Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Not even the looming apocalypse can touch the Shatterdome cantina on a good night, but good nights have been few and far between in the past year.

Nanami Kento goes anyway. Mainly because it’s Higuruma’s turn to buy. The two of them have claimed their usual stools, tucked in the back corner along the bar where the lighting is decent and the noise tends to keep its distance. Tonight, the younger rangers are already at it, spilled together in a booth and raising screaming toasts every other minute. Two of their number have just run their first solo op—a Category 2, but no small feat—and the rest of them are making it everyone else’s problem.

“Let the kids be kids,” Nanami mutters as Higuruma grimaces. “Did you see the replays?”

“Haven’t had time,” Higuruma replies, taking a pull from his whiskey that looks desperate. He’s been stretched thin recently, but Nanami’s not going to pry. The less he knows about what goes on in the thorny warrens of Shatterdome legal, the better.

Instead, he pulls out his phone and brings up the footage, tilting it so Higuruma can see. The battle plays out in miniature, the noise of kaiju bellows and Jaeger engines drowned entirely by yet another burst of yelling from the rangers in their booth. “The fight was textbook, but Mahoraga Storm’s showing a lot of promise. They might pit them against the next Cat-3 that comes our way.”

He’d meant it as a hopeful thing, but it only makes the lines in Higuruma’s face deeper. It irks Nanami worse than it should. They come to the cantina to commiserate, to share twin pours and celebrate the end of weeks that seem to be wearing longer and longer, but this is something else entirely. Higuruma’s bringing down the mood without at least the courtesy of elaborating why.

“Out with it,” Nanami grunts.

“They’re pushing to get Six Eyes operational again.”

Nanami eyes his own glass first, then Higuruma’s. Neither of them have drunk enough for what he said to make sense. Six Eyes—the strongest jujutsu-powered Jaeger in the world—has been out for the count for a full year, and Shatterdomes up and down the Asian coasts have been fighting like hell to make up the difference as kaiju attacks have gotten stronger and more frequent. It was a miracle of engineering, capable of channeling two special grade copilots, built specifically for the most promising pair of cadets ever to graduate from Jujutsu Tech.

Then the first ever Cat-5 had come through the Breach and set its sights on Tokyo. LOCCENT had named it Curseeater, and Six Eyes had gone up against it solo. They fought eight agonizing hours of uninterrupted combat until both mech and beast were nearly at a standstill, but the kaiju had only been biding its time. Curseeater struck hard and fast, with Six Eyes too worn down to keep up its defenses, and in the blink of an eye, Geto Suguru had been torn from the cockpit. Curseeater turned tail and fled for the Breach. It had been stitched together for a single purpose, designed solely to take out humanity’s strongest weapon, and it had done it in one fell swoop.

Nanami had watched the first half of the fight from his post in the command center, but the shift change had him clocking out before its horrific conclusion. Later he learned the remaining pilot nearly drowned himself dragging the punctured Jaeger after his quarry. The retrieval team had to physically restrain Six Eyes, leashing it to no fewer than five max-lift choppers to stop it from crawling the seabed all the way to the Breach and throwing itself in.

The Jujutsu Defense Corps doesn't let go of its investments easily.

“They’re retrofitting it for a new set of sorcerers?” Nanami asks, but that can’t be it—otherwise word would have made it to LOCCENT and he wouldn’t have heard it out of legal first.

Higuruma shakes his head. The look in his eyes could plunge a Jaeger to the bottom of the Pacific. “The higher-ups would aren’t wasting Gojo Satoru—not when he’s still got time on his contract. The recovery year they gave him was generous. They’re putting him back in that cockpit, and they’re in the process of figuring out who they can shove in there with him.”

The whiskey sours on Nanami’s tongue. No wonder legal’s been burning the candle at both ends recently. In happier circumstances, the pairing of pilots is an audition process that boils down to raw chemistry, but things get ugly when a willing party can’t be found. It becomes a matter of scouring through all the neural maps on record for a match, which narrows into protracted legal fights based on the pilots’ contracts. “Do you know who it’s going to be?” he asks.

“Not yet, but they’re honing in on a methodology,” Higuruma says, swilling his drink. “Makes you glad you got your release, huh?”

Nanami flashes him a dangerous look, and Higuruma sobers. "Sorry." He knocks his shoulder into Nanami's. "Didn't mean it like that."

"It's fine," Nanami says. In truth, he never knew how lucky he'd been until he met Higuruma Hiromi and learned about the intricate snares of pilot contracts. His release from service had been uncomplicated, and he’d pivoted into operations with little fuss. He hadn't yet graduated into the ranks of the rangers, and the legal binds were far looser on cadets. Once the JDC started construction on a Jaeger meant to channel your precise cursed technique, the trap closed. The shackles went on.

But Nanami's escape hadn't been worth the price.

He knows what it's like to lose a copilot. Knows how it feels to have the drift go from screaming panic to sudden, awful quiet. He wouldn't wish it upon his worst enemy. He never wants to feel that void again, and now that his drifting days are over, he never will. All that's left is the raw tangle of grief in his heart and a certainty that his mind is salted earth.

And some poor bastard is about to get legally forced into drifting with a similar monstrous loss. “What’s the methodology?” Nanami asks.

Higuruma opens his mouth, but whatever he’s about to say is drowned out by a sudden swell of boisterous noise from the young rangers’ booth. One of them’s just been shoved bodily off his seat and onto the floor. For a moment, Nanami worries a fight is about to break out, but the pink-haired kid is laughing so hard he can barely breathe, flat on his back with the rest of his peers jeering at him. Even the girl who seems to have done the shoving is grinning.

Nanami’s long since given up on trying to divine what’s funny to these kids. All of them are fresh out of cadet training, a full decade younger than him, and they might as well be an alien species—one that’s difficult to understand but pleasant to observe. They remind him of lighter days. Before his mind was irrevocably wrecked. Before his optimism got cut at the root.

He allows himself a soft smile, but it’s quickly smothered by the look on Higuruma’s face as he watches the kid’s copilot extract himself from the booth and drag his compat up off the floor. “The higher-ups are pushing… younger,” Higuruma mutters, his voice so low Nanami has to lean close enough to smell the whiskey on his breath. “Something about how a more resilient mind might better handle the shock of drifting with that much raw trauma. And of course, they’ve only just signed their contracts. Plenty of years of service ahead. The last I heard—”

He pauses, leaning even closer, like he barely trusts the secret to make it to Nanami’s ears alone.

“Last I heard, they could even split up an established pair to do it. Anything to get a good neural match.”

It’s not a decision. Later, Nanami will think back on this moment as a light going on, illuminating a path he was already walking. Every step he took before was inevitable in the same way every step he takes after will be. And because the choice is already made, all he does is take an unhurried sip of his drink—perhaps a bit heavier than the ones that preceded it—shake his head, and mutter, “Fuck.”

Chapter Text

“I’m required to give you a physical,” Ieiri Shoko says. “I’m not required to tell you this is a horrible idea, but I’m going to do it anyway.”

Nanami grimaces as his former classmate winds the blood pressure monitor’s cuff around his bicep. The thing is, of all the people he attended Jujutsu Tech with, Ieiri’s the one whose opinion he most respects. Maybe because she’s one of the few who never set her sights on a Jaeger, who’s chosen to apply her cursed technique in a completely different fashion. She’s also the person who knows Gojo Satoru best—at least among the living.

She knows what she’s talking about, is what it boils down to.

“It is a horrible idea,” he acknowledges.

Ieiri huffs as she pumps the cuff tight, then lets it sigh its release. “It’s suicidal. You were supposed to be smarter than this, Nanami.”

“Hate to disappoint.”

“Your blood pressure’s a little high,” she mutters. “Not high enough to disqualify you,” she adds with unvarnished disappointment. “Stressful times over in LOCCENT?”

“Stressful times everywhere,” he replies. “You must have seen your share of it.”

“I’m tired of patching up Jaeger pilots I know personally,” Ieiri says with a pointed look. “But that’s not the crux of the issue here. You’ve clearly kept yourself in fighting shape. You’ll be able to hold your own in the cockpit. But holding your own in a drift with him?”

“What’s he like nowadays?” Nanami asks.

Ieiri takes a moment to think. “Motivated,” she says at last. “Motivated like I’ve never seen him before. He used to act like he was doing us all a favor every time he loaded into Six Eyes—fighting kaiju just to test the limits of the power he could channel into that monstrosity. Now he’s single-minded about getting back out there. Tearing those things to shreds with his bare hands if he has to.”

The answer catches Nanami off guard. He hasn’t made much of an effort to keep in contact with Gojo since their school days beyond the occasional moments a comm line between Six Eyes and LOCCENT has connected them. He sent flowers and a card after Geto, offering an understanding ear if he ever needed to talk. He’d meant it, but he knew it would come off as the usual perfunctory niceties.

Gojo never reached out.

If he had, maybe Nanami wouldn’t be stuck in the massive assumption he made when he volunteered to test their compatibility. He’d thought they shared the same grief, the same hole torn in them. Nanami had held Yu’s upper half in the sparking, flooded remains of their cockpit and groaned empty promises into his hair, his thoughts howling into the merciless void of the drift. He’d felt the warmth leach from his compat and decided right then and there that his place in this fight could no longer be on its frontlines.

But it sounds like Geto’s death has had the opposite effect on Gojo.

If that’s the case, they might not even clear basic drift compatibility.

After years of observation, Nanami thought he had Gojo’s thought processes all figured out, but this moment dredges up an old school memory that’s long been stuck in his craw. It was someone’s birthday—a decade passing has erased whose precisely—and a group of them had gone out to one of the beaches at dusk, a scar torn in Tokyo’s shoreline where a kaiju made landfall twenty years ago. The sky had been gloomy, verging out outright dire, with clouds hung low that reflected the spill of the city’s heart. Gojo had whined about not being able to see any stars, but Nanami didn’t mind. They’d all lit sparklers. Yu and Ieiri had chased each other around with them, shouting joyfully over the water they kicked up, while Geto scolded them for getting their shoes wet until they lost patience and grabbed him by the arms to drag him into the shallows.

It was strange to him, then, that Gojo held back. Nanami expected him to either come stomping gallantly to Geto’s rescue or if not that, at least go help push him in. But instead there was this fleeting moment—frozen perfectly in Nanami’s memory—where Gojo had caught his eye.

He can picture it precisely. Gojo’s violently blue eyes, lit by the bright snaps of the sparkler he held, his stark white hair tossed back by the breeze rolling in off the bay. And the expression he wore, where for once, Nanami couldn’t even pretend to guess what was going on in his head.

He’ll never know how long they held that look. Longer than they should have. Long enough to make it last.

That’s the Gojo he should have remembered before he put his name in.

“Well there’s nothing physically wrong with you,” Ieiri says, snapping him back into the body that has, apparently, passed muster. “Your neural map’s horrendously out of date, but there’s no point in taking all that time to redo it when a test drift will tell us what we need to know. We’ve got the chamber booked for the next hour. Satoru’s already prepared.”

Nanami stiffens, thrown both by the intimacy of Gojo’s first name and the prospect of drifting so soon. He knew they were eager to get moving. He should have anticipated this too.

Ieiri clocks his hesitation. “I can try to get it kicked back a few hours. Order a few more tests before I clear you.”

The offer is tempting. Nanami feels a querulous, teenage part of himself begging for time to forget the memory he’s just excavated. He’s not sure what, exactly, it reveals about him, but he knows it’s going to follow him into the drift and it’s the last way he wants to start their first handshake.

But thoughts of his own youth lead inevitably back to the kids in the cantina. To their uncomplicated joy, their unblemished triumph. The higher-ups are acting with wartime desperation. He’s seen it push them into reckless action more than once from his comfortable seat in ops. Pilots thrown out into combat with unsteady neural handshakes. Jaegers rushed off the production line to meet the latest crisis head-on, completely untested. Nanami pictures what they’d do with a gap in the schedule.

“No time like the present,” he says.

--

They fit him with a new drivesuit, sleek black with a presumptuous electric blue trim matched to Six Eyes’ detailing. It’s not the full kit—no need for that until he’s in a proper cockpit—but even the weight of the circuitry suit hugging close to his skin has Nanami missing the button-ups, slacks, and suspenders that had become his uniform in ops.

The last time he walked into one of these chambers, he’d been fifteen years old and wide awake, electric with the prospect of drifting with someone for the first time. He’d feared his thoughts would tilt inevitably toward something embarrassing, even though his instructors had repeatedly told him that the drift didn’t work like that, but that fear had immediately been shouldered out of the way by a greater dread when he took in the setup. At the heart of the chamber lay the twin helmets that would link up with his circuitry to bridge his mind with his potential compat’s.

On its far side lay the paper screen. Just behind it, he could make out a kneeling form, lit from below where the higher-up’s interface glowed. He’d never been in a room with one of the mysterious strangers who controlled the jujutsu world before, but he could feel the weight of their judgement, the way they could alter the course of his life with nothing more than the wave of a hand.

Now an adult, Nanami steps into the test chamber with far less concern—partly because he’s managed to wrest his destiny away from these people once before, and partly because Gojo’s already arguing with the person behind the screen.

He has the nerve to squat to their eyeline, his head tilted arrogantly to the side. With Gojo’s back to him, Nanami has to guess at his expression, but he can picture a petulant pout. “I’m just saying, I deserve some transparency. You’re expecting me to drift blind with whomever you’ve picked?”

“We did not pick,” the higher-up replies, their voice a level calm against Gojo’s whine. “We had a volunteer.”

It’s at that moment the chamber door clunks shut behind Ieiri. Gojo’s head snaps around. Usually Nanami can’t help locking on to the blue, but he finds his gaze drawn just below it, to the dark smudges beneath Gojo’s eyes. Humanity’s strongest sorcerer looks like absolute shit.

