[tasty, miss a] drift compatible
drift compatible
tasty + miss a, soryong, jia/min
pg-13 (past character death, violence), 4085w
pacific rim au. min's never experienced ideal drift. soryong has, and once you know the feeling, anything less will never be good enough. (for intoaclub)
ao3 mirror
Technically, Soryong knows, there’s nothing wrong with Lee Minyoung. Quite the opposite, in fact; she’s Marshall Park’s favourite for a reason. He’s kept her in training for the past five years even as Jaeger programs around the world wound down, with three years overall in the Nagasaki Shatterdome and two in Los Angeles in between, and her experience shows. She has the eighth-highest lifetime simulator success rate on record, and was given first choice of hours in the Combat Room during her last year in Nagasaki. Most importantly, she’s confident, even among all the veterans in Hong Kong. Looking at her straight-backed walk off the helicopter from Japan, you wouldn’t guess that she’s never actually seen a kaiju in battle, let alone killed one. All of this is what made Officer Meng Jia select her to be Soryong’s new partner, the latest in a string of candidates that were almost good enough, but not quite. But as soon as he makes eye contact with her, even as they shake hands and smile and she tells him to call her Min, Soryong knows she’s only another failed attempt.
Still, he goes through with it, partly because they’re running out of time - the next kaiju attack is predicted for less than two months from now - and partly because Jia had threatened to drop-kick him off the deployment bridge the next time he told her no. The first thing he does is take Min to the hangar. They walk past triple-armed Crimson Typhoon, past the stocky Russian Jaeger that’s taken Horizon Brave’s place, all the way to the far corner where the tallest Jaeger resides, 80 metres tall and shining with newly buffed metal.
“This is Draco Spectrum,” says Soryong. “My big bro. And yours, too, once you get into it,” he adds.
Min is staring upward, her head almost tilted all the way back. The other candidates had all looked nervous or uncertain when Soryong introduced them to Spectrum. Some looked like they were afraid of breaking it, even though its armour was thicker than the width of their legs. There’s some measure of caution in Min’s eyes, but more than anything, there’s wonder. “Wow,” she breathes. “It looks so cool. You fixed it all up and everything.” Something about her reverent expression makes the edges of Soryong’s stomach radiate with jealousy, and he chuckles uncomfortably, then looks away.
That night, he tells Daeryong about Min, even though he already knows. “She tested really well,” he says, lying on his bed and looking up into the dark. “And she likes Spectrum, which is important. We have almost identical algorithms or something. But, I don’t know, man. She’s...”
Not us, Daeryong finishes in his head. Soryong can see his close-lipped smile of understanding and the way he would have shrugged one shoulder, as if apologizing for being the best.
“No,” he says. His left forearm aches suddenly, and he bends his wrist back, trying to stretch it out. “She’s not.”
---
Over the course of the first week, Soryong spends most of his spare time with Min, often with Jia hovering in the background as chaperone. They go over Spectrum’s blueprints, sit next to each other at meals, and run a few drop simulations, walking side by side on separate elliptical trainers, which are closer to a Jaeger’s pedal controls than a treadmill. Most of their time together, though, is spent in the Combat Room. The Combat Room is the proving ground for pilot compatibility, and despite being a foot shorter than Soryong and eight years younger, Min wins almost half their matches as predicted. Soryong quickly learns to adapt to her style, her powerful, full-limbed movements and strong follow-through, compared to his loose, sweeping strikes. Still, some of their fights feel more like she’s chasing him and he’s running away.
Then, one week after she arrives, Min and Soryong drift for the first time. She’s the first of Soryong’s potential partners to ever make it this far, and only the second person Soryong’s ever drifted with.
Soryong’s jittery as he stands on the bridge in his drivesuit and the gear, waiting for the spinal clamp and then the go. It’s been years since he’s done this, and he feels simultaneously eager and frustrated, like there’s something crawling under his skin. On his right, Min’s standing with her limbs perfectly still as she allows the neural bridge operators to introduce her to the procedure, but she keeps pressing her lips together. Their eyes meet through their helmets for a second, mirrors of each other, and Soryong feels instantly apologetic. He’s supposed to be the veteran here, his mind a calming hand to guide hers, not the thing that amplifies her first-time nervousness.
“It’ll be fine,” he says, mouthing exaggeratedly through his helmet, and he tries to think it, too. He gives her a thumbs-up and she gives one back.
Then the operators step back and the grey-yellow relay gel fills their helmets, and even though it’s been years, Soryong’s body goes into automatic alignment.
The gel drains, and the A.I.’s voice seems to whisper in his ear: “Initiating neural handshake.” Soryong takes a breath, and beside him Min does the same, and they plunge.
Their minds are separate but parallel, like a double projection, but at least they’re looking at the same thing. There’s Soryong at fourteen, playing basketball in New York with his friends when news of the attack on San Francisco hits; there’s Min at eleven, and Park Jinyoung is reassuring her that she’ll always have a home, even if she’s left hers. The liquid of Min’s mind is pink dye, bright and watery and clear, and it spreads over the edges of Soryong’s, just as the dark blue ink of his mind is spreading over hers, just as the darkness of Spectrum will settle over both of them later. It’s not an instant connection, but it’s working.
