Giant Robots: Cigarette Break
Aug. 30th, 2014 07:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeCigarette Break
Prompt: H/C Bingo “magical trouble”
Word Count: 2166
Summary: Summer has come to the Jaeger Academy, and Biff and M.D. share a cigarette on the roof. They also meet Mako Mori.
Notes: A Giant Robots fic, takes place a couple months after Dirt-Bike Made for Two; M.D. is eighteen and Biff is twenty-three. Biff’s powers are one of the vestigial remains of the original Infinity Smashed draft, back when magic was a huge part of the story.
“You gonna freeze,” Biff warns from the top of the stairs.
“Shut up.” M.D. is still working her way up, placing her crutches and bodily hauling herself up each stair. Three months ago, she would’ve been puffing and sweating, but now, all she has is a look of studious concentration. “I haven’t had direct full-body sunlight since 2014. If I’m going to freeze, I’m going to freeze happy.”
Another lurch, another stair. Biff adjusts the folding chair under his arm and waits patiently. He knows better than to offer his help. Besides, she’s the lock-breaker; he can’t bust down the door to the roof himself with any hope of not getting caught.
It takes a couple minutes, but M.D. makes it. She pauses just a moment to catch her breath—three flights of stairs using mostly her core muscles has gotten less difficult, but he doubts it’ll ever be easy—then tilts to eye the door. It’s a massive steel bulkhead, like all the others in the Jaeger Academy.
M.D. snorts and digs into her pocket, pulls out a few bent bits of metal. “Easy.”
Biff kicks the folding chair open and scoots it under her, and she lowers herself down and gets to work. In theory, she could get down on the floor, but it’d take her forever to get back up again. The lock clicks quietly while Biff keeps watch out, but nobody seems to be around.
Except for a pair of dark eyes, peeking around the corner. Biff doesn’t get a closer look at the person they belong to; the moment he notices them, they jerk back out of view. He frowns, then studiously looks away, and after a few seconds, he notices the eyes returning in his peripheral vision.
He nudges M.D. with his elbow. “Someone over there.”
She doesn’t pause. “Must be a local. Civilian staff, you know.”
Biff risks a direct glance, and the eyes vanish again. He makes a sound of frustration.
“Your reputation must precede you,” M.D. says dryly. “You being such a get-along kind of guy and all.”
Biff gives her an annoyed look, but she only has eyes for the lock, a smirk playing around her lips. Rolling his eyes, he reaches down to unlace his heavy boots. Once he’s gotten them off, he gives the corner a good hard look to insure the voyeur’s retreat, then vanishes.
“You’re terrible,” M.D. says, but otherwise ignores him.
He ignores her back, and getting up on the balls of his feet, he slips down the hall towards where the dark eyes disappeared. In his socks, he’s silent, and he makes it around the corner to find…
A teenage girl. She has a choppy punky haircut, not popular on the mainland and dyed purple. She’s wearing a PPDC jacket over civilian clothes, and she’s peering around the corner at M.D. with curiosity. She looks Japanese; she must be the child of one of the mechanics or something. Something about her makes him uncomfortable.
Biff gets behind her and lets the vanish drop, then clears his throat.
The girl jumps a mile, whirls around to stare at him. Much to his dismay, she doesn’t have to look up to do it.
“You got somewhere to be?” He crosses his arms, trying to look bigger.
She squints at him, glances back as though to verify that he isn’t one of the many pairs of twins running around the Academy, then frowns and slouches away, giving him a resentful look over her shoulder. He just gives her a brush-off gesture: run along, now.
Biff returns to the door and pulls his boots on again.
“Have fun scaring the children?” M.D. asked.
He grunts.
“Who was it, that whiny Australian again?”
“Nah. Mechanic’s kid or something.”
“Good.” Click. She smiles. “Now help me get the hatch open.”
Biff sighs and puts his shoulder to the ancient lump of steel. It doesn’t give at first, but then it finally starts to creak open.
