Disoriented. Un-oriented? Non-oriented?

[Chryses]

argyros chryses

y así te espero como casa sola
y volverás a verme y habitarme.
de otro modo me duelen las ventanas.

There's not much to do around the shatterdome for a jaeger pilot without a jaeger, and that's what Argylos is. He's been told that he'll be working with Ocean Titan, a machine that will work well with his boxing experience. It's a relief to know that he won't need to be re-trained for combat in order to serve, because after the basic PPDC training he's really, really sick of military-style teaching. If he gets one more racist, misogynistic or homophobic thing yelled at him he's pretty sure he's going to lose his carefully honed self-control. You can get called a "pussy" by an angry drill sergeant so many times before you go a little crazy. Chryses isn't naive or anything, but he does think it's a damn shame that it's 2081 and people are using the same derogatives as they were 100 years ago. 

So far, Chryses hasn't made any friends. He's not surprised or anything, because he's never really ever made a friend before. On rare occasions other people have made friends with him, but that's taken a long time and a lot of determination. It's also had very little benefit for those people, as far as he can see. He honestly doesn't know how they expect him to be able to drift successfully. Apparently, according to the tests they've taken, it's possible, but Chryses has serious doubts. He's never been tested for compatibility with anyone and has no idea what expect when that time finally comes. Descriptions of the neural handshake are strange and tend to be sprinkled with paradoxes and things that you can't really imagine unless you've experienced them. Also, most of them are written in English or Chinese or Russian and Chryses can't read two of those languages and has only a tenuous grasp on English. He can communicate, more or less, through the use of many elaborate hand signals.

Not that he finds a reason to try and communicate often. He keeps to himself almost constantly. 

He's his on his own in the rec room, with his feet up on a shaky card table and leaning back on the chair's back legs. His hat is tipped over his eyes and hiding his face from others. It's not like anyone would approach him anyway, but keeping up the appearance that's he's fallen asleep guarantees his solitude. It's not that Chryses doesn't want to make friends. It's just that the whole thing would be intensely uncomfortable for all involved. He's not exactly suave when it comes to social interaction, even when everyone speaks the same language as him. It's actually a bit surprising that no one has tried very hard to speak to Argyros, because he's been here about nine days. He was supposed to get the grand orientation and shatterdome tour, but then a category 3 Kaiju showed up and everyone went into emergency mode. He was told to stay out of the way, and that his tour would be given at a later date. He's still waiting.

He's not stupid or anything, and has figured out how to navigate the building himself. He also knows that he could - and probably should - ask someone about the orientation at any time and they would probably be helpful and apologetic. But the whole thing fills Chryses with a sense of dread and he puts it off everyday. Interacting with his tour guide would be awkward. Pretending to be interested in the fun facts and history of the dome would be exasperating. Not actually understanding half the things said to him would be frustrating and make the whole tihng pointless. He knew that there was a Spanish Jaeger in the shatterdome - Calypso Hurricane, obviously an Anglicized version of its original name - but he has yet to meet anyone who speaks Spanish. Maybe if he tried a little he could at least find someone who knew it as a second language, but he was feeling a bit pouty. 

The fact that he felt like an outsider was compounded by the fact that he hadn't been recruited the way the other pilots were. He was pretty much thrust upon the marshall through the power of political leverage. The others had innate abilities and skills that made them ideal material for piloting a jaeger. Chryses was the equivalent of an Ivy League scholar whose parents had bought his way in and was now studying alongside the best and brightest of his time. He cringed to admit it, but he was intimidated by the other pilots and terrified, paralyzing frightened of screwing up. It would dishonour himself, his father (whom, he's been thinking more and more lately, he should never have left), and his entire country. The pressure is immense.

It makes Chryses tilt his head a little forward to better hide it from the world.

[Detox]

Life in the Shatterdome wasn't what Hawkeye had expected when they shipped her out of Afghanistan to investigate her father's last 'screw you' to the world. Anchorage had been bustling, which in itself was strange given the general emptiness of Alaska, but Hawkeye had liked it after a while. After spending most of the last eight years with a rotating group of eight people while working in the army it had been nice to have some variety but with a strange sense of stability. She'd travelled all over western Europe, the middle east and Asia, walked the streets of Dubai and stood in the emptiest mountains in Afghanistan, fully aware that there were no people for hundreds of miles. Being able to lie down at night and know the same crew was waiting for her in the morning, without the constant threat of being shot or killed in a riot, had been nice. Of course, all Shatterdomes were different and since landing at Shatterdome 13 four days ago, Hawkeye had to admit it had taken some getting used to. Bigger jaegers were kept here than in Alaska, including her father's crimson Flaming Hawk, currently in her care along with her foster brother as her copilot. Other than the jaegers, the people were very different too. In Anchorage it had been a majority of American citizens and personnel, most raised in Alaska and a spattering of Canadians pitching in to the war effort.

