Giant Robots: On a Dirt-Bike Made for Two
Dec. 13th, 2013 05:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeOn a Dirt-Bike Made for Two
Prompt: Stuff100 “Spring,” H/C Bingo “hugs”
Summary: It’s spring at the Jaeger Academy, and M.D. and Biff are desperate to get outside. Too bad April on Kodiak Island is also known as ‘ice rink season.’
Notes: Takes place after Sturm und Drang, a few months after the Dark of Winter.
By the time April rolls around, M.D. is thoroughly sick of Alaska. The entire Jaeger Academy is covered in ice and snow, and M.D. is positive she has slipped, tripped, and fallen on every single patch of it. Apparently giant monster-punching robots are totally within the realm of possibility, but keeping the streets properly shoveled is just too much to ask for.
The Canadians, Russians, and the Japanese from Hokkaido, of course, are totally at home. They race along on snowshoes and cross-country skis, pointing and laughing whenever one of the Fijians or Australians take a fall.
Nobody laughs when M.D. takes a fall. The Rangers just studiously ignore her, or worse, try and pick her up and put her back on her feet, like she’s a small child. After the second time one of the Russians attempt this, M.D. takes to hitting people with her crutches and snarling at them. It offends them, but at least it allows her to keep some semblance of her dignity. Biff is better—he makes good ballast and he doesn’t appear to notice the death grip she keeps on his arm. But though he never says anything about it, she knows it’s difficult for him to move so slowly for her sake.
Biff gets his hands on spikes that go on the tips of her crutches, which helps a little with slipping on ice, but does absolutely nothing about the necessity of wading through knee-deep snowdrifts. And it turns out the spikes become worse than nothing on smooth wet surfaces—like directly inside the doors of the PPDC complex, which is filled with the half-melted slush from hundreds of pairs of boots.
So even with the spikes, it’s almost impossible for M.D. to go outside for any length of time. The herky-jerky cycle of falls, near-falls, and picking herself back up is just too exhausting, and she can’t afford an injury. Four months at the Jaeger Academy, now, and she’s seen practically none of the island. It’s maddening, and being cooped up inside feels too familiar. It reminds her of that never-ending time when her and Biff’s entire universe was a six by ten cell and a tiny exercise yard. Close walls, too close, when what she wants is the blue sky and the living wind and grass and dirt but she can’t.
She remembers when she used to live outside, in a shelter made out of dead trees and a chunk of fencing and a U-haul blanket. When everything was wind and water and figuring out the next meal. She never thought she’d miss that, and now she knows she’ll never be able to do that again.
Biff stays in with her, and they play a lot of cards and read a lot of books and spend a lot of time in the dojo and the rec center, her doing her physical therapy, him pumping iron, but she can see the tension in him. When he doesn’t think she’s looking, she catches him gazing out windows, out at the trees and the snowdrifts, and she knows he wants nothing more than to go out and hike it all. He has strong legs, and he’s not tired all the time. He could still do it.
But he won’t. He doesn’t want to leave her inside alone, because he just can’t shake the fear that if he does, when he comes back she’ll be gone. So he stays.
She would be offended, if she weren’t so pathetically grateful. She doesn’t want to be left alone in the straight, sterile gray walls of the inside. She doesn’t want to be inside at all, but until she can afford an off-road handcycle—and they cost thousands—she doesn’t see how she has a choice in the matter.
Then it becomes spring, and she sees the Harley Davidson.
It’s in the parking lot, squeezed between a Jeep convertible that the owner surely regrets buying and a four-wheeler. M.D. pays it very little attention—what does she care about bikes—but then she sees Biff’s reaction. His feet keep moving, but his head doesn’t, staring at the motorcycle until he’s forced to snap back and look where he’s going. When he sees M.D.’s look, he says, “What? ‘S a nice bike.”
M.D. gets an idea. She hastily takes her hand off his arm before he notices, puts on a look of incredulous boredom, and asks, “Can you even drive one of those things?”
“Sure. Had a dirt bike as a kid.”
“And that was how long ago?”
He rolls his eyes, drawls in a tone of exaggerated patience, “’S like riding a bicycle,” and studiously ignores both bike and her from there on out.
That cements it. M.D. is getting him a motorbike. They’ve been snowed in at Kodiak Island all winter, but spring is here now, and she wants to see the island. They’re both going stir crazy, and for the first time in her life, she has money now. Forget the stupid handcycle; she’ll get that later.
First, though, she needs to find the owner of that Harley and figure out where they got it.
