#fuck. step 1 : no thinking about beast!dazai

[monstersqueen]

Each one of these great achievements came to fruition only because of the new boss Dazai’s extraordinary talents. Rumor had it he hadn’t even slept a day ever since taking over from Mori four years ago.

he probably hasn't

[hannigramislife]

Saw your thoughts on dazai ships and wanted to hear about your take on akutagawa ships.

Entrapta voice: You're asking me about my theories?? I've waited years for someone to ask me about my theories!

Hello friend! Thanks for the ask! I love talking about Akutagawa, he is my heart and soul, so this will be fun! I will take the chance to also thank you about your interaction with my posts, it makes my day ^^

Now, let's get into it!

Shin Soukoku (Akutagawa/Atsushi) - This is everything to me. Absolutely everything. They're in love. They're soulmates. They were created by the same ring of laughter. An angel lost its wings and they both fell in Yokohama, waiting to be reunited. Sskk is the definition of "whatever souls are made of, his and mine were the same." I cannot accurately describe how happy they make me. I can't even give a coherent and objective reasoning as to why they're the best ship ever, they just are. "Just the two of us? / Do we need any more?" WHY ARE YOU RECITING YOUR WEDDING VOWS NOW, GOD–! Anyways. 1 billion/10.

Chuuaku (Chuuya/Akutagawa) - Similarly to my other post, I don't get people who have a problem with this ship. It's cute, it's beautiful, it makes me happy. I talked to my friend about this issue once; like, why is multishipping not a thing in this fandom?? Maybe I want to jump around dynamics??? Can skk give me friends to lovers?? No?? Great, Kunizai it is. Like, why can't we let people ship other shit than skk and sskk?? Anyways, Chuuya and Akutagawa care for each other, there is mutual respect, they would be a great comfort to one another. I say valid, 10/10 ship.

AkuHigu (Akutagawa/Higuchi) - I love, love, love this ship. Love them. They're so cute?? Like, I'm a die-hard sskk fan until I die, but I would LOVE to see more of this ship. The scene where Higuchi goes to save him?? Where Akutagawa gains consciousness and the first thing he does, before he can properly gather his senses, is apologize to Higuchi?? Also, the whole episode where she's stalking Gin because she thinks she's dating Akutagawa?? Their interactions in Wan?? I actually fucking love them. Every time the focus is on them, I feel like I'm watching a shoujo anime. Higuchi makes me think that Akutagawa would be a romantic. I need more of theeeeeem. Literally they're born to shoujo and forced to shounen. 10/10.

Dazaku (Dazai/Akutagawa) - Since I expressed my frustration with the fandom regarding this in the Dazai ships post, I will focus on my opinions about this ship. Honestly, it makes me feel kinda awkward? When I think of them in a romantic manner? Feels just a little bit like missing a step. However, it's an interpretation I would be open to if I could be convinced that Dazai actually, you know, likes Akutagawa? Like, you know that one scene in Lady Bird that's like "I wish you liked me / You know I love you / But do you like me?" That's how I feel the dynamic is between these two. Yes, Dazai is hoping Atsushi will be good for Akutagawa, and yes, he is happy Akutagawa stopped killing, and God knows what his plans are for the future – but do you like me? Valid ship context wise, neutral territory, I just need a little more from Dazai before I can make a final ruling.

TaniAku (Tanizaki/Akutagawa) - LISTEN GUYS. LISTEN. I BLAME BEAST FOR THIS, BUT THESE TWO ARE SO, SO, SO IMPORTANT TO MEEEE. I unironically love them. I don't care that Beast is the only canon I have to work with for this ship; it's so good. Like, the way Beast Tanizaki understood Akutagawa?? The way he supported his revenge mission from the get go?? The way he stormed the Mafia HQs and fucking held an assassin hostage just so he could help Akutagawa?? Ride or die. That bitch. I would actually die if I saw them interact in canon. Like, that's your bestie in another life. 100/10. I need them. It is a need.

TachiAku (Tachihara/Akutagawa) - I have no serious thoughts about this, to be honest. I think it would be lowkey hilarious. I haven't had nearly enough interactions between them for me to get attached to this ship in any way. Plus, now that we know more about Tachihara's...real self, I would love to see more of these two! I am going to allow this ship, and hope to see these two at least fight by each other's side in the future!

I think that's it for the most popular ones, please let me know if I forgot any ships!

[kaeyx]

Kinktober 2023 is open!

How this works: send in a number and character (or characters). Once that prompt is picked I won't be taking requests for it anymore though you are still very much encouraged to come talk about it in the inbox, anon is on

Prompts + additional notes below the cut!

1 Humping/thigh riding - Dazai

2 Drunk sex - Chuuya

3 Hatesex - Poly!skk

4 Gun/knifeplay - Poly!skk

5 Drugs/aphrodisiac - Fyodor

6 Edging/denial/chasisty - Demon/angel!skk

7 Gaping/fisting - Jouno

8 Chase/predator+prey - Fyodor

9 Cockwarming - Chuuya

10 Size difference - Nikolai

11 Deepthroating/face fucking - Pm!Dazai

12 Kidnapping/stalking - Nikolai

13 Petplay - Catboy!Dazai

14 Masturbation - Chuuya

15 Sex pollen - Angel!Chuuya

17 Breathplay (choking/asphyxiation) - Pm!Dazai

16 Boot worship/stepping - Jouno

18 Hemipenis(double dick) - Mer!Dazai

19 Corruption/virginity taking - Jouno

20 Breeding/stuffing/creampie - Jouno

21 Somnophilia - Fyodor

22 Public - Pm!Dazai

23 Overstimulation - Catboy!Dazai

24 cnc/noncon - Pm!Dazai

25 thighfucking - Angel!Chuuya

26 Biting/marking - Vamp!poly!skk

28 Car sex - Pm!Dazai

27 Tentacles/oviposition - Mer!Fyodor

29 Voyeurism - Demon!Poly!Skk

30 Sensory deprivation - Chuuya

31 Amputation - Beast!Dazai

Additional notes: you can of course specify what gender and agab the reader will have, as well as any particular words you wouldn't like included. (Think "clit" for an ftm reader). AUs like merman/angel/demon/monster are welcome! I'll be editing the list as I get requests so you know which prompts are taken. Have fun! <3

[ratwars]

Can I ask you about shipping? Do you ship every ship you rb to your blog? Is there a reason you don't tag ships? Are there any bsd ships you don't like?

Sure. No I don't. Yes there is. And yes.

Extended explanation (warning: long)

I will pretty much rb most fanart I find something I like about or looks nice irregardless of the ship or intention of the artist (whether it is ship art or not). I also don't care about a lot of ships (more in a "yeah sure whatever floats your boat" or "that could be fun, sure" type of way), or have such a casual attitude towards them it doesn't matter to me.

For fic, if the tags match up with what I like or think would be interesting, don't include any of my hard no's, and the summary catches my attention I will read whatever if I feel like it. Though for mutuals or ppl I talk to sometimes I have tried to read things that I wouldn't usually, sometimes it has been a happy surprise, other times I can't really get into it or there is something about it I just can't fuck with even though their writing is good. With art it matters even less though.

I have also been "sold" on ships by other people through fic and art as well. Because I will consider *mostly* anything, at least for a moment.

I decided early on to not tag ships. This is for multiple reasons.

1. My tagging system is detailed and organized but tagging ships makes it more complicated.

2. I would have to determine if the art was intended to be ship art or not before tagging just because of how I am. This is an extra step which gets more complicated if I am rbing from someone else because it means I have to click through every time to see the OPs original tags assuming they exist.

3. I never have the desire to search my own blog by ship. Only by character.

There are bsd ships that don't exist to me, ones I don't like, and there are bsd ships I am completely indifferent to/don't get it. I'm not going to list everything, I don't know every pairing that exists, I am surely forgetting things, and you didn't ask for specifics. So I will keep this part shorter than I could but me not listing something doesn't mean I like it or actively ship it. It just might fall into the "doesn't exist to me" or "have never thought about/don't really give a shit/forgot it existed even" category.

Any ship involving underage characters (or underage versions of characters who are presently adults) do not exist to me. As in, I'm pretending it doesn't happen for my own peace, and if I have the misfortune of seeing it I block with the quickness.

I don't like Morizai or Dazaku (in any interation including Beast version).

I am not okay with Fukuran at all.

I am not a fan/don't understand Kunichuu or Kunichuuzai or Kunichuuwhatever Kunikida and Chuuya polyship of the hour is.

I'm really mid on Kousano though I will rb art of them because I am always happy to see art for bsd women. Would probably never read fic with them though specifically/intentionally as I don't understand the pairing much.

Odazai is not something I ship but when he dies he is 23 and Dazai is 18 so I don't understand ppl who give others serious flack for shipping them in dark era (when Dazai is an adult though), or shipping Beast Odazai or AUs where Oda lives and they are both adults.

I mention this because this one I have seen just get thrown around a lot with a bunch of moral outrage with it, and I personally don't get it.

[drangues]

long, long ago in a land far away, I sent in some posts about Atsushi and others being the incarnations of the Five Beasts. And I'm just thinking how possible it is that when they were separated, they lost all contact/were not allowed to contact the others. And for this, I'm going to focus of Aoi, the Blue Dragon. 1/

As the oldest, he was the primary caretaker for his siblings, and losing them would have gutted him. He was supposed to protect them, instead he was unable to prevent them from being separated, and without the skills/ability to contact them. And the worst part is, as he gets older, he has no idea whether they're alive or dead. 2/

And maybe, when he's old enough to escape from the (metaphorical) cage his 'parents' put him in, he tries to find the others. He successful too, for the most part, reuniting with Akari (red bird), Shikiharu (yellow dragon), and Michika (black turtle). But he never finds Atsushi, no matter how long he searches. 3/

Eventually, Aoi is forced to believe the possibility that Atsushi, their littlest brother, is dead (he knows of the orphanage Atsushi was sent to. Everyone in the system knows that sometimes, the special kids that go in don't come out). Years pass, and Aoi's work ends up with him moving to Yokahoma (he's still in contact with his siblings, but they can't bear to be together. Not when Atsushi is missing. 4/

Aoi is taking a walk down by the river, when he catches a scent he knows better than his own, and this is impossible, Atsushi is gone, how can he be here- Aoi is barely conscious of the way he starts running to the source, praying to anyone that will listen that he's not wrong, not giving himself false hope. And as he rounds the corner, he sees them. A pretty man covered in bandages, a young girl in a red kimono, and- a young man with white hair and purple/gold eyes.

5/This shouldn't be possible. But that doesn't stop Aoi from taking a shaky step forward, eyes trained on the ghost of his youngest brother, hardly aware of the words leaving his mouth. "Atsushi...?" 5/

... I think this turned into Aoi/Dazai, and I'm not sure how that happened, but I'm rolling with it. 6/ (sorry if I skipped or did the same number more than once)

love how you started it with "long long ago" but yes i do remember and im already in love with aoi (blue happens to be one of my fav colours awooga) but them not being able to be together cus atsushi isnt there is just :'(( SO SAD AND THEY BETTER HAVE FUCKING HUGGED DUDE

[lovingnikiforov]

2018 Fic Writing Round-Up

Total year-long word count: 632,603+ words…..that’s about double what I wrote for 2017 omfg

Word count by fandom: ~ Bungou Stray Dogs: 461,813+ ~ Yuri on Ice: 166,925 ~ Kuroshitsuji: 3,865

Fics completed: 33

♥ Drabbles: ~ 5 twitter prompt fills - bsd

♥ Oneshots: ~ All Dolled Up - bsd, soukoku, pwp, wyll companion ~ Workaholic - bsd, ranpoe, canon -compliant ~ Kids Again - bsd, soukoku, bartender au ~ like a moth - bsd, soukoku, mafia boss chuuya ~ Five Steps - bsd, soukoku, royalty au ~ Writer’s Block - bsd, soukoku, sugar daddy Chuuya ~ What About Trust? - bsd, soukoku, dark era ~ On the Clock - bsd, soukoku, secret relationship, au ~ A Warlord’s Conscience - bsd, kousano, feudal era au ~ No-Show - bsd, soukoku, canon-compliant ~ Sorely Missed - bsd, soukoku, hogwarts au ~ what a pair - bsd, soukoku, sugar daddy Chuuya, Writer’s Block sequel ~ Propriety - bsd, soukoku, royalty au, Five Steps sequel ~ Something to Lose - bsd, soukoku, wyll companion ~ Perfectly Pleasant - bsd, soukoku, college au ~ Shattered Glass - kuroshitsuji, gen, canon-compliant ~ A Phone Call Away - bsd, higugin, canon-compliant, manga spoilers ~ hide the truth - bsd, soukoku, amnesiac Chuuya au, canon-compliant ~ Playing Human - bsd, soukoku, pwp, incubus Chuuya, vampire Dazai ~ Unplottable - bsd, soukoku, hogwarts au, Sorely Missed sequel ~ Closer to Home - bsd, soukoku, established relationship, canon-compliant ~ A Stupid Question - bsd, soukoku, dark era (patreon exclusive) ~ Private Lessons - bsd, soukoku, pwp,  like a moth sequel (patreon exclusive) ~ New Normal - bsd, soukoku, secret relationship (patreon early-release/coming soon!)

♥ Chapter Fics: ~ Shared Gravity - bsd, soukoku, college au, joint fic with ZODIACHUUYA ~ Equivalent Exchange - yoi, viktuuri, magic/fantasy au ~ where your loyalties lie - bsd, soukoku, arranged marriage/yakuza au ~ Rent a (boy)Friend - yoi, phichuuri, fake dating au

Works-in-progress: ~ even on the darkest night - bsd, gen/kyouka-centric, dystopia au, dyetyd sequel

This year I wrote and posted: 34 fics in total: 4 completed multi-chapter fics, 1 wip multi-chapter fic, 24 oneshots, 5 drabbles.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d predicted? So, so much more. I almost can’t believe how much I managed to write this year.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January? Kuroshitsuji. It’s not a fandom I’ve ever written for and the fic I did write was a gift fic and a prompt fill.

What’s your own favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest? Ahhh that’s hard, there are a handful of stories I am really happy with. I suppose I’ll have to go with hide the truth it was a beast of a story to write and I had a lot of fun working through soukoku’s dynamic in it.

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them? Big time! I’ve been using my fic writing to really challenge myself in terms of my stories. My biggest risk was just in terms of quantity, I spent much of the year juggling four wips and a patreon with additional content. Getting through everything month-to-month was hard but it really helped my efficiency and increased my writing speed.

Your best story of this year: Hmm, this is a hard one. Honestly, I’d have to say Equivalent Exchange. It was a massive undertaking with a lot of characters and plot lines to keep track of. As a fantasy piece, the worldbuilding was extremely intensive. 

Your most popular story of this year: By a slim margin with EE, my most popular story this year was where your loyalties lie.

Story of yours most under-appreciated by the universe, in your opinion: Any rare-pair story is going to have a hard time getting views, but I honestly think A Warlord’s Conscience is one of my best stories of the year and it was my third least popular fic. 

Most fun story to write: The Hogwarts AU verse  (Sorely Missed and Unplottable) was a lot of fun! I was a big HP nerd growing up so it was enjoyable to dive back into the universe. 

Story with the single sexiest moment: Playing Human. By a long mile. Easily one of the most explicit stories I’ve written for bsd. Honorable mention goes to All Dolled Up.

Most “Holy crap, that’s wrong, even for you” story: This honor also goes to Playing Human. I grew up really religious and they’re in a church and I did not back away from any form of sacrilege. 

Story that shifted your own perceptions of the characters: Hmmm, I can’t say I had any real shift in character perceptions this year.

Hardest story to write: where your loyalties lie. There was a lot going on in that story and the character development/journeys were really delicate, especially for Chuuya. 

Biggest disappointment: tbh...I don’t think I feel disappointed with any of my stories this year. Progress!

Biggest surprise: Writer’s Block, I wasn’t expecting people to like it as much as they did, much less to the degree of requesting a sequel.

Most unintentionally telling story: where your loyalties lie. Anyone who read the Author’s Commentary of the fic probably has a good grasp of how many of my personal struggles over the course of the year got projected into the fic. There were also a few other personal things from years past that also get referenced. 

Favorite opening line(s): ~ There was something that came alive when the sun went down. - Playing Human ~ Sometimes Dazai finds it hard not to think that the person responsible for making text cursors blink just had a sick sense of humor rather than any practical reasoning for the programming decision. - Writer’s Block

Favorite closing line(s): ~ It felt like a dagger in the gut to know that he’d already made his choice. - What About Trust? ~ And if Viktor is imagining the way the moonlight seems to shine brighter when they pull back from their embrace, well, he can’t quite see a problem with that. - Equivalent Exchange

Favorite 5 line(s) from anywhere: ~ He can trace the features of the figures depicted, all wholly inaccurate but it’s not as if the religious painters would bother to consult a vampire on matters like the faces of the figures they exalted to sainthood. - Playing Human ~ The very idea is absurd but it is the only explanation that explains both his pain and the fact that he is holding a building in his hands, lifting through dense fog to float in mid-air and stare at…at…Is that a fucking dragon? - hide the truth ~ It takes a bigger effort to get to his feet than it ever has, and for a moment Chuuya wonders if his ability is working against him, if gravity has decided to press down on him in retribution for every time Chuuya has ever felt weightless - wyll, ch. 13 ~ A dependency on alcohol is gradually self-destructive, a dependency on a person is instantly debilitating. - wyll, ch. 11 ~ Just as Viktor said, it's nothing like a duel, but Yuri wishes someone had told him that a real battle was as close to hell as a living human could get. - EE, ch. 18

Top 5 scenes from anywhere you would choose to have illustrated: ~ Yuuri showing up on the battlefield - Equivalent Exchange (ch. 18) ~ Chuuya’s tattoo - wyll (ch. 20) ~ Kouyou standing in the garden - A Warlord’s Conscience ~ Drunk Phichit and Yuuri dancing salsa - Rent a (boy)Friend (ch. 8) ~ tbh any bit from All Dolled Up

Fic-writing goals for next year: Hmm, I’ve been toying with trying my hand with a new fandom. It’s been a while since I’ve taken that jump with new characters so I’d like to do that in 2019!

