Chapter Text
The duty of waking Marvelous up, even on normal days when laziness alone knocked him out in his chair or up in the crow's nest, almost exclusively fell to Joe. Navi could withstand getting hucked across the room, but she didn't have Joe's effectiveness. Joe could wake him quietly, which Ahim assured him was an admirable skill.
Marvelous had stopped taking his irregular naps on the bridge. He'd retreat to his cabin under the pretense of doing some vague 'work,' and emerge again hours later with pillow creases in his face. Gai had suggested that - at least on that day, as they all chattered and busied themselves readying for an expedition planet-side - it was just too noisy to nap on the bridge some days. That was true enough, but Joe knew better for being the one to always slip in and bring him around. When Marvelous did sleep, at least in the past couple weeks, he didn't sleep well.
More than once, Joe had come in on him with his face pinched up and the fingers on his right hand twitching and flexing, his whole body tense with garbled panic signals from his sleeping brain. The day they began their descent to that nameless planet at the rim of the galaxy wasn't any different.
The first few times, Joe had approached his sleeping friend with the same slow and broad and deliberate motions one uses when confronting an unfamiliar dog. Now, though, he crossed the room in quick strides and filled Marvelous' restless hand with his own and he squeezed. Whatever Marvelous was grasping for, it wasn't here. Joe was here, and that brought him awake without the usual snapping or thrashing that would send Gai fleeing or Navi flying out into the corridor. He came awake with a hissing intake of breath that knocked the tension out of his limbs, shook his head like a drenched dog, and sat up. He always looked over Joe's shoulder, at the door. Joe never bothered to ask; he knew Marvelous had to be sure it was shut.
"We're getting ready to disembark." There wasn't any point in asking if Marvelous was all right, seeing as his answers only ranged as far as 'Of course,' and 'Shut up.' Instead, he let his hand slip free and stepped back so Marvelous could do his best to spring out of bed. He was still dressed, boots and all. Gai would be appalled. "You're sure Doc doesn't need you up here?"
Marvelous scoffed and turned his head hard to one side. His neck made a sound like wet gravel underfoot and Joe grimaced. "As if I'd miss out." He stepped around Joe and swept his coat off the chair before his desk. The desk itself was more a permanent art fixture than functional furniture, a craggy landscape of plundered souvenirs and utilitarian items and certain precious things Joe had learned through painful trial and error he wasn't allowed to touch. "You can nanny me yourself while we're down there if you're so bent out of shape about me missing a little sleep."
"Two weeks of stealing three hours a day isn't missing a little sleep." Joe pointed this out as coolly as he could manage, tailing Marvelous into the corridor. "You're racking up a serious sleep debt."
"You think I haven't missed a lot more sleep for a lot better reasons before?" Marvelous didn't turn to speak to him. He did that sometimes, threw out some scrap from his life before Joe as an illustration of just how little even Joe was allowed to know about him. "I can handle myself. I know you've got my back, but the going forward I can usually manage on my own.”
Joe didn't believe him, but he didn't want to start the expedition with a bloody nose either.
A familiar chaos greeted them on the bridge that served double duty as their common room. In fairness to the others, Gai was the epicenter and instigator of most of the horseplay. While Ahim and Luka took turns ticking off equipment lists, Gai flitted around the room waxing nostalgic about summer and cicadas and wading through rivers. He had dressed for their excursion in a garish button up shirt and cargo pants that made his legs look like matchsticks. He'd somehow become more embarrassing than usual to behold.
"What! Don-san, you've really never been camping?" He hovered around poor Doc - who'd tried to take refuge with his toolbox under the ship's console - like a lamprey that was still struggling to work out its purpose in life.
"I- Well." Doc tried to sit up straight and only banged his head on the underside of the console. It took him a moment to recover. "I wouldn't call what I've had to do camping."
Gai's face fell and he released a characteristic wail. "That's right! Ah, I'm so sorry." He dropped down beside Doc, and Joe couldn't tell if he was bowing or trying to get on Doc's level to appear more sincere. Either way, it looked ridiculous. "Camping and not having a home are different."
Marvelous put an end to the display by striding over and dragging Gai back up by the collar of his shirt. Gai didn't resist, letting himself be pulled along like a cat grasped by the scruff of its neck. "Enough chatter, we're not going on some stupid camping trip anyway."
