Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"I'm sorry, dude," said Ray.

"Don't worry about it," said Brad, already wishing he wasn't stuck in this conversation. Nobody seemed to be coming to bail him out of it, though.

"It just feels kinda like a divorce," Ray went on, ignoring his very reasonable request. "Like I'm divorcing you and getting custody of our kid. And leaving you for a younger piece of ass."

It was true that Ray had been one of his longest-running co-pilots to date, but it was fine, really. Brad was used to this shit.

"We named that giant death robot together," said Ray, his lower lip theatrically trembling a little. "I'll let you have visitation, okay?"

"Oh my god," said Brad to the ceiling.

"And I hope we can still be friends." Ray wiped away a nonexistent tear and then clasped his hands together in front of his heart.

"I'm leaving this conversation," Brad decided.

"I'll think of you every time Walt and I rip a kaiju's spine out!" Ray called after him as he made his exit from the interaction and the room.

Brad slowed to a stop in the corridor, out of sight of Ray and his bullshit, and wondered where to go. Finally, he decided the weight room was probably calling his name and headed off that way.

His path took him past an observation window looking out over the hangar bays, and he stopped again at the sight of Carbonite Rhino having its exhaust ports cleaned out. It was probably due for a repaint, too; the glossy black was worn off the knuckle joints and some of the chest plating. Battle scars. That rig didn't have four marks on it for kaiju taken out for nothing.

He was going to miss piloting it. A little.

A lot more than he was going to miss having Ray in his head, that was for sure.

He gave the Rhino one last look before continuing on his route to the gym.

Poke was in there, doing squats with free weights. He finished his set as Brad started stretching and wandered over to lean on the weight rack, wipe his face down with the towel around his neck, and talk at Brad.

"Scuttlebutt says that Person and that new corporal Hasser are fucking drift soulmates or some shit like that," he said.

"Pretty strong, anyway," agreed Brad, folding himself in half to stretch out his legs and ass. He needed to get back into yoga. He didn't know why he'd stopped in the first place.

"So you're benched again."

"Guess so." Brad leaned into a stretch for his hip flexors. "Till one of these whiskey tango motherfuckers gets their dumb ass injured and they need a fill-in. Or they need to pair up new personnel."

Poke clucked his tongue. "Rough deal being the Iceman, sounds like. Man, have you ever actually been drift compatible with anyone?"

"I'm compatible with most people," Brad pointed out as he straightened up again and went to the chin-up bar. Poke followed him to continue the discussion. "That's why I'm the reliever."

"Yeah, yeah, so frosty he can keep his shit on lock in the drift. I get it." Poke should have gotten it, because he'd drifted with Brad himself, in training at least. "What I mean is you've never been drift compatible enough with anyone that they weren't gonna reassign you as soon as someone newer and shinier like Hasser came along. Right?"

"I guess," said Brad through his teeth, hauling himself up through his third rep already. He paused at the bottom of his next rep just long enough to say, "Otherwise I wouldn't be the reliever, would I?"

"You coulda had a partner who died or burned out," said Poke, which theoretically was true. Plenty of people had done both in the first year of the program, on the prototypes and the Mark I jaegers. Poke had spent a year up in Anchorage before transferring to Pendleton, and he didn't know what Brad could have gotten up to in that time.

"I didn't," said Brad. "Never had that kind of co-pilot."

"That's sad to hear," said Poke with a little frown. Then he shrugged his eyebrows. "I guess filling in operational weaknesses is just being a sergeant though, huh?"

"Mm," said Brad, turning his concentration inward to finish his set. Poke nodded and left him to it.

The way they were stepping up operations in the Pacific theatre, the active recruitment of jaeger pilots and construction of jaegers was likely to mean that Brad wouldn't be riding the bench for too long. But in the meantime, he had plenty to do as a training asset for the new or less experienced pilots, and a guinea pig for the R&D team on new systems.

But Brad had joined the Marines, and Recon in particular, so he could go to fucking war, against other humans. He had years of very expensive training for that purpose. It was just his luck that the Breach opening and monsters crawling out of it had turned out to be the key to world peace and international cooperation.

The American war machine had pivoted pretty gracefully since the San Francisco Incident. Japan, China and the US had put their heads together and figured out how to stop pilots' brains coming out their noses in the giant mecha suits Japan inevitably created to kill Real Life Godzilla, and in 2015 they'd shipped Brad off to Okinawa for eight months to attend kaiju boot camp, as part of the first big recruitment push for the jaeger corps (officially, AKSOC, the Anti-Kaiju Special Operations Command). Poke and Ray had been in that cohort with him, and the three of them had come back as some of the foremost giant monster experts in the USMC. A lot of other Recon Marines had quickly followed in their footsteps; the logic behind that, in the infinite wisdom of the Corps, seemed to be 'if you survived BRC, you can probably survive a fucking kaiju'.

By Brad's estimate, easily half a million dollars of his reconnaissance training was now obsolete and he'd never use it again, which was just great. It didn't make any fucking sense to reassign Recon battalions to the jaeger corps, but Poke liked to explain it as the government needing cars for the demolition derby and remembering they had a garage full of finely-tuned Ferraris just collecting dust.

"A halfway-intelligent person matches the tool to the purpose," Brad had argued on one of his more annoyed days in Okinawa.

Poke had just shrugged at him. "A Ferrari's still got four wheels and an engine, though."

So now here Brad was, a fucking jaeger pilot. Nobody much cared about his recon skills anymore, as long as his hand-to-hand and situational awareness were up to standards. He had to admit that his time in Japan had been really good for the hand-to-hand, as they'd had a crash course in fucking shit up without the benefit of live ordinance.

The most important thing about his new assignment, though, was that he finally had a job where he was being sent out to slay dragons.

Do what you love, and you'll never work a day in your life.

***

Brad passed the next couple of weeks by hitting the gym and the simulator enough to stay combat-ready, and doing pilot testing for some new Mark II designs that the R&D team hinted were the bridge to Mark III jaeger tech. That shit was all still above Brad's clearance, but from what he'd heard anyway it sounded like the first Mark III units were going to roll out within the next six months.

"Do we need a third generation of jaegers?" Brad asked innocently as they took his vitals to finish off a testing session. "Does that mean they have less than the utmost faith in the big fucking wall that the esteemed President-elect says is going to make jaegers obsolete? Next you'll be telling me he's just pandering to the uneducated and naive marks who got him into office, none of whom live within 50 miles of the west coast."

"You're hilarious," said Mara, his favourite of the nerd squad (she was gay and mean). "Arm," she said, beckoning so she could wrap the blood pressure cuff around it as she went on. "Trespasser went through the Golden Gate Bridge and half the San Francisco skyline like a kid ripping apart a Lego model. I don't know how they can look at that mess and go, 'Hm, yeah, a concrete-and-steel wall ought to fucking do it.' Christ alive."

Brad smirked. "Better keep up the fine development work and mad science here then."

Mara gave him a sarcastic little salute as she wrote down his blood pressure and heart rate on her notepad, then ripped off the cuff with the loudest snarl of Velcro Brad had ever heard. "Your assistance with the mad science is appreciated as always, Sergeant," she said, shooing him away.

Brad hopped off the exam bed tucked in the corner of the lab and picked up his jacket, throwing it on as he left the room.

Ray pounced on him in the hallway. "Jesus, there you are!" he practically shouted. "I swear to fuck, it's like playing Where's Waldo trying to track you down these days."

Brad waved back at the lab door three feet behind him. "I've been in there all afternoon," he said incredulously. "I have a regular fucking schedule for it."

"As if I keep track of your schedule."

"I'm only ever in like, four places in this goddamn base," countered Brad. "The fuck do you want from me, anyway?"

Ray stared at him like he was mentally deficient. "It's Fresh Meat Day, homes. We need to go check out the delivery."

Brad rolled his eyes. He hadn't clocked that it was the first Monday of the month. Recruitment had gone up so much that there had been a guaranteed and predictable wave of new personnel at this time of the month for almost a year now. "I don't care," he said. "You run along and have fun."

"How can you not care? You'll have to train half of them."

"At least half," Brad nodded tiredly.

"And you're gonna get partnered with at least one or two of them."

"So I'll fucking meet them when that comes up," said Brad. "Who cares?"

"God, you're a miserable bastard," said Ray. "Fine. I'll let you know if anything hilarious happens."

"I'm sure you will," said Brad, and as Ray walked away muttering to himself, he decided to use the distraction of Fresh Meat Day to go score a fast dinner in the mess while it was guaranteed to be nearly empty.

Dinner turned out to be tacos, so he absolutely did not regret his choice.

***

Ray caught up with him at his quarters later in the evening, before the nightly poker game was due to start. Walt Hasser was with him, but it was already normal to see him playing Ray's shadow. Brad nodded at Hasser and got a nod back, and Ray settled them in to regale Brad with news about the new recruits.

"There's nine guys this month—"

"Four of those ‘guys’ are actually women," Walt interjected.

"Yeah, that's what I said," Ray carried on. "Anyway, all Marines. Couple NCOs in the mix, one I crossed paths with in Afghanistan. He's a dick. And a new lieutenant, Bradley!"

"Oh?" asked Brad. The jaeger corps was a little light on trained command; it was a growing problem.

"Yeah," said Ray with a gleam in his eyes. "Told us he finished BRC not long before K-Day," he added. "Got in one tour in Afghanistan."

If you want to lead a pack of wolves, you need another wolf. Brad suspected the hole right above the enlisted personnel of Bravo-2 in the chain of command was about to be filled. "Alright, so he's a CO, but how dumb is he specifically?" he asked, not sure he wanted to hear the answer. "Is he a step up from Encino Man?"

Ray and Walt both started laughing, which was alarming. "That's a bar low enough to fucking trip over, but yeah, he's smarter than Encino Man. You're either gonna hate him or fall in love at first sight," said Ray.

Walt nodded enthusiastically, and at that point Brad figured there was probably a pool going on this question, since this bunch of degenerates would bet on whether the sun was going to set.

"Great. Can't fucking wait to meet him."

"Speed dating starts at 1400 tomorrow, so you won't have to wait long," said Ray.

"Ugh," said Brad. "Tell me all about that later, too."

"What?" asked Walt, startled out of his usual silence. "Do you mean you're not going to speed dating?"

"He never fucking does if he can help it," said Ray, shaking his head sadly.

"But he has to?" Walt said in confusion. "Unassigned pilots have to go and he's unassigned?"

"He's still sitting right here," Brad reminded them, getting matching guilty expressions as his reward. "It doesn't matter if I go, they can assign me to whoever's left. It's all the same shit."

"Eternally picked last for kilo kickball," said Ray, clapping a sympathetic hand on his shoulder that he immediately shook off.

"Wait," said Walt. "So it's really true that you can drift with anyone?"

"More or less," said Brad, and didn't elaborate.

Ray sighed and filled in the blanks for him. "Nothing leaks through the link from Brad when you drift with him," said Ray. "And he has a lot of control over blocking out your shit too without fucking up the drift. So he's pretty safe to drift with even if you're not really compatible with anyone else around."

Walt looked back at Brad with awe dawning on his face. "The Iceman," he breathed.

"The Iceman," Ray agreed, giving Brad a shit-eating grin. Brad wanted to punch it off his face.

"It's not that fucking hard to keep your shit contained in your own head, Person," Brad chided him instead. "Not my fault I'm surrounded by inbred and illiterate whiskey tango motherfuckers who couldn't ID a thought if it sucked their cock."

"I like to think that one day," Ray said to Walt while still staring Brad down, "Bradley's gonna find out he has a drift soulmate after all, and that motherfucker will just take a neural can opener to his brain, let everything out. And then he can finally unclench and find peace."

Walt tilted his head and contemplated Brad with a soft smile; he was feeling like an animal at the zoo now. "Melting down the Iceman," he said wistfully. Ray sighed and put a hand over his heart, and then his other hand over Walt's heart. Walt clasped it there.

Brad closed his eyes to block out their bullshit. Ray was clearly a terrible influence. Hasser had been respectful and a little fearful of him a month ago, when he'd come in with the last Fresh Meat Day delivery.

"Get out of my fucking quarters," said Brad. "Both of you. Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out."

"Our fingers are crossed for you," Ray called back over his shoulder as they scuttled out of Brad's quarters.

***

Chapter Text

The next day at 1400 found Brad in the claustrophobic and cluttered office he shared with Poke, Pappy, and Lovell, catching up on paperwork; almost everything about his job might have changed since the Breach opened, but he still had idiotic amounts of paperwork to do.

With nine new would-be pilots to run through their paces at speed dating, he figured he'd have solitude at least until dinner.

His phone, sitting facedown on the desk, buzzed with a notification at 1630. It was a text from Ray: They dragged like 14 NCOs in here to test w new LT.

It buzzed again in his hand: Gfather just asked where u r, looked mad abt it.

Brad raised his eyebrows at that and then put his phone back down, going back to his work.

Ray stayed silent until Brad found him in the mess at dinner. "Did they find someone for the LT yet?" he asked idly as he sat down with his food tray.

Ray shook his head and swallowed his mouthful of food. "Nah," he said, "they ran through all the candidates they had there and Godfather didn't look impressed with any of them."

"Also, General Mattis was there?" said Walt, looking baffled by it. "He wasn't there when I did speed dating."

"Yeah, and he didn't look impressed either," said Ray.

Brad put two and two together. "They're looking for Cinderella and no one else will do for their shiny new officer," he guessed. Best of luck to them with that. Brad was going to end up partnered with this guy when they couldn't find anyone with high enough compatibility.

Ray nodded. "And they noticed you weren't there," he said pointedly.

"Gunny Wynn looked good with him," said Walt, possibly missing the unspoken part of the conversation. "Maybe they'll go with him."

"Maybe," said Ray, still looking at Brad.

"Sounds like a 'them' problem," said Brad, and without further ado he tucked into his food.

After dinner, he headed for the hangar bays to see if the tech team needed a spare brain and set of hands for anything, only to find an unfamiliar CO with his face practically pressed against the glass of one of the observation windows. It had a really good view of the Rhino, which was indeed repainted now, so Brad couldn't blame him for being riveted by the sight.

The CO turned at the noise as Brad approached, returning Brad's salute crisply. "At ease, Sergeant," he said easily, and then looked at Brad's nametag and said, "Oh, you're Colbert."

Not being able to slip by unnoticed was one thing, but Brad didn't feel up to making small talk. Especially when it started off like that. The guy's uniform said his name was Fick. It didn't ring any bells.

"I am, sir. Presumably you're the new lieutenant who just arrived?" said Brad politely.

"Guilty," said Fick, offering a handshake which Brad dutifully accepted. "I just finished Camp Kilo last week and frankly, I'm still feeling the time difference."

"Food's worse, too," said Brad idly, which got a quiet laugh. He shifted awkwardly and cast around for either another topic or an exit. "Scuttlebutt says you had a busy round of speed dating today, sir," he said finally.