[izanyas]

Build Upon The Ruins (7)

Pacfic Rim Soukoku fic, again, 

Rating: M Words: 7,700 No warnings.

[Read from Chapter 1]

Build Upon The Ruins Chapter 7

Dazai woke up with a smile, to the sound of the kaiju alarm ringing loudly through their room and to the unmistakable groan Chuuya reserved for nightly attacks. He was up in a second, rolling sideways out of the bed and then stretching his body up until his spine cracked pleasantly.

"Your bones are disgusting," Chuuya said into his pillow.

"We can't all be made of chewing gum," Dazai replied. He grabbed the top bed's metal railing with one hand and shook it until Chuuya glared at him with one sleep-crusted eye, hair in disarray, face still pressed onto the sheets. "Come on," he said more gently. "They're waiting for us upstairs."

"Fuck," Chuuya mumbled, but he was sitting up. He stared at the ladder near his feet for a second before deciding to forget it entirely and simply jump to the floor.

Dazai didn't mind, despite the stupidity of it. Far from it. Chuuya's sleeping attire consisted of underwear and a T-shirt, and even as he grabbed water from the fridge it was Chuuya's legs he was staring at, unbothered.

Chuuya rolled his eyes when he noticed—he snatched the bottle from Dazai's hands before he was finished and drained the last half of it, crumpled the plastic one-handed, and threw it into the trash. Then he walked into the bathroom with a glance that told Dazai just how aware he was of Dazai's trail of thoughts.

Dazai was still grinning as he shoved himself into the first pair of clean pants he found and the previous day's shirt. The screen above his desk was alight, running with numbers and orders and the automated summoning message. He read them while waiting, letting his mind adjust to wakefulness and his body to the Alaskan base's cold.

"What're we up against?" Chuuya asked, emerging from the bathroom. His hair was tied down on his neck, the sleeves of his own shirt pulled up at the elbows.

Dazai let his eyes drag along Chuuya's arms as he answered, "Category three, about twenty kilometers off the coast. Almost as big as Hammerhead."

"Only twenty kilometers?" Chuuya leaned closer to the screen, squinting. "How come they didn't notice it sooner?"

"Because the mother of all storms is raging outside," Dazai replied, and then he could only laugh as Chuuya groaned, "Fucking great."

The base was thrumming with activity. People ran around with fear in their hearts, as they always would for as long as kaiju would attack; but Dazai knew that his and Chuuya's presence for the last six months since they had flown in from Hong Kong had eased some of that. They were greeted with hopeful smiles, with grateful shouts. It made Chuuya stand taller as he walked. No longer hunched over like someone in hiding.

He couldn't help but mirror it—couldn't help but feel excited even against the odds they would face. In a few minutes there would be nothing separating him from Chuuya at all.

It was with this thought in mind that he let himself be dressed for piloting. He watched Chuuya peel off the shirt he had just put on so they could slide the black sleeves of the suit up his arms, and his eyes lingered on the evidence of strength that the flowers never masked. The muscles and sharp bones outlined cleanly by his skin.

"See something you like?" Chuuya commented. He wasn't looking at Dazai, but there was the hint of a smile at his mouth, the whisper of heat on his voice.

"I always do," Dazai answered lowly.

The spine of the suit clasped into place at his back, painful, wakening.

"If you're quite done," Kouyou said, stepping into the changing room. They both turned to look at her. "The conditions outside are terrible—this is more of a hurricane than a storm, lads. You might be fighting blindly."

"Oh, is that all?" Dazai said mockingly.

"No," she replied, unsmiling. "We've managed to alert most of the ships we knew of, but reports say one of them is still out. You are not to compromise the mission to save them."

"Cold," Chuuya let out.

His eyes flashed toward Dazai; the same idea flashed through both their heads.

By then Dazai barely needed any help to suit up or strap himself to his station. He let the aides do it for him anyway, knowing protocol as much as they did. Warmth was pooling inside him despite the cold of the base with every second that brought him closer to the neural handshake; he was so aware of Chuuya at his right, so conscious of every breath Chuuya drew in, that it felt almost as if they were already drifting.

"You guys ready?"

Dazai saw Chuuya grin as he brought a finger to the controls to answer, "Sasaki. How went the hot date last night?"

"Terribly," she replied, dry as stone. "Now shut up and let me drown my sorrow by making sure you two don't make our readings implode again, Nakahara."

"You do that." He glanced at Dazai, mirth over his lips, handsome even through the unappealing yellow of the helmet's visor. "We're ready."

"Initiating neural handshake."

Dazai was out of himself almost before the drift could jostle him the right way; he was meeting Chuuya the moment it took on, mind spreading around and in his, and Chuuya fit himself as he always did—right where Dazai's mind opened into the shape of him.

Dazai breathed in slowly, like he only ever breathed when Chuuya's lungs moved with his. Air tasted different in the midst of drifting. Like it was actually meant to make life livable.

"All right," he said, body languid with heat, heart beating heavily. He opened his eyes. "Does this big boy have a name?"

"Fawk," Sasaki replied. "Three point eight tons. I think it has feathers. It's been moving slowly so far."

"Piece of cake. You guys start working on the medal while we take care of it."

"Arrogant bastard," Chuuya muttered, fingers busy onto the main control panels. "Did you forget the part about the hurricane?"

"I did, in fact," Dazai replied truthfully. "I had more interesting things to think about."

Dazai let Chuuya pick at the memories of the last few minutes, of himself as Dazai saw him: soft face and wild hair as he woke, hard muscles running under painted skin. The ever-bright wonder of his mind melded into Dazai's, braided together like threads in a tapestry.

"Get your mind out of the gutter," Chuuya said, but his smile was soft on Dazai's lips.

Double Black's head dropped to reattach to its body now that its pilots were in place. They couldn't be lifted out in this kind of weather; they walked out through the giant doors of the base and directly onto the beach, then into the water. Every step pushed forth by them and every breath shared between them.

It really was a hurricane. Wind slammed into them from all sides, not enough to still them but enough to make moving harder. Their thighs started aching only five minutes in, and still the kaiju was nowhere to be seen. The rain and clouds made it too hard to see anything from cameras alone; they relied on readings, linked their sights together so that information flew between them both as if they shared one brain only. There was no delay to it at all. It was as easy as thinking on one's own.

"There's our boat," Dazai murmured.

It shone bright on the radars despite its small size. A fisherman's boat. No more than ten people aboard, probably.

"What are they even doing here in this weather?" Chuuya asked.

"Capitalizing on the fact that no one else is brave enough to fish right now. Or stupid enough. They probably went out before the storm and got stuck on their way back."

"Who the fuck braves a hurricane and a kaiju just for fish…"

They fell silent as something else showed on the readings—something as big as an island, moving like no island could.

Chuuya deployed the blade wordlessly, fingers tightening over the right hemisphere's calibration device as it would a real knife. He was used to handling knives. His life was full to bursting of memories of stabbing and memories of being stabbed, his body littered with scars. It was the kind of violence Dazai had never experienced but felt familiar with all the same.

They walked slowly through the screaming wind, legs heavy with the weight of the jaeger. Fawk kept swimming toward them leisurely, not deviating once, heading straight for the tiny boat. Once they were close enough, Dazai leaned forward with the full of their backs; he wrapped Double Black's left hand around the width of the boat and picked it up—smiling curtly when the cabin became visible and he saw the terrified faces of the men holed in it—and then the kaiju stood on its legs and roared.

Chuuya stabbed it instantly through the shoulder. In the precious few seconds it took for the beast to recover, Dazai let the boat fall back behind them and toward the beach. Hopefully they'd find a way to make land without drowning in the process.

"Dazai," Chuuya said.

"I know," he replied.

The cannon heated up in his palm as Chuuya breathed with both their lungs. This time, when the kaiju threw itself at them, Dazai shot it through the stomach.

"I can't see shit," Chuuya said between his teeth as the thing squirmed away through the water. His breathing was deep and easy despite the tension Dazai could feel up his spine. He made his own back relax, his own shoulders roll, and the jaeger's with them; Chuuya sighed from it, gratitude settling warmly in his stomach.

"We'll be fine," Dazai said then. "Just keep an eye on the signals—it doesn't matter if we can't see."

"I never know if you're confident or just stupid."

"Maybe I'm both," Dazai replied, thinking of nothing but the drift, nothing but the thrum and beauty of Chuuya's soul.

Chuuya huffed. "This isn't really the—Dazai!"

Dazai was not a second too late; Fawk's beak-like face rammed into his arm instead of his side, but the clean snap of bone above his elbow wasn't reassuring so much as overwhelmingly, sharply painful, and Chuuya shouted from it just as he did.

"Fuck!" Chuuya roared, furious like he only ever was when wounded. "You bitch—"

He took control away from Dazai entirely as Dazai tried to regain his focus; stepped back and sideways, brandished the blade in their right arm too late—Fawk gripped them by the shoulders and buried its hind knees into their ribs.

Chuuya's anger sang through Dazai, smoldering, aching. He struck Fawk with their right elbow so hard that Fawk's leather-like skin split open from it. The kaiju howled into the night, loud enough to be heard above the sounds of the hurricane.

"Are you okay?" Chuuya asked breathlessly as soon as Fawk ran off.

Dazai sucked in a breath before answering. "Yeah, I—I think it's just my arm."

"Your arm and our ribs. Fucking hell."

Every breath they drew in hurt. Every movement of their shoulders and backs as well.

"Is it dead?" Chuuya said lowly.

"I can't tell. Not without visual confirmation." Dazai forced himself to touch the screen in front of him, mind hazy with pain from his arm. Already, though, the confusion was wearing off. He was too familiar with this sort of injury to be too affected by it. "Looks like it's still moving," he muttered, eyeing the bright yellow shape on the radar.

"How? Fucker already looks like Swiss cheese."

"Aliens, Chuuya," Dazai replied, but the joke fell flat in light of how serious he now felt. "Well, it'll probably come in from the left. You should keep the sword up."

"If I do that and it comes from the back we'll be sitting ducks," Chuuya replied.

It wasn't a light-hearted counter. They could only use one arm now. Chuuya had grown cold with tension, body stretched like a rubber band, Dazai's efforts from earlier gone. He kept the blade-arm down.

"It'll come at us from the left," Dazai repeated. His eyes never left the wide screen of the visor, the one that showed only snow and tall waves. "It knows we're weakened there."

He felt Chuuya struggle for a second more, protest burning at his lips. He was too used to Dazai being right, though. Too used to Dazai's words becoming prophecy.

Too used to trusting Dazai wholly, with every fiber of their shared being.

He raised the blade. Pointed it to their left in preparation. Dazai charged the cannon much the same, though he couldn't raise his arm. In those seconds he still reveled in the anger Chuuya felt on his behalf, the genuine worry that he was more hurt than he let on, so unlike anything anyone had ever felt for a lowlife like him; he warmed himself to them, soul soaked with a bond that needed neither words nor touch. Heart flush with the certainty that he was where he was supposed to be.

Fawk came in from the right.

Dazai could do nothing at all. The loaded weapon in his palm pointed at blurry flying snow, at unstoppable waves. The knowledge of it settled into him, sped up by terror and understanding, and his mouth was open with it—with a warning, with a scream, with Chuuya's own fright threaded through his whole self, right as the kaiju's raised fore leg struck down from the sky and sliced clean through them both.

He barely felt the violence of the hurricane that shoved through the hole it had opened. Fawk's claws broke into the skull, its palm opening to encompass the right half of the cockpit, and then it flattened it onto the floor, taking everything.

Taking Chuuya.

Dazai never felt himself unload the cannon into the beast's heart. He never heard himself scream because he didn't scream at all—he moved with his mouth open on nothing as he butchered it, and even the rage, even the anger of two lives couldn't mask the fact that his heart had stopped dead.

Fawk died in utter silence. The waves carried its corpse out and dragged the foot it had plunged into the head of the jaeger with it.

Dazai saw Chuuya's body stuck under the metal; the broken helmet whose glass had opened his temple and spilled blood over the floor; his hair flying red over his closed eyes.

"No," he said.

In the empty drift, he discovered agony.

"No. No, no, no no no—"

"Dazai? We can't see Nakahara, what is going on—"

Dazai never answered—he begged, out loud and not, horror crawling up his veins more strongly than the pain of piloting alone did. His back screamed and his knees bent and his nose spilled blood over his lips, and still the only word in him, mouth and mind alike, was No.

"Chuuya," he sobbed.

The jaeger trembled around him. The wall Chuuya was stuck under slid because of it—Chuuya dragged down with it, trailing blood over metal. He didn't even twitch.

"Dazai."

Kouyou.

"We aren't getting his vitals." Her voice shook, but he couldn't care, could barely notice it at all. "Is he breathing?"

I don't know.

"Dazai," Yosano,"is he still inside? What can you tell me?"

"He's—" Dazai's heart bruised against his ribs, empty and cold for lack of Chuuya's beats. His back and head burned from the load of the single drift. "He's, he's stuck under—I can't—"

"Okay. Okay. Dazai, listen, we can't fly to you in this weather."

He knew that.

He knew it the way he knew how to breathe; fleetingly, automatically, emptily. But breathing was of no importance when he couldn't break out of his restraints to run to Chuuya's side and make sure he was still—

"You need to bring him to us," Kouyou said into the line. "We'll have everything ready."

"I can't," he said numbly.

He could barely keep the jaeger standing. He felt barely alive.

"You can. Please," and it was her turn to sob, to shatter in a way he hadn't known she could. "Please bring him home."

Dead or alive, she didn't say. Bring him home.

Dazai spat bile into the inside of the helmet. He had no air left in him, none at all. His soul burned from being torn open and his chest was still as a dead body's; he was watching Chuuya when he pushed through all of it to take the first step, and he sobbed again as it jostled him, as he saw Chuuya shake from the wind and the sea and the motion.

Please, he thought, with every agonizing step. With every breath of salted air. Please.

He walked twenty kilometers alone in the body of the jaeger, easing into every movement so that blood would stop spilling out of the wound in Chuuya's head and being washed up by the sea. Chuuya's face was pale. He didn't move at all. Dazai kept searching the drift anyway for any sign of him; coldness answered back every time, crueler than physical pain.

"You're almost there," Yosano said in his ears, voice thin. "We have teams ready on the beach. Whatever you do, don't move him, okay? Don't try to pull him out. Wait for the—"

Dazai was struggling out of the harnesses the moment Double Black's feet came out of the water. He ripped himself from his station with Chuuya's name bursting from his lips, tearing the spine of the suit off painfully, shaking his broken arm—he ran across the slippery floor with the suit's heavy boots and fell to his knees alongside Chuuya's left side, the side of him not caught under debris.

His left leg looked broken. His shoulder dislocated. The rest of him was hidden under metal, completely stuck. Dazai tried to hover his shaking fingers above Chuuya's mouth, but the strength of the wind made it impossible to know if he was breathing at all.

Please.

He didn't try to touch his neck. He circled his fingers around Chuuya's wrist, pulled off the glove he wore finger by finger. Then he pressed his index into the crook of it, against ice-cold skin. Against heart-shaped petals.

The pulse he found there traveled through his own chest.

Dazai cried without daring to move. He waited for the medics to climb the side of the jaeger without feeling anything except for that slip of living skin, that inch of feeble hope. He spilled tears over the blood he was kneeling in and let Kouyou's calls go unanswered. He counted each slow beat of Chuuya's heart against his fingertip. He let the searing emptiness in his mind soothe itself with it until the wound there felt a little less raw.

He refused to leave Chuuya's side, not even as he was being freed of the fallen wall and carried to a stretcher on the crane standing outside, not even as he recoiled from the sight of his mangled right leg; he stayed with him all the way to the only hospital still standing in Anchorage and had to be restrained so Chuuya could be sent to surgery alone, despite his own broken bones.

It was Yosano who sedated him. Who held his hand with her shaking ones until he lost consciousness. Who swept the hair out of his face and promised him that she would try her best with tears in her eyes.

Please, Dazai thought for the thousandth time, standing at the cusp of sleep. I can't lose him.

--

Dazai had been sure of very few things in his life.

One of them had been his own death, for as long as he had been old enough to appreciate the concept for what it was. He knew he would live his life leaving very little behind himself as proof of his existence. He grew even surer of it at fourteen years old, when the first kaiju made land in San Francisco and set the world's panic afire.

He wasn't sure how long he would survive. Even after meeting Oda and experiencing being valued and loved for the first time, the certainty of death clinged to him like a ghost. Dazai went through the motions of life and did not feel human, or good, or bad. Morals' hold on him was thin; Dazai followed his heart not out of its goodness, but out of what would lead him to the path of least pain.

