We drift inside each other,
All we have is one another,
United we can never fall.
The Shatterdome is silent. Tonight is the last time it will stand as a whole, in the morning, wrecking crews will arrive to take it apart – tearing down the monolith to send its scrap metal along the cost. Relief efforts to help ease the damage of war.
Tonight, there is no celebrating, no cacophony of cheers and mourning, no toasts to the living or the dead. Almost everyone is gone. Alone in the LOCCENT, Tendo sips his coffee and dismantles the last of his computers, all tech packaged carefully to be sent back to Anchorage – to go stagnant in storage. Below him Raleigh and Mako walk under the bows and structures of the working floor, the last vestiges of Jaeger parts packed tightly in Styrofoam and safety padding and they do not talk. There is no need for words, really, even between those who have never drifted. Here there is no need to look at another person to know they feel their home is being stolen right out from under their feet, for the greater good.
Herc had tried to rally them, to give his best impression of a Stacker Pentecost speech – most of their workers and engineers had moved down coast, following the restoration and avoiding the no-go zones. Fear was still palatable and real despite the end of the Kaiju threat. After the initial celebrations, after everyone had finally realised that there was still a world to rebuild, we had gone back into silence. Not the silence before a storm, huddled fearing and cowering in bunkers, but the silence that comes with nerves and anxiety and not knowing what might happen next. The fear you can't place and so instead humanity had done what it did best: it endured. They toppled the domes in every city, brought the wall to crumbling dust and used it, let what had protected them become what might sustain them. Herc could say what he liked though, Max obediently at his feet, everyone who was left would listen out of respect but still feel a great sense of loss and longing – so much so that Tendo, Mako and Raleigh would move to Alaska with all their memories and in secret keep the Jaeger program alive. Because you never know what might happen next. And Drift compatible or otherwise, they were completely, intricately connected to those pieces of metal that had kept the apocalypse at bay.
Naturally there was one part of the Shatterdome still abuzz with madness. K-Science, deep within the dome, was a hive of activity and emotion, blocked from the rest of the world by thick metal doors and a long suffering resistance to scientific bickering.
But the nature of the bickering had changed, and both Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb knew that it would never return to the way it once was. And that they, for all their stalling and waiting, had only this one night left to figure out why.
"Could you please clean that up?" Hermann was eyeing something that had re-emerged from a thick glass container that itself had not ten minutes ago been secure and snug in a box, "it's going with you, you don't have to keep checking on it."
Paced. Placid. Understanding – instead of raised voices and talking over each other like children. Without looking at Newton, Hermann could tell which facial expression had settled on the other man and Newton, without looking at Hermann could tell how it made him feel. Unsettling, yet warm, like the feeling you get from losing your stomach on a carnival ride, it grew from the bases of their spines and spread into their synapses like electricity every time they felt the others presence in their heads.
You never let go of the handshake, said Raleigh, but eventually it becomes easier to ignore.
Ignore?
"Sorry, Hermann, but this is important. You know this is important. We were… we were inside this." Hermann looks at the embryonic brain matter in Newton's hands. Yes, it is important (he thinks) but if you keep manhandling it you are going to damage it.
Inside Newton… inside Newt's head were a great many things. The location of where he kept his medication hidden should ever he need it, the feeling of his first tattoo, the strange mixture of understanding and helplessness he felt as the first Kaiju hit ground, the bizarre rush of power, ecstasy and pure, unadulterated fear of the first Kaiju Drift and – occasionally thought about but never spoken out loud – the slick hot rush of molten lead in his guts when Hermann told him "I'll go with you."
Hermann felt that too, so they didn't really need to say anything about it. But it was a two way street and they never spoke about Hermann's horrific childhood or how he came to have such a badly damaged leg either.
"Where will you go?" Newt's voice cracked whenever he asked this, had done three times so far, and Hermann always said "with you, wherever you go." I know you are afraid of my leaving you, but I can assure you that won't happen. I need you to breathe.
The last night in the Shatterdome was quiet after that, silence; pressing and imploding on its inhabitants, an oppressive migraine of doubt and uncertainty that made Newton take his pills and reach out for another body that wasn't there. He only had one night to do this, or Hermann would leave. Irrespective of what his neural link with the other scientist proved, Newt was afraid of letting go.
Please let me in, Hermann heard in the back of his mind, as he was opening the door to his quarters. Everything in this small space was organized by size or colour or weight or usefulness and he had seen through Newt's eyes how that drastically differed from his own room, where he was still using duffel bags instead of draws (although once he even went so far as to put a duffel bag in a draw). Newt gravitated towards him like a magnet, and Hermann put him to bed in the single cot, fetched another glass of water and lay down beside him, bad leg raised on a pillow. But Newt didn't want to sleep.
They kissed, awkwardly at first, Hermann only ever having been intimate with his ex-wife and Newton never having cared for the other people he'd slept with, but the kiss was like a neural handshake in the cockpit of a Jaeger – it sent currents of emotion between them, linked them inexplicably, so drawn into one another that their memories became one and Hermann witnessed the wonderful childhood he might have had with different parents while Newt received a trophy bigger than he thought he could carry and looked down at man he knew never cared for him and he felt powerful. They grin into the kiss and it deepens, Newt leads and Hermann goes with him, as always and as will always be.
Shirts come off first, orderly over the head, and then thrown messily to the floor and Newt glides down Hermann's thin frame kissing everything and Hermann keens and tries to raise off the bed but Newt holds him down – careful – and with a spike of pain present in his own leg. He's soft when he removes Hermann's pants and briefs and so rough with his own that Hermann smiles. There's something about sharing the load that makes his leg hurt so much less. Newton smiles, nibbles at his hipbone and then bites down hard.
"This is so uncouth," says Hermann and Newt replies, "only you would say uncouth during sex."
It is desperate, and needy, and Newt alternates between careful and cautious, and biting and punching the wall beside him and Hermann lets him, one fist in his hair and the other pulling up the bedsheet once tightly tucked under the mattress. They breathe in unison, hearts pumping against thin and painted chests, Newton has his head in the crook of Hermann's neck, his cock buried deep, in and out, in and out, breathing and thrusting and feeling and existing only from one heart beat to the next. This is what is means to Drift, to be so complete in another person's world, to exist so perfectly with them.
To Drift is to love. And it can be found in any two people. The deeper the bond, the stronger the Drift. Without a hint of muscle between them they could pilot a Jaeger. They could win.
Tendo is the last person awake in the Shatterdome. The LOCCENT is clean and empty, boxes stacked neatly against the far wall. He looks out the glass partition and over the working floor. Somewhere the war clock is still and steady. Somewhere the last remaining Jaeger pilots are asleep. Somewhere a newly lonely man sleeps finally calm, an old dog at his feet. Somewhere at the end of the world, brave warriors watch over the rest of us, forever connected by the Drift, and somewhere two scientists are connected in body and mind, but Tendo doesn't know this.
It is silent in the Shatterdome, but somewhere, someone is celebrating. Somewhere, someone is mourning. Somewhere there is a sunrise.
We feel it all,
We feel the rise before the fall,
No dividing us,
We feel it all, we feel it all.