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They’re only two kaiju into this wave of attacks when Dream’s copilot goes offline.
He gets no warning. Just a brief flicker of confusion wait, what? in the headspace that is Dream-and-George, and then nothing. Half of them just vanishes.
Dream reels, unbalanced, and Nightfall Sniper grinds to a halt.
george? he calls, first through the drift humming between them, and then aloud. “George?”
Nothing.
He shouldn’t be getting nothing. Even if George suddenly fell unconscious (or, gods forbid, asleep), Dream should be able to feel him through their neural handshake. All the power in their jaeger could go out and they would at least be ghost-drifting.
So why can’t Dream feel him at all?
Something cold pools in his gut, a little too close to terror for his liking.
george, answer me. george. george!
“Night, that kaiju is still alive,” crackles the comms, as though the monster gathering itself for a sprint right in front of them—him, it’s only him, where is George?—isn’t dead obvious. “What hell are you doing? House to Night, do you copy?”
Dream doesn’t have time to respond, too busy trying to throw his weight to the side in a desperate attempt at a dodge. He knows even before the kaiju slams into them that it isn’t going to work; there’s a reason no jaeger can be operated by a solo pilot. Nightfall reacts much too sluggishly, and the backlash of trying to leverage his will against countless tons of bolted metal just sends a spike of white-hot pain through Dream’s temple.
While he recovers from that, rough grey scales tear into Nightfall’s torso. The jaeger collapses from the blow with little resistance, and Dream feels him fall with and within it, all alone in a seat meant for two. Dark waters rise over their heads, swallowing them into the sea.
not panicking, stop worrying, george this isn’t funny, Dream thinks at him instead of acknowledging the fact that his earpiece shrieking from the sound of with people shouting all sorts of commands and queries. He’s not worried about those people, not when he knows there’s another team out in the sea with them, ready to intercept the kaiju now that Nightfall is downed.
The only one who doesn’t have backup is George.
george. getting worried now. george, wake up!
Instead of his partner’s voice, he only hears the people back at the House. They’re still shouting at him, but he doesn’t have an answer for them.
Frustrated, gracelessly hurling should be here but fine, take your time, get back to me in two to three business days it’s not like the fate of the world is at stake or anything between them, Dream refocuses on Nightfall’s vision.
They’re laying crumpled on the ocean floor, thousands of tiny bubbles rushing across the screen as they slowly take in water—the jaeger itself may need to be hauled from the seafloor by something else, since it’s flooding, but the cockpit is sealed specifically for this kind of thing.
Luckily, the kaiju hadn’t cracked it open when it struck.
Dream watches with bated breath as the kaiju shifts now, its giant reptilian body stomping dangerously close to them. Instead of finishing the job, though, its turns towards the other jaeger and wades away to confront it, leaving Dream, George, and Nightfall Sniper limp at the bottom of the sea.
With a blink, Dream backs out of their jaeger’s vision and into his own. The first thing he does once he’s sure he’s moving his own body and not Nightfall is rip out his earpiece, because it’s annoying and won’t shut up and he can’t think when people are yapping senselessly in his ear.
To his right, he can see George. He can’t see any visible damage on his person or his gear, but George is staring into the middle distance and doesn’t snap out of it even when Dream leans as far out of his spot as he can without detaching from the pedals below him, waving a hand in front of George. There’s no contemplative furrow to his brow, no look of concentration.
Just… calm, a pleasant and useless platitude that Dream can’t pierce when he was allowed a backdoor past it ages ago, and it freaks him the fuck out.
“Come on,” Dream says, and his voice sounds too loud in the hissing, whirring cabin of their cockpit. Panic creeps into his throat, a chilling sensation against the heat of the metal spine gripped to his back. “Sapnap’s going to be so annoying if he and Quack and Karl kill all the kaiju while you’re out, George, do you want that? Do you want to sit through all that bragging?”
The drift echoes his voice into nothing. Dream feels like he’s sifting through sand in a playground, digging with a plastic trowel for treasure that isn’t even there, offering up memory and voice to an empty chair beside him
He should probably tell the people back at House, where the engineers and mechanics are always on standby. They might have a solution for him.
But the emptiness in the mind meld itches at him.
Logically, he knows George isn’t moving from his spot, but he can’t shake the feeling that if he looks away, George won’t be there when he looks back. It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s really compelling when he’s spent months and months with George’s presence pressing at the edge of his awareness. Just last week, George’s boredom and annoyance with some random irritant had been broadcasted so loudly into Dream’s brain that he hadn’t even been able to continue his conversation with the marshal. It’s one of Dream’s favorite excuses to leave meetings early.
