once more (into the breach)

Raleigh loses in his brother and begins again. Or Raleigh drifts alone. Fuck you canon.

Fic a day 7

The Drift is-

you are nine and your brother is younger. He's bleeding and you're trying to keep him from telling Mom because it was your fault and your bribing him with the plastic set of dinosaurs Dad bought for your birthday three weeks ago. You know you've been played when he grins, as wide and as bright as you've ever seen him, the tears drying sticky on his cheeks and triumph in his eyes.

(This memory is your brothers. You know this because you are there opposite him, guilting him into giving you the toys.)

You're reading from this book of fairytales you're mother bought you in Germany the last time she were there, and really all you get from it is blood is power, and if somebody hasn't died then just wait for it.

(Your brother never shared your fascination with fairytales so you know this is yours.)

oOo

2020

Raleigh loses his right arm first and then there's a jagged hole in his head where his brother used to be, and a blade rammed through his chest.

And then.

oOo

Raleigh wakes up gasping an afterimage of his brothers fear in his guts. The hospitals staff rushes to sedate him and he fights them every step of the way. Calling for Yancy because he's still there, in his head and his heart and his lungs feel out of step with his body because there should be another body with his heart on the same one-two time. He can't feel his right side, and his left is on fire.

The drugs pull him under and he whimpers for Yancy before blackout.

oOo

Gipsy's a wreck, missing an arm, the head shattered, the exposed wires sparking. Her core's open, heart exposed and technicians are tinkering. Beginning the process to shut down a nuclear heart.

The PPDC can't afford to lose her. They've stopped production on new Jaegers and there's rumors up and down the line about other plans, the Wall of Life, and giving up the fight. The academy is still turning out new pilots but most of them will never see the inside of a jaeger.

Raleigh's watching from the bay, his arm in a sling, head still bandaged. There's a Yancy shaped hole in his head and some days he wakes up and can't feel his right side (worse are the days when he can, and the pain is awful, because his mind is telling his body it shouldn't be there).

The Marshall is still waiting for him to make a decision, and as much as his first instinct is to run, Gipsy's still here.

Pentecost understands what it means to be a Ranger. Which is why when Raleigh begs for Gipsy to be rebuilt he listens. They still have all the funding they could ask for. Jaegers are the only defense against kaiju that doesn't involve nuking the whole damn world.

So the Marshall says yes and the world shifts just so.

Gipsy's wreckage is sent south to the mechanics and Raleigh is sent to the academy to find a new partner.

oOo

The Drift is-

you're fifteen drinking beer with your friends and in ten minutes, you'll follow one of the girls away from the camp and trade kisses against a tree, and she'll let you touch her breasts but pushes you away when you try to go further.

(Yours, you think.)

You've just piloted a jaeger for the first time and you stumble out of the conn pods and moving feels easy when you're not carrying two thousand tons on your shoulders and you stumble into your brother, and collapse together. You're jumbled up together, and laughing 'cause God there's nothing like a jaeger.

(You'll never be certain whose memory this is.)

oOo

2021

They hold trials for a copilot, and Raleigh refuses to hold back, waiting for someone who's heart can beat on the same time. Whose breath can match his. There isn't anyone who can keep up, in the Academy's past two graduating class, so they send him the children who are finishing in a month and when that fails those who are only halfway through the course.

There's a girl from the final group who's close. Not a perfect match but close. She's seventeen, Cuban, the daughter of parents who are wealthy enough to buy themselves a bunker in North Dakota and pretend the world isn't ending.

She's young, fast, too angry to do the same. Danielle is her name.

She lands two hits with wild angry strikes, and they call her close enough to drift with if they need Gipsy.

oOo

They share space for a month and she teaches him Spanish in exchange for Japanese. The Marshall watches them in the Kwoon, lines carved into his face, grave and still. When they're done he pulls Raleigh aside and offers to let him try to go it alone.

It'll kill you. The Marshall tells him.

And you, Raleigh Becket who has already died in a jaeger says to him- there are worse ways to go.

oOo

Gipsy's repairs are finally done when the war clock hits zero for the third time since he lost his brother in Anchorage. A category 3 is disgorged by the Breach and it turns east instead of west, towards South America. Kaiju have been ravaging Asia for the past year and now it's their turn.

The Shatterdome is in Panama City and there's one other jaeger in base, Hydra Corinthian, piloted by a pair of women, who finish each others sentences and turn in unison when called for, and Solar Prophet is in Lima too far away to stop the kaiju before Central America is ravaged.

They deploy Hydra to the ten mile line with no back up with Gipsy on standby. She's a Mark IV and they're fast and smart. Predictable. That's what kills them in the end.

