A/N: Many thanks to everyone for the wonderful reviews! Please keep 'em coming! The quote from my author's note last chapter was Loki in Thor: The Dark World. Loki and Thor are the other pair of fictional brothers who tend to drown me in the feels! This chapter is meant to lighten things up a bit before we plunge back into the angst. Hope you like!
Chapter Eight: I Got The Horse Right Here
Jaeger Academy, Class 2016-B, Term 3…
November 2016…
Yancy's twenty-first birthday came and went quietly. Raleigh wanted to blow off drills and studying for one night and go out, but Yancy refused. "Not at this stage, it's too important. Don't worry about it, Rals. Eighteen's a bigger milestone than twenty-one. It's not like I never drank before now, and I wouldn't be up for doing shots anyway. We can celebrate when the term's over."
Raleigh put the word out anyway, and there were honest-to-god cupcakes available in the mess hall that night, including one with a candle for Yance. Amazon delivery wasn't very reliable to the Academy, so the plushy mini-Hulk that Raleigh ordered arrived a day late. It wasn't much, but it could get smashed into the bottom of a standard-issue duffel without a problem, and it made Yancy laugh. Raleigh had a feeling that part of Yancy's reason for not wanting to celebrate was that he was still too low after Mom's death and the mess with Jazmine.
"Only thing I really want is for us to not completely suck at the simulator," Yance insisted.
"That'd be a present for both of us," Raleigh agreed.
They got it. By the middle of week two, they were cleared for a full drift combat simulation. "Dude!" exclaimed Bruce Gage. "That has to be a record!"
"Close to it," said Dr. Lightcap. The other three pairs from their class were still struggling through the cognitive drift sims, though Devi and Suze were close to finishing, and Kennedy and Steph were making progress.
"Man, if you don't at least get killed on the first drop, I'm going to have serious inadequacy issues," Trevin mock-grumbled.
They did get killed, but they managed to get through all the pre-combat drills in full drift without crashing their virtual Jaeger. Combat sims were confusing and chaotic, and they had to deal with a lot of rabbit-chasing at first.
"What was it Marshall said in his opening address? 'Like solving a Rubik's cube in the middle of a boxing match?' I couldn't even see the other boxer!" Raleigh fumed as they unwound after an especially bad round. The headspace got easier to understand and navigate, at least until a new variable was thrown in. Then it was like starting from scratch, and so damn frustrating!
The Psychs bluntly pointed out to both of them that they had a particular stumbling block to deal with, coming away from the death of a parent and estrangement from the rest of their family so recently. It was awkward as hell to talk about it or hear someone else talk about it, but at least the Psychs were candid with them.
Just refocus. Don't judge. We're human. We can't always help what we feel or what we think, or what we imagine.
The Gage twins had been very accurate in warning about the weirdness of the human imagination. Both Raleigh and Yancy wound up needing the buckets again the first (several) times that happened, gagging and mortified and babbling apologies.
Raleigh felt naked in the headspace. It wasn't like he hadn't been bare-assed in front of his brother multiple times before, but the drift was a level of exposure that went far deeper than skin. Early on, a part of him was always screaming to stop, to recoil and hide himself and turn away, because nobody, not even Yancy, should be seeing so deep into his soul.
Then he'd refocus, rethink, and walk back in.
And it did get easier.
This was his brother. He could trust his brother. His brother could trust him. Yancy didn't hate him for wanting to be chosen over Jazmine. Raleigh didn't hate Yancy for resenting both of their parents, even Mom. They weren't saints. They'd both done bad things, unkind things. Raleigh wasn't evil for being glad that Yancy had chosen to stay with him at the Academy rather than finish raising Jazmine. Yancy wasn't a monster for having sometimes been gratified that Raleigh and Jazmine had fought over him.
We're drift compatible. We can do this. We can fight kaiju and save the world.
Neither of them were perverts for the physical impulses or the mental ones, and sometimes in the drift one would latch on and attach itself to the other occupant of the headspace and - oh shit, no, that's bad, that's wrong, sorrysorrysorry not supposed to ever think that way - and one or both of them would end up puking.
Just let it go, just let it go, it isn't real, refocus, refocus, stay in the drift and it'll just float by.
On their third sim drop, they had their first non-kamikaze kill. They came whooping and bellowing out of the sim pod, high-fiving, hugging and chest-bumping and acting like a couple of deranged frat boys while the techs and Dr. Lightcap applauded and laughed. Then they all had to collect themselves in a hurry when Marshall Pentecost came around the corner.
