Author's Notes: If anyone's interested, my Tumblr (3Fluffies) now has a master list of the original characters in this fic series, including more detailed backstories. Thank you all as always for the wonderful feedback! Please also note that my knowledge of the rules of Greco-Roman wrestling/grappling is limited to reading Wikipedia.
Geek Culture Notes: The quote Raleigh gives Yancy at the end of this chapter (as well as the title of the next chapter) is from George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones series. As you can probably guess by now, I firmly believe the PPDC is full of nerds, Beckets included.
Chapter Seventeen: Through Nature To Eternity
PPDC Jaeger Academy and Assembly Building, Kodiak Island, Alaska…
April 2017…
The new PR woman was so adept at handling the Beckets that Tendo and the rest of the crew were in awe. "Is this the part where we find out you've got boys their age?" Antwan suggested.
"Actually, no. I have three daughters, all older than them. Two granddaughters. Two sons-in-law, but that's all."
Cady won the prize for being the most tactless. "Wow, I'd have only pegged you for my mother's age."
"Dude!" hissed Tendo, appalled.
To Cady's credit, he went scarlet and muttered, "Sorry, that came out all wrong."
Luckily for all concerned, Carolina Olivares had a good sense of humor. "My oldest granddaughter is eleven," she replied with mock-aloofness. "I retired in 2010."
"Wow!" This time it was Stephanie who had to pry her foot out of her mouth. "And you came back out after K-Day? Just patriotism?"
"More or less. I lived most of my life in San Francisco."
That got everyone quiet again, like it often did as people looked at the shadows hanging over each other. Tendo wordlessly raised a hand. Me too. She got the message.
"Were you close on K-Day?" asked Antwan cautiously.
"Not as close as we might have been; we lived in Sunset District. But we'd gone to Point Reyes with the girls before school started again, and that's where we were when the quake hit. We came out the other side with the clothes on our backs and our lives. An embarrassment of riches," she murmured dryly. "So, of course, I returned to the service. I couldn't fail to repay a blessing like that."
"I don't blame you for that," said Kennedy. Antwan and many of the others were nodding.
There were other changes going on in the Jaeger Program that spring. The tacticians and strategists spending a lot of time analyzing Vaulimi's attack, along with the engineers and pons experts, trying to figure out what had gone wrong for Talon Tasmania and how to prevent it from happening again. Tendo, Cady, Indra, and the other LOCCENT trainees got their first hands-on experience in a post-engagement investigation... and really wished they could have cut their teeth on one that hadn't caused so many fatalities. It was damn depressing.
"We're shifting our tactics towards group deployment along with multi-Jaeger coverage for each Shatterdome's region," Marshall Gagnon informed them. "Whenever possible, backup needs to be available and fully-deployed at the start of the engagement. So one Jaeger will be designated as point, but at least one more will be already deployed and in easy distance."
May 25, 2017…
On the day of the Sydney Shatterdome's opening ceremony, Dr. Schoenfeld and Marshall Gagnon called the Hassans out of the after party. Everyone grinned and nudged each other as they headed for Schoenfeld's office. Raleigh and Yancy refilled their drinks and announced, "Here's to first impressions."
"Cheers!"
When Devi and Susanti returned, they were as quiet and distracted as Yancy and Raleigh had been on Christmas Eve. "Start of a beautiful friendship?" Yancy asked them.
"More like the love of my life," breathed Suze, getting a chorus of "aww" from everyone. Then she mock-pouted, "But a long-distance relationship until he's ready for pilot testing. One more month."
"Oh, so this one's a he," Raleigh remarked. Dr. Schoenfeld was returning with Dr. Lightcap and Captain D'onofrio, so he asked, "Can we get the inside scoop on his name?"
The Hassans looked to Schoenfeld for permission, and seeing his nod, Devi said, "Vulcan Specter."
"Vulcan? As in 'live long and prosper?'"
Suze swatted Tendo for that. "Vulcan as in the god of volcanoes, you dweeb! Because his incendiary is lava."
"Seriously?!" exclaimed Kennedy, looking from her to Schoenfeld.
The engineer laughed. "Not exactly, but it does look a lot like it should be coming out of a volcano. Especially when you use it underwater. He'll launch sometime this fall."
"I thought the next Mark III was going to be China's," said Tendo in surprise.
"China's candidates are this class," Dr. Lightcap explained. "But after… losing Talon, we need to get Australia more coverage as soon as possible." She gave the Hassans a quick smile, then left abruptly with Captain D'onofrio at her heels.
