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The helicopters fish Cheung and Jin from the tumultuous sea, amidst the pouring rain. Only Cheung and Jin.
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’Shit, shit, no, what about Jin – ‘
The ceiling of the LOCCENT is grey, made of overlapping squares of dusted, dirty steel with exactly 32 silver studs nailed around the perimeter of each.
Jin’s lying on his back, there’s muffled noises at his ears, and he can’t really focus on anything, but there’s 8 studs on each side of the square until Cheung’s bald head is breaking his line of sight, face creased in worry.
‘Jin, Jin,’ he calls out, voice a hint strained. Jin blinks once, twice, before he realizes he’s lying on the empty floor of the abandoned LOCCENT. There’s celebrations going on at the end of war and everyone’s in the Kwoon with Ukrainian hard house vibrating up the pillars, and booze a free for all from the open port.
The world is celebrating and Jin is on the floor of the LOCCENT, counting metal studs, his stomach a little nauseous, his head a little empty.
‘Get up, you fool,’ snaps Cheung once he realizes Jin is neither wasted nor high.
‘Get down,’ says Jin instead. His hand is reaching upwards. His fingers are long and pale, and he always thought they were sort of girlish, but they’re Hu’s fingers, and Hu’s hand is curled in the collar of Cheung’s shirt now, tugging him downwards.
Cheung rolls his eyes, doesn’t really get it until his arm is pressed alongside Jin’s arm and he’s also idly contemplating 32 studs, then 64, then 96.
‘Hu’s voice,’ starts Jin as if he’s talking about tying shoelaces or walking to the market for onions, ‘was in our heads before he died.’
There’s a tight moment where Jin is sure Cheung is going to stand up and walk away. It’s been twelve hours since Hu died. It will take twelve decades, Jin imagines, before his heart will stop feeling like it’s sluggishly bleeding to death.
‘Yeah,’ says Cheung. There’s a pause where his breath hitches and Jin knows his brother can’t say anymore.
‘I want to,’ starts Jin again. This time his voice trembles a little – a lingering note of despair curled up in the air. ‘I want to get back into her again. One last time. With you.’
He’s crying now. There’s ugly tears over his cheeks, his nose starting to leak with snot and his throat pulls on shuddering, gasping breaths. Jin’s fists unclench; he splays out his fingers and his hand brushes against Cheung’s pant leg. His hands clench once more, fingers wrapped tight around the cotton and he’s clinging to his brother now.
Cheung is silent. Jin can’t count 32 anymore, or 64, or 96; can’t even focus on the stuttering beat of his heart, the silent movement of a clock on the wall – the minute hand getting closer and closer to twelve..
‘Okay,’ says Cheung finally. A beat later and his hand is curling around Jin’s wrist – warm and alive.
Jin can’t help it. He wails, voice breaking halfway – the octave snapping and hanging unfinished between them.
-
’Man, I should tell Cheung that Jin’s cha siu baau was way better than his, but he’d probably kill me.’
It’s one of the most inane thoughts that Cheung has ever gotten while Drifting and he doesn’t think anything of it until the realization hits him that – to his right – there stands no one in the cockpit. Only Jin is here with him at his left, and Jin’s voice doesn’t have that echo, that intonation, that curl of conceit slipped at the edges of his syllables.
Cheung takes a breath, lets the silence wash over him again, the hurricane of hurt and grief and anger and bitterness that shoots out from Jin still doesn’t match what Cheung finds elsewhere in his mind.
’After English, Russian makes so much sense, holy shit.’
Is it called chasing the rabbit if the rabbit is not a memory but a voice, caught between the wirings of Crimson Typhoon, haunting her electrical circuits, cutting and reappearing like breakers down the line of the cockpit wall?
Is it anything if Hu’s voice chases Cheung instead?
Cheung feels for Jin past the wall of grief and Jin presses back, gently, a pressure on their connection, a careful reassurance of his presence.