“Ah,” is all Gojo has to say. Then, “No. No—you’ve got to be joking.”

The circuitry suit goes tight around Nanami’s neck as he squares his shoulders. “You know I don’t joke,” he replies.

“Not you,” Gojo hisses, holding up a finger that Nanami instantly wants to snap off. “You’re telling me the best you’ve got is Nanami?” he groans at the figure behind the screen. “He hasn’t touched a Jaeger in a decade.”

“The search for a qualified compat prioritizes willingness,” the higher-up says. “And Nanami Kento stepped up.”

“I’m not getting in a cockpit with a has-been who couldn’t hack it—”

“Gojo,” Ieiri interrupts, her voice practically a slap and not a word too soon.

Gojo ducks his head, then pushes to his feet. “Fine. You cleared it?”

Ieiri gives him a stiff nod.

Nanami appreciates the backup, but he hasn’t missed that Gojo’s talking to anyone but him. “Let’s see what we’re working with before we throw around words like has-been,” he says. The JDC should give him a medal purely for the civility he’s forcing into his tone.

Gojo looks him up and down, and for a moment Nanami swears there’s something that looks suspiciously like fear creasing the corners of his eyes. Before he can be sure of that, Gojo cracks a strained-looking smile and claps his hands. “Sure, Nanami,” he says with a singsong lilt. “Meet me in the drift and we’ll find out exactly what you signed up for.”

Chapter Text

“I’ll take the left hemisphere,” Gojo declares.

Nanami had already been planning on taking the right, but he resents the way Gojo says it—like it’s already been decided. It’s been nonstop friction since he entered the chamber, and every hitch is another test of his convictions. Another reason to pull the plug before it’s too late.

Nanami steps up to the right helmet anyway. He takes the weight of it in his hands, stunned at how familiar it feels even after all these years. The wires attached to its rear go slack as he lifts it to his brow. Out of the corner of his eye, Gojo’s already crammed his over his head, snapping down the visor like he’s desperate for its cover.

Nanami takes his time, fussing with the fitting to make sure it sits snug before threading the plugs carefully into the connections on his circuitry suit. He remembers it. All of it. All too well.

He’s not going to panic. He’s spent years cultivating himself into the antithesis of panic, the steady hand and reliable calm in LOCCENT. The story he told himself was that three years of cadet training prepared him for worst case scenarios, that he could handle anything thrown at him.

It was a lie.

He snaps the final connection home anyway.

“Pilots staged,” the higher-up behind the screen announces. “Initiating drift.”

Nanami closes his eyes, trying to tune out the sound of the switches being thrown. It’s not difficult—he’s already breathing hard enough to cover most of it.

“You good over there?” Gojo calls. He’s still singsongy, still treating this like a joke.

Nanami takes a deep breath and holds it. He won’t be toyed with. He won’t let this overcome him before—

The drift takes him like a wave, swelling up through his nervous system and closing over his head before he can properly brace for it. His sense of self crumbles, and he feels each little component of his life begin to slip through his fingers in grains.

It’s exactly the maelstrom he feared. Endless, circular, howling in the place where his ears should be, the place where his heart should be. The only safety is the eye in the center of it, but even with his focus pinned to the false calm in the middle, he’s still surrounded on all sides. He’s boiled away to the raw essence of his consciousness, crowded in by memories that layer over each other like a jumble of celluloid.

Childhood scraped knees. The choking burn of stolen whiskey down his throat. The first kaiju attack he ever witnessed, the mad scramble to the shelter, the press of bodies as his mother and father made themselves into walls and forced room for him to breathe. That one he grabs for like a rookie—tries to hold on tight to the RABIT as it whips past in the frenzy. He needs those walls now.

But the reality of the drift, the rule of the drift, is that no boundary survives it. And here comes the deluge—the tsunami of another consciousness slamming over him.

Electric blue eyes reflected back in a mirror. Kneeling in a clan meeting, three times smaller than everyone else. Suguru. Suguru. Suguru. A whirlpool with dark eyes and an easy smile, a heartbeat under a palm, the jumble of an empty space where it shouldn’t be—and suddenly all organizing principles of this barely-controlled chaos dissolve. No maelstrom. No storm at all. Just a scream.

They don’t hear the scream. They are the scream, tearing through matter as only sound can. They’re a desperate howl to find what’s missing, to fill the awful emptiness of a vacuum. The consequence of complements merging at the fulcrum instead of balancing the scales.

Mistake. But even that notion is enough for Nanami to discretize himself, a fixed point of disagreement he can anchor on with enough purchase to lift his head from the surface of the drift. He knew what he was getting into. He knew what had to lurk in Gojo’s head, because it’s the same wound that scarred over for him a decade ago. It’s tearing open now. He’s seventeen and all he wants is Yu back. That ache calls to its like, to the behemoth that is ten years of drifting together with the same endpoint.

The force of it is crushing, but Nanami fights it with everything he has. He came out the other side of that grief. He wills Gojo to understand that inevitably he will too. It just takes time.

Time they don’t have.

And back under he goes, like he’s just swallowed a hook and the line is reeling. Trust pessimism to be his downfall, to be the thing that unifies their minds unshakably. They can’t come into alignment over their wounds, but one thing they can peaceably agree on is how fucked they are.

The funny thing is it works. The maelstrom starts to settle. Nanami feels his body come back to him, feels the uncomfortable tightness of the circuitry suit grounding him in his skin.

Feels a second mind, nestled uncomfortably against his own.

He grits his teeth. Eases his right palm skyward and lifts his arm. Sees it twinned in his periphery.

“Right hemisphere calibrated,” the higher-up announces.

His left arm repeats the motion, feeling like a sleeve someone else is wearing. He doesn’t own the impulse, but he’s unified behind it.

“Left hemisphere calibrated. Calibration complete.”

It doesn’t feel complete. It feels like he’s just been put through a woodchipper. Nanami’s been through bad drifts—distracted drifts, even incompatible drifts in his early days as a cadet, before he and Yu settled together—but nothing like the absolute shitshow the two of them just emerged from. He doesn’t trust the stability of their connection, even with their calibration confirmed. It feels like one wrong move will throw him back into the storm.

He's still breathing hard, but now it’s mirrored. Gojo’s chest rises and falls in sync with his. Nanami fights the impulse to tell him to stop, but there’s no fighting a thought in the miasma of the drift, and Gojo gives him a sharp look and a thought that solidifies into an agreed what the fuck was that? The sync is undeniably there, but it feels wrong.

Or maybe it just doesn’t feel like Yu. Doesn’t feel like the joy of a mind in parallel, a unified purpose. They aren’t two dancers swaying to the same melody—they’re two horses yoked to the same cart.

Stop it, Gojo snaps across the drift. Stop thinking about him, stop—

You first, Nanami retorts. He’s been holding the drone of Gojo’s thoughts at bay, but they run along such similar tracks that it’s taking an absurd degree of effort to keep from getting sucked back in.

“The hell is going on in there?” Ieiri’s voice cracks through their focus, both realizing they’d completely forgotten she’s in the room. She peers at a tablet readout, running her fingers through the data. “These numbers—”

Nanami draws a breath, bracing to scrub it. Good thing they took the simulation for a spin before this disaster had a chance to get near a functioning Jaeger, because there’s no way in hell they’d ever get this clownery more than a step out of their bay.

“You’re hitting career-high sync percentages. Both of you.”

Not possible. The thought is simultaneous, unquestionably mutual, reinforcing the point even as both of them vehemently reject it. This doesn’t feel like a career-high drift—it feels like building the airplane on the way down. But the more Nanami focuses on the truth of their bodies, the more he realizes the numbers don’t lie. Their physiologies are in chaos, their minds in utter turmoil, but it’s paired so perfectly he barely senses the intrusion. A simultaneous meltdown.

A half-second later, they realize exactly what this means, their joint attention settling on the screen and the shadow of the higher-up kneeling behind it.

A pilot’s wellbeing has never been core to the JDC’s mission. They have a higher calling. The defense of humanity takes precedence. The personal can be flogged into shape to suit the numbers’ promise.

Their unbeatable sync percentage has condemned them to share a cockpit.

And the storm raging inside their drift—that’s probably condemned them to die in it.

Chapter Text

Nanami Kento was not emotionally prepared to be a twenty-seven-year-old man sleeping in a bunk bed.

But these are pilot quarters, and he’s a pilot now. He’s been issued a basic wardrobe—t-shirts stamped with JDC branding, a jumpsuit that feels as baggy as the circuitry suit was tight, and perhaps most damning of all, a bomber jacket with Six Eyes scrawled across its back and a single blue eye embroidered at the lapel. He rubs one thumb dispassionately over the threads’ patterning, wondering—because he can’t help but wonder, now that the dams in his mind have been washed out—what his and Yu’s Jaeger might have been.

They’d talked about it, of course. Every cadet pair couldn’t help imagining the ultimate personification of their partnership. Nanami had always envisioned a lean, lithe build—something that could easily channel his precision strikes. Yu wanted mirrors along the arms that would flash proudly in the sun every time he pulled light out of cursed energy. They’d spent many fruitless hours brainstorming names, sprawled on their favorite window bench at Jujutsu Tech with Yu’s head laid in Nanami’s lap. He’d shot down every single one of Yu’s picks.

He'd be proud to pilot any of them now. Give him Corona Strike. Give him Seven Radiant. Any of Yu’s fanciful Jaegers were better than Six Eyes.

“Slick, right?” Gojo asks from over his shoulder, and Nanami jolts back from the wardrobe and his reverie.

“It’ll take some getting used to.”

Gojo scoffs. “You wore cadet uniforms for three years—you’ll live.”

Nanami tamps down the fight he wants to have. The room around them is a testament to the different paths their lives have taken, and he’s not sure how to explain to a man who’s spent the past ten years in military quarters that this is going to be a bit of an adjustment.

His eyes flick back to the bunk beds.

“Top bunk’s yours,” Gojo says. It’s another blunt declaration of something Nanami was already planning on doing, but it grates less after the awful experience of sharing the drift. Maybe because before, Nanami had never pictured Gojo as a bottom bunk kind of guy.

Maybe because now he’s been in his head long enough to understand. The top bunk used to be Gojo’s. He hasn’t slept in it in a year.

This strange, sudden intimacy is another thing Nanami wasn’t prepared for. He feels as if he belongs in this room, a residual of being in Gojo’s head, but he doesn’t know how to navigate his own presence. Worse, Gojo notices immediately. “Don’t get all fussy on me,” he says, slinging himself into the bottom bunk with a worrisome creak. “You’re a grunt now. You’re gonna be grateful for the luxury accommodations the JDC has seen fit to put us up in.” He pauses, considering. “Was it really that much better in ops?”

Nanami shrugs. “Had my own apartment off-base. Didn’t have to share it with anyone.”

Gojo raises his eyebrows. “Anyone?”

Nanami’s lips thin at the salacious tone. It’s none of Gojo’s business, even though he’ll inevitably find out the longer they drift. If anything, Gojo should understand better than most. Nanami lost his best friend, his closest confidant, the person he shared his mind with. He knew better than to let anyone else get close enough to see how bad the damage was. Over the past ten years, he’s had a handful of casual relationships. Sometimes he and Higuruma shut down the cantina and leave together when their Friday night drinks aren’t enough to take the edge off. It’s physical, meaningless, and never invades his space for more than the span of an evening.

“You know as well as I do,” he says, the edge of his words sharp enough to cut. “Someone died in my head. You don’t let anyone else in after that.”

“I let you in,” Gojo says pointedly.

Nanami wonders if he’s imagining the sincerity. “Wartime necessity,” he says.

“Oh, how generous of you,” Gojo simpers. “Finally decided it was time to play the hero after ten year of cowering behind a desk?”

Nanami’s fists tighten. He’s not a hotblooded cadet anymore, and he resents Gojo trying to provoke him like one. So many Jaeger pilots are like this, in his experience. They’re all kept pets of the JDC, never emotionally maturing past that young adult machismo the corps rewards them for.

But he’s a pilot now too. Not a peacekeeper, not a stabilizer. So he braces one hand over the lower bunk, looms over Gojo, and looks him dead in the eyes. “If I wanted to be a hero, yours is the last cockpit I would have chosen.”

“And yet here you are,” Gojo replies coolly. In the shadows of his bunk, his eyes shouldn’t be that blue.

“You really think we’re destined for heroics after a drift like that?”

“You were in my head. You tell me.”

“It’s a total clusterfuck in there. We’re both to blame,” he adds, cutting Gojo’s And whose fault is that? off at the pass. “But unless we figure out how to use it, we’re just going to get our asses handed to us in the Jaeger.”

Gojo opens his mouth, then closes it. Nanami gets the feeling he was about to try another deflection, another way of keeping the conversation one-sided. “They’ve already run me through about fifteen different shrinks,” he says instead. “And the net result was exactly what you saw today.”

“Grief takes time,” Nanami offers, but the sentiment is just trite without the truth of the drift behind it. An acidic scowl twists Gojo’s lips. Nanami’s had a luxurious decade with no pressure to hop back into the drift, but the war won’t wait for Gojo to do the same. “It’s going to be ugly,” he offers as a middle ground. “It has to be. But the sync percentage works in our favor if we can just get the rest of the drift under control.”

So easy to say. An impossible mountain to move in practice. But it drains some of the fight from Gojo’s expression, and Nanami will take that tiny victory for tonight. “We’ll see about that,” Gojo offers, then turns on his side to face the wall at the back of the bunk.

He’s so different from what Nanami expected—and even more so curled on his side with his shoulders hunched in. The height he lords is gone, and even though he couldn’t stretch himself fully in the bunk’s narrow confines, there’s something about it that makes him seem smaller. Makes him human—not the JDC’s golden ace, and not the monstrous tsunami of grief Nanami confronted in the drift.

