Chapter Text
Jazz likes to listen to music in the cockpit of his Jaeger.
He’s read scientific papers, back in college, about how music is one of the last things a human forgets, that music is so intrinsically tied to memory that dementia patients who have forgotten even their own children remember nursery rhymes from their time as babes.
That, and smell was very powerful for memory.
Although something tells him command wouldn’t appreciate him sneaking scented candles into his cockpit.
Hm.
Maybe a little tree air freshener?
But it feels disrespectful to hang something for cars in a Jaeger, and Jazz may be casual, but he’s not disrespectful. Especially not to the Jaeger who’s saved his life several times over.
Bebop had a mind of her own.
Centuries of warfare from these Kaiju aliens, with the circuitry of the scavenged living dropship metal intimately connected to each successive pilot, rubbed off on the tech. These imprints from dozens of pilots coalesce and form…something.
Something officially off the books.
Something not really known except to the pilots.
Something with a deep and abiding love for its pilots, for humanity.
These Jaegers had a protective streak worse than his own mothers. Jazz imagines being created for the sole purpose to protect. To be so connected to the people you serve that you see their most beloved memories, their darkest secrets, for a breath of time, for a measure of music, hold their very souls.
Yeah.
He’d be protective too.
Hell, he was literally a Jaeger pilot!
Jazz hums along, sings to Bebop. He had not named Bebop, but a previous pilot did, noting how Bebop would slow their return to shatterdomes to listen to the cheering, chants, and music of a celebration that would break out after repelling an attack. The pilot had told him this on her deathbed, had begged Jazz to be kind to Bebop.
Jazz had promised her he would, and hummed her a lullaby until she passed. Bebop was a younger Jaeger, Jazz would only be her third pilot. She didn’t think in words yet, but emotions, and concepts slowly formed into something more. Older Jaegers were said to share conversation when drifting with their pilots, but again, Jaeger sentience was not publicly known yet.
It was officially known. Older jaegers, if not repairable, were retired to an education facility, and kept in good shape with public funds. Jazz went himself a time or two. The Jaegers were happy with the company and to observe civilians, humanity not under pressure.
He also learned in Anthropology classes that humans were unique in that they were mother nature’s best vocal mimics. It cast a new light on his bachelors in music. Jazz had been in his college’s marching band playing the saxophone, and had joined the military for the military band. He had been in his church's choir growing up too.
And he sings to Bebop and himself so he does not forget.
He’s read the history. Pilots who go insane, pilots who get stuck. Pilots who confuse themselves, think they were the other pilot they drifted with although those stories were locked away under so much black ink even Jazz and all his nosing around had a heck of a time getting his claws on them. Admittedly, those risks are less common, but always a possibility due to the simple fact you were messing with your brain every time you drifted.
It was also so he does not forget his family, his mother who first sang that to him. It gets lonely up in the shatterdomes, circling the battered colonies. Europa’s shatterdome was his favorite, but Titan’s wasn’t bad either. Jazz is singing softly again as he does maintenance-as all pilots are taught to-when he’s snapped at from below.
“Jazz, cut that out! What if you don’t hear command trying to contact you?” Percy says. Good old Percy! They had him to thank for the safer Drift technology. Unfortunately this concern bleeds through and makes him a bit of a stickler for other safety protocols.
Nautica comes up.
“I think it’s pretty neat that he does that. Why deny him his humanity? Isn’t that what this is all about?” Nautica asks, smiling faintly.
Percy, who had thrown down with politicians to get the funding for the safer tech, sighs but concedes to her point.
Jazz grins at Bebop from where he’s doing upkeep on her elbow’s photo-cells, invented by the scientist Botanica. The living metal they salvaged from the Kaiju ships was a secret they had not yet figured out. But they had combined it with organic cells to make Techno-organic Jaegers, a metal-organic material that could replicate, making Jaegers capable of self-repair, but only to a certain extent. Maintenance like this was still needed.
He keeps humming Carol King’s ‘Jazz Man’.
His version of a lullaby to Bebop.
…
…
…
Humanity did what it always does.
Expanded into the solar system because it became clear that they couldn’t play defense forever. They would need to expand, get more resources, more land. Also to prevent the invaders from settling them first and getting a base to launch closer attacks from.
No other planets were inhabited in the solar system meaning it was free for humanity’s taking.
Ethical colonialism.
Who knew it was possible?!
Humanity now numbered over 32 billion. A respectable amount, as his mother says!
They didn’t know why the aliens attacked, or even how they found Earth. The moon colony had barely been established when the attackship came out from the Oort cloud.
As a whole, humanity had to get really good at giving a shit about each other in the wake of an attack. Having an enemy that wasn’t another human helped for sure. Also so many of the feats they’ve pulled off simply wouldn’t be possible without cooperation. Earth united under one central government, and then the colonies were pulled under it too.
