Arrival [Hawkeye]

[Meister]

Once upon a time, Roy's big dream had been space. Yes, the kaiju had once skipped the space ride and just barged onto the planet through a wormhole (and while the whole world ending bit had been bad, the concept of a wormhole had seemed so cool to his young mind), but he'd learned about Star Trek and the voyages of the starship Enterprise at his mother's knee. And back then, he'd have bet all he was and had that his mom was the end-all-be-all of knowledge.

Now, he knows better. Knows different. The stars are still pretty, but out there somewhere is a kaiju homeworld he's itching to drag a jaeger onto and give them a piece of his mind. Out there somewhere is a world of beings that have no issue completely decimating the local populace to claim a new home. Humans have acted similarly in their pasts, but Roy knows that even with the genocides, they never caused the extinction of the sentient populaces whose homes they invaded.

These kaiju don't care. Wipe 'em out, move in, move on. It was a grim cycle that kept Roy up at night sometimes, wondering just how many times they'd done this. His high school history books said that the crazy scientist who'd drifted with a kaiju secondary brain discovered that they'd been planning on doing this to the dinosaurs, and wiped them out even after discovering the earth wasn't their kind of environment.

Well, now it was. Moreso than ever, with the lingering (returning) kaiju blue toxicity in the water. Roy's grandma used to grumble about a time when bottled water had been an indulgence rather than a necessity, and he longed for such a time to return. The PPDC was working to bring it back, for good. If those overgrown glow sticks hadn't learned the first time, they'd teach them a second. If they needed two nukes for the lesson, Roy'd be happy to take the dive.

He had a lot to protect, personally. Sitting on his bed trying to convince his hair to fall into some semblance of neat, he mused that he really did. Hawkeye was coming to the Shatterdome, and he'd soon have a drift partner he equated to half of his limbs and mind. Of course, a whine from the furball at his feet prompted him to remember another, smaller thing he was fighting for. Roy rubbed the puppy's head and wondered to himself again at the fact that he'd even done it.

Getting the dog had only seemed natural when he'd first heard that Hawkeye was coming. She'd been like his sister for years, his best friend and most stalwart supporter, and he knew she'd just love the little malamute pup at his feet. He hadn't even named the dog, just taught it where to piss and how to sit, just enough so that Hawkeye could focus on having the dog and giving it the real training.

And yeah, it took a chunk out of the money he was saving up for when Christmas and Ellie's birthday rolled around, but jaeger pilots weren't exactly paupers, and it was worth it. She'd never admit it, never let it show, but Roy had the feeling that this dog'd be a big part of her life.

Roy gave up on his hair with a huff and whistled softly. The dog's ears perked, and he stood, almost tripping over his enormous paws. "Let's go meet Hawkeye, yeah?" His ears perked and he barked, pawing at the door eagerly. Chuckling, Roy opened the door and walked down the hall, hands shoved into the pockets of his cargo pants. He got his fill of tighter clothing in jaeger cockpits, suited up like he was going into space rather than battle.

The dog was partially for his sake, too, he acknowledged. Even though he was young and energetic and curious, the dog stuck to bounding in circles around Roy as he walked toward the jaeger bay, tail wagging and tongue lolling out. He helped Roy forget about Maes for a bit, kept him from wondering about what would have happened if he'd gone with his copilot like the man had asked, if the delay of having the two of them would have saved Maes. Circular questions with no answers, like chasing the damn rabbit down the hole and getting caught by the drift. No bottom and a snowball's chance in hell of pulling himself out of it.

Opening the doors to the bay let Roy know just how active and busy it was. Techs on foot, in little carts and in mark 6 jaegers scurried about making repairs and tending to various jaegers and pieces of equipment. The smaller jaegers did all the heavy lifting, and even acted in place of scissor lifts to get techs into high, tight spots. He waved to the ones he'd met, and winked at a couple of the female techs. It never hurt for a pilot to be in the good graces of the techs.

But his final destination was not (yet) one of the jaeger bays. That lay beyond the doors out to the helipad, which he shouldered open. A chopper hovered and began touching down as he strode out to meet it, the pup hiding slightly behind his foot. To the little dog's credit, he didn't run or tuck his tail, but peeked curiously out at the loud machine.

"Yeah, we're here to meet someone special," Roy murmured to the dog. He canted his head and wagged his tail a bit, panting with his tongue lolling out as if he'd understood the human's words. But there was no time to bend down and love on the pup, because the helicopter's doors were opening, and soon he'd get his first glimpse of his copilot, and of Hawkeye.

Roy grinned.



WORDS 964
NOTES Hayate <3 this came out so easy it's wonderful
TAGGED Hawkeye

[Detox]

Sixteen hours. That was how long it had taken Liza Hawkeye to travel from Anchorage, Alaska to Reever’s Island off of the coast of Chile. Packed into the compact helicopter with only the pilot for company and the thick file of her father’s research for company, it had been a mostly silent trip filled with the thrum of the chopper blades. They’d stopped off in Lima for fuel and were now on the last leg of their trip, the pilot having learned fifteen hours ago to not bother trying to engage the blonde ranger in conversation. There was too much chatter in Hawkeye’s mind for the aimless small talk the pilot was interested in so she simply kept her gaze fixed on the small window beside her head and looked out at the crashing waves far below.

When she had been fourteen, her father had taken Hawkeye and Roy to southern California, letting them run around San Diego mostly unattended while he went to a conference for biomedical engineering. They’d taken a taxi to the beach and wasted the day away staring out at the Pacific, Hawkeye sitting well out of the reach of the surf while Roy ran around collecting shells and body surfing. He’d still been trying to get used to his new family and had been a bit wary of Hawkeye then, still somewhat intimidated by her father and not quite up to calling her ‘sister’. She remembered sitting in the sand, her loose grey sweater just pulled over her arms, toes dug into the sand and hair tied up in a flyaway knot at the back of her head. The sun had been going down, glinting on the water when Roy came up to her with a shell cupped in his hands. Inside there had been a crab, snapping its small claws harmlessly and aimlessly. Hawkeye missed that grin, the way it had lit up his blue eyes like he was showing her the greatest treasure. They’d gone back to San Diego, three months before Hawkeye deployed to Afghanistan. They’d spent the day shoulder to shoulder, walking up and down the beach or sitting up out of the way of the surf, so much closer than at thirteen and fourteen. That was the last time Hawkeye could remember not being afraid of the Pacific.

In her lap, Hawkeye’s grip on the files left by her late father tightened. She’d run away from him and kept running from his insane kaiju/jaeger nonsense for eight years. Even after the breach reopened she’d promised herself she’d never be here, never be wearing this navy uniform with PPDC and the eagle logo stamped on the breast. Now the file in her lap, stamped with FLAMING HAWK PROJECT 59923, HAWKEYE, G was a reminder that she couldn’t run anymore. Her father had never let her run in the first place. He’d put that lock on that damn red jaeger because he knew once she came back she wouldn’t leave. The first time she’d seen it, she had known what it really was. Flaming Hawk wasn’t just a 260 foot jaeger meant to defend mankind. It was Dr. George Hawkeye’s last ‘screw you’ to the world because it defied what everyone wanted.

It wasn’t the typical dark, serious shades used by most jaeger designers for the sake of blending in. Flaming Hawk was scarlet, burning like a flame through the storm. In the recorded interview Hawkeye had watched, her father had been questioned on that design. His response had been simple and deadly serious. “Let the kaiju see it. Let them see it from miles away. Let them know it and fear it because it’s the last thing they’ll see.” But it wasn’t just the bold color that made others tsk. Most jaegers were built symmetrically, meant to match left and right and built for pilots that matched one another. Piloting a jaeger was harmony, was a perfect neural connection. Flaming Hawk boasted the left and right hemispheres having completely different weapons. Her father had scoffed at that idea as well. “Two pilots are never in perfect harmony. They should complement one another, push and pull and fight because that is what they are joined to do. No two pilots are the same, why should the halves they pilot be the same?”