Nanami tries to hold that image with him as he goes through the motions of getting ready for bed, brushing his teeth at the tiny metal sink that folds out of one wall, splashing a bit of cold water on his face, and stripping off the sweats with “JDC” stamped in possessive capitals across the thigh. He clicks off the light without asking and clambers up into the top bunk, and he keeps thinking, He’s just a person. The next time he drifts, he’ll look for the person inside that wave. He’ll try to bring Gojo to the surface.

It's enough of a plan to put the simmering anxiety at ease, which leaves room for the exhaustion from today’s ordeal to take over. Not even the crunchy vinyl mattress under stiff, starchy sheets is enough to keep Nanami from dropping into the deep bliss of his mind going quiet and his thoughts gradually draining away to nothing.

At least, until something wakes him in the middle of the night. He’s momentarily disoriented, every sensation unfamiliar, and the first thing his brain latches onto is the strange, repeating sound coming from beneath him. At first he thinks it’s laughing. A steady rhythm, a pause for breath, the soft stutter of a throat being held back

But he only thinks that because it’s Gojo, and he’s never heard him cry before.

Chapter Text

Nanami has worked for the JDC for the past decade, but he can count on one hand the number of times he’s walked the Shatterdome floor. He’d avoided it whenever possible, content to take a longer trek through the hypocaust tunnels if a reason came up for him to hike to the other end of the base. There were a few times he couldn’t avoid it, the ops crew dragging him out into the scrum of a victory celebration that he couldn’t beg out of. Nanami kept his eyes down.

He lets himself look now. Lets his head fall back to soak in the open space overhead, the retractable roof where the choppers can throw down their cables to harness a Jaeger for deployment, the sturdy, arching beams that descend from the heights to carve out the space for each Jaeger bay. Nanami follows the lines painted on the floor, paring out the pedestrian path that runs a circuit past each of the massive machines, trying for the calm of an old man perusing a sculpture garden.

He's not allowing himself to turn around. He can look at Mahoraga Storm, sleekly built, fresh off the line, not yet repainted after its tangle with the Category 2. He can look at Playful Cloud, a retrofitted Mark 1 that’s been passed down in the Zen’in family of sorcerers since the Breach first opened.

He cannot look behind him. He cannot look at Six Eyes. The metal monster that’s now his metal monster, the cockpit that will carry him to his death.

Even if he’s due there in less than ten minutes.

Nanami can feel someone watching him from above. He has a few guesses who, and it’s ruining his concentration completely. He’d thought coming to the Shatterdome floor would somehow make him feel like a pilot again, that he’d see the Jaegers and harness that youthful pride he remembers. He thought that might be enough to steel him for another drift with Gojo.

He turns and makes his way to the elevator, still not looking up.

--

Gojo’s already loaded into his drivesuit by the time Nanami reports for duty. “Never thought I’d be the punctual one in this partnership,” he remarks, toying with the plugs along his arms as he watches the technicians manhandle Nanami into his armor.

“You’re only up this early because of me.”

“And how do you know that?”

“Because I didn’t hear a single alarm go off the entire time I was getting ready.”

Gojo snorts. “I don’t need alarms.”

Nanami’s about to fire back, but something about the way he says it catches him before he can find the words. Back in their school days, Gojo was the heaviest sleeper in their class. He’s seen him nap in all sorts of uncomfortable positions, usually dead to the world until Geto shook him awake.

Maybe he’s not sleeping so well, now that there’s no Geto to wake him from it.

He flinches from the intimacy of that thought—which is rich, given that they’re about to drift. The playbook says this second time should go smoother, now that they’ve had a chance to get acquainted with each other’s headspace, but smoother might not be enough to carry them successfully through their first ride in Six Eyes. Especially not if Nanami’s stumbling against the ghost of Gojo’s thought processes before they’ve even strapped into their conn-pod.

Find the person inside the wave, he reminds himself as the last piece of his battle armor locks into place.

Gojo leads the way through the hatch at the back of the conn-pod. If he hadn’t, Nanami would miss the moment of hesitation before he steps over the threshold.

It puts a chill in his blood. This is the first time Gojo’s been back in Six Eyes, isn’t it? The second the thought lands, he knows it’s true. The last time Gojo was in this cockpit, he watched Geto Suguru get ripped out of it.

It’s like the JDC wants his mind flayed alive.

And yet, Nanami toes into the mounts without complaint, letting the pistons lock him into the right side pilot position. Hydraulics whine behind him, a pressure at his back as the connection to the machinery overhead eases home. Every piece snapping into place sends a rush of heady power through him.

Perfect for the fight he’s spoiling to have. The JDC expects him to take shitty scenario after shitty scenario lying down, all in the name of the war effort. It’s not fair to him, and it’s not fair to Gojo either.

He glances sidelong at his copilot as the wrist mounts lock into place, caging the last free bit of his body in the Jaeger’s machinery. Gojo’s stare is fixed on some distant point that might as well be the other side of the Pacific.

Nanami still can’t quite read him. But if he’s just as pissed about this—and why wouldn’t he be?—then hitting a sync isn’t going to be a problem.

“Good morning, Six Eyes,” a familiar voice announces in his helmet.

“Morning, Ijichi,” Nanami replies. “I was wondering who they’d put on my desk.”

“Yes, well, thank you for the promotion. Looks like both of you are locked and loaded. Cockpit is clear. Initializing neural handshake.”

Nanami likes to give his pilots far more lead time than that, but he can’t blame Ijichi for being eager to get this over with. He braces as the countdown starts, trying to settle into the weight of the armor and the way the Jaeger’s restraints lift some—but not all—of it.

The memories come first, a steady rush he’s ready for this time. It’s no longer a strange thing to feel the ache of the ankle he broke back in middle school blending with the familiar press of Higuruma’s shoulder in their cantina seats. He doesn’t even push back against Gojo’s intrusion, against flickers of the unfamiliar that layer over his consciousness. The taste of sugar, far sweeter than anything Nanami would seek out on his own. The ache of loss far keener than the ones Nanami has built himself back from. The wave is just a person. He’s just a person.

The drift hits like a switch being thrown in a stadium, the lights blasting on overhead as all at once Nanami becomes aware of the space he occupies. The simple pilot-to-pilot connection he hit yesterday is nowhere to be found, lost in the enormity of embodying Six Eyes.

He thought it would help, keeping his eyes downturned instead of facing the Jaeger head-on. Thought it would mean he’d slip into sync with its massive body with fewer preconceived notions. Instead, all he feels is the strangeness of a Jaeger custom-built for a different sorcerer pair. The training rigs he rode in with Yu were generic, made to be filled by any pilot. But Six Eyes has a gap where Geto Suguru’s technique is meant to rest, a gap Nanami suddenly finds himself struggling to fill.

He's back in that ocean, fighting to keep his head above the surface, and suddenly it strikes him how absent Gojo has been this entire time. He’s unquestionably in the drift, but Nanami’s been taking the lack of his overwhelming thoughts for granted. Even if it’s better than the alternative, there’s something off about it.

“Right hemisphere calibrated,” Ijichi announces. “Left hemisphere calibrated.”

The hell they are, Nanami thinks. They must be hitting a good sync if LOCCENT is calling it, but they’re not ready for—

A hollow clunk rattles through the conn-pod as the release on the pilot-to-Jaeger controls gets thrown. His body goes electric with awareness of the sudden transformation, held taut by pistons and gears as much as muscle and sinew. He’s four stories tall. He’s standing in the Shatterdome, eye-to-eye with Mahoraga Storm across the bay.

And his long-dormant cursed energy is crackling across the surface of his skin.

The draw is gentle, idle, but it builds in him like static. It demands to be used. “Six Eyes, you are clear to deploy,” Ijichi announces from LOCCENT.

Nanami leans eagerly into the yoke of the drift. Their right leg rises from its cradle, and he fights back the disorienting feeling of his weight shifting on two fronts as the Jaeger leans into the step.

Two fronts, when it should be three.

Something’s wrong. He feels like he’s doing this on his own.

The very instant that thought settles, something snaps in the drift.

“Left pilot abdicated!” The voice in his ear is a thousand kilometers away.

He’s lost the ocean entirely. All he knows is the wildfire. The Jaeger’s metal skin should keep it at bay, but Nanami feels it everywhere. He’s plunging. He’s on his knees in the middle of the Shatterdome, slumped like a puppet with its strings cut, burning like someone’s thrown gasoline over him. There’s a swarm of activity in his periphery, ants crawling over his surface, and if he could scream, he’d shout for them to get back before they all go up in flames.

He's felt this once before.

He’s not sure what he’ll see if he looks to his left.

Mercifully, he passes out before he can.

Chapter Text

Nanami wakes to soft sheets and the faint, nauseating scent of burnt skin.

For a moment, he's ten years younger, freshly cracked open by loss, choking on the smell of his wounds. He squeezes his eyes shut, taking long, slow breaths through his mouth until the sensation passes.

“I told you this was a horrible idea.”

Nanami cracks an eye open to find Ieiri leaning over his bedside. "What happened?" he croaks.

“It was a pileup of bad scenarios,” she replies around the unlit cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth. “You had an inexperienced officer running ops who didn't take his time. You had two pilots whose last ride in a Jaeger resulted in the death of their copilot. And then...” Ieiri pauses. The look she's giving him says she doesn't trust him to react well to the ultimate reason he's lying in this infirmary bed.

Nanami spares her the trouble. “Gojo abdicated.”

“Yeah,” she mutters. “That fucker.”

Abdication is supposed to be a last resort. In the event a pilot needs to get out of a drift fast but the Jaeger needs to keep operating, there's an emergency release that will snap one pilot out and leave the other to bear the load solo. It's meant for desperate times, for the heat of battle, for do-or-die.

A test run is none of those things, but Gojo pulled the plug anyway.

Leaving Nanami to burn.

He should be here. He should be here and on his fucking knees, groveling for forgiveness. Nanami’s hands wind tighter and tighter in the bedsheets, leaning into the faint ache it creates on the irritated patches of skin that Ieiri’s worked her magic over. “Am I free to go?” he asks.

Ieiri gives him a long look, one where he can see every ounce of professionalism she’s trained for warring outright with her personal feelings on the matter.

Professionalism wins. “I have to keep you for observation for another few hours. But if you aren’t fully cooled off by then…” A fierceness lights her eyes, and for a moment Nanami sees the absolute terror this woman could be in a Jaeger. “…give him hell from me, too.”

---

Nanami’s never been the type to cause a scene, but his release from the infirmary just happens to coincide with the lunch hour. He finds Gojo in the center of the Shatterdome cafeteria, cheerfully digging into a hefty serving of katsu curry, and his world narrows to a point like a laser sight targeting. “You,” he thunders over the cafeteria’s bustle.

Gojo takes a bite, his focus on his tray unbroken. He doesn’t look up when Nanami’s shadow falls over him.

Nanami grabs him by the collar, wrenching him up out of his seat.

Gojo keeps chewing.

“You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve,” Nanami snarls. “You think this is some sort of game?”

Gojo shrugs, leaning closer to the table, stretching his chopsticks toward his lunch. Nanami jerks him back, and Gojo huffs.

They’re drawing stares. This is the first look most of the Shatterdome is getting at their partnership, and boy is it an eyeful. Over Gojo’s shoulder, Nanami spots the young rangers from the cantina clustered around a single table, their eyes locked owlishly on the spectacle. As he looks on, the pink haired kid’s next bite drops unceremoniously into his lap.

“With me,” Nanami grunts, and drags Gojo to the doors.

There’s a nook a few meters down the corridor—not exactly private, but out of the way enough that they can have this talk without the whole Shatterdome listening in. Nanami all but throws Gojo into it. He catches himself on the wall with one hand, the other clenched around his chopsticks like he has half a mind to try to fend Nanami off with them. “Get it out of your system,” Gojo mutters.

“You absolute bastard,” Nanami spits. “When I signed on to join you in that cockpit, I thought I would at least be riding with a competent pilot. Not someone who pulls the rug out from under me barely a minute into a drift and gets me fucking hospitalized.”

“I couldn’t…” Gojo’s gaze is fixed on some rivet in the wall next to him.

“There’s no excuse on the planet that can justify what you did back there,” Nanami seethes. “And you can’t use a single one on me. It was my first time in a Jaeger since my copilot died too. It hurt like hell to hit that sync, and I know you know that because you were literally in my head. So tell me why—”

“I don’t want this,” Gojo snaps, and finally his electric blue eyes come to rest on Nanami’s, blazing with hurt. “I never wanted this, but they won’t let me break contract. They can march me into that Jaeger on my own two feet or they can drag me in at gunpoint—all of it’s legal. I’m meat for the JDC to stuff in that suit. So fuck me, I guess, for finding somewhere I had a choice and taking it.”

“Yes,” Nanami says, low and level. “Fuck you.”

He reaches up for his own t-shirt collar and pulls down.

Gojo's gaze drops, his eyes widening as they rove over the scar tissue Nanami's just exposed. Ten years on, they've faded, the raised tissue gone pale and silvery, but the shape is unmistakable, the lines drawn by an overheated circuitry suit branching over his left side. “I kept them,” he says, cutting off the quizzical look that flashes across Gojo's features. “I couldn't let it be something that only lived in my head.”

For a moment, Gojo looks like he's dangerously close to reaching out and touching the scars.

“You forgot, didn't you?” Nanami prompts.

“Of course I didn't forget,” Gojo snaps.  “God, you act like you're the only one who mourned him sometimes. I remember the action reports. It took them three hours to get you out of that cockpit—it was horrific. You just never struck me as masochistic enough to carry that around with you like some sort of badge of honor.” He pauses, his brow furrowed. “Which I definitely should have picked up on in the drift.”

Nanami lets his shirt collar snap back into place. He's bared too much.