"Close enough," Gai said. He pursed his lips and rubbed his neck where his collar had dug in. He brightened. "If we have to stay overnight, we'll be camping."
“It's a lot less fun if you don't have a choice,” Doc said.
“It is with your friends around!” Gai insisted, tearing out of Marvelous' grasp in a spinning flourish. “I was in the scouts as a kid, and-”
“Of course you were.” Marvelous caught Gai again, spun him around, and gave him a light kick to get him moving. “Go find the bird.”
Gai spun a few times, like an off-balance top, and bounded down the steps to the corridors beyond the common room. “Aye aye!” And then he was off, calling for Navi the whole way.
Sighing, Marvelous retired to his chair. Joe couldn't blame him for chasing Gai off, seeing as he found Gai exhausting even on a full night's rest. There were other reasons that Marvelous wouldn't admit or accept, of course, like the way Gai loudly and insistently worried at him. If Gai wasn't around, Marvelous could slouch and nod and drag a little. He could stand worrying the others but Gai was too sunny and chatty to take his captain's discomfort in a way that didn't cause him immediate, noisy distress. Joe, by contrast, worried very quietly and expressed it by standing off to the side of the captain's chair to keep watch.
“It's not exactly like we gotta go anyway,” Luka said once Gai's cries had died down to a distant din. She whipped an apple from the fruit bowl on their coffee table at Joe's head. He caught it without a thought.
“Already told you, it's preventative measures,” Marvelous said. When Joe offered him the apple, he took and gnashed into it without thanks or grace. He wasn't too changed from his normal self, thankfully. “If there's a cup that holds the key to great power or whatever here, we might as well take care of it before any delusional imperialists get wind of it.”
“A cup or a spring,” Doc put in, rising from behind the console. “Or a well. The texts, from what I could translate, were euphemistic and maybe not the most clear. It's a trait of the language, probably, but seeing as it's technically a dead language we'll never be sure.”
Ahim made a small, thoughtful sound and crossed the room to one of the portholes. “That is not entirely the most helpful information, but I suppose we shall make the most of it.”
“Right, and if you think about it a well or a spring's a lot easier to find than a cup.” Every plosive sound from Marvelous' mouth sent a little spatter of apple juice ghosting over Joe's hand.
“Yeah, but what are we going to do with a well?” Joe asked, wiping his hand on the front of his shirt. On a normal day he'd slap Marvelous upside the head with his sticky hand. “You can't just smash that, unlike a cup.”
Marvelous shrugged. “Dunno. Kill the monster at the bottom? We'll figure it out. We always do.”
Joe hummed, Doc fidgeted, and Luka joined Ahim at the porthole.
“It really is a lovely little green planet,” Ahim said dreamily.
Luka leaned against the bulkhead, peering out with practiced disinterest. “Yeah, lovely and empty. Makes you wonder where everybody went.”
Doc hung back on the Galleon to run maintenance, something that Navi – despite having some requisite knowledge – couldn't do without thumbs. He would remain on standby and keep watch over the immediate area, but Joe didn't consider the auxiliary member of their team a fair trade for Doc. Rappelling down to an unfamiliar planet with one less Gokaiger had him on edge before his feet hit the ground.
The planet was as Ahim had described it, lovely and green. The clearing that served as their touchdown point was wreathed all around by trees and creepers so thick and tall that they gave the impression of a distant green canyon wall. Under his boots, the ground gave like a firm sponge. The air smelled thickly of warm rain just passed.
“Uwah, it's like a rainforest!” Gai was an explosion of noise behind him, and the beside him, and then muscling up to the front of the group. “Man, I'm glad my Cellular can take pictures.”
Marvelous had Gai by the scruff again before he could steal the captain's place at the front of their procession. He yanked Gai back and Luka stepped aside to let him take her place as second in the lineup. Joe stepped around them all to stand beside Marvelous, who had given up on chastising Gai in favor of slowly unfolding his copy of their map. He first held it backward, and then upside down.
“Perhaps it would be best to accomplish our goals before we set to sightseeing,” Ahim said, regarding the expanse of treeline nearest them. “After all, that would free up our time to... go camping?”
