Author's Notes: Many thanks to everyone for the awesome feedback! Please keep it coming! The incident of teenaged violence Mako recalls that causes Stacker to train her so hard on control takes place in Chapters 7 and 8 of Tales From The Front Lines. Raleigh and Yancy's relationship with their sister is fleshed out in the first 6 chapters of Aurora Borealis. They're not required reading, but in case anyone's curious. So here it is, the last update before the US premiere of Uprising. Hope everyone keeps reading once this finale becomes a complete and total AU!

Chapter Seven: The Rabbit Hole

Hong Kong Shatterdome…

Despite the trauma of her childhood, Mako Mori had never been an especially aggressive person. She didn't act on her frustrations with violence or anger, unlike some. In recent weeks, when someone had made that observation, Raleigh had coughed "Chuck!" and got snickers from everyone in earshot. Now Mako had that in her head whenever she considered her own reaction.

But she knew by the time she graduated the Academy that everyone had a moment where they found themselves on the edge and ready to cross that line. As a teenager in boarding school in Pennsylvania, she'd only crossed it and let her temper take her truly out of control once. She knew that had surprised Sensei and her counselors.

The Psychs talked about that kind of thing often enough. She had always wondered where the line of her temper would fall as a grown-up and what horror of the war would reveal it.

She was a little surprised in retrospect that she didn't find that line again until after the war.

She certainly understood what it was to be angry, even angry at other people, but never had she felt such a burning, all-consuming desire to tear a human being limb from limb with her bare hands. Her consolation after the fact was that she wasn't the only Ranger who went berserk that day.

The inevitable questions went on in Washington about the PPDC's purpose and whether the Jaeger program should still exist. Some of the questions were easier to answer than others. Support for continued construction of the coastal walls hit an all-time low, and funding was being re-routed to establish a new network of seabed sensors and sonar stations in every ocean.

Naturally, President Lunk and his supporters were not pleased at all.

Dr. Geiszler and Dr. Gottlieb provided much of the data behind that project from their drift with the kaiju, and they warned that although it seemed that the breach had opened up in the same general location each time, the kaiju's instigators hadn't known and hadn't cared whether they were hitting the same spot. Ergo, there was no reason to assume the Marianas Trench might be the only place to worry about in the future.

"Are you really going to tell me it's not worth the expense?" Newt demanded to Congress. "Come on, this was a worldwide project ever since K-Day, and even before that - this same technology can be applied to warnings of earthquakes, tsunamis, eruptions, and oil spills! Multi-tasking, for god's sake!"

"Well, when you put it like that," Mako heard Tendo mutter to Raleigh, getting a soft chuckle.

The entire United States Congress and a small army of international delegates in Washington looked completely befuddled by the time Geiszler was done talking – and then it was the Kaidanovskys turn again.

"Was it really a good idea to turn Sasha and Aleksis loose on that lot?" Chuck wondered aloud.

"Absolutely," said Raleigh. "Cold war sensibilities still aren't dead in the US. Russia's reestablishing its Shatterdome and replacing or restoring Cherno? The US and Europe will have to do at least enough to keep pace with them. That's why we didn't disarm after World War II." The Weis and Chuck raised curious eyebrows at him, and Tendo grinned. Raleigh shrugged sheepishly. "I'm a history buff."

"Ahh, the 'greatest generation,'" snorted Chuck, and waved a derisive hand at Congress. "And there's what they grew up to be."

"Nah, most of the World War II survivors are dead. These guys are the boomers. Well, they are!" Raleigh protested.

"Bunch of useless talking heads," Chuck muttered, though to Mako's relief (and Raleigh's, she knew) his ire was directed at the pompous old men in question rather than at his usual verbal sparring partner.

