Work Text:
“This next mission is of utmost importance,” is what Stratt first tells him upon entering her office. She waves him in, looking both ways before closing the door.
She locks it, too.
Grace notices but doesn’t say anything, still confused on why he was invited to this seemingly very important one-on-one meeting in the first place. He stuffs his hands in his lab coat, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“So I’m guessing that this is super top secret stuff?”
“You could say that,” she says.
Grace purses his mouth. “Cryptic,” he chuckles, trailing off awkwardly when she just stares at him. He clears his throat. “Sorry. Go on.”
Stratt looks out the window, the sunset hitting her silhouette just right and painting her in red and orange. The room feels all the more smaller because of it, like a vacuum, the sound of the rest of the base far off with them this deep in the compound.
“We’re planning to drop a bomb into the breach at the next reported Kaiju sighting,” she says, ignoring his flinch of surprise. “We’re hoping it’ll close the tunnel for good.” She lets out a breath, rubbing her forehead. Stressed. “But we only have one shot.”
“That’s—”
Grace runs a hand through his hair.
“Okay, that’s a lot. Not to mention all the factors we gotta account for. The breach itself being unstable as it is, pressure underwater, how all this’ll affect the mechanical hull of the suits—”
Stratt nods. There are dark circles under her eyes. Grace wonders how hard she’s been thinking about this. About this plan. About the pilots willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of a safer world, free of monsters.
She looks tired. Too tired.
Grace pauses in his rambling. His hands are shaking. “Who’s…” He swallows the lump in his throat and tries again. “Who’s on the team?” Who volunteered? he wants to ask, but something stops him.
The wording, maybe.
People signing off their lives for the greater good, or something like that.
“Li-Jie and Ilyukhina. They’ll be our defense, scouting the perimeter around the breach for any incoming enemies. Their main goal will be clearing a path.”
He nods. The two of them were a good team, and already had a solid enough track record. The fact that they were willing to risk it all, though, just for one chance at saving the world… admirable.
Scary, but admirable.
(He could never be as brave as them.)
“Defense, okay. Then who—?”
“Mr. Garcia will be leading,” Stratt cuts him off, walking to her desk. She pulls out a drawer, rummaging around inside. “He’ll be responsible for going inside and making sure the bomb is secured for detonation.”
Grace stares at her.
“Going inside?”
Stratt doesn’t respond, but the look she gives him is all he needs.
“But that—that’s suicide,” Grace whispers, horrified.
“After the loss of his partner, he didn’t hesitate to offer his services.” Stratt sighs at whatever expression he must be making on his face. “Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong. That I’m opportunistic, Doctor. Using a grieving man’s recent tragedy for my own sake.”
She shakes her head, turning back to the drawer. She seems to have found whatever it was she was looking for, something Grace can’t make out from where he’s standing, closing it.
“But I stopped caring about ethics a long time ago,” she murmurs. Then louder, more determined, “The world needs saving, and it needs that saving now. Garcia understands the risks. He signed up for it.”
James ‘Rocky’ Garcia, Grace recalls.
The other man and his copilot, Adrian, were well-known across the base. Celebrity-status because of their winning streak, the smooth flow of their drift, actions and thoughts in perfect sync. They still managed to be elusive however, somehow sneaking around the compound without anyone batting an eye, always showing up to pilot meetings unannounced.
Grace can count on one hand the number of times he’s actually interacted with the guy, and he’s been working here for a few years already. Brief, shallow meetings, and always Jaeger-related. As one of the head scientists of the research division, expert on neural links and drifting, Grace couldn’t exactly avoid talking to the pilots without Stratt getting all up in his rear end about proper communication.
He’s… different, is one way Grace would describe it.
Not exactly the social type, the way he’d sit in on meetings, eyes never on the training holograms and head seemingly in the clouds. Adrian was more the focused one of the two, a gentle presence compared to Garcia’s eccentric, sometimes confusing behavior.
And in the privacy of his own mind, Grace might as well admit it. He’d always been jealous. Not of either one of them specifically, but of the bond they shared. The closeness. The relationship they have—
He corrects himself.
Had.
The relationship they had.
