Chapter Text
The Drift felt like this:
Like walking into a room and knowing without needing to see exactly where everything was. Every piece of furniture. Every doorway. Every photo on the wall and who was in it. Like muscle memory for a video game: knowing how to move so something else moves with you.
Colt tried to explain it to Ryland once.
A grimace on his twin’s face as he tried to stomach the cafeteria’s excuse for coffee while trying to compute Colt’s rambling at the same time.
Colt poked at his — well. They might be eggs. He wasn’t going to go digging too deep for proof on that.
(It was one of the rare edible foods, after all.)
“It’s like a party game… like a piñata… or pin the tail on the donkey.”
Ryland nodded, pushing aside his coffee in favour of fixing his glasses.
“Except you know without fail where the piñata is.”
Ryland made a face. “I thought it was more about your thoughts? Like not being in your head alone, or something.”
“Nah.” Colt shook his head. “That’s just the brain stuff. It’s the physical stuff that really makes it.”
“Does it feel weird?”
“Weird” was Ryland’s way of asking bad.
Colt had thought about it honestly.
He tried to always be honest when Ryland asked him direct questions like this. Ryland always seemed to know when he wasn’t.
“No,” he’d said finally. “It feels like… it feels like when you call me and I already had the phone in my hand, ready to pick up.”
This, if the light in his eyes was anything to go by, was something Ryland understood.
Three years.
Three years of Drifts, of practice, of missions, of press tours. Three years of winning. Time flew quickly, no doubt about it.
For three years, Jody Moreno was the phone call Colt knew to pick up. The piñata he never missed.
It hadn’t always been this easy. In fact, before Jody? Colt kind of sucked at Drifting.
He felt a slight flicker of amusement through the Drift at the metaphor, but turned from her smile in order to keep his focus on task.
Three years together piloting Metalstorm.
Three years learning the shape and size of another soul’s instincts. The taste of their decision making. The sizzle of where their reflexes stopped being separate from his own.
“Hungry?” Jody asked.
“Maybe a little?” he admitted with a laugh.
He felt her smirk through the drift, and his own amusement bubbled back up.
They didn’t talk much while drifting. There was a certain dance to it all. She would think left and he would already be moving. Their satisfaction in finding a weak point was shared, every emotion was theirs.
It was possibly the closest Colt came to not feeling alone since the day he and Ryland were put in different classes.
A flash of irritation for the stupid guidance councillor who decided the death of their parents meant they should be separated. Twenty years wasn’t long enough to get over it.
Maybe a Kaiju ate him.
(Ryland would probably remember his name. Colt only remembered how angry he’d been.)
He blinked, already pushing through the Drift for Jody’s attention. As expected, she’d already seen what he was looking at. Their reaction simultaneous.
The Kaiju, (a Category 2 Colt already forgot the name of, choosing “Aurora Borealis” instead of its official designation) reared back. (They said it was 102 meters, and a fishy type. Colt thought it resembled an anglerfish crossed with the “spaghetti casserole” the cafeteria served for dinner.)
It roared, bright blue fluorescent spit spraying from its maw. Colt felt the reverberation of it through Metalstorm’s feet before the instruments took measure of it.
Three years fighting these things and something about the scale of them still awed Colt.
“Left shoulder joint,” Jody said without words.
Colt was already moving. “Got it.”
The knife attachment of their plasma cannon struck true into the joint they aimed for, locking their plasma cannon in place, and they quickly unloaded a full clip through the beast.
The Kaiju — David Boreanaz — made its displeasure known. Loudly. But the angle of their canon fire ensured a hit straight through to the core of it. It could yell all it wanted, it wasn’t going to walk away from this.
The yell continued, loud and at length before it finally collapsed into the waves. For almost four full seconds, everything was fine.
Then the world tilted sideways.
Not Metalstorm… the Drift itself.
Colt was left with a very specific sensation, yet it was one he had absolutely no words to express. The only sense in his mind was in the negative.
The sound of electricity you don’t notice until the power goes out.
Like all the furniture was moved several inches to the left.
Like when that guidance councillor decided he and Ryland needed separate classrooms.
Wrong wrong wrong.