The Kaiju had no singular form.
They took whatever shape was convenient for destruction.
The casualties were initially in the millions.
Humanity fought back with reversed engineered technology from the monsters and ships they managed to take down. It took centuries to clawback and then expand into the rest of the solar system.
It was unknown if there were any other aliens in the universe besides these invaders.
Or if this invading force was made up of one creature that was capable of altering its DNA into several different species. Or if these were creatures from other planets subjugated to serve. The Kaiju DNA began to degenerate immediately after death large in part due to the toxic blood, or kaiju blue, meaning there were almost no intact DNA strands to study and confirm that theory.
In that case, how many civilizations have these invaders crushed? What would it mean to die and come back as a zombie, a weapon used to destroy other societies like yours?
Jazz grit his teeth.
The Sol System would not be one of them!
He hums in time to his punches, the music keeping him motivated and unstoppable.
Jazz had been deployed from the Titan shatterdome, the farthest out colony, a new one, and just getting started.
This colony would not end before it could begin!
“Percy, send me the info beats!” Jazz snaps.
“2 documented waves on radar in Titan’s atmosphere, 3 waves in orbit. You have backup en-route but it will be three hours until arrival. Evacuation is 42% complete. The Dropship has depleted it’s reserves. It’s outside the range of our canons.”
5 waves ?
Jazz has had worse odds.
Although.
Not by much.
Jazz beats the two waves in a stretch of time that feels both eternal and too short. He nearly loses his life in the process, but the colony stands. The dropship has stopped spitting out Kaiju, but a few are still in orbit.
The third wave lands.
Half the colony is destroyed.
The half that had been evacuated first.
No casualties.
A god damn miracle.
“Evacuation is 92% complete.” Percy shouts in the comm.
One of the last Kaiju lands to destroy the rest of the colony’s infrastructure. A huge loss to humanity, trillions of dollars and decades of work, gone.
But one they would eventually recover from.
One monster splits off to land on the colony in front of Jazz. It’s abnormally large, a Cat 3, when most waves are Cat 1’s and sometimes 2.
The others are still in space.
“Jazz! Mirage is down and the second wave is going after the evacuee ships! The Railguns will only hold them off for so long!”
Jazz must choose.
He grits his teeth.
Bebop croons a mournful melody as they leave the 8% behind to save the 92%. Jazz turns to the crowds gathered at the base of the ships to burn them into his memory, to apologize, as he tries to take off.
Of course, that fails.
“I don’t have enough fuel left to make it into orbit myself!” Jazz shouts, punching the charging monster in the face. His heart rips thinking of Mirage’s fate.
Wait.
The monster takes off to chase the civilians, going where the people are and Jazz grabs onto its back and hitches a chaotic ride up through Titan’s clouds, and then, into orbit.
“Are you able to hold on?!” Percy asks, voice colored with shock and awe at Jazz’s daring. As far as he knew, no one else had ever hitched a Kaiju ride.
“Yes!” Jazz calls back through grit teeth.
The 8% are left below, defenseless in a ruined city should any more dropships arrive, vulnerable to Titan’s extreme cold, but not under any immediate monster threat.
As they breach orbit and begin to float, Jazz kills the monster with a sword, not worried about the pollution from Kaiju blue in space.
He kicks off to the other one just in time to prevent a ship from being shredded.
Jazz slices off an arm.
The monster dodges the next hit and slams Jazz so hard he’s sent spinning.
Head over heels with no end in sight.
He rights himself just before crashing into an evac ship. Jeez, can you imagine how horrific that’d be? If he wrecked the ship of civilians he was trying to save?
He sees their faces pressed to the window, thousands of precious little faces and Jazz briefly has an out of body experience, recalling the first time he went up in a space ship, a boy born and raised in the south side of Chicago reaching the stars, staring in wonder.
They are staring in horror.
The body of Mirage, or rather his Jaegers spins in place in space with no gravity or traction to stop him and Jazz gently stills the body. No use in leaving it behind for the kaiju to get their hands-or paws- on and study for weaknesses.
Not when the Kaiju had already gotten their hands on several destroyed civilian ships. Mirage’s efforts saved the several hundred other ships but these ones were an unlucky few.
Mirage’s Jaeger, Shimmer, was a magnificent thing with a special paint tech that rendered it near invisible to the Kaiju.
Until now.
His Jaeger had no face and can’t flash his normal, reassuring grin. No Jaeger does.
But he does nod at them.
I see you. It says. You are not insignificant to me.
A young woman grins and blows him a kiss.
An old man exhales a cloud of water vapor into the glass and writes hi! With a smiley face.
