Chapter Text
X
The headache only worsens as the technicians prep them in the Drivesuit Room. As they run last-minute checks on the suits, Erik tries futilely to banish the steady, pounding pain behind his eyes. It’s bad but not debilitating enough to make him think twice about piloting. If only Charles were here, he thinks, rubbing his forehead in discomfort. Charles can make headaches vanish like magic.
They step onto the loading platforms and wait for the technicians to make sure their suits are properly hooked up. When they get the go-ahead signal, Raven begins the sequence for Drift initiation, and Erik closes his eyes.
The rush of Alex’s mind is easier to bear this time. Erik knows what to look for and what to avoid, and he slides past the aching scab of Armando, past the patch of worry that is Scott, past the lingering wisps of a nightmare that has Alex unsettled now. Calm, he says, and he knows his mental voice isn’t as strong or forceful as Charles’ can be, but Alex’s thoughts settle as they both fall deeper into the Drift, into the bridge of focus between their minds.
Ow, Alex thinks with a wince. You have migraine problems or something.
Or something, Erik agrees. He pushes the pain to the back of their minds. You ready?
More than.
They wait for the all-clear. And when it comes, Erik grits his teeth and tries to ignore the throbbing behind his temples, but it’s ramping up in intensity with every passing minute.
He really wishes Charles were here.
X
Charles really wishes Erik were here. Or, more specifically, he wishes Erik were here with a Jaeger and he wishes he were in that Jaeger, perhaps in the copilot seat, though he would also settle for just the relative safety of the Jaeger cockpit.
Hong Kong, he finds, is not a particularly friendly city in torrential rain in the midst of a Kaiju attack. The streets are so flooded he’s slogging through water that comes up to his calves, and the majority of the buildings he passes are towering apartment complexes or skyscrapers that any Kaiju could topple with a direct hit, let alone two Category IVs. All the shelters have long since closed. He’s alone.
Ear-shatteringly close, a Kaiju roars, its wordless shriek echoing through the streets in dissonance with the rumble of thunder. Charles feels the ground tremble beneath his feet. No, he thinks, his heart thumping unevenly in his chest. Not quite alone.
He quickens his pace as best as he can, clenching his teeth together to keep them from chattering in the cold. He needs to find someplace to hide, and, failing that, he needs to keep moving until the Jaegers show up. It’s been nearly half an hour since the alarm first went up, and Jaegers are trained to deploy in under five minutes. They should be fighting already, but the Kaiju in the city sounds as if it’s roaming about freely, smashing through streets accompanied by cacophonous crashes of falling buildings. They must be busy engaging the other Kaiju, Charles reasons as he ducks into a narrow side alley. The Shatterdome only has three Jaegers fully-prepped to deploy, and Shaw will want to keep Shadow Wolverine out of the fray for as long as necessary, to keep Logan and Kitty safe and intact for the mission to close the Breach for good. And Blue Glory...
No, Shaw wouldn’t send them out. Not as unready as they are.
He tries to put Erik out of his mind, but the bond between them throbs. The pain is growing with the distance, and it’s only a matter of time now before Erik realizes the source of his matching headache. Charles keeps waiting for the spike of recognition, incredulity, anger. But it doesn’t come. Erik must truly be preoccupied with something else if he hasn’t noticed Charles’ absence yet, and Charles hopes to god it’s not Blue Glory that’s preoccupying him.
He ducks into a dark convenience store to catch his breath and wipe the rain from his eyes. He’s drenched and shivering. He can only hope that the rain is muddling his scent, making it more difficult for the Kaiju to track.
Outside, the storm howls, obscuring his visibility. In this sort of weather, he can’t see ten feet in front of him, which is both advantageous and disadvantageous in turn. He’s in the middle of trying to work out how to use the rain as cover when a sharp bolt of fuck, CHARLES slams into him, and he staggers back, grabbing at the bond to stabilize it. In doing so, he brushes up against Erik’s mind and feels his touch splinter outwards. The Drift, he realizes in shock and dismay. It’s Erik-and-Alex he’s feeling now, Erik-and-Alex’s surprise and fury.
