[Yukikaze] Slipstream
Title: Slipstream
Fandom: Sentō Yōsei Yukikaze
Rating: PG
Contains: Fix-fic. Possible man on man on jet. Yes, jet.
Notes: Will be posted in increments.
Slipstream
The first time they tow it into the hangar, Jack thinks he's looking at God in the shape of a plane.
The sun is out, one of those rare, clear days that's shaping up to be hell on the AC, just eleven in the morning and the airfield is already turning into a simmering, brilliant desert. Squinting out the hangar doors means almost going blind, a moment's nothing turning into something as the jet melts out of that scintillating brightness, itself shining like a piece of iridescent opal. First the nose, then the dark dome of the canopy, the long, sleek body unfurling into wings that seem to be moving on their own, reflected heat turning them into the minute movements of a giant bird. A pair of state-of-the-art laser guns, jutting forward like the spears of a valkyrie, custom-fitted missile tubes, and somewhere in the back of his head a part of Jack is grown up enough to trip the circuit breakers before the rest of him can prove he's never grown beyond fifteen, and draft up a plan to steal the keys and run away with that beauty into the sunset. Or alternately, start drooling.
He's got more important things to think about, like how they're dragging it into the hangar. His hangar.
The operator in the observation bay shouts something after him that Jack doesn't quite catch, grabbing his jacket on the way out. He's a major now. Heat or no, he's got to make it look like he's upholding standards and discipline. The trek down the grated metal staircase is just long enough to get his buttons done up in the wrong order and realize he's still holding the mug of stale coffee in one hand, but by then, he's on the ground floor and it's too late.
"Major."
"Sergeant."
A once-over, the man's disapproving look losing itself in the forms on his clipboard. Behind him, the tow clamps are being dislodged, techies in orange jumpsuits working so fast they almost seem afraid to touch the jet, and if Jack could spare the attention, he's pretty sure he could pick out a few open-mouthed stares among his ground crew, too. It makes him feel oddly better.
The sergeant flips through his sheets. "If you'll just sign here, here, and here to confirm the receipt."
"What receipt," Jack says, finding his hands full of clipboard. He fumbles, pats his uniform, finds a pen in his shirt pocket. Unscrewing the cap stains his fingers blue.
"The receipt of the Super Sylph B-503."
"I wasn't informed." Raising his eyebrows meaningfully, Jack signs anyway, because there's precious little choice and perhaps, irrationally, because the plane is truly beautiful. The military is stingy with its toys, especially toys like this, and he sure as hell isn't cleared for prototype repairs. His hangar is regular squads only. Maintenance, training, sorties. Getting shot out of the sky and piecing what's left back together. If they're handing this beauty over to him without giving notice, it means they've already gone through every possible channel. This is a last ditch effort. Last ditch effort at what, he can't say.
"You are now." The sergeant takes back the forms, handing over a file he kept tucked under his arm. "Word has gotten around you have a good hand with tough cases."
Tough cases meaning stuff that, by all rights, shouldn't be working anymore. Jack isn't R&D, isn't even a mechanic per se, he just likes planes and fixing things and teaching a couple of flyboys to do the same. It's what should have started years ago on a grand scale, back when the JAM were still a problem on the other side of the world, and maybe even before that. Fixing things instead of scrapping them. Stripping parts to use with other parts, tuning up machines, tuning them down to fit. Teaching the blackbox in an American fighter drone to talk to the Chinese board computer. Jack makes do with what people give him, and they've given him dwindling resources and a damn tight budget.
No sense in telling that to the sergeant, so he just shrugs noncommittally. "I like tough cases."
Smiling thinly, the sergeant steps aside to let Jack get a good look at the thing that's come attached to the plane, a scrawny Japanese kid circling around the jet with the look of a caged tiger pacing around his fake log.
"Well, Major, I can guarantee... you won't like this one."
