Chapter Text
Nikan, Sinegard Academy
"I want to become a good pilot."
"You and the rest of this school," Jiang muttered without opening his eyes as he sat in the lotus position. "But none of you understand that being a good pilot takes more than getting away with a brawl."
"And how should meditation help me?"
Now, another teacher would answer his student's question and that's it, but Jiang was Jiang so what he got was another question that had nothing to do with the current topic.
"How do you defeat an enemy?"
Rin thought about it carefully. Rin thought about it carefully. She had already learned that with Jiang, quick answers were not always the correct ones. She mentally went over all the war tracts and military manuals he had made her study and arrived at a one solution.
"The objective. War itself is based on an objective; More land, more resources, the affirmation of religions or even personal ambition . Once you prevent your enemy from reaching their goal battle after battle, that's when you defeat them."
"And what is the goal of the kaiju?"
"They are beasts, huge beasts of another dimension, it is obvious that they come here to hunt."
Jiang opened one eye and stared at her with the look he gave when she gave an answer that was too general or trivial. This was what they taught her during the other classes, what was wrong? They stared at each other for a long awkward second.
"Then I don't know," she finally admitted reluctantly, stretching out on the cobblestones of the garden, puffing with her arms spread over the warm stone like a starfish.
"Exactly, we don't know," the man closed his eyes again. "The studies we are doing on the carcasses of kaiju clearly tell us that they are not a breed and not much else, but we insist on treating them as if they were animals with complicated biology that we can disassemble and reuse without actually understanding. "
"And. . ."
"And so we've built even worse monsters that work with parts of our brains that we don't even understand and, coincidentally, shamans are starting to reappear in the world."
Rin got nervous. "I don't understand," was something she often said during Jiang's lectures. "You said that the ability to interact with the Gods began to fade as humanity entered the Modern Era until it disappeared. What do the kaiju and Jaegers have to do with all this?"
Rin knew she was going in circles in this way, but Jiang had his own way of teaching, so there were two options. Either her teacher was taking an absurdly ride along that would lead her to the question, or they would get into another conversation.
Or worse, she would end up with more questions.
"What does shamanism do to our minds?"
Rin closed her eyes disconsolately. There would have been other questions then. "It takes them to a higher stage; it releases them from our body and from the material world to the Gods."
"Well and what does Drift technology do to our minds?"
"It merges them with the co-pilot's, it connects them to . . ."
Rin paused by sprinting to her seat, opening the eyes wide for realization.
"It detaches us from our material body and connects us to a higher stage, the Jaeger, which takes us to . . . "
"To the Kaiju," Jiang ended with his eyes closed but with a smirk on his lips that for Rin was better than verbal praise.
"Think about it. Don't you find it strange that the interconnection rate of shamans is higher than that of a normal person? Or that the legends are coming back to reality when those things have crawled out of the Breach?"
Rin nodded to the rhythm of each word. All the pieces fit together with an almost frightening ease, so obvious that she called herself foolish for not having thought of it before.
"Wait," she blurted out at the mental image she was painting. "Wait, that means the kaiju come from . . ."
"Pantheon?" Jiang concluded with a smile almost too wide for his face. "Our ancestors interpreted as far as they were able to do things that were beyond their comprehension. What tells us that the Pantheon is not the way they interpreted the world beyond the Breach?"
"But..." Rin's head pulsed with information overload. "But kaiju don't behave like Gods," she tried to elaborate. "The description of the force of nature moving the world suits them, but the powers of shamans are different and the kaiju have not demonstrated such an extensive degree of consciousness, even their appearance is more reminiscent of the beasts of . . ."
The wind suddenly picked up along with Jiang's voice.
"The Jade Emperor's Menagerie," he said as he opened his eyes.
They were yellow like the eyes of a beast staring into the dark.
It lasted so little that Rin did not even have time to gasp, a literal blink of an eye and her master's eyes had returned to their usual blue and the wind had stopped. She could have imagined it if Jiang hadn't already done such things in front of her.
"Shit," she said with an almost manic laugh. "If the beasts of the Menagerie are how our ancestors interpreted previous types of kaiju, it means that there must be a Jade Emperor who controls them or even more than one then. . ."