The D'onofrios were another pair who'd been devastated by the Blancos' death. Dr. Lightcap had been quiet and withdrawn since returning from Hong Kong to start testing and training Class 2017-A on the pons and simulator, and Cap stuck closer to her than ever. They dodged the media more than ever too, trying to evade insensitive questions about how it felt to lose the first team of Rangers.
"Most of the first pilots were hand-picked and taught by the D'onofrios and their support crew one-on-one," Carolina explained to Gipsy's crew. "When they discovered that drift compatibility isn't universal, they had to find people with some sort of relationship. Lieutenant D'onofrio had remembered Trevin Gage, a fellow pilot who had a twin. Min and Jing Li were known by the senior Chinese liaison to the PPDC, the Hansens by the Australian military, the Jessops by the Japanese. Relatives, married couples, long-time friends, officers who'd worked together, they are the pilots of the Mark Is. And they trained many of the Mark II pilots themselves, in skills they were still in the process of mastering."
"Yeah. For Doc and Cap, it's gotta be like... losing your kids," Cady mused.
"We knew it would happen," Brandon Pines told them. "This is war, guys. It'll happen again."
They knew he was speaking from experience. The US Air Force had taken massive losses on K-Day, and Brandon had been among a minority of pilots from Travis Air Force Base to survive direct combat against Trespasser. Yancy could see him staring off into space sometimes, with the same look in his eyes as Tendo, Antwan, and anyone else who'd been at ground zero of an attack. K-Day and its aftermath had killed four members of his family and most of his close colleagues and friends.
"Do you ever get used to it?" Raleigh asked him quietly.
"I didn't say that." Brandon studied his cards as if they were Tarot, not poker, and he could see the future. Or maybe the past. "Even when you don't know them... when they're one of us, it stings. If you're in action, you can keep distracted. If not, you just... keep moving. Stay on your mission – the overall mission, I mean. It's a way of honoring them. I think it's the only way."
"In the next two years, we're supposed to have over thirty Jaegers in service," said Carolina. "The kaiju attack every few months, and the technology is still developing. There will be deaths in action. There will even be accidents." Everyone grimaced. "Brandon and Marshall Gagnon are right; that's a fact of life, even when we're not at war, and we are."
June 2017…
Raleigh didn't want to dwell on bad possibilities, and for the most part, it wasn't too hard to distract himself in the weeks and months after Guayaquil. However, he found out the hard way that Yancy was dwelling on it… more and more as time went by, not less.
First, it was just flashes of Vaulimi's attack in the drift. That wasn't out of the ordinary; they were analyzing the hell out of every attack. But what Yancy kept thinking about wasn't technical; it was an image of what it must have been like in Talon's conn-pod.
Yance! Shit! he thought, almost flattening virtual Gipsy while trying to dodge an attack that was only in Yancy's mind.
Sorry.
They didn't wind up dead in that sim, but it was a closer call than they'd had in months, and one of the poorest runs since they were assigned to Gipsy. Worse still was what Raleigh caught from his brother at the end of their handshake: Worse ways to go down than together in a Jaeger.
"Seriously?!" he hissed aloud as they powered the simulator down.
"Rals, chill! It's just another random thought. You're not supposed to dwell on it."
"And you're not supposed to be thinking like that!" Raleigh protested. "Don't turn it around on me; that's your freaking rabbit!"
Yancy heaved an obnoxious sigh as they wrestled themselves out of the rigs. "And you're the one who keeps chasing it! We can't police our own brains or each other's, remember?" He stalked out of the sim pod, but as Raleigh followed, they were found not only the instructors, but their shrinks waiting.
Oh, wonderful. I could not be less in the mood for this.
"Everything all right, gentlemen?"
"Fine," he muttered.
There had to be a class that Psych Analysts took on how to raise their eyebrows on cue. "Wrong answer," said the team leader.
Raleigh glowered at the wall, but Yancy knew the right answer. "We'll deal with it, okay?"
"Do. This is your fourth run where you've followed that drift pattern. One more, and we have to report it. "
And then a committee of superiors and headshrinkers would decide whether the Beckets should be grounded for instability. Great. Just great. "We'll deal with it," he muttered, and trailed after Yancy back to quarters.
Once back in their rooms, Yancy rounded on him like it was all his fault. "You need to quit - "
"You're not supposed to THINK like that, man!" For the first time in... probably years, Raleigh took Yancy by surprise; he practically screamed it. Even in the prelude to that brawl in December, he hadn't actually shouted. Not at Yancy. "When did you become a fucking fatalist?!"
