There’s a lot of reasons people enlist to pilot a jaeger. Some join because they want to save the world, some join because they want to save themselves. Some join because they are afraid and others because they are not. Some join because they wish to protect and others because they wish to destroy. He joined because he wanted to escape. Escape a city he used to call home but now he calls a prison (and the walls crumble farther every day), escape a family held together by all the people who are not there. Mostly he joins to escape the empty space where a little girl used to be.

When Hanbin is 16 years old his mother tells him not to grow up too fast. Maybe she sees the look in his eyes when the Jaegers go marching past. She tells him

“Wait to grow up. There’s still time to join the war.”

When he’s 17 he tells her gravestone it has always been time to join the war. Normally you can’t enlist in the jaeger program until you’re 18. Hanbin joins a year early because his father signed his life away with the of a pen.

He arrives at Kodiak Island alone. Everybody else has somebody, a sibling, a best friend, a lover. Hanbin steps off the airplane with nothing but ghosts and an empty suitcase. He tells himself he’s okay with that. He doesn’t have time to think about whether or not it’s true. He thought he was prepared for training. He was wrong. It is brutal, mentally, physically. He falls into the routine of it, wake up, eat, train in the kwoon, after lunch there are classes in jaeger tech and tactics and everything in between, eat, and fall into bed. Rinse and repeat. It becomes almost like a religion, and the days fall away in an endless cycle.

There are no breaks, no vacations, no helping hands or kind faces (he’s used to that at least). And he understands. The apocalypse is upon them and they aren’t kids anymore. They gave that up when they enlisted, no they aren’t kids they’re soldiers.

Hanbin finds out he’s good at being a soldier.

There is a boy, a boy with messy hair and a too wide smile (too wide for a world as tragic as this one) and front teeth a little big for his mouth. A boy whose shoulders are not yet bent with grief. Hanbin hates him a little, Hanbin loves him a little (Hanbin is jealous of his smile and his laugh and the way he loves so freely and easily) He learns his name is Kim Jiwon and that he signed up with his cousin Jisoo, two years his senior.

If the academy is his religion then the kwoon is his church, his sacred ground. The mat the altar where he bends his knees (the sound of wood against wood echoing off metal walls sounds almost like prayers). In the kwoon he finds peace, in the kwoon he finds something that feels like forgiveness.  

The Fightmaster is always telling them “okay kids, now remember this isn’t just hitting each other with sticks this is a dialogue, a discussion”

Hanbin never really understood what he meant till he was on the mat with Jiwon. He’s a precise fighter, ‘cold little bastard’ some of the other trainees whisper about him when they think he isn’t listening. But with Jiwon it’s different, with Jiwon it’s new. It isn’t a fight, isn’t about winning, isn’t even about scoring a point. With Jiwon the world falls away around them till the only thing that matters is the way their bodies move together, the way they draw closer then spin apart like planets (and every time their hanbo’s meet it is lightning racing up his arm)

The day they sync test Kim Jiwon enters the training room with his too wide smile and a hand around Jisoo’s shoulder. When he leaves the smile is gone and there is a bruise on his cousins cheek. And when their eyes meet across the room Hanbin sees in them that he knows grief now, he knows loss. He should be happy. He’s not.

And maybe because he knows his eyes look like that too he raises his hand and says in a voice quiet as whispering wind and strong as iron he says

“I’ll drift with him.”

Later as they sit, surrounded by a tangle of wires and electrodes Hanbin realizes they’ve never said one word to each other. He thinks that maybe that’s for the better.

People scurry around them saying things that Hanbin is only starting to understand

“Neural handshake in three…”

Four years and this is the moment it all comes down to

“Two…”

What’s left behind in this cold grey room is success or failure. There is no next time.

“One…”

He looks at Jiwon and does not smile.

“Initiated.”

Grass tickles his nose and he sneezes, his dogs wet tongue against his cheek

               She feels fragile and small in his arms and he knows that he’d die to let her live

The taste of cherry ice cream and sun

       He swings higher and higher, maybe if he tries he can touch the clouds with his toes

He traces the scar that stretches down his back and does not cry

                                    His name in sounds like love, it sounds like pain 

            The feel of lightning in their palms and in their hearts

When their tangled minds separate it’s like waking up from lungs filled with water. He gasps and chokes and shakes and his hands are reaching, reaching for Jiwon. They come together on the floor and hold each other tight and as he presses his face in the curve where Jiwon’s shoulder meets his neck and feels Jiwons hands bunch and pull at his shirt he knows he will never be the same again.