One moment Jody was there. Present and solid and known to him completely, and the next—
“Jody?”
Static.
The static of a neural link going through a catastrophic failure.
He’d experienced that failure exactly once during training, and after throwing up and being dismissed for the afternoon, he prayed he’d never have to feel it again.
(The inside of his skull being hollowed out and sandblasted.)
“Moreno’s down,” someone said over comms. Colt was aware enough to hear it for what it was; the calm of someone trained to be calm, and not actual calm. “Left hemisphere spike, Seavers, the sync is down, what is your status?”
He knew. He knew before they’d said it.
That was the part of the training handbook that no amount of “training” ever prepared you for.
The way that you would know the very moment the other persons light went out. No instrument readouts needed, not to recognize the absolute terrible privacy of being alone in your own head.
“Jody,” he thought again, uselessly.
Nothing came back.
Metalstorm lurched, dropping hard to the left as Colt tried and failed to compensate for Jody’s absence.
He heard the comms blaring but ignored it in favour of — you know — not dying.
78 meters of Jaeger was now running on half a brain. And between him and Jody, he was the worse half of the brain. But Metalstorm was stuck with dad now, and together, they were burning their way through emergency compensation protocols — so quickly that even if he’d wanted to answer the comms, he wouldn’t have heard them over all the alarms.
The Kaiju wasn’t reading on any of his scans. Dead.
Certifiably dead.
Yeah. He wasn’t planning on taking any chances.
He took aim, sweat dripping into his eyes, and prepared to empty another clip into the corpse.
A wave of nausea overtook him as the Kaiju leapt up to tackle him.
Colt had once, when he was newly nine years old, tried to ride his bicycle with no hands. Despite all of Ryland’s panicking and worry and calls to: “be careful!” It hadn’t helped, and he lasted about six seconds before the concrete introduced itself to his face.
This was like that.
If a bike weighed over a thousand tons and if Ryland fretting was actually an alarm system screaming at him in several languages and if the concrete was actually a giant spaghetti monster.
(All hail the hypno-borealis, or whatever.)
He didn’t let himself think about Jody. Locking the absence, and the static, and the sick wrong wrong wrong feeling away. Filed it in a drawer. He moved.
The next five minutes were the worst of Colt’s career.
Which said a lot, considering the last three years had been a highlight reel of things normal people tended to say: oh, no thank you to.
He took Metalstorm down to one knee, ocean waves rolling over his legs felt in that phantom way the drift translated the Jaeger’s body. It was half for strategy and half to help alleviate some of the weight of the machine from his mind.
He braced and absorbed a second hit with a pained cry, ears ringing like bells. He drove his plasma cannon home and emptied the clip, this time into its guts directly.
Afro Beanstalk cried out, louder than before, then not at all.
Still, silent, no movement, no resistance, and no one in his head to confirm it.
He didn’t know how he’d gotten back to shore.
He heard it in Ryland’s voice. “The brain does incredible things to protect you.”
But it didn’t feel like protection. It felt like a loss. Like his will was gone and he was forced to move on puppet strings.
The metaphor didn’t matter, not really.
His comms crackled again.
He should check in. He knew he should check in.
He did not make a move to check in.
Instead, he proceeded to dissociate. Sitting in the specific feeling of being alone in his own head fully for the first time in years.
It wasn’t like being alone before the Jaeger program. Back then alone was the norm. (Well, alone-plus-the-twin-thing. Ryland was always at the edge of his periphery.)
The room felt like the furniture hadn’t just shifted several inches to the left. It was ransacked and empty.
The comms crackled to life, this time with a voice. One of Stratt’s various assistants. “Seavers. Status. Respond. Over.”
He tried to say “alive,” but what came out was closer to a wheeze.
The other end went silent a bit too long, in Colt’s opinion, before the voice continued. “Don’t move, we’re sending a recovery team. Over.”
Well. That was something. At least.
They’d moved to remove Jody first; more critical condition.
He wished his brain had blanked out how it felt to stare at the empty left half of the cockpit. Her hookup gear: wires, cords, all that shit, hanging loose and haphazard.