In week three, Kennedy and Stephanie as well as the Hassan sisters had also made it into full combat sims, and the six of them had group classes analyzing their performances and techniques. Watching just the raw pons and instrument readouts was boring - and often incomprehensible. Watching the sim replays was more fun, though all of them would get frustrated, imagining how they would handle the scenario differently.
At one point during a drop against Virtual Onibaba, the pons readout indicated Steph was drifting off, and Kennedy yelled "PINK ELEPHANT!"
Raleigh and Yancy stared at the Hassans in confusion. Dr. Lightcap smothered a laugh, and all the techs were grinning into their instruments, but they refused to explain what it was about. However, Stephanie did come back into alignment in time to salvage the fight, and they scored a kill.
It was Yancy who figured it out afterward. "Are you two seriously using a safeword?!"
"Oh, thanks, Becket, thanks so very much!" Devi Hassan exclaimed, burying her face in her hands. "Now we take our turn with that image in our heads!"
Yance turned beet red and mumbled, "Sorry," as the Hassan sisters groaned, Kennedy and Stephanie giggled, and Raleigh couldn't decide whether to laugh or vomit again.
"How have you not figured out how to erase things yet, Doc?" he muttered to Lightcap. "Can't someone invent some brain-bleach?"
She chuckled and punched him lightly in the shoulder. "Don't tempt me, kiddo. There are days."
At the end of week three, Brian and Janet were out of the running. They took it as well as the others had: disappointed, sad, but determined to be adults about it and stay in the war effort. The six remaining contenders cut studying short for an evening so they could get together with everyone who was available for a commiseration pow-wow.
"Will you stay or shift to another department?" asked Raleigh.
"We hadn't decided yet. We were trying not to think that way yet, hoping we could get it together in the drift, but..." Janet shrugged helplessly. "I suppose it wasn't to be."
"Hey." Tendo waved a fingertip over his head, indicating the whole population of the room. "Been there, done that. Like we said to all the rest: be proud. You made the second cut, top ten, and if the eight of you walking around like zombies for the past month is any indication, it's no picnic."
"You have no idea," Suze Hassan muttered. "We face-planted Virtual Romeo in front of the Gages today."
"Ooh, girlfriends, you are done!" Tendo warned, as the others hooted. "They're gonna have you whacked for sure."
Bruce and Trevin were back while Romeo was getting new reactor shielding installed, and were often coming in and out of the simulator before and after the trainees. It was intimidating as hell when they hung around to watch - and whenever the virtual Jaeger being run was their own, they never failed to make comments.
Raleigh and Yancy barely managed not to get themselves killed in Virtual Romeo while the Gages were watching, but it was one of their more clumsy victories.
The twins knew it, and made no bones about giving them hell. "What the hell was that hoppity-skip thing you were doing?! Trying to make our Jaeger do pirouettes or something, Becket?!"
Raleigh and Yancy were mortified to find that Captain D'onofrio was there as well, but Dr. Lightcap's husband came to the rescue. "Like one of YouTube's top clips of all time isn't you two making your Jaeger do the Macarena. You do not have room to talk, Mr. Gage!"
"Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen, place your bets on Class 2016-B!" Along with training for a strike trooper position, Antwan Ferrier had appointed himself to the role of Bookie In Chief. Whenever the stuffier superior officers (translation: Pentecost) weren't around, Antwan was parading around the Mess Hall during breaks announcing the odds.
The three remaining candidate teams attended meals together as an unspoken rule, so that they could at least try and spread the embarrassment around.
"Supporting our comrades-in-arms and all that," mumbled Stephanie as she and Kennedy returned from the simulator one evening.
"Bad?" Raleigh asked sympathetically.
"Ugh. We melted down Cherno Alpha." But the girls squared their shoulders and marched between the Beckets and the Hassans into the mess hall to endure the ribbing.
Antwan was in the center of a crowd of personnel, including a group in jumpsuits that weren't Romeo Blue's. "Oh, hey, there's our newbies!" Bruce and Trevin waved them towards another pair in pilot jackets. "Vic and Gunnar Tunnari, heirs apparent to Coyote Tango."
"Congratulations!" exclaimed Kennedy, shaking their hands. She and Steph were all enthusiasm to get the topic of discussion off the odds, but as luck would have it, the Tunnaris were betting men.
