Chapter Text
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.
There was a phrase carved onto their jaeger the first they met her in the hangar of the Taipei shatterdome.
It was like a rite of passage. An impromptu tradition born in the earlier years of the war when kaiju attacks were still scarce and human wars had been altogether abandoned for the cause of the greater good; when Yaga could still afford to commission new jaegers as presents for the chosen few and the construction teams still had time to bestow blessings from a dead language onto every new jaeger for protection and luck and plain old fun.
She was waiting for them in the hangar in all her gold and green glory, tinted blue and orange under the fluorescent lights and the sparks of the crewmen’s drills. Infinity Alpha, Yaga had told them, Mark III, lighter and more agile than all her predecessors, fitted with a core of titanium alloys and a fluid synapse system; and there, on the edge of her giant metallic breast—audentes Fortuna iuvat.
“Fortune favors the brave.” The English was clumsy on Satoru’s tongue, but he didn’t care enough to stop. Why would he? Infinity Alpha was here, she was strong and beautiful, and she was theirs.
His shades almost slipped when he looked down and grinned at Suguru. “Fits us pretty well, huh?"
They had been standing on the technician’s bridge that day, peering down into the void while Satoru climbed a ladder to get a closer look at their jaeger. Though the sounds of construction were loud around them and drowned everything out, the drift was still hovering between them—and that was how he knew Suguru had heard him. Every word, every thought.
He climbed back down the ladder in time to see Suguru roll his eyes.
“Every day I wonder how your inflated head fits inside your helmet.”
“Sure you should be talkin’, Mr High and Mighty? You’re cocky too.”
“And somehow, that’s still less than you.” Suguru scowled when Satoru stuck his tongue out, but there was no real heat to it. Instead, he looked up at those words and apprehension flickered across the drift. “Those words don’t mean anything once we’re deployed.”
“Who said they gotta? They just sound cool.” Satoru felt Suguru roll his eyes again, and grinned.
Nineteen drops, nineteen kills. That was nineteen monsters less that humanity didn’t need to worry about terrorizing their shores, but Satoru didn’t care about that so much as he did about the fact that they were winning.
Sore winner, he felt Suguru think at him. Killjoy, he projected right back and felt Suguru laugh quietly before they both looked at where the construction teams were adjusting a panel on Infinity’s arm.
“The world needs us, Satoru,” Suguru eventually said. His voice carried heavily, despite the construction around them. “We can’t afford to fail.”
“Then we won’t.” Satoru slung an arm around Suguru’s shoulders. “We’re the strongest, remember?”
Of course he did. Of course they both did. That was the way things were back then: ride or die, best friends till the end of the line, partners until death did them part.
But nothing good lasts forever. And they were stupid back then, young and stupid and so high on victory that both of them forgot one crucial detail: in war, things changed as quickly as they stayed the same.
They were winning, until they weren’t. Fortune favored the brave, until it didn’t.
Satoru remembers it like it happened yesterday.
The moment Yaga had yelled across the comms "that thing is still alive!" and the panic lancing across the drift a split second before their systems went haywire. The moment of impact, and the .2 seconds of cold dread sinking into them before Infinity's left side crumpled like fucking glass under Hammerhead's claws and took Suguru with it when it tore apart and fell like a scrap of flaming metal into the deep dark sea.
He remembers feeling the drift between them snap.
He remembers screaming so hard tears burst from his eyes.
And then there had been Shoko's voice on the comms, not screaming or crying but pulled so taut she must have been close, telling him—begging him to "Leave him, Satoru. Leave him and come back."
And he had.
Damn him to all nine circles of hell, but he had. Smashed the kaiju to a blue and bloody pulp with both the storm outside and his blood raging in his ears until it wasn't possible to tell where one ended and the other began, and then turned back without Suguru.
Solo drifts had only been done once before but suddenly he was back at the base and being pulled free from the remains of a broken jaeger, by hands that both held him down and hugged him as he screamed and cried from the unfamiliar emptiness inside his head.
They put him in the infirmary for a month. A month of laying on one of the infirmary beds with broken ribs and a broken arm and a brain that would suffer from the consequences of a severed neural bridge for the rest of his life; he lay there with bandages wrapped around his eyes and thought about how much better it would be if he had just died with Suguru on that drop.