He doesn’t feel so much as a hint of George now.
Dream hovers there, caught between a voiceless body four feet away from him and a bunch of bodiless voices next to his boots, trying to figure out what he could possibly do to get George back.
His eyes catch on a little metric on the lower left of his visor. Under the small icon of a handshake, a distressingly low 41% slowly decreases to 40%, 39%, and lower still. Occasionally, it bumps up—reaching only as high as 53%—before starting to fall again.
Alignment. They’re wavering in and out of alignment.
That’s not possible without George being awake. Or, at least, alive enough to be thinking about something. In fact, his thoughts must somehow be running parallel to Dream’s, despite being unable to get through to each other, to have a percentage at all.
He… he couldn’t be RABITing, could he?
Dream’s usually the one who RABITs. That’s why they keep telling him to pilot left, even though he’s right-handed and George is left-handed. Most of the old-school higher-ups still insist the split control has something to do with brain hemispheres even though pilots have told them again and again that it’s not like cutting two fruits in half and welding them together with technology, it’s putting them all in a processor and hitting “blend until silky-smooth” on the settings. Left and right only matter when it’s convenient to have a pilot closer to their dominant hand.
A sharp beep tears him out of that line of thought, with the alignment meter dipping all the way down to a bare 7%, which, okay, point taken.
Dream shuts his eyes, trying to clear his mind like everyone keeps telling him he needs to in order to be a better pilot, peeling back memory after memory in hopes of uncovering George somewhere in there, and but all he can think is where are you george we don’t have time for this, come here, come with me, i need you here—
—games, really? says a fragment of something just barely audible in the headspace, and protocol dictates that Dream should step away and let it pass him by, but that’s George’s voice, so fuck protocol.
Dream seizes that tiny sliver with everything in him and lets him pull him in, falling, diving deeper.
And then he comes to, gasping in a room too fuzzy to be anything but the uncertain steps of a memory, words tearing from his throat: “I don’t see you doing anything better.”
George, all sharp detail and more colorful than anything else in the room, says dryly, “Well, I’m introducing myself to the only unpaired ranger in the entire base, so I think I’m doing pretty good.”
For a moment, Dream feels that same numb angry helplessness he’d been filled with at the time, so recently severed from his original copilot after everyone decided (not wrongly) that three was stronger than two.
Not that it was ever Sapnap’s fault. No, the blame he wields is pointed solely at the command that left him useless with a useless jaeger, wasted in the sidelines, left watching as one jaeger alone defended the bustling coast of thousands.
“Congratulations,” Dream says wryly, trying to sort out what that statement even means. He knows what it means, now, but back then? Not at all. “Are you done gawking?”
“No,” George says, unruffled and infuriatingly flat.
“Then take a picture or something, I—”
“Is it multiplayer?”
Dream feels himself be caught off-guard even though he knows that this is how the conversation would turn. “Yeah, sometimes.” His mouth stops moving but his voice continues pouring into the room, realization, you knew the answer from the start. A future memory turns this stumbling start into something softer. Fonder.
Their surroundings—glitch, for a moment. Like everything crunches in on itself, folding away time that isn’t there, and suddenly they’re trading soundless jabs about each other’s playstyle as they tap furiously away at their keyboards.
Even without the words, Dream can see the shape of George’s complaint on his lips, something about the spare keyboard being worse, and so they trade and go at it again, and again, and again… Somehow, at the time, it had never occurred to Dream to be suspicious of how quickly George picked up the controls.
He’d been too focused on the match, he supposes. Too driven by how their differing strategies paired, too hopeful about the way the edges of their puzzle pieces lined up to question anything.
you’re such a bad actor, exasperation, utter fondness. how did i ever believe you?
isn’t it obvious? snorts in response, and Dream jolts half-out of the memory at the sound of it. not everyone spends like nine hours a day in my head.
the only obvious thing here is your—wait, wait wait. george. george!
that’s my name, George thinks back to him, crystal-clear and vivid as anything. don’t wear it out. The memory twists around them, pulled off course by their thoughts drifting off topic, and Dream can feel him again, the steady amusement and near-whimsical interest that only barely includes their current situation, self-satisfied at being able to drag Dream into his RABIT by choosing such a specific memory to lose himself in.
Dream’s mock-irritation belies the way the alignment bar ticks up, and up, and up. you chased the rabbit on purpose! he accuses, borderline giddy.
“Why are we talking in our heads?” George says, physically turning to look at him with a grin he can’t quite keep off his face.