But there’s another colour, an orange glow at the upper right corner of Soryong’s vision. Soryong tries to ignore it; if he pulls that thread, he knows, it’s all over. The pink extends closer to it, curious. Don’t, Soryong thinks, and it’s Daeryong who answers:
It’ll be faster.
Soryong opens his eyes and the colourless light of the hangar blinds him. He fills his vision with it, willing it to wall off his brain. There’s still pink at the corners, but it’s fading, too weak to hang on - proof of an imperfect Drift. Outside, the technicians and operators are looking around and murmuring, unsure of what’s happening. The monitor tracking their sync rate clicks rapidly as the numbers nosedive. Inside Soryong’s head there’s a voice like a whispering crowd, like a kaiju’s mouth crammed full of teeth, endless, a pool of bad memories simmering and reaching for him. He whips his head to his right and there’s Min, a foot shorter than him, and it’s not right. It will never be right again.
“That’s enough,” says Jia’s voice in his ear, and then everything stops.
Soryong stands there for a moment, just breathing, as he comes down, and gradually the noise fades away, and he’s back. He exhales deeply as the sounds of the world flood his mind again.
He hands his helmet to the operator who’s already taken out his spinal clamp and goes into the control room without saying anything to Min. “What happened?” Jia demands, standing up from the sync monitor.
“Where’s the Marshall?” Soryong asks.
“I sent him away, because I thought this would work. Answer me. What did you do?”
“I stopped,” Soryong says simply. “Before she saw something she didn’t need to see.”
“The whole point is that she’s supposed to see everything.” Jia’s voice sizzles, and she inhales through her nose, then blows out harshly through pursed lips. When she speaks again, her tone is more even. “Well. If you’re interested, before everything went to shit, you peaked at eighty-six-point-seven. I don’t know what your problem is, but it’s certainly not compatibility, because JY himself will tell you that’s a pass.”
“You sure like numbers.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” Jia snaps. “You’re not alone, you know.” On the other side of the glass, Min’s being helped out of her drivesuit. She’s nodding and talking to the operators, smiling widely at their words of encouragement, but her eyes roam the hangar, distracted. Her posture is stooped forward a little; she’s probably feeling the nausea that accompanies a bad connection.
Soryong watches her and it triggers nothing. “I mean, that’s the problem right there, isn’t it?”
A stabilized sync rate over 92% is considered high Drift compatibility, with 97% or above being the rare ideal level. Even though their trial failed, the fact that they could get past 75% without stabilizing is impressive, especially when you account for the fact that it was Min’s first time with a partner. Soryong knows that Jia thinks he’s doing it on purpose, that he’s being too picky. He is picky, and maybe to Min, what she and Soryong have is what compatibility should feel like. But Min’s never experienced ideal Drift, and neither has Jia. Soryong has, and once you know the feeling, anything less will never be good enough.
---
In 2016, years before he would be named Marshall of Hong Kong Shatterdome, Park Jinyoung was assigned there from Nagasaki to oversee a Chinese-South Korean collaboration on two Jaegers, Draco Spectrum and Amazon Quake. The machines were almost ready; Jinyoung would be in charge of the people in them. He split his time between the Korean trainees in Nagasaki and a pet group of Rangers he cultivated in Hong Kong, including Soryong and his twin brother Daeryong.
Draco Spectrum, Mark-3, was practically made for them, with its long, flexible limbs and lithe range of movement. The first time he saw it, headless but nearly complete, Daeryong dashed off the bridge and all the way down the twisting stairs until he reached its feet, ignoring the mechanics’ warning gestures and shouts. Soryong watched from the bridge as Daeryong looked up at the new Jaeger, from its pointed chrome feet to its rounded shoulders, his whole face wide and open with wonder. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled something up at Soryong, and beside him on the bridge Jinyoung scrunched his eyebrows down in concentration and leaned over the railing, trying to hear him. Soryong didn’t need to hear to understand.
“He says, ‘That’s Giant Dragon,’” he told Jinyoung. “Jjangryong.” He grinned down at the figure waving by the Jaeger’s foot. “That’s our big brother.”
Daeryong and Soryong had gone through their whole lives together. From city to city, through their parents’ separation and their mother’s death, they were the only constant the other had for the past 18 years. The Drift was a foregone conclusion. At Spectrum’s first ever pilot test, their stabilized sync rate was 97.4%, peaking as high as 99.2%, and it had left the J-Tech officers running the trial slack-jawed. There had been no resistance to the link, and the immersion was immediate. Their mind was Spectrum’s, and Spectrum’s mind was one.
It was impossible to go back after that. There was nowhere to go back to. It was as if they’d spent their whole lives inside a room, and now they had finally been let out in fresh air. When the operators stripped away their suits, the ghost of a link remained. They spent the rest of the day next to each other in silence, while their heads buzzed and chattered, inventing jokes and codes, reliving old stories and places, and constantly thinking about the next time. There had to be a next time. They had experienced a connection as natural and automatic as breathing; to be without it now was like holding their breath.
They both slept in Daeryong’s room that night, limbs intertwined like the braid of a rope, and together, they dreamed of the future ahead.
---
Soryong finds Min in the cafeteria the next day, sitting with Jia and chatting happily. They both look up at him when he approaches, which makes him hesitate.
“Can I sit here?” he asks.
