Uhm. I've been working on this for a little while. Not the most original, but hey, I'mma roll with anyway and see where it goes.
(Because I have very little of anything really that I'm sure of. I have spiderplan. It'll do whatever a spiderplan can.)
I own the neither characters, nor the universe of this fic, I'm simply borrowing them in order to wreak a little havoc.
Title taken from the song Finale, by Madeon.
Then
Jade and Artemis donated blood regularly for two reasons. It was the right thing to do, and there was usually free food. When the Jaeger Programme called for candidates, they figured that the same rationale could be applied. (They also suspected at least a few Richie Rich deck shoe wearing assholes to be there, ripe for the swiping of wallets, but that was beside the point.)
If by some manner of miracle they were both daring to hope for (not that they would let each other know that) they passed the multitude of tests the flyers had promised they might get to pilot one of those giant robotic Iron-Man-Wishes-He-Was-That-Cool suits. If that happened, they'd get food and a bed(each! A bed each!) and the constant threat of death. (Eh, that last one wasn't anything they would describe as novel, but a bed and regular food? That was something to sing home about, if they weren't two homeless kids. Artemis could write to Mom about it, at any rate.)
The form to apply was strange, but Artemis figured it to make some kind of sense to someone looking for something that meant strapping you into an Autobot wouldn't end in complete disaster. Names, birthdays, (she was barely fifteen, and Jade a few months shy of eighteen, so that had been a blatant, outrageous lie) qualifications (would being a middle school dropout be a barrier to their application?) had all seemed like reasonable question, but then it had gotten oddly specific. Whatever they were looking for, they knew exactly what it was, but hadn't told anyone else.
15. How many languages do you speak?
Five. English, Spanish, Vietnamese, German and French. (being multilingual was a big indicator of Jaeger aptitude, Artemis would later learn.)
33. Do you play any instruments?
Yes, the violin. The piano. (Not that either of them had much opportunity to practise any more, but they tried their best to keep up with it.)
61. Have you had any training in hand to hand combat?
Yes. (There was a call to elaborate, but they left that space conspicuously blank, smudged with the ghost of a pencil erased with extreme prejudice.)
95. Have you ever played any team sports?
Yes (softball, Artemis was the catcher while Jade pitched. They'd won a few medals, which they managed to hold onto, somehow.)
98. Can you drive?
(Neither of them had licenses, but they both dare to hazard a yes. They hadn't been asked for licences, after all) Yes.
The form was hundreds (okay, one hundred and twenty-nine) questions long. It had space for up to three pilot applicants, and it needed a photo of each of them. Artemis had a thick wodge of photos she'd taken when they were younger and thought they were happy, but that had been nearly five years ago, and she wasn't exactly going to call them up to date.
So they splashed out, jumping in and out of a photo booth quickly. And they posted it, in one of Artemis's precious envelopes, citing the elderly woman who gave them lunch on Sundays and a place to receive letters in exchange for gardening work. Jade liked working there, liked coaxing the plants from the earth, but she'd never actually tell Artemis as much. Not out loud where she could hear her.
Test after test, interview after interview of completely irrelevant questions (according to Jade, Artemis was sure they made sense to someone somewhere). They tried their best to look clean at each meet up, and at each event there were less and less people to stare at their tangled manes of hair and mostly clean clothes. Probably thinking that they weren't fooling anyone, that Artemis and Jade didn't even want to be there. (They did. They really did, anyone who couldn't see it wasn't looking hard enough to see the glint in their eyes, or was unwilling to meet their sharp steel-piercing gaze.)
The tough, brawny men, sets of brothers and police partners and one gay couple who pulled them aside to tell them gently that this was really dangerous work and ask them did they know what they were doing? All looked at them like they were little kids, a look that said they couldn't believe someone had let these two scrawny brats in.
(They both had fake IDs, one to push Artemis over eighteen and another to put Jade at a respectable twenty. The guy who'd made them had been a little stunned. Not even old enough to drink? They'd forked over twenty wrinkled dollars each and he'd handed back it back when they agreed that one of them would go to prom with him the following week, but he'd need to get a dress. Artemis had gone in an ugly bridesmaids' dress that belonged to his sister. She'd lost the game of rock paper scissors on purpose, or maybe Jade had beaten her fair and square.)
