here's the trashbag au we were literally blackmailed into writing, but now it's indulgent and addictive to write and hopefully somewhat decent.
title is from a stephen crane poem "i saw a man pursuing the horizon" because tell me that doesn't sound like bakura's entire life. (also, tell me that "a man said to the universe" isn't malik in a nutshell jfc.)
for the sake of clarity, yami marik is just marik here, and hikari marik is malik. that's relatively standard for our fics, but let us know if there's any confusion.
- kit & ash
"Bakura, are you sure you can—"
"Ryou, I swear to Christ, if you ask me that one more time I'll feed you to Leatherhead personally because I," Bakura tells him as he shoulders open the door of their room, "am fine."
"You," Ryou confirms, flopping onto the nearest bunk and watching his brother scowl at the mirror just inside the door, "wheedled and threatened your way down to a month of rehab instead of three because of a chronic case of jackassery, aren't wearing a sling like you're supposed to, and are still down one functioning arm on account of blatantly refusing to take care of yourself." He flips off the general direction of his brother as Bakura makes an exaggerated show of slipping his broken (fractured, honestly) arm back into the sling around his neck, and asks, quieter, "What do you think?"
Bakura slumps down right where he's standing and props his uninjured arm on his knee. "A Shatterdome's a Shatterdome, what's it matter?"
The lengthy pause should've tipped Bakura off, but instead he's still fiddling with his dog tags when Ryou says, "We're not the only new transfers. Two other Ranger pairs came with us."
Bakura looks up with a jerk, eyes narrow. "How the fuck did you—"
Ryou gestures vaguely in the direction of the bags he dropped near the dresser. "I may have taken a look at some files."
There's a battered tablet stuffed between mismatched socks and MMORPG-themed underwear (Ryou, honestly) in his brother's duffel, and Bakura unlocks it one-handed and flips through the files until he finds one marked 'this is some BULLshit'. "Yeah, yeah, taken a look at the copy Otogi gave you; that punk's such fish food if anyone finds out we have this." He grins, teeth sharp, and scrolls down until he hits a list of names. "Bakuras," well, that was them, no surprise, "Ishtars, Mutous. Mark-III, Mark-IV—Mark-V?" He glances up from the tablet at Ryou's impassive expression. "I thought the Australians were piloting Striker Eureka."
Ryou's face betrays nothing. "They are. This is another one."
Bakura jerks around to face his brother fully and slams his busted arm into the side of his own bag. Ow. "Another Mark-V? Ryou, they only made the one—" He pauses. "That's not what's bothering you. The fact that there's an entire Mark-V Jaeger that no one knows about isn't the problem here."
Ryou lets his arm loll off the side of the bed until his elbow hyper-extends, which Bakura has always thought is gross, for the record. "Did you notice their names?"
Ishtar and Mutou, plural. "Could be married couples."
"They're not."
Oh. "Siblings."
Ryou heaves a sigh, long-suffering and exhausted—from their trip or preemptively for what's going to amount to be a shitty time in the very near future, Bakura's not sure. "Twins."
Bakura is considerate enough to put Ryou's tablet out of harm's way before he slams his uninjured fist into the ground. "Fuck!" This shit again.
Ryou arches his eyebrow like he can hear Bakura's thoughts. "This shit again."
Seven years ago, two years into the Jaeger Program and a year before "are you fucking kidding me, you can't let minors pilot Jaegers" protocols were in place, the Bakura twins were hot shit and a hopeless miracle. Two Marks of Jaegers had come and gone and the Kaiju were getting bigger and smarter and meaner and there were enough twin studies being vomited out of the neuroscience and biochemistry communities to allow two fourteen-year-olds to attempt a neural handshake. The running theory was that twins could circumvent the cons of Drifting—they were practically the same person, same memories, they could be faster and stronger and smoother than pairs who weren't.
And they were. But not by enough.
Bakura runs a hand through his hair and resists the urge to grip hard out of sheer frustration. He keeps reading instead. "Mutous just shipped back in from New Zealand, looks this Shatterdome in Domino is their home-base. And the Ishtars just came down from Alaska, poor fuckers." Bakura glances up again and scowls at his brother. "Those names sound familiar. Do we know them from the program?"
