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Rengoku dies.
Rengoku dies, and it’s like a light is snuffed out somewhere deep in his heart. Giyuu spends three months in the infirmary of the ‘dome, reliving every brutal second of it, half stuck in the drift where they were wrenched apart.
Ghost drifting , they call it, and how apt, he thinks. Ghost drifting , to be drifting with an actual ghost. The ghost of Rengoku is everywhere, from the training scars in his knuckles (given to him by Rengoku), to the scars that litter his body (earned with Rengoku strapped into the Jaeger at his side). Thoughts that are not Giyuu’s and are more Rengoku in shape skitter across his mind sometimes.
It is, simply put, unbearable.
And so, three months after having his Drift Bond cloven in two, after burying his heart at the bottom of the sea, Tomioka Giyuu steps out of the infirmary of the Shatterdome and vows to never step foot in another Shatterdome again, so long as he shall live.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
His vow lasts eleven months, thirteen days, nine hours, forty six minutes, and twelve seconds.
But who’s counting.
(Certainly not him.)
“We need you,” Ubuyashiki explains over steaming cups of tea. They sit in Giyuu’s living room, sterile with it’s white walls and basic IKEA furniture. Of all the things to survive the apocalypse, of course it would be IKEA. “Not in a Jaeger, of course. I wouldn’t ask that much of you, after what happened. But the recruits coming out of the Academy are too soft for what I fear is coming. None of them are Drift Compatible with each other, which means less Jaegers in the field. You understand the implications, of course.”
“Of course,” he murmurs, cup pressed half-way against his bottom lip, mind turning the problem over like an old, smooth stone. His vow sits on the shelf of his mind, freshly dusted and sparkling. Never go back , he reminds himself.
“I need someone who is field tested. Driven. Who understands that the Kaiju aren’t going away any time soon, and that we will have to be the ones who drive them back. Someone who understands the stakes.” Ubuyashiki pauses a moment to take a sip of his tea. “I have a handful of others already on board, Giyuu, to tell you the truth. But I want you, specifically. Because your wounds are still fresh. Because you understand so well.”
He’s about to open his mouth and say no when there is the barest of nudges against the back of his mind, as though pushing him forward. To walk a new path.
It’s what Rengoku would have wanted.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
The Shatterdome hasn’t changed in his time away. It’s as though he pressed paused on a video game and set it down for a few minutes, came back, and pressed play again. The corridors are still dark and over-crowded, everything still smells of saltwater and rust and engine oil, and the lights flicker occasionally.
It feels different, without Rengoku at his side. Larger, somehow, yet emptier at the same time. Like someone’s pushed out the walls and carved out the middle.
Like the hollow spot in his chest.
Because nothing has changed, he doesn’t need anyone to show him around. He knows where the mess is, where R&D is, where the Kwoon Room is, where Ops is located. He knows where the Jaeger Bay is, which he’ll be avoiding. He knows, vaguely, where he’s bunking; it isn’t the set of rooms he and Rengoku used to share.
He isn’t sure if he could have handled that; it was hard enough just setting foot on the tarmac, getting off the helicopter. Harder still, to actually enter the ‘dome.
The room he was assigned is a single, with a small bed stuffed into the corner and a communal bathroom assigned to the hall just next door. Slate gray walls, concrete slab for a floor, single ventilation shaft. Small, no-nonsense, compact.
Impersonal, just like the apartment he left.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
He is back inside of the Shatterdome for two days, ten hours, and nineteen minutes before he is expected to report to the Kwoon Room. Giyuu spends most of that time avoiding everyone else, sticking to dark corridors and less-brightly lit corners, and empty tables in the Mess, which he attends at off hours so there’s less of a crowd.
Less of a chance at being recognized.
He’s in the workout clothes the ‘dome assigned when he walks into the Room and sticks to the shadows, hands loose at his sides. Gyomei is already standing at the opposite end, thick hands clasped behind his broad back as he listens to the noise around him, unseeing eyes roaming listlessly over the room.
Ubuyashiki had said he had recruited others, but he hadn’t said whom; Giyuu hadn’t thought to ask.
He sticks to the edges, skirting the room, shoulder brushing the wall as he goes. It isn’t overly full, just a handful of Ranger Cadets going at each other, the sounds of their staffs beating off each other a cacophony that makes his ears ring.
Taking up a post on Gyomei’s right, he settles with his feet even with his shoulders. A soldier’s stance. One ingrained into him in the Academy.
Gyomei acknowledges him with the barest of nods. “Marshal Ubuyashiki always said you would come back.”
He says nothing, because there is nothing to say. If Ubuyashiki says something, it will be so; if he said Giyuu would be back, then Giyuu would be back. If he says two Kaiju will come out of the rift at once, two Kaiju will emerge. The universe seems to bend to the Marshal’s will and not the other way around; Rengoku used to joke that one word from him, and the apocalypse would be over.
Giyuu packs the thought up and tucks it away into one of the deeper recesses of his mind, back where it belongs. It should not have made it to the forefront in the first place; he doubles down on watching the room at large, at the scattered pairs of cadets wailing on each other with the purpose of honing their skills and building bonds.
Most of them are young. Determined. Focused on the task at hand, but skittish because of a bout going on in the corner that’s drawing their attention away from their own matches. He dances his eyes from one coward toward the other, to the one that’s preoccupying everyone, and isn’t enthused about what he sees.
There’s a white haired cadet, older then the rest—his age, maybe—absolutely brutalizing his opponent. Malice rolls off of him in waves, and a large swath of the mats around them is surrounded by curious onlookers who flinch with each blow.
How he didn’t notice the spectacle walking in is beyond him.
He watches with practiced disinterest as the white haired stranger strikes with nearly enough force to break both of their training staves in two, then casually disarms his opponent as though it’s nothing, sending him tumbling to the ground in a mess of limbs.
White Hair—and scars, Giyuu notes, so many scars—doesn’t stop to see if his opponent is okay. He bares his teeth at the crowd instead and barks, “Which one of you fucks is next?”
He’s hardly paying attention when Gyomei presses the training staff into his hands and nudges him forward. If he had been a stronger man, he wouldn’t have budged.
If he hadn’t had a ghost in his head, in his soul, in his heart, urging him onward, he would have stayed where he was.
Instead, he is weak. He ghosts across the mats to the crowd and they part for him like a sea, wide-eyed, curious, and a little fearful.
He presents himself without a word to his opponent, staff loose in his hands, and waits for the downed cadet to have the presence of mind to scramble out of the way. He does, quickly.
The cadet who is to be his opponent studies him for a moment before saying, “I can’t stand the silent type. You weird me out.”
Giyuu lifts a shoulder in a shrug, because there’s nothing to say to that, and points one end of his staff at his opponent, signaling that he’s ready.
He won’t admit this to anyone, but: he’s out of practice. In all the time he spent after his recovery, all the time he spent wallowing in his impersonal apartment, he never once bothered to pick up with his training that used to mean so much to him. Never went to the gym. Never went for a run.
He is as ill-prepared for this as possible, but something in his bones still hums that he is ready.
His opponent makes a noise of disgust when his taunt doesn't elicit an answer, and steps immediately into action, attacking Giyuu with everything he has. He is unbridled rage and fury, wind whipping through pine and over prairie. His strikes are quick and brutal, his sweeps wide and arching. He is relentless.
But Giyuu knows his type, and meets him head-on. He is not swayed by hot-headed men, has brought more than one to heel.
This one , he tells himself, will be no different .
He steps into the void spaces left behind by his opponent, goes left when the other man goes right, can feel something building between them with every blow and strike and point scored.
And there are points scored, for both of them. A back and forth between the two, a wordless discussion held entirely via combat. He does not keep track of who scores what when, just knows that they pause, staves quivering, wordless, the end of his staff hovering just over the other man’s throat, his opponent’s staff butted firmly up beneath the soft skin of his ribs.
Don’t let it be said that the white haired cadet pulled his punches; Giyuu will have bruises in the morning.
“4-4,” Gyomei calls out, and Giyuu thinks, for a moment, that the blind man might be joking. But he’s always had a way with Drift Compatibility tests, and he isn’t one for jokes.
Quiet descends on the room as everyone processes what, exactly, just happened.
“I—I thought we were here for practice bouts?” some brave soul ventures.
“Most of you were. Tomioka Giyuu was not.”
It’s then that Giyuu knows that he’s been had, amusement that isn’t his own sparking up and down his spine.