He didn't ask them to keep him alive. He didn't ask about Suguru's body either. Why would he? Suguru was not in the drift, no matter how many times or how hard he searched. He would never be there again. His body was at the bottom of the fucking ocean, and no sane person was gonna use a jaeger to search for a dead man.
The strongest.
Don't worry, Suguru. We're the strongest.
Sometimes, Satoru thinks he might have cursed them.
Cursed Suguru, to die young, to die a horrible terrifying death in the ocean he always loved.
Cursed himself, with the dreams of that godforsaken day even now, even years later.
They aren't all nightmares. Most of the time, they're not; most of the time, they're memories of the earlier years.
The first time they met. The first time they drifted together. The day they met Infinity and the thought Satoru had almost immediately after, of asking Suguru to stay with him forever.
And other times, they're dreams of what could have happened. Of what could have been if Satoru had been as brave as he claimed to be back then. If he had asked Suguru, if he had actually listened to him.
If Suguru had lived.
Pilots don't carry regrets; there's just no room for them. But Satoru does; why not, when no one else will be in his head again?
He carries regrets like builders would carry stones and takes them out in the privacy of his own room, all his memories of Suguru that he flips through one by one like a photo album when he can't sleep. This one, the first time a stray kick ended up hitting the fire alarm; and that one, the first time they drifted together and caught Satoru thinking, damn, Suguru has pretty eyes.
Suguru didn't let him live it down for months.
Shoko would tell him he's a masochist. It's true for him and it's true for her, when she decided to become a doctor on a spur-of-the-moment whim and ended up as makeshift coroner, reliving that goddamn day with every body that came back to her in a broken jaeger.
Salt in the wound. Acid against bare skin. With every day that passes, it feels less like remembering and more like self-loathing, but if this is how he remembers Suguru, then he'll take it: every memory and every regret, one and infinity of them all in the palm of his hand.
Nanami left Taipei two months after Suguru died.
It wasn’t really a surprise. The life of a jaeger pilot does things to people, and everyone knew Nanami Kento had a heart no matter how much he pretended he didn’t by saying things like “work is shit”, “piloting is shit,” and “It’s my policy to separate personal feelings from work.”
The last time Satoru saw him, he had been standing in the hangar looking at a jaeger bound for Oblivion Bay; looking, also, at the ghost of someone no longer with them. Mourning never lasted for very long back then, mostly because there was no point: the jaeger would be destroyed, the ghost would pass on, and Nanami would do what any smart person would do in this situation: leave, skedaddle.
Escape.
The last Satoru heard of him, he was traveling around the world like a kind of pseudo-businessman, recruiting the incarcerated and homeless and able-bodied to work on the wall stretching from coast to coast, city to major metropolitan city.
He knows better, though, than to assume Nanami’ll stay gone. Cause maybe he doesn’t care about the people they save but Nanami does, and it wouldn’t have taken him long to realize the wall was a lost cause from the beginning.
So when Nanami eventually calls, Satoru’s not surprised in the least.
“Nanamin~” he sings, strolling through the bakery serving as their meetup point. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
Nanami’s brow twitches, but he doesn’t do anything else except push a cup of steaming coffee to the empty chair across from him.
“It’s been a while, Gojou-san. I assume this is how you still like yours.”
So he’s mellowed out some after all.
It’s a little disappointing.
“Sure.” Sugar’s a luxury these days, but he can smell it in his coffee even before he sits down. He takes the cup between his hands and lets it warm his fingers. “New look? Can’t say if I like it or not.”
“Your opinion on my appearance makes no difference to me. These were a safety precaution.” Nanami touches the armless sunglasses covering his eyes, like an afterthought, and then lets his hand drop. “You look different as well. How are your eyes these days?”
Satoru mindlessly reaches up to touch the blindfold around his eyes, a gift from Megumi; sheer enough to see through, but thick enough to ease the strain on his vision. He sees Nanami follow the motion and offers a crooked grin.
“It’s the end of the world. They can’t get any worse.”
Nanami just nods, and that’s another thing that’s changed; patience in place of a lecture about minding his health. Satoru can’t decide whether or not he hates it.