Mako had seen memories in the drift of Raleigh's sister calling him a nerd for his hobbies. Only a year apart in age, competitive and hormonal, their fights had been vicious and only escalated when his mother became ill. At its height, Raleigh had saved up for a model spitfire once the family stopped traveling after K-Day. Jazmine had seen the box arrive and stepped on it, then blamed the shippers. Their parents had believed her, and while Yancy didn't, he had insisted that Raleigh not retaliate. (That whole mess had gotten started when Raleigh had mocked her on Facebook for an outfit she'd bought for a date.)

Raleigh looked back on his teen years with a mixture of resentment and guilt. Less confident, less grown, standing between a handsome, talented elder brother and a pretty, popular younger sister (at least in his own skewed view) he'd felt that he had the least of everything, and Jazmine's taunts had cut deep. In turn, he had cut her whenever he could, blaming her for his frustrations just as she blamed him for her own. Yancy had been stuck as the mediator between the endlessly-squabbling pair, which elevated him in their view and made him in turn an object of their competition. For a boy also still in his teens, Yancy's priority had often been not to make peace, but to keep himself elevated. These were among the many more painful truths the brothers had had to face when they began drifting together.

Chuck had inadvertently struck close to home: Raleigh had idealized the World War II era as so many young men did, believing the legends of fierce patriotism and righteous defense of freedom against tyranny as the driving force. Even in the kaiju war with alien invaders that oozed blue toxin as the enemy, he'd found the reality of his fellow human beings, with all their twisted motives and skewed priorities far less romantic.

The subject of the hearings in Washington, DC and the UN Headquarters also turned to the issue of other uses of pons and drift technology. The PPDC still held most of the patents, but some of the simplest neural interfaces had made it into the hands of commercial enterprises, who were now raring to put their ideas to work. With the threat of kaiju no longer hanging over everyone, backing was starting to come in, and they all wanted Rangers to be their test subjects.

Metacortex Laboratories billed itself as a great humanitarian endeavor for the good of all the world in the aftermath of the war, and came to Hong Kong (conveniently, Mako later realized, while Marshall Hansen, the K-scientists, and the Kaidanovskys were still abroad) with a slew of credentials and backing from powerful operators.

Dr. Patricia Greller talked a good game; even Chuck and the most cynical Shatterdome personnel admitted that. It didn't help that she looked a little like Dr. Lightcap – blonde hair, white coat, glasses, big, earnest eyes as she explained her mission.

She'd made the potential benefits of the pons technology sound far less dry than the witnesses in Washington did - nano-surgeries, rescue/recovery in coal mines and floods, preparing mounted defenses underwater and underground in case the Breach ever reopened. She had appealed so much to the need for the Rangers to make this final contribution in their great service that afterward, with the benefit of hindsight, Mako wondered how deep into Raleigh's background she had delved in preparing her pitch.

Chuck, Jin, and Cheung still weren't cleared by the doctors for drifting at all. Only Raleigh and Mako were. Raleigh was definitely the one Greller wanted most. "It's no more invasive than the initial tests you did in the Academy," she insisted. "We've already been given access to that data, but we need corresponding scans for after you served. And, Ranger Becket, well..." she seemed so sincerely reluctant. "Forgive me for mentioning it, but you're now the only living Ranger who ever piloted a Jaeger alone. That makes data on you especially vital to our efforts."

Raleigh fidgeted absently. Mako could tell he wanted to refuse, didn't want anyone poking around his head again, but feared he would be depriving the world of research that might be needed. "You know I didn't do the brain scan when I mustered out in 2020."

"Yes, and of course, I understand completely," Dr. Greller insisted. "The neural load won't be in any way comparable to a Jaeger. Just a solo drift. The risk is minimal... really, Rangers, I have to say, even the inconvenience is minimal. I don't understand why you're so reluctant."

Chuck folded his arms, eyes narrowing. "I take it you've done it on yourself, then, Doc?"

"Of course!"

"Well, are you really saying you enjoyed it, hooking your brain into machinery?"

Greller looked so puzzled. "I'm not saying I think it has many recreational uses, but I didn't find it painful, if that's what you mean."