“I'm not the only one sabotaging us, huh?” Gojo says.

“Being fucked in the head isn't sabotage,” Nanami replies, dropping his voice lower as a group of technicians wanders past.

“It is when I'm also fucked in the head. When we're just making each other worse in there. C'mon, it's one of the very first things we learned in school—the number one way to throw a drift is to hold back. So if you're too emotionally constipated to give it a real shot, you'd better step aside.”

Nanami's focus sharpens. “No.”

Gojo blinks. Nanami wonders if he's imagining the flicker of fear he sees in his eyes. The dread of being tethered to a sinking ship. “You really are a masochist, huh? You want us to burn together out there, is that it? Why—”

Nanami takes a daring step forward, crowding Gojo back into the wall. They’re chest to chest, closer than they’ve ever been, close enough that the chopsticks Gojo holds jam into Nanami’s thigh. “They were going to put someone in that cockpit with you regardless. Didn’t have to be me. The JDC wanted someone with the neuroplasticity to take your fucked up brain head-on, did you know that? Did you know they were going to stuff you in that cockpit with a fucking kid?”

There’s a long pause where Nanami dares to believe he’s struck Gojo silent. His mouth twitches around a comeback he can’t quite voice. And then his eyes narrow. “Knew you were playing the hero.”

“It’s not—”

“You wanna be a martyr so bad—”

“I swear to—”

The kaiju siren rips clean through their sputtering attempts to talk over each other. Red lights flash up and down the corridor as the whole Shatterdome goes from a lazy afternoon standstill to fully alert in the blink of an eye. Nanami’s hindbrain has already mapped the fastest path from the cafeteria to LOCCENT before he realizes that’s no longer his post. Dread settles in the pit of his stomach.

And Gojo looks thrilled.

That’s not helping.

His copilot is starting to grin, his impossibly blue eyes teetering on the edge of manic. “You wanna be a real hero?” he says, leaning close to Nanami’s ear.

“There’s no way in hell they’ll clear us—”

“We’re loading up. And you’re gonna give me a real drift this time. No holding back. I’ll know if you do and I’ll put you right back in that infirmary bed.” Gojo claps him on the shoulder like this is nothing but a friendly baseball game, like he hasn’t just threatened to tear up Nanami’s trauma at the root, then ducks back out into the corridor and takes off in the direction of the Jaeger bays.

Nanami knows he should probably run the opposite direction. That the court martial for failing to report for duty is probably worth it. That there’s no way in hell it’s a good idea to drift with the Gojo he just confronted.

But he’s also never seen Gojo so eager to drift with him. Unwittingly, he’s gotten exactly what he wanted when he dragged his copilot out of the cafeteria.

Nanami squares his shoulders and sets off for Six Eyes.

Chapter Text

The clearances go through far faster than Nanami expected—but really, it shouldn’t surprise him. The JDC wants a pilot in Six Eyes’ cockpit. They don’t give a fuck if the pilot in question was hospitalized earlier the same day from an incident in that same cockpit. The pistons sigh around him as the connections to his battle armor snap into place, and he might as well have never left.

But that’s not exactly true. As Six Eyes rumbles to life around him, Nanami opens himself to the drift. He doesn’t charge in with all the bluster of this morning, eager to pick a fight. He doesn’t brace for impact like he did back in the test chamber. He lets the waters come to him. Lets them close over his head with nothing more than a steady, deep breath.

He lets himself drift like he used to. Throat bared, unsheltered, raw and truthful. A drift used to feel like holding his heart in his hands—and that’s how it’s supposed to be. A Jaeger pilot doesn’t hide from a storm. They walk right into it.

So this is Nanami’s truth. That he’s spent ten years watching other young hopefuls go through the meat grinder that left him broken. And sometimes they make it out. Sometimes they emerge victorious, kaiju corpses stacked at their feet, their joyous bonds on display for the whole Shatterdome to see, and Nanami claps like he’s supposed to, even though he knows it’s nothing but luck. Nothing but delaying the inevitable.

The dread built and built, and on the day he found out the JDC was going to shove Gojo back into Six Eyes with one of those bright young faces, it finally snapped. But Nanami had spent ten years numb, ten years being the fixed point LOCCENT so desperately needed. There was no room for emotion in that chair, with entire battles hanging in the balance.

There’s plenty of room for emotion in a Jaeger. A Jaeger demands emotion, and Six Eyes was only half-full the last time he strapped in.

Because Gojo’s not the only one hurting.

Nanami loosens the dam that’s held back his grief, his rage, his fighting spirit for the past decade. The resulting swell would sicken him if he were anywhere near his physical form, but in the drift all it does is sharpen every sensation with the clarity of panic. He doesn’t have control. He’s deliberately ceded it. He’s going to be torn to shreds.

But instead he finds a matched force. He finds himself paired. Equalized. They’re in this drift together—in all of its ugliness, all of its sadness, cracked along parallel faults. History repeating itself as it has, as it will, so long as the Breach is open.

And, because they’re being honest with each other, he can feel the knife Gojo holds, ready to cut the cord again at a moment’s notice. He leans into the notion of the blade, daring him to do it even though they both know Gojo won’t. It’s too intoxicating, the feeling of another person’s mind so bare to yours, the bitter joy of not having to explain yourself to someone when your thoughts and your memories and your histories are one and the same.

When their gaze turns outward, it’s in perfect sync. The two of them fit themselves to Six Eyes’ glory, their hemispheres locked into unflinching control of the Jaeger as they stride off the docking mounts. Gojo brings his cursed energy up as easy as breathing. Nanami has to work to match him, but match him he does.

“Six Eyes, you’re lining up nice,” Ijichi’s voice announces in their ears. “Hold for calibration, and we’ll get those choppers in the air.”

Nanami has words for Ijichi, but they can wait until the kaiju bearing down on Tokyo has been dealt with. That is, if they’re up to the task of dealing with it. Playful Cloud has already been deployed, and while Nanami’s certain the Zen’in Jaeger is more than prepared to take on a Cat-3, he’s already bracing for the moment the monster slips through its defenses and Six Eyes becomes the sole guardian standing between the beast and the city he calls home.

That resolve, too, is twinned in the drift. He knew this from running Six Eyes from LOCCENT, but it’s another thing entirely to feel Gojo’s switch flip, to feel his compat get serious all at once. The resulting flare of cursed energy trips a warning light in Nanami’s HUD, and in his peripheral vision, he spots several techs taking a startled step back.

“Let’s, uh, take that back until we’ve got the kaiju in sight,” Ijichi stutters. “You’re calibrated and clear. Hooks are coming down now.”

Save the showboating for the Miracle Mile, Nanami thinks, because he knows both from experience and from the handy access of the drift that Gojo’s completely ignored the first part of what Ijichi said.

God, it’s so much worse when you can do that directly in my brain. But he’s pleased—Nanami can feel it. For once, the feedback loop ping-ponging between them is a positive one, both of them swept away in the giddy rush of letting their cursed energy loose. There might even be a smile pulling on the corner of Nanami’s lips.

The hooks from the choppers lock in, and a sudden storm cloud darkens the drift. A RABIT flashes across Nanami’s consciousness—the last time I was hooked in, five of them pulling as I fought back, I had to get to—and Gojo shudders physically as he fights the urge to chase.

“Easy,” Nanami says out loud, pushing his calm into the drift. He can feel that knife getting closer to the tether, but before the blade can bite, another RABIT skips past. If he’s so calm up there in the tower, we can do this too.

Now it's Nanami fighting the urge to chase—and the RABIT isn't even his. Heat rises in his cheeks, which only stokes the sudden flare of delight blazing at his left.

You prideful little bastard, I knew it.

It's not pride, it's professional intrigue—

The tension snaps taut, and both of them lose their heads to the simple animal instinct, the sensation of being lifted by the scruff of your neck. The thrum of the choppers doubles the moment they clear the Shatterdome roof, and there's no room for rational thought in between the rattling of their teeth and the stomach-dropping sensation of swinging on an eight-thousand ton pendulum. Instead, it’s a swirl of memories layered over each other like film, Jaeger drops blending with amusement park rides blending with confessions that tint the whole experience with a lurid flush.

“Six Eyes, approaching the drop.”

Ijichi’s voice breaks through the daze, the mission brief splaying over their HUDs. A Category 3 kaiju LOCCENT’s nicknamed Yamarashi—hulking, green, and covered head to toe in spikes that look armor-piercing—is approaching Tokyo. Playful Cloud has been deployed to run frontline offense, with Six Eyes assigned to the mouth of Tokyo Bay, ready to intercept any attempt to move on the city.

Love a good Hurry Up And Wait, Gojo thinks bitterly as he scans the details. Missed them so much in my off-year.

We’re a critical part of the city’s defense, Nanami counters, trying to infuse it with a hundred memories of his God’s-eye-view in LOCCENT, but Gojo strikes back immediately with memories of his own, of being hustled into his Jaeger just to stand waist-deep in the ocean for a few hours while another pilot team took all the glory.

This isn’t how Six Eyes, champion of the Tokyo Shatterdome, is supposed to return to action.

We’re nowhere near ready for a blaze of glory, Nanami hums.

But you want it just as badly as I do, Gojo replies. Don’t you dare try to deny it.

Just because I might—MIGHT—doesn't mean you'll catch me defying a direct order, Nanami fires back. Out loud he says, “Six Eyes, ready for the big drop.”

“Confirmed for drop,” Ijichi replies. “Choppers release on my mark.”

Gojo's burst of glee is infectious, ripping a grin from Nanami as Ijichi counts down, the hooks detach, and the Jaeger plummets. They hit the ocean feet-first, their weight bludgeoning through the water until they find purchase in the bottom of the bay. When they rise, the waterline settles at Six Eyes’ hips, leaving their cockpit high and dry with a clear sightline south. In the distance, Nanami can pick out the flecks of the second chopper fleet, hovering over where Playful Cloud deployed.

Nanami itches for his desk. For a battlefield laid out over monitors, for seeing every inch of the fight play out where he can safely guide it to victory. Here, he’s but a cog in the JDC’s strategy—demoted of his own volition, but still demoted. Still a grunt, like Gojo said, because if there’s one thing Gojo Satoru does better than anyone on the planet, it’s see clearly.

Curiosity tugs at him. What else has Gojo seen that Nanami hasn’t?

Gojo scoffs. Course you only want to know when you’ve got direct access to my head.

Because you would have told me directly if I asked outside the drift?

A moment passes, swathed in Nanami’s impression of Gojo—the flippancy, masking the hurt. Pain’s not the only truth, Gojo says, and hits him with that ice-cold clarity Nanami’s starting to develop a genuine taste for.

The thing is, he loves being a pilot—for more than just the dumb grunt reasons Nanami’s always ascribed to him. It was his favorite thing in the world, the freedom to wield the cursed technique he’d been born into, the sense of importance it gave him to be Tokyo’s valiant knight. He loved it, and he loved Suguru, and it nearly killed him to have both torn away in a single blow. This past year, he's felt like a ghost—like something worse than a ghost, because at least a ghost has enough of a sense of self to haul itself out of its grave. And he feared this forced resurrection, because he knows he's coming back wrong, but he can't deny the hunger for the missing piece that's still within reach. Gojo Satoru, pilot of Six Eyes, protector of Tokyo.

And Nanami's handed it back to him. He's made it uncomplicated—and simultaneously very fucking complicated—by choosing to walk into his cockpit, emotional baggage be damned. Gojo knew he wasn't ready for this, but he especially wasn't ready for how easy it would be, now that they're through the snares of the first drifts.

How much he wants to show the world he's back.

Just as that thought hits, there's a sudden flurry of activity on the HUD, paired with a frantic scramble of noise in their comms.

Breakthrough?

Breakthrough.

They're squaring up before the call comes. “Yamarashi has immobilized Playful Cloud,” Ijichi announces, and Nanami has to give him credit for the calm he's maintaining. “It’s headed straight for you.”

“Are the twins okay?” Nanami asks. The Zen’in girls used to be the uncontested winners of the Tokyo Shatterdome’s Most Volatile Pilot Pair title, but that lends itself naturally to Playful Cloud’s fierce fighting style. It's no small thing for them to get taken out by a Cat-3.

“Purely mechanical damage,” Ijichi replies. “Those spikes cut through plating like butter, but the kaiju didn't touch the cockpit.”

The HUD blazes, a 3D scan of the beast spinning before them. A long-dormant part of Nanami's mind awakens at the sight. He doesn't see the kaiju in arms and legs and armored plating—he sees it in measures, ratios. Where to anchor his technique to find that perfect 7:3 strike.

“LOCCENT has identified what we think are weak points in its armor, marked in red. As you can see, they're well-defended by the spines, so it will take precision.”

Nanami had understood, before, that their sync percentage was off the charts, but he’s never really believed it until this moment, where he feels Gojo and him thinking the exact same thing at the exact same time. Nanami can hit those precise targets. Gojo’s infinity will keep the spikes off them.

They’re going to win this.

Chapter Text

Nanami’s not used to easy wins.

When Yamarashi goes down, he doesn’t trust it. He’s right not to—many good Jaegers have been lost to a kaiju they didn’t check for a pulse—but the pulse check turns out to be utterly unnecessary. The single strike Six Eyes dealt shattered the monster’s spine to splinters. There’s no coming back from that kind of nerve damage, even with a secondary brain.

His own relief is nothing in the face of Gojo’s. A year of doubt and anguish has just come to a decisive end, the battle so quick there was barely any time to second-guess his readiness. He’s almost unrecognizable in the drift, lighter in a way that sparks off Nanami’s own thrill. “Fucking hell,” Gojo murmurs out loud. Nanami can feel his grin.

“Not bad,” Nanami replies.

