Gemini

After two years of being a Diver, Kaya and her team have finally found something of interest. All the other teams in her Diving unit have found things in the city ruins beneath the waves years ago. Kaya’s team had been deemed unlucky or useless for the longest time but now, finally they have something to show for all the resources they were using.

Their saving grace was found inside a drawer in a tiny studio apartment in a complex hundreds of feet underwater. The entire building was covered in barnacles, moss painted across every inch of wall space they did not occupy. Kaya and her team swam through a shattered window, single file. Kaya had gone in last, as usual, her older teammates pushing through ahead of her, their desperation for this mission to yield something all too familiar.

They split up to scavenge through the many floors; prying open a rusted out elevator to check the buttons revealed they had sixteen of them to cover. There were only six in their team so they had their work cut out for them. They had come in at the top most floor and her colleagues took off towards the lower floors, leaving Kaya with the top most ones. Perfectly fine with her. The window they had entered through was a hallway one so Kaya started her slow, methodical combing through all the apartments on the sixteenth floor. None of the locks on the doors survived a good shove, rusty as they were, so it wasn’t difficult getting into each one.

Kaya found nothing of interest on the sixteenth floor and found the same amount of nothing when she swam down the stairwell to the fifteenth floor. She had started to resign herself to another dud mission about halfway through the fourteenth floor when she found it. Opening a drawer in the little studio apartment she was in, expecting to find more nothing, she found a box. A white box, medium in size, ornately detailed in delicate golden filigree. There’s a symbol stamped on the lid, in the same lustrous gold as the filigree. It looks like a capital “I” but doubled. She does not know what it means.

She stares at this beautiful box, in awe of its wholeness, bafflingly untainted from the degradation of the waves. It is as pristine as she imagines things were from before the waters rose. A real relic. And she had discovered it. Kaya felt a swell of emotion in her chest but pushed it down. No time for that when she was still on the clock. She clutched the box to her chest and continued her search. She did not find anything else in that apartment, in the rest of the fourteenth floor, or the rest of the floors she searched before she met up with her colleagues again.

Her teammates' reactions upon seeing the box would be comical in any other context. Here, though, their hesitance to touch the box, the shock and awe (and tears in one case) she sees in the eyes behind their goggles is depressing instead. She half expected one of them to rip the box from her hands, to claim it as their own. No one tried that and Kaya feels ashamed that she even had the thought. They do follow her closely as they swim out of the complex, however; this box was their only find after all.

And that’s where they find themselves now: back in the Submerged Ruins Recovery Federation Headquarters, facing their Unit Leader after a mission with something to show her for the first time. Kaya clutches the box like a lifeline, feels her hands shaking as she presents their find under Jax’s critical gaze. Kaya had asked her teammates, all older than her and in this profession much longer than her, if they had wanted to present the box to their superior. They had insisted that, since she had discovered it, she should present it to Jax though. She could see in their eyes that they wished it had been them but not in a malicious way. Just a tired way

When Jax layed eyes on the box, his brows raised in surprise. This is the only change in his expression but it is the most emotion Kaya had ever seen him express in her two years of working under him. He goes to take the box from her; part of Kaya wants to keep it, to not let his large, gnarled hands handle something so delicate. But he is gentle when he takes hold of it, surprising Kaya yet again that her cold and weathered boss was capable of such a thing. As he sets it down on his desk to examine it, her colleagues shifting and shuffling behind her, she wonders how he’ll open it. It’s locked and nothing the six of them had tried on the boat ride back to HQ had been enough to open it. She hopes something good is it. The box is certainly pretty on its own, will probably be studied by Pre-Flood historians to find it’s date of creation. And even if the box is empty, it will be enough to bring them the recognition in the SRRF. Not much but even a little is better than the contempt they’ve suffered. She should feel grateful for this much and she is. But she still hopes there’s at least something inside of it.

Jax pulls her out of her thoughts by loudly opening his desk drawer, making her jump. She can see out of the corner of her eye that she isn’t the only one. He pulls out some kind of contraption. It has many sharp looking implements partially sticking out of it, including one that looks like the tip of a knife. He pulls out a thin looking one out of the handle and proceeds to stick it in the lock. Kaya tilts her head, watching him carefully move the implement around in the lock. She figures it must be some kind of universal key or something. Her thoughts are confirmed when the lid of the box pops open.

Multiple breaths catch behind her as Jax flips the lid of the box open. It’s facing him so the insides are not visible to us, so we only have his reactions to tell us what's in it. Not very reliable, as his expression expectedly does not change. Slowly, he reaches into the box and lifts his hand up. In his grasp, dangles a delicate golden chain. On the end of that chain, is a small locket in the shape of a heart. Gasps of delight ring out around Kaya, this beautiful thing a wonder to people who’ve only known dullness their whole lives. Kaya does not gasp. She only stares. She stares for long enough that the others start noticing she isn’t celebrating with them. Jax finds her gaze, locks eyes with her, questions the intensity of her gaze.

She doesn’t give a verbal reply. Instead she reaches down into her shirt and pulls out her own necklace that she’s worn since she was a child. It is identical to the one swinging in Jax’s grip. A perfect twin.