Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was her worst fear made true. Bad enough that she had been expected to Drift with someone someday, but two? A triple-way Neural Handshake hasn’t been seen, let alone accomplished, in over a decade. Not since the famous Legacy Sunlight and its own three compatible pilots.

At first, Rumi thought that it was just a fluke—a glitch in the recruiter’s algorithm that somehow pinged two viable candidates for her. It wasn’t until she looked into the combat room from the other side of a two-way mirror that it finally sank in as reality. The time had come. They were really going to make her do this.

Despite preparing for this practically her whole life, Rumi bit her lower lip, holding herself. Yet still she looked on. There were other trainees in the room but she had eyes only for the duo. Barefoot on the mat and wielding quarterstaffs, Mira moved like a dancer and Zoey had an agility that defied all physics. They exchanged strikes and blocks like a sonorous dialogue with one perfectly intuiting where the other would swing and when, how to fall into a new stance that flows with the other’s. They were fast. They were strong. They were compatible.  

And she’s somehow supposed to cut in as their third? What did the analysts see in the three of them that couldn’t already be accomplished with just the two?

Most of all, “How am I supposed to keep them both from knowing?” Even if everyone on the planet understood the propaganda around the creation of Jaegers boasted that “To fight monsters, we became monsters,” how literal were they prepared to take it? To accept it?

“By doing exactly what we practiced, Rumi,” Celine said simply. There was no other answer she could’ve given. For the good of the world, for the sake of sealing the rifts in the Honmoon from which all the calamitous Kaijus have arisen, Rumi and these new cadets must do their duties. “You will not Drift for a long time yet. If you still need it, we can always spend more time training your mind to make sure the truth of your nature is kept locked away where the Pons won’t reach it.”

“You say that, but you really think I’m ready for this?”

“I know you are. Everything that I’ve taught you, it’s time for practical applications. The world can’t wait any longer than it should.”

“Right...”

“Remember: data and projections can only account for so much. Today will be the true test of your compatibility with those two,” the Marshal reiterated. “What comes afterwards, reputation and skill will mean everything. From there on, you must be very careful how you cultivate this. The Honmoon depends on it. Understood?”

“Yes, Celine.”

“Good.” She turned, placing a hand on Rumi’s shoulder and giving her a light shove forward. “Now, go. Introduce yourself.”

***

Their names are Mira and Zoey, and their stories are familiar. Prior to this day, Rumi had poured over their case files, committing every detail to memory that now, in the breadth of a second between the door hissing open and her stepping inside, came over her again.

Victims of a Honmoon breach that laid waste to their hometowns. One in America and the other here in Korea where the attacks were so devastating that they inspired the Anti-Kaiju Wall projects to find global support. 

With nowhere else to go or to direct their anger, the two women became names on the recruitment list of the failing Jaeger program and the equally sparse Jaeger Academy. Surviving family and friends suggested that the Walls would better use their time and effort. But better to die in a mech than on a structure born of blind fear and delusion disguised as optimism. The common refrain amongst naysayers of the projects (and no one in the Academy were any different): the Walls won’t survive the first tsunami that hits it, let alone a sea beast that knows nothing but bringing destruction onto their elusive sense of control.

Where they lacked in the military discipline of others in their class, Mira and Zoey made up with determination that they spent in spades. From strangers, to fellow cadets, and, according to the psych analysts at the top, potential Rangers.

And Rumi was slated to pilot with them...

Seeing her approach, the two women paused their spar, panting and sweating as they turned.

“Pardon the intrusion,” she said and bowed to them both. “I’m Rumi.”

The duo blinked at her, clearly taken aback by the formality.

“Hey,” said Mira.

“Hi, I’m Zoey,” the other said brightly and gave a short little bow of her own. 

I know, she almost said, but bit her tongue.

“You look new. What department are you from?” Zoey asked conversationally.

Rumi groaned inwardly, regretting that she hadn’t thought to request for a cadet uniform instead of coming here in just black sweats and a tank. “I’m—here for the Jaeger Academy as well.”

Mira raised a brow. She looked her up and down. “You’re a cadet? How come we’ve never seen you around before?”

“I’ve been transferred from another base,” the lie came easily with the weight of Celine’s eyes and ears lingering nearby.

“Uh huh. Well, you’re kinda late to party.” She gestured in the space between her and Zoey with the top end of her staff. “Think you can keep up with the rest of us?”

Rumi nodded. “I can.”

From the corner of her eye, she could see Zoey suddenly regarding her with squinted eyes, and she held her chin between her thumb and forefinger like she was trying to think of something just beyond her memory. She turned to her. “Is there something—?”

Then Zoey snapped her fingers and she dug into the back pocket of her pants for a palm-sized notebook. “Rumi, right?” she said distractedly, riffling through the pages until finally arriving at the desired one. “Aha! You’re that Rumi! Your mom piloted Legacy Sunlight!”

The entire room grew still. The other cadets halted everything, their heads snapping in their direction.

Zoey winced. “Oops. Was—that supposed to be a secret?”

Rumi frowned. Was it? Celine told her to hide one thing above everything else, nothing about who her mother was. Then again, maybe it was an unspoken rule. Celine herself never talked about her time as a pilot of Legacy Sunlight and no one would blame her otherwise. The destruction of the Jaeger and its consequences still rippled into today, the day the world lost a powerful protector, fragile hope crumbling and falling onto the shoulders of inheritors too young for the task. 

“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m sure it would’ve been announced at some point for morale.”

“Well it’ll work on me, that’s for sure! I had a Legacy Sunlight figure when I was a kid,” Zoey giggled. “It’s so cool to meet you face to face, you’re practically Ranger royalty.”

“Then you wouldn’t object to sparring against Rumi first, would you?”

“M-Marshal Celine!” Zoey startled and even Mira stood up straighter at the woman’s sudden appearance along with all the other cadets in the room who all scrambled over themselves to line up, shoulder to shoulder. Only Rumi didn’t appear surprised, besides the fact that it happened sooner than she’d like.

Celine arched a brow at the young woman, expectant.

Zoey cleared her throat, minding herself beneath the heavy scrutiny pressing around her. “Sure, I can go another round,” she complied. At her side, Mira stepped forward to intervene but Zoey held out a hand to stop her. It’s okay, her eyes spoke, and reluctantly, Mira turned to join the line up of cadets, but not before glowering at Rumi with unrestrained warning.

Celine watched the exchange, her expression unreadable. Then to Rumi she prompted with a flick of her eyes for her to get ready.

Rumi nodded to her mentor, and gave another, this one apologetic, to Zoey before stepping off the mat to retrieve a quarterstaff for herself.

“Cadets,” Celine called over the tense anticipation of the room. “What is the significance of conducting these sparring matches?”

They looked amongst themselves. No one answered.

“Go on. Tell me,” the Marshal intoned sharply. “Or does this mean that the lot of you making the cut was a mistake.”

One cadet finally raised his hand, “To test the physical compatibility between candidates, ma’am.”

“Correct.” She walked with her arms folded behind her back from one end of the line to the other. “Many of you have grown up seeing Jaeger on television. Seeing those pilots move with ease, practically mirroring the movements of their partners without even knowing. Many of you would attribute that as the result of the Pons Technology, but a neural connection can only go so far. When you are in the Drift, there is a fine line between knowing and doing what needs to be done. If both of you aren’t in harmony, mentally and physically, no amount of time in the Drift will align you both, and a Jaeger is wasted on you.

By now, Rumi has removed her shoes and re-entered the training mat where Zoey stood waiting on the other side. 

“The first to score four points is the victor. Begin!”

Zoey held out her quarterstaff, both hands curled around it tightly as she studied her opponent. An offensive stance. She readjusted her feet for a defensive one. She blinked once. And suddenly Rumi advanced on her with an overhead strike. She didn’t even have time to flinch before the incoming staff stopped short of smacking the top of her head. The rush of displaced air brushed against her cheeks.

0-1

Rumi retreated back a step, her gaze questing for something in Zoey’s bewildered expression. Apparently, she didn’t find it, and she advanced again with another attack.

Zoey dodged cleanly out of range and came back with a counterattack meant for Rumi’s shoulder. If that didn’t work then she can redistribute her weight and come in with a—

Rumi blocked, shoved Zoey’s staff away, and brought the other end of hers in a backward swing, stopping short of touching Zoey’s hip.

0-2

“Focus,” Rumi coaxed quietly. She fell back into a new stance, her staff poised and muscles tight like a coiled spring. Waiting.

Zoey wiped the sweat off her right temple with her shoulder. If it wasn’t apparent that Rumi was the daughter of a famous Ranger already, it certainly was now. She shook her head and exhaled through her nose, getting back into focus. Maybe she can try—

Rumi’s staff cracked against her calves, hooking beneath the bend of her knee, and the world tilted. Air wheezed out of Zoey’s lungs as she slammed hard on her back. Rumi loomed over her, heaving her hooked leg up until it was trapped beneath her arm.

The other cadets collectively winced as the impact echoed. Mira’s jaw clenched.

0-3

“Damn,” Zoey hissed, her grimace caught between pain and embarrassment she wanted to laugh off there and then. She didn’t realize how good she had it whenever she fought Mira. But that must’ve been what the Marshal was trying to prove to all of them. They were growing too complacent with one another and they hadn’t even started the real training.

Rumi regarded her sympathetically and she whispered for only Zoey to hear. “You speak Korean, yes? ” she asked in the aforementioned language.

“Enough to get by,” Zoey returned in kind, and she might’ve shrugged too if she wasn’t so thoroughly pinned down. “Why?”

“I’ll share this with Mira as well, but remember that this isn’t about winning.”

Zoey narrowed her eyes. “How do you know her name?”

“That’s not important. Concentrate. Treat the fight like a conversation. You don’t plan for everything people are going to say to you, yeah? Just listen and talk back to me. That’s how I learned.”

“At your fancy off-site base, I take it?”

Rumi didn’t answer, instead waited for her advice to sink in.

Yet all Zoey could think was why she would share such valuable insight and encouragement for someone she just met and was clearly better than. 

“Why are you helping me?”

Rumi leaned in and whispered even quieter, “I had a Legacy Sunlight figure too.”

Zoey stifled a snicker, her smile crooked. Rumi let her back up. They resumed their stances, only this time there was no pause to adjust their feet, no hesitation of who should make the first move.

Rumi barreled forward with the same overhead strike as before. It whistled through the air. The enemy can and will lead with their strongest strikes. What will you do?

Inspiration flashed across Zoey’s eyes and in that suspended half-breath of a moment, any doubt Rumi had of this arrangement were dashed into nothing.

Zoey blocked, taking the shock of impact with a grimace but planted her back-foot in a way that granted her leverage to shove the staff out the way to create an opening of her own. She stopped just shy of touching Rumi’s neck. I’ll return the favor.

1-3

Zoey didn’t relish in finally scoring a point, and instead pressed on. She spun the staff around her waist, creating the momentum needed to land a swift strike for Rumi’s left shoulder, a move easily countered but it was a feint. As soon as Rumi’s staff went, Zoey redirected the momentum, and came back with a flourishing backslash towards her intended target at Rumi’s right side. I can keep up.

2-3

A small smile teased the corner of Rumi’s lips. Very well.

They exchanged blow after blow—strike, block, strike, the wood of their staff clacking noisily through the combat room where the other cadets looked on in unfiltered awe. But where Rumi kept to a disciplined box of controlled movement, Zoey was dancing all around her, using the uncanny agility that had captivated Rumi’s attention from the onset to push her perception and reaction time to their limits. Then, the unexpected:

Rumi lunged, looking to exploit an opening on Zoey’s left, and in that moment of imbalance she knew it was a mistake.

Her opponent, a cheeky little thing when she’s found her groove, hooked her staff in the bend of Rumi’s knee and heaved up and slammed her back against the mat, keeping her leg trapped between the length of the weapon and the strength of her own arm. I can learn.

Rumi smiled through her wince. You can.

3-3

“Enough,” Celine intervened. 

“Oh. Uh. Did we do good?” Zoey couldn’t help asking as she helped Rumi up to stand. Nothing in Celine’s expression betrayed her true thoughts. Even Rumi wasn’t sure what to make of it. 

“Your performance will be assessed accordingly later today,” said Celine. “You’re dismissed, Cadet. Rumi, you will fight Mira next.”

Zoey gave Rumi a sideways glance. “How did you know?” she asked again.

Before she could deflect the question, Mira was already making her approach. 

Right away Rumi knew that this fight wasn’t going to be anything like her match with Zoey. For one, the way she held the quarterstaff boasted just how at home she was with the weapon, more so than anyone she’d seen with it so far, including herself. For another, it set in for the first time that Mira was taller than her. Only by half a head at most, but with that steely, challenging glint in her eye, she might as well have two heads over her.

Taking that as her obvious cue to leave, Zoey gave Rumi a thumbs-up and turned to join the line of cadets. As she walked by Mira, she bumped her arm against hers. A reassuring gesture that didn’t go unnoticed, not by Mira and certainly not Rumi who stared in the phantom afterimage with a pang of jealousy and longing. Once more, she wondered how she was meant to come between these two cadets who are clearly well enough on their own.

“First to four is the victor. Begin!”

Instinct shocked her nerves into overdrive just in time to see Mira’s staff make a direct swing towards her head. She barely had enough time to catch it mid-flight, and the clack of wood on wood made her ears ring.

They held there together, their staffs crossed and creaking from the prolonged pressure of their immovable strength, both experiencing its equal, perhaps, for the first time.

“Did you have to go so hard on her like that?” Mira asked in a low tone.

It took a moment for Rumi to realize that she was talking about Zoey. “Real combat won’t wait for her—for any of us—to be ready.”

“Yeah. And who the hell are you to say so?”

Your future co-pilot who’ll want to keep you both alive, Rumi wanted to say, but couldn’t. Not yet anyway.

They pushed off one another and came back with a flurry of blows. Unlike her fight with Zoey where she managed to keep pace through reaction alone, wherever Mira moved, Rumi was forced to meet it, morphing the match into a deadly dance that pushed her right out of her box. It was as if Mira was granted all this space and she was damn sure going to use every inch of it. There was no talk to be had here, dashing her hopes for the same icebreaker tactic.

But there was... rhythm, though. A choreography she missed the rehearsal for. It scratched something in the back of her brain, if only she could just find it. She was always half a beat too slow, her eyes warily following Mira’s staff far too much that it became a wonder how she hadn’t lost a point yet with how blatantly on the back-foot she’d left herself. She could only imagine that Celine was seeing exactly that. A reset. She needed a reset.

She abandoned her form entirely and rolled out of the way of a swing, and finally managed to counterattack with a backswing that got Mira’s right thigh.

0-1

Rumi panted slow, heavy breaths, relieved but by no means victorious. Sloppy. 

She recovered and resumed her previous stance, correctly predicting that Mira would be upon her again right away. Despite having gone several rounds before this, Mira was strong and her swings hit like a bullet train. The rhythm this time was different though.

Rumi counted their steps. The clack of their quarterstaffs impacting to a beat no one else could hear.

Was this 4/4 time?

So when she’d thought that Mira moved like a dancer, that wasn’t just some hyperbole that waxed poetic. She’d stone cold guessed. She exhaled through her teeth, resolute and meeting Mira’s razor sharp gaze. She blocked her last hit and once more their staffs were crossed. “You were a dancer?” she asked between the gap.

Mira furrowed her brows. “What’s it to you?” she ripostes in English.

Not denial. Rumi could work with that at least.

When she wasn’t given an answer, Mira pressed the offensive. 

The time signature changed, throwing her utterly off the beat she’d painstakingly counted.

Mira got in a hit.

1-1

Rumi shook it off.

They went again. Back to 4/4. A baseline. They danced. Strike— block —strike— block . They used the whole mat as their stage. Their steps weren’t heavy but gliding.

Then Rumi scored.

1-2

Realization set in then, and Mira didn’t know whether to be impressed or irritated.

Again. Faster this time and the signature a bouncy 12/8. She was getting bolder, and the match started to get fun. She could hear music in her ear and she hadn’t for so long it felt like she’d been starving for it.

They weren’t even keeping score anymore, barely thinking of scoring at  all. The beat set by their synchronized steps rather than the aggressive clack of their weapons that were no more than mere props now. She forgot, for that moment, that she’d been upset and instead she was being seen. 

Mira struck. How? You don’t even know me.

And Rumi, with a look of satisfaction despite the sweat on her brow and the flush in her cheeks, heard this loud and clear. She dropped, dodging the strike, took Mira out by the ankles, and pinned her to the mat with the end of her quarterstaff pointed at her neck. No, but I can try.

“That’s enough,” Celine called out to them, again cutting the match short of its goal-point. “I’ve seen what I needed to see. Rumi, find me in my office at 1700 hours. The rest of you, you’re all dismissed.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the cadets all chorused, save for Zoey, Mira, and Rumi, who remained stunned in their shared confusion.

The Marshal made no further comment, turning crisply on her heel and left. After a tense silence where no one moved, and no one hardly breathed, the line of cadets broke into soft sighs of relief, and, one by one, all began to file out of the combat room.

“I wasn’t expecting high praise and fuzzy feelings but damn,” Mira deadpanned.

Rumi flinched, suddenly aware that she still had the woman pinned beneath her. She quickly stood and held out a hand. “Sorry.”

Mira looked at the proffered hand, to Rumi, then back again. She sighed. “It’s fine,” she said, and took her hand. Rumi pulled her to feet and she brushed herself and smoothed her clothes. “You’ve got moves, princess, I’ll give you that much.”

“Just Rumi,” she insisted.

Then Zoey, the only cadet left in the room, came to them, grinning, “Don’t worry, Mira using nicknames just means she likes you, right Mira?”

“Whatever makes you feel better, Zojo.”

“See?”

Rumi smiled at the two, in spite of herself. “Thank you both for the spar,” she said. “Sorry that it had to happen so suddenly though.”

“Yeah what was up with that?” Mira groused and she studied Rumi again like she’d done before, only now she looked at her like an inscrutable puzzle got placed in front of her. “That wasn’t normal what we just did, was it?”

Zoey chimed in too, nodding her head, “Same. It’s kinda how we fight, Mira, but still... different somehow.”

When Rumi offered nothing by way of explanation or insight, Mira huffed impatiently, “Come on, it’s so obvious that you know something. Don’t tell me we have to wait for the reports.”

“You’d—rather hear it from me?” she wondered, because how else was she supposed to think?

The duo gave her a long stare like it was obvious.

Even though Rumi knew what the final reports were going to look like, they did, in fact, have to wait as per the protocol. Still, she hesitated and didn’t refuse outright. Instead, she weighed within herself the ratio and heft of what was meant to stay classified and what she could reveal, of what she knew to be facts and the inevitable lies that will be told, all in the fraction of taking in Mira’s calculating glare.

“We can’t talk here,” Rumi murmured eventually, gesturing with her eyes to the camera hung in the far corner of the room.

“Oh! Let’s have lunch together. I’m starving,” Zoey proposed.

Rumi acquiesced with a short nod, while Mira shrugged, “Yeah, I could eat. Getting your assed kicked works up an appetite.”

Chapter Text

There are many factors that are taken into consideration whenever analysts drafted their proposals of strong Drift partners. Rounds in the combat room measured physical compatibility, there were brain scans collected over a period of time, and personality screenings conducted for interpersonal synergy.

Taking so many variables into account alone made finding pairs difficult and especially delicate. To do this for a triplet narrowed the candidate pool considerably, with only a handful of subjects that the Pan-Pacific Defense could boast of. It was no real loss to have gone this long without a triple-piloted Jaeger. The resources to engineer one specifically tailored was more than they were willing or able to spend with their waning budget and public support.

Legacy Sunlight, true to its name, remains their best and last endeavor.

At least, until now.

“That’s insane,” Mira put bluntly and moved around her plate of rice and beef bulgogi.

“I dunno, I think it’s pretty cool,” Zoey contested with a sheepish shrug.

“You sure that’s not just the fangirl in you talking?”

“What? Of course not! I’m being totally professional.”

“Uhhhh huh.”

Zoey pouted. “It can be both.”

“Sure, sure.”

Rumi watched the two banter, keeping her amusement to herself as she bit into her share of gimbap .

Eventually, once the pair had calmed down, and more of their meal was eaten, Rumi said, “I read your files and saw that you were both paired pretty early on. I understand that suddenly having to work with a third pilot would come as a shock.”

“Only a little bit, I guess,” Zoey said, glancing side-long at Mira. “But, I mean, this is what we signed up for, isn’t it? Whatever it takes to beat back the Kaiju.”

Mira only shrugged and didn’t bother to elaborate, though her thoughts brewed behind her eyes like a gathering storm. “What I’m caught up on is, why now? Like, I know the Honmoon breaches have been ramping up lately, but last I checked this place doesn’t have unlimited money for a gamble like this.”

“I don’t know all the details. I just know that resealing the Honmoon is retaking priority. The Jaegers were always meant to be a temporary solution, a means of buying the researchers time to find a way to fix the barrier rifts for good. But we’ve lost track of that, sinking more time and resources into one and neglecting the other.”

Historians will point to the sensationalist media as being responsible for this lapse. Morale walked a threadbare tightrope, and public opinion was everything. Jaegers and their pilots, with every successful Kaiju death, became nothing short of celebrities; the rockstars of the pacific. When they weren’t being deployed or living on-base awaiting orders, they were smiling faces in interviews, scientific marvels who were shot up to statuses bordering on mythic proportions. The number of younger recruits skyrocketed, and government grants in endless supply with little-to-no debate. Toy lines, fanclubs, even wagers akin to sports betting rose up all over the globe.

Despite the fear and destruction, the Kaiju succeeded in one thing that strengthened humanity: starting a war that united them all. And here they were now, twenty years since the first breach with a dozen Jaegers scrapped, and dozens more Rangers dead (or lucky to have retired) to show for it. And the world stood no closer to being free of the demons that granted it its ultimate purpose. They should’ve known, perhaps, that the greed of dragging this out so long wouldn’t come cheap.

We need a new weapon, Rumi once heard when she was a child—too young to understand. Those words, the beating heart of the Jaeger Program, took on new meaning when one man sought to revolutionize the technology even further. When humanity needed to fight monsters, it became monsters through Jaegers. And now, they were running out of time, outpaced by the evolutionary chain of beasts that came faster than they could begin to understand. Humanity became monsters, and yet still they needed a new weapon.

Her fingers began to tremble beneath a pulse that was not hers but was hers. She dropped her food onto the plate and hid her hands beneath the table before the others could see. 

“Anyway,” she said, “they’ve been developing this new Jaeger for a while. Like you said, Mira, the attacks have only gotten more aggressive, and the battlefield needs a reset. A Jaeger piloted by a triplet, they think, might be the key.”

Mira and Zoey were quiet for a long time, glancing at one another in varying degrees of resignation and apprehension. The weight of the world—right here, on the table bearing their half-eaten meals, the clattering white noise of the mess hall and its denizens; the space between the three of them, charged and keeping them inextricably bound together. It’s destiny lying in their every breath.

Eventually, the tension snapped as Mira spoke, “Right. So three rookies just need to learn how to pilot a super rare kind of robot no one has seen in over ten years or the world is gonna fall into a demon apocalypse. No pressure.”

Zoey nudged against Mira gently with her shoulder. “Aw, come on, you don’t have to be nervous,” she said. “We’re not ready now, sure, but that doesn’t mean we won’t ever be ready. Right, Rumi?”

She flinched, not expecting such earnestness to be directed at her. This is what being a leader means, she supposed, and gave a curt nod she hoped looked confident. 

“Exactly. But besides that, it’s still not even official. There’s a chance that it might not even be the three of us,” she amended if only to get Mira to snap out of her thousand-yard stare that’s rendered her unnervingly quiet now. 

The attempt was weak at best, and somehow Rumi hated having even said it at all. She’d barely even met them and yet the idea of having to test for compatibility with anyone else made her ache with dread.

But Zoey uttered what all of them already knew, “After what happened in the combat room? I think it’s safe to say that it’ll be us.”

“What we did in there wasn’t normal,” Mira murmured, echoing what she’d said back then. She met Rumi’s eye. “But it’s what they wanted, right?”

She nodded.

Then Mira scoffed and scooped up another spoonful of her food into her mouth. “Alright. Whatever it takes, right? Someone’s gotta send those demons back to hell and eternal torment.”

“That’s the spirit!” Zoey crowed.

Meanwhile, Rumi only exhaled softly, her thoughts unknown even to herself. She took up what was left of her gimbap and finished it off.

***

At 1700 hours sharp, Rumi knocked on the door to Celine’s office.

“Enter.”

She stepped inside. The office was dark, lit only by the deep pink glow of a grow lamp that hung overhead by a steel cord, and a humble desk lamp trained over a stack of neatly organized documents. Behind the large redwood desk, stood Celine. Her back was turned, and the occasional snick and snip of gardening shears was the only sound to be heard.

Rumi approached, stopping in front of the desk, just beyond the reach of the desk light. She folded her arms behind her back. “You wanted to see me?”

“About your performance today: you’ve taken to those two quite well. Better than I expected, even,” Celine observed, not turning away from her task of trimming the bonsai tree that she keeps. It was a replica of a far greater and more ancient tree that grew on the grounds of her home in the mountains. Rumi knew that tree quite well.  She’d played in its trunks, napped in its shade, offered incense and fruits to the headstone where her mother laid buried in the shadow it casts at sunrise.

“I can see why they were both held to such high standards,” Rumi said.

“And your technique was lacking. You were trained better than that.”

“Better to adapt and find harmony with them than to overpower.”

