Author's Notes: It took a while to get this written, if only because the chapters are so long and extensive. It may not look it, but I put a shit ton of stupid details in this thing. I'm so fond of it. At any rate, there is only one more chapter left after this.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Life sucks.
The Long Night
part four
The years after Ned's death were long and hard, but Catelyn bore them with a kind of silent strength thought only capable of jaeger pilots. While Robb waged war against the creatures that took his father away and Arya disappeared into the Jaeger Academy the second she turned fifteen, while Sansa graduated top of her class with a political science degree from NYU and Bran dug himself into his studies about jaeger tech science, while Rickon became wild and disruptive in school, Catelyn took all their pain and sorrow and absorbed it as best as she could. How anyone could continue on after their soulmate's death had been beyond her until it had actually happened.
Ned died.
She mourned.
But more importantly, she lived.
When Catelyn visits the Shatterdome in San Diego where Arya is about to graduate and Robb is stationed, it's the first time that she witnesses firsthand what goes on when a kaiju appears. She doesn't panic, despite being what everyone here would call a "simple civilian". Instead she hurries to where her children are. She knows that they hate being babied and not all of them are children anymore, but she can't help herself.
"Is Robb going to be deployed?" Rickon asks as they weave their way through a flood of mechanics and techs.
Catelyn glances at her youngest, but is unable to say anything, her throat closed up. No, she tells herself, they'll someone more experienced, older, wiser. They won't send a jaeger team that has only fought two kaiju up against a Category V.
(Ah, but she knows better though. Jaegers have been dropping like flies in these past few years, what with the kaiju evolving, according to Bran and all the research articles he's been burning through. The kaiju are growing larger while humanity is only growing desperate.)
Somehow, miracle upon miracles, they find Robb just as he's finished suiting up.
"Mother–"
He's in his mid-twenties, still so young and fresh, his red hair curly and sitting in his eyes. He needs a haircut, lest it gets in his soft blue eyes in his helmet. Sometimes, she forgets that he has a pregnant wife shuttering around here, a gentle girl named Jeyne that has only ever been sweet. But Robb will forever be a child in her mind.
"Just come back home," Catelyn says, no pleads.
The look in her eyes is too much for him and he turns away. As he walks down the hall to meet up with Theon, his co-pilot, Rickon shouts after him, "Kick some kaiju ass!"
Robb affords his little brother a grin and Theon gives a thumbs up. Catelyn is too busy thinking about Ned drowning in his own blood to consider reprimanding Rickon for his language. Once Robb vanished from their sight, the two of them make their way to a bridge where they can watch Young Wolf come to life and then disembark on their battle, where they were fighting alongside another team, Patrek Mallister and Dacey Mormont.
Just as the jaeger begins to head into the bay, Arya rushes up behind them, sweating and out of breath. "I missed him!" she wails out in despair.
Rickon rolls his eyes, all child-like arrogance and surety. "It's not like you won't see him when he gets back."
Catelyn almost misses it – but she catches the strange and distant look in Arya's eyes as she looked at her youngest brother. It was the look of someone that has been studying, the look of someone that has finally begun to understand that this war takes no prisoners, only lives. Before Catelyn can say anything though, the look fades away and her youngest daughter's face is a blank canvas. Arya is the best out of all her children at that. Sansa can hide what she's feeling, but the moment someone she loves is concerned, she is all emotion. Robb has always worn his heart on his sleeve and has never been afraid of showing it. Bran is so completely unashamed of explaining how he feels that Catelyn sometimes feels he's more emotionally mature than she is. And Rickon is all wildfire.
Arya, however, is able to put on another face at the drop of the hat. Sometimes she slips, as she just did, but then she'll blink and be someone wholly different. There are moments when Catelyn fears that she cannot recognize her young daughter. It's like she's looking at another girl, not her Arya – but then she'll bit her bottom lip and return back to the Arya that Catelyn has tried to protect from herself all her life.
