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Sometimes you think that he’s haunting you in the drift. Like a ghost, as idiotic as it sounds. They tell you it isn’t possible, that you’re not the only one who’s been in a copilot’s headspace while they died. And you’re doing much better, they say, than most of those others. You’re back in the jaeger, although you insist on piloting it alone. They tell you it’ll kill you. You know it will, don’t care, even. You feel Patroclus lingering in the corners of your mind, but you can only manage to hold on to him in your sleep and in the drift. You simply won’t accept another pilot pushing him out, not until you can help him. He’s in pain, he’s bewildered, lost even. Odysseus, more a jaeger technician than a pilot these days, once remarked in his pointedly un-pointed way that maybe, on some metaphysical level, copilots only die in pairs, that the first to die is still alive in the mind of the other, that in surviving a catastrophe one pilot can keep his fallen partner from true death. Smoothly he added that the thought was merely the product of a philosopher’s dream, but the message stuck you like a splinter. You know, you know you’re the reason Patroclus is so damn scared, you’re alive so he can’t be dead and now he’s stuck and it’s agonizing.
They tell you that piloting alone will kill you, say it’s not worth chasing Patroclus’ ghost through the drift if the only thing you’ll find is your own ruin. They’re idiots. You can always see Patroclus in your dreams. There’s nothing to chase. He needs to be freed.