Chapter Text
DECEMBER 2020
The day after the kaiju attack on Anchorage, Laura Kearney has her first drift compatibility trial with her partner.
It doesn’t go well.
Laura was in Oakland when the first kaiju attacked. Her best friend was driving her up to her co-op at the vet’s office just out of town. They were only sixteen, but they were making big plans for the future. Whether to go to college, whether or not to go out of state. What programs to apply for, what summer jobs they planned on taking.
They’d both thought it was another earthquake at first. The giant footsteps, the towering monster of scales and shadow, the jagged mountain of teeth. The creature carved its way across the state, levelling entire neighbourhoods in its wake.
Then the missiles came.
“What the hell was that?”
Laura’s not even looking at their examiner. The aftermath of the neural handshake still rings in her head, vertigo threatening to take her to the ground. She grits her teeth through it to look at her partner instead.
Max tears off his headset and stumbles out of the simulator. Laura strides after him.
The first lesson: don't chase the memories. Don’t get stuck in the past. The RABIT, they called it: Random Access Brain Impulse Triggers.
Well, they failed this time.
“Cadet Kearney,” their examiner barks. “Cadet Brinly, where do you think you’re going?”
She knew it would be hard, but there had been no doubt in her mind that they would be compatible. How could they not be? All the years they’ve spent working towards this, all the years of being friends, and then more. The pivot to enlistment instead of grad school. The hours spent in classes and combat training. The sleepless nights studying and going through drills. She’s wanted this for so long, and he—
A drunken confession to one of the other cadets: I don’t know if I can do this anymore.
Max asking, Why don’t we just take the night off? and the incredulous look she gives him as she gestures at her workbook.
Test scores hidden away. An acrid lie burning the back of his throat.
Watching her turn away, again and again and again. Always facing her back. Always trying to catch up.
“I thought you wanted this just as much as I did.” The words come out accusatory. There’s an edge in her voice, a slow-building realisation that tightens around her ribcage.
“Yeah. I know.” Max turns around, face pinched and eyes red. He lets out a hollow laugh. “I thought I could do it, but…” He fades into a shrug.
The test scores, they can fix. She can work with that. A little tutoring, and she knows he could get there.
But the rest of it?
In the drift, one of his most recent memories was watching the memorial footage of Yancy Beckett, the ranger who died in yesterday’s attack. She had watched it, the footage of the Jaeger being torn apart. Where she had felt renewed determination, he had felt fear. It was not the kind of fear that kept you alert, cautious, responsive. It was the kind of fear that killed you. And with it came a realisation: this was not how he wanted to die. This was not what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.
Her throat feels thick. “So that’s it, then?”
A beat passes, and then another. They aren’t drift compatible, but they don’t need to be to understand what she was asking.
“Yeah.” He doesn’t meet her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Weeks pass.
Max drops out of the ranger program and transfers to the Los Angeles Shatterdome.
The Alaskan winter is long, but Laura spends it training harder than ever.
Drifting remains a problem. None of the algorithm-based matching has ever turned out well.
She hones her body in the meantime. Goes through drills until she can do the Fifty-Two Ways half-asleep and with her eyes closed. Runs through combat simulations solo and climbs the leaderboard.
The war clock ticks on.
The Jaeger Academy on Kodiak Island is over two hundred miles from Anchorage. All recruits start at the Academy before the prospective rangers transfer to the Anchorage Shatterdome. The Dome itself sits closer to Chugach State Park, an hour away from the city itself, tucked away between the mountains.
The problem with attending a remote paramilitary academy in the middle of a frozen wasteland is that there’s nothing to do except work, train, and drink. There’s exactly one pub nearby, and it’s over an hour’s flight to even get to the mainland. The planes stop making the runs to Anchorage in the late afternoon, and no one’s running a ferry after dark.
Rumours run through the grapevine fast here. Nothing Laura isn’t used to, coming from a small town where everyone knows everyone’s business. But it’s hard not to notice the looks people give her.