He looks at his opponent—his new Ranger partner, apparently, though it may be premature to call him that when they haven’t even managed to drift together yet—who looks at him, agog.
Then he gets his wits together and spits, “It can’t be you.”
Giyuu stares at him dryly, like a desert stares at the sky, and waits him out.
(One minute, thirty three seconds.)
“I’m waiting for my brother. ” The man is all heaving sides and shoulders, eyes wide and wild as he tries to rationalize his way through this in front of a crowd of curious onlookers—those they haven’t lost. “My brother .”
“The Kaiju wait for no one.”
“The Kaiju aren’t going fucking anywhere! They come, one every six months—that’s kind of their deal! Aren’t there other people’s lives you can ruin!”
Giyuu walks off, putting his practice staff back on the wall where it belongs, his new partner yelling at him the entire time, an audience watching their every move.
He’s been back in the Shatterdome for two days, ten hours, fifty eight minutes, and fifty two seconds, and already things have changed drastically.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
“You’ll have to excuse me for setting you up like that,” the Marshal demurs later, in his office. “I sensed potential and knew it could not be wasted. I had to see if my hunch was correct.”
Giyuu stares at him, unseeing. He had promised to never set foot in a Jaeger again, and here he was: breaking promises left and right. Not that he had gone into a Jaeger just yet, but that was next logical step.
Ubuyashiki smiles at him, making the scars the mar the top half of his face bunch up around his sightless eyes. “You always were the quiet one. I had forgotten, somehow.” He clears his throat, a delicate sound, and Giyuu tilts his head back to stare at the ceiling, waterlogged and stained. “His name is Shinazugawa Sanemi. He’s been a cadet since he left the Academy—he graduated a year after you did. He has a younger brother, one Shinazugawa Genya, who is due to graduate from the Academy in two months. He’s been adamant that they are Drift Compatible, but we simply don’t have the time to wait and see. We need Rangers in the fight, and he’s been scaring away cadets left and right. This is the fifth ‘dome he’s been assigned to since he graduated.”
He’s telling you you have trouble on your hands , Rengoku’s voice laughs in his ear, quiet and whisper soft. Giyuu stiffens in his chair, unprepared for the mental assault, hands balling into fists in his lap.
Ubuyashiki doesn’t seem to notice or, if he does, has the grace not to comment. “I can understand if you are hesitant, given the subterfuge to get you this far. But it’s for the good of humanity. If we can hold back the Kaiju, keep them at bay for just a little longer, I’m sure we can find a way to close the Breach. I just need Rangers to hold them back, and you were one of the best.”
Giyuu closes his eyes, blotting out the ceiling above him, because he didn’t do it alone. No Ranger can pilot a Jaeger on their own, it’s the whole point of the program; each Jaeger requires two pilots, sometimes three, otherwise the neural load is too much on one person to move a giant robot to fight a giant alien.
No, he didn’t do it alone.
Ubuyashiki seems to know where his thoughts have trailed to. “You have to understand, Giyuu. I’m not trying to replace him. I’m trying to help you move forward.”
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
He waits dutifully outside of the Marshal’s office as the situation is explained to Shinazugawa.
There is a lot of yelling involved.
The word ‘fuck’ as well.
It does not bode well.
He’s leaning against the wall opposite the door when Shinazugawa finally storms out of the room and Giyuu wonders, for a moment, if the other man was born mad or if the circumstances of his life made him this way.
They lock eyes, and Shinazugawa comes to a complete stop, door to the Marshal’s office banging shut behind him, clattering noise echoing down the empty expanse of hall.
He sneers and says, “What are you gonna do, hold my fuckin’ hand?”
Giyuu glances down the hall. There’s no one around. “Top or bottom?”
Shinazugawa sputters. When he looks back at his new partner, he’s red in the face, open mouthed and gawping.
“You’re fuckin—what the fuck! We literally just met, and you’re already trying to fuck me! Aren’t there laws against that! I should--”
Oh. He’s made a mistake.
“Bunk,” he clarifies. The double rooms are all bunk beds, and it hadn’t occurred to him that Shinazugawa wouldn’t know that. That he would think he would be talking about something else altogether.
Shinazugawa makes a noise like a wounded beast, coming down the short set of stairs that lead to the Marshal’s office. “Can’t you speak in complete sentences, you fuckwit?”
He meets his gaze impassively, thoroughly exhausted by the events of the day. He just wants to know if he’s going to end up on the top bunk or the bottom bunk; he truly doesn’t care which, at this point. He’s never had a preference. His things have already been moved into their shared berth; he isn’t sure about his new partner’s. It isn’t likely his things have been moved yet.
“You’re impossible ,” Shinazugawa grouses, half under his breath, before he storms off down the hall. “And I want the top bunk!”
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
The first night is horrific.
Giyuu tries to go to sleep before Shinazugawa enters the room. The other man’s things had been moved in at some interminable point during the day, when Giyuu hadn’t been in the room, stacked neatly in the corner to be unpacked at a later date.
He’s unsuccessful, and the other man enters like a shadow, white hair gray in the dark with the light of the hall behind him. Giyuu’s eyes are opened to slits to watch him, curious, but the door shuts with a soft snick and the room is plunged into a seemingly never ending darkness.
Feet, whispering across the floor. The bunks shudder and shake as Shinazugawa hauls himself to the top with a grunt, not bothering with the metal ladder bolted to the structure. It seems to last a lifetime as the other man struggles to get comfortable, every moment sending a jolt through the entire structure, as though he’s going to come crashing through his bed and down onto Giyuu.
After what seems like a lifetime, the movement stops. The room settles into quiet, Shinazugawa’s breathing evening out into the even measures of sleep.
But peace does not come to Giyuu; it eludes his grasp, slipping through his fingers like sand. He isn’t used to sleeping with someone else in the room, anymore. The breathing, the warmth of another body, no matter how far away, the shifting of sleep.
Morning comes too soon, without even the barest hint of sleep to show for it.
Shinazugawa comes awake all at once, and Giyuu can tell because his breathing goes from slow and steady to the rapid-quick of wakefulness. He’s still for a few seconds before Giyuu hears and feels him sit up, the motion moving the entire structure of the bunkbeds, and then he’s jumping down, landing on his feet with a dull thud that seems to reverberate through the empty berth.
Giyuu pretends he’s asleep, and Shinazugawa leaves the room without a word after changing in the adjoining bathroom, all without flipping on a light.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
Muichiro finds him just after lunch, tucked into the corner of a room no one’s using like a piece of old furniture, and informs him, “Ubuyashiki has ordered a drift test. You’re to come with me.”
Giyuu found he had no choice but to pry himself out of the corner and follow him. His primary goal had been to nap and that had evaded him, so he had moved on to his secondary goal, which was to brood, and he had been achieving that just fine.
Ubuyashiki’s head aide leads him through the halls of the Shatterdome, knowing them better than Giyuu knows them himself. He knows little about Muichiro, beyond the fact that the other man showed little interest in everything but his dedication to Ubuyashiki.
Rengoku had always said that that was enough, to be dedicated to someone. Giyuu had believed him, and then he had gone and left Giyuu alone.
The find Shinazugawa in the Kwoon Room, beating the life out of some cadets, and he wonders idly if this is all the other man’s life was before this moment--wake, go to the Kwoon Room to train, eat, rinse and repeat. It’s almost as pitiful an existence as one Giyuu has led himself.
Shinazugawa is reluctant to go with them, but he puts his training staff away at Gyomei’s gentle urging and stalks from the room after Muichiro, Giyuu bringing up the rear.
He doesn’t have to watch where they’re going to know where they’re headed to next. Their destination is obvious, from Muichiro’s stated goal.
It takes them six minutes and thirty seven seconds to reach the Jaeger Bay.
The Jaeger Bay is, like the rest of the Shatterdome, as he remembers it. A busy crush of people, the smell of heated metal and oil, constant yelling and clattering. Spark showers of blue and white and orange, pneumatic hisses, the honking of the horns on the little carts.
Chaos, embodied in one large, cavernous room.
Rengoku’s favorite room in the whole place; Giyuu feels a little sick to his stomach just stepping over the threshold.
Shinazugawa falls into step beside him as they enter deeper into the room, Jaeger’s in their bays towering many stories above them. Giyuu pays the robots no mind, because there is only one he is here to see, and he dreads seeing even that one. Sweat prickles at his palms, at the back of his neck, at the base of his spine, and in his chest his heart accelerates.
He has not seen Fatal Flame since she was nearly ripped apart by the Kaiju Akaza.