In a long list of things that should probably have been reconsidered, he and Ryou had been put in charge of vetting the first few waves of twin recruits, and while the Mutous and Ishtars sound familiar Bakura doesn't remember giving the "the world thanks you for your service and courage in volunteering but personally I think you're a fucking idiot, are you aware of how painful drowning can be" speech to any faces that matched those names. But it's as Ryou starts to respond that the overhead speaker chimes and an incredibly hassled-sounding tech snipes, "Could all available Rangers report to LOCCENT immediately, all available Rangers to LOCCENT immediately—"
Ryou straightens up with a hassled sound of his own and looks around blearily for the boots he just toed off, and Bakura is grateful for the moment he looks away because trying to get up by resting his weight on his fucked-up arm is not ammo his brother needs. And yet, just as he gets up and straightens his tags, Ryou hip checks him on his way to the door with, "Need a hand, Bakura?"
Bakura's first attempt at a smart reply is drowned out by the same voice adding, "Yes, Mokuba, that means you, I don't give a flying Kaiju shit that you wanted a nap," so Bakura shoves his arm back into his sling and follows his brother out the door with a grumbled, "Let's get this the fuck over with."
/
Immediately turns out to be fifteen minutes later by virtue of the Domino Shatterdome being a fucking bullshit maze of steel corridors and vague banging sounds in the distance, and by the time Bakura and Ryou see the shiny chrome and massive monitors of LOCCENT all the other Rangers have already gotten there. The Ishtars and Mutous are easy to pick out on the basis of looking exactly alike, shocker, but Bakura is more interested in the resident pairs that have come out to greet them. Ryou waves as the LOCCENT doors shut behind them. "Good to see you again, Mai, Anzu!"
The Ranger pairs of Harpie Lady and Tomb Raider were old friends from the start of Bakura and Ryou's careers—at sixteen years old, Anzu had been closest to their age when they first passed Ranger training at fourteen, and Mai and Bakura's constant, vitriolic banter during press conferences was the talk of a number of tabloids. In the beginning, Bakura hadn't understood what he'd thought was a massive rift in personality types for a Drift-compatible team—
Anzu whirls on them, wraps Ryou into a tight hug, and smacks Bakura right on his injured arm. "You promised to call us if you got transferred out of Hawaii, you little shit!"
—but Bakura had been swiftly and violently made aware of exactly how similar Anzu and Mai could be. "So sorry," he drawls, "I got distracted, what with the broken arm and all."
One of the short twins gestures at his cast and Bakura can't get over the fact that he looks like he's fucking twelve, seriously. "Which Kaiju did that?"
Ryou and Bakura exchange a wry smile. "Dunno. Didn't have time to ask its name before we slit its fucking throat."
"Oh fuck, I heard about that." One of the techs looks up from his soldering. "'Overkill in Oahu', that was you guys?"
Bakura can still feel Kaiju blue splattering all over his side of the Jaeger like it's his own arm, hot and wet and it jars him out of his thoughts when Ryou answers, "Yeah, that was us."
Clearing her throat to pull all the eyes in the room back to her, Mai jerks a thumb at the new pairs in turn. "Your escapades in poor anger management aside, asshole, have you met the new guys? That's Atem and Yugi Mutou, in Duel Monster, and Marik and Malik Ishtar in Daddy Issues." Mai arches an eyebrow. "That would be the Mark-V."
Bakura chokes on a laugh. "Daddy Issues? That some sort of joke?"
Marik and Malik exchange glances—unlike Atem and Yugi, these two were at least considerate enough to style their hair differently. One of them, Malik maybe, fiddles with one of the stack of gold bangles on his wrists and shrugs. "Some sort, yes."
"I don't think anyone piloting a Jaeger called 'Tomb Raider' has room to comment on anyone else's name."
Bakura turns on his heel, smooth-like, to see Seto Kaiba leaning against a bank of computers, smirking. A foot away, Mokuba sways on his feet, exhausted and with his Drift suit only halfway off—they must have just returned from a call down the coast. The Kaibas had compatibility scores second only to twin Ranger pairs and a press scandal second only to Bakura and Ryou; where the Bakuras had been under the world's spotlight for revolutionizing the Ranger training program, the Kaibas stirred the media's frenzy when Seto inherited his father's lucrative gaming company and promptly switched gears and markets to revolutionize the Jaegers themselves. Bakura matches Seto's smirk tooth for tooth, "You're just pissed your shiny carbon-steel nightmare doesn't have the kill record of our analog darling."
Ryou rolls his eyes so hard Bakura thinks they might stick like that for a moment—they both remember the starstruck look on Bakura's face when he'd first seen the Kaibas' custom Mark-IV, Blues Eyes, not that Bakura would cop to it ever—and Seto just arches an eyebrow. "I wouldn't touch your darling with a ten-foot pole, not when there's a Mark-V in the bay."
The shorter short twin—Yugi, if Mai's half-assed hand gesture was at all accurate—steps away from his brother to lean next to Seto and peer through the LOCCENT deck into the bay where the Jaegers loomed. "I think Jounouchi would probably fist-fight you for first dibs, Seto."