“Don’t you deflect,” Dream says. “You RABITed!”
“I didn’t RABIT.”
“You what?!” says George’s comm, which Dream hears through George’s ears. Shared senses, washing through the drift like habit, have never brought him such a sense of relief.
“I didn’t ,” insists George.
“Yes you did! You literally did!”
“Nope. Never happened. You don’t have any proof.”
Dream hurls the memory of literally one minute ago into George’s head, and George retorts with a blast of circus music that Dream echoes back at him, louder. Dream’s the more experienced drifter, he knows how to be the most irritating copilot ever, and George is an idiot for daring to challenge him.
“No proof!” George nearly shouts, trying to be even louder than the music being projected into his thoughts.
there’s a whole bunch of proof! indignant! we’re at the literal bottom of the—wait, shit—“we’re at the bottom of the ocean because you fucked up!” Dream says, remembering to talk out loud just a second too late.
George rolls his eyes, even as they move together and try to push Nightfall Sniper to its feet. It’s easy to move the jaeger like this, like it really is just another part of them. The jaeger’s creaking and struggling engine goes unheard as he says, “Uh, I think if you check the logs, you’ll see that that was all you.”
“Hey, not to interrupt your super-important arguing or anything,” says Sapnap-Karl-Quackity through the earpiece in the eerie synchronization of copilots deep in drift, “but in case you didn’t notice, we’re still fighting!”
The situation is dire and growing worse by the second but Dream can’t help but think, at least i’m not alone this time.
rolled eyes. you weren’t alone i was here you were just deaf for like ten minutes.
you chased the rabbit! you! don’t you lecture me.
and you followed, so there, you’re the idiot. “What do you want from us? We’re stuck,” George says to Sapnap, ignoring Dream’s disagreeing huff. As if on cue, the jaeger’s cameras flicker and die, blinding them to the fascinating view they had of the ocean floor. The lights dim as well, switching onto some kind of power-saving mode.
From way back in the House, the marshal sighs. “Blitzkrieg Aria is on their way to back you up, Blaze. Night, stay put.”
“We couldn’t go anywhere if we wanted to,” Dream says, but George is the only one who hears him, because he’d tossed out his earpiece. Oops. They’re definitely going to install speakers into the cockpit next time.
George catches that thought with a real roll of his eyes this time. of all things. can’t believe you. stuck under the sea with kaiju and jaegers fighting outside and that’s what you’re worried about?
my worries left when you came back. wait that wasn’t as funny as i meant it to be, Dream quickly appends, knowing it’s a moot point to try and hide anything from someone who’s already in his head but trying to project as much Do Not Look around his fluster as he can regardless.
Something warm swells up between them, suffused with not just the trust and understanding of copilots but the affection of i missed you even for so short a time found mirrored in each other no matter how they try to veil it.
nope can’t process that now no, anyway it wasn’t my fault. that part is true and real, George barrels on, reluctant to linger on the way Dream shakes i missed you! at him despite the thrum of joy that it brings. didn’t they update the handshaking program recently, maybe there’s a versioning issue or a leftover glitch. felt like—stuck path barred couldn’t feel—like something was in the way.
so you picked a memory to get lost in?
a memory for you to find me with, is George’s first thought, followed shortly by, since, i mean, it’s the least you could do as a copilot—
i know what you mean, Dream thinks. Very carefully, he brings up the memory of late nights spent on video games and the early mornings in the cafeteria thereafter, the first few days of their introduction when George was so jet-lagged he couldn’t sleep properly, the countless times they sparred until they wound up lounging on the floor and talking about what they could remember of pre-kaiju life, all their favorite non-apocalyptic things to do…
Their first drift, the clumsy collision of their thoughts that somehow delivered one of the cleanest kills the coast had ever seen, and the celebrations and smiles they had after.
Nightfall Sniper’s cockpit is completely dark now, powered down from the seawater flooding through its multitude of parts, but Dream drags up the image of the sunrise they watched and the thought of look, another day. look, we delayed the apocalypse again.
actually we didn’t do much this time, George points out, just to be contrary, and Dream shouts loud enough to be picked up on the earpiece, “We still contributed!”
“Someone cut these two from the line before I strangle them both,” Sapnap says through the earpiece.
George huffs, pulling together a mental image of dragging Nightfall across the seafloor to grab Blazing Rift’s ankles, and Dream thinks amusement, we could, we could, we could even kill the kaiju after, can’t even fire us, who else they gonna hire? even though he knows that Nightfall won’t move another inch.