Raleigh's suited up and waiting to go but they're holding him back for fear that he'll self-destruct when they put him in the field never mind that he's dropped 24 times in the sims and has 24 kills for the effort.

The LOCCENT officer looks to him when Hydra falls to the kaiju Ceremander, and says "I hope you can pull off another miracle", then orders him into the pods.

Raleigh's back in Gipsy's bridge alone. He's burning, a monumental effort just to get one foot off the ground. Then another. He's taken the left side out of habit, and when he looks over he can see Yancy smiling back at him. Gipsy remembers how this is supposed to go and it doesn't hurt the way it should. He fights it for three hours with his anger and his fear, and his brothers hate and he's still going strong when Gipsy takes her sixth kill.

They walk back through the waves, Gipsy and Raleigh and they just changed everything.

oOo

Immediately after he's released from the connection pod, they rush him to medical. CAT scans and MRIs and every test they can think of to figure out why he's not dead from a seizure.

He should be dead, they tell him with varying degrees of hysteria. Him still standing is in direct contradiction to everything they know about the drift. But really he's fine and across the Shatterdome the technicians are coming to the exact same conclusion about Gipsy.

oOo

The Drift is-

you confirm through the comms, that the kaiju is in your line of sight, and you and your brother breathe, 1-2, 1-2. You start with a hook and your brother follows through, the momentum carrying you through the kaiju, and it spatters kaiju blue on Gipsy, hissing on contact with the metal. The next nine minutes you don't speak, and-

You just killed a strange creature, a hurricane, an act of god.

(This is theirs.)

A reporter shoves a microphone in your face and your brother laughs easily to take their eyes off the way you flinched. He does the talking, and you smile bright and brash and are everything they expect you to be.

He does the talking because he's less likely to make them want to punch him.

(This is theirs too.)

oOo

2022

He's permanently assigned to the Panama City Shatterdome after that, but he gets the PPDC to send him Tendo to run LOCCENT. Jaeger pilots are a commodity, the kind the requires them to be kept happy so they can perform, and if Tendo is the Becket Boys favorite J-Tech then who are they to deny him.

It gives him somebody to talk to when the rest of the dome's giving him leery looks and steering clear, like they're afraid that seizure he's owed is just waiting to catch up with them, dropping him and leaving the Shatterdome without a pilot. It doesn't help that Gipsy's temperamental when Raleigh's not around, shooting sparks and drifting, arms moving with Raleighs from across the dome.

His crew won't work on her if he's not in the bay and he's in charge of her bridge, because they refuse to touch it. They'll swear up and down that she knows that they're not her pilot. Raleigh on his more superstitious days will agree, and Tendo brings Gipsy little offerings, small things that Yancy liked, before he tries to tweak her code.

Tendo of all the J-techs is the only one that hasn't been shocked.

Yancy died six feet away from his pod and the neural handshake was holding steady. They had to clean his blood off the floor and Raleigh used to be a fan of fairytales when he was young. He knows if spill your blood for something you'll always get it.

He takes another two Kaiju that year, with minimal damage bringing his kill count to eight, and the world loses eight Jaegers and sixteen pilots.

The final Jaeger lost is based in Vladivostok and one of the pilots survives. He lost his partner in their bay of the Shatterdome to a grand mal. Command wants to fly Raleigh over to Russia to talk to him see if they can duplicate Raleigh's success.

The survivor dies in medical before they can get him on a plane, for reasons no one can explain.

They end up scrapping the jaeger when three tests with new pilots end disastrously.

Raleigh's right side aches, and he doesn't even feel the damage to his left side. He remains the only pilot to have survived losing a copilot while connected.

oOo

Raleigh Becket meets Mako Mori that year.

He's working on a couple of loose wires, with a j-tech hanging over his shoulder telling him exactly what to do, because the man's scared of Gipsy. Raleigh's no engineer, and his hands are too big for the work he's trying to do, so this is the sixth attempt to fix this and he can feel Gipsy getting impatient in the corner of his mind she occupies, the hole that got left behind by Yancy.

Try number six ends with burned fingertips and seven's looking to go the same way when a small pair of hands intrudes in his vision. The j-tech squawks at her but she's steady and calm, her English accented as she fixes in thirty seconds what he's been working on for half an hour.

Then he looks up and she's smiling, and in his head Gipsy is humming approval.

Then Chuck Hansen shows up and predictably things go straight to hell.

oOo

The Drift is-

nine minutes of silence, the j-techs say, is a record. The techs read one hundred percent drift for the duration and that's a new record they say to the Becket boys, separately. Whoever they tell second he already knows, though his brother hadn't said a word, hadn't drifted since they'd been told.