"Well, we did. Drifting is a different can of worms when you've been in combat," Chuck informed her, then headed for the door and paused in the doorway for his parting thought. "Even if I weren't still at risk of brain swelling, I wouldn't do it. I won't blame him if he doesn't either." He gave Raleigh a pointed look, then left.

But Raleigh sighed. "How many of these things do you need?"

Greller held out a placating hand. "Give me ten minutes for recordings. No longer than your first tests. If you don't want to repeat it after that, I will not press the issue."

"Okay." He looked at Mako and shrugged. "What's the worst that could happen, right?"

They let the group set up shop in one of the testing bays off Crimson Typhoon's dock, rather than Gipsy's. "Typhoon's equipment was in best repair," Jin and Cheung pointed out, but they shot Raleigh a dubious look too.

One of Greller's assistants asked Mako to step back into the control room with the others. "Just in case there's any chance of ghost drifting, we don't want to contaminate the results."

Why, why, why were they all so naive? After months and years of listening to gut instinct and little voices warning them in their heads of what was coming from a kaiju, why were they all so willing to disregard that when it came to people?

The neural bridge caps that Metacortex used looked like the first-generation ones from Dr. Lightcap's earliest test vids. Mako reminded herself again and again that the test subjects hadn't run into trouble until they'd tried taking on the neural load of a Jaeger and all its intricate systems.

"Okay," said the man watching the monitors. "Dialing it up in three...two...one..."

At first Raleigh just frowned into the distance, then he seemed to relax, and everyone let their breath out, assuming they'd been worrying over nothing. Greller was making approving noises as she and her assistants muttered over the monitors, and Tendo was looking over their shoulders.

"Well, it doesn't look like he's chasing the rabbit, but with only one set of readings, it's hard to tell... impossible to tell, actually." Tendo made a face at the monitors. "Dude, there's no reference point - shouldn't we have one?"

"Why?"

Mako waved at Raleigh through the glass to catch his eye. He didn't seem to see her. And... something sent a chill down her spine. "Wait."

"It's going fine," Greller said dismissively. The readings looked normal…the drift was established…but there was no way to measure its stability, and that didn't seem to bother the doctors at all.

Tendo cracked first and tapped the comm. "Raleigh, you all right?"

No answer. And something pricked Mako's memory from her drifts with Raleigh - a hazy vision of herself in the conn-pod through Raleigh's eyes, lost in the memory of terror and pain, oblivious to his calls...

She lunged for the door. "Hey, wait, what're you doing?!" protested one of the assistants, and they actually tried to pull her away.

She reacted on something beyond instinct, something white-hot that she tried to keep contained with rigid control, like Sensei and the martial arts coaches and the fightmasters and psychs had all taught her – it exploded back to life and she lashed out like a cobra. Her fist slammed into the first assistant's teeth with terrible form, but all of her substantial strength behind it. The shock and pain that lanced up her arm must have been at least as bad as the impact on him – he flew backward, blood spurted from his mouth.

"GET AWAY FROM ME!" she roared, and that doctor had the sense to freeze and not come any closer. If she had, Mako would have attacked.

"What the f - " she caught a blurry vision of Chuck Hansen grabbing the other in a headlock, and she yanked the door to the test room open –

- the ghost drift flooded out with more power than she would have imagined possible, and she should have fallen back, but she wouldn't, not with him in that room in that torrent. She threw herself forward.

Dark... drowning... alone. Alonealonealone - turning around and around and around - the lights of the conn-pod flickered and he was cold, so cold, lost – ashes falling – hot metal falling – sunlight – darkness – spinning around and around and around…

Blue-white eyes blazed in at him - the deafening roar - Yancy was gonegonegone - the cannon fired and it fell and he was alone and his brain was burning up and crumbling in on itself like the pod walls - darkcoldsilent alone- sunlight and ashes – mama and daddy were gonegonegone and IT was searching for her as she crouched behind a dumpster – darkness and red lights and blaring alarms, water sprayed and Mako was gonegonegone and he was alone again…

Mako was jolted back to reality by the hard floor under her knees as she fell, and from the pressure in her throat, she realized she had started to scream. Raleigh was still blank-faced in the pons chair, eyes distant, but he was in hell, the ghost drift told her, and he was alone.