Snip. The glint of Celine’s eye peered up from over her shoulder, dull pink from the grow lamp against the dark. “Quoting your mother, are we?”

“Is it working?”

Celine hummed, unimpressed. “There are more efficient means of doing so that do not involve lowering yourself to such a degree.”

“They learned quick enough. The points they scored against me were fair. ”

“Yes, that Zoey character certainly demonstrated that,” she relented. “Very well. I’ll accept your answer this time.”

“Does that mean that the test—?”

“Yes.” She turned away again. Snip. Snip. “The three of you are Drift Compatible. But weakness can only get you so far. From now on, whatever training you undertake will be performed together, and I expect that you will bring those two to your level, and not the other way around, Rumi.”

She released a long breath, almost giddy despite her aunt’s words. This was it. Things have been set into motion. The future, her freedom, loomed brightly on the horizon. “So, about the Jaeger.”

“What about it?”

“You’ve never talked about it in detail apart from its slow progress,” she spoke carefully. Even her own independent snooping over the years yielded little information. If something in the Jaeger Program was meant to be classified, then it stayed classified. “I was curious about if... if it’s going to be Legacy Sunlight.”

She watched Celine grip the shears tighter for a fraction of a second before a blink took away the weakness of her thoughts. “Legacy Sunlight is dead, and it should remain that way.”

Was it relief or disappointment festering there in the pit of her stomach? She couldn’t be sure. One made her fingers tremble with her shame. Both simply made her nauseous.

She bowed her head in deference. “Yes, Celine.”

The shears were set off to the side and she turned around. “And what do you plan to do about Mira? Jaegers aren’t exactly known for being light on their feet.”

In spite of herself, Rumi suppressed a grin, knowing that the question was posed in all seriousness, but the image of a giant mech dancing lingered. It eased her upset stomach, if only for a moment. “I’ll think of something. Will we be doing simulations soon?”

“Patience. Focus on your studies first and foremost. Here.” Then she went over and opened a drawer and pulled out three papers. She fanned them over the desk. “Your schedules.”

Rumi stepped forward and grabbed the one with her name typed at the top in bolded letters.

“Starting tomorrow, your mornings will be dedicated to drills and team based exercises,” the Marshal recited. “In the afternoon following your midday meal, you’ll attend lectures covering topics of Kaiju physiology and tactics. In the evening, you’ll meet your psychologist who will see to it that you’re all well-versed in psychology and made ready for Drift simulations. Following your first trials, he will act as your primary counselor as well. I’ll forward you the details tomorrow.”

Rumi read and reread the schedule, committing it all to memory. Then she grabbed the other two copies meant for Mira and Zoey. “Understood.”

“Good. Then if that is all, you are dismissed.”

Her body twitched with the habit to leave, but she made no other moves.

Celine watched her, her brows drawn together. “Is there something else?”

“I... I wanted to inquire about our, uh, living situation. Myself and my co-pilots, I mean.”

Celine said nothing, waiting.

“I’ve read that it’s efficient and even beneficial for paired pilots to cohabitate while on base. I was wondering if, maybe, I could be granted permission to relocate to Mira and Zoey’s quarters.”

For a moment, something in the Marshal’s expression softened. For a moment, Rumi’s hope rose in fragile anticipation that she would agree.

But then, Celine shook her head once—a movement so slow, it was like it pained her to make it. “Permission denied. I’m sorry, Rumi, it’s just too risky right now.”

She nodded, expecting nothing less, and it stung not because she’d been refused, but that she was naive enough to think that anything would change. “I’ll see myself out then.”

Celine’s mouth opened, like she wanted to say something more, but then she closed it, her gaze finding the top of her desk, the little bonsai tree, then back to Rumi. “Good night, Rumi. You... You’ll do just fine.”

Ignoring the tightness in her chest, Rumi bowed and hurried out the door where it shut with a muted slam.

***

Some hours later, Rumi found Mira and Zoey’s room on the third floor of the barracks. Their voices came muffled through the door, soft and easy. Longing returned and exhaled as a sigh. She knocked.

It was Zoey who opened the door, her expression confused at first, but immediately brightened and the door swung wider. “Rumi, hi!”

Right away she smelled peaches strong and sweet in the air, and Zoey’s cheeks were ruddy; her smile a little looser. Cuter, even. It took Rumi a full second to recollect herself. She cleared her throat, “I just wanted to come by to give you both your schedules.”

“Ohhh yay!” she giggled and, yes, that was definitely alcohol on her breath.

Mira came up then and snatched up the papers, offhandedly holding Zoey’s up high above her head to make her jump for it. 

“Hey!” she whined. She jumped and caught it on her first try.

Like Zoey, Mira’s face was flushed, meanwhile her eyes behind her wireframe glasses were half-lidded and unfocused, though she kept them trained on the page. She looks good in glasses , Rumi thought appreciatively.

“When do we start?” Mira asked.

Ugh, why am I getting so easily distracted? “Tomorrow.”

Both women groaned, the sound carrying far into the end of the corridor.

“ Right when we finally break open the soju?” Zoey despaired and Mira poked her forehead.

“Told you it was too early to celebrate. Better to get sobering up, lightweight.”

Zoey groaned again and retreated back into the room, staring at her schedule so dejectedly that it would melt the heart of anyone who saw it. Then she perked up and she turned around so fast that she nearly fell over. “Ruuuuuumi!”

“Y-Yes?” she said, caught between wanting to rush over to catch her and freezing up in her own surprise.

“Drink with uuuuuus! Don’t let us suffer through hangovers alone.”

“Go drink water, Zo.” Then to Rumi, “Don’t listen to her, we didn’t drink that much.”

“That’s good then.”

“But,” Mira drawled, as cloying and as sweet as the peach soju still clinging to her every word, “we do still have half a bottle left if you want a shot or two. Take some of that edge off you.”

Whether it was out of surprise or genuine mirth, Rumi found herself snickering. “Ignoring the fact that we shouldn’t be drinking on base, I think one of us should still be the responsible one so I’ll have to respectfully decline your offer.”

Mira froze, her eyes widening a fraction. Then, “Huh.”

“What?”

She leaned against the doorframe. “That was a laugh.”

Oh. “And that—surprises you?”

After a long moment, Mira shrugged, “You surprise me.”

If Rumi’s brain could spark and short-circuit, it would’ve done it right there in the middle of that hallway, possibly taking out the rest of the electrical grid along with it. “Uh...”

“So that’s a no on the drink?” she barreled on as if she hadn’t just made profundity look effortless.

“N-no—I mean—yes, it’s a no—wait.” What would it take for the floor to just open up and whisk her away to her room? She took a breath, salvaging what was left of her dignity. “Maybe next time?”

Mira laughed. “Alright, alright don’t hurt yourself, princess. See you tomorrow?”

Rumi fought against the rising blush, and lost. “Yeah. See you tomorrow.” Then she called into the room, “Good night, Zoey.”

“Good night!” the other called back cheerily, waving for good measure. “We’ll save the rest of the bottle for you.”

“No promises,” Mira added smugly, and promptly shut the door.

Rumi stood in a momentary daze, the phantoms of Zoey’s smile and Mira’s laugh warm in her thoughts. It was a good handful of seconds before she finally uprooted herself and began the long walk back to her own private quarters on the other side of the base. And she did it while smiling.

Tomorrow loomed on the horizon. Gold and bright.

Chapter Text

At dawn, Rumi found them already waiting for her on the track dressed in light workout shirts and leggings. Mira performed a series of arm stretches while Zoey sat on the metal bench with her eyes half closed, munching slowly on a granola bar where crumbs either gathered on her lap or stuck around her lips.

“Is it a hangover or is she just tired?” Rumi wondered, intending the question for Mira, but Zoey answered for herself.

“Tired,” she moaned, her mouth still full.

“She’s not a morning person,” Mira explained, moving to stretch her legs. 

Rumi blinked. “What?”

“I know right? I couldn’t believe it either.” Then she reached over to brush away the bits of granola and pinched her cheek. “Give it maybe another half-hour, she’ll be all right.”

Zoey weakly swatted the hand away with a pout and stuffed the rest of the bar into her mouth. “How long are we gonna run for?”

Rumi surveyed the open air track; empty save for the three of them. The morning was cool and gray with the marine layer overhead. She took in a deep breath, relishing in the wisps of mist in her nose. “Let’s go for five kilometers. Sound good?”

She gauged for a reaction. Five kilometers she could do in her sleep, it was practically nothing to her, but what of her co-pilots? As she braced for the worst, neither Mira or Zoey put up any complaints. They drank from their respective water bottles and readied up. 

The track was wide and could easily accommodate several people to run side by side. In terms of fostering Drift compatibility, learning to run in sync with your partner was the most accessible means of doing so. It took some doing at first. The three of them all ran to the beat of their own paces: Rumi a full stride ahead with Mira close behind, and Zoey, still in the grip of lethargy, brought up the rear. Though, by the second kilometer, Zoey seemed to have woken up enough to keep up with Mira. 

Ignoring the voice of Celine in her ear, Rumi slowed her jog and soon they looked like a proper triad. Not quite in sync in their strides, their breaths a rolling staccato of heavy exhales, but they ran at pace and shoulder-to-shoulder. That was well enough.

***

“Who thought it was a good idea to put us in a class about Kaiju guts right after we had lunch?” Zoey moaned, holding her stomach. 

“The Marshal did, so keep your voice down,” Mira warned. Her own pallor wasn’t fairing much better either. She burped once, winced, and hastened her steps.

They’d just concluded their introductory lecture into the anatomy of Kaiju, only the professor seemed to have missed the memo on the keyword ‘introductory.’ In his apparent enthusiasm of having a whole room of students hostage for two hours and forty-five minutes, he skipped right into live demonstrations, wheeling in whole capsules of recovered Kaiju parts and other organic materials from past encounters. The whole room stank of preservation fluids and acrid refuse. Even if they had lunch afterwards, no one would have the stomach for food with such odors lingering in their noses. A few of the other cadets were even on their hands and knees outside the laboratory door, gasping for air and trying not to vomit.

“I did tell you guys to eat light today,” Rumi remarked, only a little smug—a tasteful amount of smug, she’d go so far to say.

“Now is not the time for an I-told-you-so moment, princess, not when I can’t get back at you.”

“In that case, it’s arguably the best time. I told you so.”

“Oho, sass, huh?” Mira laughed, and some color came back into her cheeks. “Better watch yourself now, I’ll remember this.”

“Can you guys flirt when we’re not seconds away from seeing our lunch again, please?” Zoey remarked.

“We weren’t—No! Flirting? That wasn’t flirting,” Rumi stammered.

Despite their less than stellar condition, they both burst out laughing—not unkindly though, just mirthful chimes of genuine charm and endearment. And Rumi, the newly minted leader and holder of the fate of the world, did something she never thought herself capable of: she pouted. 

“You’re both awful.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Zoey said in between giggle fits. But Mira was far less apologetic. She threw an arm over Rumi’s shoulders and tugged her in closer. 

Rumi nearly tripped over her own feet then, not just from the abrupt pull, but rather... Oh god, she’s so close.

“Let’s get one thing out there, princess,” said Mira, grinning wide and wicked. “If I was flirting with you, you’ll know it.” 

Against her will, she thought of last night. The peach soju taunted her even after she’d left, and every step closer to her room made her denied request for relocation sting all the more. She doubts that she’d ever be able to smell it without thinking of Mira’s eyes on her, or Zoey’s cute dopey smile. If her cheeks weren’t already burning from embarrassment, she certainly was then.

Then Mira let her go, looking for all the world completely satisfied with herself.

“Sheesh, go easy on her, Mira,” Zoey chided playfully, “she’s turning redder than gochujang. Ooh! Speaking of which, can we get another quick bite before tonight?”

“You’re thinking of food after the horrors?” Mira asked incredulously and even Rumi, in the midst of her whirlwind of mortification, looked at her in shock.

“Oh I’m over that now. Thanks to Rumi, I feel much better!”

“You’re... welcome? And, yeah, I guess we could eat before our next lesson.” Though taking a light lunch spared her constitution, it won’t do her any favors to have a 3.0 magnitude earthquake erupting out of her empty stomach in the middle of their last class.

She glanced at Mira for confirmation, only to find the woman had gone quiet and pensive. Her brows were drawn together, her stare vacant with nothing else but an unseen memory. “Mira? Are you alright?”

She blinked hard once, coming back to herself. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,” she said, shoving her hands deep in her pockets. “You guys go ahead. I think I need to sleep this off before we meet this counselor guy.”

“Aw, you sure?” Zoey asked.

“If it’s your stomach, there might be ginger tea in the mess hall,” Rumi offered.

“Seriously, it’s no big deal. Just a quick nap and I’ll be good to go.” She waved casually and turned to leave. “You kids have fun, I’ll meet you there later.”

“I’m six months older than you,” Rumi pointed out.

“Wow, you really did read our files, huh?” said Zoey.

But Mira was already walking away without further response. Even with her back turned, Rumi watched her troubles follow after her, right up until she rounded a corner and fell out of sight.

“Is she going to be okay?” she asked, looking now at Zoey.

“Hm? Oh yeah she’ll bounce back.” Then her smile tightened with sympathy. “I don’t think she’s looking forward to meeting the counselor much.”

“Oh... Bad experiences with, uh...” She didn’t know how to phrase it without prying too far into something that couldn’t be any less of her business. Not to mention that Mira wasn’t even here to speak for herself. She almost rescinded the question entirely before Zoey replied.

“She’s mentioned it a couple of times. It was her family therapist so it wasn’t exactly her choice, or her problems to fix. That’s the gist of what I got. Sorry.”

“No, no it’s fine, I shouldn’t have asked anyway,” Rumi sighed, fidgeting with the end of her shirt sleeve.

“I mean, you could always talk to her about it yourself. I know she’s kinda got that whole blunt, devil-may-care vibe around you right now, but she’s actually really sweet when she opens up.”

She won’t have much of a choice when we all start Drift training , Rumi thought regretfully. But that was still weeks away—maybe even months depending on outside factors. No use worrying about that now. “So, food?”

“Food!”

***

They took their meals outside this time, finding a platform that overlooked the docking yard. As they ate their bibimbap with a generous bowl of kimchi to share between them, they watched a deployed Jaeger making its patrolling rounds in the far distance. Its hulking form lumbered through the churning waves; the glow of the reactor core in its chest a brilliant blue star against the burning sunset.

“Hard to believe that that will be us one day,” Zoey said, still chewing her food.

Rumi hummed into the thermos filled with green tea before screwing the top closed. “We’ve still got a long way to go,” she tempered diplomatically.

“Still,” Zoey returned, unperturbed by a truth she already knew. Abruptly she said, “Thank you, by the way.”

“For what?”

“For your advice during the match. Putting things I can sort of already feel and think into words really helps me, you know, understand stuff better.”

Rumi nodded then pointed to the little notebook Zoey had taken out of her pocket before they sat down to eat. It was green with small doodles of smiling turtles done in blue pen all over its cover, and a label  Zoey's Awesome Thoughts Vol. 33 done in a scratchy font. “Is that why you carry that around everywhere?”

Zoey tapped her temple with the top end of her chopsticks and winked. “My memory outside of my memory,” she said. “My brain can be... a lot sometimes. It’s hard to keep it on track or remember some things, so I write it all down. If you ever come by the room again, you’ll see my shelves are full of notebooks. Like, dozens of them. Mira even has to keep a box on her side of the room.”

Rumi tried to ignore the flare of heat in her chest at the idea of another visit like last night’s, instead focusing on the endearing absurdity of notebooks in such quantity. It’s probably just the spicy food anyway. “What’s gonna happen when you take more notes during classes?” she couldn’t help wondering.

“Maybe keep them in their own bag so I don’t lose them with the rest? Ugh. If I knew that when I signed up for this I was just gonna do school all over again I would’ve just gone to university

Rumi scoffed and they ate. By the time they finished, the Jaeger started to make its return to the base and the sky was dimming, turning the sea purple.

Zoey no doubt had meant it as a joke, but still Rumi couldn’t help but wonder... “Hey, Zoey?”

“Yeah?”

“Have you ever had second thoughts about joining the program?”

“Oh, uh...” She quickly swallowed another bite. “That wasn’t in my file?” 

“I didn’t completely scour through the database for every shred of information on you, okay?” Rumi defended, rolling her eyes.

“No, I genuinely mean it.” After a moment’s silence, Zoey set her empty plate off to the side and uncrossed her legs to let them dangle over the edge of the platform. “Yeah, there were plenty of times I wanted to quit. I got so homesick that I had a letter of resignation ready to go for months. I thought maybe the higher-ups caught on and put it on my record as a red flag for ‘unreliability’.” She formed the finger quotes and dropped her voice an octave when she said it.

“You thought they’d keep track of that?”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t like I was really trying that hard to hide it. But I didn’t quit, and before my first year was out I met Mira, got paired with her a little after that, and we’ve been together ever since.”

“Oh... Then, can I ask what made you stay?”

“You mean other than Mira?”

“Yeah, other than Mira.”

Zoey said nothing for a while, shifting to lean back against her freed hands laid flat on the platform. Her gaze kept on the Jaeger on the horizon as she spoke, “Not much of a home to go back to, I guess.”

“Your hometown never recovered after the attack?”

“Oh they recovered, I just never felt like I really belonged there—not enough to go back, anyway. Burbank was just a place where I lived with my dad and went to school and worked a dead-end job at a bowling alley. Then the Honmoon was breached there and sometimes I think about how it was... I dunno... the excuse I needed to finally leave, that I needed to finally do something—something useful, meaningful. And I know, I know that’s super messed up to say, I mean, people died — I almost died. But if it didn’t happen, I know I would still be there trying to study to be an accountant or whatever.” 

For the first time, Zoey looked over to Rumi, her eyes shining and vulnerable. “People shouldn’t have suffered just to give me an epiphany, but that’s how it is, isn’t it? If I had quit, if I quit today for some reason, then it’d be all for nothing. I’d be alive... for nothing.”

Rumi released a long breath, her eyes still wide and transfixed on the woman before her. “Zoey...” she murmured, scrambling for what else she could possibly say that wasn’t hypocrisy on her own, thoughts that haven't crossed her mind a thousand times already and yet were the most devastating thing to hear out of someone so bright.

But Zoey shook her head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to trauma-dump on you like that.”

“It’s okay. Really, it’s okay,” she said quickly. “I’m the one who brought it up.”

“I still wanted to share,” she smiled wanly, scratching her cheek. Then she sighed, “I guess Mira’s not the only one dreading the psychology thingy later.”

“You’re dreading it too?”

“Ahh, maybe not ‘dread’. It just feels better that you know it before a stranger does, even if he is a professional.”

“We’ve only known each other for a day,” Rumi reminded her.

“I know,” she said, her smile now made lighter by the color in her cheeks. “And I have a good feeling about you.” 

Rumi looked at her, lips parted from a sharp, yet nearly imperceptible intake of breath. “I...”

Then her pulse jumped, that extra little beat syncopated with hers. She curled her fingers tight into a fist to still it. Not now, she pleaded.

“You okay?” Zoey asked, reaching for her shoulder but Rumi jerked away before she even realized she had done so. 

Seeing Zoey also recoil, Rumi rushed to reassure, “I’m fine. Sorry, I’m just not used to people talking to me like this.”

“Not even at your old base? But you’re so easy to talk to, I honestly find that hard to believe,” Zoey smiled, apparently accepting the answer readily enough, though she retook her hand and placed it in her lap. Rumi wished she’d try again; she’d make sure to hold still, just to know what it felt like.

“Guess I was just too focused on training to really socialize,” Rumi provided, only really half lying.

“Yeah I can believe that too.” Zoey drew her knees up to her chest and rested her head against them. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“I shared some super personal stuff with you. Now it’s your turn. Here, tit-for-tat: Did you ever think about quitting the program?”

Rumi sat with the question for a long time. Had she thought of quitting? No, of course not, that was never an option. Just thinking about it almost made her laugh if only from imagining the look on Celine’s face. Oh, she’d be furious.

“Did I want to quit,” she recited aloud just to hear it in her voice and found it completely alien to her own ears. She shook her head as her thumb mindlessly stroked along the vein of her inside wrist. “No, I never thought about it. This is what I was born to do.”

Zoey sat back up and her gaze became the most inscrutable thing in the world. “Is it... Is it because of your mom?”

What? Rumi almost said aloud and had to bite her tongue lest she blow it completely after only a single day. Suddenly, Celine’s imaginary wrath wasn’t as funny anymore. “Yeah. Legacy Sunlight. Pretty big shoes to fill, like, Jaeger sized, you know?” she joked lamely.

And Zoey did snicker, miraculously. “Wow. That was kinda bad.”

“Hey, but you still laughed!”

“It was out of cringe, Rumi. If that’s the best you can do then don’t let Mira hear, she’ll never let you live it down.”

“Alright I get it,” she laughed, holding her hands up. In spite of herself, some tension did leave her shoulders. “I’ll work on my material.”

Then Zoey’s smile turned soft and she leaned back on her knees again, still looking at Rumi. “You’re pretty when you smile.”

Rumi froze, immediately blushing to her ears and the pulse in her still-clenched fist reignited. “Do you and Mira have a contest going or something?”

“No,” Zoey said simply, but that didn’t take away the impish glint in her eyes. “You’re gonna be in my head at some point anyway, so I figured now you’ll get to hear it twice cuz you deserve to know.”

Abruptly, Rumi turned away, biting the inside of her cheek. “You’re ridiculous. But... thanks.”

***

True to her word, Mira met them before their psychology class. She was leaning up against the wall opposite the entrance, her legs crossed over the other and her gaze held firmly on the ground by heavy thoughts. There was an opened bag of pretzel sticks poking out from the front pocket of her jumpsuit. She drew one out and let it hang from her lips. She chewed it slowly.

When she saw them approach from the end of the corridor she kicked off the wall, finishing off the pretzel, and raised a hand. “Took you both long enough,” she said.

“Well next time you shouldn’t say no to food and you won’t have to wait around,” Zoey teased.

Mira’s lips split into a half grin that was soon broken by a long, drawn out sigh. “Let’s get this over with.”

Rumi regarded her for a moment, trying to see in her face what Zoey does so easily. But the pair was already making their way through the classroom door with Zoey pulling Rumi in after them.

The counselor inside, in the midst of laying out various charts and diagrams depicting the human brain, turned to greet the three of them with a wide smile. “Good evening!” he said, and gestured with a sweep of his hand. “Go ahead and have a seat, we’ll get started in just a moment.”

They do and soon they’re introduced to Bobby, their designated counselor for the foreseeable future as Rangers in-training. At a point where it seemed like he was going to ask them all about their feelings or some such platitudes to help break the ice, he simply didn’t. He listed off his credentials along with an outline of various cognitive exercises that he’ll walk them through in preparation for Drift simulations in the coming weeks. 

In the way he spoke, he had an ease about him that Rumi liked. He didn’t try to hide the weight of such a daunting task of looking out for the mental well-being of what are effectively supersoldiers, and his assuredness to perform his duty wasn’t any less diminished. 

Then he looked at them with a great sense of gravitas, and somberness. And it was then that it sunk in—despite the passion and eagerness that brightened his face— just how much this program has taken from him. His eyes were tired, his smile worn, and yet he spoke with conviction that would command an entire stadium. “The Drift is a powerful thing,” he said. “It’s going to ask a lot of all three of you; mentally and physically. It’s going to take a lot of practice and a lot of trust, and it’s not going to be easy. I wish I was here to make it easy, I really do, but I am here to help.” Then he passed to each of them a card with his name and phone number along with a drawing of a small brown dog with an envelope in his mouth that he must’ve done himself.

“I haven’t lost anyone to the Drift yet, and I won’t start with you three, no chance in the world. So, if there’s anything you need, anything at all, I am here for you.” Then he clapped his hands together and he grinned triumphantly in a complete heel-turn away from the solemnity of a few seconds ago. 

“We’re gonna get you girls in that Jaeger, and we’ll celebrate with Itaewon corn dogs after. My treat,” he promised. “Sound good?”

The three looked at one another, equal parts inquisitive and bewildered. When they finally managed a nod, he eased them into the lesson of the night, going over the parts of the brain and their respective functions. The basics. 

At the end of the hour, from the corner of her eye,  Rumi thought she saw Mira relaxed in her chair. Meanwhile Zoey took her copious notes, her tongue caught between her teeth in the midst of her focus.

We can do this , Rumi thought proudly. Every step taken is one closer to becoming full-fledged Rangers; to the end, to freedom. Just a little while longer. 

It won’t be for nothing.

Chapter Text

Weeks went by. They ran, they sparred, endured classes, all of it together. A trio. There wasn’t a single person living in the Shatterdome who didn’t know who they were, or what they’re meant to do. There was a mix of awe, of hope, and of doubt. There were always long looks thrown their way from all corners of the mess hall while they took their meals. Eventually, Rumi and Zoey showed Mira the spot above the docking yard and they’ve eaten there since.

They ran, they sparred, and endured classes. In between, Rumi learned that Zoey loved turtles and poetry. She learned that Mira was a fiend for spicy food and though she kept calling Rumi ‘princess’, the playful sarcastic edge of it had smoothed into something like fondness with each use. Rumi tries regularly not to think too much about the latter development, to varying degrees of success.

Reports of Honmoon breaches appeared sporadically. Another city in smoke, and a Jaeger obtaining a victory. But as Rumi watched and rewatched the footage of each case from her computer screen, she studied not the Jaegers, but the monsters they fought. She hadn’t even meant to shift her focus so intently, and yet, after three straight hours of playbacks, she paced about her room with a single observation that disturbed her. 