They were a package deal from the start. Wherever she went, so did Max. Their names always trailed each other.
Now, it’s just her. Just Laura Kearney, no partner, alone.
It’s New Year’s Eve. Even in a war, things slow down during the holidays. All the cadets were granted couple days of reprieve for the winter holidays. Something about morale, and a much-needed break after the devastation of the Anchorage attack.
The rec room is empty tonight. It’s hard not to think of this as her first Christmas and New Year’s without Max. She’d left the pub early, not in the mood to party and spend the countdown with all the recruits drunk off their asses and hooking up left and right.
“Staying in?”
Laura turns and jumps to her feet. “Officer Hackett,” she says automatically, and he gestures for her to sit back down.
“You should be out with the rest of them. Won’t get much of a break after this.”
It’s strange to be talking with him like this—and stranger still for him to settle on the sofa opposite hers. All the instructors shared the same mess hall and rec room as the rest of them, but they typically kept to their own little lounge.
Some of the instructors are more social than others, like his brother, who always insisted they call him Chris. Apparently, some smart-ass had tried to call them Hackett One and Hackett Two. The others tend to keep to themselves, including him: Travis Hackett, retired Jaeger pilot of the Delta Wrangler, now Conn-Pod Control Instructor. And the one who watched her catastrophic failure in the drift sync test.
“All due respect, sir, but I’m good.”
Officer Hackett—Travis—glances down at his hands. He’s got a bottle of champagne and two glasses, and after a moment of deliberation, he extends one to her.
Why the hell not, she thinks. The night can't get any weirder than this. Laura takes the glass, holding it steady as he pours.
“The Salty Dog not your scene?” he asks, referencing the go-to pub of the academy recruits.
“Not tonight. And it looks like you’ve all been holding out on us. I always knew there was a secret stash in the officers’ lounge.”
The corner of his mouth tips up. It’s a rare thing to see, and it catches her off-guard. “Don’t go tellin’ anyone now.”
“No one would believe me. Travis Hackett, slumming it out here in the rec room?”
He gives her a sidelong glance. “I come out here.”
“Yeah, to stand in a corner and frown and keep us all in line. Not to hang out.”
“Hmmm.” He looks genuinely perturbed by that assessment, although he doesn’t argue. Definitely the less social one, between the two brothers.
She’s not sure how she ended up here. Somehow, she’s found herself keeping company with her distant, strict instructor who barks at her to move faster, strike harder, be better. There’s an awkwardness to him, a stiffness to his posture, the look of a man trying to appear comfortable and relaxed and not quite managing it.
The glass is cool against her fingers. The silence stretches out for a beat too long. “So what’s the real reason you’re out here?”
“Maybe I want to enjoy some peace and quiet for once.”
“Bullshit,” she says without filtering, and when his eyebrows lift in surprise, she adds, “sir.”
“Pardon me?”
“You came out here with two glasses. You sat near me. If you wanted some alone time, you would’ve just stayed in the officer’s lounge, or in your room. Not like there’s a different view out here,” she says, gesturing to the industrial concrete around them. The academy was built to be a functional bunker in case of a kaiju attack. “The first cut’s next week. You’re here to let me down early.”
His face, which had become progressively more tense with each word, suddenly relaxes. He takes a maddeningly long sip from his glass before he responds, “You’re one of our best recruits.”
“But I can’t drift.”
“But you can’t drift,” he agrees, “yet.”
Her mind latches onto the first part of his sentence with such encroaching despair that she nearly misses what he’s actually saying. “I’m still in?”
“For now,” he says. “But you—”
Laura throws her arms around him. He goes absolutely still, and in the split second that it takes for common sense to kick in, she feels him hesitantly return the hug.
“Thank you, sir,” she says. “I won’t let you down. I’ll work harder—”
“You don’t need to work harder. That’s the problem. You can read all the research and learn all the jargon, but the drift is instinctual. The more you try and force it, the more unstable you become.”
