Author's Note: I fell head-over-heels in love with the rich, diverse, and gritty world of Pacific Rim the first time I saw it in March. Under the influence of SO MANY FEELS, this two-part story exploded to life in a single weekend! It also now has a sequel and a prequel, delving into the struggles, joys, and grief of our heroes, deviating a little from the movie canon on the outcome of the battle of Hong Kong. I suppose you could call this a "fix-it fic," although for the fates I've fixed, I've only added to the angst!

War Clock

Chapter One: Spiritus Ex Machina

Mako slept like the dead.

Like most kids who'd lived in the Shatterdomes for any length of time, she'd learned to live and sleep surrounded by the constant thudding of machinery, the clang of metal, and the whoop of warning klaxons. Nobody slept through the last one - that was the point - but apart from the alerts, Mako's generation had been well-trained to sleep through noise.

Raleigh was a little disappointed when he didn't pick that up from her. But he was still stuck with insomnia and now had her nightmares as a bonus.

He probably should have expected that. Yancy had been an instant-sleeper too, and Raleigh had never managed to get that particular trait from him either. After Knifehead, it had only gotten worse, and sometimes he would go thirty-six to forty-eight hours until sheer exhaustion drove him unconscious.

Fortunately, Mako hadn't lost the ability to catch a few Z's after drifting with Raleigh, although neither of them slept much after the first drift up through the catastrophe in Victoria Harbor.

However, it turned out the death toll wasn't nearly as bad as they first feared. Cherno Alpha's unorthodox design made it nearly impossible to use escape pods, but Otachi gave her pilots a gift: blowing the reactor caused the whole conn-pod to blow free. The Kaidanovskys hit the surface with the rest of the debris, unnoticed. Unlike Cherno herself, Sasha and Aleksis were expected to recover.

Two of the Wei brothers also lived through the demise of Crimson Typhoon. Only two. After the conn-pod was crushed, Hu had still been compis mentis, it seemed, and had managed to jettison his brothers' escape pods. His own rig had been too severely damaged, and from the condition of the body, the medics doubted he'd have survived the trauma of the jettison anyway. Jin had compound fractures throughout his left leg and hip, and it might be years before he managed to walk again. Cheung had lost an arm.

And together, they'd lost a brother. Out of all the situations Raleigh had wanted to avoid when rejoining the PPDC... this had to rank in the top three. No, make it the top one.

After Jin and Cheung escaped the infirmary, he went looking for them anyway. How could he not? Mako would have gone with him, but by then she was dead on her feet, not used to the energy drop-off that came after combat drift. "Get some rest," he muttered, giving her a gentle nudge towards the barracks. "It might be easier on them without an audience." She let him persuade her.

Coming into to Typhoon's now-empty bay, the staccato punch of the basketball on the concrete was louder than ever. But it was slower than before, only the most basic rhythm to it... like a heartbeat. A stuttering, uneven heartbeat at that.

Following the sound to maintenance headquarters, he could see why. Jin was seated in his wheelchair against the cleared utility table, one leg in a full cast extended out on another chair. Leaning to one side, he was dribbling the ball between his hands and occasionally passed it to Cheung, who was on his feet and tried to catch it in his single hand. One sleeve of his pilot's jacket swung loose against his side.

Both of them had bandages wrapped around their heads and half their functioning limbs, and their exposed flesh was black and blue and red. Jaeger pilots after combat lent themselves well to news cartoons, looking like Wile E. Coyote after a tussle with the Roadrunner. For the first few years, they'd been as adored as any wounded warriors, gushed over and fussed over while they healed, showing off their scars and telling war stories. Then fewer and fewer of them were coming back, and Jaegers and Rangers became subjects of mockery rather than gratitude. The wounds were symbols of failure, not valor.

Cheung missed another pass, and the ball rolled towards the door straight for Raleigh's feet. It came to a stop against the toes of his boots without a bounce. Even the damn basketball was out of energy.

We're alive. Woo hoo. We live to fight another day. Rah-rah, bring on the ticker tape parades.