------
Rei Fukai is a second lieutenant who's won every conceivable honor there is for a test pilot, short of getting buried with his casket of medals. Rei Fukai has had the skin burned off his legs, and all his ribs broken, and needed reconstructive surgery on his right eye, all within the last three months. His left arm is still in a sling, in the delicate grip of a support cast, the thin metal struts meant to send electric impulses and stimulate the nerves to bring back his fine motor skills.
After the last crash, the doctors wanted to take him off the program, recommended psychological reevaluation. When he realized what was happening, Rei Fukai stabbed the doctor on duty with his blunt plastic dinner fork, then took down a musclebound nurse with a new syringe of sedatives and the security chief with his spoon. They found him back in the testing facility, curled up on the floor below the underbelly of that white Super Sylph, sleeping peacefully as a baby. When they made the mistake of waking him up, they found he was also sleeping with a box-end wrench.
All of this is just a roundabout way of saying that Rei Fukai is batshit insane.
Jack keeps gazing at the file for a bit, not entirely sure whether he really just read all that. It's the sort of crazy thing you usually see in a psych ward movie, where they have the drugs and the braces to strap down a kid who's a danger to others, a danger to himself. There's enough in this file to make Jack's stomach squirm with the realization of what they have handed to him, the knowledge that this kid should have been getting treatment, should have, at the very least, pissed off the brass into removing him after the first incident, but they didn't. They don't just find nutcases like this, they make them.
He can't even say what he's supposed to do here. He fixes planes, not kids. Planes don't develop neuroses, or try to kill doctors, planes don't circle other planes with a murderous glint in their eyes whenever anybody curious enough steps forward to admire the jet more closely. There's a stack of specs and protocols in the back of Rei Fukai's personal file that's so censored that there's barely a straight sentence left, but what Jack can read makes his gut flip on its side again.
Human-machine interface.
The last hope against an enemy who is faster than their fastest computers, who learns at an exponential speed. Jack's no cyberneticist, no psychiatrist, no anything this kind of project would require, but if they're shoving their top secret weapon on him in a way that almost screams, "Take it, for fuck's sake, take it," it means they've thrown everything they had at the problem, and still failed.
Taking a deep breath, Jack rakes a hand through his hair.
Up ahead, the kid is still circling, not in reach of anything to use as a weapon but you never know.
He should do something, Jack thinks, before Rei Fukai starts decorating the landing strip with the entrails of his ground crew.
------
Jack's mom used to run an animal shelter in Chicago before it was swallowed by the fireball that ate the rest of Illinois. She got all kinds - dogs, cats, a couple of rabbits, the occasional giant python - and through some miracle, she managed to get along with all of them. Other people called it a gift, his mom called it learning to speak the language, read the mood until she could reach safely between the bars and scritch behind an ear, check a muzzle for bad teeth.
Jack loved the dogs, and the cats, and the rabbits, but the day usually ended with him needing band-aids and maybe a tetanus shot, the lot of them too skittish and traumatized to do anything but bite and scratch. He never quite managed to get the feeling for them that his mom had, the patience and intuition, so the most he ended up helping out with was pushing the bowls of ground beef into the outdoor pound every day at ten and at five, with a long stick and jittery hands.
That's what he's doing now, minus the hands.
Now that everybody's understood that they're sharing hangar space with a lunatic, Rei Fukai has stopped pacing, turning to place his good palm against the cockpit, his cheek almost resting against the weld seams on the hull. Up close, he's even skinnier, the gray-green flight crew coveralls sagging on his frame, with a non-regulation belt that needed an extra two holes punched in to hold up anything at all. The file said it took three days to get him away from the jet, just so they could get it ready for transfer. Bless whoever thought of putting a lock-out code on the cockpit, Jack really doesn't want to think about what a kid that takes down people with a plastic fork would do with a pair of laser needle guns.
"Hi," Jack says, because it's the smallest possible word and he's not sure whether the kid will even hear, lost in communion with the plane.
He does. Tense, rigid, with a glare that could freeze blood, and Jack has to keep himself from taking an involuntary step back.
