Chapter Text
“Esterín!” She turns around with a tired grin as Corunir rushes into their prep room. She’s already halfway into her jaeger armor. “I wasn’t sure you would make it.”
“I wouldn’t leave you to this alone,” she says. “It was close, but I am here.” Back from her own secretive mission- and entirely unrested from the look of her. She leans wearily into his quick hug. "I can still fight," she says before he can ask.
He holds his tongue and instead asks: "Have you seen Golodir?”
“No, I only just got here myself.” Corunir curses under his breath. Her voice sharpens. “What’s wrong?” Corunir presses his hands to his face.
“I don’t know. He hasn’t said anything to me, but you’ve seen him these last couple weeks. Something is eating at him.” He hurriedly dons his own pilot’s armor. “No one has seen him since they called the last sighting, maybe-”
The pilots’ wing shudders; the surest sign that a jaeger has dropped. Not even the nearest and swiftest pilots could have dropped in the time between the first alarms and now.
They have been doing this long enough they hardly need the Drift to know each other’s thoughts. Corunir snatches up his helmet and they run for Sparkstone.
This will be a dire day and everyone in the complex knows it. There are too many arrayed against them, too many and all at once, and that’s a new thing and that should scare them, because new things in this have never once meant something good. Corunir’s fear for Golodir dwarfs such rational things, swamping the Drift so badly that Esterín flounders in it until he can bring it under control.
We will find him, she sends in the place where their minds touch and oh, she really is exhausted. “Where are we needed?” she asks into the comms.
“Head west,” the reply comes immediately. “Thrúgrath. Only Category Two, but plenty dangerous.”
“Is there any word from Golodir?” Corunir asks quickly, before they have no choice but to move out.
A hesitation. “He also went west.” Twin spikes of alarm shake the Drift. A longer hesitation. “He went alone.”
“We’re on our way,” Esterín says over the swell of Corunir’s angry, anxious thoughts. Of course he went alone, the stubborn man. Of course he went without a word. Even newly renamed and remade, Dúnachar was not meant to be piloted by one man, no matter his insistence that he would not enter the Drift again since his return, no matter his insistence that it could be done, at great need.
He says it with such certainty, that he could pilot a jaeger alone. Corunir never really wants to know why he’s so sure.
Of course he had gone. Corunir checks Sparkstone’s displays. Of course they had let him. They haven’t been so desperate in recent memory.
“Corunir,” Esterín says, aloud and in the between-place that only really exists like this, settled into Sparkstone’s nerves.
“Let’s go,” he says. She’s worried, too. For Golodir, for their friends, for him. He tries to send back reassurance, the thought that it will be alright, but the Drift does not well tolerate even kindly lies. They step forward together.
Thrúgrath is already dead when they find it. Dúnachar kneels over it, bright sword sunk deep in its chest.
“Golodir,” Corunir calls through the comms. “Golodir, are you there?”
Sparkstone’s speakers crackle with static for a long, terrible moment. A heavy sigh. “I’m here.”
Relief blooms in Sparkstone like a long-awaited storm. Dúnachar stands, the groaning of metal audible even through Sparkstone’s thick armor. Golodir’s jaeger leans heavily on its sword, but makes it upright. And then it wobbles, and something in its legs gives way with a great shrieking of metal plates, and it goes back down.
The instinct to jump forward, to catch him and hold him close, comes from both of them at once. “You fool…” Corunir thinks- says aloud, to his own surprise. Golodir’s laugh is breathless and short through the speakers. Something crackles; Dúnachar’s comms must be damaged, too. Little surprise, given the state of the jaeger.
“Maybe,” Golodir says. “Maybe. But I do not think so.” His breathing rasps loudly through the speakers in Sparkstone’s head. “It was necessary.”
Hardly, Esterín growls, not meant for Golodir to hear, not with such vehemence. Corunir finds himself in great agreement. “We can’t stay here,” she says aloud. They adjust Sparkstone’s grip on Dúnachar, dark and almost dead in their arms. “We’ll get you home, Golodir.” Sparkstone turns around and begins the long walk back to safety.