"Yeah, you're right," Arya says, a placating smile appearing on her face. It's not a smile meant for Rickon. It's a smile meant for Catelyn, meant to make her mother worry less. (It doesn't work anymore.) "I wanted to ask him for help with some new fighting techniques Syrio taught me in the Kwoon today. I'll just do it after he and Theon knock this kaiju back to the hell it crawled out of."
Her voice speaks of confidence. Her two children go hand in hand to watch the feed of the fight, Catelyn trailing behind them. There's a rat chewing in her stomach, only serving to call a wave of nausea to roll over her. It's still there, gnawing away at any self-assurance she might have left in her, by the time she reaches the tech room. Their new J-Tech Chief, Roose Bolton, stands at attention watching the screens, his calm demeanor making her feel colder instead of relaxed. Her entire mind feels unsettled, like she knows that there's something wrong but she just can't figure out what.
"Prepare to engage in combat, Wolf," Roose intones, almost sounding bored with the whole thing.
The incredible urge to smack the man comes over Catelyn, but she clasps her shaking hands in front of her instead.
"Category V, my ass!" Theon barks out with a laugh once the kaiju breaches the water. She can almost picture the easy grin on his face, the one he almost always wears whenever he catches sight of a pretty girl. But she can't though because the huge massive kaiju on the screen is all she can see, each step rumbling like thunder and creating monster waves.
It's difficult not to watch the fight through the slits of her fingers, but she keeps her hands tightly clasped and her eyes glued on the screen. She barely registers Rickon's hollering and cheers, Roose's commands and visual information, Arya's stone cold silence and intense face, or even the sounds coming over the speakers from the two jaegers going head-to-head against the largest kaiju she's ever seen. There are no sounds. Only sights. Sparks, bright blue acid, fire, steam, metal, armored skin, swords, and knives – kaiju and jaeger melding into one as they clash against each other.
"Wait–" Roose furrows his brow, looking more human than robot for the first time, and begins to fidget with the computer at his left. Catelyn wants to scream at him, remind him just who and what he needs to be paying attention to, when he jumps forward and grabs the mic, even though it won't help the jaeger pilots hear him any better. "There's a second signal from behi–"
Before anyone can do or say anything, a kaiju bursts out of the water headfirst, its head looking more like a knife than anything else, and it roars ferociously as it digs its knife head deep into Young Wolf's torso, piercing through it completely.
Everyone goes silent in the room, Rickon dropping his arms so fast, Arya turning pale white, Roose nearly breaking the mic – all except for Catelyn.
She screams and screams until her throat is raw and there is nothing left of her.
Sansa is the picture of pleasantness. She is the great soother, the bringer of soft smiles, the speaker of matters. While her younger sister dreamed of fighting against the kaiju in a jaeger, Sansa always knew that there was another battleground meant for her, and that is in government buildings. For the little that they know about the kaiju, they are simple creatures with one goal. People, especially politicians that had no real or even a hint of understanding about what it was like to go up against a monster from another dimension in a giant robot or lose their loved ones in those fights, were a completely different matter altogether.
"The Pacific Wall is a ridiculous program from start to finish," Sansa says with clarity, not a drop of forgiveness in her tone. Normally she is gentle, able to placate and sway the most ardent of those that oppose her into agreeing with her, but today she feels like she's on the breaking point. She sits calmly at her table while gazing at a group of people from around the world that will decide their planet's future, looking them directly in the face, doing her best to look demure, but she can't stop herself from twirling her pen nervously between her fingers.
"Ridiculous?" a man of unimport (at least to her) exclaims. "There have been many promising reports–"
"The plans for the Wall were made years ago when Category IV's were just starting to crawl out from the Breach, not taking Category V's and soon-to-be Category VI's into consideration," Sansa interrupts. All of the politicians glance at one another, all of them very unused to being interrupted, especially by her. Even before graduating, she had wormed her way into many of these councils. She was knowledgeable, genial, and most importantly, politicians liked her. The Marshall decided to use her for that very reason. She might not agree with everything that Tywin Lannister did, but she respects him and knows he is right. The Jaeger Program took away her father and her older brother, her best friend's older brother, and so many more. Her only sister was next in line to die. But she knows that it's the right thing to stand by, not stand behind some stupid concrete wall. "The Wall will fall. What would you have citizens do then?"
