Work Text:
Oran didn’t really think about how the collaboration between the two organisations would even work. He didn’t get much time to think about it at all. Before he even got to unpack all his belongings, his company mandated phone dinged with an email. A succinct, formal email that told him his partner for the project, the meeting place, and the time. Ruben Pontes, outside 7/a, and at 0900. The only time he really got to think about it all was when he was unpacking. He wasn’t really given much choice when he came aboard this project, just another formal email telling him he’d have to transfer to this facility in 4 days. He’d barely even got enough time to pack as much as he could from his flat. It said nothing about what he would be doing here, nothing about who else would be here, it was pretty much just a blind shift from one facility to another.
Walking around the facility, nothing really seemed out of the ordinary. Well if you didn’t count the massive line down the middle of the hallway separating the two sides. Oran had tried to step over it, but got greeted by a loud beep and an automated warning about someone crossing the line and decided not to try it again. Aside from that, everything was basically a Kingdom Corp building. The long grey, metallic hallways, the blocky lettering indicating which area was which, the triangular windows which held a variety of illuminated objects ranging from models and small quantities of radianite to foliage, the large holographic posters of Kingdom propaganda and the like. The harsh ceiling lights that illuminated the hallways he was walking in was basically kingdom standard too. Oran navigated himself along the twisty, winding hallways and tunnels before he got to where he wanted. The cafeteria. It was protected by a locked door and a keypad as was protocol, and Oran quickly scanned his card, punched his code, and waited as the door slid open. Stepping inside, Oran couldn’t help but gawk at how mirrored everything was. The counter was U shaped with the ends being mirrors on each side, identical vending machines on both ends, and the separation line still stretching down the middle of the room. Oran punched out a coffee from one of the vending machines, and grabbed a pastry from the main counter. With the time being the middle of the night, the cafeteria was practically empty aside from a single person sitting on the other side of the line. The other man didn’t seem to have noticed Oran at all, but that was only until Oran dragged a chair that screeched loudly. Oran grimaced at the screech.
“Sorry,” he mumbled and was about to take a seat before he heard a similar screech from the other side. The other man picked up his tray of food, walked over to a table nearest to the separation line, set himself down, and waved at Oran.
The man grinned at him when Oran sat himself down at the nearest table on his side of the line.
“Good time for a coffee, no?” The man kept grinning at him, and if it wasn’t for the glint in his eyes as well Oran might’ve seen his grinning demeanour as creepy.
Oran nodded while he took a bite of the pastry, and internally cringed. He hadn't expected good pastries but he certainly hadn’t expected pastries that tasted like sidewalk chalk. He started hearing soft laughter from the other man, and realised that his reactions might not have been that internal after all.
Oran had waited for the other’s laughter to die down, and sipped on his coffee. Not enough sugar, he’d have to place three lumps of sugar instead of the usual two, maybe some sweetener might help the taste too.
“Do you know why we’re here?” The other man’s laughter stopped as he shifted the unsaid topic, Oran shook his head at the question and the other man sighed.
“Wasn’t really given a warning, or much time, they said pack and so I did,” The other man stared down at his coffee cup, he started again but this time taking on a mocking tone, “‘Pack your bags and meet report to the transportation point in two days’, no explanations, no nothing, not even a quick brief about the shift.”
Oran listened in solidarity and nodded along as the man complained about the sudden nature of their move.
“Did they do the same to you?” He looked at Oran, and when Oran nodded he groaned loudly, “They really should start briefing us on things, not just giving us vague instructions about where to go. Fuck all this confidentiality and the secrecy, we really do deserve the bare minimum pieces of information.”
Oran nodded along to the man’s complaints, and cradled his cup of bitter coffee as it slowly went cold.
“Not much of a talker?” The man looked at Oran again, and Oran really wasn’t a talker. He was more of a wallflower at parties, meetings, and all of those social situations.
“No, not really,” The man’s grin grew wider at his reply.
“So he finally talks,”
“Well technically, I apologised for the chair screeching earlier so I did talk earlier,” The man laughs loudly at this and Oran can’t help but smile at the man’s laughing figure.
Their burst of joy is interrupted by the musical notes indicating an intercom announcement.
“Curfew in 30 minutes, all workers are asked to be in their rooms with security guidance measures being followed. Thank you.”
The intercom starts repeating the announcement in a variety of different languages, but the two have already looked down from the speakers that broadcasted the announcement.
The other man seemed to be sombre following the announcement, a strong shift from his jolly manner throughout the rest of the short time they’d been together.
“I guess that cuts our time together, no?” The other man stood up from his seat and Oran started to mirror his actions on the other side of the line.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you around?” Really, the odds of them meeting like this again was low. Them meeting like this without all the security hassle that went into keeping the two organisations apart was something that would probably never happen again. The two of them both knew this, and it went unspoken.
