Topsy-Turvy
Author's Note: Enjoy the story and R&R.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything related to or of Patema Inverted.
Pairings: Age x Porta. Referenced (canon) Age x Patema, one-sided (canon) Porta x Patema.
Summary:
"Trust I won't let you fall."
Who Porta finds himself pulled toward is a toss-up. In a way (and another way), it's not up (down) to him.
He and Age and Patema have a habit of popping up (or popping down) wherever they shouldn't, and gravity does the work for them. Except the difference is he and Patema come from the same dark place of pipes and grates and rusty machinery. Age, meanwhile, comes from the place of idyllic grassy hills, clouded sky, and stars.
An imitation nevertheless mesmerizing to behold.
Age is pulling Porta in two different directions. The topsy-turviness of their world makes this a very real, lived phenomenon.
They're from different worlds, yet the same world at the same time, just recently splitting down (up) the middle to reveal the core truth of the world.
The true TRUE WORLD, not captured in the photograph of Aiga that Lagos gave to Patema.
Understanding. A bridge. What Lagos talked about in Patema's daydreams.
At the end (beginning) of the day, they were all Inverts, any way you looked at it: above, below, vice versa. Residue and offshoots embroiled in the fallout of the experiment. The Great Change.
It was a matter of perspective. To the Aigans, the Inverts were despicable, filthy sinners who escaped falling into the sky and deserved their fate of being feasted upon by it, whereas to the deep folk, the Aigans were red-eyed bat men stalking areas children shouldn't plod – the monsters Porta warned Patema existed in the danger zone, in an effort to protect her from the knowledge passed down (up) to them by the chief's last will.
Both peoples' rules were thrown out (into) the cold (sun).
The veil was now lifted over their heads (under their feet), and the secret was out (or in). In spite of Jaku's reservations of his society's readiness to face up to their backward beliefs, slowly (or swiftly), the truth would trickle down (or up) to the rabble.
They'd all gone underground, and were all turned around all along; the Aigans, themselves the sinners they vilified, and the deep folk, walking upside-down in self-penance.
Secrets the eldest hid, creating two cultures founded on a monumental mistruth.
The real sky and stars were on the other side of their world, separated by a crust of ruins, while the stars above (below) Aiga were merely the lights of machines.
The deep folk walked out onto the planet's true surface, those with unaltered gravity.
Porta liked Patema. He always had. Yet with Patema falling into Age's world (followed by Age falling into Patema's), she never seemed more out of reach.
Porta fell up (down) into Age's line of sight. The uniting embrace Patema shared with Age, Porta also shared with Age.
Only when he was with Age did Porta feel he could lose the ground underneath (above) him for good. That groove missed by his gloved fingers, or the fence clung to as an anchor to keep him from levitating off.
He'd keep rising and lose anything to hold.
Concentrating on his memory of Patema pulled him back. Like the distinct regions where gravity was weaker or stronger, depending on the extent of the damage their ancestors exacted on the land generations prior. But Age was a second object (after Patema's first) with opposite weight. Always present. Always there, tugging him up or down, depending on the part of the Earth which Porta was standing on (or crouched under).
They'd held each other. Porta, Age, and Patema, the three of them.
Vertical was the default position.
Infiltrating the control center to rescue Patema, Porta and Age had improvised additional ones. The number of positions two people could come up with on the fly while attempting to bypass the gaze of a security camera inches from their faces on the ceiling (floor) would surprise you.
Crunched up into a ball of limbs. Crosswise, stomach to stomach. They learned to hurry over the roof (floor) the security camera was installed upon with surprising speed.
Porta tries not to think of it in uncouth terms, but give a heartsick guy who's spent his whole life underground some slack. When living spaces are cramped and you wear a hazmat suit all the time, dirty comes with the territory.
He and Age have a better handle on flexibility and agility than Age's handling with Patema, although Age and Patema have more experience flying. Moving their body weight around to engineer the right bend for a kiss was no sweat once Age and Porta had the practice of painfully hugging one another to the walls to evade detection in Izamura's tower.
"Porta, thanks," Age mutters again, now that they don't have the security police aiming nets and bullets at them. This segues into Age complimenting Porta's eyelashes. They're prominent, and Porta hasn't paid attention to them before Age mentions them.
Age was turned around too, periodically unsure where Patema fit in to all of this. Maybe his teacher was correct about his brain being inverted. It would explain his snag making heads or tails of who he should love.
But no matter how he and Porta and Patema fit together, he knew the one thing he must let go of was the religious articles he'd been brought up on. The depressing, prohibitive, and vile tenets his father died seeing an alternative for. Prejudices his father had hoped to invert.
Looking in the inappropriate direction was a sin. Yet the Aigans resided under a fake sky.
Ironically, the textbooks ordered the Aigans to reject the sky above (really below) and point their gazes down (actually up), beyond which was the true TRUE WORLD.
All those positions Age and Porta improvised during Patema's rescue…They were the prelude to something higher (lower).
Porta blushed then. At Age, from the gap beneath the stairs.
Age could hold down Patema, but on the surface, Patema (or Porta) had to hold Age so he did not float off into the depths of space.
Age was looking in an inappropriate direction, all right, but he and Porta could meet halfway, hearts beating opposite each other.