Resting her forehead against the glass of the window, Hawkeye wondered what Roy would say when he saw the jaeger. She wondered what he thought about their pairing. She’d expected him to contact her the instant he found out that she was to replace his former copilot but no such communication had come through. It wasn’t that they’d been in close contact per say over the last eight years but if something had happened, Roy had always been able to get in touch, even when she was in the most deserted mountains in Mongolia. He’d made a point to call her each year on her birthday, even if he had to be up until three in the morning to do it. She still remembered the call when he’d been assigned to Echo Tango. She’d been on a brief one week leave in northern Italy. It had been the one time she’d met Maes Hughes, Roy dragging the man into view. She’d been on the vid-link all day with them, until the sun rose for them and the sun set for her. That had been nearly four years ago now, or close to it. Now Maes was gone and the last time Hawkeye had spoken personally to Roy had been nearly three months prior to the man’s death.

“Almost there,” the pilot called from the front of the chopper, bringing Hawkeye out of her thoughts.

Blinking, Hawkeye looked down to see the Shatterdome rising up from a small island below. There were sea-beaten cliffs surrounding the island and a modest bay where a few supply ships were docked. Helicopters sat on the helipads, waiting to launch as hers came around to land. The command center rose high from the heart of the Shatterdome and people, Mark 6 jaegers and other vehicles milled around below, not even pausing as the transport sank lower to land. Looking away from the window, Hawkeye tucked her father’s files into her modest duffle stamped with US ARMY and covered in faded camouflage. She’d had it since her days in basic training. It held her uniforms and her favorite grey sweater that Roy had given her for Christmas when she was sixteen. It held all of her possessions, pictures and memories, all but one. The pendent Roy had slid into her stuff before she deployed, that she wore at all times tucked under her navy button up uniform shirt.

The helicopter touched down and without waiting for word from the pilot, Hawkeye unbuckled herself and unstrapped her duffle. Stepping out of the helicopter she didn’t look extraordinary and no one really looked twice. Rangers, technicians and officers came and went so often from Reever’s Island that someone coming or going wasn’t that unusual. She didn’t look like much either, 5’2” with blonde hair clipped at the back of her head. She was dressed head to toe in PPDC uniform, from the navy pants tucked into black boots to the black belt and button down navy shirt with sleeves that stopped at her elbows. The only addition was a PPDC windbreaker, RANGER stitched in white across the back with Flaming Hawk’s logo below the words. It had been a gift from the marshal in Anchorage, his sign of good faith that she’d finally be able to make the neural connection needed to make Flaming Hawk the finest jaeger in the fleet.

Turning back to the helicopter, Hawkeye held out her arms and accepted the duffle the pilot handed down to her. Taking a deep breath, Hawkeye shouldered the bag and turned to see who was waiting for her.

It was Roy, looking older and a bit more scruffy than the last time Hawkeye had seen him but there was no mistaking that smile or the twinkle in those blue eyes. Hawkeye’s lips twitched, wanting to match the smile, but a lifetime of keeping a straight face to please her father keeping her from doing so. Bag over her shoulder, Hawkeye left the chopper pilot behind and walked toward her brother and best friend.

[Meister]

What hopped out of that helicopter was only half what Roy expected. Liza Hawkeye emerged from the bird with the ease of someone very much accustomed to riding in helicopters, and his grin only widened at the sight of her twitching lips. She wouldn't outright smile, thanks to Doc Hawkeye's grouching at her, but he knew she wanted to, and that had always been what mattered to Roy.

With him, she could express herself as much or as little as she wanted, and all Roy cared about was if she was happy. Far more than Doc Hawkeye ever had, Liza Hawkeye had been the one to draw the mourning preteen from his shell and coax smiles out of him, make him feel like he had a real family again. A couple of seashells still went with him wherever he was assigned, cradling a small piece of sea glass between them. She had more of them than he did, but he didn't know if they went places with her, or stayed at the Doc's old house.

Either way, the shells reminded him of happier times, of a time when the Pacific was just a big body of water to splash and play in, that spat out cool and interesting shells and polished bits of broken glass until they looked like colored pebbles. Occasionally, he'd lay in bed and rub his thumb over one of the two sand dollars he'd found in San Diego when he was thirteen. Roy remembered bounding up to Hawkeye like the pup currently at his feet sometimes did, excitable and proud of himself for his find. Rather than smiling placatingly and plucking the sand dollar from his hand, she'd inspected it and given solemn approval.

It could have been his imagination and hope, but Roy could swear he saw the glint of a chain around her neck as she twisted around for her duffle bag. His eyes crinkled at the corners, grin widening even further. Hopefully the price to pay for seeing that pendant around her neck wasn't a smack to the back of the head or the pointed application of her service weapon in the vicinity of his feet or balls.

As soon as she turned back around to walk toward him, Roy strode forward and wrapped his arms around her, hefting the smaller blonde off her feet. He tucked his face against her shoulder and huffed a small laugh. This close to her windbreaker, it was sinking in that it was navy blue and not army camouflage. "I missed you," he murmured instead of commenting on her PPDC gear like he wanted to. There would be plenty of time to grill her on why she was geared up like a ranger after their hellos.

His hand passed over stitching on the back of her windbreaker, and Roy traced the word, still holding Hawkeye off the ground. Under his fingers, the word ranger spelled itself out in white thread, nestled above the stitching for an unfamiliar jaeger logo.

Thought kind of abandoned him for a moment, and he eased her back to the ground, taking care to set her down with her balance intact. Hawkeye had a jaeger logo stitched onto the back of her windbreaker. Which had the word ranger stitched over said logo. And it was all stitched into PPDC gear. Which meant that Hawkeye was PPDC, and the jaeger pilot he'd be drifting with tomorrow....

It was her.

Just when Roy thought he couldn't grin any more or any wider, his face decided to prove him wrong and ache merrily with the effort. He could barely see for how his eyes scrunched up, and the dog sensed his happiness, tail wagging and barking for Roy to bring him in on the happy. Shaking his head and chuckling, Roy knelt and nudged the dog away from his foot.

Glancing between them, he ran a hand firmly over the dog's head and back, and snapped his fingers, pointing down. The dog sat immediately and looked to Roy. Roy scratched vigorously behind his ears, and the pup panted happily, his own eyes scrunching and his tongue lolling in a doggy grin. Blue eyes darted up to gauge Hawkeye's reaction to the dog, and Roy waved her down. "Come meet your dog," he told her.

This was either going to go very well, or very poorly. He'd never known her to dislike dogs, but both Hawkeyes had very efficiently shot down his request for a dog when he was thirteen. Granted, that might have had more to do with Doc Hawkeye's experiments and the questionable substances routinely left lying out about the house than any dislike of dogs, but it'd become a lingering paranoia ever since he finally managed to sweet-talk a breeder into sending an Alaskan Malamute puppy down to a craggy rock off the coast of Chile.

Right now, the pup was all big paws, floppy ears and downy fur, still in possession of the puppy breath that made Roy happy to stick his face right in the dog's and cuddle with the furball. But when he grew up, Roy knew that some people would mistake him for a wolf, with his long, rough fur and coat pattern, and his lean build. He'd be a big, fierce dog, and the minute Roy had stumbled across the breed's Wikipedia page (which to this day he doesn't know how he managed from starting at the function of kaiju cellular biology), he'd known they'd be well-suited to as badass a woman as his foster sister.

He could imagine them shortly after the kaiju threat was eliminated, with reporters scrambling to interview her and all the shoots that'd make her look more dangerous than any bleached-blond pair of Russian pilots. Cherno Alpha's team had looked like they could eat kaiju for breakfast without breaking a nail or a sweat, even decades later and knowing they got taken out by a pair of category fours. Hell, the shoots had their work three-quarters done for them, because Liza Hawkeye was likely to take one look at a jaeger and know six different places there'd shortly be holes in it, and then follow through with that knowledge.