“Maybe!” The other man grinned from his side of the trashcan. The man waved boisterously at Oran, and walked out of the cafeteria leaving Oran alone in the room. Oran also trashed the remaining chalky pastry, dumped the bitter tasting coffee before he walked back to his room as well.
Once back in the room, he really let the week’s event sink in. The moving from one station to the other, the formal emails that disclosed nothing about what he was working on, and finally the events that happened a couple minutes ago. The meeting at the cafeteria. Though a rare occurrence like that wouldn’t happen again, Oran found himself hoping that something like that did happen.
The next day, Oran woke up early. He wasn’t meeting his partner until 0900 but found himself staring up at his ceiling at 0730. He didn’t move to get up. He stared into his ceiling like it had all the answers and if he stared at it enough it would reveal everything to him, but it didn’t. He stared and stared until his alarm finally went off and he rolled himself out of bed and into his morning routine.
As he pulled his tie up and walked out to the cafeteria for some food, he found himself hoping to run into the man from last night again. As he punched his code into the cafeteria door, the loud sounds of a crowded cafeteria greeted him this time rather than the silence of a cafeteria after 1100.
Shoving and pushing his way through the crowd, he decided to avoid the pastries and added as much sweeteners and sugar to mask the bitterness of the coffee. He took the coffee and headed towards the meeting spot.
The facility’s areas were all labelled numerically from one all the way down to 20 but they weren’t placed numerically. Sometimes it went from one A/B to three A/B and then to 6 A/B. Oran followed the signs and labels trying to locate seven A and thanked his bad time management for making sure that he even had the time to allow himself to get confused with directions. Kingdom and its confusing placements, the prior bases that he worked at had the same issue too. Areas would go from one number to the next in really no numerical order. Mentally complaining about it, he found himself standing outside 7/A. It was a large lab with fogged out glass on its doors to make sure you couldn’t see inside it, and honestly he still didn’t know what he was going to be working on. He checked his watch, 0855. His new assigned partner had 5 more minutes to spare before he was late. He heard quick footsteps headed his way before someone promptly ran into him, bringing the both of them to the floor.
“OH SHIT SORRY!” The person that tackled him scrambled off quickly, alternating between curses and apologies. Oran rubbed the back of his head where it had taken the most damage. He rapidly blinked and focused his vision again, he was greeted by an outstretched hand. He took it and the person helped him up before flitting around him faster than any human should’ve been able to.
“Are you ok? I’m sorry I should’ve looked at where I was running? Did you hit your head?”
The rapid fire questions and the flitting about didn’t help his unfocused vision at all, “I’m ok, just a mild bump.”
At his reassurances the person finally stopped flitting about and Oran could finally focus on who it was that he was assigned to. When he saw the person, he froze. The man, Ruben Pontes, also seemed frozen.
Lighting could strike at the same place twice then.
“Ruben Pontes!” He stretched out a hand towards Oran and grinned at him. The same grin from their chance meeting at the cafeteria last night.
“Oran McEneff,” He took the man’s hand and they shook. Oran turned towards the door and punched the code in for both of them.
“You’re late.” When walking in, he was greeted by their superior,a short stocky man, with white hair and a similarly white moustache, and a group of assembled engineers; there was an absence of the big line though, with everyone sitting with their assigned partners but to make up for the lack of the line there were security details from both organisations placed all over the room.
“Sorry Chief, we had a short delay right outside,”
The chief sighed and addressed the group, “You’ve all been collected here to help build the future,”
“Ah again with the propaganda and the whole building a path forward talk,” Oran muttered to himself but he heard a stifled giggle from Ruben.
“-This will be the future to all cooperation between the two earths, both Alpha and Omega.”
At this Oran started tuning into the chief’s lecture.
“We’ll be building a radian collider! A collider powered by radianite that will bridge the two earths and allow for travel, trade and more.”
Now, that was interesting.
The brief went quickly after that, a “short” introduction of the action plan for the collider and then they were off for lunch. Ruben and Oran walked together as much as they could with all the separation measures set, talking about the collider as they walked. They talked about the plan, what would be best to start with, where they thought they were going to be building it, and so on.
One thing that didn’t add up for Oran was why they were doing this, it was most likely resources but Alpha earth was pretty much abundant in all the resources so it didn’t make much sense to him.
“Why do you think we’re doing this? I know it’s probably for the resources but why now?”
Ruben looked at him for a second, before he sighed. “Omega Earth is pretty much dead. The radian collider would probably allow resources to go from one hand to the other without much interference between the two. It would help Omega Earth and potentially push the image of both the Kingdoms too. A win-win situation.”