Jiang seemed delighted. "It means we're focusing on the wrong thing."
"How do we defeat them then?"
"The Jaegers give us a body to fight their beasts," he touched his temple with a finger. "So we have to train our minds so that we can reach the masters behind the beasts. And since inside a Jaeger there is not only your mind and a full bowl cannot be filled yet, you must learn to empty it. "
Rin deflated, looking at him frowning. She knew where they were going. "That means..."
"It means. Learn. To. Meditate." each word was accompanied by a tap on her forehead. "If you really want to make a difference."
In the end it was a ride long.
Rin grunted in frustration, lying down again with a heavy thud.
"I despise you."
Jiang's loud laughter was not long in coming.
§
Rin was going to die.
"No," Altan hissed louder than in her head. "You'll survive, you just have to move."
But Rin couldn't, couldn't move, the left hemisphere to which she was connected had been compromised, Phoenix's flank stuck in a spur of rock and she couldn't move, the water made their movements slower, her leg was in the wrong angle without the ability to pull.
The Category III corpse they had shot down was polluting the sea waters with its Kaiju Blue, but that thing was just a smokescreen. Something had lurked in ambush, somehow evading even the sensors of the base, grabbed and pushed them against the rocks when their guard was lowered. Rin had time to turn around and prevent the spur from hitting the cockpit, but in doing so she had trapped them.
They would die, and it would be Rin's fault.
Altan, however, managed to break through her panic with sheer stubbornness, burning in their mental bond like poison for weeds. "Rin, pry with your hand and..."
Rin saw his lips moving, but her ears could only hear the heartbreaking sound of metal tearing apart.
A second later, Altan was gone.
§
Years later, Alyeska.
"The world is coming to an end," Kesegi mimicked in a big voice and his face still stained with soot. "Where would you rather die? Here?! Or in a Jaeger!?"
Raleigh and the rest of the table laughed loud. Marshall Pentecost had been gone for a while, taking away his useless and flashy armed team with the helicopter in which he had come, finally leaving them for their miserable lunch.
"I have to admit, Pentecost is good at speech," muttered Rin, chewing his bread too hard. In Alyeska the cold made the rations of boulders, but at least they were fresh for sure.
Her Hesperian friend laughed as if he didn't have a single worry in the world. "Marshall makes you feel like you can get into the eye of a storm and get out alive."
"So, when are you leaving?" asked Kesegi, leaning over the other side of Rin.
"To leave?" Raleigh raised an eyebrow. "And leave you and Rin at the head of the welders' team? I'm not going to bring down the Wall before it's even completed."
Even louder laughter rises from the table, more jokes continued to cover the sense of unease that had crept into all the workers when they saw the kaiju break through the damned construction that was supposed to be indestructible. And amid the noise, the man exchanged a look with Rin that for them was worth as much as a neural handshake.
The world was really about to end and they couldn't fucking do anything about it.
After all, they were no longer pilots.
They could no longer be pilots.
Can't or don't want to? the disappointed question Altan rang in her ears as if he were there with her.
"I'm waiting for them to call you too," Raleigh whispered so others wouldn't hear him. " Then we will go together to Arlong."
"Your dear Marshall came from Arlong, if they wanted me, they would have made a double call," Rin replied, lowering his frown to the plate with a nonchalance she couldn't feel.
"And take away the opportunity to show that they can be as pompous as we Hesperian?" Raleigh grinned. "Come on, Birdie, you don't believe it either."
Rin took a breath to answer, but at the same time the hum of another helicopter was heard. Also from there they could see the Dragon, which was Nikan's national coat of arms since the time of the Red Emperor, imprinted on the door.
"You talk about Chaos," Raleigh whispered with a chuckle.
Rin elbowed him in the ribs. "I hate you. "
§
Rin hadn't seen him before leaving Nikan so the scar was a surprise.
The right side of his face was streaked with a series of geometric scars that had bent the corner of his mouth into a permanent sneer, crossing on the skin like the patterns of a turtle's shell. Such a thing would have made anyone's skin look like that of a strange reptile. But, with the golden light of the early afternoon running along the sharp lines of the scar, half of his face looked like a piece of crushed porcelain put back together with gold, one of those kintsugi works of art for which Mugen was so famous.
