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We both knew the risks, Kenshin thinks as he stands at Tomoe’s graveside and shakes hands dutifully with his commanding officers. We both agreed to take them. That’s what he keeps telling himself, as suit after suit comes with sorrowful eyes to clasp his hands (such strong hands and they couldn’t hold on the one time it really mattered) and whisper their mea culpas and if-there’s-anything-I-can-dos.
Then Pentecost comes, as he comes to the funerals of all the fallen, and he only nods, once.
“Will I see you tomorrow?” he asks.
And Kenshin thinks, really thinks about his answer. He straightens his back and looks into Pentecost’s eyes, ignoring the half-grown girl who clings to the marshal’s hand with a wide, solemn stare. He clasps his arms behind his back – parade rest – because they’d agreed to take the risks, together, and they’d agreed to fight this war until the end, even if they had to finish it alone.
“0800, sir,” he says softly. Pentecost nods, once. There is respect in his eyes.
Kenshin stays at the grave until everyone is gone, until it’s only him and her in the rain just like it was before the war began. The wind had torn the umbrella from her hand and they’d chased it, two strangers, until it blew into the river and he’d offered her his own. But she couldn’t just take it and leave him stranded, so he’d walked her home.
It’s almost dark when he accepts that Tomoe will never take his hand again, that her hands are lying soft and white in the cold, hard ground, and soon they will be only withered flesh stretched over powdering bone.
He reports for duty at 0800 hours the next day.
~*~
Rangers who have lost half of themselves do not return to the drift. It is madness to try. But it was madness that made the Jaegers in the first place, madness to think that the world might be overrun by monsters out of drive-in movies, and therefore Kenshin does not think that a little more madness will do much harm. Pentecost agrees.
Tomoe’s loss is a wound in his side that bleeds him out a little each day but there are five liters of blood in the human body so if he is careful, he will make it through the war before he dies.
Most of Tomoe’s blood had splattered across the cockpit, but some had gotten on his face and he’d licked his lips without thinking. It had tasted like pennies and rain.
The first five cadets fail. They’re good cadets, well-trained, and as they open their minds to let him in the wound of Tomoe’s death overwhelms them, makes them sick into their helmets, and Kenshin cannot quite get enough of a grip on their minds to keep them stable. As the last cadet gasps and falls limp he sees Pentecost looking sadly at him through the viewscreen and stares back, unblinking. The marshal shakes his head, just once.
No more.
And Kenshin cannot fault him. Rangers are rare, too rare to waste on madness, unless the madness works.
~*~
Kenshin was a ranger, once: now he trains those who would be rangers, teaches them what they need in the hopes that they will not die, will not leave another man or woman with a wound in their side that kills them a little each day. Despite this, they are dying more and more. He cannot prevent this – he isn’t a ranger, not anymore – so he does not think about it. He trains his students and he tells them: survive. Above all else, survive. Nothing is stronger than the will to live.
He thinks that he must be a very good liar, because he makes them believe it. His trainees have the highest survival rate of any unit, and that’s something he can almost be proud of.
There’s a girl in this year’s class with bright blue eyes and a determined jaw, and he tries not to notice her. He does such a good job, in fact, that one day she corners him and demands to spar – because he’s sparred with everyone but her, and how is that fair? Does he think she can’t do this?
He almost lies to her, but her eyes demand the truth. So he bows his head and leads her to the ring.
Her first stance is easy, like his: she relaxes her shoulders and holds the quarterstaff loose and ready. So does he. Her gaze is calm, clear, focused. So is his. They stand like that for a long while, long enough that a small crowd gathers, because she’s not the only one who’s realized that he never spars with this trainee.
She paces forward as he paces back: he steps to one side and she circles, responding so quickly that it’s more choreography than combat, and not a single blow’s been struck but he knows. The rest is window dressing.
When the dance ends with 4-4 score – the last hit is simultaneous, her staff-tip thrusting at his kidneys while his stops just short of her throat – he looks up and realizes that Pentecost has seen it, too.
~*~
The cadet’s name is Kamiya. She thinks she understands that risks but she doesn’t, she can’t, and he argues with Pentecost long into the night until the marshal finally dismisses him, mind unchanged.
“We need you out there, Himura,” is the last thing he says. “Let her try.”
So he does, and it’s just like every other time. Her mind reaches out to his, brushes the wound that will not heal and she collapses, held up by steel that stretches her like a marionette as tears stream down her face.
“Disengage,” he tells the control room, and doesn’t add I told you so.
“No.” Her voice is a prayer flag on the highest mountain, ragged and bleached white. “I can hold him. I can do this.”