He just stared at it, then looked up. Cheung and Jin stared back, dark eyes dull, empty, and lost and so fucking familiar, like himself in a mirror after Knifehead. He almost turned and walked back out. Don't chase the rabbit.

He picked up the ball, moved abortively to bounce it back to Cheung, but instead carried it over. Cheung took it.

They stared at each other. Raleigh had spent a few days in Shanghai during PR tours, but never Hong Kong, and his Mandarin was limited to a few useful phrases like "where's the bathroom," "how much is a beer," "I'm a Jaeger pilot," and "your place or mine."

The Wei Tang clan and their crew spoke solid English. Raleigh sighed and made himself talk. "If you want privacy, I can go."

I don't mean to intrude. I would never do that. I won't be offended if you tell me to go away and leave you alone. Not at all. Please, feel free to tell me to get the hell out of your space.

They didn't.

They went straight into the hurricane like they were still in their Jaeger. Cheung did a crazy, one-handed flip of the ball to get it spinning on the tip of his finger. Studying it, he mused, "Five years?" No need to ask what he meant. His voice was impressively level.

Raleigh kept his eyes on the ball too as he answered. "Five years, four months." Now they both looked at him, and he concluded, "Three weeks, six days." Eleven and a half hours. His own voice was almost steady.

Jin shifted in his chair, nodding to the wall above the utility table. There was a whole row of clocks and calendars on the wall above it, not dissimilar to any other bay. J-techs and Rangers all tended to come from the same military and engineering stock, or at least they all ended up having the same competitive hang-ups about time. The war clock on the main Shatterdome wall was just a macrocosm of every crew's thinking, measuring the time from incident to incident, noting how long it took to recover and parading the results around with pride.

Until the event from which there was no recovery.

What Herc Hansen and Raleigh had politely not mentioned in front of Pentecost and Mako was that Manila had been a disaster. Lucky Seven had been reduced to scrap. Horizon Brave had taken the kaiju's tail barb straight into her conn-pod. Only Gipsy Danger and her pilots had come out unscathed, but Raleigh and Yancy weren't about to leave the area while their fellow Rangers were unaccounted for. The Rescue-Recovery teams had gotten to the Hansens by the time the Beckets were back on solid ground, and the teams had reports that Horizon Brave's escape pods had jettisoned. Raleigh and Yancy had found themselves moving with their crews down to Horizon's temporary headquarters to wait for news.

That was actually where Raleigh had first met Herc Hansen face-to-face, among their crews during that wait, a mix of grim worry and hope, a celebration of victory combined with dismay that they'd lost two good Jaegers and possibly a crew. They had all crowded around television screens and tablets, watching the news broadcast images of the rescue crews navigating the flood of Kaiju Blue and burning fuel and debris on the water.

"What's more important, the Jaegers or their pilots?" some talking head had blathered.

"Mute the damn commentators!" Herc had spat, and nobody'd argued.

Horizon Brave had been a brother-sister team, Min and Jing Li. Same age difference as Raleigh and Yancy; the sister, Jing, was the older one. They were a cute pair, compact, older than they looked, all kinds of military training. They were part of the Academy's iconic first "class" in 2015, though in reality they were more like co-founders. They'd designed the curriculum that Raleigh and Yancy had attended a year later.

Raleigh and Yancy had only met them once in person when they visited the Academy during training. In Manila, the three crews had chatted a little over the comms while moving into position, making plans for the typical tour of the Philippine PPDC facilities and a post-adrenaline-work-off spar, last pilot standing to win. Followed by bar hopping (bed hopping optional).

The Chinese crews were as close as the Americans or the Aussies, and Min had seen Tendo trying to chat up one of his pod link techs, her enticing curves noticeable even under the shapeless coverall. He'd warned Tendo off as if the girl were his own sister, but Jing had just scoffed that Lu could take care of herself.

Well, Lu and Tendo had wound up sitting practically on top of each other afterwards, but no flirting ensued. Tendo'd been too distracted to even try to cop of a feel.

