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His back hurts.
That's the main thought running through Jake’s mind as he unlocks their quarters with his hand print and retinal scan. He's been on his feet all bloody day, discussing training regimen ideas with their new batch of kwoon and mock-pod instructors, running errands for Mako, showing new cadets around the ‘dome—the list goes on an on. At least the new batch this time around seemed promising enough.
There'd been one, dark hair, piercing brown eyes that spoke of quick intelligence, only just sixteen according to his file. He said his father had, apparently, known Jake's dad. Had worked with him as head of LOCCENT out of Anchorage and Hong Kong at one time or another. Jake has high hopes for him, if he's being honest, if only because the cadets from PPDC families seem to be less likely to wash out. They ‘have a lower attrition rate,’ is how the Nate in his head says it with that know-it-all, I'm-an-adult-so-I-know-better tone of voice Jake has had directed at him more than once. To be fair, in retrospect he was more often than not being unreasonable when Nate pulled it out, but thankfully it's mostly reserved for cadets.
Today, though, he'd done the cadet tour after he’d overseen Ranger Rashkovska’s cadets’ first drift trials, she and her co-pilot—another Russian woman who went by just Aleksis—having finally been given their first batch of fish to whip into shape. Ideally, they didn't need his help, but he'd promised a week before he’d be there just in case, and Mako had dropped the tour in his lap first thing this morning. He could've said no to that too, of course, but she already knew his every weakness and exploited them ruthlessly. And on top of that she’d somehow gotten him to agree to do some kind of talking heads interview about the new Mark 8s they’d started rolling out this year.
Pure evil.
So, with so many promises coming together all at once, he'd been on his feet nonstop for something approaching thirteen hours. Now that he thinks about it, he's probably had a cumulative twenty minutes or so of breaks, ten of which had been spent in the mess with Nate and Burke shoveling lunch into his starving mouth as fast as he could.
Ah, the glamorous life of a Ranger.
So. His back hurts.
He barely notices the room when the door slides open. Instead, he practically trips over to his bunk and falls face-first into the soft material with a groan as the door hisses itself shut behind him.
“Wow he looks like shit.”
Jake raises his hand towards the source of the voice with a gesture that would've gotten him scolded by his dad when he was a kid. He recognizes the voice, slightly distorted as it is through the comm.
“Fuck off, Jinhai. S’been a long fucking day.”
Nate laughs, and Jake can picture him without looking: his co-pilot sitting at his desk, the comm link above it showing Jinhai in his own quarters in the rebuilt Anchorage ‘dome. Even though it's almost 2200, Nate is probably still in his uniform. Jake’s been working on getting that stick out of Nate’s ass, in no small part with Joe’s help. But, even now, five years after Jake's come back, Nate is still the perfect goddamn boy scout in some ways.
Jake peeks with the one eye he hasn't covered by a sprawling forearm, and—oh, never mind. Nate must've been in the shower when Jinhai called. He’s not wearing anything but a towel around his waist, and the way the glow from the holo is catching the droplets of water left over on his skin, in his hair, and how the muscles of his upper body are tensing with laughter...yeah. He looks goddamn good.
Jake uncovers his other eye and rotates a bit to appreciate the view. At the same time he grunts, “Fuck you too, Lambert. How come you never get saddled with this shit any more?”
“Probably because my sister isn't the Secretary General?” Nate offers between guffaws, turning in his chair to more fully face Nate. “You know you could tell her no, right?”
“What did she have you doing this time?” Jinhai sounds legitimately interested, legitimately concerned—he's a good kid. Jake is still glad Amara got paired with him, after a fashion.
“New cadet tours,” he sighs, flopping back slightly as if to demonstrate how damn tiring cadets can be, “three of them.”
“Did you take them all through—” Nate starts, but Jake turns his head to cut him off with a half-hearted glare.
“Yeah I took them through Royal’s conn-pod. I know the drill.”
