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Alarms were just part of life at Kirkwall Shatterdome; not a day went by without at least one klaxon blaring in the background of the cavernous, concrete-lined labyrinth. Anyone staying there for any length of time had to learn to identify what alarm went what by the tone, the volume, and the part of the base it was sounding off from, so they'd know whether they could go back to bed or scramble for their lives.
Which was why this alarm made all four of the figures deeply involved with a ferocious game of Wicked Grace (no money; betting for chores only) stop what they were doing and look up intently, heads cocked like a hunting dog that heard the horns blowing to start the chase.
"That's definitely an incursion," Sebastian remarked, scraping one nail nervously against the edge of his cards. "Who do you think they'll send?"
"Not you; Fenris is laid up in the infirmary with a broken foot for at least another week," Hawke told Sebastian, who pulled a rueful face of agreement. He turned to the next member of their foursome, a dark-haired beauty who handled her cards like she'd been born with a deck in her hands. "And not you or Merrill either; Nature's Fury is still in drydock for repairs."
"Some people get all the fun," Isabela said with a pout.
"Guess it'll be either you or me, Hawke," said the fourth player with a rueful, self-deprecating smile. "And let's be honest, that means it'll probably be you. Your track record is much better than the Guard Captain's."
"That's just because you and Aveline haven't been in the game long enough," Hawke said generously. "You're still finding your feet together; your kill ratio will improve with enough kills to your name."
"I hope you're right; I know I can't really compare to Aveline's first..." Donnic began, but was cut off when the alarm klaxon suddenly silenced with a final raucous whoop.
The PA system crackled with a whitewash of static, and then with a voice; "Kirkwall Champion pilots, report for duty in the hangar immediately. Kirkwall Champion pilots, report for duty in the hangar immediately..."
Hawke let out a whoop of his own as he jumped to his feet, throwing his hand of cards down onto to the table. "Hear that, Isabela?" he cried. "Kirkwall Champions ride again!"
"Stealing all our kills," Isabela bemoaned. "Bring me back something shiny, will you?"
Hawke grinned, even as he quickly gathered his kit back up around him; even when he was technically off-duty, he never let it stray far. "I'll bring you back some radioactive kaiju balls, how does that sound?"
"Oh, Hawke," Isabela said with an exaggerated sigh and flutter of her thick eyelashes. "You do know how to treat a lady. And here I thought you'd get all out of practice."
Donnic coughed, and Sebastian flushed a deep red; Hawke laughed over his shoulder as he dashed towards the doors.
The hallways were thronged with hurrying Shatterdome personnel, though not as many as there could have been; as ear-shattering as the alarm was, it was still one of the lesser ones, not an all-hands at stations call. That alone told Hawke a lot about what he could expect to face; nothing they hadn't faced, and thoroughly curb-stomped before.
Still, it didn't do to get careless. Never turn your back on the Breach, the older pilots said - at least, the ones who had lived long enough to become older. There's always another surprise.
Hawke had moved quickly, and the other Jaeger Wardens melted out of his path as soon as they saw his face - still, by the time he got to the hangar, his co-pilot was already there, already ensconced in the cockpit and being hooked up to the neural harness. "What took you so long, Hawke?" Varric yelled out, to laughter and hoots of agreement from the other Wardens. "I've been cooling my heels in here waiting for your slow arse to show up!"
"Hey!" Hawke threw himself into a lift, pounding on the cables as though that would make them lift him faster. "Not everyone spends all their time in a Jaeger's cockpit just waiting for things to blow up, y'know. Some of us have lives!"
Varric barked out a laugh. "Ha! Not you, Hawke," he said. "You live for killing Kaiju and we both know it."
The lift finally arrived at the level of the cockpit, and Hawke slid off it into the heart of the great machine, hastily stowing his gear on the hooks and lockers provided for that purpose. "Won't argue with you there, old man," he said, flashing Varric a grin. "In fact, I think I'm ahead by one."
"No way, I'm definitely up one on you!" Varric scoffed.
It was an old joke, and Hawke grinned more from exhilaration and nerves than any real humor as he stepped into his place in the harness and waited for the techs to hook him up. Of course, neither of them could actually be ahead of the other, since all of their kills had been as a team; but the easy banter helped to get the Drift flowing between them.
