[can't escape this hell] zoey

[Detox]

Motion had always been therapeutic for Danny, specifically the motion of a fight. There was something about the rhythm of a fight that his body simply flowed with. It got his blood pumping, made his muscles burn and it felt so damn good. It wasn't a sexual kind of good, he wasn't that screwed up, but Danny had always been the kid looking for a fight and had spent the better part of his 'slumdog years' making money winning brawls. Whether it was with his fists or with a bo-staff, Danny got his licks in and learned to take his. When the kaiju came...Danny had figured out that he could use his fighting ability to his advantage until he remembered people like him weren't allowed to come out on top. The kaiju reminded him of that fact. Still, here he was in the training room on one of the mats, facing down probably the fifth person in the last three hours that wouldn't accept that they were outmatched. The staff in his hands felt familiar and warm from the motion of his hands, his muscles humming pleasantly under his skin after he'd spent the afternoon going from fight to fight. Off to the side of the mat, Danny could see the quartermaster looking bored. The man was probably tied of reffing matches where the scores were always the same, always showing no compatibility. Danny couldn't really blame him, considering all around them people had filtered in and out, successfully finding partners while he continued to wade through the cadets that fought too much by the book and not enough by thinking on their feet.

The cadet currently on the mat with him hadn't given Danny much of a challenge. The young man, Chris Morell, was aggressive at least which was better than some had been throughout the afternoon but overall he lacked the ability to think ahead. His strikes, while strong, were easy to predict and his stance was easy to break. Danny had already pinned him once before letting the cadet take some swings, none of which came anywhere near landing. Currently, Danny was hanging back watching as the cadet rolled his shoulders and seemed to try and get a hold of himself after Danny's last strike had left him pinned and gasping like a fish out of water.

"Too predictable," Danny snapped. "Try to use your brain, if you have one."

Across from him, Morell growled in irritation.

Why they even bothered trying to pair Danny with people that obviously hated his guts was a mystery to him. The marshal was probably grinning in his office or creeping on them from some security camera, getting a kick out of wasting Danny's time.

Morell lunged across the mat, bringing his staff up to swing it down at Danny's head, despite Danny's half-head height advantage. Bringing his own staff up, Danny blocked the blow and twisted against the weight Morell put into the swing. The end of his staff whacked Morell's hands and caused the man to duck away to avoid having his temple bashed. Morell released his staff as the spin from Danny's staff all but yanked the staff from the cadet's hands, the staff whirling up and landing neatly in Danny's hand. Really they were making this too easy. More than a little bored, Danny tossed the extra staff back to Morell.

Almost absentmindedly Danny watched as Morell, came at him swinging the staff. In one smooth motion Danny shifted his weight, bringing his own staff up to block the downward blow, the crack of their staffs meeting sending vibrations down his arm. Using the momentum in Morell's swing, Danny deflected the cadet's staff, breaking the younger man's balance enough to swing his left leg up and plant it firmly in the young man's ribs. Morell dropped like a rock to the mat and groaned. Danny barely resisted rolling his eyes as he straightened up. The kid would be fine and if he wasn't then he should get the hell out of the PPDC. Kaiju wouldn't take it easy on him and neither would Danny. Any pilot that did needed to be dropped.

"And that's 4 to 0," the quartermaster droned, marking the loss down on the list of cadet names he had on a clipboard.

"Come on!" Morell snapped, "I can take him!"

Danny raised an eyebrow at the kid.

"You've tried three times this afternoon kid," the quartermaster shot back. "You're not compatible, get over it. Report back to your barracks or go wait for another pilot."

Grumbling and scowling, Morell marched off, striding past another queue of waiting cadets. Danny watched him go before turning back to the quartermaster, absently twirling his staff from one hand to the other. The quartermaster looked back at him with the baleful look of a basset hound, bored and permanently droopy. Danny's eyebrow rose again at the man's blank, watery stare before he glanced around. There weren't any lingering cadets around the edges of his mat.

"No more?" he asked, planting the end of the staff against the mat and looking back to the quartermaster.

"Nope," the man droned, looking down at his list. "You've burned through most of the cadet class. You'll be on standby until the next round of graduates at this rate."

Without meaning to, Danny growled in the back of his throat. He'd been on standby for months and he was sick of it. This was turning into the marines all over again. He'd signed up for revenge and at this rate the war would be fought, win or lose, by the time he found a damned copilot.

"I don't have time for this," Danny growled. "When I came here they told me I was compatible. How many heats have I had with no success?"

