Chapter Text
Jade Harley waited at the airport, heart racing in her chest and hands shaking. She had made it through the Jaeger Academy. Weeks ago she thought graduation at the top of her class would bring her some relief, but there was none to be found in a waiting room full of her peers who were now all competing for the same job. Graduating shouldn't feel like being thrown into a cage match. She had been on her own for years since her grandpa died, but she had never felt so alone as she did waiting for the plane to take her to the Shatterdome.
It seemed a miracle that Jade got this far. The odds were certainly not in her favour, all things considered; she was a scholarship student with no influential family -- or any family. She had no relatives with a military background to help her like some of the others did. Not only has she made it through, she was now sitting in an Alaskan airport with twenty-eight other graduates to be sent directly to a Shatterdome for selection.
Jade had worked hard to become a pilot, but she never realised the reality would arrive so quickly after graduating. Jade couldn't help but feel unprepared. She didn't really know any of her classmates all that well, and yet to have a shot she would need to be able to drift with them. To go to that Shatterdome in Los Angeles and prove to whoever would listen that she was the best pilot they had. Could she do that?
Her eyes drifted across the faces of her peers around her. Most ignored each other, a few were chatting amiably if they knew each other. Not everyone who was selected were friends -- they prioritised personal potential over fleeting teenage friendships, for reasons Jade appreciated. Teenagers could be fickle and mean. Hell, now they were technically adults, and Jade still remained weary; As a scholarship student at a highly competitive school full of old money, she had learned long ago to put up walls.
Rich snobs or not, she noticed that many of her peers shared the same solemnness and apprehension. A lot of Jager Academy families moved to Kodiak to be with their star children, and now those kids were leaving their helicopter parents behind for the first time in their lives. Jade had one advantage in not having anyone left to miss. Obviously, she would rather have someone to miss than nobody, but she'd learned not to let that thought run away from her. All it would do was invite rabbits, and in her line of work those were deadly.
Jade empathised with those who already looked homesick, as she knew how hard it must be to say goodbye even temporarily. As for those who looked nervous, she too couldn’t shake the feeling that the odds of success were stacked astronomically against her. At best, two of their group might see active service in a Jager, but it wasn't unheard of for the Jager program to recruit by other means. Their graduation, their years of study… it had only promised them one thing, and that was an interview. Nothing more.
Jade couldn't help but snort bitterly at the thought of all the hoops they jumped through just to have a chance at dunking some aliens back into the drink. When she’d first become interested in kaiju it wasn’t because of a violent urge to beat the hell out of something, but an interest in life beyond their planet, and dimensions beyond their own. She’d always thought she would grow up to study the rift. What would she be doing now, in a dimension where she’d taken that path? Certainly not bouncing with nervous energy in a socially hostile environment, that was for sure.
"Could you cut that out?" A voice, sudden and sharp, cut into Jade's train of thought. She looked up to see a girl sitting across from her. The girl was lean, like Jade, but seemed to be quite a bit taller even sitting down. Her eyes, which were outlined in black with admirable precision, were narrowed at Jade's confused expression with a look of disdain. "The pen. Lose it."
Taken aback by the harsh comment, Jade looked at the pen in her hand, only now realizing she had subconsciously been nervously tapping it on the arm of the chair while she sat with the other candidates in the boarding lounge. Was this pen even hers? When did she pick it up? She hoped quietly she hadn't stolen someone's tool for crosswords or sudoku--
"It's that long thin thing in your hand," the girl prompted snidely, as if Jade didn't know what she was looking for. She didn't look up to meet the girl's gaze as she went red and immediately shoved the pen in her pocket. It wasn't really about the pen at all. She was used to this kind of passive aggression from her peers that could actually afford tuition; A scholarship such as hers was perceived as an unfair exception due to circumstance. It seemed the only thing they didn't deem an "unfair advantage" was having the money to buy your education, ironically enough.
Jade tried not to take it all to heart, but years of a hyper competitive setting had worn her so thin. Her willingness to trust others wasn't what it had been when she was young. She just hoped she still had enough left to give what it took to get herself in a Jaeger. She couldn't even imagine failure.
As they waited for the gate to open so they could board their flight, Jade flicked through the glossy pages of a leaflet for the Jaeger Program. It had been given to each of them in their orientation kit. "Introducing The Jaeger Program" read the header, with a grey background and the silhouettes of many recognisable Jaegers overlapping across the background. The next page showed two pilots, their backs to the camera, and a graphic representing a neural link between them.
Jade had done it before many times on trial runs, but it was different to high stress situations. To enter the mind of another person, and trust them with your life and all that it held up until the moment your minds touched? That was hard with or without the threat of a giant alien tearing you to shreds.
They finally boarded the plane that had been lying in wait on the icy tarmac like an ominous predator, and Jade found an empty seat in the back rows. She slept most of the ten hour flight to Los Angeles. Only the flight attendant thought to wake her when they landed, and she rushed to gather her things while the backs of her peers disappeared single file into the LA sunlight.