I couldn't get this out of my head. Here, enjoy.
Charlie Kenton leaned back in his seat, eyes wearily closed. He sighed and stretched out his legs, getting comfortable in his chair that brought up memories of visits to the dentist's office.
"He should be here any minute," his handler told him.
Charlie made a dismissive noise in response, giving her a blaming look. They had been waiting for his drift candidate for over twenty minutes, and he still hadn't shown. Not a good first impression, especially considering that Charlie didn't even have a name yet for this rookie, only two numbers: 50 and 49. The first number was the number of times the kid had gone in a simulator drop. The second number was the amount of times he came out of those simulations triumphant. Charlie was achingly curious about that one flop, but for the most part he was pissed about having to wait.
Not that Charlie was rarely pissed, however. He was pissed when, following Finn's retirement from Ranger to Ops, they put him on indefinite leave. He was pissed when they gave good ole Noisy Boy to some new hotshot team, let them put their grubby mental fingerprints all over his precious Mark IV baby, and he was pissed when, after four years of sitting on his ass being pissed at basically nothing, they called him up for a special project and then refused to tell him anything more.
They even refused to tell him the name of his drift-compatible rookie.
"What is the deal with this kid, anyway?" Charlie demanded his handler, Bailey Tallet, a UN representative of the United States, sitting pretty in a suit she seemed to wear like armor. "There's gotta be something special or else you wouldn't put up with this bullshit."
Bailey gave him a thinly veiled look that demanded he go back to fuming in silence. He did so with a frustrated noise, settling even farther down in his chair, legs stretched out as far as they would go. He was the picture of relaxation and he would be damned if he had to move an inch for the benefit of whatever slacker was going to walk through the door. He closed his eyes.
He didn't have long to wait, and it wasn't hard to fulfill his promise to himself.
Even as the door opened and Bailey moved her chair back to stand in greeting, Charlie remained the very image of laziness, arms crossed at his chest, eyes closed. He listened to the sound of the rookie walking in, his footsteps stopping abruptly as he entered. He sucked in a hard gasping breath and then released it, slowly. Then there was the sound of weight being settled on the other reclining chair, and Charlie held onto his composure as the headset was lowered over his close-cropped hair.
"You ready, rookie? They told you all the rules?" he asked in the general direction of his partner, eyes still closed.
"Do you even remember the rules, old man?" the voice that responded was male, young, and vaguely familiar. Sharp and acidic.
Before Charlie could retort the countdown began.
Charlie had to admit, the drift was strong from the start.
There was the physical response, of breathlessness with no source, a slight tingling in the fingertips as blood flow was temporarily rushed to the brain, a slight bit of vertigo, although not so strongly they would collapse when they drifted standing.
Images began to bleed, diffusing together at such a rapid pace it was like focusing on memories of a single heartbeat, but there was a few highlights that jumped out, flashes and moments of a child and a teenager and all the strong moments of pain and regret, and he knew that the rookie was getting the same from him, making the experience of spying on a lifetime a little less awkward. The strength of the emotions and sights was very, very strong, stronger than anything Charlie had had with Finn, and he let it rush on by without making a grab for anything specific.
But then, something different.
The hard, incorporeal rush of colors and sights diminished suddenly; it was given weight, and Charlie felt his stomach suddenly drop. His heart rate accelerated as he realized what was happening and he withdrew as quickly as he could from the drift, clinging to his own memories, lest he get pulled down as well..
He opened his eyes and turned his head, almost dislodging the headset. The rookie was still lying there, eyes locked straight ahead, on the ceiling. "Kid! Kid, don't go after specific memories, do you hear me? Don't chase the R.A.B.I.T.—fuck."
He turned his head to tell the Op to cut the tie and pull the rookie back, but then the young man turned to him, blond hair looking smooth and edgeless, eyes gleaming and familiar. Too familiar.
"Come on," he said, goading, and even though Bailey was shouting at him not to do it, Charlie tightened his jaw and dove back in, let the memories take weight and pull him under, arms straining for a fight.
He opened his eyes and he was in a living room, decorations outdated and the television looking second-hand. A young boy played on the carpet with toy jaegers and a tiny model kaiju, not based on any existing one, Charlie was able to tell at once, just an approximation of the wildness, the destruction, made tiny to fit into a toddler's hand.
Behind the young boy, watching with a serene look on his face, was the rookie. He stood there, shorter than average, in his training blacks like all the others in the academy for pilots.
