sure I'll put this on main: I'm a "Woden had long hair" truther. to make his design distinct from Edér's, for the sneaky Waidwen parallel, and also so that when Edér forgets to cut his hair for a while he ends up being spooked by his brother staring back at him from the mirror
The Lady of Caed Nua wasn’t always a Watcher, a lady with dignity and poise, one of the most talented ciphers ever seen, and a skilled marksman to boot. Once upon a time, the Lady of Caed Nua was just Claria, and although she wasn’t born in Gilded Vale, she was raised in the small town alongside Edėr and Woden. A bookworm at heart, she worked at the inn and honed her culinary skills, baking those honey cakes Edėr loved (she was part of the reason why he loved them so) and learning every trick of the trade, in hopes of becoming the best chef Eora had ever seen. When she wasn’t in the kitchen with her knives and pans, she was in the library, reading anything she deemed interesting. Often times she was accompanied by Edér but he’d be kicked out before he even finished a book for loudly scolding her every time she moved. It always knocked off his counting of her numerous freckles dotting her face.
She was orphaned at a young age, to parents who just weren’t meant to be parents. If you ask her, she doesn’t remember much about them except they used to chew that awful drug. Any thought of svef still makes her stomach roll and she worries whenever Edér takes out his pipe for a smoke.
But the Teylecgs took her in - this tiny, blonde child who had nothing to offer - and she is forever grateful to them. Raised like a daughter, she was the one who caused the least trouble compared to the boys but had her own flair for mischief. Claria discovered her cipher abilities when she was a young child, and since then has incorporated those skills into her pranks against the Teylecg brothers. She was a bit wacky - no one in Gilded Vale had those skills, at least not the ones who stayed - but Woden and Edér loved her for who she was.
Over time, her relationship with the brothers changed with the rumours of St. Waidwen planning to invade the Dyrwood. Woden was flighty, aching to do something, Edér and Claria more nervous than anything that this could be their god. But the war ended up splitting their family for good when she woke up to Edér flinging ever horrid thing he could think of at his brother in a blind rage to prevent Woden from enlisting and him doing it anyways. The absence was strange for her at first, but when she woke months later to Woden’s birthday, she cracked. That was it for her. To see the tension finally snap and cause a chasm between the two brother, her two best friends, spurred her into action, leading to her own fight with Edér. They broke up on terrible terms, ones he thought he’d never be able to amend.
When he returned from the war, she was gone. Can’t say he wasn’t heartbroken, but he got through it, even if it meant making up twenty different lives she lived without him and driving himself half-insane wondering if she was dead or alive or worse. It was only chance for them to meet again decades later. She was a brunette now (suddenly he had a thing for brunettes), godless, alone, and without any memory of who he was. She was a bit more rough around the edges, insensitive, but still had her golden heart and her songbird voice. His gut had a good feeling about her, even if they didn’t know eachother anymore, and that was enough for him.
We don’t know how it got its magical properties, only that it happened at some point during the war. We also know that the enchantment on it is Second Chance, which brings the wearer back upon falling unconscious, which is suspiciously Eothas-themed (him being the god of rebirth and all).
But Edér was fighting against Eothas’ forces; why would he have that kind of magic just kind of… happen to him?
Well, there was a Teylecg fighting on Eothas’ side: Woden. And we know that he had an audience with Waidwen himself, though we never find out what they spoke about, and what convinced Woden to switch sides.
So, what if Woden asked Waidwen (Eothas) to protect his brother?
content warnings: major character injury, major character death, sibling loss
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
"C'mon, Edér, lights on!"
Two hands grab him by the shoulders and shake him awake, not stopping until Edér pushes his hands forward blindly and shoves the offender away.
"The Hel you doing?" he growls and sits up, bleary-eyed.
The room is lit up. It doesn't feel even close to morning.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.
"Got a kaiju alert," Woden says, and throws a balled-up shirt at his face.
Edér catches it, pulls it on, shakes his head and jumps to his feet.