Fick's forehead creased with confusion. "Speed…? Oh. Right. Yeah, they put me through my paces. I kind of felt like a show dog." He cleared his throat. "Well, I'm sure you were heading somewhere, so I won't keep you, Sergeant," he said, and Brad took his escape at the nod that followed.

When he got to the hangar bay, he walked straight into a clusterfuck about an electrical problem in the computer system and the ops manager nearly cried at the sight of him. Brad got out of there at 2200 that night and was back bright and early at 0600 the next day to keep assisting.

They finally got it all cleared up around 1730, just in time for Brad to catch the tail end of dinner. Poke was there.

"Didn't see you at speed dating with the new LT yesterday," Poke observed when Brad sat down with his tray.

"You went?" Poke was already paired up with Garza to pilot Deep Six, a newer Mark II unit with better pressurization for trips into the ocean.

"I went," agreed Poke. "I was ordered to. And then I got my ass handed to me by that white boy, so Gabe's not rid of me yet."

Brad was admittedly impressed; Poke was a pretty strong fighter.

It must have shown on his face, because Poke shook his head at him and said, "I don't know why you didn't take a turn, Colbert. I think they had damn near every E-5 in there who isn't a fuckup."

"I wasn't ordered to, and I was using my talents elsewhere," said Brad. "Anyway, it's confusing when I show up. I'm doing them a favour by skipping it."

Poke raised an eyebrow and pointed his fork at him as he said, "If you weren't ordered to, it's probably because they couldn't fucking find you to give you the damn order. You're a slippery son of a bitch."

"I was in the office. Not a big mental exercise to go look for me there."

"Well, whatever," Poke frowned. "He didn't have any good matches in there that I saw—maybe Gunny, I dunno—so I don't think they've assigned him yet."

"I'm sure they'll find someone," said Brad.

***

Ray accosted him in the corridor outside the mess right after breakfast on Thursday morning. "There you are," he grumbled, as if Brad eating breakfast at 0730 was unpredictable behaviour. "Godfather wants you in the gym at 1000 sharp."

"Okay," said Brad slowly.

"He also told me to pass on that he doesn't want to hear you've been delayed for any reason, including a kilo alert, since you're not assigned to a jaeger right now."

Brad let out a humourless snort. "Fine. Thanks."

"Good luck, homes," said Ray, patting his shoulder.

When Brad reported to the gym as ordered, Lieutenant Fick was already there and stretching next to the wrestling mats. Godfather was standing off to the side, giving Brad an unimpressed look. Thankfully, there was no sign of General Mattis.

The gym seemed kind of busy for 1000, he thought as he headed over to the mats.

"Sergeant Colbert," said Godfather once Brad had greeted them both with a salute, "what is the policy we observe here regarding attendance of new personnel assessments?"

Brad shifted to parade rest. "Sir. All personnel qualified to operate a jaeger but not currently assigned to a jaeger strike team are expected to attend so that their compatibility with new personnel may be assessed."

"That policy also applies to you when you're unassigned, doesn't it, Sergeant?" prompted Godfather.

Brad hesitated just a little. "Yes, sir, it does."

"And since you're unassigned right now, I don't have to order you to attend, correct? The policy is clear to you?"

"It's clear, sir."

"And yet here we are," said Godfather, giving him a pointed look that got the warning across very strongly. "Well, let's get to it," he said. "First to four points, gentlemen; you both know the drill by now."

Brad stripped down to bare feet and his t-shirt to match Fick and dutifully walked onto the mats to square up in front of him. He wondered if Fick had spent yesterday going through the rest of the NCOs on base, and then as a crowd started to wander closer to the mats he wondered if he'd have made this less of a spectacle if he'd just shown up on Tuesday when he was supposed to. More people had definitely come in the gym behind him.

"Start when you're ready," said Godfather idly from behind him.

Brad focused his attention on Fick. One of the things he relied on to great effect without the elusive prize of high drift compatibility was his ability to notice details. By applying the principle of 'observe everything, admire nothing' in close combat situations, Brad picked up on body language cues from his opponent and reacted faster; it worked on people and kaiju both. Ray had called it mind-reading more than once, but the point was that it was nothing like mind-reading, since drift compatibility was the mind-reading: the whole concept boiled down to whether you could anticipate what your co-pilot would do if you weren't currently mind-linked to them in the first place. Brad didn't predict, didn't anticipate; he merely observed and reacted appropriately in the moment.

He and Fick stared each other down across the mats for a long moment, held in suspended animation, and then a muscle twitch betrayed that Fick was about to make the first move. Brad watched for it and ducked around the punch Fick threw, stepping inside his guard to grab him by the collar for leverage before hooking his arm and throwing him.

"One," called Godfather.

The LT got to his feet with a frown as Brad backed up; clearly his mental gears were turning. Who knew what he was seeing. Brad could hear Marines cheering on the sidelines and saw money changing hands in his peripheral vision. Predictable.

He didn't know how he'd been figured out so goddamn fast, but Fick launched his next attack with no warning to betray what he was going to do. Brad… moved anyway, and although he missed his next grapple attempt, he managed to hook Fick by the ankle and dump him on the floor that way. Fick evaded the pin and hopped to his feet. He was grinning now. It looked kind of feral.

"Come on," he taunted Brad, beckoning him with one hand. Brad snorted, took one step forward, and then fell for a feint and found himself on his back in an arm bar.

"One-one," called Godfather.

They circled each other and Brad looked for an opening in Fick's guard. When he caught one he went straight for it, relying on his speed and reach, and Fick moved out of the way like he was water before trying to reverse it on Brad.

Brad knew he was going to try the reversal, evaded it, and then wondered how the fuck he'd just known like that. He wasn't even relying on his vision like usual. Frankly, he could probably handle the rest of this fight blindfolded if he had to.

…Shit.

Brad eventually won four points to three, to great fanfare from the crowd they'd drawn. Godfather had a smug little smile on his face. Brad turned away from that sight to see Fick with his hands on his hips, catching his breath and staring at Brad like he was just now seeing him for the first time.

Brad wanted to get the fuck out of there.

Brad also wanted to go another round.

He picked the smart option and left, shoving his feet into his boots as fast as humanly possible so he could make a beeline for the door. He'd get notified when it was time for testing their actual drift compatibility in a jaeger, although Brad already knew what the results of that would be.

Ray chased him down the corridor. "Don't run around with your glass slippers untied! It'll be bad for your Iceman rep if you trip and fall on your dumb perfect face!"

Brad sighed loudly but stopped and crouched to do up his laces, because he really didn't want to eat floor. Or run into the Sergeant-Major and get lectured about the grooming standard. Ray skidded to a stop in front of him and Brad saw him tuck a wad of bills in his pocket.

"Homes," said Ray with feeling.

"Exactly which bets did you win?" Brad asked as he stood up again and led the way down the corridor in the same direction he'd been escaping.

"That you'd win the fight, obviously. You had a lot of naysayers after everybody watched the LT wipe the floor with Espera, Kocher and Gunny the other day, but I still believed, Brad. I believed!"

"I want half," said Brad.

"How about no, but next time we're on libo your first row of tequila shots is on me."

Brad considered that. "Acceptable," he decided, and they shook on it. "And the other bets?" he prompted. "You couldn't have called the one on me hating him or loving him based on that one match."

Ray shot him an incredulous look. "Okay," he said, smirking. "Bold of you to say that to a dude who's seen the inside of your head during combat, but whatever you say."

"You haven't seen fuck-all of the inside of my head, Person."

"My ass, Iceman. You don't hold it all back. Your memories, sure, but I get your thoughts in the moment. We wouldn't be able to drift otherwise. Yeah, that's right," Ray said to the look of quiet horror that had to be growing across Brad's face, "I know how you think."

"That wasn't a bet you won today, though," said Brad confidently, because a neural bridge was always a two-way street.

"No," admitted Ray. "The other bet I won—and for less money than you winning the fight, I'm gonna point out—was that you and the LT would be drift besties."

Brad sighed. "Lucky guess, Person."

"Hmm, I had a good feeling about it. And so did Godfather, apparently! And also the six other guys I had to split that pot with." Ray smiled widely. "Hey, this means you'll get to pilot a jaeger again really soon! And you won't get benched and reassigned anymore!"

"Slow your roll. Speed dating doesn't mean shit compared to the hot seat testing," said Brad. "We don't know yet how that's gonna go."

After a beat of silence, Ray said, "It's incredible that you managed to say all that bullshit with a straight face, Brad."

"Practice makes perfect."

"You know," said Ray, "I kind of want to feel bad for the LT that you're Cinderella, but I've got a hunch he likes them mean. And crazy. So you're probably fine."

"Never call me Cinderella again," said Brad, shutting his eyes painfully and regretting all his life choices to date.

"You can't make me promise a thing like that, man," said Ray solemnly. "You brought this one on yourself."

He really had, too.

***

Brad passed an exciting hour in his office tackling more paperwork—at this rate, he might get caught up for the first time in his career—before there was a knock on the doorframe. He looked back over his shoulder at the door and startled at the sight of the LT.

"At ease." Fick waved Brad back down before he'd managed to get his ass more than a few inches off the chair, then stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned a shoulder on the doorway. Brad watched him take in the office: desks stuffed in like puzzle pieces, shitty DOD-issue laptops, paper and empty coffee mugs scattered around. Poke had left his soft cover sitting on his desk.

"Cozy," said Fick.

"They furnish us with only the best comforts here, naturally."

"Naturally. Listen, Sergeant, I just wanted to come by and say hello properly, because I don't think either of our first two meetings really qualify in the circumstances. I was going to chat with you in the gym this morning, but you left like your ass was on fire so I've chosen the ambush approach."

Brad winced a little. "Sorry, sir, I had to go deal with some pressing matters."

"Looks like," said Fick, pointedly looking over Brad's shoulder at the paperwork on his desk and the solitaire game on his laptop screen, which he'd forgotten was still open.

"Uh," said Brad, but Fick was grinning widely now, so he probably wasn't going to get written up for this.

"I didn't take it personally, Sergeant Colbert. I thought maybe you didn't want to sign autographs for your adoring fans."

"Something like that," Brad agreed. "And you can just call me Brad, sir."

Fick looked startled. "Pretty sure I'm going to be in your chain of command," he said slowly.

"I'm pretty sure you are too, sir," said Brad, since this guy had 'new platoon commander' written all over him, "but the regs are relaxed… quite a lot… around here when it comes to interactions with your co-pilot."

An eyebrow went up. "As I understand it, the shit in the gym was just an initial screening process, and we have to pass a 'neural handshake' test before getting assigned together."

"That's correct, sir," said Brad, making himself look Fick in the eyes, "but you do know we're going to pass, right?"

Fick looked away for a second and then quietly said, "I've never had a sparring match like that in my life." So he knew.

"Me neither, sir," Brad admitted, turning back to his desk as he said it.

"My name's Nate."

Brad turned back around, but the LT—Nate was already gone.

***

Chapter Text

Godfather was clearly done with dicking around, because Brad got paged to the simulator room at 1400. Nate got there about 30 seconds behind him.

"Iceman, reservation for two?" came Ray's voice, and Brad realized he was the tech on duty.

"Ray. Is this actually your shift on the sim?" he asked, because it wasn't.

"It is today!" said Ray enthusiastically.

Brad crossed his arms. "How much did that cost you?"

"How about I don't divulge that information, and instead you just feel happy that your old pal Ray-Ray's got your back while you and the LT take Jimmy here for a spin?"

"Jimmy?" Nate echoed in confusion.

Brad and Ray both pointed at the training cockpit, Ray a lot more excitedly than Brad.

Nate looked at the training rig and furrowed his brows. "Why—"

"A Marine named it," said Brad, before Ray could answer.

Nate visibly followed that thought to its logical conclusion and then said, "You're right, I actually don't really want to know why."

"All right," said Ray, "Brad, LT, go get your flight suits on so we can start the ride."

Brad led the way to the changing and staging room and pulled one of the small number of non-midget-sized simulator suits off of its hook to start strapping pieces on. Nate silently followed his lead.

"There's not much to these, is there?" said Nate after a minute, looking at the skeleton armour running from shoulder to wrist down the outside of one of his arms. "I think I was expecting an actual flight suit."

Brad looked up from where he was securing a shin-piece on his own leg. "We do have full body armour suits for combat. These are just for the simulator, because you can't put on a combat flight suit without two people helping."

"Oh," said Nate, nodding and looking down at himself. "How heavy are the actual suits?"

Brad strapped on his other leg piece. "Feels like you're wearing full gear. And two knee splints."

"Great. I guess I'll start doing more squats, then." Nate didn't sound thrilled by the prospect and Brad had to swallow back a laugh.

"If you're Recon," he said, securing his last strap into place, "then you can handle it."

"Your confidence is appreciated," said Nate, and then he turned around, flailing a little at a strap hanging half-loose in the middle of his back. "Sorry, would you mind…"

"Yeah," said Brad, stepping in to secure the strap properly for him. While he was there, he checked three others and tightened one of them.

"Appreciated, Serg—Brad." Nate turned back around and looked down at himself, testing his range of motion a little. "Hopefully next time I put one of these on, I won't need anyone to help me tie my shoelaces."

"Your self-sufficiency is already well above the benchmark," said Brad, grabbing two helmets off the shelf and offering one to Nate. "For an officer."

"Wow, thanks. High honour."

"I expect great things, sir," said Brad as they strapped their helmets on. "For example, can you find the door unaided?"

"The same one we came in through?" asked Nate. "I believe it's over there." He pointed across his chest in the direction of the door. With his middle finger.

Brad couldn't hold back his grin anymore. "After you, then," he said. "Rank before wisdom."

"As ever." Nate led the way back into the control room. Brad followed a few steps behind him, settling into the deep breathing pattern he used to clear his head before strapping into the pilot's seat.

"Finally!" said Ray. "All right, strap yourselves in, keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times, and please be sure to let a ride attendant know if at any point you feel like your brains may be leaking out your nose."

Nate approached the training rig. "Does it make a difference which side you're on?" he asked.

"No," said Brad.

Nate nodded and went to the far side of the rig, so Brad hauled himself into the near spot and settled his arms and legs into the braces. Ray helpfully extended the length of the braces to accommodate Brad's limbs without him even having to ask, which was nice for a change. He settled into place and the slight backward lean of the harness left him looking directly up at the one-way glass of the observation area overhead. He realized in that moment that Ray had turned up the lights in the training lab enough to opaque the glass and show him his reflection, instead of the inside of the observation area.

"Ray, how many people are watching this right now?"

"Homes, why would you ask me a question you definitely don't want me to answer?"

Brad tore his gaze away from the one-way mirrors and looked at Ray instead. "Yeah, forget I said anything," he agreed, going back to blanking his mind.