Varric wasn't wrong about Hawke's passion for killing kaiju. He'd always wanted to be a pilot, ever since the Jaegers were first commissioned and the Jaeger Wardens formed to support them; Hawke had only been a teenager then, but he'd dreamed and trained and plotted for the moment with every testosterone-laced fiber of his being. Seen himself inside a Jaeger cockpit, just like he was now, with his mind and body driving the behemoths into battle in tandem with his partner.
But that had been before the kaiju had made landfall at Lothering, where Hawke's family had been sheltering; before the kaiju's claw had descended on Bethany, his baby sister, before the kaiju had torn his family apart for ever.
After that, it had been personal.
He and Carver had made their way to the Shatterdome together, determined to make it as pilots - everyone said that siblings made the best pilots, after all, had the most shared memories and best chance of compatibility in the Drift.
Or at least that was what the recruitment posters said - the reality failed to live up to the dream. He and Carver, the technicians told them in no uncertain terms, were not Drift compatible. At all.
And that would have been that - the two of them resigned to living out the days of the war in the barracks with the other failed hopefuls. But that night, Hawke had gone in a foul temper to the canteen and proceeded to get spectacularly drunk, and then spectacularly in trouble with a pair of ex-Wardens in the bar and set off a truly magnificent bar fight. At the other end of the bar had been Varric, drowning his own sorrows; he'd made a valiant effort to stay above the fray until a bar stool had smashed over his head. His head won.
So had Varric and Hawke.
The next day they'd presented themselves as pilot-candidates again, and this time the Drift compatibility score had been stunning. They'd been in pilot training by the end of the day, and fitted for neural harnesses by the end of the week. Their first chance at battle had come less than a month later - the kaiju [name and location] - and Hawke had never looked back.
"Left hemisphere on-line," the computerized voice sang in his ear, drawing him out of the stream of memories that always came with the Drift. "Right hemisphere on-line. Neural handshake complete."
Hawke breathed again, feeling as always the strange echo to the breath that came when in the harness, before he and Varric had quite synched up their biorhythms. He keyed up his headset mic. "What have we got today, Warden-Commander?" he asked.
The deep voice of Warden-Commander Cousland cut across the channels, sounding calm and measured and authoritative as ever. "We have an incursion out by the Awakening Sea, on a coastal shelf south of the Breach," he said. "Aveline and Donnic will be your backup, should you need it; the others will stand by to defend the base. Are you prepared?"
"Aye aye, Commander!" Varric said snappily.
Hawke held off for a moment. "Depends, is my boy in the booth yet?" he called out, keying his mic down to the combat channel. "Anders! Are you there?"
There was a rustle of static, and then a warm, familiar voice came over his headset. "I'm here, Hawke," he said. "As always."
Hawke couldn't stop the stupid grin that spread across his face as the words sank in. "Then I'm ready for anything," he announced. "Kaiju can eat my shiny metal ass!"
"Mm, do be careful, love," Anders said, his volume dropping to a deep purr. "Don't do anything reckless out in the field today, or I'll have to find someone else to eat out my ass later tonight. Nobody else's dick is quite like yours, love, so keep it all in one piece and come home safe, all right?"
Hawke felt the flush rising in his cheeks, but he couldn't stop grinning; at least, not until another familiar voice coughed uncomfortably in his ear. "Anders," Aveline said in a strained tone of voice, "you do realize that your mic is set to broadcast to the whole base and not just to Hawke's headset..."
The channel burst out into raucous laughter, and Hawke joined in uproariously, imagining the look on Anders' face when he realized he'd been caught out. "All right!" he said, cutting over the jeers and teasing that were certain to follow. "Let's get this show on the road. Talk kaiju to me, Anders."
Anders cleared his throat, then again before he managed to return his voice to its normal tone. "It looks like a Category Three, code name 'Vartarrel,' " he said.
Hawke heard another voice muffled in the background behind Anders, not over the channel. "Honestly, how do you come up with these names," it said.
"Because that's what it is," Anders replied irritably, then launched further into his explanation. "We're getting some chemical traces off its saliva that look bad. Don't let it spit on you. Aside from that, just watch out for the legs."