Oran took all of that in, and the pair sat in silence after that.
Another day passed by them like that, and another, and another. The days were passing them by quicker than they could even keep track of them. Their calendars went from T-485 to T-460 before they knew it. The pair worked and worked, spending late nights in the cafeteria as they threw their notes across the line, and when the cafeteria closed they moved to working via email instead.
It was after curfew, and the two had started working via email as they calculated the maths needed for the collider to run properly
His phone dinged with an email as he was working out how much energy would be needed to run the mini model and how to scale that energy for the much larger model of the collider. He checked it so see an email from Ruben, as expected, “Dis GOod?”
He laughed at the wonky text for a second before digging into the calculations that Ruben had sent over.
When he finally emerged from using Ruben’s calculations as a base to his current ones and finally creating a formula to scale the energy needed to run the collider, he sent an email back to Ruben as he cleaned off his desk.
“Lifesaver.”
It didn’t take much time for his phone to ding again.
“:D”
After all the maths had been figured out, it didn’t take much long for the collider’s supports to be built in the canyon that split the facility down the middle. Then the main body of the collider followed. Throughout this Ruben and Oran ping ponged ideas, calculations, errors, and fixes off of each other. The timer for launch ticked away as five more days passed.
On the night of the fifth day, in a fit of anxiety and paranoia, Oran decided to run the calculations again. It was always better to be sure rather than have something explode in their faces when they tried to run it. Nothing in the maths was wrong, but Oran felt this nagging feeling in his stomach anyways. A nagging feeling to double check everything, the support structures, and everything in between.
He sent off two emails one right after the other, first an email to the higher ups for permission to double check the Eastern supports with Ruben as per protocol, and another email to Ruben about his concerns.
He got a quick response from Ruben with an affirmative to the meeting, and drifted off into an uneasy sleep. A sleep dogged by the consequences of a failed test launch.
His mood in the morning hadn’t changed at all from the night before. The same paranoia dogged him through the morning from the night before. He’d risen with the sun again and laid in bed staring up at the ceiling like he usually did. He pondered the calculations, the collider as a whole, the conditions of Omega Earth, and Ruben.
Oran found himself thinking of the other man a lot. There was just so much he respected about his counterpart. The unending sunny nature, the way he always talked about his work like it was his children – he could bet his last dollar that Ruben would carry around pictures of his projects in his wallet if he could – and the nature in which the sharing of ideas felt like an evenly matched ping pong duel. He thought that the two of them really just hit it off, but he sighed. The two of them only really knew each other in the proximity of their work, they hadn’t really had the chance to talk about each other as much. It was always “How’s the calculations going?” “How’s the model for the supports?” and really nothing more than that. Maybe throughout the year that they’d be working together, they could connect to each other more? Oran mentally jotted down a note to ask the other man about his interests, his hobbies, his home, and maybe his family too.
The mental drabble didn’t last for much longer though, his alarm went off in time with a ding indicating an email from the higher ups regarding the check through with Ruben today. He quickly checked it while running through his routine, an affirmative. He’d expected that but a wave of relief still washed over him. Damn all the security measures in place, what were they even in place for? To protect against someone defecting from one organisation to the other one? He leaned over and spit the toothpaste out of his mouth while mentally cursing Kingdom and its paranoia. What were they even scared of? Someone rising up against them? Oran had seen Morocco. He knew what happened to people who didn’t follow Kingdom, and knew that they had the power to do it again; really what were they even scared of?
His mental musings and cursings faded out and blended with the background noise of the hallway as people went up and down on both sides of the hallway. Rushing to where they had to be for another day of reworking, fixing, and making adjustments to the Large Radian Collider, or the LRC. The background noise of people talking and walking amplified as he grabbed his usual dose of caffeine in the cafeteria and it died down as he got closer to the Eastern Support. The support areas usually only had no more than 3-5 groups of people working there at a time, with some other engineers going in and out to check on things creating this revolving door of constant entrances and exits. There was one thing that always stayed constant though, no matter which branch or which area you were working from. The security guards, there to “keep both the Kingdom Industries staff and the Kingdom Corps staff safe” everyone knew they were there to keep them separate though. Making the climb down to the support structures, Oran had to admit that he didn’t think his fear of the gigantic canyon mouth they were working in would fade anytime soon. He saw the other’s man stature, or lack thereof, standing over the railing and trying to get started on the checks. He walked up to him, “Good morning.”
The other man jumped a considerable distance, and for a second Oran was scared that he’d accidentally fall into the mouth of the canyon. He reached out to grab the other man, and misjudging the force needed Oran had pulled the other man a little bit too hard as the two of them toppled over to the floor.
They separated fairly quickly with muttered curses from Ruben, and apologies from Oran.