M.D.’s legs don’t let her jump up and vault the stairs, but she pulls herself up as fast as she can manage and starts her fourth flight of stairs. Biff picks up the folding chair and follows, feeling excited despite himself. They haven’t had cabin fever since the bike took them all over the island, mountain and cliff and forest, but this is the first warm sunny day they’ve been out in for four years. His skin aches for sun.
One more door, and they’re out on the roof.
Biff has to admit, the view is nice. The clouds are sparse puffs against the deep blue sky. To the northeast, he can see the township of Kodiak, currently made up of roughly equal parts tourists, locals, and PPDC employees. East, he can see the ocean. Everywhere else, it’s forest, mountains, and ocean. Blue, gray, and green, and the air is crisp and cool in his lungs.
The roof itself is just a slab of cement. Usually, that’s enough to make the back of his brain itch—cement walls, steel doors, M.D. playing with the lock because there’s nothing else to do—but the expanse of sky helps.
“Ugh. Hideous,” M.D. says, circling around the roof, looking for a less-uncomfortable spot. “Maybe they hope that this way, they won’t get too sentimentally attached if a kaiju stomps it.”
There’s a clump of green hidden around back behind the door. Plants, mostly flowers, stuffed in pots, coffee mugs, and cans that originally held grease and bolts.
M.D. catches him looking at them. “They’re Whakarea’s, I bet. He’s who I found out about this place from.”
Huh. He always figured Whakarea was just a computer monkey.
“Hey, guy needs something to keep that smile on his face all the time.”
M.D. does a couple brisk strolls around the periphery of the roof. Biff just watches her. The ice is gone now, and it’s good to see her moving around without falling. Her arms are lean and strong, and he can see the ropy muscles rippling under the scars and skin. All those hours in the gym are paying off. Finally, she chooses a spot near the garden and he puts the chair down for her so she can strip off her coat and toss it down to cushion the cement before flopping down on top of it. Shrugging out of her over-shirt, she rolls it up under her head and unzips her jumpsuit to the waist, showing the too-big A-frame underneath. She wriggles her arms out of it, baring them to the sunlight, which glints off the sockets in her head and makes her scars shine almost white on her dark arms. He can see her ribs, but less than he did six months ago.
“Yesssss,” she purrs, arching up and tilting her face into the sun, “come to me, my precious vitamin D. Come to mama.”
Biff snorts and sits next to her, positioning himself so as not to block her light. It does feel nice, the warmth on his skin, but he can see the gooseflesh already rising on her arms.
“You cold?” he asks.
“Do I care?” She pulls a pack of Marlboros from her jumpsuit pocket, gives them a few taps against her palm. It’s their concession to the habit, one shared cigarette a day, that M.D. got from him, their second year in a cell. “I’ve been cold before.” She pulls a cigarette out and lights it with her fingertip. No open flame—she can’t do that—just enough heat and current to make it burn.
She catches him watching and fans her fingers. “Magic,” she says.
Biff rolls his eyes.
She shrugs, inhales, and smirks. “Like you can talk. There’s actual science behind what I can do. Stupid science, but science.”
“Fuck you say,” Biff says, taking the cigarette from her hand.
“No, really, Geiszler told me. Our brains run on electrical signals. Every thought and feeling we have is part of a constant electrical storm going on in a pound of jelly, trying to interact with the rest of the meat-sack that makes up our bodies. It’s how the Pons System works.”
Biff shudders.
“What’s with the face?” She takes the cigarette back, leans back and crosses her arms behind her head. “I think it’s cool.”
She would.
“I mean, in theory, if I could just replicate the gestalt of my electrical patterns in something else,” she says, “I’d never die. Not really.”
Biff snatches the cigarette from her, inhales hard, leans over to hug his knees. “Knock it off.”
“Biff, I’m sick. You need to accept that.”