The Kaiju were attacking with more deliberate strikes, no longer feral or animalistic based on strength alone. No, these were aimed at key points of weakness in the Jaeger’s design philosophy: the reactor cores for power, the jet propulsions for movement, coolant tanks to prevent overheating, the Conn-Pod where the pilots were practically strapped in place, ripe for the taking. These recent wins were being snatched from the hands of luck, and the window of success was getting narrower and narrower with every fight.

Were the Kaiju researchers seeing this pattern as well? If not, what will it mean for the new Jaeger? There was still no news of its progress yet. There were rumors, of course—whispers of anticipation for the project finally nearing its conclusion. Just a few more tests, they said, just a few more. It was a familiar mantra that set the tempo of everyday life at the base; the metronome that sounded off their steps towards the inevitable—anxious yet steady on its course. But will they be ready in time? Maybe she should write up a report and submit it to the research department. 

Rumi was snapped out of her thoughts with a sudden knock at her door. 

Celine? she thought. She immediately checked her phone for any missed messages and found none. She went over to the door and pulled it open. And there, stood Zoey and Mira, dressed so casually that Rumi had to blink several times to reorient herself. Zoey had on a floral patterned bomber jacket and shorts along with a bright yellow bucket hat; effortlessly cute. Meanwhile, Mira wore a sleeveless white button up, a ballcap, and gold rimmed glasses; effortlessly cool. It occurred to her then that she’d never seen them in anything other than their uniforms, tank tops or sweats. After a beat too long, she stopped herself from blatantly gawking at them. 

“How’d...” She cleared her throat. “How’d you know where my room was?”

Zoey smiled, shrugging her shoulders in a picture of perfect innocence. “We looked through the directory. Kinda weird that we went this long not knowing where our third has been hiding all this time though, huh?”

“O-kay,” Rumi said simply, having grown so accustomed to their... phrasings that she can instead direct her attention on trying not to be blinded by the woman’s grin. “And to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?”

“We’re rescuing a princess from her tower,” Mira said, standing with a hand on her hip. “We finally get a day off and here you are watching Jaeger fights. Tsk tsk.”

Rumi threw a glance over her shoulder at her computer monitor, the picture still paused on the scraped up mech standing over the dead Kaiju. “It’s—independent study,” she argued feebly.

“Nuh uh, not allowed,” said Zoey and she practically skipped inside with Mira close on her heels. Rumi didn’t fight them, instead closing the door with a soft sigh and quickly moving about the space.

“Excuse the mess,” she said as she picked up the meager spread of notes and folders in an otherwise spotless room. “I don’t usually have people here.”

“Clearly,” Mira said, though not unkindly. Anyone with eyes could see the sparseness and understand that this was meant only as a place to sleep. Like all rooms in the barracks, it was spacious enough to accommodate two people, though here the allotted bunk bed had been replaced with a single cot. There were few things by way of personalization: a colorfully patterned quilt on the bed, a single framed photo atop the nightstand of three people in Drivesuits with their arms over each other’s shoulders, corkboards littered with old newspaper clippings of Jaeger deployments, and—

“Oh my god!” Zoey gushed, bounding over towards Rumi’s dresser where a figure stood in a battle-ready pose. “You do have a Legacy Sunlight figure!”

Rumi rubbed the back of her neck, trying and failing to suppress the pride in her smile. “Yeah I wasn’t kidding.”

Zoey studied every inch of the model, turning her head this way and that while listing off its every characteristic with increasing excitement. “No way, this is the super expensive one! 1:300 scale die-cast metal, fully articulated limbs with swappable arm attachments and deployable weapons?!”

Rumi pointed out with a finger. “Push on its chest plate.”

With supreme reverence and care, Zoey did and the visor of its Conn-Pod lit up before popping open to reveal three tiny figures in Drivesuits and affixed to their rigs rendered in excruciating detail. It truly looked as though they were going to move at any moment and the Jaeger along with them. “Ho—ly!”

“Nerd,” Mira teased in her usual deadpan, but there was a slight curl to her lips.

“Hey I walked nearly every dog in my neighborhood for weeks to save up for the cheapy version, and it was worth every cent,” Zoey defended. Then she looked ardently at the current model in front of her. “I would’ve murdered a guy for this one.”

Rumi laughed behind a hand, feigning a cough while storing this bit of information away for later.

“Okay, okay stop getting distracted,” Mira chided, lightly chopping the top of Zoey’s head, “we came here for a reason.”

“Ah, right!” Then she came up to Rumi, a pleading look in her eyes. “We’re gonna head to the bathhouse in town. Why don’t you come with us?”

“Bathhouse? We have showers here on base though.”

“This is totally different!” Zoey refuted right away with Mira nodding alongside her. “You can actually sit and relax in this one. It’s suuuper nice.”

“Plus it gets us the hell out of this place for a little while,” Mira added.

“That too! Come on, Rumi, please?”

Rumi looked back and forth between them, deliberating with a ‘yes’ on the tip of her tongue. But she glanced again at her monitor and the footage rewinded in her memory; how each Kaiju was getting increasingly more deadly. In a horrific bout of premonition, the Jaeger in her mind’s eye became theirs and it was being torn apart—

She shook her head fiercely to dispel it. She couldn’t let that happen.

Plastering on a smile, she said, “You girls go on ahead, I’ll go next time. I told the research team that I was going to submit a report after I finished watching these recordings.”

The disappointment was immediate. “Ruuumiiii,” Zoey whined and it took everything in her power not to fold there and then.

“I’ll go next time, I swear,” she insisted.

Zoey held up her pinky finger, her pout worn front and center with her eyes set and serious. “Promise?”

Rumi stared, bewildered by the gesture. She looked to Mira for help, but the woman was also watching her expectantly. Unsure but left with no option other than to take a guess, Rumi hooked her own pinky with Zoey’s.

Seemingly satisfied, Zoey gave their joined hands a little shake, as if setting it as an absolute law of the world. “Next time then,” she smiled, a little sad, but accepting. “You better not back out either.”

“I won’t,” Rumi said. “You two enjoy yourselves.”

They turned to go, Zoey crossing the threshold first into the hallway. But Mira lagged behind, pivoting a half step towards Rumi to reach over and give her chin a terse little tap with a hooked finger. “Don’t work too hard okay, princess?” she said, then walked out and shut the door shut behind her without waiting for her response or even a backwards glance.

Rumi felt the spot where she’d been touched begin to tingle and burn. She pressed her fingertips against it, unsure of what to think. And in the silence that stretched on, her room felt so much bigger than it had a few minutes ago. She wished that they had stayed a little longer. Sure, she wasn’t at all equipped to entertain anyone here—hell, she didn’t even have any extra chairs, but...

She sighed and wrote on a sticky note to consider decorating her room in the future. Maybe that’ll help it not feel so cold.

With that established, Rumi sat back down at the desk, pulled up the research department message board, and began typing up her observations and concerns. She hoped beyond hope that it would prove useful to them. Or, more importantly, that it wasn’t too late.

***

At 0300 hours that night, a Jaeger will be destroyed. Category 3 Kaiju, the biggest one on record.

Rumi woke before the alert of a Honmoon breach even hit the radars. She sat up stiff in her cot, sweating and breathing through her mouth. She’d always had this knack for sensing storms. For as long as she could remember, she would get an incessant buzzing in her ears, an ache in her teeth like a tuning fork struck it, and a taste like metal that would wake her from any kind of sleep, choking on her own spit.

All the while, the pulse was strong, thrumming in her neck and rising painfully into her temples. She got up, tugged on a sweatshirt and her boots and clamored out of her room. The roof. She had to get to the roof. 

The corridors were dark, scarcely lit by dull overhead lights to conserve power, and while she knew this place front, back, and upside down, the dark itself has never been a real obstacle for her. She could still see. She hated being grateful for it.

She took the stairs two steps at a time—a set hidden away behind an innocuous door whose sign had broken off years ago. She threw open the door where it clattered on its old hinges. It impacted against the wall, and swung back. She stumbled forward towards the edge where guardrails lined its perimeter and she braced herself against, nearly pitching up and over it from the sheer relief. She took in full gulps of the thick, electric air. The storm was approaching from the east. Thunder rumbled in the distance, the promise of rain churning the waves into a restless fervor against the coastline. She stared out longingly at the midnight horizon before closing her eyes, hands gripped on the railing to let her lean back with her face angled towards the sky. She could almost taste the drops on her tongue.

“Welp, so much for this being a secret spot,” came a voice and Rumi yelped out of her skin.

“Whoa, easy, easy, princess. It’s just me,” Mira soothed, coming out from the shadows with her hands up. She must’ve been lounging on the other side of the rooftop until she heard Rumi unceremoniously stampede her way up here.

Rumi held her chest, her heart pounding against her palm. “For the love of—What are you doing up here?”

“I don’t care much for closed spaces for too long.” True to Mira fashion, she didn’t elaborate any further than that. But it was getting easier, the simple act of sharing themselves even if they were mere pieces at a time. It was getting easier. “What about you? A storm’s coming in soon.”

“I know. I just...” Rumi drew herself up, at least making some attempt at being normal. “I just needed fresh air.”

“Ahh.” She glanced around, from the city lights in the distance, to the watchtower on base, to Rumi, then to the rolling clouds overhead. She scuffed the tip of her boot, thinking.

Rumi looked at her, a question plain to see even before she said it. “Aren’t you gonna head back inside?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t.

“Unless—you want to stay up here? I mean, you were here first and all.” Rumi amended.

“I mean if you want me to stay up here, I guess I can stay,” Mira said nonchalantly then sauntered closer, one languid step made after another.

Rumi suppressed a smile, making a show of moving over as further invitation. “How was the bathhouse?”

Mira sighed dreamily, as if she were there all over again, or wished she was. She came up beside Rumi and leaned on the rail, kicking up a foot to catch on the bottom rung. “It was nice.”

“I’m glad,” Rumi hummed.

“You’d like it. Next time we get a day off.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

They watched the storm make its approach, the clouds growing thicker with each passing second.

“So,” Mira ventured after a beat of silence. “Was it a bad dream?” 

Rumi sighed, falling back against the rail, her elbows propped on the top rung. She didn’t meet Mira’s eye. A blast of humid wind washed over them both. “Something like that.”

“That sucks.”

“Mhm...”

“You get them a lot?”

“Sometimes.” Not a total lie, but just not applicable presently.

“Me too.”

Rumi remembered her file and could hazard a guess as to what those dreams were about. “I’m sorry.”

Mira shrugged and they were quiet again.

“Kinda impressive you found your way up here,” Mira redirected. “Took me a while to even figure out where the staircase was hiding. But it figures that you’d know since you basically lived here your whole life.”

Rumi froze. “You... You knew?”

“It didn’t take much, honestly,” she admitted readily.

“How? For how long?”

“Ever since you guys brought me up on that platform for lunch. You move around this place better than anyone I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been here awhile. Even the custodians get turned around half the time, but not you.”

Rumi swallowed hard. Why hadn’t she considered that before? Maybe Zoey’s lack of scrutiny made her complacent. Has she really gotten so careless? Unfocused? If Mira was able to expose a lie as measly as her very first one, what else might she be able to sniff out?  She’s letting too much of her mental defenses down and surely now she’ll be a Drift away from being completely found out.

“Hey, hey,” Mira coaxed, she leaned over to catch Rumi’s gaze that had suddenly glazed over with fear. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I’m—fine, it’s fine,” Rumi managed, pushing past her own confusion. “But, aren’t you upset?”

“Why would I be?”

“Wh—I lied?”

“I mean, yeah you totally did, but I get why.”

“Huh?”

Mira huffed, like what she was about to say was somehow obvious. “Well, the Marshal is basically your mom or whatever—”

“Aunt,” Rumi weakly corrected by sheer force of habit. “Well, kind of. We’re not related, exactly...”

“Whatever, like, Zoey kinda outed you right away on accident anyway but I... Ugh, okay, listen. What I’m trying to say is that I get it. I came from a pretty well-off family. I could’ve had anything in the world just by throwing around the family name like it was currency on its own. But I didn’t want that, cuz it meant being what they wanted me to be. I want to live my life so that whatever I get I can keep because I went out and did the damn thing. It’s my name that matters, and it doesn’t need any kind of special treatment to get by. So you saying that you came from a different base—I get it. I do.”

Rumi stared, bewildered. It wasn’t her truth, but hearing Mira’s... She didn’t have the heart to correct her. Maybe she should feel guilty taking advantage of Mira inadvertently giving her the easiest out she could possibly hope for. But the contours of her face, the softness against her usually sharp and impassive features, she didn’t want to lose this image.

Mira glanced away. “Are you gonna say something or am I just gonna feel like an idiot all night?”

“No! No, no, sorry I wasn’t... I just didn’t expect that from you, is all.”

There was a semblance of relief, though her smile was wry. “Heh. Well, a month ago I would’ve said it’s cuz you don’t know me. And it’s not like I made it easy either.”

“I dunno,” Rumi began, suddenly feeling impish, “I thought we had a nice connection with how strong you came on.”

“You say that,” Mira remarked blithely, “yet you still haven’t said yes to having a drink with us.”

“I thought you said you weren’t gonna promise that you’d save it for me.”

“It’s been a while. Could be a brand new bottle for all you know.”

Rumi shook her head, playfully exasperated. “You two really shouldn’t keep alcohol in your room.”

“Where else are we gonna keep it, oh great and insightful one?”

“You’re doing fine as is,” she said, her hands raised innocently. “I just don’t want you two getting us grounded before we even see our Jaeger.”

Mira rolled her eyes. “We’re only in trouble if we get caught. It’s just a drink, princess. You’re so serious.”

“I’ll think about it,” she retorted coyly.

“Sure, sure.”

Serenity returned, leaving only the wind and the distant waves to fill the emptiness left behind by their words. Rumi craned her neck back with her eyes closed in renewed bliss. If only the rain would fall.

“Enjoying yourself there?”

“It feels nice, yeah.”

“You’re so weird,” Mira chuckled. Then, after a while, said, “Hey, princess, can I ask you something?”

“You just did.”

“Ha ha. Seriously though.”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“What were you doing here this whole time? Before you got stuck with me and Zoey, I mean. Can’t imagine that it’s a great place for a kid to grow up.”

“You could say that about the general state of the world, really,” Rumi countered with a vague gesture of her hand.

The deflection didn’t work and Mira kept her gaze locked and expectant.

Rumi crossed her arms over her chest, feigning nonchalance to hide how exposed she felt, so small beneath the gale shrouded sky. Thunder rolled, louder now. “I didn’t grow up here, not really. Celi—the Marshal had me stay at her estate in the mountains for a while. And when I came here I was just... training.”

“Training?” Mira said in a way that didn’t know whether to be disbelieving or concerned.

“Being a Ranger is what I’m meant to do. It’s more important than anything else.”

“So important that you were just locked away on the other side of the compound this whole time? How come you didn’t just join up with the rest of us sooner?”

Rumi shrugged, holding herself even tighter. “It’s complicated.” Not to mention classified, she kept to herself. And whatever the Marshal deemed classified, no one will ever find out.

Mira looked ready to say one thing, but her expression twisted and she ended up saying another, “What kind of training?”

She hesitated. “For Drifting, mostly.”

“What? Like actual Drifting? That’s insane, how old were you?”

But Rumi quickly shook her head, trying to make her smile reassuring, insouciant. “Relax, it wasn’t like that. I meant stuff to prepare. Meditation and mental exercises, that sort of thing.”

“But as a kid?” She spoke so slowly, it was as though she was almost too afraid to even ask.

“It’s—complicated,” Rumi repeated.

Mira narrowed her gaze, razor sharp and unflinching. “Try me.”

Rumi didn’t say anything. She couldn’t even if she wanted to.

Around them, shattering the night alongside the storm, sirens sounded. A flash of the tell-tale, menacing purple rippled through the scape as the Honmoon was breached. The ocean bubbled and erupted as a demon surfaced from its depths just as the sky finally opened to let the rain fall.

A Jaeger was immediately deployed to meet it, the same one she and Zoey had seen patrol all those weeks ago. But the subsequent fight passed in a blur. Soaked through to the bone, Rumi couldn’t focus on anything, not with the raging pulse in her head. What’s happening to me? she cried out to her own traitorous body. Her grip on the rail turned white as something primal rested deep in her gut wanted her to move, to run, to fight, to take something clean apart with her teeth.

Then, the Jaeger finally felled the beast, blasting a plasma cannon shot through its abdomen. Its cries died in its throat as it crashed beneath the waves. Its sickly blood—viscous like ichor and bioluminescent blue—shot from its wound, glowing against the dark storm. At the sight of it, Rumi nearly collapsed to her knees.

Beside her, Mira released a long, held breath. “Come on,” she said, taking Rumi gently by the shoulder. “Let’s head back in before we both get sick.”

But Rumi didn’t budge. It’s wrong, it’s all wrong. That second pulse still thrummed like it was truly alive. Except this wasn’t simply benign like she’s used to. All those other times, those flare ups, she realized, were radio static. Now she picked up on something, resonating on a level she couldn’t comprehend. And yet she knew, down to her marrow, that what resonated now was malice and deception.  

It struck her with a certainty so profound that she didn’t even have the wherewithal at first to be afraid. She just trusted it. 

“It’s not dead,” she said, just barely above a whisper against the tempest.

“What?”

Rumi looked at Mira, fear finally beginning to set in beside the burden of knowing. “It’s not dead.”

Then the Kaiju leaped up out of the water, catching the Jaeger fully off guard as it dug its claws deep into the metal hull of its back. Deep fissures split the titanium like it was paper, sparks arced in all directions—the mech’s limbs spasming and panicked.

Then the Jaeger was sinking. Its failing reactor shone like a distress beacon as the Kaiju held it underwater. The storm raged and thunder struck. The Jaeger drowned and its blue core, the guiding star of the coastline for as long as Rumi could remember, exploded into fiery yellow, orange, red—a supernova. Then it was gone. The demon screeched in its triumph

The next Jaeger, on temporary loan from another country as it was being transferred from yet another defunded base, deployed as soon as it could. It intercepted the Kaiju before it reached the city limits and, weakened from its earlier fight, the Kaiju went down in less than five minutes. But neither Rumi nor Mira felt any compunction to celebrate or even feel relief of seeing another monster vanquished. 

A Jaeger had been destroyed, its pilots presumed dead unless they too realized they were doomed and managed to engage the escape pods in time. Either way, the world was to go on with one less defender—so thought the world.

“Rumi...” Mira said, and couldn’t say anything more. Her voice was smaller than any other time she’d spoken. Was that the first time she’d ever used Rumi’s name? Probably. 

Rumi shook her head, or had tried to. She was still staring out at the sea, as if she might be able to turn the time back again or will the fallen Jaeger to rise out of the ocean unscathed and still in commission. She could not. The world she had lived in where there was more time to prepare—that the Honmoon would not need her so soon—became a memory, a fantasy, then nothing at all.

They both knew the truth then. That there was yet one last Jaeger left to make its debut and it will need its pilots.

***

Rumi rushed to Celine’s office at first light. She hadn’t been summoned here since that first day of meeting Mira and Zoey. On purpose of course. Rumi needed only her training to focus on. And now that training was over. How so much had changed in the course of a single night.

“The plan is being moved up. You three will be put through Conn-Pod simulations within the next twenty-four hours,” Celine said without preamble while keeping her eyes trained on the paperwork in front of her. Data from last night’s encounter. The salvaged parts of the Jaeger, the confirmed deaths of its pilots, the new percentage on the Honmoon’s compromised integrity. All this information at the start of her day, it was no wonder Rumi’s sudden arrival didn’t surprise her in the slightest.

But before she could devolve into her usual diatribe, Rumi spoke up, “Something happened during that last fight. I knew that the Kaiju wasn’t dead.”

Celine glanced up from the files, studying her for a long, hard moment. “I see. Should we run tests—?”

“No,” Rumi said, so quickly it edged on pleading. Flashes of the Shatterdome laboratory replaced Celine’s office; the smell of antiseptic and rust filled her nose. She shuddered, clawing at the edges of her own thoughts to keep them from spiralling.

“Alright, it’s alright. No tests,” Celine appeased, suddenly on her feet and coming closer. She raised her hands out to her... but she came no closer than a hair’s breadth away. Then she lowered her arms and refolded them behind her back. “Tell me then, what can you recall?”

Taking a breath, Rumi told her, trying her best to relay as much detail as she could manage, how she had somehow sensed the beast’s intentions for herself. But for even as sharp as her memory and mental discipline has been honed, the fight against the Jaeger and the Kaiju remained vague. It was something just out of reach, a pencil impression made against paper.

Something so abstract, how could she hope to keep this out of the Drift? Unless she didn’t have to.

“Celine? Maybe I can tell Zoey and Mira about my... my condition?” Her tongue soured with the word but it was all she’d been taught to call it. “Maybe they’ll understand?”

Without hesitation, Celine shook her head, the firm set of her jaw betrayed by the sheen of fear that she couldn’t hide in the way her shoulders stiffened. “No, Rumi. Nothing can change until the Honmoon is sealed for good.”

Rumi bit her cheek to keep from shouting. “But how am I supposed to keep this from them? It’s not just a memory or an emotion, it was something else. Like... instinct. What if in the Drift I—”

“It will be just as we’ve practiced, no more no less,” Celine intoned coldly. “Now is not the time for doubts.”

“But—”

“I have an idea.” She began to pace. “I’ll have it be reported that your Jaeger is equipped with a new system, a prototype that can pick up on Kaiju habits and tactics and transcommunicate them directly via the sympathetic neural system. What will be instinct for you, will be data to them. You will bring nothing to the Drift. Our faults and fears are never to be seen. Understood?” Her tone was so neutral, so matter-of-fact after years of repetition that Rumi struggled even now to tell if it was reassurance or an order.

When Rumi said nothing, Celine heaved a quiet sigh and spoke in a softer tone, “You’ve been training your entire life for this moment, Rumi. You know what to expect. Trust that, and you will not falter.”

But I’m not you, Rumi wanted to say. There’s just too much to hide. But she swallowed the words whole, and her stomach soured all the more. These were old words that have risen up into her throat time and again, only to be pushed down again, always to be replaced by a tasteless and automatic, “Yes, Celine.”

Of course Celine would come up with a contingency plan. She always made it so effortless, so easy to lie and to carry on like it was anything but.

Kaiju instincts relayed through the neural system like biological radio waves. It sounded so ridiculous, yet so plausible, that Rumi wished that it were real.

***

All day, she took to avoiding Mira. If it wasn’t anything pertaining to their usual routine, she didn’t engage more than she had to. It was juvenile to do so, she knew that. But Mira’s unanswered question hung over them both like the storm that brought reality crashing all around them. 

It wasn’t as though Mira made any extra effort to bring it up again either. She was waiting for them to Drift. There won’t be any hiding then. If Rumi were anyone else, she’d be resigned to this definite outcome of being left open and exposed.

They were fitted into their Drivesuits, the measurements for which having been taken days prior. The techs probably didn’t expect to have to take them out so soon, but they were ready all the same. 

The suits were black, form fitting, light, and engineered for regulating body heat and sweat generated from intense and prolonged movement. Truly there was nothing better than a well-crafted Drivesuit in this line of work. Out of all of them, Zoey looked the most excited to be wearing hers, despite the reticence that clouded her cheer since Rumi broke the news of their promotion. She looked good in it, deadly even. Mira too. Then again, she could make anything look good.

Meanwhile, Rumi stared at herself in the full length mirror for a long time, so long that her form began to blur and become so charged with gravitas and meaning that she saw her mother looking back at her. For years she stared at the one photo she kept of her, memorizing how she smiled in the older Drivesuit model alongside her co-pilots: a younger Celine and another woman Rumi has never met before and whom Celine never spoke of.

The techs called the three of them to attention and they were soon escorted into the simulation chamber. It was built like the inside of a Conn-Pod complete with a mock heads-up-display, rigs that would affix the pilots in place via the spinal implants of their suits. At the front of the chamber, a pair of mechanical prosthetics sat perched on a stand, meant to imitate the arms of a Jaeger.

This chamber was specially installed with a third rig, and they were arranged in a triangle formation. Rumi was set on the right, Mira on the left, and Zoey in the middle. The dominant pilot, the defensive interface, and the mitigating visual.

Celine, no doubt, had arranged this herself.

In front of them, in addition to the mock HUD screen, was a large window where the full operation took place. More techs and analysts sat at various controls, carefully reading whatever data was currently presented to them; brainwaves, mechanical readouts, the works. And at the center stood Celine, her posture upright and prevenient as she held her hardened gaze on the three girls.

Bobby was also there, smiling and encouraging as he greeted them through the microphone sticking up from the main control panel. 

“Hi, Bobby,” they all sang in unison, a shared joke amongst the four of them. It helped alleviate the tension of the chamber, if only somewhat.

“We’re just about ready to get started, girls. How’re we feeling?”

They each gave non-committal answers—nods of the head, half formed sentences. None of it seems to surprise him.

“That’s okay. Steady breaths now, okay? Just let the memories flow and don’t get caught on any one,” he warned. “This is important. Don’t chase the rabbit and let the Drift take its course.”

Then a tech chimed in. “Neural Handshake commencing in five... four...”

“It helps if you close your eyes,” Rumi offered to her co-pilots.

They didn’t reply. She didn’t need the Drift to know they were nervous.

“Three... two...”

She drew in a long breath.

“One.”

At first, the memories all flowed too fast to properly see. Too many images passed at once to latch onto, three entire lifetimes converging in a fraction of a second.

