Fight the Hurricane

by acequid

Summary:

You said, Dani, your best friend, your other half, your partner in crime, your partner-in-all-things, Dani, would you rather be a pop star or save the world?

And Dani, your roommate, your other brain cell, your flutter-beating heart, had said, Fucking, be a pop star.

Notes:

우리 시작하자

Chapter 1: The Shatterdome

Sophia was actually in Manila at the start of the end of the world, which isn’t something a lot of people can say. Most of the people who could say it are dead. 

She was home for the semester break trying to install Solidworks on her dad’s old desktop computer when Hundun heaved itself out of the ocean, trailing algae and fishing line and Kaiju Blue. She didn’t hear it from the news; she heard it from the sirens, and then the jets and the explosions. Her mom was down the street at the pharmacy, trying to find more ankle wrap for the boys. They kept injuring themselves playing sports.

Sophia remembers the way the ground shook. Thinking it was an earthquake for one blissful second, until the roar that cracked the sky. Knowing something was wrong, and smelling iron and smoke and the depths of the sea. She remembers the lights flickering and going out. 

Maybe it was naive, in retrospect, to not have guessed, but – Trespasser was six months ago, and on the other side of the world. Trespasser was never supposed to happen again.

 Her younger brother had been in the basement playing on the Xbox, and she’d run down there and held him in the dark for a full day, waiting for the screams outside to stop. She remembers the glowing screen of his phone lighting up his eye sockets from below, and the way he’d gripped her hand like he hadn’t since he was six years old. She remembers feeling both very old and very young. Mostly she remembers being scared.

The internet was down, and their phones weren’t connecting to any networks. Her dad had been in Cebu for business. Her mom at the pharmacy. Her older brother had been at a volleyball tournament, on the beach.

 

 

HOST: What do you have to say to people who don’t believe in the legitimacy of the civilian ranger recruitment program?

L. RAJ: [LAUGHS]

D. AVANZINI: [LAUGHS]

L. RAJ: Legitimacy? Dani, do you think this is because we were pop stars?

D. AVANZINI: Hey! Were?

L. RAJ: Look, Tim. We saved L.A. yesterday. Sydney in September. Personally, I’m hoping they ship us to Hawaii tomorrow. 

HOST: [SOTTO] It’s Tom, actually…

D. AVANZINI: We get this question like every two weeks. Sorry, I just don’t get it. Like, girl. We’re hunting actual monsters.

L. RAJ: Killing!

D. AVANZINI: Right – we’re killing them. Lowest collateral damage stats in the entire fleet. Uh, no civilian casualties yesterday, by the way. [AUDIENCE CHEERS]

L. RAJ: And people just want to talk about Gnarly!

D. AVANZINI: Right, that. That part.

L. RAJ: We’ll say it for the last time. The civilian scouting program was a success. Turns out, ten years of living and working together every single day makes people pretty drift compatible.

D. AVANZINI: Ok, we get it, we were pop stars.

L. RAJ: Which is awesome.

D. AVANZINI: Which is awesome! Now we kill Kaiju. Still awesome, I think, yeah? [AUDIENCE CHEERS]

L. RAJ: Right! Right! Let me hear you!

HOST: Anything else you’d like to say to the people of the world?

L. RAJ: Well, actually, yes! 

D. AVANZINI: Yes!

L. RAJ: [TURNS TO CAMERA 1] Hey, guys. So, about Gilded Dream–

D. AVANZINI: We love the name.

L. RAJ: We love the name! It’s so…

D. AVANZINI: Inspiring.

L. RAJ: Right! Inspiring. Um. But it’s just not…how shall we say…

D. AVANZINI: It’s just not cunt, guys.

L. RAJ: It’s not cunt.

D. AVANZINI: We can do better.

L. RAJ: We should do better. It is like, our civic duty to do better. [FRANTIC ACTIVITY FROM STAFF BEHIND THE SCENES] Don’t mind them. They didn’t know we were doing this. [WINKS]

D. AVANZINI: Good morning, people of the world. We’re rebranding.

L. RAJ: We’re rebranding! Starting today, say hello to the pilots of the newly renamed–

Gabriela falls in the shallows of Tokyo Bay, sundered shoulder to hip and bleeding sparks the size of flares. She falls slow: joints locking up and shutting down in sectors. Right ankle. Right knee. Left knee. Colossal actuators burning out in the shattered remains of the left hip. The jerky start-stop inevitability of a mountain collapsing under its own weight. 

Sophia is watching a deliberate, controlled, final re-routing of emergency power. She thinks, Someone in there knows what they’re doing.

Only a thousand kilometers from Tokyo to Busan: the broadcast in the Busan Shatterdome mess hall is crystal clear. Sophia and five hundred engineers, soldiers, and PPDC personnel let their breakfasts steam off into a cold morning as Gabriela’s pilots put her down in the water.

Most of what they’re getting is helicopter footage as the massive impact wave rolls out and swamps the Port of Tokyo. Unhelpful. Sophia scans the screens embedded in the mess walls until she finds a ground view: some Kaiju-chaser with a phone and a death wish streaming from a rooftop. 

Okay. The Jaeger’s in bad shape. But no visible reactor leakage – no meltdown sirens, no self-destruct protocol. Shredded hydraulics and warped chassis panels but only a fractured conn-pod, not breached. Well, obviously. Someone had to pilot her back to shore. God, Sophia wants the telemetry from this mission on her datapad like, five minutes ago. But LOCCENT for this mission is obviously the Tokyo Shatterdome, and Sophia doesn’t know anyone currently posted there.

It’s gotta be bad though. It looks bad. Three thousand tons of machine scrapped and facedown in a spreading pool of oil, ten-billion-dollar shield discarded and resting somewhere on the seabed in the middle of Tokyo Bay. The fresh carcass of a Cat-III oozing Kaiju Blue into the waters beyond the miracle mile, fish already floating belly-up to the surface. 

Gabriela is long-overdue for a reconstructive overhaul. Sophia had pulled her logs as soon as the dispatch order went public, three hours ago. Around the room, people are already making bets. Anchorage has been taking a lot of the chop-shop cases lately. But Gabriela has a strong record, and popular pilots. Sophia doubts the PPDC would pull the plug on her, especially when she coded on a technically successful mission.

“She’s coming here,” Manon says disinterestedly, from across the long table. She could be talking to anyone, tucking into her powdered eggs like that. But then she says, “Don’t cream yourself,” and smirks around her next bite. So Sophia knows she’s talking to her. 

Technically speaking, Sophia doesn't need to get up as early as she does. 

She has a little digital clock display on her nightstand with a hacked-together LCD screen that shows a video of a coral reef. Not regulation – an extra drain on her daily power ration that means she usually has to get dressed in the dark. But in Cebu Shatterdome the engineer quarters were built closer to the surface: Sophia had a half-window there that let the light in. When she first arrived in Busan, she would sometimes wake in pitch-darkness gasping and tangled in the sheets – back in the basement with her brother, feeling the ground shake with Hundun’s thunderous footsteps, waiting for the ceiling to crumble and collapse and bury them in dust.

So she started plugging the clock in.

The ocean picture is still dim when she rolls out of bed and pulls on her running shoes; all the fish are somewhere else, asleep. She makes her way through the deserted corridors of the barracks and up four levels in the lift, and then sets out around the asphalt perimeter of the Shatterdome in the predawn chill.

Sophia doesn’t need to get up as early as she does because there isn’t, actually, that much work to do in Busan. They’re backline. No Kaiju has reached mainland Korea since Atticon, three years ago. There are only two Jaegers on the whole base, and only one of them – Echo Saber, wrecked in Hong Kong last month – even needs repairs.

Sophia isn’t really here for Echo Saber. Sophia is here to babysit Debut Dawn.

That’s mean. She’s not, like, bitter. Her heartbeat is pounding steadily and she’s working into her sixth kilometer and there’s a pain flaring up under her kneecap and – she has nothing against the team, for the record. She loves Megan and Yoonchae. She has no doubt that they’re capable, that they’d be great rangers if another Atticon made landfall. But Marshal Briones sent her here from Cebu a year ago to retrofit Debut Dawn, which she did, which she did in six months, and she still hasn’t been called back.

Sophia rounds the corner of the barracks and there it is, though, and it’s hard not to feel a fierce burst of pride: the colossal arch of Launching Bay 1, and all twenty-five stories of Debut Dawn standing silent sentry, face to the sea. 

God. Sophia is good at her job.

Debut is in perfect condition – arguably better than when she first emerged from the Daejeon Crucible almost four years ago. The first Jaeger entirely developed by Korea, she’d answered the call when Atticon clawed its way out of the Han river and the Kaiju sirens started blaring in Seoul. 

The Atticon fight is still studied at the Ranger Academy as the most critical example of cog-desync in the entire War. 

Debut’s pilots had slipped their neural handshake and lost their lives in the last-ditch self-destruct they pulled to end the battle. Sophia remembers watching the pulse of blinding white light bloom on the news when she was still at Cebu. She remembers the hush that fell over the room.

Busan spent the next two years resuscitating Debut’s wreck; then Sophia got her hands on her. 

In the time since, Sophia’s team has implemented a near-complete overhaul: a new Mark-3 reactor core, titanium-alloy armor plates from Germany, and a weapons system ripped straight from the Mark-4s coming off the line in Shenzhen. 

