Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

A young boy is running down the hall.

It’s a long, wide, entangled passage, Escheresque in design, unearthly, gravity-defying and strange. Myriad floating platforms, carrying people in various forms of armor, slide by above his head. He races underneath their heavy shadows on the track below, swerving out of the way of the machines rolling out around him, behind him, and in his path.

It’s faster to get to the other side this way, he knows, to take the shortcut through one of these long, crowded hangars. Plus, it’s exciting to see the colorful humanoid robots in their rows and columns, to run past the soldiers in their capes and helms preparing to ship out.

The soldiers give him a wide berth as he passes by, a few jumping to an odd salute, but he’s already racing ahead, without even giving them a glance. The machines stand still and tall. A few move, shifting, not in reaction to him running by, but adjusting themselves, unseen pilots all aligned in their triads, making their preparatory checks.

His footfalls echo in his ears, but they’re lost in the whirr of internals and heating up of electricity, the familiar tangible-intangible warmth of Getter Rays crackling in the still air.  He’s long learned how to avoid the pools of potential damage, the places where the magnetism of it all would drag him in and distract him from his goal, or where bolder soldiers would notice him and stop him in his path and insist he go back to somewhere safer. It’s an illogical-seeming trajectory he takes, one that brings him running along the walls and ceilings at times, held in place by the centrifugal gravity of the chamber.

It takes some time to reach the end of the hall, and the elevator that will take him up to the bridge. He’s unsure how long. He’s never bothered to time it. But he makes it there, and turns around in the pod, palms pressed to the green-tinted glass, to watch the vast room and its soldiers and machines grow smaller below his feet as he rises, model-train-display-sized, all of them organized in their rows and regiments.

He makes it up to the other level. It’s a primarily ceremonial thing, the bridge. The main three ships of the Emperor direct themselves by the orders of their core, their heart, their primary pilot, which are synonymous with the orders of the Emperor itself. Soldiers staff the command locations, in case they need to separate for some reason in battle, but they all are listening to commands from elsewhere, synchronizing their actions to the tick of some unseen clock. This isn’t even the only bridge—it’s just the easiest one for Takuma to make it to, and the one he’s most used to navigating, and the one the officers don’t mind his presence at.

It’s all the more convenient for Takuma to sneak through, to park himself by the window and catch a glimpse of the other two immense Emperor ships moving into position below them in space. They move slowly, but they’ve been moving slowly into position for some time now, and they’re just about to line up and press forward to shift.

Their movement is hard to perceive physically, just as the forward drive of the ship they’re on isn’t really able to be felt, but Takuma still senses the rush, the rumbling beneath his feet, the anticipation and potential energy of the moment-before transformation. The soldiers, focused as they are on the task, can feel it too—he can tell, in the wild-eyed looks underneath their helmets, the toothy grins that slowly emerge as green light begins to spark from the controls. 

It’s faster than you would expect, the reconfiguration into form, as the three ships join, immense machines—most of them out of Takuma’s view, somewhere some miles below him—interlocking and changing shape and activating their function. It’s like pushing a rolling ball down an inclined plane, and watching it pick up speed, momentum, directional inertia. Once set in motion, the ships are alight with energy, crackling, every console on the dashboards that the soldiers pore over gleaming and active, every construct in the hangar tightening up with coiled, ready potence.

He hears it just as he feels the massive snap of the components into place, as the view of the starry expanse through the bridge port shifts in its perspective. It’s a sound more thrilling and electric and all-encompassing than anything else Takuma has experienced in his short life, a cry out into space that brings wild cheers and mad celebration to every soldier on the bridge, all set in motion now, green light glittering off their helmets, a shout that energizes the engines and mechanisms of the ship—no, the robot—no, the body they’re all a part of, that strikes fear and dread and abject impossibility into the hearts of any enemy that dares oppose them. 

It is, of course, the voice that shakes the universe. Which is, indeed, that of his dad.

💚

Takuma’s uncle Musashi keeps an eye on him.

He’s wide and sturdy, and can carry Takuma on his shoulders easily, while he holds onto the top of his head for balance. When Takuma was smaller, he’d bang on the peak of his uncle’s helmet with his two balled fists and Musashi would laugh. He used to hide behind his tattered cape when the lights got too bright. The shadow the fabric cast was always enough to shield him away.

Musashi is one of the Bear Platoon’s best. The other soldiers respect him, and salute whenever he passes by, keeping their hands held aloft as Takuma follows behind him like a baby duck. When the alarms go off, he hefts a mighty-looking bazooka over his shoulder and climbs into one of the mass-produced Getters. He’s good enough that he can lead one himself, without any balancing triad.

He’s so serious when he comes back from the battle, face twisted into a leering scowl, the edge of his helmet tipped down to cast a shadow over his eyes, but before long he melts back into joviality, clapping Takuma on the shoulder.

“How many’d you get?” Takuma asks, beaming up at him. He’s not allowed out there—“you’re too small, and you don’t have a team around you,” the soldiers say—these after-battle reports are the closest he can get to the real thing.

There’s a green gleam glittering off Musashi’s smile. He laughs, filling up the whole airlock.

“I lost count!”

There’s been more than a few times where Musashi hasn’t come back from the hangar after a battle, but instead from one of the medical bays, shirtless and covered in a thin film of lime-colored slime and an odd fresh smell. Those times, he’s usually a little less cheerful and patient with Takuma, but it doesn’t take long for him to return to his usual self within a few hours, once he’s put back on his uniform and equipment.

“Don’t worry, I’m still here!” He gives Takuma a high five, leaving a residue on his hand.

Takuma wasn’t worried to begin with.