The annoying beep, beep, beep is catching up to him now, and so is the announcer lady's automated voice, except he's too sleepy to make any sense of what she's saying.
"Next time I'm gonna dump my water bottle on you," Woden says, pulling his pants on.
"Do that, see what you find in your pillow later."
"So you want ice water?”
"Shut up." He's not awake enough to have a better comeback. "What're we fighting?"
Woden zips up his jacket.
"Type 3, codename Saint."
Edér grumbles and runs a hand over his face, willing himself to fully wake up.
"...Yeah, I ain't calling it that."
They step out of the room, head for the elevator.
"Gotta call it something," Woden says.
"That's a dumb-ass name. It’s a monster, not a saint .”
"Well, you name it then. What’s it called?”
Way too early for this.
"...I don't know. Shiny Head."
Woden barks out a laugh, claps a hand on his shoulder.
"See, that's why you're not in charge of naming them," he says. "Now let's get to the dock before Shiny Head wrecks half of Defiance Bay."
Edér doesn’t need to be linked up to his brain to know Woden won’t let him live down Shiny Head for a couple weeks at least.
Their suits are all white plates and black joints, with Dyrwood's stag engraved on one shoulder and Dawnstar Corp’s three-star logo on the other. Can’t really protect you from teeth longer than you are tall, but they're a comforting reminder that soon you'll be way bigger than those teeth, and most anything else that could come at you.
As a side benefit, they also look awesome.
The familiar cold yellow-white-blue lights and the hum of machinery welcome them as they step into the pilots' cabin, and now Edér is wide awake. Awake in the way he's never really been before he first set foot inside of a jaeger; before cheating death over and over again with his brother became routine.
They step into their places: Edér's on the left, Woden's on the right. The machinery shifts; braces click shut around their legs, control discs rise up to meet their hands. Cables come down, attaching themselves to their suits.
The comms go live.
"Good morning, Dawn Strider."
A voice that's also familiar, and not the worst one to hear first thing in the morning. Edér's kind of glad she doesn't see him, though; he's never sure what to do with his face when he talks to her nowadays, whether he should smile or not.
One thing he's certain of, though, and it’s that he can never leave her hanging.
He pushes the comms button.
"Morning, Elafa. How're the kids?"
Her laugh floats through the speakers, a little amused snort.
"Asleep, if they know what's good for them."
Her boys and her husband are far inland, miles and miles away from whatever they'll be dealing with in a second. She doesn't have to worry for them, at least.
Not if Edér and Woden do their job right, which they always do.
"Well if I know anything about you, you run a tight ship," Edér says.
"Damn right I do," Elafa answers.
Woden shoots him a look, half grinning.
"Good thing she can't see inside your head," he says.
Edér grimaces.
It is good that she can’t see. She's married, happily, with kids.
Elafa's voice comes through again; the smile gone, all business now.
"Marshal Webb on deck."
And then:
"Engaging drop."
"Dawn Strider ready for drop," Woden confirms over the comms.
The gravity in the room shifts as the pilots’ cabin – Dawn Strider's head – is released from suspension and dropped down a chute as deep as Defiance Bay's lighthouse is tall.
Even with braces holding them in place, there’s no escaping the weird floaty thrill of free-fall as their insides stop experiencing the pull of Eora for a few seconds.
Edér whoops; Woden echoes with a laugh and a "yeah!" as they fall and fall and fall, until, with a thud that rattles the entire cabin, the head connects to the body.
Even with most of the shock absorbed, it's enough to give them a good shake; if there was still any sleep left in either of them, it's gone now.
The cabin turns left, right, tilts to one side and then the other, the freshly assembled jaeger cracking its neck, testing the security of the connection.
"Coupling confirmed," Elafa reports.
And that’s when Strider’s core kicks into full gear, a steady hum beneath their feet. They’re being transported to the bay exit right about now, but up in the pilots’ cabin, that’s a movement they don’t really feel.