This Shatterdome boasted some fourteen different nationalities, or at least that was what Roy had told her when he'd acted as Hawkeye's tour guide the night she arrived. According to Roy it was because of Reever Island's location, off of the Chilean coast, south of Mexico and far enough from the coasts that if often was a front line when kaiju surfaced from the south Pacific. For all his boasting though, Hawkeye hadn't met many of those varied nationalities, though she would have liked to. After eight years hopping around every country from Austria to China she was familiar with a lot of cultures, although she doubted she'd find few of them here. She liked culture though, loved travel and was usually the first to befriend locals when they'd stopped in villages during her army days. One day she would be getting a flow from a girl in an Indian village and the next trying to stop a riot in Dubai with a gun in her hand.

Shaking her head, Hawkeye pushed the idle thoughts away and focused on the files spread out before her. She was in a quiet corner of one of the Shatterdome's many rec rooms with her father's files on Flaming Hawk spread out before her on a card table she'd pulled over to a couch. Pictures, designs, scribbled notes, computer read outs and much more were scattered all over the table. Hawkeye had a pen between her teeth and several pages in her hands, skimming through the notes her father had on the red jaeger's weapons designs. At her feet, her newest companion was laying with his head on his puppy-big paws. Hayate had been Roy's welcoming gift to her, a four month old Alaskan Malamute, white and coal black with big brown eyes and bigger paws and ears. For his age he was well behaved, never really venturing far from Hawkeye despite the noise and constant motion of the other people in the rec room. He was content to lay at her feet and wait for Roy to come fish Hawkeye out of her research.

Reaching for a cup of coffee Roy had left balanced on the corner of the table earlier, Hawkeye dropped her pen. It bounced off of her boot and went skittering across the floor. Before she could grab it, Hayate was up and bounding after it, making Hawkeye scramble to stop him from upending the table when he bumped a leg. Hawkeye snatched the coffee cup up before it could tumble and grabbed the card table with her other hand. To quick motion stopped the table from upending but sent several pages fluttering across the floor. Frowning at the mess, the blonde pilot stood and looked around for her dog, about to snap at him for the mess. Before she could get his name out she spied that he wasn't gnawing on her pen like she'd expected. Instead the pup had gone...over to another person's table and was nosing at their leg. Hawkeye sighed as she heard the dog yip from across the room, probably vying for attention.

Roy had done a great job of training Hayate before Hawkeye got her hands on him but he was still just a puppy and apparently wanting to pester somebody because as Hawkeye watched, he reached up a paw and pawed at the man's leg. Great. The poor guy was probably some ranger that hadn't had a good sleep in ages and her dog was going to bug the guy. Snatching up the scattered papers as she crossed the room, Hawkeye clicked her fingers. "Hayate!" Hawkeye said as she approached, keeping her voice firm when she called the dog. "I'm sorry about him."

Only after she'd called attention to herself did Hawkeye wish she'd have stopped to put down the papers or something, considering she probably looked like a crazy woman. She was still wearing the PPDC uniform pants (dark navy blue) and the black boots but the rest was just a grey t-shirt and her blonde hair tied up at the back of her head and held in place with a messily placed clip. She'd been pouring over Flaming Hawk's files for...apparently almost six hours and in general had that look of someone slightly frayed around the edges. Anyone that knew Hawkeye knew for a fact that wasn't her. Normally she was in uniform at all times and that uniform was impeccable but around hour three she'd forgone her ranger jacket with Flaming Hawk's insignia on the back, leaving it laying across the back of the couch. Any other time Hawkeye never had a hair out of place and always looked like she knew what was what long before you did. Now she looked something like a med student the night before the MCAT. Oh well, nothing she could do about it now.

[Chryses]

There had been various ambient noises while Chryses reclined meditatively, mostly people passing through the recreation room to get to the other side. There had been a game of cards at one point, probably some crew with an unusual work schedule that had them eating lunch at 9 PM. But that noise had come and gone relatively quickly. Mostly Argyros was able to block out the noise. It was probably because of his mental absence from the room that he was so surprised to hear the noise of a table being shaken, papers falling on the floor, and then... Chryses nearly fell over backward in his chair. Thanks to his quick reflexes he managed to slam the chair legs forward onto the ground and prevent some sort of grievous head wound. With a somewhat frantic gesture Chryses lifted his hat up from his face so he could see what was going on. In front of him was a dog. It was huge, but at the same time it was obvious that it was still a puppy. Its disproportionate features made that obvious; his oversized ears and paws that still needed growing into, the teeth that hadn't hardened into fangs quite yet. Chryses knew very little about dogs, although his father had kept a mutt to scare of deer and rabbits from eating their crops. It wasn't a house pet, his parents constantly reminded him. It shouldn't be spoiled or it would become lazy.