Dazai's second absolute and all-encompassing certainty was found in the drift, in Chuuya's open mind, in his twin thirst for belonging. He knew the word for it and never spoke it, because there was no need to.

There had never been any need to.

Two days after Chuuya woke up, the day after his last surgery, he found the very last thing he was sure of.

"They found a match for Akutagawa," he said, balancing a tablet into the crook of the cast than ran up to his shoulder.

They had been moved back to the base after the first round of surgeries—after Yosano had kept Chuuya alive, as promised.

Chuuya's answer came raspy and tenuous. The only part of him not cast or bound in some way was his left arm. Right now his fingers were splayed onto the sheets, and it looked like he wanted to make a fist out of his hand, to grab the blanket and externalize the pain that even morphine couldn't dull, but didn't have the strength for it.

He said, "I knew that. Higuchi… something." He blinked slowly. The plaster on his left temple moved with it. "Angry blonde chick."

"The other Akutagawa," Dazai replied, lips twitching. "He's compatible with a boy from Yokohama. They tested them on that mark-one they still have there—incredibly strong drift, according to Kouyou. Apparently they're making a whole mark-five just for them."

"Lucky bastards."

The screen of Dazai's tablet was open to world news. It had been seventeen days since Fawk's attack; by now the novelty of it had evaporated, but still his eyes occasionally fell onto a picture of Double Black standing still on the Alaskan beach, with the headline, Winner Jaeger Out of Commission?

"We're both officially dead," he hummed, scrolling through older articles. "Congratulations. I would've brought flowers if I'd known."

"Dazai."

Dazai took his time to look sideways and back at Chuuya's flushed, sweaty face. His hair looked almost orange under the glaring white light. It stuck to his forehead limply.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"What do you mean?" Dazai replied lightly.

Chuuya glared at him as hard as the unfocused quality of his eyes allowed. He gestured to his legs faintly with his hand and said, "I can't pilot anymore."

Yosano had saved his leg for now, but she didn't know if he would ever be able to walk again. She didn't know if it would get worse and need to be cut off. The wounds on the rest of him were less severe—broken bones, lacerations, marble-like bruising—but the leg had been crushed under the weight of the kaiju's foot and then stuck under metal for several minutes. Physical recovery would take months, maybe years. He would never regain full mobility, and he would be in pain his whole life.

"I know that," Dazai said.

The truth of it was branded into him.

"So," Chuuya continued, unrelenting. "What are you going to do?"

"I don't know." Dazai leaned back into the armchair, let the tablet fall to his knees. His ribs ached with the movement, albeit a lot less sharply than two weeks ago. "I guess I'll stick around. It's not like you're going anywhere."

For a moment Chuuya was silent. Still enough that Dazai thought he must have dozed back into sleep again, like he had been doing ever since waking up, and the thought was a mixed blessing.

Sleep would mean that he wasn't in pain. Which was good. Sleep also reminded Dazai of the days he had spent waiting for him to wake up and hoping he would still be Chuuya.

Instead, Chuuya fisted his one free hand into the collar of Dazai's shirt and pulled him down with surprising strength.

"What are you—"

"Shut up and listen to me," Chuuya growled.

Dazai stilled under the weight of his stare. Hunching over the bed like this pulled at his shoulder and ribs, made his body protest with angry flares of pain—but it was nothing at all compared to the deep frown of Chuuya's brows, the damp pallor of him, the shaking in his fingers.

Dazai could have freed himself, but that would have meant hurting him more, however fleetingly. The thought alone made him want to hurl.

"I'm going to walk," Chuuya said, teeth clenched on agony. His shoulders had arched off the mattress so he could lean closer. "I'm going to walk, and I'm going to work with ane-san to run this fucking thing."

"Chuuya—"

"So you're not allowed to just sit here and brood. You're not allowed to do nothing—" Chuuya gasped when his shoulders dropped back onto the bed. His hand still grabbed at Dazai's clothes weakly. "Dazai," he panted, "you're not allowed to blame yourself."

Dazai's chest burned.

Chuuya's hand fell. His face was completely tense now, the heart monitor beeping frantically. "I'll walk," he repeated. "I don't give a shit how long it takes me to get there. I don't care about the pain. So don't you dare think this is your fault."

Don't you dare give up on me.

Chuuya had lived his whole life in spite of other people. He had climbed above the limits that others said he couldn't reach. He had fought and struggled and bitten his way through everything like a wild animal, ignoring his own desperate need to be loved so that he could never be hurt. And those memories may be closed off to Dazai forever now, the knowledge that he could give Chuuya what he wanted out of his mere human reach, but—

"Okay," he said. He never looked away from Chuuya's eyes. He never touched his shaking hand. "I won't."

The promise was easily made. Dazai couldn't imagine any world, any iteration of himself, giving up on Chuuya.

Of this he was surer than anything else.

Chuuya smiled at him, drunk off exhaustion and the powerful painkillers coursing through his body. "I'm glad," he slurred. His eyes closed with a sigh as he started to slip off. "I'm glad it was me instead of you."

--

--

Harvesting a kaiju corpse took more time than Yosano would've thought. Fitzgerald actually looked busy. His mouth was constantly pressed against the surprisingly old-fashioned walkie-talkie he used to communicate with the people now walking through the kaiju's entrails, examining what could be saved. He gave orders left and right, never sat down for a minute, didn't change out of the fine clothes she had sullied.

"You're in luck," he had told her a few hours ago. "Secondary brain looks fine and kicking."

She had only graced him with a nod.

Her arm was in a sling now, not plastered yet because she hadn't gone back to the dock. Naomi came to her instead after checking on all the pilots, and the girl's scolding had been something to be proud of, but not enough to drag Yosano back—she could stay out with just some painkillers. She needed to see this to its end. It was past noon already. Afternoon stretched into the winter sky, pale blue and cloudless, and Yosano waited.

At three o'clock, they finally dragged the brain out of the beast's open belly.

Kajii showed up almost like clockwork, with some people from Tanizaki's team carrying drift equipment behind him. The sight of him struggling to run on sand snapped Yosano out of her lethargy.

"What are you doing here?" she asked when he reached her.

Kajii panted, knees bent and hunched forward. He gulped in mouthfuls of cold air before straightening up. "I need to drift with it now," was his answer.

"Why? The brain's fine, you can keep it for—"

"Yosano," he cut in lowly. "They're already here."

Yosano stared at him, words swept out of her.

"But," she said. "The alarm—it's only been…"

He crept closer so that none of the people gathered around would hear him. She bent toward him, heart beating wildly. "We didn't sound the alarm because they're not attacking," he explained in a whisper. "They're guarding the breach. Not getting out of the water."

Her breathing hitched. "So they really know what we're planning," she said.

Kajii nodded.

"Shit." Yosano rubbed her face with her free hand, feeling weak in the knees. "How many?"

He made a face before answering, "Five."

One for each jaeger they had left.

"Two of them are too big to be category four, we had to call them fives," he continued lowly. She had never seen him look so serious. "The first ever. They're waiting for us, Yosano, I have to drift and confirm now. Boss is already strapping the explosives to Death Vine. They're sending everyone out again in a few minutes."

Dazai would not have slept during the night, not after seeing Nakahara collapse. He had to have already tired himself out fighting this morning—she dearly hoped that he had taken the time to eat and sleep since then, and Kunikida as well.

The difference it would make would not be consequential, she knew. The outcome the odds pointed to gripped tight in her guts.

Kajii made his way toward the gigantic brain that Fitzgerald's employees has just finished encasing in a fluid-filled glass. Yosano followed him with heavy steps, feet cold through the leather of her shoes because of the sea-wet sand. It was still stained blue by the kaiju's blood, and the torn hem of her skirt looked green with it and with the white dust of the city. By the time she reached the brain too, Kajii was already setting up the equipment under Fitzgerald's skeptic eyes.

"Wait," she said.

He stopped halfway through putting the drift helmet on his head.

"Hang on, Kajii," she went on. "You can't—you had a seizure last time. It's too dangerous for you so soon."

"You think I care about my life?" he replied, and she stilled at his tone as much as his words.

Gone was the light-hearted disregard, the lack of true devotion. Kajii looked angry with the sort of urgency that only came out of caring.

"I lost everything to these monsters," he said, voice low. "If I can help us win then I will. I don't care if I die."

"Don't fucking say that," she growled.

His eyes widened as she approached—she slapped the device away from his side and grabbed him by the arm, pulling him close.

"You have a second helmet in there, don't you," she said.

"Uh, yes?"

"Good." She released him. "Go get it. The neural load is too much for one person, I'm doing this with you."

There was a pause.

"What?"

"Don't act so surprised," she drawled, though her heart was racing up her throat with shaking fear. "I'm a doctor, I'm not about to just watch you fry your brain when I'm perfectly capable of helping out."

"Sensei," Kajii said in a high voice. "You don't even know if we can drift together."

"Don't I?"

For ten years now she had been involved with the jaeger program. She had fixed every single person now gathered in Yokohama in some way. She knew all of them by their wounds if not their names; she knew Kajii, had known him for years. She had ended and started her days in his labs for the simple pleasure of watching him fumble around, trying to help outside of the direct fight. For the simple rush of arguing with him.

Kajii seemed to come to the same conclusion himself. He mumbled, "I'll go get the second helmet."

She was thinking of Kouyou when she put it on—of her strength and resilience, of the relationship they had nurtured in the face of certain doom, of the sun's shine on her naked back when she woke up in their shared bed.

When this is over, she thought, I'm going to marry her.

Whether they won or not. Whether ten pilots came back or none at all.

"I can't believe I'm going to share minds with a medical doctor," Kajii muttered, grasping the switch with sweaty hands.

Yosano smiled thinly. "How about sharing minds with a friend?"

"Sensei," he gasped. "Was that a Lord of the Rings reference? I might just fall in love—"

She rolled her eyes, took the switch from him, and activated it herself.

--

Kunikida found Dazai asleep in the second floor's TV room, body thrown across one of the couches and face pressed into the back. He stood for well over a minute not knowing how to move, struck by how vulnerable slumber made the other look. Even having seen more of him than was strictly human, Dazai still felt like he did two days ago. Fickle and fleeting. More mocking spirit than person.

Only tethered to him by a promise to another.

In the end he shook him by the shoulder, feeling only slightly guilty at the way Dazai struggled to stay asleep. Kunikida's own body still screamed from the morning's fight. One nap wasn't enough to erase the strain of moving a jaeger, or the fear of dropping down from the limits of the sky.

"What…" Dazai slurred.

"Sorry," he said without heat. "We're getting deployed."

He saw confusion in Dazai's eyes, in the still-lax lines of his face. Then, as fast as it had appeared, it made way to alertness.

"It's only been—" he checked the time on the unlit TV's screen, "—eight hours. It's only been eight hours."

"There are five kaiju guarding the breach," Kunikida replied. The reminder sent electric shocks down his spine.

Dazai looked at him in silence.

Eventually he pushed himself upright, his right shoulder shaking slightly. There were dark bruises over it from earlier, where the kaiju had squeezed them with its tail and then held them down. Dazai dragged fingers over his face. They lingered on his mouth for a second too long.

"Let's go," he muttered.

He grabbed the plastic bag that had been sitting on the low wooden table next to him. There was food in it. He ate it on the way to the comm room, mechanically, silent except for the sound of his footsteps.

Kunikida didn't know how to start a conversation then. He didn't want to either. Ozaki's face as she had caught sight of him and sent him to fetch his copilot had spoken truer than her words, had left him shell-shocked with knowledge.

This was a suicide mission.

They were among the first to reach the room this time. The eight other pilots trickled in within the next minutes, looking a mix of disbelieving and resigned. Akutagawa Gin was still in her sleepwear. This time, she was holding onto her copilot's arm.

"What's going on?" the boy with white hair, Nakajima, asked.

Ozaki sat in front of them at the opening of the room. There were as many people as this morning, all of them still and silent. Chuuya was nowhere in sight, because he had been walking down to get changed when Kunikida had crossed his path, face hard with resolve.

"We're attacking now," Ozaki said.

Something bristled through all of them, as if they all shared one drift.

"Why?"

It was Steinbeck who had asked the question. His copilot stayed silent.

Ozaki's fingers tightened in her lap as she replied, "There are five kaiju guarding the breach. Two of them category fives." Kunikida felt goosebumps rise along his arms. "They know what we're doing, and they'll attack first if we don't. Now is our only chance."

She looked at each of them in turn, and Kunikida had never seen her look less than composed before, much the way Chuuya was; but her eyes shone with the sort of anger reserved for the desperate. The sort of hopelessness driven into the wild.

"I used to pilot, once," she whispered furiously. "I know, as well as all of you, what I'm asking of you when I send jaegers into the field. I'm aware of what I might lose. What you might lose."

Her hands opened; a picture sat in them, the paper crumpled from her hold but recognizable all the same. Ozaki and a man he didn't know, and next to them Dazai and Chuuya. Younger than Kunikida had known them. Bright-faced and smiling.

Next to him, Dazai didn't move at all.

"Twice now I've had to watch people I care about fail to come back," Ozaki continued. "Once by feeling my partner and friend die while our minds were still linked. I still wake up today crying for him. Trying to help him. I will always be haunted by what I could have done to save the life of the man who once greeted me with a smile and offered me his company for nothing in return.

Fukuzawa Yukichi was my friend and mentor. He was one of the pillars I leaned on to keep living and hoping." She smiled hollowly, looking at the picture. "He was the best man I have ever met. He fought selflessly, just because he could. And he saw me, a criminal, someone who had never in my life care about humanity, as something worth saving too."

Her thumb stroked the man's face gently.

"I have watched countless pilots fall. I have sent many to their deaths." She lifted her head. "I remember and mourn every single one of them," she said, meeting their eyes in turn. "This may seem hopeless—it may all seem useless—but I have never sent someone into the field whom I didn't believe in and care about.

I'm sending you out now because I know you can do it. I'm saying all of this because I know some of you might not come back once all is done—might not get to live in the free world you created." She breathed in heavily. "And I want you to know," she added, "that if that is the case, I will never forget you. For as long as I live. I will never allow the world to forget that you lived."

Kunikida's ears rang with the sound of her voice, with the finality of it. He felt her promise settle along his shoulders and loosen something there that he hadn't known existed.

Ozaki straightened in her seat, pushing herself up against the arms of the chair. "Now," she said. She slipped the picture into a pocket of her slacks. "Take ten minutes to yourselves. Say goodbye, or good luck. Hug your loved ones." Her eyes dragged to Kunikida's left, where Dazai was standing still. "Then get suited up and help me cancel the goddamn apocalypse."

She left.

Almost everyone left with her, dribbling out via the open doors, rushing to talk or falling utterly silent. Kunikida stood in the midst of it with his back to the door and his mind empty of all thought. He didn't have anyone left to say goodbye to. His family was long dead, his students gone and forgotten, Aya just another ghost haunting his every dream.

He didn't need to say goodbye to Dazai either. Dazai would be with him all the way, whether they made it out or not. The fact that Kunikida even entertained the thought made surprise flare through the blurry confines of his mind.

He turned his head to look at Dazai, to see the face he was making—and found Dazai walking toward the dressing room with his hands in his pockets.

"What are you doing?" he asked, grabbing him by the elbow.

Dazai looked at him over his shoulder. "Getting suited up," he answered.

It took a moment for Kunikida to understand that he wasn't joking.

"No you're not," he growled then.

He released Dazai to step closer, the way he had upon first meeting him—and he couldn't believe, now, that it had only been two days. Dazai felt like a lifelong acquaintance; his life part of Kunikida's own.

"We might not come back from this," he said between his teeth.

"So what?" Dazai replied easily. His slouch was deceptive. He never turned to face Kunikida fully. "It's no different than any other fight. I'm always prepared for the possibility that I might die, Kunikida-kun."

"The odds are different now. Even you've never fought five kaiju at once."

"Are they," Dazai replied darkly.

Kunikida inhaled through his nose until he felt his tension lessen. "Chuuya is in his room right now," he said. "I saw him when I was looking for you." Then, after a second: "You have enough time to go talk to him."

Dazai's mouth twitched in something so unlike joy that all the air in the room seemed to cool at once.

"I wonder, Kunikida-kun," he said coldly. "Why do you care so much about this? Drifting with you is like swimming in self-hatred. You've spent the last two years absorbed by guilt for something you think is your fault, when any moron could tell you that Kouda Aya's death wasn't any more your doing than if a plane you weren't even on had crashed."

He breathed in. Took a step forward. Kunikida didn't move back, ears burning with the flow of Dazai's voice, heart slowing down to a deathly rhythm.

"You couldn't have saved her," Dazai said, face twisted into sympathy. "You loved her, she was your favorite student, and you did everything you could. But you couldn't have saved her with how badly she was injured. Not even if you'd been running in a jaeger." It was his turn to grab Kunikida by the arm, and Kunikida almost flinched. "You were with her until the end. She died in the arms of someone who cared. It's more than enough, Kunikida-kun, you have nothing to blame yourself for."

"Enough," Kunikida exhaled.

Dazai dropped his arm and stepped away.

He didn't leave as Kunikida fought to regain his composure. He said nothing of the tears gathering in his eyes, of the well-visited memory of Aya's voice he must now was now playing through his mind. His presence was a comfort and a pain both.