"Whoa, hey. I'm just here to say hello." Not off to a good start, when he has to justify walking around his own place. Technically, he's the kid's CO now, but if looking like a pushover keeps things from exploding, then hell, he's not that keen on the military alpha male crap.
Rei Fukai says nothing, but Jack thinks maybe, maybe the glare's getting downgraded from hostile to suspicious.
"I guess we'll be working together from now on. Not sure what they think this'll do; we're just the mechanics here. So unless the ouch is somewhere in there-" he gestures at the white expanse of jet, "-I don't know what we'll be able to fix."
Another venomous stare, the kid's fingers twitching against the surface of the plane as if to grab and throw something.
Jack sighs. "Hey, don't worry. Nobody here's touching your girl, you've made that clear. But if you could actually tell me what's wrong with either of you, that'd be a start. They gave me this-" He moves to wave at the file, realizes he's gesturing as if speaking to a gradeschooler, and redirects his hand to finally put his buttons in order, "-but damn if that says anything. So unless you're sworn to secrecy or something, I'd appreciate a few pointers here."
Still nothing. He's starting to wonder if the kid can even talk, if they didn't just get a mute as a lab rat because you can't hear them scream. Human-machine interface. It's the stuff he read about in cheap sci-fi magazines as a boy, and all the stories ended with eternal nightmares and mutant uprisings. Personality reconfiguration. That sort of thing. He has no idea if that's what's happening here.
"Look," Jack tries again, "I can call up the labs and get the dirt straight from them-" Wishful thinking at best, a blatant lie at worst, "-but I'd much rather hear it from you. They dumped you here, you know. You're part of the whole thing."
No answer, but Rei Fukai's hand has started fluttering along the hull, up and down, as if stroking a nervous pet.
"I'd say we go up to my office, but if you don't want to move, that's cool, too. I get being attached. Work with them long enough and you feel like they're part of you." He risks a glance around the hangar, the two dozen machines lined up there, half of them ready to get shot down again next week. "Breaks your heart, seeing them get beat up."
Goofy to put it that way, but it's the truth. A glance back at the kid reveals that Rei Fukai has tilted his head to the side, messy bangs sliding over a contemplative gaze.
"So, really, nobody here's going to do anything to make it worse. What do you say I grab us some more coffee, and a bagel, and then we can start tal-"
Evidently the wrong thing to say, because Rei Fukai is growling. Or rather, a part of Rei Fukai is growling. Rei Fukai himself is staring at that part with the kind of look that says he's forgotten he doesn't come with a built-in drop tank, that this is what happens to human beings when they spend three days exhausting themselves by trying to kill people with engine parts.
Perhaps it's not the best idea to laugh at a would-be psychopath, but there's something oddly endearing about the look of utter stunned bewilderment, like the kid isn't even sure how to go about fixing the problem.
In the depths of his uniform jacket, Jack's fingers hit upon the squashed granola bar that's been there for six weeks and two laundry sessions already. Tossing it to the kid, he grins. "I'm guessing we're agreed on those bagels. Don't run off while I grab them. Name's Jack, by the way."
He could have said 'Major Bukhar,' but hell, that's like trying to yank a mangy street dog to his heel. He'd rather stick to what'll keep his hands intact.
The kid still doesn't reply, examining the granola bar like its garish foil wrapping is holding some kind of arcane mystery. Shaking his head, Jack turns to get back up to the observation bay for a raid on the fridge and the coffee pot, waving the doubtful-looking flyboys back to their tasks. He's almost to the stairs by the time he catches the voice, so low and quiet it could have been swallowed by the clatter of a stray tool.
"...Rei."
-TBC-
------
A/N: Hated the anime, swore I wouldn't write for it, this happened anyway. I blame the guy/guy/jet overtones. Will be running with that, and fixing mostly everything else that didn't make sense. In other words, this fic is pure self-indulgence. Hope you'll bear with me. XD More whenever time allows.
