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Raleigh Becket reaches Moyulan about three days after the world nearly ends. He would have come sooner, but rogue jaegers and catastrophic kaiju attacks have a way of scrambling all the civilian travel channels, and no one in the PPDC could spare the resources to fetch him. His arrival is marked with a great deal of fanfare that he seems rather sheepish about, as most of the Shatterdome drops everything to either stand at attention or gawk at him from the gantries. It’s a lot for someone who doesn’t even hold an official rank anymore, but, well, he deserves it.
Amara, still feeling emboldened by her heroic turn on the slopes of Mount Fuji, leads a small cadre of rangers in following Raleigh around the building with all the subtlety that a bunch of giddy glory-drunk teenagers are capable of. Jake finds them loitering about around the entrance to his quarters, staring a hole in the hatch.
“Give the man some space! He’s just lost his partner,” he says.
“So has Ilya,” Renata points out, and she’s not wrong. Jake sighs.
“Everyone besides Ilya clear out, then.”
They grumble a bit, but then they leave, Ilya included. Jake considers Raleigh’s closed door. He thinks it’s been fifteen years or more since they’ve spoken, before Raleigh left the corps the first time and Jake wasn’t even a cadet yet, just one of the half-feral jaeger brats running around the Icebox. What do they even have to say to each other right now?
(Mako could never have been described as half-feral , even at her jaeger brattiest.)
He can’t bring himself to knock.
Amara finds him slouched against the bulkhead a while later. “I thought we were giving him some space?”
Jake gives her a blank look.
“Where’d you all wind up?” he asks, changing the subject.
“They’re hitting each other with sticks in the, uh, the kwoon?” Amara shrugs. “I tried. Jinhai kicked my ass. And then when I got up, Vik kicked it twice. After that, I was kind of done with fighting.”
“It’s not a fight,” says Jake, half-automatically. “It’s a conversation.”
“What?”
“C’mon,” he says to her, getting up. Amara follows him. “It’s a thing my dad used to say. About the sticks. It’s not a fight. It’s a conversation.”
“Okay,” Amara says slowly, “but in that case, I don’t think I even speak the language. It’s got, like, forms .”
“Katas,” Jake corrects. “Don’t sweat it. I’ll show you. Um. Later. I’m not going in there right now. I don’t want anyone else imprinting on me like you have.”
“I haven’t imprinted on you,” she objects.
“You have. Like a duckling.”
“I have not.”
They take a long walk around the dome, the air abuzz with the sounds of repair, and finally arrive back at the kwoon, for lack of anywhere else to go. There’s a pair of pilots squaring off, staves clacking, while the rest of the group stands watching around the outside of the ring. “Those two,” says Jake. “Renata and Ryoichi. See how they move together?”
“I guess,” says Amara.
“That’s what I mean about it being a conversation.”
“Oh,” she says, thoughtful. “You used to spar with your sister like that, right? I saw it.”
She means in the drift. Jake changes the subject again. “Do you want to keep piloting with Jinhai and Vik?”
“Yes,” she replies. “Did you ever-”
“Get back in there. Make them teach you.”
“But you said-”
"Never mind what I said.” He gives her what he means to be a nudge but comes off as more of a shove, and then takes off before she can retaliate, the sounds of the kwoon quickly fading from earshot.
He winds up, perhaps predictably, back at Raleigh’s door, still paralyzed against knocking. He feels like a starstruck kid again. He’s a grown adult and he just saved the world and he can’t do this one thing.
From down the hall, a voice that is unmistakably Raleigh Becket’s asks, “Jake? Jake Pentecost?”
Jake turns. “Yeah,” he says. “Hey. Hey, man.”
Left to his own devices and without a PPDC publicist to dress him, Raleigh Becket’s personal tastes have always run towards someone's granddad . He’s wearing a knobby gray sweater that he had no business packing for a trip to the South China Sea, and there’s a deep tiredness in his posture and expression that might be jetlag but is probably… not.
For a while, neither of them says anything else.
And then, Jake says, “I’m so sorry.”