Rarely had Roy ever caught her ire, but the few times he had left him in perpetual fear of returning there. He'd known guys in high school whose exact same fear had created a personal bubble a good five feet in radius that spread to the rest of the school, until Roy was the only one who'd barge through that bubble as he pleased. He'd had money on her terrorizing her units in the army into good behavior, and won some decent money from it as well. Roy grinned back down at the pup and rubbed under his chin.



WORDS 1121
NOTES i'm a rambler i'm a gambler...
TAGGED Hawkeye

[Detox]

If it was one thing Hawkeye knew about Roy, it was that he was a hugger, although he hugged very few people. He was charismatic and kind but the number of people allowed into his true personal bubble was very small. Few people got hugs from the man, although they always felt close to them because he gave the impression of having no personal bubble but to be held, that was the true sign that you’d been let in. So, unlike how she would normally treat anyone that tried to hug her, Hawkeye didn’t fight it. She dropped her duffle and let him wrap her up. Compared to him, she felt tiny because he was a good foot taller than her. She looped her arms around his neck and let him lift her off her feet in the way she pretended to hate but secretly loved. He knew it was no secret but she had always had a reputation to uphold in high school. Now though, she figured she was allowed to enjoy this because it had been eight years since he’d hugged her goodbye at four in the morning when she shipped out to basic training. So she buried her nose in the crook of his neck, idly noting he hadn’t changed colognes in all that time. For some reason, that knowledge made her fingers dig into his collar just a little harder.

In the back of her mind, the blonde newly minted ranger felt Roy’s fingers trace the stitching on her windbreaker and it struck her then that no one had told him she wasn’t just accompanying Flaming Hawk, but also staying as his potential partner. He figured it out soon enough, piecing together the navy uniform and windbreaker. When he set her back on her feet, Hawkeye drew back and saw his eyes gleaming even brighter and a grin on his face so wide it looked like it must hurt. Hawkeye wished she could smile like that sometimes because Roy made it look so easy but instead she over just that one-sided quirk of her lips that he knew meant she was grinning on the inside.

Something brushed against Hawkeye’s leg and drew her gaze downward before she could comment on how long it took him to put two and two together. What she saw made her raise an eyebrow. A puppy, two or three months old, was milling around Roy’s legs. It was a fluffball to say the least, all big paws and ears that looked a touch too large. It tipped it’s head back and looked up at her with big brown eyes and its pink tongue lulling out of its parted jaws as it panted while Roy crouched to scratch its ears after making it sit. Hawkeye’s gaze flicked from Roy to the dog and back again before, at his bidding, she crouched to meet the little creature.

“’Your dog’? You bought me a dog?” Hawkeye asked, crouching with her left knee on the asphalt and her right arm balanced on her right knee.

The puppy perked its ears at the new human now on its level and came forward, nose twitching at the end of its short snout as it took in the smell of the helicopter and unfamiliar places. Hawkeye held out a hand, letting its nose tickle her fingertips before they skimmed over the dog’s muzzle to rub its triangular ears. It had been absolute years since she’d had a dog, well before Roy had joined the Hawkeye family. Back then, from when she was five to when she was twelve, Kodiak the husky had been her best friend and solitary companion. Kids at school thought she and her father were weird and would have nothing to do with her so, to give her a friend, her father had bought the wily husky from a humane society. Two years old and willful, the husky had tried to run their household but even as a little kid apparently Hawkeye had been good at putting people in their place. Her father used to muse absently about how that dog had trailed around behind her, tail wagging at all times, more than happy to growl at anyone that it felt made her uncomfortable and listen to every order. She could still remember laying on the floor in their living room as sunshine fell through the window, head pillowed on Kodiak’s belly while she read a book and absently stroked his red and white fur and he napped. He’d been hit by a car a month before Roy joined them and to this day Hawkeye was sure it hadn’t been an accident.

“You always did like big gifts,” Hawkeye murmured, stroking the dog’s head as he came closer to her. She stroked her hand down from the crown of his head to his neck before grasping his scruff. The dog went still and let Hawkeye roll him onto his belly, wriggling only a little as she held him in place with one hand and absently scratched his belly in reward for his good behavior. “How did you get a dog on an island like this? Or get a marshal to let you have it in the Shatterdome?”

Under her hands the dog wriggled but mostly because it liked the tummy rubs, laying on its back placidly, looking up at Hawkeye with its tongue lulling out. It reminded her of Black Jack, the Labrador retriever one of the men in her unit had had, a bomb dog that had sort of been their unit’s mascot, complete with his own patch on his vest. All of them had that patch, a retriever’s silhouette with the number of their unit around it and the ace of spades alongside the dog’s head. It had been a gift from one of the wife of the man that technically was in charge of Black Jack. Pulling back her hand, Hawkeye watched the dog roll to its feet before it came closer, bumping her knee with its nose and then sniffing at her face. She put a hand on its muzzle and scratched lightly, looking at Roy, one eyebrow raised for an explanation.

“What’s his name?” All the while, Hawkeye’s hands absently roamed the dog, skimming his shoulders and front legs, along his hips and spine, pressing through the thick fur to feel the developing muscles underneath, curling her fingers along his tail. It had been a while since Kodiak but in those young years, Hawkeye had made it her business to know her dog and what they should feel like, how they looked when healthy and when ill, how to tell if something wasn’t quite right. Apparently the old habits hadn’t completely vanished in her years without a canine companion.

[Meister]

"You always did like big gifts."

He really did. Roy had a tendency to give people little things without thinking, stashing candy bars and little trinkets in his friends' bunks year round, because he could and because it made them happier in a world going to hell. Because he did that, it was go big or go home when it was real gift-giving time. When Hawkeye turned eighteen and shipped out, he'd been saving up working part-time in a boxing place for two years for the gift he'd slipped in her duffle. It was a dragon's breath opal, fiery and almost ethereal in its beauty. In Roy's opinion, it was well suited to his foster sister; hiding it had been the only way she'd accept it, though.

When Ellie's birthday came around five months ago, Gracie'd had to talk him down from going to haggle with a horse breeder for the pony Ellie had wanted. Instead, he'd gotten her a massive stuffed rocking horse. Large gestures were just a part of Roy's personality. Hence the puppy currently panting happily and gazing up at Hawkeye as she gave him belly rubs.

"How did you get a dog on an island like this? Or get a marshal to let you have it in the Shatterdome?"

Ducking his head and tugging gently on the dog's tail, Roy guessed that she hadn't been a ranger long enough to clue in as to how they were treated. While the PPDC was a military operation with military ranks, the rangers were a valuable commodity that needed extensive training to be replaced. Thus, the powers that be tended to look the other way if rangers or the teams maintaining the jaegers wanted to do things like brew moonshine in a back room or have pets. "I'm a very persuasive man," Roy said mock-gravely.

Actually getting the breeder to ship the dog had been the hard part. She'd been reluctant to send him to as dangerous a place as a Shatterdome, and her husband had been convinced he'd be too wrapped up in his job to take proper care of the pup. Roy had put a good month into reassuring them of his intentions, and of the fact that he could care for the dog. Mentioning that a very responsible army officer would be the intended owner with the ranger merely assisting had gone a long way on that front.

The cincher for the breeders' agreement to his purchase of the pup had been Roy's offer to pay for the shipping costs. It was an expensive thing, what with the breeders being based in southern Alaska, but entirely worth it. If there were wolf-sized jaegers, they wouldn't stand a chance against a fully-grown, Hawkeye-trained malamute. Especially not a Hawkeye-trained one.

Roy stood and whistled at the pup. His ears perked and he turned to face Roy, but he remained by Hawkeye's side as she ran her hands over him in a motion that seemed practiced and familiar to her. He wondered when she'd had experience handling dogs and just how much experience there was. Studying her face, Roy couldn't find any signs of tucked-away distress or sadness, and cheered mentally that he hadn't accidentally stirred up bad memories. There was no telling what she'd done while in the army and what bonds she'd forged until (or unless) she told him. For now, it was blind flying and going off an instinct that told him she'd love the dog.

"What's his name?"

"He doesn't have one until you give him it." Roy had purposefully avoided calling the dog by name, knowing that he should be named by his owner, not his part-time caretaker.

