Chapter Text
When Bren Aldric Eremendrud was a boy, whenever he felt small or lonely, he’d look up at the stars, wondering if there was life up there. Turns out, he was looking in the wrong direction. When alien life entered our world it was from the deep beneath the Lucidian Ocean, a fissure between two tectonic plates. A portal between the dimensions, a breach.
Bren was fifteen when the first Kaiju landed in Port Damali. The wave of destruction was unimaginable to a little boy from the coasts of the Dwendalian Empire. He didn’t understand how something could wreak so much havoc and take so much firepower to stay down. Even its blood was corrosive. The shambles of Port Damali would never be the same.
All wars and infighting between countries ground to a halt as mankind united under a common enemy.
To fight monsters, the people of the world created monsters of their own. The Jaeger Program was implemented. Jaeger. Zemnian for hunter, named for the place where the first prototypes were constructed in the Zemni Fields of the Dwendalian Empire. Monsters designed to put these otherworldly abominations back in their place.
One pilot couldn’t handle the neural load to pilot the Jaegers alone, so a two pilot system was implemented, one on the left side, one on the right. The two pilots had to link their minds to work in perfect synchronous harmony to ensure that the mechs could run properly. With technology being advanced from cooperation around the world to stop this problem, the Pan Lucidian Defense Corps was born.
Worldwide they worked to find matches too, pairs of people who were drift compatible, who could pilot these massive mechanical monstrosities. It was found that familial bonds were often best, but occasionally those who were good friends or even couples would work as well.
The Dwendalian Empire didn’t believe that was enough.
The studies of Trent Ikithon showed a common factor in non-familial drift compatible bonds. They had usually gone through many shared or similar experiences, and shared trauma seemed to yield the most powerful bonds.
So Ikithon created the perfect team.
Three children from the small port town of Blumenthal were taken to Rexxentrum. Blumenthal had been taken under the rule of the Empire after the war, and now supplied the Empire with whatever they needed. Soldiers, fish, food, and these three children were among many things usurped by the king. They were selected for their skills, their brains, and trained to be the perfect drift compatible team.
The three of them ate together, slept in the same room, shared the same lessons, shared the same pains and punishments. Three became one, and they turned into an indomitable force. Wulf and Astrid each controlled an arm on the left side of the body, with Bren at the right, calling the shots and keeping them moving as one to implement the battle strategies they’d been taught since they were children.
The Jaegers were a success. They started winning.
And then it all went wrong.
At 2am one cold morning, seven years into the war against the Kaiju, Bren, Astrid, and Eadwulf were deployed to take out a Category 3 Kaiju, the biggest one they’d ever seen. The day had started like any other, with them jogging down to suit up, each wearing their personalized red jackets, emblazoned with the crest of the Dwendalian Empire over the breast and a massive Phoenix across the backs.
Normally Bren loved the feeling of the link, settling into the drift with the two people he was closest to in the world and piloting Phoenix Fire with them. They were heroes in the Empire. They thought they could do no wrong, gods among men.
As soon as Bren saw the Kaiju they were up against, he felt his cocky attitude fade away. But there was no hesitation from Wulf or Astrid. They were fighting the beast just like normal, and they didn’t seem to have a worry in the world.
This time, Ikithon had told them to save the head. They knew what would happen if they failed their commander.
But this Kaiju had an armored chest plate that they couldn’t penetrate, not with their projectiles or their fiery gauntlets.
It was as if it had learned from all their previous attacks, seeing through every strike they could think of. As Wulf tried to hit it with a blast from his gauntlet, it caught the fist mid air before it could even finish charging up, wrenching it from the arm and tossing it miles out to sea.
Bren tried to call out to them through the drift, tried to keep them further away from the shore, but Wulf and Astrid didn’t seem to care. They were more concerned with fulfilling their duty to the Empire, completing their mission so that they could please Ikithon. Not a single one of them wanted to return to the Shatterdome empty handed, but Bren was starting to feel a pit of dread in his stomach.