“Not bad? That was incredible.” In the drift, he can feel Gojo reviewing the tapes. Crystalizing the moment Six Eyes struck, so the feeling will never leave his memory. His awe is distinctly directional, honed on Nanami’s technique.

Nanami fights not to preen under the attention. “It was both of us,” he says, shouldering off the unbearable weight of Gojo’s admiration. “That opening only happened because of your infinity.” It had been electrifying to inhabit Gojo’s cursed technique, to wield it in tandem with his own. For a pair of pilots matched through desperation, they’re surprisingly suited for each other. Nanami’s precision and Gojo’s overwhelming force.

Something about that thought clouds the drift. Gojo withdraws into himself, and Nanami feels their sync start to sag. The fight’s over—there’s no need for perfect harmony anymore—but Nanami bristles all the same. This is supposed to be a celebratory moment. Can’t it stay that way?

But no—it’s on him, for thinking this could be that easy.

Before the disconnect can metastasize into a full-blown issue, Ijichi’s voice cuts through the brewing storm. “Choppers are lining up overhead. Steady for extraction.”

Nanami tucks his feelings neatly back into the box he’s kept them in for years. “LOCCENT, we read you. Take us home.”

-

The Shatterdome cantina hasn’t seen a night like this in ages.

It’s no small feat to pack the entire base into the bar, but these are the people whose work topples interdimensional monsters. They get the job done. Maintenance techs press wall to wall with LOCCENT operators, and even the K-science division has emerged from their labs to make an appearance. The smell of sweat and alcohol mingles over the crowd, and the noise fills whatever space the bodies don’t.

Gravity has clustered the cantina’s occupants into three distinct islands. The first centers the Zen’in twins, consoled on all sides by the younger cadets and looking more and more pissed about it with every passing second. A fight’s bound to break out before the night is over—most likely between the twins themselves. Nanami’s seen it happen more times than he can count.

The second, of course, centers Gojo Satoru’s bright star. Tokyo’s hero, its savior, its avenging angel. Today was the closest call the city’s had in years, but it wasn’t enough to get past the newly resurrected Six Eyes, and the Shatterdome is welcoming its pilot back with open arms. Gojo’s laughter carries over the noise as he gamely fends off roughly twenty admirers at once, soaking in their gratitude like a sponge.

Nanami’s startled to find himself the focal point of the third cluster. He’d tried to retreat to his usual stool, but he’d almost instantly been cornered by some of his old LOCCENT coworkers and wrenched out into the cantina’s open floor. Everyone wants to shake his hand, to tell him how they felt the moment they saw Six Eyes make that devastating strike. Ijichi presses a bottle of his favorite top-shelf whiskey into his hand and shouts an apology into his ear over the hubbub, and Nanami immediately uncorks it to pour him a glass and let him know all is forgiven. It’s not just that Ijichi won’t make the same mistake twice—Yamarashi has forged Six Eyes’ new pilot pair. There won’t be an opening for him to make the same mistake again.

All the attention is starting to get to his head. The liquor’s not helping. Nanami’s not used to being seen in the first place, but there’s an added factor here—that it doesn’t even feel properly targeted. People are praising him, but he’s only part of the equation that makes up Six Eyes, and the sum total was what finished off Yamarashi in the blink of an eye. He feels like he’s stealing valor. Not from Gojo, but from what they became together.

Just when it’s starting to overwhelm him, Higuruma finally clears the crowd and makes it to his side. “Oh, thank fuck,” Nanami mutters under his breath, slinging the arm with the bottle over Higuruma’s suited shoulders. Higuruma immediately pulls the whiskey out of his grasp, gives the label a glance and a lift of his eyebrows, and takes a hearty swig.

“That’s the stuff,” he groans. “Don’t even start,” he adds when Nanami opens his mouth to protest the blatant thievery. “It’s your turn to buy.”

“I don’t think they’d let me buy you a drink if I tried,” Nanami scoffs.

“Exactly.” Higuruma waggles the bottle. “You’re a hero.”

“Believe me, I’m aware.”

Higuruma shakes his head. “No, you don’t even know. They’ve been sending us home early. I got to see my apartment in daylight. You might have fucked your life up irreparably, but you totally cleared our slate in the process.”

“Happy to be of service,” Nanami deadpans, tugging the bottle out of his hands to take his own swig.

Higuruma glances at him sidelong, one of those looks that cuts clean through bullshit in court. “How’s it feel?”

Nanami shrugs, tilting the bottle this way and that. “He put me in the hospital this morning. Abdicated and left me to burn in Six Eyes on our first run. It’s probably not going to be in any of the action reports. And now the whole Shatterdome is turning out to celebrate us. That about sums it up.”

On the far side of the cantina, a few of the young pilots have broken away from their pack to crowd around Gojo like a pack of over-excited puppies. He seems to be taking it in stride, laughing good-naturedly along with what Nanami is assuming is their effusive praise, but there’s a hint of tension in his expression. Nanami wonders if anyone else notices, or if he only sees it because he’s spent the day soaked in Gojo’s brainwaves. Gojo’s locking up in the face of kids who’ve spent most of their conscious lives with him as their hero. He’s thinking about living up to that, about how easily they’re welcoming him back, about whether he deserves it.

It hits Nanami all at once. He hasn’t been this close to anyone in ten years, and it happened in one ugly, terrifying, triumphant day. Just a handful of drifts and he understands Gojo inside and out, can read his thoughts from across a crowded bar. It’s horrifyingly intimate, made even worse by how many eyes must be on him at this very moment.

He tightens the arm he has around Higuruma, drawing their heads conspiratorially close. “Speaking of going home early, what do you say we get out of here?”

Higuruma tenses, and the nervous chuckle Nanami feels more than hears drops the floor out from under his evening plans before Higuruma’s even had a chance to say “Oh, buddy—”

“Forget it.”

“No, look, it’s just…” Higuruma pulls a face. “Not with a pilot, you know?”

Nanami does know. He should have already known. What he has with Higuruma worked because they could keep their partitions up, keep it safe from anything remotely near a drastic consequence. Being a pilot changes that calculus significantly—too significantly for them to do anything but call it.

“To keeping it professional,” Nanami says, offering him the bottle. When Higuruma takes it, he frees his other arm and claps the lawyer on the shoulder. “Don’t let Ijichi see you with that or he’ll try to apologize to me again.”

“I’ll make it disappear,” Higuruma replies, taking a deep pull as he tips Nanami a friendly salute. “Go. Enjoy your hero’s rest.”

By some miracle, Nanami makes it out of the cantina without getting stalled by another pack of well-wishers. With the base’s entire population at his back, he savors the empty corridors, the looming views of the fog settling over Tokyo Bay, the way he can make his feet fall soft, even in a pilot’s combat boots. It’s not until he’s halfway back to his quarters that he realizes his quiet has a shadow.

“Thought you were enjoying the party,” he calls over his shoulder.

Gojo slips from the darkness into the cool moonlight that falls across the hall. “I was. But then my copilot snuck out.”

“Don’t let me keep you from the adoring masses,” Nanami says.

Gojo draws closer. In this light, his eyes are impossibly blue. Almost lit from within, like the bioluminescence spackled along a kaiju’s back, like the lure of a deep sea anglerfish. “I saw you with the guy from legal, what’s-his-name. Swing and a miss, huh?”

Nanami’s throat goes dry. The phantom sensation of a drift is creeping up on him the closer Gojo gets, an uncanny ache for a second body in tandem with his that does him no favors. He won’t let himself back down—which only makes what comes next devastatingly inevitable. Less a decision, more a precise alignment of circumstances, the same way he found himself signing on as a pilot. He’s been walking this path for a while now.

Gojo’s so close, but he’s not touching him. No cursed technique crackling between them, but Nanami can feel it all the same—the way he might as well be clear on the other side of the universe. It takes a special sort of arrogance to think you can transcend infinity.

And Gojo’s always seen clean through Nanami’s pride.

The only choice he has to make is how he wants to do it.

In the end, he goes for the only known territory. The only place he’s touched Gojo before. But this time, his grip on Gojo’s collar is gentle, only the barest hint of a gravitational force drawing him in. It gives them time for their eyes lock. Time for their breaths to catch, in eerie synchrony.

Time for Gojo to decide what he wants from this.

The first things he takes are Nanami’s lips.

Chapter Text

It’s not explicit in the manual, but it’s probably an omission of common sense, a command too obvious to write down. Don’t fuck your copilot on day two.

But this doesn’t feel like breaking an unwritten rule. Yes, they’re stumbling hastily back to the privacy of their bunk, Nanami checking over his shoulder no matter how many times Gojo tells him no one’s there. Yes, the higher-ups would probably have their hides for this. But the thing Nanami finally realizes—as Gojo urges him over the threshold, pulling the door shut against his back and Nanami hard against his front in the same motion—is that this is a necessary part of their bonding. An inevitable part of the forging process between two pilots united by the loss of an intimate compat.

He’s horribly aware of the territory he’s broaching, territory that once belonged wholeheartedly to Geto Suguru. At first he tries to tread lightly, but Gojo’s pushing, pulling, doing everything he can to get more of Nanami on him, and he understands. Gojo doesn’t need him to be gentle—he needs him to be tangible. Real. Here. Geto was ripped from his grasp, torn out of Six Eyes in a gut-wrenching blink. It’s only natural that Gojo’s hands latch on to Nanami’s wrists with a grip tight enough to bruise.

And it’s only natural that Nanami lets him. He’s already given himself over to Gojo in so many other ways. Put himself in that cockpit, let his mind rest side by side with the hurricane of grief. All in the name of a cause larger than himself—a cause he’s already laid his body on the line for.

But this isn’t just for the cause. He can’t hide the fact that he craves it, that he’s chasing the contact just as much as Gojo as they grind together. Nanami’s teeth close around the shape of Gojo’s collarbone beneath his t-shirt. His hands tug desperately where his jumpsuit is tied off around his waist. If he inhales, he can still smell the drivesuit rubber clinging to his skin. They went straight from the cockpit to the whirlwind of the Shatterdome’s celebration.

And this is going back. This is hitting that unbeatable sync percentage again, because Nanami doesn’t even have to ask—Gojo’s already walking him back into the shelter of the bottom bunk, groping, squeezing, rucking down the jumpsuit and spinning him around in the same motion that sends Nanami sprawling into the crunchy mattress. There’s barely room for a sharp breath before Gojo’s joined him, teeth at his ear, heat over every inch of his back.

Gojo doesn’t have to ask either. Nanami’s already clawing into the slot in the wall where his stash has been gathering dust.

It’s fast—faster than Nanami would prefer under other circumstances. They fuck like they’re at war, like at any moment, that siren might blare and send them scrambling for Six Eyes. With the rate kaiju have been coming through the Breach, he supposes it’s possible—possible enough that the desperate pace they’re setting feels earned. They haven’t bothered shedding any more clothing than necessary. Jumpsuits stripped down just enough to expose their hips. Nanami’s back gone tacky with sweat under his t-shirt. Their breathing is synced, but out of step with each other, giving and taking like the steady strides of a Jaeger.

There’s a careful line he’s riding, the balance getting more precarious by the second. He’s been in Gojo’s head, and through the echoes of that sync, he knows exactly how to please him. But he also knows all of that knowledge was cultivated over a decade with Geto—that there’s very little Gojo knows about himself outside that context. The closer he gets to that ghost, the more precarious this becomes.

All he can do is let Gojo lead the dance. Meet every firm thrust, but stay pliant to wherever he’s pushed. Which is also not what he’d prefer under other circumstances, but strangely, it’s working for him—this half-clothed, almost teenaged fumbling, the thrill of the transgression, the thought that someone could be wondering where the heroes of the hour disappeared to and never imagine this.

He never could have imagined this. It’s not just that he’s being reduced to a shuddering mess under Gojo fucking Satoru of all people. It’s the way he’s doing it. The hands gripping his hips with bruising force, something Nanami’s never imagined that he would be into in the first place—only apparently he is, and apparently Gojo knows. And yet, it’s not that Gojo knows him better than he knows himself, more that they’re so irrevocably twined that in a moment like this, they exist in a harmony that transcends anything they were before. Possibly anything they’ll be after.

The sync only breaks when Nanami realizes he doesn’t want it to end, in the exact moment Gojo’s thrusts double in force without warning and a flush of heat pulses between them. His weight bears down hard on Nanami’s back as he sags over him. Nanami groans, and groans louder when all Gojo does is chuckle against his nape. “Fucker,” he grinds out into the pillow.

“You liked it.”

He’s not going to dignify that with comment.

“Nanami the martyr,” Gojo singsongs, punctuating it with a nip on the join of his neck. There it is again—that frisson of a thrill that comes from Gojo seeing right through him. Knowing that on some base level, Nanami wanted to be used.

A hand splays over his hipbone, prying into the already tender flesh. Gojo slips out of him and rolls him over onto his back, and Nanami’s breath stalls under the weight of that bright blue gaze. Gojo’s admiration is palpable, as palpable as it was with Six Eyes joining them. He doesn’t need a neural link to know how helpless Nanami is to it.

Or to know what Nanami desperately wants him to do next. Gojo holds his gaze as he eases down Nanami’s body, his breath feathering over the tender red smudges his hands left. He takes Nanami in his mouth languidly, his tongue pulsing teasingly against his length, and through it all, he keeps eye contact. Like he’s daring Nanami to look away first.

Like Nanami could possibly look away from this. The debauched stretch of Gojo’s flushed cheeks, the way the low light catches on his fine, snow-white hair, those impossible eyes gone hazy with lust. Nanami has never felt more human against something so ethereal—at least not until his hand finds its way into Gojo’s hair and urges him down.

If he was being used before, now he’s being spoiled. Gojo saw that Nanami had given himself over, and he’s giving right back. His pace is unhurried—perhaps a tacit apology for the way he finished—and his long, elegant fingers pull teasingly at Nanami’s entrance like he wasn’t just there.