This dog was nothing like the dog on the farm. It definitely looked like a house pet, from its silky, well-groomed fur to its pleading eyes, the paw that it placed on Chryses's knee, begging for attention. He was used to this behavior from horses, who likewise craved human affection. It was so strange that animals longed for affection so much. Cautiously, Argyros extended his hand for the dog to smell. Just because the dog seemed innocent and friendly didn't mean it wouldn't try to bite off his hand. A woman entered Argyros's consciousness as she called to the dog, awkwardly chasing it. She had so many papers tucked messily into her arms that Chryses wanted to wince, trying to imagine being assigned that much paperwork. Maybe he would be, eventually. He was pretty sure the woman was a Jaeger pilot. They always had a look to them. Not just the posture that comes from training in a full-boy vice, but also a general frazzled look. The public saw them as heroes, but rangers usually looked more like rumpled children who'd been woken up too early. This woman was a perfect example, wearing half of her regulation uniform, her hair messy.

While he took the few seconds required to take in the sight of the woman who had approached him, the dog had decided to take matters into its own hands (paws) and rub his face against Chryses's hand. He made little gruff noises of concentration as he searched for the perfect place to put Chryses' fingers. Argyros took pity on the puppy, his face curving into the faintest of smiles, which effected his cheeks and eyes much more than his lips, which were still barely more than a thin straight line. He find a spot behind the dog's ear that made it groan happily. "I'm sorry about him," the woman said and Chryses looked up at her again. He wasn't really sure what the correct response to that was, so he nodded gravely, trying out, "Sí. Okay," as a response. He then turned his face back to the dog almost shyly, not sure how to properly continue the conversation. However, at the same time Chryses felt very afraid that he would come across as rude, or breach some obscure American taboo.

He raised his head again, making brief eye contact before his eyes skittered over to the table she had come from. He could see more papers, one or two files dropped onto the floor, a mug of coffee precariously perched close to the table's edge. "Hm, I am Chryses," he said hesitantly, and then nodded more certainly again. He made eye contact for another split second, then said, "You... are pilot of Jaeger?" He knew his accent would come across as thick and might impair her ability to understand him, but he fought the urge to blush. Once again he turned down to face the dog, who was much safer than the woman. The dog seemed to like him already. People were always more difficult to win over.

As an afterthought, Chryses realized the woman was probably trying to get her dog back. He drew back his hands (to the dog's apparent dismay) and pushed him slightly in his owner's direction. "Ah, perro," he said, under his breath, "Ir a la mujer." He tried to illustrate what he wanted the dog to do by gesturing over at the blonde and making a pushing motion. The dog seemed happily oblivious.

[Detox]

Shuffling the papers in her hands, Hawkeye wrangled them into some semblance of order and tucked them against her side, feeling just a little bit less scruffy. The hair and uniform she could do nothing about at the moment but at least it didn’t look like her father’s work was going to spill out of her arms at any second. When the man introduced himself, Hawkeye gave a polite nod and watched as he absently interacted with Hayate, rubbing the dog’s ears much the way she had done when she’d first been presented with the canine gift. As the man inspected the dog, she inspected him, much as he had done to her not a moment before, and he was a fool if he thought she hadn’t noticed. Hawkeye, as Roy joked, was an apt last name for her because according to him she’d never missed anything in her life, from a shot to Roy trying to make trouble when they were kids. Roy wasn’t necessarily wrong. She’d been one of the best sharpshooters in the army and her accuracy with a jaeger’s long range weapons in the simulator were unparalleled.

The man looked like he was permanently curled in on himself, his shoulders slumped forward defensively and a wary look in his eyes even as he inspected her wolfish canine. There was a hesatincy when he spoke that seemed to go beyond just a language barrier, evidenced by his accent. Hawkeye had heard heavier accents in her life and had an ear for them after doing so much country-hopping while in the army. Of course she’d never been stationed in South America but she knew sooner or later she would come across rangers, technicians and the like from such countries. As far as she knew, none of the countries below the equator were able to fund their own jaeger programs which was why Reever’s Island was so vital. In essence, it protected the entire South American Pacific coastline. Glancing at his lonely spot off in a corner of the rec room, Hawkeye wondered why more people weren’t with him. From what she’d seen most people on the island were fairly open people, mingling and mixing with little more than the occasional drunken brawl from too much moonshine.

‘You…are pilot of Jaeger?’

Hawkeye nodded and pulled a picture of Flaming Hawk from the stack of papers she held to show him. No doubt he had seen it, standing in the bays with the other jaegers, the only crimson one in the fleet at the moment burning like a flame between the more somberly colored machines. “Flaming Hawk, Halcón llameante. My Spanish is poor, mis disculpas.”

It had been high school the last time Hawkeye had tried to speak Spanish but her father, while lost in his jaeger and kaiju obsessions had always been adamant that Hawkeye and her step brother excel in school. That included languages because Dr. George Hawkeye had been a man of many talents and that had included many tongues. So, when freshman year had landed Hawkeye in Spanish I, her father had expected excellence. While most students got to drop the language classes sophomore year, her father kept both her and Roy in theirs, firmly insisting the knowledge would come in handy someday. For Hawkeye it never had, seeing as she’d been stationed mostly in Asia and the middle east but with that time, languages had come a bit easier. Still, the knowledge, while it was there, was rusty for Hawkeye although she’d been meaning to brush up since being moved from Anchorage.