Charlie didn't dwell long on the fact that anyone chasing R.A.B.I.T.s was never physically there in their normal age or dress, and immediately called out "What the hell are you doing?!" He formed fists of his hands.
The rookie looked up, his strangely familiar eyes now hooded beneath a sarcastically raised eyebrow. "You really don't recognize me?"
"Am I supposed to?" Charlie asked, exasperated. "We need to get out of here, however you got here in the first place—"
"Give it a minute," he cut him off, and then stepped aside as the front door opened, revealing a tired woman with faded blonde hair and kind blue eyes.
Charlie stopped breathing. The memory swam around him, and he walked forward in a daze, watching but not comprehending as a very familiar woman took the boy into her arms and picked him up. She carried him past Charlie, into the kitchen, not seeing him.
He looked once again to the rookie.
"M-Max?" he stuttered, not accepting, not yet. It had been too long. Longer than forever.
Max, his son, with perhaps a bit of him in his jaw and shoulders, gave a grim, cold grin and a consenting nod. "Now you're getting it."
He brushed past him and walked into nothing, dissolving into the drift, and taking the memory with him.
Charlie came back to reality to the sensation of the headset sliding from his head as he sat up, looking around and feeling the post-drift headache set in around his neck and shoulders. He looked to Max, sitting up as well and wincing, face contorted. Meanwhile, Bailey was making a racket at the Op on duty and the man who had arrived with Max, his handler and trainer in the academy, berating him.
"Why didn't this show up in the background check?" she demanded.
"We didn't look too far, once we found the initial drift compatibility to be so high…" he tried to say, but Bailey was nothing if not scary as hell when mad.
"The compatibility was high because they're related!" she hissed, and pulled back one arm like she was about to hit him. Max stood up like he was about to stop her, but swayed heavily and sat back down, face pale.
Charlie stepped in.
"It's alright," he said, standing and cracking his neck, "It's fine. No one was hurt, we were just… shaken a little."
He looked to Max with a meaningful look.
"Yeah," the young man said, "Yeah, just… shaken." He seemed a bit confused, but it gradually faded away to something more like smug triumph. A twisted, proud smile, that Charlie could remember seeing in the mirror, as photographs of himself sitting on Noisy Boy's foot in his flight jacket.
Charlie looked at Bailey, who still had lines of anger etched on her face.
"He's my co-pilot," he said, and his tone left no room for argument.
Max wasn't surprised when Charlie went looking for him after their experimental drift together. In fact, he made sure to sit in his bunk with the door open, giving the older man easy access when he finally tracked him down.
Charlie wasted no time, shutting the door and standing with his muscled arms crossed over his chest. "What the hell was that?"
Max, sitting on his bed, looked up. "I chased the R.A.B.I.T.," he said bluntly. "I'm just better at it than most people."
"No, that wasn't just some R.A.B.I.T. chase. You went looking for that specific memory, and then you brought it to me. That's not normal. How did you do it?"
Max shrugged, an easy roll of his shoulders, and Charlie sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "You are your mother's child," he sighed, and then sat down in Max's desk chair. Then he winced, checking to make sure that his turn of phrase wasn't causing any problems. Judging by Max's look of disinterest, it wasn't. "Look, kid…"
"My name," Max cut in acidly, "Is Max, not kid. And I don't want to hear anything you have to say."
"Well, too bad," Charlie barked. "You're my co-pilot. We've got one of the highest drift compatibilities ever seen, and they're putting us in their new pet project, whatever the hell it is. We need to talk, because if we drift again without clearing any of this up, it's going to end badly."
Max looked away and tightened his jaw. Charlie flinched inwardly, having done that same gesture of submission countless times in his life before. The more he watched how Max moved, it became clearer he got his looks from his mother, but his temperament from him. How that would work in a jaeger in a battle situation, only time could tell.
"Your mother… I loved her very much. Alright? Don't ever doubt that."
Max gave him a look in response that told him exactly how much he doubted that.
Charlie sighed. What was he thinking, agreeing to let this kid inside his head in situations that could get them killed? "I just want to clear up any problems between us. Honestly. I mean, there must be something, your mother told you about me being a pilot, that made you want to join up…"
The look Max shot him in response was incredulous. "Alright. You want to clear things up? Here's one for starters: I'm not here for you. Piloting is good money, fame, and saving people. How could I say no to that? You just showed up."
Charlie gave a small groan and wearily closed his eyes. "That's how it's gonna be, huh?"
"Frankly you're not my dad. Sure, you're responsible for me and all that, but when you really get down to it you're just a stranger. A co-worker. Let's keep it that way."
