Chapter Text
"Cypher, you need to retreat, and you need to do it now!" Locent ordered. "We are no longer tracking the vital signs of Alicia, and you are alone in the Drift, you need to disengage and get back here now!"
Verso panted, glancing to his side where Alicia was hanging limply, the side of the Jaeger ripped open, and the electrical fire that was rapidly growing larger by the second on her side, it hadn't reached her yet. "How far out is Crimson?" Verso snarled, tightening his hand on the command for the ion canon that he had. One shot left, and he had to make it count. The Kaiju was pacing in front of him, slowly, sizing him up, or perhaps waiting for him to collapse.
Silence on the other end of the comms told him everything he needed to hear. If he wanted to save Alicia's life, he needed to ignore the yawning abyss of the drift that was already starting to pull at him harder and harder, and the growing heat of the metal that he was strapped into from the fire, and focus on the fight in front of him.
Verso took a deep breath and hit the button for comms. "Cypher readying ion canon." There was another shout, static destroying anything that was actually said, and Verso lifted his head, meeting the eyes of the Kaiju in front of him. He trembled as he struggled with the weight of bringing their left arm forward alone. No one had ever said how heavy the Jaeger was if you tried to move it on your own. Perhaps that was just what they called neural load?
Verso shook his head and watched the kaiju roar and steadied himself, listening to the canon power up steadily, glancing at the warning systems about the growing fire in the cockpit. Alicia's vital signs were there, barely, and it would have to be enough. He hit the ejection button for her and leveled the gun, buying the Jaeger just enough time to launch her pod out and into the sea behind him before he charged forward, grabbing onto the screaming kaiju. Shouting with the weight, Verso shoved the gun up and against its throat, every single muscle in his body burning, alarms screaming, and squeezed his fist, firing the last shot of the ion canon at close range.
~!~
Gustave was frozen, watching as Cypher made one final charge forward, ignoring the command to retreat, to allow the minimal defenses the Shatterdome and surrounding coast had handle the dying Kaiju, but Verso and his sister were stubborn. So stubborn it was infuriating. "Putain," he cursed and was glad that he didn't need to give the order for the medical teams to rush to get to Verso and Alicia.
"He's going to take the head off the Jaeger!"
"Why did one of the pilots evacuate?"
"What the hell are they thinking?"
Gustave ignored the conversation growing steadily louder from the rest of the engineers and kept his eyes glued on the monitor, flicking to check the vital signs and any other information that was coming through on the Jaeger. Despite all of the systems and mechanics being pressed to the limit and beyond, the Painted aspects were holding, and he allowed himself the briefest moment of pride as the ion canon ripped through the Kaiju, leaving it beheaded and falling, at last, into the sea, and there was a wave of relief across the Shatterdome.
He knew better, and didn't take his eyes off the Jaeger, didn't look away as it immediately stumbled and began to slump, the pilot barely able to support the weight of it all. "Zoom in on the cockpit," he demanded, stepping up behind Locent. Gustave shot Alan a look and gestured to the video feed. "There's a fire. We need a closer look."
The camera zoomed in, and horror flooded Gustave. Even with the long-range lenses from the helicopters, he could tell the fire was bad through the hole in the head of the Jaeger. There was nothing but a wall of flames now.
"Cypher, can you hear us?" Alan, in command as Locent, said, slamming the comms button. "The fire is out of control, evacuate, get out now! Disengage and get out now!"
There was nothing but static in response and Gustave felt the entire room go tense and still.
"Cypher! Evacuate! Get out of the Jaeger! Save yourself and abandon the Jaeger!"
All at once, the Jaeger went limp, and the entire mechanical and support team flinched.
Jaegers only went limp like that when there was no more input from any of the pilots, and it was nothing more than a machine waiting to be commanded. Gustave stared at the video feed, didn't let himself look away and then pointed to it. "There! There!"