Elafa's voice over the comms again.
"Engaging pilot-to-pilot protocol."
"Dawn Strider ready and aligned," Woden says.
Another voice responds to him: older, harsher.
"Dawn Strider, this is Marshal Eydis Webb. Prepare for a handshake."
"Starting in fifteen seconds," Elafa says, and begins to count down:
"Fifteen. Fourteen."
Woden looks over at Edér, grinning:
"Put all your dirty laundry away?"
"You put away yours?"
"Thirteen. Twelve."
Woden shrugs:
"Don't got any.”
Edér snorts:
"Yeah, keep telling yourself that."
“Eleven. Ten.”
It's all a bit, obviously. Can't hide anything from the other person when you're drifting.
“Nine. Eight.”
Fears, insecurities, petty grudges, Woden's guilt about sending their parents away, Edér's dumb crush – it's all getting out there. But it's nothing they haven't seen before; both of them have always known what the other was about, long before their brains got hooked up to a computer for the first time.
“Seven. Six.”
That's why they've always had each other's backs. That's why they're good at what they do now.
Woden gives him a nod – and then he's gone, and so is Elafa's voice, and so is the pilots' cabin.
Edér's standing in the kitchen of their old house, barely as tall as the table.
Then he's outside, chasing Thuris, and then the scene melts into another and he's in the kitchen again, wrestling the dog down and yelling at him to drop whatever's in his mouth as someone laughs in the background.
Then he's elbow-deep in a tractor's engine, peering up briefly to receive a wrench and some stupid-ass unsolicited advice from himself , about ten years younger, seen through Woden's eyes as he snaps at him to help or get out of the way.
Then they're somewhere else, surrounded by people – enemies – fighting. One of them goes down and the other pulls him right up, nodding in a direction to point out an opening they can use. They lock on, and they go to work.
Then they're seeing their parents off in the airport.
And then they're back in the pilots' cabin, wearing their Dawnstar suits, the shared experience of twenty-seven years lived together circulating between their minds and Strider's mainframe.
"Neural handshake strong and holding," Elafa reports, and her voice stirs up joy and repressed affection and amusement and a tinge of pity towards themselves, and then they gather it all up and put it away, clearing the channel, centering themselves each in his own body again.
"Left hemisphere calibrating."
But aside from their own bodies there's also Strider, alive with its roaring core and joints the size of a car and supplementary engines in every limb.
They raise an arm, flex their fingers. Outside, tons of metal move to match the motion.
"Right hemisphere calibrating."
Armor and pipes and cables and pistons and computers and plasma cannons. That's them too, now.
"Calibration complete."
Marshal Webb's voice comes through the comms again.
"Gentlemen, your orders are to hold the Saint down a mile off Ondra's Gift. Copy?"
Edér pushes the comms button; usually they have Woden do the talking, but right now his brother's distracted, looking something up on his part of the display.
"Copy that, ma'm."
Just as he finishes the sentence, Woden finds what he was looking for: a little ping on the radar, a ways off from their destination.
"Ma'am, there's still a civilian vessel in the gulf," he says.
"Gentlemen, you're protecting a city of two million people; you will not risk these lives for a boat that holds ten. Am I clear?"
Sharp, cold, and making it incredibly clear there'll be no further discussion.
Edér grimaces, once again glad that the control room has no view of their faces.
"Yes, ma'am," Woden says. He's not happy either; knowing exactly how many people there are on that vessel has only made it worse.
He's the one who starts getting the idea; Edér just finishes the thought by saying it out loud.
"Y'know," he says once the comms fall silent, "It's kind of on the way if you squint. You thinking what I'm thinking?"
Woden grins.
"Well, you know what they say: don't take a farmer fishing."
The display in front of them changes, giving them a view of the outside world: waves whipping up, shattering against Strider like they're nothing, like it's one of those kids' sprinkler toys and not the entire ocean throwing its weight against them.
There are things in the world you can't fight; acts of god. You see a storm, you take shelter; you see a tidal wave, you get out of the way.