"People are evacuating closer inland–"
"Do you mean the wealthy?" Sansa practically huffs in aggravation at them. These men and women are privileged and hiding in fear behind their privilege and holding onto their money is far more important to them than protecting lives. If the kaiju win and take over, their money won't be worth so much anymore. "People like you, like me and my family, can afford to move inland, but that leaves the majority of the population out in the cold with nothing more than blankets to protect them. This plan will end billions of innocent lives, but in more ways than just killing them. The Wall is nothing but a cage. It won't keep the kaiju out, but it will keep us in."
"Miss Stark, you of all people should know the costs of the Jaeger Program," a woman says. "Your sister is in the program. Are you willing to sacrifice her as well?"
Sansa pushes her chair away from the table and stands up straight, unable to keep her cheeks from flushing bright pink. "If my sister is willing to sacrifice her life in order to protect your ineffectual minds and selfish lifestyles, then that's her decision to make, not mine."
A two pilot system.
The phrase bounces around in Arya's head, has been for years, for what feels like her whole life. Jaegers have been an integral part of her world since she was born. Becoming a pilot, a fighter, has been her dream. It is what she was born to do. She knows that in her bones. Whenever she was around Winter Fury as a child, she'd press her hand against the cool metal and she swore that she could feel its soul humming against her. She's a jaeger pilot without a jaeger.
And without a co-pilot, it seems.
"Dad tried to warn me about this," Arya groaned into her pillow the night before.
Sansa was there to visit, sitting at her bedside and smoothing Arya's messy brown hair just as she'd done when Arya was really little and had a bad dream about huge monsters and Daddy dying. Another meeting with the Political Powers that Be had gone awry. She didn't say anything, of course, but Arya could tell. She'd thought that maybe she and Sansa might be drift compatible, but Sansa just smiled and shook her head when Arya suggested it. "I'm fighting a different kind a war," she sighed, "a much more annoying one."
Though her big sister said nothing, Arya didn't really need her to. She was done with the Academy, but left stranded in water without a co-pilot. Only two people had piloted a jaeger alone (the Marshall and Loras Tyrell – she'd read the reports thousands of times) and it ended badly for both of them. Neither were able to pilot a jaeger again. Arya is stubborn and independent and very much a loner – she doesn't need help from anyone and she steadfastly refuses anything of the sort – but this is something she can't do on her own. Her father had his best friend, Robert Baratheon; Robb had his best friend, Theon Greyjoy. And who does Arya Stark have? No one.
In the Kwoon Combat Room the next day, Arya practices in silence, on her own, as she has always done, even before she was in the Academy. She has the moves of masters like Jaime Lannister and the late Oberyn Martell imprinted in her memory. Cut fiercely like a lion, she thinks, move quick like a snake.
(Bite down and kill kill kill like a wolf.)
Arya swings the hanbo around – and nearly falls back when the stick clatters against another.
Looking up sharply and breathing heavily, Arya finds herself standing in front of a much taller boy. He hasn't been around long, having come from an Academy much further south, but he's fixed to graduate. Shaggy black hair, bright blue eyes, muscular build, probably more than a foot on her, and either wearing some stupid grin or stubborn scowl. Most notably, he was something of a lone wolf, like her.
His name is Gendry Waters, she remembers suddenly.
"Can't be getting much practice fighting with air," Gendry says.
A flame of indignation rises in her belly. "Air probably puts up a better fight than you."
The stupid grin appears on his face and she feels the urge to swipe it off with her hanbo. "Wanna bet?"
"Bet what?" Arya has plenty of money that she's saved over the years, but while she doesn't know this older boy very well, she does know that he doesn't come from money. He got here by the scrape of his neck, plucked out of some town for a talent he wasn't aware of having – a talent for fighting.