"Great! All right, LT, are you strapped in? Hold onto your butts," said Ray, flipping switches on the control console. "And remember not to chase any rabbits."

"Rabbits?" echoed Nate.

"Random stray thoughts and memories that catch your attention," said Ray, pausing the activation sequence to answer. "It's easy to follow those down the rabbit hole if you're not watching out for it. Except you don't end up in Wonderland. It's usually more like a traumatic flashback. And then everything goes to shit on us."

"Okay," said Nate, sounding worried.

"You'll be fine," Ray assured him. "You're not in an actual jaeger, so you can't accidentally blow us all up with a plasma cannon because you're caught in a bad dream! So, nothing to worry about. Aaaand showtime!"

Brad closed his eyes and breathed in deep and slow as the system activated. It always felt like something grabbing and yanking at his guts from behind his spine, even though everything was happening in his brain. Mara had told him once it had something to do with the nervous system doing weird fucking shit in self-defence when your brain got lo-jacked by a computer.

"Neural handshake commenced," said Ray, sounding far away. "Nice firm grip, no sweaty palms please."

Brad breathed out even slower as he retreated into his head. Everything was staying in its box, as usual. He felt a presence creeping in around the edges of his thoughts and identified it as Nate.

'Holy fuck,' Nate thought.

'You get used to it,' he thought back, and opened his eyes. "Person, we good?" he said out loud.

"Well, it's stable," said Ray.

"So we're good?" he pressed. "Seems fine from here."

"I think 'good' might be pushing it. We're okay. Solid B. Maybe a B-plus if I'm grading on a curve." Ray looked up from the console display and made unnerving eye contact. "Bradley," he said, aiming for coy and missing, "are you being shy?"

"He's being a little shy," Nate answered before Brad had a chance to open his mouth. His flash of outrage was met by deep amusement. "Come on, Brad," Nate added in a warm voice that was also terribly amused, "it's show-and-tell time. Share with the class."

'Not necessary,' Brad thought.

'Pretty sure they taught us at Camp Kilo that the more you sync up, the better you fight,' Nate fired back. 'And you're holding out on me, Colbert.'

"Brad," said Ray, "I know it can be scary your first time, but it's not gonna work if you keep your legs closed. We found you this nice boy, he's gonna treat you right, and you're in this giant prophylactic, so it's safe to let him in."

"Don't tell me they call him the Iceman because he's a little frigid," said Nate.

"It's true, but we love him anyway," said Ray. Brad was officially in hell.

But he did have a front row seat to Nate mentally connecting 'prophylactic' to 'Jimmy' (correctly) and then instantly wishing he hadn't, so that made up for it a little.

"Brad," said Ray, "do you trust me?"

"No."

"You're a bad liar, dude. Trust me on this one: try going in 100% just this one time. Ray-Ray's right here, I got you. Nothing bad's gonna happen that a little psychotherapy can't fix."

'I promise to be gentle,' Nate teased him.

"Fuck. Fine," said Brad. "If it gets Corporal Person to shut the fuck up and gets us out of here."

He took a deep breath, and then… exhaled. He took another deep breath, held it this time, and then shut his eyes and let everything out of the box, dropped his guard, fucking flattened his mental defences.

That held breath got punched out of him as he saw two entire lives at once, everything superimposed on everything else.

He was spraypainting an underpass in San Diego/riding a bus to a track meet in Baltimore/learning to surf/reading Homer for extra credit in English class/shipped off to military school/shipped off to Grandma's for the summer/in his Mountain Warfare course/in a Classics program at Dartmouth/deployed to Afghanistan/deployed to a different part of Afghanistan/taking down his first kaiju/watching the news report about the first kaiju he took down—

"Fuck!" said three voices at the same time. Brad realized one of them had been his and opened his eyes.

"Now that's what I'm talking about!" Ray crowed. "How's that shit feel, Iceman?"

It felt like he'd been fucking full-body electrocuted. But in a good way, according to Nate.

They looked at each other. Nate's chest was heaving like he'd just run five miles flat-out, and his eyes were lit up like he'd beaten his best time in the process. Brad's blood pounded in his ears and everything looked hyper-sharp; adrenaline rush, he realized.

"All right," said Ray, making them break eye contact, "hemispheres should be calibrated now. Try moving."

They lifted their right hands in perfect sync, and gave Ray the finger. He started laughing.

"Oh, man, those kaiju are fucked. This is the best." He flipped another switch and then gave them a shit-eating grin. "Wanna try the combat sim?"

The speaker from the observation area crackled to life with Godfather's voice. "Excellent numbers, gentlemen. My office, fifteen mikes."

Ray wilted.

"Next time, Corporal," said Nate, although he was a little reluctant as they started the powering-down process. Brad couldn't hide in the drift that he wouldn't have minded a quick shakedown run himself, but they had plenty of time ahead of them for training.

Once he was alone inside his head again, Brad tried to relax and calm his breathing as he extricated himself from the training rig and made his way toward the changing area to pull off the suit. That shit was definitely dangerous with the wrong person. Even worse, he was pretty sure all of Nate's memories were still in his fucking head. Blocking people out in the drift up until now had been the right call.

"Well, that was a wild time," said Nate, stopping in front of one of the empty gear hooks and pulling off his helmet.

"It was something," agreed Brad, focusing his attention on the straps at his wrists.

Nate paused and then turned to face him. "You know, I also kind of felt like a bug under glass out there."

"I know you did," said Brad. "You were inside my head when you were feeling it."

Nate started picking at the velcro armour straps on his arm. "This morning I'd have apologized for accidentally dragging you into the spotlight, but at this point I'm pretty sure it's you who's drawing all the attention, not me."

"You spent five minutes in my head and now you have me pegged?" asked Brad, still keeping his eyes on his suit as he dismantled it.

"Actually, I spent three hours hearing all about you from, oh, about half the fucking battalion after you left the gym this morning."

"Even better," Brad muttered.

Nate gave no indication that he'd heard. "Your reputation very much precedes you around here, you know. The men have a lot of respect for you and you seem to terrify some of the officers."

Brad looked up at that. "You can just say it was Encino Man," he said.

"I'm sure I don't know who that is," said Nate, in a tone that told Brad he did, in fact, know exactly who that was. "My point is, they've got you built up as this borderline mythical figure, and most of what they think they know about your life story is crazy rumours that I know for a fact now are incorrect. You apparently hold yourself aloof and apart all the time. And now someone's actually able to drift properly with you, so they're all fucking fascinated because you might be just a person after all."

Brad stopped partway through unstrapping his right leg. "Sir, are you attempting to suggest that I brought this on myself?"

"Yes, Sergeant, that is exactly what I'm suggesting."

"Well, what the fuck am I supposed to do about it now?"

Nate shrugged. "Nothing, I guess. They'll get bored and move on eventually. Next kilo attack, if nothing else."

"It won't even take that long," said Brad. "You grossly overestimate the attention spans of that bunch of illiterate, inbred, ADHD-riddled delinquents." He hung up his suit on its hook and straightened out his uniform. "The chow line is too much excitement for them to handle, most days."

Nate smirked. "Speaking of delinquents, it's a shame you gave up such a promising painting career to go to military school."

And there they went. "Well, I was unappreciated in my time," said Brad, stowing both the helmets as Nate finished freeing himself from his suit.

"What were you, thirteen?"

"About that, yeah. Fourteen? It was a long time ago." That little memory refresher in the drift had brought a lot of half-forgotten things back to the front of his mind, for better or for worse.

"I admit, after hearing so many awe-inspiring stories of the exploits of the great Iceman, I was surprised to learn you were such a little shit as a kid."

"And I was completely unsurprised to learn that you were a middle-class WASP who went to Dartmouth to get a useless degree in dead civilizations. Sir."

"Tacking that on the end doesn't make the statement less insubordinate, Brad. Just for future reference. Also, fuck you, a classics degree isn't useless. Our society is built on the backs of those 'dead civilizations'." He even used air quotes. Brad had known he was pressing a button but hadn't realized it would be such a big red one.

He schooled his face into something approaching seriousness as they left the changing area. "Duly noted, sir. Maybe sometime you can tell me all about how that degree is serving you in the Corps, and specifically how you apply it to killing kaiju."

"I know you think you're making a good point against me there," said Nate as they nodded goodbye to Person and headed out into the corridor, "but I would love to have that conversation, since a huge percentage of Greek myths are about somebody figuring out how to kill a giant monster."

That one made Brad laugh.

***

"Gentlemen," Godfather greeted them when they entered his office. "At ease. Have a seat." He waved at the chairs in front of his desk, and once they were seated he looked back and forth between them. "Some really good numbers on that sim today. I'm impressed, and General Mattis will be impressed. He's taken a personal interest in seeing Bravo Company get filled out as they step up production of jaegers and prepare to roll out the Mark IIIs, and we're very pleased to have a junior officer with some actual Recon experience and training in the mix. Someone who's capable of leading from the front and coordinating engagement with kilos from a position of immediate knowledge."

"Thank you, sir," said Nate.

"It was very important to us that you get off on the right foot by finding a well-matched NCO to be your co-pilot. I was hoping for someone experienced, but drift compatibility is a hard thing to predict so I was trying not to hope too hard. But I had a good feeling about this match-up as soon as I met you, Lieutenant, and you two have proven me correct. Brad here," and he pointed at Brad as though it needed clarifying, "is one of our best. There's a lot to learn from him, and he's a hell of a trainer, too. His field experience—Brad, how many kilo encounters have you had at this point?"

"Eight, sir," said Brad, feeling like something interesting under a lens again. He cleared his throat and clarified, "Five kills credited, and I played a supporting role for the others."

"No shit?" asked Godfather, looking startled. "That's even more than I thought. Impressive work, son."

"Thank you, sir," said Brad, feeling awkward.

"Well, you've won the lottery here, Lieutenant," said Godfather. "As you can see, his reputation is well-earned. You will not find a more experienced or capable co-pilot than this guy."

"Yes sir," said Nate, "I look forward to working with Brad and learning everything he has to teach me about kilo hunting. I think we're going to work well together."

Godfather beamed at them both. "We expect great things from you two. Great things."

"We will endeavour to live up to those expectations, sir," said Nate, sounding a little pained about it.

"Glad to hear it. Well, I didn't call you in here just to blow smoke up your asses. Now that we've got you sorted out with a team assignment, we've planned some personnel movements to balance out our assets in Bravo Company. Sergeant, I doubt you'll be shocked to hear that Lieutenant Fick will be the new commander of second platoon."

"I did expect that to be the case, sir," Brad agreed.

"We've also decided on Captain McGraw as the commander for third platoon, and Captain Schwetje will remain the company commander and handle first platoon. Lieutenant, we're going to assign Gunnery Sergeant Wynn to your command. I believe you met him on Tuesday. He's very good and has been at AKSOC pretty much since the beginning, along with Captain Patterson. Wynn is ideally positioned to manage the platoon on base and assist you with your command in general. He will, however, be staying back at the ranch during kilo engagements. Part of our adjustment process since joining AKSOC has been applying Marine Corps adaptability to our command structure and role assignments. For example, Corporal Person is the RTO for Bravo-2, but he's also a jaeger pilot. When he's deployed, your gunnery sergeant will have to wear the RTO hat when and as needed. Thankfully, Mike is used to this type of arrangement and does a great job with it."

"I understand, sir," said Nate. "Makes sense to me."

Godfather cleared his throat and shifted his attention to Brad. "Now that you're assigned to the same strike team as your platoon commander for the foreseeable future, that's another shuffle we'll need to do in your platoon and team assignments. You'll be in the field while Mike stays at command HQ, so you're inevitably going to have to step up as your commander's right hand during an engagement." Godfather chuckled. "I guess literally his right hand, if you're in a jaeger."

Brad laughed politely. "Understood, sir. I'll coordinate with Gunny Wynn as appropriate."

"Good. We also need to pull you off of Team 1 and assign them a new team leader. General Mattis and I are envisioning you two acting more as a floater unit assisting the Bravo-2 strike teams in kilo engagements, which could mean you see a lot of action if we can keep your unit combat-ready. So, I would suggest you try not to scratch the paint job too often unless you're getting something out of it, gentlemen."

"Yes sir," said Brad, and then considered that. "Are we reshuffling the teams?"

"We are. Second platoon is getting some new Marines, all of whom are thankfully matched up for drift compatibility at second grade or better, but it's a lot of untested men at once and we need some balance in there." Godfather picked up a piece of paper from his desk blotter and passed it across to Brad. "You know these people well and you've fought alongside several of them, so if you have any input on these teams I want to hear it now, Sergeant."

Brad nodded and scanned down the list, raising his eyebrows at the addition of eight new personnel besides Nate. That meant five new jaegers coming to Bravo-2 alone. "I assume you have Sergeant Espera in mind as the new Team 1 leader, sir?"

"Yep."

"I think he'll impress everyone in that role, sir. I don't have any input to add on this list. I note you've put us on Team 3 with Sergeant Lovell as the team leader; I assume that was intended to balance the fact you've got more new personnel on that team than the other two."

"You're correct, Brad. You two keep that copy; your platoon will need it for personnel assignments."

Brad mutely handed the page over to Nate, who accepted it without comment and folded it up to tuck in his pocket.

"Any word coming down yet on when we'll get all these new jaegers allocated, sir?" Brad asked.

"The word that's come down to me is 'soon'. For now, they all need sim training anyway. Until we get our units delivered and out of the packing peanuts, Bravo-2 will maintain its current active watch rotation for kilo alerts with existing jaegers. If your teams need relief or backup, I anticipate Bravo-3 will continue to loan the services of Sergeant Kocher and Corporal Carisalez whenever Golf Rodeo is cleared for action."

"Understood," said Brad, considering the logistics already.

"One thing I do know definitively, though, is that unless something stupid happens you two will be the last to receive your jaeger. They're telling us April for the first Mark III units to come off the line, for what that's worth. I'm sure you'll find plenty to keep yourselves busy for the next four months."

It took a moment for Godfather's words to sink in properly, but then Brad's initial disappointment turned into stark fucking disbelief. He stared at Godfather, who smirked back.

"Sir. Did you just say we're getting a Mark III unit?" he asked as calmly and evenly as possible. From what he could see in his peripheral vision, Nate was also staring in shock.

Godfather's smirk got wider. "Great things," he said again. Then he slapped his hands down on the arms of his chair and pushed it back to stand up. "Alright, dismissed. We've all got lots to do."

Brad got to his feet in a bit of a daze.

"Thank you, sir," said Nate faintly.

***

Chapter Text

After a lull through the holidays and the new year, everything seemed to start happening all at once.

First, in mid-January AKSOC transferred all of Alpha Company to Hawaii, to 'better distribute America's assets in the Pacific theatre' and 'improve their combat readiness'. Ray spent a week in mourning that Bravo was stuck at Pendleton, until Walt pointed out that they could still get deployed to Puget Sound or Alaska. Ray found the silver lining pretty quickly after that, lest he give anyone in Command any ideas about actually sending them up north.

