Over the Horizon; Fuji & Tezuka, Atobe, Shishido & Oshitari, M, 21958 words, complete.
Over the Horizon
By Miki
***
“We’ve flown twenty-three hours in total,” Fuji remarked, the next night. “Three days’ worth.”
Tezuka nodded. His shoulders and back attested to that, his arms starting to turn pink with all the harsh and constant sun on them.
“Can I see the map?” He gestured with a hand.
Fuji handed him the top one, keeping the others for himself, finger tracing where one led on to the next as he looked at the geography of the islands. “They’re strange, aren’t they,” he frowned.
“How so?” Tezuka looked at him. He sipped his tea, wincing to find it unpleasantly hot.
Fuji shook his head. “Just a feeling…” he trailed off. “Yuuta said he’d heard of some pilots who went missing around here earlier this year.”
Tezuka swallowed, putting down his tea and going back to studying his maps.
“He said they were from your squadron,” Fuji said, staring at Tezuka. “Two guys he’d done some training exercises with last year. He said they were highly capab-”
“I trained them,” Tezuka cut in sharply. “They had to be.”
Fuji startled slightly, surprised at Tezuka’s response. In the light of their campfire, he watched the flickering shadows on Tezuka’s face, and saw the way he pulled his glasses tiredly from his face.
“Momoshiro Takeshi and Kaidoh Kaoru. I sent them to the west,” Tezuka said. He looked a little pained, taking a moment to collect himself before he began.
“It should have been routine. They were to check the coast, and pick up some documents from an observation station that way. Halfway back, they reported picking up distress signals from the south-west. That was when I…” he sighed. “Nothing ever registered on our radars. I know the system doesn’t pick up everything, but if they reported picking up anything that far out from here, surely our systems would have registered it. According to the records, according to the guys monitoring, there was nothing.”
He rubbed his glasses at his shirt, squeezing his eyes closed and blinking rapidly before replacing his lenses.
“My guess is that they headed into this area before they realised how short of fuel they were. If the headwinds were worse than what they’d expected, and the weather here is reputed to be bad… You’ve heard the stories,” he sighed. “I had an idea of what might have happened, but I couldn’t be sure.”
Fuji nodded, and put aside his maps, carefully slipping them into his leather folder. Then he frowned a little. “But you said you hadn’t been here for two years-”
Tezuka cut him off. “Almost no one has been here for two years. The force no longer permits its pilots to come this way except under certain circumstances… It had never really sent anyone this way in the first place - ninety-five percent of pilots to have flown this way have been adventurers, private pilots and owners of their own planes…”
“And almost all of those have crashed,” Fuji swallowed. He looked down at his folder of maps and touched its corner.
“It’s why I-” Tezuka began, and cut himself off.
“Anyway, we have a full day ahead tomorrow,” he said abruptly, and stood, making it quite clear he didn’t want to talk any further. He downed the rest of his tea and flicked the remaining tealeaves at the bottom into the bushes behind him.
“Don’t stay up late.”
“Yes Cap’n,” Fuji smiled, chuckling at the frown he got from Tezuka.
Fuji crawled into his blankets less than an hour later, having waited to see that the fire was completely smothered. He could only just make out Tezuka’s face once he’d put out the light, but he shifted closer to him, trying to make up in physical closeness, what he couldn’t otherwise.
His sleeping face was peaceful, but Fuji wondered just what Tezuka was dreaming beneath the façade. Touching his fingers to his hair, he watched him wince and pulled his hand back.
“Sorry,” he apologised.
Tezuka opened his eyes, closing them as soon as he’d realised who it was. “Don’t be,” he murmured. He’d been dreaming of Momoshiro and Kaidoh again, dreaming of their plane disappearing into the clouds and never emerging again.
“I wanted to search for them myself,” he sighed, sleep slipping away from him as he spoke. “They forbade me from going. They - the higher ups - said they’d send their own team instead, but by the time I’d argued for enough staff and funding, two weeks had passed already.”
Fuji closed his eyes, listening to Tezuka’s voice.
“A week after that, the search and rescue team reported picking up signals from the area, but honing in on them, they found nothing.” Tezuka sighed. “They crashed on the way back, and any other attempt that might have been planned had to be abandoned. To have anyone else die looking for them…”
“You’ve been looking,” Fuji said slowly, in realisation, eyes widening. “You’ve been looking the entire time we’ve been travelling.”
He recalled the times Tezuka had kept glancing around, peering to the sides even though he had no need to look so frequently with a navigator in the cabin. True; he was in the habit of doing it, but Fuji realised now that he had never been looking to gauge their exact position as he’d normally have to do - he had been looking at the coast, at the reefs, at the beaches. The straights and the hard, flat areas.
Anywhere an airplane could have and may have landed.
Tezuka opened his eyes. “I just want their families to be at peace.”
Fuji slid his hand out from under his blankets, tracing his fingers along Tezuka’s cheek gently. When he realised what he was doing, it was already too late, but Tezuka didn’t seem to notice, staring blankly at him for a moment, before he blinked.
“After we finish here with Atobe’s plant,” he sighed. “I want to come back to look for them. If you want-”
Fuji smiled. “I’ll come with you.”
Tezuka closed his eyes again. “Thank you… Fuji.”
***
“What was Atobe’s father like when he was younger?” Fuji asked.
Tezuka had been quiet for the past hour since take off; nothing abnormal in itself - in the four days they had been travelling, Fuji had learnt Tezuka wasn’t as talkative as his other acquaintances - but he’d seemed worried.
Fuji pulled an apple from the box behind his seat, also pulling out the small fruit knife he’d been using to cut things with.
“He was intimidating,” Tezuka answered, without hesitation. “Loud, commanding, he always knew what he wanted.”
Fuji smiled. “Similar to Atobe then.”
Tezuka nodded slightly. “To a certain extent. He was interested in planes from the moment he sat in one, or so he said. He did a lot for the aviation industry a decade or two ago, but he mostly only flies now as a hobby.”
“Atobe wants him to give it up,” he added dryly. “In his old age.”
Fuji laughed. “I’d love to see him try. I can’t imagine what the two of them would be like, arguing with each other.”
“I’ve seen them,” Tezuka responded, a slight amount of exasperation showing. “They might as well get out their fencing gear; it would probably solve the problem a lot faster.”
“Atobe would win then?” Fuji mused.
“His father,” Tezuka corrected. “Atobe never had the patience for practicing fencing. He did other sports instead, saying waving an oversized stick around and having to wear a helmet while doing it wasn’t his style.”
Fuji gave a grin. “Touché.”
He handed a thin slice of apple to Tezuka, who took it in one hand and put it in his mouth, his right hand still on the wheel.
“Sour?” Fuji asked, noticing the frown on Tezuka’s face. He cut off another slice and slipped it into his mouth. Nothing sour - only sweetness. They were red apples, not green ones - there was none of the bitterness of the skin and acidic taste of the flesh of those.
“No,” Tezuka responded, voice betraying his sudden confusion. “The wind speed just… Just dropped. Just then.”
Fuji put aside the rest of his apple quickly, taking a glance at the instruments, looking around them. The clouds were perfectly still, as though the sky were made of fixed panels painted on a whim with white and blue.
There was stillness around the plane - it felt too light.
“The steering wheel,” Tezuka swallowed.
Fuji touched it, and held his hand to it when he realised why Tezuka was so worried. The engine was running - they hadn’t lost or gained a single foot in height, but there was no feedback coming through the wheel. It was as though they were propped up somehow - nothing felt as though it was moving.
Nothing.
“Fuji,” Tezuka’s voice; strained and urgent. “Look at the map. Tell me exactly where we are.”
Fuji had only looked at the map a few minutes ago. “We’re off the coast of… I mean, we passed the southernmost tip of Getty Island…”
They both looked out the window.
“We should have gone past it two or three minutes ago,” Fuji said, fingers tightening against the map, scrunching paper.
He glanced back, urgently trying to see through the windows of the plane, his neck hurting as he stretched and craned and bit his lip when he couldn’t see any better.
They had definitely passed the tip of Getty, but they were already over another island, directly below them - shorter, wider, a flat strip in its centre. And it wasn’t marked on the map.
“The maps aren’t complete,” Tezuka said carefully, but he was shaken by the lack of vibration running through his hands, and he had trouble keeping the worry from his voice. Without feedback from the engine, without the bumps of the plane and the headwind dictating any angle of attack, he was simply cruising straight.
“No.” Fuji answered. “The maps have been perfect so far… Not in detail, definitely, but in outline, they’ve been perfect.”
“There’s something wrong with them,” Tezuka said quickly. “They shouldn’t be - There’s no record of any real mapping in the area.”
“Atobe didn’t say where he got them from,” Fuji responded, flicking through them. “I thought he might have gotten them from the national archives…”
Tezuka shook his head. “The archives don’t have any for here, but don’t worry about the maps right now,” he instructed, but Fuji was sketching on the island beneath them as the plane moved silently through the air.
Mankind had never been built to fly, their bodies not designed for the currents of the winds. Instead, they had crafted flying machines, never able to harness the winds on which they flew, but able to predict, use and exploit them.
As a pilot, Tezuka had been taught exactly how to fly, how to use the instruments at his fingertips and the weather at the tips of his plane’s wings.