He shrugs his shoulders. "Dunno. Bragging rights?"
"Bragging is for losers."
"Oh, you're probably right," he sighs melodramatically. "What would be the point if I'm just bragging about beating a little lady anyways?"
Arya swings at him blindly. "I'm not a lady!"
But he just laughs – he laughs – and swats her wild attack away with his own hanbo. His laughter bounces in her mind now, and she switches tactics almost instantly. Her brain never goes into autopilot like she sees some jaeger pilot wannabes do. You can never go into autopilot. You have to always be in the moment – always in jaeger pilot mode, as Bran calls it. When she attacks, it's with precision, a tranquility she wasn't thought capable of. When she fights, it's almost like she's dancing.
Indeed, to anyone watching, the two of them dance around the room and each other, their hanbos clicking and clacking against one another rhythmically. It's like she knows his steps before he makes them, but he knows hers as well. The moment he has the upper-hand on her, she slides out of the way and then she has the upper-hand. All of it both frustrates her and exhilarates her as she fends off an attack and then goes to strike him. It's a dance to a song that has played in her heart more times than she can remember. His almost mocking laugh keeps ricocheting off the walls, but soon it is mixed with the sound of her own triumphant laugh when she actually smacks him in the ass.
"Not so cocky now, are you, you bull-headed boy?" she taunts.
Gendry doesn't say anything. Instead, he uses her arrogance to his advantage and he somehow manages to swipe her off her feet and pin her down against the floor. The smug look on his face is almost too infuriating. "Maybe I was going easy on you."
Completely ignoring the stick in her hands, she sweeps feet around and hooks one around his ankle, catching him unaware and jerking him hard, causing him to come tumbling down too. Arya is on him in a second, practically sitting on his chest and pressing her hanbo down against him. "If that was you not going easy, then you better go back to the Academy while you can," she says, her lips curling up into a smirk. "I win."
For a second, neither of them say anything, just sort of…sit there, staring at each other, both gasping for breath and sweating, red in the face. This is the hardest she's fought in a while; and though she won't say it out loud, fighting him was a lot better than fighting on her own. It felt…it felt good, electric, right.
There is a very strange look in his eyes, one that catches her off guard and makes her not want to breathe – or maybe it makes her incapable of breathing. It's nothing like she's ever seen or felt before. Her heart races manically in her chest, her grip on the hanbo tightening so that they don't start shaking, and she just–
A very strangled-sounding, "Arya…?" comes out of Gendry's mouth, and that's enough to startle her into action.
She jumps up off him and throws the stick to the side of the room like it's been contaminated. With what, she doesn't know – just…just something. As he clambers to his feet, she frantically looks everywhere but him, trying to remember words, the English language, anything but what is swirling inside of her body right now, but nothing comes up. When she looks at him, there's that electric feeling again; and she swears that there's a crackle of static in the air. Gods, she was losing it. Not sleeping properly in a week was going to her head.
"I've got to go," Arya finally musters, turning on her heels and starting to run.
"Wait, Arya!" Gendry shouts after her. "Shit, wait! Just – would you just stop?"
Arya does stop, though why, she couldn't really say. She doesn't turn around though. She can't. But she knows that he hasn't moved – that he's just standing there, wearing a confused look, his brow furrowed in a way that says he's thinking of something really difficult and can't figure it out. She knows that he's breathing heavily, his chest rising and falling in rhythm with hers. She knows that he's brimming with the same energy as her. "You felt it too, right?" is all he asks.
Anyone could train to be a jaeger pilot – but not everyone is drift compatible with someone.
"Drift compatibility is a rare ability to find it another person," her father told her one time when she was a very little girl. "You'll know if they are."
"Arya, I know, it's kind of crazy, but – well, I think – we're–"
"Drift compatible," she finishes, turning around to face him.
He grins slowly, unsurely, not so smugly.
She laughs clear as water.