Debut is rebuilt, functioning at 100% efficiency, and spotless. She has new pilots and a dedicated engineering team and a low-risk station. 

And Sophia doesn’t need to be here.

When she makes it back to her quarters, she keeps the overheads off and showers in the dim orange of the running lights embedded in the floor of the bathroom. The enormous generators for the whole base hum almost imperceptibly ten levels beneath her feet. It’s peaceful; she just barely remembers not to sing.

After, she makes sure the bathroom door is shut tight, and then turns the fluorescents on above the sink. She saves her electricity for her Dyson Plasmawrap 2000. 

One guess – not regulation. But Sophia is not siphoning, she is not drilling a hole into the cinderblock wall and splicing the wires back there. She is doing this all by the book. The PPDC engineering uniform is a shapeless, grey, polyester jumpsuit: she is doing this to remain human.

Hair blown out, potato sack on, she makes coffee in her kitchen: the cramped corner behind the door with a single portable gas burner. It’s her PPDC-allotted instant ration, plus the extra that Yoonchae gives her every week. It’s basically wet dirt, but she’s pretty sure they’re getting some K-Lab chemtech to spike it with extra caffeine or maybe straight adrenaline, because it always seems to do the trick. 

She pours her thermos and leaves the rest of the pot cooling on the table, and then she eases out into the hallway and goes to work.

“Boo,” says Megan, when the pneumatics on Debut’s conn-pod hiss open. Sophia had checked the cameras, though, and already knew she was in there. Megan is wearing PPDC-branded sweatpants and a wrinkled Yonsei University hoodie that swallows her hands, and there are dark bags under her eyes.

When Sophia first met Megan, she had choppy pink bangs and whisker dimples and enough energy in her body to single-handedly power Debut’s reactor. That had been almost exactly where they’re standing now, except Sophia had been up on a stepladder installing radar in the ceiling, and Megan had been coming through the hatch of her new Jaeger for the first time, side-by-side with her copilot.

Now, Megan still has her dimples when she smiles. But her hair is icy blonde at the tips, and Sophia has seen her cry.

“You don’t have clearance to be in here right now,” Sophia says, which she isn’t really expecting to work, but Debut is currently garrisoned and technically under engineering jurisdiction, so she has certain responsibilities. 

Megan pouts. “Sophia, this is literally my car.” 

“That’s a fire hazard,” Sophia points to the sleeping bag and electric heater tucked under the control panel. And then, softer: “You can’t keep sleeping in here, Meg.”

“I’m actually not doing a lot of sleeping,” Megan says with a pained grin, but then her face falls. “Sorry. I know. It’s just – we ran sims yesterday. You know how it is.” Sophia doesn’t, not really. But she knows the theory.

“Ghost drift?” Sophia holds out her thermos, and winces sympathetically when Megan splutters on her first sip.

“Argh! Jesus, that tastes like ass.” 

“I know. Triple shot,” says Sophia, and then ignores the pointed look Megan gives her. “Go get breakfast. ”

“In a minute.” Megan bites the inside of her cheek. “Yoonchae usually goes early.” 

“You guys did simulations last week, and I thought everything was fine?”

A muscle twitches in Megan’s jaw. She will never be a good poker player, but that’s fine; gambling is prohibited in the Ranger Corps. To whatever extent that’s ever stopped anyone. She says, “You sent Daesung to Australia last week.”

Oh. That’s right – Sophia had forgotten. She did send Yoonchae’s fiancé to Sydney last week. She’d needed new power cores for Echo Saber. And Megan had needed a break. 

Megan smiles weakly. “Ghost drift is weaker in here, I dunno. There’s like, interference. Maybe someone should do research on that.”

“Oh, Megan,” Sophia sighs. “Go to breakfast, babe. You can’t keep living like this.”

“As soon as I figure out any other way, I will let you know, trust me.” Megan gathers up her things and sidles past Sophia, then stops short in the doorway. “Sophia.”

“Hm? Yeah?”

“Triple shot?” Megan nods at the thermos in her hand. “I thought you could only get Yoonchae to give up her ration.”

“I–” Sophia feels her face get hot, which is ridiculous, because obviously Megan does not know anything, and also, she is not even doing anything wrong. Megan is grinning though – a little evilly, but still, for real – and so maybe it’s fine. She needs this. “Whatever,” Sophia says lamely. “Leave me alone, you weirdo. You’re the one sleeping in a conn-pod like a – a pod person. Hey, check your schedule and take a shower. Don’t you know what’s happening today?”

Megan’s grin has extended to the neighborhood of shit-eating. But she still says, “What? What’s happening today?” 

“This is what happens when you mute your datapad.”

“Sophia!”

“Gabriela,” says Sophia, and watches Megan’s eyes light up. “Gabriela is coming here.”

Gabriela is coming here. 

Gabriela is coming now, and for some inexplicable reason they’ve all crammed into the same lift — the whole 50-person welcoming party — so Sophia has exactly five seconds when the loading doors crank open to worm her way through the crush and catch up to Marshal Paramo as they all spill out onto the landing pad.

The Marshal doesn’t exactly groan when she sees Sophia approaching, but it’s a near thing. 

“Officer Laforteza—“

“Good morning, Marshal,” Sophia says, and salutes stiffly. “I was just wondering if you’ve had the chance to review my transfer request.”

The Marshal sighs. “Sophia, you don’t have to salute me, you’re a civilian.”

“Yes ma’am, sorry ma’am,” Sophia says, and drops her arm. “It’s just – I know Cebu was short-staffed when I left, and I’m sure they could use the extra hands after Sawtooth. I’d be happy to submit another request, or undergo a performance review, if you find anything about my conduct unsatisfactory.”

Sophia has put too many years into school and garages and workshops and hangers to not say it this way, to not know the protocols and what’s allowed and how the whole machine works. But what she really wants to say is: Just send me home. 

“Your conduct is exemplary, Officer,” says the Marshal tiredly. “You know that. I’m sorry, I can’t talk about this right now.” The drone of a helicopter drops in low overhead, and the whole crowd jostles, trying to catch the first glimpse of the incoming pilots. Marshal Paramo moves to join Megan and Yoonchae at the front of the congregation, and Sophia just watches her go, a stone in the stream of the river. 

“What was that?” Manon leans in to say it, low and right into her ear, and Sophia jumps.

“What are you doing here?” Sophia’s startled; it maybe comes out more aggressively than she means to. A flicker of surprise, and – hurt? – flits over Manon’s face, before she smooths it over. Regret sinks in Sophia’s stomach. She didn’t mean to––but this is just like Manon. Why does she have to take everything so personally? Why is Sophia always the bad guy? Manon does not lead any engineering teams, and she is not senior staff. There is no reason for her to be here right now. 

“I know them,” Manon says cooly. For a second, Sophia cannot at all fathom who she might mean.

“What?”

Manon rolls her eyes, and the twist of regret in Sophia’s stomach tightens. “The pilots, Sophia. Gabriela’s rangers. Dani and Lara?” 

Dani? Sophia has time to think – Ranger Daniela Avanzini? – before the PPDC bird clears the top of the Shatterdome behind them and roars overhead, buffeting the landing pad with downwash. 

For a minute, everything is noise and wind. Despite that, the helicopter touches down relatively delicately, and everyone manages to form ragged but acceptable lines behind the Marshal and Busan’s resident rangers.

As the rotors slow to a stop and the helicopter’s engines whine down, Manon leans in again. “And the Marshal asked me to be here,” she says, casually. Sophia can only blink at her, because that obviously doesn’t make any sense, re: Manon is not a real member of this base. Manon is smiling placidly, like she doesn’t know the kind of rapid mental arithmetic Sophia’s just launched into – which is, of course, just an act, because Manon knows exactly what she’s doing at all times.

Doing her absolute best to get under Sophia’s skin.

But before Sophia has a chance to ask anything else, Gabriela’s pilots step out of the helicopter.

The first thing Sophia notices is that they are both wearing their right arms in matching slings, strapped across their chests. The second is that Lara Raj and Daniela Avanzini look like superstars. 

There is no other word for it.

First of all, their red and black service uniforms are clearly custom. The PPDC doesn’t manufacture cropped bomber jackets; Sophia would have known. Both women are wearing aviators from their limited-edition Ray Ban/Shield of the Pacific brand collab: Daniela’s resting in her hair, Lara’s flashing in the sun as they strut in perfect synchronization across the landing pad like something out of a movie. Daniela is snapping gum, lips shiny enough at fifty meters to have Sophia reaching self-consciously into her back pocket, just to check she’s still carrying her emergency gloss. Lara Raj has evidently made some deal with God to set the flawless black waves of her hair bouncing and tumbling over her shoulders in slow-motion.

A murmur ripples through the gathered crowd as everyone unconsciously takes a half-step forward, drawn to the raw magnetism of two real-life heroes. 

They’re popular – of course they’re popular. They were already pop-star famous before they ever started saving the world. And then they did start saving the world. 

And, obviously, it turns out they are both just as gorgeous as they are in the interviews.

“Oh my god,” Sophia hears Megan whisper excitedly, shifting a little on her toes, and Yoonchae elbows her. 

As they draw closer, both sets of pilots and the Marshal snap salutes at each other. 

“Welcome to Busan, Rangers,” says Marshal Paramo. Despite the propwash, Sophia thinks it’s actually possible not a single hair has shifted from her bun. “We’re sorry you’re here, but glad to have you.”