[Detox]

It was impossible for Hawkeye to stay irritated with Roy for very long, it always had been. From the first time he exploded pancake mix all over the kitchen to springing yet another unexpectedly large and meaningful gift, Hawkeye simply couldn’t hang on to the irritation that she would show anyone else that tried to do the same. When she had been unpacking at boot camp and found the scarlet pendent, she’d nearly dropped it and had to scramble to clamp down her self control to keep from going to the nearest phone, calling home and tearing Roy a new one for wasting his summer job money on her. Instead of doing that though, she’d sent him a steady stream of photos of the countries she had gone to, taking them and routing them to a friend she had back in Washington DC that had printed them and sent them on to the Hawkeye residence, and later to whatever shatterdome Roy was deployed at. They’d ranged from pictures of men he’d never meet to one a friend had caught of her wearing her full gear, the helmet and bulky body armor making her look even smaller than ever before. Landscapes of Afghanistan, Mongolia, Italy and almost every other country between England and Japan had been steady repayment for the expensive gift. The pictures had stopped when she’d been dragged to the PPDC. Thinking back on it, she wondered if the sudden stop had made him wonder if she’d finally come on the wrong side of a landmine. The assumption wouldn’t necessarily have been wrong.

Stroking the puppy’s ears, the blonde former army lieutenant looked at the malamute pup long and hard. He was a big boy, a couple of months old already and if his big paws were any indication, he would be a fair sized adult. Her lips twitched in a smile. Roy knew her so well, even if he didn’t know it. She’d always loved big dogs that looked like wolves, one of the reasons her father had gotten her a husky as her childhood companion. This one though, he would be bigger than Kodiak, more hard muscle under dense fly-away fur, more shaggy than a well-groomed husky. Combing her fingers through the fur along the pup’s back, she watched him wriggle in anticipation and look up at her with big brown eyes. Yes, someday he’d be big and fierce and if she had anything to say about it, very well trained. What to call him though?

In her mind’s eye, a face came swimming to the surface: a scrawny little Japanese PPDC cadet that spoke in broken English, waved his hands too much when he talked and liked to try and get everyone to love sushi. Tanto Hayate. Barely eighteen and saddled with her as a drift partner. He’d been her only drift that had shown any potential but not enough for the higher ups to keep him in base. He’d been shipped back to Tokyo’s Shatterdome two weeks after they were deemed incompatible. No one had been able to understand a word he said except for Hawkeye but even she had to put effort into it. A normal five minute conversation had taken an hour with Hayate but…the work had been worth it and since his jaeger, Aurora Mistress, went down last month…Hawkeye can’t help but wish she’d tried harder. He and the dog had the same potential, the same sloppy grin. Hawkeye’s lips twitched in a shadow of a smile.

“Hayate.” She gripped his muzzle gently but firmly, looking the dog in the eye. “What do you think, Hayate?”

The dog didn’t say anything of course but he nosed at her palm and licked it. Good enough. Hawkeye straightened up and clicked her fingers. The pup stood and leaned against her leg, tail wagging, head tipped back and watching for more commands. Instead though, Hawkeye looked to Roy, hoping he knew she loved it. He probably knew, the bastard had a sneaky way of knowing everything about her, from what would please her to what would enrage her, seemingly from the day they’d met. Hopefully he liked Hawkeye’s gift too.

“I’ve got a gift for you,” Hawkeye said, reaching into her duffle as the thrum of chopper blades filled the air again. “And it sounds like its just arriving.” Pulling out the three files for Flaming Hawk, Hawkeye tipped her head back in time to watch as two massive transport choppers carried Flaming Hawk over their head.

Even from far below it was easy to spot, flaming scarlet between the two black transports that suspended it between them. It was 260 feet of her father’s desperation, 1,890 tons of stories and lectures about kaiju and jaegers and drifting that had filled her childhood, and quite a bit of Roy’s young adulthood. In one of his interviews that Hawkeye had watched in Anchorage, someone had asked him why he had made it so vibrant when most jaegers were designed to stay hidden in the dark to make them less of a target. His response had made Hawkeye shut the reel off but even now she could hear it echoing in her mind. “Let the kaiju see it. Let them all see it. Flaming Hawk won’t wait in the dark for the monster to find it, Flaming Hawk will find the monster and all kaiju will learn to fear it.” Of course her father wouldn’t just settle for defending mankind. He had built Flaming Hawk as a warning to the kaiju, a threat, nothing less. Proof that he wasn’t just a madman dreaming his career away.

Hawkeye watched as the transports hovered over the bay and lowered the jaeger down before looking to Roy. “Come on. If you think she’s impressive from here, wait until you see her up close.”

Reaching down, she shouldered her duffle, clicked her fingers for Hayate and started walking toward the jaeger bay without waiting to see if Roy was going to follow her or if he was going to spend all day staring at the sky, gaping like a fish out of water. She’d seen pictures of Echo Tango once or twice in the newspapers and it certainly hadn’t made quite the statement Flaming Hawk did but…sometimes sentiment overrode all of that. Hawkeye hoped Roy could care for Flaming Hawk like he had Echo Tango, regardless of if their drift worked or not. She wondered if anyone had told him about her sketchy drift record or that this was her last chance. Considering her PPDC uniform had taken him by surprise she doubted it but…Hawkeye wasn’t quite up to voicing it herself. So, she walked into the crowded jaeger bay with Hayate on her heels, and no doubt Roy, navigating the place like she’d always been there until she came to Flaming Hawk, standing vibrant and new between a battered giant tinted blue and a dark, somber jaeger of similar height. Hawkeye had reviewed the docked jaegers at Reever’s Island and figured those must be Ocean Titan and Samurai Dark.

[Meister]

"Hayate. What do you think, Hayate?"

Hayate? Roy wondered what had been going through her mind to pick that up. She'd gotten the same look on her face she always had when she was remembering something she had mixed feelings about, and her hands had been gentle, and a sight closer to absent-minded than Hawkeye tended toward. But whatever the pup's namesake was, Roy was certain it or they weren't, or wasn't, anything mundane.

His grin turned fond as Roy watched the woman and dog interact, glad he'd found a dog breed she liked and thankful that the breeders had sent a pup with such a good personality. Being a ranger was often stressful business, and while most of them dealt with it in their own ways, Hawkeye wasn't the sort to take her stress out on anything but a kaiju or a practice target.

"I've got a gift for you. And it sounds like its just arriving."

The air filled with the whump-whump-whump of a helicopter, loud enough and stirring the air enough that it couldn't be just one. For a moment, Roy's grin turned teasing, and he wondered if she'd finally decided to match his style of gift-giving. And then he looked up.

It looked like a jaeger. It was massive like one. But with a paint job that bright and loud, it was certainly no jaeger designed by an engineer Roy had heard of. His head whipped around to stare at Hawkeye, and then craned back so he could stare at the scarlet jaeger the 'copters were flying in. Memories of sitting wedged between Hawkeye and the arm of the couch, both careful to avoid the stacks of books sprawled on and around the furniture, while Doc Hawkeye lectured the two of them about kaiju, the rift, and jaegers.

He'd tuned most of it out, instead occupying himself with his imagination, and sometimes with silent communication with his foster sister. But this? This would be just like the Doc, a final defiance of convention and declaration of intent. Roy hadn't know Doc Hawkeye like Liza had, but he knew the man wouldn't be able to resist reminding the world that he'd known, always known, that this would happen. That the war would return. And that his invention and years of dedication to the subject would be out there killing kaiju and not being the least bit shy or subtle about it.

Let them come, he could almost hear the Doc say. She'll kill them all and they'll learn to fear her. He didn't know what the jaeger was named, but the sight of it already sparked something warm within him. It sat neatly beside Echo Tango and the jagged hole left by Maes's death.

Maes. His copilot would have loved the dog, teased Roy mercilessly about how much time and effort he'd put into making sure Hawkeye loved him. The man had been almost manically happy in his marriage and with his little daughter, and vowed daily to find Roy a woman to be happy with once they figured out a way to close the rift. Roy had only scowled at him and muttered petulantly that he wasn't the dating type, avoiding Maes's keen green eyes.