"So this class is down to a three-fer also, huh? Same as 2016-A," said Vic, the older brother. His wicked smirk was all the warning the candidates needed. "So where are the odds?"
Cackles rang out and Steph and Kennedy face-palmed, and the Beckets and Hassans braced themselves. "Well, Team LaLa's dropped a bit after that wipeout," Tendo announced. "Five-to-one."
"Excuse me?! Team WHAT?!" Stephanie forgot all about her embarrassment at their sim performance.
Whoops of laughter erupted. "Your fault for having different last names," said Bruce Gage. "Every team gets a nickname around here."
Brian Patrick and Janet McDonald exchanged bemused glances. "Dare I ask what ours was?"
"Team Irish," said Antwan, and the cousins groaned in unison.
"So why can't we be Team America?!" Kennedy protested.
"Because there's two of us," Raleigh replied, getting an elbow in the ribs from his brother (though Yancy was close to cracking up too). "Well, it wouldn't be fair!"
"Says the left half of Team Twinkletoes," announced Trevin Gage. Raleigh choked, and now the hoots were directed at the Beckets. "Well, have you seen their sims?"
Yancy sputtered and finally blurted, "Aw, come on, we haven't croaked since our second drop!"
The Tunaris jumped right in. "So you're two-to-one odds, but I've seen your runs. Even in the big tanks, you guys are seriously mincy when it comes to planting your feet. You're worse than Pete and Hedy were – 2016-A, they were Team Klutz," Gunnar added to the gleeful onlookers.
Devi Hassan rolled her eyes and threw an arm around the still-appalled Stephanie. "Well, they still graduated and got a Jaeger, so that's a good sign." She grinned at her sister, and Susanti squeezed her eyes shut in anticipation. "So what are you calling us?"
"If you say Team Kangaroo, I will end all of you," Suze informed them… and everyone hesitated just a bit too long. "ARGH!" She pointed accusingly at Raleigh and Yancy. "If anyone gets that, it should be them – they're the ones who keep bouncing!"
Oh, fine, I see how it is! Apparently it was every team for themselves when it came to assigning nicknames, so Raleigh retorted, "Then that makes you Team Wrecking Ball."
"Oooh!"
Yancy face-palmed, but didn't rush to Devi and Susanti's defense. The Hassans did have a habit of going through obstacles instead of around them, though it certainly had the element of surprise. Luckily, Antwan and Tendo seized control back before the naming war erupted into violence. "Okay, okay, shut up so we can finish! Odds are two-to-one on the Beckets to win!"
"Who places and who shows?" snickered Christian Warner. But he studied his betting slip and announced, "I'm keeping my dough where it was."
"So that means we scratched," said Janet, but she kept her good humor and handed some bills to Antwan. "I'm still betting on you," she informed Stephanie and Kennedy.
"Thanks, Cinna. Just call us Team Mockingjay."
"There you go! Chins up; lots of candidates get dead in the Virtual Mark I drops. Those mechs are beasts," said Vic Tunari. Studying the stats sheets with mock-seriousness, he finally declared, "Damn, you Beckets may be bouncy, but you got some moves. Fifty on Team Testosterone!"
"Uh-oh, it's Battle of the Sexes now!" said Cady.
"Shit, that's never happened before!" Bruce and Trevin dove for the stats sheets as everyone started talking again. They were right. Up until now, every class had had a couple of male/female teams, so the Battle of the Sexes had never come up. 2016-B would now be the first with all single-gender teams.
"No fair, Team Estrogen has two shots!" protested several of the guys, exchanging frantic looks with the Beckets.
Yancy groaned. "As if we needed any more pressure."
"Suck it up, Twinkletoes," Chloe Warner said cheerfully. "Divide mine up for Team Estrogen: twenty-five on the Hassans, twenty-five on the cheerleaders."
But that got Kennedy and Steffie's hackles back up. "Hey, why do we get all the cheesy nicknames?!"
"Since when is 'Twinkletoes' not cheesy?" Raleigh tried to peek at the stats sheets, only to have the Gages pull them away. "Aw, come on, why can't we see what you're looking at?"
"They're afraid we'll pull a White Sox," said Yancy. "We're not allowed to bet either. 'May the odds be ever in'… our favor." Groans rang out, and he grinned. "So what happens if everybody graduates?"
"Win-place-show is still a thing. Who gets the first, second, and third Jaeger assignment," Antwan explained.