“Yeah!” Luka leaned into Ahim, grinning, and Joe had to wonder if she was playing up her enthusiasm for Ahim and Gai's sakes the way Marvelous sent Gai to look for Navi.
“Work first, campfire stories later.” Marvelous snapped the paper in his hands and started for the trees. Joe kept close to his side in case drowsiness and the heels of his boots in the soft soil unbalanced him.
They penetrated the treeline without incident, though Gai's enthusiasm did dwindle the further they hiked. The trees packed tightly around them on all sides and jutting mossy roots threatened to catch unwary feet. All around was a silence anyone not accustomed to the remote outdoors might call absolute. Gai's time playing around in the woods as a child hadn't prepared him, obviously. Then again, Ahim certainly looked at ease. She moved light and quick through the growth and over the roots and fallen trunks, even in her skirt. Maybe there was some deeply ingrained distrust of deep, green wilderness in the Earthling psyche. For Joe, this wasn't so bad.
The pack on Joe's back was a comforting, familiar weight. It was lighter than the one he'd hauled up mountain ranges during survival training but present enough to take some part of him back to those days. The times he shared with Sid and the others in their unit hadn't been perfect – they had been predicated on a terrible, all-encompassing lie, even – but many of them were happy and simple in a way he couldn't full appreciate at the time. The small sounds of boughs creaking overhead and little unseen things moving through the foliage brought the part of him he'd all but shed the day Sid died back to those times, if only briefly.
When the inevitable happened and Marvelous pitched forward beside him, Joe was ready. He snapped a hand out and caught him by the arm to haul him upright. It was all automatic. He didn't even feel his expression shift.
Marvelous muttered his thanks and kicked the root that tripped him as if that would make him look less ridiculous. Navi buzzed his head.
“Marvelous! I know you're tired, but you can't take a nap in the woods, sleepyhead.” She sounded her tinny laugh and circled his and Joe's heads.
“Bird!” Marvelous lashed a hand out at her and she spiraled up out of his reach, cackling.
“Too bad you were so generous when we left Earth. I bet Jetman could catch me easy!”
“You gotta land sometime!”
Joe let himself smile. Even if Marvelous was rapidly expending his energy reserves it was a relief to see him springing around after Navi. He was a flitting splash of red against the green, all lively and loud like he ought to be. The others watched, too, and it was Gai who swooped in to catch Marvelous when he lost his footing again making a dive for Navi. Marvelous shrugged him off and everyone but Marvelous laughed.
Then a reverberating rasp cut through the trees. It was like countless voices sighing through tight throats, and it rolled over them like a wave from the east. The laughter bled out of them instantly. They all came to cluster with Marvelous at the center, as they always did, and Mobirates and GokaiCellular at the ready.
A horde of things came roiling out from the spaces between the trees. They weren't Gormin, they weren't soldiers, but there was a uniformity to their silhouettes that brought to mind the association. Even if those silhouettes rippled and writhed as they moved, as if loose rubbery fibers composed their limbs and trunks.
Marvelous spoke first. “Bird, go tell Doc there's trouble down here!”
Then, they all called out in unison. “GokaiChange!”
Gai dove into the fracas first and brought down two in a long swipe. Not bad, but he'd be hacking them down for a while without help. What they lacked in strength, they compensated for in numbers.
Joe moved with Marvelous into the whirl of strange bodies. They were lanky, sinuous things the color of clay that sprang and lurched around as if boneless. The flat, blank plates in place of their faces swiveled and jerked to follow Joe's eyes – not his body or his face – wherever he moved. Each time he cut one down, it collapsed and unwound with the same rasp that had preceded the things' coming.
Boneless, faceless, voiceless. Weak though they were, they were terrible and numerous.
When Marvelous strayed from him and left his back open to one of the things, Joe leaped to slash it away. His blade swiped clean through the cords that made up its chest, but not before it snapped out at him and wrapped its too-long fingers around his outstretched arm.
'Run!'
Joe screamed and didn't know why. The need to run, the equally powerful want to stay and prevent some unknown terrible happening, both these things struck him so hard from inside that he reeled back into Marvelous.