"Jounouchi can go die in a fucking—"
"You all know each other?" Ryou interrupts, to Bakura's chagrin. He would've really liked to hear the end of that sentence.
Atem looks like he wants to personally rend Seto limb from limb and sell him by the pound when the Kaiba rests his hand on Yugi's shoulder, and Bakura sees Ryou arch an eyebrow. That looks like a personal problem right there. Yugi smiles. "Seto and Mokuba worked with us under Grandpa Sugoroku."
Bakura's heard that name before too, but can't place it before Ryou asks, "Grandpa Sugoroku? You mean Metal-Mind Mutou?" He turns to Marik and Malik. "And don't tell me, your older sister is Brigadier General Isis Ishtar?" Ryou looks back at his brother. "Bakura, we're in the presence of Jaeger royalty."
"You're one to talk," Mokuba tells him, bouncing on his heels. "You're the Bakuras, right? First ones to pilot a Mark-III, passed Ranger training at fourteen," the kid is blubbering and Bakura scowls at the attention, there's only one place this list of accolades will end, where it always ends, "you're the reason for the T-BOM initiative!"
The room freezes over. There it is. As if noticing for the first time, the Blue Eyes and Harpie Lady pilots—and every fucking tech and grunt and lackey and soldier in the goddamn bay—look over their new comrades and realize they're standing in a room of carbon copies. Bakura looks around the room and sees four new people too many who are going to fucking die choking on seawater and pipe dreams because he and his brother walked into a military summit with a catchy acronym and a stupid idea.
Ryou freezes up next to him and Bakura shifts to block him from the rest of the Rangers—'Two Bodies One Mind' was Ryou's idea and his noose if Bakura were willing to let him hang himself on it. "Yeah," Bakura says, "that's us."
He's got half a mind to apologize to the other twins for literally getting them into this mess, but the door hisses open before he can speak, spitting out someone important-looking. The man honest-to-fuck clicks his heels as he comes to a stop before the Rangers and the smile on his face so simpering that Ryou and Bakura share an exasperated glance. Even his voice is politician-grade spit-shined when he says, "Welcome, everyone! Some of you know me already, but I'm CO of the Domino Shatterdome while Marshal Mutou is assisting in Mexico. My name is Wallace Marshall."
Bakura feels like a slightly more mature adult when Yugi says before he does, "So you're Marshal Marshall?"
Marshal Marshall smiles. "Just Marshal will do."
Bakura snorts and mutters under his breath, "Sure thing, Just-Marshal," and it's absolutely worth Ryou elbowing him in the ribs.
Just-Marshal didn't seem to have heard him because he continues, "If you would all follow me to the Kwoon Room?"
Bakura sees Malik mouth "Kwoon Room?" to his brother and echoes the sentiment, can't understand why they need to head to the training room when they're already paired up and Drift-matched, but they all trail after Just-Marshal anyway. It's out of habit that everyone beelines for the matchup list as soon as they set foot in the room, even though no one is entirely sure what they're doing there. Mai's long legs outpace everyone—she's even taller than Marik, almost as tall as Seto, holy shit—and snatches the clipboard out of its cubby.
Mai glances over the roster for the Kwoon Room matchups and looks up, sharp eyes fixed on Bakura. "Hey, you didn't fill out your info all the way." She rattles the clipboard at Bakura and Ryou chuckles. He knows where this is going; he's heard Mai and Bakura having this exact conversation seven years running. They both know Mai could easily pull up Bakura's dossier and find out his first name, but the brothers suspect that she'll get more satisfaction if she tortures it out of him.
Bakura is considering the merits of fighting one-handed before a stern look from Just-Marshal stops him trying. He scratches absently where the cast meets flesh and grins. "You don't say?"
Atem peers over Mai's arm at the roster—Christ, wasn't there a height minimum for Ranger training? He and Ryou were taller when they fucking enlisted nearly a decade ago than the Mutous are now. "Don't you have a first name?"
"Not one that's any of your fucking business."
Atem bristles and takes a step forward just as Just-Marshal claps his hands together and every head in the room looks to him. "I'm not sure how much your respective COs have told you about the reasons for your transfer, but we have reason to believe that Domino and the surrounding coastal areas may be seeing an increase in Kaiju attacks. As I'm sure you've noticed, we've requested the involvement of T-BOM, and while two of the six incoming Rangers are currently sidelined," Just-Marshal nods at Bakura, who takes it as his cue to demonstrate his cast to all and sundry, and then glances over at the Mutou twins to Atem's thunderous frown, "it is my belief that we have a strong team capable of defending the coast."