“Yeah, but it goes both ways. If I don’t find a compatible partner, then I’m cut from the program.”
And then all that time, gone and wasted. For nothing.
“A good pilot can learn to drift with anyone,” he says.
It feels like a natural thing to ask, “Could you? Drift with me?”
He shuts her down quick. “That ain’t happening.”
She hadn’t been totally serious, but the idea sticks in her head. He’s more than twice her age, but she’s seen him in the shooting range and in the Kwoon Combat Room. He’s got a lean strength to him still, a war-readiness that the Academy demands from everyone.
“I thought you said a good pilot could drift with anyone.”
“It’s off the table.” The look on his face clearly tell her to drop the subject.
“So what’s the plan, then?”
“Spend time with the other cadets. Participate in the team-building exercises. We run them for a reason. Kwoon teaches you how to fight and move with someone. But it’s not the only way to find a partner.”
She sighs. “You want me to make friends.”
Officer Hackett tips his bottle toward her. “Get to it, cadet. You’ve got until the next round.”
He stands up. Message delivered, she supposes, so he’s done with her now.
“Hey,” she says, his first name on the tip of her tongue. She swallows it back. When he turns back to her, she lifts the glass in his direction. “Happy New Year."
She would not call his expression warm, but it’s something close to it. “Happy New Year, Laura.”
Laura passes the first cut, as he’d said. Her simulation scores alone keep her afloat, but she won’t get another chance.
The days pass by. Partner after partner in the sparring hall, countless exercises of trust falls and blindfolded coordination tests that fall apart within minutes. The other cadets start pairing up, one by one. She tries not to think about Max.
In the background, Officer Hackett watches her trials. The others think he’s intimidating. He’s got a reputation for being a hard-ass who never smiles. She and Max used to complain about the stick up his ass and call him silly names behind his back that they never dared say to his face.
She’s gotten better at deciphering his frowns, she thinks. The one where he presses his lips together means that he’s disappointed. The lopsided frown that pulls to the right means that he disagrees with something. The one with the slightly raised eyebrows means to cut the bullshit and step up. Sometimes, though, he just looks at her with this unreadable expression on his face, not quite a frown, but not exactly a smile, either.
It becomes a game that she plays in her head sometimes. Predict the face he’s going to make before he actually does it. Guess what he’s thinking.
The game stops when he notices her staring at him a little too often.
Their eyes meet across the room. Since that night in the rec room, he hasn’t spoken to her outside of training. He barely even glances at her.
He’s looking at her now, and she’s looking back.
Sometimes, though, Laura doesn’t have to guess what he’s thinking. Officer Hackett says it right to her face.
“The hell was that?” he demands, after another particularly lacklustre training exercise with what was probably her fourteenth partner candidate. It’s almost the exact same thing he said after her drift sync test.
The second cut looms ahead. The thought of all this time spent in this frozen wasteland for nothing, of having to pack it all up and head back to a town that no longer exists, to come so close to actually doing something that matters—
He reaches for her shoulder. She senses him before she feels him, and Laura whips around and grabs his wrist before he actually makes contact.
“I’m not in the mood for another lecture about how I need to ‘bond more with my peers,’” she snaps, pushing him away. “Every day I’m in here for hours. I even tried doing that dumb blind maze exercise, which, really? Walking around blindfolded is supposed to help us drift?”
Travis is looking at her oddly, and his gaze drops down to his wrist before he responds. “It’s a conversation,” he reminds her. “Not—”
“A fight. I know. I know. I’m trying. I just…” Her shoulders slump. To her horror, she feels her eyes start to go hot.
He sighs. “Come sit,” he says, and leads her off to the benches, where she starts to focus on unwrapping her hands and keeping her breath calm and even.
“What does the neural handshake mean to you?” he asks.
“It’s an interlacing of brain waves and synchronicity of the limbic system using the conn-pods as a bridge.”
