August 11: Signal to Noise (T; Pacific Rim)
Title: Signal to Noise
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Rating: PG-13
Challenge: twistedshorts: August 11
Crossover: Pacific Rim
Spoilers: Post-series, no comics; movie timeline (SPOILERS)
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.
Notes: 8th in the Slayer Jaeger sequence. This one was more difficult to write-- but something else I've had in mind since the first time I saw the movie. WARNING for canonical character death, with a twist.
Summary: "Who's going to look after him?" Yancy broke the silence, staring at Buffy with pleading eyes. 2200 words.
Buffy'd had a lot of bad days in her nearly forty years of living. More of them before K-Day than after, which made her kind of unusual as far as humanity went-- so it was probably a good thing she and Faith had proven to be Drift compatible, or their damage would have driven anyone else screaming from the Conn-Pod. But it hadn't been so long that she'd forgotten how days like that tended to start.
A dream. A feeling of dread trickling down the back of her neck, as if someone had cracked an egg in her hair and let it run. And the awareness of some kind of deadline, ticking down to the end of the world.
Buffy sat up, shivering as she rubbed her palms up and down her arms, and glanced toward the digital clock in their quarters. It blinked an unforgiving 3:39 AM, more than an hour before her alarm would usually wake her for an early-morning run. Then she glanced over to the other side of the bed-- she and Faith weren't anything as simple as lovers, but they'd slept better within arm's length of each other ever since they'd first stepped across Kaiju Slayer's neural bridge, not exactly an unusual situation when it came to Jaeger pilots-- and sighed as she caught her sister Slayer looking back at her.
"Did you--"
"Yeah. That's some fucked up shit," Faith swore, scooting back against the pillows to hang her elbows around up-thrust knees. "You think--?"
Buffy nodded, heart aching with echoes of remembered loss. "Don't you? Though-- I guess we'll find out for sure when Stacks calls, or from the news."
"God." Faith shuddered, glancing toward the slick black screen of their vidcomm slash TV unit, but didn't reach for its controls. She didn't really need to. "Guess that's the end of our lecture series, then."
Buffy winced. One way or another, she agreed they probably wouldn't come back to the Academy in Juneau anytime soon; if the dream was true, the Alaska Shatterdome was down a Jaeger and half of one of the most popular pilot teams in the PPDC. Kaiju Slayer would be needed there for morale, if nothing else.
If it was true-- she closed her eyes and shivered again, sliding back to prop herself against the headboard next to Faith. They could take a moment to breathe, right? Just breathe, before anything else had to be done. It had been years since anyone had had a proper Slayer vision, so long that Buffy had assumed the Powers That Be must have fled their dimension along with almost every other supernatural resident of Earth after the first Old One came through the Breach. She'd forgotten how hung-over and cranky they made her feel.
Apparently, they hadn't. Or at least, something about the night's events was important enough to bring them back out of hiding-- and that made her nerves crawl nearly as much as the dream itself.
It had started simply, if a little disorienting in its familiarity: a sunlit bedroom, with a great arching window looking out over a city that hadn't existed in twenty years. Both had been dressed the same as they'd been the last time they'd Seen each other in that space: Faith in a white and orange striped tank top, Buffy in a comfy long-sleeved gray tee, both young and fresh-faced and freshly off of their mortal enemies kick. Except that the bed wasn't made this time; both of them clasped one edge of a sheet with their fingers, stretching it across the width of a Queen-size mattress.
As easily as if they'd been doing the laundry together all of their lives, Buffy had fluttered her end of the sheet, sending it swelling over the bed in a wave. And Faith had fluttered it back, shaking out the last of the wrinkles, then pulled it taut as they drew it down atop the mattress between them.
Only instead of lying smooth, the sheet had molded itself to a pair of slumbering young men. One had sported a bandaged, bloodstained shoulder and wore a troubled expression; the other had wrapped himself around his brother, his hands white-knuckled where they gripped each other across the younger man's back. Both stirred at the cool touch of fabric-- but only one woke, eyes blinking slowly open.
"Who's going to look after him?" Yancy broke the silence, staring at Buffy with pleading eyes.
She wasn't the one who replied, though; Faith sucked a sharp breath, then spoke in echo of the words they'd shared so very long ago. "He's a big boy. He can take care of himself," she drawled.
And that was the moment Buffy had actually realized it was a vision, and not some artifact of the Drift or shard of old memory stirred up by recent events. The feel of it was unmistakable: the imperative underlying every word and motion, the knowledge that something had to be done and it was within her power to do it.