"The legs?" Hawke said, somewhat puzzled. Usually, teeth and claws and horrible stinging quills were a bigger problem than legs.
They had spent the whole conversation slogging across the rocky coast north of the Awakening Sea, their huge stride eating up the distance. They slowed as they entered the water, heavy surf pounding over the metal legs, as they approached the blip on their maps that marked INCURSION.
At first it was just a colorless lump bobbing in the surf above the coastal shelf, too small and distant to even make out its form. As they approached, it seemed to catch wind of them, and turned to charge in their direction. Water sloughed off around it in churning whirlpools as it rose from the surf; a blotchy, mottled-gray hide over its head and back, with a queer pale orange light glowing off its underbelly.
Its head - at least, Hawke guessed it was the head, it was on the forward end of the beast and it was at least vaguely head-shaped - split open horizontally, revealing a ghastly greenish light framed by rows and rows of razor-sharp incisors. It screamed in horrific defiance, grayish flesh bunching and shuffling as it rose from the water... and rose... and rose...
"Oh," Hawke said as it reached its full height, towering over them like a massive jumping spider, hissing and raining toxic spittle from far above. It had at least four pairs of limbs that he could see from this angle - some thick and knotted like tree trunks, bearing its massive weight, others thin and spindly and twitching in a nervous, worrying fashion. "Those legs."
"Holy shit!" Varric swore from beside him.
Hawke could only agree. "It's like a praying mantis fucked a spider and had a baby," he said. "A giant, acid-spitting monster baby. That's also a bear."
"That thing's got to be taller than Drakon Tower!" Varric continued. "How is that only a cat-three?"
"Because it may be tall but it hasn't got all that much mass," Anders answered his (probably rhetorical) question. "Those legs are going to be pretty spindly. Break a few of those, and you'll bring the rest of it down within reach."
"Oh, is that all?" Varric said, heavy with sarcasm. Hawke only grinned.
"Sounds like a plan," he said. "Let's do it."
The first part of the fight could only be described as nerve-wracking. Varterral moved fast for something its size, and the thick dragging waters on the coastal shelf inhibited Kirkwall Champion's movement much more than the tall, spindly kaiju. Two thousand tons of metal and wires, the Jaegers had never been particularly delicate instruments, but they'd never felt so clumsy as they did now. They had to stay on edge, every nerve singing, waiting for the right moment to push their Jaeger to the left or the right to avoid a flying gob of corrosive spittle. After seeing the way the water churned and bubbled when it came into contact, and the rapidity with which a nearby rock had been reduced below the waterline, they had no desire to come into contact with it themselves.
Their only saving grace was that the Varterral blatantly telegraphed its movements; it was always obvious where it was aiming to spit next, and only a few minutes of narrow escapes taught them the range of motion on its swinging legs. They were more like mandibles than legs, Hawke thought, and felt Varric agreed; lined on one edge with ugly sawtooth protrusions and ending in cruel barbed hooks.
One of those legs came whistling in towards them from the left side, but Hawke was ready for it; he dodged the swing and then caught it, gripping the insectoid protrusion between the two huge metal gauntlets of the Jaeger. For a moment, monster and machine pushed back equally against each other - then Hawke found the right leverage and shoved, and the spindly leg snapped clean off in his hand.
The kaiju reared back with a hideous shriek, one that made their ears ring even with the muffling protection of the suit around them. The severed end of the limb flailed wildly through the air, and acid spittle sprayed widely into the air and fell in a gentle rain all around them. They could feel the soft pinging and hissing as even the small drops began to eat their way into the metal skin, and had to scoot to get Kirkwall Champion out of range.
Staying in close range to any of the legs was nearly impossible - the kaiju moved them too quickly, and the acid spit made it too dangerous to stay in one spot too long - so they fell back on ranged weapons. Varric was mostly dominant here, although they were still both in sync, and Hawke fell back and let Varric's thoughts race through and around and over him in the Drift. Memories of his childhood in Orzrammar, his mother and brother, the long march in exile. Memories of one shooting range after another, each one blending into another, rifle becoming shotgun becoming handgun in their hands as all their focus narrowed down to the target.