"Oh yeah, what the fuck's benched you?" Bakura gives Atem an once-over that Ryou once described as a noninvasive vivisection, because Atem and Yugi both look fine. "Inhaled too much hairspray?"
Atem gains a whole half an inch when he straightens and Bakura revels in the way that he looms over the smaller pilot, can hear Ryou shift his weight behind him, ready to grab his brother if things go south because Atem's going to be the one who needs protecting, when Yugi chimes in from over by the weapons rack. "It's me, actually."
Ryou's fingers close too hard around his wrist and force him back a step and Bakura's gaze slides, predatory, to Yugi. The kid's as much as admitted to weakness and Bakura won't stop until he flays him open and picks it out. "Oh? You look fine to me."
His bones grind together under Ryou's grip and he can feel the other Rangers watching them, but Yugi just shrugs and says nothing, leaves a gaping silence that Bakura would just love to fill with the sound of snapping bone—
The sound of wood tapping against concrete snaps him out of his daze, and he sees Malik lean against his staff and rest his hand on his hip. He's the picture of lazy consideration but his eyes are sharp. "What else?"
Just-Marshal looks at him. "Excuse me?"
"Two of three T-BOM pairs are benched, but that doesn't explain why you brought them here instead of rehabbing at their respective Shatterdomes until they could pilot again and just transferring in someone else." Malik and his brother do that silent conversation twin thing that Bakura realizes actually does look unsettling when someone else does it, and Malik adds, "Let alone why my brother and I were brought here."
Just-Marshal sighs and says, "This was an opportunity," and keeps talking over Ryou's scoff of "There it is," in the background, "an opportunity to determine what exactly made the T-BOM successful. Duel Monster and Tomb Raider are both down a pilot, but that still leaves us with four viable Ranger pairs, Blue Eyes and Harpie Lady included."
Malik and Ryou put it together at the same time, their respective brothers can see, but Malik speaks first. "Yes, but one of those pairs would be Ryou and Atem, who aren't—ah. I see." Malik scrubs a hand across his face and shakes his head hard enough for his jewelry to rattle. "You're going to shuffle us like a deck of fucking cards, aren't you? To see if this is just a twin thing or if we can play nice with others, too?"
Bakura hopes Just-Marshal feels as cornered as he looks, because the room full of Rangers is suddenly buzzing with dissent. Drift compatibility wasn't a fucking coin toss, it took luck and blood and work. "For the moment, we only intend to rearrange established T-BOM pairings to, yes, test the possibility of exchanging twins and seeing the same improvements to standard Jaeger—"
"No." Bakura steps back because he knows that tone in his brother's voice. He's been on the wrong end of it and has the titanium screw in his jaw to prove it. "Absolutely fucking not," Ryou snaps, rolling his staff between his fingers in agitation. "This is completely counterproductive! Why would you separate pairs you know are faster and stronger and break us into—into subpar Jaegers?!"
Just-Marshal doesn't miss a beat, and he sounds too smooth and too slick for a man with a room of veterans turned against him, and Bakura realizes Ryou's been baited into having this exact conversation in front of this exact group of people. Across the room, he sees Marik's grip on his staff tighten until his knuckles stand out white when he comes to the same conclusion. "Because you're the only remaining whole T-BOM pairs. We've got more than enough single strays to spare, and we need to know if there's a way we can use them."
Bakura lunges before he even processes that he's moved, before his brother can stop him, because he's heard this particular mix of snide blame and saccharine condescension enough times in seven years that it's like a straight shot of lightning down his spine—and it's always, always aimed at Ryou: this was his idea, his success story, why did they keep dying, why didn't he try harder, what were they missing, why can't he keep his fucking brother on a leash—and his fingers close around his commanding officer's throat so hard he can feel the air fan out of Just-Marshal's mouth across his wrist. Bakura puts his weight into it and between his fingers and solid brick, Just-Marshal was starting to fade.
Bright pain flares in his stomach and Ryou appears out of the corner of his eye, bracing against the wall and shoving the staff he's wedged between the two men like a crowbar, and Bakura flies away from his prey to skid across the mat. Ryou turns on his heel with the practiced precision of having made Bakura eat dirt a thousand times before and slams the staff into the rubber an inch away from his left ear, but still pulls Bakura to his feet when he grabs the end of it and winks. The real definition of brotherly love, right there.
It's as he's following Ryou out of the gym and potentially the hell off this base that he hears someone (Marik, he thinks) talking behind them. "We owe our loyalty to them more than to you."
Malik echoes his brother's sentiments. "If you're not careful, you won't have any T-BOM pilots left at all."