The first glimpse of orange and blue painted metal nearly rips his innards out and sends him to his knees. Somehow, he stays on his feet, face stoic, hands planted in his pockets. There is a pleased hum at the base of his skull, a feeling that he can only describe as Rengoku. Next to him, Shinazugawa tilts his head to the side and then backwards, looking up, up, up at the hulking metal robot the two of them are to pilot together.
“Huh,” is all he says, unimpressed.
Muichiro begins to talk about the repairs and upgrades made to Fatal Flame since Giyuu last saw her, but he doesn’t hear him. He’s too focused on keeping his lunch where it belongs and his expression as neutral as possible.
Who knew those two things could take so much energy.
Finally— finally — Muichiro finishes his spiel that Shinazugawa somehow didn’t interrupt and leads them from the Jaeger Bay to the Drive Suit Room.
Being fit into the Drive Suit is a little easier; it seems to hold him together, contain all of his anxiety in one place without it oozing out into the atmosphere. The Drive Suit keeps him safe; the Drive Suit keeps him whole.
Beside him, Shinazugawa is all nervous energy expended in curse words and complaints: his Drive Suit fits weird, it’s too tight, he can’t breathe in it. He keeps it up the whole time they’re led down the hall to the conn-pod of Fatal Flame, and somehow still keeps going when they’re clipped into their respective cradles.
The only time he quiets is when Ops announces they’re about to initiate Drift; it’s only then that Giyuuu realizes that the other man is just as nervous as he is, if not more so.
He doesn’t have long to ponder it. The Drift reaches out and takes them both by the hand, threads their fingers together. They fit like pieces of broken glass, picked up and jammed back together with glue, all jagged edges and tacky sides.
It’s odd, having someone in his head who isn’t him. Sharing his brain space with a man who openly doesn’t want anything to do with him, with someone he understands so little but was openly compared compatible with.
It feels entirely too much like being dunked in a cold lake; beside him, Giyuu can hear his partner inhale through his teeth.
The number one rule of Drifting is not to chase the R.A.B.I.T.s, and Giyuu breaks it right off the bat. He knows better from years of experience, the siren song of Rengoku’s laughter is too much to ignore.
He’s slipping, sliding, chasing his own R.A.B.I.T. down a hole he shouldn’t follow it.
Akaza, purple hide and Kaiju blue, Rengoku laughing next to him until suddenly he isn’t, he isn’t , he’s gone , nothing in his place but a gaping hole and sparking wires, and—
“ I told you, I fucking got it! ” Shinazugawa’s voice, cutting through the noise. Finding him in the middle of a storm, bailing him out of a sinking Jaeger, hauling him back to the surface.
He feels himself come back to life a little, right then and there.
The rest of the test drift goes smoothly, no more R.A.B.I.T.s chased, no more plasma cannons almost accidentally discharged. Shinazugawa simmers beside him, a kettle settled over low heat, but he goes through the paces without complaint.
It isn’t until they’re in the hall that connects the conn-pod to the Drive Suit room that Shinazugawa speaks, helmet in his hands. He doesn't look at Giyuu, voice subdued. “I didn’t realize how fucking intense it would be.”
There are no words of comfort he can offer up, no platitudes to make this easier, because drifting with a haunted man isn’t sure to get any simpler, so he simply continues down the long stretch of hall in silence, blood thrumming in his veins, wondering if he’s doing the right thing.
There’s a familiar head of pink and green waiting for them in the Drive Suit room, bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet. Next to her is a black haired man covered in bandages who looks less than excited to be there, a snake wrapped around his neck like a security blanket.
Joy, bright and unadulterated, lances through the base of his skull, and he knows that it doesn’t belong wholly to him. But he also cannot deny that he doesn’t mind seeing Kanroji and Iguro again, in this setting, to know that they’ve survived this long. That they are still here, when others are not.
He lifts his helmet a whole five centimeters in an approximation of a wave.
It’s enough to make Kanroji bound toward him and throw her arms around him in a tight hug, giggling like mad. “I can’t believe you came back!”
Giyuu does not hug her back, too startled by the contact.
Kanroji tilts her head back and loosens her grip, but does not let go, looking right into his eyes. She’s always been able to see right through him. “Is this weird? You have to tell me if this is weird, Giyuu. You have to use your words.”
He feels like the air has been knocked out of him. He isn’t used to casual touching anymore, be it light touches on the shoulder or full contact hugs. He finds that he missed it, missed this , be the source Kanroji or someone else.
He didn’t think that he would.
When he fails to say anything, she renews her hug and says, “I missed you. It’s been quieter without you here, which I know is kind of weird to say, but it has been. Quieter. Spiritually.” Finally, she releases him and takes a step back, turning her attention to the man who has been suspiciously quiet through the entire exchange. “And you must be Shinazugawa, Giyuu’s new partner! I’m Kanroji! It’s nice to meet you!”
Shinazugawa rolls his eyes and steps up for the Drive Suit techs to peel him out of the suit, handing the helmet off to one of the waiting personnel.
Kanroji purses her lips, and Giyuu can practically see the thoughts spinning out in her head, all of them comparing his old Ranger partner to his new one. He doesn’t like them, because Shinazugawa and Rengoku are incomparable; Rengoku would have never been able to pull him out of a R.A.B.I.T., never would have been able to keep a steady hand on their Jaeger while he was spinning out of control.
Finally, she looks back at him and smiles, true and bright and so Kanroji it makes his insides squeeze. Over the top of her head, he sees Iguro glaring at him for taking up so much of his partner’s time. It’s almost comforting in it’s familiarity.
“We’ll get out of your hair, but I just had to come and see you! You have to promise not to avoid us, okay? We’re all stronger together, remember?” She giggles and steps away from him, placing a hand on his arm and squeezing even though he can’t feel the pressure through the metal of the Drive Suit. “Bye-bye, Shinazugawa!”
Even after Kanroji and Iguro leave, the two of them don’t speak over the sound of the Drive Suits being peeled from their bodies, leaving them in the black circuit suits underneath. They don’t talk about what happened, an understanding passing between them like a current:
Giyuu will go to the edge, and Shinazugawa will pull him back from it.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
The days slip by, seemingly unmarked. Neither of them keeps a calendar in the room, the only thing marking the passage of time Giyuu’s sharp brain that he can’t seem to turn off no matter how hard he tries.
They break their fast together in the mess hall in the morning, not a word passing between them. It’s a companionable sort of silence, the kind Giyuu finds he can get lost in, the sort he never had with his other partner, who always had to fill the noise with chatter. They head to one of the private traning rooms after that to whack each other half to death with training staves, though neither actually succeeds in that goal. They are evenly matched, after all; it’s why they’re Drift Compatible. The afternoons are for himself, where he wanders around the ‘dome or simply sits in their shared room and stares at the wall, living the half-life he thinks he should be living.
He thinks he can feel their bond growing, little by little, like a particularly small flower one must coax into bloom. That he can feel the stranglehold Rengoku has on him loosening, bit by bit, the more time he spends in the presence of Shinazugawa.
It’s during one of his afternoons alone that he’s summoned by Muichiro for an unscheduled patrol duty, even though they’re three months out from the last Kaiju seen in the Breach. Giyuu doesn’t pay attention to the explanation Muichiro gives, listening to the other man with only half and ear. Something about Ubuyashiki’s feelings or other.
Shinazugawa is already in the Drive Suit room when he arrives, half encased in the black armor. He doesn’t say a word as Giyuu steps up beside him to be fitted into his own suit, simply acknowledges him with a nod.
Giyuu counts it as progress.
Drifting seems easier this time, like stepping into a worn pair of slippers. They still fit together like pieces of jagged glass, but the edges have worn down a bit; they’re less liable to cut themselves on each other.
It’s quiet in the conn-pod as they trudge through the grey-green water of the Pacific, looking for anything Ubuyashiki might have had his feeling about. It helps, too, for them to acclimate to the feeling of being in a Jaeger together before a Kaiju shows up and demands their full, undivided attention. All of Fatal Flame’s sensors are online and working, but nothing’s coming up.
Twenty minutes and nineteen seconds into the excursion, Shinazugawa reaches up and switches off their microphones, the ones that feed back to Ops.
Ops is not going to like that.
“I know you’re not, like, a fuckin’ mute, so. What’s the deal?”
Ah. A conversation, meant not to be overheard. A cornering, so to speak. Somewhere Giyuu can’t get away, quite literally. They both have to present to pilot the giant robot, after all, they can’t just leave it out in the Pacific, defunct.
