Chapter Text
You learn everything in the drift.
A young boy, dark-haired and lanky, standing on the porch of a traditional Japanese house with a traditional Japanese garden, eyes wide as he stares at the billowing smoke and steam rising from over the horizon. The knowledge that Tokyo is burning.
He melts, fades into another boy of about the same age, pale as moonlight in a dark suit that smudges shadows across the drift, sombre and silent.
Speed, a sense of time and age. The dark-haired boy becoming a dark-haired young man, running alongside another as they train, work themselves into muscle and sweat with their eyes on the ultimate prize, the giant robots that will save the world.
The pale boy too, becomes a pale young man, still solemn, lips pressed into thin lines, eyes pinching as he hunches over a computer screen, lines of bright code reflected in his glasses, bringing the jaeger to life.
The images blur together even more. A woman in a hospital bed, her lips and fingernails tinged purple-blue with poison, the dark-haired man beside her with a toddler in his arms, stuttering into an older woman with neat clothes and neat hair, bringing coffee and food during binges of all-night coding.
A sharp spike of intense emotion- pain and fear, surging through the drift, straining but not breaking it as everything dissolves into a swirl of kaijuu and twisted shrapnel, the screech of tortured metal mixing with the screams of the pilots as the jaeger’s injury rips across their nerves-
~~
The kaijuu came when Kotetsu was twelve.
He remembers watching the first attacks on Tokyo on TV from his grandparents’ home in Ibaraki, and being able to see the smoke hovering on the horizon. He doesn’t remember being afraid, but he does remember the way his parents and grandparents became suddenly so serious, spoke in hushed tones and wouldn’t let him and his brother go outside anymore. That scared him more than any monster on TV.
As soon as it could be arranged, they moved out of Japan and to the United States, far away from any coast. That was where Kotetsu met Antonio, and they became fast friends despite barely speaking the same language at the beginning.
Both of them were determined to find a way to fight the kaijuu, so when they heard about a program taking volunteers to test pilot what would become the first jaegers, they jumped at the chance. They trained hard, physically and mentally, and owing in part to their long friendship they found themselves drift compatible.
They were the third team to ever deploy, and the youngest, dropping into the Pacific shallows in a big green and grey beast they dubbed Rock Bison. The Mark I’s were unstable and duct taped together, the software that guided the drift was still being refined. When the jaeger was damaged, the pilots felt it more severely than they did in later models, nerves seared as though they’d sustained the injury themselves.
In their seventh year of fighting, just as the Mk III’s were coming into use, the first Category 4 to ever breach ripped off Rock Bison’s arm.
~~
Kotetsu was at the bar, idly watching a report on the latest attack when a woman slid onto the stool next to him. He didn’t even have to look to know her, tall and blond with her sharp military uniform straining to contain her impressive cleavage. He took a drink of from the glass in front of him. “Evening, Agnes.”
“That’s ‘admiral’ to you, you never officially resigned,” she sniffed, and would have tossed her hair were it not tightly bound back. “I’ll have what he’s having, barkeep.”
“Water it is,” Kotetsu’s favorite bartender said with a grin, and Agnes gave him a surprised, then thoughtfully pleased look.
“I suppose that makes sense. You’re living with Kaede again, aren’t you?”
“Mostly. No more barracks for me.”
Agnes sighed, apparently decided to stop the small talk. She’d never been good at it, with Kotetsu. “I want- no, I need you back.”
Kotetsu choked on his water and coughed, turning a furious glare on her. “Hell no. I got out for Kaede, and I’m staying out for her. Losing one parent to kaijuu is bad enough without the other one jumping into their jaws.”
“You’re too good to let a kaijuu take you,” Agnes flicked her fingers dismissively, recrossed her legs the other way. “Let’s face it, if it hadn’t been for Antonio’s arm you’d both still be out there. Probably still in that hideous lump of a Mk I, good god.” She shuddered delicately, and Kotetsu scowled.
“Bison was a tank, faithful to the end.”
“Besides,” Agnes ignored his comment, giving him a hooded look. “You’re not as 'out’ as you claim. You’re dying to do something against the kaijuu. You still have that hero complex, why else would you volunteer with the evac teams so often?”
“That’s different, it’s much further from harm’s way!”