The kaiju screamed and staggered as smoking craters peppered its head, underbelly, and the strangely delicate joints of its legs. Varric didn't shoot wildly or blindly, and he didn't waste ammunition; every shot went precisely where he wanted it to, and every shot hit somewhere that hurt. It was half of what made Kirkwall Champion so effective at their job; between Varric's accuracy and his stingy conservation of ammunition, they could keep up their rate of fire for a long, long time.
Varterral began to limp and stagger as one spindly leg was blown to a smoking ruin, then a second one; it began to sway dangerously on its remaining legs and Kirkwall Champion followed up, harrying the kaiju remorselessly with a barrage of shots to its beaklike head, and blows to its remaining wobbling legs. The creature let out a shriek of agony and hatred, lashing out with its remaining limbs; they dodged, and the motion left the kaiju scrambling and unbalanced.
Seeing the opportunity, they darted in and sliced one of their blades across the bulging, monstrous tendons. Spurting viscous blue blood, the leg buckled - but a spasm knocked Kirkwall Champion back, and their heel caught in a hidden fissure the kaiju's claws had dug in the ocean floor. The Jaeger lurched, the pilots fighting to keep the machine upright even as they struggled to free themselves from the unexpected obstacle. "Shit!" Hawke yelled.
"Champion, move!" Aveline's voice crackled urgently over their comm. "It's about to spit again!"
"Trying!" Varric grunted back over the mike, and put a firm stop to their panicked thrashing. They reached down to brace their gauntlets against an underwater outcrop of stone, and with the new leverage, heaved -
Newly freed, they stumbled to the side, but not quite fast enough to avoid the steaming gob of corrosive acid that the kaiju flung vengefully down on their position. Half of it missed them entirely, splashing down into the water beyond them, but the rest of the acid caught on the Jaeger's right shoulder, trickling down the outside of the arm. A gentle hiss built quickly into a stuttering, grinding groan as the metal skin of the Jaeger writhed under the assault, the edges curling back from the hole being eaten into the interior of the suit, and Hawke flung them both with a splash into the saltwater in hopes of quenching the acid's bite.
Alarms sounded all around him, damage reports and environmental hazard reports, and both pilots staggered and struggled to regain their feet. But over everything Hawke heard one voice, high and panicked over his headset.
"They're hit!" Anders yelled. "Oh, Maker, they're down! Hawke! Hawke, are you all right?"
"I'm fine!" Hawke yelled back, wrenching the Jaeger back upright and into fighting position. He swung around dizzily, strafing the suit's cameras until he could get a fix back on their enemy. "It didn't hit anything vital."
"Oh, thank Andraste," Anders breathed.
"I'm fine too, thanks for asking," Varric said testily over the comm. "But the coolant line to the arm cannon is fucked. I can't shoot again without having it overheat and probably blow up in our face."
"Harren and his boys are going to have a grand time patching that up later, though," Hawke said cheekily.
"Clear the channel," Aveline growled over the headset. "No more chatter. Focus! The kaiju is still active and your Jaeger's integrity is compromised!"
"I told you, we're fine," Hawke countered. It was only the one arm that was compromised; the legs and body of the machine still worked fine. They pushed the Jaeger through the pounding surf, towards the seething boil of water that marked where the kaiju had fallen. The monster was still alive, still shrieking malice and defiance, but its spindly legs lay in shattered ruins; it wouldn't be getting up any time again. "And... Varterral is down! Let's finish this!"
"Over to you now, Hawke," Varric called out, and faded back into the Drift.
Where Varric excelled at ranged combat, Hawke was in his element once Kirkwall Champion got into close quarters. Varric hung back, Drifting, as all of Hawke's memories of every brutal fight he'd ever been in rushed forward. The meaty thump of flesh on flesh, the muffled crunch of breaking bone, the leverage of limb against limb - every kata, every punching bag, every back-alley brawl he'd started - and finished - since he was still a child rushed forward, and Hawke brought their fist down on Varterral's head with a thunderous crack.
The kaiju screamed and flailed, trying to throw them back, but Hawke hung grimly on. Anders had been right about its size; now that it was down to their level, the eerie elongated legs out of the picture, it wasn't much bigger than Kirkwall Champion itself. But while the legs had been - relatively - fragile and breakable, the thing's body was a tougher nut to crack.