But at that moment, he still couldn’t feel the wind at all - no headwind, no tailwind, no crosswind - and every instinct in his body told him something was wrong.
“I’m going to descend,” he murmured, hands at the ready, when suddenly -
There it was upon them before they could blink - Sweeping, swirling, uncontrolled winds, pushing them sideways and whipping the plane around like a paper toy. It lifted and jerked, propelled by the sudden wind at their backs, destabilising them and sending them dipping forwards.
“Fuji, hold on!” Tezuka yelled, even as his own head knocked against the window. He felt the plane tipping to the starboard side as winds thrust it off its path - they must have been almost at a thirty degree angle, and he grabbed the wheel in both hands, trying desperately to guide them downwards safely, away from the huge landmass beneath them, but the winds were still as unrelenting even as they dropped in height. He knew it was dangerous, and he knew such a sharp descent could send the plane into a tailspin, but they flew on, angled towards the water sharper and sharper and faster and faster, almost trying to outrace the winds, and Tezuka could see the ocean speeding towards them faster and harder - and the breaks of the waves coming closer until he could nearly see their peaks.
Fuji must have yelled - someone yelled - and Tezuka pulled the wheel back. Hard.
And then they were cruising - low enough over the ocean that the waves could have reached up and licked their underbelly. But they were still flying, climbing again a little steeply, and Tezuka could feel the winds dying down behind them.
In his hands, the wheel vibrated - the hum of the motor running through to his brain and telling him they’d made it.
“I guess that was what Atobe meant when he said something about… the weather,” he breathed out, eyes squeezed closed for a second. His heart was still in his throat, vomit perhaps not far behind it, but everything around them seemed perfectly calm; in complete contrast to the tight breaths Tezuka knew he was taking.
Fuji was silent.
“Fuji?” A glance in his direction. “Are you okay?”
Fuji was frowning out ahead of them, his blue eyes showing an anger that disconcerted Tezuka. “You said he can’t fence well?” he clarified.
“A-Ah… Well, he isn’t as good as his father.” Tezuka answered uncertainly, his thoughts skittish and his brain having trouble realising Fuji meant Atobe.
“Good,” Fuji nodded, and plucked his pencil up from where he’d let go and it had been sent to the floor. “I beat his father the last time we had a match, you know. I look forward to giving him a good whipping once we get back. I suspect he could do with it.”
Tezuka slowly brought them back up to a little under their previous cruising height and Fuji made more than enough noise for the two of them with his impatient pencil scratching on their maps and his occasional stabs of his knife at his apple.
Combined with the noise of the plane, they comforted Tezuka, sending feelings of relief through his body.
Fuji’s idea of revenge amused him to a degree; Atobe was certainly going to find his hands full with him once they got back.
***
Tent flaps secured, Fuji slipped inside, crawling across to his pillow. “That was some wind today,” he murmured, possibly still a little shaken.
Tezuka nodded briefly, poring over Fuji’s additions to their maps. “Are you sure we passed this many islands?” he questioned, holding the map up to the light.
Fuji sat next to him and nodded. “Some of them were tiny - this one, this one…” he pointed a finger. “Barely bigger than, say, a modest sized house. But they weren’t rocky at all - they were just flat and green.”
Tezuka frowned. “Are you sure they weren’t sand banks?” he asked. He hadn’t noticed that many, although after their scare, he had hardly paid attention to the direction they were going in - only the winds he could feel.
“They were green,” Fuji rolled his eyes slightly. “Besides, sand banks are exactly that - they’re banks. They tend to span metres and metres in lines - natural build ups. They don’t occur like piles in the ocean,” he pointed out.
Tezuka tilted his head slightly, conceding the point.
Still, he studied the maps a little longer, looking for patterns among the islands. There were none, as far as he could tell, and they struck him as strange. He couldn’t understand how such things would withstand the tides of the ocean, or how they would have formed in the first place.
Fuji eventually pulled the papers from his hands and folded them away. Then he tucked his folder under his pillow and smiled. “Sleep, Tezuka,” he said. “You can look at them again tomorrow once I’m awake.”
Tezuka decided not to argue, and his eyes were protesting the dim lighting anyway, so he settled into his bedding and waited for Fuji to do the same.
“I was surprised,” Fuji said quietly, voice barely above a murmur. “With the way you handled that today.”
Tezuka frowned. “It’s nothing I haven’t done before; I just hadn’t anticipated it then.”
Fuji smiled, tucking his knees up under his chin as he sat. “Yuuta told me you once helped him out of danger when he was in a similar situation.”
“It was my duty,” Tezuka responded. “I picked up his radio calls and I answered.”
Fuji kept smiling. “But not everyone fulfils their duty. Anyone else could just have let him be.”
Tezuka shook his head. “Only a coward would do that,” he said.
“And who says the force isn’t full of those?” Fuji asked.
Tezuka simply shook his head. “None of my men are cowards. If they were, they wouldn’t have stuck with me all this time.”
Fuji blinked, not looking convinced. “Your men perhaps, but the other squadrons…”
Tezuka looked away. “Men are men,” he said. “Some are better than others. Some try to be better than others. Whether they succeed is another matter.”
***
The sun was rising the next morning as Tezuka stepped out of the tent. He straightened up and squinted. Then he stretched his arms up above his head, relieved to feel the soreness in his neck dissipating somewhat. For him, tents were not conducive to good nights of sleep nor good mornings, once awake.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Fuji said, his voice at Tezuka’s ear.
Tezuka winced, rather tempted not to tell him not to surprise him like that. “Have you been out here long?” he asked instead.
“Feel,” Fuji grinned, and pressed the back of his hand to Tezuka’s cheek. It was pretty cold; Tezuka assumed the answer to the question was yes.
He frowned a little. “You’ll get sick like that.”
“Nonsense,” Fuji said, and it was then that Tezuka noticed he’d set up his camera tripod just a few metres in front.
“Can you do me a favour?” he asked, walking to the tripod and fiddling with the top of the camera. “Go and stand over there.”
He pointed to a spot to the centre-right of the camera’s obvious focus, and Tezuka shook his head uncomfortably. He slipped on his glasses and squinted at the spot.
It was in front of a cluster of bushes. The scenery on this island wasn’t as interesting as on some of the others they’d flown over (it mostly had lower ground-covering shrubs than trees) but the sunset itself…
“I just got out of bed,” he pointed out somewhat unnecessarily, but he very nearly wavered. “Find a different subject for a photo.”
Fuji grinned. “And where shall I find another subject?”
Tezuka looked around them. “Take a picture of a tree,” he said, moving towards the plane, looking for the place he’d left his mug last night.
“Tezuka, please?” Fuji asked.
The ‘please’ made Tezuka stop walking, turning around again and grudgingly taking up the position.
“See,” Fuji murmured, bending down to put his eye to the viewfinder. “You look fine. No one will be able to tell.”
Tezuka very much doubted that, and suspected the smile on Fuji’s face had less to do with his victory and more to do with some clump of hair sticking up, or the fact that he was wearing his pyjama pants with leather shoes.
“Wait!” Fuji called out, once he’d taken the picture. “Stay there.”
Tezuka sighed, wondering what Fuji had up his sleeve now.
“Go and take a picture of me,” Fuji directed, once he was standing right next to Tezuka.
Tezuka obliged, reasoning it could do no harm to photograph Fuji. It was better for him to be behind the lens rather than in front anyway.
Fuji had obviously been up for a little while and looked picture-worthy at least, Tezuka thought. He cringed to think any of his future descendants might see him standing in the middle of a strange island, for all intents and purposes looking as crazy as his cousins liked to tell him he was.
Fuji, on the other hand, was… beautiful.
“Done?” he called out, after Tezuka had taken the first photo. “Take another one just in case.”
Tezuka ducked down and put his eye to the viewfinder again, adjusting the zoom. He took in the shot awkwardly, and the sunlight bounced off Fuji’s hair and shoulders, making Tezuka squint.
Fuji’s expression was happy, smile relaxed and lips curved upwards, as though he may or may not have been laughing at his companion and Tezuka would never know.
“I’ve always loved sunrise,” Fuji said, packing away the tripod a little later.
Tezuka looked towards him, munching on his slightly singed, campfire-cooked piece of toast.
“I once said that to Yuuta and he told me to go live on another planet where they had them all the time so I wouldn’t have to talk his ear off about it,” Fuji laughed.
“But if there were a sunrise and a sunset all the time,” he smiled, “they wouldn’t be special anymore.”
“I’d feel sorry for the lamplighters,” Tezuka said.
“And the weather forecasters,” Fuji smiled. “They’d be forever forecasting weather so they’d never have any time to enjoy it.”
“If it were an unconventional planet by our standards though,” Tezuka pointed out. “Why hold it to our conventions?”
Fuji looked a little surprised, tilting his head at Tezuka. “True.”
***
“We should reach it by midday,” Fuji said over the dull hum of the engine.
He handed Tezuka a bottle of water, scrounging a few lollies from the bottom of the bag at the same time.
“Do you like those?” Tezuka asked as he handed back the bottle.
Fuji smiled. “Why would you think that?”
“You eat a lot of them,” Tezuka pointed out. “Almost a whole bag in five days.”