She swears that he almost smiles. “See, some people say that but I know that they don’t know what the hell they’re saying. I can tell that you do. And ‘cause you’re one of our smartest cadets, you know that’s not what I’m asking.”
The neural handshake is a means to an end. The first step into a suit of armour, the grasp around the hilt of a sword, the weight and potential of a loaded gun. The anticipatory breath before the blow of a fist. Preparation, and a tool for a fight.
A conversation. She tries not to think of that first drift. The emotions had lingered for days, all tangled up with her own. Anger and resentment and blame. There had been love there, once, buried deep. She doesn’t know when it ended. Maybe there wasn’t an end, but a slow death instead. She wonders if that made it worse.
“It means trusting your partner with the fall,” she says. “Balancing out each other’s weaknesses. Leaning into each other’s strengths.”
He nods. “The drift happens between minds, but if you don’t trust your partner, if you don’t respect them, you’ll never achieve resonance. When pilots drift, it’s about that trust, and that moment of weightlessness and possibility that you experience together.”
“Weightlessness,” she echoes. “Is what what it felt like for you?”
His eyes grow distant for a moment. “It felt as easy as breathing,” he says. “Most of the time.”
“To me, it felt like sinking.”
“Yeah. That can happen if you get too distracted. Or if you have the wrong person on the wrong side.”
She’d sat on the left, Max sat on the right. It was how they’d always practised. The right side drives the drift and takes the lead, but she’d always thought it didn’t matter as long as they were in sync.
“You think we’d’ve passed if we switched seats?”
“No. But I was surprised.”
“We’d always done it that way. I didn’t really care about all that dominance talk. I thought it’d be fine.”
He lets out a long-suffering sigh. “It ain’t all talk. The right side leads. If you have someone anxious in the right, their fears and doubts control the drift. You’re more likely to chase those triggers. Still would’ve happened in your case, but maybe you wouldn’t’ve gone so far.”
“So what is it, then? What am I doing wrong?”
Officer Hackett considers her. “When you’re in the drift, you can’t hide. Everything about you is revealed to your partner. The question is, are you able to trust someone you barely know? Compatibility’s a crapshoot at this point. But you can create it. You need to find a way to ground yourself. An anchor. A memory that will help you focus. It’s not about burying memories or feelings deep down… it’s about being able to acknowledge them, and let them go.”
Another fracture in her relationship with Max, a trust she’d taken for granted, something precious that had rusted and eroded over time. The revelation of each other in the drift had been the very thing that split them apart. All of her memories coalesce into the grief and guilt and pride and determination that led her here.
Sometimes, it’s something in the other person that gives her pause. A certain kind of arrogance, a feeling of wrongness in her gut. Other times, though, it’s her. She doesn’t know how many times she can offer herself up to someone, hoping that something will click together.
“What is the basis of the neural handshake?” he asks.
She sighs, but she answers, “Psycholinguistic identification.”
“And what is the basis of that?”
“Common experience.”
“These exercises we do,” he continues, “they’re for a reason. Now, the blinded path isn’t my favourite, but it’s a way to force that shared memory and trust.”
“Through fear.”
He doesn’t disagree. “It’s memorable. Did you know we used to host dances? Like we were chaperones at a goddamn high school prom,” he says wryly.
“Now that sounds more like it,” she says, grinning at him. “Might be nice for morale.”
“Sure. Not great for drifting.”
“What, why not? Dancing seems like a great idea.”
“What’s the number one reason for failure to sync?” He’s quizzing her again.
It doesn’t take her long to come up with the answer, to both his question and her own. “The modesty reflex,” she says. Sex tends to make things awkward in the drift, especially when it happens before the compatibility test. And that awkward self-consciousness makes people shut down. After, though, is different. She’s heard the rumours; she knows how much the drift can affect two partners, in more than just the mind. It’s not uncommon for drift partners to hook up at least once after. “I guess I can see that.”
“Another reason why I advised you to seek another partner,” he says.