(There was that one memorable time when Takuma saw Musashi go down right in front of him. It was a fluke, really—a construction beam from one of the scaffolds fell from the higher levels of the hangar in just the wrong way, and skewered his body right through the middle. It happened so fast Takuma could barely process it, or process the blood that splattered across his clothes and hands from standing too close.

He stood there, staring, struggling to make sense of it. It felt like time had frozen. It’s not that Takuma didn’t know what death was—he saw death all the time—but close up, it was so different from the way that the aliens died on the video screens. There was no fanfare, no glory, no cheering victorious soldier on the other end of a gun. Just a splatter, and silence.

Takuma fell to his knees, still frozen on residual human instinct. Other soldiers walked around the two of them, saying little. One of them rolled his eyes. Another shrugged.

He isn’t sure how long he stayed there, unable to speak, caught in the shaded gaze of his uncle’s corpse, until a hand fell on the top of his head, and he turned.

“What’re you so glum about, kid?” 

Musashi was there, grinning as bright as ever. A pristine cape and uniform, eyes just as wild as every time Takuma has seen him before, body fully intact, face glowing with an uncanny air to it, like one of the machines fresh off the manufacturing belt. 

He wiped the tears from Takuma’s face with the edge of his cape, and helped him to his feet. Takuma didn’t even realize he’d been crying.)

💚

They’ve explained it to him this way. Takuma is the Emperor’s greatest invention—a successor, a simple body made in the image of someone no one recalls the face of. He’s been designed for a purpose—someday, when he is older, he’s to be sent out on an important mission, to ensure the world he lives in can exist.

That day isn’t today, though. Today, Takuma stands at the back of the launch bay, watching the soldiers hurry to their machines, the clatter of their boots against the floor and their weapons against their armor echoing throughout the hall. 

Most are too busy to notice him. The Fleet is a well-tuned albeit chaotic machine, and every being within it has their role in the war, whether it be in raising the colossal doors of the 237th Hangar or manning the control rooms or scanning the launch catapults for obstacles or rocketing out onto the glorious battlefield itself in their triadic groupings, voices screaming to the empty sky. A few of them even have the job of keeping an eye on Takuma and standing tall in his way if he passes a certain invisible line on the concrete floor, the line at which the pumped-in oxygen grows too thin for his pastborn lungs and the pull of vast outer space becomes too strong to resist.

He’s thought, sometimes, about sneaking past, climbing behind a cargo crate and up the gantry and into the cockpit of an unmanned mass-produced Getter and shipping out into battle himself. He knows well enough how they work—some of the other soldiers have taken him on tours around the exterior of the ship in theirs, while they worked on repairs—surely it couldn’t be that hard?

Something in his heart sings for it, especially when he hears the hangar erupt in cheers and army songs, staccato-punctured chants that urge the Fleet’s folk onward, verdant flickers in every eye and a hard-to-pinpoint synchronisation in their movement. When the soldiers rush past, he feels the wind, and wants to be blown away with them. It’s a feeling that’s difficult to put into words—a desire to go where they go, to fight where they fight, to be where they are.

But no, it’s too unsafe, the soldiers all say, and he can’t be brought back from the brink like they can. When he protests too hard, stomps his feet and gets mad, they chuckle and let him impotently pummel his fists against their solid forms. Even the shortest of the soldiers of the Fleet have been made broad and strong, purpose-evolved for their stability, for their ability to withstand G-forces, for their fortitude to yank the flight levers up at the last possible second to avoid an enemy strike. His body isn’t made for the same purposes—not only is he shorter, still-growing mid-evolution, but he can’t breathe in deep-space like they can, can’t rip through alien flesh with just his teeth or hoist huge containers on his shoulders. No matter how frustrated Takuma gets, he’s not making it through.

So he settles, then, for watching and waiting. He climbs to high places in the catwalks, counts the crews by threes, helps with hangar errands and fetching supplies when the technicians allow his help. He waits for his favorite machines with his favorite paint jobs to return, bets with himself on which ones will have taken damage, and which ones will have new kills to add to the glyphs carved on their sides. He waits, and he dreams of the day he’ll be allowed to be one of them.

💚

Takuma does have a role in it all, to be fair. He’s just not fond of it.

He can always tell when he’s about to be summoned for his duties when he hears the metallic clank of the battle priests’ boots approaching his location. It’s always an interruption, somehow, always when he’s in the middle of something. He rolls his eyes.

They lead him back to his quarters, and he dons his ceremonial robes—red and yellow and white with bands of branching green threads—grudgingly allows the priests to paint green lines on his face—and follows the retinue out again. The getup is at least not uncomfortable physically, but he still doesn’t like it. He can’t run very well in it, for one, and other people often trip on the trailing tails of the cloak, and then freak out about it, apologizing and bowing profusely and making Takuma the center of attention in the worst way.

Takuma is usually allowed to wander where he pleases, with a few exceptions for physical impossibility—he’s not allowed out the airlocks without a space suit, even though nobody else needs them—but this is the one time his movements about the ship are formally restricted. He’s led up by the priests to a glassed-in observation platform overlooking an immense factory room, so large he can’t even begin to see the other side of it, nor the roof of it—it just goes on and on, wide enough that fog collects at a certain height, clouding his view.

There’s a too-long period of standing around, and he gets bored enough to start kicking at the console with his boots before one of the soldiers tells him to be quiet.

Everyone, in fact, goes quiet as something vast and mechanical on the far other side of the factory activates. Doors, maybe, or an airlock, or some other structure, built to specifications Takuma is not privy to, with even more esoteric functions. It’s never clear to him what exactly is happening during this process, but as he watches, something begins to take form in the enormous center of the chamber, something round and gaseous and almost too-big-to-perceive, whirling in arrested orbit. If he squints, he can sort-of see the expanse of space out beyond it, but he’s never sure whether it’s the stars he’s catching a glimpse of, or a hallucination in the fog, a distortion caused by distance.

