#allijay

[kayleerowena]

if you won’t be my valentine, will you at least give me a little bit of sympathy?

[doublevampires]

allijay + switchboard

premise is that jaylen was on a one-on-one switchboard call with allie when she was alternated!! chat rp hell my beloveds saw the other half of this convo with new jaylen so. this is old jaylen.

"Results are up," Jaylen says, ignoring the warning signs: the pressure of a headache building behind her eyes, the sinking feeling in her stomach. "Gimme a minute to read 'em, I'll give you the highlights."

She scrolls down the league's election results page. Unwin the underbracket, and gray creeps into the corners of her vision. Something about debt — never a good omen — and a rumbling like distant thunder booms. The Monitor has given gifts to every team, and the sound grows louder, and louder, loud enough that she drops the switchboard's phone to the ground and covers her ears with her hands, eyes clenching shut as the room trembles.

When she opens her eyes, the phone is in her hand again. She doesn't remember picking it up.

"Jay? You still there?"

It's still Allie's voice on the other end of the phone. Jaylen takes a deep breath, then another — she is no longer in Tot's garage, no longer at hir switchboard. The set-up in front of her is sparser; a soundboard, a connecting phone with its curlicue cable, a couple of notebooks and her guitar leaning against the wall — her guitar, the acoustic one with the old Garages stickers on it they'd printed on label paper back in college, half-peeling off.

"Allie?" Her voice comes out smaller than she wants it to be. Shakes on the familiar syllables of his name, splitting them into pieces, cracked pottery glued haphazardly back together. Her ears are ringing. "What the fuck was that?"

"What was what?" She can picture, even at a distance, the furrow in Allie's brow. "You alright, honey? What's wrong?"

"I don't know, it — I got fucking teleported or some shit, I don't know. Sounded like a bomb going off or something. You didn't fucking hear that?"

And it is, in this new universe and in the old one, Allie who makes the connection first, who says "Okay," who says, slowly in that way that means he's trying not to panic, "Elections were today, right? Jay, I need you to check the results for me."

"I was about to, uh, give me a second —" and Jaylen scrambles to find her phone where she dropped it, face-up on the table next to the switchboard.

The Flowers chose Jaylen Hotdogfingers to receive an Alternate Trust.

She reads the blessing aloud, like it's a death sentence, like how Parker III had read out Star player Jaylen Hotdogfingers is incinerated those first elections.

"Fuck. Fuck, Allie, are you — are you still there?" She asks, though what she means is are you still my Allie?

"I'm here, I — did not want to be right, shit. I'm here, Jay, I'm — are you still —" and it could be are you still there or it could be are you still my Jay and Jaylen doesn't know, but she doesn't let him finish the sentence.

"I don't know how to fucking tell, I — I was in Tot's garage, I was telling you about the shit the coin was saying, I was gonna catch you up on the Moss Woman bullshit after the election." She's counting the facts off on her fingers like they mean anything.

"No, you were — you were telling me about the farmer's market," Allie says, something sinking in his voice. "Shit. Uh. Hi."

And Jaylen — who had gone out of her mind with worry when the shadows were at risk of alternating just in case Mike got swapped, who had taken the news of Agan alternating from within the trench with immense panic on Allie's behalf, but who hadn't done anything to prepare for it herself, because why would she, she's a good pitcher, a famous one at that, and maybe Patterson's alternation should have made her afraid but she had hardly noticed it because it isn't like she'd cared about the first Polkadot at all — begins to cry.

[dykesforcyclops]

allijay + 5?

5. where it doesn't hurt

the television plays reruns of some mindless game show that jaylen seems uncannily engaged in. she has refused to lie back, insists on sitting cross-legged on the couch with the popcorn bowl in her lap, her back straight, her shoulder relaxed as allie gently holds the wrapped ice pack against it.

they picked this couch together, he recalls. the chill is beginning to cut through the kitchen towel, numb his fingers, and he carefully rearranges the towel's folds to give himself a less frigid grip. jaylen had thrown herself onto the iklea display, declared this one, and he could never say no when she got that grin - patted the soft orange cushions to call him to her, arms outstretched. he'd let her pull him down, kiss him messily on the display sofa in front of half a dozen customers. she'd let him pull her back up to her feet before an employee caught them.

he draped a blanket over it when she broke things off again and moved back in with mike. dark brown and loosely lace-knit from thick, soft yarn, to let just a bit of the color cut through, but not too much. the orange had been grating on him.

his fingers are frozen again.