But it’s fully Erik who snarls, Charles, tell me you’re not where I think you are.
Erik, draw back, he answers, nudging Erik’s attention away. You’ll break the Drift if you linger on me too long.
Charles, tell me where you are right now or I will fucking kill you the next time I see you.
Charles swallows. You’re going to kill me anyway.
Charles! Half a dozen questions surge through their link in a jumbled mess of worry and anger. How the fuck did you—where are you—are you hurt—are you safe—are you armed—can you fight—are you hurt areyouhurtareyouhurt—
Erik, I’m fine, he sends back, shaking the bond slightly in an attempt to dislodge him. Go—just go. I’ll be—
The storefront explodes in a blast of shattered glass, twisted metal, and broken concrete, and Charles hurls himself behind the nearby register, shielding his head with his arms. Curling up to make himself a smaller target, he takes cover as best he can beneath the counter, turning his face into his sleeve as glass rains down in both thick, deadly shards and fine, jagged pieces. A thin piece of girder the size of his arm slams down into the ground inches from his head, spraying chunks of concrete through the air. He feels some of the pieces slice into the back of his hands and bites his lip hard against the pain.
Charles? CHARLES!
I’m fine, he says, a bit shakily. He doesn’t wait for the dust to completely settle before pushing himself to his feet, ready to run. Except when he takes one step toward the door, he sees the Kaiju looming directly in front of him in the street, rearing back to slam against the storefront another time. This time, there’s no doubt that the entire structure will collapse, weak as it already is with most of its front half crushed like a soda can.
Charles? Erik is frantic now, and his panic should feed Charles’ own, but instead Charles only feels very, very calm. No, not calm—numb. Numb with horror and shock.
Oh, he thinks back a bit faintly. Oh shit.
X
There’s a lot of talk when Erik and Charles decide to christen their Jaeger simply Onslaught, abandoning the—not long-standing tradition; the program’s only been around for barely a year at this point—usual custom of a two-part name. Some people like it, say that it’s a bold statement from the pair of new hotshots, while others balk, because this is technically military, after all, and no one likes to keep things in neat-file order and follow tradition more than the military.
Erik and Charles do follow tradition in the sense that they wait to name their Jaeger until after their first sortie with a Kaiju, emerging victorious over the amphibian-looking Category I that Charles later has inked across his right wrist. The battle itself is a rush because it’s their first real fight and it’s their first fight together, holding mental hands across that neural bridgeway and moving in perfect synchronization to take the monster down nearly flawlessly, pulling off every move that they try with deadly precision and accuracy with hardly a pause to catch up mentally with each other. They already know one another and mesh that well.
It’s an onslaught. They both think the thought at the same time and glance at each other from across the cockpit and know.
“Gentlemen, it’s just really not done,” Shaw tries to tell them, looking at the both of them with cool amusement as they stand side-by-side at parade rest in front of his desk, so close that their arms are nearly brushing, “I know you think it sounds cool, but I’ve got a base full of superstitious soldiers who think that having two names is better than one.”
“We didn’t name it for ‘coolness factor,’ sir,” Charles answers, a little dubiously. Surely the Marshall knows them better than that.
“We named it Onslaught because that’s what our Jaeger is,” Erik says tersely. Charles doesn’t have to be a telepath to know Erik thinks the superstition is...implausible, put politely. “That’s what we are.”
Charles cannot suppress the tiny shiver he gets at Erik’s use of the plural. They’re a we, now. They’re an us. Fortunately he’s able to hide it by rolling his shoulders in the guise of shifting restlessly before Erik or the Marshall can notice.
“I won’t deny that we haven’t seen a team more compatible than this,” Shaw acknowledges, his eyes glinting and oh, he’s openly amused now. Charles knew that Shaw wouldn’t hold much stock in things like tradition—he is the man heading the program that involves enormous robots fighting even bigger aliens, after all. If that’s not unconventional then Charles isn’t sure what is. “Your fighting technique is fast and furious, too, I’ll give you that.”