There'd been married couples and childhood best friends, whittled away two by two like the animals in the Ark, each assured that just because they weren't Drift Compatible, it didn't mean that they weren't close. Eventually there were only six sets of applicants left.
"We could take them," Jade said, over confidant and spoiling for a fight.
"I don't know," Artemis replied, eyeing the Navy Seals. "I'd feel pretty bad about beating these guys up."
They'd all done the fitness, the running, the sparring, the dancing, the leading each other through a room of obstacles blindfolded, puzzle solving, Mario Kart playing and there was one final interview before entering Jaeger Academy. (They called it an Academy, but it was an indeterminate time period spent learning how to pilot a Jaeger and beat the shit out of every Kaiju the Breach could produce and hanging out in a simulator while they built a Jaeger. They were getting faster at it, or maybe it just took a while to figure out how to build a robot.)
Jade and Artemis were the fourth pair out of the remaining candidates. They pulled their hair back into tight ponytails and dressed in a way that made them look a little more like a matched set (it was a twin audition technique) and look neat and respectable, kind of.
The man who'd brought them up in the elevator looked at them like he couldn't believe they thought they were fooling anyone. It would take more than neatly belted tunics and black leggings to fool him, certainly. He had the voice of a snobby butler and looked like he might have been called Alfred or something suitably Britishy sounding like that. (He was called Alfred, as it turned out and he was an excellent baker and repairer of torn clothes.)
It was the first door on the right, that's what he'd told them (Artemis had a good memory, especially for shit like that) just before he practically shoved them out the elevator and hurriedly pressed the 'Close Doors' button. (Jade insisted she knew something was off when recounting it later, Artemis was just used to being disliked by strangers who didn't want to give her and her sister a chance.) The doors dinged much faster than they normally did, and it was pandemonium.
People swarmed in, dressed as those pro-Kaiju religious nutjobs they'd been seeing on the news for months, yelling and moving in for the kill. They were unprofessional and untrained, but try fighting a zealot and you'll find that whatever god he believes in has granted him some kind of super strength. But Artemis and Jade fight this fight like they have fought a thousand others- viciously, victoriously, and without much mercy. (Murder, even if it was of weird cultist goons, would probably have reflected badly on them. Maybe put them out of the running. So they held back, just enough. That didn't mean no one went home without broken bones.)
It was going swimmingly. They were holding their own, gaining ground, Jade hadn't pushed anyone out any 20th story windows and nobody had an injury they wouldn't recover from in four-to-six weeks. It was, as previously mentioned, going swimmingly. Until Artemis almost knocked out Bruce Wayne; founder and leading private contributor (Artemis later learned that this was to be read as 'leading contributor') to the Jaeger Program with a fire extinguisher when he came to congratulate them.
Luckily, he ducked.
Of course, the first thing Bruce did after he congratulated them and assured them of their place on the Jaeger Program (in the Academy, with the food and the beds and the constant life threatening danger and the slightly greater chance to pilot one of those gigantic robots) was to order the pair of them to 'fess up about their real identities.
Artemis cheekily (and hopefully, so, so hopefully) replied that they were Jaeger Pilots. Bruce cracked a small grin before telling them that there was no way she had the vote so how old where they really.
Jade tells the billionaire in no uncertain terms that even though she's only eighteen and Artemis is only fifteen that if Jade says it's okay for Artemis to be strapped into a giant robot beside her sister, then it was okay to strap Artemis into a giant robot beside her sister. (And Jade did say it's okay, so it is. Because Jade's been Artemis's self-appointed legal guardian for at least two years.)
Bruce nodded, and Artemis and Jade are enrolled in the Academy for an indefinite length of time until they graduate by getting thrown into a giant Jaeger to beat up equally giant nightmare Godzilla monsters.
It turned out that the Academy only existed for as long as it took them to frantically build the Mark II Jaegers. Older, experienced Mark I pilots trained them while they waited. (Not that anyone was too experienced in the field of beating the shit out of the probable harbingers of the Apocalypse.)