That would be littering.
Shinazugawa half-laughs at the shared thought. “That— quit trying to distract me and answer the question.”
Here’s the thing: there are no secrets between them. There can’t be. One cannot hold anything back from the drift. So, Shinazugawa knows all about Giyuu’s family, killed in the second Kaiju attack, about how Giyuu made it to safety and they did not. And Giyuu knows all about Shinazugawa’s dead family, killed in the fourth Kaiju attack, about he was nearly killed in the aftermath in a building that came down on top of him and his brother.
The point is: no secrets. He has to answer the question.
So Giyuu bumbles out the one word that makes sense to him: “Anxiety.”
His Ranger partner stares at him in disbelief. “You don’t talk . . . because you’re anxious.” Giyuu nods. “You know they make medication for that, right?”
“Interferes with the Drift.”
“It wh—”
Ops chooses that moment to use their manual override for the comms, voice crackling down the line, “Fatal Flame is everything alright? We lost communications for a few moments.”
Shinazugawa glares at the speaker and announces, “Everything’s fine.”
They don’t speak about it again.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
Kanroji corners them one afternoon, serious look on her ever-smiling face. Shinazugawa curses when she approaches them at their lunch table, a string of ‘fuck’s’ laced together so perfectly Giyuu thinks the other man might be reciting poetry.
“Ubuyashiki wants you to do an interview in a few months,” she explains, tightening the end of one her braids like she means business. “He’s sent me to bring the two of you up to snuff.”
“What the fuck.”
“ That .” She snaps her fingers, puts one of them on her chin. “We can’t have you cursing in front of a live studio audience, Shinazugawa. It isn’t befitting of a Ranger of the PPDC. You see, you represent the PPDC whenever you go out in the uniform, now. You’re like a PPDC ambassador. You have to make a good impression on everyone, even if you don’t want to.”
“ Me? What the fuck about him .” He jerks his thumb in Giyuu’s direction. “He doesn’t even talk!”
“Exactly! Giyuu’s the best! The strong, silent type! We don’t have to worry about him saying the wrong thing when he doesn’t say anything at all. You, on the other hand . . .” She trails off, a glint in her eye that suggests that they do, in fact, have to worry about what he says. “You’re going to need some work.”
Shinazugawa sputters. “Wh— how did he get away with interviews before? He had to have done interviews before!”
Kanroji waves her hand. “He had Rengoku then.” She says the name casually, as though the very mention of the man isn’t like acid being poured over his head. “Of course, you’re not charming or pretty like he was, but you’ll have to do. We’ll figure it out.”
“What the fuck do you mean, ‘you’ll have to do’!”
She blinks at him as though he’s grown horns. Giyuu likes to think Shinazugawa might have been born with them and files them down on the regular. “Well, Giyuu doesn’t talk much. So he’s useless in interviews, and interviewers know that, because he’s been on the circuit before. Which means you’re going to be doing all of the talking. We can’t have you chewing out the interviewers, so we’re going to have to sand down those edges a little.”
Shinazugawa grumbles something that Giyuu doesn’t quite catch, Kanroji’s pert mouth pulling into a frown. “I’m acting with the authority that Ubuyashiki has seen fit to grant me. Now, let’s get started, shall we?”
It’s all downhill from there.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
Some kid approaches him in the hall, one day. He’s towering, with a black mohawk and a frightening scar across the bridge of his nose. Giyuu isn’t one to turn away from people because of their appearances, but there’s something familiar about the force the kid radiates, something that makes him want to avoid this other being.
Unfortunately, it’s a straight stretch of hall, and there’s no corners for him to duck behind. Also unfortunately, the kid seems to be looking specifically for him. He steps directly into his path, somehow making even the PPDC jumpsuit look menacing.
Neither of them speak, waiting for the other to make the first move.
Finally, the kid clears his throat. “I’m, uh. Sanemi’s little brother.”
It takes him a moment to remember that Shinazugawa has a given name. That he’s heard it, somewhere.
Another moment to recall the moment in the Kwoon Room: I’m waiting for my brother. My brother .
Giyuu strings the two facts together neatly, briefly considers himself a genius for a job well done, and says, “Oh.”
Genya tilts his head slightly to the side, studying him closely. “‘Nemi said you didn’t talk much. Listen, I just wanted to thank you. For, uh. Being his partner. I never really wanted to pilot a Jaeger, you know? But I couldn’t hardly tell him that. He’s been so dead set on the two of us piloting a Jaeger together that he wouldn’t even think about getting in one with someone else, let alone think about what I wanted. Then you came along, and I’ve heard about how you manhandled him in the Kwoon Room, and how you guys just fit , and I just— wanted to thank you, I guess.”
Giyuu blinks at the young man, tongue thick in his mouth. Shinazugawa’s been on his case about ‘keeping up conversations’ and ‘making small talk’ and what better place to start than with his younger brother, right? And he needs to make a good impression on this kid, Rengoku is telling him he needs to make a good impression on this kid, so he finds himself opening his mouth against every instinct in his body.
“What. Uh. What is it you want. To do?” Every word is like having his teeth drilled out with a screw gun. And the worst part is, they came out wrong . Stunted. Giyuu knew he shouldn’t have even tried.
But Genya half-smiles at him, one corner of his mouth tugging up. “You know, ‘Nemi’s never asked me that? I want to work on the Jaegers as a tech. And now that ‘Nemi isn’t breathing down my neck about being Drift Compatible , I get to. I wouldn’t be able to, if it weren’t for you. So, uh, thank you. Again.” He rubs at the back of his neck like he’s nervous. Like Giyuu makes him nervous.
Which is preposterous. Giyuu doesn’t make anyone but himself nervous.
When he doesn’t speak again, Genya says, “This is awkward. I should go.”
Giyuu can’t even muster up the courage to say goodbye. He does, however, seek out Shinazugawa, who is huddled in one of the training rooms reserved just for Rangers, as he usually is at this time of day.
He folds himself into a corner and watches as Shinazugawa moves through his katas, eyes only flicking to acknowledge Giyuu for the barest of moments. Giyuu comes, some days, just to watch Shinazugawa go through the motions with his training staff, fighting an enemy only he can see, keeping his body lithe and limber in preparation for when they’re called out to fulfill their duty.
They never make conversation; they never leave together. Giyuu is just there to watch, to lose himself for a while in how different the other man moves compared to everyone else. Compared to Rengoku.
Sometimes, in the dark, Giyuu even allows himself to think that he and Shinazugawa are better suited than he and Rengoku ever were; the ghost he carries with him hums in agreement at those thoughts, and a sick sense of shame floods him for even thinking it in the first place.
Today feels different; full of untapped potential after his meeting with Genya. A time for new things.
Shinazugawa is mid-swing when Giyuu opens his mouth. “I met your brother.”
He looks at him over his shoulder, clearly disgruntled at being interrupted. “And?” The word is spoken with disdain, as though it shouldn’t matter that Giyuu has met Shinazugawa’s only surviving family member, the gap toothed little kid that shines so brightly in the drift when they first step into it and swap memories like packs of gum.
“He thanked me.”
The training staff clatters to the ground; Shinazugawa turns on his heel to face Giyuu properly, eyes wild. “He did what.”
Giyuu, never one for repeating himself, says with exaggerated slowness, “He thanked me. He wanted to work on Jaegers instead of fight in them.”
Shinazugawa makes a noise like an aborted snarl and a snort all in one, twirling his training staff between his fingers like a baton. “He wouldn’t say that. It was always our plan, to be Rangers together. Until you came along.”
“What if you aren’t even drift compatible?”
“What?”
“We don’t.” Giyuu pauses, hesitates, chews on his words. Shinazugawa stares at him, unblinking, long enough to make him uncomfortable (thirty seven seconds). “We don’t get to choose who we are Drift Compatible with. Just because you’re brothers doesn’t mean you’re Drift Compatible. The bond forms in unexpected ways, in unexpected places, sometimes between unexpected people. The Scientists thought they understood what they were messing with, when they decided to meld man and machine, but humans are . . . humans are tricky.”
Shinazugawa snorts. “That’s the most you’ve ever said to me.”
“Humans are tricky,” Giyuu repeats, softly, as though peeling back a layer of himself just for Shinazugawa to see.
That small layer might be too much, because one shows Shinazugawa a weak spot and he dives for it, going for the kill.