“Of course you can,” says Min, and she shifts over to make space for him. She’s sitting on his right side again, or maybe Soryong just always takes the left himself. “Always gotta get ready for the next one, right?”
“The next one?” asks Jia. She looks at Soryong as he sits down.
“Yeah, we’re doing another trial today. Aren’t we?”
Min looks at Jia expectantly, and Jia looks at Soryong. Soryong nods at her, untroubled. “Right,” she says slowly. “Right, I guess we don’t have much time for this. I just thought you might want to wait a day, that’s all. You know.” She’s stumbling over her words a bit, and not just because they’re all speaking Korean.
Min looks back and forth between Soryong and Jia, her eyebrows pressed down. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” she says, “both of you. What’s the matter? What am I missing?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” says Soryong quickly.
“Well, no, it’s not nothing,” says Jia. She examines her nails, which are painted black with silver crosses on the index fingers, the most decoration she’s allowed. “It’s just, I’ve had some failed trials, too.”
“With him?” Min looks at Soryong like she’s trying to X-ray his brain, to see who else has been in there.
Jia laughs at that, just once. “No, no.”
“You know about Spectrum, right? The history?” Soryong asks Min, even though he knows that she knows. “Well, Jia was a Ranger at the same time.”
Min’s eyes go wide and she turns back to Jia. “I knew something was up! Why didn’t you tell me? Who’d you pilot?”
“Nothing.” Jia brushes her black bangs away from her forehead. “I never piloted anything.”
“That’s not true,” says Soryong gently.
“Shut up,” says Jia, looking up at him, but there’s no venom in it. “Well. I had a Jaeger. And a partner.”
“What was its name? Their names,” Min adds quickly.
“Amazon Quake, and my partner’s name was Feifei. Wang Feifei, from Hainan.”
Min sips at her soup, eyes fixed on Jia. “Okay. So it didn’t work with you guys at first, and then…”
Jia shakes her head. “It didn’t work with us, ever.” She pushes her tray away. “The first time was a failure, the second time was a failure, but we still kept trying. We went four days in a row, three times a day.” Min shifts in her chair, like she already knows how the story ends. “It wasn’t healthy. Day five, she chased the rabbit, the Jaeger punched a hole in itself, and we were all decommissioned. The end.”
“‘Chased the rabbit’?”
“It’s like when you have a bad dream and you can’t wake up,” says Soryong. “Only it’s a bad memory, and you’re reliving it.”
“Oh.” Min glances at Soryong sideways, and she doesn’t move but Soryong can feel her pushing gently at him, like a blunt edge against his right side, like pink dye spilling soundlessly. The sensation surprises him. Daeryong used to be able to do that, too, though more acute. He wonders if he could push back at her and she’d feel it. He doesn’t try.
“I think we’ll be okay, though, right?” Min continues, and Soryong and Jia both start a bit - it breaks a silence Soryong hadn’t known they’d lapsed into. “It’s only two days in a row, once a day. It has to work eventually.” The last part isn’t a question. She looks up at Jia and their eyes meet at the same time.
“Well,” says Soryong, looking between them, “only one way to find out.”
They’re back in the hangar that afternoon. This time, Marshall Park is in the control booth with Jia. He’s standing with his feet planted apart in the way that has always made Soryong feel so much smaller than him, even though they’ve been the same height for years now. Soryong hadn’t been there when he’d been informed of the failed trial, but he can imagine how it might have happened. The Marshall rarely loses his temper, but the look of sour disappointment on his face would be worse than any kind of rage.
Before they put on their helmets, Min comes in and stands so close to him she’s almost on his toes. She looks up and Soryong looks down. He wonders if she fits into him in that way. Her eyes are big and serious.
“I know,” she says, “about your brother.” Soryong inhales. “But I want you to know that I’m not afraid. Okay? If I was, I wouldn’t have come here.”
You don’t know about him, Soryong wants to say. Instead he looks somewhere around her chin and says, “I’ll remember.”
She touches his left arm briefly and awkwardly, then they part.
“Initiating neural handshake.”
It’s the same scene as yesterday, the double projection, though Soryong wills himself to bring the edges together closer, and he can feel Min trying to do the same, pushing into his mind. He wonders why she’s pushing into his mind, rather than him going into hers.
That’s your choice, not mine, says Min.
They can talk to each other - they’re drifting, Soryong realizes, and before he can clamp it down the thought unlocks some Pandora’s box inside him and there’s Daeryong, or the absence of Daeryong like a hole being burned in something, and it’s that day again and one instant they’re together and one and the next it feels like Soryong’s spine is being ripped out of him as Daeryong is torn away, and they’re both suffocating with pain and terror, and then -
Soryong opens his eyes and yanks off his helmet and lets in the light, and beside him Min drops to her knees and starts vomiting.
A million technicians swarm around him but Soryong pushes them away. He pushes into the control room even as Min is screaming at him, “Let me in, goddammit,” and she’s screaming because she’s not in his head and he can’t let her be in there, because Spectrum will never belong to anyone but them, it will always be their weight to bear, and their death is Soryong’s and no one else’s.
Jia’s running after him and Jinyoung’s voice is booming down the hall, but all Soryong sees is orange and all he hears is the silence of Daeryong’s voice. He goes into his room and falls onto the floor and he chases the rabbit alone.