“Fuck you. You younger’n I am. You ain’t dying for shit.”
She reaches for the cigarette, but Biff holds it away from her. If she’s going to be like that, she can get her own damn smoke.
“Fine. Be that way. I’ll never die. I’ll live forever in a state of perennial vigor and health, just because that’s the way you think reality should be. All right?”
That sounds better. He lets her have the cigarette back. “Till Marshall Hardass bites it.”
“Sure. Till Pentecost bites it. That’s a totally rational belief.” She exhales a plume of smoke. “But anyway, all that got me sidetracked. The point I was trying to make is, I’m scientific. You are magic.”
Biff grimaces. “Nah.”
“Basic physics, Biff. Can’t go invisible without going blind. You can, ergo, must be magic. Hate to break it to you.” She hands the cigarette back to him. “You ever going to tell any of them?”
No.
“Just checking.”
Biff lets go of his knees and lies back. The concrete is sun-warm and rough under his back and the tobacco burns pretty in his lungs. When he breathes it out and takes in the air, it’s cool and clean.
“I don’t know how you can be so blasé about it,” she says. “If I was magic, I’d use it.”
Biff makes a neutral sound, and then they’re silent for a while, staring up at the sky, flat on their backs and content. It’s cool, and even Biff feels it, but it’s the first time either of them have been able to do this in almost five years, and the chill seems inconsequential.
Then, behind them, the door opens up with a bang. Hot ash drops down Biff’s collar, and he jerks up, slapping and swearing. M.D. sits up.
“Ah,” she says. “You must be the mechanic’s daughter. Nice hair.”
Biff finally beats out the spark and cranes his neck. The Japanese teenager is back.
“I’m not a mechanic,” she snarls. “And you’re not supposed to be up here.”
“Neither are you,” M.D. says, and takes the cigarette back to stub it out on the sole of her boot. “And I know you’re not. You’re Pentecost’s kid. Mako, right? Nice to meet you.”
Biff frowns. He hadn’t known Pentecost had adopted.
The teenager’s eyes narrow. “He told you about me?”
M.D. shrugs. “I hear things.”
Most people on the Island try to avoid looking at M.D. too closely. The scars, sockets, and crutches make them uncomfortable. But Mako apparently missed the memo; she stares back and says, “I hear you’re crazy.”
M.D. grins. She has a lot of teeth. “Yup. You got me. I’m crazy.”
Biff snickers. M.D. tilts her head at him. “What’ve you heard about him?”
Mako’s eyes slide to him, briefly. Apparently he makes her more uncomfortable than M.D. does, which is a first. “Not much. Except he’s magic, and likes to sneak up on people.”
M.D. gives Biff an amused look. “She’s got you pegged.”
Biff shrugs. Mako snuck up on him first.
“What I hear about you,” M.D. says to her, “is that you’re good with Jaeger engineering.”
“I’m not going to be an engineer,” Mako says. “I’m going to be a Ranger. And I’m going to be better at it than you.”
“Ouch,” M.D. says. “Well, far be it from me to criticize your dream. You here to report us, or cloud-watch with us? Plenty of room for more.”
Mako is silent for a while, then says, “Bye,” and leaves.
Biff shakes her head, gives M.D. a curious look.
“Maybe she likes us,” M.D. answers. “More likely, she just finds us interesting. You might want to tone down the magic for a bit.” Then, raising her voice, “I hear she has a wicked crush on the Beckett brothers.”
The heavy metal door, which had been slightly ajar, shuts with a clang. Biff snorts.
“Smart kid,” M.D. says. “Hope she does make it into the Rangers. It’d be nice to have fewer meatheads around.”
She lays back down, but Biff doesn’t. He has it now, what bugs him about Mako.
“How old she?” He asks.
“What? Mako? Dunno. Fifteen, I think?”
He’s right, then. Mako now is as old as M.D. was when she first got dumped in Biff’s cell. When she got the sockets.