"Eighty-one, not counting the ones that tried more than once," the quartermaster replied promptly, not even looking up at the dark agitation in Danny's voice. "I'll report this to the marshal. We may have to retest your compatibility. Perhaps reassignment is in order."

Without waiting for Danny to protest, the man turned on his heel and strode away across the training room, skirting the cluster of cadets that had migrated off during Danny's last match to observe another pair in training. Danny stared after the man, yet another uniformed promise that was being broken. How many times would the military screw him over before he learned his lesson?

"Damnit!" Danny hissed between clenched teeth. Why was this so easy for everyone else?

'You've always been a lone wolf Jacks, you even fight like one.'

Danny shoved Jeremy's voice out of his head. It was easier said than done considering other than his family, Jeremy had probably known the most about Danny, having been the one that got him into fightingrings in the first place, not to mention teaching him everything he knows about how to streetfight. He'd always commented that Danny fought dirty, fought like he had nothing to lose. Really it hadn't been far from true and now...now it was just the reality he had to live with. He wouldn't leave the PPDC until they kicked him out if only because he had nowhere else to go in a world that seemed to be on the brink of apocalypse.

'You fight like an animal backed into a corner that tries to be brave when it's just scared out of it's fucking mind.'

Swinging the staff, Danny lashed out, body following the motion as he fell absently into one of his many practice routines. The staff acted as an extension of his arm, body following through with the motions as he lashed out at attackers he couldn't see but could hear every time he thought he might get ahead. The attacker today? Apparently his old coach, the same man that had picked him up and shoved him at the PPDC, promising revenge for the family he couldn't protect.

'Quit guarding! You're not some lame dog so don't fight like one!'

Danny's posture shifted, his spine straightening as resolve coiled around his mind at the imaginary reprimand. How many times had Jeremy smacked him in the ribs hard enough to paint his sides red, black and blue? Too many to count, all because his teacher had decided that if he was going to fight like he was lamed then he might as well really be.

'Use your space! Don't back into a corner and fight for territory! The ring is your territory Danny, own it!'

Falling into that trance-like rhythm of solo training, Danny moved around the mat, lashing out at enemies in routines his body easily remembered from being too young and having to find some way to make money, some way to get rid of the anger that always seemed to be curled up under his skin just itching to get out. He remembered the dirty alleys of downtown LA, the warehouses where the heats would be held and the random noise of people cheering, jeering and screaming god knows what. In his mind's eye, old opponents rear their heads, ashing out with fists and staves and chains. He remembers most of them, sparring the few that had managed to land stunning blows to his head. In his mind, Lucas drifted to the front, grinning at him while petting a stray kitten, begging to keep it. He saw his brother studying for a biology test, saw his mother switching uniforms to go to her third job for the day. It wasn't fair. He'd fought and struggled all his life for them and then...some monster that was supposed to be a bad dream reared it's head and trashed LA because he wasn't fast enough, wasn't strong enough. Now he was going down that same damned road. Every time he turned around he was the loser, the underdog, the slumdog that none of the cadets wanted the pair with, that no one could seem to match.

The crack of the staff cracking in his hands barely dragged Danny out of the haze. He felt sweat trickling down his temple and in his hands the staff was cracked. Breathing fast, Danny let go of the staff and watched it fall. It was still intact, sort of. Kicking it aside, Danny went over to the edge of the mat where Morell had abandoned his staff from their heat. Somewhere in the back of his mind he heard people muttering around him but ignored the noisy, nosy cadets in favor of reaching down for the still intact staff.

[Meister]

Zoey was bored out of her hungover mind. She slumped over on the bench wedged in the corner of the room, pulling one knee up to her chest and resting her chin on it. Her head throbbed in time with her heart and the abyss that had once been known as her stomach. The high ponytail she'd lashed her hair into the moment she'd seen it that morning might have had something to do with it, as it pulled her hair taut enough to tug at her scalp. However, given the fact that she'd very nearly had an afro when she rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and staggered into the bathroom, there was no way in hell Zoey was undoing the tail.

Her brown eyes tracked as the guy in the middle of the mat sent yet another cadet sprawling. He'd been at it all day, and something about the spectacle had Zoey glued to her bench watching instead of begging for the greasiest and most protein-packed breakfast the cooks could scrape out of their mystery-meat containers. At this point, she'd even go for the jerky. The k-scientists weren't all sure that the jerky wasn't made from kaiju samples, so that said quite a bit about the state of the ranger's stomach.