"You think you can help yourself by helping me," Dazai said eventually. "But you're wrong. It won't help either of us."

"I'm not," Kunikida spat back.

At least Dazai showed some surprised at that.

Kunikida dug his nails into the back of his left hand. He wished he had the time to shower once more and erase the slick taint of blood he could always feel there. "I'm trying to help you," he said, "because drifting with you is the equivalent of making myself go through torture every single time Chuuya so much as crosses your mind."

All the time. Every single second of both drifts they had gone through. Chuuya was as present in the neural handshake as Dazai himself, alive and breathing in the drift through the magnitude of Dazai's feelings.

"And it doesn't have to be," Kunikida continued, under Dazai's wide eyes. "You're terrified of losing him, but he's right here. He's not dead, he hasn't left you—he's right here. If you don't talk to him now and the mission goes…"

He couldn't get the words out. The perspective itself was an aberration. It went against nature.

"Why do you care so much?" Dazai asked again, bewildered. "This morning it was all you could think about. I barely even saw Aya. I don't—I don't understand."

He looked so genuinely lost. As if he couldn't fathom anyone caring this much now that he had lost access to the proof that someone did. And Chuuya did; he did every time he said Dazai's name and every time he met eyes with him, in every one of those shared glances that made the world fade out and left Kunikida feeling as though he were witnessing something too private to exist.

Kunikida's chest felt swollen with pity. His throat tight with understanding.

"Dazai," he said gently. "Do you even realize how much you love him?"

Familiar tapping reached them then, echoing against the walls of the empty corridor. Chuuya walked into the comm room with his wooden cane in hand and dressed up for battle, suit and shoes and tied-up hair. Nothing like the vulnerable sight he had offered just this morning. He came to a startled stop at the sight of them.

Love was the way Dazai's eyes broke away from Kunikida's to look at him instead, pulled by inescapable force. It was the immediate softening of his features, making him look closer to the teenager Kunikida had glimpsed on Ozaki's photograph; the soul-wide want Kunikida knew was now making every cell of him shudder.

If it wasn't love, then nothing on Earth could be.

Dazai stared at Chuuya, and Chuuya stared back, and the space between them shook with unvoiced yearning.

"I can't," Dazai said.

Kunikida could not feel angry at him anymore. Not even as he walked away. He looked at the floor rather than subject himself to whatever sort of new pain would be painted on Chuuya's face now, whatever sort of new regret Dazai would carry to the drift. The door of the dressing room closed with a click, cutting through the silence.

He knew better than most just how much fear could sour.

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[izanyas]

Build Upon The Ruins (6)

More....... more Pacific Rim Soukoku fic

Rating: M Words: 9,900 No warnings.

[Read from Chapter 1]

Build Upon The Ruins Chapter 6

Ozaki already stood between the glass walls of the comm room when Kunikida made it through the door, Dazai in tow. The fierce look she wore was mirrored by Chuuya's expression by her side. Neither of them had looked so serious in his presence before.

She didn't waste time on trivial greetings.

"This is the first double event we've faced," she said as soon as the doors slid shut, facing the row of people Kunikida now recognized as pilots. He made his way to the left of the line, Dazai to his right. "One of these beasts is heavier than we've ever seen. Tiger Claw, Heartblade, Scarlet Wind, get suited up. You're leaving now."

Six of the ten of them walked toward the dressing room. One was a boy who couldn't be older than twenty; he was looking at Dazai as he passed by them, and after Dazai nodded to him, his eyes rested on Kunikida for the briefest second in fleeting curiosity. Kunikida watched him until the shine of his strikingly white hair disappeared behind the doors.

"Double Black and Death Vine, you're on standby," Ozaki said then, eyes turned toward Dazai.

She wasn't the only one looking at him. Chuuya's eyes hadn't left him, though he gave Kunikida a nod when he noticed him staring.

Then they waited.

Kunikida hadn't appreciated the preparations it took to get a jaeger moving when it was himself stepping into the cockpit. With three of them deployed at once—a record, as far as he knew—not a head in the room was turned away from work. Chuuya left Ozaki's side to stand at the front of the room, where the largest window opened to the width of the hangar. Kunikida felt Dazai fidget by his side as if he wanted to join him.

The thought grated at him, in light of the conversation they'd just had.

One after the other the pilots came out, first Tiger Claw, then Heartblade, once two of their respective pilots stopped hugging. The Akutagawa siblings, Kunikida thought. Neither of them showed any fear, either stepping into the cockpits via the bridges unfolding from the room or watching as it happened. Heartblade's second pilot was a girl with blond hair; she stood by Akutagawa Gin dressed in deep blue and didn't once touch her, but already their breaths matched in preparation for the drift.

Kunikida watched through a haze as Heartblade's head dropped to attach to its body and Scarlet Wind took its place. This was the jaeger that had taken down the kaiju who killed Aya. Its pilots were strangers to him, a man and woman whose matching wedding rings he barely saw before their hands disappeared through thick pilot gloves.

He felt a weird sort of grateful toward them both.

"We're lifting you now," Chuuya said into the mic. From the screens displayed throughout the room Kunikida saw the six pilots nod. "We'll engage the drift as you're going—it's probably going to be a bit bumpy until you touch down, but we don't have time to calibrate it beforehand." He paused before adding: "Good luck."

The walls of the dock trembled from the jaeger's departure. Thick steel cables pulled them up through the open roof of the hangar, one after the other, until the alcoves where they had rested were left bare, the soil crawling with unplugged lines and stained with fluid. People immediately converged to tidy everything up. From this far up they looked no bigger than insects.

"Initiating Heartblade's neural handshake," Tanizaki muttered.

Akutagawa and her copilot shuddered visibly. So did the two in Scarlet Wind once Tanizaki warned them.

Inside the fastest jaeger in the world, Tiger Claw's pair barely even blinked—the boy with white hair was one of them. The line on Tanizaki's screen that showed their drift was almost ruler-perfect, the time to stabilization less than two seconds.

"Even better than last time," Kunikida heard Dazai say. "They really are going to break our record."

His words were only addressed to one person; when Chuuya didn't acknowledge them at all, his face fell into a quiet smile.

"A sad sight," a man commented. He was sitting on top of a desk by Chuuya's side and staring at the helicopters' visual feedback with what seemed like plain disinterest. "Our two mark-four and our only mark-five… Are you sure you don't want to send Death Vine instead, Ozaki?"

"Death Vine is our only remaining mark-two. It has too much firepower to risk on a simple attack," Ozaki replied.

The man hummed. "I wouldn't call this a simple attack, though, don't you think? It's a shame to sacrifice Tiger Claw on it. We'll never be able to recreate such speed once it's destroyed."

"Shut up, Edogawa," Chuuya snapped. "We're not sacrificing anything."

"Whatever you say, Nakahara," Edogawa replied politely. "I defer to your expertise on wasting resources." He gave Dazai and Kunikida a meaningful glance.

Chuuya's hand tightened over the grip of his crutch. Next to Kunikida, Dazai exhaled softly through his nose.

Kunikida took his mind off the tension in the air to focus on the video feedback. The three jaegers were low above the sea now, dragging long shadows over the water. There was still no sign of the kaiju no matter where the cameras pointed; only the ocean, quiet, and behind it the ravaged line of the city.

They had been fifty kilometers away. With the time it took to get pilots ready, contact should be established any second. Kunikida couldn't read the radar signals that Alcott was hunching over, but the tension he saw in her back made cold apprehension glide down his neck like sweat.

"Boss," Dazai said beside him. When Kunikida glanced at him, he was looking around the room with a frown. "Where's Yosano?"

This at least seemed to catch Chuuya's attention. He turned back to look at them, blinking, searching the room as well. "How the hell is she not here?" he mumbled.

"Yosano-sensei is busy with something else right now," Ozaki said. "On my orders."

"What's more important than this?"

"Nakahara!" Alcott called loudly.

Chuuya limped toward her immediately, staring down at the screen she showed him. "Fuck," he said, before pressing a button on his earpiece and saying, "They're underwater. Scarlet Wind and Heartblade, drop now."

"Yes, sir."

The videos were without sound, but Kunikida felt the jaegers' impact against the sea through his body regardless.

--

Higuchi felt her station shake with the landing. The harnesses fit into the lulling weightlessness that separated the surface from the bottom of the sea, trying to keep the balance standing. She followed Gin's instinct to step forward with their right foot for stability; it was a few seconds before they stopped feeling like Heartblade was about to fall sideways.

A quick glance at the screens told them that Scarlet Wind had landed with no trouble.

"Not bad for geezers," she couldn't help but say, thumb pressed deliberately over the communication line.

"Is this really the time," Hawthorne replied. He sounded like he was making his most infamous offended but prudish face, and she heard Mitchell snicker in the background in spite of the situation.

"Don't take it too personally—I'll take you over Double Black any day."

"What did Dazai-san ever do to you, Higuchi?" Nakajima said tiredly. Akutagawa, as always, was silent.

"You brats need to stop treating this like a party—"

"Ichiyou," Gin said, at the same time as Higuchi saw the shadow of the first kaiju move from the corner of their eyes.

They fell silent, focusing on the familiarity of the drift and of the jaeger's awareness. Higuchi unfolded the blade embedded in Heartblade's left arm at the same time as Gin took care of the right, and the circular saws started rotating, nice and easy.

Come on, she felt Gin think, elated, in-between the sharp sting of worry she felt for her brother still hovering above them. Come on, come on, come on—

The kaiju leaped out of the water.

They folded at the knees to brace for the impact, elbow curled around their middle. The beast grabbed them by the shoulders and made them swerve backwards, against the resistance of their left feet. Gin slashed their right arm so that the blade embedded itself into its flesh and drew first blood.

Yes, they both thought.

The scream the kaiju let out reverberated through the hull; it jumped back and around, trying to hit some imaginary blind spot, but cameras were everywhere. There was no blind spot when you stood as tall as a building. Higuchi felt the water around her middle as though she were standing alone in it, as though her skin were metal.

Scarlet Wind caught the beast at their rear with both hands, and its powerful thrusters dragged it away from them so that they could focus on catching sight of the second one.

"Where are you, baby," Higuchi crooned, eyes flying between the readings she received. Gin was amused through it all, her own eyes roaming the deep waters.

The one that had attacked them was the big one. It stood tall and thick on its powerful hind legs, wrestling against Scarlet Wind a hundred meters away, like some sort of a giant monkey. Unhindered, Gin's memories shifted to the first King Kong movie which she had seen as a little girl—Higuchi's lips stretched into a smile.

"Like King Kong had sex with Godzilla," she said, tightening her grip on the left arm's calibration device.

Disgusting.

"Hey, you were the one thinking it."

"There it is," Gin said flatly.

The shadow of the second kaiju emerged, fast, heading for their feet. Too fast to be followed.

Higuchi's smile died when it made contact and dragged them down—she felt Heartblade fall backwards into the water with swears bursting from her lips. The weightlessness was back, and with it reduced movement. This was why she preferred being deployed on land, regardless of the risk to civilians.

"Saw!" she yelled sharply.

"On it," Gin muttered.

Gin lifted the right blade while Higuchi put her arm down to push against the floor of the ocean. For a second they thought it had worked: the kaiju's leather-skin split open against the edge of the saw as it swam off, spilling blue blood, giving away its position despite the murkiness that their heavy movements caused.

Not that it helped much. The kaiju moved at a speed she had never encountered. Its scrawny limbs looked ridiculous next to the mountain that had emerged alongside it from the breach, and which Hawthorne and Mitchell were still battling with their bare hands, but they made sense when seen in action.

"It's too fast," she gasped into the main line. "Nakahara, we need Tiger Claw."

"They're going to drop on top of it, just hang on for a bit."

She didn't have time to answer before Gin was moving the body up and then back, just in time to avoid the flash of sunlit claws that cut down the air where they had stood.

They couldn't wait for Akutagawa and Nakajima's drop. She felt Gin realize it the same as she did, and they raised their arms in tandem, legs flexing against the footholds and through the weight of the jaeger, before leaping forward.

They didn't manage to grab the kaiju by the neck as intended; it slithered out of their grasp, its scales more slippery than any kaiju that they had ever fought. Higuchi caught it around the hips with the full of her left arm and pushed with Gin's right until the saw brushed against where its stomach should be.

The kaiju opened its mouth and screamed.

Higuchi felt her mouth open as well, but she didn't hear her own voice through the awful ringing that shook her, making her very bones vibrate. It was physical pain through sound, a kind she had never felt in her life, and it was all she could do not to hurl and vomit inside her own helmet from the violence of it. She fought against her bonds to escape it, chest heaving, sharp pain running through her limbs. She was almost out of air when it finally stopped.

Heartblade's arms dropped like a puppet's cut from their strings. The cockpit wavered in front of her burning eyes, making the nausea in her throat threaten to spill over, and it wasn't until she breathed in with all her might and felt no one breathe with her that she realized the neural handshake was gone.

"W-What—"

Gin was heaving too. Higuchi looked at her through her tears, saw her look back with confusion and horror.

Nothing moved except from their separate bodies.

"Nakahara?" she called weakly.

Silence answered her. Not even the emergency lights were on. She pressed on every button she could reach with shaking fingers, and not one of them gave a sign of working, every screen unlit, all static gone.

They were cut off completely.

-- 

"What the hell was that," Chuuya breathed.

His fingers hadn't left the side of his ear for a good two minutes. Kunikida watched with increasing tension as each of his calls to the deployed pilots failed to come back. Every screen in the room that was linked to the fight scene had blackened and turned silent.

"Are they all—" Alcott's voice shivered into a stop.

It was the same question everyone was too afraid to ask.

Chuuya's hand dropped to his side, fist closed. "No," he said. "No, that was too fast—something's blocking contact with us. We can't power them anymore."

The man named Edogawa was silent now, his face dark. Kunikida could hear the hitch in Dazai's breathing next to him—could remember now, with stark quality, that the two boys piloting Tiger Claw were his students.

"Then—what are we supposed to do?" Tanizaki asked. Panic was emptying his face of blood, making his eyes look sickly pale in the light. "Did that kaiju do it? Was that what that scream was?"

"They're adapting," Ozaki said lowly. "That was a weapon made for us—they're aiming to completely disable us."

"Okay, but what do we do about it?" Chuuya asked loudly. "Do we send new choppers to retrieve them and power them back? It'll take at least two hours to reroute Tiger Claw's auxiliary, we don't have that kind of time."

Kunikida thought about the time they would lose doing it, thought of the destruction that two category four kaiju could bring in the hours it would take to put three jaegers back in condition, and felt light-headed with it.

"We need to send Death Vine now," Edogawa said.

"It won't work," Sakaguchi Ango replied from his corner of the room. "Death Vine is digital. It'll stop working too if that kaiju does it again."

"All the jaegers are digital, Sakaguchi. What are you suggesting, that we sit down and do nothing?"

"Not all of them," Dazai and Chuuya said in the same breath.

The room fell silent.

"Double Black is analog," Dazai said. His voice was calm—his eyes fixed toward Chuuya by the window, meeting Chuuya's own silent stare. "A mark-three. Nuclear."

He turned toward Ozaki within the next second.

"Send us in," he told her. "You already know you don't have a choice."

She looked at him with the same implacable strength that Chuuya had used on Kunikida just this morning. "We need Double Black for the mission. We can't risk you on this."

"Ane-san," Dazai said softly.

Ozaki's eyes shivered at the corners, and suddenly the grip she had over her own wrist looked more defensive than professionally relaxed.

"Send us in," he repeated. "And focus on rerouting Tiger Claw while we hold them off."

"Can you?" she asked under her breath. "Can you really? This'll be one jaeger against two kaiju, Dazai."

"Of course," Dazai replied. His lips lifted, his gaze brushing Kunikida's and then fleeting beyond him, toward the one person he was really talking to. "It won't be the first time I beat impossible odds."

Ozaki looked at Kunikida, then, with a question in her eyes; and Kunikida found that he had only ever had one answer to give her.

Piloting was the reason he was here at all.

"Dazai," he said a few minutes later, back still aching from the snap of the pilot suit closing shut.

"I know," Dazai replied.

Their eyes met.

The room was abuzz once more. They waited for the bridge to Double Black's head to unfold next to Tanizaki's team, who were working at reestablishing communication with Tiger Claw and preparing to send another helicopter. Kunikida searched Dazai's face for any hint of deceit, any clue that he would sabotage himself again. He found only resignation.

"Drift with me, this time," he said anyway. "For real."

Dazai nodded.

--

Yosano hadn't run so much in her life before.

She ignored even the thought of taking shelter in any of the public refuges that Yokohama's remaining citizens were hurrying toward. She forced her way through the streets the opposite way that people were going, toward the beach—toward the jaeger dock—but she knew that she wouldn't get there in time. Kouyou would have locked the place down the moment the kaiju were spotted.

She watched, panting, as their forces were deployed. Three jaegers lifted in the distance, visible now that the city's skyline was but a dream; they shone in the sun the way marble tombstones did, and she could not help but think of the men and women piloting them, the boys and girls she had fixed over and over again through the years just so they could keep going back into the fray.

She wouldn't be there to welcome them home this time.

The thought threatened to freeze her over the way Kajii's convulsing body and Nakahara's pain had the day before. Yosano stopped in her tracks, pain burning at her side, sucking in a mouthful of biting cold air. Her hand shook around the strap of her bag.

