Shatterpoint
Genres: Drama, Adventure
Warnings: canon-typical violence
Summary: When Ging Freecs's partner is injured in battle, Ging is recalled to the Shatterdome. His jaeger rebuilt, he is partnered once more with the man he abandoned years before-Pariston Hill. Their history is both a liability and the very thing that makes them such a formidable combination, but Ging is wary about letting anyone else inside his head. As Magical Beasts crawl from the oceans to crush everything in their path, Ging hides a secret. What does he know about the Dark Continent? [Pariston x Ging Pacific Rim AU, written for the HxH Big Bang 2021]
A/N: Written for the 2021 HxH Big Bang event! This is a Pacific Rim AU, although there are minor spoilers (I guess? There are elements used out of context) for the Chimera Ant & Dark Continent Arcs. The Hunter World map and geography are also used out of their original contexts. I hope you enjoy!
Shatter point
The meeting isn't scheduled to start until ten. So, at eight-thirty in the morning, Ging Freecs shuffles through the lowest levels of the Shatterdome, observing the people working around him. His stomach grumbles a little. He should've brought breakfast. It's been a long time since he's been in this city—the Jaeger he'd piloted with Kaito had been stationed in Kakin, but both it and him have since been brought to Swaldani City. He hasn't seen any of the others who worked here—or anyone from his graduating class at the academy, which in a remarkable twist of fate were one and the same—since his graduation a little over ten years ago. Sure, he'd kept in touch—Cheadle was a difficult person to be estranged from, if she wished it otherwise, and it was part of what made the newly-minted Vice-Director Yorkshire so successful in her position.
He spends his time wandering the facility, mapping it out and speaking to a few of the janitorial staff in the break room. It's amazing what one can learn from someone most in the building would treat as invisible, and by the time the clock has advanced an hour he's memorized the layout of the entire complex, including the maintenance levels, and learned everything he cares to know about the Jaeger models housed under its roof. Including the one he stares up at now.
The 100-Type Guanyin Boddhisatva was one of the earliest Jaeger models, and undoubtedly the most powerful. Decommissioned years ago because it was built to house just the one pilot, once information about the medical consequences to solo piloting became readily known, and it now serves to prop up the roof, ensconced into the stone wall at the head of the facility and surrounded by the bright lights of the Director and Vice-Director's offices. He can see Cheadle through the glass, on the phone, facing away from the window, but the other office appears to be empty.
It is a simple matter to amble up the steps and down an empty hallway to arrive at her front door. Instead of knocking, he tries to slip inside without being noticed, but her ears all but twitch as she turns, clearly irritated at being caught between addressing Ging and her obligation to whoever is on the other end of the phone. He knows that Cheadle hates to do things in half measures. Any surprise at his appearance is flatly masked as she returns to her call; he is still a few minutes early to their meeting, even despite his best efforts to occupy the morning.
She holds up a gloved hand and scowls in his direction, and he takes a moment instead to study the office. Momentarily a little grateful for the reprieve, he wonders who it is she's talking with.
Inside, he can still see the traces of the former Vice-Director in the office Cheadle now occupies. The walls still smell slightly of new paint, and there's a few potted plants and decorative chairs that don't seem her style at all.
She nods to the air on the other side of the desk, mumbles some words of acceptance, and hangs up. Ging feels suddenly a little bashful under the full force of her attention.
"Your Jaeger's been prepped for battle. We don't estimate any events for at least three days, so you'll have some time to adjust."
Immediately to the point and professional without a hint of hesitancy or unnecessary social padding. Cheadle is exactly as he remembers her, save for the added stripe on the shoulders of her uniform and the new, thicker glasses. He comments on them, compliments the shape and what it does for her face.
"These disbar me from piloting, as you know. So don't remind me," she says.
Ging scratches at his unshaven chin and reminds her, "There's a pilot in East Gorteau that's blind, isn't there?"
"An anomaly. The Kokoriko is uniquely designed for that team and their drift is among the strongest there is. Surely better than whatever you and Pariston have."
He looks around the office, at all the empty space, and tries to think about how Pariston would have filled it. "And where is my new partner?"
"Probably in the barracks. He was invited to this meeting, of course, but you can understand why he didn't show up."
"Took it that hard, did he?"
"Ask him yourself." Cheadle's clipped speech suggests there is nothing she'd prefer to talk about less, and while Ging ordinarily would agree, she was probably the one who knew Pariston best after all this time.
"Is it true he's never been able to drift with anyone else?" Ging knows he himself is something of an anomaly, able to successfully connect with more people than anyone in the history of the program; he'd been paired with Pariston initially because he was the only one Pariston was able to drift with at all.
"There's been attempts. We've tried—" Cheadle stops herself and makes a face. It wouldn't surprise him to learn that she had been one of the candidates to partner him, and feels a wash of sympathy for anyone else who might have shared a mind with Pariston Hill.
"No," she finally says. "Not in all this time. Not after you left him."
Not after you left the day after your academy graduation and came back with a homeless kid with a stronger drift than his, is left unsaid. It was only Ging's prodigious talents that made it possible at all, and their Jaeger had been successfully defending the Northern seas for just as long. And with no one else to partner with, Pariston had been shuffled into a managerial track, planning strategy and building new machines alongside Cheadle and Netero.
"Well, I'm back now," he says, his shoulders lifting and dropping in an awkward, half-hearted shrug.
"Go find your partner. That's an order. He can help you move in."
"I didn't bring anything."
Cheadle shoots him another look, and he leaves, shutting the door behind him and making his way across the building and down three flights of stairs to the dormitory wing.
A series of doors lining a long, narrow hallway face him. None are labeled with names, only numbers, and he'd rather not knock on each until he finds who he's looking for. As it turns out, he doesn't have to, as the bathroom door in the middle of the hallway swings open and Pariston Hill steps out, dressed in a pink bathrobe and carrying a caddy filled with designer bath products. He stops, and the two stare at one another for a moment, before Ging sighs and takes a few slow, shuffling steps towards him.