Yancy sputtered for a couple of seconds, thrown by the explosion, then rallied and threw up his hands. "It's not fatalism, it's realism, kid!" He gestured to the black memorial bands that they'd hung carefully above the wall calendar. "Did you completely miss what happened? We have to acknowledge it."
"We did acknowledge it! You're obsessing over it!"
"You are being a drama queen!" That was low. "Or maybe just a wimp if you can't even admit that we're in a kind of high risk line of work." That was lower.
Raleigh just barely caught himself from taking a swing. He had to end this conversation before he did. "So how far you gonna take it to prove you're right? Get us grounded for instability or excess downs in the sim before we ever make it to launch? Ever heard of a self-fulfilling prophesy? Maybe I'd rather try NOT to get us killed!"
He threw the door open and wrenched away when Yancy tried to stop him. "Oh yeah, go running off to sulk again, very mature!" his brother sneered.
"Go play Debbie Downer to somebody else. Doom and gloom doesn't make you mature." He grabbed his gear and headed for the gym. This time, Yancy went in the opposite direction. Good.
The psychs were lurking like wolves in the forest from a fairytale. A couple of them actually used the pretense of working out while Raleigh was in the weight room; he wanted to snap at them to just take notes. They might as well have been taking his picture coming in and out of the shower.
Worse, it wasn't just the psychs. Somebody must have heard him and Yance, because everybody was shooting him side-eyes.
Is this really how it ends? A couple months shy of deployment, we fuck it up and knock ourselves out of the running?
He shamelessly dove for cover when he saw Carolina coming down towards the mess hall. On top of everything else, he did not want to think about PR - even if, in all fairness, she didn't actually talk about PR much. Dealing with her had been a lot easier than he'd anticipated; she actually seemed to realize the Rangers were human. She treated him and Yancy like equals.
Now he felt a pang of honest-to-god guilt just at the thought of how disappointed she'd be. Everyone on the crew, everyone in the whole damn Corps was looking forward to launch. "You two are a heartbeat away from active duty," Pentecost had said in December.
That had been a lot of heartbeats. Now they actually had a launch date, and - someone was coming.
He looked over his shoulder and saw Bruce Gage coming from the opposite direction. Aw, shit. It's the Ya-Ya Brotherhood.
But Bruce didn't haul him off for a lecture, just gave him a casual nod as he went by. He murmured, "Remember, there's a brass-sanctioned way to resolve things." Raleigh blinked, but Bruce kept going, and around the corner, he shouted, "Abuela! How long have you been up north!"
"Bruce Gage, I have been here for days and you haven't come to say hello to me! Now where's your brother - wait, show me. Show me!"
"We are never gonna live that down, are we? Look, you can barely see it."
It dawned on Raleigh that they were talking about Bruce's scar. "Deal with it the way the brass allows: in the Kwoon. Go at it. And that way you don't have to explain to the man in charge how you hit him in the chest plate with your face."
"It was the PR guys who were ready to fry us. Imagine trying to spin that!"
Maybe they'd meant "PR guys" in a non-gendered sense. Something told him that under all that grandmotherly good humor, Carolina had her flash points. He felt another pang, hearing Carolina laughing and teasing Bruce as they walked off, just like she did Raleigh and Yancy. She'd said she knew the Gages.
"You don't need to draw blood to make your point, and you'd be surprised how much sparring works stuff out."
Well, he'd run, he'd lifted weights, he'd drilled himself backwards and forwards with Bushido, and still felt ready to fly apart from nervous energy. What did he have to lose?
So he turned around and went looking for his brother. He eventually found him outside, ironically, in almost the same place where Raleigh had talked to the Gage twins six months earlier. It was finally full dark - at one in the morning - and the Northern Lights were out. Yancy was staring up at them. Being all whimsical and depressed. Maybe he'll start writing poetry or something. Raleigh sighed.
Yancy turned, and the look on his face wasn't anything like in December. It was more like back when Raleigh and Jazmine were fighting, and Raleigh'd done something to "escalate it" as Yancy liked to put it (rather than simply responding to whatever vicious thing she'd done, which always seemed to get overlooked.)
Fine, be like that. "Kwoon," he said curtly. Yancy blinked. "Work it out the way the brass allows."
After a brief pause, Yancy nodded. "Okay."
They left the hanbōs in their racks in favor of straight-up grappling. Until a year ago, Raleigh hadn't been big enough to compete evenly with Yancy at Greco-Roman. I'm not a kid anymore. Not here, Raleigh fumed. For the first round or three, they didn't even talk, just focused rigidly on throws and locks and clinches. Neither of them had ever been champions, but they knew the rules and who scored what points.