Heads shot up around him, and he felt the room take a breath as they all watched Verso Dessendre, it had to be Verso, stumbling through the wall of fire and out of the Jaeger.
"Medics!" Locent bellowed. "Medics on site!"
~!~
It took almost twelve hours, after the medical rescue of both pilots, for the husk of Painted Cypher to make it back to the Shatterdome.
Gustave stared at her, and watched as the ripped open Jaeger was brought back, her tail curled around one of her feet, her head ripped open, and more than half her body consumed with char from the fire. The amount of work needed to repair her was going to be... staggering. The electrical systems alone would need an entire replacement, not to mention the full redesign of the cockpit with how badly things had been melted and burnt.
He could already hear the mounting whispers that they should scrap her and build an entirely new Jaeger. "We've got our work cut out for us, boy," he muttered to Bones, glad his dog had settled next to him.
Gustave smirked and stepped forward, and began barking diagnostic orders, watching the teams around him jump to attention before running over as Cypher was slowly, carefully, laid down for them to begin work on her. She might have been damaged, but he was not going to let her be put to the junk yard yet. Not when he could repair her and make her even better. He reached for his radio and flipped channels, sending a call through, waiting for the response.
"Go for Locent."
"Beginning assessment of Cypher now. Route all redesign requests through me, and if you think I am going to let a single fucking person suggest that she gets scrapped on my watch, they had better be ready for a metal fist through their face," Gustave said cheerfully and watched more than a few of his engineers give him an appreciative look. "Also, if you could be so kind as to reassign Sciel from the other Painted Jaegers to help me with this repair, we should be able to actually get it done this century."
"Anything else?"
Gustave glanced up at Cypher and winced at the state the ion canon was on the left arm. He traced his thumb over the button on the radio before lifting it to his mouth once more. He could already see the screens popping up, one after another, as diagnostics started to filter through. "How about an IV of caffeine, I'm going to need it." That got him a bark of laughter, and he considered it a win, before he began to approach the flurry of activity that had descended on one of his ladies. It was his job to repair the machine, and it was the job of the medics to repair the pilots.
Gustave looked at where the cockpit had been ripped open and the way the metal had been burnt and warped from the heat and let out a low whistle. He lifted his tablet and flicked through a few screens before he let the diagnostic data start filtering through and winced at the initial readings of the cockpit. He might be able to keep most of the Jaeger, but the entire cockpit would have to be gutted, redone, and rewired.
Which... did leave an interesting opportunity.
He had always wanted to redesign the tail interface to have it be more effective, especially when it came to wielding it. Verso Dessendre had never mentioned a problem with it, but Alicia had complained about the way it hindered her movement, perhaps he could...
"Wow, she took a beating," Sciel commented, stepping up beside Gustave, holding out her fingertips for Bones to sniff on reflex before he went back to ignoring her.
Gustave glanced at her. There hadn't been enough time for Locent to reassign her and for her to get over here if she hadn't already been on the way. He bit down a smile and nodded to her. "You got here quick."
"All the diag teams were on their way here before the reassignment came through," Sciel said. "Pretty sure majority of the mechanic teams are coming over too."
Gustave tightened his hand on his tablet and breathed in deep, glad when Bones pressed in close to his leg, reaching down to scratch him behind the ears. They protected their own, and the absolute redirection of resources told him how bad things were with Cypher. "Have we heard anything about the pilots yet?"
Sciel shook her head. "Only that they were both recovered alive, but they both have severe burns. Alicia is the worse of the two. The fire burned on her side for long enough that some of the metal of her suit melted onto her."
Gustave winced and looked down at his tablet as another feed of data started to pour in, and sighed at the state of things. On the bright side, the shielding had held, for much of it, which meant that he was right about things not needing to be completely scrapped, but there was so much that they didn't know yet. So much that they would have to discover. It would be like rebuilding her from the ground up, even if it wasn't precisely that.
"How much of the Painted tech do you think survived? Are we going to have to redo all of it?" Sciel asked, glancing over his shoulder at the tablet.