“We’re not naming our Jaeger after a movie with too many sequels,” Erik answers, only barely keeping within the realm of respectfully addressing his superior officer.
Charles is fighting hard not to laugh now, and somehow manages to keep a straight face as he adds, “I agree with Erik, sir.”
“Yes, of course you do,” Shaw says, dry as bone, “anything to avoid further redundancy. Well, what about adding something to ‘Onslaught’ if you’re both so fond of it?”
“I still fail to see what’s wrong with just Onslaught,” Erik says stiffly.
“What about Relentless Onslaught?” Shaw suggests, not even bothering to hide his smirk.
“But sir,” Charles says, his own smile curling at the corners of his lips, “that’s just redundant.”
X
Raven never expresses any desire to become a Jaeger pilot, which surprises Charles at first because all throughout their childhood life she was the more adventurous one, the one more prone to taking risks, the one more likely to get into a fight. Having a large machine with any multiple array of weapons and explosives at her fingertips seems like something that would be right up her alley, but when the offer is made to take scans of her brain to test for compatibility levels—there’s a high chance, they say, that she’ll be compatible with Charles since records indicate siblings make good Ranger pairs--she politely refuses.
“Are you sure?” Charles asks her later as they leave the medbay together to wait for Charles’ scans to be processed. “I wouldn’t have stopped you if you said yes.” He gives her a rueful smile. “You’ve always said I’m too overbearing as an older brother, haven’t you? Here’s me gracefully stepping aside.”
Raven snorts. “There’s nothing graceful about you.”
“Hey—” Charles begins to protest.
“It’s not that, though,” Raven cuts across him smoothly, and Charles goes quiet to let her speak. They haven’t had an exactly ideal childhood, and sometimes it’s caused their very different personalities to clash, especially when Charles had taken it upon himself to act not only as Raven’s brother but as her guardian as well. It puts an odd twist to their already strange relationship, especially since communication has never been their strong point. “You couldn’t stop me if you tried, if I wanted to be a Ranger.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Charles says with another small smile. “It would be hypocritical of me, anyway, in light of my own decision to sign up for the program.”
“And you’re never a hypocrite, Charles,” Raven says dryly, but then stops when she sees his meaningful look. “Anyway. It’s not about whether or not I thought you would try to stop me from doing it.”
“Care to tell me?” Charles asks her gently.
She’s silent for a moment as they walk down the hall, thoughtful. Then she says quietly, “Charles, I don’t even let you into my mind. What makes you think I want anyone else in my mind?”
Charles comes to a stop, and it takes Raven a couple extra paces before she notices, stopping as well to look back at him questioningly. “I hadn’t thought about it like that,” he admits.
It makes sense. They’ve had a long-standing agreement between them that Charles is to stay entirely out of her head with his telepathy unless otherwise given explicit permission. It’s a large part of the reason why things are often tense between them—Charles isn’t good at people, they’ve discovered, without his telepathy. He manifested at birth and has never had to perceive the world around him without it so asking him not to use his telepathy is the same as asking anyone else to not use their sight. Or hearing. Or touch.
Raven maintains that her mind is hers alone and guards this privacy with an unrelenting fierceness that Charles does his best to respect, even if it leaves him fumbling.
“Of course you didn’t,” she says, but there’s no bite to her voice as she reaches over to ruffle his hair. “Piloting a Jaeger involves the Drift. They link your mind directly with someone else’s. That doesn’t strike me as appealing. No offense.”
“None taken,” Charles replies, but raises an eyebrow. “Though for someone who adamantly refuses to hide, you’re awfully concerned with keeping your mind hidden.”
Raven grins, her white teeth bright against her royal blue skin. “That’s just who I am, Charles. Not everyone is fit to become a Ranger. You’ll be perfect, though, with your telepathy. It’s like we’ve finally found a group of people crazy enough to open their minds to anyone and everyone if need be. You already fit right in.”