Royal Voltaic, like Chronos Berserker had been, was one of the last surviving Mark 5s. Most of the few that had been made had been destroyed in the drone attack five years ago, but Royal had managed to defend the Lima ‘dome. Most of the other pilots there had died—either in their jaegers or trying to get to their jaegers—but Royal had managed to remain standing by the time Shao sent out the kill code.
Also like Chronos, she was now mostly only good for serving as a tour destination and a final exam.
“Should I let you go?” Jinhai asks, but Nate turns back to the screen and shakes his head.
“Don't let his bellyaching fool you. He’s just as glad to hear from you as I am.”
“Mm,” Jake adds from the bed, his head falling back to the mattress. “How're things up north? Anchorage treating you alright?”
“Well, Vik loves it. Amara hates it.”
“Lucky you,” Jake quips, feeling his lips pulling themselves up into a faint smirk.
“Actually, yeah. I am.”
Jake isn't so sure what it is about Jinhai’s words. Not so much what he says,, but how he says it. Full of so much longing, affection, and contentment all at once. It has something in Jake’s chest twisting sympathetically. Jake doesn't see it with his eyes covered, but he can feel the way Nate’s interest blossoms across the ghost drift.
“Oh? Did something happen?”
Jinhai coughs in a way Jake can tell without looking is meant to distract from something else.
“Are you blushing? What the hell happened, Jin?”
“Well, it’s,” Jinhai breathes deeply before letting out in a rush, “it's Amara.”
Jake lets his piqued interest flow across the ghost drift to Nate. Wherever Joe is, he's probably more than a little confused by the emotions the two of them are broadcasting. Oh well.
“What about her?”
There’s a rustling sound from the connection. Jake’s mouth twitches as he imagines Jinhai squirming a bit.
“Well, y-you know that Vik and I, well, we’ve been a-a thing for a while now. So. We’ve known that Amara’s had a thing for Vik for...a few years now. Mostly just a crush, we think. And, uh, recently we all sat down and had a talk and…” he trails off. Jake raises a hand where he's sure Jinhai will see it and makes a rolling gesture.
“And?”
“And...Vik and Amara are actually out on their first date right now.”
“Either of you hurt her, and I’ll personally feed you both to a kaiju.”
Jake keeps his tone nonchalant, though it’s not like it’s hard, all considered. He can feel Nate’s eyeroll—not the physical act, but the exasperated fondness that means he’s definitely doing one—and is expecting the soft, “C’mon, Jake, stop being such a dad.”
He’s also expecting Jinhai’s, “Wouldn’t dream of it, sir.” Not because he’s drifted with the kid or anything—though, really, at nearly 23, ‘kid’ might not be the best descriptor any more—but because he pays attention. Jinhai has always been good, or at least decent, as long as Jake’s known him. Respected the chain of command, at least as much as any ranger does. Treated others well. Through the drift, Nate’s shown him that Jinhai was one of the first cadets to befriend Amara when she first arrived.
So yeah. Jake trusts him. And, in her own way, he trusts Vik, too.
Though not enough to not give them both a shovel talk. Amara is a special case, after all.
“That a fact?” Jake rumbles, tilting his head back towards the screen, pointedly ignoring the look Nate is giving him.
“We’ve agreed to take it really slow, sir. None of us want her confusing our feelings for one another with her own. Everything is on her terms, at her pace.”
“Anyway,” Nate’s always been awful at subtlety, and even more awful at talking about personal topics with the cadets—which is probably why Jake can feel the anxiety crawling up and down his co-pilot’s spine as phantom tingles between his vertebrae, “I heard you all put on quite a show for the press the other day.”
“Nah, they just haven’t gotten over the novelty of a four-armed jaeger yet. It’s not like they’ve seen what she can really do.”
“Don’t want to scare people, eh?” Jake jokes, though, really, it’s not entirely a joke.
