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The first thing you need to know about drivesuit scars is that Yancy Becket once kicked a Jaeger fly out of his bed for having fake ones tattooed on her ribcage. Picture this: they’re in some shitty Motel 6 in Anchorage, the girl’s on top of him with her top off, they’re basically dry-humping, and in the light of the electric snow from the television, Yancy sees lines and junctions curving beneath her breasts. The artist did a good job. They almost look real. “Get off me. Get dressed,” he tells her.
“What?” the girl asks.
“You have to earn scars like those,” says Yancy.
*
Early in the war, Caitlin Lightcap floats the idea of developing drivesuits that won’t leave their characteristic pattern of circuitry scars after taking a hard hit. The other pilots threaten to riot. The suits remain the same.
The pilots count their scars, and remember the names of the monsters that caused them.
*
Stacker Pentecost has a spider web that stretches from his wrist, over his shoulder, across his chest, and around his ribs, down to his hips. He earned it from Onibaba, from burning for three hours inside that conn pod, feeling every hit Coyote Tango took. He does not show these scars off, like some pilots might. Perhaps it is modesty that keeps him in long sleeves. Perhaps he does not like to be reminded of the years he has lost, the cells that have gone wrong, and what it feels like to be a giant.
Tamsin Sevier has the same spider web, spread like red-veined marble all over her arm and torso, from when her mind was out of the drift but her body was still in the interface and the circuits burned into her skin.
She has every right to wear those scars, every right to say she earned them. Instead, like her co-pilot, she covers up.
Close to the end, when Tamsin is too weak to wash herself, Stacker eases her hospital gown off and runs a warm sponge over her brittle skin, careful around her ports and tubes and sensors. She looks at the places where her lines match his. “I should have been there to help you,” she says.
“You were there,” says Stacker. Tamsin sighs, closes her eyes, and focuses on making her breathing even. She doesn’t want him to see her cry.
*
The first time the world sees drivesuit scars is when the Gage twins take off their shirts on Good Morning America and let the anchor feel their chests. Everyone smiles. The audience goes nuts. If they weren’t such valuable assets, they’d have been more strongly reprimanded.
Anyway, after that, it’s the hottest new tattoo fad.
An ungodly number of Jaeger-centric bodice ripper novels are written in the years that follow, lovingly detailing how co-pilots share their marks.
*
Hercules Hansen’s scars are like Morse code, nearly a dozen different battles on four continents played out on his skin as incomplete circuits: dashes and lines. Stacker reads with praying lips, until he can recite by heart every story inscribed on Herc’s torso, running from collarbone to hip.
In the half-light some night before the end of the world, Stacker lets Herc trace his keloids with his battle-roughened fingers. “You’re a marvel,” says Herc.
“Yeah, right,” snorts Stacker. “A real piece of work.”
*
Raleigh Becket has small scars where he matches his brother from the four drops and four kills they rode together. When he looks in the mirror, he does not see those. He sees the large scar, where they do not match, where Yancy’s body never had a chance to form burn tissue, stretching up the length of his left arm and cradling his ribs.
The first time he catches Mako Mori looking, he thinks – she is only jealous because she hasn’t earned any of her own yet, because she hasn’t felt how much they hurt. She doesn’t know the phantom ache of an old wound.
*
Aleksis and Sasha Kaidanovsky’s drivesuit scars match in every way. They have older scars, though, scars earned from living rough and surviving out in the cold, and those are the scars they love best about each other.
*
After the battle of the breach, when Mako peels off the layers of her drivesuit, she finds circuit burns as delicate as filigree all up and down her right leg. Tracing the lines delicately with her fingers, she remembers a vacation in Hawaii when there were still months between attacks, and begging Stacker to go in the ocean with her because she couldn’t go alone. She recalls the scars she saw on his arm when she held his hand and pulled him into the surf; how even as a child, she thought: these are the scars you get from being brave.