Jade and Artemis were top of their Academy class (not that there was an official grading system, but they can beat everyone else into the rubber sparring matt, so that's what they measured by), and they spent their free time getting their high school diplomas (let's just say that neither of them were valedictorian and leave the GEDs at that) and badgering construction workers that probably had better things to do than humour teenage girls but humour them none the less.
Each set of potential pilots still viewed the others as competition, aware that they still might not get the chance to pilot a Jaeger, and they all avoided being chummy. Artemis wondered if it's not just them the other teams are avoiding, bitter over their 'natural' talent when it comes to beating people into a bloody pulp, embarrassed by their youthfulness or just unable to connect with them because they were all goody goody two shoes and her and Jade were the baddest of baddie baddie one boots in comparison.
Jade and Artemis were smart, even if they'd never been given the opportunity to really figure it out before and with the GEDs quickly out of the way they moved on to learning anything anyone in the Shatterdome was willing to teach them while the other trainee pilots sparred more or booked extra slots on the simulator.
The instructors had stated again and again that the neural handshake and the Drift were the most important parts of operating the Jaeger, but the canned memories the simulator provides are too sugary sweet and soft for Artemis and Jade to ever get fooled into thinking those memories were their memories. (The scientists behind it all were working on a new simulator, one that can create a real neural handshake but it won't be ready for another long-time yet. They all have more pressing matters to attend to, and a simulator to train pilots cannot be made top priority. It falls off of the long finger eventually, but no one ever managed find time to complain.)
Artemis became very fond of a lithe flexible Jaeger- Eden Tempest (that was an oxymoron, but Artemis liked it anyway, and that sort of thing had to happen sooner or later when you used a generator to create names for giant robots) - mostly because it had the most patient crew, the ones who taught her how to use the TIG and MIG welders and the angle grinder and all the tools it was definitely irresponsible to let a fifteen year old use on the giant Hail Mary Pass. They confided in her that, even though they have absolutely no say in whose Jaeger Tempest will be, that they hoped it would be her and Jade's. (Artemis hoped so too, but Jade knew better than to hope for anything, so she just milked the bed and the food and the showers that are hot for five whole minutes- four-and-three-quarter minutes longer than they were used to.)
The pair of them hung out with the Research and Development Department a lot, because those guys argued over their science homework in way that were both amusing and not nearly as helpful as Artemis was hoping. They also explain everything they know about the Kaiju (which is admittedly not a whole lot yet, but there's something new to learn every day) and they showed them the fun science experiments and how to blow stuff up. (How to blow a lot of stuff up. Artemis was grateful she didn't die in an explosion before she could die fighting a Kaiju.)
One of the scientists, Barry told them about his girlfriend Iris, and her nephew, who's about her age so much that Artemis told him in no uncertain terms to just fucking marry her already if he loves her so much. Barry laughed nervously and showed her the engagement ring he'd been carting around for months. (Artemis thought it was cute. Jade thought it was a good way to lose something, so Artemis was pretty sure that was what made him ask in the end. Wallets had a tendency to end up mysteriously thinner when they were around.)
Iris agreed to marry him, probably against her better judgment, and an invitation turned up for Jade and Artemis. They didn't end up going, and Barry never asked why.
There was a set of maintenance workers who taught them how to play (and how to cheat) at every card game under the sun, and how to clean just about anything that might need cleaning. (Jade and Artemis become far and above the most useful of all the recruits before they ever pilot a Jaeger.) There were a couple of caterers who teach them how not to poison themselves and how to make a dozen kinds of bread from scratch. Jade was better at it then Artemis. (Of course she was. Jade was better than Artemis at almost everything, unfortunately.)
There was the kindly, quiet man, stooped and elderly, with eyes that told a story Artemis couldn't read (no one told them what he did, no one was able to, it seemed) who let them into the Armoury (where they weren't supposed to be) and the firing range (they weren't allowed in there either) in the small hours to practice a set of skills no one in the Shatterdome needed to teach them.
