And now we meet a character who may be familiar...

#

Mako steps off the helicopter into sun and warmth. She can already feel sweat under Raleigh's heavy sweater, but she refuses to take it off. It feels wrong enough not having him right here beside her when she's going back to a Shatterdome. It would be too painful to bear if she didn't have some part of him to hold onto. Literally, because right now her fist is clenched around a handful of the over-long sleeve as Marshal McTavish steps up to meet her. If she doesn't keep a good grip on that, she might punch him in the face. He treated Raleigh like he didn't matter. Like he was useless.

"Ranger, we've got everything prepped for you. Your techs are all ready and the systems are primed." That takes a long time. Did he drag all her techs out of bed and in to work at 4 am? Those systems are complicated and her techs should have been wide awake and focused to set them up. He tried to speed things up and now all he's done is cause a setback. I'll have to go over every connection with them again, because I am not letting someone have a Drift malfunction just because he wants to up the clock.

She tries not to let the anger show, but she is going to let him know in no uncertain terms that she will not be cutting corners. "I'll have to check them all again, just to be sure. And I'd like to recommend that the team assigned to pilot Gipsy Avenger stand down. We've been holding off on installing her Drift tech, and…"

"Her systems were installed this morning, the same ones as in the other Jaegers."

"You can't put in a Drift system in a few hours."

"Actually, we can. The only things missing were the pilot rigs, the rest of the system was wired." He has no idea what kind of work actually goes into installing. If he'd told Mako he was going to do this, she would have shut him down immediately. It isn't as simple as hooking wires together and attaching some bolts to the rigs. The slightest mistake, a frayed wire connection, a bad sensor, a misplaced connector, and someone could go into an eternal coma when they hook in. Installing a system takes days of testing, recalibrating, and double checking everything.

"Gipsy Avenger will not be ready to deploy."

"I suggest you focus your attention on her, then, and let your techs test the others. Because I'd like you in her and ready to deploy at 0600 tomorrow morning at the latest."

"Excuse me, Marshal?" Mako knows what she heard. She'd been thinking about it the whole way down. McTavish only told her she was coming for the Jaeger finalizing, but he's no fool, even if he is an insufferable prick (she remembers Sensei calling him that when they met the man at some PPDC function). He knows she's the only pilot left who has both been in combat and is also still capable of piloting. But her co-pilot is missing, and they can't just pair Mako Mori, the girl with the monster in her head, off with just anyone. Even McTavish isn't that much of a risk taker.

"Ranger Mori, we've determined that your adoptive brother, Jake Pentecost, is sufficiently drift compatible with you for you two to compose Gipsy Avenger's combat team."

She wants to scream, throw something, shatter McTavish's spine for this. Jake's just a kid. She still thinks of him as that sweet little boy who came into her room unannounced at three in the morning and asked if she needed someone to help keep the monsters away (it was so precious that he asked her what she asked him when he had his own nightmares, she loved that kid). She thinks of the huge smile the day he completed the model Gipsy Danger she bought him for his tenth birthday, not without sticking his fingers all together with that instant bond glue. She thinks of the boy who cried on her shoulder after his father told him he was going to finish school and go to a real college, not the Academy. And the young man who, after dropping a handful of dirt on an empty coffin, apologized to his father's spirit and then went off to follow in his footsteps, saying Stacker couldn't have objected much now since the Jaegers were no longer for a war.

She can't quite make that match with the tall, broad-shouldered nineteen year old with a serious face and perfect posture, waiting inside the doors when they enter. They've made her baby brother into a soldier, and she will never forgive them.

And then the door opens and her little brother is back, all smile and sparkling eyes and looking so damn much like his father she wants to cry, even as she laughs and hugs him, formality be damned.

"Mako! We're going to by co-pilots!" She can hear the enthusiasm in his voice, and she knows it all too well. It was her, back in Hong Kong, when Raleigh called her out on the training mat. When he asked her what she wanted to do with her life. When Stacker handed her the old shoe and let her get in Gipsy.

Now she's the one with the battle scars, the one who has to tell the enthusiastic, naïve child that war isn't about glory and being a hero. It's about surviving. I've become Raleigh. She would laugh if thinking about him didn't make her feel like part of her heart had just died.

"Yeah. We are." She remembers hours spent with this kid in the house, building Jaegers out of cardboard boxes and pretending to be in Drift together, fighting imaginary monsters (and when they lived in the house with the yard, the neighbor's dog) with brooms and tennis balls. He used to make Mako promise she'd wait for him before she went off to fight, so they could be pilots together. He wanted to name their future Jaeger Dragon Slayer. And then life happened, and Stacker refused to let either of them be pilots, and the play fights and dreams stopped.

If she refuses, she has no doubt Jake will simply ask for another co-pilot. He'll go out there with someone else. Someone who doesn't, can't, know him like she does.

She lost Sensei. She will not lose his son. If she is there, in the Jaeger with him, she will be able to do all she can to ensure that he makes it through this alive. "Okay, Marshal. I'll pilot with Ranger Pentecost."

#

I decided to go with at least enough of the sequel that Jake makes an appearance, because I really wanted to explore his and Mako's sibling relationship, and how she would react to him being a pilot after she already lost his father.