Trust Yin Nezha to still look cute even with a scarred face.
"You have a lot of nerve," hissed Rin full of venom. She felt her eyes veil red, and her palms burned with embers as if they were waiting for nothing more than an opportunity to burn something.
The sight of a pissed-off Speerly would have been enough for anyone to run away. But Nezha crossed his arms to his chest, all presumption and bored condescension Yin contained in a stupid suit with tailored coat and gloves that embraced him in all the right places.
She hated it.
"Believe me, I didn't want to see you Fang again either."
"Well, then turn around and don't come back."
"Come on, Rin. Don't make it harder for me than it already is."
She leaned against a steel pillar. "Say what you need to say and fuck off Yin."
"My father reactivated all the pilots on leave and..."
"No."
"Rin. . . " Nezha started.
“Your father and the whole fucking army made it clear long ago that I'm unreliable and now they want to put me back in a Jaeger? Fuck you."
"Now don't be a hypocrite," Nezha tried to reason. "You voluntarily resigned."
Rin felt the metal warm up behind her shoulders. "And don't pretend you don't know why."
Silence fell heavily upon them under the weight of unsaid things. Nezha's already pale face took on a sickly tinge, and Rin wished with all her might that things would return as they were in Sinegard. In those days Nezha would spit insults that hit where it hurt the most and Rin would return the blow even harder.
It was all so damn easy in those days.
Now, however, Yin Nezha, the one who had almost ejected her and messed up her head in ways the average human could not even imagine, took a deep breath with his jaw contracted. He looked like an adult tryingnot to yell at a child.
"Rin," began softer again. "I know it was hard but..."
"Hard?" Rin scoffed at him. "Did you become a pilot while I wasn't there?"
Irritation and anger returned to his eyes and Rin almost thought finally, while something she refused to call anticipation made her blood boil. But Nezha deflated, shaking his head almost disconsolately, suddenly looking older.
That sight pissed her off even more.
"I didn't come here to fight."
"My answer is still no."
"My father's is an order, mine is a courtesy Rin. If you don't show up..."
"Will they kill me?" Rin approached Nezha, sparks crackling on her tongue along with her words. He did not move even though the flames could fill the few steps that separated them.
"Or will they make me disappear without leaving a single corpse?" she hissed, the last words Jiang had mumbled on her phone echoing in her head.
"Get out of here and don't come back. "
"But Laoshi... "
"Go away! Your mere presence is a threat to them, don't let them catch you not... hmph! "
"Laoshi! "
After that, no one had seen Jiang Ziya's hide nor hair. If Rin hadn't spat fire and flames to make herself heard, authorities would not even open a missing person investigation. Within a few months it had been filed as a voluntary disappearance and probable suicide, since the man was certified as mentally unstable and a habitual drug user.
Rin hadn't fled that far to be dragged back again.
"Stop talking like there were some weird conspiracy!" Nezha seemed to have to restrain himself from stepping on his foot like a child. "Bad things happen! But people keep going!"
"Don't come and talk to me about bad things Yin, you don't even know half of them!"
This, of all things, triggered him.
"You! How dare..."
He managed to take only one step forward, one step less from touching Rin's nose with his own, before the sound of something hitting the ground caused them both to turn. Raleigh was a few feet behind them, his hands casually resting on the handle of a heavy wrench as if it were a simple walking stick.
"Need a hand?" he asked simply, as if he was absolutely capable of using that thing to crack someone's skull.
Nezha grinned, bringing his gaze back to Rin.
"Since when does a Speerly need protection?"
Raleigh did not lose his temper and bent his lips in that smile with the canines outside that Rin had always reminded of a wolf that bares its fangs in warning.
"Oh, but I wasn't asking her. I was asking you," he continued, casually placing the large tool on his shoulder, the threat clear and simple in the gesture. "I don't think it's a smart move boy."
Rin had to hold back a laugh because she had been the one who told the man that Nezha absolutely hated being called a young and could hear the snap of his jaw clenching.
Yet, the irritation in Nezha's expression dissipated, as if he had remembered something suddenly. He turned to Rin again, his scars seeming to change shape as he spoke to her in their native language.
"What would Altan say if he saw you like that?"
Rin punched him in the face.