“Not from Kaijuu Blue. Wasn’t it you who just said Kaede losing one of her parents was enough…?”
Kotetsu bit his tongue, then sighed. “What do you want, Agnes?”
“I’ve got a Mk VI ready to deploy.” She smiled when Kotetsu sat up straighter, and he slumped again sheepishly. “We’ve got one pilot, a brilliant young man who might almost have been a match for you in your prime.”
“Hey!”
“But,” Agnes ignored him and kept on talking; easy with practice. “He’s not been able to drift with any of the copilots we’ve tried. He’s a very passionate, driven young man, but he’s not used to letting anyone close enough to touch, let alone drift.”
“So get another pilot altogether, then.”
“That would be impossible. Mr. Brooks designed most of the Mk VI’s pilot interfacing and software himself, and he requested the rights to fly it. Given the circumstances, we’ve agreed.”
Kotetsu couldn’t help an impressed whistle, scratching at his goatee. “What makes you think that I’d be any different, then?”
“You have more experience than any of our other combat pilots. And you’ve made peace with your demons, you wouldn’t contaminate the drift and it might even be able to help soothe it.”
“Mm,” It was a tempting offer. Very tempting. The rush of fighting, of keeping people’s children safe, and all in a bright, shiny, untested jaeger. It would be just like the good old days. And as much as he didn’t want to admit it, Agnes was right. Having fought the kaijuu hand-to-hand (or claw, or tentacle thing), going back to having to sit out the attacks had been slowly driving him mad over the years. He wanted to fight. Sometimes, in the dark of night once Kaede was in bed, he wondered if that was all he was made for.
And way down deep inside, the thought of being in a jaeger again thrilled him. He couldn’t remember being this happy since Tomoe died. And wasn’t that a horrible thought?
And yet…
“…Alright. I’m not agreeing 100% to go back into combat yet, especially since we don’t know how well my hand will hold up, but I’ll give drifting with this guy a try. On one condition.”
“Oh?” she eyed him warily.
“I get to name this one.”
Rock Bison had been named by Antonio, something about Mexican wrestlers and childhood heroes. Kotetsu hadn’t really been listening at the time, and it had sounded like a cool enough name, so Rock Bison it was.
Agnes sighed, massaging at her temple as though the concession pained her. “Fine, provided Mr. Brooks gets veto rights.”
The first time it had gone unnoticed, but the second time she said his name Kotetsu raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you be calling him by rank, Ms. Admiral?”
Agnes sighed again; her life was hard, especially when dealing with Kotetsu. Still, he could be charming in his own annoying way, and she would readily admit he was probably the best jaeger pilot there was. And, in a twisted way, she’d missed seeing him in the halls at the Sternbild jaeger base, arguing with him over tiny mission details and smacking him upside the head when he got too out of line. It would be good to have him back, not that she’d ever actually tell him that. His ego was big enough as it was. “Well, that would be difficult since he doesn’t have one.”
Kotetsu let out a startled laugh. “What? They made Antonio and I enlist before they even considered letting us be pilot candidates, way back when. Getting a little desperate?”
“Hardly. As I said, Mr. Brooks has been a jaeger programmer for years, and he coded the Mk VI essentially solo. He requested to be considered for a pilot position, and considering the work he’s put into it, special concessions have been made.”
Kotetsu muttered something that might have been 'cheater’, and Agnes gave him a sharp look. “Are you in or not?”
“I’m in, I’m in! We’ll see if this kid is as good as you say he is.”
“I suppose we will.” Agnes laid a bill down on the bar, and for a moment Kotetsu wondered where she’d gotten it. He hadn’t seen her rustling through the neat little purse she was carrying, but then again Agnes had always been like that. She got up smoothly, and he half-turned on his stool to watch her. “I’ll contact you with the details,” she said, “But expect to be called in sometime next week.” She paused briefly and put a hand on his shoulder. It occurred to Kotetsu suddenly that the last time he’d seen her in person had been at Tomoe’s funeral, nine years ago. “It’s good to see you, Kotetsu.”
“Yeah,” Kotetsu shrugged slightly, awkwardly, grabbed his glass to drain the rest, just for something to do. “You too.”