The memory comes back to her hazily. Officer Hackett, recommending against her partnership with Max. Counselling them both to try testing with someone else. She’d dismissed it soon after. It was always supposed to be her and Max. She had a hard time picturing herself with anyone else.
“It wasn’t that,” Laura says quietly. She doesn’t even remember the last time she and Max had slept together. “It’s as you said. The drift reveals who you are. And I realised he’d changed. Or maybe we both did, and I just… I never noticed. I want this, you know? I’ve trained hard to be here. I want to be a Jaeger pilot more than anything else.”
More than she wanted to be with him.
And Max hadn’t felt the same.
For the first time, she feels that pit of resentment in her stomach slowly ease. Her anger at him for leaving, for not wanting what she wanted, for not telling her. She sees herself again in his eyes, in his memory. Never looking back at him, always looking ahead. They’d grown apart, and when she realised it, they’d already drifted too far away.
Officer Hackett studies her face. “Yeah, I get that,” he says, and she believes him.
He’s been stationed up here for years, she’s heard, and she doesn’t know why. He’s old enough to retire. Duty, maybe. A true drive for the job. The Hackett brothers were the one of the strongest Jaeger pilots before Travis stepped down from active duty. He’d retired abruptly for some reason that was never made public, disappeared for a couple years, and now both of them are still here, training the next generation of fighters.
“Those dances are still happening, you know. Just not here,” she says.
His expression grows grim. “Oh, I know.”
“Maybe I should head down to the pub. Save you a dance,” she says with a grin.
“Oh—well, that’s not—I’m your—” he stumbles over his words, looking oddly flustered.
“Relax, Officer Hackett,” she says, putting him out of his misery. Her voice is light, but there’s a strange feeling in her chest. “I know who you are. I was just joking.”
He clears his throat. “Right,” he says awkwardly, rising to his feet. “I should—”
“Yeah.”
“Good night, cadet.”
The blatant attempt at formality makes her roll her eyes. But she doesn’t call him out on it.
“‘Night, sir.”
The countdown resets on the next day.
They wake to blaring alarms, breaking news projected onto a large screen. A Category III Kaiju attack on Los Angeles. The Shatterdome there is taking heavy hits. All available Jaeger teams are mobilised to respond, though none of them will make it in time to help with the first wave. They can only hope to stop the path of attack.
The cadets continue to train. Pairs begin to form faster, spurred by the latest attack.
Laura remains alone.
She goes through the drills. Chris had wanted her to try Wing Chun over Krav Maga. Her sparring was too adversarial, he’d told her, when the point was to connect with her partner. She wasn’t sure how physical fights were helping her at this point, but she’ll try anything.
She goes through the motions. Learns each form, starts new drills.
She tries not to think of the Jaeger being slammed into the wall of the Shatterdome, caving in the walls and ceiling.
She tries not to think of anything at all.
In somber ceremony, Officer Travis Hackett reads out the names of the dead the next morning.
Laura knows what’s coming before he even says it. There’s an imperceptible pause before he says, “Max Brinly.”
For a second, everything goes quiet except for a high-pitched ringing in her ears.
Her childhood home, reduced to rubble. Her parents. Her friends. Max.
She thinks of that day years ago, Max at the wheel, white-faced as he slammed down on the gas pedal, Laura screaming at him to drive faster as the towering cloud of smoke puffed up into the sky.
The car had spun out as the blast rippled out from the city, shattering windows and blowing down trees.
The world ended that day, but they had each other.
It takes so little time for someone to cease to exist.
She doesn’t cry on the first day, or the second, or even the third. She doesn’t cry when she finds one of Max’s old sweatshirts tucked in a drawer, or when she boxes up everything he left behind to send to his aunt, his only living relative. She doesn’t cry when she spends three hours staring at a blank piece of paper, wondering what to write to her, or whether to send it with any message at all.
In the end, she settles for I’m sorry.
Laura throws herself back into the combat room.