A man with a grizzled face and broad shoulders stands in the corner. He offers a hand up to Hanbin who takes it, legs still shaking and weak, breath still catching in his throat at the heady feeling of being so completely someone else. He smiles at him widely and clasps Hanbin on the shoulder (he thinks it might leave a bruise)

“Kid,”

he says

“That was the strongest drift I’ve seen in a long while.”

The drift is silence, but the emptiness it leaves behind is deafening. It’s the most intimate thing Hanbin has ever shared with a person. More intimate then his fumbling first kiss, more then his first time in an alley behind a neon lit club. The experienced pilots say that the drift is built on trust. And it is, it takes trust to let someone know every inch of you, to see the demons you knew you had and the ones you didn’t. It takes trust to show them everything you’ve ever fought for (the fights you’ve won, and the ones you didn’t) And for some reason, he trusts Jiwon with himself. More then he trusts the other kids who came alone to sit at empty tables and hide from something that will always always find them.

And when you drift, you take everything with you. Every secret, every lie, every open wound is laid bare. Jiwon takes a family. He takes sunny days and his little brother tears as they sit in the darkness and feel their world shatter and fall around them and takes the bitter acrid taste of fear in his mouth. Hanbin takes blood on concrete and a name he hasn’t said in three years.

As soon as they are cleared to drift again they are moved into the same room. As they sit, unpacking their bags he looks at Jiwon. And when he smiles at him, Jiwon smiles back.

Later Hanbin finds out the man with the grizzled face and broad shoulders was Herc Hansen, who will become one of the greatest pilots ever to step into a Jaeger (at least in Hanbin’s opinion) It also turns out that he has a son a few years younger then Hanbin who’s also enlisted in the Jaeger Academy. He meets him once in the halls on the way to class and all he can see is his father in him (even though he tries to hide behind the angry lines in his forehead that never seem to go away). The second time he meets him in the kwoon. Hanbin’s close to graduating a full fledged pilot and Chuck is fresh off the boat. He thinks it’ll be an easy bout. He’s wrong.

The way he fights is full of rage, every line of his body strained and quivering with something he’s just holding back. He’s not very technically skilled, but what he lacks in precision he makes up for in aggression. It takes longer then Hanbin would like to admit to pin him, the tip of his hanbo hovering above his throat. He didn’t understand what it meant to grow up in the cockpit of a jaeger till that day. Later Jiwon teases him about letting a match with a newbie drag on for that long. Hanbin tells him to shove it where the sun don’t shine.                      

The end of the world has a way of stripping away the lies we tell ourselves. Humanities soul is laid bare for all to see, it’s beating heart and all the parts it tries to hide with words like “civilized” and “humanity” (But what is humanity but blood and sweat and claws that refuse to let go) And a lot of it is ugly, there’s hate and desperation and a harsh desire for survival and a lot of it he wishes he’d never seen (like the red caps of the BuenaKai nuns, the newspaper clippings he hides under his bed with the name of every jaeger pilot who bled for a world that refused to bleed for them). But amid all the ugliness he finds beautiful things as well. Like the way Marshall Pentecost looks at his daughter (the little red shoe he saw him cradle in his palms once like it was the most precious thing in the whole world), or how when Chuck Hansen rubs Max’s head his hands carry a gentleness he’s never seen in him before. There’s beauty in the way that he and Jiwon drift, together and apart all at once.

Sometimes Hanbin felt like his spine was held straight by grief, each thump of his heart echoed pain, and the air he breathed was guilt in his lungs. He felt he was held together with splintering tendons of loss. Jiwon sees him, and he doesn’t try to fix him, just like Hanbin doesn’t try to fix Jiwon. And maybe that’s what makes them work. They’re a matched pair, Hanbin and Jiwon. They’re both a little broken (and broken edges always cut) but their brokenness fits together and they might not make a whole but they’re pretty damn close. (and when Hanbin feels like he is falling apart Jiwon holds him tight in his arms and he thinks maybe that’s enough)

After their training period is over they are deployed to the Nagasaki Shatterdome. covering Busan, the Yellow Sea Coast, and Shanghai. A part of Hanbin wished they were stationed halfway across the world, maybe in Lima or Anchorage someplace new and strange, places where he doesn’t see her in the dark haired little girls, in the smell of duekbokki and walnut cakes, all the places she used to play. But as he strides past the beaches and coastlines of his childhood, each of Nova Hyperion’s strides half a city block he thinks there’s something about filling the sky his five year old self had once stared into dreaming of the impossible.