Grace shakes his head, wanting to hit himself for thinking such stupid, selfish thoughts. The other man was still mourning, for god’s sake. Grace has no right to feel anything but sympathy for him, a pilot losing his copilot in action, probably traumatized to hell and back and grieving them like a missing limb.
So despite not knowing Garcia all that well, Grace hopes he is okay.
But maybe he isn’t.
Not if he was willing to sacrifice his life for a plan Grace still has no idea why he himself is being filled in on in the first place for.
“Okay,” Grace starts, feeling nervous all of a sudden. He looks around her office, wringing his wrists. “As long as they’re aware of the risks… and willing, that too. That’s the most important part of course.”
He turns back to her.
“But that doesn’t explain why I’m here.”
Stratt blinks slowly at him, as if it should be self-explanatory.
“If you’re looking for advice on when and how to approach the breach, well, I don’t think I’d be much help,” he begins rambling, unsettled by the nonresponse. “I’m your guy on everything drift compatibility, but this? Haha, don’t think so.” He jabs a thumb behind him. “DuBois or Shapiro, probably—”
“Probably,” she repeats, interrupting him. She shakes her head.
Grace trails off.
“I don’t need a probably, Doctor. What I need is a pilot.”
She takes a singular step in his direction.
“Garcia can’t control the Hail Mary alone.”
“Then there’s the—the pilot program,” Grace stutters, backing up. He doesn’t like the intense look in her eye, the same look she gets whenever she’s got her mind set on something. “People trained and willing to copilot with Garcia. He’s just gotta choose one of ‘em.”
“You said so yourself, didn’t you? You’re ‘my guy’ on drift compatibility.” She stops an arm’s length away. “So you know better than me, better than anyone else, that a random candidate isn’t going to cut it.”
Grace freezes, hands splayed out on the door.
“... where are you going with this?”
“The people in those pilot programs. They train using simulations that you created. That you tested out. All hypothetical situations that you had to pass first before deeming them good for practice.”
“I’ve never actually been in a Jaeger before—” he tries.
“Your research has been fundamental. Hence, by extension, so are you. Everything Jaeger-related has been built in mind with your teachings, your specifics. You do not need personal experience to be a pilot, Doctor. You already are one.”
Grace wiggles at the doorknob but it’s locked.
She had made sure to keep him trapped in.
Like an animal.
“You’ve… you’ve really thought of everything, huh?” he half-laughs, feeling more and more hysterical by the minute. “But I bet you didn’t think about the most important thing here.”
He throws out his last line, desperate.
“Compatibility, Stratt. Drift isn’t possible if there isn’t already a shared connection between two people.” He grins at her, all teeth. Triumphant. Shrugs his shoulders as if they aren’t hurting from how stiff he’s been keeping them. “And I barely know the guy!”
Stratt shakes her head, a resigned expression on her face.
“But you forget the other, other most important thing. I was made leader of this base for a reason. Because I watch, and I listen. I know where to move my pieces, and when. So I know, without a shadow of a doubt, Doctor, that you and Garcia are drift compatible.”
She brings one hand up between them, counting on her fingers.
“You possess a similar thinking process and speed. You’re both experts in your own fields. You’re also both much more observant than other people would give you credit for. And stubborn to a fault, too, when it comes to troubleshooting and solving a problem. You both get in your head,” and then she huffs, “‘tunnel vision,’ I think you Americans call it.”
She looks back up, one eyebrow raised.
“In short—you’re smart but stupid,” she sums up, blunt. “But if put together, that last part might just cancel out.”
Grace gawks at her.
“You can’t ask me to—to replace his partner!”
“No one can replace Adrian,” Stratt immediately tells him off, accompanied by a dismissive flap of the hand. “They were one of our greatest pilots. One of the best. But I don’t need the best. I just need someone who can get the job done. That is just as good.”
“I can’t do that,” he tries one last time, weak. “I can’t get the job done. I understand the risks, and I can’t—won’t sign myself up for what sounds like a one-way suicide trip. Even if it’s to save the world. Please.”
He’s begging now.
Crying a little bit, too.
“I don’t want to die.”
