he felt himself get blown away. He hit a wall and then a floor. He hit it softer than he thought it would.
His surroundings were dark, it was pitch black. He fumbled for a flashlight he coincidentally found near him.
He noticed the familiar style of clothing on the other people unconscious around him. What was he doing there with them? He was in the middle of a battlefield, ready to die.
"Hey Wufei, you're not dead yet, are you? It can't end like this." Duo watched the projections of his future Deathscythe in his hands.
Then he looked around and didn't see Wufei anymore, just blackness. He almost believed death came for him. "Retrace. A bright tunnel ahead leading me over, wouldn't be held by Heero Yuy of all people." He filled his lungs with oxygen. Air. Lots and lots of air. "We survived? Where are we?"
"Retrace. I don't know," Heero said. "There is a flashlight next to you."
"Oh, goodie for me." Duo took it. "Are we out of barge?" He looked at Heero longer with his flashlight. "You are scruffy."
The quiet between the bodies was gone as Wufei let out a bloodcurdling scream.
"Wufei, we are saved," Duo said to him. "Partly deaf now too, thanks."
Wufei was startled. "Retrace? Where am I? The colony!" Panicked. "Nightmare. Where's Nataku?!"
"We must have been left unconscious for some time," Heero said to him. "I wasn't even in the colonies."
"For the glory of-ah!" Another familiar person woke up, but he wasn't a friend. "Retrace. Where am I?"
"Zechs." Kidnapped with them?
"Why does my face feel so brushy?" Duo stroked his chin. He looked toward Quatre. "Him too. All brushy."
"Retrace. Crystalia Bloom. It's called facial hair." Trowa's voice came from his spot on the floor. "I noticed it too on me."
"Hmm." Duo kept touching his chin, rubbing the hair. "Okay. Fifteen. Lot of facial hair. We would have been locked up for . . .?"
Heero touched his own face too, but besides that. "Every single one of us said retrace when we first talked to each other. Trowa, who is Crystalia Bloom?"
"A woman I see, in my vision. I don't get it. I just started to get my memory back about being a gundam pilot," Trowa insisted. "I needed to help save Cathy. Who took me and how? Why do I see a vision of a woman named Crystalia Bloom?"
"Retrace! You've got to-!" Quatre started to wake up radically too, bending himself in an odd way. He touched his chest. "I am fine?"
"I'm not so fine," Trowa answered. "I don't understand this. Where are we?"
"Somehow, an enemy has gripped us in it's grasp." Zechs answered him. "Leaving us in darkness with nothing but flashlights."
"And scrubby beards." Duo scratched it again. "It's not like thick, but I uh, don't shave much yet."
"You're not fifteen anymore," Zechs said outright. "You are all about as old as me."
"Were we under sedation?" How could this be? Heero looked at his hands. He looked at his legs. He was definitely older.
"We can feel the difference," Quatre said to them. "We just can't . . ."
They all got up and started to move along the walls with their flashlights.
"What kind of jail is this?" Heero asked as he kept touching the sides. It was like an infinite loop of pitch black and grey all around.
"Oh!" Quatre had his flashlight looking upward instead of ahead at some point. "There's no way."
"What is it?" Heero asked. "Where are we?"
"These are the exact days and locations left by the original constructionists of when this section was sealed." Quatre moved closer to the ceiling. It wasn't very high, he could touch it. "We should be dead right now. There's no air in here."
"Trust me, there is air," Duo answered Quatre. "Lots of it, and comfortably."
"There shouldn't be." Quatre just stared at the ceiling. "We are at the base of a colony."
"The bottom of a colony?" Heero asked.
"No, the base. We are in the construction of the first starts of the colony," Quatre insisted. "See that date? It translates today to After Colony 003." Quatre staggered back slightly. "Oz couldn't do this. The Alliance couldn't have done this. Not Romefeller either. No one had the power to do this."
Quatre looked like he was losing it. "How do we get out, Quatre?" Heero asked.
"We don't. We should be dead." Quatre just shined his flashlight ahead. It's just miles and miles of this, and it just loops."
"Then, we have to find a way up." Duo pressed on the seal.
"Wait, you don't get it," Quatre warned him. "This is the very structure that makes a colony strong. It is like the leg in the lower base of stacking cards."
"If we risk going up, we could take out the colony." Heero understood. "Which enemy? A new one?"
"Oz isn't capable of this. Even Treize isn't capable of this," Zechs answered back. "This is something new."