Oran smiled a little bit as the other man dusted himself off while still muttering a string of curses in both English and Portuguese.
“For a giant, I don’t get how you’re always so quiet,” Ruben lightly punched him in the arm, and Oran started laughing. Not the booming laughter that one would expect of someone like him, but softer peals of laughter. It was short, and he’d barely even realised that Ruben’s speedy muttering stopped entirely. He let the last bit of laughter out before he quizzically looked at Ruben’s stare.
“What?”
“Has anyone ever told you that your laugh is nice?”
Oran slowly felt blood rush into his head at the compliment, and he broke away from the stare by deciding to focus on his shoes. He studied the detailing in the leather, the highlights in the metal buckle, and the way the small highlights in the shoe’s main body as he waited for his flush to slowly decrease.
When he looked up again, Ruben was also looking away from him and he could see the faintest bit of red in his ears, but Oran wasn’t sure if it was just the light or not. It probably wasn’t, the only light they got down here was the harsh company mandated lights.
“So, you uh, you want to start examining the supports on this bad boy?” Oran coughed out in an attempt to break the awkward silence.
It did it’s job and before the pair even knew it, they were already harnessed up and ready to start a closer look at the support beams via the canyon faces it was built on. The two of them moved carefully up and down the ledges as they started checking on opposite sides and moved down the middle. They worked in an amiable silence which broke when they shouted a quick “Clear!” as they worked down the beams.
“Hey Oran, I think you might want to come look at this.”
Ruben glared at the offending beam as if it would set itself correct by sheer intimidation, and didn’t notice Oran creeping up to him.
“Yeah?”
Ruben jumped a little bit again and their shared safety harness gave a quick jolt with the movement.
“Foda-se sua mãe! You really have to stop doing that,” Ruben took a moment to catch his breath from the quick scare, “But look here, do you think those beams are angled properly to support the larger one? I think there’s something wrong here but I can’t really place my finger on it.”
Oran took a closer look at the beams that Ruben was pointing out, and yeah, something was wrong. He reached into his back pocket and took out the mini notebook before frantically flipping through notes and calculation trying to find the page he put down the notes for the Eastern Supports.
“The smaller ones aren’t angled properly, I thought I wrote down a 33 degree angle for each of these supports?” Oran quickly kept looking from the beams and his notebook, trying to figure out where exactly it had gone wrong. He exhaled and shoved his notebook back into his pocket.
“What do we do?” Ruben went back to glaring at the offending beams after listening to the potential error.
“We fix it.”
The two of them crawled into the spaces between the beams and took a lot of them out as gently as they could. Taking out the beams one at a time to not let the bigger beam suddenly fall and crush them, they slowly fixed the angles of the supports and before they knew it the error had been fixed. One less thing to go wrong tomorrow at the test run.
“I’m glad we got to fix this ourselves instead of just letting it wrong at the test tomorrow, no?”
Oran nodded as he unstrapped himself from the several harnesses.
“But, I think they’re finally letting a little loose on the whole segregation thing.”
At this, Oran looked at Ruben in confusion.
“If you haven’t noticed, they’ve really been easing up on the whole thing. Sure the line still beeps and screams if you even step a toe out of line but when we’re working like this the security details seem almost just like decorative plants!”
Oran smiles at the comment about the security while glancing at the nearest one, and it does sink in. The whole security thing has really gotten more lenient these days. He wonders if they’ll slowly start easing off the big loud alarms at an accidental crossing and if the cafeteria will eventually become a mixed place. Maybe the base would become a mixed place as well. He sure did hope for that to happen soon. It’d be nice to get to spend more time with the people from Industries, and more time with Ruben at a closer proximity outside of work.
He’s quickly snapped out of his musing and daydreams by a light punch to the arm, and sees Ruben with his harness draped over his arm and ready to head out. Oran follows behind him as they head back into the heavily segregated hallways and go to dinner.
Testing had gone well, surprisingly not a lot had gone wrong. With what they had so far, any amount of progress was good progress. The LRC was at its barebones stage with the supports creaking underneath the large weight of the skeleton. Oran made a mental note to try to see what he could do to make them more sturdy to make sure it wouldn’t crack once all the safety measures and layers were added to the skeleton of the LRC. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ruben push his way through the crowd and head over to him.
“Lucky we checked out that support, or else what we’d be watching right now is the total collapse of the barebones.” He laughed softly. Ironic laughter at the idea of having to watch their work fall down a canyon? Oran couldn’t figure out the cause of laughter, but Ruben’s laughter was nice to listen to. Pushing that aside for the moment, he made a sound of approval at Ruben’s comment.
After the testing, everything went back to as close to normalcy as it could get in a heavily monitored facility occupied by people from different universes.
