sunko pacrim au b/c im trash
He’s drift compatible with two people; the neural handshake is strong between himself and his first partner, all smiles and kindness where as he is harsh angles and sneers, darkened green glass for eyes, easily shattered but hard, and he never meets the second possibility. He wonders sometimes, eyes wide open in the dark, waiting for their call, waiting for the silence of the drift, never chasing the rabbit, but always wondering, always curious, what his life (their life) would be like if they’d been partnered up instead.
At first, he only sees long hair and a sneer, and he thinks they could have stopped the apocalypse by now.
But instead, he just grins when her voice floods the cockpit, “Neural handshake complete.”
“You know it, sweetheart.”
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He’s desperately young when the first Kaiju hits; San Francisco seems like a far, distant, other world. It might as well be Mars where his accomplishments, the newspaper clippings on his grandparents’ fridge in Croatia, Young Chess Prodigy Proves His Might Again, are a mere speckle of dust on an entire surface. He’s done the math for the surface area, and the one speck his entire life encompasses is dismal at best.
But those are the young days, when he spends the glory of his youth in small rooms with tables and clocks and people that speak Russian as if he doesn’t understand it; they’re all older than him except some Chinese kids, but he doesn’t pay much attention to them. He insults the old men he plays as they stroke their beards; he knows all the openings, all the ranges of play, and he despises anyone that can’t make up their own strategy, can’t exhibit some kind of creativity in a game that’s centuries old. It’s what makes him a great Ranger, and a horrible Ranger; an aversion to authority, to accepted strategy. Unpredictable, and therein lies the madness.
They call him Jerko the Jerk. Perhaps he is.
When Kaijus become infectious, when their merchandise is sold on the store corners, it’s no more chess games. He’s confined to Croatia, to beaches and sand and sun that tans his skin leather brown to where his moles barely stick out anymore and the local boys don’t call him Pjega, voices thick with their undignified dialect, coarse with youth. But it’s the coast, the water is unnaturally blue, and he’s rigged up the ancient, Soviet era TV in his grandparents’ living room to get news; some days it’s good, some days it’s bad. Like the tide, his Djed says, and his Baka asks him to turn off the television, it’s time to eat. It’s not any safer than the United Kingdom, but as his father tells him on their last phone call, he’d rather die some place sunny than under the miserable English rains.
He checks the weather reports in London for weeks on an end. He’s young and irritable and even though some of the local boys and even a few of the girls are going down to the beach that day, he sits inside at the only internet café in the internet, sipping on caj, and waiting for the dial up to produce results. The only time he ever latches onto a memory, the weather report is all sunny for the week, suns with sunglasses smirking at him. He kicks the chair away, looks over the Kaiju blue sea, and sips on his caj with a faint frown on his face. He’s found the proof he’s been looking for - that his father has sent him away for more than the weather, more than the miserable English rains and hard scones and badly brewed tea, tea not caj, and he decides to go and join the others for once.
London is destroyed on a sunny Wednesday.
He’s smart enough to know better than to hope.
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He knows he’s the best at the Academy and still doesn't pull any of his punches.
He knows it in the way that his spine is rigid and stiff from pouring over books he’s already memorized through sheer force alone, the way everyone cringes at the soft accent he can’t get rid of when he’s called on in class, the way the other kids, at first at least, looked at him hopefully when lab partners were assigned. He knows it in the way that his ribs are no longer bruised, but instead covered in lean muscle, the way no one will spar him one-on-one in the Kwoon Combat Room, giving him the width and berth he deserves. He knows it in the way the instructors have given up on breaking his spirit, the only time he’s been praised for being unyielding, unfriendly, and immodest. He’s no longer the little boy from Croatia, tanned and scowling but always tinkering, always curious. He’s no longer the littler boy from the United Kingdom, pale and voice dripping with disgust and disdain for men twice, triple his age.
He’s the boy with 23 drops, 23 kills.
Despite this, warn him he’ll probably never be a Ranger.
Instead of Jerko the Jerk, they call him the Drift Incompatible. His drift compatibility scores are awful, no matter who they pair him up with. There’s only twenty of them at this point left, but it’s still an unknown anomaly for a Ranger candidate at this point in training to not have some kind of compatibility with the people who have endured with them everyday, the spirit-breaking, back-breaking, mind-breaking fury of the Academy. It’s unfortunate, seeing as he’s possibly one of the strongest potential candidates they've seen in a while, but they can’t help it. With scores like these, he could do whatever he wanted to do, even be a Marshall one day. He’ll be an officer, one of their best and brightest, but he will never be a Ranger.
He’s about to quit the Academy, the whole thing, go back to Croatia and work on his tan, he’s gotten pale underneath nothing but fluorescent and the eyes of analysts, teachers, specialists, trying to break him, but his shoulders are little more than a defiant line. He’s even got his resignation letter, seething with a bitterness and indignation unknown to those outside of narcissistic, dramatic teenagers, a I can’t believe you would do this to me, to humanity, I am the greatest hope for another tomorrow kind of letter when they find him not just one potential partner, but two, one just entering the Academy, the other studying tech.