“But not all of them. You don’t talk about him. Fucking Rengoku.”
The name is like a hot knife right in his lungs, twisting and searing at the same time. He keeps his face carefully void of emotion, but he knows he can’t keep the pain out of his eyes.
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“But you loved him. Everyone knows you loved him.”
Giyuu studies his Ranger partner critically. “Did I?” he finally asks, hitching one eyebrow up higher than the other. As though he doesn’t know the truth of his own emotions. As though he doesn’t know his own heart, the way it beats in his chest, the way it’s regrowing even now, a phoenix nosing up through the ashes.
Shinazugawa grips at his own chest, right where his heart is, grabbing a fistful of his tank top. “I can feel it. In the drift. I can—I think I can fucking feel him.”
The words hit Giyuu like a sack of bricks to the jaw, nearly sending him to the knees. He knows, logically, that Rangers take everything into the Drift. That they leave nothing behind, everything shared between two souls. But he didn’t think that he would take the ragged ends of his Ghost Bond with him, that he would take a dead man with him into the Drift and thrust him onto someone else.
He ends up saying nothing, because that is what he is best at. He says nothing and he stares, unblinking, at his Ranger partner, at this man with whom he has drifted with only a handful of times, because it’s easier than saying anything at all. What is there to say, at a declaration like that?
I think I can fucking feel him .
He is so used to being alone, to being adrift in the world despite having someone quite literally in his head, despite having a ghost attached to his soul, that the weight of being almost-known is too much. He sags back against the wall he was leaning casually against, warm shoulder meeting cold metal, and breathes in deep through his nose.
“Well? Are you going to talk to me, fucker?”
Shinazugawa’s voice snaps him out of his trance.
Giyuu pushes himself off of the wall and stalks out of the room without looking back.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
He can’t avoid Shinazugawa forever.
They share a room, they share a Jaeger, they share a Bond.
They also share a ghost. Apparently. It’s a lot to wrap his head around.
He heads back to their shared berth after wandering the ‘dome, because it’s the only place for him to go.
Shinazugawa sits on the top bunk like a gargoyle waiting for him, legs crossed up beneath him.
Giyuu makes the mistake of direct eye contact while he closes the door behind him, the locking mechanism snicking shut forebodingly. There is no backing out now. Between the locked door and Shinazugawa’s eyes, that much is obvious.
He gulps, almost audibly in the quiet of the room, and trudges to the bunk beds to face his fate. There are no secrets between partners, he reminds himself; there can’t be, not if there is to be a strong bond. Not if one doesn’t want to die in the field because they’re holding something back.
He has to talk to Shinazugawa, or this will all fall apart. It’s almost surprises him, the fact that he wants this to work. He hadn’t been actively sabotaging it, before this moment, but he hadn’t been actively fostering their bond, either. He had simply been allowing it to exist, unnurtured.
So he tells Shinazugawa a story about two boys who met in the Academy, neither of them sure what they wanted to do beyond pilot a Jaeger. One of the boys had no tongue and the other had more than enough for two of them, which worked out just fine for them. They became fast friends, inserpable, and before long it was clear that they were Drift Compatible.
They graduated early, the top of their class; one young man who didn’t quite understand what fear was and the other who understood it so well he wore it in his shadow. Opposites, physically and mentally, that worked, somehow.
Over time, they fell into each other. It wasn’t love, exactly. Just a need for human contact. The seeking out of another body, one you know as well as your own, when things got too dark.
Eventually, they rose to the top. Around them, their comrades died, felled by the Kaiju and side effects of Drifiting and experimental Jaeger-tech alike. They were not foolish enough to think themselves immortal, they knew every drop could be their last. They clung to each other more tightly as each day passed, trained harder with each second that they breathed.
Finally, their count grew to nineteen drops, eighteen kills. Their timer was up. The bright one died while they were in the Drift, fighting a Kaiju, leaving the other one clinging to his ghost and choking on saltwater.
“You talk like you’re the one who died,” Shinazugawa says when he is done. He hasn’t moved from his gargoyle-like position on the top bunk. Giyuu hasn’t moved from his spot by the door.
They’re in a stalemate.
“I should have been.” It’s the first time he’s made the admission out loud, staring down at the scarred palms of his hands, voice quiet.
Shinazugawa snorts. “Every survivor says that. You should know better by now.”
“We switched sides that day.” The only piece of information that wasn’t in the official reports, the only bit of information that only those in Ops and Ubuyashiki knew. “Rengoku’s shoulder didn’t feel right so we switched sides. It should have been me.”
The weight of Shinazugawa’s stare is heavy, but Giyuu feels no judgment in it.
“Shit,” his Ranger partner breathes out. Giyuu finally finds the courage to bring his head up and meet his eyes, and what he finds there startles him. For the first time, Shinazugawa isn’t looking at him with hostility or annoyance; he’s looking at him with something Giyuu thinks might be compassion .
It’s gone as soon as the other man realizes he’s being studied, shuttered and locked away to a place Giyuu cannot reach.
“It really should have been you.” He relaxes into the heavy blow of each word, allows each of them to land precisely as they’re meant. Something about the knowledge that at least someone else feels the same way puts him at an odd sense of ease. Someone else, finally, knows he shouldn’t be sitting here, breathing.
Someone else agrees with him. Finally. It’s like a breath of fresh air after minutes underwater, a gasping lungful on the precipice of death.
“I mean, fuck,” Shinazugawa continues, unaware of the relief Giyuu feels. “I didn’t mean— I mean, it should have been you, but I’m. I’m glad it wasn’t you. I’m glad we’re partners. Even if you do come haunted, fucking Tomioka.”
Giyuu feels a little weak in the knees at the admission. That Shinazugawa, who openly hated his guts in the Kwoon Room when Gyomei first announced Drift Compatible, would come so far so quickly makes his head spin.
He almost laughs in relief. Instead, he says, “Now that we have all the unpleasantness out of the way, you could call me Giyuu.”
There’s a glint in Shinazugawa’s eye that he nearly misses, partially because of their imbalanced height, partially because of the poor lighting of their berth. “Sanemi.”
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
Life goes on, somehow.
They eat, they train, they sleep. They go for walks through the Shatterdome, just the two of them, sometimes with Genya tagging along, locked in conversation. It’s like a wall in Giyuu’s mind has come down, one that blocked his words from his tongue, and he’s free to use it whenever he wishes instead of when he has the courage to.
Then there’s Kanroji’s Interview School for Delinquents, which Giyuu does not have to attend but Sanemi absolutely does , twice a week, in the afternoons, like clockwork. While Sanemi is busy with that, Giyuu has taken it upon himself to take up a post in the Kwoon Room with Gyomei, watching how the cadets are filling out. They’re promising, but there’s no Bonds forming between them, and neither Giyuu nor Gyomei see a Drift Compatible pair coming out of the room for a long time.
In the midst of all of that, Sanemi and Giyuu are deployed in Fatal Flame for patrols, each time on some kind of hunch by Ubuyashiki, and each time the hunch turns up nothing. Not that either of them mind it; they like wandering the Pacific in their hulking orange and blue robot, just the two of them and the barest outline of a third, the wind and the waves and the hum of machinery keeping them company.
Their seventh drop turns disastrous.
They’re trudging through water, on their way back to the Shatterdome, when someone from Ops crackles through their headsets and says in the most non-casual voice possible, “ Movement detected in the Breach.”
Sanemi’s head jerks in his direction, wicked grin knifed across his face as he breathes, “Fucking finally.”
“ You’re taking the lead on this, ” Ubuyashiki says as they turn their Jaeger around and head toward the Miracle Mile. “ Kanroji and Iguro are deploying as we speak.”
Excitement and adrenaline hums and shifts across their drift bond, tangled up and twisted to the point Giyuu doesn’t know what originated where.
“ It’s a Category I,” Muichiro relays to them, taking over for whomever had control of the mic in Ops. “ Designation: Cloudbreaker . It doesn’t look like anything too extreme. On the small side.”
They reach the Miracle Mile and wait for the monster to appear out of the ocean or their proximity alarms to go off, whichever comes first.
Ten minutes, eight seconds, and the beast rises out of the water before them, as though looking for a fight.
Panic spears him in the chest at the sight of the Kaiju. The last time he had seen one in person was Akaza, and everyone knows how that ended. Akaza had been the first Category III Kaiju on record, and there had been none sighted since.
Calm radiates down the bond, pulling him back down to himself. Reminding him that he’s not alone right now.