"Hey." He offers an attempt at a wave before stuffing his hand back into his pocket.
"Ging." Pariston's voice is surprisingly cordial, but Ging knows the more cheerful he sounds, the more he really means the opposite. "You look well."
Ging knows that he's got a bruise near his left eye from his last battle that still hasn't healed. Perhaps Pariston's fishing for compliments. His current state of undress makes that difficult, but despite how much time has passed the other man doesn't look much different from the last time they'd seen one another.
"Could you tell me which one is mine?" He gestures towards the doors.
"Ours is down the hall," Pariston says. "Teammates share. Budget cuts and all." Still, he makes no motion to move, and Ging finds his eyes tracing a droplet of water as it makes its way down Pariston's neck and under the collar of the bathrobe.
He tears his eyes away. Dangerous territory, when they'll be sharing a mind again in the not-too-distant future. "I've heard you've been doing well for yourself, here."
"And I've heard your old partner is missing an arm." His expression is more sneer than smile, although his voice has lost none of its cheer. "When they brought the machine in, I hardly recognized it. It looked like something I'd find in the trash. You haven't been taking good care of your belongings, Ging."
"They spliced it with parts from three other defunct Jaegers." Ging remembers hearing from the mechanics about all the damages that had since been repaired and the new features Pariston had added. "One man's trash, and all that."
"I guess we'll see how it performs in the field. Cheadle says the next attack is due in three days."
"You don't sound happy." At Ging's words, dark eyes settle heavily over him. Pariston's hair hangs damp around his ears, lending him a familiar air. There's nowhere safe to look. The walls are beige, the doors are a few shades darker, and Pariston has yet to move as much as a step. Instead, Ging looks at the floor; Pariston's shower shoes match his bathrobe.
"I would have thought you'd be excited at the prospect of finally getting to pilot a Jaeger."
"Perhaps I'm merely worried, after you let your partner get torn to shreds. If you don't take care of your Jaeger, and you don't take care of your partner, where does that leave me? I've read the report."
"I haven't." Ging feels suddenly, suspiciously bereft, then interrogates those feelings and decides no one would have shared the report with him when he had a reputation of barely reading them, let alone creating the kinds of write-ups the bureaucrats here loved to produce. He knows it was his inattention that was blamed for the attack, and the catastrophic results, even though his partner holds with the belief that the creature was simply too strong for them to fight on their own in that moment. It had been a different team, brought from the marshes halfway to Yorknew, that had been the ones to finally take them down.
"Or instead," Pariston continues, a gleam in his eyes like he's finally ferreted out a kernel of truth, "you're the one who's uncertain about continuing on. What is it? You have one bad day after years of unmitigated success. What's changed?"
"Nothing," Ging says, far too quickly.
"It's either you, or it's me." Pariston taps the edge of his chin with one free hand. The bathrobe is old. Ging's seen it before, and it's gotten a little ragged along the underside of the sleeves. "But I have no idea why you'd be nervous at the thought of fighting with me. You recall my scores, don't you? I was the best at principal combat. The most adaptable, the most vicious. My techniques are used by pilots all across Yorubia."
He pauses, his mouth going slack. "Is that it? You were the lead fighter in your old unit, and you think I'm going to be given that spot. After all your experience? You needn't worry."
Pariston sighs, and Ging leans into it, glancing away from his feet to shuffle his shoulders in that way that had been so effective on Cheadle earlier. Just as before, Pariston asks no further questions.
In the ensuing silence, he wonders where they will go from there. Once they get going, he finds that Pariston is one of the easiest people to talk to, but in the moment it feels a little like he has unearthed a huge rock only to watch a thousand different organisms scurry around in its wake. Once lifted, it is not easy to maneuver or replace. It's a delicate matter, is what he's getting at.
"I'm hungry," Ging says, suddenly. "Let's get something to eat."
"Oh, I regret to say I'm expected in the gym," Pariston says. He doesn't sound sorry. "Perhaps another time."
"Yeah." Ging watches him cross the hallway to a door marked only with A-10. He points to it with a sunny smile that's more genuine than any other expression Ging's seen him wear.
"It's this one." Around his arm, Ging gets a view of standard-issue furniture and cheap vertical blinds as he opens the door.
"Cafeteria?" He's memorized the layout, but he wants to know if Pariston will give him the correct directions or not. He's rewarded when Pariston points instead towards the boiler.
"It's that way," he says, and closes the door in Ging's face.
x
The cafeteria is boisterous and loud and just exactly like the one at his old facility in Kakin. They probably even serve the same rations, not that he's picky about that sort of thing. Ging takes a tray and easily finds a table, spotting a few of the janitors and engineers he'd met earlier that morning and catching up on an entire station's worth of gossip.
He was surprised Cheadle had already approved his entry clearance—he'd been prepared to talk his way past the checkpoints and routine security staff, like he had that morning—and although he suspected she probably knew he was lurking around, he thought her unlikely to do anything about it. She'd long given up on trying to understand his methods on matters that didn't pertain to Magical Beast battles.
One of the administrative aides stops by about an hour into his stay—he's progressed now to card games with a few of the trainees, their lunch long since eaten—to deliver a folder with his new schedule and identification. He can access their room now, which is nice, although the whole point of lingering so long in the cafeteria was to wait for Pariston's eventual appearance. Not only to catch him on more neutral ground, but to see how the others in Swaldani reacted to him in turn. And every time a new face steps inside, he's disappointed to see that it's someone else. After enough time, he goes back for a second plate.
Ging has a medical exam scheduled for the following day, and routine tests for athletic endurance, psychological baselines, and meetings on tactics and weapons demonstrations. He scans the document—the new machine has more ballistics than his original model, which used mostly martial means of combat to subdue their opponents. The B team is apparently out in the field today, and according to the cafeteria gossip, both their record and their drift are largely a disappointment, their placement a miserly substitute for the behemoth of a Jaeger in the hangar that is now little more than decoration. As for its pilot, he doesn't even need to ask.
"Is the Chairman still off trying to poach pilots at Heaven's Arena?"
