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Chapter Text

Max regretted picking Godzilla for date night when he turned on the news and realized what he was seeing. He flipped through a few channels and Jessie poked her head around the overgrown fern on the table, one hand on her pregnant belly.

“What is it?” she asked, as he skimmed every news channel and then moved on to other channels. It was the same image on every one, a stone-gray head looming fifteen stories over house-sized clawed feet, crushing cars and scoring the ground like a giant in a mouse-sized city.

“Boot up the computer,” he said. “Should double-check this.”
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Mama didn't want Furiosa to see what had interrupted her show on the telly. Furi pressed herself against the sitting room door, faint explosions and the anchor's breathless patter only audible in the pauses of Mama's low-voiced argument with Aunt Keeper.

A rumbling roar came from the speakers and the door was yanked open. Furi stumbled forward, catching herself just before knocking heads with Keeper's shoulder. Her aunt grumbled and stepped aside, running a cupped hand over Furi's hair.

“What's going on?” she asked, but Keeper's mouth went flat and tight and she just propelled Furi towards the telly, where her mother was standing with her hands white-knuckled on the couch, face still and severe.

Furi scrambled over the couch, asking “Mama?” as she went over, but she was already looking at the screen and neither grownup answered her.

“Official evacuation of the entire west coast is underway,” said the newsanchor, but the image on the telly was an overhead view of a monster smashing through a city. Furi read the letters at the bottom of the screen twice to make sure it was San Francisco instead of Sydney. “Nuclear measures have been approved by the president.”
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Half of the police station had packed up and either moved further inland or signed up to one useless organization or another when the Pan Pacific Defense Corpse was initiated and the development of homegrown monsters – “Jaegers” – was announced. Jessie refilled Sprog's bowl of cheerios and looked at maternity clothes on the internet while Max read through news articles on his phone.

“Might should have held off on the second sprog,” he mumbled into his coffee.

Jessie laughed, just a shade of humor underneath the grimness like most laughter was in those days. Sprog babbled to his action figures, flying Superman with one hand and making Darth Vader dance a jig with the other.

“Bit late for that, love,” Jessie said, nudging the bowl closer to their son. “The world might be ending, but we're safe enough.”
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“We need to go,” Mary said, and Furi blinked as the light came on and her mother flipped the quilt off, disappearing before Furi could make a sound. Val was already halfway off her bed, one earbud hanging, and they stared at each other for a moment before Furi jumped to pull the suitcase out from under her bed and Val ran to get the water bottles.

An hour later, Furi was crammed between the car door and Aunt Maddie, knees folded up so her feet could rest on one of the emergency boxes, Shag standing on Val's lap on the other side of Maddie and barking out the window. She had lost sight of Keeper's hatchback in the dark and chaos a creeping kilometer before.
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“I'm signing up to the PPDC and you're coming with me.”

Max blinked at Goose standing on the doorstep, jittery like he'd had nothing but coffee to keep him upright, still in uniform and unshaven even though he'd gotten off shift yesterday evening. Max opened the door wider and guided his friend in with a hand on the shoulder, but Goose shrugged out of the hold and started walking backwards down the hall, bouncing from foot to foot and hands swinging as he spoke.

“I'm serious!” he said, and slapped Max on the chest. “It's not just someone else's problem now, they've stepped foot on our home and it's time we do something about it.”

He tripped over one of Sprog's toys and went flailing onto his back. Max heard Sprog call for his mother and Jessie hushing him before she appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Good morning, Goose,” she said, but she was looking at Max. He shrugged and pulled the other man to his feet, then gave him a light push towards the sitting room.

“I'll straighten him out,” he said.
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Aureate Rebel stood as tall as their apartment building and glittered like a knight in full armor. Furi bought a poster and hung it over the water stains on the wall of her closet-sized room and ignored Val's teasing.
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“It'll be just like patrol,” he told Jessie, leaning over the bundle of Glory in her arms to kiss her. “The perps are a little bigger, but I get to drive a building-sized car.”

Her laugh was choked and watery this time, and tears shone on her eyelashes.

“Everything's about cars with you, isn't it?” she said, and kissed him back.
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Furi marked down every Jaeger kill on her poster, now jostling for space between a PPDC recruitment poster that made Val's eyes go tight and an image of Ranger Angharad standing proud before her Jaeger.
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Training ground Max down to lows he didn't even know he had, but one day he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Goose and realized that the words the headmaster was saying weren't a dismissal but a congratulations.

They got twenty-four hours off. Max went home, kissed his wife and children, dropped the acceptance form and orders on the kitchen counter, and took a nap.
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Lockjaw descended like a typhoon. They didn't bother with a car this time, just grabbed their go-bags and took to the streets along with every other person in the city. Maddie was knocked off-balance and Furi stopped to steady her, only to turn around and realize that she couldn't see the others even with her height.