And at the same time, Raleigh says, “Ranger Lambert’s been briefing me.”
And then they’re silent again. “We tried,” Jake says, when next he finds his voice. “You’ve gotta believe me. We tried to save her.” He’s going to feel this for the rest of his life. This hot, wet regret that lives behind his eyes. Mako spent literally years bailing Jake out of trouble, and when it was his turn to return the favor, he let her slip through his fingers.
“There wasn’t anything you could have done differently,” says Raleigh, too kind for someone who’s lost so much these last few days. Jake wouldn’t be half as forgiving if their places were reversed.
No , he thinks. If I’d been faster. If I hadn’t been so bitter about being there. If our neural handshake had been stronger. She’d be alive . “I should’ve--”
Raleigh puts a hand on his shoulder. Steady. Jake stops short, his breathing ragged in his ears. “I’ve seen the tapes,” he says, fixing Jake with his gray-eyed stare. “It’s not on you.”
Jake’s doesn’t believe that. Maybe it’ll start to feel true in time.
He nods at Raleigh. “What’re… what’re you planning to do?”
“Stay a few days,” says Raleigh. “Get some things in order. Then… take Mako and go home.”
"She'd want to be near you."
“I never got to bury my brother. My first copilot.” replies Raleigh.
“I’m sorry,” says Jake, and the words can’t carry just how all-encompassing he means them to be. There is so much he wants to say - to Raleigh. To Mako. To his father. More than he can bear to unload here, and more than it would be appropriate to, anyway. He had so many opportunities to be better , and if he’d taken even just one of them, maybe they wouldn’t be here right now, trying to reach each other across this yawning void of loss.
“It’s really,” Raleigh says, and stops, sucking air through his teeth. “We’ll talk another time.”
“Yeah, man. Sure. Yeah. Yeah,” answers Jake, the words ash on his tongue, and watches Raleigh walk away until he turns a corner and vanishes from sight.
After that, he searches half the Shatterdome looking for Nate and finally finds him in one of the records rooms on the lower level, watching old tape of the pilots of Romeo Blue on some talk show. Jake pulls up a chair. “Is this the one where they take off their shirts? With the drivesuit scars?”
Nate glances over at him. “Uhhh, no, I think that was Good Morning America , but I can put that one on.”
Jake gingerly touches his side where his circuit burns are healing. "Yeah, maybe."
Nate leans forward and calls up the clip in question, and they watch in silence as identical slices of all-American beef Bruce and Trevin Gage, in a piece of truly inspired off-the-cuff propaganda, disrobe from their dress blues from the waist up and explain that every mark is a million lives saved.
The clip cuts to commercials, sound edited out, and Jake clears his throat. “Uh. Listen. Brother.”
Nate looks at him. “Yeah?”
“There was a moment in Tokyo, uh, when that thing pierced the Conn-Pod and the handshake broke and… And I was just really fucking scared you were dead.”
Nate laughs, just a little. “I would haunt the shit out of you if I died inside your head."
"Be serious," says Jake.
"I'd haunt you," Nate says again.
The clip comes back from commercial, sound suddenly cutting back in. Jake jumps a little in surprise, then glances towards the screen. The Gage twins have their shirts back on but still unbuttoned. An entire generation has undergone a sexual awakening .
Nate sets a hand over Jake's.
When they were teenagers, a million years ago, they'd set the academy drift record and moved in exact unison for just as long afterwards, connection persisting beyond wires, beyond scientific reason. From then until Jake left the PPDC, they'd breathed in synchronized unity in the other's company, and knowing what the other was thinking had come as easily as that breathing.
It is harder now.
“That’s confusing,” says Jake. “Do you have any idea how confusing that is?”
“Huh,” Nate says, considering. “No.” He leans in and kisses Jake on the mouth. “Is that confusing?”
“No,” says Jake, “I think I got something from that.”
“Good,” says Nate, and kisses him again. Jake leans into it this time, hands going to his shoulders. Nate grips his jaw, tongue pushing against Jake’s lips.
The clip ends and rolls over to the next one in the queue. Stacker Pentecost’s face fills the screen. Jake’s back goes rigid.
