my brother's keeper

The Drift is far more complex, far more intimate than we ever imagined.

~ Dr. Caitlin Lightcap ~

Salt spray and terror wash over him. Fear in his mouth as he looks back at the great, glowing eye of Knifehead, as he feels the ghost-ache in their left arm, where the kaiju tore it off.

How did they know we were here? They've never done this before – targeting the pilots. If they know to target us then they know how to break—

"No," says Raleigh behind him, following his thoughts.

A spark strikes within Yancy, rebellion and protectiveness and determination. He looks over at his brother.

"Raleigh, listen to me! You—"

He wakes gasping, with Mako's hands hard on his shoulders, calling his name as she shakes him awake.

"Yancy," he says – is all he needs to say before he buries his face in her throat and shudders in her arms. He can feel the hole inside him again, the emptiness that clawed at him beneath the weight of the Jaeger pressing on his mind.

She feels it, too, rocking them both, her nails digging into his shoulders as she Ghost-Drifts with him in the horror of Yancy's loss, in the agony of her own childhood certainties stripped bare.

That's what pulls him back in the end – the knowledge that in cradling his pain, he's making her fight herself as well as him. His Yancy is her Tokyo: two children who lost the people they'd trusted to catch them when they fell. She found refuge with Pentecost, he found refuge in solitude, and they healed in their own ways, but the missing parts of them remain.

They have each other to catch and keep now.

He clings to that thought, holds her hard and close as he steers them out of the memories of desperation and fear, until her shudders ease and his own are nothing more than the pounding of his heart against his ribcage and her breast.

"He would have wanted you to live," she murmurs. "As you wanted me to live when we were in the Breach."

"Yes." Raleigh angles his head into the curve of her throat, caught in the memory – the fierce protectiveness that had flamed within him at that moment. Falling is easy. Anyone can fall...

Mako hiccups. The little noise tilts his mouth upwards at the corners where his lips press against her neck, and she shakes with sudden laughter. It quiets as he shifts – a subtle movement that asks a question without pressuring her for an answer.

Her answer is a turned head, and a nose-nudge to lift his face to hers for a tender meeting of mouths.

Mako doesn't fill the hole – no-one could ever replace Yancy, just as Stacker would never replace her parents – but she's something else, something all her own.

She's something all his.

Raleigh eases them down in the sheets and reminds himself of that again.

Breathless pain in his chest, darkness and fog and fire. The sticky sweetness of kaiju blue all around him – cut by the steel and oil of his Jaeger, broken by the shape of his thoughts as he falls.

Falling is easy – anyone can do it. And, after all, it's not the fall that kills you, is it?

The wrenching emptiness of the broken Drift sucks at him, a black hole that's painful enough for Yancy and which will be worse for his brother after the short, sharp stop at the end.

Survive, Rals, he whispers to the hole inside him as he falls. Survi—

fin