“We'll meet up after,” Maddie yelled over the sounds of the crowd.

They were still a kilometer away from the closest open shelter, a green beacon of hope on Furi's phone, when the ground shook and the straggling group around them went silent. The windows rattled with a roar like an avalanche.

“Go, go, go,” Furi chanted, dropping everything and pulling her aunt after her.

An eternity and a moment later, she lay amongst rubble, dazed with blood loss and pain from her crushed arm, and watched Aureate pummel Lockjaw to death.

In the stillness after, a figure emerged from the Jaeger and stood for a moment, then removed their helmet. Blond hair caught the light like fire and gold, and Furiosa screamed her rage.
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“The Drift is gone, the Drift is gone!”

Max roared and slammed the comm off, calling for Interceptor to move and getting clumsy responses as he felt his partner slip from the Drift.

“Goose!” he shouted, but there was no response and his right side was weighing him down, Knifehead rearing back for a final hit.

He caught its spearhead and fired once-twice-thrice into its jaw, but it ripped free and scythed back and his leg buckled in agony like lighting but he hammered down, pulled it over and rammed his arm down its throat and fired his last shot.
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Furi filled out the Jaeger Academy application forms with one hand, the other held together with pins and rods and medical tape. She put no name on the line for her guardian.

Two weeks later, she received a plane ticket to Anchorage.
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Max felt Goose slip away in the tendrils of the ghost drift as he tore his way out of Interceptor's shattered conn pod and into the rubble of his home.

He stayed upright until he found the door of the shelter, warped off its hinges, the space behind it crushed and collapsed. He stayed conscious until he heaved a chunk of concrete out of the way and found his nightmare.

Chapter Text

Her classmates laughed at her, Furiosa with the shaved hair and scarred arm, until she beat them bloody with their own staffs in the Kwoon and ate through science and engineering and strategy like she gulped down her meals, always looking towards the next thing.

Teachers berated her for her jealously-guarded independence, reminding her that a Jaeger took two to pilot. She added student dossiers to her assigned reading and challenged second- and third-semester students and graduates to tests of combat and strategy and piloting.

She burned through all of them until a stocky third-semester fought her to a standstill in the Kwoon.

“I'm Ace,” he drawled, sweat soaking through his gray shirt, and Furi watched him look from her clenched fists to the scars on her arm to the expression on her face.

When he looked her in the eye and smiled, she bared her teeth in a smile back and shook his hand.
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He didn't tell the doctors about the whispers in his ears or the flashes of torn figures at the corners of his vision. They gave him a leg brace and put him in his barely-used Shatterdome quarters with a bucket's worth of pills and a therapy order. He packed a change of clothes, stripped the bedding, and pulled his jacket over his shoulders before walking out and taking the first bus out of state.
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Her teachers made a fuss about a first-semester pairing with a third, but Ace knew the rules backwards and forwards and there wasn't a thing that forbade it. When Furi passed the final – one of the thirty-five out of three hundred – he met her at the board of scores with a coffee and a sandwich. Her stomach reminded her that she'd been too nervous to eat before the test, and she took a bite of the sandwich before it was even out of Ace's hand.

“Drift tests next,” he said, handing her the food and then the coffee cup.

Furi slurped the coffee and swallowed. “I'll make it work,” she declared through a half-full mouth.

He chuckled. “I believe it.”
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Ration cards didn't need a home address and background checks were an exercise in futility, so Max jostled with the crowds of dirty, burly men at the foundation of the American west-coast wall until a job opened up (a man slipped and fell under the wheels of a digger, crushed before he could make a sound) and he snatched the red card from the foreman. The man he'd elbowed out of the way swore at him, wheeling around and squaring up, so Max jackhammered his fist into the man's solar plexus and stepped over him when he collapsed, dead man's card clenched in his hand.
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The morning Drift tests started, Furi threw up in the barrack bathroom, laced up her boots, and marched out to meet Ace and walk shoulder-to-shoulder to the testing rooms. He was murmuring, to himself or to her, but her fists were clenched and her jaw was clenched and all she could hear was the sound of Aureate's metal fists pounding on the bone plates of Lockjaw's skull.
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Standing on top of the wall was dizzying in an entirely different way than piloting a Jaeger. There was no sense of moving through space like a giant king surveying his domain, no sense of metal-plated skin shifting over diesel-powered muscle strands, nobody standing beside him but ghosts. Their presence was cold on the back of his neck and shadowy in the corners of his vision, so he hunched deep into his jacket and kept his eyes on his work.
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They tried to put Ace on the right. He laughed and stepped out of the tech's guiding hands, Furi stepping around him so she could lock her stiff armored boots into their receivers, easy like walking into a home that no longer existed.

