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Derrick is standing in the command center, nearly at Mike’s shoulder, when Spearjaw starts breathing fire. Derrick’s heart drops into his stomach. He grips the back of Mike’s chair until his knuckles turn white, feeling bile in his throat. Mike is saying something into his headset, and the words glance off Derrick like they’re in a foreign tongue, everything drowned out by the sound of the machines around him and the steady hammering of his own pulse in his ears.
This was supposed to be Tiana and Bennett’s first deployment. As drift partners, they’re practically made for each other. Couldn’t hope to find anyone better. Derrick’s dropped in to watch them spar with each other, has heard about their progress in the sim, knows how much they practically live inside each others’ heads already. And Ursa Major is solid as anything. Derrick knows that too. He’s installed so much of it with his own two hands.
He also knows that in an ambush, under fire, Ursa Major isn’t going to be fast enough to get out of there in one piece. LOCCENT is already deploying Engine Four - but fuck that, honestly, because Engine Four can either hold Spearjaw off or rescue Tiana and Bennett, but it can’t do both. Derrick isn’t about to watch his friends drown because some idiot in the lab slapped a Cat 2 label on something they didn’t bother to understand.
Derrick turns on his heel to storm out of the room, and Mike catches him by the wrist, maybe anticipating it. Derrick wrenches away.
“I’m not going to fucking stand here -”
“You don’t have a fucking drift partner,” Mike shoots back at him, without turning around. There’s a quaver in his voice that says he’s inches from losing his shit, but he can’t, because he’s holding it together for Tiana and Bennett on the other end of the comms.
“I’ll find one,” Derrick snaps.
He’s blowing through the doors before Mike can say anything else, shoulder-checking other faceless people aside to force them out of his way. Derrick walks straight-backed, eyes front, in the way he’s learned to make people in the Shatterdome assume he’s supposed to be exactly where he is, that he always knows where he’s going and what he’s going to do when he gets there. But he doesn’t know, not really. Not until he spots a shock of pink hair in the hangar and shoots an arm out to grab Shaq by the collar.
“Torres,” he says, yanking them into the relative privacy of a niche in a jaeger’s towering leg. Bourbon Lancer, he thinks. Not one he’s worked on recently.
“What,” Shaq yelps. Their glasses are askew, eyes wide with panic behind the lenses. “Man, you can’t just grab me, I was working -”
“Did you fix the grappling hook on Elephant Gambit?” Derrick asks, sharply.
Shaq blinks. “Yeah, I -”
“Good,” Derrick says. He shifts his grip from Shaq’s collar to their arm, steering them out of Bourbon Lancer’s shadow. “We’re stealing it.”
* * *
The chestplate of the drivesuit feels too heavy against his ribs, constricting Derrick every time he tries to breathe. The suit is meant for another pilot, doesn’t quite fit the way it’s supposed to, and Derrick’s worried that it’s going to fuck up the way he and Shaq need to be hooked into the jaeger until he hears the AI chime in with Initiating launch operations and lets that particular worry go.
“Now’s the hard part,” he says aloud, to Shaq, who forces a laugh. Their eyes are dilated behind their faceplate, fingers jittering in what might be anticipation.
“Hi,” Mike’s voice crackles over the comms, “are you out of your fucking mind?”
“I think your line is ‘initiating neural handshake’,” Derrick says, helpfully.
“You’re stealing a jaeger.” Mike sounds like he’s teetering on the edge of hysteria. Derrick can’t blame him - it’s turning into a long day. “You don’t have a partner -”
“Hey,” Shaq says, offended.
“- a real partner, and even if you did, the two of you are as good as arrested the second you step out of there.”
“Mike,” Derrick says, “I would love to stand here and argue with you, but we both know it’s going to end with you initiating the neural handshake, so can you do the damn thing already?”
“I’m not going to watch you die out there,” Mike says. There’s a waver in his voice that might be something, or it might be static.
“I don’t intend to die,” Derrick says, his voice steely. “The handshake, LOCCENT. Please.”
Silence on the other end of the line. It stretches on so long that Derrick starts to wonder if Mike’s hung up on him. Then:
“Initiating neural handshake.”
Thank God, Derrick thinks.
He and Shaq have never drifted with each other before. They each had plenty of other partners in the pilot program, before they both dropped out. Derrick was supposed to be an easy partner - he knows how to move his mind along the flow of memories without drowning in them, and he’s good at clicking with people outside of the drift, socially or in combat. But every drift he’s tried has left his partner exhausted with emotion, full past the brim with feelings that aren’t theirs. There’s something wrong with him, something that bleeds over into other peoples’ brains. He feels too strongly, too much.
Shaq can only focus on things too much, or not at all. Combat bored them, unless it was with someone who fought dirty and not with the goal of being in sync. They failed training sim after training sim; getting lost in one partner’s memories, then struggling to find a foothold on another’s, looking for a way in and finding none. Shaq was bounced between potential partners, doctors, and commanding officers, nerves rubbed raw by evaluation after evaluation until they snapped. Broke down, screamed at an officer - “Stop treating me like a lab rat, I’m a fucking person” - and dropped out.