But everyone was surprised at what they do know, as it turned out. Artemis couldn't do laundry, but she could fire anything with deadly accuracy (anything from a gun to a dart, a bow and arrow to a basketball. She wasn't allowed in the local snooker club anymore either, something about hustling). Jade couldn't do long division but when Barry was annoying her one day with a patronising explanation of Kaiju in the lab, and Jade synthesised a toxin in less than three minutes and threatened his life. (Artemis assured him that it means she liked him, she wouldn't waste the time it took to synthesise it otherwise. She'd just have stabbed him and been done with it otherwise. He didn't look overly reassured.)
The other cadets pretended to ignore them, ignore the pair of sisters who scrambled to learn everything they could, climbing that which should not be climbed and pestering everyone who might have had so much as a sliver of wisdom to impart. The Shatterdome is a fountain of knowledge and they drank deep, attempting to quench a thirst they didn't even know that they had.
The other cadets talked though, almost never shut up, about those strange sisters, almost feral in their fighting style like every spar is life and death and something even bigger. (Because it is, to them. This was a way out and a way in at the same time) Those sisters who only pulled back at the kill shots, when the instructors called to stop them and they snap out of whatever they had snapped into, spines ruler straight suddenly and heels clicked together. Those girls were insane and over eager and surely, surely no one would ever even consider let them in a giant robot that could level a city. Several cities.
They were wrong.
Artemis was allowed to pilot a Jaeger before she was allowed to drive. (She never got a license in the end. Neither did Jade. They became too important to be trusted with their own motoring skills overnight.)
When Jade and Artemis were strapped into a Jaeger, (their Jaeger, it's Eden Tempest and she is their Jaeger. Theirs, theirs, theirs.) to fight the Kaiju known as Snapjaw, the other cadets thought it was a waste. (Waste of a Jaeger, waste of whatever lives these girls could've hoped to have had.) They kept saying it was a waste, kept thinking it was a waste for the entire eight minutes it took them to rip the bastard limb from limb.
(There was stunned silence, then reluctant cheering, then contemplation of whether all those appendages even were limbs.)
They became Rock Stars, heroes, prodigies. They got to be on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and there's a book deal; a (mostly true) autobiography about two underdog extraordinaires. Artemis remembered the ghost-writer fondly later. (She'd been really good at dealing with very sullen teenagers who liked to antagonise people who pried in their private lives and histories.)
Artemis saved everything in a box under her bunk (under Jade's really, she refused to sleep in the top bunk point blank. Artemis thought this might be because she knew Artemis wanted the top bunk, but Jade would never give Artemis something just because she wanted it); dozens of newspaper clippings, discs of interviews, a copy of the book that her name on the cover- over Jade's- (it's supposed to be very good, but Artemis had never read it. Apparently they cut the only part she actually wrote from the acknowledgments, when she'd thanked the ghost-writer. There were a lot of photos she'd taken in it, though.). Even the action figures were there, her, Jade and Eden Tempest (they really weren't to scale, the three of them were all the same size. Artemis was miffed that they didn't acknowledge the inch and a half she was able to lord over Jade.) Her GED diploma was there, and so was Jade's, every medal, she had so many now, one that had been pinned to her breast by the President nestled with her softball one. (She preferred the softball one, mostly because it still had a smear of blood from when she used it as a nunchuck.)
All of it was tucked into a shoebox- the first pair of new shoes she'd ever owned- along with thick stacks of photographs, product of more than a few crappy disposable cameras.
Her team made fun of her- she could definitely afford a digital camera. She knew she would never remember to actually go and print the photographs, so she kept buying crappy plastic disposable cameras. Barry told her it didn't make sense, fiscally, but she could never find it in her to care too much about fiscal sense because a) no matter how much ground they are graining, it was probably still the end of the world so what was she supposed to be saving for anyway and b) she was fucking loaded. (Artemis couldn't believe it, but she also didn't know what to do with that much money.)
(She bought a violin, but no one was supposed to know that.)
(Everyone does.)
(Jade was shrewder than that, she rang up a piano company and asked for one. And they just gave it to her, free. Jade managed to get a lot of free things. Artemis knew she could too, but it felt immoral somehow. Jade was above morals.)
The shoebox was getting pretty full, by anyone's standards, and very heavy. She'd need to buy a new pair of shoes to have enough box to hold all the memories she'd made. There was some older mementos, things that corresponded in the section of her and Jade's autobiography entitled 'Origin Story'. (There were three sections; 'Origin Story', 'Ready Or Not, Here We Come' and 'How To Stare Death In The Face')
She'd never had so much she wanted to remember before.