Cloudbreaker is small, for a Kaiju. Grey-green hide and abnormally large eyes compared to the rest of it’s skull. It still has four arms despite it’s small stature, and Shinazugawa has a thought he doesn’t voice about not wanting to see how man legs it has.
They engage the beast as one, grappling with it. Time speeds up for Giyuu during the fight to the point that he misses chunks of it, blurring together and blending, time chopped up into bite sized, disjointed pieces:
An arm comes off, Kaiju blue arcing through the air into the ocean churning below them.
Their plasma cannon discharges, a direct hit into one of the freakishly large eyes of the Kaiju, and Sanemi laughs like a maniac.
Cloudbreaker scores a direct hit with it’s third arm while their own two are busy locked in combat, taking out some of the plating on their stomach and a good amount of wiring, leaving them both gasping for breath.
Kanroji and Iguro arrive in their Jaeger, a pink and black painted monstrosity, and immediately slide up beside them to join the fight.
Ultimately, the fight lasts for one hour, sixteen minutes, and thirty nine seconds. Giyuu is only half aware of most it, body entirely on autopilot, mind humming with the words, stay alive on repeat.
The few blows the Kaiju does manage to get in on them are a few blows too many, and he can feel them bruising as they limp back to the Shatterdome, the carcass of the Kaiju cooling in the Pacific behind them.
“Now that’s what I call littering,” Sanemi crows, laughing, then wincing when the motion sends a jolt through his ribs that even Giyuu can feel.
It had been too much, too soon, perhaps. Or maybe he had just grown complacent, thinking he was healed when he was just a collection of parts stuck together with duct tape. But being so close to a Kaiju, having to fight one again, had rattled him to the very core of himself.
He had thought, for a moment, that history was bound to repeat itself. That he would be stuck in Fatal Flame again as she took on seawater, the other side of the conn-pod empty and sparking, Sanemi lost to the Kaiju and the sea both.
The realization had been creeping up on him like ivy, but it had struck him in the back of the head all at once in the middle of the fight: he doesn’t know what he would do without the other man.
Worse, he doesn't want to find out.
They’re heralded as victors upon their return to the Shatterdome, hauled out of the conn-pod and paraded around the Jaeger Bay for all to see. But the emotions sit heavy in Giyuu’s stomach, and he’s never liked being the center of attention anyway.
It takes fifty eight minutes for Giyuu to peel himself away from the festivities, helmet in his hands, and head upstairs to the Drive Suit room.
He’s halfway there when he has to pause and lean against the wall, nearly bent double with his hands on his knees, taking deep, gulping breaths.
The pounding of booted feet on the grated metal of the walkway makes him straighten up just seconds later, trying to get his breathing under control.
“That was fucking— Giyuu?” Sanemi steps up behind him, placing a hesitant hand on his shoulder. “Are you. Good?”
He looks at his Ranger partner in the empty hall. His messy white hair is an even bigger mess than normal, sweat slicked and sticking up this way and that, sticking to his forehead. His eyes are bright, almost feverish, and he is so alive that it nearly knocks the breath from Giyuu’s chest.
It might be much too soon. It might be far too early. Giyuu has never been one to let his emotions rule him, but it’s kind of hard not to with Rengoku hanging onto his mind and urging him onward, forward, away from the past and toward his future.
He bundles up every last ounce of his bravery and crashes against Sanemi like the ocean breaks against a cliff side, one hand going to the other man’s waist and the other still full of his Drive Suit helmet. Rejection will face him on the other side of this, of that he’s certain, but at that moment all he knows is two things:
1) He was absolutely certain he was not going to die without kissing Shinazugawa Sanemi and,
2) Sanemi tastes like sweat and honeyed milk, and he is absolutely not kissing back.
Giyuu has the presence of mind to allow the contact to continue for three entire seconds before removing his lips from his Drift partner’s, hand sliding off his waist as he takes one large step back, not quite meeting Sanemi’s eyes.
“I—sorry.”
Sanemi looks wrecked, all wide eyes and quivering lips. His body is held taut, as though the only thing holding him together is the drive suit and sheer force of will, and Giyuu immediately regrets what he’s done.
“Fuck,” he curses, succinctly.
“Sorry,” Giyuu apologizes, automatic, taking another step back.
“I just— fuck , Giyuu. I don’t know if what I feel is what I feel, ya know? Like if they’re my fucking emotions or his .” He gulps, column of his throat bobbing delicately beneath the suit. “It makes my skin crawl. Like, do I want to maul you with my mouth because he does or because I do? And it’s the same thing when I think about pinning you up against the wall. I just— I can’t sort out what’s me and what’s him, and until I do, I can’t fucking do anything. I—”
He stops himself just short of apologizing and leaves Giyuu standing in the hall, bereft and aching.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
He finally goes to see Kochou.
She doesn’t look surprised to see him, folded neatly into her white lab coat and surrounded by Kaiju specimens, lab giving her skin a sickly blue glow.
She does, however, nearly laugh herself sick when he explains the entire situation he finds himself mired in. Petite hands pressed to her stomach, nearly doubled over in mirth, cold laughter ringing out of her mouth and into the hollow spaces between specimen jars like bells.
“What are you,” she finally says, when she has herself under control, “some girl in a pre-Kaiju YA novel?”
He does not see the appeal. But he sits and allows Kochou her humor anyway, because there is not much brightness to be found in Kaiju labs aside from the LED lights.
“I haven’t seen you in . . .” She trails off suggestively.
“Twenty months and ten days.”
“How many minutes.”
Giyuu doesn’t answer; this is the problem with Kochou, always treating him like one of her science experiments. The problem is, this time he wants to be one of her science experiments.
“How many minutes, Giyuu.”
“. . . forty seven.”
She looks at him as though he’s a particularly shiny new piece of lab equipment. “So your dead boyfriend might be influencing the emotions of the guy you want to make your new boyfriend, and you want it to stop.”
She’s always had a way of putting things that was unsettling, but Giyuu can’t exactly say she isn’t wrong.
He doesn’t answer her, and she’s used to that. She sends one of her assistants off with a note signed by both of them for his medical records, and proceeds to hook him up to a series of machines for a battery of tests that he doesn’t think are approved by any board of anything.
Three days, two hours, twelve minutes, and too many pots of tea to count later, Kochou throws her hands up in the air. “I don’t know,” she admits in defeat, placing one hand on her hip and the other on her forehead. “There are cases of Ghost Drifting between fully alive, drift compatible Ranger pairs, but none between a living and a dead one.” She looks him square in the eyes. “You’re being haunted.”
As if he didn’t already know.
“I have to stress that there is very little known about Ghost Drifting, but what little is known is that it normally fades when contact is limited. By all rights, yours should have faded months ago. I think forcing you back into a Jaeger so soon, making you reconnect with the memories of that day over and over again, might have reinforced it. There might not be a way for you to be rid of it.”
Giyuu nods that he hears her, that he understands her, but his brain is already working, trying to puzzle out a solution. He knows, in his heart, that he can’t live the rest of his life in this half-existence.
It takes him one day, sixteen hours, four minutes, and eight seconds to figure out what exactly he has to do to get rid of the Ghost Bond.
He does not tell Kochou.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
The morning of the interview dawns a soft gray, shrouded in mist. The starched collar of his dress uniform itches at the back of his neck, just beneath his low ponytail. The last time he wore it was for another interview, just like this; he would have worn it for Rengoku’s funeral, but he couldn’t attend. He had still be unconscious for it.
Sanemi makes his discomfort more well known, tugging at the sleeves and collar intermittently in their shared dressing room and loudly proclaiming, “This is the most uncomfortable fucking thing I have ever worn in my life!”
Kanroji pushes at her cheeks and mumbles, “Why did Ubuyashiki not insist on a radio interview? Why .”
Giyuu finds he agrees with her. A radio interview would have been preferable. Less people to stare at him, no dress uniforms, less bright lights in his eyes.
Instead, he’s going to have to stumble through an interview in front of a studio audience. At least they’re used to his antics. Sanemi, on the other hand . . .
Well. he doesn’t think Kanroji’s ‘interview school’ did anything to soften his rough edges. The word ‘fuck’ comes flying out of his mouth more times than not, and any hope anyone had of him charming the audience the way Rengoku did is sorely misplaced.
Giyuu can only pray for a properly timed Kaiju attack. Really, it’s in everyone’s best interests.
