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You're one minute into 2005. Your sister and her husband are attending a work party, your nephews have long since been put to bed, and you're sitting on their couch staring absently at the TV.
Less than two weeks ago you turned twenty-eight. You are alive, with your entire life ahead of you, but you have the horrible feeling that you have peaked.
It's not a familiar feeling, and you don't appreciate it. Your whole life, there has always been another challenge to face, another summit to reach, but two months ago you found proof that von Däniken was right (or at least slightly less wrong than you thought), saved the world from an infestation of extraterrestrial parasitoids, and made what you hope might be a step towards co-operation between your species and another.
You have nothing to show for it but an alien spear and a host of physical and mental scars, and a professional reputation that collapsed almost overnight.
Everyone who trusted you is dead, but you survived. The truth would not make a difference, not that you would be believed anyway.
The cave-in killed them, you insist. Not the serpents. Not your strange companion. Certainly not you and a borrowed gun and a teammate begging for death.
You killed a man who might have become a friend, to spare him from a worse fate. Later, you sliced open another for the same purpose, pulled out the stuff of nightmares and hoped it would be enough.
You doubt you will ever know if it was.
You have blood on your hands, now, and you can never tell a soul.
What the fuck are you supposed to do now?
You've been living with your sister for a month now, but whilst you love her and David and the kids and the Everglades, you know she doesn't really want you here, with your scars and your nightmares and the compact spear you keep under your pillow. She doesn't live anywhere near the Everglades anyway. Amanda is your mother's daughter and you are your father's, and neither of you were ever sure how to fit yourselves into each other's lives with them gone; the love is there, but the understanding never was.
(You wonder what it says about you that the only person you feel could understand you now is somebody you know nothing about, with the few things you do know filtered through so many layers of translation and missing context as to be almost meaningless.)
She wants you close, wants to know that you're alright, but she doesn't want you, really. Wants an older sister with your accomplishments and competence, but not the reality, the shambolic personal life and inability to be satisfied with what you have. Wants the Alexa Woods you are in your professional life, not Lex.
(She's always thought you take after your father too much; you've never told her how afraid you used to be that she's right. When it's only you, you can take stupid risks, but not with clients, never with clients, you used to be better than that.)
You need to move out, and soon, before you start to resent each other again.
It is 2009, and you still can't bear to take clients, but you hike and climb alone in your free time and it's good, and you still work with the Foundation of Environmental Scientists, and you've moved your spear from under the pillow to the back of your sock drawer where your surprisingly tolerable Craigslist roommates are less likely to find it. You know what's out there now, can never forget, but from what you can gather from years of late nights of research rabbit holes with reputable sources and conspiracy forums alike, the pyramid you found, the hive you wiped out, was the last of them on this planet.
You saved the world, you and your strange companion, even though you didn't intend to. The world didn't end.
(Sometimes you feel as though your world ended that day - there is no other way to think of your life than Before and After. You are not who you were Before.)
Nobody knows what happened to you, but all this means is that nobody knows what almost happened to them. (You understand that line from Men in Black much better After.)
The world spins on.
It is August 10th, 2013.
You're an entire continent away from San Francisco, but the footage is inescapable. The creature lurches up from the depths, crashing through the Golden Gate bridge, and suddenly it's 2004 again and you are twenty-seven and calling yourself twenty-eight and staring Death in the face in the Antarctic twilight, and this is so much worse because the thing crushing the city beneath its feet is so much bigger, so much harder to stop, and you risked your life for nothing because surely this is the end of the world.
For six days you join the rest of the world in staring transfixed at the news, watching the death toll mount as the awful thing drags itself through San Fran and into Sacramento, then to Oakland, until finally the military nukes it to shit ('they made sure nothing survived'), and you don't understand how people can believe that this is over. Maybe you would have accepted it Before, maybe this is something you could only understand After, but there is something deeply wrong with the idea that the impossible, once it happens, will never happen again.
You're proven right six months later, in Manila, and as if the nuke wasn't destructive enough the new monster's shit proves almost as bad for the environment. Then four months later another surfaces in Cabo, and in Sydney after that, and people start naming them, like hurricanes, only instead of Ivan and Rita and Katrina and Sandy they're Trespasser and Hundun and Kaiceph and Scissure, and arguing over whether or not it's appropriate to call the creatures Kaiju like the old movies about men in rubber monster suits. It's not the worst name to give extraterrestrial life.
