Chapter Text
“This is the worst idea you have ever had.”
Gottlieb's voice echoed in the vast darkness of the hangar. Newt hastily motioned at him to hush, even though there was no one to hear them. The air smelled like wet concrete, cooling engines, years of sweat and grime. From far away, they could hear the sounds of the post-apocalypse party that was still raging hours after the war clock stopped—thumping bass and laughter, distorted and ghostly as it filtered into the huge, abandoned space.
All around them, shut-down Jaegars watched them like the statues of abandoned gods, stern and disapproving. Newt gazed up at them, forgetting himself for a moment. There was something tragic about them now. Their purpose was gone. They were defunct, extinct, bound to be dismantled or propped up in museums.
“Ever,” Gottlieb went on, pitching his voice to a whisper that was somehow louder than his normal speaking voice. “I want you to understand the gravity of that statement. Really. This tops them all. The time you almost blinded me with Kaiju stomach acid back in university. The time you spent your half of the rent on those action figures.”
“This is totally going to be worth it.” Newt stopped in front of a boxy, last-gen Jaegar, gunmetal gray with red accents that had gone murky and faded with wear. He knocked on its giant foot and grinned at Gottlieb. Gottlieb scowled back at him. “This one. Tin Star. It may not look like much, but it's a classic. Besides, it's perfect for us because one pilot controls the leg steering pistons and the other controls the arms and weapons. One of those bisected neural networks from the old days. Remember when this guy took down Dolphintail? Man, that was a beautiful fight. Dolphintail had those sweet razor-sharp fins...”
“That's discounting your more recent terrible ideas. Drifting with a squashed monster brain and almost killing yourself, for instance. Do you have any idea how frightening it was to find you twitching and bleeding on the ground, Newton? I thought you were--”
“Don't tell you haven't dreamed of piloting one of these bad boys. Besides, we already know that we're...” Newt waggled his eyebrows and lowered his voice to a cheesy, seductive croon. “Drift compatible.”
“Dying a fiery death isn't really one of my dreams, no. It's rather low on the list.” Gottlieb tapped his cane on the concrete in a nervous, irritable rat-a-tat rhythm.
Newt bounced on his heels slightly, a sure sign he was fully invested in an idea and had no intentions of letting it go, no matter how ridiculous or potentially deadly. “Come on. It's not like we're going on a joyride. We'll just do the neural handshake thing and then, like, walk around in the hangar for a while.”
“The last time we...shook hands...I relived all my worst childhood memories and then vomited.”
“But it was kind of a rush, right?”
Newt yanked down on a lever and engaged the emergency access hatch. There was a rusty groan—clearly, this particular Jaegar hadn't seen combat in quite a while. And now it never would again. A prickle went up Newt's spine as he stared up into the dark interior, as if he were looking into a tomb. He turned back to Gottlieb. His partner's face still looked haggard from the night's experiences: his normally slicked-down hair stuck up in wild quills, his dark eyes were pouchy, and his sweater vest had come untucked on one side. He was leaning pretty heavily on his cane, too. Clearly he had come off the adrenaline high Newt was still riding long ago.
“Hey...” Newt said softly, rubbing the back of his neck. It was kind of unsettling to see the normally fastidious Gottlieb looking so run down. Newt knew he must look like a mess, too. He had traded his rain-damp, bloodstained button-up for a clean t-shirt and discarded his cracked glasses for his emergency pair (round tortoiseshell, not flattering,) but he was still nicked and bruised and worn out. “You know, we really don't have to do this. I'm serious. No pressure. I just figured, everybody else is celebrating, why don't we? I know I get carried away with stuff sometimes.”
Gottlieb narrowed his eyes. “Just walking around the hangar, is that correct?”
Newt shrugged, avoiding eye contact. Suddenly Tin Star seemed very large and very clunky and very liable to fall over and explode at any moment. “Yeah, I mean...forget it. You're right, this was a dumb idea. Let's just head back to the party and...”
“I suppose it could be fun.” Gottlieb said the word fun as if it was a potentially volatile chemical. His forehead creased the way it did when he was working out a seemingly impossible physics puzzle, the ones that always looked like a kid's scribbles on a chalkboard to Newt. Suddenly, Gottlieb shouldered past Newt, heading straight for the spiral ramp that led up into the cockpit. Newt stumbled backwards a step, blinking. “You know what? All right. We almost fried our brains for those bastards, might as well have a good time before our jobs officially become meaningless.”
“Uh...yeah!” Newt laughed, a little shakily. He hurried to catch up with Gottlieb, whose cane clanged determinedly against the steel walkway at a rapid beat. “Awesome. Great.”
The cockpit was dark and small and smelled like burnt wiring. For a moment Newt wondered if they would even be able to get the damn thing on without a technical operator, but Gottlieb was already busy at a control panel, flipping on glowing blue lights and filling the cramped space with a rolling electric hum.
“And you thought I wouldn't be up for this,” Gottlieb muttered. “I probably know these machines better than you do. You were always more preoccupied with the rampaging monster side of the equation.”
“Oh, yeah, watch out, mechanical genius over here,” Newt grumbled. He fiddled with the armor, trying to get it to open. “Hey, man, do you need any help into--”
He looked over. Gottlieb was already in his armor plating, his cane neatly wedged against the nearby corner where it wouldn't roll away. Normally Gottlieb looked like a miraculously de-aged old man in his frumpy sweaters and slacks and oxfords, but in the glowing titanium armor suit he looked kind of...badass. The sharp angles of his face, which usually made him look curmudgeonly and disapproving, looked intense and determined in the silvery glow of the holo-monitors.
“Just stand still,” Gottlieb said, rolling his eyes. “Stop fidgeting. It's trying to lock onto your biological signature.”
“Uh--” All of a sudden the armor plates clapped onto Newt's body with a whirring click that made him flinch. His eyelids twitched as the sensor current hummed around his body, tingling and sharp. “Oh, okay. Cool.”
“Counting down to neural handshake in ten...nine...” the automated female voice said, cool and collected as always.
“Remember the protocol, Newton,” Gottlieb said, his voice calm and professorial. Newt's heart was hammering painfully in his chest. A wonder it didn't clang against the titanium. “Go with the Drift. Don't hang on to anything. Just like before, all right?”
“Yeah.” The icy computerized voice kept counting down, steadily, inexorably. This didn't seem at all like the wacky jaunt Newt had intended.“Hey, Hermann, before this starts, can I just--”
A high-pitched buzz filled the tiny cockpit as a searing, blinding headache suddenly blazed between Newt's temples.
“One.”