"Come on. If you think she's impressive from here, wait until you see her up close."

Belatedly, Roy realized that Hawkeye was walking away, the newly named Hayate at her heels. His longer legs caught him up to Hawkeye without him having to jog just before they entered the bay proper. Activity swarmed around Samurai Dark and Calypso Hurricane, maintaining the two in case of a kaiju attack. Ocean Titan loomed in its own bay, a couple of techs hanging from its thick chest by sturdy cables. Cans of paint dangled from their harnesses, and they touched up where Razorback had chipped away at the dark blue coloring.

"You going to be piloting that with me, or just minding it?"

[Detox]

'You going to be piloting that with me, or just minding it?'

Ever since they were kids, Roy had had the bad habit of asking the best and worst questions. He was curious to a fault, something that probably made him a good ranger and all that but something that had frequently driven Hawkeye nuts because the man didn't know how to ask a question. Correction: he knew how to ask questions too well. He didn't beat around the bush and tact wasn't always his best friend, especially when questioning his superiors if the news reports were to be believed. Looking up at Flaming Hawk, standing in its bay between the two titans of the sea, Hawkeye felt her heart skip a beat because damn it all if Roy hadn't cut right to the heart of the matter. Instinct told her to tell Roy the truth because he might be able to help her but pride told her to keep her mouth shut because she didn't need help. Well, maybe not that she didn't need help but that she didn't want it. Her father had spent his life clucking his tongue at her choices and accomplishments, frowning from behind his glasses and saying she could do better. He'd left her one last challenge and she could beat it on her own. Or so she had thought.

"When he designed Flaming Hawk, father put a lock on it. When he died no one could open it except me." Hawkeye didn't look at Roy, just leaned against the rail of the observation deck looking at the crimson jaeger standing between its scarred companions. "I was in Russia when they pulled me...there were riots in Moscow and their army asked for help. When I went to Anchorage it was just to open the jaeger but when I saw it...the marshal talked me into testing. I was compatible so...they put me in the ring to find a copilot, said Flaming Hawk was mine if I could prove I could control it. The drifts never lasted and now they need Flaming Hawk, they can't wait on me anymore." Hawkeye bit her lip and forced herself to keep looking at the red jaeger that had become an eyesore after so many months of trying to find that perfect copilot. "This is my last chance. If I can't drift with you, and maintain the drift, Flaming Hawk is moving on...and I'm going back to the middle east."

That was probably the most she'd ever told anyone about her situation, including any potential copilots. All of her father's lessons about self control were coming back to bite Hawkeye in the tail because now she couldn't let up enough to let anyone have full access to her mind. She couldn't share headspace with some random stranger from Texas or Japan or Thailand. How many people had she had test drifts with? After Hayate she'd lost count. Anytime they rescanned her, retested her, she proved compatible but when in the drift with anyone else she locked down her mind, slammed the door on anyone trying to initiate a neural handshake with her. All because her father had told her time and time again to keep that stiff upper lip, to repress and hold on tight so no one else could see if she was bleeding. She could trust her platoon to watch her back in a firefight but she couldn't let a stranger share her mind, her body. Everything in her being was repulsed by it, even though she was even more repulsed by the idea of someone else defiling her father's last 'screw you' to the world. He'd flipped them the bird and left her to deal with the mess.

"I figured if this didn't work, at least you would be able to take care of it like father wanted," Hawkeye finished with a soft sigh, finally forcing herself to look at Roy. "Because I don't think I can."

The words were almost physically painful for Hawkeye to say because if it was one thing she didn't do it was admit weakness. Hawkeyes in general were allergic to emotion apparently, seeing as her father had been so stoic and taught her to be much the same. Admitting they needed help or were hurting, it wasn't their style. Hawkeye could remember getting caught in the blast from a Molotov thrown in a riot in Iran. She'd walked around with a gashed arm for three days before a medic caught her dressing the wound and nearly screamed himself hoarse in frustration while stitching her up. Hawkeye hadn't been ashamed, she knew the wound had been fine, that the burns were fading and the gash healing. The medics had been busy with other things and she'd been able to help herself, just like always. Hawkeyes didn't talk or plead. They fought their own wars and if they won it was under their own power, no one else's. Hawkeye didn't know what else to do though. Roy read her like a book and he would know if she lied so...it was faster this way. Looking down at Hayate, sitting beside her and leaning against her leg she sighed.

"If I get shipped out, I won't be able to take him with me."

Hawkeye didn't have to tell Roy everything, and maybe that was the nice thing about their relationship, but she could tell him enough. He didn't need to know that each drift had left her headachy or that her first drift had left her with parallel bruises down her spine because the neural suit hadn't fit right. She didn't have to tell him how much it sucked to know she was so stubborn that no one, not a single person thus far, had been able to break through and drift successfully with her. He could guess that stuff, he'd been a ranger much longer than her after all, although she would bet good money she had drifted with more people. Or tried to drift. Close enough. Hawkeye knew that Roy would understand at least some of it. He could probably guess at the things she had seen, trying to manage the turmoil inland while the coasts went to hell, she knew he watched the news when he had time. He'd heard about the riots and the political unease. He probably had seen a few of the flashier firefights on the news and wondered at one point or another if she'd been in it. There were things Hawkeye didn't want to show other people, things the drift would bring out. She didn't want to share those sunny afternoons with Kodiak or that beach in San Diego...but maybe it wouldn't be so bad if she shared it with Roy?

'But what about the people you've shot? What about them? Can you show him those people?'

Hawkeye looked away from Roy, trying to push back that nagging little whisper in the back of her mind.

[Meister]

"When he designed Flaming Hawk, father put a lock on it. When he died no one could open it except me."

Roy almost laughed. The words certainly brought a smile to his face. It was such a Hawkeye thing to do, creating such a fine, well-crafted thing only to squirrel it away and make it so that only a person with no love for the organization could unlock it. And he wondered just what Hawkeye had had to drop to become a ranger and come to Chile. He wondered where she'd been when she'd gotten the news.

While Hawkeye and he kept in contact, swapping letters and photos, she was often unable to tell him where she was or send the photos until she'd moved on. Roy was allowed to send her pictures that didn't involve the Shatterdome's defenses, or the jaegers themselves. He liked sending her pictures of the Indonesian countryside when he got a chance to get out there, and in the last few days between his own arrival and the news of hers, Roy had started taking pictures of the view of the craggy beaches, the view of the sunrise and the sunset from the east and west sides of the comm-pod. Sunset shots were gorgeous, painting the sky with warm pastel colors sprawled over the endless ocean and merging almost seamlessly with their reflections in that water.

It was almost impossible to believe what was increasingly regularly coming out of that water to decimate humanity when he looked at those pictures. They were so beautiful and so peaceful he'd wound up taping a couple on the wall beside his bunk, to stare at when he thought and when he needed reminding of just why he had agreed to a new copilot and a new jaeger, why he continued to fight kaiju after half of him died.

"I was in Russia when they pulled me...there were riots in Moscow and their army asked for help. When I went to Anchorage it was just to open the jaeger but when I saw it...the marshal talked me into testing. I was compatible so...they put me in the ring to find a copilot, said Flaming Hawk was mine if I could prove I could control it. The drifts never lasted and now they need Flaming Hawk, they can't wait on me anymore. This is my last chance. If I can't drift with you, and maintain the drift, Flaming Hawk is moving on...and I'm going back to the middle east."

That brought Roy up short. He had a habit of asking questions that cut to the heart of the matter, driven by a curiosity and a need to know that made him the ranger he was and got him into the program. However, the other side of that double-edged sword was that he heard things he didn't always want to hear.

Now that she was here, Roy knew who his next and last copilot was. If he somehow survived losing her, he'd be putting a bullet in his own head before the week was out. The ranger knew it in his bones, knew it like he'd known he and Maes were drift compatible before they'd ever stepped onto a mat together. It was him and Hawkeye or nothing at all.