In the end she forced herself to move again. She couldn't run now, so she pushed open the first door she found unlocked and sat behind the counter of an empty convenience store. Breaking open the glass window of a drink dispenser was child's play—she took out palm-warm water and drank half of a bottle in one go. Her heart rate abated somewhat.

They had been so, so stupid.

Even after Kajii's words about the kaiju functioning with a hive mentality, it hadn't struck any of them that they would've felt the drift too. That they would retaliate. Yosano wanted to rage at herself, at the world, for the risk they had taken. Kajii knew of the plan, and now the kaiju knew it too. They had officially destroyed their only chance for the sake of one dangerous, idiotic experiment. And now the kaiju would be looking for the people they would have seen through Kajii's own mind—for him, for Kouyou, for Yosano.

"Fuck," she breathed out. It didn't help much.

Everyone was in the dock except for her, and the kaiju would know to head there, she knew, with anguish growing inside her chest. The best thing she could do was remain hidden. She crawled further into the corner of the shop, keeping her eyes out for the glass door and what little sky and street she could see out of it.

It seemed like such a short time before she felt the ground shake in a terrifyingly recognizable way.

Yosano shut down all frightful thoughts of the pilots' deaths before they could take shape. She watched the sunlit street from above the line of the counter, body hidden under it, trying to focus on what little she could remember of Nakahara's own breathing exercises. She had never wished he were in her presence more.

Her entire body shook when the deep shadow of the beast fell anyway. She crushed a hand over her mouth to choke back her whimpers, closing her eyes as the first of four heavy, monstrous feet landed before the door.

The kaiju had moved slowly down the street. She heard windows break on the floors above hers now that it was here, as if it were busy peering through each of them. She didn't know if it could smell her, if it could hear her; Kajii would've known—he would've been able to hide them better than she could hope to, with her whole self struck still with terror—but Kajii wasn't there. She was alone.

The ceiling crumbled over the opposite half of the store, and she jumped, banging her knee against the foot of the counter.

The kaiju fell into a crouch outside the door almost instantly. It was all she could do to flatten herself onto the ground before it could glimpse her.

Her lungs stilled. She heard the sound of the door breaking apart, felt the air move as the beast breathed into the shop. Hot, sweet-smelling air, heavy with alien chemicals. Yosano watched with wide eyes as the kaiju's foot appeared on the other side of the counter, patting around almost awkwardly. Shelves fell along its way. An old fire alarm started ringing, from its button being crushed by the kaiju's flesh.

The kaiju punched around in answer, growling out of its wide mouth; when it made as if to draw back its arm and leave, it took the counter on its way, sending Yosano crashing into the wall at her back. She felt bone snap in her left arm when she landed—she screamed.

The kaiju roared.

Yosano crawled to her feet, not letting herself look back at it shoved its head into the building, making the entire structure tremble around her. She kept her eyes fixed onto the back exit and opened it shoulder-first despite the pain she felt at the movement; at the back had once been an alley, but whatever building had walled the other side was a ruin. She jumped over the rubble with the sound of the building crashing down in her ringing ears, with the shaking of the kaiju's footsteps under the sole of her shoes.

The shaking stopped for a single, weightless second; then the kaiju landed in front of her from its jump, and the debris she was running over rolled over and took her down.

Yosano landed on her back. This time the pain in her arm wasn't enough to make her scream.

She looked into the electric blue eyes of the gigantic creature with the breath knocked out of her. It crawled closer, saliva dripping from its mouth, raising its arm to strike, and in that second all Yosano could think of was the footage she had seen only once of what had happened to Nakahara as he was swatted down like a fly.

All she could see was Kouyou's stricken face when the line had come alive four years ago, after a minute of terrifying silence, to the sound of Dazai's sobs.

She and the kaiju turned their heads at the same time when the rushing noise of flying helicopters reached them. Yosano looked at the silhouette of Double Black rising out from the open roof of the dock, unable to tear her eyes away from it even as the kaiju screamed again and then began running for the shore, leaving her alone in the dust and rubble.

Her terror vanished.

--

"He's not going to answer," Akutagawa said.

"Can't hurt to try," Atsushi replied between clenched teeth.

Akutagawa was right, of course. It didn't matter how many times he tried to call the base, Tiger Claw's power was completely down.

Atsushi's mind still felt raw from the sudden drop out of the drift. He kept trying to reach Akutagawa and feeling solid nothingness instead; judging by the slightly confused look Akutagawa wore, strapped to his own station, he was facing a similar struggle.

At least they hadn't been connected to Tiger Claw when it landed into the water. The jaeger was standing, by some miracle, even without their directive. It didn't do much to appease him considering the occasional moans that the second kaiju let out from just outside the skull of the machine.

It had been running circles around them for at least fifteen minutes now. Not attacking, just watching.

"Damn it," Atsushi said, letting his hand drop from the control panel. "I hate this so much."

"I'm not especially enthusiastic about the situation either."

Atsushi couldn't help but twist his mouth into a smile.

"What do you think they're doing?" he asked, staring up at the top of the jaeger's head.

"Probably sending Double Black."

Atsushi turned his head sideways to look at Akutagawa. "Really?"

"Why do you look so surprised?" Akutagawa muttered, looking back. "Whatever that thing did obviously jams all communication and power. Of course they're going to send the only analog jaeger they have. And a temporary nuclear core for us."

"That's so cool! Does it mean we'll be fighting with Dazai-san? I hope they reroute us before he finishes them off."

Akutagawa just grunted.

Still, as much as Atsushi looked forward to seeing Double Black fight in person, the thought of sitting here waiting while a kaiju toyed with them was uncomfortable. A pilot's station wasn't meant to relax in either; there was nowhere to sit, and letting himself hang from the harnesses only pulled uncomfortably at his shoulders and back. The only thing he could do was stand still and bear the weight of the suit for as long as he could.

He brought his hands up once more, grabbing his helmet and pulling it off his head. His hair was already damp with sweat despite how little effort he had actually put into piloting.

"What are you doing?" Akutagawa said immediately.

"I can't breathe with this thing on," Atsushi replied. "It's fine, they'll tell us when we're ready anyway."

He started unhooking himself from the station under Akutagawa's angry, then reluctant stare. Atsushi didn't comment when he heard the other unstrap himself as well—neither of them enjoyed being still for long, especially tied up—and looked pointedly away to hide his smile.

"That's better," he sighed, kicking off the footholds. He slid a little against the floor of the cockpit as he stepped away; Tiger Claw had landed upright, but its head was bowed as if in surrender.

"What are you planning?" Akutagawa murmured, stepping off his own station.

"Nothing."

Atsushi walked to the nearest wall with heavy, awkward steps. He banged against the skull of the jaeger as loudly as he could.

Outside, the kaiju roared.

"What are you doing," Akutagawa hissed, hurrying to join him and tug him away from the wall. He misjudged the strength of the metal floor's incline, though, and slid the last few steps, body impacting loudly against the wall. The kaiju screamed again, this time from much closer.

"Perfect," Atsushi said.

"Nakajima—"

"I told you to call me Atsushi."

Akutagawa looked at him with deep offense. "Atsushi," he spat, as if the name itself was repulsive to him. It had less to do with dislike than with the confusing mix of attraction and annoyance Akutagawa felt toward him, Atsushi knew, so he only smiled encouragingly in answer. "Tell me what you're doing."

"Isn't it obvious?" He twisted the manual opening of the cabinet where they kept the emergency flare guns. "Just because Tiger Claw's down doesn't mean we're powerless."

"It does, actually, mean we're powerless."

Akutagawa took the gun Atsushi handed him, though, and his eyes were already wandering toward the trap door that led to the top of the jaeger's skull.

Atsushi hit the wall again. The kaiju was very close, now; he could feel the water rock against Tiger Claw's body, making it waver in place, as the beast swam around them.

"We have him where we want," he said.

"There is no 'we'. I had no part in this."

"Keep telling yourself that, Akutagawa."

Atsushi walked to the opposite end of the cockpit with heavy steps. The ladder leading to the top slid down its holding spot easily once he tugged at it, and he climbed it loudly and painfully, the suit's weight slowing him down.

Akutagawa was climbing too when he reached the trap door. He opened it with glove-clumsy fingers, barely recalling all the drills that Dazai had made them go through years ago—he let out a satisfied breath when the thing finally unlocked.

The sun was bright outside, enough so that Atsushi had to blink to chase off tears. It was not the kind of day one would imagine an attack of this size happening; once, he had thought kaiju only crawled out of rain and night, as if the elements chose to frame their destruction accordingly. It would be a long time until he first moved a jaeger with his body and understood that humanity's end happened no matter the weather.

Atsushi crawled atop the jaeger, pulled Akutagawa up after him, and finally they stood as tall as man could be. Looking down into the eyes of the monster.

The kaiju was surprisingly short of stature. Its limbs were scrawny, the skin of its back folded like an old man's. Electricity ran along its spine and gathered in its mouth, and it was the same blue of its blood, which dripped out of its side from where Heartblade had cut.

It stood on its hind legs to peer up at them.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Atsushi asked.

"I long for the day you stop using that line," Akutagawa replied, lifting the gun.

He shot the kaiju in the eye with terrifying accuracy.

The red trail of the flare was of no importance now. Atsushi sidestepped the stray sparks as the kaiju shrieked in pain, held himself balanced with the side of the protruding ladder, and shot the kaiju's other eye as soon as it opened.

The beast fell backward; its body displaced tall waves as it hit, disappearing underwater. Its cries finally drowned out.

Atsushi glanced at Akutagawa with his mouth stretched into a wide grin. Akutagawa stared back with the same humor in his eyes. Right now, with his back against the sun and his hair pushed back from sweat and wind, he had never looked better.

The rushing sound of an approaching helicopter reached them. They turned their back to the sea to watch Double Black advance, with its fourteen gleaming medals, with the mind and body of their mentor in it—and Atsushi thought, across the tendrils of the drift that always clung between him and Akutagawa: We're going to win this.

--

"Atta boys," Dazai said, eyeing the pea-sized silhouettes of Tiger Claw's pilots. He raised Double Black's right arm in their direction, and saw Atsushi punch the air and cheer in answer.

Kunikida was looking down at the deep green waters, keeping watch for the kaiju. Dazai left him to it, focusing on the achingly familiar feeling of the drift. The urge to coil himself around Chuuya's memories tore through him with every breath he took; he wanted to crawl deep into the space that Chuuya had inhabited and which now gaped open like a wound, as he had the first time he and Kunikida drifted.

Let it go, he repeated to himself.

Kunikida must be feeling everything he did, now, with how deeply they connected. It had only taken four seconds for them to stabilize this time. He never said anything, though, only let his compassion wash through them both and then away so they could focus on the task at hand.

All three of the shut down jaegers still stood, thankfully. None of the other pilots seemed to have tried anything except for Tiger Claw. The knowledge made Dazai smile.

"That was reckless," Kunikida commented. "Did you teach them that?"

"Not that specifically, but I always did try to tell them to think outside the box."

Kunikida shifted through quick flashes of Atsushi and Akutagawa's training, following the trail of them back to Dazai's own pilot days and then Chuuya's.

They were falling down when Dazai felt Kunikida touch the first of Chuuya's memories. He closed his eyes to it, letting their bodies and the jaeger's distract him from it by flexing at the knee as they hit the water and then the ocean floor. He saw Kouyou and himself, much younger than he ever remembered being; felt Kunikida let go of it with no more than a brush.

"We need to plug them back in," Kunikida said.

There was still no sign of the fallen kaiju. The second one was heading toward them from the beach, still too far away to try anything.

They lifted the heavy charge they carried in their left hand toward Tiger Claw; Atsushi and Akutagawa seemed to understand, because they climbed back down into the cockpit. A minute later the back of their jaeger opened.

Kunikida pushed the charge into one of the slots there and then stepped away; it wasn't ten seconds before static rang through their ears and Atsushi's voice exclaimed, "Dazai-san!"

"This will only last you a few minutes," Dazai warned. "Tanizaki's going to try to power you back up in the meantime, but you can't move yet."

"Can we shoot?" Akutagawa asked.

"You can."

He huffed. "Then that's all we need."

"Do you want the big scary one or the one who can outscream Kajii?" Atsushi asked.

"I wasn't aware we were obligated to share," Dazai replied, grinning. "Catch up or we'll take both."

It was all so familiar. Dazai let the flow of the fight carry him, let his body fit back inside the jaeger's and vice-versa; by now the drift ran no risk of wavering, and Kunikida must feel it too, because even he was letting Dazai's confidence settle his nerves.

The kaiju that his pupils had shot chose this moment to surface again, two hundred meters away from them, swimming forward.

"All right, Kunikida-kun," Dazai said. "Let's go hunting."

They started charging Double Black's left-hand cannon; Dazai unfolded the right-arm blade, and it was almost as though Chuuya were doing it instead.

"It's fast," Chuuya said then, almost in a whisper. "Fastest we've ever seen."

Dazai let his voice wash over him as he lifted his elbow. "Then we'll be precise," he replied.

The kaiju leaped at them.

It screamed as it did, current running over its skin, in the same way it had when disabling the others; but Double Black didn't waver once in the face of it even with the headache that shot through Dazai and Kunikida both. They grabbed the thing by the crook of its gnarly arm, and Kunikida shot it, twice, dead in the heart.

This time the thing's howl was one of pain rather than vicious rage; it squirmed in their hold, blue blood gushing through the wide hole that Kunikida had opened, eyes leaking the same from Atsushi and Akutagawa's previous attack.

"Once more," Dazai said.

Kunikida was charging the cannon again before he was finished speaking.

They didn't manage to finish it off, though. They saw Tiger Claw's chest pivot above its legs to aim backwards—its missiles fired close enough that Dazai felt Double Black swerve from the moving air alone, and one of them embedded itself into the hip of the second kaiju, right behind them.

"We need to take care of the one that can jam us first," Kunikida said.

Dazai eyed the large body of the second kaiju thoughtfully.

"Dazai. We can't run the risk of letting it disable Tiger Claw again."

"We have some time," Dazai replied. "Right now Tiger Claw's working on nuclear for a few more minutes. This one looks like an easier target."

He felt Kunikida's outrage at his arrogance in his own throat; it was so reminiscent of Chuuya that he almost laughed with it.

Kunikida did let him turn them around and walk toward the biggest of the two kaiju. Tiger Claw was shooting again, the second of its three available waves of missiles, and this time one tore through the beast's flank as if it were only paper. They started running towards it as it screamed and fell. Kunikida turned to the left to avoid being grabbed; Dazai lifted his arm and plunged the blade at its end deeply into the kaiju's belly.

They would have finished it off if the fast one hadn't grabbed them around the middle right then, its long tail coiling around Dazai's right arm and then squeezing.

He shouted from the pain of it, feeling his skin cave in like the metal armor.

"I can't dislodge him," Kunikida breathed. "Shit—"

The bigger kaiju was squirming again at their feet, its ugly head peeking out of the water, beady eyes watching them greedily.

Dazai thought, Cooling agent.

Kunikida's breath stuttered. His mind ran through several reasons why it would be a bad idea. In the end he simply swore and opened the reservoir at Double Black's right elbow.

The kaiju tried to scamper off the moment the cold hit it, but Dazai grabbed the end of its tail despite the crushing pain running through his shoulder and forced it still until it took effect. When it did, when the flesh under his palm felt solid as a rock, Kunikida punched at the base of the tail. It broke apart around them.

Dazai breathed in harshly, the pressure finally gone.

"Let Tiger Claw finish off the big one, the other's swimming toward the city—"

"Got it," Dazai replied, moving his legs again.

"Akutagawa," Chuuya continued. "How many more shots do you have?"

"Two if you count the core. Nakajima can use the claws as soon as you allow us to move."

"I don't think that'll be necessary. Just aim for its damn heart."

"Understood," Akutagawa answered darkly.

Dazai and Kunikida heard the kaiju's roars die for good after the third round of shots.

The one they were pursuing was badly wounded, but no less fast for it. The skin of its back had extended in a way too reminiscent of wings for Dazai to feel settled; he pushed himself harder, felt Kunikida push back, until they were running at a matching speed.

"Chuuya," Dazai panted. "This thing looks like it can fly."

There was a pause. "There's never been a flying kaiju before," Chuuya replied. "Their bodies are too heavy for that."

"There's never been one who could disable jaegers either," Kunikida grunted. "And this one is lithe—it really looks like it might be able to fly."

"Fuck."

Only a hundred meters now. The kaiju had reached the beach, was turning in direction of the black dock at the very end of it, and Dazai felt his heartbeat shake through him painfully.

"We won't let it reach them," Kunikida breathed, in and out of the drift. "Dazai."

Dazai bent at the knee, feeling Kunikida bend as well, and they jumped across the rest of the distance.

The kaiju growled and struggled the second they landed on it, its slippery hide almost impossible to hold. Dazai slashed the blade in his right arm across its back, opening blue welts along its spine but not stopping it.

The beast turned around all at once. Kunikida was in the middle of charging the cannon again and didn't stop it in time—the kaiju's claws dug into the palm of Double Black's hand and ripped the weapon off entirely.

Its hind legs wrapped around them at the waist, making them fall back. It rolled its shoulders until the full length of its wings extended by its side, much larger than it was.

Then it lifted them off the ground.

"Shit!"