---
When you live on a military base, it’s hard to avoid people. Still, Soryong does his best. Two days after the second failed trial, he waits outside the Combat Room until there’s a break in training sessions before going in. Even then, some of the trainees who are leaving the room eye him cautiously, and skirt around him like he’s contagious.
He takes one of the staffs from the wall and starts to move through the basic training kata, counting out loud as he sweeps through the movements: up, down, diagonal, across. Jinyoung had taught them to think of it like a dance, to think more about the movement itself than the end goal of the strike. “You’ll always reach your goal,” he told them, “as long as what you do to get there is correct.”
“Mind if I join you?” asks Jia, and Soryong looks up. She’s leaning against the doorway, wearing black leggings and a tank under her uniform jacket. For a second, he finds it strange that she’s dressed for the Combat Room; but when they were both Ranger trainees, this was their favourite place to be. Of course she would know to come here.
Soryong continues through the kata while Jia shrugs off her jacket and selects a staff from the wall. “You aren’t mad at me?” he asks. The staff is a balanced weight in his hands.
“I’m not mad at you,” she says. She joins him for the next two steps, one, two, and then her third one is a strike of her staff across his. He’s ready for it, but the blow still sends shocks through his fists. “But you’re better than this.”
“You’re disappointed, then.” They shift together, combining their weight, and it’s Soryong’s turn to strike. Jia meets it full-force. “That’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” says Jia. She pushes Soryong’s staff off of hers and swings through a series of blows while she talks. “You have to let her in. That’s the only way this is going to work. It’s not her, it’s you.”
Soryong sweeps around the blows, walking backwards. “I don’t want to hurt her.”
“You don’t want to hurt yourself,” Jia counters. She swings and Soryong brings his staff up to block it, and she stumbles a bit to one side, her weight thrown off. “What are you so afraid of, anyway? She’s tiny. She can’t do anything to you.”
“Oh, come on,” says Soryong. He thrusts forward and Jia recovers and parries it, reaching, and the next one. “If you really believed that, you wouldn’t have assigned her to me.”
“What am I supposed to do? No matter who it is, you’re going to treat them the same way. Like an outsider. You’re never going to let them drop into that Jaeger.”
“You know what it’s like to break someone.” Soryong swings and misses. “I can’t do that to her, Jia. I just can’t.”
Jia winds up and strikes, passing across Soryong’s face. “You miss him too much to see anyone else.”
Soryong stops. “I can’t miss him,” he says. “He’s with me all the time.”
Jia stops too, as if considering this, and then gently swings her staff forward, engaging him again.
They exchange a few blows silently, walking back and forth, the clicking of their staffs echoing off the walls. Then Soryong says, “Why didn’t you ever try?”
Jia grunts as she swings. “I tried thirteen times.” Her grip is steady, but her voice is wobbly.
“Then you quit. The only reason you’re here is because JY asked you to come back.” Soryong’s breathing hard too, but he stays locked in the position. “You can do it. I’ve seen you. I’m seeing you now, you’re still ready. And you know what?”
“What?”
Soryong grins. “You fight just like Min.”
“What does that mean?” Jia pushes out of the grip, but gently. Now her shoulders are shaking. Their fight hadn’t seemed hard, but now that they’ve stopped the exertion catches up to them.
Soryong wipes sweat off his forehead. He can’t stop smiling. It’s so clear now; how could he have missed it? “It means,” he says, “I think you two are compatible.”
---
One month after she arrives at the Hong Kong Shatterdome, Ranger Lee Minyoung performs her first Drift trial with her partner, Ranger Meng Jia. Officer Jung Soryong is in the control booth, watching the sync monitor as they prepare out on the bridge.
Marshall Park is in the control booth with him. He puts one hand on the back of Soryong’s chair. “Are you ready?” he asks. Soryong laughs.
“I think you should be asking that into the mic, shouldn’t you?”
“No, I’m asking you.” He leans on the desk and peers out the window, where Draco Spectrum stands, its chrome shoulders gleaming. “Are you ready, Soryong?”
“Yes, I’m ready.” Soryong looks down at the controls, at his hands. “I mean, I don’t know if I’m ready. But...” He inhales deeply and smiles up at Jinyoung. “I think it’s time.”
Jinyoung crosses his arms and nods. “As long as you feel good about this. It’s your responsibility, too.”
Out on the bridge, Jia and Min stand next to each other as the operators set up the gear. Jia turns over her shoulder and Soryong gives her a thumbs up. He can’t see her face, but then she turns to look at Min, and Soryong can’t see their eyes, but he knows.
“Believe me, sir,” he says, “this is the best I’ve felt in five years.”
“Initiating neural handshake,” says the A.I., and Min and Jia turn back to face away from him, towards Draco Spectrum.
“Big brother’s in good hands, don’t worry,” Soryong murmurs, and the orange glow around his right eye flares and then dulls down, appeased. He watches as Min and Jia lock in, and the numbers climb, and his heart soars as they drop.
notes: 1. this fic requires a medium level of familiarity with pacific rim. the wiki may be helpful.