He was doing what was right.
He was doing what was necessary. They needed to continue to study these things, and this was the way. It didn’t matter if it was a tricky battle. Jaegers could be repaired. Towns could be rebuilt.
Right?
The trio didn’t know the beast had some sort of projectile blast as well, some corrosive acid, similar to the horrible blue blood, that came from a sack in its throat. It began to eat away at the protective core around their Conn-Pod, leaving them all vulnerable. It got more and more desperate as the fight went on, taking riskier moves and keeping two steps ahead of whatever they predicted.
It wound back for another wave of acid, and Bren knew it was too close to the shore, that they should just take the hit, but then the city would be defenseless. There was no good option.
People were going to die, all because of them. Because of Ikithon.
They were able to dodge out of the way of most of it, though Bren could hear the screaming from the shore, and he knew the damage had already been done. He knew they should have just been going all out on this thing from the beginning. That was their job. That was how you dealt with monsters.
The Kaiju was already rearing back for another attack, its vicious mouth and pointed horn-like protrusions lunging directly at the Conn-Pod, like it knew where to aim. Like it knew where all their weaknesses were.
He felt the terror and the burst of hot white pain as Astrid was ripped away from them. Bren felt the rage that surged through Wulf as one of their own had been taken, and they both agreed to stop trying to save any part of the Kaiju. They both wanted it dead. Wulf from anger, and Bren from cold fear. But the drift held steady. He wasn’t in control of Astrid’s abandoned arm. He only had access to one gauntlet, and Wulf with nothing but a stump on the other hand. The suit was trying to reroute functioning to Wulf, but it was taking too long.
Despite being sure that they would both die, Bren fired up the gauntlet and aimed directly for the head, shoving the fist of the Jaeger halfway down its throat. Wulf did his best to help, surging forward and knocking the thing off balance as Bren tried to blast it apart. Ikithon was yelling in their ears to save the head, to do as they’d been ordered. There was no hint of grief, of loss, as one of his pilots he’d raised for seven years was brutally killed.
Tears burned down Bren’s cheeks, hot and shameful, threatening to cloud up his helmet.
They were just kids.
This was a mistake.
Everything Bren had ever done felt like a mistake.
The hours of torture he’d endured with Astrid and Wulf, and now she was just gone.
There was a deafening sound, as all the soundproofing of the Conn-Pod was gone, and for a moment, Bren thought they’d made it out alive. For a moment, Bren thought the gauntlet attack had worked. They’d done it.
As it fell, it grabbed out at the Conn-Pod, trying to keep itself steady. With the weakened state from the corrosive fluid, its claws rent through metal like butter.
Wulf was turning to Bren with a grin of success, relief, and vengeance. He could feel the underlying grief, but the other pilot was satisfied with bringing it down.
And then Bren felt the blinding pain, deep red this time, and the utter fear as the claw slashed just close enough to take Wulf along with it.
Bren panicked, stumbling backwards in the suit, controlling the lot of it himself. His head ached with physical pain, but there was nothing compared with the complete loneliness and emptiness beginning to consume his mind.
He had to wait for the heartbeat of the Kaiju to stop until he could unplug himself. The suit was rerouting the entire neural load to him, and he could feel blood begin to drip down his nose. From his ears then too, sticky and red.
The little blinking light stopped, and a flatline sounded to accompany the ones for Wulf and Astrid.
With that, Bren and Phoenix Fire collapsed a hundred yards from the shore, with Trent Ikithon screaming in his bleeding ears.
Bren woke up later, disoriented, reaching out for Astrid and Wulf only to remember hazy images of pain. He was strapped up to more machines than he would have been back inside Phoenix Fire, all beeping lazily to prove he was alive when he shouldn’t be. That he survived, alone.