Yancy, though, had shaken his head at Faith's words, going off script as he clutched his brother closer. "I know I should let go-- but I can't. I don't know how," he said, voice thick with confused anguish. "He's me, and I'm him!"
Raleigh had stirred then in his brother's arms, whispering his name brokenly against his throat, and strange words had welled up from Buffy's hindbrain-- or probably the Powers'-- at the sight. "Don't worry; there's still time. Counting down from seventeen-eight-oh."
Fortunately, that had seemed to make more sense to Yancy than it had to her; he'd calmed, relaxing his grip a little, and stroked a soothing hand up his brother's back. "I hope you're right," he said, then closed his eyes, laying his head back beside Raleigh's on the pillow.
The sunlight gilding the Becket boys' forms had transmuted then to a harsher and brighter glow; Buffy had glanced up to see the window replaced by a vidscreen lit with a warming message. KAIJU ATTACK, it flashed, in shades of lurid red and yellow: CATEGORY THREE. CODENAME KNIFEHEAD. Then it stuttered to a glimpse of dark waves, lashed by rain; of Gipsy Danger's navy and gold superstructure looming out of the water, Conn-Pod pierced by kaiju claws.
On the bed, Yancy's form faded a little, as intermittent as the weather. Then he solidified, and the screen changed to a view of the coastline: of a Jaeger toppling to one knee in snow-shrouded sand, then collapsing forward onto a chilly beach.
"Yancy!" she and Faith had shouted in unison, their voice somehow echoing with Raleigh's--
--and then they'd woken, chilled to the marrow with second-hand shock and grief.
"Stacks is going to think we're crazy," she concluded wearily, tucked up against her co-pilot from shoulder to ankle. "He's going to think they're crazy."
"I dunno. Might be surprised," Faith shrugged. "He ran a lot with Andy and Dawn's crowd when he came to visit, back before he got all rank-conscious and shit. He knows a lot of the stories."
"Andrew's stories," Buffy expressed her opinion of that with a wry-half smile. "I wouldn't believe half of Andrew's stories, and I lived through most of them."
She didn't add, Remember when he told all the potentials you killed a Vulcan? and Faith didn't reply, Point, but then, they didn't have to.
"He's got stories of his own, too. Remember Tokyo?"
Buffy blew out a breath at that; she had forgotten. Stacker Pentecost was known as the only pilot ever to drive a Jaeger solo; his co-pilot had fallen unconscious early on in the fight, and he'd gone up against Onibaba alone for three hours. But in one early, unguarded interview, he'd said he hadn't even noticed her absence for half of that, until he'd realized the voice in his head wasn't matching what he actually heard and glanced over to see her drooping in harness, face masked with blood.
"Okay, I get it; trust the Marshal. Stop distracting myself by borrowing trouble," Buffy sighed, leaning over to rest her cheek against Faith's shoulder.
Moments later, their vidscreen chimed with a call.
The moment of truth had arrived.
*
It was.
*
Stacks was skeptical, but by the pained look in his eyes, wanted to believe them. Marshal Pentecost couldn't afford to let any valuable resource slip out of his grasp. And by the end of the conversation, their immediate transfer back to Anchorage had been approved, regardless of the benched state of Kaiju Slayer.
He filled in a little more of the context, too, before signing off to convey their regrets to the commandant.
Gipsy Danger wandering out of Chrome Brutus's backup range to rescue a fishing trawler stranded in harm's way. Knifehead zeroing in on that exact location. Then the scenes from their dream: Yancy clawed out of the Conn-Pod while still hooked up to the neural bridge, Raleigh piloting solo.
Gipsy stumbling onto an Alaskan beach more than an hour after Chrome Brutus had arrived at her last known position to report Knifehead dead and Gipsy Danger missing. And then-- the PPDC consigning Gipsy to Oblivion Bay before they even knew whether Raleigh would survive, writing her damage off as irreparable. Which meant that more than half that boy's soul had just been torn away from him-- because a Jaeger gestalt contained more than just the pilots, it encompassed the quirks and A.I. of the machine as well.
Even if Yancy really was somehow still with him, Raleigh Becket would never be the same pilot again.
Nothing they could do would help that. Nothing had ever helped Buffy but time and her own will to keep going-- after Angelus, after her mother's death, after Heaven. But the least they could do was ensure he wasn't alone while he stabilized enough to make his own decisions about what to do next. So the first thing she did after dropping their bags at the Shatterdome was to find the infirmary.