The neural handshake is strong. He smirks at his partner before adding, “You okay Rookie?”
He doesn't wait for an answer.
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He loves everything about the ShatterDome; the anxious buzz that propels everyone like puppets on strings, strings that all circle around Jaegers and their pilots, the crappy food that is at least better than what they were served at the Academy, the smile on his co-pilot’s face when he makes a new friend, when Jerko, now exclusively Jockey, Jock to the control team, pisses and runs them off eventually. He can’t help it, he’s hot blooded, he explains, letting the Croatian accent drawl his words out, all the while with that sneer on his face. He even likes the rain, a soft Hong Kong lullaby.
Reliant Wildcat is a beautiful American Mark-4 Jaeger, painted a bright yellow that they say only reflects the loudness of its pilots. It’s not the fastest and it’s not the biggest and it’s not the strongest, but it’s everything Jock needs to end the apocalypse.
His only problem with the ShatterDome is her.
She’s all long hair and a wide open face that tells of innocence, but he knows, the second they’re introduced, with his face nothing but a sideways grin and wide eyes, she’s nothing short of evil. He can feel it the first time they meet, when she’s tasked with showing him and his co-pilot around; he makes an off-hand comment about the hospitality, a little chilly to be honest and she rounds on him, words as sharp as a Kaiju alarm in the dead of sleep. They eventually find their way to the Kwoon, and after an hour, they have quite an audience.
He bites down on the thought that he knows her from somewhere, that if he had made different choices, if he was different and a temper didn’t chafe at the back of his throat, that they would know each other better.
He’s above beautiful women, above anything other than being the hero this world so desperately needs, but it’s easy to call her patronizing nicknames, to roll his eyes when she thinks her accomplishments will impress him, the prodigal son of the Jaeger Academy, and to ignore her, whether she’s screaming at him in the dining hall, or giving herself the elegant name of “handler” (because he needs a handler) and thinking that will give her the right to boss him around, or becoming his LOCCENT Mission Controller.
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He waits and he waits and he waits.
He watches the other pilot teams deploy, scowling and burning with an impatience that makes him even more grumpy than usual if she’s to be trusted on providing accurate reports of his personality. (She's not, despite everyone's adamant idea that his only friends are her and Rookie.) He watches some of them come back with grins. The others don’t come back.
It doesn’t break his enthusiasm – they would have weeded him out early at the Academy if something as trivial as dying unnerved him. He waits in the darkness of his bunk, the soft night sounds of Rookie snoring and Technicians scrambling around outside, eyes not perceiving much more than the faintest outline of the nuts and bolts of the ceiling, ears straining for the hint of an alarm. He knows better than to stop eating or stop sleeping; if he’s going to be deployed, he needs to be the best himself he can at any moment, but he likes to worry Sunmi about it.
It’s 5 pm, and he’s resigned himself to stale cornbread and a casserole-esque concoction as his only company for the evening, when the alarm comes through.
He wishes his first Kaiju was bigger; this one is only a Category II, and he feels disappointed until his Academy training shakes him. Each Kaiju should be respected, independent of its size or might. Each Kaiju has a destructive potential. Each Kaiju could be the one that wipes out an entire city, all because you’ve got a sizable ego on your shoulders and managed to get yourself killed.
He’s been on the end of that lecture too many times, so when Sunmi repeats it over and over as they’re getting fit for their Drive Suits, all he can do is roll his eyes and think about how horrible he looks in yellow. “Is that worry in your voice, or am I already delusional, kitten?”
He decidedly doesn’t think about how he wants to kiss her when she looks like she’s going to punch him. He’s young and naive and he’s got an entire world to save.
He only gets nervous, a little anxious he explains to Rookie, Rookie’s part of the Drift, he’ll explain to anyone else who asks, when they’re in the middle of Jumphawk transport.
But the second they drop down, the second Sunmi’s voice smoothly interrupts his thoughts, “To your left,” any feeling other than the silence of the Drift, a shared spike of adrenaline that is probably more him than Rookie, are washed from him, as if they’ve never existed.
Grime and sweat and a little blood form a thick layer of what he affectionately calls disgusting over his skin, but his Baka writes him to tell him he’s never looked more handsome, hair curling in the dampness of his sweat, grin for once less than a smirk and more of a smile. He charms the reporters, the Marshall pats him on the back, and the Technicians are pissed off at him, but they're always pissed off no matter what you do. Sunmi comes by his rooms later, to review something from the drop, probably to bitch at him for ignoring her and going for the kiss of death early, the cocky ingenuity that will make Reliant Wildcat the most prolific Jaeger ever if Jock has anything to do with it. Instead of reviewing all of that, letting her bitch at him and then asking her sweetly if she'd repeat that please, he ends up kissing her and kissing her and thinking I could get used to this.