"I thought he was trying to buy some of those good steel alloys, you know, the stuff the more experimental Jaegers are made from?"
Ging shakes his head at that, around a mouthful of his second rations. "Nah, you wouldn't want that. It has to conduct electricity a certain way, or it could affect the neural link. The people over at the Arena are messin' with fate."
"Sure is a fun thing to watch, though," someone else says. "They trap the smaller Beasts in, and let them fight. And when there's no Beasts, the Jaegers just fight amongst themselves. I've seen some of the pilots paint themselves up like animals, to try and resemble the Beasts instead. It's great television."
The conversation devolves into a highlight of the most-replayed moves on i-tube and how to best calculate the heights of the tallest creatures. Ging just listens and chews.
"I'm just saying, the tail doesn't count. The one that hit the Azian Continent last month wasn't the largest, not by a few meters."
"One meter, who cares."
"Size is important! That could make all the difference between—hey, why're you laughing?"
"I heard they carved it up and made a fortune. The collectors got to it before the scientists, some outdated Kakin law about finder's rights—"
"What'd they find?"
"I have a buddy who works in a chop shop abroad. This one was stringy, tons of muscles in places that the other beasts don't have. In the ears, along the legs. Segmented fingers, still. An oddly-sized heart, must beat so much faster than some of the others, like the one with the hard carapace in the Sahertan harbor—"
"The flying ones are the worst. You remember that one with the wings? Took the Yorknew team ages to put it down, I watched it on the news. Now, some of the smaller Beasts don't even make primetime anymore, isn't that sad?"
"Do you count the wings in the height rankings?"
"Absolutely not-! Head to toe only!"
"What do you think about the Beasts?" Ging asks after a moment, in a lull in the conversation. There's a round of thoughtful chewing. Then:
"Terrors."
"Abominations!"
"The purple one was cute, though—"
"There's no rhyme or reason for it!" One of the engineers speaks up. From their earlier conversations, Ging knows he's among those responsible for studying Beast physiology, to better adapt their weapons. Calibrating sonic charges to blind or deafen them, creating munitions strong enough to break skin. And likewise, making sure the Jaegers were protected by an ever-changing roster of claws and teeth.
"One spits acid, another has antennae, the next crawls on the ground. Some of them look so close to animals we know—remember the small one, with the tiger stripes? How did it know to look like that?"
His voice rises in pitch, his manner erratic. He adjusts his glasses quickly with one hand. "And that's not even counting the special abilities. Impossible to predict or quantify. The one with the gossamer wings knocked out communications in Yorknew just by proximity. And they're everywhere, coming faster and faster. How do you study something like that? How do you even understand it?"
Silence descends on the table as the engineer breathes heavily. Ging merely drops his shoulders and says with sympathy, "You're all doing a great job so far. Don't let it get to you so much."
"Besides," one of the others adds. "It's not like there's anything else we can do."
xx
Ging steps onto the scale, then lets himself get led over to a height indicator. An aide is taking some of the introductory measurements, and Ging has to bite the inside of his cheek whenever Cheadle tries to micromanage her progress. Numbers on a series of rods at his head and shoulders will take measurements not only to calibrate the baselines of his drift connection, but to fit the suit that he's assured will be ready by the time his machine is ready to be deployed.
"Cheadle." He lets his voice carry across the nearly empty room; considering her specialties, the clinic shares space, equipment, and staff with the laboratory, and he can already tell Cheadle feels much more comfortable here than she does in the office upstairs. Still, there are fewer technicians around than he expects to see, and empty spaces against the walls where he would expect to find some of the fancier processing machines the station in Kakin possessed with abundance.
"What?" she calls back, her head stuck in a cabinet. A moment later, she returns triumphantly bearing a series of vials and tubes.
"Open your mouth," she says, and Ging immediately complies. She swabs something against the inside of his cheek.
"What was it you were saying?" she asks, and for a moment Ging tries to speak around the implement in his mouth.
"Ishsffrrsh?" He begins, then tries again after she removes the swab and stores it away. "Is this really necessary?"
"I have to follow every protocol. You can hardly argue with that. For you to be successful out there, we have to know every last detail. This is how we win."
He doesn't comment on her insistence, merely submits to the battery of tests she foists on him. The sooner it is over, the sooner he can find his new partner.
"At least you're not making this as difficult as Pariston," Cheadle says, waiting for their archaic printer to finish producing a copy of one of his old diagnostic reports from one of his first years in the field. "His appointment was before yours."
"Really? I didn't see him."
"He's slippery as an eel, but I'm a little surprised he's avoiding you." It almost sounds like she's holding back a laugh. "Considering rather shortly you're going to be back in each other's heads. Nowhere to run, then. Anything either of you want to say, you might as well get it out of the way now."
"It's hardly avoiding." He wants to say something about how their schedules likely just haven't lined up, but then remembers who probably assigned his itinerary in the first place. Feeling the slightest urge to defend his partner, he adds, "It hasn't been so bad. He left me the top bunk, at least."
Cheadle narrows her eyes, her oversized glasses magnifying the deliberate arch of her eyebrows. "And he left me all of his problems to fix. When you do get inside his head, please find out what he was thinking when he wrote up last quarter's financial projections."
Ging remembers Pariston's earlier words. "Budget cuts?" he asks.
Cheadle adopts a grim expression. "Something like that," she says.
He tries to press her for more. "Shouldn't Netero be taking care of things like that? He was always good at getting fundraising, in the past."
"Well, he isn't here now," she says, her voice hard. "He hasn't been here in weeks! And even then, it's only to supervise some of our more difficult battles. His mind is always elsewhere."
"In Heaven's Arena?" He takes another guess. "Or in the past?"
At that, she seems to hesitate. "I shouldn't be speaking of him like this. His insight is one of the most valuable things this program has."
"What about your research? I thought the Swaldani station was at the forefront of Magical Beast investigation. It was one of the reasons I accepted the placement here." Not that he'd had much of a choice in the matter, but Cheadle didn't need to know this.