Fuji held up the empty bag. “Does eating them necessarily imply I’m doing it because I enjoy them? Perhaps I’m only doing it to keep my mouth engaged from otherwise distracting you all the time.”
Tezuka looked at him uncertainly and shook his head. “You’re not a distraction,” he answered, taking Fuji’s talking more seriously than he’d meant it.
“Glad to hear it,” Fuji teased. “Are you sure you don’t want any?”
“I’ve never been fond of sweet things,” was all the reply Fuji got, before a demand for their bearing and why there were still so many islands down below which looked like little green polka dots.
***
“Watch your foot,” Tezuka warned, walking around to Fuji’s door to help him down. The sand beneath his feet was deceptively soft; it had looked hard enough from the air for them to land, but it was now evident it wasn’t going to provide much traction for their take-off. They’d either have to wait until the tide came in far enough to wet it slightly and hold it firmer, or they’d have to push the plane, a little further in where it seemed to be dirt terrain.
Tezuka found himself silently questioning, not for the first time, why they hadn’t taken a seaplane, and shaking his head at the answers he came to. Surely Atobe, having seen the maps, would have decided it would be safer and more appropriate, and why hadn’t he questioned their choice of airplane? Perhaps because he too was wrapped up in the newness of Atobe’s toy?
He’d admit it was a lot smoother to fly than his own plane, but much of that was simply to do with its larger size and heavier weight - he felt less turbulence and the plane was less susceptible to it.
A small voice at the back of his head wondered if his own girl would have been able to get them through the unexpected turbulence they’d encountered, so much worse than anything he was used to.
“I wonder if there are tigers in there,” Fuji smiled and tilted his head towards the centre of the island.
He let go of Tezuka’s hand as his feet touched the sand. “It looks like the sort of habitation, don’t you think?”
“I’d hope not,” Tezuka sighed, but flinched when he found Fuji walking more than a few steps away from him. “Wait for me,” he frowned, and hurriedly flicked through the folder of notes and photos Atobe had passed on to them.
“I don’t understand why they have such detailed notes about the plants here, but no samples to speak of,” he frowned, almost on the verge of complaining. The entire mission had him asking questions with no answers in sight.
Fuji shook his head, stepping back towards him. “My guess is…” He pointed to the dates at the tops of the pages. “A research expedition came in the past, took samples which died in the labs, and didn’t bother replacing them since the plants were of little medicinal or monetary value.”
“But Atobe must see something else in them,” Tezuka pointed out. “Even if his mother were the one who wanted them in the first place, he wouldn’t ask anyone to go and get them unless he saw monetary value in them, don’t you think?”
Fuji shook his head. “Perhaps he saw something else in this trip,” he suggested, but shouldered his backpack properly and closed the plane door next to Tezuka.
They covered the plane up with a sheet, weighted down to make sure it didn’t blow off, and set off up the sand towards the edge of what looked to be a thick forest.
It was dark and musty under the canopy, moisture getting into their mouths and throats and wetting their skin. As soon as they were more than twenty steps in, it became difficult to see, and Fuji had to hold up the light as he walked in front.
Tezuka gave up studying the files quickly, finding it useless to squint at sketches of plants and try to distinguish one type of leaf from another, and finding he needed to concentrate on his feet instead.
“Do you know what you’re looking for?” he asked Fuji, just avoiding tripping over a tree root. They sprawled all over the path Fuji walked through the dense undergrowth, and more than once, Tezuka felt wet trails across his pants and felt a shiver pass down his spine.
“I think it should be further in,” Fuji answered, raising his voice. He disliked having Tezuka behind him, but one of them had to lead - the path was too narrow to walk side by side - and he was the one who had stepped in first.
The noise of the bushes brushing against their legs was loud, and only made the flips in both their stomachs worse.
“The notes said the plants are more likely to grow by freshwater lakes, and I thought I saw one in this way when we flew over,” Fuji continued. “I’m sure it’s this direction because I drew it on the map.”
He held their compass up to the light, moving forwards again when he was sure they were close enough to the direction for the lake.
“How much further in?” Tezuka asked, wanting clarification.
“Probably about two hundred metres,” Fuji answered quickly.
Tezuka swallowed, trying to quell the growing sense of uneasiness he felt. Two hundred metres wasn’t far, he told himself. Even if they had to battle vines to get there, they should only take another fifteen minutes at most.
“Here, let me.” He put his hand on Fuji’s shoulder, feeling a slight tremble. He hadn’t been able to tell from behind, but when they were face to face, Fuji didn’t look certain of himself either, his smile gone and a look of worry in his features.
Tezuka took the light from him and Fuji took the files, and with Tezuka clasping Fuji’s arm in his clammy hand, they made their way slowly through the bushes. Fuji’s voice gave directions and Tezuka’s feet felt the ground before them and led the way.
Hot sunlight filtered through the trees soon enough, and they broke into a small clearing, feet splashing straight away into water a few inches deep.
Tezuka’s hand had slipped during their walk, down to Fuji’s wrist, and then to his hand, but he didn’t let go even once they’d reached the water.
“Do you see any?” he asked, slightly out of breath.
Fuji shook his head, his hand squeezing Tezuka’s, because what he saw was not a few inches tall and green with leaves.
Through a thin patch of trees on the opposite side of the lake, he could see a building.
***
“Why are you taking so long?” Shishido frowned. “I’ll do it if you can’t.”
He pushed Oshitari aside, hands reaching down into the body of the airplane. “Reckon he’s found out yet?” he asked as he worked. “And hand me that thing - the clip things.”
Oshitari sighed. “Names would be useful,” he pointed out, eyeing the numerous ‘clip things’ Shishido could mean. On a hunch, he picked out a pair of cutters and handed them over, getting no complaint in response.
“And who do you mean?” he asked. “You mean Tezuka?”
“Who else?” Shishido shrugged. “Hand me that towel.”
“I can’t, I’m dirty,” Oshitari responded, sighing. “Get it yourself.”
“I’m dirtier than you,” Shishido snorted, and waved a pair of greasy hands at Oshitari. “Unless you want to clean these off for me.”
Oshitari picked up the oily old rag on the floor with distaste, and tossed it at Shishido, staring at their engine again.
“You think they’ll be back on time?” Shishido asked. “I’ve heard stories about… that part of the south.”
Oshitari shrugged. “They’re just stories.”
“If they’re just stories, why are half of them true,” Shishido answered, frowning at him.
“They’re not - not that many of them,” Oshitari insisted, taking the cleaned cutters from Shishido. “Most of those crashes were pilot error, and you forget we’re talking about Tezuka,” he sighed. “He’s not so stupid to make a mistake and you know it.”
“Mistakes can happen to anyone,” Shishido answered pointedly, and tossed the rag down on the floor. “Even Tezuka.”
***
“I feel like we’ve stepped back in time,” Fuji grinned.
“I think we’ve stepped into something we weren’t supposed to find,” Tezuka said with a shake of his head.
Fuji’s nervousness suddenly gone and replaced with a kind of curiosity, he pulled Tezuka forwards, despite Tezuka literally digging his heels in.
“I think we should leave,” he said, clearly and carefully. “I don’t think we’re going to-”
“No one’s here,” Fuji insisted, cutting him off. “Look,” he said quietly.
Buildings spanned in front of them as far as the eye could see. The island, marked on the map as only two kilometres wide and three long, was deceptively large. Building after building could be seen in the distance, some which looked like accommodation and some which clearly served other purposes. Dishes were on most roofs and wires and poles ran along next to the buildings, along the quiet bitumen paths.
The main doors of the building closest to them had vines growing up and across the glass and to the bricks, the plant undeterred by the slippery surface it sat against and the concrete edge from under which it had grown.
The sun shone through above them.
“Fuji, can I see the map?” Tezuka asked.
Fuji pulled it out and spread it open. “The island looked almost completely wooded from above,” he said, tracing a finger over it. “Only the lake was visible.”
Tezuka nodded, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as he looked upwards. Above them, thin criss-crossing lines - panels, Tezuka surmised - spanned as far as they could see from the edge of the forest behind them over and above all the buildings. From above, the ceiling had taken on the appearance of the woods around it.
No plane would ever consider landing on this island, if it weren’t for the fact that the tide was out right now. The moment it came in, they both knew their plane would be floating in water.
The thought that they should have pushed it further up the beach before setting out worried Tezuka, but there was nothing he could do now.
“Let’s just get those plants,” he insisted. “I know there’s something going on here, and it’s not normal…” He let out a shaky breath. “But let’s just get out of here. We need an hour to refuel and I don’t want to spend any more time here than necessary.”
Fuji stared at him evenly before tilting his head. “Okay,” he agreed. “I’ll meet you at the lake in an hour, I promise. Just let me walk around and take some photos.”
Tezuka shook his head. “I don’t want you going alone,” he insisted.
Fuji stepped back from Tezuka. “I can look after myself. I’ll be fine, and I have the compass and maps. I won’t get lost.”
Tezuka glanced upwards at the sun, taking note of its position. The watch on his hand ticked a little past one in the afternoon.
He looked at Fuji, his mind already clearly made up as he stood and waited for Tezuka to do the same.
“Fine,” he agreed stiffly. “But I need you back here in an hour. Don’t make me worry.”