Biff shudders. He ends up getting a second cigarette.
Prompt: H/C Bingo “magical trouble”
Word Count: 2166
Summary: Summer has come to the Jaeger Academy, and Biff and M.D. share a cigarette on the roof. They also meet Mako Mori.
Notes: A Giant Robots fic, takes place a couple months after Dirt-Bike Made for Two; M.D. is eighteen and Biff is twenty-three. Biff’s powers are one of the vestigial remains of the original Infinity Smashed draft, back when magic was a huge part of the story.
“You gonna freeze,” Biff warns from the top of the stairs.
“Shut up.” M.D. is still working her way up, placing her crutches and bodily hauling herself up each stair. Three months ago, she would’ve been puffing and sweating, but now, all she has is a look of studious concentration. “I haven’t had direct full-body sunlight since 2014. If I’m going to freeze, I’m going to freeze happy.”
Another lurch, another stair. Biff adjusts the folding chair under his arm and waits patiently. He knows better than to offer his help. Besides, she’s the lock-breaker; he can’t bust down the door to the roof himself with any hope of not getting caught.
It takes a couple minutes, but M.D. makes it. She pauses just a moment to catch her breath—three flights of stairs using mostly her core muscles has gotten less difficult, but he doubts it’ll ever be easy—then tilts to eye the door. It’s a massive steel bulkhead, like all the others in the Jaeger Academy.
M.D. snorts and digs into her pocket, pulls out a few bent bits of metal. “Easy.”
Biff kicks the folding chair open and scoots it under her, and she lowers herself down and gets to work. In theory, she could get down on the floor, but it’d take her forever to get back up again. The lock clicks quietly while Biff keeps watch out, but nobody seems to be around.
Except for a pair of dark eyes, peeking around the corner. Biff doesn’t get a closer look at the person they belong to; the moment he notices them, they jerk back out of view. He frowns, then studiously looks away, and after a few seconds, he notices the eyes returning in his peripheral vision.
He nudges M.D. with his elbow. “Someone over there.”
She doesn’t pause. “Must be a local. Civilian staff, you know.”
Biff risks a direct glance, and the eyes vanish again. He makes a sound of frustration.
“Your reputation must precede you,” M.D. says dryly. “You being such a get-along kind of guy and all.”
Biff gives her an annoyed look, but she only has eyes for the lock, a smirk playing around her lips. Rolling his eyes, he reaches down to unlace his heavy boots. Once he’s gotten them off, he gives the corner a good hard look to insure the voyeur’s retreat, then vanishes.
“You’re terrible,” M.D. says, but otherwise ignores him.
He ignores her back, and getting up on the balls of his feet, he slips down the hall towards where the dark eyes disappeared. In his socks, he’s silent, and he makes it around the corner to find…
A teenage girl. She has a choppy punky haircut, not popular on the mainland and dyed purple. She’s wearing a PPDC jacket over civilian clothes, and she’s peering around the corner at M.D. with curiosity. She looks Japanese; she must be the child of one of the mechanics or something. Something about her makes him uncomfortable.
Biff gets behind her and lets the vanish drop, then clears his throat.
The girl jumps a mile, whirls around to stare at him. Much to his dismay, she doesn’t have to look up to do it.
“You got somewhere to be?” He crosses his arms, trying to look bigger.
She squints at him, glances back as though to verify that he isn’t one of the many pairs of twins running around the Academy, then frowns and slouches away, giving him a resentful look over her shoulder. He just gives her a brush-off gesture: run along, now.
Biff returns to the door and pulls his boots on again.
“Have fun scaring the children?” M.D. asked.
He grunts.
“Who was it, that whiny Australian again?”
“Nah. Mechanic’s kid or something.”
“Good.” Click. She smiles. “Now help me get the hatch open.”
Biff sighs and puts his shoulder to the ancient lump of steel. It doesn’t give at first, but then it finally starts to creak open.