Gustave let out a rough breath and held it out for her to look, smiling at her immediate whistle. "The entire cockpit is going to be redone, so I'm going to do a complete overhaul of the tail interfacing to see if we can make it easier and work better for Alicia." He stretched his neck. "So the hardest parts are a complete loss. But the integration points across the rest of the Jaeger should still be functional. So we only have to redo about forty percent of the work on her, rather than the entire thing."
Sciel snorted. "Golgra is going to kill you for destroying her budget for the rest of the year."
Gustave shrugged. "She knows that if she doesn't pay for it, I will, and that looks worse on the press releases."
Sciel laughed, her head falling back. "That would be what keeps her paying for it." She crossed her arms over her chest. "All right, boss man, while we wait for the formal reassignment order to come through for me, where do you want me?"
Gustave looked up at Cypher and tapped his fingers on the edge of the tablet, considering. If he took the cockpit, then... "Her heart," he gestured. "Give me a full diagnostic breakdown of her heart. How bad the electrical is there and if the fire touched it."
"You got it," Sciel said, jogging over to the side of the Jaeger, hopping up on one of the ladders already starting to be lifted on her side.
Gustave took another deep breath and watched as more and more people began to crawl over the Jaeger, flipping open side panels to examine the extent of the damage and flinched, looking away from it as he clenched his jaws and began to stalk toward the cockpit, glad when Bones kept close, jogging beside him. If he was going to redesign the entire thing, he would need to hurry up and get started.
~!~
Verso was falling, falling, falling, he was going to hit the water too hard, he hadn't been able to jump feet first, and he was screaming, the metal panels of his suit were too hot, too-
Verso snapped awake in the hospital bed, in a dark room, staring at the ceiling. He managed a small breath, because anything more, any deep breath made his entire body ache. He'd learned that, the hard way, when he'd woken up yesterday. At least this time there were no screaming medics and no excited shouts from his parents.
"About time you woke up," a gruff voice said.
Relief at the realization that his parents seemed to be gone for the time being and that it was someone he actually wanted to see flooded through him. Verso glanced to the side of his bed and was glad when his best friend hit the button to raise him up just enough so he didn't have to crane his head to talk, or sip the water that Monoco offered him. "Been pining for me?" he teased, huffing softly.
"More like been waiting for your parents to fuck off so I could come see you. Their reaction had everyone thinking you were going to die," Monoco grumbled.
Verso didn't smile. Smiling hurt and he was hurting badly enough right now. "Alicia?" he rasped, glad when Monoco offered him more water. When Monoco didn't answer immediately and stared down at the side of the bed, his heart rate spiked, making the machine next to him squeal.
"Putain, stop panicking, she is fine," Monoco growled. "She's already awake." He glanced at the door and sat back pretending to read his book when one of the nurses came in to check Verso's vitals. "He woke up from a nightmare."
Verso gave the nurse a tired smile. "Sorry for the scare," he rasped, glad when she didn't linger, and left them once again. He relaxed. "She's okay?"
"She will recover," Monoco said. "But before you got her out Verso, she was baking alive in that suit."
Verso flinched at the reminder and that made all of the skin on his body pull taut, making him tight down a hiss of pain. "We both were."
"They're not sure she's going to be able to talk," Monoco continued, meeting Verso's eyes. "And she lost one of her eyes."
Verso cursed and clenched his eyes shut, leaning back against the bed. He hadn't gotten her out in time. Fuck, he hadn't been able to get her out in time. He bit down on his lip hard enough to taste blood as he heaved in a slow breath. "I should have ejected her earlier."
Monoco grunted. "If you had, you wouldn't be sitting here talking with me."
"You don't-"
"Yes I do," Monoco grumbled. "You held the Jaeger on your own for the final parts of that fight. If you'd done it for any longer, it would have killed you. Cypher is too heavy for single person support, and you fucking know it."