It was gone as soon as it came, the monster spooling away to nothing on the ground and the world around him in the sharp, clear focus of presence. He cut a wide swath through their numbers out of spite, and when they touched him again as he mowed his way through them he felt nothing.
Navi returned when half the horde remained, though not with Doc. She stayed well above the calamity, calling the same message over and over to the dispersed pirates.
“There's a Zangyack ship tucked up ninja-style under the canopy a half a kilometer from here! East! Probably explains these weirdos!”
When her words reached Marvelous and Joe, the former was off like a shot. “I'll go ahead! Catch up when you can!”
Joe snarled at Marvelous' back as it bounded between the trees, and Gai swept over to clear the line of creatures encroaching on him. He pressed up on Joe's shoulder and gave an affirmative nod of solidarity before Joe shoved him away.
“Gai, follow Marvelous.”
“But-” Gai ducked a swing from one of the creatures, and Joe jabbed it away.
“In his absence, I give orders. We'll catch up, but don't let him go alone.”
He could practically hear Gai swallow through his helmet. “Right.”
Marvelous funneled his consciousness into the physical. His heartbeat, the snap and swing of his legs and hips, the weight of the saber in his hand, pointed awareness of these things and more could keep him upright and balanced and moving.
His lungs burned – considering the humidity, maybe they boiled. Even transformed, keeping his footing and his breath at a full sprint proved difficult. He'd need sleep soon, real sleep. Not that he hadn't been trying.
There was no point pausing to investigate or confront the pounding and crashing trailing behind him. If he'd managed to draw some of those wriggling freaks away from the others, all the better. He could handle it. If he kept his mind in his body and not in his brain, he could handle it. Duck the branches, launch over the mossy hulks of long-dead trees, leap streams. If he could do these things, he could handle this.
He didn't count on a frontal assault. They sprang out from the underbrush, rising up like unfurling fern fronds, the instant he touched down on the bank of the sluggish stream. Because his mind was in his body, he bounded forward and swung out with his saber. They were flimsy as moldering bread; he had no reason to hesitate.
One of the nearest things dispelled that notion with a simple touch. Its lanky fingers folded over his shoulder, springy fingertips digging in and bruising the flesh underneath his suit. The touch pulled his mind out of his body and sent it rocketing back home.
'And just what are you doing in here, sneakthief?'
Marvelous didn't make a sound. His throat sealed itself, an ingrained defense mechanism. The same mechanisms couldn't keep him from sinking to his knees; he'd already diverted his limited energy stores to smothering the scream. That he held his transformation on the way to the ground was a miracle.
He curled in. His mind reeled too fast to process any single thought individually. They all whirled together, hot and clinging and blinding bright. His heart beat faster than his lungs could pull in oxygen. His head swam. Long hands scrabbled at his back, pawed at his arms, tried to drag him. He couldn't make his limbs cooperate to slash or kick them away.
How far did they drag him before Gai came blazing in? He was wet and sore and shaking, still, when the flash of Gai's spear cut through the dark of his eyelids and called him to open his eyes. Half the monsters juddered and staggered back, uncoiling and falling to nothing. The others forgot Marvelous and lunged for Gai, only to be cut down on the second arcing pass of the spear.
The last one took hold of Gai's neck and Gai, unaffected, gutted it.
And Marvelous was still shaking.
Gai left the last monster to unspool itself to death – or what counted for death – and came to crouch on one knee beside Marvelous. The forest around them was quiet again. “You okay?”
“I'm fine.” Marvelous wished he could see Gai's eyes, wished he could get a better read on just how much pity he only imagined in his voice. “Why'd you follow? Where are the others?”
“Joe-san sent me.” Gai said. He looped an arm gingerly under Marvelous' and tugged up on him. “You don't look fine.”
Marvelous straightened up and slipped his arm free. “I'm tired. Forget it.
“Are you sur-”
Marvelous mashed his open palm into the face of Gai's helmet. “I'm sure. I'm fine.”
Even if his head swam and his stomach churned, he had no real choice but to be fine.
“Do you hear that?” In his sleep-deprived state, Marvelous had forgot that a hand on his helmet wouldn't prevent Gai from talking. Not that much could.
Marvelous listened. When the haze around his brain cleared he could make out a distant sonorous tone out of place in the deep forest.