He didn’t expect there to be so much waiting. Their record is a year and a half between deployments (and he should be glad there aren’t more events but when he’s out there he feels whole in a way he can’t find anywhere else so secretly he prays for their next chance) They run sims, and every now and then they take Nova out for a spin but Jaegers are expensive to start and even more expensive to keep going so they really don’t get out as much as he would like. And sometimes the waiting is like the moments between songs on the radio. When there is nothing but empty noise and the faint sound of static in the background, when you sit and wait and it’s all anticipation because the next song might be great or it might . When you’re a pilot though, your next drop could be success (slapped shoulders and loud laughs and the feel of power and adrenaline coursing through your veins), your next drop might end with two empty graves and another candle lit in a line of many.

People fall in love in mysterious ways. They fall in love between death and life, in the quiet moments when they can forget the enormity of the weight resting on their shoulders, they fall in love in the conn pod of a killing machine. Hanbin thinks it’s impossible not to be a little in love with the person you drift with. Because yes, you see the bad (anger and hate and jealousy and all the things we’d like to hide) but you also see the good. All the times they’ve loved and been loved, their favorite color, the first car they drove, the little moments in between. And how can you not love somebody when you’ve seen all that. He never speaks those words, at least not where Jiwon can hear them. Some things are better left unsaid. He can feel Jiwon knows, but to say those words is to make it something altogether different, make it into something they can’t afford. Not now, maybe not ever. So he is silent (and maybe he should have said them, let them be the last ones on his lips)

This war has left no one untouched. Hanbin doesn’t know a single person who hasn’t lost something, someone to the kaiju. J-tech , k-sci, rangers are all the same in their grief, in their loss.  The pilot’s who jockey Tacit Ronin, the second jaeger stationed in Nagasaki have. Kaori Jessop lost her home, her husband Duc almost lost his leg. He shows them the scar once, pulls his left pant leg up past his knee to expose the ropey tissue that stretches from his knee cap to upper thigh. When Yamarashi hit a steel girder from a collapsing building tore through his leg. He tells them he would have probably bled out on the street if Kaori hadn’t carried him to a hospital. They enlisted three months later, got married four months after that. In the mess hall that night Duc whispers with a grin that the only thing that kept him alive that day was Kaori’s beautiful face. She’s slugs him on the shoulder (he clutches his arm while dramatically crying out in pain) but her face is gentle and there is a smile in her eyes and Hanbin thinks this, this is what love is. 

Later, as they lay in the darkness of their room Jiwon whispers

“I used to have a dog, back before K-day. His name was Bobby. He ran off, when Trespasser hit and we never saw him again. He probably died. I still miss him sometimes, is that stupid?”

“No.”

Because loss is loss and grief is grief and who is Hanbin to judge someone’s pain for them, he has enough of his own regrets as is.  Jiwon’s sheets whisper and crinkle and Hanbin feels as he turns to face him. “Who did you lose?”

“My mother. Kaiju blue got her, back before they did major damage control with that .” This Hanbin can bear to say, the loss hurts, but it’s manageable. It’s scraped knees and broken arms and it hurts but it’s healing.

“Don’t you have a sister, that little girl in the drift? What happened to her?” This he can’t. This pain is shattered bones and blood filling lungs and broken glass. Every muscle in his body goes stiff and hard.

“I don’t have a sister.”  Each words grates against his throat like gravel and he can taste salt and metal in his mouth and when they tear from his lips they are harsh and painful and filled with so much loss, so much guilt.

Jiwon never asks about the little girl with the dark hair again

When they hear the news that Yancy Becket is dead, killed by a kaiju off the coast of Alaska Hanbin thinks about how Raleigh is only one year older then him. Thinks about what it must feel like to have an empty space where a brother used to be. That night he slips into Jiwon’s bed and they hold each other close. That night Hanbin learns that sometimes home isn’t a place. Sometimes home is two hands and a beating heart.

Everyone carries their scars a different way. For Jiwon they are honor, they are pride, they are reminders to himself and to the world that he has faced hell and lived to tell the tale. To the Jessops they are a promise. For Raleigh Becket they are a reminder of everything he’s lost (he has scars where there used to be a brother). To him they are something else entirely.