"We're working with a lab in Yorknew analyzing the dirt found between the claws of that Beast you fought in Kakin," she admits, finally. "I have to thank you for that, at least. Because of the nature of that particular Beast, the fur and paws were ingrained with substrates in higher quantities than any other prior creature. We were able to obtain and study quite a few soil samples. Like the others, they match no known location, and what we're finding suggests a level of biodiversity and climate unlike anything you'd find here—the scientists in Yorknew are calling it the Dark Continent."
"What? That's a little sensational."
"Surely you've read the article we all published in the Barvard Review? Even Pariston gave me his opinion on it."
"I just haven't had the time." He doesn't want to tell her he gets most of his news from conversations just like this, and not from the more traditional sources. It's not like he'd be able to do anything about a news broadcast from a country at the other end of the world, but the opinion of a person standing in front of him—that he can change. Or can let change him, as it goes. He's spent his life trying to make a difference, in whichever way presents itself. And currently, as Cheadle busies herself with straightening her papers, he finds himself missing Kaito more than ever.
"When would you?" She glances at his charts, taps the edge of a pen against the dates in his transcript. "There's barely been a moment where you weren't in one of those machines. Only...an extended sabbatical, after your first year."
She makes a brief noise of disapproval, and the corner of his mouth ticks up. "You've heard of those, right? Breaks?"
"Me? Take a break?" There's a slight growl in her voice that makes her sound bitter, and she gives a sigh he suspects is just a bit wistful. "And leave everything up to Pariston? Or you? I'm glad you seem to have discovered a sense of responsibility since we last knew one another, but we're barely hanging on by a thread as it is. Without me—without any one of us, I think—who knows what would happen to this world? What the Beasts would do?"
Hollow reassurement has never worked on Cheadle before, but before he can make an attempt at cheering her up Cheadle gestures with one gloved hand towards the farthest door. "You know, you're probably most likely to find Pariston in the gym, if you wanted to speak to him. He used to get his meals delivered to his office—I don't think I ever once saw him in the cafeteria—and we can call it early, if you like. You can hash things out with your partner, and I can try one of those breaks you're so fond of."
Ging flashes his teeth. "It was one time!"
A glance at the papers. "You were gone for months!"
"I thought you were just telling me to leave?"
"The lab, Ging-!"
"Of course, of course!" He departs as hastily as he can manage, waving from the doorway. As irritated as her expression is, she still appears in higher spirits than when he'd arrived. If nothing else, he can claim that as a success.
xxx
Ging falls into step beside Pariston Hill, running laps on the gymnasium track. Without saying a word, Pariston picks up his pace, his longer legs giving him a greater stride that Ging has no trouble matching. They are on the third lap before Pariston speaks, and when he does he barely sounds winded.
"I was thinking I'd go and look at our Jaeger." He swings his arms in perfect form, his body shrouded in a matching athleisure suit with logos Ging doesn't recognize.
"Sure." They round the corner, and Pariston offers him a sunny smile. His face is absent of sweat, and Ging feels a deep stab of resentment. "Let's go."
"Oh, I'd like to get in a few more miles."
"If you insist." Ging's calves are screaming. He can't imagine his standard-issue shoes were meant to be broken in quite like this.
"I do." Pariston picks up the pace, and Ging begrudgingly complies. Three miles later, and Pariston is apparently satisfied enough to give mercy. Pariston even brings him water while Ging mops his face with the hem of his shirt.
The gym is not far from the containment hangar for the facility's Jaegers, and they pass by the Final Knife, piloted by Menchi and Buhara. It returned from the prior day's routine patrol with a few scratches, and they can see technicians buffing and reinforcing sections around the legs.
At the farthest end of the hangar, the color is what catches his eye first. His old machine had been silver, with bulky arms, weighted more for durability than speed. He can see the sections Pariston mentioned had been spliced from other units—much of the left side, including the arm, is bright gold, and almost mirror-like in its shine. They spend a moment just staring up at it. Pariston exhales, and when Ging turns to watch his partner instead Pariston projects unguarded joy.
"So, what do you think?" Pariston finally asks.
"That's new," Ging says, pointing to the protrusions on either side of the command pod. Two spikes curve out, pointed at the ends—their purpose appears to be protecting the viewshield from external damage, but from this angle he thinks they look like tusks.
"They're calling it the Golden Boar. Apparently making the Jaegers look like animals themselves is popular now. I didn't like it at first, but it's growing on me."
"Can we get inside?"
Pariston's smile sharpens. "I don't see why not."
Ging watches him talk one of the technicians into opening up the pod for them; it's both impressive and terrifying. They're not prepared to do any of the neural calibration yet, but they climb inside the chest of the machine and Ging puts his hands on the cables that will connect his mind to Pariston's.
"Are you upset it's less pretty in here?" Ging asks upon noticing the way Pariston's expression changes.
"The cameras only care about what's on the outside, it's true," he says, turning around in a slow circle on the left side of the platform. The inside of the pod is mostly a dull gray, but the new rivets are all the same gleaming gold, brighter even than Pariston's hair.
"I'm hoping our debut is everything I want it to be."
Ging doesn't know what that means to him. The satisfaction of victory, or an eventual end to the fighting?
"I think about what might have been, often," Pariston continues. "You'll have to forgive me."
"Of course," Ging replies, automatically.
"What are you thinking about?" Pariston asks. "Right now."
He takes his time, choosing his words carefully. He doesn't know if Pariston is looking for a more specific answer, like a memory or image, or something more abstract, like a feeling. "I'm thinking about how you got us inside. I've always liked watching you work. I'd heard you were an excellent manager here. I thought that even though this was something of a lateral move for you that you would still be able to command some of the status of your prior position. It's nice to see some of that speculation confirmed."
"It sounds like there's something you want to ask me to do." He phrases it as a question, his voice rising in places. Despite the allure of the displays and instruments around them, he is focused exclusively on Ging.
"Go ahead," he says. "Ask."
This time, Ging does not need to pick over what he wants to say. "No, I can't. I want to be certain of your answer before I do," he says at last, "and I'm not. Not right now, not yet. You understand."