Maybe this isn’t going to work. Maybe Derrick should have put more time into picking a partner, should have grabbed someone from the actual fucking pilot program instead of -
Two pilots engaged in neural bridge, the AI says, and Derrick realizes he’s already been in the drift for half a minute.
“Holy shit,” he says, at the same time that Shaq lets out a “No fucking way,” and they look sidelong at each other, then back towards the front of the jaeger.
“Gambit,” Mike says over the radio. He sounds alarmed.
“What’s up, LOCCENT?” Shaq asks. Derrick thinks about asking it, and his words come out of Shaq’s mouth. It’s fucking uncanny. He feels Shaq grin (ice cream dripping onto fingers at the beach, kissing under the stage at prom) and grins back, giddy. Couldn’t stop himself if he tried.
“Uh,” Mike says. “Your handshake is perfect.”
“Thought we weren’t real partners,” Derrick says. He flexes his arm (cold fingers against the colder buttons of a trumpet) and hears more than feels the arm of the jaeger flex with it.
“Derrick, you don’t get it.” Mike still sounds urgent, his voice shrill with it. “This - I don’t know how you’re doing that, but it literally shouldn’t be possible. Not even with married couples -”
“You’re wasting our time,” Shaq says, Derrick putting words in their mouth again.
“Can we go already?” Derrick asks, Shaq putting words in his.
“You don’t have permission to deploy,” Mike says, retreating into his LOCCENT-official voice, then sighs. Derrick can almost see him deflate in his chair. “But go ahead.”
* * *
Engine Four’s siren is earsplitting. Derrick can feel Shaq skirting the edge of overstimulated from the noise, and has the feeling that it would be worse if he wasn’t here to take on some of the neural load. A part of him wants to reach across the conn-pod to touch them, ground them physically, but he settles for envisioning himself as an anchor, as a stone in the ocean (Haystack Rock towering over him, saltwater licking at his ankles). Shaq breathes a little easier. Derrick feels a weight lift off his own chest.
They move slowly, one foot in front of the other, the current trying to drag Elephant Gambit backwards as it steps closer and closer to the wreck of Ursa Major. And it is a wreck, now. Without Spearjaw in the way, Derrick can see the gaping hole melted in the other jaeger - and through it, a glimpse of the conn-pod. He doesn’t see Tiana and Bennett hooked into it. But that could mean anything, he tells himself, and ignores the jolt of panic (driving too close to the edge of a cliff, no guardrails) that comes simultaneously from himself and Shaq.
Ursa Major is listing to one side, and starts to tilt even more dramatically as Elephant Gambit approaches it. Gambit’s searchlights illuminate Major’s smoking hull sharply, every jagged piece of metal and torn wire cast into harsh relief.
“Grappling hook,” Derrick says, even though they’re both already thinking it. Shaq is punching the command into the conn-pod’s control panel before the words are even out of his mouth.
Grappling hook deployed, the AI chimes. Derrick and Shaq extend their right arms in tandem, the way they were both trained to operate a jaeger with a blade, and find that it works more or less on the same principle. The hook fires and lodges in Ursa Major’s side. The weight of it feels satisfying, somehow, like it’s an extension of Derrick’s own body instead of Elephant Gambit’s. He wrenches his arm back hard (winding up to pitch in little league, hauling a part up the side of an unfinished jaeger) and feels Shaq do the same, Gambit bracing and planting its feet in the silt as it holds Ursa upright.
“You see them?” Shaq asks, yelling over the noise of metal groaning against metal.
“No dice,” Derrick yells back. There are a hundred different places Tiana and Bennett could be right now, none of them good. Hopefully they’re not being bounced around in the conn-pod by the tug of war between Elephant Gambit and Ursa Major’s dead weight.
“Okay,” Shaq says. Derrick can feel him still holding back panic. When he goes on, it’s both of their thoughts trying to crystalize into one suggestion. “What if we -”
Ursa Major deploys an escape pod. One escape pod. Derrick and Shaq wait for the other pod to fire, seconds that stretch into minutes, and it never comes. Derrick and Shaq pointedly do not wonder who is in the pod, and who’s left inside Ursa Major.
Derrick reaches over to splay his fingers on the control panel and retract the grappling hook all the way back into Elephant Gambit’s arm, hidden until needed. Ursa Major starts to list again, momentum lurching it forward like someone is still in the conn-pod, trying to make it walk. The escape pod is in the shadow of it. If Ursa falls forward, it might trap the pod underneath it, incapable of surfacing.