"cold," jaylen mumbles. she shifts uncomfortably. she's stripped down to nothing but her sports bra and tight boxer shorts, said she was overheating an hour ago. "cold. cold. allie -"

"oh, is this cold?" there's a hint of a grin spreading across his face. he pulls the towel away, presses the bare ice pack to her collar.

"fuck!" she tenses up comically, springs inward, her face scrunched like she's bit into a lemon, but she's laughing. "hey!"

"sorry, is that cold?" he moves the ice pack to his other hand and shoves his frozen hand into her face, his fingers pressing divots into her cheek, her nose. she shrieks, and pushes him away as best she can with her good arm.

"fuck you!" she gets out through laughter. he's chuckling too. he takes the ice pack back, and gently rubs the flushed red skin at her collar with his hand - not the cold one - to bring some warmth back. "you're the worst," jaylen tells him. "i'm injured."

"whose fault is that?" he says, because he knows if he told her once he must've told her a thousand times not to work herself to hard, not to push herself until she found a limit and then push harder past it - told her a hundred times that a breaking point is a stopping point, and not a fucking challenge.

"fuck off," she answers. even that line of teasing is a little too close to a lecture for her tastes.

he presses a warm kiss to her collar, an apology, and reaches for the knit blanket - pulls it up from the back of the couch and wraps it around her. "there," he murmurs, all playful cruelty gone, all tenderness now. "better?"

"little bit."

"you have to keep the ice on it," he reminds her. "your doctor said."

"i know," she says, and he can tell how badly she wants to complain. he picks the ice pack up from where he'd discarded it on the cushions, goes to work carefully rewrapping it in the kitchen towel.

"you know what it's called?" she asks.

"labral tear," he recites without thinking, though as her tone sinks in he can tell she's setting up a joke.

"a slap tear."

"'cause it'll happen if you slap too many people?" he guesses.

"no, i'm serious." her grin spreads through her voice. "superior labrum anterior to posterior. that's actually what it's called. slap," she finishes, and pops the p, and punctuates the word by smacking the afflicted shoulder.

she regrets the bit immediately, and groans in pain, and falls backwards into the couch cushions. allie is stunned for a moment, and then bursts out laughing - can't help himself - shocked sputtering laughter, and he gets out through it, "why the fuck would you do that?"

"i don't know," she groans, eyes squeezed shut tight. "oww," and it's so pathetic, and so predictable, moronically self inflicted, and even as the obligatory concern for her settles in his chest he can't help the laughter, the adoration on his face.

he pulls the blanket shut around her, and gently places the bundled ice pack against her injured shoulder again, and with his other hand he cups her cheek, leans over her, kisses her as she lies there. "you are so fucking stupid," he mumbles, still half laughing, against her lips.

send me a ship and a number and i'll write a short fic

[kayleerowena]

your honor theyre in love

[doublevampires]

alliejay + the shadows

Jaylen does not fly to Dallas to see Allie the moment she’s shadowed, but it’s a near thing.

Instead, she throws everything she owns around Tot’s guest room and then cleans it back up, sweeps the glass into the dustpan and shoves the clothes haphazard into her suitcase. She screams loud enough that Tot’s neighbors start knocking on the door. Tot knows her well enough to know when she needs to be alone, and kindly leaves the apartment, texts her that ze’ll be around and that there’s cookies on top of the fridge, and Jaylen shoves three cookies in a ziploc bag and takes her suitcase and goes.

She doesn’t have a destination in mind until she gets to the airport. She thinks, maybe Dallas. She thinks, no, she’s going to have a breakdown if she sees anyone who’s still playing right now, and picks a city with no blaseball team, and goes there instead.

So in the end, the first time Jaylen-in-the-shadows sees Allie in person is months into the season. A layover in Dallas turns into god, I just want to sleep turns into a cab to Allie’s ranch would only take half an hour turns into dragging her single suitcase out of the airport, leaving a seat unfilled on the flight she was meant to get on, and forty-five minutes later she’s using the key Allie insisted she keep on her keyring to let herself into Allie’s home and collapse on the couch.