Then, unbidden, Rumi found herself up in the branches of Celine’s tree, nine years old and eager to reach the top. The sun was warm and bright, the leaves rustling and urging her on. She took hold of the memory and cast it aside with an ease that surprised even her. The Drift rippled tilting the world as gravity reassured itself, her palms alight with the pain of tree bark scraping against her delicate skin. The ground, fast approaching. Her stomach swooped into her throat, but then her knees came underneath her, bent perfectly and bracing for the impact. But instead of the hard, unforgiving ground of her aunt’s garden, Rumi dropped into a half-pipe, a skateboard at her feet clacking against the smooth concrete. The momentum carried her on, the wind in her face and hair a wild and frenetic thing as a chorus of cheers erupted around her.

Zoey, fifteen and beaming, shone even brighter than the California sun in the cloudless sky. She waved to her friends as she passed. At the next rise, she twisted in the air, pulling off a 360-spin. But the wheel caught on the lip of the half-pipe on the way down, launching her off the board with a one-way ticket to eating concrete. She tucked, rolled, and stood up on two-feet. And gone was the skatepark and sun, replaced now with a gymnasium with spotlights all trained on her that the audience in an indistinct glob of blinking eyes and camera lenses. 

Mira danced, her legs burning with strain but her heart wanted to burst with the need to keep going, to chase the high of freeing everything that’s been pent up into every kick, every turn, every beat of the song carrying it all away. She was thirteen, and her ears were always filled with hollow applause.

Memories all flowed into the tide of the Drift until all that was left was them, their lungs moving in sync, their immediate thoughts shared like a second and third heartbeat.

“Handshake complete; strong and holding,” reported the tech.

They breathed and all opened their eyes, looking at their hands, turning them over and back again. They looked at one another.

“This is...”

“Crazy...”

Rumi nodded, hoping to be encouraging. She doubted that she pulled it off, though. All her mental faculties have been trained for years to bring nothing. This was nothing. Her expression betrayed nothing. 

From behind the window, Bobby spoke again, “Okay, girls, nice and slow.”

Together they moved their right arms, and the test arm moved with them. They tried the left, and the same thing occurred.

“Hemispheres calibrated. Handshake still holding,” recited the tech.

“We’re actually doing it!” Zoey exclaimed.

“You’re doing great!” Bobby praised, giving them two thumbs up.

They undergo a few more exercises, getting used to the weight and drag of the rig simulating the true heft of moving a real Jaeger arm. They were supposed to get used to the two test arms first before the techs brought in the third.

Rumi was about to call out for it, confidence—hers and what was undoubtedly Zoey’s—pushing her voice to advance them on, they were ready!

Until she felt a force pressing against her mind. Not intentional, rather it was something caught on a current, drawing nearer and probing in the dark in its curiosity of where it would be led to.

Was this Zoey? Mira? She couldn’t tell, not without splitting her focus and exposing a weak spot.

No, Rumi pleaded, don’t look.

But it only spurred it on, pressing in harder. 

Rumi threw up as many mental walls as she could. If Bobby was speaking to them then, she could barely hear. Focus, focus. There’s nothing here, nothing.

Then, there was a flash of something. A scream. A little girl crying. A woman shouting for her. Oh no—

The test prosthetic arm spasmed and short-circuited, falling off its stand and crashing to the ground, still twitching as it severed from the Drift. Meanwhile screens and readouts glitched with static, red warning lights flaring across three helmet visors as they all jerked to the side like they’d be struck.

“Ah!” they cried out in sync.

“Pilot neural sync out of alignment. Repeat: Pilot neural sync out of alignment.”

“All three of them?” Celine demanded, her eyes hard and glaring. Behind her back, her hands were trembling.

“All three of them,” the tech confirmed.

“Ready the emergency severance protocol.”

“Wait! It’s fine, I-I can fix it, I can still fix it. Just give me a second,” Rumi intervened, her voice cracking. I can fix this.  

She held her head for a moment, breathing in and out at a steady pace. Just like she’d practiced, just like Celine taught her. It’s nothing. It’s nothing. It’s not me. There’s nothing to see, nothing to hide, nothing in the Drift. Focus.

The headache ebbed, yet she didn’t find any relief in this. There were still screaming in her ears, chaos playing behind her closed eyelids. 

These memories weren’t hers.

She looked over to Zoey, to Mira. They were both staring straight ahead, their eyes hazed and unseeing. They were rendered utterly still from the shock of it and their breaths puffed white against their visors—the onset of hyperventilation.

“Girls?” Rumi called, and again, “Girls! Stay with me!” But already she was feeling the pull of the Drift, their memories coalescing into hers, the rabbit hole opening to swallow her whole. Even with her intense training, two minds chasing the rabbit against one weren’t good prospects.

“It’s just a memory, it’s not real!” she tried again. “It’s not—”

Too late.

The ground shook. An earthquake. 

Nothing new for California. Life went on. 

Then came another. 

An aftershock, again nothing new. Life went on.

But… another? That’s...

And another, this one stronger than the rest and then came a great screech that split the sky. A great claw rose from behind the mountain, the same mountain Zoey had grown up gazing at during bus rides home from school, the mountains where the sun went to sleep. Here, something had awoken, and it dragged its colossal body over the mountain side. It headed straight for the city.

In another place, a world away, there were sirens blaring. Mira turned and looked up towards the sound, pure instinct. The ground rumbled and the skyscrapers quavered and cracked along their glass faces as if they too were grimacing at what was to come. It moved faster than anyone thought possible, already trampling through the city with reckless abandon. At the end of the wave of fleeing people, the Kaiju rounded from behind a building, collapsing it with its gargantuan shoulders like it were made of a child’s wood blocks.

Zoey stared up at it, her mind a blur of why’s and how’s that her home would be a target. Mira’s muscles coiled, ready to run and too frightened to even begin to wonder at her own disbelief and anger that it was happening at all.

And Rumi, standing between the two of them, beheld the colossi standing upon the meridian of a kaleidoscopic landscape combining two ravaged cities on opposite sides of the world. All of it coalescing into a terror magnified three-fold.

After a long and terrible pause, the twin Kaijus roared. Hot iron seared through Rumi’s head. She wailed in pain as Zoey and Mira ran, and the memories split apart. 

There was screaming, but they all knew what to do, where to go. Like fish taken up in a current, the people of Busan all flowed into bunkers made specifically for Kaiju attacks. The titanium doors sealed behind them and they waited.

Heavy footfalls of the Kaiju sounded overhead, rhythmic yet agonizingly slow. They heard buildings toppling, glass shattering and car alarms blaring before being crushed and silenced entirely. The screams of people who didn’t make it to safety drowned in its midst.

The shelter stank sour of bodies, with acrid fear rolling off of everyone like a tide. Mira shrank into herself, she held her head in her hands, palms pressed so hard against her ears that the ocean of her own blood fell silent. The ceiling shook and rained dust upon their heads. More bodies pressed against her, so mindlessly panicked that they didn’t realize just how trapped they were here. Moving was useless, and it was all so suffocating. She wanted to shout at them to get away, to push at anyone who came too close. But there were simply too many to fight against, too risky of sparking a riot. She’d heard of those happening before, of tramplings and eyes being gouged right out of people’s faces.

She closed her eyes as tight as she could. 

Maybe she screamed.

“Mira!” Rumi shouted, her voice muffled behind her helmet. She pushed through the crowd, standing out in stark contrast while dressed in her Drivesuit in a sea of pedestrians but she only had eyes on Mira. This version of her, so young and unrecognizable in the terror that consumed her, it broke her heart to see.

Finally she made it and took Mira’s shoulder. But she didn’t see her. “You have to wake up! Come on, it’s just a memory, you’re safe! You’re—” But before she could even make contact, she was wrenched away and thrown backwards, back outside where Burbank’s skies were choked with ash and soot.

There was a yelp and the thud of a body crashing onto the pavement right beside her. Zoey caught herself on her elbows, hissing in pain as grit and debris dug deep into her skin. She tried to stand but couldn’t. She looked down at herself. Her knee, not just scraped bloody from the fall, but it took a chunk of flying concrete dead-on. It throbbed, bent in a way it shouldn’t be, and it was excruciating to move.

She didn’t have to say a single word, her expression was plain to see for anyone who would’ve bothered to stop and look at the girl laid out in the middle of the street. The Kaiju’s rampage drew nearer. I’m going to die...

She began to sob, she called for her mom who wasn’t even in the country anymore, for her dad who was away somewhere on business. Maybe she could take solace in the fact that they were both far away and safe. But she cried anyway, and held her useless leg as she curled up on the pavement and waited.

Rumi stared on, tears burning her eyes like they did Zoey’s. How did she survive this? A broken leg; anyone who could help was too scared to even think of stopping. How did she live? Rumi waited, waited with her and shared in her fear and her dying hope. She reached for her, wanting to stop her crying. Then she saw her hand—gloved, still in the Drivesuit.

In a snap, she came back to herself, gasping and fighting the rabbit chase with every ounce of will she had.

“Zoey,” Rumi said, rolling onto her hands and knees with great labor. “Please, listen to me, you have to wake up. This is just a memory. You’re not dying here, you survived this day already, you can’t let it win now.”

Seconds stretched on. Slowly the sobs quieted, followed by a confused whimper.

Hope surged through her and she moved closer until she was right over Zoey. She leaned down, speaking softly in her ear and praying to whatever higher being that would listen that she’ll reach her. “Come on, you can do it. I’m here, I’m right here. You’re going to be okay.”

Then, at long last, Zoey opened her eyes and her watery gaze found Rumi’s. She blinked once. Twice. Clarity returned and all around them the sounds of calamity fell muted, like the world had been put on pause. “Rumi?”

Rumi exhaled, heavy with relief. “It’s me. I’m here, I’m real.”

Tentatively, Zoey sat up and looked down at herself again. Now she was in her Drivesuit and her leg wasn’t broken or bleeding. She moved it, just to be sure. No pain. “I thought I...”

“It’s the Drift,” Rumi said, hesitating at first then taking Zoey’s face in her hands. She felt for their tether briefly, glad to find it there and far stronger than it had before. But there was another between them and it was distressed and keeping them here in the rabbit hole. “Stay with me, okay? I need your help to get to Mira.”

That snapped Zoey back into focus, “Where is she?”

Right on cue, the scene fell away and they’re yanked back to the bunker in Busan, only now the crowd was no longer in a state of reserved panic, it was utter chaos. There was no point of origin, no catalyst of word or action that brought the moment to this point, but there was a riot playing in front of them both, tragically plain and devastatingly simple.

And there, fighting like cornered prey, was Mira. Her mouth was bleeding. There was no finesse to her movements, no discipline in her strikes that they were accustomed to seeing in the combat room. There was only survival and the crowd of young girls cowering behind her. They were crying, holding one another while bleeding from the arms and head. If Mira couldn’t be brave for herself, then maybe she could for others. 

Anyone who got too close, by accident or intent, she was on them with a ferocity that was frightening to behold. She wasn’t simply shoving people, she was scratching, punching, doing anything in her power to keep them away. She can hold them off. She just needed to last long enough until the bunker doors were opened. She can do this... She’s fought her brother’s bullies on the schoolgrounds plenty of times she can—

Zoey didn’t hesitate, she wove her way through the violence until she was upon Mira and she wrapped her arms around her middle. Rumi, not far behind, went at Mira from the back, hooking her elbows with Mira’s to lock them in place. It was a difficult and awkward position given their difference in height, but Rumi held on with everything she had when Mira started to fight against her.

“Mira!” They both shouted over the cacophony and reached for her in the Drift.

All at once, silence descended and the people around them were held frozen in place. Mira panted, hard and fast. She made no more moves, but her muscles were tense with uncertainty. “What...?”

Zoey took a chance and loosened her hold on her, shifting back just enough to look up at her face. “Mira, it’s me. It’s me. Please, wake up.”

Mira choked on a gasp. “Zoey? But, how—This is... You can’t be here, you’ll get hurt.”

With shaking hands, Zoey took Mira’s face and guided her down so that their foreheads would touch. And when Mira’s gaze began to wander frantically for incoming threats, she said, “No, no, no look at me, Mira, look at me. Okay? It’s not real. It’s not. Look, Rumi’s here too.”

“R-Rumi?” Mira turned her head slightly and Rumi let go of her arms to meet her eyes half way. There was confusion at first. Then recognition. “Oh...” she breathed. Deep breath in. Then out. “Oh.”

“Welcome back,” Rumi praised, though her accompanying smile was exhausted.

They each held onto each other, taking slow and measured breaths. Slowly, the neural link between them returned and settled back in place, making them collectively heave a great sigh of relief.

But it was short lived as, all at once, the Drift abruptly severed and they slammed back into their physical bodies. They spasmed with resounding agony, jerking in their suits and thrashing against the restraints of the piloting rig, though it was the only thing keeping them upright.

Once her muscles went lax, Rumi recovered first, her years of mental training paying off as she yanked off her helmet and reached for the emergency latch that disengaged her from the rig. All sense of self-preservation or concern for what the techs and Celine were thinking were gone. She didn’t even know that her nose was bleeding. She stumbled over to Zoey who was groaning with her eyes firmly shut against a pounding headache, too weak to move on her own.

“Rumi,” she croaked, somehow knowing it was her. Perhaps it was the remains of the Drift still keeping its grip on her senses

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Rumi said mindlessly, freeing her from the controls and her helmet before easing her gently to the ground. Then she went to Mira.

Mira was fully unconscious, her lips parted slightly. Rumi couldn’t see her breathing. Once she was out of the rig and on the ground, Rumi dragged her closer towards Zoey. She needed both of them close to her. Her hands shook as she held Mira in her lap, taking off her helmet to check for a pulse. Her fingers were met with a strong and steady rhythm. She might’ve been simply resting if not for the pained grimace that pinched her expression, and the beads of sweat along her flushed brow.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Rumi kept repeating, but it was so often at this point that she lost track of who she was saying it to. Zoey, Mira, or herself. She held Mira to her chest, and reached over to take Zoey’s hand in hers. She stayed like that until a medic team barreled into the chamber with a barrage of questions and directives and equipment on wheels.

Rumi neither heard nor saw any of this, or felt the spinal implant suddenly leave her body. Instead, she watched from the other side of the simulation window Celine gave her a look. Was it anger? Disappointment? Both? And there was something else, but she couldn’t decipher it from where she sat. Then Celine turned sharply on her heel and walked out of the command center without a word to anyone.

Chapter Text

"Your scans came back normal."

"They did."

"I'm—sorry you had to endure the tests again. But we had to be sure. You understand?"

"…I understand."

“Because I don’t believe I have to be the one to tell you how disastrous the simulation was.”

“No.”

“And I don’t have to tell you that if you’d been in the real thing, the three of you would be far worse off. Permanent brain damage, infrastructural compromises, overloads to the Jaeger, public imagery.”

Rumi winced. She imagined that scenario so many times at this point that it nearly replaced the memory of the real thing. “No...”

“So what happened?"

Rumi didn’t hesitate, but it didn't make it any less difficult. “It was my fault. I was the one to get out of alignment first and I didn’t recover the connection in time.”

“Mm,” Celine invoked neutrally, pacing back and forth in front of Rumi with her arms firmly behind her back. “Why did you break alignment?”

“I...” She swallowed as she remembered of the sudden pressure against her mind, wanting to be let in. “I lost focus,” she said, simply.

Celine's fury was quiet, tempered to remain just below the tenor of her reprimand. Some of the fire seeped into her next words, but only just as she asked in a hush, as if they'd somehow be overheard, “Did they see?”

Rumi shook her head, suppressing a shudder. “Their memories were too strong, even I got dragged into them...” Her chest ached just to think about what she’d seen, what she experienced; their fear and their desperation to live clung to her like a bone-chilling frost and she couldn’t get warm

Not until I see them again, her subconscious yearned.

“As unfortunate as it is for those two to relive that trauma, it’s at least a fortunate smokescreen for the time being.”

Heat flared in her chest, spewing forth words before she could stop them. “Smokescreen? It was the worst day of their lives,” she said.

“Yes, yes, I read their files—”

“You didn’t live them. I was in their memories, I felt everything they did.”

Celine narrowed her eyes. “Where is this going, Ranger?”

“Their...” Rumi paused to recover herself, the invocation of rank a clear warning. “Their experiences shouldn’t be belittled for my benefit. Ma’am.”

“Benefit,” Celine echoed, all irony and no humor. “Before, you came to me with the appeal that they might understand and still you do not see? The worst days of their lives brought on by the appearance of Kaiju. And what if they were to discover the truth of your purpose, of what you are, of what they are sharing a mind with?"

The words hit her with unrelenting force, beating her back and back into submission. But Celine wasn't finished.

“If it were up to me under ideal circumstances, I’d have all three you suspended indefinitely from the program. The dangers have increased after that simulation attempt, but as it stands we don’t have time to find a new set of three, let alone train them. The world cannot afford to wait any longer than they already have. So, bearing all this mind, Ranger, do you care to take that gamble on mere sentiments?”

Rumi said nothing, her ears ringing and jaw tight. She ached to hold herself, as if it could hide her own hideousness, an abomination. Though tears began to haze her sight, she did not let them fall. She said nothing at all, and that was a single word in and of itself, shame and all: No.

Celine sighed harshly through her nose, not content with the silence but still at least pleased by the lack of opposition. Even so, she spoke gently, “Listen to me, Rumi. I’m giving you all a week to prepare yourselves, that is the best I can do. That’s seven days before you will make another attempt at the Drift. The Jaeger will be complete by then and you will pilot it on a brief patrol, just long enough for the people to see that we haven't given up, that there is still hope as long as there is a Jaeger on their shores."

"Right," Rumi uttered quietly.

"We are so very close to the end now. Trust in your training. You did very well keeping your memories out, but what happened in the simulation cannot happen again.”

Rumi's neck spasmed, barely even a nod. But it was enough.

"You are dismissed."

Rumi bowed stiffly, and turned to exit. Just as she reached the threshold, though, she stopped and muttered over her shoulder. It was too quiet for anyone to truly hear under normal circumstance, but in the oppressive silence of Celine's office, the words cut through like a freshly sharpened blade. "How did you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Hold yourself back in the Drift? How did you do it?"

"…It needed to be done. Nothing more."

"What were you hiding?" the question fell out of her mouth faster than the mortification of having even thought it at all.

Celine was silent. Her breaths and her thoughts suddenly the loudest things in the room. "You are dismissed."

But it was as if the dam had broken and Rumi couldn't stop. "You didn't have to cut the Drift."

"After a misalignment that strong? I did it to ensure your safety."

"I had them," she invoked, turning back to look at her. "Both of them. They were coming back to me in the link. We would've come back on our own."

If not for the fact that she was looking for it, Rumi might've missed the flicker in Celine's impervious gaze, that slight crack she needed to finally see what she knew she'd find: surprise. It was gone faster than a blink, a puff of air blowing dust away into the nothingness of imperceptibility. But Rumi saw it, and she relished in the afterimage even if it left her insides knotted and despicable as she closed the door firmly behind her.

***

It had already been three days since she'd last laid eyes on either Zoey or Mira, let alone even spoken to them. She consulted obsessively over reports regarding their conditions, readying herself for the long haul of waiting for them to be released from med-care. But they were released within a day, a clean bill of health for each aside from a shared severe lack of sleep.

Relieved by the news as she was, a day wasn't nearly long enough for Rumi to gather her courage to face them again. She stayed out of sight, keeping out of her own room where she knew they'd try and find her. She didn't know how long she'd keep this up for. She was tired, utterly helpless with sleep deprivation. And yet she continued to spend more energy and brainpower coming up with new hiding places, new excuses to be let out of the compound to trek the city—anything but actually figuring out what it is she would even say to them.

The truth, she thought more than once. So often, in fact, that it was beginning to sound like a good idea, the only good idea.

Then came Celine's office, the scathing reminder, a seven-day deadline, and no other choice.

Rumi spent the first day of that seven visiting the city one last time where she met with an old collector at their home. They presented her with the goods, she paid handsomely for it, and left. On the way back to base, she stopped at a convenience store while ignoring the inquisitive looks thrown her way, and left with her armful of purchases.

She made an immediate beeline for Mira and Zoey's room, hoping that if she walked fast enough, the apprehension that had held her back all this time wouldn't catch up.

Rumi switched the heavy figure into the crook of her left arm and reached up to knock, heart pounding in her ears.

At first, Mira peered out from behind a crack in the door, then she opened it the rest of the way with such speed that Rumi flinched at the brush of wind on her cheeks.

"You're here?" Mira said in a hush, her voice so heavy and rasped with restlessness that Rumi's own throat itched in sympathy. Looking at Mira after so long, she was struck again with what she'd seen in the Drift. For a fraction of a breath, she was looking not at Mira as she was but at the young version of her, bloodied and frightened, surrounded by noise and violence.

Rumi shook the image away.

Meanwhile, mistaking Rumi silence for puzzlement, Mira continued hoarsely, "No one could tell us where you were after… We… we thought you were transferred away or you were…" Mira's throat closed then, and she couldn't utter the words.

"Oh," Rumi said pitifully. Unsure of how else to respond, she asked, “Did—Did I wake you?”

Mira sighed, her voice still wobbly, "Zoey’s asleep, yeah, but I’ve been up awhile. Are you okay?"

She almost laughed. "Define 'okay'."

"Yeah," Mira scoffed. She rubbed her face, then her eyes that were red with fatigue. "That was probably stupid to ask."

"It's not," Rumi assured. "Just hard to answer right now…"

"Yeah. Same." Mira chewed on the inside of her cheek, looking for all the world like she wanted something so badly that she trembled from the lack of it. But with whatever restraint she found within herself to keep still, she asked instead, almost tentatively, "Where have you been?"

In lieu of answering right away, Rumi held up her armful of goods. "Can I set these down first? It's actually getting kind of heavy."

Mira blinked, seeing the load for the first time and quickly stepped off to the side.

It wasn't lost on either of them that this was the first time Rumi set foot in the room. It was cramped, but in a cozy sense of being lived in. There were posters and photographs, Zoey's notebooks and Mira's magazines, a bunk bed where the bottom bunk was unkempt like Mira had been trying to wrestle sleep into submission, and the top bunk bore the weight of a fitful rest.

Rumi allowed herself only a cursory glance before making her way over to what was undoubtedly Zoey's writing desk.

"Here, let me." Mira came over and began meticulously stacking the notebooks according to their numbered labels. "I can't believe you actually got one for her," she said, chuckling under her breath.

"My condolences to your storage space," Rumi snickered as she arranged the die-cast Legacy Sunlight figure into position, moving its arms and legs in a way that would allow it to hold a Get Well Soon! card with illustrated chibi-style turtles on the front, and a plastic wrapped choco pie carefully balanced in its arms. Then she placed the other snacks all around the desk.

Once she was satisfied, she crept over towards the top bunk where Zoey laid curled on her side facing outward. Even in sleep, her expression was troubled. Rumi grimaced at the sight, guilt a sour thing in her stomach. Then a blink later Zoey was covered in grime, her face was wet with tears and ash catching in her hair. In another, she was back and her exhales were broken, bordering on a sob. Rumi ran her fingertips through Zoey’s bangs, catching a thin film of sweat blooming from her fevered dreams.

“I’m sorry, I wish there was something I can do to help,” she whispered and brushed along the curve of Zoey’s cheek.

Then the sleeping woman sighed, still in dreams but the tension seemed to have left her at once. Her lips parted in a soft breath and she settled deeper into her pillow.

“Huh," Mira hummed.

Rumi turned. “What?”

“She’s been frowning non-stop in her sleep these past few nights. Now it’s gone.”

"And you haven't been sleeping at all?"

Mira shook her head.

"I think Bobby went over something like that in class," Rumi recalled.

Mira's eyes lit up with some recognition. "Zoey might have her notes about it somewhere. Help me look?"

Rumi went to pull away but then Zoey's hand immediately shot out and took hold of hers. She inhaled sharply, startled by the touch, yet she held completely still. Even Mira seemed to hold her own breath.

Awake now, though just barely, Zoey mumbled groggily, "It's you…"

Rumi gave her a weak grin and leaned down, whispering, "It's me. Go back to sleep."

"Don't… don't go…"

She swallowed and held on tighter. "I won't. I'm here."

Zoey relaxed with a pleased sigh, and promptly fell back asleep.

The two woman watched the steady rise and fall of her chest. Peaceful. Quiet. Safe. Finally, Rumi murmured, "She's been like this since the Drift?"

"Yeah," said Mira as she came up beside Rumi. There was a slight shuffle in her step, like she'd suddenly become too heavy. Rumi glanced at her and took in her half-lidded eyes and the clear struggle to keep them open. A yawn split through the both of them, long and pulling them deeper into drowsiness. Mira fell on her bunk with an unceremonious fwump.

Rumi's knees began to buckle beneath the totality of every hour of elusive sleep now crashing down on her. She barely managed to find a chair to collapse into, her hand missing the warmth of Zoey's palm when she had to let go, but there was an undeniable lull for them all to finally rest.

It's the three of us together, Rumi concluded through the thickening fog coaxing her into stillness. It was safe here.

"You're not gonna disappear on us again, are you?" Mira plead quietly from where she laid and was also about to succumb.

Rumi could only manage the barest shake of her head before her eyes fell shut. She didn't dream. A small mercy. She didn't fall hourly into wakefulness nor into the inexplicable need to bask in a storm. For the first time in a long while, Rumi slept soundly.