M.D.’s legs don’t let her jump up and vault the stairs, but she pulls herself up as fast as she can manage and starts her fourth flight of stairs. Biff picks up the folding chair and follows, feeling excited despite himself. They haven’t had cabin fever since the bike took them all over the island, mountain and cliff and forest, but this is the first warm sunny day they’ve been out in for four years. His skin aches for sun.
One more door, and they’re out on the roof.
Biff has to admit, the view is nice. The clouds are sparse puffs against the deep blue sky. To the northeast, he can see the township of Kodiak, currently made up of roughly equal parts tourists, locals, and PPDC employees. East, he can see the ocean. Everywhere else, it’s forest, mountains, and ocean. Blue, gray, and green, and the air is crisp and cool in his lungs.
The roof itself is just a slab of cement. Usually, that’s enough to make the back of his brain itch—cement walls, steel doors, M.D. playing with the lock because there’s nothing else to do—but the expanse of sky helps.
“Ugh. Hideous,” M.D. says, circling around the roof, looking for a less-uncomfortable spot. “Maybe they hope that this way, they won’t get too sentimentally attached if a kaiju stomps it.”
There’s a clump of green hidden around back behind the door. Plants, mostly flowers, stuffed in pots, coffee mugs, and cans that originally held grease and bolts.
M.D. catches him looking at them. “They’re Whakarea’s, I bet. He’s who I found out about this place from.”
Huh. He always figured Whakarea was just a computer monkey.
“Hey, guy needs something to keep that smile on his face all the time.”
M.D. does a couple brisk strolls around the periphery of the roof. Biff just watches her. The ice is gone now, and it’s good to see her moving around without falling. Her arms are lean and strong, and he can see the ropy muscles rippling under the scars and skin. All those hours in the gym are paying off. Finally, she chooses a spot near the garden and he puts the chair down for her so she can strip off her coat and toss it down to cushion the cement before flopping down on top of it. Shrugging out of her over-shirt, she rolls it up under her head and unzips her jumpsuit to the waist, showing the too-big A-frame underneath. She wriggles her arms out of it, baring them to the sunlight, which glints off the sockets in her head and makes her scars shine almost white on her dark arms. He can see her ribs, but less than he did six months ago.
“Yesssss,” she purrs, arching up and tilting her face into the sun, “come to me, my precious vitamin D. Come to mama.”
Biff snorts and sits next to her, positioning himself so as not to block her light. It does feel nice, the warmth on his skin, but he can see the gooseflesh already rising on her arms.
“You cold?” he asks.
“Do I care?” She pulls a pack of Marlboros from her jumpsuit pocket, gives them a few taps against her palm. It’s their concession to the habit, one shared cigarette a day, that M.D. got from him, their second year in a cell. “I’ve been cold before.” She pulls a cigarette out and lights it with her fingertip. No open flame—she can’t do that—just enough heat and current to make it burn.
She catches him watching and fans her fingers. “Magic,” she says.
Biff rolls his eyes.
She shrugs, inhales, and smirks. “Like you can talk. There’s actual science behind what I can do. Stupid science, but science.”
“Fuck you say,” Biff says, taking the cigarette from her hand.
“No, really, Geiszler told me. Our brains run on electrical signals. Every thought and feeling we have is part of a constant electrical storm going on in a pound of jelly, trying to interact with the rest of the meat-sack that makes up our bodies. It’s how the Pons System works.”
Biff shudders.
“What’s with the face?” She takes the cigarette back, leans back and crosses her arms behind her head. “I think it’s cool.”
She would.
“I mean, in theory, if I could just replicate the gestalt of my electrical patterns in something else,” she says, “I’d never die. Not really.”
Biff snatches the cigarette from her, inhales hard, leans over to hug his knees. “Knock it off.”
“Biff, I’m sick. You need to accept that.”
“Fuck you. You younger’n I am. You ain’t dying for shit.”