Then on January 28th at 2115, there was a kilo alert, their first since Halloween although some had targeted Asia in the interim. It was Bravo-3's watch that day, but as it was apparently a Category 3 kaiju (in other words, fucking huge), Bravo-2 got orders to be ready to deploy on one hour's notice. In practice, this meant getting into combat flight suits and playing poker in the hangar staging area while the mechanics did ready checks on the jaegers and the battalion XO monitored the battle. Nate had conferred with Gunny and then tapped Deep Six and Carbonite Rhino to stand ready; Brad joined them for the poker game, since he was off-duty anyway.

"They really need to put fans in these fucking suits," Ray bitched as he dealt the cards out.

"Is your delicate constitution affected, Person?" asked Poke. "Do we need to get the smelling salts?"

"I'm sorry, Antonio, are you not marinating in your own sweat right now? Do you not have sweat glands?" Ray fired back.

Poke looked over at Garza as he said, "I mean, yeah, I do have sweat glands, dog. But I'm Mexican. My ancestors spent thousands of years surviving and thriving in the heat. This, this is nothing." He waved at himself.

Garza started laughing. "Yeah man! This is like, Guadalajara room temperature. Dude, my grandma's harder than you."

Poke and Hasser joined in the laughing.

"Yeah, yeah," said Ray. "Gabe, does your grandma wear 40 pounds of ceramic fucking combat armour? This shit doesn't breathe, is my point."

"She wouldn't even need it," said Garza dismissively, throwing chips on the table to call. "That woman ever saw a kilo, she'd just whip a sandal at it. Game over. La chancla could discipline the devil himself."

That cracked everyone up, including Brad, but Poke fucking lost it and had to put his cards down before he dropped them.

Ray, who seemed to be laughing as much at Poke's reaction as anything else, managed to say, "International cooperation my ass. Mexico's just hiding away a secret weapon like that?" He thumped a fist down on the card table and shouted at the room at large, "Release Gabe's grandma now! Unleash la chancla!"

"You're in rare form this evening, Ray," Brad commented as he watched Poke gasp for breath. "Was it your sister, your cousin or your favourite goat that sent you dirty pictures in the mail this week?"

Ray gave him the finger and said, "Don't be fucking ridiculous, Brad. My favourite goat can't read or write, let alone use a camera."

"Neither can your sister or your cousin," said Brad, shamelessly swinging at the easy pitch.

Ray snorted and rolled his head back on his neck. "Yeah, fine, you can have that one. I walked right into it." He sighed loudly. "I fucking hate being on one-hour notice. I hate it. Kocher and Dirty Earl need to seal the fucking deal and wrap this shit up, man. I'm stewing in my ball sweat, I have a fucking wedgie and I can't reach my own ass under this fucking suit, and I had plans tonight that weren't sitting in the hangar playing poker with you assholes."

"Not the goat pictures?" asked Walt, looking concerned. Brad grinned.

"Man, not you too! No, motherfucker, I was gonna introduce the kids to Evangelion tonight, remember?"

"Oh, right," said Walt.

Brad snapped to attention. "Ray, you whiskey tango son of a whore, what the fuck have I told you about watching that shit on base? And where did you get another copy?"

"Amazon?" Ray shrugged.

"Ev—what?" asked Garza, shaking his head in confusion. Ray lit up like Christmas and Brad groaned internally.

Poke chuckled again. "It's a cartoon, dog. Japanese stuff. It's pretty fucked up," he admitted.

"It's about teenagers in mecha suits fighting giant monsters from a hell dimension and getting PTSD from it," said Ray cheerfully.

Garza looked intrigued. "Are there titties?"

"Yes," said Ray, nodding happily.

"And it is banned on this base," hissed Brad. When Garza grinned at him, he said, "That's not a joke. I'm serious. Sixta banned it."

"What?" Garza laughed. "What is he banning a titty anime about robots for?"

Ray rolled his eyes. "There was an 'incident' involving some boot lance-corporal who lost his fucking grip on reality for reasons totally unrelated to our harmless, bad-acid-trip kaiju cartoon. But Command freaked out when they found out what it was, blah blah PR, optics, Sixta banned it. It was fucking stupid."

"Jesus," Walt hissed.

"Nobody died, it's fine," said Ray dismissively. "Personally, I like to look at Evangelion as a nice warning about the negative effects of PTSD from trying to beat giant fucking monsters to death. If you see something, say something," he said earnestly, apparently to the whole table.

"It's not a fucking training video, Person," said Brad tiredly.

"Yeah, and you can't train a Marine by having them play Call of Duty either, Brad, but when was the last time you had to explain the difference between a SAW and an M4 to some PFC Fucknuts, huh?"

"Man's got a point," said Poke. "…I think."

"No he doesn't. Don't encourage him. Ray, do not corrupt the children with Evangelion; you'll give them fucking nightmares or weird fetishes and either way, I'm going to hold you responsible. Watch that shit with your inbred family when you're home on leave."

"You're not my real dad!"

"No, because I would never pay your mom unless she used condoms like a professional. But I am your sergeant." He smiled with teeth.

Ray's face landed on something between a pout and a frown, and then he looked over at Poke. "Hey, TL," he said winningly.

Poke looked up, blinked as he apparently tuned back into the discussion, and then gave Ray a forbidding look. "Person, are you really trying to play us off against each other right now like your divorced-ass parents?" He pointed threateningly. "My kids do this, and they're better at it than you. For starters, you can't do that shit while we're both in the same room."

"But Mom…"

"And I ain't your mom!"

Garza piped up, "Mom Actual incoming at my two, ten feet and closing," and they all looked up as Nate reached the table, stopping between Ray and Walt's chairs.

"Gents," he greeted with a nod. "Not to break up the party, but Golf Rodeo advises that Bravo-3-2 has neutralized the kilo, uh, 'Dicknose'," he paused for a beat, "and is RTB. So your ready order is cancelled and you can get out of your suits and on with your evenings."

"Finally!" Ray groaned.

Garza laughed a little. "Heh. Dicknose. That one must have come from Dirty."

The men actually on duty abandoned their cards and went off to get pried out of their flight suits, leaving Brad to gather up the deck and poker chips while Nate hovered like he wanted to say something. Brad looked up at him and waited for it.

"From the images the strike team sent back of the kilo, I'm not gonna say Dicknose is an inaccurate description of it, but it's occurring to me that the identifiers they usually get are a lot more… family-friendly?"

Brad raised an eyebrow at him. "The official identifiers," he said. "For civilians. And action figures," he added, rolling his eyes.

"Ah," said Nate, nodding slowly. "So… first to glass it gets to name it?"

"If you kill it you can change the name, but usually by then it's stuck."

"What did you call the last one you took out?" asked Nate.

"Octopussy," said Brad. "Beginning of September. That one came from Jacks. Some of his finest work."

"Sep—" Nate's face scrunched up in thought. "Wasn't that Verocitor?"

Brad shrugged. "It looked like a cat. With some tentacles. LA-16-2."

"Yeah, that was Verocitor."

"That's a stupid fucking name," said Brad. "Doesn't even make sense."

Nate grinned. "It's not as good as Octopussy, that's for sure."

***

A week after the ignominious defeat of kilo SD-17 Dicknose, or whatever the UN or AKSOC decided to name it by the time it was dead, Pendleton received two shiny new Mark II jaegers, hot off the line. Gunny Wynn decided to assign them to the teams with the best records in the simulator, so one went to Leon and Brunmeier and one to Lilley and Christopher.

"They both got names now," he said on Friday when Brad crossed paths with him near the weight room.

Brad braced himself. "Do I even want to know?"

Mike shrugged. "They're not too bad. Leon and Brunny went with 'Saber Helldiver'—kinda badass, if you ask me—and Lilley and Christopher named theirs 'Hollywood Banshee', which doesn't make any fucking sense but it's definitely not moto."

Both acceptable, he supposed. "Well, you know how I feel about moto bullshit," said Brad.

Mike smirked. "Yeah, Colbert, I know. But you can rest easy today."

"Gunny, if we let everyone use moto names, we'd run out of words. And they'd all be named shit like 'Freedom Eagle'."

"Uh huh."

"Or 'Steel Rain'," Brad grinned.

Mike laughed. "Fuck you, Brad. They didn't let us name the Mark I units, that was all Command."

"If I call Captain Patterson in Hawaii, will he corroborate that?"

"If he's got any sense, he’ll remember he’s in Hawaii and won't even answer the fucking phone."

***

Chapter Text

The following Wednesday, Brad was in the middle of both dinner and an argument with Ray (about watching Evangelion on base, again, after Stafford and Christeson had informed the whole table that it was "fucking screwby", whatever that meant) when a hand landed on his shoulder from behind. He twitched at the surprise contact, but it turned out to be Nate and Brad kept himself from dropping him where he stood. Nate was visibly jazzed about something, which was only occasionally a signal of some looming torment.

"Evening, sir," Brad greeted him. "What brings you out of the officers' mess?"

"He missed you!" declared Ray.

"Nah, he's just slumming," said Walt.

"Thanks… on both counts, gents. But no, I got this today," he said, turning his attention back to Brad and waving an envelope.

Brad looked back and forth between the envelope and Nate's face a few times, and when no further information came his way, he chose the path of mocking. "Letter from your pen pal?" he guessed. "Ransom note? Phone bill? Jury duty summons? An offer for a credit card? Photos of Ray's sister? Blank office supplies so you can write a letter to your grandmother?"

"Worn yourself out yet?" Nate asked after a beat of silence.

"Yeah, I'm done," said Brad, swallowing back a shit-eating grin that wanted to spread across his face.

"This," said Nate, holding up the envelope, "is classified information from R&D."

Brad froze. When he pulled his gaze away from the envelope and back to Nate's face, Nate shrugged his eyebrows and grinned winningly.

"Nathaniel," he said warningly, "don't be a tease. Details."

"I haven't actually opened it yet," Nate admitted. "Thought I'd find you first."

"Gender reveal party!" said Jacks. Chaffin whistled.

Ray mimed opening an envelope and then gasped theatrically, putting a hand to his face. "It's a nuclear powered murder machine!" he cried. "Just what we were hoping for!"

"Oh, congrats," Walt simpered.

"Kampai!" Garza called from down the table, toasting in Brad and Nate's general direction with his milk carton, and most of the platoon followed suit with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Brad closed his eyes for a second. "Hurry up and open it, before they escalate."

"Yeah, alright," said Nate, and sat down straddling the bench when Rudy wordlessly shifted over to make some space next to Brad. He ripped open the envelope in the space between them, his knee on the inside part of the bench pressing against Brad's leg without his seeming to notice the contact. Brad watched him pull out a handful of what definitely looked like jaeger schematics and started holding his breath in anticipation as Nate unfolded the pages.

Nate stared at the top page in unmoving, silent reverence for a few seconds. "Fuck me running," he breathed finally. "Look at this." He held out the page in between them, and Brad automatically reached out to hold the paper steady.

"Holy shit," Brad mumbled once he'd figured out what he was looking at. "And they're just going to give us one of these?" He flipped the page to see what other mechanical delights were in store.

"Well, it does still belong to the government," said Nate. "So they're going to lend it to us, I guess. Like, what are we gonna do, steal it?"

"What are they gonna do, stop us?" Brad asked, and showed Nate the second page of the schematics.

Nate tilted his head to see the design better even as his eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. "That… would be pretty hard to stop, yeah."

"Are you two cockteases gonna share with the rest of the class, or what?" Ray demanded. Brad looked up to see everyone staring expectantly.

Nate just sighed, pulled the top two pages off the stack, and handed them to Rudy without looking. "You will be giving all the pages back so I can make sure they're accounted for, gents. This is technically eyes-only intel and Godfather wants it returned in good order."

"Yeah, got it," said Poke absently; he was already on his feet and rubbernecking over Rudy's shoulder at the design. Brad turned his attention to the next few pages, which were all technical specs without the helpful visuals; he passed them directly across the table to Ray, who was second only to Dirty Earl in the company for both understanding and giving a shit about that kind of information. He immediately drew a small crowd of his own and started quietly walking them through it all.

"So this is what the Mark IIIs are gonna be like?" Rudy asked after poring over the schematics and then handing them off to Pappy. Thankfully, he was sensible enough to keep his voice down and not excite half the mess into piddling on the floor.

"That's the word right now," said Nate with a shrug.

"Screwby," said Stafford, sounding awed. Brad decided on the spot that he hated that word.

He forgot about it immediately, though, because the next page in his hands was a colour photo of a half-constructed jaeger. He turned it to show Nate and said, "Ultrasound photos."

"Oh, look at that," Nate said fondly, playing along as he stole the papers back and then flipped to the next photo, holding it where they could both see at once.

"I think I see its little arm there," said Brad, pointing at a half-assembled gatling gun.

Nate chuckled. "Smartass," he said, still sounding fond and making the back of Brad's neck go hot as he flipped to the last photo, another angle on the chassis that showed the nuclear cores. "This is really happening," he said after a moment, waving his handful of papers a little before handing them off to Rudy as well.

Brad raised an eyebrow at that. "It's been happening. Need I remind you that we're in the combat simulator three, four times a week now?"

"Yeah, I know," said Nate, "but it's just hitting me, I guess. Now that I'm looking at a half-built jaeger that I'm going to be operating, it's not so abstract anymore."

"Trust me, sir, it'll stop feeling abstract at all by 30 seconds into your first combat drop."

Ray piped up, "So have you picked out any names for your bundle of joy yet?"

Nate looked over at him. "No, we wanted to wait until we knew the baby's ordinance," he said, straight-faced.

Ray choked on his water a little bit.

"All right." Nate stood up and extricated himself from the bench, using Brad's shoulder as a support until he had both boots back on the floor. "I have shit to go take care of, so I'll leave you all in peace to finish eating without an officer looming. Brad, can you grab the papers for me when they're done ogling?"

"Will do, sir."

"Thanks. And gents," he added, raising his voice to get the whole table's attention, "can you please wrap up the chess tourney by lights-out tonight? I've got the Sergeant Major on my ass and Bravo-2's on a seven-day watch starting from 0800 tomorrow anyway. Get some rest tonight."

"We'll keep an eye on it, sir," said Pappy, and Nate left them with a nod.

"Five mikes to finish jacking it to those jaeger specs," said Brad, staring around the table. "Not like any of you buck-toothed, half-wit, cross-eyed hicks can read anyway."

"Yeah, but the pretty pictures make up for all the confusing squiggles," said Chaffin, flipping over a page while Jacks hung off his shoulder to look at them too.

***

They really did need to name the fucking thing, though. In the third week of February, a few days after Bravo-2 cleared that seven-day watch without incident, Nate walked into the weight room while Brad was halfway through a set of bench presses and leaned over to make upside-down eye contact, sticking out a hand on the pretense of spotting for him.