Just as he shifted to grab her hand and drag her to go try out a drift, she spoke again. His mouth snapped shut and he resettled in his former position, listening with as much seriousness as he could muster. While Roy had no doubt that they could maintain an adequate drift and pilot Flaming Hawk to the Marshal's satisfaction, Hawkeye might have her own doubts and hangups about it.

"I figured if this didn't work, at least you would be able to take care of it like father wanted. Because I don't think I can."

Surprisingly, he had to work to avoid rolling his eyes. Of course she couldn't. Not alone, anyhow. But together, they could. They would. Roy had latched onto the idea of her as his copilot like a dog with a bone, and even the Marshal's refusal wouldn't budge him. "We could together," he murmured.

"If I get shipped out, I won't be able to take him with me."

Hayate beamed up at them with a doggy grin, tongue lolling out and blissfully unaware of the fact that the woman he'd taken to rather quickly could be separated from him at the order of the Marshal. Roy smiled down at the dog, and then leaned forward and snagged Hawkeye's hand. "Well then you just won't ship out. You'll stay here and show everyone just how well we can drift."

Roy grinned at her, his solemn expression melting away. "Let's go take Flaming Hawk for a test drive!"

[Detox]

The problem with Roy was that once he got an idea in his head, there was no changing his mind. He would cling to anything he thought was a great idea or great plan. Hawkeye usually just let him ride the wave, making nudges here and there to make sure he didn’t crash and burn but sometimes she got dragged into the madness too. His easy acceptance, easy declarations that everything would be okay, that were like a balm for Hawkeye and she wanted nothing more than to have the blind faith to say he was right. The problem was Hawkeye had never been able to manage blind faith. The closest she had ever come to that was her faith in Roy, but even that she sometimes had to take with a grain of salt. When he tugged on her hand and declared it was time to take Flaming Hawk for a test run, Hawkeye could practically taste the salt on the back of her tongue. How many drift partners had she had? Potential copilots, roommates, even instructors, none of them had worked, not properly. Sometimes the handshake would take and then break in under fifteen seconds or it wouldn’t take at all and they’d just be standing in the cockpit of the jaeger with Hawkeye feeling like a fool. For some reason though, Hawkeye didn’t protest as Roy tugged her along, Hayate falling into step alongside them, grinning in his doggy way.

Roy dragged her through the bay toward the loading dock for Flaming Hawk. Once there, Hawkeye tugged her hand free gently and mentally braced herself for all of this. One last go. One last try. “I’ll go suit up and power up Flaming Hawk. You go tell the comm-pod what’s going on, make sure we’re even allowed to do this, okay?” A tiny tendril of worry niggled at the back of Hawkeye’s mind. “I don’t want to do this unsupervised.” She hoped he would understand, knew he would. Gently tugging her hand free, Hawkeye headed into the locker rooms that housed the neural suits, leaving Roy to do as she’d asked and trusting he would.

The neural suit Hawkeye found in the locker with her name on it surprisingly fit her the way it should. In Anchorage she hadn’t expected to be there long so they’d simply pulled a suit from a pilot that had been similar in height, not necessarily in build. So, when she’d gone to practice drift on occasion she would find parallel bruises down either side of her spine from the neural connections fitting too tightly. When she pulled on this suit with a small Flaming Hawk logo on the left breast and her name across the back, it fit like it was supposed to, like a second skin. Breathing a sigh of relief as she slid on the material into place and secured it, Hawkeye grabbed the helmet from the shelf in the locker and headed out to load into the jaeger. By the time she walked out in her suit, a technician was waiting with Flaming Hawk’s logo patch on their sleeve. The technician nodded to Hawkeye and led the way into the loading elevator, leaving Hawkeye to assume Roy had gotten clearance if their crew had been called.

“Ranger Marshall is suiting up,” the technician informed Hawkeye as they were brought up to the command pod for Flaming Hawk. “I’ll just get you situated and he should be up in no time. Left hemi?”

Hawkeye nodded and followed the tech off of the walkway and into Flaming Hawk’s cockpit. It wasn’t the first time she’d been in here but it still made her want to hesitate. Steeling herself, Hawkeye forced herself to not hesitate and instead stride purposefully toward the left side pilot’s pad. As she stepped onto the pad, the cockpit lit up scarlet as the jaeger came online. The tech milled around, pulling down the controls and lining up the neural exoskeleton, holding it in place as Hawkeye took a hold of the arm controls, feeling the hum of the running jaeger through the controls.

“Neural hookup in three, two…one.”

Hawkeye stiffened as the spinal tap lined up and clamped down. All down her limbs she felt the semi-familiar buzz of her nervous system being connected with the jaeger. Closing her eyes, Hawkeye felt the phantom of over 1,000 tons of steel and titanium all around her as the exoskeleton came online. Distantly she heard Roy coming into the cockpit and talking to the tech as he got set up with his own exoskeleton but Hawkeye didn’t let herself focus on that. Instead she waited and simply felt as the exoskeleton logged into her nervous system to sync her with the left side of a multi-ton titan. Soon she’d link up with Roy and hopefully feel the full extent of Flaming Hawk’s power but…

“Flaming Hawk exoskeletons online, ready for neural handshake.” The technician’s voice seemed far away but when Hawkeye opened her eyes the tech was still standing between the two pilots before giving them a thumbs up and beating a hasty retreat.

Hawkeye reminded herself to breathe as the comm-pod overseer’s voice came over Flaming Hawk’s speakers to fill the cockpit. “Okay Flaming Hawk this is just a dry run. Weapons are disengaged, all safeguards in place. Exoskeletons are synced 100%, neural handshake approved. You two ready?”

“Ready,” Hawkeye said, not daring to look over at Roy. She didn’t want to look because she knew how he’d look, confident and so certain this would work, so certain she could do this, that they could do this. She knew if this didn’t work that she’d never be able to look him in the eye again.

“Neural handshake in three…two…one, initiate!”

Hawkeye lost her breath. The world narrowed down to a whirlwind of colors and half forgotten sounds. She heard a dog barking and Kodiak skittered across her mind. The thunder of the ocean waves and the grit of sand under her hands but they weren’t her hands. A man with dark hair was laughing and waving a picture of a man and a woman. Maes. The name echoed across her mind and rang in her ears like a thousand church bells. A hulking iron grey jaeger loomed in her vision and then she was staring down a drill sergeant while he yelled at her. There was a little girl with dirt smudged cheeks giving her a flower, hands tiny compared to her thick combat gloves. She felt a pistol heavy and familiar in her hands, the worn wood of an old hunting rifle against her cheek. A woman held up a mirror and Hawkeye saw herself wearing a dark green sari, blonde hair tied up against the Indian humidity and heat. Roy was chasing her after a big fight, calling out her name except she was seeing through his eyes. Maes was dead and the sorrow was going to swallow her whole. Liza was gone and he was never going to have a friend like her. Regret, sadness, happiness, everything thundered around and rolled under her skin, surging in her mind. Suddenly, all of the boiling emotions and screaming memories turned into static as they found the lightning silence of the drift. Hawkeye gasped and her eyes snapped open, bright blue with the drift.

“Neural handshake holding steady. Hemispheres synced.”