Once it—this thing—is fully formed within the chamber, there’s that sound on the other side of the chamber again, the closing of doors or the grinding shut of mechanisms. Other machines descend, some piloted, some vast megastructures attached to the side of the bay, and begin plunging into the shape, pulling, pushing, extracting parts of it, glowing faintly with the telltale green of Getter Rays. The battle priests and scientists and soldiers in the observation room with Takuma nod solemnly, singing a low note that’s joined one by one, by all present, in three-part harmony. It’s an incredibly strange experience, Takuma has always thought—they never have taught him the music, nor the details of the tradition, nor what’s going on in the chamber before them. He’s just there to be present, apparently, at the center of the room, unspeaking, unmoving, draped in his garments, like a statue decorated with banners and ribbons.

The ritual completes, and the song ends, at some arbitrary point. When they’re done, the object in the center of the chamber is still being worked on, and there’s never really any indication of what triggered the finishing of the ceremony. He’s just shooed off by one of the soldiers, who all go about their business. 

None of it has ever made much sense to him. But he continues on with it, because if he doesn’t, the priests will get mad and chase him down, and as fun as running away into the bowels of the ship is, getting scolded isn’t worth it. 

So he endures the boredom, and when it’s done, takes the outer robe off, balls it up under his arm, and starts the long trek back to his quarters.

💚

Takuma has never seen his father’s face.

They talk, though, sometimes. 

It’s mostly one-sided. When Takuma finds himself frustrated, or bored, or uncertain, he takes a shortcut through the tangled corridors of the ship, dodges out of the way of the big rolling supply transport carts and the passing regiments of soldiers, and ends up here, in an abandoned command center room, where moon dust covers the panels. A long time ago, one of the windows here shattered; self-repairing machines have long since fixed the cracks, but the glass is a different color, a jagged sort of sickly green patch in the shielding, and the grainy particles from somewhere out in space that got in somehow still remain.

Takuma kind of likes that about this room. It’s fallen into disuse and disrepair. It’s not impeccably designed like everything else on the ship so often is, nor so obsessively supervised. He figures if someone needed to find him here, they could—after all, it’s here that he talks to his father, and if his father knows where he is, then so does everyone else—but he’s satisfied at least with the illusion of privacy.

Ryoma Nagare is the center of the Emperor Fleet’s universe, its core and leader and idol, the front point of the triad. He’s also, quite literally, nowhere. As far as anyone knows, he has no physical body, no tangible form to take, or if he does, it’s never seen. He’s a voice, mostly, and sometimes a light, a green bolt of electricity that shoots through the wires and veins of the Fleet’s ships themselves. His shouts echo through the halls in moments of celebration, and his more direct strategic commands are heard by the closest generals. He’s everywhere at once, and the sound of buzzing energy heralds his active presence even before he speaks a word.

It’s that voice that Takuma knows him as, when he returns to the control room after a day of activity or idleness. That voice that responds to him when he rambles about something or other, complains that Musashi wouldn’t let him carry his bazooka on his shoulders, gives his simple updates on the most recent battle. He’s sure, of course, that his father knows all of this. But there’s something in the telling that feels significant.

The responses are often short, but full of energy; it’s like the voice itself glows. His laugh tends to stick in Takuma’s mind, a warm and embracing feeling. Ryoma sounds proud when Takuma tells him how he’s been training to use new weapons in one of the sparring rooms, as he shows off a few jabs with the new staff he snuck out of the armory. He praises his dedication, his drive-forward, his—what is it the soldiers call it again?—“indomitable human spirit.” Takuma beams back, feeling accomplished.

Once, when he was very young, Takuma clambered up to the disused captain’s chair on that bridge and brushed the dust off the handrests. He watched his father’s command activate the long-abandoned screens with lime-lit circuit lines, concentric hexagons expanding across a map of space like ripples in a pond, the three coreships of the Emperor fleet at their centers, radiating out across all of the galaxy. It’s a more complex battle map than Takuma has ever seen, fractalizing in minute detail from the most enormous star-cruiser to the tiniest manned skiff, full to the brim with foot soldiers. It’s the first time he’s seen it all, the whole dizzying scale of it at once, blinking and whirling in synchronization, and understood it all to move at his father’s will, at the will of the Emperor Fleet itself-themselves. 

“This’ll all be yours someday,” Ryoma had said, the back of the chair warming through Takuma’s back with a ghostly presence. It was almost as if someone had put their hand on his shoulder.

💚

All of the Emperor Fleet is organized in threes. It’s something as natural as breathing, anyone would tell you; there are balances and strategies that only make sense in the triadic structure, three gears interlocked, hand-head-heart. Every human in the universe is a certain type of person, and one of each of three certain types of people are needed to solve every situation, onward and outward in scale.

“Family groupings” within the Fleet all share this structure. They aren’t designed to produce children or further generations as much as they are built for camaraderie—new soldiers tend to be synthesized artificially anyways. Pilot teams live alongside each other; they work out and eat and sing drinking songs and spar in the simulations with each other. The archetypes embodied by the triad make each member’s functions interchangeable, but the bonds between the three—and their machine, mass produced or unique or no—function best when the groupings are consistent. 

Takuma has occasionally pondered the significance of the familial words he calls his father and Uncle Musashi. No one else uses them, opting for military titles or role-number combinations if they’re not just using each other’s names. He’s not sure where he picked them up. 

He supposes he may be one of a kind, to be the direct progeny of the Emperor itself. Most other Fleet folk can’t trace that close of a lineage, though the data and material every soldier can be rebuilt from is stored within the deepest parts of the Emperor’s ship-cores, so if you squint, one could say they were all descended from him. Thinking about it all too hard makes Takuma’s head hurt, so he doesn’t think about it too hard.

