#Oh look it's Guerro | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

moosemonstrous · 6 months

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Ghost Rider Pacific Rim AU - the inherent injustice of being the youngest person in any group

The Wall is nearly ready.

Amadeus likes a good wall, especially if he gets his hands on a printer and some red string. It’s good to be able to put all information in view at once – helps him organise his thoughts, or at least present them in a way that appears organised to a random observer.

“Oh, so we’re in crazy town already?” Tony sighs. “Cho, it’s not been a week.”

The Wall is nearly ready, save for a giant empty space he’d mentally labelled as OTHER PILOT. Now, Amadeus would be the first to admit he can get excited a smidge too quickly, so when he talks Tony through his and Montesi’s findings, he needs to make sure to include absolutely everything. He starts with two near-identical sets-of-four scans of the Maximoffs’ brains.

“No, no, let him talk,” Montesi pushes him into a chair. She’s got her hair up in the messiest bun Amadeus has ever seen on her, and he’s fairly sure she hasn’t meditated once since the first MEG scan came back making zero sense. He’s a great influence on everyone around him. “I triple-checked every conclusion. If this is real…”

“These were taken still in drivesuits, straight out of the Conn-Pod,” he says, tapping the highlighted area in the centre of the sagittal view. “Increased blood flow and activity in hippocampus for up to forty-five minutes after disconnecting from the hardware.”

Next: the original MRI Carter’s team took after the techs fished Reyes out of The Charger. Then, the results of the whole set of tests they took on his first day as their, ah, research participant. Montesi had the misfortune of taking the Hippocratic oath and doesn’t like the kind of language Amadeus got used to in private labs. “Six hours,” he says, pointing at the MRI, “three days,” pointing at the day-one MEG, then: “and yesterday.” He got a little carried away time-wise and didn’t image the scan onto a more user-friendly brain model, so it’s just rows and rows of electromagnetic waves in a table, with the relevant anomalies highlighted in neon green. Tony is a smart cookie; he’ll figure it out.

Smart as he is, he doesn’t really deal in meat brains. “Kid, help me out. What am I looking at? These are all pretty much the same.”

Amadeus just about manages not to clap like a proud parent. “They pretty much are!” He stretches himself across The Wall to point out the similarities in the detected anomalies: “See that? Minimal, but present activity in the frontal cortex, and constant stimulation to the hippocampus.” (Please please please don’t find something obvious I missed this is too interesting to be just. Nothing.) “Six! Days! No aneurysm! No seizures! Not even beginning stages of neuron malfunction!”

Tony pinches the bridge of his nose. “Is this another Spector?”

Amadeus is ready for that. “Nope. His history is muddled at best – we really need to get into that, by the way – but there is no prefrontal cortex dysfunction, and no damage to the anterior cingulate gyrus.” Tony sends him a truly murderous glare over his fingers. “If it was DID, or schizophrenia, or anything, we would’ve seen signs of it by now. We mapped out his brain millimetre by millimetre, alright? There isn’t another explanation, it must be–”

“Don’t say it,“ Tony warns, but Amadeus can’t help himself:

“–ghost drifting! Come on, Doc, back me up.”

Montesi clears her throat. “He’s right.” Before Amadeus can whoop in victory, she adds: “Don’t put that in writing, I have a reputation to uphold.” She straightens the lapels of her lab coat. “Reyes needs thorough monitoring. There might well be nothing on the other end of that drift.”

“Well—”

“No,” she says, already aggravated by their many, many previous discussions on the topic.

“But—”

“No,” she repeats. “Yes, something weird is going on with his brain. Yes, I think we should investigate. But we have no evidence it’s connected to that dreadful jaeger.”

“Yet!” Amadeus is distantly aware that the noise he makes resembles a dying goose. “Tony, just hear me out.”

“Give me a damn minute.”

Both Amadeus and Montesi back away from the Wall to let him inspect the scans at his leisure. Amadeus hates being evaluated in real time; what he wants is to provide supplementary information to every piece of paper Tony looks at, what he has to do is wait for him to draw his own conclusions. Even though his understanding of neurophysiology is at best intermediate, and even though it’s Amadeus who’s supposed to be the biology side of their partnership—

“Take it down a notch,” Tony tells him seriously. “You’re about to vibrate through the floor. Go grab a drink or something, I need a word with Vicky first.”