He knows this interview. It’s from after the second Tokyo Bay attack in 2016. The city was sacked three times in as many months, and someone decided that putting one of the pilots of Coyote Tango on television would be a good morale boost. He can’t remember if it worked. (He was a literal child at the time, and his entire world revolved around Mako that summer.)
Nate has stopped kissing him.
“Sorry,” says Jake, jerking a thumb towards the screen. “It’s not that I don’t like you. This just… got a bit weird.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” nods Nate. “We can pick this up later.”
“Your quarters or mine?”
Nate cracks a smile. “I like where you’re going with that.” He reaches aside and pauses the video. “I feel like we’re supposed to be doing something right now.”
“Supervising half a dozen teenagers?” Jake suggests weakly.
“Oh,” says Nate. “Probably. Marshall won’t be happy if he hears I’ve misplaced them.”
Jake’s not even sure who the marshall is right now. The whole command structure was literally blown to smithereens last week. “They were in the kwoon.”
“That’s a terrible place to leave them, Jake.”
The rangers are still, fortunately, exactly where Jake left them, despite Nate being certain otherwise. They’re no longer sparring - instead, the whole group is sprawled out on the padded surface in a tangle of arms and legs, peals of laughter drifting down the hall.
“So, if you rebalanced the neural load across a next-gen capacitor, yeah, you could definitely do a five man drift,” Renata is saying. “Dr. Lightcap’s got a paper about it. I’ll pons it to you.”
“Okay, but what would that even look like?” asks Ryoichi.
“It would be a monster,” says Vik. “If you read Lightcap’s paper closely, you would know she predicted superego breakdown at anything above three.”
“You would have to work up to it, obviously,” responds Renata, “but we pull threes on the regular. Four wouldn’t be a stretch. And Lightcap assumes diminishing returns on drift compatibility above two, so it’s already like five years out of date anyway. Our training corrects for that.”
“Again, why would you need this?” insists Ryoichi. “I understand a three-man rig. Two pilots and a gunner. Adding more people to the conn-pod just seems like a mess.”
“Who says it would be for a Jaeger?” asks Amara, and Renata whoops and leans over to high-five her.
“She gets it!”
Amara looks over and locks eyes with Jake. She grins. “Rangers on deck!”
What happens next is a slow-motion disaster as eight teenagers fall all over each other to stand at attention. Jake tries very hard not to laugh and sputters anyway, which just makes Amara’s grin wider. “Alright, at ease,” says Nate, “and no drift experiments without J-Science supervision.”
“J-Science does unauthorized drift experiments,” says Renata smartly.
Nate assigns push-ups - first to Renata, and then to the rest of them when they can't stop cutting up. Then, he sends them off: showers, dinner, evening study sessions.
“But we’re rangers now,” grumbles Vik, heading up the rear.
Jake makes uneasy eye-contact with Nate. “Later,” Nate says and walks away, leaving Jake adrift. Something about seeing how well Amara gets on with her peers has him feeling melancholy.
He’s jealous of her, he decides, which is stupid, because the last thing Jake wants to do is live in the barracks with a bunch of teenagers.
He goes with the flow. The flow takes him down to J-Tech.
“Look alive, Pentecost,” shouts Jules as soon as he crosses the threshold. Jake ducks just in time - a drone hurtles through the air, slams into the bulkhead behind him, and then course corrects.
“What’re you doing with that?” he asks, watching it zip off across the workshop. Jules waves the control pad at him.
“Present from Shao,” she says. “Haven’t quite figured out what I’m doing with it yet, but it’s neat.”
Jake nods slowly. “Uh-huh.”
“I’m kind of busy!” she says, raising her voice over the din of the workshop. The J-tech crew is hard at work. Mako, Jake thinks, would know what on. She had more of a brain for robotics than he does. “Can we do drinks later?”
“I’m supposed to do something with Lambert?” Jake says.
“I can also do drinks with Lambert?” Jules replies, imitating his tone.
“Ask Lambert?” Jake says, not exactly sure what he is volunteering for.
“Get a room,” says a mechanic helpfully.