Fuck Wing Chun. She goes through match after match, no punches pulled, fists clenched.
Her opponents don’t seem to mind, and she takes a fair share of beatings herself. There’s a sharp tension in the air, a live wire ready to spark. She’s not the only one who’s angry.
On her third match, Chris tries to pull her out. “Cadet Kearney, that’s enough. You’re done.”
She ignores him. Good thing she does, because her opponent goes for a straight cut that she barely dodges. The follow-up swing, though, catches her in the jaw, and her teeth slice into her lip. The taste of iron coats her tongue.
“Kearney! Simmons!”
She barely registers her own name. Here, she is nothing but blood and muscle and bone; here, she is no one’s daughter, no one’s friend, no one’s ex-girlfriend.
Simmons drops his guard by an inch. She snaps her fist toward that opening—
And a hand snags her wrist, not stopping her, but using her own momentum to make her lose balance and stumble forward. A carefully positioned foot slides around her ankle. At the same time, a palm slams into her shoulder and shoves her to the ground. The ceiling whirls into view, and her breath wheezes out with the thud of her back against the mat.
Laura blinks up at Officer Hackett, standing over her.
His expression is harsh. Disapproving. In the background, Chris dismisses the rest of the recruits.
Then, Chris says, a warning in his voice: “Travis.”
“I’ve got it,” he responds, not looking away from her.
“Trav—”
“I said I’ve got it.”
There’s a long pause. She’s still staring at him. Footsteps retreat into the hallway, followed by the soft click of the door.
Travis begins taking off his officer jacket, then starts unbuttoning his shirt.
It’s enough to jolt her to attention. “What are you doing?”
Left only in a white undershirt and trousers, he places his folded clothes on the bench against the wall. With practised speed, he wraps his hands. “You wanna fight? Then let’s fight.”
Laura pushes herself to a sitting position. “We were just sparring.”
“Cut the bullshit, Kearney.”
“I’m not fighting an old man,” she snaps.
“But you’ll beat up every new recruit that has the misfortune of being paired up with you today? Let ‘em hurt you, if that means you can hurt ‘em back?”
“I wasn’t fighting dirty.”
His face is flat. “No. You weren’t. Now get the fuck up, cadet.”
She growls in frustration, but she rises to her feet. “Don’t blame me when you need a new hip,” she says, and moves to strike.
Three kicks in succession: he dodges the first one, blocks the second, and takes the blow of the third to grapple her. He pins her calf to his thigh, and with a surprising amount of strength, he topples her off-balance again and she lands on her ass.
“Focus,” he says sharply.
She bites back a retort.
He circles her, weight carefully balanced with each step he takes. His palms are open but not relaxed. His stance is familiar.
Her fists slowly unclench to mirror his. His expression tips slightly towards approval.
This time, Travis advances into a series of blows that Laura blocks with barely a second to spare. His hand slides against her forearm and transitions seamlessly into the next movement. With each advance is a retreat, neither of them gaining enough ground, but neither letting their guard down, either. They fall into a rhythm, almost as if she can anticipate his next direction. When his left hand whips toward her, her right arm is already there to meet it. When her foot slides forward, he’s already stepping back.
There it is: a gap in his defense. She gets close enough to him to mimic the same move that took her down earlier, taking him off balance. He stumbles back, and she pins him to the wall. Laura presses her forearm lightly against his neck. His eyes are dark, pupils wide, and she can feel his throat move against her skin when he swallows.
“Good,” he says, voice rough.
There's something different about the way he's looking at her now. His gaze snags on her mouth, before traveling down. She can feel her heart beating fast in her chest. A different kind of tension fills the air, honey-thick and warm. It punches the breath out of her lungs, and she feels almost dizzy with it.
Travis grasps her wrist and gently nudges her to take a step back. His touch leaves behind a lingering warmth that she can still feel.
Then he reaches out and smooths his thumb across her mouth. It comes away stained red with blood. Reflexively, her tongue darts out to lick her lips. She can barely feel the cut, but she can taste the iron now.