"The cannon's gone," Dazai said, teeth clenched. "It's holding down my arm too—"

The ground was already so far away. They both watched with bated breath as the kaiju took them higher and higher, until they flew above mountaintops, until the air in the cockpit thinned to the point of unbreathable and the emergency oxygen supplies came to life.

"You can't take a drop from this distance," Chuuya breathed through the now-staticky line. "You need to find a way to bring it down."

It was easier said than done. Dazai didn't reply, mind running through half-thought ideas twenty a second, body soon to be weightless from lack of gravity.

It was Kunikida who found the way out.

Dazai saw it unfold through the other's head only to be dismissed for the risk it would pose; he grabbed onto it immediately.

"No," Kunikida said.

"Have some faith in me," Dazai replied.

They looked at each other for the first time since the drift had started.

Kunikida's face was red through the helmet, gleaming with sweat. The fatigue was starting to get at the both of them—Dazai hadn't eaten anything, had barely slept at all, and Kunikida wasn't as used as he was to the deceptive lightness of the station, to the false equivalency of the jaeger's strength and their own.

"It's our only shot," he added. "Have some faith in you, Kunikida-kun."

Kunikida's acceptance tasted like fear. Acrid, biting, at the back of their throat.

Dazai freed his mind of it as he extended the sword again. He closed his eyes, letting Kunikida see for the both of them, letting memories of Chuuya's own mastery of Double Black's blade flood him until he couldn't help but smile from it. It was Chuuya who kept the arm extended as Kunikida made them rotate the way Tiger Claw had earlier; Chuuya who withstood the pain of their almost-dislocated shoulder like he withstood the pain of his leg, the pain of his loss.

Now, they thought.

Double Black's feet hit the back of the kaiju; the second its grip slackened on Dazai's arm and pain rushed up his shoulder, he slashed sideways with the sword, opening the belly of the beast, making its guts fall out.

It dropped them immediately. The instant that followed was spent still and suspended. Then Double Black started rushing toward Earth, and Dazai felt his heart rise up his throat and make him gasp.

They hadn't been prepared for the heat of it. The fact that the dead kaiju fell alongside them was poor consolation when sweat coated them and alarms started ringing about overheating—Kunikida opened the second and last of their cooling reservoirs once his wits had returned to him, but it was barely enough to keep the jaeger from catching on fire.

"Dazai," Chuuya said.

"It's okay," Dazai replied quickly, heart beating off-tempo. "It's okay, Chuuya, we won't die."

The sound of Chuuya's pained breaths was almost soothing.

"You'll have to—"

"I know."

Chuuya exhaled deeply. "We'll tell you when," he said, voice slightly less shaky. "Don't miss."

"We won't," Kunikida replied.

The mountains came back into sight. Wind screamed around them, and the corpse of the kaiju took some distance from them, lighter and more flexible to its whims. Dazai followed the instructions that Alcott was sending them, moving Double Black in tiny little thrusts so it would land on the beach and nowhere else. Kunikida was doing the same on his side.

"Now!" Chuuya said.

They opened the core of the machine and turned on all the thrusters.

It wasn't enough to stop them, only to slow them down; Dazai's head hit into the back of the station from the backlash, and during the seconds it took from then and until Double Black crashed into the sand, everything swam in his sight. His mind was so far encroached into the drift that he barely felt the physical impact of landing at all.

The silence that followed felt like eternity. Kunikida was holding his breath, shocked by his own continued living. It was a familiar feeling, as much as the shadow of crushing relief that now loomed over them. It broke through when they heard the kaiju land fifty meters off of them and saw it stay down, intestines spread like ribbons around it.

"Are you conscious?" Chuuya asked.

Dazai breathed out, forcing Kunikida to do so as well.

Then he laughed.

It racked through every one of his aching muscles, pulsing in his throat, flushing his face. He felt Kunikida look at him in confusion and didn't take the time to look back—he took off his helmet, cutting the drift short, letting himself fall back into his own body.

"Yeah," he said breathlessly. "Be a dear and get me something to eat when we're back, Chuuya."

"Oh, fuck off," Chuuya replied, but his smile was audible.

--

They're all alive. No major injury.

Yosano didn't take her eyes off of Kouyou's message as she walked toward the dock.

Double Black's landing had shaken the ground again. Some of the buildings damaged by the kaiju's foray into the city fell over when it did, and she had to be careful to stay away from walls altogether lest they crumble onto her; but she walked anyway, broken arm hanging limp by her side, step after step through the ruins.

Pain was a long place away from her thoughts. The sun shone through curtains of dust around her, bright and cold. A winter's sun. She made her way to the beach, following the hesitant line of people who were gathering there.

A group of men and women in full-body protective suits ran past her, at one point. Fitzgerald's goons hurrying to gather what could be saved of the kaiju's remains.

She tightened her grip on her bag and walked faster.

Fitzgerald himself was standing by the corpse when she arrived. Double Black was in the process of being lifted, its right hand flayed and its torso caved in from the impact but otherwise undamaged. She was here for it, though; she knew that Dazai and Kunikida were fine, that all of them were fine. She knew she'd be able to make her way back to the dock with ease, knew without needing to ask that Kouyou would be with her when she went to sleep that night.

Yosano dragged herself toward Fitzgerald. A few people tried to stop her, relenting when she glared at them. After that her path stayed clear.

Fitzgerald only noticed her when she was right by him.

"Miss Yosano," he said, stepping back. His eyes roamed over her, and she wondered for a fleeting second at the sight she must make—one-armed, dirty, skirt torn, bleeding out of numerous cuts. "What a pleasant surpr—"

She punched him across the jaw.

Fitzgerald fell with a cry, and Yosano didn't grant a single glance to the group of furious people who tried to approach her with blades or guns in hand—she shook open her bag, took out the old bonesaw she carried around precisely for this, and put her right foot on Fitzgerald's squirming head.

He stilled. His people stopped in their tracks.

"My," she drawled, satisfaction sweet on her tongue. "That looks like a nasty bruise, Fitzgerald. Mind if I take a look?"

He swallowed, neck shaking with it. "There's really no need—"

She pushed down with her foot. He sputtered as sand dribbled into his mouth and moaned pathetically.

Yosano saw some movement from the corner of her eyes. When she turned her head to look, she found Fyodor standing a few feet away, staring at them with bored eyes.

"Not going to stop me?" she asked him.

He looked at her for a second before shrugging, lips curved into a small smile.

"Do what you want, sensei," he said. "I'm only here to observe."

"Suit yourself," she mumbled.

The blade of the saw, blunt as it was, came to rest near Fitzgerald's ear.

"Okay," he breathed in panic—her satisfaction only grew as he coughed again, lips cracking open in the cold soil. "I'm—sorry. For throwing you out."

"Were you hoping I'd die?" she asked sweetly. "You really have a low opinion of me."

"I wasn't thinking—" she stepped harder, and he cried out. "Fine! I'll get you your brain, just get off me so I can tell my teams!"

She kicked him in the belly for good measure before she let him go.

He picked himself up with shaking arms, spitting at the ground to get rid of the sand in his mouth. There was a trail of saliva on his chin when he stood up, and his once-neat suit was now filthy, stained blue by the blood-soaked beach.

"Good lord," he breathed. "Do you treat your husband so roughly? Or are all men driven away by your violence at first sight?"

"Oh, I don't know," Yosano replied, resting the saw on her shoulder. "Ask my fiancée the next time you see her. Which might be in a while—keeping the jaeger program afloat is one busy, busy job."

Fitzgerald's face was almost translucent in the cold winter light.

--

Cheers welcomed them back, loud and bright in the halo of the comm room.

Dazai let his chest fill with them until the air he breathed felt warm. He took in the smiles tearing each face apart, the sweat on Atsushi and Akutagawa's brows. Kunikida was stolen from his side the moment he stepped in beside him, his surprise shining through the familiar awareness that followed successful drifts.

For a while Dazai himself was cornered by Tanizaki Naomi. In Yosano's absence she was the highest-ranking doctor of the dock, and she asked question after question, until he finally managed to reassure her that no, nothing felt so much as sprained, he was just a little sore.

He expected Kouyou to step in in her stead when she was done, but not the words that left her mouth.

"I'm proud of you," she said.

Dazai stared at her for a long second, not knowing how to reply.

Kouyou and him had been close, once. From the day she had lost Fukuzawa to the day Dazai had stepped down as a pilot, she had been something like a friend. Drifting with Chuuya blurred the lines of what was his and what wasn't until he didn't care to know at all—Kouyou had been his sister, for several years, because she was Chuuya's.

He swallowed. "I only did what you asked me to."

"No," she replied, and her eyes were understanding. "You did much more than that."

Some small, lonely part of him swelled at the praise, at the way she looked at him, warm and affectionate. The part of him that had renounced family for as long as he cared to remember. He nodded at her almost hesitantly.

"Where's Chuuya?" he asked then, unwilling to prolong the moment.

Kouyou chuckled. "I think he's gone to get you food, actually."

"Works every time," Dazai huffed. The fact that his stomach growled right then only served to make her laugh.

None of the pilots had gone to get changed yet. Euphoria bled through the air of the room, made them stick around in their suits in spite of the discomfort of it. Dazai watched with a smile as Atsushi told Tanizaki about what they had done before Tiger Claw was powered back.

"It was stupid," Akutagawa cut in, leaning heavily against Tanizaki's desk. "The next time you do that will be your death, Nakajima, either because the kaiju will stomp on you in its rage or because I will."

"Akutagawa," Atsushi replied in a low, serious voice. "You talk too much."

He hooked his fingers into the collar of Akutagawa's suit and pulled him down into a kiss.

The noise stilled around them for a second; then Tanizaki squeaked, and Kouyou said, "Oh my," and satisfied laughter spilled out of Higuchi's lips.

Dazai watched it from a distance, literally and otherwise. The room fogged around the sight of his students' embrace, and relief left him to make room for an ache he didn't know how to name. He blinked slowly, steadily, as they separated.

Then he couldn't look at all as the high came down, as they opened their eyes again.

"I'm going to get changed," he said. Kouyou glanced at him with surprise in her eyes, but he didn't stay long enough for her to question him.

The weight of his suit had become suffocating. The cheer of the room only enhanced it—the sight of Atsushi and Akutagawa looking at each other with understanding too deep for words, too graceful for mocking, burned in his lungs alongside the warm air.

He found the dressing room perfectly empty. Dazai knew he should wait for someone to come dress him down, lest he risk damaging the suit, but he had been in and out of it enough times by now to know how it was done. He freed the spine of it with a wince, gasping in a breath when the plates around his chest loosened. His shoulder was still tender from the kaiju's hold. He peeled the sleeve off of it carefully; there were red marks all over it, ones that would bruise a deep purple within a few hours.

It was nothing he needed medical attention for. He let the top half of the suit fall onto one of the benches with a sigh, closing his eyes, breathing deeply.

"Everything okay?"

His eyelids lifted only just enough to allow light.

Chuuya stood at the entrance of the room, one hand over his crutch, the other holding a plastic bag. He met Dazai's eyes for a silent second before limping further into the room. The bag came to rest next to the suit.

"Got you food," he said uselessly. His eyes were on Dazai's bruised shoulder as he straightened up. "Ane-san said you ran off like an idiot."

"She's never been right about me a single time in her life," Dazai replied.

Chuuya's mouth twitched. "I'd be inclined to believe that if I didn't know you haven't been right about her a single time either."

"Too many words, Chuuya. Spare me, I just killed a kaiju and a half."

"I'm not going to baby you," Chuuya said, rolling his eyes. "This was hardly the toughest fight you've been in."

"I just dropped from—you know what, never mind. You tyrant."

It made laughter shake through Chuuya's frame, brought forth by exhaustion and relief more than actual joy. His face looked almost pained from it. His hair had slipped out of his tie in numerous places now, especially around his ear, from messing with his earpiece. He had to bring his hand up to push it out of his face as his mirth left, softening into a smile.

Every second of it traveled through Dazai's chest, familiar and forgotten at once. He hadn't realized how parched he was for the sound of Chuuya's laughter until then.

"Heard about Nakajima and Akutagawa," Chuuya said, stepping closer, leaning back against one of the tall lockers. It seemed to relieve some of his tension; the lines of his face eased, and his grip on the crutch turned lighter. "Too bad I missed it," he added, staring somewhere at the floor. "I'm pretty sure Higuchi is collecting about a full salary's worth in betting money right now."

"I don't bet on stuff like this," Dazai replied. "It's rather in bad taste."

Chuuya snorted. "Right. I'm going to pretend I don't know you had every bet about us rigged and monitored."

Dazai's chest ached, ribs to lungs to heart, and Chuuya's smile faded. The silence around them thickened.

Chuuya shifted back onto his feet, crutch secure against his forearm. He seemed to hesitate before taking another step toward Dazai—and Dazai didn't move, not even to breathe; when Chuuya's fingers ghosted his shoulder, barely enough to touch at all, he felt it through his every bone.

"Is that gonna be fine on its own?" Chuuya asked lowly. His hand still hovered close.

Dazai blinked. "Yes," he managed to reply. "It's just bruises."

"Good."

Something fragile went over Chuuya's face. He looked up as he spoke again, and Dazai could not have looked away from him if he were about to be stabbed or shot, if he were about to drop down from the edges of the atmosphere again. Gravity had no pull at all next to that of Chuuya's eyes.

"You did good today. I probably shouldn't have—" Chuuya bit his lip. Released it. "I feel like I've been a little hard on you," he said.

"Why?" Dazai replied. The sound of it came hazily to his ears.

Chuuya smiled hollowly. "I pushed this whole piloting again thing on you. I didn't realize what it would mean until…"

He trailed off, looking perturbed.

Dazai took a step forward, and he didn't know at all what he wanted to say or do—if he wanted to say anything at all—but Chuuya's next inhale hitched, and he looked up once more, and none of that seemed to matter.

His fingers dragged against Dazai's shoulder, dipped under the strap of his tank top. He didn't close the hold with his thumb or touch anything more than this.

His hand was shaking.

"I wish," he let out, and the way he looked then was the same as the very first time.

Face warm, chest tight with heart-deep yearning. The scar at his temple shone in the muted light. Dazai let his eyes trail down the shape of it until they reached his lips, and Chuuya leaned in with the same breathless shiver that he could feel between his shoulders, between his ribs. It was the sort of longing made solid by the years; the sort of aching hope whose heart beat like a living thing.

"Chuuya," he whispered.

Chuuya's fingers spasmed against his skin. If he had breathed, then, Dazai would have felt it on his own mouth. He would have sucked it in, cradled it into his own lungs. He stood hanging by the sheer promise of it, by the fingers hooked into his clothes and the bare brush of Chuuya's lips against his.

Their eyes snapped back up at the sound of incoming voices. Dazai witnessed the breadth of true despair in Chuuya's in that single second, before shaking resolve took over and he let his hand fall once more, taking all the warmth of Dazai's body with it.

He stepped away. Dazai let him.

"You should get some rest," Chuuya said roughly. "Kouyou will want all of you ready for the breach by the next attack."

Dazai didn't have words left in him to answer. He nodded, though Chuuya wasn't looking at him anymore. Chuuya seemed to feel it all the same. His shoulders shook once; the grip he had over his crutch drew the blood out of his knuckles.

He left as the other pilots came in, limping between them all, muttering thanks when they fell sideways to let him through.

All the air in the room was left stale in his wake. Dazai took it in anyway. Lungful after lungful of nothing worth living for.

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[izanyas]

Build Upon The Ruins (2)

Back with more Pacific Rim AU Soukoku!

Rating: M Words: 7,800 No warnings.

[Read from Chapter 1]

Build Upon The Ruins Chapter 2

Moving from base to base was a hassle in itself. Moving all of the world's jaeger resources to one base was about fifteen times worse. Means of travel were scarce in the face of imminent doom; planes, which were already rare to begin with, had to be requisitioned entirely to move personnel and machines around. The jaegers went ahead by boat or train, stripped of their insides to make the weight manageable on water. Individual parts were lifted by helicopters. Everything had to arrive in a timely and orderly fashion.

Chuuya was in charge of overseeing that.

He was also in charge, less officially, of making sure Yosano didn't lose an eye making sure her fragile and pricy equipment didn't collapse and break during the trip. He was in charge of the Tanizaki siblings' chronic inability to function without coffee for more than two hours. He was in charge of reassuring Akutagawa that yes, Rashoumon was safe in the animal compartment of their plane and wouldn't get mistaken for stray luggage—as if the damn cat wasn't loud enough that all who walked past his box thought he was getting viciously murdered in it. He was in charge of texting back and forth with Sakaguchi about the candidates for Double Black's free pilot position, he was in charge of keeping Kouyou informed of every single development, and most of all, he was in charge of fucking Dazai.

"Get the hell out of my face," he growled, slapping his cane across the seat next to him before Dazai could slip into it like he apparently intended to. "This is the angry disabled corner."

"I'm here on a mission," Dazai replied innocently. "It's even Kouyou-approved."

Chuuya's eyes narrowed in suspicion.

He let the cane fall back next to his knee when Dazai nudged it away, groaned when Dazai picked up the papers strewn across the seat to shove them upright between their armrests. Dazai sat down with a sigh once he was done.

"When was the last time you slept?" he asked, looking down the path and waving back at Nakajima, who sat at the front of the row. Akutagawa seemed to be in the middle of ripping the fabric off of his seat, he was clawing so hard at it.

"Does it matter?" Chuuya replied.