Then she was hooked up and he was hooked up and the Drift was blue, blue, blue, burning with memories.
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He slept in his car with nightmares for company. He forgot Jessie's smile, Sprog's first word, the blue of Glory's eyes, the mischief-warmth-energy of Goose in the Drift. Instead, he had screams and rage and accusations hammering around his skull like an echo chamber, battering his mind like a kaiju's fists.
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Nobody fussed after the first test. Furiosa felt Ace as the seabed to her raging ocean, steady and solid and still, shoring her up when memories teased and tried to drag her down.

Together they stayed afloat.

Chapter Text

War Rig was a refitted Mark III monster, rust red highlights over oil black, stocky and smooth with a long range cannon doubling as an arm and a rack of missiles his other shoulder. For short-range combat he had broad, heavy, spiked fists that could pummel and crush stone and bone to dust.

Furiosa couldn't take her eyes off him until blond flashed in her peripheral vision and Ace straightened like a toy soldier.

“What do you think?” asked a warm voice with a British accent.

Furi turned to face Ranger-turned-Marshall Gael Angharad and saluted. It was easier to do it for this woman than it had been with every other instructor and superior in the PPDC, but she just smiled.

“At ease.” She stepped up to the railing, hands at the small of her blue-coated back, and looked at the Rig. Furi did the same, but watched the Marshall from the corner of her eye.

“I remember the first time we saw Aureate,” she murmered, and Furi's ears perked up. “She's still the most beautiful sight I can remember.”

“All due respect,” Ace said, and Furi turned to look at him a beat behind the Marshall, “but I think the Rig is bringing some stiff competition.”

They chuckled, but then the Marshall turned to Furi, solemn and regal.

“The Rig was built on the bones of Interceptor Berserk,” she said, and Furi saw Ace raise his eyebrows over the Marshall's shoulder. “Every Ranger has a duty, but yours is twofold.” She put her hand, narrow and strong, on Furi's rigid shoulder. “Protect this world, and honor those who have come before you.”

Furi nodded. “We will.”
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Their first deployment was a team-up with Carmine Royal, a domed close-range fighter with wrist blades and incendiary spray. Their target was a serpentine Category III with way too many hooked legs and jagged horns, codename Qilin.

After three hours of dodging and sprinting up and down the Peruvian coast, Qilin crawled and writhed its way on top of Carmine, then screeched as the Jaeger snagged it by the legs. Furiosa powered up the canon and Ace planted their feet, charge building and building until Qilin threw its head back and Furiosa fired.

The headless kaiju sprayed Blue all over Carmine, but they both made it back. When Furi and Ace stepped out of their bay, a gangly Ranger in copper-red armor charged up and hugged Ace, whooping and yelling. A shorter, redheaded woman in the same armor followed and wrapped her arms around Furi.
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Carmine's pilots were the young married couple Nux and Capable. After a few days, Furi could pick them out of a crowd just from their matching sweaters and their height. They almost seemed too… perky to be Jaeger pilots, but they got the job done. Six months later, Carmine and the Rig had two more kills.
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Vulcan Specter fell against a Cat 4 that crawled out of the breach three weeks early. Hydra Corinthian finished off the kaiju, but celebration was muted. For the rangers, there was none.

“She was the last of the Mark IIIs,” Capable said to her drink. Nux put an arm around her and she rested her head on his shoulder.

Furi drained her own plastic cup and got up for a refill to avoid having to answer.

“Not the very last,” Ace said for her.

The Rig had benefited from the development of the Mark IVs, but at his core he was still a Mark III. Just another legacy, now.
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A short-lived one, maybe. Talk of the Anti-Kaiju Wall had floated around in Shatterdome gossip, always spoken of with a sneer and rolled eyes. In the early days, someone had organized a sham debate over it, Dag from K-sci arguing for it with a vacant smile and impossible scenarios while Toast from engineering threw sarcastic one-liners to counter.

Nowadays, the Wall was eating up more and more of the PPDC budget, Toast was sleeping in a hammock in the hanger bay to keep up with repairs, and Dag was predicting a double event within the year.

“Not enough,” Furi heard Angharad muttering, walking out of a PPDC meeting. “This won't be enough.”

Then the alarms wailed and all activity stilled.

“Movement in the breach! Category IV, code name: Taurax, War Rig prep for deployment!”

Furi pushed the Marshall's words out of her mind and sprinted for the prep room.
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“This is the biggest Cat IV on record,” Cheedo said over the conn-pod comms. “Sonar has given us a rough image, looks like lots of concentrated body mass with some tendrils or legs, we're not sure.”

The computer sketched a mock-up hologram of their target. Furi only glanced at it before turning back to the scans, feeds, and data on the conn-pod screen, the eyes and ears of the Rig. A flash of Ace's memories darted into their shared mindspace like a minnow; biology class, a fat frog splayed on the table, and an old cartoon with a tentacled monster swallowing a spaceship.