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Fandom: Sentō Yōsei Yukikaze
Rating: PG
Contains: Fix-fic. Possible man on man on jet. Yes, jet.
Notes: Will be posted in increments.
Slipstream
The first time they tow it into the hangar, Jack thinks he's looking at God in the shape of a plane.
The sun is out, one of those rare, clear days that's shaping up to be hell on the AC, just eleven in the morning and the airfield is already turning into a simmering, brilliant desert. Squinting out the hangar doors means almost going blind, a moment's nothing turning into something as the jet melts out of that scintillating brightness, itself shining like a piece of iridescent opal. First the nose, then the dark dome of the canopy, the long, sleek body unfurling into wings that seem to be moving on their own, reflected heat turning them into the minute movements of a giant bird. A pair of state-of-the-art laser guns, jutting forward like the spears of a valkyrie, custom-fitted missile tubes, and somewhere in the back of his head a part of Jack is grown up enough to trip the circuit breakers before the rest of him can prove he's never grown beyond fifteen, and draft up a plan to steal the keys and run away with that beauty into the sunset. Or alternately, start drooling.
He's got more important things to think about, like how they're dragging it into the hangar. His hangar.
The operator in the observation bay shouts something after him that Jack doesn't quite catch, grabbing his jacket on the way out. He's a major now. Heat or no, he's got to make it look like he's upholding standards and discipline. The trek down the grated metal staircase is just long enough to get his buttons done up in the wrong order and realize he's still holding the mug of stale coffee in one hand, but by then, he's on the ground floor and it's too late.
"Major."
"Sergeant."
A once-over, the man's disapproving look losing itself in the forms on his clipboard. Behind him, the tow clamps are being dislodged, techies in orange jumpsuits working so fast they almost seem afraid to touch the jet, and if Jack could spare the attention, he's pretty sure he could pick out a few open-mouthed stares among his ground crew, too. It makes him feel oddly better.
The sergeant flips through his sheets. "If you'll just sign here, here, and here to confirm the receipt."
"What receipt," Jack says, finding his hands full of clipboard. He fumbles, pats his uniform, finds a pen in his shirt pocket. Unscrewing the cap stains his fingers blue.
"The receipt of the Super Sylph B-503."
"I wasn't informed." Raising his eyebrows meaningfully, Jack signs anyway, because there's precious little choice and perhaps, irrationally, because the plane is truly beautiful. The military is stingy with its toys, especially toys like this, and he sure as hell isn't cleared for prototype repairs. His hangar is regular squads only. Maintenance, training, sorties. Getting shot out of the sky and piecing what's left back together. If they're handing this beauty over to him without giving notice, it means they've already gone through every possible channel. This is a last ditch effort. Last ditch effort at what, he can't say.
"You are now." The sergeant takes back the forms, handing over a file he kept tucked under his arm. "Word has gotten around you have a good hand with tough cases."
Tough cases meaning stuff that, by all rights, shouldn't be working anymore. Jack isn't R&D, isn't even a mechanic per se, he just likes planes and fixing things and teaching a couple of flyboys to do the same. It's what should have started years ago on a grand scale, back when the JAM were still a problem on the other side of the world, and maybe even before that. Fixing things instead of scrapping them. Stripping parts to use with other parts, tuning up machines, tuning them down to fit. Teaching the blackbox in an American fighter drone to talk to the Chinese board computer. Jack makes do with what people give him, and they've given him dwindling resources and a damn tight budget.
No sense in telling that to the sergeant, so he just shrugs noncommittally. "I like tough cases."
Smiling thinly, the sergeant steps aside to let Jack get a good look at the thing that's come attached to the plane, a scrawny Japanese kid circling around the jet with the look of a caged tiger pacing around his fake log.
"Well, Major, I can guarantee... you won't like this one."