Pariston puts a palm flat against the viewscreen, examines the hangar from the perspective of the inside of their Jaeger. Within the low, overarching ceiling of the pod, the effect is perilously intimate. "I've waited long enough."
xxxx
Ging joins a few of the newer techs, crowding around the broadcast of a fight far away on the Azian coast. The image is striking, the elevation rising up dramatically only a short ways away, the varying greens of old forests mixing with the gray of venerable mountain peaks. A Jaeger leaps towards a Beast, its curved back ringed with ridges like an armadillo. Ging knows the pilots inside by reputation only—a Pokkle and Ponzu, young compared to most of the others in the program.
"Is this live?" he asks, and one of the others answers as the Beast gets in a few good kicks.
"I'm not sure, so far they're just showing recaps and opening footage." A cheer as the Jaeger releases a series of projectile weapons to lodge in the cracks in the plates along the Beast's back. "Look at those mountains. You ever seen anything like this?"
Ging's mouth twitches a little, that the tech seems to find the surroundings of the battle more captivating than the battle itself.
"Yeah, I've seen mountains like these." Taller, he wants to say. Majestic, breathing things, full of life. All of the animals and birds would have run from this fight, these outsiders. What would they not flinch to see?
"You've traveled a lot, right? What's the coolest thing you've ever seen?" he asks, and Ging is distracted once again, thinking.
"These are nothing!" the one holding the phone says, eavesdropping. "Padokia's mountains are much taller than this. Nearly 3,800 meters!"
"Dude, why are you so obsessed with how tall things are?"
"Look, the Bright Arrow is going to punch it again!"
He is not sure what to say, because there are simply too many choices. Ging imagines rough-hewn cliffsides, a sandbar that stretches for miles, plants with spiraling leaves, a cave like the inside of a geode, sparkling with a thousand colors. Places he's almost stopped seeing in his dreams. In his mind, he places his cheek against the sand, watches the world tilt at that angle. He is alone. It is quiet.
"Oh! The video cut out." There is a groan of annoyance from the crowd. The tech lifts up his phone and waves it around, but the signal does not return. "I thought we had better service than that? What gives?"
"Yeah, yeah, we should be getting back to work anyway," the one who first spoke to Ging says. He seems to have forgotten all about his earlier question. "I've got to make a delivery to the Vice-Director."
"I'll take it," Ging offers immediately. He finds himself bringing a series of briefings along with a spare dinner plate to her office, recalling both their earlier conversation and her habit to work through mealtimes. He stays to join her, and before long they've spoken about everything from the recent books Cheadle's read to new airship designs. Then the conversation shifts, as it usually does, to what and who they have in common.
"Why did he move the binder clips I had laid out on the counter? I knew where they were. And the push-pins! I knew where everything was." She throws up her hands. "Now nobody knows where they are."
"What do you need those for?" Ging can't remember the last time he did something so mundane.
"All of my papers are out of order, Ging!"
He cannot help but laugh. "That's what he likes. He likes to make everything a fight."
"Really? You think so?" Cheadle asks, cynically.
Ging opens his mouth, then closes it. Somehow, it's too personal to say that Pariston had moved an entire drawerful of the standard-issue clothes Ging had been given to make room for more of his own things, and hung that ratty bathrobe on the back of his closet door.
"I think he does it, as a substitute for what he can't have. If he had a better outlet, he wouldn't need to mess with my papers, or reply-all to the listserv so often, or redistribute the parking permits every month." Cheadle lists a few more aggregate sins, and Ging nods with sympathy as he shovels another forkful of the admittedly nicer rations into his mouth.
"You think he wanted to fight?" he asks Cheadle.
"I think," she says slowly, "it was more to do with the drift than anything else. I think he wanted to be inside someone else's mind. To know what that was like, and to move something as large as a mountain with nothing but the force of that combined will."
Ging imagines a snow-capped ridge. There are mountains, near the coasts, that can descend underwater for miles beyond what would be apparent from the shore.
"What do you think of that?" Cheadle asks.
"No one who seeks glory at the edge of a weapon can be trusted with the safety of more than their own form," he answers. He can't remember if he's quoting some long-dead philosopher or not, but the sentiment seems appropriate to the idea of a neural drift. "But if he wants a fight, I think I can give him that."
xxxxx
The alarm comes in the middle of the night, blaring throughout the facility. Ging nearly falls out of his bunk, snapping upright and catching himself almost on autopilot. He more slides down the steps than climbs them, narrowly avoiding Pariston's long legs sticking out over the edge of his bed.
"What do you think the emergency is?" Ging uses the blinking red lights set into the top of the door to see as he reaches for his clothes.
"They only use that alarm for one thing." Pariston's voice is soft from sleep, and he leans back on his elbows to watch as Ging yanks the hem of his shirt down across his stomach.
"Magical Beast attack," Pariston clarifies as Ging picks up another shirt off the floor and tosses it at him.
"I was afraid of that." Rather than wait for his partner, Ging opens the door and ducks his head outside. A few others look out of their own rooms, and the hallway is awash with an energy of sharply coiled anticipation.
"Come on." A moment later Pariston appears behind him and loosely takes his arm. He begins to yank him down the hallway.
"We haven't done any of the preliminary drift tests," Ging says, picking up the pace as a digital voice begins to blare warnings across tinny speakers.
"BEAST SIGHTED. FIVE MILES AWAY. EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS ACTIVATED. PREPARE FOR IMMEDIATE CONFRONTATION."
"There's no time," Pariston says. "They'll want us to fight. We'll just have to be ready."
Everyone is heading in the same direction—towards the Jaegers, towards the computer consoles and defense stations and, if it should come to that, safety bunkers. Ging's done this enough times he has little trouble squashing down the apprehension building in his gut. Pariston still has a hand on his arm.
"Are you ready?" he asks. Such concern is atypical, even if it mattered in the slightest how he felt. Then, it occurs to him that maybe Pariston is asking this because he himself is nervous.
"You bet." He makes a thumbs up with one free hand, then staggers against the wall when their surroundings begin to shake.