Quatre touched his scruffy chin. "I last remembered fighting with Dorothy Catalonia. Wufei remembers his colony. Heero, you remember before we went to the Sank Kingdom."
Hm? "We went there?"
"Duo, what's your last memory?" Quatre asked.
"Running out of air on the moon," he said. "I don't get it. How could someone sedate us for years? What happened in the war?"
"We have different memory endings. It's not like we all remember being kidnapped. It's all different cut off points," Zechs noticed. "Why?" He started to hit the seal too.
"I don't know, but I'd say someone wants to eliminate all the people capable of flying gundams." Quatre watched Duo and Heero pushing on it too. "It's a calculated risk to the colony, but we can't afford to let this new enemy win." Known or unknown, a gundam might be the only way to stop them. "I'm sorry to anyone above if this ends them."
They all pushed on the seal. They started pushing along different areas of the ceilings. There had to be a weak point.
"Someone gave us air down here. Someone put us here where we can't be found. Someone wants us alive." Quatre started to scan the ground. "The constructionists were supposed to put away all of their things, but the floors been cluttered. This might be considered so old, they didn't have a well established system for leaving yet. Or, no consequences at least."
He looked around the floor. "If we can just crack into the area above us, will be right in the middle. We can circle for a few months, and there will be a small area above somewhere that we can move upward."
"I guess controlling colonies really helped you out here," Duo said to Quatre. "I never heard anything about this stuff."
"No." Quatre looked guilty. "I . . . used to fantasize how to get so lost in a colony, that no one could ever find me. I'm just thinking backwards," he uttered.
"Don't worry about it, Quatre," Trowa said to him. "We've all had those thoughts at times. At least now it's helping us."
"If we can't get up into the ground floor, we are going to die of starvation. If they left old preserved food, then we might survive for a little while. Otherwise. It might be a better idea to just end it if we can't," Quatre warned them.
"Right back into that kind of situation again, huh?" Duo started pushing harder. "I didn't just escape from jail, losing oxygen, just to end like this. As some corpse in a colony base somewhere random. I don't even know my death location spot. I don't want to die somewhere when I don't even know where or when it is."
"There!" Quatre said excitedly as he saw a tool on the ground. "Hammer and pull it with this. If we can get into there, it increases our chances of survival."
They each took a turn trying to put their energy into the crowbar and hammer tool, until it finally popped open.
When they went up, it looked the same. Air was still in there.
"It'll be months before we can reach the surface, but if we just walk the length of the colony, maybe three times? We should get there." Quatre smiled.
"Walk the length of the colony?' Duo shot his finger to the left to the right. "Like that?"
"More like this." Quatre took his finger and spun it around once, around twice, and around three times. "It might be closer to a year. I never ran that exact data around it, it was more like, just thinking to get away at one time."
"Food? Water?" Zechs pointed out. He gestured toward Trowa on the ground. "He's been through some kind of battle recently."
"I can still move." Trowa stood up, but it was clear Zechs was right. "I will slow everyone down. I can continue and rest on my own."
"That isn't how it should work," Heero said. "All gundam pilots are making it out of here. Don't let the enemy win, Trowa."
"Why can't we just do the same thing we did below?" Duo asked. "Just, up with the tool thing?"
Quatre shook his head. "With a tool, we could get into this layer from below. The bottom is how they entered into this section. It's reinforced to make sure it didn't break easily. Even small asteroids should just bounce off."
"Oh. Great. So that kind of strength? A gundam could break through, but six unarmed humans, probably not so much," Duo just had to say. They still tried, but Quatre was right.
How long would it take to get out?
Not only did all six of them have that question, but at night, they had a vision. Each of them saw a woman each. A small portion, like a clip, of someone. Some they knew. Some they hadn't.
Trowa's was an older woman with red and white hair in a wheelchair. He said she didn't seem sad, happy, or angry. She was just there with no trace of a smile.
Heero's was of a school girl he once knew that became a princess, lying in a bed next to him. He said she was in a compromising situation but never said more than that.
Duo kept seeing a basic pilot he once met that helped him to the moon. Instead of a uniform, she had on civillian clothes now. Hilde Schbeiker. She always looked nervous, at some hotel tabel, with babies around her.
Quatre's was the woman that he said he was fighting with in AC 195, a cousin of Treize Kushrenada, Dorothy Catalonia. She was standing in a desert, her dress blowing in the heavy winds, holding some kind of present.
They just kept moving on, ignoring the visions, knowing that one day it would probably make sense.
Just keep moving.