------
Rei Fukai is a second lieutenant who's won every conceivable honor there is for a test pilot, short of getting buried with his casket of medals. Rei Fukai has had the skin burned off his legs, and all his ribs broken, and needed reconstructive surgery on his right eye, all within the last three months. His left arm is still in a sling, in the delicate grip of a support cast, the thin metal struts meant to send electric impulses and stimulate the nerves to bring back his fine motor skills.
After the last crash, the doctors wanted to take him off the program, recommended psychological reevaluation. When he realized what was happening, Rei Fukai stabbed the doctor on duty with his blunt plastic dinner fork, then took down a musclebound nurse with a new syringe of sedatives and the security chief with his spoon. They found him back in the testing facility, curled up on the floor below the underbelly of that white Super Sylph, sleeping peacefully as a baby. When they made the mistake of waking him up, they found he was also sleeping with a box-end wrench.
All of this is just a roundabout way of saying that Rei Fukai is batshit insane.
Jack keeps gazing at the file for a bit, not entirely sure whether he really just read all that. It's the sort of crazy thing you usually see in a psych ward movie, where they have the drugs and the braces to strap down a kid who's a danger to others, a danger to himself. There's enough in this file to make Jack's stomach squirm with the realization of what they have handed to him, the knowledge that this kid should have been getting treatment, should have, at the very least, pissed off the brass into removing him after the first incident, but they didn't. They don't just find nutcases like this, they make them.
He can't even say what he's supposed to do here. He fixes planes, not kids. Planes don't develop neuroses, or try to kill doctors, planes don't circle other planes with a murderous glint in their eyes whenever anybody curious enough steps forward to admire the jet more closely. There's a stack of specs and protocols in the back of Rei Fukai's personal file that's so censored that there's barely a straight sentence left, but what Jack can read makes his gut flip on its side again.
Human-machine interface.
The last hope against an enemy who is faster than their fastest computers, who learns at an exponential speed. Jack's no cyberneticist, no psychiatrist, no anything this kind of project would require, but if they're shoving their top secret weapon on him in a way that almost screams, "Take it, for fuck's sake, take it," it means they've thrown everything they had at the problem, and still failed.
Taking a deep breath, Jack rakes a hand through his hair.
Up ahead, the kid is still circling, not in reach of anything to use as a weapon but you never know.
He should do something, Jack thinks, before Rei Fukai starts decorating the landing strip with the entrails of his ground crew.
------
Jack's mom used to run an animal shelter in Chicago before it was swallowed by the fireball that ate the rest of Illinois. She got all kinds - dogs, cats, a couple of rabbits, the occasional giant python - and through some miracle, she managed to get along with all of them. Other people called it a gift, his mom called it learning to speak the language, read the mood until she could reach safely between the bars and scritch behind an ear, check a muzzle for bad teeth.
Jack loved the dogs, and the cats, and the rabbits, but the day usually ended with him needing band-aids and maybe a tetanus shot, the lot of them too skittish and traumatized to do anything but bite and scratch. He never quite managed to get the feeling for them that his mom had, the patience and intuition, so the most he ended up helping out with was pushing the bowls of ground beef into the outdoor pound every day at ten and at five, with a long stick and jittery hands.
That's what he's doing now, minus the hands.
Now that everybody's understood that they're sharing hangar space with a lunatic, Rei Fukai has stopped pacing, turning to place his good palm against the cockpit, his cheek almost resting against the weld seams on the hull. Up close, he's even skinnier, the gray-green flight crew coveralls sagging on his frame, with a non-regulation belt that needed an extra two holes punched in to hold up anything at all. The file said it took three days to get him away from the jet, just so they could get it ready for transfer. Bless whoever thought of putting a lock-out code on the cockpit, Jack really doesn't want to think about what a kid that takes down people with a plastic fork would do with a pair of laser needle guns.
"Hi," Jack says, because it's the smallest possible word and he's not sure whether the kid will even hear, lost in communion with the plane.
He does. Tense, rigid, with a glare that could freeze blood, and Jack has to keep himself from taking an involuntary step back.