Time passed them by once again, with the calendars on their phones ticking down day by day. From T-454 the days just kept trickling down, and before they even knew it it’d been 101 days of them working in this facility and trying to build the LRC basically from scratch. There hadn’t been a blueprint, they’d had to create the barebones basically unled and unplanned. If Oran had more energy from underneath the workload to cuss out Kingdom as loud as he could, he would. He would curse their inability to properly think their actions through before jump starting restorations, large scale projects, and so on forth. He picked up the same coffee day in and day out before making his way over to his usual seat across the line from Ruben.
They’d created this routine amongst themselves at this point. Same meeting place, same time, usually the same opening conversation; a comment about the workload or the coffee before they melted into their usual topics.
Due to that well established routine, he hadn’t expected Ruben’s first course of action.
Ruben stuck his arm out across the line and as expected, a loud beep went off. Ruben slumped back into his seat and sighed.
“At 101 days, you’d expect them to be more lenient in the cafeteria at least, but no.” Ruben dropped his voice to take on a mocking tone of their chief, “‘Security protocols must always be adhered to’ my ass honestly. You’d think that after how we were able to work together to fix out the support beams they’d be more lenient.”
Oran nodded along and listened to the other man’s various complaints about the heavy segregation policies, but found it to be interrupted by a loud ding from Ruben. Ruben reached into his pocket to check what the email was, and Oran went back to his coffee and mediocre cafeteria food. Once he had adapted to it, it wasn’t that bad but it wasn’t good either.
When he looked at Ruben, the other man had a fond smile as the soft glow of his phone illuminated his face and reflected off his glasses. Oran couldn’t help but wonder who the person on the other email was. To bring out a fonder side in the fondest person he’d ever met, it really struck his curiosity as to who it was.
Ruben put his phone back into his pocket with a fond sigh, “My niece, can you believe her?”
At the mention of a family member, Oran stilled for a second. These emails were pretty much locked to the nines. No one outside of the two organisations could reach them through these work phones, and to even do that one would have to crack nine layers of encryption.
His shock seemed to be apparent on his face as he snapped out of his musings to the sound of Ruben’s laugh. The soft laugh he’d encountered so much but at the same time it felt like he was hearing it again for the first time.
“I know right? Bypass all these layers of security and for what? To tell me about her football team making playoffs.” Ruben’s soft laugh slowly got louder as it turned into a much heartier laugh, “She sure is something right?”
“She really is,” Oran had joined in on the laughter and the incredulous nature of Ruben’s niece really bypassing all that just to tell him about making playoffs, “it is a big achievement to reach playoffs though, can you wish her good luck from me?”
Ruben nodded at his comment about the achievement, and at his request his eyes seemed to light up. Oran didn’t know what they lit up with, but he knew that in that moment Ruben’s eyes seemed to resemble a small galaxy. A small galaxy that he couldn’t look away from.
Ruben broke it first, but only to reach into his other pocket. Oran knew by now that Ruben liked to keep his phone in the right pocket and pretty much everything you could ask for in his left pocket. He took out his wallet and grinned at Oran. A grin that told him he was going to be subject to an hour of wallet pictures, and Oran found himself not being able to complain. He did want to get to know about the other man outside of work anyways.
He was introduced to images of a city under the sea, a city surrounded by a dome of glass. Why they called it a geo dome when it was made out of glass he didn’t know, but he did know that they were fascinating, both on paper and in execution. He’d also been introduced to Ruben’s niece, who he’d kept a massive deck of photos in his wallet. Some when she was still a baby crawling around the floor, some when she was held up by her parents, some when she was a bit older and kicking balls around the street with a group of kids, and some which were more recent of her holding up a trophy with her team. When all was said and done, Oran had left the cafeteria that day feeling this warmth from how happy Ruben was to talk about them. He held the same fond smile from earlier throughout, with hearty laughs as he retold funny stories of his family. It made him feel his certain warmth that was hard to explain, was it that Ruben trusted him enough to tell him about his family and launch into spiels about them or was it the contagious warmth that Ruben showed throughout. Maybe it was a mixture of both? Oran never found out what it was that gave him that warmth, but he drifted into an easy sleep still holding onto that warmth.
That day was a turning point between them. As the days passed on, they got as close as the facility would let them. Moving the tables and chairs as close to the line as they could when they worked, when they talked, and nothing seemed off limits. Ruben would slip in stories of where he came from, of his family, of his niece, and so much more. In return, Oran also warmed up even further to the other man. He told Ruben about his home, his moms and the stories they had told him while he was curled up in their lap. He told Ruben about Ireland, and Ruben told him about Portugal. The stories flew between the pair, and it was hard to find them separated at any point of the day. When they were working on the LRC they were together as expected of them, during mealtimes, and during the afterhours. During the afterhours where security got much more lax. During the afterhours when the day’s events would he laughed about, and more stories of pasts and presents would be shared.