Furi didn't look up, but Ace laughed for the both of them.

It wasn't long after that the Rig's sensors pinged, a red target popping up at two o'clock.

“LOCCENT, we have eyes on target,” Furi said, as they pivoted to face it.

“Copy, Rig,” said Angharad. “Carmine is still patching up, but she'll be ready to assist in about an hour.”

Furi held herself loose in her pilot's rig, feet braced and hands hovering, but the target remained blinking at their twelve o'clock for long, stubborn moments.

Then it leaped forward and they braced, pulling fists up and arming them with heavy metal spikes. Impact jarred them back on their heels, claws prickling over their iron hide, but the kaiju's screech rang in their ears and Blue bloomed in the water.

Ace snagged one of the flailing limbs and Furi pulled her arm back, locked her fist and raked it over the kaiju's stomach.

It thrashed, wailing screech almost deafening. Ace's grip slipped and the kaiju wriggled out of his hold and over the sloped surface of the conn-pod. Furi's heart slammed into her throat as its talons punched dents right over their heads and they reached up, grabbed the kaiju and flung it off.

It shrieked as it flew through the air, spindly legs lashing. Furi twisted her wrist and the joints of her arm locked to form the cannon; the blinking target hit the water and she fired twice. There was another warbling shriek, but the red shape of the kaiju on the instruments clipped off the edge of the screens.

“Spotter's can't tell if you hit,” Agharad reported, and Ace growled, frustration from both of them muddying the drift.

They were back to waiting, rotating in the water to try and pick up the swift-moving shape. Furi retracted the cannon and rotated her fist, feeling the ache of microfractures and the acid bite of Blue. The kaiju was hurt, they just had to keep hurting it.

Alarms blared and Angharad screamed over the comms, “Behind, Rig! Behind you!”

They pivoted and Ace raked up with his fist, Furi reached around, but weight slammed into their shoulders and talons hooked under their chest plates like pitons, anchoring the kaiju on their back as its other many-limbs scratched and tore at them.

They roared, lurching forward to keep from toppling and reaching up and back, grabbing at spindly limbs to tear them away.

Furi caught one and pulled, but another talon hooked under the plates of Ace's arm and tore the muscle strands at his elbow as they yanked.

Alerts erupted across the screens as talons grappled with the chinks in their armor, ripping into weak spots and gaps. Something snapped in Furi's shoulder and her suit crackled and sparked, the ghost sensation of the Rig's damage overlaying the electrical burn.

The kaiju fell away from their back but seized the joints of Furi's arm, half-hanging in the water as it scrabbled for grip and bit down on a forearm plate with its beak. The plate buckled as Ace swung his arm around and brought the spikes to bear, but the severed muscle strands stopped the motion halfway through and he grazed the armor plates of the kaiju's back.

The kaiju slipped but kept its grip and Ace couldn't find a better angle to strike. Furi flicked her wrist and the plates of her hand flipped back, the muzzle of the cannon breaking through right under the kaiju. She emptied the clip into its underbelly and it screamed, plasma cracking and burning the plates on its hide until it released its grip on them and fell away into the water.

They staggered against a wave. Their left arm burned, barely responsive, and the right jolted when Furi tried to put away the now-useless cannon. Damage blared red on the screens, cables torn and armor cracked.

“We're in bad shape, LOCCENT,” Ace croaked over the comms.

“Carmine is on the way, Rig, just hold on,” Angharad ordered.

Furi swallowed a laugh or a groan at the useless advice and realized that the sharp-metallic taste in her mouth was blood from her throbbing, bitten tongue.

“Copy, LOCCENT,” Ace answered.

“Movement to the left,” Angharad reported, and the kaiju target blipped into their view.

They squared up and turned just in time to catch the brunt of the kaiju's leap again, Ace's arm useless to block it and Furi's strike clumsy, arm still half-transformed into the stiff cannon.

It doubled down, hooks embedded over their shoulders and into their waist, Blue dribbling down on them, and snapped at the conn-pod with its beak.

Their armor buckled and tore, sparks flying and metal shrieking until it drowned out the yelling on the comms. Ace grabbed for its limbs and Furi swept her arm up to belabor at it, trying to switch out the cannon again and again.

Ace caught a leg and pulled until the pressure on the conn-pod eased, kaiju rearing back and scrabbling at Ace as he pulled it down.

A flailing leg hit the conn-pod and its talons punched through the damage left behind by the beak. Pain erupted through Furi's scalp as it dragged a furrow over their heads

Ace's arm seized and the kaiju heaved itself back up, talons hooked into their shoulders until it sank its beak into the conn-pod again.

Their armor buckled and cracked and chunks tore away until the drift splintered, her connection with Ace pulling like a rubber band until it snapped and the rebound dragged Furi down into the black.