Crashlanding above the beach.
Trowa… may have had an issue.
The last thing he’d really known, he’d taken on a junior Preventer out under Une’s orders while his regular partner was stuck doing nothing but paperwork after almost getting run down by a panicked criminal on a four-wheeler. The mission had gone bad, and he’d been in what he believed was termed a Mexican standoff with the target—an overweight man named Daniel Klemp, sweating from stress with his little ferret mind scrabbling for an escape. He was good at what he’d done, although during the war he’d gotten careless and not yet managed to get his way back to being as careful as he should have. They’d entered, being careful and giving him the chance to surrender. It should have been simple.
And then he’d pulled a gun. It was an antique, a WIST-94 with 9mm Luger ammunition. The junior partner had tried to creep in around Trowa, get the drop on the target. He’d tripped over debris on the floor.
Mr. Klemp, nervous already, hadn’t flinched and swung his gun down. Trowa had been right in thinking that the man’d been in this position before.
He’d seen the bullet leave the barrel, aimed for his liver.
He’d known that it would hurt, and braced himself accordingly, halfway disbelieving that he’d die at the age of twenty-two and not when he’d been in the thick of a war.
He’d felt something grab, twisting his renal artery and vein, jerking them out his bellybutton and then terrible cold like when he’d floated serenely through space with benefit only of a suit with limited air, except that there had never been a kaleidoscope or black, blue, white, and faintly rusted red when Trowa had been floating. Perhaps that was his blood, although there wasn't any pain.
Then he was in Heavyarms, fifteen again, life flashing before his eyes and wondering that his life had apparently started in the middle of battle.
Trowa fought. He killed people. His soul sang in delight at fighting and holding those incredibly familiar controls in his hands, even despite the destruction and confusion at how he had gotten there. Was the life he'd been living nothing but a dream, or hallucination? He hadn't eaten anything strange, and nobody had been near his drinks...
Heavyarms made a strange noise, and he was back in that whirlwind of black and silver-blue spirals… but not alone anymore. Never alone, when encased in familiar metal and held securely in place by the reassuring X of his harness.
And then he was three hundred feet in the air (under Heavyarm’s feet) and trying to land while Heavyarms registered that they were no longer in vacuum and was adjusting accordingly.
When they hit, Trowa only barely saw/felt that they were kneeling and relatively stable before the sudden cessation of speed, the whiplash, and the pain in his shoulder made him black out, dangling limply in his harness. It seemed his blood had chosen to go elsewhere.