Varterral had six eyes, set in a half-circle around its head; three of them were burst and blind from Varric's sniper-precise shots earlier, and the other three rolled beadily at them as the remaining mandible-legs clawed towards them. Hawke managed to get their damaged arm around its neck and locked on, giving them an anchor when the kaiju tried to shake them off like a dog ridding itself of water, and stabbed downward behind the neck.
The blade ground against armored plate, stuck, and slid off the side; even with all of the Jaeger's strength behind it, the armor was just too thick. The kaiju screamed indignation at the attempt, and snapped its razed-lined beak at their chest. Hawke moved quickly to block, and the teeth snagged for a moment on the Jaeger's arm; before it could bite through multiple layers of titanium-reinforced plate, he keyed on the blast-flamethrower built into the kaiju's arm.
The flame-gun had only a short range, and the engineers had originally wanted to remove it from Kirkwall Champion's arsenal entirely, but Hawke had argued them down. He had also argued them into modifying the barrel to resemble the head and gaping jaws of a metal dragon, which had taken a half-hour monologue on its benefit for crew morale and on the importance of proper imaging for Hawke to be able to correctly manage the weapon as part of the neural interface before they gave in; mostly, Hawke suspected, just to shut him up.
The dragon's head roared, and a searing blue-white blast of flame shot forth into the kaiju's mouth. Teeth charred and crumbled, the edges of the beak blackened, and Varterral screamed in agony as it cringed backwards. Hawke followed the movement, still firing, and the inferno washed over the kaiju's head to blacken its three remaining eyes.
Kirkwall Champion readied for a counter-blow, but there was no need - the kaiju slid back into the water with a enormous splash, keening in bewildered agony. Thrashing around in the shallow water, blind, bleeding and broken - Varric almost felt sorry for the thing.
Hawke remembered a collapsing roof, a descending claw, and a bloody smear on the concrete floor, and he didn't.
"Got one more shot in you, Varric?" Hawke asked as they strode forward, digging hard metal fingers into the kaiju's neck.
"Enough juice left for this," Varric replied.
Together, they forced open the dying Varterral's mouth, and unloaded their guns down its vulnerable throat.
Cheers rang out over the comm as they slogged back to shore, encumbered by the dragging corpse of the kaiju. Ugly and toxic as they were, the bodies were too valuable to be left to rot in the middle of the ocean; the cleanup crews could scavenge much of use from their virulently chemically active hides, and the R&D teams were ever hungry for new specimens to dissect. They brought it as far as a nearby empty beach and dumped it there, so as not to spread its radioactive blood to any inhabited regions, and jogged double-time back to the Kirkwall Shattedome.
Hawke jittered in his harness, all the more the closer they got to the base, until by the time they actually clanked their way into the hangar he was nearly thrumming with impatience. Varric bore it with a weary tolerance born of long practice.
Almost the moment the Jaeger settled into the dock, and the computer's voice announced that the neural link was powering down, Hawke nearly ripped himself out of the harness and began to shimmy out of the piloting suit. Varric looked away with an exaggerated groan, having seen this spectacle too many times; by the time the cockpit doors ground open, Hawke was doffing the last piece of his gear except for his boots. He leapt out onto the open hatchway stark naked, thrust his fists in the air, and roared "I AM THE CHAMPION OF KIRKWAAAAAAALL!"
"Nice to know I'm just chopped liver," Varric remarked from inside the cockpit, but Hawke ignored him; he leapt from the Jaeger to the hangar floor without waiting for the lift to crank slowly up, and dashed off through the hangar to a chorus of mocking whistles and dismayed groans. As much fun as it was to pilot the metal suit he needed to be out, he needed to move, to be free - needed the reminder that he was a human, in a human body, and nothing more.
Of course, that was only part of the reason for him streaking the base; mostly he just liked seeing how far he could push the limits of the base crew's tolerance for erratic, eccentric behavior on the part of a Jaeger pilot. He'd heard some truly crazy stories of the Jaeger pilots who had come before him, and he was determined to top them in at least some way before he was through.
