Title: Welcome to the Hunt

Disclaimer: Pacific Rim belongs to Legendary Studios and Deltorro

Author's notes: Just a short character piece.

It, no, he was a he, that much he was sure of, awoke in a sudden, jarring realization of awareness. He was… he could feel himself moving in two bodies, in unison. He could feel the flex of steel and titanium and the churning roar of the nuclear power pouring through his veins.

Three voices reached his conscious. Yancy and Raleigh were strong, warm, determined. Their minds, their souls, connected through him. Their connection felt… right. The third was cool, feminine and clinical. It held no emotion, no individuality. AI was the understanding that reached him from the brothers' minds.

Then the connection dropped. Suddenly he felt like he was falling, alone. Desperate, wild panic swelled up inside of him; he wanted to scream but had no throat, no lips, no voice.

Suddenly he was caught. Strong, warm confidence touched him, like he was suddenly again in the drift, and he was suddenly aware he was not alone.

They were… it was difficult for him to put into words. They were like him. But he didn't know what they were. He didn't know what he was.

It would be one voice that spoke up, grizzled and grim, tinged with what he somehow knew was Russian, "Jaeger."

That word struck something inside of him and he felt an image flash before him: A massive form, strong, blue-grey steel with flashes of red and a splash of gold on its visor. This was… him?

And with that realization, suddenly he felt himself take form and structure.

Yes, this was him. This was what he was. This was who he was.

And with that realization he could perceive the way the presences around him took form and shape. The one whom spoke earlier was a weathered and brutal-looking machine, like a humanoid tank as it regarded him with an appraising silence. The others varied, each of them looking different. Some were almost pristine, whole and undamaged. Some were weathered like the first. And some…

They looked at him, some of them looking half crippled, others looking completely so.

The question came to him almost unbidden, "What happened to you?"

Those damaged jaegers did not seem insulted by his question. They looked at him and he was filled with a sense of sad understanding. The question was expected.

"Our brothers/sisters/mothers/fathers were taken from us," one of them said sadly, looking away, off into a distance he couldn't understand. "We remember them. Here, in the drift, we are all that is left of them."

One of them, looking as weathered as the first who spoke, but leaner, built for speed over the first's power and strength, but at the same time… less than the first. "Tell us, do you know your name?"

He paused at that and frowned. Searching what he knew, what he'd learned from the bridge between Yancy and Raleigh. Then he knew, "Gipsy. Gipsy Danger."

The Jaegers nodded, before a bulky, squat jaeger with long, powerful arms spoke, "Then, Gispy Danger… Welcome to the Hunt."

-o-o-o-

He'd learned their names since then. He'd been there for the awakening of more like him. He'd been there when they seemed to be pushing back the tide.

He'd been there when the last of them, Striker Eureka, had joined them. And for a brief moment, the drift had been glorious.

Thirty active jaegers. Thirty voices hungry for the hunt. Kaiju fell before them like wheat. Almost sixty kilotons of metal and power.

Then… it changed.

Knifehead.

Where others had fallen, it had stood. Where others had died, it lived. Where others had broken, it had reached up and had torn the bridge asunder.

Yancy was ripped away them, him and Raleigh. They could feel it, his death, his passing. They shared the pain, and reached desperately to pull him back.

When Raleigh took over his brother's hemisphere, he still reached. When he had fired and finally put down the monster that had hurt them, he grabbed hold of what ghost of Yancy lingered in the drift and clung to it with a terrified desperation.

And then he lent what strength he could to Raleigh. Tired, aching, bleeding. Empty and broken, their pair bled into the drift. In those moments, something changed. In the drift, among the Jaegers, in him.

When Raleigh finally exited, relatively safe on the Alaskan shore as his body fell, broken and tired, he felt like collapsing with him.

He had expected to find his body a half crippled mess. Like those fallen jaegers before him, those who had lost one of their partners like he had. Instead, he was met with a mix of broken, jagged metal, and soft, warm, human flesh.

Somehow, and none of the other jaegers truly understood it, when he had clung desperately to his departing brother/father, moving in the drift in perfect unison with Raleigh, they had pulled at least a portion of Yancy into themselves.