There'd been a clock stuck on the outside of one of the portable cabinets belonging to Horizon's crew. Somebody'd asked about it, and they'd all learned a little of the various tech crews' traditions. Gipsy Danger's crew started their clocks with each deployment call. Horizon Brave's support crew started theirs as soon as they knew the Jaeger was going to have to go out of service for repairs, competing with themselves and the others for recovery.

Seven hours after visual contact with target, a little more than four hours since Horizon Brave's tech crew had started the maintenance clock, the search and rescue teams had called in. "Confirming both pilots down. Repeat, Horizon Brave pilots down. Visual contact with both bodies."

Lu had calmly stood, walked away from Tendo, and put her fist through Horizon Brave's clock. She hadn't made a sound; people didn't shed a lot of tears by then among the crews. Not in public, anyway. They'd all been on the front lines too long.

But something deep inside Raleigh had throbbed a lot harder than before when any of the other Rangers had gone down with their ships. He'd assumed at the time it was due to having lost a team they'd been fighting alongside. Survivor's guilt.

They had grief down to something like a routine by then. Black armbands on the uniforms for a week, the flag-lowering ceremonies at the Shatterdomes and the Academy. "Behave yourselves in public for a few weeks. Show a little respect. Say something nice in the interviews. Condolences to the nation and the pilots' families," the PR reps had drilled into them.

Yance had been better at the PR stuff too. "We're all brothers and sisters in the Jaeger program," he'd told a reporter before they'd headed back to Anchorage. "Not just the guys related by blood, not just the people in the conn-pods. We'll never forget Min and Jing."

That had been Manila's big sound bite, and Raleigh and the rest of the Gipsy crew had given Yancy hell for it after they got home. "Duuude, you're breaking my heeeart!" Tendo had wailed, waiving a Kleenex around and mopping his eyes when the interview had played on TV.

"So beautiful!" Raleigh had mock-sobbed into Yancy's shirt.

Joking about things like that was just another way of taking their minds off the ever-present possibility that one day it would be their team whose clock stopped running.

The rescue and recovery crews determined Jing and Min Li had gone almost simultaneously, blunt force trauma when the kaiju's tail barb gouged out the front of the reactor and the conn pod. At least it had been over fast, and the auto-jettison of the escape pods had worked. Maybe someday in the future it would save some lives.

But they had privately comforted themselves with one foregone conclusion that even Yancy the Realist had never questioned: when the Beckets went down, if they went down, they'd go down together.

So ironic. After two and a half years and four kills, they had still been so naïve.

Raleigh blinked back to the present, half-expecting to see Mako in front of him, calling him back from the drift.

I can't have anybody in my head again. He really hadn't thought it was possible. No chance that he could be drift compatible with anyone after Knifehead. Let alone that he'd fit into someone else, and she would fit into him so perfectly. Driftsex, the irreverent in the Corps called it. As more and more siblings and cousins were found compatible, it also adopted the term Driftcest.

There were all kinds of rumors, and even Raleigh and Yancy had privately admitted they could understand it. Drifting required some open-mindedness about seeing your partner in circumstances that you neither expected nor wanted, and letting those thoughts and emotions and any accompanying reactions float by. They all wondered if things were different with any of the other crews, but... "Don't ask, don't tell," Tendo had said at a club one night, after they'd all had too much to drink and somebody Went There. "Doooon't tell, for the love of God!"

"Once you've been in the drift, you're always sort of two guys in one body that has four arms, four legs, and two brains,"one of the Psych Analysts had explained during the first term at the Academy. With a sly smirk at the (then) all-male breakout class, he'd added, "And two dicks, so you have to be twice as careful when you're off the clock."

But it was all abstract theory until the first round of Drift Sync Testing, and a lot of boasts about "made it this far, not gonna fail now!" went straight out the window. There were a lot of red faces, relatives avoiding each other, and guys muttering "No homo," under their breath during the weeks after testing started.

