Summary: With the Kaiju come superpowers, but the war isn't any easier than before.
Just a short thing I wrote after school when a friend suggested writing a superhero AU, since most of my other stories are about superheroes anyway.
Thanks go to Cari for the beta and for making me actually write something.
Anyone who can pilot a jaeger is not like the rest of the Earth, Schoenfeld tells the pilot class. If you're here, you have it.
Have what? someone asks – Yancy, who's at the front, can't tell who.
Schoenfeld's eyes light up and behind him, Lightcap rolls her eyes. I believe the colloquialism is 'superpowers'. If you can pilot a jaeger without your brain oozing out through your ears, congratulations. You can become a pilot. Some of you already know what you can do. Some of you will never find out. And others? It won't be until the first time that you get in a jaeger that you realize you don't have it.
Before the Kaiju burst through and tear his world apart, Yancy is a loud child. He's boisterous and uncontainable, a showboat and show-off. He grows up terrified of silence, of loneliness.
Now, with a lifetime of war behind him and a thousand minds screaming for attention, Yancy Becket can't help but wish for the world to go away. In the times when Gipsy Danger's locked tight and shut down he can hear Pentecost's brutal analyses, the way Hermann's work is the only thing keeping endless grief from bleeding him into roaring madness, the concerns of the lunch crew over whether there's enough beef to feed everyone in the building – Yancy can hear them, all of them but Raleigh clawing away at his mental shields until he wants to dive back into his jaeger, where all that exists is him and his little brother.
They're near Anchorage when it happens, when the Kaiju's thoughts shriek into his mind for the first and last time, when Yancy starts screaming and Raleigh screams with him. Yancy screams until he can't take it anymore and he shatters and-
Yancy lashes out at the kaiju as it moves to strike at them. The blow's already in motion as the full-force of his unpracticed, adrenaline-filled mental assault hits it. Yancy can't do much more than deflect the blow meant for his brother and it rips into his side of Gipsy Danger.
Yancy! In the Drift, Yancy can hear Raleigh still screaming, pain turning into a single word. Yancy!
The howl goes on and on until it becomes the only thing left between them in the drift. Yet as the kaiju tears the life from his bones, Yancy pushes away his fear and agony and permits the quiet, welcoming Drift embrace him.
Raleigh never knew what he had that let him pilot a jaeger until Yancy is ripped away from him in the midst of the Drift. He'd always figured he was a null to balance Yancy, the one person in the world whose thoughts Yancy's couldn't hack. The first time he enters the Drift alongside his brother, Raleigh has a brief moment of panic, of ohgodiamgunnadie before the world snaps into reality around him.
It isn't until Yancy suddenly isn't there anymore, until after they sink below the icy waters together and after Raleigh washes up on shore, utterly alone, that he realizes. His world becomes a bright swath of darkness and light, brilliant hues of happiness and anger and loneliness and sadness.
At first, Raleigh can't take it. He runs, burying himself in icy walls and a monotonous routine that defies emotions. It's easy to lose himself, to ignore everything he and Yancy have worked for and to try to forget the fact that his brother's dead and he's not.
Raleigh doesn't want to feel, doesn't want to feel anything at all and of course this is the point where he starts to sense everything.
Raleigh learns that if he takes the hard jobs, the ones no one else wants, he can get brief moments where no one is near enough for him to sense. Rather than an overwhelming cacophony of worry and fear (and sometimes what Raleigh thinks might be the worse – love and happiness) he works in silence and loneliness.
His talent's nothing flashy. He just knows what people need and how to get it to them and sometimes it's enough. The rest of the time, he sits alone, above an empty world that darkens a bit more every day.
Stacker doesn't let himself sleep much, not anymore. When the dreams start appearing, he casually dismisses them as nightmares. Perhaps it was an instinctual reaction, an urge to hide from ridiculous images of big robots fighting bigger monsters.
And then he watches the world get torn apart.
Now, Stacker wishes the dreams could be nightmares.
Sometimes the dreams are small, just helping him to know which of the new jaegers he should funnel money into. Other times, the dreams trap him, keep him captive as he fights losing battles and rescues little girls crying for their parents.
And then one day, he sees the dream he's been waiting for.
Stacker knows that these dreams – these wretched, cursed dreams – always come true. Armed with that knowledge, Stacker Pentecost walks to his death with the calm certainty of victory on the horizon.
When Mako is eight, her father hands her a sword and tries to teach her how to use it saying just in case.
When Mako is eleven, Stacker Pentecost hands her a gun and tries to demonstrate how to hit the target.
Mako's talent is a quiet one, most of the time. Most of the time, she's just as ordinary as any else. But with a weapon in her hand, Mako's extraordinary.
When Mako is eight with a sword in her hand, she's barely strong enough to wield it for five minutes but she has the swordpoint at her father's throat in two, so she figures it doesn't matter anyway. Instead of working on honing her skills, she works on her strength and stamina and speed. Slowly, the three fall into place and she's unstoppable.
When Mako is eleven with a gun in her hand, she closes her eyes briefly and adjusts her grip (she's left eye dominant, she learns when Stacker asks) and fires without thought. In her mind, she can see everything – a host of targets, what she would need to hit first if she suddenly becomes surrounded.
Mako Mori is a weapon, honed and tempered in the fires of war.
Chuck can always feel it simmering under his skin, waiting to consume the instant he lets his guard down. It's always there, a lake bubbling up until he's ready to boil over, to explode, to step back and watch the world burn.
Fire exists by consumption, so Chuck lets it eat him. At times, he wonders what will happen the day when he runs dry of hate and anger and resentment.
But other times, the fire doesn't need to be contained. Other times, it springs free, crawling up the body of a Kaiju as Chuck does little more than laugh. The fire's most satiated after the fight – it's slumbers, peaceful as a worn out tiger until it without fail begins to kindle once more.
Sometimes, Chuck's a bomb waiting to go off. It's like there's too much coiled beneath the surface, a volatile mixture designed to take him and everything around him out, to reduce him to mere ash.
(he wouldn't mind being ash)
Chuck burns like a fierce, fierce fire, bright and hot and impossibly alive until one day he suddenly stops.
Herc Hansen can't die.
No, really, he's tried.
In the Air Force, Hansen's plane crashes (twice), he gets shot (six times), and at first it seems like he's just a really, really, lucky guy (and maybe he is, after all people don't start finding out about their talents until after the rift opens) but then he gets torn out from a jaeger and thrown onto pavement from a height of about thirty feet.
Thirteen days later, he's up and walking, none the worse for wear.
Chuck and Herc don't talk about it – they don't talk about much at all, and it's just another item for the list that they don't mention, they don't think about, and they ignore when it comes up. It doesn't seem fair that Herc can't die but Chuck can, and sometimes Herc wonders which one of them got the better end of the bargain.
(He thinks it's Chuck but Chuck thinks it's him, and when they're in the Drift it's too horribly confusing to keep separate)
He knows that Chuck can never truly understand why he doesn't resent pilots like Mori for failing, or those like Becket who wash out after the death of their copilot. But Chuck looks at Becket (who comes back even though he knows what death feels like) and Pentecost (who steps into a jaeger knowing that he's going to die) and Mori (who fights against odds longer than Herc's chances of dying) and knows they're better than he is, that they face death every day and come out a little stronger for it, even as he suits up knowing that he'll always come back.
Then, when Chuck dies and Herc isn't there beside him like he should be (all because of a stupid broken arm), Herc knows he'd take a lifetime of resentment and rage, if only so he doesn't have to listen to a lonely dog whine at night.