“You hear it, right? I'm not going bonkers?”
Marvelous nodded. “Yeah.” He swung his saber and started off at a jog. “Care to investigate?”
“You bet!”
Neither realized they'd fallen into following the path marked out on the map until Marvelous found himself with no ground to run on. He went skidding down the rocky lip of the massive sinkhole that the trees and underbrush had obscured, then toppling down in the open air. He let out a shout that rang off the far walls, spinning head over feet once before Gai, who'd leaped in after him, caught him up in his arms and legs and made sure that they both cannonballed their way to the surface of the water below.
They hit the water with a smack that resounded through the cavernous space. The impact knocked all the air out of Marvelous. Gai dredged him up by the collar of his coat before he could cough and replace it with water.
Gai spewed out a long arc of water and grinned at him. If having his transformation knocked out bothered him, he was doing a good job of hiding it. “You almost sleepwalked yourself off the plank, captain!”
“Shaddup.” Marvelous pushed him away and tried to find the bottom with his feet. The water was deep and cold and smelled of minerals he couldn't identify. It shone a lustrous green in the harsh sunlight streaming down from the sinkhole's gaping mouth. Craning his head around, he noted that the sheer stone walls would present a significant challenge if they meant to reach the surface again. Luka had the climbing stuff.
A warm tone – many voices raised, harmonious – rolled into the chamber. They both whipped around. The sound, subdued compared to the chorus in the forest, issued from an opening in the rock. The surface may have to wait.
Gai got to swimming first. “So, investigate?”
“Yeah.” Marvelous kicked after him, smiling his mad smile. It was easier to be fine with a mystery at hand and the dangling promise of Zangyack heads to crack. Gai's presence didn't hurt. He had a certain buoying quality even at his most aggravating, and his hero worship – as much as time and close quarters had mellowed it – was adequate incentive to keep it together.
They crept low and slow through the tunnel, feeling along with their hands to the walls when they lost the residual light from the sinkhole. They walked abreast, toward the sound, into the sound. It flowed around them like the deep, opaque water in the sinkhole. It was a straight shot, and after many minutes of blind shuffling they sighted fresh light ahead. It flashed, flickered, and finally solidified at the far end of the tunnel, burning sulfur flame blue.
The droning chant ceased and Marvelous threw and arm out to still Gai, and Gai created a wet splat walking into his back instead.
“Watch it,” Marvelous hissed. “And listen.”
“-resurrection of our glorious Empire. It is to this end that we call upon you!” A single voice, old and worn and all but swallowed by the caves, rose where the chanting had died.
They moved again, toward the light and the voice. Marvelous' heart pounded. He didn't have to tell Gai to be quiet. They were both listening to that voice.
“I hear you in my mind; I hear you and you demand an equal trade for your assistance. We offer only everything. We can take you from this empty place and lay the universe at your feet.”
Gai nudged him, and in the gathering light Marvelous could see worry creasing his face. He offered his own mad grin as a silent reassurance.
The sight that awaited them at the tunnel's end was no average meeting of imperial conspirators. Scores of the writhing things from the forest milled around the vast, vaulted limestone chamber only yards from the tunnel opening from which the pirates observed, pressed flat to the tunnel's wall. The things mingled with imperial officers and Gormin alike. Whatever was going down, it needed serious security.
The main attraction, though, rose above the rabble at the farthest end of the cavern. Steps cut into the stone terminated in a flat slab, like an altar, under which the blue flames that painted the room lashed and licked in unnatural silence. Their light wrapped dully around the gathered officers and flashed off the hard, glossy skin of the looming figure at the center of the platform.
It was tall and hunched and twisted, too thin and too long in every way. It had the same lanky fingers and twisted appearance as the grasping forest things, but its skin glinted like black glass splintered at its joints. Its empty face reflected the light like a looking glass, throwing the beam around as it swayed and rocked on its sinuous legs.
The light fell on them and its swiveling head stilled.
The droning man at the foot of the stairs went silent. Sound died for a full second, and in the next instant the whole security force came down on them. The flash of Gai's transformation washed the blue out of the room for an instant, but Marvelous instinctively recoiled when the things reached for him. He felt sick at himself and tried to wind that up into anger, into action, but he couldn't.