Lara opens her mouth to say something, but before she gets the chance, Megan is jumping in, stumbling a little over her words.

“Hi! I’m Megan! Oh my god, I’m such a Newcrazy fan – I have both your original photocards from SIS, actually, would it be, like, totally insane if I asked for your autographs? I mean, wait, sorry, this is––”

“My name is Yoonchae Jeung,” says Yoonchae. Her eyes are narrowed. “We beat your Onibaba sim record. In Academy.”

“Yoonchae–” Megan grits out the side of her mouth, but Lara is just laughing.

“That was you guys? Fire. Sohey actually sent me an email when that happened, did I tell you, Dani? I had to send him fifty bucks.”

“Uh, yeah, I remember,” says Daniela. Half her attention is fixed on the crowd; Sophia is trying to figure out if she’s wearing contacts, or if her eyes are really just that hazel. “My fifty bucks, by the way. Don’t worry, I put it on your tab.” 

“I love you, pookie,” says Lara. “You and your imaginary tab. You’re so good to me.”

“Thanks for having us, Marshal,” says Dani respectfully, and Sophia decides: definitely contacts. “We’ve heard great things about your team.”

“And we love being back in Korea!” adds Lara happily, throwing a finger heart to the crowd, “Saranghaeyo!”

Yoonchae’s nose wrinkles, but Lara manages to pull a half-embarrassed cheer from the gathered personnel, which Sophia thinks might have been the whole point. 

“That was an impressive job you ladies pulled in Tokyo,” says the Marshal. “God knows we need more pilots like you two on the Rim. We’ll do our best to get you patched up and rotated on out of here as soon as possible.” The Marshal turns and gestures for Sophia to join them. “I want to introduce you to our chief of engineering: this is Officer Laforteza.”

If there’s anything she knows in life, it’s a cue. “Call me Sophia,” Sophia says with a generous smile, stepping forward to shake hands. Decorum takes over: Sophia is no stranger to hotshot pilots with wrecked rides. Okay, so these particular pilots are more attractive than most. Sophia is still the one with their futures in her hands.

“Sophia,” says Lara Raj deliberately, and raises a slitted eyebrow above the mirrored surfaces of her shades. Sophia feels suddenly like the ground she’s standing on is more unsteady that she realized. “I’m Lara.” Lara smiles, and bites her lip a little. “But you can call me whatever you want.”

“Oh, god,” Daniela groans. Sophia feels her face get hot; all at once, she is hyper-aware of Manon standing behind her.

Sophia gets flirted with. It’s not a big deal. And the last person on earth who should care at all about that fact is Manon. And since Sophia doesn’t care, and Manon doesn’t care, then nobody is caring, and it’s all a big useless stupid wash of an event.

Sophia has been shaking Lara’s hand for a while. She lets go.

“I think I’ll stick with Lara,” says Sophia apologetically, but – is that too harsh? “It’s pretty,” she adds, and winks, and that seems like a good balance. 

Manon is somewhere behind her. Sophia wishes she could stop thinking about that for more than one second.

She wishes she could see what Manon’s face is doing.

That’s when PPDC Ranger First Class Daniela Avanzini catches sight of someone in the crowd and shrieks, at the top of her lungs, in front of the Marshal and the gathered crowd and the whole Shatterdome and everybody: “MANZANITA?”

Sophia turns around.

Manon grins. “Surprise, bitch,” she says, and then catches Daniela as she crashes into her. And Manon is giggling, spinning Daniela once in the air, arms tight around her waist, eyes alight. Laugh lines scrunching around her nose.

Sophia blinks.

Sophia feels––

“I thought you were in Berlin!” Daniela says breathlessly, stepping back and holding Manon at arms length, looking her up and down. 

Lara says, “Okay, what the fuck, you’re even hotter outside Dani’s head.”

“She’s called us, Lara, you’ve literally seen her before.”

So Manon like, knows them. So they’re friends. It’s just a lot of information for Sophia to wrap her head around at once. By information she mostly means the way Manon is holding Daniela’s uninjured hand and swinging her arm back and forth.

 There are a couple more introductions as the Marshal beckons over various senior staff, and no one even seems to care that any formality to this proceeding has been blown all to hell. The mystique of the Gabriela pilots is now thoroughly shattered, and it seems like everyone is falling over themselves to catch a glimpse or interact with celebrity. 

 Daniela is somehow actively meeting people as she hangs around Manon’s neck with one arm. Lara is taking photographs with some of the younger personnel, and camera flashes start lighting up the helipad. Megan has acquired a large pink binder, but she must have dropped it at some point because there’s a knot of activity where a small group of people are helping her scavenge an intimidating number of scattered photocards off the ground.

It’s exciting. It’s the most excitement the Shatterdome has seen in months. 

Yoonchae comes to stand by Sophia, arms crossed, mouth drawn in a tight line. “This is too much drama,” she says petulantly. Sophia agrees. But also – God. Sometimes Yoonchae sounds so young. Sophia forgets, sometimes, that Yoonchae would just be out of college, if this were a world where she finished college. If she wasn’t accepted into the Ranger Academy halfway through university, hadn’t dropped everything for the chance to be a hero. 

Yoonchae will be a hero. Probably, someday. Sophia just hopes it’s not for a while.

And then all the Rangers are swept away by the Marshal to the front of the crowd, and Sophia is left with a gaggle of hyped-up professionals and one glowing Manon, who is beaming with an expression so open it’s doing something funny to Sophia’s pulse.

Sometimes Manon makes Sophia feel, like, abnormal. Like there’s something wrong with her, in some system of her body that she can’t identify. Like she can’t remember how to operate normally.

“I didn’t know you knew them,” Sophia says quietly. After all the excitement it feels inadequate, but she’s not exactly sure what she would rather say instead. You could have told me? Why didn’t you tell me? I know things between us are – but if you wanted to – I would have listened – it’s all a jumbled mess in her head and she needs her journal, she needs to work this out on paper, since the one thing that might possibly help is also the one thing she categorically cannot do. Which is talk to Manon about this.

For obvious reasons.

Manon is just looking at her with a bemused expression. She says, “Okay. Why would you have?”

The thing is, Manon is not even part of the team.

Manon is on retainer from the Berlin Crucible. She’s here to port a new J-OS update into every wrecked Jaeger that passes through Busan Shatterdome’s six launching bays, and Sophia really does not understand why they couldn’t have accomplished the same thing by mailing over a flash drive. 

She’s mentioned it to the Marshal – I’ve got software techs that could do this in their sleep – only to be stonewalled, which has been happening more and more frequently these days. It’s code word classified, Officer. Bannerman stays. 

So Sophia pieces together that Manon maybe wrote the update, and there’s something in it that nobody is supposed to see. Which doesn’t make any sense, because every bolt, panel, and line of operating code for a hundred-billion-dollar war machine has to pass a dozen expert committees and a national leader’s desk before even making it onto a production line.

And also, Manon’s computer engineering degree is a sham.

That’s really what Sophia can’t stop thinking about, staring down at the message on her datapad in disbelief. Manon was a tech influencer. The PPDC fast-tracked her degree so they could hire her for recruiting videos. Manon spent the last three years of the war in Berlin doing R&D for the Mark-4s; she hasn’t seen combat, she hasn’t done field repairs, she doesn’t know the protocols for decontaminating a wreck so the entire hangar doesn’t fill with Kaiju bloodmist. She is not the chief engineer for the entire Shatterdome.

But she is leading the Gabriela restoration. Apparently. And the Marshal is dropping this on Sophia via email.

There are a number of things that Sophia doesn’t particularly like about Manon, but the most egregious one is probably her unprofessionalism. By this she means blatant disregard of safety procedures. By this she means: Manon, white tank, top-half of her PPDC jumpsuit unzipped to her navel and hanging down around her legs, face shield, leather gauntlets, bare arms exposed to the spitting sparks from the arc welder she’s using to cut into the side of one of Gabriela’s 4-meter-long severed fingers.

You’re not really supposed to disturb someone holding a live arc welder, but Sophia marches over and cranks the voltage down on the power supply so the torch dies before she taps Manon on the shoulder. Peripherally, she registers that Manon is kind of sweaty, and her tank top is sticking to her back in places and turning see-through. 

Manon slides the face shield on the helmet up, and Sophia is surprised that she doesn’t even look annoyed by the interruption. “Look at this thing,” Manon says breathlessly, eyes shining with excitement. Baby hairs are sticking to her damp forehead under the edge of the helmet. “We could fit a whole rocket in here.” 

“Put your clothes on,” Sophia blurts, and then swallows hard. Not what she’d meant to say. 

Manon raises a perfectly straight brow. “Careful what you wish for,” she says, which Sophia ignores.

“Did you know?” Sophia isn’t angry. It isn’t Manon’s fault. It’s just – “Did you know, Manon. Did the Marshal prep you for this?”

“She dropped it on me this morning,” Manon says calmly, but something hard is creeping into the edge of her tone. “What do you want, Sophia?”

“Did you clear this with intake? They did an acid wash before you started cutting?” Sophia means, of course, the finger, laid out laterally across two work benches and rising above their shoulders. 

There are just all these protocols for a reason, and fingers and hands usually come back to the workshop with higher levels of toxicity, given how Jaegers usually fight: melee and smash-y. And the preliminary acid washes help to counteract excess ammonia and coagulate residual Kaiju Blue and Sophia’s done this a dozen times by now, and if Manon needed any help or a consultation, or something, she really should have just asked.