And then she’s blazing across his mind like a comet, past the wound and into the deep dark places that only one other person has ever seen and he wants to scream at the invasion but she does not relent. Fireworks light his skull and when they settle her mind cradles his like a mother with a frightened child.
“Okay,” she says, still weeping: but her voice is strong, stronger than his has ever been. “Okay. I’ve got you. Let’s do this.”
~*~
His co-pilot’s name is Kaoru, and they are not in love. This is war, and there is no time for love, and anyway all that he ever loved lies dead and rotting in a Tokyo grave, long-obliterated by kaiju claws and Jaeger landing-tracks.
That’s what he tells himself. But the drift makes its own demands and they cannot simply join and unjoin like puzzle pieces: she holds him through too many long nights as the war wears on, and one by one her year-mates fall. He lost his a long time ago.
Sometimes he wishes that he could hold her, too, but the wound in his side bleeds a little more each day and she can absorb some of the grief, enough to keep him alive and fighting, but never truly staunch it. It’s better this way. He has no life beyond the war, but she’s young and brave and beautiful and will have so much to live for, once the fighting’s done. He knows she will survive it and prosper, because the drift tells him so; in the drift he has seen her future, and it is something clean enough to be worth fighting for.
They are among those who retreat to Hong Kong at the end of days, when all hope is almost lost. They are there for the double event, and they fall with the Wei brothers and the Russians – he never did learn how to say their names. But they don’t die. Kaoru won’t let them die. She dislocates her shoulder and crawls out of the straps, hauls him loose and swims them both through churning water and kaiju claws and the faint radioactive glow of Cherno Alpha’s dying heart.
“The will to live is stronger than anything, right?” she says to him as they haul up gasping on the beach. He has time to smile before the darkness takes him.
~*~
Some pilots say that sleep is something like the drift, but Kenshin knows that for a lie because he’s never seen Tomoe there. This time, though, he dreams of soft, white hands and the smell of white plum in rain.
Idiot, she tells him softly. If you only knew how long it took to find you… why did you hide yourself away?
He tries to apologize, with words and that which runs deeper than words, and her arms are warm at his waist and her head is gentle against his chest, resting without leaning.
It wasn’t your fault, she tells him, and kisses him as his weeps. He has never wept for her, not once in seven years: all his tears streamed out of the wound in his side. But her hands are on the wound now, closing it, and the tears can come and they do, and they will never stop.
And then there are strong, warm hands cradling him and Tomoe whispers it’s time to let me go. He wants to beg her to stay but she can’t because she’s not really here, will never be here again, and the knowledge twists in his chest until it drains his heart and then all is clear and still and hollow and he is alone except for Kaoru, and her hands holding him steady. They curl around his face like a lover’s, not plum and rain but jasmine and salt-sweat and Jaeger oil. They are calloused and firm and gently, gently wipe the tears from his eyes, and soon the tears stop coming.
The last thing Tomoe says to him is remember. The will to live is stronger than anything.
~*~
Kenshin wakes up on starched sheets in a room that smells like a hospital, and Kaoru is sleeping by his bedside. Her eyes open a second after his, and he wonders why because there is no echoing drift connecting them, now – he must have been out for days. The skin of his cheeks feels stiff, and he lifts a wondering hand to touch them.
“You were crying,” Kaoru says, pouring him a glass of water. “I couldn’t leave while you were crying.”
The window is open on a blue, blue sky. He can hear a festival outside and he wonders at the human capacity for joy, even here at the end of all things. A seagull floats by, shouting insults to the waves.
“What happened?” he asks, when his parched throat can speak again.
“The mission succeeded.” She says it so simply that it takes him a moment to understand. “Pentecost’s plan,” she continues, as he stares. “It worked. We won.”
“We won,” he repeats idiotically. And then: “I slept through it.”
She laughs like someone punched her in the gut and suddenly there are tears streaking down her face.
“They’re dead,” she chokes out through disjointed sobs. “They’re all dead – the Weis and the Kaidonovskies and Marshal Pentecost and Chuck – and all those people – and it’s not fair – ”
The glass falls from his hand and he is out of the bed, somehow, tearing wires and tubes that are probably important but what matters is that she is crying, and she has never cried her own tears – only ever his, as she held him, because he could not cry with the wound in his side.
His arms come around her and it feels right, right to gather her into his lap and hold her tightly and press his lips to the top of her head. She stiffens, pulling away, and he hushes her.
“You’ve held me long enough,” he tells her, stroking her hair. “Now it’s your turn.”
And the world doesn’t end.