Takuma mostly knows that he’s one of a kind because of the frequency. That’s what he calls it, anyway; there’s not really a common word for it that’s used by the soldiers and shipside people because it’s everywhere, something all-encompassing and surrounding. Maybe instinct or will would be a better way to describe it. 

It’s the shared impulse the Getter Fleet’s people run on, something between telepathy and laser-line comms and hivemind mentality. It’s what makes sure the pilots dashing out of the hangar and the rockets launching from the ship cannons don’t collide; what ensures the work on the assembly floors isn’t inefficiently duplicated; what keeps the promise that as many squads as is possible are locatable on the commandants’ grid mapping, and called back up when this part of the fight is over. It’s how everyone knows when the ships are about to combine, how pilots themselves know how to align their Get Machines, how the soldiers chasing Takuma down the hall when he’s been up to mischief know what turns he’s going to take before he’s even taken them.

Takuma himself can’t tap into it, not like they can. He can feel the presence of it around him, that green glow at the edge of his vision, but it’s just out of his reach. Sometimes, he’ll be tagging along with a group of soldiers, and they’ll pause for a moment, clearly listening to something he can’t hear, and tell him gently he’s got to move along now while they deal with business. It feels, sometimes, as if everyone is speaking in a register above his ability to hear. 

It’s…odd, sometimes. He’s of the understanding that his inability to access the frequency is important to his role in the plan, somehow, but that doesn’t make it any less lonely. He’s always felt out-of-step with the whole, sometimes literally, his footfalls out-of-rhythm with the regiments marching in the hallway, the green glow and flare in his eyes kicking on just a second too late when the energy swells across the whole ship.

He’s wondered, sometimes, whether his father and Musashi count as being part of a triad with him, but it’s not quite right. All of the triad teams Takuma is surrounded by seem to understand each other completely. The two of them both—the Emperor and his favorite general—are operating on such distinct and contrasting planes of being that Takuma can’t really get at what either of them are about half the time. Takuma is a distant third point, if he’s a point at all.

All Takuma can do, when he feels like this, is trust. Or believe, rather, as the soldiers are so fond of saying. In his father, in the plan—the plan he knows very little about, other than that he’s got an important role in it someday—in the unshakeable nature of the Getter Fleet itself. In the reassurance given to him, whenever he’s worried about something, that it will all work out. Here, it always does. It’s a given.

💚

Takuma has never been sure when the moment would come when the Emperor deemed him ready for his mission. Apparently, that moment is now. The battle-priests who usually fuss over him during the ceremony for intaking material into the ship are at the door to his quarters, but there’s something distinctly different about it all this time. Instead of his decorative robes, they dress him in plain, faded clothing. It’s nowhere near as brightly colored as the usual garb the folk on the ship wear, and feels dated and strange. They lead him by the hand hurriedly down a passage he’s never seen before, down into the bowels of the ship.

They emerge in a chamber twice the size of one of the hangar bays. Most of it is taken up by an enormous machine, a series of round metal rings concentric around themselves, wires and cables entangled around the edges. Soldiers in heavy armor plating are scattered around the base of the room, some holding weapons, a few mass produced Getters lining the room’s walls. 

Musashi is there. He greets Takuma, shakes his hand in a self-serious manner, and claps him on the back. They sit down on a raised platform, and he explains to Takuma what he must do.

He will be sent through the machine into the past. This is both exciting and mundane for Takuma. There’s always been talk of travel between time in the Fleet, and some of the soldiers have even done it, and bragged of their exploits and adventures to him—but it’s not something he’s ever imagined himself being chosen to do. His pride swells at the honor.

He must not reveal anything about the Fleet and the future to the people who live in the past. To them, he must be as such—Takuma Nagare, the lost son of Ryoma Nagare, who has appeared now after years in a Getter without any memory. The people of the past will understand this concept enough not to question it, Musashi tells him. 

He must fight, once he gets there, alongside the people who will undoubtedly rescue him. His enemy will be a powerful foe from this future time, sent back so far as to attempt to cut the Getter Fleet off at the root. Takuma Nagare must do everything in his power to make sure that does not happen. Once that is assured, someone will come from the future to retrieve him.

It’s a heavy responsibility. Takuma can’t keep his hands from fidgeting, his eyes from darting back and forth. He tries—oh, he tries—to believe, to have faith that he’ll be able to accomplish the mission he was made for, but he can’t muster the certainty. He shifts from foot to foot, lit by the glow of the giant ring-like portal before him, beginning to activate in all its spinning immensity.

Musashi senses it, his anxiety, whether in the wind, or in the frequency surrounding them, or just in the way Takuma can’t stand still. He asks him what’s troubling him.

“What if I can’t do it?” Takuma finally asks. He tries to make his voice strong, firm, like everyone around him, but it wavers.

“Well, you’re here now, aren’t you?” Musashi says. He takes the yellow hard helmet he’s often seen with off of his head and places it in Takuma’s hands. In an old script, emblazoned on the front, it reads—“safety first.”

“If you were doomed to fail, we’d all be dead right now in the future. But you’re here, and we’re here, so you must be destined to succeed, alright?” Musashi grins. “Don’t you worry for a moment, kid. I know you’ve got it in you.”

Takuma swallows his fear and breathes deep. He can feel the energy crackling around him in the air. In his reflection on the side of the mass-produced Getter they’ve provided him with, he catches a glimpse of himself—his eyes glowing green, stark against the dull brown scarf wrapped around his shoulders.

He lifts himself up onto the gantry, and is carried to the center of the machine. For not the first time, he wishes he’d had the chance to practice in battle, that he wasn’t going out on instinct alone.

Instinct alone will have to do. On the signal of the soldiers below, he clutches at the controls and prepares to launch. He can feel—sense—know, somehow, the presence of his father watching him, in the sparks at the edges of his vision. Musashi gives him a stiff salute, smiling all the while.