When she eventually woke, she was laying in a bed to stiff to be hers. Then her eyes peeled open to find an unfamiliar room. Panic stuttered through her chest before she caught the soft murmurs and stifled giggles and remembered where she was. There was a slight stiffness in her neck, though not nearly as severe than if she'd remained sleeping in the chair. When did she move?

She turned over in the cot to find Mira and Zoey sitting at the small table with mugs of tea in their hands. They looked well-rested, though there was still a faint darkness rimming beneath their eyes. Their smiles were easy, like they'd been freed at last from an unbearable and unnameable tension.

As if sensing her gaze, the two turned to look at her.

"Finally awake?" Mira teased.

Rumi sat up, groaning and wiping the crust from her eyes with the heel of her palm. "How long was I out?"

"A few hours. What was that, anyway? I don't think I've slept that crazy good in a while."

"Side effect of the Drift," said Rumi, finally remembering what Bobby had gone over in an earlier lesson. "It's common for newly Drifted pilots to want proximity to the point of insomnia. It's like when newborn twins sleep better when they're put in the same crib together, otherwise they're fussy all night."

"Huh." Mira and Zoey both hummed at the same time.

"Why am I in your bed, Mira?"

"Well, it was either that or leave you bent like a pretzel in that chair."

"I've slept in worse conditions," Rumi groaned through a particularly tense stretch with her arms high above her head.

"My bed better not be one of them. You're welcome, by the way."

Rumi smirked. The normalcy settled on her shoulders like a warm blanket. How had she gone so long without it? "Thank you."

Finally, Zoey abandoned her tea entirely and proceeded to tackle Rumi in a hug. "We thought you were gone!" she wailed into the crook of her neck.

In her stupor, her arms came up around Zoey's waist. It felt easy, it felt right. Perhaps it should frighten her on both counts. But in the throes of restfulness where her reservations and apprehensions had yet to return, she only squeezed her tighter. "I'm sorry. I wanted to find you two sooner."

"Why didn't you?" Mira asked. She'd brought her chair closer to the bunk and sat. Zoey had yet to remove herself from Rumi. It might've looked ridiculous having to explain herself with someone with no compunction to move on top of her. But in reality in only seemed to add to Rumi's shame, throwing her own cowardice back in her face.

"I didn't know how to face either of you after…"

Mira's gaze fell to the wayside. "Because of what you saw?"

"Partly," Rumi confessed.

Zoey pulled back. "Do you think that we're not cut out for the program anymore?"

"It's not like that, I don't think that at all," she uttered, though she kept what Celine said to herself. Somehow she found it in herself to continue. "I know I wasn't supposed to see those memories, but it's all my fault. I couldn't face you girls because I didn't know how to begin to apologize. If I hadn't compromised the handshake, you wouldn't have—"

"It wasn't your fault," Mira interjected, her jaw tight and eyes screwed shut.

Rumi faltered, the words abruptly catching in her throat like a road block. "What?"

It was a long time before Mira could meet her eye again, and longer still before she could speak. "It was me. It's foggy when I think too hard about it, but thought I felt something missing when we were in the Drift. I knew that you were there, I could hear your thoughts, but that was it. It was like standing on a cliff edge, solid ground then open air."

Beside her, Zoey was quiet, pensively so.

"You felt it too?" Rumi asked her.

She bit her bottom lip, then nodded. "Not at first. Then it was only for a moment, and I didn't know what it was. Then everything started to hurt."

Rumi imagined Zoey's broken leg, her bloodied elbows, crying in the street. Her chest seized. How did you survive? she wanted to ask, but couldn't. It was too soon, too raw; a sacred site she'd already desecrated.

Zoey reached over and laced her fingers with Mira's. It was enough to get her speaking again.

"I didn't mean for it to happen like that, to throw us out of alignment. I was trying to get through the exercises with you guys, and I should've just left it alone. But… after what you said on the roof," she said, "I wanted to know why—why I couldn't feel you there like I could Zoey. I should've just left it alone. I'm sorry."

"No, Mira, don't blame yourself," Rumi insisted, reaching for her other hand. Mira's hand was soft, softer than she would imagine it to be, and warm. She spoke quickly, like she was trying to outpace the fear of possibly overstepping her bounds. "I should've warned you both about what might happen."

Mira stared at her, her eyes narrowed. "You knew?"

She winced. This was nearing dangerous territory, but if there was any chance at successfully Drifting again, she had to follow through. She just had to choose her words carefully. "I didn't know that it would happen like that exactly. It's part of my training. The one I mentioned that night."

"What kind of training was it, Rumi?" Mira implored, leaving no room for distraction or redirection. Even Zoey sat up attentively.

Mira must've told her, Rumi thought. She took a breath. "That emptiness you felt, the me that wasn't quite all me… It's what I've been taught to do, to bring nothing to the Drift; no memories to chase or feelings to distract from the mission. Just sharing the mental load, and giving focus."

Mira's mouth fell open, a thousand and one things wanting to come spilling out at once. Her eyes flicked from Rumi to Zoey—who looked surprised but still comprehending—and back again, as if she might catch on to whatever insight they possessed. "What does that even mean? That shouldn't be possible. The Drift is supposed to be a weird mind-meld of everyone involved. They made a pretty big deal that's what it was. Right?" She looked to Zoey again, hoping for something. Explanation. Agreement.

"There's only one other reported case of a pilot being able to do something like that," Zoey said tentatively, second guessing what was fact and what was merely legends from her childhood.

Rumi spared her from the trouble of it with a gentle look and a nod. "The Marshal. She said that that was how they made a three-way Drift work for as long as they had."

"She said that?" Mira asked dubiously.

"That's all I've ever known," Rumi qualified. She took another slow breath, knowing that her next words carried a great and terrible burden. Just say it. "My training was to make me into the perfect Drift pilot. No matter who I ended up with, I wouldn't bring anything that would disrupt the flow."

I was born to do this, that was what she told Zoey all those weeks ago, but somehow she could bear to say it again. Maybe because back then it had the luxury of being metaphorical, hyperbolic.

One look at Zoey, and there was no doubt she recognized it too.

But it was Mira's response that landed a devastating blow. "So how are we supposed to trust you?"

"Mira—" Zoey began, but Rumi was already on the defense.

"Y-You can," she said, promising. "Of course you can. Everything we've been through, training and the simulation, it was all real. I just can't…"

"Can't what? Share a mind with us? Must be nice." She tugged roughly at the roots of her hair. "Ugh. I need air."

She held up a finger to Rumi, the steel in her gaze undermined by the struggle of maintaining eye contact for too long. "We're not done yet," she said, then stood up and left the room.

It all happened so quickly, and yet Rumi immediately went to follow before Zoey's hand fell on her shoulder.

"Better let her cool off first," she advised with an apologetic grimace. "When she's inside for too long it's easier for her to get stressed and cranky because… well, I guess you know now."

"Oh… Oh, right, yeah," Rumi murmured, settling back on the bed.

"I told her she should've stepped out while you were still asleep, but she wanted to make sure you were okay."

Rumi glanced over at the tea mugs left on the table, one half empty and the other hardly even touched at all. She dragged a hand down her face. Her acquired restfulness seemed to have been rendered completely moot with the weight of Mira's expression now burned in her mind. "I could've worded everything better."

Zoey offered a supportive shrug. "I think she'll will come around to appreciate that you told us. It doesn't sound like it was an easy thing to share. It was super classified or something, right?"

"Yeah…"

"Are you gonna get in trouble for telling us?"

Rumi smiled, a weak attempt to reassure, yet no less genuine. "It'll be fine." There are worst things still… "I'm more worried about Mira."

Zoey sighed, grimacing again. "Yeah Drifting's… It's always been a touchy subject for her, even when we first met. You can imagine that it took a while for her to come around to one day maybe sharing a mind like mine," she said, grinning through her self-deprecation. "But don't take it too hard, okay? She'll come around, you'll see."

"…I liked sharing a mind with you," Rumi confessed, a bashful whisper.

"Aw come on, you're just saying that," Zoey snickered, giving her a playful shove that was too soft and shy.

"I mean it. I felt confident with you there, that the three of us could handle anything in that simulator, maybe even the real thing. It was…" She fished for the right words. "I think Mira would agree, that it's really something special having something bright in the Drift with us."

Suddenly, Zoey buried her face in her hands, the tips of her ears a glowing pink. "You can't just say stuff like that," she whined and Rumi startled.

"D-Did I upset you? I'm sorry I—"

"No, no," Zoey interrupted, still muffled by her hands. "It was really nice, I just didn't expect it!"

"Oh. Uh, sorry. "

Then Zoey leaned forward, pressing her head against Rumi's shoulder. "Don't be," she sighed softly.

She stiffened at the contact. No matter how many times Zoey has touched her since they met, it always felt like the first time, and her brain scrambled for its next move, a word to either stop or to ask for more. She couldn't decide one from the other. The simplest thought in the world that she clung to was just that it was Zoey and it was comfortable.

"Thank you, by the way," Zoey after a while.

Rumi frowned. "For what?"

"For helping me, you know, wake up."


Oh… "You don't have to thank me. We're co-pilots. It's what we do."

"Still."

"I wish you didn't have to relive that memory at all."

"Me too. But it happened. And you really helped me. I won't forget that. This whole thing about your super secret and intense training won't make me forget that."

Rumi's breath caught in her throat. "Really?"

Zoey nodded, burrowing in a little closer and wrapping her arms around Rumi's waist. "I'm glad you're still here."

And right then, Rumi wanted to tell her everything. She wanted to scream it out all at once, be free of everything, Celine and all she'd ever been told and taught be damned. But her voice refused to work. She didn't want to ruin this, the tenderness of a moment so fragile she felt that if she even breathed wrong it would come crashing all around her. She was being selfish, and yet that cloying whisper, her own shame interrogated her own sensibilities, her 'sentiments' as Celine called them: Would Zoey really understand what she was? What she's made for?

Did she deserve to be forgiven a third time?

"Whoa, you think really loud you know that?" Zoey chuckled.

"Oh yeah? How so?" Rumi humored, hoping that her voice wasn't shaking as much as felt.

"You're heartbeat. I could set it to a crazy beat how fast it's going. You okay?"

"M'fine…"

"Still thinking about Mira?"

"Mm."

"That's okay. It means you really care. She'll want to hear that. Oh, do you know how to dance at all?"

"Uh, I used to when I was younger. Why?"

"Ask her to dance with you."

"Why?" she asked again, slower and as curious as she was suspicious.

She could almost feel Zoey smirking in just her voice alone. "Call it a cheat code. Just trust me."

Rumi exhaled, allowing herself a small smile and the courage to rest her head on Zoey's. "Thank you, Zoey."

"No problem. And thank you too!"

"Again?" Rumi paused, thinking, "What for?"

"For this beauty!" Zoey separated from her and practically skipped over to her desk where Legacy Sunlight stood vigil, still bearing its gifts and all. "I can't believe you found one! And you brought choco pie!"

Rumi laughed quietly, "It's just some pick-me-ups. And no murder involved."

At first, Zoey glanced at her inquisitively, then she scoffed. "Out of everything I've said since we've known each other, that's what you choose to remember? That better not come back to bite in court or something down the line."

"They won't get anything out of me," she vowed, unsure of who exactly 'they' would be, but playing along made Zoey happy. That's all that mattered.

"Oh she's gorgeous! I gotta clear out a special spot for her," Zoey returned to gushing at the figure. "Oh but first!" And at this she picked up the plastic wrapped pastry from its metal arms. "Can you believe that I didn't have choco pies as a kid?"

"Really?" Rumi asked, incredulous. Strict as Celine was while raising her, she still let her have the treat once in a while.

"Well, I guess growing up in America will do that to a girl. Here, split it with me!"

"And get it stuck in my teeth? I think I'll pass. Besides I got it for you."

"Hey this is bonding time, and we get chocolate and marshmallows stuck in our teeth together."

"Alright, alright," Rumi relented and once the treat was freed from its packaging, the two passed it back and forth, taking small bites at a time if only to make it last as long as they could.

And, despite their best efforts, they did get choco pie in their teeth.

Chapter Text

Celine never cared for hospitals. The last one she'd set foot in was the one that took a piece of soul from her. The med bay at the Shatterdome was the one place she tolerated, and even on a good day she had trouble disassociating the stark white walls and antiseptics from unpleasant memory that lurked in the shadows of her anguish.

One of the nurses escorted her to the room that bore the bay's sole permanent resident. Then she left with a curt bow of her head.

The door was open, morning light streaming in from a nearby window that fell muted on the neutral walls of the room, and cast the bed and its occupant in half shadows. Gathering herself, Celine knocked on the door frame.

"Is that you, Celine?" the patient, an old woman, called weakly from the bed. Marshal Roe Sun-hwa, or rather, former Marshal pending a hearing that will officially name her successor. She was once a Jaeger pilot herself, but those early models had relied solely on nuclear power. Dangerous machines, inside and out. Any pilots who were able to retire from combat were rewarded handsome pensions, and, years later, cancer diagnoses from exposure. Presently, Sun-hwa was one of only a handful still remaining. And she was sick. Very sick.

Celine inhaled, fortifying herself. "Yes, seonsaengnim, it's me."

"Sit then," rasped Sun-hwa. "I don't have it in me anymore to shout across a room."

Celine cracked a smile. Her mentor was never one for jokes or humor, however unintentional, and being at the end of her days certainly wasn't about to change that. She walked into the room wordlessly and took up a nearby chair to sit to the former Marshal's left. No matter how many times she's visited her, Celine would pick out yet another detail of her deterioration, yet another reminded of just how old her teacher had become. Her hair was wisp-thin to the point of her scalp, sun spots and all, was showing. Her eyes, once sharp with awareness were now sunken and tired. And though she clutched at the edge of the blankets about her waist, there was an unmistakable tremor in her fingers where there was once steadiness from a time when her veins weren't nearly as bulged nor this blue.

"You called for me?"

"Yes." Sun-hwa gestured with a barest twitch of her finger towards the cup of water on the end table. Celine took it and held it to the woman's lips for her to drink. Once she was finished, she licked her wetted lips before saying, "I wanted to hear of any news you might have. The people here, no one wants to tell me anything."

Celine smiled wanly. "It's because you should be resting."

"Bah! Sleeping my days away, the nerve of it all. Knowing what's going on in my Shatterdome is a better use of my time."

"Once a Marshal, always a Marshal."

Sun-hwa gazed at her, unamused. "You, of all people, will come to know this as well. Knowledge is power and thus should be wielded with wisdom."

She bowed her head in demure apology. "Forgive me for speaking out of turn, then. Though I will say that nothing has been decided yet. The hearing isn't for another two weeks."

"You'll be the next Marshal, Celine," the old woman intoned, the croak in her weakened voice did little to strip it of its stern absolution. "They'd be fools not to promote you. After what you went through to save that girl, they'd not only be fools, but unrepentant fools. It urks me that I'm the first of them to go, but I'll be waiting for each one of those lab bastards in hell to punish them myself."

"Whoever said that you didn't possess a sense of humor has been wrong all along."

"You think I won't do it, girl?"

"I'd be more shocked if you didn't."

The old woman clicked her tongue. She stared up at the tiled ceiling. "So this is what's become of my legacy? Quips and uncertainty of your rightful place."

"If I am chosen," said Celine, firmly, "I will do what I know needs to be done, and the Honmoon will be sealed."

"I know, I know. " Sun-hwa sighed. If it were even possible, it was as though she sank even deeper into the bed. "Yet I still worry for you."

She frowned. "It's not good to have thoughts when you're close to…"

"Dying, Celine," the woman huffed impatiently, "I am dying. Nothing more."

"Yes…"

"Come now, I didn't call you here for your sympathy. Tell me about the girl, then."

Celine looked at her. "I sent you a copy of the reports."

"Yes, yes. Quite cruel of you, actually. Expecting an old woman of my condition to read."

"I—thought you'd appreciate the normalcy of the task," she explained.

"I was teasing, Celine." Sun-hwa sighed again, but it came more as a painful wheeze than proper exasperation. She was helped to another sip of water.

"My apologies."

"Oh don't you start now," she chided. "I supposed that's what I get for trying to change my ways at a time like this, huh? Back on topic. What of the girl?"

Celine inhaled. "They are searching for any surviving relatives who might be able to take her in. But as it stands—"

"Mi-yeong was orphaned long ago," Sun-hwa interjects knowingly.

"And her… husband, is estranged from his family, so goes the investigation. I doubt any of them would be eager to adopt the four year-old daughter of a virtual stranger."

"God rest his soul," Sun-hwa muttered, "if not for a peaceful afterlife, then for the sake that he won't ever come to know what he had done to his own child."

Celine nodded, even though there remained that childish part of her that resents him still. What had he been thinking? Experimenting on himself with Kaiju cells?

But she knew the answer to that. There wasn't a soul in all the Shatterdomes of the world who wouldn't. We need a new weapon, that was what he and that damned research team were all on about. How hadn't she seen it sooner? How had no one seen it sooner?

"The prospects are not promising," she said, returning to the topic at hand. "The girl may end up in foster care, unless…"

Sun-hwa grunted, leveling Celine with a shrewd stare. "I know that look of yours," she said, and with a hint of warning. "Have you weighed the options? The consequences?"

"She is Mi-yeong's child."

"That's a no, then."

"Master, please. My dedication forever belongs to the Jaeger Program and sealing the Honmoon, but I still swore to protect everything precious to Mi-yeong. There is only one choice to make."

But Sun-hwa shook her head. She sank back against the pillows. "It is not simply 'one choice', Celine. It will be a choice you must continue to make. Over and over and over. Do you understand?"

Suddenly Celine felt very small, and not at all the woman who exposed and decommissioned an entire corrupted research team. Forever a student, even when her teacher lay dying right in front of her.

"You will be the next Marshal, tasked with the heaviest burden I can only hope this world will ever come to know," the woman intoned. "But that girl will want a mother."

She sucked in a breath. The impact of the titles each already a great undertaking. The two together… she was beginning to see now what Sun-hwa was getting at, but her mentor never did anything in half measures.

"Knowing what she is, what she's been created to do—when the time comes and those demons have humanity backed into a wall, will you be able to ignore her potential to save us?"

"She is a child," she hissed, yet it escaped from her like a plea.

"A child with latent Kaiju genes, and the youngest surviving case of Drifting; let alone Drifting with one of those beasts. If that report of yours is anything to go by, those genes may well have been activated by that. Worst of all, she will grow, but into what?" Sun-hwa said, unaffected. Ever the one in command.

But, softer now, she continued, "That's all to say if she survives whatever those bastards put her through. Who's to say that she will live past ten years-old? Perhaps then you won't have to make the true choice that will be waiting for you."

"What choice?" Celine asked, because even though she would get an answer regardless if she had wanted it or not, the illusion of her own initiative was a balm against this harsh reality.

"Will you hone a weapon? Or will you raise a child?"

Celine's lips thinned—childish, indignant. Then, she couldn't help the words that fell out of her mouth. "I can do both"

The old woman smiled mirthlessly. It was easier than the bark of laughter that wanted to send her into a coughing fit. "Naivety doesn't suit you."

"I can do it," she insisted.

"You will break her. Weapon. Person. She will break."

"Every child in this world must grow up—"

"She will hate you."

"—and the world hasn't been kind to anyone. I will train her myself. When she is needed, she will answer the call and fulfill the purpose she'd been burden with."

"Oh, Celine…" Sun-hwa murmured sadly.

"What?"

"Will you be able to forgive yourself in the end?"

Silence. The words hung over them both like a sword held by a thread. Celine swallowed. "Have you?"

"Ha." Her eyes drifted closed, not in sleep but rather with the mass of her entire life coming upon her in that very instant. The book of every action, every word spoken, and consequence reaped, unfolding behind her tired and heavy eyelids.

"No," the old marshal said at last. "I cannot forgive myself for having allowed for that experiment to continue for as long as it had; for my oversight and negligence that a child must now pay for for as long as she lives. That you must now clean up."

Sun-hwa opened her eyes again, and for the first time in a long while since her declining health took a harsh turn for the worst, they were bright with terrible clarity. "You both deserved better than to inherit the mistakes of an old woman and a world of problems I couldn't remain alive long enough to see resolved."

"Master…"

"I know you don't need it, but if you wish to adopt the child—for Mi-yeong's sake or yours—then you have my blessing to do so. And for whatever it's worth coming from a dying woman, there's one other wisdom I will leave you with: you must learn to forgive yourself, Celine. When you are Marshal, there won't be anyone else to do so."

Celine sat with the words a long time. Neither of them spoke.

Sun-hwa drifted in and out of drowsiness, meanwhile Celine had gone completely still in her chair.

Then, at long last, Celine broke the silence. "Sentimentality doesn't suit you."

The old woman wheezed again, though this time it was a genuine laugh. "I know it."

The court adjourned after a long two hours of presenting her case and, with none of the candidates they found during their investigation deigned to show up, the finalization of custody went in Celine's favor. Two long hours, and yet as the gavel cracked it was as though time had righted itself again and it had hardly gone by at all. There was simply the ache in her lower back and the relief that it was over.

Celine bowed to the judge and briskly left the courtroom. Was it eagerness or nervousness there in her stomach?

Outside the door, sitting on a long bench, was a young girl—four years-old, perfectly normal and healthy. There was a bandage taped at the nape of her neck however, a stark patch of white standing out against her purple hair that drew strange looks from passersby. Purple hair…

Sitting beside her was the social worker, whom Celine briefly shook hands with, thanked, and assured that she will take over from here onward. When it was just her and the girl, she hesitated at first to speak. She couldn't, in her right mind, recall a time she ever interacted with a child.

"Rumi?"

The girl looked up, saying nothing. Her eyes were a dark brown, round and wet, yet no tears fell. Was it a brave front? The inscrutability of shock? The poor thing just lost her father after all, but… oh damn it all, Celine wasn't equipped to even tell the difference. Was she even cut out for this?

She fought down the doubt and came to kneel down in front of her.

"I don't think you'd remember me, you were just a baby when we first met," she spoke gently, trying for a smile. "My name is Celine. I was a very good friend of your mother's."

Rumi eyed her, suspicious. She shrank in her chair slightly.

Good instinct, Celine commended. But she came prepared and she reached into the pocket of her blazer for the photo of her and the other Sunlight pilots in their Drivesuits. She held it up and pointed to herself positioned in the middle. "See? That's me. And here," she pointed to the woman at her left, radiant and always smiling, "that's your mother Mi-yeong. You've got her eyes, you know. And she always wore her hair in a braid just like yours."

Rumi's hand went up to her hair. It was already getting to be fairly long and will need to be cut soon, Celine clinically noted, but watching the girl pull her braid over her shoulder to study its weave like a treasure staved the thought, and melted her heart right down to its core.

"Here," she said, bringing the photograph closer into Rumi's hands. "Keep it."

"R-Really?"

She nodded once. "Just promise to take good care of it, yes?"

"I promise!" Rumi said, and for the first time she broke into a smile.

You've got her smile too. Oh, Mi-yeong, what a life you've left me to live in your place.

Then Celine stood up, smoothing the front of her skirt and adjusting her blazer. She cleared her throat, trying to the swallow the burn that's welled up there before it could steal her voice entirely.

"Come, Rumi," she said, and pivoted on a foot towards the courthouse exit and held out a hand. "Let us go home."

Chapter Text

The knock on the door was soft and yet it echoed up and down the corridor as potent as a burst of thunder. She waited, holding her breath and closing her eyes on an inhale, and opening them again on the exhale. She braced herself.

The door swung open and the smokey scent of burning incense and coffee wafted over her like a breeze. Bobby, dressed in his usual business-casual wear of a simple shirt beneath a gray blazer, jumped a little in surprise before smiling. "Mira," he greeted brightly. "It's good to see you up and about!"

"Hey, Bobby…" She hesitated a moment. "Do you take walk-ins?"

"Walk-ins?" he echoed. Finally taking in her expression, his smile grew gentle. "For you three, it could be midnight for all I care. My door's always open." He swung it open wider and stepped off to the side in silent invitation.

She stares at the space between the carpet of the office and the concrete of the hallway for a long, deliberating moment, letting the decision to come here simmer in her gut until she found that she regretted it all along. Strangely, it didn't.

"Thanks," she mumbled and stepped inside.

"Of course. Make yourself comfortable." He closes the door with a muted click, then crossed the room over to a bubbling coffee pot sitting in a humble kitchenette. "I already made coffee but if you want tea I've got a kettle ready to go."

"Coffee's fine."

"You take anything with it?"

"Just sugar."

He putters about, retrieving an extra mug and pouring out a helping of sugar into a small bowl. Meanwhile, Mira took a lap about the space. The windows were large and with the city and glittering ocean at the center of its view. Natural light kept the room bright and open. She sighed softly in relief at this.

She eyed some of the books on the shelves, pictures of family and classmates and Jaeger pilots through the years, and framed diplomas and certificates. When she reached his desk, there was the usual suspects of a legal pad, no fewer than fives pens scattered about, sticky notes bearing various reminders of a busy body and doodles of an idle mind. Sitting in the corner of the desk was a small picture frame of a much younger Bobby, a little thinner and without his facial hair wearing graduation robes. Beside him was a girl of around the same age, maybe a little younger, with an arm over his shoulders—a captured moment of pure pride and joy.

"My sister," Bobby said fondly, catching her lingering gaze on the photo.

Mira threw a small smile over her shoulder. "She's cute."

"She gets it from our mom's side," he joked. He carried over a tray of two coffee mugs, cream, and the sugar bowl over to the low table that sat between two plush chairs sat facing one other.

"Where is she now?" she asked, coming over to sit.

"She's a cellist, actually. So she travels all over."

"That's—cool."