He’d watched them extract Jody without fully processing what had been happening. They moved in slow motion and fast-forward all at once. Nausea rolled over him again, and he squeezed his eyes shut.
He opened them in time to watch them slip an oxygen mask over her face. Relief hit him so hard he thought he’d pass out.
Unconscious and injured and —
He locked it away. Slammed the drawer harder than needed.
Then he was alone in the cockpit. Silent without her. Just the empty space she’d left. A faint taste of copper in the back of his throat. Something he didn’t have the faculties to examine.
He was left alone for what was either three seconds or three-hundred eons.
Colt wasn’t sure what he was doing. Not waiting. No.
Just spending an unending stretch of time unhooking himself against advisement and turning toward the empty space Jody left.
His comms sparked to life again, the voice almost shocking him out of his stupor. Stratt herself, sounding softer than Colt had ever heard her. “Moreno is alive. She’s being taken to medical.”
Alright, well, soft for Stratt, anyway.
Colt didn’t reply, unsure if his voice would work yet. But he knew she was alive.
He felt it when her vitals shifted from critical to stable. Or maybe it was the concussion speaking, and he just needed to believe it badly enough that his brain made it true.
He’d stopped being able to tell the difference between his own thoughts and ghost drift.
Three years was enough to blur the line.
Stratt signed off without another word.
Almost immediately his comms lit up again. No crackle of the direct line from LOCCENT. This was his personal line. He knew before he looked — he always knew before he looked — the same instinct as the Drift, just from a different emotion.
INCOMING — RYLAND
Ryland.
Ryland. Who would’ve seen the alerts from his science bay. Ryland. Who tracked each and every one of Colt’s missions with the same dedication he put into his science projects. Ryland. Who had been trying to reach him, based on the missed call alerts, for the last twenty minutes.
Colt swiped at the HUD, answering the call.
The other end of the line held a very specific tight silence. The kind Colt could see in his head — the stims and nervous movements that held Ryland together in the moments he felt afraid.
“Hey,” Colt said.
Look at that, he can speak.
An exhale of relief replied.
“Hey,” Ryland replied. His voice was doing that wet thing that heralded tears. “We— the feeds went down. And then you weren’t answering, and—”
Colt interrupted him, “I’m here.”
“Yes,” Ryland said. “I— Are you okay?”
What a question.
Ryland usually knew better than to ask Colt questions. Especially ones Colt could just answer with a yes. Ryland would know he was lying, and then they would have to go around the whole thing twice. And honestly? Colt listened to that quiet restlessness coming from Ryland’s end and—
He looked over at the empty half of the cockpit.
“Jody’s in medical.”
A much different silence followed before Ryland finally sighed. “Oh, Colt…”
Colt could hear the med team gathering around the entry to the cockpit. “She’s stable. I know she’s stable.”
“Okay,” Ryland said.
Colt and Ryland waited in silence for a moment. Just the sound of breathing over the faint ambiance of the science bay: the ventilation hum, equipment doing its work, the muttering of whoever else was in the lab.
“Do you want me to come to the docking bay, or—”
“No, the med team is waiting for me. I probably have a debrief to get on with.” Colt trailed off, his eyes wandering back to Jody’s dangling harness.
“Okay.” Ryland said.
Colt knew that meant: “I’m coming anyway” and couldn’t help but feel grateful.
Ryland always knew what he really meant. Twenty-eight years… you would think Colt would be used to it. But Ryland still managed to surprise him with the way he knew the end of sentences Colt didn’t even know how to start.
“Go see medical, I’ll find you.”
Colt was glad to note the fear finally leaving Ryland’s voice.
“Yeah,” Colt said.
“Colt?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you’re okay.”
Colt looked at the empty cockpit and the swinging harness and the place Jody had been. He thought about the drawer he filed everything into. He thought about how full it was getting.
“Me too,” He said. It didn’t sound convincing, even to himself.
Ryland hummed, a disbelieving noise. But Colt ended the call before it could resolve itself.
He let himself breathe for thirty seconds.
The med team was still waiting just outside for him.
But he could take a moment.
He finally finished disconnecting himself from his gear. He let the medical team handle the rest.