And Takuma Nagare is launched into the unknown. 

💚

Chapter Text

The first thing Takuma Nagare notices about the past is the stars.

They’re the wrong color.

He sees them over the shoulder of the heavyset, close-shaved young man who’s pried open the hatch of Takuma’s cockpit, who’s helping him out by the hand. His grip is strong, and he’s checking Takuma for injuries, snapping his fingers in front of his face and looking for a reaction.

Takuma gives that reaction to him in time, but there’s still a moment of arrested motion — shock, maybe, or maybe it’s his consciousness catching up to him on the journey from the future. He’s come such a long way, after all. He’s not sure exactly how far — thousands and thousands of years, he assumes, but it’s not like the soldiers back home told him the date.

It’s the stars that stick in his memory, though. From the windows of the fleet ships he grew up on, at the heart of the legion itself, every star within his sight had always burned green , a sign that the fleet had made it there, staked their claim and safeguarded their light from the encroach of their enemies. They would radiate, spreading Getter Rays even when the fleet had left an area, ever-bright and ever-shining.

Here, they’re pale and colorless, feeble tiny dots too far away, and only above him, not spread all around in all directions. It’s deeply disorienting, as is the pull of gravity at the center of his chest anchoring him to the ground as he stumbles to his feet, drawn only in a single direction instead of every one at once.

Takuma has never set foot on a planet. The soldiers had always said it was too dangerous, and the fleet traveled too far and too fast, anyway. If he were to have left the ship, he would’ve been left behind on the further reaches of their footprint. It’s jarring, to see and feel it, the way the horizon stretches out flat and curved, the moon — he assumes that’s a moon — an out-of-place but stationary visitor in the firmament above him.

He trips on a rock as he tries to walk forward, and gravity yanks him down. He’s caught by the young man, whose necklace clinks against Takuma’s forehead.

“Whoa! Are you alright?” he asks. Takuma blinks. He speaks the same language as they do back in the Fleet, but with an archaic accent.

“ ‘m fine,” he mumbles, still struggling to get his bearings. His voice sounds odd and harsh comparatively. “Who’re you?

“Baku Yamagishi,” the other says, scratching at the back of his hairline awkwardly. He offers a hand to Takuma again, this time to shake.

You’re a 3-type, Takuma realizes. It’s something in the way he reaches out, earnest  and without faltering—the same way Musashi shook his hand before he left. I guess this world has triads, too?

He accepts the handshake, and breathes in deep of the terrestrial air.

“Takuma Nagare,” he says, his own name strange on his lips. 

Baku’s eyes widen. Takuma remembers his cover, haltingly.

“I don’t seem to know where I am,” he says. It’s not exactly a lie. 

“New Dream Island No. 14,” Baku says, gesturing around him. Takuma assumes that’s supposed to mean something. He takes in the sights his eyes elided over. It’s a trash heap, an island landscape made up of broken-up buildings and pieces of technology. A few limbs of machines stick up from the rubble.

His mass-produced Getter has been pummeled by the journey, and most of its identifying markers are blotted out by atmospheric soot. Time travel had not been kind to the poor machine. That’s fortunate, at least, Takuma thinks, sad as it is, as the enemies Musashi mentioned won’t be able to identify it. 

Baku’s eyes still widen when he looks at it.

“That’s a Getter, isn’t it?”

Takuma nods.

“Then my premonition—and what those guys told me—was right. C’mon, I’ll take you back to the lab.”

Takuma can’t think of anything better to do at the moment. So he follows behind Baku, steadying his footsteps on the long, wide plane of the ground.

💚

The first words Takuma Nagare hears from Hayato Jin are muffled through the lab door.

“Baku, is that you? Did you manage to retrieve him?”

Baku leans up close to where a camera must be in the imposing barrier. There’s a scoff from behind it as he puts his eye up to it, and Baku laughs.

“Made ya look!” he said. “Anyway, yeah, I got him. We towed the machine, too, but it’s pretty beat up. I don’t know if it’s salvageable.”

The door opens halfway through his sentence, sliding apart with a creak. And there he is, standing there. A tall scientist with long greying hair and an expression Takuma can’t place.

He knows this man was once a 2-type before he opens his mouth. It’s in the context clues. Something about how he scans the scene for obstacles, how he’s already making a plan with whatever’s in front of him. Something about the coldness of his glare.

Hayato Jin doesn’t break eye contact with him for a long moment. Takuma gets the sense he’s being analyzed, scrutinized, run under an invisible scanning beam. For a moment, he wonders if his cover is already completely blown. But Hayato looks off to the side eventually, or maybe at a point on the wall behind Baku, and sighs.

He speaks, finally, in a voice quieter than was just heard through the door.

“You really do look just like him.”

💚

This is what they tell him.

He is the long lost son of Ryoma Nagare, born here on Earth some nineteen years from this current date. His mother was a woman named Ryo, and he was born after Ryoma had departed with his Getter unit to Mars, from which he has never returned. His mother was killed by unknown assailants that targeted their home when he was an infant, and he has been assumed dead ever since then. 

Takuma isn’t sure what to make of this information.

It could be a lie, of course, misinformation fed in by enemies of the Fleet to compromise his mission. Or just a misguided belief, at the very least, something that the people in this distant time found believable, a simple idea that lined up with their outdated worldviews. 

But it also could be true.