Do you hear it, asks Cheung carefully. Jin stares blankly at the darkness where the holographic images would pop up, at the unlit screens, listening to the abstract hum of engines in neutral.
’When that Kaiju attacked, I hope mom and dad died quick.’
This one is more jarring, but it’s not dyed with anything bitter or longing. Hu’s always been good at stepping back from life, pressing replay when Jin couldn’t, when Cheung was too caught up. Middle-ground. Hu was always good at choosing the middle ground.
Brother, murmurs Jin to Cheung. Brother.
Jin’s tsunami of hurt slams hard against Cheung’s own, and they’re shaking by the time the realization hits them that their brother’s floating somewhere in the Drift, caught between the cracks of Crimson Typhoon, the last spark of neurons from his brain skimming through the lines between man and machine.
They’re crying by the time the agreed upon half hour of Drifting comes to an end – Jin’s hands are shaking and weak as they struggle to lift up his helmet. Cheung’s ankles are weighted with his unwillingness to step out.
Hu’s voice echoes:
’I hope we never die.’
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Old wives tales, rumours, whispers, answers to sleep-deprivation. Stories, Jin. They’re stories.
Tendo’s eyebrows are raised in consternation. Yeah, the human brain is electrical. No shit, the nervous system runs off pulses of energy. Yes, the Pons connection does fluctuate between mechanical and electrical energy like a surge protector, but not quite, of course, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
It’s all technical, Jin. There are no ghosts in the machine.
Raleigh begs to differ, snugged up in a sweater as he munches on toast though it’s two hours past noon. The mess hall is a muffled murmur at this hour, but Jin prefers quiet now. Prefers one person over many people.
He used to thrive in Hong Kong, in the masses, with the mechanics and the pilots, but Hu’s voice can’t echo over the rising tide of voices and chatter and vehicles and mechanics and consumption and life. So Jin finds silence, curls up into it, tries to latch onto his brother for one more time, one last time.
‘Yancy lives in her,’ he tells Jin, confident, face open and giving. ‘Not him, yeah, but an impression of him. Something of an echo. Fragments of thoughts and feelings, and Mako hears them too. Your brother…?’ He trails off, expectant.
Jin nods, fingers tracing the cool edges of his dogtags. There’s four of them around his neck now, instead of the usual two. Raleigh understands the weight of a keepsake when he sees one, suddenly hyperaware of the wool on his skin, the sleeves an inch too long because it was never knitted for Raleigh.
‘I miss him,’ says Jin finally. He looks up. ‘How do you – ’ His voice breaks off then. Raleigh’s face is creased in lines of understanding and Jin suddenly feels exposed, vulnerable, in his grief.
‘I spent five years building a wall,’ replies the other, taking a sip of his peppermint tea. It’s Mako’s favourite tea, thinks Jin idly. He wonders if it’s a Drift side-effect or simply affection.
‘There are only ports in Hong Kong,’ murmurs Jin, looking away from the mug as if he’s a voyeur.
‘So go swimming.’
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’I had a dream that we went up the Himalayas with the Russians, except only Cheung and I were climbing. Aleksis was just walking upwards at a ninety degree angle, carrying Sasha on one shoulder, Jin on the other. That traitor.’
Snatches of laughter. Low and quiet.
’American pie is disgusting.’
A snort. Muffled noises from the back of the throat.
’How badly would Cheung lose in a fight with Pentecost?
Humming softly, contemplative.
Crimson Typhoon whispers in rumbling engines and the sound of metal clamps clicking over his Drift suit. She wants him to leave now. It’s no good to Drift alone – though, it’s only a quarter neural load since only the head of the Jaegar is communicating with Jin’s brain right now. He can handle it, even if Crimson crackles in warning with her electricity, tries to shoo him off with the rough sound of metal on metal.
Not yet, Jin tells her. I’m going swimming.
No, she’s murmuring through the wires, shooting warning signals up his spine. Jin is drowning.