Brad raised his eyebrows expectantly while he saved his breath for his workout, and Nate said, very calmly and quietly, "I am going to string up Gunnery Sergeant Griego."

Well, then. Brad racked his weights and sat up, catching the towel Nate tossed him. "Understood. Just so I'm clear, is this an ankles or neck situation?"

"I'm not sure yet," said Nate with a grim smile. "Can't make up my mind."

Brad wordlessly shifted over on the bench, which conveniently put him closer to his water bottle, and Nate moved to sit in the open space without hesitating, immediately putting his face in his hands and rubbing at it hard; signs of a headache. Brad just drank his water and waited him out.

"This is a… challenging command, in some respects," Nate said to his knees after a minute.

Brad smirked. "You've missed your calling in politics. And I'm pretty sure you know by now that Schwetje and Griego have been here almost as long as I have," he said. "So you're preaching to the choir."

Nate turned his head to look up at Brad. "At this point, I have to say I honestly don't understand how you and Griego can coexist in the same chain of command. One of you should have murdered the other one by now."

"He's nowhere near the first incompetent ops chief I've had to work with," said Brad with a shrug, keeping his voice low since they weren't exactly in a private space; someone could come in the door anytime and hear them speaking so unprofessionally about Casey Kasem. "Sometimes I just check out while he's talking and think about surfing. Somehow, I never seem to miss anything important."

Nate snorted. "Of course."

"So what the fuck did he do this time?"

"I just spent like ten minutes looking for an exit from a 'conversation' where he was trying to convince me we should let Captain Schwetje name the fucking jaeger, because it's Bravo Company's flagship unit or some shit like that."

"That will happen over my dead body," said Brad matter-of-factly. "He'd name it something so moto I'd have to self-destruct it rather than pilot it. It's a matter of honour, Nate."

Nate grinned, a brilliant flash of white teeth that was there and gone. "Well then, we need to pull the trigger on naming the damn thing so we don't end up with you blown to hell and me in jail for first-degree murder, because I can tell he's going to be a dog with a fucking bone about this."

"Not a good outcome," agreed Brad. "Alright then… after chow, 1830, my office?"

"Perfect. I need to go find Gunny Wynn; word is we're getting another Mark II next week. Enjoy the rest of your workout."

"Think happy thoughts," Brad called after him.

***

After dinner that night, Ray followed Brad out of the mess so he could finish telling the desperately goat-fucked story of his weekend bar crawl with Walt, Chaffin, Jacks, Lilley and Garza. Brad was starting to wonder if he could be arrested as an accessory after the fact just for hearing the details.

"—So then Jacks is trying to find somewhere to put down this giant fucking… potted tree, but at this point he can only see out of one eye, right, so he keeps tripping over cracks in the sidewalk. I thought he was gonna just fully take out Lilley and then we'd have to go to the fucking hospital after all. But then Garza—homes, are you even listening? This shit is objectively hilarious, you should appreciate it more!"

Brad shook his head as they approached the last turn before his office. "I should stop listening, then when the fucking cops show up looking for you degenerates I at least won't have to lie to them. I know you bunch of short-bus frequent-fliers collectively share one braincell, but where the fuck did you leave it all weekend?"

"Poke said he'd look after it," said Ray without batting an eye.

Brad snorted as they rounded the corner, and then almost stopped dead when he saw Nate leaning against the wall by his office door, arms crossed and giving them a bemused look.

"Heard all that, did you?" Brad asked without thinking too hard about it.

"I don't particularly want to talk to the police either, so we'll go with no. No, I didn't hear a thing," said Nate. "Why, what were you talking about?" he asked in an artificially chipper voice.

"Training rotas," said Brad. Ray nodded vigorously but didn't bother wiping the shit-eating grin off his face.

"I think I'm a little early," said Nate with a glance at Ray. "Do you have time now?"

"Yes, I was just on my way here to meet with you, sir," said Brad, pointedly not glancing at Ray. "And Corporal Person was just leaving."

"Ooh, a meeting!" said Ray. "What's it about? Also training rotas?" Brad didn't like the inflection he put on that.

Nate made the rookie mistake of answering the question before Brad could deal with Ray. "We need to decide on a name for the Mark III."

Ray's whole face lit up. "Hell yes! Can I join? I'm very helpful with this type of shit."

"Fine," Brad sighed, opening his office door and leading the way inside. Ray dropped into Poke's desk chair with a loud creak and Nate took Pappy's.

"So," said Nate, "there's like, naming rules, right? Conventions of some kind? Like, the units seem to need two-word names?"

Brad nodded. "We also try not to repeat any elements of existing names."

"Okay, so how do people tend to name them?"

Ray chimed in, "Some people go for super fucking moto names, and others just pick shit that sounds cool, which is good because it means we use more unique words. Like mine and Walt's jaeger! Carbonite Rhino. Brad and I named it together," he said, waving between them.

Nate raised an eyebrow. "I've been wondering about that. So you named it after a Star Wars reference and… a strip club?"

"Yeah," said Ray fondly.

"And I honestly can't guess which one of you contributed which part of that name," said Nate, shaking his head.

"It was a shared effort," said Brad.

"So besides the Rhino," Nate went on, ticking names off on his fingers, "we've got Deep Six…"

"Kinda moto, but also kinda cool," said Ray. "I wanted them to name it something with 'Kraken' in it, though."

Nate grinned. "…Hollywood Banshee—is that right?—Saber Helldiver…"

"Both cool, maybe a little try-hard," was Ray's unasked-for assessment.

"…Pappy and Rudy's is Chesty Papa—moto, thanks Ray—Lovell and Baptista named theirs Jackal Diablo…"

"Also moto," Brad interjected.

"It is? How?"

"Jackal. Diablo. Think about it," said Brad.

Nate visibly thought about it. "Diablo… oh, is that supposed to be 'devil dog'?"

Brad nodded, letting his distaste show on his face.

"Brad," said Ray very seriously, which was always a bad sign, "I've got the perfect name for your jaeger: Banana Hammock."

Brad closed his eyes and breathed in and out slowly. "Not only no, Ray, but fuck no, and furthermore, that name is banned."

"It's not on the list, homes! I know what's on the list!"

"I'm gonna fucking add it to the fucking list," Brad announced, standing up to pull the memo down off the corkboard and grabbing a pen.

"We have a list of banned names?" Nate asked incredulously.

"Of course we do, sir," said Brad. "We're Marines."

"Right, my mistake. Give me the list."

Brad handed it over once he was done adding 'Banana Hammock' to the hall of fame, and Nate read through it with his eyebrows gradually climbing higher.

"Mike Foxtrot, Charlie Foxtrot, anything Foxtrot, fair enough. November Juliet, of course. Hitman anything, Assassin anything, Bravo anything, Kilo anything, okay. Red Bull?"

"Doesn't give you wings, it turns out," said Ray. "Not without a licensing deal."

"Uh huh. Candy Striper, wow. That's a good one. Cowboy Bebop? Alright. Horizontal Tango," he started laughing, "that's even better. Jigsaw Pennywise. Damn. That's… wow."

"I think that one was all Chaffin," said Brad.

"Bobcat Goldthwait? Who the fuck tries to name a jaeger that? Vulcan anything, Romulan anything, Klingon anything. More licensing, or has Star Trek lost the culture wars around here?"

"Too many nerds," said Ray.

"And now, Banana Hammock," finished Nate. "Keeping illustrious company on this list." He handed it back to Brad, who left it on top of his keyboard. "Alright, so basically, avoid anything that's not PG or would be confusing on comms, but that doesn't mean we can't use the radio alphabet otherwise."

"Correct," agreed Brad. "Although they probably regretted that one when Chaffin and Jacks bounced back from the rejection of 'Jigsaw Pennywise' and named their jaeger Whiskey Tango instead."

"Wow, Command let that one through?"

Brad shrugged. "The civilians don't seem to have figured it out yet."

"And then I remember Bravo-3 has Golf Rodeo," said Nate.

That set off both Brad and Ray laughing at the same time, leaving Nate staring at them in confusion.

"What? Is there something funny about that that I'm not getting?"

Brad breathed in deeply enough to speak. "That's not its name," he wheezed, and then broke down laughing again.

"What? I've heard it being called that on comms!"

"That's what Command calls it," said Ray, pulling himself together and wiping at his eyes. "Because they fucking hate its name but it was too late to change it. I think Kocher and Jeff did that on purpose. Oh man, I can't believe they hate it so much they haven't even told you the jaeger's fucking name. Oh, that's the best. I have to tell Jeff."

"Its actual name is Goat Roper," added Brad, rescuing Nate from the look of frustration taking over his face.

"Goat Roper," echoed Nate.

They both nodded, still grinning.

"I would have expected something worse. I don't know what, but something worse," he concluded. "But okay. Note to self: keep calling it Golf Rodeo."

"So," said Brad, "any brilliant name ideas coming to mind, sir?"

Nate looked thoughtful for a second. "No," he admitted.

"I've got one," said Ray.

"Oh my god," Brad muttered.

"No, shut up Brad, it's good. Like actually good, this time! Okay, we'll get some post-its or strips of paper or something, and then each of you write down a bunch of words on them that you like the sound of, and then I'll draw two out of a hat. Or… this pen cup." He reached behind himself to Poke's desk and dumped pens out across the surface, then held up the cup triumphantly.

Brad and Nate looked at each other and shrugged, so Brad pulled the first blank page off of a notepad on his desk and tore it up into a dozen pieces, handing half to Nate while Ray helpfully tossed one of Poke's scattered pens at him. Ray whistled a jaunty tune and spun back and forth on his chair as they scribbled down some words, and then after a couple of minutes they had folded up all of the strips and dropped them into the cup. Ray theatrically slapped his palm down over the top and shook the hell out of it, then drew two entries while making a trumpet fanfare noise with his lips.

"And the lucky winners are… Coronado, and… Ajax. Thank you to all our lovely contestants."

"Ajax Coronado?" said Nate. "I think I like it."

The 'Ajax' had not been Brad's entry. "If I dump that cup out, how many names of Greek warriors and gods and shit am I gonna find in there?" he asked.

"Don't ask questions you don't want to know the answers to, Brad," said Nate brightly. "Are you good with this, or do you want to draw again?"

"No," said Brad, raising an eyebrow at him, "I think I'm good with avoiding the risk of ending up with a jaeger named Hercules Odysseus or something. We'll stick with Ajax Coronado."

"Solid choice. Well, I'll leave you to your evening then, and go get this name registered with Command before… anything happens," said Nate, standing up and pushing Pappy's chair back into its desk. "Thanks for your assistance, Ray." He nodded at both of them and then left.

Ray and Brad sat in peaceful silence for a moment, and then Ray said, "Casey Kasem wanted to name your jaeger, didn't he? Or he wanted Encino Man to do it."

"It's like you know him," said Brad tiredly.

"You know what? They're like Smithers and Mr. Burns, if they were both dumb as rocks and Mr. Burns was the nicer one."

And Brad promptly had to block out that mental image before it stuck with him forever. "Just clean up the pens, or I'll tell Poke it was you."

***

Chapter Text

By the second week of March, they'd received shiny new Mark II jaegers for Holsey and Stinetorf (Paladin Phoenix) and Stafford and Christeson (Raptor Whirlwind), which rounded out the rest of Team 3, and Casey Kasem had found out about Brad and Nate naming the Mark III without consulting him first and was no longer speaking to either of them. Brad's reaction to that snub was to wonder how he could keep it up indefinitely.

Nate looked a little more harassed about it, because he had to interact with Casey Kasem quite a bit in taking orders from Encino Man, and apparently the silent treatment he was getting included not telling him things until the last possible moment before Casey Kasem would have gotten NJP'd for not passing on orders. In Brad's view, this was exactly the kind of shit they kept Gunny Wynn around for, but far be it from him to tell Nate how to do his job.

Then on March 19th, before their two new jaegers lost that new car smell, they got a kilo alert for the San Francisco area while Bravo-2 was on watch. It was nearly 0300, Brad had just gotten eliminated from the chess tournament in the hangar, Ray was starting to nag him to go get some sleep since he couldn't respond without a jaeger to pilot anyway, and then the klaxon startled them all to full alertness.

"All right," called Nate over the alarm, "Team 1—Deep Six, Rhino, Banshee—get ready, I want you oscar mike in 15 mikes. Chesty Papa, stand by to provide support."

Everyone scrambled and Brad came up to flank Nate near the control desk, currently manned by Mike; the battalion XO would be on deck in a few minutes to take over for him.

"What have we got, Mike?" asked Nate, chewing on his thumbnail.

"The UN monitoring station brief is just loading up, sir," said Mike.

"Hundreds of millions of dollars in sci-fi fucking robot-tanks all around us but they can't get faster fucking internet," Nate muttered just loudly enough for Brad to hear. "Let me know when we have it, Mike," he said at a normal volume.

"Aye-aye, sir. Okay, here we go. It's a Category 3, little smaller than Dicknose. Air Force is saying it's about 50 miles offshore still, and seems to be on course for the Bay Area."

"Thanks, Mike." Nate switched on the comms. "We have a Cat 3 kilo. Chesty Papa, prepare to deploy with Team 1. Your dropoff will be 40, I repeat four-zero, mikes south-southwest from Sierra Foxtrot. Please be oscar mike once cleared to depart; your rides are waiting on you. Good hunting, gentlemen."

A chorus of ”Get some!” erupted from the remains of the chess tournament behind them and over the comms where Team 1 was getting strapped into their conn-pods. Nate muted his end of the comms and stepped back to where Brad was standing. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned in just a little to tell him in an undertone, "Stay put, Brad; I might need you to suit up and provide support as well."

Brad looked at him sideways. "With what, sir?"

"You tell me. We've got Whiskey Tango and Jackal Diablo both ready to step off and you've got your choice of four experienced co-pilots between them."

Brad mulled that over. "Lovell would be the easiest choice, in that case," he said finally, "but he and Baptista could go."

"Don't think I asked for him and Baptista to go," said Nate. "I think I asked for my sergeant with all the jaeger combat experience who also used to lead Team 1."

Brad sighed as quietly as possible, although Nate probably still heard it. "Understood, sir," he said. "But you've got three experienced and highly trained teams responding already, and in my view Lilley and Christopher are ready for this as well. I don't think a Cat 3 will pose any real challenge for them."

"Glad to hear it, Brad. Stay in shouting range."

"Will do," he said, and took his implied dismissal to head back to the chess tables and kill some more time.

Rhino had eyes on the kilo less than 10 mikes after dropoff in the AO, immediately christened it Beetlejuice, and then engaged it with a battle cry of, "It's showtime!"

Brad shook his head sadly and got on the radio once the other jaegers had arrived to join the fight. "Carbonite Rhino, this is Hitman Two."