2. anything involving the drift and numbers comes from my headcanon that 100% synchronization is either unachievable or unsustainable, even by the most drift-compatible. i glossed over/strayed from the precise details of the established timeline when it suited me. if anything looks particularly wrong or contradictory, please let me know.
tasty + miss a, soryong, jia/min
pg-13 (past character death, violence), 4085w
pacific rim au. min's never experienced ideal drift. soryong has, and once you know the feeling, anything less will never be good enough. (for intoaclub)
ao3 mirror
Technically, Soryong knows, there’s nothing wrong with Lee Minyoung. Quite the opposite, in fact; she’s Marshall Park’s favourite for a reason. He’s kept her in training for the past five years even as Jaeger programs around the world wound down, with three years overall in the Nagasaki Shatterdome and two in Los Angeles in between, and her experience shows. She has the eighth-highest lifetime simulator success rate on record, and was given first choice of hours in the Combat Room during her last year in Nagasaki. Most importantly, she’s confident, even among all the veterans in Hong Kong. Looking at her straight-backed walk off the helicopter from Japan, you wouldn’t guess that she’s never actually seen a kaiju in battle, let alone killed one. All of this is what made Officer Meng Jia select her to be Soryong’s new partner, the latest in a string of candidates that were almost good enough, but not quite. But as soon as he makes eye contact with her, even as they shake hands and smile and she tells him to call her Min, Soryong knows she’s only another failed attempt.
Still, he goes through with it, partly because they’re running out of time - the next kaiju attack is predicted for less than two months from now - and partly because Jia had threatened to drop-kick him off the deployment bridge the next time he told her no. The first thing he does is take Min to the hangar. They walk past triple-armed Crimson Typhoon, past the stocky Russian Jaeger that’s taken Horizon Brave’s place, all the way to the far corner where the tallest Jaeger resides, 80 metres tall and shining with newly buffed metal.
“This is Draco Spectrum,” says Soryong. “My big bro. And yours, too, once you get into it,” he adds.
Min is staring upward, her head almost tilted all the way back. The other candidates had all looked nervous or uncertain when Soryong introduced them to Spectrum. Some looked like they were afraid of breaking it, even though its armour was thicker than the width of their legs. There’s some measure of caution in Min’s eyes, but more than anything, there’s wonder. “Wow,” she breathes. “It looks so cool. You fixed it all up and everything.” Something about her reverent expression makes the edges of Soryong’s stomach radiate with jealousy, and he chuckles uncomfortably, then looks away.
That night, he tells Daeryong about Min, even though he already knows. “She tested really well,” he says, lying on his bed and looking up into the dark. “And she likes Spectrum, which is important. We have almost identical algorithms or something. But, I don’t know, man. She’s...”
Not us, Daeryong finishes in his head. Soryong can see his close-lipped smile of understanding and the way he would have shrugged one shoulder, as if apologizing for being the best.
“No,” he says. His left forearm aches suddenly, and he bends his wrist back, trying to stretch it out. “She’s not.”
---
Over the course of the first week, Soryong spends most of his spare time with Min, often with Jia hovering in the background as chaperone. They go over Spectrum’s blueprints, sit next to each other at meals, and run a few drop simulations, walking side by side on separate elliptical trainers, which are closer to a Jaeger’s pedal controls than a treadmill. Most of their time together, though, is spent in the Combat Room. The Combat Room is the proving ground for pilot compatibility, and despite being a foot shorter than Soryong and eight years younger, Min wins almost half their matches as predicted. Soryong quickly learns to adapt to her style, her powerful, full-limbed movements and strong follow-through, compared to his loose, sweeping strikes. Still, some of their fights feel more like she’s chasing him and he’s running away.
Then, one week after she arrives, Min and Soryong drift for the first time. She’s the first of Soryong’s potential partners to ever make it this far, and only the second person Soryong’s ever drifted with.
Soryong’s jittery as he stands on the bridge in his drivesuit and the gear, waiting for the spinal clamp and then the go. It’s been years since he’s done this, and he feels simultaneously eager and frustrated, like there’s something crawling under his skin. On his right, Min’s standing with her limbs perfectly still as she allows the neural bridge operators to introduce her to the procedure, but she keeps pressing her lips together. Their eyes meet through their helmets for a second, mirrors of each other, and Soryong feels instantly apologetic. He’s supposed to be the veteran here, his mind a calming hand to guide hers, not the thing that amplifies her first-time nervousness.
“It’ll be fine,” he says, mouthing exaggeratedly through his helmet, and he tries to think it, too. He gives her a thumbs-up and she gives one back.
Then the operators step back and the grey-yellow relay gel fills their helmets, and even though it’s been years, Soryong’s body goes into automatic alignment.
The gel drains, and the A.I.’s voice seems to whisper in his ear: “Initiating neural handshake.” Soryong takes a breath, and beside him Min does the same, and they plunge.
Their minds are separate but parallel, like a double projection, but at least they’re looking at the same thing. There’s Soryong at fourteen, playing basketball in New York with his friends when news of the attack on San Francisco hits; there’s Min at eleven, and Park Jinyoung is reassuring her that she’ll always have a home, even if she’s left hers. The liquid of Min’s mind is pink dye, bright and watery and clear, and it spreads over the edges of Soryong’s, just as the dark blue ink of his mind is spreading over hers, just as the darkness of Spectrum will settle over both of them later. It’s not an instant connection, but it’s working.