When the circuits of his drive suit burn themselves into his skin, he doesn’t flinch. He thinks that maybe this is his punishment for his sins (and god he has sinned)

Later Jiwon will trace the scars it leaves behind and when Hanbin shakes and trembles against his fingers he thinks he might sin again. He should have known he’d find no salvation in those hands.  

Hanbin has no illusions about his future. He knows the numbers, knows the average pilot doesn’t make it past thirty, he’s walked past the graves of all the friends he’s had to lay to rest and he weeps for them but he is not afraid to find his own. He is not afraid to face death (he has stared death in the face in a dark ocean lit with blue and death stared into him and turned away) no he thinks he will welcome death like an old friend. And he knows how he will die, he will die with blood on his fingers and rage in his bones and Jiwon standing next to him and his last breath will not be a scream or a sob or a plea, it will be defiance. He thinks this is a good ending, as far as endings go so he is not afraid to die.

And he is not afraid.

Because piloting a jaeger is being a god, and being a god means fearing nothing. So he is not afraid when the darkness comes or the roar of thunder and beating hearts and monsters that used to hide under your bed but now hide under the waves. He isn’t afraid, and that’s what terrifies him.

And he is afraid. 

Afraid to admit that the things that lurk in the corners of his mind scare him more then the ones that try and rip their world to shreds

It’s been hours, days, or maybe it’s been no time at all. The seconds bend and stretch like putty and even if he knew it wouldn’t mean anything. Now he counts time in each step their Jaeger takes, each thump of Jiwon’s heart in time with his, each of the six million lives that hang on the edge of their success, he counts it in each deafening collision of metal and 3,000 tons of genetically perfected destruction.

The lines between them are starting to melt and blur. He can’t tell if sweat is dripping down his face or Jiwon’s, can’t tell whose lips are forming the words he hears floating in the air. And they say if you pilot long enough you can start to lose yourself to your Jaeger, and Nova Hyperion may be nothing but steel but sometimes Hanbin swears she moves own her own.

It’s been the eternity of six million lives and Hanbin is starting to lose. Starting to lose himself, lose Jiwon, starting to lose the drift. He see’s her standing in the corner of the conn pod and closes his eyes hard and when he opens them she’s gone but he can still feel her flickering at the edges of his vision (a little girls laughter, his feet against the open blue sky as he swings higher and higher, blood on concrete) and then Jiwon shouts his name and it sounds like the way she shouted his name that day

The sky crumbles and cracks around them, her hand is in his and they’re running faster and faster but he can’t run fast enough he never runs fast enough

They’re hiding breath trapped and bubbling in their lungs afraid to even open their mouths. They sit in the darkness and shake and he holds her tight against his chest

His name is the last thing on her lips (he hears her screams echoing in his ears)

Red on grey against a blue blue sky

He hears his name in his ears again, ragged and desperate and he realizes it’s not her voice. It hasn’t been her voice for five years. And then the world rumbles and he remembers where he is. Jiwon’s staring at him with fear in his eyes as their Jaeger shakes and burns around them.

They make it out. Barely. They almost lose their right arm and the kaiju gets too close to breaking the miracle mile for anybody’s comfort and it doesn’t feel like a victory. But they’re alive and the kaijiu isn’t and Hanbin’s learned to take what he can get.

When they stagger back to the ‘dome Pentecost is waiting. There are no cheers or friendly hands today. Just the Marshall standing tall and lonely with fire in his eyes.

He takes one look at them, sweaty and bruised, barely standing (looks at the ghosts in Hanbin’s eyes) and his shoulders slump. He sighs and with a voice that sounds tired and a little bit sad “Go. Sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”

And Hanbin thanks god they have a good man for their leader.

They walk to their quarters in heavy silence.

Hanbin closes the door behind them and then Jiwon slams him into a wall, arm across his chest and face so close Hanbin can feel his breath against his cheek.

“What the  was that?!”

he hisses

Hanbin shrugs and looks away

“No. No you don’t get to do this Hanbin. You just almost got us both killed, and a whole lot of other people too. You need to tell me what the hell happened out there or next time we drift or we’ll both end up dead.”

And Jiwon doesn’t say it but Hanbin knows that when he joined the PPDC, when he first stepped into a jaeger, into someone else’s mind he signed away his past. Ranger’s don’t get the luxury of secrets.