He’s lost the right to call any of their simultaneity uncanny, but it’s still new, the way Gojo moves with him as easy as breathing, the way he knows exactly how to crook the digits that slip inside Nanami, exactly how to swallow the cock stuffed down his throat. Nanami’s already wound tight, but pride has him fighting the pleasure building in him, which only encourages Gojo to clamp down hard, which makes it inevitable, really, when Nanami bucks into a ripcord pull of an orgasm that Gojo just takes, wicked blue eyes at half-mast.

When Nanami finally remembers to let him go, Gojo bolts for the sink, the hiss of running water covering any gap that either of them might try to fill with conversation. The terrifying prospect of actually thinking about this is looming, and they might as well stave it off in whatever inane way they can. Nanami strips out of his sweat-drenched t-shirt, pitching it toward the duffle he’s christened into a hamper, but he can’t summon the energy to do anything more than that.

At least, not until the dampened washcloth slaps him in the face. He peels it off in time to catch Gojo sizing up the picture he makes, sprawled in his bed with his jumpsuit rucked down around his thighs, and for once his gaze darts away the moment it’s caught. Nanami nearly laughs—now he’s flustered? After?

“Always thought you’d be chattier in bed,” he says, before the tension gets too unbearable.

Gojo’s lips twist. “Usually am. But I knew you’d hate it.”

Nanami shrugs, palming the washcloth over his crotch. There’s a lot about Gojo he thought he’d hate, a lot he’s been horribly surprised to find out works for him. Under very particular circumstances. “Next time I want to hear it,” he says, which surprises both of them.

Gojo blinks, the ghost of a smirk flickering on his features. “Next time, huh?”

“Next time I’ll get it out of you,” Nanami amends.

The words land like hitting the ocean after a big drop, and for a beat it seems all Gojo can do is desperately try to close his mouth.

Then his knee’s on the edge of the bed. Nanami tenses—next time wasn’t supposed to mean right now—but all Gojo does is lean over him, a strange, curious light in his eyes. All at once, the significance of their location catches up to Nanami, his senses suddenly overcome with the whispers of memories that aren’t his.

It makes it doubly strange when Gojo wedges in at his side, one lanky arm thrown cautiously over his chest. He can feel the echo of a thousand moments layered over this one, his body resting precisely where Geto Suguru’s once did. Nanami’s usually halfway out the door at this point—he’s never been one for post-coital intimacy. He doesn’t want to retrace the steps of a dead man, especially not one who practically lives in his head.

But he knows just how achingly badly Gojo needs this. What a horrible year it’s been, robbed of the simple touches that have been keeping him going for decades. He’s acutely aware of how Gojo’s accommodated him, and really, it’s a small thing to repay the favor.

All things he tells himself as he follows that echo and tucks the strongest sorcerer-pilot in the world closer into him.

Gojo lets out a breathy little disbelieving chuckle that trails off into a thick swallow. “I… You… There’s something you should know.”

Gojo’s tone has shifted, honest like he’s never heard him before. A different flavor of honesty than the one he finds in the drift, where he swallows Gojo’s psyche raw. Whatever Gojo’s about to confess, it’s something he’s managed to keep close to the chest through the linking of their minds. Nanami hitches his chin, but his wariness is no secret.

“I knew about our compatibility before we got in the chamber together. I’ve known for… a very long time now.”

“How long?”

Gojo’s eyes are locked on the scar tissue stamped into Nanami’s chest. “Eleven years.”

The words hit, then the math. “But that would be—”

“The higher-ups gave me a choice,” Gojo interrupts. “They said it would be a factor in the pairing, in the weapon we’d build together. When it came time to start laying the groundwork and formalizing my contracts, there were two neural maps that lined up nearly perfectly with mine.” The haunted look in his eyes has gone glassy. “And I picked Suguru.”

It’s the first time he’s said his name out loud in Nanami’s presence.

“I was half in love with him already,” Gojo murmurs helplessly. “I thought... They’d suggested your technique would be more suitable, but it had been me and him against the world ever since the day we met. I thought we’d show them all.”

The thing is, they had. Ten years is a hell of a lot more than a lot of pilot pairs get. But Nanami knows the spiral Gojo’s thoughts have locked into. He can almost hear the howl of the hurricane.

“I didn’t want that choice to be wrong.” At this point, Gojo’s confession seems to be pouring out of him whether he likes it or not. “But then, today—that fight was over in seconds. You were incredible. And if I hadn’t… the fuck is so funny?”

Nanami lets his head fall back, desperately trying to smother the laugh that’s just burst out of him. “Sorry,” he chokes. “I was imagining the two of us paired together at Jujutsu Tech.”

Gojo stares at him like he can’t believe what he’s seeing.

“We would have been terrible and you know it. Imagine the past few days but with us as idiot teenagers? Forget it.”

“I’ll have you know I was a pleasure to have in class as a teenager,” Gojo mutters.

Nanami didn’t think it was possible for Gojo to make him laugh even harder. “I wouldn’t have known what to do with you,” he says before it can get too out of hand, but the warmth that slips into the words surprises him even worse—reminds him that he’s sprawled in Gojo’s bunk, his jumpsuit still rumpled around his thighs, his arm getting more and more comfortable around his compat’s shoulders.

“I would’ve made your life a living hell back then,” Gojo concedes at last, the hurricane fading from his eyes.

“You make my life a living hell right now,” Nanami replies flatly, but Gojo’s been in his head long enough to know he doesn’t really mean it.

Chapter Text

Nanami’s been at war long enough to know the highs never last. The victories are peaks. You have to turn the corner eventually.

He knows this, and yet he can’t seem to stop himself from hoping. Things are going too well. He’s choked out his inner doom and gloom for the moment, and without it constantly whispering in his ear, he’s almost able to enjoy the hot streak.

Their second and third kills are child’s play—a phrase Nanami has never in his life associated with a Category 4, but it’s the only thing he can think when he surfaces from the focus of the drift and finds the monster LOCCENT barely had time to name Vengeback splayed across the ocean bed with its skull gone concave. There’s a moment of dissonance, his cognition grappling with being both the person who did that and only part of the person who did that, but it’s grounded by the feeling of Gojo grinning—and the flicker of an image slipped coyly under the door to his mind, a particular dark corner just shy of their conn-pod dock.

He’s worried about the neural pathways he’s starting to reinforce. One of these days the techs are going to crack him out of his armor and see in no uncertain terms just how badly Nanami’s lost hold of his professionalism. Gojo will laugh himself sick.

But if Nanami were really a professional, not just an arrogant little cartoon of one, he’d walk right past that dark corner and head for the showers.

Instead, he takes his sweet time decoupling from Six Eyes’ controls. He waves off his team as soon as they’ve finished with the battle armor, thanking them for their work and ducking their attempts to thank him in kind. Once they’ve cleared out the conn-pod, he performs the final tie-downs, flips the lights, and seals the hatch behind him.

“You’re so petty sometimes,” Gojo whines breathlessly the moment he resurfaces from their initial collision. “Making me wait like this.”

Nanami grinds him harder into the wall. “Someone’s got to keep you humble,” he says with a harsh squeeze.

“Mmm, all I want to do is celebrate our achievements.”

“Ah, so this can wait until after the cantina—”

Nanami finds himself laughing—laughing—into the desperate kiss that smothers his words.

It can’t last. Nanami tries to ready himself for the inevitable, but the other shoe doesn’t so much drop as it does come barreling in from orbit.

The first rumblings come out of K-science, from the network of monitor buoys anchored around the Breach. Usually they pick up a signature when a kaiju crosses through the dimensional rift, then hand off tracking to an aerial team that can pursue the kaiju and lock down its heading in time for a Shatterdome to respond. But this time, the signature doesn’t move. It crawls through the wormhole gullet and camps at its mouth.

Also, it’s one they’ve seen before.

Nanami’s the first to find out—to realize, with a plummeting dread, that he has mere minutes to track down Gojo and soften the blow before the base’s rumor mill gets there first. He runs, which leaves no room for thinking, which leaves him panting and grasping inelegantly for the right words, the words that are going to make any of this better.

They don’t exist, and all he’s left with is, “Curseeater’s back.”

Nanami hadn’t understood it until this moment. They’ve seen retreats before, but whatever’s on the other end of the Breach has never thrown the same kaiju at them twice. The moment the words leave his lips, he gets it—sees the change that comes over Gojo and knows exactly why their enemy has made this unprecedented move.

Six Eyes has returned to the field, and this is the answering blow. A weapon designed specifically to target Gojo Satoru.

A premonition sweeps through him with nauseous force. An echo of their next drift. It’s a consequence of being so entangled with Gojo’s thought processes, a parallel computation he’s forgotten he’s running until this very moment. And it’s ugly—worse, even, than their first drifts together, because that was Gojo dulled by a year of grieving. He’s never seen a fury like the one that lights those striking blue eyes. The charge is palpable, like lightning on his tongue. Any sensible person would run for cover, but Nanami is a Jaeger pilot, made for impossible battles.

He shoulders into the crackling, unchanneled cursed energy, and breathes a sigh of relief when Gojo lets him.

“With me,” he says, anchoring a hand on Gojo’s shoulder. “Outside.”

-

They walk side by side, and for a while it’s all they do. Slow steps, each footfall perfectly paired the same way they move in Six Eyes, tracing the perimeter of the deck that runs along the outer edge of the Shatterdome. It’s a cloudy, moody afternoon, and with no kaiju inbound, the base feels uncommonly quiet. It would be Nanami’s favorite kind of day under practically any other circumstances.

But his world has reduced to Gojo’s misery—to doing anything he can to mitigate it. There’s no cure, but he knows walking helps. It puts him back in his human body, wrenching him away from thoughts of the furious revenge he’ll enact in Six Eyes.

“What’s left to spare me from?” Gojo asks.

Nanami grits his teeth. They’ve reached the stage in their partnership where conversations start midway, and it’s one of his least favorite things about having a compat. It’s not that Gojo’s predicting his thoughts—it’s that he won’t go through with the niceties of voicing the first half of the thought they’re both having. Which, in this case, is that there’s something more Nanami’s not saying, for a very good reason.

“There will be a mission briefing later,” Nanami says, eyes fixed on the chopper deck below them.

“And you want me to fucking lose it in front of the brass, is that it?”

Nanami stops, leaning on the rail that runs parallel to their path. Gojo mirrors him, but he grips it like a sailor in a storm, bracing for a gust he can see ripping across the ocean’s surface.

“Curseeater wasn’t the only familiar signature they detected,” Nanami says at last. “Something’s working in tandem with it. Or, more accurately, it’s putting out two signatures at the same time. Its old one, and… It’s widening the Breach, siphoning cursed energy like it’s swallowing it. The residuals are—” Gojo does nothing to stop him, but he breaks off anyway. He knows he’s said enough to convey it, and any more will only be twisting the knife.

A cursed technique is innate to the sorcerer who wields it, etched into their body. The K-science division has put forward a sickening hypothesis about why Geto Suguru’s has suddenly reappeared in Curseeater’s signature. After a year of wondering, they may have finally gotten an explanation for why the monster tore him out of the cockpit and ran.

Gojo bends low over the rail, and there’s a dizzying moment where Nanami feels like he might need to pull him back from it. “It’s not… him,” he says, the words weak against the sea breeze buffeting them.

“I know,” Gojo retorts bluntly. Of course he does. Nanami’s seen the replay enough times in the drift—the wounds, the confusion, the fading at the far end of the tether. There’s no way Geto survived. But he also knows there was an instant where Gojo hoped, beyond reason, a peak he’s been shoved off.

It feels natural—too natural—to reach one hand around Gojo’s waist and pull him hard into his chest. Part of him is still rationalizing it as damage control, doing whatever he can to spare himself from the horror that will be their next drift. There has to be a selfish explanation, because that’s what Nanami has always been. Selfish, to snag a cushy seat in LOCCENT while his classmates threw their lives on the line in a Jaeger. Selfish, to take a hero’s post only when it meant aligning himself with the strongest sorcerer-pilot on the planet.

It won’t take. The moment Gojo turns into his grasp, the moment he feels the tension begin to melt, the relief that warms through him is so uncomplicated that there’s no place for his delusion to latch. Nanami holds him tighter—because Gojo needs it, because he wants to comfort him in whatever way he can, because by some miracle, in all the highs and lows of their partnership, he’s come to care for this man beyond all reason. Whatever’s in store, they’ll face it together.

Nanami eases a hand up into Gojo’s hair, tugging gently on the silky white strands as he drops a featherlight kiss against his temple. The gentle affection, too, feel strangely natural for something he’s never tried before. He feels the curve of a smile press into his shoulder, a welcome complement to the damp patch starting to grow there.

He’s about to open his mouth and say something useless, but he’s cut off by the distant shriek of a wolf-whistle. Down below, on the chopper deck, the younger pilots have emerged as a pack and apparently sighted the two of them immediately. From the way Mahoraga Storm’s Fushiguro smacks his pink-haired compat upside the head, it’s safe to guess Itadori was the one who whistled.

“It’s the kids,” Nanami murmurs.

“Let’s give ‘em a show,” Gojo leers into his neck, but Nanami pushes him off before his teeth can make good on that.

-

They white-knuckle through the briefing shoulder to shoulder, Gojo’s leg juddering ceaselessly under the table as Nanami tries to ground him with a steady press into his side. It’s the most somber the base’s situation room has ever been. Usually there’s at least one pilot team bringing an air of bravado to the mission, but the mission has never been this daunting before.

