I miss my favorite show, and then Kari Kimmel's Black came up on my shuffle, and this happened.
I've actually kept this idea for a long while, that the Jaegers aren't robots and the Kaiju aren't giant lizards, but the timing wasn't right by then. Until tonight, anyhow.
This might be a long one, the first continual fanfic I've written thus far, so apologies if there should be any discontinuity in the future. This is simply a starter chapter. Bear with me. Just let me now if anything sucks or seem out of place. This isn't going to be a crossover either, because I'm going to use unspecific different takes on how the dead operate. So you won't be seeing just one side from these creepers.
Incidentally, this also fills the Jaeger box on the #3 JaegerCon bingo card, for reasons to come later.
Pompeii and its lyrics are courtesy of Bastille. I do not own any aspect of the song.
She wanted to wake up, but looking at the damp, gray ceiling above her, and turning her head and seeing that the glass door was closed as it always constantly was, and people were walking along freely and without suspense along the metal bolted floor, chattering what she thought must be something about after-hour dates over coffee, and knowing that outside the Hong Kong rain is pouring happily over the rubbish-spectacled streets, made her suddenly wish she was dead again.
The black Tissot they placed around her left wrist made itself noticeable by aggravatingly activated its alarm system, beeping on and on in an unfathomably loud tweeting noise, similar to those birds that surprise you during your morning sleep on calm, chilly winter Sundays. She always hated those birds as long as she could remember, whatever that meant. Not that she could – or wanted, for that matter - recall anything before the shock wires snapped her up from God's daydream some months ago. She laughed. She was Frankenstein. No real name that they were prohibited to return to her, no family she was allowed to console herself to, no friend she was able to contact. For the first time, the world gave her a true definition of loneliness, something she had always interpreted from movies as the simple feeling of being alone, left out, that one fat kid in the middle school gymnasium nobody wanted to pull into their dodge ball team. It humoured her tragically that it took her two accursed revivals to get the understanding of loneliness into her brain. And it's not even the entirety of her original brain. Nothing of hers she could regain. This was what the revival taught her; her own personal definition of loneliness. Loneliness was being abandoned by yourself, that peculiar moment when you began to ridicule your own existence.
She pretended to breathe. It made her feel better, at the very least. It'd been a long time since it was comforting to know you're breathing, that you're lungs had the ability to inhale air. Now that she had no need for that ability, she felt empty. It was too late for her to apologize to everything she had taken for granted before – everything was turning their back on her, leaving her to a road of dust full of thoughts she didn't want to keep in her head. The synthetically planted part of her brain whirred noisily for her to lift her head and sit up. She didn't want to. She wanted to stay there, lying like a corpse she told herself she was supposed to be every single morning that damned wristwatch beeped and beeped and beeped telling her it was a good day to be alive.
It sucked to have lost your life twice and still have your soul intact somewhere to feel the burn.
The doorbell rang. It was funny that they had installed a doorbell – it wasn't like she couldn't see who was at her door. The only thing that made her feel like they appreciated her privacy was the fact that it was a semi two-way mirror – semi because there was a switch that could change the perception of the glass to viewable from both sides an otherwise, depending on her mood, or the mood of those docs out on the hallway. Unfortunately she was a bit moody today. Must have been the injection from last night, that glowing fluid to keep her inner Frankenstein in bounds.
"Gipsy, are you awake?"
She closed her eyes. Every morning the head of her repair program would knock on her door, put on that irresistible puppy face she only used toward the Marshal and her, and ask her to breakfast together. The mess hall was sadly messy in a literal sense, not exactly a good environment if you had the identity crisis of a Revive. But Mako was nice; she'd gotten used to the synthetic skin and the contact lenses and the blackouts from injections even before the program began, even before she was transferred there from her pathetic hideout one the miserable coast of Anchorage. If she could remember the slightest detail of ever having a friend, Mako fit the details perfectly. At least she didn't glare curiously at her every five minutes.
"It's Taco Tuesday!"
"Yeah?"
"But they're serving all kinds of other good stuff."
"Hmm."