But when you're in a jaeger, you can walk through the storm; you can fight the tidal wave.
And you can win.
*
A fishing boat with a ten-person crew is tossed about in a storm.
The captain, an older Dyrwoodan, wrestles his way into the cabin, soaked by rainfall and sea spray despite his neon yellow raincoat.
"How far to the mainland?" he shouts over the roaring of water above and below.
"Seven and a half miles to Defiance Bay, sir!" a crew member shouts back.
"We won't even make it back to shallows," yells another one.
"No, we won't – " the first crew member begins to say, and stops, eyes wide as he stares at something way ahead.
"Can't be," he says. "That's the lighthouse."
The radar says they're miles off, but the rest of them see what he sees: a tall motionless shape among the waves, shining a beacon of light into the storm.
Defiance Bay's lighthouse. That's the only thing it could be; this tall and bright, there's no mistaking it for another ship or an oil rig or anything else, really.
That's what they think for a second, at least – but there is one more thing it could be.
The captain works it out first. He grips the shoulder of the man next to him with a strength that is half urgency and half horror, and says:
"That's not the lighthouse."
It's then that the beam of light turns towards them and locks on, following the boat across the waves like a projector, as the lighthouse itself takes a step forward.
It has limbs: strong legs that allow it to cut through the waves as if they’re thin air, and long arms, held flat around its torso as it was lying in wait and now unfurling, bristling with spikes and fins with their own little lights on the end, like nightmare wings slowly moving forward to swat the little fishing boat out of existence.
The captain pokes his head out of the cabin, pelted by rainfall and sea spray, and yells at the top of his lungs:
"KAIJU!"
The rest of the crew have seen it too, by now; his shout is a barely needed confirmation.
They huddle on the deck, clutching railings and ropes and each other, knowing there’s nothing else they can do. A few of them turn to look at the roiling sea, wondering if throwing themselves into it is a better alternative – and that’s when they see it.
A second light beneath the water’s surface.
Getting closer.
“Oh, fuck, there’s another one – “
“Think they’re gonna fight each other?”
“Fuck, shit, fuck , we’re gonna die – “
And then it emerges from the sea: tons and tons of metal, armor and floodlights and plasma cannons waiting to be fired, shedding seawater in sheets, not as tall as the kaiju, but broader than its thin lizardlike frame.
A jaeger.
Quicker and closer to the boat than the living lighthouse monster, it snatches the fishing vessel from the waves before the kaiju closes the distance, holding the entirety of it in one armored hand.
The crew scream with joy and terror, and hold on for dear life.
*
“Ship secure.”
As the automated voice announces this, a hologram of the boat rests snugly in Woden’s right hand. At the same time, they can both feel the weight of the real thing in the jaeger’s palm; it’s barely anything to them, but that’s exactly why they have to be careful.
Kinda like carrying a kitten, Edér thinks.
He doesn’t say it out loud, but Woden hears anyway. Edér gets a ripple of his thoughts back, something between amusement and anxiety and irritation: be serious, we’re holding ten lives in our hands.
Edér’s just about to say that he is serious when Woden sees the kaiju moving in, and whatever banter they were both thinking up gets discarded immediately.
“Adjust the torque!” Woden calls out, using his voice to say the important part; Edér picks the rest out from the drift.
The lighthouse-head – he’s not calling it Saint – is about to swing at them, and it’s coming for their right, where the boat is.
“I’m on it!”
Edér reaches for his side of the screen, makes the adjustments, and then he gets ready: half a step back, one arm up in a guard, eyes on the opponent.
To his right, Woden does the exact same, except he’s also busy keeping the boat upright and making sure they don’t squish it or drop anyone into the sea, which means Edér will have to guide them through the rest of it.
It’s nothing they haven’t done a hundred times before.