But there’s another colour, an orange glow at the upper right corner of Soryong’s vision. Soryong tries to ignore it; if he pulls that thread, he knows, it’s all over. The pink extends closer to it, curious. Don’t, Soryong thinks, and it’s Daeryong who answers:
It’ll be faster.
Soryong opens his eyes and the colourless light of the hangar blinds him. He fills his vision with it, willing it to wall off his brain. There’s still pink at the corners, but it’s fading, too weak to hang on - proof of an imperfect Drift. Outside, the technicians and operators are looking around and murmuring, unsure of what’s happening. The monitor tracking their sync rate clicks rapidly as the numbers nosedive. Inside Soryong’s head there’s a voice like a whispering crowd, like a kaiju’s mouth crammed full of teeth, endless, a pool of bad memories simmering and reaching for him. He whips his head to his right and there’s Min, a foot shorter than him, and it’s not right. It will never be right again.
“That’s enough,” says Jia’s voice in his ear, and then everything stops.
Soryong stands there for a moment, just breathing, as he comes down, and gradually the noise fades away, and he’s back. He exhales deeply as the sounds of the world flood his mind again.
He hands his helmet to the operator who’s already taken out his spinal clamp and goes into the control room without saying anything to Min. “What happened?” Jia demands, standing up from the sync monitor.
“Where’s the Marshall?” Soryong asks.
“I sent him away, because I thought this would work. Answer me. What did you do?”
“I stopped,” Soryong says simply. “Before she saw something she didn’t need to see.”
“The whole point is that she’s supposed to see everything.” Jia’s voice sizzles, and she inhales through her nose, then blows out harshly through pursed lips. When she speaks again, her tone is more even. “Well. If you’re interested, before everything went to shit, you peaked at eighty-six-point-seven. I don’t know what your problem is, but it’s certainly not compatibility, because JY himself will tell you that’s a pass.”
“You sure like numbers.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” Jia snaps. “You’re not alone, you know.” On the other side of the glass, Min’s being helped out of her drivesuit. She’s nodding and talking to the operators, smiling widely at their words of encouragement, but her eyes roam the hangar, distracted. Her posture is stooped forward a little; she’s probably feeling the nausea that accompanies a bad connection.
Soryong watches her and it triggers nothing. “I mean, that’s the problem right there, isn’t it?”
A stabilized sync rate over 92% is considered high Drift compatibility, with 97% or above being the rare ideal level. Even though their trial failed, the fact that they could get past 75% without stabilizing is impressive, especially when you account for the fact that it was Min’s first time with a partner. Soryong knows that Jia thinks he’s doing it on purpose, that he’s being too picky. He is picky, and maybe to Min, what she and Soryong have is what compatibility should feel like. But Min’s never experienced ideal Drift, and neither has Jia. Soryong has, and once you know the feeling, anything less will never be good enough.
---
In 2016, years before he would be named Marshall of Hong Kong Shatterdome, Park Jinyoung was assigned there from Nagasaki to oversee a Chinese-South Korean collaboration on two Jaegers, Draco Spectrum and Amazon Quake. The machines were almost ready; Jinyoung would be in charge of the people in them. He split his time between the Korean trainees in Nagasaki and a pet group of Rangers he cultivated in Hong Kong, including Soryong and his twin brother Daeryong.
Draco Spectrum, Mark-3, was practically made for them, with its long, flexible limbs and lithe range of movement. The first time he saw it, headless but nearly complete, Daeryong dashed off the bridge and all the way down the twisting stairs until he reached its feet, ignoring the mechanics’ warning gestures and shouts. Soryong watched from the bridge as Daeryong looked up at the new Jaeger, from its pointed chrome feet to its rounded shoulders, his whole face wide and open with wonder. He cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled something up at Soryong, and beside him on the bridge Jinyoung scrunched his eyebrows down in concentration and leaned over the railing, trying to hear him. Soryong didn’t need to hear to understand.
“He says, ‘That’s Giant Dragon,’” he told Jinyoung. “Jjangryong.” He grinned down at the figure waving by the Jaeger’s foot. “That’s our big brother.”
Daeryong and Soryong had gone through their whole lives together. From city to city, through their parents’ separation and their mother’s death, they were the only constant the other had for the past 18 years. The Drift was a foregone conclusion. At Spectrum’s first ever pilot test, their stabilized sync rate was 97.4%, peaking as high as 99.2%, and it had left the J-Tech officers running the trial slack-jawed. There had been no resistance to the link, and the immersion was immediate. Their mind was Spectrum’s, and Spectrum’s mind was one.
It was impossible to go back after that. There was nowhere to go back to. It was as if they’d spent their whole lives inside a room, and now they had finally been let out in fresh air. When the operators stripped away their suits, the ghost of a link remained. They spent the rest of the day next to each other in silence, while their heads buzzed and chattered, inventing jokes and codes, reliving old stories and places, and constantly thinking about the next time. There had to be a next time. They had experienced a connection as natural and automatic as breathing; to be without it now was like holding their breath.
They both slept in Daeryong’s room that night, limbs intertwined like the braid of a rope, and together, they dreamed of the future ahead.
---
Soryong finds Min in the cafeteria the next day, sitting with Jia and chatting happily. They both look up at him when he approaches, which makes him hesitate.
“Can I sit here?” he asks.