Nor was that all he meant to top. Hawke skidded around a turn, palm stinging from the rough metal doorway he'd used as a brake, and took the steps to the control room three at a time. It was a controlled bustle of chaos, as usual, but Hawke only had eyes for one person: down at the end of the bank of machines, headset still perched over his ears, was a strawberry-blond man in a white button-down shirt.
The third reason he so enjoyed doing this.
Anders was laughing, covering his mouth with his hands, and beet-red with mortification at the same time. As Hawke approached, wearing nothing but a grin and a swagger, his eyes traveled involuntarily down Hawke's body from head to foot before he clapped one hand over his roving eyes and let the laughter escape. "Oh, Hawke," he gasped out, between helpless laughter. "Oh, Maker. Not again. What am I going to do with you?"
Hawke struck a pose, hands on hips, and waggled his eyebrows at Anders outrageously. "Mm. What are you going to do with me?" he said, leering. "Will it take all night? It just so happens that my calendar's clear after saving the world..."
"It would be nice if it involved clothes!" Aveline called from the next station over, in a disgusted voice. Anders clapped his hand back over his mouth, unable to hold back the whinney of laughter.
"Indeed it would," spoke a deep, measured voice from behind him; Hawke had to take a moment to control his expression before he turned around, acting casual like he reported to his Commander in the nude all the time. Which, to be fair, he did.
Warden-Commander Cousland stood in the center of the control room, chaos parting around him, and the only sign of discomfiture was a quirk of his lips that he couldn't quite smooth out. "Well done out there today, Kirkwall Champion," he said, speaking also through his own headset to Varric, still back in the Jaeger cockpit. "We can expect no less of the Hawke-Varric team. But, I admit I would expect a little more in the way of professional decorum."
"Really?" Hawke raised his eyebrows. "Have you even met me?"
Cousland shook his head. "Get dressed, Pilot," he said firmly. "Come to my office for a full debriefing. Then you can take the rest of the day off."
Only Cousland could have said that with a straight face to a naked man without the slightest hint of either embarrassment or innuendo. Hawke was still working on a good play on words involving 'debriefing' when there was a cough behind him, and a gentle hand tugging at his elbow.
"Come on, love," Anders said, pulling him around. He was holding out a pile of fabric - Hawke recognized the pieces from his own wardrobe, Anders must have brought the change of clothes with him to his post as soon as the incursion alarm sounded. Hawke couldn't help but chuckle ruefully as he accepted the clothes and the hint.
At least when he had pulled on a pair of pants and a shirt, Anders rewarded him with a kiss - deep and thorough, full of Anders' passion and his frustrated worry. "I saw you go down out there earlier," Anders whispered, when they parted for a moment for air; his hands, hooked around Hawke's low back under the loose sweatshirt, clenched for a moment with remembered fear. "I thought I'd lost you."
"Who, me?" Hawke scoffed. "It'll take more than a spindly cat-three to take down the Champion of Kirkwall."
"I'm not doubting you, love," Anders assured him. "It's just - never turn your back on the Breach. There's always another surprise waiting."
"I'm not worried," Hawke said. "Not as long as I know you've got my back."
Anders' eyes softened, and he leaned in for another kiss. He brushed his fingers lightly over the front of Hawke's shirt, threaded his fingers through the gaps left by buttons all mismatched to the wrong holes from Hawke's hasty dressing. Hawke pulled him close, rubbing up flush against his lover's body, until a hoot from one of the other technicians in the control room brought them out of their reverie. "Hey, pilot!" he yelled out. "Party in the canteen at nineteen hundred! You gonna be there? Or are you gonna be occupied?"
"Hey, I'll have you know I'm the one doing the occupying," Hawke yelled back over his shoulder; Anders groaned and buried his face against Hawke's neck, skin heating to incandescent red again. "But yeah, we'll be there!"
"Wouldn't want to miss your party," Anders murmured, regretfully taking a step back and let his hands slide down to Hawke's forearm. Hawke stopped him before the could lose contact entirely, taking Anders' hand in his and raising it to kiss the palm.
"Can't deprive them of the man of the hour, you know," he replied.
"What is Varric, chopped liver?" Anders said with a laugh.
Hawke sighed regretfully. "I should go meet with the Commander before nineteen-hundred," he said. "But we'll pick this up again tonight."
"It's a date," Anders promised him.