When the monsters first break landfall, giant robots are the last thing on people's minds. Mazingers and Gundams and EVAs aren't the stuff of reality (neither are kaiju).
The first steel skeleton cuts across the horizon long after decimated shores settle into the front page headlines. The eponymous Jaeger prototype, a BundeswehrR&D baby, clambers onto the map when its crew disregards orders to hold Kiel in favor of hailing distress calls along theentire Baltic Coast. They save Stockholm and Copenhagen and singlehandedly set off the conversation that ends in the Pan Pacific Defense Corps.
The Briggs Battalion goes down buying Helsinki time to evacuate. The German chain of command never raises formal charges against the surviving company, but only just. Stacker Pentecost has heard the story more times than he can count. His pilots see it as something of a life philosophy.
2.
Knifehead rips Yansey out. The split and crack of his bones flutter under Raleigh's skin. His thoughts, disoriented and loose, pitch through Raleigh's skull. The Drift is collapsing in on itself, their memories bright and distended in the open air. He can't save all of them—there's enough for two people and he's just one—but he can't pick out what's his.
His name tastes thick in his mouth. He is smiling down as his baby brother toddles one step then two, he is smiling ahead as his big brother lets go of the bike. He is strange and looming treetops rendered warm and familiar. He is two sides of the same fight, please, please can he take me and please, please don't make me.
He is tired, so tired, and he's on the ground crying because if he doesn't get home Mom'll never let him out with Yansey again, but it really, reallyhurts. He is tired, so tired, and he's slinging Raleigh over his shoulders anyway because if his brother can't get back to Anchorage on his own, he'll just have to carry him.
It's too quiet when he crashes onto the waterfront. Yansey is dead.
3.
Hannibal Chau is sticking out a deep cover operation right as the Trespasser wrecks San Francisco. He picks up the receiver at a Wanchai payphone, and his boss rumbles over the static about how the apocalypse is now, bureaucratic shorthand for the CIA has decided it cares jack shit whether the Triads buddy up with La Cosa Nostra, so you'll have to fish yourself out of that barrel, fuck you very much. The boss lays it on a lot nicer, of course, with enough sap about honor and service for a goddamn eulogy. Hannibal hangs up and lets out a low whistle. That was above and beyond the usual professional courtesy. Things must really be shot to hell.
He pokes around the underworld for a while, keeping an ear to the ground for what sort of contraband the end of days has turned gold. After he stumbles on the kaiju organ market, it's as easy as expanding his old network. He figures he's still fighting for the hearts and minds; he's just selling a different brand of hope now.
4.
Before the end of the world, Cheung, Hu, and Jin Wei play basketball for the Shanghai Sharks. They're on the junior team, but their ball handling lights up talk of spots on Team China, and they spend the majority of the off-season dodging scouts and interviews. A kaiju levels their hometown skyline three games into their sophomore year. They never make their professional debut.
Some days, they miss the ebb and flow of the game, the squeak of their shoes against polished wood. Mostly, they miss everything else (their parents worked the concierge desk in Jin Mao Tower). They make a point not to haul the heavier stuff into the Drift, which means finding a home somewhere in between all the scrap metal in the Hong Kong Shatterdome.
Tendo Choi calls it an elaborate excuse for driving him up the wall. He wastes an entire night wading through one of Jin's pet projects gone awry—the details are scarce, but apparently it has everything to do with Aleksis Kaidanovsky skulking around the base shirtless—and wakes up the next morning to their signature dragon stenciled all over his bedroom door. He confronts Hu about the spray bottle he finds in their locker, or would have, if Cheung'd quit teasing him about his Mandarin every time he tries to get a word in.
For all that he complains to the other technicians, though, Tendo can't help but smile every time Crimson Typhoon shambles back in one piece. He leaves a ball and hoop outside its dock one day and hopes the triplets will call a truce.
They dribble circles around him the rest of the week.
5.
Mako Mori grips the reconstruction blueprints like a blade in her hand. She ducks in and out of meetings, firing and re-firing her drafts into a strike pointed straight at the kaijus' hearts. She argues with the structural engineers about tensile strength and loads, drills the pilots about strain and maneuverability. In the mornings, the technicians nudge her awake; she falls asleep slumped against the mechs, a mess of overhauled schematics in her lap.
The Marshall gave her the Mark III to make better than new, more than it was, and she breathes everything she has into it. She solders thank youand I'm ready into the torso and buries I can't remember their faces into the core. The mechanics polish her fingerprints off the armored plating, and she thinks mine, mine, mine as she sends her teacher off to fetch its pilot. Pentecost's goodbyes end in not yet and someday, but even he can't change where this road leads. She wonders if Raleigh Becket ever understood his Jaeger as well as she understands it now.
She catches her face reflected in its frame on the way inside. "Soon," she whispers. Her father built swords. For the time being, she would build monsters.
6.
By the time Chuck Hansen joins the PPDC, Jaeger pilots are heroes. His father watches him spark rivalries and drop press bombs and counts his stars that the kid doesn't consider any of it a luxury. Herc can't forget, in the early days, Jaeger pilots were martyrs.
The jerry-build for sharing neural loads takes years to perfect: too many people chase the rabbit to a wonderland they never come back from. Vic Stone doctors an old Aperture Science VI to modulate the mind-machine interface. Audrey Ramirez piggybacks a sense of pull to the neural handshake. The mechanics, for their part, don't stop crossing their fingers until Parvathi and Padme Patil pull off a marathon drift running defense from Daman to Mumbai. It's a hollow victory in hindsight, long before radiation shielding and escape pods.