"I know what you're thinking," he grinned and sat down in the other chair. He reached over and began to fix up his cup of coffee with cream and sugar, all the while sliding a mug closer to Mira's side of the table. "A musician and a psychologist as siblings is a weird combo to have happen, right?"

She scoffed, scooping half a spoonful of sugar into the dark brew. "I could think of something weirder."

"Oh? Like what?" he asked, genuinely curious.

She took the mug up one hand, fingers curled around the hot ceramic unflinchingly as she leaned back against the plush backrest. "Try a civil engineer and a Jaeger pilot in-training."

Comprehension didn't settle right away, but when it did, Bobby nodded. "Yeah, I'd say that that's quite a difference. But you're both building for the future of humanity."

She only sipped in response. It was good coffee.

"I take it you don't speak with your brother often?"

"I'm not here to talk about my brother. Or anyone in my family," she said curtly.

"Right, of course, my apologies," Bobby immediately aborted. "We can start whenever you're ready."

Mira continued to drink.

He did the same, one leg crossed over the other. Quiet. Patient. Then, after a long time of silence, "You know, I didn't expect that it'd be you who'd come to me first," he said conversationally. "I understand that you haven't had positive experiences with therapists in the past."

She shrugged. "As far as shrinks go, you're not… terrible, I guess. And it's not like there's anywhere else I can go right now," she replied neutrally, but Bobby looked appreciative all the same. She jerked a chin in his direction. "Who'd you expect instead?"

"Zoey."

Her fingers closed tighter around her mug. "What's wrong with Zoey?"

He smiled, "There doesn't need to be something wrong to come visit me, you know. I'm okay with a simple hello."

"Oh."

"You're very protective of her," he said, not judging, just an observation.

"Sure."

"She came into the program first, if memory serves. Then you followed a little while later?"

She nodded.

"You both were paired up fairly early on too."

"Guess we really hit it off during combat training."

"You both exhibited strong compatibility," he affirmed beyond her stony remark, accidental pun and all. "Results like that we'd expect to see between family members or even childhood friends, not people who'd just met."

"So, what, we were a couple of weirdos in your system?"

"On the contrary, it showed that you both are predisposed to form strong attachments."

Her lips thinned.

"It's nothing bad," he assured. "After all, the stronger the bond, the better you're able to pilot together."

"For a sec I thought you were gonna say that it was a trauma response," she said blithely.

"Well," he smiled sadly, "I didn't say it because you didn't need me to. You two both know what you've been through, and in a world like ours… we cling to who we can."

"…Right," she murmured.

He studied her for a moment. Then he set his mug down and folded his hands in his lap. "How did you feel about Rumi when you first met?"

Mira shrugged, idly staring into her coffee. "Didn't think much of it. Just another cadet until she put Zoey flat on the mat."

"It sounds like it bothered you."

"It did."

"What happened after?"

She sighed, and shrugged again. "We sparred. And it… changed my mind a little."

"Changed your mind how?"

She was about to speak when she sat up straighter in the chair, suddenly realizing. "Hey," she drawled pointedly.

Bobby raised his hands up, only a little sheepish, "You're welcome to stop if you feel uncomfortable. Or did you not want to talk about Rumi after all?"

She slumped back against the seat. "How did you know I even wanted to?"

"Call it a well informed hunch," he said, sobered. "First time Drift-attempts can go one of two ways: pilots integrate seamlessly, or things are a little tense between them for a while. Either way, this is what I'm here to do: talking you girls through it."

"…We couldn't sleep all week," she confessed. "Then Rumi finally came to our room. We all passed out right away, it was weird."

He nodded sagely. "A common side affect; proximity helps alleviate symptoms for the first few weeks. It's simply your brains trying to make sense of one another. I'm surprised the Marshal hasn't relocated you three into your own living quarters."

"I'm not," she grumbled.

Bobby tilted his head, inquisitive. "What do you mean?"

She huffed, heat bubbling in her chest that wanted to be the spark in her voice, that Rumi's had her own separate room all this time, so why that change now? But instead, she said, "Nothing. Just… just thinking that it's all so unfair."

"What is?"

She didn't answer, hiding behind another sip of her drink.

"Have you talked to Rumi about what you think is unfair?" he asked patiently.

"We were starting to. But I started getting antsy."

"Anxious about the conversation?"

She shook her head. "Being in closed spaces too long makes me irritable. I was probably going to say something I'd regret if I stayed."

"That's very astute of you," he praised, but she only sighed.

"I don't have any excuse not to be. It's happened too many times."

He hummed a sympathetic note. "You've must've been really affected by those times then."

"One did." She glanced away, the indignant heat in her chest from before now simmered into a remembered shame. When she spoke, it was with a small voice, "I blew up on Zoey. One time and that was it, I never want it to happen again. Not even to Rumi…"

He paused, assessing the tension rolling off of her before asking tentatively, "Do you feel protective of Rumi?"

She scoffed, but it lacked any sort of bite. "It's not like she needs me," she dodged, and yet it was a telling answer all the same.

"How do you know? Did she say so herself?"

"…No."

"Why do you assume that she wouldn't need you?"

Mira's throat closed, the immediate instinct to clam up and force the conversation to move on again. But the words just… fell out of her anyway. "It's easier."

"Easier?" he coaxed.

"To think it ahead of time instead of hearing it from her, I guess. I… I thought it wouldn't hurt as much. But I keep thinking about it. When we Drifted , I couldn't feel her there while it felt like I was cut open on a table for everyone to see. It was just this Rumi-shaped hole in my head and—no," she stopped, and tried again, "a window, and she could just see into me and there was nothing I could do to stop it. She saw…"

"It's all right," Bobby soothed, "you don't have to say."

She didn't need to be told twice. She shoved the memory back into its corner until the next time she was forced to confront it. "And come to find out that she can just… turn that part off? It's not fair," she said instead.

He exhaled softly. "Is it because you want her to be vulnerable with you? It feels unbalanced?"

Clicking her tongue, Mira set the mug down and propped up one leg up on the chair, bent at the knee, and she leaned against the armrest, looking out towards the large windows. She pinched her bottom lip between her fingers, staring out at the blue sky and the V-line of black birds flying by.

"Mira?" Bobby spoke gently. "Do you want to stop for today?"

"Maybe," she said, not looking at him.

"That's okay. We can always—"

"No, I meant… maybe I do want her to be vulnerable. Maybe I want… I don't know… It was so easy with Zoey."

He considered this for a moment. "Vulnerability is tricky. It can mean different things to different people. I think with Rumi, it'll just come down to trust, trust in that she is your co-pilot and you are hers."

"What about when we're not just co-pilots?" she asked before she could even stop herself.

Bobby looked at her, puzzled now. "How do you mean?" he started but Mira was already shaking her head, her cheeks a little pink.

"Nothing. Scratch that from the record."

But this time, Bobby took a chance and pressed on, "In a, let's say, casual sense, I think it still applies. Maybe even more so. Oftentimes, when people who are used to handling things themselves, it can be hard for them to know when and how to ask for help." When he saw Mira's frown deepening, he added swiftly, "Or sometimes the help they need comes in forms you might not expect right away."

"Like what?"

"I could go off on a whole list but we'd be here all day," he jested. "But basically, it's about feeling, uh," he snapped his fingers a few times, struggling. "Ah, what's the word I'm looking for?"

Almost unbidden, like a delicate chime coaxed by a tender wind, Mira recalled being back in her room, the three of them together at last after days of restlessness and worry. The urge to finally sleep knowing that the other was just within reach was so strong, even just remembering now it settled on her shoulders like an embrace. It was the assurance that neither of them were gone or going anywhere any time soon and it was certain, it was right, it was… "Safe?" Mira supplied, though her tone was far away.

"Exactly," he grinned satisfactorily, the smile of someone who knows precisely what he did.

Mira smirked. "Sneaky."

He splayed his hands open, like a magician after a trick. Then, sobered again, he added, "Realizing that you need someone can take time to sink in. It's a pesky thing, old habits and behaviors sometimes need to feel safe to break. But that doesn't mean that you can't want someone there until they do. Does that make sense?"

Mira sank back in her chair, throwing her eyes back to the window as the words quietly settled like ash, all livid fire and smothering smoke gone out of her with nothing more than a whisper. "Damn."

Bobby offered her a small smile. "Did this feel productive for you?"

She sighed, bordering on a groan, but kept it mild out of sincere gratitude. "Hate to say it, but yeah, I think so. Thanks, Bobby. For listening."

"Like I said, any time you girls need me, I'm there. Are you going to talk to Rumi?"

She bit the inside of her cheek. "Yeah. Yeah maybe I—"

Right then, Bobby's phone began to ring. They both startled in their chairs before he reached into his front pocket with an apologetic grimace. "I thought I put this thing on vibrate. Hold on, Mira." He squinted a little to read the contact name on the screen. He frowned for a second before hitting the answer button and put the phone up to his ear. "Yes?"

A pause. His frown deepened. "Yes, she's with me in my office. We were just wrapping up a—Oh, uh, I haven't seen either of them. I assume they're are in their quarters. Why?"

Another pause, though this one was much shorter as Bobby exclaimed into the receiver. "What? Now?!"

Mira sat up in her chair, heartbeat spiking with a familiar dread. Even still, she asked, "What's wrong?"

And a violet pulse rippled through the room. Followed soon after by sirens.

When it finally came time to look for Mira, Rumi first went to the mess hall. She grabbed a snack on the way out, ate it while walking towards the track, finished it when she reached the gym, and wished she'd saved it for when she reached their lunchtime platform. She went anywhere that wasn't the place she'd knew to find her.

Stalling for time gave her no reprieve, of course. It only made her stomach curdle sour in the anticipation of it all. It made whatever script she had rehearsing and rehearsing grow staler and more pathetic with every iteration. Wrong, all wrong, take it from the top, she'd direct the little dolls in her head, her and Mira on the rooftop standing stiltedly in front of one another, spouting dialogue that truly only sounded better without their actual voices.

"Just go for it, you'll be fine!" Zoey had said, giving her a playful punch on the shoulder before she had left to find Mira, and yet here was, doing the opposite.

"Come on, Rumi," she muttered to herself, "stop being a coward. You've been through worse." Which was true, she's definitely been through a lot, but nothing like this. Nothing like this.

Then the sirens blared, and Celine's number lit up on her phone screen. She answered it and held it up to her ear. "Celine?"

"Change of plans. Gather your pilots, get into your Drivesuits, and meet in the hangar bay."

Her heart firmly lodged in her throat, Rumi spoke, "But you said that our Jaeger won't be ready for another week."

"We'll make it ready now if need be," Celine intoned, but even with the distance and the crackle of the call, it wasn't a command, but a plea. "We still have the Jaeger from the other defunked Shatterdome here, they'll handle this situation; you'll be placed on standby as back-up. It's just protocol. So get to the hangar as soon as you're able."

But we're not ready. Rumi inhaled, long and through her nose. "Understood." She hung up and immediately dials a three-way call between her, Zoey… and Mira.

They pick up on the first ring, both of them opting to have their cameras on so Rumi followed suit. Mira looked to be running down a hallway while Zoey still sat in her room, right where Rumi had left her.

"Guys?" Zoey said, the concern bleeding into her voice that verged on the edge of panic. "What's going on?"

"Honmoon breach," Mira panted, her eyes flicking between the camera and ahead of her as she ran.

"Already? But we just had one not even a week ago, how could it—?"

"It doesn't matter, it's here. We can speculate on how later," Rumi interrupted "The Marshal wants us to suit up and ready to report to the hangar bay."

"Us?!"

"Yes. We're on the standby-protocol."

"What do they expect us to do?" Mira whinged. "We did and botched one round at simulations."

Rumi's jaw tightened. Mira was right, but agreeing with her wasn't going to get them moving. "We adhere to the protocol," she relayed firmly. "We suit up and wait for further orders. I'll see you both in the tech room."

Meeting the face of one another through the screen, they'd see their own expressions reflected back at them. Trepidation, comprehension, and resolution of a terrible fate. They all signed off at the same time, and Rumi took off in a hard sprint.

Chapter Text

They all sat, waiting in the wings while geared up in their Drivesuits. Meanwhile, the Jaeger on loan deployed moments ago to meet the Kaiju breaching the Honmoon. There was a palpable tension in the air—not just from the techs caught between pacing and watching the live surveillance feeds or listening to radio transmissions of the conflict, but from the pilots themselves.

Every few seconds, Rumi would glance over at Mira where she sat forward with her elbows propped on her knees, then glance away. Then Mira would look over at Rumi over her shoulder, studying her pinched features like she might be able to read every thought that stitched her brows together, then she'd turn back.

Zoey, meanwhile, stood against the back wall, watching this silent back-and-forth. Finally, she huffed impatiently, "Will you two just talk to each other already?"

The two sat up at attention with the same intensity as if Celine herself had suddenly called on them. When they both look Zoey's way, she crossed her arms over her chest. "Either you talk now, or the Drift is going to do it for you eventually."

"Well, it will for one of us," Mira grumbled, and Rumi shrank back a little.

One look from Zoey, and Mira winced. "Sorry, sorry, that just came out of me."

"Don't apologize to me."

A heavy pause settled over the room. The techs all exchanged puzzled looks among each other, unsure whether to say something, nothing at all, or to vacate the premises entirely.

Then, Mira turned to Rumi. When she didn't do the same—her shoulders trembling that she wanted to but couldn't—Mira called, "Rumi."

It was a careful sound and yet it still made her tense. Eventually, Rumi met her eye and she jerked a chin towards the door, a signal. Rumi nodded reluctantly, and got up.

One of the Jaeger techs went to intervene but a warning glower from the third Jaeger pilot stopped him in his tracks. Soon the two were afforded the privacy of the hallway. Rumi retreated to one side, leaning back with her hands folded behind her while Mira stood across from her, one leg jacked against the wall and her arms crossed over her chest.

They didn't say anything for a long time; the gravity of the moment, combined with the uncertainty surrounding the combat happening beyond the shelter of the Shatterdome, shifted and molded with the tension that still clung to the space between them.

Finally, Mira spoke quietly, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that in there."

"No, I deserved that… And I'm sorry too."

They fell wordless again.

"Can't believe it's another breach so soon," Mira remarked after a while—no color in her tone, no resentment or a lighthearted invite for banter. It simply was.

"The research department are going to have a field day with this one," Rumi tried anyway.

"Yeah," Mira said, and then she was suddenly impossible to read and for a frightful moment, it was as though their weeks spent together had been tossed away altogether, that they were nothing more than strangers, completely unknown standing at two opposing ends of a great chasm.

"Mira," Rumi began. "What I told you back at the room, I know I should've spoke up about it sooner, or gave you some kind of warning, I just—I didn't know how. It's been a part of my life for so long I never…" Her throat closed, the words disappearing like they'd never been at all. Even to her own ears, they were nothing more than excuses—forgone remedies.

In the wake of her silence, Mira said, "My memory. How much of it did you see?"

Rumi swallowed. "Bits and pieces."

"What bits? What pieces?"

"I… saw the Kaiju in Busan. I saw you running into one of the public bunkers. I heard you screaming. I tried to snap you out of it but you were too deep in the rabbit hole and then I was thrown into Zoey's memory."

Mira's jaw feathered with a suppressed grimace. "Did Zoey tell you about what she went through?"

"Some," Rumi answered meekly. "But it's nothing like—nothing like seeing it the way she saw it."

"Yeah…" she agreed. "What else?"

"I saw the riot. You were protecting this group of girls, but I didn't get a good look at them. I was focused on you. Had to snap you out of it before it got worse."

"Mm. I didn't look at them either," Mira said truthfully. "I thought I did, but all I remember is the blood on them. I remember shouting, and how hard it can be to breathe when you suddenly have to make each breath count. I remember how even city air felt like the cleanest, freshest thing in the world after being packed in a room full of people scared out of their minds. But I can't remember the people who kept me fighting."

Rumi stood quiet, taking in every pull of Mira's lips, every twitch of her brows, and every direction her restless gaze found itself darting to. She basked in the heat of the woman's fervor emanating from her every word.

"After that day, I promised myself that I wouldn't let another Kaiju make me, or anyone like those girls, go through that ever again."

"I'm sorry…" Rumi said, though she didn't know what for. Sorry that Mira had lived through that? That it was the Kaiju, specifically, that did this to her?

How responsible for it all was Rumi? Her, the hybrid human-Kaiju weapon pointed at the monsters that terrorized them. Has she been pointed too late?

People shouldn’t have suffered just to give me an epiphany, Zoey had told her all those weeks ago. But that's Rumi's entire reason for existing. People suffering granting the epiphany to create… exactly what Rumi was now.

Then Mira pushed off from the wall, stalking over towards her. She kept her strides slow and measured. Her impervious stare never left Rumi, like she was expecting she'd bolt at any moment. The effort was wasted, really. In that moment, Rumi didn't have the wherewithal to even look away, let alone run. She stood in place and soon Mira was standing over her, only half a head taller and yet it rendered her utterly still.

"I thought I knew what I was getting into when I signed up to be a pilot. Now the only thing I know for sure is that I don't want to lose anyone to this mess. Not Zoey, not you—" she faltered, then intoned firmly yet so unbearably soft Rumi nearly swayed on her feet, "I want to trust you, Rumi."

Instead, she swallowed, meeting Mira's gaze beat for beat. "You can."

"How?" Mira demanded, quiet fury even as her voice hitched ever so slightly. "What do I know about you that I can trust? When I told you about me and my family—I thought… I thought…" She hissed irritably, calming herself. She tried again. "I thought we might've had something in common."

The silence that followed was so thick that it made Rumi sick. She should've said something that night. The joy of Mira opening up to her for the first time was all but soured by her own selfishness and she scoured for a solution. What was she missing? What did she have that she could give? What could fill the void that she brings to the Drift?

There was only one answer to that. Or, rather, many answers. "A memory for a memory, then?" she proposed.

Mira looked at her, frowning. "What?"

Rumi took a breath and spoke before she could cower away, "My name is Ryu Rumi, it's the first and only thing my mom gave me before she died in the hospital bed. Complications during the delivery is the official reason. To the government, Celine is my guardian, but to everyone else she's my adoptive aunt. When I was five, I begged her to take me to a teddy bear museum, and, yes, I still like teddy bears. I have a pair of sleep pants to prove it. When I was nine, I tried climbing up the big tree that grew in front of her house and broke my arm in two places as a reward."

Then she paused. Deliberating. "I have a scar right here." She pulled aside her braid to expose the nape of her neck where a thin, faint white line—some sort of cut or deliberate incision made there—sat hidden. It looked old. Very old.

Before she even realized what she was doing, Mira drew in closer, bracing a hand against the wall right beside Rumi's head to study the mark. She heard Rumi's breath hitch in her ear, but deigned not to comment. They held impossibly still.

"What's it from?" Mira asked instead, though she loathed to hear the answer.

"Medical procedure. I don't remember what happened, just that I was young. Too young."

Mira pulled away, only a fraction—just enough to take in Rumi's face. "Do you have a lot of memories like that?"

"Ones I don't remember?"

"Yeah."

"I don't know. That's kind of the point of them, isn't it…?"

Mira swallowed her rising embarrassment. "Right. So, is that why you can't Drift like us? You… might remember something you shouldn't?"

Rumi said nothing. All along she's trained to keep the truth of the Kaiju genes out of the minds of others. The concept of keeping her own memories from herself, however, "Could be. I never thought of it like that." Which now begged the question: Had Celine?

"I heard crying," Mira murmured. "When I was trying to see you in the Drift, I heard it."

"Oh."

"Was it you?"

"Yeah… Yeah, probably."

Then she felt the brush of Mira's fingertips tracing the scar, so gentle that it almost seemed like it hurt to be so careful. "What did they do to you?" she asked, musing and distant with rhetoric but their proximity made it achingly sincere.

Rumi inhaled shakily, catching the faintest whiff of Mira's scent. She smelled like coffee and the fading floral notes of her hand lotion. "It's classified."

"Classified," she echoed, like she wanted to mock it, but instead it sounded like acceptance. Or something at least close to it. Then she sighed and removed her hand. Rumi didn't know whether she understood the gravity of suddenly missing her touch. "Tell me something else. Please."

It took a moment to remember what she'd even been doing.

Right. Pieces of herself in exchange for pieces of Mira. Getting that trust again. "I've never had a pet, but I think I'd want a cat. I'm lactose intolerant. I like the crust on my sandwiches. I do this thing where I peel them off and eat the bits as I go. The first soju I ever tried was when I was sixteen—it was tangerine and I nearly threw up. I already don't care for orange juice so I don't know what I was even thinking at the time."

Mira snickered softly, her shoulders shaking from the effort to keep it in. Rumi kept going.

"When I was thirteen, Celine put me on track for Drift training and I've been in it ever since. And, weeks ago, I was drowning in my own anxiety at the idea of having to Drift with someone, let alone two people. But then I met these trainees and they made me not only want to try and make it work, but want to keep it. Even if one of them put me flat on the training mat," she chortled.

"You had it coming," Mira remarked, and a hint of humor had snuck into her voice.

"I did, I did," she laughed under her breath. Then she continued on solemnly, "I'm supposed to be the perfect co-pilot: composed, centered, adaptable to whoever they ended up choosing for me. But the idea of even starting over with anyone other than you girls is the worst possible outcome I can think of. And I don't know if—"

"Rumi," Mira mumbled, barely an interruption, but Rumi acquiesced. "That's… That's enough."

Rumi tried a smile, but then Mira was quiet for a long time—thoughtful for a great span of seconds where she could simply change her mind and refuse everything Rumi had laid out between them. A whole universe could be born right there where she simply walks away and leaves Rumi alone in the hallway with her heart in tatters. But that universe born of Rumi's fearful imagination was soon made gone when Mira pulled her off from the wall and wrapped her arms tightly around her shoulders.

And just like that, the tension fell away at once and she slowly returned the embrace. "Mira?"

"Shh. Let's just—stay like this awhile, okay? As long as we can."

"…Okay." But Rumi lasted all of five seconds before saying, "For what it's worth, I don't want to lose you either."

Mira huffed out a laugh, perhaps too amused to be exasperated. "Thanks, princess," she said, and felt Rumi startle a little in her arms.

"You called me princess…"

"Oh." Mira blinked, stammering, "Y-Yeah, I guess I did. Come to think of it, I never really asked if you were okay with that. Zoey kinda covered for me already about the whole nicknames thing, but still."

"It's fine," Rumi assured. "Great, even. It feels… normal."

"Normal." Mira nodded then, more to herself than to Rumi. "Normal's good."

"Yeah… Just don't go around calling other people it."

Mira snickered. "No? Wow, didn't peg you as the jealous type."

"I'm not jealous. I'm—particular."

"Uh huh, sure, whatever you want to call it."

The door behind them clattered open abruptly, and there was Zoey hanging off of the frame calling out to them, "Did you guys kiss and make up yet?"

"Wouldn't you like to know," Mira countered snidely with a barest turn of her head in her direction.

"But you're hugging! That's good yeah?"

"Rumi was cold."

Rumi scoffed, indignant and alight with mock offense on her face as she playfully shoved Mira off of her. "I was not!"

"Wait no, I wanted to join you guys," Zoey whined.

"Well then get over here," Mira beckoned, and Zoey wasted no time, rushing over to tackle her from behind with a hug of her own.

Mira grunted as she stumbled slightly. Still, she was smiling as she threw an arm behind her and pulled Zoey closer.

Rumi smiled behind a hand at the display but was far from being spared as the duo took hold of both her arms and tugged her into their waiting embrace.

"Much better!" Zoey giggled, and Mira nodded along.

"You're both ridiculous."

"That's the best part, isn't it?"

Unsurprisingly, their bubble of respite wasn't meant to last. Rumi's phone rang and she answered on reflex, her nerves alight with knowing, utterly, what was about to be said. "Celine?"

"It's time," said the Marshal. "Get your team ready."

And yet, despite her knowing, her stomach plummeted. If she were looking in a mirror, she'd see that she'd gone completely pale. She inhaled shakily, trying to keep her voice even. "Celine, we can't. We haven't trained enough."

"There's no other choice, Rumi. A city full of people is about to be in extreme danger. We do not have the luxury of 'getting ready' anymore."

She clutched her phone tighter. "Did the other Jaeger…"

"No. No, they are still fighting," Celine said, and before the relief could give way to confusion, she continued, "The scanners picked up another breach point. We have less than eight minutes before it breaks the surface."

Unable to stand being left out any longer, Mira and Zoey were at her sides. "What's she saying?" one of them asked, but the ringing in Rumi's ears made it impossible to know which.

"Two Kaiju breaches?" Rumi breathes. That… That has never happened before, it seemed impossible to even think about let alone hear it from Celine's own lips, yet she couldn't think of any feasible reason why it would be. She thought back to her time reviewing clips of past Kaiju encounters, the way they were gradually showcasing a frightening level of intelligence—more strategy and deadly cunning.

Maybe the real question should be: why haven't come in pairs sooner?

They don't even know what the Jaeger looked like, and yet there they were, fastened to their respective rigs of the Conn-Pod that doubled at the mech's head. Jaeger techs were abuzz with activity, all nerves and purpose wrapped up in a swarm of checks and inspections. Whatever they were saying might as well have been in another language. None of the pilots spoke.

Soon, the Conn-Pod plummet down, like a high speed elevator and they hear the cacophonous hiss of compressed air as they're affixed to the top of the Jaeger's body. Every second drew them closer and closer to the inevitable.

"Neural Handshake commencing in five…"

"We can do this, we can do this," Rumi heard Zoey muttering under her breath. Looking over at her, she saw that her eyes were closed and her brows were drawn tight in rapt concentration.

