Leonard McCoy was watching a category four rip Sydney a new one when the chopper landed just outside of the construction zone. He drew his mouth into a tight line and stepped out into the dust so graciously kicked up by the chopper's blades and steels himself to have a conversation that he'd been avoiding, successfully mind you, for five years.

It had been five years. Five years since he walked away from the Jeager program. Hell, more like stumbled out with a gaping hole in his mind and heart where his co-pilot used to be. Five years since Jocelyn had left, taking the house and everything else with her. She had her reasons, he shouldn't fault her for it. She said he'd never really come back from that drop. He didn't, she was right. He faulted her anyway. Five years since he had first used his hands, once famously steady with a scalpel, to wield a welding torch in order to raise the Wall.

Admiral Pike stepped down from the chopper and marched right up to him, clapped him on the shoulder, and greeted him by his given name. McCoy managed a tight smile but it didn't reach his eyes. They never did anymore.

"Admiral," his voice was more clipped than he had intended.

"McCoy," the admiral was smiling, but it was tense. He wouldn't be here unless he was truly desperate and they both knew it. "You're looking well."

"You're not much for lying, sir," McCoy pointed out mildly. Curious eyes turned away from the devastation on the news; McCoy could feel their weight on the back of his neck.

"I imagine you didn't fly all this way just because you missed my pretty face," he goaded, "walk with me."

"You're not wrong," the admiral said as they walked away from the chopper, from the crowd, from the looming wall. "I've been looking everywhere for you, McCoy. Manilla, San Francisco, Sao Paulo. Doesn't help that you never return a phone call."

"I'm always in the same spot," McCoy shrugged, "at the top of this damn thing. The city is irrelevant. Man's gotta make a living."

He craned his neck to peer up at the looming monstrosity and the admiral did the same. It wouldn't hold. They both knew it. The entire world knew it now, thanks to that thing in Sydney.

"A man has to be alive in order to make that living," the admiral begins and McCoy sighs, because here it is.

"I know what you want, Admiral, and I can't. I can't do that again." His hands had begun shaking and he balled them into tight fists. He took a deep breath and then another and let them out slowly, slowly. One..two..three..

He had still been connected to Chapel when she died. He felt everything, saw everything, until there was nothing, nothing but the pull of the Jaeger on his own brain. He didn't know how he made it back to shore. He often wished he hadn't. He couldn't go back to that.

"I understand your reservations, McCoy," the admiral said in that tone of his, almost paternal and damned frustrating, "I wouldn't be here unless I truly had no other choice. There's an old Jaeger, you might remember her. Nuclear, Mark-3? The last of her kind and she needs a pilot."

McCoy looked at his shoes, at the wall, anywhere but the admiral. He hadn't thought about Gipsy in months. She had been home to him once, a second skin, but in his dreams she was a tomb. Still, he couldn't stand the thought of someone else piloting her. Not that anyone could without being retrained. He was the last of the Mark-3 pilots.

He took another deep breath to even out his breathing. One..two..three. He flexed his hands.

"How bad is it?" he asked, already well aware that he truly doesn't want to know.

"Bad." Pike never was one to sugar coat anything. "Our funding has been cut, all future Jaegers have been decommissioned. What we have is all that we will ever have and that's why I need you, Leonard. We have to act fast."

McCoy looked at him for the first time, his brow raised skeptically. "You're going for the breach."

Of course they were. That was always the plan, had always been the plan, and the plan had always failed.

He doesn't give the admiral time to respond.

"We've tried that before," he sighed, beyond frustrated, "It won't work, damnit. It never works."

"Just let me worry about that for now," Pike said calmly and McCoy could have sworn there was a twinkle in the old man's eyes. "It's the end of the world, Leonard. Haven't you noticed? Now tell me, where would you rather die? Up there on your wall, or in a Jaeger?"

McCoy sighed, defeated, and cast one last look at the wall. He supposed Gipsy's just a good a tomb as any.