Ray's voice came over the radio. "Rhino here, currently slapping a kilo around. Go ahead."

Brad grinned. "Rhino, please advise why you chose such a stupid fucking name for the kilo."

"Good question, Hitman Two. The name was selected by Echo-four Hotel because the kilo looks like a giant fucking nightmare beetle."

Christ, having Ray inside Walt's brain was ruining it. "Solid copy. How's it going out there?"

The response took a few seconds. "Deep Six just got the kilo in a headlock and Hollywood Banshee is charging up her plasma cannons. Break. I estimate RTB within 30 mikes."

"Acknowledged. Stay frosty." Brad exchanged smirks with Mike as he backed off of the control desk.

"They're fine," he said to Nate without looking at him. "They're winning. Quit worrying."

"I'm not worried," Nate protested.

"The fuck you're not."

Nate sighed and stopped rocking back and forth on his heels, settling for a moment into stillness. "It's really fucking annoying sometimes, having someone know what goes on inside my head."

"You endure it admirably, sir."

When Nate's elbow jabbed him in the side, Brad's smirk bloomed into a full-on grin.

***

The next day saw Hollywood Banshee getting her first honour badge painted on after being credited with killing SF-17 Beetlejuice, and Brad went to catch some rack time and then gym time in the post-kilo quiet while the watch scaled back to a skeleton crew consisting of Whiskey Tango and Saber Helldiver. The last Brad saw of them, Chaffin, Leon and Brunmeier were all trying to arm-wrestle Jacks.

Post-workout, Brad walked out of the gym feeling refreshed and ready to grab some chow for lunch. Halfway to the mess, he heard Nate call his name and stopped to let him catch up.

"Afternoon, sir," said Brad, nodding in lieu of a proper salute.

Nate returned the nod. "Brad. Hope you got some rest this morning. Am I keeping you from anywhere urgent?"

"I did, thank you. And no, I was just heading to get some lunch. Something you need to discuss? The watch team should be good for another four hours or so, and then the next watch rota should be Jackal Diablo and Paladin Phoenix."

"Thanks Brad, I know you and Mike have the watch schedule well in hand. I had a different question that just came up. I think I must have missed a step somewhere in our procedures and I was hoping you could fill in the blanks for me."

Sounded quick enough. "Fire away, sir." Brad pulled the top off his water bottle while he waited.

"Great, thanks. Rhino and Deep Six were preparing an after-action report for myself and Captain Schwetje on the engagement with Beetlejuice, and aside from the engineers' inspection report on the jaegers, I thought that was the extent of our post-kilo follow-up procedure. But it's not?"

"What?" Brad paused with his water bottle in front of his mouth. "No, that's all the paperwork we need as long as nobody's injured," he said, and then took a drink.

"So there's nothing within teams or anything either? Then now I'm more confused, because I overheard something about Pappy and Rudy completing an after-action."

Brad choked on his water.

"Jesus Christ, Brad, are you okay?"

Brad waved Nate off, managing not to spill the rest of his water bottle on the floor as he coughed into his other arm. "You mean nobody fucking told—not here," he rasped, looking around and then waving Nate into Gunny Wynn's thankfully empty office just down the hall.

"Nobody fucking told me what?" Nate asked as soon as Brad had shut the door behind them. "What is it?"

Brad looked up at the ceiling to try and find some guidance there. All he saw was a water stain on one of the ceiling tiles. Absolutely unhelpful, he was already at sea here.

"Brad?" Nate prompted.

"Fuck," he muttered. "Okay. Remember when I told you that the fraternization regs are… relaxed… when it comes to jaeger teams?"

Nate nodded, crossing his arms expectantly.

"We don't talk about it, but it goes beyond just not having to acknowledge rank within your team. It's an open secret, Command just looks the other way and pretends it's not happening at all, but I still can't believe nobody fucking told you. Well, okay, I can believe that Encino Man didn't fucking tell you." It was easy to ignore the face Nate made at the nickname, since he was avoiding eye contact with Nate.

"And this has to do with after-action reports?" Nate asked.

Brad wanted to drop through the floor a little bit. "It's not reports. It, uh. Fuck. Sometimes after a kilo engagement, a team, especially the ones with higher drift compatibility… the mind-link shit can fuck you right up with all the adrenaline and endorphins you're both high on after enemy contact, because the link amplifies it into some kind of feedback loop."

"They mentioned that during training in Okinawa."

"So they mentioned what can happen as a result?"

"No."

Useless, but predictable. Brad rubbed a hand angrily over his face. "I don't know what they call it at any other jaeger base, but around here we call it an 'after-action'. Except it's more like… action… after," he finished lamely.

The room was silent for a moment and Brad could hear the blood rushing in his ears.

Finally, Nate said in a flat voice, "Are you fucking telling me that this is code for a post-combat hookup?"

"Yes. That is exactly what it is. Sir."

When he finally had the balls to look at Nate's face again, the smirk there surprised him quite a bit.

"So I can just look the other way and pretend that's not going on?" Nate confirmed.

"Command exercises plausible deniability to the fullest extent of the definition," said Brad with a nod.

"Understood." Nate hesitated for a second. "Just between us, Brad, has that ever happened to you?"

"No," he said, truthfully. "It does happen within some teams more than others."

"I see. Okay, thanks for filling me in. I always appreciate your candour," said Nate with a nod.

"My candour?" he echoed, raising an eyebrow.

Nate smirked again. "Among other things. Enjoy your lunch." And with that, he disappeared into the hallway.

Brad cleared his throat and hit the lights in Gunny's office before heading for the mess.

The thing was, Brad hadn't been lying about never getting up to that shit after jaeger combat, and his long-held opinion was that it was another symptom of a weak mind, Marines who couldn't control themselves (which was an embarrassment to Recon). Keeping his thoughts to himself in the drift and keeping the other guy out of his head meant he hadn't had that feedback-loop experience.

Now, though. Now he wasn't allowed to hold back. Nate wouldn't fucking let him if he tried. And their simulator combat experiences so far were starting to leave him thinking he didn't want to hold back anymore. They really did fight better together than anyone else Brad had ever drifted with. Nate was a natural, their tactics complemented each other damn near perfectly, and having access to Brad's mental library of experiences seemed to be helping him improve by leaps and bounds. Sim time with Nate was fun. He looked forward to it. Fuck, even sparring in the gym was something he looked forward to.

He'd never heard of a Marine yet who'd come out of the simulator needing a combat jack after taking down a fake, already-dead kaiju, because even the most degenerate Recon Marines still had at least that much mental discipline, so that wasn't a concern. But he was starting to think he could understand now how that feedback loop after a real combat scenario could lead to after-actions. It was getting to be a little too easy to understand.

***

Chapter Text

Ajax Coronado rolled off the production line only two weeks behind schedule.

"She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," said Poke, as the entire platoon stood in the garage to witness her majesty for the first time. After a second, he added, "Nobody tell my wife that. If she asks, the answer is still 'when my babies were born'."

"Understandable," said Mike, who also had kids.

"Yo," said Christeson, "the first time I see that cannon get fired, I'm gonna cry, dog. That shit is art."

"Screwby," breathed Stafford.

Ray sidled up to Brad. "Dude, you're Command's favourite son for sure."

Brad, faced with his new jaeger in person for the first time, could not dispute that. "Mine," he grinned instead.

Ray laughed and wandered off, and Brad finally peeled his eyes away from his new baby long enough to scan the room for Nate. They made eye contact, and Nate gave him one of his most feral, excited grins. 'Mine,' he mouthed at Brad.

***

There was only one way to test a jaeger.

"SOP, Colbert," said Mike, and then to Nate he said, "So first we're gonna test the conn-pod, and once we know you're not gonna snap and kill everyone in the hangar, we got some Air Force en route to give you a ride to the live target range up the coast. Plenty of room to practice your dance moves and shit, too."

"Gunny, I did oversee the testing of our four other new jaegers since I've been here."

"Yeah, LT, but you weren't in 'em," said Mike, completely unbothered. "And," he grinned with teeth, "they were Mark IIs."

At Nate's raised eyebrow, Brad added, "there's going to be a video feed at the range."

"The boys are making popcorn as we speak," said Mike.

Mara walked into the hangar. "Gentlemen, if you wouldn't mind, it's suit time."

"What are you doing here?" Brad asked her.

"New mecha, new flight suits!" she said, already walking away. She raised one hand in the air and snapped her fingers twice. "Chop, chop!"

"You heard the lady," said Mike, and waved goodbye as they followed her to the changing and staging area.

"Do you think these will be easier to get into than the other hardsuits?" Nate asked conversationally.

"Absolutely not," said Brad.

Brad was correct.

"Oh my god," said Nate, experimentally trying to do a squat once they were finally bolted into the suits. "You were not overselling how hard it is to move your knees in these."

"Up that squat weight, sir," said Brad, making sure Nate was watching before he bent his knees to pick up his helmet off the bench.

"Fucking show-off," grumbled Nate, following him awkwardly to the conn-pod staging area.

Mara also oversaw the staging, from them being strapped into the harnesses right up to the activation of the pod. If Brad didn't know better, he'd say she had some kind of personal investment in making sure her favourite guinea pig's brain didn't melt out his nose. Or she was just excited to try the new equipment herself as soon as possible. It was probably that, he decided.

"Okay, boys," she said absently over their comms as the techs finished checking their harnesses, "almost ready for the neural handshake. And remember: if we see a rabbit…?"

"No, we didn't," they finished dutifully.

"Good!" After a moment of silence, she continued, "I'll count you back from ten to the handshake," as the techs scuttled out of the conn-pod and it sealed behind them. "Ten… nine… eight…"

The neural handshake experience was basically identical in a conn-pod to how it felt in the sim unit, since that thing was, in fact, a stripped-down conn-pod. But there was just a little extra oomph to the real thing, and Brad was ninety percent sure it was the endorphin and adrenaline rush of knowing that you and your co-pilot were about to be dropped into a giant robot, armed with enough live ordinance to flatten everything in a five-mile radius without effort. Nate swore in his head, and Brad figured that meant he got it, now.

"Handshake is shook," said Mara in their ear. "Drift is solid. That's a pretty green colour on my board. Diagnostic is… complete! Okay, time for the drop. Have fun and don't stay out too late."

They were strapped into the harnesses securely enough that the sensation of movement from being picked up by a crane and dropped into a socket on Ajax's upper torso was minimal.

'Weird,' thought Nate, and Brad realized he'd been thinking himself about the cognitive dissonance from knowing, objectively, how far they'd just been moved without really being able to tell. He advised Nate to just try not to think about it whenever possible.

Mike's voice replaced Mara's on their comms. "Ajax, this is Hitman 2. Confirming connection to the unit… now."

The panels in the conn-pod all lit up like Christmas, and the information started flowing in. "Oh, shit," said Nate out loud.

"You good, LT?" Mike sounded a little concerned.

"He's good," said Brad, because he was. "Are we oscar mike?"

"Your truck is rolling. Pickup in 3 mikes."

"Thanks." Brad muted their comms for the time being and relaxed into his harness to wait, which meant Nate automatically did the same.

"That's a dirty trick," said Nate, when he realized it.

"Works, though," said Brad.

"This is fucking wild," said Nate after a minute, as they picked up their escort carriers on the external sensors.

Brad chuckled. "We're not even at the wild part yet, either."

It was, thankfully, a quick trip to the testing range. Brad unmuted their comms again as Mike came back in their ear.

"Ajax, we still good? Over."

Brad answered. "Not only are we good, the radio quality is even clearer than normal," he confirmed.

"You got that fancy state of the art antenna, Ajax. The might of the US Military, on display. Okay, give us a little wave."

After confirming for Nate that yes, Mike was being literal and serious, they duly made Ajax wave to her audience.

"This feels fucking ridiculous," said Nate. "Oh, Christ, you really can make these things dance, can't you? Like, for real."

Brad grinned and Mike laughed over their comms.

"Alright, the kids are getting rowdy over here, so what say we start on the target practice, Ajax? Over."

"Let's fucking go," said Brad, as they pivoted and started warming up the heavy weapons.

The live fire test felt, in a word, amazing.

It also, apparently, looked as cool as it felt.

"I love my job," Nate breathed. Brad knew the feeling.

***

On May 10th at 1745, they were blessed with a kaiju for Ajax's big debut. LA-17 was yet another Category 3 sighting.

"Why are they getting bigger and bigger?" Mike asked nobody in particular as they waited for the first intel while scrambling to get combat-ready.

"We're just lucky, I guess," said Nate. "Deep Six, Rhino, Banshee, status?"

"Just about loaded up, LT," Poke reported. "Lilley had trouble with a boot but it's fixed."

"Glad to hear it." They could not, unfortunately, load more than three teams into conn-pods simultaneously, so he and Brad were waiting for the staging area to clear a little before suiting up themselves. Nate was taking advantage of that extra time to micromanage before Mike chased him out of the control room.

Brad started to wonder if he'd have to drag Nate out by the scruff to get him loaded up for their own deployment, but Nate went willingly enough when it was time. "Ajax is getting ready. Hitman 2-1, your Ubers are en route. Kilo was last seen twenty, that is two-zero, mikes northeast from Lima Alpha. It is apparently a swimmer. Time to get paid, gentlemen."

They loaded into Ajax so fast that the two of them barely had time to think about the fact that they were heading into Nate's first combat drop, but Ray was there to helpfully remind everyone of the gravity of the event as the Air Force delivered them to the AO.

"Echo-five-Charlie, this is Rhino. Seeing as we're about to pop the LT's cherry, it seems appropriate that as we deploy on this very special day, you say the line. Over."

Nate barely had time to ask him what line before Brad sighed loudly and flipped on their comms, clearing his throat loudly. He didn't know why he indulged Ray sometimes. It wasn't like he usually deserved it. But it was a special day.

"Autobots, roll out," he declared.

Ray's cackling—and Walt's, Christopher's, and Garza's—came over the comms, and Ray shouted, "Get some!" as they dropped into the AO.

"Kilo sighted," said Poke after taking Deep Six for a swim. "Motherfucker's got a lot of tentacles."

"I hate the tentacled ones the most," said Ray.

"Squidward," Garza announced. "Deep Six engaging target."

Brad shook his head sadly. "Squidward it is," he said. "Light him up. Ajax is inbound to your position, Deep Six."

"Acknowledged. Better hurry if you want a piece."

Nate used their sensors to track Deep Six's progress underwater as they kept their own jets firing to hold position over the surface. After five minutes, Rhino and Banshee had caught up and were holding a triangle formation with Ajax, and then Squidward popped out of the water.

"Oh," said Nate. "It's a swimmer and a flier."

"Contact left," said Brad, and they barrel-rolled away from an acid spitball before closing with the target. They drew their plasma sword in a smooth motion and switched their grip on it as they pivoted again, moving in sync inside the conn-pod like people doing tai-chi in the park as they used the jet thrusters on Ajax's hull to build momentum before the swing.