~*~
Barnaby Brooks Junior was born into a world at war, three years after the kaijuu first came. He grew up far from the coast, but even so they learned all the drills in school, and their town had an underground shelter, just in case.
When he was a child, all his classmates were fascinated by kaijuu, wavering back and forth between awe and fear, excitement and wariness in the way of children who don’t quite understand how the adult world works and suspect that everything might actually just be a giant game. There was one boy Barnaby knew in the second grade who had a stuffed kaijuu that he carried with him everywhere like a security blanket.
Barnaby himself never cared. The kaijuu were always far away, and if anything he was more interested in the jaeger; how such huge things could be built and moved by people was a mystery that he wanted to solve.
When he was ten, his father’s job offered him a promotion, but it required them to move across the country. Suddenly, they were only a dozen miles from the coast, and Barnaby remembers vividly his mother fretting and his father trying to reassure; kaijuu never came this far inland, and never into areas this sparsely populated. For whatever reason, they always seemed laser-guided to the largest cities.
There should never have been a kaijuu, but there was.
Barnaby was in school when the attack came, but because no one ever expected one, there was no warning and no preparation. Everything was disorganized chaos, screaming and running and Barnaby remembers wanting to find his mother, to reassure her and make sure she was safe since she’d been right about the kaijuu after all.
He never found his parents. They died in the attack, along with most of his schoolmates and everyone else he knew. He managed to get away, to find a little high ground outside the town, one tiny boy lost within the wilderness as three jaeger converged on the kaijuu.
He remembers this, far clearer than any of the horror or the fear. He doesn’t remember how he felt, but he remembers what he saw, burned into his eyes to be replayed over and over.
The kaijuu was huge and nasty, Barnaby had never thought they could be that big. It had a sharp, pointed beak and heavy, meaty arms and shoulders that looked terribly out of proportion to its skinny hips and legs, balance aided by a thick, lizard-like tail. Its upper body was so out of proportion, in fact, that to move it slammed its fists into the ground like a gorilla.
And he remembers the jaeger gleaming in the sunlight, every detail cataloged because he was ten and he knew every fact about the jaegers that he could cram into his head. Gypsy Danger was a brand new MK III, only built last year and only blooded in a few battles so far. The other two were both older MK I’s, battle scarred but still holding their own; Yukon Brawler and Rock Bison.
He wasn’t afraid, he knew the jaegers would save them. He remembers cheering them on, tiny voice lost under monstrous roars and screeching metal, tons of mass slamming together perilously close over his head.
His cheers probably turned to screaming when the kaijuu grabbed ahold of Rock Bison, grotesque shoulders straining with titanic strength as it ripped the arm clean off the jaeger, but he doesn’t remember.
~*~
Kotetsu didn’t meet Barnaby before they stepped into the sterile white room and settled into the chairs for the test drift. Agnes said that her techs had some weird theory that not meeting before a drift gave a clearer picture about whether or not the pair was truly compatible. Frankly, since Kotetsu’s only other drift partner had been his best friend for years before they even knew what a drift was, he thought the theory was a load of shit. But Agnes just shrugged, so Kotetsu rolled his eyes and went along with it.
There wasn’t time for more than a hello and a handshake before they settled into their chairs and slipped on the headsets that would provide the basis of the neural link. Kotetsu didn’t know much about Barnaby beyond that he was a software engineer, had lost his parents to a kaijuu attack, and that he wasn’t much more than a kid.
(Then again, some part of him felt compelled to point out, he was still older than Kotetsu had been the first time he stepped into a jaeger.)
Kotetsu wasn’t sure what Agnes had felt the need to tell Barnaby about him, and it was hard to read much from the cool blue eyes that gave him a once-over as they settled into their seats. Kotetsu wondered if all Barnaby, in his crisp white pants and tailored shirt, saw was an old man well past his prime. He felt a pang in his hand, and realized he was gripping at the arms of his seat far harder than necessary. With a grimace he forced himself to relax, closing his eyes and putting Barnaby out of his mind in preparation for the drift.
He didn’t know what he was doing, not really. The first time he and Antonio drifted it had been very different - the idea at the time was that syncing the pilots mental maps would be easier if their physical movements were already synced, so he and Antonio had been on treadmills side-by-side, hooked up to wires and sensors and god knows what and told to run. It had been… odd, and nearly magical in a way. Kotetsu remembers running, and the odd sense that he and Antonio were blending together, until there was only one of them running with steps perfectly in sync. He learned from watching video later that the moment their feet struck the ground together, their eyes began to glow blue. Successful drift.