Raleigh had already been seen to at the local hospital, and transferred back to base; he was bandaged from gouged and dislocated shoulder down to the fingertips of his left arm, and heavy black bruising peeked from the neck of his hospital gown. Buffy could only guess what else hid under the light sheet; the boy-- boys?-- slept the sleep of the heavily sedated, but the anguish lurking in the exhausted lines of his face was almost palpable in the air of the room. Who was going to look after him, indeed. Buffy didn't even ask before drawing the curtain around the bed and climbing up onto it with him.
They weren't really that close, but she knew as well as any pilot that the Drift left even the moderately compatible pairs skin-hungry and clingy for hours afterward, and in tight pairs like the Beckets or she and Faith, frequently empathically clingy as well. Whether Raleigh was alone in his own skull or not, this was the most vulnerable phase of any pilot's post-battle experience, and if it had been her--
Well. Buffy wasn't going to think about that; even the wash of reassurance from Faith's direction as she settled atop the sheet, carefully half-draped over Raleigh's unbandaged side, couldn't make her believe she'd survive yet another soulmate bailing on her. But-- something similar might help her heal long enough to come to a different conclusion, as she hoped it would for Raleigh.
It wasn't just the physical closeness; no two pilot teams, or even the same pilot team in two different Jaegers, ever bonded on the same frequency as any other, or there'd be a telepathic jumble in every Shatterdome's mess every time a group came back from a drop. But in pairs matched tightly enough that ghost-Drifting was a regular phenomenon rather than an occasional distraction, it created a sort of empathic 'noise' that other such teams could pick up. Having her and Faith near might be the only medicine that could help Raleigh's less physical wounds.
Faith stood over them for a moment, then went out and flagged down a nurse in a PPDC uniform. She came back radiating a faint mixture of concern and empathetic pain, then pulled up a chair on the other side of the bed and reached out to wrap a hand around Raleigh's wrist.
The thread of connection flared more brightly at the gesture, channeled through their friend, and the wounded pilot relaxed fractionally in his sleep with perhaps a few less lines around his eyes.
Buffy had called the Scoobies her chosen family for more than half her life, but the long-term staff of the Alaska Shatterdome had become just as important to her over the last few years, and the Beckets were like-- well, like obnoxiously cute nephews, the kind where it was impossible to decide whether the obnoxious was really a descriptor of their cuteness or the boys themselves. And Buffy would never turn her back on family-- not unless they were dead, or they turned their backs on her first.
She took a deep breath, tasting tears on the back of her tongue, and settled in to wait.
-x-
Author: Jedi Buttercup
Rating: PG-13
Challenge: twistedshorts: August 11
Crossover: Pacific Rim
Spoilers: Post-series, no comics; movie timeline (SPOILERS)
Disclaimer: The words are mine; the worlds are not.
Notes: 8th in the Slayer Jaeger sequence. This one was more difficult to write-- but something else I've had in mind since the first time I saw the movie. WARNING for canonical character death, with a twist.
Summary: "Who's going to look after him?" Yancy broke the silence, staring at Buffy with pleading eyes. 2200 words.
Buffy'd had a lot of bad days in her nearly forty years of living. More of them before K-Day than after, which made her kind of unusual as far as humanity went-- so it was probably a good thing she and Faith had proven to be Drift compatible, or their damage would have driven anyone else screaming from the Conn-Pod. But it hadn't been so long that she'd forgotten how days like that tended to start.
A dream. A feeling of dread trickling down the back of her neck, as if someone had cracked an egg in her hair and let it run. And the awareness of some kind of deadline, ticking down to the end of the world.
Buffy sat up, shivering as she rubbed her palms up and down her arms, and glanced toward the digital clock in their quarters. It blinked an unforgiving 3:39 AM, more than an hour before her alarm would usually wake her for an early-morning run. Then she glanced over to the other side of the bed-- she and Faith weren't anything as simple as lovers, but they'd slept better within arm's length of each other ever since they'd first stepped across Kaiju Slayer's neural bridge, not exactly an unusual situation when it came to Jaeger pilots-- and sighed as she caught her sister Slayer looking back at her.
"Did you--"
"Yeah. That's some fucked up shit," Faith swore, scooting back against the pillows to hang her elbows around up-thrust knees. "You think--?"
Buffy nodded, heart aching with echoes of remembered loss. "Don't you? Though-- I guess we'll find out for sure when Stacks calls, or from the news."
"God." Faith shuddered, glancing toward the slick black screen of their vidcomm slash TV unit, but didn't reach for its controls. She didn't really need to. "Guess that's the end of our lecture series, then."
Buffy winced. One way or another, she agreed they probably wouldn't come back to the Academy in Juneau anytime soon; if the dream was true, the Alaska Shatterdome was down a Jaeger and half of one of the most popular pilot teams in the PPDC. Kaiju Slayer would be needed there for morale, if nothing else.