Besides, seeing as she only had her battered Army issue combat boots, and the brown leather zip up boots that lived in the shoebox before her memories did, were starting to let in a little more water than Artemis would've liked, maybe it was time for a new pair of shoes.
She could afford them after all, what with her being loaded now and everything. They got paid well enough, but it was the royalties from the autobiography (a New York Times bestseller) and the merchandise (there was so much stuff for sale with her face on it, authorized and unauthorised) that really brought the cash into her and Jade's accounts. (Some of the money from the merchandise went into the Jaeger Programme, but Jade and Artemis are best-selling items. There was all kinds of gross porn about them on the internet. Everything from male fans filling a perceived void to tentacle porn to incest porn. That was a subject something Artemis hoped would never ever come up in an interview ever again. There were some things you couldn't unsee.)
She was thinking about shoes and where to get them when the klaxon went off. The klaxon was the loudest sound Artemis could imagine, accompanied by a flashing red light that made it feel like everything was falling apart. It was loud enough to rouse the dead, but Jade still had to be all but tipped out of bed. This was Kaiju number nine for them, and they had a record to break.
"Get up!" Artemis tugged on the blanket.
"No," Jade burrowed further into her bunk. "Fuck off."
Jade didn't care that they were going to break the record with this one, she'd rather roll over in bed, swearing sleepily in Vietnamese, and let another team from their 'graduating class' handle it. Artemis was buzzing though; this'd be nine drops, nine kills and she was only seventeen.
(It was a beautiful day.)
Some teams fixed up their armour after every drop, but Artemis and Jade both like the distressed look. It suited their public image to be battle scarred and hardened by life's troubles. The armour that they are strapped into (it was impossible to put that suit on, especially the spine, by yourself) was very familiar now (as much from public appearances in it as actual Kaiju attacks, if not more so) but neither would have described it as a second skin, it was heavy and cumbersome and the plates pinched your skin occasionally. Jade was jacked up on caffeine from a mystery cocktail (it was a combination of Red Bull, Diet Coke, Caffeine Pills and Turkish Coffee Sludge) that her boytoy Roy brought her. (Artemis pretended not to know about the whole boytoy thing.)
(Jade knew she knew though, as much as she pretended to believe Artemis's feigned ignorance. There weren't any secrets anymore. Not that there ever really were secrets, just things let unsaid as they were deemed unimportant. The only thing Jade had brought up that she'd found out from the Drift was Cameron. Jade had ignored whatever 'friends-with-benefits' thing that Artemis and Cameron had had going until it was time to sit her down and tell Artemis that that boy was getting too attached so she needed to either cut and run or grow a pair and develop some feelings for the poor schmuck.)
(The cut and run had only halfway worked. The run was the tricky part, reduced to a pitiful avoid-eye-contact at all costs. They'd been getting better though- when eye contact is made, they make serious nods of acknowledgment as opposed to looking away frantically. Artemis had faith that they would be able to recapture the magic of friendship one day.)
Artemis was excited enough that she was forced to repress the urge to babble, which, seeing as she wasn't a talkative type, wasn't really all that hard in the first place. Jade's caffeine cocktail had only levelled her up from tired to 'murderous yet alert' and even Roy the Boytoy was dancing along the periphery. Helping the techies in any way he can. (Mostly by caffeinating them.)
The Jaeger Programme, the drop days especially, were halfway between complete chaos and a well-oiled machine. (Roy was a pilot after all, together with some rich asshole named Oliver Queen whose bow and arrows Artemis liberated for her late night target practices because she still wasn't allowing in the target range.) Today, Roy was scrambling to help the techies set up, placating Jade and fetching coffee for anyone who looked like they could use it and then some that didn't. There were no idle hands on a drop day, even if Roy'd have to rush to his station to get fitted after this in case he was needed as back up. (He was a pilot, and even though Black Canary wasn't on call, but he'd go be ready just in case, because not being on called was no guarantee for not being needed.)
(He'd never let them live it down if he was needed, even if he was needed because they had died.)