She does punch him afterwards, when their sweat has settled and he’s thinking about when the laundry is the most crowded so everyone will know just what he got up to, and he even pretends to act like it hurts.
(People laugh more about the bruise on his arm the next day than they do congratulate him on the sheets incident, but that’s what you get for being a self-important jerk, as Sunmi phrases elegantly).
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He doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about why he does it, he just does. It’s been the same way all his life, following impulses, not actual goals or the plans his chess coach would elegantly lay out. He decided he wanted to be a Ranger one day, maybe the day after London, maybe the day the local boys called him Pjega, and so here he stands, a full fledged Ranger. Sure, there’s the glory involved with it – he soaks up the cameras and the interviews and the almost hero worship some have come to shower him in, the Jaeger Flys, the letters from his Baka. Your father and Djed would be very proud of you, in a scrawny cursive, signed with love at the bottom, and pictures of the house, of the sands and the smiling people and the girls who ask when he's planning on coming back for vacation. There’s revenge and there’s anger, but everyone has that. There’s no drive behind it, no projected velocity except upwards and skywards until he meets her.
When people ask these days, interviewers and fans and the occasional curious PPDC member, he tells them he’s making the world better for someone.
She’s an insufferable know-it-all, but he wonders if she knows that he loves her.
He’s not the type to have meaningful conversations – he’s a man of action, a man of purpose and force, and that’s why he’s strapped into the Jaeger and not her. He wouldn’t want her here anyway, when Reliant Wildcat’s AI is informing him of just how desperate the situation is, a constant OxygenLevelsLowHullDamageSevereConnPodCompromised in his left ear. He wishes he was a man like that, a man who knew his way around words that weren’t sharpened into spears to keep people away or melted into charismatic remarks to reporters, words that didn’t really mean anything but were everything in times like these.
Instead, he’s a man of silence. Of the Drift. Silence is everything between two pilots, the simple trust between three, two breathing and one covered in chrome and yellow paint, but it is too silent now. It was supposed to be a routine mission, but people die on routine missions all the time, so that's not exactly a safety net. Category III, and not an especially big one at that, but it sure did pack a hell of a punch. He’s not exactly sure what happened to Rookie, if Rookie is even breathing, he can’t focus on anything like that since the Kaiju aimed for the Conn Pod, punctured the oxygen reserves, and almost immediately knocked Rookie unconscious on impact. Everything other than eliminating the threat has been moved to the back of his mind, and he's even beginning to think of it as an after event. After the Kaiju. After Rookie. After the Silence.
At first, he couldn’t even tell that there was any silence, because Sunmi was screaming in some language so loudly he could even hear her after the Marshall had assumed control of the Mission. The only indication anything was wrong was an agonizing pain in his left arm and then the silence that followed, punctuated by the Marshall's final order. Kill the thing.
If he was the romantic type, he would save his last thoughts for her, but instead, he saves it for the fucking blue green monster in front of him. It pisses him off that his last thoughts are being rushed, that he has to focus on work instead of what he wants. He's been warned about this, that even to one's death, one must always be a Ranger, willing to die in service of humanity. He will die, if he has to, as a ranger, but he refuses to die. He refuses to die like a scared little boy with his chess games and his Kaiju blue seawater. He refuses to die at the hand of something so trivial, it'll take at least a Category IV to take him down without him whining. He refuses to die when the when he still has a job to do, when the world isn’t safe, and he can’t trust others to make it safe. He refuses to die alone.
The Plasmacaster roars to life beneath his hatred and his stubborn right hand. Somewhere in the distance, the Kaiju roars.
“Checkmate, you ugly son of a bitch.”
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He’s too exhausted to be anything other than just that, exhausted, when they finally get back to the Shatterdome. Everything happens in slow motion, like he is still seeing through Relay gel. To his right, Rookie gets rushed off to the Medical Bay, and he hears himself ask if he's ok, if he's breathing, but he doesn't hear an answer. He loses sight of the yellow of Reliant Wildcat at some point. The Marshall grasps his hand and though Jock speaks English and Croatian fluently, is proficient in Russian, and the pilots from Cabo and Lima have been teaching him Spanish, the noises coming out of the Marshall’s mouth are unlike anything he’s ever heard. Someone must have taken off his Drive suit, because when he sees Sunmi running at him, screaming at him and everyone else in what is definitely Korean, still with that authority and faint bossiness in her voice, he laughs and kisses her on the mouth.
She doesn’t stop babbling at him in what seems to be a scolding tone, in and out of Korean and English, until they reach the Medical Bay but she also doesn’t stop holding his hand, so he’s only mildly offended by it. His last thought before slipping into his exhaustion is that people will talk if she’s not careful.
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“So, the nurses told me you even slept in my bed the other night. Care to elaborate?”
“Your head injuries must be more extensive then they thought.”
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