“I’m not actually an idiot,” Manon says. Her expression has gone very stony – Sophia thinks of it as her mask, when she gets like this. She kind of gets like this a lot. She’s always hearing something in Sophia’s words that she didn’t actually say.

“I obviously don’t think you’re an idiot,” Sophia says, strained. “I just wish you would have run this by me. Like, just your work schedule. Or your repair plan; I need to know who I can keep on Echo’s day shift. And how much hangar space you need to reserve, starting Monday––”

“Okay,” Manon cuts her off coolly. “But you aren’t the lead on this. And I don’t report to you.”

Sophia starts to feel an eye twitch coming on. This is only technically true. This is only true in a technical sense because Manon is still not officially stationed here, still has paperwork assigning her to a corner office in Berlin, in a steel-and-glass Crucible compound overlooking a winding river, with quarters that get sixteen hours of sunlight, and a supervisor doing God-knows-what for six months while Manon makes Sophia’s life just a little more difficult every day.

Sophia says, “The Marshal––”

“Called me. Told me to handle this. And you don’t have to worry about my roster because you’re not on it.”

“Manon. Be serious.” Sophia feels her blood pressure rising. “This is the highest-functioning Mark-3 in the fleet, and we’re talking about a fifty-eight percent reconstruction, not including weapons recovery, and who knows what that shield’s going to look like once they get it back on land. We both know your best move is to just sign me on. You’re – I mean, no offense, but – you’re a programmer!”

Most of the time, Manon manages to take offense when Sophia is not even saying anything insulting. The problem is, sometimes Sophia does say something insulting. 

“Whatever, Sophia,” Manon says, tone flat in a way that Sophia knows means the conversation is over. “Move. Stage one of my repair plan is getting through this fucking armor.”

“You should try pulse arcs,” Sophia says before she can shut herself up, and Manon looks at her sharply. And honestly that is really the trajectory of most of their interactions: Sophia not shutting up, and Manon looking at her.

[A DECADE OF WAR: REMEMBERING THE FALLEN CITIES]

A New York Times retrospective on the largest worldwide population centers lost in the dark days.

SAN FRANCISCO

OAKLAND

CABO SAN LUCAS

MELBOURNE

MANILA

The twists in the world must be working themselves out because Sophia gets another message from the Marshal sometime in the evening, after dinner, summoning her to Command at her earliest convenience: so, now.

This will be the meeting that fixes everything. She is suddenly as certain of it as she has been of anything. Gabriela is going on her schedule, and once that’s done Marshal Briones has called with her return orders, and Berlin has sent word for –

Something about that thought twinges. It, like, constricts. Sophia’s throat tightens. It’s doing that a lot, lately, and she pushes through it. Everyone is going back to where they are supposed to be, the world set to rights. She is going home.

On the way up to Command, Sophia pokes her head into the Ranger lounge, just to make sure she doesn’t have to chase any star-struck personnel back to their posts. She finds the two pairs of pilots in conversation on the couches: two red bomber jackets draped over the arm of one. Megan looks up when the door opens and waves at Sophia happily.

“It’s psychosomatic,” Lara is saying. “When you’re in your Jaeger, in the drift, you feel everything.”

“Kaiju took our arm off,” says Daniela. “I mean – Gabriela’s arm. But our brains can’t really tell the difference yet.”

“We have to give it a few days,” says Lara.

Megan’s eyes are wide; she is literally sitting on the edge of her seat. “Does it, like, hurt? A lot?”

Lara laughs. “Holy shit, yeah.”

“Like a bitch,” Daniela says. From this angle, all Sophia can see is her hair: it seems healthy. Dark and curly and thick. Probably not dyed. Probably she does not have to fit a whole beauty routine into ten rushed, half-lit minutes every morning. Probably there are lots of perks in Nagasaki, where Gabriela was stationed last, where they were on a record three-offshore-kill streak, and people were throwing parades for them in the streets.

Sophia wasn’t ever a big Newcrazy fan, really. After things didn’t pan out musically in undergrad, it was always a little painful to follow groups like that. She doesn’t know why she’s thinking about that now.

“Wow,” says Yoonchae, and she even looks faintly interested, which is more than she was giving on the helipad. On the couch in between them, Sophia can see that she’s holding Megan’s hand.

Sophia keeps walking.

There’s not much she knows about Megan and Yoonchae that everyone else on the base hasn’t already figured out. Sometimes, all you have to do is look at a Ranger pair and know what the story is going to be. Sometimes Megan watches Yoonchae across a crowded room and Sophia feels like turning away just to give them privacy.

Yoonchae and Daesung got engaged two years ago, just after Yoonchae graduated from the Ranger Academy. Pretty immediately after. Pretty – like, the day after. Sophia has thoughts about this, but it’s not fair to share them with Yoonchae, and it would be cruel to bring it up with Megan. 

There’s no wedding date, yet. Sophia has thoughts about this also. But it’s wartime, and there is, technically, always a small chance every day that Yoonchae will be asked to risk her life to save the world, and ultimately it doesn’t matter that sometimes Sophia bypasses the secure Shatterdome network to browse Pinterest flower arrangements before bed. It’s the apocalypse: everyone has to stay sane somehow.

That’s what she’s thinking as she keys open the door to Command, and Marshal Paramo turns from the window to meet her. Sanity restored. 

“Sophia,” says the Marshal, and all at once, Sophia sees the gravity in her expression, the flyaways escaping from her bun. “Close the door behind you.”

Sophia’s heart sinks straight to the floor.

The Jaeger program is dying. 

Cebu Shatterdome is being decommissioned. So is Anchorage. Lima. Vladivostok. Sophia’s ears are ringing like a bell. Cebu decommissioned. 

Briones got you out, said Marshal Paramo, and everything starts making sick sense – Got you out. Saved your job. Everything is being consolidated. Busan is staying operational, taking most of what resources can be spared from the Northern Hemisphere. 

Sophia was transferred a year ago. So most of what she’s thinking is, How long did any of you know this was coming? 

It will be Hundun all over again: she can see it so clearly. Kaiju coming through the coastal wall all over the world. Tearing through it like tissue paper. Hundun, Trespasser, the charred and smoking exclusion zone where San Francisco used to be, and it’s everywhere. Jaegers in scrapyards. Jaegers rusting at the bottom of the ocean, and nobody left in the world to recover the wrecks. 

Cebu decommissioned: Sophia is running the numbers. They’re keeping Hong Kong – so, two hours away, maybe. Calculating average Kaiju speeds out of the Breach, advance warning, mobilization times… Fucking Hong Kong as the nearest defense to home. Sophia feels sick. Her head is pounding. She feels – they’re at war! Of course it’s expensive, of course it’s inconvenient, of course there are risks, of course there are losses.

Record losses, the Marshal had said bitterly, quoting someone, this year. 

The money is running out. The program is dying. Manon had done some really innovative work with the Mark-4s; she had done more with less. I know you were surprised by the designation. Read her records, Sophia. We need her, now more than ever.

Manon can’t go back to the Berlin Crucible, because there is no more Berlin Crucible. There are no more Crucibles, anywhere. Shenzhen will be the last offline. Striker Eureka will be the final Jaeger ever commissioned.

How long did you know?

Sophia angrily punches in the door code to her quarters, gets inside, slams the door shut and leans her forehead against it, breathing hard. Shuts her eyes. 

Because her lights are already on.

So now, to top it all off, she has to snap–

“You shouldn’t be here.”

“Oh, sorry,” Manon says dryly. “Didn’t realize this had an expiration date. Should I take back all my stuff too?”

“Your stuff–” This is it, this is the very last she can take from this terrible day. It is all bubbling over, frustration, a volcano, unstoppable. She whirls around. “First of all, everything you’re wearing is mine, and you know it.” 

Oh.

So, it turns out Manon isn’t wearing anything at all, actually. She’s stretched out naked on Sophia’s bed, reading something on her datapad. Sophia flushes despite herself.

“Manon.”

“What? Put some clothes on?”

“What if someone had come in! What if I had—been with someone?”

Manon’s eyes flick up at that, and the corner of her mouth tightens slightly. But then she’s back to the datapad, expressionless. “Would you have?” Her tone is completely flat. “Been with someone?”

Sophia is not going to respond to something Manon already knows the answer to. She doesn’t have time. None of them have time, anymore. 

Manon must read it in Sophia’s expression, or maybe in the way she almost kicks her single plastic chair over in an effort to take her shoes off, because she sits up a little in the bed and says, “You heard.”

Sophia rounds on her. “You knew?”

“Just today,” Manon says. She holds her hands up, which has the unfortunate effect of reminding Sophia that she is very naked. “I learned a lot of things just today, okay? Don’t kill me.”

Sophia tries to muster some sense of betrayal, but all she’s managing is a kind of dumb stupefaction. So she is the last one on this base to know anything. So being chief of engineering means nothing. So actually every choice she’s ever made in her life has led her here, to this one inescapable singularity, where maybe a dozen faceless people in the whole world decided that none of those choices ever mattered, and it was always going to end this way.

Sophia says, “I should kick you out.”

“Don’t do that either.” Manon is watching her face carefully, like Sophia is a scared animal that can’t decide whether to flee or strike. Or maybe that’s just how Sophia feels, underground in this bunker: they are all just rabbits in a warren waiting to be flushed to the surface. 