Mako didn't give up. It wasn't like her to, anyway, Gipsy knew this. She had the sense that this is a regular morning routine – her waking up to a dead mood, and Mako would spend at least ten minutes trying to get her up and play breakfast just to align her being with the other crew in the Shatterdome. It was simply a way to merge her with the rest of the Dome society. They thought it would make her feel less alien. Something to proportionate her psychological state.
Mako didn't say a word for a few moments. Gipsy could see her nose pressed against the glass, her breath creating a vague shape that she imagined shaped like Hello Kitty. She'd seen it before, on one of Mako's socks.
"Okay. I'll let you skip breakfast today, but you have to get out."
That tone was a mix of retreat and threat, relaxing yet resilient. Gipsy was starting to think that the Marshal had been teaching her Commandeering 101, specifically to get her to get back to being an entirely average human being but with a more directed purpose.
"Just to get some air."
"Do I really need any?"
"Come on, Gipsy, we don't have time to play sorority girls with PMS right now. Drift test run, remember?"
Bingo, you caught me by the magic words, Gipsy spat inside her head. If there was one thing she had been dying to shout out at the crew of the Shatterdome, it was for the sake of the remains of her soul being ripped by the same nightmare over and over again during test runs. She sometimes wondered if they ever still thought of her as human, putting her into that kind of stress. It wasn't even shameful for her to complain. The emotional pain she had to endure was overwhelming, and she had to do it at least twice a month. In all honesty, she could really use some of that Alaska wind to replace the distressing bustles and heat of Hong Kong.
But she fought it all, looking at Mako's determined face, the blue edges of her hair tapping on the glass, framing her tense cheekbones. If all decided to fall, at least she had Mako. It was safe for her to call her family.
Mako pressed her forehead harder against the glass.
"Allright, allright, I'll get up," Gipsy grumbled as she kicked off the pastel blanket from her torso.
The contact lens bowl sat neatly on the smooth oak nighstand, just below the wall lamp. She flung her palm just below the bulb to turn the light on, and taking the bowl with her, walked wearily toward the mirror by the dresser to set her human eyes in action. Putting them on wasn't hard – the feeling of looking at the color of your pupils afterward and realizing you weren't supposed to sport those browns or any kind of colors in those pupils anymore bothered her to no extent. It annoyed her that she was this grumpy every morning. On good days she would at least wake up relaxed and tranquil, with less inner storm. This wasn't going to be one of those days. She could predict the storm to be leaving by mid-afternoon at the earliest.
Her boots stomped the carpet floor as she made her way across the small apartment she had been stationed in and opened the doorknob. Her jacket, hanging lazily from the hanger behind the door, watched her glare at it with such distaste as she made her way out of the door. Her apartment was the only bunker in the entire corridor, and even though the door was designed to look just like any other crew bunk door from the outside, she still got glances that irritated her, mostly from the younger part of the crew. She had tried to like everyone the first time she came in as a supposedly normal person. It occurred to her later that those glances would come off so regularly as to be considered normal.
Mako had her clipboard tugged between her hand and her chest as usual. Their boots were of the same size, but Gipsy stomped them against the metal floor much louder, and they had to give her a bigger work shirt because of the extra muscles and the broad shoulders. Mako handed her a blue hairband – Gipsy had lost her previous one just the day before, and Mako always had the initiative to give her new ones or even, on some occasions, find them for her. Gipsy never asked her to, she was always unconscious or under heavy medication during these events. Mako regarded those as simple zap-offs. People get those, and it's a part of being normal.
But what is normal, anyway?
"I'm gonna take a wild guess and assume you haven't eaten yet," Gipsy said between tying her black hair into a loose ponytail and trying to scratch her nose with her elbow to shake off the imaginary headache. Mako had her eyes straight forward and her chin slightly low; how the reserved gesture added to her air of intelligence and authority constantly captivated Gipsy. Here was a young woman who could hold up her honour and speak out her mind without hesitation, a woman so intelligent she could be enclosed all she wanted and still earn the utmost respect from anybody. After Gipsy finished fiddling with her discomfort she would grab her arm and they'd walk down the halls into the mess hall hand in hand. She would speak in a low tone of lame jokes, gossiping the crew, making Gipsy feel like any other young women out there, the ones she always saw on TV shows. High heels, D&G handbags, The Devil Wears Prada. Mako's natural attitude made her think of what she used to be back before the revival. Had she been a socialite, going into offices wearing tight skirts, red lipstick, hair bunned to give the bosses an air of sexy sophistication? Or had she been a post-graduate political activist, shouting protests at the government for making stupid decisions on the plagues that severely cuased thousands, even millions of lives?