Raleigh pinned Yancy first. He used to prefer scoring his points by throws, but for some reason, that had changed. Yance had always been good at pinning his opponents, but... his style had changed too.
After the second round, they muttered curtly about their scores. "Three points."
"That was only one, I wasn't exposed."
"Then it's one to four instead of three to four." Yancy went for a towel and finally cracked a smile. "You still win." Inside Raleigh, something cracked at that.
He pinned Raleigh next for five seconds, landing himself a bonus. Getting held that long used to piss Raleigh off... but now it didn't. It was like being hugged. Maybe if it were anyone other than Yancy, he'd still get frustrated.
A round later, he got the hold bonus. He'd never managed to pin Yancy that long before in his life. When the skies were lightening again, Raleigh was ahead on matches and points, and Yance didn't step back to the start. "Man, we're gonna pay for this in the morning."
"No kidding." If they went to bed right now and skived off morning drills, they'd get four hours of sleep.
And Rip Van Yancy actually seemed okay with that. "Well, let's make it count, then. Come on."
They wound up at the bar off-base. It was so late (or early) that the place was nearly empty. They caught the bouncer eyeing them, but by some miracle, paying for the damage and apologizing had kept them from getting banned.
If only the TV hadn't been playing yet another sappy, drooly special report on the burgeoning Jaeger Program and harping on its first fallen heroes. Raleigh winced and turned away, but Yancy nudged him. "Rals." It was hard to look at him now. "It'll be okay. It will. Look at it."
After showing the flag-lowering ceremonies at the Shatterdomes, the story was moving on to the Academy. The largest-ever second cut class was halfway through the third term. Seven Mark III Jaegers were slated to be launched this year from six different countries. Ten Mark IVs were being built, with the first projected to launch in 2018. The Mark IVs were going to be digital, an entire new technology to work out some of the kinks from the earlier models and lower the radiation risks. The Jaegers would start fighting the kaiju in teams, and there were plans in progress for some kind of missile attack on the Breach itself.
"The greatest goal of all would be to stop the kaiju from ever reaching this side of the Breach," one of the geologists was saying.
"Barring that, the Jaeger Program's goal is to one day have a zero-fatality event," said Marshall Pentecost down in Lima.
"You think?" Raleigh asked quietly. "You think we can pull that off?"
"It's worth trying for. Every time. I wasn't being fatalist. Planet Earth's going to make it even if you and me don't, and that's okay. We're on the front lines, but it's bigger than just you and me. Hell, that's a good thing. It takes the pressure off. 'The problems of three little people don't amount to a hill o' beans in this crazy world,'" he concluded a la Humphrey Bogart, and Raleigh finally managed to laugh again.
They were both staggering tired and groggy by the time they got back to quarters, but once in their room, Yancy hugged him. "I'll try not to dwell on it in the sims, kiddo. I'm sorry."
Raleigh gave him an answering squeeze and whispered, "Valar morghulis," and they both laughed.
You were right, he thought, too tired to deny it and knowing Yance would catch it in the drift. It's a possibility, not the only one either. We could get run over by a truck, buried in a blizzard. In Gipsy, maybe saving lives? Together? There are worse ways to go.
And as long as they were in a Jaeger, then when the Beckets went down, if they went down, they'd go down together.
To be continued...
Coming this weekend: The return of Stacker Pentecost! (Uh-oh, everybody look busy!) Our favorite Marshall has some words for Rangers old and new, and change is in the air for the entire Jaeger Program in Chapter Eighteen: The Pack Survives.
PLEASE don't forget to review!
Original Character Guide
Carolina Olivares: Team Liaison/Public Relations Representative, handles internal and external non-combat-related scheduling, public appearances, etc for the Jaeger team and the Rangers. Late 60s, Mexican-American from San Francisco, widow who came out of retirement to join PPDC after K-Day.
Antwan Ferrier: Strike troop Personnel Coordinator, leads a team of Gipsy's support personnel. Jamaican national, age 39, former cruise ship steward who witnessed Kaiceph's attack on Cabo San Lucas.
Brandon Pines: Rescue/Recovery chopper pilot, age 30, American from Monterey, CA. Lost most of his colleagues in combat with Trespasser on K-Day.
Cady Spencer: LOCCENT trainee along with Tendo Choi. Filipino-American from Oregon, age 25, lost most of his mother's family to Hundun's attack on Manila.
Devi and Susanti Hassan: Indonesian-Australian sisters, ages 26 and 24, who graduated the Academy along with the Beckets. Newly assigned to Vulcan Specter, Australia's Mark III.