Tendo Choi seems a safe bet, but it turns out he only shares the wardrobe of a greaser, not the riding habits.
“Drive a motorcycle? Here?” He laughs. “Hell no. I like living.”
M.D. doesn’t have the energy to clatter all over the facility searching, so she cuts her losses and goes to George Whakarea.
Even after months at Jaeger Academy, she’s still not sure what exactly Whakarea does. Something to do with HR, maybe—he’s the one who got her with Dr. Kaur—but his official job title seems to be ‘Person who does Things.’ He seems to know something about everything, and she has yet to see him flub a name.
She finds him behind his desk, which is covered in stacks of paperwork and three different cups of coffee, none of which are entirely empty or full. Someone on the phone is screaming at him loudly enough that M.D. can hear it from the door (and it’s not on speakerphone), but Whakarea’s smile is serene and Buddha-like and he nods along amiably, even as he types at full speed.
Eventually, the screamer on the other end winds down, Whakarea says, “I’ll tell him, ma’am, have a nice day,” hangs up, and turns his placid gaze on M.D. “Help you?”
“Who owns the motorbike out there?” She asks.
“The Harley? Dr. Gottlieb, I think. Why?”
“Gottlieb?” She knows who Dr. Gottlieb is, of course. Ey is how she got Biff back on hormones without spilling the beans to everyone in the complex. But somehow, the twitchy intellectual never struck her as the Harley Davidson type.
“Sure. Collects them, I think. That all you need?”
She leaves him to his tasks, whatever they are, and goes to chase down Gottlieb.
It’s not hard. Rather than chase the good doctor around the engineering department, she just sits in a chair outside Geiszler’s office and waits until she hears shouting. Then she raps on the door.
Dr. Geiszler answers, and his eyes light up behind his glasses when he sees her. “Rawlins! What’re you—”
“I’m not here for you,” she interrupts, before he can try to talk her into giving a urine sample or cheek swab. Then she shouts over his head. “Hey, Gottlieb!”
Geiszler wilts and retreats back to his desk, grumbling about how nobody ever comes to his office to talk with him anymore, and Gottlieb appears from behind a large vat of spare kaiju parts, sputtering indignantly about being interrupted.
“Is that your bike outside?” M.D. asks, before Gottlieb can continues ranting.
“What? Yes, it’s mine. Why?”
“Where’d you get it? I want one.”
Gottlieb frowns, and she sees em waffle between continuing eir cathartic rant with Geiszler versus getting someone else into eir hobby. Finally, the motorcycle side wins and ey takes M.D. back to eir office to discuss the matter. M.D. explains her plan to get Biff a gift, and Gottlieb tents eir fingers and makes thinking noises.
“Well, I hope you don’t have your heart set on a Harley,” ey says. “I had mine shipped from the mainland, but it’s ungodly expensive. Besides, if you want something that can handle more than the Jaeger roads, you want something more robust.”
“Like a dirt bike? Do they make those for two?” And then, because ey will know, “With something to stick my crutches on?”
Gottlieb smiles impishly and rests eir chin on eir fingers. Ey, at least, understands her predicament. “How do you think I get around? Here, let’s see what your budget is…”
M.D. grins. For a moment, she doesn’t care that the Rangers pretend she doesn’t exist; her better connections with the support staff are proving rewarding.
After a bit of research and swiping Biff’s phone for some shouty calls (M.D.’s gotten better, but for some reason she still can’t get a phone to function reliably), it’s set up. Biff almost spoils the surprise by getting back from the rec center early, but then she accidentally loses control of her electricity and he gets so worked up ranting at her for destroying his phone that he forgets to ask what she was using it for in the first place.
Two weeks later, when M.D. tells him to get on the bus with her, he grumbles and sneers and rolls his eyes, but he also tries to take her arm to find out what’s going on. She elbows him and tells him, “cope with uncertainty,” and they get on the shuttle bus to Kodiak.
It’s a pain. The bus’s aisle isn’t wide enough to comfortably take M.D.’s crutches, and of course, it’s not a kneeling bus so she has to take a big step up. Somehow, she manages to get in without falling, and they head into town.
The walk from town to the shop is an adventure. What would normally be a five-minute walk for Biff turns into a fifteen-minute slog with M.D., but she’s determined. This is the first time she’s been out and about since December, and she’s going to make this happen in person. She wants to see Biff’s face.
Finally, after taking a wrong turn and having to go back and retrace their steps, they finally find Black’s Workshop.