Trying to hold the idea that he was born here, not made, not manufactured individually, powered with green energy by the Emperor to fulfill the purpose he was sent to fulfill, is difficult. The thought runs through his hands like water, like air, hard to grasp on to. If it is true, it would mean a lot of other things aren’t true, and that is a worrying implication. It would explain some others, too—like the fact that he was always the only young person on the battleships he grew up on, the fact that they were always so careful with him, that his body had never been strong enough to breathe in vacuum and cleave enemies to pieces with his bare hands like the others, his mind never tied in to the sizzling instinct of the Fleet’s will. In that way, it’s a justification he wants to be true, if only because it gives reason to a host of other questions, a lifetime so far of wondering why he was always the odd one out.

But then, there’s the fact that it doesn’t feel true, either. Takuma turns his hand over and presses into the back of it until he sees his veins below the surface, faint-glowing green like the light of a million suns. When he takes a breath of the air outside the lab, heavy with pollen motes from the trees in the valley below the mountain they call Mt. Asama, it feels tangible and foreign in his lungs, in a way it never did back home. And when he tries to talk to people, they look at him strange, like his patterns or speech are off, somehow, or maybe it’s his accent—they all sound so immeasurably old-fashioned to him, after all, he must sound even weirder to them in the other direction—or just the way he thinks of things, mission-objective-completion.

He’s clearly not from around here. So he can’t be from here. He really can’t.

💚

Takuma doesn’t like the Saotome Lab.

It’s too small, for one. Back home, he doesn’t think he could have ever seen every corridor, nook and cranny of the Bear-class mothership he grew up on. It had been far too vast, too expansive; he had felt comforted by that, in a way, in the knowledge that even if he ran for days and days, he’d still be within the walls of the ship, the vast stretching horizon of space still firmly outside. 

Takuma memorizes the main layout of the lab within a few days. He learns where Hayato’s office is–no one’s allowed in there–where the mess hall is–the food is strange and unfamiliar–where the barracks sit in orderly rows–where the armory with emergency weapons waits silently. He paces in the hall until someone tells him to cut it out.

Doctors and scientists in long white coats bustle up and down the length of the facility regularly. Takuma slams straight into one of them more than a few times when running around a corner—they don’t give him a wide berth like the soldiers did, or know he’s coming before he gets there. A few of them are interested—a little too interested—in taking Takuma’s vital signs and studying the way his green eyes flicker when he’s around Getter Ray powered machinery. He smacks their syringes away with the back of his hand, and they slink away disappointed. He doesn’t know whether them snooping around would spoil his cover, after all. 

They’ve prepared a bedroom for him in the barracks sector, a small room with a stiff cot and a few blankets, and a closet with a few items of clothing in those same dull colors. There’s a circular skylight that looks up into the clouded blue atmosphere, and an empty “minifridge” (he’d heard one of the scientists call it that) that appears designed to keep food cold.

He spends as little time there as possible. Back in the Fleet, rest was different than it seems to be here. The soldiers were all usually so energized with Getter Rays that they didn’t need to sleep much, and the rest cycle only ever took a few hours at most. That’s how Takuma is used to getting his downtime in. Running on the schedules that they do here in this world—long sleep periods without activity, everyone getting up around the same hour every day as opposed to in organized shifts—feels wrong. He has little success forcing himself to stay still for a full eight hours, so he wanders at night, exploring the facility when less people are around. Surely if he keeps walking, he’ll find something interesting.

It’s during one of these late night wanderings that Takuma meets him.

He can’t help his curiosity when he first runs into him in a deserted break room, digging through the pantry for a snack. His reflection shows in the mirror over the table and Takuma startles.

“What the hell is up with your face?”

The figure turns, and glares him in the eye with yellow eyes ringed with red. The sides of his pale face are encircled with grey-green scales, and a slight pointed crest juts out between his eyebrows.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he replies, lunging forward. An instinct seizes Takuma and he dodges out of the way, fists automatically balling to attack or defend. This could well be one of the enemies that Musashi had told him about. Takuma curses internally that he’s unarmed.

“Stay back!” he yells at the intruder, who swipes at him with sharp nails. Takuma vaults over the break room table and out of the corner he was pinned in, trying to settle into a fighting stance.

He doesn’t get the chance to throw a punch, as the dim lights of the room flick on to full power and the intruder looks towards the door at the same moment he does. Dr. Hayato Jin stands on the threshold, hair messed up and in pajamas, looking very annoyed.

“What are you two doing at this hour?” he says, calmly, with an aura somehow more venomous than either of their vulgar questions. “Go back to bed. Kamui, lay off. He’s new.”

The enemy—Kamui, his name is, apparently, and maybe he’s not an intruder—relaxes his shoulders, but keeps scowling. Under his breath, Takuma can hear him muttering—“He started it.”

💚

This is what Takuma knows about Sho Kamui.

He is a hybrid entity, between human and Saurian. It’s a species name that rings vaguely familiar to Takuma, but one that had to have been from far enough in the Fleet’s past to be no longer a threat. Maybe the memory comes from a story his father’s voice told him once, or maybe something Musashi and the soldiers made rude jokes about and refused to explain to him. From what Takuma can discern, they are reptilian, cold-blooded, and naturally crepuscular. He’s unsure whether Kamui’s strength comes from his species background, or from the training the three of them undergo every day in the lab’s gym.

The three of them. Yes, the three of them. They are a triad—or they are supposed to be—him and Kamui and Baku.

Takuma never did get assigned a triad back home, so he doesn’t know how it’s supposed to go. But he assumes it’s not supposed to go like this. For one, he’s just arrived here. He doesn’t know these other two pilots at all, save for their names, their faces, and their voices, and trusts them even less than he knows them. He’s spent all of a few hours in Baku’s presence, and even less with Kamui. He isn’t even certain, at this point, whether Kamui is his enemy or not—he sure looks like he could be, but Takuma assumes any enemy worth taking seriously would’ve made a decisive move by now, and Kamui sure hasn’t.

(A true warrior back home, Takuma thinks, would’ve destroyed even the potential of an enemy by this point. Takuma hasn’t made a move towards Kamui. He’s not sure what that says about him.)