‘Ir a la mujer.’

Looking down at Hayate, Hawkeye watched the man try to nudge the big pup toward her, gesturing toward her. Hayate, for his part simply panted up at the Chilean man, Chryses as he said his name was. The sight made her lips twitch in something that might have someday become a smile but never got past a tiny twitch at the corner of her lips.

“His name is Hayate,” Hawkeye offered, clicking her fingers. Hayate tipped his head back to look at her, giving his tail a little wag but when she clicked her fingers a second time the dog got up and trotted the three feet between herself and Chryses. He leaned heavily against her leg and nosed at her palm until she stroked his overgrown ears. Looking from the dog to Chryses, Hawkeye offered her hand to shake. “Liza Hawkeye. Most people just call me Hawkeye. Would you like company?”

In her military years, Hawkeye had spent a lot of time as a minority. In the middle east and India, she had been an oddity to many for being a woman in the military but also for being blonde. She could remember, in a village in northern India, a little girl asking to touch her hair after seeing it when Hawkeye pulled off her helmet. In China, in a rural village far into the mountains, a little boy had asked if her hair was spun from real gold. What she mostly remembered about all of that time though, was the voices and the languages. Most people spoke at least broken English but many in her platoon hadn’t known how to manage the huge gap in languages. For Hawkeye it had been easy because she had simply let them talk. On quieter missions where they’d be in villages for a week at a time or more, she used to sit and just listen to the kids babble in their strange tongues with random words of English thrown in. They hadn’t needed her to understand their words per say, but more she needed to understand their meaning and with children that tended to come through pretty clearly. They would point to things and tell her all about them, though she might not understand the words she understood the meaning; that a certain hut was their home because they got excited when they saw it or a certain man was important because they spoke reverently. Those sorts of things didn’t need words, just tone.

When she first got pulled into the jaeger program after her father forced Flaming Hawk onto her, Hawkeye had roomed with the man Hayate was named after, a spry man from Japan that spoke only broken English and worse when he got excited. Hawkeye had done little talking in their relationship but a lot of listening which, more than anything, he had seemed to like. He would wave his hands and babble on in rapid Japanese, posing questions he knew she couldn’t answer but tried her best to anyway. Hawkeye was no expert at international relations but…she liked it and she knew what it felt like to be the minority. In the army, she was the woman with the gun, even in her platoon and few had really tried to be her friend. Her real friends had always turned out to be the people she knew for maybe a day or two that didn’t speak word of English.

[Chryses]

Chryses studied the proferred picture of the Jaeger the woman apparently piloted. It was huge and bright red. Of course he'd seen it; it was impossible to miss. He had been visiting the Jaeger bay almost every morning since he'd arrived, staring up with absolute awe at the monolithic machines he was supposed to drive. It was almost impossible to imagine himself controlling those arms and legs and guns, even with a partner. Ocean Titan, his assigned Jaeger, was the biggest Jaeger they had at Shatterdome 13. Actually, apparently it was the biggest Jaeger in the world. When Chryses had first set eyes on the Titan, he'd started to feel very dizzy and faint. He wasn't afraid of heights, but the magnitude of the robot was... overwhelming. Verging on terrifying. 

"Muy...Very beautiful. Very... Flaming,"Chryses said, gesturing to the picture of the Jaeger. He gave a tiny smile, hoping she would catch his lame little joke - calling the "Flaming Hawk" very flaming. It might come across as sheer stupidity instead. Chryses was struck by the urge to hide his face under his hat again, but he resisted the temptation. 

Liza Hawkeye ("call me Hawkeye") and Hayate, her dog. Chryses looked at the two of them thoughtfully, the dog nosing its owner's hand and the woman offering the other for him to shake. He accepted the outstretched hand and politely shook it, noting her firm grasp and the unmistakable callouses formed by years of handling a gun. Chryses had callouses of his own, ancient ones from handling farm tools like rakes and hoes, and more recent ones from hangling horses' reins. He had gun callouses from handling a small caliber pistol - for dramatic effect, mostly. Honestly, Chryses had never killed anything more than a chicken before he'd come to the Shatterdome. Now he was expected to utterly destroy giant aliens the size of buildings. He was sure the ethical codes normally applied to execution didn't apply, but the idea was intimidating. 

"What...language is the Hayate?" He asked, looking down at the dog. The pronunciation was different from English, an emphasis placed on the vowels that many languages, including Spanish, made use of, but which English and other Germanic languages did not. Not that Chryses could actually put that thought into those words; he'd only had a high school education. He could just tell from his exposure to English (mostly on TV) that there was something strange about the word. "Is it have the meaning?" He cringed after that sentence came out, knowing he had definitely messed up the grammar. English's lack of articles - no distinction between feminine and masculine words, for example - made it easy for him to throw in too many. It was generally after saying things out loud that he noticed that they didn't sound right. 