“I won’t,” Fuji agreed, smiling. He opened his backpack and unpacked the boxes they’d brought to store the plants in, and handed over the small trowel along with the notes. “Be careful.”
“You too,” Tezuka said, watching Fuji he walked across the concrete towards a clump of the nearer buildings.
The trees around them should have been home to thousands upon thousands of birds. They should have been noisy and teeming with life. But instead, the air was heavy and humid, the silence deafening, and Tezuka couldn’t help but look back at Fuji’s small figure walking alone across a deserted, man-made space as he himself stepped back through the hedge of trees and to the lake.
He almost called Fuji back, but he didn’t.
Standing at the edge of the water, he pulled off his watch and rested it beside the boxes. It wouldn’t do to get dirt all over it, or if he accidentally slipped, he didn’t want it water damaged.
The lake was a shallow thing, perhaps man made in itself. It didn’t seem natural, at any rate, and there was nothing growing at the bottom, so when Tezuka accidentally stepped into it, all he stirred up was a lot of muck and mud.
Luckily it seemed the plants were common enough, and Tezuka found he was able to discern one type of leaf from another, glad that the notes at least, unlike the maps, were correct.
He glanced up at the sun as he worked, taking note of its position each time he potted another plant. The notes were very particular about not exposing the roots to air, and he dutifully shovelled in enough dirt to cover them, all the while glancing towards the direction Fuji had gone in.
He had three of each of the species (he hoped, anyway) into the boxes by the time he pulled off his shirt, sweaty and feeling nearly exhausted. The sun didn’t come down into the trees a few metres into the forest, but he didn’t want to walk back in there without Fuji. If he did, there was always a chance Fuji might not be able to see him and lose track of his directions, or alternately…
He didn’t want to think about the alternate.
The sense of uneasiness returned to him as he waited for Fuji, but the more he glanced upwards, the longer the moments seemed to pass, and the stillness of the air under the island’s panels did nothing to calm him.
He was checking the plants again, when he heard Fuji.
“Tezuka!”
He looked up quickly, relief flooding through him to see him okay, but Fuji’s face was worried, and Tezuka moved towards him.
“Tezuka!” Fuji yelled. He was running towards him. “The plane!”
“What? What about her?” Tezuka demanded.
Fuji reached him, stumbling as his feet stopped their flight across the ground, a shaky hand squeezing Tezuka’s bare shoulder for a split second.
“Quick, we have to get back to the beach,” he panted. “She’ll be underwater soon if we don’t run! We have to push her up the bank!”
He grabbed the samples, stuffing them into the backpack carelessly, as fast as he could. Tezuka grabbed his watch, not even having the time to check it.
“But the sun hasn’t moved,” he protested, not understanding the urgency. Surely the tide couldn’t move this fast. “You can’t have been gone for more than an hour.”
Fuji’s hand gripped his as they hurried back along the path they’d come from, vines snapping and barely missing their faces, sharp thorns scraping their legs through their pants.
“The sun doesn’t move, Tezuka.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t move?” Tezuka demanded. “Of course it moves!”
“The canopy wasn’t just camouflage from the outside,” Fuji snapped back. He breathed heavily, coughing in the moist air. “It was camouflage for the inside as well. That wasn’t the sun we were seeing; it was only an illusion.”
“How do you know?” Tezuka asked.
He stumbled, nearly falling against Fuji, but Fuji pulled him forwards, never allowing him to slip behind.
Tezuka glanced down as they ran, wary of the tree roots raised above the ground.
“Check the time,” Fuji answered, just before they burst out of the forest, stumbling, panting hard and running down onto the beach.
Tezuka cursed. Three hours had passed according to his watch; no wonder he’d been tired. Hot afternoon sunlight spread across his bare back when they slowed down, reminding him -
He rubbed at his hair frustratedly. “I left my shirt.”
“Forget about the shirt,” Fuji answered, grabbing his arm again. “The plane’s wheels are already in water. I think the sand will be too wet for us now.”
“So what should we do?” Tezuka said, trying to calm himself down. There was no use in panicking. The plane’s wheels were wet but they could still push her or run her up the beach to higher ground… But what they really needed was a take off straight and somewhere high enough that they’d have time to refuel her with half a load of fuel.
“I saw a ramp up that way.” Fuji pointed. “I think we should be able to get her up that, and there are empty runways inside.”
“Inside?” Tezuka asked. “But it’s all closed in.”
Fuji shook his head. “Not on the other side,” he answered. “They were using it as an air force base and there’re some buildings which look like research labs as well.”
“But we don’t have… There’s no record of any of the forces ever posting people to this area,” Tezuka answered, blankly glancing across the edge of the forest.
“Not our forces,” Fuji said.
It suddenly dawned on Tezuka exactly what Fuji was telling him. “You mean this is all left over from the last war,” he said.
Fuji gave a nod, and pulled off the weights on the sheet, his hands and legs wet when he stood up straight again. They pulled off the sheet and bundled it, and Fuji got the weights into the back of the aircraft, even as Tezuka fumbled his.
Fuji pulled open his door quickly. “Come on, we need to hurry and get her out before the sand’s too soft.”
Tezuka rubbed at his eyes for a moment, tiredness and confusion overwhelming him. “Of course,” he answered, climbing up on his side.
They were able to steer the plane up to the ramp Fuji had found, and she climbed up the incline. Some boats sat to the side just on the inside, shielded by the trees. They’d obviously been abandoned, and the boxes that sat inside them didn’t bode well with Tezuka, almost giving him the impression of escape attempts abandoned in a hurry.
He took the scene in as he steered the plane to the left, flat concrete areas clearly marked for take offs and landings, a hangar with its doors left wide open, one plane half out and uncovered. Its pattern distinctive, Tezuka recognised it immediately.
Their air force hadn’t ever flown that model; it had been deemed too expensive, its specs too low for what was required of it, but it had been produced en masse, and it had been used in the war.
By the enemy.
“If they were situated here throughout the war,” he murmured, “Why didn’t they ever come up at us from the south?”
“They didn’t want us to know they were here,” Fuji answered. “And I don’t think they had any intention of letting us know.”
“I don’t understand,” Tezuka shook his head. “They knew we hadn’t adequately guarded the southern coasts. Half our troops were deployed to the north, and our best air squadrons to the north-east.”
“It’s not that they didn’t have the intelligence,” Fuji answered quietly. “I suspect they were preparing for an attack from the eastern sea, but… There are record rooms in that building,” he gestured.
“You went inside?” Tezuka asked, unnerved. “Why?”
Fuji shrugged. “The door was open. It seems as though people were here up until a few years ago.”
“Then why abandon it all?” Tezuka frowned. “It can’t have been cheap to build something like this, and why give it up? Should we go to war again…”
“We won’t,” Fuji answered decisively, voice hard. “You know why there are no people here? You know why they left?”
Tezuka swallowed uneasily. “I…”
“Or rather…” Fuji murmured, “Why they tried leaving.”
Tezuka couldn’t help the shiver that ran down his spine.
“The entire population of this island was killed off by exposure to disease. Something we manufactured, it seems,” Fuji said quietly. “Even if they’d wanted to escape, trying was futile.”
“I took a few photos and I’m also taking these back.”
He opened his backpack to show a stack of files, causing Tezuka to jerk in his seat as soon as he realised what they were. “Why?” he asked.
“Leave them,” he demanded.
“Why should I?” Fuji countered. “You said yourself that you wanted your men’s families to be at rest. How are the families of these people any different?”
Tezuka pulled the plane up at the end of one of the runways. At the end, the canopy disappeared, a clear, narrow pathway out to the sky visible to them.
“The men and women who worked here died because of something we made with the intention of using it on people,” Fuji whispered. “It was released here, with the intention… the sole purpose of killing.”
“These people were posted out here to an island in the middle of nowhere, ordered by their government to carry out its strategies, isolated from their families and homes, and they died for it. And our own people have gone missing in this area, and you know why the government won’t consent to sending out more search parties? You know why they’re relieved whenever another plane doesn’t come back?”
“Because it’s one less plane which might bring back evidence,” Tezuka answered, swallowing. “Because it’s one less plane which could have stumbled across this place. Because they don’t want anyone to know how close we came to defeat,” Tezuka said. “Because if no one knows this base is here, no one will know how critical our neglect of the southern coasts was and how we managed to rid ourselves of the problem.”
Fuji nodded. “Exactly.”
Then he let out a breath and ran a hand through his hair. “I was fifteen when the war ended. I used to read stories about it but it never felt real to me. I thought it would be an adventure…”
Tezuka shook his head sharply. “Can you give me directions?” he requested, and leant over to pull the maps out of their folder.
“Mm,” Fuji frowned. He picked up his pencil, realising the time for talking was past.
They wouldn’t be able to refuel the plane here, and it seemed as though neither of them really wanted to stay any longer on the island, but they’d have more than enough fuel to get back to the island where they’d spent the night before, and that at least would give them a familiar spot to land in the dark.
Anything else could be left for tomorrow morning.
Tezuka stared uncertainly down the runway at what seemed a tiny gap between the edges of the trees and the manmade canopy above them. It was their only chance to get out safely, and he’d only have one chance at it. As soon as they were off the ground, the only dip below them would be into the ocean.
As he stared, visualising his take off, Fuji put his hand over his, fingers gentle and warm. “I’m ready when you are.”