It’s not just that Curseeater’s returned. It’s not just that it seems to have integrated Geto’s cursed technique, and all the grisly implications that come with that fact. The cursed energy draw that it’s using to widen the Breach seems to be the prelude to an invasion. Already three Cat-4s have emerged—none of them bound for Tokyo, mercifully—with more on the way. Shatterdomes worldwide are in a state of panic, scrambling Jaegers to counter the inbound kaiju while desperately petitioning their governments for the resources they might need to sustain a siege.

The higher-ups are calling it the Final Event. The strategists are putting together projections for how long they might be able to hold out, curves that get worse and worse with every predicted spike in the rate of kaiju crawling through. Every second that ticks by without a counterattack is a second wasted.

It will take a joint effort. That much is clear. Jaegers from every Shatterdome that can spare them, deployed directly to the Breach. No offensive has ever attempted to hit the dimensional rift since the start of the war—since they first realized it was useless, that no human-forged weapon could collapse its interdimensional gullet. But Curseeater must be stopped.

And only one Jaeger in history has ever held its own against a Category 5 before.

No matter what strategy they settle on, Six Eyes will be the tip of the spear. They need to project strength and confidence, or else all of this falls apart. Nanami’s fighting for his LOCCENT-calm, but it’s eroding with every nervous glance that flicks their way. He can’t make that promise. Their recent hot streak, their perfect drifts—they all feel like flukes now. Next to him, Gojo is glaring daggers through the scans of Curseeater, and the air around them has the dangerous electric tinge of cursed energy flavoring it. No one could possibly look at his red-rimmed eyes and think he’s stable.

And no one could look at Nanami and think he has what it takes to stabilize him.

But when the orders come—when the higher-ups kneeling behind their screens proclaim that tomorrow at dawn, every Jaeger in Tokyo’s hangar will set out for the Breach—the two of them stand side by side in perfect sync and accept their fate with a salute. They may not die perfect pilots, but they can be good soldiers to the bitter end.

Chapter Text

By the time their last morning alive dawns, Nanami and Gojo have already been awake for two hours.

It was a miracle they slept at all. At some point, the exhausting weight of their prospects finally smothered them into a restless slumber, but Gojo woke after only a few hours, and once he was up, Nanami’s brain fell in step naturally. It felt like a mercy, a pocket of time they could steal for themselves. They owed nothing to the world until the sun rose.

Most of it, they passed talking. Idle chatter about everything and nothing, dancing circles around the fate that waited for them on the other side of the door to their quarters. Wishes and hopes, things they felt needed to be said, even if it was to someone just as doomed. At one point, Gojo made a joke so horrible Nanami had to laugh, which naturally lead to Gojo needling him ceaselessly about it until Nanami flipped him over and shut him up in other ways.

When they load up, they’ll be locked into Six Eyes' machinery six feet apart, with only memories of touch to share between them. The intimacy of the drift is unmatched, but there’s something just as special about being skin to skin, a heat it can only ever echo. He’ll know nothing but the stiff embrace of his battle armor when he dies, so Nanami does whatever he can to savor the trembling press of Gojo’s thighs against his ribcage, the drag of his tongue up his neck, the taste of their sweat comingling.

They wring everything they can from these last moments. Make an utter mess of it. It’s the last time they have to be selfish, and there’s so much less of it than Nanami ever thought he’d need. He yearns for a slow morning, one where he can take Gojo apart touch by touch.

But dawn crowns. Duty calls. And so, for the last time, they walk out the door of their quarters and into the open arms of their obligations.

-

They load horizontal, Six Eyes laid on its back over the deck of an aircraft carrier like a child’s discarded toy. The ocean is calm, but Nanami swears he can feel the swell as he settles into the pilot harness and lets the technicians bolt him in. He spares Gojo a sideways glance, and is startled to find his eyes shut. Even in the stiffness of his armor, he looks strangely relaxed, strangely peaceable. A prince at rest, waiting to awaken.

It gives Nanami too much hope. He goes into the drift buoyed on it—and wholly unprepared to meet the storm to end all storms.

There are no other words for it. Their first tumultuous drifts pale in comparison to the howl of this one. Gojo’s mind is one uninterrupted scream, and there’s nowhere Nanami can find his footing. What common ground can he possibly claim? He’s never seen someone he loves resurrected as a zombified puppet to an alien consciousness bent on the utter annihilation of mankind. He’s just as terrified of what awaits them in the Breach, but it’s a fear of the unknown that Gojo doesn’t share. Gojo’s fought Curseeater before. For eight uninterrupted hours, he and Geto matched it blow for blow. Gojo knows exactly how awful this is going to be.

Nanami can barely fathom anything worse than this moment. He’s caught like a bug in amber, mired in a funhouse mirror reality he can’t shatter. The tyranny of Gojo's pain is absolute. There's no room left for Nanami to exist within it.

He has to make room.

He starts with the most familiar object he can think of in a crisis, the one that's been there for him the most through all the highs and lows of this war. Its solidity manifests first, the mere concept of it enough of an anchor that Nanami can plot out the shape of the sturdy wooden surface, the monitors that sprout from it, the dials and knobs and keys he can map by touch alone. He sinks into the sturdy, stiff-backed chair, scoots it forward to his liking, and bends as a microphone materializes inches from his lips.

Six Eyes, this is LOCCENT.

He’s never in his life imagined how a hurricane might stutter. There’s a moment that feels like someone’s just tripped over the plug to the simulator, a lurch in the howling winds that his lone, small voice shouldn’t be capable of producing. A new voice joins the current, the echo of a hundred drops before this one where Six Eyes let Nanami’s calm hand steady them for the engagement.

You’ve got a job to do. Line up.

The drift twists into a flicker of where, exactly, Nanami can line up, and he knows he’s got Gojo in the net. He’s not a hurricane—he’s just a man who’s been hurt one time too many. Nanami can’t promise there won’t be more by the end of the day, but he can swear on his life, on his honor as a pilot, that he’ll give everything he can if Gojo will.

“Right hemisphere calibrated. Left hemisphere calibrated.”

Nanami lets out a long, slow breath—one that’s twinned on the other end of the drift.

“Calibration complete,” Ijichi announces.

He’s rushing them again, but Nanami doesn’t blame him. It’s time they got to work.

-

It’s a long, slow, silent drop to the Breach. Any heat signature will be an obvious target heralding their approach, so they fall dark, Six Eyes’ systems spun down. The tradeoff is the knowledge that it’ll take them an extra beat to react when the first blow comes. The anxious thought pingpongs between them in the ambient drift, but it’s a far more immediate worry than the ones that whipped Gojo into a frenzy before they got into alignment. The ocean past their viewscreens is dark, and only getting darker. Occasionally Nanami thinks he spots a flicker—a running light from one of the other fifteen Jaegers dropping with them—but their comms are silent and their shadows have long since disappeared into the murk.

Nanami loses time to the monotony of falling through the dark, too anxious to sleep through it but too bored to do anything but drift into a haze, until a steadily growing glow rouses him. It’s disorienting to be underwater with light coming from beneath their feet—makes them feel like they need to reorient despite the consistent tug of gravity. They resist the pull to power up, and Nanami scans the darkness outside the conn-pod, silently begging the less-experienced pilots to keep their composure. In the growing light, he can just make out Mahoraga Storm at their fore, limbs eerily loose in a dead man’s float.

Below, the mouth of hell awaits.

The Breach broke through their world in the heart of a volcanic fissure in the crack between two continents. Its disruption has left it wreathed in magma seams that bathe the surrounding waters in a dull orange glow. They’ve still got a ways to fall before they reach the ocean floor, but Nanami can already make out movement in the shadows. From this distance, they might as well be ants, but their sensors know better.

The seam to another universe is crawling with kaiju. Nanami’s seen double events before, known the strain of battling these monsters on multiple fronts. When his naked eye alone picks up three separate beasts at once, the shiver of fear that takes him is so forceful he wonders how it didn’t rattle all of Six Eyes.

Gojo is steady, his thoughts glazed over with the stillness of a predator in wait. There’s only one creature he’s looking for, and he hasn’t sighted it yet.

The distance to the Breach has been ticking down in the corner of his HUD. When it hits five hundred meters, an almighty groan sounds from below him as Six Eyes’ reactor resurrects. The cockpit lights flare, and the ocean outside goes suddenly bright as a fleet of light-wielding drones deploys from their back.

Now Nanami spots no fewer than eight. He can’t gauge their size properly at this distance, but he has his suspicions about where they fall on the Serizawa scale. His comms whine in his ear as they go live, and he understands, in a way he never could before, exactly why the voice of a LOCCENT operator is sometimes the only thing that can wrench a Jaeger pilot out of a panic. “Tokyo pilots, this is LOCCENT. Hold position until the rest of the squadron makes contact. Curseeater is further down the gullet—we’re going to bait it out.”

They blaze their repulsors, pumping the brakes on their descent. In his periphery, Nanami spots Mahoraga Storm and the newly-refurbished Playful Cloud doing the same. The rest of the deployed Jaegers continue their plummet to the seabed, running lights glimmering into obvious targets as below, the kaiju take notice.

How did you do this for ten years? The thought is tinged with awe, the first coherent one Gojo’s produced in hours. He’s imagining the desk Nanami erected in their drift, the reality of sitting behind it day after day while watching pilots rush to defend humanity from these monsters. Nanami answers with the numbness that’s made a home in his heart, a self-deprecating aside for the stool in the cantina that’s been just as close a companion as his LOCCENT chair.

He can’t do that from a Jaeger. His heart seizes in tandem with Gojo’s as the first of their companions makes contact, landing heavy on a tentacled beast and immediately finding themselves snared in its myriad arms. Machine and monster go down in a tangle, landing on a seam of exposed magma that flushes the drift with a wince of cringing sympathy.

From there, it’s carnage. Six Eyes’ HUD is insufficient—the chaos of the fight below overwhelms it. A strange flavor of sensory deprivation overwhelms Nanami. He’s wrapped in the safety of the conn-pod, protected from the crushing pressure of the ocean around them, from the salt, from the heat, from every outside force but the ones that move his limbs. He aches to be in the fray, if only to feel something more than the itch ricocheting between the two of them.

“Movement in the Breach,” Ijichi announces in his ear.

Finally, they breathe together.

Mahoraga Storm and Playful Cloud close in first, fists up, ready to grapple anything that tries to interrupt their drop. Six Eyes plummets to the seafloor after them. A kaiju pounces, and Mahoraga Storm lunges to intercept it as Nanami and Gojo smother the impulse to shoulder clean into the hit. They have to save their strength for the real target.

A shadow looms in the Breach’s throat. At first, Nanami fears a double threat—no monster he’s ever faced in the flesh has ever been this big—but Gojo’s thought process straightens him out in a hurry. He knows Curseeater’s bulk with the intimacy only eight hours of slugging can produce. He’s hungry to face his foe.

And then he loses his appetite all at once.

Nanami takes the reversal like a blow to the head, and his reeling confusion costs an extra second they can’t afford trying to understand why Gojo’s fire went out like the hull’s just caved. Curseeater has crowned the lip of the Breach, its leering, almost crocodilian skull stuck in a rictus grimace that shows far too many teeth. But that’s not where Gojo’s attention has lodged.

In the center of the monster’s forehead lies a stitched line, fresh flesh layered in sloppy ropes to bind the base of a bobbing lure that glows faintly from within like an anglerfish’s. A lure that has arms and legs.

The moment of horror lands so deliberately it puts aside all doubts about the intelligence of their enemy. And Curseeater seizes that moment by the neck. It lunges with a speed that should be impossible for a creature of its bulk, and it hits like ten freight trains at once. Pressure alarms wail instantaneously, their HUDs flaring with warnings for every critical bit of shielding the blow has stress tested.

Their footing is an afterthought. Curseeater pummels them onto their back, jaws closing around the arm they throw up instinctively. More warnings flare. Everything that didn’t take damage from Curseeater’s hit is now being ground into a magma seam, pressing vicious burns across Six Eyes’ hull.

Gojo draws cursed energy to him, and Nanami braces to share the load. They cock back the arm that’s not lodged in Curseeater’s maw, packing it with as much power as they can spare.

The blow snaps forward.

It hits like a nudge. Nanami’s reality has been so overwritten by panic that he can’t process it. Not until Gojo completes the thought. He understands what happened—he felt it. His power’s just been siphoned by the beast puppetting both his dead compat’s corpse and technique.

Gojo’s thoughts form a knife. Listing slowly toward their drift’s tether. Fucker, if you abdicate on me now— Nanami thinks, but half of him is riding the rising tide of existential fear that argues it might be better to go limp, to face their promised oblivion. If Curseeater can negate their attacks, it’s all over anyway.

But that’s Gojo’s thinking. Not Nanami’s.

No, there’s still something left.

When Curseeater faced Six Eyes a year ago, it still had tricks up its sleeve. A last resort it never used—not in a battle on the surface, where a kaiju bleeding out could spell decades of environmental fallout for the nearby population. But here at the mouth of hell, there’s no need to hold back. The beast may be built to negate their cursed energy, but it’s still made of flesh.

Nanami throws a switch, slams his hand over the interface, and cocks their fist on a trajectory into the soft flesh beneath Curseeater’s arm.

“Sword deployed,” Six Eyes’ interface announces.

In the periphery of the cockpit window, he catches the fish-belly gleam of its segments unfurling from their wrist. The instant they lock into place, Nanami jams their fist forward, putting every last drop of strength he has left behind it. The blade sheathes in Curseeater’s side, flushing the waters around them a lurid, inky blue.

The monster’s subsequent scream shudders through the cockpit like a shockwave. They wrench their forearm from its mouth, but Curseeater slams a paw the size of a tank down on the heart of Six Eyes’ chest, choking back any notions of loading up another blow. Nanami tries to twist the blade while he still has it buried in flesh. Curseeater bucks off of it, and its pained roar doubles in force.

He may have only made it angry.