There's orange juice in the mess this week, just out of your reach and your brother slides it to you without looking up. You shovel down your food in unison, your shoulders bump gently, and you share your space.

oOo

2023

He meets Dr. Lightcap in August taking down a Category IV. Brawler Yukon assists and he finishes the fight bringing him to a grand total of ten Kaiju dead at his hands. It's a good start.

She shakes his hand, tells him to call her Caitlin and has him in the med bay as soon as they finish the post drop checks. He doesn't hold the battery of tests she runs against her. Raleigh's an anomaly, the type that could fall apart in battle in an instant, never mind that he's got two years and five solo kills under his belt. Another three years and five kills of experience with Yancy.

Still he's dangerous and she's the expert.

She doesn't find anything that other medical officers haven't found, because there isn't anything special about Raleigh. There is absolutely nothing to distinguish him from other pilots, beyond the fact that his brother died in his head and he chose to live.

"You should be dead." She says and grins, which means she's not taking his survival personally, like he's some sort of puzzle to be picked apart in a lab. "I suspect you've heard that one before." (She and her partner will be dead in three months from the kaiju gives Striker Eureka seven kills.)

"Yeah." And then because she's a ranger and a scientist, but mostly a ranger, he says "Do you want to meet Gipsy?"

oOo

Gipsy drifts with him in his sleep, metal creaking. Gipsy drifts with him in the Kwoon when he's working out and the engineers used to set up cameras outside Gipsy and in the training rooms just to watch them sync. If any of them had asked he'd tell them this is the routine the Beckets used to do before Knifehead. Gipsy drifts with him in battle diffusing the load, spreading it to far corners of his mind to the empty space that used to be his brothers.

(Gipsy's nuclear heart pulses in time with his too fast to be coincidence.)

Caitlin Lightcap's final thesis was uncompleted and Raleigh was the subject of it. Working title- Drift Trauma and Adaptation in the Human Brain. He reads it, then gets Tendo and a couple in the science department to go through it for him. It's speculative bringing together a couple of unproven theories on the Drift into a synthesized version with the more sci-fi elements cut.

Structures in the brain are changed by the drift, opening up more cognitive function. The Subject had functioned with a partner and now functioned without. In theory it was because his brain had been altered by the Drift enough that he could hold the neural load because he remembered how to. In practice who the hell knows.

She probably thought she would have more time.

oOo

Mako is in the Kwoon when Raleigh stumbles in at four in the morning, eyes wide and unseeing. He's barefoot and a stick finds it's way into his hands easily enough. He's graceful running through drills she's never seen before. But the patterns are there easy enough to pull out so she steps into the swing of the stick with a high block, then counterstrike again and again. The drill ends with a sideswipe that she deflects and turns smoothly to a match.

She can see the minute he wakes up in the way the intensity shifts, and she follows. He tries to check a blow headed for her head but it's unnecessary as her sword finds it's way to block the strike and she swings out to counter and. The Drift has no need for words and neither do they.

Their match ends in a draw. Mako turns away, gathers her shoes, and replaces her stick and turns-

Raleigh has integrated himself into her personal space, close enough to share air.

When you get your jaeger, he says, it should feel like that, and then he's gone.

oOo

The Drift is-

Invincibility. You are unstoppable, carrying two thousand tons of your shoulders, bright and brash and new.

(The Drift is-)

yancy. yancyandraleigh and scrambling together and pulling apart. Your brother's fear, his scream torn from your lips as he's stolen away. You felt him die and died with him. Sometimes your brain mixes up the signals it's supposed to be sending and your lungs seize because your brother died once in your head and sometimes you remember it.

oOo

2024

Seven Kaiju are spat up from the breach and there are four Jaegers left in the world. The PPDC is losing a war of attrition with every section of the Wall that goes up. People turn their hope to the Wall of Life and Shatterdomes are closed.

In July, Raleigh has a seizure in the middle of a fight with a C3 they're calling Bonesquid. He loses four minutes and the fight. He's lucky they called in Striker Eureka for this, luckier still that Striker didn't need him.

He drags Gipsy's battered bones back to base and collapses on his own bed. He sleeps for sixteen hours and when he wakes Tendo drags him to medical.

"It's not cancer." the doctor says like that should be some sort of condolence prize. It just might be, given that there is only one other person like Raleigh and soldiers gossip. Marshall Pentecost is still as steady as a mountain and twice as solid, so they speculate outside of his earshot. Nobody knows for sure.

"It's not cancer." The doctor says, "The neural load was too much. You're going to need a partner."

Raleigh already knows who he'll ask.

oOo

The Drift is-

Dark eyes and blue hair and sensei aishiteimasu. Marshall Pentecost hallowed by light, hollowed by disease, a single red shoe. Yancy telling you both to stay cool. Gipsy humming cradle songs to your mind and the tear away as she falls into the void.