The ground is shaking – she breathes deliberately, in and out – it’s just the generators, deep under their feet. She glances from Manon to the clock on the nightstand: a few sparse fish eddying in a beam of moonlight, a big coral brain.

“Why not?” Sophia manages. She steps over to the wall and flicks the overheads off, resists the urge to ask Manon how long they were on for. She can check her utilities later. 

Edge-lit by the cool blue of the datapad, Manon says, “Because you seem pretty tense right now.” 

“They’re going to kill us.” For the first time in ten years, Sophia realizes dully that she doesn’t even mean the Kaiju. “Cebu is being decommissioned, and Berlin is already offline, and the PPDC is – holy fuck, Manon, we’re all going to die.”

“Uh, yeah. World’s ending, thanks for noticing.” Manon sets the datapad aside, yawns, stretches. Arches her back, arms above her head, breasts pulling high on her chest. Even in the half-light, it’s kind of – obscene. Ridiculous. Unfair. 

Sophia huffs; all the anger in her body transmuting into something else, trickling, pooling. Melting ice. 

“Sophia,” Manon says. Her deep brown eyes, the spray of freckles over her nose, her lips, pink and pursed and saying– “We are all fucking screwed. Just get into bed.”

Sophia gets into bed.

So. 

Okay, so. 

This has always been the easy part for them. Maybe the only thing that’s ever been easy, for them. Sophia climbs over her and feels sort of undignified, but that stops mattering immediately because Manon pulls her down into a long kiss, threading her fingers into Sophia’s hair and cupping the back of her head. Heat radiates from every place Manon is touching her – her lips, her fingers scratching gently against Sophia’s scalp, the long lines of their bodies aligning and pressing together. The tension melts from her forehead-neck-shoulders. Warm static fills Sophia’s head. 

This is how it is.

Manon’s coffee ration in her coffee pot. Manon using half her water and more than half her electricity. Manon interfering with her operations and undermining the chain of command and keeping secrets Sophia is not entitled to, but still manages to feel betrayed by. 

This is the ultimate problem: at the end of the day, at the end of the world, all Sophia wants to do is kiss her.

“You feel so good,” Sophia whispers, and then presses into Manon harder because she didn’t, actually, mean to say that. And it’s so unfair, because Manon never says anything she doesn’t mean.

After, Sophia lies on Manon’s chest and tucks her face in the crook of Manon’s neck and feels their hearts beat in tandem and Manon holds her, drawing lazy patterns on Sophia’s shoulder blade. She feels wrung-out and sated and a pleasant buzz is humming in all her limbs, and usually Manon will let her stay like this until they fall asleep, or until Sophia says something about endorphins or post-coitus.

Sophia has a list of things she’s not allowed to mention after sex. This includes work, which probably, she assumes, extends to the imminent possibility of them not having work, or a planet, in the near future. 

She finds it’s easier to think about it like this. Wrapped up in Manon, it’s easier to think the singularity might not be inescapable after all. The world’s been ending for ten years. They’re still here.

Instead, Sophia shifts a little, tracing Manon’s collarbone with one finger. She says, “Why didn’t you tell me? About Daniela.”

“What do you mean?” Manon doesn’t pull away, but her hand pauses on Sophia’s back. “She’s my friend. I thought…we don’t really talk about stuff like that.”

“Oh,” says Sophia quietly. “I mean, yeah.” 

She lets it go. Manon’s heart thumps steadily under her own. The clock display sits dim and silent, and Sophia breathes in. The world is ending, but it hasn't ended yet. There are still good things, warm things, and she can still fall asleep and expect to wake up in the morning. Her eyelids drift closed. 

Sophia has never let anything go in her life.

In the darkness she mumbles, “You know, you could ask me about my friends, though. I’d tell you.”

“Okay, Sophia,” Manon says sleepily. “I’ll ask you.”

Chapter 2: Just A Memory

Notes:

i just basically think lara raj could save the world

You took the test because everyone was, back then, and no one was getting picked. Sports teams, orchestras – there was that story about Gaga and Leo, who tried it just for movie promo. It was a midnight tattoo. Drunk-calling your ex. The world was ending, you did it for the plot; no one was actually getting chosen. They taped electrodes to your forehead and made you answer questions on either side of a soundproof wall and then it was over, joint insta story: newcrazy could pilot a jaeger / could the becket brothers do gnarly?

The envelope came sealed, hand-delivered, you read it with the front door still open and two PPDC soldiers standing on your lawn. 

The paper in your hand. Two words, bolded, at the top.

You called for her. You said, Dani, your best friend, your other half, your partner in crime, your partner-in-all-things, Dani, would you rather be a pop star or save the world?

And Dani, your roommate, your other brain cell, your flutter-beating heart, had said, Fucking, be a pop star.

But she had come out to stand with you. To read the paper in your hand, the words on the page; you were both high on that helium end-of-the-world feeling. Everyone was taking the test, back then. No one was getting picked. 

You said, Yeah, me too. But I think we have to save the world first.

 

DANIELA ANDREA AVANZINI LLORENTE & LARA RAJAGOPALAN: 

DRIFT COMPATIBLE

They’ve settled.

It’s gorgeous here; the port and the mountains and the sky. And it’s so peaceful. It’s so restorative. That’s the point, right? To get restored? And they love Korea. Holy shit, Lara has missed Olive Young. Her skin gets so good here. And the food is totally unfair. It’s a Shatterdome; it’s a military base, and on the first night in the mess Dani had taken one bite of kimchi jjigae and moaned so loud she’d drawn alarmed looks. Oh, fuck. Lara, this stuff is like poison. It’s like, so good.

Yoonchae had liked that. That’s when she started thawing. 

God, the kids are so cute – Lara wants to win them over. She wants to, like, mentor them. She’s never had a maternal instinct in her life, but this seems pretty close. At least these kids can walk and talk and don’t spew gunk everywhere – but that could be interesting, though, in small doses, now that she thinks about it. Maybe she could fold that into her cool mentor duties. How to save the world and get turnt and not die doing any of it: a seminar with Lara Raj.

Dani keeps saying, We aren’t even that much older than them, which, like. When Newcrazy was on their Asia tour, Yoonchae was still in high school. (Jesus, stop telling me that, says Dani.)

The thing is, there’s not that much alcohol on the base, but there’s always a Guy Who Gets Things. Lara is a certified expert at finding the Guy. Also, when you’ve killed eight Kaiju, people tend to make exceptions for you. They’ve been in Busan for two months and the beginnings of a plan are taking shape in Lara’s mind.

It’d be the kids, obviously. And Manon; she knows how to have fun. So Sophia, then, also. Because Lara wants to have some fun too.

(Girl, don’t, Dani says. Manon would kill you.)

Like Lara doesn’t already know that. That’s not even what she means, anyway. Those two need a seminar she is not equipped to give. But that doesn’t mean she can’t still play around, a little.

Which is all to say – at least Nagasaki had clubs. 

TO: LARA RAJ

YOU ARE MY HERO

Dani’s already on the scaffolding when Lara goes to find her after breakfast, which is just crazy work.

“You whore!” Lara calls up at her, thirty feet in the air. “It’s not your turn!” 

Dani just cackles, welder lit and burning in her hand. “You don’t do the petals right!”

They had to decapitate Gabriela to fix her up. It’s disconcerting: the Jaeger’s massive head suspended low over the floor of Launching Bay 3, thick wires and pneumatic tubing hanging loose out the bottom of her conn-pod like a dangling spinal cord. Dani is halfway up the scaffolding, right where the smooth red titanium of Gabriela’s forehead slopes down into the mirrored gold of her sun-shielded viewport. 

Dani is tattooing Gabriela's eyebrow.

“It’s a rose,” Lara yells back, “it’s all petal.” 

“I said what I said,” Dani replies, and then flips her face shield down and sparks the welder up to a brighter blue.

Lara spares a wave at Manon then, who is also up on the scaffolding and apparently supervising this betrayal. She might also be asleep, though: hoodie drawn in around her face and sunglasses on, sort of slumped against the rail. Maybe Dani dragged her out of bed for this. 

Lara started getting the stars after Turantulos. That one had been majorly fucked up.

Clawhook had been fine; big, ugly, stupid-looking – easy. They all train up on the Onibaba sim; Clawhook had been so similar. Big claws, meet titanium shield. Wham, bam, plasma beam, no losses, perfect debut, hello brand deals, hello Late Night. 

Lara had pushed for SNL. That had been met with about twelve internal memos and a phone call from a three-star general about militaristic integrity, which was sad, but then Mattel collabed with Bandai on a Gabriela model figure, which was awesome. (Gilded Dream, still, back then, which matters a lot to collectors, apparently.) 

Clawhook had been, like, okay: so maybe we can save the world. Maybe we fucking can kill these things, Dani, maybe we are like fucking superheroes. 

(Clawhook, after, had been…there wasn’t any other feeling like it in the world. Nothing. Not debuting, not their first concert, not their first – anything. Thirty-one minutes of life or death, and when the waves settled and the spray cleared and the slack mountain of a kaiju was sinking below the surface, Lara had looked over at Dani, her face pale and sweaty behind the drivesuit helmet, the smile breaking like dawn over her face, and thought – I know. I know. I know.)