“Of course you can,” says Min, and she shifts over to make space for him. She’s sitting on his right side again, or maybe Soryong just always takes the left himself. “Always gotta get ready for the next one, right?”
“The next one?” asks Jia. She looks at Soryong as he sits down.
“Yeah, we’re doing another trial today. Aren’t we?”
Min looks at Jia expectantly, and Jia looks at Soryong. Soryong nods at her, untroubled. “Right,” she says slowly. “Right, I guess we don’t have much time for this. I just thought you might want to wait a day, that’s all. You know.” She’s stumbling over her words a bit, and not just because they’re all speaking Korean.
Min looks back and forth between Soryong and Jia, her eyebrows pressed down. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” she says, “both of you. What’s the matter? What am I missing?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” says Soryong quickly.
“Well, no, it’s not nothing,” says Jia. She examines her nails, which are painted black with silver crosses on the index fingers, the most decoration she’s allowed. “It’s just, I’ve had some failed trials, too.”
“With him?” Min looks at Soryong like she’s trying to X-ray his brain, to see who else has been in there.
Jia laughs at that, just once. “No, no.”
“You know about Spectrum, right? The history?” Soryong asks Min, even though he knows that she knows. “Well, Jia was a Ranger at the same time.”
Min’s eyes go wide and she turns back to Jia. “I knew something was up! Why didn’t you tell me? Who’d you pilot?”
“Nothing.” Jia brushes her black bangs away from her forehead. “I never piloted anything.”
“That’s not true,” says Soryong gently.
“Shut up,” says Jia, looking up at him, but there’s no venom in it. “Well. I had a Jaeger. And a partner.”
“What was its name? Their names,” Min adds quickly.
“Amazon Quake, and my partner’s name was Feifei. Wang Feifei, from Hainan.”
Min sips at her soup, eyes fixed on Jia. “Okay. So it didn’t work with you guys at first, and then…”
Jia shakes her head. “It didn’t work with us, ever.” She pushes her tray away. “The first time was a failure, the second time was a failure, but we still kept trying. We went four days in a row, three times a day.” Min shifts in her chair, like she already knows how the story ends. “It wasn’t healthy. Day five, she chased the rabbit, the Jaeger punched a hole in itself, and we were all decommissioned. The end.”
“‘Chased the rabbit’?”
“It’s like when you have a bad dream and you can’t wake up,” says Soryong. “Only it’s a bad memory, and you’re reliving it.”
“Oh.” Min glances at Soryong sideways, and she doesn’t move but Soryong can feel her pushing gently at him, like a blunt edge against his right side, like pink dye spilling soundlessly. The sensation surprises him. Daeryong used to be able to do that, too, though more acute. He wonders if he could push back at her and she’d feel it. He doesn’t try.
“I think we’ll be okay, though, right?” Min continues, and Soryong and Jia both start a bit - it breaks a silence Soryong hadn’t known they’d lapsed into. “It’s only two days in a row, once a day. It has to work eventually.” The last part isn’t a question. She looks up at Jia and their eyes meet at the same time.
“Well,” says Soryong, looking between them, “only one way to find out.”
They’re back in the hangar that afternoon. This time, Marshall Park is in the control booth with Jia. He’s standing with his feet planted apart in the way that has always made Soryong feel so much smaller than him, even though they’ve been the same height for years now. Soryong hadn’t been there when he’d been informed of the failed trial, but he can imagine how it might have happened. The Marshall rarely loses his temper, but the look of sour disappointment on his face would be worse than any kind of rage.
Before they put on their helmets, Min comes in and stands so close to him she’s almost on his toes. She looks up and Soryong looks down. He wonders if she fits into him in that way. Her eyes are big and serious.
“I know,” she says, “about your brother.” Soryong inhales. “But I want you to know that I’m not afraid. Okay? If I was, I wouldn’t have come here.”
You don’t know about him, Soryong wants to say. Instead he looks somewhere around her chin and says, “I’ll remember.”
She touches his left arm briefly and awkwardly, then they part.
“Initiating neural handshake.”
It’s the same scene as yesterday, the double projection, though Soryong wills himself to bring the edges together closer, and he can feel Min trying to do the same, pushing into his mind. He wonders why she’s pushing into his mind, rather than him going into hers.
That’s your choice, not mine, says Min.
They can talk to each other - they’re drifting, Soryong realizes, and before he can clamp it down the thought unlocks some Pandora’s box inside him and there’s Daeryong, or the absence of Daeryong like a hole being burned in something, and it’s that day again and one instant they’re together and one and the next it feels like Soryong’s spine is being ripped out of him as Daeryong is torn away, and they’re both suffocating with pain and terror, and then -
Soryong opens his eyes and yanks off his helmet and lets in the light, and beside him Min drops to her knees and starts vomiting.
A million technicians swarm around him but Soryong pushes them away. He pushes into the control room even as Min is screaming at him, “Let me in, goddammit,” and she’s screaming because she’s not in his head and he can’t let her be in there, because Spectrum will never belong to anyone but them, it will always be their weight to bear, and their death is Soryong’s and no one else’s.
Jia’s running after him and Jinyoung’s voice is booming down the hall, but all Soryong sees is orange and all he hears is the silence of Daeryong’s voice. He goes into his room and falls onto the floor and he chases the rabbit alone.
