prompt: drift
Shameless Pacific Rim!AU. Don't judge.
In her dream, the Emperor was whole again, and well. The serial number—JA-15392—embossed and shiny on the back of the door. She traced it with her fingers. The room smelled of the Drift, sweet-and-sour chemicals and sweat. Her helmet was under her arm. She put it on and heard the hiss of the airlock closing. Ling was already waiting for her on the right-hand side, suited up and strapped in; he reached out to touch her hand as she went to take her place, and Lan Fan let him, weaving her fingers into his. He set her palm against the side of his helmet. Olivier had told her once that once you drifted with someone, there was no need for words anymore. Lan Fan hadn't ever believed that. She'd never needed words for Ling anyway. He'd always known precisely what she was saying without her ever having to open her mouth.
The visor of her helmet shattered. She was looking at him in pieces. His hand fell out of hers. The ocean was rushing in. She took a gasping gulping breath, and tasted blood and saltwater on her tongue. Her feet were locked in, and she couldn't get to him. Lan Fan slammed her hand on the control board and keyed the emergency escape pod just before the water crashed into her and washed her away.
She woke sobbing and screaming, the sheets torn where her metal hand had clenched them too hard. Ling had his arms around her, his fingers in her hair. She turned to breath in the smell of him, the warm living scent of skin and his shampoo and the dog tags around his throat, and he held her tightly, lips against her temple. "You're all right," he said, and lay back on the bed, letting her rest her head against his chest so she could feel as well as hear the staccato beat of his heart. "We're all right. You're all right. We're alive."
She lifted her head and kissed him until she tasted salt again. She wasn't sure if it was from her tears or his.
She was sixteen and painfully fresh when she'd seen their Jaeger for the first time. She hadn't been able to speak at the sheer immensity of it, the complexity, the absolute power wrapped up in every metal sinew. She'd licked her lips and stared at it, flexing her prosthetic without thinking. She'd designed this one herself (well, mostly) and she'd been surprised when the Jaeger Program had accepted her because of it, not despite of it. The program manager, a man with large muscles and almost no hair, had clapped her very hard on the shoulder and said that it indicated that she had the sort of brain that they could use, even if she wasn't allowed to actually get into a Jaeger. Then she hadn't thought she'd be able to keep on living if she was banned from drifting. That Jaeger was everything she'd ever wanted. She wanted to crawl all through it, see how it worked, take it apart to examine every inch.
Ling knocked his shoulder with his, and she turned to look at him, eyes shining.
"We get to name it," he said, "after we drift."
He'd never had doubts. Not like her. Even after they'd passed the compatibility test, her bo to his throat, his pressed deep into her gut, she'd lain awake and wondered what would happen if they failed. They'd both be sent home. If anyone at the shatterdome discovered how young they were, they'd be sent home anyway. Seventeen and sixteen were too young to be a part of the program, but the authorities in Beijing had been desperate, and they hadn't looked too close at their ID. They'd gone through the three week orientation, through the six month training program. Now they were in a shatterdome, two out of the six that had graduated in their class, and they had a Jaeger.
If they could Drift.
Ling caught her hand, her metal one, and tugged on it. Lan Fan turned. "Come on," he said, and jerked his head after the man with impressive muscles. "We need to go try out the Drift."
She nodded.
She'd been twelve years old and watching over a troop of six year old white belts when Ling Yao had first traipsed into her grandfather's Shanghai studio. Half-Chinese, half-Japanese, he'd spoken Shanghainese with an odd accent and whistled through his teeth. "I'm a blue belt," he'd said to her conversationally, once she'd set the kindergartners to their katas and gone to question her grandfather with her eyes.
"Brown," she'd told him, and his eyes had lit up.
"You should teach me."
Lan Fan had flushed, and kept her mouth shut. She'd had no idea what to say. She'd always been better with fists than words. She'd beckoned him into the ring and had him pinned in thirty seconds, but he'd just popped back up and demanded that she show him how she'd done it. She'd had kindergartners to watch, so she'd begged off, but the next day he was back, and the day after that too, until she realized she didn't ever go a day without seeing Ling Yao, and she couldn't actually imagine having one. He even came when he was sick, and she'd panicked enough that she'd put him in her bed and given him an ice bag for his fever before she'd realized that she'd never let him into the apartment above the studio before that moment.
Ling Yao did that to people.