They drink their coffee in silence. It’s raining outside, as it had been for days now, and the London chill Satoru’s still not accustomed to blows in through cracks in the windows. The tv above the bakery menu is tuned to the news, and they watch with the bakery’s other customers as the kaiju codenamed Titan rips Sydney apart.
“That’s the second category four in five weeks,” Nanami notes, “though it shouldn’t be. Having them pop up this frequently throws everything off.”
“Kaiju destroy because they want to. Logic doesn’t apply to monsters.”
“Perhaps we should discontinue the jaeger program then, since it is clearly illogical.”
Satoru sits back and watches Titan get his face smashed in by the fist of a green and blue tinted jaeger—Hammercloud Lance, Mark IV. Nobara must be having fun, he thinks.
“That’s what we have the wall for,” he says. “How’s that going, by the way?”
“Abysmally.” Nanami looks less annoyed and more tired by it, but the words still come out dry. “The world leaders insist on calling it ‘unbreachable’ despite multiple incidents that say otherwise.”
“Quit then, if you’re so worked up about it.”
“I did.”
There’s not much silence between the downpour outside and the tv running in the background, but it feels like it as Satoru blinks. Nanami meets his eyes evenly.
“I quit yesterday,” he repeats. “I leave tomorrow to report to the Tokyo shatterdome.”
For real? Satoru would ask if it wasn’t already obvious. Nanami quit, for real. He’s going to pilot again like he swore he would never again the day he left. For real.
“Tokyo, huh? Haven’t been there in a while.”
“No,” Nanami agrees into his coffee. “It’s a long flight from here.”
“Should have left earlier then, instead of waiting around for the apocalypse.”
Nanami doesn’t laugh, but he allows a sliver of wry humor to shine through. Satoru only smiles.
“I thought about it,” he says at last, “but I had some unfinished business to take care of here.”
“And what’s that?”
“You.”
Satoru’s smile thins.
He leans forward until his elbows are on the table. “Why did you really call, Nanamin?”
They exchange stares for a long moment. Then, Nanami adjusts his sunglasses.
“Gojou-san, please look around the bakery.”
Not really much to look at; display cases that are almost empty, leaky windows, the little golden lights contrasting so much against the weather outside. Some guy in a threadbare jacket paying at the counter, a mother with her two kids, a student trying to get cell reception. The girl working the register with dark smudges beneath her eyes and a tired, sunny smile.
“This bakery ran out of money and supplies three weeks ago; right now, they’re making do with what they have. The bread in the display cases is stale but the employees refreshed it and are selling it at a fraction of the original price. And despite the economical difficulties, the young lady at the counter gave me our coffee for free. As thanks for being a jaeger pilot.”
The note in Nanami’s voice is almost pensive.
Nothing’s new about that; he's never been the type to do or say anything without reason. Still—
“Spit it out, Nanamin.”
Nanami nudges aside his coffee and looks him right in the eye. “Gojou-san. Infinity Alpha is in perfect fighting condition.”
A memory: three Latin words promoting courage. Three more words, a cursed catchphrase.
We’re the strongest.
Satoru shoves down the memories as deep as they will go. His hands close around his coffee again, and when he thinks he can speak without his voice cracking, he does
“Yaga’s a real coward for not coming to me himself.”
“He didn’t send me; I was already planning to come to you by the time I made up my mind to go back. He only asked me to pass you a message.”
The bell at the door rings, another customer comes in. Nanami sets down a manila folder between them and it doesn’t take Satoru too long to realize what it is; the seal of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps has always been recognizable. He slides it back.
“Going back’s kind of counterintuitive now, isn’t it? The program’s getting shut down.”
“Six months from now. In the meantime, Yaga-san plans to fight with the funding we have left.”
“That’s a horrible idea.”
“The only one we have. And a necessary one. I had hoped you would understand this.”
Satoru says nothing.
“The wall is a lost cause. Men have died building it and will continue to die building it while the kaiju continue breaching through its weakest points without giving us time to rebuild. It won’t save us; neither will the jaegers, likely, but there is a slightly better chance with them.” Nanami’s voice is low and urgent; and suddenly, he looks way older than a man approaching thirty. “Please come back, Gojou-san.”