If it was true-- she closed her eyes and shivered again, sliding back to prop herself against the headboard next to Faith. They could take a moment to breathe, right? Just breathe, before anything else had to be done. It had been years since anyone had had a proper Slayer vision, so long that Buffy had assumed the Powers That Be must have fled their dimension along with almost every other supernatural resident of Earth after the first Old One came through the Breach. She'd forgotten how hung-over and cranky they made her feel.
Apparently, they hadn't. Or at least, something about the night's events was important enough to bring them back out of hiding-- and that made her nerves crawl nearly as much as the dream itself.
It had started simply, if a little disorienting in its familiarity: a sunlit bedroom, with a great arching window looking out over a city that hadn't existed in twenty years. Both had been dressed the same as they'd been the last time they'd Seen each other in that space: Faith in a white and orange striped tank top, Buffy in a comfy long-sleeved gray tee, both young and fresh-faced and freshly off of their mortal enemies kick. Except that the bed wasn't made this time; both of them clasped one edge of a sheet with their fingers, stretching it across the width of a Queen-size mattress.
As easily as if they'd been doing the laundry together all of their lives, Buffy had fluttered her end of the sheet, sending it swelling over the bed in a wave. And Faith had fluttered it back, shaking out the last of the wrinkles, then pulled it taut as they drew it down atop the mattress between them.
Only instead of lying smooth, the sheet had molded itself to a pair of slumbering young men. One had sported a bandaged, bloodstained shoulder and wore a troubled expression; the other had wrapped himself around his brother, his hands white-knuckled where they gripped each other across the younger man's back. Both stirred at the cool touch of fabric-- but only one woke, eyes blinking slowly open.
"Who's going to look after him?" Yancy broke the silence, staring at Buffy with pleading eyes.
She wasn't the one who replied, though; Faith sucked a sharp breath, then spoke in echo of the words they'd shared so very long ago. "He's a big boy. He can take care of himself," she drawled.
And that was the moment Buffy had actually realized it was a vision, and not some artifact of the Drift or shard of old memory stirred up by recent events. The feel of it was unmistakable: the imperative underlying every word and motion, the knowledge that something had to be done and it was within her power to do it.
Yancy, though, had shaken his head at Faith's words, going off script as he clutched his brother closer. "I know I should let go-- but I can't. I don't know how," he said, voice thick with confused anguish. "He's me, and I'm him!"
Raleigh had stirred then in his brother's arms, whispering his name brokenly against his throat, and strange words had welled up from Buffy's hindbrain-- or probably the Powers'-- at the sight. "Don't worry; there's still time. Counting down from seventeen-eight-oh."
Fortunately, that had seemed to make more sense to Yancy than it had to her; he'd calmed, relaxing his grip a little, and stroked a soothing hand up his brother's back. "I hope you're right," he said, then closed his eyes, laying his head back beside Raleigh's on the pillow.
The sunlight gilding the Becket boys' forms had transmuted then to a harsher and brighter glow; Buffy had glanced up to see the window replaced by a vidscreen lit with a warming message. KAIJU ATTACK, it flashed, in shades of lurid red and yellow: CATEGORY THREE. CODENAME KNIFEHEAD. Then it stuttered to a glimpse of dark waves, lashed by rain; of Gipsy Danger's navy and gold superstructure looming out of the water, Conn-Pod pierced by kaiju claws.
On the bed, Yancy's form faded a little, as intermittent as the weather. Then he solidified, and the screen changed to a view of the coastline: of a Jaeger toppling to one knee in snow-shrouded sand, then collapsing forward onto a chilly beach.
"Yancy!" she and Faith had shouted in unison, their voice somehow echoing with Raleigh's--
--and then they'd woken, chilled to the marrow with second-hand shock and grief.
"Stacks is going to think we're crazy," she concluded wearily, tucked up against her co-pilot from shoulder to ankle. "He's going to think they're crazy."
"I dunno. Might be surprised," Faith shrugged. "He ran a lot with Andy and Dawn's crowd when he came to visit, back before he got all rank-conscious and shit. He knows a lot of the stories."
"Andrew's stories," Buffy expressed her opinion of that with a wry-half smile. "I wouldn't believe half of Andrew's stories, and I lived through most of them."
She didn't add, Remember when he told all the potentials you killed a Vulcan? and Faith didn't reply, Point, but then, they didn't have to.
"He's got stories of his own, too. Remember Tokyo?"