(Bran is going to make so many jokes about this, she knows it; and Sansa will smile knowingly. Rickon will pepper her with an endless amount of questions and her mother will return to biting her nails. Robb would have loved Gendry. And for some reason, Arya can't help but think that her father would be proud. Gendry kind of looks like Robert, after all, and they have a similar laugh too.)
"Math, math, math – you should listen to yourself sometimes. We're talking about living creatures, not some abstract concept."
"What you seem incapable of understanding is that math is alive – it's in everything we do, see, breathe. Math is about as abstract as you."
Tyrion's mouth twists into an almost gruesome grin. "You must not know me very well yet. I'm about as abstract as they come."
His new, much younger lab partner nods his head almost thoughtfully and turns his attention back to his laptop, their almost argument already shoved out of his mind. Ah, youth – so full of bright ideas that they believed no one else thought up before. Tyrion remembers it well. It's why he can't fault the young man for thinking this way. To his credit, he's not entirely wrong either, though Tyrion would be the last one to admit it. The kid is extraordinarily bright and reminds Tyrion so much of himself at that age, so full of life, so full of wonder. They've both been through a hell of a lot too in order to get where they are, even if the Kaiju Science Department was depleted of nearly all its resources and funding these days.
After trying to get his head back into the piece of kaiju that he's experimenting on, Tyrion stops again and can't help but glance at his lab partner. To anyone that doesn't know them that walks by this lab and glances inside, they'd look like a ridiculous sight – a dwarf and a crippled young man, barely passed being a kid. Bran Stark has a good head on his shoulders – great really. His legs might not work anymore, but his brain is more than fine.
Besides, kaiju didn't care about any of that. They didn't care if you were in a wheelchair or barely taller than a child or completely able-bodied. We're all just ants to be stepped on to them.
"I remember when I just started here; I wasn't much older than you." The words come out of his mouth without him really thinking about it. For the past few months, it's just been him in this lab, everyone else having left when their pay was decreased and funding began to dwindle. Bran was different though. He'd jumped at the chance to join this Department, make a difference, do some science. He didn't care about the shit pay. "I thought I could save the world with science."
Bran smiles back at him, his eyes glinting behind his glasses. The smile makes him look remarkably young, definitely not like someone with a PhD under his belt, but then again, he graduated early for a reason. "Maybe you still can. There's always hope." This boy lost a father and a brother. His great uncle is dying of radiation poisoning from the Mark I generation (along with the Marshall). His mother is still in mourning. He had one sister off fighting in her own jaegaer now. And yet here he is, smiling.
It blows Tyrion's mind a little when he thought nothing else could. "Give yourself a few years. That hope won't feel so shiny."
At this, the smile fades and Bran looks back at his computer screen. "If my calculations are correct, we won't have a few years if something doesn't change – if we don't make a change."
Cersei's young voice from the past whispering in his ear, "I'm the only one Jaime could be drift compatible with and you know it," wakes Jaime up on a nearly nightly basis at this point. Casterly Rock has been out of commission for a year since undergoing terrible damage after a kaiju fight gone wrong. Sometimes, he'll flex his right hand and, if he doesn't look down, he can almost pretend that it's still there and he's not just imagining things, and it's not a fake hand there instead.
They saved the machine for the most part, but they couldn't save all of him.
When it's become apparent that sleep isn't going to come to him, Jaime gets out of bed. It's been two weeks since the last kaiju attack and his non-existent hand still aches and his mind burns. He's been itching to get back into the pilot seat, though he knows that it's impossible these days. His prosthetic isn't so much of a problem, not since Willas Tyrell made it the standard that it shouldn't be all those years ago, but his choice of drift partner on the other hand…
That was what had gone wrong a year ago. "You're out of calibration!" Baelish shouted at them, but that had been unnecessary. Jaime had fallen into the fucking RABIT like an amateur – except this time, instead of in training or during prep, it had been in the middle of fight with two kaiju.