Charles chuckles. “Point taken.” He catches her hand as she moves to withdraw, linking their fingers together. “Rather opposite of the real world, isn’t it? I can’t say it’s not refreshing.”
Raven laughs, squeezing his hand affectionately as they begin to walk again. “Well, if it means anything, I am happy for you. I’ve never been able to be that open with you, but I’m glad we’ve found a place where people can be. Will be.”
“It means a lot,” Charles tells her softly, squeezing her hand back. “I’ve never been angry with you, you know, about wanting me to stay out. It’s alright. I’ve always understood.”
Raven gives him an unreadable look. “You always understand, Charles,” she says, and while her tone isn’t derisive Charles isn’t sure it’s entirely meant as a compliment either. Then the moment passes, and she’s cheerful again. “Anyway, I’ve sort of already talked to the Marshall a little about working my way up to LOCCENT.” She adds, teasing, “I think I’d be pretty good at keeping missions under control.”
Charles nods. Raven is nothing if not level-headed, which will be crucial under the pressure of running a Jaeger mission. “You’ll be perfect.”
“Of course I will,” Raven boasts, mostly for show as she grins and ruffles her hair again, “and besides, someone has to make sure you crazies come home.”
X
When the Drift breaks, Charles feels as if someone has plunged an icy-cold hand into his guts, fished upwards, and ripped his lungs out. It isn’t so much the pain as it is the shock that has him gasping aloud, his entire body jerking spasmodically as his mind snaps around, half-bridged, half his own, half Erik’s, wholly confusing. Beneath him, he is vaguely aware of Onslaught jerking, too, one huge foot crashing down into the waves, one arm flailing as if warding off invisible enemies.
Erik, he shouts. Erik!
Nothing reaches back at him. He is alone in his head, but his mind is stretching outwards, still connected to Erik’s, being dragged from him with every passing second. Erik is going somewhere that isn’t their bridge, somewhere strange and indistinct and frightening. Charles scrabbles for him, but Erik isn’t responding. Trying to grab for his mind is like trying to hold onto a slippery rope, and his mental fingers burn at the friction. Erik!
Faintly, he hears Mama! and then a distant, roaring fury that screams, You hid it from me. For a week you had me pilot, for a week you kept me here while my mother was dying in the hospital and you had no right, YOU HAD NO RIGHT—
The realization is like a slap to the face. Erik, no! Erik! ERIK!
Neither of them is a rookie. Neither of them has ever made rookie mistakes. One of the first lessons of Drifting is to never latch too firmly onto any memory, or else risk the collapse of the Drift that must be maintained with strict concentration. It’s called chasing the rabbit, and they have never been guilty of it, so Charles doesn’t know exactly how it feels. But now, this—he has no doubt that Erik is losing himself and dragging Charles down in the process.
Erik, come back! he tries to shout, but it is like screaming down a wind tunnel. He tries to reach out with his telepathy, but it is difficult to maneuver when the neural interface is splintered like this, so confusing to navigate, impossible to shove through.
And then everything shudders, and he jolts back away from the bridge into physical reality. Onslaught shudders again, and Charles hears Raven scream, “Charles, what the hell is happening in there?”
Sparks are flying from jostled equipment. Their power level has dropped from 84% to 68%, and they’ve already burned out some of their extra fuel cells from their rush to reach Red Darwin. Charles has little to no control of the right hemisphere of the Jaeger, what with Erik spiraling down and away.
And Knifehead is on them. Not close, not nearing, it is literally on them, its claws scratching for the vulnerable glass viewscreen of the Conn-Pod, its teeth closing vice-like around Onslaught’s right shoulder. It bites down viciously, sharp teeth crunching metal, and Charles cries out, half in fear for Erik, half in anger. The circuitry suit wired underneath the Drivesuit allows pilots to feel what the Jaegers do, to detect damage and avoid it and the like, so the Kaiju’s razor-sharp teeth must feel like knives stabbing into Erik’s shoulder. But Erik is so far gone he hardly flinches, and the only sound that emerges from him is a low, soft moan.