"You're a smart-ass, you know that?" Charlie snapped.
"I'm perfectly aware," Max replied, standing. "Now get out of my room."
Charlie couldn't help a small smile from appearing. "Now you're really starting to sound like my son."
The look on Max's face encouraged him to beat a hasty retreat.
"How exactly are you expecting to pilot a jaeger with your long-lost son?" Bailey demanded of him the next morning, on their way to the training area for their first day of physical trials. Normally with such a strong drift test run they could have forgone the physical aspect, but considering the new information come to light, they wanted to be sure that there wouldn't be any issues with the physical aspect of piloting.
"Carefully," Charlie said in mock seriousness, and Bailey gave a swift punch to one of his arms.
"I'm serious. Have you two even talked about… what happened with his mother?" Normally Charlie would have been flattered with the amount of care and worry in her voice, but he had caught himself tightening his jaw in response to it, and noticing that small connection to his son made him only weary.
"We sat down and had a short talk after we drifted," he said evenly. "We've agreed to keep our relationship businesslike."
Bailey almost stopped walking for half a minute before scoffing and walking with longer striders to keep up with Charlie. "You're kidding. You've never seen your son before, he turns up as one of the highest possible drift compatible pilots for you, like, impossibly high, and then during your first drift together he chases a R.A.B.I.T…."
Charlie stopped himself before he could tighten his jaw.
"… and you just agree to keep it professional." She sounded fifty shades of doubtful, with a few hints of mockery tossed in for flavor.
"Yeah, pretty much. Neat, huh?" Charlie flashed her his biggest shit-eating grin as he pushed his way into the gym, the floor covered in mats. Max, in a deviation from his current precedent of being late to everything, was already there, getting his knuckles taped by an attendant before pulling on a pair of boxing gloves.
"No staffs?" Charlie asked, pleasantly surprised.
Max barely looked at him. "I have boxing experience, and so they think this will be a better judge for out physical compatibility."
"For this project, we're looking for something different than anything we typically look for in a physical compatibility test," Bailey informed them both as Charlie shrugged out of his flight jacket and was given a roll of tape to wrap around his hand, waving off the attendant who offered help.
"Are you going to tell us what it is you're looking for?" he ribbed her.
She gave him a look.
"Of course not," he sighed, ripping the tape with his teeth and starting on the other hand. "Tell me, are we ever going to know exactly what it is we're training for?" Max, across the room, perked up in interest in her answer.
"Mr. Kenton," Bailey said, her voice dripping with sweetness, "I am just a representative of the United States government and have no idea about classified information."
"That means she's part of the committee behind this whole thing," Charlie said across the room to Max, who couldn't help a small smile. Bailey glared and took out a clipboard, as did several people who looked like scientists. One was the Op from their neural handshake.
"When you're ready, Mr. Kenton. Mr. Kenton." Bailey looked at both Charlie and Max in turn, and they both tightened their jaws, nearly in unison.
They squared up at the middle of the room, touched gloves, and fell back into defensive positions. "I don't know if you're aware, but I was a middle weight boxing champ back in the day," he said.
"Waaaay back in the day," Max replied easily, and Charlie straightened, about to snap something about respect, and Max darted out a straight jab to the face, taking him by surprise.
Charlie fell back into position, sputtering slightly. "You're ruthless," he informed his son in a wounded tone, trying to suppress any feelings of pride.
Max smiled brightly in return. "I'm pragmatic," he replied, and went for another jab. Charlie cut in and got a hook right in his abdomen, releasing Max's breath in a loud huff. The young man backed off, hunched over, trying to get his bearings.
Charlie turned to the gathered scientists. "Isn't this considered child abuse?" he asked, and barely managed to fend off Max getting his breath back and coming after him.
They crashed together again and again, testing weaknesses and pushing edges. Max tried out Charlie's low hook and caught him by surprise, and Charlie retaliated with Max's habit of quick jabs to vulnerable areas. Again and again Max would copy Charlie's moves, and they continued on and on for what seemed like hours, losing ground and then gaining it. Blood dripped down Max's nose, and Charlie could feel his left eye swelling shut.
"Alright! Alright!" They both skidded to a half-stop at Bailey's call, and they looked over to the panel of scientists and representatives, all scribbling away in excitement. Bailey was grinning at them widely.
"You're in," she said. And then, before Charlie could pant out a reply, she said, "You get to meet Atom."
Yeah, so, I'm going to be writing more. Review?