But before the mind-numbing terror of that thought has a chance to boil over, the weight is suddenly stripped from their chest. The silhouettes of two Jaegers flank Curseeater, grappling it on two fronts like a wrestling tag team, forcing room for Six Eyes to finally scramble clear of the searing magma.

The terror switches targets when Nanami sees that it’s Mahoraga Storm and Playful Cloud. Neither of them have ever faced a kaiju bigger than a Cat-3. They’re just kids—they’ve got their whole lives ahead of them. He can barely focus on getting Six Eyes back on its feet.

So he doesn’t miss the moment Mahoraga Storm locks its arms around the limb Nanami weakened, shoulders up close to the kaiju’s side, and hauls Curseeater’s outrageous bulk clean over its shoulder, pummeling the beast into the seafloor. That’s Itadori Yuuji’s strength, his cursed technique—possibly slipping the monster’s negation because it was channeled into the Jaeger itself instead of into an attack—but the move is one Nanami’s only seen from one other Jaeger before.

Despite everything, Gojo is beaming.

You taught him that?

Told him to give it a spin in the simulator. Thought it’d be suited to him.

Gojo’s certainly right, but one good move isn’t enough to keep Curseeater down. It swipes at Mahoraga Storm’s legs, catching one of its ankles. Playful Cloud tries to stomp on its arm, but Curseeater twists away, taking Mahoraga Storm’s footing with it. The beast’s starting to adjust to its wound, sharpening with every passing second.

But watching the kids go head to head with it is bringing Six Eyes steadily back into alignment. They push upright, cueing a storm of warning lights splattering across their HUD from every system in the Jaeger. Curseeater knew exactly where to hit, and it hit hard.

Only, the monster doesn’t know what a mistake it’s made, going after the young rangers. “Tokyo pilots, this is Six Eyes,” Nanami announces into the comms. “Disengage. This one’s ours.”

They don’t give the kids time to do anything but obey. The two other Jaegers dive for cover as Six Eyes charges, sword cocked back. Gojo readies another blast of cursed energy, but he’s learned now that targeting the kaiju itself is a straight shot to getting negated. Instead, he places it to their rear, cuts it open, and lets the subsequent shockwave knock them hard into their opponent.

Curseeater staggers back a step as the blade bites into its plating.

Under other circumstances, the sight would be a victory worth celebrating. But they can feel their time starting to run dry. One step is barely anything when Six Eyes is already so damaged. They peel off, dancing into the beast’s left side, chasing the blue still trailing from its armpit. Gojo’s focus keeps skipping off the center of its forehead, and that, too, Nanami can feel like a ticking time bomb. They have to end this. They have to end this now.

Against all odds, it’s Gojo who’s reaching across the drift, Gojo who’s steadying him. Got a plan, he thinks. But you’re not going to like it.

Nanami tries to wring it out of him immediately, but Gojo makes his thoughts slippery like an eel, turning it into a mental game of grab-ass that Nanami’s not going to stoop to when they’re in the middle of combat. They land another body blow on Curseeater with a fist, narrowly dodging its snapping jaws, and in those bare seconds of breathing room, Gojo flips the switch on their comms.

“LOCCENT, this is Six Eyes. I need all Jaegers clear of the Breach. Minimum distance one kilometer. Make it happen.”

The hell do you think you’re doing?

Do you want to save the day or not?

Before Nanami can protest the ridiculous question, Gojo hits him with a burst of clarity. Nanami knows the moment it lands that it’s only a fraction of the vision, but he can’t turn down a perfectly itemized list of exactly what Gojo needs from him.

They square up to Curseeater, sword held on guard. The monster lurches into a prowl, trying to outpace their determination to stay on its injured side. If they lose their footing now, it’s all over. The kids have their orders. The rest of the field is clearing, Jaegers fleeing the kaiju corpses they’ve left behind. Not every monster has been put down—they can tell that much from the data on their HUD—but they can’t afford to let their focus slip from the Category 5 sizing them up.

Almost there, Gojo pushes into the drift like a steadying hand.

This is it, Nanami realizes all at once. The moment they’ve been bracing for this entire day. The moment they’ve been fated for ever since they hit their first sync. The end. The only question that remains is how much of an ending they can make it. It could be that the only thing they manage to stamp a period on is their lives.

But Nanami will be damned if they don’t take this fucking kaiju with them.

Curseeater lunges. Six Eyes braces, meeting the blow with a shoulder and a howl of hull pressure alarms. Nanami seizes the barest second of an opening the knockback creates, sketching his ratios, finding his target, and driving their sword forward. The kaiju swallows the cursed technique that would have made the hit devastating, but an extra burst of kinetic power from Gojo at their elbow makes the blade bite deep into the monster’s plating.

Deep enough to lodge.

Which is precisely where Gojo’s clarity ended.

Panic closes over Nanami’s head. They’re locked in, the kaiju’s jaws snapping closer and closer to their head with every twisting lurch. The cockpit is bathed in the eerie blue light of its lure, and the nearness of Geto’s corpse is making the drift go molasses-thick with grief he can’t possibly counter.

Stay with me a little longer, Gojo thinks, and before Nanami can parse what the hell he means by that, their footing suddenly goes.

And beast, machine, and the two of them topple backward into the Breach.

The shock of it freezes both Six Eyes and its opponent. There’s nothing to leverage against but each other, and that would interrupt their mutual goal of tearing their respective enemies to shreds. And in that moment of clinging, clutching confusion, Gojo wraps himself wholeheartedly around Nanami’s consciousness.

Kento, he thinks—which in retrospect buys him a truly embarrassing amount of time. Thank you. For everything. You brought me back to life. You didn’t have to, you absolute martyr. Now it’s my turn.

A familiar feeling ripples through the drift. A knife in Gojo’s hand. Nanami moves to counter instinctively, but he goes for the wrong tether. It’s not his own connection Gojo’s abdicating.

“Pilot eject: activated,” their interface announces.

The shock of being slammed back into his frail human body leaves him limp and helpless to the pistons that lever him up from the Jaeger’s controls and into the escape pod overhead. Nanami’s head lolls, his brain scrabbling for a foothold amid the flashing lights and alarms that overwhelm his senses until they’re abruptly sealed away by the hatch swinging shut beneath his back.

“No,” he croaks. It does nothing to stop the launch sequence that momentarily liquidates his thoughts as the pod rips out of Six Eyes. The walls of the Breach flash past, impossible to parse rationally, electric, pulsing, spitting him out like a chunk down its airway. And then he’s in the vast, empty dark of the open ocean, mercifully familiar—if anything about this moment can be called a mercy.

They were supposed to see this through together. Half of Nanami’s overcome with the irrational impulse to crack the pod open, to swim back down the throat and demand his rightful place in Six Eyes, never mind that the pressure at this depth would vaporize him the instant he did it.

It wasn’t supposed to end like this. Gojo doesn’t get to end it like this.

But for Nanami, it seems this isn’t the end.

Chapter Text

The sky overhead is a shade of blue that makes Nanami want to scream.

He can see the carriers on the horizon, but he turned off his transmitter halfway through his ascent. Retrieval can come later. Nanami’s supposed to be a professional, and he can’t stomach the thought of his comrades seeing him like this.

He sits folded over his knees, his head buried in his hands as he grasps desperately for control of something. His breathing eludes him. His heart won’t settle. He can barely focus. It’s been like this the whole way up. Like he might never have full governance over his body again.

He thought they were in alignment. He thought the plan was to go down together, so neither of them would have to feel like this a second time. Instead, Gojo’s robbed him. Nanami chokes back the urge to throw himself into the Pacific, to swim right back down to the Breach. He remembers the footage of Six Eyes leashed to those choppers on the day Curseeater took Geto—mangled, solo-piloted, drowning, but single-mindedly trying to chase its quarry.

He's never understood Gojo better than this. Of course it comes the moment their sync percentage no longer matters.

A sudden splash cuts through the utter chaos of his panic. A pod breaches from the ocean surface a hundred meters away, and even from this distance he can pick out the electric blue trim as it slams back down, twin to the detailing beneath him.

He’s in the water before he can second-guess himself, fighting the swells of the waves and the weight of his battle armor doing its best to sink him like a stone. He’s frenzied, still clawing for breath, nearly delirious from the way his heart’s hammering, but it feels purposeful now, the antithesis of before, and he hauls himself to the pod’s side with single-minded determination, heaving up on its floaters and swinging a leg over its bulk to steady himself as he yanks the quick-release that sends the seal on its top rocketing off into the ocean on a blast of compressed air.

Inside, Gojo is impossibly still. So still that for a moment, all Nanami can wonder is how Six Eyes managed to return his body. His eyes go blurry at the cruelty of it. Just this morning, he’d watched him lying on his back as they loaded in to Six Eyes and thought he seemed like a prince at rest, waiting for someone to awaken him. If this were a fairytale, all it would take is for Nanami to bend down and press his lips to Gojo’s.

He chokes on a word. It might be “Satoru.”

But—

The moment he spots the faint curl edging into the corner of Gojo’s mouth, Nanami’s moving without thinking again.

Only this time he’s grabbing Gojo by the shoulders and shaking the ever-loving fuck out of him. The spell breaks, Gojo squawking as he’s manhandled, and maybe Nanami should be more cautious of the blows he’s taken, of the fact that he just ran solo, but he’s had an absolutely horrific day and he’s at the end of his goddamn rope. “You don’t get to say I brought you back to life and then fucking die on me,” he snaps.

“I’m not dead,” Gojo wheezes, but Nanami gives him another couple shakes to be sure.

Then, before Gojo has a chance to protest that he’s being incredibly mean, Nanami pulls him hard into his chest and hugs him so fiercely that it’s a mercy they’re both wearing armor.

“The hell were you thinking?” Nanami groans as he’s grappled just as furiously in turn.

“Oh, you know. That I would go all-out on infinity, let Curseeater choke it down, and use the resulting energy to tear the Breach in half. But I didn’t know if it would work. And I definitely wasn’t sure I could get in the pod in time. And I had to get you out—I couldn’t live with myself if… I had to…”

As their combined frenzy begins to settle, Nanami realizes that Gojo’s trembling. That he’s never had a call this close before—and if he really managed to collapse the Breach, he may never have an escape this narrow again.

“Did it take?” Nanami asks, then braces for two equally unbearable possibilities: either the knowledge that everything they went through was for nothing or the insufferable brag he’s just given Gojo permission to unleash.

But Gojo picks a secret, third option. He pulls the earpiece from his ear and wrestles it into Nanami’s. Nanami’s protests over how disgusting that is die the moment the sound registers.

More precisely, it fails to register. It’s chaos. It’s so much clamor that for a moment he’s shocked into stillness, trying to parse what, exactly, he’s hearing.

Simply put, it’s joy. He’s hearing an outright torrent of it, whoops and screams and cheers and claps that show no signs of cresting the longer he listens. He’s hearing the sound of a war he’s been fighting all his life being won. The only world he’s ever known has ended—not with a cataclysm, but with a triumph.

A bout of dizziness has him slumping, catching himself on the edge of Gojo’s escape pod as he feels his whole body reverse its spin. Just minutes ago, he was furious with grief, resigned to a life where he’d never again drift with Gojo. The former has changed, but the latter hasn’t, and he finds the grief still there despite the unfettered happiness rattling in his ear. He’s out of a job. They both are. And Six Eyes is… gone. The greatest Jaeger humanity has ever constructed was consumed in the Breach’s collapse.

It's staggering, to gain a future and lose it all at once.

Nanami’s never been without a plan before. He’s walked a path that the necessity of war has guided him through, always doing exactly what he felt was asked of him, always looking outwards, lest anyone accuse him of that selfishness he's been trying to hide. The ocean around them is terrifyingly open, the sky unconscionably bright.

Gojo snorts.

Nanami glares down at him. If anyone should be in an existential tailspin, it’s Gojo. What’s left for him if he can’t be Tokyo’s lucky ace?

“You’re thinking too hard,” Gojo singsongs, and Nanami considers throttling him. “The future can wait.”

He doesn't bother asking how Gojo knew exactly where his mind’s gone. The echoes of their last drift—their last drift ever—are still roiling through his brain, and on top of that, he’s come to accept that he’s a very predictable man. Maybe he won’t even notice when their sync starts to slip.

Gojo grins even wider.

“What now?”

“Just realized that it must be new to you. Thinking about a life with someone long-term.”

Nanami chokes. He wasn’t... He didn’t... He was only imagining how their connection might fade without regular drifts to reinforce it. How he might look into those startling blue eyes years down the line and—

Gojo’s grin has somehow gotten worse. “You're so bad at this,” he crows.

“And you’re not? I’ve been in your head—I know you don't have a five-year-plan.”

“Things tend to work out for me,” Gojo says, folding his hands behind his head.

“Oh, do they?”

“I did just save the world.”

“And you’re going to coast on that the rest of your life?”

“I just saved the world. Give a man a break.” Gojo huffs. “Though if you must know, I’ve recently started to wonder if I might be a good teacher.”

The Nanami of three months ago would have scoffed at that, but he thinks of the young pilots—the way they crowd around their hero, the way Gojo knew exactly how to guide them, the way the kids make him lighter. The Nanami of one week ago would have fought like hell to suppress the way the idea makes him smile. But the joy in his ear demands an echo. “I’d like to see that,” he says.

Gojo gives him a long, considered look. “You could teach too. Though I fear we’d be causing scandals left and right.”

“That so?”

“Unable to keep our hands off each other in the workplace, you know.” He underscores his point with a palm sliding up Nanami’s armored thigh.

He can’t blame all of the way it makes him feel on the motion of the waves.

“The retrieval team’s inbound,” Nanami warns. The thunder of distant rotors underscores the point.

“Let's give ‘em a show,” Gojo replies. He pulls him down hard, and Nanami surrenders to the wonderful truth of this moment: that there's nothing left to fight.