(You've given unimaginative nicknames to alien lifeforms and their species; it's difficult to think about things that haven't given you their names, and you have to call them something.)
The world is coming to an end, and the conspiracy forums you still can't make yourself leave are torn between self-congratulatory vindication and abject horror. There's a lot of talk about expectations, about how the invasion was supposed to descend from the skies, not emerge from the depths of the ocean.
None of it comes from you. For you, alien life has always come up from below.
(The question is, what put it there?)
It is 2015, and humanity is working on solutions to its latest problem. Most people who can afford to, or who have relatives who can take them in, are getting as far away from the Pacific Ocean as they can. Those who can't and don't, or otherwise refuse, have dug themselves in, trusting in the construction of bunkers and alarm systems to keep them safe.
And then there's the third option.
Humanity's common enemy is right out of science fiction (not that you can judge there, marked as you are as a warrior of an alien culture), and somebody somewhere must have concluded that the solution should be, too, because they're building giant robots to punch the monsters into submission.
You want to scoff, but for one thing you don't have any better ideas, and for another-
- For another, the new Jaeger Program is recruiting. Recruiting people who are physically active, good in a crisis, strong and clever and adaptable. People like you.
They've named the project hunter. You trace the raised skin of the mark burned into your cheek, and for the first time in your life you start to believe in fate.
When you call Mandy and tell her what you're doing, out of the same strained mixture of love and obligation that made her take you in all those years ago and that keeps the two of you in contact for birthdays and Christmas and the anniversaries of your parents' deaths, she calls you suicidal and impulsive and just like Dad, and you don't even bother trying to explain yourself because you never expected her to understand anyway. (Later, you'll realise how terrified she is of losing her sister along with her parents, but not today. The two of you have never quite managed to communicate on the same frequency, both shouting into the void and hoping the other will hear you and respond.)
Jo tells you to have fun dying, and Tasha tries to talk you out of it, but she has about as much luck with that as she's been having on her near-constant phone calls trying to coax her ninety-year-old grandmother into leaving western Oregon. It probably would have worked Before, but not now, not in the whole world's After, and you've already signed up anyway. You tell Jo that you'd rather die on your feet than under something else's, pull the next six months' rent out of your emergency fund, ask Tasha to look after your stuff for you (you always liked her more than Jo, and you're not bringing alien weaponry onto a military base), and ship out for Kodiak Island with the new intake group. (You wonder what it says about you that, over a decade After, you've only started to feel settled again now that you're off to fight more alien monsters.)
You're not the oldest recruit - there's a USAF guy in his early forties - but you're thirty-eight years old and most of your fellow civilian cadets are somewhere in their twenties. The military imports are a little closer to you in age, but they don't much care for the civilians and so aren't particularly interested in making conversation with you. There's an Australian amongst them, however, with an affable demeanour and a world-weary air, and the two of you band together in a way. Herc's a single father and joined up with his brother, and he's clearly seen some shit, even if it's not the same shit as you. You don't particularly hit it off with the brother, who's the sort of idiot you've always hated as a client, but he's a package deal with Herc and you need somebody to shout 'get off my lawn!' and mutter 'kids these days' with, so Scott stays.
(Back in the pyramid, as Before gave way to After, you and Sebastian had guessed that the hunters might have been the equivalent of teenagers, but watching some of the twenty-somethings posturing, desperate to prove their worth and standing, to slay the monsters and come home heroes, makes you reconsider that theory. You think that Scar would be having a great time, here at the end of the world.)
For the first eight weeks, you do well. You memorise tactics, the basics of Jaeger engineering (it's been long enough that you don't wince when the name Weyland Industries comes up), the essential points of Kaiju biology (there is blood on your hands), and the forms of Jaeger Bushido. The Air Force guy and about a third of the civilians wash out, but you're still here. The barracks aren't comfortable, but you've shared worse accommodations with worse people, and the food isn't the best but it's good enough for purpose, and you're that much closer to your goal.