("Jaime! Jaime, come back to me! For fuck's sake – my god – Jaime, please–"
Are you going to fuck Lancel again "Jaime can never know never know I can hide this from him even in the Drift" Are you going to fuck I can't trust her how can I trust her I love her "He's nothing I'm the real brains of the jaeger" time you find another fucking co-pilot "as thick as the press makes you out to be you're as thick" another fucking co-pilot "I love you I love you I love you you are mine and I am yours mine yours no one else can have you but me" she is all I ARE YOU GOING TO FUCK LANCEL AGAIN)
Jaime blinks. The memory fades away. They warn you about the RABIT in training – "Don't go chasing the RABIT!" – but to actually experience it is something else entirely. It takes over your whole world, mind, and body. By the time he'd come out of it, he was on the operating table and Casterly Rock was bleeding oil and he was bleeding blood and Cersei was howling and Tywin was silent as stone.
Who will love Tyrion if I'm gone? he remembers thinking blearily, not yet aware that he was missing a part of himself.
(His hand had been cut off his body, and Cersei had been cut out of his mind.)
Without realizing it, Jaime finds himself standing at the foot of Casterly Rock, which is being worked on even this late at night. Mechanics have been working hard on and off to repair the jaeger in hopes of putting their star jaeger team back in action before they run out of funding at the commands of Tywin Lannister. Jaime doesn't have the heart to tell his father that it's pointless – that he'll never pilot the jaeger again with Cersei – and knows that even if he did, his father wouldn't stop.
"You miss her, don't you?" a voice says from behind him.
When Jaime whirls around, he's caught off guard by what greets him. What he heard was a soft female voice; what he sees is a tall woman in a mechanic uniform with broad shoulders and cropped blond hair. He doesn't say anything at first, just eyes her with suspicion, unsure of what to make of her. He's been mocked for his condition, his seeming impotence, the great Jaime Lannister hath fallen, all of that. It's not a stretch for him to think that this is just another trap to tease him.
But the look on her face speaks of nothing except for genuineness. "Wish I could pilot one of them," she sighs wistfully, gazing up at the jaeger with the type of admiration he'd once reserved only for Cersei. "They're amazing creations. I've worked on them for years and know their ins and outs, but I've never actually been in one."
"Being in a jaeger is all I know," Jaime says without thinking. "I don't know what it's like to be in the outside world."
"Then why don't you go back?" the woman asks.
Jaime doesn't roll his eyes like Cersei would. Instead he waves his prosthetic hand around in the air. "Say hi to the mechanic, fake hand."
Though she most certainly isn't a beauty by any means, her face wide and speckled with freckles, when she blushes, it brings a sort of light to her face, especially her light blue eyes, that catches his attention. "Oh, I didn't mean…" But words fail her and she looks down at the ground, clearly embarrassed. For a while, he was embarrassed too, but he was forced to live with it as well and evolve. Just like the kaiju – gotta adapt. "I used to dream about becoming a jaeger pilot."
"Then why didn't you?" Jaime asks. He knows that he should just leave, end this conversation, go back to his bunker, pretend to sleep, ignore Cersei all day, try to eat lunch with Tyrion, go to physical therapy, mental therapy, all that stupid daily stuff… But he can't, he doesn't want to, not yet at least. It's been a long while since he's just talked with someone and it feels like relieving pressure that has been building up inside his brain.
"I did – well, I tried." Again, the mechanic girl looks embarrassed. She's taller than he is, looks like she could toss him like a rag doll in the Kwoon, especially at this point in his life, but here she looks young, like a little girl. "I pretty much washed out. I couldn't… I wasn't…drift compatible with any of the other graduates."
("I'm the only one Jaime could be drift compatible.")
"Try again," Jaime says suddenly. "Don't just quit. Try again. That's what a true jaeger pilot would do."
At this, the woman looks at him, all challenging-like. "So says the guy who lost one fight a year ago and just quit after being the rockstar among all jaeger pilots?"
He doesn't know what he's saying and he certainly doesn't know why he's saying it, but for the first time in fucking years, the words coming out of his mouth feel like his own. "Maybe I'll try again too. Maybe it's time to go back."
Time for revenge. Time for redemption.