And every time after that, it had been easy. He and Antonio knew each other inside and out, their likes and dislikes and fears and allergies. Barnaby was a stranger, and this technology was worlds beyond what Kotetsu had used in the old days.
“Bonjour, heroes,” Agnes’ voice came over the speakers from where she and the techs were watching behind a one-way mirror, and Kotetsu rolled his eyes. Still the same old spiel. “Relax. You both know how this is done. Drift initiating in three, two, one…”
There was a jolt, more than Kotetsu remembered, his vision graying out as the drift overtook his senses. Memories played, rewound and sped up at random, his own mixing with what he assumed were Barnaby’s. There were flashes of familiar things; Tomoe, Kaede, Antonio. And kaijuu. And then there were the unfamiliar things that, in the drift, were oddly familiar as well, Barnaby’s thoughts sparking over into Kotetsu’s mind. Aunt Samantha. Uncle Maverick. Kaijuu.
Kotetsu tried to relax, to let the drift settle, but something kept pulling at him. Kaijuu. He 'glanced’ over sideways, saw Barnaby looking back at him.
Genghis, the name given to the first Category 4 kaijuu. It breached off the coast of Sternbild when Barnaby was ten.
Suddenly both of them are standing there, on that hill where Barnaby somehow survived, and for Kotetsu it’s really fucking surreal watching the fight from the outside, because he remembers it from the inside. He can feel Barnaby beside him, almost vibrating in anxiety, breath hitching. Without even thinking about it, without taking his eyes off the kaijuu and jaeger trading blows, Kotetsu reaches over and puts a firm hand on his shoulder.
It stings, the tight grip sends a brief flare of pain through the nerves damaged in this very battle they’re watching. Out of the corner of his eye Kotetsu sees Barnaby’s fist clench in startled reaction to the shared pain, but it seems to steady him a bit. He swallows, takes a breath, opens his mouth to say something, but Kotetsu beats him to it.
“The battle didn’t go on this long, you know. I remember, I was there too. Right there.” He raises his other hand to point at Rock Bison, feels Barnaby jerk a little under his hand. “Why are you stalling?”
“I…” Barnaby swallows again, and Kotetsu shakes his head.
“You can’t lie in the drift, not without breaking it. You were just a kid, it must have shaken you to see a jaeger fall. But you also saw Brawler and Gypsy come back and kick Genghis’ ass in vengeance, and Antonio and I walked away minus a limb or two, but at least we kept our lives. Jaeger fall and pilots die, kid, that’s a fact you have to deal with before you step into one at all.”
Barnaby takes a long breath, deep enough that Kotetsu feels his shoulder raise and his head tip back. He lets out the held breath in a rush, and the drift settles.
Kotetsu’s vision came back into focus still locked on Barnaby’s face. He blinked, then let out a breath of his own he hadn’t known he was holding. Barnaby’s eyes, and his own, were glowing blue.
~*~
Antonio knocked on the door right around dinner time, and Kaede squealed, abandoning her duties setting the table to run and answer the door. Kotetsu just sighed, but couldn’t help a smile as he stepped away from the stove to grab another place setting. Honestly, he’d been expecting this particular social call for days, ever since the pilots for the new MK VI had been officially announced.
Kaede returned, dragging Antonio by his remaining hand and babbling about a project on jaeger she was working on for school. All the other kids thought the fact that her father and honorary uncle were jaeger pilots was amazingly cool, and Kotetsu had been dodging calls from her teacher to come in and give a speech for weeks. He probably wouldn’t be able to avoid it now.
Antonio just smiled indulgently, letting himself be dragged over to his place at the table. The empty sleeve of his t-shirt didn’t bother Kaede like it did most kids (or, frankly, most people), but she’d only been two when Rock Bison had fallen, she didn’t remember Antonio any other way.