"I get you," said Cady. "Did anybody get the trifecta last year?"
"Nobody did," said Trevin. He pointed at the Tunaris. "These two were the big upset. Nobody expected Coyote Tango to get reassigned; we were all betting on them getting an American Mark III next year."
The Tunaris winked in unison at the Beckets. "So now that one's still up for grabs." Gunnar shot a grin at the Hassans. "And the Aussies are bitching because they didn't get a Mark II, so they'll probably get at least one Mark III."
"That's comforting," said Indra. "I'm keeping my loyalty and my money on my cousins, even if Team America has two shots as well: the boys and the cheerleaders." He laughed as said cheerleaders huffed again.
"As if that was the only sport we competed at in high school," Kennedy fumed. "We were first in the state on the swim team!"
"Yeah?" Chloe perked up. "Then wait'll you do an underwater sim. That tends to kill all the candidates." She gave Raleigh and Yancy a wicked grin, her loyalty flag firmly planted with her gender. "Your odds are about to go down, snowmen!"
But Tendo just couldn't resist. "So we could call Team Lala the swimmers if you like that better. Though…" He feigned thoughtfulness. "You're kinda small. So that makes you the Lil' Swimmers."
Dead silence. Soft, strangled noises began to rise as people started to lose it, and Kennedy and Stephanie exchanged a long look. "Oh, man. Start running," Antwan murmured, pulling the betting slips away from Tendo. "Start running now!"
"… You are dead, Choi." The cheerleaders advanced, and Tendo scrambled out of his chair and started backing up. The onlookers parted to make way for the girls on the warpath. "Seriously. Dead."
Tendo let out a high-pitched and very girly shriek of terror and bolted, with Team Lala hot on his heels as the mess hall erupted into howls of laughter and roars of encouragement. (Most of the women were bellowing approval for Kennedy and Steph to inflict various painful punishments, while most of the men were shouting for Tendo to run faster.)
"What'd you do when you caught him?" Yancy laughed as the candidates gathered for after-dinner studying.
"You did catch him, I hope," added Devi Hassan.
"Hell, yeah!" Kennedy replied smugly. "We tackled his big mouth on the running path outside and rubbed slush into his hair."
The Hassans applauded, while the Beckets duly protested the mistreatment of their dudebro. "Girrrl, you messed up Tendo's hair?!" Raleigh exclaimed in mock-horror. "That's just not right!"
"He asked for it!" But behind the bravado, Yancy sensed Kennedy and Steph were uneasy, and from the way she was watching them, Devi could see it too.
"None of us are in danger of scratching, if that's what's worrying you," the elder Hassan sister told the younger girls. "Captain D'onofrio says nobody's ever come out of training with a perfect record. So far we're all on track to make Ranger Ready."
The cheerleaders – oops, Yancy would have to watch out for calling them that out loud – exchanged a look. "It's not… exactly the simulator we're having problems with," Kennedy admitted, dropping her eyes. "It's the Psychs."
Ooh. Ouch. The headshrinkers were bad enough for Yancy and Raleigh to deal with, constantly poring over the neural data and wanting to rehash their emotions and triggers about Mom and Dad and Jazmine and anything and everything else that made their concentration slip for even one second in the drift.
The Psych Analysts had the power to ground a team for instability; they were all very aware of that. It was, in its own way, even more intimidating than the Tacticians and the Fightmasters breathing down their necks.
What issue the Psychs were having with Kennedy and Steph, he couldn't guess from watching their runs. Maybe it took a woman's empathy to read it, because Devi did. "Battle stress?"
Kennedy nodded. Raleigh shot Yancy an uncomfortable look, but Suze patted the other two girls. "They've got on our case about it too. It's not just you. We've all got things we have trouble with."
For unity's sake, Yancy pondered the criticism he and Raleigh got most often. "They keep getting on us for being reckless, not thinking stuff through. I swear they get points for picking us all apart." He smiled at them. "So whatever the bookies say, we're not a sure thing."
The younger girls did cheer up and grinned at them. "Yeah, you two are down to three-to-one." Raleigh feigned outrage, and they all laughed.
Team Testosterone's odds dropped yet again on their next sim run. The difficulty level of underwater sims had not been exaggerated, and while all three crews survived, Steffie and Kennedy did come out with the high score. And, as luck would have it, the Gages were watching when Yancy and Raleigh emerged. "You guys do know you can't drown a kaiju, right?"
