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It’s the morning of the Triumphant’s redeployment, and Wolffe’s seeing rainbows, jagged auras that tear at his brain with sharp teeth.
Of fucking course he has a migraine, on this day of all days. They were triggered by stress and anxiety, but sometimes they just happened.
Just a fun little souvenir from having your eye ripped out by debris and replaced with a prosthetic.
It’s funny. His prosthetic eye works perfectly, even when the migraines occur. It’s his human eye that starts to see the telltale static lines cross his vision, and it’s the unscarred side of his face that aches from his forehead down to his teeth, like someone’s embedded an axe into his face and left it there.
At his side on the catwalk looking over the massive Jaeger bay, Fox notices. Fox notices everything, ever since they’d been decanted into the Kaiju War; custom-made identical clone partners designed to drift with the Force sensitive pilots.
“You ok, Wolffe?” he whispers, slanting a glance at where Wolffe’s hands are white-knuckling the rail.
“Fine.” He wants to see this through. He wants to see the Triumphant, his beloved Jaeger, stride out to sea again. He wants to prove that being taken off the duty roster doesn’t hurt, that he can support his brother and his old partner and not feel any slow-burning hatred towards Fox at all.
In truth, there’s no one to hate but the kaiju. It was the kaiju that had taken out the Triumphant, along with Wolffe’s right eye, his shoulder, and part of his hip. He’d spent weeks in the medbay, and when he came out, he couldn’t enter the drift without sudden, screaming pain in his head. He’d known it was over then; the meeting with Plo, Windu, and Director Yoda had just confirmed it.
The aura creeps across his vision, turning everything at the edges to jagged rainbows and the center to a pure, blinding white. Soon he won’t be able to see out of that eye at all. Splitting pain pulses in his face, in his teeth, and Wolffe curses quietly.
“Meds?” Fox says, too low for anyone else to hear. Yes. Good idea. Meds. Wolffe fishes them out of a pouch on his belt and lets Fox steer him by the elbow towards the barracks. His right eye is functionally blinded, tunneled down to only white with the world shattering crazily around the edges. The input from his prosthetic is clear, but - a Jaeger pilot needs two eyes
Fox drags him into his room and makes him sit. A glass of water is pushed into his hand, and Wolffe downs the migraine pills with a few sips - any more than that and he’s sure he’ll throw up.
“Lay down,” Fox whispers in his scratchy voice. “You don’t have to prove anything by being there.”
“I know. Ok? I know,” Wolffe grits out, then sighs. He’s not angry at Fox for replacing him on the Triumphant. Plo had already assured Wolffe that their bond wouldn’t change.
He’d proved that many times over already, by guiding Wolffe through his physical therapy, sparring gently with him, even sitting there murmuring reassurances as Wolffe cried. No, Plo’s heart had room for both him and his brother.
And if anyone deserved Plo’s partnership, it was Fox.
He and Fox were equally vicious on the battlefield, but off, Wolffe was less paranoid, less calculating, and so he’d been the clone paired to drift with Plo Koon, the gentlest force sensitive in the Jaeger program. Fox had always been sharp and cunning, just like his namesake; it was why he and Sheev Palpatine had made such a good team with the Coruscanti, until -
Wolffe would always hate himself a little bit for not noticing the signs; how Fox always seemed to have black eyes from “sparring”, how his brother had shrunk in on himself until he barely spoke, how he never seemed to have time for their batch anymore.
Eventually Sheev had gone too far and choked Fox half to death; Wolffe remembers the livid purple bruises ringing his brother’s neck and the hoarse sounds of his ruined voice telling them everything in the stark white hospital room. It had all come out, Sheev had been arrested, and Fox was free.
Free, but grounded, same as Wolffe. Now Fox has a chance to drift again; Wolffe never would.
“I want you to know that I’m proud of you, Fox,” Wolffe says. His prosthetic eye shows him Fox smiling, bittersweet and fond; his other eye is just white static.