Buffy blew out a breath at that; she had forgotten. Stacker Pentecost was known as the only pilot ever to drive a Jaeger solo; his co-pilot had fallen unconscious early on in the fight, and he'd gone up against Onibaba alone for three hours. But in one early, unguarded interview, he'd said he hadn't even noticed her absence for half of that, until he'd realized the voice in his head wasn't matching what he actually heard and glanced over to see her drooping in harness, face masked with blood.
"Okay, I get it; trust the Marshal. Stop distracting myself by borrowing trouble," Buffy sighed, leaning over to rest her cheek against Faith's shoulder.
Moments later, their vidscreen chimed with a call.
The moment of truth had arrived.
*
It was.
*
Stacks was skeptical, but by the pained look in his eyes, wanted to believe them. Marshal Pentecost couldn't afford to let any valuable resource slip out of his grasp. And by the end of the conversation, their immediate transfer back to Anchorage had been approved, regardless of the benched state of Kaiju Slayer.
He filled in a little more of the context, too, before signing off to convey their regrets to the commandant.
Gipsy Danger wandering out of Chrome Brutus's backup range to rescue a fishing trawler stranded in harm's way. Knifehead zeroing in on that exact location. Then the scenes from their dream: Yancy clawed out of the Conn-Pod while still hooked up to the neural bridge, Raleigh piloting solo.
Gipsy stumbling onto an Alaskan beach more than an hour after Chrome Brutus had arrived at her last known position to report Knifehead dead and Gipsy Danger missing. And then-- the PPDC consigning Gipsy to Oblivion Bay before they even knew whether Raleigh would survive, writing her damage off as irreparable. Which meant that more than half that boy's soul had just been torn away from him-- because a Jaeger gestalt contained more than just the pilots, it encompassed the quirks and A.I. of the machine as well.
Even if Yancy really was somehow still with him, Raleigh Becket would never be the same pilot again.
Nothing they could do would help that. Nothing had ever helped Buffy but time and her own will to keep going-- after Angelus, after her mother's death, after Heaven. But the least they could do was ensure he wasn't alone while he stabilized enough to make his own decisions about what to do next. So the first thing she did after dropping their bags at the Shatterdome was to find the infirmary.
Raleigh had already been seen to at the local hospital, and transferred back to base; he was bandaged from gouged and dislocated shoulder down to the fingertips of his left arm, and heavy black bruising peeked from the neck of his hospital gown. Buffy could only guess what else hid under the light sheet; the boy-- boys?-- slept the sleep of the heavily sedated, but the anguish lurking in the exhausted lines of his face was almost palpable in the air of the room. Who was going to look after him, indeed. Buffy didn't even ask before drawing the curtain around the bed and climbing up onto it with him.
They weren't really that close, but she knew as well as any pilot that the Drift left even the moderately compatible pairs skin-hungry and clingy for hours afterward, and in tight pairs like the Beckets or she and Faith, frequently empathically clingy as well. Whether Raleigh was alone in his own skull or not, this was the most vulnerable phase of any pilot's post-battle experience, and if it had been her--
Well. Buffy wasn't going to think about that; even the wash of reassurance from Faith's direction as she settled atop the sheet, carefully half-draped over Raleigh's unbandaged side, couldn't make her believe she'd survive yet another soulmate bailing on her. But-- something similar might help her heal long enough to come to a different conclusion, as she hoped it would for Raleigh.
It wasn't just the physical closeness; no two pilot teams, or even the same pilot team in two different Jaegers, ever bonded on the same frequency as any other, or there'd be a telepathic jumble in every Shatterdome's mess every time a group came back from a drop. But in pairs matched tightly enough that ghost-Drifting was a regular phenomenon rather than an occasional distraction, it created a sort of empathic 'noise' that other such teams could pick up. Having her and Faith near might be the only medicine that could help Raleigh's less physical wounds.
Faith stood over them for a moment, then went out and flagged down a nurse in a PPDC uniform. She came back radiating a faint mixture of concern and empathetic pain, then pulled up a chair on the other side of the bed and reached out to wrap a hand around Raleigh's wrist.
The thread of connection flared more brightly at the gesture, channeled through their friend, and the wounded pilot relaxed fractionally in his sleep with perhaps a few less lines around his eyes.
Buffy had called the Scoobies her chosen family for more than half her life, but the long-term staff of the Alaska Shatterdome had become just as important to her over the last few years, and the Beckets were like-- well, like obnoxiously cute nephews, the kind where it was impossible to decide whether the obnoxious was really a descriptor of their cuteness or the boys themselves. And Buffy would never turn her back on family-- not unless they were dead, or they turned their backs on her first.
She took a deep breath, tasting tears on the back of her tongue, and settled in to wait.
-x-