They sit in elevated chairs in a holographic chamber as the lab’s scientists explain the workings of Getter Machines to them. It sounds similar to how they worked where Takuma came from, or to what little he knew of that. Not for the first time, Takuma wishes he’d been given more battle training before they sent him off into the great beyond.

Here, he’s shown the enemies , too. These, too are vaguely familiar—insectile and carapaced, clearly the work of the Andromedans, a persistent foe back home. Other teams here are working on handling them, but they’re struggling; the Arc Team, he’s told, will turn the tide.

The first time they launch, Takuma struggles to keep hold of the controls as he rockets into the sky. The g-forces press him back in his cockpit seat, the blue-and-yellow reflective pilot suit sticks close to his skin with the velocity of his forward motion. He’s going too fast to even yell. Vertigo whirls in his head and he squints to keep his eyes focused forward. The crackling Getter Energy at his machine’s core is present in his peripheral perception, but it’s nowhere near strong enough for him to grasp fully. He feels like he’s spinning out of control. It’s all he can do not to crash. 

They don’t align their machines to combine that first time, nor the several times after. They return to the base, separate in parts, and retreat into their designated hangar entrances, one-two-three in succession.

Takuma had assumed that once he got older, all his uncertainties and problems would be solved by instinct . That at some point, the will that he’d always struggled to describe back home would take over, and ensure that everything worked out okay—that someone, or something, would reach out from behind his back, place his hands on the levers, and press forward. But here he was, confused and overwhelmed at the helm of his Getter Machine, afraid to loosen his grip on the controls even as his jet was lowered into its dock for safekeeping.

Maybe, he thinks, it’s like this for everyone back home, too. Maybe everyone had been winging it this whole time, and he was the only one who ever assumed they had it all together.

💚

The town below Mt. Asama is quaint and unimportant. Takuma finds its layout strange. He’d never been to any of the settlements on the myriad planets that the Emperor Fleet had recreated, but he knew they were vast, megastructural things, with cities the size of continents and machines to match them. This little town is a fraction of a fraction of such a size, with streets the soldiers back home would dwarf if they showed up in their smallest numbers. 

There’s a city hall, a bank, a shrine, a run-down motel, and a couple of convenience stores. The one in the north is the best one. Takuma is told this by Dr. Shikishima–the strange, diminutive man with the cybernetics that stick out at odd angles from his body–when he sends him off on an errand. He insists the store to the east never has his favorite type of cigarettes in stock, and that their manager is a mean old bat. Guess it takes one to know one.

(Shikishima is strange. Like so many people around the lab, when he saw Takuma for the first time, he’d insisted he looked just like his father. Takuma was never sure how to respond to that, cover aside. “Thanks?” “Sure?” “I’ll take your word for it?”

The old scientist had also given him a tour of his armory, showed off what he seemed to think were extravagant weapons—nothing compared to the stuff the guys back home carried, of course—and let Takuma pick one to practice with. Takuma, not wanting to reveal too much about himself, figured he’d go with something simple—an ordinary-looking pistol that fit in his waist belt. For some reason, that had made Shikishima laugh, a shrill, barking sound, and slap his hand roughly on Takuma’s back. “Of course you’d pick that one!” He hadn’t elaborated.)

Today, though, no guns are involved. Takuma has been sent off with a purseful of cash to exchange for the snacks on Shikishima’s list. The old man claps his hands before he goes and cackles with glee. Takuma stands in the doorframe for a long moment, bewildered by Shikishima’s boundless energy at nothing in particular, before stepping out past the perimeter of the lab for the first time since he’s arrived.

He’s been out in the surrounding air in his Get Machine multiple times, but this is the first time he’s stepped foot on the ground beyond the Saotome Lab fence. The path down to the town is rough, but not entirely overgrown. Once he’s within the village limits, the road becomes paved; a few bushes line the sidewalk, and a fruit tree stands on the corner.

Back within the Fleet, there were vast, well-organized food and fuel production greenhouses inside of the Emperor’s ships, with corresponding machines to upkeep them; the idea of planting fruit-bearing plants around haphazardly is strange and wasteful to Takuma. Why create such a thing, if it serves no purpose? 

He walks by the trees, and by the school, where small children—another novelty, Takuma has never seen any other development-stage humans aside from himself—play in the yard. One, sitting at the top of the slide, waves to him with a tiny hand. Tentatively, remembering this is the proper motion, he waves back.

People aren’t in a hurry here. The townsfolk he passes along the road take the time to say hello to him, and they don’t seem to be headed anywhere in particular—no missions, no impulse guiding their footsteps. A woman walking by carrying peaches in a basket asks Takuma where he’s from, and for a second, he blanks. How secret is the Saotome lab to the townsfolk, anyway?

She takes in his silence and laughs a little behind her hand.

“You’re one of the lab’s boys, aren’t you? We saw you flying over here a bit ago.” A smile. “My, those jets are so loud!”

Takuma blinks, sheepish. He’s not sure what to say.

“…Sorry?”

She laughs again, wrinkles at the corner of her face.

“Oh don’t you worry!” A smile. “Better you all flying over us than some of those nasty things. You keep it up!”

They seem used to disaster here. There are bomb shelter signs on every other building, and sirens mounted atop tall poles. He assumes that when the enemy arrives, the townsfolk huddle underground somewhere. He supposes the lab and its fighters are their tiny version of a guard regiment, similar to the legions stationed on the colony planets back home.

The woman offers him a peach. He takes it, and thanks her. He doesn’t bite into it until she passes on by. The juice runs down his hand.

The bell over the convenience store door rings when he opens it. The guy at the desk barely looks up. He’s watching some broadcast on a little boxy TV on the desk. Takuma can hear snippets of it—“evacuation”—“state of emergency”—“Stoker”—as he rummages through the snack aisle. 