Dazai thankfully stayed silent.

There were several components to Chuuya's current god-awful mood. First was the stress of the move. Second was the fact that his body was in more pain than usual because of it—his breath kept hitching from phantom breaks in his ribs.

Third was the fearful looks that the flight attendant had given the spread of tell-tale tattoos over his naked arms, as if the flowers were about to jump off his skin to poke her in the eyes. He would've worn longer sleeves if only the Australian summer weren't so hot.

"I hate planes so much," he muttered. "Fucking unreliable flying cans. Never know if you're gonna land at all."

"I can think of a couple things scarier than a plane that you've rode in, Chuuya," Dazai said. Chuuya didn't need to look at him to know he was grinning.

"Yeah, well, it's different when I'm the one piloting the damn thing." Little as he wished to step back inside a jaeger and subject himself to the no doubt excruciating pain of trying to lift a single limb, he'd take it over trusting someone to fly him anywhere. "This just means nine hours of no contact with anyone on ground," he continued. "Like I have time for that."

Dazai elbowed him lightly, but he said nothing as they took off.

At least the ascension went without trouble. Chuuya massaged his thigh absently, recalling a few painful past landings. His leg throbbed, but he couldn't do anything about it for another two hours at least.

"You said you were on a mission," he said a while later. The same scared attendant who kept looking at him like he was about to pull a blade on her had gone by their seats—she offered them a drink, and Dazai smiled lopsidedly at her, making her blush.

At least she looked less like she was about to do something stupid after that. Like try and attack him.

"Indeed," Dazai replied. "Serious business."

"Stop joking around. What is it?"

"I'm here to make sure you sleep."

Chuuya stared at him.

"You're fucking with me," he accused.

"I would never," Dazai lied. "I'm under firm orders to make sure you get at least five hours of it. Yosano-sensei says you've been wearing this shirt for the past forty-eight hours."

Chuuya wanted to knock him across the head, or maybe yell in his face, but instead all he felt was fatigue.

"Fuck," he breathed, letting his head fall against the back of his seat. He stared at the plain grey ceiling of the plane unseeingly. "I don't have time for sleep."

"Sure you do." Dazai hunched over his backpack and took a black strip of cloth out of it. When he handed it over, Chuuya recognized a sleeping mask. "Everything's already settled—you're just being an idiot. And you're fortunately cut off from all communication except the physical." He smirked. "I think you're a little overworked, Chuuya."

"I'm not," Chuuya mumbled, but he took the mask. It was better to put it on than to have to watch the exhaustion on Dazai's face anyway.

He had an idea of the reason why Dazai looked like he hadn't slept either.

The pressure of the mask felt good against his eyelids. His headache lessened, and with it the sharp pains in his chest. He shoved a hand against his side to press lightly on his ribs.

It's in my head, he told himself.

It never helped, but it was what he knew he should do.

"You better wake me up in exactly five hours," he muttered. "I need to brief you on the candidates before we land."

"I can look by myself," Dazai replied lightly. Chuuya heard a shuffling of paper by his elbow. "Top of the pile, right?"

It made the corner of Chuuya's mouth shiver. "I know you're lying, but in the miracle case you're actually willing to work… look at the guy named Kunikida."

"Sure."

Dazai's voice was even. As if he were discussing the weather. Chuuya turned his head toward the window, though he could see nothing anyway.

It took a while for him to fall asleep, despite the exhaustion. Chuuya tried to keep his mind busy with thoughts of the day to come: assembling back the last jaeger, forming the new comm team, finalizing the attack plan… meeting with the twelve-odd people Dazai would judge one after the other—meeting the person he would allow alongside him in the body of the beast. The one he would allow in his head.

He hadn't let himself think about it too much when he discussed it with Kouyou. She had looked at him with affection and regret, had asked, Are you sure? and Chuuya had nodded, pushed forward, not let himself envy. Not let himself sink.

He already knew he would never drift with Dazai again. The frightening emptiness he felt at the thought was less because he wanted to be back in Dazai's head than because he didn't know how to soothe the wounds he knew he would find there. This shortcut was closed to him forever.

When this is over, he thought, as he often did. Then we'll talk.

He didn't know what they would talk about, or how. He just knew he could deal with the rest on his own until then.

"Sleep, Chuuya," Dazai said softly.

It was its own kind of ache, one unrelated to trauma or injury. Dazai was sitting next to him and breathing next to him, and there was no danger around them, no burning terror through the tendrils of the drift—no sudden and excruciating silence, no amputated psyche—but he felt very far away indeed.

Chuuya slept.

-- 

Kunikida stood out like a sore thumb among the group that hopped out of the helicopter.

There were thirteen of them, men and women alike—boys and girls, really, because Kunikida didn't think any of them was older than twenty except for himself and a gloomy-looking white man with black hair. He had introduced himself as Fyodor and nothing else as they went through the selection process.

The girl next to him, Izumi, was only eighteen. She had greeted Kunikida with a few clipped words but no animosity, and he had given her the same respect in turn. At least she had been quiet on the way to Yokohama's jaeger dock.

"Follow me," their instructor, Sakaguchi, intoned.

They had to hurry along the length of the heliport. Rain was pouring down onto the sea, and this high up the air was biting cold. The chill spread through Kunikida's bones before they even reached the door. Inside was only warmer from human warmth and proximity. The large elevator shook under their combined weight, making a few of them look down warily. Kunikida watched Sakaguchi's face for any sign of worry and, upon finding none, decided not to care.

"Where are we going?" one boy asked.

Sakaguchi took the time to push his wet hair out of his face before answering. "Meeting, then training hall," he replied.

"Aren't we going to look around first?"

"No time."

The boy looked like he was about to protest, but the elevator stopped abruptly, and he had to lean on the shoulder of the woman beside him in order not to stumble.

Everyone stopped wanting to ask questions once the doors opened.

Kunikida had seen a jaeger in the past. In fact he had seen Scarlet Wind, specifically; he had watched with blurry eyes as it tore through the giant body of a kaiju not a kilometer away from the ruins of his school. And the memory was well-lived, as fresh in his mind as it had been six months ago, but even he couldn't help his intake of breath once the wide hangar he had known was hidden behind the dock's massive black walls appeared to his eyes.

None of the heads in the group were turned toward the ground as they walked across the length of the hall. They all watched the feet and legs of the machines, all lingered with bated breaths upon the silhouettes of ant-sized people working high on their bodies. One especially was unmistakable, even half-assembled as it was—Double Black stood at the very end of the hall like a great and silent statue. Fourteen gleaming medals adorned its wide chest. None of the other jaegers had any.

This was the one that two among them would pilot. Kunikida tried for a second to imagine himself moving it with his own limbs and mind, and though it was what he wanted, the perspective was humbling.

"Hurry up," Sakaguchi called ahead of them. He sounded faintly amused.

They scrambled behind him.

Kunikida didn't try and join the excited murmurs that sprouted around him as they walked through thinner corridors. Sakaguchi led them to a wide meeting room and instructed them to stand at the back in silence. The silence part was more or less respected, but Kunikida simply watched him join another man at the head of the room.

He was a short man, with long red hair tied into a high ponytail. One of his feet was perched atop a low stool, and with his free hand, he toyed absently with the silver pommel of a wooden cane.

The man raised his head once Sakaguchi was done murmuring to him. He watched over their group for a second, face unreadable. When his eyes met Kunikida's, the corners of his lips lifted, so quickly that Kunikida thought he must have imagined it.

"Thank you," the man said loudly. Sakaguchi nodded; he put a friendly hand over the man's shoulder after a second of hesitation, and then he left.

The stranger took his foot off of the stool. His cane's contact with the floor was loud into the thick silence as he made his way toward them. All the chairs and tables of the room had been pushed against the walls, so nothing stopped him until he was standing only a few feet away.

"Now," he said. "I'd trust Sakaguchi with my life, and I'm sure he worked all of you into the ground just to my liking—but there's been a change of plans."

He threw the files he was holding across the nearest table. Izumi jumped a little, shoulder hitting Kunikida's elbow. She was so small.

"We only have one job opening," the man declared. "So I'm expecting this selection mess to be finished within a couple days, instead of weeks. Maybe even today if we're all lucky."

For a second there was silence; then protests emerged, especially from the corner of the group where the youngest candidates had gathered together.

"What the hell?"

"I thought you needed two people to pilot a jaeger—"

"I'm not interested in what you thought," the man cut in, though his mouth was twitching again in amusement. "I want twelve of you to be gone by the end of the day. You should be relieved—I know I am. This has been a pain in my ass for months now."

"Who are you?" the one named Fyodor asked calmly. "And why change now? Two people are needed to drift."

"Glad you asked," the man replied. He rested his weight on his left leg and spun the cane against his palm, like an afterthought. "My name's Nakahara Chuuya. I'm the second in command here, after Boss Ozaki. And the reason we only need one of you is because you were never being trained to work together—we selected you based on how likely you were to be drift compatible with one of Double Black's original pilots."

Quiet reigned once he finished speaking.

"I thought the original pilots were dead," Izumi said lowly.

Nakahara huffed. "No. They're both alive. One of them's coming back into the field, and one of you," he gestured toward them with a gloved hand, "is going to be his copilot. Sorry we tricked you. We only got confirmation yesterday."

"Why can't they just pilot themselves, then?" That was Tachihara, Kunikida thought faintly, though he couldn't see the kid through the tight row of people between them. "If they're both alive then why bother finding a new pilot at all—"

"Because Nakahara Chuuya is one of the former pilots," Fyodor cut in. His words were flat, but his eyes were alight with interest. "And he obviously can't."

All heads turned to look at Nakahara again.

Nakahara himself only seemed mildly annoyed. "That's classified information," he said.

"I have my sources."

"I see." Nakahara spared another second to look in Fyodor's direction, not exactly frowning but not far from it, before apparently deciding that he didn't care. "Anyway. Now that you're all informed, let's get this show on the road, shall we? Unless you have further questions."

His eyes met Kunikida's with something akin to curiosity.

With the way he acted and talked, it looked like a challenge.

Kunikida opened his mouth and asked, "How are we going to know who's right, outside of testing directly with the drift?"

Nakahara smiled at him, every handsome line of his face sharp with satisfaction. "Test-drifting in pairs blindly would be useless," he answered. "Not to mention dangerous. I know you've all tested solo, but a true neural handshake is not to be taken lightly."

He blinked, and tucked a strand of hair behind his ear.

"There are ways to figure out if you're compatible with him," he continued a second later. "And most of you probably are, though not enough to make a jaeger move." He turned the cane in his grip before looking at Kunikida again. "All of this is vastly experimental—we've never had to find a new copilot for anyone before, after all. But when you've drifted with someone before, you can tell if someone else would be able to drift with you."

The air felt chilled. Kunikida heard Izumi creep closer to his side, saw the way that Tachihara's group tightened as if to keep warm. Maybe it was another proof of how weird it was that he had been selected at all among them—they were all young, as fit as he was physically and no doubt quicker-minded. And they looked scared.

He wanted to be here. He had carried that resolve with him for two years now. But he didn't know why he was.

"I don't know how Dazai intends to test you, exactly," Nakahara Chuuya said softly. "But you should know something before I let him loose on you."

There was a pink scar at his temple, splayed in the shape of a star, half-hidden under his hair. Like something had struck him there and broken glass-like over his skin. He leaned heavily on his cane as he walked, and his right hand shook when it picked up the papers he had left as if he were trying to carry a much greater weight.

Still, there was not a hint of shame or weakness on him. The room's attention stuck to him with grace, and he handled it like someone who knew exactly who he was and where he stood.

Kunikida found that he had no problem imagining a man like that moving Double Black's imposing body. Killing fifteen kaiju in fifteen fights. A record no one since him had approached, let alone broken.

"You can't expect to drift with someone and leave any part of you a secret," Nakahara said. "And Dazai will not wait for the drift. He'll go after your secrets long before you can think of glimpsing his."

-- 

Dazai sat deep in the shadows of the ninth floor balcony. This aisle of Yokohama's base had once been used to stock jaeger parts until the rooms were full to bursting. Now the rooms were mostly empty, mostly unused; he had found a broken coffee machine in one and a working sink in another, and after that he had sat crossed legged against the wall and not moved.

He was almost level with Double Black's cockpit from this height.

He let his eyes linger on the grey eyes of the machine and then down toward its chest. It hadn't aged, not a bit. He hadn't expected it to, but it was one thing to remember Double Black as it was the last time he had seen it—skull knocked open and breastplates caved in from the monster's blows, the floor of the cockpit awash with seawater and blood—and to see it now, as good as new. It made his eyesight hazy. It made faint wishes materialize in his head as they hadn't done in years; he almost thought he would turn his head aside and find Chuuya sitting by him, mind still encroached to the last dregs of the drift.

"You just planning on hiding here all day?" a voice said behind him, and though Dazai's breath hitched for less than a second, it took no more than that for a grin to split his face in two.

"Just taking in the sight," he replied. His shoulders eased out of the tense line he had kept them in since landing. He shifted on his backside until the ground felt more forgiving. "I haven't seen my old friend here in a while."

"Mmh." The footsteps grew closer. A shoe nudged Dazai's hip gently. "What about your actual, flesh-and-blood friends?"

He laughed before he could help it. Oda's grip on his wrist was firm as he pulled Dazai to his feet and then further in, chests knocking together, arms squeezing around him tightly.

"Welcome home," Oda said against his temple.

Dazai's fingers fisted into the back of his shirt in answer.

They released each other eventually. Oda gave him a quick once-over and then looked away, unbothered by the way Dazai stared at him, committing change to memory.

There were new lines around Oda's eyes. He was clean-shaven, his suit rumpled but spotless. He looked even more at peace than the last time they had been in each other's presence, if possible.

"Four years," Dazai mused out loud. "Ango's been whipping you into shape."

He got a rough hand rubbing against his scalp for his trouble. "Shut it," Oda replied, once Dazai shook him off. "If you wanted to keep me lazy you should've stayed."

"I wanted to keep you fun. You're no fun when you work, Odasaku."

The other smiled fleetingly. "It's been a while since anyone called me that," he said.

When Dazai turned to look at Double Black again, the smile on his lips was genuine.

They observed it for a moment, standing side by side. Oda leaned over the bannister to peer down at the machine's chest. "They never did give you your last medal," he observed. "Not that there's any room left with all the others."

"It's fine," Dazai replied, glancing down at the rows of shining plaques, each bearing the name of a fallen monster. "I'm not sure why they stopped doing it to the others, though."

"Ozaki had a fit when they tried."

Dazai made a face.

"Well," he said slowly, "it's not like it matters. The kaiju punch just as hard regardless of the medals."

Oda nodded. He dragged a box of cigarettes out of his back pocket and lit one nonchalantly, exhaling the smoke toward the jaeger's neck.

"I can't believe you still have cigarettes."

"I keep them for special occasions." Oda's mouth twitched when he looked at him over his shoulder. "Like when my best friend, who never calls, decides to visit."

Dazai shrugged guiltily, crossing the space between them to stand by the bannister too.

The distance to the groundfloor of the hangar was immense. It was something he always forgot when he was in the pilot's suit—how high he was, how small and breakable people looked from this high up. How one step in the wrong direction could make the difference between life and death when you stood in a jaeger.

One wrong decision almost had.

His lips thinned. "How are the kids?" he asked, as much to distract himself as because he genuinely wanted to know.

"Good," Oda replied evenly. "Yu has a girlfriend. Sakura just started college."

"College," Dazai scoffed.

It got him the hint of a mocking smile. "Just because you dropped out the minute you turned sixteen doesn't mean you get to make fun of my kids for pushing forward."

"There were bigger things to think about than a higher education."

Oda flicked his ashes off into the high fall of the hangar. "Yeah," he said. "And it feels even more hopeless now. But I can't blame them."

Silence stretched between them. Easy and thoughtful. Dazai had long forgotten to care about the fact that he was, technically, an outlaw—had been since he was a teenager and running scam after scam in the streets of Yokohama alongside the man standing next to him.

He couldn't imagine being a teenager now, with only five jaegers left to defend the world. He couldn't fathom caring about college while knowing that only a thin wall stood between humanity and the breach.

"I heard you're going to be riding again," Oda said in the quiet.

He wasn't looking at Dazai when Dazai glanced in his direction. Just staring at Double Black again. "News travel fast," he replied, grasping the bannister.

It was ice-cold under his fingers.

"I saw Chuuya."

"I figured." Dazai's smile was shallow, directed at no one. "Sent you to fetch me, didn't he."

"Yeah. He gave me a list of your old hideouts."

It made him chuckle, made him taste bitter at the back of his tongue.

"I'm not going to ask about you two," Oda continued in the same tone—with the same understanding. "He looks like he knows what he's doing. I'm not sure you do, though."

"Have I ever been sure of anything?" Dazai asked lightly.

Oda only looked at him, fond and sad, and it felt more piercing than anything Kouyou could hope to manage. "You have," he replied simply.

He straightened his back, then, and rolled his neck around until the sound of his vertebrae cracking could be heard through the silence. He sighed some of the tension out after that and turned to face Dazai again.

"C'mon," he said, "we've been delaying long enough. I'm sure you partner's done putting the fear of God into your prospective copilots by now."

"He is rather terrifying," Dazai agreed, falling into step with him. He breathed in the deserted silence of the floor for a second, readying himself for the bustle of noise and activity of the lower levels.

