#<- HELL YEA BABYYYYY WOOOOOOOOOO THATS WHAT WE LIKE TO HEAR THATS WHAT ITS ALL ABOUT WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[wazzappp]

(There's no time to explain, get in the jaeger)

Ghost Rider Pacific Rim AU - perception shift

“They, um. Mapped all the seizure points. The risk is minimal. I just don’t know how long it will take, so—”

Robbie doesn’t know who he is trying to convince – himself of Gabe’s shift teacher. Mrs Lai has the expression of someone who has had to sit enough children through conversations like this. He catches her glancing towards the box of tissues on her desk. Her eyes are dry.

“Of course. Gabe is more than welcome to stay in the children’s centre as long as you are away.” Mrs Lai winces, just a little. “But, just in case—”

“Just in case,” Robbie repeats like it’s a spell.

“We don’t have any next of kin information. Is there anyone...?”

He sat through a four-hour long psychiatric evaluation last night. He’s not going to break down in a teacher’s office. You cried in the shower like a little girl. And now he’s fine. Great. Can we get a move on? When he doesn’t answer for long enough, Mrs Lai nods to herself, one sharp movement like she’s putting a decisive dot at the end of a sentence.

“I will make sure to schedule Lisa for a wrap-around shift. She and Gabriel get along really well.”

He opens his mouth to say: that won’t be necessary, and shuts it again. Just in case.

Mrs Lai recommends that Robbie leaves through the staff entrance to avoid bumping into Gabe, then insists when Robbie wants to see him before he goes.

“It’s already halfway through the music class,” she says. Not unkindly. “I saw you tell him you will pick him up as normal. Let’s stick to that plan, shall we?”

Robbie never lies to Gabe. What is he doing? What the hell did he agree to? Only the best chance at making something out for yourself. Come on, move it, let’s go let’s go let’s go! The weird mix of dread and excitement makes him too queasy to even consider breakfast. He sits on the stairs at the back of the children’s centre with his head in his hands for who knows how long, until enough people passing give him weird looks that he has to go or attract security.

See, another benefit. Rangers don’t have to worry about security. Yeah. They only have to worry about catastrophic brain damage. The only type of brain damage worth having, if you think about it.

Robbie has been living out of the academy sweatpants for several weeks and the way the undersuit clings to his skin feels a little suffocating. It’s heavier than he expected, too. It’s all the circuitry. Pull the hip plates up or the techs will do it for you, and they ain’t gentle. The neck brace clicks in place, just push it together, it won’t break.

It’s like going through the motions, even though he’s never seen one of these suits up close before. Or maybe it’s just not that hard to figure out. Like in the academy, he has the vague sense of what to do next, and next, and next, and it all breaks apart if he thinks about it too hard, so he lets the instinct drive him forward in an unknown direction and hopes it will all turn out alright in the end.

Did he watch his dad suit up at some point? He must have.

Each active jaeger has its own dedicated drivesuit room, most at the top of the dome with the detached Conn-Pods waiting to be lowered onto the mech, and Cherno Alpha’s right off the walkway, feet away from the open hatch to it’s built-in cockpit. Hell Charger doesn’t have one set up – yet – so the techs have rigged one of the maintenance rooms a level below the access point with all the monitoring systems. At least a dozen pairs of eyes fix on Robbie as soon as he walks out from behind the stack of boxes serving as his changing room. Somebody takes his phone and clothes out of his arms – he meant to text Gabe before turning it off, is it too late to—of course it’s too late to back out, don’t be a pussy.

“Damn,” the head tech lifts up his goggles to take a better look at him. He’s a big guy, tall and broad and clearly used to people giving him a wide berth. “Ain’t this a blast from the past.”

Robbie swallows around the growing lump in his throat. “Yeah?”

The man reaches out for a handshake. At least the undersuit hides how sweaty Robbie’s palms are all of the sudden. “It’s Canelo. I used to run power routes for The Charger back in the day.”

Oh. Oh! “R-Reyes.” Don’t get star-struck, he’s just a wrench. “You knew my--?”

“There’s still a few of us around from the good old days, yeah,” Canelo slaps his massive hand on Robbie’s shoulder and pulls him to the centre of the room. He makes ‘good old days’ sound like a curse. “We’ll catch up once this whole thing shakes out, hm? I assume Cho talked you through the procedure.”

Robbie nods to confirm. When he looks, Cho gives them a thumbs-up from across the room. He always looks three coffees past bedtime, but he’s been extra jittery today. Even now, he’s gesturing around the screens with an open can of an energy drink and the tech next to him might brain him with her power tool if he spills anything.

“Stand still, limbs apart,” Canelo instructs Robbie, pointing to the markers on the floor. As soon as he takes position, he’s surrounded by people carrying pieces of the drivesuit armour. It’s not a full set; just enough to ensure Cho can monitor his brain activity. The uneven weight distribution makes him feel half-dressed.

“We disconnected the joint motors.” Canelo’s booming voice carries over the noise of the drills screwing the pauldrons to the chest plate. “You’ll only be able to move the head and upper torso after you plug in. It should lighten the neural load, keep you from going under.”

Killjoy.

Robbie does his best to cooperate with the techs, but he hates being prodded and he hates people looking at him, and rather quickly he finds himself hating the way the circuitry against his skin heats up when the switches get flipped. You can feel that? Shouldn’t he? Is something already going wrong?

The hot spiderweb along his spine cools down almost immediately. Huh. Maybe it’s just the initial power surge.

