#also starring: eli's brand of peaceful negotiations

[moosemonstrous]

(both this and previous chaper on AO3 - we're getting into some of Eli's less charming personality traits here, so, yknow. Proceed at own risk.)

Ghost Rider Pacific Rim AU - internal monologue

It’s T plus twenty one and Robbie never wants to pilot a jaeger again.

He readjusts his (the jaeger’s) grip on the deep gash in the demon’s hide and punches it again, and again. He’s fairly sure his eardrums will never be the same again from the deafening scream it makes when The Charger’s (his) fist connects with it’s ugly snout. Logically, he knows the spray of corruption hitting the outer hull isn’t actually touching him, that it’s being immediately washed away by the ocean waves, but if it was up to him he’d be dropping the beast and backing away as quickly as he’s capable of.

Oh, get over yourself. He pulls his arm back, The Charger following suit less than a thought later, and throws the length of the chain that serves as The Charger’s primary melee weapon over the demon’s head. It wraps around its thick neck and Robbie has to dig The Charger’s feet into the ocean floor not to be dragged along when it bucks. This is the fun part!

He’s not having fun. He was supposed to be taking pot-shots at the beasties swimming ahead of the demon. He wasn’t supposed to even see actual combat. Captain Danvers told him to stay back. What the hell is wrong with him? Can you not just enjoy something for five goddamn minutes? Focus, it’s going for a bite—

Razorback roars and swerves left. It's not a conscious decision to raise his arm and bring the jaeger’s elbow down on its flat head, but the resounding crack feels extremely satisfying. Coyote Tango is right there to take over, grabbing the demon’s tail to fling it deeper into the ocean, the chain going taunt in his hands.

“Charger, stand clear,” he hears. Clear of what? Fuck that, you’ve got it. Reel it back! “Charger, move before you get hit!”

Robbie drops the chain in panic – move where? Before he can even begin figuring out the display screens, he’s already moving, pulled along in a wave of the grey-blue memory. He’s looking at his dad – he knows it’s him in the other console, even with the helmet covering his face – and barks pull left, now! The jaeger trips, its shoulder hitting the water before he manages – just – to right it. He has no idea what’s the protocol for collecting a jaeger from underwater, and by this point LOCCENT might just leave him there.

He did dodge a laser beam from Romeo Blue’s reactor cannon by a hair though. It hits Razorback directly in its open maw, its black blood spilling into the ocean like an oil slick. Show-stealers.

Fuck you, he thinks to himself. You’re not a hero, you don’t know what you’re doing and you shouldn’t. Be. Here.

Hey, the demon came at us! If the heroes were doing their job—

There it is. He can feel something shift in the drift, like a pebble in his boot rolling somewhere he can’t ignore it. It’s so much harder to chalk it up to exhaustion when he’s one hundred percent, absolutely sure that if he turned his head to look, he would see someone else in the empty console on his right.

Now that’s crazy talk. Go on, look. No one’s there.

I know!

“Charger, status report.”

He looks up from the water; Eden Assassin is grappling the demon in its dying throes, Coyote Tango reading to deliver the final blow. “Uh.” His eyes move to the status display of their own volition. If he can read it, can’t they? They’re checking you haven’t fried your brain, dumbass. Haven’t I? “All systems functional. Minor damage to the right hand—” he bites down on ‘from all the damn punching’. His voice is all wrong, like he’s trying to put on an accent.

There’s some crackling on the other end of the comm, as if the hardware itself could tell he was about to make a terrible joke. “Copy that. Try to find that chain before it winds up on a beach somewhere, huh?”

Razorback’s head sinks under the surface of the ocean. Is it dead? Oh God, it’s dead. Please be dead. Coyote Tango grabs it by the spike on the back of its head – it must be dead.

Oh yeah it’s dead. He doesn’t feel the intense satisfaction radiating from that sentence, but when he glances to the second console, it’s still just empty rigging. Give it a rest, would you?

Robbie must be going insane.

Well, what else is new.

It’s T plus twenty four, or rather T minus however long until the next predicted arrival.

Most rangers go up into the helicopters for extraction – with the drift shut down after the fight, nobody wants to spend six hours flying back to Hong Kong when a military aircraft can take you there in two – but Robbie decided to stay put.

“I can come down if you need help detaching,” Cho offers. Robbie didn’t realise until then he came along rather than staying behind on LOCCENT bridge.

“It’s fine,” he says after a moment to make sure it’s him speaking. Really? “Can you, uh, mute me?”

“Ah,” there is a pause. “Look, if you need to freak out—”

“Can you mute me or not?”

“Sure, sure. I’ll be back in half an hour to check on you, though.”

You don’t actually believe he won’t listen.

There’s a soft click in his comm link, then static. Good enough. He reaches to pluck it out of his ear, then turns to look at the second console – empty.

“What,” he asks, feeling faintly ridiculous, “the fuck was that.”

Silence. He’s tempted to pull his helmet back on, to get back into the drift and dig into one of those flash-and-gone memories that can’t possibly be his. There is no way to hide that from mission control, though, and you can’t risk them knowing you’re losing the plot.

There. If he pays attention – and he’s definitely paying attention now, even though every bone in his body feels like it’s on fire – it’s not him. Thorough the fight, he’s been more and more aware of it with every decision he made just before he had any way of knowing it was an option. The chain – he knew about the chain, he saw it’s containment unit on The Charger’s blueprints, he saw it in the old footage from when his dad was piloting – but he didn’t practice with it. Brooks was going to pull out some ropes in training after his first run. There is a perfectly functional extendable staff in the jaeger’s arm he was supposed to have used instead.

Maybe you have superpowers.

What are you?

Does it matter? We saved the day together.

Robbie remembers every questionnaire he’d filled out over the weeks. Do you, or have you in the past, heard someone speak despite being alone in the room? Something cold spills inside his stomach.

You’re jumping to conclusions. You’ve heard the doc, your brain drifts a little, that’s all.

I don’t know how to fight like the rangers do. I don’t know how to account for water currents when charging at a fucking demon. You’ve been training day and night for weeks. Not enough! I shouldn’t know any of these things! I shouldn’t remember what dad looked like when he was drafted!

No response. He concentrates on the sliver of presence he’s been feeling, but it’s like looking at one of those optical illusion pictures – the harder he tries, the less sense it makes.

He needs to– there must be someone he could ask. The head tech, Canelo, he said he was around ten years ago. And Ivanov–

Let me lay this out for you. He can’t help but glance to the empty console. Remember that time you were fifteen, and little Gabriel wouldn’t eat his fucking dinner?

Robbie freezes. It wasn’t about Gabe.

Of course not. Nobody cared how hungry you were, or how hard you worked to pay for it. You lose control, you get put away. Think this time it will be any different? Think the wonks in R&D care what happens to you if you don’t perform to specification?

How do you– I am you. He barely saw Gabe for a year. And here they have a whole place set up for kids like him. They don’t need you to take him off their hands. They barely need you to be doing this. Show one crack, see how long until they find a less… troublesome test subject.

Robbie stares at the status displays for a long moment. Drift inactive, it says. He reaches for his comm link.

“Cho?” It takes a moment before his ping gets an acknowledgement. “I changed my mind. Get me out of here.”