A silent countdown ticks down in both of their minds at the same time, three-two-one , and, just as the kaiju swings, they duck under – the boat stays unharmed, nearly all of Woden’s focus is going towards that – and turn; as they do, the very end of the kaiju’s arm catches the back of their shoulder, but Strider’s armor takes that just fine.
Now would be a great time to punch back, but they’ve got that boat still, so instead they keep turning and set it back down onto the waves, getting it as far as they can from whatever’s about to happen in the next couple of seconds.
The tide’s in their favor with this one; the sea picks up the boat and immediately whisks it away.
Hope they’ll make it, Woden thinks.
Then they turn back to face the kaiju and use the rest of their momentum to punch its stupid shiny face in.
It doesn’t go as well as they’d hoped; it stumbles back, but immediately goes back in, now completely focused on them for lack of other prey.
Not a glass jaw, that one, Edér thinks at his brother, and gets the thought equivalent of an annoyed grunt in response.
A clawed limb moves in to grab them; Woden lets it take the right arm – they both grind their teeth as the claws dig in – and uses it to drag the creature in close, giving Edér an opening to come in from the left.
The kaiju might have tanked a punch to the skull, but it turns out to be way more receptive to two plasma shots to the midriff.
Gaping blue holes open in its body, and the thing goes limp in a way that lets them know this time it really hurt. Its hold on Strider’s right arm slips and it loses its balance, tumbling backwards and sinking into the water as the light in its head goes out.
They follow its body with Strider’s projector for a few seconds; then, the waves swallow it, and there’s nothing left except for a bloom of kaiju blue in the white seafoam.
Then –
“Strider, what the Hel is happening?”
Marshal Webb’s voice over the comms.
Edér decides to let Woden catch his breath for a second – it was his side that got clawed up, after all – and answers:
“Job’s done, ma’m; lit it up twice.”
“You disobeyed a direct order – “
“Respectfully, ma’m,” Woden chimes in, “We intercepted a kaiju and saved everyone on that boat.”
Edér glances over just in time to see Woden give him a wink; same kind he’d give him back in the day whenever they both got in trouble. Let me take point on this, I’ll smooth it over.
Edér’s more than happy to let Woden do his thing; whenever he tries to do the charm thing, it has an even chance of either working or making things worse.
“...Get back to your post, now .”
“Yes, ma’m,” Woden answers, and grins at Edér, as if saying: see?
They’re probably still in trouble, but that’ll be later. For now, they’re off the hook.
They glance over to where they’ve left the fishing boat; it’s still in sight, seemingly unharmed by their brawl with the lighthouse-head.
And then they hear Webb’s voice again; sharp, urgent.
“Strider, we’re still getting a signature. That kaiju is still alive; grab the boat and get out of there –“
An eruption of seawater fills their entire field of view, and the thing bursts out of it, its head glowing again.
It gets its claws into their right side and bites down on their left arm –
bites down on Edér’s left arm –
and it pulls –
bending and snapping the metal of his bones and tearing his cable sinews and leaving thousands of sensors screaming in pain, alarms blaring as the automated voice calmly informs them that the left gun has gone offline –
and then he can’t feel the left arm anymore.
It hurts so much and it doesn’t hurt at all and his knees are buckling and thinking is hard.
And it hurts.
And he’s probably screaming but he can’t hear himself or Woden or anything else, just the noise of Strider’s alarms going off.
He’s felt it once before, in training. They did a simulator run to teach them what losing a limb feels like. There’s a tiny part of him that manages to recall that despite the pain, and to register that his own left arm isn’t actually gone, it’s just the jaeger that got hurt, and that Woden’s already reaching for him through the drift to stabilize him, just like they’ve been taught.
Edér holds on to their connection, and breathes, and finds his footing, and pulls his mind back from Strider just a little, just until the initial flare of pain passes.
It won’t keep hurting for long, it’s just a false alarm, his brain confusing Strider’s body for his own. And Woden’s there to catch him, the way he always does.
In the time it takes for Strider’s torn-off arm to hit the waves, they’ve stabilized and regrouped, and they’re ready to go again.