It's after the first cut, when you move into the second phase, that things start to go wrong.
The problem is that the Jaegers need two pilots, and need those two pilots to merge their minds together. It's why so many of the civilians showed up in twos and threes, why so many of the military guys brought siblings. You know the theory, but the reality is that you have the lowest HSP index of your class.
"It doesn't mean you can't Drift with anybody," says Doctor Lightcap. "It just means it could take a while to find the right partner."
Gradually, your fellow cadets either prove compatible with somebody they joined up with, find a promising match amongst the singletons, or get cut, transferring onto non-combatant tracks or just going home.
You're a good candidate on paper, so the Corps doesn't want to give up on you, but after sending you into what you and the Hansens dub 'Jaeger Speed Dating' with what feels like the entire class, you have to accept defeat.
You're offered a place in J-Tech or the recovery teams, but the Marshal also offers you a third option - you can try again with the next cohort - and what you think are supposed to be words of encouragement.
"This doesn't mean you'll never be a pilot, only that your partner hasn't enlisted yet."
You take the recovery job, use what little leave you have to move out of your apartment, sorting out which of your belongings can go with you and which are going into a locker, and then ship out to Hong Kong with the Hansens and their support crew. You're not going to hang around like a lost puppy, waiting for someone to take pity on you, when you could be doing something - and you think the Marshal is closer to the truth than he realises.
You've seen what Drift-compatibility looks like from the outside. You know you need to find somebody you can fall into step with, with whom fighting as one, no matter how little time you've had to practise, is second nature, and you have a horrible suspicion that you've experienced just that, eleven years ago, with somebody who won't be signing up to fight in humanity's war any time soon.
Fuck.
It is 2016. Before, you would have been content to work Rescue & Recovery. It's an important role. It's enough.
(Sometimes it seems like everybody would rather have you Before than After. You'd hoped the PPDC would be different.)
You're good at being a personnel coordinator. You like the team you're working with. They listen to you. There's no sense in complaining about what could have been.
(Maybe the universe just hates you. Maybe this is the price of surviving the ordeal that killed every other human to try - to be caught between worlds, with no solid place in either.)
Fishing Herc and Scott out of a blue-stained Lucky Seven isn't the most glamorous job in the Corps, but you'll do it, no matter how much you wish you were the one in the conn-pod.
(You and Herc are friends out of more than convenience by now. Sometimes, mostly when you're a little drunk, you think about telling him your theory about why you never managed a proper Drift, but that would require explaining Bouvetøya and the serpents and Scar, and you don't want that information to end up in Scott's head too. You can't confide in somebody who shares a brain with somebody else.)
Hong Kong is a beautiful city, or at least it was until Reckoner fell on top of it. Cleanup crews can carve the meat off the bones, but they can't move the ugly motherfucker without causing even more damage to the area, so the skeleton stays right where it is. The area should be a wasteland, but the city grows over the remains like lichen. It reminds you, in a way, of whale fall, life colonising death. Scott thinks the effort is bloody stupid, I tell ya, but you remember the people back in the States who can't afford to move inland, and people like Tasha's grandmother who would not be uprooted, and you tell him to shut the fuck up. Humanity is standing its ground.
(You don't know how the hunters' rule over this blue planet came to an end, fading from memory. Maybe it was just too many failed rituals, but you like to imagine their former subjects drove them out. This planet belongs to humanity, and neither hunter nor serpent nor Kaiju will take it without a fight.)
It's 2017. You're stationed at the new Sydney base, and you're still adjusting to June being winter.
Lucky's a little north of Hobart, standing in a spreading patch of luminous blue blood seeping from Himantura's corpse, and Scott's leg is fucked. He and Herc are loaded into one of the choppers, but your team has a different priority.
Himantura hit something airborne, and you're looking for survivors.
Kyle snarks about UFOs, and you tell him to shut up - jokes about little green men haven't really been funny since the big blue bastards came onto the scene, and you in particular haven't appreciated them since October 2004 - but what hasn't sunk yet doesn't look human-made, and whilst Penn suggests a military test flight none of you really believe them, especially when you get a better look.
There's a survivor, unconscious but still alive, and definitely not human.
You recognise him all the same.