Three tentacles came off and dropped into the water with a hiss.

"First blood," Brad announced. "This is definitely one of the made-of-acid kilos, look lively."

"Solid copy," came in from the other three jaegers, and Rhino took a turn at making Squidward into sashimi.

Then Squidward possibly got mad that it was now missing half of its tentacles, because it took off into the sky.

They rolled Ajax backward in mid-air to better use the front cameras to track the kilo. "Oh, that's definitely coming back down in a second," said Brad, half to himself.

Deep Six shot out of the water in a column of spray and then hovered in a loose diamond formation with the rest of them. "We still got it on our long-range, Ajax," said Poke. "It went straight up."

Nate was considering the cloud cover, which there was a lot of. "Did it have eyes?" he asked.

"I didn't see any," said Brad.

"No eyes," confirmed Ray.

"Use the cloak," said Nate.

"You motherfuckers have a cloak? What?" Garza demanded.

"Yep," said Brad, and hit it. It wasn't a visual cloak—they were still perfectly visible—but it dampened their heat signature by over ninety percent.

"You just went dark on my heat map, Ajax," said Poke, sounding impressed. "That's some reconnaissance drone shit."

"Man," whined Ray, "I want a heat cloak!"

Brad grinned widely, and Ajax went up and out now that they had the power of surprise on their side.

"This is Hitman 2," said Mike over their comms. "What's your status? Over."

They let Ray answer, because Squidward was coming back down. Nate already had the predictive targeting rolling for their arm cannon.

"Call it in the air," he said.

"Tails," said Christopher.

Ajax fired while Squidward was still sixty feet overhead from the rest of the team.

"Think that was heads," Brad guessed as the kilo hit the water in a mess of flesh and acid spray.

Banshee finished it off with a plasma cutter but there was no question which jaeger was getting credit for that kill.

Nate called it in. "Hitman 2, this is Ajax. Squidward is confirmed down." The satisfaction was practically coming off of him in waves, and Brad couldn't blame him because he felt about the same.

"Now that's a shakedown run," said Mike. "Congrats, Ajax. You didn't break your new toy, right?"

"I think we'll keep her," said Nate, smirking at Brad. "Hitman 2-1, let's pack it up for RTB. Good hunt today."

"Man, that was cool as fuck," said Lilley as they headed to their pickup rendezvous for extraction.

"Like skeet shooting," said Walt.

***

Brad felt like he might burst out of his skin by the time they made it back to base and got unpacked from their death robots. His teeth were practically humming with adrenaline. He lingered in the hangar as the rest of the team got out of their flight suits and into the showers, half-hoping for the crash but getting an early start on his report for Mike's sake, and the showers had cleared out by the time he got in himself. Thankfully, there was still hot water.

Nate came in a couple minutes after him and went straight into the shower stall nearest to the door without a word or look of acknowledgment to Brad. Which was fine. It was the showers. Brad was so jumped-up that he was pretty sure he'd head straight for an hour on the treadmill, then need another shower again later, but he was taking one now anyway and it was fine. The joy-in-stereo of the moment they shot down the kilo was playing through his head on loop and had been since they'd landed back at Pendleton, and he'd never felt like this after any of the eight other kilos he'd helped kill, but it was fine.

He got out of the shower, towel around his waist, and went for his folded pile of clothes. He vaguely registered the other shower cutting off and the noise in the otherwise quiet room of the stall door being opened and then allowed to bang shut behind Nate.

And then there was a warm, damp hand on Brad's arm, and he whirled around just in time to have his head dragged down into a filthy kiss.

Everything inside him flared up into a roar, and he backed Nate into a row of lockers before he knew what was happening. Nate had one hand in Brad's short-cropped hair and the other sliding down to grip his shoulder, and Brad was leaning all his weight on the hand he'd planted on the locker door right next to Nate's head.

One of them moaned—he wasn't even sure who—and his brain came back online. Brad pulled away from Nate's mouth, leaving him heaving for breath and looking debauched, and said desperately, "This is the worst idea either one of us has ever fucking had."

Nate looked around the locker room, which was empty but still far from private. He pushed himself upright and away from the locker he was leaning against, reaching down to keep his towel from falling the rest of the way to the floor in the process, and then looked Brad in the eyes and instead of agreeing with him, said, "If that's true, then when I knock on the door to your quarters in fifteen mikes, don't let me in."

And then he disappeared around the bank of lockers and was fully dressed and out the door two minutes later.

Brad stared after him, feeling lost. And still itchy under the skin.

***

The knock came like clockwork. Nate was reliable like that.

Brad let him in. He suspected he might be reliable like that, too.

And later on, when he was showering again and trying to ease sore muscles under the spray (but feeling like he could stay inside his own skin, at last), he tried to tell himself that he was in about the same position as he would have been by resorting to the treadmill to wind down instead.

So, no harm done, right?

***

Chapter Text

After a night's sleep, the whole incident took on a surreal quality. He hadn't actually had an after-action with Nate. That was… a weird dream he'd had. Adrenaline could do that. It definitely could.

Brad told himself that with an almost religious fervour, right up until 1000 when he passed Nate in the corridor on his way to the gym, made the briefest second of eye contact, and immediately remembered what Nate looked like when he came.

Nate just smiled benignly, gave him the same little nod hello that he normally would, and carried on walking when Brad numbly nodded back and managed a "Sir."

Well, Nate had said it himself when Brad had explained the whole phenomenon to him. 'So I can just look the other way and pretend that's not going on?' Apparently that also applied to after-actions that Nate himself was involved in. And of course it did, Brad scolded himself immediately; Nate was the fucking platoon commander. Brad was his subordinate. He had no other option. The message was loud and clear to Brad: be a professional. Carry on with the job. It was only as awkward as they let it be, and they couldn't afford to let it be awkward and interfere with their combat effectiveness.

Besides, it was a one-time thing. Their first joint combat drop and the exhilaration of the fight and the kill had overwhelmed them both. It wouldn't happen again. They'd both been taken by surprise, that was all.

Brad went into his weight training feeling a little better about the whole thing. It all could have been much worse than it was. It was really nothing at all. Just a blip.

***

SJ-17 T-Bone (it looked more or less like a bull, and Chaffin had been hungry) was a Cat 2 kilo that rolled up near San Jose to celebrate July 4th, and Ajax festively wrestled it into submission for Whiskey Tango to deliver the killing blow.

Afterwards, Nate and Brad shut themselves inside the locker room janitor's closet for a mutual handjob. Brad almost sobbed into Nate's shoulder when they came (in practically the same breath, as if they were still in the drift or something).

"I feel like I'm having a heart attack," mumbled Nate against Brad's throat. "Or I did," he amended after a second.

Brad still felt some of that restless edge, but not like his skin was going to split open from it anymore. He could probably just work off the rest of it in the gym, now.

"Is it going to feel like this much every fucking time?" Brad asked the uncaring mop buckets.

Nate inhaled slowly and then stood upright, starting to fix his clothes. "Well, if it does," he said slowly, "at least the fix is easy."

Easy? He thought this was easy?

Nate returned his glare with an unbothered look. "Listen," he said calmly, "this is happening because the drift is so strong, right? A strong drift is good. We can't sacrifice that. This? This is nothing." He looked away for a second. "And we're hardly suffering with it."

That was maybe the worst part, as far as Brad was concerned: that he was having orgasms this good from goddamned battle high fucks with his commanding fucking officer.

"I gotta go," was all he could bring himself to say, and he left.

***

The third time, they'd taken down a kilo near Oregon that looked like a giant bat (Nosferatu, because Nate had glassed it first that time) by punching it right in its toothy, hellish maw and then feeding it several 40 mike-mikes followed by a plasma cannon shot from Raptor Whirlwind. Back at Pendleton, Brad tried to hide himself away in his quarters to… take matters into his own hands, as it were.

He came once by thinking about the time in the broom closet, which had implications he refused to consider, and was still feeling like he needed to go climb some scaffolding in the hangar when there was a knock on his door. He barely got himself squared away before answering it, because he was pretty sure he knew who it was (although there was always still a chance it might just be Ray). When he opened the door, they just stared at each other for a second.

"Are you okay?" Nate asked, looking honestly concerned.

Brad did a quick scan of the empty corridor, said, "No," and hauled Nate inside by the front of his shirt.

"It's okay, Brad." Nate's tone was soothing, but he was also grinning like he couldn't contain it.

"No it isn't," said Brad, and then kissed him before any more words could be said. His blood sang at the contact, and Nate shoved him back on his rack to crawl over him.

"It's going to be," Nate breathed into his collarbone.

Brad did his best not to believe him.

***

General Mattis was back for an inspection in September, and he and Godfather came into the hangar while Bravo-2 was on watch to commend their efforts.

"We are pleased as hell with your numbers, gentlemen," said Mattis, taking in the whole platoon with the compliment. "Bravo Company is filling a very big set of shoes by covering Pendleton's part of the Pacific theatre basically autonomously, and the results are good. Very good."

Godfather nodded happily. "Seven kilos in the past six months is a frankly unprecedented number of attacks for this region, and all. Seven. Have been repelled." He shook his head in mild disbelief. "Six of them by Bravo-2, unaided. And all but one of those with our platoon command jaeger taking point on the hunt. Tremendous work, gents. Godfather is beyond pleased with your level of effectiveness."

All the men straightened up a little at the compliments, and Brad resisted the urge to roll his eyes at how it was going to go to all their heads.

"Are you having trouble keeping the Mark III in good repair for all these engagements?" asked Mattis. "It missed one?"

Godfather shook his head. "No. That was the one before we took delivery of Ajax. They've been 100% since the unit arrived."

Mattis nodded thoughtfully. "Good." Then he levelled Brad and Nate with a look. Brad was trying not to tense up in his parade rest, by that point. "You're putting her through her paces. Any notes? Maintaining readiness with that tempo?"

"It's fine, sir," Nate answered for them. "Smooth as anything. Sgt. Colbert and I are managing the tempo."

As long as they could get half an hour of privacy on RTB, anyway. The last one had been dicey, with Stinetorf sustaining a minor injury when Paladin Phoenix took some acid damage from the kilo mid-fight. Getting him patched up on return had taken Brad's attention—what he could manage of it while riding a drift high, anyway—until Gunny had managed to get away from the monitoring station and relieve him. The look on Gunny's face when he'd told Brad to go get himself squared away had been a little too knowing for Brad's taste, but he'd taken the dismissal at face value and gone to Nate's office to 'give a report'.

Honestly, between the frequency of Ajax being deployed for kilo engagements and Nate's level of visibility as the platoon commander, Brad was feeling some stress over potentially being caught in their little arrangement. Plausible deniability's fullest extent still only stretched so far.

General Mattis was looking at him, he realized. So was Godfather. "We're Recon, sir," he chipped in with a little shrug. "Kaiju are nothing."

Mattis chuckled. "Glad to hear it, Colbert."

***

The libo was overdue, and Brad intended to enjoy it as much as he could to make up for that. This was enough justification to agree to go bar-hopping with Ray.

"I still owe you tequila shots, don't I?" Ray said when they arrived at the first stop.

"Yes," Brad agreed. "Pay up."

They had a table, and just after Ray wandered back from the bar with a beer for each of them, a waitress in a low-cut shirt brought over a tray full of shot glasses. Ray lined them up in regimented rows, five for Brad and five for himself. "I keep my fucking promises," he said as Brad surveyed the battlefield in front of them.

"That's because I know where you sleep, Person."

"We don't need to bring my motivations into this, man. Ready?"

They dispatched all the shots methodically, glasses knocking on the table almost in sync as they worked their way down the rows. Ray crammed a lime wedge into his mouth when they were done, blinking hard. It was going to be a shitshow of a night.

"So, Cinderella. Now that we're alone and I've poured some alcohol into you, you can be honest. How's things going with Prince Charming?"

Brad glared. Ray smirked back.

"It's fine," he said into his beer.

"This is more action than you've ever gotten, homes."

Brad's back tensed up. "The fuck is that supposed to mean?" he snapped.

When Ray reared back a little and started side-eyeing him, he realized the magnitude of his fuck-up. Too late.

"It means," Ray said carefully, "that you've almost doubled your kaiju count since the LT showed up. Why? What did you think it meant? Bradley."

"Nothing," he said, looking away.

The silence got unnerving, but he refused to break. Sadly, he could see the gears turning in Ray's head. He was way too perceptive and alcohol never did anything to dull that. It was Brad's most and least favourite thing about Ray.

He was gearing up to try changing the subject as a distraction when Ray leaned in a little and said, at a volume that was just barely audible over the music, "You remember that double attack in August? Slap Chop and Pikachu?"

Brad was unlikely ever to forget. They'd deployed half of Bravo-2 to deal with it.

"I was fucking flying after that," Ray continued, still hushed. Then he paused. "And apparently so was Walt, because he showed up at my quarters after we cleaned up."

Brad sucked in a breath. "Ray, you cannot be telling me this kind of shit," he started.

Ray cut him off with a shake of his head. "Are we on base right now?" he asked, waving a little at their surroundings.

"That doesn't fucking matter and you know it," Brad hissed.

"No, Brad. It does. A man's gotta talk this shit out sometimes, you know? With someone he trusts. Who also has clearance. And it's not my fault that my best buddy also happens to be my sergeant. There just needs to be boundaries. You feel me?"

Brad drained his beer and got them another round while he processed that. Ray waited him out.

"Fine," he said at last. "You're right. But you keep it to circumstances exactly like this." Off base, nobody else around, preferably with intoxicants handy.

Ray just nodded, and then after a thoughtful sip of his beer he said, "I never did that shit before. It was pretty good, actually."

"You're not going to make it a habit, are you?"

"Fuck, no. Strictly a combat jack scenario. We can't all be destined for each other like Pappy and Rudy."

Ray was straying into dangerous waters. The platoon Did Not Talk about Pappy and Rudy. Pappy and Rudy were a hyper-effective jaeger team and had commanded a lot of respect in the Recon community, both separately and together. Nothing else mattered, as far as Bravo-2 was concerned.

So Brad didn't bother acknowledging that statement, and just drank his beer instead. Ray let him, for about thirty seconds, and then said, "Your turn."

"I just got this round," Brad tried.

"Don't fucking play dumb, Brad. Just let it out."

He put his beer down. It turned out to be easier to ask the question to the ceiling, so he let himself be that much of a coward. "When did you figure it out?" He didn't dare ask 'how'.

"I wasn't actually sure till tonight," said Ray, and goddammit. "But I had a hunch. Don't freak out, man. It's only because I actually know you, unlike the rest of the platoon. Well. One person excepted."

It was, admittedly, reassuring that they—that Brad—hadn't been obvious. He could handle an idiot savant of Ray's caliber being able to connect the dots. That meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. And he could trust Ray. He knew that for a fact.