"Whoa, hey. I'm just here to say hello." Not off to a good start, when he has to justify walking around his own place. Technically, he's the kid's CO now, but if looking like a pushover keeps things from exploding, then hell, he's not that keen on the military alpha male crap.
Rei Fukai says nothing, but Jack thinks maybe, maybe the glare's getting downgraded from hostile to suspicious.
"I guess we'll be working together from now on. Not sure what they think this'll do; we're just the mechanics here. So unless the ouch is somewhere in there-" he gestures at the white expanse of jet, "-I don't know what we'll be able to fix."
Another venomous stare, the kid's fingers twitching against the surface of the plane as if to grab and throw something.
Jack sighs. "Hey, don't worry. Nobody here's touching your girl, you've made that clear. But if you could actually tell me what's wrong with either of you, that'd be a start. They gave me this-" He moves to wave at the file, realizes he's gesturing as if speaking to a gradeschooler, and redirects his hand to finally put his buttons in order, "-but damn if that says anything. So unless you're sworn to secrecy or something, I'd appreciate a few pointers here."
Still nothing. He's starting to wonder if the kid can even talk, if they didn't just get a mute as a lab rat because you can't hear them scream. Human-machine interface. It's the stuff he read about in cheap sci-fi magazines as a boy, and all the stories ended with eternal nightmares and mutant uprisings. Personality reconfiguration. That sort of thing. He has no idea if that's what's happening here.
"Look," Jack tries again, "I can call up the labs and get the dirt straight from them-" Wishful thinking at best, a blatant lie at worst, "-but I'd much rather hear it from you. They dumped you here, you know. You're part of the whole thing."
No answer, but Rei Fukai's hand has started fluttering along the hull, up and down, as if stroking a nervous pet.
"I'd say we go up to my office, but if you don't want to move, that's cool, too. I get being attached. Work with them long enough and you feel like they're part of you." He risks a glance around the hangar, the two dozen machines lined up there, half of them ready to get shot down again next week. "Breaks your heart, seeing them get beat up."
Goofy to put it that way, but it's the truth. A glance back at the kid reveals that Rei Fukai has tilted his head to the side, messy bangs sliding over a contemplative gaze.
"So, really, nobody here's going to do anything to make it worse. What do you say I grab us some more coffee, and a bagel, and then we can start tal-"
Evidently the wrong thing to say, because Rei Fukai is growling. Or rather, a part of Rei Fukai is growling. Rei Fukai himself is staring at that part with the kind of look that says he's forgotten he doesn't come with a built-in drop tank, that this is what happens to human beings when they spend three days exhausting themselves by trying to kill people with engine parts.
Perhaps it's not the best idea to laugh at a would-be psychopath, but there's something oddly endearing about the look of utter stunned bewilderment, like the kid isn't even sure how to go about fixing the problem.
In the depths of his uniform jacket, Jack's fingers hit upon the squashed granola bar that's been there for six weeks and two laundry sessions already. Tossing it to the kid, he grins. "I'm guessing we're agreed on those bagels. Don't run off while I grab them. Name's Jack, by the way."
He could have said 'Major Bukhar,' but hell, that's like trying to yank a mangy street dog to his heel. He'd rather stick to what'll keep his hands intact.
The kid still doesn't reply, examining the granola bar like its garish foil wrapping is holding some kind of arcane mystery. Shaking his head, Jack turns to get back up to the observation bay for a raid on the fridge and the coffee pot, waving the doubtful-looking flyboys back to their tasks. He's almost to the stairs by the time he catches the voice, so low and quiet it could have been swallowed by the clatter of a stray tool.
"...Rei."
-TBC-
------
A/N: Hated the anime, swore I wouldn't write for it, this happened anyway. I blame the guy/guy/jet overtones. Will be running with that, and fixing mostly everything else that didn't make sense. In other words, this fic is pure self-indulgence. Hope you'll bear with me. XD More whenever time allows.
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