"Four… three."

She looked at Mira, seeing the way her fingers tapped a soundless rhythm against her thigh.

"I'll be right behind you," she called softly to her.

Mira gave a short nod in response.

"Two… one."

Rumi closed her eyes.

And it's as though the memories were waiting for them to return, picking up right they each left off only here, in the dire urgency of the moment, the three minds let them all flow.

Mira, emerging from meters below the earth, was greeted by the scant traces of blue sky behind clouds of smoke and a bright afternoon sun. She basked in it, breathing past the rawness of her throat put there from shouting, the lingering taste of rust on her tongue after she'd caught an elbow and split her cheek on her own teeth.

Arms came around her torso, hugging her tightly and a slew of thank you's came muffled against her back. One of the girls she had helped, the Drift supplied in retroactive certainty. Then the arms were taken away and she stood there, letting the outside air simply coat her skin in the relief of open space before a pair of paramedics took her away to suture her wounds. Soon though, those insistent hands became the gloves of a Drivesuit, and there was Rumi pulling her along.

When Mira held her hand tighter, and Rumi thought how much it emboldened her to know that a woman of Mira's strength had found the will to persevere in such adversity.

Then there was Zoey, crying on the ground on the asphalt and waiting to die, still holding on to her broken leg. But one last surge—one last defiant cry—rose from the soul that still wanted to live, and shouted for help. Was it seconds that passed? Minutes? Either way, Zoey was suddenly rolled over, the concrete slab that took her down pushed far away, and she was scooped up into the arms of a complete stranger. She cried out in momentary jolt pain of her leg being jostled, but the shock overrode all else.

"Hang on, kid," the man hissed through his own agony, metal shards dug deep in his side and upper back. They reached a shelter, haphazard but sturdy courtesy of a doomsday prepping store owner. In collective, giddy relief they all swore secrecy not to snitch to the insurance company. Or to the landlord.

Rumi was already there, watching Zoey be carried inside and carefully helped to sit right beside her. Zoey blinked, seeing Rumi beyond the memory and she smiled, as if to say Here I am, this is how I lived.

Someone with a first aid kit rushed over and Rumi thought how it was a great relief to know that a woman of Zoey's singular radiance wasn't alone.

But even with all this, with the threat of Kaijus firmly supplanted in the forefront of their thoughts—

"Neural Handshake holding."

Celine's jaw tightened, not missing the reluctant relay of lackluster information. She eyed the readout screens, then the cameras trained on each of the girls' faces. Their eyes were kept shut, the effort to maintain the connection even more pronounced than the first time. They were scared.

"It'll have to do for now," she said and bent down to speak into the microphone, "Deployment in T-minus sixty seconds. The three of you stay focused and do not lose the Drift. You are at the helm of an unmarked Jaeger and will answer to the codename Prototype until further notice. Acknowledge, Prototype."

"Acknowledged," they chorused.

"City-wide evacuations have already commenced. Your mission is to intercept the oncoming Kaiju making its way towards the harbor; delay it until Saja Inferno can rendezvous with you; kill it should the opportunity present itself. Acknowledge."

"Acknowledged."

"Good." Then the line went silent and it was just the three of them. The whir of helicopters sounded from above the Conn-Pod, readying to take them to the combat zone. It was a strange feeling of weightlessness as they flew. Rumi wondered what they looked like.

"Let's try and not scuff this beauty up too much. I wanna see it later," Zoey chimed optimistically. But they all knew that that was going to be quite difficult to pull off.

Still, Rumi pitched in, her smile strained beneath her helmet, "Right, we'll have to look pretty for the cameras."

A divide appeared between their conjoined thoughts. The gratitude and small relief at the poor yet endearing attempt at levity on one side, and—Cameras. People watching. The world hanging in the balance—the very real and superseding knowledge of just how many people lived in Seoul. Even harder to keep their Jaeger intact, they had to save all those people.

Soon, they were deposited firmly between the approaching Kaiju and the shore of the city limits, the churn of dark ocean water momentarily displaced, then crashing around the Jaeger's legs.

The Kaiju stalked toward them on all fours, and the Jaeger's screen focused in on Zoey's unconscious command. Hundreds of pages of handwritten notes from their lectures swirled into her mind all at once, guiding her eye to see and dissect and relay into the Drift:

All lean muscle that broadcasted agility; a long and thick tail lashed about behind it, prehensile and just as dangerous, if not more so, as its other limbs. Leathery hide devoid of any hulking protective plates aside from small spinal spikes further lent to a heavy reliance on speed, but it was certainly vulnerable if they could land some powerful hits. Lastly, there was the single horn protruding from the center of its snout, likely its main offense, though she almost loathed to want to see its teeth.

It's movements came sharp and quick, darting this way and that while it's glowing and beady eyes studied them them in turn. On a record scale that spanned over two decades, it wasn't any bigger than those who'd come before. To a civilian, such metrics were meaningless. Big was big, and Kaiju were titans standing over insects. But here in a Jaeger that stood eye to eye with one of these demons, the perspective shift was dizzying.

Zoey licked her lips, caught in the tide of anticipation for the inevitable.

Meanwhile, Mira swallowed, taking in all the information that should've emboldened her, yet her heart remained firmly in her throat. Every beat pounded in her ears and made her temples throb.

The Kaiju screeched, the sound carrying deep into the marrow of their bones. Even the Jaeger's metal hull and gears seemed to tremble. New prey, came a hiss in the back of Rumi's mind, that same visceral sixth sense from that night on the rooftop and already her teeth were aching. She shook it away. Focus.

"This is for real," she said under her breath, more to herself but she knew the others heard, both in voice and thoughts. Then, louder, she commanded, "Get ready."

They advanced, strides long and even as the Jeager's strong legs cut through the disturbed ocean waves. But just as they came within range, the Kaiju lurched, thrashing its head up and its horn struck them square in the chest. Sparks flew. They stumbled backward, stunned. From the Drift, Mira's side flared up on instinct—possessor of the strongest balance—and they leaned on this certainty, recovering quickly.

Then all three of them converged together, pulling back the Jaeger's arm for a punch and swung. The Kaiju's head snapped to the side from the impact. Their breaths fell faster. They press in for another attack. But the demon was already anticipating this and came up with its jaws unhinged. It took the offending arm between its teeth, sinking deep.

Rumi cried out, a sound quickly stifled as she bit the inside of her cheek to fight against the raging hot pain that now took her own arm in turn. Focus, focus, fo—Another scream clawed at her throat. Get it off me!

"The horn!" Zoey called out over the warning lights and alarms filling the Pod.

The Jaeger's free arm came down, taking the beast's single horn by its base and yanked. The jaw loosened, but not enough. Finally remembering that the Jaeger had a third arm, Zoey attempted to take control of it. But it remained limp and unresponsive—dead weight hanging from their back. Tapping into its channel felt like her spine was in a permanent backbend. Her attention was simply too divided.

Hang on, Rumi— Zoey called down the bond and went for the alternative.

Taking hold of the Jaeger's right arm for herself and sharing the load even as her own nerves were lit ablaze with the Kaiju's phantom teeth ripping muscle and sinew.

Already, Rumi could breathe easier. And that's what Zoey's supposed to, isn't it? The mitigating third pilot where pain was her epiphany—to go where she's needed most.

Together Zoey and Mira pried open the jaws just enough to free the arm, keeping the horn firmly in their other grasp. Rumi rejoined them and all at once they pooled their strength into wrenching the horn loose. The Kaiju thrashed and tried to recapture its target, but they met its strike instead, taking hold of its lower jaw for leverage and they wrenched. Sickening wet noises filled the Pod, keratin being torn from muscle and skin until it separated in a geyser of thick blue ichor.

They threw the broken horn away where it landed in the ocean with a great splash, but in this momentary victory, the Kaiju immediately retaliated. It leapt backwards, just far enough to spin and bring its tail around like a cudgel. It struck the Jaeger square in the chest knocking it clean of its feet and sailing through the air, straight across the border of the city limit.

"Brace!" Rumi warned through the residual pain.

Despite the forewarning though, the impact came as just as much of a shock through their collective systems.

“Who the fuck put all this infrastructure in the way?” Mira shouted as the three of them jostled and fought against their Jaeger's thrown momentum to regain its footing. Entire strips of asphalt and concrete crumbled beneath them like it was nothing more than dirt. Buildings came down on the mech’s shoulders as dust, debris and rebar. The Conn-Pod filled with the sound of dozens of car alarms.

“I don’t think now’s the time to be thinking about property damage,” Zoey said, already huffing for breath. "But yeah imagine working in insurance."

Idly, Rumi had to agree, but her attention was already back on the viewing screen, expecting to see the demon bearing down on them, but found it… gone.

Mira cursed aloud, realizing the situation along with her, and the three recovered and stood the Jaeger back up.

"Prototype, your right arm at seventy percent functionality," a tech reported through the main communication line. "Your objective remains to delay the Kaiju. Exercise caution when engaging in further combat."

Rumi huffed a shaky exhale and answered in a croaked voice, "Acknowledged."

"Are you okay?" Zoey asked and Rumi could only offer a meager thumbs up.

She'll be fine. She has to be fine. This was far from over with. They were on home turf now, which meant more obstructions and obstacles to work around. Already they were losing arm usage, and in the Drift, the undisciplined thoughts of her co-pilots ran rampant.

This isn't going well—

We're already fucking this up—

Should we retreat—?

What if the other Jaeger doesn't make it—

It was too much. They should've had more training. “Eyes up, you two. It moves fast," she ordered, calling them back to attention and placing herself at their center. Stalwart and calm. Then she switched to the comm line with the aerial team. "We lost sight of the target. Requesting visual aid."

But she needn't have bothered to ask at all. The hairs on the back of her neck rose on end. She froze, muscles coiled tight as she listened. Hisses and the sound of snapping jaws teased just beyond the periphery of her perception. It was still close by. Hiding. Waiting.

Right. They were dealing with a predator, though and through.

Zoey and Mira also tensed, prey mentality setting in as dread loomed like a cold shadow.

"What… is that?" Zoey whispered, either too frightened to raise her voice or to even ask what she was feeling.

"New system," Rumi lied, Celine firmly in her ear. "Sensors pick up on Kaiju habits and tactics and communicates it to us via the sympathetic neural system."

"That's—" Mira shuddered, unable to speak further.

Rumi wavered as deep seeded discomfort stirred through each of their stomachs. Her control slipped just enough for her to think Celine was right before snapping back into focus before either Zoey or Mira could catch it. They still had a mission.

"Get ready," she spoke in an urgent hush as she dropped into a ready stance, arms up and feet planted wide and firm. They followed her lead, and three pairs of eyes scanned the panoramic screen for movement. They breathed, in and out. Hearts beating as one. Fingers unmaking and remaking the Jaeger's fist.

They waited.

Strike! came a lurch in all their chests as the Kaiju is immediately pounced from the left, its massive jaw unhinged to reveal rows and rows of teeth. In the split second before contact, there was the instinct to dodge, and the drive to stand and block the attack.

Zoey and Mira, wanting to do two different things.

Runrunrun—

Fight back don't show weakness—

The concrete slab breaking bone.

The riot closing in.

Not good—not good.

"Down!" Rumi shouted.

Miraculously, the Jaeger dropped to one knee, the hull of its shoulder sparking against the scrape of the demon's teeth as it sailed overhead and crashed through the half-crumbled building, destroying it the rest of the way completely and it became buried beneath the rubble.

"Prototype, your Neural Handshake is becoming unstable."

"Acknowledged," Rumi growled. She needed to think, she needed something that can fix this.

Zoey's apology came like a shy touch and Mira's string of curses was drowning.

The Handshake was coming apart. But they can fix this. They can do this. They were all compatible, they were. They all knew it from the very first spar in the combat room. Zoey meeting Rumi head on despite her insecurities. Mira setting the tempo of their steps until it wasn't even a fight any more.

Wait, that's it! Her cheat code, came the realization and Zoey was quick to agree. "Mira," Rumi said aloud. "Dance with me."

"Huh?" You lost your mind—

"It'll be like how we first met. We can make the connection stronger."

"Rumi, I don't think—"

"Then don't think, just count us in, okay? The three of us, together, we can do it," Rumi encouraged, and to Zoey, "Ready?"

Zoey nodded. "Right behind you guys."

The Kaiju emerged from the rubble and went for another attack, its jaw wide open to retake their weakened arm.

They side-stepped, narrowly avoiding the scrape of its sharp teeth once more.

In the Drift, a fraction of a fraction of a second in between, the three pilots stood facing each other, though two only have eyes for one. Unbridled trust, waiting for her to start.

Then, taking in a deep breath, Mira counted.

The Jaeger moved, punching with a left hook the off-balanced Kaiju in its unhinged jaw. Teeth shattered on impact, impaling the asphalt street with spikes.

Mira danced with Zoey, their steps easy and smooth; familiar and safe in this space that's so very strange.

In 4/4 time. Left punch. Right. Left.

A claw slashed at them, carving through the air.

Rumi's side flared—possessor of swift reflex

They leaned on this certainty and the Jaeger dodged.

And there was Rumi, stepping in time with them—still a distance apart, like a meteor but caught in the orbit of Mira's counts

Dodge.

Dodge. Left. Right.

Rumi—

Mira held out a hand to her. Hesitant, but there.

She took it.

They danced, the music of their joining in their ears. And it world outside the Drift became a far away thing.

The Jaeger swung with an uppercut, making explosive contact with the Kaiju's head, sending it to the ground in a sickening crack and a cloud of debris. It spat blue, screeching in alarm and scrambling back onto its feet and ran, disappearing behind a block of buildings as its claws dug and churned concrete and asphalt in its retreat. Get away have to get away, came its panicked instinct, quickly growing fainter.

"Oh no you don't." Zoey's side stirred—possessor of great speed. She led the dance. Mira and Rumi, leaning into her certainty, matched her stride.

They took off in pursuit, maneuvering around buildings and over bridges until they were on the demon in little time at all. Then they leapt, jet propulsion firing at their back and the Jaeger's arm bent and poised as they landed square in the center of the Kaiju's back and the point of their elbow pile-drove deep into its neck. A choked sound broke in its throat. More viscous blue spewed from its mouth.

The three pilots cheered, laughing in spite of themselves at the ridiculousness of the impulsive move they just made.

"Ha! See? I told you watching WrestleMania wasn't a waste of time," Zoey gloated, breathless with adrenaline.

In between sparring sessions and reps at the gym, Zoey had taken it upon herself to show them the over-the-top world of the WWE. While it was baffling to learn that someone like Zoey would take interest in fighting as entertainment, it certainly explained her talent for grappling and acrobatics.

An enthusiastic wealth of other maneuvers played into their minds.

Mira and Rumi zeroed in on one and they looked at one another. Panting, excited, powerful, Mira held out a hand to her again.

Smiling, Rumi took it with zeal, letting herself be pulled in for another dance.

The Jaeger pushed up and grabbed the demon, helping it to stand back on its feet before clocking it in the jaw once more. It dislocates with a crunch, but they don't stop. They took it by the neck, a merciless squeeze, and heaved upwards, lifting it up off the ground and back down again in a ruinous choke slam that broke several of its spikes into ivory splinters.

The Kaiju's beady eye peered directly up at the Conn-Pod, even as all its hind brain could register was pain pain pain, Rumi caught the faintest whisper, a tickle in her ear: learn. And it repeated, growing no louder nor quieter, just simply there like the pulse from a beacon.

Learn? What does it need to learn?

The beast would not stay down. This close to death, what more did it have?

And that's when the pilots collectively remembered: the tail.

Moving in step with one another, they barely had time to turn and catch it as its end split open like a second pair of jaws. It whipped and snapped in their single-handed grip. Taking advantage of this, the Kaiju surged. Its frothing mouth hung open with its broken jaw, but it didn't deter from its deadly teeth, nor its massive claws—both aimed for the Jaeger's reactor core.

"Hold on, guys!" Zoey shouted and she tries for the third arm again her back already screaming against the attempt but still the limb didn't move why won't it move?

Mira and Rumi faltered, warnings for their damaged right arm flashing again as the Kaiju closed in. Zoey redirected her attention to keeping the razor teeth from the core, and the snapping prehensile tail away from the Conn-Pod. How long they're able to keep this up was anyone's guess but it was effectively an impasse.

"What do we do?" Mira grunted.

"I'm thinking, I'm thinking," Rumi shouted back, one eye squinting against the sparks popping from her arm as the warnings blared its sixty percent—and dropping—functionality. "What's the status on the other Jaeger?" she spoke into the comms.

"Kaiju kill confirmed," came the report. "Saja Inferno en route, three minutes out."

Can we even last three minutes—

That's too long—

Only one option— Rumi drew a harsh breath in. "Celine!"

The comm-line crackled. "I'm here."

"What the hell is this thing equipped with?"

They heard a faint relay of features coming from a tech somewhere in the command center. Then Celine returned with, "There is a plasma cannon equipped in your third arm. That's your best option."

Zoey gritted her teeth, her frustration renewed, "But I can't even get it to move. It feels like I'm about to break my back in half when I try."

Celine paused as she was thrown backwards twenty years and hearing those same words but in someone else's voice. Twenty years, and she could feel that twinge in her spine even now.

How would Ji-woo go about explaining this? Celine wondered to herself, suddenly nostalgic in spite of the situation. "That's normal. Work up to it like you would any other muscle. If it takes all three of you to move it, so be it. Share the load."

Still in lockstep, Mira and Rumi came to the same conclusion. Nodding, Mira spun her away while she stood firm and took control.

The Jaeger shifted, moving to pin the Kaiju's head beneath its knee and free its left arm to aid the failing right. Crying out, Mira held on against the tail alone.

Zoey honed back into the third limb, sweat gathering along her brow until she felt Rumi's arms coming up beneath hers.

I'm here—

Let's do this—

The Jaeger's third arm jumped to life, a spastic twitch like an electric current shot through it. And again, and again, and again on Mira's count until finally the arm flexed, its elbow bending in, rising up to loom over the Jaeger's head, poised like a scorpion.

They struck out with it, taking hold of the snapping end of the tail. With a decisive squeeze, the vertebrae cracked and its movement ceased altogether, but it was still dangerous and the Kaiju fought harder to break free.

"Can you hold it?" Rumi called back to Zoey.

"I got it, I got it—hurry!"

"Mira!"

"On it!"

They came back together, step for step, beat for beat

Never thought I'd be a click track—

No you're more than that—

You're our pulse—

With the Jaeger's knee anchored for leverage, all three arms converged and pulled. The tail tore away, taking with it a chain-link of bone and the last spasms of dying muscle as it squirmed mindlessly in the Jaeger's hand.

They tossed it away, flexing the fingers of all three hands.

The Kaiju lurched, finally wriggling out from under their knee and lunged in one last burst of vengeance.

Let's finish this—

Together!

They met the demon half way, stopping its momentum dead. Mira and Rumi both roared with effort, their neurons firing together in the shared heat of muscle strain as they held the demon back by its shoulders, keeping its teeth and claws—it's last remaining weapons—from the Conn-Pod and reactor core. Functionality of the right arm plummeted further as the Kaiju struggled and beat to get closer, but they held on. They brought their knee up, driving it deep against the demon's underbelly until it doubled over.

“Zoey, now!”

Zoey pumped her right arm, activating the holo-interface and a deep, reverberating thrum filled the pod as the Jaeger’s third arm charged an electric blue. She rammed the plasma cannon barrel against the Kaiju’s exposed side and fired. The air splits like thunder sundering the sky as the demon wailed. She fired again, this time taking out a chunk of its flesh.

“Empty the clip!” Rumi roared over the Kaiju's screeches and the sparks erupting from her own arm. “Empty the clip!”

Zoey pulled the trigger again, and again, over and over and over, her breaths falling harsher, falling faster, and sweat rolling down her temple, until, finally—

Silence.

The cannon, exhaling smoke and heatwaves. The Kaiju, dead weight in their hold.

Dazed and high off the adrenaline and the piercing lack of noise, Mira and Rumi dropped their arms, letting the demon fall onto the ruined street. They glanced at one another, panting heavily, bordering on delirium until they cracked into matching smiles and breathless laughs.

They've done it. It's over.

Then the Conn-Pod filled with noise again as another plasma shot blasted the Kaiju's head open, blue bioluminescent gore and viscera splattering across black asphalt. They glanced back at Zoey,

"Making sure it's dead," she said, deactivating her holo-arm with a self-satisfied grin.

"Well, uh," Bobby cleared his throat, looking a little green in the face as he pointedly refused to look at the screen. No matter how many years he's worked here, his constitution hasn't gotten any stronger. "They're a little—ahem—a little messy, aren't they."

Messy didn't begin to cover it. They absolutely brutalized that Kaiju. There were half a dozen instances that Celine could where the girls could've ended it sooner and without causing further damage to themselves and the Jaeger. But finesse and efficiency will simply come with time and experience, nothing more than that.

Celine pulled up the nearest chair and eased herself down. "Hold off on the city evacuation lifts," she ordered. "Get a clean-up crew on site, and prioritize getting the worst of the viscera out first. Leave the rest of the carcass for the people to see and get their dose of hope."

"And Prototype, ma'am, should we pull them out? We're already getting calls from dozens of news outlets," came a report. "They want to know who the new pilots are."

She sighed, hardly surprised. "Tell them that if they want interviews, they come here to the Shatterdome. Right now, I want those girls back here for decompression, no delays."

"Right away, ma'am."

"Bobby," she intoned.

"Y-Yes?"

"Take a seltzer, or find a bathroom. Be ready for when they arrive."

"Right! Right, I'll get it handled," he weakly saluted and left clutching his stomach.

If they're anything like we were, they're going to have one hell of a mental crash, she mused internally. She studied the screen again displaying the unmarked Jaeger and the carnage that used to be a fearsome Kaiju. She didn't know whether to be concerned or proud. But there was one emotion she was certain of.

"And someone get me coffee," she commanded before slumping back in the chair, hiding her relief behind her fingers.

Chapter Text

In some future compulsion to remember the period of time immediately following their first victory against the Kaiju, Rumi would find fragments of memory where her actions were divorced from any context or conscious agency.

She blinked and she was in the Conn-Pod, triumphant and proud and invincible with her copilots there at her side. Then the rush of vertigo knocked every ounce of breath from her lungs as the Drift receded, and she was once again alone in her own mind. The adrenaline, once tripled and now having nowhere else to go, dropped all at once and gave way to a turbulent listlessness.

She'd blink and she'd be laying on her side on a stiff cot with a too thin a blanket draped over her—feeling so terribly empty.

She'd blink again and she'd be crying, the foreign pillow below her head soaked through along with the voices of clinical concern. The feeling of victory from before was but a shadow—a vision of some far away world in the face of this despair that has taken her.

So, so empty. Where? Where were they? Where did they go?

She blinked again to see herself reaching through empy air for a ghost, and there was Bobby coming into view. He spoke gently to her, though she didn't know what for or about. She'd been crying again. Maybe he said something reassuring, something about 'fixing it', and he must've done exactly that. Her cot jostled, at the left then at the right, and soon after two bodies found hers like magnets coming together and she nearly wept again in relief.

Never in her life had she cried this much; not that she had the wherewithal to know it then.

The rest of these fragments were tempered into mundanity by the comfort of being made whole again. She blinked and she was holding a bowl of soup, the spoon half way into her mouth and she ate. She blinked and a nurse was taking her temperature. It came back normal. She blinked and she was settling back against the pillows, feeling so wonderfully warm.

She roused momentarily from sleep to see Zoey there,her dark hair an inky pool beneath her head, and eyes half-lidded and unseeing in the throes of a lingering torpor. Even still a smile grew on her lips at the weight of Rumi's gaze on her.

"Hey, Rumi?" Zoey whispered, her words slurred and obvious in the fact that while this was Rumi's moment of clarity, it wasn't Zoey's.

Treasure, the thought floated across Rumi's mind like a leaf caught on an errant breeze, and she answered with a smile of her own, because it's Zoey and how could she not? "Yes?"

"Did I do good?"

She managed a nod. "The best."

"Yay," Zoey mumbled dreamily and promptly fell back asleep.

Rumi didn't know how much longer she was lucid for after that, just that she blinked again and there was Mira, leaned over her and her fingertips tracing the scar at her neck. Her hair was mussed from restlessness, her brow glistening with a thin sheen of sweat like she'd been woken from a nightmare, and there was an intensity in her stare that would've backed Rumi into a corner like prey. But in that in-between state of cognizance, she thought her the most beautiful thing in the world.

Neither of them spoke. Rumi reached up and took Mira's questing hand in hers. Their fingers laced, and that's where the memory ends.

She blinked for the last time and, for an uncertain second, she thought that she saw Celine exiting the room.

Like waking up from a fever, the succor of full cognizance—to become aware again of your own corporeal body—was as true as it was brutal . Here Rumi woke with massive headache and a painful heat in her back like someone had driven a railroad spike through it.

And she was warm. Maybe a little too warm? Did the air conditioning in her room finally break?

With a wince, she tried opening her eyes. Her vision swam momentarily, but right away she knew that she was in the medical bay. The smell of antisceptic finally registered beneath her nose, and clinical murmurs of passing nurses sounded off in the near distance. She tried to move her arms but couldn't. Had they been tied down?

Panic shot through her; another one of her worst fears suddenly made utterly real in that agonizing second, until she looked to her right. And she sighed, again remembering herself.

There slept Zoey, snoring with her mouth slightly open and her cheek squished against Rumi's shoulder. She smiled and, already knowing what she'd find, turned to her left.