Everyone in the Hong Kong Shatterdome has a reason they'll follow Stacker Pentecost to hell and back. Herc knows better than to doubt a walking miracle. The Marshall's all that's left of a snakebit generation.
7.
Sasha Volkov is a legend written all over the Vladivostok Shatterdome. Aleksis collects the stories like loose change as he works his ways up the ranks: how she killed her first kaiju at eighteen, how she came back from Cape Town, then Osaka, then San Francisco, how she's logged more strike missions than the other active pilots combined. Five years and two growth spurts later, he drifts with her for the first time. He pictures her mind as a war room, disciplined and ruthless and meticulously organized. He doesn't expect a hurricane.
He's seven feet tall, big as a Jaegar's fist, and she dwarfs him completely, howling flashes of grief and anger and a wrenching, wrong sort of emptiness. He can measure the length of the war in the tautness of her neck, the set of her shoulders. He is her co-pilot because she lost her old one.
"Stay with me, Kaidanovsky," she says. "I won't let any of it touch you."
Aleksis thinks of the first time he met her, Cherno Alpha's barbed fingers dredging him out from under the rubble. He could feel Sasha's voice, ragged and swollen, roar out of the Jaeger's speakers. She told him not to worry. He believed her then, too.
8.
What Newt calls "The Supremely Epic Shatterdome Prank Royale" and Hermann calls "The Extended Temper Tantrum of the Delinquent I Am Forced to Call My Colleague" kicks off with a scream. Newt's screams, specifically, as Hermann runs him out of the lab. Herc and Sasha attempt to piece together a coherent account from their assistants, most of whom wave to the unidentifiable-but-probably-kaiju related slime coating Hermann's blackboards. They settle for sticking Newt with clean-up.
It's quiet for so long afterwards, the whole base just assumes Hermann's taken the high road right up till a minor explosion sends the latest pile of monster salvage splattering across Newt's glasses. The back-and-forth escalates from there. The Wei Triplets start fielding bets on the winner. Mako loses one of her favorite clipboards in the crossfire. Pentecost calls them up to his office.
"It's truly a struggle for me to comprehend your immaturity," Hermann mumbles, en route to the Marshall's "friendly chat." "I almost believe that if a kaijuu came crashing through the ceiling tomorrow, you wouldn't die happy unless you knew you'd already swapped out all the taus in my equations for gammas."
"I mean, when you put it that way, I think I'm more of rho and epsilon kind of guy, and like, my bucket list goes on for a really long time, but," Newt bounces from heel to heel, waiting for Hermann to catch up, "yeah, it's not like we've been working together since grad school or anything."
Hermann rolls his eyes. "I do seem to recall what your arms looked like before you covered them in those horrifically garish tattoos."
9.
To his crew, Stacker Pentecost is exactly the fixed point he claims to be. No one bats an eye at the kid he brings back from Tokyo: heroes mean survivors, after all.
Stacker doesn't mention he has no idea what do with her. They buy it, mostly, except that Herc keeps dropping by to swap stories—he has a boy just about her age—and Sasha develops a nasty habit of airplaning her through the loading bay. Tendo taps the Japanese-English dictionary on his desk and says, "So she's a keeper, huh?" and it strikes him, clean and quick as falling out of the Drift, that maybe outposts and military bases aren't the place for Mako Mori at all.
He sits her down that night and bites back a grin at how she folds her hands in her lap, her back stick straight. "Do you like it here?" he asks in halting Japanese, and she's already correcting him before she latches on to his meaning (they've made a game out of it, English for Japanese, Japanese for English, although he's fast running out of things to teach her).
Her eyebrows bunch together and she looks serious—too serious, like his sister before she went out to sea for the last time—and he pockets his anger for later, for the monsters who slid that bleak calculus into his little girl's head. "Yes," she answers. "I want to fight."
He puts her to bed and stays up into the morning memorizing the names of her toys and converting one of his cabinets into an archive of crayon doodles. He doesn't tell her, "You'll be a warrior someday, but you'll be a child first."
10.
There are too many empty places in the Shatterdome at night, so Mako goes out to the city. The crowds push her back and forth, and the back roads and alleyways yawn wide before her. Without the ghosts in the storefronts, the drowned screams beneath the bustle and chatter, she'd never leave. Raleigh finds her on the beach.
"Thought about what's next?" he asks. The sand stretches out on either side of them, deserted and empty, like no one really believes they've won yet.
She trains her eyes to the waves: she can call up his smile from the muscle memories newly braided into her synapses. This close, she can almost pluck his heart from the space between them. "A little, but not like this. Why?"
"I went through a couple ideas yesterday. Then it hit me ," he pauses, and she looks at him then, catching odds ands, his teeth peeking out from behind his stubble, loose threads of his sweater frayed at his wrists. "I'll just follow you."
She has to blink away the Drift's afterimages when he stuffs his hands into his pockets. He's not seventeen anymore, not hanging on the promise of becoming the superhero he'd always dreamed he'd be. This isn't the future he had in mind, either, but he bumps his shoulder into hers, and she thinks maybe their nearness grounds her as much as it does him. "You'll need to keep up," she says, finally.
His laugh's a short, sharp thing, a few parts I miss them too and some parts pure, unadulterated sunshine. She doesn't tell him it reminds her of the lights rippling in the waves, because if she knows that behind them, Hong Kong is incandescent against the black of the ocean, he knows it too.