According to Gottlieb, Lillian Black is the only person on the island who sells a decent bike at a reasonable price—by island standards, anyway, where everything costs roughly fifty percent more than on the mainland. There aren’t enough cars in Kodiak to support a full-time mechanic—even with foolish Ranger recruits buying up Jeeps like hotcakes—so Lillian Black fixes cars, bikes, snow machines, and four-wheelers, and does the odd bit of refurbishing for kicks. She is even less verbally communicative than Biff is, preferring to express herself in grunts and nods.
When M.D. rings the bell, she comes out from her workshop, wiping her hands on a rag. Her face is like granite, but she looks at M.D., gives a brusque nod, and returns to her workshop, waving them in after her.
Inside is an idling, battered dirt bike. Its paint is faded with grime and wind, but everything works and its tires and suspension can handle the rough back roads of Kodiak Island, and it’ll carry two people.
Biff doesn’t seem to get it, so Lillian Black apparently decides to encourage him.
“Racing bike, once,” she says, patting her hand on the faded number 40 on its side. “Not so fast anymore. But…” and she taps the special fixture on the side for M.D.’s crutches.
Now it sinks in. Biff swoops around to give M.D. an incredulous look.
M.D. shrugs. “What else am I going to spend my money on? Besides, I’m fit to burn the whole complex—”
He hugs her. Just for a split instant, hard enough for her to feel the muscle through his vest and jacket, and then he pulls back, awkwardly thumping her on the back. He seems to be trying to reassemble his face into something other than a scowl, but it’s been so long that he can’t seem to remember how.
“Get off, get off,” she grumbles, shoving at him with a crutch. “Don’t get all soppy on me, I’m just using you for your ability to drive…”
He ruffles her hair roughly, then goes to investigate the bike. This time, he notices the grip heaters, the cloth athletic tape on the clutch and gear levers. This isn’t a cheechako job; this bike will hold up in the weather. He smiles and straddles the bike. Despite the chill, the engine revs up over immediately with the sound of an overgrown mosquito.
He looks over his shoulder at her, jerks his chin.
“Now?” she asks.
He raises his eyebrows sardonically, as though asking whether there’d be a better time.
She clamps her crutches to the side of the bike, and gets on behind Biff. His broad back will cut the wind. She wraps her arms around his waist and grins.
Then they zoom off to explore the island. It’s beautiful.
Prompt: Stuff100 “Spring,” H/C Bingo “hugs”
Summary: It’s spring at the Jaeger Academy, and M.D. and Biff are desperate to get outside. Too bad April on Kodiak Island is also known as ‘ice rink season.’
Notes: Takes place after Sturm und Drang, a few months after the Dark of Winter.
By the time April rolls around, M.D. is thoroughly sick of Alaska. The entire Jaeger Academy is covered in ice and snow, and M.D. is positive she has slipped, tripped, and fallen on every single patch of it. Apparently giant monster-punching robots are totally within the realm of possibility, but keeping the streets properly shoveled is just too much to ask for.
The Canadians, Russians, and the Japanese from Hokkaido, of course, are totally at home. They race along on snowshoes and cross-country skis, pointing and laughing whenever one of the Fijians or Australians take a fall.
Nobody laughs when M.D. takes a fall. The Rangers just studiously ignore her, or worse, try and pick her up and put her back on her feet, like she’s a small child. After the second time one of the Russians attempt this, M.D. takes to hitting people with her crutches and snarling at them. It offends them, but at least it allows her to keep some semblance of her dignity. Biff is better—he makes good ballast and he doesn’t appear to notice the death grip she keeps on his arm. But though he never says anything about it, she knows it’s difficult for him to move so slowly for her sake.
Biff gets his hands on spikes that go on the tips of her crutches, which helps a little with slipping on ice, but does absolutely nothing about the necessity of wading through knee-deep snowdrifts. And it turns out the spikes become worse than nothing on smooth wet surfaces—like directly inside the doors of the PPDC complex, which is filled with the half-melted slush from hundreds of pairs of boots.
So even with the spikes, it’s almost impossible for M.D. to go outside for any length of time. The herky-jerky cycle of falls, near-falls, and picking herself back up is just too exhausting, and she can’t afford an injury. Four months at the Jaeger Academy, now, and she’s seen practically none of the island. It’s maddening, and being cooped up inside feels too familiar. It reminds her of that never-ending time when her and Biff’s entire universe was a six by ten cell and a tiny exercise yard. Close walls, too close, when what she wants is the blue sky and the living wind and grass and dirt but she can’t.