A lot of guys just couldn't take it and scrubbed out because they couldn't handle the mental/emotional exposure even if they were compatible. Those who didn't just learned to sort of... let it roll by. In each subsequent class, there were more and more women making the final cut, and while the chauvinists among the Corps grumbled, the smarter ones recognized that in a lot of countries, females were either just naturally better or conditioned better to handle drift and all the weirdness that came with it.

To the ones who made it all the way into a conn-pod, including the Beckets, it really... didn't matter that much in the end, from day to day. They could let it roll by like everything else. The few pairs who weren't blood related or emotionally attached before making it to a conn-pod... almost without fail, they became couples, or at least hooked up on a regular basis. "Draw your own conclusions," Tendo used to smirk, though most of the time even he acknowledged that some things were sacred, and didn't make innuendos about the pilots who were related.

The Wei triplets had a legend almost from day one, all three compatible with each other. There had been a lot of speculation on why none of them were assigned to the Mark I and Mark II Jaegers. Raleigh and Yancy had assumed it was just an urban legend that a special Jaeger was being built just for them.

"Bullshit," most of them had agreed... until the press release about Crimson Typhoon. The media had gone nucking futs over it, and for the first time, all the other Rangers found themselves feeling damn near inadequate.

Gunnar Tunnari had blurted, "I don't know if I want to kill those guys or build a fucking temple to them!"

"So the fucking mech has three arms," an especially envious soul had grumped. "Big fucking deal."

Raleigh blinked back to the present again. He hoped he wasn't ghost drifting... but didn't think so. Mako would've come and found him. This was just run-of-the-mill flashbacks, chasing the rabbit outside the pons.

Who knew flashbacks that aren't about death and destruction can hurt just as bad?

Until Knifehead, Raleigh hadn't realized that.

Movement caught his eye; Cheung was pacing, Jin following him with his eyes. When Jin's eyes suddenly stopped, Raleigh followed his gaze and instantly wished he hadn't: there was a big picture, maybe an actual oil painting, of the triplets on the bay wall. This was their home base, of course. They were more moved in here than the other teams.

Most of the Wei paraphernalia in Hong Kong had the three of them in fighter poses, all dignity and strength and intimidation. But the way they were posed in that image, it could have been him and Yance, just grinning for the camera at a spur-of-the-moment shout of "Say cheese!"

Raleigh looked away from it at the same time as Cheung, and they looked at each other. Jin said something, so softly that Raleigh had to go closer, and he had to repeat it. "How do you have done it?" he whispered.

Fuck. Shit. God fucking damn it. He had to answer. He'd known this question was coming, couldn't claim he didn't understand the imperfect grammar. He'd come to hear it, to try and answer it, try and give these guys something, anything, some vague little cobweb-wisps of experience that might somehow help. Honor Yancy. Honor Hu. Make it all worth something - or at least make it mean something.

How had he done it? He didn't know. Five years, four months, three weeks, six days, twelve hours, he's been gone, and the clock's still running, and somehow I kept walking. One foot in front of the other.

The silence was pressing down on his head. They'd stopped dribbling the basketball. He'd wanted the noise of it to quit before, finding it more irritating than the Kaidanovskys' hard house… now the lack of it was about to send him into a panic attack.

And every time he was actually moved to be afraid, his mind went to the same place:

"Raleigh, listen to me - " The screech of tortured metal, pain from the drive suit's nerve receptors – ah, FUCK, my head – then real pain no breath limbs out of control – RaleighlistenRaleighohshitRals – blackpainpainpaincrushingblow – Nothing.

Painpainpain my head, my arm can't breathe can't breathe Yancy where the fuck – "Warning: Neural Overload" – cannon, one cannon, pain everywhere – "Cannon Loading" – dark, lights down, pain pain shoot the fucking cannon – where's Yance, too heavy, it hurts, pod's dark – YANCYYYY WHERE ARE YOU?!

"Raleigh." Dark eyes in front of him, bruised and blackened and bandaged face – Raleigh lurched backwards and landed on his ass.