When Hawkeye offered to join him - the wording of which he didn't quite catch, but which he understood from her lingering by his table and eyeing the empty chair - Chryses was surprised. He blinked over at the three empty chairs and glanced back at all of her paperwork. She seemed busy, but if she was actually doing serious work she probably wouldn't have spent so much time distracted by him. Or offered to sit with him. Besides, she would probably just be present at the table, not actually conversing, just reading her files. That seemed safe. After a long hesitation Chryses nodded. "Sí. Okay," he repeated. He graciously gestured at the other chairs as if he was inviting her to join a grand party. "You can sit." He shot her another timid smile. 

"Do you need help to get the papers?" He added, looking back at her old table near the couch and the documents still on and around it.

[Detox]

‘Muy…Very beautiful. Very…Flaming.”

Hawkeye couldn’t help it, she had to smile. From day one, people had described Flaming Hawk a lot of ways. The media said it was shocking, called it ‘too bold’. Admirals often tutted and said it was impractical. Rangers looked at it and just shook their heads, a few of them muttering about ‘Mad Doc Hawk’ and his crazy designs. No one had ever just said it was flaming. In that moment with a quiet laugh, Hawkeye had to think her father would have liked this strange man.

Smiling wasn’t something Hawkeye did often, in general Hawkeyes didn’t smile much because even her father had hardly ever cracked a smile. Roy would say, in his sometimes sappy way, that a smile from a Hawkeye was Christmas and your birthday rolled into one but that was just because he’d grown up with both Hawkeyes and understood their stoic faces. He could read the smiles in their eyes, their moods in the set of their shoulders and whether they wanted company by the way they angled themselves toward someone. He’d turned it into a science and sometimes Hawkeye had to remind herself that not everyone knew those intimate things or were used to such stiff people. So, when Chryses complimented Flaming Hawk, Hawkeye let her lips twitch in a little smile. It was shy and fleeting but it softened her face and something unwound the tension between her shoulders. It had been a long day for her, filled with staring at her father’s last creation and having to remind herself that he wouldn’t come looming over her shoulder and tut at her performance anymore or quiz her on the intricacies of the crimson jaeger’s design.

“I can manage the papers,” Hawkeye assured, putting down the pile in her arms and going to gather the rest.

They were mostly just printed out interview manuscripts, technical readouts and the like, all centered around her father’s last creation. She tucked pages into the folders and carried them over to where Chryses was tucked into his corner, grabbing her jacket from the couch before heading over. It had RANGER stitched across the shoulders with a hawk with wings of fire stitched under it, FLAMING HAWK curved on the bottom. Laying it across the back of an empty chair, Hawkeye took a seat while Hayate sat beside her with his muzzle resting on her knee.

Scratching absently at Hayate’s muzzle, Hawkeye offered Chryses a little smile. Enough people thought she was scary around here, it would be nice to have one person not thinking she would shoot them on sight. Now, to be fair there were some people that had a bullet with their name on it but…apparently jaeger pilots were expensive to replace so whatever. Still, it had been a while since she had just sat and had a conversation with anyone about anything, even jaegers. Hayate licked Hawkeye’s fingers before getting up and going back to Chryses, nosing at his hand in askance of pets.

“His name is Japanese, it means ‘huracán’ in Spanish, or ‘hurricane’ in English but he was named after my roommate at the academy. He didn’t speak much English pero era un buen hombre. Muy valiente, muy amable.” Pulling the clip from her hair, Hawkeye smoothed out the whisps that had escaped during her hours of pouring over Flaming Hawk’s files and reclipped it in a knot at the back of her head before looking to Chryses again. “Are you a pilot? Eres un piloto?”

Her father used to insist that languages were useful and now, Hawkeye was reluctant to admit he was right. Now that she was fishing for the words in her mind they were coming up easier, old grammar rules coming back into play and speaking up as she tried to think of what to say. Her accent was most likely awful and maybe she wasn’t speaking the right dialect but she hoped it helped somewhat. With Hayate they had used a lot of pictures, gestures and sometimes plain old guessing games to communicate when he couldn’t find the English word he wanted. This was a bit easier, memories of evenings with her father quizzing her or having full conversations in Spanish floating to the forefront of her mind. No doubt Roy hated those memories and suppressed them quite soundly but Hawkeye had never been able to totally block out her father, even when he was in ‘lecture’ mode. It was like riding a bike now, though it required a bit more thought the idea was the same.