“Shit,” she hears, a few not-quite-restful hours later. The sound of something falling, the sound of Allie scrambling to pick it up. Jaylen yawns as she opens her eyes.

“Hey, Al.”

“Hey — jesus, Jay, you couldn’t have texted?”

“Forgot,” Jaylen says, dragging herself up to sitting, rubbing at her eyes. “Wasn’t planning on coming here, but I had a layover and decided I didn’t actually care about where I was planning on going anyways, and —”

Allie’s found his way to the couch at some point, and his arms wrap around Jaylen, suddenly holding her tight. The embrace is such a shock to her system that she can’t remember what she was going to say next, not even a little bit. It’s been — it’s been a while since anyone’s touched her. She thinks she’d ended up sprawled halfway across Betsy when they’d gotten high on the roof the night before elections, but since then she’s been jetting around, looking for any meaning at all beyond the game she’s no longer permitted to play (or maybe just an escape from the hostage situation Seattle has made of her life.) It’s only now that she realizes she was missing it.

“Missed you,” Allie says against Jaylen’s hair.

“Yeah,” Jaylen murmurs into his shoulder. Her voice is hoarse all of a sudden, and she’s content to pretend it’s just sleep making it that way. “Shit’s been weird. Didn’t want to lay all that on you.”

“That’s — weirdly considerate of you, you know. But you don’t have to do that.” Allie pulls back a bit — just far enough for Jaylen to miss the touch — and brings a hand to her cheek, and looks her in the eyes, and —

He covers up the sharp breath pretty well; it wouldn’t be noticeable at all, were he not so close, and if Jaylen weren’t so familiar with Allie.

“Oh shit, your eyes,” Allie says. Softly. Something like awe creeping into his voice.

It’s been just long enough for Jaylen not to leap out of her skin every time she looks in the mirror and sees two dark brown eyes instead of one dark and the other burning incinerationfire blue, the way it had been since she came back.

The way blaseball has changed her physically has always been among the lesser of her worries — she can change herself right back, keep its influence off with shitty haircuts in hotel bathrooms and shittier dye jobs — but this feels personal, feels like something’s been taken away. Every sign of what she’s been through erased. She looks, once again, the way she did in season one, with her hair grown almost to her shoulders, her eyes both dark. She also looks nothing like she did before she died: she carries herself differently, now, like she’s always looking for a fight; she’s tired; something skeletal still hangs around the edges of her smiles when they appear.

“I — fuck, did I not tell you about that,” she says, knowing full well that she didn’t. It was a stupid hope that they’d return to what’s been normal for the last decade. This was the norm for the two decades before she’d died, but nothing else is the same as then, so why the fuck should she look like who she was?

(It isn’t true that nothing’s the same. Allie’s — well, Allie isn’t the same, he’s changed, same as everyone else, but he’s still here.)

“You didn’t,” he says. He reaches up to brush a strand of hair out of Jaylen’s face, and she feels exposed, she feels — more seen than she has since she was shadowed, that’s for fucking sure. People tend to look around her, now, more than at her. Their eyes slide past. It’s made her question, more than once, if she’s even still visible, if blaseball hasn’t taken her very corporeality from her — but Allie is looking at her, and there’s no doubt in her mind about that.

She looks down at his shoulder, because if she looks him in the eyes while he’s looking at her like that she’s going to lose her entire mind right here on his couch.

“It’s fucking weird, I know. I don’t know how I feel about it, either. It’s — I don’t know, it’s —” The words come out all in a rush, and don’t stop until Allie kisses Jaylen, sweet and soft and over before it’s even started.

“Jay, it’s fine.” He smiles, just a little. It makes something that had nearly been dormant flutter to life behind Jaylen’s ribcage. It makes her feel in a way she hasn’t since she got shoved unceremoniously into the shadows. “It’s fine,” he repeats. “You look beautiful.”

[doublevampires]

allijay + street fair?

set between s7 and s8!

“Jay, honey,” Allie says, leaning in close to Jaylen’s ear. “Don’t you think you’ve got kinda an unfair advantage here?”

Jaylen’s standing in front of a carnival games booth, eyeing up the knock-em-over games like the milk bottles are a batter and she’s still got debts to pay. She does, but nothing to do about that until the next season starts. A year and twelve lives paid has brought her from half-dead to mostly-fine, and today’s a good day, anyways; it doesn’t press on her mind. 