As the days passed like that, the countdown gradually trickled down. From T-381 to T-350, more progress was made on finally working up from the base skeleton. More days passing meant continual progress before the days were nearing T-300. T-318 was really like every other day, except it really wasn’t. Sure it was a day of being cooped up in the lab with Ruben, but there was also something really off. Maybe it was the sudden appearance of the really rich man. Oran had never seen the guy before today. He just showed up from thin air, which really was impossible. The facility was first of all insanely closed off and isolated, but the security measures too. Kingdom and its paranoia would never let someone unknown into the facility’s vicinity. Was the man Kingdom affiliated? He knew that mercs were often hired from other companies and forces, was he one of them? All he knew was that the business card he got handed cost more than his life’s worth, and probably his previous life’s worth too.
Oran was snapped out of his musings by Ruben, an occurrence that was pretty common between the pair, and Ruben looked at him quizzically.
“You seem like you’ve got a lot on your mind, penny for your-” Ruben stood still for a second, thinking, “Or was it quarter? But whatever coin for your thoughts?”
Oran let a small peal of laughter leak out at the other man’s musings, “I saw a guy roaming the facilities today, a really rich looking guy?”
Oran took in Ruben’s confused expression and took it as a sign that the other man hadn’t seen the man.
“Nevermind, it was probably just a transfer or a Kingdom merc.” Oran shook off his concerns about the man, and the semi-bad feeling that he had regarding him.
“Kingdom mercs?”
Oran froze and just stared at Ruben, “You know, Kingdom mercs?”
Ruben still seemed confused, “I know what a mercenary is, but does your Kingdom hire third party sources?”
“Doesn’t yours?”
Ruben shook his head, and drifted off into thought for a second, “We didn’t have third party mercs, but we did have this special forces unit? I think.” He then exhaled in exasperation, “Kingdom wasn’t the most transparent company, still isn’t. They say ‘It’s for the greater good’ or ‘We do this to pave a path to the future’ or shit along those lines. That’s all they say.”
Oran lifted his mug of coffee in a silent toast. One moment of solidarity between the pair out of many other moments.
The two continued the night like that, talking about their respective worlds. Ruben about the geo dome that encased his city, Oran about the sprawling greenfields in Ireland, and the two were happy like that. They were happy just to share stories and photos when they could. Well that was a bit of a lie. Ever since Ruben told him about the geo dome, Oran had grown this fascination with it. He wanted to see this dome for himself, but more importantly he wanted to see it with Ruben. He wanted the other man to drag him along the city and show him the small juice stand he’d mentioned, or the small cafe built out of a tram. Maybe he could do the same for Ruben. Show the other man the sprawling fields of Ireland, and the pub that he and his mothers ran.
“I’d like to show you in person one day,” Ruben shrugged, “Silly pipedream or whatever, but with the LRC allowing for travel between the earths, it might even be possible one day.”
Oran smiled at Ruben. “Yeah, I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”
Ruben grinned in response, and the two continued on their work but Oran’s brain never really stopped churning with the thought. The other man was right. It was a silly pipedream because even though the bridge between the two Earths was being built in the form of the LRC there was no way either corporation would allow people to jump between them. At most they’d let tightly controlled resources and radianite to pass, but not people. Never people.
The two part ways for the night after they finished their work. Both drifting off with thoughts of showing the other their home, and getting to see the other’s home too. Both drifted off with the knowledge that it was nothing more than a pipedream.
The days kept trickling down as the LRC kept being built up. All the necessary inner workings of the LRC were either in place, or working on getting put into place. The building ground areas were just gigantic revolving doors of engineers and scientists from both corporations just coming in and out, fixing things left and right, adding the final touches to some parts, adding the starting touches to others, and more. The areas were never empty nor quiet, with groans, swears, muttering, and cheers being the most common sources of noise in these areas. They were entering the final stretch, and the 300 day mark slowly came into view.
Ruben and Oran were working in one of the labs, and it was strangely empty today. Probably because everyone was currently crowding around the cliff’s mouths to attach this and that to the main body of the LRC. The pair were trying to figure something about the energy needed, and how sometimes the energy would just randomly fall off or on startup the LRC would release much more energy than was truly needed. The issue was sporadic, and it was pretty much impossible to predict which issue was going to happen on any given test run.
They’d tried a variety of hypothetical solutions. Oran had presented an idea of having like a kill trigger in case the energy was too much, but it didn’t pose a solution for when the energy was too little. Ruben had thought up a complicated mechanic to syphon away the excess energy but it still wouldn’t do anything for the machine if there was too little energy.