But he’s still angry. Angry that this secret isn’t his to keep, angry that he almost destroyed the only things he cares about anymore, angry at his own weakness (that is so very very human)

“What is this anyway, some kind of revenge? For whatever went down? Cause, Hanbin, I swear revenge is just going to tear you apart.”

He doesn’t do this for revenge, not even close. Hanbin thinks it might be for something that will destroy them so much quicker.

“When I was 15 years old I killed my sister.”

Jiwon pulls back, dark eyes wide and shocked and lips parting in a silent oh. Hanbin wonders if he’s disgusted by the person who’s mind he shared. The person who killed a seven year old girl.  (he sees the look on his fathers face when the aid workers brought him home alone hears the words he whispered as they walked in the door it should have been you oh god why wasn’t it you)

“jesus” Jiwon breathes

“you think this is your penance”

And listening to his voice echo in his head he handles it like he handles all his problems. He runs. He hears Jiwon’s voice calling out behind him and pretends he doesn’t.

Jiwon finds him in the kwoon, sitting barefoot and still with a hanbo in his lap. It’s past midnight and the moon casts cold shadows on the metal of the walls and floors. And sometimes it feels as if they live in the remnants of some ancient beast, surrounded by decay. The steel beams become bleached ribs, each rivet holding together a skeleton and here he is the beating bloody heart of the remains. He thinks its beautiful, he thinks it’s sad.

He feels Jiwon enter, more then hears. Three years of drifting and he’s started to learn the feel of Jiwon’s mind brushing his. He’s silent as he stands on the edge of the mat, facing Hanbin’s back.

“She wanted to go to the park after school, so I took her. We were the only ones there. When the Kaiju hit there was- there was nowhere to run. She died and I lived. We didn’t even have a body to bury.”

Jiwon says nothing, just bends over and picks up a hanbo. Hanbin closes his eyes and waits. He’s been waiting for this moment from the first time he drifted with Jiwon. He knew it was leading to this, he knew he couldn’t hide forever. It’s strangely appropriate, it all started here in a room just like this one and here it will end.

He says “You know what my father said when I left to enlist? He told me I hope you don’t come back.”

He doesn’t say that he was never planning to.

They circle each other, slow and measured; dancing to a music that is the blood rushing through their veins and the roar of the engines that keep Nova Hyperion running and the storms they will die in.

Jiwon makes the first move and he is a shadow against the inky darkness of the kwoon. It’s a solid arcing swing and their hanbos  meet with a sound that echoes through the emptiness like a gunshot.

“It was your fault wasn’t it.”

(the words are low and bitter and they burn like acid on his skin)

He pulls back and circles again. The second time he comes in low and fast and Hanbin barely blocks the strike

“You were her older brother! You were supposed to take care of her!”

(he can taste the guilt raising in his throat, taste smoke and ash and loss)

Another swing.

“You should have been the one to die Hanbin!”

And now Jiwon’s voice and his fathers mix in his head till all he hears is hatred and anger and grief and it should have been you oh god why wasn’t it you

He falters and Jiwon’s foot is behind his knee, and then his back is flat against the mat, Jiwon’s face above his and the feel of cool wood against his throat. He’s shouting but Hanbin barely hears the words it was your fault, your fault

It’s Jiwon’s face, Jiwon’s voice but his fathers eyes and in them he sees so much guilt.

“No.”

It is a whisper.

“No.“

It is a scream.

“it wasn’t my fault.”

It is the truth.

He stops, and stares at Jiwon. And the words coming out of his mouth are not ones he ever though he’d hear himself say. Jiwon stares back and whispers

“I know. I just needed you to know it too.”

They visit a grave together. In it is the empty coffin of a little girl  (a girl who would never fall in love, never come home after midnight with messy hair and a wild smile , never even learn how to ride a bike). Hanbin remembers a time before. A time when the end of the world was something they read about in books and watched on cinema screens. He remembers when blue used to be his favorite color (before his mothers veins were more blue then red and when she exhaled she clouded the air the color of the sky). He remembers family picnics and smiling faces and what it felt like not to be afraid all the time. Hanbyul never will remember that. And it makes him so angry sometimes. But with Jiwon standing by his side he thinks he can learn not to be.

Jiwon kneels by the headstone and places his fingers against the weathering engraved letters.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of him now.”

And when Hanbin hears the faint sound of laughter, when he sees the flash of dark hair in the corner of his eye, he doesn’t turn to look.