He hadn’t actually lost his arm in the kaijuu attack, per se. The cockpit had never been breached. But when the jaeger’s arm had been ripped off, it tore through both Antonio and Kotetsu’s nervous systems as well. For Kotetsu, it had been his non-dominant side, so the damage was less severe. His hand pained him sometimes, especially when he was trying to grip something, and he didn’t have nearly the strength or the range of motion he once did. But for Antonio, it was as if the nerves had been severed as completely as the jaeger’s. His arm wouldn’t respond to him at all, and so after a couple months of attempted rehab he’d made the decision to have it amputated completely. But at least he was alive, and he’d eventually come to terms with that.
Kotetsu gave his friend a quick warning look, and Antonio just grinned and held up his hand in placation. After drifting for so long, they’d learned to communicate with just a look, and right now both of them were in agreement (though with differing tones); we’ll talk after dinner. Kaede didn’t seem to notice, and after they were done eating she allowed herself to be shooed up to her room to start her homework with a promise of ice cream once she was done.
Once she was upstairs, Kotetsu and Antonio settled on the couch with a beer each. For a few minutes there was silence, each of them lost in their own thoughts, until Antonio said,
“So you’re cheating on me now, Kotetsu?”
It was an effective ice breaker. Kotetsu sputtered and coughed up the sip of beer he’d just taken, turning to level a glare at his best friend. “What the hell?!”
Antonio burst out laughing, nudging Kotetsu with his elbow. “You can’t seriously tell me that there’s another person stubborn and stupid enough to be drift compatible with you. What’s really going on?”
Kotetsu shook his head, still growling a bit and taking a generous swig from his bottle to regain his composure. “Actually, it’s true. Agnes tracked me down and asked me to try, apparently this new kid is brilliant, but hadn’t been able to find anyone else he could drift with. I tried, and…” he paused, watching the fluorescent light from the kitchen glint off the bottle in his hand, formulating his words. “There’s a connection there, of some kind. Turns out he was there, when Rock Bison fell south of Sternbild.”
Antonio whistled softly, solemn again in an instant. “Not many people in the town survived that day.”
“He managed to get out, to the woods outside, I think. I’m not sure, I only know what I saw in the drift. I don’t know if that’s what makes us compatible or what, but…”
“I wonder…” Antonio trailed off, then shrugged at Kotetsu’s questioning look. “I wonder if he’d be compatible with me, or any of Gypsy or Brawler’s pilots.”
“You’re not a pilot, you’re a liability,” Kotetsu jabbed good-naturedly at his maimed shoulder, and Antonio rolled his eyes. “…And we’ll never know, will we? Brawler’s pilots died of Kaijuu Blue ages ago, and Gypsy’s…” He stopped, and he and Antonio silently clinked their bottles together in toast. Sometimes pilots walked away from kaijuu, sometimes they didn’t.
“…You’re not seriously thinking of combat again, are you, Kotetsu? At your age?”
“Hey! I’m thirty-six, not sixty! Apparently the MK VI has the engineering of a heavenly chariot, or so I’ve been informed by the lead engineer. Weird guy. But he was quick to reassure me it’ll be tons safer than the old MK I’s and it’s practically impossible for the pilot to actually die, short of being stepped on, drowned or blown up.”
“All the usual ways, then,” Antonio grunted. “The MK I’s were perfectly serviceable, for the time.”
“That’s what I said!”
“What about Kaede?”
Kotetsu stopped, shoulders slumping a little as he leaned back in the couch. “…Yeah. That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“What about Kaede?”
Both men jumped, twisting around with wide eyes to stare at the girl standing in the doorway with one hand on her hip, binder of math homework cradled in her other arm. She frowned at them, brows drawn down into a sharp expression that made Kotetsu’s heart ache with how much it reminded him of Tomoe suddenly. “A-ah, Kaede-”
“What’s going on?” She walked over to plant herself firmly in front of them, just on the other side of the coffee table where neither of them could really escape without physically pushing her out of the way. “I’m thirteen, dad, not a kid. You don’t have to hide stuff from me.”
“Well….” Kotetsu scratched at his goatee, shared a helpless look with Antonio. His best friend made a desperate and clear 'don’t look at me, she’s your daughter’ motion, and Kotetsu sighed again. He set his beer down and scooted over on the couch a bit, patting the space beside him. “…Kaede, come here. I need to talk to you about something.”
Kaede put her binder down and sat, and Kotetsu began to tell her about the drift.