Mira frowned in her sleep, her lips a deep downturn and her brows slightly pinched together, but she didn't stir nor was she fitful as she clung to Rumi's arm.

Someone must've pushed the cots together to make one large bed for the three of them. In the recesses of her foggy recollection, Bobby floated across her mind and her smile turned sardonic. How long before they didn't need this proximity anymore to sleep? she wondered. A part of her hoped that it wouldn't be too soon.

The fight against the Kaiju resurfaced next, but only in fitful bursts of electrical heat coursing down her arm and Mira's pulse in her ear. There was a moment where she felt her heart rate wanting to spike in belated catastrophizing that she somehow didn't die but should've. Then one more look at Zoey, then at Mira, silenced the spiral before it could take root.

They did it. They won.

Rumi breathed, shifted, and slept a little while longer.

The next time she woke, she didn't know how long had passed. The sound of Zoey's voice pulled her out from the arms of rest. Rumi turned her head to the side to peer up at her as she read in English from a book held open between her thumb and pinky finger. She vaguely recognized the cover from where it had sat atop a stack of notebooks. It was a book of poems, but the author's name was obscured by her long fingers.

As she read, Zoey's free hand was outstretched and mindlessly stroked Mira's hair, the last of the three to remain asleep. It was a picture of such perfect ease—one that spoke of many nights dedicated to this ritual—that it made Rumi chest ache with want.

Zoey recited the poems quietly, and with a lyrical tempo befitting the poet that Rumi has come to know her as, even though she was still rather shy to share her work. As if feeling the weight of eyes on her, Zoey flickered her attention down at Rumi, her lips quirked up in greeting before continuing on.

Rumi sighed through her nose, content to listen for a while and watch the flickers of emotion crease between Zoey's brows and bask in the reverent pauses that would suddenly take her when she read something particularly impactful.

It's only when Zoey paused for a drink of water that Rumi finally spoke. "Those're pretty."

"Yeah, I think so too." She drank half then handed the rest over to Rumi for her to drink as well.

"Who wrote them?" she asked, taking the cup gratefully.

"Just a poet I grew up reading back home. It's the only book I brought with me when I left."

"Mm…" she hummed into the tilt of the glass. When it was empty, she handed it back. "What made you want to read it all of a sudden?"

Zoey set the cup back on the side table. "A nurse came by and saw me awake. Said that the doctor needed to 'test my cognition' or something, so I asked if I could have my book brought here. Good news: I can still read, so the Drift didn't completely melt my brain."

"That is good news," Rumi chuckled. Then she looked at the book with renewed interest, a thing with so much significance for a single person. There came an aching to know, something she couldn't quite name but it was more potent, more profound, than mere curiosity.

Zoey smiled at Rumi's sudden intense focus. "I remember one time it took me two weeks and a half weeks to even finish one of her books cuz I had to keep taking breaks from it. Crazy deep stuff had me in tears, I'm still waiting on my emotional compensation."

Rumi hummed, and thought of all of Zoey's notebooks and the pounds of ink and pencil lead that've been shaped into poetic stanzas. She's never read any of them, always too shy to ask and terrified of how blasphemous it would be even chance a small peek. "Would you ever want to get your stuff published?"

"God no," she snickered, her cheeks growing a light shade of pink. "There's no way my chaotic mess could make any kind of sense."

"I dunno I think it'd be fun," Rumi advocated, but ultimately relented and asked, "So you just write for yourself?"

"Yeah… I mean, it's nice to get stuff out of my head, but honestly sometimes I get that bug where I think it could be nice to want people to see it—see me. You know?"

To be seen. It sounded so utterly simple, but neither them believed it, not really. For Zoey, it sounded as though it was something to be worthy of—the expectation of nothing less than perfection. For Rumi, it's a luxury too opulant for the flimsy veneer of her very being. She thought of curtains being drawn, gentle fingers curling around the fabric that carried the threat of plain exposure. In her mind's eye those fingers belonged to two different hands, and from behind cover it was Mira and Zoey calling her name, trying to coax her out.

Suddenly, fingers thread through her hair, short nails stroking gently along her scalp before retreating, and starting again. It took a handful of seconds for Rumi to not only register the touch, but that she had leaned into it. She blinked, looking up.

"Is this okay?" Zoey asked. She had put her book aside, directing all her attention to studying Rumi's face as if she might catch a glimpse into her inner world.

Slowly, she nodded, and even without words she must've worn her question of why? plainly on her face.

"Your thoughts were super loud again."

"How could you tell?"

"You get the same look on your face that Mira does. Your eyes get all dark and your eyebrows do that thing where it pushes together so tight I think that I'm getting a headache just looking at it."

Rumi winced as, more and more, she's coming to know that for all her training over her own mind, there was little to be done with the obedience of one's face and the emotions it's enslaved to. "Sorry," she said sheepishly.

Zoey shook her head and tapped Rumi's nose. "It's just a figure of speech. Where did you go just then?"

"It's nothing."

"You feeling okay?"

"M'fine," she sighed softly and truthfully as she casted aside her troubled thoughts in favor of enjoying the feeling of Zoey's fingers in her hair. She couldn't help but think that Mira was a damn lucky soul to have this. And the contentment on her face must've assuaged Zoey enough to let the matter drop. At least for now. "What about you?"

And here, something flickered over Zoey's expressions, the soft shadows contouring her features falling stark as she looked suddenly… uncertain.

Rumi sat up on one elbow. "Zoey?"

She frowned, mostly at herself even as she looked at Rumi. "I…"

"Are you two gonna talk the whole damn time?" came a sleepy grumble.

Both their attentions snapped over to Mira, whose eyes were still closed but she was definitely awake.

And just like that, Zoey's jubilent smile returned and she giggled only half-guiltily, "Oops, sorry. Does someone still need her beauty sleep?"

"It's whatever." Mira sat up, sighing groggily and rubbing the crust from her eyes until she could finally get them to open more than a sliver. Then she stretched her arms high above her head, the medical issued sleep shirt riding up slightly with the motion.

"H-How are you feeling?" Rumi asked, making a conscious effort not to look down.

She looked down.

"Feeling like I've been wasting money on melatonin supplements this whole time. This Drift-sleep-whatever-it-is got me good. How long have we been out?"

Rumi frowned, her bashfulness blessedly forgotten in lieu of glancing at the nearby window to gauge the time by sunlight. Luckily, though, Zoey beat her to the punch.

"A nurse came by a little bit ago. Said that we've been in and out of it for three days."

"Three days? The hell happened to us?"

"I think it was Drift-lethargy…" Rumi mumbled, recalling what Celine had once told her. It wasn't often she'd get the woman to speak of anything regarding her Ranger days in any deep detail or fondness. But if there was one thing that could loosen the woman's tongue a little, it was reshaping one's curiosity into something that benefited the program.

Over twenty years hence, and Celine could still recount the sensation of being outside her own body, losing time as she came back into herself in the midst of being guided through even the most basic of motions. She'd 'wake up' and find herself trying to up and leave the hospital room only to be gently escorted back by a team of nurses. Or she'd just laid back down after taking a long pull of ice water like she'd just walked a whole length of desert. She also certainly said some things that she never would've without her air-tight filters in place, but even Rumi knew not to push her luck on any more details.

But it was at that thought when panic shot through her nerves like a bolt. Had she said anything? Three days without her ironclad mental faculties was a long time—far too long. She could've blown her secret and not even know it. She looked between Mira and Zoey, searching for anything resembling outrage or contempt. Presently, there was outright exasperated confusion from Mira, and Zoey was completely unreadible as she held her chin like she was trying really hard to remember something.

Before Rumi could discern whether to take comfort in this or foster doubt, Mira asked "O-kay? And what the hell is Drift-lethargy?" all the while still trying to shake off the persistent grogginess that kept her from noticing the storm behind Rumi's prolonged silence.

Just then a nurse came in with a cart of food and other supplies. "Oh!" she startled, clearly surprised to see all of them awake and seemingly cognizant for the first time in seventy-two hours. "I'm glad I thought to bring three after all." Then she distributed bowls of rice porridge and turned back to retrieve the doctor.

They ate with some disappointment at the unseasoned juk, and Zoey made more than one allusion to the fact that even she could make it better, to which Mira reluctantly concurred.

In between bites, Rumi did her best to explain the lethargy effect of the Drift. More intense than the insomniac symptoms they experiened after their simulation attempt, Drift-lethargy occurs in cases of high stress and its subsequent crash; the brain yet again trying to accomodate and recalibrate itself in the wake of not only the sharing of biochemical reactions taking their course, but the sudden absence thereof. Between conventional piloting pairs, the experience tends to last no more than a day. Three days would be considered a rather extreme case, but for a triple piloting system, they'd be hard pressed to find anyone surprised at the pattern of things coming in threes.

The doctor—Dr. Han, who has been the Shatterdome's primary physician for years—arrived a few minutes later. He smiled to each of them in turn.

"Glad to see you all awake and alert, that is a very good sign," he began, adjusting his glasses higher up his nose. He spotted the book in Zoey's lap and nodded approvingly, "Reading comprehension intact?"

She saluted him proudly. "No problems at all."

"Excellent. Now, I hope you'll bear with me while as you all some questions and check your vitals."

They all nodded.

"We'll have to separate your beds to do so, I'm afraid. Will that be all right?"

That sat a little less well, but again, they nodded and begrudgingly Mira and Zoey scooted themselves off of Rumi's bed. A pair of nurses entered to pull the cots apart to create a wide enough gap for Dr. Han to move between. Starting with Zoey, he brought the end of a stethoscope over her chest then against her upper back. He asked about any feelings of nausea, lightheadedness, or shortness of breath; all of which she answered in the negative. Then he did the same for Mira (who only complained of general muscle soreness, to which the other two corroborated in mutual pained chuckles), and lastly, Rumi.

Here he lingered on Rumi, drawing extra attention to her right arm that she just now realized had been put into burn dressings. The wraps concentrated mostly along the length of her bicep, and she remembered the Kaiju tearing into the Jaeger's arm and the currents of electricity.

"Is it… bad?" she hesitated to even ask and in her peripheral vision, both Mira and Zoey were leaning over, trying to look but ready to be at Rumi's side.

"No," Dr. Han assured, but there was an intentional placidness to his tone that struck in Rumi's ears, though she couldn't pinpoint why. "Thankfully, your Drivesuits' had been manufactured with an upgraded, non-conductive material preventing any lasting damage. But I will still require that you keep the bandages on and return for regular check-ups just to be sure. Of course, this will also be run up to the Marshall."

Rumi nodded, she's certainly dealt with worse. "Understood."

Then, brightly, he continued on, "Aside from your Drift-lethargy, the three of you are in great health. Barring any signs of relapse, you can expect a formal discharge within the next few hours."

"Thank you, Dr. Han," Rumi said, speaking for all of them. But for herself, she asked, "Has—Has the Marshall said anything else in the meantime?"

He paused to think. Then shook his head, "Nothing immediately pressing that I can recall. It was at my recommendation, as well as your counselor, that you three are to be left to rest for however long you require—or at the very least until we're sure that the effects of the lethargy have come to pass."

"Right." She wondered, then, if she should speak with Celine sooner rather than later

"Ah, speaking of which." To this, he turned his attention to one of the nurses, murmuring a quick instruction and she left the room. "Bobby will be here shortly," he said. "He specifically requested that he see you as soon as you all regained awareness."

"Is everything okay?" she asked uneasily.

He smiled in response, his hands folding smoothly behind his back. "He mentioned something about having a surprise for the three of you."

They all looked at one another, mirrored looks of puzzlement on their faces.

"Uh, Bobby? Do we have clearance to be here?"

Bobby glanced over his shoulder as he continued to walk ahead of them. He smiled and said, "For the next hour we do." And along the way, he glanced about for any wandering personel who may see them.

Just as Dr. Han said, Bobby came to collect them out of the medical bay and had them dress quickly. A "quick field trip" was all he offered by way of explanation. Whatever it was, it was apparently under a tight time constraint. A difficult obstacle to overcome as the three pilots were still unfortunately recovering from three days of inactivity. They leaned against one another, pausing momentarily whenever one of them needed a short break or simply needed the proximity.

Presently, they made their way down a long corridor that led towards the maintenence bay of the Jaeger hangar. No one besides maintenence workers and the Marshal herself were permitted to be here. When he was met with inquisitive stares of how he managed to gain clearance, he shrugged and further assured, "I pulled some strings and the engineers are off on lunch. Now, come on."

"You still haven't told us what we're doing here," Mira pointed out.

"Well, let's just say you girls deserve to meet your Jaeger properly."

"Really?" Zoey said excitedly, bouncing a little in place beside Rumi.

Bobby fished out his phone from his back pocket and sent a quick message. Then he opened the door leading into a viewing chamber where the three pilots fell in step behind him. He flipped on the lights and with a grand sweep of his arm towards the wide window that was pitch black save for the soft glare from the overhead lamps, he introduced, "Ladies, Jaeger Prototype in the flesh."

As if waiting for that cue, the lights of the hangar blazed to life in a flood of bright white. They all squinted against the momentary sting, blinking away the discomfort before giving themselves wholly to awe. Their jaws dropped in sync as the mech loomed overhead in all its splendor. It was mostly unmarked and unpainted, lacking the personalization indicative of established Rangers claiming the Jaeger more as their own. From where they stood, it was impossible to tell if Prototype was any smaller or larger than other Jaegers. But that hardly mattered.

Zoey was the first to step forward, her wide and shining eyes taking in every detail of the Jaeger's physique:

While not overtly bulky compared to the tank-like builds of past designs, Prototype's defining shape came from the scapula fins mounted along its three arms and legs for aerodynamic motion and balance. Zoey wondered, then, if it meant that theirs was the fastest Jaeger in commission. Over the Conn-Pod itself, a golden visor shield glinted beneath the floodlights, as bright as the noonday sun. The technicians have already begun work on welding and restoring its titanium plates that were damaged during the fight. The Jaeger's energy core lay dormant in its chest, but it was far from lifeless as it stood with its first battle scars worn proudly.

She observed its hands next and realized them why it had been so easy for them to grapple the Kaiju as well as they had. At the tips of each finger were sharp points; they were maybe even double pronged and it closely resembled climbing spikes. But, really, she smiled and thought quite conclusively that the engineers functionally gave them claws to fight with.

Then her gaze fell on the right arm, and she remembered the burden of pain she shared with Rumi. Looking down at her own arm yielded no marks or blemishes, even though she had felt those electrical currents just as potently, and yet Rumi was the one to require treatment. She hadn't been enough…

Immediately assuaging the rising guilt, Zoey made mental notes to check in on Rumi whenever she could and returned her attention back to the Jaeger as a whole.

It was strong, it was beautiful and, best of all, it was theirs. They had shed Kaiju blood with its very hands, and it, in turn, had endured its injuries and protected them from the jaws of their enemy.

“Will it get a name? Or is it just 'Jaeger Prototype' forever?" Zoey wondered.

“Well,” Bobby drawled, clearly expecting this question, “normally it would be decided by a committee. But given the reallocation of sources and restructuring of priority and yadda yadda—” he waved dismissively and put both hands on his hips. “Basically, it's only right that you all get to pick the name.” 

"It is really that simple?" Rumi asked warily.

"Trust me," he said, still smiling. "Now go on, whatcha got in mind?"

Right away, Mira and Rumi looked to Zoey, who flinched back. “What?”

“You’re the card-carrying-poet,” Mira remarked. “Bet you’ve got some gas in those notebooks of yours.”

There was an excited gleam in her eye, but soon sobered as she looked to Rumi suggested, “Should we, I dunno, name it after Legacy Sunlight? You know, for your mom?”

Rumi didn't hesitate and shook her head. No doubt that if there was still a committee, they’d push for something like that. She could see the dozens and dozens of international news outlets having a grand time playing up the sensation of a Legacy Sunlight II: The revival of a beloved Jaeger, if not in body then in spirit as the daughter of one of its legendary pilots stood at its helm.

But no. It's as Celine had said: Legacy Sunlight is dead, and it should stay that way.

“It's our Jaeger,” she said, her smile determined and warm with encouragement. “And if anyone’s got a name ready to go, it’d be you.”

Zoey returned her smile sheepishly. “Yeah I might have played around with a few here and there for fun.”

“Just a few?” Mira challenged.

Then Zoey fished out one of her pocket notebooks from the fold of her uniform. “Okay okay maybe three dozen!” She flipped seemingly to a random page and read the first one that jumped out at her. “Demon Hunter? Ugh why did I write that? that's way too on the nose, and it lacks that punch.”

“I’m down with having ‘hunter’ in the name somewhere,” Mira chimed with a light shrug.

“Great cuz I thought so too! I’ve been playing with the spelling a little.” She turned her notebook over for them both to see the myriad of pen scratches and scribbles (and some doodles in the corners), before their eyes landed on an entry that’s been enthusiastically circled multiple times. Huntrix. "You know, cuz there's three of us?"

Admittedly, Rumi did like the ring of that.

“Oh! What if we just flip them, so we can have something like Huntrix Demon—” Zoey immediately made a face. “Ehhhh no. Getting rid of Demon right now it's killing the vibe. Let’s see... Gotta get the creative juices flowing here. Ha—Heo—Ho—Definitely something with an H. Hojak-do!”

“Hojak-do?” Rumi parroted.

“The paintings with the tiger and magpie on it?” Mira chimed.

"Yeah maybe!"

To Rumi, Mira added slyly, “If she’s not going on and on about turtles, it’s tigers.”

“It could work," said Zoey, "you know cuz it’s made up of three parts? Like us? Let's see… tiger, magpie, painting." She counted off each word on her fingers. But after a beat she shook her head again. "No, too many syllables." She buried her nose in her notebook once more and rattled off more names and combinations, gauging their quality on Mira’s micro expressions.

Rumi chuckled under her breath, her gaze fondly resting on her co-pilots. Eventually, though, she found herself going back to the Jaeger out the window. She walked toward it without thinking, reaching out to press against the reinforced glass as she craned her neck up to look into the impassive gaze of the mech’s gold visor. She’s so close now. The Honmoon will finally be resealed after so long, and she can be free of what her father left behind. It was... almost too good to be true.

Can you see me, mother? How far I’ve come?

Two hands fell on her shoulders then, Mira on her left, Zoey on her right, and in a flash of pure fantasy, she saw them standing in this way in the Jaeger’s Conn-Pod again—tall and proud and ready for danger because they stood as three parts of a whole. To any Kaiju to stand in their way, they were the harbingers to usher the era of gold.

Gold...

“What’re you thinking about?” Mira asked, soft, patient.

“Halcyon,” Rumi offered suddenly.

“Halcyon?” Zoey echoed.

“For the name. That’s what we’re here to bring, right? Halcyon. And you needed an H word, right?”

Zoey repeated the word, rolling the syllables in her mouth like a sip of vintage wine. Then, “I got it!”

FINALIZATION REPORT

Jaeger No.036912

Classification Mark-6

OS: Arbiter Triple-Way Tag-Conn

Designation: Huntrix Halcyon

The three were properly discharged from medical care a few hours later, and by then their status as Rangers were made official along with their Jaeger's name. At this, Bobby wasted no time declaring that he'll treat them all to a hotpot dinner off-base to celebrate.

Surprising no one, the three of them ate ravenously and probably drank more soju than was reasonably allowed. Neither Mira nor Zoey had any compunction to curb their blatant staring at Rumi when she downed her first shot without a hitch.

"I can drink," she supplied, rolling her eyes at their shock. "Just not on base."

"What was that?" Bobby asked watchfully.

"Nothing!" the trio responded and made a point of dumping more contents into the center pot of broth.

After than, they relished in the warmth and the firm supplanting of this new reality. The dread of inevitability was finally over and this was to be their new normal and they'll face it all together.

There was no greater comfort, truly.

That was, until Rumi received a message from Dr. Han. She backed out of the passionate debate of whether burgers count as sandwiches she'd been inadvertently dragged into by Zoey and Bobby as she studied the message. She frowned, reading his request for her to return to the medical bay at her earliest convenience. A second message appeared, clarifying that it was in regard to her burn treatment.

Slightly appeased, she replied with an affirmative before placing the phone face down on the table and resumed eating.

"Everything okay?" Mira asked, gesturing to the phone with her chopsticks.

"Yeah. It's just Dr. Han wanting to change out my bandages when I get back."

"It can't wait 'til tomorrow?"

She shrugged. "I mean I've had this dressing for most of the day already. It should be quick."

Mira still looked uneasy, but she let the matter drop with a small, reluctant nod of her head.

"If you want," Zoey piped in around a half-full mouth of food before swallowing, "you can stop by the room after. You can read some of my stuff since, you know, we were talking about it before."

Rumi smiled, understanding. "Sure, I'd love to."

They ate and stayed out until late evening.

Returning later that night with a warm belly, Rumi went to her room first to wash her face and change into comfier clothes. Part way through pulling her arm through the shirt sleeve, though, she paused, looking at her wrapped bicep in the mirror. It's a begrudging walk to the medical center from her side of the base and it was already getting rather late. Not to mention, Dr. Han said that the burn hadn't even been that bad thanks to her Drivesuit. If the damage was mild enough to warrant an early discharge, surely she could just treat it herself. She's versed well enough in first aid and she's got a kit here in her room. Even better, she could just go straight to Mira and Zoey's room when she's finished.

Nodding to herself, she ducked into the cabinet under the sink and riffled through until she found the first-aid kit. She popped it open and pulled out a couple of packets of hydrogel patches along with a roll of bandages. She removed her shirt and began slowly unraveling the wrap from her bicep.

The more she unraveled though, she noticed something off about the dressing. The tell-tale lump of hydrogel patches weren't there. And even if the patches weren't used before, there wasn't even any smell or trace of burn ointment. Come to think of it… she hadn't felt any pain from her arm all day. Granted, her only experience with burns existed within the parameters of a kitchen—a quick touch of a hot pan, or oil jumping off frying vegetables and onto her exposed wrist—but she'd surely feel something here.

Apprehension gripped her in a frosty hold, slowing her motions even more, but the need to know kept her steady on. At least until she reached the final layer and she finally stopped altogether. Irrevocably, there was no sign of treatment there at all, though the layer still hid the truth. What did Dr. Han not want her to know? Such a tenuous barrier to lock a question like that behind.

Biting her lower lip, she slid the rest of the bandage away.

She stilled, gawking incomprehensibly at what she now saw.

The skin was… wrong. No, that's putting it mildly, it wasn't even skin anymore—it was scales. There were scales on her arm; a patch of them, blue-violet in color, just below the cut of muscle at her shoulder and stopped half way down her bicep. Even in the weak bathroom light she could make out how they shimmered as she turned her arm this way and that. She squeezed her eyes shut, hard and tight, then opened them again in some childish logic that she was simply imagining all this.

But still the alien nacreous patch shone with every twitch and twist of movement. Fighting against the bile rising in her throat, she reached up and poked a fingertip against the thick keratin. It was supple, and cold to the touch. She dug a nail in, catching on the crevice between two scales. She dug in deeper, trying to lift and peel one of them off until her nerves ignited with that warning-pain to stop hurting herself.

She stopped. "Oh no. Oh, no, no." Her breaths fell faster now, a terrible ringing clogging her ears of all sense and thought. Along with her own jackhammering heartbeat, and that second pulse that had been blessedly faint as of late was there in full tandem force. It throbbed so hard beneath her skin that she thought she was about to burst.

The Kaiju genes. They must've flared up. But how? And why? Why? This can't be happening, this can't be happening. She swept aside the hydrogel patches off the counter. They scattered in muted thumps against the tile floor as she dug through the kit again. She found the trauma shears and split the blades open. The sharp edges caught the light faintly, and she deliberated for a long and harrowing moment. Her focus and attention narrowed, the world becoming fixed upon the precipice of here and now.

I have to try, she thought miserably. Resolutely. And frightened. But she had to fix this. She had to.

She swallowed down a faint whimper as she lowered the shears to the scaley patch. The kiss of cold metal had just registered to her senses and her self-preservation instinct wriggled violently in her hindbrain, when the chime of a text message suddenly cut through the suffocating silence. The sound startled her so badly that she flinched and the shears clattered to the floor by her feet.

Just like that, the spell had broken. It mattered little who had messaged her. Whatever nerves she had steeled to make that botched attempt had burned out and she panted like she'd just sprinted for her life. The mirror showed her wide eyes and her trembling hands. She did not pick up the shears.

She stumbled out of the bathroom, as if getting away from the reflection would put any meaningful distance from the affliction that has taken her arm. Her shoulder clipped against the doorframe but she barely noticed. She tried to remember where she set her phone down, then saw it on the desk.

Mira had messaged her, asking her if she'd gone to the medical bay and if she was still going to stop by the room.

Rumi wanted so badly to go to her, to them both. She didn't want to brave this alone. But Celine's warning, in all its correctness emerged from the back of her mind and settled around her shoulders like the weight of the world itself. What if they were to discover the truth of your purpose, of what you are, of what they are sharing a mind with?

Before, the truth had been amorphous, an abstraction held under lock and key after so many years of disciplining her mind. Now, it's been made physical, manifested upon her arm and she had no idea what to do.

She didn't know what to do.

Except, maybe, what she had done best in the past.

She let the phone fall carelessly to the floor, forgotten for the remainder of the night. She crawled into bed, burrowed beneath the covers and laid there, breathing in the darkness like a child again where she let the simple physicality of the blanket's weight and texture trick her body and mind into thinking that it was safe from the outside world that both hated her, and yet wanted her to save it.

At some point she fell asleep, and dreamt fitfully of oceanic storms.