The pair went on like this for a while. Ping ponging ideas off of each other.
“Filter!” one would exclaim before the flaws of it come to light and they head back to the thinking board.
A second later, “A switchboard!” another would yell before the process repeats itself.
Over and over, as the ideas went left to right, right to left, and bounced off the walls like a ping pong ball.
It went on like this for a while, before finally something clicked for Oran.
“A syphon, and a switchboard!”
Ruben looked at him quizzically, it was the same as before. One of them would have a spark of an idea, and the other would take a while to catch up to speed.
“If we could make something of a combination between that syphon and the switchboard. Then we could have something that works to both filter out the energy when it's too much. And turn it up when it’s too little. A mixture of both!”
Oran saw Ruben digest the words, as his face went from a look of confusion to a look of awe.
“Thats-” He started stuttering, almost running laps around the work table with how fast he was moving. “That’s such a lifesaver of an idea!”
Ruben’s excitement leaked into his surroundings, and before long Oran found himself smiling along with the other man.
“You’re so-” Ruben started again, stuttering this time too, “You’re so brilliant, I could just-”
Ruben’s words sped up, and so did his stuttering, “I could just- I could just kiss you right now.”
Oran’s brain short circuited.
What?
Huh?
“I could just kiss you right now for figuring this out,” Ruben looked back at him, this time not so speedy, and time felt like it just slowed down for a second.
Oran’s brain was still out of it.
“Could I kiss you right now?”
Oran’s brain hadn’t caught up to him at all, still in that state of frozen shock and panic. A good kind of panic though. The kind of panic when you get a promotion you didn’t expect, or when someone you liked just asked if they could kiss you. The good kind of panic.
Oran felt himself nodding quickly, before he could even say anything, he felt Ruben’s kiss.
A small featherlike kiss, a light one.
Oran leaned into the kiss, and before long the small featherlike kiss turned into something a little bit heavier. Not the heavy kiss, where tongues are wrapped around each other and pushing back and forth in a battle for dominance, but not the featherlike kiss it was before.
It was somewhere in the middle, and Oran couldn’t really complain about it.
They split apart, both flushed red from head to toe, and both giggling a little bit.
“Maybe we could do that sometime again?” Ruben asked him, both giggling and smiling at the same time, and his smile felt like the sun. If it was any brighter, it could probably lead a solar system of its own, and Oran would gladly be one of the planets that orbited that Sun.
“Yeah, that’d be nice.” Oran flushed, and hid his face in his hands as he mumbled that it’d be even more than nice if they did that again.
“Can I hear that again?” Ruben leaned into him with this massive shit-eating grin and he couldn’t say that he didn’t love that grin of his.
“It’d be more than nice if we did that again.” Oran mumbled out again, but this time it wasn’t blocked by the hands that covered his face. The blush crept higher and higher in his neck, until he could feel the blood pulsing through his head, and Ruben’s grin got wider and wider as he took Oran’s hand.
“Then we shall!”
The other man went back to fiddling around with the new proposed changes to the LRC as Oran numbly just went along with it. From that day on, things changed between the two of them. The two of them spent as much time as they could together without it seeming suspicious. Small grazes of each other’s hands while working on the LRC, hugs when no one was watching, small kisses in blindspots of the CCTV whenever they could. It was all they had, and all they could do. Until the end of this.
When the end of the combined project came, so would all their communication. Sure the LRC was something that was built to bridge the gap between the two worlds, but it was for resources and support. No one would let something as unimportant as a letter to make that resource heavy trip. It was a fact that kept Oran up at night as the days continued to tick lower and lower. What was once T-318 was now T-182. Time just flew and flew, an unyielding foe that didn’t stop for anyone. New faces came and went throughout the facility. The kingdom mercenary that the two of them laughed about, and more. Even among those good moments, the clock just kept ticking on them.
Ruben had left for his scheduled furlough, and Oran could only hope that the other man was having fun as he cooped up in the lab to finish the quality checks on the LRC. That was of course up until he got interrupted by several of the guards barging in and taking him away. Thoughts ran through his brain, what if he and Ruben were caught? What if they assumed he wasn’t making enough progress on the LRC? Why was he being called? What was happening?
He stumbled into the security room, with the overhead lights seemingly being even stronger than ever.
“Have you seen your chief engineer recently?”
Oran’s running thoughts were quieted for a second before it ran at full speed again.
“No? I haven’t seen him since Tuesday.”
The interrogator seemed to get irritated at that and he could make out a mumbled curse, “Can we run a quick security check on you?”
Oran had worked long enough in Kingdom to know that it wasn’t a request, more of a disguised demand so he couldn’t really do much more than oblige.