She remembers when she used to live outside, in a shelter made out of dead trees and a chunk of fencing and a U-haul blanket. When everything was wind and water and figuring out the next meal. She never thought she’d miss that, and now she knows she’ll never be able to do that again.
Biff stays in with her, and they play a lot of cards and read a lot of books and spend a lot of time in the dojo and the rec center, her doing her physical therapy, him pumping iron, but she can see the tension in him. When he doesn’t think she’s looking, she catches him gazing out windows, out at the trees and the snowdrifts, and she knows he wants nothing more than to go out and hike it all. He has strong legs, and he’s not tired all the time. He could still do it.
But he won’t. He doesn’t want to leave her inside alone, because he just can’t shake the fear that if he does, when he comes back she’ll be gone. So he stays.
She would be offended, if she weren’t so pathetically grateful. She doesn’t want to be left alone in the straight, sterile gray walls of the inside. She doesn’t want to be inside at all, but until she can afford an off-road handcycle—and they cost thousands—she doesn’t see how she has a choice in the matter.
Then it becomes spring, and she sees the Harley Davidson.
It’s in the parking lot, squeezed between a Jeep convertible that the owner surely regrets buying and a four-wheeler. M.D. pays it very little attention—what does she care about bikes—but then she sees Biff’s reaction. His feet keep moving, but his head doesn’t, staring at the motorcycle until he’s forced to snap back and look where he’s going. When he sees M.D.’s look, he says, “What? ‘S a nice bike.”
M.D. gets an idea. She hastily takes her hand off his arm before he notices, puts on a look of incredulous boredom, and asks, “Can you even drive one of those things?”
“Sure. Had a dirt bike as a kid.”
“And that was how long ago?”
He rolls his eyes, drawls in a tone of exaggerated patience, “’S like riding a bicycle,” and studiously ignores both bike and her from there on out.
That cements it. M.D. is getting him a motorbike. They’ve been snowed in at Kodiak Island all winter, but spring is here now, and she wants to see the island. They’re both going stir crazy, and for the first time in her life, she has money now. Forget the stupid handcycle; she’ll get that later.
First, though, she needs to find the owner of that Harley and figure out where they got it.
Tendo Choi seems a safe bet, but it turns out he only shares the wardrobe of a greaser, not the riding habits.
“Drive a motorcycle? Here?” He laughs. “Hell no. I like living.”
M.D. doesn’t have the energy to clatter all over the facility searching, so she cuts her losses and goes to George Whakarea.
Even after months at Jaeger Academy, she’s still not sure what exactly Whakarea does. Something to do with HR, maybe—he’s the one who got her with Dr. Kaur—but his official job title seems to be ‘Person who does Things.’ He seems to know something about everything, and she has yet to see him flub a name.
She finds him behind his desk, which is covered in stacks of paperwork and three different cups of coffee, none of which are entirely empty or full. Someone on the phone is screaming at him loudly enough that M.D. can hear it from the door (and it’s not on speakerphone), but Whakarea’s smile is serene and Buddha-like and he nods along amiably, even as he types at full speed.
Eventually, the screamer on the other end winds down, Whakarea says, “I’ll tell him, ma’am, have a nice day,” hangs up, and turns his placid gaze on M.D. “Help you?”
“Who owns the motorbike out there?” She asks.
“The Harley? Dr. Gottlieb, I think. Why?”
“Gottlieb?” She knows who Dr. Gottlieb is, of course. Ey is how she got Biff back on hormones without spilling the beans to everyone in the complex. But somehow, the twitchy intellectual never struck her as the Harley Davidson type.
“Sure. Collects them, I think. That all you need?”
She leaves him to his tasks, whatever they are, and goes to chase down Gottlieb.
It’s not hard. Rather than chase the good doctor around the engineering department, she just sits in a chair outside Geiszler’s office and waits until she hears shouting. Then she raps on the door.
Dr. Geiszler answers, and his eyes light up behind his glasses when he sees her. “Rawlins! What’re you—”
“I’m not here for you,” she interrupts, before he can try to talk her into giving a urine sample or cheek swab. Then she shouts over his head. “Hey, Gottlieb!”
Geiszler wilts and retreats back to his desk, grumbling about how nobody ever comes to his office to talk with him anymore, and Gottlieb appears from behind a large vat of spare kaiju parts, sputtering indignantly about being interrupted.
“Is that your bike outside?” M.D. asks, before Gottlieb can continues ranting.
“What? Yes, it’s mine. Why?”