Verso sighed. "Alicia would have died."
"I understand," Monoco huffed. "I would have done the same for Noco if I'd had to. But don't blame yourself for what happened to her. You did what you could, and you're both alive."
Verso swallowed and asked the question that he hadn't been quite able to ask when he'd woken up the day before under the overwrought care his parents had been offering. Monoco would not lie to him and would still offer him more comfort than they did. "Cypher?"
"That's the one bit of good news in all of this."
Verso's eyes snapped open and he looked directly at Monoco and saw his smile and realized that he meant it, it wasn't sarcasm. "She's, they're not going to-"
"Écrivain threatened to pull the Painted patents from the PPDC if they didn't let him restore Cypher. All of them. The PPDC would have to decommission the entire generation if he did that."
Verso sucked in a sharp inhale and then hissed in pain as his skin pulled again. "He did what?" he breathed.
Monoco grinned and crossed his arms over his chest, stroking his beard with a nod. "He did. After the full diagnostic breakdown came in two days ago and they realized they'd need to fully replace her electrical systems, as well as more than two thirds of the engines in her, PPDC leadership unanimously agreed that she needed to be scraped for parts."
"What, what happened?" Verso asked. By Monoco's growing grin and the pleased look on his face, whatever Gustave had done to bring the entire PPDC executive team to heel must have been top secret, and therefore the entire Shatterdome knew.
"Rumor has it," Monoco started. "That Écrivain stomped right into one of their board meetings, with what was, by all counts, more than fifty file boxes, all of which he made sure were stacked in front of the board room before he started talking. Then he explained that those boxes contained every single patent for the Painted technology the PPDC was using. And went on to explain that the PPDC actually had its own patent arm legal branch, specifically for dealing with him, and the patents that he had on his devices, and while they could, perhaps, force enough government pressure to make him still keep the technology with the PPDC, he would cease development of any advancements, permanently."
Verso didn't care that it hurt, he burst out laughing and fell back against the pillows. "Oh, what I would have given to see the expressions on their fucking faces..."
"There may or may not be security footage that was, ahem, acquired and passed around the entire PPDC afterward," Monoco said and grinned, despite himself. "Repairs on Cypher have begun in earnest. Your entire cockpit is getting a redesign and update, though. He's at the heart of it, and has pulled almost all of the Painted engineers onto the project. Your lady is going to be as good as new, if not better when you're ready to step into her again."
A fear that he hadn't even realized had been weighing on him was released all in one moment. If there was one thing he was certain of, it was that Cypher was going to be in good hands if Gustave Écrivain was the one taking care of her. Especially if she was getting a complete redesign. It would be worth it. It would be worth all of the rehabilitation he knew that he was going to have to go through and all of the work he would need to put in to be back to peak physical form.
Monoco settled back in his chair. "I did always like that boy," he commented. "Your parents are making noise about the two of you getting back into a Jaeger again, though."
"Unsurprising, considering how badly Alicia has been hurt," Verso said, sighing deeply. "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it." He glanced at the IV beside him, tiredness starting to pull him under again. There were bandages on most of his body, so he couldn't see how bad it was, but Monoco would tell him, would be honest with him. "How bad is it?"
"Bad," Monoco sighed. "You've got burns over almost your entire body. The suit prevented any of them from being third degree, except for a few specific spots where there was metal touching your skin, but it was. It's bad, kid."
"Right," Verso breathed, closing his eyes. "But I'll heal?"
Monoco snorted. "Of course that's what matters to you. Yes, you idiot. You'll heal. Now sleep before I get in trouble with the nurses for keeping you awake."
Verso wanted to argue with Monoco, grumble at him, but discretion was the better part of valor, and sleep did sound very, very good at that particular moment in time, so he was going to take proper advantage. Especially if it meant that he slept through his parent's next visit so he didn't have to listen to them talk about how he should resign as a pilot and focus on supporting the program in other ways.