Turantulos had been a living nightmare. Just – a big fucking bug. Landfall. Sydney. Sometimes Lara wakes up gasping, dreaming about the feeling of buildings turning to powder under their feet. In a Jaeger, it feels like nothing. Sensation. Pressure in the pedals of the ambulatory rig. She wakes up thinking: they had the warning. The city had time to evacuate. And then she re-checks the position of every Kaiju shelter in Sydney until Dani rolls over and grumbles, Dude, and takes her phone away. 

After Turantulos, Lara had gone out and gotten the two stars on the webbing between her thumb and pointer finger. There are eight, now, and Dani has them too, but back then all Lara remembers is how pissed she had been. 

How do you not tell me? This is so crazy; so you can solo-pilot next time, since that’s what you want so bad. Oh, my god. This obvious fucking couple tattoo, Lara! 

And it hadn’t really been that serious, but also it had been a full two-day fight until Lara dragged her to the shop and threw the money down on the counter. 

Wincing her way through the second star, Dani had said, We could, like, paint her too, or something. It’d be cute, and the vision had hit Lara with the force of a thousand suns.

That would be such a fucking vibe, she’d said, then: Oh my god, Daniela. Rebrand. 

So Gabriela gets roses. Eight of them – well, seven-and-a-half, currently – etched above her viewport in a line, like they’re drawing in a snatched eyebrow. It’s massively cunt. Bandai hates it – what are they supposed to do? Release new molds every time they get a kill? So most of the models just leave the roses off. They’re small, anyway: you can’t even see them from the ground. It’s a fun piece of trivia for interviews. Actually, after every fight, we…

Sometimes, though, at fan meetings, they meet people who do the art themselves. 1/100 scale models with tiny silver dots painstakingly rendered over the eye. Little girls waiting in line with roses in facepaint. Sometimes it makes Dani teary. Okay, fine, sometimes it makes them both emotional. They have to wear this really locked-in waterproof mascara every time they have a fan event; Lara blames the ghost drift. 

It’s December in Busan, and a cold draft blows through the hangar as Lara retreats back to the main complex. It genuinely was her turn, this time, but whatever. She can’t really be assed to climb up there right now. Dani usually does a good job, anyway.

dear gabriela . i live in OHIO now but i used to live in l. a.. thank you for saving my mommy

The beautiful thing is Lara does not even have to plan an unsanctioned guerrilla party, because Yoonchae is conveniently having a birthday. 

They’re crammed into the Ranger lounge in the dark: all the people Lara knows here, and a surprising number that she doesn’t. Yoonchae is so popular: Lara feels a swell of affection. The girl has literally no idea the magnitude of her serve. 

Lara’s in the back behind a couch, wedged between Dani, who is sucking loudly on some kind of guava-smelling hard candy, and Megan, who won’t stop shaking her leg. Which is just an all-around awesome situation considering Lara’s also had to pee for the last thirty minutes, and no one in this room has opened a single bottle of alcohol yet. 

“Okay, can I air a grievance,” Lara whispers, “to the community?”

Dani says, “Grieve,” and cracks the candy between her teeth. 

Megan’s head whips over to both of them. “Shhhh!”

Even in the dark, Lara can see Dani roll her eyes. “She’s not here, dude. Relax.”

“Please,” says Lara, “can we stop the shaking,” and she takes the opportunity to seize Megan’s knee and force it still against the floor. 

Megan doesn’t even seem to notice, too busy checking her communicator for updates from Sophia. It’s cute: obviously Sophia planned this whole thing. But it was Megan’s idea. And she was the one running around, catching people in corridors and eagerly pressing invitations in their hands: TOP SECRET!!  EAT AFTER READING.

Hers and Dani’s were pushed under the crack in their door. Lara thinks Megan is still a little bit scared of them, which is just adorable. They’ve signed half the photocards in her binder.

A little blip lights up Megan’s comm and she stiffens, before whisper-shouting, “She’s here! Everyone get ready!”

Sophia’s voice drifts in from the hallway: “I know. And she was so mad: I kept being like, where else was she supposed to land? Like, she obviously had to LAND. She had to COME IN. For the LANDING.” Then there are three big thumps on the door, and the sound of someone incorrectly inputting an entry key.

Yoonchae’s voice goes: “What’s wrong with you?”

Lara glances over where she knows Manon is hiding; it’s obviously too dark to see anything, though.

There’s a cute guy waiting right in front of the door, holding a big lopsided cake and getting help from some people hurriedly lighting the candles. Lara had clocked him the moment they entered the room. 

She nudges Megan. “Why aren’t you up there? Isn’t that your cake?”

Megan makes a face Lara’s never seen before: a kind of deep grimace. Maybe a glower. She says, “That’s–”

Then the door opens in a wedge of light, and the whole room surges to its feet. 

SURPRISE!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY YOONCHAE!!!

The lights flick on, and Yoonchae is actually, genuinely surprised – incredible, Lara did not think Sophia had it in her – and then the cute guy holding the cake sets it aside, sweeps Yoonchae up into his arms, and kisses her on the lips.

“Oh, shit,” says Lara.

“Damn,” says Dani.

“Oh,” says Megan darkly, “yeah. That’s Daesung. Her fiancé.”

Lara’s mouth could not be more open if it dropped the fuck off her face. “What? What do you mean, fiancé? You’re in love with her.” 

Sophia is starting the song, so nobody even hears that part. Megan’s face still drains of color so fast Lara almost expects her to faint. She doesn’t. She drags Lara into the corner of the room and hisses, “Don’t say that.”

This is so weird.

“She’s your copilot,” Lara says incredulously. “She knows you’re in love with her. You literally know that she knows you’re in love with her!”

Megan’s skin is doing a kind of chameleon thing; Lara starts looking around for a trash can. She seriously might be about to throw up. 

“You don’t understand. It doesn’t matter,” Megan says tightly, and some kind of tragic picture starts to take shape in Lara’s mind.

“Oh,” she says. “Meg.” Then, shaking her head: “No, sorry, what? I’m gonna need more, babe.”

“It’s not – you know it’s not – Rangers aren’t always…like that,” Megan is spluttering, like she’s trying to defend herself. And Lara is not trying to attack her, so she backs up a little. “He’s her college boyfriend,” Megan says. Jesus, there is so much tension in her shoulders. “They were together before we even – before the Academy. And he proposed right after we graduated, so, you know, it’s been, like, a while. They’ve been together for a long time.” She swallows. “They’re really cute.”

Which weirdly sounds a lot like I want to kill him and throw his body off the top of the Shatterdome, to Lara. She glances over to where Sophia is posing a whole tableau to take a million pictures. Yoonchae’s fiancé has his arm over her shoulders. Her eyes are closed, she’s making a wish, she’s blowing out her candles. While everyone cheers, she looks around the room until she finds Megan, who waves back weakly. Yoonchae beams, a flush rising to her cheeks. Maybe it’s the excitement. Probably it’s not.

Lara has kind of a sixth sense about these things even if they weren’t copilots. The thing is, they are copilots. They’re in each other’s heads.

“Go hang out with her,” Lara says, and Megan goes.

It was so fucking different from being a pop star, but what were you expecting, anyway? 

At least you were a little prepped. At least you knew what it was like to have a schedule that started at 5AM and ended after midnight. At least you had each other, and you already knew what that was like – your rhythms and routines: Dani still had to get you out of bed. 

The difference between the civilian program and the Ranger Academy, as far as you could tell, besides that they were theoretically not trying to fucking kill the cadets at the Academy, is that the civilians had all come already-partnered. There were siblings, spouses, cousins, teammates; a couple ballroom dancers, an Olympic figure-skating pair. People recognized you. Obviously. Hey, Grammy; you were signing autographs in the cafeteria. 

Then the program started fucking you all up the ass, and it stopped being such a big deal.

Maybe if you had to put a date to it, it was then. If you had to pin the exact time, butterfly wings on the corkboard, it was you tangled up in her, tangled up in scratchy military sheets, too tired to dry your hair from the shower, dripping all over her shirt because she was too tired to yell at you, and she was saying, Lara, what the hell are we doing. What the hell are we doing here?

And you said, Do you want to be here? Because in that moment you would have given it all up. You would have gone home, moved your whole family inland, gone underground, dropped off the face of the earth; you would have done anything she wanted.

We’re so tiny and small. And the world is so big.

The world’s small, Dani. Kaiju are big.

Dani was silent for a long while, and you wrapped your arms around her and listened to her heart beat steady time, closer to you than any in-ear had ever been, warm and strong and yours and thinking: her chest, your chest, one indivisible line melting away like thunder in rain. Then Dani said, I’d rather be in a Jaeger.

Yeah, you said. And so that was it: no going back. You would have done anything she wanted; it just made it easier when you already wanted the same thing.

I’d rather be in a Jaeger.

One week after Yoonchae’s birthday, Manon is late to her appointment to put Gabriela’s brain back in. 

Lara’s in the barracks anyway; she volunteers. She takes the lift down a level and knocks on Sophia’s door, and then she graciously backs up and does not listen to anything that might be going on inside as she waits for the door to open. Which it eventually does: all of two inches.

“Hi Sophia,” Lara says pleasantly.  “We need Manon.”

What she can see of Sophia basically amounts to: big sweatshirt. Teased-out hair. “Okay,” says Sophia – breathlessly, maybe. “She’s not here.”

“No, I know. Just if you see her.” Lara glances down: right foot sock. Left foot pale purple nail polish. Lara didn’t do college, technically, but maybe it would have been a little like this.

“Okay. Sure.”