There were no idle hands on a drop day. They might be beating the Kaiju back for the minute, but the Breach in the middle of the ocean is spitting out bigger and nastier beasties faster than they can build Jaegers to take them on. It was days like this that it was hard to forget that they were only delaying something inevitable, but that line of thinking wasn't helpful to anyone on drop days, so they mostly lived in a state of denial.
Someone asked Artemis a question. She made a vague non-committal noise before waving them away. She couldn't think straight, she really wanted that record. She shouldn't've been excited about the beastie that was coming through the Breach, but she couldn't help it. She and Jade were good at what they did, the best that there was.
The more Kaiju they beat the harder it was, but it wasn't impossible yet.
There weren't exactly any retired Jaeger Pilots, except Bruce Wayne, kind of.
He was mostly just promoted because his partner was dead (died in a car crash, how ordinary a way to go; the reason that Jade and Artemis weren't allowed drive anywhere by themselves. Jaeger pilots were too valuable to risk anywhere other than a giant robot) and had left him some weird son who liked to climb the rafters in and hang out in all of Artemis and Jade's favourite haunts and hack the NSA.
His name was Dick Grayson and he changed the code for the Kaiju strength category assessment software without asking anyone.
(They were sort of friends, and Artemis didn't know who that was sadder for, but she couldn't help it.)
Jade and Artemis got into Eden Tempest's head, got as strapped in as anyone was in a Jaeger (not very, and too much at the same time) and wait. It never took long, but it always snuck up on you and felt like a blow to the head. The Drift. It felt raw and vulnerable every time, even though Jade already knew everything. You needed to let everything wash over you, even if it hurt. Catch one memory and before you knew it, you were chasing the RABIT down the deep hole of human psychology. A extremely dark one in their case.
Neither Jade nor Artemis had ever chased the RABIT, although they've made more than their fair share of Alice in Wonderland jokes about it. (A fragment of their childhood bedroom flickered past their eyes, one faded poster in particular flashed into view before being swallowed in a slew of fresher, crisper memories.)
It was much easier to let everything swirl past until they sync up than let themselves get caught up in remembering. Every shitty part of their life flashed before their eyes. (It was easy to pretend that it had been as easy to let it happen.) Something glowed an affirmative green on a screen somewhere, but they knew without checking, because suddenly they were one person that happened to be two hundred and sixty feet tall. Artemis's hands started shaking as caffeine rushed through Jade's blood.
Other pilots didn't describe the Drift and piloting the same way that they did. Dinah, the psychologist that made sure none of the pilots are going to turn around and destroy a civilian population (and therefore, arguably the most valuable personnel member to the Jaeger Programme), said it was because Jade and Artemis were so young and had very little life that didn't involve each other in some way. They have never spent more than a day apart, without counting the two and a half years of Jade's life Artemis spent not-being-born.
(They didn't.)
(Artemis liked Dinah, she was very down to earth for someone who believed in psychology.)
And then there was the drop, right on the Miracle Mile (a misleading term for the ten mile mark from the coastline) outside Alaska and there was a boat where there shouldn't be.
According to the peeling letters they had to squint to read, she was the Angeline.
Angeline carried eight people on her, which was nothing compared to the population of Anchorage and the other cities within walking distance for a beastie that big, but Jade and Artemis were heroes now, and that mentality was infectious, especially when you were sharing a head space. (Jade would pretend that the hero complex was all Artemis, but Artemis knew there every thought overlapped in the Drift. They were one person here, Eden Tempest, and they wanted to save everyone aboard the Angeline.)
As soon as heroics start setting in, they're hard to shake loose, even in people who were bitter and cynical. (Compared to Jade, Artemis was downright naïve.)
So, as it stood, Jade and Artemis would've been more than happy to trade each of their eight successful Kaiju kills for one of those lives. (Assuming of course that each of those kills went to one of the other sets of pilots, like the pilots of Black Canary or Martian Manhunter and the Kaiju hadn't killed the population of a major city.) But history didn't work like that, and neither did saving lives. They needed a different plan.
The record won't matter shit if they can't save the people on that boat, actual human lives that they could see and hold in their (enormous, robot) hands, lives that were placed inconveniently between them and the Kajiu. Saving lives, all of them, was the whole point of the Jaeger Programme after all. (A part of Eden Tempest wondered if they'd have made the same choice a year ago.)