Kanroji frets over the rumpled state of Sanemi’s attire, tugging his sleeves back down to his wrists and then at the ends of her braids every time he pushes them back up to his elbows. They go back and forth like this until an aide comes to fetch them, looking thoroughly fed up with her job of herding important guests around the building. Kanroji leaves the dressing room with them, spouting reminders the entire walk as they dodge crew members backstage: “Remember to smile.” “Don’t curse.” “Be polite.” “Remember, there will be children watching.”
“Why are these all aimed at me and not Giyuu?” Sanemi finally snaps when they’re feet away from the stage.
Kanroji smiles at him, strained. “If you haven’t figured it out yet, we’re all doomed.”
There are too many people for Giyuu’s comfort in the audience, all of them on their feet and cheering. The attention makes his skin crawl, and he subconsciously walks a little closer to Sanemi than is socially acceptable, the backs of their hands nearly brushing.
Sanemi, for all of Kanroji’s hard work, attempts to smile at the crowd, but it comes out as more of a sneer. They eat it up anyway, because he is a Ranger, and he keeps them safe in theory. Giyuu’s heart is a hummingbird in his chest, rapid and fluttering under the bright lights and intense scrutiny.
He feels like he’s going to crawl out of his skin.
“Welcome, welcome!” a half remembered voice crows, one heavy hand clamping down on his shoulder. His eyes widen a fraction as a face, grinning, comes into his peripheral vision, taking up the space between him and Sanemi. “It’s always a pleasure to have the PPDC’s finest on the show! I’m married to three of them, myself.”
Uzui— and Giyuu understands, now, why Ubuyashiki had insisted on this interview instead of a radio one—motions to the audience to settle down, and for he and Sanemi to take their seats. They do so, Sanemi taking up a post between Giyuu and the audience, as though by instinct.
It settles Giyuu right into the jaws of the lion, as it happens.
Uzui oozes grace and goodwill as he introduces them as his guests, and then draws Sanemi into conversation. Giyuu only half pays attention, mind focused more on keeping the ball of anxiety in his chest ball-sized rather than boulder-sized.
Sanemi does well. For all of his grousing in the car ride over and backstage, he keeps his curses to himself. He seems half-polished under the stage lights, but even that’s better than the rough edges he reserves just for Giyuu; he keeps his temper in check, to the point that even Giyuu has to admit that Uzui really is good at his job, drawing his interviewees out of their shells and getting them to talk.
Uzui makes Sanemi seems likable to the audience at large, instead of Giyuu’s audience of one.
Then Uzui has to go and ruin it all by opening his mouth and saying, “Really, this is all just an elaborate excuse to talk to Tomioka. Everyone remembers Tomioka, don’t they?” He pauses, half for dramatic effect, half for the audience to chime in their assent. “Of course you do! He and Rengoku were regulars, but he never spoke a word . Then the Kaiju Akaza attacked, and Rengoku made the ultimate sacrifice.” His voice is colored with false cheer, none of which reaches his eye. “Of course, it’s quite surprising to see you here again, Tomioka . Especially with another Ranger at your side. What’s it like, being in a Jaeger again?”
Everyone waits for his answer with baited breath.
His throat is dry.
“Fine,” he answers, voice on the quiet side. The mic hooked to his collar picks it up anyway.
Uzui presses a hand to his chest, ever dramatic. “You do have a voice!” He laughs, over-loud, as though he hasn’t heard Giyuu speak to him on several different occasions. “And here I thought we were in a Little Mermaid situation!”
Even Sanemi snorts at that one, rolling his eyes.
“Anyway,” Uzui says, getting back to the matter at hand. “It’s just ‘fine’? There’s no other words you want to tack in there? No other emotions?” Now he sounds like the PPDC-appointed therapist he had seen for three months before he had stopped going to visit altogether, seeing their appointments as useless. He didn’t like talking about his feelings, because there was nothing to talk about. Nothing to explore . He felt something, he let it go.
A little like fishing.
“Fine,” he repeats, digging his elbows into the arms of his chair.
Uzui gives him a droll look, one that says I know what you’re doing and I don’t like it, expect to be chewed out later , and forges ahead. “The average person has no perception of what drifting is like, other than it’s being in two heads at once. But you have the distinct pleasure of having drifted with more than one person in your lifetime. What’s it like, Tomioka, to be drifting with someone other than Rengoku?”
Giyuu wants his chair to swallow him whole and eat him alive. “Fine.”
Uzui smiles like he wants to strangle him, slowly, with his bedazzled eye patch. Sanemi says something under his breath, too soft for even the mics to pick up, that sounds suspiciously like, “It had better be more than fine, fucker.”
“Right.” Their host draws out the word, making it sound more like three. He shuffles the cards in his hand, eye narrowing. When he doesn’t find one that he likes, he sets them facedown on top of his desk and looks straight at Giyuu, eye glittering dangerously.
Giyuu doesn’t like that look. Has never liked that look on Uzui’s face, when he comes to think of it, because that look has always predicated danger. He wants to reach out and warn Sanemi, but he can’t , because there is an audience, and so he can only will Sanemi to pick up on his vibes.
“Tomioka, do you even miss Rengoku?” A knife, right to the ribs. Twisting, twisting, twisting. Underhanded and just a little dirty, and so, so much like the Uzui Giyuu knows the other man rarely shows to the cameras.
For a moment, he’s too stunned at the question to formulate even the barest hint of an answer.
And then he stands up and walks offstage, right past an open mouthed Kanroji, leaving a roaring mad Sanemi behind. He can hear Sanemi cursing and yelling at the other man, the entire tirade blasted through the speakers backstage as he makes his way through the throng of onlookers back to the dressing room.
Once there, once the noise is shut out of the room, the door firmly closed behind him, Giyuu collapses onto the couch and loosens his collar, finally taking the deep breath he’d been so desperately craving. He undoes the buttons that hold his cuffs together, folding his sleeves back twice, focusing on the task.
With that done, he has nothing else left to do but count the ceiling tiles, a task he focuses on with every fiber of his being so he can stay in the moment and not pay attention to the chaos surely unfolding onstage.
He’s counted twenty seven tiles before there’s a knock on the door and Kanroji allows herself in, pink in the cheeks and looking madder than he’s ever seen her before.
“Are you alright?” she demands, closing the door behind her. “Because I’ll go and give that Uzui a piece of my mind if you’re not! The nerve of that man! Pretty as he may be! I— I— I’ll loose some of Iguro’s snakes on him! Oh, no, I can’t do that. Iguro loves those snakes.”
Giyuu recounts his twenty seven ceiling tiles and then keeps going. It’s calming. This way, he doesn’t have to think about the question Uzui posed to him, doesn’t have to think about the panic that flared in his chest, doesn’t have to think about the way Sanemi stiffened beside him at the question.
He’s reached forty ceiling tiles when the door bursts open again, revealing a very angry Sanemi. The apperance of the other man startles him from his task, drawing his eyes away from the ceiling and to the door, past Kanroji.
Sanemi takes one good look at him. “I can’t fucking do this right now.”
He disappears without another word.
Kanroji tilts her head to the side, anger seemingly forgotten. “I think they’ll be able to cut a short interview out of what the two of you provided. It should air tonight. I . . . “ A look of determination appears in her eyes. “What Uzui did was wrong, but Shinazugawa chewed him out good. Are you ready to go? Shinazugawa can find his own way back.”
Giyuu thought she would never ask.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
The Breach alert jolts him from sleep that same night.
He sits upright, exhausted. He had tried to stay awake until Sanemi came back, but he must have nodded off. The clock on his nightstand reads 23:44, and he hadn’t felt the bed shaking or heard the door snicking shut.
For a moment, he thinks of going back to sleep. But that would be useless, now, with alert from Ops calling for Kanroji and Iguro to get to the Drive Suit room immediately for deployment.
There is a Kaiju, and it may be closing in on Japan.
He hauls himself out of bed and, only bothering to pull on one of Sanemi’s ratty sweatshirts that the other man leaves lying around the room, he puts his boots on and heads to Ops. There is a sea of people heading that way already and he gets lost in the tide, pulled along by these people that have purpose and ambition.
They let him into Ops, where they allow him to stand quietly in the corner, out of the way and not bothering anyone. Ops is a flurry of activity, all people rushing to and fro and shouted commands and questions.
Ubuyashiki arrives shortly after he does, looking as though he hasn’t gone to bed yet himself. The Marshal acknowledges him with the barest of nods before going to gather the newest information from those that have it, ordering the Jump Hawks that carry Kanroji’s and Iguro’s Jaeger to be deployed immediately, no time to waste.