Hawkeye had spent years running from her father’s lecturing voice, across barren landscapes and destroyed cities, fought mobs and shot men to escape him and he’d come back from the grave in the form of a hulking red jaeger. She remembered seeing it for the first time. It was the first time she’d felt properly afraid because…this was not the life she chose. She had run to the army at eighteen and when the kaiju appeared, accepted only inland missions. Her father had been obsessed with jaegers and kaiju all through her childhood and it had ruined her social life, ruined her connections with anyone other than Roy. At the first chance she had, she had run and kept running. In death, her father had drawn her in like a moth to a flame, making her the only one able to open Flaming Hawk. She had gone when called, went to open the machine they needed for their war…and now it was her machine because in one look at Flaming Hawk she had known she would let no one else at its helm. It was terrifying and huge, the kaiju impossible and toxic and dangerous, the sea suddenly a battleground when in her memory it was a symbol of peace, of lazy days when Roy would bring her seashells and the sun would be warm on her skin. She’d killed monsters in men’s clothing but she’d never faced a real monster, not one like these.

Sometimes looking around at the other pilots, cocky and confident, she wondered if she was the only one that was scared, that thought “this isn’t what I wanted.”

[Chryses]

Chryses felt a ridiculous amount of relief when Hawkeye smiled at his joke instead of - well, he didn't know quite what he had expected her to do. Maybe roll her eyes and say, "Duh," like he'd seen people do on TV (but never in real life). Or she might have started treating him like he was crazy and/or stupid. He was smiling shyly, then she seemed to smile shyly back, which led him to smile a bigger shy smile. As she gathered the papers, Hawkeye prepared his next question for her. By the time she was back he was ready to ask, "Do you know why is such a strong colour?" Usually Jaegers were painted dark colours in an attempt to camouflage them against the ocean. Which really seemed a bit ridiculous. The noise they made with every step, their size, the unnatural way they cut through the waves, it all made it possible to spot a Jaeger from miles away. And that was just with human vision. Kaiju often had several pairs of eyes, or motion-detecting flagellum, or other methods of detecting threats. Chryses really liked the red Jaeger. It seemed more proud and bold. More heroic, while the others always looked like they were trying to hide.

Once Hawkeye was properly seated across from him, Chryses felt a swell of panic in his chest. He felt an anxiety that he knew would show in his face, so he tipped his head down and started fiddling with the hem of his PPDC logo-stamped t-shirt. He noticed the jacket Hawkeye had grabbed from the back of the couch, with the Flaming Hawk's symbol emblazoned (a very appropriate word) across the back of it. Chryses had one of his own, which had appeared - almost magically - one day on his bed. The Ocean Titan's emblem was less flashy, the words huge and its picture the silhouette of a giant bringing his fists down to crush the Earth. Chryses thought the logo was a bit unfriendly to look at. He was going to be crushing Kaiju only, not random patches of ground. But it also reminded him of the story of Prometheus, the giant titan who gave fire to humans. His dad had been a Greek mythology fanatic (thus his Greek name) and it had rubbed of on Chryses, who idolized his father and tried to copy everything he did. He hadn't started wearing his jacket around though. It felt silly when his Jaeger was still offline. 

He nodded when she asked if he was a pilot. He shifted nervously and couldn't help himself from blurting, "Have you ever been in the Jaeger?" A faint blush coloured his cheeks and his eyes darted up to meet hers quickly. He probably sounded like an over-excited child. "I have never...My Jaeger is still offline." He knew that Flaming Hawk hadn't been out in the field yet. There would have been news of it all over the Shatterdome. Probably all over the world. But many of the pilots here had been previously deployed at other places in the world. A lot of them were victims of past tragedies. The thought of it filled Chryses with dread and fear. To lose one's drift partner in battle was an unspeakable horror. But then, to lose one's drift partner at all was a more profound grief than most people could even dream of. Chryses hadn't felt it. He desperately hoped he wouldn't ever have to. Some people never recovered from the trauma. They went insane, or became too depressed to function. Some had committed suicide. In the grand scheme of things, Chryses felt that he was a very weak person. Not the kind that could ever create that kind of bond a second after having it ripped away.

The way Hawkeye spoke of her old roommate made Hawkeye's head snap up and his eyes become alert. She spoke about him in the past tense, said things that most only say in eulogies. He wanted to know, ask her if they'd drifted, find out what it was like, how she could possibly be strong enough to bear it, how any human could survive the experience. But he didn't want to disturb painful memories. Instead he looked down again as Hayate came to him and licked his fingers. "Huracán," he murmured, stroking the dog's huge, soft ears. Then he tried out the English pronunciation. "Hurricane," it sounded strange to his ears, but he continued to mutter it under his breath so that the word would become familiar. It would be a useful addition to his vocabulary, living on an island in the Pacific. Looking down at the way the dog's tail wagged at about a hundred miles per hour, his tongue lolling out while he panted, his bright eyes full of excitement and energy, Chryses felt that the name fit perfectly. 

"When he is bigger, he will be a... hurricane." His pronunciation was flawed, and he smiled self-consciously. But at this point, after his time in training, he was used to stumbling over English words. "He will be a category three, maybe four." He smiled, rubbing the dog's head again, and smiling a little at his own joke.

[Detox]

‘Do you know why it is such a strong color?’