"Raleigh!" she scrabbled across the floor and pulled herself up next to him, trying to rip the pons unit off him, but someone pounced on her.

She screamed again and clawed at her captor. "Mako, Mako, DON'T! You could kill him!" Only Tendo's familiar voice, full of desperation, made her stop fighting.

"He's fine, he's perfectly fine - "

"SHUT THE FUCK UP! What do we do?!" Chuck shouted. "Tendo, what do we do?"

"Make it stop make it stop make it stop!" She wasn't aware that she was the one screaming.

There was blood in her eyes…there was ash in his eyes…there was a hole in his soul the shape of his brother…there were holes in the skyline of Tokyo the shape of a monster…there were holes in the conn-pod…a hole in the bottom of the ocean…below her…above him…below…

Alone…

"Give me the other unit - GIVE IT TO ME, YOU FUCKING QUACK! MAKO!" Tendo shook her hard, and she managed to focus on him. "Listen! He's locked in just like you were, but if we just rip it off, we'll hurt him. You need to bridge in, drift with him and calm him down, get him centered so we can deactivate."

She nodded vigorously, barely able to make more than a grunt of assent, but she fumbled to assist him in getting the cap on her head. She scrambled back to Raleigh's side even as Tendo counted down the handshake and the stupid doctor still dithered in the background...

She plunged into the full drift and tuned entirely into Raleigh's mind. Alonealonealone… YANCYMAKOMAMADADDYSENSEIMAKO! He was screaming no less than she had been. The memory of those hellish hours in Gipsy had warped still further in his subconscious, and with no partner to temper and help balance it, he was completely lost.

Reality twisted and warped, sending them both tumbling out of control…onto a Tokyo street full of falling ash, a little girl and a little boy screaming and fleeing from a giant monster, being ripped from the conn-pod and torn from his brother, an escape pod carried her away, relief that she was safe but he couldn't breathe and oh God, he was alone again…

Mako was only vaguely aware of his face under her hands.

"Raleigh! RALEIGH, look at me!"

He was there in front of her in the lab. He was there in front of her in Gipsy's shattered conn-pod. He stared, bewildered, haunted. Mako couldn't help recoiling when the nightmare reset itself and Knifehead's claw came through the hull to Raleigh's shout of warning, and Yancy was there again - "Raleigh, listen to me - " Then he was torn away again and Raleigh screamed and convulsed and the dark and the terror and the crushing weight of the neural load left him writhing in the harness. Yancy gone, Mako gone, Raleigh gone, her parents gone, Sensei gone, everyone gone – alone -

She wrapped her metaphorical arms around him in the conn-pod where she had never been, ripped open and torn in half in the Gulf of Alaska, and shouted at the top of her physical and mental lungs: "RALEIGH!"

He blinked. He saw her. "Mako?"

"This is just a memory, none of it is real - " he'd said.

But she hadn't believed him before. Why should he believe her now? How could he escape when he could see and hear and feel this agony? "You're not alone," she whispered, slipping into Japanese. "I'm here, Raleigh-chan. You can leave this place."

"But...Yancy...M-Mako"

"I know. But he wouldn't want you to stay here." He shivered in the drift and in the chair, and she could hear voices. Raleigh heard them too and squeezed his eyes shut. She felt the vision weakening and tightened her grip. "That's it. You've avenged Yancy, remember?"

The conn-pod faded, but they hadn't escaped. Ashes fell and she struggled not to look at the overturned cars and the red shoe. "We've avenged my family."