Rather unhelpfully, her stomach gurgled its agreement. Nobody but the waiting cadet seated beside her seemed to notice, so Zoey ignored it in favor of watching the ranger wipe the floor with another cadet. If he kept up at the same rate, by sunset the floors would be cleaner than they'd ever been. She frowned and cocked her head to one side as he parried a blow to the head easily and disarmed his opponent in the same motion.

Fluid. Simple and as natural a movement as if he were breathing. Zoey came out of her slump, fingers itching for a staff. Alas, she wasn't scheduled for "speed dating" to find her copilot until the next day. If she wanted a swing at the dark-haired ranger, she'd need to wait out the other candidates. A small grin spread across her features, and she winced when the flurry of motion on the mat stopped blocking a light.

Reflexively, Zoey pressed a hand against her eye and swore under her breath. The cadet beside her shot her a scandalized look, and she cracked up. She'd sworn worse streaks stubbing her toe, and certainly when she and Bravo Gipsy had to step in to catch some moron who hadn't tightened their harness properly.

The frown returned to her face, and Zoey shifted so she could scratch at an itch on her ass. She was going to miss Bravo. Six years of time and devotion locked into a docking station while the Marshal tried to talk her into giving them the passcode. Her hands clenched on her loose training pants, and she glared at the cadet currently fighting the ranger. Zoey's baby wouldn't unlock for anything less than the security algorithm for his operating system, and she wasn't about to spread that knowledge around anywhere at all. There were intelligent people in the Shatterdome, and she'd created Bravo's system herself.

It had nearly driven her off her nut doing it, too. Jaeger operating systems were notoriously difficult for people with no in-depth knowledge of biology, and she'd had to ensure a professor thought he'd "accidentally" deleted the files for one of his classes' essays to get the help she had needed. And oh had it been worth it. Bravo was a beautiful, fluid flurry of motion when she ran through capoeira forms to test the programming, and once she'd chased all the bugs out, she was pretty sure Bravo could be the biggest pain in a kaiju's ass any mark six could aspire to be, were they to return.

And return they had, and lo and behold, years later found Zoey idly scratching itches and watching the way the other ranger fought, becoming increasingly certain that there was at least some degree of compatibility between them. His motions weren't the fluid, economic grace of capoeira, but it was something that could complement it. He fought with a rough edge to it, like he'd learned how to fight somewhere between being slammed against walls and breaking his knuckles on somebody else's face.

Zoey rubbed the knuckles of her left hand against her pants and grinned fiercely in remembrance of the fight. It had been a magnificent fight, vicious and no-holds-barred, and she very clearly recalled nearly taking an asshole's eye out with the business end of what had five minutes before been her beer. That was the last time someone in that zip code messed with her drinks, even if it was also the last time she'd set foot in that particular bar.

But such were the hazards of life as a genius smartass such as herself. Either knock the other guy out cold or on his ass before he could do it to you, and save yourself the trouble of being your dentist's most frequent customer, her capoeira teacher had always said in response to her bruises and cuts. He'd promptly taught her to use her opponent's weight and momentum to fling him across a room roughly the size of a typical bar, so Zoey figured he'd understood.

Fighting was just something she did. It was entrenched in her blood, and no matter how her gran had sighed sadly and her mother had tutted, Zoey continued to get into fights. At school, after it, whenever someone was cocky enough to grope her without her say-so.

At the sound of the ranger bickering with the quartermaster over the idiot cadets and not being given any real possible copilots to fight, Zoey's mind returned to the present, and her hangover meekly allowed her to watch. It even behaved and didn't make the world sway beneath her feet as she padded barefoot to the spare staves and selected one that was worn a lighter color where people gripped it by use and was littered with small nicks and scratches. A weapon that had seen a great deal of use and held up was a weapon to be trusted.

A twist of her wrist sent it tipping out of her grip, and another enabled her to return it and bring the staff full circle. Its balance felt good in her hand, and Zoey grinned, bouncing on her heels; the retreat of her hangover and settling of her headache into a background annoyance was allowing her usual energy to return. She walked onto the mat as the ranger started to walk away and planted her free hand on her hip.

"Hey!" Zoey leveled the end of her staff in his direction and cocked an eyebrow, grinning. She was still wearing the same tee with Bravo's black-and-white magnolia logo on it, Bravo Gipsy in elegant script above and below it. The fabric was hopelessly rumpled and stained by oil in a few places, a sharp contrast to her clean and wrinkle-free pants. Her wildly frizzy tail of hair tied the two together neatly.