“Where’d you get it? I want one.”
Gottlieb frowns, and she sees em waffle between continuing eir cathartic rant with Geiszler versus getting someone else into eir hobby. Finally, the motorcycle side wins and ey takes M.D. back to eir office to discuss the matter. M.D. explains her plan to get Biff a gift, and Gottlieb tents eir fingers and makes thinking noises.
“Well, I hope you don’t have your heart set on a Harley,” ey says. “I had mine shipped from the mainland, but it’s ungodly expensive. Besides, if you want something that can handle more than the Jaeger roads, you want something more robust.”
“Like a dirt bike? Do they make those for two?” And then, because ey will know, “With something to stick my crutches on?”
Gottlieb smiles impishly and rests eir chin on eir fingers. Ey, at least, understands her predicament. “How do you think I get around? Here, let’s see what your budget is…”
M.D. grins. For a moment, she doesn’t care that the Rangers pretend she doesn’t exist; her better connections with the support staff are proving rewarding.
After a bit of research and swiping Biff’s phone for some shouty calls (M.D.’s gotten better, but for some reason she still can’t get a phone to function reliably), it’s set up. Biff almost spoils the surprise by getting back from the rec center early, but then she accidentally loses control of her electricity and he gets so worked up ranting at her for destroying his phone that he forgets to ask what she was using it for in the first place.
Two weeks later, when M.D. tells him to get on the bus with her, he grumbles and sneers and rolls his eyes, but he also tries to take her arm to find out what’s going on. She elbows him and tells him, “cope with uncertainty,” and they get on the shuttle bus to Kodiak.
It’s a pain. The bus’s aisle isn’t wide enough to comfortably take M.D.’s crutches, and of course, it’s not a kneeling bus so she has to take a big step up. Somehow, she manages to get in without falling, and they head into town.
The walk from town to the shop is an adventure. What would normally be a five-minute walk for Biff turns into a fifteen-minute slog with M.D., but she’s determined. This is the first time she’s been out and about since December, and she’s going to make this happen in person. She wants to see Biff’s face.
Finally, after taking a wrong turn and having to go back and retrace their steps, they finally find Black’s Workshop.
According to Gottlieb, Lillian Black is the only person on the island who sells a decent bike at a reasonable price—by island standards, anyway, where everything costs roughly fifty percent more than on the mainland. There aren’t enough cars in Kodiak to support a full-time mechanic—even with foolish Ranger recruits buying up Jeeps like hotcakes—so Lillian Black fixes cars, bikes, snow machines, and four-wheelers, and does the odd bit of refurbishing for kicks. She is even less verbally communicative than Biff is, preferring to express herself in grunts and nods.
When M.D. rings the bell, she comes out from her workshop, wiping her hands on a rag. Her face is like granite, but she looks at M.D., gives a brusque nod, and returns to her workshop, waving them in after her.
Inside is an idling, battered dirt bike. Its paint is faded with grime and wind, but everything works and its tires and suspension can handle the rough back roads of Kodiak Island, and it’ll carry two people.
Biff doesn’t seem to get it, so Lillian Black apparently decides to encourage him.
“Racing bike, once,” she says, patting her hand on the faded number 40 on its side. “Not so fast anymore. But…” and she taps the special fixture on the side for M.D.’s crutches.
Now it sinks in. Biff swoops around to give M.D. an incredulous look.
M.D. shrugs. “What else am I going to spend my money on? Besides, I’m fit to burn the whole complex—”
He hugs her. Just for a split instant, hard enough for her to feel the muscle through his vest and jacket, and then he pulls back, awkwardly thumping her on the back. He seems to be trying to reassemble his face into something other than a scowl, but it’s been so long that he can’t seem to remember how.
“Get off, get off,” she grumbles, shoving at him with a crutch. “Don’t get all soppy on me, I’m just using you for your ability to drive…”
He ruffles her hair roughly, then goes to investigate the bike. This time, he notices the grip heaters, the cloth athletic tape on the clutch and gear levers. This isn’t a cheechako job; this bike will hold up in the weather. He smiles and straddles the bike. Despite the chill, the engine revs up over immediately with the sound of an overgrown mosquito.
He looks over his shoulder at her, jerks his chin.
“Now?” she asks.
He raises his eyebrows sardonically, as though asking whether there’d be a better time.
She clamps her crutches to the side of the bike, and gets on behind Biff. His broad back will cut the wind. She wraps her arms around his waist and grins.
Then they zoom off to explore the island. It’s beautiful.