A toddler attaches their mouth to the glass like a limpet and their amused and embarrassed mother draws them back lightning fast.
It does the impossible.
It makes Jazz laugh in a situation like this.
He grins.
“Let's do this, Bebop!”
Jazz leans forward and punches the incoming Cat 3 Kaiju so forcefully he swears he hears the neck snap even in the vacuum of space.
The people start jumping up and down so hard Jazz also swears he can hear their cheering through the vacuum too.
A spiral of Kaiju blood, Kaiju blue, arcs out into the recess of space.
And Jazz smiles. There is a distant warmth from Bebop , the sparks of what would one day be a full consciousness.
“Jazz, two other Jaegers are on their way!” Percy shouts.
“No need, just defeated the last one.” Jazz’s smile slides off at hearing Percy’s panic. He hopes he can reassure the scientist.
“Our sensors have detected a new emergence event!”
And Jazz feels his stomach drop.
"These reinforcements are larger jaegers, pilot pairs instead of solo.”
Drifted pilots?
Oh shit!
Jazz’s Jaeger was small enough for a single pilot, it could manage most Cat 1’s and 2’s that swarmed from the dropships. The drifted Jaegers were reserved for 3’s and up. Multiple were only sent out when Cat 5’s were detected! Jazz had drifted before with only two others, one being his child bestfriend, and another his cousin who was more like a brother. Drifting was serious business and made for more powerful Jaegers.
He knows this means the civilians he just saved were doomed.
And they didn’t even know it.
Jazz watches the ships move towards the Colonies of Jupiter. He wonders if the girl would still be blowing kisses or the old man writing ‘hi’ if they knew his actions were for nothing. Jazz does not have the speed to keep up with them.
He waves goodbye and tries and swallows hard when it leads to another round of applause from inside the ship. He’s glad he can’t hear it now.
The empty dropship turns and heads back towards the breach. Humanity often shot them down and repurposed the metal in Jaegers. It was a metal previously unknown to earth, an oddly predictive metal, almost semi-sentient- although that last part was kept for those strictly ‘in the know’. The not shot down ships would go back into the breach and later emerge with new kaiju, kaiju that had clearly learned somehow from the previous fights, kaiju that now fought with deadlier strategies.
It was imperative to drop the dropships.
Before they could communicate back to whatever force was sending the kaiju.
As Jazz watches, a smaller, cat 1 Kaiju leaps from behind the body of a dead Cat 2, snaps through the tow line connecting to Shimmer, and is picked up by the drop ship.
His radio explodes.
“-need to detonate Mirage’s dead man switch but the remote signal is being blocked by the dropship’s scrambler-” Percy’s voice is rapidfire and nearly panicked, so unlike the scientist with hands steady enough to operate on pilots.
“They’ve never gotten their hands on a Jaeger before.” Jazz repeats numbly.
Oh.
This was bad.
If the Kaiju got their hands on a working Jaeger with the dead pilot still inside and figured out effective counter strategies…
Humanity was doomed.
“-can we recalibrate and send additional support for the drifted Jagers and to Jazz?” Magnus asks, voice calm yet somehow conveying his distress. To see if anyone could go and manually destroy the Jaeger with a time-bomb.
“No, the specs don’t line up.” Nautica’s voice trembles a bit.
And then Jazz gets an idea.
A crazy one.
His throat closes up.
He feels a wave of grief and for a moment he lets it flow through him, he rides that wave like a beat of music.
He jets forward and grabs the carcass of the Kaiju he killed.
He wraps himself in it and heads back to the ship following closely behind Shimmer and the Cat 1.
“Jazz, what are you doing?” Percy whispers. Jazz knows the scientist is smart enough to have figured it out, he just doesn’t want to believe it.
Jazz drifts to an opening hatch. They might still be figuring out exactly how the ships work but they knew enough to know that the Kaiju had DNA that also served as entry keys for the doors. In space, the Kaiju blue degeneration process would be slower.
It opens.
Unbelievable.
“Sorry Percy. I gotta go dark.”
Jazz cuts the comms.
He detached the neural link and presses his forehead to the dashboard and pretends it’s the crook of his mother’s shoulder and neck.
…
…
…
They approach Pluto, the dwarf plant small but large enough to hide most of the details from humanity on whatever the breach was. Whenever they sent probes, Kaiju specifically made to prevent the probes from collecting any useful data came out and destroyed them.
Jazz has not moved from whatever hanger he landed in with the Kaiju on top of him.
He does not dare to.
He has not tried to reach out to Percy either.
He can’t believe he’s actually doing this.
Bebop’s sensors begin to detect the energy from the breach and Jazz finally throws the carcass off of him.
It seems the breach only activates when an escaped dropship needs transportation back, and the invaders then use the opportunity of the open breach to send out a new dropship while processing the data the first brought back.