Comments appreciated ♥ Continue to Part III~
By Miki
***
“We’ve flown twenty-three hours in total,” Fuji remarked, the next night. “Three days’ worth.”
Tezuka nodded. His shoulders and back attested to that, his arms starting to turn pink with all the harsh and constant sun on them.
“Can I see the map?” He gestured with a hand.
Fuji handed him the top one, keeping the others for himself, finger tracing where one led on to the next as he looked at the geography of the islands. “They’re strange, aren’t they,” he frowned.
“How so?” Tezuka looked at him. He sipped his tea, wincing to find it unpleasantly hot.
Fuji shook his head. “Just a feeling…” he trailed off. “Yuuta said he’d heard of some pilots who went missing around here earlier this year.”
Tezuka swallowed, putting down his tea and going back to studying his maps.
“He said they were from your squadron,” Fuji said, staring at Tezuka. “Two guys he’d done some training exercises with last year. He said they were highly capab-”
“I trained them,” Tezuka cut in sharply. “They had to be.”
Fuji startled slightly, surprised at Tezuka’s response. In the light of their campfire, he watched the flickering shadows on Tezuka’s face, and saw the way he pulled his glasses tiredly from his face.
“Momoshiro Takeshi and Kaidoh Kaoru. I sent them to the west,” Tezuka said. He looked a little pained, taking a moment to collect himself before he began.
“It should have been routine. They were to check the coast, and pick up some documents from an observation station that way. Halfway back, they reported picking up distress signals from the south-west. That was when I…” he sighed. “Nothing ever registered on our radars. I know the system doesn’t pick up everything, but if they reported picking up anything that far out from here, surely our systems would have registered it. According to the records, according to the guys monitoring, there was nothing.”
He rubbed his glasses at his shirt, squeezing his eyes closed and blinking rapidly before replacing his lenses.
“My guess is that they headed into this area before they realised how short of fuel they were. If the headwinds were worse than what they’d expected, and the weather here is reputed to be bad… You’ve heard the stories,” he sighed. “I had an idea of what might have happened, but I couldn’t be sure.”
Fuji nodded, and put aside his maps, carefully slipping them into his leather folder. Then he frowned a little. “But you said you hadn’t been here for two years-”
Tezuka cut him off. “Almost no one has been here for two years. The force no longer permits its pilots to come this way except under certain circumstances… It had never really sent anyone this way in the first place - ninety-five percent of pilots to have flown this way have been adventurers, private pilots and owners of their own planes…”
“And almost all of those have crashed,” Fuji swallowed. He looked down at his folder of maps and touched its corner.
“It’s why I-” Tezuka began, and cut himself off.
“Anyway, we have a full day ahead tomorrow,” he said abruptly, and stood, making it quite clear he didn’t want to talk any further. He downed the rest of his tea and flicked the remaining tealeaves at the bottom into the bushes behind him.
“Don’t stay up late.”
“Yes Cap’n,” Fuji smiled, chuckling at the frown he got from Tezuka.
Fuji crawled into his blankets less than an hour later, having waited to see that the fire was completely smothered. He could only just make out Tezuka’s face once he’d put out the light, but he shifted closer to him, trying to make up in physical closeness, what he couldn’t otherwise.
His sleeping face was peaceful, but Fuji wondered just what Tezuka was dreaming beneath the façade. Touching his fingers to his hair, he watched him wince and pulled his hand back.
“Sorry,” he apologised.
Tezuka opened his eyes, closing them as soon as he’d realised who it was. “Don’t be,” he murmured. He’d been dreaming of Momoshiro and Kaidoh again, dreaming of their plane disappearing into the clouds and never emerging again.
“I wanted to search for them myself,” he sighed, sleep slipping away from him as he spoke. “They forbade me from going. They - the higher ups - said they’d send their own team instead, but by the time I’d argued for enough staff and funding, two weeks had passed already.”
Fuji closed his eyes, listening to Tezuka’s voice.
“A week after that, the search and rescue team reported picking up signals from the area, but honing in on them, they found nothing.” Tezuka sighed. “They crashed on the way back, and any other attempt that might have been planned had to be abandoned. To have anyone else die looking for them…”
“You’ve been looking,” Fuji said slowly, in realisation, eyes widening. “You’ve been looking the entire time we’ve been travelling.”
He recalled the times Tezuka had kept glancing around, peering to the sides even though he had no need to look so frequently with a navigator in the cabin. True; he was in the habit of doing it, but Fuji realised now that he had never been looking to gauge their exact position as he’d normally have to do - he had been looking at the coast, at the reefs, at the beaches. The straights and the hard, flat areas.
Anywhere an airplane could have and may have landed.
Tezuka opened his eyes. “I just want their families to be at peace.”
Fuji slid his hand out from under his blankets, tracing his fingers along Tezuka’s cheek gently. When he realised what he was doing, it was already too late, but Tezuka didn’t seem to notice, staring blankly at him for a moment, before he blinked.
“After we finish here with Atobe’s plant,” he sighed. “I want to come back to look for them. If you want-”
Fuji smiled. “I’ll come with you.”
Tezuka closed his eyes again. “Thank you… Fuji.”
***
“What was Atobe’s father like when he was younger?” Fuji asked.
Tezuka had been quiet for the past hour since take off; nothing abnormal in itself - in the four days they had been travelling, Fuji had learnt Tezuka wasn’t as talkative as his other acquaintances - but he’d seemed worried.
Fuji pulled an apple from the box behind his seat, also pulling out the small fruit knife he’d been using to cut things with.
“He was intimidating,” Tezuka answered, without hesitation. “Loud, commanding, he always knew what he wanted.”
Fuji smiled. “Similar to Atobe then.”
Tezuka nodded slightly. “To a certain extent. He was interested in planes from the moment he sat in one, or so he said. He did a lot for the aviation industry a decade or two ago, but he mostly only flies now as a hobby.”
“Atobe wants him to give it up,” he added dryly. “In his old age.”
Fuji laughed. “I’d love to see him try. I can’t imagine what the two of them would be like, arguing with each other.”
“I’ve seen them,” Tezuka responded, a slight amount of exasperation showing. “They might as well get out their fencing gear; it would probably solve the problem a lot faster.”
“Atobe would win then?” Fuji mused.
“His father,” Tezuka corrected. “Atobe never had the patience for practicing fencing. He did other sports instead, saying waving an oversized stick around and having to wear a helmet while doing it wasn’t his style.”
Fuji gave a grin. “Touché.”
He handed a thin slice of apple to Tezuka, who took it in one hand and put it in his mouth, his right hand still on the wheel.
“Sour?” Fuji asked, noticing the frown on Tezuka’s face. He cut off another slice and slipped it into his mouth. Nothing sour - only sweetness. They were red apples, not green ones - there was none of the bitterness of the skin and acidic taste of the flesh of those.
“No,” Tezuka responded, voice betraying his sudden confusion. “The wind speed just… Just dropped. Just then.”
Fuji put aside the rest of his apple quickly, taking a glance at the instruments, looking around them. The clouds were perfectly still, as though the sky were made of fixed panels painted on a whim with white and blue.
There was stillness around the plane - it felt too light.
“The steering wheel,” Tezuka swallowed.
Fuji touched it, and held his hand to it when he realised why Tezuka was so worried. The engine was running - they hadn’t lost or gained a single foot in height, but there was no feedback coming through the wheel. It was as though they were propped up somehow - nothing felt as though it was moving.
Nothing.
“Fuji,” Tezuka’s voice; strained and urgent. “Look at the map. Tell me exactly where we are.”
Fuji had only looked at the map a few minutes ago. “We’re off the coast of… I mean, we passed the southernmost tip of Getty Island…”
They both looked out the window.
“We should have gone past it two or three minutes ago,” Fuji said, fingers tightening against the map, scrunching paper.
He glanced back, urgently trying to see through the windows of the plane, his neck hurting as he stretched and craned and bit his lip when he couldn’t see any better.
They had definitely passed the tip of Getty, but they were already over another island, directly below them - shorter, wider, a flat strip in its centre. And it wasn’t marked on the map.
“The maps aren’t complete,” Tezuka said carefully, but he was shaken by the lack of vibration running through his hands, and he had trouble keeping the worry from his voice. Without feedback from the engine, without the bumps of the plane and the headwind dictating any angle of attack, he was simply cruising straight.
“No.” Fuji answered. “The maps have been perfect so far… Not in detail, definitely, but in outline, they’ve been perfect.”
“There’s something wrong with them,” Tezuka said quickly. “They shouldn’t be - There’s no record of any real mapping in the area.”
“Atobe didn’t say where he got them from,” Fuji responded, flicking through them. “I thought he might have gotten them from the national archives…”
Tezuka shook his head. “The archives don’t have any for here, but don’t worry about the maps right now,” he instructed, but Fuji was sketching on the island beneath them as the plane moved silently through the air.
Mankind had never been built to fly, their bodies not designed for the currents of the winds. Instead, they had crafted flying machines, never able to harness the winds on which they flew, but able to predict, use and exploit them.
As a pilot, Tezuka had been taught exactly how to fly, how to use the instruments at his fingertips and the weather at the tips of his plane’s wings.
But at that moment, he still couldn’t feel the wind at all - no headwind, no tailwind, no crosswind - and every instinct in his body told him something was wrong.