Without meaning to, Hawkeye was moving her arms and out of the corner of her eye saw Roy moving them the same, their motions perfect mirrors. Roy’s thoughts were buzzing in the back of her mind, all static electricity and the tang of ozone on the back of her tongue. He was murmuring in her ear, telling her how he wanted to move and she simply mirrored the action until a staccato rhythm of static crackled across the radio from the comm-pod and…

People were screaming all around her. She was standing in ranks with a rifle raised, armor heavy and oppressive, aimed at the wall of civilians in Cairo. Fires burned and people screamed in Arabic, waving signs she couldn’t read and demanded things she couldn’t give. All around her she felt her fellow soldiers growing more and more tense as their commanding officer tried to appease the crowd, as a man on a stage tried to make promises he couldn’t keep. She felt her heart beating fast in her chest and knew this wouldn’t end well. The air was thick and all at once, silence fell. The man on the stage behind the wall of soldiers, the man she couldn’t see, didn’t know why she was defending, was the only voice ringing out, insisting he could do whatever it was they wanted. A single gunshot rang out and in front of her, her commanding officer fell, skull cracked open like an egg and his blood splattering the sandy ground at her feet. There weren’t any words after that. It was chaos and gunshots, gunshots she fired at angry civilians. They surged toward her and her platoon. All at once they were surrounded and she was off her feet, her gun was gone and her arms were over her head. Feet were kicking her and somehow she’d lost her helmet. She was going to die in the desert with sand in her mouth and her body beaten beyond recognition. They’d have to give Roy her folded up flag and her father would shake his head and tut, say she shouldn’t have been there oh god she was going to die…Someone fired a gun and somewhere something exploded. Everyone was screaming and everyone was dying. She was going to die.

"She's chasing the rabbit! She's out of sync!"

Without meaning to, Hawkeye screamed. Screamed because there was blood on her lips and she was going to die and she didn’t even know why. She was going to die and it was never going to be enough.

[Meister]

It had been a long time since Roy had been so excited for something. If he was honest with himself, he'd probably pinpoint that last moment of excitement at Echo Tango's last shift under her original pilots. Standing beside Maes in his neural suit, both of them nearly vibrating with energy and enthusiasm had been spectacular. And now he could have that again, could have that with someone he trusted in his head long before she ever got there.

Really, it was no surprise that he dragged his foster sister through the Shatterdome by the hand, grinning at her with a hint of apology over his shoulder as they moved. Flaming Hawk loomed closer with every step, silent and vibrant in its dock, resplendent in its highly-polished glory. A part of Roy that had begun to lose interest in jaegers after leaving Echo Tango behind latched onto Flaming Hawk with hope.

He approached the loading bay with the assured confidence of someone who'd made the exact trip dozens upon dozens of times before, fingers skimming over the decals with the jaeger's logo on the maintenance equipment settled near it. Roy craned his head back to get a better look at the jaeger's head, wondering what the interior of the cockpit looked like.

"I'll go suit up and power up Flaming Hawk. You go tell the comm-pod what's going on, make sure we're even allowed to do this, okay?"

Roy nodded and squeezed her shoulder as he began to walk past her, to the staircase leading to Flaming Hawk's section of the comm-pod. "They should be fine with it," he assured her. Well. He wasn't one hundred percent certain, but the saying that it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission did exist for a reason.

"I don't want to do this unsupervised."

"Nobody ever does," Roy replied. The sound of his heavy boots hitting the metal stairs clanged and echoed, a din that rose with him. It alerted the technicians in the comm-pod to his arrival, and by the time he was high enough to think about maneuvering the door open, a tech was holding it open so he could clamber in. A few of them waved at him, but Flaming Hawk's team simply eyed him with a combination of wariness and expectation.

Echo Tango's team had looked at him and Maes the same way, once upon a time. Tech teams expected arrogance and demands from cocky young pilots fresh from the ranger training program. He'd merrily disappointed those expectations back then, and now, with the crimson jaeger's team watching without any visible signs of an expected reaction, all the blond ranger could do was clap his hands together and rub them briskly.

"So," he began. "We need to run a test handshake." That set off red flags. One tech sifted through a stack of files and then narrowed her eyes at him. He smiled blindingly bright at her. "Elizabeth Hawkeye's my foster sister. If we can't hold a drift I'll eat my weight in that thing the mess staff calls jerky."

That elicited shudders from a few of them, and grimaces from a couple more. The mystery of whether or not the "beef jerky" the mess hall claimed to serve was actually beef, jerky, or any kind of edible material was, according to the Marshal, a legacy passed down from the rations of the first kaiju war. Regardless of what material it was made from, the jerky was dry, brittle, and smelled vaguely of gun oil and refried beans.

"I'll hold you to that," said the tech sitting in front of Flaming Hawk's vitals display. He gestured to another tech, who walked away, presumably to let Hawkeye know that the light was green and Roy was about to look very dashing in his dinged and scratched neural suit. Roy and the tech who'd spoken shook hands briefly, and then Roy strode out of the room and to his locker.

The neural suit fit him like a glove, the individual pieces of the suit slotting into place without effort. It felt like the months he'd spent sat cross-legged in front of Maes's headstone staring at the inscription (Devoted husband and father, courageous jaeger pilot with Echo Tango's logo set underneath, tiny and carved deep) had vanished, had never occurred, and as long as he didn't pay any mind to the new logo on the chestplate and shoulders, Roy could almost pretend that he was suiting up with Maes behind him, chattering about Ellie's latest accomplishment and his latest prospective date for Roy.

Behind him, a technician snapped the spine of the suit in place, and Roy grunted. Always felt like a kick in the back, no matter how many times he suited up. He rolled his shoulders once the suit was completely settled on him, helmet tucked under one arm. It moved with him, and Roy had to grin. Suiting up again felt good, even though the lack of Maes beside him ached like a missing limb.

Drawing in a deep breath and attempting to push Maes to the back of his mind where the drift wouldn't pick him up, Roy strode into the cockpit. Hawkeye was already settled in the left hemisphere's rig, moving herself and her controls as a tech flitted to and fro, checking systems and bringing Flaming Hawk's drift system to life. The tech helped hook Roy into the right hemisphere's rig and then retreated to the controls. Roy began to move as well, smiling at the ease with which the rig followed his motions.

"Neural hookup in three, two…one."

Hooking into a thousand-plus ton robot's equivalent of a nervous system was always amazing to Roy. Flaming Hawk felt much different than Echo Tango had, and he rolled his shoulders and then his head, cataloging the differences and attempting to accustom himself to them. His body hummed with the sensation of power flowing through the jaeger's systems, barely registering the spinal tap clamping onto his suit. Maes, he thought, would get a kick out of Roy practically squirming in his rig to sound out Flaming Hawk's feel.

"Flaming Hawk exoskeletons online, ready for neural handshake."

Despite himself, Roy felt nerves begin to make their presence known. He'd known Hawkeye for the majority of his life, but that didn't always guarantee a successful handshake. Neither did a gut instinct, though science had shown that it did have a surprisingly high success rate. Half the K-Science division liked to study the phenomenon in their off-time, and their debates in the mess hall got just as rowdy as any rangers' debate. He closed his eyes and drew breath in, held it for a beat, and then slowly released it. The man forced his muscles to relax, and reminded himself of who was to his left. They could do this. They could do this in their sleep.

"Okay Flaming Hawk this is just a dry run. Weapons are disengaged, all safeguards in place. Exoskeletons are synced 100%, neural handshake approved. You two ready?"

"Ready."

"Ready."

"Neural handshake in three…two…one, initiate!"

Every neural handshake was different. Objectively, Roy knew that. His instructors had said it, he and Maes had understood it. But now, plunging into a drift without the man beside him, without new memories of Ellie laughing and gazing at him adoringly, without a new memory of his wife's light, loving touches, Roy got it. Viscerally, truly understood it. Maes was gone, gone, gone, and the only place he could see him again as if he were alive was the drift. Memories of his deceased copilot attempted to well up, and Roy clamped down on them, reaching instead for the exchange of memory the drift caused between himself and Hawkeye.

He found himself running with a dog nearly large enough for him to ride, confident in Kodiak's loyalty and determination to remain by her side. He watched Maes branding a photo from Christmas of himself and his wife, eyes gleaming with pride and happiness. A little girl offered him a flower, her hands tiny beside his gloved ones. He looked in a mirror and saw herself dressed in foreign, green clothing- a sari, her hair tied up against the heat and humidity. He was running from a fight, running from Roy behind her, and he wasn't giving up, was following her. Memories of Maes battered at his control, and he clamped down again. His grief welled into the drift, and it felt as fresh as when he'd first heard the news. Maes was dead and gone, not coming back, and the kaiju that day had lost and died, been messily and brutally killed, but it had won a little, won when Maes died and half of Roy screamed and fell into oblivion. He was kneeling again before Maes's grave, one hand pressed to the headstone as rain fell around them, as the tears streaking down his face mingled with the rain and washed the evidence away.