Instead, he watched Gai stand as a whirling sentry at the mouth of the tunnel. Their touch did nothing and they fell easily, but Gai was only one man.
“Come on, Marvelous!”
He stood, even with the ground pulling at him. Not in years had he been so keenly aware of gravity. The sick feeling swam in a pipeline between his head and his guts and he wavered on his feet. The world gnashed and swirled around him. He recognized the process distantly. His body was trying to crash. Only barked words from the altar held his head above the metaphorical water.
“Forget the empty fool, he's worthless! Bring the little red one!”
Before Marvelous could react, two sets of pawing arms darted through Gai's defenses and brought him tearing and hollering out of the tunnel. Their comrades made a wall around him as they dragged him through the assembled Zangyack loyalists. Marvelous thrashed and tore at them, trying in vain to get both hands free fast enough to transform. Their touch didn't affect them as it had the first time, but fatigue and panic could be just as debilitating.
“Marvelous-san!”
Gai's voice cut through the clamor, and Marvelous didn't need his voice ringing through the cavern to explain the looks of smug recognition he caught on the faces of officers they passed on their way up to the steps.
On the altar, Marvelous played the indignant prisoner, smirking even as the attendant Gormin guards shoved him onto his knees. The gnarled thing creaked when it bent to his level, its black mirror face swiveling and jerking on a boneless neck. It offered a dim, desaturated reflection of his bedraggled face.
“Does this one satisfy you?” the officer who spoke to and for the thing called from his place at the foot of the stairs. “Is this one useful?”
That featureless face loomed nearer and the reflection of Marvelous' face flickered away. It turned dull, swallowing the light instead of reflecting it.
Marvelous smirked. “I'd say you're real ugly, but you haven't got a fa-”
It swung a heavy hand up from where it dragged on the floor and grasped his throat. The splintered glass tips of its fingers threatened to break the skin over the bend in his jaw. He stilled and waited for the panic to come again. It didn't. Instead, it was as if something bled out of him where the thing's cold, plated flesh met his. Fatigue flowed into the spaces it left behind. His body started to slump, and the thing began to change.
It crumpled in on itself, folding down smaller and smaller, crackling and throwing glittering splinters to chatter on the stone below.
It pulled more, draining him like a deep wound. What it took, it rearranged into a smaller, suppler body that stooped rather than loomed over him.
Limbs rippled and smoothed in the light, the reflections no longer harsh. The finger pads on Marvelous' jaw were soft, though they dug in just as hard.
His body slumped, his gaze dropped to the floor. He couldn't bear to look up. The panic bloomed in him again. His breath was hot on pale, chilled lips.
Voices raised all around them as the battle picked up. Gai must have been doing well, but Marvelous could hardly parse the sounds. Half of him was elsewhere.
Fingers caught his chin again and jerked his head around. He would be made to look.
“What a shame. I'd thought you would surprise me by getting taller again.” A smirk on a face too despised and familiar to be mistaken. The fingers curled in and tucked nails into his skin. “Marvey.”
A hail of rounds fired from the other end of the cavern peppered the altar. The percussive startle tore Marvelous' mind away from those fingers and that face and threw it hard into the core of his body. He tore away and went staggering back – one step, two steps, then tipping violently backward onto-
“Idiot!”
Marvelous didn't have to see Joe's eyes behind the helmet to know he was good and mad. Those same eyes wouldn't be directed at him anyway. Gokai Blue looked forward and up. His gloved fingers dug into Marvelous' arms and his entire body was a taut line of unreleased tension.
Where Marvelous was afraid, Joe was furious.
Fury couldn't override practicality. Marvelous, with no choice left in his drained body, let Joe dash down the stairs with him half dragged behind once he tore his attention away from-
From the thing at the top of the stairs. That's all it was. That's all it could be.
Still-
“Gai, fall back! We have to get Marvelous out of here.”
Clangor and clamor swallowed Gai's reply and fatigue muddled their flight into the tunnel. When they cleared the blue light and found darkness again, Marvelous tried to stand. Joe let him stagger along beside him while Gai brought up the rear, ready for any pursuit. None came. They reached the rocky subterranean shore – and the sunlight and the Galleon hovering above – far quicker than expected.
Marvelous collapsed.