They charge up the right gun, aim for the torso again. This close up, there’s no way for them to miss, and the kaiju doesn’t have time to move out of the way.
It doesn’t.
Instead, it grabs their head and digs its claws in around where Strider’s right eye would be. Woden doubles over, clutching the side of his face, groaning through clenched teeth.
Sparks rain down on them as a claw pushes through the hull of the pilots’ cabin.
Edér freezes, midway through trying to pull his brother out of the pain the way Woden just did for him.
He feels Woden pull himself out, pushing himself to straighten up, looking at the puncture and then over at him, taking deep, heaving breaths, his right eye bloodshot.
“Edér,” he says, “listen to me – ”
The only thing coming from him through the drift is fear.
Then, something gives. The hull buckles inward, rain pouring into the pilots’ cabin.
And then –
Claws rake through. They grab Woden. His suit is crushed inward. The broken plates dig into his chest. His shoulder pops out of its socket.
He screams. He screams Edér’s name.
He screams, and
And then
And then there’s no one piloting on the right side.
There are torn cables and a hole in the hull. There’s the kaiju.
There’s no one on the right side.
There’s no one on the right side.
There’s no one
There’s
no one
There are torn cables and a hole in the hull. There’s the kaiju. There’s Strider, and it’s heavy, it’s impossibly heavy. There’s pain.
And Edér’s alone.
And the right gun is charged up.
Moving it doesn’t feel like moving an arm or aiming a weapon, it feels like lifting all that metal with his own two hands; like the kind of effort that’s only maybe possible if you’re fine with letting it kill you.
It moves. It wedges itself right into the thing’s mouth as it goes to bite down on him.
He can’t feel the control disk in his hand, or his hand, (but he can feel a buzz in his spine and in his teeth and his chest caving in and his shoulder popping out of its socket) but it has to be there, so he clutches it so hard he feels something crack.
And he tells Strider to shoot.
*
“...The second discharge fried all the comms; I’m not getting any signals.”
Elafa hears her own voice as if it’s coming from far, far away.
It’s steady, maybe just a little shaky at the end. She’s not letting the – the whatever it is that’s happening to her – take over. Her hands keep moving over the keyboard and her eyes keep watching the screens and her mouth keeps saying words. That’s what she’s here for.
But her mind is watching all of that happen from some distant place.
She realizes that it’s been a second and the marshal hasn’t replied. She turns around and sees the woman’s back, her rigid shoulders and her short white hair, as Marshal Webb walks away from the control station.
Elafa calls after her:
“No signature, ma’am!”
That’s what her job requires her to say, even though what she really means is are they dead, they’re dead, aren’t they, tell me there’s a way for them to not be dead.
Jaegers fall. It happens. But Strider, it can’t be Strider, it shouldn’t be them.
Webb says nothing.
Elafa tries again, and now her voice cracks; blazes, she thinks, tell me something, you’re supposed to be the one keeping it together.
You’re not the one who had dinner with their parents.
You’re not the one who knows the name of their family dog.
You’re not the one who just watched a man she used to love blink off the radar like it’s nothing, and maybe he’s gone now, and if he is then it was probably horrible, because that’s the only way jaeger pilots die.
“What do we do now, ma’am? Ma’am?”
But the marshal doesn’t say anything back to her.
*
Somewhere on the Pearl Coast, a few miles off Telaneir, a family walks along the beach: a mother and three of her children, all carrying bags or baskets. The children run around, picking through the sand and bringing back pieces of driftwood, rocks, seashells and anything else that looks like it could be fashioned into something interesting, or even sold as it is.
Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea to go down to the water these days, but as far as Clara – the mother – is concerned, on quiet days it’s just fine, and so far, it has been the very definition of a quiet day.
Still, she keeps an eye out.
“Antonio! Antonio! ”
Her six-year-old freezes and turns to look at her; he’s standing ankle-deep in the ocean, and she doesn’t like it.