There’s so much to choose from here. Takuma shoves colorful bags of chips, a couple of sodas, and an onigiri or two from the prepared food corner into his bag, and fishes the money out of his pocket that Shikishima gave him. The cashier raises an eyebrow when he tries to hand him one of the notes, and he gets a lot more in return as change. Must not have been the right bill, he assumes.

The walk home is just as long, and uphill this time. Takuma isn’t used to this type of climbing—the ships back home were immensely large, but never with this level of incline and rocky footing. He takes a break about halfway up to the lab, unwraps his rice ball, and eats lunch looking down on the town below. It looks even smaller from up here.

💚

He should’ve known it would be like this. It’s part of the whole principle of the thing, after all—Getters are piloted by triads, by three hearts beating as one. It’s something he knows like the back of his hand. That anyone from the Fleet would know.

But did it have to be so frustrating?

The three of them have gotten better at it, at least. They can combine and recombine properly now. Takuma leads the Arc into combat — hands still clutching the controls for dear life — but he leads their team still. Baku, determined and steadfast, shifts them into Khan as they dive into the ocean; Kamui, silent and calculating, whirls their parts into the sharp-edged Kirik and drills through the ground. 

That’s how it goes when it’s going well. When it’s not, they argue and they bicker. None of them seem to have a solid instinct of when to Change or Open Get yet, or if they do, they’re not aligned in it. Multiple times now, one of them has thrust the levers forward to shift forms only to be met with a stubborn resistance—one of the others holding onto their control stick, preventing the machine from changing its shape. They snipe at each other over the comms—Kamui is prone to insulting Takuma’s relative lack of experience in the cockpit, a dig that hurts more because it’s true—and are sometimes interrupted by one of the base technicians or even Dr. Jin, scolding them to get it together.

Amidst it all, they do battle with the Insectors. They’re strange things, with all the wrong angles and a disdain for human life. They’re an easy enemy to find and track, but not easy to get rid of. They’re disturbingly strong, resiliently built, with the ability to combine themselves—not in an orderly manner, in the way that Getters do, but piled on top of each other, clinging uncannily to each other’s bodies to form larger enemies. The clustered shapes of them make Takuma’s skin crawl, some instinctive memory in his blood shouting out to him in alarm. Whenever he dispatches one, there’s a sense of relief.

It’s mission after mission after mission. The three of them are getting better at it, and he can tell, but it’s not easy. Takuma had always assumed it’d come naturally to him, the fighting, and in some ways it did—much of his combat style was all will and instant motion, not much time for strategy, that was more Kamui’s style anyway. But he’d figured it would be more like the soldiers back home talked about. Instant, decisive victory over their enemies was their style. He’d never heard them talk, really, about struggling or losing, even though he could’ve inferred, from the trailing lines of fresh-made bodies walking in from the medical wings, that not all of them always made it back in one piece. It wasn’t right to dwell on failure. You instead evolved past it. It was rude, he’d learned growing up, to talk about your shortcomings—rude, and discouraging, and ultimately unnecessary, when you were destined to overcome them anyway. 

Maybe this was why he struggled to struggle. He didn’t have the language to talk about it, to understand it, to learn. An odd weakness, he thought. Maybe that’s why he was sent back here, to bring that type of knowledge home—how to really, really train, how to try and fail and try and fail and get up over and over again. Maybe that was his evolution.

💚

They’re to go on a secret mission, Dr. Jin tells them. He won’t explain where they’re headed, but Takuma can tell that Kamui knows. Something in the quiet confidence of his amber glare, something in how Arc—right now, Khan—responds to him even when he’s not leading, as they descend into the ocean.

Something ancestral in Takuma becomes uneasy as they head deeper. His skin feels clammy, and he can see his eyes and cheeks flaring up in green in the reflection of the window—usually a sign that danger is near. This type of sensation had always been the closest he’s ever gotten to the instinct, the shared feeling between Getter Fleet warriors he’d always been distant from. To experience  it now feels like a warning.

It’s sudden and soundless. Monsters appear around them, scaly and long-necked. Takuma grips the controls and his eyes narrow. Over the comms, Kamui tells the team not to panic, and not to make any sudden movements, and to follow the monsters toward.

Takuma puts up with a few minutes of the dark descent before he snaps.

“So. Any more important information you’re keeping from us, Kamui?”

“What?”

Takuma is tensing up. “I thought we were supposed to be a team? I thought we weren’t supposed to hide things from each other? Are you trying to get us killed?”

Silence on the other end of the line.

They land at the bottom of the ocean. Spiny, interconnected megastructures fill their view screens. A city rooted to the deep sea floor. Khan rolls forward, following the beasts to an entrance, and as the dust clears Takuma realizes why it’s so familiar.

“Machine-Land,” he mutters, somewhat under his breath.

“How’d you guess?” Kamui says a little too fast.

Takuma blanks. It’s got to be a reasonable assumption, right? The people of this world—people like the old lady who gave him peaches at the surface—seemed plagued with disasters, from all manner of the Fleet’s—no, the Getter itself’s—enemies. He’s put two and two together now—the Dinosaur Empire who attacked in the Earth’s late 20th century, the records of which he’d perused on one of his dives into Fleet archives, must be the same Saurians as Kamui is descended from. It’s not completely out of the question that he would have recalled—or come across—information on the Saurian home base—which he’d thought destroyed—in his studies, or in his everyday.

But why did Kamui sound so suspicious?

“I did some reading before the mission,” Takuma says finally, then tests a jab. “Figured I’d brush up on who might be out to get us.”

More silence from Kamui. Takuma takes this as sign enough that he’s off the hook.

Flanked by the monsters, the Arc Team enters the city.

💚