He remembered, and the world turned red with warning lights and sparks and the conn-pod was still half-empty. "We destroyed the Breach. They will never hurt anyone again."

Raleigh sobbed, and the drift dissolved around them as hands fumbled to get the caps off their heads. There was so much noise - Chuck and Cheung were with them along with several Shatterdome meditechs, all shouting at the Metacortex doctors, the Metacortex doctors were arguing, and Tendo was simply roaring at them, pointing at the monitors.

"You all right?" Chuck finally stopped shouting profanity to check on them. "Mako?" He tapped her cheeks, then Raleigh's. "Raleigh? Come on, say something."

"We're - " Raleigh tried to get up, but his legs gave way, and he wound up on the floor in Mako's arms. She held him and pressed her face into his hair. The nightmare might be gone, but the pain wasn't.

It never would be, she realized bleakly. She could drift with him, comfort him and hold him, but a part of him would always be trapped in that place, just like a part of her was always trapped in the ashes clutching a shoe. Even without the renewed ghost drift, she ached along with him, wanting to reach into that gaping, burning hole and find what he'd lost.

In the doorway, she saw Jake. Her brother. Wide-eyed, half shocked, half angry as he tried to comprehend what had happened. But he was still here, and that was such a breathtaking relief after the stabbing, crushing agony of being alone…

Oh, Yancy, why are you gone? He misses you so much.

Tendo and the Weis threw the Metacortex personnel into the brig before Tendo even bothered to get stitches from the gashes to his arm from Mako nearly slamming him through the floor. "That stupid bitch obviously had no clue what was happening in the drift and if her credentials were half as good as her papers say, she'd have shut it down!" Tendo fumed. "There's fraud in here somewhere; dunno who the fuck these fuckers are, but I want to find out!"

"I want to see them," Jake Pentecost insisted. Before Tendo could argue, he snapped, "Yeah, I know they're sedated, just lemme sit with 'em!"

"Okay, okay! Christ," Tendo rubbed his eyes. What a goddamn clusterfuck they'd managed the minute Marshal Hansen was gone! "I'll go with you. I wanna look in on them too."

Jake broke away from Tendo as soon as he found Mako awake – sort-of. She looked doped up, while Raleigh was out cold but still twitching restlessly. "Mako?" Jake sounded not a day over his sixteen years as he seized his adoptive sister's arms, giving Tendo a pang of anxiety. "You know me?"

Mako nodded sluggishly and, to Tendo's further shock, cuddled into his arms. Tendo went to the other side of the bed to check on Rals. Shit, this reminded Tendo way too much of those first hellish days and weeks after Knifehead. He was drugged unconscious, but still twitching in his sleep, fear visible on his face. Tendo cautiously put a hand on his head. "It's okay, Rals. It's okay. Mako's right here."

Yancy wasn't. Yancy would never be, and Tendo didn't need any drift expertise to know that Yancy's final moments had made a brutal appearance during that solo drift. But at least Rals had Mako now – and Mako had him.

Jake cajoled his sister into lying down and cuddling up against Raleigh's side, calming them both a little. Tendo moved away and went to Dr. Tan's side. "How bad is he?"

"I don't think there's actual brain damage – or at least not any more than Raleigh already had," Tan murmured. "This is drift shock, pure and simple, and a major traumatic episode. Mako was able to tell me a little; he saw his own memories as well as hers and they ran together, completely uncontrollable. Call it a hunch, but I don't think solo drift is a possibility for experienced pilots, least of all Raleigh Becket. Without a partner, they can't direct their memories or their attention, and every bad memory they've ever experienced spirals out of control."

"Shit. So if we thought he was recovering after partnering with Mako…"

"Yeah. This is gonna be a huge setback, and it's more important than ever to keep the press and the politicians away from both of them. Make no mistake – Mako was in a recovery of her own when she got here, as those dipshits in DC so impolitely pointed out the other day, and she had to climb into hell to get him out."