"What -" That had been a ghost drift, and he'd probably woken Mako up. Or given her a nice new batch of nightmares. Around a throat tight with horror not a fraction less than five years, four months ago, he croaked, "Sorry." Sorry, Mako. He'd meant to help fellow Rangers out, and now everyone was having to deal with his shit again.

Cheung sat down on the floor a few feet from him, rolling the basketball under his fingers. "Memory does not go away," he observed.

Raleigh shook his head, feeling pathetic and useless. Then there was a rush of indignation like he hadn't felt since before Knifehead…

Oh. Yep, Mako was up.

Chuck wasn't planning on admitting anything. But he never did sleep well the first night after a fight, so he worked out in the Kwoon until the wee hours. His route back to his room was only a detour to avoid Marshall and Herc; he just didn't feel like dealing with them tonight.

Unfortunately, said detour took him straight between Mori and Becket's rooms, where Mori's shriek nearly sent him through the ceiling. "Jesus, fuck!" Staggering against Becket's door, he went to pull a gun that was integrated into Striker, not his hip.

Mori roared again, pain and rage and panic, and Chuck righted himself and was going for her door when her words stopped him cold. "No – Yancy, where are you!? YANCYYY!"

Mori had taken on a decidedly different accent. Took him a few seconds, but he put it together. First full-length drift in combat. Shit. Chuck looked over his shoulder, hoping Becket would come shake Mori out of it, but his room was unoccupied. So it came down to him, and even before Gipsy had saved their asses, he wouldn't have left a fellow Ranger in the grip of a driftmare. Well, probably not.

He hammered on the door. "Mori! Wake up! Come on, snap out of it!"

"YANCE - " There was a shuffle, a thud and a grunt of pain as she fell out of bed, then a muttered curse in Japanese. Satisfied, Chuck decided not to stick around for the awkward part, and was heading down the hall as Mako came out of her room. "Thank you," she said, as he knew she would, and he just waved a hand over his shoulder. Piss-poor manners, but Mori's opinion of him couldn't really sink any lower, and everyone knew he was born in a barn, so what did it matter? But then, "Wait! Where is Raleigh?"

"How should I know?" he demanded. Did she think they were all best mates now? A look back at her in her pants and tank top, and he saw she had drivesuit burns. God damn it. Those things stung like a bitch until they healed up into those sexy scars the media loved. It was superficial as injuries went, and healing didn't take too long, but… Wonder if any of us will live that long.

"You're a Ranger, for Christ's sake!"

She's a Ranger now. Saved our paralyzed asses. Now she was knocking herself out of bed with ghost drift nightmares, looking around for her partner and still half-linked to him if that distracted expression was a hint. Mori would never have betrayed that much distress before now, let alone to Chuck.

He dropped his eyes even though she wasn't staring him down this time. "Last I heard, he was down in Typhoon's bay."

Mako's eyes widened, and there was that flash of comprehension. Standing in the middle of the corridor with bare feet in her jammies, she still looked more like a Ranger than ever before. With an absent mutter of "Domo," she made to run right past him for the bays.

"Oy. You gonna get dressed first?"

There you are, Mori. She turned scarlet, and he smirked as she spun around and scurried back into her room. Old man always does say embarrassment's the way to snap you out of ghosting. But his lightened mood didn't last long. He went to his room trying in vain to keep his own mind off all the jockeys who'd gone down in sparks and darkness of a conn-pod, and one who'd survived still screaming for his brother.

To be continued...

Coming soon: Mako joins her partner and ruminates on the path of loss and sorrow that led them both here, and the two of them try to ease the burden on the two remaining Weis in Chapter Two: Cadence.

Please remember to review!

Additional Notes: This fic draws heavily from the Pacific Rim: Tales From Year Zero graphic novel and the other tidbits that Guillermo Del Toro and Travis Beacham have given us. I've deviated a little from the pre-movie canon regarding Horizon Brave - the writers identified another team as Horizon's pilots and reported her destroyed in Lima. So for this fic's purposes, while Horizon's first pilots were killed, the Jaeger herself was salvaged and the canon Rangers were the successor pilots.

Translation: Domo = "Thank you" in Japanese.