“I can’t,” Satoru replies, conversational. His gaze slides to the window next to them, at everything left of London on the other side of the glass; rubble and refugee fires spilling over the beach like black blood, right next to the deep dark sea. “Besides, you’ve got my students, haven’t you? Megumi and the rest? What about them?”
“They are on the way to Tokyo as well. Your students are strong, but they still have much to work on.”
“So? They’re capable enough as it is right now.”
“They are children, Gojou-san.”
So were they. So was Suguru.
Nanami watches him for an uncomfortably long moment, his eyes unreadable. Satoru clenches his jaw so hard it hurts and shuts his eyes behind the blindfold.
For a moment, the only sound there is, is of the rain.
“I know you don’t want to go back. I understand it, as well.”
A name: Haibara Yu. A bright and sunny presence, who was always smiling. Nanami’s copilot.
Ex-copilot.
He opens his eyes again to see grief in Nanami’s, there for barely a second before it’s gone like it was never there. “It’s been five years, Gojou-san. We lost five jaegers and twice as many pilots in the past eight months, and we are gathering everything we have left in Tokyo to deal with the end of the world. One way or another this war will end, but either way we need you in a jaeger, Gojou-san." A pause. "We can't win without you."
His stare is unwavering, hardened with the years stacked on him and the knowledge of there being more lives to save than to grieve, and it says more than his words ever could. Satoru holds it for as long as he can before he looks away, tasting bitterness on his tongue instead of sugar.
You can’t win without me. But I—
“Sorry, Nanamin.”
I can’t pilot without him.
It's selfish. It's terribly selfish, and they both know it.
It feels like running away, as he gets up and leave a twenty pound banknote in front of Nanami, but it’s been too long since he knew how to do anything else.
Suguru would call him a coward. Well, tough, cause he never said he wasn’t. “Good luck out there, Nanamin. Thanks for the coffee."
“Gojou-san.”
He stops, one foot out the door.
“Death comes for us all in the end, but no one shares the same death. For me, I would rather die in a jaeger than die knowing there was no meaning to my existence." Nanami pauses, and pushes the banknote back towards him. "Please consider this before tomorrow morning.”
Satoru doesn't take it back.
He walks out of the bakery, hunched up against the rain, and promises himself he will not look back.
Hours later, his phone pings with a message—a time and an address.
Weird that Nanami still has his number. Weird that Nanami didn’t delete it right after he left, like Satoru had, to cut himself completely from the world he wanted to leave behind.
Guess fate was in the works for this one; Nanami was always coming back.
There's an attack in Bangkok on the news. A kaiju with Mt Fuji for a head, jagged black teeth and claws, and a single eye. Another category four.
Satoru. His memory molds itself into Suguru’s face, scratched bloody from a broken helmet, and wraps around him like a chill down his spine. Satoru.
He turns off the tv.
His phone rings at midnight with an unregistered number, and for old times’ sake, Satoru lets the call go almost to voicemail before picking up on the last ring.
“How many times are you gonna ask me, Nanamin?”
“As many as it takes to change your mind.”
That’s not Nanami’s voice. Satoru presses his phone closer to his ear and makes his way to the window, pushing aside the curtain to look outside.
It’s a little crazy to expect a chopper in this weather, but to be a jaeger pilot, it’s a requirement. Not that there is one—there’s nothing outside but the rain blowing into a storm and the imaginary outline of a kaiju’s back in the distance—but Yaga could be persistent when he wanted to be.
A good leadership quality, sure. Right now, though, it’s a fucking pain.
“Sensei,” he says, projecting just enough false politeness to make it sound sincere. “This is a surprise.”
“It’s been a long time.” Not nearly long enough. “You’re a hard man to find, Satoru.”
“That was the point. Flick Ijichi between the eyes for me, please and thank you.”
“Leave him be. That man’s put up with more than enough from you already.”
His voice is infuriatingly calm.
Satoru resents whatever point in the past Yaga learned patience.
“Tell him to stop making it so easy for me then. What do you want?”
“I’ve spent the past six months activating everything I can get my hands on. Reviving old connections, calling in favors and collecting debts, pulling every goddamn string I can to turn the tide of the war.” In the background, there’s the cranking of the war clock, the sound it always made when it was set back to zero. “We’re getting shut down. I don’t know if you heard.”
“Sure.” What have I always said, sensei? The people at the top are just old, rotting prunes. “Not my problem though.”