“Right,” Cho appears in front of him like he wasn’t just elbows deep in a mess of cables leading from the monitoring station to the back of Robbie’s drivesuit. His gloves are black from grease and some of it made it up his forearms. He’s got a surprising amount of know-how in this department for someone ostensibly in charge of the biology side of things. “Everyone else will be watching the feed up on the bridge. Canelo got a new helmet prepped; we’re going to modify the Conn-Pod so you don’t have to initialise the drift yourself.” He peels the gloves off to take said helmet from another tech. Yet another wraps the thick cable running from it’s top on a pole to hook it directly above Robbie’s head. Now that he's noticed, the whole ceiling looks like it's crawling with tentacles. Cables. They're just cables.

Here we go. It’s happening. Cho hands him the helmet and it’s honestly a miracle Robbie doesn’t immediately drop it. Keep it together. Think about the—the medical insurance or whatever. Come on, you’re panicking, do the breathing thing. He does, and Cho must notice, because his expression turns into something... guilty.

“You’re gonna be alright,” he says, sounding as confident as usual but with a very different set to his eyebrows. “I will see a seizure coming before you even get a tingle. We’re not taking any chances, we’ll pull you out the second there’s a blip on the radar, okay?” He puts his hands on the shoulder guards on either side of Robbie’s neck. “I’m not getting you killed.”

Robbie wonders if he feels like he did when speaking to Mrs Lai. He licks his lips, but there’s nothing to say, so he just nods instead. Cho nods back before stepping away, and then all there is left to do is to pull the helmet over his face and hope like hell he wasn’t lying.

The relay gel immediately washes down the HUD, the display flickering to life. He can tell when each circuit activates by the hot flashes travelling along his skin and he has to force his breathing even again. You’re doing great, kid. Keep it up. You’re nearly there.

“Alright, everyone to position,” Cho calls, muted through the helmet. “Prepare for drift protocol.”

Oh god, he’s going to throw up. You’re fine. Stay on the surface and don’t go chasing whatever you see, and you’ll be just fine.

“Drift activating in three, two, one—”

The washed-out blue pulls him in like a whirlwind, completely out of his body. It’s like travelling at high speed past monochrome images – he sees himself carrying Gabe on his back through the flooded ruins of Los Angeles, the face of the firefighter urging him through the break in the fence, Gabe strapped into the seat of the first car he bought. On the other side – there are no directions, everything is happening forward and all at once, but there is his side and the other side – somebody gets punched in the stomach, and his dad is stepping in front of him, and a helicopter barrels down from the sky. He does his best not to look – impulse triggers, Dr Montesi said. That’s how you lose the thread. Each scene flashes for maybe a fraction of a second, long enough only to register before moving on, and on, and on, until both sides crash into each other and—

Fuckin’ A, kid! A voice whoops like there’s someone standing right next to him. No, don’t focus on that. The egghead’s talking.

“—process successful!”

Robbie blinks. He realises he’s bent his neck forward at some point, and when he lifts his chin, it’s like the helmet suddenly weighs several tons. There’s a loud creak outside the room, followed by a second of stunned silence inside of it. Robbie blinks the blue away to see a tech run to poke her head outside the door.

Cho waves a hand, and Canelo steps into Robbie’s field of vision. “Any bright spots? Nausea?”

Without thinking, Robbie shakes his head no. More creaking from the outside, like a bridge settling. The lookout tech shouts something in Cantonese and Cho’s focused expression breaks into a grin.

“No signs of kick back,” he says. “Hey, Reyes! Can you shrug?”

Slowly, it dawns on Robbie what’s happening. He lifts his shoulders, the extra weight becoming more natural by the second. Someone cheers. Watch this. Next time he blinks, he’s looking at the hangar like he’s standing on the access walkway, and—

Oh god. He can see through the jaeger’s head cameras. He’s standing in the middle of a concrete room, and he is the jaeger, and then there’s a third view – he’s inside the jaeger’s cockpit, watching the status displays light up with something that feels almost like happiness blooming in his chest.

Excuse you, that’s my side.

When he blinks back to the control room, nobody seems to be talking to him for all the noise of multiple people speaking all at once. He blinks again, and the LOCCENT bridge seems to be within reach of his arm. The more he does it, the easier it gets to hold both views, like he’s inhabiting two bodies at once—

Three bodies. The third view settles in among the others, unmoving but undeniably there. He’s pretty certain Cho talked about this – normally, there are three views, but Robbie doesn’t have a co-pilot.

Don’t think about it too hard.

Are you--?

Relax, we’re one and the same, yeah?

Robbie focuses on his real body. Behind the monitoring equipment, Cho is frowning, but doesn’t look concerned so much as—

He’s fucking thrilled, that’s what he is. He wanted a solo drift and here you are, drifting solo. Enjoy the moment.

He wishes he could see The Charger move when he does. He’s seen the footage from his accident, but the miniscule shift of the giant head was almost imperceptible. Now, he can feel the hydraulics under the steel hull like he can feel the way his muscles strain when lifting a kettlebell.

Pretty cool, huh?

It—it really is pretty cool. He’s really doing it, and other than the quick bursts of heat along the circuit lines there is barely any discomfort. His bad eye feels a little hot, but it’s no worse than having a bright light shone into it during medical exams.

He’s not going to die. Told you. He’s drifting, and it’s working, and Robbie isn’t going to die.

“Reyes, talk to me,” Canelo taps on the side of his helmet. “How’re you doing?”

“Good,” he croaks out. He sounds a little manic. “Good, is it really moving?”

Yeah she is!

“Yep, we’ll get you the side-by-side later. Medical wants to know if your vision is clear in both views.”

He doesn’t even have to blink to be sure. “It’s clear,” he confirms.

Canelo nods and pushes the mic from his comm link to speak into it among the noise: “Pilot confirms, vision clear,” and the realisation hits Robbie like a freight train.

He’s piloting a fucking jaeger.