Charles pulls his scattered mind together and forces Onslaught’s left arm up to grab the Kaiju by the thick skin of its neck. He clenches his fingers together and feels metal dig deep into scaly flesh. Then he wrenches Knifehead from Onslaught’s front and flings it bodily away, staggering when the Kaiju slams into the water in a tremendous spray of water. The effort feels colossal; Onslaught responds far more slowly than usual, and Charles shakes with the strain, unused to shouldering the brunt of the neural load by himself.
“Charles!” Raven shouts. “What’s happening? Erik’s vitals are way off, and the neural interface—”
“Out of alignment,” he pants aloud, his pulse thundering between his ears. “I know, I know. Erik’s—”
Knifehead spears up out of the water and smashes into Onslaught’s weak right side. Charles reels, unable to control their fall with just control of the left hemisphere. Rain is beating down so heavily that it’s hard to tell what is the sky and what is the ocean. All he knows is that the Jaeger lands with a jarring crash on its side, Erik’s side. There’s no time to recover--Knifehead pounces on their exposed left side in an instant, and Charles raises his arm to beat it off. But he’s not fast enough, and the Kaiju’s jaws snap around the thick elbow joint and rips.
Charles feels the arm tear free just above the elbow, metal and gears and wiring shearing apart in a messy, horrible screech of machinery. He can’t bite back the scream of agony, the circuitry suit transmitting every sensation from Jaeger to pilot so vividly that he nearly blacks out with the shock of the injury. His ears are ringing with pain, and his head lolls for a moment as he teeters on the edge of blackness.
It’s Raven’s voice that pulls him back. “Charles! Charles! Stay conscious, do you hear me? You need to stay conscious—the Kaiju’s circling back around for another—Charles, are you listening to me? Stay with me now, stay with me!”
He blinks blearily. His left arm hangs uselessly by his side, afire with pain. It might as well be gone. He shudders and fights his way back to full awareness, trying to assess the situation and figure out a strategy all at once. One Kaiju, one Jaeger at—he glances at the side monitor above his head—42% and falling. And he is only one pilot, one half of a whole.
To his side, Erik hangs lifelessly in his Drivesuit. The faint press of his mind is all that tells Charles he’s still breathing. His mind has gone too far down the rabbit hole to drag back, and even if it weren’t, Charles has no energy to go after him. He barely has the energy to hold his own head up. This is no time to be worrying for Erik. This is the time to be worrying for himself.
Think, Xavier, think .
Sweat stings his eyes, blinding him. He raises his good hand and yanks the helmet off his head, tossing it away. Wiping his eyes, he takes a shaky breath and forces his broken thoughts into some semblance of order.
Two good legs, 39% power, one cannon in the arm that he can’t use. 39% is enough for two, three blasts at most. But he can’t even reach the arm, fuck.
Or can he?
Erik’s conscious mind is gone, but his body is still there, and so is the delicate nervous system that controls it. A nervous system that Charles, with his telepathy, can use.
Sensors on the viewscreen and side monitors beep frantically, and there’s no time to think anymore, just act. Knifehead surfaces in an explosion of water two hundred yards away according to the sensors, and Charles guides the Jaeger painstakingly to its knees, then to its feet. He can’t see anything in the blur of rain, but the thermal imaging picks up Knifehead’s heat signature approaching fast on his left. Even though he tenses in preparation, he’s still caught off-guard by how quickly the Kaiju moves, spinning upward into the air with the lethal claws of its front legs arcing for the Conn-Pod, straight for Charles.
He waits until the last possible moment before turning and allowing the Kaiju to latch onto his left side. Its claws tear into the already-shredded metal of the ripped arm, and Charles bites down on his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. Then he dives into Erik’s mind, racing past the turmoil of his waking mind, still stuck somewhere Charles can’t reach. He reaches down, down, down until he finds the base instincts, the centers of the brain that send neural impulses to control the body, and he grabs a hold of them and orders Erik to move.