To Raleigh and Yancy's intense relief, Captain D'onofrio was there as well, and retorted, "Ignore them; they've gotten Romeo stuck in the mud more times than I can count."
There seemed to be a mostly-playful snark war going on between the Gages and the D'onofrios, which luckily derailed Bruce and Trevin's harassment of the candidates for their poorer sim runs – most of the time.
Tendo and Cady got the scoop on it. "Bruce and Trev are a bit full of it. Captain and Doc are tetchy because they refer to Brawler Yukon as 'the Clunker.'"
"Aww, that's mean!" protested Antwan.
Chloe tsk'd and shook her head. "Didn't their momma teach 'em to respect their elders? Brawler's the granddaddy, father of a nation. I'm with Cap and Doc; I don't care if it's decommissioned, nobody disses His Majesty."
"Hear hear," Lea surprised them all by saying with a thump on the table.
Raleigh surreptitiously watched her from the corner of his eye. As always, she didn't talk a lot, but she was certainly smiling more than she had when they'd all first met. And a lot of her smiles were directed at Yancy. Yance was friendly with her, gentle when she was in one of her skittish moods, but he didn't seem to be flirting. Even so, it gave Raleigh a twinge, and he found himself being a little more vocal then necessary, encouraging Lea to take the offer from R&D. If Yancy saw that in the drift and recognized his reasons, he never said.
It turned out that the drift sometimes showed too much of some things and not enough of others. In the middle of week four, they hit their personal best in the simulator and went out to the nearest bar to the Academy for an actual drink.
"Nobody checks IDs at that place, so as long as you don't get drunk, you're good," Trevin and Gage told them. "Just watch out for the Jaeger Flies. That place swarms with 'em."
That was a warning that could've been a little louder.
To be continued...
Coming Soon: The Naomi Incident, from the POV of the Gages, Tendo Choi, and other bystanders at the Academy. Quarrels between brothers are nothing unusual, but between Ranger candidates, they run the risk of tearing apart more than just a family relationship! The rest of our heroes rush to do damage control, and Stacker Pentecost does something that nobody ever expected in Chapter Nine: The Bro Code And Other Bullshit.
PLEASE remember to review!
Original Character Guide
Devi and Susanti Hassan - First-generation daughters of Indonesian immigrants to Australia, ages 26 and 24. One of four teams (including the Beckets) to survive the second cut.
Brian Patrick and Janet McDonald - First cousins, Irish nationals, mid-20s. Their parents were NATO aid workers who went to San Francisco after K-Day. Brian's father and Janet's mother both died of exposure to Kaiju Blue toxin, leading the cousins to enlist in the PPDC. One of four teams (including the Beckets) to survive the second cut.
Cady Spencer - mid-20s, Filipino-American from Portland, Oregon. His mother's family is from Manila, and she lost all contact with them after Hundun attacked in 2014. Failed the second cut, but stayed with PPDC for officer training.
Lea Franklin - age 17, lived in San Jose, California. Sole survivor of K-Day out of her family because she was traveling abroad with a school group. Has intense social anxiety due to PTSD, but trained for military service to avenge her family. Failed the second cut, but stayed with PPDC for officer training.
Christian and Chloe Warner - African-Americans from Atlanta, Georgia, ages 25 and 23, half-siblings from a blended family. Failed the second cut, but stayed with PPDC for officer training.
Antwan Ferrier - Jamaican national, age 38, was a cruise ship steward in Cabo San Lucas when Kaiceph attacked. Failed the second cut, but stayed with PPDC for officer training.
Familiar Faces
Kennedy LaRue and Stephanie Lanphier - childhood friends from Seattle, age 18, high school athletes and cheerleaders who opted to try the Jaeger Academy after their college plans were derailed by the war. (If you don't know more than that, well, wait and see!) One of four teams (along with the Beckets) to survive the second cut.
Dr. Caitlin Lightcap - age 30ish, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, inventor of the pons neural bridge and co-pilot of Brawler Yukon, the first Jaeger, until its destruction.
Vic and Gunnar Tunari - brothers, successor pilots of Coyote Tango according to the canon. According to this story fanon, they are Americans of Bolivian ancestry, late 20s, sons of a US Marine who lived for several years in Okinawa, hence their being assigned to a Japanese Jaeger. They graduated Class 2016-A of the Jaeger Academy directly before the current class.