Stratt sighs and, for a moment, Grace wants to pull her in for a hug, despite the situation. She looks older than she is, the burden on her shoulders something he could never, in a million years, imagine for himself.
He wonders when the last time she had a minute just for herself was, wonders when the last time those lines around her face were from a real, genuine smile, and not some pent up frustration.
But then she reaches for her pocket, pulling out a needle.
And he feels all that sympathy for her disappear in a flood of alarm.
“I’m sorry,” she says, all the while he continues fumbling with the door still, turning his back to her. He grunts, throwing his whole weight into the metal of it, but there’s no give. He tries again, and again and again and again.
“Please. Don’t do this. I can’t. Stratt please—”
“Thank you for saving the world, Grace.”
.
.
.
A sharp pain, and then nothing.
.
.
.
Grace comes to standing inside the Hail Mary’s cockpit.
It takes him a moment, everything coming back to him in bits and pieces while he stares at a small crack in the corner of his right lens. Yes. That’s right. He’d tried to escape through the window, only to end up tumbling down the side of the building where a team was already waiting at the bottom, Carl at the front.
He also remembers begging, falling to his knees and grabbing at the dirt.
Had wondered, just briefly, why they weren’t doing anything but circling him. And then he realized that they were just waiting him out. Waiting for whatever Stratt had drugged him with to make its rounds, circulating throughout his body, the pumping of his blood—heartbeat loud, too loud, in his ears—exacerbating the whole process, probably.
The last thing he can recall is Carl reaching for him, a gentle hand keeping him from falling face-first into the dirt. And the betrayal.
He remembers that, too.
The stinging, hot pain of it.
(Or maybe those were just the tears tracking down his face. Who knows.)
Grace looks down at himself, still numb from it all. He’s groggy, but not groggy enough to realize he’s been put into a red drift suit, mustard yellow accents in between the joints and padding, a form fitting black undersuit peeking through the gaps. Every ranger had a part in choosing their suit, from color to extra features.
Something uniquely just them, tailored to their exact measurements and preferences.
He wonders, bitterly, when they’d picked this out for him.
If it was scrounged from past unused suits or—if his suspicions were right—something they’d always had in storage, just in case.
He turns his head, neck hurting from whatever angle he’d been in previously, to find himself leaning back against one of two robotic arms. He jolts in surprise, pushing himself away, hearing a ‘pop’ behind him as wires disengage from the port on his back.
Grace watches in terrified silence, backed up all the way to the very edge of the cockpit—which isn’t saying much—as the arm’s claws grab at the air, searching for him, and wonders how deep he’d been put under to the point where they’d already put him in prime position to control an entire friggin’ mecha.
“How is Doctor Grace doing?”
Grace jumps. “What?”
“How is Doctor Grace doing?” the Hail Mary repeats. “I apologize for startling you. But I must inform you that all checks have been done, and that the vessel is ready for piloting. Recent additional adjustments, however, have also been noted and added.”
“What… what kind of additional adjustments?”
“As per orders and mission details, the hull has been reinforced. Power systems will remain online, however will switch over to nuclear once inside the breach in preparation for detonation. Also, all exit pods have since been ejected. Current internal temperature is—”
Grace’s mind comes to a stuttering halt.
“Detonation?” he chokes, ignoring the lack of exit pods—which, of course, is very alarming in and of itself, though he isn’t surprised that they’d thought ahead and made sure to ruin any other chance of him escaping.
Because when Stratt mentioned a bomb…
He looks down at his feet as if he could see through hundreds of layers of soldered together metal and straight into the heart of the Hail Mary, where he can just faintly hear the thrumming of the nuclear reactor.
“Current internal temperature is operational,” someone decidedly not-Mary chimes in, right as what looks like a trapdoor opens from the floor. A head of gray hair peeks out, a pair of hands coming up on either side to pull a body up. “Could afford to be hotter, however. Considering ocean temperature.”
“Temperature will be adjusted accordingly when we descend underwater, Pilot Garcia.”
“Ugh. I told you this. I prefer Rocky instead.”
“Right then, Pilot Rocky. I will update your profile preferences for all future interactions from now on.”