Her lower lip poked out in a faux pout ruined by the fact that her mouth wanted very badly to grin. It won over her act, and she shifted smoothly into a defensive ready position. "You weren't going to leave without fighting everyone, were you?" Zoey bounced on her toes again, unable to help herself. It had been a while since she'd looked at someone fighting and thought there was even a snowball's chance in hell of compatibility. The Shatterdome that had decided to make a ranger out of her hadn't had any luck, and things hadn't been looking much better here before today.

[Detox]

Being normal had never been something Danny was good at, all things considered. Being successful hadn’t ever really been in his cards either. There were some people, born on the lowest rung of the social ladder and that could work hard enough to make it to the top and live successful, safe lives. That had never been Danny and at this rate, never would be. Hell he probably wouldn’t know what to do with ‘safe’ or even with money, should he ever live long enough to get his pension from PPDC. Every decision Danny had ever made had always turned out to be the wrong one, sometimes it being as simple as choosing what kind of food to get when his mother had been too busy to grocery shop and had left him a couple of dollars to scavenge up something with. Of course the decisions he made as an adult had never been any different. Of course the marines hadn’t moved his family, why would they? Of course the PPDC couldn’t pair him with a copilot, of course they were going to look at dropping him back on the streets where he’d run all his life. Danny was sick of it, sick of it all. There just came a time in a man’s life when he got tired of having his chain yanked around by the higher ups. Maybe today was that day.

Reaching down, Danny collected the staff he’d broken, idly considering lobbing it at the marshal’s head on his way out the door before he simply tossed it to the edge of the mat for some unfortunate grunt to clean up and dispose of. Flexing his hands, Danny started walking across the mat to head out of the training area, mind set on packing his bags so he could catch the first chopper off of this god forsaken island when movement out of the corner of his eye made him stop and turn. The movement had been the swing of a ponytail, a ponytail attached to a woman that was strutting toward him like she owned the whole damn world. She had coffee-and-cream skin, a fake pout on her lips and a staff in her hand. Too old to be a cadet but with no copilot looming in her shadow like so many of them tended to do after a long partnership, she gave Danny reason to pause.

‘Hey! You weren’t going to leave without fighting everyone were you?’

The muscles in Danny’s shoulders tensed. Boy did that sound a whole lot like some of the challenges he’d answered in the back alleys of LA as a kid? Raising an eyebrow at the woman, Danny shifted just slightly so that his body was rotated toward her, although calling the whole thing quits was still plenty an option in his mind. He could go right out that door, leave this odd little woman to her delusions before she got hurt, pack his meager belongings and hop the next chopper to he didn’t care where. Flip the marshal the bird on his way out the door, live his life hopping from place to place with not a dollar in his pocket. That didn’t sound too bad after spending the last almost seven years getting his chain yanked by people he owed no loyalty to, scraping his knuckles and bleeding dry for things that didn’t matter while the one thing that did matter got crushed by a fucking alien. He could do it, Derek knew he could. He could turn around and just keep walking out that door, maybe scrounge around South America for a while and work his way north back to the states.

Eighty-one heats. Eighty-one wins. Eight-one failed copilots. Was eighty-two fails worth the time? Then again…what did he have to lose?

Huffing out a small sigh, Danny watched the woman slide into a defensive stance, staff in hand. He didn’t have time for this really…she probably already had a copilot but…copilots didn’t typically offer to spar others if they were already matched. Some scientist had tried to say it was neural attraction, like two magnets seeking each other out when they wanted to train instead of seeking random joes to bother.

The sound of a staff flying through the air jerked Danny out of his inner battle, causing him to lash out and snatch it out of the air before it could hit him in the face, drawing his gaze from the odd woman to the side of the mat. One of the few cadets left in the room had heard her challenge and apparently noticed Danny had broken his staff. The man had the decency to shrug sheepishly but didn’t look ashamed of himself for barging in on other people’s business, considering the whole staff that now rested in Danny’s hand. Little shit. Hefting the staff in a more comfortable grip, Danny nodded once and resigned himself to one last unsuccessful heat. Moving toward the center of the mat, Danny kept a two-handed grip on the staff as he moved, eyeing the woman’s posture. She balanced like she was ready to move the second Danny lashed toward her which was fine, he could work with that. At least she would move, unlike half the cadets he’d fought that couldn’t seem to get the lead out of their asses on the mat. Anyway, he would need to block her escape, use her own inclination to move to herd her like a dog herding sheep. If he could disarm her that would just make her move faster but it could give him the advantage…He’d have to wait and see on that front.