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‘Jin! Jin! Brother!’ Cheung’s voice is cracking, splitting open in Jin’s skull as awareness throws his body’s neurons back into focus. Suddenly, he’s aware of the cool air, the scratch of low-grade cotton sheets over his skin, and his brother’s warm fingers skimming over his collarbone, his shoulders, pressing fingerprints of worry into his being as if that’ll wake him up.
‘You dumb fuck,’ snarls Cheung, but his voice is dyed in hurt not anger, ‘I can’t lose you too, especially not in her.’
Jin’s eyes flutter open. The med bay’s lights are dimmed, thankfully, and he tries for a smile but his mouth won’t move. There’s a weight on his chest, on his bones. Everything is heavier, and sounds come distorted and delayed, but Cheung’s face – once it comes into view – is a visceral knife of emotion.
‘Brother,’ says Jin. ‘Hu’s voice…’
Cheung’s face crumples, and he drags a hand over the bridge of his nose as if to reign in himself, but it’s obviously not working. Not when tears begin their journey over the curve of his cheeks as his voice trembles, ‘Jin, Hu’s dead.’
And that angers Jin. The way Cheung can dismiss the neurons his brother left behind, the thousands of electrical signals that pass in and out of Crimson Typhoon like a fish in the red, cockpit sea. ‘You heard him. You can hear him!’ He wants to punch his brother, but he’s too weak. Still, his arm flails out, catches Cheung at the neck, and his brother stumbles sideways, eyes wide in surprise.
‘Jin,’ warns Cheung – taking older brother position as his face hardens. ‘Our brother is dead. You need to accept this.’
Jin bares his teeth in response. ‘How can you accept it? How is this not affecting you?’ he snaps, voice incredulous, trying to prop himself up on the cot, eyeing Cheung who is now standing at his bedside.
But it does affect Cheung. Jin looks at his brother and sees only a thread holding Cheung’s vibrating edges together, only waiting for the snap that will let him fall apart over the floor in despair.
‘We can’t chase ghosts, Jin, we can’t, he’s gone.’ Cheung’s voice is breaking, his face pinched with the effort to draw himself together.
Jin balls his fists into the cheap cotton sheets, staring at the silhouette of his kneecaps underneath. ‘But he didn’t – ’ He sucks in a breath, tries to stem the tears, but they fall anyway and goddamnit – he’s an adult, he can’t keep crying like this but Hu. Hu. ‘He didn’t leave anything behind.’
Cheung takes a step closer, offering, and Jin takes. Lays his fingers – Hu’s fingers – in Cheung’s tank top and pulls him forward, buries his face in his older brother’s stomach and loses himself, like he always does, over and over again – ‘We’ve only got his voice left, only his dumb thoughts and laughter and shitty tone-deaf humming and – ’
‘Yeah,’ replies Cheung, curling his arms around Jin, holding him close, holding him together.
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One morning, Jin sits on his bunk, watching the tired way Cheung slides into his in-base military uniform across the room. He does it slowly, clumsily. Head getting closer to the sleeve than the neck of his shirt, his toes caught between the pant leg as he pushes his feet through, the slow way he tightens the belt around his waist.
He sees Hu in all this. Hu and his exhaustion, Hu and his not-morning-person attitude. Hu and his permanent drowsiness until he’s had two servings of rice and coffee at the mess hall before heading off to stretch on the training mats in the Kwoon.
The faded light of the dawn catches Cheung around his eyes, laying heavy shadows under his jawline, and suddenly it is Hu – come back to life, circles under his eyes, mouth pursed in concentration.
Jin blinks and the sunlight slides sideways, bringing back Cheung. His brother is looking at him. ‘Get dressed, we’re decommissioning Mako’s girl today.’ He’s tired. He’s so fucking tired. Tired of days without two brothers to look after, tired of chasing after Jin’s grief, tired of putting away his own despair.
Jin tries for a smile – it must come off awful strained, but the sight of it at least has some tension dropping from Cheung’s shoulders.