Human eyes had never seen the breach before.
It swirls before Jazz now through the ripped open hatch. There are no windows on a dropship. Nautica had confirmed it during one of her deconstructions. Jazz had been floating in the vacuum of space while the ship shot through the outer solar system.
All Jaegers had a self-destruct bomb in case the Kaiju got their hands on them. Jazz planned on using Mirages and then his own in the breach.
He contacts Percy.
“Purse?” Jazz calls gently. Base command for the outer colonies at Europa is staffed by many people but still he hopes. Jazz hopes using the nickname Percy hated would maybe get him riled up enough to miraculously hear Jazz, and come to yell at him.
And perhaps god is real and listening because Percy answers.
“Jazz!” and can you really blame a guy if Jazz starts to tear up at the pure joy and relief in Percy’s voice? The scientist doesn’t even sound mad!
“It’s me! I can see the breach. It’s uh, nothing like we’ve ever seen before.”
A circle the size of the dwarf planet Ceres is hidden behind and barley concealed by Pluto. It is a swirl of incredible colors, it looks like a gaping maw of teeth with the metal outlining.
“An Einstein-Rosen Bridge.” Jazz croaks.
“...Can you send back images without detection?” Percy asks. This kind of technology would be groundbreaking. If they could somehow reverse-engineer this too…
“Yeah. I uh, hang on. I can’t when I’m still in the dropship.”
Jazz finds the Jaeger of Mirage down in a sealed hanger, where gravity is activated. Every step with a dead Kaiju over his shoulder, slowly leaking Kaiju blue on him was a nerve-wracking one. The ship is completely alien, with no recognizable human features and at a much larger scale. The walls are empty of all design, there are no benches or marked paths.
There is nothing guarding Mirage.
The ship, made of such an unearthly metal, seems to be able to steer itself.
The ship is hauntingly empty since Jazz and Mirage-before he died-had killed all Kaiju sent out, with the exception of that one pesky cat 1 that ended up snagging mirage. But there still might be something on the ship.
Jazz grabs Shimmer and Mirage. He takes a second to allow the crush of grief to pass.
He can’t carry both the Kaiju hiding him and Mirage.
He takes Mirage and moves as fast as he can.
The portal fluctuates.
Jazz curses as he moves faster with Mirage to the damaged hatch bay.
A second dropship slowly exits the portal as his damaged one nears.
Jazz sets the timer on Mirage's bomb. He runs through the ship and begins tearing at what look like fuel lines before blasting a hole into the side and leaping out into the vacuum of space.
“Europa command, this is Jazz. The ship has been sabotaged and Mirage’s bomb set. I’m now far enough to broadcast.”
“This is Europa command, begin the broadcast.” Magnus’s voice is firm but gentle, a mercy to a doomed soldier.
Because there is no coming back from this.
He’s gone to where no human has gone before.
“See you, space cowboy.” Jazz grins so hard it's painful, it turns into a grimace as he hears Nautica’s muffled sobs. “I’ll catch you all in the Drift.”
Now that rips choked sobs from several folks listening in the background.
Drifting, the flow state, over the past centuries had taken up a quasi-religious status with the Sol defense system. It was many a brave pilot’s last words. Jazz thought a snazzy guy like him would say something different, fresh, but in the end…
All he wanted was the comfort of belonging, to pretend he wasn't in a hostile universe.
He would need all the divine help he could get.
The second Jazz begins broadcasting the Kaiju begin to swarm from the incoming dropship. Whatever allows them to detect the probes have now detected him since he’s now outside of the damaged dropship. Jazz is livestreaming his own death, the portal that grows ever larger as Jazz flies closer and closer. Bebop’s stream of calculations across his vision are incredible and once transmitted back to humanity might tip the scales of this war!
He needs to hang on.
The Kaiju approach.
Jazz records.
Mirage’s timer ticks down
They get closer.
Jazz’s hands twitch to Bebop’s dead man’s switch.
And the damaged dropship explodes.
The portal collapses in on itself like a dying star. The shadow of Pluto warps and twists, the heart shape on its surface cracks and Jazz feels his own heart do the same. Charon in the distance rolls like something out of a nightmare, now unmoored.
The Kaiju that had been close enough to scratch Jazz’s visor as he dodged twitches and tears.
Jazz holds on to Bebop as the universe collapses around him.
“Don’t you forget about me.” He chokes out, or at least he thinks he does.
The last thing he sees when he looks back from being swallowed by the inverting portal is the distant light of the sun that had raised him, a single clawed hand of Bebop’s reaching towards it like something sinking into the deep sea looking up to the light of the surface, hoping to be saved, to feel its warmth one last time…
He drifted.