Shifting the staff, Danny held it at its mid-point with both hands, sliding his hands along the shaft until they rested slightly more than shoulder-width apart. The grip was natural and easy, absentminded in nature as he moved casually toward the woman’s defensive stance. He didn’t think he would break her stance at first so, if she wanted to move he would just get the ball rolling and make her move. When he felt he was close enough, Danny lashed out, bringing the left end of the staff back against his body, tucking it under his left wrist and sliding his right hand along to bring the staff around, sweeping at the woman’s knee. Might as well get the ball rolling.

[Meister]

For a moment, Zoey wasn't sure that the other ranger was going to take her up on the challenge, and she steeled herself for the first of a Shatterdome's worth of letdowns. The cadet who'd been sitting beside her on the bench tossed him a new staff, and he caught it seemingly without thinking. Something about his day or her must have tipped the debate clearly going on in his head, and he stepped onto the mat.

There were not words offered in beginning, and no formal motions. He simply nodded and sized her up, taking in the almost flighty way she held herself, and no doubt formulating some sort of plan that banked on her moving. Zoey already knew that this match would wander around the mat like a hunter after its prey, and the anticipation was already making her blood sing. A quiet competence lay draped over the man, his light eyes focused on her.

She grinned broadly at him, and sprang into motion as soon as the swing of his staff registered in her mind. Zoey rocked her weight onto her back foot and slid her front backwards, whipping her staff down and outward to buy herself the room to maneuver. As soon as her foot cleared, she brought the downward momentum of her staff into a circular motion and twisted, lashing out at his shoulder.

Not a particularly difficult move to block or follow, but the point of fighting a heat wasn't to decimate one's opponent. It was meant to find a rhythm-- or more accurately, it was to find out if there even was a rhythm. And if there was a rhythm, it was also meant to find out just how in sync with that rhythm the two were. She'd heard of a couple of jaegers with trios of pilots, and knew she'd have dished out a couple months' worth of booze money to see them.

Her fights at her first 'dome had all been the same, much as this ranger's were. Step onto the mat with a cocksure cadet, all swagger and confidence, sneering at the mark six logo on her shirt. Some had taunted her, claimed she wasn't a real jaeger pilot if she sat the controls of such a puny thing, and Zoey had fought those the hardest. She hadn't even bothered to try and find compatibility with them, and a couple of times had abandoned her staff to fling them off the mat.

Those had been causes for soft, mocking laughter. Zoey still relished the looks of shock on their faces, and hadn't been able to resist mentioning that, maybe, she was chosen to pilot a bigger jaeger 'cause she was smart and could kick their asses, thank you kindly. Of course, none of them understood that the mark six, chief technician on the back of her tee (the very same one she wore today) meant that she knew damn well what a jaeger could do, and that she worked on the jaegers they were drooling over.

Admittedly, her hopes were pinned on this guy. If he wasn't it for her, Zoey was probably going to drink herself stupid again tonight, her own set of heats in the morning or not. Any copilot of hers would need to be able to handle her cranky and hungover if they wanted to fight beside her anyhow, and practice couldn't start too soon, as her capoeira teacher had liked to say.

The man had said a lot of things, come to think of it. Zoey adjusted her grip on her staff almost absent-mindedly, recalling his words to herself and instilling a sternness to them. No going airborne, even though a good quarter of capoeira techniques included it, because airborne meant a guaranteed trajectory that an opponent could take advantage of and that she couldn't adequately defend. No getting cocky, because she never knew when someone was playing with her or holding back, and that could mean her defeat. No aiming to kill when she wasn't actually defending her own life. No aiming to break bones when nobody was aiming to break hers.

Zoey had broken that last rule too many times to count, but it was really only preemptive on her part, as bar fights rather frequently involved broken or fractured bones for some sorry sadsack. All the participants of the fight could do was try not to be said sadsack. She was proud to say that she was rarely the one walking away nursing some kind of break or fracture, and that several of the times she did, they were knuckles broken on some mountain of flesh's jaw or face.

Really, Zoey enjoyed barfights too much for her own good. This 'dome's marshal had laid down the law, and the restrictions of her position. No more than five fights a month that didn't involve this room or a kaiju, and even those only because they were good practice for the no-holds-barred, any-resource-available aspect of fighting the big blue bastards. Zoey couldn't wait to get her jaeger-moving hands on one and wreck 'em.