“Get out of the water! Do you want a kaiju to come and eat you?”
He shakes his head fervently.
“Then get back on dry land! Vielo, vielo!”
He stumbles back onto shore, pulling his feet through the soggy sand as fast as he can.
Clara feels a tug on her sleeve, and turns to see her eldest, Gianna, looking up at her.
“Mamma,” the girl says, and points in the direction they came from.
Clara looks.
She’s only seen jaegers on TV before, but from what she knows, this one doesn’t look good. Its left arm is gone, and it’s dragging its feet worse than her six-year-old son wading through wet sand.
She shouts at her children to get closer to her; they huddle around her, and the four of them watch as the metal giant steps onto the shore.
Then, its knees buckle, and it collapses, face down, and it’s hard to see from this distance, but Clara is pretty sure that she sees something spill out of its helmet.
Like brains from a split skull, she thinks, and then grimaces and tries to stop thinking about it, because the comparison unsettles her.
Then she realizes: there are people in there.
Oh, merla.
She sets her basket down, grabs Gianna by the shoulder, and tells her:
“Take your brothers to Caffè Vulpi; tell Luciano to send people down here. I’m going to look.”
As soon as her daughter nods, Clara sets off towards the jaeger.
The jaeger looks scarier than they do on TV, and scarier than it was from far away.
When they’re small on a screen, or far in the distance, it’s easy to focus on the way they look and move like people – but up close, you can’t see all of it at once anymore, and then all you can think of is how big it is.
And it smells. Clara has never thought that a jaeger would have a smell at all, let alone a bad one, but it does – it smells like burning plastic and fuel and… almost like cleaning products? Whatever it is, it’s bad enough to make her eyes water.
She pulls her shirt over her nose and mouth and keeps going, because there are people in there.
She circles around the head – a round cabin with a windshield-like pane of glass that’s been broken on one side – and tries to figure out what exactly she saw spilling out.
There are cables, metal plates, long shards of glass scattered across the sand. She’s glad, like never before, for her habit of wearing closed shoes to the beach; vindication for all those years of being afraid of stepping on a treacherous piece of glass in the sand.
Something moves in the wreckage, and her heart jumps – for a moment, the shifting debris makes that movement into something unrecognizable, a creature, a monster – and then sunlight falls onto a bloodstained white suit of armor, and a man crawls out of the jaeger’s head.
He pulls himself forward with one arm; the other one hangs limply at his side, the armor broken and singed, a deep gash in his flesh.
By some stroke of luck, she spots the stag on his shoulder. He’s from Dyrwood.
She conjures her loudest and clearest Aedyran, and calls to him:
“Sir? Sir, do you need help?”
He pulls himself up to his feet, and she catches a better glimpse of his face through the glass of his helmet.
There’s blood running down the side of his face and from his nose, sticking to his beard. His expression is wild, wide-eyed; he looks around, looks straight at Clara at one point, but it’s like he doesn’t see her at all.
Now that he’s standing up, she can also see the other bloodstain on his suit, running down his side, and the piece of metal stuck between the plates of his armor.
That’s probably bad.
“You need help,” she says; asserting rather than asking, now. “You are very hurt.”
He walks right past her. She hears him muttering something inside of the helmet.
“...Woden.”
It’s not a word she knows. A name or a place, maybe, but not one that’s familiar to her.
She hesitates for a moment before going after him, gently reaching for his shoulder:
“You are hurt – ”
But he stops before she ever touches him.
“Woden,” he says again, and from the way his voice breaks she can guess that it’s probably a name.
He makes a noise that might be a sob or a sharp inhale of pain, it’s hard to tell with his voice muffled like that – and then, like the jaeger, he falls to his knees and down onto the sand, and doesn’t move anymore.
Clara knows that there should have been two people inside, but no one else comes out of the jaeger.
It’s probably too late for the other one, then.
She kneels next to the wounded pilot, tries to remember everything she knows about first aid, and hopes, for this man’s sake, that more competent help comes soon.