“It’s my office,” Amadeus grumbles, shoving his hands in his coat pockets.

“It’s my base,” Tony raises an eyebrow, but Amadeus knows better than to challenge him on that. “Run along, come back in fifteen. I’ll need you to walk me through the spongy bits again.”

Robbie thinks his spine might have turned to jelly. The wooden bench in the locker room didn’t look comfortable at first, but now he reckons he could stay on it for the rest of the shift. Or maybe the rest of his life.

It’s not the most tired he’s ever been. But it’s somewhere in the top five, for sure.

“Hey, man, that wasn’t too bad,” someone punches his shoulder. Robbie is too numb to figure out whether it was hard enough to hurt or not hard enough to register. “Have some water before you pass out.”

He accepts the plastic bottle. Briefly wishes death and suffering upon everyone who laughs when he can’t operate the screw top with his shaking hands. Finally, shoulder-puncher takes mercy on him and takes it away, then hands it back, open.

“Thanks,” he manages to mumble between sips. His bad eye is all screwy and he can still feel adrenaline pulsing in his temples like a hammer. Is he really supposed to do this every day? He doesn't know if he can find his legs before it's time to pick up Gabe.

“First day always sucks,” says the shoulder-puncher. “Brooks doesn’t normally stay on one person the whole time.”

Oh. Good. Someone else says: “I thought newbies were all air support.”

“No way, he’s too short for air support.”

“I could do air support,” Robbie frowns. He’s... not entirely sure what air support is in this context. He’s only partially convinced he’s actually forming words. Shoulder-puncher grabs the water bottle back before it slips from his fingers. “’m not. But I could.”

“Sure you could, pip-squeak,” Shoulder-puncher laughs. His accent is... familiar. Robbie tries to focus enough faculties to actually look at the guy. On his way to buff, blond, freckled like someone who hasn’t given up on a tan despite all signs indicating it isn’t meant to be. Maybe a couple of years older than Robbie. “You sound Californian.”

“East L.A.,” Robbie confirms. Shoulder-puncher points at one of his mates with a satisfied smirk and collects a bundle of Hong Kong dollars among a mix of cheering and booing.

“Grew up there before my old man got drafted,” he tells Robbie, tapping the side of his nose. “Name’s Guerro.”

The three other guys in the locker room also have names, and Robbie will be very embarrassed he can't remember them in the near future. They're training to be on the ground cover, but just as anyone else in the academy, plan to become rangers as soon as the new jaeger finally gets built.

"Brooks said--" Was that meeting classified? Robbie is too wiped out to care. "Vibranium problems. There's a delay."

"Aw, fuck that noise," probably-Kim drops down on the bench to his right. He makes an exaggerated double-take when he notices Robbie’s bad eye. "Dang, did Brooks get you in the face?"

"Accident," he shrugs.

"Make sure you see Nurse Carter, get some drops for that shit," Guerro cranes his neck to take a better look. "It's too fucking damp here, everything takes forever to heal up."

It's... nice. It's nice to have people talk to him rather than at and over him, and use a language he can mostly understand - there's some Cantonese inserts he's still getting his head around. Guerro and his friends tease him for being too-brain dead to remember the way to the barracks and express jealousy that he gets to bunk with the civilians. There's the tiny, irritating sliver wedged between his ribs that bristles at being the new kid again - always - but Robbie is truly too exhausted to pay it any mind.

Besides, comes a thought, if anyone around here is going to make ranger, it's you.

***

(Thanking @cicada-candy and @rokhal for the Spector idea. Also @wazzappp for help with the science magic bc let's be real in my hands that's the best we can hope for 😌😅)

#Ghost Rider Pacific Rim AU #robbie reyes #amadeus cho #Oh look it's Guerro #He doesn't have a reason to hate Robbie yet! I'm sure they will become great friends #Augh that whole scene did not want to come out AT ALL

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