Garcia—no, Rocky—smiles up at him, a little something between hopeful and hopeless. “All future interactions.” And then he lets out a laugh, though the expression he has makes it obvious he doesn’t find anything funny.
Grace just stares.
“Morbid humor,” Rocky tacks on when the quiet stretches a beat too long.
Grace doesn’t know what kind of face he must be making, but the other man shakes his head, pulling the rest of his lower half up and into the cockpit.
“I realize that the timing for humor right now might be… insensitive. Apologies.” He shrugs, standing. He tries smiling again but it falters, so he settles for just holding a his hand out. Shocked and still a little numb, Grace automatically reaches for it. “I know handshakes are customary for first meetings, and that we have already met on more than one occasion—but I feel as if this particular situation calls for one, Doctor.”
“Grace,” he says automatically. “Just Grace.”
Rocky nods. “Grace,” he says, and then, “I thought your place was in the lab. I did not expect them to tell me you had volunteered.” Me too, Grace thinks glumly, waiting for a break in conversation to maybe, just possibly sneak in the fact that he’d not so much volunteered as had been coerced. “But I am grateful that you chose to be my fellow copilot. Thank you. Whatever reasons you had in choosing to go on this mission with me, I will not ask.”
Okay, perfect timing, right here—
“As I am sure you have heard by now, my former copilot died in action.”
Grace clamps his mouth shut.
Rocky takes a deep breath, closing his eyes.
“Adrian,” he whispers, a broken note of melancholy so tragic that Grace can feel his own eyes tearing up. “I am doing this in their name. For them. For all that they had sacrificed up until this point.”
He opens his eyes.
“I will not let their death be in vain.”
Going back to the trapdoor, he grabs two helmets. One that’s green he puts under his arm, and the other a deep red, looking much more brand new than the first. Grace can see his full government name stamped to the side of it as Rocky hands it off to him, his hands just this side of shaky as he stares empty-faced into its visor.
Rocky is still talking, his mouth moving in visor’s reflection, upside down as it is with the other man in front of him, but Grace can’t hear a thing.
There’s a loud, high-pitched ringing in his ears, everything else fading into the background. Rocky is gesturing with his hands now, pointing to the mechanical robot arms and his back, to the control panels located on either side of the cockpit, probably something important and mission-related, but Grace still doesn’t hear any of it.
For a long, long moment, all he does is stare at his own reflection.
Thank you.
Thank you, Rocky had said.
(Adrian. For them.)
Grace can’t do this.
“I’m… not supposed to be here,” he stutters, gripping the helmet in both hands, knuckles gone all white. He looks up and swallows back the bitter taste in his mouth, throat clicking audibly in the quiet. “Please. I don’t want to die.”
Rocky stops, staring at him.
He stares at Grace’s trembling mouth, the shaking of his legs, the sweat collecting on the suit’s collar. Understanding blooms slowly on his face—too slow—so Grace decides to hammer in the point by tilting his head just the slightest bit to the left, baring his neck.
There, right under his ear, swollen and red: a needle mark.
Rocky’s breath catches. “You did not sign up to be a pilot,” he whispers, horror-stricken.
It’s not a question.
Grace shakes his head. “No,” he confirms, hollow.
Quiet in the cockpit for a moment, and then,
“I’m sorry,” he blurts. He brings the helmet up, bowing his head and hiking his shoulders to keep hidden, so Rocky can’t see the tears welling up in the corners of his eyes, can’t see how choked up he is by the sheer emotion catching itself in his throat. “I am so, so sorry.”
“Grace…”
“I know you want to do this for your copilot. Your partner. That this mission could possibly help save the Earth and thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people. But I just… I can’t. I’m not like you guys. I’m not selfless. I can’t be a hero. I can’t save the world!”
He’s sobbing now, face pressed into the helmet’s visor like a small child.
“Please,” he begs one last, final time.
There’s a hand on the back of his head.
Grace sniffs, glancing up.
Rocky looks down at him, a fierce expression overtaking his features. “Who,” he demands, brow furrowed, mouth pulled to the side. It takes Grace an embarrassing couple of seconds to realize what he’s asking for.
“Stratt,” he manages to choke out.