Mako said she could skip breakfast – she didn't say she could skip mess hall. Gipsy walked next to her, looking at the floor with her thumbs slipped behind her belt as Mako grabbed a tray and filled it with a sandwich still wrapped in clear foil, a juicebox, and a cup of chocolate pudding. They took an empty table and sat across each other, just the two of them. She gracefully unwrapped the sandwich as Gipsy watched, her hands folded on the cool tabletop. Strands of untied hair close to her broad forehead blew into her eyes, but she didn't feel them.
Mako pushed across the pudding cup. Revives don't really need to eat – Gipsy thanked silently the scientists for augmenting her entire digestive systems so that she only needed to feed at a minimum rate without minimalizing her amount of energy. She only ate when she wanted to, and she could still excrete. She guessed she just wasn't those girls who lashed out their feelings on food.
"It's good. It's the regular Yang recipe." Yang Niulan was their personal favourite cafeteria cook – her pudding recipe was made especially to welcome Gipsy into the Shatterdome just 5 months earlier. Her cooking's' only admirers were Gipsy and Mako.
"She was pretty upset that you didn't want her pudding."
"I just don't feel like eating."
"At least you can't get fat."
"Hah, I thought you didn't care."
"I don't. It's just funny that you're acting like you do."
She gave her a puzzling grin. There was always something about her grin that made her question if she was mocking her, examining her, or just plainly trying to get her to comply with the joke. Gipsy snorted.
"You brought your iPod?"
Mako took out her MP3 player and handed one of the earphone buds to Gipsy. They both silently plugged each into their own ears, and Mako played a song, the same song she always played in the morning during cafeteria moments between her and Gipsy.
I was left to my own devices…
"I dreamed about them again last night," Gipsy said, almost whispered, shakily, looking away at the cafeteria door and the torrent of people coming in and out, work boots banging against the floor, numbing her ears. Chitter-chatter, mumbles, hums like bumblebees. Everything around her was in motion. Alive. Taunting.
Mako paused before she could have her first bite at the sandwich. Her face suddenly turned sullen and aware. Empathy oozed out of her eyes. She leaned forward.
Many days fell away with nothing to show…
"Why didn't you tell me earlier? I could've asked Control to delay the test run."
"It's not gonna be a problem, I promise."
When was the last time she promised anyone anything? She promised LOCCENT to keep her low so as to not attract the other dead; she broke that. She promised the boys victory, and hell, did she break that one too. There was one thing the boys subconsciously inherited to her and that was their ego. That big, beefy, Becket pride.
And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love…
"But it's different this time, Mako. I mean, it used to be just those things, " she emphasized bitterly as her arms pushed deeper inward crossing one another, "ravaging, tearing into my head and Yancy's blood all over the place, just that scene on replay, but last night…there was no Yancy. Just Rals, lying on the ground, and he was in his sweater and pants and boots, and snow was piling up his back. He was freezing. He kept whispering Yancy, Yancy, Yancy, but nobody showed up, and I just knew he was freezing to death."
Her sentences were rabid, impatient, panic. She could feel imaginary sweat trickling down her arched eyebrows, down to her cheeks, all the way to her thin lips into her mouth, sultry on her tongue, tasting like fear, failure, inapprehension. She let her knees joggle while she tried hard to control her guts. She turned her head at Mako, who was intently fixing her sharp eyes at hers. They were dissecting her, she realized, trying to gather the smallest piece of information from her story, analysing them one by one, drawing a conclusion, like reading tarot cards.
Great clouds roll over the hills, bringing darkness from above…
"And then he called my name."
The song sounded distant in either of their ears. Mako was now alert – she could sense something was churning within her complex systems, something the tech crew might not be able to explain. She had a feeling this was much deeper than technology could fathom. No, this was different. This was concerning her mind. Their mind.
"Mako-"
The young Japanese pushed her tray aside. Eyes started to swing secretly at their directions.
"-he's going to pilot me again, is he?"
But if you close your eyes…
Five years extinct and the word was still as sacred.