She reaches for the cigarette, but Biff holds it away from her. If she’s going to be like that, she can get her own damn smoke.
“Fine. Be that way. I’ll never die. I’ll live forever in a state of perennial vigor and health, just because that’s the way you think reality should be. All right?”
That sounds better. He lets her have the cigarette back. “Till Marshall Hardass bites it.”
“Sure. Till Pentecost bites it. That’s a totally rational belief.” She exhales a plume of smoke. “But anyway, all that got me sidetracked. The point I was trying to make is, I’m scientific. You are magic.”
Biff grimaces. “Nah.”
“Basic physics, Biff. Can’t go invisible without going blind. You can, ergo, must be magic. Hate to break it to you.” She hands the cigarette back to him. “You ever going to tell any of them?”
No.
“Just checking.”
Biff lets go of his knees and lies back. The concrete is sun-warm and rough under his back and the tobacco burns pretty in his lungs. When he breathes it out and takes in the air, it’s cool and clean.
“I don’t know how you can be so blasé about it,” she says. “If I was magic, I’d use it.”
Biff makes a neutral sound, and then they’re silent for a while, staring up at the sky, flat on their backs and content. It’s cool, and even Biff feels it, but it’s the first time either of them have been able to do this in almost five years, and the chill seems inconsequential.
Then, behind them, the door opens up with a bang. Hot ash drops down Biff’s collar, and he jerks up, slapping and swearing. M.D. sits up.
“Ah,” she says. “You must be the mechanic’s daughter. Nice hair.”
Biff finally beats out the spark and cranes his neck. The Japanese teenager is back.
“I’m not a mechanic,” she snarls. “And you’re not supposed to be up here.”
“Neither are you,” M.D. says, and takes the cigarette back to stub it out on the sole of her boot. “And I know you’re not. You’re Pentecost’s kid. Mako, right? Nice to meet you.”
Biff frowns. He hadn’t known Pentecost had adopted.
The teenager’s eyes narrow. “He told you about me?”
M.D. shrugs. “I hear things.”
Most people on the Island try to avoid looking at M.D. too closely. The scars, sockets, and crutches make them uncomfortable. But Mako apparently missed the memo; she stares back and says, “I hear you’re crazy.”
M.D. grins. She has a lot of teeth. “Yup. You got me. I’m crazy.”
Biff snickers. M.D. tilts her head at him. “What’ve you heard about him?”
Mako’s eyes slide to him, briefly. Apparently he makes her more uncomfortable than M.D. does, which is a first. “Not much. Except he’s magic, and likes to sneak up on people.”
M.D. gives Biff an amused look. “She’s got you pegged.”
Biff shrugs. Mako snuck up on him first.
“What I hear about you,” M.D. says to her, “is that you’re good with Jaeger engineering.”
“I’m not going to be an engineer,” Mako says. “I’m going to be a Ranger. And I’m going to be better at it than you.”
“Ouch,” M.D. says. “Well, far be it from me to criticize your dream. You here to report us, or cloud-watch with us? Plenty of room for more.”
Mako is silent for a while, then says, “Bye,” and leaves.
Biff shakes her head, gives M.D. a curious look.
“Maybe she likes us,” M.D. answers. “More likely, she just finds us interesting. You might want to tone down the magic for a bit.” Then, raising her voice, “I hear she has a wicked crush on the Beckett brothers.”
The heavy metal door, which had been slightly ajar, shuts with a clang. Biff snorts.
“Smart kid,” M.D. says. “Hope she does make it into the Rangers. It’d be nice to have fewer meatheads around.”
She lays back down, but Biff doesn’t. He has it now, what bugs him about Mako.
“How old she?” He asks.
“What? Mako? Dunno. Fifteen, I think?”
He’s right, then. Mako now is as old as M.D. was when she first got dumped in Biff’s cell. When she got the sockets.
Biff shudders. He ends up getting a second cigarette.