His hand falls away. Travis closes his eyes, and when he opens them, his expression is different. Somber. He opens his mouth. She doesn’t know what she expects him to say, but it isn’t this: “I’m sorry about Max.”
The name slices through the haze of adrenaline. She wasn’t ready for it, and something splits in her chest.
It’s the fifth day. Max is dead.
There's nothing she can say about that. Her vision blurs with tears, and for the first time this week, she begins to cry.
There was love there, once, between them. Between her and the boy who had watched the world end at her side, who’d slammed his foot on the gas pedal as the missiles fell on the city, who'd saved both their lives. The boy who had, like her, lost everything in a matter of minutes, everything they'd known reduced to nothing but dush and ash.
There is still love there, even though it wasn’t enough. Part of her wonders if things had been different, if she hadn’t pushed them both to the ranger track, if she’d loved him more, or loved him differently, or if he’d chosen to stay, or if she’d asked him to stay—
In the end, it doesn't matter. He’s gone.
Travis brings her an ice pack after. She takes it and presses it to her mouth and cheek. Now that the adrenaline has faded, she can feel each ache and throb of all the blows she took. She’s going to look like a canvas of bruises in the morning.
Laura doesn’t know what to make of him. He’d been silent the entire time she cried, looking hesitant and helpless and deeply uncomfortable. His hand had twitched toward her, as if he wanted to reach for her but thought better of it. But he hadn’t left; he’d just sat with her until her breathing slowed and she came back to herself.
Now he just looks at her, and his mouth compresses before he says, “You're off-duty.”
It takes a moment for his words to sink in. Then:
“What?” She gives him an incredulous look. He had goaded her into this fight, told her he was sorry her ex-boyfriend was dead, and now he was punishing her for grieving? She says, voice still hoarse from crying, “You can't do that.”
“I just did.”
“But why—”
“It's not up for discussion.”
Laura lets out a frustrated growl. “Travis—”
She doesn’t know why she calls him by his first name. She doesn’t know when she started thinking of him as Travis and not as Officer Hackett. It just slips out, and it catches them both off-guard.
Travis just blinks at her, and then recovers.
“I want you to see Dr. Hill,” he says, referring to the therapist stationed at the academy. At the look on her face, he adds, “This isn't a punishment. But when you’ve been cleared, you can report to me why I’m right to pull you from your training.”
Laura drags her feet to each appointment, but she goes to see the damn therapist.
It takes her a week to get cleared to return to duty, conditional on biweekly check-ins on top of the routine assessments that every ranger candidate is required to attend.
She finds Travis out on the loading dock, two stories high, resting his forearms on the rail overlooking the decommissioned Delta Wrangler. His only acknowledgement of her presence is a glance in her direction when she approaches.
The Jaegers loom larger than life as monsters carved out of precious metals and electric circuits rather than flesh and bone. Creations built by human hands to combat the inhuman, weapons of war built to destroy.
There are many who revere both the machine and their pilots, but there are also those who welcome the arrival of the kaiju. Fringe cults across the world have taken the kaiju as a sign of the end times, and there are others who have built altars out of the colossal skeletons left behind in the wreckage. She’s seen them in the cities, the red and black robes of the BuenaKai followers in their temples of ruin.
Laura still remembers the first time she saw the Delta Wrangler. She had just turned twenty, two years into a university degree that felt meaningless with the end of the world looming ahead.
The kaiju called the Destroyer had emerged from the breach, heading toward the west coast of Mexico with projected landfall on Puerto Vallerta.
Delta Wrangler had been deployed along with one other Jaeger to intercept. The fight had been broadcasted on all news stations, and she'd watched it on a livestream on her phone. The Jaeger had wielded a wicked combination of a chainsaw arm and plasma cannons that ended with the kaiju bisected on the shores of Puerto Vallerta.