When Jin brushes his teeth in the bathroom, he stares at his reflection. He looks a little worse for wear, some stubble around the edges, circles under his eyes, lines of sadness around his mouth. Still, he tilts his head to the side, a little upwards, looks down his nose in a sweep of eyelashes.
Jin finds Hu in himself. In the sharp curve of a cheekbone, the edges of his jaw line.
He spits and rinses, washing his face and spraying water on the mirror. His reflection is a little distorted now, but it’s enough. Opening his eyes wide and quirking a smirk, he can see his brother.
Jin wipes the mirror with the towel before he leaves.
There’s a ghost in the machine, he thinks, but maybe it’s not living in Crimson Typhoon at all.
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Cheung comes to him with the news, ‘they’re decommissioning her in three days.’
Jin is sitting on the edge of a catwalk in the Shatterdome, legs dangling over the edge as he watches Crimson Typhoon’s paint job be rebuffed and redone. She’s going to look gorgeous for it. Absolutely perfect. Just the way when Jin and his brothers first met her after two years of building her up – tall and shining and glorious.
‘The war’s over now,’ replies Jin, elbows on his knees, teetering. It’s a fifty foot drop to solid concrete.
‘I want…’ starts Cheung, voice muffled. Jin looks up, and Cheung has his hand over his eyes as if he can’t look at Crimson right now, can’t look at Jin right now. ‘I want to Drift one last time.’
It takes him by surprise. There’s been an unspoken agreement since Jin’s solo voyage into Crimson’s cockpit (which landed him in the med bay for neural overload for a week) that they never do it again, solo or together.
Still, Cheung offers, and – as always – Jin takes.
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’I never liked Beijing accents, I hope Jin or Cheung don’t date anyone from there.’
It’s so… boring. Normal. Usual. Of course Hu would have opinions on Mandarin accents – it’s inane and completely him and doesn’t matter to any single person in the world except Hu.
The normalcy cripples Cheung. He craves it, chases it across the cables of Crimson Typhoon, tries to get snatches of other partial thoughts, sounds of Hu’s laughter, his anger. The sharp snap of his tongue when he spoke English, the elongated hiss of his Russian.
It’s Jin that pulls him back – the cool fingers of his love and hurt wrapping themselves around Cheung’s shivering, broken self and centering himself once more.
Hu lives in Crimson now, Jin reminds him, don’t chase him or you’ll hurt her. Maybe it’s Jin’s previous experience or something more like acceptance over Hu’s death that allows his voice to stay so calm, so steady. Cheung clings onto it and finds the silence of the Drift again, keeping the bridge between them free-flowing once more.
’One day, after the war is over, we should go to Thailand.'
He would always sneak out in the night to Kowloon for the Thai food, snorts Cheung.
And you’d stay up waiting for him, replies Jin in fond remembrance.
There’s no set timer for this Drift. Maybe they’re in her for an hour, maybe for two hours, three, five. The Drift is a wave of silence and emotion, snippets of Hu caught between the cables, sparking up against the dark cockpit, weaving between Crimson’s ticks and lights and sounds to come forth at any moment.
It’s like swimming through memory but it doesn’t hurt as much this time, doesn’t cut Cheung open in its freshness. There’s still something in them where Hu lives, still somewhere where Hu will go to rest in the way he deserves.
When Cheung presses into Jin’s mind, he does so with focus and determination. We need to do this, he tells the younger.
Okay, says Jin. There’s a pause where they steel themselves for the onslaught, where they might go out of alignment, where they will slide back to where they were, but it’s worth the risk. It’s worth the hurt.
Jin recalls it first because it was Jin’s name in Hu’s mind before Otachi’s claws skewer through his torso, ripping him out of the cockpit ruthlessly. Cheung hurtles forward through the memory – the slam of Otachi against Crimson, the way they’re tilting forward, the drop of his stomach as gravity slides sideways and he’s falling.