---
When you live on a military base, it’s hard to avoid people. Still, Soryong does his best. Two days after the second failed trial, he waits outside the Combat Room until there’s a break in training sessions before going in. Even then, some of the trainees who are leaving the room eye him cautiously, and skirt around him like he’s contagious.
He takes one of the staffs from the wall and starts to move through the basic training kata, counting out loud as he sweeps through the movements: up, down, diagonal, across. Jinyoung had taught them to think of it like a dance, to think more about the movement itself than the end goal of the strike. “You’ll always reach your goal,” he told them, “as long as what you do to get there is correct.”
“Mind if I join you?” asks Jia, and Soryong looks up. She’s leaning against the doorway, wearing black leggings and a tank under her uniform jacket. For a second, he finds it strange that she’s dressed for the Combat Room; but when they were both Ranger trainees, this was their favourite place to be. Of course she would know to come here.
Soryong continues through the kata while Jia shrugs off her jacket and selects a staff from the wall. “You aren’t mad at me?” he asks. The staff is a balanced weight in his hands.
“I’m not mad at you,” she says. She joins him for the next two steps, one, two, and then her third one is a strike of her staff across his. He’s ready for it, but the blow still sends shocks through his fists. “But you’re better than this.”
“You’re disappointed, then.” They shift together, combining their weight, and it’s Soryong’s turn to strike. Jia meets it full-force. “That’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” says Jia. She pushes Soryong’s staff off of hers and swings through a series of blows while she talks. “You have to let her in. That’s the only way this is going to work. It’s not her, it’s you.”
Soryong sweeps around the blows, walking backwards. “I don’t want to hurt her.”
“You don’t want to hurt yourself,” Jia counters. She swings and Soryong brings his staff up to block it, and she stumbles a bit to one side, her weight thrown off. “What are you so afraid of, anyway? She’s tiny. She can’t do anything to you.”
“Oh, come on,” says Soryong. He thrusts forward and Jia recovers and parries it, reaching, and the next one. “If you really believed that, you wouldn’t have assigned her to me.”
“What am I supposed to do? No matter who it is, you’re going to treat them the same way. Like an outsider. You’re never going to let them drop into that Jaeger.”
“You know what it’s like to break someone.” Soryong swings and misses. “I can’t do that to her, Jia. I just can’t.”
Jia winds up and strikes, passing across Soryong’s face. “You miss him too much to see anyone else.”
Soryong stops. “I can’t miss him,” he says. “He’s with me all the time.”
Jia stops too, as if considering this, and then gently swings her staff forward, engaging him again.
They exchange a few blows silently, walking back and forth, the clicking of their staffs echoing off the walls. Then Soryong says, “Why didn’t you ever try?”
Jia grunts as she swings. “I tried thirteen times.” Her grip is steady, but her voice is wobbly.
“Then you quit. The only reason you’re here is because JY asked you to come back.” Soryong’s breathing hard too, but he stays locked in the position. “You can do it. I’ve seen you. I’m seeing you now, you’re still ready. And you know what?”
“What?”
Soryong grins. “You fight just like Min.”
“What does that mean?” Jia pushes out of the grip, but gently. Now her shoulders are shaking. Their fight hadn’t seemed hard, but now that they’ve stopped the exertion catches up to them.
Soryong wipes sweat off his forehead. He can’t stop smiling. It’s so clear now; how could he have missed it? “It means,” he says, “I think you two are compatible.”
---
One month after she arrives at the Hong Kong Shatterdome, Ranger Lee Minyoung performs her first Drift trial with her partner, Ranger Meng Jia. Officer Jung Soryong is in the control booth, watching the sync monitor as they prepare out on the bridge.
Marshall Park is in the control booth with him. He puts one hand on the back of Soryong’s chair. “Are you ready?” he asks. Soryong laughs.
“I think you should be asking that into the mic, shouldn’t you?”
“No, I’m asking you.” He leans on the desk and peers out the window, where Draco Spectrum stands, its chrome shoulders gleaming. “Are you ready, Soryong?”
“Yes, I’m ready.” Soryong looks down at the controls, at his hands. “I mean, I don’t know if I’m ready. But...” He inhales deeply and smiles up at Jinyoung. “I think it’s time.”
Jinyoung crosses his arms and nods. “As long as you feel good about this. It’s your responsibility, too.”
Out on the bridge, Jia and Min stand next to each other as the operators set up the gear. Jia turns over her shoulder and Soryong gives her a thumbs up. He can’t see her face, but then she turns to look at Min, and Soryong can’t see their eyes, but he knows.
“Believe me, sir,” he says, “this is the best I’ve felt in five years.”
“Initiating neural handshake,” says the A.I., and Min and Jia turn back to face away from him, towards Draco Spectrum.
“Big brother’s in good hands, don’t worry,” Soryong murmurs, and the orange glow around his right eye flares and then dulls down, appeased. He watches as Min and Jia lock in, and the numbers climb, and his heart soars as they drop.
notes: 1. this fic requires a medium level of familiarity with pacific rim. the wiki may be helpful.
2. anything involving the drift and numbers comes from my headcanon that 100% synchronization is either unachievable or unsustainable, even by the most drift-compatible. i glossed over/strayed from the precise details of the established timeline when it suited me. if anything looks particularly wrong or contradictory, please let me know.