She has bigger things to worry about: “You know they’re rigged anyway, right?” She looks over at Allie, bumping his shoulder with her own. “’sides, I know how you sound when you’re saying shit just to make sure someone says it. You care way more about me winning you a giant teddy bear than whether it’s fair for me to be playing this.”

“I can care about both,” he says, rolling his eyes. “And I want the big dog, not the teddy bear.”

Jaylen grins, hands the kid working the booth a $5 bill. Notices the way recognition flashes in their eyes, how they flinch back when she picks up a softball from the bucket, and maybe it’s cruel to laugh but maybe Jaylen’s a little cruel. “Chill,” she says to them, and she watches for a moment as they suddenly take great interest in arranging the hanging plush toys.

“Bet I can make it in one shot,” Jaylen says to Allie, cocky as she lines up her throw.

“You know they’re rigged, right?” Allie repeats, half-sarcastic with Jaylen’s words in his mouth.

Jaylen laughs, again, joyful instead of cruel this time. She throws the ball, a dead-center sinker that tumbles the bottles to the ground like they’re nothing, and walks away with a massive magenta stuffed dog under one arm and Allie’s fingers laced through her own. 

[doublevampires]

23 (“I immediately regret this decision.”) with a dealer's choice of au jaylen

ft pacific rim au !! this one ended up long, so it’s also on ao3.

Jaylen knows, the moment one of the drift techs suggest offhand that she try drifting with Allie, that it’s a bad idea.

She knows this somewhere distant in her mind, omnipresent background radiation — the same way that, when kaiju begin spilling from the breach again, she’ll be able to predict with a hundred-percent accuracy when it’ll happen long before the nerds down in k-science figure it out. Her instinct is to say no. She almost says no — almost says fuck no, absolutely not, we aren’t dragging him into this, almost storms out of the room and slams the door on her way out.

But she has to be a good little pilot to prove Mike was right to drag her out of the breach. At the very least, she has to avoid getting into fights. She’s made sure half the jaeger program will never get in a cockpit again just by drifting with them, something inside her mind breaking something in theirs, and she’s made the other half terrified of her; they scatter when she walks through the halls, as if her death is contagious. 

They would not have let Mike rescue her if they’d known it would cause this much trouble. That’s another thing she knows; she’s still deciding how she feels about it. Parker would’ve sent every jaeger the program had left to follow Mike into the ocean, drag him kicking back to shore.

The least she can do, in their eyes, is find a copilot who can drift with her without collapsing with blood leaking from their goddamn eyes. Current record’s forty-four seconds of drifting with Jaylen; in the droves of pilots they’ve sent since Henderson’s failure, no one else has gotten close, and clearly they’re fucking desperate if they’re asking for Allie, who has never wanted to be a pilot, never trained to be one. Allie teaches music. Allie hangs around the mechbay because that’s where Jaylen is, most days, and he is the only one who treats Jaylen the same as he did before she was declared missing in action and presumed dead, the only one who hasn’t made a huge fucking deal out of her being dragged out of the breach with her eyes the color of kaiju blood, like something just as toxic was waiting inside her.

A part of Jaylen worries that drifting with Allie will change that. Jaylen is not a person prone to being honest, but she only lies to Allie in ways he’ll be able to detect; he rarely calls her bluff, but she knows he knows whenever she’s told him something untrue, and she knows he knows she has reasons for it. In this way, she’s more honest with him than she’s ever been with anyone else.

Drifting is a whole other level. She has walls built up she has no idea how to collapse; she isn’t even sure she’s the one who built them. Jaylen hasn’t exactly been gentle with the other pilots they send to drift with her, but she doesn’t know how much of what happens to them is in her control.

She worries, but distantly. It’s far enough back in her mind that, when the drift tech who’s name she’s already forgotten says “Jaylen? I suggested we bring — what’s his name, Abbott? To try drifting with you.” she nods, sharply, and turns on her heel to leave the room.

***

Three days later, Jaylen and Allie walk into the drift-sim chamber side by side.