It was a good question, considering the fact that not many jaegers were painted so boldly. In the end it all came down to a father-daughter relationship that had gone rotten. Hawkeye was good at knowing how to make everyone assume she was in control because she liked being in control of her situation. It was one of the reasons she and her father had often clashed quite violently because he liked to be in control too, specifically in control of her. Forget a simple overly protective parent or concerned parent, her father had been determined that he knew what was best and no other route was acceptable. So, when Hawkeye chose a branch of the military she chose the one he couldn’t stand, the one that had most often shunned his research and written him off as an old mad man. Hawkeye had signed the contract and picked the farthest stations she could find because of the simple fact that she could. The problem was, her father always liked to have the last laugh and he was laughing his ass off now because he’d yanked that control away and replaced it with the crimson jaeger.

Licking her lips, Hawkeye decided a good question deserved a good answer. “My father was a man that liked to have the last word, in all things. The military called him a mad man because he thought the kaiju would come back. The red jaeger is him having the last laugh.”

And laughing he was because he’d succeeded in dragging his wayward daughter out of the army and into the PPDC to pilot the one thing she’d sworn never to touch. If Hawkeye ever saw him on the other side, she wasn’t sure if she’d punch him, hug him or cuss at him for all eternity. Which route she chose might depend on whether or not there was any ghost or whatever willing to hold her back. Frankly though, Hawkeye was sick of fighting with her father and fighting his ghost as exhausting.

‘Have you ever been in the jaeger?’

Hawkeye shook her head. “Not a real one. I’ve been in the computer one, the simulator. Forty-five solo drops, forty-five kills.” She chose to leave out that when it came to actually drifting she had some the worst scores in PPDC history, even from the first kaiju war. Letting some perfect stranger into her head was just…harder than Hawkeye had ever imagined it would be. The neural handshakes that had been successful had never lasted long, one or the other of them falling out to chase the rabbit or simply going out of sync and snapping the connection. She fought it too hard; that was what Hawkeye’s instructors had always said. They’d tut and tell her to relax; that she needed to open her mind or this would never work. Roy was the first person her drift had worked with, her first successful drift. It had been nothing like Hawkeye had ever imagined and if she tried, she could still feel a phantom connection tethering to her copilot, fast asleep on his bunk, snoring loud enough to wake the dead.

Chryses, who seemed to have taken a shine to Hayate, commented on the dog’s eventual size and Hawkeye couldn’t help but agree. When she was a kid, Hawkeye had owned a husky named Kodiak and had made it her business to know everything about huskies when her father gifted the dog to her. With Roy’s gift, it was no different. Hawkeye had dug up every piece of information she could find about Alaskan Malamutes and had been mildly surprised to find that they were about thirty pounds heavier than a husky, which at a healthy weight topped out at around 60 pounds for a male. For a male malamute, 95 pounds wasn’t uncommon. Yes, there was no doubt in Hawkeye’s mind that Hayate would be quite the hurricane indeed. Hawkeye wondered if Roy had known just how big Hayate would be, or had the potential to be, when he’d bought the dog considering their bunks weren’t very big. At least when she wasn’t on active duty waiting for the next kaiju alarm she would be able to exercise him well since she’d gone to check out the training rooms the day before.

“He’ll be quite the hurricane,” Hawkeye agreed, amusement coloring her tone lightly as she reached forward to rub the dog’s ears as he sat grinning up at Chryses. “He’ll be very big by the time he’s grown, as big as me I’ll bet.” Hawkeye, despite her demanding and commanding presence was not a large woman. Standing five feet, two inches tall she could scare a man twice her size until he was cowering in fright but when he was grown, Hayate may easily reach her height when standing on his hind legs. It said a lot that Roy knew she’d be able to control him despite his height and heft.

Looking from the dog to the other human, Hawkeye leaned back a bit in her chair, laying her arms across her lap in a relaxed manner. “You’re not military. You don’t have the…roughness, I guess.” Her gaze softened a little and her head angled a tiny bit to one side, not unlike her pup when he got curious. “How did you wind up here?” With one hand, she gestured loosely to the rec room at large with its brawny pilots playing poker and grease-smeared technicians griping about the pilots that broke their jaegers. There was a group of men arguing valiantly and rapidly with thick Australian accents and a brooding scientist at one table pouring over calculations. They were hodgepodged and confusing, all babbling and yet saying nothing, adding to the din and background noise of the room. A quiet man like Chryses, to Hawkeye it didn’t fit. She was used to rowdy men and being a mess and not sleeping enough because that was the military but there was something about the way Chryses held himself that said he simply wasn’t trained that way and said it much louder than any words the man had uttered thus far.