“I think there’s gloss on your face, babe,” Lara says. Sue her. It’s too fun. “Just, like, right here.” She makes a little motion to the corner of her mouth. Sophia’s whole face goes bright red, and she makes a small squeaking sound as she swipes at her mouth with the back of her hand. Behind the door, someone very clearly muffles a laugh.

She’s so cute. Lara almost feels bad for her. 

“Sorry,” Sophia says desperately, edging the door more closed. “I’m just really busy right now. I’ll totally let her know, though. I mean, if I see her. I mean, when she shows up to work, I’ll – thanks, Lara!”

She’s still talking as the door shuts, and then Lara has to roll her eyes in an empty hallway. 

give it an hour, she texts Dani. ish.

Okay, Lara doesn’t know half as much as she pretends to. But she pretends to know everything, and half of everything isn’t that bad, considering the world is ending and nobody’s actually known much of anything since the aliens came from under the ocean instead of out of the sky.

(Um, you know me, says Dani. Which, thank fuck. That’s been true for a while now, anyway.)

The thing is, not even the apocalypse could steal her ability to spot a situationship at a hundred meters.

There’s a weirder moment, a few days later, when Lara catches them holding hands in the corridor just by like, literally turning the corner. Sophia pulls away so fast she actually yanks Manon off-balance, and then she mumbles an awkward greeting to Lara as she marches off, face flaming red.

Lara has this innate sense for tea. For fraught dynamics. This is obviously the worst-kept secret on the whole base, so she has no idea why they are still going through all this trouble to stay on the DL. To be fair, it does seem like mostly a Sophia issue. To be fairer, Manon still won’t really talk about it with anyone, even Dani.

“Dude, that was weird,” Lara offers Manon sympathetically, who is watching Sophia walk away. 

“Tell me about it,” says Manon, with a very clenched jaw.

DEAR LARA MY QUESTION IS CAN YOU PLAY MUSIC IN YOUR JAEGER AND IF YES HAVE YOU EVER PLAYED GNARLY

Chuck Hansen is being an asshole on TV again.

“This dick,” says Lara. Just because Striker Eureka is the only Mark-5 on the planet. Just because he gets to play with the last shiny toy the PPDC is ever going to make. 

“I know. I’d smash though,” sighs Dani wistfully. Lara slightly thinks she might mean Striker Eureka, not Chuck Hansen. T-16 Angel Wings and eighteen individual K-Stunners and the fucking Sting Blades – it doesn’t matter that they never even trained for dirty boxing. Dani doesn’t play about her Jaegers. 

Then again, Chuck is her type. 

“Shut up,” says Lara. “I know.” 

“Merry Christmas,” Sophia calls, driving her sleigh into the hangar – a forklift draped in tinsel, hauling a pallet stacked with boxes.

“Aw, yes!” Dani pumps her fist. “I was worried they wouldn’t be able to find us.”

“When have they ever not found us?” Lara asks. “God, I want a golden Poobo so fucking bad.”

“You always get your dumb gold shit,” Dani pouts. “I want a Lambo.”

“Okay, the fans aren’t shipping you a fucking Lambourghini,” Lara says. “Sophia does not have that on her forklift. Please get serious.”

“The fans sent you all of this?” Megan’s eyes are seriously bugging. Lara invited her and Yoonchae to the holiday unboxing because she is so benevolent. She wants to give them a taste of their future.

“Oh, sweet Meg.” Lara claps her on the shoulder. “Win a Grammy. Save the world a couple times. Fans will send you things you didn’t even know it was possible to send.”

“Hair, mostly,” says Dani. “They really love to send shit off the dome. We’ve gotten some teeth. Hey – the small ones are mine this time, ‘kay?” She’s rifling through the loose boxes at the top of the pile.

Yoonchae says, “Teeth?”

“There aren’t CAR KEYS in there,” says Lara, and then she beans Dani in the back of the head with a single jingle bell off the side of the forklift.

“MY BELLS!” yells Sophia, which drowns out Dani’s shriek like a crowded stadium drowns out mic feedback. That is – Yoonchae plugs her ears with a certified stinker look. 

“Oh my god,” Lara throws her hands in the air. “Everyone just get in there!”

Everyone gets in there. Some of the boxes are even wrapped, which is extra cute – Lara sends those down the line to Yoonchae, who is carefully reading every card before slitting packages neatly at the tape lines. Megan is gouging boxes open with a set of keys, and twice Lara hears the crash of glass or ceramic (pottery – inexplicably very big with the fans) before Sophia sits down right next to her offering a box cutter, and then takes any box Megan fights for more than a few seconds. 

Halfway through the pile, Dani steps away to take a call. Lara pulls a LV clutch, a hot pink Poobo (score), and a Gabriela sock monkey made with rose-patterned fabric, which she tucks into Dani’s pile. Yoonchae reads ten more letters, Megan unwraps a PlayStation 17 (very big deal, apparently), and Sophia checks her wrist comm about a dozen times before huffing and shutting it off with a dark expression. Which could be anything, but again: Lara has this sense. 

Yoonchae rattles a small box by her ear. “Lara, is this teeth?”

Then Dani comes back with her phone pressed between her shoulder and ear, going, “Okay, bye, babe. I love you too. Bye.”

Megan tracks her with curious eyes all the way back to the table. “Who was that?”

“Oh, my boyfriend,” Dani says casually, and starts going through the new things in her pile. “This is cute.” She holds up the sock monkey and gives it a squeeze.

Megan’s eyes are wide, wide. She’s glancing back at Lara like this is somehow news; like Lara somehow did not know about Dani’s boyfriend of six years; oops, Drift missed a spot. 

Lara considers playing into it, then just cracks a grin. “Best friend Jonah!”

Then it’s a whole thing. Sophia has a lot of questions. Most of them get really focused once the whole six years thing comes out. 

“Is he going to propose?” Sophia’s whole body has gone very taut with what Lara can only describe as Manic Planner Energy. 

Dani just shrugs, which doesn’t seem to release much of Sophia’s tension. 

“What happens if you get married?” Megan asks. Something very vulnerable in her – everything. “I mean, like. Is Lara your maid of honor?”

“What?” Dani frowns. “No, Lara’s also there.”

“No, I know, obviously.” Megan’s eyes are flicking between all their faces except  Yoonchae’s. “I mean, what, is she a guest?” 

Lara has to laugh. “Yeah, Dani. Are you inviting me to your wedding?”

“No,” Dani scowls. “Stop it. I mean, if I ever get married, Lara would also be there.”

Megan’s brow furrows, but it’s Yoonchae who pipes up, from the end of the long table. “If you marry your boyfriend…Lara also marries your boyfriend?”

“Ewww,” Lara says. “I would not want that to be my husband,” and then she dodges when Dani swats her. 

“Not too much on Jonah,” Dani warns, and Lara shrugs. 

“It’s simple, babes,” Lara says. “Wherever she goes, I go.”

Lara figures there’s maybe a handful of fundamental truths about the universe and maybe Einstein figured out a couple, maybe Cher knows one or two. And Lara doesn’t know half as much as she pretends to, but she’s always, always known that. Wherever she goes, I go. The world flipped upside down and somehow this didn’t change, this one, single thing didn’t change; Daniela Avanzini at the center of it, the core of the whole entire world and the only steady thing in Lara’s life. Which is how it’s always been, so how could it ever be any different? 

Dani looks at her and rolls her eyes and says, “Ditto,” grins, and Lara knows. Obviously she knows. She’s in her head. Dani uses her nail to slice open another box. 

“But you would marry him,” Yoonchae says slowly, something pained in her expression. She turns to Lara. “And you wouldn’t.” 

“Duh,” sighs Lara. “Do you think Dani can do anything without me?”

“Okay, not too much on me,” Dani protests. “I’ll put you in the back of the church.”

“Bitch, I thought we just said I’m at the altar. Wait, why aren’t we having an Indian wedding?”

“It’s my wedding!”

That’s when Sophia gasps loud enough the whole table whips around. She’s gazing into a large box, frozen, like she’s looking at the literal face of God. She reaches in and pulls out a single wireless microphone with an orange plastic collar. “Yoonchae,” she says reverently. “Noraebang.”

Obviously she is doing drunk karaoke New Year’s. They are all doing drunk karaoke New Year’s. Lara is so, so excellent at drunk karaoke New Year’s, and she is so proud of everyone who is also doing (not as good, but) beautiful that they are trying drunk karaoke END OF THE WORLD Last New Year Maybe Ever except that’s happened like ten times already and it’s been wrong every time, they keep saving the world and it keeps ending, which is so annoying, which so totally blows, that the aliens were disgusting op Godzilla freakmonsters, instead of what they were supposed to be, which is still tentacle slime freaks, probably, but maybe they also could have been hot. 

And Lara is a superhero and Dani is a superhero, which, they used to be popstars, so, how many other things could they have done, even, that would have been more awesome, except they don’t get to sing as much anymore, because they are so busy like, killing and slaying, and being 250 feet tall. But they have to keep saving the world so they can all together keep having sick and fun drunk karaoke New Years all of them together, but next time they will ban Sophia from show tunes who is taking about her fourth consecutive turn with the mic and Lara didn’t know her birthday, obviously, Sophia didn’t tell anyone, but she came to work in the morning with a bright pink Birthday Girl! pin at the corner of her greige jumpsuit and there is no way anyone else bought that for her, but awesome now it’s technically drunk karaoke birthday party also and Lara has never met anyone like Sophia in her entire life. Sophia put Gabriela’s head back on! Like a week ago, she’s so shiny and clean and new, and Dani was so happy, Dani currently with the karaoke tablet, inputting a song, they used to be singers, that used to be their life.