Derrick feels a sudden and intense refusal to allow that to happen, a white-hot fire in his chest like a jaeger’s arc reactor. He has no idea if it’s coming from him or Shaq anymore. Their thoughts and emotions are all bleeding together on the same spectrum, two broken machines somehow operating in concert with one another. Derrick-and-Shaq, a unit, a completed circuit. Neither of them want to question how it works, or why it’s perfect, and that’s fine by Derrick.
“Picking you up, Ursa,” Shaq says, with the unlikely hope that Ursa’s comms are still online.
Elephant Gambit bends and reaches a hand out into the ocean, palm-up, more gentle than a jaeger seems capable of. It cradles the escape pod in that palm, water streaming through its fingers. Derrick still can’t see who’s inside. The pod looks so small against the hand of the jaeger, too small to contain a human life. Too fragile to protect anything.
“Gambit,” Mike says, over the comms, “you got any survivors? Engine Four’s holding off Spearjaw, you should have a clear path back.”
“Yeah,” Derrick and Shaq say simultaneously, then pause.
“We’ve got Ursa’s escape pod,” Shaq says.
“Just one?” Mike asks. His voice is crackly and unreadable over the radio, especially with Engine Four still wailing in the distance.
“Just one,” Derrick says. “See you in a minute.”
* * *
The silence is fucking deafening.
Derrick’s ears have been ringing since getting Elephant Gambit back to the hangar, since painstakingly peeling off his drivesuit and surfacing from the drift into the shallow pool of his own thoughts. Even the ringing isn’t enough to make the inside of his own mind less quiet. He can feel the ghost of the neural handshake, still, like a phantom limb that he can’t quite operate. Shaq’s thoughts inside his own like a nesting doll, falling away to nothing if he focuses on them for too long.
“It’s too fucking quiet,” Shaq says aloud, next to him. They’re sitting side by side on an exam table in the medical bay, mostly waiting to hear word back on Tiana and Bennett now that they’ve both been checked over for injuries and brain damage.
The kind of brain damage that matters, anyway. The kind that would keep them from doing their jobs, or would let them plead they hadn’t known what they were doing out there, when they inevitably get court martialed for stealing a jaeger. Not whatever is going on in their heads right now, the incessant missing of the single, coherent unit of Derrick-and-Shaq, the blind fumbling for a connection that’s faded to a phantom.
“Too fucking quiet,” Derrick mutters in agreement.
Shaq hums, shifts so his knee is touching Derrick’s. “You think they’re okay?”
“Hope so,” Derrick says.
The single escape pod deployed from Ursa Major became less of a mystery as soon as it was opened in the hangar: Tiana had stuffed both herself and Bennett inside, and it was a miracle they both hadn’t been killed. Tiana had been awake but delirious, and Bennett had been unconscious, their bodies contorted to fit the small space in ways that made them look like broken dolls from high above in Elephant Gambit’s conn-pod. Derrick had barely gotten to see them before they’d been whisked away to the med bay. But he’s been listening to the people rushing past in the hall, enough to catch words like coma and phrases like bridge still active , and the picture isn’t pretty.
The door of the exam room slams open. Derrick and Shaq startle at the same time in the same way, Derrick’s hand going to Shaq’s shoulder, their hand going to his thigh. Gripping hard, the way they couldn’t help ground each other in the jaeger. Staring at the doorway with the sharp alertness of pilots whose adrenaline hasn’t quite worn off yet.
“You two are in so much trouble,” Luis says delightedly, bustling into the exam room. Their hair is pulled back in a loose bun at the top of their head, and Derrick is pretty sure the clothes they’re wearing now are the same ones he saw them in yesterday, so either they slept in their clothes or they haven’t slept at all.
“Don’t tell me they sent you to arrest us,” Shaq says. Their grip on Derrick’s leg loosens, but their hand stays where it is, wariness coming off them in waves.
“Please, like we’d agree to that.” Luis laughs. There’s a clipboard in their hands, which is never a good sign. “I mean, you did steal the Games’ jaeger, but personally, I love that for you, and it’s not like they’re using it since the divorce.”
“Luis wants to study you,” Tot says, bluntly, from the doorway.
“No,” Derrick says, scrambling to his feet. “No - fuck that. No tests.”
He doesn’t have to look at Shaq to know they feel the same way. There’s nothing wrong with Luis and Tot, usually, but they’re still scientists, and Derrick doesn’t particularly want to be under a microscope at the moment. Or at all. In fact, he would prefer to be as scientifically and medically unremarkable as possible.
“The longer we take, the longer it takes for someone to come down here and arrest you,” Tot points out, hir voice a perfect deadpan. And as much as Derrick hates to admit it, ze’s right.
“Fine,” Shaq says - just as Derrick opens his mouth to say the same thing. It’s uncanny, to hear it outside of the jaeger. Maybe there’s more of the neural bridge left in them than Derrick thought.
“One test,” Derrick says, finishing the thought. “And if we don’t like it, we’re fucking off to turn ourselves in.”
Luis laughs, high and bright, and waves him off. “Fine, fine. One test! Whatever you say.”