The Jaeger is heavy. It takes a lot of heaving and huffing to shoulder it to the side, sparking and smoking while he takes in great breaths of unrestricted air. He allows himself several moments to fumble for balance before heaving to his feet, cursing his instability. Thank the Masters for his ability to shut out the pain, if only temporarily.
The humans begin crawling in again. He takes this as the warning it is and slams up against a wall, forcing his wing bone back into its socket with an awful grind, before flapping once experimentally and taking off.
Needless to say, he doesn't get far. Bone shifts and he slams into what's left of the roof, sending large pieces back down into the building as he scrabbles for purchase on the smooth surface. His claws dig in, and he takes the opportunity to pull up and crawl over the side with his middle limbs to support him.
It begins to rain.
The slick surface is suddenly a lot harder to get a grip on so he slips, tumbling right down the side of the Shatterdome to bounce off the walkway and crash into the ocean. Bubbles obscure his vision and he spends half a moment panicking before thinking to use the radio silence from the rest of the hivemind to focus. Actually, that is very worrying. He stills in the water, some hundred feet deep, and reaches out.
The little one is disturbingly quiet, so he only prods it once to see if it's going to live before moving on. The Masters, too, are silent, but in such a way that he wonders if they purposefully cut his connection with them. If so, then he won't be able to get back through the Breach. Finally, he broadcasts to the other kaiju and only gets vague mumbling. Well. At least they're still there. He's not quite sure what he'd do without them.
Go mad, maybe.
Parts, kaiju, he suddenly remembers. It seems like a long time ago now. He'd been so worried about that stupid little human. He should still be worried, maybe, considering it found its way into the hivemind. Maybe the Masters will know something, should they be in a forgiving mood. They usually aren't.
It takes much more time to swim than to fly, and more energy he really can't afford. It took only a minute to fly to the base, and that was with his procrastinating; it's more than fifteen minutes before he feels the magnetic tug of the Breach, calling him home.
And there it is: an electric tear in the ocean floor, wider than he is long. It's underdeveloped, too narrow to allow anyone but the smallest through. The smallest, he reflects, don't get much smaller than him. He's less than half the size of many other kaiju. Maybe he was only picked because of his convenient size. Which makes him lucky, he supposes.
He noses at the fiery edge, waiting for permission to enter. A flash, and he's allowed through. He hesitates only a moment longer, pondering a split second of uncharacteristic nerves, before slipping past the barrier.
A clawed hand grabs him around the throat and pulls.
He comes out on the other side with a watery snarl, hitting the ground painfully when the hand releases him. The owner of the offending limb, a massive kaiju easily five times his size, shoves him back down when he tries to get to his feet, squashing his middle limbs beneath him. It's extremely uncomfortable and he wriggles around in an attempt to relieve the pressure until the stilted legs of a Master step into his line of vision.
He stills and lowers his gaze.
"Where," the Ambassador says, its voice high and cold and deadly furious, "did you go, vermin?"
He swallows. "To retrieve parts, Master."
"And why did you feel the need to sever your connection with your precursors?" it demands. "How, exactly, did you manage this?"
"I didn't," he responds. These are his last moments. He's going to die, pinned like a recalcitrant child to the dirt while the Master scolds. Wounded, aching, miserable, and humiliated.
He thinks maybe he should have prolonged his mission, if only to put off his sorry death a little longer.
"Explain," it demands, voice clipped and angry.
He swallows a noise of surprise. It's giving him a chance to explain himself? How unusual! He's certainly not complaining, though he'll admit to a bit of confusion. This opportunity is a rare thing, generally granted only for those few experienced warriors, who come back from the war triumphant. Is he one of those few now?
He now has two choices. It feels somehow intrusive, and wrong, to tell the Masters of his little human. He could explain away the cut connection with a few words of fumbling excuses, and with his apparent new status get away with it. Or, he could take a bigger chance and describe the insistent pull of the human in the hivemind. He really, really doesn't want to.
This is important, he tells himself. If the Masters don't know about it, they should. And he has no right to withhold this sort of information.
Still, he feels deeply uncomfortable with sharing it, even as he tells them. "There was another being in the hivemind, Master."
It clicks angrily and shuffles its feet. "What do you mean, another being? There were no kaiju actively connected."
"Not a kaiju," he corrects, and nearly bites his own tongue off before forcing himself to continue," a human."
There is a very long silence.
"A human," the Ambassador repeats softly.
"Yes, Master," he can't help but continue. "Its consciousness resides in the hivemind. Its presence distracted me, but it was too weak to maintain communication and faded after a short time."
"It spoke with you?"
"It gave me an impression, of sorts," he explains. "Instructions in the form of images and feelings."
The pressure eases up on his back, and he takes the opportunity to shift his legs out from underneath him. Feeling comes back in a cold rush of stabbing sensations. He hisses in displeasure.
More Masters have come forth to hear his story, so he offers an extremely vague run-through of what happened, leaving out the embarrassing bits as he pulls out the parts he retrieved for them to examine.
"We will discuss this," the first Ambassador says imperiously, stepping back and turning away from the mess of circuitry. Other precursors collect the pieces hurriedly, scurrying off to the construction chambers. "In the meantime, you will show your worth in the pit. Someone repair the kaiju," it calls, louder, and the scavenger Masters swarm around him as the higher-ups take their leave.
He scowls at the dirt as the Masters work. Just when he thinks he's free from painful humiliation followed by execution, they decide to throw him into the pit, to be torn apart by the bigger kaiju.
Not so kind, after all.
**8**
"Newt, man, you are in so much trouble."
"It's not like it's my fault," Newt complains, actively restraining himself from playing with the IV in his right hand. It itches and he hates it with a burning passion. "I didn't jump down the stairs, okay, with the, I dunno, intention to hurt myself."
"You're right," Tendo retorts, "you passed out and fell down them, and now you've got a twisted ankle."
"And bruised ribs," Newt adds helpfully, scowling. "Hasn't stopped me before, y'know."
"Well it's stopping you now." The plastic chair squeaks as Choi shifts to cross his arms. "Not only that, but Marshall Hansen's calling in reinforcements."
"I don't need a nanny," Newt protests, but there's no arguing with the Marshall's decisions. "Who did he call?" he asks, his scowl pulling the bruised skin on his cheekbone uncomfortably.
"Mako. No, don't fight us on this," Tendo says, smile fading. He looks serious now, stressed. "We all saw it, Newt."
Newt swallows. "Saw-?"
"You had all the signs of a bad Drift," Tendo explains. "You know what happened yesterday, right?"
"I ended up in the infirmary?" he tries. He knows full well what happened yesterday. The kaiju situation is tough, though, and he realizes there's no good way to avoid it. Much like his first Drift in the lab, someone had to have found him where he fell. That's a medical concern all on its own, but the connection between this and the kaiju is obvious.
He gets a frown and a headshake instead of the lighter atmosphere he was vaguely hoping for. "No, man. We have to talk about the kaiju."