Or maybe he’s being thrown, it’s hard to tell. Jin feels it again – the way his body slams hard against the side of the cockpit, concussed, but not unconscious, he refuses, he fucking refuses. Crimson Typhoon’s cockpit crashes into the sea, and water is fucking cold, salt stinging his eyes as Cheung bucks out of his harness and footholds to grab onto Jin’s arm.
They’re going to get out of here and find Jin, they’re going to be alive and together again, even if Crimson Typhoon teeters and crashes over, losing all neural connections and the ability to move. Otachi throws itself against the body, making sure it crashes over finally, not paying attention to how Cheung is swimming, desperately, dragging Jin along – who is weak and his head is bleeding sluggishly.
Hu, Cheung might be screaming, he can’t tell, Hu, and there’s something floating – all neural wetsuits have float-enhancing capacities, the body won’t drown, it will always resurface. No, not the body, there’s no body, it’s Hu and Hu is going to be alive and he‘s –
Cheung vomits in the sea. There is no Hu. There’s gore and flesh and a look of surprise on Hu’s face that’s relaxing into something more dazed. Like he’s had too many vodka shots with Sasha again. Like he’s just going to sleep. Like half his body isn’t ripped open and bleeding out and dead.
Brother brother brother brother brother brother
Cheung’s saying it or maybe Jin’s saying it or maybe it’s Hu’s voice or – fuck – it could even be Crimson Typhoon, but whatever it is, Cheung and Jin jerk back, throwing themselves from the memory violently, slamming so hard against the restraints of their harnesses that Cheung can hear his ribs creak dangerously underneath.
They’re both breathing hard but it’s done. It’s over. Relived and reexamined and reconsidered.
Hu is dead and they’re alive and Crimson Typhoon is leaving tomorrow.
But it feels like waking up, and Cheung sucks in the oxygen around him, his lungs working hard, and Jin is unstrapping himself, cutting off the neural connection manually from the controls so that he can catch his big brother when he falls.
-
The decommissioning is swift and painless. Crimson is gleaming under the lights – her logo stamped proudly on the shoulder and her red paint bright and fresh. Jin and Cheung stand under attention, are rewarded with medals from a weary Hercules Hansen before being officially dismissed from the line of duty.
Jin sits on his bunk, his stuff packed up into one box and a backpack, just like Cheung. They burn Hu’s items in recompense for being unable to burn his body – lost at sea as the Drift suit had been too torn to keep his body afloat. The smoke from his things rise high over the sky, past Hong Kong’s skyscrapers, and Cheung tosses the ash into the sea.
They walk down the coastline after dropping their stuff at a hotel. Cheung will look for an apartment soon. Or maybe. Maybe –
Jin slings an arm over Cheung’s shoulders. ‘You heard him, right?’
‘Yeah,’ replies Cheung.
It’s not over yet, not nearly. Crimson Typhoon will be taken to a museum somewhere, and Hu will whisper in her electrical cables and circuit boards, laying his head against the smooth, curved wall of the cockpit, a smile playing on his mouth.
And Cheung and Jin – washed up but loved pilots that they are – will let Hu live inside them too. In the curve of sunlight when it hits Jin’s cheek just right, in the way Cheung will smooth out his bedsheets before bed, in the way they’ll eat quietly at a Thai restaurant or have a cup of coffee in the morning.
Still, Hu lives, quietly, softly.
And finally, Cheung feels like he can breathe, and Jin does too, and it’s not happy, but it’s not hurt either, and that’s okay for now. That’s okay.
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’I hope we get a real house one day.’
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’A cat for Jin, a dog for me, and a bird for Cheung.’
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’Have to put up Crimson posters on the walls, of course. Guess we couldn’t bring her with us, could we? Damn.’
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’And we’ll live on the coastline, obviously. I’m never giving up fresh crab meat.’
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‘And motorcycles, so we can drive into the city at night.’
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’Drive anywhere, really. We’ll drive to Kowloon, grab food, and head to Shanghai to visit home again.’
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’Yeah. After this, let’s go home.’
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