He’s seen the specs for the jaeger Amara, Jinhai, and Vik were given. At the time of its completion about two to three years ago, Aegaeon Dauntless had been the most formidable and ambitious piece of technology ever conceived. The first from a partnership between the PPDC and Shao Industries. Designed specifically for the considerations of a three-person team, Aegaeon was—still is—the first and only jaeger with more than three arms. More than that, while the third pilot is capable of moving the two additional arms independently from the first two, each arm has its own unique array of weapons. The really interesting part, though, is that the two pairs of arms can merge, fully syncing the motions of the third pilot with both primary hemispheres, producing two arms with incredibly high strength and a new array of weaponry possibilities. The one Amara had been most excited about—because of course she’d had a hand in the design process—was merging a chain sword with a gravity sling. Something about imploding whatever they managed to successfully stab.
Regardless of the intricacies, though, Jake remembers Amara bragging that the only reason her team had been selected to pilot Aegaeon—or, as Jake secretly suspects, Aegaeon had been built for them—was the strength of their drift. A triad team with excellent drift compatibility could, historically, pilot a jaeger with an additional limb or other semi-autonomous functions. But to have two extra, and then sync up motions in the merging process required the kind of drift compatibility that hadn’t been seen in the Corps since the Beckets or Kaidanovskys—the kind of drift compatibility that hadn’t ever been seen before in a three-person team. The Weis probably could’ve done it, if the legends still circulating the ‘dome about them are to be believed, but they would’ve needed to have survived to a time when J-Tech had advanced another fifteen years.
Still, as impressive as Aegaeon is, two Mark 8 jaegers—Phantom Howler and Havoc Beta—have both already finished construction this year, with at least one more on the way. And, Jake’s seen the reports from the SI and PPDC think tanks, already working on designing the first ever Mark 9 prototype. No name yet, but the theoretical blueprints alone look like fine art.
Jinhai huffs out a laugh.
“More like superstition, I think. Vik doesn’t want us to fire up any of the serious weapons except against a serious threat.”
He doesn’t say it aloud, but Jake can hear the unspoken ‘like a kaiju’ hanging on the end of that sentence.
“She figures, since they’re meant to fight Kaiju, using them will be like, I dunno, an omen for them coming back again or something.”
“Weird,” Jake muses aloud, grin stretching his lips, more to hear the offended sounds both Nate and Jinhai make at the same time—Jinhai on behalf of his co-pilot, Nate on behalf of his former student. After all, most jaeger pilots are strange or superstitious—or both—to a certain extent.
“Like you’re not weird, mister sprinkles,” Nate sounds like he’s trying to embarass him in front of Jinhai, like this is some secret or something, but a quick prod at the ghost drifting between them lazily reveals no malice. Just a sense of playfulness.
“At least I prefer something interesting in my desserts, mister vanilla and boring,” he fires back, still smiling.
“Sprinkles? Vanilla? Boring? Do I want to kno-okay you’re actually mostly naked, I—”
Jinhai’s words are just about the only warning Jake gets before he feels the mattress dip, and suddenly a mostly naked, still-damp Nate is on top of him. Looking up at his co-pilot, at the mischievous glint in those eyes, at the expanse of muscle and warm skin towering above his own prone form, Jake maybe, kind of, sort of can’t seem to breathe properly.
“I’ll show you vanilla and boring,” Nate practically whispers the words, but they sound like they’re blaring through a loudspeaker to Jake’s ears.
“A-alright, uh, guys? I’ll, uh, I’ll tell Amara and Vik you guys say hi when they get back, okay?”
Jinhai doesn’t wait for them to answer before disconnecting the call.
Which is probably a good thing. Neither of them are really listening any more.
And, as it turns out, Jake’s back doesn’t hurt nearly as much as he thought it did.
~~~
Amara calls him at breakfast to gush about her date. Nate offers his congratulations, while Joe—he still prefers Burke, but Jake and Nate are the only ones he’ll let call him something else—is an unhelpful asshole and asks if they slept together on the first date. Jake smacks Joe upside the head, though both he and Nate give the bigger man a kiss on the same spot to make it better.