"He's not that scary." Oda opened the door to the stairs. His voice was loaded with sympathy. "Not when you talk to him."

Dazai didn't grace that with an answer.

-- 

The training hall was one of the widest rooms in the dock. When Dazai had last been here, almost every corner of it was full of trainees and otherwise work-out inclined personnel, all equipment occupied in the down hours of the day. Now the matted floors were mostly bare, some of the running mills and weight benches rusting a little. The familiar smell of sweat and detergent still hovered.

Chuuya stood a few feet away from the door. He and the group of misfits he intended to make Dazai interact with had all left their shoes in the hallway, and it was a little funny, seeing him so seriously dressed in a suit, coat hanging over his shoulders and hair tied up business-like—standing in his socks. Almost none of the others wore environment-appropriate clothes either.

That was okay. Dazai didn't expect any of them to satisfy him enough to necessitate a hands-on approach anyway.

Dazai slithered out of his boots at the door, divested himself of his jacket and waistcoat, loosened his belt by an inch. All eyes turned to him once he set foot onto the mats.

"You took your sweet time," Chuuya said to him, before glancing back ahead.

"You should've sent Ango if you wanted me to be serious about this," Dazai replied evenly.

"I do want you to be serious about this. Sakaguchi was busy."

"Of course."

Chuuya looked better than he had when they stepped onto the plane, at least. Dazai was glad to have let him sleep seven hours instead of five, though the scolding that followed his waking up had been harsh. The bruise-like bags under his eyes were less pronounced.

Dazai tore his eyes away from him to finally glance at the thirteen people gathered a few meters away. They stood close together, quiet now but no doubt about to become louder with the words he could feel forming in his head.

He dismissed seven of them at first glance.

"Welcome to Yokohama's jaeger dock," he said in his friendliest voice, smiling widely. "I'm sure you're all as anxious to get this over with as I am, so let's not take more than an hour or so, all right? Then you can all go home."

He felt Chuuya's glare burn at his nape from the assumption that he would send all of them away, but he didn't turn back. If he couldn't find anyone satisfying enough to step into the head of the machine by his side the way Chuuya had once, then he didn't want anyone. It wasn't worth the risk.

They both knew it.

"My name is Dazai Osamu," he continued, standing still, meeting each of their eyes in turn. "You may call me Dazai. Though I'm not sure most of you will be here long enough to do that anyway."

Most of them bristled with indignation—but no one said a word.

Dazai's smile turned fleeting. Less kind. "If I'm unlucky," he went on, "one of you will have what it takes to pilot with me. As you can guess, I'm not ecstatic about the prospect."

"Why?" a woman asked. She was one of the few who had slouched in disappointment and distrust the moment he had opened his mouth.

"That's a good question," Dazai nodded. "Short answer: I don't want to pilot again."

"What's the long answer?" another questioned immediately.

"What's your name?"

"Fyodor." He didn't volunteer a last name. Under the yellow lights for the room, his eyes glowed almost purple.

"Well, Fyodor," Dazai drawled, "the long answer is none of your business."

The tallest of them all was a man with blond hair standing at the very back. Dazai was looking in his direction as he finished speaking, and though he didn't move, his face clenched in anger, too stark to be smoothed over in time.

"Have any of you drifted with someone before?" Dazai asked.

He wasn't surprised when no one came forward saying yes.

He let out a hum. "It's a singular thing, the drift. I haven't kept up to date with everything the media used to say about it when the technology was finalized—back when they still made jaeger and kaiju toys and stuff." That had stopped shortly after Double Black went inactive, he recalled. "There's a few things you should know before stepping foot into a jaeger."

Fyodor observed him with cold curiosity. The man with yellow hair with hot fury. Between them stood a girl, short and quiet, and she looked like she was drinking every single one of his words in and carving them to memory. There was no blank admiration on her face. No fear either.

Dazai knew, in that moment, that if he had to pick someone it would be one of these three.

"The first," he started, "is that kaiju are exactly as big and terrifying in a jaeger as they look from the ground. If you think for a second that you'll be safe inside the cockpit, then it will be your doom."

"Fawk," the girl said. Her voice was soft.

Dazai could almost fool himself into thinking he felt the way Chuuya tensed behind him.

"Exactly," he replied evenly. "A kaiju can and will rip apart the strongest armors created by man with its bare hands. Codename Fawk had very sharp claws. It only took it one blow to rip apart Double Black's head."

Fawk's claws had sunk into it like it was just butter. Sunk into the head and sunk into the drift and crushed Chuuya's body under alien flesh and metal. He didn't share those details with the group because he wouldn't know how to try, and because they weren't necessary.

"But they've got stronger jaegers now, right?" a man with red-dyed hair asked, switching to Japanese, maybe in the hope of gaining Dazai's approval. "Stronger alloys. Diamond reinforcement. They replaced sixty percent of Double Black's body with those last year."

"I have no idea about that," Dazai lied, feeling some satisfaction at the incredulous way the man stared at him. "I just know that the kaiju keep coming out bigger and stronger, and making yourself big enough to fight back doesn't mean you'll win.

"The second thing you should know," he said before anyone else could speak up, "is that whatever you've been taught about drifting will be completely useless once you actually do it."

"This is stupid," the redhead said. "What's the fucking point of teaching us anything, then?"

"They do try so hard to teach that. But it's not something you can learn. I'm sure you gathered that on your own," Dazai added.

Redhead glared at him.

Dazai turned sideways, looking at the pile of rotting training equipment to his left, letting Chuuya's silhouette emerged in his line of sight.

"A neural handshake is uncontrollable," he said. "It doesn't matter how stable it is. It doesn't matter that you're focusing on making thousands of tons of metal move. You've never known what it's like not to be able to stop your thoughts until you're aware that someone else can think every one of them with you."

He almost wanted to go on—it's the worst feeling in the world. It's the easiest thing in the world.

"We all get intrusive thoughts, sometimes. Shameful thoughts. Thoughts we're infinitely glad no one but us can see. If you ever drift with me, or anyone else, you can say goodbye to that. The more you try to hide something, the easier it is for the other to see. It's essentially letting go of any privacy you ever thought you had.

"I'll know if you kicked a puppy when you were five. I'll know if you murdered someone." It made him smile briefly, before he continued, "I'll know if you've ever jerked off to something you shouldn't have."

He couldn't resist looking at Chuuya then—and Chuuya was looking back, unsurprised, the threat of a smile fluttering around his lips.

Dazai looked away with longing burning in his throat. The panic pooling around his heart was stronger, though.

"Speaking of which," he said, distraction and need alike, "how many of you are under twenty years old?"

It took a moment for them to realize he expected them to answer. Eight of them raised hesitant hands up.

"Really," he muttered.

"Needs must," Chuuya replied darkly. "It's not like we get many volunteers."

The young were always more prone to making brash decisions.

It didn't matter. Dazai didn't think Chuuya meant for him to pick a teenager anyway, no matter how their simulation results looked. "You can go home," he declared. "Thank you for participating."

He stood bored and silent through the rise of protests, through the indignant voices barking about months of training and dedication and effort—until at last they seemed to realize that he really, actually didn't care.

"Fucking prick," the girl from earlier muttered, walking past him and toward the exit.

He was left with five people standing in front of him, two of which he already knew wouldn't do. "You," he said, gesturing to them, "can go as well."

They did so looking potently offended.

Dazai took his hands out of the pockets of his slacks and walked closer to the remaining three. His eyes were fixed onto the girl. She withstood his stare easily in spite of how much taller than her he was.

It felt familiar. In a good way. However—

"You're not twenty," he said.

"I'm of age for the selection," she replied.

He gave her a more genuine smile than he had allowed out of himself since leaving Oda's side. "What's your name?"

"Izumi Kyouka."

"Izumi Kyouka," he repeated. "You have a good reason to be here, I suppose."

She nodded. "The kaiju called Hammerhead killed my family," she explained, as if she expected and was absolutely prepared for the possibility that he might discover it on his own, and didn't care. Dazai couldn't help the approval he felt at that. "I want to be a pilot so I can take revenge."

"Revenge isn't a good enough reason to pilot."

"Saving people isn't the reason you pilot either," she accused. "You don't care about that."

He chuckled. "Indeed. You caught me. But revenge is a bad reason to pilot."

He saw her jaw clench, her hand spasm at her side as if she wanted to curl it into a fist. Dazai had no doubt that she was compatible with him, perhaps even more naturally so than the two men standing behind her. He knew he would be able to make Double Black move with Izumi Kyouka in his head.

But she was just a kid. The same age as Oda Sakura, who was starting college.

"Kyouka-chan." Her face flushed a little at the familiarity, which made something fond spread warmly through his chest. "I'm not going to pilot with you, but you're not going home. I want you to wait for me outside—there's a room with couches and a TV two doors down, maybe even coffee and food, if you're lucky. Help yourself to anything you want. I'll talk to you shortly."

She stared at him with an edge of despair for a second longer before relenting. Dazai watched her walk away; he caught the look that Chuuya gave her as she went past him wordlessly.

Chuuya never looked better than when he approved of something. The still-tired lines of his face eased into softness for the barest second, and Dazai felt warm in the neck, giddy even with the knowledge that nothing would come out of it.

"Okay," he said, turning back toward the two men left. Fyodor, and the man with yellow hair. "If I'm correct, I'm not going to like one of you, and the other isn't going to like me."

Fyodor gave a thin smile. The other man scowled.

"It seems we're in an impasse," Fyodor said tranquilly.

"Not at all," Dazai replied in kind. "Liking someone isn't required to pilot with them. It might even make it easier. Nothing to be ashamed of when the other side hates you anyway, don't you think?"

The man with yellow hair spoke, at last. "You said you would be unlucky to find a new copilot."

His voice was deeper than Dazai expected, but no less accusatory.

"I did," he agreed. "I don't want to pilot again."

"Why?"

"None of your business."

The man seethed, teeth bare, chin high. "I understand that Nakahara can't pilot due to past injuries," he said. "I can respect that. But you're not injured."

"That's true," Dazai replied, frowning.

He was pretty sure his and Chuuya's names and statuses were classified information. The way Fyodor looked at him, boastful, told him more than he liked to know about that. Chuuya's lack of a reaction even more so.

"Then why?" The man stepped forward, leaving Fyodor behind to crowd into Dazai's space. He was taller than him by a couple inches, and broader too, shoulders wide, arms thick under the deceptive softness of his shirtsleeves. "Why wait four years to pilot again?"

His anger felt personal and not at once. Righteous in a way Dazai had seldom encountered.

Dazai looked up at the man under the longer strands of his hair that always swept over his forehead. "None of your business," he repeated.

The look he was given was one of honest disgust.

"You've been standing here doing absolutely nothing to test us, nothing to let us prove ourselves," the man went on roughly. "You're acting like this is a game. I'm having some trouble believing you're one of the guys who once killed fifteen kaiju in fifteen deployments."

"He has been testing us," Fyodor interjected softly. Dazai and the man glanced at him in tandem. "This was never about training results or abilities. He's trying to figure out how compatible we are."

"Well I don't like it," the man replied hotly. He shoved an accusatory finger into Dazai's chest as he turned back, eyes dark, voice low. "You were right. I don't like you. What are you trying to achieve?"

Keeping his lips still instead of smiling was a struggle, but Dazai managed. "Why don't you take a guess?" he asked. Mockingly so.

He barely avoided the first blow.

It was testament to Fyodor's understanding of the situation that he didn't cry in outrage or try to stop his fellow candidate from hurting what was, in all due forms, a superior officer. Or maybe to Chuuya's understanding of Dazai that he never said a word either. Dazai sidestepped the man's first punch, feet catching gently on the ratty mats of the hall, and had to crouch and roll away to avoid the second.

The other's fist few so close to his cheek that it stung anyway, hot and dry.

"You could've been piloting all these years," he was saying, breaths deep and even in spite of his irritation. "We all thought the reason Double Black wasn't being used was because its pilots were dead—but you're here, and you're fine, and you're—"

This time, the blow landed, harsh, into the arm Dazai used to block it.

"I'm what?" he prompted.

The man's face whitened with rage.

His leg thrust out too fast for Dazai to do more than jump over it. The man followed up with a punch that turned out not to be a punch at all—Dazai raised his bruised arm to block again, and instead found his wrist caught in a grip too strong to dislodge in time to avoid being pulled forward and slammed belly-first onto the mats.

The impact knocked the breath out of him. The man twisted his arm behind him until it hurt sharply with the threat of a snapped bone, digging one knee into the small of his back.

"You could've been piloting all this time," he told Dazai, his victory not enough to erase how completely he despised him. He didn't sound satisfied at all. "You could've been saving lives. Give me one reason I should allow you into my head, you selfish bastard."

Dazai arched his neck until he could look toward the door. Chuuya met his eyes, silent.

"So that's your reason for being here," he said breezily. It was hard to breathe with his chest crushed under the other's weight—even harder with the way Chuuya looked at him. "You tried to save someone and failed."

The knee dug further into his back.

Anyone else looking at Chuuya now would've thought him indifferent, perhaps; but his grip was tight on the cane even if the gloves masked the yellow-white tint of bloodless skin under it. He looked ready to bolt into a run. It was that thought, ultimately, that caused Dazai to bow his head again.

He let his cheek drag painfully against the mat so he could look above his shoulder and at the man holding him down. "What's your name?" he asked.

The face above his was livid with fury. "Kunikida Doppo," he spat out. "Write that down into your little papers when you throw me out too and go back to letting the world die, Dazai."

Perfect simulation results, excellent martial artist. Stubborn as a mule.

Disappointment gripped Dazai by the neck. He felt breathless in so many ways. Nauseous with it.

"I'm not throwing you out," he said. "You're my new copilot."

Kunikida's eyes widened; his grip slackened only just enough for Dazai to twist out of it quickly and push Kunikida down in his stead. Kunikida yelped at the shock, then fell silent when Dazai's hand wrapped around his neck and squeezed warningly.

He never stopped glaring, though. Never stopped meeting Dazai's eyes with that same holy anger.

Dazai released his grip with a sigh. He stepped off of Kunikida's body and said, "I need a nap."

"Then go take one," Chuuya answered. His tone was almost convincingly disinterested. "We won't be ready to test until tomorrow anyway, no one needs you."

"Harsh."

"That's it?" Kunikida called, bewildered.

Dazai glanced back at him. He was still sitting on the floor, looking shell-shocked. "That's it," he replied. "Congratulations, Kunikida-kun. I'm looking forward to working with you."

He scoffed dismissively—it almost made Dazai smile despite the ache in his heart.

Kunikida would understand more about Dazai than he ever wished to very soon. And Dazai would have no choice but to know him right back.

"Go wait where I sent Kyouka-chan," he said. "Ango or someone else will come by to give you the grand tour and show you to your rooms. You," he told Fyodor, who was watching everything unfold with utter boredom on his sickly pale face, "are free to go."

"Thank you for considering me," Fyodor replied. His odd-colored eyes met Dazai's cooly.

Dazai's back ran with shivers.

The door closed behind them with little noise. The padding on the floor had always muffled its sounds for as long as he could remember. Dazai stared at it thoughtlessly for a while. He didn't know if the ache blooming over his forehead came from the lack of sleep, the trip from Sydney, or from Kunikida's rough handling.

"I'm glad it wasn't that other guy," he said lightly, turning face Chuuya. "Gave me the creeps."

"I didn't think he'd be strong enough anyway," Chuuya replied. He was looking down at Kunikida's file in his hand, but his eyes weren't moving. "Genius IQ, mediocre physical. I'm pretty sure he's been hiding some sort of health condition too."

"How the hell did Ango miss that?"

"Shut up." Chuuya rolled his eyes but still didn't look at him. "Sakaguchi works almost as much as ane-san does, he's allowed to make mistakes."

"Mad, the lot of you."

The joke flew over Chuuya's head entirely. Dazai felt very little like laughing too.

"Well," Dazai murmured, "you were right. Kunikida is very compatible with me."

"I told you he would be."

"Drifting with him might even be as easy for me as it was with you."

Chuuya didn't flinch. He didn't shudder or let his breathing stutter. His head turned sideways, eyes meeting Dazai's, showing absolutely nothing, and Dazai felt misery coil tight in his belly. He felt it run up and settle like pressure behind his ribs. His mind slid helplessly toward thoughts of reaching out with his hand to brush the faint star-shaped scar sitting at Chuuya's temple.

Maybe he would know what Chuuya thought if he did. Feel it at the tip of his fingers.

"How did you know?" he asked instead.

Chuuya breathed carefully before answering. "His psych eval."

"Are you even allowed to look at that?"

"Who's going to stop me?" Chuuya said wryly. "You'll know him better than any therapist soon enough anyway." He looked away. Stepped away. Then he added, "Kunikida almost didn't make it into the training program."

That was surprising.

"It's not for lack of effort or dedication. His physical scores are the best, he's dreadfully accurate in simulations, he's more than smart enough. But he has some issues."

"What issues?"

Chuuya gave him a joyless smile. "You'll just have to find out the hard way," he replied.

He started walking toward the exit, a little gauchely, because soft mats were more difficult to navigate with a cane than hard floor. Probably also because he hadn't sat down to rest his leg since the moment he stepped out of the chopper and into the dock.

I don't want to find out, Dazai thought, following in his steps. I never want to know.

There had only ever been one person he wanted to know that way. Only one person he had wanted to know him that way.

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