“I’m going to descend,” he murmured, hands at the ready, when suddenly -
There it was upon them before they could blink - Sweeping, swirling, uncontrolled winds, pushing them sideways and whipping the plane around like a paper toy. It lifted and jerked, propelled by the sudden wind at their backs, destabilising them and sending them dipping forwards.
“Fuji, hold on!” Tezuka yelled, even as his own head knocked against the window. He felt the plane tipping to the starboard side as winds thrust it off its path - they must have been almost at a thirty degree angle, and he grabbed the wheel in both hands, trying desperately to guide them downwards safely, away from the huge landmass beneath them, but the winds were still as unrelenting even as they dropped in height. He knew it was dangerous, and he knew such a sharp descent could send the plane into a tailspin, but they flew on, angled towards the water sharper and sharper and faster and faster, almost trying to outrace the winds, and Tezuka could see the ocean speeding towards them faster and harder - and the breaks of the waves coming closer until he could nearly see their peaks.
Fuji must have yelled - someone yelled - and Tezuka pulled the wheel back. Hard.
And then they were cruising - low enough over the ocean that the waves could have reached up and licked their underbelly. But they were still flying, climbing again a little steeply, and Tezuka could feel the winds dying down behind them.
In his hands, the wheel vibrated - the hum of the motor running through to his brain and telling him they’d made it.
“I guess that was what Atobe meant when he said something about… the weather,” he breathed out, eyes squeezed closed for a second. His heart was still in his throat, vomit perhaps not far behind it, but everything around them seemed perfectly calm; in complete contrast to the tight breaths Tezuka knew he was taking.
Fuji was silent.
“Fuji?” A glance in his direction. “Are you okay?”
Fuji was frowning out ahead of them, his blue eyes showing an anger that disconcerted Tezuka. “You said he can’t fence well?” he clarified.
“A-Ah… Well, he isn’t as good as his father.” Tezuka answered uncertainly, his thoughts skittish and his brain having trouble realising Fuji meant Atobe.
“Good,” Fuji nodded, and plucked his pencil up from where he’d let go and it had been sent to the floor. “I beat his father the last time we had a match, you know. I look forward to giving him a good whipping once we get back. I suspect he could do with it.”
Tezuka slowly brought them back up to a little under their previous cruising height and Fuji made more than enough noise for the two of them with his impatient pencil scratching on their maps and his occasional stabs of his knife at his apple.
Combined with the noise of the plane, they comforted Tezuka, sending feelings of relief through his body.
Fuji’s idea of revenge amused him to a degree; Atobe was certainly going to find his hands full with him once they got back.
***
Tent flaps secured, Fuji slipped inside, crawling across to his pillow. “That was some wind today,” he murmured, possibly still a little shaken.
Tezuka nodded briefly, poring over Fuji’s additions to their maps. “Are you sure we passed this many islands?” he questioned, holding the map up to the light.
Fuji sat next to him and nodded. “Some of them were tiny - this one, this one…” he pointed a finger. “Barely bigger than, say, a modest sized house. But they weren’t rocky at all - they were just flat and green.”
Tezuka frowned. “Are you sure they weren’t sand banks?” he asked. He hadn’t noticed that many, although after their scare, he had hardly paid attention to the direction they were going in - only the winds he could feel.
“They were green,” Fuji rolled his eyes slightly. “Besides, sand banks are exactly that - they’re banks. They tend to span metres and metres in lines - natural build ups. They don’t occur like piles in the ocean,” he pointed out.
Tezuka tilted his head slightly, conceding the point.
Still, he studied the maps a little longer, looking for patterns among the islands. There were none, as far as he could tell, and they struck him as strange. He couldn’t understand how such things would withstand the tides of the ocean, or how they would have formed in the first place.
Fuji eventually pulled the papers from his hands and folded them away. Then he tucked his folder under his pillow and smiled. “Sleep, Tezuka,” he said. “You can look at them again tomorrow once I’m awake.”
Tezuka decided not to argue, and his eyes were protesting the dim lighting anyway, so he settled into his bedding and waited for Fuji to do the same.
“I was surprised,” Fuji said quietly, voice barely above a murmur. “With the way you handled that today.”
Tezuka frowned. “It’s nothing I haven’t done before; I just hadn’t anticipated it then.”
Fuji smiled, tucking his knees up under his chin as he sat. “Yuuta told me you once helped him out of danger when he was in a similar situation.”
“It was my duty,” Tezuka responded. “I picked up his radio calls and I answered.”
Fuji kept smiling. “But not everyone fulfils their duty. Anyone else could just have let him be.”
Tezuka shook his head. “Only a coward would do that,” he said.
“And who says the force isn’t full of those?” Fuji asked.
Tezuka simply shook his head. “None of my men are cowards. If they were, they wouldn’t have stuck with me all this time.”
Fuji blinked, not looking convinced. “Your men perhaps, but the other squadrons…”
Tezuka looked away. “Men are men,” he said. “Some are better than others. Some try to be better than others. Whether they succeed is another matter.”
***
The sun was rising the next morning as Tezuka stepped out of the tent. He straightened up and squinted. Then he stretched his arms up above his head, relieved to feel the soreness in his neck dissipating somewhat. For him, tents were not conducive to good nights of sleep nor good mornings, once awake.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Fuji said, his voice at Tezuka’s ear.
Tezuka winced, rather tempted not to tell him not to surprise him like that. “Have you been out here long?” he asked instead.
“Feel,” Fuji grinned, and pressed the back of his hand to Tezuka’s cheek. It was pretty cold; Tezuka assumed the answer to the question was yes.
He frowned a little. “You’ll get sick like that.”
“Nonsense,” Fuji said, and it was then that Tezuka noticed he’d set up his camera tripod just a few metres in front.
“Can you do me a favour?” he asked, walking to the tripod and fiddling with the top of the camera. “Go and stand over there.”
He pointed to a spot to the centre-right of the camera’s obvious focus, and Tezuka shook his head uncomfortably. He slipped on his glasses and squinted at the spot.
It was in front of a cluster of bushes. The scenery on this island wasn’t as interesting as on some of the others they’d flown over (it mostly had lower ground-covering shrubs than trees) but the sunset itself…
“I just got out of bed,” he pointed out somewhat unnecessarily, but he very nearly wavered. “Find a different subject for a photo.”
Fuji grinned. “And where shall I find another subject?”
Tezuka looked around them. “Take a picture of a tree,” he said, moving towards the plane, looking for the place he’d left his mug last night.
“Tezuka, please?” Fuji asked.
The ‘please’ made Tezuka stop walking, turning around again and grudgingly taking up the position.
“See,” Fuji murmured, bending down to put his eye to the viewfinder. “You look fine. No one will be able to tell.”
Tezuka very much doubted that, and suspected the smile on Fuji’s face had less to do with his victory and more to do with some clump of hair sticking up, or the fact that he was wearing his pyjama pants with leather shoes.
“Wait!” Fuji called out, once he’d taken the picture. “Stay there.”
Tezuka sighed, wondering what Fuji had up his sleeve now.
“Go and take a picture of me,” Fuji directed, once he was standing right next to Tezuka.
Tezuka obliged, reasoning it could do no harm to photograph Fuji. It was better for him to be behind the lens rather than in front anyway.
Fuji had obviously been up for a little while and looked picture-worthy at least, Tezuka thought. He cringed to think any of his future descendants might see him standing in the middle of a strange island, for all intents and purposes looking as crazy as his cousins liked to tell him he was.
Fuji, on the other hand, was… beautiful.
“Done?” he called out, after Tezuka had taken the first photo. “Take another one just in case.”
Tezuka ducked down and put his eye to the viewfinder again, adjusting the zoom. He took in the shot awkwardly, and the sunlight bounced off Fuji’s hair and shoulders, making Tezuka squint.
Fuji’s expression was happy, smile relaxed and lips curved upwards, as though he may or may not have been laughing at his companion and Tezuka would never know.
“I’ve always loved sunrise,” Fuji said, packing away the tripod a little later.
Tezuka looked towards him, munching on his slightly singed, campfire-cooked piece of toast.
“I once said that to Yuuta and he told me to go live on another planet where they had them all the time so I wouldn’t have to talk his ear off about it,” Fuji laughed.
“But if there were a sunrise and a sunset all the time,” he smiled, “they wouldn’t be special anymore.”
“I’d feel sorry for the lamplighters,” Tezuka said.
“And the weather forecasters,” Fuji smiled. “They’d be forever forecasting weather so they’d never have any time to enjoy it.”
“If it were an unconventional planet by our standards though,” Tezuka pointed out. “Why hold it to our conventions?”
Fuji looked a little surprised, tilting his head at Tezuka. “True.”
***
“We should reach it by midday,” Fuji said over the dull hum of the engine.
He handed Tezuka a bottle of water, scrounging a few lollies from the bottom of the bag at the same time.
“Do you like those?” Tezuka asked as he handed back the bottle.
Fuji smiled. “Why would you think that?”
“You eat a lot of them,” Tezuka pointed out. “Almost a whole bag in five days.”
Fuji held up the empty bag. “Does eating them necessarily imply I’m doing it because I enjoy them? Perhaps I’m only doing it to keep my mouth engaged from otherwise distracting you all the time.”