Big baby.
Amara continues chattering at the three of them until they’ve finished their food. Nate and Joe say they’re heading to the Kwoon, but Jake waves them off when they invite him. His first item today is to familiarize himself with the new synapse system the techs have been installing in Gipsy Defiant. She’d been the first Mark 7 ever built, so she’s constantly being upgraded with the latest tech to keep her top of the line. Exactly what one would expect from the flagship—flagjaeger?—of the PPDC. Keeping everything recent is even more important now that they have Joe with them, too—triad jaeger teams are still uncommon, and the tech for them is ever-evolving. Anything they can do to trim down stress mid-drift is a godsend. And with the modular weapons system Gipsy Defiant has—something only possible because they have the extra mental capacity from a third person—keeping their drift stable and strong mid-fight could be the difference between life and death some day.
“So, have you talked to Ilya lately?” Amara sounds distracted, but Jake’s used to that. She’s amazingly adept at multitasking, so he wouldn’t be surprised if she were also looking over some new designs or doing paperwork—endless paperwork—while they talked.
“Not really,” Jake says as he navigates the corridors towards scramble alley, a twinge in his belly at the admission. “Last I heard, Suresh was still getting used to his new arm. Ilya said he kept breaking mugs whenever he made tea.”
“Oh wow,” Amara rolls her eyes at her screen, laughing a little; Jake sticks his tongue out at her in retaliation, “that was like a year ago Jake. A week ago, they had their first successful drift since Suresh got out of PT. Today, they were offered one of the Mark 7s that no one’s claimed yet.”
“Hey, that’s fantastic!” Jake smiles down at his comm. “Have they announced their engagement yet by the way?”
“Oh my god,” Jake’s smile widens at the exasperation in her tone and eyeroll, reminding him so much of the 15 year old he met in Santa Monica, “they’re not engaged. They’re just dating.”
“Speaking of,” Amara’s mouth is still open, as if she’d been about to say something else, but Jake cuts her off, “for real. No one else around. Just between you and me: how’d that go?”
Amara blushes a bright red, eyebrows coming together as her lips purse.
“I can literally see you walking through a corridor, you liar. I hear other people.”
“Ah, no one who matters,” Jake winks at a group of chattering J-Techs as they walk past him. They at least take it in stride, laughing softly before returning to their conversation and gesturing at the tablet between them. “So spill.”
There’s silence from Amara, her face turned to just off-center as she bites her lip, for so long that Jake actually frowns at the device in his hand and taps the screen gently to be sure it hasn’t locked up again.
“You love both Ranger Lambert and Ranger Burke, right?”
Jake blinks down at the image, at the way Amara has turned to fully face the camera. His feet come to a stop, and without thinking about it, he ducks into the nearest alcove her can find. Said alcove has a door, and the door leads to a classroom that isn’t being used yet this early in the morning. One of the new classes of cadets he showed around yesterday might be in here today, but not for at least another hour. Probably. Hopefully.
He sighs down at the screen, his free hand scratching absently at the shadow of a beard on his chin.
“I, uh, yeah. I do.”
It feels oddly liberating to say the words aloud. He’s told both Nate and Joe how he feels before—of course, though it’s not like they don’t know from the drift. Still, Jake feels it means that much more when the emotions are put into words, into some sort of physical, tangible thing that can’t be taken back or erased. Even so, it’s not like he goes around shouting it from the rooftops. The world, especially the PPDC, may be more accepting of some eccentricities in pilot relationships—the old heroes of the first Kaiju war are testament enough to that—but it’s still not something Jake really...brings up. Not unless he’s asked directly.
Probably something he’s picked up from Nate in the drift. The wanker.
“So,” Amara looks like she’s almost physically chewing her words, testing them out before she says them, “how do you know you love them both? Like, really love them?”