"BEAST SIGHTED. FOUR MILES AWAY. EMERGENCY PROTOCOLS—"
"Took you long enough!" Cheadle shouts as they enter the hangar. She has a lab coat thrown on over a thick green sweater, and Ging does a double-take.
"Were you still awake at this hour?" He doesn't even know what time it is, but it feels closer to dawn than midnight. A team of techs swarm him, attaching the pieces of his bio-regulation suit and hurriedly calibrating his vitals. Someone hands him a helmet.
"My dear Cheadle, it's unhealthy to work through the night," Pariston adds, his chastisement just on the side of condescending.
"Where are the pilots for the Knife?" Ging asks.
"Not here yet," she snaps. "We're sending you out first. Don't screw this up."
He's not sure for whose benefit she's saying that, but he nods and shoves the helmet over his hair as a lift begins to take them up to the front chassis of their Jaeger. There is almost no time to even think about it, as they strap themselves in and begin awaiting the connection of their drift.
Her attention split between three different monitors, Cheadle slides an earpiece into one ear. A moment later her voice echoes inside the cockpit of the Golden Boar.
"Are you ready? We're going to begin the countdown now. Thirty seconds until drift establishment, estimated deployment in one hundred and twenty seconds, engagement with the Beast in one hundred and eighty seconds—"
One moment, Ging is trying his best to clear his mind, to focus instead on the battle maneuvers he's perfected over the years and the breathing exercises he's learned to keep the drift steady and under control, and the next he is thrown bodily into a memory—conversations with Cheadle, conversations with Kaito—and he tries to wrench himself forward, into something more recent, attempting to seize control.
He sees himself standing in the hallway, watching a bead of water run down Pariston's neck. He's wearing that ragged pink bathrobe. The water droplet is suddenly refracted into a dozen different angles like the turning of a kaleidoscope. In the reflection of the water, he sees them again, when the robe was new. His hair was longer, when he was at the academy, and it takes him a moment to realize the memory is from Pariston's perspective, not his. He is embraced, he is admired.
Pariston's mind is as rough as a piece of sandpaper, and he witnesses flashes of his childhood, his training, his days lobbying for the Jaeger program and pushing pencils around an empty office. Feels his triumph at a promotion, his bitterness whenever he sees Ging's old Jaeger in the news. Feels his panic when his defeat was broadcast, the subsequent injury publicized. His relief that it was not Ging, his curiosity at the roar of one Beast and the buzz of another, his deep, unending pleasure at the linking of their minds.
He lifts his head from that sandbar, the world once again tilted on its axis. A bird is screaming, somewhere above his head. It takes him another moment to realize it is the alarm, still blaring, announcing the Beast's position three miles away. The Boar is being raised on its platform through the ceiling, ready to be launched into combat.
"Testing, testing. Move the fingers of your right arm," Cheadle's voice comes through the comms. Upon hearing it, there is a brief rush of fondness through his mind. Is that Pariston?
He moves the fingers of the Jaeger, clenches them into a fist. It is sluggish, his mind still playing catch-up. Pariston is cycling through the automatic commands, toggling the response systems in preparation for battle.
"Where is your head at today?" Pariston asks, chiding him. Ging lifts an arm and bends the elbow as the Jaeger clears the surface and he is greeted with the facility's above-ground buildings and the surrounding hillside at night. A helicopter lifts off on an adjacent platform, and the lights against the distant tarmac blink red in his double vision.
"Wherever yours is," he says.
The alarm blares again.
"BEAST SIGHTED. FIFTEEN MILES AWAY."
Ging pauses. "Do you suppose that's a mistake?"
Cheadle rushes for the monitors, consulting a stream of data as her face slowly pales. "No, it's not. There's not just one Beast. There's two."
"What?" Pariston, who had been so dutifully keeping their steps, falters, and the Jaeger stumbles a little around a perfectly flat stretch of ground.
"The computer designation for the first beast is RAMMOT." Cheadle toggles something on her end, and a moment later whatever specs she's been able to gather filter across the screen of his helmet. "Your orders are to engage the first Beast in battle and keep it from reaching the city or this facility long enough for the Knife to join you."
"Understood," Ging says, and when he fully devotes himself to movement, the Boar begins to run. To Pariston, he adds, "I don't want to risk too much artillery around this many trees. I think we should save that for a last resort."
"A blade, then?" For a moment, Ging sees another flash of memory—the nine different weapons in Kaito's arm, first the long scythe and then the club failing him before—
"I was thinking we'd just punch it and see what happens," he says, shaking himself free.
"Ah. You don't want to talk strategy?"
"Not particularly."
"We could discuss what I saw in your mind," Pariston says, his voice deceptively light.
"I'd rather not."
There are moments where the drift is as stable and calm as a pool of water, and times where it seems to roil with a sourceless disturbance. It takes him a moment to understand the problem.
"You're going fishing," Ging realizes, and a moment later another memory resurfaces, Ging standing on the edge of a lake, the only human around for hundreds of miles, a handmade line pulling up a fish with articulated fins and a neck of blue frills.
"Stop that!" He yanks, more with his mind than his hands, and the Boar coils in on itself in response. Steam rises from vents along the side of the tusks, and he can feel Pariston's ragged breathing in his own lungs.
"I'm just trying to understand something," he says, and they only get a second's warning before a flash of white barrels through the canopy at their right. Ging throws out a fist, and it is years of instinct that catch the Beast across its body and send it crashing away.
It rights itself a moment later, and snarls something around a mouth ringed with whiskers. The creature is tall, leporine, with splashes of teal alongside the otherwise white fur. Ears protrude upright from a long, narrow head, and the body is almost obscenely muscled.
"So this is Rammot?" Pariston says, still sounding like he's carrying on a casual conversation and not about to fight for his life.
"Yeah, it looks like a Rammot." Ging prepares to attack again, drawing back his fist, but Pariston reaches with his own arm at the same time and both attacks are too indirect to damage the creature and too slow to reorient. Ging crouches a little, planting himself firmly before activating a thruster in the elbow and trying again. His fist connects with Rammot's face with a sickening crunch, and the Beast falls to the side, shattering a line of trees.