The training videos had said that it was impossible to describe a Drift. Lan Fan couldn't find the words herself. It didn't bother her the way it seemed to bother Ling. After all, he was the one with the silver tongue. The Drift reduced him to silence. "You are me," he said to her one day, as he was lounging in on the floor of the shatterdome dojo, and she was going through one of her black-belt kata, carrying an unsheathed blade and spinning it in her flesh hand. He was wearing nothing but a pair of pants with the symbol of her grandfather's studio near the ankle hem. Lan Fan was wearing spandex shorts and a sports bra, because it was too hot in the shatterdome to be wearing anything else. "I am you. But it's more than that. It's—it's more."
She'd shrugged, sheathed the sword, and flopped down next to him on the mats. He curled into her, his hair tickling her cheeks, and set his hand against the flat of her stomach, on the soft parts that she never showed to anyone else.
She closed her eyes.
For Lan Fan, the Drift itself was enough.
Their first Kaiju was a Category Three. Codename: Chimera. They'd come into the war late enough that Ones and Twos almost never showed up anymore. Lan Fan had specifically requested their mechanic that someone come up with a style of grenade that would be big enough to stun a Kaiju, and they'd delivered.
She'd held the mouth open. Ling had shoved the grenade inside. Together they'd held the mouth shut until the Kaiju's head burst, sending blue blood and bits of brain all over the windshield of the Immortal Emperor.
Two weeks later, some journalist found out that they were both underage, and they were hailed as the youngest Kaiju Killers in the fleet. The government hailed them as the most patriotic teenagers of the decade.
Ling cut out an article from one of the spoof magazines and taped it up on his door. The headline was "Youngest Runaways in the Fleet." For some reason he thought it was hilarious. Lan Fan thought of Fuu, and couldn't quite laugh about it.
The Immortal Emperor had two swords laid into its arms, two knives buried in its legs, flash missiles in its chest, and a great big reactor for its heart. Its highlights were crimson and chrome, and at her request, the mechanics had painted an enormous yin-yang symbol on its shoulder as its crest. It reminded her of days spent in her grandfather's studio, him correcting her stances, closing her hands around the blades.
If you can defend yourself, he'd told her, then you can defend anyone.
When she was alone, she would go sit on the balcony that looked out over the shatterdome and stare into his face. She knew the Emperor stared back.
Once, someone sold a photo of her and Ling sitting together in the mess, hands tangled, and then the romance bomb dropped in the gossip pages.
Ling hooked an arm around her waist the next time they went in for an interview and didn't let her go until they were back in the limo, on the way to the shatterdome.
On Lan Fan's seventeenth birthday the Breach gave her a present. A Category Four, heading for Shanghai. Kain Fuery named it Homunculus. It was a blobby thing, a slow-mover, its hide so thick that her knives glanced off and his swords barely cut. Finally they'd wrestled it onto its belly, and Lan Fan had shoved her left hand forward—her metal hand, her dominant hand—and let the finger rockets fly into its guts. When it had staggered, because even that hadn't killed it, Ling tore its jaw off and flung it to shore. She heard later that the jawbone landed in a park, and that once it was cleaned off and purified, children used it as a playground.
Somehow, that made her sick to her stomach.
The Beijing Shatterdome was built to hold twenty Jaegers in a bay, and it had four bay, one for each cardinal direction. In the mess, she heard the wing she and Ling belonged to, the East Bay, called the "Prodigy Wing." She assumed that it was because of Ed and Al Elric, the German boys. They were younger than either her or Ling. Germany started its training programs early. Their Jaeger, Fullmetal Sentinel, was studded with rivets and screws, and had horns all along where its scalp would have been, if it had lived. It was the heaviest Jaeger in the bay. The first time they'd tangled with a Category Three, they'd stepped on its skull, and it shattered like pulp under the weight of its foot.
They were right next to the English colonel, Roy Mustang, and his partner Riza. Lan Fan liked Colonel Mustang's mechanic; Hughes treated her like a person, not like another pilot, and he was always willing to show her some of the insides of Mustang's Jaeger. The Marked Inferno was lighter and swifter than the Immortal Emperor (much more so than the Fullmetal Sentinel) but it had enormous tanks of gasoline all through its arms, guarded by the heaviest metal plates on the entire Jaeger. When Mustang and Hawkeye took to the water, there was often so much steam from the flamethrowers they'd put in the Inferno's wrist the news crews could never keep track of their kills.
She'd never spoken to Mustang beyond quiet greetings in the mess hall—when those two were together, they kept to themselves, the same way she and Ling did—but Riza caught sight of her one day after her birthdate had been plastered all over the newspapers and pulled Lan Fan into her room for an hour or two to teach her chess. Lan Fan went every Saturday. Eventually, chess turned into shooting lessons for Lan Fan, and kung fu lessons for Riza.
She kind of wanted to be Riza Hawkeye when she grew up.