"Fuck."

Even as the drugs were cut back (for her, anyway), Mako found it hard to give a damn about what was going on in Washington anymore. Crew came in to give them updates, and she tried to pay attention, but between being unable to sleep without drugs and then with her brain a foggy mess of nightmares, nothing else really seemed to matter.

Jake would probably have moved into the infirmary if Dr. Tan had let him, but as it was, he was there every time Mako woke up. Tendo and the veterans of the original Team Gipsy definitely had a rotating shift set up - not unlike what they'd done to be at Raleigh's bedside after Yancy died, she realized with a mental flinch.

"You okay?" Jake whispered to avoid waking Raleigh.

Mako nodded. Liar. They both knew she was exceedingly not okay. She couldn't control where her mind went now even with the drift over. Jake's face...she was twelve and he was seven and Tamsin made them a blanket fort on the hotel room floor, and they stayed up giggling and whispering for hours. She hadn't felt like a child again until that day, more than a year since Tokyo.

She'd been thirteen when she gave into his pleading and told him about Tokyo. He'd been appalled when she said "it's all my fault. I ran away from them, and they were searching for me when they died."

"There was a kaiju!" he'd protested. "It's nobody's fault for trying to run away from it."

It had been years before she believed that. By the time she arrived at the Jaeger Academy, she had understood it, if only because blaming herself might hurt her chances in the drift. It was the kaiju's fault her parents were dead, not hers.

Raleigh'd never reached a conclusion like that. The closest he'd come was drifting alongside it, letting it live in his mind and his heart, because as far as he was concerned, it was a fundamental truth of the universe: Yancy was my fault. My fault.

She hadn't had the opportunity to really challenge him on it yet, so she'd just held him when those thoughts hit harder some days than others, tried to distract him the way he tried to distract himself.

When she could manage to think coherently without spiraling into a crazed combination of Raleigh's memories and her own, she wondered what had gone so catastrophically wrong. "Why did that happen?" she managed to ask Dr. Tan. "I used to use the solo simulator at every chance I had, before..." before Raleigh, before Gipsy, before everything. "It never felt like that."

"The solo simulator wasn't a drift, not like what those quacks set up," Dr. Tan told her. "They based their design on Dr. Lightcap's published work, but there's a lot they didn't understand about the early design of the neural handshake for a solo pilot. Instead of just connecting the pilot to the machinery, they put Raleigh into a neural feedback loop. I think any person would've had a bad reaction, but someone whose brain was already trained to drift with a partner in a Jaeger and had that drift broken catastrophically - this is about as close to the worst case scenario as we could have gotten."

At least he's not dead. Mako had no doubt that was the true "worst case scenario" that absolutely none of the personnel were willing to say aloud. Or that we didn't both come out with brain damage - more than either of us already had, anyway.

To Be Continued...

Coming Soon: Our heroes succeed in minimizing the public fallout from the drift disaster, but Raleigh and Mako have a harder challenge with defeating the fallout in their minds and hearts, as they and the Jaeger Program try to figure out what happens after canceling the apocalypse in Chapter Eight: Point Me!

PLEASE don't forget to review!

Original Character Guide

Dr. Patricia Greller: An American scientist of dubious credentials and even more dubious ethics who is determined that her company, Metacortex, will pioneer in post-war pons science - and make her a billionaire, of course. She's based on multiple real world slimeballs in multiple nations who've shamed their professions, damaged their fields, and cost lives without a qualm.

Dr. Steven Tan: Chief medical officer of the Jaeger Program, originally at the Jaeger Academy and gradually migrated to Hong Kong as the program closed down. Chinese-American, early 40s.

President Jerald "Jerry" Lunk: President of the United States. Billionaire hotel mogul who ran on a campaign of "make America safe again" in 2024, proponent of the Wall, now arguing over who has the strongest Jaegers. Likes to use Twitter. No, he's not based on anyone in the real world. Seriously. No, really.