Tezuka looked at him uncertainly and shook his head. “You’re not a distraction,” he answered, taking Fuji’s talking more seriously than he’d meant it.
“Glad to hear it,” Fuji teased. “Are you sure you don’t want any?”
“I’ve never been fond of sweet things,” was all the reply Fuji got, before a demand for their bearing and why there were still so many islands down below which looked like little green polka dots.
***
“Watch your foot,” Tezuka warned, walking around to Fuji’s door to help him down. The sand beneath his feet was deceptively soft; it had looked hard enough from the air for them to land, but it was now evident it wasn’t going to provide much traction for their take-off. They’d either have to wait until the tide came in far enough to wet it slightly and hold it firmer, or they’d have to push the plane, a little further in where it seemed to be dirt terrain.
Tezuka found himself silently questioning, not for the first time, why they hadn’t taken a seaplane, and shaking his head at the answers he came to. Surely Atobe, having seen the maps, would have decided it would be safer and more appropriate, and why hadn’t he questioned their choice of airplane? Perhaps because he too was wrapped up in the newness of Atobe’s toy?
He’d admit it was a lot smoother to fly than his own plane, but much of that was simply to do with its larger size and heavier weight - he felt less turbulence and the plane was less susceptible to it.
A small voice at the back of his head wondered if his own girl would have been able to get them through the unexpected turbulence they’d encountered, so much worse than anything he was used to.
“I wonder if there are tigers in there,” Fuji smiled and tilted his head towards the centre of the island.
He let go of Tezuka’s hand as his feet touched the sand. “It looks like the sort of habitation, don’t you think?”
“I’d hope not,” Tezuka sighed, but flinched when he found Fuji walking more than a few steps away from him. “Wait for me,” he frowned, and hurriedly flicked through the folder of notes and photos Atobe had passed on to them.
“I don’t understand why they have such detailed notes about the plants here, but no samples to speak of,” he frowned, almost on the verge of complaining. The entire mission had him asking questions with no answers in sight.
Fuji shook his head, stepping back towards him. “My guess is…” He pointed to the dates at the tops of the pages. “A research expedition came in the past, took samples which died in the labs, and didn’t bother replacing them since the plants were of little medicinal or monetary value.”
“But Atobe must see something else in them,” Tezuka pointed out. “Even if his mother were the one who wanted them in the first place, he wouldn’t ask anyone to go and get them unless he saw monetary value in them, don’t you think?”
Fuji shook his head. “Perhaps he saw something else in this trip,” he suggested, but shouldered his backpack properly and closed the plane door next to Tezuka.
They covered the plane up with a sheet, weighted down to make sure it didn’t blow off, and set off up the sand towards the edge of what looked to be a thick forest.
It was dark and musty under the canopy, moisture getting into their mouths and throats and wetting their skin. As soon as they were more than twenty steps in, it became difficult to see, and Fuji had to hold up the light as he walked in front.
Tezuka gave up studying the files quickly, finding it useless to squint at sketches of plants and try to distinguish one type of leaf from another, and finding he needed to concentrate on his feet instead.
“Do you know what you’re looking for?” he asked Fuji, just avoiding tripping over a tree root. They sprawled all over the path Fuji walked through the dense undergrowth, and more than once, Tezuka felt wet trails across his pants and felt a shiver pass down his spine.
“I think it should be further in,” Fuji answered, raising his voice. He disliked having Tezuka behind him, but one of them had to lead - the path was too narrow to walk side by side - and he was the one who had stepped in first.
The noise of the bushes brushing against their legs was loud, and only made the flips in both their stomachs worse.
“The notes said the plants are more likely to grow by freshwater lakes, and I thought I saw one in this way when we flew over,” Fuji continued. “I’m sure it’s this direction because I drew it on the map.”
He held their compass up to the light, moving forwards again when he was sure they were close enough to the direction for the lake.
“How much further in?” Tezuka asked, wanting clarification.
“Probably about two hundred metres,” Fuji answered quickly.
Tezuka swallowed, trying to quell the growing sense of uneasiness he felt. Two hundred metres wasn’t far, he told himself. Even if they had to battle vines to get there, they should only take another fifteen minutes at most.
“Here, let me.” He put his hand on Fuji’s shoulder, feeling a slight tremble. He hadn’t been able to tell from behind, but when they were face to face, Fuji didn’t look certain of himself either, his smile gone and a look of worry in his features.
Tezuka took the light from him and Fuji took the files, and with Tezuka clasping Fuji’s arm in his clammy hand, they made their way slowly through the bushes. Fuji’s voice gave directions and Tezuka’s feet felt the ground before them and led the way.
Hot sunlight filtered through the trees soon enough, and they broke into a small clearing, feet splashing straight away into water a few inches deep.
Tezuka’s hand had slipped during their walk, down to Fuji’s wrist, and then to his hand, but he didn’t let go even once they’d reached the water.
“Do you see any?” he asked, slightly out of breath.
Fuji shook his head, his hand squeezing Tezuka’s, because what he saw was not a few inches tall and green with leaves.
Through a thin patch of trees on the opposite side of the lake, he could see a building.
***
“Why are you taking so long?” Shishido frowned. “I’ll do it if you can’t.”
He pushed Oshitari aside, hands reaching down into the body of the airplane. “Reckon he’s found out yet?” he asked as he worked. “And hand me that thing - the clip things.”
Oshitari sighed. “Names would be useful,” he pointed out, eyeing the numerous ‘clip things’ Shishido could mean. On a hunch, he picked out a pair of cutters and handed them over, getting no complaint in response.
“And who do you mean?” he asked. “You mean Tezuka?”
“Who else?” Shishido shrugged. “Hand me that towel.”
“I can’t, I’m dirty,” Oshitari responded, sighing. “Get it yourself.”
“I’m dirtier than you,” Shishido snorted, and waved a pair of greasy hands at Oshitari. “Unless you want to clean these off for me.”
Oshitari picked up the oily old rag on the floor with distaste, and tossed it at Shishido, staring at their engine again.
“You think they’ll be back on time?” Shishido asked. “I’ve heard stories about… that part of the south.”
Oshitari shrugged. “They’re just stories.”
“If they’re just stories, why are half of them true,” Shishido answered, frowning at him.
“They’re not - not that many of them,” Oshitari insisted, taking the cleaned cutters from Shishido. “Most of those crashes were pilot error, and you forget we’re talking about Tezuka,” he sighed. “He’s not so stupid to make a mistake and you know it.”
“Mistakes can happen to anyone,” Shishido answered pointedly, and tossed the rag down on the floor. “Even Tezuka.”
***
“I feel like we’ve stepped back in time,” Fuji grinned.
“I think we’ve stepped into something we weren’t supposed to find,” Tezuka said with a shake of his head.
Fuji’s nervousness suddenly gone and replaced with a kind of curiosity, he pulled Tezuka forwards, despite Tezuka literally digging his heels in.
“I think we should leave,” he said, clearly and carefully. “I don’t think we’re going to-”
“No one’s here,” Fuji insisted, cutting him off. “Look,” he said quietly.
Buildings spanned in front of them as far as the eye could see. The island, marked on the map as only two kilometres wide and three long, was deceptively large. Building after building could be seen in the distance, some which looked like accommodation and some which clearly served other purposes. Dishes were on most roofs and wires and poles ran along next to the buildings, along the quiet bitumen paths.
The main doors of the building closest to them had vines growing up and across the glass and to the bricks, the plant undeterred by the slippery surface it sat against and the concrete edge from under which it had grown.
The sun shone through above them.
“Fuji, can I see the map?” Tezuka asked.
Fuji pulled it out and spread it open. “The island looked almost completely wooded from above,” he said, tracing a finger over it. “Only the lake was visible.”
Tezuka nodded, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as he looked upwards. Above them, thin criss-crossing lines - panels, Tezuka surmised - spanned as far as they could see from the edge of the forest behind them over and above all the buildings. From above, the ceiling had taken on the appearance of the woods around it.
No plane would ever consider landing on this island, if it weren’t for the fact that the tide was out right now. The moment it came in, they both knew their plane would be floating in water.
The thought that they should have pushed it further up the beach before setting out worried Tezuka, but there was nothing he could do now.
“Let’s just get those plants,” he insisted. “I know there’s something going on here, and it’s not normal…” He let out a shaky breath. “But let’s just get out of here. We need an hour to refuel and I don’t want to spend any more time here than necessary.”
Fuji stared at him evenly before tilting his head. “Okay,” he agreed. “I’ll meet you at the lake in an hour, I promise. Just let me walk around and take some photos.”
Tezuka shook his head. “I don’t want you going alone,” he insisted.
Fuji stepped back from Tezuka. “I can look after myself. I’ll be fine, and I have the compass and maps. I won’t get lost.”
Tezuka glanced upwards at the sun, taking note of its position. The watch on his hand ticked a little past one in the afternoon.
He looked at Fuji, his mind already clearly made up as he stood and waited for Tezuka to do the same.
“Fine,” he agreed stiffly. “But I need you back here in an hour. Don’t make me worry.”
“I won’t,” Fuji agreed, smiling. He opened his backpack and unpacked the boxes they’d brought to store the plants in, and handed over the small trowel along with the notes. “Be careful.”