Once, a Kaiju named the Philosopher managed to break her long-fingered way into the Emperor's cockpit. Her talons lashed into Ling's shoulder and side, drawing blood, so much blood, and Lan Fan had screamed. Even if she hadn't been drifting with him, she would have felt like she'd been torn apart.
She knocked the Kaiju onto its back and tore its head off. Then she'd shut down the Jaeger and pulled herself free of her harness, flinging herself at him, tearing his helmet off. His lips were covered in blood, human and kaiju blue, and his throat was bubbling.
"No," she'd said. "No no no no no. Don't die. Don't die. Don't die don't die don't die." She'd put a hand to his cheek and gone to grab something, anything, to stem the blood, but he'd lifted a shaking hand and covered her fingers with his.
Lan Fan had kissed him without thinking about it. Kaiju blood burned on her lips. She wrapped his flayed side in towels, and then pulled his head into her lap and leaned forward so she could watch every twitch of his eyes, feel every rattling breath that left his lungs.
The medics were there in minutes. Every second that had passed she'd watched him gasp and wondered if this was the day she died.
Ling was barely able to walk when Olivier called them into her office. (Her lips were permanently stained Kaiju blue, like the skin of Ling's throat. She started wearing blue eyeshadow to go with it, and when people stared, she stared back until they fled in droves.) Mustang and Riza were there too. Ed and Al Elric were sitting on the couch. It was only the three of them in the shatterdome now. Six months of therapy, she thought, watching him move. Six months before that of recovery. She was eighteen. She hadn't been in a Jaeger in a year.
"The program is being shut down," said Olivier, and she folded her hands on her desk. "We have enough for one last push." Her eyes sharpened. "You probably won't come back alive."
She'd looked at Ling. Ling had clasped her hand, weaving their fingers together. She hadn't hesitated to say yes.
Her memories of the push were fragmented.
The Marked Inferno breaking up, its leg torn off, its head knocked away. Roy and Riza deploying emergency pods, shooting to the surface.
The Fullmetal Sentinel lunging forward, tangling with the Category Five, with the Allfather, and slamming it into the Breach, vanishing with it.
All she remembered was the way the windshield had cracked, cracked and cracked like an egg being crushed, and then it had shattered and all she could feel and see and taste and touch was water.
She didn't remember how she managed to hit the emergency deploy. All she knew was waking up with Ling giving her CPR in the South China Sea. She'd choked, and vomited water, and he'd wrapped his arms around her, hid his face in her soaking wet hair, and he'd cried.
She held on.
The shatterdome is closed now. The bays are being dismantled. The Jaegers are gone. Somehow, Lan Fan breached the surface with a piece of the Emperor dug into her metal hand, a long sliver of metal that completely destroyed her circuitry. Ed Elric brings his girlfriend to her and Ling's apartment in the weeks after the war's end, and Winry Rockbell designs her a whole new arm, one that fits better and functions smoother than anything she's touched other than the Emperor himself.
They keep the shrapnel piece in a box on the mantelpiece in her grandfather's studio. He'd died in a Kaiju attack while Ling had been grounded. The studio itself had nearly been melted by kaiju blood. Lan Fan is wealthy now, she realizes with a funny feeling in her chest; more wealthy than anyone in her family has ever been. She rebuilds the block, and she still has money to spare. She starts the studio again. People come in droves. The Youngest Kaiju Killer in China. Of course they'd sign up. Ling has healed as well as he can, but on his right side he is more scar and metal than flesh. They have pieces of the Emperor salvaged and melded into his shoulder and thigh.
People want them to talk about it. Ling does, sometimes. So does Lan Fan, at women's colleges with Riza Hawkeye. Riza calls her every Saturday and they keep up an international chess game. Their men are both wounded. Roy is blind. Unlike Ling's shoulder, it can't be repaired.
She wakes screaming almost every night. Every night she doesn't, Ling does. His dreams are something he never talks about, but sometimes she wakes up before he starts moaning and she can hear him talking, begging for her forgiveness. "You're here because of me," he says, and she cups his face in her hands. "You're here because of me."
He asks her to marry him in the shadow of the Homunculus' jawbone.
Ed and Al come and visit every year for a month. Ed brings Winry. Al falls in love with Ling's sister, and he and Mei get married within six months. They accumulate nieces and nephews like ticks.
Ling is sterile. The Kaiju blue made him that way. They gather the orphans from the Kaiju attacks, as many as they can handle. Sometimes they ask about the war, but she always thinks to herself that they are too young.
The oldest is a girl who when she turns sixteen begs Lan Fan for a tube of blue lipstick.
Lan Fan gives it to her, and then takes her to the shatterdome memorial.
There is a lot to say.