Here, in the drift, it showed.

He wondered if the next time that Raleigh came back, with a new partner, he would look more like Yancy.

When they consigned him to Oblivion Bay, he thought he'd never know.

-o-o-o-

He'd been only the first. With a frightening regularity, the other jaegers had fallen. With a grim certainty, the tide had risen against them. Then there were less than a dozen.

When they'd begun rebuilding his body, years later, he was already resigned to the thought that he would never again see his brother. It was too long. He'd vanished, like dust in the wind. No other Jaegers were partnered with him.

He could step aside, surrender fully to the drift and let another be born in his place. A new voice would finally be added again, even if it was a new bastardized mix. If it wasn't Raleigh… he didn't want a part of it.

There had been five others when his reconstruction had finished. Then Mutavore had taken Echo Saber and Vulcan Spector. When Striker Eureka had killed it, there were just the four of them.

Then he could feel him, sense him. Raleigh. He was in the Shatterdome with him. With them. In the drift Cherno Alpha had nodded his chassis, Crimson Typhoon had been skeptical, and Striker Eureka had been torn between disdain and happiness.

When Raleigh had entered the drift again, he had practically grabbed hold of him, clutching, desperately across the bridge, forgetting, for a moment, that he was supposed to balance both pilots. Raleigh had been thrown off, stumbling into the last moments they'd shared with Yancy, before pulling himself back out. But the stumble, the lack of balance had in turn sent the new pilot, the new partner, tumbling into the darkness.

They'd reached for her, through the drift. Mako. That was her name, Mako. They'd tried to reach her, they'd shared in her memories, in her experiences… But they couldn't pull her back.

The plug was pulled instead.

He'd been horrified, terrified at what it represented. When the clock had sounded, he'd been left behind. Eureka, Typhoon, Alpha, all had been sent out. But not him.

Then Typhoon had crashed into the drift as a broken cripple. In an instant he had gone from fighting to the ghost. There were just of them then.

Cherno Alpha had fallen next. It had seemed impossible. The thought of the stoic, iron juggernaut falling had been… inconceivable, really. But it had happened, and it was just the two of them.

Fear rose up inside of him. Dark, alien, clawing. Striker was alone. Was he going to be the last? Without even being able to try and save them? Was he going to have to wait, helpless as the kaiju tore apart the screaming, helpless jaeger, forcefully trapped in his own, inert body and ripped away from the bridge between his pilots?

No. They were launching. He could feel it. In the drift, every eye was on him, on them.

They were the last chance.

So, they fought. First one, then two kaiju. Bonding with the new pilot, holding the balance between them.

They won.

And the clock reset.

-o-o-o-

Three.

Three kaiju, including the vaunted category 5.

And the sacrifice of Striker's pilots. He'd reached out through the drift then, he wasn't sure exactly how, but he'd pulled Eureka back into the drift. He wasn't going to let the youngest of them be snuffed out like that.

As the others took the jaeger, he realized with a dull ache in the core of his being, that he was the last. It fell to him to finish this.

They were dragging the corpse of the kaiju they had bisected to the breach when the category five tackled them. It was still alive. Somehow it was still alive and it was pulling them back down into the breach with it.

The drift suddenly went quiet as the voices of the other jaegers grew dim, distant, then, not at all. In the silence, he focused on the fight at hand, the task at hand.

It was a race against time now. Kill the kaiju and make sure they had enough time for his pilots to escape.

The first had been done. But now Mako was unconscious and the detonation, his detonation, had to be triggered manually.

Mako was away. So, that much was certain. Some part of them would live.

Then the countdown started. He considered being selfish for just a moment. He considered trying to cling onto Raleigh, to not be left alone in the silence.

But instead he watched as he left, as he escaped, and he turned his attention to the sudden panic of motion around him. They knew something was coming. They knew were in trouble.

It was in those final instants as, for the first time, he marveled at being truly alone. No other voices, no other presences could be felt. Here, the drift was empty of everything but him.

He decided then that he liked the quiet.

And his cores erupted and the breach was sealed.

The clock would stop.

The hunt would end.

And the Jaegers held a silent vigil in the drift for their lost brother, whom they knew would not return.