So, calmly and respectfully, they ignored Bruce Wayne and a thousand techies' angry orders and protests and made it their business to pick up those fishermen and get them out of harm's way.
Hammertail, the Kaiju, (who named these things? Probably Dick's refurbished category determining software) didn't like that one bit, lurching forward and roaring. The water rippled and waves broke, swelling out with the noise. Even inside the Jaeger head, their ears throbbed in protest. (Artemis took back what she said earlier about the klaxon.) There were the cries of the fishermen, no doubt writhing in pain and panic and fear, echoing faintly under that terrible sound. (The fishermen must have been loud, to be audible to them through it all.)
Hammertail swiped and Eden Tempest dodged back, dancing on light boxer's feet. They kept it up, dodging and dancing and trying not to lose any ground over the Miracle Mile (so named, because if a Kaiju broke it, it'd take a miracle to take the beastie down). It served only to frustrate the beastie, who roared again, the sound ringing painfully in eardrums. (Drowned out Bruce Wayne's barking voice and angry orders, though, so they found time to be grateful for small mercies.)
This was turning out to be one of the most dangerous games of keep away that they'd ever played, and they couldn't afford to lose this one. (As it was, the fishermen had probably all suffered permanent hearing loss.)
Hammertail howled, rearing its ugly head before springing, eager to rip every part of them to shreds with claws and gut them with the tusks that protruded from a serious underbite. They ducked again, swinging in up against the beastie's jaw. He stumbled back, and his heavy tail started moving (Hammertail was dangerous from all angles), swaying back and forth as he watched them, meeting their eyes with his own surprisingly calculating ones.
They were at a stalemate, and everything was altogether too quiet, only the harsh gasps as Artemis and Jade sucked in lungfuls of air. The heavy sounds of the storm building outside are muted. (Even Bruce recognised that it was a time to shut the hell up because this guy ain't nothing like anyone's seen before.) They stay focused, trying to read his next move, running a comparison with what he's shown them already.
Hammertail may have been ugly, but that didn't mean for anything new in the world of the Kaiju. They weren't pretty, and they certainly weren't soft. They were mostly dumb as shit, but you didnn't need to be smart to destroy a city when you were that big. Hammertail looked to be smart though, and that spelled for a lot of things, all of them T-R-O-U-B-L-E.
His tail was moving faster now and his shoulders and hunching he was getting ready to spring and they turned to block-
The tail he was no doubt named for, heavy and spiked like a mace, swung around hard and fast from all that built up momentum, crushing into their free arm, rendering it near useless when it crumples like aluminium foil. The arm in question was on Artemis's side, so she bared the brunt of the pain, but even Jade had to grit her teeth against the scream that threatened to rip from her lungs, the scream that poured from Artemis, spilling all the air from her and leaving her gasping. Her arm still worked, but the giant robot one it was supposed to correspond to was suddenly dead weight, barely responding to her.
They had to put the boat down if they wanted to keep up this fight, and hope that the fishermen can get far enough away under their own steam to save themselves. They were relying a lot on the preservation instincts of the captain and crew of that boat, but they were only human. (Humanity was awfully stupid when it came to danger zones and get away opportunities sometimes.)
The skies tear open, rain thrumming against the outside of Eden Tempest.
Hammertail broke through the Miracle Mile, pushing and gaining more ground than Eden Tempest had ever given before, but they pushed back, holding him and grappling and they were gaining inches. (Inches aren't anything to a Jaeger, nothing to Kaiju.) It's not enough, they can't get him back over the Miracle Mile with inches.