Roy was alone in that memory, which confused him for a beat before he plunged through the screaming wall of the maelstrom and emerged into the electric blue eye. Calm and centered, Roy exhaled and opened his eyes. He'd heard that some pilots' eyes took on degrees of a blue tinge from the drift, but he could recall from Maes's memories the way his own eyes looked: already blue, they edged right into downright ethereal in their own right, a brilliant, shoking shade the color of drifts and kaiju blue and the earth's hopes.

"Neural handshake holding steady. Hemispheres synced."

Without any degree of conscious thought, Roy moved. Hawkeye moved in sync with him, the buzz of her intentions and thoughts settled at the back of his mind like they belonged there. He grinned and rolled his shoulders, and felt the jaeger copy the motion as his copilot moved with him. They simply existed in the drift, movements nearly lazy with the ease that they came to them. There was no her and no him. Just them.

Until the radio crackled, and then they were plunged into a memory that had never lived in Roy's head. He froze, muscles tensed and body automatically dropping into a fight-ready stance. Civilians and soldiers stood in opposing groups on either side of him, and Roy spotted Hawkeye amongst the soldiers, a rifle trained on the civilians. Heavy in her hands, he knew just as she did, but a good kind of heavy, when she wasn't aiming it at civilians.

A gunshot cracked the air and a soldier with command badges sewn on the side of his uniform dropped like a puppet with its strings cut. Hawkeye's commanding officer, the drift told him. Chaos erupted.

"She's chasing the rabbit! She's out of sync!"

The moment he spared to process the technician's words cost Roy his knowledge of Hawkeye's location. He growled in frustration, shouldering his way through people who had already done this, who would never feel the phantom of his touch on them, rough and urgent as it was. His search for her seemd fruitless, and yelling her name was beginning to rub his throat raw. Then, she screamed, and a good portion of the memory ceased to register with him.

With unerring accuracy, Roy plowed through the crowd and to Hawkeye's side. He snarled at the people kicking her and sat himself down beside her, drawing her into his lap. She'd kill him if they weren't in a drift and down the rabbit hole, caught in the fangs of a terrible memory. Roy tucked her head under his chin and curled himself around her as best he could, rocking her gently and murmuring soothing nonsense. His hands skated up and down her arms, and paused every now and then to smooth her hair.

"I got her," he called at some point. "Keep us in, I got her!" She wasn't getting away from him, wasn't getting away that easily. His arms tightened around her briefly, and he pressed his cheek to the top of her head. Hawkeye had been his protector and his best friend and his sister and a pillar of strength to him throughout his life, in various combinations and incarnations.

She was the woman for whom he wouldn't bat an eye at spending two years' worth of summer job money on, the one person he could go to with any and everything, the one person he'd been able to do that with without the influence of a drift easing the way. Her letters and photos had helped him put Maes's death behind him, had helped him cope and live. If it was possible to communicate such things while knee-deep in shit and down the rabbit hole in a drift, Roy hope she caught his drift, pun completely intended, cheesy as it was.

[Detox]

Hawkeye had never wanted to die young. That had never been her goal but here she was, trapped in a mob. Voices around her screamed harsh words in a language she could never hope to understand. There was more blood on her hands than possibly anyone would ever understand. Someday she would have to go home and hope Roy never saw the blood. Her father would though. He would see it and he would judge her for it, just the way he’d done everything else. Hawkeye curled in on herself as the memory played, feeling the phantom weight of foreign boots aimed at her ribs and at one point someone breaking a bottle over her head. Pain seared through her, firing down familiar neural pathways and black spots danced in front of her eyes. When had she lost her helmet? Where was her gun? Did it even matter?

‘I’ve got her!’

A phantom of a voice echoed through the din of unpleasant accents and harsh words. Hawkeye’s heart skipped a beat because…She forced her eyes open and her breath caught in her throat. Arms were coiled around her, wrapped tight and firm. But…Hawkeye struggled a little because this…this wasn’t right. Those arms…she hadn’t been held by them in five years…Confusion washed over Hawkeye and with it, she started to struggle harder, trying to break the grip that wasn’t supposed to be there. Someone was murmuring in her ear, tugging at her mind and it was all so confusing because around her, the memory was playing on. A mountain of a man, Private Hutchinson, barreled through the raging protesters and went through the motions of pulling someone from the crowd. Her. He…she remembered. He had been the one to pull her up and out of the crowd, dragging her in a fireman’s carry out of the crowd because reinforcements were finally there and her platoon had seen her go down. But Hawkeye wasn’t there now. Someone else was holding her and murmuring in her ear, foreign thoughts tangling with hers in the back of her mind, humming pure nonsense beneath a buzz that sounded like angry hornets.

A heart was beating rapidly under her ear and someone was murmuring that she was ok, that she would be alright, that she just needed to wake up. The memory tugged at her, phantom screams and yells as people were gassed and gunshots were fired, but the arms around wound around her tightened, as if they could feel the memory trying to pull her away. It was like what she imagined drowning would be like, being tugged down by a current she couldn’t fight. Hawkeye turned her face into the chest of the person holding her and squeezed her eyes shut. Her fingers dug into foreign material, not army fatigues and armor like what she was wearing, but sleeker material that felt almost unnatural.

Roy.

The name slammed into Hawkeye and her mind shrank back because nononono he wasn’t ever supposed to see this! A keening wail echoed in her mind and around the pair, the memory rippled and shifted. It felt like being sucked down a drain, leaping from one memory to another. She felt herself being pulled out of Roy’s arms and a whirlwind of mismatched memories clamored at her, feeling so familiar, just like every other ‘mayday’ neural handshake she’d ever had before. She was flying in a rickety transport packed in with fifty others at three in the morning somewhere over Iran….she was looking at herself through Roy’s eyes as she looked at the newest shell put in her hands…the pistol felt warm and heavy in her hands, comfort like she’d never known….Roy’s eyes again as he watched her inspect Hayate with hope in his heart and then she was swept up in strong arms and being held tight like she’d missed for eight years and…
Hawkeye’s eyes snapped open and she gasped, jerking in her neural harness as the neural handshake gave out and dumped her back into reality. The speakers were crackling at her as the comm.-pod tried to communicate with them but she couldn’t make out the words. Her knees shook so hard that before she realized what she was doing, Hawkeye was sinking to the ground. There were phantom aches in her ribs and a thundering in her head reminiscent of when she woke up after that riot, bandages around her head and painkillers buzzing in her system. There were no painkillers now, just the phantom of boots stomping through her armor and her hands being crushed under stampeding feet. A million voices clamored in her head and without thinking, Hawkeye curled in on herself and wrapped her arms around herself, trying to make herself a small target. The world felt like it was shaking and it took longer than it should have for her to realize she was the one shaking, not the entire world. It filtered in slowly, around that time, that she realized it was another failed handshake. Another failed partner. She could hear her father grumbling in her ear, this time a voice that had nothing to do with her rocky drift with Roy.
Roy.

Oh God…Roy had seen…he had seen all of that. Before…with everyone else she’d been able to filter her memories, make sure the normal and mundane memories were shared in the drift and the PTSD and others were all stamped down, locked behind mental doors that she would never open. With Roy…at first it had been so easy. It had been so easy to share those summer days on the beach and spring mornings chasing Kodiak around and all those good things…she’d…she’d forgotten about the bad. Forgotten about the hours at the gun range learning how to kill a man, about what it felt like to drive over a bomb and be shot at and be caught in a riot. Hawkeye had failed all because she’d gotten lazy. She’d let her guard down and now…Roy would never look her in the eye again. Hell, if he even looked at her it would be a success…Could she even look at him? Hawkeye let out a shuddering breath, not a sob no matter what anyone said, and tightened her grip, trying to curl up smaller against the metal grating that made up the floor of Flaming Hawk’s pod.