Lara says, “Dani, remember when Sophia put –” and Dani puts a cup of something, cool and wet and water in her hand, and says, “Drink, girl, it’s not even eleven,” which is rude, because Lara’s just catching a basic buzz. 

Dani can’t police her, Dani’s in her head. Sometimes Dani is her. Sometimes Lara is Dani and Dani is her and if you’re two people in the same body, that’s a third person, that’s some kind of third and new person, you and you and the big machine, and you did her tats yourselves, awesome, your child, your car, your armor, your body, you and her and you and you. And your whole job now is Save the World, okay, easy, turns out you’re good at that, but you still miss singing, but at least you can still sometimes sing like at Drunk Karaoke New Year’s and finally finally Yoonchae (drunk! drunk!) snatches the mic from Sophia and starts singing something in Korean, and it’s not even the song that’s playing. 

That’s Yoonchae: beloved. By so many, so, so many; so, so drunk! Cute and drunk and saving the world, also. What a big fucking ask, is the whole thing, really, and they are not even getting paid that much for this, holding the tear in the world together with their big and new and fresh baby brass-knuckle superhero hands, but at least they are not alone. You and you and me and us and Yoonchae and Megan and, and, Chuck Hansen, dick, Sting Blades, Dani loves those a lot and would maybe fuck them if she could, or maybe it’s just that Chuck Hansen is hot, and his dad is a total dilf also, way rugged, so weirdly cut for an old man, probably from wrestling aligators with his bare hands which is in Lara’s understanding something they do in Australia, like, probably, a lot.

Awesome question.

“Hottest Jaeger pilots!” Lara calls, and Yoonchae’s rapping with her hair all in her face but that’s okay, fiancé, she might not have an answer anyway. Wait. She has to say – “Hottest Jaeger pilots, not in this room!” Close one. Good one. Because otherwise: duh. Obvious. Lara says, “Sophia!” and holds an empty soju bottle (how’d she get that?) up to Sophia’s flushed face, soju mic, God, Lara freaking loves Korea, Sophia’s eyes keep flicking over to Manon (not! drunk enough!), but Manon is pretending to look at the song list. Lara has this sense about things like this: matters of the heart. Pretending. Performers. 

Sophia keeps looking. Yoonchae is on the floor doing air guitar. Sophia swallows and says, “Oh. Um. Maybe, Cheung Wei?” 

Which, who? Lara says, out of the corner of her mouth: “Dani, who?” Manon is pressing buttons on the karaoke remote, and listening, listening, sneaky, obvious, Lara should be a therapist, Lara should be the goddamn matchmaker to the alienless stars.

Dani hands her another cup of water (where? does she keep getting those?) and says, “Uh, Crimson Typhoon. Oldest brother, I think?”

“Ohhh,” says Lara, “yeah, he’s cute.” Back to Sophia: “Yeah, he’s cute!” Hands the water to Sophia. She needs it, maybe. Her face is so red. It’s a new song: Yoonchae is doing chair choreo, staring Megan down. Defcon, Megan, fire alarm, Megan, security, Megan, is there a doctor in the room, Megan looks like she’s about to fall to the ground and die, just die right now.

Sophia flushes and says, “He’s a good leader,” but it’s so quiet and almost nobody even hears her, because the soju mic isn’t real, and Yoonchae is so (drunk!) loud.

“Manooon!” sings Lara, does a run just for the fun of it, like old times. Somehow, there is more water in her hand. “Who! Is your most crackable Jaeger pilot? Not me, not Dani, let’s be fair, here.”

And Manon looks up from the song list and right at Sophia – wow, static, electricity, eye contact, lightning – and goes, “I don’t have one,” coldly, flat, blank, not even Yoonchae covers that one, and Sophia turns redder. Ouch, uh-oh. Lara’s sense. 

Sophia (red, splotchy) says, “No, I mean, I don’t really either, though.”

Manon says, “Okay, but you did.”

Sophia says, “It was just a dumb question, Manon.”

Manon says, “No, I know.”

Wow, wow, wow, yeah, no, yikes, damn, that’s Lara’s bad. That’s so – “That’s my bad,” Lara mutters, corner of her mouth, just Dani. Yoonchae’s straddling a cherry-faced Megan-shaped corpse on the couch. 

Dani, beautiful, perfect, immovable, unchanging, forever and always center of the whole fucking fucked-up world, pats Lara on the back and says, “You’re not even gonna make it to midnight.”

More water. 

Lara wakes up and feels like freeze-dried dehydrated bullshit, and Dani isn’t even in bed with her. Dani isn’t even in the room. It’s a small room. Standard, two bunks, one that’s never been used. Lara’s head is genuinely at a point where she can’t stand up from how painful it is, but then she slowly rolls over, and Dani (beautiful, perfect, forever and always) has left two Advil and a water bottle next to the bed. 

Eventually, Lara pulls the exposed nerves of her body together enough to encase them in a garbage hoodie; slips on her slides, rummages through Dani’s bag and comes up with the biggest sunglasses either of them own. Checks her phone for the time: God. No. But she’s cold. She’s cold and sick and pathetically uncuddled. She’s going to actually kill Dani after this. 

Makes it to the door. Doesn’t throw up. So she probably won’t, then.

Shuffles down the corridor to the lift. Woah, fuck, shit, wow, awful. Fucking freezing.

Hangar. Launching bay. Head back on, hey babe: 250 feet in the air, though. Loading lift. Conn-pod. Okay, not the conn-pod. Back out. Scaffolding?

Lara finds her on the maintenance scaffolding at the very top of the hangar. Dani’s feet dangling over the edge and swinging idly thirty feet above Gabriela’s escape hatch. Once you’ve lived being that tall, heights stop scaring you. There are worse things in the world to be afraid of.

“I hate you,” Lara groans, sitting down next to Dani, leaning her head on her shoulder.

“You hate you,” Dani replies, but it’s not sharp; her words fall out muted into the early morning. “I left you Advil.”

“I need anesthetic,” Lara says miserably. Closes her eyes with her feet dangling in empty air. If she falls asleep, Dani will hold her steady. “Drift with me. See how this feels.”

Dani snorts, but she also shifts so Lara’s head rests more comfortably in the crook of her neck. “What are you even doing here? Go back to bed.”

“What are you doing here?” Lara retorts. “Psycho. Do you know what time it is? Look at her: she’s fine.” 

If Lara falls asleep, Dani will hold her steady. If Lara falls, Gabriela will catch her. This high up: her head beneath their dangling feet, the ground 300 feet and a mile and forever away. The last time they were this high, they were all falling together.

“I don’t know,” says Dani softly. “She just seemed lonely.” 

Dear Ranger Avanzini,

My daughter tells me she wants to grow up to be just like you. She wants to be a superhero, like you. Two years ago we were living in San Diego and you stopped a Kaiju a hundred yards from our front door. I don’t know how to thank you, or your partner. I’m sure you hear that all the time. I don’t know that there are words for this. My daughter is twelve, and she has all your albums. She gets to grow up to be like you. I get to see her grow.

It’s not a sound a Jaeger pilot ever forgets.

Their bodies react quicker than their minds can wake up, so they’re halfway out the door before Lara pulls up short, grabs Dani by the shoulder and yanks her to a stop. 

“It’s not us,” Lara says, breathless, eyes wide, expression mirrored on Dani’s face and framed by her wild sleep-hair.

Overhead, the proximity alarm blares like a physical weight: piercing and heavy, pulsing like the heartbeat of the entire Shatterdome shot with adrenaline. The same adrenaline that is shaking Lara’s hand on Dani’s shoulder, as she says again, “It’s not us, Dani, it’s not us.”

Four weeks, Manon had said, after New Year’s. Until we can run a soft boot of her operating systems. Six before we can even get you into a dry-drift. Sorry, guys.

Dani wakes up; it only takes a second. Lara sees it – feels her realize. 

“Oh, shit,” says Dani, and when they make it up to LOCCENT, Megan and Yoonchae are already there.

The room is swarming with activity: engineers half-in sleepwear scurry around control panels while Sophia barks orders from the front of the room in a lavender silk set. Lara’s eyes find the radar screen immediately, but its scale is locked on the Breach. No trajectory lines yet. The brightest screen in the room, however, is flashing the gravest message: KEAS OFFICIAL BROADCAST – CATEGORY-IV EVENT IMMINENT

Cat-IV. Lara’s mouth goes dry.

The briefing is already underway: Marshal Paramo flawless in her standard uniform, Megan and Yoonchae listening at attention in their drive suits.

“What’s the target?” Megan is asking, and her voice doesn’t even shake a little. Beside her, Yoonchae grips her helmet firmly, studying the scrolling walls of incoming data. Her jaw is set. Lara is so, so proud.

Marshals get the call directly from PPDC central command. Preempting radar, preempting ground systems; the Marshal had the news from satellite operators full minutes before. She stands straight and serious as she says, “Jeju.” 

Lara sees Yoonchae’s breath stutter for a split-second, before her eyes sharpen and she nods with all the weight of a nation’s protector.

“It’s heading for Jeju.”

 

Notes:

guys im so sorry for how long this took....it WILL happen again ㅠㅠ love you love you love you please forgive me