“Drinks!” shouts Jules, waving him out.
Cut loose once more, Jake considers that he has been back in the PPDC for less than a week and he has already managed to save the world and get caught up in a love triangle, and maybe things aren’t quite as bad as he thought they were a few hours ago.
Raleigh is in the mess hall when Jake gets there, sharing a table with Hermann Gottlieb. Jake has always found the scientist intimidating, but he grabs his tray and marches right over. “Gentlemen,” he says, forcing the words out over how awkward this is. “May I join you?”
Raleigh nods. Dr. Gottlieb nods. Jake sits.
“Thank you,” he says, “For saying what you did about the tapes."
This is met with silence, because there's nothing else to say. For his part, Dr. Gottlieb has also had a monumentally terrible week.
"Sorry," says Jake. "I didn't mean to interrupt whatever it was that's happening here."
"Just old colleagues commiserating, Jacob," Dr. Gottlieb assures him.
They descend back into silence. The awkwardness is overwhelming; Jake's soul tries to squirm out of his body. He stands up suddenly, and Raleigh and Dr. Gottlieb startle.
"I'm gonna go," he announces, picking up his tray.
"Jake," says Raleigh, looking up.
"Yeah?"
"Everyone you ever lose - they're still there in the drift. And the drift is everywhere."
And there it is - the wet, hot grief that lives behind Jake's eyes, suddenly back. He feels like he's swaying, like the earth is shaking under his feet, and the tray of three kinds of starch and stretched meat in his hands can't save him but he holds on to it for dear life.
"That's good - good to know."
He leaves the mess. He loses the tray somewhere. He doesn't know where. The shatterdome's winding halls feel suddenly like tunnels dug by some burrowing creature: a colony, a hive. He is miles underground, miles under the sea, a place so deep that no color reaches except the blue tint of memory. He is face to face with the sundered beating heart of the ocean and it tastes like saltwater which tastes like his grief.
Amidst all this, Jules's face swims into view. "Jake? Oh my god."
She hauls him to his feet. His blood rushes in his ears like a torrent of seawater pumped out of a Jaeger's legs after a deployment. "Do you need to go to medical?"
"No," he hears himself say. "No. I'm good. I'm good. It's just… been a long day."
At least the room's not spinning anymore.
"Have you ever drifted, Jules?"
She shakes her head. "No. I know too much about how conn-pods work to want to strap into one."
This strikes Jake as incredibly sad, but he can't figure out how to tell Jules why , and while he's trying to do that, she's staring at him all the while.
"Seriously, are you okay?"
"Yeah. Yeah." If he says it enough, he'll believe it. If he says it enough, it'll be true. "Do you think we could find Lambert?"
"Sure," she says, and they set off, her hand aggressively clasped around Jake's bicep like she'll be able to keep him upright by grip strength alone. Whatever nightmarish transformation had overtaken the halls is reversed in her presence; the bulkhead is not a tunnel wall. The hatch doors are not yawning maws.
Nate is in the empty Jaeger hangar, up on the gantry like some kind of stupid bird. Jake feels recovered enough to make the climb up.
"Planning the Mark-7s?" Jules calls as they come over the top of the ladder.
"You bet," says Nate. "Getting some ideas together. You alright, Jake?"
"Been better."
The sun setting over the bay casts long shadows across the hangar floor. It hangs suspended in the slice of sky visible through the open doors, a glowing nuclear heart. Jake sinks down to sit with his legs dangling in the void below. Something seems to pass between Jules and Nate in the air above his head; then, they sit flanking him.
"We have to keep fighting," Jake says to the fading light. That's the horror, isn't it? That they won and they have to keep fighting. That the apocalypse wasn't cancelled. It keeps happening and happening and eventually everyone's happy endings get unwound, and that's assuming you even had one in the first place.
Raleigh Becket will fly home with Mako’s ashes in his carry-on, and the only place he’ll ever find her again is in the kaleidoscopic memory-hurricane of the drift.
Nate puts a hand over his. Jules leans her head on his shoulder.
For a moment, they breathe as one.