The drones had swept in to stream the image of the pilots. The Hackett brothers. The Pan Pacific Defense Corps had been pushing their recruitment hard in those days, and everyone knew who all the pilots were at the time. Chris Hackett had an easy, confident smile that made him the public image of the PPDC for a time, but it was Travis Hackett’s quiet resolve that caught her attention. He rarely spoke in interviews, letting Chris take the lead most of the time. When asked why he decided to join the PPDC, his answer had simply been, To keep my family alive.
Saving the world, protecting the future—all the lofty ideals the PPDC had promoted, but it’s this one thing that Laura could understand. Something achievable, understandable. She didn’t know if she would be able to save the world, but she did know that she wanted to be able to save the ones she loved. And she’d been tired of feeling helpless.
The next week, she'd submitted her application to the PPDC.
“I’ve seen videos of her in action,” Laura says, looking at the Mark-2 Jaeger. “She’s incredible.”
“She is,” Travis agrees, a wistful note in his voice.
It’s been a couple years since he stepped down from piloting, handing the reigns over to the youngest brother, Bobby. Chris and Bobby Hackett pilot the towering tank of a Jaeger docked at the Anchorage Shatterdome, a red and navy beast called the Hellion Bruiser.
“Would you ever pilot again?”
He lets out a short laugh, as if the idea were ridiculous. “My Jaeger days are done. Too old.”
“You beat my ass pretty good for an old man.”
His lips pull to the side in a hint of a smile that she so rarely gets to see. It’s strangely humanising, she thinks. Another glimpse of the man behind the hard-ass instructor who runs them through combat strategies and life-or-death simulation case studies. “You needed it,” he says, and glances over his shoulder at her. “Heard you got cleared today.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
It’s nearly physically painful to say it. Laura steps up to the rail next to him, leaning her back against it. “You were right.”
To his credit, he doesn’t look smug. He’s got his teacher face on, serious and patient. “Why?”
She huffs. “Really?”
He raises his eyebrows, clearly expecting a response.
Laura relents. “If I bring that kind of emotion into the drift, it could cause a misalignment at best. At worst, I could harm my partner, or trigger the Jaeger to fire around me.”
He nods. “I know it’s hard, believe me.”
“Have you ever had that happen? Lose control while piloting?”
“Yeah. It ain’t pretty. If you misalign on the field, you’re a sitting duck for a kaiju to rip you apart. Everyone deals with their shit in their own way. But if you’re going to step in a Jaeger, you need to be able to handle it. Not take it out on other people.”
She takes a breath and exhales slowly. “I’m trying.”
“I know you are.” He rests his hand on her shoulder for a moment, before he turns and heads for the stairs. “Welcome back, cadet.”
She feels the weight of his hand linger even after he’s moved away, and she remembers another time, another touch that’s burned into her memory.
“Wait,” she says, catching up to him. “When we were sparring…”
Travis stops and turns around. It’s a stark difference, looking at him now. The easy warmth of their conversation is gone; any ground she's gained with him is lost. His expression is stone, a warning carved into the lines of his face. “It’s not gonna happen again.”
Laura presses forward. “I’ve never sparred with anyone like that. It was almost like—like—”
She doesn’t say it, but she knows. She knows instinctually that they’re drift compatible in a way that’s not about skill, not about adapting to a partner. It’s a natural synergy between two people. Something in her recognises something in him.
And there is something between them. She's not imagining it.
His thumb on her mouth. The darkness of his pupils, wide on hers. The surprised curl of heat. Something she hasn't felt in a long time.
She hadn’t realised how much she missed that feeling. That sense of curiosity that gets all tangled up with wanting, that feeling of being connected with someone on a level that shouldn’t make any sense at all, but it does. And she’d felt that, strangely, with him.
“Laura.”
It’s the second time that she’s ever heard him say her name. Not cadet, not Kearney. With that one word, she can tell.
He feels it, too.
“It’s not gonna happen again,” he repeats, and he walks away.