“It should be.” Static crackles across the line—poor connection, maybe, before Yaga’s voice is in his ear again. “There’s an old jaeger, Mark III. You may know it. It needs a pilot.”
Satoru lets go of the curtains.
“A pilot,” he repeats, “so find someone else. There are other people, aren’t there? Other Mark III pilots?”
“Two years ago, maybe. But now all the other Mark III pilots are dead, and I’m not putting newbies in a jaeger just for them to get us all killed. It’s you or no one, Satoru.”
“Sorry to disappoint then.”
(He’s not sorry at all.)
The bad connection’s not enough to muffle the background noise from the other end—the mechanics working, the beeping of the drivers transporting parts and food and supplies, the tinny distant blips of the loccent system at work. He hears Yaga sigh.
“Years ago,” he says, “I asked you a question, the morning of your initiation into the jaeger program. Do you remember what it was?”
(Why do you want to join the program?)
“Do you remember what you said?”
(To kill kaiju. And probably save humanity on the side.)
At nineteen, there was only one simple philosophy Satoru lived by: that everything exists just because it does, with no deeper meaning. The sky is blue just because it is. Kaiju exist to be killed, just because. The end. Done.
It wasn't humanity Satoru was thinking of every time Infinity was deployed; it was the adrenaline high and the satisfaction that came with slicing through bone and blood and muscle.
He doesn't care about humanity. He didn't back then, either; he was only half of the strongest drift-compatible duo, and Suguru cared so that he didn't have to.
Look where it got them.
Look where it got them.
Look where it got us.
Satoru doesn't care about humanity. He knows it, and Yaga knows it, so:
"What's your point?"
"If humanity's imminent end isn't reason enough to come back, then come back for something you care about. Do it for your students." Yaga's voice loses the steel tempering its edges, softening in a way it rarely did for anyone. Least of all Satoru. "Do it for Suguru. You owe it to him the most, to come back."
(Another thing about Yaga Masamichi: he knows how to hit where it hurts.)
Satoru's hand curls into the fist he would have slugged across Yaga's face, respect to elders and authorities be damned, if this conversation was happening in person and not over the phone.
"Going senile already, old man? Piloting's a two-person job." The remnants of the drift in his bloodstream, the memory they hold inside of dark hair and dancing laughter, does nothing for the anger festering just below the surface. "And in case you haven't noticed, I don't have a copilot anymore."
"What if I told you otherwise?"
Satoru almost laughs. The idea of putting anyone that's not Suguru in a jaeger with him in these dark times is—
(Impossible.
Unthinkable.)
Hilarious.
Satoru doesn't laugh.
"Doesn't matter," he says instead. "That one-in-a-million drift compatibility you're looking for? That'll never be me and whatever moron Ijichi picks to get us all killed."
"Ijichi didn't pick this candidate. I handpicked him myself. Personally."
The fact of the matter is this: Yaga Masamichi doesn't handpick people.
For a moment, all Satoru hears is the blood inside his ears.
"Who is it?" he eventually asks.
Yaga doesn't tell him.
Naturally.
"There's a plane on the way," he says instead. "It will arrive tomorrow at six a.m., your time, at the location Nanami sent you. What you do with that information is up to you."
(He dreams of Suguru, and being back on that bridge in the Taipei shatterdome.
He's had this dream before, but there's always something different; always some tiny deviation from memory. In this one, it's not Infinity Alpha being assembled, it's another nameless jaeger. In this one, victory and arrogance alike don't get the better of them.
In this one, they're looking at each other, and Suguru's hair glints blue from the lights of the shatterdome.
"The world needs you, Satoru." A one word difference from reality's script; one devastating change. "You can't afford to fail."
In this one, Satoru doesn't speak the words that cursed them.
In this one, the sea pools around their feet, cold and dark, and swallows them whole.)
The next morning, at six a.m. sharp, the plane emblazoned with the sigil of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps leaves the Port of London.
He sits in the row across from Nanami and ignores the weight of his silence and his stare burning into the side of his face. When the captain announces takeoff, he turns and watches London become smaller and smaller; and when it gets too small to see anymore, Satoru rests his head against the window and turns his gaze downwards.
Below them is the sea, rolling blue and shining.