He spent his hospital stay in a trance, vaguely understanding that people were trying to talk to him. There was Veth, coming to visit him, holding his hand, crying sometimes, Bren thought, though it was hard to tell. Beau came once, but looked uncomfortable as she dropped off a small stack of books. She didn’t come back. Dairon, some figurehead from the Shatterdome, was there a few times. They assured him Ikithon was no longer in charge.
That it would be safe when he came back.
At that, he laughed for the first time in what felt like months but might have only been weeks. His impeccable sense of time was shattered, and nothing made sense. And laughing hurt. Where even was he? Why weren’t his parents visiting alongside Veth?
Why did no one else from the Shatterdome bother to come?
He healed slowly, still lost in a haze of pain medication as he was finally discharged from the hospital. There was a car in the parking lot, waiting to take him back to the Shatterdome, they said.
He managed not to laugh at that. It still hurt, and they might try to stop him. It was clear that he was a nuisance to the hospital staff, and they didn’t want to deal with him any longer. How much of that was the truth and how much of that was his own self loathing, it was hard for Bren to tell.
Once he left the hospital, he ran all the way home. Something about his shoes pounding on the pavement as he wound through the familiar streets was comforting, even as his chest ached in protest, muscles atrophied from weeks of bed rest. Still, it reminded him of doing the same as a child, back when he had no responsibilities to Ikithon or anyone else. Nothing but a few chores to do before bedtime, and a curfew of ten o’clock. Back before the war, when he, Astrid, and Wulf had not a care in the world.
He ran until his feet ached and the streets looked to look familiar, but as he rounded the corner his breath caught in his throat.
All he found was rubble, burnt away and corroded by sickeningly blue acid. Kaiju blue. Like the injections in his arms, meant to bring him closer to Wulf and Astrid.
Two others who were dead because of their stupidity.
There was no one else left to share the guilt. Bren hadn’t done anything completely alone in seven years.
But now, he sank to his knees on the threshold of his childhood home, brought to barely gravel beyond the front doorway.
There was a reason his parents hadn’t come to see him in the hospital.
There was a reason.
And it was his fault.
Everyone he ever loved was dead and it was his fault.
Bren broke.
Bren was completely alone.
There were discussions, there were questions he couldn’t answer coherently, and there were white walls and small rooms and needles and people in scrubs talking in condescending voices and Bren hated it.
Slowly, he came back to his senses.
He realized everything he’d done.
The only one found to be at fault by the Dwendalian Empire was Ikithon, for delivering the order. His punishment was that he was taken out of the Jaeger program and replaced by someone picked by the Cobalt Soul. Ikithon was able to return to his research at the Cerberus Assembly with just a slap on the wrist.
King Dwendal had turned a blind eye to how the pilots were made, and it seemed he was giving Ikithon a pass in this case too. If any other nations had an opinion about how the Empire ran its Jaeger program, they remained silent.
Bren was still broken.
Once he was going to be released from the mental hospital, Ikithon’s men reached out to him, hoping to recruit him to a new project. As soon as he heard the news, Bren bolted, three days before his planned release. He was on the run with no money, no food, hospital whites and socks with strange rubbery tread instead of shoes.
But he was smart and relatively quick, even though his physique never really recovered after his stint in the hospital. The months spent on the street, unable to find food or shelter beyond a rare subway grate at night, didn’t help either.
At least he no longer looked like anyone Ikithon would want anything to do with.
Without Bren caring at all, the Jaeger program was shut down. They moved to a bare bones team stationed in Nicodranas, and in eight months they would lose all government funding.
He wasn’t pleased or upset about the news. But he did know the other plan, the wall, was far fetched. The job he’d managed to land, with his new name, Caleb Widogast, where he’d started with hard labor and they soon found his brain worked much better than his slightly atrophied body, was to fix the wall. This was something he could try to do to redeem himself.
To fix not only the wall, but some of the guilt and shame inside his heart.
Far-fetched indeed, but he had some sliver of hope.