Erik’s right arm comes up. Onslaught’s right arm surges up in response and slams palm-flat against the Kaiju’s throat. Charles pulls metal fingers closed around the ridge of bone at its collar and shouts, “Cannon!”
“Cannon engaged,” says the Jaeger A.I. A deep hum accompanies its words, the sound of the plasma cannon coming to life. The Kaiju twists viciously, clawing down Onslaught’s side and ripping new holes into the Jaeger’s torso, digging deeper toward its core. Charles is distanced from the pain, planted so deeply in Erik’s mind that his own body feels far away. He tightens Onslaught’s grip on the Kaiju, waits for the cannon to reach full charge, and fires.
Once—power level down to 29%. Twice—11%.
"Power levels critical.”
One more, he thinks hazily. He would be desperate if he weren’t getting so light-headed. All he can think is one more and he squeezes his hand around the Kaiju’s throat and thinks, Fire.
He’s not sure if he blacks out, but the next time he comes to, he’s still looking through Erik’s eyes, and all life signs of the Kaiju have ceased. Through the cracked main screen, he can see Knifehead’s corpse sinking into the waves. It’s done. He did it.
He still has enough presence of mind to pull back, following the thin tether of telepathy back into his own head, and then he sags bonelessly in his harness, terribly weary and terribly cold. He can’t feel his left arm. He can’t even feel his legs. He’s bleeding from his nose and his ears and his mouth; he can taste coppery slickness down his tongue and throat. His head is throbbing as if it’s about to explode. He tries to reach up and stem the blood flowing from his nose, but he doesn’t think his hand is responding. Nothing is responding.
“Charles!” he hears, and all the sound around him suddenly filters in at once: half a dozen different pitches of beeping signaling emergencies, the creak and groan of abused metal, Raven and Shaw and a dozen other people shouting through the comm system, his own heavy labored breathing, the crack of thunder, and water.
Water rushing in through the gaping holes torn in Onslaught’s hull.
It takes his ragged mind a precious few seconds to realize what is happening: the Jaeger has listed into the ocean and is lying on its side, all two thousand tons sinking with every passing second. The Conn-Pod is flooding rapidly, the water already up to his ankles, and if they don’t get out, they’ll drown.
The last dregs of adrenaline shoot through his veins, giving him enough energy to raise his head and look toward Erik. Still not conscious. He tries to reach out with his telepathy and is met with such a sharp agony that his eyes sting with tears. He knows this feeling. Too much. He’s overextended his telepathy, and if he pushes it, he’ll pass out. But he can’t reach Erik’s monitor from his platform, as much as he stretches out his right arm. He can’t send him to his escape pod.
Manually, he thinks woozily. He fumbles with the buckles of his suit and his legs give way as soon as the harness releases. He hits the ground hard enough to drive all the breath from him.
He comes to at the slap of water against his face and at Raven’s voice echoing in the cockpit: “Charles, get out of there! The Conn-Pod’s filling up, you’ve got to get out!”
She sounds panicked. Shaw is saying something, too, his voice infinitely calmer but infinitely sharper. Ignoring them both, Charles struggles to his knees, his entire body almost too heavy to move. He drags himself over to Erik’s side and somehow manages to stand, bloodied fingers swiping across the screen to activate the ejection sequence. Then he stumbles back as Erik’s platform raises up into the ejection pod. A moment later, he’s gone, and Charles is left standing alone in the cockpit of their ruined Jaeger.
He’s got to eject, too, but it’s getting harder and harder to focus. Spots of black dancing on his vision, he staggers toward his own platform and gets halfway up before he collapses against the seat, his gloved fingers gripping painfully around the wires of his harness as water swirls up to his thighs. He gasps for air through the blood still running from his nose and mouth.
Don’t black out, don’t black out, he thinks fiercely. You’re nearly there, you idiot, get up, get up, get—