“As opposed to?” Call it a guess, intuition, whatever, but he has the feeling there’s more she’s asking than what she’s saying.
“I mean, as opposed to,” he can see Amara’s shoulder rise in what looks like an attempt at a nonchalant shrug, “only really loving one of them. Or maybe, I dunno, the drift sort of...confusing everything?”
If anyone else were around, Jake might be embarrassed about the sound he makes. Something between a snort, a laugh, and some sort of honk.
“The drift does make it really confusing, believe me, but it can also make things way clearer, believe it or not. It can give you an outside perspective on what you’re feeling by seeing it through the eyes of your co-pilots. So, really, end of the day? You have to trust your emotions for what they are. The drift can’t...can’t make you feel something,” he realizes he’s gesturing with his arms and stops, settling his comm in place again, “at least not anything you’re not capable of feeling yourself. So, yeah. It was confusing for a bit, because Nate loved Joe—like, really loved him. And I thought it was just that bleeding over to me at first, sure, but..."
As he trails off, he sighs, glancing around the room for something to distract himself so he doesn’t have to keep looking Amara in the eye. No distraction is forthcoming, though, so he sighs again and looks back at the screen. If his cheeks feel warm, he does his best to ignore it.
“Believe me, if it’s someone else’s feelings, give it enough time and you’ll know. The things you feel are,” he slants his mouth as he tries to find the words to explain, “are yours. They just, they feel right, y’know?”
He really hopes she does, because he’s fairly certain that’s the best he can do. In the drift, emotions, thoughts, feelings, perspective—they all meld together into a cohesive whole. Sometimes, finding one’s self in that whole can be difficult, if not impossible. It’s simultaneously the most exhilarating and most terrifying thing Jake has ever experienced. Drifting with someone is the most intimate thing Jake can think of, because not only is there a merging, there’s something each participant leaves behind in the other—it’s an exchange. The more romantic, he’s heard, call it exchanging a piece of the soul, a union of the true selves.
It’s no wonder married drift partners often refer to the drift as a second kind of marriage—and, as far as Jake’s heard, a marriage much more binding and personal than a ring or a piece of paper.
Thankfully, Amara nods.
“Yeah, I...I guess so. So what you’re saying is...I should go with my gut feeling?”
“Who said we were talking about you?” Jake teases, but feels his smile pull at his cheeks as it reaches his eyes. “You know they both think you only like Vik, right?”
And Amara...Amara giggles at that.
“Jin thinks so, maybe,” she hides her mouth behind her hand, “but then again, emotional breadth has never really been his thing.”
“True,” Jake inclines his head to her. “I’m happy for you, y’know.”
Amara giggles. Again. Jake feels his face color.
“What?”
He might sound a bit defensive.
“Nothing. You’re just a giant sap, Jake.”
“That’s Ranger Pentecost to you, you little twerp.”
She sticks her tongue out at him. Which, okay. He deserved that.
“Whatever, Jake. Call Suresh and Ilya. I’m sure they’d love to hear from you. Miss you.”
And, without waiting for a response, she kills the connection, leaving Jake in the dark with something warm rising in his chest. When he gets inquiring messages from both Nate and Joe about it, making sure he’s okay—damn ghost drift—he quickly assures them he’s fine. He’s just...
Proud.
Happy.
As he leaves the classroom to once again head for scramble alley and Gipsy, making sure to add a calendar alert for this evening titled ‘Call Ilya and Suresh,’ he finds himself humming an old PPDC song to himself. One from the old war vids. One that was meant to inspire confidence and hope in humanity’s darkest time. His comm chimes an alert, and it’s a picture message of both Joe and Nate, Nate kissing Joe’s cheek while Joe is wearing this stupidly sappy smile. The caption at the bottom reads, good, we love you.
The warmth in his chest doubles in intensity, because, really. These fucking idiots are going to be the death of him. Someday.
Today, though. Today is not that day. Today is going to be a good day.