[Chryses]

Chryses was very impressed by Hawkeye's father's ability to predict the return of the Kaiju. Of course, his village had always expected them to come back, but it was based entirely off of superstition and a general attitude of pessimism. It was amazing enough that Hawkeye's own father had been the one to design her Jaeger, the magnificent robotic creature that drew so many eyes in the Jaeger bay. To think that he did it while others called him crazy, before it was needed, so that it could be ready for the second Jaeger war... It was all incredible to him. "Your father must have been very smart." He thought of his own father, a simple farmer with an obsession with Greek mythology, who taught Chryses everything he'd known... Arriving at the Shatterdome, Chryses had received a harsh blow in discovering that what his father had taught him wasn't enough, barely covered the bases of universal knowledge. An irrational pang of jealousy for Hawkeye's smart, prophetic father shot through him. Immediately afterward he felt terrible, thinking of his father's leathery, wrinkled palm, so used to pulling plants from the ground, his pants with constant dirt stains at the knees, the crow's feet around his eyes from years of laughing, of playing with his son and caring for him so deeply. He was hit by a crushing homesickness, although he technically was more or less still home in his own country. He cast his eyes downward and kicked his feet against the floor.

It was relieving at least to hear that he wasn't the only completely green, inexperienced ranger in the program. Hawkeye's scores were a little intimidating. He'd only ever been in twelve solo runs, and while he had a perfect score, his two-person missions had been a bit more dire. He had, in fact, only been successful in 89% of his simulations, even had a partner destroyed in one of his simulations. That partner hadn't made it through the program, and technically Chryses shouldn't have, either. Candidates with less than 90% success rates were simply too much of a risk. It had been sheer political pressure that had allowed Hawkeye to continue his training. The president of Chile, as well as a few other South American world leaders had banded together to defend him, blaming every failure on his partner. It was true that every drift of his had been shaky and superficial, no real memory connection, just a temporary joint consciousness. It was considered incredible that he was even capable of such a thing, because the drift was meant to be absolute. Chasing the rabbit had never even been an option for him, because the hole was so shallow. Incredible though it may be, it was not ideal for the Jaeger program. A deep connection was an absolute necessity. Technically Chryses was on probation until he established his first real drift.

But it was unofficial, and definitely not something he would willingly tell anyone. It was an obvious sign of weakness, and if his fellow pilots considered him incapable of his job, trust would be impossible. That would jeopardize their lives in the field. Talking about Hayate was a welcome distraction from those thoughts. The dog looked so happy, his gormless smile and tongue hanging out. It was amazing to Chryses that this animal would grow so large, would be so strong. He would be able to protect his owner from men twice her size. He would probably be intelligent, too. Chryses wondered what kinds of tricks a woman like Hawkeye would teach an animal. Chryses had little experience with any animal other than horses, which were, admittedly, a bit dumb. Honestly, an animal almost twenty times the size of a cat, with a brain, presumably, just as much bigger, that couldn't be litter trained at all... It was a bad sign, intelligence-wise. But Chryses had never needed a clever animal. The stupidity was actually a good thing when it came to tricks and stunts. The horse had no imagination, so it had no idea what kind of danger it would be put it. "I have a horse," Chryses says suddenly, wanting her to know for some reason. "He jumps five feet... Maybe over your head," he smiled at her jokingly. "I am... You know cowboy?" He asks. "In Chile, cowboy is a good job. Like a celebrity. The horse that jumped highest in the world... In 1949, Huaso. A horse from Chile, and a man from Chile. Ocho..." He paused, trying to think of the correct word. "One, two, three, four..." He muttered under his breath, searching for the right number. "Eight feet. Very tall." He smiled at her, a sense of pride filling his chest. He couldn't help it, really. American cowboys had so much swagger. But it was a Huaso, on his horse named Huaso, who had put them all in their place.

Of course, after that moment of happiness and pride, Hawkeye mentioned that he... didn't really belong. His smile turned into a grimace and his face turned read. He dropped his eyes to his lap, his hand retreated from Hayate's head, much to the dog's displeasure. The broad muzzle of the Malamute nudged at Chryses' hands, which were now twisted together anxiously. "No, not military," he said. His voice was quieter, his initial shyness back in full force. "Huaso, cowboy." Now the very idea of it seemed sort of pathetic. Even Hawkeye, small and pretty, had a rigid spine and obvious combatative knowledge. He shifted awkwardly in his seat. "No, not military... Ah, I was not... Chosen for the program. By the marshall, like others." His blush intensified, and for a moment he wondered if he was even brave enough to tell her the whole story. In one way, it would be relieving for it not to be a secret anymore. He felt the petty need to explain himself, to justify his place among all the others. "I said, I am a celebrity in Chile. A little. Not a big one. And the people said, for the Jaeger program in Chile, there must be a ranger from Chile." He wasn't even sure how to explain why he was chosen. Language barrier aside, he himself wasn't certain. It had happened so fast, with no input from himself. He had just been plucked from his horse one day to go and ride robots instead.

With a self-conscious smile and a shrug Chryses said, "I don't really belong here. I think they will realize that soon." His eyes returned to his lap, not even bothering to take stock of the muscled men around him, or the clever scientists, or the rough-around-the-edges engineers. He'd been watching them for about ten days now, and around day two he had realized how much he was different from them. And they knew it too, from the way they skirted around him like an oddity, some inexplicable anomaly.