So that's why Brad said, "Every. Single. Time. I feel like I'm going to climb out of my fucking skin. And nothing else takes the edge off."

"Probably some things would," said Ray. "But they're not as good of a team building exercise."

Brad almost spat a mouthful of beer on the table.

"Maybe we should start calling it 'team building exercises' instead of after-actions," Ray mused.

"Stop."

He laughed. At Brad. "Yeah, I bet that's what those UN pussies call it."

Brad just shook his head, but Ray was probably right.

"Seriously though," Ray said, getting serious—a rare and precious event. "It's not hurting your combat effectiveness. Is it hurting you?"

"I don't know," said Brad. "No."

"Is it hurting the LT?"

"He doesn't seem to give a shit that we keep doing it."

"So what's the problem?" Ray asked, spreading his hands.

"We're going to get caught."

"Homes, if you managed to get caught then you'd deserve it, but only for being a disgrace to Recon by getting caught."

That stopped Brad cold. Ray had an actual point there.

"Good talk," said Ray, looking pleased with himself. "Now let's get obliterated."

***

"How was your libo, Brad?" Nate asked, so loudly that he had to know Brad still had a headache.

"Bracing," was what he decided to go with.

Nate grinned. Yeah, he definitely could tell Brad was hungover.

"Yours?" Brad managed after the throbbing in his head subsided again.

"Not as… bracing," said Nate in a much quieter, far more soothing voice, "but enjoyable. One of my sisters came out for a visit with her family, so I spent some quality time spoiling my nieces. They'll head back east after getting some more beach time in."

"Family time sounds more like a chore than libo to me," Brad admitted.

"You say that, but you taught your nephew to surf last year."

"I was investing in the future," said Brad. "If they'd all take up surfing, I'd happily spend more time with them."

"Well, thanks to my niece, who keeps up with pop culture for me," said Nate, "I got you a souvenir."

"From weekend libo?" If Nate was inflicting San Diego keychains on him, there would be reprisals.

"I left it on your desk," said Nate cheerfully. "Along with a bottle of Advil, since I heard the other day you were planning to spend time with Ray. Now, I have a meeting with Captain Schwetje to get to." He left with a nod that Brad was too distracted to return.

He detoured to his office and took two of the Advil dry. Then he saw the other new thing on his desk.

It was an action figure of Ajax Coronado. A post-it note stuck to the packaging said that Nate had gotten one, too.

Brad changed his mind about the reprisals.

***

Chapter Text

The acid burns that Stinetorf had received when Paladin Phoenix took a faceful of acid from the kaiju Potatohead—which had eaten through the jaeger's armour, the conn-pod shielding, and Stiney's combat armour in order to reach his skin at all—had thankfully been relatively minor and would scar minimally. He was cleared for action as of the 1st of October.

Paladin Phoenix had not gotten off nearly as lightly. Nate and Brad went to Mara to hear the close-to-firsthand assessment, and she said that while the armour plating was not in her area of expertise, the conn-pod had taken some concerning damage.

"There's a lot of goddamn wiring in there, remember?" she said, slapping a clipboard down on her workbench with a very loud noise. "Three of their monitors need replacing, and that's practically just cosmetic damage. We have to check all the electrical in the pod just to make sure a stray acid loogie didn't take out, like, the processor that manages the oxygen and pressurization in the pod, or something even more important."

"Yikes," said Nate, which about summed it up. "So, do you know what the timeline's looking like?"

Mara shrugged aggressively. "A month? Two? We're pretty busy around here. Plus, we have enough jaegers we can afford to bench one."

Nate had his thinking face on. "Alright," he said. "Thanks, Mara. I always appreciate your insights."

She squinted at him suspiciously, like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. "You're welcome," she said finally.

As Nate turned to leave, she shot Brad a disbelieving look. He just nodded; it said a lot about the usual quality of Marine officers that even a civilian contractor didn't know how to take genuine gratitude from one.

Brad caught up to Nate in the hallway. "Thoughts?" said Nate.

Brad shrugged. "Technically, we're also part of Team 3. It's a four-unit team. It can be three units like the others for a little while."

Nate made a face. "We're always out there, though. I think this adds up to a reduction in presence in a kilo engagement, in the end."

"Okay… rotate Banshee and Helldiver through Phoenix's spot when Team 3 is on deck. The kids can always use more experience."

"Does Sgt. Brunmeier count as a kid?"

"Yes. But you didn't hear that from me."

"Give me a third option."

Brad sighed. "I don't know… fucking… borrow Goat Roper from Captain America?"

"I am begging you not to nickname other officers around me."

Brad grinned unrepentantly.

"All of these options end up with Stinetorf and Holsey benched. Kocher is not going to let them borrow his car."

"Actually, it's Cpl. Carisalez you really have to watch out for," said Brad.

"Noted. Still."

"It happens. We've had an impressive run of being fully combat-ready since you got here, frankly. We were overdue for a team to have some forced downtime."

"I knew it was too good to be true." They stopped outside the gym and Nate turned to face him. "All right. I'm going to go make my report and recommendations. Coordinate with Gunny on Stinetorf and Holsey's downtime. I'm sure there's plenty to keep them busy."

"Aye aye, sir."

Nate actually rolled his eyes, which made Brad grin some more. "Dismissed," he said pointedly, leaving Brad and heading around the corner to go track down Encino Man.

Brad checked the time and then stuck his head in the gym doorway. Stiney was on the treadmill.

"Hey, Brad," he said, slowing it down when Brad appeared next to him.

"You broke your jaeger too much," said Brad. "It's gonna be in the shop for a while."

"Damn. Guess next time we should try dodging."

"Good idea," said Brad. "We have the watch as of Thursday morning, so you and Holsey report to Gunny for your daycare activities."

"Will do."

Stiney picked up his speed again, and Brad left the gym to go track down Gunny Wynn.

***

At 0830 the next day, Gunny texted Brad to come to his office ASAP. He stared at his phone in complete incomprehension for a full minute before deciding that speculating was a waste of his time. If he double-timed it to Mike's office, well, Brad had never gotten a message like that from him before.

"Am I in trouble?" Brad asked when Mike shut the door behind him.

"You? Not as far as I know," said Mike. He looked very tired.

"Then—"

"The LT, on the other hand," Mike drawled, "is likely about to step in some shit."

"What? How?"

"He was reporting to Encino Man yesterday about Phoenix," said Mike, sagging in his chair. "And our captain, in his infinite wisdom, picked option D: none of the above. He said that maintaining combat readiness is a priority, and apparently someone—don't know who—told him the damage to the jaeger is superficial. He ordered it back in the field by the time Bravo-2's watch rotation starts up again on Thursday."

"Today is Tuesday," said Brad, unable to process any of this.

"Yes, yes it is."

"That's not gonna happen. It just isn't."

"Encino Man says it is." Gunny paused thoughtfully. "Most likely, the armour damage can be fixed by then. That's just a matter of welding new material in there and slapping some Rust-Oleum on it."

"Well, what about the conn-pod?"

Gunny leaned back in his chair until it creaked. "I got ten bucks says he thinks we can just swap another jaeger's conn-pod in there. Or that we somehow have a spare just lying around."

Brad closed his eyes. "No bet," he said.

He heard Gunny chuckle. "I mean, it might work. We don't need to be able to use the guns or anything, right?"

"So who's gonna tell Encino Man that we can't do that?" asked Brad.

"Oh, the LT already did. At length, I bet." Mike sat forward again with another creak of the chair. "And he got shot down, and then he told me he was going to Godfather about it, because he was—rightly, I think—concerned about operational safety with trying to get a jaeger back online that we don't strictly need unless a whole kaiju army comes through the Breach."

"Good," said Brad.

"Well," said Mike, looking skeptical, "I think that's gonna come back to bite the LT. Casey Kasem hates his fucking guts. And as we all know, he's got some friends in Command from all that ass-kissing and toadying he's spent his career doing."

"Fuck."

"So. Now you're all caught up. And I guess we'll see what happens next."

"Fuck," said Brad again.

"And Brad? Keep this between us for now, alright? Let's not add more to the LT's plate. He's got plenty to choke on as it is."

"Fuck."

"Yeah," said Mike. "I'm pretty sure we're gonna end up down two jaeger teams, instead of just the one. So I'm planning for that."

***

Brad had the great misfortune of coming across Casey Kasem himself later that afternoon. The son of a bitch set his beady eyes on Brad and stopped just long enough to say, "Colbert. Hope you enjoyed using that Mark III while it lasted."

Something small but important snapped within Brad in that moment, and he stepped in front of Casey Kasem to halt his progress. "What's that mean, Gunny?" he asked in his most pleasant voice.

"It means that Fick's insubordination is catching up with him. There's going to be consequences."

"Would that be Lieutenant Fick you're calling insubordinate, Gunnery Sergeant?"

Casey Kasem glared up at him. "You wanna be careful who you throw your lot in with, Colbert."

Brad breathed out slowly through his nose and then said, "And you wanna be careful where you get your information from when you're tasked to do research, Gunny. Who the fuck were you talking to, a janitor?"

Casey Kasem fumed but said nothing.

"Did you talk to anyone at all? Or did you pull all that out of your ass, because you thought you should just save yourself the work and tell an officer what he wants to hear? That shit worked in Afghanistan where the highest tech gear we had was radios and some GPS that only worked right on alternate Wednesdays, Gunny, but the jaeger corps runs a little differently. There's more people here in a position to check your facts."

"Are you looking to get NJP'd, Colbert?"

Brad shrugged and stepped back out of the way, so their company ops chief could scuttle off to safety where nobody would call out his bullshit. "Well, if you're on a roll, why stop now? Let me know if you need any direct quotes for the report," he said, and left before he could dig himself any deeper.

***

Brad did not get disciplined, as he figured he wouldn't, but Nate did. Late Wednesday afternoon, Godfather scared the shit out of Brad by suddenly appearing in the doorway of his office while he was doing paperwork alone.

"Sit," Godfather waved at him when he stood to attention, and shut the door behind him before stealing Lovell's chair. "I imagine you've heard about Lieutenant Fick by now," he started.

"Yes, sir. Gunny Wynn told me that he's been grounded."

Godfather nodded. "Which, of course, means you've also been grounded as a side effect."

"Just in time for Bravo-2 to pick up the watch tomorrow," Brad couldn't help pointing out.

"Yeah, I know. The timing is unfortunate. Listen, Brad, I'm doing everything I can to move this along swiftly. You don't deserve to be in limbo like this."

"I don't think the LT deserves it, either, sir. He was trying to pass along accurate information."

"I'm not gonna get into the details with you. That's not what I'm here for. Brad, you're a hunter. We're going to get you back in the hunt. You have my word on that. Alright?"

Brad bit his tongue. "So what happens now?"

Godfather sighed. "Due to the loss of our command ground team in Ajax, right now getting Paladin Phoenix's conn-pod repaired and cleared for duty is a high priority. Right now, they're telling me three to four weeks, but I think they can do it in two with proper prioritizing of other projects and the required routine jaeger maintenance."

Brad swallowed down the bubbling-up complaint that clearly Nate had been exactly right about Phoenix's conn-pod issue (as he should have been, since he'd conferred with an expert). He knew there was no point. Whether Nate was correct about the jaeger was not the issue he was being investigated over. At best, it might have been a mitigating circumstance if he was found guilty. Sometimes, in small moments like these, Brad wondered why he'd ever thought it was a good idea to join the military.

"My fingers are crossed that we make it through this watch without any kaiju sightings, but I've instructed our battalion XO that should we need to deploy units to deal with a kaiju threat right now, maintaining Ajax at operational readiness remains a priority due to the superior firepower the Mark III tech affords us. We simply can't let it collect dust. His suggestion to me was that we pair you with Sgt. Kocher if the need arises, and frankly, I can't see any downside to that plan in the circumstances."

"Understood, sir."

"That's a temporary solution. Now, I can't say how the lieutenant's disciplinary proceeding will resolve, but we can't let you collect dust either. My own priority is to make sure you have a copilot, because I think giving Ajax to anyone else would be a waste. I'm giving careful consideration to the options available."

Brad chewed on his question a little before asking it. "How long are you going to wait before you start pursuing those options, sir?"

Godfather looked at him. "As long as possible."

That unaccountably relaxed Brad. "Yes, sir."

***

Bravo-2 made it through one watch without any kaiju alerts, but their next rotation was less lucky. Kocher suited up with him in Ajax as promised. Nate was still working, of course—he'd only been grounded from jaeger piloting duties, not the rest of his job, not while the office hours were still ongoing—so he was in the hangar with them when the alert came in.

"Time to go get paid, Brad," he said when the alert went off. He sounded very calm, which somehow irritated Brad more.

"It's fucking stupid that you're not going in there with me," said Brad, although he said it quietly. "You're being punished before you've been found guilty."

"It's optics, Sergeant. I can't be going out and being a public spectacle in a kaiju fight with this hanging over me. Now get your ass in that conn-pod, I'm not gonna tell you again."

"Yeah," said Brad, and went.

'It's all some bullshit, dude,' opined Kocher in the privacy of the drift as their conn-pod was getting carted over to Ajax. 'He's getting punished for doing his job well, meanwhile Captain America probably couldn't pick a conn-pod out of a lineup with two things in it.'

'We didn't join the Corps for their stellar management practices,' agreed Brad.

Out loud, he said, "Okay, gentlemen, let's bring the welcome wagon to this Cat 2, and don't forget to smile."

Rudy named the kilo Frogger. Brad approved.

After they killed it and were RTB, Brad took a shower and went straight to bed to squeeze in four hours of sleep. He told himself that it was nice to not have his teeth humming from adrenaline, for a change.

***

The day before Halloween, Brad saw Nate in the hallway coming from the research lab and stopped to say, "You know, sir, the betting pool about whether you or Paladin Phoenix gets returned to action first is getting pretty big."

Nate arched an eyebrow at him. "Which did you bet on?"

"The jaeger," Brad admitted.

Nate smiled a little. "That's probably for the best." He looked around and then leaned in and said in a hushed voice, "You want some insider information? I filed a grievance."

Brad turned that news over in his head. "I don't know if I'm happy about all the money I'm about to win off Ray, or upset."

"At least you're getting something out of this. That's good to hear."

Brad abruptly realized that he missed Nate. They hadn't spent this long outside each other's heads since they'd met. "Are you busy tonight?" he heard himself ask before he could think it through properly.

Nate blinked. "No?"

There weren't a lot of options to hang out socially on base with someone in his chain of command, and jaeger pilots had to adhere to a schedule for libo, to maintain readiness. Brad thought fast. "Meet me at the gym. Let's say, 1930? I haven't kicked your ass in a while. Wouldn't want you to get out of practice."

Nate huffed out a little laugh at that. "Fine. 1930. See you then."

They parted ways, and Brad tried not to look forward to it too much. He had half a workday left to get through.

***