It’s strange — she’s never actually come in at the same time as her prospective copilot before, never watched them strap into the helmet and connect the electric wires to their temple and pull the restraints over their arms and legs, just in case Jaylen sends them spasming to the hard metal floor. She’s never given a shit about who they are. The first few drifts, part of her was still too far gone to care what she was doing; the dozen or so following that, she’d learned to sink her expectations as low as they could possibly go. She’s learned to fight back the animal instinct to grin as blood-dripping drift partners are carried away on stretchers.

“You sure about this?” Allie says, turning his head to look at Jaylen. It’s clear in the way he moves that he isn’t trained for this; he doesn’t know what to do with the bulk of the suit, he shifts awkwardly to avoid running into the wires connecting him to the interface in front of them. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

Jaylen wants to laugh. Of course she has to. She bites back the sound, smiles at him in a way she hopes is comforting. Everything about her has been too sharp since she returned, but if anyone could see past that, it’s Allie. That’s half the problem — it feels, sometimes, like he’s already inside her brain, and she cannot imagine something more intimate than taking that to its more literal conclusion.

(Drifting with Mike had never been so terrifying. They were best friends before they were copilots; she’d dragged him into the jaeger program alongside her; he’d been by her side for all her worst moments already, and her his, so nothing they saw in the drift could surprise either of them.

Drifting with Allie should be easy, for the same reasons. But Allie was not there for Jaylen’s worst moment. Mike was, and now Mike is gone. Allie grieved somewhere on land, untouched by the category-three that had dragged Jaylen screaming into the Pacific Ocean.)

Jaylen talks less now; when she opens her mouth she feels like she should still be screaming to be heard over the wind and rain and ocean and roaring kaiju, even safe on solid ground as she is now. She forces her voice to be low and steady as she replies: “C’mon, Allie, don’t fuckin’ chicken out on me now.”

She knows that he knows that it’s more for herself than for him. If Allie wanted to stop, she wouldn’t blame him.

“I wouldn’t,” Allie says, genuine as ever.

“I’m not scared,” Jaylen says, feeling laid bare already as she pulls the helmet over her face, double-checks by rote that all the wires are in the correct places.

“I know.”

The voice of one of the techs crackles through the speakers in their helmets. Jaylen knows they’re standing on the other side of the two-way mirror outside the simulation chamber, watching to see if Allie will be the person who cracks down Jaylen’s defenses at long last, or if their last-ditch effort will be a total fucking disaster. “You guys ready?”

Jaylen nods. “Yes,” Allie says, like he’s sure of it.

“Initiating neural handshake in five, four, three, two —”

***

Jaylen has not successfully drifted with anyone since Mike.

It was almost a joke, with Mike — they would bitch at each other about whatever they’d caught floating off the other’s mind, act like they were psychic when really it was just ghost drift, fully scientific. Jaylen’d play her bass and Mike would pick up his guitar and they would be in perfect sync, even writing songs off the cuff; by the time she died, it felt like they were always drifting on some level, always a little bit in each other’s heads. That was fine with Jaylen. She’d trusted Mike with every stupid fucking thought she had, and he’d trusted her the same.

Part of Mike died with Jaylen. When she was thrown into the sea from a height that must have killed her on impact, she was still so intertwined with him that she couldn’t tell where she started and he ended; she couldn’t tell if she was screaming or if he was, or both. Mike would have far too much time to ponder the same question, and would die without an answer.

Part of Jaylen must have died with Mike, too. He’d brought her back, but not all of her, because he’d sacrificed himself in the process and even hardly-lucid as she was when her lifeboat sprung to the surface she’d felt him fall and fall until she could no longer feel anything, just a gaping emptiness.

Now, when she tries to drift, something breaks in her and the shattering echoes across the drift. Maybe Mike feels it, too, wherever he is, now.

***

“Neural handshake calibrating.”

Flashes of memory from Allie. Hanukkah with his dads growing up. The first time he wrote a song. Watching Trespasser land on TV, San Francisco, 2013; watching his dads discuss if they should flee Seattle, move inland, as far away from the Pacific as they could get. Meeting Jaylen. Mourning Jaylen.

It’s the furthest into a drift Jaylen has gotten since her return. It’s the most she’s let in from anyone else’s mind.

Jaylen’s funeral. Allie’s hands piling pebbles on Jaylen’s empty grave. Jaylen in the cockpit beside Mike. She can’t remember her jaeger’s name now, and isn’t that funny, the thing that killed her and the thing that brought her back and she can’t remember.