Civilians don’t like to think about how much waiting there is involved with the PPDC, but Giyuu knows firsthand that waiting is a professional pastime when it comes to his job. Waiting for the Kaiju, waiting to be deployed, waiting inside the Jaeger, waiting in Ops, waiting during the fighting, waiting, waiting, waiting.
It’s shit, honestly.
It isn’t long before Kanroji and Iguro are engaging the Kaiju, designation: Giyuu missed it. A simple Category II, nothing they shouldn’t be able to handle on their own. It isn’t like Giyuu could go out and provide backup, since Sanemi wasn’t there .
Of all the times for his Ranger partner to go missing, this was not it.
The Ranger pair afield hold their own for twenty minutes until, somehow, the Kaiju makes a copy of itself and slips past them, through the water, sluicing through the tide like a great big sailboat and making straight for land.
Giyuu’s heart thunders in his ribs as he watches, awestruck, because such a thing should have been impossible. But the Kaiju were ever evolving, weren’t they? Shinobu had chided Rengoku, once, for using the word impossible in her presence because nothing was impossible where the Kaiju were concerned.
In the time it takes for Kanroji and Iguro to dispatch the copy, the Kaiju has torn through two cities, three villages, and is nearly into a mountain range.
“We need another Jaeger out there,” Ubuyashiki says, voice clear enough to cut through all the noise.
“I’ll do it.” It takes Giyuu a moment to realize that it was him who spoke, who opened his mouth and found his words. He’s of half a mind that it wasn’t really him, that he didn’t speak entirely under his own power, but it’s something he’ll examine at another point in time when an entire room full of people aren’t staring at him.
“But Shinazugawa isn’t here ,” someone protests.
Oh, well, he thinks.
But the Ghost Bond , his brain insists.
And what is he, if not a Ranger? What is he, if not a man with the ghost of another man inside him? Neural loads this, they say, mental capacity that. Giyuu knows his body, knows his Jaeger, knows his brain.
Knows he can do this much, without a shadow of a doubt.
“Get Fatal Flame ready,” he repeats, turning on the ball of his foot and strolling from the room as though there is no hurry. As though no one thinks he is walking to his death.
As though he isn’t issuing commands in his pajamas.
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
Fourteen minutes, fifty seven seconds.
Giyuu remembers it in a kaleidoscope of too-bright colors and over-loud sounds, every nerve in his body on fire. The Kaiju was big, it was ugly, it was in the goddamn mountains , and most importantly, at the end, it was dead.
He doesn’t remember the details. Who struck what blow when or where.
He remembers thinking, Sanemi is going to kill me if this Kaiju does not .
＊*•̩̩͙✩•̩̩͙*˚
Giyuu wakes up, and for the first time in twenty one months, he doesn’t feel Rengoku’s shadow clinging to his edges.
It is mind numbingly terrifying.
Kochou looks up at the noise his makes, then kicks him in the leg lightly from where her feet are propped up on his bed in the infirmary in the Shatterdome. The jolt sends fire straight into his spine. “You broke the Ghost Bond, if that’s what your intentions were. You nearly killed yourself in the process.”
All Giyuu can do is stare up at the ceiling, unblinking. He feels not-quite hollowed out, but nearly, like someone took a spoon to his edges and scooped blindly. But most of all, he is tired and bone-weary, and the pain he’s in is more than enough for two people.
He feels as though he is on the edge of something new, standing on some precipice and about to drop off the edge. It is not unwholly a good feeling, but he has never been overly fond of change. Willing to face it, to adapt to it, but never willing to meet it head-on.
He has always thought of himself like water, but never like a river; more like a puddle, stagnant and unmoving. Contained to one spot, to be evaporated by the heat of the sun, sucked up by the clouds above him until he was released, back down to the earth, to his puddle-like shape. Fluid, but never really changing form.
He must change, now.
“Damage?” he manages to rasp out.
Kochou nearly snorts. “You mean besides from the—and I stress the words here— minor brain damage , which I’m nearly convinced you already had, broken hip, and internal bruising? Not too bad. You’re not going to die any time too soon, unless Shinazugawa gets his hands on you.”
“Mad?”
“Oh, he’s furious. You’ve been in a medically induced coma for two weeks, Giyuu. What do you think his rage has done since then?”
Giyuu doesn’t have to guess. He knows Sanemi like he knows himself, inside and out, back to front. Maybe just as well as he knew Rengoku.
Perhaps even better.
Kochou continues, closing her magazine and settling it neatly in her lap, “Your brain activity was much more interesting when you were being haunted. I wonder if we could—“
The door to the room opens, and Giyuu’s eyes flick to it.
Sanemi stands in the doorway, staring at him openly. As though he can’t believe his eyes. His bloodshot, weary, blue-black bags underneath them eyes. He looks like a wreck, hair more disheveled than normal, clothes looking like they’re on their third day of wear at least.
Silence settles on the room, thick and heavy and suffocating.
“YOU FUCKING IDIOT,” Sanemi finally roars, when he finds his voice.
“You have to be nice to me, Kochou says I have brain damage,” Giyuu says immediately.
Kochou whips herself in the forehead with the palm of her hand, then stands and leaves the room immediately. She can’t witness a murder. She just can’t.
She shuts the door behind her so there are no other witnesses, either.
Sanemi does not approach the bed. He stands, slightly out of the doorway, staring at Giyuu, drinking him in. His hands are fisted at his sides, and Giyuu is reminded of the first time they met, of how much rage Sanemi seemed to hold in his body as he flew at the other cadets in the Kwoon Room.
He had thought the other man had been bled of it, but it seems to have returned with a vengeance.
“You,” Sanemi starts again, much quieter this time. Giyuu sags his head back against his pillows, because no one has seen fit to help him sit up and he isn’t quite sure he can manage on his own just yet. “Fucking! Idiot!” He pauses for a moment, as though to collect his thoughts, as though he hasn’t had a good two plus weeks to collect them, to practice just what he’s going to shout at Giyuu.
Giyuu finds it amusing that Sanemi doesn’t know what he’s going to say beyond those three words.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be sitting in a bar and look up, and see your own fucking Jaeger deploying without you in it? Or to find out, on national fucking television , that your dumb ass Ranger partner has decided that he apparently doesn’t fucking need you anymore and can pilot a Jaeger on his own? Or for people to recognize you while this is fucking happening ?”
He doesn’t find this amusing anymore. It’s kind of painful, actually.
Sanemi stalks further into the room, all tense muscles and tight jaw and hardly reigned in fury. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to watch your partner fight a monster, alone? To make it back to the Shatterdome just in time to watch them cart what I thought was your lifeless body off of one of the Jumphawks? To have to sit here for two and half fucking weeks without knowing if you were going to wake up or not?”
Giyuu takes the blistering verbal assault in silence. He wants some water. He’s parched.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to realize you’re in love with a fucking imbecile ?”
Giyuu hums at that, deep in his chest. “No, tell me more.”
Sanemi, startled either by the words that came out of his own mouth or Giyuu’s—Giyuu isn’t sure—just blinks. All of the anger seems to have fled his body at once, leaving behind a weary husk of a man. Drained, but not quite defeated.
“I—” He stops. Walks over to the side of the hospital bed and flops himself down into the chair Kochou had abandoned minutes earlier, all graceless limbs; he won’t meet Giyuu’s gaze. “I realized about the same time I realized they allowed you out in the Jaeger alone that it was my emotions I was feeling, and not his. That they might not have ever been his and I was just lying to myself to avoid the truth.”
Giyuu really wishes he were sitting up right now. With a glass of water, maybe with a straw. Wishes he could reach out and take Sanemi’s hand in his own, to reassure him, but it’s too soon and that’s too much energy to expend, energy he doesn’t think he has.
He says, “Rengoku is gone. There’s no coming back from what I did.”
Sanemi looks at him in exasperation and exhaustion. “But you came back from what you did.”
He did, didn’t he? He survived, which was all he really set out to do in the first place, when his village was destroyed and his family killed. All he set out to do when he signed up for the Academy and the PPDC. All he wanted to do when he met Rengoku, and drifted with him and even after, when Rengoku was mostly gone.
Now, he wants to do more than survive. He wants to live.
Where does one even begin, after leading such a half-life? How does one start to re-insert themselves into a life they’ve shunned for so long?
They start here , he thinks, for himself, as he musters up the energy and courage to reach out and take Sanemi’s hand.
Sanemi meets him halfway.