"Pivot!" Ging shouts, attempting to turn as Rammot leaps from the debris.
It reaches out, not to punch like he expects, but to brace its body against the ground before it kicks out with one gigantic foot. The attack hits the Boar square in the chest, and they go toppling backwards, falling against the ground and sending up a spray of dirt and rocks.
Then, it bounds away, in the direction of the base, alternating between running on two legs and four.
"Vice-Director!" The Boar staggers to its feet, the two pilots struggling inside the pod to keep the movement steady. "Did you get that?"
"Are you asking if I saw you embarrass yourselves?" Cheadle's voice cuts through the comms. "Yes, I did."
The viewscreen data shows Rammot only a few hundred yards away. Still too close to use firepower, he prepares the blades and spikes built into the armor as they run.
"We deserved that," Ging says, and he feels Pariston laugh inside his mind.
"You're lucky the Knife is just about at the surface. It's getting closer, but the helicopters should be able to—watch out!"
The words are not directed at them, but they see through the darkness the form of Rammot leaping into the air and catching the nearest helicopter in one broad hand. He brings it down, blades still spinning, into the ground in a mass of wrenching metal and fire. Then, he picks up one of the steel blades and throws, and then they do not see what happens next.
"It's skin doesn't look armored," Pariston says, and Ging gets a whirlwind of combat theory and a cut-scene of moments from various prominent Jaeger battles, some of them his. "If we can get a blade into it, we can cut it down."
"Releasing the spikes in the knuckles," Ging says as he activates additional layers of defense. This close to the base, the alarm is still going strong.
"BEAST SIGHTED. EIGHT MILES—"
Cheadle shouts through the roar in his ears, the Beast continuing to screech. "The front casing of the Knife is crushed! You're going to have to fight both of them!"
"Dodge!" The Boar surges right, a second thrown propeller blade missing their viewscreen by inches. Next, Rammot's snarling face is all that fills their sight, and it is Ging's fist that smashes forward, golden spikes scoring a line of bloody marks across Rammot's cheek.
Then, Pariston follows with an uppercut, and Rammot's own bulging teeth smash through his lower lip as his chin is knocked askew. He toggles through a list of the Boar's weapons, but does not select any.
"Which one do you want?" he calls as he pulls back his fist.
Ging thinks of the blades, his old partner's signature weapons, and realizes that Pariston is asking him to pick. That it will be his choice how to destroy it.
He selects a single-edged sword, built into the underarm. He applies it to the left hand, and it emerges into Pariston's palm, the hilt shining gold. Then, he reaches out to intercede Rammot's last attack, meeting the grapple and keeping him locked in place.
It is Pariston who cleaves the sword through Rammot's body and slices up, straight through muscle and sinew and bone. As the Beast falls to the ground, Ging is momentarily overwhelmed by the strength of Pariston's delight.
"The next one is going for the city! You have to stop it!" Cheadle's voice sounds so distant, through the fog of Pariston's praise. It requires tremendous strength for him to retract the sword and toggle the long-range sensors instead, to determine the location of their quarry.
"We're not done yet," Ging reminds him, and it is shocking how fast his mind is cleared, with a touch of apology.
"The computer has named the next one FLUTTER," Cheadle tells them as they run. "You should be coming up on it in another two minutes."
"If we can catch it before it reaches Swaldani, we should test out some of our firepower," Pariston says, keeping his voice deliberately light.
"You just want to use the fancy missiles." Ging had not missed them on the list of their weapons.
"Well, I didn't have them installed to look at them," he says, taking a moment to look at Ging, his helmet turning with the motion. Ging gets another sudden rush of double-vision as he once again sees himself through Pariston's eyes.
The longer they run, the more steps they take inside the drift pod, the easier it gets to maneuver the machine, and the more in-sync those movements become. If nothing else, it is easier than he would have thought to link their minds and turn the combined power of their thoughts into something visible and real. He remembers, for a moment, the brief joy Kaito had felt the first time they had piloted a Jaeger.
"Please keep your thoughts in order," Pariston says, and Ging is sure there's a frown on the visible slice of his face beneath the boundary of his helmet. "I don't know what's worse, this or that faraway—"
Something beeps in the front of the viewscreen; their sensors say the Beast is somewhere close by, within one hundred yards, and yet they cannot see it on the ground or amongst the trees.
Then, he looks up.
There's the tiniest speck of green against the sky, but the viewscreen magnifies it—compound eyes, four segmented wings, ragged hair or filaments across the body—and it zips a little higher, traveling in a jagged arc.
"Oh, it's small." Pariston's voice takes on the same quality as one talking about a miniature dog or cat, and Ging feels instantly rankled.
"Does that matter? It'll attack us just the same."
"With what? It has no claws, and look at how its teeth are interlocked? I highly doubt they'll be able to do more than nibble on our armor. What if we tried to capture this one? Heaven's Arena can't be having all the fun—"
The tiny, square-shaped mouth opens, and a shock of energy bursts from inside and sinks through the Jaeger from the top of the head through the soles of the feet. It feels, to Ging's imagination, like he is being electrocuted, and then Cheadle is yelling something into the comms, someone is screaming, and a systems overload alarm is going off inside the pod.
The legs of the Boar are frozen, locked in place, or else Ging thinks they would have fallen over for all that he can keep himself upright on the platform. As the energy is grounded, rolling off of the Jaeger, he can only look around wildly for the Beast and brace himself for another attack. Steam rises from the vents below the tusks.
It does not come. The sensors are impaired, the numbers it spits out across the viewscreen nonsensical and contradictory. He almost laughs, imagining trying to find the tiny flying bug in the nighttime sky without any aid. Has Flutter moved higher, or flown farther? Then Pariston makes a wounded noise, and all of his attention is thrown to his left.
The pain of the impact is jarring enough to almost threaten the connection of their drift. "How do you manage this?" Pariston asks through gritted teeth.