“When.”
Grace sniffs again, wiping at his nose. He looks away, hugging the helmet to his chest. “Late afternoon,” he whispers, “however long ago that was. Told me it was important so I followed her back to her office.”
He squeezes his eyes shut.
“That’s where she…”
The hand that was previously on his head slowly migrates down, to the back of his neck. Rocky’s thumb tap-tap-taps on the drift suit’s collar, where skin meets undersuit, and Grace nods, understanding the unspoken question.
“Okay then.”
Grace blinks, wiping the underside of his eyes, glasses gone all foggy from emotion.
“Okay what?”
Rocky looks at him like he’s stupid. “We go talk to Stratt,” he says, like it should be obvious. It’s decidedly not. “After the mission,” he clarifies, like that makes it easier to understand. It has the completely opposite effect.
“What—?”
“After the mission,” Rocky repeats, enunciating each word like Grace is a toddler—which, uh, hello, he’s not? “We will go find Stratt. I have some choice words for her regarding choosing my drifting partner. Not that I do not have full confidence in you.”
He adds that last part as if worried about offending Grace’s nonexistent capabilities.
While Grace is just… very, very confused.
“My gasters are so flabbered right now,” he admits, not sure if he’s making sense. “I’m going to die—we’re going to die—by blowing ourselves up in the middle of the ocean, hundreds of feet underwater, via nuclear reactor, and you’re talking as if we’re gonna make it out alive.”
He laughs, feeling hysterical.
The other man huffs, an offended little action that Grace, for some odd reason—ah, must be the hysteria again, of course—finds awfully endearing considering that they’re both grown, middle aged men. “You are not listening. Stop spiraling.”
“I am not spiraling!”
Rocky rolls his eyes before bringing up his other hand, sandwiching Grace’s face in between them. Fingers splay across both of his cheeks, the long expanse of them capturing his temples, the jut of his jaw.
“You are not going to die. Adrian would not have allowed it.” He leans forward, their breath mingling for a moment, all moisture and hot air. Grace breathes it all in, feeling lightheaded. “I will not allow it.”
His eyes are hazel, Grace thinks distantly.
With little flecks of bright green scattered throughout.
(He’s also really, really pretty.)
((He’s also—going off the ring Grace can feel pressed against one cheekbone, the metal a cold balm to his feverish skin—a man whose partner had just died, for goodness sake.
Gosh dang it, Grace, get ahold of yourself!))
“But the mission…” he mumbles.
“What makes you think completing the mission and me punching Stratt in the throat are mutually exclusive—”
“You said you just had some ‘choice words’ for her—!”
“—outcomes? The entire premise of this mission is based on a what-if. Yes, numbers were involved. A lot of math. But still a what-if. The chances of us achieving both is little, indeed, but not zero. You are a scientist. You know this. Every possible scenario, account for it.”
And Grace just… he blue screens, for lack of a better term.
Opens and closes his mouth a couple times while he’s at it, too.
How they transitioned from one topic to another, he has no idea. Feels like he has just come face-to-face with the living, breathing embodiment of what emotional whiplash must be as a person. An impossible man with an impossible hope.
He bites the inside of his cheek, hesitating.
“But… it’s like you said, I’m just a scientist. I’m not a pilot.”
“Semantics,” Rocky throws back at him, a little hint of cheek. “If you want me to be more specific, then let me say as follows—you are Doctor Ryland Grace. Head scientist on neural linking. Leading expert on drifting. Hoarder of skittles. Also kind of messy. Your workbench has seen better days. But I digress.”
Grace rears back, offended.
“Ok, first of all, skittles are a rare commodity, it’s not my fault the canteen doesn’t purchase them in bulk, second, I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a hoarder, and third, what do you mean messy—”
“You are Doctor Ryland Grace, who is going to save the world,” Rocky cuts him off.
Then the other man suddenly bends down, picking up his green helmet where he’d abandoned it on the floor, only to switch it for Grace’s own. Grace looks down at it, at the worn scuff marks, the scratches on the sides.
Rocky nods, satisfied. Motions for him to put it on.
“And I’ll be here to make sure you save yourself, too.”