The security check really seemed to go on forever, and by the time Oran was released and had all the answers to the questions that ran through his mind the day had shifted into night and the nightly curfew had already begun.
He quickly fired an email to Ruben not wanting the other man to get caught off guard by the most recent developments inside the facility. He chose to make it slightly more discreet due to the intense surveillance that Kingdom kept on a lot of the things that were sent inside and outside of those who were working on the LRC.
‘Got called into security today. Was worried it was something we did, but it turns out our chief engineer has gone missing. Relief and worry all at once! This place feels cursed sometimes…’
No matter how discreet he was trying to be, he wasn’t lying. The place did feel cursed sometimes. Something was just off about this place, there really wasn’t any use thinking too hard about it though.
Days kept ticking down and down. What was once T-182, now shifted into T-26 faster than either of them could track.
Days became nights, nights became days, and time blurred into one hazy mess. One hazy mess with small flashes of distinct memories here and there as he remembered the day that Ruben got back and presented him gifts from where he went during his furlough. The day where they took a quick dinner break off, and snuck off onto the roof of Everett-Linde to watch the sunset over the Arizonian canyons. Brief flashes of memories against the hazy mess that was finishing up the LRC.
Everything was ready to go at that point. Things were wrapping up, the unveiling party was getting planned. Everything was safety proofed, everyone was saying their goodbyes to their counterparts. Ruben and Oran knew that the group of people saying goodbye should include them too, but for obvious reasons the pair were hesitant. That unveiling party was all they had left at that point. Ruben would go back to Omega Earth, and Oran would go back to Alpha. The nights got longer and longer as Oran tried whatever he could to steal more time, but it was really all for nought.
The night of the party was upon them in a flash, and before they knew it they were there. Standing in the corner of the party with a glass in each hand, not wanting to talk to each other but also knowing that they had to talk to each other. They had to make this night last because this night was all they had left.
A future together was basically impossible, owing to the separation in universes. As Oran stood there, he would’ve given anything to stop time at that moment. To just have a couple more hours more with Ruben. To be able to have more of their conversations together, to laugh at Ruben’s nerdy jokes together, he just wanted more time together. He wanted to see the geo dome together, and show Ruben the sprawling Irish fields. He just wanted them to be able to be together. In a world where they weren’t separated by this dimensional split.
“Well this party is gloomy,” Ruben lept off the wall, and looked back at Oran, “You wanna go somewhere else?”
Oran nodded and took Ruben’s hand as the two of them snuck off into the site of the main collider. The hanging balconies inside the cliff mouth where they worked daily. The two ran down the familiar balconies before reaching a small nook where they went into just to embrace for a bit. Away from the CCTVs and the overbearing surveillance of Kingdom. Their little corner of the world, where the dimensional split didn’t matter, where it was no one but them. The two just stayed there in that nook for as long as they could before the starting of the LRC. They’d planned to leave before the LRC had the chance to run, but when the whirring of the LRC could be overheard they knew that it was it. Once that collider was running, Ruben would be packed up and gone the next day. For now, this was the only night they had left.
Oran took the last chance that he had.
He dragged Ruben into a kiss before they could leave the nook. An urgent one, a one that spoke all the words that neither of them could. A frantic last grasp at that chance to just be in a place where nothing they did really mattered, where it was just them. Their own nation, their own world. A place of their own.
The pair broke apart when the whirring got louder and louder around them, and the two made to rejoin the party until the blinding overhead lights they’d gotten used to shut down suddenly. They were submerged in a world of pure darkness in that nook, with only faint lights from the starting of the LRC to guide them back to the mouth of the canyon. The whirring had become disjointed at this point, a broken record. The LRC was malfunctioning when it shouldn’t have. Oran looked to Ruben with alarm, and found the look mirrored on the other man’s face. That look of alarm melded into something else though.
Ruben had this gleam on his face, the look of a man who had a crazy plan, the very look that Oran loved so much.
“We could jump.” Oran’s brain went through a double take as it processed those words but the other man continued,”It’s now or never, the LRC is going to fail and it’s probably going to take the whole facility down with it. Oran. We could jump, it’s still firing up and we’d probably end up in Omega Earth just fine.”
Oran processed everything that Ruben was suggesting. This was all he had been asking for the whole time. The chance for them to just be together regardless of where it was, and this was it. It was just offered up to them on a silver platter.
Ruben outstretched his hand as an offer for the pair to jump into the fired up LRC, and Oran didn’t hesitate to take his hand at all.
They took a running jump and leaped into the mouth of the canyon, embracing on the way down. Laughing as they fell into the mouth of the LRC and the portal of colours took them far away from their crumbling now, and to that chance to create a world of their own.