"I recite something, something concrete," Ging finds himself saying. "Data, mostly."
He can think of nothing to say. "Cheadle? Read us something?"
She does, a moment later, scientific facts and data points from some document within easy reach. It takes him a moment to realize she is reading from her published report on the Dark Continent.
"Tell me more about it," Pariston says, and Cheadle recites something about enzymes and element composition and the relative age of the particles. She says something soothing about the newness of volcanic soil and the ancient quality of whatever was found between the claws of the Beast the Kakin computers designated PITOU. Older than the oldest rocks found in the oldest caves on record. Ging's always been fond of archaeology.
"Are you listening, Ging?" Pariston's voice is still breathy and thin, but he is at least taking the opportunity to try and recalibrate whatever operating systems were damaged by the attack. "This is as much for your benefit as it is mine."
"Of course, yeah." He spots a tiny blur of green in the viewscreen. "That thing packs quite a punch."
He pulls up one of the artillery weapons bolted into the shoulder with a series of clicks. The automatic targeting is disabled, the numbers on the screen scrambled. The overlay on the viewscreen is still operational, thin transparent lines notating distance and depth.
"You want to fire on it?" Pariston voices the question, even though any resolve should have been quite clear inside the drift. And what reluctance he had, had nothing to do with the target or the threat of a second attack.
"We're going to have to do it without the aid of the computers, unless Cheadle can get them back online in the next few minutes. Which means manual operations. We'll have to manually calculate the distance to the creature, or fire at such close proximity that the mathematics no longer matter."
"My head hurts for two reasons, now," Pariston says, mustering a wheezing laugh. "Fire away."
Ging takes aim, sending an explosive shell in an arc towards the green dot, estimating the distance to impact and hoping he has the numbers right. It goes too low, exploding in a ball of fire far beneath their target, and soon it is swallowed up in a cloud of black smoke and their visibility ceases again.
Pariston turns the Jaeger to the side, and leads Ging in taking a stiff path across the slope.
"This way!" he says. "The sun is coming up, and if we put ourselves at the top of the hill, with the rising sun at our back, it will be easier to see."
The thick smoke is already choking the air at the treeline, and Pariston fires a few bolts from one of their weaker firearms as they retreat, to cover their escape. When the smoke clears, they will only have a moment to take their attack.
On the ridge, the faint orange light at the horizon is just beginning to swell. As their Jaeger turns, both arms extended out, the light catches on the one golden arm and shines brilliantly. He adds the distance they'd traveled, adjusts for the height of the hilltop, the speed and weight of the incendiary charge—
"I can see your screens on our end! You're aiming too low again! Adjust the input by twenty percent!" Cheadle yells into his ear.
He does as she says, and against the pale blue sky Pariston points out the moving green Beast. As it rotates to face them, its segmented jaw clacks together.
He does not speak, instead hearing Pariston's voice shouting inside his head to fire, an echo of his own response returning as he deploys the explosive missile. Flutter's jaw opens, an attack building within the throat, and then the Beast is consumed by a brilliant explosion.
The Golden Boar stands at the ready, its pilots breathing in unison, when the display re-rights itself and flashes green in confirmation. Their systems report the Beasts have been destroyed, their city protected, the mission a success.
"Good job, you two," Cheadle says. Someone near her is cheering, the sound carrying over the comms. "Head back to the base and someone will meet you at the docking station. We'll want to study the Boar to make sure nothing critical was damaged after the—"
Pariston is toggling through a different menu—not weapons, but routine systems—and a moment later the chatter from the base ceases in his ears and there is only the steady silence of their breathing. He doesn't pull his helmet, but he reaches his hands up to it and touches the cords trailing from the back. His eyes, now that Ging can see them, are wide and dark, like he is still in battle.
For the moment, he is unsure what to say. There are too many thoughts swirling around in his brain. Pariston, however, has never had trouble with such a task.
"It's the most curious thing," he says smoothly. "I saw something very strange in your mind. At first I didn't know what I was looking at, but now I think I do."
While there are more than a few secrets in Ging's past, there could only be one to which he was referring. It was the reason he delayed the drift, his hesitation when speaking to others, his initial reluctance to even travel at all. Keeping things in one's head was safe. Putting them out in the open, speaking them aloud, sharing them—was a risk. As were all things, really. But he had risked this much—he had risked his very life, fighting with Pariston now. What was one more thing?
"It makes sense, you know. Explains much of what I have been wondering. If the Magical Beasts are so frightening on their own, what would be enough to drive them away from their home? What must such a place be like? And the creatures, what were they fleeing from?"
Ging waits for him to get it over with and just say it. He can feel Pariston's sublimated delight. Was he to have no peace, even in his own mind?
"Ask. What you wanted to ask me before."
Ging needed to know, even if he feared an answer. Any answer. "Will you help me?"
Pariston laughs, something low that sticks in his throat. "You've been preparing for a very big fight for a very long time. Of course I'll help you."
The weight that rises from his shoulders is immense. And then Pariston has to speak again.
"The Dark Continent. One of the greatest mysteries there is." He pauses to lock eyes with Ging, and he knows the real battle is only just beginning. "I had no idea you'd been there."
END.
Notes:
1) The implied Yorkshin team was Morau and Novu, and the 'gossamer wing' Beast is implied to have been Shaiapouf. I like to imagine the adultrio are piloting a three-person Jaeger somewhere in Padokia lol. The 'tiger' Beast was meant to be Leol, the harbor Beast with the hard carapace was Brovuda, and the 'cute' purple one was Zazan lol. Pokkle and Ponzu (rip lol) were battling that one Armadillo creature Gon fought that one time.
2) Coming up with Jaeger names is so hard you guys. Please share if you come up with any you like for any of the other characters, I'd love to hear them. I wanted to include more of the Zodiacs but thought it felt a little crowded; possibly I imagine them at a different facility, Cluck and Kanzai are partnered, maybe Saccho is a mechanical overseer? Idk, food for thought.
3) Thank you for reading. I would appreciate and value your reviews.
~Jess (My Misguided Fairytale)