“You too,” Tezuka said, watching Fuji he walked across the concrete towards a clump of the nearer buildings.
The trees around them should have been home to thousands upon thousands of birds. They should have been noisy and teeming with life. But instead, the air was heavy and humid, the silence deafening, and Tezuka couldn’t help but look back at Fuji’s small figure walking alone across a deserted, man-made space as he himself stepped back through the hedge of trees and to the lake.
He almost called Fuji back, but he didn’t.
Standing at the edge of the water, he pulled off his watch and rested it beside the boxes. It wouldn’t do to get dirt all over it, or if he accidentally slipped, he didn’t want it water damaged.
The lake was a shallow thing, perhaps man made in itself. It didn’t seem natural, at any rate, and there was nothing growing at the bottom, so when Tezuka accidentally stepped into it, all he stirred up was a lot of muck and mud.
Luckily it seemed the plants were common enough, and Tezuka found he was able to discern one type of leaf from another, glad that the notes at least, unlike the maps, were correct.
He glanced up at the sun as he worked, taking note of its position each time he potted another plant. The notes were very particular about not exposing the roots to air, and he dutifully shovelled in enough dirt to cover them, all the while glancing towards the direction Fuji had gone in.
He had three of each of the species (he hoped, anyway) into the boxes by the time he pulled off his shirt, sweaty and feeling nearly exhausted. The sun didn’t come down into the trees a few metres into the forest, but he didn’t want to walk back in there without Fuji. If he did, there was always a chance Fuji might not be able to see him and lose track of his directions, or alternately…
He didn’t want to think about the alternate.
The sense of uneasiness returned to him as he waited for Fuji, but the more he glanced upwards, the longer the moments seemed to pass, and the stillness of the air under the island’s panels did nothing to calm him.
He was checking the plants again, when he heard Fuji.
“Tezuka!”
He looked up quickly, relief flooding through him to see him okay, but Fuji’s face was worried, and Tezuka moved towards him.
“Tezuka!” Fuji yelled. He was running towards him. “The plane!”
“What? What about her?” Tezuka demanded.
Fuji reached him, stumbling as his feet stopped their flight across the ground, a shaky hand squeezing Tezuka’s bare shoulder for a split second.
“Quick, we have to get back to the beach,” he panted. “She’ll be underwater soon if we don’t run! We have to push her up the bank!”
He grabbed the samples, stuffing them into the backpack carelessly, as fast as he could. Tezuka grabbed his watch, not even having the time to check it.
“But the sun hasn’t moved,” he protested, not understanding the urgency. Surely the tide couldn’t move this fast. “You can’t have been gone for more than an hour.”
Fuji’s hand gripped his as they hurried back along the path they’d come from, vines snapping and barely missing their faces, sharp thorns scraping their legs through their pants.
“The sun doesn’t move, Tezuka.”
“What do you mean, it doesn’t move?” Tezuka demanded. “Of course it moves!”
“The canopy wasn’t just camouflage from the outside,” Fuji snapped back. He breathed heavily, coughing in the moist air. “It was camouflage for the inside as well. That wasn’t the sun we were seeing; it was only an illusion.”
“How do you know?” Tezuka asked.
He stumbled, nearly falling against Fuji, but Fuji pulled him forwards, never allowing him to slip behind.
Tezuka glanced down as they ran, wary of the tree roots raised above the ground.
“Check the time,” Fuji answered, just before they burst out of the forest, stumbling, panting hard and running down onto the beach.
Tezuka cursed. Three hours had passed according to his watch; no wonder he’d been tired. Hot afternoon sunlight spread across his bare back when they slowed down, reminding him -
He rubbed at his hair frustratedly. “I left my shirt.”
“Forget about the shirt,” Fuji answered, grabbing his arm again. “The plane’s wheels are already in water. I think the sand will be too wet for us now.”
“So what should we do?” Tezuka said, trying to calm himself down. There was no use in panicking. The plane’s wheels were wet but they could still push her or run her up the beach to higher ground… But what they really needed was a take off straight and somewhere high enough that they’d have time to refuel her with half a load of fuel.
“I saw a ramp up that way.” Fuji pointed. “I think we should be able to get her up that, and there are empty runways inside.”
“Inside?” Tezuka asked. “But it’s all closed in.”
Fuji shook his head. “Not on the other side,” he answered. “They were using it as an air force base and there’re some buildings which look like research labs as well.”
“But we don’t have… There’s no record of any of the forces ever posting people to this area,” Tezuka answered, blankly glancing across the edge of the forest.
“Not our forces,” Fuji said.
It suddenly dawned on Tezuka exactly what Fuji was telling him. “You mean this is all left over from the last war,” he said.
Fuji gave a nod, and pulled off the weights on the sheet, his hands and legs wet when he stood up straight again. They pulled off the sheet and bundled it, and Fuji got the weights into the back of the aircraft, even as Tezuka fumbled his.
Fuji pulled open his door quickly. “Come on, we need to hurry and get her out before the sand’s too soft.”
Tezuka rubbed at his eyes for a moment, tiredness and confusion overwhelming him. “Of course,” he answered, climbing up on his side.
They were able to steer the plane up to the ramp Fuji had found, and she climbed up the incline. Some boats sat to the side just on the inside, shielded by the trees. They’d obviously been abandoned, and the boxes that sat inside them didn’t bode well with Tezuka, almost giving him the impression of escape attempts abandoned in a hurry.
He took the scene in as he steered the plane to the left, flat concrete areas clearly marked for take offs and landings, a hangar with its doors left wide open, one plane half out and uncovered. Its pattern distinctive, Tezuka recognised it immediately.
Their air force hadn’t ever flown that model; it had been deemed too expensive, its specs too low for what was required of it, but it had been produced en masse, and it had been used in the war.
By the enemy.
“If they were situated here throughout the war,” he murmured, “Why didn’t they ever come up at us from the south?”
“They didn’t want us to know they were here,” Fuji answered. “And I don’t think they had any intention of letting us know.”
“I don’t understand,” Tezuka shook his head. “They knew we hadn’t adequately guarded the southern coasts. Half our troops were deployed to the north, and our best air squadrons to the north-east.”
“It’s not that they didn’t have the intelligence,” Fuji answered quietly. “I suspect they were preparing for an attack from the eastern sea, but… There are record rooms in that building,” he gestured.
“You went inside?” Tezuka asked, unnerved. “Why?”
Fuji shrugged. “The door was open. It seems as though people were here up until a few years ago.”
“Then why abandon it all?” Tezuka frowned. “It can’t have been cheap to build something like this, and why give it up? Should we go to war again…”
“We won’t,” Fuji answered decisively, voice hard. “You know why there are no people here? You know why they left?”
Tezuka swallowed uneasily. “I…”
“Or rather…” Fuji murmured, “Why they tried leaving.”
Tezuka couldn’t help the shiver that ran down his spine.
“The entire population of this island was killed off by exposure to disease. Something we manufactured, it seems,” Fuji said quietly. “Even if they’d wanted to escape, trying was futile.”
“I took a few photos and I’m also taking these back.”
He opened his backpack to show a stack of files, causing Tezuka to jerk in his seat as soon as he realised what they were. “Why?” he asked.
“Leave them,” he demanded.
“Why should I?” Fuji countered. “You said yourself that you wanted your men’s families to be at rest. How are the families of these people any different?”
Tezuka pulled the plane up at the end of one of the runways. At the end, the canopy disappeared, a clear, narrow pathway out to the sky visible to them.
“The men and women who worked here died because of something we made with the intention of using it on people,” Fuji whispered. “It was released here, with the intention… the sole purpose of killing.”
“These people were posted out here to an island in the middle of nowhere, ordered by their government to carry out its strategies, isolated from their families and homes, and they died for it. And our own people have gone missing in this area, and you know why the government won’t consent to sending out more search parties? You know why they’re relieved whenever another plane doesn’t come back?”
“Because it’s one less plane which might bring back evidence,” Tezuka answered, swallowing. “Because it’s one less plane which could have stumbled across this place. Because they don’t want anyone to know how close we came to defeat,” Tezuka said. “Because if no one knows this base is here, no one will know how critical our neglect of the southern coasts was and how we managed to rid ourselves of the problem.”
Fuji nodded. “Exactly.”
Then he let out a breath and ran a hand through his hair. “I was fifteen when the war ended. I used to read stories about it but it never felt real to me. I thought it would be an adventure…”
Tezuka shook his head sharply. “Can you give me directions?” he requested, and leant over to pull the maps out of their folder.
“Mm,” Fuji frowned. He picked up his pencil, realising the time for talking was past.
They wouldn’t be able to refuel the plane here, and it seemed as though neither of them really wanted to stay any longer on the island, but they’d have more than enough fuel to get back to the island where they’d spent the night before, and that at least would give them a familiar spot to land in the dark.
Anything else could be left for tomorrow morning.
Tezuka stared uncertainly down the runway at what seemed a tiny gap between the edges of the trees and the manmade canopy above them. It was their only chance to get out safely, and he’d only have one chance at it. As soon as they were off the ground, the only dip below them would be into the ocean.
As he stared, visualising his take off, Fuji put his hand over his, fingers gentle and warm. “I’m ready when you are.”
Comments appreciated ♥ Continue to Part III~