The crippled arm was hanging uselessly. (Worse than uselessly, actually, each move sent a fresh bolt of pain up Artemis's arm. She could hear Jade wince when it did, so it wasn't just her.) They were barely managed to block, barely managed to hold Hammertail back (Artemis could hear the baited breathe of the Shatterdome in her ear, and the distant noise or hurried preparations to send back up over the blood pounding in her ears) but this Kaiju was smart enough (too smart, and that was their whole problem) to know that they were favouring one side and-
(It wasn't slow motion. It wasn't slow motion at all, it was fast and painful and-)
-it was a feint to the left to Eden Tempest's vulnerable side and they moved and Hammerhead moved and they were open they had left a space wide open because they had gotten sloppy because they thought they were gods, unbeatable and infallible and they fall to earth hard and fast and painful when Hammerhead's claws (they were harder than any that have come before, and he was smarter) tore as though through paper, the metal shrieking and rending and the sound was nothing, nothing to Jade when she released a scream made of everything she had held in over the years and Artemis screamed like a whole becoming half and Jade's life, her life, their life flashed before her eyes but no matter what it was she wanted to cling to she couldn't chase the RABIT not now and not ever and Jade was torn from the cockpit, torn from the Drift and torn from Artemis.
Hammertail roared like he had won some great victory, beating his fists against his chest and the sound reverberates through what is left of Eden Tempest and Artemis feels it throbbing in her ears but she couldn't hear anything over her own voice and the echo of the scream made up of everything Jade didn't want to be.
Artemis was screaming still, screaming with the pain of being torn apart and torn to shreds and a loss so acute she didn't understand it, would never understand it. The sound was lonely and broken, lost in the vastness of the pacific and rage building in her chest, filling the space that the scream is vacating, the hole torn by Jade's absence.
It would've broken her ribs, the pressure pushing there, if she didn't do something about it. Hammerhead was still out there (still taking the time to pat itself on the back) and so are eight fishermen and an entire planet of people (who aren't Jade) counting on her (her and Jade) and she was going to kill him.
Nine drops.
Nine kills.
Now or never.
She was on her own, and every muscle and nerve was screaming, echoing her grief and yelling, yelling that this was a terrible idea but it was the only idea she had and no one had ever prepared a backup plan for this scenario. No one is coming to rescue her, no one that would arrive in time to save her and eight fishermen anyway.
(Jade would never let her live it down if someone had to rescue her.)
Lightening crackled around her, the air in the cockpit flooded with ozone and the reclaimer struggled to keep up with it. Let it strike. Tempest could handle it. She was in her element.
(A storm, a life or death situation, dark desperate times called and demanding for ever more desperate measures.)
She stepped across moving into the space Jade wasn't, pulling out of straps that are there for her own safety and there weren't any straps for this, to hold her in place while she stood between two pilot rigs and hoped for a miracle.
She took the full neural load.
it's painful she's on fire every part of her was burning burning she was burning burning burning searing and blazing like a lost saint and a forgotten sinner and she's all alone on her own no one no one coming burningburningburninsBURNING-
And she'd better suck it up and deal with it because Hammerhead wasn't getting any more dead while she was standing around. (Jade wouldn't have stood for such weakness. Neither would their father.)
The lightning flashed again illuminating everything and blinding her at the same time. It crackled down Eden Tempest dancing like a force of nature never should, but always seemed to.
(She's a giant hunk of metal, getting struck by lightning wasn't unusual.)
She screamed again, like it would fuel something, and punched, hard enough and fast enough to yank part of the wiring free. And she punched him again and again and again forcing her crippled arm to work because the bolts of pain don't matter shit when every part of her is burningburningburning and it was too soon and not soon enough that she crushed his glowing heart in her hands. (Not her and Jade's just hershershersshe'salonethisisjustArtemis-)
She ripped him apart, an eye for an eye, because that's how it went in what was left of her family. (Just her, alone little Artemis all alone alonealonealone-) She couldn't hear Bruce, couldn't hear anything but the warm blood trickling from her ears and she spat it out when she tasted the coppery flavour on her tongue and it spilled from her nose and her eyesight was tinged red and blood poured down her face like tears and she can smell the rusty tang of it in her nose and it dribbled from her ears and seeped from her pores like sweat and it was all she was, every part of her was blood and rage and pain and burningburningburningBURNING and no part of her was Jade and it never would be again and she turned and walked the Miracle Mile back to the shore, shaking the glowing blood off her fist.
The end of the world had been a long time coming, but it had finally hit Artemis.
Please R&R, I'll decipher that spider plan tomorrow, because with 12k+ on paper... well we'll see.
Minor edits made on 09/05/2016.