She can remember what it felt like to be inside it. The power. The ability to fight whatever storm came at them. Mike’s mind in her own. Her mind in Mike’s.

“Out of alignment. You’re both out of alignment.”

Jaylen ripped out of the jaeger by something unfathomably large. Never seen a kaiju from outside the jaeger before, not up close. Not a living one.

Jaylen thrown into the water, still conscious. Somehow. Jaylen underwater. Jaylen drowning for what felt like the entire six years she was gone.

“Jay?” Allie’s voice, distant. Right beside her. Unbelievably far away. Not there at all.

Jaylen dying. Jaylen gasping for breath —

“Shut it down,” she gasps. “I’m tapping out — stop the fucking drift, stop it.”

The connection between them severs, though the ghost of it remains; Allie’s concern, Allie’s fear, and worst of all, Allie’s love for her all sliding into her mind like a knife through the gaps in a ribcage. The hum of machines powering down around them overpowers the clattering of Jaylen’s helmet as she throws it off her head and onto the ground, the shattering of the glass in it; they’ll be angry with her for that, but she can’t bring herself to fucking care, not right now, not after dying again. Maybe not literally, but — does the distinction really fucking matter? Death twice feels the same as death once.

Allie is gentler with the equipment, coaxing the helmet off his head with one hand and reaching out to Jaylen with the other. She flinches away from the touch.

“We shouldn’t have done this,” she says. Her voice shakes and she hates it for doing so. She wants to scream; she wants to tear the shatterdome apart with her bare hands. She wants to be something huge and monstrous and capable of vast destruction, not a woman trapped in a body too small to hold everything swirling within her.

Maybe the rest of the pilots are right to fear her. Maybe death and undeath have changed her in some irrevocable way.

Right now, she doesn’t care.

“Jay?” Allie doesn’t reach out again, but she can feel how hard he’s clenching his fists to keep them by his side. He’s straining against the urge to take her into his arms and make promises he can’t keep, that everything will be fine, that nothing he saw changes how he feels, that they can try again if she wants.

Allie is physically fine. He lasted at least four times as long as the next-highest attempt, and his eyes are clear, and no blood drips from his nose. Jaylen did not hurt him, and some distant part of her is grateful for that, but it’s overpowered by the death lingering over her head, the way it felt to experience it again. The way it feels to know Allie was there with her.

Regret swirls deep in Jaylen’s stomach. She feels sick. “Don’t,” she says, even though he isn’t doing anything. “We’re not doing this again.”

She runs from the room as quickly as her trembling legs will carry her. Bares her teeth at the crowd of onlookers swarmed outside the door, waiting to see if Allie will be another to the line of copilots broken by Jaylen Hotdogfingers. As loudly as she can, she projects her thoughts to Allie through the ghost of their drift, already fading fast: Don’t follow me. Please.

Jaylen needs to be alone.

[doublevampires]

hmm.. jallison, something w/ reflection?

“Needed to feel like myself again,” Jaylen says in her smoke-hoarse voice, incineration and its aftermath still clinging stubbornly to the inside of her throat, her lungs, her entire body; she gestures, shakily, to the tangle of still-wet hair atop her head, bleached messily and dyed blood-red even messier. The dye-water drips down her forehead and onto her shoulders, still, and Allie has to do a triple-take to convince himself it isn’t blood.

Jaylen makes not-quite-eye-contact-but-close-enough through their reflections in the foggy bathroom mirror, and offers Allie a not-quite-smile that doesn’t reach anywhere near genuine — but close enough, still the closest thing to a real smile she’s given Allie in the three weeks since she came back, and Allie tucks it somewhere in the back of his heart like a treasured photograph he’s afraid the sun will fade into nothingness.

“Yeah,” Allie says; thinks of his own bleached-white hair that he cut off as soon as plans to get Jaylen back started leaving the realm of the what-if and taking a concrete place in reality; “I get that. D’you want me to touch up the spots in the back you missed?” The dye bottle is still open on the counter; Allie reaches around Jaylen to put the cap back on it before it stains the entire bathroom red.

Jaylen shakes her head, leans her weight back against Allie. “No,” she says. Smiles that halfway-there smile again through the mirror — or maybe it’s just the fog distorting her reflection.